skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe I misunderstood, but it seems to me that without set-car!, Scheme becomes more like Erlang in respect to "unchangeable variables" (don't remember the proper term right now).

I had recently evaluated Erlang but found some things very difficult to achieve. For a contrieved problem, how do you program an effective algorithm to calculate prime numbers in Erlang?

So I felt quite good about the destructive operators of Scheme. If they are now wanted anymore, I might reconsider using Erlang.
I hadn't intended to make this sound negative, per se. But I think there is a pattern that some employ, where self-importance can come into play. We've seen the Silicon Valley darlings move from month to month... Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, for example, and I can find examples at each stage. If it did end up being too negative, my apologies. That's what I get for keeping it as brief as I did. There are certainly opportunities for services to continue in a mainstream use role for infinity, assuming they continue to meet needs.
How To Create A Keypress Navigation Using jQuery
... By not requiring $90 a month plans.
She'll have gained a greater knowledge on how to run a fledging small business. A degree from Harvard Business School would put her in a much better position for a high-growth starting job at a large company. Big difference. As much as this place likes to avoid the reality, the fact is that most businesses eventually need pure business types to efficiently run the company. They may not be involved in strategic planning, product development, etc. (although many are) but you need those operations people to keep the wheels turning efficiently.
Thousands of real Facebook friends for sale on eBay
I found this interesting, too. Margins should be huge in the cafe business, right? So it must be rent and employees that are costing her so much. I still would have expected a cafe to be profitable with that kind of revenue.
It's been my take that "startup" connotes something entrepreneurial, where "new business" (or "small business") connotes the start of something that's been done before.

That's a meaningful distinction to make because it involves different skills, a different assumption of risk, and a different level of tenacity needed to be successful in one or the other.

So startup = selling something different. It's about pitching people your idea, and positioning a product creatively in the market. New business is about being seen (e.g. consider starting a franchise pizza shop and advertising on local TV/in print). It's "new" because people didn't know it was there before. But it's not "startup" for lack of its differentiation along the lines of how that something is sold.

I like this defition because it permits that a new company that sells the same old product (e.g. Threadless and their tees) may be called a startup for its ability to creatively position their products.

Exactly when a company transitions from "startup" to "going conern" is another question.
Yahoo is dead. This will only make google's monopoly bigger. Yahoo should have teamed up with Microsoft, and they would have a chance. But instead they waste time on introducing a poison pill (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214893) which damages the company when a change of control happens (not only when Microsoft would buy yahoo, but also if the board changes!!!), thus forcing the stockholders not to vote for a new board of directors!
Amazon Web Services for everything else: From bits to atoms.
Or else?
Today's Squawk Box will discuss "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
Optimism Knows No Slowdown
1:33 this afternoon, the Justice Department announces sweeping anti-trust against Google.

I love Google. They're a model company, but in a 1.5 player market (Google being one player, Yahoo being .3 of a player and Microsoft being .2 of a player), you just can't allow the top two to collude together. Unless the partnership is merely giving Yahoo a fork of PageRank, it's going to be crappy - and it isn't that.
Invent This Product
Offset Your Investment Portfolio with Foreclosures
As the article points out... Or else they'll be more likely to be lured away and, while they're with you, give bad customer service, etc. I certainly know that's true.

I worked in a retail chain a few years ago. At the first store I worked at, the manager went out of his way to take care of us hourly folks. We felt appreciated and were willing to put in extra effort when it was needed. After I moved and went to a different store, I discovered that this wasn't corporate policy. In fact, they seemed to go out of their way to treat employees (even managers and asst. managers) like replaceable cogs. It really lowered my own drive to perform well and eventually was a major contributing factor in my leaving (when I did and under what terms, anyway).
Typical bullshit from a guy who can't conceive of an economy that isn't based on the production of physical goods.

Stop posting this crap, please. :-)
House To Vote On Extending Unemployment Insurance
Right! It's almost as fast as writing code a second time after you accidentally rm it into oblivion! Thanks for that YAGNI page, makes a lot of sense.
>> His arguments are sound.

The production of good as the basis for an economy is dead. His argument is ignorant.

This is not an economic forum. Please post elsewhere.
Building on what Brian said.

A few more characteristics of a start-up:
1. Technology (often web based) plays the key role in the interaction between the company and it's clients / users.
2. The present market either doesn't exist, or functions in a fundamentally different way before / outside of the startup.
3. The start-up is not as geographically limitted as the new business. That's not to say that a start-up can't be location specific, but if it is, it should be a platform that can be applied to other locations.

And a few characteristics of a new business:
1. A new business, like a say a bakery, is another instance of a proven business that addresses the market in the accepted, historical way. There are many bakeries, they are fundamentally no different from each other. In fact, it's likely one of the oldest professions still still actively being pursued. Each takes raw ingredients and makes baked goods out of them. Each then try to sell them for more than their costs.
2. New businesses are often very location specific and often rely heavily on face to face interaction, or local phone/email interaction to complete transactions.
3. New businesses often rely on physical goods or services for the basis of their offering, where with start-ups technology is often the basis for the interaction.

Selling your new-businesses good via an online store, does not automatically make your new-business a start-up. In the case of the t-shirt entrepenuer and the baker, they are most certainly not start-ups, but just new-businesses trying to do business online.

In short, a start-up is a new business, but a new business is not necessarily a start-up.
OCC: U.S. Banks Tightened Lending Standards
best take on this: "Last one out, turn off the lights."

-John Gruber (Daring Fireball)
Thank god, a posting that isn't by DHH (wink) or about some doomsaying economist! THIS kind of thing is why we hang out here. Thx for posting it. Useful!
Right. The developers might balk at Apple's restrictive ways. But the end-users are probably going to be delighted with quality of the upcoming apps. It's all about controlling the seamless user experience, and what Apple's doing amounts to a subtle quality control on the 3rd party apps.

As the article points out, not everyone wants to wade through a deluge of untested applications.
My understanding of the situation is that the PLT people had some optimizations they could do if lists were immutable, and they noticed that there were very few places in their code where they mutated lists. So they decided to just make lists immutable and see who complained. And it turns out few other people were actually mutating lists, so they kept the optimization.

PLT Scheme still has other mutable data structures that can be used instead of lists, though; I don't know if this is the case for Erlang.
AppStore is one thing that Google could do just as slickly as Apple. It would be right in their core competency.
New Yahoo Logo Spotted in the Wild?
now if twitter could hire him, that would be great
I think they're sort of opposite ends of the spectrum, and that it's probably not a winner take all market. Just as Linux completely dominates MacOS X for applications where you need real control (servers, embedded, etc...) Android will be popular for many people and companies. On the other hand, the qualities of the iPhone in terms of user experience are pretty obvious, and will win a lot of people over... but probably won't dominate the market, which has never seemed to be an Apple goal in any case.
Detox: the Duke Nukem Forever of the hip-hop industry
This is an interesting point. It brings out the question: just how far can you make something ugly (assuming I'm not dead wrong about lack of aesthetic appeal in those slippers), provided that they do their non-aesthetic job right?

Certain famous websites come to mind. On a tangential point, it seems like these things must be relatively cheap and easily accessible, and cannot become status symbols. Sushi is an example where aesthetic appeal is as important as its palatability. (I'm typing a bit aimlessly)

So, what about those NIKE Naked shoes (or whatever?)? They are less of a fashion statement because they stand out less, I presume?
Amusing:

Is the Plan a “poison pill”?
No.
"Gen Yers lack confidence" without further qualification means "All Gen Yers lack confidence".
My favorite pair up, which I learned at Microsoft, is "slash and whack" for '/ and \'.

Killer is trying to remember which is which, but it sounds awesome.
He got it right - they're idiots. A roomful of people sitting around a ringing phone - sheesh!

What surprises me is the lengths that people will go to in attempting to justify the groups' actions, especially on the blog.
I love the intelligent comments below the article. A particularly insightful gem:

Google sucks !

Amazing that he can't even get the punctuation right on a two-word sentence.
Messaging service Twitter hires top developer firm Pivotal Labs
Yes, but it's also a lot harder to charge money for an online business, especially a consumer-facing one. Nobody expects to get a muffin for free, but they expect Facebook to be free even if they use AdBlock.
The best take is a cliche repeated by a marginally famous blogger?
RIAs? Rich Internet Applications? Stick with JavaScript. Flash and Flex aren't currently supported on the iPhone or 64 bit browsers. Microsoft Silverlight is Windows only, which will arguably make your software inaccessable to a large pool of early adopters.

Recent developments with SquirrelFish will make Safari's JavaScript implementation 10 times more efficient and subsequent developments could provide an additional factor of four improvement. Firefox is likely to follow with a similar implementation.
Having spent many years working on this problem in the US market, here's my two cents ...

There are tens of millions of mainstream handsets on the market that contain GPS, including virtually all phones sold by Sprint and Verizon in the past few years and most new AT&T phones going forward. However, location is typically locked down and requires a relationship with the carrier to access the handset location APIs. For location privacy and business reasons, making a deal with a carrier for a location-enabled application is often a multi-year process.

The other possibility is to target smart phones such as the Nokia N95, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, or Android that provide more open access to location. This is a good audience of early adopters with high data usage, but it's a very small percentage of total phones on the market.

Handsets using carrier-assisted GPS will typically have better performance than smartphones. The 'autonomous GPS' in most smart phones takes a long time to get an initial fix and is less accurate than carrier assisted, or aGPS handsets, which utilize cell towers on the network to enhance performance. Note: The new iPhone will combine GPS, Wi-fi, and cell tower location and so should be fairly fast and accurate.

One means by which developers can gain access to location across multiple carriers is through WHERE http://developer.where.com (caveat: i work there).

I'm working on a white paper covering all of this in more detail. If you're interested in getting a preview copy, let me know.
Ask HN: Should I pass on a remotely located co-founder?
In looking for a co-founder, I've attracted some interest from various parts of the US (the reason might be in my HN profile). I'm located in the Boston area and have passed on some good candidates that weren't living in Massachusetts.

Should I consider a remote co-founder? What experiences have you had - good or bad?
I am really looking forward to when GPS is included in most point-n-click cameras. This idea is brilliant, but nothing compared to what can happen when you look at what might happen.
My daughter won't be arriving until around the 19th, so I don't get to celebrate this year. :(
How the Mind Works: Revelations
When trust becomes of value, it will be traded. Sure, it isn't quite as nice and human as the person who goes to church in order to help his life insurance sales, and there is the layer of transferability that is new. But still...
This doesn't make any sense. Yahoo! bought Overture and runs it's own ad network. This is a lot like Ford giving there employees GM cars to drive.
If it fails all she learnt is a tiny subset of what not to do.
I still have to wonder if Intel will finalize the host controller spec after their own chipset has taped out.
Interview with Marten Mickos
I started a successful business with a friend who was in another city, two hours away.

However, he was also my best friend that I'd known for 10 years.

Remote is fine, but you need to know the person well in real life, or else there will be many, many miscommunications.
Most of PG's essays are about startups, hacking, and the like, although perhaps fewer have been lately. The other ones are generally interesting looks at something or another, but very rarely wacky rants about politics or economics.
The + is what I'm talking about. For whatever reason, on my XO, 100% is too small, and the next bump up is too big. I'm not just picking nits here...it's a dramatic size increase...like from 7px to 16px (or something along those lines, though I haven't actually done a side-by-side with something that I can see the size of fonts).
Yeah, I bought some molesinke cahiers for the same purpose. Simple and lightweight, and they take a good beating.

Still, I don't think I'd buy them again. Seconding Yan's sentiment, a notecard (or napkin!) is all you need in moments of inspiration.
I learned about this design pattern by watching folks eat street pizza in NYC.
Isn't this already built into every web browser as "access keys"?

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/accesskey.html
Can you develop for free to the Android?
You have to buy a developers package for the iPhone right?
I upvoted for this. I take Peter Schiff very seriously. He has been right on housing, right on gold/commodities, and he is coming from a very fundamental point of view. I have been a fan of the "Austrian School" of Economics (Mises/Hayek/Rothbard) also known as the libertarian school, which is where people like Schiff come from.

Do yourself a favor, and read up about it before you dismiss all of that as pointless doom and gloom. Ultimately it all comes down to the mindset change that has happened in America (and many other countries) over the past 15-20 years. Debt has become very fashionable, and large segments of the population have unwittingly become debt slaves. The ultimate root cause is Federal Reserve monetary policy (find out why).

Credit bubbles do not end well.
This site is a bit more hardware orientated but you may find some of it useful:

http://www.hackaday.com/search/?q=gps
Do you have forums?

A blog is just not useful to the vast majority of your users (or, even if it is, they are not investing the time to read it). Our product website gets, as I mentioned, 40k visitors per month...our blog gets about 2000. Our forums are very active, because they provide a mechanism for people to get help and talk about their problems and goals. People love to talk...but it sounds like you're wanting them to only talk to you (because commenting on a blog feels like talking to one person--talking to a forum feels like talking to the world), when what they really want is a range of experiences.
Really? I find it very nice. There were a few things that I couldn't reason out...but Joe Hewitt's video made it all clear:

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/111597

Setting breakpoints was not obvious to me, for example.
Sounds like a really good idea, actually. Even without the GPS tagging, you could input your travel itinerary and, based on that, build the scrapbook using the date/time stamps on the picture.

Dangit. Now my mind will be occupied by this while I facilitate my next meeting.
Margins are not huge for this sort of business. This am on NPR they were talking with a baker who said that his flour costs had tripled in the past year, his egg costs had doubled, and all of his supplies now had "fuel surcharges" tacked on. While margins might have been comfortable in the past, they certainly aren't now. These folks are between a rock and a hard place and have had to absorb much of these costs in their margins.

People think you have to be crazy to start a start-up these days. No even close, but you would have to be crazy to start a bakery now!
Ask HN: where's a good place to look for smart contract work?
I've decided to leave my current job to work on my startup. It turns out working on a startup while you work at another startup doesn't work out, time wise. However, I only have enough money to last through the end of the year. I'd like to bank about $5-$10K more before applications for the winter YC funding cycle are due. I have a few personal connections and about 7 leads since 9 am today, but am trying to collect as many options as I can before making a commitment. Does anyone on HN know of any resources for contract work other than craig's list and dice/elance/odesk ? I'm in San Francisco, so info about any local networking events would also be helpful.

I'm looking for something with cool people, but in a decidedly temporary arrangement.
The Power of Efficient Algorithms on Big Data
The"background search" paranoia just gets me off my bleeding rocker.
look on any of the niche job boards.

authenticjobs.com is a good start, and it has some links to aggregators where you can spread out your search. also, freelanceswitch.com's job board is decently good.

they're not all designed for freelance/contract work, but they do have plenty of postings for it.
I hesitated posting this one on Hacker News, but then I saw the Gen Y'ers CNN story. It's still not "TV" material, and the amount to which we restrain our online expression is a matter of concern to programmers. Also, there could be "background check" startups around these places. Screw them.
cool - thanks!
The wireless tidal wave.
Excellent, this is right up my alley. Thank you.
Sounds awesome, but they've managed to exceed their pageview limit.
OurDoings already auto-organizes by date, but don't expect an animated car moving along a map any time soon. The first GPS-related feature I'm likely to implement will be a privacy option that removes GPS info if the coordinates fall within a certain range (presumably near your house.)
I shall disagree with swombat. I co-founded a company a few years ago with some remote co-founders I had worked with on other projects. I thought it would be fine. However, there are major barriers to remote co-founders that can kill a business

- Inability to brainstorm at any moment

- Weakened brainstorming - It's just not the same via video, IM, or phone

- Paperwork takes longer - Often you both have to sign it. Mailing that crap is just horrendous

- Harder to keep on task - Having each other to keep pushing each other and set tasks and to-do lists is vital

- Meeting with investors is a pain when coordinating two different travel plans

- You just don't get to interact with your co-founders enough to REALLY know whether you're compatible for working together on a startup. You're going to have to be at the same place later on, might as well be now so you know this partnership is going to work 100%

The geographic distance was one of the big factors that killed our startup. Don't do it if you can avoid it in any way.
I like the fact that Crocs are anti-bacterial, but it also worries me. The use of anti-bacterial soap and other cleaning products in hospitals has spawned super bugs resistant to known means of combating pathogens. Could Crocs share the same fate?
no problem, i feel your pain :)

also note that, typically, elance/odesk/guru/etc. isn't worth trolling for work, because they're dominated by cheap, lower quality labor and project-based pricing.
You only have to pay a $99 (more for enterprises) yearly fee to actually deploy native apps to the iPhone. You can download, develop, and test in the simulator iPhone code today for free.
I think DHH would say you are doomed for failure unless you are on different continents. :)

It probably depends on how self-motivated you both are and if you are keeping day jobs. The biggest challenge I've seen is keeping momentum-- and either distance or outside responsibilities are often huge drags -- but only you can make the call ultimately. You could try going long distance with just clear terms laid out so that in three months if stuff isn't getting done you aren't stuck in a lousy partnership.
Who keeps on submitting links to sites that steal original content and don't even link back to the original? http://www.usnews.com/articles/business/your-money/2008/05/3...
I was talking about becoming a father, not finding mine. But I guess I didn't make that very clear....
Scott Stanfield talked about this on .NET Rocks (http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=348) and said that GPS readings aren't precise enough to worry about such fine-grained location. All of the pictures at home would show up as a cloud 100m in diameter centered on your house, not at their actual precise location.

That whole podcast is a good discussion about the intersection of software, tech, and photography.
In the .NET Rocks episode I mentioned in my other comment, Scott Stanfield mentioned a small, headless GPS receiver that you can attach to your camera. It has software that matches timestamps on pictures to the GPS location history and tags each picture with coordinates. It's a slick way to solve the problem while keeping your existing camera.
This hits home.... I'm working with a distant co-founder right now.

I second each of Mystalic's points, with a single addition: motivation. Everyone -- even startup founders -- needs motivated now and again. When you need it your co-founder will be little help. And (what's much, much worse) when your co-founder needs it your attempts will likely be in vain. Motivation, passion, drive... it's hard enough to sustain those things in a physical setting. Trying to do so in a virtual setting is near-impossible.

I should add a caveat: Motivation is almost never an issue in the beginning, which is why this is such a precarious problem. You'll be tempted to disregard the likelihood for issues down the road in light of the current, rosy status quo. Fact is it's when you hit the dip (like when you miss your first deadline) that things turn sour. Just hope you don't find yourself there without recourse.

My advice is that if you think you absolutely have to found a company with someone in a different geographic region, ask yourself if that's really the case. Chew on it for a night (or a few weeks) if you need to. Err on the side of working with a local co-founder, and if you must work with someone in a different geographic region, move forward with caution.