skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Would you sign this if you were me?
I was recently approached by a media agency looking to syndicate my blog's content, make it mobile friendly, find and put ads on it and revenue share with me. The term sheet is a bit daunting though. The highlights are:

I get 30% of adjusted gross advertising revenue.

"Initial term is one (1) year. Then, repeated one (1) year automatic renewals, unless Owner notifies [media agency] of non-
renewal in writing. [media agency] will have a 30-day exclusive right of first negotiation after any termination, expiration or non-
renewal. Owner will not have discussions or negotiations with any third party until 30 days of negotiation are complete." That was initially 2 years but I got them to work it down.

I only get paid if my amount payable exceeds $1000.. which I think will take a long time.

I have to put their logo and slogan on my site.

"Owner must ensure that factual assertions in the Internet Blog are true and that no content on or linked to by the
Internet Blog will be obscene, pornographic, abusive, harassing, intimidating, deceitful, deceptive, offensive, or violate any
law, or any right of any third party (including copyrights, trademarks, or trade secrets), or disparage [media agency] or its products or
services."

I'm a bit wary about that one as they hold me liable for what I write about.

"Disclaimer and Limitation of Liability. [media agency] makes no representation or warranties express or implied and
disclaims any implied warranty. In any case, [media agency]’s liability to Owner will be limited to $100."

Feedback greatly appreciated. Also, is Google okay with essentially duplicate content floating around elsewhere on the net? I thought this was a big no-no.
Notepad++ does code folding for Python rather well, but it's Windows only.
Last time I checked, bOING bOING was one of the 5 most popular blogs on the Internet.
A 31 year old guy working in Silicon Valley needs to get over feeling creepy about being friends with 20 year olds. In the future he'll be working for one of them.
Heh, now I see what made your comment unclear to me. It was simply the word "So". If I had read it when it was the only one I bet I would have gotten your meaning.

Incidentally, I like how you're processing this information through your own experience.
'...it looks like another form of abstracting away some details...'

I think this is the main reason why I don't like it - it's an extra and inferior way of organising code. Automatically generated boilerplate code in ASP.NET is now hidden using partial classes, for example, which I think is an improvement.
The ascendancy of Hacker News & the gentrification of geek news communities
"warning: personal frustration inspired comment"
yes, i know. my point is, try finding an entry-level position that requires knowledge and experience of b-trees and not hashtables.
How To Raise Money for Your Startup (real world)
Digital goods tend to be inferior goods with inelastic demand curves. As your income rises, your consumption of them doesn't go up after a certain point and people aren't likely to pay more for a digital good once they have something that is "good enough".

The DTrace guy blogged about this here http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/date/20040828
"...because pedophila or cannibalism is mandated in the Internet Terms of Service"

If we eat a pedophile, does that cover both requirements? Or is there a bonus?

Hey -- welcome to the club for people who want to do their own start-ups. It's topic-oriented and self-censoring. Now that I know a 12-year-old is online I'll refrain from posting my entire dirty limerick collection.
Try to negotiate that $1000 threshold down.

Better yet, try and negotiate an advance on ad revenue.

Do you currently have any AdSense or Affiliate ad revenue?
Can't you just use a wordpress plugin to make your content available for mobile phones? What is this company providing beyond ad sales that it deserves such control. I'd run the other way
The extensibility of jQuery continues to move the library forward in cool new ways. Love it.
By any chance do you have an old version of Firebug loaded? It used to crash my FF a lot until I upgraded it to the newest version.
They host the mobile friendly site on a 3 letter domain along with other such syndicated content. I think the big thing is just that they find advertisers, but is that worth agreeing to these terms?
I already tried to negotiate that:

"I’m sure with your fan base and the cross-pollination you will automatically receive form other blogs and content within [domain] you will reach our minimum threshold in no time whatsoever. Unfortunately this clause is a requirement as is by our CFO."
Post away with the limericks--I'm not really 12. Lying about your age is also mandated in the Internet Terms of Service.
The Science of Setting Goals
EUCALYPTUS - Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems - is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing "cloud computing" on clusters. The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is compatible with Amazon's EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. EUCALYPTUS is implemented using commonly-available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain.
What's with the hating on ideas? Ideas do matter. Sure, anyone could have had the idea of a photo sharing site, but someone had the idea to do it that way. Someone had the idea to make it look and work the way it does.

Ideas are the driver here. All good companies involve good ideas, and more good ideas on how to go about executing them. What, does 37signals say "Hey, look at our execution of our bad ideas!" Of course not.

Anyone can execute shit, but not everyone can execute their idea in a good way. The way to go about executing an idea in a way that makes it successful is itself an idea. Execution brought Flickr into being. But all the ideas that went into it made it great.

Anyone who thinks ideas don't matter in entrepreneurship is kidding themselves.
This seems to be accurate, but I've never been able to find any scientific explanation for the difference in effect. I've heard it attributed to the different ratios of THC to CBD, but I can't find any articles/papers to confirm this.
Can someone point out any compelling reasons to use RSpec over Test::Unit?
No.

They're asking for too much in exchange for too little.

If you're interested in the economics of pro blogging, read this about how Gawker pays its bloggers: http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2008/07/gawker-cuts-st...
"So much so, that you are seeing public companies withdraw and go private to save the average half a million a year in costs."

A public company that goes private to save $500k/year has much, much bigger problems. I'm guessing that it'd take >10 years to amortize the legal costs of going private if that is all they're saving!
My advice: if you're the least bit squeamish, don't sign. Better yet, procrastinate on it for a few days and see if your thoughts change. Who knows - they may get antsy and start writing back with more info.

I do that - it's, "The Art of Decision Making by Procrastination" lol. I figure that if, after a week's time, I still want to do it, I should do it.
You can't grow a 10 foot Sativa plant in our closet. You're better off with a hybrid that's mostly Indica (smaller bushy plants). Which if you're looking for some motivation won't help you a great deal (will help your PS3 high scores though)
The actual NY state law as explained by NORML: "Possession of 25 grams or less of marijuana is punishable by a fine of $100 for the first offense." 25g is .88 ounces, which is what a recreational smoker might consume in an entire year. It's worth noting though that the punishments are much harsher if you get caught smoking or displaying weed in public.
When I was 6 a nice man down the street gave me my first coca cola and showed me his Pete Rose rookie and baseball card collection without molesting me! Should I be offended?
You should write a patch!
Let's see what the risks are. I'm going to guess most readers here are from the USA, and besides, it has some of the harshest laws in the developed world about marijuana.

According to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annual_cannabis_use_by_country
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States
http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=7370

12.6% of the US population annually uses marijuana. Out of a population of 304 million, that makes 38,304,000 users per year. There were 829,625 marijuana-related arrests in 2006 (no idea how many led to actual charges or convictions). That means the chances of being arrested are about 2.2% per year, assuming uniform enforcement across all users.

For most people, this overstates the actual chances of being caught since, sadly, the hammer comes down hardest against poor people and ethnic minorities. I don't have a citation for this, but I think this is the case. Can anyone improve on my stats here?

So, while I originally hoped to show you were wrong, I have to conclude it is a significant risk and getting riskier. According to the NORML article, marijuana arrests for simple possession are skyrocketing. In most cases the penalty amounts to a wrist slap, but still there's a risk of more severe prosecution.

Where I come from (Canada, and my last place of residence, BC) people are barely afraid of toking up right in front of a police officer. It's probably bad to disrespect the officer, but I've seen them turn a blind eye to such violations many times. Especially in BC, there's a broad consensus that the plant does very little harm.
Actually I don't have any limericks.

Lying about just about everything else is also required.
yeah i've procrastinated for about a week, and decided to get your opinions here. I could go either way but I feel like they would get more out of me than I would get out of them and I don't like being a means to an end.
Thanks, I thought that I had the last version but I had 1.2.0b3. Updating to 1.2.0b4 fixed the crashes.
Marketing Vs. Engineering. Can't We All Get Along?
Yeah, any list of music sites without thesixtyone is pretty well missing the boat- whenever I'm on a stable connection it's all but replaced iTunes for me.
Get the advance of $1,000 if you're worried that it will take so long. If they're so confident they can get there, then you're fine. Standard book author terms - hooray for precedent that strengthens your position. Again, they think that their $1,000 is enough - but only you can decide that.

I have no comment on the "harshness" of the other T&C's.
pretty cool to see these companies and founders reaching success milestones while doing the day job thing. the quote from the ZoomInfo CEO about supporting his employees in their entrep. pursuits was great. A friend recently left zoom to start viximo, so its the truth. some inspiration for all the yc moonlighters, including me.
Thanks to Twitter's chief architect for giving me a good laugh :)
As much as I admire Howard Roark, could you explain more clearly how we hackers can take credit for him?
Economics of Software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
Comparing it to the Internet TV world, 30% revenue share seems awfully low. Hulu, for instance, passes about 70% of its ad revenue on to the content owner (i.e. you).

If they won't negotiate on the other terms then definitely get a better deal on the revenue share.
You're right, for pure sativas you would need a big closet.
Maybe with a 75% s - 25% i, you can get close enough. (PS: i don't like to mix tech with thc).
If you don't like #regions, you don't have to collapse them.

I like them personally because they aren't comments - they're comments that imply structure. It sets the high-level structure of the file apart.
Surely when you're dealing with the Chinese censorship authorities, attributing everything to malice is usually a pretty reasonable approach?
IPhone enterprise opportunity "larger than thought," Goldman says
But most companies (in my experience, before some little punk says "but where's your data") tend to replace all their kit every 3-5 years anyway. Those "old" computers didn't suddenly get slower. Unless you're in a business where raw CPU grunt matters, there's no real reason, but they do it anyway.

It's funny, loads of companies in the late 90s ripped out their Unix CAD workstations and replaced them with high-end PCs running NT . No-one batted an eyelid at that. Now we're talking about replacing average PCs with Unix workstations and everyone's like shyeah right.
My point is not necessarily the risk of incarceration or the inconvenience of being arrested, but in being able to accept any risk (and clearly there is one, even if it's small) of what problems it might cause in your life if you were to be arrested or have even a minor offense on your file (and considering how deep those files go and how easily they are shared nowadays, that could be a big issue).

For example, the United States consulate suggests to UK travellers that anyone who has ever been arrested, even if no charges were brought, should not travel to the US under visa waiver, and must attend an interview to get a visa. That's a pretty big deal if you didn't know about it (as one person who /was/ on my wedding vacation - and now must stay at home - found out to their dismay).

It's unlikely anything relating to some marijuana use will destroy your life or impede you significantly, but even not being able to travel freely between countries /could/ be an impediment, especially if such travel is necessary for your job, etc.

This is the least of it, of course. If you want to work with children, particularly in the UK, you also have to declare all of these things. If you want to work in certain industries, you have to declare these things. Things will come out if you go on to become a celebrity or a public figure of some sort. The risks are small, the outcomes not fatal, but still worth considering if you want to maintain a clean record.
You can. In a way, writing tests first is all about exploring. You're only specifying what you're trying to achieve in the next little while. The test is a device to tell you when you've achieved it. Then you move to the next step. What you're trying to do overall still evolves.

There is a tradeoff. You end up with a longer program that does the same thing - that's bad. On the other hand it works better, and you're likelier to know if you break something - that's good. People argue about whether the bad exceeds the good or vice versa, but surely that can't be answered all one way or the other.

My experience is that this style of programming is well suited for the OO environments that it emerged from. OO object graphs get complex very quickly and you need a device for managing side effects (i.e. unexpected breakage). Unit tests, specifically TDD, are the best currently known device for that. But to me a better approach is to program functionally in a way that eschews (most) side effects and to test one's code by evaluating expressions in a REPL. That gives most of the benefits of unit testing in a much lighter-weight form. I still write the occasional unit test, but only in targeted places where the code has to do something tricky and I want to keep a record of good examples. All I do in that case is put the expressions I've been playing with in the REPL into a function somewhere.
I don't know how useful it is, but I'm willing to give it eight points for the acronym alone.
Balsamiq - Software and Website Mockup App
I think democratization is a better word than gentrification. In gentrification, something bad is turned into something good, in the process displacing those who made it good. In democratization, something scarce and luxurious is devalued by its increasing popularity. Niche Communities (like HN) despise the unwashed masses and recoil when their community is invaded.
More analysis here:

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/adobe-flash-running-on-an...
If the content is going to be worth a large amount of money to them it seems like they would be willing to play ball on an advance. Them not being willing to budget on the issue might be a bad sign about how much they actually expect both you and them to make on the issue, and the fact that you can't sign any other deals would lock you into them for a year.

Is there any way to do a test, put up content for a week, see how it performs? Maybe $5000 + one year commitment upfront, or no advance, test content for a week, and decide whether to move forward after the one week test.
Like a lot of things, it's good to know for the interview but most likely useless after that.
I find it hard to believe this isn't a bit of participatory narcissism considering he goes to great lengths to point out how often artists get laid. Which also couldn't possibly be an overly-broad generalization. Although he gets a point for the use of "weenis."

Pot: Kettle, you are black, sir!
Shortwave ~ an extensible quick-search and shortcut system
I never understood the (North) American "high school popularist fetichism". Must be a cultural self spreading virus (meme). I wonder how can you get rid of it? Because i haven't see such behaviour in South America, there the division is rather blured, the nerds are friends with everbody else, an the populars aren't so "elitists" and bulliers... that reminds me this clever bully fight back story: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/nova-scotia/story/2007/09/18/pink-t...
Try finding a senior-level engineering position that doesn't require knowledge of B-trees or similar computer science topics.
It isn't likely, since most of the high-end shops have a lot of custom software on those Linux machines, and even their Linux distros are in many cases heavily customized, beyond what they'd be able to do with OSX.

Smaller FX shops that don't have IT staff are much more likely to consider it, unless they rely on software that isn't available in OSX, like XSI.

Which reminds me, now Houdini is available for OSX (it might still be beta, but it's coming if not here already).
One hears the exact opposite argument too, which is that these techniques are suited for large/average teams in corporate environments and not at all for startups where people are talented and have to work quickly.
Lisa and Jeff R. Peri of Los Angeles depleted their $200,000 in savings, maxed out their credit cards and borrowed $300,000 from family and friends to develop and market their low-impact car-wash product. The concoction, Lucky Earth, comes in a quart-size spray bottle that retails for $17. It's a mixture of water, coconut by-products, sodium carbonate and water-soluble silicone, blended with the notion that eco-sensitive customers will gladly substitute some elbow grease for a garden hose.

Idealism-induced myopia combined with the current "green tech" fad is breeding some truly bad business ideas. This is one of them.

Seriously, I'm supposed to wash my entire car with a quart-sized seventeen-dollar bottle of mostly-water in order to save a few gallons of tap water? There's a small number of people out there who are dumb enough to pay for anything if they think it's "helping the environment" (at least until the next fad comes along to displace the green-panic fad of the moment) but the market seems really very limited, both in extent and in duration.
Marijuana actually impairs memory and learning
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn10607
At one company I worked for, the IT guys hated the macs.

The first reason was that they ended up costing twice as much to match the configurations (extra memory, the requisite software, etc).

The second and more critical reason was support. Apple just wasn't up to the task of handling a call from someone with somewhere between half a dozen and 100 macs at once.

The first reason has been changing in Apple's favor since, and the last time I checked around 4 months ago the cost was pretty much even.

The second I don't know, but one can hope.
Ask HN: Feedback on my learning startup
I have some brief contact with the VC industry China, and almost anyone with money that I've met is basically just thrusting it at whatever seems hot overseas. The focus is on bringing companies to market (quickly) rather than trying to build sustainable businesses with competitive advantage in their field.

Losing cash on deals like this is great if it forces the VC industry to look for non me-too investments that actually deliver value. I'd prefer not to have the field cluttered with investors who don't know the difference between ren and ru. Will waste less of my time when/if I ever need funding.
I'm resubmitting since this didn't get any notice last time around. Hopefully timing is better this time :)

We're about to launch our new startup, but wanted a bit of feedback from our fellow startup-starters in the HN community.

Our idea can be described as the Basecamp model/philosophy applied to training. We want to make online training much easier, and affordable for any company. Beyond that, I'll let the site speak for itself.

Thanks!
During high school, I worked with a guy who loved weed. Today, he has a type of skin cancer that has been traced to pot use. He is currently losing his fight with cancer.
Knowing what a binary tree is turned out to be overkill for even most of the senior developer positions I've had.
Conformity is orthogonal to nerdiness. I was absolutely a nerd in High School. I was also a non-conformist. I gave respect based on merit and admiration. That style of respect (or lack thereof) got me in hot water with more than one teacher. In fact, most of my nerd friends are some of the most non-conformist people I know. If you depend on admiration and popularity from your classmates then you will desperately cling to someone else's perception of "cool." The nerds go their own ways.

On your dinosaur-island, the nerd probably knows how to find clean water, build a shelter, start a fire, and set a trap. And how to make a dinosaur-slaying weapon from the wreckage of your plane.

Sounds like a lot more help than some "non-conformist" who doesn't know anything outside of the High School popularity game.
So far in my experience the companies hiring want you to know that sort of thing, but that knowledge is largely wasted at most jobs.
I think that cycle is a lot longer than 3-5 years now, especially with the economy the way it is. It probably was that way for a while (and was probably even shorter before that) but there seems to be little justification for it anymore. We're finally at a point where a computer from 3 years ago can do everything we need it to do today, and not too slowly either. That's a relatively new development.
more like careful design to DB than programming...
Microwave ray gun controls crowds with noise
"In a study of more than 80,000 American women, those who drank moderately had only half the heart attack risk of those who did not drink at all, even if they were slim, did not smoke and exercised daily. Moderate drinking was about as good for the heart as an hour of exercise a day. Not drinking at all was as bad for the heart as morbid obesity."

The overall risk curve for alcohol is J shaped. In other words, your total morbidity risk decreases sharply with moderate consumption but then increases after about two drinks a day. Interestingly, risk of heart disease is lower even among the heaviest drinkers. However, total morbidity rates are higher because of other risks.
What's the rational behind having some of the mockup bits be resizable and others fixed? The calendar and button bar are fixed while individual buttons are resizable.
before clicking through, I thought this was a joke judging from the url.
Great article on open source, the peculiarities of software economics, etc.

"To put this in retail terms, open source software has all of the properties of a loss-leader -- minus the loss, of course."

"either the demand-side will ultimately force sufficient improvements to the existing open source databases, or the supply-side will force the open sourcing of one of the viable competitors."