skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now that I'm working on a proper startup -- raising money, building a product, hiring a team, making deals, acquiring customers... I feel a renewed deep respect for people who actually make things. No amount of hearing "the idea isn't as important as the execution", no amount of startup culture indoctrination can really prepare you for doing it yourself.

Building something that people want is just so much harder than anyone could possibly imagine until they try it. I don't think any typical judge could possibly understand. If they did, a case about "he stole the idea" would be instantly thrown out with prejudice. The idea is so unbelievably inconsequential in the scope of skill, determination, and heart needed to succeed.

Even if Zuck mislead these guys into thinking he was building this exact product for them and on their time, I don't think they are entitled to anything. Even if the Harvard Connection was the most popular social network and Zuckerberg was hired as a 10th engineer and left and build Facebook to compete. I don't think they'd be entitled to a dime. Love him or hate him, Zuckerberg built an incredible business with a stellar team in a remarkably short time period. Luck was involved, but this was no accident.
I think your battery might be defective. My WakeMate loses about 19-20% battery life each night. I was using the original black charger... looks like I'll be using the real brick from Apple now.
If SKS microfinance is charging 24% they are a loanshark, period.Rates as high as that are usury and should not be lawful.

I'm of half-Indian and half-European descent and I am always ashamed of my Indian heritage.
The Indian people as a collective simply do not know what it means to be humane and have never heard the word solidarity.
I don't mean that Western countries are perfect, just that they are lightyears ahead of India.

Civilized countries have laws that protect the poor. Interest rate limits for people (not corporations) are generally and histroically limited to about 8-12%.
The US exception caused the subprime crisis, but was compensated for the poor by generous bankruptcy laws.

Also, western countries have bankruptcy laws, social safety nets and a lot of private charity.

Even poort western countries such as Bolivia have a minimal level of solidarity so that no-one should feel that suicide is the only way out.

India, I am disappoint.
Marx had quite a bit to say about 'voluntary' exchange, hahaha.
It is true that when a resource is difficult to use and produces little, its not in great demand. And when more efficient and productive ways to use it are found, the resource is more widely used.

But this doesn't mean that it will not become more expensive as it gets used up and more careful use of it will be made. Human nature will continue to function.
Analysis Paralysis by Babbling VC
Good old capitalism, always there to turn nice things into shit.

And what about all the "nice things" we probably wouldn't have without capitalism? How many drugs and labor-saving devices are in widespread use today because somebody saw a chance to make a profit by producing them?
You can check out Bunnies blog about the long hike to Chumby for the definitive work in this genre.

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/

As for me, counterfeit capacitors have no doubt shortened my life by a few years. Hardware is stinking hard. I have mad respect for anyone who sets foot in this domain. Here be dragons.
My father worked in the engineering department at the DuPont Corporation in Delaware in the '60's, and I remember going there on "take your son to work day" and seeing my first Cray. This really brings back some old, old memories.
The fact the human + weak machine far outplays a strong machine should show you that how the result is achieved matters a lot.

The ability of a human to think better than a machine puts them in a completely different classes.

They do not accomplish the same result - they think and calculate different things. In certain tests they may accomplish the same result, but not in all tests.

If they did then a strong machine plus a weak machine should do better than a strong machine alone - but it doesn't.
This is par for the course. I have friends who have had to manage manufacturing processes in China. You have to be very specific, to the point of utter paranoia, in the instructions that you provide. Wherever, and I mean absolutely wherever a corner can be cut, it will be cut at this level.

One friend had to get rubber household cleaning gloves made in China. He worked for a retailer and this would be for their store brand. If they specified something to be done, it would be done exactly the way they wanted. If something was unspecified, you could bet that the cheapest, shoddiest, most dangerous materials/processes would be used. For example, he never specified that the rubber used should actually be safe to be worn by humans. Prototypes came back with obscene levels of toxins in a glove that is meant to protect people from getting their hands dirty with household cleaning chemicals. There was just no common sense to fill in the blanks in the instructions here. Once they sorted out this issue, as another commenter mentioned, they would have to check each and every shipment because the manufacturer would try to sneak cheaper variants into the batches. Eventually my friend went and inspected the factory on a business trip only to find so many ethically questionable practices that he eventually decided to switch to another job.

If you choose to go the overseas route, I'd suggest that you find a consultant who has experience here. It will be well worth it. They'll be familiar with all the games that are played and will save you money.

As a westerner enjoying the luxuries of a western lifestyle, obviously I'd urge you to try to source/assemble locally. Cheap labour practices aside (i.e. I understand the argument that folks on that side of the world need work too and are willing to put up with cheap wages and long hours), a lot of the savings come from a complete disregard for the local environment. So these workers might benefit from the wages they earn, but they'll pay for it with their health. You probably wouldn't want heavy metals leeching into your community's drinking water, and you'd cease doing business with a factory doing so in your neck of the woods. But somehow folks seem to think it's acceptable if it's not in their backyard. That's an ethical question you'll have to answer for yourself.

All this said, quite frankly some of the manufacturing expertise simply no longer exists in North America. So your only choice is to get stuff done in China. I know a wealthy flag-waving patriotic ex-military businessman who confided in me as much about why he had to outsource overseas. He said it wasn't so much the cost but that the manufacturers overseas were simply better skilled. We like to think we've got superior technology/processes over here and that the only advantage of overseas manufacturing is the cheap price. But the more that manufacturing is done overseas, the less this will be true.
I love my WakeMate and the Wakelytics web app. It's super cool.

My only complaint is that it seems the wristband can be a bit tight, but I suppose this is necessary to provide accurate movement calculations.

Good job WakeMate team. I know it's been tough, but I'm proud of you! Thank you for handling this situation in such an appropriate manner.
Not criticizing WM here, but as a hardware-oriented engineer, I'd love to hear a post-mortem on this issue. Perhaps it's as you say and the promised PSUs are different then the prototypes; but either way, as someone who has a myriad of different design requirements (including electrical safety) I'd love to hear where WM thinks things broke down.

EDIT: The particular reason I'd love to hear a post-mortem on this is because I work for a mega-corp that is supposed to have the process to prevent such a mistake. Although all of our hardware undergoes both design testing and factory acceptance testing, we still manage to miss our share of mistakes. I would love to hear what WM thinks they missed.
Though some USB chargers output more than the standard 5V @ 500mA, up to 1500mA in my experience.
Suicides amongst micro-finance customers would be a more appropriate statistic. There are clearly more widespread problems that need to be addressed, but seeing as this behaviour is a consequence of for-profit companies applying First-world credit policies to Third-world customers, i.e., those with no other way to change their financial situation, I consider it irresponsible behaviour on the part of companies who should've known better.
I was using the original charger as well and I get about 2 nights of sleep on it.
Of course any developing entrepreneurs will have higher interest rates - they are greater credit risks, and the costs of making the loan are similar for small loans an large loans. To properly compare, you have to compare the the 24% rate to the previous lenders, who, if I remember correctly charged rates from 100-300% and up.
This piece is astonishing: if accurate, it means the profession of psychiatry is in the process of imploding. The editor of the DSM-IV (the bible of American psychiatry) accusing the profession of a "wholesale imperial medicalization of normality"? Wow.
http://www.onlinegames.com/basketball/
I agree with most of this post - the part about the value of good, solid work. I disagree with this, which the blogger just presents as a given and does not justify:

Capitalism piles up consumer goods but deprives more and more of us of the satisfaction of genuine work.

In fact, I believe capitalism allows more people to have good, solid, enjoyable work than any other system.
Does this also explain the problems Engadget had with the battery life?
This article illustrates the tension between the original philanthropic intent of micro-finance and the reality that high risk lending requires high interest rates to be profitable. I worry that the micro-finance brand will become usury with a fresh coat of paint.
A Sound Argument Against Net Neutrality
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Hi Colin! I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I feel like your arguments address semantics/linguistics and not the actual issue.

First, this limit isn't set by his computer.

Obviously the size of the stack depends on a number of variables (including the hardware architecture, the kernel, how the kernel was compiled, various settings, etc.), but on Dan's configuration it's roughly 10MB, as verified by the program at the end of the blog post. Here is a program that confirms it by computing the number in a different way:

#include <pthread.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
size_t stacksize;
pthread_attr_t attr;
pthread_attr_init(&attr);
pthread_attr_getstacksize (&attr, &stacksize);
printf("Default stack size = %lu\n", stacksize);
}

On our configuration (which is roughly what most customers are expected to run) the output is 8388608, or 8MB. According to the manual, pthread_attr_getstacksize returns the minimum size (in bytes) that will be allocated for threads created using the thread attributes object attr. Naturally the size can be changed manually (in the code or with ulimit), but it is the default minimum for newly created threads according to the manual. The point wasn't that you couldn't change this value, it's that for our purposes (lots of green threads, shallow stacks) a much smaller default stack size is more sensible.

Second, processes don't have stacks. Threads have stacks.

Certainly, but this is a question of terminology. On Linux threads are special-case processes (with address-space sharing and a few other changes). For example, when calling strace you have to pass -f to see syscalls from all the threads instead of just the main one.

Third, the stack starts out small -- like, a few hundred bytes or so.

Again, not according to the manual (see above).

You guys have heard of userland threads, right?

When we get the chance we'll post benchmarks between GNU Pth, NPTL, and our coroutine implementation. I can assure you that NPTL is much slower than what we're doing. GNU Pth is a real contender, but there are some issues associated with using it (mainly the fact that we need to be able to move coroutines between native kernel threads, and it's not clear how well GNU Pth can handle that). The coroutines implementation won't be making it into the first release - ultimately we'll test all three alternatives and pick the best one, but it will take some time before that happens.
..and both cases come to surface only in certain cases. And this is one of those.
A Year of Clojure
It looks like both have been put under github.
Book Download: Non Uniform Random Variate Generation
Breaking a WoW addiction
>Good old capitalism, always there to turn nice things into shit.

The best thing about this meme is that it WILL turn everything nice into shit if people believe it.

Capitalism and free enterprise produced everything good. The issue with suicides is not related to capitalism, it's related to cultural norms and lack of bankruptcy laws.

Your communist spin on this turns my stomach. If you really care about the poor you will recognize that free enterprise is their only true hope for attaining a better life. Lenin is not going to do it. Charity is not the solution. The solution is productive free market wealth producing labor.
I didn't say I agree with it - I said that is what you hear a lot of.

Zuck and Bill deserve absolute credit for their successes.
Perhaps the only use case would be for people using shared hosting.
There's no 'general and historical' interest rate limit of 8-12%. Credit card APRs in the United States range up to 30% or so, and payday loans can have APRs of well over 100%. In other countries, rates for products catering to the poor are similarly high - this is just the cost of doing business when extending small amounts of credit to poor prospects with high default rates.

The wisdom of that is what should be debated. Since businesses need to charge high interest rates to compensate for defaults, does mean the poor shouldn't have access to credit at all? Note that that's what effectively happening in Andhra Pradesh, where laws to 'protect the poor' have dropped the repayment rate of loans to under 20 percent, ensuring microcredit there will cease to exist.
Online chemist UK
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I agree with your bit about solidarity in India, but you might be a bit mis-informed about the interest rates.

The CoF (cost of funds) to SKS is in the vicinity of 12-14%, and the norm is to add 10% on top of that. More middle-of-the-curve MFIs usually charge 30%+.

Loan sharks in villages typically charge 100% and/or servitude, and are more often than not the cause of loan repayment related suicides.
I haven't read any of Rand's nonfiction, so correct me if I'm wrong - but I don't think she advocated violence as a means of change.

Hitler and Marx both did. Marx advocated violent overthrow and takeover by the "dictatorship of the proletariat" - and when it was tried, it worked really, really badly, leading to much destruction and death and misery.

Marxist-inspired philosophy and governance have been a wasteland of insanity and destruction... for the last 100 years, nothing else even comes close in terms of destruction. Fascism comes in a distant second. I don't think any Randian philosophy of individuality has stacked up millions of bodies in the same way, but I'm open to being corrected on that.
Every financial instrument was originally designed to help and serve people but somehow some guys who think they are smart manage to abuse the system, make a lot of damage and still get away with it. Why are not there any regulations to prohibit this? Why everybody learns only after game over when its too late? Here you go, the results of capitalism at its best
That's all well and good provided that the loan is unsecured and generous (i.e. humane) bankruptcy laws are available.

In India, bankruptcy means a rural farmer will lose everything, including his land and his seed corn.

You can't have it both ways. Either the loan is secured and farmers pay low interest rates.

Or a high rate is allowed because the loans is an unsecured loan with high credit risk.
But then the debter should be able to default without severe consequences, just a damage to his credit rating.

Neither is possible, because India doesn't know what humane capitalism is.

Edit: Sure 24% is better than 300%. So I should congratulate India for leaving the Feudal ages and entering the Robber-baron capitalist era of the 19th century.

Well OK: Congrats India! Now let's enter that 20th century, shall we?
Related is Paul Graham's essay on the acceleration of addictiveness: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

(And to add a shameless plug, my own article on akrasia: http://messymatters.com/akrasia )
Lessons From A Master Marketer
PHP 5.3 : Practical look into Lambda functions and closures
I use them every week at my local Woolworths: http://i.imgur.com/kGwNq.jpg
Check your facts: http://www.lectlaw.com/files/ban02.htm

E.g. Alabama:
ALABAMA, the legal rate of interest is 6%; the general usury limit is 8%. The judgment rate is 12%.

Like I said, it's not perfect, there are many exceptions. The US has devolved quite a bit from the humane society that built it up.

But generous bankruptcy laws still make it possible for Americans to escape high debt.
In India, suicide seems to be the only solution for some.
They also had this little fiasco: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2029052
Yes, the desire to exploit and the drive to work tirelessly to maximize what you might get from being exploited is the source of all good things.
True story. Wasn't aware of Benchmark.js, looks good! Anyone want to fork n' port? :)
There are so many people doing this that I can't play Holdem online anymore! I'm not good enough to beat the decent bots today, they have improved massively over the last 5 years.
8 Keys to Deliberate Practice
>Although WoW is a much better game than Farmville, with a substantially different business model, their tactics are fundamentally the same: use your social obligations to keep you clicking. Exploit your friendships, sense of reciprocity, and the joy of being part of a group with shared goals. Turn it all from something commendable to something frivolous that serves mainly to increase the game developer's profits.

This put into words something I've been thinking about for a while, but struggled to articulate. There's something wrong when we start doing this to friendships.
The two people agreed to 50:50 odds. That does not mean that the underlying phenomena are anything like that.
37 Signals BaseCamp is an obvious choice, but it is costly for a start up.

I also was interested in project management software and wanted to find something comparable to base camp that was free. I ended up finding one, it's called http://www.teamlab.com/. They seem to have everything base camp does at the same quality level, except it is free. I'm going to be using it for my projects.

Has anyone else used this?
In the UK, A few companies like Google and BT have come together to solve this problem. http://www.gbbo.co.uk/ They offer a free service (until 2011) for businesses to create their own websites managed by Google Sites, integrating with Google maps, places, etc.

I think in future Facebook pages will also play an important role in getting small businesses online.
Sneakers 2011 from Christian Louboutin
> Not really, because he makes a fundamental mistake. He thinks those that hold capital use violence and oppression against the masses.

You will disagree, I would imagine, but Marx would argue that one of the most important features of capitalism is that it appears to be an abstract relationship of buying and selling sans violence, even as it is very much a system of oppression of one class over another. He doesn't forget that the swords are put away (though they come out when necessary to sustain the market relationships), he just disagrees with you that forcing a whole lot of people to trade their labor on the market (at a low-ish price, since they don't control the market environment) is any less oppressive than telling a peasant explicitly to till the soil or get killed.

No offense, but he understood capitalism a lot better than you -- he just didn't believe capitalists when they said "it's not the merchants and traders ... that oppress people"
I read hacker news to break the tension and build motivation :)
Their original attorneys were fired, not paid, and had to go to court to force the Winkelvosses to pay them their attorney fees. The Winkelvosses withheld the money due to their claims of their lawyer's incompetence.
Will we stop holding communist parties, or will start holding nazi parties?
Ask HN: Bangkok HN meetup anyone?
Hi, I'm currently staying in Thailand and I was wondering if any of the HN members live in or near Bangkok. Could be a good idea to make a meetup sometime in January or just meet individually over lunch.
Use 64-bit and all problems with 10 MB stacks go away. 64 KB is surprisingly small when you call a library function or if the OS uses the userspace stack for OS calls.
Rand believes in force. Remember Ragnar Danneskjöld, the philosopher turned pirate?

Rand doesn't believe force should be used to create a utopia. She believes that force should be used in self-defense when it is rational to do so - and this includes defending your property from collectivists. So basically she believes it is morally acceptable to violently defend your property from tax collectors, as long as in doing so you are not sacrificing some greater good such as your happiness and well-being.
Please read, I never whine about Android fragmentation. I'm saying iOS (at least to me) is not as fragmented as Android, so the title is misleading.