skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What would you use the money for? What does the angel investor expect from you in return for the money?

Without answers to those two questions, it's really hard for anyone to decide whether it's a good decision or not. There are always strings and charitable people always get something out of their charity, regardless of whether it's simply good feelings (I'm a good person, I helped someone, my money is going to a good cause) or something material (I'm going to control some of this company).

If you feel like you can use his connections, perhaps you could tell him that you don't feel comfortable accepting money at this point, but it would really help if he could connect you with some people.

Essentially, I'm seconding what Michael Dorfman said.
White papers: Modern Perl tools and best practices
Pirate Bay working on a mysterious new site
Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype
Just like collective responsibility for the Iraq and Afganistan wars rests with all Americans?
Danger: America Is Losing Its Edge In Innovation
Did you read that article and decide that people are getting off due to questionable statistics? As far as I can tell, the article is about calculating the probability of random people matching a particular DNA sample, not about excluding people, which is a lot easier.
What I dislike about the attitude of many businesses
towards Nigeria is the way they just dismiss the
country with a wave of their hand.

I've thought about it before, and wish it was easier to do and that there was more of it.

I get lots of ssh connection attempts and spam from the third world. I don't regularly communicate with anyone there. It would fabulous if there was a way I could tell my servers to block traffic from vast ranges of IP addresses that are known to be located outside of the first world.

Some people wouldn't be able to email me or read my website, but it would be a good tradeoff for me.

Think of it this way: imagine that paypal suddenly
decided to exclude Arizona from using Paypal because
it has a higher statistical likelihood of fraud.

They're an independent business. They're free to choose who they deal with.
That reddit thread satisfied many pedants, I think.
While I very much sympathize with your viewpoint I've been peripherally involved in analyzing a bunch of e-commerce traffic and I'm sorry to report that of all the charges coming from Nigeria over a substantial period of time there was not a single one that was actually legitimate.

I'm sure there is at least one person in Nigeria that goes against the flow here and that is an honest person simply trying to get by but with the odds that bad you really can't fault the conclusion that Nigerian traffic so risky that the risks far outweigh the benefits.

Merchants typically run a very fine line between operating their business and having their accounts yanked due to 'excessive fraud', any measures they can take to protect themselves from this happening will be implemented without any remorse, it's a survival thing.

For the record, yes, we block Nigerian transactions, and several other countries besides.
He said 'internet population', not population. Do you realise that 70% of the country is below the poverty line?

It seems like I'm missing something, so I have a question for those who upvoted this comment. Do you all seriously think that the OP should set up an "african paypal" just because the real paypal is broken for him?
Technically, Django doesn't run on GAE. All the options to get it running on GAE involve quite a bit of hacking of Django. So there really isn't any support to maintain.
Republic Day of India Celebration 26th January 2011, Photos Selections
Facebook is Japan's nothing. It is not that well known in Japan.
Depending on just how big the unpaid invoice is, in some states small-claims court is an option; it's cheaper and quicker usually. Here's a list of each state's limits for a small-claims-court suit: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/article-30031.html
I tend to agree with you, it would be one thing if they had it stipulated in the contract that they could disable the software, no different that a license agreement with a software lock, but to air the dirty laundry on the site, that's over the top, I would steer clear of working with someone like that.
Told you man, it's all about the domain hacks these days :), seriously though, noone really wants a .net do they?
Startup Quote: Alan Kay, computer scientist
> It's long overdue for Nigeria to get their act together.

What do you mean by get their act together? In my experience living in a third world country, it's hard enough to get the establishment to prosecute violent crimes. So I'd say as an ordinary citizen it's pretty much impossible to get anyone who matters to take electronic crime seriously.
If you don’t fail at least 90 percent of the time, you’re not aiming high enough.

- Alan Kay

http://startupquote.com/post/2892285401
he is not attempting to make a counterargument... he is simply very irritated

Sounds like he'll fit right in with most of the Internet.
Certain types of meditation have been shown to exhibit different neural signals compared to those who do not (do a google scholar search for "Occipital gamma activation during Vipassana meditation").

Those who meditate also tend to have a much shortened "Attentional Blink". This is quite interesting as it shows a brain reorganisation which allows for greater information intake and filtering. You can find youtube and wikipedia entries for "Attentional Blink".
So what do you suggest an ordinary citizen should do? Don a cape and black mask and hunt the scammers down?!
If you have a rather large monitor, that might put your terminal at a ridiculous size. For quick access to Terminal.app, Quake console style, I use Visor, which slides it down from the top of the screen on a global hotkey:

http://visor.binaryage.com/

One of the handiest SIMBL's I've ever found.
F.C.C. Seeks Mandatory Alerts of Cellphone Overage Charges
To the developer: Some of the CSS looks broken: http://min.us/mvkte3T

OSX 10.6.6
Firefox 3.16.13

Looks OK in the latest versions of Chrome and Safari
This is a broader issue than access to Paypal.

There's lots of reasons it's not great to be a Nigerian in Nigeria - fixed elections, corruption, violence, low standard of living, tension between the north and south, nasty tropical diseases, relatively lower education opportunities, weak arts community, flowover from ethnic tension in neighbouring states.

In the scale of things, concern over ability to make internet payments is probably pretty low, and a concern that would be pressing only to a small elite in the country.
i also think it's a good idea to get a 'bootstrap startup' partner on the side that can help keep your project moving forward when you get stuck with real work (and can't get back to startup for a while), smooth out the burnout risks, and help overall momentum and morale when things get tough.

ideally, it would be someone that shares your 'ramen profitability' and complements your skill set.
$1 Gesture Recognizer
I don't get it. Won't doing any task with a certain complexity everyday for 8 weeks show a change in brain structure that is statistically significant compared to a control.

That is my hypothesis. Now falsify me, please :-)
Indeed, orthogonal to the extent to which those wars are bad on overall (and the collective responsibility of the Dutch and Brits for slave trade in the past, which we can all agree on, was a shame... (am Dutch, to take it home...))
I didnt know that either! Cheers
Given/when - The Perl switch statement
Am I the only one reminded of the Usenet Oracle when hearing about Quora?
I've tried using apps for this, and I've found that the thing that works best is a plain old wall-calendar. Hang that up somewhere visible, and make one box on each day for each of the habits you're trying to build. Put a green tick in once you've done it, and try to keep it up every day.

Apps are easy to ignore. A wall calendar is harder to forget about.
> if you are already treated as a thief, why not just be one?

Because that would just perpetual the problem.
You could leverage http://www.kickstarter.com/ if your idea solves a problem in a lot of people's life. Also, a good way to validate your idea in the open market.
> all the charges coming from Nigeria over a substantial period of time there was not a single one that was actually legitimate

How can dis even be possible? You mean not even one out of the possible millions in a day is legitimate? Haba!
Recently there have been a number of experimental programs that actually do use experience points and leveling in lieu of normal grading procedures for younger students, with good results for all I've heard of so far. There was a TED talk that mentioned this last year, but I don't remember which one.

There's also at least one college prof doing this, Lee Sheldon at Bloomington's Indiana University. His course is related to computer games, though.
The first DVCS I used was darcs, because I wanted to contrib to a project using it. Next was hg, because it seemed very nice for my needs. Now I'm using git, for various reasons of my own. I don't think I'm all that different from others out there, in that I'd heard of DVCS and heard many of the options, then was prompted to try one so that I could mess with an open source project, then found which one I personally like. Git is only synonymous with DVCS to people who barely know about DVCS, because it's used for some high profile projects. If that success causes some manager to pick git over svn then the world is a slightly better place.
The site is down...not a good sign for a CDN
they do suck. you should have left all of that up. you should wipe their server harddrives while you're at it.
I may be missing something, but why isn't skipping your list comprehension maintaining the benefit of using a generator?

>>> from itertools import chain
>>> chain(*[['a', 'b', 'c'], ['d', 'e', 'f']])
Can't agree more! Wait till 'Quora' version of Social Media experts start spamming the site.
He is both right and wrong on this.

Right, for the present: Quora is special because of who is there, not what, and there is an upper limit to the success of a fan-club.

But he is wrong in the long term, or could be wrong, if Quora adapts and allows the rest of the world to create their own fan-club universes. If it goes on to inspire communities from different backgrounds, fields, industries and specialties, then yes, Quora can become "Stack Exchange" + resident celebrity monks + Wikipedia.
If you think exercise is a pointless and repetitive manual labour. Try doing martial arts.

It is fun, sweaty and requires you to think on your feet. You need strategy to defeat an opponent before sparring. You need to think immediately on how to counter an attack or how to attack. You need to use leverage against a bigger opponent. You need to seize that small advantage you have to convert it to something bigger.

All of these train your mindset for entrepreneurship. Planning a strategy, changing you game plan, using leverage against bigger opponents. Having your body hurts trains you to take a beating. Losing a fight gives you feedback on how to improve if you are open to learning
My company deals with university sports teams, so often this is a state institution paying us. Most invoices are paid net 60-90 despite the terms in whey contract being net 30 + fees after. Occasionally and predictably we have clients in the net 120 or worse camp. There is no dilute about the work or the billing, just the finance office not doing their job, not getting the correct POs etc... We have one Job right now we did in august and have not been paid for despite having a PO to start. Did I mention this is the third year we have done similar work for them?

If we did something like this we'd be out of business. At large companies the person you sell to is not the person who pays you and creates all kinds of problems. All you can do is work the system and try to plan for it in your pricing. We just give less discounts and charge more for the hassle up front. Puts a hurting on the cash-flow though. We never not been paid.
This is a neat story.

So I'm a IOS noob and have a couple of dumb questions. I'll address them to the author, but please anybody just jump in there.

You still had to run a server with PHP to do the scraping to get the data, right? Were your server costs included in your profit estimate?

Because this was split up over several years, what kind of effort and money do you think it would be to go from being a competent Javascript/HTML/Server programmer to having an app in the store for this type of project?
Leaks software will have broad applications
I am surprised by the fact that arrington allowed an article that criticizes tehcrunch for being hype machine (which it is).

Regarding quora, yes it gets too much techcrunch attention but it is not as flawed as the writer thinks, quora generates quality content thanks to its quality users, while quality may start to decline as number of users grows(something that happens to almost all startups) it is possible to prevent that to some extent with introduction of advanced peoplerank/answerrank algorithms.

Going back to techcrunch, yes it is a crappy place that religious fanboys (MG) write about twitter, iphone and foursquare (and now quora) 5 times a day and ex-alcoholics (Carr) makes fun of its readers.
Nice article, liked it a lot. But I like almost anything EB writes.
Lots of domains show up available when they're not.

Domain hacks would be great.

Otherwise - nice interface, very responsive.
It doesn't sound like you put a price (both in added time and money) on the additional out of scope features. So instead it looks like your super late, and want more money. Not a good place to be with a "why do we need a website" client.
I know a few Japanese people on Facebook: those married to foreigners. There are practical limits to the scalability of this customer acquisition method.

[Edit: I need to remember not to make Japan jokes because people take me seriously. FB accounts are also popular with Japanese people with recent experience abroad and those with many foreign friends, at least in my social circles in central Japan (like Kansas, minus the white people). Of approximately 70 people at my previous day job, two admitted to having Facebook accounts when asked for a show of hands at a meeting, and one of those was me.]
Slow websites Bring Bad Press from Frustrated Visitors
Actually, the scraping is done in the client nowadays, so no server costs at all. The client is basically making a visit to the page, and then the relevant information is extracted and presented with a different UI than the original site.

In regards to your second question, I'd say it is not too much effort. If you're a skilled web developer you can spend one day getting familiar with the iOS web platform and then build a cool app. There are tonnes of material on Google and since you can test the web app using iOS Safari there is no reason to spend money on an iOS developer license until you're confident that the app idea will work.
The biggest problem with iTerm was the fact that if you left it running it would constantly eat up 1-2% of your cpu and never go to idle. This really hurt the battery life on any laptop.
I have a japanese guy in my friendlist on facebook, but that's not the issue here. And yes, this way of customer acquisition won't take facebook too far.
i'm working at work, coding side project at some nights, read some hackernews, techcrunch AND have one wife and two small kids. imagine how focused i am and on what! )))
Ouch. Using Verisign's domain files - I will check what went wrong - I assume I misread them.

Thank you :)
The idea is targeted at health care professionals. If it were a consumer app or a social networking site, it would have been easier to bootstrap.

Will checkout the site. Thanks.
From my own experience, he's too enthralled with mathematics, which in many ways is like having a photographic memory. Use it to your advantage, but spare us the advert (just the results would be fine).
In the short term, Quora is an interesting site. Long term, I see nothing being done by Quora to anticipate spammers, marketers, trolls, plain stupid people, etc. Add to that the front- and back-end performs atrociously.

The first time I saw Quora, I didn't really see the point of it, but it turned out to have some very interesting users. I don't think they have any roadmap for the service, and I sincerely doubt that Quora is going to be relevant in six months.

Quora may have done some interesting things as a start-up (or not), but the founders seem to have foregone any basic wisdom that concerns creating and maintaining a community.
(disclosure: I work for Mozilla)

The 2x improvement is for cold startup on specific configurations, mainly on hard drives with slow seek times. For faster hard drives, the improvement is less, and for SSDs it may be much less.

I should also note this is just one of many startup speed improvements coming in Firefox 4.
You're 100% correct here ... That's exactly my experience of downloading Chrome in Thailand. Plus, even if you add Google serch again fresh, it doesn't do instant search from the address bar. It's maddening to say the least!
That is not the issue at all. Git's popularity is great, sure, but this is an issue of semantics. The things the author mentions are not specific to git, they're common to all DVCSes. People will pick git up because other people use it, not because the term DVCS has been annihilated.
"Fuck indeed"? You mean fuck GoDaddy, it has competitors, use those instead.
CDN for all the other scripts (backbone.js, modernizr, etc.)
No, it means that Nigeria already has a very low number of people that are going to be paying customers for online services and that those people are completely drowned out by the number of Nigerians that attempt to commit fraud.

It's sad, but it's really true.

The possible millions make use of free services they're not possible millions of e-commerce consumers.

You wish. If Nigeria had millions of legit e-commerce consumers the situation would be quite different.
I don't know much about Quora, and have never used it, so I can't comment on its chances of success.

But I really don't like the name, and I think it may hold them back, as far as mainstream adoption goes. It's not an attractive name to begin with, and I don't quite know how to pronounce it: koo aura or kwaura (rhymes with Laura)?

If we're comparing Quora to Facebook and Twitter, it loses the name game by a mile. Facebook and Twitter are both easy to say and there's no confusion on spelling or pronunciation. Also, Quora can't be easily or obviously verb-ized; "Facebook me" or "Tweet it". I don't see "Quoraize it" or "Quoing" becoming a commonly used phrase.

All of this may be irrelevant if Quora is just that good, but it's certainly something to think about.
Thanks :)

I might be visiting Stockholm soon and I'll grab your app!
An African paypal that is open to those countries that were locked out due to excessive fraud would have an even harder time to stay alive than paypal already has. After all their fraudulent:legit ratio would be a lot worse than paypals'.
Yes, winning usually still means you usually don't get paid.

http://www.sptimes.com/Hillsborough/90698/Small_claims_usual...

"Only 8 percent of those winning plaintiffs collected, court records show. Officials say some plaintiffs might not have notified the court, so as a backup test, the Times contacted 39 winning plaintiffs. Eight -- 21 percent -- said they had been paid.

Court officials nationwide confirm that whatever the real number is, it's low.

"Most plaintiffs would be better off taking their money to the roulette tables in Biloxi, Miss., and placing it on red," said Jimmy Dye, a collections lawyer who works throughout Florida. "They'd certainly have more fun." "

Go on Judge Judy or something. The TV shows will actually pay you if you win.
"while quality may start to decline as number of users grows... it is possible to prevent that to some extent with introduction of advanced peoplerank/answerrank algorithms."

You say that as if it's some sort of established industry best practice and they just have to go yank the relevant open-source project off of Sourceforge, rather than something where only a handful of people at great and continuing effort have gotten up to "reasonably adequate", and the usual path for a site like this trying to pull this trick is simply to fail.
exactly, easily my biggest failing on this is intimating exactly what extra costs would be acrued when the initial contract expired and adjusting end dates. Then if they pulled the plug fine, at least I wouldnt have been working for the last 14 weeks for no money and could have moved onto another project.
Bug identified... almost fixed.
No.

You owe the Oracle a successful social network running on NNTP.
Someone who solves problems or produces work in unconventional ways, not working via the usual channels.
it has been a long time since I have done any Perl but it's always a pleasure like seeing a old friend!
yeah, that really wasnt an option as I am resident in Thailand where legal proceedings are usually settled with big brown envelopes and such.
Very nice designs! I love to see people who are different and brilliant.

My suggestion is to teach math/design online; maybe even create your own online course/site.
Ask PG: Please revert the change to break up discussions in multiple pages?
If this is to reduce the load then it will have the opposite effect (far more inbound connections) to some extent and it completely spoils the flow of the site when you're reading.

In active discussions things will jump around from one page to another all the time depending on the votes and there is a positive feedback effect from those things on the 'first' page of a discussion getting far more votes.

I don't think this experiment is an improvement, please consider reverting the change.
thats a bit harsh
Was not the NewsFeed Sean Parker's idea originally developed for Plaxo (he is cofounder)?

P.s. Its nice to see academicians finally admit that they sometimes do kill creativity and discourage students from innovation.
Are you disputing the claim that P(scam | from nigeria) >> P(scam | not from nigeria)? Keep in mind, a scam rate of even 1% would put Paypal Nigeria way into the red.

Obviously, a "which country to do business in" decision is not done by algorithm. That doesn't mean Paypal isn't using objective metrics to make that decision.
No, this website doesn't engender trust, and that's vital for a cdn of this nature.
Yeah, that's the original idea. Something that students and staff can use to post and reach those who are off-campus (in my university, we are by the hundreds, each one of us potential patrons, customers, participants of the places and events they promote in those flyers).
They have a lot of good data to identify positive users. Also they have considerably more latitude than your average geek q&a site, since there is no firehose, and no visible karma score. Don't count them out yet.
Maybe I just got up on the wrong side of the bed, but am I the only one who was put off by this comment:

"Quora’s membership is growing largely because of the attention that TechCrunch has given it."?
I would keep the door open and figure out what possibilities such a change in your plans would bring.

If after careful consideration (no need to be in a hurry here if this offer is good it will still be good three months from now) you think that on balance you're going to be better off by taking this guy on board and you have an idea of how much your company is worth then you can start to negotiate a percentage.

Be prepared to walk at any stage, it's apparently a sellers market so you can afford to play it pretty hard.
fixed, although the availability checks are offline, this is by design, checking the availability inline is just a horrible experience, even using batched Asynchronous lookups. Perhaps we can do something similar to Skyscanner and do the check only if you're interested in a particular domain.
flagged for ad hominon attacks.