skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What kinds of cash managment and financial practices do your startups use?
I have what I feel is a somewhat naive set of questions. I've been part of 4 startups but always on the engineering side of things both as an engineer and a leader. I've been exposed to a lot of the financial aspects of one company that was successful. At this new company, I'm simply an individual contributor with no leadership responsibilities.

So my question is, what kinds of cash management practices are typical in your startups? This current company is regularly slow paying vendors, as a matter of business practice. Typically we don't pay until past 60 days, and we have money in the bank. The one other company where I was exposed to the finances, we would let companies know when we couldn't pay them and we tried to be forthcoming the few times it happened. The CEO says it's just aggressive cash management and unlikely to change. I know a lot of large companies slow pay because of their bureaucracy, it's the first time I've seen it at a small company when it wasn't needed. Personally, I feel bad about it as a lot of the people we are slow to pay are fairly small and independent vendors.

Secondly, we bill monthly for our service, we need to send out
between 200 and maybe 500 invoices a month, not an incredibly large number. Some of the early sales work was sort of fly by the seat of the pants and so there is some differences in what customers pay. We've been trying to use salesforce.com. What I've seen is that we don't regularly invoice customers, sometimes we won't bill them for 3 or 4 months at a time. Our more sophisticated customers have actually complained about it. At least one time our CEO had to give credits to a company because we didn't bill them regularly and they were upset with it(?!?) How many companies kind of have these growing pains? Everywhere else we've been rock solid on the accounting and billing, I've never been to a place that has had problems like this, are these legitimately growing
pains or serious red flags?
I am in So Cal, but I have had POS displays and packaging done by http://www.winterborne.com/ and http://www.tazpack.com/
Title reminded me a bit of "Roll Your Own Linkbait Tech Headline" (http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/01/roll-your-own...)
You can't fool me, there ain't no Sanity Clause--Chico Marx, "A Night at the Opera"
Mobile Spinach is hiring
Craigslist is such a bizarre monopoly.
I am not convinced this is the whole truth. Let's try and separate facts from opinion. Apple using these screws is a fact, "Apple chose this fastener specifically because it was new, guaranteeing repair tools would be both rare and expensive", from what I can tell, is an opinion.

I could find two arguments for that being a fact in the article. The first one is that these screws are only used on the outside of the devices.

However, the screws on the outside likely also are the ones that are fastened with the most torque, and they also can the only ones connecting two particular materials.

So, it could also be that these are just the technically best choice for the application.

The second argument I could find is the claim "Apple occasionally refers to these as “Pentalobe security screws.”" however, Google didn't turn up anything for a search for 'pentalobe' on Apple.com.

Finally, Apple being Apple, these screws might even have been chosen because their color best matches the case, are the ones that could be painted white best, or to prevent cases where the alignment of visible lines with the edges of the display of a square or rectangular screw would occasionally be 'just not right'.

My opinion? Making stuff hard to open may have been an objective, but I am not convinced it was the or even the major reason for choosing these fasteners.
This is the setup I aspire to one day have. I've spent the better part of the past 6 months getting very comfortable with the command line and editing within the shell via emacs - now if only I could convince work to make the server I run all my analysis on be accessible from my home...
BackTrack 5 on the horizon
Spotlight your startup at Strata
Security is a big one here - doing a <Script src=> include from another domain might be really convenient for getting around cross-domain limits - but if that remote server has been compromised, or if it's run by dodgy individuals, they now have complete control of your webpage and can do incalculable damage to your business.
The link for the tweet: http://twitter.com/#!/ericschmidt/status/28196946376130560

This one was the best satirical one:

Larry Page has just ousted Eric Schmidt as Mayor of Google on @foursquare. http://bit.ly/hQGNRe

Link: http://twitter.com/#!/pourmecoffee/status/28198140209270784
Why Do People "Watch" Code? A Short Survey for Open Source Devs
Then my method isn't the best choice until you develop the knowledge to solve widely varying problems. You don't need to understand the exact syntax but you definitely need to understand why it works since that's what most problems share.

You can learn this by changing and manipulating the code to see how changes effect the program.
Ask HN: Contact Management solutions
I'm surprised I haven't found a solution for this already: I've been manually copying out contacts from GMail contacts in Highrise for a while now, (even though VCard importing helps slightly) I still find it frustrating. I've searched around a few times but can't find anything that will sync highrise (or competing product I can use for managing call lists, which I would gladly switch to) with GMail contacts. Doesn't anyone know of one?
> It is, however, a cool story to tell…

Right. Microsoft : PrimeSense :: Tartars : Joseph Boyce

If you’re an inventor, it probably doesn’t hurt to have a origin myth. And, I’m not quite sure if Apple is therefore the Luftwaffe or the lard...
The way I understand meditation is that it is a way of stepping out of "worlds of becoming" that the mind is constantly entering and wandering around in. (Until things go bad, and then it jumps to another world.) The way I try to deal with this is through the ongoing practice of calming the mind and giving it good mental food. A good source of this food is the blameless pleasure that comes from the ability to settle on a single range of awareness such as the body or the breath, and then to stay there for long periods of time, which is actually more satisfying than it sounds at first. It's inevitable that the mind will keep pulling itself away to harmful yet tempting subjects, so learning how to return peacefully, yet firmly and repeatedly is a skill that I've been trying to develop.

It becomes somewhat obvious as one begins to meditate that this wandering, and the repetition of unskillful mental qualities, is connected with what stress and suffering there is in life. The accompanying insight into these thought worlds and how they keep originating and pulling stress and suffering with them can supposedly allow one to grow dispassionate for those addictions and give them up to at least a greater or lesser extent. It's interesting to see what repeated mental habits the mind thinks are good ideas, simply because it hasn't taken a good look at them since before the age of two. Giving those habits up, even if only temporarily, can be a great relief for the mind.

The tough part about all this is putting in the effort on a regular/continual basis when the initial results can come and go without your really seeing why. Looking at my own practice, I can say it's worth the effort so far, despite the difficulties. When I'm in a tough spot, remembering the moments that I have been at greater ease in the meditation give me reason to keep working in that direction.

If you're interested, here are some talks by my favorite meditation teacher:
http://dhammatalks.org/Archive/BasicsCollection/BasicsCollec...

I hope this helps your practice. ;-)
Netflix Makes its Way Onto Cardio Maches  the Gym. Awesome.
Who knows where they might have been, it could even have been better.
You can see your results on their own page by appending /show to a saved fiddle, see:

http://jsfiddle.net/amadeus/5y5nE/show/

Also, it's recommended to use jsFiddle over Mootools Shell, since MooShell is essentially a really old version of jsFiddle, and will eventually be removed from mootools.net
The hardest part of being a motivated founder of a start-up is finding equally motivated people to work with.

You can have a great idea, money and desire but its very hard to get the motivation-train moving if you cant find people that share the passion. Also finding a mentor to help guide you is turning out to be difficult.

I am currently having a very hard time getting connected with well versed programmers for our company. Its driving me nuts. We are the guys like the ones in The Social Network?
courtesy of tptacek's HN profile: http://amzn.to/cthr46
I didn't say steal the code, I said steal the design. I didn't need to look at the actual source to make that distinction.
Because there's just no way it's going to be a $100M kind of company. reddit was probably the source of much of their initial traffic. And reddit was worth, what, $10m, in pre-bubble money?
On Google and evil
If you think writing prose solidifies your understanding of a subject, try formalizing its findings as knowledge .. in code.

Most specifications can be turned into a database for some form of Prolog, play with it. At the very least, you might get yourself a type or model checker, or you might get lucky and actually get an expert system out of it.
Bing seems to be working with Facebook, at least to some extent: they're one of the first services to make use of Facebook's new "Instant Personalisation" feature.
Having moved 5 or 6 times in San Francisco, the one feature I'd like from craigslist would be a field for square footage. This alone would make CL infinitely more useful for housing searches.
they compete with paypal because you fundamentally use paypal to send and receive money. it's a pretty basic function, except paypal sucks for doing that when you have groups. they don't explicitly say "we do group payments" but the fact that wepay works better for sending and receiving payments still makes them competitive.
The Best Times to Buy Anything in 2011
Cliff Click on Azul's Pauseless GC, Zing, JVM Languages (video)
Oh look, a single data point!
Step 1. Don't use Google Chrome because then you can't see my blog entry.
I only use Chrome, works fine for me.

Also, according to my analytics, 40% of my readers use Chrome, so unless they're all just constantly refreshing my blog like mindless zombies without seeing anything, the issue is probably on your end.

What issue are you experiencing?
The Apigee blog uses Disqus, so you should be able to comment: http://blog.apigee.com/detail/api_design_for_developers/

Always interested in feedback, either on giving better talks or on making better APIs / developer experiences.
Small businesses expect the marketing rewards of those loyalty cards, look forward to the breakage, and demand everything to be as cheap as possible.

Traction is going to be hard. Good luck.
Introducing JavaScript Player API for iframe embeds
Wolfram Alpha API v2: Radically new pricing including free "experimental" access
+1

Also, billions are harder to spend than millions, because purchases that big change the environment.

For example: a small, unprofitable company makes purple widgets, even though no one else thinks it's worth it to make purple widgets. Owning these guys would give you a competitive advantage because their widget-making technology coordinates well with your sprocket-making pipeline, so you acquire them for $1B. Suddenly a flock of other companies will jump up to make purple widgets; they will get acquired by your competitors, who can learn from your widget-making mistakes. This all cuts down on the competitive advantage that made you buy the company in the first place.
jQuery, while used & loved by my team, has made hiring vastly more difficult.
The blog entry flashes and then disappears. Works fine in Firefox. Using 9.0 beta... perhaps this is the issue?

Regardless, the menu on the blog overlaps "Strategies for rapidly acquiring and monetizing lots of traffic." in both Chrome and Safari.

Edit: You're right. It's an extension. Ad Sweep.
5 minutes a day? ;)
Transparency: The Quest to Power Africa (infographic)
Um, exactly? Memorizing important numbers is a good idea precisely because then you can use a friend's phone in case yours isn't available.
Yes, every day with very few exceptions.

I recommend the Golden Flower method, generally, as described in The Secret of the Golden Flower translated by Thomas Cleary. The Wilhelm translation of the same text is broken.

What is significant about meditation is not specific to sitting. Sitting quietly is a way to clear the everyday human mind so that a more profound awareness can arise in awareness. Then one can hold that awareness through all activity, practicing quiet when quiet is appropriate and acting when action is appropriate.

Meditation can be mundane: a way to relax, to enhance concentration, to feel peaceful. Or it can be greater, a way to understand reality in a way that is denied to the analytic mind.
Holden Caulfield’s Goddam War
I think being contrarian for it's own sake is a dick move, and any benefit is secondary. Jobs may have thought he was being clever, but he was just being a dick. This seems to be pretty typical of his early years: Apple succeeded because of his vision, and despite his management.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm on Chrome 9 beta and it looks fine for me, it's probably an extension. Try incognito mode.

Edit: Now I'm wondering why this extension perceives my entire blog as one giant ad :)

Good point about the menu overlapping the tagline, I'll have to work on that. It's a fluid width layout I believe, so they overlap on smaller/netbook/low-res screens.
Alas, not in the US. I'd at least like to hold to the reduced standard of practicing software engineering if you're going to call yourself an engineer.
I hope that Larry Page is the next Steve Jobs, not the next Jerry Yang.
Facebook 'leads to Salvador Cabanas shooting suspect'
Clang gains support for C++0x variadic templates
Man, ionfish beat me to the punch. Things I learn best, are things that I put into practice or write about. Things that I have an opinion about usually form some sort of dialog that I consider to be analogous to writing. This has been the case for me in every subject imaginable. Politics, math, science: all things that are conceptual with ideas. I know that history encompasses ideas, but rout memorization of facts has never appealed to me. Writing about a time period or such requires not just that I know the facts, but that I recall them, restructure them and express them in my own words. Even if it's just filtering through a couple extras areas of my brain, it makes a huge difference in my ability to remember important facts later.

I've never tried to pay attention to my knowledge before and after a test, but I've taken too many tests that I didn't feel accurately represented the material to be leery of offering as much praise as the NYT does.
Probably via growl, which can listen over a network (and presumably, forwarded ports via SSH). Not sure on details though.
True, but it is interesting what little soap, toilet paper, and hair can do... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_1962_Alcatraz_escape#Escap...
Everyone's on a Holiday, But Nobody's taking a Vacation
No wonder people's impressions of sysadmins are not overwhelmingly positive. (I'm envisioning Wally from Dilbert here.)

If you can replace someone's job with the proverbial small shell script (or apt-get install $OPENSOURCEPROJECT), sooner or later that is what will happen.
Are you paying for power for a fridge? Then laptop energy consumption is negligible.
I was aware that you can see the results on their own page. What I meant was that not having to switch between views is one of jsfiddle's strengths over jsbin. Edited my earlier reply to remove the misleading 'but'.

Thanks for the info about MooShell. I don't use it but wasn't aware it was to be killed off.
WikiLeaks defies the "war on hi-tech terror"
When Microsoft has a big success — Kinect, for example, is amazing — I find myself rooting for them.

I was amazed to find myself doing the same thing, and if I had gone back in time to tell my younger self that I would be doing that, the younger me would have suspected that the older me was pulling his leg.
"Personal" and "person" are obviously related, but as Roberts observed, so are many other noun-adjective pairs like "edge" and "edgy," and edgy things very often don't even have edges. You can't infer the precise meaning of one from an arbitrary definition of the other. It seems very unlikely that Congress had the law's idiosyncratic definition of "person" in mind rather than the common definition of "personal privacy."
New funding source available for startups: MicroVentures
Mass exodus of executives continues at Microsoft
A friend of mine died of malaria last year - this was difficult to watch. But for sure an amazing achievement for science.
This is certainly true of physics or mathematics. You can read all the textbooks you want, but you can't claim to understand those subjects unless you sit down and actually solve some problems or prove some theorems.
I'm pretty sure the developers have an idea how much is lost.
You might want to check out Nuevasync, it syncs Gmail Contacts with Highrise Contacts if I am reading their landing page right.
I do the majority of development locally and I find it works out just fine. I have ssh open to my machine and have a bunch of git repos offloaded to a server somewhere so I can work from practically anywhere, too. You don't have to have a network of four-five computers to work this way. :)
Re: getting my sons to do more housework: One of my explicit goals was to make sure they can care for themselves. My oldest son has the same medical condition I have. We have gotten off all the drugs and stuff and gotten well by eating better, keeping the house stringently clean, etc. He literally could die if he moved out (or I died) and he didn't know how to care for himself.

Re: "domestic slave" -- seems to me like good shorthand. You knew pretty clearly what I meant -- someone really unfairly bogged down with uncompensated labor -- without a lot of elaborating, offended or not.

Re: Female audience. That's a laugh. Women seem to find me far more intimidating and offensive than men do.

Re: Arguing: That has two meanings, one of which is to debate it and the other is to fight about it. I don't mind a debate though my experience is that most folks on the internet don't really do that. They pretty quickly deteriorate into fighting.

Nor am I making excuses. I have pushed the envelope on topics like this many, many times in male dominated forums. I have a fairly good idea of how hard it is do this kind of thing and that one of the big issues is the framing and underlying assumptions of what other people say. It very, very frequently becomes "If you don't agree it's black, then you must be one of those psychos that think it's white. And that is so amazingly obviously wrong that you must be a retard." There is no room for discussing shades of grey, much less a more technicolor version of reality. If I don't agree 100% with their assertion it's black, they peg me as one of those "100% white" folks. I get routinely slammed as being someone who strongly holds the "opposite" view for attempting to say "I don't see it that way". It really matters very little what the topic is -- politics, gender issues, homeschooling, you name it. If I say I homeschooled my kids, I must be one of those folks who wants to dismantle public school. If I say I don't think the anti-vax crowd is completely crazy, someone inevitably asks me what made me choose to not vaccinate my kids at all (which is a fallacious assumption and real example from this very forum). And on and on. So a public forum is a quite difficult place to try to articulate a view that is substantially different from the "standard positions" everyone is familiar with. All attempts to side step the repeated efforts of other people to peg me as this, that, or the other makes it incredibly difficult or downright impossible to convey how I really see it. Thus a blog would be a better option, and not out of cowardice.
Why is Verizon suing over net neutrality rules it once supported?
World's Med Students Declare for Open Access
I'd discard results under say a second or 2, took me a couple of goes to see that you can't move the mouse at all once the page loads.
As a Virginia Tech student that is excited about startups, I'm glad to hear you had such a good experience with DayOne Ventures. I'm going to apply for this year's summer session.

Since you guys are still local, I'd love to buy you lunch sometime so I can hear more of your story.
We Talk With Body Language. So Should Our Cellphones
Everything in Xbox land has that kind of tint for me. The 360 has been a great console and the Kinect is a wildly impressive bit of technology, not to mention a great user experience. If you can remember to stand in front of your TV, it's hard to do anything wrong.

It's fun, it works well, and it beats the hell out of anything you could do with Wii nunchucks and the balance board.
Google news: New Google CEO Eric Schmidt | Breaking News
Maybe I'm missing something, but he still needs a physical computer to connect to his development machine in the cloud right?

I personally think this is expensive for the benefits it brings but clearly for the author it is worth it.
And as the article you point to states, it radically changed under Google, from a C++ standalone application to a in-browser application.
Ask HN: Domain privacy?
I've been using domain privacy on my domains, but my registrar recently increased its rates by quite a bit. I found that I would get quite a bit of spam when I made my details public. Have you found domain privacy to be useful? What's a good registrar offering the service at a fair price?
"What I cannot create, I do not understand." -- Richard Feynman
Why Amazon Needs An Android App Store
A different, more strategic take on the rationale and opportunity behind Amazon's entrance into the app store market
I've been working with qrush on this app.

We thought this teaser page would be understood as clear parody of the Hipster site (Or as another commenter phrased it, "in-crowd sarcasm".) Based on the comments here, it seems like we could have done a better job communicating that. This was a few hours worth of work to get the word out about what we're building. The actual app is where we'll hopefully convince you of it's worth.
A 128-word rant that boils down to "don't complain about a lack of libraries, rarr!" is a bit of a "bump" in and of itself.
Life360′s Family Safety App Embraces The Check-In, Then Surges
Oh wow, this is fantastic! I'm moving soon and this is exactly what I need. Scanning down Craigslist text adds is just terrible. This is downright fun. Thanks so much for creating this!
Or try sha1_pass and never bother remembering any password ever again.