skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're just in it for the social benefit of revolutionizing the day spa customer acquisition game?
Suggestion: Show a preview whenever possible before asking customers to "Buy Now". I might have bought a Tumblr poster, but I stopped when I had to click "Buy Now" and still didn't know what I was getting! I might get one anyway, though. What a great idea.
No. http://www.cardreport.com/laws/california/1747-1748-7.html They can check your ID and verify it matches the card, they just can't record anything from your ID.
They'll be rolling in every shape and form.
It does not depend unfortunately whether you mind or not.
I think you're getting downvoted because "they're doing something skeezy" and "prospective partners are free to refuse" are orthogonal. If I walk up to a random person on the street and ask them what their credit card number is, that's questionable & skeezy, even though they can just tell me to buzz off!
where there's a will there's a way :P
It was risky. But, I also believe that there are two key points from the story that made it easier.

1. He married a woman who is extremely supportive and dialed in.
2. He had a savings that he could fall back on. So, getting kicked out of Y Combinator was heartbreaking but not soul crushing.

Basically, he had some good protective factors which made it possible for him to take risks.

Congratulations and best to you and Storenvy.
Who downvoted this? That's not cool. Asking for an explanation is always ok.

Anyways, Yuri Milner (with Ron Conway) recently announced a blanket offer to all YC companies: $150k in no cap convertible debt. The title could have been to a story where a YC company dropped, presumably forfeiting the offer, only to be tracked down specifically and offered much more.

[edit: typo]
This Nokia/Microsoft deal is really terrib... Hey, look at those shiny phones!
People, this link talks about "inventions". Nothing else is included in this. Please do not generalize this to "work".

If you invent something while adhering to the statutes stated here, and write software implementing that invention, then the invention would belong to you. But the software doesn't! Software is subject to copyrights, not inventions.
Ask HN: Review my startup, BeautyBloc.com
We're positioning BeautyBloc.com as the "Groupon for beauty products and services." The idea is that by being more targeted, we will get higher quality customers for our merchants and also provide deals that are more relevant for the our opt in subscribers. Would love to get any and all feedback you may have on the business model, the best way to merchant leads, drive traffic to the site, the site itself, etc.!

Thanks so much!
The post is about editors. It's the joke I don't find interesting.
Check out http://startupdigest.com/ to see some of the events happening around here during your trip.
You are not supposed to use one giant repo for everything. You are supposed to break it into pieces, one per project.

See Android, which already has a wrapper around git ( http://source.android.com/source/git-repo.html ) to sync multiple repositories as a single unit.
I always found statistics deeply disturbing when I was studying it at school.

You can establish a null hypothesis and then test at some confidence interval (say, 99%) and find that your null hypothesis still holds.

But, being somewhat ingenious, you may decide to lower the confidence interval (to, say, 98%) and find that your experimental evidence is now significant enough for you to reject your null hypothesis and accept your alternative hypothesis.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics, indeed.
More like, a concept designer in Nokia has spent a few hours mocking something up in Photoshop.
I remember this too. Jeff Atwood made the comment in the stackoverflow blog back in 2008:

"We rely heavily on full-text search on stackoverflow.com, which worked amazingly well for us under SQL Server 2005. Looks like that’s no longer the case for SQL Server 2008, unfortunately."

Here's the entry: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/11/sql-2008-full-text-sea...
They actually train their people in music theory, because they pull the music apart and list a few hundred features. Depending on the genre, there are different lists of musical features that might differentiate the songs.

This is what makes Pandora unique from Last.fm, or Ping, or other "social" music discovery sites. Instead of recommending songs according who likes them, it learns what kind of music you like. It looks across genres and artists to the actual musical features of each song.
Sounds like a good story to blog about and post on HN.
Actually, it doesn't. A compound modifier isn't hyphenated when it's clearly an adverb modifying an adjective -- e.g., when the adverb in question is a -ly word.
Cache.

http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html
I really don't know the answer to this question but my best guesses

a) At some point you would do a real valuation on your company and debt would be converted to shares or some type of equity. Investors would hope that you become profitable and investors could sell shares on secondary market or company would eventually buy back shares.

b) If no cash you would eventually close shop, and I imagine if you dissolve your corporation nothing happens. Like going bankrupt and if you have no money theres nothing to collect on and nothing happens. I guess its possible to sell what assets are available.

Thats why investment is a risk.
Strange concept, and not a lot of detail.

I can't tell if $200 is a great deal, or horrible deal.

That being said, looks like an interesting story.
This looks cool as hell, and if my life circumstances were different, I'd be onboard (so to speak).

At the same time, I think that the focus on "48-hour startups" for these kinds of projects selects against a lot of potentially profitable ventures which would require some complexity, and which simply can't be designed and prototyped without at a couple months of work at minimum. Unless you have a compelling innovation already well-fleshed-out in mind, there is a tendency to ape what's already out there, which makes for fun technical exercises, but not always compelling startups.

I hope I'm wrong, though. I wish the participants a safe journey and happy hacking. :)
Wondering why you chose the "bloc" part of the name. (For me, it has unfortunate implications.)

Thanks.
How secure is your website?
A few tips to secure a CMS site.
>Maintaining a short position is expensive

Short positions on companies like Netflix should be initiated using capped-loss derivatives instead of assuming the unlimited risk of selling the company's stock short.

Buying a long-dated put option is often the best way to short something, assuming you have conviction.
I've certainly heard of it, I just haven't heard of people actually using it.
Interesting.

I visited the site, typed-in my child's name, then got stuck.

I couldn't immediately think of one thing that he's working towards (although now that I think about it...).

What i wanted to do was create the StarChart and send it to my wife to check it out.

You may want to consider (even further) simplifying the already-simple getting started process.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, my son is working most on becoming potty trained. Your mad-lib style form doesn't really work for this case "[name] is working towards a [???]" Of course, we could also argue the value of using a tool like this to help with potty training...
This guy's opinions are most appalling, he gets so many things wrong! I'd like to write a long comment about it, but for now this easy one caught my eye:

"Do Asians think that Western societies have a lot of problems?

Yes. The concept of obligation to family is very different. I'm not saying one is right and one is wrong. American families are so strong. But if you look at the number of children born out of wedlock ... that's the sort of thing that Asian societies don't want to see happen. "

What a simplistic comment to make!
I love qr codes. I'm currently changing roles/jobs so am thinking about my new cards. I'd like a qr code on there, but almost think a short url is better. Yes I like info convergance, so something cleaner than about.me would be good.

Good luck
MPEG LA starts the search for VP8 patents
Google Tried To Buy Ad Startup Admeld, But Talks Broke Down Over Price
A startup batch has to all be physically present for the YC period. That is because they meet in person frequently. So for 3 months you have to live where they are holding it.

Originally YC alternated between Boston and Silicon Valley. However they have now changed to always operating out of Silicon Valley. So you have to live there for that period.

This does not stop companies from moving there for 3 months and then moving back. As a notable example, Wufoo is based in Florida.
8M cars to recall (and the resulting hit to prestige) is a huge cost, compared to the PR gain they had on this issue.
:-)

Let me know if you figure something out!
Any info on the total number of English speakers in Egypt?
No, this post is not about 'text editors', it is about 'a joke about text editors'.

Nobody really cares if you don't find it interesting. Flag it, maybe make a comment to that effect, and buzz off. Just don't veer off topic.
500 Startups' First 12 Investments
I think Pandora will go back into heavy losses if they raise money. I love Pandora as a service, but it's a far cry from being a Netflix. ( a long time paying customer of both )

Pandora's revenue is threatened by so much, RIAA contracts, pirating, advertisings race to zero ( via google ), etc...

They know this, and they will need to reinvent themselves to be worth anything. As a result I predict they will blow the 100 million on radically new business methods. Considering the success rate of music companies... I am worried.
Remember that you aren't trying to convince a bunch of HN readers - you are trying to convince a judge (who thinks computers are magic boxes)

If your day job is Oracle DBA and your startup is iPhone apps or web design that still equals the same "computer stuff" to a judge.
They've been working together for some time already, but this is likely just a mock-up using Nokia's internal concepts to show how it might look.
This seems to be a Joomla-centric post.

I think better advice would be to avoid all extensions that you haven't fully audited yourself, or hired an expert to audit. The mass majority of Joomla exploits are from poorly written extensions.

Points #10 and #11 try to deal with this, but miss the larger point.
OK, that is good to know. I had talked to somebody about this problem several years ago and I had thought that you could start with some kind of metric space and see which songs were 'close' to each other. The guy I was talking to seemed to view the problem as a kind of Bayes Theorem problem. The example being that if you had some obscure Beatles album then you most likely had 'Abbey Road' but the inverse probably wasn't true and that is where a software service could step in ... to recommend the obscure album as one you would probably like.

One thing that I really like about the service is finding artists that seem to lead to lots of other great songs. It isn't always who I think it is. For example on a lark I put in "New Radicals" because I liked one of their songs and I was so impressed with how well that defined a particular sound. When I put in big names like the Beatles or Rolling Stones I don't think I left those stations defined for very long. I wonder is there is some kind of structure to the what Pandora has calculated that could show which bands or songs seem to be most influential.
I agree with the gist of your response. I think we just disagree on the semantics of software in this case. Software being "instructions" that control the operation of hardware doesn't apply to a biological brain because the instructions are a combination of the state of each neuron and the connections each neuron makes with its neighbors, which themselves change over time. There may be higher level abstractions that can exist independent of a neural network as its basis, but I wouldn't label that the software in the case of a biological brain.

Even if there are higher level abstractions yet to be discovered, neural nets can open the door to them by allowing us to create more life-like simulations and then run experiments on it. I can imagine this is rather difficult in an actual biological entity.
there's nothing quite like hearing an f1 engine scream.
>> When they do discover that CS isn't for them, they will be stuck with the ability to write scripts and analyze data.

>> With all due concern for not wasting students' time, this is a problem we in CS should willingly accept.

Or, programming skills are good for you, even if you dont do it professionally.
The point made (below) by @dspillet is correct, and important for one very good reason:

You will almost definitely have scripts that you have included after these two that depend on the jQuery object existing (otherwise what's the point in having jQuery at all). So imagine this trick wasn't used, and you just served up a local (or CDN hosted) copy of jQuery, then started using it in later scripts. It's reasonable at that point to assume that jQuery exists - which is because each script blocks, or if it doesn't, the browser itself will still make sure they execute in order. So it's perfectly safe to use this script without worrying about the order of things.

This is exactly why I (and many others) suggest that you put all of your <script> tags at the bottom of the <body> element. They block page rendering, so if they're in the <head>, or dotted around the <body>, they're going to delay the presentation of the page to the visitor.
Google even prevented one prominent C# expert from renewing his microsoft MVP once he went to work for them - and this was in europe where workers generally have some protection
To be pedantic, it was the economic inefficiencies of the communist bloc that started everything. Events were just inevitablities.
My employer is hyper-strict about stuff that is directly competitive with their offerings, but has tightly "ringfenced" those offerings and allows us to do what we like outside them.
Love your name alexophile. I also love the explanation for it in your profile.
> The reverse is also true, which is why once someone experiences depression, they are always susceptible to it. The brain learns the path to certain behavior.

Damn. I’m officially cursed then; recent diagnosis of depression here due to midlife business failure. sigh
Android apps can run on BlackBerry PlayBook
This is why things like TrueCrypt's plausible deniability feature are good. Just toss some embarrassing (but not illegal) scat porn on the "fake" encrypted partition and give them that password instead.

http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=plausible-deniability
The alternative was doing nothing and being raped by the media for killing people and doing nothing about it.

What choice did Toyota have? Better to be seen doing something even if the problem did not exist.
California employment law most likely addresses an employee's "duty of loyalty" to their employer, even in the absence of a contract. This means that you won't compete with the company or work against its interests while remaining in the employ of the company.
I agree that it has a nice station feature, but I've almost completely switched to mog. For about the same price I can listen to whatever I want whenever I want and as many times in a row as I want. Their radio feature is decent as well and for only a few more bucks a month it seems a much better value. Of course pandora has a huge advertising factor that could bring in good revenue for them to make it worth the investment.
http://blog.printf.net/
clickable http://www.BeautyBloc.com/
If they had spent enough time they would have demoed it at the press conference, so they are probably mockups.
Every batch there are some groups that fall apart between when we agree to fund them and when YC starts. Sometimes we tell them not to worry about it and do YC anyway, and sometimes we tell them they should take some time to repair the damage and reapply for the next cycle. It depends on how bad the breakage is. If a team of 3 loses 1 person, that's no problem. Whereas if a team of 3 loses 2 people, that's bad.

In this case, the breakage was not only on the bad end of the spectrum, but we weren't told about it till the last moment. IIRC Jon told us an hour before he got on the plane here. That affected our decision more than the breakage itself. At the scale we operate on, we can't afford to have people around who aren't upfront with us.

I'm glad Jon got funded though. As he says, I was quite enthusiastic about what they were working on.
He seems to think you have to log on via remote desktop to administer.
Letting the Founder Go: How I Got Here « John Sheehan : Blog
As well as the other valid points, I think he is looking at it bass ackwards.

The two types of programmer do the job for different reasons and came to the job for different reasons.

There are the types like me and presumably him, who are into that sort of thing and enjoy it. When it came to finding a way to pay the bills it makes sense to do what we enjoy and get paid for that, especially at times when the economy offers us good rates for our hobby. We'd program even if there was no money in it (though we'd probably chose to work on very different projects!)

The other type come into programming because they need a job to earn the money to maintain the lifestyle they want, and programming jobs pay far better than many others that are readily available. So those with the ability to learn at least the basics do so and try make their way. It isn't their hobby. It just pays the bills. They want to go home and do other things at the end of the day/week.

Sometimes the second type of programmer will catch the bug and become the first. Sometimes the first becomes completely dissolutioned and becomes the second. Or they can go half way: works 9-5 on work projects then goes home and does something completely unrelated but still programming, like being a C#+MSSQL developer 9-5 and a Linux+Python+Other person in their own time - this can be quite useful for developing new experience that will help you move away from the area you are dissolutioned by.
The issue is interesting, but the title is dead wrong.

It is absolutely true that the composition of Google's workplace does not match the diversity of the surrounding population. However that isn't the right thing to measure. You have to ask how it compares with the applicant pool. There are a lot of Hispanics in Silicon Valley. But there aren't a lot of Hispanics applying as software developers. And therefore without a lot of reverse discrimination, there is no way that Google's software developers can match the general population.

That said, Google does a lot to try to improve how many minority students go into software development. And tries to make its population as diverse as possible. Google truly would like to be more diverse than it is. But you can't hire people who don't apply.

(None of which is going to matter to activists whose minds are made up and who are just looking for someone to get mad at.)
How about "Joey" is working towards a "new stuffy" (or whatever). When he goes potty 10 times, he gets a new stuffy.

I was also thinking that maybe there doesn't need to be an end reward… getting 10 stars may be the reward in itself.
If that's not intentional, I've lost what little remaining respect I had for Atlas Shrugged groupies.
It's a popular "foreign" language in schools, like French is in the USA. Basically no one speaks it on a day-to-day basis.
Man Dunks Himself Through Hoop At Basketball Game
It may be something as easy as just telling you that package X will be arriving on day Y in your calendar. In this case it's helpful if you have roommates or significant others living with you so they know. It would also be quite helpful for small businesses, or at least the few that I've spoken with. I'll do a bit more customer dev and see what happens.
"They won't listen" - really?

I've had lots of older mentors in my life, and they treated me like their equal. This is a distinct contrast to older people who just take the opportunity to lecture and judge.

"You won't understand until you're older" is a sterling example of how to ensure no young person will listen to you -- it's inherently disrespectful, and shows you are concerned less with communicating than affirming your own special-ness.

Maybe it's you.

(When I was in middle school, I befriended my librarian, taught her HTML, which led to me teaching whole classes of librarians and meeting the library sciences executive for the entire county. She became a friend. Once she told me in typical frankness, "I wish I hadn't given so much to this job. A job will never love you back." Do you think I ignored her, figuring that I knew better? She never once told me "you can't understand until you're older." Because she was a true mentor, and that's a cop-out.)
When jumping off a burning oil platform into the freezing North Atlantic, don't look down and think "Oooh, I'll jump into the burning oil slick, that'll be warmer!"
New string search algorithm
Gen Y Survey: 79% Interested in Entrepreneurship and 27% Self-Employed
Given WP7's pretty disappointing launch so far, Nokia is customer #1 at MS. They can dictate the direction of the platform, and as the de facto (and one of the only) WP7 OEMs, the WP7 user experience will become synonymous with the Nokia user experience. They are in essence taking HTC's place back in the old Windows Mobile days - as one of the only actual supporters of the platform, they got front-row seats.

On Android, Nokia would've had no say in anything - being in the company of juggernauts like Moto and Samsung. They'd have trouble differentiating their UX from anyone else's, resulting in the commodification that Samsung, LG, and Moto are facing now. They'd be stuck in the same position as all the OEMs now: a UX they don't control, branding diluted across your competitors, and relegated to shipping crappy UI tack-ons in a desperate attempt to differentiate your Android offering from someone else's Android offering.

The WP7 launch hardware has been disappointing so far - build quality is middling, and resembles far too much like the hordes of Android phones out there. MS would do wise to tie WP7 tightly to Nokia - who have in the past created some of the best hardware in the entire industry (design and build quality inclusive).
Twitter Kills the API Whitelist: What it Means for Developers & Innovation
Not at all - ideas are worth nothing, but if you can prove the execution you're good to go. So own the idea, go forth, and execute some kids better than anyone else.
I agree. But these forced constraints are for a reason: getting you to think a certain way.

So yes, you can pull something complex off...but the trick understanding that seeing is believing :) A good design with grease monkey scripts to give perceived functionality that gets validation from investors is smarter than putting your head down for two years and then reaching out to the market.
Bingo! The quality of the information is high but the presentation quality is, ah, um, has room for improvement.

Transcribing the narration and converting the "chalkboard" to text/svg/flash/whathaveyou would be a huge win.
Thanks. I'd like to write about it but, sadly, there are some relatively confidential details there (e.g. information about the Google project that my software would be theoretically competing with) that I can't reveal publicly.

I'm not ready to give up my employment over this (though it does significantly lower the bar for what another organization would need to offer me in order for me to consider switching jobs :-().
Secret plan to kill Wikileaks with FUD leaked