skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a crazy interesting article. Just for starters i think Option #3 is the best. Taking a "loan" from the company is the most simple, least complicated approach.

What i think is even more interesting is the idea of " what percentage of the company is "sweat equity" worth?" - I recently was working with someone to start up a company. I was not going to be able to put in as much sweat equity as she was right away and we ultimately could not agree on legal terms we both felt comfortable with.

Any one have any experience in this?
Correct me if I am wrong, but while the talent acquisition makes sense because the execution from the Beluga team has been brilliant, but why the technology?
I mean are not they using Twilio's API for the most part of the service?
You must have missed the last 10,000 years of human development, because the elite have always been at the forefront of human development. It is part of what makes them elite. Humankind does not advance because of the efforts of the average person, it simply continues.

Having said that... Why Julia Sweeney is always at TED is still a mystery to me. When one of her videos come up, I can't find the skip button fast enough.
> if only people would take the time to read what the scientists wrote

To do that, I'd have to either pay $15 (for just this one paper) or take a trip to my local university library.

You're free to chastise people all you like, but as long as the actual papers are locked up behind paywalls, it's quite difficult to "read the science".
Early days in a startup
You don't need to sign your comments - your name already appears right there.
here is a naive but working way to do it in ruby : https://gist.github.com/849625
Ask HN: NASE Health Insurance
Has anyone else tried to use NASE (National Association of the Self Employed) for health insurance lately? I got a bit of a bad taste in my mouth from dealing with the guy I was paired up with for a quote. Old school hard sales tactics and all sorts of "make you feel you're being an ignorant bother" stuff. Was this just bad luck of the draw?
I'd take Fringe over Big Bang Theory any day. BBT feels like mockery to me.
Sure, using Alfred without the power pack

ctrl+space
"Mail"
cmd+n
"person@example.com"
tab(x3)
"Subject"
tab(x5)
"Message Body"
shift+cmd+d

Tabs may vary.
Swarthmore has a system (the Honors program) where the degree granted (graduation, with Honors, with High Honors, or with Highest Honors) is based on the judgement of external examiners on the quality of examinations (written and oral) taken at the end of the senior year.
What's even worse is that the IEEE charges to read their standards. The ITU charges as well but the IETF thankfully does not.

All 3 organizations are effectively doing the same thing. Granted their standards focus on different areas. But why can the IETF manage this completely without charging while the others have to charge extortionate fees?
so disqus is unneeded now?
now they may ditch wordpress and move entirely to facebook
Or how about this fellow who has an undergraduate degree in Chemistry, a PhD in law, and was an Olympic swimmer but is best known for his movies where he gets into fights with other guys (pretty much everybody in my age bracket in Germany and some other European countries knows him).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bud_Spencer

Edit: He is also a jet pilot, helicopter pilot, holder of multiple patents, and a startup founder with a successful exit as Wikipedia shows! :)
Thanks for the reports Melvin. We're fixing the project loading. I haven't been able to reproduce the stuck Enter button yet. The buttons on the right are used for debugging. I'll make sure we'll add some tooltips on them.
Not really. Take the pure functional example - you've got power because the compiler can transform certain parts of code. Now, throw in all sorts of unsafe mutable operations to the language. The language can still transform the pure parts, so you've lost no power. But you've gained the power to write other types of code as well. It's not as if you have to use every language feature all the time and suffer the downsides everywhere.
I'm referring to the GPs attitude towards the show. Despite the near constant stream of jokes at geeks expense, people still somehow think it isn't making fun of geeks.
The DSM-IV criteria have never impressed me as particularly specific or technical; especially for milder (more common) diagnoses like hypomania, ADHD, bipolar II, etc...
Pretty much.

I go to a high-rated public undergrad business school because I was entrepreneurially-spirited when I was applying for schools and though college would cultivate that.

Instead, I found out that BBA programs are more focused on funneling you into a mid-level management position where you make dataflow diagrams and Gantt charts.
There's also Brian Cox (there must be something in the UK water about turning out musicians/physicists):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_(physicist)
Rid yourself of long email threads with micromobs
Thank you.
0.upto(string.length - password_length) do |index| that's the line of logic I didn't it get correct.
Dems push for Congressional investigation of HBGary Federal
Jumping from HN to your site makes me realize how much I love HN's no-bs, simplicity.
KISS :)
I disagree with the motive of lowering the friction to send email. I want to spend less time answering email by receiving less of it. Anything that makes it easier to generate more email means I will receive more email.

I think using email to shoot off "quick questions" (such as the message depicted on the page) to people is an abuse of the medium - that's what Twitter and iChat are for.
This looks great but I'm not on a Debian system. Is there something similar for OSX?
A Satellite Phone and Cellular Phone, All in One
Call me a grumpy programmer but "optimizing for joy" reminds me of Ruby's "a programmer's best friend". Come on, keep it real... less marketing. For example, how is Redis a DSL? Is everything a DSL these days? How is it for ADTs in general? It's not for all ADTs, just the ones that are very commonly used, the ones you support. Which is good, but it's another example of your marketing missing the mark.
Adding Millions To Your Valuation Using SEO
Wasn't Cloud9 open source? I can't find any link to the source code.
Well, to walk through some numbers..

Assume an eCPM of $8 (I think that is good performance, but still a "safe" number to work from). For perspective, I write about personal finance and tend to get a few more dollars than that.

Work backwards from there.

To make $100,000, at an eCPM of $8, you will need: 12,500 thousand impressions, OR 12,500,000 impressions. If each visitor has 10 pageviews, you need 1,250,000 visits. So, each month, you need to get 104,167 visitors.

Of that $100,000, how much goes towards costs?

Just a thought exercise!
An argument for functional programming languages that I've heard many times is that they can be optimized very well for (automatic) multi-core parallelism and even GPUs.

But I've never found any actual examples, evidence or benchmarks showing this in practice.

Anyone have any pointers on this?
Just last weekend at the startup weekend in San Diego I joined a team working on this kind of idea. Having a facepalm moment right now upon hearing this news...
Clickable - http://www.blackriverpoets.com
Never heard of Beluga before, but checking it out now and I sure hope they don't die after the acquisition is completed. Congrats.
I agree! Tick(http://www.tickspot.com/) work just as well for me.
micromobs is a useful way to move email threads to a discussion forum.
Facebook Follows Our Advice, Buys Beluga
Great, trading one slow loading invasive comment system that my plugins block (disqus) for another slow loading invasive comment system that my plugins already block.

Nothing like progress.

Widget block: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hgiihiookhijpbhafl...

Disconnect: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jeoacafpbcihiomhla...
In-App Payments for Android Still Coming in Q1 2011
Killer application - it's a real game changer.
Stephen Jay Gould Speaks Out Against Science Paparazzi
It's important to check the back of the manual for definitions of all of the terms in the criteria. Reading the criteria, you may be interpreting them through their conversational meanings. It also underscores the need for doing observed interviews during training, to make sure that you are applying the terms correctly. However, you are right in saying there's always room for improvement.
The Fascination with Watson by the Press, Congress & People on the Virtual Grid
You keep asking the same question repeatedly, hoping that some magic combination of words will lead to a different answer.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/01/20/93411...

UNIX pipes are only a tiny bit like OS X Services from a user's perspective. They are nothing alike from a program's perspective.

As others have said, UNIX pipes simply connect one program's standard output to another program's standard input. That's all. It uses the exact same mechanism that would otherwise show information to you and accept input from you.

OS X Services are a completely different, proprietary thing. It works via the 'Pasteboard' which is rather like a secondary clipboard. Apple created a specific interface which must be recognized by a program in order to supply OS X Services with data. This interface is wholly unrelated to the rest of the program's interfaces.

OS X Services are much more akin to something that you would build on Windows using COM, like a Windows Explorer Shell Extension.

If you wanted to recreate OS X Services on Linux, you would have to define some sort of new interface for exchanging data between applications, then convince developers around the world to add the new API into their programs.
I'm not sure which comments to answer first: The ones that say WePay is nothing like PayPal and the comparison is misleading, or the ones that say WePay is just a feature of PayPal and therefore undifferentiated.

We'll just keep building the product and let people decide for themselves.

Not the best video in the world, but check this out: http://vimeo.com/18765571

If you were to make a demo video of PayPal, what would you show?
Great idea blogging about the experience from very early on, and a fine job of capturing the "so many possible features" feeling.

Not sure I'd pick Facebook as the model for execution, though.
Unix for Poets
Unfortunately, Instagram hasn't released an API for accessing the news feed. Apparently they're making quite a bit of changes to it before they release it. I agree, though. That would be awesome!
This is a great inside view about nosql in production by an Amazon guy. He compares the different nosql solutions and also mysql.

One conclusion: There are big differences in performance and reliability between out-of-the-box configurations and tuned configurations of all databases, SQL and NOSQL and that makes comparison very difficult. For example MongoDB is just tuned for speed and most users don't realize the risks they are taking when using the default configuration.
Really, this has been debunked? If I can get something at a cheaper cost (whether by stealing or some legal mechanism) then I won't get it from another mechanism.

For example, I used to rent seasons of shows on DVD (and on some rare occassion bought boxed sets from Costco). Haven't done that in years. Just wait for Netflix. Now Netflix isn't stealing, BUT if bit torrents just became completely legal right now, I'd probably cancel my Netflix subscription.

I'm not saying that every "stolen" copy is a lost sale, but it does sound like the potential qualifier is pretty accurate.
This article shows why Unix might be the greatest word processor ever invented.
What I'm saying is that the Republicans do very little for you. Especially if you believe in things like science. They'll occasionally make noises about cutting the smallest pieces of the budget, and do nothing else whatsoever for the libertarian cause. Especially when it comes to the whole idea of state authoritarianism.

You just asked me to justify calling Bachmann crazy?

Can I get you on the record first as saying "she's not that crazy"? I'd like to see how strongly you endorse her before I waste 90 seconds googling.

Are you claiming to be a small-l libertarian, as opposed to a doctrinaire republican who supports Michelle Bachmann?
Science: How Intelligence and Personality Affect Longevity
I have been using micromobs and like their service. It is a crowded space, so hope they can iterate on functionality quickly enough to find their sweet spot
Skype Teams Up With Citrix To Bring GoToMeeting Web Conferencing To Business
Should managers prohibit programmers from using IM in office?
> ..there often isn't much difference between someone who appears smart and someone who doesn't... Maybe they're just a fish out of water, spending too much time on things that don't interest him.

Amen!
Avatar is an interesting choice to make an example of, since copying it degrades a lot more information than copying normal, non3d movies. That is, by whatching it in a cinema, you get a better experience than if you download it (since you lose the 3d effects).
IP laws can be a net win for everyone. Let's leave the giants like MSFT be and use a simple example:

Dentist needs billing software. He's going to pay through the nose and face a free rider problem if he just pays some guy straight up to write it and release it under a liberal open source license. The software may not get written at all!

If, OTOH, the developer says he'll take a tenth of what it costs him to write it, and the dentist introduces him to 20 of his friends, the dentists all pay less than the labor costs, and the developer makes more money. And the software gets written.

Sure, simplified a lot, and ignoring various options, but you get the idea.
Has anyone ever used psd2html or similar service?
I'm working on a new boot strapped project and want to outsource as much as possible and as cheaply as possible. I have PSDs coming next week from a design firm. I can slice it into HTML and CSS myself but it will probably take me 3 or 4 days with my current workload.

Has anyone used or can recommend one of the psd to HTML services.

I want something to come back clean tested and W3C/CSS compliant.
Videos Chistosos
Los Mejores videos Chistosos de la web!
Patents has been used exclusively to stifle competition and have a very bad record of actually hampering progress. Even the canonical case of pharma is debunked thoroughly.

For copyright, the case is quite clear too, though it may still be possible that a short copyright (14 years, for instance) may still be better than nothing at all.

Trade secrecy are treated page 188. Basically, it is much more used than patents, so suppressing patents won't change things much. Revealing secrets through patents is very inefficient anyway.
Hero worship?

My heroes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Kennedy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Powers.

People I'd place in the category of scientist based on the fact that she co-authored a paper with one of the pioneers of developmental psychology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Portman.

That's a far cry from being a hero. Please, let's be reasonable.
Sign Up for a beta of minible.com - Website Copy Organiser
Hi,<p>I am creating a new web application for my University Project which is called minible, it will be a simple way to give a designer content for a website.<p>It will save you having to worry about finding the latest version of copy whether it be in e-mail's or text files.<p>Minible will allow you to access this and update it anywhere in the world,<p>I would love if you would be sign up for the beta as it will be launching in the coming days.<p>Thanks,
Mark Kelso
That is what JSig was discussing, no?

"...somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti [in regards to the code taken by Sergey Aleynikov]

(Aleynikov is the guy who allegedly stole code from Goldman.)
That's definitely not impossible to achieve in the long run. The costs right now are pretty low, just a cheap VPS but as soon we get traction the hosting and storage costs will go up.
I'm working at myGengo this week on creating a SEO strategy and teaching the team about it. They have a fun company-wide institution called power blogging hour: drop what you're doing and, for the next hour, write like mad, then we post the results. Since I was there I got asked to participate, and this is what I could come up with regarding SEO and startups in an hour.

Let me know if you have comments. I sincerely think the blind spot about SEO and reflexive distaste for it is the biggest marketing opportunity startups are routinely missing.
I don't reboot that often, so it took me a while before I could try it, but my home desktop, also with SSD, gives

user@twen:~/tmp$ time jruby -e '1'

real	0m0.664s
user	0m0.390s
sys	0m0.110s

for a cold boot. Subsequent startups are 350-400ms. Stock JRuby 1.5.6
Social Mechanics: The Engines Behind Everything Multiplayer
Love the service, I think this will be the tipping point year for micromobs
Is X Going? (very cool hack to check if someone is going to sxsw)
It's expensive to run a journal. PLoS isn't evil, but they still spend millions of dollars every year http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7096/full/441914a...
I took a look at your URL http://www.zubhalabs.com/ that I found via your previous thread.

Although your product category is not really my kind of thing, I feel you've really put in some great effort on it. Your site is also quite sleek.

You need to understand, however, that 'if you build it, they won't necessarily come'. :-) You need to market it at least initially, to get the ball rolling and one (failed) thread at HN is not marketing.

Another member here recently announced a site containing links to a large number of online news/media portals. I suggest you go out and announce your beta app to as many of those places as you can. With some luck, at least some of them will pick up your story and the next thing we know, you'll probably come back here screaming 'Haaaalp! My server can't handle the traffic'. ;-)

Here is the link: http://www.startshout.com/list.html

I'd say having done all this work (creating a good product), you owe it to yourself to give it a fair shot, which just may lie at the above URL.

Go for it and all the best.
Prescient as always.

Thank you for this excellent discussion.

Very few people in the lively sectors of nosql and cloud computing have the ability to distill both popular concepts and misconceptions this plainly.

Now, when will we see those fast_ip invites?
Sure, trolls will be trolls. But I'd make a bet that average Joe Sixpack might just get tired of logging out of Facebook to log back in with his troll account just so he can post a hit-and-run nasty comment. It's probably enough of a barrier to make an impact.
Haha! I'm really pulling for Uber to succeed (and come to Denver).
That will be the best thing that's happened to blog comments in 5 or 6 years.
That said, I haven't ever really heard too many complaints about this system.

One obvious complaint is that an engineering student might have 50% of their GPA attributable to non-engineering grades.
Really clever! I guess the challenge would be keeping users in the group rather than reverting back to email the next time a big discussion is about to start. Are there tools to keep users updated? Like a daily digest maybe?
Raph's social mechanics for social games
Auto Respondents, A Boon for Your Business 
Auto respondent software act as a virtual assistant of the firm and no matter how far away the customer is located, he would still be updated with all the information of the business.
Demo 2011 Roundup: The Seven Best Startups of Day 1
There's also facebookblocker and Defacer for Safari:
http://extensions.apple.com/#social-networking
Xilinx Zynq: SoC plus FPGA
How Wufoo Turned A Profit In 9 Months By Selling Slick, Simple Forms
Also, can't commit anything here.
Most white papers are written by professors and students who are supported by grants. These grants generally come from DARPA, the NSF, or other federal programs. All that money comes from the taxpayers.

Yet as a taxpayer, I still have to buy the papers from a journal. A journal that hasn't funded the research, but profits from it.

A) What a cushy gig, I wish I had invented a professional society

B) This is an issue worth far more of the easily drummed up internet outrage than most of the silly things we all get worked up about, yet it seems to fly under the radar most of the time
I don't know what was worse:

1) An article with "Justin Bieber" in the title hits HN, or

2) I click on it, or

3) I read the whole thing, or

4) It was actually worth reading.

Not bad Mark Suster... not bad at all.
(echo;cat)|msmtp

But yeah, stackoverflow.com
Pay money to get an username?
"Maybe they're just a fish out of water, spending too much time on things that don't interest him."

Doesn't sound too smart..
Why Skype's designers suck
Win $1m No.4: The Hodge Conjecture.
Clickable:

http://jigarpatel.in/how-i-built-newzupp-in-30-hours
Hmm, going back and reading it again, you're right, the article apart from the headline isn't too bad. I could've sworn some of these details were left out of it initially though. Any good way to check if the article has been updated?
Browser Support for CSS3: What’s the Current Status?
I almost hate to say this, but it really almost doesn't make a difference... at least not right now. You don't know enough for it to matter, yet. Pick any one of the more popular languages that has a good community, plenty of documentation, and good libraries, and just run with it. Build some stuff, learn about programming in general, and then you'll have a basis to start comparing your chosen language to the alternatives.

Don't take this generalization too far though. COBOL on COGS[1] aside, I really don't recommend you pick COBOL, PL/I, FORTRAN, RPG/400, APL, Ada, etc. as your first language, especially if the goal is to build web applications.

But something like Groovy, Ruby, Python, or even Java or Perl, is a fine way to get started.

[1]: http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM
I'm just glad they abbreviate 'Extensible Processing Platform' as EPP, not XPP.
Micromobs is great - definitely helps keep my email sane!
Super Mario Brothers Analogy to Jacket's GPU Runtime
I would say "forums are back" except they never went away in the first place...other than to investors and advertisers. Great news!
AreYouPop? - Become Famous In Your City
AreYouPop is a new kind of animal website. Half tiger, half dolphin. Showcase your talents by uploading a picture of you modeling, showing off your sense for fashion or doing something funny.
Get ranked and received exposure. Are you pop?
Unix pipes are just unnamed FIFOs, that's it. You are free to implement "OSX Services" in linux if you want, and you could use unnamed FIFOs in your implementation, but they are unrelated concepts. You could also implement the idea with any other form of IPC, it hardly matters.

Furthermore, Linux doesn't have them because, unlike pipes, this isn't a feature that should be provided by kernels. If you wanted to add them to Gnome or KDE, I'm sure you could with minimal trouble.
wow lots of helpful feedback here, thanks! I see your point about the two different calls to action and the need for a different color for the second button. I'll definitely take your comments into consideration.

Thanks again
This, more than any other book, technical or otherwise, made me a much better freelancer/consultant.
Micromobs: Group discussion made easy