skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Crucial Conversations is the book that I'd most like my younger self to read, but it didn't exist back then. However, if we're allowed to time-travel, I'd probably switch to something with lots of detailed stock quotes. :-)
You probably don't live in London, then:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom#...

When taxi drivers are required to demonstrate a deep knowledge of the geography of their area and are not allowed to rely on maps or GPS navigation systems in order to be certified, you end up with taxi drivers that are very good at navigating the city.
What is market curation exactly?
Rep. Holt beats Watson the super-computer at 'Jeopardy'
Inkpad: Vector graphics app from the maker of Brushes
Inside the Y Combinator office
I don't like Apple's business practises and never have, but this 70/30 split furore is hilarious to someone who has worked in retail and supply before. It is entirely normal for a retailer (apple) to take this kind of split in the retail price and the supplier/wholesaler to take 70%. In the retail industry I worked in, the retailer took a 35-40% portion.

This split is yawningly normal in retail. What's not normal is the huge numbers of "one-person" wholesalers... who have very little in the way of business experience and see that split as a "tax" rather than payment for a service.
Expanding on your advice: when diversifying it helps to not throw darts. It may be best to not have investments only in tech, auto, health, etc., but it's quite another to randomly choose a company or two in different sectors.

Unsolicited advice ;-):

* Tech: ARMH over MSFT over FB (phones/tablets need to be low, low power and P/E of FB seems egregious)

* Auto: VLKAY over F over GM (100MPG TDI trumps "made in USA" trumps bankruptcy)

* Health: ILMN (NGS is the next $100BB market http://bit.ly/fYehBI )

(OP: I'd be more than happy to be a "trial run" for your angel investing. ha! ;-)
Is it just me, or are we seeing a lot of hip new Web 2.0 sites that are going under lately? Is lack of an actual business model the culprit?
Why did you resubmit your own blog post under a new URL?

see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2274015

flagged
Sheldon is actually played in a pretty high-status way, despite his quirks.
I didn't mean to suggest that it portrays realistic science or an accurate representation of the scientific process - after all this is a show whose main plot revolves around travel between alternate universes and non-human shapeshifting sentient beings - just that the show makes it's scientist character the heroes, and not buffoons to laugh at.
Nice easter egg. Wonder what else is there...
404 is the right code for such things.
What the AngelList Debate Means for the Future of Startup Investing
regarding the first point about 32% take, below is my cut'n'paste from the same issue on the Apple platform. At least on Android you can sideload. Summary: "If you want to do business, you have to pay for services. Deal with it".

If you think otherwise, well, there's a market full of screaming developers with little business experience, and this is the 'home of startups' - there's a startup idea to capitalise on.

----
I don't like Apple's business practises and never have, but this 70/30 split furore is hilarious to someone who has worked in retail and supply before. It is entirely normal for a retailer (apple) to take this kind of split in the retail price and the supplier/wholesaler to take 70%. In the retail industry I worked in, the retailer took a 35-40% portion.

This split is yawningly normal in retail. What's not normal is the huge numbers of "one-person" wholesalers... who have very little in the way of business experience and see that split as a "tax" rather than payment for a service.
Well, because my server went down right after I did last time, which was frustrating. The problem has been fixed, so I resubmitted it. Is that ok?
I think some of these demands might make operating a competitive market difficult for Google - particularly open-sourcing their market's code and implementation (Algorithmic Transparency).

Perhaps Google should be encouraged to create a marketplace which provides a better user experience for customers?

In terms of other marketplaces - I strongly believe that the creation of alternatives will lead to major gains for Android as a platform.

If conditions are made more favourable for developers (e.g. lower commission) due to competition, and a choice of marketplaces are provided to customers (with better UX) .. all markets (including Apple's) will eventually need to come into line.

I think it's good you're making your voice heard though.
I've been around ycombinator about two years. The character-string 'patio11' somehow stands from the crowd here without any other effort needed.
Verizon plans to end unlimited data plans by this summer
As someone who has tried to educate new entrepreneurs about IP, I can tell you it's really hard to get the message across. By default, new founders just have no idea that IP matters at all. They understand moral principles like "stealing is bad", but they are clueless about licenses, patents, copyright and trademarks. It takes at least 2 hours of a pretty intense discussion to get them to even remotely open their eyes.

And in practice, does it really matter? Look at YouTube, they cheated to get started, and no one seems to care. Better cheat and win than play by the rules.
Thanks for the advice guys... I hadn't thought about that stuff... Will edit taking that into account.
HTML5 celestial viewer (best seen via Chrome)
how should we monetize publications so that the staff gets paid?

That's a toughie in general, but for scientific publications the model is obvious: They get paid with government money, the same money that pays for most of them now (and that also pays for most of the scientists and the studies).

But, of course, right now there are lots of middlemen: The government gives grants to researchers, who pass on a substantial fraction of said grants to their institutions, who fund institutional libraries, who buy subscriptions from the journal publishers, who pay the editors.

We could cut out some or all of those intermediaries, but the for-profit journal publishers -- as the first on the list to be disintermediated -- are not going quietly.
J Source to be released under GPL
Can't edit, but I liked the suggestions below. 51/49 with the 49 being accrued on a vestment schedule that focuses on contribution and meeting deadlines. Clearly I don't want someone to jump in, sign away 50% of my company, and then have them do nothing without protection.
after looking at the site, i wondered where the 'made on a mac' footer was. interesting timing, considering the recent stories about the iAppstore. smells like personaware to me.
But to play devil's advocate; it's not the same as retail - Apple don't buy stock and sell it on.

Apple (and Google) provide a space to sell Apps. They operate more like a department store which rents space to individual concessions.

I don't think a department store would necessarily take 30% of all sales made within it.
Of course this is a silly statement. If 100% of Apple developers decided to join a union in an attempt to collectively bargain, of course Apple would negotiate. If 1% join, of course they won't. Where the tipping point lies is an open question. It's fairly unlikely that enough people would ever get on board to find out, though, given the way things have played out thus far and the existing community.
You should be upvoted more. These organisations exist to extract millions of dollars of subscription fees out of University Libraries each year.
I feel like this would be theoretically better for middleman publishers but much worse for non-technical end users. I have to change a setting then download an app and set up an Amazon account just so I can download another app? Too confusing.

Also, the Amazon store has, as I recall, the interesting caveat of the prices all being set by Amazon in the first place. You don't even get to decide what your app is worth, which a lot of developers wouldn't care for I suspect.
I also would like to emphasize the value of a demo. Feature lists and videos do not let me control the experience and get the answer to my questions as quickly. Also, make sure to put it at the top, in the same bar as your logo.

Many times, I have bought a service over another because of the speed at which I can see exactly what I get. I want land on your page and be able to see demo, right off, and immediately see the concept, design, and layout. No ready, watchy, or thinky, just clicky.
"The Heretic: Specifically, he builds his case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons."

Statistically speaking, the employee is probably right. But at most companies, building a case for this is an exercise in tautology. Maybe take him seriously and at least make it look like you are being proactive about his issues.

"The Flake: ... he completed the project in 72 hours."
He did two weeks of coding in 3 days. If he doesn't show up for the next two weeks, and the product had no major flaws, who cares?

Drug addiction and mental disorder are a separate issue, in my opinion. If he is really as good as it seemed, it would have behooved the employer to get him into rehab/psychological treatment.

"The Jerk: ...sounds like House M.D."
WHY did you put someone with no people skills in a management position? (Senior management to boot). It makes very little sense. Someone who is a jerk isn't going to be good at managing people. A jerk could be a great individual contributor, as long as the jerk does his work correctly.

I feel like it is more about making the right concessions given the individual, and making sure you don't put people into positions where their faults are amplified.

An analogy to this post would be finding that a puzzle piece doesn't go where you want to put it, and therefore declaring that it is a bad puzzle piece (even though it fits somewhere else just fine).
The NSF has recently instituted a mandatory data-sharing policy reminiscent of the NIH. So, it's not unthinkable that they would do this.
I understand what you're saying, but I still don't see how your argument is convincing. Almost everything you said about Steam there might be true today, but if everyone was legally allowed to openly redistribute content, most of the potential advantages Steam offers by not sucking as much as the other approaches today still disappear. It all comes down to convenience and reliability, and I see no reason to believe that social networking tools wouldn't quickly evolve at least as much of both as any centralised, controlled service. After all, this has been happening within the modding community for years.

As far as donations, I do understand that the point isn't whether everyone pays. However, you still need whatever total you raise from whoever does donate to be worthwhile. Given that (a) there is nothing in today's law stopping someone from adopting that approach if it truly provides a better incentive to share their work, (b) various people have tried, and (c) I'm still waiting to hear about the market-changing success stories, I think a major cultural shift would be required before a purely donation-based model could provide incentives as effective as even the broken copyright mechanisms we have today.
You bring up a fantastic point and it's certainly gave us things to think about while it was all happening. I have seen that kind of thing happen in my own career, but it's usually men replacing men with different men -- usually to disastrous effect.

I think what finally made us conclude the sexist element was the speed with which it happened, and that red flags were raised with HR that only seemed to speed things up -- get rid of the complainers faster than they can complain.
This guy should be banned from the Market simply so Google doesn't have to waste oxygen looking at his support requests.

Anyone who takes the time to put together a list of hard-hitting business requests like 'algorithmic transparency' is going to ever, ever, ever have a hit consumer application. The linked list isn't about making more money, it's about ideological purity.
Here's the problem: the law of quickly diminishing returns.

Recently I've tried to "learn more" about one specific IP issue: what are the rules for Intellectual Property developed while being employed by someone but outside of work and not using employer's equipment?

I've read very informative discussion on http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/19422, including authoritative-sounding response from Joel Spolsky and frankly, I don't think that in terms of knowledge I can act on with confidence about what the final outcome will be, I'm any smarter than I was before I've read it.

The bottom line seems to be: technically the company that employs me owns any IP I do during employment but if you're lucky you're not going to be sued.

And that seems to apply more generically: in most cases you can use your common sense (don't use other people's trademarks, don't write code for your future company at your current workplace etc.) but when things get contentious, it's anyone's guess what the final outcome will be.

I've got code to write and the time spent reading books on IP law (which is part of the advice that this article gives) is time not spent writing software.

What I need is not a book or 50 blog posts but a "1 day guide" to the most important issues which provides bottom-line advice and not only "this is what theoretically might happen" but "this is how it usually works out" (e.g. in the context of "who owns the IP developed during employment" the theoretical advice is "employer, so don't even think about bootstrapping your startup in your free time" but practical advice is "technically employer, but it's virtually unheard of employers suing ex-employees and many do it, so keep things quiet and bootstrap anyway").
No, it's not. There is a practical limit -- and it's a low one -- on how many people can borrow and benefit from a single copy of a book, even if a library buys that copy and then lends it out freely to the public. If everyone wanted to rely on a library model instead of buying their own copies, libraries would have to buy many more copies. Thus the people behind the book would still get compensated, and thus the loop would be closed and there would be a meaningful incentive to create and share books in the first place. This isn't a matter of attitude, it's a matter of practical economics.
Hey Lost,

HN won't let me reply directly to your latest reply. Weird.

This is great feedback, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to act on it. Here are some options:

1. Point to a user-facing demo (like http://feedback.uservoice.com)
2. Point to an admin-side demo where you can play with fake tickets
3. Offer a 30-day free trial (which we do, but it may not be easy to find)

Which would be best for you?

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice
[3DS Teardown (1)] Looking Into 3D Display
I wish there were a way to bring topics back and still retain the link to the previous discussion. Maybe years later, there would be new insight into this topic, but for a lot of stuff, the comments of 2 months ago are just as valid as anything you'd say today.

searchyc is great, but no one really finds new comments buried on old posts now. For topics which have lasting value (vs "what will apple release tomorrow"), some kind of curated repository of interesting articles would be great.
The Most Powerful Linux Utility
Nature, however, provides a very unique academic service: they can give you a "no" within two weeks. This is light-speed in academic publishing. Most ACM conferences take 4 months to return an answer. Journals in other fields can take years.
Essential JavaScript design patterns for beginners
...but the native YouTube app on iOS does have a back button: obviously there's something important about navigation that "stack of pages with a back button" isn't sufficiently describing.
You'd be surprised at the amount of evidence required to make a good case. My wife and 3 other women decided to investigate this option and pool legal resources.

We came close to collecting enough evidence, but the lawyers we talked to said we needed either a smoking gun, or more overt documentation to establish a pattern. Most of the outward sexism was verbal or in the form of indirect patterns of employee movement.

At one point we considered secretly taping conversations but it turns out those are illegal in our state, which is too bad as my wife related some cases that sounded like something out of a bad 1940's movie.
Maybe the real problem is that people aren't making a distinction between pulling down content and pulling down content + markup/presentation/interaction.

If you're looking to parse information from a remote resource, you should be pulling it down in JSON or XML anyway, so as long as your application provides data in both human-usable (i.e. Javascripty) format and machine-readable (i.e. RESTful JSON/XML) format, both consumer groups should be happy, right?

I guess one of the problems is that Google only pulls down content + markup. It would be nice if there was a way to provide machine-optimized content to crawlers for indexing, basically telling the crawler "here's the data in XML format, and here's a link to the data in human-interactable format". It's sort of what Google's escaped_fragment URLs do, but escaped_fragment still expects content + markup.
A long time ago, I used to use intentionally-obscene or otherwise offensive text and images for placeholders, lorem ipsum text, variable names, etc., on the theory that this would prevent that content from ever shipping.

It only took one violation for this theory to be discarded. Luckily, the recipient was fairly cool :)
Without wanting to get political - I do believe sometimes capitalism does need reigning in. Not everything has to be about making money.

In any case, some of the requests relate directly to customer (developer) support - positive gains here should definitely affect profitability.
You've got to pivot
What's missing from this post is the better Android Market app and ecosystem he designed and developed.. The only limiting factor is his willingness to educate himself.
"there are a surprising number of women in engineering departments in large companies, especially when the companies are not actual software companies, they do business in other areas and have large IT departments to support the business internally. Because the culture in these is not really a startup culture, you really don't hear about most people in there. For the most part they aren't posting in HN or doing technical blogs or participating much in the "geek" community - and so this community doesn't actually realize they exist, and when people talk about the lack of women in IT, they're really talking about the lack of women in the open source and startup cultures."

That's exactly the kind of industries or departments she's worked in, non-tech in focus, but needing a large technical/development/engineering department to run things.

But yeah, I've definitely noticed at the large system integrator companies, there's a higher than usual (for startup geek standards) % of women.
Well if he's 5'9 he's not gonna make even the top 1000.
The new entrepreneurs you deal with, have they worked in other startups before or are they really young?

The first thing I did with my company was hire a lawyer. This is the first company I've personally started, but not my first startup. So my question above has to do with the experience level of the folks to whom you are preaching. To me, getting incorporated correctly, trademark searches, etc. was extremely important and well worth the money I paid.
To clarify - the demand is not the market be open sourced (I too think that is unreasonable at this point) - simply that the bug tracking be done in public.

I don't know if you're an Android user/dev, but the market is AWFUL, and I receive numerous emails PER DAY from customers who have been unable to download because of technical fault in the client or server.

I agree with all of your other comments! A better UX for the customers is a better experience for us developers!
I don't see much of a problem with the Market. Sure it could be better, but it could be a lot worse. I'd rather have them continue to spend developers' time and energy making Android competitive so we have a market to sell our apps, instead of catering to our every need.
Yeah, it is. I actually wanted to hear about what some others around here are thinking about this and was bummed to get no joy from the link. Perhaps you should have retitled?

Don't sweat it. 'sall good.
I don't see downvotes, nor do I see anyone ripping on him. Everyone's been pretty supportive.
Thanks, I will definitely try the "air breaks". I went for 3 weeks last time I tried to quit smoking, so maybe 5th time's the charm :)
Do you think no one ever told Usain Bolt "It doesn't matter how hard you practice, you're not going to run faster than $previous_record_holder"?
The Future of Blogs is Paid Access
Where the Wild Thoughts Are
I once had an employer who seemed (to me) to prefer people who were (in my opinion) pretty inappropriate for their jobs because they had so little ability to do them. I found it very difficult to understand at the time, because I generally like to have people around who are better than me at most things, so I can concentrate on what I do best.

It was interesting over the years, though, to see what happened. That particular employer was a great believer that anyone can learn anything, and she was incredibly patient with some people who really were not gifted at all in their area of work.

Above all she valued loyalty (and in key areas, such as finance, she preferred absolute stupidity). I learned a lot from her. I saw that most of the clever people who were around left, often when they were most needed, whereas the slower, more loyal people were still there getting the job done. I also learned that loyalty and commitment are more valuable than brilliance. I saw that she liked stupid people in sensitive areas because then they couldn't mess up in any serious way. They made lots of small mistakes but they didn't have the ability to make big mistakes and they always asked whenever they didn't understand what they were doing.

Personally I think there is a balance here. I would find it hard to go as far as she did, but it certainly caused me to look at people decisions in a different way, which I would never have come up with if I hadn't seen her in action.
Goose article extractor has a full suite of unit tests and also does pure text and image extractions: https://github.com/jiminoc/goose
Minecraft developers (Mojang) announce second game
Switching biofuels could do a double-whammy on climate change
You've got a few grammatical mistakes in there. Anyway, very cool video!
RTP Hackers & Founders, March 18, 2011  SplatSpace
Hey guys, good news... we're having another RTP Hackers & Founders Meetup, and this time we are in the beautiful city of Durham, NC, thanks to the folks at SplatSpace - Durham's hackerspace.

This is a change from past events, which have always been held at a bar or restaurant, but I think it's a net win. Why? Well, we don't have to compete with a bar full of people for places to sit / stand, and we don't have the noise and buzz of a full bar to deal with. BUT... conveniently, SplatSpace is within walking distance of both a bar and a coffee shop! So if people get tired of mingling at SplatSpace and want food/coffee/beer etc., we can migrate - individually or en masse - to one of the other establishments.

The other positive is that we have access to a project at SplatSpace, so if you want to bring a laptop to demo a project, or practice pitching your project or something along those lines, we can do that sort of thing.

It'll still be pretty unstructured and free-form, but this does give us some more options.
Minecraft creators’ next project is a strategy game: Scrolls