skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Must be capable of creating 10 jobs in Ireland and realising sales of €1m within 3 to 4 years of starting up."

They are asking a fair bit, what do they do, kick you out of Ireland if your not quickly successful?
Compiling Java to JavaScript is far from impossible - GWT manages to do it, for example. I don't know if Adobe is willing to go that far, though...
another bummer:

"Please note applicants must be eligible to live and work in Ireland."
And exactly who is the arbiter of what is "web pollution," of what is "worthless?"
Stuff like the maps Pegwoman feature frustrates me. The world would be a better place if, instead of letting Pegwoman join Pegman for a day, it was a gender-neutral 'peg person' (or someing shorter - Peggle? Peggy?) to start with.

The fact that one day of Pegwoman is thought of as a /good/ thing just highlights the problem. Highlighting the problem is not a /bad/ thing - its not a solution though.
The Hashable Pivot
Dublin is a great place to live and good place for tech companies. I recently had to hire a developer and got plenty of good resumes and was really happy with the eventual hire. Google, PayPal, Facebook are here and loads of online gaming/gambling companies too.

Plus you can't beat the Guiness.

That being said, I'd say that if you aren't already in Ireland--the funding above would probably not be an option. Getting a visa is not a trivial matter (especially without an actual employer) and Enterprise Ireland will make you jump through alot of hoops for that money. Pretty great idea tho'--Ireland needs programs like that to get the economy back on track.
While I'm all for working remotely, I believe this is counter productive in a startup. There is something about a bunch of people in a room with a whiteboard that can't be beaten. Since in a startup so many forces are already against you, I think it's important to not compromise on the factors that you can control. So to maximize our chances of success we need to all be in the same room with a whiteboard...

Interesting that many of you think we're looking for an employee rather than a co-founder... I must have not made that clear enough. If we find someone to join the team in the next few weeks, they will be an equal co-founder. No pay, their fair share of equity and an equal vote in decisions.

We can do this with the 2 of us, but I think our chances of success go up with an extra co-founder. Someone as excited as us about the idea and with the right incentives.
I would imagine that they expect your business plan and projections to be able to satisfy these criteria.

If you're already eligible to work in Ireland (a requirement of the grant), I'm pretty sure the Department of Enterprise doesn't have the power to deport people ;)
It is hard not to respect someone who treats their customers right AND treats fellow HN readers like customers, even when they are clearly in the wrong as I was.

I went to your profile and to bingocardcreator.com and appointmentreminder.org just to see how I may avail myself of such excellent service :) While I find myself not currently in the need for either product, I will be on the lookout for potential users for both.

Rock on.
Zowie, that was fast! Thanks, the logo is indeed being looked into to make it stand out more on the page.
You have to pay the money back--with interest of course. ;)

No, I think that's more a guideline for selection--they aren't looking to fund lifestyle businesses. This is a government run fund and is meant to provide a boost to the economy.
Eric Meyer : The Setup
I'm sure Zuckerberg gets this -- it is a pretty blatantly obvious concept. But addressing this technically is hard to do, and likely to be unsuccessful.

Think about your own rules that you posted about. How is Facebook going to successfully deal with them? What happens when you decide that some friends get to see the "inner child" and some don't? There are probably ways to accomodate these things, but they are complicated, and 80% of the hundreds of millions of users will screw it up and blame Facebook.

So Facebook deals with it by pushing it down to you and making your problems your problem. Don't want your boss to see the pictures of you doing body shots on Spring Break? Don't want your parents to know your sexual orientation? Fine -- don't post it on Facebook, or don't invite people to read it.

It's not that Facebook doesn't get it -- they just choose not to get involved.
Sure thing, CountSessine. We all have that inside person who validates our bullshit opinion.

Again, Android's dominance has been on the backs of Motorola Droids and Galaxy S' and HTC Evo 3Gs, and the like. All high-end phones.

But you keep trying to make yourself feel better as you clutch, desperately, only your iPhone.
I remember being confused by International Women's Day when I first moved to Latvia -- I had never heard of it. I was quickly educated though when I showed up to the office without any flowers or candy for the ladies!
Ahhh so only people who are single minded have the luxury to have their condition called burn out?

Have you been burned out? I have and I'm still recovering. And my condition ain't that bad either. But discord between what I have come to expect of myself and what others have become to rely on from me and the sad reality that mere thought of activities I used to excel in, make me physically sick.

First you get tired, then you stop enjoying your work, then slowly others change their opinion of you from being the coolest person you become a drag in their eyes. Then you loose job, then your spouse leaves you. And then the society calls you a looser.

Some people get lucky and see where it is going while in early stages. Others try to compensate and blow it.

And there's the third kind who yap about it while not having a slightest clue.
Thank you Paras :)

Focusing on historical uptime sounds like a good plan to me, and it's pleasing to hear that the companies don't tend insist on an SLA if you can demonstrate that.

Custom contracts are frightening. On the plus side they give you a good reason to charge more. But on the minus side they give the other company a good reason to take you to court if something goes wrong and you're unable to deliver as expected.
WD Starts on SSD trip, ends up buying Hitachi
The Bill&Melinda Gates fundation might be interested too. They are interested in medical & technology. That would be a good fit.
Don't sell yourself short, all of these options could easily bring in more than $50 per day.

Think about your current skill set versus what you would like to learn that would help your career and future earning potential. Balance those two items to help you choose.

If you have an interest in all three develop all three ideas over time.

For the short term I would pick the area that you are most skilled in so you have the best chance for success.

Digital content probably has the best chance for success depending on your knowledge base and target audience. An e-book could be put together fairly quickly. Pick something you are passionate about and put one on the market and see how it goes.

Web Apps are great for reoccurring revenue, the software as a service model is one of the best business models out there. Find a problem and solve it with a web application.

Apps would be the most difficult to break into and have a money maker the first time. It's definitely a high demand skill and something you should develop for the future if you have an interest.

Recommended listening for inspiration:

http://mixergy.com
http://37signals.com/podcast#episode5
Long story short: if you don't allow anonymous or psuedonymous comments on your site, you're a Nazi.
Understand the Role of Research in a Product Launch. Or Fail.
Yes, I liked the way it can be scripted, but I guess I did understand the purpose then. When you search on Google for provisioning servers + rails, you come onto Puppetmaster almost exclusively. I'll keep an eye on it anyway. Thanks for the insights.
> This is demonstrably not true, and even says so in the article. The brains of a teenager are different than that of an adult.

This is bad logic. It's not much different from saying "men and women are demonstrably different, therefore women should not have equal rights".

Of course they are different. 16 year olds are not the same as 40 year olds. It doesn't follow that 16 year olds are children who are just being rebellious and should be shunned down.
I don't think it's the cute visuals. I have struggled with compulsive gambling for over 15 years. I normally hate casual games, but immediately had the same addiction to Angry Birds that I do to gambling (which is good because it costs less :) ). The same thing occurred with Tiny Wings. In fact, I've been able to predict both the rise and fall of several game titles just based on my initial reaction to the game. I guess I am hyper-sensitive to any addicting elements that exist.

Anyway, if you want to design an addictive game, look at the characteristics of casino games and design games around those. Maybe all game companies should take copies of their games to Gambler's Anonymous meetings for vetting :).
Pretty sure from what I read the American startup visa was tied to your business continuing to run. Thought this may be a similar type of thing, guess this into tied to visa requirements though.
But it does serve as a sort of evidence that 16th century society didn't view teenagers the same way modern society views them.
Agreed. In fact, this is a big part of why I dislike Facebook: the public nature of conversation distorts it.

I have wonderful, deep conversations with my wife. I also have deep conversations with my best friend. I love them both, and I'm not hiding anything from either one. But the intimacy and tone of either conversation would be ruined by the presence of the other person. This isn't about duplicity; it's about the nature of friendship. The sense of humor between us, the shared memories, the references we don't have to explain - those are all different.

Public conversation like wall posts lacks all of that. It's not inimate; it's self-conscious. It inherently lacks depth because it's dumbed down to the lowest common denominator for everyone who will see it. It's more like performance art than real conversation.

That's why I'll take email over wall posts any day. I want to hear what you have to say to ME, not what you want everyone else seeing you say to me. It's not about secrets, it's about real, personal contact.
This could easily be remedied with some CSS3 background gradients.
jesus, try

"Please note applicants must be eligible to live and work in the U.S."

for size
Spotify hits 1 million paying subscribers.
And there I was thinking that AB's success and CTC's failure was that the former doesn't finish after a mere handful of levels...
It seems to me that there is a solution to these type of identity problems, although it's a bit non-ideal: don't mix business and personal networks on sites like Facebook.
Software Industry Lobbies Against EU Consumer Rights Laws
You might have one identity, but you probably have many personas - and personas are what most people put forth on the web. That's a pretty fundamental fact, and it seems like Zuckerberg is dead wrong on this.

This might be an unpopular statement... but IMO, Google seems to get this on some level (even though they haven't figured out a way to package it.) There is a recurring theme in the occasional bits that leak out of Google about their high level thoughts on what they could contribute to the social web around understanding and helping people separate their personas -

http://mashable.com/2010/07/13/google-social-slide-deck/ (update: creator of this deck now works at FB... wonder if he took his opinions with them, or if this is still indicative of the thinking at Google?)

https://profiles.google.com/ (notice the language around managing what the world sees when it searches for you...)
The Android phones are currently outselling the iPhone by a factor of between 3 and 4 in the US. This current stat is marketshare, so includes the last year or so when Android was selling much less than Apple, they were equally matched in sales last August. It's probably selling twice as many globally, it was 150% at the end of last year but growing rapidly compared with Apple being just above flat.

Several single phones are already outselling iPhone 3GS in the U.S., and single company smartphone lines by Samsung and HTC are roughly on par with the total sales of Apple phones and look set to overtake them soon. Whether the Samsung Galaxy family will overtake the iPhone family mostly comes down to whether you feel that a Verizon iPhone, or an AT&T 3GS, or Tim Cook's rumoured cheap/small iPhone nano is still an "iPhone" and how far you'll extend the same logic for the various Galaxy S phones. (Though more directly, in some European countries a single Galaxy S model outsold the iPhone 4)
It's all about the execution not NDAs.
An even simpler game that's doing very well in the app store is Little Wings. All you do is touch the screen to fold the little bird's wings, so he falls faster. Just goes to show casual games don't need much complexity to be fun.
Very cool. When you do decide to start charging, I would charge > $5.
Super easy to use. I would buy right now :)
That report is talking about the "phone" market, as in the billions of commodity phones used to text and talk in developing nations. Apple's market share and profit share of the smartphone market is far less impressive (something like 20%/40% the last time I saw figures), and is mostly inflated by Nokia phones that most here wouldn't consider as a smartphone and have correspondingly low margins.
Game & Watch style mini games you must see (Nintendo 3DS)
M Project Framework - Write Cross-Platform Mobile Apps (HTML5/JS)
I am curious, why do you think that transparency is the future? I can't think of a significant reason why that would happen. The only people that think this way are the ones that would benefit from it, and for the regular user, there is not much good. I can see alot of downsides though, like many here have mentioned, out-of-context interpretation.

Possibly the only people benefitting from this are companies, especially those with good CRM systems. And don't jump to the idea that being anonymous is no good either. Imagine sites would begin to ask for your identification before you were allowed access to content or features, like commenting systems. Imagine you are a kid again and were trying to access hacking information that were behind a over-18 wall, or just trying to post a comment on HN, but you have to be either a hacker or an entrepreneur to do so...

Also, transparency will never stop hackers or crackers from doing what they do, neither it will stop terrorists, piracy or <insert-your-digital-threat-here>. Hopefully, transparency will fail.
Google Buys BeatThatQuote, a UK Comparison Site Violating Google's Guidelines
Waste... on recognizing waste in software development
I wrote an article about lean's idea of waste within software development. Hopefully it is of interest to you.
TorButton does that (and, of course, allows you to switch Tor on/off).
Not really. If it was revealed that new prisoners were being sent to Guantanamo under Obama's watch, then that would be pretty bad, but that's not what is happening.

The deal is that there is a bunch of detainee's who may or may not have done anything to warrant being where they are, but they have been so badly treated over the past x number of years that if they weren't radicalized before they arrived in Guantanamo, then they probably are now.

So what do you do?

The moral of the story is that it's best not to get yourself into shitty situations like this in the first place.
"price of 6 lines of puppet code" = 90 characters

price of your example = 105 characters
Witcoin is fascinating; thanks for the link. But it seems like it could make trolls very rich.
The Elements of Content Strategy
Be careful. Disconnect also ends up blocking core services, like Google Channel API, used by some App Engine apps (this took me hours to figure out why my site was broken in Chrome).
Here's some more anecdotal evidence from my personal experience that "hanging out with a 30 year old" in sixth grade is not always bad, and shouldn't always be considered strange.

I grew up in a small middle class neighborhood in a small town and was fortunate in that my dad went to one of the best engineering schools in the country. From ages 6 to 14, two of his friends taught me more about business and science than any kid can hope for, and I had a ball learning it.

The first was a small town shopkeeper who was our neighbor. Initially, I would go to his shop with my dad every Sunday and hang around and explore it for hours while they chatted. He would teach me bits and pieces about business more through example than words: treating customers and employees right, pricing products right, managing people etc. Eventually, I'd often go to his shop alone and hang out and sometimes he'd let me man the cash register for an hour or two. It was a huge responsibility and one that I was proud of. Many people today would consider a 8-14 year old going to a shop and hanging out with a 30 something shopkeeper alone weird, but I only benefited from this relationship. Obviously this was someone my parents knew and trusted, but I can't help but think these few years shaped my desires to be an entrepreneur and helped me along the way.

The second person was a guy who had a job building/fixing machinery at gas refineries who my dad went to school with. He was divorced early and never remarried, a recluse who liked to study and talk about physics and chemistry. He was also eccentric and (what I recognized later as) a consummate geek: generally shy but never shy about tearing apart bad/flawed arguments anyone made. He was also unfailingly fair about accepting defeat in arguments when he was wrong. In our small town, judging from the outside, I'd say most people would have called him a weirdo and they probably did. My parents trusted him though and I regularly hung out with him, often alone. He had a huge role to play in my interest in science and (what I hope is) my ability to never be shy about making my case, but to treat opponents fairly. Fun aside: this gentleman retired at 55 from his job with significant savings and went BACK to school for a Ph.D. in math, because he loves to learn.

NB: I do not have kids yet, and it is possible that some biological or cultural switch that goes on when I have children will change my perspective on this making me more protective. I hope it doesn't make me wary of all adults though.
Actually, if you use MySQL as a "great hashtable in the sky (cloud)", it's not all that much more painful to shard things. That said, if you do that you're already in a state of sin/pain...
Dropbox means you don't have to edit files directly on the server, it means you can edit them directly on your computer. That's going to be simpler and easier for some people.
To get Administrator access on Windows (theoretically) you could plug in a USB hub with a virtual keyboard, USB mass storage and a random unknown device. The USB mass storage would have the payload you wanted to run in the form of a driver for the unknown device and the virtual keyboard would replay the keys needed to accept the warning messages about installing unsigned drivers.
Another small readability thing, the text on the buttons doesn't stand out that well.
Thanks Jeff for your input :)
Great idea and a good pivot.

My recommendations:

- No autoplay on the video with audio. Either let me click play or remove the audio in favor of subtitles

- The logo seems small compared to the rest of the site

- May need to reword some of the taglines in the body... I should understand exactly what the site does without having to watch the video. If it piques my interest, then I can watch the video for more information.
Why is installing Ruby "provisioning my server" while installing Puppet is somehow "not provisioning my server"?
I quite agree but Apple's anti-Flash play has almost certainly made this a thing of the past.

OP seems to be saying something different and altogether less defensible: "Anything made with Flash is bad". This is denying an entire range of applications that are currently unfeasible with HTML-based technologies.
Update - Google Confirms Beat That Quote Spamming Activities By Penalizing BeatThatQuote.com

http://www.seobook.com/beat-it-beat-it
Actually looks better to me in chrome/html5 than flash.
Ask HN: Online identity?
Lately I've been contacting a few people online, and I was wondering whether I should use my real name or a pseudonym.
The people I sometimes contact aren't of any real importance, but I'm really paranoid so the question popped up in my mind.

How do you deal with your online identity?
Are you still in Japan?

Asking because I'm curious whether this kind of adult/child relationship stigma is as prevalent there as it is in the U.S.
True. Compilation isn't an ideal solution however as you end up with code that's not human readable or editable. I wanted to make the point that Javascript and Actionscript used to be so similar that some form of conversion that left the code usable might have been possible.
There have been a lot of suggestions (on here and other sites) to run puppet with locally-rsync-ed (rsunk?) copies of manifests, but there are a few things which won't work if you do this, unfortunately. Most importantly is the `storedconfigs' which (afaict) require the puppet server to work.

This means that you lose a large amount of the power of using puppet, by which you can use configurations across machines to do things like collect up all the services you run on a set of machines and generate a nagios config, or firewall config, or whatever. Without using stored configs for this I assume it's possible but will require more explicit configuration rather than the rather more elegant solution provided when using a puppet server.

Side note : I've used puppet on a fairly small scale of up to ~50 machines, and just started using it for VMs, and it's pretty straightforward to integrate into a bootstrap install to get ruby and puppet installed so that you can use it to install all the rest of the dependencies. But of course, the most use is for changes later on rather than at install-time when there are already a huge number of tools to set up or image machines or whatever.

Side side note : I've not used Chef to compare this with.
Adobe makes authoring tools, and directly makes no money on Flash Player: If advertisers need a way to attack every iOS user with ads, Adobe wants to be there with a tool.

However I laugh at point #2 -- it is simply inconceivable that Flash, with over a decade of a head start in heavy animation, actually does look better in many cases (which it does) -- it has to be FUD.
this is what he wrote prior to Disconnect. if you have the later, it does Facebook and other sites
The State of Version Control: an Infographic
It really looks great. CSS3 is really fun..
http://www.disconnectere.com/
Also, how is this better than http://smokescreen.us/?

I'd say its current advantage is that it exists.
Shocking to hear about this from Hacker News. I'm an Irish citizen living in Oz, with a startup (www.dealpinch.com), and this is the first I've heard about it.

One thing strike me straight away. The only reason I would accept equity would be for contacts and expertise. This program does not offer it, but it is a start!

Ireland is in a bad state right now, it's recovering from an inept government and crazy policy when it came to small startups. This will go a long way to starting up jobs in the country, they need to go much further.

The country has the talent to make an impact on the world stage, we have a highly educated, motivated workforce. It is exceptionally difficult for any startup to get a loan from the banks in Ireland right now.
Often people are discouraged to talk their mind until they feel that enough people thinks the same way. Anonimity allows that. You first see that there's a lot of people of your same opinion, then you "come out":

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