skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Are you equating those actions to Gaddafi's proclamation that he would weed out rebels 'House by house, room by room' in Benghazi?

That's the thing, because I really do want to believe in Kant's credo that humanity/human life should always be treated as an end in itself, and not as a mean to whatever other ends, so that you could say that I do "equate" Gaddafi's actions to any other Government-inflicted injustices done to other people around the world. Although I would object against the use of the term "equate", because this sort of implicitly suggests that human life is just an operator in a mathematical operation. This is I think the reason why Kant was very strongly behind the idea of "Perpetual peace" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_peace#The_Kantian_vie...)

Of course, like you rightly suggest the world is not black and white :), and I agree with you (hence my reference to Hobbes, for example), but what bugs me in all these articles is that the people writing them seem to have no idea of what has been discussed on this matter for at least the last 350 years, or, even worse, they treat us like we have no idea, and just regard us as children being told what's good and right.
Personally, I put our main node.js based app behind nginx which is behind varnish. Varnish caches any get requests, Nginx balances multiple instances of our app running (currently 5 instances) as well as handles x-sendfile requests.
Apple solves marital spat with three simple words
Its a bit of a mockery to talk about something being 'cross platform' when you're talking about running on three different versions of Windows. It might make sense to focus on Windows as a Desktop OS, but the xbox doesn't have equivalent market share, and WP7 isn't doing very well at all by comparison with the Android and iphone platforms.
You could have made this post without including the person's name.
Suit yourself if you want to write crap code.

The fallacy here is that cleaning up your code, doing things right, and writing unit tests slows down your development speed. You could be implementing new features, after all.

But what you will (or would) find if you did take the time to do it right is that it speeds up your development speed tremendously.

I am not talking about proof of concept implementations and skeleton apps, rapid prototyping - these all have their place.

I don't want to write the next Twitter fail whale server app - thanks very much. As for Facebook, they obviously have a rock solid backbone infrastructure. Extremely impressive, and I am willing to bet that it didn't get there by adding hacks upon hacks - to the contrary.
I've been using ephemeral_response[1] in Ruby, there may be a similar library in whatever language you're working with. The idea is that it makes one real call to the service and caches it for a specified amount of time as a fixture. That way you don't constantly make calls against e.g. the Twitter search api, but when they change how it works in 6 months, your test will fail.

[1]: https://github.com/sandro/ephemeral_response
Russian scholar and TED fellow Evgeny Morozov on censorship and democracy
I agree with your analysis but I think you missed the fact that al ot of other countries tax spending through VAT rather than income. I'm not saying this is a better system (I don't think it is...). For instance, the standard VAT in Norway is 25% (14% for food and drink) so the slack is being taken up (in a big way) somewhere else.

I also don't care if there is a large income disparity. All the remedies I've seen proposed to fix this "problem" essentially just raise taxes on top earners. I can't think of a worse place for that money than in the hands of a politician.
"The ratio of "we just got funded" to "we actually developed a valuable product" stories I see in the tech press is getting to astronomical levels."

In the tech press. But amongst all enterpreneurs it is still quite low. For example no one would fund me, the noname hacker without a working product I can tell you that for sure. As I've browsed angel's profiles I saw that a working product with some customer/user traction seemed to be the absolute minimum for most of them to consider funding a startup. (I've seen something like 'social proof' in those angel-application forms, which may change things for some people, but not for me.)
There is only one good code coverage number and it's "100".
If you aim for 100% code coverage then it really helps make your code better as you must test all the parts, not only the easy ones - that forces you to write code that's easier to test, and "code easier to test" equals "better code" (more sane interfaces/API, decoupled classes, etc. etc.).
Amen. Bugs tend to crop up at the interfaces of subsystems, so you're usually better off spending your testing effort at a feature level.
What skills do they offer?

Have they previous experience with startups?

Who do they know who can help your startup?

What is their actual goal with the business? (i.e. quick sale vs long term growth)

What is their work ethic? (and does it match yours?)

What personal projects are they working on?

Just a few ideas, I'm sure there's loads more you'll need to know before teaming up.
Thomas Paine (http://files.libertyfund.org/pll/quotes/123.html):

> War is the common harvest of all those who participate in the division and expenditure of public money, in all countries. It is the art of conquering at home; the object of it is an increase of revenue; and as revenue cannot be increased without taxes, a pretence must be made for expenditure. In reviewing the history of the English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander, not blinded by prejudice nor warped by interest, would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes.
I learned to program on modern FOSS computing environments and I must say that I think a simpler, more constrained learning environment would have helped me out a lot. It's obviously dependent on the student's learning style, but having complete knowledge of a simple system is much better for me than working knowledge of a complex system.
I'm only arguing in favor of applying this standard of curation to apps that provide medical advice, I wouldn't currently apply the same standard to other industries.

This is as much for social signaling reasons as anything else. For whatever reason, the medical industry is responsible for more spam and hucksterism than all other industries combined, so if you don't curate what people are providing then the entire app store loses it's value and credibility really fast.
Stackops Distro & Smart Installer: Deploy Openstack in your datacenter
There are a number of issues with the article. Some work - any development of technology - can be second order. The workers output maybe constant but the productivity of the underlying product grows. In this sense comparing national to personal productivity is apples and oranges (or speed and acceleration).

Also I would argue we should not underestimate the bullshit economy and the effects it has on stealing productivity growth. Essentially extra capacity gets largely consumed by an increase to the size of the welfare state - an increase in welfare for both non-productive individuals and non-productive corporations.
I was surprised at some of the names on this list that I kind of took for granted as already established companies, like AppHarbor and HelloFax. It kind of drives home the idea that Y Combinator isn't just for new ideas that need to get started, it can really be beneficial for already successful teams.

Congratulations to all of the teams, and good luck!
First 24 Hours' Downloads: FF4 - 7Million; IE9 - 2.4Million
I meant transactions as in actual exchanges of money, not as in the computer science / database term.
The utmost thing is the user experience, to have the most useful experience.

- Marissa Mayer (@marissamayer)

http://startupquote.com/post/4044812270
What's next, we will be forced to view something like this on the in-seat screens in front of us on the plane.
Is it just me, or do a lot of the complaints in the article sound quite ungrateful? Take this one for example:

>Just last week, I had a conversation with an HR executive at a leading financial institution. He was calling because two of his firm's most important executives - each paid millions and millions of dollars - had come to him saying they just weren't sure they could keep it up anymore.

>They each listed their challenges: incredibly long hours, relentless travel, 24-7 digital demands, time away from their families and insufficient energy to even take care of themselves.

I read it as, "I'm tired of getting paid big bucks to jet-set around the world on the company's dime." I compare this to the situation faced by the bottom billion of the world - e.g. being unsure of where the next meal is going to come from and I have a very hard time taking any of these executives' complaints seriously.

Top executives are like professional athletes. The pressure to perform is an inherent part of the job, and indeed, it is what justifies the high salaries and other rewards. You can't accept an executive position and then complain about the stresses of the job. Stress comes with the territory, just like the $250,000 a year salary.
Yep - I learned it in my first job after college. We had a hacked-together app that was 99% complete. It then remained 99% complete for the next 2 years as we fixed bug after bug after new-bug-that-was-introduced-by-the-last-bugfix.

The codebase was unstable from the very beginning. It did eventually ship when we had added enough duct tape, but it never turned into a solid app.

Towards the end of year 1 I already knew that most of this simply needed to be re-written and done differently, but I was overruled by more senior folks who were responsible for this mess. It was always "we can't do this now, because we need to ship as fast as possible".
Mark needs to do my PR. He always seems to find a way to get into the news.
Mark should try to hack it so it broadcasts live without the thief's knowledge. It could be a huge inside joke where nobody tells him, kind of like The Truman Show.
I don't think we're disagreeing here, I was just trying to point out what the browser vendors motivations might be. It is also quite possible that law enforcement etc. requested a delay in the announcement to aid what has to be a significant ongoing investigation.
Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy Clinic (BLIP) offers a full-service, pro bono law firm for NYC tech startups and policy initiatives.

* http://www.brooklaw.edu/academics/clinicalprogram/theblipcln...
I run a lifestyle business and I don't think anyone would say anything bad about it including VCs. I just think they probably wouldn't want to invest in it. That's cool with me because I'm not sure I would want investment in this particular business. I escalate my goals with it after meeting each new goal but I don't think I want to sell it or go public ever. I just want to run a profitable business that makes my customers happy. I end up reading a lot of VC news and blogs and I never feel like anyone is putting me down or discouraging me from doing what I'm doing.

I do my thing and they do their thing. That's the end of it.
I apologize for this being offtopic, feel free to downvote me for it, but are there any other websites like this one? (Follow lists instead of status updates).

I've been working on http://thingist.com/ for a few months now (and showing HN along the way) and this website is pretty much a direct copy of it (down to having the name of the site as a dictionary word at the top of the page, which is what it looked like last time I showed anybody here)

I'm just asking because I think it's a cool idea (which is why I'm working on it) and am curious to see how other people are approaching it.

(I also think it's kindof a shitty move to copy something that closely)
In a free society, you will always have wealth Inequality. Some people make poor life choices (having kids too early, drugs, crime, etc), some people choose not to get educated, and others decide to sacrifice their time and be successful.

The answer isn't to take away from the rich and give to the poor. This will just create a class of people that rely on the government for handouts.

We should be educating the poor on poor life decisions. If they still don't listen, there isn't much we can do.
The coup de grace: I was approached by several of the people who didn't win the auction but were still interested in the site. I ended up selling a few white-label versions of my (very simplistic) software for $1000 each.

Note to self, if I ever buy a site on Flippa, make sure to get a con-compete too.
>The pressure to perform is an inherent part of the job

This is an inherent part of any person's job. Executives are not unique snowflakes in this regard.

What struck me as really disconnected from reality in the complaints was that everything they complained about are things that also afflict people in the same companies - who make far less money than they do. Perhaps they'd like to add "financial turmoil" to the list and see how they feel then?
How to install and test your apk on your Android device
Show HN: MicroEvent.js - js micro event emitter in less than 20lines
[parody] A Letter from Twitter to our Advertisers
I'm not sure why you're getting upvoted. The NT base OS already runs on embedded platforms with equal or lesser power than that of any of the iOS platforms.

Are you trying to imply that the base OS is bloated? Or, are you trying to imply that the UI frameworks are bloated?

Apple didn't just port Mac OS X to the iOS platform, they more accurately ported the underlying Darwin OS to it, and added UIKit and other specialized frameworks.
Wouldn't a large consumption tax make the overall effect even more regressive? (Maybe you are reinforcing the parent comment's point?)
Flipboard Raising New Funding at $200 Million Valuation
10% is a lot but given that we are talking about extra money, it wouldn't impact me. If I stopped blogging, the blogs would progressively earn less and less for sure, but the majority of the income comes from posts that are from several months to several years old. So no, they wouldn't lose 10% revenue per month.

The gist of what I'm saying is that the majority of the revenue (which we may define as the baseline) is, for all intents and purposes, passive income akin to having self-published an ebook or an app in the past.

Besides, even if we disagree on the definition, the original question was about "small/passive" income. The OP clearly wanted to know about extra income on the side, more than limiting the field to 100%, strictly passive income sources.
Wedding. Yeah, it's totally overdone.. but there's a ton of opportunity there. Tens of thousands of weddings every year in a major metro area, and as a wedfog depending on how you price yourself you're usually looking for around 30 (we try not to shoot more than 24 or so).

Another huge advantage wedfog has over commercial if you're getting into it while you've got a 9-5 is the hours. You shoot on Saturdays, and edit at nights. It's still grueling to do while you've got another gig (the year before my wife quit we shot about 20 weddings, which each take 6-8hrs to shoot and 20-40 hours to edit)... but it can be done.

Many other genres are going to be difficult to start doing seriously if you have a 9-5... the business models are all different. Much more to say than fits in a comment. I've been meaning to write some stuff up, but meanwhile feel free to drop me a line and I'm happy to share anything you'd like to know. famousactress [at] gmail
> I agree with your analysis but I think you missed the fact that al ot of other countries tax spending through VAT rather than income.

Sales taxes and VAT makes the US even more progressive in comparison because the rich spend a smaller fraction of their income on VAT-taxed things.

For example, Bill Gates spends maybe 5x as much as me on dinner yet we both pay the same tax rate on said dinner. His "dinner budget" is in the noise in his budget. Mine isn't.

Luxury item taxes are in the noise for him so the fact that I don't pay them doesn't make a significant difference wrt progressiveness.
Pictures of Earthquake Effects on Japan's Libraries
Once again, the title of the post and content overstate / misstate a point and belie the reality. Many high school students apply to schools like MIT without having a degree -- they get the degree when they actually graduate, by which time they have already been accepted or denied admission by schools like MIT. Speaking as an MIT graduate, and one that was accepted early as part of the early admission process, not once did they ask in the application or in person whether or not I already had a high school degree. Of course I didn't - I'd get one when I graduated. When I applied, I was still a Junior. and I applied early. All I needed were my SAT scores, a transcript (which the person in the article had as well), and evidence of excellence.

I don't understand the point of articles like this that breathlessly trump one thing while the reality is something else. Colleges everywhere regularly accept people that have not yet completed high school. This is not just MIT. To say that MIT is somehow unique here misses the point. And yes, I know, because I went to MIT.
Thanks for the feedback. Though currently Mighty CV doesn't actually display the number of repos watched. My feeling was that listing the last five repos watched would act as a top line indicator as to what someone was currently working on or interested in. The link to your real github profile provides a much better way of showing your activity than can fit in Mighty CV sidebar. That said, I really like your idea of allowing for a couple of handpicked choice commits. I'll give some thought to how to integrate this.

Also my choice to use watched items rather than commits stems from my assumption that there are more non active github users, lurkers if you will, watching repos than actively contributing to them. People like me who don't commit or contribute as much as they should probably still watch a lot of stuff. There are likely many reasons for lack of commits from folks such as myself. These could range from lack of time and/or confidence to things like work and family commitments etc. For me I know it's something I need to work on finding the time for, I really hope that I'm able to do this sooner rather than later.
One thing I love about Vonnegut is that certain kinds of naivete retain their wisdom long after the sophisticated opinions of the day have changed.
Windows Phone 7 gets cut'n'paste, other tweaks in update
I never claimed it was acceptable. Only that it was irrelevant. Why should anyone besides PHPFog's lawyer and the kids' parents care? It's because PHPFog chose to play PR guru and throw the drama into their postmortem as a distraction.

Does it matter to you if some kid in Australia is brought up on charges? No?

Does it matter to you if a hosting company is competent in securing their servers? Yes?

Any discussion of who did the hack servers no purpose other than to distract from the only issue that matters to anyone which is PHPFog's security.
I assume he was referring to "www".
#2 may have been shot down by Apple this week. I'd assume if he were going to leave Apple, they'd keep mum. Or maybe he was going to bail but they offered him more money. Or offered to let him work from the UK.

Also: TUAW rivals the National Inquirer on reliability of their news. You shouldn't cite them if you want your points taken seriously.
Review for BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet | Technorox
Facebook tells privacy advocates not to 'shoot the messenger'
I'd like to learn more about how your setup works and how one would go about doing it. Do you have any suggestions on where to read up on it?
Let's just let the officer determine that for himself, shall we? ;)
Facebook snaps up Snaptu
When I travel to SF (where the startup I work for is based), I often end up shooting headshots for folks who have talks to give, or need bio photos, etc. Someone could definitely corner the PA/SF entrepreneur headshot market, without much trouble I think.

The trick with headshots is enough finding people (close to you) willing to pay enough money to make it worthwhile. That usually means actors, authors, or executives.. but I'm sure increasingly wide-eyed young startup kids and software developers make the Bay Area an interesting target.
Tips for creating a successful new online product
Best bluetooth headset
The reviews are in, tests have been completed. We've found the best!
Not a good chart. I live in Europe. I have lived in France and Germany. Both in those coutries tipping is not very common. You only tip when you are having a really fancy dinner with loads of people.
In states you tip everything and everyone... which is crazy.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 Beta Announcement
I guess you could say: Make it good. Just don't make it _too good_.

Not all code needs to be super general, extensible, and re-usable. However, all code needs to be simple and elegantly designed, and unit tested. It needs to not smell.
This is an intentional change because we believe the padlock icon is misleading and potentially harmful. Users were being told to "look for the padlock" as a sign that a transaction was secure, when really it means no such thing.

It's important that users actually verify the identity of the site -- a "secure" (encrypted) transaction is no good if it's a secure connection to a malicious site. The new security UI in Firefox is designed to emphasize identity, rather than just encryption.
Eight Fallacies of Entrepreneurship
It should be clarified that you are referring to income mobility between parents and children, and not income gain over the lifetime of an average worker or change in average wages over time.
When I was a teenager I knew a lot of cops.

They used to tell me they didn't feel right "baiting" drunk drivers, for instance sitting hidden outside of popular bars and waiting for closing time. They felt like if they observed you driving impaired, you got pulled over, and if you were drunk you got a ticket. To them this was just the right way to act.

I think there is a natural balance between people being outrageously and stupidly human and law enforcement needing to control the population. In my opinion, the balance has shifted too far to law enforcement's side.

I don't see anything wrong with the apps. I wouldn't use one, but I really hope Apple doesn't come down on the wrong side here. The gay thing was bad enough. Simply because somebody is unhappy or raises a ruckus shouldn't mean that some developer's app can't be purchased. That's crazy. If it breaks somebody's phone? Sure. If it hurts the user? Fine. But just because a bunch of senators wrote a letter? Not good.

I note that all of the Senators involved receive substantial contributions from both police management and union groups. I understand that a monitored population is easier to control, and I understand that these groups seek to lobby to make their jobs easier (and therefore the public safer), but there has to be limits to these things. If not for constitutional reasons just because of common sense.
37signals: eBook offers tips to reduce your workweek and recommends Basecamp
Same story:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2351084

Many comments.
As someone who's had plenty of things stolen in the past, these stories make me happy.

The vengeful part of me hopes this jerk gets laughed out of every job interview he ever has for being the guy who stole the computer and had his dancing video put on youtube.
I never used a service, I usually just got some sort of conversations started with different profiles and eventually real people started pitching in. Just can take a bit of time and depends on your traffic.