skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's exactly what I just said:

* We used FeeFighters to find a merchant account (ended up going with Merchant Focus). FeeFighters gets you a bunch of competitive bids. We only looked at the top three recommendations, read the reviews, and ended up going with the #1 recommendtion

* The application took one hour to complete, and was done entirely online. We followed up with a phone call to Merchant Focus to help expedite the app. It was approved and completed within 24 hours. No set up fees. Very competitive rates. No monthly minimums. Just a gateway fee and an Amex minimum plus the per-transaction fees.

* We had our Authorize.Net login within another 24 hours. We got any holds removed. I forgot how this happened, but it didn't seem that it was a huge hurdle.

* Once we had the Authorize.Net login, we signed up for Recurly. It took one hour to sign up.

* Integration with Recurly took a few days.

That's it.
I was privy to several buy-sell transactions and it certainly seemed to me that attorneys regularly use "shelf" documents to frame the deal and have their legal secretary just change the names of the entities from past transactions and then tweak a few clauses. Lots of work on the schedules but just drafting deal documents should not cost $15K. I even had one lawyer comment when sent an asset purchase agreement that he was the original drafter of the document several years previously. He literally said,"Hey that's my APA".
Flipboard Fundraising at a $200 Million Valuation
Is this important? Do customers actually care?
Do you care?
Mark has no connections to Backblaze does he?
Unless your product can really benefit from a strong network effect in the open-source community without compromising your competitive edge, I wouldn't do it.

However, if you feel the potential to gain traction outweighs the threat of losing an edge (or a paying customer, since they can just use your code), open-source the engine, but hold back on the parts that are unique to your offering and/or make your engine easy to work with (like a GUI, simplified wrappers or builds for different platforms), though this depends on the nature of your product.
Doesn't necessarily have to be shortest, I can approximate that myself. I just need a map that actually allows for 100+ inputs. I think I found something cool here, though: http://batchgeo.com/. Testing now.
Three words for the thief: Wrong victim. DANCE!
Digital textbooks becoming a reality
Last I checked, jQuery mobile was in alpha and not really ready for prime time.

I'd be very curious to hear anyone's stories or opinions as to how it was maturing, how close we are to a beta / RC, etc.
He missed one important thing: networking can be extremely important when it comes time to start hiring employees. Not EVERYTHING is directly about the customer.
Yes, because I actually agree with his statement. I have nothing to hide; Google can know all about it if it makes my life easier.
Massachusetts is, in fact, a two-party consent state. The stolen laptop thing might get you off the hook, but probably not without legal bills.
“Filthy Rich from Selling Android Apps”
Other discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359112
Amimon raises $15M for wireless home video transfer
Just try it? what have you got to lose (and everything to gain).
The public wasn't lied to, or even spoken to - some browser makers just slapped a band-aid on a broken system to prevent it from visibly falling apart. People (but not necessarily Mozilla et al. - think cryptographers) should arguably be fixing the system instead, but it's a hard problem and immediate fixes would be needed anyway.
Has the Arab League asked for intervention in Bahrain?
I found this "room for debate" to be a disappointment. The nytimes wrote an earlier article titled "how we value the super rich" that I thought was far more insightful. This article indicated that Americans distinguish between super-rich who create wealth, and super-rich who are essentially toll collectors. It appears that conventional wisdom does an ok job at this - tech entrepreneurs, for instance, are generally admired, whereas wall street is generally despised, especially these days. There is some merit to this: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/101129fa_fact_...

Unfortunately, there is nuance, and I don't think there is really any possibility that the public will fully grasp it. Not because they're dumb, but because it takes a huge amount of time to figure it out. Even that new yorker article, which takes a severely dim view of wall street, absolutely acknowledges that banking fulfills a critical role in the creation of wealth. How do you make sure you keep the baby when you throw out the bath water? And we're all too familiar with "innovative technology development" companies that really just exist to patent stuff, in order to extract a toll from those who do create (often completely independently of the original "innovation").

As for what to do? I don't even have a good answer in theory. I browse the randian/libertarian literature at top dog in berkeley every now and then, and there is a compelling case that many rent-collecting segments of the economy are propped up by government regulation, though even then, what do you do, eliminate the patent system? go back on the gold standard? abolish the AMA? Some people would say yes, I'm not so sure. I wonder if just a more vigilant attempt on the part of government to identify and eliminate rent-collection would help... I know, I know, a lot of people would hear this and say "in your dreams", and as usual, I'm really unsure about this myself.
As a rule, downvotes with no explanation really suck.

I meant this comment sincerely, and thought it worth reading. I'm quite willing to be wrong and learn, but I don't get anything from a bunch of -1s (given that I observed the no one-liners, no jokes, etc. rules).

Jus' sayin'.
Over the past few years I've come to the conclusion that the vast majority of law firms actually commit legitimized fraud on a daily basis. There are a few honest lawyers who actually take pride in their work (but who probably still charge more than their time is really worth), but there are many, many lawyers who are simply well-dressed scam artists.

New company documents should cost $0. Each VC firm should purchase the rights to the document templates up-front (or hire a general counsel full-time and draft their own!) and use them again and again.

Would this put a lot of lawyers out of work? Yes. Do they have loans to pay? Probably. Is that your problem as an entrepreneur or a VC? No.

Maybe this kind of system would encourage Americans to actually build things, instead of going to law school.

I actually feel so strongly about this that I'd be willing to contribute my knowledge (mostly in the trademark realm) to a group of pro bono non-lawyer entrepreneurs who have dealt with all of this stuff before. There's a lot you can do without actually being a lawyer. I even have a name and domain picked out for the group. Feel free to get in touch if you're interested.
Testing a DB connection sounds more like integration than unit testing.

Mocks are used to fake things that add significant overhead but no value. If you have a suite of 1000 unit tests, you really don't want half of them making actual database requests.

Simply making 'safe copies' of the database data does not solve the problem that Mocks are intended to solve.
The DUI checkpoints in Illinois are also revenue generators; they issue compliance tickets there as well.
GroupFlier (group texting app) transfers to paid service
If you were walking down the street and my 9-year-old daughter were to run up to you and stab you in the eye, is it your fault for not wearing a helmet? Everything is penetrable given enough time, money and patience. I agree that PHPFog made some mistakes, but it's not like they were being willfully negligent.
this is stupid as hell! there are so many other freakN priorities than sending a letter like that to Apple or anyone. What's next? Are these senetors also going to write to radar or laser detector makers/companies too saying you guys shouldn't be making those devices? I don't drink and I don't condone drink and drive either. Here are the things the senetor should think of

1) If a person is so impaired to drive, he will be even more impaired to operate and understand an app on a tiny freakn device.

2) Maybe the police shouldn't setup any checkpoint. Instead the check should happen in random places on the street.

3) Think of legislation or creating better safety standards for Cars, so the manufacturers are forced device cars that can detect impairment of the driver and not start at all. This option can create more jobs, inovations, etc.

These morons are freakn shame to our democracy!
A Big Google Problem: 37 Android Related Patent Disputes [Infographic]
Testing Apps For SmartPhones and Mobile Devices (Without Buying Out the Store)
Doing that would be very much illegal in Germany. Isn’t it in the US?
It'd be nice to know why the guy captured on video is in fact the theif (and say not someone who got the laptop off Craigslist).
Before anyone says "about time", I'd just like to add: compare the WP7 initial release timeline to the Android initial release timeline. (Can't reasonably compare to iOS because WP7 and Android are multi-manufacturer and multi-carrier right out of the gate, whereas iOS is a closed system on limited carriers.)

Android v1.0 - 2008-10-21

Android v1.1 - 2009-02-09 (111 days)

Android v1.5 - 2009-04-30 (191 days)

Note: v1.5 ("Cupcake") was the first generally available update. v1.1 was exclusively for the T-Mobile G1.

WP7 v1.0 - 2010-10-21 in EU region (earliest date)

WP7 v1.1 - 2010-03-23 (153 days)

MS launched a brand new platform with 10 different devices on 60 carriers in 30 countries. Google launched a brand new platform on 3 HTC phones (Dream, T-Mobile G1, and Era G1), and if you look at the manufacturer release history, things didn't start to take off until v1.5.

Haters gonna hate, I suppose.
BigAppDeals - exclusive bundle deals on apps, software, and services.
Am I the only one that thinks that this could be a contrived story?
To that end, a VC friend of mine pointed me to this collection of legal and funding documents for startups -

http://www.orrick.com/practices/corporate/emergingCompanies/...

I've used Nolo Press to set up several companies and non-profits. You really can do it yourself, at least for the simple organizations. And templates, such as the above, help with the more complex cases.
I spent a year or so networking heavily. I was a freelance developer hoping to meet businesses to work with.

I did not get the results I hope for. The networking events were parties not business events. People just stood around, drank and aired out.

My current conclusion, especially for freelancers, is to invest your earnings back into raising your profile. Write a blog, travel to customer sites.
The New Medium is the Personal Message
I don't see how we get to "decline/stagnation in median wages must be primarily caused by immigration". You're only referring to income compared to parents at the same age.

If I call home to the suburbs, I can find a whole bunch of 35-55 year old white people named "murph" and "sully" who exceeded their parents' incomes at 25 on a generation-over-generation basis but have been personally stagnant/declining in income for the last 10 years. Furthermore, I can find another group of 25 year olds who are very much not making what people used to make in non-knowledge-worker jobs a few decades ago. The average might say otherwise but the average includes me. I didn't stay home.

That's the story of the last 30 years for many Americans who aren't high end knowledge workers, and there's a lot more of them than there are recent immigrants.
From the Gemvara Blog: http://blog.gemvara.com/2011/03/23/gemvara-announces-additio...

Also covered on Xconomy: http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2011/03/23/gemvara-sparkles-wi...
New startup gokit was born lean at sxsw after attending the lean startup track
There are a lot of people (I'm not one of them), particularly movement libertarians, who believe that blood alcohol limit laws are unreasonable. Different people metabolize alcohol differently, what you want to eliminate is the actual impairment, etc. If you're one of those people, camping out to catch people just over the limit is an injustice, as it'll tag lots of people who are innocent of impairment.
Did file-sharing cause recording industry collapse? Economists say no
Why I Don't Like Mocks
Machining doesn't work that way. The groove in the laptop is done with a round nosed end-mill. It makes the rounded profile and creates lots of chips. Those chips are then melted down and made into something else by some other company.
From what we've seen, the so-far implemented parts in jQuery Mobile work great in a majority of the mobile browsers. I think the prolonged alpha stage is mostly due to their extremely ambitious browser support goals http://jquerymobile.com/gbs/ and relatively vast feature pool. But, as I said, the stuff that has been implemented, is really stable in mainstream browsers (at least iOS/Android).
Ask HN: HackerNews for the Enterprise (Social Link, File and Q&A)
Dear HN,

I think I've identified a problem:
There is no central place in the company for employees to share interesting information about business topics, ask questions and get meaningful answers. Currently all of this happens via email.

Don't you think that something like a private HN for the Enterprise could solve this problem (actually I'm thinking of a little bit Quora/HN solution)?
Private and secure place where all the company employees go to ask questions, share links and have meaningful discussions about business topics they care about?

The key elements of the system:

1. topics (essentially tags that you can follow)

2. karma points (reward for being active and a way to find out what is more interesting - like on HN)

3. Ability to add links, files (doc templates?images?) and text (questions)

4. search

5. Quora like activity stream sorted by karma consisting of links, questions and other interesting info from topics you follow

Anyone here WANTS this kind of system in their company?
Thanks in advance for feedback,
Jarek.

PS. 2 mockups are here: http://sygitowicz.posterous.com/social-link-file-and-qa-for-your-company
Best summary of bubble/non-bubble debate I've read yet:

“Maybe,” says Naval, “Certainly valuations are creepy up quickly in all stages of deals. On the other hand, 10 years ago when we all felt like this last time the total market size for any company was at maximum 100 million potential users. Now we’re in the billions of users. Facebook connections alone bring 500 million, Twitter 200 million. 10 years ago we only connected for brief periods of time when we were at our PCs. Now we’re connected to apps all the time, everywhere we go. So maybe there’s a bubble. It’s hard to say. But we’re also looking at unprecedented opportunity.”
http://sygitowicz.posterous.com/social-link-file-and-qa-for-... - clickable link
If the error rate is 0.1% it would take a user 1000 tries (on average) to enter a word that's not in the dictionary. That's a lot of attempts.
Page Hacker: Add-ons for Firefox
If anyone wants to try something that approximates a computer that boots into a BASIC prompt, try AVR programming or Arduino. It's either C or assembler and you've got to use mainly reference manuals. Arduino has more resources and thus may be more prone to distraction.
Think Like a Doctor - Solve this Medical Mystery
Unless you've got multiple downvotes then it's just as likely to be someone with an iPhone and big fingers trying to upvote you.
Looks like RepRap is already self replicating:
http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page
Show HN: hubski; I built my first web app using news.arc
I’ll put the tl;dr up front: I built my first web app with HN’s news.arc: http://hubski.com

The long version (I can be verbose): Recently, I was in a startup that sputtered out. It was my seed idea, but my contribution was on the design/UI end. We applied to YC fall 2010, and were rejected (rightfully so, in retrospect). My previous coding experience entails a bit of Fortran from undergrad research, and building a couple of simple websites (Frontpage even. o-O). Anyway, I had tons of energy for the project, but lamented not being able to contribute to coding, where it was badly needed. After that experience, I resolved to teach myself something, so I could at least build a MVP, and not depend on anyone else to launch it.

I’ve been a redditor since near the beginning, and I’ve been on HN for about a year now. I have many ideas for these types of community sites, and (unlike many who lament the clones) think there remains a lot of potential in this space. As a result, about three months ago, I got news.arc, put it on Linode, and started to try to figure things out. The results of my efforts to date are Hubski, a general site for thoughtful sharing and discussion.

A number of my ideas are for Hubski have been implemented, some are not. Here are some that are:

Tags: each submission can have a hashtag. These are organic, the submitters choose. You can click a tag, and it will sort out submissions with that tag.

Following: You can follow users. The submissions of these users go into your ‘hubfeed’, your personalized version of the site. You can also follow hashtags. Submissions with those tags are put into your hubfeed, regardless of the author.

Scoring and voting: Karma is a currency. When you vote up or down, it costs karma, which gets converted to clout. Clout cannot be spent. Everyday you get a small bit of karma. This daily portion increases as your clout and number of followers does.

Hubs: The stream of someone’s submissions looks kind of like a blog. It may even more so over time if it seems to make sense from usage. I even imagine Hubski could be used as a blog eventually. I have more thoughts along those lines. I’ve enabled image embedding, to see how it works. I’m going to do the same for video.

There are a number of smaller changes as well, such as tabs (opens 2 tabs, the url and the comment page), hovertext (hover over a title while logged in), and some others.

I have much more planned, but from here on out I want to implement further changes to be a bit more informed by usage. Also, I am learning, so it takes extra time.

I know that this won’t be my last app, (I have designs for a completely original one) but it’s my plan to maintain and evolve Hubski going forward. I’ve been using it with my wife and some good friends, and it is serving a need that I have.

BTW, I want to thank the folks in the Arc forum who have been really friendly and helpful to someone as green as myself.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated, especially if you can take the time to bounce around the site. Who knows, maybe pg will find it worthwhile to try a hubski function or two on HN. :)
Fair enough. I guess I don't know enough about the overall funding picture.

What gives me the impression of underfunding though is that education spending is one of the first things to get cut when there is fiscal crunch. I think this is ass-backwards and a result of optimizing for the short term and ignoring the long-term consequences.

Still if the spending is at record levels...
Up close, the making of sausages is not pretty.
Create it? Didn't Xerox PARC "create it"?
I've posted this on HN before but in case there's someone here who's not in the UK or the US, but in mainland Europe and facing the same challenge: we've been there, it was a headache, and we came up with Spreedly/Ogone/Atos Worldline. It can be done. Here's our writeup: http://blog.quplo.com/2011/01/looking-back-on-the-quest-for-...

Thanks for sharing Adam, there should be more articles like this!
It's a different kettle of fish in the UK. It's a lot easier to get a merchant account for a non-established business in the US. While the British banking system has become incrdibly liberal in the last 20 years, it still lags in the merchant account department and you have to do a bit of legwork. It's not uncommon to need to send a business plan or spend time on the phone convincing a provider of your worth, for example.
China's cheapest nuclear plants are the CPR-1000, which are a refinement of an earlier French design imported from Areva. They're switching more of their efforts over to producing Westinghouse AP1000 plants. These are both designed with safety in mind.
Dream Essays
Writing dream essays can be very interesting. There are a number of topics which students can use to write these essays and if written properly will bring about a good grade. Writing these essays can be fun and will provide students insights into themselves as well.
What I meant by 'public, open application process' is that anyone can apply and get their ideas reviewed by very smart people whereas many VC's/Angels won't even glance at you until you're referred by someone they know.

PG has openly stated that the overwhelming majority of the time, it's not that you have a bad startup idea where he can just list of a bunch of reasons why you didn't make it, but rather that other people just simply had better startup ideas. I'm pretty sure the companies they invest in are made publicly available, so it would be easy to see what better ideas are out there.
What precisely is cyclomatic complexity coverage?
Are you serious?

Is he serious?
Software Development And IT Outsourcing Powerhouse Globant Raises $15 Million
Apple Yanks 'Gay Cure' App
New "Slim" Micro PHP 5 Framework
Dawn of the Ted
Warning: Contains Teddy Bear death
I really like the idea! I wish I lived in SF to join and participate.
What are taxes and regulations like? It may not be possible to run companies cheaply, part for the rent.
When I drink, I stay home.

Contrary to popular libertarian thought, I'm happy with new laws as long as they are consistent. If we want to do things to reduce risk of death while driving I don't especially like having government rules, but I'll take them as long as they are self-consistent.

The thing with drinking and driving is that, contrary to popular belief, you don't drink four beers and go run over a school bus full of orphans. Most drunk people drive fine for hundreds of trips.

What the actual situation is that drinking increases your odds of having an accident. It does not make it a certainty. Not by any means.

So as long as we equally prosecute all of those things that increases the odds of having an accident by the same percentage by the same punishment, I'm happy with a compromise. That means cell phone usage, arguing while speeding, etc. If it's as dangerous as X and society needs to intervene, it's as dangerous as X.

Of course, framing the issue this way brings up the great problem with DUI -- it's an emotional, moral issue that somebody wants the law to fix. We are "offended" by the drunk driver running over the orphan in a way that we are not by the cell phone user doing the same thing.

When people talk about "legislating morality", they are not talking about pulling words from some holy book and trying to make a constitutional amendment out of it. I wish that it were so simple. Instead, it happens when people of all faiths, including atheists, become morally outraged at some sort of behavior and seek to punish it in a way different from other behavior with similar effects on society.

I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion for this comment, but all I'm pleading for is a little dispassionate logic here. I fully understand this is a very emotional issue for lots of people. (And I sympathize with those people) In no way at all do I condone drinking and driving.