skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think the article misleads on the point you are contending with. I'm not from India but do know quite a few very talented Indians in the US who are stuck with their present employment because of visa BS. The process for permanent residency is surprisingly painful and rigid (e.g. restricts job mobility). There are multi-year roadblocks such as getting labor certifications, etc. Additionally, many employers require you work with them for a number of years (get to year 4 or 5 of your H1 before they will apply for permanent residency). I don't see too many viable alternatives here.

Let me put it differently ... to a young foreign student who just earned a degree from a top US/Canadian school, this is what say: "If you want to stay in the US, you can't change your job." Would this be a fair assessment of the situation faced by thousands of Indians (and people from many other foreign countries) in the US?

P.S. I hope I don't sound harsh in response to your comment. That's not my intent. I'm just a bit sad at how these folks are being treated. I don't want to start a flame war over this.
So i'm assuming this is the YC company in this batch that didn't present in Demo Day?
I would say that that the music side of things was the driver here--not to be a cloud-drive competitor. They are going to make a ton of money selling music and letting people play it from the cloud. I think the CloudDrive as a standalone storage product is more of a by-product (they needed the drive product to create the player product).

From what I calculated, it's cheaper than storing files straight in S3 (atleast at the 500G level). So their "retail" is cheaper than their "wholesale". I think it's probably not much of a profit source for them.

EDIT: "wholesale" not "hardware"
What programming language/web server/cloud server is your test site using?
A tool to create those fake Facebook threads. Something like this - http://i.imgur.com/KutR7.png
I cant remember for sure but i'm assuming you would use google docs to store any file you like? I seem to remember a while ago they opened google docs to any file.
It is pretty easy to make a solar still with an old tin can and some plastic sheeting or surplus window glass.
With practice you can become really good at most things.
This reminds me of C#'s LINQ, but for Python... PLINQ?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2062540/help-with-linq-ex...
I think the 'mummy and daddy' bit was his attempt at humor.
BTW one reason that Grid Parity is a moving target is that one of the input costs to making solar power is energy. When energy (hydrocarbon fuel) becomes more expensive, instead of making solar power cheaper in comparison, it has no real effect.

Instead, regular power becomes more expensive, which makes building solar power also more expensive, and the net result is a wash.
Very nice piece of sugar. Pipes are one of the things I love about f#, and it's nice to have a quick and easy implementation for when I'm playing with Django/App Engine.
Wow, you are in an excellent position to describe, from inDinero's perspective, the pros and cons of Lightspeed relative to Y Combinator. Do you mind providing a few details on that? :) Is it even correct to compare the two or would you say that's like comparing apples and oranges (for whatever reason).
Agreed - check out http://startupbritain-done-better.com/
that's great! I always wanted something like this for Python

the problem is, I rarely feel like I can just use all these cool-syntax libraries for production, since they don't add a lot of value. why do I need a whole dependency dependency for something that just make one or two line more readable?

I've written a syntax enhancer for PHP once, but it just added one feature (array dereferencing) for a small but noticeable price of setting up; I never considered it for production usage because there weren't enough features to justify it. (CoffeeScript is an example of justifiable price for huge changes and multiple ideas)

for personal just-for-fun projects (like solving project euler problems) it's an awesome idea, though
This fact concerned me, especially when they suggested using this in India. 80% of Indians currently rely on a finite subterranean water supply. When this runs out, this will pose a very serious humanitarian problem. I'm hoping the technology they mention can be used or adapted to use sea water.
Interesting... maybe we need to split off a site into more sections to first determine audience segments and then attack each?

I've started my own response to StartUpBritain.org with startupbritain-done-better.com

It's a project done last night after work :)
Perhaps not a Business Plan, but spending a day planning how you'll do business is a good idea and not one that "sucks time and energy".

Let's say [as a concrete example] you're going to open a hairdresser. You need to sit down and work out your fixed start up costs (shopfitting, deposits, licenses), your monthly outgoings (electricity, rent), and what you can expect in income. You need to know the location, the foot-fall, the number of employees, and add in contingencies.

All of that is going to take you a day or so to work out.

This is not a "Business Plan"(TM) with exponentially increasing graphs and 5 year projections, but it's a sound concrete Plan for a Business which lets you know if it's worthwhile starting off.

This is not a high tech Hacker News example, but much of the same fundamentals apply for any business or project.
I don't see how this makes Facebook worse than other corporations. Isn't trying to influence the goverment (and probably partially succeeding in it) the norm?
An interesting metric; how many years back would it be before the judge would have instantly recused herself from ruling on any case involving file-sharing?
The Unholy Alliance: The Rise of an Internet Cartel
Braintree's API is crazy simple. You can do pretty much anything you need with a single call to a well-designed endpoint using a sane object model. They have working client libraries for pretty much every tech too.

All designed and written in the last few years, and thus completely free of legacy insanity from the 70s.

You need your own Merchant Account though. They'll find you a provider if you need one.
Very exciting news.

I moved to Roosevelt Island a year ago. It's really a unique spot in the city. Surrounded by water, a cable car to Manhattan, loads of indoor and outdoor sports facilities, and some interesting (and spooky) history.

The Main Street area is pretty disappointing. It's pretty run down and not much going on. Most residents head over to Manhattan for shopping and restaurants.

Hopefully if this goes through it will be a catalyst for Roosevelt Island to up it's game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Island
Are low interest loans really helpful?
A student loan is the best thing when it comes to covering the expenses which are incurred in college. When obtaining a student loan it is always a good thing to consider the loans which offer the lowest interest rates. This means the payments are lesser.
It's not exponential—quadratic at most. With exponential factors cinema wouldn't be possible until quantum computers ^)
Either that, or reboot the whole airport.
Robots need a lot more computing power than a desktop PC, maybe even more than a current supercomputer, because the computer off-loads the hard parts of interacting with the world to people. In a sense, you could consider programmers and users robot peripherals that let less powerful computers get more done.
My problem with .NET is not as much that it is "high-level" as it is completely closed and Microsoft driven.
The framework has some serious short comings, but unfortunately the only solution is to pray that Microsoft will eventually decide that it is worth changing, and until then you have to do with ugly hacks.

Just last night I had to basically reimplement the entire email class MailMessage simply because Microsoft didn't bother making it Serializable from the beginning. That's 500 lines of code that I could've used on making our product better instead.

More specifically on this post, point #3 just seems childish to me; "If we can't use X then you can't use Y either !!"
Guess what, I hate Java too. I do however imagine Java, and especially Rails being more open in it's development.
I honestly don't know much about either stack, but again I imagine you'd at least be able to hack all the low-level parts of Rails if you wanted - and that is a huge difference.

Finally, for a startup that does "language-agnostic" interviews, why not choose a more platform-agnostic environment to begin with?
OK, perhaps overtaken was the wrong word. But bitcoin will become the main form of micropayments on the web because there is no messing around with banks or credit cards or any of the hassles that those involve. It will allow this kind of business to develop at a pace much faster than previously possible.
Yes. That's right. Any kind of file with (obviously) no limit on bandwidth.
He mentions in the link that linq is an inspiration.
Online Marketplace Reviews B2B B2C C2C And Auction site
Totally. No matter how hard the government tries to help (#startupbritain, tech city east or whatever trendy name it is now) it keeps on sounding to me as a political pro on something that has already been happening for time. I mean come on David Cameron's face on the home page, what's that about?

It's interesting that Startup Britain had real entrepreneurs help. I'm interested to know how much though, did they actually propose the plan of what is being done or just had their names associated with it?

I guess i'm a little biased as I've ran startups and obtained the information they try to put across from better sources and what they offer for saving money means nothing for a tech startup perhaps others might find it useful. But things like Appsumo's recent lean startup bundle really showed how to save money or things like Amazon's free tier EC2 hosting.

The only thing that looks interesting to me would perhaps be the mentoring marketplace and the pledge matchmaker if they can make it work. Some of the other new features are already being done, why create yet another place to do this.
'best of web' just to go to delicious and search for the tag startups
'A calendar of enterprise related events' ha, upcoming? meetup? Lanyrd?
Audi Q5 2.0 Tdi Quattro launched in India
I agree that the visa requires reforms and definitely people are affected in terms of job mobility and permanent residency status.

I absolutely agree with you that thousands are affected (especially students who studied on a equal footing with their peers while completing the course) but having disadvantage to get employment just because of the lottery system and their status.

But claiming that half a million are stuck unable to start a company / change jobs due to a visa is BS just to push the author's opinion down the reader's throat and this is where I differ.
Absolutely agree that working out cash flow is critical if you are going to spend significant amounts of cash, otherwise you are in danger of breaking the golden rule.

However, with your hairdresser example you can get started and JFDI by working freelance at another salon or doing home visits.
"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p85xwZ_OLX0
Going back to school for programming? Yes? No? Are you crazy?
After learning about YCombinator almost a month ago I ended up applying for my project that I've been working on. As I've read more and more though I know I face an uphill battle. A) I'm not a programmer so I'm trying to work with a company. B) I'm founding my project solo.

Truth is I have an economics and finance background. I am absolutely fascinated with the possibilities of the internet over the past few years and have see the proverbial "light" or I keep leaving my MAC on at night. I'm considering going back to school for a postbac in computer science. Should I go this route or are there other alternatives? At the moment I have an enormous amount of student loan debt and I am nervous about adding to what seems like an already insurmountable amount but I believe I can be successful in this field. But do I need another degree to be so?
I think the problem with business plans is the "plan", as 37signals would say, a business plan is a business guess. What you're talking about is actual hard numbers that are relevant in the immediate future. Business guesses are pointless, mainly because, most of the time, you never ever end up where you "planned" you were going.
A hairdresser is not a startup, and since it is startupbritain we are talking about your example does not apply.
Pyretic - Reverse engineer obfuscated Python bytecode
Hydraulics and pneumatics work pretty good, but they are really tedious to work with, especially for people used to electronics. Their biggest problems are cost and seals, especially seal durability. And of course the cost in energy to keep them powered - when I get around to it, I expect to need to use a IC powered version out in the garage. But then energy budget is a problem with all mobile robots.
By what definition of efficiency? I'm sure a leaf costs much less energy to produce than one of these.
Maybe I am the only one, but I thought the headline meant they turned down $250,000 worth of funding. In reality, they turned down a buyout offer for $250,000.
Mobile tech brings big retail brands to rural India
Correct. There's no Mac/PC client that emulates a local drive/folder (yet). Just an Air MP3 uploadeder app and a web based file upload for other types of files.

I wonder if you could isolate the S3 bucket used and use existing S3 clients. Of course then you might as well use raw S3.
That's actually almost crazy enough to not be a prank.
That wasn't my point — I'm a coder, btw and I'm totally 100% with your comment. My point was that if you don't know how to code, get a team mate or a co-founder that does. Same goes for design.
Server is unresponsive. Maybe Coral will cache it sometime: http://dev-tricks.net.nyud.net/pipe-infix-syntax-for-python
In fact it works perfectly fine with wine until linux version is out
I experimented with listening to internet radio on the commute to work about a year ago. I used about 500Mbyte/month with that setup. The stations I listened to were 128kbyte/s IIRC, so perhaps my usage would be about 1 Gbyte/month now.

That is more than my data plan, so I wouldn't be able to use it all the time... perhaps useful as a backup for those moments you're not in the mood for anything you have stored on the device itself.

The main problem for me was that the 3G in public transport wasn't reliable enough -- if this cloud player does enough buffering I could probably use it.

edit: note that all consumer data plans in .nl are more or less identical: EUR 10/month on top of your regular phone plan gets you an "unlimited" data plan (which have a fair use policy limit of about 800Mbyte/month currently).
TinyCmd - the command string shortening service
An established hairdresser may not be a startup, but I see no reason that a new hairdresser can't be called a startup.
Rob Pike, Vint Cerf, Peter Norvig
http://fakebookquotes.appspot.com/
Why wouldn't Amazon choose to implement one of those 'low hanging fruit' kind of features? They seem the most logical to approach first.
I used to spend about 3 days every year writing a business plan. Everyone used to tell me how much I need one to ensure the direction of the company is set.

It's 80% bollocks, if you'll pardon my french. What you need to do is ship, measure and respond. The numbers in a business plan never reflect reality and there's too many things that you wouldn't see coming that'll affect you.

Where business plans come in useful is in getting your idea down and making sure you've done everything to confirm that it's a viable startup. Once you're up and running you should be reviewing what you're doing on a regular basis - you don't need a business plan for that.
Is their a way to see the specific names of each user who shared the URL on Facebook. For example, I have a Youtube URL that has been shared on Facebook through 9300 Users. Therefore is it possible to view the names of the 9300 users? When I right click the link on Facebook it directs me straight to the Youtube link and when i click see more it only shows the most recent 20 People who have shared the link out of the total 9300.
Having to click 64 times to get through a brief story is not efficient.
Are You an Influencer? 4 Ways to Measure Your Influence Online
Clickable:
http://www.homebrewvault.com/
I am a happy Dropbox user and not planning to move away anytime soon. Amazon's expansion strategy is commendable though.
You don't need no formal education, in my humble opinion.

Instead, practise, practise, practise.

One good starting point: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/intro/tutorial01/
github repo: https://github.com/JulienPalard/Pipe/
Possibly inspired by Pypes: http://arvindn.livejournal.com/68137.html
Too long, did not read.

Sorry.
AudioMesh - Flash meets WebGL
Minno seems to feel this is true as well, and are hard at work making a payment tool they feel is as simple and powerful as cash, without the political and regulatory trappings of bank-related NFC schemes or credit card tie-ins.

If they can realize that, and make it work for non-US (might be the case, haven't looked at their terms yet), and easy to use, it'd be extremely welcome and I'll certainly use it.

(Micro)payments on the web is still a very underserved area. I don't want to give my credit card details and personal information to pay for a $0.50 magazine issue or software download, or force my users to do this.

(Also, hopefully it will be more reliable than Paypal, to not just block your account for vague reasons)
Photo Particles - explode your pictures
Talking of books, I think we should all (re)read Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider" [1], inspiring and prophetic. The book that coined the term 'computer worm', maybe parts of the 'remedy' are written within...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider
Nexus S Versus iPhone 4 User Report
Yes, you can find people you've interacted with on HN by browsing Threads (top nav) and Next -> Next -> Nexting through your history. Though the URL of each deep page is not permanent, the threads/history do not disappear and you can always browse your history.

URLs of threads/parent/child comments are permanent.
I know what you mean. I'm appalled at such an idea - but I can't dismiss it as having no market. And the last line of the article seems to indicate some people have the same opinion.
Cool Men Hair Style Pictures 2011 – Best Wallpapers
This is hilarious. I love pranks like this. If you feel particularly snide, dare to check out the comments on youtube from people that think this is real.

Main reason this is fake? Someone with lofty ideas about peace and love would have no interest in selling something that belongs to all of us children of mother earth. :)
I prefer Spider Robinson's advice. No one who you totally and completely ignore will keep pestering you for long. Some people take insults as validation, or are like kids who just want attention, but no one will keep bugging you if you don't even recognize their existence.
A common theme here is that computer science doesn't teach you to be a programmer. You learn to be a programmer through practice and experience. Also, learning a scripting language for web development is relatively easy. Rather than spend time in class, take some time to go to a coding cave and learn the basics of one of the popular scripting languages. Take some time to practice every day. Build some applications. Read Hacker News to see what people have answered for similar questions.

Personally, I'm not sure this is the best route to go. Bootstrapping by learning web development is fine, but keep in mind there are still more roles that you may not be able to fill. For example, people who spend most of their days writing code generally aren't great designers. Designers who can make things pretty may not be the best user interface people. A great development team still needs people who can make sales and know how to run a business well. So, you could spend a lot of time learning to be a coder and still have big gaps to fill depending on what you are building.
"Spinal Tap" meets "Startup.com"
Love this. The variation in visual output depending on image colors keeps it interesting.
grellas, I'm surprised you would submit this — when I clicked on it I figured I'd find a comment from you in this thread agreeing with the linkbait's eventually acknowledged punchline: "problems of perception, if nothing else"
If I were the one sending out these mails I'd have been surprised that some people equate message length with spam. I'm not saying it is wrong to do so, I've just simply never personally associated email length with whether or not something is spam -- for me the problem of spam arises when single sources begin to email me too often resulting in an inbox with dozens/hundreds of messages to sort through a day. The actual length of each of those emails is basically irrelevant to me, I either care about them or I don't and I know that after reading the first paragraph.
The trouble with the word startup is that it means different things to different people. Taken literally, it could mean any company which has just started up. That's not what the word usually means when used on HN, of course. I recall this pg essay http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html which notes the difference between being a band that aims to sell a million copies of a song versus a band that is content to play at weddings and bar mitzvahs. A hairdresser is more likely to be the latter than the former. It can still be a startup but it's not a "Startup".
I made a question on Quora [1] for this in case anyone wants to contribute. I've seen alot of conflicting discussion on Hacker News as to the authenticity of TrueCrypt. Hopefully we can continue the dialogue and organize the response over there, as it may go beyond the scope of the discussion here, where it arguably only has a tenuous connection to amazon cloud storage or other web storage services.

[1] http://www.quora.com/Is-TrueCrypt-safe
You're missing the whole point.
Plenty of former criminal defense attorneys too.

However will we rid ourselves of their outrageous pro-murder agenda?
Your idea is worthless
I already read The Underground History of American Education. Is it worth reading Weapons of Mass Instruction too?

Not that it greatly matters, of course, since there is absolutely nothing I can do about it as I have already decided not to have kids.
Ship, measure, respond. That really is the not-so-secret sauce.
Which is all the more poignant because at a higher level here we have Amazon confidently building on Google's platform, in direct competition with Google's own services, knowing they can do so without prejudice.

Amongst all the argument about "open"-ness and what it means, whether it's source code or something else - for me this is the important part. If a competitor can build on a platform and safely do so in competition with the interests of the platform owner then that platform is "open" in the real sense that matters.
Before-and-after photos from Earth Hour 2011
RSA Breach: Imagining the Worst Case, And Why it Isn't Time to Panic (Yet)