skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Veil-piercing isn't about "transacting business on behalf of the company in a role that doesn't legally exist." That's an indemnity issue (the LLC is trying to shuffle blame from itself to an employee)."

No... you are confusing the issue.

By way of example, let's say that I am running a member (owner) managed LLC. My official title under state law is "Member". But I sign all my documents with customers and suppliers as "CEO". Then, the company goes broke, and owes money to its suppliers. The suppliers could argue that I did not represent the company in good faith, because I was not the CEO of the company. That position doesn't exist. So they might want to come after me personally instead. Depending on the laws of your state, the court may agree that you did not represent the company in good faith, and allow your suppliers to pierce the veil and come after your personal assets.

The only way to shift blame to an employee would be in cases of fraud or gross negligence, and even then, your company would probably still be liable. What I am discussing is only really relevant in cases where the owner and manager are one and the same (as in the case of the original poster's situation). This doesn't apply to employees who may sign on behalf of the company for routine transactions, but don't have any controlling interest in the company. However, as a manager, it is best to make sure that anyone with signatory authority in your company is given such authority in the operating agreement. However, there is no such thing as piercing the veil with regards to an employee of a company who does not have a substantial ownership stake. They will always come after the owners of the company if it seems that the company is a sham to protect personal assets. The more loosely you operate your company without specific legal agreements (ie operating agreement), the more likely someone will be able to prove that the company is a sham.
Mr. Wilson's numbers leave out some key realities about Android as it stands as a smartphone platform.

First of all, Android is much harder to develop for than the iPhone. This is because the Android ecosystem is so dispersed. There are many more phones, many more os versions, and many more carriers to support. For a resource-strapped application team, iOS is a simpler choice and a quicker win.

Also, there is, what I would say, less of an app culture amongst Android users than iPhone users. I think this because I develop and work on a team that develops native apps for both platforms as well as a cross platform mobile web app. Our iPhone app does about 50 times better (in each category -- downloads, usage, and revenue) than our Android app without exaggeration. Part of this, to be honest, is our iPhone app is better, and that is partly because of my first point. Even in our mobile web app, though, we see about twice as many iPhone users.

Now, I'm glossing over a whole slew of details here, but the net takeaway for me is, if I were a start-up looking to make a dent in the smartphone market, I'd start with iPhone.
>Next big company.

They're not already?

And making an android device is what would finally push them over the edge?
I moved over from Windows to Linux in mid 2003. For me, it has not only been a valid alternative, but a superior one.
urban myth.
Lean Startup - Google Tech Talk
He was also pretty active in the discussions about the personal blacklist and ranking change to block out contentfarm sites.
Alexa seems to agree that HN has caught up with Slashdot and is about to overtake it: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/slashdot.org+ycombinator.com
Tweet inspired 'Quakebook' to help Japan relief
You'll still have to pay $50 for the tax report to be filed (for each year), but there's no tax liability for the company if you file before business begins or before issuing shares.

You just can't file the reports online, you'll need to talk to a representative of the Franchise Tax Board and they'll email or fax you the company's Annual Franchise Tax Report.
That's why there are so many parallelisms to Gutenberg's revolutionary invention and the modern age, for instance:

http://www.amazon.com/Piracy-Intellectual-Property-Gutenberg...
These videos helped me get a handle on Node.

http://nodetuts.com/
If you want to fix anti-intellectualism, you first need to fix intellectualism and return it to its roots of dispassionate exploration, commitment to truth over all else and bending processes to find truth rather than bending truth to fit (politicized) processes

Perhaps science was once like this, when it was practiced only by a monied elite at their leisure. But if science, or intellectual life broadly, is important and consequential, it necessarily will not be dispassionate.

Science is a human endeavor, practiced by humans. Scientists aren't Vulcans, and efforts to "fix" them will be as problematic as other social engineering efforts. To get the outcomes desired, one has to change the incentives; changing people doesn't work.
Thanks. It doesn't quite match what I'm looking for, but good to hear a vote of confidence in the basic lower end of Android.
Hydrogen is not an energy source, but a means by which to store energy. You know, like a battery.
This is OT, but does anyone know the link to the blog posts about reviewing computer science? I've used google and searchyc without any luck.
Bathos is Clarkson's style though. Or inverse bathos. He'll spend say half the review mocking a car, and then he'll stop and say 'and all that is true, but there's just one other thing you've got to consider: it's the most fun you've had since Woodstock '68.' Basically goes to extremes, then changes the complexion of the whole piece in an instant.
Just FYI, I didn't downvote you.
So what caused the massive Slashdot dropoff? I generally gravitate to where the most intellectual conversations are (and hacker news is that place), but Slashdot has been consistently decent for ages.

I will say, Slashdot seems to be mostly made up of a cranky, close-minded older crowd that fails to comprehend current trends. Maybe it's the user base that's the problem?
I have 5 weeks now eating mostly the inside of the peels and I'm fine.
Uncharted territory? We have been charting this for the past twenty years.
No, but I eat apple cores.
They took a worst case mileage and recharge time and said a specific trip would take you 3 days. Without saying if you actually drove that distance and used a larger power source than a normal wall outlet it would take a few hours. They also pretended one of the cars ran out of power which did not actually happen.

Now, I don't mind making fun of actual issues. And they had some things that actually broke, but making shit up crosses a line IMO.
I would remove the statement that it's addictive. Even if it is, let people come to that conclusion themselves. You can't force it to become viral - it just needs to be easy enough so it can become viral.

Once you have it as easy as possible, send it to all your friends - or better yet, use it to describe all your friends with a song... If it peaks their interest they will play with it and send it on to their friends. That's how it will grow viraly.
Google Latitude, while not open source, has an API: http://code.google.com/apis/latitude/

You also might want to check ProgrammableWeb. They have a reasonably comprehensive directory of APIs: http://www.programmableweb.com/
> You could have given the same feedback in a way that is much less likely to come off badly by simply saying "I've really a UNIX kind of guy and a Windows shop probably isn't the best fit for me."

This also has a good chance of being interpreted badly. Depending on who reads it, picking Windows for your development environment could make sense. Lots of Java development is done on Windows and Windows laptops are a very common sight on Java-related conferences.
Self control also makes more modifications to your computer than just modifying /etc/hosts, which in turn makes it a lot harder for me to disable than just commenting out the lines in the hosts file, which I could rationalize myself into doing.
At least we have Loser Pays, so it feels unlikely that the license fee payer will actually lose out.

As Top Gear is a big winner for BBC Worldwide (commercial, not-license fee funded), it's been frequently the case in the past that they will fund any legal action should that become necessary.
I agree on the design. I am not a designer myself but I will see what I can do without spending absurd amount of time. Thanks.
His point was Hydrogen was just another form of battery.
My QNAP is super-quiet.
Does Saturday bring out the debaters? What is this? "Sitcoms and soap operas look the way they do because of lighting."

Now come back at me with some word-by-word, point-by-point dissection, but i'm done, this isn't worth it.
Got to love that "Shouldn't you be working?" black out page, means more work will be done in those hours. That said I found ways to circumvate the black out page and stepping away from the screen with a notebook and pen in hand is really key to productivity for me.
When angels can’t understand what your business is about
I’ve got an issue which other people on HN are sure to have met, and would appreciate their views.

I’ve been putting together a business based around providing a particular type of risk analysis for banks and pension funds.
Up till now there have been zero products that make this available at reasonable cost, and there is a gaping market opportunity. The software is written and in beta test, I have a stack of interested clients and meetings lined up for the next few months, and the numbers are pretty compelling.

Here’s the problem. Anyone in the business understands the concepts and the benefits. However, the reaction of almost all potential angels I’ve shown has been ‘we can’t understand what it is you’re doing - we don’t invest in ventures we don’t understand’. I’m beginning to see why TV shows like ‘Dragon’s Den’ only show inventions that can immediately be understood by the audience, rather than more abstract IP such as industrial processes. I’ve made the elevator pitch as simple as possible, but it’s still more complex than talking about an improved mousetrap.

While I don’t actually need angel capital at this stage, this does raise some questions for the future.

- The issue may be due to me, in that I haven’t expressed the idea simply enough. However ‘controlling risk/stopping your bank collapsing’ is just too vague. Are there better ways to get interest? Or should I just wait until I have sales, and let the numbers speak for themselves?

- Do all angels/VCs take this attitude? What proportion of potential investors will dismiss anything they can’t understand immediately? Is it just a question of finding the right investor? (I’m in Australia where the pool of angels is tiny compared to the US).

- How do other entrepreneurs manage this issue? I would imagine biotechnology has similar problems - the potential profits are considerable but the investor needs to be pretty knowledgeable even to understand the opportunity.
All joking aside, for some users with disabilities this sort of gesture based interface could be really useful.

My prediction is that gesture interfaces are going to be used for some basic things, but that most interactions with computers will remain fairly conventional. If you do a time and motion study, the way people currently interact via keyboards, mice and touch screens is pretty efficient. Even with augmented reality, I expect that users will still be tapping on virtual keyboards.
I don't understand why they can't give us a profiler that shows memory consumed by add-on and start up time by add-on . This shouldn't be difficult. Then everybody can see where the problems are.
complaining about your life is usually not a good way to get others to stop complaining about theirs..
You could also display another version to the troll than to other users where the troll sees the forum as if his posts are successfully submitted while the rest doesn't see the postings.
If I leave Firefox open during the day the memory goes up to 1.2 GB. The performance slows down at about 800BM memory. I have 8 GB so it's not a big deal but it still seems an awful lot of memory.
My question is: how did this get to the top position on HN? I could hardly care less about Jeremy Clarkson's opinions, or TV shows such as Top Gear.
"I am from Perth, Western Australia but currently live in New York City and work for Google."

we've got a live one!
Does Steve Jobs have only one outfit or a massive wardrobe of one outfit?
It's an important question which bugs me. I keep thinking of a huge billionaire's walk in wardrobe which he steps into every morning - what is in there, just one, or thousands of black skivvies?

Maybe it's just one and his wife has to do the washing every night when he comes home.
Exactly my point. I've put hydrogen power in quotes in case that was unclear.
My opinion: It's tricky to submit your own content here. It's certainly not forbidden but it doesn't always go over well. I completely suck at starting conversations (not just here, it's a long-standing personal issue) and I am still trying to observe and learn and figure out what works here. I think the trick is that it needs to serve the needs of the community at least as much as it serves your own need for self-promotion. If it clearly serves your needs/ego far more than the HN community, people here generally won't hesitate to let you know how they feel about that.
I left slashdot because they never published a link contributed by anyone near me and they never changed important news mistakes after I corrected them.
I don't understand. A fake discipline is a field that is complicated, important, and one where even smart people have difficulty understanding/modelling?

Is environmental engineering also a fake discipline since it's difficult to model and various disasters have resulted?
When Madoff was busted, my co-worker and I put his returns into a spreadsheet. After applying Benford's law we saw that they were obviosly faked. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Alo, the IRS uses this to determine who to audit by applying it to you tax returns.
See also: http://norvig.com/21-days.html (Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years by Peter Norvig)
The ability to spend 10,000 hours of deliberate practice on something is an inherited talent.
All the Japanese animation that I seen has been animated at a much lower frame rate than American animation.
True, but if Worldwide end up paying/losing, that means less money paid back to the corporation, therefore a lower budget for other productions (effectively the same thing).

I'm a fan of electric cars, but I am disappointed by Tesla on this... using the legal system like this leaves a bad taste.
Number of the Week: PCs Make Americans $500 Billion Richer
Awesome. I've never read that book, but I loved the Dead Milkmen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Milkmen) when I was a kid. One of their songs talked about smoking banana peels and that was enough for, um, some of my friends.

Dried in the oven and... no effect. Glad there was some remote possibility it could have been more interesting. I've always wondered if that was just a joke on their fans or not!
They do if they are concerned about losing too many viable candidates to competing employers, which seems likely since they sought feedback.
Hobby developer threatened with patent on app...advice?
Another angle to see that the new "interesting stuff" pile is effectively unlimited is to look at where you go when you have some minutes to spend on interesting stuff. If you are often needing to go back to that "Read Later" pile to find anything interesting enough to read, well, then maybe there isn't much new stuff coming in that you are interested in.

But me, I very rarely have to go back into that "Read Later" pile to use free minutes of brain-time. If none of the aggregators have anything of merit, a couple of searches related to "the topic I'm into at the moment" gets more than I could read in a week. This empirical fact is something I try to use to slow the rate of additions to my "Read Later" queue.
I understand the feeling. It can feel like that you'll be ignorant or less informed unless you click that next link. Keeping up with the Internet could be a full-time job.

When I get on my computer to get some work done, I usually jot down some things on a notepad or in vi about what I want to get done. When I do this, I usually get right into it the tasks at hand.

If I find myself wandering and realize it, I usually close my laptop or get up and walk around.

It's funny to see this because I've been reading HN for at least 2 hrs, and I realized a few minutes ago that I should have been doing other things.

If you use GNOME, there is a timer applet that will flash a notification message when the time runs out. I think I'm going to try timing things as I do them so I get flashed when I should be off.
I don't think this is an important question. I'm not sure that you're serious when you say that it is.
Thanks for the well wishes, SkyMarshal.

We just think it's something worth experimenting with. PG (and David Cohen et al.) are engineers. We think their bias towards developers is natural but until we see empirical data showing otherwise we think there's still potential for non-coders to successfully start and grow a product company.

There's no question there's pros and cons.

The only question is can we address the cons and accentuate the pros. (See Quora: What are the pros and cons of a non-technical founder for a start-up: http://qr.ae/clRm )

The good news is we'll find out fairly quickly!
My standard reply when questions like this come up: If you can't stay focused, you may have an unrecognized health issue contributing to the problem. I have a really serious health issue and while very ill I fucked around a whole heckuva lot on the internet/computer. The healthier I get, the less I do the aimless futzing around type stuff. But, to this day, I wipe my computer/keyboard down (both at work and at home) before getting on it. I react pretty badly to dust and stuff. An unclean keyboard/work area can put me in a fog and make it impossible to stay focused.

Like others here have said: Eating right, controlling my blood sugar, and so on also contribute to my ability to remain focused. When my mind starts wandering at work, I get up, go to the restroom, and get a new drink and/or snack. Then I am usually good for another hour or two. (If your health issues are less serious than mine, I assume you probably won't need such frequent intervention.)
I second the pomodoro technique, but advise against lengthening the time block. I find the original 25-minutes block to be non-threatening, which is very useful in fighting procrastination. After all you can dive into a problem for 25 minutes, it will not compromise too much your reassuring flow of junk fun. (then, once you have started working, it's much easier to keep it going).
The energy has to come from somewhere, but it doesn't have to come from electricity (every conversion means energy is lost, and a light -> electricity -> water conversion is potentially less efficient than a more direct conversion).

Hydrosol-2 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrosol-2) is an example of solar hydrogen production with no electric current intermediate - it involves high temperatures, so I'm not sure how much energy is lost maintaining that temperature compared to captured producing hydrogen, but it could theoretically be more efficient.
Good luck guys! It's nice to see that there's a tech / startup scene getting going in Minnesota.
I think he has closet full of that wardrobe.
source:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2a2b1506-0d0b-11df-a2dc-00144feabd...
How to find startup ideas that make money
Yep... some sort of neural control is much more likely.
Just to quote that sentence, -
"He found this one really great black turtleneck which he loved – I think it was Issey Miyaki – so tried to buy another one and they didn’t have any more,” Mr Lasseter confided to the FT recently. “He called the company and asked if they would make another one, and they refused. So he said: ‘Fine, how many do you have to make before I can buy them?’ So they made them – I think he has a closet full of them.”
>No, not quite. They/we want the same kind of justice so our fundamental expectations or rights preserved -- and if that does not suit copyright, then it is copyright that must give way.

it is somewhat false dichotomy - the copyright itself has no conflict with the fundamental rights. It is the modern way of enforcing the copyright on the Internet and investigating/prosecuting the copyright violations there that is violating fundamental rights.

Somehow due process gets relaxed when it comes to copyright violations. Though may be the strength of the due process was only perceived as such if one considers all these cases when an Afro wearing guy would get arrested a week later and get a life (or even death) for the crime committed by a bald perpetrator. 30+ year ago society felt that these guys weren't worth the due process and looks like today the society thinks that "the ones who copy from the Internet or the ones who have something to hide" aren't worth the due process.
Maybe not your FAVORITE guy ever, but I don't know if you can call yourself a motoring enthusiast if you don't derive at least a little bit of guilty pleasure watching them race a jet fighter in a Bugatti.
In any case, great thought went into choosing the washing machine:

Our family just bought a new washing machine and dryer. We didn't have
a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them. It turns out
that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans
make them much better - but they take twice as long to do clothes!
It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water
and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them.
Most important, they don't trash your clothes. They use a lot less
soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer,
and they last a lot longer.

We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off
we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about
the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done
in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our
clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using
a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this
every night at the dinner table. We'd get around to that old
washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design.

We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany.
They're too expensive, but that's just because nobody buys them in
this country. They are really wonderfully made and one of the few
products we've bought over the last few years that we're all really
happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did
such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill
out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html
I find Rubymine very useful. Some of it is just wrappers to shell commands, but other parts have syntax highlighting and suggestions and catching syntax errors. I like the git VCS integration and the debugging. I program Rails with it and really find it useful.
I have noticed a significant decline in the quality of discussions on many slashdot stories over the past few years. Interesting stories are littered with really bad +5 nerd humor, and seemingly very little else in some cases. I still check it every so often, but mostly just out of habit.
We've got one privately, and we'll be launching one publicly within the next few weeks - email chris@lazerclub.co for a preview!

(or use Google Latitude.)
http://www.quora.com/Can-a-H1B-holder-work-for-a-startup-as-...
We use Tim's nvm here.

https://github.com/creationix/nvm

Similar to Ruby's rvm.