skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The notion that you will need permission to raise any kind of capital in a certain kind of approved mannor is going to be very outdated very quickly.

An almost ruleless stock exchange is launching next week denominated only in Bitcoin, and there have been "companies" that have been operating for months after issueing "shares" for capital (bitcoin in this case).

Some have raised as much as $30,000 equivalent in bitcoin.

Who cares about the sec anymore.
You make a lot of good points but overstate Groklie's influence on the professional press. It came down to a few journalists who wanted to present themselves to their audiences as open source activists. Serious media didn't care.

A few days ago, I was quoted on Google's $900M bid for Nortel's patents by the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, BBC News, law.com, and on Android's patent problems by Bloomberg. I started my FOSS Patents blog only a year ago. Did Groklaw ever get quoted by media like that? I can't remember having seen that ever. That doesn't mean that it hasn't happened, but I'm not aware of any example.
I can't say I have a lot of negative experience, but after evaluating it, I've come to the conclusion that it's not the right tool for the job for us. We develop trading systems and I wanted a decent messaging framework for internal non-speed-critical communication between apps. Disclaimer: I had limited time to evaluate it, so I may have some misconceptions about ZMQ, you have been warned.

1. Extensive use of asserts in release builds terrifies me. It's meant to check for conditions that shouldn't happen, but I see users complaining about their apps aborting with assertion failures on ZMQ mailing lists and it comes up fairly frequently in Google. There are a fair bit of asserts for error codes returned from system calls. I don't want a critical process crash because I've used library in a wrong way in a completely different part of the application.

2. Only in 2.1 they've fixed the problem where some messages would not be flushed and be lost if you terminate the process too early. This seems like a fairly common bug for younger projects. Recommended workaround is... calling "sleep" before you exit, which is one of the deadly sins of multithreaded programming! This and above point convinces me that ZMQ isn't as mature enough for me to be comfortable with.

3. Transparent reconnection is good, but some of our applications need to quickly detect that other nodes in the system are missing, which forces me to implement off-band heartbeat mechanism.

4. Threading model seems a bit awkward to me (last I checked). First of all, let me state that I personally believe that a library starting threads behind your back is a Bad Thing (unless it's a framework). ZMQ uses a sender thread that you queue your messages into, yet it forces you to dispatch your receive loop by either blocking read or zmq_poll. If it already starts threads by itself, why not provide a callback?

5. Not really a problem, but a missing feature: no way to demultiplex messages from a stream of messages, so you have to implement it yourself. You can subscribe to a subset of messages on a socket, but can't subscribe to multiple subsets from a single socket.
I have no problem with .net, but what od you mean about "all the pieces are in place"?
Go talk to a school...
Existing expertise

If the goal is to get to a minimum viable product quickly (like most startups) then existing knowledge is a pretty good reason to go with a certain stack. He even mentions having the main algorithm already implemented in C# so at that point it's pretty much no contest. He can always go the route similar to StackExchange in using Linux & Open Source on utility servers (Caching/Load Balancing) and keeping the MS-centric App/Database server.
> was invited to Redmond to meet the dev teams as part of an early adopter program.

I think that's the problem I see with Azure. AppHarbor needs no early adopter program. It's great for the same reason that Heroku and Rails were great for people: if you want to get an MVP up and running, it's almost instantaneous. I want to focus on my core product first and delay thinking about seriously scaling and the other major benefits of Azure over AppHarbor.
Yes.. then I would be DQ'd.
Wow, didn't even realize the two authors had written two books on the subject. I meant the former and hadn't realized the parent of my post meant the latter, having not read the title after seeing the authors' names. Whoops!
Mac hackers: can I have a copy of your .pbxproj files?
Hi all,

I'm working on an Xcode project editing framework, which can be found here: https://github.com/danhd123/XcodeProjectEditor

The framework is in decent shape - after a bunch of work last night, it doesn't leak all over the place in a non-GC environment, and I've got it parsing every project file on my system. Key word: "my" system. I need other .pbxproj files (or the .xcodeproj) to make sure there's nothing else I need to implement. The stranger your build process, the more targets you have, the better. Feel free to anonymize the file by stripping out the filenames, although in the PBXFileReferences, I do ask that you try to keep the filenames unique; it makes validation easier.

In the near future I'm looking into a couple of things: first and most importantly, methods to allow actual editing; right now it's pretty much just a parser (though it can write out too). Second, I'm looking into creating the classes and methods dynamically at runtime, as the parser encounters each one. There are promising preliminary results for some classes, the ones without references to others.

But first I need to make parsing as solid as humanly possible, and to do that I need more variety of project files than I've got currently.

Also, if you check it out and decide you want to contribute, that's awesome too.
You can also hit http://www.allstepisodes.com/

Not sure of the legality though.

EDIT: seems to be more ad laden than I remember.
When I switched from .net MVC to Rails after a few years with Microsoft, my biggest pain was from missing VS. Rock solid variable renaming, autocompletion and method look up saved so much time.
YESYESYESYESYES

Sorry, but Picard influenced me as much an any person in my life. This makes me so happy.
I know the point is accepting the process of failure, but it reminds me of Edison vs Tesla. Tesla supposedly said "If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.
I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor."
Is the Sony mess not important? It's all about copyrights and license agreements, and it seems like it could have major repercussions for the right to run the software of your choosing on hardware that you own. (Not to mention the horrible privacy precedents Sony is trying to set with their subpoenas.)

I'm not saying that the software patent issues aren't big, but they're battles between corporate giants, and will have limited effect on developers until most of them are settled. The Sony cases, on the other hand, could mean that you would need the manufacturer's permission before putting free software on the hardware they sold you. Most companies selling hardware would love for that to be the case, but it would make it nearly impossible for open-source communities to form around consumer hardware.
Not relevant to the subject topic, but what a poorly written piece, it was posititvely annoying reading it.

This facility which is already producing computers and other electronic products for HP and Sony.

With Apple selling iPads just about as they can manufacture them

the 8th richest person on the planet aaccording to Forbes

stating that components where already being shipped

it should drive down the price of the iPad in Brazil by a large factor

Sorry, just really bugs me.
I'm also in my senior year of high school, and I'll say this: don't skip on school. You'll have free time, and you can put that time into starting a company. But first, you have to just play around with stuff, and you'll always meet people in any school. Find people who share your passion, because they'll help you continue forward. And keep doing stuff like FIRST -- it's fun, but it also helps you tackle problems well. If you start building stuff for fun that seems like it'll make money, you've found an alternative to school. But unlimited free time sounds fun, but I guarantee you'll be getting the same amount of work done if you go to school and work on stuff in your free time. You may even produce better work because you won't "have the time" to procrastinate.

But it's all a matter of preference. I'm not really any wiser than you. But one question: does the idea of school sound appealing to you on its own?
3-D Print a Figurine of Yourself
I've had a lot of luck running a design contest on 99 designs and then continuing to do work afterwards with the people I chose as finalists for the design. My 2c.
You're first four reply's are about how great a design this is, and how we would purchase this if available. You should get this going...
I'm not PG but I remember some of these answered last year:

1. You should be ready to accept/decline when you receive the call. You're not going to get any new information at that point, so your mind should be made up. (Unless you're under special circumstances that require more time, but you should let them know about that.)

2. I don't know.

3. Terms are not negotiable. (I remember this being written somewhere but I can't find it right now.)

Please correct me if I'm wrong. I figure unofficial answers are better than no answers in case the real thing doesn't come along.
1. Since we show you all the paperwork in advance, the only thing you don't know before I call is how much stock we'll ask for. Usually groups can decide about that on the fly, or even in advance. So most people either tell me yes or no when I call them, or call back a few minutes later. But we don't have any deadline for replying, so if groups have some reason they need more time to decide, we always give it to them. E.g. there was once a startup that we offered to fund that got an acquisition offer that weekend. They needed weeks to see if the acquisition was going to happen. (It did.)

2. It wasn't DST but the Start Fund, which is a separate thing. I believe those guys are going to invest again, but I can't promise anything, because it's not for me to promise. A lot of people don't realize this, but YC was not a party to that deal. It was just between Start Fund and the individual startups. (We were in favor of it, certainly, but we didn't have any agreements with anyone.)

3. In years past I caved a few times when people tried to negotiate with me, but I haven't recently. I realized I was just doing it out of fatigue at the end of a long day of interviews. I've also learned from experience that there is near zero correlation between groups' tendency to negotiate and how well they end up doing. In fact come to think of it, possibly an inverse correlation. So it's easy to say no.
Please end the 'Please end the "we are pissed because we got rejected posts"'. I've seen more of those than I have of the "we are pissed...' posts.
Does anyone know why Fuel uses a mixture of Zend_Style class naming and namespaces? For example controllers are prefixed by Controller_ and are in the root namespace while tasks are put in the namespace Fuel\Task with no class prefix.

class Controller_Foo{}

namespace Fuel\Task;
class Foo{}

It seems confusing.
Sun made some progress in that area: http://blogs.sun.com/dillon/entry/reg_fd_update

You just need to convince the SEC that Twitter is the new RSS.
This is impossibly little information to go on. What's the idea? What kind of competition exists? Are you targeting the more moneyed schools, the less moneyed, the in between, all of them? What are the costs to you? Is this something schools need (or can you convince them it is), is it just a "nice to have", or is it more of a "well, we need to spend this year's budget somehow"? There's not nearly enough information here to remotely begin answering that question.
Why the "Why Not" message hurts
As my first experience with applying to YC, I just received the Why Not (rejection) email.

Above everything, after researching a lot for the past month or so on the YCombinator funding and application process, I fell in love with the aura of its community.
As something YC itself didn't expect, this community is probably a golden by-product that is worth a lot more than their actual ownership in the startups they fund(1).

Information on how to make money (no matter how difficult) is much better than direct access to money(2). Even though supposedly the goal of most applicants is money, I would estimate there are a lot that would just give a portion of their company as a membership fee in order to join the YC process and community.

I am not surprised with my reaction to the "rejection" as funding was of secondary importance to me, and that's why it hurts.
I do not wan't to join or create another YC reject group, I wan't YC to keep doing what they're doing and try again.

You can find the equivalent money anywhere, but you cannot find the equivalent YC aura.

(1) just how I feel - its hard to make this estimation on paper.
(2) this goes for those who admire the YC process more than the monetary funding they receive.
This is my standard MO for learning big new ideas. Say for example I want to use MVC for the first time. Once I think I understand the general idea, I will build my own. I might peak at Rails or Struts or whatever to see how they solve something, but in general I just go my own way. Once I have something to approximately proof of concept level, I feel ready to go out and evaluate existing options with a pretty high level of confidence in my conclusions.
In their defense, Azure's target is not startups or 'hackers' with a toy app. In fact, it makes no sense at all pricing-wise if you only run a single webserver and database. Their pricing covers a large and growing set of features.

Microsoft's programs exist because of the insane amount of features and support that have to go into their products for their enterprise customers. And its those features that really make us stick with Azure for now. Specifically, I'm talking about TableStorage, Queues and AppFabric's Distributed Cache Service. I've already had a small chat with the AppHarbor guys before. I'd definitely love to move if it made sense.

Don't get me wrong though. I definitely have my gripes with Azure too.
Congratulations on your success. However, I think you should finish your degree. Online flash cards are not the Future of the World.
Wow, that article is full of all sorts of stupid. Someone should tell the author that .NET is not a language (not that it'll make a difference).

I find this part particularly hilarious:

"However, if you need to make a 1.7 oz burger, you simply can’t. There’s no button for it. The patties are pre-formed in the wrong size. They start out frozen so they can’t be smushed up and reformed, and the thawing machine is so tightly integrated with the cooking machine that there’s no way to intercept it between the two."

Pure silliness. Perfect example of an irrational language bias.
I mean the barrier to entry has been lowered drastically. I used to do my projects in Rails because I didn't want to go through the hell of renting and setting up a server for ASP.NET. Also, MVC 3 has really flattened the learning curve and the expert community is finally putting together seriously good OSS and tutorials. Finally, MVC 3 development is also highly decoupled from a lot of the uglier MS attempts at making a totally proprietary stack (MS AJAX -> jQuery, Codeplex -> Github, Azure -> AppHarbor).
Can someone give an example of what this would be used for?
I agree, there are plenty of great intern candidates out there even in mid-April, but the cycle is definitely winding down. I'd suspect that the students interviewing now are, on average, not as competitive as the ones who received offers weeks or months ago.

I'd hesitate to stereotype startups' hiring preferences, but encourage students to apply to any company that's remotely interesting. Just like the bigger corporations, there's a huge variance: I've approached some startups about internships only to realize that their singular focus was to bring on full-time engineers ASAP, and worked for others that hired and mentored younger students with great success. It's often impossible to tell without starting a conversation.
Please, when you link to an editorial titled "Groklaw accused of censorship", have the integrity to note that you're the accuser.

And don't use childish epithets like "GroklXX" and "Groklie" and still expect to be taken seriously on a forum like this.
You can only be rejected from YCReject if you consequently reapply to YC and get accepted.
Actual clickable link: http://thingsfromthefuture.com/grow/

P.S. I like it and my girlfriend likes it, we'd definitely buy a set if it's priced within the IKEA range.

+2 to Kickstarting it!
Is there a way around the WSJ's paywall? Seems to be not quite as easy to defeat as the NYT's.
I think what is being said is that since only the top few academic performers get the A label,by design, the remainder should get extra non-academic (here, enterpreneurial ?) skills to level-up when they get out in the real world.
With a command to bot in Basecamp chat none the less.
It looks like you can use it as essentially an LLVM backend, meaning that any compiler/interpreter that uses LLVM can compile into Javascript (for use in the browser).
How does it find similar artists?
It's certainly much better than a few years ago, and an order of magnitude improved over webforms. In some respects, I think the OSS ecosystem has much room to grow to catch up with Rails and Django. Although Rails and Django could also learn some tricks from Microsoft.
Ask HN: Why haven't anyone done Instagram for Android or BB?
I have thought of buying an Iphone just so I can have Instagram. Why haven't anyone decided to build Instagram for Android or BB?
Youtube has always been kinda cluttered. I hear youtube is run mostly independently from the rest of google, so im not surprised that it is hasnt gotten the minimalist treatment
full of annoying ads, unsynced audio, constant buffering, low resolution. it's a very poor viewing experience, and it's copyright infringement.
It's in the PHP style guide? Maybe?
Get Out of Stealth-Mode and Market Your Startup with These 9 Audiobooks
I speak for myself here, but I don't think something needs to be the "Future of the World" for it to be an immensely fulfilling way to lead one's life, degree or not.
A bunch of people will push forward regardless: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2422145
مشاهدة مباراة الهلال والشباب بث مباشر اون لاين
> it took 5,127 prototypes and 15 years to get it right

This works out to 341 prototypes a year. I understand this is based on a true story and it's probably a good vacuum cleaner, but - c'mon, give me a little break here.

(edit)

Worth adding - I was buying a vacuum for myself not long ago and looked at Dyson. Their marketing materials are full of exaggerations, inaccuracies and half-truths. One of their central claims is that their vacuums "do not loose suction". A reasonable question here is what happens when a dust canister fills up? Does it keep sucking dust and ejecting it back into the air? They also claim it is the only cyclonic vacuum (followed by some fine print), and this is simply not true.

All in all, it is really well marketed, but otherwise severly overpriced vacuum of an average manufacturing quality (can't lift certain portable models by their carrying handle, because some seal opens up and, ironically, they loose suction) and it was designed by an interesting person. That's about it.
Edison: Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Telsa: If Mr. Edison had thought a bit more he wouldn't have to sweat so much

(full disclosure: I've never found an original source on the Tesla quote, so it's probably apocryphal).
In the author's defense, it's not like he outlandishly says ".net is a language" -- it's fairly common to refer to the framework when discussing stacks because of specificity. Saying "I program Rails apps" is clear, and Ruby is assumed. Technically, I don't "program in Rails" is if it was a language, but since the knowledge needed to effectively work with a framework is so involved, it's worth stating.
While this is true, it was essentially mandated that there be two competitors. The choice was to have many resellers of DSL competing against cable, or an entrenched duopoly. Chairman Michael Powell chose the duopoly, even using that word to describe it.
You shouldn't be so quick to knock the idea. People probably said the same thing about a stupid website that was pretty much a yearbook online. It has 3milliom monthly users, he can definitely turn it into a revenue generator and is in a great position to be strategically acquired by Washington Post (which owns Kaplan), or Princeton Review. Dropping out of MIT is a risk- but, he can always return.
> Also, "I'm buying a MBP" translates to "I'm serious about startups"?

Well, that was tongue in cheek.

But really, just the opposite-- I'm saying that I'm a total tool who's caved in to the trendy peer pressure of the startup culture. That culture shuns .NET on principal and there's lots of pressure to never use it for a startup.

And if you don't believe there's peer pressure to use a MBP, try going to Red Rock or the Dojo with an Acer laptop. You can just feel people judging you. ;)
I use Eclipse a lot, as well as a sprinkling of other IDEs. I tend miss autocompletion too (support for generics and polymorphism? yes please) but the thing I tend to miss the most is the debugger. Nothing else even comes close.
Well, I don't agree about polymorphism (but that's a whole different conversation) :) I forgot about the integrated debugger though. I sure do miss variable inspection without littering code with puts.
They have - it's called picplz and it works on both iPhone and Android today.

http://www.lockergnome.com/android/2011/01/27/instagram-for-...
If you really have the itch, my vote is to take a year and go all-out entrepreneur. I'm on the far side of an electrical engineering degree and by the end of it an extra year one way or the other makes no difference, but the amount of experience to be gained from just one year of trying to run a business is invaluable. If school is a priority for you, set a benchmark for yourself so that you are not tempted to drag along a failing business for years instead of going to school.

If you don't have access to a good network of hackers (to be a part of your team and to go to for advice), ignore what I just said. Go to school - a CS degree is probably the best way for a young person to build up a network of programmers.