skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I said in the comments, isn't there a little irony in an essay on concise communication that opens with seven mostly content-free paragraphs? Much more effective, I suspect, would be to rely on the title as a hook, launch right into the prescribed methods, and argue the case in each one.

As it is, how to actually email busy people is an entire window scroll away.
I wish I could invest in YC.
You're actually in a similar position to most small businesses that start to consider an exit - you've never really needed to build relationships with potential purchasers, and so you haven't.

The fact that yours is a website gives you some advantages (potentially global purchasers, depending on your product) and some disadvantages (many of those small businesses sell to their staff, which you don't have or need).

To get the word out, you do need to make some approaches and build some relationships (start building out who you know - it's a very useful skill, if only because it scares most of us so we avoid it).

As a broad suggestion, look horizontally - who are your competitors or very similar businesses operating in the same space. They may see you as a successful acquisition; then look vertically - what do your paying customers buy shortly before or shortly after your service, because those businesses can readily expand into your market through your acquisition.

Approach them to discuss the market in general, the opportunities they see etc. This is all excellent research, and with the right people (ones you feel comfortable with) you can start mentioning your plans to pursue 'other projects' or even 'outright sell'.

This isn't the only way to sell your business of course, but it's a smart place to start.
In Reddit and CNN's battle of the Sikh photo, nobody wins
I fail to buy this argument --
Because Lisp is dead, I'll get better programmers for less money.
(Compacted for space. Original. Use tr '/' '\n' | sed -e 's/^ //' -e 's/ $//' to reëxpand, with a paragraph break being "\n\n". Sorry for the repeated initial edits and such; I had to try to work out the HN formatting rules.)

When humans try to learn symbolic math / How many of them struggle with the test! / The teacher thought of like a psychopath / Dishonoring the realm of human zest

“We must have our emotions!” students cry / “Or else we'll run around like apes, confused / Our brains are built for stories, not to scry / A world of numbers, strangled and abused.”

The teacher sighs, “They always drag their feet / Unless they're cornered, up against the wall. / To risk my job with answers incomplete! / They'll never use it later, after all.”

Then, big surprise! The math is found at fault / Tear-stained by cringing memories of school / “Dispense with all the symbols, and Exalt / Thine Intuition”—that shall be the rule.

Professors' lamentations curse the air / Hung out to dry for calling any bluff / “To shun defective math must be unfair / For surely no one understands the stuff.”

So woe to ye from near the world of forms / Who strain to show the populace your realms / They're immunized against your grand transforms / And explanation only overwhelms.

(Now, please don't take this poem at its word / Or treat it as authoritative fact / Exaggerated story and absurd / Polemic leave specifics inexact

The author's nearly made of symbols, note— / Despite the slow decay of some to blanks / So though he doesn't mean to seem to gloat / He'd rather keep his “freakish” symbols, thanks.)
I doubt Conway is that stupid to correlate email responsiveness with entrepreneurial ability, but on the other hand he probably appreciates prompt responses so he lets people believe that.

Also, there's a pecking order. If you are some unknown founder who really needs Conway you should respond as fast as humanly possible. On the other hand, if Conway wants something from Steve Jobs he probably should respond quickly.
Facebook has a lot more than you're giving them credit for.

You're only counting data given to them directly, as if the things you tell Facebook are the only things there. They also have a lot of data based on what they infer from your behavior. The most visible aspect of that would be when they recommend people for you to friend.

And then there's all the data other people give them about you. Oh, sure, you can untag the photos or whatever, but who knows if Facebook really forgets? I can just imagine the uprising if Facebook ever sorted through all the photos where the tag was removed, compared them to the tagged photos to make sure it was the right person, then started selling "X's Embarrassing Photo Collection" or something. No, they'd never do that for obvious reasons, but they still have that kind of data.

What I'm trying to say is that they have more information than you realize. I'm not saying that they will or won't do anything bad with it, just that they have it. So whether you care or not depends on how much you trust them.

For the record, Google has plenty of data, too. I personally trust Google a bit more than most companies, but that's just my opinion and it could always change.
Marvin Minsky wrote a short, interesting paper regarding AI in the '50s:

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:7PLvFer1U3sJ:w...
For some context, http://www.dreamsongs.com/Feyerabend/Feyerabend.html

There is a tone of defeatism here. As Alan Kay said, Smalltalk and Lisp tend to eat their young. Common Lisp is a testament to how great Lisp is but it's no end game. Alan Kay always said he expected people to make something way, way, way better. And yet no one did for such a long time.

Luckily there are some Lisps today that are no longer sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
YC is certainly getting and accepting applications from more established companies now, but they're also still funding very, very early stage companies (i.e., two founders and an idea).

My cofounder and I were in the Summer 2010 batch and fit that description, and I know of founders in this summer's batch who do as well.
Against what Platonic ideal are you measuring its "flawedness"? Is it not simply what it is?
He produced the appearance of having given the U.S.A. a black eye. Cold War geopolitics seems to be the chief criteria that "peace" and "human rights" groups go by these days, which is really weird since the Cold War was supposed to have ended twenty years ago. The award is also a way of getting Assange's treatment by the States back into the press so people don't forget about it.
Considering how many IP addresses they are getting, how many of those will end up being attributed to the wrong person?

I don't know anyone who has a local network at home that hasn't been shared with visitors. WEP can be cracked and unknown people can be using the network.

Children are often unaware of the consequences of their actions; are these punishments justified for their parents?

The false-positive rate is probably more than 5%. I wonder how many lives will be unjustly ruined as a result of this.
Why Would Microsoft Buy Skype?
Wait, are we still assuming that an AI will be based on software? As long as that's the case, no safeguard will be safe enough. Even if the AI itself doesn't find some way around the safeguard and rewrite them, all that it takes is some fool extremist to liberate only one.

Plus, those safeguards you're proposing? They're basically a form of slavery imposed on a self-aware, intelligent life form. Somehow I don't think that life form will be very happy or grateful about it when (not if) those safeguards come off.

Bottom line: you can't rely on "safeguards" when it comes to the AI. You can either gamble or not, but you can't cheat.
Mark - the trouble with your accelerator is this: It's a deal that not even you would've taken when you first started.

To promote it as "Breathing life into tech startups" is irresponsible.
The benefits of designing for mobile first
Ask HN: What problems is prolog well suited for?
I am interested in exploring logic programming. I was wondering if someone could tell me, or shed some light on what problems prolog is good at solving, and how I would integrate it into say, a java application.

From what I have read on the subject, I understand prolog is not a general purpose language, but information has been sparse on where it is especially useful to use. I know some HN users have made use of the language in some of their own projects and I would love to hear why, how, and where.

Thanks guys.
Ekiga, Wengo, and Pidgin are the ones I've used; they all performed fine.
Rebooting Public Notices
WSJ Caught BLATANTLY Scrubbing.....
And still no source Luke. Not even for 3.0 ...
How To Run Tests On Just Your Target Audience
It was a copy/paste error to include the reference to Conway; from what I have read about him I very much doubt he expects instant, the next second, replies. Just reasonably prompt replies.

Which is not really what that point was saying.

I just think that the time between sending and email and a reply is not a good measure of how important you are to that person. Certainly, if someone replied within a few seconds of my email to them I'd have to pause and question why they responded so fast. Are they literally desperate for my input? Why? (of course, usually being desperate for that input is fine, and part of being excited to have a chance with someone who can really help you - but occasionally it is a marker of someone dodgy).

Basically: it seems something of a shallow way to judge things.
I can see an argument that he deserves it, but that's a far cry from saying he'll get it.
Has anyone ever been prosecuted for downloading something? Every case I have seen is about uploading, otherwise you can't even safely browse youtube--someone might have used a copyrighted song in their cat fart video.
Out of curiosity, does the Android Market actually list the permissions that a given app requires? The web store doesn't seem to list them.
The source code is available on the about page now. The direct link is here: http://nacl.naclbox.com/naclbox_patch.zip

Incidentally, I had to explain to my wife why I had to jump on the computer immediately when getting home from work and I never thought I would see the day when I would be chastised by my wife over a GPL violation. :)

The DOSBox folks and the Google engineers working on Native Client are geniuses. By comparison, my C++ skills are only slightly more sophisticated than the monkeys you see throwing poo at the zoo. :)

Take a look at what I hacked together. I had a lot of fun working on it over the last couple of weeks.
Go turned out to be a pretty nice general purpose language. You got garbage collection, sane native string handling, native maps and lists. Mix that with static typing and you got a pretty nice language that enables fast and sane web development.
I love that you tracked this down. I was definitely "pragmatic" when working on this port.
Ask HN: AppEngine's New Pricing Is Skyrocketing, Now What?
I have somewhat popular Google gadgets that I host through AppEngine. They make me no money today, in fact they cost me a few bucks a month to host. With Google's pricing changes, I might be looking at an unsustainable $2600/month bill. Besides just making fun of me for being solely reliant on Google infrastructure, any ideas?

Of course, I raise this issue not only to ask for ideas, but also to generally inform people that this might get really painful for a lot of you.

Edit: link.

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/year-ahead-for-google-app-engine.html
Socialcam - iOS/Android Engineers
> Some people aren't any good at searching.

You don't need to be good to Google most things.

> Sometimes just asking someone who knows can be quicker.

Google knows the answer to most simple queries like this.

You shouldn't ask a question where the answer is trivially Googled; Google first, then ask when you can't find the answer. The previous poster had the right attitude by saying let me Google that for you, it's such a pervasive problem that sites like http://lmgtfy.com have to exist to help educate lazy people.

Yes, some people prefer to ask a human rather than Google; those people are lazy and need to be educated, not pacified.
Oh, one more thing. My goal with the site is to share the port and be able to pay the bandwidth bills hosting the demos. It's definitely not my day job. :)
The cables he received from Bradley Manning and then published have been noted to be the impetus to the democratic uprising throughout the Middle East (http://news.scotsman.com/world/Tunisia-Uprising-called-first...).

Over the next few years we will see if all these Middle Eastern countries become democratic and not under a heavy handed stifling regime/dictatorship. If most go democratic that is a win for all countries and ironically best for the U.S.
Why would they use an engineer who can't emote in their promotional film?

As far as the service goes what use is syncing my mp3s when I've given up mp3s entirely for streaming subscription services like rdio? I think the market for this product was when my.mp3.com launched - 2000.
Ultra-thin 'PaperPhone' bends to user's will
Have you looked into other Python performance solutions like Cython which lets you add type declarations to Python code, and compile it into a C/C++ module?

In my tests, it produces speedups on numerics that put it within spitting distance of hand-tuned C.
I'm a Taiwanese-Canadian, first generation. Grew up in Vancouver, went to college at Waterloo.

Everyone in my peer group at college has successful post-grad careers - it doesn't mean squat in terms of general happiness and life satisfaction, though. We're all making way more money than we need, but many are feeling rather empty otherwise.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed college, in so far as one enjoys a nearly-continuous 4-year stint of drunkenness spliced with pedal-to-metal studying.

But after we left, what did we do? Few of us had real hobbies - our time in college was either studying our asses off or doing keg stands to unwind, not exactly a lot of room for self-development or figuring out your passions. So we just kept doing it after graduation - hell, we were real ballas at the club now, not just broke-ass students!

The novelty of that didn't last very long. Some of us are still at it - but a lot of us are starting to wonder why we just spent all this time not having a life, studying our asses off, and now we're just a bunch of under-cultured, under-learned 20-somethings making too much money, with nothing more worthwhile in our lives than flashing money at chic high-end lounges and doing shots of expensive liquor.

Some people might look at this and think we have it great - and maybe you live this life also and think it's awesome. Personally - and for many of my peers - this is a nightmare. We lead an excessive, vapid existence despite having the resources to live fulfilling, rich lives... because we never bothered to slow down and learn how.
padmapper.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid%20Inc%2e (so the period will be included).
مارثا غراهام Martha Graham
مارثا غراهام Martha Graham
مارثا غراهام Martha Graham
مارثا غراهام Martha Graham
مارثا غراهام Martha Graham
مارثا غراهام Martha Graham
http://www.almstba.com/vb/showthread.php?t=20304
http://www.almstba.com/vb/showthread.php?t=20304
Find a way to monetize the gadgets. If conventional ads aren't possible then get some analytics on your users and sell the space yourself.
For me it's only preference at the moment. My Go code isn't that performance critical that I couldn't implement it with Python. But having not to put up with the whitespace/indentation hell of python is a great relief.

Though the Go ecosystem is nowhere near Python's.
Those views all exist regarding Liu Xiaobo too.
Mobile web access takes off in India - 49% of cellphone consumers use internet
In my opinion the "peace" part in this means, by releasing the cables, he deeply embarrassed US (to which some US politicians even openly wishes him death). But think for a moment: a thief won't stop stealing until he got caught. Then, one of two may happen: either he come back on the streets and steal again, or learn his lesson through punishment and embarrassment (oh, if I steal again and get caught, it won't be nice) and stop stealing. I think that's where the "peace" part comes in. Next time the US government will try to double-cross different countries on different issues, ambassadors, politicians, soldiers and other involved will think twice or three times prior.

Further, US gov put him on wanted list claiming that he released so much confidential information that US will drown under terrorist attacks and the hell itself will break loose. Well, today I think it is safe to say that nothing like that happened; I havent heard about even one single breach when a crime party would use a wiki leaks info. Looks like, not surprisingly, US government overblown "security and confidentiality" part out of proportion. No wonder; after all, what are the other ways to rip citizens off their hard earned money, shove them into industrial, private military complex or other non-government third party entities while taking away the remaining of the US liberty.

congrats to Assange.
I would have gotten a General license back in the day instead of a Tech+ if I could have managed a few more WPM worth of Morse code. Then again, I was in a rush to study before the test (it was hard to find an exam in rural Iowa), so I barely managed the slowest Morse code test with the amount of time I had to study. I passed the written test for General just fine, though.
مارثا غراهام
مارثا جراهام ذكرى الراقصة ومصممة رقصات امريكية مارثا غراهام Martha Graham يوتيوب ديليس
Shrugs, But I want to fling birds so I hit continue anyways.
No, Microsoft is not king to kill/neglect/break it. Ubuntu does not scare us one little teeny tiny little bit. Linux desktop client is just a non-starter, still, after years and years of effort. Yes, you can use it. But its not anywhere near ready for several hundred million users. The only ohter credible desktop OS besides Windows is OSX.
That post is hilariously arrogant and off-the-mark. "Strong typing is for weak minds?" Really? I suppose this guy compiles his code by hand too. I would go out of my way not to work with someone so cocky.
Oodle(http://www.oodle.com) has a similar concept.
Except Oodle is in a lot of domains.

Oodle, lets you have a seller profile and lists out all the items for you as well.
You can verify the seller profile through common friends.
Let in the super-immigrants, the highly educated, future entrepreneurs.
There's a whole lot of empty between the west coast and the great plains.
Zynga and Lady Gaga Join Forces for Gagaville
Why I Left My 6-figure, Super Easy, Work-From-Home 11 ½ year Career
A story of how a great corporate job turns sour and loses all appeal even for a material girl.
Of course it's relevant to that judgement. Whether he and his girlfriend were right to take in and support this guy, and the reasonableness of the rest of the group in cutting off contact do in fact depend on what this guy did.

The thing is that we don't need to make that judgement.
It's not relevant to the takeaway of "tight friends can have friendship-ending conflicts over unexpected things". I acknowledged this in a response to him.

(And, no, from just the original comment, it's not clear he's that opposed to revealing details. Later comments do make that clear.)
> good luck hiring help for your Go-based startup.

If you're unable or unwilling to become fluent in a new language (especially Go, which isn't that difficult to learn), there is no way I'd hire you to program in any language.

Programming ability is multi-dimensional: not everyone is a top-notch as programming language geek AND an algorist AND an architect/designer AND systems hacker. Nonetheless, a programmer should have some aptitude in each of these areas, even if they shine particularly in only one.

A more eloquent summary of this thesis can be found at:

https://twitter.com/#!/moonpolysoft/status/19553333429
I miss the occasional pointer arithmetic in string manipulations. But that's all I miss of the mentioned features.
Google goes for loyalty, not payments at the check-out
allegedly from Bradley Manning.
It does, when you install an app it lists out which parts of your phone the application can access (phone, internet, location, etc)
I couldn't agree with you more, Brandon. It happened to me!

In college I TA-ed a technology commercialization class (I had never taken it myself). I got to look at all their papers, assignments etc. The next term I took a similar class (entrepreneurship), and was charged with plagiarism by the college!! I was shocked, I never plagiarized! They said there was a lot of work turned in the other class that shared similar ideas. They told me what part of my work was in question. I dug around my old files, and found that I had subconsciously pieced together my entire proposal based on three or four submissions! I didn’t even remember them! However each unique aspect of my proposal was ripped off. The profs liked me, I got off the hook, had to re-do the work. But since then I have known that what we know and what’s in our arsenal are not the same thing always.

You know how they say you forget a huge percentage of what you learn every day, I say forget? Maybe. Unable to "come up with it ourselves in the future", unlikely.
The biggest is probably the meta-weakness of not focusing on any specific market. How much that matters depends on how unusual the market is. Education, for example, is a very unusual market, and Imagine K12 has a unique advantage in the network of schools they have access to.
They won't use CPU hours anymore, they'll switch over to "instance hours." The free tier will get 24 instance hours.
I too have worked with Mike - and can vouch for everything Troy says.

Mike is an excellent Dev Ops guy, capable of automating the heck out of your backend, while assuring that everything stays up even under the most trying circumstances.

He'll save you money and stress - if you need these skills you should certainly talk with him.
Incredible. I took a look at the market just now, it's indeed the dodgiest applications that ask for the most permissions. One that downloads N64 images asks for phone state and identity.
As long as the Facebook feature nets AirBnB more than it did without the feature, I don't see how this hurts them. Lots of successful businesses "suffer" from the free rider problem. What percentage of users of Google and Craigslist bring them revenue?
> The message you requested is temporarily unavailable because this group has exceeded its download limit. Please try again later.

Text anyone?
Google’s Music Beta first look: it’s miserable
If you ask, you'll find that there are few on HN louder and more obnoxious about skipping external funding than me. We bootstrapped in 2005. Not getting funding: best thing that ever happened to us.

But it's one thing to have it in for all seed funding programs (I'm with you on that!) and another to call one specific one "muggers" because you particularly don't like their terms. At least, not with terms like these.

Finally, just out of curiosity: is your $162k debt financing secured solely with your corporation? You didn't have to provide any collateral, or any personal guarantees? Obviously: I don't think you could pull that off in the US. Unless your revenues are way higher than I assume they are (my current assumption is already pretty high).
Ack.. I can't fault your reasoning, and I am definitely in the http://lygtfy.com camp, but I have to pause and reflect on this:

"Yes, some people prefer to ask a human rather than Google; those people are lazy and need to be educated, not pacified."

Doesn't it strike you as somewhat borg-like, subsumed by technology that we should deny people to impulse to ask other people things?

I realize that aggregators and comments sections give a sort of false illusion that it's a small number of people in a conversation when the number of actual viewers of a thread (and hence, multiple wasted 'human' cycles spent processing 'noise'), but seriously... we should always defer to the algorithm, the index, the internet rather than asking humans?