skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm having it happen to me more and more often recently. There are situations.also, where it can be a huge hassle. I was reading over GPRS a couple of weeks ago and could barely get beyond the first page without hitting the error.
Thanks for sharing that. We've had a lot of articles lately that treat startups like 9-5 jobs so I think it's important that people like you give some perspective on how it's really like for the waste majority of startups.

This reminds me why passion is so crucial when starting your own business. You will work crazy under conditions that most employees would see as unreasonable and there is a great risk that the business will fail. But as long as your doing it out of passion you can motivate yourself through the hard times and, if it doesn't work out, walk away with the satisfying feeling that you followed your dream and gave it all you got.

Would you say that your passion played an important part in managing your business?
You are right. I must have mixed up two replies.
Hiring only the best is impractical unless you are Google and can pay the best for the best.

A much more practical strategy: hire people that can learn, and train them in best practices.
I use a mail server stack that includes Postfix + Dovecot + RoundCube; RoundCube's search function isn't as good as Gmail's, but the ability to filter messages by literally any part of the message content just blows Gmail's tagging out of the water, IMO. (You need managesieve + a plugin for RoundCube to do this.)

I so far haven't had the mail server blacklisted even once since I started using it 18 months ago. I have a number of other customers on it, including one that sends out a 500-odd subscriber newsletter, using software I developed. I have taken a couple of precautions against spam: I use SPF records for as many domains as possible, the mail server itself is locked down tighter'n a flea's bunghole (including some proactive security measures), I have remote monitoring that keeps an eye on the server constantly, and (so far) I've had the pleasure of only doing business with people I trust.

It requires a lot of effort to build a good mail server, and there isn't a single "perfect" tutorial on the web for it. So, for a lot of people, it might not be worth it. For me though, I haven't touched my Gmail account in a very long time, and I really do love the fact that I have complete control over every aspect of my email (and my customers').
We'd need three axes to define a coördinate in space, four to include time. Given his estimation of the known Universe as 9.3e10 light years across, giving each axis 2^96 would yield an accuracy of about 1.1 kilometers, plenty enough for space navigation. Multiply that by the number of axes.
Wouldn't you have to submit a new version to Apple, which then needs to get approved by them?

That is the showstopper.

"Sorry, we fixed the bug, but Apple hasn't approved it yet. We'll keep you posted."
Do you have restaurant experience (server/owner/manager)?
I think Steve Yegge wins here: Done, and gets things smart. That's what you want.
This is interesting to me.

I wonder if we - to a certain degree - might receive better reporting since he is more active on a day-to-day basis in the actual investing. I really have no idea if this would be the case, but it's entirely possible that he might be privy to additional info than he would otherwise.

As for as the open letter...Mike appears to be open about who he's investing with and I would doubt he would want to harm his reputation - or TechCrunch's - by appearing to be biased towards those he has a vested interest in.

Well written letter but perhaps wait until you have examples of the downsides before you write the next. It will carry far more weight.
I don't think even what you said is sufficient -- as long as they are within the jurisdiction of the US court system, I think a judge can order them to start saving copies of incoming mail before encrypting, etc.

I think fundamentally you can't circumvent the law with technical measures. You need to change the law to require warrants.
Is there an email address where I can drop you an email abt the position??
Turismo en Cajamarca
Osama Bin Laden's burial at sea: Why did we throw his body in the ocean?
I agree that its better to be in LA than in some podunk town working on a script if you wanted a movie to be made. Because movie making has not exactly been democratized to the extent that software development and creating businesses has been.

However, if what I have is a piss poor idea that has not won over customers, has no traction or revenue, then I dont think thats a problem a million dollar can solve. It will just be someone else's money that I will end up losing over a terrible idea. I would rather fail with this idea where I am now, than work on it (with someone else's money) for the next year and then still fail.

The Valley entices everyone to go there. I both drank the koolaid in 99 and ran for cover in the wake of the dotcom crash. Entrepreneurs who persevered were the ones who coupled the right ideas with a sense of commitment bordering on the insane. Thats what I want to emulate. That, to me is more tangible than a million dollars.
makes a lot of sense. here are points for plausible:

- Mike is an asole. By that, I mean he built his fame out of being a bad boy of tech. Its not that he just play it low, like Lady Gaga or Diddy; he actually HAS an opinion of not trustworthy person; most Silicon Valley insiders avoid him, plus TechCrunch has never been good at keeping news to themselves before a company that they plan to write about asked them to stay silent for a day or two more in order to break the news louder. Further, he must have not been a good lawyer as well -- remember hot JooJoo broke down when Arrington cried over spilled milk when he realized he had not secured his business side in accordance to law or with etiquette of any businessman.

- he sold to AOL. I think the main reason was publicity of TC, not money. But I think he knew by selling and getting more ears/eyeballs to read his stuff, he can tube out about companies he invests in.

- given his personality, I personally think it makes sense for him to use TC tube to make as much money as possible. One thing is being on AOL payroll, other is to use that tube to overreact about companies (read: stocks) you in: facebook, twitter, quora -- all has had huge TC coverage while plenty of other companies similar to quora never seen a single line.

Who knows, maybe he may be the last one to do that; I am sure sooner or later FTC will tap in. I dont see a difference, monetarily-wise, between buying penny stock and batch-calling thousand of random phone number leaving voicemail with "secret message of stock thats going to soar soon", and actually owning a second-market stock and applauding it through a tech-blog tube.
Couldn't help myself. America. Freedom. Etc.
Don't communicate vital, secret, sensitive, or confidential information over email.
I am asking an honest question here as I have no idea as to what the answer might be:

What good does it do for a startup to be featured on TC? I suspect it may have to do with getting funding if you are doing a round, but is that it? I would assume that most startups don't derive many paying/staying customers from a TC post, unless the startup itself is narrowly targeted at entrepreneurs/other startups.
Ex-Gaia Online CEO joins VC firm
I think that's not a fair analogy. PG isn't the curator for content on HN, and while you could argue he could algorithmically alter stories about YC companies, or manually remove stories, this isn't an editorial blog. It's a collection, and the users vote stories up and down.

PG's goal from HN is to get a pulse of the tech community, see smart people who may be interesting to invest with in the future.

Arrington theoretically runs a journalistic operation, and he brings up journalistic integrity when it suits him. This is a much stronger conflict of interest for something that perceives itself as journalistic.

While the blog didn't bring up great examples of how this will hurt TC, I don't think it's an even analogy.
What happened to him is very unfortunate but see the kind of conclusion he draws from his ordeal:

"I have formed the opinion that medical specialists are no more equipped to make a medical diagnosis than lay-people."

You would think someone with a reasonable intellect would refrain from making such sweeping generalizations, especially when their own judgment has been clouded by negative empirical evidence.

No, really, he's deranged. Quite a waste indeed.
I am sorry but I don't see the parallel between a community ranked link sharing site and a editorially controlled blog. HN is not journalism. TC is.
The idea that ISI doesn't like the U.S. is nothing new, it's true. But the idea that the Pakistani military sheltered him (which is an easy conclusion if he was that close to the military academy) and that the U.S. then went in, made the kill, and then told Pakistan, that could be a major game changer in relations at the official level.

So you are correct, as the details come out, it could turn out to be just country level business. But if it's more like what I described, I think it's a bigger deal for U.S.-Pakistan relations than when Bush forced Musharraf into letting the U.S. hit Afghanistan after 9/11.
rb01usa has the right of it. One of our (locker project) goals is definitely to enable applications like yours. Have a community that's focussed on tracking and adding all these new digital data sources. I'd love to have you email or stop by IRC (freenode #lockerproject) to hear about your project.
Yeah. I've also tried a galactic simulation game and ran into the limitations of floats. 32 bit floats only give you a usable resolution of 1 in 100000 for global coords. Even doubles are too small. This becomes an issue if you want to zoom from local ship view out to the local planetary body. You end up having to do goofy things like make a scaled billboard out of the nearby planets and place them far enough away that nobody notices.
Why Entrepreneurs make Bad Angel investors
Great Web Design Sale: Minimalist WordPress Themes Now For Just $59
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Customization can actually be an important part of a business model. The problem is how to behave when it's not part of it, and here I agree with the author, the customer is asking for "something else".

I've been in a startup that used to say yes to every stupid request possible to get a customer and yes, it destroyed the product, because we had some general and generic features available to everyone and a lot of stuff that was very specific and not reusable. This means that even if you get the client, you're raising maintenance and development costs (and probably performance - if it's very specific if/else are your friends) without investing in your product and in future clients, and this is very bad for a business, because the customer owns the product and you don't.

Actually, I believe it's the single worst thing that can happen to a startup - case is, it always happen when who is in charge is not a tech guy but a seller, and the reason is that while costs are hidden to his eyes (developers do weird things in dark rooms) the benefits are high.

Unfortunately, you're gonna pay such decisions sooner or later :)
You specify the accuracy you need. Let's say, 1 millimeter.

(9.3e10 light years) / (0.001 meter) = 8.79 × 10^29

log2(8.79 × 10^29) = 99.471

So you need 100 bits to represent each coordinate at that precision.
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Requirements
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Pluses
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These types of articles seem absurdly generic, given the wide range of software complexity.

Like with everything else in life, get the best value for money. Sometimes the Porsche is exactly what you need. Other times, the Honda Civic is better for your requirements.
Surely there is a reason NASA trains underwater. ;)
If your algorithm works on both 32-bit and 64-bit integers, then you can parameterize it:

safeAdd :: (SmallInt i) => i -> i -> Maybe i
safeAdd x y = if (maxBound - x) > y then Just (x + y) else Nothing

`maxBound` would be a member of the `SmallInt` typeclass, with different values for `Int32, `Int64`, `Int23`, etc.
As a self-described loyal reader of TechCrunch, I think it's reasonable to believe that the author of the post does not "expect" Arrington to do anything based on his open letter. He'd just prefer him not to invest in start-ups because he doesn't think it's good for TechCrunch and the quality of journalism that appears there. I agree completely.
They're great, and also pretty active on IRC (#racket @ Freenode) and Stack Overflow.
DuoLingo: Luis Von Ahn (Creator of Captcha)'s Next Big Thing
This is a great idea. I wish I could apply for this one and I hope there are more opportunities like this. (I can't do this because of schedule commitments, but if it were two weeks later I'd be sending in my application.)
Goodsie Makes Setting Up A Gorgeous Online Shop Dead Simple
1.1 kilometers is not even close to being enough precision. That's way larger than your typical missile or a space ship. You can't deal with that kind of error and expect collision detection to work correctly.
Not released yet, but here's the site:
http://duolingo.com/
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وريال مدريد بث مباشر اياب ابطال اوروبا 
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وريال مدريد بث مباشر اياب ابطال اوروبا
Understanding the precision of floats is a small pain, but fixed point math is much more painful.

With fixed point, you have to decide how many fraction bits you're going to have. If you have more than zero fractions bits, multiplies and divdes end up looking like this (assuming 16 fraction bits):
result = (a * b + 1 << 15) >> 16
result = (a / b) << 16; // rounds to zero is a is close to b
result = ((a << 4) / b) << 20; // not much range or precision on the result
Of course, if your variables can't all be represented with the same number of fraction bits, you need to keep track of that and adjust your shifts for each calculation. You also need to do shifts when you add two numbers with different numbers of fraction bits. This stuff is all taken care of for you by floating point numbers.

With fixed point, if you mess up a calculation and it overflows, you get completely whacky results (wrap around) which will cause massive bugs. With floating point, you lose a bit or two of accuracy.

There are definitely places where fixed-point is needed. If you're on a microcontroller without an FPU, you'll have to learn your way around floating point. If you absolutely can't deal with the loss of precision you get with big floating point numbers, you'll have to use fixed point and make sure you understand the range of parameters that can go into each calculation and prevent overflow.

If floats work for you, just use them.
It's fast and loose, but to be honest I neither agree nor disagree with the post's premise, it just seemed like a good point to bring up to spark some discussion.

As for journalistic integrity, my feeling is that conflict of interest in journalism is between a journalist and his employer, not between a journalist and his readership. Media properties all have strong biases fueled by the self-interest of their owners, the market they are attempting to serve with their product, or other factors. In the era of Wikileaks, Twitter, and blogs, journalistic integrity seems like a quaint notion, more unusual when it is present than when it is absent.

I live in Toronto. None of my daily newspapers are unbiased. How about your town?
Android And iOS Soon Irrelevant
The concept is a good mix between a a fairly inexpensive vacation and peer driven entrepreneurial fun. It sounds like a refreshing alternative to being holed up in some corporate office for a weekend eating crappy pizza.
It's happened: Microsoft Moves Scott Gu to Head Up Azure
And questions which really are easy pickings will get 10 people answering them if the site becomes popular. So that $10 reward -- actually $7 after the 30% fee -- would have a 10% probability to win, assuming equal strength of answers for the really easy ones. I don't know many people who'd care about 70 cents.
yay! someone else who uses diæresis marks:)
Buffer Overflow Exploit Prevention?
We'll be doing another one, likely in the fall. Hopefully in a European castle. If you follow @startupworkaway, or sign up for the mailing list, you'll be notified when we nail down details.
TechCrunch has always been Arrington's blog above all else. He uses it to help his friends and defeat his enemies. Ask Jason Calacanis what it's like when he's your friend (lots of easy coverage) and what it's like when he's your enemy (LAUNCH conf boycott).

Any additional bias he may have because of investments won't be detectable in the mass of existing ones he already exhibits.
On the upside, the prevalence of things like Facebook also introduces a lot of noise and weak social links.

Half a century ago you coud make a precision strike and kill half a dozen people to cripple somebody's life. Today you could start clipping off someone's 500+ Facebook friends or Twitter followers, but it gets really impractical really fast and the impact wouldn't be as strong.

Back in the day, you'd find a stash of letters and find your targets. Today Google, Facebook, and Twitter have hundreds of thousands of messages between me and thousands of other people. Where do you start? Especially if you're looking for something very specific like signs of strong relationships, your thesis on this could very well be its own startup or sociology study.

Having more data than you can swallow is cool and all, but pulling something valuable out of it is its own non-trivial task. Throwing raw computing power at it doesn't fix it either.

(Side note: I'm all for private/secure/distributed/federated implementations of... everything.)
Wikitude AR preloaded on millions of BlackBerry devices
Last chance: let the FDA know why you want direct access to your own genome
He was indeed only specifying a single axis, just as you wouldn't use a single float to specify three axes.
Keeping Japan In Our Hearts — Delivering Happiness
What's the best real-world (i.e., non-propellerhead) solution to this?

There isn't one. I've looked at creating one, and while its a sizable engineering job all the pieces are available. What it isn't is monetizable. Not like 'make me a gazillion dollars' monetizable, but like 'pay me a living wage to work on it' monetizable.

The key (and its a horrible pun) is the key. You can build zero knowledge proof [1] key exchangers now (patent expired :-) and a relatively inexpensive 'key' based on either USB or bluetooh communications (see Yubikey [2] as an example). Such that email to a new third party could be done in an encrypted way such that the message could only be read when that exact party was reading the email in a reader that could get the keys to unlock it from the physical key.

Like most such systems it only 'makes sense' if everyone (or at least a large fraction of everyone) has one.

To get initial adoption it needs support in 'free' tools which means it needs to be open in the sense that folks can trust what it does, and implement a compatible protocol without paying you anything.

To earn a spot in your pocket/purse/pack it needs to be flexible enough to accomodate other uses. To get those other uses the folks who provide them need to be able to support it for 'free' since their customers won't be paying them to put it in.

So a large investment in propellor heads to make it usable by the rest of the world and achieve critical mass for adoption. Oh, and if you do start getting traction the governments of the world are going to want to disappear you (which was one of Bruce's points)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

[2] http://www.yubico.com/yubikey
A transparent Python API for asynchronous functions based on lazy evaluations
Here's how you use it:

@async()
def add_two_numbers(a, b):
return a + b

@async(async_mode=None)
def div_two_numbers(a, b):
return a / b

a = add_two_numbers(1, 2)
print a # -> 3
print a + 5 # -> 8

c = div_two_numbers(4, 2)
print c # -> 2
print c.__value__ # -> 2
# PromiseProxy.__value__ returns the evaluated object.
d = div_two_numbers(8, 0)
print d # Error here -- when you use it, not when it happens.

The way it works (if you don't want to read the code), is you add a decorator to a function that you want to run asynchronously. When you run the function, it returns a promise object which runs the function in a separate thread (or process). When you use the promise object, it acts as a proxy to the actual object. So you can use operators on it and call functions that the object has. The way I did operator proxying at the moment is currently messy, and I advice on how to do it better would be appreciated.

You can look at the code: http://codepad.org/yf9Cz45a , but please don't steal =) Although, do tell me if it's worth stealing. Let me know if you would/will actually use this module and why. Any criticism is appreciated (though I prefer the constructive kind). Any pointers on how to improve my coding style would also be appreciated.
Ask HN: Location of tech/design/startups in Vancouver?
Hi guys,

I've been reading about how Canada is cultivating great talent and start-ups.

In terms of locale, can someone enlighten me about Vancouver and if there is an epicenter where the tech/design/start-ups congregates?

Thanks in advance, looking to visit Vancouver.