skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a big proponent of NearlyFreeSpeech (http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/). Everything is pay-as-you go, literally. 1GB data transfer = $1. Everything is super affordable, but let me state this, and this is the theme of what I'm going to tell you: it can become expensive if you're running a very trafficked site with lots of user activity.

That said, you should look at hosting with price as the very last thought. Find out what you need, compare that against availability. Find out how much you need, compare that against reliability. Find out how you can support it, compare that against your host's support community, staff and users alike. Using things like this you pick out your host, and if the price is okay, great. If not, move to the next and deduce in the same fashion.

EC2 I think is a good way to go to keep prices low to start off, and if you want to something else later on you'll have the finances saved to do so. Just know the more you use, the higher costs will be, but at least you're not paying $40/mo for clustered/redundant/balanced hosts and databases when all you're doing is writing a blog early on in the game.
I have most of these problems, and some of the good points. I am "dyslexic" and I'm guessing that if your friend saw a late-1990's shrink, he would be "dyslexic" too.

I even did the cleaning thing today on my desk; some important papers get pushed together, others got binned. Things that don't really have a place are still lying around.

I find that when I work with organised people, I do very well.
You've got to be skeptical of a magazine and website that calls itself "reason". Of course! Free-market thinkers are the only reasonable people out there.
Thoughts:

Give straight answers.

Have co-founders with whom you have at least 6 months working history.

How will you make money? Try this formula: "_____ will buy ___ for $___ because ___."

Avoid seeming like an unstable loner.
See also: http://www.biostat.wisc.edu/~annis/creations/PyLisp/

Which also points to: http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/pyscheme/
and: http://www.xs4all.nl/~yduppen/site/psyche.html
Israel to Put Dead Sea Scrolls on the Internet
I'm not sure I agree that starting a business with your friends is a bad idea. If things go wrong, perhaps it would be worse, though?
As I posted on the blog:

I often cook the troops quality, gourmet food, give them cool trips and the chance to put up crazy installation art, and throw many person dinner parties (with outsiders, too).

I also am getting graph paper placemats:

http://einfall.wordpress.com/2008/08/20/engineers-a-paper-ta...
Damn Apple! They took away my freedom to write mobile Java apps for the iPhone. Now I have to use their SDK to make apps that look like iPhone apps instead of having the same uniform crappy appearance and behaviour on every platform. True, that would eliminate any reason for someone to own an iPhone, which would eventually commoditize iPhones and bankrupt Apple, but come on, my freedom is at stake!

Also, background processing is important to me. If I want to write an app that drains the battery down, who are Apple to say no to me? Why can't I write my app and let the market decide if they want battery-draining apps? If they mistakenly think that the iPhone battery is to blame instead of my software, that's not MY problem. Apple should "let the market decide" instead of dictating the user experience to customers and developers.
Let me try to summrize the discussion so far:

-article: Apple made apps more open

-me: Apple made apps more closed, here's the proof

-you: Customers!

A completely off-topic quip that aims to create a false dilemma where none exists to distract from a valid point.
You pay an employee to do a job ... not for his imagination, except he is on a professional contract for you 24/7
Last I checked, you're free to _not_ buy Vista. Buy a Mac. Buy a pre-installed Linux box. Buy your roommate's cousins used Pentium 4 w/o an OS and have your way with it.
Nos. 3,4 & 5 - Sounds just like the current startup I work for... Time to jump ship!
How I Learned to Love Middle Managers
Slicehost and Linode are both great VPS options. In terms of learning curve for setting up the environment, I think you could play your cards right so that it is nothing too intensive. An Ubuntu or CentOS slice would provide an extremely well-documented base to get set up on. Depending on your needs, there is a good chance that whatever you need to do with the VPS has been done before and is documented.

In addition, both services have very helpful support, and they are notoriously affordable.
I wonder if this blog post is the reason the guy is getting sued?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=287217
Yes, and it was just as poorly worded then.
Aza Raskin: Introducing Ubiquity
Social Networks: The Case for a "Pause" Button
Amazon.com to Buy Social Network for Book Lovers
Agreed. If you have partners, employees, licensing agreements, or any other contracts, then you should hire a lawyer for good organizational documents. And don't copy & paste out of a book or website. :)

This is true even if you're good friends with your partners. Or maybe even especially if you're friends with your partners. :)
Collaboration web apps to beat the Credit Crunch
Nvidia's Huang ushers in era of visual computing
PHP or Ruby?
when it comes to choose programming language and framework which elements I have to consider? what are the criteria to trade off?
First they should probably work on getting gears to work on any browser. That's the least reliable product Google has ever shipped.
Can we stop with the strawmen please? My post was talking about smartphone apps on smartphones, not J2ME apps on feature phones. If you're gonna use this tactic, go all the way and pretend I was talking about BREW on a phone from 2001 or something equality ridiculous. This is really one of the poorest ways to argue any point.

Onto background processing - the major consumers of battery on a phone are the screen, CPU and radio. A background app that doesn't require the screen, doesn't do heavy processing (ie video decoding) and makes only occasional use of the radio (ie max 1 second to make an HTTP call) will have a very small impact on battery life. A simple example for this is that before Jobs & co invented this justification about why they placed such limits on the SDK, no one ever complained that MS, RIM, Nokia etc gave developers this ability.

And of course, you completely ignored the lack of system integration. Say you were Xobni and wanted to write a mobile version - you could do it on a BlackBerry, you can do it on a desktop computer, but iPhone? Sorry, Jobs no - he knows better than both users and developers.
starting a business with friends and hiring friends are two different things.
Depends where your business is registered. Different jurisdictions place different reporting requirements on business. Some jurisdictions require business residency and address. This guy needs to talk to an accountant who does this sort of thing rather than a lawyer.

My recommendation is that if you will need to bill people online using credit cards, set something up in the United States if at all possible. Doing the paperwork yourself will save you a bit of cash as will opening your own corporate bank account. You will NEED a US-based bank account (not necessarily corporate) in order to set up a merchant account somewhere as anything but a high-risk company (which basically means you pay more for processing and find it more difficult to get a merchant account and access to a processing gateway). The major advantage of being incorporated here is that you can bill people in the name of your company, rather than as an individual.

We are registered in the BVI. The setup is a dream as far as accounting and tax liabilities go for the organization itself, but it has been a major pain in the ass trying to get our banking affairs in order. It isn't as if you really save money with offshore companies until you are profitable anyway, and even after that you're still liable to treat corporate income as personal income until ownership is significantly diluted. If you're looking for an environment in which company books are essentially closed, it's not a bad call. If I were American, I would probably have registered in Delaware.
Why do programmers write open source software?
The 3 Keys to Hiring Success: Thank You Marc Andreessen
So, you're gonna code the whole thing, do the servers and work for sweat equity...
That's what I don't like about being employed, no chance to get rich with a good idea. Conclusion: never get employed.
Google may let users comment on, rearrange search results
Online maps vs. custom maps
Facebook is a short, pointless project? ;)
One thing i've always had to consider is what servers actually support Ruby. A few personal projects i've made in Ruby. However, when working on Web applications for other people (Who already have a server), they may not support Ruby (Or PHP for that matter).

I think it really comes down to preference. I learnt PHP first off, then discovered the power of Ruby.

I suggest taking a look at this: http://www.killersites.com/blog/2006/php-vs-ruby/
I get that but I'm not sure I see the author's point though. Replicating Archive.org isn't hard, it's pretty standard web spider stuff, it's just massively resource intensive.

You can try and distribute that but I suspect it would just end up like most Bit Torrent trackers where the head of the long tail has lots of support and the tail has little to no support.
What would they do if pirating was impossible?

Use Gimp or buy Photoshop?
What is exactly is 'your way?'
Marty, my point is not that you want to write BREW apps, it is that many people want to do many things that Apple does not want them to do because they are not in Apple's best interests.

So please pick your argument from column A or B:

A: What you want to do is in your best interests but not Apple's, but you want them to let you do it any ways, or;

B: What you want to do is not really a negative for Apple, but they misunderstand the situation and need to be enlightened.

If you think Mr. Jobs misunderstands that your app will have very little impact on an iPhone, by all means take the position that he misunderstands. I wager that he understands that you can write a background app that doesn't drain the battery, because the iPhone ships with several of them built in.

However, that doesn't mean that somebody, somewhere won't write a crappy app that will drain the battery, and right now Apple doesn't want to allow that.

And wrt you rpoint about System Integration. Speaking of Strawmen, I doubt Apple claims that they know better than you or I what we want, it's just that they know better than you or I what they want for their platform.

It's the same as Hacker News. HN is the platform, the articles we submit are the applications.

Paul and Co. know what they want for their site, and they enforce it. I might think that articles about SUVs and Prius' are not what I want, but that's too bad. I submit the articles I want to see, and if the ones I submit don't match what Paul wants to see on HN, his bots kill them.

We can argue what we want Paul to do, and we can talk about what we would do if we ran HN, but we don't run HN, we just play by the HN rules.

So back to an iPhone. Apple makes the rules that it perceives are in its best interests, not what you or I pereceive to be in our best interests. There is no claim that they know better than you or I what we want. There is a claim that they know better than you or I what product they want to make and what custoemrs they are trying to serve.

If you like to submit posts from englishrussia.com, you don't come to HN. If you want to write applications that do background processing, you don't write for the iPhone platform.

Simple.
Hypothetically speaking, both. Those that could afford it would buy it and grumble, those that can't would use Gimp.

But this is reality, and the reality is that pirating is easy to do even with all the DRM/anti-piracy stuff that is in place.
Best list on the topic I've seen in a while!

Living through a start-up for last 5 years they are all great. Here's a couple thoughts on some of the items.

* Get book on managing people and read them

* If you dare hire friends, make sure you understand each others expectations to a 't' and check-in often.

* Spend as if you have to live on your own means

* Prove your business model early

* Dont define yourself by what your start-up is. Keep yourself intact.
There's nothing wrong with raising money before you have customers at all. A lot of great businesses started out that way. You just have to be adaptable.
The better then nothing bit still applies.
There are good ideas in Atlas Shrugged, but they're presented so badly as to resemble a strawman argument. My copy is 1069 pages long, but Rand says nearly everything she has to say within the first hundred. Although, to be fair, I'd read about her and was already a small-l libertarian, so there wasn't a whole lot new.

But before I forget: yep, I'm a small-l libertarian. Rand and her followers and I wouldn't get along well, for the most laughable -- if they weren't pathetic -- of reasons. Peruse some of the results at http://www.google.com/search?q=objectivism+and+libertarianis.... Pretty sad, really.

Rand had a number of other beliefs about topics such as the role of women in a heterosexual relationship and homosexuality that many people living in a modern society in the 21st century will have a hard time swallowing. That her ideas were unpopular doesn't make them wrong, of course. But I think they often were.

Back to Rand's writing in Atlas Shrugged, I agree that the dialogue is bad, often simply not credible. But suspension of disbelief only works when some aspects of the story -- be they characters, settings, events, or something else -- remain recognizable from reality. But very little in Atlas is, certainly nothing key to the story.

We the Living is a much better book than Atlas Shrugged, for what it's worth.
the support of the server is not my concern though it can be considered as one criteria + I don't have any preference or feelings about any framework!

So suppose I have an Idea and I'm searching to find out my co-founder who is a developer. shall I go for php developer or ruby? what are the elements which i should consider? and how this choice will effect me as the CEO in the future? for example is it hard to find a ruby developer or PHP? etc....
I read recently that Tracemonkey will have prototype "cache" of sorts that should speed up prototypical inheritance significantly.
As a language PHP has some problems. That is not to say that it is a bad language. I use PHP with CodeIgniter or Kohana (frameworks) on a regular basis.

That said, I believe that Ruby and Python are both more robust languages on the whole. I suggest doing some generic (read: non-web) scripting in the languages and see what feels right, including community, documentation, and libraries.

Good read: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001119.html
The answer to that: Don't pick them based on the language they are proficient with. If you find an incredibly sage person who writes webapps in COBOL, take them. The language is not going to dictate the success of your venture.

As for numbers, there are generally more PHP developers than Ruby developers, but you want a good developer, not just a developer.
NASA renames observatory for Fermi, reveals entire gamma-ray sky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China
This is a really great write-up. Many of us who have been in the situation of a lacking paper trail can identify greatly with this advice.
For those that would buy, piracy is a net loss for the company.

For those that would use open source, it's a net a loss.

It's like the old saying: "Only thing worse then being talked about.."

Only thing worse then being pirated is not being pirated.
fine with that as long as its the phone users who are being charged extra to sit there.
Exactly. Having a friend as a W-2 employee was a terrible experience for me. I wouldn't be opposed to starting a business with a friend though.
Still. Doesn't seem like justification for a government ban.

You could have a 'talkers' section like they used to have a smokers section.
Reddit doesn't offer RSS submissions, does it?
D'OH!

I was at the one on Embarcadero and ECR.

Ah well, next time.
Not that impressive, as a visualization. The zooming in and zooming out doesn't work that well.

Nor does it, at a glance, seem to much support the political point which I assume they're trying to make -- that US troop levels around the world have been significantly increasing. I assume the sudden appearance of a drop shadow around everything in the last frame is some kind of semi-deliberate attempt to make it look more menacing?
A good professor explained this to me in 2 minutes after I had struggled with it several times.

Losing a lot by not doing this in person, but what he said, pretty much, was:

Prove that something is true for 1.

Prove that if it's true for 1, it must be true for 1+1. Then it's true for 2. Recycle the proof to prove that it's true for 2+1. Then it's true for 3. Generalize the proof so that it's true for (anything it's true for)+1. Then it's true for any finite number, by induction.

Drawing a number line on the board helps, or a bunch of lines connected by dots.

Questions?
Google Now Searching For Synonyms
There's Wall Street, MBA from Harvard or equivalent + management career in corporate America, medicine, law (if you do well), entertainment (Hollywood plus pro sports plus books plus some other categories), politician turned lobbyist, and crime. I think that about covers it.
Exactly what I was wondering. And I was beginning to like slinkset too. Maybe I'll just keep using slinkset because it is the smaller of the two and for now, does everything I want.
Saying 'Restore' is not actually obvious - restore what?

Undo maybe, but then I'd expect it to undo a piece at a time.

Put a onClick="confirm(...)" on the reset button maybe, if you feel they'll loose a lot of work.
Shapeways Allows You to Materialize Any 3D Object
Right, that's what i meant. Another option is noise cancelling headphones. They're available cheaply enough that I'm surprised they aren't available to rent from the airlines.

Also, ear plugs work wonders. I never fly without them.
Creativity as the Root of Software Development
Dealing with programmers who are different and disagree
Real-time tracking of human eyes using a webcam
The buyer’s envelope, please
Zune player forum makes teen a fortune
The ultimate black hole size limit
Howto use Joomla Templates in web2py
On the scalability of Perl development practices
What it's like to work at Radar
This story makes me really sad because not only do I know one of the Tapulous employees, but also Tapulous really showed a lot of promise with twinkle and tap tap revenge.

I personally can't wait to see what Mike and the employees at Tapulous close to him are going to do next..the rest of the company not so much. I didn't really like some of them when I met them at WWDC.
That's one of the coolest office spaces I've ever seen...
Visual Voicemail Inventor Strikes Again, Sues Google, Verizon, Others
You're telling me the user will press Reset, see the form cleared and the new Restore button immediately appear, and not figure out what it means?

And I'd say the Restore feature (or you can call it undo) is better than a confirmation. The confirmation is annoying if you really mean to clear the form and ineffective to prevent data loss (how many times have you regretted performing some action right after it's too late?).
People need to learn what 83b elections are and how your company can offer them. They're good for the stock issuers and the company, and they're good for the people buying the stock.

I know it's new, but it's definitely worth investigating.
"some kind of semi-deliberate attempt to make it look more menacing"

That was my thought exactly.
Free online: Full documentation for the Large Hadron Collider
I don't see why you need a reset button at all.

I don't think I've ever gone through a form and decided at the very end, after filling everything in, that I needed to just do it all over again with completely new values in every input box. Can you think of an example where you really needed it and wouldn't just refresh the page?
That was pretty good. But there is a problem - there are ways around a lot of these things. For instance, board member - if everyone else (your partner(s), VC member on the board) vote as a bloc, your vote becomes powerless. Another example would be about access to financials - the company can just ignore your requests, and leave you to sue (which ain't cheap).
FYI, I work on web archiving at archive.org.

Our tools for crawling and creating your own Wayback machine, including search at smaller scales, are open source. See the projects 'Heritrix', 'Wayback', and 'NutchWAX'. (Though, the bulk of our public archive still comes via Alexa's closed-source crawling.)

There's a company called Iterasi now offering personal archiving. A company called HanzoWeb at one point offered a del.icio.us-like bookmarking-plus-archiving service, and that might return.

CS professor Frank McCown, while a PhD student at Old Dominion, built a tool called 'Warrick' for reconstructing recently-disappeared websites from a combination of public sources.

So many options for collection and access are out there -- it's a matter of organization: building redundant stores and collecting the right materials at the right time.
I'd say the Karaoke is generally for the worse ;)

Very cool.
Loving these interviews, snaptalent is awesome.
sloshball!
Linux under attack: Compromised SSH keys lead to rootkit
Definitely.

Brick and wood > cloth-covered cube walls.
i'll sell my soul to the devil for that office space. hopefully he'll throw a bed in their too, and I can just call it home...
But, given that there's wifi, you can still use VoIP phones. Those that really need service still have a means of sending their voice down to ground; it just inconveniences those who pay for specific (ground) cell coverage, that's never guaranteed to work outside of its physical region, let alone in the air, anyway.

Also, even if the plane doesn't have wifi, don't satellite phones still work?
I'm guessing that was an all-male company?
Date Set for RailsRumble - Who's In?
RailsRumble 2008 has a date; Oct 18-19. We're putting together a few teams in North East Ohio, North West Pennsylvania - I'll be opening up my house & pool for a team or two to work together in in PA.

Who else is rumbling?
Road to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: 64-Bits
YAW!
I recently mentioned "equity" to some fellow hackers regarding a project we're thinking of starting. They bailed, calling me "Mr. Corporate"

Still, I think the outcome proves that they're not ready or not willing to go through the necessary steps to spin up a startup.
Xbox Vs. Firefox
Why would you negotiate for a yearly salary increase lower than the rate of inflation? I fail to understand this clever strategery.
Oh man, this sucks. I've been reading Mike's blog for a while now. He seems like a super smart and insightful guy, and his passion and attention to detail really rubs off in his writing.

I'm sure he'll be kicking ass again soon. :)
The same thing they teach those squids. How to survive. With boys.
This is good to hear! The more the merrier, and thank you for your work on archive.org. I agree that the organization and redundant stores need work, but the collection and access need help, too.

If something is not in Google Cache or the Wayback, it's effectively gone. There may be a copy in a LOCKSS server or in a nearby browser cache, but if I can't know that or am not allowed to read it, it's useless.
Another common mistake: Imagining your business will have a fairytale YouTube-style ending.
The WB Rises From The Ashes As A Competitor To Hulu