skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not a lawyer, but I have helped launch a couple companies:

* Form an LLC now, so that your business operates under limited liability, as its own entity that can invoice and be invoiced, instead of out of your bank account. Cost: $200-300. You don't need a lawyer to do this in a one-person shop; just fill out the web form and give them your credit card number.

* You want a business lawyer once you have multiple employees (whereupon you'll restructure the company, often to a C corp so you can issue equity) or before you sign your first complicated contract.

* If you charge money, you probably have terms and conditions, and you probably want those reviewed before you publish them.

* You don't need to do anything special to claim copyright in the US, or anywhere else the Berne Convention applies.

* Nothing stops anyone from copying your idea and launching their own site except for a contract that they actually sign that prohibits them from doing so. When you launch, the clock starts ticking.

* Regarding your next question: welcome to the Internets.
+1 for that - I am dreading the day that people are able to talk on their phones on the plane. Cue massive increase in 'air rage' when it happens!
You're right. I hadn't seen the newer news.
European Venture Capitalists Putting Less Money Into Fewer Deals
Is Doxygen Dead?
The Doxygen news list seems moribund. Does anyone know one way or the other? Documenting minds want to know!
We have been considering a "crush list" feature where students can add the email address of their crush to a private list. If two people add each other then their identities are revealed. The one thing we are worried about is the possibility for abuse (like someone adding everyone they know to see if there are any matches).
re: #2. Actually, that doesn't stop them either, only your willingness to sue them and the amount of money you have to sue them with does.
You don't need to invent anything for this--- that is what significant others are for.
I think Apple would have to cooperate with Google in order to get Gears working with MobileSafari... user apps interaction with other apps is pretty limited. But if they do, that would be awesome.
I like some of the emphasis on physical location of the data store. I'd like to store my data in the country with the strongest privacy laws, please.
When Paypal was first starting up, I saw Luke Nosek give a demo that involved creating an email account for russiandrugdealer@hotmail.com and sending $10 to it. I think they've got a pretty credible claim to libertarianism.

Re: munging of Singularity concepts, see http://www.singinst.org/blog/2007/09/30/three-major-singular...
Google Ad Manager drops beta tag
Google Ad Manager is now officially available for anyone, without invitation requirements. Now that the beta tag has been dropped, Ad Manager becomes available to anyone with an AdSense account.
This is precisely why I quit my corporate job - so that I can work on my application and not worry about them owning intellectual rights to the product when it is done.

Eventually, you'll get over the burn out phase. I took me 2 months to shake it all off (read some good books, played a lot of COD4) and now I have plenty of energy and energy to pursue my own project. Good luck to you on your future endeavors.
Why focus solely on the text Web? The article mentions archaeological value of the data, and how trash dumps are more important than great books. On the Internet, I think that translates to archiving things like World of Warcraft and Punch the Monkey. It's not highbrow, but it gives a good idea of how we're spending our time.
The synopsis of the article is that it's technically tricky to enable cell phones but not impossible. The problem is that cell phones hit hundreds of towers from a mile up. Instead enabled planes would have a local cell and use radio noise to block traffic to ground based towers.

The main reason the ban has remained in place is public opposition to sitting next to someone talking on a cell phone. Which makes sense to me. Air travel is hardly comfortable.
The best tip of your life concerns black convertibles and Karel Appel
This post contains the best tip of your life. I realize that’s quite a bold statement, especially coming from a 22-year old chap. But it’s really important, since it’s the one tip you DON’T want to hear.
One of the best companies I worked for was just around the corner from a Holmes Place (upmarket chain of gyms), they got us all memberships and we could literally hold meetings in the sauna or jacuzzi.

Only place I've ever worked where everyone had seen everyone else naked...
The web site was last updated on the 19th (7 days ago) [http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/]. Seems alive to me.
Can you tell us wtf DAL means? I've never ever seen that acronym before.
Gotta wonder if HR are on 60% as well...
Startup Emergency Plan
I thought that at first, but by the end was convinced it was just someone trying to be creative and failing.
As a heart attack would be my guess.
Big businesses hold an insurmountable advantage over startups when it comes to recruiting <em>the most conservative and least aggressive talent</em>

"Wanna be the first to do something cool?"
vs
"If you punch your time card accurately every day, you'll get a sticker at the end of the fiscal year!"

It's a pretty easy choice for most startup-types.
I think attempts to "hack" the YC application will be largely counter-productive, given the people doing the selection and knowing a little about the process.

My advice would be to be genuine. If you're worried too much about conforming to what you think YC will want, you're missing the point entirely.
I'm unimpressed. Firstly,it isn't clear to me what you might do in Java instead of doing it in SQL. Java isn't a query language. Secondly, parallelization has been available in mainstream databases for a long time now. If you have partitioned your Oracle table n ways and have m query slave processes, Oracle will happily "map" your query onto many workers then "reduce" (merge) it and give it back to you as a single result set or even a single row if you are using aggregation functions. You don't need to do anything special, the query optimizer will take care of it. The only person who needs to know what's happening under the hood is the DBA whose job it is to understand all this stuff.

And while I'm here, I'm pretty sure Google invented neither map nor reduce. They've been in functional languages like, forever.
Interesting choice to group together open-source projects by language. . .

I guess I can see how it would be useful from a developer standpoint; developers who are hardcore on PHP now have a place to network, showcase, share ideas, explore the range of functionality of PHP, etc.

It's actually quite similar to the idea I had, originally, for my site. Originally zentu was going to be a "developer network" of sorts. . .

But in the end, I thought there's more use to be had by classifying according to end-use functionality rather than languages; however, I made sure to devote nice, hefty sections to development frameworks, CMSes, etc:

http://www.zentu.net/

Not to steal thread thunder or anything. ;)

P.S. and my site certainly isn't as pretty. . .
You're usually ok if you do not produce a competitor to your day job's business in your spare time.

From the sparse info available, the issue here is that he built something that could have been part of the core business of SGN.
That's a very good point, but you have to start somewhere. Text is the easiest thing to preserve and packs a lot of information into a small amount of bytes.
ISIS - The Most Difficult Puzzle Ever
Spore iPod game now in iTunes
Has anyone bought/seen this? Is it any good? Is it worth the money?
been using it for a while - great tool!
Making Remote Working Work Each Day
thats why I'm a proponent of doing your startup full time, it eliminates this type of BS.
I agree. Tom, what did they teach you in the Army on those lonely nights?
Amazon begins their Shelfari (sounds poetic)
You also need friendly atmosphere, make people want to come to work, instead of having it be a chore
That's a great question!

It depends on your employment contract and the law in your state/country. It also depends greatly on the area your startup's in and whether your startup is even remotely similar to what your employer is doing and whether you might become their competition down the line.

A chance of getting entangled in a lawsuit increases exponentially if you're going to take on your employer. Also, most emp contracts usually also state that you cannot contact your employer's customers or people you met through the company's business engagements for at least a year and usually more. Also, don't try to poach current employees or you'll get sued. Never use employer's computers or any other equipment that belongs to them for working on your startup (that includes take-home laptop that they might have given you). Don't even use their Word or Outlook for your own stuff. Delineate your startup as much as possible and don't share your ideas/prototypes with anyone at work since they might testify against you when called in front of a judge.

I know of one entrepreneur who got sued by a former employer and the argument they used was that even though he quit before he started the company, the IDEA was conceived while he was working for them and that he could not have come up with the idea had he not worked for them. Needless to say, the charge was ludicrous but it diverted his focus off startup and it also scared some investors and the startup was stillborn.

PS: IANAL but I know a lot about law and have been advised by many lawyers so take my advice with a grain of salt.
I agree. Your passion for the idea you're working on should make it more or less easy to explain it to others - maybe not concisely, but you can surely talk about it.
Explain your vision exactly as you hope it to be - changing it to meet others' expectations hints that you don't have confidence in your idea.
Put your application in. If it gets rejected, and you believe it's a good idea, why not pursue it anyway? Look at it this way - another 2-10% of your idea you get to keep to yourself :)
Also write an aggregator and call it 'hand' :)
I think this is part of the job of Archive.org

I would also say that particularly on blogs it shouldn't be too hard to capture revisions of major blogs. Most blogs 'ping' out Technorati, etc in order to get updated into the search index. It would be easy to capture a revision with each ping.
In priority order for me:

1. interesting work (not sure if this is considered a perq by most, but it is for me.)

2. time off, both via flexible work schedules and generous vacation

3. located within a short commute of desirable and reasonably affordable housing. alternatively offering telecommuting

Other benefits like health/life/disability insurance are nice, but they won't make or break a deal for me any longer.
I would imagine that by now college admissions officers are tired of reading the same formulaic crap.

If I were reviewing applications for anything I would provide a basic skeleton of guidelines and hope for a diverse pool of responses. Trying to fit in to someone else's mold (even that of the reviewer) often comes off as quite contrived.
Not a terrible idea, I was trying to think of something that fits nicely into the gossip/anonymous board idea. Like maybe a post-secret type section. Errr... well, I'll think about it some more.
Is it saying that Microsoft developers develop web sites like Desktop applications? Oh hey! This explains MSN!
Forming an LLC is cheap and easy, but be sure to keep up with paperwork. I showed our "books" to an accountant and he told me that if we ever went to court with that, our LLC status would be stripped away immediately and we'd be personally liable on everything.
What's wrong with making known physical location a service that you buy, rather than a right? A right is really just a service that you can't not buy.
It is archive.org's mission, but archiving is a case where you'd want to have more than one... right? :)
The last one is an excellent jab at devotees of dynamically typed languages.

Neat submission. Copied and saved!
Amazon tries to play down Kindle sales estimates
Aren't trackbacks automatic with most blog software?
Reminds me of Greenspun's Tenth Rule:

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
If You Want To Create a Mashup, Just Ask Your Browser.  Mozilla Labs Launches Ubiquity.
The sharper image is bankrupt.
Uh, it was a jab at Haskell & lazy evaluation:

> He plunged into deep meditation in the middle of conversations

...forcing a large complicated thunk in the middle of a simple function definition

> could not help waking up late in the morning

...all expressions are suspended by default

> and failed to do his chores in a timely manner.

...evaluation is delayed.

> "You must go back to your strict ways."

...the opposite of "strict" being "lazy", in FP terms.

The comments confirm it, the "H___ temple" being the Haskell community.
The nice thing about a good ui is its universal. Whether the codebase sucks or not, you cant deny when an app looks and feels right on the ui side.

It tends to make sense to put most of the effort on frontend usability, especially for web apps.
16 IT roles with a promising future
Let's also consider an employer's perspective here. OK, you are a Y Combinator start-up, and you have hired your 18th employee (there are at least 10 that have 20+ employees, I think). If that employee were doing something like this on the side, would that sit well with you? How would you draw the line?

Forget the ownership aspects of whatever the employee is creating on the side. Would you be happy as his/her manager to realize his/her mental efforts are going somewhere else?

Think hard before you answer.
Tapulous Cofounder Mike Lee Ejected From Company
The Sharper Image is working on P=?NP.
Yep.

It's disgusting how some companies/people are reserving all the names they can think of, hoping to sell them to someone.

No wonder we have services with names like "Heroku" - at least that was free.
Alright, sorry for ranting :)
M Foord (voidspace.org.uk)'s Knol on IronPython
(RE: #1)

That's fine and dandy for LLC documents, but if you're working with partners and don't have a clear Operating Agreement written out then you're asking for trouble. I had serious issues with my first successful startup because our Operating Agreement was basically pieced together from little things my partner and I found on the Net with collaboration from a first year Yale law school student. Terrible, terrible, terrible idea.

To make a long story short: the company became wildly successful very quickly and re-doing the Operating Agreement wasn't really on the top of our minds -- it never is when you're doing well. Then three years later the two of us grew apart and wanted to take the company in different directions. Sadly, we had a poorly written agreement that made this a very difficult process with lawyers on both sides fighting to interpret it. If you do nothing else, I'd say get this done professionally sooner rather than later.
Method_missing() in python: try a callable else call default method
My Paypal experience as a UK citizen: They shut down my account for some obscure reason, and only re-opened it when I threatened to contact the Financial Services Authority.

So much for libertarianism, and yay for the FSA.
Bolt's freaky fast 100M run broke statistical models of human speed
I'd be interested to know more about what people actually did versus what they should have done. And how did it work out?

There's more legal work than just incorporation. Do you need business insurance? Do you need to register somewhere for DMCA protection?
7 Teeth Gnashing Mistakes I Made With My Start Up
Micah, could you share a little more about what state your books were in and what you would have done differently?
Paralysed man walks again thanks to Robocop-style exoskeleton
Do remote-control war pilots get combat stress?
I think pingbacks are, but I don't believe trackbacks are, because they require a URL which is different than the entry permalink.

Although, that's part of my problem -- it's not at all obvious if it's okay to stop doing trackbacks and just rely on pingbacks.
Which infinity?
This point can't be emphasized enough. If this BS ever happens, I will pay $50-$100 more per flight to be on an airline that _bans_ in air cell phone usage.
Interactive map on US troop levels around the world since 1950
Ask first and get the answer in writing. Most of the time places will be quite reasonable about it.
Any infinity (countable is the "smallest" infinity, I think?). I was inspired to this question by reading "down and out in the magic kingdom", where people live forever , but occasionally get bored and commit suicide. So I wonder if in theory, there would be enough new stuff to discover to make it interesting to live forver.
"Not Using Open Source" - I wish more small businesses would realize they don't need a full custom website when they shell out 5K for a site that I could do with a custom wordpress theme for a few hundred.
Yeah, my advice was definitely for a one person company. Two people should get it done professionally. With one person the focus is on protecting yourself from others. With two or more, the focus is not only protecting the principals, but regulating the relationship between the principals and the process by which that relationship might end. One thing a good lawyer will make you do is think about what will happen if your company breaks up, and they can advise you on how to structure your document to avoid a giant litigation mess.
In the future there'll be an awful lot of chefs and not much broth according to this!
Why not charge people extra to sit in acoustically partitioned sections??
You know what the killer feature of App Store is? Customers! Lots of customers, some are even paying customers. I'll live with restrictions.
"You only need insurance when you need insurance" Ok, I just made that quote up, but its true. You can never really answer that question, because the people that paid for it and never used it would say it was a waste of capital, and the people that never bought it and needed it will say you should always buy it. Insurance is, and always will be a risk calculation that only you can do. A lawyer just reminds you of a lot more bad things that can happen to you than you probably had on your list, but ultimately, you need to decide the chances of them happening to you, and how much you're willing to pay to be protected.

With that said, some businesses are required to have insurance and bonds by law, but that's usually something you can easily find out by looking at a government website or Googling.
I'll just go ahead and delete my post, because you said it better.
I'm pretty sure you can get HR people from a one-click shopping listing at Amazon.
I have been told that you also have to do a few things to make your LLC "real", like get a bank account with your EIN and keep occasional records of meetings.

Go here to get the EIN free online. http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=102767,00....
Curbing too much diversification!
Some folks might find this link useful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=251075

It's a response to a question I posted a few months ago asking to see former (successful) YC applications. There was a single response but it could shed some light on what works.

And to set the record straight, of course getting into YC has less to do with the application than it does the quality and content of the company's founders/their ideas. But there's no reason to let a poor application get in the way of that end.
"You will never get rich working for someone else. You may make a few million over the course of years, but without ownership, you'll never build true wealth."

Except for on Wall Street
Music and programming languages -- again
The web site is fine--- I'm talking about the list...
Loved the article. Ambivalent about the office advice. There's a false dichotomy here between "basement" and "vanity offices". A couple hundred a month will get you a couple rooms and an Internet connection. Having a single place for everyone to work that is an office, and not your house, has advantages. We find that they're worth it (and I dragged my feet for over a year on this, forcing my team to work out of the library).
Yet another indication of increasing specialization. There is a "this" specialist and a "that" architect, and a "the other" expert. In the future, if we keep up this trend, we will also specialize ourselves into insects.

Hyper-specialization in a Hiveorporation is certainly possible and might be beneficial to the overall corporate entity: eke out performance and expertise to compete with other peer corporations. But a big downside of this increased specialization and perceived need of more specialists is the increased cost of communications (N- node problem), and hammer effect on the part of the specialists.

But unless you are filling a specialization niche, I see no real benefit for startups, which require generalists who can be much more nimble.

I like Heinlein's quote:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Man, we need to start hyping our stuff more.
http://www.uuorld.com
Printing's a pretty dirty business, but thankfully that's slowly changing
I would draw the line whenever he stops doing his job right. No difference from someone who watches TV on his free time.
For the reset button problem, why not have a reset button that saves the information (client-side), resets the form, and shows a new "Restore" button that does the obvious thing?

Of course it only works with Javascript so the static version could use a smaller clear button or no clear button at all.
I'm not a scientist and I don't play one on TV, but I've read Feynman's two auto-biographical books, "Surely You're Joking Mr.Feynman" and "What do you care what other people think - further adventures of a curious character" and they are both very well worth reading. What I didn't know until now was the sheer volume of writing he did in his lifetime. A search on bookfinder.com comes up with literally dozens of books.
Ask YC: Hosting costs...
I have a small project that I have been working on that has the potential to become a big project over the next couple months. So far, I have been using shared hosting, but have started to realize some of the pitfalls of it. Consequently, I have scanned over some earlier posts here at news.yc concerning hosting advice and it seems like Amazon EC2, Slicehost, and a small handful of others come widely recommended. In terms of money spent on actual hosting and time spent learning how to use my hosting environment, what is my best bet?
My hobby project: poker session logging tool
http://donkstats.com

What do you guys think of my hobby project. It started as an idea to have a simple web based tool to enter your poker sessions. There are some paid more complex versions out there, so this is a simple freebie alternative.

Whole website is built with a PHP (code igniter).

Any feedback is more than welcome.
Well, the books were in the "nonexistent" state. We had a bunch of receipts from web hosting providers, plus maybe $100 in ad revenue. We wanted to declare all the hosting costs as a loss on our income taxes.

The accountant recommended setting up QuickBooks online, I believe. The basic idea is to track each and every bit of income and expenditure. It can be a real pain, but that's what it means to run a business.

Note: We're still in the "nonexistent" state now, because we just never get around to it. So, don't listen to my advice!