skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a tough call. I almost pulled the trigger a year ago and then cancelled my appointment two days before the surgery. My reasons:

1. Google around for LASIK horror stories. Most people are happy, but I did not want to become a statistic.

2. Dry eyes. According to my research, it is a major complication that the surgeons do not mention. Anecdotally, a friend of mine who had LASIK has dry eyes now. Another friend does not (although he says his sight deteriorated since the surgery).

3. Alternatives. It's a little distressing that few civilian surgeons perform PRK. I understand that they don't want to deal with patients for four months, but my research suggests that it's the more reliable procedure in the long term. The Navy seems to trust PRK more for its pilots because it does not trust the flap's structural integrity.
With 'followers' Bloggers get more social
That would be equally tragic. Also very hard to pull off given the ending.
Google's weird ways with open-source licenses
real programmers code in assembly and debug in opcode
> I just thought stock options were like coupons I could turn in for gold coins or something :)

nice
He's Nicolas Bourbaki. Didn't you know?
Plan for a New University
"... I'm no fitness buff but doing push-ups doesn't strike me as the thing for losing weight, etc. ..."

Nerd excuse.

A push-up is the simplest measure of ones fitness. You don't need a machine, someone helping you. It's not something you have to read a manual on or get coaching. Next to chin-ups and running what else do you need? :)
I kind of think the whole idea is a bit silly, but I'm happy we can both agree that it's useless today.
I do software development for a living and about 5 years ago, I had lasik so that I could get rid of wearing glasses. Although my vision went to 20/15 after the surgery and although I did my homework, went with a name brand surgeon in my state but according to my surgeon, I happen to had fallen into the 1% category that reports 20/20 vision or better but I see artifacts in my vision. I don't see halos or blurriness, instead, it looks like I'm seeing artifacts that are highlighted by light. My theory is that I've seeing scarring from the procedure. The artifacts are really close looking like floaties but I know what floaties look like and these aren't them. Whenever my focus changes from looking at objects from up close to far away or vice-versa, these artifacts move with my vision and come into my vision from the sides. So the times that it really affects me is when my vision is tired like when I stay up late at night, have a headache or when I'm sitting in a dark room looking out a window to a sunny day out. Overall, I'm ok with having lasik, but there are those days when my vision is really bothering me that I somewhat regret having it done. I wish everyone the best in your decision to either have it done or not. Cheers.
I had lasik about 5 years ago and I can't say enough good things about it. I did a bit of research and found a surgeon in Vancouver, BC who had done a lot of surgeries and some original research on eye surgery. It cost about $3000 for both eyes, which I consider a steal.

The procedure its self was quick and painless. There was a contraption for "peeling" the outer surface off the eye which was a little freaky, but tolerable if I didn't think about it too much. Then they did the laser part of it, using lots of little blasts to reshape my cornea. That part was actually pretty cool, like watching blurry fireworks that filled my field of vision. Then they put back the corneal flaps and sent me off to a dark room to rest for a bit. Twenty minutes later I was on the sidewalk gawking at everyone and everything.

At first my vision was sharp but distorted, but that cleared up within a day. After that I had better than 20/20 vision. I had a bit of discomfort in the days following the surgery, but the clinic had given me some eyedrops that took care of that handily. After that everything felt fine, and there was a longer period of healing where I had to be careful about rubbing my eyes and wear special eye guards at night.

Before the surgery I had been using a combination of glasses (most of the time) and contacts (for sports). Now I don't need either, and a real blessing. I do moderate amounts of outdoor sports, and things like skiing, mountain biking, camping, rafting and do on are so much better now that I don't have to worry about keeping contacts clean, switching between glasses and contacts, protecting my face from water etc.

I tend to wake up with dry eyes and usually put in some artificial tears when I get out of bed. If I can't for some reason, it's no problem, my natural tears start flowing after a few minutes. I haven't had any problems with dryness during the day. My night vision is ok. Really bright lights tend to have a very slight starburst effect, in low-light situations I see quite well. I can see the stars much better than I could before the surgery.

My doctor says I'll need reading glasses when I get older, which I wouldn't have without the surgery. I don't care. I've got maybe 20 years of perfect vision, and even then, being farsighted is better than being nearsighted. I'd rather wear glasses when sitting in front of a computer than when skiing.

All in all, it's the best decision I ever made.
I talked about this with a Swedish coworker a couple months ago. I'm trying to leave the details vague where I don't remember them (long conversation, this was a small part of it), so please correct me if I'm wrong.

He said that the population distribution in Sweden is vastly more favorable for setting up networking infrastructure than in the US (more urbanized), and that, several years ago, when the government was digging up cables for some other utility infrastructure (power lines?), they decided it was a good idea to also lay inexpensive optical fiber while the holes were already dug.

Such an initiative would almost certainly be politically infeasible in the US, except at a local level. Tax dollars, you know. It's probably somewhat comparable to public transit systems. Subways systems take a lot of work upfront, so many cities only have buses, if anything. City wi-fi initiatives have had rather mixed results, too, and those don't even involve digging to lay cables.
I see his last point here:

He’s buying a work environment that is comparatively bullshit-free. Little bureaucracy, few meetings, flexible work schedule/environment, etc. If you’ve ever had an environment like this, you know how addictive it is and how elusive it is in larger companies.

... as the most important.
I begged, but they didn't include my 3 months of no haircut photo: http://danhau.posterous.com/no-haircut-for-three-months

It even pimps the YC logo.

Ah, the joys of not having a real job.
There are two things they can do with the watermark: revoke the device, and sue the person who bought it. You can't get an AT&T SIM card or a DTV smart card without a contract. The only difference between those and a DVD player is the form factor.
Hey, joined! Real name Dave Piccione.
My silver Apple wireless.
I just drink Rockstar(tm) energy drink. And wonder why the fuck my JS doesn't work on IE 6.
I don't think PG wrote this app the way it is today. He used iterative development and listened to suggestions from his users. Even on days he did not make changes, he might have thought certain things were fine. Over time, different pains became apparent.
It is a shame it's a bit link baity but the article content itself is worth a read.
"... but I figured since I don't actually like doing pushups I'd content myself with the 20 or so that I can do now, and do a bit more balanced workouts a few times a week. ..."

Sounds pretty reasonable.

The one reason these 100PU's have against them is the amount of work required to get to 100. Muscles take a long time to harden. A long time. To get to 100 a lot of people will give up. I notice this looks like a group activity. Nothing like group pressure to keep up. But a lot of hackers are in smaller teams or individual. It's also hard work. 20 a day no problems. It's not hard then to do another REP when the arms & shoulders are conditioned.
Happy Hacker Keyboard Professional.

One of the most amazing keyboards ever made.
Not so fast. You also buy stock options when you quit the company, but want to keep the equity you worked 4 years to vest into. Many options plans will require you to buy them within 30-60 days of leaving the company.

For obvious reasons, the majority of options purchase scenarios could fall into this bucket, and not the "sure thing" of selling your in-the-money liquid options after an acquisition.

Another caveat about this is that there are plenty of horror stories about what happened to people with startup common shares that left their company before acquisition. You are, as you probably know if you're been reading here for awhile, last in line in a liquidity event.
give me a way to apply filters to it (like only show what's currently in stock, let me filter by available sizes and widths), and I might find it useful.

this seems like a fun way to drill down into categories and sub-categories, but I don't think it's enough to get someone all the way to product selection and purchase.
At 150k/yr, to make 600k in a liquidity event, you would need to be holding .5% of a company that sold for $115MM --- or about 5.5 times as much as Flickr. In what valley job do you get a full half point of the company for a 150k dev job? How many companies have sold over the past 5 years for more than $100MM?
"... Have any other YCers had laser eye surgery, and perhaps have some anecdotes to share? ..."

I had a doctor give me tips on algorythms and programming and ended up using VB, DCOM and Excel for a cross platform spreadsheet system ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=287851
Yeah we talked about this recently, it's Godel's theory of incompleteness or something :-)
My vote is for Lucy Liu. You know, like Starbuck is a girl now.
"... Eye hacking, duh.
..."

Reads more like swapping "beauty tips", "hand holding" and "circular arguments". Where is the science?
Google signs exclusive deal for GeoEye satellite images
Ask HN: Please Review My Mobile Webapp (Drupal-powered)
http://www.streetread.com/blog/streetread-mobile-officially-launches

(the address above points to a blog post where an interactive demo is available, along with screenshots)

HN provided some great feedback and advice on the initial launch of Streetread over 2 months ago. The service has come along way since and the mobile edition of the site is the latest development.

Being that I love the wisdom that this community offers, I'm looking forward to any feedback you might have. I would ALSO love some ideas on how to effectively promote this. From what I know, this is the most comprehensive mobile financial news app that is free of charge.

And last, yes this is completely powered by Drupal - any dev questions are welcomed too.

Thanks
"... Linus' name for Linux was "Freax" ..."

By himself he referred to it as "Linux" but thought it was lame. Only after the name being suggested by others did he agree. I got this "first-hand" from Revolution OS ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_OS You can watch it here ~ http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409
I'm not sure I see what's in here that couldn't be open source within 12 months if enough people actually wanted it. Isn't it a tough sell to say that the open source stacks can't scale, when the majority of the big 2.0 apps are built on them?

Stuff like this is what happens to you when you use .NET instead of Python.
Except that it won't. I don't know how much silly valley money is in the movie industry but I'd guess that its a significant amount.
Regular Expression Online Tester -- and a Regex Community
Best quote, about wearing ties:

"It correlates rather well with incompetence."
Just joined. Real name Cameron Priest
http://startup.partnerup.com/2008/01/02/2007-acquisitions-we...

More in 2007 than I woulda guessed, but still... I think your points are dead on.

150k seems awful rich for a startup job. Job boards seem to agree: http://www.indeed.com/q-python-l-ca-jobs.html
(check the pay box out on the left)
The simplicity of my brother, sister, and me all being able to email our photos to one address and have them show up for our grandmother is what is really awesome about the Picwing.

AFAIK the samsung doesn't have that feature. I see it accepts RSS feeds so there are ways around that, but that's already getting too complicated.
Interesting to note that most people I've met will barter over the number of options or compare competing offers by number of options... but rarely does anyone ask how many shares are outstanding.
They seem to have removed the banner.
Joined. RN: Drew Crawford
Adam Greenfield: The City is here for You to use
Conversely it could be a 500GB cap in 2 years. Bandwidth gets cheaper and faster. My cable modem is twice the speed it used to be and doesn't cost more.
Ha, the way Hollywood is these days, you'd run out in two days.
Actually, population density and lack of a free market. We keep accepting broadband as a natural monopoly or duopoly, rather than deregulating it and getting some competition. As long as you have only one or two choices, the market cannot force competition.

Give us 10 potential ISPs to choose from and watch what happens.
I had lasik 6 months ago from Dr. Goodman in SF, and am extremely happy with the results. It was definitely on the pricier side ($6.5k), but well worth it.

Takes a good 4-5 months to heal completely. For the first month I had halos at night and dry eyes, and my vision wasn't quite perfect yet in my left eye. After about 5 months, all of these went away, and my vision in my left eye is 20/20, and in my right is slightly better than 20/15.

Also, the initial recovery is very quick -- you're supposed to sleep for a couple hours to reduce the pain, but after that, you can get right back on a computer.
I don't like having a cap but if there is going to be a cap, I'm happy that they're finally telling us what it is.

In the old days, they'd just cancel your account. When you called to ask why, they'd tell you that you used to much bandwidth. They would not tell you how much was too much.
For those of you familiar with Linux, a good way to measure your bandwidth is to install the Tomato firmware for your Linksys WRT54G/GS/GL etc. series router.

You still get a nice router for your cable connection, and as well you get a nice AJAX-y GUI to set things up, plus, it tracks bandwidth used per-day, per-week, and per-month - automatically.

http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato (just a happy user of this free software)
Answering Monty's Challenge:  Advanced Replication for MySQL
Use it in conjunction with ourdoings and you could email your photos to an address that puts them all on the frame.

Edit: Your grandmother doesn't need to know anything about RSS if you configure the frame for her. She can just turn it on and off. Someday Picwing will give her an easy way to switch between feeds, but for now just set up one feed that you and your siblings send your photos to. (You can switch feeds on the Samsung, but it involves pressing a combination of buttons on the back.)

Your brother and sister don't have to be super technical either. You set up the site within http://ourdoings.com/ and create one email address. If you don't care about the web site distinguishing whose photos are whose, just give that email address to your brother and sister.

If you want to distinguish whose photos are whose, your brother and sister can go to the site you created, click the Edit tab, and "volunteer." After you approve them, they can go in and create their own email addresses, or upload by other methods, and photos will have your individual names associated with them.
FIOS has single digit latency to many large sites, even halfway across the country. If you've never used it, its hard to describe how much snappier everything feels.

Waiting 60ms each for a dozen or so dns lookups may not feel slow if you're used to dsl, but FIOS is just a whole different animal. Even the neophytes in my family get it instantly when they use it.
$115M is still a small exit. A successful VC exit is an IPO or similar size acquisition, meaning $300M+, in many cases quite a bit more. At that level the numbers work out.

Sure, the last 6 years have been tough, but there's been plenty of exits at level. For some of the smaller exits, the earn-outs/retention packages would have also been significant.
1 for 2
Try this: http://www.google.com/search?q=comcast%20advertising%20unlim...

You'll see that they have lawsuits against them for falsely advertising unlimited internet access, as well as many reports of them advertising "unlimited" services.

Sure, feel free to argue that unlimited would really be infinite bandwidth, infinite transfer speed, etc.. That's fine.

I'm also fine to pay more money. Maybe I get 250GB for my base rate, and then a reasonable fee for overages, providing there's a way to monitor my usage (like my cell phone). I'm happy to pay for what I use. Just don't cut me off:)

Wait, bandwidth isn't magic!? :)

edit-----

Imagine if the water company said "for a flat $50 per month, you'll get our great 6 gallon/minute water service!", and then, 4 years later changed the deal to say "only up to 2,500 gallons per month, then we cut you off", that's a big change, and not one for the better.
Object-Oriented File Manipulation
It's not fair of me to single out this particular site, but why do people insist on presenting source code in tiny little windows with both vertical and horizontal scrollbars?

It makes it really hard to browse the code without copying it and pasting it somewhere else...
.NET folks have velocity http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/cc655792.aspx which is actually pretty nice, albeit late in the market
For me it really goes with stress. When things are running smoothly and I have a decent amount of free time, I sleep well, eat healthily, and work out regularly. When things are busy, and I have a huge to-do list, my stress level is way up, and there's tons of stuff demanding my time, I sleep less and poorly, I crave carb and fat rich foods when I'm stressed, and I have a much harder time taking breaks to workout, etc...

Right now I'm dealing with my first house purchase and a cross-country move on top of my normal work, and my health has taken a big dive. Hopefully once I move and things settle down, I'll get back on track.
Hans Reiser Sentenced to 15-to-Life
A successful VC exit happens once for every 7-10 companies they invest in. That's the model. Adjust your (I think) unrealistic $600k expectation for the risk. Moreover, look at the companies that sold for over $100MM in Tony's list: in how many profitable companies making $35MM/yr does senior engineer #3 or #4 hold a full half point worth of options? The CEO of that company holds 5-6%.
Good point. I did a quick test with a 190K PNG. Base64 encoded then gzipped it was almost exactly the same size as the original gzipped.
I really meant good experienced engineer. Such a person is worth much more than $150k/year, but you can't get much more cash as an employee in a startup (for good reasons). Also, at that level you are getting at least 10% target bonus, and that's included in the number.
Google Code reverses open source licence ban
Kinesis Advantage Pro.
And of course the quality (and thus bandwidth required) for Hulu / Netflix / etc will only go up.
Really, really, really good engineers with keyword-compliant resumes walk in the door on Wall Street at 175k. I'm having a hard time with your numbers.
As somebody that used to be gym rat, i can say that the 100 pushups challenge is a bad bad idea.

You will just exercise only some parts of the body, and forget the rest.
At some point, when I was working out a lot, i was obsesed with bench-pressing, and trained a lot of them. The result was an onverdeveloped chest, and triceps, while the rest was just more regular looking. It just made me look more bulky, but I don't think it made me anymore healthy.

I ignored my legs, and biceps, and at some point ended up injuring my knees, playing soccer, mainly b/c I just didn't exercise my legs as the rest of my body.

Lesson learned. You have to go to the gym, and do all the range of excercises, and not just one kind.
there are plenty of people whose vision got worse because of the operation. It varies from not being able to see at night, to getting worse vision, to going completely blind. Since for most of us our entire businesses require us being able to see, taking that chance for nothing more than vanity(lets face it, most people want to get Lasik because they don't like how they look with glasses)
The classic IBM/Lexmark/Unicomp buckling-spring keyboards. I especially like the PS/1 version without the number pad.
A good engineer has better dealflow than VCs. He can cherry pick companies backed by top VCs, within those he can pick the ones with the best engineering teams, for example.

I didn't mean that you should expect to double the salary for any given job stint. If you consider time horizon of, say 10 years, multiple jobs, 2x salary is quite a reasonable expectation.
Unfortunately, this is about the same level of interestingness as Subservient Chicken to me. Now maybe if the robot was roaming the streets of Detroit..
Sure, but what does that have to do with SV startups?
I miss your blog though... :(
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!! http://www.thinkorswim.com/ !!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Jobs don't make you fat, not exercising makes you fat.

When I was overseas I went to the gym twice a day; when I got back to the states and started working on our Startup, I went a couple times a week. When we moved to Boston to take part in YC I stopped entirely. My decline was accelerated by all-nighters, a poor diet and stress, but the root cause of gaining weight is... not exercising!

Changing jobs can, in some cases, cause a fluctuation in weight, but if you exercise regularly and take measures to have a good diet, then it really shouldn't matter. Just because there's an abundance of food doesn't mean you need to eat it! We're moving next week and since I am thoroughly disgusted with myself now, it's time to start hitting the gym promptly after that.

Final note: Push-ups aren't conducive to weight loss. And somebody tell all the people in that video to stop looking down while they do them! Ugh.
Valley engineers make less than Wall Street engineers --- COLA and scarcity.

(Sorry, you asked.)
There are good and bad reasons for this. You really should ask. But there is a common standard for how many shares you should have, so the # shares is normally comparable between different companies. Sometimes you do get this crazy company with 100M shares post round A. That's a bad sign in itself.
ErgoLogic
http://www.emailbattles.com/2006/04/24/other_aadehidhca_ia/

Although it's been solid as a rock, I dread the day when my keyboard breaks, because I know of no similar replacement.
I think you deserve an upmod!
on the front page, press
up up down down left right left right b a
nice
Drops are a refresher and I use them roughly 1-2 times a day. I can tell you first hand that I'd much rather deal with eye drops than fumbling around with clunky glasses.
Inside India’s CAPTCHA solving economy
Hi, I joined from Linkedin for several weeks. But it says status pending. My name is eugenejen.
Agreed, a "Hide this crap" X would be very useful.
...plus 10-12 hour workdays.
So, if you have $25,000 to blow on a Big-IP, you can get an XSS countermeasure that doesn't keep attackers from hijacking sessions, and doesn't prevent them from harvesting cookies on Firefox and Safari.
You might find this link interesting, I had the choice between PRK and LASIK and went for PRK based on Professor John Marshall's concerns:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2000/jun/06/healthand...
PG should add rel="nofollow" to the link anchor for each comment... Then google search would hypothetically just work.
Agreed! Their "blue phase" is painful.