skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree and disagree. Take stock of your own temper.

If you're like me, you have two conflicting streams of thought... one of them is telling you that this could be amazing, your dreams come true, etc, and showing you all that it could be. The other is showing you in increasingly accurate detail, the more you think about it, all the ways it could go wrong. Technical guys are especially likely to think of all the potential problems - that's what we're good at!

My initial pattern of reaction is always very similar:

1) elation/excitement

2) Oh my god, this could all go very, very wrong

3) Maybe it can work... but only if x, y and z are resolved.

You seem to be deep in 2) at the moment. Chill, relax. Realise that anything worth doing, there's always a chance of it going wrong. If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough. At the same time, make sure you take steps to minimise the downside to you. What if the business gets its pants sued off? You should certainly not be personally liable. You can push the terms in a direction that make it more advantageous to you. If you don't get your minimum satisfactory level to be able to get out of it without losing too many feathers even if it all goes disastrously tits-up, bail.

Lastly, the founder informed me that since he has been working on the site for years he would take the "lion's share" of the equity in the startup, and have the final say on all matters.

Lion's share is supposed to mean 100%, but I imagine you don't mean that. To get a reasonable percentage, look at the amount of work you're going to put in, and put a price on that. That's the amount of equity capital (in the form of time) you're going to put in. Bear in mind you will always get screwed if you come second and don't put in any money, but that's part of the learning game. You'll do better in the next one. Finally, as a leverage point you can point out that he needs to make your share large enough so that you don't feel that other opportunities are more interesting. You're a smart guy, presumably, and competent... there'll be many distractions. His job as a primary founder is to make sure that you don't get lulled away because he gave you too little equity. Obviously, make that point very subtly.
What I don't grasp, is how it would be possible to avoid the free spectrum being abused in a tragedy of the commons scenario?

Being able to send e-mail around the world for free was great... until spammers made it less great by abusing the system.
Oh yeah, and make sure you get everything in writing. Everything you assume is understood between you is guaranteed to blow up in your face at some point in the future.
It is not a grey area, it is illegal and a copyright violation. What is it with all these supposed lawyers offering supposed advice to people that what they're doing isn't wrong?
1. Do the Next Right Thing

I was in the next train to the one that blew up at Edgware Road in London on July 7th, a few years back. I remember that for the first time in my life I understood the meaning of "paralised by fear". I literally couldn't move for 2 minutes. All that happened in my head during those two minutes was the never-ending, looping thought that I could be dead in the next few seconds. I can remember this feeling to this day, the fear gripping at the back of my neck.

The moment where I started to move again was when I saw some people trying to pry the doors open (the carriage was filled with smoke). Somehow, a new thought broke into the loop... "I'm a healthy, emotionally stable young man in his mid-twenties; I should be able to help". So I stood up and went to help. And the paralysis was gone.

So I certainly agree with this point. Excellent first point. If you find yourself in a life-threatening situation and equally paralysed, remember this: find something useful to do, stand up and do it.
The meat of the article is explaining why people hate on the Boot Camp model rather than why it is actually dangerous. Offers some good points from someone familiar with the gamut of available programs out there.
Specifically, the Blub idea applies to language power. You could build python's libraries in Lisp, but you can't build a macro in Python without changing the language.

On the other hand, Lisp isn't at the top of the theoretical Blub hierarchy. Users of erlang can to some degree look at lisp as a Blub - what do you mean there's no lightweight concurrency, and you can't start millions of threads and have the messaging just managed? Lisp is broken! A language with Lisp's (lack of) syntax and erlang's concurrency might be able to look down on both.
As it relates to startups, the first bullet point almost says it all:

1. Do the Next Right Thing

We hackers are too easily attracted by glamorous problems instead of the important ones. We'll constantly prematurely optimize or build interesting features before useful ones. Survival depends more on prioritizing and focus than genius in the typical case.

Great Read.
Seems to fail on IE 7.
Statistics and straight up facts are not covered by copyright. There's a landmark case about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Tel...

There are some grey areas around the legality of scraping (mostly due to the added load on the servers), but for the most part it is legal. Google is one big giant scraping machine and it's scraping a lot more than non-copyrightable statistics.
I'm in a similar situation. I think ultimately show don't tell is the most important adage. I introduced a wiki (mediawiki) where I work and it's been great. At some point when things grow you have to start communicating things and the wiki doc is the right level IMHO and not too labour intensive. Also a good scratchpad that can evolve documentation as it's needed. Internal private discussion boards I find are also good because often a good record of informal chats about problems to which everyone can chime in. Also scenario oriented design is what I find works, means the actual problem is well understood and communicated rather than a DUF approach which can kill iterative innovation and prototyping I've found.
So why does a leisurely read about a fad diet belong on Hacker News?
9 JavaScript Tips You May Not Know
It is EE's choice to play sleazy games where they represent one thing to search engines and deliver something else to the users who arrive at their site.

They can stop deceiving people about their public content and go to a standard gated subscription model any time they like. Until they do, the more people who work around their weasel tactics, the better.
I don't think he missed the point. The point is that user management of multiple passwords just doesn't work. This includes the reusing of passwords for multiple accounts and there being too many disparate password recovery schemes. There is too much asked of both implementers of web apps and users of web apps.
there are people that do live off sugar water! People in hospitals, people doing the master cleanse.

You really only need calories. It's a terrible life, and no fun, but you could live off sugar water + a multi-vitamin.
Not only do you have Redux, which is a link/music/video sharing social web site which is actually covert matchmaking, there's also okcupid, which is a matchmaking site that's used by many as a covert link/music/video sharing social web site.
=JudgeCal=, early streaming video host passed away.
Android SDK 0.9 Release Notes
You should be equals, that's what i'd demand, i don't see a partnership where the partners are not equals...but that's my opinion.
I think its ok when the context makes it clear its a self reference ie : "I haven spoken about <link>this</link> before" type of thing.

When they are just seemingly wikipedia like reference links, having them all be in-links seems poor and lazy form.
He says once he can afford it he will pay

Run, don't walk, the other way!

Ethics is the bedrock of any relationship or business.

It is also binary; you have it or you don't.

You don't.

I once had a partner who disconnected his speedometer to increase his resale value. No big deal, huh? Next thing you know, he was "compromising" all over the place, with customers, vendors, and eventually, me. Don't make the same mistake.

The simple fact that this discussion is here is evidence that you already know the answer.
And, say, at technology sites about their methods. (Irony intended.)

I have seen the elitism at Crossfit, but I read the t-nation forums for a few months. They were much more negative than, say, Crossfit.
Is it possible to log all search queries that return 0 (or less than x) results, then report on that every day/week/month?

Would minimize the "I can't find xyz" type of feedback that you may or may not get.
As eugenejen mentions below, this is an article from the Sunday Times in the Life & Style, Women's section. Perhaps instead of saying "this isn't what I expected, it is crap," you could be a little more aware of the context of the article.

It was a fine piece of writing, I enjoyed the short read.
Hard to tell about the lion's share issue. If the site has traction or good IP, it MIGHT be fair. Probably not. The question to ask is, "how hard would it be to duplicate the effort"? The way to ask HIM is: "How much have you reduced my risk with your headstart?" and "If we take 4 years to build this and win, what percentage of the total effort/work/risk is your headstart?".

If he's flailed for several years with limited success, that time is (unfortunately for him) not worth very much.

If he wants blanket veto power over all decisions, I'd say bail if you aren't comfortable with it.

The legal gray area is up to you-- YouTube certain was in gray territory. Given the risk, asking for a formalized corporation to throw up a little liability screen isn't a bad idea.

Regardless of all this DO NOT PROCEED without an agreement in place. It doesn't have to be bulletproof. It can be as simple as an memo of understanding, but there is too much up in the air right now and it'd be easy to be 6-months in and be wondering, "wait, how much equity do I get?".
That's a much better question.
The Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS) License Slide
In my opinion, when you use HTTP as a transport for some ugliness, you should not call the resulting contraption HTTP.

For some reason recently we have this technologies like AJAX and REST, that does not mean anything concrete, just "we are using this to achieve that and need some name for managers".

And that is what I'm trying to say: Why in the world do we need to label some more or less trivial idea with some cute initialism?
Google did something really similar with their gchat launch on Orkut. They started out with just 1% of the userbase running it in the background and scaled it up from there till they were confident that the implementation details were mostly worked out. Its really a great idea for testing the scalability of new features without completely breaking the production site.
I think this is a great example of legitimate vs. illegitimate use. The benefits of opening up this spectrum greatly outweighs the negative aspects. Same with e-mail - the benefits are much greater than the negative uses.
Methinks I smell a useful GreaseMonkey plug-in to style narcissistic links differently from outbound links...
This is why the answer to my secret question is always my password.
A lot of people don't get the distinction between HTTP and "HTTP as a transport for some ugliness".

The cute initialism isn't the point. The paper that coined the initialism (and describes why HTTP was designed the way it was and what you'll lose if you use it as a transport for some ugliness) is.
Factor is one of those languages that, even if you don't use it for anything practical, will expand your mind a bit :).
Exactly.

It's interesting to me that users so often do the opposite of what they came to do.
If you keep your company's business in a Basecamp account, and you lose the password, what are you going to do? Give up and spend the money for a new Basecamp account?

People forget passwords all the time. Spend some time in an F2k IT department; they have whole teams of people and actual application development projects dedicated to trying to solve this one problem.
SKRAIP - A system for hardware, intellectual property dicsovery
More about the philosophy of quality code.

I can offer the following vague advice:

- When writing new code, do the best you can with the information you have. Resist taking shortcuts (copy & paste instead of a minor refactoring, etc.)

- Refactor old code as you go along, but do it cautiously, and only when it's worth it (very clear performance or maintainability advantages, for example).
So, I see the logic of what you're saying, but the simple fact was, he was happy with the low-quality product. Very happy. They were Hershey's Kisses! But after 6 months of nothing but Godiva, he couldn't enjoy them anymore. Presumably, he now has to pay a Godiva premium to get the same level of happiness out his chocolate purchases.
SKRAIP is a system for submitting and discovering intellectual property - currently in hardware applications but could also be expanded for software.

The content on the website is trivial at the moment and is still in an alpha stage, but there is a short paper that is available on there aswell.

Any comments/suggestions etc are more than welcome.
New data: 1 in 3 business PCs drop Vista for Windows XP
Well actually I did have a slow down at around 23, but when I noticed it, I just increased my work out regiment w/o changing my diet.

To me, I'd rather enjoy my food and then just spend an extra 15 minutes at the gym to balance it out instead of sustaining myself with horrible tasting lumpy green goo
The best solution, rather than changing every website, is for banks to not offer email password resets. Email password resets are ok when you aren't taking something that should be really secure like your bank account and transfering it to email. It seems almost criminally negligent of the bank.
I got caught like this once. Someone hacked a forum I visit, and they got the same password I used for my email. Luckily they didn't do anything, and I changed my password before any damage was done.

Now I have about a dozen different passwords. And to tell the truth its really not that confusing, I have one main one for BS stuff, but all the vital information usually has its own password.
Psychology aside --- obviously you're talking yourself out of this gig:

* It takes 1-2 days to set up an LLC. Without the LLC, you can't invoice and you can't buy insurance. Unless you get to manage the incorporation on day 1, don't sign on until they incorporate.

* The risk with scraping isn't just that you'll get sued, but, more likely, that you're simply going to be locked out. If your business model depends on the data, sneaking it out seems like a bad strategy.

* You have to make the call about whether you're ok with a subordinate role in the company. There's nothing inherently wrong with demanding more equity to compensate the work already done.
This is what I needed to hear. Thanks for the great advice.
for a in `ls -1 /usr/bin/`; do whatis "$a"; done | less

That prints out a list of every command in /usr/bin with a one-line description.

sed (transforming pipe with regular expressions) and file (try to identify a file type based on headers and other metadata) are also quite handy.

If you find the post interesting, check out Kernighan & Pike's _The Practice of Programming_.
But reality is that the paper is just analysis of how Web/HTTP works and or how it is supposed to work, not introduction of some new approach.
Male dominance doesn't appear to offer long-term genetic advantages.
The Matrix Vs. Carl Sagan
Tetris in 500 bytes (Appjet)
"You could build python's libraries in Lisp"

Then why doesn't someone do so?
Debate rages over free wireless spectrum
Our software currently allows for this, but we have yet to expose it through the UI. It is something we hope to get to soon, but for the time being users have to contact us to change how their site's ranking works. - SS

TIS mentioned story placement timing and power user points. Any more details?

What couldn't I change?
Poll Everywhere (YC Summer 08) Asks The Crowd To Spice Up PowerPoint Presentations
RIAA shuts down Muxtape
Did you get the self evaluating "life before your eyes" feeling? I have once (its a bit embarrassing, but I nearly choked on a 1 dollar coin, and I wasn't young enough for that to be a realistic possibility) - but I remember despair and then acceptance and then it was like a dream. All in about 30 seconds of not breathing... I would never have believed it had I not experienced it.

The funny thing was, while I was "thinking" all this, my hands were actively pressing my chest as hard as they could which eventually dislodged it, but I have no memory of doing that.
Elgg blog: Marcus Povey's blog: Summary of Elgg 1
Who Are This Year's Y Combinator Winners?
what's the business model?
"... we're all thrilled for RescueTime and Anyvite and, yes, Twitter --- but none of these companies has won yet ..."

Are any in the list Ramen profitable?
If you were working on the site for a few months, and you would ask another person to come in, wouldn't you want to have the final word in important matters?

I think it's very reasonable to ask for that, or you pay up for the time he invested plus a little something to cover the risks he made first, and then you are at equal level.
Introducing LinkedIn's Company Directory
Trading for their own account
After this article follow this thread ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=279627
Y Combinator Demo Day: Innovation Economy video (vid from Boston Globe)
Telecomplus
Telecomplus is a leader among the many companies that carry such products as well as consumer grade gadgets and electronics.
Yes. "How I built my own Kindle using the Esquire cover." is an article I'd dearly love to read (or write).
The truth is, that the focus is currently on a very specific niche which doesn't excite me too much.

Some people say that co-founding a company is kind of like getting married. And other people say that marrying someone based not on what they are, but on what you imagine they might become, is the height of folly.

Anyway, the problem doesn't excite you, and your co-founder's approach doesn't excite you, and your stomach has obviously figured out that this would be a mistake for you even as your brain continues to debate the issue, so it's time to discover a prior engagement and politely decline.
RescueTime and Anyvite might be. Twitter sure doesn't seem like it.
They sent me an email about it yesterday, asking for more details, so it seems to be proceeding, albeit slowly. (I also replied to their call for volunteers.)
In reverse chronological order:

* Looking at 200,000 x 200,000 pixel images of cortex, where each pixel samples 3.75 nm square (you see the wires and the solder)

* Sparsely expressing green fluorescent protein in pyramidal neurons of the hippocampus in a compound microscope

* Drosophila larva wriggling around under epifluorescent illumination, expressing green fluorescent protein in all its neurons

* Dictyostelium aggregation

* When, teaching myself how to program in Pascal on my Dad's Fat Mac, I wrote a program that drew circles of increasing radius centered on the mouse

* Thinking about how all we are is particles

* Looking at redwood trees for the first time, in person
Wall-sized portraits of your own DNA
Give and ye shall receive.

It's one thing for the NY Times to be insular, but I hope the majority of online writers / bloggers, most of whom are much smaller, appreciate that to get links and be found you need to give links and help your readers find other sites they may value.
Great post.

Most people that go to the gym are mainly trying to look better so those people should be doing heavy lifting. Even most training calls for time with heavy weights. Thus, the 45 minute or so rule. You point out a major caveat: Most people are not going anywhere near their limits. Around 45 minutes of high weight/volume training, one should naturally notice a loss of power not quit prematurely due to a stopwatch.

A (fat) person once told me she heard some advice that one should do cardio at a pace in which one will not experience heavy breathing and still be able to hold a conversation with the person next to them. What's next? Laying in bed as cardio?

Beginner advice: It's better to go out and just do something rather than overthinking it. Look at the people who are skinny, ripped, massive, fast, or whatever your goal is and do what they do. Many people apply premature optimization to working out. Diet matters but guys in prison become huge on three square meals a day. Sets and reps matter but Arnold wrote something to the effect of, "I don't know why beginners worry so much about details. If you are bad at pull ups, do as many pull ups as you can, rest, repeat." The key is to push yourself and measure your progress to make sure you are actually improving.
I chose a link I thought gave a better overview, but this is the actual site selling the portraits: http://www.dna11.com/gallery_portraits.asp
The aspect of REST I've always liked most is the uniform interface and the way it can influence your API. The limited verbs are important because they add some constraints and make developers think twice before designating GETs to some URL to delete resources. (Just saw one example of this in an app building on top of one of my open source projects.)

David Heinemeier Hansson made a pretty good speech on the benefits of RESTful constraints when he introduced the RESTful directions of Rails. Think more about proliferating resources (nouns) and dealing with as limited a verb population as possible. This is more important to me than deciding whether to use PUT, DELETE, HEAD, etc. or faking them in overloaded POSTs.

I think the rise of RIAs goes well with the stateless constraint and code-on-demand.
7 Principles Of Clean And Optimized CSS Code
What data is he scraping? Unless he's doing streaming stat updates, it's a lot cheaper than that. And if he's doing live stat updates, it's a lot more expensive than that.

Also, I'd tend to disbelieve that there's any gray area there at all, seems flat out illegal to me. Might want to talk to a lawyer yourself about that. I can recommend one who does a lot of work in the area if you need.
If they derived the statistics themselves, then that indicates enough level of unique effort to make the data copyrighted.

I discussed that linked Wikipedia article in the other thread about copyright law... I don't think you can use that as a counterargument for statistics.
It's pretty trivial to determine if someone is scraping your stats too, just by purposefully putting in erroneous data. I've been told people have been caught this way and sued before.
Good read, great to see Slinkset getting more exposure.

I personally think that whole notion of user-voted content and the technology behind it is still in its infancy. I see Slinkset as part of the next step in its progression.

I also had a similar idea back in the winter but didn't end up pursuing it and did something else. So needless to say their success makes me feel extra warm and fuzzy.