skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Scenario 1:

The developers on your founding team could learn .NET over the summer (in your spare time), pay the licensing fees starting in September, and take over development then. Surely the licensing fees aren't that big, compared to developer salaries (are they)?

But you wrote "we likely would not be able to handle everything [development-wise] between just the founders." So you'd have to hire some more .NET developers. I'm sure there are lots of .NET developers out there, but they'll probably charge enterprise rates. Maybe you'll get lucky.

I also worry about the founders not being able to fully understand what the .NET programmers are doing. That could cause problems. For example, the founders, being unfamiliar with .NET, might not know how hard it really is to constitute the splitzerblivits with the kazmeltrix. Schedules could slip.

Scenario 2:

Start now with a framework your two developer co-founders know. Take the cash to get some more developers right away (who know that framework). It sounds like there are no licensing fees, so that's good. Also there would be no need for the founders to spend time learning a new framework. Too bad for the experienced .NET developers, but then it was only ever going to be a short-term gig for them anyhow.

Maybe make a list of the pros and cons for each scenario. I've probably missed some, because I don't know all the details. Then you can make a clear-eyed decision.
Too easy. The idea was to create an entirely plausible pathway of links that nobody could complain about individually (so they wouldn't get reverted) which nonetheless eventually led to http:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/goatse
Ask HN: Non-technical person seeking help learning how to make weekend project
Please don't mistake this for the "looking for a developer to work for equity (i.e. free) to help me build the next billion dollar idea." This isn't what I am asking.

I saw great advice on a post on here that essentially said if a non technical person just asked for help and showed a desire to learn how to develop their idea, that individual would be happy to help. I am taking their advice.

Any help pointing me in the right direction would be much appreciated. If you would actually like to help me and be a part of the project, please feel free to reach out.

What I know: I can do graphic design. This will not be an issue for me. I know basic HTML and CSS and can build a static website.

What I would like to learn: I am trying to make a website that is similar to Textsfromlastnight.com. I have an idea that would function similar in concept and is a twist on the idea. How would I go about creating this type of website? What languages (PHP, java) would I need to learn or is there anything open source I could try and learn and modify for my needs. I am interested at being a better web programmer and I think this would be a great weekend project of sorts for me to try my hand at. If the site doesn't ever take off, I will be happy I expanded my knowledge.

I have enjoyed being a part of this community and thanks in advance for anyone who helps or posts!
You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are
You'd think with the panic the film industry is in they'd be falling over themselves trying to please the moviegoer. Instead we see them trying to treat you as a captive audience and squeeze more revenue out of your eyeballs.

They forget who actually holds the money in every transaction: the customer, and few transactions are as thoroughly optional as movie tickets.

I'm sure the talking and disrespect in the movie theater is a symptom of the problem. People no longer respect the theater because it's stopped respecting them, and in the process lost its own self-respect.
"There are a lot more ways to be wrong than there are ways to be right.
Yet somehow, many of us think that we are probably right most of the
time. Prior generations were wrong about almost everything they
believed, but this does not stop our unfailing confidence that we,
being so much more enlightened, have things for the most part figured
out."
Seems to me that spending that much money preserving "hardware" (bodies) another (better) option would be to preserve "software" (e.g. DNA sequence, MRI, cat scan, EKG, etc.).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2590217
Clicakble: http://textsfromlastnight.com/
Some of us are still in the corporate world and waiting to take the plunge :)

I actually work for a remote insurance company that would really benefit from FogBugz :)

(but I have fairly limited influence and no decision power)
I'm not sure what you mean when you refer to applying to to a corporation. Can you expand that a little?
Funny, because the one thing I forget most often when I leave the house is my phone. I think that deep down, I'd prefer to not have one.
PayPal Lawsuit Against Google Reveals Recruiting Saga And A Deal Gone Sour
The funny thing is that Apple has won big in the past decade but it really wasn't at the expense of Microsoft. Microsoft still dominates the desktop and with Office. Microsoft is very profitable but they have not really been able to grow as much as the could have.
I just want to point out that this won't really work if the site tries to redirect you to a search engine. Naturally broken links will come up with all kinds of search results, but deliberately broken links will come up with "None".
Paypal has company phones that log all your text messages?
Ask HN: Should I form a Board of Advisers?
I was wondering what the HN community thinks of having a board of advisers?

Do I need to offer the board a percentage of equity in the company?
While better than nothing, I am skeptical that a good enough MRI or CT scan can be taken to preserve one's personality to the degree that preserving the brain physically could do. Chemical preservation is one inexpensive option that has been around for centuries -- Ben Franklin mentioned the possibility, and some brains such as that of Charles Babbage are still preserved. Brains preserved this way and scanned at a later date would yield much better data than the best brain scans taken today.

However, even this is probably a lot less fidelity than cryonics at its best. The vitrification process actually preserves a significant degree of cellular viability. For example, a rabbit kidney has actually been successfully implanted after cryopreservation. So if we are trying to maximize the degree to which someone avoids death (acknowledging that some degree of death / memory loss is probably inevitable, for now at least), cryonics is likely to be the best available bet.
I think it's really stupid to announce this stuff before people can actually use it. It's one thing to have a feature in your product. That's great. But if no one uses it, it's worth way less. It's not helping your word of mouth, and it's not helping people stick.

Google, Twitter, Facebook post stuff like this all the time, and I think "wow, that's cool. I'd like to try that." And I fire up my mail, or my FB or my tweets and it's not there. And I think "oh well, I'll see it eventually."

But I often don't. This happened last week, but I've forgotten entirely what the feature was, which product it was, or even what company. One of those three. They could've got me using the new feature, but now I may never discover it.

Lost opportunity. Impotent press.
http://www.intuitivesurgical.com/products/
Amazing, 3D vision robots. Very graceful translation of hand movements into the robots arms. Very nice product. Currently only for laparoscopic intra-abdominal surgery. Not yet automated. They have DaVinci assisted cardiac surgery programs developing in some parts of the country.

Robot assisted airway manipulation
http://www.anesthesia-analgesia.org/content/111/4/929.abstra...

This robot could intubate you. DaVinci could operate on you.
I recently found a blog that has something kind of like a long, comprehensive “getting started” page – http://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/opinion/. The news post of when the blogger added that page is http://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/my-novel-opinion.... Maybe you want something like that page.
If I were incarcerated for a crime that I didn't commit, that would totally suck.

I don't see how being forced to work would make it suck any more, though. It actually sounds better than (a) having nothing to do all day, and (b) stuck with a whole bunch of much worse people who also have nothing to do all day.
Hacking on mozilla graphserver is fun and easy
There's a vagrant config and puppet manifests here too https://github.com/rhelmer/graphs/tree/master/vagrant
Is anyone else tired of the fact that on the internet you can't say "Hey, look at this sucky thing in Random Country X" without having someone pipe up and say "Yeah, but what about this vaguely-similar thing in the USA? Huh? Huh?"
I don't own a business, so maybe I'm missing something obvious, but why would this uncertainty matter if his employees are at-will? If the regulations change such that the new employees are unprofitable, then just get rid of them and you'll be back to the same state he's in now. One could even make the new employees aware of this situation so that were the changes to happen at very least they'd be strongly inclined to become your political allies? Furthermore, even if the business-owner had to get rid of the employees later, he would at least have the temporary advantage of having them now, the employees would have the temporary advantage of a paycheck and I don't know how this works, but wouldn't their unemployment clocks reset?
Can you give a specific example? My example about relocating the tab bar is pretty easy; either View->Toolbars or just right-click on the toolbar.
when htc improves their battery life (as far as the manufacturer can do) they'll be tops in my book.
I'm confused, doesn't the thirteenth amendment specifically allow involuntary servitude for convicted prisoners? It's right there in the text!
“trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_bubble

So while flippant, the goal was to point out the disparity in the perceived value generated by incubators and the investment to build them. And wholeheartedly it was flippant and designed to garner attention, but not out of context. Sorry.
What's the problem? A dude was a prison guard. Then he (presumably) committed a crime. Now he's an inmate.
An online friendship of mine ended in part because of the other person's habit of pouncing on any excuse to bad-mouth the US and it's government and culture like it is The Evil Empire. So count me among the tired.
This is great news. The HTC CEO made a pretty quick and sudden decision.

Meanwhile, Motorola vaguely semi-committed months ago and nothing has happened.

I don't really buy that carriers are demanding this as Samsung currently doesn't do this.
The pattern looks more interesting than simply that. Multiple semantically related terms are correlated with "accident". And, strangely, "fatal accident" is not correlated very much with any of those other semantically related terms. Further, there are bunches of other queries that you might imagine "summer-ness" could also drive (air conditioners, heat rash, e.g.), but which it doesn't.
See: mandatory sentence laws. Convictions didn't yield prison time before them at the same rate they do after.
I make it a point to only have books that I could see myself reading 10 years from now. This occasionally applies to tools that have almost become concepts in themselves, like C or Unix shell scripting for example.
Well so long as we're being technical it's a bug in the JavaScript standard and implementations. At least that's my understanding.
Winners and losers separated by milliseconds on the Web
Fujifilm X100 Digital Camera Reviews
The image quality also satisfied us, and even trumped Leica’s X1. That said, we still don’t fancy the confusing menu structure and sluggish performance, which are things we don’t expect from a premium compact.
AMD Fusion Developer Summit: 60 Free Passes Up For Grabs
This question is better asked at Quora, but one reason quality NVGs are so expensive are because the high gain/low noise components required for modern, passive NVGs are quite expensive to 1) produce, 2) QA, and 2) buy.
Need open source policy? Ask the DoD
Applying computational linguistics for Skype call eavesdropping
Better algorithms just aren't cutting it. What will?

Make things harder rather than easier.

I mean, I do not want 5-line bot scripts slurping up my associations. I do not want it to be easy for Joe Blow to learn what book I last read or what foods I like. I do not want to be fodder for every Social Media expert.

Having some sort of speed bumps might help filter out the frictionless-friends from the real friends.

Facebook had that initially, to some extent, by requiring a school. Now they're icing the roads.

I don't have a clear idea on this other than a gut feeling that making some things at least slightly troublesome might go a long way to helping evolve real social networks.
Prison: rehabilitation, punishment, deterrent, segregation. Punishment is largely about the victims, justice being seen to be done, etc.; it shouldn't affect crime rates in ways that don't also come under rehabilitation or deterrence. Segregation (keeping dangerous people apart from the main population) is not relevant to our discussion here, I think.

Is slave labour rehabilitating? More or less rehabilitating than productive labour? A net wash? I personally think education would be more rehabilitating. Perhaps that can be combined with labour? Probably not chain-gang type labour though.

Deterrence, I'm more skeptical of. I don't think prison time has a lot of net impact on crime. Someone on the point of committing a crime, but with their rational thinking cap on, may be evaluating their expected punishment; but that expected punishment will be moderated by their expected chances of getting caught. Obviously, if they expect to get caught, they would not rationally choose to commit a crime; therefore, very drastic changes in punishments need to be applied in order to stay significant after the criminal has taken into account the chances of being caught. (Yes, there's risk / reward calculations where very high rewards may justify taking higher risks so the expected punishment has higher effects, but I think big bank robberies etc. are not the majority of crime we need to be worried about, at least outside of white collar crime, which does need more focus.)

And that's all with the rational thinking cap on. Other crimes where rationality appears to be less evident - I'd guess most non-organized violence, for example - the punishment is very far from mind, if it's in mind at all.

I think if you're truly interested in reducing crime rates, what you have to focus on is increasing the probability of criminals getting caught and convicted, so that deterrence is credible. Reducing repeat offenders requires more focus on rehabilitation. Fiddling with the punishment in and of itself is, IMO, unlikely to have a large impact unless it's a disproportionate change, which would make it unjust.
How one man made $6 billion dollars with a single toy
Well, now I know who I'm buying my next phone from.
These are not the only two possibilities, of course.
Russ Olsen on "Eloquent Ruby"
Tracking state in Fexl
Talent moving from company to company is not new in SV. And to be more specific, if you've been working you're whole career in maps technology and then move to maps division in another company, that shouldn't be shocking. Also, I have a hard time believing this one guy was the entire lynch pin on wallet and was the difference between Google doing it or not. A payment wallet is not a new concept.

This is a clear sign of paypal's weakness. Rather than compete, sue. It's like zuckerberg said: If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook.

I'm not a lawyer, just an engineer so maybe i'm missing something but doesn't seem as dramatic as some of the comments here imply
This is a follow-up to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2552180 . I aim to do more and more of my production code in Fexl if possible. The hedge fund accounting software I wrote in Perl is quite complex, managing a large amount of intricate state. I chose to represent all that state as a completely flat key-value store in memory, where I write out the keys that changed at the end of each batch.

Naturally that approach seems at odds with a purely functional language such as Fexl, but I'm trying to overcome that apparent mismatch by just doing the key-value stuff in Fexl.

There are some fans of Fexl out there, myself included, who are not yet completely clear on how to use it for production code. The jury's still out. I hope that samples like this will help.
Any chance you'll be appearing on the stack exchange podcast anytime soon? I'd like to hear you guys talking and throwing ideas around.

I know you were involved in the Fog Creek side of things and not the Stack Exchange side... but that actually make it more interesting for me since I expect your ongoing series of blog posts will cover as much as possible of Fog Creek-related stuff.
In India entrepreneurs face similar harassment if you're not from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_caste community
Tips for Saving Money on Online Inventory
Hope http://www.fairtrials.net/ can help them out.
AFAIK The SGII is open, but I had heard rumors a while back from people I trusted that Samsung was headed in a similar direction. There's no reason to believe it, and with HTC taking a stand I'm hopeful.
GitHub repo high scores in 8-bit, 80's-tastic arcadey format
I first met Portland when attending JSConf this year. The city is simply amazing.

It's relatively cheap, its residents seem very pleasant, its street are well laid out, it's biker friendly, it's in a beautiful area, it has great food ( loved all the food trucks ), it's youthful, it's walkable, it has great public transportation, it has a grassroots feel to it, it has a great tech vibe to it, it has great neighborhoods, it has great shopping, it seems unpretentious, etc, etc...

Ever since I left, I've seriously thought about moving there.
Presumably the base rate of bad people in the human population does not vary greatly from country to country,

That's an empirical question. I wouldn't presume one way or the other on that issue until I had some data. (I would, of course, have to define "bad people" in some reasonable way that would work cross-culturally to gather my data.)
Hot Penny Stocks, Penny Stock Picks, Penny Stock Alerts
I would love to see an App like this. When my wife and I moved to Denver I got an old fashioned dead tree map out and put a pin where she worked and a pin where I worked. I then took a string that would be the longest commute that my wife would accept and did the same for myself. We then searched for apartments in that location. It was a good system but it didn't help us find the apartment we ultimatley choose. I didn't take in to consideration a major highway and the effect that would have on the commute time. An App that had an estimated drive time function would be great. Then create profiles for each person and the app could logarithmically show areas that would have least amount of commute for both parties. Incorporate a Apartment, Rental (house/condo), and real estate finder and you got yourself a killer App for people moving. Lots of marketing synergy and in App ad/purchasing possibilities too.
Why was this announced via a post on Facebook? Don't they have a corporate blog or something?
Montana Free Online Newspapers - Comic Book Resources Forums
Chrome style browser for iPad
You're absolutely right that my initial comment made the 180 day hold sound different than it is. To be fair, I'm not talking about PayPal Website Payments Pro accounts at all but basic personal or business Paypal accounts. It sounds like you've had a pleasant experience as you've been using a different product. Speaking of baseless opinions: "despite so many on HN using it without problems". I'd love to see a source for that. The fact is, even if 80% of people using Paypal have a great experience, too high of a percentage is being screwed over.
I thought the use of scarcity really drove the growth of this business.
Approachable open problems in computational complexity theory
Museum Field Trip Deemed Too Revealing [2006]
On Gnome 3
Am I missing the point here? There are a few people who did get lucky by being laid off or alone. What about all of the other unemployed or lonely people who do these same things and don't get the same breaks?
I'm speculating but it is definitely possible, for example http://www.cellular-spy.com/
> "What are these red dots?" Also seems non-trivial to diagnose. They can be tested, or more questions can be asked of them, but this seems like an awful lot of work to be managed by a computer alone.

I don't entirely disagree with you, but I think you might be underestimating the capabilities of smart programmers, e.g., some of the stuff at the beginning of http://daniellefong.com/2010/02/11/how-law-shapes-the-busine...

If algorithms discussed in that blog post were used in one system (even with pictures taken from an Android device possibly), and that system were to communicate results to Watson ... I can't think of a reason why that wouldn't work.

Other than, y'know, patents.
When will Las Vegas run out of water?
I hardly ever log in to my facebook account. It's not really my cup of tea. Nonetheless, I can somewhat relate to your experience in that at one time I had a good friend online who stopped emailing me and then popped in out of the blue to comment on something I had posted on my website. It turns out this person had begun following my website and that apparently met their needs and they felt no need to actually engage me in conversation. This was kind of an icky moment for me. The friendship later ended.

I continue to wrestle with my relationship to such things. You can only have so many actual close friends. There are only so many hours in the day and close friendship requires sustained, on-going interaction to maintain. For this reason, I tend to think "social networks" are doomed to be shallow affairs. Yet, paradoxically, I find that I share a lot more info online than I do with most folks I know in person. I'm not shy there just isn't enough time in the day to explain some things to everyone I meet, so I just don't want to open up some can of worms. Still, I wrestle with this process where I seem to gradually be working on developing an online audience where the relationship is inherently lopsided: Other people often know a great deal more about me than I know about them. But this isn't really what I think of as friendship and I like having friends, which have been a tad scarce of late (remaking your life usually causes you to shed friends).

I don't have answers for you. Just sharing some of my own internal questions, FWIW.
I agree, but it may be more useful to discuss what else was done to enable the scarcity-driven growth to succeed. Most of the time, if you try to create artificial scarcity around a product, nobody is going to see it to know how much they want it.

What do you think are the critical conditions that need to be met before scarcity becomes a viable marketing strategy?