skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think its an interesting project, and if they can actually produce it as inexpensively as they hope (or even twice that - $50 is still a good price point!), I think it will be useful in schools simply because kids will be able to own one themselves, bring it home etc, which I think will inspire (at least some of) them to learn more and do more interesting things with them outside of the classroom. As somebody in another HN post about this said: "get technology into as many hands as possible" - this is certainly a great thing!

However, I think the statements in the video about how computers have become much more complex and that is why people aren't learning to program them at a young age is incorrect. BBC Micros and ZX Spectrums (and Commodore's and Amigas and all the rest) were, IMHO, not easier to learn with compared to todays computers. They were actually much less accessible and therefore attracted the type of people who were able to learn. Smaller audiences of more capable people (because the less capable people were never attracted to them in the first place) gives the illusion that they were simpler and easier, even when they weren't.

Todays computers are usable by just about anyone and most people are exposed to them in some way through games, social networking, websites.. whatever. The amount of people learning to program is probably a lot higher today than it ever was as the barrier to entry is so much lower (going from something as simple as Scratch, to web development with Javascript, to Ruby and Python and Processing - a lot of simple, yet powerful, tools (with instant feedback) are now available), its just that the percentage of people learning to program out of all the people using computers is now a lot lot lower.

I don't see how this device would be able to make it any easier than a full blown computer (once somebody found and installed the software for the kids) except that 1) it will have the tools preinstalled and 2) it will be inexpensive enough that each kid can be given their own one creating a sense of ownership and hopefully inspiring and encouraging them to do cool stuff with them (which in turn means they learn more).

TL;DR: This thing does have potential, but I think they (at least the people who made the video) are focusing on the wrong thing (bringing back the 80's of computers and programming because they feel it was simpler back then, while I believe it is a lot lot simpler now).
We've launched and have been selling product for about 5 months.

My partner's role is that he was the one with the experience in the market. He had the connections to suppliers, resellers, etc.

I edited the post above to explain a bit more of the business, and the reasoning behind flyers and some other merchandise. Beyond that, I could tweak some logos and start over. I've replied with a couple of concerns I have with that in other posts.

Thanks for your feedback, I do appreciate it.
No compiler support on one common system.

You should be handling every case anyway - by the time the code is done, there are no exceptional situations left ;)
in terms of keeping the business going. i just want to re-state how aurbnb got off the ground, they lived off of cereal...they were on the brink of poverty, and they didnt give up. they refused to label their company as a failure. and they kept working at it, until they got to what they are today
Gas, wear and tear on my car, before and after school care, etc. would probably add up to about 7k/year if I didn't work from home in the relatively inexpensive city where I live (Indianapolis). I can't imagine what it would be in Chicago or New York.

There are other benefits to working from home that are harder to measure:

* I cook more when I work from home because I can stick something in my oven during the work day and have it ready at dinner time, rather than getting take out or buying heat-and-eat foods during the week. This saves big bucks on food, and also improves our health.

* My son gets a better education when I work from home because I am there to see when he's struggling with something, and can work with his teachers to fix it (as opposed to delegating homework time to a nanny or daycare).

* I don't have to take off of work to let a plumber in, to care for my son when he's home sick from school, and so on.

* I don't take off when I'm sick, unless I'm falling-down can't-think-right sick -- there's no worry about infecting my coworkers, not being close enough to a restroom, how I'm going to drive home if I get worse while at work, etc..

* I save a lot of time I might have spent commuting, which can be spent instead on my family, a side project, recreation, whatever.

* I'll never lose 1-2 days of productivity to an allergy attack because Joe Blow from marketing who's a pack-a-day smoker keeps popping by my office reeking of the stuff.

All else being equal, I'd take a job with 20% lower pay in order to work from home full time -- assuming, of course, it isn't one of those companies where telecommuters are second-class citizens. Other related benefits (such as being able to build my work schedule around my life to some degree) could knock it down a bit further.

I see money simply as a tool to help me do things that matter -- money, in and of itself, or as a matter of score keeping, isn't important to me.
Our Fantasy Nation
Legally, I have no idea as I'm not a lawyer and even if I were I'm probably not even living in the same country, let alone the same state. You really need to talk to someone qualified to answer that.

Ethically...I think as long as you are above board and honest with all parties, explain the situation and what needs to happen, then you're probably OK. Running a business involves making hard decisions such as firing employees and dumping cofounders. If you can't face doing these things then you're not cut out for running a business (I've had to do it, and hated it). However it's important that even when you have to do these things that you are honest and as decent as possible at all times.
LLC filing as a corporation.

If I decide to pick up and run the project solo, I'll definitely work with him to a mutually-agreed decision. Thanks for your comment.
That was my exposure, Struts, and poorly designed struts too. I think 90% of the code was in static methods. I deferred to the people with 10 years of seniority over me at the time.
Rebrand. Your defence is tenuous and fight isn't worth the distraction.
I see -- that all makes perfect sense. Thank you!

However, you're still suggesting that Haskell is only good for prototyping, not for "real apps", which understandably for you are Google-scale apps. There is a very long distance between what Google does and what I need to do, today, and premature scaling is the death of many projects. But let's be ambitious and pretend that one day I will want to operate at that scale. Assuming C++ is out of the running, is there really no alternative to Java?

I've been working on apps in PHP (Flickr, now Wikipedia) and while I admire the language, in the same way I admire how weeds can colonize an area efficiently, I am not going to choose that for a personal project. I agree with your assessments of Python and Ruby, and I'm not sufficiently enamored of any framework in those languages to make it worth the trouble. I can sling Perl as well as anybody (even in a style approaching functional) and it can be very efficient, but it's hard to find collaborators these days.

This seems to leave Erlang, Haskell, Scala, or maybe Node.js + JavaScript.

Scala seems like what an enterprise would choose for its foray into functional programming, and indeed that seems to be the hopes of its creators. While it's a "safe" choice, for Java shops maybe, I fear the massive shear forces between Java's way of thinking and Scala's attempt to paper over all that with functional thinking. Not to mention the complexity of that language. Still, it seems to work for Twitter, FourSquare, et al.

There's nothing wrong with Erlang, and it has its adherents in industry, but the syntax annoys me.

I'm already an expert in JS, and a codebase of a single language has its benefits. The intense competition in the browser to make JS an application language seems to have already vaulted JS performance over other scripting languages and new libraries are being written every day. Still, it just feels odd to write directly to a database or file in JavaScript. And I've gotten myself tangled up in JS' asynchrony a bit too much recently. Maybe that's an irrational prejudice.

I guess this is why I've been looking on Haskell; in part because it offers some hope of really writing a lot less code and having that code be so well-typed, automatically, that it practically writes its own tests (see QuickCheck) or doesn't even need them. It seems like there ought to be some way to get the best of that without needing to shoot yourself in the foot because you suddenly want to log some action and you didn't define some code twenty layers above it as monadic.
GRC is Not a Tool But a Business Enabler
Wired is not banned you can get the UK & US editions in most bookshops. It's just expensive!

Various publications that have been critical of the political environment have been dragged into court to deal with Singapore's not-so-friendly libel laws.

The LGBT situation is culturally more acceptable than it was, but there is still a lot of work to be done.

NB: I am a liberal Brit who lives and works in Singapore (nearly 5 years now)
It was not that Ruby was more OO than Java, it was that Ruby on Rails had a better design than the spaghetti-code Java (poorly designed Struts apps) I had been exposed to.
Web APIs often have explicit versioning. Perhaps that approach could be adopted for programming, where you have the option to specify the version of a function you are using. This would enable gradual migration and adoption of new features.
> If you change the interface, it creates problems (e.g. unit testing gives you confidence to refactor, but if you change interfaces, you also have to change the tests...).

Could you elaborate on this point? If you change the behavior of a dynamic module A, i.e. its implicit interface, you'd have to change its unit tests to reflect these changes anyway...
مشاهدة مباراة مصر وجنوب أفريقيا بث مباشر على النت
مشاهدة مباراة مصر وجنوب أفريقيا بث مباشر على النت
مشاهدة مباراة مصر وجنوب أفريقيا بث مباشر على النت
مشاهدة مباراة مصر وجنوب أفريقيا بث مباشر على النت
You're absolutely right. I don't contest that we are infringing.

For the record, we didn't know anything about his business when we chose our name. We merely saw that 'companyname.com' was taken but not used. We assumed (you know what they say about assumptions) that meant we could go with 'mycompanyname.com' and be fine. Had we known about his trademarked business beforehand, we wouldn't have done so.

Thank you for shedding more light on the trademark situation.
<IANAL_just_paranoid>I recommended a separate entity because of the contract coding. Protection from copyright claims with contractors is only as good as one's attorney, and therefore any contract coding potentially exposes the other enterprises within a settlement. The perfect example would be reuse of elements developed under contract for one endeavor being reused on another project which took off. </IANAL_just_paranoid>
Betting on such a small and unproven platform doesn't give you very good odds in my opinion. People who've been around the block a few times are usually looking for a bit more certainty than that. Not that anything is certain in the startup world, but this seems beyond risky/crapshot. My 2 cents...
Fair enough - then you'll have to switch to a different VPS if you're sending > 128KB responses. Use the right tool for the job.
The idea is not original. But the market is lucrative and growing daily. We were completely satisfied with the idea of taking a very small slice of the pie.
By the way, I see from your past Ask HN submissions that in the past ~60 days, you've been thinking aboout "an opportunity in creating an ad network for a niche market" and looking for ways to accept payments for iPhone apps you've developed. Since your business here is apparently unrelated to these, I'll add lesson #3: if you're going to start a business, you must be 100% focused on that business. When you keep taking your eyes off the road, you're more than likely going to crash.
Watch Kung Fu Panda 2 Online
Watch Kung Fu Panda 2 Online
This film tells in which Po is still interfere with the flashback to see the first Shen feather symbol as Shen escape and destroy the tower with an arsenal of firearms After running away from
Neat!
What makes it awesome though? How do you go from the quality to the quantity so to speak? Is it some function of the number of comments and points?
Video: German Apple store site defaced with Windows logo
Yes, he's saying wait for an official C&D. When the other business owner said that approaching by phone first has been more pleasant, he actually means it has been cheaper (for him).
90% of people who say they'll get a lawyer involved never do (the kind of people who get lawyers involved, start with a letter from their lawyer).

That's not to say you don't need to change your name/logo, if it really is confusingly similar to someone else in the same industry (if they're not in the same industry, trademark doesn't apply). If there is a problem there, you'd want to remedy it. But, trademarks are pretty specific. If the guy is claiming a trademark on a generic word, you can probably safely ignore him (i.e. if I claim "Joe's Soda", and someone else makes "Sam's Soda", I don't have a case against them...but if someone made "Joe's Cola" I probably would). Also, if you both do business regionally rather than nationally, and he is not in your region, he probably doesn't have a case (though if he has a USPTO trademark and has more than one location, he might, anyway).

As you've learned, it's much better to figure this stuff out before you invest in printing and logos and such.
One od the reasons is that Singapore is pro-racial integration, so they put it on virtually every official form... for example there are rules to prevent segregation by 'race' within the public housing system.

But even after living here 4 years it still strikes me as strange.
I did a quick search for "Life Response" at the USPTO website and the only trademark I found was this one:

http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4010:8n...

for "Life Response" owned by Midwest Medical Alert Systems, Inc. CORPORATION ILLINOIS 269 Winding Creek Drive Naperville ILLINOIS 60565.

The weird thing is, the business using the http://www.liferesponseusa.com domain is "Life Response USA" and they're a division of CTR Alarm Systems Inc. --- a Pennsylvania Corporation. So that's odd: not the same company as the trademark holder?

More research is needed.
Create Dim, Min, Maj, & Aug music chords with HTML5 & jQuery
Don't carry this too far, the owner of a federally registered trademark can sue the hell out of you. I would not play this wait and see game. The trademark database is easily searched.

Edit: US Registered Trademark search: http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/index.jsp
Interesting. I wonder how you go about setting up an rss feed.
Al-Jazeera Digital Dashboard Tracks ‘Arab Spring’ Tweets
...on the most inconvinient spots.

also, what if it have back up camera or radar detection? both features pretty common but outlawed.
Either the other cofounder starts doing something to justify their continued stake in the venture or you reduce their ownership %.

Utterly ruthless but this is business. You're already in a precarious position. Don't carry dead weight.
I think the reason of rapid development is the reason of its popularity.
I worry that bringing these type of colleges to the UK will directly reflect what has already failed in the USA. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n11/howard-hotson/short-cuts
Windows logo planted on upcoming Apple Store in Germany
Ask HN: Recommended stack for a data-heavy application?
My brother and I had an idea for an application that will perform statistical analysis on arbitrary data sets. We plan to work on it as a side project over the summer (or longer if need be) to learn as well as potentially build it into a business if it turns out as planned. I'm currently doing research to see what would be the best tech stack to build this on.

I'm have experience with LAMP, but I'm not sure this would be the best tool for what we have in mind (he has no programming experience). Ideally, I want:

- A server that can efficiently handle large uploads (mostly csv/spreadsheets). Could this just be configuring Apache properly?

- A language/framework that is good/efficient for stats. (Maybe some combination of Python and R?)

- A database that can handle arbitrary data sets and preferably integrates well with the previous tools. I forced MySQL to do this in a proof-of-concept, but there are probably better tools for the job.

- A graphing/visualization tool. I kind of like rgraph.net for HTML5 charts, but I'm open to recommendations.

- Lastly, a lightweight/simple framework that handles all the typical features of a web app (user registration and management for now).

As I mentioned, this project is primarily for learning at this point, so I'm pretty open to any recommendations. Feel free to ask anything and let me know if I'm missing anything.

Thanks!
Thanks David, I appreciate the offer. I think I'll stick with US base companies for now, it's something I understand more. I don't have any understanding of Malta or the EU and doesn't sound like something I'd want to get into but I genuinely thank you for the offer.
Thanks Vivtek, I honestly don't think it's being burnt out. After my last startup, I did take a leave and traveled for a bit. I think it's really more of, the ideas I'm coming up with or encountering are just not very interesting to me personally.
I've experience with being hit by a trademark dispute and your best bet is to cut off the existing name now. It costs more than you have atm to defend it.
Will make a note to reach out to you later =]
Agreed. They're loosing customer data, which is bad, but they're not a web company. If the schematics and firmware for their computers, TVs, cameras, media players, or PlayStations was leaked, then Sony would be more concerned.

I'm surprised the hackers are still going after customer data, and haven't started targeting IP yet.
(Disclaimer: I work on Office at Microsoft)

If you want a preview of the Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote pieces of Office 365, you can use them for free at http://office.live.com - if you're using OneNote locally, they'll also host your OneNote notebooks so you can access them anywhere (as well as still use them via the desktop app)
I have some questions, email?
I don't understand what is Google waiting for to make an algorithm-based sef-served Groupon. Like they changed advertisement with AdWords/AdSense. They have the brand and advertising network and hundreds of millions of users.

Perhaps Google as an organization is too asperger-like and can't understand social? I don't know. But it looks like a big opportunity being lost.
The blog post isn't about correctness - it's about modularity. Lispers and Smalltalkers are used to programming with very small compilation units - individual methods and individual functions. Being able to fix running programs w/o going through the whole compile cycle is a demonstrable productivity gain.

Types and modularity are at odds. The antagonism is readily apparent in languages that support dynamic and static typing - Qi. It's RCEPL (Read-Check-Eval-Print-Loop) has serious restrictions in comparison to its standard REPL.
I don't know, 13% seems significant for a company like Sony.
When physicists tell you that the Standard Model is incredibly complete, remember that they still can't predict the properties of elements.
The original article uses heap to get top K numbers. It's runtime complexity is O(N*log(K)) and nth_element is O(N), so the algorithms are not similar at all.
I live in a poor neighborhood in Indiana (USA) (ah, but the house was cheap) and I would really like point (a). Speaking personally.
I don't contest that we are infringing.

This is not legal advice, just common sense: be careful what you admit online! In some cases, willful use of someone's trademark may entitle them to punitive damages or lost profits.
That is life. When I rent an apartment, I lock out all others who competed for it.
Is that a question?
Thanks, will check it out
The company that employs me has a Linux-based product that allows you to connect extra monitors and keyboards to single computer and have multiple logins on the same computer. We have equipped a computer lab with this configuration and the students use it write applications with Eclipse, browse Facebook. It is not too complicated for them.

This is the page (its in Bulgarian, but Google translator does an excellent job):

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=bg&...

Feel free to ask away if you are interested, we have contacts on the website :-).
I think his point was that you shouldn't redo everything because someone phones you up claiming to have a trademark. Give the response he mentioned then go do your homework. If you're actually infringing, it's prudent to stop before the lawsuit arrives.
Thanks for your posts.

The ad network idea started when my cofounder here first got his other job.

You're definitely right though. I appreciate your insight in both of your posts re: the opportunity cost of running a startup at my age. I have a degree and could get a decent job. Sometimes it's good to see reminders of that option, since I've always leaned towards starting my own business.
Hoboken's where I live and I love it. Rent about 50% of what it'd be in the West Village, just across the river. PATH train makes for a quick commute and runs 24 hours. City is walkable, Fresh Direct delivers, Grimaldi's and Maxwell's are here...

As long as you can walk to the PATH, the loser factor on weekends (Jersey's finest comes to party) is the only real downside.
You can try MarkLogic Server. We have a free edition that will cover what you need and Office toolkits that are really cool (so you can work directly in the excel sheets)
Not second but yeah, it's probably something along those lines. I've read many articles he's posted so far. Probably thought HN =]
We need grannies, says Startup fest organizer
In the original prisoners dilemna, there was real consequences involved: 10-20 years in jail. Getting fired from waterfallcorp doesnt sound like the end of the world. (Some might even consider it a good thing). Entertaining read though.
Yes, that's correct. I was addressing the selling point of unit tests, that they give you a safety net to ensure your changes don't introduce new bugs. The claim fails when the interface changes.

In my experience, interface changes happen quite often. When you prevent them from changing, you end up with back-compatibility hell, that popular platforms like x86, Windows and Java have to maintain - and that's just for external, public interfaces.
I've tried this but not very many people know what bugs them and the ones that do (albeit few) are things I probably don't want to do. But I greatly appreciate the brainstorming.
That's the one.

I would make the guess that liferesponseusa.com is not the same business, based on the different addresses you brought up. I wonder if they're looking at a similar situation with the trademark holder.
Ask HN: Is Ruby/RoR more religion than engineering?
Panaya Named Red Herring Top 100 Europe Tech Startup‎
Hi Kevin,

I'm located in the SF Bay Area but I'd still love to connect. Will shoot you an email later.
The universe is continuous not discrete and those who believe otherwise are insane. I'll take his word for it. It is certainly outside my comfort zone, but interesting nonetheless.
The Power of Curated Buying: A Nike.com, Real-Time Example
Neither. It was originally developed as a solution to solve my own problem. The intention was never to create a startup out of it. It wasn't until a few months later that someone pointed out that I should run with it as a startup. The rest is as they say, history...