skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, they do not even own the companyname.com. A domain squatter does. Presumably, they can't use it because this company has targeted them before with their trademark lawyers.

One lawyer has said that we are definitely infringing, while another said that there may be some leeway. However, the trademark holder is in the exact same market as us. So many of the limitations you mentioned don't affect his ability to defend against us.
> but after the 12th hack... is this just how shoddy most systems are and they just have the spotlight on them at the moment?

I think both. It's fairly common practice to hire your design/advertising agency to develop your web properties. Those companies have little or no in-house software development expertise and rarely employ good software development practices. I made efforts to introduce such practices, with relative success (we reduced cost and delivery times by implementing simple things like version control, code reviews and a knowledge base) but, without education and enforcement, developer turnaround and poor expectation management eventually erased all traces of good practices in a couple years.
From the Haskell reddit discussion:

> It's a simple truth, indeed a tautology, that if you want the compiler to check the consistency of interactions between modules, then the compiler must know the information that it is checking. That's all that's being said here. It really shouldn't surprise anyone. If you dispose of typing, then someone still needs to know that relevant information in order to write correct code; but it is the programmer, rather than the compiler.

or, with more wit,

> Types are anti-modularity in the same sense stop signs are anti-transportation.

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/hs39c/gilad_bracha_...
FWIW: This appears to be his startup: http://www.myliferesponse.com/ and from his resume, it appears he's the business/marketing partner in this relationship.
Here we come to the nub of the matter, at least for the average HN reader: a country which is characterised by slavish obedience to authority and a willingness to trade off autonomy and the right to do something that may offend others for "social order" is a country which is very unlikely to foster a robust start-up culture.

Start-ups rely on the willingness of founders and investors to be bold, break the rules, and act without concern for what others may think. This, in turn, requires a society which embraces disorder, spontaneity and a certain degree of rebelliousness.

It's not an accident that the two countries with the most robust start-up scenes are the US and Israel, both characterised by messy and sometimes annoying individualism, robust debate, and intellectual ferment.

It's hard to be believe that a nation like Singapore, whose citizens happily trade off freedom of speech for trivialities like clean streets and the "freedom" of people not to be offended will be capable of producing the kind of rough-and-tumble Darwinian business environment and culture in which start-ups flourish.

An aside: my read of the Indian national character is that is much closer to that of the Americans than that of the Singaporese: individualistic, pluralistic, and tolerant of disorder and creativity. These is, of course, much to still be achieved in India, but I think the vector is pointed in the right direction.
Each level has its own (set of) locks. When a thread goes up/down, it needs to grab a lock from the higher/lower level before it can proceed. When one thread goes up at the same time as another thread goes down and they need the same locks, you get deadlock.

Is that what you were asking about, or is there something subtler I'm missing?
9,031,807 sales / 50,583,805 subscribers = 0.18 conversion rate. Not bad...
It just proves that their customers don't care about anything as long as they can play...
You should disagree with me more often. It's more fun, and even I only agree with about 97% of what I write.

HN is poorly metamoderated. Yep. But I don't buy the argument that HN is run by cruel or capricious people. I have criticisms of HN management, but those aren't among them.

So, given that, if you've got a small group of people you trust not to be random jerks about it, who are putting in the time to keep the site running and keep the community at least somewhat functional, I think it's better for everyone that stuff like banning isn't an open transparent process for all of us to get wrapped up in.
There's two options at this point. Keep the business going or give up.

There's no way anyone can make that choice but yourself. Many people will say "don't give up" but there is little to be gained if the business is going under and you start throwing more money - or other people's money - down the drain.

On the other hand the business shows promise but needs more time and funds, none of which you have right now.

There is another option - suspend business operations, if possible, and rebuild your funds through a "normal" job or consulting. If the business is viable you should be able to relaunch at a later date in a stronger position, perhaps with better partners. If it isn't, you can try again with a new idea.

Knowing when you stand and fight and when to retreat to fight again another day is essential.
I remember an hour long video I had to sit through just so they could give the basic gist.

(I say this as a fan of Wave btw, used it on many projects very successfully, exceptionally sad to see it go)
if you haven't launched yet, why not change your name? I understand that there are costs involved, but did you quantify those costs and see if it's possible or not? You don't have to redo everything at once.
Great point.

I haven't decided to throw in the towel, but I've nearly run out of cash and my cofounder is not around to help.

You're right though, I should continue fighting to make it happen. Spend a few weeks to change our name, forget about the printed materials, and keep working to see if there are legs.

If I were to succeed, how would you (or other HNers) approach the issue with a cofounder, given that he will have not been involved in the additional push?
Gisele Bundchen: Supermodel, Entrepreneur Extraordinaire, and Wealthy
I wasn't arguing with you. My point is that even if I have the passion, the passion might not optimize for productivity. A super late night might ruin the next day, for example. I have to harness the passion to make it more productive.
Yesod is actually backed by Warp, a webserver that is significantly faster than snap:

http://www.yesodweb.com/blog/2011/2/warp-speed-ahead

The code for the benchmarks can be found here:

https://github.com/snoyberg/benchmarks
Well, in all fairness, Switzerland is much like Monaco, Beverly Hills and certain Carribean islands in that its poverty is essentially exported.

Switzerland makes it very difficult to become a citizen unless you're born to at least one Swiss parent or you marry a Swiss citizen (there are people whose families have been living in Switzerland since the 20s who can't become citizens).

There are a large contingent of workers who work in Switzerland every day but don't live there (and, in fact, aren't allowed to even if they wanted to and could afford it), particular in Geneva.

It's also one of the most expensive countries on Earth.

So, I wouldn't say the low crime rates are so much a question of effective social policy but rather of being both wealthy and exclusionary.

Yes, laws are different between the two and certainly there are cultural differences too. Zurich is very definitely (mainland) European. Singapore is quite definitely Asian.

There are severe penalties on drug trafficking because it's a big problem, with proximity to the Golden Triangle and so on. Singapore is also surrounded by Indonesia and Malaysia, places where the illicit trades have far more freedom of movement. Singapore, with some justification, seeks to avoid being a conduit or waypoint or (even worse) a destination for the drug trade.

The no smoking in public thing I consider a huge plus. The chewing gum thing is a bit weird. I think it has something to do with vandalism.

As for Zurich being strict, I imagine you don't view them that way because you're accustomed to them. Throwing out trash is a classic example. First you have to buy Zurisache (sp?) for like 2 CHF each. Throwing them out in anything else can get you fined.

Then you have to separate your trash into three different types of glass (white, brown, green), other recyclables and non-recyclables. Where you see trash cans in public there are like 6-7 different cans for the different categories of trash.

Newspapers and possibly other forms of paper (I forget) had to be thrown out on different days to regular trash. Those had to be tied with string in a neat bundle.

All of the above is enforced by the Mutzpolizei (literally "trash police").

The anmelden/abmelden (registration) system, which is the norm on mainland Europe, is extremely weird--even invasive--to most people from English speaking countries.

In Switzerland, depending on what Canton you live in, you can't make excessive noise after 10pm or before 7am (which I actually appreciate). In Zurich in some buildings this extended to regulations in certain apartments prohibiting men from urinating while standing up at those times (due to thin walls; this was deemed "excessive noise").

Some cantons also prohibited "excessive noise" or work on Sundays (for the entire day).

IIRC there were given days where you were and weren't allowed to move house.

Switzerland has its fair share of regulation is all I'm saying.
Thanks for posting these links; they look very interesting.
Very helpful. You're right, there are two options.

I've considered suspending the business as you mentioned. Which would be quite easy to do, our burn rate is negligible (could be near free). While earning funds to continue operations, I could spend personal time rebuilding the brand materials.

My concern is not knowing how to approach a business cofounder who would be entirely uninvolved in such effort. Can I make a clean break and take over that portion? Or, essentially, start a new company on my own? Our partnership agreement is very basic, and does not cover this situation.

So I would be unaware of what would be right both ethically and legally. Thoughts?
It's not the same thing. CPUs are only getting faster in that they are getting more cores. How is a programmer to take advantage of that? That is the question. Hadoop is not about this problem, it's goal is to overcome the bottleneck of disk IO for large data sets.
The article's just claiming that the modules of dynamic languages can be compiled independently; not that it will be correct.

Just my thoughts: There's a bigger question here about types, though. I think the argument is that the ceremony of types gets in the way more than it helps, and it requires up-front design. Many people like dynamic languages for their flexibility; and when you get bugs, you have to fix them anyway. There's an assumption in typed languages that we can design our types well enough upfront to help solve the problem.

It's interesting how types create a dependency on the interface (i.e. if you use a type, you depend on it). One of the ideas of Abstract Data Types was to reduce dependency on the internal implementation details; but you're still dependent on the external interface. If you change the interface, it creates problems (e.g. unit testing claims to give you confidence to refactor, but if you change interfaces, you also have to change the tests...). EDIT added "claims to"

This seems intrinsic to modularity, and I can't really see any solution to this; except for ways to make it easier to cope with interface change. Some insights may come from webapp API's, where the dependency is more explicit (you have to send and receive serialized messages).
I've got to wonder how much of a good plan it is to publish your ID card including ID Number and DoB.
I know it's just a story, but if I had managers like this, I'd be headed for the door so fast, I'd trip over them.
France bans the words 'Facebook' and 'Twitter' from TV and radio news broadcasts
Unpack in this sense means "unbox", and you can specialize before you hide the type.
I can certainly change the name, even at this point, but that would take up a significant amount of the cash left in the business. That'd leave little for the client acquisition push we were about to embark on.

If I were to take on the project myself, I would be willing to put in more cash for that purpose. But I worry about my cofounders claim to half of the business, and risking more of my own money when he technically has the right to half of the reward.
>"You can have a benevolent dictator"

Or in the case of HN a philosopher king.
True this guys methods are questionable, as well as his objective.

But if his claims are true than both and AriBnB was faking user recommendations to gain users than they should get criticized for it. Even more so if they systematically violate Craiglist ToS.
P.S. Anybody can say you infringe on their trademark, but no one you need to worry about would call you about it. The proper response is "Thank you for your phone call. We will take such steps as the law requires.", then do absolutely nothing until a lawyer C&Ds you on paper. That is the minimum for legal threats to raise above the level of noise.
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You're right.

Thank you for the encouragement.

$5,000 is less that the price of tuition, and I've definitely learned more than I ever did in a semester of college.
Both signify that the project was done quickly & may have bugs. Also, they aren't necessarily attempting to turn the project into a business, or even make money off the project.

It's a warning. They aren't looking for startup advice, they just want to show a (hopefully) helpful project that may have a few bugs.
This article confuses the reader with a weird implicit definition of modularity. The miscommunication is rooted here:

> Separate compilation allows you to compile parts of a program separately from other parts. I would say it was a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for modularity.

The author goes on to assert that a requirement for modularity is that modules that depend on each other should be able to be compiled independently, without even a specification to glue them together. This just doesn't make sense. This might be a debatable point, but it has nothing to do with modularity.
Sony Music, Computer Entertainment (PlayStation), Electronics, Pictures, Online Entertainment, Network Entertainment -- all separate companies.
Reports of Groupon's Death are Greatly Exaggerated
"The kind of app that needs to scale up to 4-8 processors but never higher is pretty rare."

I disagree. At my last job I exclusively made internal web apps that could always live on a single server. They never needed to scale beyond the cores on 1 box, but most benefited from using all cores on that box.
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It's worth pointing out that a religious belief is not the same as a belief held religiously.

A reasonable Christian would believe that God created the world in 6 days, but also believe that species have evolved to what we have now.

A dedicated atheist would believe religiously that there are no gods, even if she were standing in front of Thor.
There is already a C spec and it isn't formalized in coq. You can formalize it incorrectly.
HDFS: Realtime Hadoop usage at Facebook -- Part 2 - Workload Types
I'm not a lawyer, but I have done a lot of trademark research for my own business, and I can tell you that you're definitely infringing.

The bright line standard for trademark lawsuits is essentially "would a reasonable person mistake your brand for your competitors?". In this case, based on what you have said here, you have taken your competitors name, and added "my" in front of it. So most reasonable people would conclude that it is highly likely someone will mistake your competitors brand for yours.

If you were in a completely different industry than the similarly named company, then there would be some wiggle room, because you could argue that even if someone was initially confused about the two companies, there is no possibility for them to buy your product thinking it was the competitors. However, you are in the exact same industry, so the likely conclusion is that the customer will be confused and likely to buy your product thinking its your competitors.

Unfortunately, the domain name issue is irrelevant in the face of trademark law. In fact, as has happened with many other infringement suits, it is likely that if you lost the lawsuit, you would be forced to transfer the domain to your competitor.
HDFS: Realtime Hadoop usage at Facebook -- Part 1
I did it. I finally published my second book (my first eBook). There are a total of ten chapters which are basically re-edit of my previous LoveMyTool posts. In this short book (50+ papes), I summarize my twenty years experience in high-tech startups, based on my two companies, one VC-funded and one self-funded.

There are no overnight successes. Building a startup is a journey not a race and it is about value-creation not valuation. I write about my survival techniques in creating values for potential customers which is a much slower, much longer, much more demanding but yet ultimately much more financially rewarding journey than creating valuation for potential investors.

The first 100 downloads are free. I am hoping to get enough exposure so that as many first-time entrepreneurs as possible could benefit from this book. If you like the book, as a personal favor to me, please rate and comment on Lulu.com. The more positive feedback I get, the better chance it will be for the book to appear on their recommended list.

Thanks and good luck with your venture.
Actually, there are many folks who say: "I don't enjoy living in a police state, so I moved from [US/EU] to [Singapore/Hong Kong/Chile/etc]. Those are the people who do not spit chewing gum anyway, who don't need to smoke outside anyway, who don't take drugs anyway, who don't care much about the western "political process" and "participation" (ie. majority decides to redistribute other peoples' income for this or that pet project or an undefinable "common good") anyway -- but who increasingly DO care about and frown on ever more regulations getting in the way of their perfectly legitimate non-harmful businesses, increasingly totalitarian approaches to net censorship and surveillance, unprecedented intrusive airport patdowns, massive tax burdens on their startups (a tax dollar saved is a profit dollar earned and keeps people employed and prices competetive etc.) -- believe it or not, they feel they gain a few years of "freedom" -- the freedom to build something profitable privately and keep it running and earn its proceeds -- in places like SG, HK, UAE.

Yes, Jehova's Witnesses shouldn't be jailed and talk about Islam shouldn't be regulated by the state. But then the state also shouldn't strangle and paralyze up and coming non-aggressive mutually beneficial peaceful productive businesses. So to any entrepreneur or business guy who personally doesn't care about Jehovas Witnesses and Islam, which places do you think represent the greener pasture?
Thanks for your thought and responses. I appreciate them.

The other business owner has said they've pursued other trademark suits in the past. He said they've found that approaching by phone first has been a more pleasant way for them to solve problems than first sending a C&D (I'm sure, if for no other reason, than to save on lawyer fees).

So you're saying I should wait for an official C&D? I have little doubt that he'll send one. But I should wait until I actually receive it.
no it's not. How do you coordinate between those processes? It's far easier to use a producer/consumer model on the jvm with threads. I do this all the time and it's really easy, much easier than managing multiple processes and some kind of external queue like redis.
Ethically I think the right thing to do is talk it over with your business cofounder, and to come to a mutually-agreed decision.

Is your business a company with two owners or a partnership? If it's the former, I think you'll have to buy out your cofounder's shares. To determine their valuation, I think you'll have to talk to an accountant. If it's a partnership, I think you'll either have to get a new partner, or start a new business.

And I might be wrong, as always.
There's the high-concept pitch.
You've learned a lot about business, and it cost you a lot less than an MBA. Given the time and money you've spent, you're in a better position than most 24 year olds.
Right. And you're saying you could not figure out ways to fix these problems? Innovate!
Undercapitalization is one of the most common reasons a company fails. Have successful businesses been started with $5,000 or less? Sure. But don't drink the Kool Aid. Lesson #1: it usually takes a lot more than $5,000 to get a business going and to sustain it long enough to reach break-even. In your case, just think of it this way: any salesman worth his salt is unlikely to work for less than $5,000/month...

Lesson #2: at the age of 24, if you don't have even $5,000 worth of savings that you can afford to blow and need to borrow that amount from family, you should probably take a step back and think long and hard about your financial priorities. Depending on your location and your education and/or skills, you can probably earn $5,000/month, if not substantially more, working for someone else. Yeah, that's not as cool as starting a business, but opportunity costs are greatest at your age. What's really not cool: wasting away your twenties and having nothing to show for your efforts once you hit 30. Sure, everybody in StartupVille is always one venture away from a big exit or a $100,000/month business, but when you go to conferences and meetups and see thirty-somethings who have no net worth because they've been swinging for the fences since they were 20, it isn't pretty. Bottom line: at your age, in the absence of substantial existing savings or alternate sources of income (a trust fund, etc.), working on anything that requires you to "work for free" for any length of time is likely to be really, really harmful to your finances in the long run.