skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's challenging to compare an Internet company in 2011 to a freeze-frame of one in 2004.

The better comparison is to Google today, which is worth $171B. Is Facebook worth 2/3 as much as Google? It certainly could be, since if it assaults Google head-on in an ad network, given certain other assumptions it could capture a huge market position.
Thanks -- I got in on the iPhone beta and it looks good so far. I'm excited to see this service become public -- I think it could be super useful.
Zuckerberg has several times, in big mainstream media outlets, tried to define this word and explain the difference between the way it is used within the industry and the way it's used in the press - http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/115/open_features-hacker...
A high tax jurisdiction will charge, often, %40 of profits at the corporate level and then another %40 at the personal level. So, for every $100k you bring in, corporate taxes reduce it to $60k and personal income taxes reduce it to $36k.

A low tax jurisdiction would might charge %10 corporate taxes and %10 personal taxes, meaning that for $100k in income you're left with $81k.

I think more than doubling your net income is worth consideration, especially if it means the difference between being able to afford to continue your startup, or having to go and "get a real job".
I believe sorbus's comment covers it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2730277
Have you tried HipHop? https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php
San Francisco, CA (111 Sutter st.)

Rails engineer, fulltime, onsite

Tapjoy is looking for backend Rails engineers to join our current engineering team of 12 (6 backend, 2 frontend, 3 client, 1 designer). The company is 4 years old, profitable, and looking to grow.

https://www.tapjoy.com/careers/software_engineer

I would appreciate it if you mention me (hc5) for referral, but no pressure ;)
This is a tricky and complicated subject. Under what conditions should a corporation like Cisco be responsible for censoring or imposing its values, whatever they are, upon clients? For instance, should it be expected to regulate purchases to organizations that support the KKK? That oppose abortion? That support immigration? That support flag burning? That support cap-and-trade? That oppose the estate tax? Certainly some of these are heinous and orthogonal to American values and some are not. The question is: when should a corporate citizen not be neutral?
Astroturf hurts: leadership resigns after GLAAD supports T-Mobile sale
Hopefully projects like HLVM will be able to fix that by proving a very good target for dynamic language implementations. It's a very ambitious project that's in relatively early stages, but seems promising.
All the details are on MathOverflow [1], and the recommendation of Franzén's Inexhaustibility [2] is spot on.

[1] http://mathoverflow.net/questions/67214/pi1-sentence-indepen...

[2] http://www.aslonline.org/books-lnl_16.html
This makes perfect sense. people won't admit it but there is a fear of meeting people in person to get a number or a name. This takes the hardest part of the relationship out. I think this would be great maybe even in a college setting when people are at a bar or a party.
This was my experience 6 months ago (I ended up using multiple firefox profiles for months because of it).
Just tried it again this week, and I haven't run into the "derp derp derp one half of your accounts aren't allowed to see this"-type error yet.
at least your only 20 - i've lost EVERYTHING at 52 and have NO chance of every again living any semblance of a "normal" life. Non-degreed IT engr. with 20 yrs experience means dick these days - for some frickin reason everyone expects that if your into it you have a piece of sheepskin. wtf. i too am worried as to what will happen - but I'm not at home, and mere steps away from living on the streets. i can't catch a break, and all the gee-wiz kids (no offense, there are a lot of bright ones out there) are all up on the latest & greatest, whereas, I know 60-80% as much but being an old fart - I always get the cold shoulder. I hate my life, stay away from coding or move overseas since that's the only place you'll find a job in 3 years. fck america, fu* bush. now where's my fifth...time to get wasted and forget the misery.
I think this all depends on the nontechnical cofounder you're dealing with. Some have an idea and just want it built, and, as rcavezza mentioned, have done no customer development. As a nontechnical founder myself, I don't think it's reasonable to start seeking a web consultant or a technical cofounder until a solid amount of work (read a month or two developing the business) has been done. Customer development is only one piece of the pie, but thinking about how the iterations of the product might look, actually designing the site (at the least on a mockup software with the UX clearly defined), and really having understanding of what the consumer wants and rationale for why the product is to work the way it does is all extremely important. A very concrete vision for the product and what future versions of it would look like (contingent upon user feedback and usage, of course) is also crucial. None of that comes in a week of work. It takes lots of time and a huge amount of conversations with users, entrepreneurs, and people who understand the space you're working in.

That said, after that work was done and the nontechnical founder could reasonably say they were ready for their prototype to be built as an MVP, then sure, I'd go with $1000 - 2000 to get it built. Again, to reiterate what others have noted, this depends on the complexity of the product. I don't like the idea of saying "get it done in three days." Too arbitrary. Building a minimum VIABLE product takes communication, and I'm not sure if enough communication would be done in 3 days to actually build something viable.

For those of you that are interested in a JS/jQuery-heavy project with a RoR backend, I am actively looking for someone to help me with this. I have been actually working on this business full time for the last 1.5 months, and I'd like to say I am finally ready to work with someone technical to make this happen. Feel free to contact me @ a[dot]shah811[at]gmail[dot]com
This is neat, however I'd like to see it archive the comments as well. It looks like it redirects to the actual discussion page on Hacker News, which is not an accurate glimpse of that thread at the point in time it was archived.
What if the entity was a p2p program that was miraculously internationally recognized? The hard part to me convincing governments to give up power.
Your reasons given for building this are exactly why I built hckrnews[1], and why Peter Cooper built hackerslide[2].

[1] - http://hckrnews.com

[2] - http://hackerslide.com
I think it's generally accepted at this point that the WSJ has become the conservative mouthpiece of Murdoch since it's acqusition in 2007.
Very often I think, how stupid these files and folders actually are. But I also think that Google Mail (with smart tagging and search), OSX (with an even better search, at least I'm faster with it) and Dropbox (automated versioning) already go in the right direction. I bet that some years later you don't have to worry about folders and files anymore.
$1,000 for website with back-end code isn't that bad is it? If I somehow had assurance of the quality, didn't have a technical friend in mind, and couldn't do it myself, I'd probably heavily consider it as a solution. I say this because I do have a project in mind (but taken care of).

I feel this spiraling back into the technical co-founder discussion.
I'll get downvoted for this.

Argument (I don't completely agree, but someone will make it sometime)- I think it is not good for humanity to trust the jurisdiction of a country which has demonstrated tainted judgement by getting involved in nuclear weapons and given their recent involvements in the middle east. The United States is not the country whose jurisdiction should control any form of worldwide open platform.

Just a thought. This stuff needs some sort of international law. No jurisdiction in the world is good enough to rule the web, in any damned way. We cannot take our narrow minds into the future for our race.
I'm really impressed with the speed and scope of these recent changes Google has made. Most giant tech companies wouldn't be able to pull this off. Could anyone imagine Microsoft doing anything this big and fast? I can't.
> hastily

Was two millennia not long enough? We could take another couple centuries, I guess. I don't think we're ever going to get a new answer for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter of that circle, though.

> The lack of the 1/2 in the π version shows why it's "wrong"—it's not as meaningful.

Frankly, I don't know what this means. I've read it several dozen times, and each time, it seems increasingly more inane. I can't help but wonder what you would say about the derivative (and antiderivative) of e^x; would you complain that it's not meaningful? Does it need more coefficients? More exponents?
From reading the article, it doesn't sound like Google is going to make major functional changes to the products. Rather, the article suggests that Google is going to rename and rebrand the products to be more consistent with their other product names.
Good list, I think these belong there too: Invasion(2005) and Threshold
You don't have to choose between a nice place and low taxes. high taxes and regulations can give you cities like detroit and chicago while low taxes and regulation can give you cities like hong kong, monaco, panama city, etc.

In fact, the point of my comment is that the business could be located in a low tax jurisdiction, resulting in more funds flowing to the bottom line, while the owners and employees could be located somewhere they like, even a high tax jurisdiction if they wanted.
I suspect it's not that easy to graft them onto existing search engines efficiently. I don't know what sort of data structure search engines usually use, but in order to support regexes efficiently they would almost certainly have to be a prefix tree of some sort.
Boston, MA

Senior Linux Sysadmin/Engineer

This position is responsible for management of critical network infrastructure, including our network hardware, SAN, and Linux machines (physical and virtual). You will share emergency 24x7 on call duties and respond to critical outages including on-site work as necessary. As we are a small team, you will also share responsibility for email, support tickets and phone calls from employees and financial advisors. The position reports to the CEO/CIO.

http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=302...
The $32,000 Startup: How important are technical skills or outside funding?
Twitter Town Hall Meeting with President Obama
Can you explain further what was difficult about getting a Scala environment set up? For me it was "sudo port install scala", "sudu port install sbt", cd to/my/project/path, "sbt".
Just finished reading Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine" and I highly recommend it. A little older, but still a hell of a good read and really fed the part of my mind that digs tech histories and start-up narratives.
Google To Discontinue Blogger & Picasa Brands
I guess the main problem is that you really can't build an index for regexes, you would need to apply the search regex "live" to all the documents the searchengine knows - this will not scale at all.

Also, if you let a user search for any regex, it would be really easy to overload the server, by entering very complex regexes.
Maybe this is their indirect way of giving you incentive to move to a Google account? (Don't feel bad I have google accounts and do not have g+ access yet.)
Lack of customer service is not related to whether something is a 'product', or 'you are the product'. It's simply a lack of customer service.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_Arrangement

The companies you are really looking for are Afilias USA, Inc and Afilias LLC. If they were really based out of Ireland, their IP space would be allocated by RIPE (Réseaux IP Européens) instead of ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers).
I don't really see why. The world is not black and white. I tell my friends things that are sensitive all the time, and they understand that as a matter of simple good manners and common courtesy they would keep that information between us. How come as soon as we're on the Internet, suddenly all the shades of gray disappear, and I either trust someone with my entire life story to do with as they wish or I don't trust them at all?
1.) Very nicely designed site. Not sure about the beach theme (what's the connection) ?

2.) Chrome downloads a .wav file for the customer chat widget you have embedded. This happens every time I come back to the landing page. You should look into that. I'm on Windows 7 running Chrome 12.0.7

3.) I know you're in BETA, but one of my pet peeves are services like this, where you have no idea of what the pricing structure is going to be. It might just be me, but I'd much rather you have outline some basic pricing info and have to change it when you launch, then have nothing at all.

4.) Would love to have seen a few full page screenshots.

Best of luck.
But are these consequences of a default, or of other things going on in their society?
The Wall Street Journal editorial page is, and always has been, garbage. Poorly sourced and poorly argued, whenever I accidentally come across it I always end up in a foul mood. Not that the other papers of record, Washpo and NYT, are all that great either.
It often is... Geocoding is a fun game.

I recently did a project with just geocoding in Ontario and it took a while to fix all the various cases for the 600+ volunteer-entered locations. Bonus points: only some (and different) geographical information was available for each address. Postal codes/zip would be ideal for this.
Grammar girl has an explanation [1] of the rule I've heard elsewhere and always followed---splitting it into "Jack's and Jill's" if they have separate and distinct things (so "Jack's and Jill's stories") and attaching the possessive to the compound entity if they share the item (so "Jack and Jill's story"). So in this case you're definitely correct about not splitting up the possession.

I haven't been able to find anything authoritative to explain what to do when there is a pronoun involved, though I believe the correct form would be "my wife and my..." and not "my wife and I's".

[1] http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-compound-posses...
What makes heroku work with rails is rails' use of gemfiles/bundler, so that you don't have to upload every gem that your rails app uses. I don't know how it works with node, but from heroku's getting started articles, it looks like leiningen (a clojure build tool) is what that allows them to offer clojure support.

I don't know the scala ecosystem at all. Does scala have a similar tool that allows you to specify what java/scala libraries you want without actually having to upload said libraries?
You never tell your friends secrets in real life, and trust them not to tell the rest of the world?
So how does one pronounce "OS X"?
Pretty much "authoritatively" settles the debate for once and for all.
I'm pretty sure you're talking about Brat or Ioke, although I'm not sure. :D
Face it. Hacker is the old cracker, and cracker now means a crazy white mofo. Origins of the word don't have a lot of meaning once popular usage changes.
Old hackers need to do what old hackers used to do; quit clinging to tradition and create a new word to use to describe themselves.
Public entrepreneurs can inspire growth
Great post!

Edit: I also joined IndexTank recently. I forgot the password to my old HN account so I had to create a new one
Mentoring Is Not The Only Fruit
I wonder what becomes of the 'Blogger' name/domain etc. I'd say it's a pretty valuable 'word' -- an iconic brand somewhat.
So I just looked into what's in the VCards.

How it works is you get all your contacts, and the data you're authorized to see. So, people who you're just following and aren't sharing anything with you, just appear as Google Plus links. People who have you in their circles and are sharing their email address with you will also have their email address attached.
There're many solutions, from installable software such as Redmine[1] to hosted services such as TenderApp[2], GetSatisfaction[3], UserVoice[4], ZenDesk[5], FreshDesk[6], Groove[7], etc.

It all depends on what your needs are.

[1] http://www.redmine.org

[2] http://tenderapp.com

[3] http://getsatisfaction.com

[4] http://uservoice.com

[5] http://zendesk.com

[6] http://freshdesk.com

[7] http://groovehq.com
so..where are all the free speech advocates when someone willfully violates the GPL?
maven is the main package-distribution mechanism in use in the Java world, and it is what is used in the Scala world, as well. The specific tool used varies (sometimes maven, sometimes simple-build-tool, sometimes buildr), but the de facto standard is there.
Does membership to the Society automatically qualify one for Flat Earth Society membership as well?
I would guess that it will just forward to whatever domain Google chooses to use for Google Blogs. I think this happens with Picasa already when accessed through G+.
Oh. Apparently Microsoft doesn't operate in the United States. My bad.
It will probably redirect to Google Blogs.
Take a look at our featured brands section:
www.bombfell.com/threads

We also don't charge your card until you decide to keep the clothes we send.
I was referring to the software running on my side.
Interesting article. I tend to forget about accessibility issues on the web. I imagine something like Google+ or Facebook would be fairly difficult for blind users to navigate with so many asynchronous calls batting about.

On a somewhat unrelated note, are there any usability aids for smartphone users out there? Something like the Voiceover application mentioned in the article?

Edit: I'm mostly curious about Android phones.
Canonical Launches Android App For "Ubuntu One" Cloud Storage
Google, Yelp and Why Review Counts are Meaningless
motorcycle tires
It's a bit hysterical.

Shit! MRI/YARV/REE are inherently fatally flawed! All that code I have running in production must be a FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION! SAVE YOURSELVES
You and your wife don't have kids do you?

http://bestintrobook.com/books/sex

Good work! ;)
Given the nature of the debate, I think it's funny that the HN URL here ends in "404".
Apple JavaScript Coding Guidelines [pdf]
Statements concerning the need to test aside, "almost unusable" is very likely a gross overstatement. To state http://useit.com is almost unusable is equivalent to saying, at the very least, that it is hard to use. It probably could be easier to use (what isn't?), but hard to use it is not.

You can argue that the site is not the most aesthetically pleasing. There may have been a time when this could have been changed, however as the site and Jakob Nielsen have been well known for many years, the visual appearance serves strong branding purposes: it's very obviously useit.com, it's very recognisable, even standing well back from your screen. Jakob has supported this notion as the reason not to change.
Wow... My laptop that I do most of my work on is packing 1GB. I guess I have had it for 4? 5? years. Of course, using things like wmii and Emacs help keep my memory usage down, but Firefox is making that harder.
When does the Cisco-China issue come out?
"The U.S. has defaulted before, in 1933"

So it's defaulted.. and look where it is now.

If Greece looks to the US as a model it should default, and the sooner the better.

"Because a default ... can affect its credit rating and, in turn, its ability to continue borrowing..."

Borrowing is what got Greece in trouble in the first place. Perhaps putting and end to borrowing from other countries would put it on a sounder financial footing. At least it would never again get in to the situation where many future generations would be forced to repay the debts of their ancestors.
Can someone dissect this a little more? My understanding is the pointer to str never gets written to the stack, and so str on the heap might get freed before zstream_append_input makes use of it. But how could the GC see this/what is the faulty assumption?
Agreed - assuming they do plan to "officially" support other JVM languages in the future, that would be a pretty big deal:

* If JRuby got all the nice operational support that Heroku currently gives CRuby, it would be an awesome way to add power to an existing Ruby codebase (run the same code in JRuby, give or take a few gems, start taking advantage of Java libraries or using threads for better throughput).

* Heroku supporting Scala and Clojure could really boost their popularity - AFAIK there's no service for those languages that makes deploying a production-ready, public-facing web app as easy as Heroku does for Ruby.

Update - I guess this quote from the article is relevant, and could indicate a reluctance to support other JVM languages:

Though growing quickly, the Clojure community is small enough to be approachable and accepting of new ideas. This is crucial for a platform like Heroku, which offers a deployment workflow that is a radical departure from that used for server-based deployments. Language communities with heavy investment in traditional deployment methods will be harder to adapt to the Heroku way.
A quarter arc of the unit circle is a quarter τ (τ/4). A half arc of the unit circle is a half τ. A 5/19ths arc of the unit circle is 5/19ths τ.

How much simpler could it get?

Defining the unit circle as a circle with area τ is a contradictory statement and is semantically invalid.
There's sbt, which is less... mavenny, although I think it's actually just a wrapper around maven.
Thanks for the extensive feedback, warnings, and suggestions, HackerNews.

The problems raised here seem to be problems with the existing model of web-development-for-hire and consulting: this is a system that's focused on iterative design in a client-consultant model, not in prototyping as a product.

The key question to whether this can work is this – can we product-ize web application prototyping to make it less like contract hell and more like a turnkey product? I think it's possible.

There are two problems that were highlighted here. I think both of them are addressable, so I'll mention each in turn.

The first is the lack of a specification.

While in a PSD-to-HTML conversion, the screenshot is a spec by itself, in a PSD-to-rails conversion, screenshots aren't specs. There's a way around this; the practice of reducing ideas to specifications is the process we undertake as engineers, so it certainly can be done without any special skills, and shunting this work to the customer as a prerequisite before they can use the service doesn't seem to be a problem.

The second problem pointed out is treating this as contract/consulting work with extensive one-to-one communication rather than a quasi-automated service of compiling apps from a spec, and dealing with the agony that goes with it.

Contract work often ends in debacles (I've experienced it myself). The key to success here would be to _not_ implement this as one-on-one contract work. The goal would be to offer turnkey product prototyping as a product.

I believe that enough automatic barriers on what's uploaded can force a customer both to define specifications and prevent the endless back-and-forth that happens on mercenary work. I'll think about this a bit more and we'll see what can be put together.
For some real excitement, look at how the Apple 2's graphics worked. If you ever worked with hi-res mode you know how screwey the colors were. Turns out they basically serialized the bits right out of ram into a crude NTSC signal and the bits ended up making different frequencies--hence different colors (the high bit of each byte specified whether to delay the rest of the 7 bits by half a clock).

Looking at an Apple 2 schematic is eye-opening. There's hardly anything there!