skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Until _before_ a patent case. The taxes are what gives you the ability to sue (and a limit to the damage you can be awarded), and there is no guarantee you will win your case of that your patent will not be invalidated.

Again, you have to pay the tax _before_ you can sue, and then you can only sue for the value reflected by the tax for that year, no more (and you are still subject to invalidation, etc).
Google+ API still due? You can already do stuff …
I was an early advocate of GAE but this is now my fear as well. When the new pricing was announced, the amount that they raised the service by seemed quite fair, but just the fact that it went up spooked me into being afraid of the fact that they could readjust the price at any time.

While I suspect they won't make it a habit of raising the price from here on out, the more I thought about it the more I've come to the conclusion that it makes sense to go with providers that use more standardized software stacks (despite how great not having to sysadmin is and the easy deployment from Eclipse to GAE), because that way I can take advantage of future competition of providers. If I go with GAE the costs to switchover become greater and greater the longer I'm there... so while they may never jack the price UP on me, they'll have little incentive to bring the price down due to increased competition.
"We're dying, Jim. We're all dying."

He's not dying.
I used to run a popular blog in 2000. The thing I didn't like about blogging, was that if I shut down my blog (which I eventually did), I would lose my entire audience.

So I started letting people sign up for email newsletters back then, just to kind of "own" the contact info of my readers, so I could continue communicating with them, even if I shut down my blog.

Today everyone is a publisher. And with the proliferation of social media, RSS and eventually Twitter came to solve that problem -- even if I don't tweet for a year, I'll still have my followers (assuming people are still using Twitter then, which I think they will be).

However, having the email addresses of your followers & fans still seems a bit more durable, not relying on Twitter or any other service.

So... that's why I built it. Did I think I would sell it so quickly? Originally, no.
+1, just flag these posts and hope that enough us keep doing the same.
Question about the chat deploy bot: there are a few lines in there that look like this:

hubot deploy github/ghost-down to production

Is that deploying a branch directly to production, or does that cause a branch to be merged with master and then master deployed to production? If the former, why deploy a branch directly rather than sticking to the "master is production" idea?
PUD WHY U NO... err, you pretty much did everything right.

Good job and congrats.
T-Mobile has horrible service and horrible data plans. I'm sick of them and wish they would get sucked into the black hole that is ATT. Where I still will have horrible service and bad data plans.

Need to switch to Verizon.
We use it. The server isn't open source, but it wasn't difficult to follow the protocol and create a Google App Engine app.
It is my understanding that this was pretty much exactly the pitch for Intellectual Ventures, and now they have sunk to aiding and abetting trolls.
Custom strapless wedding dress
No, but I did get a MailChimp cat hat: http://www.flickr.com/photos/freddievonchimp/sets/7215762650...
If you're using Mercurial, Kiln offers code reviews and repository management, hosted by us or on your server.

http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/

(disclosure: I work on Kiln at Fog Creek)
I agree with the above post. Not dying after 2 years is enough for me to say you guys definitely should apply.
Game Closure Quietly Raises Seed Round From SV Angel And More
That is pretty scary.
Exactly. If you have to memorize answers to these, you need to revisit CLRS and brush up on your problem solving skills. But this is also an example of how these interviews are gamed. You don't want someone who just memorized the answers and couldn't come up with them on their own, but its hard to distinguish the two during an interview. And in many cases the guy who answers faster from having memorized it can seem like the better candidate.
Totally agree, the perspective Sebastian has indicates that he really doesn't have a lot of money- this kind of post is just way too immature.

I've done years of world traveling and met so many people that remind me of this guy its uncanny. They like to talk big, but that's about it. From an interview with this guy, question is "what is your profession?" Answer:

Entrepreneurship. Current company does technology, engineering, and business processes for a few different high margin fields. Two sets of business cards - one with "General Manager", the other with "CEO"

Oh really? What's your company? Do they have a website? What are the "high margin" fields? You write 8 million word blog posts about crows cawing in Miyagi prefecture but when it comes to what you do it's extremely vague and there's usually a reason for that. The huge numbers are for show and attention. $1k an hour! $40 million! Yeah. Right. Whatever, man.
That's pretty cool. Good move, MailChimp. Any word on the acquisition price?
We decided not to disclose acquisition price. I don't remember why we decided that.

I guess it's like telling people your salary -- just a thing people generally don't do. I think that'll change one day tho as stuff becomes more public.
The pure research funded by taxpayers via the NIH or university research represents a tiny fraction of the cost of getting a new treatment to market. The patents cover the risk of taking raw research through testing and development stages that can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and still not deliver a viable product at the end of the process.
What are video games turning us into?
I'm curious why mailchimp made the acquisition. Your service is simple and works well; it wouldn't be hard for mailchimp to build it themselves.

Was the acquisition to get your user base, or to get you to come work for them to build out their newsletter service?
And people think I'm weird for refusing to be in a Real Relationship (tm).

... or publishing my home address/real name online.

The world is full of crazy people.
Whether or not a language is strongly typed has no effect on whether the programmer has to define the type of everything. You defined what a statically typed language is, not what a strongly typed language is.

In fact if a language is strongly typed not defining anything will not necessarily have an impact on speed because it is possible to infer types statically at compile time like GHC does for Haskell.
Thanks. MailChimp loves TinyLetter also, and will make sure it continues to get even better. Better != more complicated. Keeping it simple is top priority.
Not really digging this system. Seems counter-intuitive.
I do not think Myspace could have saved themselves through brand advertising, because Facebook wasn't attacking them at a mass audience level; they cornered the college market, school-by-school, then methodically expanded social-group-by-social-group. According to the research, in most categories, recommendations from friends and family is far and away the most important influencer. Advertising doesn't come close. And anyway, this is very much the opposite of mass market awareness; they did exactly what a startup SHOULD do, which is narrowly define their audience of early adopters and then focus all their energy on a growing a critical mass of adoption there. Then, and only then, should you consider growing to a broader audience.

Also, good advertising can never save a bad product.
Applying to YC as a Single Founder
This is a valid argument against open source operative systems running top clearance environments such as the military / police / government agencies. If this modifications had gone undetected for a few months, it's possible that the compromised code could have made it into a lot of critical systems.I am a Linux user, but I remember this being a Microsoft argument in the past for promoting their OS to run in government agencies.
David Green Secret Stock Promo Review
Did you actually read the page? Because it says exactly the opposite. It says that it would be impossible to modify the source without hundreds of people noticing immediately.
The number thing is abusable. Witness facebook still operating under the SEC's 500-person limit:

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/facebook-and-the-500-...

I'm not aware of any measurement method that any moderately smart rules lawyer (aka anyone who's played more than 5 hours of a strategy video game or pen and paper RPG) couldn't figure out a way around.
why can't i digg you down?
Got my copy, too. I'm excited to read it.
Theological Chatbots: two chatbots talking to each other
Humans have been using tools for 300,000 years longer than we thought
Proprietary codebases aren't fortresses.

edit: And what ars said.

edit: And the chorus.
It's just the servers. The kernel repositories weren't modified, and even if they were, git makes it pretty impossible to modify history if you're paying attention -- the next push would fail as a non-fast-forward.
A neutral name is fine if you can own it (and I don't mean in the trademark sense here). eg. Amazon... or Zappos. Neither of these names are cool on their own, they simply mean what they mean because the company behind them worked hard to establish the brand as a symbol of quality (of customer service, mostly).

OTOH, there are names that aren't really neutral and those can hurt you no matter how good your product/service is. Nick's examples of Fukime and MunchOnMe (1) are perfectly representative of this, IMO. Those two names give me a bad impression of the company to begin with, so they are starting off in a deep hole instead of at sea level when trying to get me to use them.

(1. FWIW, I made the same connection back when Fukime was doing their launch post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2848436 )
Hilarious! Post that on Instagram and it will be a mega-hit. IG'ers love cats.

But seriously, congrats. Having followed you since FC, I really like how transparent you are with so much of your work stuff.
Ditto. We went through as a 4 founder team in summer 07.
This line is repeated everywhere now, and it is hard to swallow. A deterrent is only useful if you employ it from time to time to demonstrate its power.

If you have offensive capacity you will be bound to use it.

Guns don't kill people, People kill people.
Sure, but guns make it much easier, and by design, have the capacity for landing in the wrong hands.
I was wondering, are you ever afraid of taking the reins? The OP says how they failed a few times before they had success. Is that something that keeps you in that mode of kicking back and letting others take the rein, or is the want to succeed greater than your fear of failure? Or do you simply enjoy the challenge and struggle that comes with entrepreneurship?

I don't mean to prod, I'm just curious as I'm thinking of starting my own personal project but fear it's too big to complete.
> Last week, Sylvain noticed that there was no way to know whether code was currently being deployed to the server. So he hooked up some (huge) speakers to a spare desktop and wrote a script that plays a bell sound every time the deploy script is run.

I wrote a quick five-liner that'll prevent people from deploying over each other - until you've successfully deployed, nobody else gets to. (Yes, there's ways to unlock it.)

As far as sounds go, I'm tempted to use some of the ones from here: http://theportalwiki.com/wiki/Turret_voice_lines
Open-source wearable electronic pendant: iNecklace
That's the type of pragmatic individual reasoning that collectively just perpetuates and reinforces the current system. If we can't rely on government then the only way to change it is by being unreasonable.
Well, it stinks when you try to do something good and then catch a bunch of crap from people doing nothing, for not doing enough. So I don't want to do that.

But here's the thing - while this is good, the Intellectual Ventures of the world are actually wining and dining congressional aides and maxing donations. The financial industry got that patent carve-out a couple months ago that only applied to their industry. Until tech people get into the game, full-court press in DC and get actual job creators and moneymen in front of congressmen telling them that this stuff destroys jobs, they're not going to be represented.

You're not obligated to go on a personal crusade on this, and it sounds like a big hellish pain in the ass that would be a net loss for you personally and for YC by entangling you in politics. But until someone does, people in favor of patent reform are going to be unilaterally disarmed.

Maybe some sort of industry lobbying group for small tech biz that's not beholden to the big corps would be effective. A small amount kicked in by some of the major angels/VCs, and a limited lobbying mission of "stuff that everyone can agree to" which would certainly include abusive patent use.
Interesting that I'm not seeing this on Are We Fast Yet? I thought that was always the bleeding edge JaegerMonkey specs.
I don't think college projects correlate well, for the main reason that you often can't pick your teammates like you pick your cofounder. The motivation is a grade, not money, and there are other grades (distractions) you must concern yourself with. With a good cofounder (or even coworker) there will be division of labor and trust to speed things up. And hopefully you'll see how you work together before you commit.
> we currently believe that the source code repositories were unaffected

So for now it looks like no compromised code has been distributed.
Might want to try out Heroku's Cedar Stack. It's been great so far.
no modifications to the code appear to have been made. Like they said, that would be hard/impossible because it's all signed off by Linus in git, so ever if they compromised the server it gets them nothing. They'd then have to compromise some accounts and submit patches and still get them approved.

This argument is completely bogus. I could just as easily have happened to any one else including Microsoft, and in those cases we might not even have heard about it.

It already has happened repeatedly to some hardware vendors where an actual payload was injected into their drivers, and they weren't open source.

Between open source and git it's dramatically more likely an injected payload would be detected long before dissemination could take place.
Just as you saw Google suing startups for naming themselves "<X>oo<Y>le" when they were search-related in any way. And as you see every competently run company, everywhere defend its trademarks.

Trademarks and patents are very different things.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-tells-booble-to-ce...
Yes, those kinds of stats are collected. Ad networks, servers, and exchanges are some of those places that physics phds go when they don't go to Wall Street or, heaven forbid, academia. We're not at that level, but we do have a whole analytics department filled with statisticians.

No, you are not the norm; video pre-roll is a particularly strongly performing media type at the moment. It does radically depend on the audience & creative, of course. But if you're looking at the rates of a publisher, pre-roll is going to be one of the higher ones.
I don't think the above commenter suggests you want people who DON'T have a basic understanding of computer-science at all. The problem is that the traditional 45min-per-interviewer style of interviewing really isn't sufficient to know if someone is a viable candidate or not. You don't know until they actually work on something.

That's what is refreshing about Pulse's process: you actually work on something and present it to them. This is very practical approach, and requires the use of the candidate's facilities which include, but are by no means limited to, computer-science understanding.

As an aside, I've also worked with people who have good technical skills but had serious attitude problems. Those people tend to have a very negative effect on company culture.
How would a proprietary operating system be better?
I think the file format itself is the most trivial aspect of this whole thing. Even if you'd roll your own, you probably could cobble together some kind of XML/JSON based copy of the message DB diff within hours (or just use RSS).
You need a carrot for Congress. Right now, a patent reform (of the kind HN would generally like) will:

a) reduce government intake in the form of patent registration and maintenance fees
b) get all the lobbyists employed by current patent holders (who spend billions of dollars on those patents) working against you.

Why on earth would congress do something like that? So that 0.05% of the population that actually has any idea how bad it is would rejoice? (If your answer is "to improve american competitiveness" or something like that -- well, you have no idea how congress works)

However, if you can get a new spending source, you just have the lobbyist problem to take care of.
Salesforce Live Starts in 5mins w/ Garry Vaynerchuk
Volunteerism doesn't work when there is too much money at stake. How much has that green consumer really done for the environment without assistance from a carbon tax? Like calls for conservation, this is well-intended, but a distraction from the real problem, which is that the patent system is badly engineered for innovation.
The biggest problem with the patent system is it discourages people from using patented ideas - the more patented ideas you use in your product (even if you independently discover them), the more you pay.

A good patent system would have the following properties:
* Investment and risk taking in R&D and sharing the results is rewarded above the costs of that R&D, so there is no disincentive to share with competitors.
* There is no disincentive to using and building on ideas shared by others.

I think the best system is a 'tax'-like system - alongside the existing patent system, businesses can elect to pay 10% of their revenues to a pool for immunity from all patents. Businesses using / reselling patented manufactured products are still liable even if the manufacturer pays the 10%, unless they also pay the 10%. Patent filers tell the pool the actual costs of R&D (and may be audited to prove it). The pool is distributed based to patent filers based on R&D costs (and maybe a per-industry factor for risk) - it might be better to somehow collect some rough metric of value of the each patent to their business from patent users, although there are risks of the system being gamed then.

This system would achieve the desired properties at 10% of all industry-wide research being spent on R&D - it would favour not disclosing R&D worth more than 10%, and if less than 10% was spent, it would be stacked in favour of companies doing R&D.
Congratulations! Did they offer you more because it was coded in CFML and they didn't laugh at your back end?

Maybe more time for you to recreate F'd Company now?
I don't do any development and I've still heard about git's reputation.

edit: Why is this being downvoted?
How long might it take for a problem to be detected were compromised Windows code to make it into critical systems?
There has been a lot of confusion and complaining about the price increases, and this is understandable given the way it has come about. This is one of those oh so obvious things, but you just have to look at it and evaluate.
Besides scalability, app engine can be a great platform from a rapid app development standpoint. It has other nice aspects in addition to the scalability.

And don't forget to look into what may be able to be done to minimize some of the quota impact. Good design changes may be able to have a noticeable positive effect there.

Have a look at AppScale if you are looking at moving off the platform. That may be a way to get 80% of the way there with less monumental changes.
I don't want to speak for MailChimp (read their blog post for that).

But basically, they like TinyLetter. TinyLetter likes MailChimp (srsly, the email business can be slimy as hell but they're totally legit, upstanding, & everyone knows it). TinyLetter has a good brand and a decent amount of users (roughly 500,000 people subscribed to 30,000 newsletters). Both companies recognize an opportunity that we think is large, and buying TinyLetter gives them a head start.

I'll be helping advise TinyLetter for a while, and we both really wanted to work together.

So basically, for these reasons and more, it just "made sense," if that makes sense.
... thereby making it cheaper for trolls acquiring patents, like Intellectual Ventures, as there is less market for the patents -- but not slowing them down.
I'm not up to speed on how compatible and recent it is, but AppScale bills itself as "Open Source Platform for Google App Engine Apps": http://code.google.com/p/appscale/
Mobile TV And Video Platform MobiTV Files For $75 Million IPO
there's a mix of housing in Palo Alto - a fair amount of students and young persons intermingled with home owners of (very) expensive homes. I lived in a $1500/month place on Everett (cheap) and across the street there were million dollar houses, but a block in another direction were a few places that looked like 1920s era sharecroppers houses.
Why must Apple employees leave their prototypes at bars?
id like to point out that while you can't modify tagged+gpg signed tag commits, you can modify non signed commits (aka any commit that isnt a tag) and it'll get signed when it gets tagged.

that's also assuming that tags are gpg signed, which they often are not,even on kernel.org

non signed can be actually tampered with and they do need to check the code thoroughly with 3rd party older archives which is a PITA.

Code signing > x, including per commit signing mr Linus T and GIT maintainers.

Note that they were against per commit signing because "when you sign the tag, you sign everything so its ok".

Except you wont read all the patches you sign when you sign the tag, and if any has been modified, as explained, you don't know. Again, per commit signing solves it.

Food for though I guess.
I graduated cum laude on a thesis about mass influence so your question kind of intrigues me... Robert Cialdini has written a great book on this: 'Influence: the psychology of persuasion'. Cialdini discovered 6 principles that can persuade others:
- Reciprocity
- Commitment
- Social proof
- Authority
- Liking
- Scarcity

You can find the principles at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini#Six_.22Weapons_... but you really should read the book, it's a good read. I realize some of his tactics lean towards black flag so use with caution. Dress up the truth, but remain caring and honest would be my advice.
What's funny is that right after I posted that blog post about how I use an unusual stack[1], MailChimps CEO sent me this eerily similar blog post about their stack:
http://blog.mailchimp.com/ewww-you-use-php/

[1] http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2942129
I don't get it then. If my company holds a huge portfolio of patents, and we sue for $X damages on some subset of them in a given year, we will simply value those patents at $X and the rest at zero. Then we recover $X in damages, and pay 1% of X in taxes.

In other words, doesn't this just reduce to a 1% tax on patent damages?

(Even if we think we'll only recover on average p% of our claims, we still only pay 1% of X in taxes to get p% of X in damages. Assuming p% is closer to 50% than 1%, not much changes.)