skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But if you have a company called ABC limited and it owns the merchant account,the bank account, financial statements,legal and all the assets. It should be trivial to sell ABC Limited while not having to worry about transferring domains, bank accounts or merchant accounts.
I am against mandatory calorie counts on menus for restaurants. I don't think it passes the benefits-costs test. And, it gives me the impression that I live in a society where everything I do is being watched and regulated. Sometimes I just want to buy a bowl of chow from another human being without justifying my action to some self-righteous bureaucrat.
It's the 29th have any YC applicants heard from pg et al?
It's the 29th have any YC applicants heard from pg et al?
Er, their first unlock. I've seen several forum posts about people unlocking their G1s already.

Anyone know a reputable source for buying a G1 full price? My experience attempting to sign up with T-mobile a few days ago has lost me as a customer for them.
Very good points, thanks for the reply!

Some things might be inherently pleasurable, or rather are pleasurable just because of the qualia

I completely agree! However (and perhaps I misrepresented my own view here by making things too simplified and black/white for the sake of comprehension) you still have contrast. For instance, an orgasm would likely always be more pleasurable than eating a piece of toast, regardless of whether or not you could experience any sort of displeasure. My argument was more of, "If an orgasm is 10/10 on the pleasure scale and everything felt like an orgasm, it's the same as being 0/0 because there is no longer a scale." Of course the counter-argument here (not much of an argument really) is "Everything would just feel awesome!" Unfortunately, that assumption is made from within the context of a life that does have a scale, so it's meaningless.

Since I can't rightly say that the unknown is finite as I have no idea, I won't argue that eventually Einstein would become so bored that he wished to die. However, I stick by my opinion that if life where eternal it would most certainly redefine the idea of life as we know it and would likely ultimately dilute the experience. To visit the orgasm analogy again, I think life is sort of like one -- a very brief period of heightened pleasure, awareness, etc. If you remove the brevity from it, you eventually remove the pleasure.

I think most people would agree that life is about the moments. The orgasms, the successful companies, the broken hearts. We define our lives based on these moments, we don't define them based on the dull in-between; eating breakfast, taking out the garbage, brushing our teeth. Many of us, I think, strive to fill our lives with as many positive moments as we can mostly because (consciously or otherwise) we realize that we have only so many moments to make before there's simply no time life to make them. If you could live forever, would you honestly work so hard all the days of your long life to make those moments? Or would the lack of urgency dilute your desire for that? Even cause you to eventually lose that desire entirely?

Hell, I don't know. I'm just of the opinion that it would.
In none of the elections within my lifetime have elected candidates ended up doing anything remotely resembling their platforms. You often got the exact opposite. Bush was going to shrink the government and run a humble foreign policy. Clinton was going to massively expand social programs but instead the bond market constrained him and you got the opposite.

On this track record alone voting is a waste of time.

I hope once it becomes clear within a couple years how much of a standard issue establishment tool Obama is that you learn your lesson and remember it rather than get sucked into delusions next time around.
You will surely know on HN when people hear, there probably is no need to ask.
Now that you mention it, the picture of the printer looks like a rendered mockup.

Still, choosing to reveal a product only when it's finished can be a really good idea, depending on company and product.
I'd donate money and beer to the startup that can kill Blackboard.

Its the Windows ME of enterprise software.
Which resulted in widespread violence when landlords tried to make their tenants pay a full month's rent.
Well, they want you to have had service with them (on some contract, not necessarily the G1 contract) for three months, first. If you buy the G1 locked from some third party, you may not have that option.
Thoughts on European Startups - Great Presentation From Saul Klein
Best of luck to everyone who applied
My friends are about to pass out. They've been holding their breath for two weeks waiting for a response. At this point I think they'd be just as happy with a rejection letter.
He included "References available upon request". That's a waste of space (either more content, or more whitespace), because it's assumed you'll produce references when requested.
Do you have any background on the founding team and their "nationwide selling tour"?

I couldn't find much about Mike Chasen or the team. I'm interested in how they built the business (definitely not the software).
Impossible is the Opposite of Possible
yeah its confusing as all heck to users.

The ONLY possible upside I can see, is that it slightly reduces the risk that they give the crown jewels (say, their Google User name and password) to some malicious site mistaking it for an open ID log in.

In other words, the fact that the identity is the web site is a feature. It may not be the right feature, but I think there is some design thought behind it being a url. So users get used to not immediately providing a password, but instead this URL, and THEN after some redirect shenanigans, they do their password etc...
Yawn ...another "startup recession" article driven by originality and sound advice... or maybe not.
89 Ways to Kick Start Your Hacking
10 Years Later, Misunderstood DMCA is the Law That Saved the Web
Google: Economy So Bad We Don't Need As Many Servers As We Thought
Since I submitted this, I want to be clear I don't think it's a good article. I'm kind of stunned by this, hoping to believe it is satire...

Is this the conventional wisdom about the DMCA?
I think that's what Wufoo does - vaca every 2 months. Granted I doubt they did it their first year out.
Google Slows Its Data Center Building Boom
Mine is plaintext, and probably 1-2 pages when printed. Anything that doesn't make the cut for the first page or so goes in the cover letter, or is already somewhere on my blog or in Google, so I don't sweat it.

I actually used the layout of a UNIX 'man' page for a while, which got lots of chuckles, but no offers, so now it's just simple Markdown-like text.
Made From New Zealand – an online experience
Also a decent list of books: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FogCreekMBACurriculum...
A page is "58 lines followed by a form feed". For RFCs anyway.
Yeah, I've been looking for something like this too where you can keep a list of notes handy, online. I haven't found the perfect app yet. I usually just write them down in notepad and save 'em.
Modern candle wicks are a marvel of engineering [vid]
Applied Cryptography - Schneier
At University, I liked Blackboard, except it was a little complex.
>I don't dispute the fact that the command line makes it easier to do some tasks. I've had cygwin installed for a while now and I use the command line a lot but its power on native linux may be much more.

Windows has PowerShell, which is pretty good:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/mana...
I think this deserves killing just as much as the other article. Look at how bad some of the commentary is already.
Is it really? yuck. When I saw this post, I thought this would be reasonably simple... After all, all you need is something to ping/hit the webserver and report when it can't.

To be honest, you can't account for every possible situation. Sometimes murphy's law applies. But if you can find a service that at least lets you know when it's hitting your server historically in some way, you should purchase it and get on to worrying about other things. If the company doesn't perform, you can deal with that issue at that time.
Finding bottlenecks in WSGI applications
What do you look for in a cover letter? I'm not too lazy to make one I've just never understood the purpose. I think you might be able to provide some insight for me.
It's like Christmas eve!!!
The founders being from BYU, the beer would go undrunk. But I'm sure the money would be appreciated ;)
i prefer New Years Eve... less religion and more alcohol
1. Peopleware: http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-S...

2. Pragmatic Programmer: http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Master...
It's not satire. Some people believe that without the DMCA, every "user-generated content" site would have been slapped with a zillion-dollar lawsuit (or rather, the first few would have and nobody would have been willing to start new ones after that).
How could I forget Peopleware? Good call! I've also been meaning to read Pragmatic Programmer, thanks for the reminder...
I will add it to the to-read list!
That's too bad, this sounds like a great monetization scheme that's close to painless for the user.
Combining Parallelism, Virtualization, Heterogeneity and Reliability: Some cu...
[video] Factor: an extensible interactive language
Oh, I'm definitely in the same boat as you guys...
Rate My Startup: Try A Tune - Home
I email myself the moment I think of something, then process my email inbox once a day. When processing, I either do the thing (if it will take less than two minutes), or file it with a project or under someday/maybe. For filing, I just have a bunch of folders and files on my hard drive. Nothing fancy.
Design is a little shabby and definitely needs work, but, work in progress...what I really need is the Google mindset of always being in "BETA"
yeah. seconds on that.
I think restaurants with 15 or more outlets stopped being the little guy a while ago. There is a lot of poorly done regulation that hinders the little guy but that's more an execution detail than a basic fault of regulation.
>(One notable exception: if you're in academics, long CVs are considered better than short. Academia is not the real world.)

Actually, that isn't strictly true. A short academic CV can stand out. As one interviewer said to me, "your CV had no BS on it."

A CV should only be long if your list of publications is (though of course, it will be longer than a resume, since it must include this list).
These are all very good questions and we certainly know that we're not the first company to do grid computing on PCs. :)

First, $1500/node-year (or even $200/node-year) comes to a very substantial amount of money for our target customers. These customers use 10000s of nodes and buy high-end computers and pay a ton for network, power, cooling, and support personnel.

My background is in HPC and I've faced and solved these issues many times. We have a multi-pronged approach to using the compute power:
1) We are definitely writing our own apps on top of Plura. It's a great source of compute power and we have lots of ways we want to use it ourselves.
2) We have a short list of very high impact embarrassingly parallel customers that are evaluating Plura. We intend to help our customers absorb the porting cost associated with Plura.
3) We are open to letting students and universities use Plura's excess capacity for free. We've had several nibbles at this already.

That being said, we realize Plura is not for everyone. It is for a subset of the class of embarrassingly parallel applications out there.
Let's see: predictive I/O scheduling, buffer management, and cryptographic checksums all seem like they fall within the realm of "algorithms," and all would be fairly necessary to a well-behaved non-trivial CD-burning system. And yes, you would need to have some idea how the operating system schedules tasks if you are to have any luck maintaining write throughput to keep from under-buffering.
Well this is pretty much the same thing Microsoft does with standards that everyone yells, "Embrace, extend, extinguish!" at...
Well, before all else, I'm a software guy; not an HR person, so you will want to take this with a grain of salt.

That being said, it doesn't have to be some kind of formal thing; the best cover letters I've read just let me know that someone has actually read and comprehends our requirements and their cover letter should tell me a few things that sets them apart from the other torrent of resumes that I'll see.

In other words, it's obvious that you're applying for this position, and not just every position you see. Just like an employee wants to think that an employer has hand selected them to work there, instead of just saying "you'll do"; an employer likes to think that the person actually cares about what they do and where they work.
Why UML Fails to Add Value to the Design and Development Process
Did anyone get a confirmation email/message that their application was received?
The apps that we're running right now control it pretty well using a sneaky trick. We can't get much computer information from java in an unsigned app, so we measure how long each sub-part of a work unit has taken and sleep an appropriate amount of time. For example, if we are trying to use 25% and a sub-work takes 100ms, we sleep for 300ms. This effectively gives us 25% usage of the available CPU. It will be no higher than that anyway - it might be lower if something else is using substantial CPU time.

As far as the fast versus slow nodes, we normalize everything based on the average computer that completes work each day. So a fast computer may earn 2X or more what a slow computer earns.
Moodle is definitely targetted for smaller shops, like private colleges, schools, etc.. There's nothing restricting it from being used in large organizations, though, and it has a bunch of automation (automatic enrollment in Moodle courses based on enrollment status in another database, integrate logins with existing LDAP or other directory, etc.), but like most open source projects it's very much a community product and not the product of a for-profit entity trying to sell service to customers (that's available through third parties, though).
I always find these moments of tension and hope to be so exciting! I'm definitely on edge waiting for anything..whether it be a "sorry, no." or a "congratulations!"..

edit
and oh yes, good luck to all!
Yep, we'd love to find a way for it to work. If you have any ideas, let us know. :)
Very neat. You may want to be clear on who pays to ship the CD from my house to the next user.

Oh, and RIAA is going to be all over your ass in a heartbeat should you actually become popular.
By the end, and even the last few years, the Alpha was no longer as fast as competing processors for the vast majority of workloads. The x86 architecture had become RISC behind the scenes and Intel and AMD had figured out ways to accelerate CISC to the point where it may have even been a net win for performance (or at least not a significant loss...smaller numbers of instructions had to traverse the slow RAM to CPU bus, and could then be "decompressed" into fast executing but more verbose instructions all within the CPU pipeline, where the bus was dramatically faster--raw clock speed had just caught up to the Alpha, but performance was significantly better, and by 2003 when the last ever Alpha clocked at 1.3GHz the Athlon 64 was released with clocks up to 2GHz). Others, like Sun and IBM and others, had made more progress on the parallelization and shared memory fronts, as well, making Alpha less useful for scientific and other large scale computing work.

Finally, the Alpha technology was sold off to Intel. The advantages of the architecture (and some of the engineers involved) have been assimilated into the CPU borg. It may be ugly, due to such a long and sordid history, but the x86 architecture is now wicked fast. Also the Alpha had elephantine power and cooling requirements. My last company once attended an event where we setup our boxes side by side with a competitors Alpha-based systems, and they had discreetly placed a box fan behind their biggest unit, because, without it, the ambient temperature of the room was too high for the Alpha box to operate reliably. Their box was much faster than ours though. I asked if they included a box fan, or if that cost extra.

But don't let me stand in the way of nostalgia. I, too, remember staring in awe at a DEC that was running at 400MHz, when the Intel architectures were still stumbling along at 166, or something along those lines (and with a dramatically slower bus, and only dual CPU capability in the Pentium Pro).
I understand the theory perfectly, having a pretty good degree in CE. My argument has nothing to do with my personal situation, I'm running an argument based on a theoretical situation.
excellent?
How to Avoid Becoming a Failure Statistic
luke stangel from de anza?
Don't worry, pg will get to your applications, by and by. He has to get his Paladin to level 70 in World of Warcraft in preparation for the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, that's all.
Especially people who get accepted.
MySpace To Hire MTV Exec As MySpace Music CEO
Onenote is the best I've found, by far. And I'm still looking for a replacement for linux. In my case, it's zim, a personal wiki.
Smarty produces slightly cleaner code but is worthless otherwise IMHO.
The number of pages will depend on your experience. If you are just out of school one page is fine. I have almost 20 years (ouch!) so it is hard to make it fit in three pages.
Thanks for the feedback run4yourlives! We debated the RIAA bit for awhile, and they seem to clearly state "renting, leasing, etc.," of a CD is illegal, the theory behind the site would be we're assisting each person on the list to sell the CD to the next user (convoluted, I know, but think eBay in a strange way)
Write your own collection of object oriented php classes or use someone else's. This will speed up your projects a ton. I tend to stay away from frameworks unless it is commissioned work that involves a lot of boiler plate code (forum, blog, etc.).
They do this, of course, because we all know that MTV is "Musical Television" and MTV actually plays music. ;-)
</sarcasm>

Nah, I'm sure they hired this guy cause he actually knows something about what he's doing. More than likely he's done something in the past with the big record companies.
Actually this is terrible. This massively increases the chance of my mum getting hit by a phishing attack. Not happy google - you should have thought this one through.
Glad someone pointed to Taubes. What saddens me about the (reported) response to calorie transparency's backlash is uniform fat reduction, instead of menu options for different kinds of metabolism. My weight, for instance, happily drops with insulin control. Without carbohydrates, I simply can't gain pounds.
Will be nice to have a search. I wonder if people will pay a dollar to try a CD, great idea by the way!!
EVERNOTE!

I can't say enough good about this program. i use it everywhere (mac, web, macbook, iphone). it's certainly not perfect (auto indent?, the ability to copy check boxes) but it is certainly good. I use a moleskine too, but for searching and loading up data, and keeping task lists, with pictures! Evernote has made me very happy.

this question was asked awhile back on HN and that is how I found out about. I've tried various things in the past, but evernote has worked great for me. evernote.com.
Did a quick poll. Everyone here just looks sick with anxiety.

I keep asking them why they feel like they need permission to start a company.
Google App Engine Case Studies
I could use a drink or 5.
Thinking an album search on the main page? Or just one on the CD listings page? That page (albums.php) is so ugly right now, I didn't even know where to add one, but I like the idea.
Run a distributed GA. Plura becomes self aware on August 29th, 2010.
Ask HN: How to get out of a startup cleanly to start a startup?
Wow, this will be hard to sum up, but bear with me: I currently have 45% ownership of an unincorporated canadian startup. The business is as follows:

We started a web hosting company that resells shared hosting. Our costs are simply server rental fees, advertising and support agents who reply to emails. We've been profitable since day 1 and make a respectable living (roughly 100k per year profits to split between the two of us)

Last summer, we bought out another hosting company that doubled our income and our profit at a really good price. (paid roughly 60k)

On the side, we have a third website where we get client contracts sporadically to provide us extra income.

I want to get out of this and start my own startup, hopefully with the help of YC. I haven't been working there anymore for the past 2 months except to tie up my current projects.

How do you go about valuating such a venture? My partner tells me that the best way to estimate a hosting company's value is to look at the income without expenses over one year.

For the dev company, my partner says that since none of it is recurring income, it has no value above and beyond the accounts receivable for current projects.

I've been working on this for 2.5 years and I feel like I'm getting the short end of the stick if I get nothing but 70k for my half, given that we bought that second company who was the same size as ours initially at 60k and it was way undervalued. If I accept this offer, I'll definitely have money to sustain me at least for a year while I work on my startup. Should I strive for more or just take what I can get? Am I being greedy?
Even if you don't get in: If you've got the commitment to apply to YC, then it's only a small step to saying "I'm doing this thing, whatever Paul Graham says". NYTimes not withstanding, your biggest hurdle isn't getting into YC, it's committing to pursuing your dream.

In fact, I figure if you took all the people YC rejects, weeded out the ones who didn't want to do it if YC didn't support them, removed the people who only wanted to work on their ideas, and got the remainder together to discuss how much their ideas suck and what else they could do and with whom, you'd do pretty well.

I call it the YC Rejects Party.

Now is that socialism?
Good, but I kinda lost it when he switched to Marx.
Bustin' skulls is now a legitimate business?
Offer people equity instead of cash e.g. in place of bonuses. (You can do this with outside vendors as well).

Well, shouldn't that be harder to do in this market? I guess it's a close relative of raise capital at eny cost.
I don't think its as much as "need permission to start a company." It's just more at a chance to walk through a door of opportunity that not everyone gets to do. It's not just an investment, but its an excellent opportunity to network and meet really cool and smart people as well as have you and your idea sat down in front of other potential investors. One of the biggest feats of raising capital in order to accomplish some of the things that some of the people here want to do is getting that recommendation. Well, this is our chance to get that recommendation.

My venture, for example, we're still working, still talking to people, still getting stuff developed and getting out and selling our idea. If this doesn't go through for us, it just means we don't get a "Go to VC free" card (if you will). We'll still keep doing what we were doing.
#candyisdandy on irc.gnome.org
But what they've debated is the exact voicing and instrumentation (which instrument played which part), NOT the notes of the chord. All this "debate" seems to just be Beatles fanboys looking for a lot more cleverness and complexity in Beatles music than really exists. As a huge fan of music and music theory, and no huge fan of the Beatles, I can assure you that countless abundantly more eluding, complex, and novel chords exist in other music.
The iPhone was an "other smartphone"-killer.
I use fastmail.fm to relay email from my postfix server. Works good, but I don't send many