skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would try to sell 60-70% of my share and use the remaining bit to outsource the work in maintaining the work I was doing, then sit on the $1-2k coming in every month as a safety net to pay the bills and give me the full purchasing price to invest in my start up (though I'd advise investing much less to keep your start up honest)
Haha...sorry, I just couldn't resist :)
Ahh, I've been looking for that one for quite some time. Thanks! </spambot>
As others do too, I carry around a Moleskine (although I also like a fountain pen); once I have enough for a particular project, they'll often go into a Devonthink database (see http://www.devon-technologies.com/ ) for organization to the extent I need to.
Maybe try to see what a a comparable hosting company costs.
I hope they are on Eastern Standard Time.
12 people and counting so far on irc ...
VCs Speak On The Economic Downturn: Batten Down the Hatches
Merb 1.0 RC3 Released
Post-redesign, Facebook’s platform working well for some applications
Meta-Programming with Scala: Conditional Compilation and Loop Unrolling
Apparently Google decided they were special, and requires every relying party to implement custom crap for detecting gmail.com email addresses.

They claim that once it's stable they'll open it up so you'll be able to use "gmail.com" as your identifier in any RP:

http://openid.net/pipermail/general/2008-October/006169.html

Embrace: kinda

Extend: you betcha

Extinguish: ...
Some people put their email only in the "email:" field, without realizing that it is invisible to others. Putting it in both About: and Email: would be nice, so that we (the other readers) can send a personal email if needed.
Pre-acceptance
Create your own micro-blog and mobile marketing network in seconds.
This is no time for optimism :D.
ExpressionEngine Developer's Toolbox
bullet points inside bullet points...oh well...
This is the second revision. I could shorten it, but I wanted in part to talk about the forum-owners scene, along with talking about start-ups in general. Forums are where I first entered the Internet, and I still look on them fondly: this essay was partially a reminiscence. Is that what you were talking about?

I think that individualism web appeals to vastly more people than collectivism does. I'd guess that there's ample room for both online. Most people use the Internet for recreation primarily, though, and most people don't want to recreate beyond the small-talk level.

I remember telling friends about Zoints: this was before I even had a MySpace account. I would excitedly show them how many web pages I had and how many more I could make; I showed them how you could drag-and-drop. I think the most sympathetic reaction I got was "Oh, wow, that's neat." A few people actually did register, but there was never anything there to keep them active. Zoints didn't encourage frivolity.
1) Agree on ownership (you own 45%?)

2) Your partner needs to start taking a salary - negotiate the amount.

3) Pay partner's salary directly from the profit, and then split the remaninder according to equity.

What's complicating matters is that you are splitting the company profit and avoiding salaries.
You're killin' me Paul
Do you intentionally not allow IE users to view your site? I get redirected to http://www.shlomifish.org/no-ie/ when I try to view your site using IE7.
Consolidate4Free: Debt Consolidation Information
Well for someone wanting to prototype something, it might be a lot cheaper to buy one of these than buy the equipment needed to create a prototype out of wood.

I mean the fact that it can make a cylinder is great. I mean the only good thing about prototyping with wood is that a wood lathe is relatively cheap due to them existing for centuries.

Buying a small wood lathe and chisels would be relatively cheaper than this 3D printer, but it would take a lot more skill and talent to create some of the models you can see on the shapeways site.

I would like to know what temperature some of the 3D modelling materials melt at as it would make it easy to use for casting of metal models. I mean if the stuff melts at 100 degrees, you could just build the cast and melt the plastic out just like using wax. If this was possible, it's just easy to imagine the uses for turning a good prototype into a final product. It's like if you design a good model, just build the cast pour in the metal and there's something to sell. Like if you get this on a large scale imagine what could be done for a cast-iron furniture business. Instead of hours spent sculpting a model and then building a cast off it, you make a design and reuse it repeatedly. For the convenience of printing out the model it would save a lot of time and to say I saw a simple (very simple) cast-iron gate selling for around $1500, you'd be able to absorb the $200 for making a new model every time.
Can Amazon's SimpleDB substitute for MySQL database?
I'm developing a web app with only a couple people with small amounts of spare time and it would be great to "outsource" DB management to SimpleDB. I have heard SimpleDB can be slower than MySQL but it seems pretty fast so far w/o a large table. Does anyone have experience with it?
Compensation Structure for Early Companies
Rails Application Visualization
Good one. Apart from killing, sex is the most powerful biological thing a human can do. Like killing, it shapes and changes the genome (and the community) far beyond the creature that actually commits the act.

The problem with teen sex is that too many wield this power far too lightly. Like a child who's just found its father's gun, they don't really understand the ramifications of what they're doing or the risk that they are taking.
There is absolutely no reason for you to ask users to use their paypal email for login...it makes you look like a scam site.
On the other hand, advertisers tend to want to advertise to the people interested in their "social social network". Advertising to job seekers is inherently limited.
You can also chat about it in the Hacker News chatterous room:

web: http://www.chatterous.com/landing/hnyc/hcker/

phone: text CHTR JOIN hnyc hcker to 41411

email : @join hcker in body to hnyc@chatterous.com

jabber/google talk: add hnyc@chatterous.com and send @join hcker
Valid point - from our perspective we though it would actually make things easier. We use the approved PayPal transaction to then generate a user ID for the person (using their PayPal e-mail address). So you can't just login with your PayPal e-mail address off the bat - but you bring up a valid point, people might think we're trying to phish for their paypal e-mail/password combo and enter it into our username/password fields...thanks for the comment!
FTA:
"I wouldn't release E or anything like it, even in purely virtual environments, without engineered safeguards," Bringsjord says. These safeguards would be a set of ethics written into the software, something akin to author Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" that prevent a robot from harming humans, requires a robot to obey humans, and instructs a robot to protect itself—as long as that does not violate either or both of the first two laws.

"Because I have a lot of faith in this approach," he says, "E will be controlled."

Uuummmm, has this guy ever actually read any Asimov? Did I miss the joke?
I assume that even without actually hiring someone to replace you directly, you could differentiate between salary & dividends. Then you continue to pay the salary to the remaining founder & any replacing employee & split the dividends. I guess the remaining founder would receive gradual increase to his equity share as part of his package.

Yep. That would probably cover it. Though, my thinking in this case is that in a partnership of two people, if one leaves it's probably going to hurt the company in the short term. There's just a lot of loose ends to tie up...and as others have mentioned, being free of the whole thing may be more valuable (because let's face it, a 100k annual revenue
company isn't going to make him rich--unless it grows dramatically, which would generally mean the other found did some kick ass work without the other holding him back). If he's feeling the urge to do something completely different, there's a lot of good arguments for doing just that.

BTW, wouldn't most vesting schedules have already left this founder with quote a bit of equity (2.5 years)?

Yes. And a board seat and the responsibilities that go along with that.

But, every case is different. Nobody here can tell someone else what will make them happy.
Looks like my Wednesday prediction was spot-on. We'll see just how low we can go tomorrow.
Cool PHP trick: write a compiler from a better language to PHP and write your code in that ;)
IE voodoo doll
Working Effectively With Legacy Code - Michael C. Feathers
For comments, why not just use GitHub's built-in comment feature?
Are you going to send e-mail for everybody? (Chosen ones and not chosen?)
Is it just me or do a lot of these points contradict themselves right after being said?

-Being driven and lazy at the same time.

-Extreme optimism

-Extreme pessimism

-Being good at math

-Having good communications skills
Do you know of a good solution to tab your code for you?
Does anybody know of a good solution to auto-tab your code?
'indent' in most unixes.
Chatterous rocks!
The (function($){...})(jQuery) syntax is used by plug-in developers who want their code to run before the jQuery(document).ready event. It is closure, and it's purpose in this case is to protect the global namespace from variables introduced by the script. Closures also have many other useful applications in JavaScript.
Solution: Add an option to specify whether your email field is public or private. That would resolve the confusion.
Just the submitters.

Correction: Looks like we're going to mail everyone.
"'The idea is to tell the story of 2008 through the lens of technology,' said Lev Grossman, the Time Magazine editor who helped compile and rank the 50 best innovations of 2008."

It makes sense Hulu would be more important than the LHC if you were telling a story about (american) society in 2008, but it doesn't make sense if you're going to call your list the top 50 "best" inventions of 2008.

It's just a business model, and you can only view it the US.
Thx pg
Major universities are already contributing to the Sakai project, which will become the de facto learning management system over time. It's built by universities for universities and is open source. The project is sponsored by the same organization that sponsors uPortal, which is becoming the standard web portal framework for universities.

http://sakaiproject.org/portal
Interesting if true.
Review my new feature: improved wifi photo frame support on OurDoings
Computer Architecture, Fourth Edition: A Quantitative Approach - John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson

The Black Swan - Nicholas Nassim Taleb
Over 30. Wow.
Before I clicked the link I thought Anand was the name of a chess-playing software :O.
I have heard of inconsistencies with slow-down, but also quite a few successes.
I hear Amazon is improving it consistently though.

I would look at it this way: If you do not have time to manage it, then either the DB or other aspects will suffer - It is likely that SimpleDB will better this.
Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki
We've asked pg before :-(

Your solution will work only for new users, unless "public" is the default (opt-out for current users). This can piss off people.
MRI has been replaced with YARV, which is sometimes much, much faster, and sometimes a little bit slower.

With JRuby, MacRuby, Gemstone, and other things in the pipeline, there are plenty of choices to go around.
Time Magazine is irrelevant.
Think of the problem unregulated websites could cause. One poorly designed one could infect people with spyware that could cause the whole system to crash. Clearly, it's time to end this unfettered market and bring some much needed regulation to the web. Each proposed website or change to a website should go through a careful review by an appropriate government agency before it goes live. This is clearly becoming more important as more financial information and other sensitive data goes over the web.
Shouldn't this be addressed to the owners rather than the readers of the NYTimes?

http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chd...
They don't know much about technology to begin with.
http://bagnewsnotes.typepad.com/bagnews/obama-shoes-400.jpg
Pixolu Finds Images by Similarity
Haven't seen anyone mention Zenbe Lists yet (http://lists.zenbe.com).

It's a free web app which does one thing well: it allows you to maintain and reorder any number of lists.

The reason I use it is because their iPhone app is the best ToDo app I have used on the platform (and I have tried the majority of free ones).

The iPhone app syncs with the web app, which I can access from anywhere.

On my Mac, I use Fluid to create a site specific browser that lives in the menubar to allow me quick access to my Zenbe List at any time.

So in this way, I always have access to any streams of thought that I decide to jot down day-to-day.

Edit: I wanted to like Evernote and used it for several days, but found it was much too slow. As well, the Mac client is not suited for quick creation of notes.
Track user geolocation with JS
You're not thinking as a member of some minority. Imagine if the first black <something> was an incompetent former rapper/football player. It can't be easy to watch, perhaps especially if you think she never had any chance of winning. I'm also sure her policies on abortion have a lot to do with it.
If he's offering $70K for 45% ($1555 per 1%), would he accept $86K from you for his 55% (a smidge more per share)?

That's one way partnerships can deal with a situation where one or the other partner wants out or to go solo: have a put-up-or-shut-up binding bidding process, where whoever offers more per share gets to -- and indeed has to -- buy the other out. (The payment could be in installments out of future revenues.) Sometimes this is written into operating/partnership agreements from the get-go.

Even granting that you would prefer to be in another business, if you owned it 100% for another $86K, could you then sell the whole thing free and clear for more than $156K? (If not, it's hard to argue your 45% share is already worth more than $70K.)

Or, could you hire staff and become a four-hour-workweek owner collecting an acceptable return on your >$156K investment?

That's the analysis that counts in tiny, closely-held businesses. There's no liquid market in their ownership and their value is often tightly bound with the owner/managers.
I have hired more forty people--a mix of employees and contractors--as a manager in technology companies. One page and a cover letter/section (perhaps 100 lines total) is the most that will get read before a hiring manager decides to give you a call.

Or not.

Tailor your experience to the position you are applying for in a cover letter/section and in what you highlight in the resume. It's a sales pitch not an autobiography that should be designed to get a phone screen or an invite to an interview.

I would focus on getting it into the hiring manager's hands with an endorsement from someone they trust.
Reminds me of X Inside, now known as Xi Graphics. They make X servers.

But, they kept getting applications from people trying to get into the adult film industry. Hence at least one of the motivations for the name change.
For those of you who don't make it, don't give up! Me and my partner didn't and we're doing well for ourselves!
We have to fight the growth of authoritarian government by electing the guy who A) spinelessly voted with his party on all the privacy-destroying measures asked for by Bush, sometimes with token resistance and B) wants the government to have much more power over society.

Don't forget, he's a great leader, intelligent and courageous, though he's never had an original thought or differed from his party on any significant issue.

I wouldn't dislike him so much as President if there were going to be some substantial resistance from an opposition party, but it looks like the Congressional Republicans are going to get destroyed.
I think this is going to be great for OpenID in the long run. Email addresses just make a lot more sense than URLs for logging into sites.
Ask HN: Good reading material for "mobile" stuff?
I read a lot on the internet about tech business and startups, but I feel like I don't know enough about the mobile space. iPhone, Android, Blackberry, future speculation, any of that - what are some good resources I should be reading?
Mildly interesting rant about Linux and Complexity
Ugly Betty: Ugly Berry
Betty has a competition with Kimmie. Ignacio decides to vote for the first time ever. Hilda takes advantage of the election traffic to be able to promote her shop. Meanwhile, Wilhelmina tries to hire a new financial officer whom Daniel hates.
Music, movies, webapps, everything.
New software can duplicate keys using photographs
Vietnam Travel
A <a href="http://www.paradissa.com">Vietnam travel</a> agent and a <a href="http://www.paradissa.com">Vietnam tour</a> operator offers luxury travel, deluxe vacations, first class holidays and adventure tours in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
Tabbing your code is really something you want handled by your text editor. What text editor are you using?

Most emacs modes do this automatically. For languages with braces like C++, Perl, or Ruby you just hit tab on any line, and it automatically indents it correctly. For languages like Python tab will cycle through the possible acceptable indentations.

Other text editors like Eclipse (and I believe vi) will indent correctly by default when you hit enter, but after that nothing is automatic. But that's pretty good too.
I'm beginning to think that the following sets are mutually exclusive:

1. people who make web pages called "[1-9][0-9]* Ways To .+"

2. good hackers ∪ people I want to read

Anybody have a counterexample?
Implementing DSL Blocks
They're out! (according to the people in chatterous)
Indonesia Modern Furniture – Indonesia Office Furniture – Home Classic Furniture
Indonesia Modern Furniture provide by Homark Furniture companies comprises of a modern home furniture, office furniture factory, situated next to a classic, modern, minimalis furniture factory
The problem I have is that I just wrote a bunch of shit in vi (which has not been auto-indenting for me, though I should probably check my .vimrc or whatever), and now I'm editing it using TextMate, and the formatting is all screwed up.
Please vote at buzzup.com
SecondLight: Microsoft Surface on steroids
Whoa thank you! this PHP developer included.
And thus, you've just gone and demolished your entire argument. There is no solution in reasonable time, which is why mwerty brought it up.

This whole downvote storm is because your OP was "CS students love dropping four letters: P, NP, O and N. Whenever I want to judge who was a bit too focused on the surface details of computer science, and too little on the real problems, I wait to see if those 4 letters come up in a sentence." and there is a crowd of people here whose work on real problems involves those four letters all the time & couldn't be done without extensive knowledge about them and discussing them endlessly.

Maybe they don't come up so often when writing cd burning programs or robotics (though I find the latter hard to believe since any planning algorithms should hit up against this quickly), but other people have their own real problems where it does. I'm trying hard not to be dismissive here, even though your original post reeked of dismissiveness.
Are you sure? I don't have the numbers handy, but I dimly remember that, in around 1998-1999, the Alpha 21264 ran circles around Intel and AMD CPUs of the same era, in integer and especially floating-point performance. I'm not talking about clock speed, but SPEC benchmark results.
Tell HN: If you haven't got your YC email, check your Spam folder
My partner phoned me on receiving a YC response email. I was surprised, not having seen mine yet - but actually it was in my Spam folder in Gmail. Since I might not have seen it for a while otherwise, I thought this information might be helpful to others.
gmail marked it as spam
In IRC:

<frisco> lol, didn't pg invent that spam filter?

(Didn't quite invent it, but http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html)
How many applicants received any questions on their proposals
from YC before tonight?
Do most adults?
My point is asking whether any of this is worth it.
As a virgin and Stanford student, I can tell you it's pretty hard to get into a good college if you're trying to get laid in high school. I mean, it's not impossible, but...the opportunity cost is very real. It sucks, but that's part of the price I had to pay.
I definitely prefer the ruby build_tag too, php's fine.. until you try to do something even remotely interesting.

And yeah, in real code the helpers sometimes need to get a bit more advanced. Something I like to do is add a class name corresponding to the function name (which I usually grab from __FUNCTION__) -- it helps keep a nice consistency between server-side/html/js/css
This statement was true.
GMail > PG?

Fail :P

oh well, onward and upward I suppose, can't let something like this knock you down. Like it was said many many times. Everyone who didn't make it, please, by all means, keep moving forward because this is not a death certificate.
Ask HN: Passed the first selection for YC 2009? Share your joy and your project
Have you been one of the lucky and skilful ones invited to the interviews for YC 2009?

Please share your excitement and share what you can tell publicly about your project.

We're curious even if we're depressed because we didn't make it. :)
Thanks! Same here, mine was in my GMail spam folder.
Short Answer: No.

Long Answer:

SimpleDB is based off what every application developer wants to hear. Put your data here and it will just be available. No worries, no cares. For (relatively) small amounts of data, SimpleDB will definitely cut it. However, SimpleDB also limits your usage of that data. No nice normalized schema and joins for you. That makes development time much longer.

Of course, if you only have a small amount of data, it's pretty easy to manage MySQL or PostgreSQL. Database administration becomes hard when you have lots of data. But this is where SimpleDB just falls flat. In a single domain (roughly equivalent to a database), you can only have 250,000,000 attributes (cells). That sounds like a huge number at first, but if you have a table with 10 columns, you're down to 25M rows. Still, a lot, but not exactly no-worries. Considering that you'll probably want multiple tables with maybe 100 or more columns, you can see that it just doesn't support large web applications.

Amazon has set up an "infinitely scalable" database that has hard limits that aren't particularly high. Open source relational databases are easy and reliable when you aren't dealing with the scale of a Digg or Flickr. The only reason to go with something less useful (no joins, limited querying) would be to scale better. Amazon's hard limits on SimpleDB mean that it just doesn't scale. So, why use something less easy when the benefit isn't there?
For the record, there's #startups on Freenode, and axod (from HN) runs http://mibbit.com/ where it can be accessed by a webapp.
Hardly anyone knows anything about Karl Marx nowadays...
Nope, we didn't make it. Just saw the email. But we are NOT depressed. We still are believers!
If find VoodooPad (http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/) - a personal wiki - indispensable.
Wow that shit is hot! Let us know when you have released the library.
Did you get any questions from YC during the process?
Didn't make it,

kind of crushing. I'll admit I am depressed.

Hopefully I'll feel better tomorrow