skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. That seems to be a common occurrence in the beginning of any industry though. Take Web applications, for example. While we now have lots of extremely high quality desktop apps (heck, the whole stack really), there are only a relative handful of pro-quality Web applications that aren't proprietary (WordPress, Drupal, SugarCRM, etc) compared to those that are closed (GMail, FeedBurner, Google itself, heck.. almost any major Web app out there).
See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=323856
This is exactly what I would like, a meeting with everyone involved so that we can see what is true and what's not.
Yes it is the founder and his buddy of many years. For many months now I've had that feeling that things are "not right". I've recently found out that he's one of those guys that will say anything to get the outcome he desires.
Anecdotal evidence is not important. Quality control needs to be observed over a large sample size.
One of PG's "Ideas we'd like to fund" was "Fix advertising". The idea being that advertisements shouldn't be something odious that you sit through; they should draw you in and be relevant to your own desires.

I gave some thought to it last month but couldn't come up with any ideas on where to begin. It's tricky: you're acting as middlemen between three parties (advertisers, site owners, and users) whose interests are usually (but not always) opposed, plus the chicken-and-egg problem of attracting advertisers before you've got sites and sites before you've got advertisers.

If my job hunt goes poorly I wouldn't mind spending some more time on this problem. It's so obviously broken: companies aren't making many sales off Internet advertising, websites aren't making much money off advertisers, and users hate what the other two groups are doing. For now I'm just trying to clean my open-source plate.
5 Legal Tips To Save Startups Money & Headaches
How about just getting them to buy you out for cash?

I can't help but think if they are this flaky, the chance of success is minimal.
Great article, but it's talking more about the long-term than the short-term.

In the long-term, the removal of a "false economy" is great. In the short-term, there are an awful lot of entrepreneurs that are a wee bit dependent on that false economy.
Terrible Things One Is Not Supposed to Do With Online Storage Services
But... but... my hippie hairdo and unixbeard /are/ the things that make me look good!
Why Free Email May Not Be Such A Good Idea
I don't understand the question, sorry.
Wt (http://www.webtoolkit.eu/) makes developing C++ web applications dead easy. It is similar to Qt: you work with object oriented widgets and events are delivered through a signal/slot mechanism. You get Ajax, javascript, cross-browser portability and all the nifty stuff for free.
Selling the Downturn: Schwartz and the Silver Lining
> It's entirely normal that you sign over ownership of the code to the company in exchange for your equity. That's in every form stock agreement.

Yeah, but he's being asked to sign over ownership, in order to begin the process of receiving equity. If he signs that, they have every opportunity to screw him, which they do not have now.
Is anyone getting depressed by all this? I'm starting to feel physically sick whenever I read about the economy. I think maybe I need to stop reading the news for a while. I felt the same way after 9/11.
Tech entrepreneurs have always needed three (3) things:

Technology, Money and Time.

It used to take a lot of money to buy mostly okay technology that took too much time to learn and use.

In 2008, the technology is stable, powerful, and reliable. The cost of entry, development and delivery is very low. Only time remains a factor, but it's getting better.

So hell yeah, cast your net. And thanks Mark for an optimistic article in the midst of doom and gloom on Wall Street.

What would happen if the U.S. spent $810B funding start-ups and paying everybody's college tuition?

I mean, what would we do with the $500B (1/2 trillion) left over?
When I gamble, I do it because the pleasure I get from winning five dollars ("hah, take that, casino!") is slightly larger than the pain I get from losing five dollars ("oh well, who cares?").

I guess that truly rich people who gamble do it for similar reasons (though with numbers larger than five dollars). But poor people gamble because they (audaciously) hope to win enough money to change their lives. So I guess this explains why rich people play games with a high chance of getting a small payoff (blackjack, roulette) and poor people play games with a small chance of getting a huge payoff (slots, lotteries).
European Commission Annoyed With Data Logging by U.S. Search Sites
Local Rely-Guarantee Reasoning
More Real Time TV Comes to Livestation
Swedish foreign minister switches to Mac
Direct translated from Swedish. This one is good PR for Apple:

"Last week after a lot of consideration, testing and discussing I finally took the decision to switch from the Microsoft world to Mac.

I went and bought one.

This month largest understatement is to say I don't regret this step. The only criticism I have to say to myself is why did I wait this long to take the step.

It is a bit tricky to learn that some things works a little bit different. However Word, Powerpoint and other familiar applications are there, really makes things easier.

And after a while, suddenly everything seems much easier and faster.

The new world is definitely better than the old one. -Carl Bildt"
Reminds me of a great quote Len Sassaman has in his Orkut profile:

"Some day, I will invent a machine that turns all marxists into ants. Then, we will all be happy."
oh my god, you guys. way to miss the point.
Book Report: Purple Cow
With the particular games you mentioned, you could also argue that rich people prefer more 'visible' games while the poor prefer 'invisible' games; Blackjack and roulette are done on or around a table with (possibly) many participants, whereas slots and lotteries are aimed to be a one-person experience.
how do you survive if you haven't been paid for a year?
The MacArthur Foundation doesn't call them "genius" grants; it's just an informal slang term used by everyone else. The day the official award becomes "Genius Grant" is the day it ceases to be the case.
Yes. It is depressing. Just remember 3 things:

1) During an election year, everybody thinks the economy sucks. So there is a bias there to consider, even though there are honest-to-god issues here.

2) We still make things people want, to put it in hacker terms. Movies, games, ideas, businesses. Yes, we've moved up from manufacturing to services and ideas, but we still make a lot of things a lot of people want. That's not changing.

3) Wall Street "blows up" about every ten years or so. Our system is not a magic forumula, so there are always loopholes. Smart people will always play into these loopholes until the system becomes unstable. At this point we fix the holes and keep going. The trick is to just fix the part that is broken and not try to outsmart the market, which you can't do. That's tough for politicians to do.

Long term? We live in a society where politicians get elected making promises (or wars) that nobody has to pay for. That keeps the voters voting, but it will cause our credit to self-destruct, probably in our lifetime.

But even then, life goes on. The fundamentals remain sound, ie, we're really good at making stuff other people will pay us for. As long as the fundamentals remain sound, and as long as your personal fundamentals remain sound (you are good at doing something people will pay you for) then we're just going to keep muddling through it all. The world is not ending.
To quote Ralphie, "A crummy commercial!" I'd like to think that "hacker news" would be something a little more complex than documenting 5 steps of clicking buttons.
Give them South Africa exclusive and market it worldwide - in particular the U.S. So you get some cash to be comfortable, but do not overlay constrain yourself.
Ask YC: Python or C ?
Hi all,

I have just got out of high school and now into my first year of bachelors in computer science. I have been interested in programming since long. I started with a python about 2 months back, as I had read at a lot of places that it's best recommended for beginners. I've read a book on it and now have learnt all the basics of it. I have written a few handy scripts here and there. I have a basic idea of OOP as well. And now I was about to explore various modules in python.

But my first semester exams in college are approaching and I have an exam on C. Its just basic stuff like declarations, bits about data structures, looping, functions etc. The curriculum is really introductory. I am quite sure that I will manage by giving it a week or so.

The problem is that I don't think it is a wise idea to just study introductory C (btw it was the language I wanted to learn after python). Mainly its a personal thing, if i begin C, I would rather get deep in it than study just basics. I don't see a point in just teasing my curiosity and then moving away from it. My major area of interest is in network protocols such as TCP UDP STP and SIP.

Please give your opinions on whether I should pick up K&R and then go forward from there into C or do the bits to clear my exam and get back on python. I am aware of the fact that I can always embed C into python code.

Thanks in advance
That's what I came here to post. Seeing as within my college I've observed no laptop breakdowns, I think that Apple's still doing a pretty damn good job with quality control within my frame of reference. Meanwhile, a friend's HP notebook has broken down twice in the last year.

Not saying that my point of view is any more accurate than yours, but... you can't use a single frame of reference and decide that it's the most accurate. Gruber wrote about this a little while ago: after TechCrunch wrote that Apple had slipped from a 96% customer satisfaction rate to something in the 80s. His point was that yes, Apple had slipped, but it was still by far at the absolute top of the chain.

I asked my question kind of expecting the answer, but here's my two cents anyway: I really don't think that your original comment, or this entire chain of comments, really added to the thread at all. I've noticed a thread of people who'll enter any Apple thread just to bash Apple, and I think it's slightly annoying. I don't think I've seen anything on the Linux side going the other way, though I've seen people doing it to Windows articles and that's an annoyance too. Considering how high quality HN is usually, can't we decide to give it a rest and only add things to threads when they're relevant?
Fred Wilson Turnaround Plan - Raise taxes, Leave Iraq
Kde4.2 released
New version of kde has been released
if you're at a decent computer science school, you're going to eventually learn that languages are tools. there's definitely something to be said about becoming a python expert, but there's also something to be said about having the flexibility to know that python is not the best solution for every problem.

learn the basics of C. even better, learn how languages work and learn how to learn them, because there will always be new, better languages and methodologies. the C experts of yesteryear that put all their stock into one language are now the stodgy dinosaurs stuck in their jobs today.

learn the basics of C. ESPECIALLY if its for a grade. i learned so much garbage at college that i've totally forgotten, as well as so much stuff that i didn't really need to know but that i am better for having learned it, anyways.

thats my $0.02.
If he was to take the code elsewhere, that act could actually be considered the breach.

And if he breached, what would he have to give back to the founders that was given to him for the code?

Also, if the code was given in return for equity (or the promise of equity), then he is an owner and should have a say in the decision to accept the investment and negotiate the terms.

I agree that the final stock agreement depends on the investor's lawyers (provided everything works out), but how the equity is divided before that is between the founder and the coder.
I was in a similar position 2 years back. The only difference between you and me(then) is I didn't have an application ready. I just had the idea.

This company (a smaller one though..I was working with them as a full-time employee) was interested in my idea. They accepted my proposal. My terms were, I'll build the app, they will fund the development, they get exclusive rights to sell in Australia in exchange and I'll keep the rest along with IP. But they wanted to have exclusive rights all over the world. I said yes because I didn't understand what those exclusive rights were...hehe

But they still walked out of the deal because:

1. They thought they would have to spend double the amount on maintaining the application after I developed the first version. I never understood those terms though.

2. They thought it was too risky to trust an individual developer over a registered company.

What I understood from the discussions was: they wanted me to develop the application, take some money for the time I spent developing it, hand-over the source and then walk away from it. Exclusivity meant walking away.

So the deal didn't happen. But I haven't given up on my idea yet. I have started developing it after a gap of one year. I still like the idea even after one year gap. The only problem is I haven't completed it even after 2 years :) I am getting closer to it. I don't know when I'll complete it though. But I am not in a hurry because nobody is funding it.
Yeah. I know neither side thinks compromise is a good solution, but: considering that each extreme is half the world's nightmare, being somewhere in between is a good way of giving everybody a chance to alter things.

I think that being black-and-white in terms of your personal self is always a good way to be: if you always try to do the right thing for yourself regardless of what other people choose, then you're to be completely respected. But people who take that attitude and then try to cast it over an entire society (like Ron Paul, or Ayn Rand - though I think that the latter didn't actually think an entire society could work like that) ignore how incredibly complex any collection of people becomes, and how disastrous a black-and-white worldview would become.
Naspers via Media24? The guys I've spoken to there are smart. If it is then they would be able to offer you a lot of resources that would be very difficult to otherwise get hold of, especially in SA. Unless you really feel its going to fly (in which case it would probably be better to try get financing via equity with no exclusive partnerships) I think that partnering with a company such as one per your description would be a good way to position it for growth - particularly if you are not keen to move from part-time to "full-on startup mode". The points by westside1506 and esessoms are both very valid - worth bearing in mind. Geluk!
This really reads more like 5 legal tips to get you into a lawyer's office before there's any real need.

(1) The open source business models in this article weren't locked down until years after the products were successful. SourceFire and Tenable, in my industry, are both examples of extremely successful companies that simply shipped straight GPL until they were ready to start making money (on Snort and Nessus, respectively).

(2) There's little you can reasonably do in a 3-month old company to bulletproof yourself from a bad-faith partner who is going to make claims on your IP; also, you have bigger problems; also, if it looks like you're going to make money, VC probably doesn't care. I've been through VC due diligence a bunch of times, and I never saw them take out the fine-toothed comb.

(3) It seems equally likely to me that by posting a FAQ and "policing" your content, you set up the expectation with content providers and with the courts that you're obligated to do that.

(4) Ok. Don't sign ROFR's. Gotcha. Why didn't he just offer the real advice, which is, "don't sign any contract complicated enough to have a ROFR clause, or anything else you could call a 'clause', without a lawyer"?

(5) Have any of you bothered to register trademarks?
I might be a patsy for saying this, but you're not serious, are you? Valleywag has the highest ratio of noise to signal of any site that I've seen - with the exception of the other sites in the Gawker portfolio. I try to avoid that entire branch of blogs unless I've got good reason to, or unless I'm recommended one article in particular.
Customer Service is the New Marketing interview with Lane Becker
Branching Out (Generalists in an Organization)
Do you like coming into Apple threads and trolling? Because it's really got no purpose, especially on a site like this.
C is pretty print for assembly - you will learn much about how the von Neumann architecture operates. Python, on the other hand, is an excellent "glue" language, but it fails to allow us to program in a "highly-abstractable" way (like Lisp) or to easily produce fast code (like C).

In the tower of abstraction, I've found it more useful to learn the bottom and the top, and leave the middle to be figured out on a per-project basis; e.g. learn assembly/C, Scheme/Common Lisp, then Python to make implementation details easier.

Also, you could learn 2-4 languages concurrently. This makes for a challenging ride but it is also empowering, because you can compare them so easily.
Interesting ads, at least on the internet, have such low return because the ratio of time/effort/money put into them vs how much they make is so low. If the return, in absolute terms, is the same as for an ad that no time/effort/money was put into (largely just mentioning the brand name, which is what a lot of ads are) is going to be a higher ratio and thus what people end up generating. It's purely economics.

Even video ads, on television, that could be considered to have "gone viral" may get a lot of face time in front of consumers because they are interesting, but they don't necessarily increase actual sales. And a lot of these more interesting ads may not focus enough on the brand--how many times have you seen an ad on television and thought "what exactly are they trying to sell me here?" or "is this really the message they want to send about this product?"--and you may remember the ad but forget what it's about.

Making ads "interesting" isn't some silver bullet that is going to increase sales, but it most likely is some silver bullet that will get more eyeballs looking at your ads. When was the last time you saw a car ad that didn't have a bunch of meaningless data points (some defensible but largely irrelevant mention of "handling", damn even MPG is used like a throwaway data point in car ads) or show the car driving through some city scape or mountain pass? They _all_ show exactly the same thing.

I'd like to see more ads like the early radio ads (does Paul Harvey still these?) where something is specifically endorsed by a personality (rather than just being a paid familiar voice) and the ads are less fluff and catchphrases and more listing benefits and competitive comparisons. This would be hard to do because a lot of ads are purposely misleading or downright lies because they are advertising commodities or consumer items that actually have no benefits or are not differentiable. Truly informative ads might not be entertaining, but they would definitely be more useful than, oh, say having the "Tap The Rockies" Coors Light song in my head because I mentioned "Silver Bullet" up there. And I _don't_even_drink_or_intend_to_drink_ Coors Light (so that's a wasted ad on the part of the advertiser).
I agree with the gist of the email, but... most people don't control a domain, and most people are incapable of setting up email for themselves. I also would think that most people don't care enough about the possible risk to abandon free email entirely.
Sure, it's pretty simple -

1 - working in technology directly and fundamentally improves people's lives in a way politics, finance, and marketing don't.

2 - one day we will look back on our society as being uncivilized, wasteful, and destructive.
"Production quality" means something different for when the target audience is you, the target audience is one person, or the target audience is the general public.

All a blog is is a bunch of web pages. You don't even need a CMS to create those, you can just create them by hand. But I have been called "old-school" on occasion.
No, stop. It is important to be able to object precisely and factually. It is trivial to look up information, and leaving misinformation in a comment because you can't be bothered to check the Wikipedia articel is as jarring as that typo I didn't bother to correct a few words ago.
How is this any different than any other email provider being unavailable suddenly?
Speaking on behalf of empirical data, many humans are not content to have just enough. They always want more. Give someone a million dollars and they want more. Give them a comfortable house, and they will dream of having a better one. It's all relative, but by nature, I think humans will never be content with what they have or know. They will always seek out something more. To elaborate on the comment above about greed, agreed: This is why Communism, one form of Marxism, in favor of a single class, will never work.
I don't necessarily think that it is. I think that "early and often" still works if you've got a brilliant idea, since it lets you refine things. I think of it like early drafts to a novel.

That being said, it's an EXCELLENT attack on the people who truly think ideas are worthless. And I think that's a mindset that matters a lot.
I quit paying my $200 yearly fee because the magazines I was getting seemed to be mainly full of "datamation" type psuedo-commercials, and what I call the "web-3.0-is-the-new-web-2.0" articles.

Also, there was supposed to be some enormous library of online books you could download or something, but somehow you were only supposed to get a few at a time, and none of the stuff was worth reading. Maybe I didn't find the web page with the good library ? But anyway, it sure wasn't worth 55 cents a day.

I would pay to be part of an organization or subscribe to a publication that was a little more focused and less crap. Immagine the 2600 magazine, which sells for $4.50, but with interesting articles written by mature people (hey, like the people on HN !). I like 2600's policy of running ads only from subscribers, it is similar to the ad-trasing network mentioned here on HN a few weeks back.

A magazine such as that, but with higher quality and more interesting articles, would be worth paying a lot for. If it was associated with some kind of tech conference that met in different regions around the year, and I could get a price break going to it, that would make it worth more. It seems like that is kind of what the ACM used to be, and what it should aim to be again.
Yeah. Though to the OP: are there any good tutorials you'd recommend to those of us who would be INTERESTED in making our own?