skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fraud charges? This looks like a link to a proposal for cancellation of Facebook's trademark.

Aaron, can you provide some commentary here?
Add that to the 50%-80% that die of natural causes and we'll end up with a negative number of startups!!!!!11!! There'll be a startup void and we'll all be sucked in. This is terrible.

Or am I over-reacting?
I believe that Chick-Fil-A is a private company. The Dominoes guy probably built that town without using company funds.

There are good reasons for keeping one's personal life personal. If Sergey's comments cause a lot of controversy, I wouldn't be surprised if Google saw successful shareholder lawsuits. Using your company to comment on social issues is not acting in the fiduciary interest of your shareholders.
I've run my own business by hiring people who are new (or down on their luck) that are obviously smart and have potential. I've done this for several years, and while the business has not done well (I attribute that to my own incompetence) I can point out a long trail of people who worked for me at $10-$15/hr who left my company to get real jobs paying more than 5x that.

Uh, but yeah, actually I've had more people asking me for work than I have money of late, though, so if you shoot me an email lsc@prgmr.com I can send you a few promising resumes.

buy me lunch or something if you like one of 'em.

but yeah, how do I find people? Uh, the first was a few years after the .com bust. The guy was my roommate, randomly. Obviously he was really smart, and an excellent programmer, though he was chronically unemployed. I paid his rent and used him on my 'book price search' venture, which flopped due to competition, and on some consulting gigs. He left for a real job, and hasn't had trouble keeping a job since.

the second was a guy I worked with during the first .com boom. I met him working in a deli a few years after the crash. I hired him for a little more than what the deli was paying, he worked on my current xen vps hosting venture.

The third was that guy's roommate. I really got lucky that time.

The forth was a guy just out of highschool who I met when I spoke at the LUG in Davis. He was a customer for more than a year before I hired him.

Uh, that's the other thing. You have _much_ more flexibility if you are willing to let 'em work from far away. I haven't listed the foreigners I've hired, but there have been a few, good and bad.

But yeah, overall, make sure your social circle includes people who are both poor and smart. Make offers if you know people working jobs that are beneath them. But the thing is you are looking for a market inefficiency. these are rare things. People who are good don't stay cheap for long. Be patient, and don't hesitate to act when you spot someone good.
oh, yeah. ask friends. Let everyone you know that you are looking for someone willing to work cheap to gain experience. Many people have siblings and other contacts who are useful in this context.
Largest known Prime Number is (was) 2^20996011-1
It should be possible to get one from Belgium, if they aren't all sold out.
> My mom was also a refugee, but she has an entirely different set of stories ..

go on ..

(im a sucker for a good tale :) )
What makes a good road sign?
The bit that was interesting for me was the Liquidware, "TouchShield" ~ http://www.liquidware.com/shop/show/TS/TouchShield It's a '128×128 pixel OLED screen' which is also a touch screen. You can buy these touch-screens but wiring them up is difficult. This shield brings a usable GUI to the Arduino that non-hardware types like myself to use.
If you consider necessary jobs that you don't understand, like system administration and user experience testing, to be something you can just get anyone to do because they "require some technical knowledge but no real training", you'll get what you deserve.

A good system administrator will assist in scaling and performance and take care of a lot of other stuff that you had no idea needed to be done. A good UX person will produce reports in such a way that the developers will be able to fix things much faster than without.

If you think you just need someone to add accounts on your mail server, why are you not outsourcing this to something like Google Apps?
From the article: "The team from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) found the new number by linking 75 computers and harnessing their unused power. This enabled them to perform the enormous number of calculations needed to find and verify a new prime. "

It's probably just a matter of processing power needed to find that number(s).
As usual, the sensationalist title misses the important part of the argument: He's positing that 50-80% of venture-backed start-ups will die before making it to their next funding round or reaching profitability. So, essentially, 50-80% of start-ups that require non-trivial amounts of money just to operate will possibly die before they would have otherwise.

On the other hand, if you have a real business with revenue and lacking excessive costs I'm going to predict that you'll see a smaller bottom-line, but that's about it. Our company costs $3,000/mo to run, including living expenses for two people, and we technically have a staff as well -- we just pay them with kickbacks instead of ridiculous salaries.

Even given his actual prediction (which, again, the title fails to illustrate), I still think he's overreacting. VCs still have tons of investor money that they need to do something with and given the fact that many previously "safe" investments are becoming unsafe, giving money to VCs actually, at least to me, starts to sound like a better bet than it did previously.
Funny name?

Cheap & Easy? Woo! (thread creation that is)

I think it will not really take off until the general infrastructure (millions and millions of cores) is more generally pervasive.
There were three counts in the initial Petition to Cancel: priority of use, genericness, and fraud against the USPTO. Facebook's attorneys protested very strongly and repeatedly to have the fraud count removed, but with this ruling the USPTO denied both of Facebook's motions.
If my_var=current_penetration(Time.now) is at 55%, you'll never double my_var. You'll only be able to double something else. You're trying to use the term "current penetration" at two different times to get different results to change what was supposed to double.
Yeah, equality is such a fuzzy premise for an argument. I would have hoped for something more concrete from someone like Sergey.

UPDATE

@downvoter, if equality isn't a fuzzy premise, where is the line drawn between things that should and should not be equal?

For instance, why shouldn't everyone have an equal opportunity to participate in the Olympics? Why shouldn't everyone have an equal opportunity to be a CEO on Wall Street?

It's because they do not have the functionality that these positions require, as mynameishere pointed out regarding marriage. Claiming equality merely glosses over these important distinctions and does not bring any substance to the argument.
Half of those also ban eating pork, but I suspect there's not been an uprise in the Google cafeteria.
Dear Sergey -

You're surely aware of how divisive this issue is by just looking at the polling on this matter. By taking a hard stand on a very divisive issue on behalf of your whole company, you are spending an enormous amount of your Google brand and influence on this issue. Right?

According to gaydemographics.org, there are less than 100,000 gay couples in California. Let's assume all of them want to get married. Let's also assume, which I think is reasonable, that those gay couples wanting to get married are already cohabiting, have plenty of food, have shelter, have access to world class health care etc - and after this huge expenditure of Google influence and brand change, that will be the same - but they might have a marriage certificate.

So, I just wonder why you chose that issue over this issue - that of AIDS orphans in Africa (unfortunately that label often hides the fact that these are real living breathing children). According to one.org, there are 12 million children who have lost BOTH parents to AIDS and are on their own now. This is a rapidly growing problem and there are estimated to be 25 million AIDS orphans by 2010. The sheer scale of this disaster is mind-boggling - yet it's mostly an information problem that needs to be solved. These children need parents. There are many couples around the world that are eager for children. Who better than Google to find a solution? For many of these children, adoption would mean hope where now there is only despair. As impactful as a marriage certificate would be to 100,000 gay couples in one of the richest states of the richest country - I'm guessing an adoption certificate would be tremendously more valuable to these children who are truly destitute. And I'm also guessing this would be much more inspirational and unifying to Google's share-holders and users.

In deciding on where to spend your resources, I would suggest watching this:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global...

and reading this (the irony is not lost on me):
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118124139854628069.html

I can understand the draw to be edgy and controversial, but sometimes the causes which are most worthy also are the least popular. I applaud the work the Google Foundation is doing, don't get me wrong - but please consider the costs vs benefits to Google in working towards these two pieces of paper I mentioned: the gay marriage license for wealthy westerners or the adoption certificate for a destitute, yet living breathing child who has lost both parents in Africa.

Cheers,
Matt
"... Woz said that some of their best ideas (when building Apple) came after several days of not sleeping ..."

Don't confuse working on a problem for a long time, understanding it very clearly with having the idea in your head and regurgitating a solution in one long stint. Woz emphasized this in his 2005 Startup School talk. Understanding an idea so completely in your head you can simplify it no more.
Oh, and this kind of post is also against the site guidelines:

Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
You shouldn't jump ship because others say its cool. You jump ship because "if Rails isn't working out for you", "then you an analyze other options." You say your happy with Rails, so do nothing.

I was not happy with Rails for the work I needed to do http://shellshadow.com. I have a very deep background in App Framework development. I wrote the worlds first full-stack app framework in Smalltalk in the early 90s. I also wrote may have been the world's first ORM (also in Smalltalk in 1988). I also wrote similar full stack App Frameworks in Java. I'm out of the framework business now but have a more critical eye than most when it comes to analyzing frameworks.

I have not put together a comprehensive list of why merb is better for me than rails. You will either have to do this for yourself or wait until someone bothers to spend the time to publish compelling and objective analysis. This will come with time, I'm sure.

But if you are happy with Rails, do nothing...keep chugging along. I won't disrespect you for it. Rails just wasn't for me.
First: How do you pronounce this? Pano-eye? Pan-oy? Pan-o-yay?

Second: I wanted to turn back three times before I created an account because:

1. Why should I have to create an account just to upload a picture? I don't care about people knowing who took the picture, especially since I only have a couple panoramas. Give people the choice of creating an account or uploading anonymously.

2. You want my email? Why would you need this?

3. You emailed me an auto-generated password. Seriously? People will either forget the password and keep doing password recovery or searching through their email for the password or immediately change this to whatever password they usually use on the internet. There is no sensitive information on this site, there's no sense getting in somebody's way and making it a multi-step process for your users to use the password they want to use.

Third: The map on the upload panorama page needs to let me search for locations. I know the name of the place that I took the picture at, why are you making me find it manually?

Fourth: If you screw up orienting the picture (the < 6 deg. error) then you can't get past it and have to re-upload the image. Give me a "start over" button for orienting. Also, I think I oriented the wrong direction because it's telling me that Epcot in Orlando, FL is north of Gainesville, FL, but it's actually south. Either I screwed up or your direction finding is wrong.
Reddit's discussion for a guy that lost interest in programming
Knight Rider - Journey To The End Of The Knight
CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS
This does seem odd. As someone who has just filed a trademark, I can say the USPTO is "paid money from the filer" to do a search for name conflict. It is the responsibility of the filer to also search for reasonable conflict. But the purpose of the trademark office and the fees you pay it are for this search.

There must be something really wrong here for fraud charges to stand.
Cucumber to replace native RSpec Story Runner
EntouragePreview of Episode 5.4 Fire Sale
The fourth episode of season 5 called “Fire Sale” finds Ari showing some interest in Eric’s indie script. He envisions it as a big studio production with Vice as the lead star. However, L.B. and Nick have increased their price, believing they now have a bidding war on their hands.
I would argue that they are more dependant on us than we are on them.
Ask HN: Getting hands dirty with electronics for newbies
I have been wanting to get my hands dirty with some electronics hobby projects. The recent article on Arduino Laptop interested me.

I'm a web developer and have no idea of electronics. I visited Beagleboard and Arduino websites. Can't make out which board/kit is the right one for me to start with. Any board/kit that can be programmed to make some cool stuff is what I'm looking for. (to build something like the Mini Arduino Laptop which can be related to gadgets even if they are not actually the 'real' ones)

EDIT: for a student with limited budget :)
I think you can get unlocked ones in Italy as well. And France.
Any that are good at tracking losses? My company has a lot of red ink, but not a lot of revenue ;)
I don't think they took this stand to be edgy, or to allocate brand capital towards some public good. They took it because their employees wanted them to, complemented by a personal belief that it's the morally right position to take. Microsoft was going to take a similar position several years ago -- also from employee pressure -- but backed down.

Edit: Here's what I'm referring to: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04...
How does giving equal time to different views marginalize any?

This also sets a dangerous precedent if those who present the arguments are convinced they know which one is right. If it is legitimate for them to favor one over the other, then they end up dictating what is "right" for the masses, which is essentially censorship.
I learned something new today thanks to you and I thought I'd share it.

If you select a link then drag and drop it over the "New Tab" toolbar button in firefox, it opens the page in a tab in the background. Nice huh?

I knew you could drop it over the address bar, but I never wanted to leave the current page so I rarely used it that way.

Of course you have to have the "New Tab" button active in your toolbar, which I've always had since phoenix, and I wonder why firefox doesn't come with it active by default, but I digress...
Actually the prime was found through GIMPS and that is a vast distributed computing project. See http://www.mersenne.org/
What kind of board of directors would approve such a retarded amount?

A board of directors in a state of panic. Note that Mr Fishman was serving as Chairman at the third largest mortgage brokerage in the country (who do commercial, industrial and multi-unit residential deals - not sub-prime stuff) - not the type of job to leave for a company about to go under without big incentives.
As general content degrades, all the more that eventually we're going to see some form of information and content delivery certification emerge, not unlike what Underwriters Laboratories do for for product and material goods safety and quality, or what the USDA and FDA try to do for food and drug quality. Perhaps something akin to the movie and game content ratings, but adding fact checking.

A voluntary certification system could help people trust content. Search engines could apply web content providers' quality group affiliation (or lack thereof) to search heuristics.

Maybe it will be NGO based, maybe government run, depending on where you are in the world. I'd opt for the NGO approach myself, with a healthy number of competing organizations, especially considering China's effective use of content control as an extreme case.

A danger here, though, is if we move to "seals of approval" web content and the majority of individuals and groups avoid content that does not have a "seal of approval" then there are going to be barriers to entry, such as the various costs that members of associations pay for services.
I don't even know how to "downvote". My interface only shows up arrows. I agree that simplicity is key assuming you can rely on community decency.
Wholeheartedly second this question. I've always enjoyed software, but I have an itch to play with hardware too.
In general, I don't understand why they need to have a marriage anyways. Why not just get domestic partnerships granted at the federal level? They'd get much less flak.
How would they feel about working at Google after hearing this? There are two possibilities...

1) Said Orthodox Jew, Muslim, Christian, etc., while privately disapproving of gay marriage, recognizes that his right to be offended ends where my rights begin. Said employee does not wish to shove his own personal brand of "morality" down everyone else's throats by codifying discrimination into the State Constitution, and therefore has no issue with Google's stance on the matter.

Or,

2) Said Orthodox Jew, Muslim, Christian, etc., is upset with his employer because said employee feels he should be entitled to infringe upon the human rights of others. Said employee is free to leave Google, as he is doubtless of little value to the company, or to society in general.
I do use terminal.app for work.
But http://riffraff.livejournal.com/356503.html is better for play. :)
That's probably true, there are always evil people around.
"... biotech, cleantech, nanotech, and other hardware-type businesses ..."

Your probably right. But it's worth noting that software plays a key part in all of these industries.
http://www.nerdkits.com
Fraud here seems to mean material false statements in the trademark registration application, nothing more.
Further reflection on my reply above seems like I'm saying "I'm a framework expert and I know more than you so I am qualified to say merb is better than rails".

I only partially mean it that way ;). What I mean is I do feel qualified to analyze and make this decision myself without requiring others to publish analysis. I did my internal analysis and I chose merb for recoding http://shellshadow.com and 9 months later am still happy with the choice.

I don't mean to sound snob-ish about it though. Everyone has their own unique strengths they bring to working on start-ups. My experience with frameworks is one of mine.
Open Source Rails projects, make sure you’re safe…
Spore Hits 1 Million Mark Despite DRM
Ever seen a PC/Mac commercial? What do you think Apple is doing? Hint... comparing.
Yeah! I've always enjoyed watching people build simple robots too. Watched a lot such videos on youtube and saw a lot of pics of articles on instructables.com. I mentioned 'saw pics' instead of saying reading articles because I dont understand what that guy is really saying... some OMAP3 some 7689 whatever. Really wanted to learn things.

I'm downloading the Intro to Robotics course video lectures from the SEE site at http://see.stanford.edu

I just took a quick look at the descriptions mentioned below the video lectures. Every lecture seems to be teaching some theory. I would enjoy the theory part. But would be more interesting to build something as I learn. Maybe be something simple like a motor programmed to move straight, backward and make turns :)

Anyway, I found this link from the youtube video I watched http://www.societyofrobots.com It's got no basics, but just enjoy the pics and videos if you don't understand(like me).
Got my up-vote as well. Let's see some answers!
Answer: Who gives a crap? Since when did a variation of an answer matter more than the problem?

If a new computer language solved a problem otherwise unsolvabe, then it would raise eyebrows. If Erlang had a chance, Scheme and all those stack-based languages would be popular. Anyway...
PLEASE: A way to filter out TC stories!!! We beg! I'll name my first born YCombinator! Make it stopppp!!
Some questions to consider which will narrow down the available options:

- Do you want to design and/or build circuitry, or just write code for an existing board?

- Do you want to have lots of peripherals on the board (e.g. blinkenlights, buttons, display, ethernet interface, analog/digital converters, ...) or would you rather add on what you need?

- Do you want to make purely data-processing things, or do you want to control something in the real world (like a robot)?

- Do you want to do any audio or video processing?

- Do you want an embedded processor (runs software), or do you want an FPGA (acts like reconfigurable logic hardware)?

- If you are going to be writing software, do you want to do it in assembly? C? Something higher-level than that?

- Do you plan on doing something complicated that you think will require a fast processor and/or lots of memory?

- Do you require an open-source compiler/development environment or are you OK with using the board/chip vendor's?

- Are you at all interested in working with analog electronics or do you plan to stick to digital?
Ok Google... Keep it up and stand up to China... You got people's attention, now get governments' attention...
I'm kind of surprised it took this long. It is always absurd to me to read reviews of people who are using the review section like a comment thread and/or just saying random crap. It's clear a lot of them haven't purchased the apps in question.

Now if only apple will require at least some basic grammar and spelling.
As an undergraduate math major with plenty of difficult classes, I have discovered the power of sleep in solving problems. I have spent hours and hours on a problem to no avail. I then fall asleep and the next morning I solve it very quickly. Amazing stuff.
Many helpful suggestions here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149317
Oh goodness, I imagine I might face some confusion and trouble ahead!

-Sir Awesome Podcast Jellybeer Happyduck Bottom III