skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't make it better or worse, but it means that their motivation in all things is to figure out how to spread their advertisements elsewhere.

The fact that you need a Google account to use the phone means that they have the ability to monitor what you're doing, and that's slightly skeevy. I mean, don't get me wrong: I don't think Google will abuse that information. I gladly use my Google account when I have to. But some people are rather worried by that sort of thing.
MYOB Interactive Manual (Flash) - Mixx
So audi spent who knows how much on a complicated solution - when there already is a perfectly workable simple one.

Reminds me of the pen vs pencil joke about nasa vs russia.
Because programming and a computer science degree aren't the same thing, at least not in the way that being a physicist and a physicist degreee are. Computer Science is much more about the theory than the doing, and programming is much more about the doing than the theory. As i see it, programming is CS as to engineering is to its physics underpinnings. Now, you might say that you need a degree to be considered an engineer, and that's true. But there's also a long tradition of self builders, tinkerers, and people that just genereally get things done. Take the Wright Brothers for example - bicycle mechanics (not degreed engineers) tinker and come up with an airplane.
An initial FALSE understanding.
How about the traffic green light displaying seconds before it's going to turn yellow? I think this is feasible because of LEDs usage in the traffic lights.
I'm with the Magnificent Bastard on this one -- the full Windsor is overrated.

http://magnificentbastard.com/posts/ask-the-mb-windsor-knot
Mark to market is what the Japanese banks tried in the 1990.
There is a reason the Japanese call it the 'lost' decade.
I agree with other posters. If your one and only goal is to get your site up and running, then for sure stick to what you know... Use straight PHP or a PHP framework.

If however, you have the dual goals of getting your site up and running and also learning new and better technology that has the possibility of making you more effective in the future (initial development on your current project will be slower, but it will pay off in the long run), then go with Django... Or Rails... I'm a recovering PHP-aholic, who's moving onto Ruby, so I just had to put that in.

Good luck.
It hasn't driven away my family, but it does drive away friends. Lol.
My comment about a CS degree being the best preparation for a SE career was assuming a SE degree is not an option. At most colleges and universities in the US - as far as I know - it's not.
Review our Startup - we launched hoodiepeople.com today - let us know what you think
Wow, this is brilliant. Very useful for me who always checks blogs over and over for new content.
The Text Tool: enabling your photos to speak for themselves
You need a corporate lawyer.

The family member has to be an "accredited" investor, which means they have at least a million dollars in liquid assets, not including home.

You might consider convertible debt here, so that you don't have to set a valuation now. Instead, it converts to stock possibly at some discount to and possibly at some valuation cap from whatever gets negotiated with a VC later. This makes life easier. The cap could be in the 500k - 3m range, depending on how much work you've got done.

I do get the impression that caps and discounts do annoy VCs, as well.

(Personally, I don't like doing converts -- I just want to place the bet. I've done ~ 7 angel investments, including one or two YC companies.)

Other people are wary about lending to family. I would tread very, very carefully here.
As Steve Miller once said "go on take the money and run".

I'm assuming you think the money would help fund the business and is needed, or you wouldn't be asking. Maybe to help incorporate, host the project, etc. So why not take it?

You said in a comment that they're a professional investor. I'd find a decent attorney that will work on a deferred retainer and do a quick convertible (there's no reason to go equity here) and keep your fees to a minimum.
That was a great book. Also check out "Crypto" by Steven Levy.
"Is this indifference to the world a consequence of too much intercourse with machines that give the appearance of thinking? How were he to fare if one day he has to quit computers and rejoin a civilized society?... The more he has to do with computing, the more it seems to him like chess: a tight little world defined by made-up rules, one that sucks in boys of a certain susceptible temperament and then turns them half-crazy, as he is half-crazy, so that all the time they deludedly think they are playing the game, the game is in fact playing them."

-J.M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature and former IBM programmer, from "Youth, Scenes from Provincial Life II."
Indeed, it does sound like that from some of the bits in that posting. "put your webapp on the chopping block"!
Just because you did it and it didn't work out doesn't mean it's a bad idea. Your sample size is small.

Also, it's fine to take "just money" rather than money with value add. As long as it's not dumb money.

There are probably millions of companies since the dawn of enterprise that took small amounts of money from friends and went on to be successful, often because of it.
With time, I have felt that loneliness, yet, after a couple of hours of being around people, I can't help but think about the work I could be doing, the wonders I could be exploring.
The Function of Rounded Corners
The countdown counters are about the same size as one of the lights whereas to be able to comfortably see the counter from a moving vehicle from at least 100 meters, the numbers on the counter should be humongous. After all, the main idea behind this is knowing beforehand (long enough beforehand) what the light will turn into and when so that you can accelerate just enough to make it through just before the green ends, or decelerate enough to make it to the intersection just as the green comes on so that there's no need for braking, stopping and starting again.
Someday you may think of working there..then this kind of post will haunt you ;)
There is also problem with relationships with some women. I think, most women don't mind you are spending so much time with a computer (as long as you are making good money doing it). But they are jealous they must share the love and attention with something like a computer. That is something unbearable for them. In this case, you as a hacker have to lie that you hate your daily work, your boss is an asshole and you have to stay at work longer just to pay the bills. Don't even think to be honest for second and telling truth that you love your work, you escape there because you are resting by working, by being creative and by seeing your code/product running. If you have family, maybe is better to take well-paid but boring 8-5 job full of assholes, where you will look forward for the end and rushing home to wife and kids. Computer you may use just for reading news on Friday evening.

Are you more a mad scientist or a family guy? :-)
I believe you meant a misunderestimation.
I'm not suggesting anyone ought to know it off the top of their head. The only reason I remembered it is because I am a big fan of Raymond Smullyan's "To Mock a Mockingbird," the best introduction to Combinatoral Logic ever written:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0192801422?ie=UTF8&tag=...

As a result, I remember it as the Kestrel which he introduces in the same chapter as the Mockingbird, Identity Bird, and Lark.

But actually, I really don't expect anyone to remember it. My point was a little sarcastic, I was trying to point out that programming is at least as much about stuff you use regularly or read currently as it is about stuff you learned a few years ago.

If you don't use whatever you were taught, you will lose it. And if you learn it another way--I'm sure there are people who use #returning without knowing anything about combinbatoral logic--it might be just as good. Not knowing what a K combinator does is not particularly harmful to being an amazing software developer.

I am not denigrating a degree in computer science. I think it is an amazingly excellent way to start a career (be that working for others or yourself) in software development. But, OTOH, after a person has been working for a while, I think it carries less weight than what they have done with themselves since graduating.

If a really good degree leads to a really good first job, which leads to a better seond job, and so forth, I am all for the really good degree that started the process.
It did that to me for a while, too; I would always want to explain to them my latest idea or tell them about some awesome new language or something. They would yawn.

They're still awesome people, but sometimes I wish there were people around me who I could associate with and discuss computer hobbies with. (Sadly, being in school doesn't give you many opportunities to meet new people very often, it seems to me...)
This happens to many people who are very into their work, computers or not. I have 2 good friends who are both very successful artists, and they are both divorced because of their commitment to their work.
Sounds like the best thing to do for a mac (although it wouldn't fix the problem in tty mode). On other operating systems, it's nice to make the change globally, since all other programs seem to use control pretty regularly too.
I would buy a phone from a company that was only in advertising until they were in advertising and operating systems for mobile phones.

Who cares what other things they do? Why wouldn't you evaluate it on its merits? Is this the poor judgement of being an angry drunk?
Obviously the dollar bill guys picked the worst ones because they wanted to make their point about crowdsourcing. Whatever that point might be.

In any case, it's more interesting to stare at than just 8 well-done samples.
with all these positive and negative thinkings ... will they converge to ZERO thinking?
Agreed. FFox is way too bloated, even with "8 gazillion tricks to speed up ffox!".

The only must-have extensions are Firebug and Web Dev Toolbar, so I keep firefox around for debugging purposes. For everyday browsing it's chrome all the way.
I feel like the whole loneliness thing is mostly the person's fault. Instead of being your own man, you are trying to live up to someone else's expectations. Lets face it, as a startup founder you have a LOT more on your plate than some ex-highschool football quarterback who works at the Gap.
Btw, also try posting on the joelonsoftware.com forums. You'll find a lot of ISV's for feedback, and potential customers there.
Why People Participate on Mechanical Turk?
The Ultimate Small Business Owner's Resource Guide Available as Free PDF
My opinion is maybe biased by living in central Europe. But I see many people who are not satisfied with their work and realize their passions somewhere else (family, hobbies, you name it). I'm a little afraid here it is still social norm even 20 years after communism era. As far as I can observe women are more often these unsatisfied workers because they tend to have worse and less paid jobs and what more: they are naturally "hardwired" to be passionate about family in the first place. So they don't understand someone is going to work not for money, but for fun and his passion.
since you don't have any legal structure and don't want to waste time and money finagling with lawyers etc, I suggest you borrow the money at a reasonable rate of interest (say 7-8%), and defer interest and repayment (set yourself a generous repayment schedule) beginning on a date, let's say 2 months after launch, for when it converts to equity or repayment begins.

This way you have cash in hand now, and details can be worked out as the product matures. If the house burns down you probably ending up owing maybe a $1000-2000 over the initial $25K, totally worth it for the freedom IMHO.
School is THE place to meet new people. In fact, enjoy the variety of people you meet at school now. It's harder to meet interesting people later on, after you are out of school. Most people are content with discussing what they saw on TV last night and what their lunch companion has on their plate. "Is that pesto?" Enjoy your school years :)
i thought we were talking about programming, not architecture or any other software engineering.
I can see that this might work with some keyboards, but I think the Apple one is too low-profile.

Also, if you're not using C-M-... shortcuts, you're missing out:

C-M-{s,r} isearch-{forward/backward}-regexp (indispensable)

C-M-% query-replace-regexp (indispensable)

C-M-\ indent-region (indispensable for when M-q would mess up your line breaks)

C-M-x eval-defun (for running changes to your .emacs without restarting)

C-M-q indent-pp-sexp (pretty-print and reindent sexp at point)

C-M-{f,b,u,d,a,e,k,t} forward/back/up/down/beginning/end/kill/transpose sexps

C-M-{n,p} {forward/backward}-list

C-M-v scroll-other-window

And so on. C-h k (describe-key) is your friend.
There are two kinds of untrivial - untrivial as in difficult and hard, and untrivial as in time-consuming and demanding a lot of work.
Academic training prepares you for the first kind, professional - for the other one, and, suffice to say, this conversation consists mostly of elitist denigration of academic trivialities whereas you seem to be worked up about some disrespect of work ethic where in reality there is no disrespect.
They are a bad idea for startups, I think.

It's easy to win them, but government money is like crack. You are locked into their cycle and it will make it harder to innovate.

That said, you'd be surprised to learn how easy it is to win a few hundred thousand dollars.

If you want to make a boutique research company, go ahead.
>Why don't Apple embrace the huge community that worships their products, instead of becoming the next Microsoft? What have they got to loose?

I think for Shareholder Value, they DO want to be the next Microsoft. Technically uninteresting but raking it in for generations.
Unified IRC and IM would be nice (I like pidgin).
What's the point of Test Driven Development?
Apple blocks Pragmatic Programmers' release of iPhone book for developers
I like the simple but dramatic screenshot
yeah, i would've preferred mad lib format

Publictivity _(verb)_ for _(adjective)_ Lead _(noun)_

more fun that way.
Chinese Say They're Building 'Impossible' Space Drive, the EmDrive ('Relativity Drive')
Free Trip to Boulder, Colorado For Developers
The Boulder tech scene is growing like crazy. Twenty of our top tech startups (you can see a few in the sidebar) have banded together to fly in one hundred top software developers, programmers and engineers from across the country, all expenses paid. You can apply to be one of the hundred at the boulder.me site.

Also covered here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/24/twenty-startups-pool-resources-to-recruit-developers/
I can attest that I send my resume to some great startup I am interested working for, from startuply, and got a prompt reply from them the next day.

I did send the same resume to the generic jobs@awesome startup.com on their website and didn't get a reply.

There is still some work to do for the startuply guys, some basic functionality is still missing, but I think they might be in the right track.
the erlang port was broken for a while, actually...don't know if that's still the case, but anyway it's not hard to build from source.
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) - a comprehensive list of providers
Rubbish. The statistics on successful businesses show that he is more than likely going to fail. If you take the money, in all likelihood the investor will never see a dime.

Now, I don't know how much experience you have, but taking money from family is stupid. A) they are biased. B) the familiy member will always be there, for the rest of your/their lives. C) the debt, therefore, will always be in your/their minds, especially if the "investor" lucks out of other investments. D) 25K is easily gotten from other sources.

When people say "don't use your own money" I think this includes family too. I'd much rather use mine than families.

So my advice: keep consulting, take his advice and leave his money. If it's a good idea, there'll be no shortage of money from outside sources.
It's kind of like demand paging. When you're coding on your own, you learn what you need to learn to get the job done. This way you can learn most of what you need know for a job by working on your own hobbyist projects.

Ironically, the PC eliminated the need for a CS degree.
Statements like the above always frustrate me.

I'm in school (and have been for a long time). Many people that I respect told me: grad school was the best part in their lives, that I should enjoy my time, and that it only goes downhill afterwards (no more research, family obligations, boring jobs, administration work, etc.).

Great. But what if I don't like my situation right now? What if I don't like grad school that much? What if I don't like most of the people around me? If the sentiment that grad school is the best part of life is correct, then what else is there to look forward to? What's the point?

(sorry for being all gloomy, but the parent's post really struck a nerve)
also try: http://framework.zend.com
Out of curiosity, what was this impossible thing?
> Compared to biology, zoology, etc, where the work is by nature far more theoretical, and you're screwed if you never studied it academically.

That's probably not as true within the field as it seems from outside the field.

I have a couple friends that majored in biology in school and then got jobs in biology research labs (NIH, UCSD). Y'know what their day job consists of? Killing rats. And checking rats to see if they're dead yet. And feeding rats so they don't die quite yet. And sitting around playing solitaire while they wait for rats to die.

There are people with Ph.D's seeking these jobs, and every time my friend interviews one, she thinks to herself, "You want this job...why?"

Similarly, my sister is a petroleum geologist, and she needed a master's degree to get her job. You know what she spends most of her time doing? Coloring with crayons. And looking at core sample muck. And poring over maps. And the odd PowerPoint presentation.

I think lots of people think of scientific jobs as being ones where you just sit around and think all day. There is one job with that description: tenured professor. And you need to be tenured, with a bunch of grad students to do the work. Otherwise, your day job consists of dealing with whiny entitled students, lecturing, writing grant proposals, and building experiments in the machine shop.
A pretty good read. Thanks for sharing.
Disparition de Guy Decoux
Stick with what you know. Having said that, at some point I recommend learning a better language than PHP, like Python. Coming from a PHP background myself, I can honestly say that my programming life got noticeably better after having started writing everything in Python instead. That was a couple years ago and I wouldn't go back for anything.
Moderation.

If you let any one thing consume all of your time then you're missing out on all the beauty and diversity the world and life can offer.

Feed your brain new experiences and it will reward you.
The reason Apple is very successful is because there are few choices. A lot of hardcore hackers don't get this, but people don't like a lot of choices, and they especially like uniformity and consistency. I like that for my Ubuntu setup, all the apps have the same look and feel whether it be GTK or KDE, I keep them separate. I like that for Mac OS X they all have a common look and feel. I don't like that on Windows everything looks different.

So by bringing in all this extra crap, they loose that consistent look and feel, and that is basically what separates their platform to most people. They have a lot to loose.
I hope that the ones for cars are actually accurate, unlike the pedestrian ones which drastically underestimate the time, causing people to ignore it completely and just look both ways.
Why not try copying some of your tweets to this subreddit and see how well they score?
This is sad, I feel this way while doing a CS degree at Berkeley and working in front of a computer for UCSF in my spare time.

Instead of just complaining and racking up karma, I propose we meet up at a bar in the city (San Francisco to you non-bay area residents). Who's with me to get drunk and tell nerdy jokes on Saturday night?

I'm totally not kidding. If you need an excuse, call it networking. If you don't, call it partying.

[Edit: I'm down for seedier mission bars, but anywhere is fine if there's enough interest.]
I majored in CS, and went into financial software (where I thought I'd be able to work on interesting hard problems), and found that in the two years I worked there, I can count the number of times I needed something from my degree on one hand. Yeah, it was nice to be able to see a problem and immediately think "Stick the intervals in a heap; modify the top element each time a new quote comes up; pop it and output an element for each trade". But that was about 3 hours out of 2 years employment. 99% of my work was boring UI plumbing or dealing with bugs in 3rd-party components.
Or you can spend time doing what you want with people who also like doing that, and be truly happy. I live with 3 other hackers and love it.
Scriptometer: measuring the ease of Script-Oriented Programming in programming languages
Cruise around on your (bianchi track) bike, maybe look a little further east: Potrero hill has Farley's, 18/missouri

and west: Dolores/17: Maxfield's house of caffeine, Mornig Due, and a bunch of other small ones, i can't remember heir names
Do have any experience with SBIR-type loans, or know anyone who has any? Were you surprised to learn how easy it was? I'd love to hear the anecdotes.
RSS readers never work with certain blogs i read for some reason.
All the pedestrian crosswalk countdowns I've seen seem to tick off true seconds, with perhaps one extra second at '0'.
I once heard someone say, programming is to computer science what skating is to ice hockey.

(Just don't tell that to a theorist)
Android - why art thou?
How would you handle a customer claiming to have gotten sick from a meal?
At Pitt I heard a presentation about getting SBIR/STTR loans from a consultant who helped people get those loans. His advice was to hire a consultant to help you jump through the hoops.
Download the Android SDK
Totally agree.

Coincidentally, I'm in school and many people have told me the same thing.

To be honest, I don't "enjoy" anything about it. This only makes me wonder if college is supposed to be the "best part of your life", (and its quite the opposite for me); then the the rest of my life should be pretty darn depressing.
The real question is, what's the business model for teaching people Internet literacy? And can that even be done?
I found them quite large and readable from long distances. Here's an image I found online of a countdown traffic light in Shenzhen, China:

http://bbeled.com/project/images/dongguan.JPG

And even Thailand:

http://bbeled.com/project/images/taiguo.JPG

Come on, USA, let's get with the 21st century already!

(Photos in context at http://bbeled.com/project.htm , click the second 'Traffic signal light' tab.)
Liability is one problem. Another is that labor costs will go up as the business develops.
Ronin, a Ruby hacking environment for the rest of us
You sound really frustrated. Life is too short. If you hate grad school that much, drop it. Life certainly isn't downhill after school. My personal experience showed that the most interesting people I met, I met at school, not in cubicle land. Then again, it's what you make of it.