skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a great article and it reinforces for me, the importance of the concept of "ramen profitable". If you're Ramen profitable, you're putting essentially all of the profits you could be making into growing the business. You're not running at a loss, and thus not in the situation where a lack of ability to raise funds would kill your runway. But you're also in the situation where, if some invested were interested in plugging $10M into the company you should already have the mechanisms to manage that money and financial prudence to give the investor a high expectation that you'll put that money into growth.

Its really easy to spend other people's money and have no profits, and also have that show up as high growth. You can turn VC dollars into revenue thru a variety of ways that are unsound for the business in the long term. A trivial example is taking the VC money and then buying your own products on the open market. This would likely be considered fraud, but there's a variety of "partnerships" and inefficient advertising methods whereby you can do the same thing. If you just want to show growth.

But if you're ramen profitable, and have traction, you've shown the business is viable on its own terms. This is akin to finding product market-fit. They might not happen at the same time, but being ramen profitable is a lot easier once you've found product-market fit.

Of course investors, generally VC types, want to see massive growth and are not as concerned about profits. But as a founder you have to look out for he business... and there might not be as much VC interest as you would like, and in my experience with VCs they are known to drag out deals.

In fact, in several of the deals, during due diligence the VC determined the amount of cash we had on hand. They also made it known that they wanted us to start spending more on certain initiatives, and to not worry bout it, we'd close well before there was a cash crunch. Yet in both times, by the time we did close, they had us over a barrel because we were about to run out of cash due to taking their advice.

So, I think ramen profitability is a good balance. You're not wasting gross margin by banking profits, you're turning it all into, hopefully, an investment in future growth. You're less dependent on VCs, but have also shown the discipline to have compelling examples of how you can turn their money into growth, since you've been doing it with your gross margin so far.
My only major inaccuracy is re: Sansa Stark. I found her to be a well-intentioned yet manipulated and confused child in the books. She just wants to be a quintessential 'Lady' - courteous, artful, etc.

In the show they made her out to be... American. Rude, spoiled, etc. Other than that I just wish they had the time and the audience to tell the FULL story in all it's glory. Of course it's expected that the sub-plots have to be trimmed of the minutiae, but the complexity and ambiguity is part of what makes ASoIaF so amazing.
TextMate 2 Auto Installer
Install TextMate 2 while preserving TextMate 1. Includes ZenHTML, CoffeeScript, Git, RSpec, Cucumber, and the RailsCast Theme.
You've got a point, wish i could edit it again.
>If you want to convince them to get rid of the TSA, the side asking for the change has to appear blameless.

Is this workable? People, and specially governments, can find blame in so many ways that you can't convince them of anything unless they are forced or they realise it themselves. (In my country, protestors against massive corruption are framed for minor things they did in past and both media and government repeatedly use those points to distract masses from main issues.)

It appears to me that the lady was trying to convince others of the unreasonableness of the process. That is one of ways of democracy. Do you think "jared" will have something to think about? Do you think "the old goat" will be somewhat careful next time? Will somebody in public or those reading her blog see her point? I do think so and that is a positive impact, however small it is.

You have suggested other channels. The most obvious is voting, other is organised protest. The lady is trying to tell people that it may not be good idea to subject oneself to such procedures, and in a way creating a mass for the organised protests or cohesive votings to happen.

And for her personal courage I am inspired: she knows that she is going to appear a fool to others, she sweats, she knows that it can lead her to physical, financial problems, but she is risking because it is a step ahead.

ps: personally I don't think politicians take note unless there is a mass protest against some existing law, so to ask an individual to use other channels is unreasonable.
The problem with litigation, even if affordable in the first round, is that it can be appealed and the judgment is only recognized and enforced in the jurisdiction of the court.

Compare this with low cost arbitration: Internationally recognized, final, binding and a lot of procedural freedom.

Disclosure: I am launching judge.me, a binding internet arbitration service that charges $299 fixed price and offers awards that are recognized and enforced by court systems in 146 countries.
Introducing the for-if anti-pattern - The Old New Thing - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
You'll need the WP7 SDK for apps, or XNA Game Studio for games dev

http://create.msdn.com/en-US/resources/downloads
What's more infuriating is when people give 1 star reviews to products they've never purchased for bogus reasons like "the price is too high" or "this is not out in my country".
I'd say low fruit are -server, Xmx, Xms and MaxInlineSize and looking for boxing/unboxing. At the other extreme, is it worth it to your company to spend a few weeks reading the Hunt/John book and benchmarking thoroughly?
2011 in Review: Defending Location Privacy in Courts and Congress
Robocalling strikes me as somewhat pathetic, regardless of who uses it. Sort like spamming people.
Fire & Water Damage, Mold Removal, Hoarding Cleanup, Crime Scene Cleanup Service
YouTube Slam pits videos against each other and lets you pick the best
Of course, they should. It is not whether a company should be profitable or not that is the important question, it is when it should be profitable that is more important.

Depending on a variety of factors, companies have runways of differing lengths. Ideally, you should attain profitability as early as possible. In the real world it is not that simple a construct.
Golden rules of entrprenuership by Jason Nazar
There is a WP7 plugin/toolkit that comes for VS.
No. 7 tech story of 2011: The social 'bubble'
Wow, way to take a good thing and make it out as a bad thing.

You want the ability to appeal.

PS. It's cool that you are launching this, and if people want it more power to them and you, but the ability to appeal is important.
I count 179 mentions

http://www.biblegateway.com/keyword/index.php?search=Jordan&...

There are many translations.

"A voice of the howling of the shepherds! For destroyed was their robe of honour, A voice of the roaring of young lions! For destroyed was the excellency of Jordan."

Anyway I didn't come up with that idea. Its just something I read the meditator Yogananda say when I looked it up. He said that hearing the head exploding sound is this spiritual thing and that the bible among other spiritual text alludes to it esoterically when it mentions the roar of the Jordan and the crossing f the Jordan.

My head exploding experience sounded like the tremendous roar of a river inside my head. Happened a few times before I found that spiritual interpretation re: meditation. I haven't done much meditation since then.
Here's a link to the responses I gave last couple times this came up:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619439
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1195524

Short answer: Yes. Just be sure to differentiate on quality rather than price. Your fellow oDeskers are racing to the bottom on price. Let them. Casually walk to the top on quality and you'll find yourself all alone with a nice stack of work from good clients.
Second the recommendation for NameCheap dynamic DNS. In my experience it's much more reliable than no-ip and dyndns.

Also, if you have dd-wrt installed on your router, the firmware comes with a dynamic dns client that works well with NameCheap.
Paperless Post: Redis Tips: Persistence-Only Slaves and the Slowlog
I wasn't accusing you of hating freedom, but I was accusing you of being a hater.

If 1,000 people did what this women did, it would still have no impact. 10,000, now you're talking. But you need the brave souls to get it started.

Like I said originally, I'm not saying you need to go out and do this. I haven't, shamefully. But hating on those who do it, really?
Should add "This Just In" to the blog post's title ;-) Because isn't it stating the obvious? Or do many people really think VCs are immune.
We already have nuclear weapons on Earth, yet wars still happen. Space is big, incredibly so. And once there are people and industrial infrastructure sprinkled throughout it armed conflicts will probably be inevitable.
Thanks- I made the graphics myself. I am not a graphic artist or anything, but can get around Photoshop/Illustrator enough to create graphics for a simple game.
There are literally 240 forks of this essentially abandoned and/or poorly maintained Python SDK since May 2010 I think, and I think they just put it back with a notice to say it's deprecated. To be honest, I think people just fork the hell out of it, improve on it and find a common location for merges until Facebook releases a new one. If they don't, the community should just hack up a new one. The Facebook API changes every week and breaks every other week in 1 thing or another anyway. The community would probably respond faster and better to these changes than Facebook. It would be best if we could just agree on a central location for fork merges.

I personally just keep a modified version of this fork in my repository.

https://github.com/liorsion/python-sdk/

A note on DjangoPyPI and PyPI in general. I think it's about time we have a feature complete, stable, alternate PyPI implementation now. I tried virtually all the PyPI implementations out there a couple months ago and eventually had to settle with DjangoPyPI very reluctantly. It has trouble sitting behind a proxy and deleting things. In short, it's a mess, but it's the best in terms of features supported out there right now. It's a sad state of affairs, but Python should, and can do better than this. There's no way we can't have something like Maven or RubyGems.
Bogus scarcities we've addressed at our office:

* Macbook power bricks (we were having arguments over them, because people would borrow them from other desks; now we have a stack of them).

* Macbook video dongles (same; note: it's not enough to just have one attached to every monitor, like the article says, because sometimes people need to take them out of the office)

* Whiteboards (everyone has one on their desk now)

* Hard disks (same deal; they're so cheap, we just buy new ones any time there's any storage issue, rather than have people scavenge for space on their existing drives)

* Books (everyone gets infinite free books, and to head off time-wasting discussions about who bought what book so they can borrow it, the policy is, you order the book & it's yours full stop; we have many copies of several key books in our office)

We're probably missing lots and lots of opportunities to trade small amounts of money for substantial amounts of time. What are other people buying? An obvious next example would be "soda", since people trek down to the convenience store to get bottles --- but I feel like stocking soda is also a bit unhealthy.
Exactly. From what I understand, they were key in drafting the legislation and now no distance from it matters.

Action from the company in helping draft an alternative, or bring a discussion to more people would be a huge step forward for them, not more PR or web pages listing people they used to be publicly aligned with (and likely still aligned with in private).
Don't most of those contracts specify the arbitrator, too? I know I've read many articles about forum-shopping by corporations; are they just relying on the consumer to not know which arbitration forums are truly neutral?
Ask HN: does anyone use cloudHQ? What do you think of it?
Here is the mentioned Techcrunch article:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/30/why-kik-loves-windows-phone...
Over the past year, I've made about $2400 from the sale of three different apps. SkyView7, Lighter and Revolver (with over half coming from skyview).

Nothing earth shattering, but has help buy my tech toys :)
Sam is a complete rock star. One of the few people I know who can get showstopper applause in the middle of a talk.
In California, if a defendant loses in small claims court, there is an automatic appeal right to have the case heard de novo by a judge of the Superior Court. "De novo" means the case is heard fresh and the small claims proceeding has no bearing on it whatever - in essence, you get to go through the same sort of expedited hearing procedure (no formal pleadings, no discovery, no formal rules of evidence, etc.) but in front of a real judge. The hearing is held, typically lasts no more than an hour, and (usually) an immediate decision is rendered and that is where it ends. Thus, even after this sort of appeal, a lay plaintiff can still have a potentially effective remedy for getting a quick decision.

As I read this piece, however, I was most struck not so much by how the small claims remedy is particularly effective (in reality, this is a highly variable forum at best) but rather by what a joke the typical class action settlement can be. While that vehicle has occasionally proven effective in high profile cases, for the run-of-the-mill class action case you can often get a plaintiff's firm that is pretty much gaming the system to get a fee windfall for itself even as it puts a relatively low priority on the remedy it gets for the class of victims supposedly being represented. That is why remedies rarely take the form of significant cash payouts to members of the represented class and why the first instinct you have whenever you get one of those class notices is to simply throw it away rather than bothering to read all the fine print that might lead to your getting a $10 recovery or some such thing.

It is interesting to see how enhanced connectivity in our modern era is threatening to disrupt the cozy sorts of settlements so achieved through this vehicle. Probably the biggest losers will be the plaintiffs' class-action lawyers themselves, who might wind up having their back-room settlements more easily rejected and be left actually having to work hard to get a real recovery for the victims in lieu of taking a quick and inadequate deal that benefits primarily the lawyers.
Your choice of registrar is completely irrelevant; the registry itself is in the US (Verisign), and the government goes straight to the registry. Unless you plan to abandon the .com/.net/etc extensions, you're under US jurisdiction even if you register the domain in another country.
> Any combatant with the necessary wealth and technology to develop any space-combat capability is going to have significant terrestrial interests

Imagine a colony that long ago severed its ties with Earth (or whatever other terrestrial body they started from). Living off comets and asteroids seems entirely feasible and it's a much harder to attack/easier to defend set up.
Post here any urls that you add this link to.
I liked the WWDC talks and Chris Liscio's talk at Çingleton.
Sure, trying to mitigate damage with sandboxes is a good goal, but the reality is that if your server is hacked at all you're screwed. There is enough local shell exploits that once you are on a box, chances are you can get past user and group permissions pretty easily. Plus, they've hacked your box! Time to wipe it and start over. Period.

As for SSL certs, don't you store those on the load balancer? If you are running a single box and it goes down, pointing the LB at a new backend box is a lot easier than copying certs around.

As for SSH keys, I'm not quite sure what damage could be done there. The only thing on there is public keys, right?

As I said below, this is a big reason why I believe in PaaS if your application can deal with it (and most can). Sysadmin has become so commoditized that there is no point in wasting your own time/money dealing with this stuff.
While it is true that it should be easy to deflect, it is only easy to deflect if you can detect it. The essay assumes that the projectiles would be pushed to a significant fraction of the speed of light. At that speed there is no time to launch any type of deflection.
Given how much of a pain in the ass it is to manage python packages, I'm not really that surprised. CPAN is distributed with perl, rubygems is packaged with ruby in most package managers, npm is actually a native part of the node project now. But pip (the only proper system for managing python packages in my opinion) isn't even a blessed third-party package, it's just another package on PyPI unless you know better already. I think python just has the trouble that they started off on the wrong foot before anyone knew what worked best, and they've been playing catch-up with various coats of paint on top of their proverbial pig.
I found the historical insights interesting -- the military misadventures of dying empires in particular. But his energy analysis is a tad obtuse, and the cyberwarfare scenario was nearly comedy. You can tell this person is an historian.

I'm also uncomfortable with the way people talk about China sometimes; they're clearly the new USSR in the minds of some Americans, and I question whether that is warranted. China may well be a problem in many ways, but China also has big problems.

I personally believe that China's biggest problem is the same as that of the rest of the world: the decline of cheap primary energy (peak-cheap-oil comes first), and the decline of economic growth that will inevitably come with it. It will hurt everybody, not just the americans.
The problem isn't opioids, Rowe and other group leaders say. It's poorly trained doctors who prescribe them too easily or in excess.

No the problem is America and a decent portion of the western world refuses to treat addiction and chemical dependance in a manner that deal with the issue.

The reality is much more complicated then doctors education and is closer reflected in stating that there are a group of people that due to mental or emotional issues find day to day living more bearable by abusing chemicals. They are in essence self medicating mental health issues because either they are poor and cannot afford treatment, or the medicines that the mental health professionals prescribed did not work for their case. In the case of opiates it provides euphoria which masks the symptoms of depression as well as some of the other disorders and as such it reduces the symptoms of their condition.

If we had a program where these individuals could get help with less dangerous alternatives, a program where they where specifically treated for their disorder, then we would not have these patients infiltrating the pain treatment institution. What we don't need is a program that it's first course of action is to remove them from a chemical that they have come to believe is the only one that helps. Rather a program that replaces the chemical with a safer, similar alternative as well as one that phases in other treatments.

The problem as it sits now, is that these people can only help themselves via the streets, a pain doctor, or through a rag tag confederation of volunteer agencies. Until we stop treating drug abuse as a moral issue, we are doomed to have an ever increasing drug problem because articles like this advocate making medicine less available to pain patients of patients, due to the fact that they refuse to treat addiction patients properly. They then throw up the same tired moral arguments as if, pain patients are supposed to suffer because another class of patients (who should be responsible for their actions) chooses to abuse medicine. The article argues that we should make pain patients responsible for addicts choices by limiting the availability of medicine to both classes. It's dumb ass moral logic at it's finest.
Indeed, they need to atone.
If you're smart enough to ask this question, why are you thinking of ways to shoehorn a business into oDesk? It's a seller's market for dev talent in 2011 and probably for all of 2012. The ability to solve business problems using software development skills is not a commodity. It isn't sold by bidding prices down. No, the opposite of that.

This is one of those places where a reasonable amount of extra effort yields a disproportionate amount of benefit. You don't make linearly more money positioning yourself as a real consultancy; you make much more money.
I learned CoffeeScript (an node.js at all), played with Clojure and C (really, I didn't know it at all) this year.

Gonna deepen my Clojure and C knowledge, play with D, play with Haskell, Erlang and some Lua next year.
It must be the only mobile platform I havent found time to write anything for personally (this year managed to get apps in the relevant stores for iOS, Android, WebOS, Meego and Symbian)

I do really like the look of the Lumia and will always have a soft spot for Nokia, having to use Windows for the development OS is the large mental barrier that has caused me not to have a dabble, as it feels, most likely wrongly that it will take a while to get into.

On this respect I am selfishly glad Microsoft decided to hamper it by calling it "Windows Phone" which I am sure the man in the street has a negative view off compared to the likes of the non Windows branded Microsoft products like Xbox
It looks like its back: https://github.com/facebook/python-sdk
GoDaddy has not demonstrated any concrete steps that they're taking to prevent this from happening again, and it could be said to be executive malpractice for the company not to work to prevent this trap from ever occurring to the company again. GoDaddy can't be trusted not to support these things, so they must work to help pass laws that eliminate the risk. Otherwise, the GoDaddy executive team is leaving the company open to further problems due to policy ignorance and/or malice.
Italy fines Apple $1.2 million
Wtf? Rhodes was known as "The Empire Builder"

Who is teaching you this bullshit history?

Demonizing historical figures instead of studying them in the context of their time is really pathetic.
Really excited for the FitBit console - I just got one, and hacking my health this winter should be a blast.