skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great list. I'd like to mention I use Tower app for a Git GUI. I especially like that it shows a diff right as you're looking at changes and lets you stage chunks of code which I find very helpful.
Your Go-to Resource for Running a (MongoDB) User Group
Steve Blank said in Four Steps something to the effect that he is simply articulating the steps that most successful startups have always followed.
I have been looking for a way to sync to (and from) Google Docs conveniently for a while. Insynchq looks nice, unfortunately "Linux Coming Soon".
Yes! There's even a whole site devoted to the startup scene in Nordic (and Baltic) countries: http://www.arcticstartup.com/
Where did you get your data about incorporating abroad? From my information, the incorporation itself, if done in the UK, couldn't be less hassle-free and cheap: You get it in one day, and for less than 100€. The whole fiscal management should be doable for ca. 70€/month with a service like www.crunch.co.uk

What worries me is the Italian side of the thing: I'd like to pay what I have to pay in taxes (to the State, not to the notary) but it isn't very clear how you do that; as for pension contributions I have a day job that and am already covered there.

Simply put, right now I don't want to look for external money (THAT would be a loss of focus ;) and couldn't pay the costs of a SrL. I want to be sure if the business model works before committing thousands of euros to this startup.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the suggestions!

PS: do you know about http://srlfacile.org/ ? I like what they ask and I'm trying to help, but exactly today I was thinking about writing a more direct/polemic message referencing the "tasse occulte" our premier talked about recently. I'm sure that making much (MUCH) easier and less expensive to incorporate would be one of the few feasible measures that could bring about real economic growth. I would have incorporated at least a year ago with my other initiatives, hadn't it been for this...
In Finland, there's been quite a lot of happening lately: http://steveblank.com/2011/10/07/the-helsinki-spring/
Anyone else find it funny that Tom uses the same old photo of him in front of a whiteboard?
CSS Circles
A while back I shared a clever technique for creating triangles with only CSS. Over the past year, I've found CSS triangles incredibly effective, especially when looking to create tooltips or design elements with a likewise pointer pattern. There's another common shape that's easy to create, and that is the circle. Using border-radius, you can create wonderful CSS circles.
Yes, but did you give them the keys so that they could hold a meeting with investors in your living room? It seems that she meant for others in the company to use the account as a means of interacting with clients, etc.

I think the lawsuit is ridiculous, but I'd enjoy taking the plaintiff's side in a mock trial.
Its interesting that they use Facebook as an example of the "evils" of ad supported platforms. Facebook would never, ever work as a fee-based platform. Facebook is only useful if a critical mass of your family and friends are on it, and that's just not gonna happen if it costs money.
Considering that SOPA considers linking to copyright infringing content to be as bad as publishing it yourself, this project unifies those two actions nicely!
> and more importantly: ease of use.
I'll take "Business Risk" for $200, Alex.
Creativity Comes From Such Strange Sources
No I didn't, but if I had done that would it make a difference? It's certainly something I would do if the situation came up (and if I didn't live just down the road from our offices).

Certainly I've given access to my blackberry to answer calls from clients before, I still claim I fully own this phone.
I would disagree on the ownership question. Just because someone allows access to the account doesn't mean the ownership of the account is transferred. It would be as if you gave me keys to your house for the weekend and then I claim ownership of your house.

But one of the comments in the story has the answer. If the issue at hand are the connections in the account, then why not just hand over a copy of the list of connections? Granted, the company would then have to ask everyone on that list to connect with the new account, which they may not be inclined to do.

To me, it would depend on who created the account. If the company created it for the use of the employee it belongs to the company. If the employee created it for their use, whether it was related to their job or not, it belongs to the employee.
I'm very wary of this sort of tracking, and I do take it seriously... but I just want to point out that this number could make the tracking sound more widespread than it actually is.

The article implies that certain targets are pinged continually in order to establish their patterns. Pinging somebody once per minute for an entire day would come out to 1,440 messages.

Not saying the number is or isn't inflated, just pointing out that they could potentially have tracked a very small number of people for a while.
I have a hard time accepting that answer.

Those quotes were taken directly from these newsletters

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rXxdXLObxdk/TvFkFgQzpSI/AAAAAAAAFh...

It has his name, his face, and says by Ron Paul

He also benefited financially for over 2 decades from these newsletters. You had to write a check to Ron Paul to get these newsletters

example

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vT7kX8KDLI4/TvFnrfhhwVI/AAAAAAAAFk...

So as far as I am concerned, after viewing the physical evidence, I conclude Ron Paul made large sums of money from distributing and claiming at the time to write, hate speech, promoting misogyny, and promoting fringe conspiracy theories, in an effort to scare people into sending him money. Reminds me of how Glenn Beck operates.

Ron Paul's excuses today lead me to conclude he is either lying, or completely incompetent, and would not have the ability to lead a Cabinet effectively. In other words unfit to serve as Commander-in-Chief.

EDIT: I see the downvotes flying in. I provided evidence of the claim. Sorry to see his hero worship is so strong that people will ignore factual hard evidence. Kind of pathetic really. This reminds me of the circlejerks over at Reddit... thought the people over here were a few steps above that base level of ignorance.
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The problems with charity as a model for providing what is provided currently by the government is that it is basically dictated by being able to make a plea to people with enough spare money to donate.

So if a billionaire for example has a relative who suffers from a rare type of cancer for example they will be likely to donate a disproportionately massive amount of money to research and care for that particular type of cancer, or perhaps they find one particular endangered species particularly cute and will donate the money to the preservation of that particular species. They might also be opposed to environmentalists or hate gay people so will donate no money at all to environmental causes or treatment of aids victims.

If their income is 1000x that of the average person they basically get 1000x the say in what is important (actually perhaps more since their cost of living will likely be lower as a % of income).

This money might be used far more efficiently when some kind of justification is required in terms of providing the widest amount of help throughout society or the world as a whole.

In addition allot of the "free market" type people that I know are quite opposed to the idea of charity anyway, although I think this may be somewhat different in the US.
I recall having a similar epiphany about the value of books when you need to learn something new.

There’s a tendency to believe that all information is equally valuable. Therefore, an hour spent reading about, say CoffeeScript in blogs is equivalent to an hour spent reading a CoffeeScript book, only the blogs are free, immediate, and more entertaining.

The last bit is the key. They reason that blog posts are more entertaining is the reason to read the book. They are all sizzle, with optional steak. A book has structure, as Avdi notes, and part of that structure is balance between crazy-fascinating things and fundamentals that are not that fascinating at first but necessary for deep learning.

In cliche terms, books contain information that is important but not urgent. Thanks to the social mechanics of blogs and social news sites and retweeting, the blog posts the filter through the firehose are all urgency. Some also contain important topics, but none contain the important but not urgent stuff that is necessary for a complete education. Any blog post or essay with important but not urgent information falls into people’s “read this later” bucket and never gets the upvotes to make the front page of Hacker News or anything else.

So, you will learn things in an hour on the web, and in an hour reading a book, but if your primary goal is a thorough education in something that is new to you, an hour in a good book will serve you better than an hour reading blog posts.

p.s. Alas, my own books at http://leanpub.com/u/raganwald are simply collections of blog posts massaged into book format, and as such they are entertaining but do not provide the kind of structure and “important but not urgent” information Avdi and I are extolling here. For example, my essays about Combinators and Ruby might make you interested in Combinators enough to read a real book about them, but the book won’t actually teach you introductory combinatory logic.
I bought Ries book and made it most of the way through.

The problem here is that the Agile/Lean startup field is still in its infancy. The ideas are just now congealing.

That's good news because it means the field is wide open -- there are going to be a lot of cool new developments. But it's also bad news because every book you get is going to be hit-and-miss: a few good ideas, a few ideas that sound wacky, and a lot of noise. Agile is like that. It's a collection of best practices around iterative and incremental technology development. That's why it drives some folks nuts: different people can give you different answers and in the end it's all about custom tailoring and results-oriented process. What we're seeing now is this agile/best-practices idea extended to the startup world. That's a good thing! There's really good stuff in there. But it's going to evolve over many years, and just like Agile in the end you're not going to end up with a recipe book as much as a place to start, a lot of good material to absorb, and some guiding principles. It'll probably be something like the learn-do-adapt process we see in Scrum (Obligatory plug: just blogged about this the other day and posted about it on HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3404085)

So I like the Lean Startup idea. I'm just not sure what it is yet. I don't think anybody is.
Fixing holes in EC2 reliability
In practice, this means "standardized test scores." Does anyone actually think that's a good metric

If it isn't, we've got bigger problems - specifically the fact that we have no ability whatsoever to evaluate whether a school is doing a good job.

In that case, we need to fix our measurement process and waste as little money on unproven methods in the meantime.

Among other things, it turns out there's a lot of fluctuation of how much "value" a teacher adds from year to year.

If this is due to statistical noise, then teacher evaluation needs to be done on a multi-year basis. If this is due to internal variation in teacher quality, then maybe we need to either control the variation or accept that teacher quality varies widely and is mostly out of our control.

Note that if VAM doesn't work, then all the statistical studies claiming to show that teacher quality matters for student achievement are bunk. All those studies make some attempt at VAM, and show the variation due to teacher quality is large. Are you asserting that this is the case?
DDS-2 Tapes, DDS-2 backup tapes
> No I didn't, but if I had done that would it make a difference?

I think it makes a difference. As an admittedly weak analogy (only one cup of tea so far this morning), I can write off a dinner as a business expense if I dine with a client, but I can't if I'm just taking my family out and talking about business.
I'm fairly convinced that there is some good stuff behind 'lean startups', and that it's not just a fad.

What I'm a bit more skeptical of is how much of it can actually be distilled into practical advice, and how much of it would fit just fine in a one page summary.

Here's another way of looking at it, for fans of the book:

What concrete things did you do after having read it that you might have overlooked previously? Let's measure something:-)
Here's a nice break-down of exactly why the newsletter debacle is so damning (and how it contrasts with how Wright was handled):

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/12/re-thinking-...
http://conway.rutgers.edu/~ccshan/wiki/blog/posts/WordNumber... I read this write-up of the problem years ago that takes a different approach.
One of the Representatives of the State of Louisiana at the time of Katrina lived in an area that was not directly hit by the hurricane.

She had insurance that covered, flood, wind, and rain damage. The insurance company did not pay her a dime, even after she, and the rest of LA sued them.

There is no free market when insurance companies can buy judges to get their way out of doing what they were paid to do.
Why Babbage failed
A Naked iPhone -- Or, Why You Shouldn't Use a Case
> For example, my essays about Combinators and Ruby might make you interested in Combinators enough to read a real book about them

Mind suggesting such a book? :)
Chargify.com works well for us.
TweetingMachine, InboxCleaner (and others) Year in Review 2011
Was assembly really the right tool for this either? It seems like the difficulty of translating Fortran to Pascal due to Fortran's lack of many of Pascal's higher-level features would still apply to assembly.
In general I agree, except for the IDE part. Every single IDE I haven ever used have better editor that Smalltalk IDE.

Not being able to use your own editor, whichever it is, and being forced to use something that is basically equivalent to plain old browser textarea is a showstopper for calling Smalltalk environments pleasant.

Maybe Gnu Smalltalk is a cure to that, since it doesn't have live image and you can use whichever editor you like, but that kinda defeats most of the benefits of Smalltalk.
Do i really need to use the ide to 'get' smalltalk? I'm pretty happy with my tools, and would only use ST for the paradigm shift anyway. I don't want to leave my text editor. It has become a part of me, and i can't imagine life without it.
I hate to say it, my friend, but learning to listen is largely about changing your attitude towards the people around you. It is very difficult to listen when you perceive that you're miles above everyone around you. Consequently, the first step is to learn to see how wonderful, competent and intelligent every single person around you is. If the people who surround you are (in actuality) neither competent, intelligent or even remotely wonderful, run (don't walk) away and find new people!!! :)

Once you have built a genuine interest in the people around you, good listening skills naturally develop. When you're interested in the people around you, you will hang on their words, ask probing questions and reflect back what you heard to make sure that you understood it.

If you can't engender a natural interest in the people you surround yourself with, you can fake an interest. To do so, I recommend getting in the habit of repeating back things that you hear, nodding in agreement when the person says something you agree with, not interrupting when they say something you disagree with, and asking probing questions when you don't understand/agree with something.

Have you ever considered Toastmasters? It sounds silly to join a public speaking group to become a better listener, but I can't tell you how much Toastmasters helped me!
In One Slum, Misery, Work, Politics and Hope
On the other hand, lots of people in this thread are saying google's policy is the right thing in this case. Would they say the same if apple was refusing an app with a middle finger icon? A book? A song?

I think they're both wrong, but I understand that having something open for all, you'll get adults but children too, and as a parent your definition of objectionable content for your children may differ. But for me, simply removing the content is wrong. Maybe better parental control technology may make the situation better.
Dropbox has also clients for Android and iOS. Mobile sync would indeed be great combined with local hosting. Sparkle Share made an attempt, but it's still far behind Dropbox. This "DIY Dropbox" is not even beginning to scratch the surface of what is available in Dropbox. Perhaps an attempt to start development on a competitive DIY solution, but far from a replacement.
Yeah, the problem with this is that blocking /boot from being written to prevents custom kernels, which is kind of a big deal. :/
POF.com Office Photo
GoDaddy might as well be honest about their position on SOPA
If you have a "knot" type pain in your shoulder blade area on the same side of your body as your mouse hand, I cannot strongly recommend a track ball mouse like this enough:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-det...;

I had a continual knot and painful spot in my shoulder blade from age 16 (when I started using a computer regularly) until age 35 when I tried the trackball mouse.
Within a month or so of switching, the achey spot was entirely gone. I started a new job and used their mouse, and the pain came back. I brought in my mouse and it went away. Also, trackballs are faster once you get used to them.
His views on flag burning aren't exactly as you seem to think.

http://www.salon.com/2007/11/12/paul_3/

Mr. Speaker, we have some misfits who on occasion burn the flag. We all despise this behavior, but the offensive conduct of a few does not justify making an exception to the First amendment protections of political speech the majority finds offensive.
I'm not trying to be rude or condescending here, but if you read my reply in its entirety, you'll find the answer to your question.
3 Ways To Move Google Authenticator To A New Device
Hehe, very fun article, although it completely ignores a large portion of iPhone owners: women such as my wife who go out with a handbag and no pockets elsewhere. Car keys and an iPhone screen are, from experience, not the best of friends ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JyvkjSKMLw - In this video he claims he does not "accept the theory of evolution as a theory". While he doesn't come straight out and use the tired "just a theory" attack, it sure sounds like it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eiR_U8vhIo - A reading from his book expounds on his answer to that question. He seems to think the question of evolution is "silly" and irrelevant to his campaign. He also attacks public schools and evolution with rather weak and banal rhetoric.

Ron Paul lacks the perspective to be commander-in-chief of this country.
Here's one for you. Last year I tried an experiment where I developed a new website or app every two weeks. At the end of two weeks, I switched and started on something new.

"Normally," you're supposed to spend years on one idea, slogging away. I said "screw that" and decided I try an iterative shotgun approach. I put out a lot of things, talked about them all, and then let each one of them compete for my attention. hn-books was one of these ideas (http://hn-books.com)

This was extreme iterative behavior, and I don't know anybody that recommends it. But I had a really good experience doing this and plan on starting back up in January. I found it's a better experience learning about the entire process of business model creation over and over again than just doing it one time and trying to get it perfect. If I were at YC, I'd probably pick up on a lot of that through social contacts with all the other folks, but on my own I found that iteration on something real and tangible was really the best way to learn.

EDIT: My comment seems very ironic considering that a couple of the other comments on this thread are basically along the lines of "it's really smart people and theory, but nothing that practical" In fact, in this experiment found it to be extremely practical.
AppleDouble format version 2. Home file system is "Mac OS X". There are 2 entries in the file.

Format specifications for this file are available: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1740

General information on the file format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleSingle_and_AppleDouble_fo...
This is cool, but I wouldn't use it for any real documents. I care about versioning, edit history, etc.
Thanks!

I've actually tried Tower but I prefer the simplicity of Gitbox's UI.

If you like Tower, you should check out SourceTree (http://www.atlassian.com/software/sourcetree/overview). It's free from the Bitbucket people.
I oppose my own plan to break into my friends houses and install noise cancelling censorship devices (for my own profit) because there is a lack of consensus.

Well, they are getting warmer at least. I get the feeling that the only thing they are sorry about is that they got caught with helping the government censor the Web to increase profits. I expect more sopa legislation more cleverly hidden in the future from Godaddy.

Its easy to do Godaddy. One sentence: "censorship of the internet is wrong". They wont admit that though.
Right, so you do the same calculations in those cases, but, when someone proposes meeting at 3PM, you don't have to do any conversions. Some upside, no downside, unless I've missed something.
I believe the issue is that web development is normally far easier than the alternatives.

So, some ideas are tested in the web, and if they are successful and they benefit from going native, they will be reimplemented in a more close to the metal way. Or not.

GoogleDocs -> Dropbox

VVVVVVV in flash -> VVVVVVVV in C

Some future game in WebGL at 5 FPS -> Same native game at 120FPS with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.

OTOH: Mail clients -> Web mail
The upcoming war against general purpose computing (transcript)
Yes, you do. Smalltalk is a running object model and the IDE lets you modify that model while it's running. There are no files. Changes apply instantly. You can pull up some test data, and code it while it's running changing things as fast as you can think until it works the way you want.

To the best of my knowledge, there exists no faster environment to think and code in. SLIME come close, but it's too textual and doesn't seem as fast.
> I also love the way he's shaken up the republican party

He has not shaken up the GOP whatsoever. He has arguably shaken up the Libertarian party, but his base has nothing in common with the GOP base.
I highly recommend Refactoring, by Martin Fowler.
This was me a year ago: I’ve read all of their design rationales, and despite the fact that I’ve never written an app in Ruts, I totally agree with their critiques.