skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say: if we give you a loan, you agree to make all designs public domain. Perhaps with a small waiting period - say 5 years.
The Creative Commons license that the Fugue icon set is under says, "You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor," yet none is specified.

In addition, purchasing a license for the Fugue set is listed at $50/user. How does this work in terms of web apps?
This is nothing new...

That is correct - this was submitted here 6 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=202278
Where are these positions located? Why do you care about "potentially less career advancement opportunity?" Do you want to do a startup, or do you want a career at a big company? We can't assume much from your post. Thanks! Also, what choice are you leaning towards, and why?
Not everything has to be automated - why not do manual version control?
and

- http://www.wilshipley.com/blog/

- http://blog.dawdle.com/
I'd go for the IBM position, regardless of which pays more. For one thing, the advantage of working at a large established company is they'll teach you how to write software. There are a truly vast number of things about writing software professionally that a CS degree doesn't prepare you for.

You could do a lot worse than spending a couple of years at IBM. If your alternative is a web development company, you'll almost certainly be doing more interesting work there.
People got their HELOCs taken away and their credit card limits slashed and shopping is still up. Makes no sense...
Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo’s online search business for $20 billion
There is quite a bit of good advice here. I too was in a similar situation a number of years ago when my (as in I owned it) company was taken out by the post 911 meltdown. I closed out with more debt than you.

My suggestions (as someone who is not an attorney or a CPA) are:

1. Talk with the hosting company to get out of the contract.
2. Call all of your creditors, and tell them your situation. Ask them to help you and see if you can work out a payment plan. My creditors were surprisingly willing to help.
3. Get a full time job, work hard, and pay off your debt.
4. Keep your products on simmer until the time is again right. If you built a company once, you can do it again.

Being in debt sucks, and it took a number of years for me to get out of it; however, declaring bankruptcy will ruin your credit and be on your record for years to come. If you have that on your credit record, then creditors will stay away from you for years to come.

The economy is taking out companies left and right. Small and large alike. Just remember that nothing is insurmountable. Keep up your spirits, and keep moving forward. There is only one direction to move, ahead.
In Malcolm Gladwell's latest book Outliers he uses hockey players as an example of how genetics (or talent) isn't necessarily a deciding factor.

Top-level Canadian hockey players are disproportionally born in the early months of a year. This is because the cutoff for deciding which league to play in is January 1st. Kids born in the first half of the year are older and bigger than the other kids. They make it onto the best teams in the best leagues and get more practices. Ultimately this advantage allows them to play professionally at a higher rate.
What I want is to work on free software. The smaller python job offers that. What I'm not sure about is if it would be foolish to turn down IBM. I'm hoping other HN readers have been faced with this choice, or similar, and could tell me what decision they made and how it worked out for them.
I don't have anything against working for a big company, but it was made pretty clear to me that at IBM I would be working on enterprise applications using java, among other technologies, on windows. I'm not really excited about working on proprietary software but this is my first job and I don't know what to expect.
Is working on enterprise software challenging and exciting or am I going to spend all my time doing paperwork?
I think science is an art and not a science :)
"... I worked on it because I love programming and trying new things. Everything I was doing at the time was new to me so it was fun, engaging, and a learning experience. Plus, it beat the hell out of anything else I could have been doing in that wasteland ;) ..."

Good explanation.

I put it as a question as I'm wasn't conclusively sure why people would sign on to assignments that have a probability of failure. But I've since found that smart organisations allow pursuit of training and learning as a reason to keep staff and motivation. I figure the USF know a thing or 2 about motivation. Hope your putting the lessons you learned into some hack your working on :)
You are not supposed to downmod things just because you disagree with them - that's the reddit way. You are supposed to downmod worthless stuff that doesn't add to the discussion.
Normally isotopes don't cause chemical changes, but with hydrogen they do. Deuterium is twice as heavy as hydrogen, so it moves slower, and is less reactive - for some reactions this can make a big difference. With the other isotopes the change in mass isn't anywhere near that.
He needs that 6K to live on until he can find more income. If you pay 6K on the credit card you still owe the minimum payment next month only now you're broke. At the margin he will have to declare bankruptcy. This is a cash flow budgeting problem: many bootstrapping startups face these kinds of issues.

As for getting a personal loan he's broke and has no assets: I would be cautious about falsifying a credit application.

He needs to focus immediately on income: focusing all of his efforts to earn many times more than $600 (6 months of 20% interest on 6K) over the next six months will be more useful than more debt juggling.
Sorry if the title caused confusion. Silk is awesome -- I think that goes without saying. I found this set interesting only because it is the first free alternative that seemed worth considering.
But GWT doesn't require eclipse to run? that 150Meg I assume must mean the 10 tonne eclipse IDE? Not GWT.
I take it you mean more interesting work at IBM. That's what I was wondering. If I get to go to work and solve interesting problems every day I would be happy. I just know so little about it that I fear working at an Office Space type environment. If anybody reading this does or has worked at IBM I'd love to hear what you thought about it.
Just a means to an end, when they started out doing that — hopefully that remains the case.
Why CouchDB Rocks
Hey!

I will concede that the ratio (debt/monthly income) = level of depression(scale 0 to 9, 0 being your situation 9 months ago, 9 being suicidal)

Firstly, get the emotional support of your friends and family. Seriously, get the emotional support of your friends and family. Initially, you needed their support, because dropping out of college and starting a company definitely is a ballsy and "stupid" move in the eyes of many parents. However, you need their support now more than ever, because you risk slipping into a massive depression.

If you can, live off your parents. Cut as many expenses as possible. Get a few jobs. I would say pay off your debt AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. It will be the most emotionally taxing and anxiety-inducing factors in your life for a while. This could also manifest into severe depression which has all sorts of massively negative side effects which could delay paying off your debt due to mental exhaustion. A year of solid hard work would pay off most of your credit card debt.
10 Rules for Not Being a Complete Douche Bag
I think it is an unfortunate situation where insulting a stupid proposition is seen as worse than proposing it in the first place.

My belief is that thinking people should take a tougher line on ignorance, irrationality and stupidity. By choosing to engage with these type of opinions with a 'neutral stance' you are giving strength and legitimacy to their arguments. You are essentially saying 'Although your argument seems reasonable, I disagree for the following reasons'.

So maybe I went too far. But I do think there should be a cost for making spurious arguments. Also I feel the casual viewer of arguments shyould be left in no doubt as to the validity of the original statement.
Whenever someone in an organization proposes to add a new check, they should have to explain not just the benefit but the cost. No matter how bad a job they did of analyzing it, this meta-check would at least remind everyone there had to be a cost, and send them looking for it.

To me that's the most important paragraph here. That takes you from "let's make sure this never happens again" to a cost-benefit analysis. The issue is not whether or not to have checks, as much of the discussion here assumes. It's about realizing that not all checks are equivalent, and using that knowledge to get the greatest safety at the lowest cost.
IIUC, Tesla was applying for loans under a specific program meant to promote the development of next-generation cars; this is a program that the Big Three have also requested funding from. The public benefits most from such a program when all auto makers with scientifically sound proposals can qualify for it, not just the ones making cars that fit middle-class budgets.
This makes sense. But has any human being-- or any animal in nature-- ever ingested deuterium in any significant amount? How can you not know if this will change ever-so-slightly the way DNA transcription takes place, or example?

I just think it's kind of irresponsible for a reporter at a science publication to make cavalier statements about things like this-- "It's completely safe..."-- without having any science to back them up.
So the premise of the article is that the author has decided that Tesla is using technologies that won't work, and hence it would be a bad use of public incentives. What makes him think he knows any more about whether it will work than the people who have thought enough about it to put hundreds of millions into it?

This is exactly what technology development incentives should be used for, having money to work on stuff that is not obviously profitable in the short term, but would be big breakthroughs over the long term if it worked. If it's profitable right now, you don't need incentives...
You shouldn't lump all reporters together. I work at a daily metro newspaper and folks there tend to look at the talking heads on TV as more of the media frenzy types, particularly the 24 hr news channels that need to fill 24 hrs every day with something that will pass as news.
This is a chaotic and cynical time.
I really don't get it. What username? Do I actually have to sign up for another site? From my impressions, I thought I could just enter in any username and see a location of a friend from data collected from other networks. Now that would be cool.
Tango's also pretty good: http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Library
I did that. I got a contracting job making $50/hour, worked for a year, grossed $100K ($50 an hour times 40 hours a week times 50 weeks in a year), paid off my $40K debt, paid $40K in taxes, and lived off of the remaining $20K.

So I want to be clear what my advice is... if you still think it's terrible advice, that's fine, as long as I'm not being confusing as to what I'm trying to say.

If I found myself in patryn20's shoes, or in my own shoes again, I personally would pay off the credit card debt before doing anything to upgrade my lifestyle. I'd stay bumming with my parents and friends, or, if that was starting to impact my productivity, get a really cheap apartment. No luxuries until the debt was paid off.

However, I wouldn't now make paying off the debt the very first priority. If I found myself in the same shoes again, I would not now stay in a contracting job just to get rid of the debt.

Absolutely I would want to see the debt going down. However I understand now the reason that is important is because it means that I'm now paying attention to the financial signals in my life.

The debt itself is only 30K, and if I paid even 30% interest on that, that's only 9K a year. That's not going to kill me.

What's important is the mindset, the understanding, that I'm now going to steer my business and my personal finances in the correct direction, and that I'm going to listen to the financial signals in my life instead of papering over them with debt. Get that right, and it won't matter if I end up paying off the debt in three months or two years.

For decision making purposes (such as, suppose patryn20 wants to start another business, should he do it or not?), I claim what's important is the time derivative of his net worth. Does the proposed business put him further into debt, making the derivative of his net worth negative? Then I would say, no, don't do it. If it is going to make money, leading to raising his net worth, and he wants to start a business, he's fired up about starting a business, he's excited by starting a business, go for it. I wouldn't base the decision on the net worth itself, I wouldn't say "don't go into business while your net worth is negative".

I wouldn't necessarily give the same advice to anyone. If someone had 30K of consumer debt from overspending, I'd be concerned at their successful ability to manage their business finances when they can't manage their personal finances. For such a person I probably would recommend getting a job and getting their personal finances under control (paying off the debt), before getting into a business. However patryn20 has a track record of a successful business, just in my opinion over leveraged, and right at the moment he reeling from a pretty hard blow. So my advice for him is different than it would be for a hypothetical person who was in 30K of credit card debt for a different reason.
We are responding to customer needs.

"[anything at all]" -- Noam Chomsky
Sometimes I really dislike the NYT's editorializing. In this article they start by describing an experiment into the social lives of student which adds tracking to a windows smartphone. They then compare this to the "ever thicker web of sensor" which record our lives via the Internet, apparently.

Sure, I understand that technology and the metrics associated with it are more prevalent now than ever, but I get sick of newspapers rolling out this Orwellian nightmare every time they can't be bothered to report on some real news.

This article is not worth your time.
Indeed. Most technologies are introduced from the high end and down, because the high end is less cost sensitive. This gives time to get experience with the technology and develop it to make it cheaper, at which point it goes into mainstream products.

I don't think you should underestimate the power of image in the car industry either. If you want the all-electric car to become mainstream the public needs to see that this stuff works and is cool. There's no better way to do that than to build a car that kicks everyone else's butt.

Reminds me of graphics cards. Nvidia and ATI introduce these ridiculously overpriced high-end cards that cost $600-700, and a short while later that tech is in mainstream $150 cards.
For "hacker news", this place sure gives you the young republican kicks.
Ask HN: What are the best of public SOAP Web Services
I'm doing some research for a book and I'm looking for the best publicly available SOAP web services.

I know Google and Ebay/Paypal have some. Do people have some example they think really highlight the best of the SOAP architecture?

Thanks :)
Thanks for the advice, I really do appreciate the constructive criticism. I just want to explain the issue of margin and debt in regards to the business I was running.

The margins were ok. Ranged from 15% to 40% due to client acceptance rate on the leads. Clients in the industries I was targeting always reserve the right to reject leads and never want to pay in advance.

The problem came in with anticipatory purchasing. Let's say I need 45 graphics templates, 24 domain names, and capacity to host 1,000,000 daily impressions. I also need to buy premium CPM media for the next month on specific websites. You pay for that stuff up front. So, that runs you $12,000 (just a guesstimate). You have to do this stuff before you launch the campaign or issue a full invoice.

You launch. You generate leads, and at the end of the month you invoice for $35,000. But before you even invoice at the end of the month, you have to start purchasing for the next month. Targeted media buys, additional server capacity if necessary, creatives, and so on. If you are growing, you might spend out $24,000 in the second month.

You are generally two months out on spend if you are growing. If they are stable you are spending a month ahead. This means you will pay for one to two months of expenses before you receive the payment for an invoice in the first month.

If the business starts to shrink, you have to take a hit on pre-purchased creatives, equipment, etc. This is where I got caught. When things started shrinking, I had already acquired capacity and services I could not refund. As revenue each month declined, the ability to pay off previous purchases in full declined.

Once it seemingly stabilized, I was able to start predicting purchases again and continued acquiring placements and media for November and December. Then the clients pulled the plug.

Now, having already purchased and placed creatives for the last week of November and all of December, I am now stuck with paid for graphics with no clients and media buys that I can only get partially refunded.

Just thought I would explain how it is possible to be profitable while operating, but get stuck with debt when things get shut down.

I do have to say, if I do this again I will definitely insist on minimum notice clauses in the placement orders and service contracts. No more of this "turn it off" same-day, phone call BS.
That sounds fair. :-)
Yes. I've worked in fast food, and as a cashier at a convenience store, and in both cases, those who were better at the job preferred busier times ("It makes the day fly by, doncha think?").
Does anyone know the source of this rumour?
I think it's great to have that kind of mindset. As I said, I thought the rest of your advice was great -- I just happen to vehemently disagree with the notion that you can let revolving debt ride while you pursue high-risk investments (i.e. starting a business).

Even if you're "only" paying $9k a year in credit-card interest, that's still $9k that could be invested directly into your future. And if you truly believe in your business, then why wouldn't you want to invest everything into it? Is it worth starting a business two years earlier, only to have $9k less per year to funnel into your dream?

More practically, you need every last dollar that you've saved to start a business. Few entrepreneurs can afford that extra $9k a year, and I doubt that you'll meet many successful business owners who will tell you that they couldn't have used additional capital. It really doesn't make much sense to invest in a business when you're saddled with consumer debt.
Oh. Heh. I meant the actual "artwork", not you personally :-) My apologies for the ambiguity, it was unintended.
Paul,

Surely if the costs of checks could be "discontinuous," "non-linear," "step-change," or however else you would like to term it, then perhaps the potential cost to the company of NOT having the check in place could also be the same. Larger companies potentially have more to lose by having recurring lapses in supply, or in the ongoing case of your essay, software service. Of course, software/coding may also be a special case. Additionally, it's true that your "committee" example represents a discontinuous change in bureaucracy for that firm, which would make it much more reasonable to expect an equivalent affect on cost.
"The purpose of the committee is presumably to ensure that the company doesn't waste money. And yet the result is that the company pays 10 times as much."

Well, only if they still buy every product, which would defeat the purpose of having a gatekeeper committee. If, instead, the committee approves only 1 in 25 products that would otherwise have been bought, the committee saves them money (leaving aside the cost of the time of the committee-members).
honestly couldn't figure out how tarsnap worked

Tell me more -- what was unclear?
I think this article would actually make you a pretty awesome person rather than not a douche.

That said it seems a little self-depreciating. One thing I've always loved about start-up culture is that you are encouraged to remember your own worth and what you can achieve.

Just don't rub it in anyone else's face. Use it to show that they can do the same.
December 2007
If true, Icahn's recent purchase of 6.8 million Yahoo shares is rather timely:

http://www.latimes.com/business/investing/la-fi-yahoo29-2008...
Both Perl and Python have web libraries that have always seemed close to perfect to me.

As an example, a few days ago a friend of mine was trying to figure out how to tell people within her organization how to find the "canonical" URL from a request (the URL that the browser ended up at after possibly numerous 30x redirects) without having to actually go there with a browser, and after I'd suggested wget...she came back with, "Can it be done in Python? Everybody already has that installed." In about 90 seconds, I was able to whip up a couple of lines that did the job, and an example of doing it from the Python REPL. So, urllib2 is surprisingly powerful and clean.

Perl has LWP::Simple, which is similarly awesome.

Google Checkout, IMHO, is a great example of what not to do, while PayPal manages to provide similar services in a much more coherent fashion. (I think it's particularly sad that Google had the opportunity to learn from people who'd come before...and they still managed to make a worse API.)
AIG Execs See Bonus After All
Ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

You can go bonkers defining quality.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/KrisJordan - personal plug - programming, start-ups, php
You will find that the greatest accomplishments in the world are often built upon solid foundations.

It's perfectly possible to go from college into a startup (or to skip the college part), but in general you will do better (and contribute more) in a startup when you have some experience in a large company. You may not want to retire from IBM, but it's good to see the good and bad bits about how a large organization is run.

The IBM job may or may not be there in another 5 years. There will always be some startup opportunity available.
"Remember your own worth" and "be humble" aren't mutually exclusive (but not to the extent of faux humbleness, que the Golda Meir quote).

Also a mark of pretty much every start-up is that you'll see people doing work that they (or others) may feel is "below them".

I was recently in a start-up, where the person who both had the most fun and commanded the most respect had an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford, but ended-up doing (almost exclusively) "business operations": from securing office space, to purchasing food for the fridge, doing financial work and even running the dishwasher.

pg also mentioned how RTM (now a tenured MIT professor) was a sysadmin at Viaweb.

(I've realized I've also missed several opportunities in that way: specifically being asked to do sysadmin/operations and web development work for early stage start-ups in favour of doing more "hard core" development elsewhere; but it's a tough learning curve).
Depends on when providing a web service with an SLA is your core competency. I'd readily use S3/EC2 for running Hadoop/doing backups/rapid prototyping (and use a CDN for static hosting) -- but if your core competency is providing a web service with an SLA* you want to control as much of the stack involved in that process as possible.

Of courses in these cases you'd want to outsource as much of the lower-level work as possible (e.g. having a third party company rack and stack and provide you with a serial console).

* Not all web applications require an SLA, early adopter consumer applications, e.g. Twitter would be an obvious example.