skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i definitely agree that the community response is there, but the community organization and resources are not.
.. and she'll remember the Great Depression.
Mr Stross appears to be on a mission not to have his content reflect anything other then the tone of that sensationalism title of the article. I investigated his bio, he has written a lot of books, mostly technology related. And he is no stranger to Silicon Valley, which makes me wonder if he is playing out some personal vendetta against the people behind Tesla.

How about the American government making sweetheart deals with the oil industry so that the diesel fuel available in the United States isn't compatible with any of the many fuel efficient automobiles in use all over the world. What would that title be? "Only the Poor/Middle Class & Rich Can Afford It. Should the Collusion Between the Oil Industry & the Government Back It?" Or how about the American government turning a blind eye (or even worse) as the oil giants snapped up many of the patents for battery technology over the last decade so nobody can innovate with them? Is it possible Tesla's initial round of funding would have gotten them a bit of traction if they would have had access to some of this battery technology? This technology that already exists but is being squandered thanks to big oil? What would Mr Stross have used as a title for that one? "Only Everyone Will Be Able To Afford It. But It Is Not In The Best Interest Of The Oil Conglomerates, Should Anybody In Power Bother With It?"

Grow some balls Randall.... what happened to the NYT?
yeah i gotcha. when I first heard about it I wasn't sure if it was more a security tool or a backup tool, and/or how it compared to my current S3 setup.
They couldn't do it without Overture context advertising patents, though.
Yet Another Loopt clone, or?
At this point, it's all about pessimism. It sounds like you're right in the heart of it. Probably somewhere on the east coast of the US. Me I'm not there. I'm going to go blow a few grand.
A deal with MS, for $20B, will include a clause that says that MS will be the default search engine and search engine advertiser on all of the Yahoo's properties for a very long time. So what would Yahoo do with a new search engine?
This is a really awesome write-up and lists everything I would have thought, but in a way I might not have been able to put acorss.

To put it succiently,
1. Cut down expenses, right now and ruthlessly. Negotiate with everyone on everything. Everything is open for negotiation.

2. Economic stress WILL KILL creativity. Your only focus right now should be get to positive cash flow. Not debt free but positive cash flow. Debt free will take time, but it will happen but what you need absolutely right now is +ve cash flow. Debt is ok as long as you meet minimum commitments. -ve cash flow will lead to economic stress which will kill creativity which will make it longer to go debt free.

3. Plan for Cash flow positive. On paper - In writing - Get someone to proofread.

4. If you are not able to get cash flow positive - get a consulting assignment or a job. START LOOKING RIGHT NOW.

5. If you are able to get to cash flow positive - look at your existing ideas-business lines and pick out the one which will create revenue fastest with the most amount of confidence. Work on it, and leave everything else for a while.

6. Don't go back to school. You know that is not a solution. There was a reason why you crossed into the free world.
Ask HN: LLC with International Founder
I'm not entirely sure if this question has been answered before, but I've searched around for a while and cannot find anything on the subject.

I'm looking to form an LLC in the next couple of week for an up-and-coming product a friend of mind and I are working on. Problem is, I live in the US and he lives in the UK. Does the international aspect of my co-founder increase the complexity of government taxing? Has anyone had any experience with this scenario?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
How did you find your clients and what kind of leads are these?

Any chance you could find some more clients that would be interested in the same kind of leads?
It's a question of focus. He is desperately poor: he's completely broke. He has talents that he needs to focus on making money. My assumption was that he still wants to be an entrepreneur: he needs to learn how to bootstrap on minimal cashflow.
Facts about Apple's history you prolly didn't know
from the site's faq:

q: "Will I ever be able to restrict who can view my location?"

a: "Maybe."

why would anyone use this?
"... "They are these creatures of almost myth and legend and that just blows people away, but secondly, deep sea in general is just so fascinating because you don't have to travel to other planets to find alien creatures," he said.

"There's things down there where their entire bodies are made of snot, they've got detachable heads, their teeth fall out, they explode and they eat their snot jackets. There is just weird things going on everywhere ..." ~ http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/07/17/2307028.htm

Some of you here have a distinct lack of curiosity. The words above describe such squids. I happened to make time earlier this year to see a live squid dissection undertaken by Dr Mark Norman Deputy Head of Science (Marine Zoology) and a team of scientists at the Museum of Victoria and it was fascinating stuff ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157606211764544...

The video show is important because there is so little known about giant squid even though they live a kilometer below the surface of the ocean.
Example: http://seemywhere.com/jeremy
Nokia Nokia 1200 Lcd Display Lights Problem
200, 1200 display lights, 1200 lcd lights, 1208, 1208 display lights, 1208 lcd lights, back, lcd, light, Nokia, nokia 1200, nokia 1208
Tesla makes electric cars targeted at the wealth. There are plenty of other electric car companies making cars that are way less than $100k.
I've just spent the last hour of my Sunday afternoon reading through http://www.lambdassociates.org/MinimalManual
So far I'm impressed.
That doesn't change the fact that while they are working, they prefer to be getting lots of sales.

They like to get paid for it, they can even be greedy. They like to get recognition for it, that can go to far too.

But they also enjoy making the sale.
Time Warp, Solaris
A new, elaborate $20 billion deal for Microsoft to buy Yahoo Search?
I will run the risk of annoying everyone as a master of the obvious but this should be included, yes?

http://hackaday.com/
I was also a recipient of his scholarship. I learned more from Andy in the short time I knew him than many years of schooling. He truly enjoyed his life and lived it to it's fullest, which is a cliche to say, but think and ask yourself if you really do the same. And, not only did he enjoy life, but he also didn't take it too seriously either; he was the most humble man I'd ever met. You would not and could not ever accuse the man of not being in touch with society, it simply wasn't possible. He was a man of incredible power and stature, and yet, could sit down and connect with ANYONE.

We should all hope to be a little bit like Andy McKelvey.
Plenty of advice here already. Insolvency can only be dealt with by liquidation and retrenchment on one hand, and bankruptcy on the other. It's an uncomplicated choice, and there's not much to say.

But, for the love of god, don't finance a business on credit cards. Bad idea. Really, if you can't find friends family or fools, there's always Uncle Sugar:

http://www.sba.gov/services/financialassistance/sbaloantopic...
“Total Fiction”: There Is No $20 Billion Microsoft Deal To Buy Yahoo Search
By super-alums I mean accredited investor.
Why dont you ask for us to post opml?
"Even if the one you pick today ends up being terrible for you, it's simply not possible to choose a job so bad from which you can't recover. Not even "Swiss Patent Clerk"."

Excellent point. I hadn't really looked at it like that. Just getting started it feels like this job will determine the entire trajectory of my life but like you said, I can always change direction (relatively) easy later.
That is actually done.

http://thomas.loc.gov/

Not quite as easy to use as SVN with Trac integration, I admit, but it is pretty good for government work.
The best stat to go on is here:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/cbuilder?ticker1=.TEDSP:IND

It gives you a rough idea of the health of the credit markets. TARP actually helped quite a bit, but it's been inching up over the past few days (up==bad) at the same time the markets have been going up. "Suckers' market" is what I think, and yet I made a few conservative purchases. Safe money remains firmly on the treasuries.

Here's the only thing I know: Nobody knows. The more important the chart is (like the DJIA) the more it represents prophecy than reality.
I'm curious to know what tools OP is using to track memes.
Reports Of New Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal Hard To Believe
I guess my perspective is slightly warped. I have a dog. A big dog. Which limits my options dramatically. But, I would have assumed that the perspective was similarly warped for SF, since she's coming with me to SF, as well, but perhaps there are simply more dog-friendly options in the city.

I will say that I'm now kinda shocked by how ridiculous the paperwork is for most SF rentals. They want huge swaths of banking data. Far more than I had to provide for any other place I've ever lived (even buying a house in Austin wasn't this intrusive). I've talked about the topic with my landlord (who wasn't too intrusive when I moved in here, and has been mostly great and hands off), and he said it all boils down to how hard it is to evict someone in California. Since throwing someone out takes as much several months after they stop paying or do something else against the rules, the property owners do everything they can to insure they never have to throw their tenants out. But, I still find it horribly annoying.
Have you ever heard of the March of Dimes? It is a charitable organization, but the principle is the same. The March of Dimes was founded to eliminate polio.

Polio is, indeed, effectively eliminated.

Did the March of Dimes close up shop? Nope, they just rebranded: "Our mission is to improve the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth, and infant mortality."

I'm quite sure that the global warming brigade would quickly find alternate employment if it turned out to not be the devil. Peak Oil looks promising, or maybe they could go for the full-on population-growth-leads-to-extinction Malthus again.
I'm pretty sure I'm gonna learn an awful lot no matter which one I choose. The people I've met so far at both places were very smart and nice. I'm fortunate that judging on those criteria neither job is far ahead.
To be honest, I'm surprised that the Tesla is seen as a car that only "the rich" can afford. I'm used to Australia, where a 100k car is somewhat standard for a middle-class family, but our cars cost a fortune.
Ask HN: What happened to thefeelgood.com?
I got to know about this music site through HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375296), got addicted to it, and now the domain's dead. What happened to them? It would be interesting to hear their story.
"The IBM job may or may not be there in another 5 years. There will always be some startup opportunity available."

Another good point, between this and what ken said I think I'm leaning IBM now.
The first thing I would do is talk to an expert about bankrupcy to see what my options are.
Google does not currently have a publicly available SOAP web service, unless you already have a key.
Ha. I wonder if this happens when people speak German.
This article has good intentions, but I worry about people using this method with a list of popular bank domains to figure out where you bank online. Then the web site operator uses the password used by the user (who uses the same one everywhere) to work their way into an account. Unlikely scenario, but it shows that even the slightest data privacy breach can be used for evil.
To put this in perspective the largest Hadoop cluster Yahoo (or anyone) has spun up is 4000 2.5ghz dual-processor quad-core Xeons. According to http://www.clustervision.com/cluster_hardware.html a Xeon runs about 4 flops per cycle. That means the entire cluster was running at about 20 megaflops.

The smallest computer on that map is 27 teraflops. More than a factor of 1000 on our cluster.

That said, raw power isn't everything. I know we were all impressed with Google's recent TB processing record, which prove the old adage it's not how big it is, it's what you do with it.
Didn't Mark Twain say that most people want less government corruption or more opportunity to participate in it?
Demanding money for the language manual/guide is not an inefficient way to increase adoption!
Sun has been doing all the right things...but several years too late.

They've Open Sourced Solaris, but they seem to expect good package management to simply spring into existence (or they expect people to pretend like their pkg tools are an acceptable substitute for package management, since they've put a shiny GUI on top of it...but a highly polished turd is still a turd). I thought when they hired Ian Murdock, there would be an instant move towards apt-get and dpkg on Solaris, which would be a huge step in the right direction (I like yum/RPM better, but both are perfectly acceptable).

There's seemingly a belief within Sun that Solaris is so good that people will beat a path to their door now that it's Open. The problem is that it exhibits a complete lack of comprehension of what makes Linux so much better for the vast majority of users. Linux is so much more adaptable than Solaris...and it all comes down to how many nicely packaged applications are available for Linux, instantly. So, for all the great stuff in Solaris (and there's plenty to be excited about: ZFS, dtrace, Zones), it's simply not an acceptable substitute for Linux, and the folks who are in a position to fix it are utterly oblivious to how badly they're failing.

So, I expect the folks at Sun will get packaging figured out three or four years from now...and at that point Solaris will be even less relevant than it is today.
Everyday I am using less and less of Google products, My default search is Yahoo now and Image Search is MSN Live, they are perfect. I somehow see Google as the evil empire of the future and by giving free lunch and letting employees bring puppies inside office won't change that.
David Beazley's Python Essential Reference.

you can do chapter 1 examples with the python basics in the interpreter and go from there. by far the easiest and best programming book I've ever come across.

All the basics in one remarkably short chapter.

of course, you'll have to have an understanding of concepts, like lists for instance. but it's so easy to play around in python you can figure those things out, and how they work on your own.

then use the python cookbook to hack up your own scripts. break them down to simple versions and you'll learn a lot when solving your own problems.
Last time I checked, Tesla wasn't based in Detroit.
Its not functional programming per se but higher level languages in general. Most scheme and lisp environments already come with high-level abstractions which completely obviate the need for any obvious design pattern (like visitor, etc...) and lisp is by no means a functional language (though it does incorporate many aspects of functional languages).
Sometimes I have to spend a lot of time in RHEL or Solaris hunting down packages of software that I would find and install in Arch in a minute.

I haven't had worse problems with Arch than with 'real production server operating systems' like the two above. I am developing my personal stuff on a VPS running Arch.

archlinux.org runs on Arch. We had some downtime earlier this month, but I think it wasn't software related.

Business guys, however, don't want something new and cool. They want a conract that allows them to yell at other people when things go wrong. That's why Arch might be a tough sell sometimes. Perhaps an idea for somebody's startup, mm? :)
Just curious, does anyone still care about SOAP? It may be alive inside some companies' intranets but it seems to be dead on the public web.

When I've developed APIs, people clamor for JSON, REST, and serialized PHP. Maybe I'm in some non-Microsoft, non-Java ghetto?
More likely examples are hacking into sites that don't use two factor auth, like your domain registrar or web mail accounts.

If you are using any form of online banking without two factor auth, find another bank!!! Even paypal offers a security token these days.
Sure. It is often due to dysfunction, but it can even happen to good teams.

Imagine you have to fix a simple bug, like the description of an option in an HTML page.

Imagine that: the codebase is a bajillion lines of Java or C++ that no one person truly understands any more.

Imagine that: fucking up is considered bad. Maybe you're protecting important user data, or maybe it's just code for the online store, and even an hour of downtime can wipe out the day's profits.

The team is so big that your feature is scheduled for deployment along with four or five others this week.

As usual, management has skimped on QA so there are not enough of them to go around. Also, QA was added late, so there's no fast automated test suite. It takes them a full week of manual and semi-automatic testing to go through all regressions.

After that week of testing in development is over, then it goes to staging, where it's tested with real live data and staging subsystems.

At least somewhere in this, something breaks (something is always breaking) and a fix is produced. Then the new build is tested all over again, with the basic smoke tests as well as any test suites that are applicable to that unit of code which broke.

This is causing another trainwreck because we promised feature X to client Y by end of the month. What do we do? Emergency team meeting! Let's rebalance the work schedule.

Meanwhile, your change, which just a simple HTML fix, languishes as this build goes into its second round of testing.

Oh, and did we mention that you have to have submitted your code in time for translation into six languages? I'm afraid that the French translator did not produce a satisfactory translation in time, so we're going to have to hold your change back. Can you revert this and put it in next week's build? Thanks.
The SEC
It's used by a lot of enterprise software -- like the kind that will still be running more or less unchanged a decade from now.

I find it a pain in the ass to write SOAP interfaces, but I don't mind at all working with them. Running a compiler on the WSDL file for my programming language of choice is often a lot faster to get up and running than wrapping a REST API and WADL seems not to have really taken off.
Damn. I think you managed to get every single number wrong :-)

First of all, FLOPS is not the same as FLOPs / cycle. Note the lowercase 's'. The former is floating point operations per second. The latter is per cycle. To convert the latter number into FLOPS, you have to multiply by the clock speed. That gives you 10^10 FLOPS, or 10 gigaflops. Now that's per-core. You said quad-core, so it's 40 gigaflops per processor. 4000 processors, so it's 160 teraflops. Much higher than the slowest on that list, but much lower than the fastest.

The other thing you got wrong is that if it were a mere 20 megaflops, it would have been a factor of a million slower :-) Tera is 10^12.

Anyway, I think this whole thing is apples-to-oranges because actual supercomputers have a much more tightly inter-connected grid (I believe) than the sort of loose cluster that Hadoop typically runs on, and further, they have a different programming model (Fortran with MPI and things like that.)
Maybe in the middle of a server migration and/or IP propagation.
I haven't faced this problem myself, but I have a few friends who've been in somewhat similar situations before. Most were more interested in the smaller company, but due to various reasons (rationalizations?), ended up picking the bigger company job (ibm/microsoft/amazon/google). Despite their stated intentions to only work for a few years to learn how things work in the "real world" and, of course, make some money, they seem to have no real intention of leaving now.

At the same time, with the exception of one of the Google people, none of them are particularly interested in the work they're doing. So it seems that earning the big money and having relatively stable, secure, and only slightly challenging jobs becomes a local maximum that is hard to escape from.

So while it's true that you'll probably have many jobs over your career and in the end what you choose may not matter as much as you might think, it does seem tougher to go from big company -> small startup than the other way.

Another data point (anecdote) about IBM specifically: I know 4 people who work (or have worked) at IBM, on the software-side of things. None of them says that it's very hard. One actually quit because he said it was ridiculous that everyone just constantly slacked off and nothing got done. On the other hand, the one person I know on the hardware side of things at IBM says that the work is interesting, challenging, and fairly busy.
Sigh. And this is why I shouldn't stray outside of my realm of expertise late at night, even if it seems like an interesting diversion.

Thanks for the correction :)
I would actually argue the opposite: the IBM job (or some equivalent big-company job) will always be there. The startup opportunity at [name your startup here] is only available now.

Big company jobs tend to be alike in many ways (due to their size), whereas startups vary so significantly that it's deceptive to think of all startups as interchangeable.

So yes, there will always be some startup opportunity available, but if you know that there are good people working at this one, or if they're working on interesting things, then I think it's a better option.
Looking back, I'm amazed at how long it took me to awaken from the dogmatic OO slumber. One of the things that snapped me out of it was realizing how mechanical and low-level the GoF patterns are. Combine that with the tight coupling you get in object models (a foo has a bar and a collection of bazzes, each of which has a bizzat, and they each tell two friends, and so on and so on) and you end up with very rigid code. That medium is concrete and concrete hardens awfully quickly.

Nowadays, my programs are orthogonal sets of functions that I can combine any way I want to, with no object model to wrestle into submission, and my world is blissfully design-pattern-free.

Freud said sometimes a cigar is only a cigar. I say sometimes a function is only a function.

Edit: I exempt Smalltalk from this generalization about OO. I've met too many smart, well-informed people who prefer Smalltalk (at least half a dozen!) to believe that what Smalltalk programmers do is OO of the kind that I experienced. Alan Kay's writings on the subject confirm that.