skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd suggest that you were very, very lucky that you didn't continue with the company. There is nothing more soul destroying than to try to fight your case in an organization of people who believe they know better than you do, even when it's clear they are running the organization into the ground.

There is nothing you could have done to save this company. It seems to have shaky foundations to start with, so the best you probably could have done was to put off the inevitable for a short amount of time.
Most of the mysql holdouts I've encountered have a deeply ingrained notion that postgresql is hard (no idea where this idea comes from though) and because it tries to be reasonably correct, it must be "some academic nonsense" with no practical value for "just getting stuff done". Usually if you can force them to use postgres for a couple weeks they get over it and realize how bad mysql really is.
I understand the train of thought you're having. It may not be the best kind of business scaling-wise but if done right he could open some more somewhere else and horizontally scale that way. Everything can be scalable when pushed into the right direction.

More branches = more employees = almost automatic administration = more money.

Those are only my opinions, therefore not facts.
That's exactly the same problem, isn't it? If someone were to pay to be the Official Provider of Carparks to the games, they don't want everyone else to be able to write something which makes it look like they are too. For a slightly more realistic example, lots of places are providing food to people attending the event, but McDonalds pays a lot of money so that they're the only ones that can advertise as "London 2012 Restaurant" or whatever.
They're currently being sued for this.
Are you sure that they individual support people are self-employed? If they merely work for a contractor company, that would be okay (assuming they're employees of the contractor). Otherwise, it sounds odd.
I worked a tech company with a decent lawyer who needed to cross-check all the marketing newsletters and blog entries we posted related to the Winter Olympics. By the end we were using such convoluted terms that it rendered the entire exercise pointless.
Boat != Ship
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Hipstomatic launched before Instagram? This whole article is very condescending and the epitome of the death of TechCrunch.
> Note that this is not done on a whim: these laws and interpretations were introduced because employers were systematically exploiting workers, hiring them as contractors just to work around their established rights.

While this is the most common form of abuse, it is sometimes also used as a means of tax evasion by the employer, employee, or both.
I've wondered about this with the Superbowl, aka "The Big Game". I understand that refusing to let people mention your hugely popular event without paying is a quick way to make money. But does it help in the long term?

For events no one's ever heard of, obviously, it would be better to spread the word, rather than delete all unofficial mentions. It seems to me that eventually, the Superbowl will be better known as "the Big Game" or some other euphemism, and the NFL will be stuck wondering why they squandered their valuable trademark.

The Olympics, due to its historical nature, may be less susceptible. But how do you trademark a term that has been used since ~750 BC? I'm wondering what would happen if there were a movement to follow the rules religiously. Imagine if the only place you heard "Olympics" was in crappy advertisements? And every real human you talked to just said "The Quadrennial International Grab-Bag of Sports". Or maybe the "Quigbos".

Anyway, I'm rambling. I just really hope these language police get what's coming to them.
Why Startups Should Pay Attention To Skyrocketing Patent Prices
Birthday wishes message quotes for sister 2012 - Birthday sms
Where 14 Of The Top Internet Businesses Got Started
When I program in C-syntax languages, I always surround loop and conditional blocks with braces, even if they have a single line of code. Even though these languages allow braces to be omitted, I consider it bad style, and error prone (although I have never seen a real bug where a programmer made an error of including multiple statements without braces). The languages do allow this style, and however distasteful I personally find it, I would expect compilers to handle it properly.

I think the same should apply here, the minifier should handle the language as specified, if it can't then it is has a bug.
Both sides are probably happy because the cleaning workers probably aren't paying taxes at all.

If they were, they would be extremely unhappy with this arrangement, because 1099 employees pay both halves of FICA ("self-employment tax").

One possible way this pans out: eventually, he ends up with a worker who gets a notice of imputed liability from the IRS; that notice threatens to put the worker into bankruptcy, and so he calls an IRS help-line or his state labor board or an attorney. The IRS reclassifies all his employees and now threatens him with bankruptcy.
No, it is not the same thing as punching someone in the face. People need to stop taking offense from everything.
Introduction to Backbone.js Part 5: AJAX – Video Tutorial
Dts decoder
Ponies for Parties
A Zoo to You, Inc. is a mobile petting zoo offering ponies for parties, exotic reptile shows, and many other great animal encounters.mobile petting zoo, ponies for parties, reptile shows
If someone posts a prominent disclaimer that they are not an official sponsor, why should they be prevented from referring to an event by its actual name?

If I owned a bar, and I was showing the London 2012 games on the TVs, I would advertise that I was showing the London 2012 games on the TVs. Exactly what is wrong with that?
It's always been like that, the Olympus-named athletics committee has always been ridiculously aggressive about their branding (and no, writing the words-that-cannot-be-named in greek won't save you either). My favourite replacement term is "Summer Games 2012"

I wonder if they are preparing a Superinjunction to prohibit the tweeting of results.

Now, imagine if Christmas had similar sponsors.
"Clive's Parking. 1/2 mile from the Olympic venue."

"Half Mile Parking."
[full disclosure, I used to work with the fine folks at Shutterstock, who created Rickshaw]

Rickshaw has been talked about here before, when it was released (original thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3340089)

It's nice to see Rickshaw getting some love with the new scatterplot renderer based a subclassable base renderer, a test suite, and an updated home page.

Nice work!
This is a sentiment that I see frequently on HN, and I'm not exactly sure why. I was a "questionably" contracted employee for awhile, and I never once felt exploited by the company, and I'm confident that they never felt that they were exploiting me.

Sure, being contractors might not be ideal for them at the moment, but they are the first 8 employees at the company. There are additional benefits to being in that situation.

In addition, we have no idea how much they do or do not understand their employment status. It is convenient for us to jump to the conclusion that the employees are ignorant about tax law, but that very well may not be the case. Just like in any other service industry, there are plenty of educated and informed workers in the mix, especially when you start looking at those that tend to excel in that particular field (he did say he now only hires top notch folk, after all).

I guess what I'm saying is, the discussion about W2 vs 1099 in this case is both valid and valuable, but let's not jump to any conclusions about who is exploiting whom.
Awesome - love the fact that you have this on GitHub... however, an API needs to be stable. This doesn't look like it will be very stable at all!

Given that last time you were unhappy about the wholescale changes to the DOM that G+ made, can't they change the XHR calls at will and break any extension you write?

Like I say, love what you are doing, but doesn't seem like a good basis for development :(
The Hidden Cost of Cabs
OK. Well if some more feedback like this comes this way I shall have a rethink (on this and other projects!).
Interviews with Lisp Hackers: Pascal Costanza
This looks great. I'm 19 now, but would have killed for something like this when I was at school.
My weekend project: the Ask Steve Jobs iPhone app
traxtech tnx for your comment. Will definitely check it out.
Do you plan on launching with Clojure support, and then later on add JS support? Since JS is far more difficult, do you worry that the project will morph into a quagmire as you try to fit all of the features in? Do you have a plan to mitigate that risk?
While they'll probably go a little too far, this is a good thing. The Olympics are an incredibly expensive event to put on that many people love and someone needs to pay for it. There are a limited number of people who can visit the games due to cost and seating restrictions, so TV advertising is required. If this kind of thing doesn't happen, the value and therefor the price of the sponsorship drops, leading to a worse Olympics for all.

It doesn't matter if you don't like sport or the IOC or the fact that London won the Olympics. This is the situation and it would be imprudent to act any other way.
Didn't know that Ron Paul supporters (I am not one of them) are leftist.

Not sure if this belongs to HN though.
I don't see how you can possibly trademark a year, which is a factual statement.
Diy electronics parts
From Kickstarter's point of view, they enabled Diaspora to raise a big pile of money so that they could _attempt_ something. So it was a great success.
Creating persuasive content your market will love
I'm going to sound very stupid, but how did you do it? :-)
I wish I had the time to really help out and engage fully in the going-to-schools aspect, but I can't. However, if there is anything else you need help with, let me know!

Good luck
Thanks. I only read the initial post.

Yeah, you can't get into how to do the work. Also using anything called employee turnover is a dead stop.

But I still think it's salvageable, simply because there are so many independent cleaners out there already. This industry is heavily independent. I think he really needs to look at his structure, pronto.

I'll play devil's advocate just a bit more for the crowd. Many times startups skirt all sorts of rules and regulations when getting off the ground. I'm okay with that -- startups are always a bit subversive, and if you listen to your accountant and lawyer you'd never take any risk at all. But you can't go on like that for very long.

EDIT: Here's a possible setup: place the jobs on cards and put on the wall. Have the cleaners bid for the jobs. The checklist could just be the terms of contract completion, and you'd have to make sure the checklist was not a job description. Whether or not the contractors conspire to set the price or anything is none of your concern. You're simply a clearing house for very small cleaning contracts.

I think it's very doable. His business and income is really in chasing down people who need cleaning and people who can provide it. That doesn't have to have anything to do with employees. But it won't work as you've described it.

I was just blogging about this. Many times you find value and struggle with the model. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3847651
You can get your website recommended the same you get your app, through word of mouth. I don't understand the difference.
Best of luck - I've got a 12 year old brother who wants to learn to code, but probably needs quite a gentle introduction to it.
Graphs - When 2D is not enough, Three.js and Neo4J
All of these already exist in some form:

> Self-righting mechanisms

Modern ships can easily transfer ballast fluids (typically sea water, but sometimes fuel or distilate water) to correct any listing. There are no methods of righting an overturned ship because that would require an astronomical amount of moment.

> Self-sealing compartmental design

Watertight doors can be controlled from multiple stations on the ship, such as the bridge or the engineering control room.

> Re-floating devices

If you mean safety devices: Ships carry liferafts that, in the event of sinking, automatically detach from the ship, float to the surface, and inflate. If you mean re-floating the entire ship: Not feasible to re-float something that weighs hundreds of thousands of tons just to save some scrap steel.

> "Carefree" fly-by-wire preventing dangerous manoeuvering

Ships have automatic navigation and piloting, though not in shallower waters such as in ports.
Nice post -- it's inspired me to go ahead and try out Rust. I've been watching it for the past few month.

Also, have you taken a look at Julia: http://julialang.org/

If you like Haskell, you should take a look at Julia, which manages to integrate a lot of the features of Haskell and Lisp, but with a Octave/R interface. Performance is a central goal of the project.
http://techrights.org/2010/02/19/defamed-by-access-employee/

be sure and read the 2 comments to this article, you are being lied to by the poster here on every point
Learn to be a web director
Well if they do, I sure hope they aren't bought soon like Instagram. I'd prefer they stay for the long haul and stay independent as much as possible.
If you build some­thing good, the money will take care of itself.
For a more technical discussion of the intricacies of this topic as it relates to British Law, you may find this article interesting:

http://www.bl.uk/sportandsociety/exploresocsci/businessecono...
Some of us don't know much about super bowl, because it's a single country single sport thing. 2012 Olympic games in London are more universal. I didn't know anything about the super bowl issue.
The Future of America
Another point why this result may not be typical of attempts to duplicate this business in other parts of the country is that he is doing this in Washington DC, the epicenter of where cash is being artificially injected into the economy by defecit spending. Silicon Valley, DC, and NYC exist in a different world from the rest of the US
Spending more money on an event does not necessarily make it better.

Plenty of other great sporting events are held without these kind of ridiculous measures.
Well (perhaps I misread) but it seemed that you were implying that he is getting more money than his value is worth here, and that they should instead form their own collective. My counter was that the cleaners don't need to work for this guy, they choose to, and therefore they have by definition decided that his value proposition is worthwhile.
A beautiful interactive model of Solar System
That's surprising. Is it the example here (http://code.shutterstock.com/rickshaw/examples/extensions.ht...) that is slow? How is it slow (when you click on controls to customize the view, drag a slider, mouse over plots)? When it's slow for you is there something else on your computer chewing up a bunch of CPU?

A lot of the hard work is being done by d3, which is pretty well optimized for the tasks its doing. I'd be surprised, even on a 4-5 year old commodity desktop, to see laggy or jumpy behavior with fewer than a million or so plot points.
I remember the original article comments here on Hacker News, and it was implied by a vocal minority that Kickstarter didn't need to respond to these allegations.

Thankfully they have, and it's a very reasonable response. I'm glad that Kickstarter have realized their mistake and apologised!
This is scalable, I am not sure why people are saying it isn't. In its current form, no, but if he puts it into high gear and takes it to the next level, there is no reason he couldn't repeat this model, hire managers etc and be completely hands off. But, that is not what I would do necessarily, I would get my franchise papers in order ASAP, and start marketing this online, there are a lot of good keywords to go after (how to start a cleaning company etc). Get it to the point where he knows exactly how to repeat this in any city and make XX,XXX$/yr for the "owner". Figure out a franchising model, where the owner of the franchise can learn how to repeat your success, and you get part of the profits/or a franchise fee (hell you could "loan" them the money at interest). Nothing sells better than telling people that you can teach them how to leave their job, make 60,000$/yr, and actually be able to do it.
There's no mention of the computing at school (http://computingatschool.org.uk/) group - is there any link up between the two?
Rackspace Announces Availability of Production Ready Cloud Powered by OpenStack
You're confusing ships with boats. They are not the same and are not interchangeable.
So your biggest argument that Apple is pro-web is that instead of choosing a proprietary plugin they chose a proprietary codec? That's not a very big improvement at all, at least not in terms of "openness", though it is an improvement in performance.

Still if they really wanted to support an open web, they'd support WebM.
Real Life with Federico Viticci
That doesn't make it any less hypocritical when they attacking others for doing it.

If they think it's a problem they should stop doing it themselves.
I'm not a CSS guy so I'd like to see CSS3 and design posts. Even some of the "basic" stuff is useful to me. Personally, I'd like to see HN users focus more on the "developing skills" part, which includes coding, design, and building a business. Some of the inspirational stuff is good, but a lot of submissions are just tech news.
The New iPad To Launch In South Korea And 11 Other Countries This Week
Kickstarter doesn't agree with your reasoning, as they have just apologized for their response. I think it's reasonable that they were called out on what they stated to Rachel Marone, and they have now apologized.

Both Rachel and Kickstarter have done the right thing here.
Fine, they can claim Olympics, Olympic Games, etc. Maybe even Summer Games.

But they simply have no claim to the year or the city name. It's not a little too far, it's far too far.
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Every time I see someone using MySQL I ask them why they didn't choose PostgreSQL. Often, the answer is that they haven't heard about it.
One thing that drives me nuts about the mysql CLI is that if you type 'mysql --help' it spits out the help flags followed by three or four screenfuls of variable settings.
I once refused to sign a contract that was basically an NDA, but not labeled as such. It had a clause that said if I leaked information about the project and the project failed, I'd be liable for all damages.

When I refused to sign it, the owner started screaming at me that I was trying to sabotage his business, and I'd sign it if I wasn't. I refused to sign and left.

Later that day, I returned with their CD with all their source code. They had lent me to the CD to determine if I'd be able to do what they wanted. I didn't have to sign anything to get that CD, and they didn't ask for it back when I left.

It was quite an eye-opener for me, and I'm vary wary of NDAs to this day. At the very least, they need to have a termination date and be very specific about what they cover.
That is highly unlikely. Kickstarter is essentially a marketplace for entrepreneurs. People don't go to Amazon or ebay in the same sense as Google or Facebook. Sure they have one hell of a business, but only a certain kind of person is attracted to it. Everyone uses Google (or some search engine) and Facebook's attraction is undeniable.
Theoretical physicist turned trader: Beware of Economists Bearing Greek Symbols
While I don't disagree with protecting their private IP, don't forget that the Olympics are funded mainly by taxpayer's money in the host country, and the games are generally considered an issue of national pride for competing countries. It's not like the IOC is ethically entitled to complete ownership of the very ancient games, and thus able to treat the whole concept and event as its exclusive private property; unless they agree to cover the full cost.
> The Olympics are an incredibly expensive event to put on that many people love and someone needs to pay for it.

I am continually fascinated by the idea, often proposed in other contexts than this one, that we must spend money as an axiom and then figure out how to fund it as a corollary.

I don't really disagree with your dichotomy: we can either have expensive events or sane intellectual property law, but not both. I'm merely wondering at which meeting we picked one over the other, and what happened to my invitation :-)
Found this by a tweet by Buddy Roemer. I think this is absolutely correct. The USA is all about lobbying and money. I think it's why parents from India complain that "why can't our kids just wear a damn uniform like we did" The role of business in government is just too high in the USA.
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Becoming compliant isn't a paperwork task. It's going to be expensive. He hasn't been withholding any taxes; he could end up owing as much as $1000 for each prior month he failed to do that.

The city and state his business is headquartered in (he's in DC Metro so it could be any of a bunch) is also going to tear into him for unemployment taxes and fees. We had drama with this even though we don't even have independent contractors.
What's the problem then? Having management? 'Stealing' profit from the workers?

You can't seem to understand that 1000 workers doing 'their' job may be hundrends of times less productive than doing the same job under the same company. Lots of things (machinery, know how, etc.) need a company and a capital.

Finally, I also don't understand discussing capitalism. Here we are discussing freedom for individuals to work and to create a start up. What would you rather do? Force everybody down the same principles? Not sure it's right.
Corruption Responsible for 80% of Your Cell Phone Bill
although onejs and browserify tries to accomplish similar tasks, onejs has some noticeable implementation and concept differences (e.g browserify pollutes global scope a lot and it expects you to provide it a main module instead of a package manifest)

here is the output comparison of onejs and browserify:

onejs: https://gist.github.com/2398843
browserify: https://gist.github.com/2398824

and here is a real world example of onejs;

http://multiplayerchess.com/mpc.js

The second thing is, onejs lets us use the core NodeJS library, too. It doesn't contain it by default but you can install the available modules by typing; "one install assert path util url"
Past HN discussions:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3766284 (The new Comcast Xbox Xfinity app is the first nail in net neutrality’s coffin)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3505922 (Free Wikipedia in Africa and Middle East (first step against net neutrality?))
Someone should take the nice interface ideas and add them on top of Emacs :). I like a lot of parts of the look.
If you are not allergic to java, flying-saucer is quite good http://code.google.com/p/flying-saucer/ .
Update: ELCImagePickerController
Smells like a big win for Ubuntu 12.04.
Rumor or not?  Apple Planning a $249 to $299 ‘iPad Mini’ This Year
Do they have wireless there, or how does it work? My assumption is that he probably can send them to NASA control and they forward it, but since the article claims that he tweets himself, they obviously seem to have internet access up there.
Are you asking the wrong questions?
Bye Bye SVN, Hello Git.