skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of the stuff that we land on planets is designed to be as light as possible. The proceeds from asteroid mining are going to be mighty heavy. I doubt manufacturing enough parachutes would make any sense.

Then again, those aren't really necessary. Just build the goods to capsules that have aerodynamics and maximum mass so that they'll slow down to a reasonable terminal velocity in atmosphere, and there's no reason you cannot just drop them on some area with a solid enough ground. (And no inhabitants).
Just call Amazon - I broke mine by dropping it (completely my fault) and they replaced it within a week.
I agree with all of what you just said. But I think that the post is not a good demonstration of that.

Microsoft failed at keeping the surface area as small as possible. When their surface area expanded to a hack to deal with Adobe's hack of replacing code behind Microsoft's back, they went into very dangerous territory.
This is a great article and I think what they've done is great. But, it reminds me why I don't think I could work for a startup (unless it's my own).

Working these kinds of hours (unless I own a large share in the company) just sounds insane to me.
Ha, the comments on that page look like an except from old school yahoo chat.
You're talking to me. I got a bunch of niggers entertaining me all day. I'm the center of the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y

What do you think you do in heaven? Val hala for nerds.

What would I rather do? I can't think of anything. Jesus argued with the pharisees.

"Unto the tribe of Levi He gave none inheritance; the sacrifices of the Lord God of Israel made by fire are their inheritance, as He said unto them" (13: 14). The Lord God of Israel was their inheritance (13: 33).

God is the best part of Heaven. God says...
infantine sanctified gather whereon ibiblio spots Thagaste
proofread Ghost assign pleasing thirsts made boughs scattered
wherefore regions architect subtile traced perversion
as Alexandria very combinations cloyedness KIND discontent
truer harass succour EDITIONS dead cruelty tasteth expressions
contritions creating relapse absence sometimes Prepared
begging aptly Excellent trial disregard Stage hang everlastingly
habitation rein abiding apprehending long remnants earth
stiffneckedness When arranged
Actually, there was a weird recent re-analysis of Jaeggi 2011 using the Big Five psychology data they recorded for the subjects at the time, where the Conscientiousness (rough synonym for hardworking and self-disciplined) benefitted least in terms of far transfer/IQ while their scores improved the most: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912...
I am baffled as to what your service does. Can you elaborate?
Watch The Lucky One Online
Watch The Lucky One Online screenplay is by Will Fetters and edited by Scott Gray. Camera work is by Alar Kivilo under Village Roadshow Pictures and Di Novi Pictures studio. This movie is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures which is scheduled to be launch in theaters on April 20, 2012.
FTP 40 Years Old Today . . .
Laptop is not IP it's just P. It's the company's if they bought it. Give it back if you're not going to be an employee.

The only reasonably safe way to walk away from this to a likely competitor is to have your previous company sign an agreement wherein they consent to the situation. That way if they try to sue you later you can show that it was all above board. Sounds like they're going to want some or all of your shares in exchange for that agreement.

You need a lawyer to be safe, otherwise you will probably end up settling for a part of whatever you create at the new company.

Not a lawyer.
The light switch as a key holder is an interesting idea. But I think the keys would scrape against the wall over time.
To make things clear, the new company is in a completely different market, and we would not be competing. Anyways, I don't think I signed a non-compete and didn't see anything about it in our agreement paperwork. We are not based in California.

When you say split the difference in shares, what do you mean? Give back 1/2 my shares? Is there anything I should request in return as far as compensation for the shares? I don't think they are worth anything today.
*myth of backwards compatible"

What is the "myth" of backward compatible?

I wholeheartedly agree with your second paragraph regarding versions and kill dates - but every API is different. In our case, when our API changes/versions/deprecates - WE are directly held responsible by customers of consumers of the API - since API consumers trumpet the fact that they have integrated with our API.

On the surface, versioning and kill dates are great end-all solutions, but the reality is API consumers have a ton of leverage when your API is successful at generating revenue for you. Especially when those consumers are sending lots of revenue your way from their own customers, which think you are the source.
Absolutely! I totally miss this from my college days. Being able to crank out a project from start to finish the day its due: being in the zone for many hours straight. You could hold the entire set of necessary APIs in your head at once so there was nothing separating your ideas from the editor. It's an experience of pure creation that you simply will never achieve these days, except for very short bursts.

I cope by taking every chance I get in my day job to experience these short bursts of pure creation. Do I need an interesting algorithm implemented? I'll hand code it myself rather than spend an hour or so trying to find and shoehorn the "standard" implementation into my application. I love the rare occasions where I notice a, dare I say, "clever" solution* to a problem. Coming up with and implementing these cases are a joy. I admit this isn't always the best way to solve a problem from a "software engineering" standpoint. But it keeps me in the game.

*Not clever as in obscure, WTF worthy; but clever as in elegant and expressive, albeit perhaps inaccessible to less skilled coders.
Will do. Though I have two issues. One is that I bought it from Staples, not Amazon, and I am not sure what they would do in this case. Second, though I bought it in the US, I am currently in Sao Paulo. I hope they can send it overseas.
وظائف خالية
Ask HN: Suspect startup I have a stake in has transferred IPR out
I've worked with a startup since 2007. I joined up on half the pay I could earn anywhere else and we went through some pretty bad patches with no pay for several months at a time. I asked for shares and negotiated 10% of the company with an option to bring my ownership to 15%.

I still own 10% of the company and we're doing a LOT better than back in 2007. My income is probably just above market average and though the hours are long the work's interesting and the hours are flexible (I can take a random day off midweek to play with the kids and work a weekend instead etc.) Now that we're engaging in talks with some big companies with potential for buy-out I'm getting the feeling that the IPR has been transferred out. I've seen some IPR transfer agreements left on the printer tray which say as much and the boss is away having meetings a lot more than he used to.

There's nothing in my contract about IPR transfer. Simply that all IPR from my work is owned by the company. Any advice HN? Do I have any legal recourse if I have to sue?
Maybe China will volunteer some remote quarter of their vast stretches of land as a crash landing pad. It might be worth completely sacrificing the environmental quality of a few dozen square miles of land (there's already tons of land that's naturally uninhabitable) to gain the resources available from space.
Using Arrays As Materialized Paths In Postgres
Do you really think the market is more free now that is was 100 years ago?

I would think the thousands of regulations added every year would reduce the amount of "freedom" in the market.
After reading the article twice I'm not sure where the title comes from since that claim is never made.

Also not sure why The Fancy is touted as a David to Pinterest' goliath. The Fancy has 18M in funding from Andreesen Horowitz and has a pretty darn stellar board (Jack Dorsey, Chris Hughes, etc).
My point is that the insofar of the promise of space is "let's send lots and lots of stuff, especially people/food/air/water", then the fundamental economics center on energy use. Are you saying that some of the orbital velocity can be recaptured or otherwise used to offset the cost of fuel?
There is nothing like the rush of solving Good Problems (tm) in the middle of the night with a lit firecracker down your pants.

However I doubt all these problems are as unpredictable as the article makes them out to be. There's a whole field of science devoted solely to modeling large systems of interconnected stochastic processes and identifying bottlenecks.

This science is so old a mandatory semester-long class was devoted to it in 2nd year of my comp sci undergrad.

I do wonder how many developers who aren't working on government-backed systems actually use that science though ...
Yes. Please Stripe, we need you in Australia!
To be fair, customers should be comparing PaaS pricing to their own fully loaded cost to roll-their-own.

If a PaaS can't beat the internal price (including time, hiring ops people,etc), they're fighting a losing battle.
Robot prostitutes will revolutionize sex tourism, report says
Agreed (and studies show that brains are developing until at least 18, possibly into early 20's).

But why? Most people seem to think that this rapid development is, for the most part, genetically driven. Doesn't it seem strange to reach this conclusion when we don't even have a solid idea about what "intelligence" really means (other than "performs above X level on some cognitive test")?
You can sort by Submitted/Updated/Comments. Feel free to send feedback to support@github.com if this isn't what you're thinking of.
Funny thing. I'm hugely passionate about politics, but I avoided that path because:

* The American political system is so hugely, immensely corrupt that I can't and don't want to and won't play that game. I admire people like Elizabeth Warren for doing it, but I simply won't be the guy generating 3 "gb moni plox" emails per day because he needs a $20 million war-chest to run for a single seat in the Senate.

* I want to reach Prime Minister of Israel, not President of the United States.
To be clear, the new company is in a completely different market and will not be competition. They want all the shares back and I guess I will need to get something written up from a lawyer soon. Thanks for the info!
where as Apple does not do the same for iPads.

They do: http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/ipad
Puppet integration is completed for OpenStack
Well ... yeah. I have a bit of experience buying things, but know nothing about creating and running companies that design and build rockets. I'd probably buy Instagram too since the rocket thing would die in my ineptitude.
Why Minimal Web Design Works? Examples and Analysis
Sergey, Larry and Eric already have majority control of the company between them, so what difference does the stock split make?

I can understand disapproving of the dual-class stock structure on principle, but I don't see why people are suddenly getting upset now.
Reasons to Learn Markdown
Get Top Sellers Video Games Department 19 april 2012
Well calculating using a guess is no better than just starting or ending with a guess
Amazing Insights!

I really wonder how many people are capable of making services scale in such a short time frame and such massive pressure. I hope I can learn it one day
Is this the same way Rubinius stole Ruby, Microsoft stole C++ and KDE stole JavaScript? I think the point here is that a language isn't really something you can own. An implementation, sure — but the language itself? Under what law? You can possibly copyright the text of the specification (but certainly not the facts therein), you can copyright the implementation, you can trademark the name and you can patent specific techniques used in the implementation, but what confers ownership of the language itself? I don't believe there is any precedent for a language being wholly "owned" in the sense that nobody else could independently implement the spec.
Electrons doing the splits
I will stop using downvotes for disagreement then.

(Actually I think it is the first time I use this downvote feature on HN so the damage is fairly limited so far).
Prob. want to use a Hulk fitted with some T2 lasers. Scordite's trading pretty high right now in Jita.
> Feel. Need. To. Wash...

I too am a grammar Nazi, and the very first rule off grammar is that sentences, delimited by punctuation marks such as the point, have subject and verbs, unlike your four sentences above.

Or maybe it is because English is not my mothergrammar?
The Windows 8 Enterprise SKU: Windows To Go and new Software Assurance benefits
Bravo reality TV show about tech entrepreneurs coming soon
My issue with politics is the lack of control. If I am engineering a pet project or even a module for work, I have a large degree of control over its construction.

With politics, it seems like you fight and fight and nothing ever changes-a complete lack of control. It also seems like there is infinite cherry picking of data... I just want to get the objective facts which at this point I'm convinced do not actually exist.
Do you like Scala? Do you like Riak? Check out this open source project Scaliak
Sci-fi author sues Ubisoft over Assassin's Creed copyright infringement
Wish there was a strong competitor to paypal...

Google Checkout / Wallet?
The reason we're not running on *aaS isn't actually becuase we don't want to - we'd love to.

Yet we keep having to roll our own mini cloud on root servers because our clients fear for data security (and rightly so) when putting stuff on servers of US-based companies because of the Patriot Act.
rational investors care about their reputation because that is what gets them into the good deals. maximizing profits over a career may require different actions than you think
Actually, it seems that downvoting for disagreement is a ok behaviour:

pg: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
I am quite inexperienced in the world of stocks but out of curiosity is it possible to see the relative power of current shareholders somewhere (e.g. Larry owns 10%, Mr. X owns 3%, etc.)?
I completely agree. I would go so far as to say that for many engineers, programming-at least the type they do for work-is not their first passion, but is an activity they enjoy to some degree and it pays well. Hopefully this will allow them increased time to do what they really enjoy.
Way to linkbait that post title. Revenue from either company isn't mentioned in the article.
If it isn't a competitor then it's not nearly as risky. You still need to be very careful though. Don't take anything with you. Don't use their laptop, servers, accounts, services, code, secrets, ideas, paper, clothing, anything. Walk away completely clean.

You could give them your shares back, but don't do it for free. If you want to be nice then sell them back cheaply or trade them for something you want.
I'm just thrilled we might get a movie without a "2" in the name or a "reboot" in the description out of the deal.
If an end-user upgrades their operating system, and Adobe WhateverIUse stops working, who do they blame?
Thanks for the course recommendation! I love those guys and already have about 20 of their courses. I'll put this one on my short list and look for it to go on sale.

I think we're fine here. I understand and agree with everything you've said. My comment was about the larger problem of creating the same kind of mathematical model for economics that we have for physics. We certainly have a lot of general models that work great and do all sorts of useful things. These things have their limits, though. But none of that has to do with Spain or the Euro. I was just referring to the foundations of economics itself, not this particular situation.

Looking forward to the course!

By the way, for any other readers who are diving down this far in the comments, there was also a great series of cassette tapes (I believe they're on CD now?) about economics and philosophy that I listened to back in the 80s from Knowledge Products. Great intro-level material. The Austrian economics and overview of Marx were especially good.
Peter F Hamilton addressed this in one of his novels; one of the Commonwealth Saga books I think.

Essentially, his imagined industry uses solar energy to melt ores; these are then formed into a metallic foam and shaped into a stable aerodynamic shape (a sort of blunt wedge).

They are then deorbited to land far out to sea.

Because it's metallic foam, it has a high drag-to-weight ratio (hence lower terminal velocity) and it floats.

Some of the ore is lost to ablation during re-entry, but ... so what? There's plenty more where it came from.
Or customers will switch to a competitor's API that doesn't keep trashing their app with "improvements' that are not usable for that specific app.

But your proposal is interesting: if things are improving all the time, API-users need to be upgrading all the time and adapting to the new features anyway - so any incompatibility necessary for those features is no problem.

It depends on the phase of market (new, growth, mature, stagnating) for that specific API. At the moment, most web-APIs usages are "new".
I feel the same way while learning a new technique on an instrument. It's having that focus and attention to detail that you can draw upon in your work when you need it.
I can guarantee that you can run your apps on dotCloud on roughly the same budget as Heroku, if not cheaper. Our pricing page is tragically bad, we know it, and we are fixing it. For now a large proportion of our sales process is custom, in mostly 2 ways: 1) "I have several tiny apps, help me pay less"! and 2) "I need VIP support and features, help me pay more". This will soon make its way into official pricing. For now you should email support@dotcloud.com and mention you come from ep.io :)

This may sound unglamorous, but that is how our discovery process works, and it's allowing us to build a real business. And in the long run you need a business in order to avoid selling out and letting your customers down.
One should never presume to be able to predict that any human advancement will take multiple generations. History does not crawl, it leaps.
> get out there and grab what affords you the most opportunities to be the best overall person you can be

This is the key point of the entire post. Most people assume that "doing what you love" will provide these opportunities. However, this is not always the case.
First The Listserve Email
He also said "I think they are in a rough spot", when we see exactly the opposite happening.

"I love the team" -> we love you too! :)
Meh. First off, you'd have an effective monopoly on a handful of industrial metals. Gold aside, the main use for these metals dissipates them: I worked at a place that consumed several precious metals for hi-tech purposes, and couldn't recover them afterwards (not economical).

I've thought people would mine asteroids in the future because they're a great source for my favorite metal, iridium. I just didn't think it'd happen so soon.
There is a big difference between theory and practice. :)

While it is possible to model the large system, usually as a startup you don't have the time to make the model, nor the data to feed the model.

Part of the problem is that you don't know what the inputs to the system will be and which inputs will grow exponentially.
Yes, true.

(Moment's pause to remember and respect the Challenger and Columbia Astronauts, and the Russian Cosmonauts who also gave their life.)

As I think about it though, I think of the few brave people I know who would be willing to take a one-way trip to Mars, as long as they were starting a colony.
A Word From TCombinator's Cofounder
OP here.

When I wrote this post, I didn't imagine so many people would react by saying, essentially

"Screw the customers. Just break 'em."

One of the reasons I have my panties in wad over this topic is the Web has made it far easier for people to create APIs that get used by others. Back in the olden-days you HAD to be Microsoft or similar to get the kind of traction a kid in his parent's basement can get with a little Python and a Heroku account.

But something else has changed along the way: Composability.

Yes, I worked on COM, OLE, ActiveX and all that crap. I was thinking deep thoughts about composable software back in the stone ages (and even then, it had all already been done by others smarter than I in the 70s & 80s).

But today it is REAL. The Web technology stack has actually, finally, enabled massive distributed systems composed of loosely coupled components from multiple independent parties! The dream of my computing youth has become reality!

These things are connected by APIs.

(Which, by the way are not just function calls. A API can be a REST end-point, a file format, or a database schema, amongst other things).

Yes, you as an API provider can choose to deprecate your API anytime you want. Use kill-dates, warnmessages, etc... You can even create new, independent & parallel versions. It will help.

But you will find that someone else has built something that uses your API, that exposes its OWN API and now there's a 3rd party indirectly dependent on you. Be prepared for it.

APIs are actually easy to build. That is the problem. The solution is to realize that statement is actually false.
And they add to the abuse of Confucius apocryphal quotes. (Confucius was talking about studying, hardly equivalent to reading Da Vinci Code...)
It's more than just payments within any given app though. The issue (/proposed issue) is that every time you join a new site or pay for a product on a new site you need to look up your details again. This isn't the case for sites using paypal, assuming the user has a paypal account which it seems most people do.
I understand that there's a continuum from art to craft, from something like the code for Lisp at one end and some generic RPG reporting code at the other. I understand that artists work on odd schedules and people that work billing software typically do not.

Artists often have patrons who finance their art. I haven't seen much of this in software development. I'm not sure how artists or writers are treated in their respective workplaces, but is it the common case that they cannot expect to work regular or predictable hours? I know dedicated copywriters and graphic designers that tend to work schedules similar to my own, perhaps they are the exception to the rule.

In most cases, I find the argument that software development is similar to art less than compelling. In my experience it is extremely rare to see software treated as art and even less so to see an software developer treated like an artist. In fact, I'm not sure what being "treated like an artist" would look like. Perhaps I have seen it and simply didn't recognize it for what it was: long and irregular hours, neglected private lives, exhaustion and burn-out.
What annoyed me the most in this post is not the lame analysis, it is the assumption that all readers are US citizens. No printable words can describe this.
It's not totally straightforward. You can start here:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ir?s=GOOG+Insider+Roster

But if you look there you'll see that Sergey currently owns no shares, probably because they're all in a trust.
How to spread unhappiness in the morning
Unhappiness is infectious too :-)
I'm loving this discussion, but how would we convince even 1% of internet users to switch?

Unless I am badly mistaken, you propose we tell people: "abandon all the services you've grown to like about the internet. Let's reboot the internet within the confines of this new secure service."

No sarcasm intended - a new service, with real security, would still lack a "killer app."