skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've successfully negotiated a few domain purchases and unsuccessfully tried for a few more. All the unsuccessful ones are the professional squatters who won't take less than 4-figures - although they do regularly e-mail with lower and lower prices so never take the first offer from these guys.

The successful purchases have all been from individuals who registered the domain at some point with an idea that they never developed.

If it's useful to anyone, here's an example of the opening note I send (improvement suggestions welcome). I make an opening offer around 50-75% of what the actual maximum is, make note that the site is inactive and costing them money, make it clear we're considering other options but that we are ready to purchase quickly. Even if the purchase is for personal use I'll reference a "client" as it helps to have a man behind a curtain who just won't budge on his price.

-----

Dear Sir/Madam,

I see that you own DOMAIN.COM but are not currently using it for an active website.

I am currently looking for a domain name for a client of mine, and your name (DOMAIN.COM) is on our short-list.

We have budgeted around $250 for acquiring new domain names and my client looking to close a deal quickly.

Please could you let me know if DOMAIN.COM is for sale, and if so what price?
Deglitching a Sparkfun 7-segment Serial Display
You are wrong. Lotteries are systems, systems are hackable. I bothered to Google one example cause I know many people are ignorant and make assumption without research like you.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128264.900-lottery-w...
when I work on a personal project, if I want to implement
a functionality and there's a library that does it, I
write it myself anyway.

That's a great idea, and I'm going to do that the next time I find a library for something I'd rather play with instead. Thanks!
sry but this is a wrong correlation. this relates to trainers who have a higher chance of a heart attack than players. why? because both get the same amount of adrenaline but the players can work it out with their body. same goes for the bus driver. it's not just the sitting, it's the sitting under stress with no muscles to make use of stress hormones ..
The technological feat seems amazing! But .. my English parser crashes here:

“The initial shock wave disturbances experienced during second flight, from which the vehicle was able to recover and continue controlled flight, exceeded by more than 100 times what the vehicle was designed to withstand,” DARPA Acting Director Kaigham J. Gabriel said in a statement. “That’s a major validation that we’re advancing our understanding of aerodynamic control for hypersonic flight.”

Is he saying that (my understanding) the shock wave disturbances exceeded the designed/expected maximum by a factor of 100? And claims that this is supporting the idea of understanding hypersonic flight so much better?

I _think_ he wants to say 'In spite of these troubles we were able to recover, due to our good understanding of the underlying principles' but I parse it as 'The outcome of the experiment showed that we greatly underestimated the forces involved and this clearly validates our understanding'.

Can some native speaker point out were I stumbled?
The astroturfing in this thread is amazing.
As someone who is trying to do hiring right now, I can agree with this. With all the money flowing into startups right now, it's getting more and more difficult to hire talented people, because they are all (rightfully) working on their own thing.

It's definitely better to be an investor right now than someone trying to hire.
No - "While several Berkeley developers were involved in the formation of BSDI in 1990-91, none left the University of California to join Berkeley Software Design, Inc. at the outset." - http://icims.csl.uiuc.edu/~lheal/doc/dgp/chapter16.html
also http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/explaini...

The lawsuit was the big problem.
No, it wasn't. It was bad lawyers who can't write plain English, and picky people at the FSF who tried to fine-tune everything instead of stating a clear guiding principle.

There are plenty of other licences that are very much shorter.

Well, unlike permissive licenses, the GPL is an hack on the copyright system; they probably wanted to make sure it would hold up in court.

But the GPL isn't really that long; the 2.0 is only 340 lines of 80 characters. Yeah, it's long compared to MIT, but it's still a fraction of most legal documents.

Firstly, I suspect that a lot of people use the GPL not because they like or understand it but because it was the peer pressure "what you do" option for a while. Those kids used to just give their code away as freeware and no-one was any worse off for it.

"Freeware" doesn't include the right to modify and re-distribute. Yes, we were certainly worse off for it. If you mean Freeware as a different concept, well, then it's easy to see why licenses are useful - they clearly define that stuff, so you can sleep at night knowing your business or webapp or whatever won't get sued to the ground tomorrow.

Secondly, it's not really a standard when there are at least three styles of GPL licence that come up reasonably often in discussions (GPL, LGPL, AGPL) and then there's the whole v2/v3 mess as well.

The differences between the three versions are minimal - a clause or two more, nothing else.

The v2 vs v3 issue is problematic, I agree. On the other hand, protection against software patents is important. MIT, for example, provides none.

It seems irrelevant 'till you get hit by a patent troll, like startups are already getting hit.

Finally, while I respect the goal of trying to have some standardised licensing, the only standard I've observed in practice is that, unless you're working in an organsation where everyone values GPL-style licensing and uses it as an integral part of your business model, the lawyers and managers are likely to blanket ban any use of GPL'd code because the risk of the viral contamination effect is too high to justify any benefit from using it.

True. But unlicensed or implied licensing is dangerous too - you need some kind of legalese.

On the other hand, it's easy and feels safe to reuse code that comes with a no-nonsense BSD/MIT style licence that says in plain English that you can use the code without understanding several pages of legalese with subtle implications. That saves time.

Wait till you base your company on someone else's MIT licensed code and then get hit by a patent lawsuit from them or a troll with their patents. Safe? I don't think so.
I think his point was that there's a lot more to a business than just shipping the product, although it's obviously incredibly important to do that well.

Marketing and sales is what makes a business at the end of the day, and if I was a "business guy" that's what I would spend 100% of my time focusing on, not wasting time reading tech/vc blogs.

Facebook, Groupon, and PlentyofFish wouldn't be where they are today if their founders were just hackers with zero marketing instincts.
Amazon and the network effect: Why would ISVs go elsewhere?
I think the point was over specific, but still valid.

"Technical" translates to "someone who's actually building something physical". It's guiding the division between social/business/marketing constructions and, well, technical ones. I'd think the argument applies equally the the guy building the hardware (when that happens) and maybe even to the ID guy building the enclosure.
Millionaire leaves his company to benefit the community
I have to agree in many ways about this. Just because you cannot code doesn't mean that the person cannot contribute. It might also be that the person CAN code, but has decided not to because they need to focus on running other aspects of the business. That's why they've decided to hire programmers.

The post seemed mean spirited to me. I've worked in companies with very competent coders, but the product that they are working on is now being discontinued. Why? Because they knew what was good for the customer. And they were wrong.
Delphi 6 and 7 were the best IDE's of their time, way better than Visual Studio 6. The language was great for the time, there was a vibrant community around it, you could find a component for everything. Borland also shipped the sources for their main library, VCL, which helped a lot when debugging. It was the best way to do Rapid Application Development.

Unfortunately, the company lost it's focus, they've tried to move to .net and the next few versions of the IDE were really buggy. The language also lagged behind C#/Java, they didn't add full Unicode support until 2009, for example.
Now that's really something. A simple javascript saving battery life. You've done a super job here
Variety, use different parts of your brain (even if you aren't good at it), engage in physical activity if you are mainly sedentary, cut yourself off from the world every one in a while and just.....decompress.

Take hikes, go to a strange city and just walk around and exist there. Try drawing or sculpture, learn an instrument, try baking, or needlepoint, play video games.

Just don't do all of these things all at once.

Moderation.
I could not agree with OP more. The 42floors article is nothing but a petty angry rant.
I think that crash was more the excuse they were waiting for. Economically, it was past its prime, a prime at which I do not think it ever brought in much money, if at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#Operational_history, for example, claims "By around 1981 in the UK, the future for Concorde looked bleak. The British government had lost money operating Concorde every year, and moves were afoot to cancel the service entirely". It also says "It is reported that British Airways then ran Concorde at a profit, unlike their French counterpart", so there may have been years it was making a profit, but Concorde was flying for prestige, not for the money.

I also think that 500mph figure you give is incorrect. Wikipedia lists Concorde take off speed as 250mph, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590 talks of 500kph, or 310mph.
No offence taken. Sounds like burnout was the wrong term to use. Maybe I staved off actual burnout from developing later on by taking this time off. Either way some manual labour felt good :)
Go Back In Time: How 10 Big Websites Looked 15 Years Ago
I'd imagine it sounds like the english word exhort.
I don't want to comment on the post but I want to complete what the author is talking about:

http://42floors.com/blog/posts/technical-coder-non-technical...

Hm why does all that remind me of the movie 8Mile? Is it the refrain? Where is the DJ?
Thanks for the reference, I'll surely read it. [Pause] I've just read the first couple of chapters and it is most surely an enjoyable read. It brings the current discussion into a completely different light. Thanks again.
Your app looks like a vitamin, not a painkiller so the price wouldn't justify it for me. I agree with other poster - you need to communicate WHY I should buy it. How will it make my life better? How will it get me richer, laid more, etc?
If you think that's what we want, why don't you give it to us?
Screens VNC
I'm a developer and this guy is completely incorrect. I am technical, I can tell you the make up of a TCP packet and can tell you how many disk reads a query will take from a database, but that doesn't mean I want to go every meeting and answer business emails. If I had to to make sure my idea was being made, I would, but it would drive me insane. I am passionate about building things, in particular software, and I don't like meetings, emails etc. Without the business nontechnical co founders,I would rethink doing start ups. To suggest that only technical people add value is absurd, and I'm kinda upset that someone would actually make a post like that.

This brings about a bigger problem though; elitism in the technical world. "Oh He's just a doctor, I'm an engineer" "Oh he is just another business person, he doesn't know what he is talking about". I hear these phrases everyday and you know what, It drives me nuts. Everyone has their place in this world, business people included. When you realize that business people are answering thousands of email to allow you to do what you love (coding), you may eventually see the value that they add.
Talking about negative connotation: one can buy TrueHorror.com on NameLayer for a mind blowing bargain of $5000,- ;)
I still can't even fathom a 12-minute separation between Los Angeles and New York.
The more painful part of the article is the subtext that a startup's "product" is by definition something built in a few months with RoR or Django.

For all the talk of how much angel and V.C. money is available for young companies, it's not going to do much if investors won't branch out into ACTUALLY new product areas.
I believe he is trying to say their ability to recover from such a large variation from their initial expectation is proof that they truly understand/are advancing in their knowledge of hypersonic flight. That said, since there is a break between the two quotes the second could have come 10 sentences later and the writer could have unknowingly dropped context/information in some omitted statements. It is a bit of a hard to parse statement, but that is what you get from people, rarely do people speak in memorable, concise sound bites 'off the cuff'.
It looks like the Emacs revolution!
Sweden's Private Police Forces
That really depends on a few things.
If they built it as something that they wanted to build anyway than having it pay for the hosting + some change might be a good outcome.

Also if your app is making a profit, even a small one then everything else being equal it will eventually make a return on those 300 hours if it holds.
Odd. (I am a coder, by the way). The article (as I read it) talks about nomenclature: don't call yourself a technical founder if you aren't, then talks about his idea of what would qualify you as a technical founder. Disclaimer: I know Jason, but don't see how you got to this screed from his writeup.
Gentoo developers AMA on Reddit
Bare Bones Sinatra Skeleton (sinatra-bones)
same user reposted the article 136 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3328227
Original source: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/news/pole-asymmetry...

What ScienceDaily has added to this: (1) They've removed one of the figures. (2) They've removed links to the Hinode and SOHO websites. (3) They've added lots of largely irrelevant links of their own, all of course to their own site(s).

Please, everyone: stop linking to ScienceDaily and PhysOrg. They do at least usually provide a link to the original source: point at that instead.
I thought of something that you might have missed. This is very particular to YC.

Perhaps you didn't realize, but a successful application to Y-Combinator gets an average investment from YC of $18k.

("Twice a year we invest a small amount of money (average $18k) in a large number of startups" http://ycombinator.com/.)

18,000 for the whole company.

Let's look at it if you don't have a "technical cofounder=coder" who is part of the team getting the 18,000.

Now you have to put some of the 18,000 toward coding.

Now it is generally acknowledged that the total cost to a company of a worker is about double the stated salary.

So, 18k will get you 9k worth of salary. But of course you have all kinds of miscellaneous expenses associated with setting up a company!

Like paying for hosting, or a space to work.

Maybe you can reduce ALL of your other expenses to 20% of the investment, so that you're left with 80% of the investment (a preposterously large amount) that you can use on a coder. This is 14.4k.

This equals a 7.2K of salary (remember, you double stated salary to get actual cost to your company).

This is how much coding you get for 7.2k.

0.09 years = 1.44 months at 60k annual salary rate, or

0.15 years = 1.08 months at 80k annaul salary rate, or

0.125 years = 0.9 months at 96k annual salary rate.

At forty hours, you are getting:

230 hours at 60k, or

172.8 hours at 80k or

144 hours at 96k.

This is two weeks of crunch development time. And this is if you can give 80% of your investment to an outside coder.

Does this sound reasonable?

Also bear in mind that contractors are more expensive than salaried positions. And, if you have no coder on board, in other words you need a complete architect and CTO, then you are looking at the very highest end of that range.

And all this is you spent 80% of your investment on an outside coder.

To me, it would seem fair to say that you have more like half of your investment that you can possibly spend up-front on an outside developer, bringing those numbers to...

143.75 hours at 60k, or

108 hours at 80k or

90 hours at 96k.

Do you think you can hire a guy to build your next eBay-of-x for you in 90-140 hours to the point where it GENERATES ENOUGH PROFIT FOR YOU TO KEEP PAYING HIM?

Absolutely out of the question.

This is why, in particular, the Y-C formula requires a technical cofounder as defined in this blog post.

It's very particular to YC, because they expect you to get a company off the ground for about as much as a traditional company would spend on office space rent in three or four months.

Y-Combinator's formula just doesn't work without a "technical co-founder" working for equity.

Entrepreneurship is simply not enough, when all you have is 18k to work with spread among every single cost the company will have, until it's profitable enough to pay for coders: who are very expensive.
"We price our domains at 25% of their market value."

Don't we all sell liquid commodities at 25% of market value? You know, because we like our customers and we don't like money? Can you feel the credibility chasm expand with that statement?

Much of this article is a reasonable point of view, but statements like this are a sure way to put my purchase clicker on the defensive.
I must diagree. This is no ordinary amplifier, and I don't think you can simply compare it to an amplifier with a "unique case".

This is what I would call, if you'll forgive me, transparent design. Obviously I'm not talking about the just the case. The mechanism of action of modern electronics is hidden behind 6-layer printed circuit boards and integrated circuit packages. Opening up an iPhone gives precious little insight into its workings. You wind up googling datasheets instead of following traces.

This is a tactile product. A 6-year old could pick up this amp, ask a few pointed questions about what they see inside, and actually have a prayer of figuring out how it works. I know I would sit there for cumulative hours just turning it over and watching the image of the components refracted through the faces. With everything stripped away, the noise becomes the signal – the imperfections in the solder joints, slight tool marks on the leads, the banded resistors that have gone out of style.

Yeah, there are people that would pay quite a bit for this, even if they're not audiophiles.
Have to say, I feel like being a "non-coder" is becoming shorthand for calling someone second class in this tech startup ecosphere. As someone with lots to bring to the table, especially domain expertise, business acumen, marketing, design, etc etc. I always feel a bit on the outside looking in. I have started to learn to code but more so to become conversational with hackers/programmers/coders. I'll never be that good though, I know that. I might be able to get to the point where I can hack together a prototype or speak to someone like a conversational Spanish speaker speaks to a native Spanish speaker. But will that be good enough?

I feel like the point that needs to be made here is that EVERYONE has something to bring to the table. Everyone is good at something and on a TEAM, that's what matters. Sure a team of amazing coders can make something great, but a great product does not a great business make. Sometimes, ie PayPal and others, all coders create a hugely successful business. But Zuckerberg is not a great entrepreneur because he's a great coder. He's a great entrepreneur who happens to be able to code. So instead of worshipping at the alters of coders, and I have TONS of respect for what you guys can do, we need to acknowledge that a successful STARTUP is more than code. So much more. Its about assembling the right team with the right combination of skills. Coding is one of them sure, but to say its the only one and labeling someone who doesn't as "non-technical" like its a bad thing, negates the notion that a business runs on more than just what can be hacked together. If a car were just an engine, we'd still be driving model-Ts. What makes something beautiful, what makes it successful, what makes it sell for 1 billion dollars is the specific combination of skills and how they work in chorus to solve a need better than anyone else. And those skills are varied, complex, and come from a lot of different areas.
> Remember that old engineering joke about good/cheap/on-time, you can pick only two?

That's not a joke. That's the capsule summary of every programming project I've ever been involved with, and where they went wrong (if they did).

Hell, sometimes you don't even get two out of three.
Email definitely does have disadvantages over face-to-face conversation, and studies have borne this out: http://www.spring.org.uk/2010/09/emails-dark-side-10-psychol...

Anecdotally, I've had the same experience. I can't count the number of times I've gotten into a heated argument with someone over email, and resolved it within 2 minutes simply by talking it over face-to-face with them.

To be clear, I'm not against email or anything like that. I just think it's important to realize that any medium of communication has inherent pros and cons.
I think this depends on your product.
If you have something hot that everyone wants then you can be an idiot at business. All you need to do is keep your costs low enough that you can carry on.

If on the otherhand you are trying to penetrate a saturated market , or sell something to big companies then business nous is going to be a hell of a lot more important.
I didn't find the 42Floors post be asserting "Non Coders Bad." He seemed to be after the increasing number of "founders" claiming to be technical. From your post, I doubt you'd claim to be technical when talking to a potential co-founder. Perhaps he didn't do a good job of directing his [shared (see the comments)] frustrations.

Also, I can assure you that tossing unfamiliar (foreign to your opponent's discipline) terminology over the fence, is not a game you want to play with an engineer of any sort :)
That is true, but if many jobs will be in big data analysis I would think that this would be rewarding to people with knowledge of statistics more than CS.
fine. I intentionally lost 90 pounds in the last year or so.
http://news.ycombinator.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872886
"In my social circle of non-tech people everyone uses their phones for texting and calls. Thats about it. Most have smart phones, a few play games or use their phone as an mp3 player. That really is about it."

Most people in my social circle, and the students I teach, are now using their mobile phone as their preferred Web access device. I just noticed this coming in over the last 18 months or so.

I gave out the wolfram alpha web address last week when teaching basic algebra and graph work to some teenagers. Out came the mobiles, and we had graphs being drawn with different parameters and compared.

On the train on the way into College in the mornings, I'm usually the only one with a netbook or notebook (paper). Most of the others have their phones out.

I think the change is happening, but, as you say, not immediately.
This may be one case where "consider the source" is relevant. An author for the New York Times, working in an industry declining every year, working for a company declining every year [1], it isn't even remotely difficult to imagine some personal feelings getting into a story like this. I don't think the NYT is a happy place right now.

[1]: https://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:NYT , use the 10y view