skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd recommend writing your own contract/agreement if you can. Keep it short and simple, what you'll do, how much you'll get paid, when you'll get paid. Also, that you own the code.

I'd recommend being up front about possible reselling. Your customer may gripe about it, but better to talk it out now than make an enemy out of your first customer later. Surprises are bad.

Another option is to find a standard agreement. The other guy mentioned one, there is a book from Nolo Press,

http://www.nolo.com/product.cfm/objectID/2C02C865-21E7-497C-...

and there are surely others on the web.

Be careful about Work For Hire. I believe a Work For Hire agreement transfers ownership of your code to the purchaser. Not what you want in this case.
As a Concord resident, it seems like a great place to raise kids (fantastic schools, accessible town, etc), but it certainly doesn't provide the opportunities that Palo Alto does.
Intel closing or halting production at older factories, affecting 6,000 workers
Bryan O'Sullivan on the Power of Haskell
Ask HN: iPhone Audio Streaming Dev. Looking for Insight
I am looking into developing mobile apps for our startups and want to start with iPhone for obvious reasons. I am one of the founder of electronic dance music audio streaming service (Mugasha.com) and I think find that building a mobile app will really add value to our service.

I have never done any major development for iPhone before and looking to get started. I am eager to learn but I need some direction in terms of hot to tackle the streaming problem. So here are few questions I have

Have any of you dealt with building a streaming media app before?
What are the challenges/things to be aware of while dealing with streaming data with a mobile connection.
What are the issues when developing a client (audio player), especially for the iphone.
What are the options for server side for audio streaming. Currently we use FMS equivalent, Wowza Media server. Too bad iPhone has no support for flash or I wouldn't need to ask all these questions.

Cheers
- Akshay
Of course not. You are forgetting price. Nobody would claim a Honda Accord is better than a BMW M6 but you can bet the former sells more.
IANAL, this is not legal advice. If you want to do this by the books, get a lawyer. If you want to wing it, take the advice. This is my experience contracting for small to medium business and startups. YMMV, especially with large companies.

Contracts mostly don't matter. Communication matters. Getting paid matters. Everything is negotiable.

The wikipedia article on "work for hire" is informative. Read it. You (generally) have to specifically sign away rights to anything you create, so if you want to resell, you don't need permission, because you already own the copyright. But it will kill your reputation if you screw them.

Take deposits. Get paid +10 days. Work your way into trusting them. Stop working once you get a certain amount of hours ahead of your last invoice, until the check arrives. For a new client, the amount of credit I will extend is about 5 hours. For an established client, I still try to keep it under 40-50 hours.
re: Number 2

Does everyone get soft when they spend time out west? I've lost half my family to that coast and they all complain about the sort of weather that is optimal for sledding.

Doesn't anyone else miss having seasons?
Congrats on the kiddo, you guys! Mine is 6 months old already, and let me tell you: what a ride it's been!

Also looking forward to having the additional opportunity per year to apply to YC. :)
The Secret Service doesn't want to "track a sniper hidden within a sea of people". If they know there's a sniper, they will take them out rather than follow them cleverly around the crowd using some newfangled image zipping technology.
Really now? and how hard would that be for anyone who is proficient in their own language to implement those so called features you boast about? Feature set alone is a pretty weak argument imho.
Oh man, I was totally waiting for the Ticketstumblers reactions to this news.
Ask YC:Any PSU/IST441 students here?
Hey-
Are there any students in Dr. Giles information retrieval class http://clgiles.ist.psu.edu/IST441/index.html

who are reading this?
If you are- Please reply if you are interested in doing something advanced.
Windows Media Encoder, then upload wmv to blip.tv, who convert it to flash and host it (Got this idea from the Clojure guy)

Not sure why the other Windows Media Encoder user got downmodded. Perhaps it would be more useful to explain why you think your approach is better (other than your hate of Bill Gates)?
I was hoping this would be talking about comments in programming languages. :-/
I think your first point is invalid. Using either kind of table marks up your content with presentation details. There is no difference between <table><tr><td></td></tr></table> and <div><div><div></div></div></div> here. The nesting exists solely to represent the tabular structure.

About the second point: I don't know. Do the old <table>s degrade worse than the new fangled stuff? I'd think that the related tools (screenreaders and such) would have better support for something old than for something new, but frankly I'll give you this as I have no idea.

And wrt anonymous tables: How does that help?
It's nice that we can omit parts of the boilerplate markup but that doesn't change the fact that we're mixing presentation details into the content.
Journalist or just another suit.
Which doesn't mean it has no correlation to the idea's merit.

Actually, I'd be curious about what makes the best flamebait -- is it totally dishonest stuff, mostly controversial stuff, or ideas that people suspect are true but want to think (or what to be heard saying) are false and deplorable?
You could give it away to someone who really needs it.

A lot of low-income families and kids don't have computers, and there are organizations (Free Geek is one) that accept and distribute donated machines.
www.bustaname.com sounds like the right tool for this situation...
They said they'd name the child TomDan to make up for it.
...on the exact same project.

I think this is the key. Are interrupts to one person also usually of relevance to another? Does the early knowledge of others' ideas, completions, and course corrections make up for the distractions? If so, a 'war room' arrangement may work.

On the other hand, mixing people on uncoupled projects, with different deliverables, whose interrupts are irrelevant to each other: distraction disaster.
You should remember the transaction charges. I think most payment systems charge 20-30 cents per transaction. I dont know about PP. I don't have a PP account and would probably object to giving you my CC number unless I found your service compelling. I certainly would not give it just to look around. This would probably turn off lots of potential users. Even an email validation is a turnoff, but not so bad as a CC number.
Common Developer CV Mistakes
Get a VoIP account, set up Asterisk, throw in Adhearsion, do fun stuff. I rickroll random incoming calls. People recently stopped calling me.
Does everyone get soft when they spend time out west?

Yes. I'll probably never be able to live in the UK again, to be honest.
99% have to fail so that success is more rewarding for the remaining 1%. If everyone is special, no one is.

"Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed." -- Mark Twain
One of my friends, who is regrettably still in stealth mode or I would be shillin' like a villain, is working on an automated AB testing framework. Suppose you had a website with a banner, a sidebar, and body text with 3 paragraphs, each with 4 possible variations.

His software, as far as I understand it, genetically engineers the optimal web page for conversions for you. It apparently is already running on his (unrelated) software site and he credits it with helping him push through the $1 million mark. He also says that it doesn't assume there is a static optimum, but rather that different visitors might need to see different things (e.g. hypothetically, if someone has seen your screen shot page they probably don't need more visuals to make the purchase decision, so you'd use more screen real estate on textual benefits and less on screenshots).

I'm going to be beta testing it on my site, and I'll be blogging progress as usual, if anyone is interested in hearing about it. I'm pretty excited. I'm told the tracking code will be ready in about a week or two and the functional bits ready for beta relatively soon after that. (Nice rolling launch strategy, incidentally -- gives him time to collect data for the target sites and resolve the inevitable Analytics Is A Hard Problem (TM) issues, then the black magic algorithm will have some seed data for when it gets started.)
EBay: PayPal and Skype can’t save declining marketplace
Me. I fled Silicon Valley for Boston and I don't miss it.

Of course, I didn't have the budget (or the correct commute) to live in Palo Alto when I was in CA. Palo Alto is a fine place, no question.
Clojure, my friend.

You may have said you wanted to use Jython. Spelling does make a big difference in this case.
There're many things you can do with a spare linux box. I do keep a few 'project ideas' links just in case I got some spare time on hand.

Home file server with ZFS - http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/

Proxy Server - http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2008/10/0...

Map-Reduce fun with Hadoop - http://www.michael-noll.com/wiki/Running_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Li...

Donate bandwidth with a Tor Server - http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/2007/08/31/how-to-run-a-tor-serv...

More good ideas - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/09/17/put-that-old-comput...

A Dial-In server - http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_dialin_server
Cluttered desktop folders become art
This is the first time I learned that "brightblack" exists...

Now I won't be surprised if I see darkwhite and reddishgreen.
Putting yourself in the client's shoes always worked for me. For first time clients, it is the best way to gain their trust. I have never met face-to-face most of my clients. I live in the Philippines and they are either in the US/Canada/Australia. I have a day job and work mostly at night and on weekends. I have been doing this for almost 6 years already and in those years, I only had 2 contracts (both from France).
At least, she is working on something promising right now. Her website got techcrunched last few months.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/04/teen-bloggerpreneur-jes...
XML is like violence; If it doesn’t solve all your problems, you’re not using enough of it
Congrats on the soon-to-be newborn. But, I'm saddened by Boston being removed from the rotation.
Augh no! I'm determined to graduate, dammit, and now you've gone and made summer with YC even more attractive. Good move, PG & co.
The big difference is that your image format is data, which is what XML was meant for.
Congratulations!

The first of many kids hopefully (assuming you want many kids, that is).
Not to second-guess your choice... but what happened to Arlington, MA in this analysis? ;)

I liked Arlington when I lived there: Short bus ride to Cambridge, walk to the Red Line in good weather, bike path, wide streets, walkable, not too urban, not too suburban, not too expensive...

But Palo Alto has most of that plus startups and sun, so it certainly makes sense.
My roommate is saying this is a prank that's been going on for a few years. Not sure if this is for real or not.
President Obama Wears Bullet-Resistant Suit at Inaugural
Sinatra and Passenger Back On The Rack
congrats PG. looking forward to applying.
Obama retakes oath at White House after mix-up
From someone who was only able to handle Boston's climate until he graduated from college, we have seasons on the West coast too. We just don't experience them all in one day as often. :-D

In all seriousness, there is seasonal variation both in temperature (which the East coast also has) and in precipitation (which the East coast doesn't have), but they tend not to vary so severely, and there also tends to be less intra-seasonal variance, either. You won't find Seattle going from 80 degrees and muggy to 30 degrees and snowing over the course of 12 hours -- this happened while I was in Boston in April of a year that hopefully someone else here can fill in.

It might be a bit soft, but I think of it as removing weather from the list of things that distract you from more important work.
Would like to think that my comment here inspired this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=433084 :)

As mentioned there, there are a couple of commercial products besides Google Website Optimizer, one being Optimost (now part of Interwoven). It does a lot more than just simple AB testing but is quite expensive (we were quoted around $10k/month when I played with it at my last company).

Genetify looks pretty cool and I'll spend some time playing with it. One thing I wish all these frameworks had is hooks for testing things server-side rather than with client Javascript. This would make it a lot easier to test process flows (i.e. "one-page form versus wizard") in addition to individual page elements.

If there are other open-source options out there, I'm looking forward to hearing about them.
For the vast majority of people, Firefox will work on their system.

I wish Mozilla lowered the requirements for systems or only installed a 'light' version on older systems.
[Not legal advice] General tip - always remember everything is negotiable. Just because someone hands you a form contract doesn't mean you have to sign it as is. IP's tricky, but basically you own what you author until you assign the rights (unless it's a "work for hire", which generally doesn't apply, see the Wiki). The company you're freelancing for likely expects that you'd be signing over all the rights to the work product to them -- they're paying for it, after all. If you expect otherwise, then you should document that you're only providing them with an indefinite license to use (they'll probably want the right to modify and own all mods).
Better use from your perspective, maybe not from Y Combinator's.
Of Musicians And Programmers
As a poet and programmer, my first response was to be offended. But, then I remembered all the poetry I read on Facebook earlier today and kind of thought "eh, yeah, I can see that now."
Along the same lines (or perhaps deeper into the legal gray area), try swoopo.com. Everyone pays to bid, and the one highest bidder walks away with the item at a pretty low price, but the "house" ends up with a lot more. Shady.
Best part: this is the third time this has happened.

http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/01/obama-takes-presi...
This comic is awesome
It is somewhat disheartening to see the reaction the release of this has had.

It isnt lisp or erlang or anything "cool", from a glance at the code its a souped up xslt or templating language. The code is obviously supposed to be tool generated (how many graphically driven lisp generators are there?), yes they could use s-exps, but if you dont need the power of s-exps, whats the point? Java has a nice xml parser in built.

But the main point is that there demo looks pretty comprehensive, if it was written in 4 months then cool, it sounds like it done the job they needed it to do pretty well.

Can any of the detractors point to as comprehensive web application written in lisp / erlang etc?, it's obvious they arent worried about algorithmic complexity and "hacker cred", and more about the integration tools and free extras that come with having xml as an intermediary language, and shock horror, getting things done.

They didn't need to release this, seems like they just put out an internal tool that was useful to them so that others could benefit, and they end up getting treated like the star wars kid.
Of course 13589999047 is art! It's a incono reactive absurdist challenge to those who would have us destroy the sanctity of art!

... Not quite sure what point exactly I was trying to make, but yes, I made several words up to make it with, and I stand by my point!
"You have one goal: to connect with your audience. Therefore, you must track what your audience is feeling at all times. One of the biggest problems I face when watching other people’s movies is I’ll say, ‘This part confuses me’, or whatever, and they’ll say, ‘What I’m intending to say is this’, and they’ll go on about their intentions. None of this has anything to do with my experience as an audience member. "

I opine on this in poetry a lot. People have a tendency to write some super vague poem that completely washes over the audience, and so rather than fix it, they include a preamble that makes the subsequent poem pointless. Then you call them on that and they say "Well, I just write for myself."

If that's so, why are you reading it to a live audience and asking for feedback? If you're not writing it for the audience, save the audience the trouble. I'm sure it's the same way for movies, presentations and pretty much any performance.

In fact, I wrote a poem bashing this very practice recently. Allow me to explain all the clever allusions up front in case they are too obtuse.
She got a TED invite... that counts for a lot in this crowd.
It is called XBMP and it is the latest in image formats for the web /s
Another Arlingtonian? Crazy!

Perhaps not so crazy. Last year I discovered two other Ruby programmers (one at another startup, one at a more established firm) among the parents in my son's kindergarten class.

And this was a reasonably sized class of ~20 kids.

Is time for an Arlington YC meetup?
We were predicting this after we interviewed with them in November. :) Congrats, pg and Jessica.
That's an interesting thought. I would have never applied to YC if YC were always in Boston, so there must be someone out there who would never apply if it's always in California. Does that mean that, right now, a technically savvy angel out in Boston could start snatching up some of the MIT and Harvard alumni startups that YC ordinarily would have first dibs on? I dunno, but I guess if I were an investor in Boston, I'd be thinking about how to put myself in that position.
I'm assuming you meant that the west coast doesn't have precipitation variation. I quite like snow!

Then again, my earliest memories are from here: http://tinyurl.com/cbp4lf
Congratulations to you both!

We're applying this summer, and while we're on the East Coast we were wondering whether Boston's not being a start-up town was good or not. Guess now we don't have to worry about that.

Edit: any info on when exactly the application round opens?
xterm-256 is inferior to rxvt-unicode. it supports the color gradients, plus unicode.
For what they're worth, images from Apple's iPhone-related phone patents
A Lisp program. :)
Why is Palo Alto a better place to raise kids?

I think I would have liked growing up around the bay area better than any other place I've lived. Skate parks are everywhere (I would have killed for a decent skate park when I was a kid), there's an ocean an hour drive away, mountains not much further, a big and really interesting city is an hour train ride away, the weather is nice enough to go outside almost year round (it's maybe a little chilly for me now, since I spent 10+ years in Texas, but I would have loved it when I was a kid growing up on the east coast), there's a reasonable music and arts scene (mainly in the city, but near enough to feel it and take part), the small towns around here are extremely walkable/bikeable, and there's good mass transit for the places you can't get on foot or bike. Palo Alto is not a suburban wasteland, and yet, there are lots of places where it's quiet and low traffic.
Practical Evolutionary Computation: An Introduction
I don't know that I buy it. Sounds like a rumor-mill piece. If the clothing was as flexible as normal clothing, even if the bullet couldn't pierce the clothing, it could still do pretty much the same amount of damage I would imagine.
Haven't heard of Don Box in a looong time.
What's he cooking now?
Marblehead, FTW!
actually it does. new investment practically became extinct during the depression. the 70s were little better.
Sorry, I want to clarify:

He doesn't mean Obama had to take his oath of office three times, but instead that Obama is the third president to have messed up when saying the oath of office.
I lived in Boston pretty much my whole life until September. It was 70 degrees here in Palo Alto yesterday. I was playing basketball outside in shorts and a tshirt. I don't miss the cold at all. Not even a bit. It's like a disease. I'm glad I got it cured.
Doesn't anyone else miss having seasons?

From someone who has never lived below the mason-dixon, no.
When everyone gets their startup going, you should all just move to North Florida. Admittedly we don't have the resources like the Bay Area, but if this post is about cost savings, then North Florida is your best bet. My rent here is $500 a month and I pay $40 a week for food. No car. When I lived in Santa Clara, my rent was $750 (lived with 7 people) and food was over $120 a week.
How To Build A Startup From Scratch With No Money
To reply to your points specifically...

1. There will always be a need for things. So there will always be customers. There will always be capital available. Always. Think about the great depression. There were still very rich people. So I think it is not so valuable to argue in absolutes, as long as there exist customers and capital we have an economy, the issue is not how small, hard or tight, if it exist, then there will be entrepreneurs.

2. Your quoted statement says "the desire- the need to innovate never goes away. The author is talking about the personal and obsessive need of the entrepreneur, not "needs" in general. And your example of a need for safe drinking water... that need will be filled when there's money to be made in filling that need....
There is no "code should". Code is just a medium; it is under no obligation to you.

I think sometimes developers forget about coding as a means of artistic expression. I love Ruby for pretty much the exact same reasons so many of you dislike it: It's an amazingly expressive language and code like this is nothing but art.
I posted the same question at StackOverflow, which also yielded some useful advice: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/467739/how-do-you-get-vim...

Basically, my terminal app was at fault, not vim. Switching from xterm to gnome-terminal fixed the problem.
I just spent a few hours looking into doing this, and all I can say is kudos to them for decoding the psd file format =P.

None of the big graphics libraries (GD, Image Magick, etc) support writing of layered PSD files (Imagick can read them, and export non-layered's, but that's it as far as I can tell.), and the format specs require you to sign an NDA/non-compete with Adobe.

Taking the screenshots is doable if a bit of a pain, but short of reverse engineering the psd format, the second part seems to be a roadblock. Shame, i'd use this too =P.
So that's where it came from! My co-worker had it posted on his cube and I thought it was great
I would amend the "Get Free Help" step for a more general audience that wont have access to free interns or wont know how to ask them to help work with you.

I would say "Do Free Work." When you are starting out and you still need to build a solid skill set, practice makes perfect. Therefore, becoming a free intern yourself for a web development company or doing side projects for people who are more established will help you learn the tools of the trade.

This will give you crucial confidence and validation. Not to mention it will help you build a network through which you could later market your ideas.
Congratulations on the new baby!
Whether all those words are frowned upon would largely depend on dialect (Queen's, International, American etc.) and local custom. For example, I use waitress, stewardess and actress, but never authoress or manageress.

It's probably quite baffling to someone for whom English is a secondary language.