skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There was a Shark Tank a few months back of a guy starting a "design your own shoes" clothing company -- When Mark Cuban asked him what salary he could comfortably live with, the guy said "I guess I could be comfortable with anything over six figures"

Of course Cuban then said he was out, stating he wanted the kid to be sweating on a mac 'n cheese diet in order to ensure he was working his ass off as opposed to living the "LA lifestyle." Was a pretty interesting conversation, because the kid was currently turning a decent profit already and claimed he had already done the blood sweat and tears thing.
> Like Wikipedia, strict rules are what lead to a valuable artifact.

What? Wikipedia's strict rules (really, a hideous mish mash of conflicting obscure scattered policy and guideline and suggestion and essay and convention) detract from the purpose of getting information about a subject from a variety of trusted sources into an article about that subject.

See, for example, the amount of time that goes into deciding whether to allow someone to have a username consisting of a bunch of digits or not. (Such a user name is "confusing". But what is it confused with? It's not confusing by itself. The policy is to prevent people using names that imply power. and so on for several megabytes, several times a year.) And then, when the community has taken several months (at a short time estimate) to agree on a policy they realise that the software has hard-coded limits which are different to the policy anyway. So it all starts again.

SO's mods are doing a good, but difficult job.

Wikipedia's admins, New Page Patrollers, Anti-Vandal Patrol, Recent Change Patrol, twinkle user, rollback user, are doing an inconsistent job.

I'll agree that I'm pretty anti the current WP experience.
Now that reminds me of the (somewhat chaotic) ending of the original "Prisoner" TV series: "We want in formation...", not information.
I normally agree with Jason but I don't think he should be so upset on this one. "ramen profitable" the amount of profits you have to plow back into the company are as much as the cost of a Ramen package. It is a way of saying you're not profitable to a significant degree, but you are covering your expenses and thus you're not in the process of dying. This is an important milestone, because it means the company is sustainable and the stress level on the founders is going to be a lot less than ones who are slowly depleting their life savings (or quickly depleting it.) And it also means that any additional money will be going into growth, rather than into keeping the startup alive. This is pretty important, or should be, to investors.

I think this is a much better metric to seek than the "we've grown our user base by 1 million percent!" from a company that isn't taking in any money from its users, and whose users would never pay money to use the service (perfect example: Facebook) but has also gotten $1M+ in investment and has spent significant money. How do you tell the difference between that and buying users? The latest thing these days is to say "we got X users and we didn't spend any money on marketing".

Really? So you don't know what your acquisition cost really is? You want me to think that your social network for accountants is going viral? When your user base is about the size I'd expect it to be when all the other "Social Network for X" founders from Angel.co show up to see what you're up to?

Back to the article-- I think he's spot on to point out the difference between ramen profitable and profitable enough to hire an employee who's getting a real salary. That is another milestone.

But I think "we're profitable from day one" is really not a bad thing, because many of the other companies out there have no path to profitability without a whole lot more funding (Eg: Facebook, which took a lot of money.) It did pay off for Facebook, but your social network for taxidermists is not another Facebook.

So, "we're profitable from day one, even though we're only covering operational expenses and not covering employee living expenses yet" is still a significant piece of information compared to the companies that will take another $5-$50M to get even to that point.

Also, FWIW, my startup, which will likely be "profitable from day one" (but not ramen profitable) will be requiring about $300 a month in hosting-- and that's getting a dirt cheap deal. Not all of us are just a website that can run on a single server... we're building a cluster of dedicated machines and we need to do that before we open the doors. Fortunately, $300 a month for ~5-6 dedicated machines is kinda amazing![1] This is also one way where "immediately profitable" is more achievable than it was a decade ago.

[1] Hetzner.de has dedicated machines for cheap. Our product is very amendable to a CDN, and our major partner is hosting a lot of the higher bandwidth stuff on their own global CDN anyway, so locating in germany is not nearly the issue it would be for us if we were doing a social network for philatelists.
I haven't tried it yet, but this has amazing potential. It has become a service that not only searches all your stuff, but makes sense of it and displays it in an intelligent way.
They leave out the most important information.. how does this spread?

E-mail? Text messages? Word of mouth?

Knowing how it is going to present itself is probably the most important factor in preventing it from spreading.
Lack of notifications means that conversations can't stretch for longer than an hour or so.

You'll never get a reply if you respond to something someone said yesterday.
Joining the OSS MongoDB-specific automation tool ecosystem: Dex, the Index Bot
So the pricing is flat rate? No difference for inbound emails?
The "threads" link lets a person review their posts and see if anyone has responded. However, in my experience, there's rarely any continuation of the conversation following my delayed responses, i.e. if I respond to a response that's two hours old, odds are that the person to whom I responded will not respond back.

In addition, a mechanism which notifies people when they haven't had the last word probably would be detrimental to the overall tenor of HN.
But do you think he has a point about over-specializing? Is there an optimum level of just enough specialization?
Requiring four separate APIs is a client-side dependency nightmare; requiring around 15k lines of uncompressed code is a disaster waiting to happen.
Everything There Is To Know About Lift (Obvious Corp)
eli is correct that is exactly the photo essay that came to mind about Detroit. Having personally driven thru Detroit and witnessing large Swathes of the area totally abandoned freaked me out completely
Why? If your server is running PHP and you're not worried about confusion with some other language processor, then why not use shorthand?
Where do you find such cheap (around $500) Bootstrap designers/developers?
The Freebase "quad" dump is not in RDF format, and so cannot be imported into any standard RDF store.
I like the idea of getting crowdsourcing from MT but there will be out-of-pocket cost for you. Are you planning on charging your users to make up for the cost? Anyways, good luck.
As per the 2003 E.U. directive on renewable energy, renewables have priority access to the rid to offload their production. This is makes sense because it ensures full utilization of the assets and helps reduce their costs.

EDIT: grammar
Freebase isn't the same thing as Google Knowledge graph. Freebase contains 22M entities (according to the wikipedia entry), while the knowledge graph contains 500M entities (according to google announcement).
Stunning aerial photos of transit in the US
Authoritarian regimes could attempt to use this idea to splinter themselves (perhaps in a coalition) into separate "Internet" blocs that use the same type of communication infrastructure, but different "information" infrastructure.
The standard says, evaluation order of function arguments is undefined.. but in general, printf evaluates right to left. This was a common puzzle as I remember.
Realistically Intel is going to provide the libraries like the OpenCL runtime.
If they can get this out before Fall classes begin, this should enjoy a nice bump form the back-to-school demographic. If I were I student, I'd be considering an an Apple Air (and perhaps an HP equiv) and an iPad.

With the nice keyboard integration, and USB I/F along with windows application compatibility, this would definitely have the upper hand. An advantage an Ipad would have might be display quality, if I were in a creative field (i.e. looking at hi-res images). For note taking, this Surface seems like it hit a good balance.
I'll be happy to add a UK section.
Link is broken right now :(
Wow, this looks like a nice replacement to Redmine (which I always found incredibly hard to setup for something that should be a 5 minute installation). I'll give it a spin!
Signed arithmetic is generally only problematic when you hit the upper or lower bound. The right answer is almost never to use unsigned; instead, it's to use a wider signed type.

It's far too easy to get things wrong when you add unsigned integers into the mix; ever compare a size_t with a ptrdiff_t? Comes up all the time when you're working with resizable buffers, arrays, etc.

And no, Java did not choose signed by default because of legacy. http://www.gotw.ca/publications/c_family_interview.htm:

"Gosling: For me as a language designer, which I don't really count myself as these days, what "simple" really ended up meaning was could I expect J. Random Developer to hold the spec in his head. That definition says that, for instance, Java isn't -- and in fact a lot of these languages end up with a lot of corner cases, things that nobody really understands. Quiz any C developer about unsigned, and pretty soon you discover that almost no C developers actually understand what goes on with unsigned, what unsigned arithmetic is. Things like that made C complex. The language part of Java is, I think, pretty simple. The libraries you have to look up."

Unsigned is useful in a handful of situations: when on a 32-bit machine dealing with >2GB of address space; bit twiddling where you don't want any sign extension interference; and hardware / network / file protocols and formats where things are defined as unsigned quantities. But most of the time, it's more trouble than it's worth.
> This framework is written to embrace the DOM rather than fight it.

And yet three separate libraries with DOM abstractions are required.

Why should I trust your opinion of the DOM if you require so much third-party code?
The Phi cores are really slow unless you use the SIMD unit; the typical way to do that would be OpenCL, but you can run OpenCL code faster on your GPU.
What if the 1500 per month only requires 10 hours per month maintenence for the year after launch?
Preview is broken (http://dresssed.com/themes/gimlet/preview)

"The page you were looking for doesn't exist.
You may have mistyped the address or the page may have moved."

And you're missing a Favicon.
I went to greplin.com and was redirected to a cue splash page with no indication that greplin still existed (a link has since been added). Between this redirect away from of greplin.com and the link title "greplin becomes cue," it seemed clear that greplin was no more. It turns out greplin is not scrapped, they have added a link back to it, so you are right I was premature in expecting them to revoke permissions.

That said, if they had in fact replaced a web service with an iPhone app, that would be a fundamentally different product that I did not sign up for, and I would expect them to yield my permissions and start over, or send an email with "click to transfer permissions to the new product." What if they "pivot" to become an email marketer? Would my permissions ride along there? You are right in this case, however.
Well, supporting unsubscribes in transactional emails can sometimes make sense, like with notification or confirmation emails where the user might want the option to not receive them. With others, like receipts or signup confirmations it makes less sense. For now, we presume that you're going to do the right thing and implement unsubscribes if it makes sense for the emails you're sending. We've got a feature coming to make that process easier, but it's still going to be a decision that the sender is going to need to make.
Actually the 500M (or 400M or 300M) or whatever number is bogus.

We do know that they ported "graphd", the Freebase database, to Google's infrastructure. Really nothing happened at Freebase for a year and a half while they were doing this.

They've probably created a very large Freebase graph for scale testing and it's likely that they're able to handle 500M entities from a hardware perspective.

If you look at how often the GKG comes up in search, it clearly doesn't come up very often. So the process that makes the visible GKG is a process of subtraction, not addition. There are many topics where the GKG could give you an answer from Freebase but it doesn't, and they prune many of them away because they don't want to take the chance of giving wild answers. It's more likely that 1 or 1.5 million topics are in the visible GKG.
From the headline, my first thought was that this was going to be about estimating development time/effort on a project.
Detroit's decline started long before 2008.
Exquisite Switches and On/Off Sliders for iOS
Yes - the pricing is flat rate. Right now charging for inbound emails is turned off since the feature is so new and basic, but inbound emails will be indexed and tracked the same as outbound emails, so they'll be charged the same.
Do GTK and Qt work on it? Do desktop environments and window managers compile and run? Does most graphical software that compiles and runs on Linux, the BSDs, and Mac OS X compile and run on it? If so, this would be perfect.
One general trend in cloud hosting is to have multiple sources of the cost for a system. For instance with EC2 you have a per hour price for the virtual server and a per gigabyte price for data transfer. If you want any kind of permanent storage that's a separate thing with it's own per gigabyte stored and per gigabyte transferred costs.

Not only is it easy to miss these, but they're not things you pay as much attention to in a typical hosted server environment.
Great points. It's all about what engages the player and their social circle. In our social fitness game/platform we've found our players are motivated playing and advancing based on the intrinsic nature of the game play. It's just fun and the benefit of play is healthier you. We include extrinsic rewards like achievements and badges but only to round out the game - not as a carrot. We also find competitions and challenges that are team-based build a social contract among players and are very powerful motivators.
You don't understand. Internet profit isn't profit, we just learned that. Obviously the Internet works such that if it took you 100 hours to develop it, the Internet eats your hard drives every 30 days and you have to spend 100 hours again just to be at the same place. It's no different from standing at a lemonade stand for 100 hours. No different at all in any way. /s
What Is Managed Print Services?
Vert.x 1.1.0.final is released
My only complaint is, I write long commit messages, since the commit messages are shown in single line, it overflows the viewing area. so, if there are linebreaks for longer git messages, it would be awesome.
It's really a question of how time factors into your accounting. If you're spending 10 hours to make $50, then it's tough to claim that as a $50 profit unless your time is worth less than $5 an hour.

Of course there are cases in which your time is worth less than $5 an hour (you don't have any other prospects for making money). Or if you enjoy what you're doing it might only be 1 hour of "work" with 9 hours of enjoyment. The point is that completely ignoring time spent is just bad accounting.
The world is changing.

Facebook and Google are the new Halliburton and Lockheed of the age of behavior tracking and counterterrorism...

Both companies spend millions per year to provide elaborate back doors into their network for the NSA, FBI, and other government agencies.

Both firms are too important not to become members of the military industrial complex... Their behavior tracking technology is trusted, ubiquitous, and has far broader reach than government systems.

It starts with backdoors and warrants, then backdoors without warrants, then massive data mining and "preemptive" search of personal data, then installing government payloads on customer laptops, etc. etc.

I don't see how anyone can trust firms that go along with warrantless backdoor policies not to install government payloads on customer machines when asked.

First counterterrorism, then the IRS and immigration policies (better not mention your cleaning lady in a gmail message), then GPS data harvested and speeding tickets retroactively issued.
According to pg, the average age of YC founders is 27.
"apparently China already (or still) is cheaper than Germany in producing solar power cells"

Yeah, but that's because China can violate any worker rights under the Sun, and pollute as much as it wishes in the process (and producing solar cells pollutes quite a bit).
Is there anybody here that doesn't assume they're analyzing everything?
This is the reason why you can't run a large'ish website on sql server on AWS, and - i believe - a driving factor for adoption of alternative databases that are more easily sharded.
It's not secretaries who overpay FICA taxes, it's software developers and other well paid professionals that are making ~$100K/year in salary.

Both secretaries and business owners are on the receiving end of social security benefits.

It might be ok to call S Corp way of setting up payroll for owners a loophole (debatable), but it's definitely not scam.
Many years ago, probably in my teens, I read a wonderful anecdotal story that I have retold many times on the internet:

In the eighties, a young woman was taking assertiveness training. The instructor was some Nazi-like drill seargent type of a woman. The course was teaching these women to yell at people and be extremely aggressive and pushy. At some point, it was the author's turn to yell and practice asserting herself. She told the instructor she didn't want to do that, she liked being nice to people. She was berated about how it is a tough world and she needed to learn to stand up for herself or people were going to walk all over her. She politely declined. Eventually the instructor moved on. She decided to quietly gather her things and leave. She didn't want to do this anymore. As she left, she overheard someone in the back row say to someone else "God, what a bitch."

So, yes, she should woman up, grow some bigger tits if necessary and wear her brass bustier to mixed gender events if that is what it takes.
Build a AJAX Style PHP Chat Application
Not desperate. Just hungry. :)
Spotify to be free for iOS users in US, Android likely to follow
Our main out goings are software licenses to be honest. SQL has gone up to 240 per CPU now which racks up. Thanks for the advice though as I will certainly look around.

I do like the propspect of te cloud though and instant scaling which is why I was looking at cloud solutions anyway
That's undefined behavior, the compiler can do whatever it pleases to. It can even print 666, and be done.
I think we can safely assume the answer to "how many US citizens" is "all of them". The fact they're not even willing to give a suggestion of magnitude speaks volumes.
Drops can be used in place of release. For example "the new Justin Beiber album drops today." In the tech world it is usually associated with discontinue.
Facebook to show you ads based on your Web browsing
Free server on LINODE Now
955 Dreams releases mobile publishing and advertising tools
It depends. Is it good that I don't need to know how to get an Apache server on a *NIX box up and running just so I can play with Ruby? Absolutely.

Is it good that even though I suck as UI design & colors, I can see something I like, drop a little cash and deploy it? Again absolutely.

Is it good that it's now super easy to write a CRUD app that is nothing more than a digitized form? I'm not sold here.

I get the allure, and I take advantage of these options as much as possible. But what I want to see is software helping solve a problem. If all you're doing is digitizing a form, I'm not convinced you've really solved a problem.
In the Nordic countries, at least, that only applies under pretty specific circumstances (which try to target the tax-evading cases you mentioned). In a normal case, if you're self-employed, you pay social contributions only on what you actually make, which might be considerably less than minimum wage if your business is not very successful. Actually have a friend who recently filed taxes in that circumstance, since his one-man mobile-game studio didn't sell very many games in 2012.
Link is fixed
Disagree on the "dynamically increase" logging. Log everything all the time. When you enable logging/debug you've just changed your resource profile. Presumably your already in a precarious/high risk situation, don't add more change.
Storage is cheap to save your bits. If you need to save money record different granularities, discard old records, or use (good) sampling.

A system to dynamically/automatically capture something like oprofile/systemtap/dtrace can be handy. But on the converse I've seen it make a bad instance dead.
I remember that when Backbone came on the scene, not having to use native elements was a selling point. If you wanted to use native elements you could. But you'd end up having to put `event.preventDefault();` in every one of your event handlers.
But that's obviously stupid. See my other comments. If you stop working on it and pay someone 800 per month to maintain it and do nothing else, and ten years later the account payments go into has 200k in it, what, is that 200k from another dimension? This is so obviously wrong. The article is completely wrong economically, and can be summarized as: "Don't say you're profitable from day 1: say what you mean, that your business is cash-flow positive with respect to its own business expenses other than your original time in developing it." whoop-de-doo. not an important semantic distinction, but I will grant the author it.

I will not grand the author the contention that you shouldn't tell people if this is the case.
Many of the most successful companies are way beyond product dev stage. Airbnb had launched ~6 months before they started YC. There are many other companies that are launched and gaining traction before they join YC, tikl, colorlovers are a couple of others that come to mind.

The average age of YCers in my round was 26, and there were people that are below 21 and above 35 too. I think that has gone up as people now receive $150k extra and can reasonably survive even if they have other responsibilities.

If you have the ability to move to Silicon Valley and are accepted in to both programs I think YC is a no-brainer (though I have done it twice so am highly biased).
I'm not going to say the author stole my post from yesterday, but it sure is eerily similar... What a coincidence!

http://jerzygangi.com/2012/06/17/youre-making-money-but-are-...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126955
It's a machine readable encyclopedia with very good coverage of concepts that are in people's shared conciousness.

If it were combined with a large document corpus (say CommonCrawl) you could use it to build (i) something like DMOZ that needs little human input, or (ii) a document analyzer that extracts named entities and topics, (iii) a knowledge base to support "enterprise search" where the major problem is recall because people don't use the right keywords, or (iv) many other intelligent apps which I haven't thought of yet.