skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Edit: Thanks to the responses that pointed out that the 500 private investor limit did not force the IPO, just a pile of disclosure requirements and other restrictions; apparently some of the news sources I'd originally read had not quite grasped that point either. The main point still stands, though: Facebook had a larger-than-normal set of private investors and brokers that did quite a bit of trading at IPO-time.

Facebook had a relatively large number of private investors, enough to trigger additional restrictions regarding reporting and disclosure. Facebook hadn't intended to exceed that limit, but hit it anyway due in large part to new restrictions that prevented intermediaries such as brokers from letting many downstream customers count as 1, as well as people reselling their shares on secondary markets to extract value from them.

Those same private investors and brokers did quite a bit of trading when the IPO happened, much of it not to the benefit of Facebook.
That's exactly how I see this project - a niche social network. It's definitely not the end-all social network. I have been doing some work on the side and can continue to sustain the project at a slow and steady pace, however, I'm just starting to think long-term.

As far as a co-founder goes, there's not many people around my area that have any interest in development and/or being involved with a startup. I'd love to spend some time up north and make some connections, although I'm not quite sure how I should go about getting my foot in the door. Definitely need to look into that though
Oh, I certainly agree. I have different projects with different goals. I've spent some time eking out every ounce of performance for a Newton-Rhapson division routine in assembly. But then there are some high level things that I think lead to more elegant (and ultimately simpler) programming. Clojure for example isn't particularly close to the hardware, but it leads to better coding practices that result in easier long term maintenance, less bugs, etc.

I think a good balance would be to take a well designed language and add an option for high-performance code when needed. C and C++ do this with inline assembly (although I don't know that anyone would call C "elegant"). It would be nice if more higher-level languages added this ability.
I am tired of downvotes without replies.
But again, in those location it will be more difficult to monetize around services.
Hydrogen fluoride comes to mind, but it's probably not an important pollutant in most of the water sources we care about.

I can't think of anything else that small that would be a problem.
That sounds like it could be really beneficial to understanding a piece of code, but it seems like it would only ever be really feasible if you were working alone and taking some code from somewhere else and completely consuming it, into a new project like Toot and Whistle or into some other existing project. Most of the times that I've needed to ramp up understanding of some code is either at a new job or before contributing to some existing project.

Would you do this after starting at a new job, and make this your first commit? Or before contributing to open source?

I could envision some awkward social problems arising there. If you kept that code to yourself, but continued working on the old code, that would probably be frustrating.

I'm just curious because I'm really attracted to the idea of this method but am not sure if it would really work where I'd want it to.
There are only 26^3 TLAs, so all of them get overloaded. I suspect you are thinking of BKA = Bundeskriminalamt, because you just mentioned the FBI.

As for Hong Kong vs Seoul, I would look for boxy Korean characters in Seoul and various Chinese forms in HK.

I'm a USAn who has never been to Germany, Korea, or Hong Kong... but I read a lot, and pay attention. Most smart people do both of those things. I suspect it's part of the definition of "smart" these days.
> This comment invalidates everything else you wrote.

It doesn't, and it shouldn't.
That US presidents have to lie and say that the talk to God all the time and follow his advice - and European national leaders have to lie and say that they don't is perhaps the main cultural difference

( with the possible exception of the Pope )
Immunity against bacterial virulence factors tends to be persistent. The nature of the proteins is that they cannot change much without losing function. (Unlike viral surface coats.)
I gotta agree with you. Conceptually Lean Startup was ok, but there was zero content in it that I could easily grasp and apply to a company. It was all too high level. I think most of Clayton Christensen's books are the same way.

Eric Ries is in the consulting business (like Clayton) and he's trying to bring Lean Startup to the mainstream & big companies. I think his book achieves that goal but at the expense of being helpful to startups.
Social networks aren't open for competition like VPS hosts are. People us hosting for certain features, uptime, or price. People use social networks simply for the fact that others are using it too. It entrenches players easily.

Look at Craigslist. The UX sucks and they haven't done anything with it in a while. But people use Craigslist, with no one able to displace it at scale, simply because it has gravity and users don't go elsewhere. Niches is the best way to unentrench a social network, but these are just as saturated as vps hosts and aren't likely to get investor attention. I would cut your losses and find lower hanging fruit.
Facebook was not required to go public.

I've posted this many times, including http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3753915

They were required to make disclosures but no one forced them to go public. Plenty of companies have more than 500 shareholders yet still opt to remain private.

> Companies with more than $10 million in assets whose securities are held by more than 500 owners must file annual and other periodic reports. These reports are available to the public through the SEC's EDGAR database.
Show HN: Hacker Reads - Something I hacked together today, a digest for hackers.
I didn't have a because in there. What I said was that Americans seem unsophisticated but energetic and optimistic, and that since all those qualities are associated with youth, you could compress them into one statement by saying American culture felt young.

Nor did I say that American culture has this quality of youthfulness because the US is a comparatively young country. In fact that seems unlikely to be the cause, because there are younger countries that don't have it.
I quickly checked the apps suggested by you, all of them are different. Each of them tie up the user in some way. RunKeper has probably got pre set activity types and it has only the outdoor work outs. Also requires GPS. Gympact is more of a stake and earn money app than something to track your work outs. Fitbit has also got pre set activity types. Was unable to check fitocracy but even that appears to be like these.

SweatTrack is an app just intended to make logging of your work outs as easy as possible. It is just intended to be a replacement for excel spreadsheets and (of course I am biased) can be darn quite convenient. Everything is at the hand of users. Add work outs, edit them, have templates, do whatever you want. You can even have default values set for different routines. You can have a quick look here and even try the app.
http://visceralcoder.wordpress.com/category/sweattrack/

Honestly, I have hardly seen any fitness app which give the control to user entirely. Of course such apps must be there but they are currently totally eclipsed by the heavy apps such as the ones mentioned by you.
Haven't read the memoir yet, but after reading John's review http://blog.regehr.org/archives/743 I'm looking forward to it. Good luck at Google Phil.
This sounds like an awesome app, however, i think it would be a little bit creepy to have the webcam on whenever i'm using the computer...
Don't you think you should provide some evidence for your claim?
It is referred to as botched because it actually was - NASDAQ actually broke during the initial day of trading. Initial start of trading was delayed, then trades went through didn't get confirmed for -hours-, which is something of a disaster. This isn't some figurative use of the term, nasdaq actually failed in the objective sense.

NASDAQ's chief basically saying his company sucked:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-20/nasdaq-ceo-says-poo...
It couldn't replace the command prompt because of security issues. Basically it made it very easy for virus writers to run powerful commands that the OS would blindly run. In response, Microsoft not only made scripts not executable by default, there is also a "signing" thingamajig where a script won't be executable unless it is specifically signed off to run[1], including those written by you.

[1]: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SigningPowerShellScripts.aspx

It also isn't a drop in replacement for the command prompt. They exist as two separate programs, instead of the Unix general Terminal and shells run inside.

In my experience, Powershell has a lot of potential but is hampered by clunky interfaces and the lack of a true robust security system across the OS. Add on top of that the large malware industry around Windows, Powershell is basically a non-starter as a replacement for the vanilla command prompt.
What is your revenue model?

I'm not the best guy to value your services as I use bash, vi, and Grep for everything. I understand the love for technology but the amount of time spent building this app seems a little silly considering it is as far from solving world hunger as one could get.
Show HN: iShareFlix - My first web app after the Udacity class
I attended the Udacity's Web Application Engineering class (CS253) and was thinking of building a web app to put to use the knowledge that I acquired in that class. I and some of my friends are netflix users and often asked each other if there was a good movie that we saw recently. That made me build this app. It is a simple app to share your favorite movies with others. It uses the Netflix API. The recently announced API changes will impact my app starting Sept 15, 2012. I came to know about those changes half way through building my app and thought about dropping the idea but then proceeded to build it anyways because I wanted to. I had originally planned to add Facebook integration but don't plan to go through with it because of the netflix API changes. I would love to hear feedback from the HN community. This is my first app so I may not have done some basic things right and would love the community to point that out so that I can improve going forward.
Rather interesting to note since I just read through your old Step-by-step (2/2) today.

Thanks for the great resource.
The same here, Firefox on Win7 seems to be doing it better than chrome.

http://i.imgur.com/Vmbh2.png
Healthcare Tech Mid-Year 2012 Funding Report
Rock Health, a healthcare technology accelerator from San Francisco, CA provides a slide presentation on the healthcare tech funding-landscape for the 1st half of 2012, as compared to this time in 2011. Great info.
As I think I mentioned in the interview, I've found that if I do this, by the time I'm done with my rewrite, I actually understand the original code too. So if I had to, I could throw away my new (better?) code and still benefit from a better understanding of the original code.
Rss? FTP?
Tech remorse: the worst gadgets we ever bought
Atari turns 40
You have to be a little careful with the social mobility stats. Countries with a very equal society score very high on these scales - because they really map "am I rich and were my parents were rich". Countries where everyone is happily in the middle (eg scandanvia) show low correlation with your parents income and that counts as high social mobility - when in fact it's just low mobility for everyone.

Countries with a high immigrant population in the preceding generation score very high - just because the first wave of immigrants probably did relatively badly compared to the average population, so if their kids do average that looks like high mobility
I don't think Linux can be compared in any way, because it was never a commercial venture, and Linus released the first version in a barely working skeletal form, and proceeded from there.

If you actually meant MINIX, which the link goes to, it's also a poor example because it is pretty much a failure...it lost out to the always-open Linux, in such a catastrophic manner that most people, even most Linux users, don't even know it exists or that Linux was a reaction to it. If you plan to be the "MINIX of realtime data streams", I don't think I'll be developing for your platform.

Android is possibly a reasonable example, as I guess it did happen as a proprietary venture that went Open, but it's Open Source life happened under the oversight of Google, arguably the world's most important technology company. You don't have that kind of clout or that kind of market penetration. No one worried that Google would disappear next week, leaving a bunch of development spending un-recouped.

Finally, there is a pretty hard rule of the Internet, which is that infrastructure will be Open Source...and if it isn't today, it will be soon. HTTP, DNS, SMTP, SSL, video (HTML5, which replaced the proprietary Flash). There are still a few examples of non-Open services, and Web 2.0 (or whatever), was a valiant attempt to retake the web for proprietary interests; and the jury is out on whether Open Source and standards will eventually prevail. So, chat is back to being often proprietary, video and voice conferencing never had a viable Open Source option so it remains proprietary with competing standards, etc. But, I think for you to convince other companies to build on what you make, you'll have to either become big fast (like Twitter fast), or start Open. Or, you'll build just another also ran.

Of course, if you start Open Source, you'll never make a bajillion dollars on the software or service itself. So, you get to choose your priorities, and maybe shooting for the big money is more important than a better shot at building a standard that many people and companies use.
Tracour Wants to Umpire the Rumor Wars
Runkeeper doesn't require GPS you can manually enter thousands of workouts. Anyway, good luck to you. I guess it's up to the users to download it and prove your theorem!
SEEKING FREELANCER in NYC - We're a growing publishing startup that helps great writers get discovered. We are seeking someone to help our CTO grow our platform and begin developing our app. We are looking for a 4-week contract to hire developer who can work in our NYC office 5 days/week.

- 2-3 years of web development experience in PHP

- Proven experience developing iOS applications (please provide examples)

- Full LAMP stack experience or interest: front-end, back-end, database, server

*How to apply:
- E-mail team_at_writersbloq.com with subject line: "DEVELOPER" and include your web presence: LinkedIn/Github/Twitter/Blog
Hate to be that guy... But out of I don't know 20 tries it only worked once. Maybe it's because of the room doesn't have enough light..

Really cool concept though.
Not sure if I agree with your "beautiful and usable" comment, there's a very good reason for design iteration.

Check out some geocities sites from a while ago for some 'usable' websites.

Personally I feel like the UI of iOS is very aged, requiring you to click on a icon to see information about that app whereas a widget allows a wealth of information at a glance. Often even access to an application's controls without having to open the app.
I wouldn't quite consider social networks and VPS hosts to be just as saturated as one another. Building a social network from the ground up requires time, some creativity, the ability to bring something unique to the table, and forming a team that's just as passionate towards an idea as you are. Running a VPS company, on the other hand, requires an install of a hypervisor and a ticket/billing system. I'd prefer to contribute something that requires a bit more thought and energy. First, I'd like to weigh my options for this particular project, rather than jumping ship this early and heading down another path.
The link to your blog seems to be missing:

<div id="blog"></div>

Also, I can't find the instructions for skipping songs and other gestures.
As crops rot, millions go hungry in India
I think it's great that you want to learn something new. The main question that I would ask myself is, what adds the most value to my portfolio?

How much value does another similar backend language give?

My thoughts on this would be: Not to much. I would rather look for something that makes you a more interesting engineer. You could e.g. learn to make android apps. That would make you a quite valuable person being able to code mobile frontend and a backend service. Or a backend language/framework that is far different and let's you solve problems that you run into with PHP on high traffic websites.
Some companies started using Scala for high performance parts of their service. Or get a good understanding of Apache Lucene a search engine.

But something that is more different from PHP and will make you a more interesting engineer.
I'm western looking but they gave the password to anyone who asked (including locals)
I'm 18 and have learned a lot in the last year or so. I've spoken at length to investors and founders to get advice so understand your situation. I've been able to build a profitable startup with 100k+ users and am now working on my next thing.

Firstly, your age won't stop you raising money. Believe me, it's a huge bonus IF you're ready and serious. But if you want to start a company it has to be something you dedicate all your time to and spend years building. VC's invest because they expect you to build a company and then IPO or exit one day. I don't think you can live up to building a company if it's a summer or part-time gig.

Secondly I'll email you so you can tell me your idea as I assure you very few things are unique. In social networking almost nothing as there are hundreds of thousands of competitors.

You won't get investment by emailing investors sadly, you have to build relationships. This is the perfect time to do it.

Here's my advice. If you are interested in building a company (while doing college), raise some seed funding under 10k from an angel you build a relationship with or one of the many LA incubators and then build it through college with a co-founder. You'll be able to take your time, gain traction and if it does do well then you can take it further but will probably have to drop-out.

You don't have to have a co-founder but it makes sense for product decisions and actually building a great product. Freelancers are a waste of money and require a lot of work, if you want to build something real you'll eventually hire and having a co-founder makes sense for most. You can use what you already have towards it as it'll help to get a co-founder if you have something tangible.

By the way I'm not advocating college as the sole option, I'm not going at all but it really depends on what you're looking for any where you are on your journey.

By the way, you're in LA. A pretty huge tech scene, you should be making the most of it by going to lots of meetups and meeting founders and potential investors and partners! You have no excuse.
Please stop shouting.
As one of the last six users of the original Infogami, this makes me happy. :)
SEEKING WORK - Probably remote, as I'm currently in Buenos Aires and heading back to Chicago in October.

I do more than just web stuff. I'm also really smart (heheh). Let's talk.

Things I've used for serious work: Objective-C for iOS, C, Erlang, Ruby, Python, Javascript, Haskell, RSLogix 5000 (yeah baby!)

If anybody has a Factor project, I'll work on it for peanuts.

GH: http://github.com/zuwiki

email: mvz@mvz.so

My twitter (@mvzink) and website (http://mvz.so) aren't exactly professional, but are there if you want to make friends.
> the effectiveness of USA institutions: legal system, courts, law enforcement, Congress, media, higher education Good governance and higher civilization aren't created overnight

Couldn't you have just copied them from Britain and France - wouldn't that have been easier ?
Blog is coming soon - thanks for letting us know!
and he's perfectly fine with that
Which part?

"Everyone is blaming NASDAQ for issues that are not inherently NASDAQ's fault."

The IPO was delayed during the day because of Morgan Stanley (asking customers not to dump at the open). NASDAQ is not buying shares and hence is not required or expected to bring demand to the table.

The IPO "flopped" not because of the exchange but because demand wasn't there.

That demand wasn't there was established in many post-mortem analyses. Do a quick google search.

"Switching to NYSE won't magically change the price (and I'm pretty sure the price would have fell on the opening day if they listed on NYSE)."

For the venue to have changed the price action, the initial demand would have had to been restrained by the technical difficulties. However, given that customers at various retail brokerage houses were able to get shares in the hours leading up to the IPO, I would chalk that up to a dearth in demand.
> However, it seems like I've been waiting for it for years.

https://github.com/jamii/erl-telehash is a reasonably complete implementation (it's only missing rate limiting and auth).

After working on erl-telehash I have some doubts about the protocol details (although the overall idea still appears sound). I described how I would modify it at https://gist.github.com/1910754 but I'm not moving forwards with it at the moment (working full-time for now).
Play/pause is the only gesture available currently. Other gestures are coming very soon.
Personalising Online Prices: How Deep Are Your Pockets?
Hi rbn, possibly it's a light. Would you please do us a favor and send us a video of your lighting - that would help us improve? Also, please make sure that your palm is at least 1 feet away so as to completely visible by webcam.
Good news is that the app works entirely on your machine locally - no video data ever leaves your computer so hopefully that will alleviate some of your concern. :)
You seem to be confusing latency with bandwidth.

Being far from the servers makes a difference for gaming and maybe everyday browsing. But for streaming bandwidth is what is important.

Also most sites use CDNs e.g. Akamai, Cloudfront which have content cached pretty close to the user.
Thanks for the correction. Various news sources have made the same mistake, and I must have picked it up from one of those.
Please accept my apology for shouting.

Many threads regarding the Facebook IPO are littered with people repeating the same idea that Facebook was forced to go public, based on a faulty understanding of SEC regulations. And no one, especially late stage YC companies, should feel pressured to IPO.
Finding the Balance Between Message and Design With Web Programming
Eh, more just my own little rant about rants about rants. >_>
> The vast majority of Twitter usage seems to be as a communication tool by celebrities.

I had a hard time with the credibility of this analysis after that whopper. Twitter use continues to grow exponentially and is currently at 140 million active users with 340 million tweets per day. It is the third largest social network behind Facebook and LinkedIn.
"...because as a shareholder..."

A couple quick questions:

1. How much did you buy in at?
2. WHY on Earth did you buy?
Thank you. I will check them out.
You're forgetting the part where NASDAQ told every major player to sell the Facebook shares they had, if they wanted to get in on some of that 40 million in compensations (you had to fill in the sold-at price on the form, or forget about it).