skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2xFTE is aggressive; it presumes growth or steady revenue.

Well, a single month of 2xFTE wouldn't make me run out and hire someone... I'd need to be confident that it would continue. But presuming growth or steady revenue is pretty safe in the case of Tarsnap -- most of Tarsnap's revenue comes from storage costs, and in a typical month only about 10% of data gets deleted (and most of that is from machines which are uploading and deleting roughly equal amounts, presumably as part of an archive rotation process).

you seem relatively conservative about this stuff.

Within the limits implied by the fact that I'm running a startup company: Yes, I'm quite conservative in how I do things.

What kind of stuff would you contract out if money wasn't an object?

More testing. Kivaloo development. A GUI wrapper. I might throw some money at a web designer to see if they could make something I like more than the current site (I know you hate Tarsnap's web design, but like the picodollars, it does a good job of attracting the customers I want.) At some point, user support, but probably not yet (I worry that having someone else do user support would lead to me getting out of touch with the user community).

Probably more, but those are the bits which immediately come to mind.
This is kind of disheartening. I found it on the front page and saved it so that I could read the discussion later. I've gone through the same thought process while evaluating job offers at start up companies and would have been interested to hear the other side of the story from the employers.
Ha! Wow, I was going to write exactly the same thing! :)

I recently did something like this for the unlock password of my laptop--I type that one fairly often, but if the passphrase isn't super secure (after all, how many bits of entropy in an affirmation? ;-) ) it doesn't matter that much since it's the physical security of the laptop that's most important anyway (I've been considering removing the whole password-to-unlock part, I did not because I like the background I picked for the login screen--now I have a better reason not to).

Currently it's a mantra from a meditation exercise that I particularly liked, but that was just the first thing that came to mind when I realized "hey, I type this multiple times each day, so why not have it be something uplifting, cool, self-affirming or just nice?". But I think I'll change it to something more targeted according to the pointers given in that article as soon as I come up with something good.
There are 147 color names, but the number of colors in CSS3 spec is a bit smaller because of duplicates (e.g. gray and grey are the same color).

I would rather prefer to comment my code than use some of the more convoluted names. In CSS3 we can also specify colors with HSL format which is more natural and universal than made-up names.
View from the ISS at Night
I'm with you on this one, please keep at it. How many times have you seen a (for want of a better phrase) Reddit-esque comment on HN that contributed nothing, had plenty of upvotes, and was then followed up with "This isn't how we do things on HN" comments? There is nothing wrong at all with wanting to keep your site on-topic and /focused/.
I use Django for http://picc.it

There isn't really any reason to pick Django over RoR besides the fact that you know one technology better.

Although, personally I prefer Python because scaling Python via Cython plugins is far easier than RoR via FFI plugins, since you just take prewritten code and annotate types and algorithms to get to the bare metal.

You mentioned that you are an idea guy with a budget, why don't you get in touch my email is in my profile.
Viacom, DirecTV, And The Future Of TV Blackouts
Usually. Especially with software, you should buy based on what it does now, not what is promised. Even from big vendors. Remember how much was originally promised for Windows Vista, and what it turned out to be?
Ways to Make Big Data Make Money
This is most certainly splitting hairs - by technology they clearly meant software. There is a lot of technology involved in just about every other sector, but we don't classify SynCrude as a high-tech company for a lot of reasons.

Canada's software industry is anemic at best, arguably non-existent at worst. You have a few shops working on cool stuff, but the bulk of the code being written in the country is for institutionalized non-software companies. What is made worse are the apologists who will point to the tiny, struggling, barely surviving "cool" shops and insist that everything is fine.
I do not believe this was officially supported by the Sparrow team as he make it seems...
Does anyone ever actually use CSS color names in production except for "white" and "black"? Unless you throw in a "border: 1px solid red" for debugging to see the box around an element?

After all, the remaining 145 colors only account for 0.00086% of colors a designer might pick in Photoshop.

It's like winning the lottery :)
Journal editors don't have time to personally review every submitted manuscript, yet that peer review process is relatively successful. Journals generally do not compensate reviewers (though I have been compensated for reviewing book proposals---in the form of my choice of free book from the publisher). In any case, what if the patent examiner selected a small number of experts in the specific field and sent the proposal out for review, along with some compensation for quality reviews (positive or negative). A senior USPTO examiner makes on the order of $100k/year (http://usptocareers.gov/Pages/Misc/SalaryRates.aspx) and spends 1-3 days reviewing each application. After overhead, that's more than $500-$1500 in personnel expenses per patent. What if, after an initial filter, the application was sent to three experts at $200 each. It seems like this could keep the costs similar to what they are now, but dramatically reduced the number of false negatives for prior art.
I don't think so, I was suggesting that a company could simply not do business with anyone in an undesirable location (e.g. Texas), and have that as part of the EULA, but with some proactive form of enforcement such as a drop-down, much like those "enter your birthday" age-checks, as passively adding it to the EULA text might not be good enough.
Maybe, I don't get it, but why not simply do something?
True, but enterprise and edu account for roughly 90% of total R&D in 2011 [1]. One look at the list will show you how much of 'high-tech' R&D was attributed to RIM alone[2].

But what of the Tar Sands though? Looks like the total R&D for Imperial was only 7% of what RIM spent.

[1] http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/120113/dq120113d-en...

[2] http://www.researchinfosource.com/media/2011Top100Listsup.pd...
Google IO before last, Google announced apps with in-app payments were making 20x conventional apps. In-app payments are mostly used for a lower friction version of freemium than forcing the users to buy a separate pro app or web site sign up account/subscription.
The Customer as a God by Doc Searls
Does anyone know how an app download bot would technically work? Wouldn't a bot owner have to control a lot of Apple IDs? Plus credit cards for a paid download app bot. It doesn't seem feasible to me, but they must be out there if people use them.
One thing strikes me that I think some of the critics in this discussion miss the point of the article. Or at least, the point that I got from it.

It's not so much about self-affirming what you wish to be true, or even worse, self-affirming "I can fly!!"--yeah that's not going to work.

The article is in fact pretty clear about this, first you go for some introspection and identify some of this "inner dialogue" that's keeping you down. Actual, recurring negative irrational thoughts in certain situations. We all agree those would be bad, right? Then, you counter the negative irrational one by formulating a positive and reasonable affirmation to counter that negative one. And nothing more and nothing less. The goal should be to get rid of the irrational negative recurring thought, not to start believing something unrealistically fantastical about yourself. Although it can help the process to exaggerate the positive one a little bit, but maybe not for everyone, and it's just supposed to expedite the replacing process.

Though actually, the people referring to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy are probably most right on the mark. Because that's basically a scientifically proven version of this technique. Well it's slightly different, but the fundamental similarities are quite obvious IMHO, and you can use them to solve the same problems.
> "Once established, why move down south?"

Later, and much larger, rounds of funding that is entirely unheard of in Canada.

Also, talent. This might be inflammatory, but I venture that the bulk of Canada's A-talent is already in the USA. Given the ease of the TN visa, I think it's not a stretch to say that if you're offering $70K for software engineers in Toronto, you are not hiring any of Canada's top talent, because they're all in the US making $150K+.

In my experience the few talented people who remain do so out of philosophical or family-related reasons, and that's a tiny, tiny slice of the overall pie.

> "I think that movement is changing.."

As a Canadian expat in the US I disagree. In fact, if anything, in recent years the brain drain of software talent from Canada to the US has increased as the software industry heats up down south. If your top players are consistently moving out of the country, it doesn't matter what government programs exist, you've already lost.

Talent is 95% of the problem. So long as US companies are offering fresh graduates $120K+ comp packages to live in sunny California, and Canadian firms have trouble ponying up more than $60K, the brain drain will continue, and Canada will continue to be scraping the bones of its own talent pool.
Terrible, unless you're in a "cooperative" setting, i.e., where the user is in controlled lighting conditions and looks directly at the camera, in a decent-to-high res photo.

Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) is the de-facto standard for looking at real-world face verification ("are these two faces of the same person?"): http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html

The top performer is currently around 93% (random chance is 50%). For a very rough guide on how recognition rates would be ("who is this person?"), it's v^sqrt(N), where v is the verification rate and N is the number of different people you're trying to distinguish between. Note that it goes down very fast with N.
The truth is the Sparrow team is a Mac only team. They didn't care much for Windows. If at all. To test the Windows builds, Din Viet used a virtual machine running inside OS X..
hmm then wouldn't it make sense to create a new stack-exchange site just for programming discussion and these type of questions that don't qualify for stack-overflow and move them there? stack-discussions or something?

That way there would be a place for people to have these discussions while keeping it separate from stack-overflow?
Premium price! It was ten bucks!

This whole episode has further reinforced my complete lack of faith in humanity. How people can get so upset at so little and be so entitled when they are owed nothing just disgusts me.
See also http://json-schema-api.org for more use cases.
They're not suggesting anything as far as I can tell. But I think a suggestion they would agree with would be for conscientious business owners to consider not only what's good business, but what is good for the consumers, even if it means not getting quite as much profit. It's about personal ethics. Of course, ethics, also demand you feed your family, so it's hard.

As for the hair dryer example, see the top-level comment by makecheck.
Thanks for the feedback. Lincoln Loop http://lincolnloop.com/ is the leading Python/Django dev shop I've found so far. Please refer any others that you may know of. Thanks again
There are easier ways of finding EXIF data on images. But good find :)
That's far into the realm of sci-fi for now, given that basic face recognition is still quite poor. See my other comment for details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4275921
I believe this site [1] is a great example of what you are saying (it was featured on hn earlier this week [2]). Firefox 14.1 performs really badly in comparison to Chromium 20.0 in this case.

[1]: http://www.jasondavies.com/primos/

[2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4255738
I predict that the overwhelming majority of people who correctly solve this problem under interview conditions have seen it before.
If you're a mortal, don't put too much weight in the advice of the gods.

People at the top of their game are usually too prone to attribute their success to hard work. People at the bottom are too prone to write it off as a question of genius.

The reality is somewhere in between: Carmack wouldn't be Carmack without a lot of hard work, but most people could never be Carmack no matter how hard they work.
Adventures in Document Thumbnailing
It's a premium when you look at the average price of software on the Mac and iOS App Stores. It's also premium considering my computer comes with a free email client and Google provides a free webmail app.
I've seen quite a lot of people saying that. The author quotes several in his article. If people were merely upset, that would be one thing. But people are talking as if they deserve updates and new features.
A post going over the document thumbnailing approach we use at Attachments.me. Included is an example Python library which creates thumbnails for several common document formats.
What is the average price of third-party e-mail clients, or other productivity software of similar scope?

And how did anybody get "screwed" here, as you stated in your original post?
Lack of mind share among developers and consumers is a much bigger problem than margins when you are bootstrapping a network. Look at Sun while they were going and BlackBerry/Nokia now - on the products that they manage to sell their margins are not bad, but do they have critical mass? If Google does this right - then they have a shot at doing with Nexus to Apple what Microsoft did to Sony with the Xbox.
Best Wedding Photo App I've seen yet. No more need for disposable cameras.
Appreciate the input and will do
I wasn't even aware CSS3 added 130 color keywords. I like the larger size of the chips used here, but prefer the labeled list on MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/color_value#Color_Keywo...
" billion dollar frighteningly ambitious idea " ... solved with an assistant? Graham likes it because he groks email related services.
Enough Pretending to Ban Assault Rifles. Just Do It.
Why are there almost no marine insects?
Devices with capacitive touchscreens are made to be operated with your fingers. Once a target is smaller than 44x44 points, it becomes very hard to hit accurately. That's why screen size is important for tablets. A 10" tablet can simply accommodate more UI elements than a 3,5" or 7" screen, and thus you can use more complicated programs on them.
A possible optimization worth trying with this project would be to generate just half the face and then mirror it before running the facial detection fitness function. Seeing as how your subject matter is generally symmetrical the algorithm as it is now is spending a lot of time just finding symmetrical images.
I've dreamed of Sparrow for Windows for a while now, but Postbox is holding me over. It's a good alternative -- it has a traditional, but sexy user interface.
Many people have reported getting refunds
Immutable Persistent Data Structures in Common Lisp
you can get cross-platform compatability with svg using google's svgweb - http://code.google.com/p/svgweb/
Except the difference is: there are tens of thousands of iPad apps. How many Android apps are optimized for tablets?

(Silly example btw, who would use Foursquare on a 10" tablet?)
Interesting. Thanks!

I understand, disagree with, and respect the strategy you have with regards to segmenting out desirable customers, but think "picodollars" is a tragically bad way of doing it. :)
I use the names regularly. I use colors sparingly for fuzzy (but consistent) connotations/highlights. The named subset is good enough for that purpose, and easier to remember than every shade that might be cooked up in another tool.
It's a shame that there are some serious quality issues with the Nexus 7 though. I pre-ordered two from the play store in the UK. Both arrived a few days ago, both had the loose screen and one doesn't have a working touch screen. Still waiting on an RMA email 3 days after calling support.

The one that does work ended up being a present to my partner, and it does look very nice. I have a Galaxy S2, which is still running Gingerbread, by way of comparison.
I'd love to hear what other people have to say about this and another title (other than hustler) that could describe a non-technical...
Automatic package management is great. Now I just have to sit down and convert all the (quite numerous) extensions I've installed to using the package manager though :P.

This should help with keeping everything updated and going from computer to computer. My current system just has everything in a private git repository, but this isn't really ideal.

I should also probably submit the one major mode I've written. However, it's specific to a particular course taught by one professor, so nobody is going to be needing it for at least one semester :).
This article resonates strongly with me as a candidate who works as a generalist Software Engineer at a small company and has been looking out for opportunities.

At this point I am frustrated enough to put up a big 'Fuck you recruiters!' on the top of my resume.

I mean there are tons of software positions that I apply to that I know I can easily handle but just get turned down because of lack of 5x years of experience with Tech Stack Zaphod v4.2.

/rant
I found the concise explanations here very helpful: http://people.csail.mit.edu/bdean/6.046/dp/
When Selling Out is, In Fact, A Dirty Choice
No need for scare quotes around "privilege" and "over-represented". These are real things that you can't hand-wave away for the sake of your theoretical exception.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've got a LLC equivalent and you're almost spot on.

If I own 25 of a company's shares, and let's say the shares are worth $1000 each then it means they can only claim a maximum of $25000 from me. Which is actually my investment in the company. So the worst thing they can do is take over my shares. Along with that, they can hypothecate any and all equipment that has been purchased in the company's account. So, the company car, company computer, server space, domain name, tables, chairs, office space etc.

What they cannot do is physically come into my home and forcably take my wife's jewelry and my personal computer. They cannot take my television or my car. Because those have been bought on "my" money, i.e. the salary that I'm claiming from the company.

This is LLC/WLL.

But what I'm interested is a bit different. Say, I run a business called algorithms.com with my company registered in Sweden. If tomorrow a patent troll in Texas files a suit against me, it's obvious that the US DOJ cannot shut down my business. But can they seize the domain name, only simply because it's a .com instead of a .se or a .whatever else
My init file is now much much simpler. It's easier to use customization once you're using packages. Package quality is also better than the old "install this file in your load-path somewhere" because there are established ways of doing stuff that work automatically (autoload cookies for example, I'll do another post on them sometime).
What Steve did at Apple certainly did benefit employees, they're all still employed after all. And I'd guess many are shareholders as well. Double bonus.
Definitely agree with this. I enjoy my work for a small company in Waterloo, but the compensation is definitely a pittance, and that aspect has frustrated me the entire time I've been there. We get a lot of government money too--- IRAP, SR&ED, OCE, etc, but the lack of a VC scene means we're basically stuck bootstrapping the company. Everyone's very wealthy on paper, but stock options don't put a roof over a young family.

We've stayed in the area for exactly the reasons you speak of---proximity to family, and concerns about US politics, healthcare, etc. But it's agony to look around and see so few job alternatives, especially when I've been invited on multiple occasions to apply for positions in the valley based on nothing more than a HN comment. sigh
Statistics of Mitt Romney Twitter Followers (bots)
Maybe I'm pedantic, but the term "neurodiversity" is a little premature. We don't actually know what causes autism or for that matter a tendency to addiction. It might be neuronal, or it might be genetic, hormonal, environmental or something else or a combination of all of the above.
> Wikipedia has a faction that dislikes fair-use non-free images.

... because Wikipedia can be sued for using them, and fair use is a very, very bad thing to try and rely on in an actual court. 'Fair use' is whatever a judge says it is, which isn't something you can rely on going your way.
> copywritten

Copyrighted. It's about rights, specifically, the rights to copy and authorize copying.
We are told that if you don't pay for a product than you are the product.

So when we pay for a product and then get sold (Google wouldn't have bought the team if they didn't have any customers), it does feel disappointing.
I think this could work, if implemented as part of the current e-mail system. You could add a server that intercepts e-mails and if the user is not on the white list, or hasn't paid/registered for a particular pay service, then it could bounce the e-mail with a notice telling the sender to sign up. That would solve the initial problem of not having any users as well.
Getting Rich By The Numbers, A CrunchBased How-To
The github repo with code is here: https://github.com/3scale/sentiment-api-example
I can't imagine what kind of successful career you could have in a company with an policies and an HR department so short sighted. If both HR and the company policies are at the point where they would reject you even though you've sidestepped HR to get the actual hiring manager to deem you qualified then there is more to worry about at that company than a career.
Except it's not about fighting spam, it's about fighting legitimate email.
Ah there's a better post explaining what I mean: http://www.elezea.com/2012/07/sparrow-google-acquisition/
you missed the gist of the idea -- its not a replacement for email, but reducing the inbound flow of messages/email for famous people.
You are still taking a risk when you buy the toaster. If a toaster malfunction burns your kitchen and the shop or manufacturer go bankrupt you might not receive compensation.