skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should ask yourself what you are really passionate about. I'm currently going through similar options and here's what I have to say.

If you can do PhD later, then do it later. If it's an opportunity that you must act upon immediately, then do so. You'll double-triple your salary when you re-enter the corporate job market. However, keep in mind the being a graduate student is being an adult with no money. You'll have to tough it out for a few years.

The same situation lies with your start-up. You've already let out your idea, therefore you must invest a large amount of time and effort (money) to release before any competition gets there first. At that point, what are the odds of your success?

To be really cautious, I would personally go with the PhD and tough it out. If you're confident enough in your talent, you can develop for your start-up on the side. If, for some reason you fail at either or both, when you re-enter the job market, you'll still be worth gold.
Gene Roddenberry and wife to spend eternity in space
You get all kinds. The united states is a vary technologically advanced mostly christian society. Yet, if you look at the Anabaptist Christian denomination and think that's how most Americans live your kidding yourself. We might call them Amish, but the 227,000 Anabaptist Christian's hold fairly mainstream beliefs for the most part are are a fairly large slice of the American experience.

Talking about Islamic culture while ignoring the huge divide in our own country is missing something. We have our splinter groups and so do they. Once you start talking about 100+ million people you will get poets and serial killers, teachers, and racists. But we can lump them into one group and say they are good, or evil, or whatever because they are far away and we just don't know the true story.

PS: Think about a Gay man living in the deep south in 1950 now how well do you need to know them to have any idea how far the public / private divide runs with them. Now move that into a society where denouncing your faith can get you killed.
i think people don't think about how easy access to loans/funds inflates the price of a good. banks were falling over themselves to give people money, and realtors were happy to take as much of it as they could; if no one has $500,000 for a house, houses aren't going to cost $500,000.
I'll consider CMS solved when end users can create most any basic site -- to the pixel, with absolutely no XHTML or CSS written by hand coupled with a robust management and analytics framework. It's a ridiculously difficult problem to both create a system that is developer AND end user friendly that satisfies this requirement.

I think it's through the development of some new UI paradigms that this sort of problem will eventually feel more "solved". That said -- have you guys looked at Squarespace - http://www.squarespace.com/ (Disclaimer: My company.)? We have a pretty unique take on the problem -- with separate editing modes (content, structure) + an expansive module base + an excellent visual CSS designer + an extremely robust hosting core (think: S3 for pages). 5 years in business.

Definitely don't feel we've completely solved it, as evidenced by our system constant upgrades, but it's a great shot. If anyone on this thread is interested some facet the CMS problem, feel free to add a question.
Doesn't Joost address the simultaneous user problem?
Once you charge, you have to deliver some level of customer service. If it's a free service, you can fall back on mea culpa blog posts and the 'beta' tag.

That being said, Eudora made a mint with its Pro version for many years.
Brandeis to sell its art museum to raise money
In the past I've requested explicit opt-in and out.

Usually there is a blanket IP clause, but if I say "I'm going to work on ABC in my spare time" - and we all agree this isn't core the business - then it's added as a schedule exclusion.

You need to be specific, but it works just fine if all the parties are operating in good faith (which you'd hope with a good employee relationship).
Mind you this is a "decal", which are kind of like clubs in a sense, with student instructors that teach classes more for personal edification purposes than "omg legitimate course of study!"
Prefab Home Designer Bucks A Downward Trend
I think the problem with claiming this is the "next big paradigm" is that the average programmer, and frankly, even the merely above-average programmer, is not going to be competent to design a non-trivial special-purpose language of any value.

Once you step out of the domain of totally-trivial languages, language design immediately becomes tricky, subtle, and prone to exotic interactions and quirky tradeoffs that even our absolute best teams of language designers can only mitigate, not eliminate... and it's not all going to be "absolute best" teams, after all.

And... then you want multiple languages to be sitting there interacting, too? That's not even possible without somehow limiting those interactions ("thy languages shalt have lexical binding that works thusly"), and now you're just making another meta-language like Lisp, which, presumably, doesn't fit the bill. Either you cut off the diversity of the language or you get the sort of evil interactions the likes of which have never been seen in a real language. The only middle ground there is to do both at once.

If your paradigm requires a genius to use it, that's not a fair comparison against other paradigms; start a genius out on OO and they can get pretty far there, too.
Moral of the story: It is much easier to make money on subscriptions than by ads.
Birds of a Feather are Tested Together
If my school had classes like this, I probably would have graduated. The best we had was a game theory class that ran once every couple years.
Clearly you are all missing the insight here: where are our widescreen e-ink displays for writing code? Who needs color? Just give me paper-like readability and bold and italic.
Daniel Suarez reads from DAEMON
Perfectionists can apply higher standards than mathematicians - mathematics does not require anything like perfection. A mathematician sets the level of rigor he needs to prove an interesting theorem. A perfectionist mathematician would never prove anything, because he would never be able to convince himself that he had the right axioms. The same thing goes for engineers - a perfectionist would never finish the blueprints for the rocket. It doesn't take a perfectionist to catch a floating point error, it just takes experience, good people, and due diligence. That's hard, but it ain't even close to perfection.
Wow...totally my bad about the non-disclosure. I actually didn't see it that way, but if the community demands the disclosure, I am completely in the wrong. I apologize. I wasn't trying to hide who I am. I asked the same question here that I am asking internally. I am genuinely interested in the sentiment of non-MSFT stack users about the MSFT stack. Sometimes it's a good idea to get outside of the walls of MSFT.

Again, I aologize for any perception of malfeasance. I love HN.
You could simply pay them for a day of work.

An easy way to do that would be to rent someone from an employment service.
the basic tenet here is that #1 produces something that allows improvement and iteration, where #2 and #3 result in decisions based on abstractions.
What about the situation in Gaza?

Which groups are deliberately blowing up the Palestinian civilians? Are they terrorists? (Hint: see Chomsky's article http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20316)
More computing, less power
Again, apologies. The last thing I want is to upset this community. I am Brandon Watson, and I work at Microsoft. I am not, nor would I, trying to hide that. I asked the original question with genuine interest in the opinions of this community about the MSFT stack. I'm an HN addict, and consider it a valuable knowledge discovery (links, blogs, products, answers, philosphical questions) resouce.
I am learning iPhone programming right now, and I had no Obj C background (but I do have strong Java and Perl experience, and did a lot of C in school)

I highly recommend Stephen Kochan's Programming In Objective C 2.0 - great introduction to the language and its somewhat funky syntax (if you've been immersed in Java etc for a while), plus a whole section dealing with the iPhone SDK to get you started.
Man, I just lost 2 hours of my life to Sneakers. How did Redford, and company get sucked into that. What a horrible movie.
The Open Network
You could make the argument that PayPal with its fraud detection backend is primarily AML.
When Will Microsoft Get a Clue?
The nut of it:

Ten months, seven trips to MSU, six blown fuses and about $60,000
later, I'm proud to introduce you all to Snakebite: The Open Network!
A network of around 37-ish servers of all different shapes and sizes,
spread over three sites, specifically geared towards the needs of
open source projects like Python.

Every CPython, Jython, IronPython and PyPy committer will have access
to every development server on the network. I've also extended the
offer to prominent Python projects like Django and Twisted.

Eventually, I'll invite other open source projects to participate
(Apache, Subversion, MySQL, Postgres, etc), but the network is my
gift to All Things Python, first and foremost, so Python projects
will always get preferential treatment.

Great idea.
So you are working with a new technology stack and exploring new things... throwaway prototype is good when youa re doing something new. If you were versed witht he particular protocol, would you need to write to throwaway prototype ? I dont think so...
Although it isn't true - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blow_(film)
I don't like the maintenance aspect. People try to rip you off for simple issues. Tools take too much room to carry with the car.

So, you left Denmark? Where are you now?
I don't do interviews but one thing I will always look for in others is "passion for technology". If you code at nights for coding's sake you've got passion and I want to be your friend.
Current YC founder looking for co-founder
=The Project=

Hi. I'm Sam. I'm building a better photo sharing site. The site will enable the seamless transfer of hi-res photos among friends. Here's the demo of our photo sharing site that we included with our YC application: http://vimeo.com/2044353 The video is out of date, but gives you a general idea of what we're doing.

Interesting aside: when we showed that video to a random sample of 100 people in Amazon Mechanical Turk, 80 were interested enough to give us their contact info.

.

=The Team=

I'm building the site in Python/Django and my friend, John, is building the Mac plugin in Objective C. John has a full-time job (founder, ipodrip.com) and will be going back to school in the fall. After the summer, it'll just be you and me.

I think I have the site covered which means you'll most likely be working on the clients.

.

=The Office=

Until April, you'll probably be spending most of your time living and/or working at the Hacker House in Palo Alto: http://hackerhouse.bluwiki.com. After demo day we'll probably move things up to the city.

Here's a photo of the work area: http://twitpic.com/130qi

.

=About You=

You're familiar with at least two and proficient in at least one of the following: Objective C/Cocoa, Python/Django, Javascript/jQuery, VB Studio/C#. You're tired of your day job and ready to take on some risk. You're curious about what really happens at those YC dinners. You're persistent.

It's OK if you: Are eccentric (I am too); Are awkward (I am too).

.

=About You (wishlist)=

It'd be great (but not required) if you also had experience building a P2P application, flash plugins, and/or java applets.

.

=What you get=

You get a chance at changing the world. Or at least the way photos are shared. Oh, and you'll also get a mix of equity and cash. I've heard 10-20% is appropriate but I'm open to talking about what's fair. Cash will probably be just barely enough to pay for rent & food.

.

=Interested?=

Send an email to me/at/sam/dot/odio/dot/com and tell me about yourself. I'd love to hear about any projects you've built in the past.

.

=Edit@12:55 AM - more info=

Here's a screen cap of the current revision: http://divvyshot.com/static/images/screen_cap.png
Logo: http://divvyshot.com/static/images/logo_new.png
NYTimes hosts dev day to discuss APIs.  With O'Reilly Keynote.  Two days left to RSVP
I've been using Windows 7 and actually like the eye candy.

I think the issue is that people can't think of anything better to implement.
where are our e-ink displays for writing code

They take too long to refresh.
Web 2.0: Do tags work? (Case study: Flickr)
This question reminds me of Howard Rourke's (Fountainhead)advice to Peter Keating when Peter is presented with a similar choice after graduating from Stanton. Rourke ranks them as 1.startup 2.corp 3.continued study
Sounds pretty shitty to me. Doesn't everyone buy their music on iTunes?
Ask YC: S-Corp debts on personal credit report?
A friend of mine has an S-Corp that's going under. A lawyer is saying that unpaid credit card debt the s-corp owes will appear on my friend's personal credit report, and be quite a severe blemish. Is this how it usually works?
Thats what I am doing except I am doing research right now on computation as an undergrad and I am auditing classes to get the information to complete the research. Its fun when you can pass out of classes to simplify your course load (self study).
Pretty well-written article. Interesting analysis.
Hold on. Has he never heard of ustream.tv?
Except it seems obvious we're seeing at least some of those peripheral jobs included in the layoff announcements.
Technical pdfs on normal sized readers is pointless (I have one, I've tried it).

First you need a much larger screen. An A4 page at 5 inches is unreadable whereas a quarter size (landscape) is too little text between redraws.

Even if you get an iliad or some larger screened device PDFs are still a bad match. Thats because again the screen redraw. Reading a technical PDF isn't the same as reading a novel, you (or at least I) skip around at lot, skip code sections or want to go back.

Basically e-ink displays until they get the redraw below the perceptible level have only one acceptable use. Reading all the text sequentially where there's no formatting to get in the way of reflowing and resizing the text.
Read wickedfire.com. You'll learn everything you need from the advertiser perspective and the affiliate perspective.
Hello World Executable Sizes in 18 Languages
Not in my experience (don't ask). Unless he personally guaranteed the card, in which case, well, it's pretty obvious.

Part of the benefit of incorporation is the separation between personal and corporate liabilities. But, if you use a personal card for corporate stuff (even if you ONLY used it for corporate expenses) you are personally liable because it's YOUR card, not the companies.
From what I've read, you're apparently supposed to ask "do you have a security clearance" and "are you eligible to get a security clearance" -- i.e., ask the specific question you need answered rather than asking a more general question from which you can infer what you want to know.
California law has a pretty good balance. If it's related to the job, it's the company's. If you use the company's resources (hardware, software, customer list, employees, ideas) it's the company's. Otherwise, if it is on your own time, with your own resources, and unrelated to your job, then it's yours.
Every reader but the Kindle supports PDF and most do it better than the Foxit while actually existing.

Look at the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdPLe8TU57U he puts it into landscape mode (the only semi-readable mode on small screened readers) and it doesn't fit to width or even centre.
"For the love of FSM, why would anyone knock off Vista's UI?"

Maybe users like it?
Actually, no, it does explain the ubiquity of it. The extremely low price of HFCS is a result of government subsidies, and food manufacturers find an easy way to increase the flavor impact of their product by just loading up on sweetness instead of using more expensive other flavoring agents.

We still have only ourselves to blame though. Feeding little babies french fries, coca cola, and hamburgers is a sure way to destroy their sense of taste.
Except that it is your job to evangelize Microsoft products to us, and it's pretty clear that this thread is part of that. If you really are "new to the MSFT stack", what the fuck have you done at your job for the last year?

I've dealt with a Microsoft "evangelist" guy before in academia, promoting their "Shared Source" initiatives trying to convince professors to teach NT internals in OS courses. At least he was straightforward with his trolling, and entertainingly churlish.

Your whole deal just seems sort of pathetic. You don't have a clue about JS, CSS, or SQL? You've been paid to promote a "stack" for a year and you just tried it out for the first time a week ago and are posting about it in multiple places on the web?

You're ("pulling some marketing bullshit" ∪ "an idiot").
How did you get your startup's idea? (JoS forum)
Why Good Boards Matter
Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web Typography
There are a ton of chinese live tv p2p networks ( tvkoo, ppstream, sopcast ), in theory they could stream the kind of numbers that Cuban is talking about.
So basically in korea the major source of income is professional gamers? Ill dig that.

Did they realize that a person with say 2 hrs time every day for 3 months and 20 dollars to buy the game + some form reading time can figure this out on their own? Shit I just described every college course.
You understood my point :) But gmail vastly outnumbers docs and reader in both security and scale.

Thousands of emails and contacts with personal information. Docs and Reader doesn't need to store the contacts or emails of the user. Docs stores data and reader stores stores.

You can understand the security complications.
Sorry. I typed it all out quickly, I kind of in a rush to get back to some coding.

I also called it 'Google Gears' and not it is only called 'Gears'

I am not really one to follow or believe in grammar for a simple link though, but I will say that many errors in a single line might be a bit over the top.
It's $1m+ in America now, if you're lucky enough to find a spot where you can even open one. There are so many of them that the geographic restrictions make that hard. They're also a lot pickier about who they'll let open one than they used to be.
I don't work in DPE (Developer & Platform Evangelism). I work in product management (marketing). I have decent tech skills, but over the last year, my group was focused on launching our Azure Services Platform. The bulk of that work was about positioning, partners, brand, pricing, features, etc. Not a ton of time for actually using the platform. A new year resolution was that I wanted to spend my free hcaking time in ASP.NET. It's all up on my blog, out in the open. I'm not trying to hide anything from anyone, and I apologize againg to the community if it came across that way.
These are kit homes. They have to be assembled on a prepared site by a contractor. The kit prices seem reasonable - only about $30-40 per square foot - but the all-in costs are far higher. Here is the information from the FAQ at Romero's website: http://www.rocioromero.com/LVSeries/faqs.htm

On average the home costs $120 sq/ft to build. This includes kit costs, shipping, foundation, and finish costs. This price does not include the cost of land. In the Mid West it can be built between $100-120 sq/ft and in California as well as certain select areas on the East Coast have higher sq. ft. labor costs, the average is between $120-195 sq ft.

The kits do not come with insulation. They have insulatable space in the walls that can be filled with fiberglass batts or spray-on icynene foam.
I don't code at night for coding's sake. I code at night to make users happy (or at least happier).

Does that still count?
Zack and Miri make a porno

Seriously, they're broke, they bootstrap and they make the porn, and it's really entertaining.
I can actually imagine this being legit. It is after all, an in depth examination of a complex system. Vocational relevance was never the goal anyway.

Edit: " Is it more advantageous to attack in a line or to envelop your opponent’s army? Prove your point using flux calculations. "

Tis legit.
tstream torrents from EZTV: http://trial.p2p-next.org/
Ah, I see, you seriously meant that as a question, not a comment. Sorry.

I think I'd have to defer to a scientific study. I tend to doubt it, though; just as "typing speed" is rarely the coding impediment, I doubt "screen quality" is very much anymore. (Though it sure was in the bad old 640x480 days...)
Is HN open source? I never thought about that...
The McDonald's site has some ballpark franching-cost figures for the U.S.: http://www.mcdonalds.com/corp/franchise/purchasingYourFranch...

The costs associated with new restaurants are as follows:

Initial Costs

$45,000 Initial Fee paid to McDonald's

Equipment and Pre-Opening Costs

Typically these costs range from $905,200 to $1,746,000. [...] The new Owner/Operators must pay forty percent (40%) cash of the total costs of a new restaurant, and may finance the remainder from traditional sources.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_do_McDonalds_franchise_ow...

The average McDonalds franchise owner will make $240,000 per year for each restaurant owned. The average McDonalds restaurant will have sales of 1.9 million per year.
Homework is play two games of Starcraft a week and submit replays. I wonder how much extra credit I can get...
I think when he says "by sending people to competitors sites." he's suggesting that he already gets referral fees (why else would he send them?). I think watching the referral fees roll in makes him think - "these people are willing to pay x to get my customers, therefore they must be making y >> x." He may be wrong.
"(and doesn't complete freak out investors [and their lawyers doing due diligence])" is the key here.

I totally get where you're coming from in trying to be reasonable with your new hires. Unfortunately, everything-you-do-belongs-to-us is pretty much the standard for IP ownership in employment contracts. Whether you enforce it is a different matter, and this is where your "goodwill" towards your employees will come into play.

jwilliams is correct though, if a guy comes to you with a specific project that he's working on, perhaps you can have a specific carveout -- but even that's a little awkward (may be hard to define the scope of that side project).

At the end of the day, as a company you'll want to be making the call of whether IP created by an employee should be considered company property, and not the other way around. So it might be wise to be a little selfish up front and have a blanket clause.

Just my two cents.
Endow the News
Google Apps Botches Domain Renewals, Websites Go Dark
What's the most successful (i.e. is making money) P2P company?
This must be a recent development, because I made extensive use of this trick (1-2 years ago?). Specifically, the $10 walmart ATT go phones worked fine with the contract (3G) SIMs.
This is a variation of a theme that seems to pop up regularly here and I’m always surprised that smart people can buy into such a simplistic idea.

The problem here is this theory completely dismisses the need for diversity in a company. In my experience the very worst performing companies are ones that are packed with clones of their founder. Because no matter how gifted their founder might be he can’t know/do everything. So in the end companies with people who are identical end up with a very limited set of skills.

Building a company is like building a baseball team. Just as your first baseman is going to have a completely different set of skills than your outfielder a programming lead (who should be obsessive) is going to have a completely different set of skills than a marketing manager (a job that generally benefits from someone who goes out a parties at night).