skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think in half a century we won't have the backwards investment funding model in industries where units are extremely cheap but R&D id expensive. Instead you would have something akin to crowdfunding with guarantees and insurance against failed investments by those that want the end product, so the motive is not profit, but end product. That people who want a thing fund the creation of the thing, instead of people who want money funding an expensive up front thing that is then unnaturally restricted with patents and copyright to try to profit off the unit sales, when in many cases (pharma) they are near free, or in the case of software (past the first copy being distributed) are absolutely free (if those that have the software willingly share it).
Although helpful for US lawsuits, the article is about Canadian law so none of this would apply.
That's the headline number from the statement of claim, not how much they're entitled to. You can write whatever number you want in a statement of claim, and they did!
Not sure if this is legal (but someone sitting there once told me about it, so I'm sure plenty of people use it) - just pick a random room number.

Also, I wouldn't say that $4 for coffee that good is exorbitant. To each their own I suppose.
You don't need a prototype. Absolutely not. But is there an advantage to raising money before you have a prototype?

I'd say no, although it may vary case by case. Instead of focussing and building your product, now you have to build your product AND make sure your investors are pleased.

Also think about the valuation. Imagine going to investors saying "we built our product, we even have some customers who've given us some positive feedback and constructive criticism. We found that X meets our customers needs but we need to work on Y and Z."

I'd imagine the valuation would be higher and less speculative. I'd also imagine this situation to be more advantageous, simply by giving you more confidence when raising money.
Thanks for the feedback. I will checkout this link, it looks like there is a lot of interesting resources.

Regarding the first part of your comment: I don't think that is the case. We don't usually add backend code without UI (I don't have a measurement for this unfortunately). Our bug tracker or tracking method has not changed since we first installed Trac in 2007.

TDD definitely adds more development time (especially in the beginning where you have to learn the practice and put test frameworks in place). However, I think it's good because I see it as a good investment: you spend time upfront writing test instead of spending more time afterwards troubleshooting broken software. Even better, the test suite can catch regressions long after a feature has been implemented, so you get even more value then. That really helps as a development team grows.
Linux Core Concepts - Funtoo Linux
I guess the thing that people don't like about it is the part where you insult people you don't know for selfish reasons? I mean maybe that's part of it?
A broker-dealer (B-D) is a person authorised to trade securities on its own account (dealer capacity) or on behalf of fiduciaries (broker capacity).

Clearing refers to everything that takes a trade from transaction, e.g. a voice confirmation over the phone, to settlement, i.e. securities and cash having changed hands. Clearing involves such processes as making sure you (and your customers) remain within margin constraints, mailing tax documents, dealing with counter-parties messing up and sending you wrong securities/amounts of cash or forgetting to send you anything at all (a failed trade), etc.

A self-clearing B-D, instead of outsourcing this function to a bank's "prime brokerage" function or a dedicated clearing outsourcing firm, has its own operations department that takes care of these functions.
I'm sure they don't, but finance people are actually pretty unique creatures in my limited experience. Talk to someone working in criminal justice, for example, and they'll happily own up to all the ways their work creates human misery and they'll probably float some interesting ideas about how the system is broken.

Then go out and try to find a banker, trader or mortgage person and try to get them to accept some actual blame for the highly-leveraged, taxpayer subsidized horror their profession periodically unleashes on the world. It's surprisingly difficult to do, given the obviousness of the problems.
Andrey,

I'm in the same boat - I'm trying to work on a startup but I need advice and motivation from peers who I can talk to in an environment which isn't impersonal.

I have to agree that an IRC channel would be awesome (#startups simply doesn't work for me).

I've jumped into the "Solo Startup Doers" event you created.

P.S. I do know of your app.
One more location if you want to work alone is at Fedex kinko's particularly late nights. There are some Kinkos locations that are open 24 hours.

Very handy if you want to just stay somewhere warm and work in middle of night.
What annoys me: the expensive to replace batteries on iOS devices. My wife and I have new Samsung Galaxy III S phones and I was giving her a little lecture on recharging strategies for maximizing battery life (same lecture as for our iPads, BTW). Then I checked out how incredibly cheap Samsung replacement batteries are on Amazon. Husband fail, but recovery :-)

So, I asked her to be careful of her iPad recharging strategy, but recharge the III S at will. BTW, both devices seem to have about 10 hours of active use time between charges. Also with the III S's higher resolution screen I have started using it for watching Netflix, TED talks, etc., etc., so the battery life of my iPad may not be an issue.
I am going to have to agree with Nicole060 here.
I recently bought one of the new Macbook Pros for work - non retina, 4GB RAM.

It became as slow as hell. I am a developer.. I need at least one VM with IE open, I need to have Chrome open, photoshop open, xcode, etc. Luckily I was able to upgrade it with 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM, and it's now a pleasure to work with.

Apple only offers an 8GB increase on their online store at 100$ for my macbook pro.. and at a 100$ increase.. In my opinion, 8GB should be standard.

I love my Macbook, wouldn't give it up, I like using OSX, but I really do believe that Apple tends to rip us off when it comes to specs. And FYI, I can't imagine using OSX with 2GB.. my mac mini had 2 GB of RAM and it ran like a pig until I got 4GB of RAM into it.

We all know Apple has outrageous margins on their products.. fine, I am not against them making money. However, I do wish they invested more into their products.
The cynical answer is not always the right answer. You should hear the CAFC judges speak. They genuinely think that the patent system is good for innovation. Most engineers I know, outside the software bubble, feel the same way. They think in terms of patents regulating unfair business practices in the competition between Dow Chemical and DuPont or Lockheed and Raytheon. They think it's a Bad Thing (TM) if they work on a new chemical for 10 years, getting it through expensive and time-consuming testing and regulatory approval, only to have a competitor be able to copy it the minute they release a successful product.

They don't necessarily have insight into the dynamics of how patents function in the software space, but that doesn't mean their actions are just a cynical money-grab.
Web servers would have to be retrofitted to sign, distribute, and authenticate client certificates, so there is O(apps) work to be done. For symmetric tokens, each app would just have to store the token in the user DB, and then tell the client to hold it in local storage, which is probably less work for the server admin, and also doesn't require browser support.
Thanks. I hadn't seen that option yet. It is exactly what I want.
The lesser known but very nice alternative is SIBL: Which has nice workspace in its lower level reading room. This is more quiet like a university, and not like a hip/trendy etc. But they also have photocopy, print, and research materials if you should need some.

NYPL: Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL)

188 Madison Avenue @ 34th Street

(917) 275-6975
Thanks for the feedback. See my comment to roryokane above about the time spent on testing.

I agree with you about the practicality of TDD. For instance, recently, I was prototyping an upcoming feature involving a new library. The feature was quite different in terms of functionality (compared to the existing features). In this case, I did not use TDD as the prototyping was morphing (to use your words) quite a lot and I was trying to learn more about the library.
Why Hacking is Awesome
Ask HN: What are some ways of proving yourself to a startup?
I'm a college senior, business development/marketing/sales background with a couple NY based startups and I'll be relocating to the Bay Area in May. I have two favorite startups (both YC funded) that I am extremely intrigued by. These products/services get my heart pumping and I don't want to work for anybody else. I know I can help them grow (I've done it for much less interesting value propositions).

I told them both I'd work for low/no pay remotely to prove myself before I relocate. I had a Skype chat set-up for one (which I got blown off) and I gave my cell phone number to the other who hasn't since called me.

I'm thinking about doing this: what if I sell/market their product and show them I am capable? Send them a list of customers I found for them, it would be like free lead generation? One company is B2C so this would be a little bit more difficult. My biggest issue is I couldn't approach these prospects as working for the company since this would be unethical. But maybe I can work around it?

What do you think?
Mobile Playbook by Google
How much more would it have cost to put an extra 256MB in the original iPad? Apple has more money in the bank than they know what to do with; over $100B. It might be a better use of the money to give a little extra RAM to make their devices run better.
An 11-hour schoolday?
There is a huge assumption that capital markets are efficient, but considering the existence of things like bubbles I don't think that's peculiarly true.

Bubbles don't invalidate Efficient Market Hypothesis (which is, in any case, only known to be approximately true). EMH, roughly speaking, says that prices correspond to expected values of future values. That doesn't specify a timeframe (which is one of the problems with EMH; it's demonstrably false over very short time frames in which arbitrage occurs, and also over very long timeframes) but it's not incompatible with bubbles. Over the course of a bubble with a short timeframe (which is a reasonable assumption for something highly liquid) the expected value of the price is actually increasing (even if the very long term expected value is lower; in the long run, we are all dead).

Markets favor availability over consistency. You can trade at a price. That price might be a couple percent higher or lower tomorrow. That's called "volatility", and we model it as Brownian motion (although it's more fat-tailed than a normal distribution). The inconsistency exists because no one really knows what the true fair value of equity is, but the market can deliver a price that usually represents the expected value of the thing in the future. Markets don't do a perfect job of pricing these things, but no one has ever been able to do a better job.

The best argument for financiers as "the good guys" is that, from about 1950 to 2007, financial markets have become riskier and more volatile while the real economy has become less so. There's an argument to be made that these markets have taken risk out of the economy and transfered it into markets that can crash without wiping people out. There's also an argument to be made that the ongoing collapse of the middle class has something to do with "activist" investors (PEtards) and that this evil more than cancels out the good. Not going to form a strong opinion on that one.

Then there was 2008. That one got blamed on the quants, but it's actually people on the business side, especially the ones involved in real estate (and industry that has about as much integrity as Hitler's scrotum). Yes, finance has scumbags like every other industry, and the 2008 crash was horrible and showed how disgusting a lot of powerful people are willing to be.

I don't know what to believe. I'll say this, though: the people I meet in finance are much better than people at the higher levels of VC-istan. I've met $1-million-per-year traders who are really great people, while most startup founders and executives I've met are pretty goddamn slimy. (I'm sure counterexamples exist, but in my VC-istan experience, fundraising ability and decency are correlated at about -1.0.) VC-istan is, after all, funded by private equity guys rather than quants, so what the fuck else would one expect?
We stopped caring about notifications because spammy Facebook "games" poisoned the well, and now you want to do this to requests?
Did you try MapDroyd? How does it compare?
If you think Turbo Pascal was bad, you should have seen what we used before TP came out -- the UCSD Pascal p-system. Ugh... compared to that, Turbo Pascal was a pure delight to use.
>On average, these [violin] masters practiced in 90-minute spurts, three times a week

There must be a lot of context missing from this statistic, or it is simply untrue. The suggestion that one can master a classical instrument with only 4.5 hours of focused practice a week is absurd.

I've spent most of my life playing the Violin, alongside many different levels of professional musicians. Low- Mid-level professionals start at 3 hours a day of solo practice, not including group rehearsals. Most prodigies, those that go on to be soloists, are practicing 6-10 hours a day by their teen years. Without fail, the people that put in more effort, both in focus and in hours, are better players.

Maybe Pinkus Zuckerman or Itzahk Perlman only practice 4.5 hours a week these days, but they certainly didn't in their prime.
Symfony2 and Backbone are both great frameworks. Props to you for getting this up on HN!
This is going to become a really problem for developers. As people upgrade, they don't simply throw the old iPads away. Some sell them, but others give them to their parents. And older people will keep technology around for a long time. My mother has my old 1st generation Kindle, which happens to work fine, and probably will keep using it for many years to come. The same will happen to the iPad 1 (and 2, etc.). They won't notice, or care about maps or Siri, but they will notice if Facebook stops working.
Because it's not the "default" identity provider, it's the "fallback" identity provider.
They're trying to define a open standard which would end up with any number of identity providers. The goal is something that can bootstrap the system into usage.

As far as what to do about users? You can't fix the problem. Nothing is going to be 100% secure, and the flesh is always going to be the biggest weakness if the machine has been well designed.

If you really want conjecture on it, though, I would suggest you first ask "Is this something tied to a citizen's identity, or a online identity?", because most things that process fiat currency in any capacity will fall into the former, and should probably merit a recovery system outside of email.

I would argue, however, that anything falling into the latter and should be handled with email.
I'm not sure how it figured it out in my case. I turned on the service and a few days later, I noticed it would start alerting me my commute times in the morning and evening. I was looking up something on google maps and it had marked my work and home locations on the map. Kind of creepy, but I'm starting to like it. The way that it anticipates my needs is very helpful.
How old is your browser?
Show HN: PRLibs, madlibs to create press releases for startups
I learned Flask, Python, Uwsgi, and Nginx configuration in order to make this happen.

Oh and if you're feeling generous, you can buy them for $2 a pop:

https://prlibs.com/nocc
What about the 20 seconds it takes to replace a battery on my Samsung Galaxy III S?

That isn't being upgradable, but at least fixable. Same with putting in a chip before going to Europe, etc.
I learned Flask, Python, Uwsgi, and Nginx configuration in order to make this happen.

EDIT: Oh and NLTK, of course.

EDIT2: If you missed it, you can see all the posts here: http://prlibs.posterous.com/

Oh and if you're feeling generous, you can buy them for $2 a pop:

https://prlibs.com/nocc
> Justice is not decided based on aggregate statistics.

This is a total non-sequitor. He was talking about the mechanics of lawsuits, not "justice."
> I bike to work every day in Amsterdam, not a single bike lane on my route

Really? I don't visit Amsterdam that often, but the rest of NL really is full of bike lanes.

I agree with the GP post: in order to safely bike around without helmet, you need infrastructure that takes bikes into account. Also, traffic that expects bikes.

And maybe your particular work-route does not have bike lanes, but the road designs do take them into account, and any motorized vehicle expects to see bikes because they are ubiquitous.

For those who read Dutch, this wikipedia article talks about the bike infrastructure in the Netherlands as well as several other European countries: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fietsverkeer#Infrastructuur . Curiously, it doesn't mention Amsterdam being any exception to this, either (I'd swear seeing plenty of bike lanes there as well, but that could be projection as I expect to see them everywhere in Dutch cities).
A little help - Making Uncle Bob Happy
http://nwc.co/
So you're saying they just don't understand the software industry? I can believe that. I do see a lot of cynical money grabs though, so it's an easy thing to believe.
It's been long enough now that we should all be learning something. If its a "1st Gen" product or doesn't have an "S" on the product name, ignore it..
Ask HN: Why do HN users still obscure their e-mail addresses?
I've been noticing that just about everyone on HN uses some form of e-mail concealment (e.g. [myusername]@gmail.com), and I'm wondering why.

The fear of spam crawlers seems very 1997, especially if you're using a modern e-mail provider. I've had my e-mail address public and mailtod on multiple high-visibility sites for about 5 years now, and I can't remember the last spam e-mail I've gotten. Is this practice just a vestige of Internet-past, or is there some other reason I'm missing?
The article talks about the idea of the Federal Circuit "overruling" the Supreme Court by gradually chipping away at the principles behind SC precedent.

Interestingly, similar charges have been made of the DC Circuit with regard to the Supreme Court's national security jurisprudence, especially Boumediene v. Bush.[1] (The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has essentially become the US terrorism court — because among other things — they are the only court allowed to hear Guantanamo detainee appeals. But DC Circuit judges do hear normal cases as well.)

So it seems to me the problem with CAFC is not just in its "specialist" judges but also in allowing the law in one field to develop almost exclusively in one court. This also makes Supreme Court supervision much more difficult.

1.http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1838402
Perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems like what this post describes isn't so much "test driven development" as "testing". Rigor of the data analysis aside, unless I misread, it seems like a comparison between not testing at all, and testing (I didn't notice any specific mention of TDD methodologies).

Shouldn't the comparison be between full-on TDD (e.g. write tests first, etc etc) and 'old fashioned' testing (for lack of a better term)?
We whipped this together for a Startup Weekend fun. The articles are hilariously awful right now. Any tips for making sentences more coherent is welcome.
If you look at the track record, they treat the current generation Nexus very well, and older models less so. Forget about ICS, the Nexus One didn't get Gingerbread for over 4 months after it was released. It did, however, get Froyo almost instantly, just like the Galaxy Nexus recently got JB almost instantly.
No, please leave them incoherent.
Could we? Sure. But the thin end of the wedge -which is to have it presented in a way that lets legislators think they get an advantage out of it- has yet to be played correctly...mostly because the obvious threats to their established patterns is far more clear.
Ask: Should a startup take $50k worth of uncapped convertible note
What are the pros and cons of taking uncapped convertible note for a startup that has not taken any kind of funding
Seems like another in the line of "for some definition of startup (which we don't elucidate) this factoid (which depends on our definition) is true."

Comments like this : "But today, it is the very rare Internet software deal that has meaningful technology risk — other than scalability,"

Seem to sweep the whole patent/copyright risk under the table for example.

I get the whole 'invest in the team not the idea' mantra, but that depends on the team having a track record.
There's Sole Flounder, run by Maciej of Pinboard:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!forum/sole-flo...

Not much activity though.
I get the Safari crashes too. the App Store is the worst though, seems to crash every other time I use it.
As a kid in the 1990s, I rode my bike everywhere, always wore a helmet (kids I knew did), and here I am today. Of course, my helmet may have saved me from serious injury or death when I fell from my bike while on a hill and landed on my head, cracking my helmet in two. I walked my bike back home, hurting but basically okay, happy that I wasn't allowed on my bike without a helmet.

Anecdotes are just a sample size of one and essentially useless... unless the population you care about includes that one person.
[A]nswer [questions] where you can. - especially this. Most questions can be answered fairly readily with some research in the code. This is triply beneficial:

1. You learn a lot more about the code by directed research than by random or linear reading.

2. You will earn respect and a good reputation on the list, assuming you do good research.

3. When you are wrong, someone will correct you http://xkcd.com/386/ and both you and the original questioner will learn from that.

Ironically, I've found quite often a question will go unanswered for days, but when I post an answer it often stimulates others to respond with clarifications, expansions, and corrections that they otherwise would not have posted.
That is a cute talking point, but does it have much to do with reality? Not really.

In pick up artistry, the goal is to be and act like a natural. Sometimes there are a lot of silly hoops on the way and it does not work for everyone, but it does work in the end.
Anime and Sci-fi fan here. The guys behind Gundam definitely did their research.
Should a startup take $50k worth of uncapped convertible note?

Yes, assuming the terms are standard.
> a) Mandatory bike helmets mean you can't run a bike-share scheme because who wants to wear a much-used sweaty helmet? How can the people running the scheme sanitise them?

The idea being tossed around in Vancouver is to have a helmet rental station integrated with the bike station that will steam-sanitize the helmets. The bike share implementation date has already slipped a year from original plan of spring of 2012, so it'll be a couple more months until we can tell how well it'll work. What that'll do for cost of the program is also a question...
Those are some cool talking points, bro.

I am not sure they have much to do with reality though.