skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A brief bullet-point list of the ones you can talk about (both those you have and haven't written up already) which have been statistically validated at YC sounds overwhelmingly valuable.

Including the Ns would be even more overwhelmingly valuable. I.e. I can calculate a Bayesian likelihood ratio and get some idea of the confidence from e.g.:

* Founder has green hair: Successes 10/80 Failures 40/122

However I would much rather have the brief bullet-point list than not have the bullet point list with lovely numbers attached.
I don't think the transparent reality would work. For thousands of years people are known to gather in the back of the woods to hatch plans that must be kept secret before the execution. That's just how people want to deal with a part of the things in their lives.

The secret might be a terrorist plan, a plan to open a new business, a plan to rob a neighbouring village or a plan to arrange a surprise birthday party. You never know, but people like their privacy. Even before the internet and telephone people could talk to other people to arrange things to come, while in the outside it just looked like the folks are walking around the town.

A transparent government and officials would be nice but I think that would never happen either. There are always matters that must be processed with confidentiality in the first stages, or the system just wouldn't work. Consider the old-fashioned hard-boiled journalism: people will talk if they can remain anonymous and confidential, and by talking they can prevent something worse from happening.

Limiting the secrecy of government/public sector affairs to a certain, absolute period of time might work, though. Things should be public as soon as they're finished.

I think that equal anonymity and confidentiality is better than the current world where most people are not anonymous and the powers to be can snoop on the rest and yet retain their own confidentiality in their actions.
Even the strongest encryption is only as strong as the will of the person who knows the key. And what if the state decides to enforce controls over access to encryption algorithms and software? What if it's a crime to use unbreakable encryption?

The only defence against tyranny is the effort of a sufficient number of people, with the will and means to resist, choose to actively support freedom and dismantle tyranny. Specifically, people in power: politicians, judges, lawyers, and police. If the people who run the state, and exert force in its name, prefer tyranny, then tyranny is what we'll get. And that's exactly what happens when those who oppose tyranny abandon the state those who support it.
How is that a minor detail? The first electronic computer was built in 1946. Apple hasn't even existed for half of the time electronic computers have existed on Earth.

Seriously folks, this is some dumb, dumb stuff. Even the senator who gave the infamous "tubes" speech probably knew that the Apple didn't invent computers.
Eye Tracking CSS-Tricks.com
Cead uair ríomh gur chonaic mé comhlacht mhór ag usaid Gaeilge i fógra.
Online Javascript quiz for position at AdRise (San Francisco)
Creational Design Patterns in Cocoa Touch Framework
I would love to see Duracell or Energizer jump into the competition given that their business may have significant impact once these devices are out. I know I, for one, will throw away battery powered peripherals.
btguard.com is pretty much this. But you need to pay for it, because getting decent speed requires some servers.
If you're looking for a steady income for a while, why not join a big company or research lab where that's guaranteed?
Sorry that's what I meant to say, Verdana for paragraphs, Arial for headers.
because life in a startup is and will always be more fun.
That and they probably just got a huge grant for putting their first translation in Irish...

But yes, the tax laws in Ireland are incredibly generous, if you're a corporation. I say this as a person just falling into the top tax bracket which means that while most of my wages are taxed at 21% or so (closer to 25%), any bonuses or future wage increases will be taxed at over 50% (once all the levies etc. have been counted in). And there's also the awareness that a significant percentage of that goes towards repaying bondholders in Anglo Irish bank or towards public services who refuse to restructure or update 50 year old work practices. (sorry, rant over)

There is also the fact that it's an English speaking country with a pool of relatively highly educated employees who are used to dealing with American businesses. Wages are relatively low compared to the US or England (well, London anyway) and you can have the best and brightest of Europe can relocate with no visa issues (once you can convince them to relocate to a rainy island in the North Atlantic)
The day after fundraising
"being a pretentious asshole" is often confused with being smart in the financial industry. hence the disconnect.
Remote 0day Exploit for Tectia SSH Server released - Hacker News
My favorite PG essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html

In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because *after a while determination starts to look like talent*.
That was a great article. I wish I understood more of the math. It is making me question my attitude towards Taleb and his work, which has been pretty fawning up until now.
In my previous job I asked my dev lead from Mumbai to help me with interviewing candidates to join us on a project here in California. On a conference call with a female interviewee, he asked if she was married. He hadn't asked the previous two candidates (males) that we'd interviewed.

After the call I told him that was illegal here and he can't ask that question in an interview. He was shocked. He said Indian women are expected to devote time to their families once they are married. Single women have much more time to devote to the project and would be much better for our team.

I've known that women have been discriminated in this way for a long time, but I had never encountered it personally until then.
Have you seen our Datacenter Infrastructure (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc)? have you seen our climate (mostly cold, perfect for said datacenters)? We have an educated workforce, are close to mainland Europe, and who doesn't want to work in the home of the Black Stuff (Guinness). Tax could be an incentive, but think of the rest we have also.
[Also not the OP]
One of the ways you can see this in action is with re-targeting. If you visit somewhere like SEOMOZ or www.shoesofprey.com (with cookies enabled) you will start seeing advertisements for them pop up everywhere. It feels strange (especially since I am a long way from teh target market for something like Shoes of Prey -- checking them out as an interesting Australian startup does not mean that I want to buy a custom-built pair of high heels)
B'fhéidir go fuair siad mórchuid aireagaid lena chuir isteach ann? Street-cred mar yea.
They are up to 10 billion msgs a day now.

So incredibly crazy- More than 100k messages a second.
Maybe they're counting country codes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_country_calling_codes has 275 in their complete listing; but then, quite a few aren't "countries"
I'm pretty sure it was just the SF city payroll tax exemption. Twitter had a credible threat to move to Brisbane, so SF basically had to give them the exemption. Then, this year, SF voted to replace the payroll tax with a gross receipts tax (which is still bad, and worse for certain businesses).
Don't forget we all speak native English.
But memory LCDs ("e-paper") still have 15 uW quiescent power use, whereas the case is marketed as "always on" (zero quiescent power). So, no.
A native English speaking work force at lower salaries than in the UK helps too :-)
Hackers talk iOS 6 jailbreak in HITB panel discussion
Symbian, BeOS(Haiku), z/OS, MacOS X device drivers, Windows COM infrastructure and user space drivers are all written in C++.

Additionally Microsoft is now replacing parts of the Windows C codebase to C++, as mentioned at the latest Build 2012 conference.
> One big TIFF is an insane way to package icons for the web.

Not really. You almost always would need to resize or somewhat edit them anyway. And if you care about performance, you would want them in a sprite sheet, so you need to recombine them.

Having them in a single document is much more convenient than having a few hundred open documents in photoshop.

That is relevant for the web. Really though, I think fonts are the way to go for web icons. Crisp at any resolution and CSS style-able. Bitmap icons feel a bit 2008.
Apple iPhone Skins Custom Design
Should be vector.
> Uber is using unapproved and therefore possibly fraudulent measuring devices

Just wanted to jump on this. Black cars in NYC are not metered, they literally make up random prices. Protip to visitors: negotiate before the trip, not after!

Anyway, Uber couldn't possibly make this situation worse.
Why anywhere else? Ireland si the "India of Europe" (English fluency, low salaries, decent education) and it has the best tax arrangements among similar countries.

Microsoft, Facebook, IBM and the likes, they all basically serve the EU market from Dublin, and it's been like that for 20 years -- the "Celtic Tiger" phenomenon was based on this sort of activity: combining EU membership, low taxes, low salaries and cultural affinities to lure multinationals' HQs. Other EU members tolerated this because, when it started, Ireland was dirt poor. When the bubble burst, there was a lot of schadenfreude sweeping the continent...
My friends here in India use it because its free the first year. Almost everyone I know is on Whatsapp. But the moment they have to pay, everyone will switch. I know of nobody in person (who own the latest pretty expensive smartphones, except iphones which are not big in India) to have "ever paid for any" app.

Its not about being stingy, but more of a mentality where we know a hack/solution/pirated version/alternative will come around. It always does.
As a long time user who profited from their first free download promotion, I have been wondering how the hell whatsapp can remain profitable for many years to come. Moving to .99 cents/year sounds great, but expect a massive user exodus.

Many users out there are stingy as hell. I have actually heard people argue that they don't want an iPhone because you have to pay for whatsapp...

Let's hope that their dominance of the market is enough to incentivize users to pay forever. Oh, and that they do not actually sell out to Facebook.
Google pays about 1% tax, due to the tax loopholes (Dutch Sandwich and Double Irish, as noted elsewhere in the thread).
They certainly have the profit margins to fit it.

Now, if we're talking about further boosting their prices to maintain the same margins...
missing for me; seems to be http://phys.org/news/2012-12-goodbye-fluorescent-bulbs-techn...
In many uses, it's reasonable to consider a non-sovereign self-governing territory a country. Greenland is a country, Anguilla, Sint Maarten, Aruba, etc. are countries, etc., for the purposes of "Hi. What country do you live in?" informally.
When will these kids learn that Language != Implementation.

Back in the old days we used to say "I have a compiler/interpreter for language X", not state that "Language X is compiled/interpreted".

Slowly I am starting to think it should be compulsory to understand compiler design, before writing any blog entry about programming languages.
Can Microsoft Convince You to Use Internet Explorer?
Funnily enough, there's probably more native Chinese speakers in Ireland than there are native Irish speakers!
How do you measure the is-ness of the state? By it's budgetary expenditures? Many existent states (like Canada) have relatively small military budgets. For them, wielding or even threatening to wield violence is not their primary reason for being. Their primary reason for being is to ensure the health and welfare of their citizens, and they do so not by threat of violence, but by collection and distribution of taxes and passing of laws.

The vast majority of people in most democratic societies do not require the threat of arrest and imprisonment to follow the majority of laws. Assuredly there are minor disagreements about which the validity of certain laws, and many people cheat a little here and there. But when the majority of citizens believe that the majority of the law, and the state which imposes it, is unjust, you have an authoritarian government, and a revolution is inevitable.

It might also be worth noting that even if, based on budgetary spending, the US government is primarily an institution of the force and its display, most of that is happening outside of US soil. Most of it, in fact, is deployed in protecting sea lanes for the benefit of shipping and the people who rely on it: namely, everyone on Earth. I'm not American, and I don't like everything about America, but I'm damn grateful for the fact that the American government is funding the security of the machinery which keeps food and goods flowing around the world, since a lot of people where I live (Canada) would have difficulty surviving the Winter (and maybe even in Summer) without it.

To what extent global commerce and trade are just or unjust is another question, but I suggest it can be addressed on a case-by-case basis, and that the vast majority is far more beneficial than detrimental to everyone involved.
No. You can live your whole life without having an episode if you don't cause one. Weed seems to be a facilitator. On the psychiatric ward (specialized on schizophrenia) most people were smoking weed (some probably to alleviate symptoms).

Some illnesses are overdiagnosed some are severely underdiagnosed.
Control Trac Ticket with your Git commits
I'd say it's a best time because then the poor blokes finally have some money to pay you properly. Also it's not their own money so they may feel generous.

Unless you are working for startups only for the hope of hitting a jackpot. Then the OP is probably right.
So I'm enjoying my blank page because for some reason this free and open internet is not accessible and requires several scripts to display simple html.

Posting about a free and open internet on a website which is paid for by ads and with closed content is kinda ironic but it makes a strong point about google's credibility.

Make no mistake, they're defending their business model and profit which happens to be based on internet being sort of free and kinda open.
IE10 grabs 0.51% market share, Firefox passes 20% again
As a 25yo w/out a TV, this is the first I've heard of it as well.

Given the likelihood of similarly positioned friends on my social networks, I shared the Economist article here ( http://www.economist.com/news/21567340-governments-squabble-... ) as a set up for the link to the petition, should people agree w/ Google's efforts.
Minnesota (low on this list) implemented something like this, where when an area gets a particularly large tax windfall like from a corporate campus, a portion of that goes into a general fund. So if a location wants to give away some portion of tax revenue in order to lure a company from somewhere else in the state, it's not a big win for anyone. I think it's worked...? I don't know what other states do.
Gcc,gnome,openoffice - how not to do something.

FreeBSD,llvm,trac,vim - how to use sound engineering.
The future of Ubuntu revealed
Haha, I just checked and only 2.9% of the Irish population speaks Irish natively. That's pretty crazy.
I generally agree with you that there is no technological solution to these issues, not on a broad scale at least. Educating everyone about using encryption isn't going to fly because as soon as it becomes effective, they will legislate against it.

But I wonder what shape any political activism could have. Maybe this cryptography movement should be seen as just that, a way to force a political debate and make any political activism relevant.
Scammers Target Chrome Users With Fake Update Page
Resonant wireless power transfer has the (often undesirable) effect of de-tuning when you have multiple resonant loads in range. In short, the "resonant peak" dis-associates into two (or more) peaks, which ruins efficiency. Not to mention the effects of material composition (metal => bad).

To date, the only proposed approach to this problem is time division multiplexing (TDM) on each device and/or adaptive frequency tuning at the transmitter (which has regulatory issues). AFAIK, this is the same problem plaguing the other resonant wireless power transfer companies (eg. Witricity).

[I played around with a bit of this stuff during grad school. Specifically, I used non-resonant magnetic coupling to wirelessly power a swarm of robots: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2008/10/07/wirelessly-powering-sw... ]
I would never have thought canvas performance would be good enough for this.
Netflix has Competition: Redbox Instant by Verizon Could Launch Yet This Year
I could be wrong, but it seems it's only recently that the idea of a business that goes from zero to hero in six months has been taken seriously.
I'd rather use the back and sides as a "smart" chording-keyboard -- make the entire surface pressure sensitive with a decent enough resolution to map each finger and then automagically assign the right key to each finger based on the location and total number of all detected fingers.
> The problem with the "sufficiently smart compiler" argument, as always, is that the compiler may have a lot of optimizations, but it's still not an artificial intelligence. It can't tell that what you are trying to do with your set of operations is actually perform CRC, and there is hardware support for that.

This might be a special case, as you're taking advantage of a specific use case instruction, which will fail in portable code anyway.

I have seen Assembly programmers put to shame in modern processors by C and C++ developers, just by making use of better data structures, algorithms and a special mix of compiler flags.

Anyway thanks for the follow up, very interesting.
BaconReader is a Tasty Reddit Client for Android
It's not clear to me if Texas is taking anyone else's money – from what I can tell some Texans (and Texan companies) have to pay higher taxes because other Texas companies are receiving these tax benefits.
As a guy with hands on e-ink experience I have to point out that the actual product will prove to be extremely underwhelming.

Please note that this video is a montage and that there is absolutely no way this kind of performance could be achieved in present day. Also their plans for future (and indeed promises) rests solely on vapourware (think somebody promising a sick mod for Duke Nukem Forever in 2003).

These guys will learn the hard way that setting expectations too high can backfire massively.

To me the disconnect between "demoed" product and actual capabilities of technology are in the same ballpark as enterprise software sales.
Hey Eoin, couple of quick question for you if you don't mind. I know you're probably not a tax lawyer, but what's the personal capital gains situation like over there?

Also, just wondering what "morale" (for lack of a better word) is like now, given all the bailouts, budget crises, and even church scandals. All you hear about Ireland in the US media these days seems to be doom and gloom.

Is there a chance, given the public's hostile reaction to the bank bailouts and economic crisis, that Ireland could tack left and start rolling back its advantageous tax rates?

Thanks in advance.
Important Warning For Anyone Using Airbnb
Damn, sounds like I should have founded my company there instead.
Real-Time Business Intelligence
Internet needs “no international regulations”: Google
Joining a company right before it closes a series A is much better than joining the same company right after, but what about joining a similar company that is trying to raise a series A but never manages to? As risks suddenly drop, so does reward - unsurprising. They may be incommensurate, but they're at least moving in the right direction.
It makes sense. There's barely any incentive to speak Irish, apart from Nationalism (and we've had far too much of that IMO).
You're mixing your analogies. The correct analogy would be (roughly)

"I guess most people would be pissed they spent $20,000 on a new car and were unable to easily service it themselves".

And my answer to that is no, most people wouldn't be pissed. They would take it into a repair shop that can handle it.
Interesting interview. Although Mr. Hori seems optimistic about the younger generations in Japan (and I would like to agree with him), I still think that the "New Japan" he describes is much, much smaller than he makes it out to be. Overall though, I have seen a lot of positive progress in the entrepreneurial community in Japan over the past couple of years, especially with regards to incubators/accelerators gaining more traction.
Doesn't change the fact that the ship was used in offensive wars against other countries, ffs. Surely you can't deny that. And that's what this is all about. This "but blabla, sword can parry, blabla"... jesus...
The most fitting way to describe these entrepreneurs would be modern day ronins.
"Is there a chance, given the public's hostile reaction to the bank bailouts and economic crisis, that Ireland could tack left and start rolling back its advantageous tax rates?"

It won't be the public's hostile reaction that will raise Irish taxes, but EU pressure.
How One Guy Gamified His Google Interview And Won The Job
Food I like that's on the way to where I'm going.

Example: I'm in San Francisco and am driving back to home to the peninsula and I want to have dinner on the way. I'm out of my area of knowledge, and there are probably tons of good restaurants that I'd like that are right on my way, but it takes too long to find them. Prohibitively long, in fact, because usually I just drive back home and eat somewhere near my house rather than hop back and forth between Yelp and the map on my phone for fifteen minutes.

Another example: I'm on a driving trip and I want to eat at one of the restaurant chains I like that's near the interstate. I'd happily wait 90 minutes if I could eat at a place I like, but I don't have any way of knowing whether something is coming. And searching for all the acceptable restaurants in all the upcoming towns isn't really reasonable.
New lighting technology won't flicker, shatter or burn out
This article really mirrors my own experience in dealing with startups in Japan -- especially those outside of the Tokyo bubble. There's still this pervasive idea that if you're not a member of some multi-corporation conglomeration like Toyota or Sony, that you're not doing "real" business.

Probably the quote from the article that hit home the hardest for me was this one:

> Many people told me that, in Japan, failures are punished. They also told me that, if you start and fail, you will be personally bankrupt.

This is something I've been told many, many times throughout my professional career in Japan. And it's obviously not true -- harder than in the US, for sure -- but definitely not impossible. I see new companies springing up all the time in Japan, and not just what we would think of as startups, but also Entrepreneurial ventures in industries such as manufacturing, finance and trade.

Equally refreshing is this view of the old and new Japan coming from a Japanese person. I hear stuff about the new Japanese culture all the time from ExPats in the startup community, but normally this new vs old is the elephant in the room when the Japanese talk about the future of Japanese business (at least in my experience).

I still remember when SMAP went to GREE's headquarters and did an interview with Tanaka a few years ago -- "How can you be head of a huge company, you're younger than me!"

PS - Other favorite quote from a show about up and coming CEOs in Japan: "How can people be making that much money on the INTERNET?!?!"