skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
brownies in #startups on freenode provided this link:

https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=2...

It's a Google map showing the areas, descriptions of price/affordability for locating a business and who else is in those spaces. Which, from a birds eye view is a great start.
I would have liked to see less usage of the word 'awesome' >_>
I think the only way forward is for some manufacturer to step up and design hardware that will run Linux, yet be competitive with the features of Surface.

We're only worrying about this entire issue because the mass market, presumably, will adopt Surface - and thus Microsofts standard lockout policies - and thus 'all the cheap hardware wont be available to us'.

But, there is absolutely nothing stopping a hardware manufacturer from stepping up and saying - well, here's a laptop that is just as nice, but no lockout. Companies like Always-Innovating (shudder) have attempted it in the past - sure, its not easy, but it may be easier than getting Surface cracked, or the US/EU/Chinese Governments to apply anti-monopoly legislation to Microsoft/et al.

I know, its expensive to get this done properly, but if there is an opportunity here, its in the Hardware Startup realm. It is fraught with danger and problem at all fronts, but then again .. people said that the raspberry-pi project wouldn't work. They said it about the Open Pandora. They said it about Always Innovating. It really is just a matter of pushing harder, persisting through the storms, and I believe the market is there.

In fact, OpenPandora2 could very well be the solution to this entire dilemna. The OP guys have had a rough time of it, but they're still in the ring .. if only someone like Valve or so on would get a bit more muscle behind them, we'd see the OpenPandora2 (or whatever) step into the ring and start competing just fine, methinks ..

EDIT: Take a look at this thing and tell me its not a few small hardware-revisions away from being an ideal Surface competitor: http://www.openpandora.org/ It may well be 5 years behind the tech curve, but the damn thing works so well, and yet was created by VOLUNTEERS and PIONEERS who, indeed, have emerged from the Linux/OpenSource eco-sphere, under the radar of the mainstream to start actually delivering. I know, the numbers aren't there (they haven't hit 5000 users yet), but just imagine what it could be if a little more muscle were put behind this project from someone like Valve ..
Unitask tools of the Alton Brown stripe are leaf nodes, not pipe nodes. They're roach motels, not highways. You check in, you don't check out. Design is typically monolithic, not atomic.

The Unix philosophy is for small, atomic, pipeable utilities that do a single task (more properly, subtask) in conjunction with other tools.

There are exceptions. including, say, web browsers. But where a browser is one level of monolithic app, it's generalized to that particular information purpose. A site-dedicated application is worlds worse.
Really now. He doesn't blame "the Chinese" as you would have us believe; he blames one particular Chinese.
Yeah, I saw that line and didn't know whether that was a connection or not (that's why I used some weasel words to hedge).

Looking at it more closely, it does look like a connection, but I think it is a fairly minor one. The first Mac OS X Server was still pretty close to NeXTStep/Rhapsody.

The bigger changes came later with Mac OS X, which was a major rewrite.
From a one-time tourist to SF (I can't help you with the SV / job stuff, sorry)
:
- Don't shop/eat out anywhere close to the cable car lines. The prices are just through the roof

- use Yelp.com to find good/affordable places to eat. Do your baseline shopping at Walmart.

- We didn't need a rental car for sightseeing. IMHO most of the attractions in SF are within walking distance. This probably won't apply to your situation.
"I don't see the win in a decision like this. It's a lose lose situation that could be a win win."

Well, they want the alternatives to their product to be difficult to install so people remain in the Windows world or MS ecosystem.

When there is no alternative, there is a monopoly and you could raise your profits as much as you want, they will pay, econ 101.

Microsoft had been reaping a 90% and 95% margin from their Windows and MS Office products just because of their monopoly, and +30% in their global business(after spending billions on "me too" projects like bing, zune, winmo, lumia or xbox, witch lost billions before getting profitable).
If you specify width and height explicitly, certain browsers will have issues resizing them (if you set max-width: 100%, Chrome will squish a larger image horizontally but leave the height as it was, IE will scale it proportionally).
JavaScript command line tooling
Actually, the milestone you have to meet every 12-18 months, in 500's case, is raising a new fund. Given their speed of investment and quantity, this is an incredibly herculean task. Definitely not easy, and very easy to fail - the failure mode here, of course, being not raising another fund. Sure, the first fund might do well, but 10 years later 500 will have failed as a VC if it has only raised one fund.
My initial reaction was essentially the same (give or take a distro). The lockdown is really a shame, since thus far this is the most attractive tablet I've seen, especially with the keyboard.

I'm pretty sure someone will be able to jailbreak it, though it might take some time. I think the whole secure-boot thing will work out somehow in the future. I'm not prepared to have my next PC locked down, keeping me from running the OS I want. Until then, I will quite simply not buy a new machine.

If I've learned anything about computer security in my life, it's that there is no such thing.
Even offering free work scares the heck out of good clients. Conversely, people who will agree to the arrangement may treat your time as if it is totally valueless, which will frequently compromise your ability to succeed at the engagement. The free engagement doesn't enhance your credibility if it ends up sucking due to lack of "client" cooperation, so that doesn't help you any.

One tactic that generally worked well for me when I was at an early point in my consulting career was roughly:

"Normally I'd charge you $x for this. I am confident that you will receive $y-$z of value from this work. Let's do the work. You decide how much I should invoice for at the end of it."

I was obviously sucking up more risk with this approach - and had to be willing to walk away with zero (and did on two occasions - one of which was justifiable). But since I had picked sane clients it mostly worked out very well (in one case they happily wrote a check for $x * 5 since we'd all radically underestimated the value of the work ;-)

I don't do this now - but it helped get over some "Can you actually do this?" hassles at the point when I didn't have a reputation.
The business model isn't proven - 500's idea of investing in a lot of companies and looking for lots of singles and doubles, rather than a few home runs, is unusual, unproven, and some would argue impractical. Whether that's true or not remains to be proven, but they've had some (minor) successes so far - sounds a lot like "the first few business deals" to me.
cute idea, but most hits are a year old. Search by date instead: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22I+just+r...
Thanks for the heads up, I had no idea; just uninistalled the app.
If an upvote is a save, that's a good idea (it's a good feedback loop) but that definitely should be communicated somewhere when you register. If nobody knows that it sort of kills the thought behind it.
PG's post on where to see Silicon Valley from 2010: http://www.paulgraham.com/seesv.html
Just sounds like a language limitation to me.

Ironically, for all the shit people like to give it, abstract static methods work just fine in PHP.
The other ironic move I'll note is that true content is increasingly getting pushed to simpler forms such as ePub readers, Instapaper, Readability, Moon+Reader, etc.

I find it very difficult to actually read long-form material in a web browser, whether desktop/laptop, or phone/tablet, with all the competing features and distractions which are presented. HN is better than most, G+ is particularly bad, other sites fall at various places along that range.

The specific mode of advertising website-based apps via pop-up interstitials is typical of what I find really, really annoying about sites (persistent header, footer, or sidebar elements in particular).

When TBL's original WWW documents were posted to HN some months back, I was particularly impressed with how readable the pages were, largely due to the bare minimalism of their markup. For actually presenting information (which was, it turns out, what he was hoping to accomplish), the original HTML markup remains surprisingly good.
I'm a Londoner. SF is a beautiful city and I want to go back very soon.

With that said I'm not sure what the purpose of this trip is (I did read your objectives). Some food for thought below.

> "A very high-level view of where a few startups and VCs are located."

You're based in London, which means you have access to some excellent global VC houses (Balderton, Index, Accel + others). There is a proliferation of small (<£500k) money in London which is also easy to tap into. There are plenty of outstanding startups who are based in London. What do you gain by going to SF that you couldn't get by setting up a few meetings in London?

> one that requires a US entity within a year, we want to get a good sense of how SF can be done bootstrapped, or at least affordably

A lot can change in 12 months. It's hard to envisage a situation in which you're making a smart decision by expanding to the US within 12 months without either the capital to make it relatively pain-free, or the traction required to do Series A. It's also hard to think that groundwork you do now is going to be useful or inform that move in any way shape or form. If you're in a situation where you absolutely must be in the US within the next 12 months then maybe, but otherwise just cross that bridge when you come to it.

> Figure out how SF/SV works from a startup perspective
[…] build a few connects with VCs who might later become investors

SF/SV works the same way as London, Berlin or Paris: you can get swept up in scenester nonsense or you can spend your time working on your product and focusing on steps 1-20, not on steps 2000-3000.

In six months time if you have a good product, excellent traction and some revenues (+ ideas about 10x growth) then you will find that investors and interesting people won't be a problem. A good intro goes a long way, but it doesn't matter that much. It's platitudinal now but still true.

Everything is dictated by the focus you apply over the next few months. If I were bootstrapping my company I would be focusing relentlessly on building and testing assumptions.

So my advice is to have a GREAT time, see as much of the city as you can and have zero expectations. If there are any startups in your space in SF, drop them a line and go say hello. Drink beer with the people who are on the trip with you. Bond with your cofounder. Then come back to London and work seriously on the thing which will determine 99.9999% of your success.
scryptauthlib (Go), my first open source library, criticism please
What? I get it all the time.
I agree with you and in your point lies my biggest beef with most investors, they talk like entrepreneurs but work like bankers. (who knows what they think like)

But I've since learnt that a certain breed of entrepreneur-investors continue to disrupt (innovate) in other ways and in other arenas. One example is 500Startup's overseas initiatives like the one in India.
This brings back some memories :)

Back when I was in high school, I had no internet connection at home, so I had to go to "internet cafes", download some interesting stuff on a 1.44 mb floppy and read it at home. That's when I came across this article. It really motivated me back then.
Thanks to the OP.

It is a very interesting, and divergent point of view [specially from the established status quo], cogently presented and explained.
I have no clue as to why the author of that shit is as angry as he is, but I have zero interest in his opinion until such time as he learns to show me the issues, and not just blindly assume that anybody who is not as enlightened as him is a blind idiot.
There's a big difference between downsizing - leaving you with spare cash to do stuff with - and "Salaried jobs [...] stay the fuck away from them" which has seriously harmful potential.
These aren't strange rules at all. They are pretty common in functional languages (of which Erlang is one) - less so in procedural, imperative and object-orientated languages.

The reason is simple, with immutability you know what the value is, and you can pattern match on it with confidence.

Variables that can change value are a mini-version of global state with all the reasoning problems that 'globality' gives:

"what is the value at this point in the code?"

"when does the value change"

"what range of values can this have depending on which code path was executed?" ie sometimes the value is changed and sometimes not...

Trust me, once you have gone immutable, you don't want to go back.
I have used this for load testing before, unfortunately the project is in need of a maintainer, I don't know python, but from the github page:

"ATTENTION: This project has several open pull requests and is in need of a maintainer! If you have experience with EC2, Python and load testing tools and would be interested in taking it over, please open a ticket telling us why and we’ll get back to you. Thanks!"

is anyone fancies it!
So yes, but only if you change your bot name.
- If you go out for coffee, you can't beat Blue Bottle IMHO.

- Do a lot of walking (within reason - it's not as big as London but things are more spaced apart!). You're there for a very short period this time around - if you have any thoughts about living there longer term (right now, before you have even been there) then forget about hacking code and concentrate more on getting a feel for the city. You can hack in London just as easily as you can in SF.

- Drive down the 101 to Palo Alto and roll along University Ave.

I really like SF. I'm sure the first thing you'll notice is how much more positive the vibe is compared to London (I have been living in London for 6 years, have been to SF at least once a year for the past 3).

And good luck.

EDIT: Realised they are only there for a very short time.
Hmm...this is interesting, thanks for sharing.
No, I do not feel the need to differentiate between the varying consciousness of animals in a discussion such as this. I feel they are owed the basic right to life, freedom from suffering, and an equal right to that which they have an interest in, such as raising their young. For every qualification you could find to rationalize treating animals poorly, aside from the species label we have applied to them, the same qualifications can be found in certain people. That's why it gets fuzzy and icky to start calculating "smart trades" that compromise the rights of some for the good of others.

You should check out Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. I'm not saying I agree with everything he supports, but he makes a bullet proof argument supporting the fact that speciesism is just like any other discrimination, and relies on the same logic as racism, sexism and so on.
Hey, when you put in price-controls don't complain about a lack of supply.
Are you serious? Darius is one of the hackers I most admire.
Sort of. Running diff alone will tell you when code is similar or the same, but it won't tell you whether that similarity is because code moved directly from NetBSD to Darwin (or vice versa if that happened) or because they share many common ancestors (from the graphic, that would be at least BSD 4.3, BSD 4.4, BSD NET/2, 386BSD,..)
It was an opinion. The authority is my moral compass.
Well, I must confess that what I propose isn't necessarily native iOS development - but rather, VM-based.

In my case, I'm using MOAI (http://getmoai.com). If you check my comment history, you will see I'm quite the MOAI fanboix, and I've given a fair bit of details about how it works - so please check my history for more info.

In a nutshell, I use Linux to develop MOAI applications, and I use the Linux-native MOAI host to test/develop/code for it. It works like this: Fire up SublimeText2, write Lua code for the MOAI framework, run the MOAI host with that Lua code on my local Linux DAW. Check in the MOAI Lua code to my repo - wait for my build server on OSX to check it out, package it into an .ipa file, run it on the iOS devices plugged into my Macbook.

You would still need XCode somewhere to deploy to iOS - but you can do all the development on Linux or Windows, and the MOAI app won't just run on iOS - but also Linux, OSX native, Chrome Native Client, Android and iOS.

And before you worry that performance won't be great - performance is great. :) And there is no greater feeling in the world right now than to be developing an app on Linux, and in a few seconds watching that same app being deployed immediately on Android and iOS devices in my lab, without too much fuss. Same look, same feel, same app: completely different platforms.

I really encourage you to check it out - and as long as you can convince someone to run the XCode build phase for you, somewhere, you can deploy to iOS simply as another target architecture, alongside all the other archs that your Linux machine can support (in my case my Linux machine also builds the Android product..)

If you have any further questions, don't hesitate to come to the MOAI forums and ask: http://http://getmoai.com/forums/
Tuning your Postgres on MacOS
I think that's because Chrome treats width= and height= as if they were CSS. (have a look at the inspector on an element with width and height specified in the HTML)
No, the process dictionary is not a mutable variable - there is no natural idiom to use values stored in the process dictionary as variables in code, you have to get them out and put them in via immutable variables.

Any given Erlang process has meta-information about itself, how many reductions it has, how big its heap is, which flags are set. These are the global state of the process.

The process dictionary allows you to store and manipulate your own global state of the process - and the people (hands up, that includes me) get smart and use it as local state of the programme and then get their bum bitten badly and swear never to dance with the dark side again... :(

Not bitter :)
I think the measures they implement to prevent this failure are adequate. Changing access control patterns so that not a single person but at least two persons must allow the job to run are sufficient as a quick fix. They also mention changing the future architecture to automate such maintenance jobs and to make data recovery faster. So it is indeed a mix of process and technical measures, much as the problem was caused by more of a process problem rather than a technical problem.

Finally I don't think that the computational part of the data recovery is the time intensive one. A laptop may churn through gigabytes and gigabytes a minute, but a developer can't. In this case the more time intensive part is probably figuring out which parts of the data got lost and how to get them back, then writing the tools to automate the process, test that the data fits and then put it safely back in production. I understand that it's annoying, but theres only so many flops a human brain can run.
Html 2 pdf rendering with phantomjs
The saddest part is that in a place called hacker news there is such low interest in hacking combined with a high propensity to fall for such a transparent market manipulation maneuver coming from a convicted monopoly abuser that's trying to extend their PC dominance into ARM tablets.
Animals of unnatural size also deal with heart problems and other complications. Just because you make them bigger doesn't mean you make their bodies capable of handling their larger size perfectly.
Different use cases IMO. If it's a single image of variable size, use width and height. If there are a bunch of images, all the same size (thumbnails for instance), use CSS.
"What's sad about it? I can't replace the OS in my car after all."

Oh, I did, and is fantastic.

I could log the rpms of the tachometer, the accelerations and the gyros, GPS, fuel that the car is spending, the battery use, so I could model the energy it takes for my car to go to the mountains up or down, how much it will spend more if there are red semaphores on my way, or the true air resistance with velocity( I had some marks in the bodywork and instruments outside that really affect aerodinamics with velocity).

It is really really useful planning ahead how much fuel you will use based on a map, how much money you will spend and how much your tires suffer in every circumstance with real data instead of suppositions(that are almost wrong).

In the future all cars will be like that, that is for sure.
> like most socially active voices, her method of appealing to emotion

I'm not sure of the validity of this statement - history has been all about appeals to emotion being more powerful than appeals to reason.

> don't think there's anything wrong with a headless female (or male) body made out of "creeper cards"

It's the sentiment - creeper cards are there because of the oppression of females by lecherous males at these types of events. The fact that someone is making fun of that it by being mildly perverse is terrible because it's literally anti-anti-oppression - it's oppressive.
"Sent from my Dymo Labeler" here
Where does it say that web apps are banned from the app store? Apple (unfortunately) does seem to allow apps that are just WebView wrappers. Of course, they aren't very popular though.

Also, if you set up local caching properly, your game should be fully available in offline mode as well, if the user saves your site to their home screen.
I'm British and travelled from London to SF with my co-founder last year.

I'd recommend to not try too hard and just to enjoy being out there. You've only got a week or so and it'll go quickly. I would forget all about VCs, they will sort themselves of their own accord if/when the time is right. Seeing and getting a feel for the city and the surrounding area is far more important in my opinion.

Hire a car. I was a little hesitant about driving in America at first, but it's actually very easy compared to driving in the UK (and trivial compared to London). Remember you can usually go through a red light if you're turning right! Driving will save you a lot of time and effort as public transport around SF is very limited (again compared to London) and it's quite a big city to walk around. Hiring a car is easy to do, we just walked into one of the many hire car depots on Mission and signed up on the spot.

If it's a sunny day then take a couple of hours to drive south down the 1 highway (the Pacific coast highway). Wow.

Knowing where all the startups are located is a bit overrated, I wouldn't bother visiting startup offices/buildings on spec, we drove down to Cupertino to see Apple's HQ which in hindsight was an adventure better suited to an even bigger Apple fan than I :)

Go to all the startup meetups you can, then go to the after drinks, stay til the end and chat to random people. We didn't actually get chance to do enough of this and I do regret that a bit. But I wouldn't worry too much if you don't make amazing contacts or friends in a few days there, these things usually take time.

Americans are very hospitable! We were treated like old family by the staff at a fantastic diner near where we were staying.

Hope that helps!
If you're using iOS, just tap the Share button in Safari and tap "Add to Home Screen"