skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Value is defined in many levels. The easiest definition for everyone should be the value they can think for themselves.

For a country, most economists would consider GDP. For me, I would consider sustainability and happiness.
How Cities Should Deal With Squatters
10~12 hours of physical presence M-F at the day job, 90% of productive work done in 4. (Not a joke, I can substantiate it with commits, tickets, etc.)

0 ~ .25 hours M-F on the side business, depending on how many emails I received. I try to schedule 4 hour blocks on Saturday/Sunday to get stuff accomplished -- sometimes spiking to 6~8, although those days I find the 90% rule comes into play, too, so I generally try to avoid overdoing it.
The same can be said for youtube. I doubt that justin.tv have more pirates that youtube.
From the browser compatibility chart there, I find that &shy; would be better for the purpose than <wbr> failing only for Firefox 2 which at this point should be negligible.
Agreed with mdolon's thoughts, but another thought occurred to me while reading through this:

* As a parent, it is likely you have more and varied business connections than your son/daughter. Do you know anyone you could introduce them to who might be able to help them along both monetarily, as a seed or angel investor, and/or as an advisor if (a-d) were to happen to you? This doesn't even have to be a direct contact, perhaps a contact of a contact, or however many levels of indirection you are comfortable with. Just a thought; the help you can provide is not entirely in what you know.
"An MBA from a good university is HARD and enlightening work."

Could you elucidate what is "HARD" ? I am NOT being sarcastic. I am genuinely curious, but I've found MBA coursework , (except in advanced finance) to be relatively easy compared to, say, a compilers class.

Running a real marketing campaign could be hard (depending on the context) but what is hard about the MBA course work in marketing?

Could you give couple of examples of what was hard about your MBA so we can understand better? (repeat, I am NOT being sarcastic or mocking you)
I think he's confusing several issues. Markets are self regulating, normally. But when the government intervenes with pressure to loan to people who can't afford the loans, then has Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guarantee the securities (so the lender is not directly at risk), they become much less self regulating. Funny that people think this crisis is a reason for more government intervention. Conservatism has had a lot of bad press for the last 40 years, but maybe those old conservative bankers weren't such a bad thing.
It clearly depends on how you define value. So, in general, your case is against my point because you have taken out a lot negative factors in your argument. :-)
your claim about real estate prices is surely in jest.
I've not used OS X as/on a server

Why is it that Apple fans feel compelled to defend Apple on every front, even when they have no idea what they're talking about?

I'd therefore say that it's unfair to compare OS X on the Xserve with the likes of RHEL on Dell, and that a comparison with Sun would be more realistic.

Which is exactly what I did. To quote myself: "an XServe may be nearly cost-competitive with equivalent Sun hardware". And then I explained why hosting providers don't use them (or equivalent Sun hardware), anyway. I've defined my market, and I've explained why Apple hasn't even made a tiny dent in it. Why would this make you feel compelled to argue about why an XServe is superior to a Dell or whitebox running Linux? I don't care. The market doesn't care. The reality of the situation is that a hosting provider can buy four reasonably well-equipped Linux servers, or eight crappy cheap ones, for the cost of one XServe. And they do. Which is why we have two Mac OS X using customers running a handful of XServes, and 1500+ using CentOS or RHEL on a few thousand machines.

All of that said, I have used an XServe. And I have used Dell high end servers certified for RHEL. The Dell was better in many regards, including hardware monitoring (Linux has dramatically more third party tools for this kind of task, and Dell has dramatically more Linux servers in the wild than Apple has XServes...so sheer numbers are in Linux' favor). Sun, of course, still has the upper hand in some categories, over both Dell and Apple. The XServe is comparable to the best Dell has to offer, but it is not clearly superior in any particular area. You're assuming, incorrectly, that a Dell running RHEL is the same as a randomly installed Linux distro on a random machine. It's not hit or miss when a reputable vendor builds a system for Linux: It works right, right out of the box.
"But I do think one can distinguish between the two in a number of different ways, the most important being that there’s the potential for real personal and social benefits from cognitive enhancement that is much, much weaker in terms of sports enhancement."

Sure, but if the UPS worker can lift and move far more weigh over time, if the construction worker can work longer hours and lift heavier items, isn't that a gain for the world?

If the average physical laborer can be more effective, doesn't that boost productivity?

I can imagine this leading to a "reality is for people who can't handle drugs" dystopia, but sports-related drugs could also show real personal and social benefits.
Thanks for the example ;)
I've had two phases of my life where I went without income. The first was getting established as an open source developer, the second was starting a startup (both, interestingly, feel like they have a lot in common).

After college I worked full time for one year. I kept living with college roomies and saved up about $10,000. I used that to work full time on open source for 10 months, and move to Europe (where I stayed).

When I started Directed Edge 6 years later, I did something similar, but had more saved. I got my living costs back down to college student levels to ensure that we had a long runway.

It's easy to stretch money out if you get used to it and easy to save enough money to live on for a year if you've got an IT job. The freedom of knowing that you can survive for a year on $10k while living well, mind you, is pretty awesome and it certainly gives you the flexibility to do something you think is worthwhile.
This would be a good place to mention a book I enjoyed reading recently:

"Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594201757?tag=dedasys-20 (yes, it has my affiliate link)

It's written by a pleasantly cynical, yet curious Englishman. It's pretty interesting to hear about the whole experience, the mindset, and some of the people involved. A particularly relevant (for me) passage:

"Rubenstein looked like any other Wall Street elder statesman, in a blue pinstriped suit and owlish tortoiseshell glasses. But the moment he spoke, eh revealed a droll, self-deprecating wit. The difference between corporate leaders and those who start their own businesses, I had observed, was startling. The latter come across as so much smarter and independent-minded, so much less prone to platitudes, so much more comfortable in their own skins. There seems to be an anarchic streak in anyone who has taken a real risk in his life. And even when it has to burn its way through a pinstriped suit, it shows."

That sort of hints at one of the "problems" with teaching business - there's lots of useful stuff you can learn, but there is also some natural, innate talent there, that doesn't necessarily correspond to doing well at an MBA course. So perhaps it's best to get out there, get some experience, and then just do it.
This sounds really interesting. Is there any chance that you'll give it closer to the middle of the country? I'm in Milwaukee, but Chicago's just a hop skip and a jump away.
Adam lambert:tracks of my tears lyrics
part time, sometimes 2-3 hours a day, sometimes 2-3 hours a month. I'll be switching to freelancing in a month which should mean more time for the startup.
If you let it react with water it gets to be even more fun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrofluoric_acid)
there is many wrappers for Twitter APIs for differenet languages. I am sure that you can find a wrapper for your favorite language.

Save your money.
I've had to deal with the twitter API twice, and both times a good way was to read their API docs. It takes maybe 20 minutes to read the whole thing and wrap your head around it. It's like not you're implementing NFS, the X protocol, or interfacing with an XMPP server.
Don't warm the entire cold water supply - just what goes to the water heater. But do it in the basement, where all the pipes already are, not under the shower, and not with a small device that is likely to get clogged.
I wonder how the rate of submission grows up until the deadline.
Weather and climate forecasting confront different problems.

I can't predict the behaviour of a single gas module but I can predict the behaviour of the gas as a whole as the randomness averages out.

Climate forecasting is a lot more complex a system but the daily variability, at least, averages out in the same way.

(Another analogy some people use is that we can predict that winter is colder than summer even if some days in the season aren't etc. this isn't really an argument for modeling but I suppose it's easy to grasp.)
And yet, if your team is solid, those tiny adjustments are probably a waste of time.
"There are very few if any people who believe that it is impossible that global warming is not caused by man."

Are you saying that nobody claims that the observed global warming could not be caused by natural causes, and thus the warming must have been caused by man? For if you are claiming this, I think you are wrong.

There are definitely a few very influential people claiming that climate change can only have been caused by man: "Only anthropogenic forcing of climate, however, can explain the recent anomalous warming in the late 20th century." http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/jones2004/jones2004.html

This is from the abstract of a paper co-authored by Michael Mann, the lead author of the IPCC report on climate change.

Or am I misreading your negations as well?
My mommy loves me and is letting me bum it?
I'm just now clearing my room of coffee mugs, pizza boxes, and bowls of soggy cereal. I'm unshaved, and have hardly stepped outside my dorm room for the past 48 hours. There's a celebratory beer in the fridge, and then I'll probably sleep for an entire day.

We've started building something really awesome, and although I'm sleep-deprived and red-eyed, I'm incredibly excited. I can't wait until the summer when I can go full time on this project. YC or no YC, it's going to be a wild ride.
Well there was nothing and there became something.

If we take the cause and effect theory which clearly conforms to the evolutionary theory then logicaly we are able to so rewind the cause and effect to a point where there was nothing. Hence, if there is no choice but only predetermined causes, what predetermined something from nothing?
For anyone struggling to find the time to get some exercise in, http://www.simplefit.org is pretty nice.

The workouts are quick, can be pretty intense, and are staged based on your progress. Not for some people, but I've been doing it combined with some running and have found it to be pretty good so far.
Wilson Sonsini:  Entrepreneurs Report
you know that you can always switch to a part-time H1b to make more time, right? Also, apply to YC if you are interested and ready to commit, the visa thing is hard but not insurmountable (especially if you raise money). IIRC, The buxfers did it!

It's very easy to go down the road of, oh no there are so many obstacles, but if you're relentlessly resourceful, you can make it work :)
First of all there are no leaders, no machine guns, no morale checks or broken units. Once those are added you can call it Squad Leader.

In the original rules, it is very rare that you get a KIA when firing. It's more likely that you'll get a "Morale Check" where you roll the die against the unit's morale number. If you have an unfortunate morale check roll, then your units are "broken" and are required to run for cover away from enemy units. Leaders stacked with units help with the morale checks, and can "rally" troops to get them unbroken.

Machine guns are used to create devastating fire lanes with their long range and penetration effects.

That's just the introductory rules. Successive modules added such things as panzerfausts, smoke, tanks, americans, minefields.... until we have "Advanced Squad Leader" which is an incredibly detailed and complex game system.
Am I the only person who would ask my parents to pay for my living and allow me to startup?

I am planning to live on the provision from my parents to startup after June. That is when my current job finishes. :-)

Well, of course, I have got my ideas and plans ready before starting. :-)
"Let large quantities of data solve your problems" might not be the best advice if you are hardware constrained. Not everyone has the petabytes of storage and the terabytes of RAM that Google has.

I guess cutting edge natural language apps are going to be the playground of the big boys until PCs reach the scale necessary to do experiments.
Were there American airbases in Russia, or China?
How concerned was the first founder that while he was getting money together, another startup would develop a competing product and spend the year working full-time while he was working part-time on his own? If such a competitor appeared in the year's time, what would the first founder have done?

I ask because there seems to be some division amongst the comments and essays I've read about how severe of a risk this is, and whether it is a greater risk than jumping in without building up a sufficiently comfortable cushion beforehand. The other half of this, that either hasn't be discussed as much, or maybe I just haven't noticed discussions of, is what happens when a risk of competition appears while the people involved are working at mitigating the risk of inadequate savings/funding.

It seems that some would argue that going the route of the part-time job to fund the project is reasonable path to follow and that things will work out; others that would claim that it puts the startup at an acute risk of failing or just never getting off the ground, and that never having enough money goes with the territory.

As concrete examples of both viewpoints, the 37Signals guys would argue that splitting one's time at first is fine, and is in a lot of ways more desirable than diving straight in. On the other hand, pg has argued in his essays that moonlighting is incredibly risky to a startup's success, due to both the time commitment required by other obligation(s) and the placating effect of an near-assured soft landing should things go bad.

It seems like this situation is precisely where discussions of risk trade-offs come in. Hearing the thoughts behind how these trade-offs are balanced is interesting and useful, both for the sake of curiosity and helping me and others develop an intuition for where our own balance should lie.
You and I Can't Buy the Guns Mexican Cartels Own
How do you sort through all these apps? Do you have 3 piles, Yes, No & Maybe?
Ask HN: The best HTML editors for windows?
What's the best HTML editor for windows? Is dreamweaver the best? How about an open source one? Which one do you use?
NB. Any comment would be helpful.
Moving Toward an Open Process on Cloud Computing Interoperability
This article gives an argument I haven't seen before: legally available guns in the US crowd out illegal military weapons. The author offers evidence that fully automatic weapons are much more common in Mexico, where gun laws are stricter than the US.

This seems like a parallel with drug legalization. If 'all' drugs are illegal, there is less of a differentiation between hard and soft drugs. Is this true, and if so does this apply to guns as well?
On Rack
Web 2.0 techonologies for content and knowledge management
That doesn't make sense to me. It completely sidesteps both the questions of responsibility, as well as questions about our desired environment.

I am -- or was, before my "startup" days -- an avid hiker, backpacker, etc.; to me, your thought experiment translates this way: Imagine that I was out hiking, and that I see a bunch of trash on the trail. Now imagine that the trash doesn't belong to me. Should I pick it up?

It doesn't make sense to me that, as a species with the ability to dramatically affect our environment, we should choose to not take care of it. It doesn't make sense to me that we would spoil our own living conditions.

To get back to your thought experiment: if the causes behind global warming were out of our control, but if the global warming had the potential to create an environment which we didn't want to live in, and if we had the power to counteract the changes, then I think it makes sense to do so.

As a practical matter, "massively restructuring the world economy" is also known as progress. We're certainly not going to burn coal in space.
By consuming them?
Rtm and Trevor and I each read them online independently and vote on them. Then they're ranked in order of their total score (normalized because Rtm always gives low grades). Then we meet to argue about borderline cases. At the end of that meeting we have a clearly defined set of 50-60 groups we want to interview.
When I have to write HTML, I use Vim and Firebug.

I believe the primary advantages of GUI tools like Dreamweaver are supposed to be ease-of-use and visual feedback, along with workflow tools like automatic site uploading. Since I already know HTML, I don't need the WYSIWYG part (if I did, I'd use Nvu or Kompozer or Mozilla Seamonkey); for feedback, nothing beats hitting F5 in a bunch of actual real-world browsers; for site-uploading on small sites, I'd much rather script the deployment myself with rsync or sftp, while on large sites there's usually some deploy-from-source-control script that renders Dreamweaver's tools moot.
That's because the lawyers haven't adjusted yet. They go combing the internet for their content after it airs, but by that time its already gone from justin.tv. For that reason, you used to be able to watch MMA events on justin.tv until only a few months ago, but those events have long been scrubbed from youtube, Dailymotion, and the other video services not based in Russia. However, it does seem that the lawyers are catching up. UFC is now blocked on justin.tv, for example.
Don't go to the gym, the reason you have trouble doing that is because it is boring.

Find an activity you enjoy that involves physical labor, and do that thing. Since you enjoy it, the 'work' of exercise won't feel like work - it will be something you want to do because you enjoy it. Explore different outdoor activities and sports, and you'll find one that suits you.

Presently for me this is building a small farm. Before that it was learning to surf. Before that it was cycling for distance. The neat thing about all these is unlike gym time you are building real skills as you do them and they are rewarding beyond the calories burned and the physiological changes.

The gym is hard because other than the physical effects it is dead time, and you know it.

Although for some people the iron is that thing that is quite soothing: http://www.gittlen.com/rollins.htm
I was the same way for several years, but nowadays I find lifting quite boring and not relaxing, so I had to find other activities.
Seeing a comment like this on a forum like this makes me sad.

First, economics isn't a zero-sum game. You could waste that check away on destroying a country and impoverishing millions due to the threat of imaginary weapons, or you could build something.

For a long time I thought wind farms were surely wasteful forms of energy. I thought about all of the energy required to manufacture them, install them, and maintain them, and compared that -- in my mind -- against all of the idle wind generators that I saw at farms like the Altamont and whatever huge one there is down in southern California.

Then I got some real numbers, and it turns out that I was pretty dramatically wrong: wind energy actually provides an even better energy-return-on-investment than nuclear energy.

So, potentially, that $600 billion could be spent building cheaper forms of energy generation using existing technology, and developing new technology, and now you've just made a steep initial investment that will pay returns for the rest of our society's existence.

That, to me, sounds like one heck of a good deal. And it's good for the environment too.

[1]: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_(...
Don't use <wbr>, use &shy; (soft hyphen). Actually renders with a hyphen attached, letting you know you're reading one broken word, and not just two odd ones (I'm sure this happens, but I can't think of a good example.)
I use <abbr> for parenthetical remarks (that is, these) when I write. Is that acceptable usage? I would have rendered the line above, on my blog, as:

I use &lt;abbr&gt; for <abbr title="these">parenthetical remarks</abbr> when I write.

Having found that well-written anchor text just flows as part of the body of a document, the link itself becoming invisible if you were to reformat the text to remove it, I tried the same thing with parentheticals. So far, I think it's worked wonders for my writing. Anything I want to say that's orthogonal to the main point, but still interesting, can still be there in a sort of "director's cut" view, but instead of having all my extra clippings forced upon you, you have to decide to look.

If that isn't proper, I hope there's an <aside> tag in some upcoming version of HTML; it's at about the same "semantic" level as <q>.
A friend and I once carried several large pieces of trash out of a wilderness area. We were sore, and tired, and our packs were heavy, and we were eager to go home and shower and eat some junk food.

I'm glad we didn't make a rational decision.
Meanwhile the excitement builds among the staff at this location:

http://www.pbase.com/polakis/image/65862806
I just wrote integrations with the Twitter API, Facebook Connect, and Myspace's REST API. Twitter was by far the easiest, and is dead simple. Save your money and just read the API doc, and then use one of the many libraries someone else already wrote.
My first week as an entrepreneur
Freemium - Free to paid conversion rates
Just a simple text editor is best. My favorite for Windows is Notepad++
For those interested in a peek at the Nano this is an interesting set of photos:

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1887087,00.htm...
With all due respect, I could have cut and pasted your post from any global warming denial website.

The bulk of what I read on water vapor stated that although the process was so far poorly understood, most scientists (for the moment) believe that increased water vapor is an amplifying side-effect, not a primary cause, of climate change. Basically, that increased temperatures lead to an increase in water vapor due to the evaporation of ice, small lakes, and rivers, and that in turn further drives climate change.

I see that most of your comments in this thread fly in the face of what most climate scientists believe to be happening.
There is also the "Zero Width Break" character &#8203;

You could inject it every x characters in very long words when parsing user input.

It is used in Thai where word breaks are not visible and line breaks are only allowed at word breaks.
What was the ratio of Bay Area applicants like when you were doing YC in Boston? Did you get more Boston startups in the program?
Open source software needs more high-profile success stories like this. Great link. Thanks.
This is an incredibly astute point, and shows great awareness of human factors. I'm very pleased to see it on hacker news.
this doesn't belong here, please read the guidelines. It's also so preposterous that I'm marking it off as a troll.