skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Creating a company is the administrivia aspect, determining how to make money (and a profit) separates a hobby from a business.

The single largest business risk you face is whether a market exists for your product. Before you finish coding and graphic design, you should determine how you are going to sell your product by talking to prospects. Perhaps you have overlooked a feature or two that you will need to add. Or you may discover that you can cut your initial feature list by 1/2 to 2/3 (you may already be done!) and still find buyers.

Finishing sooner means cash flow sooner means viability sooner and external validation (people paying you is a far more serious endorsement than telling you they will buy when you finish) sooner. If it's just you coding on your own I wouldn't worry about doing anything more than operating as a sole proprietorship (which is how you are operating now) until you were reasonably confident you can generate revenue (profit often comes later).
The Boeing B-17 was an early four engine plane and was extraordinarily complicated. Previous planes were simple enough that checklists were unnecessary but the B-17 only became practical with the introduction of a pre-flight checklist. The current state of Hospital Intensive Care is compared to flying a B-17 before the checklist was used.

Empirical evidence is given about IV line infections, a major problem in ICUs. A 5 step checklist lowers the 10-day line infection rate from 11% to 0% at Johns Hopkins, an almost unbelievable result. It is confirmed over 15 months.

These results are again confirmed at an understaffed inner city hospital in Michigan with similarly dramatic results. The study from the Michigan hospital is published in the December 2006 publication of The New England Journal of Medicine. Despite these dramatic results, there is resistance against the increased use of checklists.

The checklist study author says he can introduce ICU checklists across America for 3 million dollars at the most. Because of the resistance in the USA, the country of Spain will be the first country to use checklists nationwide. The study author hopes that the USA will not be the last country to start using ICU checklists.

If anyone here has money to burn, lobbying for the increased use of checklists in intensive care units would get more net local social returns (in lives saved) than building Stanford a new emergency room and it would cost less money.
Conceded. Cross-site communication is a problem I had not thought of.

I'm still not sure what their novelty is given how doubleclick's cookies working across different portals were being talked about during the dot-com days. I thought Beacon was implemented using the same technique plus direct http calls.

Is there some deviousness I do not know about?
Advanced Rails Recipes
Dogster ("Facebook for dogs") has 350,000 members
knowledge != information
Checking 'this instanceof' on every single call to the function seems a bad idea to me, not to mention having the function call itself again to construct the object.
If you use the function as it was intended, you won't have problems.
I have to say it's not been a 'debugging nightmare' for me...

>> "So there you have it: A simpler syntax for classical-style object instantiation that easy for end users and is more robust and resilient to misuse."

I guess if you do prefer classical-style, and are prone to misusing things, it could be handy.

Far easier just to make your constructors start with uppercase.

function Foo() { // This is a constructor, starts with 'F'

function foo() { // This isn't a constructor
Interview with Ron Conway (CalacanisCast)
Banned by FeedBurner?
I don't see the point of this - system programming in C/C++ looks like this on pretty much any platform, and you almost always have a higher level alternative which avoids it.
It's not the money though. If microsoft offered far higher rates for publishers, and far lower rates for advertisers than google does, I'd still be reluctant to use microsoft.
The main blocker is that they simply cannot write webapps. The interface for dealing with adcenter is amongst the worst webapps of all time. It's a very very slow painful procedure to get anything done at all. Things you can do in adwords in 5 minutes can take hours in msn adcenter.
I moonlight as an ER nurse while I'm finishing my software engineering degree. I've worked ICU for a number of years as well.

It sounds simple to institute a checklist, but the key issue isn't the checklist, it's about allowing nurses to hold doctors accountable and the hospital backing the nurses up in those disputes.

Say you're a night shift ICU nurse. Your patient craps out at 3am, and your intensivist crawls out of bed to come and "line up" your patient and put them on life support. Do you think that Dr. Intensivist with 15 years of school wants to hear at 3am is a nurse with an associates degree tell him to stop what he's doing and start over because he didn't wash his hands properly before starting. I've had charts thrown at me for stuff like that.

This issue is accountability and incentives. This plan places accountability on the doctors, but it puts a lot of strain on the doctor/nurse relationship when that nurse is the one blowing the whistle on the doctor.

What we need is an incentive system for doctors. You need both a carrot and a stick. Doctors only get paid when the patient is sick. And, if the patient gets sicker, that doctor spends more time with the patient and bills more. There is no incentive to keeping the patient healthy, only payment for taking care of as many sick patients as possible. Doctors don't like it they generally want to take good care of patients. They just have to pay of $200,000 of student loans, and the only way to do that is to rush and see as many patients as possible.

If the doctors received a large bonus every year if their lines did not get infected, or if their patients did not get a pneumonia when the patient was on life support, you better believe that complication rates would go down.

If nurses got a small bonus every year based on our infection control practices, we'd all wash our hands a lot more often. But we don't. We're all paid by the hour on a patient assembly line.

The doctors or nurses haven't set up this system, the insurance system has. It's just the unintended consequences of our third party payer system.

Although, there are winds of change. Medicare is starting to threaten hospitals by not paying them if a patient gets an infection from the hospital.
Seth Godin's Books
13,000 Nominations So Far For The Crunchies
OpenSocial won't open till next year
We joke about this, but it is deadly serious. My theory on 2 founders:

- 2 hackers: Work your butts off, keep design simple and do it yourself until you have something functional. Then worry about finding a designer.

- 1 hacker & 1 designer: One of you will be doing most of the (important) work. Guess which one? Frankly, I don't know how people pull this off. If you can, more power to you.

- 2 designers: What are you doing here? Go get 2 jobs.
Surprised this isn't higher. Pretty cool tech behind this.
Email hijacking
A lot of sites seems to have users sign up using an email address and password and nothing else. The admirable goal is to minimize the friction in signing up.

But it seems like that can invite a pretty serious issue that I've been callling "email squatting".

The problem is that these sites don't verify that the person who signed up with a particular email address is, in fact, the legitimate user of that email address.

Consider someone signing up with my email address: foo@bar.com. Now I'm not going to be able to use that email address, because it is already taken. Worse, if messages to that account, such as invitations, the attacker can accept them, since they typically see the invitations on the site in addition to it being sent to the email address.

As the legit user, I might see the invites, but won't be able to log in at all. Worse things can happen: once the attacker signs up, they could make this email address secondary and add another, primary address so that they see all of the messages.

Here's a solution:

Rather than asking for an email address and password on the front page, have a "Try It" button and a box for the user to enter an email address. When they click on the box, the system sends email to that address with an "signup" link, signed with an encrypted hash of the email address.

When the (legit) user clicks on the link, they come back to a signup page, the system checks the encrypted hash and we're good to go.

I realize this adds another step, but the hijacking problem is real. For sites dealing with any sort of sensitive information, it needs to be dealt with.

Are there better solutions that have less friction?

Or am I just being overly paranoid?
Out of interest who here uses Selenium or any other for of testing for the client side of web apps, such as JSUnit?
An incredibly powerful argument for the effectiveness of "low tech" approaches. Whether it's health care, business, or technology, it's almost always counter-intuitive. That's why it's often such a hard sell.

(Case in point at a client of mine: When the parking lot was scheduled for paving, email was sent to everyone. For whatever reason, about half didn't read it or know about it. The next time, paper notices were posted on both sides of every door. Not one person parked in the lot. Who knew?)
From the Field: Joshua Porter, Social Web App Designer
Deconstructing a Struggling Start-Up
World's Largest Telescopes Discover Bizarre Magnetic Star
Major breakthrough in understanding supersolidity
Scala Blog
Best configuration for dedicated server?
I've some forums running on a VPS at Rimuhosting. Everything works great, but dedicated servers are cheap right now.

What's the best way to setup a dedicated server to have some services online? do you really need XEN?

I Would like to setup php5, mysql5 on apache (maybe ngnx too). And would like to ran some rails development to, so, SVN required.

Would be great if you share your dedicated servers layout.
"Your patient craps out..."

Can you be a little less technical?
Eee PC API
Experimental Philosophy: The New New Philosophy
you can try mine too. No flash, no ads and no trendy faded backgrounds. Just data. All opensource under a creative common doc license, half a million urls for download also.

http://botspiritcompany.com/botlist/
Neat Maryland Math Olympiad problem
Each point in the plane is colored either red or green. Let ABC be a fixed triangle. Prove that there is a triangle DEF in the plane such that DEF is similar to ABC and the vertices of DEF all have the same color.
Someone at my workplace has been throwing together some tests with Watir recently and overall things look good, but we're yet to take it past the experiment-on-his-desktop stage.
The next generation of security threats
It really depends on what the server is being dedicated to.

Xen and any other virtualization comes out of your overhead costs, unless you have a specific need for it (like being able to migrate seamlessly to EC2) don't bother.

For what you are planning to do Ubuntu server edition would probably cover most of your needs and give you enough support to quickly resolve problems.

Don't bother with softraid, if your data isn't important enough for you to afford a dedicated RAID controller and the disks to go with it; you can live with the possibility of losing everything up to the last backup (you will be taking backups).
The Napkin Test: Mission Statements V.S. Visions
Five Management Traps to Avoid
Give the system to me I will host it for free for 40% of the business. I will get a few servers and host it at calpop.com. I will take in the leads that come in from the site and evaluate them for business ideas and I will play around with the system and see if there isn't something that someone would pay for using it. I would be willing to spend $299 a month plus the cost of a few servers. Hopefully the code is not so balkanized it is not unmanagable.
No... I think they are in the top 25 of US companies by market cap though. Even Microsoft ($323bn) is worth $100bn more than Google.
13 Rules for Entrepreneurial Success
10 from Loic Le Meur, plus a few more from me for good measure. Inspiring stuff.
please let me undo my votes! I'm reading on an iphone now, and it's really easy to hit the down button instead of up, or vice versa.
I think you're overly cynical. Docs don't need monetary incentives for "keeping the patient healthy." They need proof that something is wrong and a simple remedy will fix it and help patients. Not every doc, particularly those with relatively fixed salaries, are rushing to see patients to maximize their personal wealth. I'd think it was financial pressures to reduce costs at the institutional level that create an imbalance between # of caregivers and the # of patients. I've seen some new medical practices (e.g., here in Palo Alto) where you can pay a lot more and get seen by docs with a relatively very low patient load.
I disagree on the soft RAID vs. hardware RAID (if by soft RAID, you mean the md layer in Linux). I'm not a fan of hardware RAID, in general. I wrote the following ages ago on Slashdot in response to the same kind of disparaging statement about soft RAID:

The data integrity benefits are still present, as are some performance benefits in some circumstances (in fact, Linux RAID is demonstrably faster in some workloads than a top end Adaptec hardware RAID controller, though this is the exception rather than the rule)

That said, I hate pretty much all RAID controllers (whether software or hardware). Linux software RAID means that I can drop the disks into any PC and access the data. Every RAID controller from Promise, Adaptec, and Tektronic requires me to use their disk format, and if I lose the controller I lose the data until I can get another controller. Sure, in high availability environments, you keep a spare...but with Linux software RAID, every PC in the office is a spare controller. That's my kinda redundancy. I've even had two identical Adaptecs with different firmware lead to pretty massive data loss during a server migration. Thankfully there were good backups. I've never had similar problems moving Linux software RAID disks into a new Linux box.
Knowledge is not just information, it's one of those fuzzy humanistic things where cultural practices, ethical frameworks and individual talent allow some individuals to apply information more effectively than others. As an example consider Santiago Calatrava; there are probably several thousand people who know as much or more as he does about the history and engineering principles of building bridges, but he adds unique value to the projects he is given that would be difficult if not impossible for another engineer to duplicate.

The knowledge economy is a bit of a misnomer because by it's very nature knowledge creates multiple measures of value, not all of which can be measured in terms of _valuta_. It's also problematic in that knowledge is embodied in individuals, and while you can build information systems that support it's cultivation in individuals, it is not possible to treat knowledgeable individuals as interchangeable plug-compatible components.
Just get plenty of memory. Nothing else matters in a modern server--CPUs are way faster than they need to be, disks are bigger than necessary (generally), and the bottleneck is pretty much always going to be RAM.
Lasers could give early warning of cancer
More than half of Amazon rainforest will be lost by 2030
Basis? Maybe not. Linchpin? Absolutely.
I will go for XEN, virtualization is always good and nowadays the performance lost is unappreciable, on the other side you gain a machine you can copy and move. If you have your full machine image backuped and you screw something on it, you only need to go the real shell and restore it. Also, you can have a develpment vm and a production vm, well you know better what you need.

On the hardware side setup a RAID either hardware or software, but with a hardware RAID you better pray for it to not crash. I've seem some nasty issues with raid controllers. Also, get plenty of memory and dual/quad core processor.

For the OS, I will go for Debian or Ubuntu Server if you want some kind of support (yes, I know that there are people servicing Debian support, but they are less blamable!)
I've been very interested on this for a while. I even had the chance to work in a related project for a client for a very brief lapse of time (after a few years working in games and virtual reality stuff).

Most common solutions for this require real time computer vision, which is hard to develop, but very interesting of course...
Mathematics, Mathematica and Certainty (including details on Mathematica's internals)
John Lennon's message for peace
The Mother of All Lists
I tend to think of virtualization as a sandboxing method instead of a deployment method. I'd only use virtualization if the apps I'm running may compromise the security or stability of the host machine. Otherwise, most web frameworks have some kind of deployment method, as well as support for different environments (production/test), and that's generally good enough.
Ask YC: My idea, what do you think?
I just submitted two interesting stories and while i was doing that I thought:
I would be easier to have an YC firefox plugin for submissions.
I know that a lot of people here are capable of coding it, so, what do you think a bout this idea?
unless you are pushing the virtual to the max I would just stay with that. I have used both and to be honest there is nothing in it when it comes to running web apps. I have done gaming servers on both and dedicated have the edge just. I would save your money.
CouchDB
interesting use of Erlang
have you tried the bookmarklet?

http://writewith.com/fun/bookmarklet

it will do what you want, just drag it on to your shortcuts area.
Violin playing robot: Why is it important?
Facebook's Real Worth? $15 Billion, According to VCs
Specifically, it's pathetic because it's grammatically ambiguous and requires additional knowledge.

It could easily be parsed grammatically as, "There was an error on the non-system disk or the disk" which makes no sense. Even when you parse it the way it was intended, you need to know that the PC tried to boot from a disk drive in order to comprehend the message.
GoBigNetwork full of scammers?
We have the terrific PR that GoBigNetwork has gotten in the press and also in this forum, so I decided to check them out and registered, since I am looking for funding, I was about to pay their subscription fee, but decided to check their forum first, and found this thread. It really concerns me that they are using the entrepreneurs' hard earned money (subscription fee of $39 and up) for creating buzz and not for actively filtering out scammers as mentioned in this post.

I would like the GoBigNtwork guys to tkae this opportinity on this forum and answer a fe questions

But I am wondering if Since the people at GoBigNetworks are not responding
So maybe there's some truth to this: http://xkcd.com/323/ ;-)
We all know of the terrific PR that GoBigNetwork has received in the press and also in this forum, so I decided to register with them, since our team is about to seek funding,

I was about to pay their subscription fee, but decided to check their user forum first, and found the thread. It really concerns me that they may by using the entrepreneurs' hard earned money (subscription fee of $39 and up) for creating buzz and not for filtering out scammers as mentioned in this post.

I would like the GoBigNetwork guys to take this opportunity on this forum and answer a few questions about their service WITHOUT A LAYER OF BS:

1. What was the total number of Internet/Web deals funded in Nov 2007?
2. What was the total number of dollars funded in Nov 2007 for Internet/Web deals?
3. What was the mean funding cycle time for Internet/Web deals closed in Nov 2007?
4. Why won't you take the recommendations of your user as detailed so elegantly in the thread?

Feel free to add more questions.
I haven't watched the video, but don't understand this reaonsing.

If these rumors are true, Zuck is cashing out Facebook stock. This is independent of the cash balance that Facebook the company has. Even if Facebook's cash balance was low, selling Facebook shares would not affect how much money they have left.
Now I have to stop reading Hacker News and clean up the soda I just spewed all over my keyboard. Thanks alot, jey.
Bravo! Bravo! Tour de force! Should be read at least once a month as an antidote to creeping groupthink.
Followup: Zuckerberg didn't cash out
50 Cent: File-Sharing Doesn't Hurt Artists, Industry Should Adapt
Taint the Data: how to quit Facebook the "evil" way
Vegetable 2.0
Give 'em credit for making progress, they don't have a "Reboot Computer?" button as the default selection ala: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=86329
Breaking news: there is no breaking news!
Common Lisp Implementations: A Survey
Slutbot aces Turing Test*
It tells you something about how much faith Facebook employees have in their company.
Facebook is quite like the emperors new clothes IMHO
New species of huge, deadly cobra discovered
Does anyone know what kind of salary Zuckerburg pulls from Facebook to live on right now?
What I dislike is when I launch a program like Photoshop, which initially opens up it's window, but it then has to hit the disk for about 10 seconds or so before it can really load, so of course, as soon as I launch it, I alt-tab away to a browser window or something else, but then when Photoshop or whatever else it was that I launched finishes loading, it steals focus back from me. It should wait quietly until I'm ready for it, or better yet, when you run a program, it should load whatever it needs to load into memory before opening up its window at all and then when it's ready to give me a usable application, then open up.
Heres the thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=81932
[Philosophers assert that a certain idea is Obvious]: well, that may be so at Princeton or Rutgers. On the other side of the planet, it might seem [that it isn't]. What should philosophers make of that?

That their discipline is the impacted wisdom tooth of the modern academy.
Clearly the human brain isn't at its best form when it's hr0ny.
Let's say we do a computation---say with Mathematica---and we find a mathematical result. How can we be sure it's correct?

Can't pass up even one opportunity to promote himself or his product.
This is a blatant copy of the original article, which wasn't even linked to: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/05/loic-le-meurs-ten-rules...

The 'extra' three regurgitated items don't merit the purloined content.
Weak guarantees lack sales closing power
How to Do Retail Right: Apple's Newest NYC Store
Adobe Labs - Brio beta is live
> By buying that widescreen TV, I'm giving all those people who build that TV a job. Doesn't that help to end world hunger?

Yes, for the subset of countries that has their shit together enough to manufacture and export TVs.