skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Registering names? Handling taxes?
From browsing the web and reading books, you see startup "guides" discussing how many founders to have, how to find an idea, etc.

None of them talk about acting on your idea. How to register a name, how to make sure no one else has the name, patenting your work, trademarking your logo, making sure you make decisions that will help you at tax filing time, not hurt you.

Does anyone know of a good source about actually launching a business? Or have advice of your own?
I don't think the two quotations are incompatible. Aurelius seems to be advising that no penny should be spared on providing a good education (and thus prefers hiring a tutor for 1-on-1 tuition). The Chinese quotation advises against children being educated by their direct families. Presumably public education was better in China at the time (see my sibling poster about Roman schooling), so public schooling was the "best" alternative, whereas in Aurelius's time hiring private tutors was.

My main concern with home-schooling is that it sort of sets an upper bound to the child's learning of that which the parent knows. (although I'd guess it works quite well at younger ages provided the social contact with peers is still maintained in some way).
> Compromise the site itself & gather information.

Yea good luck with that!

> Catch & turn real sellers.

How would you do that? This seller got caught because he was a buyer too. People only selling on silk road can't be caught unless they do something really really stupid. And even if you do catch a seller what does that get you? Nothing! You're no closer to closing down Silk Road itself.

> Crapflood it with fake buyers/sellers making it less useful.

You can't be a fake buyer. Buyers must pony up the bitcoin up front and so that only helps sellers. Who cares where the actual drugs went, the seller got his money. Fake sellers are quickly caught out because of the reputation system. Buyers already know which sellers are reputable, they'll just keep buying from them. You can't do anything about that.

> Order drugs & gather forensic info from the packages.

This just targets individual sellers and won't do anything to stop Silk Road. Especially if the sellers are overseas.

> Heck, agree to sell someone drugs and actually send them flour + a GPS/camera if you want to go that route.

Yes buyers are vulnerable and always will be on Silk Road. That doesn't stop anyone and you'll usually only bust small time users which is a waste of resources.

>For the most part, just go after the weak human links in the chain and use standard anti-network tactics like turning people into informants and isolating everyone via mistrust.

Informants are useless. No seller can help you take down Silk Road because no seller knows where it's hosted or who is running it.

> Heck, they could just start scamming folks on the site.

Reputation systems stop this. Buyers only buy from reputable sellers.

> With a little imagination, this could be used by the police as a giant honeypot.

I don't see it.
Foxconn plans Chinese union vote
The fact is that there is an old distribution model getting its knees broken by a new form of communication. Is it right? The market will do what it will do without paying attention to what is or not right.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20120912025847/http://q-gears...
How to Work; A Life of Purpose
No right and wrong here - just need to test/check out your options before "settling". I'd also check out Mandrill, Postmark, and PostageApp, if you haven't already!
yeah, the data is refreshed (and re-sorted) daily. You will often find the same mixes for a few days since they keep getting more popular, but good new mixes will bubble up while older ones fade away.
> Circumventing conventional DRM isn’t quite this easy, but no DRM scheme has withstood serious efforts to circumvent it.

This "truism" is vague, and therefore misleading in some way. Before Sony decided to piss off the entire internet, their DRM stood for the better part of a year. Motorola's had some phones that weren't rootable for months on end. In one sense, it's true: the economic forces will ensure that everything highly visible and in high demand will have any DRM broken. What entrepreneurs should notice, is that not everything is subject to the same economic forces.

There is a valuable analogy in physical locks. Since the industrial revolution, inventors produce a constant supply of new lock designs which get broken by clever locksmiths. Nothing stands forever. Yet, people still make money selling locks, and they have actual utility. Most of the possible uses for locks are for content which is far less known and far less sought after than someone's rare Ferrari or the bragging rights on the newest lock at the world expo.

Many would say digital goods are different. I say that's primarily wishful thinking. Cash is highly fungible, but is still successfully secured with chintzy little locks in many cases. I think it's high time for people to get their own DRM. It's hopeless for big corporations, but ordinary people are actually in the right economic position to benefit from DRM.
Ah, classics..the patience and study of the philosopher's common book and their grounded theses revealed. A best seller or a mention in lecture halls reassures that you've evolved into someone unique or you're a man with minimal words who aggregates the ordinary and his niche topic into art.

I've still haven't found someone who open sourced their common book journey, their resources, and resources' resources, as linked data.

Thanks for all these reading lists comments though. I REALLY appreciate it!
I actually submitted the launch post on reddit as an afterthought to the HN submission and was shocked when it was going better than the HN post. It kind of destroyed my preconceived notions of HN as the best launchpad and reddit as no-op on that front.

I had a couple friends I told about it and I'm sure they upvoted the submission, but I think really I did well because PushBullet is exciting to Android users and r/android is a hotbed of people looking for exciting things to do with the devices they know have a ton of potential.
But this is where "be conservative in what you do" comes into play. The STEP format has formal rules for exporting all ASCII, Unicode, and ISO-8859 characters.
A well-written STEP string exporter should handle them all without difficulty, no matter what goofy things are in the string.

And again, if you're worried that there may be an attack vector, change high-bit-set characters to "[Illegal character value N]". Though it might be more merciful to assume they just wanted ISO-8859-1 characters and substitute the appropriate control code.
Probably not that different, but that's no excuse to keep using bank switching on its core; it was usually painful, expensive, and limiting for the developers.
Video Documentation "for your eyes only" Conference (november 2012)
Watch and share the #superbowl thru people's eyes (Vine)
Isn't Skype from Estonia? Not from one of the Nordic countries they list?
You can also easily embed it using :

<iframe id="iframe" src="http://vinetu.be/embed.html#superbowl frameBorder="0" width="480px" height="480px"></iframe>

(Other hashtags are supported)
Does anyone have a tl;dr/highlights?
Klarna is a payment startup in Sweden focused on invoices and installments. Currently working in se,dk,no,fi,nl,de,at. Could be worth keeping an eye on.
I'm not giving you a hard time about it. At all. But you should be already looking for ways to profit from this. In one month it will hit 100K users, and suddenly you have a huge infrastructure bill. Plus the fact that you can get sued the fuck out due to DMCA, patent trols, and such. Run some tests, charge for it, and see what the apps real world traction is.
> The fact is that there is an old distribution model getting its knees broken by a new form of communication. Is it right? The market will do what it will do without paying attention to what is or not right.

What the market does is also shaped by social convention and law.
I really like the idea behind this. It'd be a nifty way to make a timelapse of developing a project over time, because then it'd just be a matter of throwing the files together and making a gif or a video out of them.

What kind of compression is this using? I'd just be worried about high-res screenshots sucking up disk space over a long period of development.
It's always an awkward situation when a community's moderation and, well, community go out of sync.
Congratulations. It is always inspiring to see successful product launches.

To keep the press buzz going, consider directly pitching journalists that cover Android stories. Send them a three to five line email about your app and the growth you have seen over past two weeks. To find the emails of these journalists, Google: [insert name of newspaper] + [Android], and you will find journalists who write about Android stories. Most of the time, they will have the writer's email there. And if not, you can try firstname.lastname@newspaper.com.

Here is an example email pitching PushBullet:

"Hi [insert journalist's name],

I see that you cover Android stories for [insert newspaper].

I am the founder of PushBullet, which is an app that makes it easy to push files, lists, addresses from your desktop browser to your Android devices. We launched two weeks ago, and have grown quickly to 15k users. We have been featured on LifeHacker, Geek.com, and Android Life. In the coming weeks, we are going to do [insert new features].

Please let me know if you want to set up a time to talk about PushBullet or if I can answer any question you may have over email.

All the best,
Ryan
[insert your phone number, journalists like calling people]"
Sherlock: Remote Door Unlocking
Why was it easier to field large armies in Alexander's time than in the medieval period? Does it have anything to do with the feudal system? Or was it that weapons, armor, and equipment was more expensive in the medieval times. Last guess: training was more valuable in the medieval times than it was earlier, so it was more effective to field smaller armies of better trained and equipped men than a horde of untrained peasants with archaic weapons (because that's all they could afford.) ?
Just in case someone misses the point, this is a work of reverse engineering, not something coming from the actual developers of the game. Still pretty impressive and worth the read though!
I was battling between saying him/her because I'm really biased towards saying him since I want my first child to be a boy. Sorry for the dehumanization!
3rd Ward - Brooklyn, NY, Full time, remote, H1B

We're a pretty amazing maker/tech/educational space in Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY that is building a tech team from the ground up. We recently raised a series A round for 4.5 million (investors have not been disclosed yet, but some very high profile ones). Equity is negotiable with a 2 year vesting period. This year we are expanding to a culinary school in Brooklyn, a maker/tech school in Philly, as well as getting into online education. You would be one of our first tech hires!

Front-end Developer (with some design chops) - You should have great HTML, CSS, javascript, jQuery skills, git. Bonuses - backbone, HAML, SASS, Rails. Design skills are also desirable, not the "pixel-perfect" kind necessarily, but at least the "wire-frame something up and make it look decent enough" kind.

Rails Engineer - Postgres, elasticsearch, TDD, git, some knowledge of Amazon Web Services is a plus, as is front-end experience.

Perks of working at 3rd Ward: an offbeat culture full of creative individuals, free classes and workshop time in our wood and metalshop, and a great deal of personal and professional freedom as you help shape the future of our company.

Contact me at jeremy@3rdward.com with a link (github or otherwise) to some of your work.
You might also be interested in this online poll that's been running for a while "Who's your favourite Stoic?" Over 400 responses so far and you can vote or view the results, which are kind of interesting in their own right:

http://poll.fm/3zsyo

Regards,

Donald Robertson
> Isn't that problem more-or-less another indication of the failure of DRM? That is, only rich people (or other entities with personhood, like corporations) can use the laws in question.

Until this changes, DRM will be a failure. Likewise, when "property rights" are just a way for rich folks to oppress everyone else, there is no rule of law, and such rights are just a legal pretext for the rich to hire soldiers to bully others. However, when property rights apply to everyone, then they become an expectation of society as a whole. Thieves are successfully prosecuted, the law can act as a deterrent, and the resulting stability allows for the accumulation of wealth in the general populace.

The Internet isn't to that point yet. We're all still barbarians, and if you can take another's livestock and horses, you're clever and a hero to be admired.
I'd imagine bank-switching a large ROM into 32 KiB of address space imposes constraints similar to those imposed by loading data from a slow-as-molasses 2X CD-ROM drive into 2 MiB of RAM.
There is a link to this on the submit page. Why is this here?
Whatever the merits or demerits of the copy-paste blocker's argument are, surely I'm not the only person who highlights text on the Internet as I read it, or who regularly right-clicks and uses commands from the context menu.

I doubt I'll be visiting that guy's site again, but in case I run into the WordPress extension he's using on another site, the 'frustrate_copy.js' file it uses has gone into my filter list.
I can no longer find this post now on the front "Ask" page..It is so weird.
Yes, more or less. People who care about tax go to Malta. There's also a lot of Swedish entrepreneurs in Berlin and I'm not sure taxes are much lower there, but rents are.
Typo on your home page: "Unleash Android's rich notifictions"
Code wise. Yeah, pretty good, it seems like a nicely built app that serves it's purpose well.

Concept wise. I wish people would stop trying to push the user voted content model onto music. Or any kind of art for that matter.

Community voted stuff works great where the end result is common across the entire userbase. Everyone wants to stay up to date with the latest news articles or funny youtube videos. This is why Hacker News and Reddit work well.

The fact is though that my idea of what makes good music is going to differ hugely from the next person. The top submissions are simply going to be the least offensive, most agreeable. I think soundcloud realise this which is why thier explore tab picks randomly.

I agree with the ideology of sharing music and making it easier to access, but it's something way too subjective to apply this approach to. If all music was ranked by popularity, we would end up with something called a chart, and ironically "chart music" was probably a huge driving force for you to branch out and explore music that connected with you as an individual.
See also DJB's notes on protocol design: http://cr.yp.to/proto/design.html
By now we are working with Paypal to show the concept (Not an API you would recommend dough...). But we are planing to create a Ltd. in the states to work with Stripe. It will also make it easier to close a round with american VCs. We are based in Spain and the Spanish VCs are not what you could call that "venturous". They are more likely to invest in "me too" startups, or proven models.
"Assuming he’s already around, how much does it cost to be Batman for, say, a year?" found the detailed report on the link:

http://economicstudents.com/2013/01/what-economics-can-teach...
I think you are right, since Lamar Smith has been a prominent baddie, but it is still true that Lamar Alexander co-signed PIPA and COICA.
"Assuming he’s already around, how much does it cost to be Batman for, say, a year?"

more details on this: http://economicstudents.com/2013/01/what-economics-can-teach...
Yeah, it's totally possible to secure it properly, just leery until I've heard that those with some chops in the area have looked at it. In principle, signing it does the job, but the devil's always in the details. Sounds like what they're doing may well be sensible.
Is Bob Parsons (the elephant hunting guy) still CEO of GoDaddy, like OP's link suggests?

The guy's homepage says he's "only" executive chairman ([1]) but Wikipedia says he stepped down as CEO in 2011, citing this interview [2].

[1] http://www.bobparsons.me/index.php

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/bob-parsons.html...
Even with careful studies, there have been some awful messes. One famous example is Thalidomide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide (If you are not impressionable you can use Google images.)

Some drugs investigations are discontinued because they cause complications or deaths in the small test groups. Another important number is how many additional dead could have been if everyone could take unapproved treatments.

And most people would sign whatever the doctor tells them to sign, for example a "NOT FDA APPROVED"-waiver. People thrust whoever has a white coat and promises a cure. There has been problems with peopled enrolled in official experimental drug test, that didn't understand the details, but had signed just another "usual" form handled by the doctors.
Start charging, ASAP.

Even something as simple as $2/mo for 500 pushes. It creates perceived value and with that you can then use to create more buzz by then giving something of value away.

Talk to #android blogs and give them coupon codes for accounts that they can then give away and they will be more than willing to help you promote.

Whereas before if you pitch them to write about something free it just gets lost in the fray of blog posts pointing out other free things that come and go.

Good luck.
Chuck Lorre of TBBT on Ray Kurzweil, the human brain and sitcoms
According to futurist, inventor and all-around incredibly smart guy, Ray Kurzweil, human beings actually reorganize their frontal cortex as they pursue mastery over different skills. For example, a musician redesigns his or her brain by means of constant study, practice and performance. The same thing applies to a mathematician, carpenter and pole dancer. The brain is physically changed over time by activity and learning. This means we have direct influence and control over how our minds operate. This means we actually mold our perception of the world by the way we mold our brains. This means that over the last twenty-five years, I have reshaped my frontal lobe to do one thing, and one thing only -- write sitcoms. I can't tell you what a relief this knowledge is to me. To begin with, it single-handedly explains why I fail so consistently at other activities (golf, common courtesy and marriage come to mind). It also eases my fears about my disintegrating memory. Why would my brain waste precious neurons remembering where I put my glasses (on the top of my head), or the names of the camera crew (I think one guy is named John, or maybe Jamie or Nigel), when it's working overtime trying to structure a joke about a character masturbating like a meth-addled spider monkey? The answer is, it wouldn't. In other words, I have an advanced case of sitcom brain. On the plus side, I have been highly remunerated for my condition. The downside is that I am constitutionally incapable of ending any communication with a straight line.

Just can't do it.

Have to spin it somehow.

Even if it's cheap or makes no sense. God forbid there's no laugh at the end.

Vagina!
I think we agree on a few of those points, #4 however, worries me dearly. Did you even read it?

But even if all of this were not so, even if artists were indeed suffering (which they aren’t, but parasitic middlemen are), copyright would still need to be scaled back. It is now infringing on fundamental rights, and as a European citizen, I’m not prepared to give up those citizens’ rights for a multinational corporation to boost their profit.

In the 21st century, the Internet IS speech, IS assembly, IS association and IS the press.

If a corporation can’t sustain a business without having these rights limited, then that corporation deserves to go out of business. The sooner the better.

And in regards to this:

> so it's very hard to say whether the music industry profits grew despite piracy, because of piracy, or independent of piracy.

This has been covered countless times, piracy, has a huge, and known, positive effect on sales to music and movies.

http://torrentfreak.com/why-most-artists-profit-from-piracy/
http://torrentfreak.com/file-sharers-buy-more-movies-121018/
http://torrentfreak.com/file-sharers-buy-30-more-music-than-...

In fact, some studios have been accused of leaking their albums early over P2P to drum up interest. (good luck proving it)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/93891327/Hammond-File-Sharing-Leak

Further to that, try to keep in mind that most of an artists revenue does not come from music sales.
http://torrentfreak.com/music-sales-are-just-6-of-average-mu...
To be fair its really uncommon, but it has stuck out quite a bit in my mind.

The amusing part to me was he turned left only about a mile up so there was no real reason to stay tailgating (no off ramps up and coming). Just to note that I wasn't being a dick about things either.
By this logic, every company that provides any kind of storage mechanism for users has to be brought down.
Ah yes, I recall watching that, too. It was one of the Total War games.
I also find it irritating when people call everything "blog spam". Many blogs are fluff, but either we go with the votes or we don't. If a link to a blog article is posted and someone thinks it's "blog spam", they should post another link to the original content, if the original content is better, more informative, more complete, it will get voted up. If it doesn't, the "blog spam" was "better" content, as voted by the community, like everything else is supposed to be over here. There should be no need for the patronizing moderation.

If we don't trust the votes to select better content what are we using them for?
It goes both ways. There are few situations more annoying than when people use this argument to fend off sincere suggestions and constructive criticisms without giving them any thought.

People should also be more considerate about others' experiences.
Agreed, but he might consider following Dropbox's tiered pricing approach and marketing strategy.

Incentive free users to market the app for you, and only charge heavy users. Down the road a few months, when he has proven the app's value to a large number of free users who have in turn told their friends, he can start charging everybody. This approach would still show perceived value by charging heavy users, while not limiting the app's growth potential by giving access to everybody.
I graduated from the school. They wanted to get me out of there so at the end of my Sophomore year, they gave me a test, I aced it, and I got to not attend my senior year. (Strangely, they still let me compete in the Science Olympiad because I was the only one who knew how to use the GPS)
I was referring to the popular-by-name-but-not-readership Snow Fall feature by the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/.
There's something to be said of IITs and the way they've done a remarkable job of taking people out of extreme poverty and into (both Indian and American) upper middle classes.

The SATs have initially had this effect in the United States as well: they were initially fiercely opposed by the WASP elite as their immediate effect was to bring "undesirables" like Jews (and later Asians) into what were once the holiest of hollies (Ivy League universities, flag-ship state schools).

Today, however, SATs tend to be too susceptible to cramming: ironically the efforts at making SATs more culturally fair have turned them into reinforcements of existing class structure as now cramming and expensive tutoring become viable strategies.
Health Care's Trick Coin