skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Startups are hard, no doubt. However, perspective is interesting. In the past year my father died unexpectedly, and my wife and I gave up on having kids (and possibly our relationship) after six years of trying by all means imaginable. After those experiences running a startup seems like child's play to me.

If when you go to bed at night your main worry is whether you'll be able to close your next round of funding, you have it pretty good (at least in theory). Trust me.
Thank you, that's a very detailed list of things to remember and take care of. I've heard of 'piercing the corporate veil' in cases of gross negligence on behalf of the business, so nothing protects a person fully, but it sounds like there are definitely more harmless ways it can happen, too.
I'm sorry I didn't mention Valve's steam as a competitor in the post, I am very very excited to see what they come up with. I <3 Valve. I do think Apple and Android have a little more indie developer momentum right now, but not sure how that will play out long-term.
Intel to enter the TV game, but Microsoft already has it under control
Could not embed GitHub Gist 4091298: API Rate Limit Exceeded for 198.61.245.60

A good example of why using gist for your corporate blog may not be such a good idea. Right when you are getting a lot of attention your post becomes a lot less useful.

Its too bad because I was interested to read the article
Using correct English capitalization rules makes someone "uninformed" now?
The Broken Mobile App Model of Today
Ask HN: Is Freelancer.com for real?
I am visiting the site and it is all gamified and shiny and whatnot...

But how much I can score hourly as mobile developer there? Any clue?

Also how much of the projects there are real? And how hard is to get projects?
If it's important, don't hack it – Fresh thoughts on Growth Hacking
Heck, I'll sell you an iPhone 5 for $1 if you agree to sign up for my 2 year Good Vibes Karma service (I send "good vibes" your way monthly; phone services not included) at $50/month. Cancelling the service incurs an $800 early termination fee. If that's a $1 phone to you, can you direct me to any friends and family who think the same way? I feel I may be selling a lot of $1 iPhones.
well, xbox 360 kinda had digital distribution since it's launch.
> To do this any other way is insane.

I don't. I vote in alderman and mayors who do this stuff. Just the idea that direct democracy is for everything is questionable. You just get bikeshedding and other forms of mass ignorance.

Nor do we vote what jet fighters get bought and how many of them. Obama decides that. You may have voted for him, but that doesn't mean you have this level of granular control because it would be insane if you did.

One of the US's biggest faults is that there's too much direct democracy in the form of referendums and line items brought to popular votes. In my town I vote in everything from all the county judges (30+ people) to the dogcatcher. Elitism and autocracy that go against what Joe Public thinks are needed. If everything was direct, we'd be living in a bankrupt theocracy sending the poor and minorities to gas chambers while enriching the popular and well connected. The people can be as much dictators as a sole individual.
> A customer pays for goods or services.

True

> It doesn't matter if they use dollars, bitcoins, or bushels of corn.

Or, say, personal information that can be used in targeting advertising.

> Nearly all users of Google are NOT customers

I'd describe them a suppliers, but unless you've suddenly decided that, contrary your early statement, it does matter what they provide in exchange for the services they receive, they can also, by your logic, be described accurately as "customers".

> and indeed do form part of the product offering, as the OP stated

No, the users do not form part of the product offering; the slave trade is not part of Google's business models.

They are suppliers of inputs (both information used in targeting advertising, and the advertising opportunities through which the actual advertising is delivered being the key pair of inputs) that are used in Google's product offerings; insofar as these inputs are exchanged for services Google provides rather than for cash payment, they are also customers purchasing those services in a non-cash exchange.
Make your libraries easy to do things that are easy, but make hard things possible too.

IME Ronacher follows this dictum very well. I'd suggest that anyone who wants to see this try his Flask and Werkzeug packages.

As for storing extra state, about which many here have complained, I've found it really helpful that I can set werkzeug.http._accept_re to my own RE when I want to do something weird with media types. That is state that the vast number of users won't need to touch, yet the fact that it exists makes life better for someone who does need it. I'm sure there are numerous other examples I haven't had to bother with yet. Would we really be better off if this RE had to be passed in every time we handled a request? (Although I would understand if you argued this value should be stored in an object not in a module. I haven't needed that yet.)

On the other hand, routing to and handling resources with these packages is typically done with functions and decorators only, although the route decorators are methods of the application object. So Ronacher is not any sort of hardass about classes; he just does what works.
Funny, I literally just created one of these yesterday...

https://github.com/CodyHenshaw/Misc_Repo/blob/master/sublime...
Horse flies were the number one cause of running around like crazy on the pool deck and then jumping into the pool and holding your breath when I was a kid.
I'm pretty sure there are 50 such books, one per state. OK, maybe not 50, because I'm not sure every state defines an LLC structure. But certainly you can find shelves full of books on "How to incorporate and run a NC LLC" or "How to start an LLC in California" etc. They explain all the paperwork necessary to file your LLC, talk about the reporting requirements, etc., and explain the stuff about required meetings, minutes, etc. Basically, all the nit picky bureaucratic details of keeping the State happy about your LLC. There are separate books on dealing with the tax side of things, so you'll find titles like "LLC Taxation for Small Businesses" etc. Can't remember if those are usually state specific or not.

Of course, if you choose to incorporate your own LLC (or C-corp or S-corp or whatever) there's always risk in that vs. hiring a professional to do it for you. I'm not really suggesting one approach or the other, but FWIW, I chose to incorporate our NC LLC myself by using one of those books and the stuff from the appropriate NC gov website.

But, also FWIW, if/when the day comes that we start trying to raise outside money or doing any complicated deals involving ownership/equity, we'll reincorporate as a Delaware C-corp, and I expect to hire a seasoned lawyer who specializes in that kind of thing, to take care of that.
Surprisingly, I've found the UI on the Wii U to be generally pretty good, even great at times. There's a lot of consistency between different parts of the OS and the underlying concepts are all totally sound.

It makes me wonder whether this will be the generation where consoles can no longer get away with having poor UI design.
Ah, indeed! Thanks for the heads up!
This is why I hate DRM. I want to be able to use my software forever.

If it's technically and culturally capable of doing so, the manufacturer has an economic incentive to want the software to die with your computer: That'll put you in the market for either another copy, or one of their newer products, every few years. Even if you were perfectly happy with the old version and upgraded your computer for other reasons.
> That's basically how the Great Depression happened

Source? I'm curious to read about that.
Massive Google Play privacy issue
Hey John, that's pretty much what I found when I did an explainer for Wired about them:

“You have no obligation to obey the disclaimer if you decide to read a misdirected email, send it to your friends, or send it to a Wired reporter,” says Susan Lyon, a privacy and data security attorney for Perkins Coie. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/pr_burningquestion_leg...
Lone Person in Toronto has median of 22k
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/f...

Lone Person in Toronto treated as Family (single parent) has median of 39k
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/f...

I noticed that you put down 300$ into savings, but later, at end of month, you claim that there 0$ left, as if savings evaporated. Other numbers

As per housing / condo market I totally agree. Toronto and Vancouver are way overpriced. To anyone interested on Canadian housing market I recommend checking out http://www.greaterfool.ca/
Massive Dosing - the LSD Thumbprint
True. And yet: the author has overtly placed it in a public place normally understood to be for sharing.

At the very least, people can reasonably assume an implicit permission to do the usual things that are done with Github public repositories: fork at Github, create local copies, create derivatives with the intent of sharing back to the original, etc.

And, if he's using Github's free plan, that's only available for projects that are "open source", a term with a fairly well-understood meaning in our profession. So he's likely also implicitly represented to Github that whatever the formal license, it qualifies as 'open source'.

The author could be confused. It could be a trap. He could probably withdraw any of these implicit permissions by taking the right explicit future steps.

But in the meantime, people don't have to fear normal copying and sharing based on a default 'all rights reserved' assumption. It's probably OK, and even if the author changes his assertions later, penalties for copying during this 'implied consent' period are unlikely.
Growing a Business [1] is the book you're talking about it. I picked it up on a whim from a book sale a couple years ago and it was an interesting read. Like this one, some things are fairly outdated (talks a fair bit about catalog sales), but overall pretty sound advice for building a sustainable business.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Business-Paul-Hawken/dp/067167...
As long as you trust this unknown third-party not to keep detailed logs.
Still, would knowledge go away today? Interesting to consider what would be the minimum sensible size for a modern society? For example perhaps acquiring raw materials like iron would be a huge problem?
Yep. <strikeout>HTML Standards</strikeout> <strikeout>webkit</strikeout> Chrome proposed standards.

We're doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
The concept of entrepreneurism as a small-time life-style has evaporated from the culture, and now entrepreneur and start-up means “get big fast.”

I dunno... I guess it depends on what filter bubble you live in and what echo chamber you participate in, and any number of other factors, but my feeling has been that, yes, "startup" - as opposed to "small busines" - does mean a business that's intended to grow very big (not necessarily fast though) and is more in the mold of your typical Silicon Valley "startup". OTOH, I've always perceived that people use the term "entrepreneur" to refer to anyone from a one man plumbing company, to a startup that's aiming to be the next Facebook. "Entrepreneur" to me includes mom and pop restaurants, tradesmen of various kinds, small consulting companies, whatever.

But, in either case, regardless of how the terminology has been changed over time, the idea of "entrepreneurship as a small-time life-style" clearly still exists. Maybe now people use the term "lifestyle business" but who really cares about the label?
When a Super Bowl Promotion Goes Right
If it helps, the determinism of the observable universe in the cases of physics and chemistry might be an elaborate illusion of averages on the quantum level.

In essence, we can't see the quantum interaction of particles and their superpositions, we can only see the average produced by a large number of these actions and reactions. This gives a small, but nonetheless interesting, hole from which randomness can leak into the apparent deterministic systems we see.

I recently walked a similar road when thinking about human behavior as a product of genetics and outside inputs. For me, the angst was the view that "free will" might be fictional, and I had built a lot of my personal ethics onto that pillar. But it was curiosity that led me out of that nihilistic moment when I thought about the loophole above.
How the Heck Do I Use GitHub?
or use something like this

https://github.com/LeaVerou/prefixfree
The faq does say that a point blank shot should "do in" a wasp or cockroach. So, if you can aim that well it should kill horseflies.

(I agree about the bites! I've only been bitten once but it's not the kind of thing you forget.)
I love excel. Users love excel. Love it so much to the extent that we actively embed an excel sheet in our internal apps now instead of any third party "data grids".

Why?

They're easy to work with, copy/paste across apps, easy to create interface logic - even so much that the users can "code" up the sheet and we embed it and bind the dataset to a database or service layer.
Wow, that brings back so many memories: thank you for posting this.

I loved Merlin.
Is there something in the Github TOS that suggests that? Because otherwise I think your beliefs about people's reasonable assumptions are the opposite of true.

Although I agree with you that his intentions are probably not at this point to take advantage of his copyright on the code. :)
Well it was sort of a lisp macro joke. ;)
"SQL is describing the data that you want and letting the computer figure out how to get it to you."

This is known as declarative programming, and is the basis for functional programming languages like Lisp and Haskell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming

It's a different paradigm, but one worth exploring if you're only familiar with imperative OO.
This is a known issue in Mathics that has been fixed in the upcoming version 0.6 (soon to be released).

Mathics vice dictator here btw.
That is incredibly strange. I have to wonder what possible reason they could have for that?
Most non-unionized service businesses take it for granted that the quality of their work will be mercilessly evaluated by people who aren't themselves providers of the same service---people called customers.

They assume that negative evaluations (both individual and group) will put pressure on the service organizations to evaluate their internal operations, fire some people, promote others, reorganize resources, change their operations to improve customer evaluations, or go out of business (and fire everyone).

Then there are unionized or government operations, where people are protected by "the contract" (real or figurative), don't have any clear sense of who their customers are, and rise up in great umbrage at the impudence of outsiders thinking their work should be evaluated. (Customers, to people who don't understand the concept, are "outsiders" or "civilians.")

I'm generation four of five generations of school teachers, but don't talk to me about who is and isn't allowed to have an opinion about the way our education system operates.

I'm a parent, the customer, and to participate in this debate, that's all the qualification I need.
My point was my last sentence. I was attempting to ironically point out that you were criticizing from a position of assumed superiority without offering anything. My means of doing so was self-referential, until the last sentence which was intended to give the game away. I guess I was not clear enough, and I didn't mean to offend.

Anyway, surely you can enjoy the irony of messing up grammar during a fierce critique of another country's education system?

Meanwhile, the trouble with the argument you're using with libertarians that since the US is so rich they could afford better public services is that libertarians can easily counter with "America is so rich (partly) because we don't waste money on that stuff."

I don't believe that, but it's very hard to refute.
Discount Auto Parts
Deceptive web practices in the extreme
I believe that many of the customer service software solutions have what amount to pre-programmed macros. Eg they may have a 'greet' one saying "Hello ${NAME}, I will do everything I can to assist you." and another 'orderstatus' "I understand your message is about your order status."

The support rep can then chain together the macros for some or most of the response far quicker than they could ever type. And of course that increases their productivity (messages handled per hour) and possibly even has an effect on happy customers per hour although that is harder to measure and seems less of a interest.

The net result are email responses that are indistinguishable from robots, and I suspect the systems would take an initial stab at which macros should be used for a response.

The real problem is companies rarely seem to take the effort to work out why people used email or call centres instead of self service. For outsourced providers there is absolutely no incentive to do anything to reduce call volumes.

Joel also has a good article http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html
AFAIK it lost money its first couple of years (primarily due to the fact it was rushed to market),

That, and the fact that nobody in Japan wanted to buy one.
I can't tell whether the 90s were a little renaissance in animation, or whether it's just my imagination.

As gcatalfamo and yareally pointed out, Disney had Duck Tales, Darkwing Duck, Chip n Dale and so on.

Meanwhile at Warner Brothers they had Tiny Toons, Animaniacs and of course the excellent Batman: The Animated Series. I rewatched it recently and, unlike a lot of my nostalgic favourites, it has held up beautifully.

MTV backed Beavis and Butthead and Aeon Flux. Fox backed King of the Hill and was riding the wave of some of the best of the Simpsons.

And let's not forget Klasky Csupo -- most famous for Rugrats and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, they were also responsible for my favourite "cartoon for grownups", Duckman. I love that show -- if it'd been around for the DVD era we'd probably still be watching it.

Edit: and Nickolodeon (forehead smack) with The Ren & Stimpy Show and Rocko's Modern Life.
> or $25/year (i think it is) for Google Play

Actually it is 25$ once and for all.
I have been working through this, and so far it has been very good. I just wanted some examples to help see what is out there and start to kind of get a taste of what things seem to work and not work.
I know some Clojure and barely any Haskell at all. I opened up "Learn you a Haskell" and copied and pasted a few code samples that appeared to have strange syntax. The idea of the post was to show the difference in the amounts of syntax in the two languages.
The problem with app templates is, how often do you start a new app vs. how often do you want to maintain every change you made to your base app template? Article pretty much nails it.
Hey Young Developers: Board the train Vishal Biyani
The key sentence from Broder's followup is: "But the test that Tesla offered was of the Supercharger, not of the Model S, which we already know is a much-praised car. "

The first question is: is that what Tesla proposed, and was the proposal based on a cold-weather long-distance round-trip journey using only Superchargers?

If so, then Tesla bit off more than it could chew. If no, then Broder is misrepresenting Tesla's Supercharger service -- is it a waypoint recharge to extend driving range reasonably in conjunction with normal overnight charging as would ordinarily be practiced, or is it a service on which long-distance travelers can rely on exclusively?

My suspicion is the former (in which case Broder is at fault). This still leaves Tesla with a serious image problem (and a ruffled, if still understanding reviewer at The New York Times). For all the attractions and upsides of EVs, range, and cold-weather range degredation, remain significant issues.

But in this case, Musk's reliance on log data doesn't seem entirely relevant: it's operator behavior and compliance which need to be addressed.
By "someone should fix this issue" you mean "Heroku should add web-socket support". And they are.
Yahoo CEO says Microsoft search deal underperforms
Your service is worthless, but the service that comes with an iPhone is required for the phone to operate.
It is. The first hour or so is sort of tough to get with because the interface is so minimal, but it's very powerful. He's financing development through the beta and although I don't do much composition on the computer now I think I'm going to buy a license from him because it's so different from anything else out there. It sounds filthy, and I mean that in a positive way.
I honestly don't know if Apple will enter this market, but I'm not quite as pessimistic as you are about the profit margin as the reason not to.

I think they could build a next-generation-console-capable Apple-TV and sell it at or below $199 while keeping their 40% margin. They would sell you each additional wireless controller (and it would be sweetly designed, I suspect) for the standard $79 peripheral cost.

The primary contributor to their bill-of-material cost savings vs. competitors is that they already own and/or license at huge volume their CPU and GPU cores and know how to fabricate them in multi-core formats with high-speed cross-connectivity. They can also buy RAM and flash for SSD storage at better costs than anybody else. These are the primary cost drivers (basically money flowing to IBM, nVidia, etc for CPU/GPU and money flowing elsewhere for RAM/SSD/HDD) for xBox, PS, Wii.

Apple would have dramatically lower overall startup costs versus the original xBox/xBox360 and PS2/3 given they already have a toolchain and SMP operating system with sandboxing, an App Store and its back-end, user-accounts and payment infrastructure, and numerous other costs shared with the rest of the Mac and iOS ecosystems.

Apple wouldn't have a lot of work to do to train developers: tell us the screen resolution, how to interact with the controller and any other new hardware capabilities, tell us anything special about the GPU's and let us go to town with the existing toolchain we are using for iPhone and iPad.

So, again, I have no idea if they'll do it, I just think it would be a very profitable business for them.
It is nice to see an article like that, lately most articles are about the violence between the drug cartels. Also, after 9/11 Mexico has been ignored by the general media, and the public attention focused in the middle east.

It is not fully recognized that the US and Mexico have complementary economies. The US is able to compete with China by taking advantage of Mexican labor. Furthermore, Mexico is a big market for american products. The ideal situation is to have american companies opening the Mexican market and at the same time take advantage of the available labor. There many advantages, the younger generation of Mexicans is very open and understanding of american culture(music, movies, sports, video games, clothing, etc) and they are willing to learn, travel is done as easily as traveling with in the US, times zones are the same, etc.
This is veering a bit off topic, but Apple do a fair bit for their $100/year. Especially in regards to handling overseas tax withholding to ensure that you don't need to keep up with every country's local tax laws. They also stand between you and the customer with regards to processing refunds, volume and educational licensing.

Google Play, as far as I'm aware, don't do this for every country you sell in. Leading to situations where you may be liable for tax payments but won't know it unless you do the research yourself. This is discussed in more detail here: http://retrodreamer.com/blog/2012/03/why-dont-we-have-paid-v...
I've added a bit of an explanation as to why there's no NumPy version.