skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You just said something monumental "Your company wont buy the fix, but that doesn't mean the fix doesn't exist. It means you can't take advantage of it, sure."

Thats one of the biggest things that Linux has going for it, if something breaks, YOU DON'T HAVE TO BUY THE FIX!

You can A. Fix it yourself; B. Get the latest source which probably has the fix (if it's a problem anyone else is having); or C. Filing a bug report and have the community fix it usually within a day, or even hours or minutes for really simple fixes.

Sure, Linux isn't for everyone, but for corporations and small businesses looking to save money, it looks better every day!
Nah...it's more that I live in SF and I have a startup and I'm increasingly meeting more and more of the people on HN, so I don't want to look like an idiot.

I think of HN as online equivalent of a lounge at a university where a lot of really interesting people swing by to hang out and talk about things they care about. If I stop to think about how I might respond in such a setting, if the types of people who are on HN were sitting next to me, I'd probably run most things through my head before they left my mouth :)
L.O.S.S. livecoding project
I tried the beta of this on my Lenovo Y510 with Intel graphics and the performance was horrible, due to the video drivers not being updated for the new Xorg 1.6 architecture.

On a positive note, my grandfather continues to enjoy his new Ubuntu 8.04.2 machine though, a welcome change to the Xubuntu 7.04 machine that was a 500Mhz P3 with 128MB RAM.
Ranking these companies based on their website traffic is misleading at best. For example, #12 is a software vendor that just hit $100M in sales. It's clearly doing much better than similarly ranked companies.

http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/2009/02/from_startup_to.html

Also, calling this site a startup (#42) seems like a stretch:

http://www.deadharddrive.com/

There seem to be several random websites with little traffic on the list, I just clicked on this one at random.
Brazilian truck drivers take advantage of US Military Satellites - An Open Relay in Space
Do you have any theory on why traders burn out so quickly? I am genuinely curious about it...
A genomic CluE for cloud computing
Only Two Percent of Bloggers Can Make a Living
> That's backwards. In a Venn diagram relations are the big circle and functions are the smaller circle inside it. A function is a deterministic relation.

That's partially right. In a Venn diagram, whenever you see a little circle S contained in a big circle T what you have is a relation that says S is a subset of T. Specifically this is a relation that maps a set of sets to {TRUE, FALSE}. Fundamentally we have sets and mappings[1] between sets. A relation is a mapping between some set and a set of logical values. So relations are mappings but not all mappings are relations. In the case of SQL a relation is a well-defined mapping so we call it a 'function'.

> If a SQL query looks like |1|2|3|3| then what you actually have, mathematically, is {{1,2,3},{3}}, aka multi-set or bag.

No sir. What you have, formally, is a programmatically generated relation/function (under a closed-world assumption) in which one of the entries in the mapping has been overly specified. Your relation maps the set {1,2,3, 4 ...} to the set {TRUE, FALSE}. If you pass it the value 1 or 2 or 3 you get TRUE. If you pass it the value 4 you get FALSE. The domain of this function is {1,2,3, 4, ...} and the codomain (or range) is {TRUE, FALSE}. Having an entry listed twice in the definition is similar to the following:

f(x) = 0 when x = 0 and x * x if x is real.

That function has been overly specified. Now if we had a table with entries like this:

1 Fred Jones

2 James Smith

3 Jane Doe

4 Alice Baker

3 George Washington

then we have a problem since the 'function' is now ambiguous (and hence not a function).

Now, back to my employee table example. If I have a table called Employees defined as:

EMP_ID (int), FIRST_NAME (string), LAST_NAME (string)

where EMP_ID is the primary key then what I have is a composition of functions (a relation in SQL is always a function)

One function, we'll call it G maps full names to Integers and has this 'signature': S x S -> Z where S is the set of strings and Z is the set of integers.

The other function, we'll call it H maps Integers to {TRUE, FALSE} so my table is actually equivalent to the function H of G.

Now I realize that this is all abstract and a bit pedantic but it is nonetheless what SQL and relational algebra are all about even if we don't ordinarily think of it like this.

[1] Formally, mappings, functions, transformations and operations are all the same things just used in specific contexts.
Sounds like a pretty bad situation. Look at http://www.ubnt.com/ if you want dirt-cheap long-range wifi.
Most investors are going to demand standard terms. Any time you go with non-market terms, you better have a very compelling product. And in a down economy that's even more important.

To some degree negotiating a term sheet is like poker. There's some provisions/terms you feel really strongly about, but there are other terms you're secretly willing to sacrifice (as a negotiating tool). And the cardinal rule to bluffing is not telling the other side your true intentions. If I'm the investor, since Mr. Ressi has already stated he'll waive the provisions if necessary, why wouldn't I just demand the provisions be waived?
You just took the first step. The second step is to figure out what you want to do. If you don't have ideas of your own, ask them to come forward with their own. Use hackers to find other hackers; too many times I found a guy or a gal with a good business brain between their ears, but things fell apart because they're surrounded with too many of their college buddies and frat-brothers who all want a cut in the deal.

Take care of your people. It is easy for a hacker to put in 18 hour days if he knows you're out there taking care of his bills. The simple act of paying a guy on time can make a world of difference. Even if he is working for equity, don't hesitate to find a grand or two from somewhere, anywhere, and cut him a check on the 26th of the month. Many hackers would be more than happy to work on the startup AND take on side-gigs, it's up to you to go out there and find the gigs, if you can't raise the money yourself.

Try to think very small. Most of us are not out there to grab your money and go. It's much easier for me to bring along two laptops and "settle" in a corner, somewhere in your basement. I will run a few cables around, replace your DSL router with something beefier, and I can stay there until very late at night and come back as soon as I open my eyes. YOU, on the other hand, need to be aware of my expenses; I spend gas driving to you. I go away to eat out twice while I'm at your home or office. If I'm meeting you and your investor buddies in pubs and cafes, I'm probably spending more money than I usually do. Feel free to reimburse me at the first opportunity.

Think of yourself as the manager of a band. The musicians make the music, sure, but they're completely dysfunctional without you. They can keep your commission and do the business side of things themselves, but multitasking is VERY expensive and taxing mentally. You can safely keep a band of musicians in your basement for weeks, even months, and they will do great work, as long as you're catering to their peripheral needs and staying out of their way. What you can't do is treat them as employees who you must micromanage and watch them do "tangible", measurable work.

[Edit: Sometimes people asked me to work with them on a startup, but they already had a draconian work process. Some guy had a quota of the number of e-mails I must send him a day. Where I should store source code, graphic assets and other stuff, and in the end told me I must install a VNC client so he can connect to my desktop. Had to dump him. If he told me I could use his home server to store things, I would have setup the version control and an ftp server myself.

Try to be nurturing and kind and you will juice the most productivity and loyalty out of anyone. Be honest and open. You don't need to give me the minutia of our financial status, if you think you can meet a budget gap by getting another client, go ahead and get that client and let me focus on the work. Don't introduce unnecessary uncertainty in our stability. OTOH, if you think we're tanking, it would be nice of you to give me a heads up.]
You need to make the sign up button have a link cursor. I almost didnt click on it because I thought it was only an image.
it'd be nice if screenshots were on the front of the page -- otherwise, it looks like another weekend project that never got finished.

increase the size of your TRY NOW button 5X, and you'll notice a higher conversion rate.
What kind of antennas would I need to make something like this work?
I'm in class from 8 am until 4 with a two hour lunch, I spend the two hours working on freelance projects or my tiny little startup (its already paid itself off!). From 4:30 to 8ish I work at a web development shop. Every day I program in C++, C#, Java, and PHP (with SQL, javascript, 3 different JS libraries and a templating language all mixed in). I move between Eclipse and Visual Studio for Java, C# and C++ at school. For my startup I use Vim and Netbeans (trying to learn Vim but I'm not all that effective in it yet so I move to Netbeans or Notepad++). My startup work is done on the weekend when I boot into Ubuntu. At work I use Textmate on a Mac.

After adjusting to my new environment 4 times in a day I manage to complete 40 minutes of real work.
I don't count my company's use of XP against Microsoft. I am suggesting that's one of the challenges they face: installed base.

We didn't upgrade to Vista because there was no compelling reason. The hardware requirements were stiff and none of our business software was actually going to run better on Vista than it already did on XP.

We still pay Microsoft plenty through our Enterprise Agreement, and they're a good company to deal with if you're running a corporation.

I hope I didn't imply that I dislike Microsoft or their software. I tried not to. I honestly want them to get BETTER at what they're doing because competition is healthy in any market.

I think Microsoft has an innovation problem, and an innovation problem is death in the technology game. If you're not innovating, someone will innovate for you. The lock-in that Windows and Office provided over the years is decreasing as things move to the cloud, so personal preference can now be a bigger factor in the choice of OS you use to reach the cloud.

Regarding your question about something that makes OS X better than Vista, for your purposes the answer may be "nothing." I too use Chrome on the PC and love it. I wish it was available on the Mac.

I do believe Apple is innovating faster than Microsoft, especially on the OS front. When one considers OS X drives the iPhone as well as the Mac, there's no question who is driving the industry at this point. The iPhone was launched publicly over two years ago and still no one has released anything close. Two years is an eternity in technology, and until someone releases a viable competitor we don't yet know how truly far behind second place is.

Spend some time with a Mac. Borrow a friend's. You'll like it. It may not be for you, but you'll appreciate seeing things through a slightly different lens.
Its good to study companies like Zappos. They are very successful without being in Silicon Valley.

I hope to take a tour of Zappos in May, when I'm there for rails conf.
Why would he be locked up in supermax?

They can link him to one armed hijacking, during which the only people seriously injured were his confederates (who were killed).

I don't know exactly the charges he'll be subject to, but according to the calculator at http://sentencing.us , a robbery with firearm discharge and restraint of a person, but with 'acceptance of responsibility' would get 6-7.5 years, and less with a rapid guilty plea. I imagine time served could be even shorter.

The piracy is a shocking issue, but the threat of a single teenage lackey isn't going to justify a draconian sentence.
NGINX + PHP-FPM + APC = Awesome
Most of the radios have built-in antennas.
I found that simply removing 'reddit.com' from 'my reddits' made my front page considerably more valuable.

I do read the comments, as they are generally entertaining. If HN is a student lounge outside the computer lab, Reddit is the local pub ... right before closing time. Two environments that I find valuable :).
Why are there fewer female programmers?
I can say only one thing: Switch to JSON. It's readable, you don't have to decide between attribute values and text and you get to save a (*)#$ of bytes. XML is so passe'.
SitePoint considered a startup?

And at
*
#62 designbay

#63 logo.designbay

#64 graphic.designbay

#65 web.designbay
*

So different subdomains are different startups?
seriously wtf?

P.S: diego, you are right anyway. This post is surely written by an author who wrote it just for the sake of writing a blogpost not out of intention to share something interesting. Plain link bait
No I am not. Actually the idea of giving equity in exchange for a service still bothers me (like the ad on HN the other day for an apartment for rent in exchange for equity) but I have learnt the credibility that one earns from having a great lawyer can make all the difference, especially early on.
And if you can get over the absolutely massive amount of wasted paper in each issue, Vanity Fair is a far better subscription to have than Time.
Ever notice that Apple hardly ever uses the word "Innovate"? It seems like companies use this word when they haven't ACTUALLY done anything innovative, but would sure like to convince everyone (and themselves) that they did.
The whole experience was probably best summed up by Amanda who, when asked why it was taking us so long to get the machine up and running, and why we all looked so unhappy, replied “Oh, it’s just so…Microsofty.”

This is exactly the problem with this device. My memories of my five minutes with one:

1) From a distance: It looks like a giant iPod touch under glass. They are better replicas of iPods than the giant LCD/Plasma screens with an iPod-alike shell at the front of the Apple store.

2) Up close: You can tell it's DLP projected. The image quality was a sizable step down from the gorgeous LCD of the iPod. I think it would have been better to work with a plasma vendor to make a plasma with a thick glass surface.

3) First touch: The top, maybe 1mm or less, of the glass top is soft. You _really_ get the feeling that you could damage it with your fingernail or a tile cup coaster, or other things you could reasonably expect to do to a table top. To their credit, the one I looked at was absolutely pristine, so perhaps it's a perception thing.

4) Other: The stupid white Windows mouse pointer was always on and dead center on the screen. The whole time. It didn't follow the touches, which would have felt unpolished but understandable, it just stuck out like a scab. This kind of thing has to make Steve Jobs cackle with glee.

Overall it looks like a solution in search of a problem, and I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would pay that kind of money for something so superficially polished but so lacking in technical engineering.
The hacker upper-body workout
With school and personal projects I often find my self in similar positions. I have been working on becoming proficient using Vim and what helped is using the Vim plugins for each editor. I pretty much forced myself to use Vim or some derivative for every thing I do and it has worked wonders so far.

The link for the netbeans plug-in is here
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3653

It is a java implementation of vim and works pretty well. The plugin for ecplipse places an instance of Vim withing the editor window but I found it was quite buggy and slowed things down a bit (at least on my laptop). I don't know if there is a plug in for visual studio but you could check.

I am so glad I forced my self to use it because it payed off. Just keep a cheat sheet by your side and within a few days you will at least be able to get stuff done, and then just pick up a new trick each day to really learn to fly. Just start now because once you get going you will wish you made the leap sooner.
Ubuntu 9.04: Slick as Win7, Mac OS X
Agreed. Didn't we do the "ride scooter to the office beanbag" thing in 99? It all seems a little forced. Maybe sticking a vaneer of excitement over the front of your business is how things roll in Vegas.

Personally, I think they could lose a few Twitter experts and hire someone with a clue about foreign customers.

From their site:

"We ship to the following locales with a $60 USD shipping fee for the first item and $30 for each additional item, regardless of weight or dimensions" (Asia, Aus and NZ)

"To order please call +1 702 943 7909. Any orders placed online with an international shipping address will be canceled"
the daily beast is quality
That depends on what you use it for - yaml may also be appropriate for configuration files.
IRA's have limits, and you pay tax now, instead of later. 401ks let you reuduce your taxible income & most employer contributions are some sort of matching.
The YouTube link comment deserved the downvotes. You meant "as a renter I'm very happy about the lower rents". But directing people to listen to videogame music, at another site, to get your meaning adds a level of frivolous, time-wasting indirection. It's understandable people didn't appreciate it.
Automatically loading more when you reach the bottom could be a nice touch, as Slashdot does.
It's time to not go to work..
Some critical and inspiring words (print ad) from Narayana Murthy, one of the founders of Infosys Technologies, one of India's largest IT companies with offices in 22 countries and 104,850 professionals working for them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._R._Narayana_Murthy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infosys_Technologies
www.mynetdiary.com , also see in the App Store
LOL - did you guys even read the post?

"Sites from startup-australia.org are ranked and listed below. If you think that a site is missing, or that one oughtn’t be included on the list, then feel free to edit the wiki.

Sites are ranked based on an average of Alexa and Compete traffic data."

So:

1) They don't compile the list, only rank the people on it. The Startup Australia wiki appears to be an openly editable list of startups. If you have a problem with who is on it, change it.

2) The data comes from Alexa and Compete so your point about random sites with little traffic is retarded.

3) The landing site has no advertising, so why would they bother link-baiting?

It's not the best list, but then again what does it matter? No one is going to win anything for being on it, so take it for what it appears to be, a fun resource for those of us interested in the Australian tech startup scene.
INDenverTimes Troubles May Signal Difficulty of Replicating Newsrooms
Eminem 3 am lyrics
So where can we get your e-book?
It's not just Time and Newsweek. I get complimentary subscriptions to both Fortune and Money, and I find it almost impossible to read either of them. It's like a bad television transcript.

(17 page rant about the failings of most media and media consumers implied)
2) It has to be DLP projected - there's an infrared camera below the screen that captures your touches - which means that there can be no obstruction between the camera and the table top (like, oh, say, a plasma screen).

3) This is a pliant silicon surface and necessary with the sort of tech that Microsoft is implementing. This is somewhat sad, since hobbyists (look up NUIGroup if you are interested) have gotten better results with a pure glass surface (which obviously takes a lot more punishment).

This is the difference between Apple and Microsoft - attention to detail. MS will get the core bullet point features working, but when using it there are so many rough edges and little things that irk you that ultimately you have a negative experience, despite the fact that the machine is perfectly functional.
Websites are ranked based on traffic. Startups are ranked based on revenue.

Btw, we are ranked #25 on this list - http://feedity.com
Are you asking where to find them or how to recognise them?
I believe AT&T has them as kiosks in the stores, and specially tagged demo phones that can interact with the screen (e.g. place the phone on the surface and get its specs, along with price plans, etc)

It's cool stuff, and as a point-of-sale thing can seriously boost marketing. It just doesn't seem like MS should be someone tackling a project that requires immaculate usability.
Great question. I'm sure you will get some good answers. There will also be a lot of good stuff that is not on the front page.

Searchyc:http://searchyc.com/find+hackers
ya. I didn't notice that. And very few will notice that.

I just read the factors of ranking (Alexa rank, hitwise etc) adn then moved on to look at the table, which most will do.
Microsoft Profit Falls for First Time in 23 Years
Just post "correlation != causation" in some thread and get it over with :-)
Some commenters recommended Nginx to me a while back. It freaking rocks. It was such a breeze to setup and the memory usage is incredibly low and stable. Thanks for the tips then, and thanks for continuing to post articles to spread the word!
upgrade your car to one that has CC. You can then enable email notifications when there's a bug in the engine, or or the brake fails the unit test suite (hopefully it's not too late then)
I'm not sure what's worse: the guy complaining, or the guy complaining about the guy complaining.

Shouldn't this thread be about good corporate policy? I remember working for a government contractor and everyone seemed like a bunch of drones. I'm happy to hear one success story. It gives me ideas about how I want my own business to be someday :)
If you live in California, a LLC might not be the right choice, as California charges a "gross receipts fee" on LLC revenue (even if you form in Delaware, you are stuck with California's fee structure because you live and operate in California). A corporation might work better for you. I have written about this extensively at www.eminutesonline.com. Good luck!
Yep, agreed. When is someone going to port Adblock Plus over to the offline world?
I like the economist but find the density of information in there is overwhelming (I can't seem to find the time to read the whole thing in a week). Additionally, I feel the stories hold more importance than from other news sources.
Finding a techie cofounder off the street at the idea stage is next to impossible. Because if someone really has the entrepreneurial spirit they are already doing their own startup.

You gotta hire. Then at the end of the project, if the guy works out, you can offer him cofounder role. As a "business guy" get ready to pretty much cover all the bills while the other guy codes, no matter if he is a hire or a cofounder. Better to hire and see how the guy works out before you start giving away equity.
Nissan Micra to Drive Into Indian Roads Early 2010
Victorian diseases: Back from the dead
Another thing those magazines can never compete on, anonymity.

The Economist doesn't run bylines. This is unthinkable for most journalists and publications. Without bylines, then you actually have to pay your people a decent wage. Also, without bylines, historically the Economist has been able to get contributions from people who'd rather not be recognized, foreign ministers, state department officials, people who actually know what's going on.
What if you set up an intermediate magazine service? People subscribe to magazines through you, paying a hefty premium. They get their magazines with all the ads town out of them a day later than usual.
Complex organic molecules detected in interstellar space
Answered in section 4:

http://www.flightlab.com/~joe/sgml/faq-not.txt
The dollar bill & the economist.