skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do you think scarcity should have anything to do with the vesting of property rights in something? Under most libertarian theories of property rights that I'm familiar with, property rights vest when something is made useful. For instance, property rights in unowned land vest when someone puts the land to productive use.

If you have a farm, and you have such a bountiful harvest that you end up producing so much food that you can't possibly use it or sell it all before it rots, under your theory of property would that excess food no longer be your property, because food is no longer a scarce resource for you?
not very many startup business models work from day 1. Startups are interesting if they are growing, not necessarily a foolproof business model; you are consistently patching the holes.

If you get a lot of press coverage, it probably means you are a good hustler and marketer, which is pretty vital to your success. If the market is bad, switch markets. Kudos to Danielle & Kevin.
Probably vs. LinkedIn and online, in particular.
> A major problem infrequently mentioned is that a lot of people, especially in parts of business far from R&D, see patents solely as a way to recoup private investment, not supposed to be balanced with public interest after limited times, and they use number of patents as a proxy for amount of innovation.

Lots of people in R&D see things this way. My friends in "Big Engineering" are proud of the number of patents they have to their name.
I'm sorry, but please learn to differentiate between a shitty day and overall sexism. When people are angry, they'll strike so that it hits the hardest, it just so happened that it was a woman and the derogatory term against her is 'bitch'.
So, please, get over yourself, and report the incident as an incident, not as a case.

Also, tell the kid to grow up, it might help him in life.
I'm an employee with options, and I'm trying to understand how all of this works. Can you please tell me if I have this correct:

1. During initial funding ("pre money") talks the founder is incentivized to ask for a small option pool because she doesn't want to divert a lot of her stock into the option pool

2. After the option pool has been exhausted through new hires the founder then asks the board for a larger pool, which is now created from the combined stock of the founders and the investors - thus the founder is diluted less than if the expanded pool had been created at the start.
I would definitely use such a service but $2 per letter is pretty steep, considering USPS will do direct mailings for cents.
As a seattle resident who lived here a year ago and moved back again. I have a few things to add to this ...

1. Amazon Fresh prices one year ago were pretty high, they have driven costs down on everything except produce.

2. I live close to a City Target and have been avoiding Amazon Fresh because I thought the target was cheaper. Yesterday I took my $100 grocery bill and recreated it on Amazon Fresh, and excluding produce, it was $89.00. I was shocked to see the prices were cheaper for most things.

3. The delivery is free for $100 purchases, so you can't use it like regular amazon (or amazon prime).

4. The delivery times range from 5 am in the morning to late in the evening.

5. The packaging is often reuse able, plastic containers or clothe-bags and so you can leave outside and the delivery folks will pickup the old packaging, this is much more sustainable than regular amazon cardboard packaging.

6. Living in a city, it is easier and cheaper to buy in bulk of Amazon Fresh, because they prefer selling in larger quantities. Some items have 2 or 4 quantity minimums. If you don't have a car this is fantastic.
Maybe , but I could see the emergence of a savvier brand of fence who might pay extra for laptops with intact data on the basis that 1/100 has something worthwhile.
I'm in the same boat as you, but I think another relevant question is what fraction on people actually agonize over such things like us? what fraction doesn't care?

then in addition, we'd have to consider whether having items chosen for you as opposed to chosen by you would engender more negative reactions buy the user (which I imagine ius the case since there's no more incentive to protect yourself vs purchase regret)
That is certainly not 'the' problem, which implies that her apology was the only thing anyone in the story should have done differently.
The medium.com proliferation on HN has disappointed me as well.

Like at least some other recent articles, I have to assume that most of us already know (or at least have our own opinions, which are only half likely to match up and unlikely to be changed by articles like this). In which case this is not for tech people, but ancillary staff that like to think they're tech people (...VC's? PM's?).

I'm not sure why these keep getting upvoted.
Obviously, startups need to scale at some point, and to do that they need experienced backend engineers. However, when a startup is still searching for product-market fit and doesn't have an influx of users, it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time and effort attempting to build a scalable backend that probably won't scale anyways. With cloud code and now integration with Express, there are almost no performance tradeoffs to using Parse for most early stage startups.
I'm reading this right now, and I'll second the vote. One of the more Orwellian/absurd fun-facts I've come across: The two biggest department stores in the DPRK are called Department Store No. 1 and Department Store No. 2. (I'm sure there's some clever joke about marketing/branding in there) Like the OP said - it's mysterious and completely fascinating.

It's been a great book thus far.
I wish I could add some gentle CSS3 to his page
FWIW, the way its usually handled when the founders have spent a lot of time previously on it is in one of two ways: a) agree to some vesting up front, and the remaining to vest over standard 4/1 terms b) agree to some acceleration (ie, you are given 1 year of acceleration, so its a 3 year rather than 4 year sched) or c) a combination of both. In the end, its a negotiated solution.
While the "Metronome" has very predictable behaviour that makes it probably the best GC collector for real-time purposes, it still has a maximum GC load before it gets backed up. If it gets backed up too far... forget about timing guarantees because the system will fail. The "Metronome" collector can guarantee a known and tunable GC capacity over time (in terms of objects collected/sec), which is good. But the flip side is that you need to be able to guarantee that your application will never exceed that capacity, at least not for any sustained period of time.

In order to provide hard real-time guarantees in a garbage collected system, you need to know that there is no situation in which the system produce more garbage faster than the collector can collect. With manual deallocation, you can prove that with static analysis. With garbage collection you have to demonstrate it empirically using dynamic analysis. That requires exhaustive testing to make sure you've covered the worst-case scenario.
Nice but in no way a Google TV.
> First, the car is worth whatever someone will pay for it

This is a nice little definition except that it doesn't mean much in the real world. OP could have gotten a better price if he invested some time and sold the car himself. He could have gotten a price closer to his own perceived value of it's worth.
I've had the idea on my list for years, and a couple years ago spent a few months really digging into it, talking with advisors, etc.

It grew from a need in a web app I was creating to send off a post card to verify a users postal address. I wished it was as easy as using an API.

Ultimately I decided this wasn't the best use of my talents, but I think there's utility to a service like this. I rejected it partly because I didn't want to be part of the problem of paper waste, but mostly because I had spent a month on the phone and email reaching out to various parts of this potential market and I just didn't find encouraging signs. Smaller users indicated they'd use it infrequently and were more concerned about quality of the sent articles than anything else. But these customers dealt in volume so low that ANY real acquisition cost would take ages to recoup.

Larger users indicated very low willingness to pay. Basically a business has some rough sense of how much the "materials" cost -- printing and mailing costs are often and easily tracked -- and they didn't seem to have any tolerance for margin on top of that. Even though there's a labor factor in there that isn't calculated when you look just at printing and mailing costs, I learned that to the customers I talked to, they saw this as irrelevant because they weren't going to let somebody go or reduce their pay just because they can outsource this task. I figured that if I was running at a very high volume and ran my own high volume printing and mailing operations, there would be acceptable margin on large direct-mail-style printing campaigns.

I'm not at all trying to be a pessimist on the idea. I'm just sharing what I learned when i took this concept out for a spin circa 2011.
And ghi for GitHub issues: https://github.com/stephencelis/ghi
There must be some reason twitter shut down posterous, I assume it's a competition thing.

R.I.P. to my favorite blog platform.
Networking and contacts (and I mean legitimate networking) really play a big part in your overall success.

Networking and relationship building is huge. I got laid off from my previous $DAYJOB back in Jan '12. I showed up at the office at ~9:30am, got called into my manager's office almost immediately, left by 10:00am, made 2 phone calls from my car on the way home... by ~3:00pm that afternoon I had a new job all but lined up (had to interview and everything as a formality, but the job was essentially offered already).

Why? Because I take networking seriously, get to know a lot of people, participate in a lot of groups, do some public speaking, organize Meetups, etc., and more than a few people in my area know who I am and what my skills are. And I also knew exactly who was looking for the same reasons. So the 2 phone calls I made were extremely targeted, as I specifically knew those firms were looking to hire.

Now it might not always work out that way, but I absolutely endorse the idea that networking is crucial.
If the PRC didn't go to so much effort to censor this event (which was, beyond just the human cost, a very pivotal moment in authoritarian china development), it would likely get less attention. Streisand effect, writ large.
A Love Letter to Designers and Developers
Immigrants Contributed An Estimated $115.2B More To The Medicare Trust Fund
The State of Magazines on the iPad: a Giant Mess
http://blog.internetcases.com/2011/08/29/using-lojack-to-fin...

Apparently, it's federal, not state based.
I agree I was probably a bit harsh on Robert.

I was a bit put off by the photo of himself in the shower.
Foreseeable roadmap for Web Sockets?
My take, from being a cube dweller at Amazon, circa 2003: Jeff Bezos' mantra (well, one of them): 90% of all commerce is local. I remember we even had a somewhat whimsical project to scan all local restaurant delivery menus... not that it panned out, but local is an intense area of interest.

Another mantra: platforms win (unstated: in the long run).

My synthesis: The purpose is to become the platform for all commerce, not to sell groceries. I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Bezos' long term goal is something breathtakingly audacious like "directly facilitate 1% of all global commerce by 2073."
Bootstrap is an answer to a 10 year old question posited by CSS Zen Garden: Can we make the web beautiful?

If this is the question, then the emphasis needs to be on who "we" is. If it's developers, then yes. If it's an ephemeral "the world" we, then no, I don't think this is the case; people were making beautiful (subjectively, of course) websites before bootstrap, and will continue to do so afterwards. Most of the designers I know don't use it as a basis unless they're coming onto a project that used it to start with.

Note: I accidentally either upvoted or downvoted you while copying the text to quote... if it was a downvote, I apologize.
Doesn't sound like a good idea to me - what about the unintended consequences?

If an employee's laptop goes missing, you want them to promptly notify IT, so that measures can be taken to plug any security holes.

You don't want them to try to hide the loss - or even to delay, while they try recover the laptop themselves - which they might do if they believe they'll get fired for reporting it missing.
I am being nitpicky but I couldn't find what that asterisk

> * Yes we do all those and more, do you ?

is referencing to.
> I suppose it has some positive externalities, but I don't think it really even comes close to the spirit of charity.

Why would you feel special if you didn't already view generosity as something desirable?
Interestingly amazon is in the backseat here and it will be interesting to see how they succeed. From my understanding http://www.flipkart.com/ is the dominant player in the online shopping marketing in India
What one can do is rarely what one does do.
Should it be improved this way?

A hard real-time system can fail by running a piece of code too soon as well as too late.

OTOH, a soft real-time program like a video game or voice chat could profit from this.
One of the coolest things about edX courses, are the interactive tools such as genomics viewer (IGV), circuit builder, also AI auto-grader. Do you think such tools will also be built by the community to be used for building new courses? I guess edX universities would not release them as open-source, since it's one of their competitive advantages, they have also invested a lot of work there.
This is a great example of the "medium.com Style": a grandiose claim with no factual back up.

This is a great example of the "news.yc style": a contrarian top comment with zero additional content. It's getting a little tiresome. I suspect there are some good comments written on the site, but if this is the standard then it's no different from 'valleywag' except it's a little more distributed.

And, also, what does that comment contribute? We already hate everything.
Yes and no. If I've never seen the product before, then I probably will not buy. If I have seen the product before, it doesn't matter to me.

Isn't there a way to localize prices in web apps to reflect the location of the user?
I wish you the best of luck. I'm hoping that SalesForce will help us solve some of these issues.

We do not focus on profit, but instead focus on revenue. This is the same model as SalesForce and Amazon.
Dealership lobby? Tesla is fighting against them in some states.
Interesting! I can imagine some really cool uses, especially if it could do "Hallmark" style thank you cards. Otherwise, bulk mailer type letters seems like the first (and limited to me at least) use.
Highly speculative publicly-traded businesses have been around as long as there have been stock markets and aren't new at all. Historians have suggested that in the 1850s/1860s more money was made selling shares in mining companies than was ever mined out of the ground. In the 80s you had the S&Ls and the post-deregulation airlines. Then the Dot Coms and Enrons of 2000 era. Everyone just tends to conveniently forget, because the companies disappear and our memories are short.
The introduction of package management directly into the language tooling core is a very good move for the language designers. It is a highly modern touch, which will enable rapid development and a common understanding of packages. Other languages have developed such add-ons, but only after a period of confusion.

If the designers want to really take it to the next level, they should introduce, possibly with idiomatic behavior but preferable with syntax, the idea of version pinning or at least version hinting within the "import" syntax.
Yeah. For starters,amazon is giving free delivery. As far as prices are concerned, tons of books are listed at lower price as of now.
The Administration’s Actions Against Patent Trolls Should Make a Difference
One question: How can we get age from the railway ticket number? I don't think indian railway discloses passenger age on their website.
I disagree, there is a tremendous amount of discussion here on HN about the real cost of "free" services, particularly in light of the recent end of Google Reader, sale of Instapaper, etc.
The thing that made him so interesting to Kim Jung Il is his innocence. He didn't know about these things - sex slavery, concentration camps, and the like - he was just a guy making sushi and partying with the leader of a country.

Maybe not a hero - but he's certainly an innocent bystander for the first few years of the story. He's not aware of all the evil that surrounds him which makes him so interesting.
Amazon launches in India
His comment points out a valid concern with the article's broad unbacked claims, your comment was very unnecessary.
There is an outcry against Parse? Seriously? As a back-end engineer, I always thought it was a clever niche product and I was happy (but a bit fearful) when they got acquired by facebook. Nice to see they are still trying to innovate.
I think you might be ignoring many of the costs associated with printing and sending a letter. Ink, paper, use of time, etc.? Actually just the savings from having to go to Fedex office this can be worth it. As for bulk operations, that's a different story.

I can see myself using this once in a while for something that cannot be sent electronically (as I normally would) but must be printed and mailed.
We've lost profit because we do not focus on profit. We focus on revenue. This strategy has worked well for other companies like SalesForce and Amazon.

This has allowed ExactTarget to spend more money on developers (like me), products, and to acquire other businesses.
"You can see taxes as a necessary evil, or hate them, but defining taxation as coercion is pretty loaded and rather close to Orwellian newspeak."

In addition to what refurb said, I feel you're exactly backwards. We should always remember that taxes come from the threat of imprisonment if you don't pay and coercive force. There are things that are worth this threat. Civilization is a big deal. It's a good thing. I'm rather Hobbesian on my view of Nature; in that sense I'm probably more enamored with civilization than the average liberal who believes in the inherent goodness of man. I think we have much farther we can fall than such a person would. But people should not casually use this power. To wipe away the fact that taxation is coercive is to encourage attitudes that spend your time and energy on irrelevant, if not downright wrong, purposes. That's not something we should overlook.

Taxation is a big deal. It's intrinsically coercive. It should only be used on really important things, not for things like shutting up some interest group somewhere, or buying votes, or lining the pockets of your buddies, or worthless administration (and please note the word "worthless" isn't superfluous there), or any of the other myriad of ways government can coercively spend the fruits of our precious, precious time on this planet.

That said, by the way, I think this particular thing is a solid use of taxpayer dollars. Or at least it is, provided it's somewhat efficient; if they're managing to blow $10,000 a box or something, as the US government would probably find a way to do (a snipe at our particular government today, not the concept of government in general), that's less true.

Also, if you do not today agree with me, wait three years. When a Republican is President again, it will once again be a popular notion that we shouldn't have to pay our taxes blindly to the government and we should think really carefully about how we're spending on things. I'm just ahead of the progressive curve here, that's all.
Correct, but if there's a pre-existing easement (right of way) you can't buy the property and then close it off. I mention it in this context because of the agreement the inn had signed to make its parking area available to campers and hikers, which it appears to have reneged on.
A lot of people in the world don't have/don't want computers. A lot of people like stuff printed and prefer printed stuff over emailed stuff (for example, I request my Wells Fargo Brokerage monthly statements on paper, because I want to keep them in print, and I have the computers, printers, and the money to do it myself but prefer not to).

Email gets eaten by spam filters, but snail-mail does not.

Physical mail does provide for a better level of privacy than email, although that is somewhat lessened by using a third-party to do the sending.

The IRS does not read physical mail not addressed to them without a warrant (that we know of).
The 21st Century Video Platform Apple Should Build
Questions of motivation mark Manning's court martial.  Adrian Lamo Testifies
Killing patent trolls is just a bandaid. Companies that aren't technically trolls can (and do) still engage in troll-like behaviour. There need to be ground-up changes in how patents, especially in technology, work.
Google Glass: Life changing innovation or just marginally better?
Fundamentally, the legal system is a way for individuals to invoke the state's monopoly on force to resolve disputes. That's the point. As long as there is law, there is the possibility for abuse, and that possibility is a cross-cutting concern.

Now, you say that the issue is associating some sort of risk with people invoking the legal system, but that's a very tricky path to walk down. What if you think someone breached a contract with you, but a court disagrees? Does losing a case inexorably mean you were in the wrong for having brought it?

I personally don't think that penalizing people for invoking the legal system is the way to go. The best solution is to make it cheap to reject meritless cases. After all, anybody could file suit claiming you trespassed on their land, and they could do so maliciously or mistakenly. We don't worry about frivolous suits for trespass because the underlying property right is clear and well-defined, so that if you do get sued it's really easy to show that you did not violate that right. The ease with which a case like that can be dismissed automatically disincentives people from bringing nuisance cases.
I was more interested in the First Round than the actual article. I read the website and was curious how exactly does one get involved in a group like the First Round? Mentorship and being able to ask other founders questions would be a huge help.
This appears a MVP, I think it looks quite nice at this stage and it seems to be an easy API to utilize.

So the product side looks great for a MVP, if you are lacking anything at this point it is the information about your company, I suppose trust is involved since 1) I am giving you access to my communications and 2) I expect my letters to reach their destination.

If you take anything away from these HN comments, I think you should create dialog with your customers. Tell them about your service. Tell them what makes it safe. Tell them what makes you trust worthy. Tell them about your technology.
It's even more expensive to do nothing when your health care system has to pick up the pieces. Appropriate preventative strategies can be cost-effective, and should be easier for voters to support (since they benefit everyone rather than just the ill.)
> I know some folks who think of the NT syscall interface as the 'true' OS API and see kernel32.dll as an add-on.

This is 100% correct, many of the real syscalls are located in Ntoskrnl, while kernel32.dll is actually part of the Win32 subsystem, given the personalities feature from Windows.

So you could be using another subsystem.

However, given that the POSIX and OS/2 subsystems are no longer supported, the only available subsystem is Win32.

Metro is another matter as it uses another architecture not based on the subsystems mechanism.

But in the end these are all OS APIs, not language runtimes.