skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting essay, thanks for the link.

I found this part interesting, in contrast to his "expert amateurs" like Knuth:

> In contrast there are masters in the martial arts who learned their art as a means of survival and became masters in a realistic and hostile environment. We don’t have anyone like this in the programming profession, or at least I haven’t met any.

Any candidates spring to mind? John Carmack maybe? I'm sure there are loads though.
I love technology more and more every day. First the kid that invented the 20 second cell phone charger, now this. I look forward to the (hopefully) commercialization of this and I now have yet another reason to take the plunge and get myself a Tesla Model S.

Exciting times we're living in.
Recently starting using Bitbucket and I really like it. I find the team thing a bit difficult to understand and not very intuitive but it could be just me. I vaguely remember them also having SVN support but that seems to be no longer there. I guess I have re-import all my old repos using Git now.
Heh, fixed mine to save somebody yet one more second. Wrote this comment to waste that second that I saved.

That said, I'm reading this paper now. It's absolutely fascinating and very approachable. Well worth checking out.
What's astonishing is the technicality really doesn't change the problem much.

I've been thinking along the same lines as you, but (to play devils advocate and help discussion):

> 1. You should not be allowed to sell a patent. The intent of a patent is to give the inventor(s) enough lead time to develop the idea, not to create a market for ideas.

Why are ideas worth nothing? If I have a breakthrough while researching, I'm screwed unless I also manage to form a company with a production line?

> 2. A patent should not be valid unless you can demonstrate it. You shouldn't be allowed to own ideas that are beyond your means to execute.

Would a prototype be acceptable, or does it have to be viable for production? Also, between coming up with an idea and being able to show it as viable might be a reasonable amount of time

> 3. There should be very low limits on patent infringement damage claims thereby removing the financial incentive of using patents and anti-competitive and extortion weapons.

This one feels the most concerning. If the limits are low, then why would anyone bother following them? You could easily make it cheaper for big companies to copy ideas and run with them, then pay people off when they get caught.

Anything that encourages people who have a new, innovative idea to hide it to try and make money is against the original aim.

I do, in general, like the approach though. Maybe there are points along the way:

1. You have a new, awesome, innovative idea. You can get a patent for it.

2. You have to show some working, or viable prototype within a certain time period (short, a few years maybe)

3. With a real example, you can then get a longer patent.

4. You can sell it, but the original time limit still applies.

This way you're compensated for coming up with great ideas (but you or someone you sell it to has to be able to make it a reality soon) and have to release how things work into the public domain (the original intent of patents).
URL Masking Done Right.
How do Zynga employees feel about the company laying off 18% of its staff?
Ultimately if the game is quality probably. Each day on the top 10 brings in 10s of thousands, if you can hold out a week or two and have in-app purchases it can clear the cost. I am not a fan of buying success but sometimes buying notice is sometimes required. I have been through a few free-app-a-days and almost always it works, especially if the game is good and you have other games that get overspill.
> Have you done any market research? Have you talked to the prospective customers for this thing? Do you have any low-cost way of validating your gut-feeling about the demand for what you're building?

I've done all 3, part of the reason I started to build them in the first place. Reading HN has enlightened me in many ways since I joined. (tho I'm sure there is something I missed about don't work with friends)

I understand your concerns on my behalf and thank you, but let's assume I did it all correctly, my question remains on how to decide equity with this friends with benefits scenario :)
Having seen quite a few design patents, and copyrighted designs, I'm not even sure where the line is between the two. Utility patents are the traditional patents in question (software and functional objects). I don't think you can get a design patent for software.

I'm all for utility patents, if the patent examining system is changed to get more help or advice from experts in the field, to more quickly find previous pertinent patents that could expedite invalidation of infringing applications, or decide if it's too broad.
I like to use Charity Navigator before donating to new charities.

They have a quick guide on donating cars:

http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&#...
Derby v0.5.0 – The first OT-powered realtime web app framework
Congrats! Before GitHub had free private academic repos, I used Bitbucket and was really pleased. I'm out of school now, and I think I'll continue to use Bitbucket for private stuff. Great product!
Kidoteca uses Bitbucket, because for us our GIT serving is free :)

Also I use their SourceTree GUI GIT tool, it is really nice too.

Now this is looking like a ad for Atlassian, I should charge them :P
This is probably one of the sites that you really need to read the terms of service https://www.outboxmail.com/terms to figure out what you are getting yourself into.

"If applicable, and unless you direct Outbox otherwise, Outbox may also, now or in the future, direct the third parties who send you mail and/or bills to send certain items of such mail and/or bills electronically to an email address provided to such third parties by Outbox specifically for that purpose and for that purpose only, in which case you authorize Outbox to do so in its sole discretion for as long as your account for the Service remains open."
Github has the social aspects nailed down, but for small teams or personal projects, I don't hesitate to use bitbucket. Particularly now that you can use HipChat for free on small teams, hosting with bitbucket and managing your project exclusively through Atlassian is fantastic. I like issue management in bitbucket much more than github, as well (personal opinion, no great foundation here).
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's a very good point. I, for one, consider taxation to be theft, plain and simple. But yet I don't try to defend myself from this theft via force, for pragmatic reasons (they employ more men with guns than I do, for one). So, I grudgingly tolerate a certain level of coercion, even though it is extremely distasteful to me.

BUT... I maintain that if you're going to steal my money and spend it - nominally - in my name, then you better damn well spend it wisely and on something important. This is one reason government agencies piss me off so much.. I see so much waste and inefficiency and fraud and other shenanigans, and it just enrages me that they are taking my money and blowing it on idiotic shit, or - worse - things that I'm fundamentally morally opposed to.
They also seem to be in some parts of San Francisco, as noted in places in their blog. But yes, a list of Zips would be helpful.
Bitbucket is an especially awesome resource for students. (Yes, I know GitHub offers free student accounts.) But the unlimited free private repositories makes it easy to back up tons of homework projects (as opposed to the small GitHub offering), without worrying about clogging your quota, or having your work available to the public.
In fact, probably more entrepreneurs have offed themselves due to business failures than startup founders.

Certainly, since historically entrepreneurs have outnumbered startup founders by a very wide margin and for a very long period.

I disagree that the entrepreneurial route carries that much risk. Importantly, as an entrepreneur you're largely in control of the risk. You can manage it, minimise it, explore it, etc. You can take (large amounts of) money out of the business any time you want if it's making that money. You don't have to wait on a binary exit event years down the line, that may be foiled because another similar startup got even further than you and took the market away. Hundreds of thousands of businesses make plenty of money for their owners without ever getting near an IPO or acquisition.

I've done both too - I much prefer the entrepreneur route. As I argue in the article, I also believe that it's more transferrable. Entrepreneurs are always in need, everywhere in the world. Startup founders, nowhere near as much.
The killer app would be to combine mail from snail mail & email into a single product. For the snail mail side, some OCR, recognizing places/dates/etc. (the way gmail does), & attaching images of the snail mail to the thread should satisfy that use case. All that would be needed after that would be a simple label to designate the snail mail. Voila, you can refer to everything as mail.
REST isn't enough.

To do it right use the HATEOAS constraint. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS

And use application/hal+json http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html

The more we follow these simple constraints the more we can start to build tooling to consume any API without having to know much about it ahead of time.

That said, well written article.
To improve today’s concrete, do as the Romans did
Absolutely. I respect the VCs and angels for playing this game successfully, and startup founders really should know better than to play this without any idea of the alternatives. My issue is that many founders think this is the only way to do business.
I've been using them for a few years now. Free repos got me there. Assembla makes use of it as well, and I've run it through that on a project. I don't do enough open source stuff unfortunately to find myself at Github, but for maintaining a bunch of free private repos its great.
It seems like a lot of their employees had the wool pulled over their eyes.

An acquaintance of mine who worked for Zynga up until a few days ago spoke fondly of her position and the company's prospects. I issued her a warning months ago. I think it just goes to show just because you have kids/mortgage/bills, etc you should always evaluate who you are working for.
I use Bitbucket at work. And it stinks compared to Github.
Venture Beat always seems to be filled with click bait and advert pieces.
I use that definition because I'm trying to make a point. Clearly, I am trying to appropriate the word "entrepreneur" to mean something more specific than "anyone who starts a business". That is a pretty useless definition for my purposes.
Well there is Flipkart (http://www.flipkart.com/). They usually take about 2-3 days to deliver. Again that depends where you are located and the product you are ordering. But they do have a huge collection of stuff.
Title is link bait, but he never claims Zynga is dying.

> I don’t think Zynga fades into the sunset. They are going through tough times, but they’re not done. Zynga still makes money. (In fact, they could do a smart pivot and get into the data center game, though that is another race to the bottom.)

I read all the knee-jerk reactions to Facebook and Zynga as the next IBM/Yahoo/etc. They not the monsters they used to be. Now they have to find a way to exist in a world that no longer revolves around them.
I downloaded datanitro - seems promising, but I'd like to see more case studies / tutorials.
I had ACL surgery in November in Italy and it costed 2200€(I did not pay anything we have public health care luckily).
US health care system is just crazy in my opinion.
After having a baby, I started using Amazon Fresh heavily. 5 am deliveries are awesome, and the costs are < PCC or Whole Foods, and you occasionally get some pretty interesting stuff. It's not perfect, but it has replaced pretty much most of our produce shopping with the exception of specific "ethnic" items.
And now my mental movie player has it. Thanks. :P
Any reason your snark has to be obligatory? Especially since it's about a pedantic issue with the video about the service rather than the service itself?

The thing is, you've actually got something interesting to say -- we should certainly consider the privacy implications, and whether this could change limits on government intrusion into your correspondence -- but you buried the lead and presented it in a negative way for no clear reason other than you were feeling like being snarky toward someone's hard work.
The most interesting thing about Indian e-commerce shipping to me (someone who lived 28 years in the USA and the last 1 year in India) is that there is no concept of choosing delivery speed. There is only standard shipping. You need the product tomorrow? Well you're out of luck. It'll be there in a couple days if you're in a metro, which definitely isn't bad for standard shipping. But you don't get to control the shipping speed.

(Note #1: I have gotten some items the next day, but it was out of luck. If you live in Mumbai, New Delhi, or Bangalore, this will happen occasionally that the warehouse on the outskirts of the city will have the product and you'll get it the next day. But it's just not close to guaranteed.)

(Note #2: I heard or read something that Flipkart, often known as "India's Amazon", will soon be offering expedited shipping for an additional fee).
I use both regularly, and while I definitely see areas that I like/dislike in each, I don't really see it as so one-sided. Care to elaborate on exactly what aspects cause such a dramatic swing for you?
It's not hard to install nodejs, and then you need forever or w/e to keep it running, you need that to start on boot, you need pingdom or whatever to monitor it, you need your haproxy or nginx for load balancing, you need to decide what to log and how to store those files beyond megabytes, maybe you need ssl, you need a way to get the next version running, and you need to be able to fix it when stuff goes wrong.

All of those things are just distractions from whatever your project really is. Are you building software or are you dicking around with servers?
So how does this work for paid apps? If you sell your app for 2.99 and you're paying 1.20 an install, aren't you making money? I know I'm missing something here because otherwise anyone could pay for infinite installs and make infinite money.
> Whether by design or accident...

It seems to have been by accident, as they were originally designing it to be a "systems" programming language to take on C++. What eventually happened is that most(?) Go programmers came from Python, Ruby, and other scripting languages.

> In Go, you would just use a for loop or a dictionary-based map. If your program gets to the point where that no longer cuts it, then it's time to move on to a different language.

So much for it being a "systems" language then :)
It's not that different from a service I used to use a loooong time ago, called Paytrust (which got bought by Intuit). I changed all my billing addresses to an address they gave me. (Actually I think Paytrust might have updated the billing address on my behalf for most of the accounts.) Everything they received, they scanned in. The benefit was that they also marked it down with who the bill was from, how much it was, etc. then you could pay them all with just a few clicks. Also, they would do the same thing which was talk to the billers and convert it to an electronic system so that they didn't need to handle paper bills. You could also look at the scanned image of the document if you wanted to, and you could also order a CD at the end of the year with all your documents as well.

So this sounds like Paytrust minus the bill-paying, but with a stronger emphasis on getting rid of and letting you easily view all your mail. (Edit after looking at their site some more: They also will send you the original item if you want it... something that doesn't really apply as much to bills. Although Paytrust did sometimes forward things to me, like a new membership card or something.)
The real advantage to plotting via code isn't just better visual styles, but mass plot generation. The process in Excel:

1. select data
2. select chart type
3. customize chart
4. export chart (for Word doc inclusion)

can be very time-consuming repeated with dozens of charts. Each time someone wants to alter the style (a manager's arbitrary decision to use three decimal points instead of two etc.), steps 3 and 4 must be repeated for each chart. Or data get corrected in a way that alters all values and everything needs to be re-exported, and the axes need to be fixed. These "little" items really eat into time as data are massaged and report drafts get reviewed and corrected.
I understand this is nitpicking, but not every app needs to be a revolution that you should join. That words gets tossed around far too often.
In this case, I think it is a function of the fact that these are acquisitions and my guess is you have stovepiping going on. Meaning, the organizations probably aren't properly aligned.

Sales teams can function this way - but usually the way I've seen it setup is that you have a group that is focused on cross-sell/up-sell after the close of some additional business (farmers) vs. a hunter organization.
I've done all 3, part of the reason I started to build them in the first place. Reading HN has enlightened me in many ways since I joined

Excellent, glad to hear that!

I understand your concerns on my behalf and thank you, but let's assume I did it all correctly, my question remains on how to decide equity with this friends with benefits scenario :)

There is a thread of thought among some people, who argue that all the co-founders of a venture should have equal equity (with maybe one person with a tiny smidgeon more to break ties if there are even numbers). I think that's reasonable in a lot of cases, but maybe not all. Part of the thinking is, if one co-founder has significantly less equity, they might not be as motivated to work hard. I tend to think that if everybody is starting at the same time, that's probably fairly reasonable.

OTOH, if one person (say, you) has been working on the project, creating value for a long period of time, and then the others come in later, I don't see a problem with you getting a larger share. But determining exactly how to value your existing "sweat equity" is kinda subjective.

You want to strike a balance between everyone's interests, and keep in mind that "a small part of a large pie is better than a large part of no pie". If the venture is never going to fly at all without the help of your friends, go ahead and be generous in terms of their equity stake. Maybe work backwards from dividing evenly by the number of people involved, then skew it your way a bit to reflect the work you've already done?

Anyway, best of luck to you!
Here's what the Excel one looks like:

http://i.imgur.com/514W5E2.png

I changed the default Excel line chart in the following ways:

Line color to green, line thickness to 1pt, remove horizontal guides, changed range to match, changed date 'major-unit' to 3 months.

I would wager that anyone competent enough to graph in Python would spend under 10 seconds making those changes.

Side-by-side:

http://i.imgur.com/wff3IpS.png
I have been using Bitbucket for all my private projects. I think both BitBucket and Github can prosper together.
Fun seeing what people do with their PIs. Really appreciate the time people put into documenting their projects.

I've been running a custom mp3 media server[1] built around a similar stack (node,socket.io,express) and I was surprised how capable the pi is for this kind of thing. The only real slowdown I saw in my project was inserting/reading thousands of records from a sqlite3 db (displaying all tracks for example) and even that was solved pretty easily with some caching. My project is all running headless though, with presentation handled on the client (phone/desktop browser); I'd be curious how the chromium render speeds are for this. In my testing any kind of web browsing on the pi was pretty painful.

[1]: https://github.com/badfortrains/wupnp my much more poorly documented raspberry pi project
Did any OMGPOP employees have stock options vesting still from the acquisition, or was it all cash?

If they did have stock options, did they immediately vest upon termination or did they lose them?
Ask HN: Am I missing something?
Has anyone here been in or is maybe currently in a position where they're not sure if they have what it takes to create a successful startup?

I've been working on startups since I was 16. I'm 22 now and I've never built or made anything close to what I'd consider a success. In the last 4 years I've worked extremely hard, dedicating nearly all my free time to planning, building, learning, networking and reading about startups/business with no success. What I find frightening is just how hard it is to judge ones ability, especially when it comes to something as complex as ones ability to create a successful business. I personally believe I have what it takes, but I have to accept all evidence would suggest otherwise. We've all seen the contestants on game shows such as X-Factor that truly believe they're something special when they can't even sing on pitch. Maybe that's me in my own domain. Maybe that's you?
How Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In" mantra has morphed into an Internet meme
Yes, FB ads was one of my main user acquisition channels for several years before I shifted from marketing to development. I remember there used to be ads for "Dad Scholarships go back to school" campaigns running for a long time, so what you're trying to do should work.

On FB, CTR is really really important, and you want to get your CTR up at least over .07%. My best campaigns started at .10% CTR and with a lot of refinement and optimization of the audience, I was able to get .20% to .40% CTR with more traffic than my dedicated server could handle for almost a year. Keeping in the FB ecosystem will lower your CPC, but it's doable with external sites too.

Based on the limited info you've provided, either you are not targeting the right demographics, or you have a messaging problem.
I travel a lot. I have clients who insist on paying me via old-fashioned paper check. And I have Outbox.

That about sums it up.

Thanks, Outbox.
Most organizations when they try to use AWS or Rackspace as a mere extension of their datacenter - discover that is quite hard, and that their apps require extensive redesign to fit the new environment. This in turn leads to the lock-in and lack of flexibility.

I think this blog post touches on the phenomenon:
http://www.ravellosystems.com/blog/the-unbearable-lightness-...
>And don't tell me it won't happen. It will always happen. Somebody other than you will have or get access to that data.

Hell that's the sales pitch: give us your keys so we can steal your mail.

Like I get the idea and it's solid, but christ that's a level of trust I don't have.

Also snark: It's called creaky voice, "vocal fry" is what people call it when they want to wring their hands about kids-these-days