skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks great. Could you elaborate on how your "automated" plans work? Who does the moderation - are you using Mechanical Turk, outsourced employees, something else?

I'd also like to see a "developer" plan, for sites that haven't launched.
There are legal ("asset protection") reasons that many taxi companies have each car as its own LLC, or ski slopes register each slope as its own LLC. So if someone has a legal problem with one, and you can really show that you've been treating them separately in your bookkeeping and bank accounts, it's clear to the creditor that they're not going to be able to go after everything you've got.

Then of course as they grow there are reasons why you may want to sell one of your websites, but not the others, etc.

The reasons why to do it are vague and different for everyone, but to me, it's a "can't hurt" and "why not?" type decision.

You go to LegalZoom (or any similar service) and pay $400. They mail you a certificate you bring to your bank to open a separate account. Total spent: $400 and 30 minutes of your time.

California is an exception: They make you pay $800 per year to the state for each entity. Most states it's only $50 and some states (like New Mexico) you never need to renew or pay any annual fees at all. If you're a virtual company with no physical office, you can set up your LLC in any business-friendly state you want. (Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, etc.)

Outside the U.S., British Virgin Islands is the quickest, cheapest, easiest place to do it: http://www.google.com/search?q=bvi+corporation
It wasn't my dad that lent me the money - it was his company. So his company couldn't just pay me $3.3M for no reason.
Cool App: ShoutNow: Make Yourself Heard With Instant Voice Messaging
"It’s a compliment when you are asked to skip the slides and just do the demo. Really."

Back in 1999 I was at the bottom of the hierarchy of a 2000-person company, presenting to the CFO. After two slides she said, "OK, what's your recommended solution?"

I said, "I haven't finished laying out the problem!"

She said, "That's fine, what are your recommendations?"

I was young and stupid and insisted on showing her how significant the problem was before going on to the recommendations section. I had thought out the problem so well, and I felt upper management had to understand the arguments I was making.

In retrospect, I can imagine that she had some trust in the tech people working there, and believed when she was told there was a problem. But I had run into so many mid-level people who didn't understand that there even was a problem, that I felt I had to sell the CFO something she was already sold on.

I think this is part of that mystical quality, 'experience': realizing when the reality of someone you're talking to is different from the realities of the last 99 people you talked to, and adjusting the message accordingly.

I can imagine that, in terms of evaluating pitches, VCs and angels inhabit very different realities than one's friends & colleagues.
Reminds me of Peep [1] which would generate a nature-like soundscape based on network traffic, theoretically leading to problems 'sounding wrong'.

There's a slashdot story [2] on another project that used music instead of nature sounds but alas it's a 404 and I haven't been able to find the original source.

[1] http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa00/gilfix/gilfix_html/index...

[2] http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/09/1325225

Edit: layout
Thanks for the link. His blog documents the facebook platform better than facebook wiki!
Can't it licence your intellectual property to attempt to create a clone of CDBaby?

Maybe the licencing deal will cost $100k/month, including consulting services from you to build the service, and unfortunately, it will turn out that the cloned CDBaby service is not profitable, and so it will be shut down after 33 months.

You'll still have to pay corporation tax on it (or whatever the equivalent is in the US), but hopefully that's less than trying to extract that money out of your dad's company.

Note: IANAA
I'm not talking about time but unless you devise a learning pill or device such as used in the matrix, these things Still require time and course work. There are probably more tertiary expenses that could be trimmed before the actual education. Perhaps states could actually fund the education institutions.
Time to Cash Out: Why Paper Money Hurts the Economy
XP Lessons From The Field
I always thought it was to save on typing ...

Remembering that a)python has shell scripting (and even interactive shell) as a design influence, and b)is often developed from within vim/emacs where mouse aversion is strong enough to influenc the convention for the language.
People can actually jam debatably useful things in the tweet limit. If not useful, amusing. Check out http://twitto.org - a PHP framework that fits in a tweet.
Even if we made every roof and every road a pure titanium white, it wouldn't make up for more than a fraction of the albedo change caused by the shrinking of the ice caps.

In the US roads cover less than 3% of the surface and all artificial structures together cover less than 10% of the surface.
Secure Cookie Auth with CouchDB
I have used exec and eval as something way better than relatively simple CPP-ish textual macros. What's better, you have all the power of Python string manipulation. If you're reading from locals() a lot you're in evil land anyway. :)
That headline didn't pass the smell test for me, so I decided to do some quick research... who did invent the tractor, anyway?

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/220609/John-Froehl...

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, it was John Froehlich - an Iowa blacksmith - who invented the first gasoline-powered tractor. Apparently a Frenchman (nicolas cugnot) had a steam-powered tractor in 1769, but apparently this was not used for agriculture.

Can't find precisely where he lived, but I imagine that as an Iowan blacksmith he had some experience with the demands and opportunities in farm work.
Self-copying 3D printers will make it an order of magnitude cheaper again, and will finally kill the idea of intellectual property. But - just as with computers and music - they will also expand creativity, because people don't create things just to make money; the real reason they create things is to get noticed by other people with whom they want to have children...

Right, because large pharmaceutical companies spend millions in researching and developing drugs that increase the quality of peoples' lives just to impress chicks.

(Viagra aside...) :P

If you "kill intellectual property," you will kill many (not all, as the article writer so astutely mentioned, but many) incentives. Very few people or organizations are going to subsidize a few hundred million dollars worth of R&D on a drug or invention if it is just going to be given away...
Gene linked to hair loss brings cure for baldness nearer
Python has a good CAPI too
great idea, not so great the rendering of '80s X application.
asserts are stripped out when python is run in optimized mode. Not to mention sprinkling them around your code is infuriating for people dealing with your code :) I'd also point you to the links to guido's writeup I put in the post, I agree: it changes the language too much to be a positive net gain.
You are the problem: the reason why so many startups don't get venture funding
I'll adjust the text to clarify my point
Eric Drexler: How to Learn About Everything
Ive noticed a few posts seem to be closed as they are deemed "subjective and argumentative", personally I think this is a shame, as yeah, although the answers may be subjective, its still useful to hear different opinions on something. Cool site though.
You missed my point entirely. Text in memory should be unicode and not encoded, as nothing else would really make sense. In that case bytes() refers to the size of string when rendered in a specific encoding. You are not getting the "size" of the actual string.

See my other comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=628031
Don't forget MyFaultYourFault - an arbitration/dispute resolution service.

This could actually be wildly successful in the startup community, if not for the tiny little fact that most significant disputes don't occur between peers or equals, but rather between sheep (startups) and wolves (BigCo). And any situation in which the sheep are put into the position of negotiating with wolves does not lead to good outcomes, as a surgeon pointed out (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_...).
Well i've never lived north of the mason dixon, so I didn't consider that end.

What is this "winter" you speak of?
Heh. No reason to flame me ;)
I strongly agree with this, and ran into the same limitation.
Mutable arguments are considered harmful; and will probably cause cancer, plague, locusts and other end-of-the-world problems.
Just to make something clear here: the VCs are not the ones with the special stuff. The special stuff is the next Apple II, Tesla car or what have you.

Get real: how many people are there that wouldn't be "the problem" by these "measures"?
I'd say it's more emblematic of the spirit of asshole pricks who think, because they know a better way, they have a right to be heard. Just ain't so, my friend.

You could have the sweetest sort algorithm heretofore known only to the gods. But it won't do you a lick of good if you cannot marshal the civility necessary to engage in honest dialog with interested peers.

The OP does not come close to meeting this criteria. You want to play with the other kids? You have to play nice. It doesn't matter if you have the shiniest ball or fanciest bat. That's not what a community is about.
People Over 55 Are Quitting Facebook
Why did you censor his name? He wrote it on the article. (Of course I'll leave it off until I know you reasons.)
Ideas like that get people sent to prison. Better to be ethical and just eat the $3.3 mil.
How about asset protection strategies?
"Facebook will always be worth something"

Tell that to Yahoo's 3B Geocities purchase.
True. I'm not passing judgement or using subjective terms like "bad guys", I'm just saying that the OP highlights what a robust monopoly Google has and that the counter arguments that some have offered are wrong.
Well there's a nice video out there from our most favorite cuddly energy analyst Amory Lovins; he's talking about parking lots but the same premise holds (I think):

http://fora.tv/2009/05/01/Amory_B_Lovins_Big_Savings_Through...

The entire video is fascinating if you've got 2c of coffee in you.
This fits with other advice I've heard: investors invest in teams, not ideas. To raise money, you need a kickass team.

In practice, we also found that mention of the "core team" came back again and again in our fundraising discussions (though they weren't with VCs).

What would be very interesting is to know what are the key indicators that VCs look for. If, for example, they look at things like degrees or "demonstrated industry experience", as someone mentioned on #startups, then I would think there's a huge opportunity for someone with good hacker recognition skills to bypass them and get to all the good deals that no other VCs want to touch. Thoughts?
Justified or otherwise, this is simply descriptive. We've heard this before, and it didn't slow us down. On the contrary, it motivated me at least twice as much to prove them wrong.

This is why I think if you're a first-time founder it's best to not show up empty handed. The best way to convince an investor that you can pull something off is by already having measurable progress on the way to doing so.

It's true that investors aren't the say all and end all of technology. They're trying to catch the wave, not make it. But understanding how they think, if you're planning on dealing with them, is definitely a good thing.
> If I were to hire someone, I'd base it on their past experience and how well the interview(s) went, not their race or sex.

Absolutely. I agree 100%.

OTOH, discussing things in aggregates also makes sense.

If 4 out of 1,000 women would make excellent engineers, and 1 out of 1,000 men would make excellent engineers, and yet we see that the distribution of actual engineers is something other than 4:1, we should investigate.

If, OTOH, the numbers are 1 out of 1,000 and 10 out of 1,000 respectively, and the ratio of actual engineers is 1:10, then we might choose to spend less time and energy on the investigation.
Any bets that he grew up on a farm?

But the blogger's original point is that people with a different point of view make inventions outside their own itch. My contention is really the opposite.
Yes, we're using Mechanical Turk - we compare answers at least three times per moderated item.

I agree with you about the developer plan - what sort of attributes would you propose (pricing, usage etc)?
Does this help? http://www.socialmod.com/images/pages/home/how_it_works.png?...
OpenBSD Develops Its Own SMTP Server
"Being right doesn't matter? That's some scheme you have there."

Yet it's the overwhelming opinion of many here. Just look at these comments.

We're trying to do you a favor, man. Let me offer you the constructive criticism you didn't offer in your post:

If you propose a theory in the spirit of honest debate and camaraderie, and that theory is proven to be incorrect, no one remembers that you were the dude with the "wrong theory". All they remember is the right theory and that you helped to frame it.

On the other hand, if you put forth a theory like an asshole, and that theory is proven to be correct, you're still an asshole.

Sure, this probably doesn't seem fair from a meritocratic point of view. But it's one of the laws of the world we live in, same as gravity. I think you'd end up encountering a great deal more success if you started factoring it into your equations.
I get the feeling HD support was an afterthought just so "Zune HD" would make sense. In my opinion adding HD support is pointless for a 480x272 screen; the only useful HD feature is the ability to play on external screens.
How to survive the digg effect
Interesting. However, the article overstated the potential range of the system. While a system like this would easily be valid within and nearby the solar system, it certainly wouldn't work at an arbitrary point in the galaxy. The beam of a pulsar is relatively narrow, so as soon as you move out of the region of space swept out by the beam the system would break down. (Of course, this could be trivially be worked around by incorporating more pulsars, but that goes beyond the scope of the original article.)
I've thought about this a while back when a co-worker and I were discussing the aesthetics of light colored shingles. Dark ones look better was his opinion, and probably in the opinion of many others.

If one were to develop a process by which titanium-dioxide (or whatever, white) paint could be applied to the "top" face of the shingles on a sloped roof (asphalt shingles are covered with small 3-dimensional granules), while leaving the lower faces dark, you would have the best of both worlds: Reflectivity from the summer sun which is high in sky and also heat capture from a sun in the winter when it is low in the sky, plus the aesthetic of a darker roof when viewed from ground level.

Just another half-baked idea of mine...
Demographics are appealing based on two things: the direct revenue that advertising to them / selling to them can bring, and the indirect value of how much they serve to propogate the brand.

Older adults are worthwhile because they've got a lot of discretionary income once the kids are off at college.

Young hip adults are worthwhile because they increase brand cachet.

I hate to be morbid, but with the meltdown in IRA and 401ks since January, people over 55 might not be worth nearly as much as a demographic as they once were.

Facebook probably doesn't care too much about this.

At http://smartflix.com, we've done demographic surveys, and our best customers are older adults - speaking in generalities, the women are retired, or working part time, and have enough money to buy canvas and oil paints, and the guys are retired or working part time, and have enough time and money to work on their cars, learn metalworking, or tinker with their guns.

Because our price point is relatively low (our a la carte rentals are ~$10, and our subscription plans are << $30/month), we haven't seen much of a decline in revenue from this demographic.
In part this comes down to some advice I was given many, many years ago:

Learn to listen.

It's not just to listen to the exact words, but also to the message behind them. Learn to find the message, and if you're not sure what the message is, ask questions to elucidate.

In the case given the message is something like "I see your point, I trust you, move along, I don't need convincing."

If you think the do still need convincing, ask. They're being blunt with you, you be straight with them.

For neuro-typicals this is fairly easy. For most tech people it's a skill waiting to be learned.

Learn it - it's valuable. Trust me, and move on.
exec and eval can be powerful. But that's their problem. They're a little bit too powerful.
Now that qmail is public domain, surely this would be an easier option.
I agree 100%. While I would like to see macros, I think they're more in the "That would be so cool!" category than the "This is really necessary" category.
> sprinkling them around your code is infuriating for people dealing with your code

Would this necessarily be any less true of static type annotations, though? And as for them being stripped out, yes - it's for making debugging easier, not performance.
I was under the impression that Python's handling of mutable arguments was actually a feature. Although I must admit, I've never written any code that would use it.
Best Practices in Implementing High Performance Drupal
A fistful of Twollars
Design: Ease of Control, or Challenge of Relationship?
I'd expand this a bit more. Firstly, I'd include non-scientific journals like business, politics, and humanities. Honestly, as a geek through and through, the best way to learn about the world is to figure out how other disciplines think. It gives you a whole new toolset and perspective.

The other thing I'd do is actually dive into a subject deep enough as if I need to pass a test. I'm doing that with statistics now. It's going very slowly, but that's kinda the point of this whole exercise.
Putting plants on the roof, fertilizing them, watering them and protecting them during the winter is cheaper than painting once every few years?

(This of course assumes your roof is flat and strong enough for greenery.)
that could be a potential exit...something to dream about i guess. but lets not get ahead of ourselves. this was simply an experiment to see if i could really build a useful app. built - check! useful - TBD.
21. Don't make a list of behaviour you dislike and poison the well by labeling it as 'childish', making constructive discussion unlikely.

22. Don't make a list of behaviour you dislike that shows you to be completely oblivious of cultural differences.
You have to spend significant time there, would be one way. A related but seemingly tangential question is when a young rancher is about to be married, he would do well to pick a rancher's daughter.

Better for the farm boy to go to college, pick up a wide range of ideas, go back to the farm. Probably the best way to get outside ideas implemented.
Topsy, nicely done twitter based search engine
If compiling with Xcode, don't forget to set Base SDK to "Current SDK" under Project -> Edit Project Settings.

Also make sure you have CoreFoundation and MultitouchSupport frameworks associated with you project. If not, just right click project and click Add -> Existing Frameworks.
calendar time...about 5 months. actual coding time...probably less than 2. the rest was reading and learning.
At the risk of sounding like a jerk, it's ironic that VCs have hugely difficult time of picking winning teams. One wonders who the losers are here: the entrepreneur who can't pitch a VC, or the VC who picks teams based on guessing how well they can perform and only hits one in ten.

I wonder if this is due to the friendly doctor effect? That's where one doctor is kind and takes her time asking you questions. The other doctor is gruff and terse. Studies show that patients naturally judge the quality of the doctor by their personal perceptions of how kind they are -- which is the only thing they have to go on. i.e. in a brief presentation and interaction with a team, only superficial qualities at best are going to be demonstrated.
To answer two questions in this thread: a number of the media liability policies include copyright infringement, though typically only of text (and sometimes images), with specific exclusion of hosting media like MP3s or DVDs, and an exclusion for intentional copyright infringement. That is to say, they're geared more for someone who exceeds the bounds of fair use than for The Pirate Bay.

As for anonymity, though the LLC is an independent entity which can conduct its own business and enter into its own contracts, and thus can keep a name out of its general business, in the event of a lawsuit most courts will permit discovery into the operations / management of the LLC, and sometimes even into the ownership. There's no specific legal protection for anonymity for incorporated businesses; the only concrete anonymity protection comes from various First Amendment doctrines, which usually don't apply to commercial activities.
Zensify’s iPhone app shows key word trends across your social graph
Even though Theo de Raadt is often abrasive, you have to give him credit for making "do it right" cool enough to attract others to his security-first perspective. OpenBSD, OpenSSH (used now in most Linux distros), OpenBGP (complex routing), PF, etc. are all pretty excellent pieces of software.
Why topsy is going to kick all sorts of ass
First: The non-linear increase in CPU consumption versus file size is not adequately explained in the benchmarks. I would do my own benchmarks to see if that is really true.

Second…

In the dark old days, there were versions of IE that claimed they could accept various compressed encodings but could not. This forced people on the server side to craft all sorts of strange rules based on the user agent which then broke on various cacheing proxy servers.

If you have tens of thousands of customers you will have some poor sod behind some misbegotten proxy that will fail and call your support line and burn up your man hours. Bandwidth is cheap compared to humans and lost customers.

Personally, I compress nearly everything these days and if someone can't use my sites I don't really care. I have the luxury of telling them to not use broken software. As for CPU use, I tend to cache the compressed results of requests so I don't have to gzip on each request, just on each new one.
The relevant quantity is not albedo x area. The relevant quantity is energy reflected = albedo x area x energy deposition.

Energy deposition is low near the poles. That's why they are cold.
Gray-on-gray-on-gray with big bold fonts don't make for good readability.
love this line: It pissed me off enough that I grabbed my laptop and a copy of rfc2821 with me to the pub

I love the open-source developer mentality.