skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an early adopter it was though (since 2008). However, if you are starting today it is not bad. And RDFa (lite) is a really easy way of getting in to it. Just make you site indexable using schema.org and RDFa for Google et al is a nice start.

I work for UniProt (a databases for biologists) and for us it is really a nice way of providing data to other users to integrate into their own systems. We also provide a sparql endpoint at beta.sparql.uniprot.org for other scientist to run analytical queries without having to deal with running a large datawarehouse of their own (beta.sparql.uniprot.org). i.e upload 5kb of SPARQL queries to us instead of downloading a 100Gb of data them to run SQL in their own systems.

These days there are a number of off the self systems that work well enough. Your main danger in the beginning is trying to deal with existing (large) public data before you are ready. The philosophical/reasoning side of the semantic web can also be very confusing but can be ignored in the beginning. Just use RDF as graph data format and SPARQL as a query language and you are good to go.
Payments: Run a small web firm (among other activities that I do) and I can sympathize with some of your pain points. Recently had client have a month late bill. Nearly put our company under because of the size of the contract and it took the threat of taking the website down to get the payment "expedited". Working with a large $400mil company, they do have excessive hoops to jump through.

Vacation: I can never take a vacation (or that's what it feels like). I think this is fairly typical of most startup/contractors since you don't get paid if you don't work, but I wish it were different. This is probably due to lack of experience which will change over time.

Networking: I have some legacy clients that get my team through the months but 100% of our business is repeat or legacy. This is extremely problematic and even though I do a lot of networking, it seems to all for a loss. Finding new clients is definitely the hardest part for me.

Hiring/Contracting: Finding good talent in local towns is tough. Always have to do coding review on developers to ensure correct methodology, look at past project experience, etc. The hardest thing to determine (in my opinion) is how hard someone works.

As others have stated... finding work = hardest problem. It is a bitch to say the least.
Just concluded. Missed it.
I'm trying to identify the guy to the far left on this picture of Grace Hopper. Does anyone have any idea?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Grace_Ho...
Not all startup failures are created equal, but when it comes to true flops like this one, one of the commonalities I've noticed is a general inability of the founders to step back and see the forest for the trees.

From http://alpha.flowtab.com/:

We also set a major company milestone to reach 50 "Flowtab regulars" (defined by 2 or more orders in a trailing 30 day period) by March 1st 2013.

That's a really remarkable comment given that the venture was started in May 2011. With its $1 per order fee, this means that after nearly two years, the company's "major" goal was to acquire 50 customers who would deliver a baseline of $100 in revenue in a month.

Sadly, one of the lessons listed on http://alpha.flowtab.com/ is "Do things that don't scale."
> Something like this experiment in setting salaries is only good if it makes recruiting/retaining/utilizing more effective. If you're doing it for any other reason, you probably have the wrong priorities.

I don't mean to be snarky, but, who are you to judge someone's priorities? The numbers and concepts you're talking about here, such as "a 0.1% improvement in A/R efficiency," are probably perfectly sound insights - if you're trying to optimize for revenue, profit, growth, etc. But it sounds like that's not his focus.

It's really refreshing to see a company leader with this much humility and integrity, and one who seems to be a lot more concerned with the quality of life of his team than the company's bottom line.

(I know that not all companies can realistically function this way, but I have a great appreciation for those that do. And if it all comes crashing down in a year then all you pragmatists can say I-told-you-so.)
Obama Will Seek Syria Vote in Congress
I was very fortunate to attend Caltech, where the focus was on how.
Title updated to reflect the major takeaway.

Obama said that he and his various advisors feel that Syria must be attacked in response to their usage of chemical weapons. He specified that there would be no infantry sent to Syria, just a long distance strike of "limited duration and scope". Congress will hold a vote on whether or not to approve the attack. The President has the authority to order the strike, with or without the approval of Congress.

*edit: see reply
You should move somewhere with really harsh weather conditions, that way you can feel good about the relative lack of homeless people.
Obama to seek Congress vote on Syria military action
The actual study:

http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/bds-tech-starts-report...
Global Shark Tracker
The evidence is so obvious and unquestionable that you don't really need to see or ask for it (because doing so would be irrational). It's that good.
While I don't want to diminish how bad it may be for those actually living in this situation, it seems to me that the only big problems about this -- besides "poverty makes non-poor people feel guilty" are essentially safety and sanitation. In this setting, there is too much fire danger, too much danger of the spread of disease, and danger of violence from less stable individuals living in the area.

Aside from that, it's basically like going camping -- except the density is too high to be safe.

One could argue that basically we (society) are merely failing to provide them with proper water, sewer, police, etc. because they're not doing this on privately-owned land and not doing it in a manner conforming to building codes, etc.

Instead we kick them off the land periodically, hoping that someone else will take care of the problem.
you got slash at the end of the url, maybe that's the reason?
Kill the password - Italian style
Type in "contrafreeloading" to scholar.google.com. Instant flood of peer-reviewed study.

By the way, "this person" in the lecture happens to be one of the preeminent researchers in behavioral economy...
If something is unquestionable than it is called faith not evidence.
He didn't say he needed congress to approve, just that he was going to have congress vote. He also emphasized that he does have the authority to strike without congress's approval.
Plotagon – Make a movie by just writing a story
Exactly...and also, suffering from horrible diseases that are all but unknown in the developed world. There are many places where it's impossible to get drinking water that isn't contaminated with your neighbors' feces. I can't even begin to imagine the horror of getting something like lymphatic filariasis, and having no way to prevent it or cure it.

It's really difficult to comprehend how much worse off people have it in the developing world unless you see it firsthand. But it's still a false dichotomy to compare one population against the other as a form of argument. It's not as if we can turn our backs on the homelessness problem in this country because things are worse in the third world.
The more moralistic and self-righteous the justification for war, the more likely it is to be a dishonest reason...
Way to parse words!

Semantics aside, killing is definitely more dangerous than selling pot

Please, let's just stick to the heart of the matter here.

We see numerous instances where killers, rapists, child molesters, etc, are granted bail, so why not a mid level pot dealer?

The big banks get caught laundering billions of dollars in cartel drug money yet not one bank employee ever saw the inside of a federal detention center, much less held without bail for over 3 years!
Spending Less Time on Facebook: Advice That Works
I've recently given a try to Jitsi [1] and seriously it works great. It really is a Skype drop-in replacement, and is fully open source. Without any need for configuration, I could discuss by text, audio, and video (and also do screen-sharing) all encrypted between my Debian laptop and a Windows PC, using existing XMPP (Jabber) account.

Really I've never seen any other free software do as good as Jitsi in the VoIP field. I've always tried SIP client and it was never perfect. Jitsi can do SIP to, but does wonder over XMPP so I didn't even try SIP.

[1] http://jitsi.org/
It is true people have different priorities -- I was assuming the set of "grow fast or die" priorities common to virtually all VC funded startups. If a business doesn't have that kind of external pressure, there is more flexibility, although I think it is universally true that for small companies, small percentage improvements are generally less meaningful than for big companies, and absolute amounts are more meaningful.

It is totally valid in a non vc funded business to have a goal of "produce great income and lifestyle for the team" and "maximize the odds the business will be healthy in 20 years". In a VC funded business the general goal is to maximize expected return, which rewards high risk moonshots which may not pay off, but if they do pay off, will be huge.
Yeah, you're right. I'll update my comment
I drove up the I-15 a couple weeks ago, and was surprised that when I hit northern Utah I saw a couple tech-recruitment billboards. We don't have those down in Orange Country.
Why are the dollars the most interesting point? I find the concrete numbers less interesting than the relative result.

At any rate, we're not really obligated to share our numbers on our blog. :-) Might be reasons we'd want to keep those private, no?
> he disputes this

See, he doesn't actually say that; he has not actually said that he himself has legitimate questions about the EFF, nor has he identified anybody that does. He implies that he does, but has avoided giving any sort of clarification. If you claim that they are not the good guys, then it is indeed proven that they are not indisputably the good guys. Merely claiming that there are other who dispute them proves nothing of the sort though, unless you can prove that those others exist (Just a name or contact information would do, I could go ask them to confirm their position myself).

I could say "It is disputed that sugar is sweet", but that statement would not prove itself (maybe I do not dispute that sugar is sweet, and am unable to find any examples of people that do). Now, if I said "It is disputed that sugar is sweet. I dispute it.", that proves itself. If I say "It is disputed that sugar is sweet. Vladimir Putin disputes it", then (assuming Vladimir Putin confirms this) it is again proven.

We need to know who actually disputes/questions this before we can accept it as disputed/questioned. This is why my question to him was "Who's asking those questions?" I expect his answer, were he kind enough to give one, would be "Me.", at which point his statement would be proven and the discussion could continue in a more productive manner.
Retraction from Tumblr
BitMessage has already proven to be breakable (as usual, by tricking the user, but still). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6263850.
The most fascinating thing (to me) about Admiral Hopper is her military service. As an Army officer, I find it amazing that there was once an era where you had so many very bright technical minds who were serving actively in the military. These days, most of the military technical achievements are being made by contractors working for the DoD but most of whom have never actually served. Admiral Hopper not only served during the WW2 era (when almost every able American adult was doing the same), she served for many years afterward.
That inference is correct: I reserved the right to veto if it was wildly over our budget.
Why did you take a deal where you took such a risk with such a limited return? Was that your best option to keep the company going?

Maybe I'm hopelessly naive, but would that deal have been impossible to make on terms where the client paid the majority of those up-front costs. Since they were inevitable and the project could not be delivered without them, it seems like they would have an interest in doing so, and thus not half-killing their supplier!

I'm a new CEO: please help me learn from your experience!
Rather Ian with harder/stronger I than John.
Well Polish it is not that hard.
It's only second hardest language on the world (China I look at you)
If it is hard for you. Well try to spell this thing correctly
"Zażółć żółtą jaźń" or "Chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie"

Sorry for OT.

All thing look really amaizing. I'd love to see more in this topic.
You can still catch it here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVeUF9RozfQ

Skip to 50:00 to get to the press conference.
Is it possible that Youtube provides the backbone infrastructure?

https://www.youtube.com/user/whitehouse
P word? Which one?
As the article states - yes, but it's 5 semi-equal quality employees so not a big deal. Of course, if you would add, say, 10 minimum wage product packers / call desk operators to the mix then it would/should be different.
Do you really think so?
Consider the scenario of a social networking site having one table for users and another table for the users posts.
If the developers don't know better than to query all my 200 shards at once this will be a pretty major performance killer.

I can instead use my userid as my shard-key and just query the shard holding the data for that user which will be way faster.
The article implies that the Medical Board believed he may have been impaired because of the use of drugs or alcohol. So he could have appeared reasonably competent before he developed those problems.
Have you actually researched the issue? There are over 600K homeless people across the United States. This issue has existed for centuries, and there are people living in this condition across the US. The US has made a conscious decision to not systematically address social issues like homelessness (or lack of healthcare) due to a belief against socialist programs (i.e. we tent to rely on the "free market"). So if programs want this issue solved, you are going to have address this at the national level and maybe support a socialist program (although there may be a free market way of attack this). And if you want to live in place that doesn't have this, go to Germany or the Netherlands because there is no place in America that has addressed homelessness (as far as I'm aware).

Funny enough, if you had scrolled a little further down you would see a business insider article talking about a SV exec trying to address this issue: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-jungle-largest-homeless-c....

Also if you have Googled a bit, you would have found out San Francisco spends over $200M on homeless issues, making it one of the largest city efforts to address the issue.

Please do not rely on link-bait from BusinessInsider to be your primary research source; there's a world of knowledge freely available out there through Google & Wikipedia.
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6307094
Where Do All The Craigslist Cats Go?
Great story. TC, VB and others should do pieces like this more often. One comment:

Flowtab could not be distributed through partnership with companies that sell Point of Sale (POS) systems.

Anyone have insights into why this is?
They've sent a retraction: http://istumblrdown.com/retraction/
I don't have any statistics on this, but I expect the majority of people getting $100k offers in the bay area right out of college don't live in the bay area when they get their offers. The only schools that are really in the bay area are Stanford and Berkeley, and although a lot of bay area tech workers come from those schools, many many workers come from other parts of the country.

My point is that if you're a college student graduating with a CS degree and you're looking for a job all around the country, no government agency will pay you as much as tech companies in in SF/bay area or finance companies in NYC. The salary difference is even large enough to make up for the relatively small cost of a recent grad moving across the country.
Thanks so much for the comments! It's a learning process, and we're going to be making some changes here and there as time progresses!

Please recommend us if you, or anyone else is in need of a website!
>The places that are exporting homelessness to us should be liable to help fix it here

"Liable" is an odd word to use in a decision regime that has no incentives or feedback.
We've discussed the long term, and we all agree: it's not something that will stay like this forever. In the long term I don't think it would be fair to maintain a perfectly flat pay structure; we won't always hire people with the same set of skills or experience or responsibilities.

I don't expect to keep this system forever, but it's a good fit for us at this particular moment in time. I expect it will change as we change.
As a developer here I'm constantly getting contacted by recruiters. I live half way between Salt Lake and Provo so I can go either direction, but there definitely is a lot going on in the tech industry here.
I would hope categorizing people as "unlucky", "lazy", "crippled", "mentally deficient", "addicted", etc. would be less offensive if it is in the context of giving them assistance tailored to their needs. I.e. I am generally in favor of basic income instead of virtually all other government assistance, but in the case of someone who is an addict, giving him $2k in cash might be more likely to kill him vs help him -- a drug treatment program and regimented living situation for a year might be better.
Quicksort is amazingly easy to screw up. There's a lot of opportunity for off-by-one errors in all the index manipulation. I coded quicksort as an interview practice exercise in plain C a few years ago and it took quite a number of iterations until getting it all correct.
Clearly you don't purchase electricity in California if you think having a car roam around constantly would be cheap.

(Admittedly, there may be some cheaper subsidized rates for charging electric cars today, but once everyone has one, will they be able to keep those subsidies?)

Also, it'll be awesome trying to drive anywhere with the additional traffic density.
Yes, I've been working with RDF(S) and OWL in the past 3 years. I find it extremely usefull for reasoning, and in general pretty cool to work with. Having all your data in a forward directed graph, including your Ontology (data structure) has some very interesting potentials. When I started with this project 3 years ago, I had to work with SPARQL 1.0 (the query language for triples/RDF), which was a bit troublesome sometimes. But now that SPARQL 1.1 has become a reccomendation, it is becomming well implemented, and working with it maked my queries quite elegant and fun again. Some people say the semantic web has long been dead since guys like google started their own semantic formats. Personally I think that's true at all. The vision/potential of the semantic web remains potent as ever. The tools are slowly but surely maturing. The field perhaps seems not that big, but it is surely active and growing. I think in time we'll see plenty of semantic web stuff entering the general field, and RDFa may be another helpfull bridge tool along the way.. Though in all honesty, I havn't worked with RDFa at all yet, so can't say much about that, but will surely have a look at this spec soon.
How do you like working for UniProt? Where are you guys based?

In the future I'd like to work at a place like this, so if you could tell me more I'd be grateful. (My email is in my profile.)

Thanks!
Fair point, I may revise the graph if I have time in the coming week.
You clearly have no idea what is going on here, and you should find out before you casually slander everyone that lives here.

The people that live in SV are VERY generous. The consequence is, we have a huge population of homeless people that moved here because the weather is mild and the people are generous, making being homeless here far less terrible than, say, New York or Chicago or Cleveland or Phoenix or even LA.

It's really easy to accuse a large and varying group of people of living purely for avarice, especially when you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. What are you doing about the homeless problem? Making snide comments on HN that scapegoat other people.

References:

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-20/national/41427...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5221311

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Homeless-p...

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-asto...
Correct. (At the moment.) (We're not saying we have to keep it that way forever, and don't expect to.)
my AuntySamantha just got an awesome cream Mercedes E-Class Diesel just by some parttime working online with a macbook air. his explanation.... http://7.ly/6gn
Disappointment, thy name is Obama.
The parent's argument was "A universal health care system would probably fix a lot of this"

I rebutted with an example of a country with universal healthcare that still has a large homeless problem. I have no doubt that homeless residents of Vancouver have better access to healthcare. I'm just saying universal healthcare will NOT fix a lot of this.
Don't just build things, help people
Hold on, whats this XHTML5 they mention? We dont want XHTML5!

The W3C is just a weird organization, basically owned by some members who pursue their own agendas, producing reams of "standards" that, largely, no one uses, or even implements. Tim Berners-Lee is a great guy but it is a failed organization as far as I can see.
Wow, really? That median was $65k/year when I graduated in 2011.
My take on that - he has decided on inaction but needs the congress to save him from his "chemical weapons are a red line" remark from an year ago.

I am not sure if there is any salvage of the Middle East situation right now - there are generational grudges and hatreds to unfold there. I don't think that there are good moves on that board. The pessimist in me just wonders whether the firewall should be on Bulgaria/Greece border or on the Bosphorus.

Disclaimer - I live in Bulgaria for now.
this is exactly what the large corporations want you to believe. Without patent protection, the small or independent coder has one less piece of proprietary. Larger corporations, when deciding whether to buy/acquire corporations would then factor in how much it would cost to just outright copy the innovation of the small guy. Small guy won't sell for less than $1m ...VS... 2 devs @ 2months.
Twelephone gets round that by using twitter for call set up only & transmits media peer-to-peer using WebRTC.
I'd like to hear more about how these kinds of architectures were programmed. I know about scalar kernels being applied in lockstep across data-parallel arrays. What other patterns were there?
I wish we'd made HTML5 from XHTML, actually. But alas.