skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kent: I looked at your website and saw the price. 10usd per month for a desktop product? That's pretty strange if you ask me. Subscriptions are usually for server based installs or online value added services.

Price it like every other desktop dev tool on the planet: one off purchase + with minor version upgrades + optional annual maintenance. Look at other established players in the java dev tool market. Copy their pricing models.

Even though it's cheap I wouldn't consider it because of the pricing model you are using. It just feels wrong.
Note to Usefultools.com team. When I click on a link called "Feedity: Create RSS Feeds From Any Website" I expect to go straight to http://feedity.com/. Please stop linkjacking!
I'd look at social enterprise coworking spaces and see who uses them, and look at social enterprise targeted funds or events (e.g. SIcamp) as well.
Free Laptop
There are plenty of sites on the Net giving out FREE laptops. Some are totally free and some requires you to fill in short surveys. 5 minutes of time = one free laptop!
Just because you already happen to have a certain function at your disposal doesn't mean your language is suddenly superior.

def partition(n, step, coll):
for i in range(0, len(coll), step):
yield coll[i:i+n]

allows

weekly = [sum(week) for week in partition(7, 7, daily)]

Using Python's map() function you can even do

map(sum, partition(7, 7, daily))

making it exactly the same as your example. And no, I probably haven't written more Python than you in my life.
Trust No One
Does the local folding process all inputs, or only those inputs whose keys would end up being local to the node?
I have both a PS3 and a Xbox 360 and hence have no real loyalty one way or the other.

I have to admit, that despite better technical specs, the user-experience with Xbox Live is just so much better that for any game I care for with a online-component, the Xbox 360 version gets the sale every single time.

As it is, I got the PS3 for near-free and hence have little emotional attachment to it, and these days have it around mostly as a bluray player.

I guess to make this comment relevant to hacker news and whoever does startups here: User-experience trumps technical merit. I don't care one way or the other if you wrote it in 100% purely in Haskell or some hacked up PHP. I want something which works for me.

Might not be a very cool message with the tech crowd, but as a consumer that's how I think. Heck I even ditched a technically superior Windows Mobile phone for an iPhone 3G and dammit if I will be going back.
+1 for "When engineers can't write code that normal people want to use, they lick their wounds by writing code that other engineers might want to use."
The writer's persona is a shtick, I wouldn't take it too seriously.
I was recently looking for one of these and found feed43.com.
It's a lot more complicated so it probably doesn't attract the casual user but it is very useful. you can apply a template to your feeds and pick out as many parameters as you need and then sort them in what ever way you would like them to appear. Only problem is, it seems to be down often enough. I would use feedity's service if it was similar. At the moment, only offering a link and title - it doesn't suit me needs.
Offensive? They were too stupid to offend me. Just another troll.
> This is not a good way to write about other people work.

I found it to be a quite humorous rant.

> And his US-centric comments about ASCII are offensive.

Thats called sarcasm, an oft used technique when ranting.

I also have a fondness for old Denis Leary standup, so I may be pre-disposed to hyperbolic ranting.

In any case, I find most of his actual points to be insightful. Opera released a non-product product - an SDK for making apps rather than apps that are useful in their own right. They didn't take the time to fix some of the deep flaws with JavaScript (namely the runtime libraries), I haven't heard anyone talking about an advanced debugger, and they invented Yet Another Template Library. There are all sound criticisms, on top of which no one has suggested why having a server in your web browser is even a good idea.

Maybe the good parts are kept secret for those in the Opera fan club, but being that I'm not a member, the whole thing seems silly to me.
I’ve encountered the same attitude from other large, profitable companies and large, profitable conferences. [..]
My hosts are clearly planning to gain value from my talk or they wouldn’t have said yes. In total they will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars paying programmers to listen to the talk, discuss it afterwards, and experiment with the ideas. But pay the presenter? Inconceivable.

At RailsConf this year, I heard that the non-keynote speakers weren't paid and weren't having their accommodation costs covered either. This might be entirely untrue (?) but I heard it more than once. If true, this decision seems to have come at the expense of paying people like Tim Ferriss to espouse truisms at big-bucks-per-hour instead.

I certainly hope that programming heroes like Kent aren't being left high and dry because the money is going on pointless eye and mind candy at some of these conferences..
Nokia N97 Themes : Spidey Black
I have represented founders as a startup lawyer in Silicon Valley since 1984. I have done a short write-up on this issue focusing on the risks from a company standpoint of relying on early-stage verbal agreements (http://www.grellas.com/faq_business_startup_009.html).

From your standpoint, without proper documentation: (1) your biggest risk is getting ripped off for your labor; (2) you would have leverage in that any IP you would develop would belong to you and not to the company until you assigned it by formal documentation; (3) if you did get ripped off, you could bring a legal claim either for breach of a verbal agreement or for fraud; (4) such claims are difficult and expensive to bring and thus not practical in most cases; (5) a lawsuit almost always leaves you worse off than does almost any other alternative; (6) therefore, get some reasonable understanding up front of what you can expect to get from your efforts and use at least informal means to document it.

You may or may not learn from this experience, depending on whether the other founders bring you into their inner circle.

Finally, I have seen this pattern work just fine very often in spite of the legal risks. In most of the good cases, though, the founders know each other and have a relationship. The cases where most of the problems arise are ones in which the founders do not previously know each other (what might be called opportunistic teaming). From your description, and from the length of time they want you to do work without documentation, I would say your case falls in the higher-risk category. Your legal downside would very likely be limited to losing your labor while getting cheated of any promised equity. The company has the greater legal downside from failing to document, mostly relating to its IP.
"I was told, by our most talented Indian engineer, that this would not happen because the values in the HashMap would magically spring back after the DAO was done with it."

I find it interesting that this understanding corresponds to the immutable data types used in functional programming languages. In Clojure, for example, a function that appears to alter a map actually creates a new map that shares some of its values with the old one.

There is this notion that the ideas of functional programming are more advanced, or harder to understand than paradigms like OO with mutable data. But in this case the intuition of a naive programmer more closely follows the immutable functional paradigm.

Of course, it is just as likely that this same programmer will expect the same data structure to be mutated in other scenarios, and ascribing a consistent model to his understanding of the code is an invalid assumption.
I don't. When I see his name in the byline, I close the tab, as it's almost always going to be some spittle-flecked rant about just how much someone else's work sucks.
I'll give it a shot. First impression: Don't use "/" as your search box shortcut. Interferes with Firefox's quickfind shortcut.
You've never read theregister.com before, have you? This is an average article from them.
this is unmitigated bullshit. if activision paid 1/2 a billion in royalties to sony that mean their ps3 games raked in hundreds of millions in profit. you think Activisions shareholders would allow them to stop developing for the PS3? The CEO is just kicking the anthill that is tech news.
Visualization of the Netflix Database
This is written by someone who in their own words is more focused on treatment than success.

“The Doctor” happens to be my favorite painting, mostly because of the story behind it: Sir Luke Fildes lost his oldest son

I have a print of the Fildes painting close at hand, a reminder that all the marvels of science, all the advances of medicine don’t replace what patients want of their doctors and what most of us wanted to offer when we felt the calling to medicine: the opportunity to be fully present at the bedside, to bring the human comfort that only the presence of an attentive physician can bring, to convey to patient and family the unspoken promise, “I will stay with you through thick and thin.”

I don't care if it's a person, robot, or pill, just fix me.
I don't know where you're located, but in the RTP (North Carolina) area, there's a local meet-up group for social entrepreneurs: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19139128576

I'd check out local environmental non-profits and ask them to point you to people who are trying to start something up, or ask to give a presentation @ their location for people considering startups.
It's hard to get money for food when no one has money to fix anything. You're plan seems nice on the surface but a recession affects everyone. Not equally but everyone sees is affected.

As for that guy, he seems to assume that because Japan didn't want to loose face in the 90s and made mistakes, were going to do the same.
The CV transmission and polyethylene are internal components.

I'm overthinking here, but the browser is essentially a JIT typesetter and job press inside a box of menus and buttons to control it.

For the "browser as publisher" question, what percentage of people know what an offset press versus letterpress is, or if talking about rendering, a Linotype versus Scitex? Even though you can touch the difference on a page, most people don't care. (Btw, does anyone have a working daisywheel printer I could buy?)

For the box of menus and buttons, thinking "browser as UI", what percentage of users know who makes their car radio?

The car radio is somewhat similar since some models have knobs, some have buttons, they generally tune in stations mostly as well as each other (except for one or two that pull in almost nothing). The car radio comes with the car, and can be replaced, but few people actually bother.

And if the radio's too specific, you could stop quite a few people on the street and ask them what kind of car (operating system) they have, and some will tell you, "A red one."
Thanks. The '/' binding is copying Google, which they use in their various apps like Gmail.
> Yes, that's why I use Yahoo rather than Facebook, I don't like the way that Facebook have multiple datacentres!

Yahoo certainly has multiple datacenters and probably has more datacenters than Facebook.

Why do you care how many datacenters Facebook and Yahoo have?
Oh come on, the article might benefit from some editing, but it was at least a little funny and technically informative. Opera Unite isn't an innovation by any measure. Worse, it could be disastrous if it gains any traction:
http://hankejh.com/2009/06/opera-environmental-disaster/
"People are losing their minds over the smallest bump in the market and most of it appears to be just speculators running from one extreme to the next."

Did you read the article?

OP's primary argument is well established: demographics.

This is nothing new. For 30 years, people have been saying, "Here's a good business to be in: whereever the bulk of baby boomers are buying. (See fast food, autos, etc.) For the past 10 years we've been warned about the period 2008 to 2016, when 70 million baby boomers are scheduled for retirement. We've never seen numbers like that before, so it won't be painless.

The only thing OP has added is that we haven't hit bottom yet. Anyone really that surprised?
Critiquing Clojure
Sorry about the vulgarity. It's just that the price I paid for that was enormous; I'd say it cost me a year and a half of suffering.
Perez hilton assaulted photo
Thanks grellas.
This is really great advice. I read your article. Really good one. I am aware legal actions seem to be less practical, and a bad direction towards and position to be in. And I agree it is a high risk, that so much I can sensed it.

Thanks keltecp11.
I am still thinking.
>> How bad is the decision to work as a co-founder without legal contracts?

In my experience? Pretty bad... A better financial decision is to make a bet with the other coders. $2000 says he doesn't pay up.
The less the programmer says, the more flexibility the compiler has to speed things up.

I seriously doubt it. The more the compiler knows, the more it can optimize things.

What it's "daily" in this example? It could be anything. The only thing the compiler knows at compile time is that it should generate some lookups searching and calling the functions "__iter__", "__slice__", etc... Put that line into a function which receives daily as a parameter and it could mean something different at every single invocation. Human beings, looking that code think know what it does, while in fact don't have a clue. The equivalent code in clojure someone has wrote only is really equivalent under some very specific assumptions.

I know, I know, at runtime you could gather all kinds of interesting data to optimize things. But, that's not easy nor cheap and, sometimes, iterating over an array, it's just iterating over an array.
It appears to be a seperate link to the same paper uploaded to scribd... new feature?
Ironically, I think you're the one failing at reading comprehension. Read the thread.

Read my posts! You're putting someone else's words into my mouth! (Ones which are uninformed and frequently used themselves to troll!) So, there should be an implicit assumption that every thread is diametrically opposed around the issue? And everyone who doesn't follow that assumption and inserts informative neutral concepts are "not paying attention?" I find that intellectually limiting, to put it kindly.

Calm down bro...I was asking for clarification because I really wasn't sure I knew enough about it. Again, no trolling intended ... no need to be defensive.

No, you were putting words into my mouth due to inattentive reading. I'm not being defensive. I'm going on the offensive. Being inattentive and putting words into someone else's mouth and being called on it is not your cue to tell them to mellow. In my book, it's time to demonstrate some intellectual integrity and apologize.

I thank you for your most illuminating reaction!
Human Factors Research On Programming Language Syntax
Having only made the leap from svn to git a month ago for my private repos, this is exactly the kind of guide I've been missing. Everything makes a little more sense now, thanks!
Hi grellas.

I have a question I hope you may help answer. Roughly how many percentile in the number of startup cases do have formal legal documentation?
if you don't mind the clear and obvious risk, you don't need a contract. the second you feel like trying to secure yourself from risk or trying to ensure yourself profit/shares/etc., its time to grab a contract.
"There's no question that Linux should be written in a low level language"

In the early days, the fact Unix was written in C was quite remarkable. At that time, OSs were written in hand-optimized assembly language.

I see no reason to stay with C-level languages (C was once called high-level) if we can make compilers that translate them into machine code that's faster than hand-optimized assembly.

Smalltalk/80 and the various Lisp machines are sufficient proof whole environments, from kernel to GUI, can be written in higher-than-C-level languages, provided the machine is fast enough. If we can extract speed from compilers and not from expensive silicon, I see no reason not to do it.

In a couple days I will attend to a lecture on porting the Squeak VM to FPGAs and running Smalltalk on silicon. That should be interesting.
Between the PS3, Wii, or Xbox 360 I prefer the PS3. Granted, FPS on the Xbox suck when compared to FPS on a PC; so I don't really play any multiplier games on it. Basically, I feel console gaming is mostly about the arcade feel and the PS3 wins that.

PS: The largest gap IMO was needing to buy recharable battery's for the other systems. That really bothered me for some reason.
In international trade with the US, it is sometimes important for foreign companies to have some sort of quality / improvement program in place. It garners better trust. There may have been a culture of implementing these programs and it simply became a standard operating procedure. I'm not sure if this is the case but it wouldn't surprise me. Along the same lines, if India does have a culture of memorization, it might be best that they establish rigid business practices to keep themselves as productive as possible.
I feel amazed that you wrote a PDP-11 assembler. How did you verify your code? Did you have a real PDP-11 machine or you tested it on an emulator?

P.S. I know someone who still has a PDP-11 in his summer house and it is functioning....
Summer time is always good for the economy. The risk is still but hope is important.
Does Apple still need Steve Jobs?
This is the kind of thing that doesn't matter till it does, which for most programmers (at least in the US) is never.

When something bad happens you go off and learn some more, but, for a lot of people, it flat out won't be an issue.
"Static typing hardly replaces unit tests."

Still, some of the errors you would catch with static typing you can catch with unit tests. It's not a replacement, but probably better than nothing.
What are some other benefits of C or Java over something like Ruby and Python?
"Fever caches and embeds the favicons of all the sites you follow into a single, compressed file so reading is fast and intuitive."

Ok, this tool is obviously targeted at a technical audience, but I don't know if this bit from the "features" section doesn't go a little to deep.
Get real. Don't write one. Make a job board. Sell a book.
I don't think the failure of Enron is typical of that of other organizations. Enron's very life was founded on cheating, and I assume that at least the senior staff mentioned in the article were aware of this.

It seems plausible to me that much of the communications leading up to the actual failure were of a cover-your-butt sort, and not so much the attempts at constructive change that we might hope an organization involved in a more ethical enterprise would experience. Indeed, I'd think that in the unethical cases, where there really is something to hide, communication with the wider corporate community would decrease as desperate scheming between those in on the plot would increase.

So I don't think that it's fair to assume that the behavior observed in the Enron case can generalize to other organizations.
You're glazing over my main point: the poor performance of recently developed High Level languages.

Do I take issue over other people using other syntaxes? No. Does syntax put any kind of limitation on VM speed? No. Do I even imply that Smalltalk and Lisp are conceptually superior to Ruby? No.

What I am saying is that the current popular HLLs are behind the curve in terms of performance.

I find it funny that adult techies discard Smalltalk over syntax. There's only 5 rules, FFS. Lots of grade school kids have used it like a highly advanced multimedia Logo. That said, the traditional operator precedence of algebras is such a deep part of Engineering, Science, and Mathematics culture, that any language that doesn't add it as a convenience to those groups is probably and understandably doomed to obscurity. (In particular, Forth, Smalltalk, Lisp, Self, and others.)

If only David Simmons had better marketing and community organizing skills. Smallscript might have been where Ruby is today.
Google Voice is extremely simple to setup and use.

Even if you want to dive into the "Settings" which is probably the most "complex" part of the app, each little settings item has a tiny question-mark that you can click and a bubble explains what you're turning on/off etc. I'd say GV is easier than GMail but I'm sure the subject is probably newer to most people (phone routing vs. email)

Other than that, there's not really much to set or configure. You pick a number, choose what number you want to forward it to and you're ready to go. I sat around for an hour thinking up 7-digit vanity numbers and managed to score one, so I'm sticking with it instead of going for number portability. With that in mind, Google really needs to give us a way to dial out with our GV# as the caller ID (from our phones).
In Salvador, Bahia (Brazil/Brasil) street names and numbers are used but the order of the numbers seem to be random sets. The hardest part is that the men I would talk to to find an address almost never say "I don't know". Instead, they act like they know and 50% of the time send you in the wrong direction.
I've been using GV ever since its early GrandCentral days. I should highlight that the biggest hurdle was to pass the new number on to my contacts. Even then, when you call your contacts without going through GV's web-site, your contact sees your old/carrier number. The end result is a lot of confusion.

On the other hand, I am now able to simultaneously forward calls (and now sms) to my VOIP (SIP) softphone and cellphone. The current exploitative state of the US cell phone market has made me hack my way through it using GV. So yes, "power users" can indeed get a big break from GV. However, GV may be moderately infinitesimal for people who blindly pay their phone bill without cursing.
It is absurd to declare that one of the most prosperous countries in the world is going to be suddenly rendered into a country of subsistence farmers (like China, Brazil, or India) because of a real estate bubble.
If you are having such a hard time, it could be easier to help established companies incubated social programs and maybe spin them out when they become successful.
Senescent care and the mortuary business are growth industries.
Ah. That does make some sense, then (I haven't used Google's shortcuts much).
That's certainly true in general, but by choosing a fixed-length word size (i.e. 16, 32 or 64 bit integers) you can preselect w so that runtime is predictably O(n). I can't see a way of doing that with most other O(n log(n)) sorting algorithms. Additionally, the constant factor is typically low compared to other algorithms.
Ask HN: Anyone building (or have) a calendar suggestion tool?
I schedule a ton of meetings and go through the same headache all the time:

1. Send email "what dates work for you?"
2. Reply email "how about these dates?"
3. Reply email "can do that date, not that time"
4. Reply email "where do you want to meet?"
.. etc.

I would love an app that allows me to send ALL the available times on my calendar through a simple email (just shows openings, not my calendar). The recipient can then click on an available time that suits their calendar and send me back a calendar file. Even better, they could sync their openings with mine upon reciept of a special mail type.

I'm well aware that you can expose your calendar and such with google calendar, but this is a simple solution that would essentially work with all calendars.

Any ideas? If that app exists, please let me know because I'd like to use it.