skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gah that thing almost drove me over to Emacs. By almost I mean, I couldn't get full vim functionality in Viper and gave up, some commands just can't be replicated. But org-mode is a very very nice tool. The current vim alternatives like viki and vim-outline do not compare.
I want to point out that the author spends more time in this article talking about the problems associated with having multiple founders than he does the benefits.

All of the benefits he outlined were individual: motivation, skills, connections, perspective. All of these things are required to some degree in any startup, but individual experiences may vary.

Bottom line: If you have a need, fill it. If not, don't force it.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=739856
That's the best idea I've seen in a long time. Give an expr, get a value, and if you like it, type something meaning "add a test that evals that expr and expects the value I just saw". The only risk is convincing yourself that what you got looks right when it's actually not.
Ask HN:  Do you want a "small talk" filter for twitter?
It might be interesting to build one in a way similar to a spam filter complete with a "Report small talk" and "Not small talk" buttons.
my word, if you're going to record a 41 minute video please use a tripod
He's not the brightest tool in the shed.
'For example, most calendar apps need the concept of a "floating timezone":'

Ok... but that's a timezone, too, at least from the point of view I'm talking about. It's not an ill-defined 11:00am, it's a specific 11:00am. The root problem is specifications that match more than one uniquely-defined time.
It's quite possible to argue that lambda calculus is not relevant to software development - I think that's the sort of thing gaius was talking about.
Except his comment is about writing a datetime library. An application could provide reasonable defaults.
It's about time. There are good developers that are being pushed off the boards by crap like this. If your app isn't in the top 20 or top 50 than chances are it won't get bought by enough people. This guy has 900 apps of absolute crap. And some of them manage to clog up the leaderboards.

If you base your entire business model on another company than abide by their fucking rules. So Apple pulled your apps because you weren't playing their game?! Too bad, you know who else does this. Google Adsense and Secondlife. I also don't see anyone sympathizing for the people who get booted from Adsense when they try to game it.

You are more than welcome to create your own appstore, put in the infrastructure and people to support. Oh and develop a delivery method for it.
The lesson is that it should not be possible to trademark dictionary words. Or maybe the lesson is that someone should trademark "The" and then proceed to haul in settlement profits?
Sure, but if they do that, who are they doing a favor? It's certainly not their customers.

I'm kind of surprised that they let the "App Store spammer" get away with it for so long. I mean, they could have righteously stopped him at 100 if you ask me.
So, what's the remedy for people who find themselves in the situation of being the "strong personality" in the lot?

After reading about people's successes here, I've taken it to heart that a team of founders is a better way to go than a single founder; but whenever I try to get a group of people together it ends up feeling like I've taken on employees instead of co-founders. By that, I mean that things only seem to get done if I personally push for them to happen. I'm not interested in having founding employees, if I'm going to go the route of having co-founders then I'd like everyone to have equal input and as equal contribution as we can manage.

However, it doesn't seem to be as easy as just saying "we're all in this together as founders, let's get on with it" (I've tried this tact and it just hasn't worked).

I guess the distilled question is: how do you find co-founders that are as driven as you are?

And as a follow-on, how important is geographic relativity to your co-founders? Being in a non-startup hub, it makes it a little tough to find groups of people out and interested in working on startups (versus going out to find interesting jobs).
Yes I also thought school was utter bullshit.
Check out Philtro ("A Personal Noise Filter for Twitter"): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730819
The viability of the MVP approach would seem to depend very much on things like the potential market size, required customer investment, and competitive landscape.

I can see how this works well for Web 2.0 software-as-a-service start-ups: new customers sign up for a free trial account, and either stick around or don't. Either way, they provide feedback through web analytics and comment pages. If you piss of your early adopters, there are always more around the corner.

Do this for a piece of hardware, and you're likely screwed -- the investment on both sides of the equation is just too high, and it's not feasible to replace your product with the latest-and-greatest, once customers have bought it and taken it home.
Your computer program is free to try to guess your timezone, free to store the fact that it guessed, and show you the guess, and give you a convenient UI for correcting the guess if it gets it wrong, free to offer some preferences to control the way it guesses... but it should never store a raw 11:32 (as a time, not a string) in its memory at any point in the process. That's a recipe for software worse than your paper notebook, because it tries to wake you up at 2:32 am localtime for your meeting. Oops.

But in general... computers and ambiguity don't get along. Dealing with that by writing sloppy programs is a recipe for disaster. Sounds like you're not writing down dates anyhow, just chunks of text that you don't expect a computer to interpret. If you do expect it to interpret your date you better have a specific time in mind or it's not going to do the computer any good anyhow.
I agree to a point, but I don't think this is much different than developing accessories for someone else's product(s) that need to be approved by the owner of the target product. (Example: Official iPod accessories.) Those companies seem to get on just fine risking some money in R&D while trying to get official approval for an item. You can bet they don't just develop in a vacuum, either, but that's what a lot of the very loudly complaining app store devs seem to be doing.

It doesn't have to be such a huge gamble developing for the iPhone. There are Apple representatives that developers can talk to, meet in person at events like WWDC, and even send development builds to. They give feedback and can warn of potential issues with approval, etc. These resources are there, but somewhat scarce. Apple obviously cannot guarantee everyone who pays their $99 access to significant face time with an insider without the dev putting in some effort. As a developer who's aiming to be serious about this, you have to be proactive in elbowing your way into the system - but once you're in, the "risk" is greatly reduced. The big iPhone and OSX studios all know this and work behind the scenes within the system to the benefit of both parties (usually).
Having an implicit timezone for the current position--as iCal does, say, while still allowing you to create events in other timezones--is a UI issue, and not necessarily a bad idea. But storing or ever even computing with "times" without a timezone is meaningless.
Hell yes! My favorite example: iCounterstrike was a promotional image of the game with a few sound files ripped straight from an install of the game placed in a picker control.
http://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?qt=adv&procstatus=All...

Well, he's been feeding lawyers.
america leads the way in value added manufacturing, ie airplanes and china focuses on low level things like pens, toys, etc.

in terms of who makes more money in manufacturing its acutually america.
Ask HN: Have you up-vote someone you disagreed with today?
I feel like there's been an interesting shift in the comments recently: not in their quality, but in how the community is reacting to them. What I've noticed is that there seem to be a growing number of light-dark-light-dark-light threads. That is, a comment voted down, followed by a response voted up, followed by a riposte voted down, etc.

Perhaps it's not my place to say, but I've always been under the impression that comment votes are there to evaluate whether the comment adds to the discussion or not. Votes should not be a measure of whether you agree with the point. When I see long threads of alternating up-down voting in comments, I think one of two things is happening:

1. Individuals are voting based on alignment of views.

2. People are responding to comments that don't add to the conversation.

If there is a long chain of follow-up comments, it seems self-evident that the comment added to the discussion, and probably shouldn't be voted down. If you feel that a comment doesn't add to the discussion, vote it down and move along; no need to reply.

So the question: when was the last time you up-voted a comment you disagreed with, but which added to the conversation nonetheless?
They are not very inconsistent with rules. I have 24 apps on the appstore and the ones that were rejected and later accepted were consistent with the policies aggregated here: http://appreview.tumblr.com/

I am upset because apple rejected google voice but so far I haven't seen anything which was rejected and was not on the list in the link.

Moreover, apple does have an appeal process. Once the app gets rejected they ask you to make changes, and resubmit the app.

There are definitely things that apple can do to improve the process for example, they should definitely get rid of changing the availability date with updates because a lot of developers just keep on posting updates with no real updates to be on the new release list. Check McPhun for example and they are actually able to keep themselves in top 10 for the past 6 months just because they have an update every week. But other than these minor issues which I am pretty sure apple will solve, there are a lot of good things going with it, which people tend to ignore.
Maybe multiple founders are necessary when you're spending lots of cash on a founding team, but I don't think they're necessary when you're bootstrapping.

The main argument being made is that founders share pressure. But how much of this pressure is self-inflicted by the need to support a large team or chase aggressive growth strategies that will justify getting funding? So much pressure disappears once you start making money, and if going alone means you've avoided the need to define compensation schemes then you can breathe easily.

I can see why larger teams are more attractive to investors. But I don't think this is good advice to younger technically-minded founders who can do the heavy lifting in creating products themselves and often just lack confidence in themselves or their markets to figure out the rest.
from the comments: http://www.perfectacumen.com/welcome/
I call bullshit. As you already point out, timezones are only relevant if you have to deal with times from multiple timezones. In practice, most applications and most people do not have to deal with that and it's a pure waste of time to add timezone handling. Dealing with dates and times is enough of a headache without taking care of timezones and daylight saving times. I'll be damned if I make my code harder to understand and more complex than strictly necessary to do it's job and the jobs it may reasonably be expected to do in the future. You're not just being pedantic: your encouraging massive overengineering.
2000 apps from a single developer is insane. So what is it? 4% of the total appstore? (assuming appstore has 50k apps).
First Criminal Prosecution for Domain Name Theft
So now it's "someone who has unfettered physical access to the machine can take advantage of that"?

I'm just not impressed in general by hacks which begin with "first you must achieve a complete breach of the target machine's security..."
Is it just me or does anyone else here find zero desire to own a tablet.
It's not the worst I've seen, but it sure is bad.
Doesn't explain how they obtained the puzzling mail that was sent in response to Apple, though.
"Is it just me, or has there been an increase in the amount of attacks on apple hardware?"

People love to be in the spotlight. If you can produce a story which involves Apple, you will get to be in the spotlight. It's as simple as that.
ShabbyDoo is definitely onto something with his guess that European government-connected churches market themselves less.

From what I understand you will be quite left-out of society in most of US if you don't go to church. Here in Sweden, as a member of church, you can have funerals, marriages and baptising at church, but the church will never really bother you to come to the Sunday service.

The Swedish church was slightly decoupled from the government a number of years ago, but fees from members are still collected by the tax office, something like half a percent at most, it varies by region (diocese?).

Also, members of the Swedish church get to participate in elections for the primary positions. See http://www.svenskakyrkan.se/default.aspx?di=272326 I don't know if that happens for US churches.

Mormons and other US free-churches do come here and have head quarters. I find that they pray on the poor and unfortunate ones by knocking doors and stopping people on the streets to offer their solutions. They're very much considered fringe groups though, since the Swedish church is so much moderate and yet provide ceremonies that are in demand even in the world's most secularized country.
you and i are here on hn. we are the definition of subset. your subset is infinitesimally small in the macro environment of voice conversations. there are billions of people who do not have computers - but do have nokia cell phones. that is the growth market of the next decade.

imho, the us market will lead the way as a test bed for services of this nature to be rolled out globally.
Oh, I have been assured by my sources that there are legal proceedings in the works over that as well.
or google.com -> search "yellowbird" (which is what a lot of people do anyway these days)
Could somebody remind me what problem it is that tablets are supposed to be solving for mainstream computer users? Sure, I've owned tablets in the past (models made by Motion, mostly), but I've always liked them more as technological curiosities rather than practical tools. Will non-niche computer users really want a tablet just to enable media distribution? Where is the burning need?
How to Conserve Water by Harvesting Rain or Snow
What 275 Quintillion floating-point operations get you [image]
From TextMate to Vim
tough day at the office? pump the breaks on the sarcasm mate, you're burnin unique id's.
Interview with Rob Janoff, designer of the Apple logo
Do you know how I can get around this error? I tried deleting the Philtro cookies, but it didn't help.

"Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
Size of a request header field exceeds server limit."
This is also amusing:

We develop iPhone applications exclusively using Objective-C and the
Mac. We have a strict work schedule of 12 hours a day 6 days a week.

I thought Objective-C developers were relatively hard to find. Who would work 12 hours a day 6 days a week with such specialized (and presumably in-demand) knowledge?
But they tried to leech off of it: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2581/3724300173_2680b2c023.jp...
Go It Alone
"go it alone by bruce judson" -- free online book

http://www.brucejudson.com/frombook.html
Yup, it took me over 30 minutes to get it to work with an Ebay item I just bought.

I was worried it had been hacked.

Funnily enough, I checked their RSS feed for what's going on, and it told nothing.

Then I checked twitter.com/paypal and that was garbage too.

So much for the 'real time web'.
Thinking Beyond the RFP
I often enjoy these articles, but they never really resonate with me. I see almost nothing of my day to day life in these narratives.

Would this article describe San Francisco? New York? Seattle? Portland? Austin? New Orleans? Memphis?

I assure you that people buying a house in SF aren't surprised to find grout in the tiles or drafty windows. We're actually kind of hoping to find those things, because this means we're not paying for someone to stage and flip (even in this economy).

I think international borders are very over rated where it comes to culture shock. Not saying there's no difference, of course, I just suspect there's the opportunity for every bit as much culture shock within the US than between the US, Canada, or Australia, maybe more... try moving from central Manhattan to central London, then move from Manhattan to the outskirts of Toledo. Hell, you don't have to go that far, just go to the New York exurbs.
Actually I'm self employed and have been for about 2 decades now.

Also I was serious.

I never thought of the value that is inherent in knowing who calls who. That's the sort of gem that comes by here every now and then.

as to unique id's...
It's not overengineering. It's easier to deal with times with timezones (probably converting them back to epoch time, but doing so unambiguously). If you've never done date handling correctly before, you may not realize that. It only takes one place where the ambiguity bites you to make up for all the "ease" you got yourself by leaving them off, and you point out the case where the user doesn't even have to change timezones: DST. It doesn't hardly add any lines of code to get it right.

It's really no different than arguing "I don't need to know about text encodings"; it's actually easier to do it right the first time than just muddle along. Text encodings and dates are hard because people just muddle along and think they're getting somewhere. Fortunately, it's a lot easier to seal away the pain with datetimes than it is with text encodings.
yeah, probably better to link directly to paypal's dev communication than a techcrunch post on this one.
How is America going to end? Choose Your Own Apocalypse
The article explains that the response is an automatic reply for any mail sent to the e-mail address that the authors found for Khalid's company. The response was not necessarily sent to Apple; presumably Khalid uses a different contact address for his App Store work.
A nation which will one day mass produce a cure for type one diabetes

My money's on the Chinese for that, actually.
There's probably an approach we can take based on this that retains the location-friendliness without reverting back to old menus.

Then again, I'd say, for any existing system built for experts... just keep the current UI! There's no chance this is ever going to be _mandated_, after all.
Providing a default timezone would also be worse than my paper notebook, because it would mean that some of the times I enter would be assigned to the incorrect timezone, which means they'd be assigned to the incorrect absolute time. It's a recipe for automatically falsifying data as soon as it's entered!
Ask YC: Recurring billing: 1. Paying resellers, 2. Switching gateway vendors
SaaS Rails Kit (http://railskits.com/saas/) with Active Merchant used with gateways such as Braintree or Authorize.net seems like a flexible and cost-effective option for recurring billing. PayPal looks like a fast way to get started, bearing in mind the horror stories (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198516 ).<p>Two questions:<p>1.	What solutions are available to automate tracking, reporting and payments to channel partners (resellers, distributors, affiliates) using the gateways or PayPal? I’ve heard that Avantgate (http://www.avangate.com) supports multiple tiers of distribution, but their fees (http://www.avangate.com/help/vendor-faq.php#bottom10) are higher than the gateways, and only the name "Avangate" appears on the buyer’s CC statement. PayPal enables payments to affiliates using simple scripts with PayPal’s Mass Pay, but you have to create your own reporting. Amazon FPS appears to only support per-transaction payments, not aggregation of payments (http://tinyurl.com/l6zvkd).<p>2.	How easy is it to switch gateway or platform vendors if they’re storing the credit card info? If you’re using Auth.net but want to switch to Braintree, how is the credit card info transferred so that you can continue billing monthly without interruption? This question has been asked before (http://tinyurl.com/mj9zgp) but not answered that I’ve seen, except that CC info can’t be transferred from PayPal (http://tinyurl.com/lyupgg).<p>Thanks!
Leaving the corporate nest
Had to write as we were talking about exactly the same thing today in my office, how using Twitter and Facebook to promote commercial companies doesn't work because it is too much of a social platform. Its about time people start to use this great technology we have through apps to help working life not just for fun. I work in exhibitions and could see how this application to share drawings could help me communicate with contractors on site. Looks as though it would have lots of other uses other than just architecture. Great vid by the way.
There are a lot people in India who can programm and you do not need a lot of experience to produce this kind of crap, so you should find some programmers very quickly.
I really want one. I often use a netbook just to watch videos, and a tablet would have a nicer form factor. Not sure how much I'd be willing to spend on one, however.
My understanding was that if you only needed a vps for five days then you're only charged for five days. Their prices are given as monthly but they measure your usage daily.
free to try to guess your timezone, free to store the fact that it guessed, and show you the guess, and give you a convenient UI for correcting the guess if it gets it wrong

This is far less convenient than pencil and paper.

it tries to wake you up at 2:32 am localtime

Yes, in order to instruct the computer to do something at a particular time, you have to reduce it to absolute time (although I think this is best done by storing the local time and the time zone, rather than the absolute time, since the time zone may change between the time I write down the time and the time I use it). But there are lots of times I write down that can be usefully processed without being reduced to absolute time; for example, if I have a bunch of times in the same (unspecified) timezone, I can sort them and compute intervals between them. (...usually.)

There's a difference between writing sloppy programs and writing programs that can be successfully used sloppily.
It's not just you. I think tablets are a over-hyped idea. I think we'll see things like mobile phones take their place. I do, however, see natural input (such as writing and drawing) making their way on to notebook computers.
3 things I found interesting in this article:

a) an NBA player investing into domains

b) a major domain investor who makes millions is using AOL

c) the arrogance of the thief who didn't even try to cover up his tracks. I mean how stupid must you be, to transfer a domain to your own godaddy account and to also add the extra papertrail by linking your paypal account to the theft.
reddit down as well or just me?
PlayNow arena
Considering the massive authorize.net outage that occured because of a fire in 1 datacenter not long ago… well, I no longer have faith that large companies have geographic redundancy ;)

Edit: or, if they have it, I don’t trust that it is implemented in a way that allows an immediate & transparent (or near-transparent) failover.
The best way to do this is to get a merchant account of your own and plug in with any one of the big IPSPs. Integration is typically less than half a days work.

PayPal is notoriously bad about charging recurring for services, I would never use them again for something like that (they once held a substantial amount of money for 6 months without any qualifications, just 'account closed' and 'because we can').