skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say the likes of .copm, .cop, etc. will be hot property - typical typos I always used to do.
Inside Seth Godin's Blogging Philosophy - Advertising Age - DigitalNext
Does anyone here know a good entry-level book on FPGAs and VHDL or Verilog that covers best practices and implementing real world designs? In school I did some work with FPGAs and may have to brush up for an upcoming work project. I have "HDL Chip Design" by Douglas J. Smith from school but I am hoping there is something else out there that has helped people here.
Yeah, but if it were a desktop app, it wouldn't have magic App Store juju and would lose all novelty. :) I'm buying it though.
Two problems, both personal:

I love Real Time Strategy games and this looks like something (more ambitious than) the Civilization family of games ... which cost me two years of my early adulthood.

I write software and I'd want nothing more than to see something like this "happen".

... I have a wife and kids, now. I'm going to have to pretend I never clicked that link.
Art Director's Toolkit is a great app for the Mac whose feature set has a little intersection with this app's:
http://www.code-line.com/software/artdirectorstoolkit5/
I wasn't talking about doing polls only. Each application would get a discussion thread, so there is room for someone to write a passionate essay or whatever.

I agree that there are issues with exposing voting. Maybe it would be interesting to shuffle the number of votes at first, see what happens when an application that was below the fold shoots to the top. (Maybe news.yc should do this too?)

The advantage of voting is that you can quickly flag wastes of time. In, e.g., fiction publishing, the ratio of acceptable to crap is 1 to 100 or worse, because any idiot can and does write a novel. You don't need to know everything as a reader to be able to eliminate the crap.

I think what you are really worried about is a situation where you have so many winners that there's no time to find the diamond in the rough. I don't think that's different from these startups' current situation though. They need to stand head and shoulders above the competition in some manner. They might as well start now.
More info on graphene (1 atom thick sheets of carbon)
My thoughts exactly. Also, there are enough additional permutation rules to balloon the result space way beyond the reach of even a modest super computer.

One approach would be to lease a massive cluster of cloud computers to carry out the calculations. However, this option isn't financially viable for a lone developer.

Maybe there's an alternative way of approaching the problem.
I was actually surprised by this and I'm sure there are plenty of intranet or small scale subscription services using Google Maps without paying.

Does Microsoft or Yahoo offer more startup friendly terms?
Ask YC: Team structure - when is the right time to start?
Hi All,

I need your help and thoughts. Here's a quick background.

I started building some projects for fun and realized that it would be great if I can hire some help. Obviously, I couldn't afford a full time salary here, so I decided to see if there's some possibility of an offshore team.

I hired my first person 18 months ago and this person started working at then my partners house (he lives offshore). We moved into our first office 15 months ago and increased the team to 4 people. Till then I was just building stuff for fun trying to see what sticks. This is when I started getting requests from a couple of people to build applications for them. It was a good source of side income and so we did.

Fast forward to now, my partner is no longer with us (I own the company now), we have moved into a larger office and recently hired employee # 10 and # 11. We're doing some fun things building fun applications and this hobby has suddenly turned into a BUSINESS with real profit and revenue.

The problems and questions I have are:
a) My structure so far was flat. Everyone reported to me. We used scrum reporting from Assembla. However, now there's too many people to manage plus I still have customers to work with. However, if we introduce a structure, the hierarchy may slow things down. Thoughts?

b) With more people especially since I am not in the same location as others, there are communication hurdles. We've gotten pretty good at this but does anyone have better experience with dislocated teams that can suggest some tools? process? etc. that can help other than the regular skype, messenger, phone etc.

c) If we decide a structure, it makes sense for me to make my first 4 employees as leads. They have been around the longest and worked with me the most (and hence understand me the most). 2 of those are the strongest developers, however the other 2 not so much. However, from experience I know that when you make the smartest people leaders, they loose their day to day contribution a little at least in the short run. What do you recommend the best structure would look like.

I understand I may not have provided some details, so please let me know in the comments and I will add here.

Appreciate your help for a first time entrepreneur/business owner with little knowledge of growing a company and creating a structure that lends well to growth.

Thanks !
This had some interesting information, but it's meaningless. If you care about performance, you won't be using interpretation in your VM, and code that's quick to interpret is almost never code that's quick when compiled. The challenges are simply different when you're dealing with compiled VM code.
Except that I believe (from YC terms) founders(and thier ability to persevere) are more important than thier ideas.
Stallman says that the inherent tension in copyrights is between the consumer and publisher, and that the consumer clearly takes precedence. You could just as easily, however, say it's a tension between the short and long-term benefits for the consumer; on the one hand, copyright weakens the rights of the consumer, but on the other hand it guarantees they will continue to have quality media to consume.

I don't claim to know where the balance lies between these two considerations, but I do know that there has to be a balance, even if we are solely concerned for the consumer's well-being.
Dreams of grandeur corrupt the best of men. Give him a link to this page, it states your concerns very clearly. If he doesn't get it, don't continue with him.
Someone please make a "I wrote an awesome open source project and all I got was this lousy tshirt" shirt.
I've worked with many people who talked this way.
One of the sexes would need to be made infertile also.
Yes, which is why I said "If [they] have a demo-ready B2C product". YC is more early stage than what you can meaningfully show MT.

Also: If users love your product (not just the idea) and pay, you have already demonstrated that you are a good team, and it is pretty easy to persevere when you have an increasing number of paying customers.
This is an interesting problem.

You're right. They'd be the Aardvark.

I remember looking for a movie that had a number in the title at a local movie rental place ten years ago (both the name of the movie and the place escapes me). I expected to find them in front of the "A" movies only to discover that they had alphabetized assuming the number was spelled.

Sad to say, the movie was probably something along the lines of "10 Things I Hate About You" being spelled Ten Things I Hate About You, but as a geek and a man, I am unwilling to admit that.

Put in some preceding exclamation points and some spaces for good measure and they'll live in infamy in (almost) every usenet newsreader.
quickly flag wastes of time

Exactly. The startup would have to opt to be publicly vetted, but it would make a lot of sense. The worries of group-think are overrated. I think most would happily allow it and be grateful for the feedback and to see how they rate.

It takes some of the stress off of YC and lets a very smart community get involved. It's a win-win, really.
I think "I wrote an awesome open source project and I didn't even get a lousy tshirt" tshirt would be even better. :-)
While your team remains small, focus entirely on issue tracking and documentation for communication: for example, set up Trac, and make sure everything is written up as a ticket and/or a wiki page. That way, work items are easily assigned to people, and at a glance anyone can see what others are doing without having to stop and ask them.

Instill a culture of checking for open items and picking them up. Your teammates should see new issues on the page and seek to assign them properly. (After all, everyone can see if one guy has 100 items and another has 2, so it'll distribute itself naturally.)

Similarly, the rate of success on tickets will tell you if your team is really big enough.
feel free to write the code in any language or platform you want, we don't care.
"used to apply the concept of a stack"

Do you really need something as complicated as a stack?

n = 0
for (char in string)
if (char == '(') n++
if (char == ')') n--
if (n < 0) print "Unbalanced"
if (n != 0) print "Unbalanced"
How about an XSL to generate this view from your sitemap.xml?
Actually, I think (for me at least) this would run the risk of pissing me off.

When all that I get in return for open source software is goodwill/karma/recognition, then there's no quid-pro-quo going on, and valuation is explicitly in non-monetary terms.

As soon as you start sending physical goods around, you're making it look like you're assigning direct value to my labour. I suspect my reaction to a company t-shirt in the post would be either

"You think so little of my work that it's worth one lousy t-shirt?"

or worse

"Not only are you profiting off the sweat of my brow, you want to me to wear this tshirt & give you free advertising?"

I don't claim this is rational - but I suspect I'd react emotionally that way.
I wonder how much of Bing's traffic is being generated by Microsoft's Cashback program? I did appreciate the irony of using Bing Cashback to get 8% off my new MacBook.
Federated Media Teams With Bing For BingTweets
It's true that GPLv3, the original AGPL, and AGPLv3 are not as well tested in court as GPLv2. However, they do not depend on "clickwrap" contracts, as your profane comment appears to imply; they are written solely as unilateral copyright licenses, not contracts ("agreements", which is what the "A" in "EULA" stands for). It's possible that a court might invalidate them, but they are grounded in the exclusive rights reserved to authors under regular copyright law.

The AGPL is not as popular as the standard GPL, partly because it's somewhat new. Laconica is probably the most popular piece of software that uses it.

I don't think the FSF really has factions. People who disagree with Richard tend to just leave.
"meaningless" is probably a bit harsh--usually there is a very good reason to use interpretation in the first place: ease of implementation and portability. you get both things for free when using an interpreter but have to take care when implementing a compiled system (even gets worse with a just-in-time compiler [needs interpreter AND compilation stuff]).
NaCl: DJB’s new crypto library
Well, the nice thing about having people send you an email offering schwag is that you can always say no. :-)

If Microsoft offered to send me a free t-shirt, I'd probably say I wasn't interested -- but I'd still be glad that they had offered.
I think the essay agrees more with your second statement than first -- that copyright is a trade-off between the public interest in using published works and an interest in encouraging publication through some kind of incentive system.
Is 30 minutes too much to ask?
is a very interesting read, for those who are too lazy or just looking for a gist, here it is:

instead of using the prevalent stack-based interpreter architecture, register based interpreters need fewer instructions, since all those load & store instructions are not necessary anymore. however, the amount of information cannot become less, therefore the information is replaced by using quadruple code, i.e., the tuple (opcode, destination register, source register 1, source register 2). the quadruple code requires more space, alas the bytecode binaries become bigger, whereas the code requires fewer instruction dispatches than its stack based counterpart.

NOTE: this paper implements the optimization for the jvm, but lua uses a register based architecture, too! (AFAIR google's dalvik [of android fame] uses a register based approach, too--probably to save energy [since dispatches in interpreters require indirect branches, which are quite expensive])
> Stallman says that the inherent tension in copyrights is between the consumer and publisher, ....

Actually, I don't think he said that at all. He said that, in passing laws related to copyright, the government is, ideally, acting entirely to maximize the benefit to the public. He says that copyright exists in order to encourage authors to produce more works, because that should benefit the public.

> I don't claim to know where the balance lies between these two considerations, but I do know that there has to be a balance, ....

Stallman doesn't agree with you. He specifically states that the idea that copyright should balance the rights of various parties, is a bad one. Read the section titled, The first error: "striking a balance". It ends: "Since the idea of 'striking a balance' between publishers and readers denies the readers the primacy they are entitled to, we must reject it."
How to get a night's sleep without shit happening
Modern nuclear submarines are not cramped.
I don't see the need for NDAs unless his idea is patentable. If this is in the consumer space, that NDA would likely not amount for anything.

If you read enough startups, you'd know that the success of startups do not depend on the idea but on the founders.

With the situation you are in right now, you and your friend would probably not work well together.
What Ballmer declares publicly means nothing. When the reports start floating out of Microsoft of the violence that he has committed against office furniture, we know we have something.
Couldn't you just make the map publicly available for both users and non-users? Your fee/subscription-base isn't for the map itself. The map simply serves as a manner to visualize data.

I have a feeling that the many, many real estate companies whom use Google maps aren't all paying for the API, despite it being a commercial venture.
Like someone mentioned, 28 days is what it takes to form a habit, through the formation of neural links in the brain.

However, to last 28 days, you will need something else to inspire you. Nothing works like love/sex, which are evolutionary needs embedded into our limbic memory. You have to somehow derive inspiration from either of these two to last 28 days.

I know because I have, on 2 occasions - and have achieved minor miracles :D . On others, I continue being the same as you. But its comforting ( and scary since I don't want to be 30 and still a lazy ass ) to know that there's more than one of us.
I'm not saying that the person would review all the apps at $10/pop. Just the extra that pg can't manage.

+ its not like it'd be peanuts. Let's say YC gets 1,000 applications this summer. That'd be $10-20-$100K(depending on how much they'd charge) to go towards the extra person to review the app.

I dunno about you, but 10-20-100K for a month's worth of work is hardly peanuts. If you use the $100 price point, that's $200K/yr just to review funding apps for 2 months. Plenty of cash to "hire" some angel investor as a "consultant", who'd be able to do this and still have the time to do his regular "job", the other 10 months out of the year.

+ talk about synergy, the angel investor would be able to get in on the ground floor, to fund the program graduates at show and tell, and if pg passes on some project that the angel thinks has merit, he can fund them outside of YC.
You're talking to the wrong people. We can't fix the fact that your friend is mad with power, and has a weak grasp on the value of an idea without someone to execute it.

You need to talk to your friend, and tell him you would love to work with him on this, but the opportunity cost only makes sense if you are an equal partner in the venture. You simply can't take those kinds of risks, accept so little income, work those kinds of hours, without a reasonable expectation of equal sharing in the results of the work. If he wants you to work for him, rather than be a co-founder, he should be offering competitive market rates and benefits (or contractor rates and no benefits; you could even offer him the "friend" rate of $100/hour rather than the regular rate of $150/hour). He'll either realize he's being a douche, or yell at you to GTFO and never call him again. Either way, you come out ahead and you don't get screwed out of a couple of years of your life just to wind up in a crappy job where you're under-appreciated and underpaid.
from the supreme court:

"The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that promoting progress means benefit for the users of copyrighted works. For example, in Fox Film v. Doyal, the court said, The sole interest of the United States and the primary object in conferring the [copyright] monopoly lie in the general benefits derived by the public from the labors of authors."
Can't stack-based bytecode languages get compiled to code that doesn't have lots of load & store instructions, by using registers to represent the top several words of the stack?
Yes, interpretation has strengths, but those go away when you try to do 'optimized' interpretation. Interpretation optimizations, particularly in register forms, are not only difficult to implement but non-portable (they'll work everywhere, but all architectures are not created equal).

If you care about performance, going the compiler route is the only way. In addition, JITCs do not need an interpreter as well, it's just often done that way to offset the cost of compilation for routines that aren't hit often.
> NOTE: this paper implements the optimization for the jvm, but lua uses a register based architecture, too!

Lua 5 uses a register based VM, it seems. There's a paper on it - and more - here: http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/doc/jucs05.pdf
I like the ten year rule. I have a similar rule for cars--it takes about one year for a driver to completely master the peculiarities of a new car--its handling, judging exactly where the tires are relative to curves, potholes, how well the mirrors tell you when to stop backing up.

But I have been using emacs for way more than ten years daily and still have much to learn.

Yes, I can imagine that you can learn vi in a shorter time, but I know very little about it. I actually know more about 'ed' than I do vi.

One (strenuous) exercise is to write a full, complete tutorial for a language. Explain it to your grandmother, for example. That will get you there quicker. And you will learn things about the product that you would not otherwise know.

Another exercise to completely learn a language is to write a compiler for it. This will flush out the corners of the language for you.

But these are admittedly a bit extreme methods.

I agree that it is worthwhile to master your tools.
One book that I've seen recommend is A Verilog HDL Primer, Third Edition by J. Bhasker. Some books focus their attention on coding for simulation without giving synthesis its due. I have been told that this book does not make that mistake.
I use Safari on my Macbook and have it installed on my windows machine for testing.

- IE8 is there because it is a clear upgrade path

- FireFox is there because it has well known brand recognition

- Chrome is there because they want to push their own tech

What would Safari there gain? It would simply be one more choice. I think the three are already too many.
You could use that route, but it's easier to just convert to an SSA form and allocate registers intelligently when you compile the code. Compiling stack-based code, even in an optimized way, is very simple.
PowerPoint: Killer App? (2005)
I was trying to google around to verify this. Could not find any hard data but it appears he did incorporate duct work in his house to pass the heating from his fireplaces around to various rooms. This was probably not very common at the time.
Google isn't omniscient. You probably won't get noticed by them until you are large enough to pay their fee. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Google never enforces this $10K rule, and that it's there just in case.

And if you do get noticed, and they decide to enforce the rule, nothing is stopping you from making that one feature free.
They can, but now you have register spilling, register allocation, and your instruction sizes aren't significantly smaller, since you still refer to registers.

All in all, it's a bad idea unless you're doing it in hardware (where you simply can't have enough registers due to cost [in money and die area] issues)
WebKit: Last Browser Standing in way of RESTful Content-Negotiation in Web Apps
shrug

Seems pretty fair to me. Not especially friendly to startups, but definitely fair.
Angel investors are already rich, by definition. We're talking about the sort of people that can write a check for $50k and not really sweat it. They're not looking for contract work that will pull them $10k. They'd probably be more interested in becoming a YC partner, as in a sense Paul Buchheit and Ron Conway have become.

The people qualified to do this sort of thing are either rich or insanely busy, which is why they'll probably do it if Paul's calling in a favor, but not to make a buck.
The article should more properly be titled "Learn anything in ten years".

One thing about Emacs (mentioned in another comment in this thread) is that it is more than an editor but mostly used as an editor. It does not take 10 years to learn to use it as a better notepad (I mean, better pico... whatever), but mastering its existing (elisp) code base and adding to it (more than the trivial customization) takes a while indeed.

The article mentions some of the general reasons why it takes a while. Another one is that few people actually set out to "learn Emacs" as such, they just do it as an afterthought while working on other projects, and therefore not in a consistent and steady manner. So there may be months between "lessons" and, therefore, 10 years to complete a course, so to speak.
Yeah, but they offer the mapping aspect for free (far as I know). If the mapping is behind a paywall, I think that's where the pricing starts.
because they're both awesome and we always want to know which one is awesomer!, now please lets not include TextMate in this conversation :)

I'm a VIM user and I always like the cool things Emacs users can do, even though I'll never use Emacs.
You can deal with that using some scarcity. Give each team 10 apps to rate. You could allow them to vote "good" or "bad" for all apps, but give them one "Drop everything and fund this" star that they can dole out. Ideally, distribute enough that each app gets rated by 2 or 3 teams and you could sort the list by star count first, and yes-to-no ratio second.
The article isn't clear whether this was a voluntary public statement or a result of a direct question (the TechFlash article seems to hint that it was a question). It makes a pretty big difference.

Had he answered with "no comment", the headline would've been "Microsoft shaking in their boots". Giving a vague non-answer might have been safer, but it still doesn't mean we should read too much into his answer (and even that could have been twisted any number of ways).
What about iphone apps? Say you make an iphone app that uses the google map tiles and api, but you want to charge $.99 for this app, are you supposed to pay the $10k license fee??