skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really? I wouldn't have guessed that...

I was hoping for some details.
As a counter-point, I have several friends who had nice companies and outstanding offers in the late 90s who could have sold but did not do so because they told themselves that they were going to make the company _huge_ and better offers were always going to come knocking (because for the previous couple years they always did.) When the bubble popped they were left holding nothing and a couple of them are still obsessed with the could'a, should'a, why-didn't-I moment that passed them by.

If you succeed once it will be easier to do again and you will not feel the same pressure to cash out because you will always know that if the current venture blows up you have a comfortable life banked away. Consider the idea that exiting now give you the freedom to exit whenever you want on future ventures by just walking away and trying something else...
I'd like to zoom in on that bookshelf. I wonder what books are on it. All I can make out easily is Watchmen.

With examination I see "Infected," left self third from the top. I notice IT and The Stand on the left shelf second from the bottom. Must be the Stephen King shelf. Lots of sci-fi on the shelf above that. Textbooks in the shelf on the right...

http://www.randsinrepose.com/assets/randsshelf.jpg

Do you recognize any other books?
I would imagine that one of the least expensive and most practical places to start a business is your parents' house. Some people may not have that luxury but for those that do it's a major cost and time savings.
Shark Tank--entrepreneurs pitches to a panel to invest cash for equity
Ah. Thanks. In Japan they do nLDK: n Bedroom + Living/Dining/Kitchen (1LDK, 2LDK).
what I've been told is that everybody who discusses Genetics and IQ honestly are effectively Nazis and should be driven from public life.

Who told you that? Someone here on HN, or someone somewhere else?

Just yesterday, writing a review of a different book, I came upon this interesting quotation from Thomas Sowell:

"The taboo against discussing race and IQ has not left this an open question. On the contrary, it has had the perverse effect of freezing an existing majority of testing experts in favor of a belief that racial IQ differences are influenced by genetics. No belief can be refuted if it cannot be discussed."

Agreeing with Sowell on the endorsement of open inquiry, I would love to have people discuss carefully, thoughtfully, and without name-calling what they mean when they talk about genetic influences on human intelligence and all other influences on human intelligence. This is a much-researched issue, and I have taken care to meet some of the eminent researchers in person and to read the peer-reviewed journal articles and major monographs of many more researchers on the issue for more than a decade. Facts are established by careful observation and experimentation, and the implications of those facts are discovered by considering yet more facts.
Why is it "important to note that"? Palm obviously have their reasons for preferring iTunes, but that doesn't make faking the vendor ID any more legitimate.
So what is between 1 and 2 million dollars?
Doesn't everybody sacrifice their youth though? I'm trying to think of what my friends are doing that's more interesting than a startup, and I can't really think of anything. Grad school. Law school. A second bachelor's, because the first was in something unemployable. Unemployment. Living at home with parents and working at a coffee shop, or as a dog-walker. Spending 5 full days/week working for a big corporation, with the commute not allowing any extra time during the day - well, at least they get weekends.

I can really only think of a couple people doing interesting stuff. One spent 6 months on a boat in an Alaska working as a salmon fisher. Another is on a boat in the South Pacific as part of a grad program in geology in Chile. A third is in the Peace Corps. All of those have downsides (eg. salmon fishing is incredibly physically demanding and stinks, literally, and the girl in the Peace Corps gets sexually harassed wherever she goes). And in all cases, it's at the cost of not being able to build up any savings at all.
I think your employer would find you to be a rather poor employee in that #2 situation.
It (in almost every case) implies hosting on EC2. I haven't added detection of image host to my script yet.
Don't listen to anything Donald Trump says. He doesn't live in reality.
Im currently living in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Low cost of living. Nice relaxed environment for when youre not working.

I was previously living in Australia. Made a decent living from consulting work which may have been one of the reasons the product side of the business didn't do terribly well. Once I was out of the country consulting work got harder to get so I've had to devote more energy to products and that seems to be bearing fruit.

Apartment rent is maybe $300/mth inc net connection, water, electricity. Can get a good thai meal for $1-3. Net connection is pretty quick although the infrastructure is a bit dodgy so there is an outtage probably once a week for generally no more than an hour or two. Dont think Id host here but for your own connection its fine.
Right, I agree. Pick an undesirable part of the bay area thats cheap, get a motorcycle, etc.

But I don't really agree with a part time job. A part time computer job anyway, will totally kill your focus. There is something big to be said for full timing it. It sounds like he's talking about saving to go full time out of the US, and the bottom line is that he can do the same thing by living in poverty IN the US - and still have access to the networks in the bay area.
Friendly FYI: That's "Allen" wrench.
Microsoft Exchange 2010 beta 1: Review
I mentioned in the post that the risks are low, but difficult to precisely quantify. I think there were lots of businesses in the dot-com boom that did not foresee the crash coming. I worry that some similar crash (or something else) could be around the corner, even though its not clear now.

As far as growing the company... we are more aggressive now than ever. Since I have already taken a good portion of money out of the company, I feel safe to plow a larger portion back into growth. In our space, to keep doubling requires constant and accelerating ramping-up.
I think it's smart not to divulge your actual company name. It could give a potential buyer too much insight into your bargaining position.

But...how about telling us what general type of business?
I'm in Beijing for fun and frugality - it hits on #1 but it is getting more expensive

Many many things here are an order of magnitude cheaper than they are in the states
Your lawyer's office address. I have an arrangement with my guy since I am not even in the U.S. anymore. He also comes handy for other things; right now he is in the process of transferring my car title to my sister (I don't need to be there physically.)

You might be able to get a similar service from a certified accountant or a public notary. Ask around.
Life is tooooo big to get stuck working on only one thing :P
I don't get it. Buying digital and real books is not exclusive. Personally, I like explicitly deciding which books deserve the honor of "gathers dust and taking up space" status. Just as I keep printed-out copies of interesting online essays or blog posts in a bunch of binders, I keep tangible copies of interesting books around as well.
I didn't know about the stale attribute for couchdb(mentioned in a comment in the article). I can see places where it will speed up things in our set up.

Also, Mongo DB is interesting and I have plans to evaluate it for our setup(batch reads and writes, no master-master replication requirement, but need master-slave replication, also need sharding rather desperately). Does anyone have any experience couchdb-lounge mentioned in the same comment?
I can see why it would be very hard to get out when you're growing so aggressively. I guess I'd just say the fantasy startups of the future are blessedly free of complications and unpleasant work and that isn't going to be the reality.
You could install sip droid on an unlocked android like the adp1 (or install unknown sources on a carrier phone) or go with any number of sip clients for pdas. Then you still need to provision a line for the other end of the sip connection, but you'll have a pda that can make calls.
The very fact that this question has been asked demonstrates the reason that the biggest companies are founded by people who are truly "not in it for the money."

Most of the numbers here are under $10 million. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, could have all sold their companies very early and had plenty of F-U money with a few extra Lamborghinis to boot. But it was the vision of creating something bigger than money that kept them going at it, even though it could all fall apart, and that's why we have the amazing things we do today.
If you can easily get a 10% return on investing every year, you can make MUCH more than $10 million by getting a job at a hedge fund :)
It would be circular logic if "Government Intervention" was a single thing rather than a designation that applies to a myriad of things.

My issue with your line of reasoning is that it's academic. You're making an argument based on a model of Monopoly = Government Intervention and that's not where we are anymore.
And don't forget New Hampshire and the free state project.
Yes, I know about those, and despite what he says, that is not the current norm. (Those posts are from quite a long time ago.)
Isn't Knob Creek a somewhat expensive whiskey? You would think people would tend to drown their economic sorrows in cheap whiskey...
$4 million after taxes is minimum I'd sell for in that position. I'd aim for $12 million after taxes, if possible. Anything over that is gravy and not worth taken much risk for.
How can an author be more careful? By never using any word that can possibly be distorted? That's hopeless, and has a more deleterious effect on communication than the misunderstandings it seeks to prevent.

As an avid English speaker, I wholeheartedly reject this notion of turning the language into a minefield of words you absolutely must avoid even when nobody is likely to misinterpret them.
This should have the general marketing technique disclaimer of: "Just because it worked for them doesn't mean it will work for you".
No, I don't think so. Or at least it depends on the job.

As an employer, I know that you are working there because you love what you are doing and don't want to be doing anything else. I don't have to worry that you'll move along as soon as someone offers you another $1.50 an hour. And in a startup, I know that if we hit a rough patch we can probably come up with a way to trade you equity for salary. For creative positions, I'd view financial independence as a positive.
Time Zone differences and crappy internet access will mess you up. I don't mind hacking until 4AM, but it gets to ya when you need to be on the phone that late when everybody in your apartment building is asleep. After long exhausting business phone calls I feel like I need to leave the house and go for a drink; try doing that at 6AM without feeling like a junkie.

I found most places in Asia to be too distracting or too removed from business life. In places like Bangkok you will be hanging out with tourists and teachers, laid back crowd. In Hong Kong or Singapore, it's too fast, too over-paid and too British and annoying; you will be very self conscious and/or lonely if you're not hanging out with MBAs and other well-paid careerists.
I'm half way in between. Good ol' Minnesota.
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Do those slides seriously lump Mercurial and Darcs together as distributed delta-based version control systems?
"So if anyone is reading this I'd love to hear. Is it just the $$? Because I feel like you need so much less of that than you think to be really happy."

In my case, it's not the money, it's the information. I work at one of the large tech companies in the valley, as a full-time employee. I spend about 20 hrs/week (out of about 50 hrs/week spent at work) actually coding, and most of the rest of the workweek reading & studying. After all, I can't write my code without understanding how it fits into the rest of the system.

The thing is, I can't learn the stuff I'm learning now anywhere else. Universities don't have it. The open-source world doesn't have it. It's all proprietary & confidential, and the only way to learn it is to work on systems that require it.

It was the same way for my last salaried job - I wanted to know how the financial industry worked, so I took a job at a financial software startup. As it turned out, I didn't want to learn how the financial world worked ;-), but I'm glad I had that exposure, even just as a high-level overview.

The money is just an added perk - it's nice to get paid 4x more and have a 401k and health coverage, but really, the only reason I care is that everyone else is getting it and I don't wanna feel like I'm being ripped off. I work for other organizations because I want to work on interesting problems, and I wouldn't have the opportunity to do so without the help of others.

I was a voracious reader in high school and college, and kinda feel like I've "read out" what's available through the public library system. A lot of books I check out now just feel shallow & superficial compared to what I've been exposed to in a professional context. University libraries are still somewhat interesting, but again, they often have the problem of being access-controlled to people enrolled in the university. I'd rather have people pay me to learn than pay someone to learn.
Digging Into A Ruby Installation, Require vs Load And Other Stuff
Based in Hong Kong which is a much lower cost base than US for engineers/designers, and we have a US based remote intern who helps with doing focus groups etc

Working out ok so far
Ask HN: How to promote my opensource project?
Folks I have created a Techmeme clone for "Indian News" as there are very few sources we can go to for quality Indian news.

This is a single person project so I get really small time to spread the word about this tool now only only family and friends are using this.

Please help me with some ideas by which I could promote this tool, as my hypothesis say this is a really good(utility) tool and Indians in general are news junkies.
You could auto-lengthen the URLs. Twitter has a useful tool for this, e.g.
http://search.twitter.com/hugeurl?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftinyurl.c...
Wheat bread's about 75 calories a slice, so 150 for just the bread. I don't know about you, but I put it on thick—maybe a serving-and-a-half per slice, which according to the Nutella website is 570 calories. So 720 total. Not 1,000, but closer to it than 239.
Ok, I'll bite. I'm a software developer, 10 years of web dev experience, and I can't fathom a business idea that would "absurdly easily" make me a grand a month. But I have little experience in entrepreneurship as of yet. Mind giving me a few pointers?
Service Innovation key to subscriber retention
The worst one was .museum. Just a way to shake down big companies like Coca-Cola who now have to go buy coke.eco, cocacola.eco, drinkcoke.eco...
The "you" I used was plural. I apologize for any discomfort I may have caused.

The comment was kinda rushed. I hoped that I would provoke some sort of discussion.. provoke because I don't knowledgeable enough to start it myself.
While I agree that this is the ideal, I don't know that this is always what happens. I think its dangerous to make conclusions about sci-fi/fantasy writers based on some of the best in the genre. I'm not very widely read outside the best, but I wonder if most sci-fi/fantasy writers do use their expanded world as a way to look at ours (as opposed to just creating a "cool" world full of magic and fun technology).
E-commerce Fever Makes Taobao China’s Newest Internet Darling
A Behance dot grid notebook was with me at every meeting until it ran out of pages. I recently replaced it with a Whitelines notebook, which I like even better.
Don't need to; Georgia is quite cheap. Even Atlanta is quite cheap compared to almost every other American city, especially the first-rate one, with very sane real estate prices except in areas like Buckhead.

But, if that's too much, head over to a college town like Athens. Can easily get a 2 or 3-bedroom apartment for $500-$600, $700-$900 if you want a rather upscale one. Salaries are low, and no shortage of college talent pool. There are a lot of townies, too; the charm of Athens seems to rub off on a lot of folks that finish college here. The University of Georgia is here - 32,000 students or more.

The broadband is good, and the living generally cheap. Real estate is by far the most expensive thing in Athens. It's somewhat annoyingly suburban outside of downtown and older historical areas, but that can be dealt with.

Honestly, I think that's a lot easier than trying to go through all the trouble of moving abroad.
Unite3D delivers a kickass plugin for games.

http://unity3d.com/

But it's a commercial product and might be too expensive for the OpenCiv guys.
Identical twins are amazingly similar - even when they're separated at birth. In fact identical twins reared apart are much more similar than fraternal twins reared together. Check out the wikipedia page on this, they have some nice charts of various traits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study
I'd love to work on putting an autonomous robot on an interstellar body.
CouchDB seems to be kind of a weird and interesting beast. I feel like it's what you'd get if you optimized completely for elegance and didn't consider pragmatism.

When I look at the design I feel somewhat inspired, but not, exactly, to replicate it. It's odd.
Okay wow I had no idea that Nutella was that high. That's freaking insane. You could have 2 and a half Snickers for that.
Set up your own server and use it instead of a web forum. :) NNTP rocks!
Hard to recruit anyone if you don't have contact information in your profile. I know some people who might be able to help you out. Feel free to get in touch.
I'd love to work on a generalized recommendation engine. After spending a fair amount of time tinkering on the Netflix prize, I now see countless sites and apps are in need of generalized recommendations--on the scale of being another layer we need on top of the web. And the topic pretty quickly drops you into the deep-end of mathematics, so developing that kind of challenging software is a plus.
I graduated and was worried, so I worked one full time job and five part time jobs - 80 hours a week. Then I taught myself Alias and went to work in Sydney as a consultant and part time lecturer. Then I got a job in Hong Kong - on half the money and worked as a government consultant. I was then hired by an Hong Kong company run by Indians selling sports shoes to Poland and Russia. I then worked in the core team for innovation for Philips CE for six years. I never had much money I have little now. I will never be an employee again and I am a partner in two startups now. Who knows what will happen but I suggest for happiness and "value" You spend your life (your time) in those places that will grant maximum experience
Or, they didn't appreciate you screwing with them when they're already agreeing to deliver your letter for just 44 cents and 3 lines of address.
http://doanepaper.com/
There are a lot of business models out there. I'm sort of partial to making software people want and then selling it to them. If that sounds interesting to you, I have a blog linked in my profile.
i did, actually, and i'm about +15% on the year so far. and about the same for the year before. i made some smart (read: lucky) decisions.
new account, yes :(
By "given your abilities", I consider these constant (let's say in the limited time window under focus). The formula is far too simplistic to misinterpret :)
I really like the people he has chosen to interview and I can't wait to get my hands on the book.

And using print statements for debugging! Glad to hear I'm in good company :-)
This depends if you're worried about obeying the letter of the law. In most jurisdictions, a corporation is required to have a "records office" where various corporate paperwork can be consulted during normal business hours (rules vary about who is allowed to consult what, but often a member of the general public can walk in and ask to see your articles of incorporation and list of directors).

If you want to be strictly legal, you should pay your lawyer to do this; google reveals lots of lawyers who provide this service for a modest (e.g., $100/year) fee. Some people are less concerned with such details, and just list one of the founders' home addresses as the records office; at which point they're technically breaking the law if they leave home during normal business hours (because at that point the records office isn't open) -- but for a small company, the odds of anyone ever turning up and asking to inspect documents is usually minimal.

Of course, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and jurisdictions vary -- but I think it's safe to say that if you're paying a lawyer to help with incorporating your company, he can help with this.
Never had a problem personally. If you're going to France, just learn five words and you're good:

"Excuse-moi, parlez-vous anglais?" ("Excuse me, do you speak English?")

(phonetically that's roughly "ex-cues-eh-mwah, par-lay-voo an-glays" with a little emphasis on the "glays", just say it fast and it'll sound recognizable)

You might get no. Then you say, "Oh... no parlez-vous francais... do you know where xyz thing is... xyz thing... xyz thing... y'know xyz thing..." Eventually they'll get it. The two-second politeness of addressing someone in French has always been enough for me.
I moved to Hong Kong as well, though lately I've been in Guangzhou quite a bit.

Hong Kong is actually a great location if you're interested in China. Getting investment visas is not too difficult and living costs are similar to the US. If you're smart, it can be much cheaper.

Trying to startup in China is _very_ difficult. I wouldn't recommend it until you have some experience in the area. As such, Hong Kong is a great place to get started.

If you are going to try Hong Kong, I would suggest getting in touch with an immigration advisor as soon as possible, because you can waste a lot of time otherwise. Also, get in touch with the people at the Hong Kong Startup Association:

http://www.hksua.com.hk/
There is a quick money-saving tip for anyone who pays freelancers through Paypal. If you are a freelancer, you should tell your employer this.

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You just need to click a link and upload a one-liner text file:

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Top right shelf contains "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" (in black) and the Harry Potter series. Below that "The Rise of The Creative Class" (green). Middle left contains "America (The Book)" (red).

Fun exercise.
I can confirm that you'll lose a fair bit of momentum in the move. In the long term, it can be great. But in the short term, you'll increase your burn rate and your work can stop all together as you figure out the rules of working in the new country.
Pet cat eaten by 13ft python 
An owner has told how his pet cat was "crushed, asphyxiated and consumed whole" by a 13ft python belonging to a neighbour.