skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not conflating anything. Censorship by the government is violation of human rights. Censorship by private business is usually not. But it is censorship.

In other words, private censorship isn't necessarily wrong. I never argued it was.

People need to learn how to separate descriptive factual concepts like "to censor" from normative moral concepts of right and wrong. We all censor ourselves--for instance, I am censoring myself from flaming you. Likewise, television networks censor their programs, Wal-Mart censors the music they sell, Apple censors the App Store, the military censors letters home from the troops, and the FCC censors the airwaves. Some of these instances of censorship are good, some of these instances are bad, and that's an entirely separate moral argument. It's lazy, imprecise, and duplicitous thinking to couple the concept of "censorship" so tightly with the concept of "wrong" that you can't meaningfully use the word half the time.
Sacrifice your youth? Heck, starting companies is the best, most interesting thing I have ever done. If it is a sacrifice I think you are in the wrong company/business.

I have not had any major payoff from the companies which I have started, but neither have I suffered. They key thing I have achieved is that I can essentially work on anything I want now, not because I am independently wealthy, but because I am recognised for what I do and can pick what I want to do. You can find freedom in more than large piles of money.
This image enumerates all the possibilities: http://www.reason.com/images/07cf533ddb1d06350cf1ddb5942ef5a...

Chances are that you'll have to go the H1B route. Which ain't pretty, because most employers automatically ignore job applications with those dreaded letters.

You'll save yourself a bunch of time and trouble by researching the companies that do employ on H1B. Meebo is one: http://gigaom.com/2008/07/05/meebos-jen-how-to-find-hard-to-... .

Also, mention the need for H1B as early as possible in the application process (cover letter is a good place), so that you don't ace the interviews only to get rejected for that reason. Another possibility is to offer to pay the legal costs of H1B applications (in the region of US$5000).
I'm currently in Australia and am looking to head to Thailand to extend my runway. Can you offer any advice on how you found your apartment and made the move? Anything you wish you'd known before you landed?
Post correspondence problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_correspondence_problem), not phencyclidine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phencyclidine).
No Such Thing as Riskless Venture Capital
If there is anything that helps for inspiration when looking for new stuff to do it is near future science fiction.

Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross and lots of others give you these nice little ideas that are just a little bit into the future, some of it is within reach if you try hard enough.

Maybe not quite the way they see it but still, plenty of hooks to hang a new project off.
Well not quite armchair, a good 30 percent of my firm's business is directly related to scaling.

Your user name didn't hint at that at all.
Ask HN: Which tech blog do you follow?
I had been following TechCrunch cuz everybody else was, but its turning to be pretty boring now. Frankly, I dislike the tabloid style posts of TechCrunch, a lot (and most of them are about Apple or Twitter).

Which blog do you follow?
Same here. Unless you're really lucky and find a startup willing to sponsor you, your best bet is probably to do the H-visa thing at a big company until you can get a Green Card. Then you're free to have some fun, as long as you don't stay out of the country for longer than half a year.

That's the route my folks took, though from Germany, so it might be different for you (with per-country quotas and whatnot).
Home Remedy For Diabetes - The Benefits of Natural Remedies
If I were you I'd take advantage of the fact that you're in India to start a local start-up. As others mentioned, your costs will be lower. Not only that, but you may be able to spot opportunities which have already been filled in the US, and "port" those solutions to India successfully.

At the very least, you should be able to make yourself enough money that you can then move to the US without worrying about getting a job.
"Mongo uses (auto) sharding as our path to scalabity (sharding is in alpha)"

it's my understanding that mongo currently only shards primary key lookups, not queries. it'll be interesting to see how successful they are in grafting a full distributed layer over top of it. generally the merge layer kills you because you must query all nodes to support global indexes. that is not to say that its impossible.

mongo has some wacky stuff in the on-disk file format which is kind of interesting, too.
this is a very good point, that as one gets into better and better shape, you at the same time become sensitized to how your body reacts to how you eat! I myself have been noticing this over the past month or two.
Risk mitigation is usually done best by splitting your bet.

In other words, sell a part of your business to limit your exposure, keep the rest. If in the future it goes down the tubes completely you will not have lost all. If it continues to go up split your risk again. And so on.
On the other hand, it means that you can be more positively disruptive when faced with a situation where someone else might not do anything (because they're afraid of losing their job). This can be a plus as well as a minus.
An earlier thread on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=751415
I'm working on a game in PyGame right now. It has a cyberpunk theme, and a little spirituality in the story. Of course it's open source.
I also work on an another open source project, with my friends. It's a localization tool.
I use a handwritten list, but this ssh host completion looks like the killer argument for this feature.
I don't know much about the details of H1Bs or implications. But when I was working in the United States (2005 to 2007) I was holding a J1 then "upgraded" to an H1B.

To move to the United States the J1 is the best, in my opinion : nearly no taxes, affordable (~$1,000). But it's limited to 18 months, once in your life.

As for H1B, two problems (for startups) :

- you need a lawyer, and it's a bit expensive. Count at least k$2~3 in legals.

- you need to pay a decent wage. For a software engineer I don't think you can go anywhere below $5,400 a month (it depends on the state, that's in NY...). Anyway it's nowhere in the "surviving on ramen" ballpark.
This video of Jobs talking about NeXT's target customers is interesting here, and I'd say that the target demographic hasn't changed very much since then: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9dmcRbuTMY
But they are not even identical in appearance--I'm decent at telling them apart, and their mom does that very well.

That rather sounds to me like they're very similar in appearance. In any case, it's brains and personality that count the most.
If I were you, I'd stay exactly where I was, open a small business selling software on the Internet to rich Westerners, quit my dayjob as soon as I covered my previous salary, and then expand your little sideline into something as big as you want to go.

You may feel you are not founder material yet. Break that down into exactly what you don't have going for you. Then, learn it as you go. Marketing, for example, really isn't black magic. Pricing is not black magic.

(If I can make a quick comment based on my previous professional dealings with Indian companies: "We're the cheapest possible price!" is a terrible, terrible way to position yourself. However, the fact that you have the cheapest possible living standards among similarly situated software firms means you will hit ramen profitability, or curry profitability if you'd rather, much faster than the rest of us will when charging the same price. That is sort of nice.)

Take this and all other advice (including the advice you're relying on to make your determination that you are not founder material) with a grain of salt.
$300M.
I must say that I don't very much like the attitude of "we didn't figure out how to monetize and nobody wants to buy us, so we just shutdown". For another type of business it might not be such a problem, but for URL shortener, which creates "ten thousands" links per day, it will just create a link rot and is not responsible towards the Internet.

I hope the future URL shorteners will think twice whether it is clever to even start it.
100% correct. I don't use url shortners if I can help it, as it's introducing yet another point of failiure in internet hyperlinks.

Who wants to bet that in a year or two there'll be another few url shortening services down the drain, and millions more broken links out there on the net.
why was this downvoted to zero? This is great advice! (I am Indian have lived in the USA , have no plans to move back on an H1 - the long waiting period for the GC isn't worth it - but if I were, this advice makes a lot of sense as an alternative)
thanks the image helps
Third shelf, all the way to the right, "The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide" -- which does not include Mostly Harmless, but IS leatherbound and DOES include slick gold-leafing.
I don't follow any blogs like TechCruch, but here are my favorites (mostly UI, Web, and Python related):

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/al3x

http://www.azarask.in/blog/feed/

http://bokardo.com/feed/atom/

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/chrismahon

http://diveintomark.org/feed/

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/garrettdimoncom

http://jacobian.org/feed/

http://www.holovaty.com/rss/

http://feeds.feedburner.com/JohnResig

http://minima.soup.io/rss

http://joegrossberg.com/paulgraham.rss

http://www.randsinrepose.com/index.xml

http://feeds.simonwillison.net/swn-everything

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xml

http://feeds.feedburner.com/b-list-entries

http://python-history.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

http://zedshaw.com/feed.xml
Photographing the whiteboard and emailing the photo(s) to everyone who was at the meeting is a great tool for remembering what was discussed and decided. I'm always surprised at how few people do it. If your whiteboard isn't big enough and you have to erase it halfway through, you do need the presence of mind to take a picture before rubbing it out. Leave the camera by the eraser.
this is what I have been thinking lately. thanks its logical and different perspectives add to the meaning
Bear in mind that by living off the interest you are actually spending the amount that you receive to offset the devaluation of your savings. This is to say that while you might still have $2 million in 12 years time, it might only be equivalent to $1 million by current standards and that $50k per year will be more like $25k by today's standards.
There's a voice-over version and a video of him giving the talk at RailsConf 2008 here:

http://gitcasts.com/git-talk

(pdf version of the sides: http://s3.amazonaws.com/chacon/git-talk.pdf)
Agreed completely. If you don't have a long term plan other than to get bought out it is better if you don't even start.

And running a url shortener costs very little money. If you do it without a plan it's pretty irresponsible.

I'd be happy to take over their business and keep it running for free, future continuity guaranteed.

I've been in business for well over a decade now and I don't think a couple of tens of megabits and a few machines are going to break the bank here.

In fact, I think I'm going to write them a note.

EDIT: ok, sent Eric Woodward an email with an offer to continue to run tr.im as a public service, not-for-profit (I fail to see how you could run it for profit anyway...).
This is one of the most brilliant uses of the iPhone I have heard in a while.

Now if only I could pay for purchases via credit card by waving my iPhone over an RFID receiver, and use it as a MetroCard…
GP is argument ad verecundiam; double standard much?
Apple iphone store economics? They have developers in the hundreds of thousands, basing your business on it and pretending they care is mostly the same thing.
Here's a big list of great tech websites and blogs that are worth subscribing.

http://www.labnol.org/websites/
This is not a difference of opinion, it's removing incorrect and even harmful information from the discussion. I'd have modded the same if he'd advised smoking to lose weight.
How about a criteria that says "we will not accept applications that are crap or that make us look bad or dilute the pool of good applications"? Because this seems like it's what Apple is doing. Now whether they are doing their filtering well is a different matter.

I don't see why government needs to be brought into this. Do we really need a "computing platform fairness czar"?
I read things like the and just think "oh, get over yourself".. So you've put yourself above email marketing? Just be content that your smart enough to know Air NZ isn't actually a good friend of yours. We all get it..

I don't believe these companies think anyone would really care if they have a redesigned site or newsletter, I think it's more about having a reason - any reason - to contact you with something more than a ticker tape of latest fares/deals (even if it's all we really want).

It's easy enough to be shrewd about marketing, but it's working on someone.. Someone else of course!
"hey’ll quickly understand the value of their content, which, with rare exceptions like the Wall Street Journal, is something very much like zero"

This is very much untrue, at least in the UK. The quality dailies have had a very strong year and have driven forward the debate on all kinds of things:- parliamentary expenses, the Brown/McBridge spin sleaze, the Iraq inquiry, the News of the World tapping scandal.

Whether we'd have seen anything like this kind of investigation from the BBC's news organisation or online is no sure thing. Possibly in a TV show like Panorama but then you're talking about 50 such shows a year.

Sometimes I feel like a minority of one but when the papers start charging I imagine I'll think its a good use of my income and I'll pick one.
There's software to clean up these pictures (remove glare, correct perspective).

I've thought about software that goes further... I'm thinking for instance, vectorize the image, OCR the text, convert sloppily-drawn lines into actual arrows. Whiteboard-photo-to-Visio, so to speak. It won't be possible to do this fully automagically of course, because of bad clarity of writing and drawing, but a tool could be made that assists the user to do this rapidly. Not easy, but not undoable either.

Would you think there's actually a business for software that does this? Or is it just a silly geek "solution looking for a problem"?
http://www.phoronix.com/
http://www.groklaw.net/
http://arstechnica.com/

Phoronix can be a good source of updates on a wide variety of software and hardware, and is the source of the biggest Linux benchmark suite, but can sometimes be shallow and dull. Groklaw is always insightful and informative. Ars is usually good, particularly Nobel Intent, but it is starting to drift into the realm of sensationalism.
While it can be fun to make big sweeping changes, I find that silly errors are easy to catch when I keep all my changes small so here's what I do:

- When I'm working with a fast compiler, I setup a small CI system to immediately compile my code and run my tests every time I save my changes. If I can't do this for some reason then I setup a trivial background script to do this constantly and watch the output in another window.

- I try not to cut corners. It's easy to stay in the flow once I have things setup so that I can build and extend my tests and scaffolds along with my code.

Small moves, Everest, small moves...
These are my absolute favorite tech news sources...whether they're blogs or news sites: (yes, Techcrunch is included):
BBC News | Technology
Bits
BusinessWeek.com -- Technology
CNN.com - Technology
Dvorak Uncensored
Engadget
Forbes.com Technology News
FT.com - IT
Gizmodo
Guardian Tech
Hacker News
guardian.co.uk
Lifehacker
Mashable!
Mixergy
PaidContent.org
PR2.0
Read/WriteWeb
Silicon Alley Insider
Springwise
TechCrunch
Techmeme
TechRadar
TechRepublic Blogs
Telegraph Technology
The iPhone Blog
The Next Web
VentureBeat

Here's an OPML file of the lot http://drop.io/s2z7plk
I noticed I can scan checks in my wells fargo ATM. I wonder how much, if any manual checking, is involved since it asks me to confirm OCR'd deposit amount by hand. This seems like a really great logical next step.
MongoDB appears to memory map its data: http://blog.mongodb.org/post/137788967/32-bit-limitations

This is fine on 64-bit CPUs, but less good on 32-bit dev boxes that people are probably using.

Very nice API, though.
Wired Top Stories
Lifehacker
http://blog.startupprofessionals.com/
PG Essays
http://www.techstars.org/
Seth's Blog - some brilliant marketing nuggets in there
Dilbert - of course
http://www.startbreakingfree.com/ - takes you through step by step as this guy built several sites from the ground up.
http://www.lifeoptimizer.org/
Mashable
Smashing Magazine
http://www.collegemogul.com
http://carsonified.com/
TED Videos http://www.ted.com/talks/browse
The Register (El Reg) http://www.theregister.co.uk/
http://wealthpilgrim.com/
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/
http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/
I'm currently setting up an office in Shenzhen in china, and the programmers really are high quality, and you pay them about $400 a month. It's an excellent way to keep your costs low and grow quickly - living space is nice and cheap, for the office I pay $300 a month in a space that can seat 6.

If you want more info, just send me an email! I'd like more guys to join in, so I can get bigger and nicer places. If you are up for some travel and want to work in an office, it's perfect!
Sante Fe Institute: Will it cost the world to save the planet?
Teaser/hat tip: http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/08/energy_needs_en.html
You have a default jre installed in the browser for 10 years already. The problem is it's not always the right version or flavor - Microsoft did a lot of nasty stuff in this direction. But this was a long time ago, that's why I said these days you probably don't need a separate download.
I know this is not the same thing as "deposit from your mobile", but PNC bank (formerly Riggs) gave me a device (scanner with an ethernet jack) where I could swipe the checks in and I pressed a green button to "send"; deposits made before 7PM Monday-Saturday were made same day :-)

Anybody with a busy business got the same offer as well, at least in our office building; they even threw in a Pitney Bowes self-stamping device for mail.
To be perfectly honest, I can't see a use for it. You WANT to have it in handwriting because it reminds you who wrote what, which helps you remember what they said while writing it. Sure, you can't really show these things to outsiders, but I don't think automated tidying would help that much.
Space industry

Games industry (but only the kind I like)
Top 50 Web Design Education Blogs
From best practices, to development, to guides and tutorials, these 50 blogs are sure to sharpen your web design skills.
I prefer to run into good articles, instead of chasing them down. RSS feeds and blog following can drain time fairly quickly; better search for what I want, if it's important enough it will find me.
At my last startup, I used to be a heavy user of "Whiteboard Photo" software, and I'd definitely pay for software that does what you suggest (assuming the right price/features/value proposition.)
The main issue with that is the people who you target may not be the people who spend time on the internet looking for websites where they can rate your ideas.
Ask HN: My Y combinator dissertation and startup survey
I'm currently writing my master's dissertation on Y combinator and all of the new "startup incubators" (for lack of a better term) that have cropped up in the last few years. I believe that many of the programs have simply copied Y combinator, and that there is a lot more innovation left.

My goal is to get some data on the programs thus far, detail why startups want to be a part of these programs, and detail why people want to start these programs. I hope to put all of this together in a framework for structuring new incubator programs.

My blog post describing everything so far is here:

http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2009/08/10/y-combinator-dissertation-and-request-for-help/

If you'd be willing to help, I would appreciate your help with two things.

ONE - Please take a (very short) survey here:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dGF5MnBUQVdFRC1zdVlXblQyX01GeHc6MA..

TWO - I'm hoping to use a better name than "startup incubator." Does anyone have any ideas?
Evernote doesn't go as far as you suggest but allows one to search for photographed words, which comes in handy.
I basically start here: http://web20.originalsignal.com/

It has Techcrunch, Mashable, Read/Write Web, Center Networks and some fun sites with betas and Web 2.0 news.
Yes it was. MS didn't want XP to be on these machines, they wanted Vista, but the low specs of Netbooks forced them to keep XP on or concede the market to others. It's one market where other OSs - Linux, Android, OSx/iPhone (when apple launch a tablet or whatever) have a good chance. And a later, more consumer-friendly design.

Though I didn't know MS's share was over 90%. It will be interesting to see what Windows 7 brings to this.

As for windows mobile - the less said about that the better.
I've been a USAA member for 10 years now, and they have always been a fantastic and innovative bank. The fact they don't have branches has forced them to do business differently, and for the better!
I suppose you have read the book.

The genetic experiment in BNW is successful insofar as maintaining social harmony and general efficiency but at the cost of individualism and freedom generally.

Now, BNW is sci-fi. In the real world and the 21 century we don't have soma or such a promiscuous culture or the abolition of the family to pacify the individual. If we emulate the policies from the 26 century setting of the book we will not end up with a single anomaly - Bernard, but with many or even everyone having the same feeling of inferiority and the thirst for freedom and expression outside the influence of the state.
I'd say using url shorteners creates "link rot and is not responsible towards the internet".

Ofcourse, on twitter you often have no choice, but I blame twitter for not solving that problem.
I am curious about why linux would be chosen as the OS instead of something a bit more battle-tested like QNX? (with the upside of the ability to go hard real-time if necessary...) I love Linux, but the thought of trusting my life to it gives me the willies?
I've also noticed a local free paper (Metro) using tinyurl links in its web section.
Brave New World doesn't suggest that this kind of engineering was successful in terms of making people better, only that it led to a controllable world in which happiness took precedence over truth.

A country that achieves what is described in the book will almost certainly fail to compete with countries that reward creative endeavours and free thought.
This is my first time hearing about DirectedEdge: very cool stuff!

I watched the video and it looks like you guys have a great thing going on. I'd like to make a suggestion, if I may: prove that this isn't just for "similar users also bought". Prove that everybody should be doing recommendations for practically anything.

Here's one idea: call the Reddit guys. Use your recommendation engine to recommend articles, subreddits, and users I might like based on my up-votes. Ask them if they would be willing to show "Recommendations Powered by DirectedEdge.com" on there. Hit it out of the park with one partner and you'll have other people lining up to use your platform!
Hahaha that was my first reaction too.
Why Neo-Conservative Pundits Love Jon Stewart
The vision sounds a lot like Loomia... though it looks like they've come to focus on content/publishing sites, retail or indeed 'anything' seemed the earlier focus.