skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the author of this article is insane.

In Stranger in a Strange Land, perhaps Heinlein’s most famous work, he pre-empted or perhaps even caused much of the sexual enfranchisement of the 1960’s and 1970’s [...]
I think I'd prefer well written fantasy/sci-fi that is not an allegory of sorts, than a story that is dead obviously a reflection on today's society. My favourite Star Trek episodes are the least moralizing ones.
I remember hearing about a Xerox research lab that had a whole room where the walls were all whiteboard.

They had a celling mounted camera that would scan the walls.
They also had a markup language that the camera OCR software would pick up. So for example if they drew a P in a square, it would print out that wall to the printer.
If they wrote an e-mail address in a square it would e-mail a photo of the whiteboard to that e-mail address.

This was 7 or 8 years ago. I wonder if they still use this system.
I wonder how much they'd sell it for. It seems a waste to just shut it down.
I am well aware of the taboo surrounding political pieces on HN, but be sure to read this before you write it off completely. I think it's HN worthy because (spoiler alert) the conclusion is, ultimately, that Jon Stewart is willing to have an intelligent debate. Politics aside, why does it take a comedian to have the sort of intelligent debates that an entire news media industry can't?
A lot of people don't really like his stuff, but, personally, I find Cleo Saulniers articles interesting (and in this case, maybe even relevant):

Cantors theory: http://my.opera.com/Vorlath/blog/2009/06/22/cantors-theorem and http://my.opera.com/Vorlath/blog/2009/07/05/cantors-theory-v...

The halting problem: http://my.opera.com/Vorlath/blog/2009/04/16/flaw-in-halting-... and http://my.opera.com/Vorlath/blog/2009/06/18/halting-problem-...
> Does that make their points any less valid?

If you are relying on them to provide a reasonable and unbiased summary of the scientific consensus on an issue then yes. There is no reason to trust what they are saying. They are likely to have cherry picked the evidence to support their customer's views.

Of course the points 'could' be valid but because of the lack of trust you would actually have to go to the source material to have any level of confidence. Perhaps you should do this.
Agreed. I can't really speak for any other area, but several of the large Chicago papers (most notably the Tribune) have been key in exposing and fighting government corruption.

While their average content isn't always that great, they are able to supply a level of investigation and fact checking that would be missed if they went out of business.
http://www.topix.com/rss/tech/programming-languages
The question might say "what's your number", but the number isn't the main focus, the thinking around it is. Why $300M? and not $200M or $400M?
Sinu9i, take the time to learn how to program before you start teaching it to others:

if(search_word=='')
{
}
else
{ ..
For iPhone developers. If Apple decides it doesn't like you, it will cut off your only source of revenue for your product. And they have proven to be capable of that.
You live in Latvia, yes? I imagine that to be a generally cheaper cost of living than many places represented on HN, and your answer is less than many peoples. Coincidence? Or are you a frugal person? Or are you considering it as a nice start that could carry you to something else more profitable?

If you had a company you could sell for $1M and were predicting it to be worth $2M in a year, as the original question predicts a doubling every year, would you be tempted to hold out another few months for $1.5M?
XHTML.PixelCrayons.com – Service Review
There's scanr.com, which was pretty good a few years ago.
Agreed. I'm currently working for a salary lower than what I'd normally accept for two reasons:

1. I like the people I work with and the work environment.

2. More importantly for me at the moment: I'm learning things which would be difficult for me to learn elsewhere. For example, in a few weeks, I'll be going to the middle-east to install some hardware and train the customer (as a software developer, I wouldn't normally get hands-on experience with the customers, hardware, support and trouble shooting - all of which I think will be useful if I do decide to go the startup route); I was also put in charge of implementing a new interface for our system (and the accompanying test-suite), so I got free reign to design and program it however I want, communication with the hardware vendor and time to learn technologies which I never knew anything about - all of which, I think, will be useful to me.

Having said that, I don't intend on staying here forever. Before I hit my 30's, I want to have taken two or maybe even three years off to travel, meet people from around the world and do what I love to do (which incidentally is software, but slightly different than what I do in my work - I might very well go startup for this, because it would be something I enjoy, even if its never profitable).
What are OCD issues anyway? First time I encounter the term.
A great resource for working out the (monthly) income to do what you want with your life is at Tim Ferriss' blog (author of the Four Hour Work Week).

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/lifestyle-costing/

I've read the book and I dont't agree with everything he says, but I found this particular part really interesting. Tim advocates writing down all the things you want to do (cars, holidays, house(s), travel, etc),working out how much all these will cost per month; then mulltiplying that figure by 1.3 to give yourself a nice 'cushion'. According to him, there's no point in 'a million' or 'two million' or any other arbitary figure in the bank, most people don't actually want to be millionaires per se, it's the 5-star lifestyle that is attractive to them.

The monthly expense calculator is at:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/expense-calculator/

Obviously you need to work out what you want from your life fist, more info on that if you read the first link. Hopefully this will help you make a more informaed decision.

p.s. I'm not affiliated to Mr. Ferriss in any way, I've just finished his book and there's some great advice in there, you may wish to consider getting a copy.
How far is your forseeable future? Doubling is exponential growth and if you change nothing it will significantly slow at some point - how far away is that point in your predictions?

How long have you put time and effort into the company? A year? Ten? Optimistically, what would you have earned in this time otherwise and how does the sale amount compare?

Would you personally be tied up in the sale - e.g. you have to work for the purchaser for 2 years? Does that matter to you?

If it's been doubling every year for three years, imagine yourself asking this question on HN last year, having doubled for two years, considering selling for half the price. Looking back, would you advise yourself to have sold or held?

Do you have anything else pressingly interesting or important to work on, or other plans for what to do with yourself post sale?
Top geek holiday spots
Python Binary I/O Handling
No lie: my dream was to sell my startup and make a USAA for the rest of us. (USAA really is restricted to active duty and vets, despite the article.)
Yes. Game dev is complicated. You should start off with something you can hope to actually accomplish if you want to move forward.

Building a Civ clone is not like building a Twitter clone. Especially with the terrible architecture decisions this guy has chosen. The project will most certainly fail, and he probably won't get far enough along to even learn anything.

I'd suggest he starts by building something small. Something that fits entirely in the browser, so that he can learn the basics of DHTML, Javascript and Canvas. Something small in scope so that he can learn the basics of video game programming. Something that doesn't overload his brain to the point where he's asking whether he should implement Comet to handle a turn-based game.

So no, I'm not saying he should quit programming, or even quit game development. I'm just saying he should abandon this particular project until he has at least some of the skills he'll need to pull it off.
A JavaScript key/value store based on localStorage
They... are.
Canada looks way more attractive in terms of immigration :)
The point is, if you want to be an entrepreneur, be prepared to go boldly into uncharted territory, without the guidance, perhaps even despite the guidance, of others. You will find yourself in places you have no business being and you will make it your business to be there. You'll learn the local customs and maybe even change them. Some people will help you out, others will screw you over, but ultimately you'll be riding on your wits, ambition and luck.

It's an excellent metaphor.
You know, my friend....one thing you could do is marry an american girl? haha
How much more does organic produce cost?
I came across a great little snippet about organic produce
It still comes down to self control. I didn't move to Europe until I was 36, and I'm not fat. I've cut my share of Applebees Chicken Fried Steaks in half to box up for dinner, while my co-workers finished theirs off. It has just always seemed readily apparent that if you eat every meal until you are full, you will get fat. I don't, so I haven't.

So yeah, it's entirely possible that we're conditioning our kids to overeat. But then we're also going out of our way to make them feel better about themselves because you're special just the way you are.
This is interesting. Something I've always wanted to do but never had the information for (so I'm going to Canada instead - which is not at all cheaper).

Eagerly following this thread.
Bertrand Meyer on Incremental Research
I don't understand why he is trying to use canvas, rather than positioning images with HTML and CSS.

I haven't coded something like that myself, but I have been wondering if CSS layers would work nicely for isometric graphics.

I am surprised how many people suggest Flash. Flash needs to die, so it is a worthy goal to try to implement games in Javascript instead. Flash simply is not available anywhere and causes a lot of suffering.
Ask HN: Where do you live?
I live in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. I'd like to know where you live? :)
oh, $300M is enough to become a competent angel investor, secure family future and to have enough to do anything. When you start looking at yachts and houses, you'll soon spend $15M.

The investing is the bit that really interests me, you'd be able to properly do seed investing and "give something back" to the community. Really be disruptive.

Similar to the founder of Ubuntu.
Kindle DX does perfectly well with PDF, although you don't get real zoom (if you turn it horizontal, though, it will fit the PDF to the Kindle DX's width). PDFs also lose the dictionary lookup and markup abilities that you get by using the Kindle's mobipocket formats or plain TXT. I don't know how it works if you convert your PDFs; I believe images can be included for diagrams. Pictures look very good on the Kindle in general.
I think USAA got started because the military used to get ripped off on car insurance all the time. They then expanded into banking, etc.

I'm all for a "USAA for the rest of us" and would love to be a customer.
How about O1 visas (emporary workers and trainees: extraordinary ability or achievement)? Any experience on how hard is to get one?
"One commenter on the Tr.im blog post suggested that perhaps the service could live on in the form of an open-source project"

That was my favorite bit of the article, ignoring the fact that URL Shorteners are all essentially open source already. (There are technologies that can put up a working version with a dozen lines of code.)

The humorous part was the assumption that "open source" is this magic concept that can fix anything. Got a service with crippling server and bandwith costs? Open source it so that... um... you can run it on the open source servers? Do they have those?
Fair enough. What I was really trying to get across is my hesitation to take conclusions from the best/most well known series and apply them to the genre in general.

But I'm curious to know which ones are your favorites. A lot of Star Trek is at least to some degree moralizing - often about accepting other cultures (although sometimes its more obvious than others).
No, but I think that you're missing that he's pointing you at that conclusion - that the system is self-regulating to a large degree.
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Utrecht, the Netherlands.
This is excellent advice. But would it give an edge if you are starting a product on the lines of http://basecamphq.com/ ?

37 signals does have customers outside the US but I suppose its a small figure.
Miercurea Ciuc, Romania
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As a method of keeping a whiteboard for posterity, also consider MagicWhiteBoard :: http://www.magicwhiteboard.co.uk/

You do your whiteboarding, and can peel them off and save them for later.

[I do not work for MagicWhiteBoard in any capacity]
Brno, second largest city of Czech Republic (around 500k of people). Great city to live, there are a lot of tech companies around, but mostly just larger ones: Red Hat (biggest development center outside of US), IBM, IBA, Accenture, Honeywell and so on.

Unfortunately there is nearly no startup scene here.
Who says the OP would be an employee? A lot of fun though low paying jobs involve owning your own shop/bar. A second hand bookshop. A motorbike shop. A cafe doing X for the Y demographic etc.
Don’t Promise Me Cross-browser Support
London, England.
hii,
i am also based in india.
i wonder have you considered working in good US firms(google, amazon et. al.)in india itself.
the reason i am asking is why one has to move to US if those companies have a presence here(hoping same culture,work as done in US ).
What happens if you are working for a startup on an H1B and it goes out of business?
Shropshire, England
Chicago, IL. I think I'm the only person awake right now too.
The blog stated something along the lines that they couldn't sell it, because there was no apparent way to monetize it.
I read rec.games.roguelike.misc
Helsinki, Finland.
A poll on the same topic with lots of specific comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527681

Myself: Zurich, Switzerland, currently in Singapore
But a specification could be ambiguous, with the need for human intervention to resolve ambiguity through the 'compilation' process.

And I'm not sure that I'm aware of any production-grade systems that use declarative English as a specification mechanism. Most of the systems that I am familiar with use ASCII-friendly logic notation or mathematical notation in the style of LaTeX or similar.

I'm not necessarily suggesting that this is how software should be developed, rather I'm just pointing out that your experience and knowledge of what might pass as a specification is different to mine.
I wonder how they could increase SMS limits past 160 chars?

That can't be done unless you change the underlying cellular protocol (e.g. the upcoming 3GPP LTE protocols). The length of an SMS is based on the capacity of one GSM frame.
Copenhagen, Denmark.
Mol, Belgium
Melbourne, Australia.
Mountain View, CA

I was wondering why most responses were Europe. Then I realized it's 2:30 in the morning. :-/

Goodnight Hacker News! Hack away until I rise again.
Tucson, Arizona.
a nice scraper could turn this into theeeeee ... HN Social Network !!! :D
Kortrijk, Belgium
Business Opportunity:

- Buy these guys out for whatever they ask

- Repurpose the site as a Jenny Craig style weight-loss business (or pretty much any other business that you like) on the site

- Redirect all those useless tr.im links to your new tr.im homepage

Suddenly you have a business with 10M unique visitors every day. It's like buying ALL the advertising, all at once. You now have 40 zillion inbound links to your thing. If you can't make money from that somehow, there's something seriously wrong.

So yeah, just do the big bait & switch. When the complaints roll in, 301 them over to the old tr.im team. After all, it's them who sold you the domain, so they should take the blame.
I was just thinking about that! :)
Village next to the DMZ, South Korea. But only for another month or six.
Tokyo, Japan.
HugePre-Launch.com - Win a Mercedes Benz 
The Mobile Money Transfer Industry Changer Has Been Arrived.
Padova, Italy. Probably saw its heyday as a "hacking" city when Galileo spent "the best years of his life" here, but it's not bad even now.
Publicis to acquire Razorfish from Microsoft
Project Management Tool
Hi Guys,

I don't seem to be able to login using my previous username/password combination so am forced to request this from a new account.

We are looking at implementing a new project management system at work and ideally would like an online based tool

Could anyone recommend a good tool.

Cheers

Wrigley
I think you can do sprites within canvas.
If a parent or spouse has USAA then you are eligble.
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Rotterdam, Netherlands
God I hate those ads. They pop up everywhere. I hope that game dies.
Research Your Market Before You Build a Membership Site
Thanks in advance for any help!
Lausanne, Switzerland
Oslo, Norway.
basecamp ?
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCD

One of the most common "mild" mental disorders.
I thought I was the only one in the Netherlands reading HN. Has there ever been an attempt to meet up and hack?
Kunming, China. One of the nicest places I've been to so far.
Some are not too keen on Basecamp here, any other recommendations?
Toronto, ON, Canada.
Leuven, Belgium
JQuery and Ajax Best Demos
Istanbul, Turkey.
Google Wave is the new X-Windows
Yes, part of the reason we moved back to Bangkok. Forget about operating costs, worth it just for the awesome food.
Berlaar, Belgium

Holy crap, this place is full of Belgians.
Toronto. Cool. I've always thought how it is to live there?
Buzau, Romania
My favorite part of this article was a part in another article linked in the "Related stories" section:

Indeed, exercise was more strongly associated with weight loss than any other factor, including diet. Overall, the more the women exercised, the more weight they lost.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1827342,00.ht...

So yeah, diet is more important than exercise, and exercise is more important than diet. Glad we solved that, thanks Time.
Manchester, UK.
OCR would be useful for allowing you to search.
Ask HN: Do we (HN members) need a HN social network?
Do you think we could use a social network, specifically for us, HackerNews members? If so, what features would you add?
After Injury, Fighting to Regain a Sense of Self
Colombo, Sri Lanka
That was the bit of the article I found strange. I'll often head straight from the gym to the grocery store, and what usually happens it the exact opposite of what the article describes.

After a workout, I'm in "Health Mode", so at the store I fill the cart with the things that Health Mode Jason wants to eat. 3 days later, Slouch Mode Jason heads to the kitchen to find it filled with brown rice, chicken breasts and dried seaweed. What could I possibly have expected to make with seaweed??? And why isn't there anything here for dessert?

But yeah, it would never occur to me to head straight from the gym to In & Out burger. Health Mode Jason would never stand for that.
winner, me to
I move between Mainz and Heidelberg, Germany
London, England
Hà Noi, Viet Nam
We use wrike.com and like the system. My fav is that we can assign tasks and do other work directly through email. Just email the task and it gets added to the queue.

http://wrike.com/
Cardiff, UK
bangalore, India
Stillwater, OK
iPhone Call Recording: It Makes Too Much Sense Not to Do
Why is that button gray?
Suffolk, England
Kerala, India.
Patiala, India
Lincoln, England

or rather a tiny town just south of it. Does everyone else listing these big cities actually live in the city. Or are you just meaning "really close too"? Just interested (because just about everyone has listed a major city so far).
I've used this stuff and can heartily recommend it. It's convenient for living spaces and the like where you might not want (or be allowed by the SO/Landlord etc) to put up "real" whiteboard.
Kobe, Japan at the moment, Corvallis, OR at other times.
That's true, but you have to work pretty hard on a bike to get your pulse rate as high as you do by running. (I've done a fair bit of cycling and running over the years). For an inexperienced cyclist, tired leg muscles tend to limit the effort before their heart and lungs do. And it's always tempting to take a rest on the downhills. So I reckon in most cases, you burn significantly fewer calories per hour cycling than you do running. On the other hand most people are capable of cycling for say two hours (if they have time) whereas it takes a lot of training to be able to run for two hours.
Wellington , New Zealand
Well, USAA Indemnity is military or dependents only. USAA bank products are available to civilians as well since it's established as a federal savings bank. I remember a CSR telling me that some of the credit lines aren't available. USAA also has a credit union for its employees.
Paris, France.
Arnhem, the Netherlands.
hai pe cs [at] clair.ro !
Leiden, the Netherlands. That makes 5 so far.
Software : Steganos AntiVirus 2009 Free Download
Atlanta, GA, US.
>> "XML's only real advantage over JSON, imho, is it's human readability."

You're obviously being sarcastic here.
A feature to search for submissions.
hehe, do you read minds or something :) ?

that's what my question the other day

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=750597

was leading in to.

This being hacker news I figured hackability is the main thing that it should provide over other social networks. Otherwise why do it at all, then you might as well use facebook or something like it.
Seattle WA
Londaaaan, England.
near Nagoya, Japan
Delft, The Netherlands.

Meet up: don't know, I'd be interested though.
Norwich, UK.
COBOL: Everywhere and Nowhere
Edmond, OK.
Bogland, Ireland :)
From: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528308

> It's probably too late for this comment to get noticed by anyone, but can I suggest people register with http://www.hackrtrackr.com/ ??
Dallas, Texas (suburb 15 minutes out)