skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. I too am not a programmer, but I believe that I have great creative ideas, and I do have an educational background and professional experience in business in marketing. I have a BBA in business mgmt, and MBA in marketing, and I work for myself as a social media marketer. I have been where you are, and I decided not to learn code, but to just research and better understand what I wanted by projects to accomplish with code.

2. When I began my web startup http://www.bidrealm.net, I decided to outsource the programming work through hiring a contractor that I found on http://www.elance.com. Here you can post what it is that you want to create and have people from around the world bid on your project. Here are some tips. Make sure you give your programmer example websites that resemble what you are looking for, with specifics. Only pay your programmer in increments as they complete phases of the project (you can do this electronically via elance.com). Before you hire a contractor, get a full statement of work, that shows exactly what work is to be completed. Us the website's Private Message Board for all communication so that what is said and done is all documented for your safety. Ask a of questions and give the contractor as much detail as to what you want as possible. Check out the programmers posted work on the elance site, and check their references as well. And lastly, you will get the best deal by hiring programmers located in India and China. I hired my programmer from Mumbai, India. He is great, professional, and works for a large reputable company that also has offices in New Jersey, and I saved $45,000 on the programming cost, as opposed to hiring the company I was working with out of Cincinnati, OH. Depending on the magnatude your project, you should pay no more than $10,000. I paid $4500.

3. I would definately apply to YC. I think that Paul Graham and his team can see the potential in you as a person, as well as your idea, and how well you understand it, its opsticals, and how you can overcome them to make your idea a great competitor. It is not required that you be a programmer. A great idea, and real world experience to better understand that idea and how you can develop it, many be a greater asset than being a programmer alone. You can take you and your idea and experience, and plug in any good programmer, and make the startup happen. But if you have just a programmer, and dont have you with your idea and real work experience, the startup goes nowhere.

4. If you're interested in partnering up. Let me know. Again, I am not a programmer, but I have gotten a starup off the ground without it, though learning, hard work, dedication, research, and utilizing resources. And my company is debt free right now, with not investors except myself. Contact me at lorenzo.dickerson@gmail.com if you have any more questions.
How is "deflate + execution" going to be faster than "execution" when running the boot process?

The reason that modern operating systems take a fairly long time to start up is due to things like enumerating hardware for PnP, getting a network address from DHCP, and starting whatever system services are necessary for you to have a pleasant (if you want to call it that) user experience. It really doesn't have anything to do with the size of the executable files, since the CPU is going to have to run the same code to make it all happen anyway (you can't execute GZIP'd code and have it run faster).
Work in Cheltenham, live near Ambler and Willow Grove.
Centrally imposed restraint is different from self control. We aren't talking them deciding not to add a feature. We are talking about them actively preventing others from being able to do so. That's not restraint. That's totalitarianism.
Irvine, CA.
FTA:

The WSGI spec impresses upon its readers (or upon this reader, at least) the overwhelming desire for everybody to just quiet down and use ISO-8859-1 instead of whatever character set is actually convenient.

Is this really true? What a disaster. If you're going to pick/encourage a single encoding, how can that choice not be UTF-8?
I used to work in Chesterbrook.
vmlinuz?
Sprint doesn't, verizon supports slightly longer then normal text but I don't know if it's CSMS.
Jodd: Generic Purpose Java Library and Frameworks
Menlo Park, CA
Bad Times Spur Entrepreneurship, But There's a Catch
TomTom One Is A Stellar GPS Navigator For Its Price.
Brooklyn, New York

Where abouts in nyc? I hear lots of fuss about California when it comes to startups, but I've had no lack of business here in the "alley".
Nantes, France
Password Advice
Are you joking? This advice is horrible.

He is advocating taking a verbose language and making it even more verbose and far less efficient. Think about what the final in "public final int x;" means in #8.

Many Java developers have fallen for the idea that everything is an interface to an interface. However, if you start by trying to get stuff done, you find a most scaffolding is pure waste.
I thought there would be more of us.
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see how they could legally restrict you from joining a class action lawsuit, even if you sign a contract saying so; my (very) limited understanding of contracts leads me to believe that illegal contracts aren't enforceable in court (i.e. AT&T couldn't enforce a service contract that says you have to shoot your neighbor if you terminate the contract before 2 years, because that would be forcing you to commit an illegal act to satisfy the contract).
DARPA designs a new Clippy – virtual assistant military style
Really, I'm the only only representing from Beijing?
OK, but there aren't many (any?) corporations that actually pay that rate. The effective tax rate for US corporate income -- what companies actually pay -- is about 25%.

The "35% corporate tax rate" is a disingenuous business-lobby talking point. Actual effective US corporate taxes are lower than those in many industrialized European countries.
Comcast DNS hijacker is here to stay.
People that think they can encapsulate you by looking at X-attribute usually lock in some (comfortable to them) simplification and reject further information that breaks their understanding if it's 'good' or can be much later disappointed if it's 'bad.'

Just look at the API the person offers you at your current user privileges. Digging into internals just results in leaky abstractions and buggy dependencies (e.g. Why are you looking for the books their hiding? Do you have trust issues?).

Keep it simple.
I'm curious whether or not younger entrepreneurs are increasingly more successful now than they have been in the past given that business isn't as restricted to being local, the growth in resources/technology that levels the playing field and falling costs.
Web Development Company
Web Development Company Apex Global Solutions offers incredible website design services at unbelievable prices. We specialize in developing professional websites that can support features such as CMS, E-Commerce, and SEO.
Zer01 service still vapor, distributors empty-handed
I think it might be a good idea to have a social network to bring hackers/entrepreneurs/geeks together and to find others who would want to work together on projects.
I work in Solana Beach, and am looking for an apartment in SD to cut down my hour commute from Fallbrook. Any recomendations on decent areas of the city?
Durham here as well.
dont we call this a feature when OpenDNS does it?
He is advocating using a style more like modern functional programming languages such as ML, Haskell and F#.

The example in #8 is essentially recreating primitive tuple types present in the languages I just mentioned. Given that the overheads on such an object are small, and the garbage collector is good at dealing with short-lived objects, it makes sense to instantiate a new class when it is necessary to mutate it. Your optimiser will love you, and maintaining this style of code is considerably easier.
for the learning experience?
So having to write extra code to extend your versioning system to parse whatever language your code is in and then check it to see if you've altered a variable value doesn't increase bloat, but adding the 'final' keyword does?

There are other problems with that idea, the first of which is that if someone else takes your code and extends it (say, for an open source project) they won't have the same "checking system" that you have, and so it won't catch their mistakes (while using "final" would). Also, I'm not a Java programmer (I mostly use C# or C), but marking classes/methods/variables in C# as 'sealed', 'final', 'static', etc. actually increases the running speed of that program on the CLR because it is able to skip some safety checks on the IL code when it is executed; I don't know that the JVM does that, but it might be worth looking into.
This would be true in a lot (if not most) of the OECD/industrialized countries that the amount paid and effective marginal tax rates are significantly higher. But either way, it's discouraging for those who seek to create businesses in the US. The quasi-good news may be that a lot of other countries are in worse financial shape and may increase their marginal tax rates in coming years but with the recent large and projected deficits in the US I suspect US marginal tax rates could rise significantly as well.
Capital City, hot today btw.
final ... ah yes, the old final.

Just remember that final is a signal to the compiler that it can perform certain optimizations on your code. This includes inlining the value.

So if you use

public static final KEY="value1";

you can get inconsistent class files if you change the value, the copy classes that use KEY 'variable' across selectively.

This is most ant webapp and J2EE compiling workflows.
The Most Pathetic Business Excuse of 2009
Best comment from the page (referring to the ability to now cancel your contract without charge):

I suspect the people that do this will be zero, including all the tech journalists that will repeat this story for the next week.

Probably very true.
Entrepreneurship in Microwave Valley
NE Ohio here
I think his idea was that since the hard-drive is a bottle-neck, it would be faster to pull less data (compressed files) off the hard drive and do a little more work in memory (decompression) where it's faster.

I agree with you, though - I don't think that's really why it's slow - I'm just pointing out what he meant.
+1. You guys know of any good tech/startup meetups in TO?
Net Applications Changes Methodology: Windows & Linux Market Share Rises
I see your point, but I have a hard time believing there are many people (certainly not here on HN) who are thinking, I'd really like to start a company, but the taxes are just too high.

Personally, I'd be a lot more worried about getting health insurance for myself and any other employees of my startup than paying the income tax.
Why not all of the start-up files though? There are loads of other things (such as scripts) that are not compressed...
Functional programming is ancient.

You might be all atwitter about the power of functional code. But, it's an old idea. Emulating the functional style a language that's not based on it provides minimal gain, at the cost of code bloat.

PS: Pun was intended to be funny not mean. This really is an old idea, which is occasionally useful, but mostly it's a waste of time, money, and CPU cycles.
Twitter Apps Still Recovering From DDoS Attacks
Red hair mutation makes redheads more sensitive to pain
> The longevity of short URLs (or any form of redirect) is their primary drawback. Having one company bail out another is not a long-term strategy. The only long-term way to make sure redirects continue to function is to have some kind of open, federated redirect service (which might be what 301works is trying to achieve). However, the kind of flexibility inherent in a federated service implies that the links would not be very short (e.g. 301works.com/bit.ly/abcdef), so they would at best be a backup solution.

Or someone specifically concerned about longevity: http://purl.org (those aren't short either though).
Hello Jon, Jim and Matt!
Ask HN: Getting started with Access Control (B2B web application)
How would I get started implementing access control for an business-to-business web application.

Any tips would do - design guidelines, warnings, frameworks, implementation approaches, libraries to use, etc.
Lawrence, KS, USA.
In this case, I referenced the iPhone because of their recent introduction of voice memos. It seems like the tech is there, and they can marry it to the standard interface. I also understand Android has this available.
I think 220 Billion is a highly inaccurate number as well, but I'm not sure if I agree with his assessment of the Y2K stuff.

Granted, it -was- overhyped (stock up on batteries, rice, haz mat suits, etc.) but there would have been fairly significant problems if the companies developing these systems didn't prepare. The possible effects were exaggerated, but I still think it's a better example of "crisis" management than mass delusion or panic.
So far I've gotten an impression that the best NYC techies work in finance and startups are left with those who couldn't get in. It may sound harsh, but that is what I hear from people here.

I miss Austin a lot and I'm not alone: wearing a UT t-shirt in Central Park almost always leads to a random conversation with an ex-Austinite.
Ruby Panel Discussion @ TechStars (Cambridge, MA - Aug. 17)
easiest thing is to use tweakpng (open source windows softwarer) to delete the srgb and/or gamma chunks of your png. it runs great under wine, but I don't know about good solutions under mac.
no, they wont.

edit: for the downvoters - try it first, then downvote. If multiple people are in the same city/place -> only the last one added is shown, since others are probably overlapped with it.
What makes me laugh is the commenter defending getters and setters as encapsulation.

No, what getters and setters are is a huge verbose door cut through your encapsulation, turning a class into a mere vending machine.
In 20 years: "In which I attempt to remember my Google Docs account and reprint my doctoral thesis"
Piccolo2D: Java and .NET Framework for Zoomable User Interfaces
link to your startup plz

edit: i'm just confused. could you explain what happened. did you panic or are you referring to your competitors? if you're the founder of festbuzz what's the problem?
I would use final if something is final because it would also help to understand the code. It is a piece of information that something is final.

Don't forget that final things can still be changed, though.

somethingFinal.setName("teehee"); is still possible even if somethingFinal is final.
Morgantown, WV
This is great advice - it's how I learnt coding.

It's much easier and much more fun when you actually see results. "Look what I built mom"
I have seen many serial entrepreneurs (who originally were developers) become very adept at the legal aspects of dealmaking. From this, I believe that cross-overs would not be too hard, but this assumes that one is drawn to things that lawyers do.

At the advanced level, the most important trait by far is good judgment that assures strategic thinking. If a lawyer lacks this, your deal will be in trouble. I assume your development project would also be in trouble as well without this trait.
I agree, but unlike the other commenter, I think some equivalent of LINQ or concise (i.e. using type inference) syntax for lambdas is necessary to really make it work. And even then, for imperative operations that need to be applied to a subset of elements of a list, an imperative for-loop is still usually the best way to do it.
Any cube without a spittoon for your cow-orkers to deposit their tobacco juice isn't a contender, in my opinion.
Agreed. Lots of code would have failed without significant amounts of work. That almost nothing broke on the day is down to a lot of very hard work.
Cambridge, MA. USA
Down modded you by accident (is there an undo?), that's a great quote
"business-lobby" ?

Does that mean "people in favor of profits, job creation, and value creation" ?

Count me in to that lobby.

Because, frankly, what's the alternative? Thinking that we have too much entrepreneurialism, value creation, innovation, and employment, and we should tax it more so that we end up with less of it?
Wasn't there an article in Time or the New Yorker recently that showed that prevention is cheaper? I believe there was a small town in Texas that compared to similar towns, had the highest cost of insurance per person. When investigating why, the reporter found that there was little preventative medicine taking place, meaning more serious surgeries, etc.

That said, it was also found that there was an overuse of MRIs, scans, etc, which were also contributing to the ballooning. I think the take-away is that preventative healthcare is probably cheaper, in moderation.

edit: take my hazy recollection with a grain of salt, and instead here's a link to the article. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_...
Congrats dude!!!! :)
It's probably just that now it's fashionable for most entrepreneurs -- especially younger ones -- to be more vocal about their business in a wider forum than the local newspaper.

Well, a lot of new business ventures being web-based helps too; since -- being web-based -- they have to advertise to a wider audience as well.
I respect Schneier as a security expert, but he seems to have completely failed at conceptualizing the threats involved in using password managers. Other than your basic problems, such as malware, screen spying, and the like, whenever you use your password manager, all of your passwords will be decrypted in memory and displayed on the screen. This leaves your passwords exposes in two places. Cold boot attacks make it very easy to grab this from memory, especially on desktop machines where they might remain in memory for a good while. On the iPhone, screen leaking is of particular concern as the device has several things going on in the background transparent to the application. These include a keyboard logger which caches input into insecure fields and a screenshot utility which takes screen snaps to process animations and transitions, among other things. I've seen some password managers that input your passwords into normal, insecure fields where your password winds up in the keyboard cache in plain text. I've also seen plenty of passwords show up in screen shots taken by the iPhone unbeknownst to the user.

It's far better to adopt the good habit of committing passwords to memory, and reduces your risk of exposure greatly. And if your data is that important that you absolutely have to protect access to it, you should be using one-time passwords or RSA keys.
Pozdrav!! :D
Do other countries' companies pay something closer to the official tax rate?

It's also a good idea to keep in mind that Europe can be a little more corporatist than the US. e.g. a German auto company might pay extra taxes in order to give their future engineers subsidized education, or to ensure that unemployment benefits are high enough that when they fire people, they can hire them back a year or two later. American companies often have much more diffused benefits.
I'm also curious about the correlation between people intending to bootstrap / fund and whether they intend to eventually exit or whether they wish to be employed by their own company for the foreseeable future.
True. Also, they're more likely to want to start online businesses. Which they'll talk about -- online.
Fair point - though Japan is the one country with marginal tax rates higher than the US and it's been in an economic malaise for over a decade. Understanding that taxes and policy often requires trade offs, it would appear that the projected deficits don't take into account any healthcare plan (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123137375313762735.html), the US obviously has some difficult decisions ahead of it.

PS I don't think you could characterize the OECD to be part of a "disingenuous business lobby" group.
I find that orange background to be obnoxious. I wouldn't want to read his blog for more than a minute or so. But maybe that's what he was going for? ;)
The Chroma Hash effect
Password entry can be frustrating, especially with long or difficult passwords. On a webpage, secure fields obscure your input with •'s, so others can't read it. Unfortunately, neither can you—you can't tell if you got your password right until you click "Log In".

Chroma-Hash displays a series of colored bars at the end of field inputs so you can instantly see if your password is right. Chroma-Hash takes an MD5 hash of your input and uses that to compute the colors in the visualization. The MD5 hash is non-reversible, so no one could know what your password just from the colors. Your password will display the same sequence each time, so you can learn to expect "blue, red, pink", for instance; if you instead see "green, purple, yellow", you'll know you typed it wrong. The visualization also includes a user defined salt to prevent guessing passwords. The visualization is also salted with the domain name, trying out site to user authentication as an experiment.
Slightly offtopic: I think it would be possible to implement downvotes on stories, and undoing of votes, through an FF extension. What you'd do is this: you would sign up for the extension, and it would implement your actions by ignoring other people's actions. For example, user A wants to downvote a story. User B wants to upvote it. User A clicks the extension-added downvote button, and when User A clicks "upvote," the vote is discarded. Similarly, the system would undo your downvote by ignoring the next downvote.

This is probably not an intended HN feature, though.
Sure, but I used the word modern. As in, "of the modern era". There are old functional programming languages and there are young functional programming languages. The fact is that most of the interesting research into programming languages these days goes ends up in functional languages such as Haskell or an ML-variant.

And I really don't buy your "bloat" claim. Surely mutating member variables unnecessarily is "bloat". And having redundant getters and setters seems pretty bloated to me. In fact, forcing everything in the universe into a paradigm that largely consists of straight-line imperative code boxed up in classes seems like the ultimate example of bloat, given that one could simply code in an imperative style without using objects.

If anything, I would think that the measures suggested would result in marginally smaller code-size, which I assume is the metric you are employing to measure "bloat". In performance terms, I would imagine that these suggestions would result in no performance impact, or some small improvement as it is quite likely that the optimiser will be able to do a better job if you apply this style uniformly. As you say, it might be a minimal gain, but don't we as programmers have something of a responsibility to write the best programs we can and use our tools to the fullest of our abilities, especially when the cost is zero or almost-zero?

So what metric are you using here? I assume it's something a bit fuzzy like "readability" or "ease of maintenance"? In that case, you're basically saying "things that are different to what I already do are harder to do", which in addition to being mildly silly, is a total cop-out and is intellectual dishonesty. Too many good ideas in programming languages have been sunk by programmers who hate the idea of not being the expert all of the time, with such behaviour being hidden behind very weak justifications that sound technical, but are actually just about egos.

Naturally, this might not be the case with you at all! However, I'd be very interested to know on what objective basis you are making judgements about the awfulness and bloatedness of code (in any language) that employs a more "functional" style.
Yeah, go to fry's and buy one.
Yes please. There are many clustering / level-of-detail solutions available for Google Maps:

Handling Large Amounts of Markers in Google Maps

http://www.svennerberg.com/2009/01/handling-large-amounts-of...
Scottsdale here