skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
+1.

One caveat: building motivated teams is hard, even if money does seem to be in the mix.

-

Motivated teams are a confounding factor in startups, I think. A common reason for starting a startup is 'independence' which I take to mean 'choosing who I work with'. But I have no confidence whatsoever that I can do a better job if I take on that infrastructural task. Perhaps it is under-estimated?
We run our online MMORPG, Star Sonata, on it. We just use the console since we're not really changing our instances much. We just use it because it has great ping times and bandwidth and the largest high-CPU instance is just perfect for our server.
It's only a matter of time before Google can do facial recognition on any face in any picture it finds on the web.
Hypercomplex Fractals
How's it suspicious? They charge a pretty solid amount of money, in return for a solid amount of space.
Are you talking about keeping the emails sorted out, and remembering who answered what? For that I use Email Center Pro (http://www.emailcenterpro.com). If you have a catch-all email address like support@mycompany.com, you set it up to be checked by Email Center Pro, and you can assign incoming emails to specific users, and track followup. It shows threaded conversations with comments alongside, and you can save templates for common responses.
Please post about it when you can. This was my vote, since I believe an informed populace is an empowered one.
Agreed, never used the main site. Apidock.com is my main source for Rails info. Also I think some of the Ruby micro-frameworks may be gaining popularity.
OMIGOD!

I just read the US Constitution, and guess what!!! It allows for this sort of stuff!

Let's blame the founding fathers!!!
Instead of numbers, I use my middle initial too. d=Daniel, k=Kenneth, okelley=O'Kelley.

I've found that I'm much less likely to run into any other identical usernames. In fact, when I do find that the username has been taken, it's always been because I registered for the site earlier, and it was time for a password reset.
What should the role of the Federal Reserve be in popping bubbles?
In praise of family businesses
I'm not hearing unanimous support.

I am disappointed that investors that openly support a founder visa have not published a pitch on par with what they expect from founders pitching to them. You guys should be able to write better pitches than anyone, right? You have access to the best data, right?

I don't think anyone expects your first essay that brought this issue to light to be anything more than an essay. It was well written and I agree with the general idea. But that's not enough to "fund" the deal. Where is the hard data on these assertions that investors are missing out and if they had access to founders visas, what the return would be to the economy.

When it comes to IT startups, I think its a tough hurdle to show there would be net job creation. Its my understanding that most IT value propositions, if achieved, result in a net reduction of labor. I know that at least one aspect of the value proposition for every IT project I've ever worked on in 20 years was to reduce labor costs. This was true from $250M enterprise projects to $50K bootstrapped ones.

Although I'm not hearing unanimous support for the founders visa, those that are questioning it do seem to be pro-immigration in general. So if there is a stir in these quarters, what happens when this issue gets in front of Americans that think building a wall covering the entire Mexican border is a smart and achievable goal?
my cofounder arash and team definitely deserve more credit than i do.
My Angry Letter to My Ex-Employer
I do disagree with what you say. US State and local governments are not filled with business development agencies or startup clinics. Those organizations which do exist are almost all privately run (with some minor government sponsorship).

You may be thinking of the Chambers of Commerce, many of which do offer similar programs but which are not government affiliated.
Hypnosis Magic Secrets
Cassandra has the features you are looking for, including adding nodes as needed, and is starting to get a bunch of success stories outside of its original authors (facebook). Digg, for instance, has 9TB across 12 machines. They wrote some articles about it at http://arin.me/code/wtf-is-a-supercolumn-cassandra-data-mode... and http://blog.digg.com/?p=966.

(I work for rackspace and we have an internal app going live on Cassandra in the coming days. But it doesn't technically qualify for "in production" yet.)
Well, going by your comment above, do you consider the small business Administration a slush fund beset by corruption? I await further details on this new initiative, but noticed they spoke of reducing red tape; it's not easy for a brand new business straight out of the gate to get SBA funding ('small' businesses can have up to several hundred employees in the US), so personally I like the idea of a 'micro business administration' that could offer bootstrapping assistance and possibly small amounts of seed capital to garage/loft sized outfits.

The SBA has a reasonable good reputation for both utility and probity, so why not use that as a comparison rather than some speculative stereotype of waste and corruption?
Just because they changed the logo? It's been a Y! Company for years, it's been yahoo-mail only login for more than a year.
It isn't enabled by default so users still have to turn it on at this point. AdBlock was the highest voted feature that users wanted and was the biggest feature I could include that Chrome could not. From a bang for my time/effort AdBlock was a winner.
Note that if you refresh the page it reorders the list.
Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp
"I disagree unless all your changes are really shallow."

You are correct sir! What the tests do is allow you to refactor (reorganize or clean up code) and verify that you haven't changed functionality. That's the theory.

In practice however you are hardly ever refactoring for its own sake. In most cases you can't really justify paying developers to change code without some benefit that someone (i.e. a customer) will pay YOU for. And as soon as you start changing behaviors, you now have to change code and tests (or write new tests).
Funny -- I've been to both the Philly.rb meetings and the new Build Guild meetings and had no idea that this even existed.

Is there any type of consolidated event site for these things?

Regardless, I'll see you there.
So what you're saying is global population is not increasing?
Twitter’s Latest Valuation: $1 Billion
It's never a good idea to write an angry letter to your ex-employer. Just find a new job and move on; it doesn't do any good to burn any potential bridges. This letter sounds like something I could have written to my last employer, but I didn't, and I still have a good relationship with them and my company is doing contract work for them. In fact, they are paying my outsourcing company more now than they paid me to work there full time.
You're right, it's weird how people don't understand, don't write the kind of tests that slow you down; write the kind that help you work faster by automating the manual testing you'd be doing otherwise. Test things that you think might break, or you want to make sure won't break and skip testing the dead simple stuff where you feel it'd be a waste of time. You don't have to test everything. Seriously, if some strategically written automated tests don't speed you up, you're doing something wrong.
Don't offer email support to non-paying customers. Set up a forum for free users to help themselves. Jump in when you can, but don't spend all your time on it.
I totally agree with it, smart rotation can be dumb in many scenarios, there manual controls work best

also the internet tethering enabling / disabling needs 5-6 clicks/swipes, it can be made lot simpler than that
Someone didn't read the article:

"Of those, Dropbox has almost one million users that are active."

It was hidden in the first paragraph though.
"A good intro program should make you acutely aware of how little you know, and still yearn for more."

I agree completely.

A good intro program should also be enough to give you enough tools to do something useful and meaningful, even if you can't compete with someone who goes through the full course.

One heck of a balancing act to pull off, there. Python still has my personal "best balance" vote.
Haha this is so true. I use my iPhone as an alarm clock and sometimes also read mail or news on it in bed. Landscape mode is so annoying. You finally get comfy and then .. boom! .. landscape mode ..
As an update, I did some groundwork to see how this might work in PHP, by creating a small example that tails the Apache error log:
http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2009/09/how-to-f...

Still feels kinda sketchy...
Maybe make it so certain clients don't take up the entirety of your CPU while they try to add bits onto the icons of the files themselves...
I must have remembered someone that made a new username and just wrote in their profile what their old username was.
He has a good point, but I think the problem is more that developers don't want to take the time to really think through the user experience--they want to jump in and code.

I'm doing "user experience" design this whole week, for a fairly simple project, and it's darned tedious work. But it's worth it in the end.

And, of course, once we start coding, we'll have to modify things as we go, and as we get user feedback...
Interesting Duct Tape vs Architecture thought
They are the top brains of India as judged by an entrance examination. The correlation of those test scores to entrepreneurial capabilities is unknown.

As an aside, I know of no other school(s) in the world, a majority of whose students choose to append their school names with their email addresses and nicknames on websites. NickIIT* or NickIIM* is legion. One of the reasons people describe it with phrases like "circle jerk".
http://www.tjkeller.net/ but it doesn't mention anything about this system. Most of the energy savings described can be accomplished using off the shelf home automation products like motion sensor, dimmer, and timer switches for lights, and timer-controlled thermostats.
Limits based on some ineffable-to-the-layman bandwidth usage numbers totally break the "it just works" factor
People get fired all the time for the stupidest thing, this including, but writing angry letters is a complete waste of time (other than venting your anger, nothing will change) and it hurts your credibility and reputation. Move on.
Hallelujah! Thank you for making that leap.

I'm no longer as fond of Firefox as I once was. It has persistent memory issues, and is getting more and more bloaty. But, it's also got AB+, and that for a lot of people is a killer feature.

I think there are a bunch of sound counter-arguments to the people saying that AB+ will kill their websites: one, users are sick of websites with more advertising-related content than actual content; two, fake virus alerts and other related ads are now one of the most common vectors for new spyware and malware; three, the ad revenue model is already starting to fall over due to over saturation, and maybe it's time that website owners start looking for a better way to do it.

So, thank you. I'll be trying out the next release of Arora.
I would love to be able to leave some folders in the cloud on some machines. My laptop has a small hdd... Overall I love Dropbox, but I am confident it can and will improve.
"(changed to protect the innocent)"

Probably not well enough. I'm pretty sure I found a picture.
Maybe not a native speaker (no offense, I'm not either). Seems like a more reasonable question thinking that way.
How about a working CLI client now? the python one is broken.
Jigsaw’s Business Model Is Built on Crowdsourcing
Does your company really want to hang out with me?
Indonesian woman gives birth to 8.7 kilo boy - Gvke
And now I'm stuck with this name because babyshake was already taken!
http://www.commerce.gov/NewsRoom/PressReleases_FactSheets/PR...
(...) Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship
The mission of the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship is to unleash and maximize the economic potential of new ideas by removing barriers to entrepreneurship and the development of high-growth and innovation-based businesses. The office will report directly to Locke and focus specifically on identifying issues and programs most important to entrepreneurs. Working closely with the White House and other federal agencies, this new office will drive policies that help entrepreneurs translate new ideas, products and services into economic growth. The office will focus on the following areas:

Encouraging Entrepreneurs through Education, Training, and Mentoring
Improving Access to Capital
Accelerating Technology Commercialization of Federal R&D
Strengthening Interagency Collaboration and Coordination
Providing Data, Research, and Technical Resources for Entrepreneurs
Exploring Policy Incentives to Support Entrepreneurs and Investors

It doesn't sound much like a fund to me, more like a clearing house or head start program for the self-employed.

The National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship will ... include successful entrepreneurs, innovators, angel investors, venture capitalists, non-profit leaders and other experts (...)

They have been influenced by this detailed and somewhat surprising report produced for the Small Business Administration in 2004 ('A National Assessment of Entrepreneurship
and Regional Economic Growth and Development'): http://www.sba.gov/ADVO/research/rs256tot.pdf
I am currently an undergrad at Berkeley. I really like the current structure of our computer science program. We start in Scheme for Intro to CS, move to Java for data structures, and finish with C and MIPS for machine structures. After that, the upper division courses are either C++/Java/Python.
Employers that are stupid enough to make these sorts of mistakes are too stupid to deal with even constructive criticism, let alone a round of firebombing.
I sympathize, but this really seems like one of those times where you should have deleted the letter after writing it, instead of mailing and definitely instead of posting it where others can read it.
2020 vision: What's next for news
Is This the Light Bulb of the Future?
I haven't the slightest clue how you extracted that conclusion from anything I've said.
Most agree that things like the H1-B program are broken. We have tons of data over many years to support this.

The assertion that creating a founders visa enables more successful startups that in turn makes the economy grow (preferably sustainable growth) has not been proven at all. Its a very nice assertion, and I'd like to buy into it, but I have seen no meaningful data in support.
Nintendo prez on Wii price cuts
Perhaps a more accurate description would be "Hacker Things That Interest a Significant Number of Hackers at the Time when they are Posted". But that's a mouthful.
Aren't Flickr accounts already merged with Mail accounts (and the other Yahoo-branded services)?
Wish granted. I do read most threads here, though I don't comment often.
you're welcome.
Dropbox is a brilliant service that's so well executed it makes baby jesus cry. That's how much I love it. (paying customer)
Rotation is a system-provided feature. Apps that require the accelerometer access it directly; apps that require landscape would still be able to force that orientation (and would work as they do today)
Sure. Companies pay big bucks for branding campaigns because it works.
I'm TAing an introductory programming class, and the reason we lose people is because programming can be hard for people to wrap their minds around. Loops are easy for you and me, but for a bewildered freshman who's never seen them before, translating a simple problem into actual looping code can seem like an insurmountable brick wall. Ever seen someone write "for" and then stare blankly at the screen for the next half hour? It's painful to watch.

(I just got back from helping a bunch of freshmen try to test a number for primality. It was brutal. And we're using a language without all that "public static void main" stuff, so that's not even an issue.)
All of us liked being in Cambridge, We certainly didn't leave because there weren't like-minded people there. But being bi-coastal sucks, so we had to choose.
FolderShare was acquired. I don't know if Microsoft has done a terrible lot with the program since the acquisition to be able to claim the success as its own.
Why'd this get down voted? What he describes in paragraph 2 is not far from what happens with a lot of the current government ventures into the economy.

E.g., private company's wishing to get in on government contracts need to publish their "diversity policies" to ensure they are diverse enough (I guess):

http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2008/06/19/46401/priv...
The business cycle has since the 1970's has been a bit worse than the cycle from '45 to 75. Nothing like the current financial crisis happened during that time.

I don't know how the overall growth rates compare. GDP calculations are full of subjective assumptions. I think there is some truth to the statement that the rate of economic growth has slowed, but that's a much longer argument, and not relevant to my original point which was about the business cycle.
Modest success is reported in AIDS vaccine
Goby: search engine for the structure of data rather than text gets funding
One of the hardest things for a lot of people is learning how to learn things as they go. It's such an essential skill that you take it for granted, but many (most?) people come to university with the assumption that everything they'll need to know will be spoon-fed to them. (This is especially common among students from China, but it's a problem with people from everywhere.)
Dynamic Geography: A Blueprint for Efficient Government
I think Manish's estimate is right on the mark if you are an internet startup. Things like good bandwidth or hosting or servers are way more or at least as much costly here as in Silicon Valley. Compare the rates for a 10 mbps unlimited internet connection and rented physical server space in Bangalore and silicon valley. You would probably not even make 2 3 months in Bangalore on 5L if your start up required those while 5k usd will more than cover 10 months of both in the silicon valley. Please correct me if I am wrong.
So, you're saying it's good for the gov't to give a lot of handouts, but to ensure fairness all citizens will have to get involved, follow politics, lobby their congressperson, to ensure the pork is divided fairly.

How about just making the government hand out less pork. Wouldn't that be more efficient? As pork approaches zero, it's not only fair, but founders won't waste all their time writing grant proposals and we all won't have to waste our time getting involved in politics.
Open to other location ideas. You don't need to be working on a project to hang out. If you want you can just sit around and give me feedback on my projects. Is that enticing enough to get you to come out :)
"in terms of ancillary tools, automated testing in general could only be second to version control for what it does to long term productivity."

His whole point is that short-term productivity is sometimes more important. No point building a product that'll be easy for you to extend in the future if you don't build it quick enough to have a future.
BIONIC EYE: Augmented Reality on the iPhone
"A Glorious Dawn": Duet sung by Carl Sagan & Stephen Hawking
" 'He woke her then, and trembling and obedient she ate that burning heart out of his hands. Weeping I saw him then depart from me.' "

- My all time favorite psychiatrist quoting Dante Alighieri :-)
Small Kitchen Appliances
Find a variety of small kitchen appliances and more for your home or business
I've been on the 'shipped shit' side of applications a couple times. Ten's of thousands of customers and a shiny new app that could only be described as shit.

I'd have rather had the product late.
Cool, this is Gabriel (yegg) in case you couldn't tell from my username :). Please point people to the signup page linked above. Can IndyHall host in November? That would be awesome.
No it's not. It's an instance of "cui bono", and skepticism about credentials.
My story and support for the #FoundersVisa
Write it. Never send it. Don't look back. Politely respond "sorry, no thanks" if they call.

Moving forward is the best (and oddly easiest) solution.
But would the customer?
5L is not a lot of money in Bangalore but for 5 to 10% equity, good feedback and support I would be very much interested. Sadly their application deadline was September 12. :(

Approx burn per person in Bangalore:
Initial: Relocating+ house deposit+ registration+ CA + desktop + table + chair + net connection setup + office stationary: About 1L.
Monthly: Rent + utilities + food + net + cheap vps: 12-15k, Phone + travel: 5k. Extra: 15k.

So, we are looking at about 60k monthly and 1.5-2L initial burn for 2 non-Bangaloreans to go and do a start up there.
"Social media strategy" says it all, really. You use a strategy to exploit something.
Actually, the closest Microsoft equivalent is Live Mesh.
From Seth's blog that launched brands in public: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/09/launching-br...

Over the last few months, we've seen big brands (like Amazon and Maytag) get caught in a twitterstorm.
I'm going to completely ignore the political rhetoric that seems to be driving this, and wonder aloud myself - is there another analogy to replace the slanderous misrepresentation of a jacuzzi-bound frog?

Working on it right now ... watch for updates!

Edit: There's a reasonably well-known poem by Martin Niemöller - "First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out for I was not a communist etc". Seems to convey the same concern regarding a creeping threat, though without the solid visual of a frog.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...

Edit 2: Spent some time rolling through options - a car that needs regular servicing, because incremental wear and tear will stop it; a fish in a pond that begins drying up, not leaving until it's too late to escape; even comparisons to compound interest or the 'one cigarette won't kill me' school of thought.

Then I realised I'd been sucked in by the assertion that a comparison didn't exist - when one does.

It's the Turkey that doesn't have an appetite off switch - if you keep putting food in front of it, it will keep eating until it dies.

Seems a relevant analogy. Now whether its true is a subject to research.
http://phillynewmediahub.com/ has a bunch of stuff, though not these hackathons. http://macalliance.basecampbusiness.com/calendar/search has some stuff too, though more bizy than hackathony. Also missing though is Philly Lambda (http://groups.google.com/group/philly-lambda), which has hacker speaker type events, and PSL (http://phillystartupleaders.org/), which has startup focused events.
Big GPL copyright enforcement win in Paris Court of Appeals
OK, we'll go for a weekend event sometime soon!
Actually most IIT-ians are amazingly persistent in a way that, I think, overshadows their "genius". It takes a heckuva lot of studying to get through that test. Years and years of studying. To be able to do that you have to be amazingly persistent.

That kind of dogged persistence helps when doing a startup.

The IIT-ian you need to watch out for is the one that keeps reminding you that he's from IIT. This kind of guy has usually not done anything else with his life.

Sridhar Vembu of Zoho went to IIT-Madras. He aint doing too bad!

So IIT helps but you certainly dont have to be an IIT-ian to succeed. Some day I hope to prove that :P ...

The only negative "opinion" that I have about IIT-ians (from the ones that I have met) is that they are very good at solving clearly defined problems but they have a hard time defining the problem itself. Ie they have a hard time figuring what the problem is in the first place. If you can give them the problem, clearly defined, they will solve it for you.

(Again this could just be my prejudice :) ...
ditto for Palm Pre!