skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
his baseless attack on Last.FM

Other commenters have referred to this as well. I'm curious: how do you know it was baseless? All I remember is an unsatisfyingly ambiguous they-said-they-said dispute that was never resolved in my mind (and apparently not Google's as well, because a quick search doesn't reveal anything). IIRC, Techcrunch printed what they said was a leaked email substantiating the base of their claim. Was that email a forgery?

Just to spray some anti-troll foam on this, I mean my questions strictly literally. I don't have a preference for the truth to be one way or the other. I'm just curious (mildly; enough to post the question) what it actually is.
Brooklyn Mortgage
It is a reality that you must review your Brooklyn mortgage situation. Whether you are facing a foreclosure, an adjusted interest rate, or simply looking to purchase new or additional real estate, it is imperative to find an experienced company that can guide and get you into the right loan. Great Northern Mortgage Corp. is that company.
Still doesn't mean we aren't going to compete and rest on our laurels :)
It's about time. Google AppEngine (Map Reduce, GFS, etc) has always lacked behind the Dynamo architecture in terms of winning developer mind share and specing the right features. The inherent problem with Google App Engine is it's not backwards compatible with existing system.
Moreover, even if he did copy the idea... who cares? Ideas are a dime a dozen... whoever executes best will win... assuming there is a winner. Seems like a space that several players could comfortably operate for quite a while.

Also, accusing someone of copying your site is rather ballsy considering that both sites look like repurposed Facebook clones. At least the eduset guy changed the color from blue to green. ;)

(Not that there is anything inherently wrong with that, but you don't exactly have a unique style that got ripped off.)
Lisp & the Semantic Web
Did a quick search for Eduset. From the blogs I have read this dude Jeff just spams "Rip off of Edmodo", "Not impressed", etc. everytime somebody posts about this thing.

I have no relationship to either, but pretty scummy practice IMO.
Alternative title: Kalashnikov discovers pirates, et al, unwilling to pay for intellectual property.
Thanks, I'll make the video more prominent and make it clearer what it contains.

You're right about the FAQ, that line is pretty much marketing-speak. I'll work on re-writing both that and the about page.

I have to say, you have 37signals to thank for the green button idea.
I'm not going to turn down applause, but building something on the side isn't all peaches-and-cream.

I realize that it's not supposed to be easy to build a successful business. But if it's so hard, why should we make it even harder by pursuing our business every night when our mind is already fatigued from a full day of work?

I'm doing a startup on the side because I have to. I'm not able to take on the risk that comes with quitting my day job, especially in this economy. Especially when I like my day job. However, if I could pursue my startup full time, you better believe I would. In a heartbeat.

I do agree, however, that applause should be withheld until something comes to fruition.

Sorry if this comes across as negative, but I write this as I'm up late writing code instead of sleeping. To all of you would-be entrepreneurs thinking of starting something on the side: go for it! It's fun! :-P
What I find interesting about the AK is that it is also a logo. The product can be drawn in outline, and you still know what it is. That is the best type of product success.
Best email add-on ever: Liaise.
With no formal training, Ron Meadows, a pool service guy from San Jose, built a stratospheric balloon package and took photos at 100,000 feet. http://cbs5.com/watercooler/stratosphere.balloon.launch.2.11...
I can't say I'm too sad about gun makers going bankrupt.

I guess this is OT but I will say it anyway... Humans will probably always want to kill each other, but humans will also continue to be lazy. When you have to knife someone to death, you get bored before you can do too much damage. When you have easy access to an assault rifle, you may kill more people than you meant to, because it's very very easy to quickly kill lots of people.

So less cheap assault rifles == less killing. And I'm for that.

(As for gun control, I am not really sure. Chicago has a totally unconstitutional law against guns in the city limits. But as a result, you rarely read about people being shot to death on the L... they just have their bags stolen or whatever. I think that is a good thing.)
The kind of experience that reminds us how much innovation is still possible.
This is false. You could certainly handle the workload. You may handle it poorly, but you can handle it. It will not kill you. It will not maim you. Perhaps you gain 10 lbs from overeating due to stress and your WoW rating goes down (or whatever you fill your time with). But the statement above is patently false.

I say this as someone who lies to himself like this sometimes, too. Any time you hear yourself saying the words "can't" and "need" you have to stop and realize that you're probably lying to yourself. You don't _need_ that feature. You _can_ survive being stressed out for 3 months.
A few (or even just one) examples of this approach yielding real results would have made this article worth reading. Results are what matter in startups, not applause.
Although less accurate than other machine guns, the AK-47 is easier to use and more durable. “It's simple, it's cheap, it's indestructible,” Mr. Kahaner said. “You can fix it with a coat hanger and a piece of gum. You can bury it for 10 years in the sand, pick it up out of the ground and it still works.”

You mean it keeps working forever?! How are we supposed to make money out of something like that?

Seriously http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47 has many interesting insights into the design and manufacturing history - given that it's basically a hybrid of the best bits of other guns, much of this information is transferable to other domains.
This is the opposite of the truth for small businesses: you can sell to any teacher, all you have to do is convince her to get out her credit card. To sell it to a district, you're going to have to go through a sales cycle measured in months to years. You will have to collect rubber stamps from upwards of four different decisionmakers, three of whom have no interest in using your software, at least one of whom has incentives to kill the purchase.

Selling software to educational institutions is largely a matter of playing Enterprise Sales. I don't suggest you make that choice lightly.
Pair programming bad. Pair debugging good.
No formal training, guy launched 100,000 ft balloon. Took better space pictures.
Note that the list is sorted by absolute dollars, not taking inflation into account; the Alaska Pipeline, costing $8B in 1977 would be roughly $28B in 2009 dollars (subject to the entirely unsupported assumption that construction costs rise in parallel with CPI), which would put it into second place after the ISS instead of 6th place.

Or, put another way: the Alaska Pipeline is, corrected for inflation, the most expensive object on earth. :-)
I favor a 'scratch' or 'junk' dir in each project. Source that I know I don't need now, but want to keep around. grepping for terms will often find a chunk of code I wrote that nearly solves a new problem.

Version control is not so easy to search, particularly if you're looking for a utility that you think is live in the project.
but it isn't their intellectual property because they have no copyright -- this design is in the public domain
It may seem boring to them, but we know that it isn't - at all. To me, chemistry seems boring. It's a problem of perception.

I can easily imagine a society where 90%+ of the programmers are women, where programming is thought of as a typically female profession, requiring skills such as accuracy and conscientiousness.
Your friends are flakes. Get as much ownership as you can (all, maybe, or perhaps just the code — it doesn't seem like there was a great deal of formality) and go it alone. They're not helping.
It should be illuminating that a site of this size doesn't need to have a lavish description of arcane scaling strategies. It's fairly straightforward so the how they make the site becomes most interesting.
Quitting your job is by no means easy. You'd either have to be willing to take a huge risk if you don't have any savings or you have to plan way ahead to minimize the damaage. Having a spouse and/or kids to support only makes it harder. Sure, quitting your job doesn't mean you've made anything useful but it isn't as easy as the article suggests. For most people, building something on the side requires they give up some other aspect of their personal lives. If someone has found a way to chase their dreams by quitting a job they don't enjoy and keeping their personal lives straight, then I think they deserve some encouragement.

I'm a fan of 37signals and have been reading their blog for years but the tone of their recent posts have gotten strangely negative. Just by applauding someone for quitting their job doesn't mean they're ignoring those that moonlight. I hope this post, 'The Next Generation Bends Over,' and the 'Mojito Island is a Myth' aren't indicative of a new direction for them. Every new post seems to be a defense of their business model.
There are hardly any pseudonyms in this thread that aren't gender-neutral. frossie? boggles? roundsquare? dandelany?
37Signals is a (fairly successful) product company whose products were all nights-and-weekends developments while doing client work.

I will refrain from calling myself "real results" since I don't know what your criteria for that are, but my new hobby replaced WoWing away my nights-and-weekends. Less dragons, better loot.
A Really Nasty Ad Slips Past Google
Any market for a web service that generates paid comments via tools similar to what spam marketers use and possibly Mechanical Turk for premium packages?
Deborah Tannen's: You Were Always Mom's Favorite
Deborah Tannen has contributed to You Were Always Mom's Favorite: Sisters in Conversation throughout Their Lives as an author. DEBORAH TANNEN is the acclaimed author of "You Just Don't Understand", which was on the "New York Times" bestseller list for nearly four years; the "New York Times" bestseller on mother-daughter communication "You're wearing THAT?
I'm hesitant to add more plans at the risk of creating too many options for users

Read 'The Truth about Relativity' in Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. He explains this problem really well.

A quote from that chapter: most people don't know what they want unless they see it in context. We don't know what kind of racing bike we want—until we see a champ in the Tour de France ratcheting the gears on a particular model. We don't know what kind of speaker system we like—until we hear a set of speakers that sounds better than the previous one.
"but with a German accent, my best Andrew Dice Clay manner is rather abysmal..."

Hmm. Andrew "Würfel" Klay could sound interesting ...
Ask HN: Where can you buy hotel/restaurant/waypoint databases?
I've been wondering where places like Yelp get all of their data from. From some sets of data surely there are databases that one can purchase and use? I checked searchyc.com but couldn't find anything suitable.
You are right. This really has nothing to do with types.

Java uses types for pattern matching since that's all the language allows pattern matching on. (Common Lisp is similar, but also has eql qualifiers.)

The type system can be useful for more complex cases. Eventually you might have a good reason to represent each operation with its own type. In this case, typeclasses can remove redundant code. (For example, if you write a lazy evaluator for each type of operation, you can get the eager evaluator "for free", implemented in terms of the lazy evaluation in the typeclass definition. etc., etc. I am too tired to decide how this would happen in Java, but my gut instinct is "not cleanly".)
I've seen this as well but in a much later stage of running a company, a nearly done deal went south at the last possible moment and everybody got demoralized to the point where they wanted to quit. I ended up selling my house to buy everybody out, and it's been a pretty good company ever since.

Not everyone is made to be an entrepreneur you have to take your beatings and keep going, that is the only road to any kind of success unless you are a very lucky person.

I'd make a reasonable valuation of what you think the whole project is worth at this time, try to figure out fairly what their contribution is worth and then offer to buy them out if you can afford it, or, if you can't to take them on as silent partners and give them non-voting stock. The latter is a (nearly) surefire way to never get any investors on board though, you have to be aware of that.

Then, after that you go and work like the devil to make it happen.

If you can't afford it and/or you don't want to have them on board as deadwood I'd just walk away, and do something new.

About your 'black cloud' following you, this can happen simply as a series of coincidences, or it might have to do with the company you keep & pick.

That's very hard to comment on without knowing a whole lot more about the situations you were in, one thing is for sure though, if you want stuff to happen and to succeed then you'll simply have to shift over to the drivers seat, if you think you 'need others to succeed' you are not yet in the right mindset, you are seeing yourself as a victim or at the mercy of others. That needs to change for sure.
Herbs For Diabetes
Work on Surface started around 2001 (as far as I remember). Jeff Han presented his work in 2006 at TED. So both were most likely developed in parallel.
I think he was advertising this as a feature. Failing to compile is much better than hitting your "this can't happen" conditional at runtime.
LTX800G Backup Tape
The LTX800G is the latest in line of LTO tape media from Sony. The Sony LTX800G is an LTO-4 tape cartridge that has a capacity of 800 GB native (meaning uncompressed) and 1.6 TB compressed.
I think I've actually read that quote before, but somehow it slipped my mind. I'll check out the whole argument.

To present different options would pretty much require a shift from my one-class-free model to an extra-features-for-money model, so that's something I'll have to wrestle with.
If you quit, I'll still take you more seriously
In my experience, CS professors like automating the grading process as much as possible. It's conceivable that your assistant professor was upset she couldn't just run your app through the grading script.
That's very nasty, indeed.

Why does Google allow advertisers to display a different URL than the one they are sending people to?
I would check if teachers think about their job in terms of workload per class or per month and work backwards from there. The real question is: how do I get to $X/teacher?
I didn't think I would but now that I'm a freshman in college, I must admit I'm having a very hard time doing web dev part time. Any tips?
It's great to hear feedback like that. I intentionally designed Eduset to have less customizability than options such as the one you linked, or even Google Sites, as it's almost always the customizability that introduces the complexity. Further, from what I've heard, having an institutional payment option seems like the way to go.
I've been following this path. I got my first job out of school three years ago and worked on several personal side-projects at home after hours. Earlier this year I finally got to the point in one of my projects that I would either have to quit my day job to apply myself full-time to it, or abandon the idea altogether.

It has been about four months since I quit my day job to pursue this startup, and let me tell you, quitting was not easy. It was a very tough decision and honestly more stressful than it was to get the job in the first place. I don't think I deserve any applause just for foresaking a steady paycheck, but I wouldn't make the blanket statement that it is easy, either.

Finally, I will be launching my startup this week! I am up late making finishing touches to the website. I will be making a "Review my startup" post here on HN when it goes live. I can't wait.
You're right - it was a gut feeling. Thanks for the data.
"Eduset completely changed the way I interact with my students."
- High School English Teacher

Would be much more effective with a name (and even a picture). My first impression was that you made that quote up. Here's a good tutorial on using testimonials: http://www.marketingexperiments.com/improving-website-conver...
That's only half the problem. The other part of the problem are the large number of companies that force their employees to use IE6 (or if they're lucky IE7), combined with the large number of in house web apps that only work with those browsers.
I started out keeping the day job and building on the side. After awhile it gets old and you lose all motivation for the day job. Since moving to working on the startup full time I have never been happier in my life. I wake up every day living the dream and have no plans on looking back. Unfortunately my co-founder is still working a day job, but we are close to getting him working full time on our little project.
1. Stop the car and ask them to get out.(Maybe compensate them for the journey so far.)

2. Get in the drivers seat.

3. Hit the accelerator as hard as you can.

4. If the ride is good, you might get more passengers to ride along.

5. Even if the ride is not good for sometime, you still might get the adventurous sort going in the same direction.

6. Whatever happens don't let go of the accelerator and keep moving ahead.

7. Most importantly, always remember to enjoy the journey - make stops, meet people, reflect on how far you have come. It is more important than your destination.
A larger set to recruit from is merely an easier way to find more developers total, unless there's some reason more women would be valuable but more men would be useless.
Device drivers and processor architectures might make the source tree big, but they don't make the kernel slower or its memory footprint larger. I believe you can even still compile the kernel without SMP support.
How the Netflix prize was won
> But if it's so hard, why should we make it even harder by pursuing our business every night when our mind is already fatigued from a full day of work?

Doing it on the side is very hard, but I'm one of those people that can't sleep if I'm worrying about what I'll put on the table tomorrow ... since I have a family. I know that having a family is not an ideal scenario for starting a startup, but the support I have from my wife really helps (not to mention that we are in love, plus I have a social life that helps me relax), so it's a tradeoff.

Besides ... the real advantage of doing it on the side is that you don't have enough time. With such harsh limitations you start cutting down the bullshit and deliver the minimal functionality that does the job, improving what really matters and prioritizing your next features ... as opposed to day-dreaming pink ponies (as I usually do when thinking of a new project).
+1
Im not sure how someone can do justice to the day job as well as the side projects. Over a period of time, you start thinking about your side project during the day job and vice versa.

IMO, having more than one job is just going to split your thoughts and wouldnt help much in either of them.
You can't convince admins to install IE7 if it breaks IE6 pages, but you can convince them to install Flash. This is an opt-in plug-in on the server side. It seems like there would be far less opposition to installing this by admins if Google packages and markets it correctly.
Isn't time a product of memory and state?
I caught this a few weeks ago when I tried to install ffx on my girlfriend's dad's laptop. Something smelled funny and I backed out without thinking much of it. Never saw the $2.50 charge though. I've reported malicious ads to google in the past and they took them down. Though that was for obscure electronics not a major browser. I bet this is gone in less than 12 hours.
Which part of "I will not tell you" isn't clear? :-)
Saying something has too much bloat is ambiguous to the point of being useless. Many people use that term simply as meaning slow, or a lot of code, or even poorly designed code. It's always better to describe things precisely.

The interviewer asked Linus about benchmarks that show the kernel getting slower and slower each year. Linus acknowledged that the kernel is in fact slowing down. I don't think they would be worrying about badly configured kernels, or kernels with unnecessary modules loaded. I don't know what features Linus is talking about that make a properly configured Linux kernel bigger and slower than it was ten years ago. Nor do I see any explanation or examples cited on this page. I wish someone who understands would give some examples of the feature creep they're talking about.
He's overly optimistic about the long-term returns to stocks, but the basic plan works.