skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How big a deal is trademark for consumer web startup bootstrap?
serious question: Lets say I am building a consumer web service/product aimed at a large demographic, so I'm just another product person toiling away trying to be the next Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or Facebook..

The plan is to bootstrap and raise a seed round AFTER traction. How dangerous is it to launch a product that could gain some press attention without first federally registering a trademark ?

What if you haven't even formed an entity and were just going to use a "doing business as" during the bootstrap phrase ? How do you reconcile the expense of hiring an IP attorney to file for marks as well as and setting up a corporate entity with the idea of "lean startup" and "failing cheaply" ? How many now-successful web startups launched without federal trademarks ?
Yes, about 2.4x median household income (just me, not my partner).
6 to 8 times. Up to 10 if I work hard. I'm working as a contractor.
A Classroom Leaves the Syllabus to the Students
A Note from the Trenches of Microsoft's Vendors and Permatemps
I should make a LOL app. LOL is much better valued than YO.
MiniLock
The chaos and tangled energy of living cities
MiniLock – File encryption software that does more with less
Wow, I'm actually below the median...and I thought that I lived well.
Maybe you should narrow your focus to the one or two projects you think have the strongest value proposition for the general public and treat all the others as just tools for your own use?
Ask HN: Recommend me podcasts
This week, Marco Arment (the guy who made Instapaper) released a podcast app called Overcast https://overcast.fm. I tried the app and realised that there's some great content on podcasts. For now I'm listening to The Tim Ferriss Show and Foundation.

The problem is that it takes some time to listen and form an opinion about a podcast.

So what are you listening?

PS: Someone already asked the same question 4 years ago. In 4 years, a lot of things change...
I suggest creating a survey that would allow you to collect this information without binding it to specific identities.

As it is, yes, I am above my country's mean and median (Canada), but I'm not sure I want to tell you what the scaling factor is in a public forum. (FWIW, I'm above the median and mean for the number one countries in each respective list posted by jamilv - but again, I ain't sayin' by how much.)
Yes, by a very large margin. I also try to maintain an attitude of gratitude at all times. I realize that my position in life is largely a matter of luck. I was born in the right place with the right genes.
Unfortunately the best way may be through spreading FUD: Get people to believe that government employees are perving over pictures of their children, and attitudes will change very quickly.
As https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8058496 has now been posted to point to the actual project, we'll demote the current article.
After writing that post, I was all fired up to work on a micro-payment solution of the type you mentioned in one of your other posts...but then I lost motivation. Cheeky landing page:

http://stevejain.com/penthouse/

How can I contact you?

EDIT: just sent you an email.
Thanks @brent_noorda, I am aware of this. I am thinking of modifying the code to do that. CL is such an inspiration!
UK based. Yes. I believe I am significantly. I am the co-owner of a small company that writes specialist pharmaceutical related software. For the last 3 years my partners and I have pulled down around £110k per year (pre tax). In the last year work hours have gone down for us, but profit has gone up. We are just building "cash at bank" now, while maintaining the same income. We don't really have exit. Just enjoying the "good times" while they last.

The key thing is I am only as happy, if not less so than I was when we started up. There's no excitement now, an important factor for me day to day. Also, it sounds played out, but I have more financial stress now. I have a big mortgage on a big house and employees to worry about. It really can be more money more problems.
He just footnoted 4 sites with real facts.

It is amazing the extent people will go to contradict data when that data disagrees with their personal experience or worldview.
"I am not a fan of AirBNB but AirBNB doesn't deserve blame for this. "

Well (I'm not a fan either if that means I use it or have used it - I haven't)

Airbnb knows this situation could exist because statistically it almost certainly has happened to a group of people.

Consequently, Airbnb may very well decide, for business reasons, (so as not to scare off potential landlords) to not mention risks which they are fully aware of. Which someone who is casually using airbnb might not run into on their own for years, if ever.

This is a common business predicament. Say to much and you loose the sale. Say to little and you can get bad publicity. Obviously you have to weigh the pros and the cons.

As far as "hiring a professional" although that is certainly better than winging it generally it's not as if professionals will point out all the things that can go wrong, either. If you buy a rental property (as a newbie) the agent is not going to guarantee that they will get you a tenant obviously. But they are also not going to tell you all the things that can go wrong with a tenant unless you happen to ask. (And this isn't limited to realtors it's just a general business thing).
This has to be some kind of joke. Unbelievable.
Turns out it's a "feature" of the PDF format.
I think that may have been referring to formatting that is correctly formatted to be visually appealing. I may be wrong though..
Probably due to lock in.
Most Memorable Moments of the 2014 FIFA World Cup
It's a $10 million dollar idea, they just sold 15% of it.
My uncle immigrated to South Carolina from India in the 1960's, and worked as an engineer at an otherwise white company.

The Christmas party was at a segregated establishment, and they had no idea what to do with him. I think that ultimately they decided that it was ok for "others" to attend, even though by skin color, he was definitely closer to the black end of the spectrum.

Must have been a fun party.
"Can 'insert popular thing' really do 'insert farfetched results'? Click the link and find out!'
One could argue that if any side had firm evidence of the other side's culpability they would produce it.

The political damage to the opponent would be of far more real-world value than any possible impact from revealing one's technical ability, which the other side had probably already guessed or been made aware of.
...with this one weird trick
Yes, by a fair bit. Unwilling to quantify exactly how much without anonymization.

Have to echo zafka's sentiment: I'm incredibly lucky to be in my position, and try to remind myself often that it can vanish just as quickly as it came. I'm fortunate because of luck and preparation (more former than latter), and it ruffles my feathers when people on HN try to toss around the "self made man" thing.
Verizon Promises 2 Years Of Free Data Access To Chromebook Users; Delivers 1
US Supreme Court makes the right decision to nix Alice Corp
Did your property insurance cover the damage?

I've had damage happen and my insurance, less dedictible, covered the damage from paint spilled on carpeting. (Got all new carpeting as a result).
Not remotely similar. Zipcar owns and maintains the cars they rent.
I have very little sympathy for Airbnb landlords: they want to make a quick buck without following the laws to run a real hotel, then they don't get the legal protections of hotels.
Find out why doctors hate her!
"because I happened to live with 2 muslim roommates"

I just want to play devil's advocate for a moment; You say this nonchalantly, but that's the most important bit of your statement. If one of those two roommates were under investigation or were on some watch-list (for a valid reason or not), you should fully expect the FBI to keep tabs on those who they were living with. That would include you. Now whether they were watching your ex-roommates for a good reason is neither here nor there, but the fact remains that the FBI wouldn't be doing their jobs if they didn't keep tabs on you, someone whom they were living with.
This sounds ok, but the lack of a secret ballot could be a problem. Having your name associated with a particular vote for a particular decision or party can have repercussions if you do not belong to a privileged group.
"a big mortgage on a big house" Why?
Dns.Watch: Alternative recursive resolver the right and transparent way
Or find a more established project that you like, and become a contributor.
Well not exactly. If the AirBNB host is a tenant themselves, then the subtenant relationship will end when the AirBNB host vacates the property.

Not all SF landlords are opposed to their tenants rerenting the units on AirBNB. Some even deliberately rent for minimums of 30 days, to avoid running into zoning regulations against short term stays. AirBNB promised to start collecting hotel taxes in SF, but such taxes wouldn't apply in this case either.
The non-H1B salaries aren't public, but they do get audited. Employers need to be able to demonstrate that they're not paying H1Bs less, or there is hell to pay. These audits aren't rare either -- by the time you're large enough to have decent number of H1Bs they're practically routine. Large companies have a team of people just focusing on H1B compliance.

As you discovered, there is a hidden wage pressure anyway. Over your career, it's your mobility that helps drive your wages up: either because you leave for greener fields, or just because you can. While you're on a H1B your mobility is so limited which can put your career in low gear until you get your GC. If your on lame project or a cheap company you just have to put up with it.

The dumb thing is that the solution is absurdly simple: just allow H1Bs to transfer sponsorship with zero penalty. If that means that they work for 5 different firms before they get the GC, so be it. Labor market dynamism is a good thing, embrace it. You also could scrap the whole auditing process; if a company starts underpaying their H1B's the problem would sort itself out very quickly as they start getting poached by the competitor down the road.
What do recent cpus do differently?
This sounds like a very San Francisco story to me!
You have successfully managed to reply to a detailed technical blog post in a manner that provides zero value to anyone and only serves to make you try to sound smarter than the original author. Good job.

It'd be great if you could provide value by giving, or linking to, an explanation as to why the post is "not very accurate with respect to recent cpus".
Let me know if you want to know technical details.
Airbnb Redesigned
I imagine you don't get much of anything with your smtpd running on port 26. (:
The Modern C++ Library for a Modern Windows
Indeed. It would also be interesting to see a map bucketed by median age instead of fraction above or below some threshold.
I like the concept, but the interface is not usable. You chose to try to make it cool instead of usable. Just make it more normal. The kinds of people who will be using your website will not be comfortable with the interface.

Start the app with content first, the first thing I should see is the data on jobs around me that you have. It should try to look up my location using any available APIs. Whether mobile GPS apis, or looking up the location via geoip at the worst. Then, it should let me enter my location for finer grained selection.

If you need data for the jobs you could scrape other websites or something. The user should be able to add jobs too. Start it for free then when your site becomes popular you can charge them to post.

Just because it's called 1 mile jobs doesn't mean you can't have other ranges. Let the user select to expand this.

You will want to look into using a stored procedure for checking the radius against other geolocations. In server side code it will be too slow.

Don't color the radio button in solid black. It just makes it look broken. Use typical and idiomatic colors and patterns that users expect. If you're not a design god, then use a bootstrap 3 or foundation theme.

You need to have hover effects and click effects when a link is engaged. This lets the user know something is clickable. I almost thought I couldn't click your buttons. When I did, the first time I didn't press the mouse hard enough and it made me think it wasn't even a working button.

The text is too close to the icons on the bottom. It is hard to look at.
Not a joke. It has a fair bit of utility and 2 million installs.
It’s now a crime to let your kid play alone at the park
I've been using Yo since I first heard about it on Hacker News and it's actually really useful.

Get to someone's house and want them to let you in? Send a yo.

Getting to be lunchtime? Yo your coworkers (Yo widgets on Android mean you can just go across a row and yo each one super easily) and meet up at the usual spot.

Want to meet up with a mentor? Yo them when you get in; if they yo you back they're probably free, head over and talk to them.

Thinking about your girlfriend? Send her a yo to let her know you care.

I really like using Yo; the interface is really clean and it's really fast to get to my yoscreen on Android.

The people hating on Yo just don't understand the way that technology is moving towards ephemerality. There's an art to Yo. It's elegant and simple and beautiful and it's probably worth much more than $10M. Yo has the capacity to change the way humans interact with each other.
Yes, but friend: it matters much whether the state's deployment of ethics in the selection of potential suspects are good and just. An individual's ethnic heritage and choice of religion cannot in a free society suffice for just cause in being warrantlessly surveilled. That's what warrant means.
@petar, how can i explore and understand escher ? The two example codes doesnt tell me much.
> some vowel-suffixed friends

Sorry for OT, but I've never seen this phrasing before. I assume from context that you mean the mafia, but why "vowel-suffixed"?
I am a grad student and my wife is a PostDoc, this puts us right at the median income in the US. I think we live well, but we also don't spend much: my wife hates stores.

On this income we are able to afford to live in a nice suburb outside Boston. I am really worried about having a kid towards the end of the year though. Daycare in this area costs about $20k per year.
Andrea Dworkin is one of the foremost feminist thinkers of the 20th century. If you're dismissing her offhand you are not a feminist.
Agreed. I simply couldn't be bothered - particularly as I was already trying to scroll down past the huge video to find content before the page had finished loading, leaning to page-jumping hilarity. I gave up almost immediately and came to visit the comments to find out what it was.
I won't deny that a lot of times you only need to convey a very short message, but what makes this better than just texting?
Yes, 3.5 times.
Gist List – Clear Organization of Your Gists
Its a lot faster, as in less touches
> thought

Then you probably do, no?
According to [1] in the UK the median pretax income for an individual in 2012–13 is £21,300; the 75th percentile £33,300; the 90th percentile £50,500; the 95th percentile £68,500; and the 99th percentile £156,000.

My income is closer to the 90th percentile than the 75th or 95th.

According to [2] compared to international income distributions (rather than just my country) my income places me in the richest 0.5% of the world's population.

Needless to say, I try to stay appreciative; my position is heavily dependent on luck. I also donate around £10,000 a year to charity; seems like the least I can do really.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom

[2] http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/how-rich-am-i
Because he didn't have enough cash for a small mortgage?
Numeric matrix manipulation: Cheat sheet
In the UK, we're actually below the median since my wife isn't working at the moment.

OTOH, we own our house outright and don't have any crazy expensive habits or any debts, so I still currently save over 50% of my net income.
Thanks jcr for the comments. 1 mile is the goal. Not the starting point. I have not restricted the distance from the beginning until I get critical mass.

I agree, it's really a pain to maintain older browsers.
All that is old is new again:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnet_(peer-to-peer_network)
Having a pre-filled form you could look over and send back is suggested occasionally, but seems never to pass. The nefarious explanation for why is that Intuit has good lobbyists [1], but I'm not sure how true that is.

We have pre-filled taxes in Denmark and they work fine. You have a month to look over the pre-filled forms and revise them if necessary. Although the tax system is also a lot less complex (taxes are high, but also simple). I know the IRS is doing something like that, just not giving it to you, which seems silly: I've gotten a letter before pointing out that I filled out a line incorrectly, which also told me what the IRS thought the correct value should be. I'm sure that was auto-detected by comparing something I entered with the W2 or 1099 information (I forget in which context it came up). So just pre-fill it for me, then, since you obviously already know what should go there!

[1] http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax-...
John Nash's PhD Thesis [pdf]
Just to pick a few statements:

by default, loads can fetch stale data . No, not really.

everything gets even more vague when Out of Order execution is involved . OOO is the new normal. Not to mention prefetching, which completely destroys any mental model of in-order memory access you could have.

Architectures with a weak memory model do the minimum amount of work necessary in the core . I wish. weak memory is very complex. Look up synchronization barriers for an idea of how messy it gets.

But again, for software developers, that article is good enough.
People already make mistakes on their own taxes. It should at least be available as an opt-in.
a->a ?
Bullshit. It is utility based on installs ? Are you insane or out of mind ?
You do realize that number of installs mentioned always inflated , right ?
If these scumbags are getting $1.5M what really appears to be a simple text app , I can't wait for next technology bubble burst.
Seriously , US is terribly flawed country.
well the UK system seems to work well I got one rather complex tax situation sorted out with a single phone call.

Previous employer went bust the hard way so I had a couple of tax years where my income was up and down - I rang up got though quickly the operator on the other said ok yes your owed xxxx we can change your taxcode for most of it and for this tax year you will get a refund after the tax year end.

I was expecting to have to take lots of calls and take several months to sort out.
I actually really enjoy using Yo. I think it's a great idea. But I don't know how the future of Yo might look like. I mean, implementing features would ruin the whole point of the app.
I'm wondering how they are planning to spend the $1.5M. I don't think they need a big infrastructure, lots of engineering resources etc. Since running Yo is cheap and there might be actually useful use cases for it, I don't think investing in it is such a bad idea. I don't understand the people trolling here. Someone invested some time in an app that became successful. That's it.
the host should have immediately call the cops to vacate the property

As someone who has been in a similar situation before, the line you will get from any cop is, "This is a civil matter." And the cop is right. Police officers aren't equipped to determine who is right and wrong in a dispute among two parties when one of the parties isn't clearly violating the law. That's what courts are for.
What an awesome trip. I've wanted to go there ever since I read "Motoring with Mohammed" [1]. It's an incredible book about an American who shipwrecked on a remote desert island off of Yemen (not Socotra) and buried a bag of valuables. The book is the story of his trip back there--many years later--to retrieve his bag.

It's a damned shame that the Middle East is so ravaged by conflict. There are so many places I'd love to visit. I want to drive the Khyber Pass in my old Land Rover, I want to visit my family's roots in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon (apparently a Hezbollah stronghold these days). I want to chew qat in Yemen and float the Euphrates in Iraq. Maybe someday...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Motoring-Mohammed-Journeys-Yemen-Red/d...
what is good
its trippy
Yet another reason to pursue space exploration.
Oh so "devil's advocate" is code for racism and stereotyping?
Java Machine Learning
The writing is amazing. I had a turbo-XT back in the day, so parts 1 and 2 really bring you back if you were of that age.

Part 3:

"Running C code is a bit more difficult. The problem is that the code generated by any standard C compiler for the x86 CPU will heavily depend on RAM. System RAM is not enabled yet and the code to enable it is so complex that you really want to do it in C. Two solutions have been devised and both of these are in use (one or the other depending on the hardware).

Use a special C compiler (romcc) that does not make use of RAM, but keeps all data in registers. As the register set of the x86 is quite small (only 8 general purpose 32-bit registers), this severely limits the things that your C program can do. As the CALL and RET instructions cannot be used (they always use the stack in RAM), all C functions have to be inlined.
Use the CPU cache as a data RAM. This requires some special tricks to pretend that all cache lines contain valid data and to prevent them from being evicted. Which tricks are exactly required, depends on the exact model of CPU, but it can be done. The Cache As RAM trick (CAR) yields at least 16kB of usable RAM, sufficient as stack space for a simple C program. All recent hardware ports use this trick."

Mind. Blown.
lol..seriously these type of assholes are reason true startups get fucked up
Meanwhile the entire apparatus of the NSA continues to exist in it's same form and doesn't give a shit what Congress looks like.

Does anyone even believe that the NSA would actually stop if Congress "told" them to?
seriously, these assholes are the reason startup get repeatedly fked
seriously, these assholes are the reason startup get repeatedly beaten
2008 joke, copyright 2011 in the footer. Also, why does this come up now?
It's a way of saying "Italians" while trying to avoid appearing racist by directly saying it. Many Italian surnames end in a vowel.