skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Carpooling market ?
Hey,
I'm working since a while now with one of my talented friends on a carpooling website for both users and companies, with a lot of fancy features,
Until there it was only a toy, spent some long nights to talk about it, but now the development began with already some cool stuff even if we are far from the end.

Do you think a "carpooling" market really exists ? Do you know companies that could pay for this ?

Thanks for your feedback,
it's my first post on Hacker news, hello world !
I'm curious if anyone has experience with something like this or know of other situations where a joint venture was owned 50/50 and one side allegedly decided to take their ball and go home?

Is there legal recourse either side can take to reclaim ownership and move on?
Common Lisp and Parenscript.
The odds are decent that nothing you work on at your startup is going to be meaningful, because nobody is ever going to see it.
As my cofounder and I are currently finalizing our own incorporation, I look at Fundable's sad situation and think, "Wow. What if that were us? Is there any way we can avoid ever having that kind of situation with a clever bit of legalese?"

Unfortunately, I suspect the answer is "no". As soon as you give one partner the ability to eject the other (for whatever reason), you open the door for all sorts of abuse. Besides which, if a partner wants to cause chaos and destruction, you're in for supreme nastiness, regardless of the legal situation.

So, at the end of the day, I think the best you can do is choose your business partners carefully, keep things above board, and do the best you can to behave morally and ethically. That way, even if things go to shit, hopefully you'll still be able to walk out with your head held high.

I'm sorry Fundable went out this way. Sounds ugly as hell.
people love a train wreck, + it has the lesson of being careful of who to pick for your cofounder, and about giving second chances to people who screw you over.
Successes in Speech, Machine Translation, medical diagnosis and data mining successes have all descended from sound theoretical research in statistics and information theory.

For instance, Machine Translation (as we know it today) was originally inspired by the "noisy channel" for speech recognition that is based on Bayes Rule. In speech recognition, the probability of some words given some input waveform is proportional to the probability of someone saying those words times the probability of hearing some wave form given those rules. The same model led to statistical machine translation: if I speak to you in French, what I'm really doing is speaking to you in English, but the "channel" is so noisy that it comes out sounding like French.

Today, the parallels are less clear (for instance, German and English have substantially different word order, and in speech you don't usually have reordering in the channel--though there's actually some cool new research in MT to bring it closer in line with modern speech processing!).

Yes, there are huge amounts of specialization and hacks for each of these fields, but they are (mostly) based around core good statistical ideas.

In fact, some people are worried that the AI community is so focused on log-linear models and the like that we're in some kind of local minimum, and that we're unlikely to work our way out any time soon.

That said, Kurzweil is still wildly deluded, as you suggest.
Concur.next — The Laundry List
The way things are in Berlusconi's Italy, I would not be surprised if this case is being kept alive by his friends to benefit his media companies which are undoubtedly pissed off at youtube.

Imagine if Rupert Murdoch became president of the US. That is, in a nutshell, the situation with Berluscony and Italy.
syntax on

color zellner

set cursorline

set cursorcolumn

set nu

set autoindent

set tabstop=4

map <C-n> <ESC><ESC>:tabnew<CR>

map <C-left> <ESC><ESC>:tabprev<CR>

map <C-right> <ESC><ESC>:tabnext<CR>

map <C-down> <ESC><ESC>:tabclose<CR
He is not offering to work for free, he is offering to work for profit sharing. By not asking for hourly cash, it sounds to me like he is hoping to get a larger piece of the pie.
I agree. Seeing stuff like this is scary. My heart goes out to both parties, as I'm sure it's not pleasant for either of them. Even if the story is 100% accurate, and Helm is just a bad guy, no one who's that rotten is happy. It's a shame.

Money has a funny way of ruining even the best of friendships.

Be careful. Do the right thing. Cover your bases to protect against either of you going crazy.
In need of a good collection agency
I read your comment and i'm just starting a collection agency and i would be glad to help you and recoop all the money they owe you.please let me know if your interested in my collection agency.
I like autocomplete in my .vimrc

function! InsertTabWrapper()
let col = col('.')-1
if !col || getline('.')[col-1]!~'\k'
return "\<tab>"
else
return "\<C-P>"
endif
endfunction
inoremap <tab> <C-R>=InsertTabWrapper()<CR>
I am having a total mental block trying to recall the name of the "Donate people money through Twitter" service that was on HN a few times, but I think this is what he meant when he said "Do not take payments lightly."

[Edited to add: Tipjoy. I knew it was T-something but I ran through about 15 combinations of Twit-X before realizing that it was not from that naming convention.]
Yeah, it's why you find a good third party mediator and ask them to be a non-exec or mediator/advisor. It also helps to have the arguments and tantrums early- at least you'll know if you can get over them or not before it's too late :)
The sad thing is that you missed the point of this article, that pirating isn't really a big thing, not enough to worry about.
I'd like to believe that this site is better than that – that it's not about watching train wrecks. The problem with picking co-founders isn't that people don't know it's important – it's that they ignore it anyway or don't know how to tell. It's about as useful as a surgeon general's warning on cigarettes.
Google does proactively censor:

Search for June 4th: google.com 2,780,000 hits, google.cn: 164 hits

Try posting a blog entry and reference "June 4th" in it and see if it ever shows up in google.cn

Don't be evil, unless there's yuan at stake...
http://github.com/msanders/vim-files/blob/master/.vimrc

Most of it's just my quirks but I think there's some useful bits in there. My vim setup is _heavily_ customized, for better or for worse.
The problem with Microsoft and mobile devices is they always want to put their operating systems in them and their OS's are hogs which results in mobile devices that are not that mobile really.

So I we will see about this thing. If they can make it significantly small (i.e., much smaller than a netbook) it may be useful. But if it is around the size of a small laptop or netbook (which is the what it looks like), it will be utterly pointless, people will just use laptops instead. And if they are serious about putting windows 7 in it, then it will probably be the size of a laptop.
VisiCalc memories - the first Killer App
If this is PR, it will be lost with the masses (for whom PR is meant for). This feature neither falls into the hacking nor PR camp. Easter egg, maybe. Useless feature, definitely.
They were a YC company, weren't they? Ivan and Abby?
seek legal action against Louis Helm personally
should he fail to resolve your payment issues promptly

Well, IANAL, but I don't think that is how it works. The corporation is liable for funds it holds on your behalf. Boy would I be worried if I were Pratt.
Cancer Gene BRCA1
Bandwidth always confuses me a lot, when they mean throughput
I was just reading this, and this paragraph struck my eye:

"Bricklin and Frankston recalled that their initial efforts to promote VisiCalc did not meet universal enthusiasm. Experienced computer people weren’t bowled over, Bricklin said; they would dismiss the spreadsheet with, 'Hey, I can already do most of this in BASIC.' People who had no experience with computers tended to think that computers could do anything under the sun, and so VisiCalc didn’t wow them. 'But when the accountants saw it - there was an accountant [at a particular computer store], he started shaking - he said, ‘This is what I do all day!'"

Reminds me: who are you solving the problem for?

For more details, here's Bricklin's Visicalc history.
http://www.bricklin.com/history/intro.htm
I'm torn between 'sad' and 'pathetic'. The word 'immaturity' applies, without question or hesitation.
Here's a function I wrote to get rid of trailing white space:

fun! s:RemoveWhitespace()
if &bin | return | endif
if search('\s\+$', 'n')
let line = line('.')
let col = col('.')
sil %s/\s\+$//ge
call cursor(line, col)
echo 'Removed trailing whitespace.'
else
echo 'No trailing whitespace found.'
endif
endf

You can map it with:

nn <silent> ,R :cal<SID>RemoveWhitespace()<cr>
Much of this is cribbed from other places (credited where possible):

http://github.com/larrywright/emacs
Apart from the usual utilities, I've got an emacs-lisp version of write-or-die; it deletes words if you stop typing for more than a few seconds. It's an excellent motivator for first drafts.
$300 Home-Brew Street-View Camera
Not train wrecks in general, but a very specific train wreck along the same tracks upon which many of us are traveling, or hope to travel.
I think you have two ways of dealing with it:

51/49 split, or have 3 partners.

Both methods ensure you never end up with a stalemate.
It's a joke, making fun of Apple's approval process.
Lesson: in the articles of incorporations, spell out the arbitration process and include clauses that prevent out of control behavior - like automatic forfeiture of company stock.
Brain Processes Facts and Beliefs the Same Way
Maybe they'll release it for the laptops, which do have accelerometers in them.

from a simple google search: http://chancechancellor.com/?p=337
The cited research article,

Harris S, Kaplan JT, Curiel A, Bookheimer SY, Iacoboni M, et al. 2009 The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief. PLoS ONE 4(10): e7272. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007272

can be found here:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
They were. Ivan's now at Facebook, where everyone assumes he's working on Facebook Payments. Abby's probably doing something even cooler, although IDK.

BTW, Tipjoy never held the money; they were just a front-end for PayPal, so they didn't have the issues that Fundable apparently is having.
http://bitbucket.org/natw/dotfiles/src/tip/.vimrc

some parts I haven't seen mentioned otherwise:

set statusline=[TYPE=%Y]\ [ENC=%{&fenc}]\ [ASCII=\%03.3b]\ [HEX=\%02.2B]\ [POS=%04l,%04v][%p%%]
hi StatusLine term=bold,reverse cterm=bold ctermfg=7 ctermbg=0
hi StatusLineNC term=reverse cterm=bold ctermfg=8

gives me a nice status bar with some good info

set t_Co=256
colorscheme railscasts

best color scheme I've found yet, and I don't know how I lived before 256 colors

set noerrorbells
set novisualbell
set t_vb=

This might be redundant, but I hate error bells SO MUCH. This might be even more important than "set nocompatible".

map ^P :set paste!<CR>:set paste?<CR>

in python mode at least, autoindent will usually mess up pasted text

Plus the usual 4 space soft tab, autoindent stuff. I also highly suggest keeping your dotfiles in some kind of version control. It is definitely fun to see them grow, and I can't imagine working on multiple systems without it.
There may be legal recourse but the legal system moves so slowly that in Internet time you are pretty much screwed. So in the beginning stages it may be a good idea to keep copies of all software, data, etc. close just in case one gets locked out of the servers.

I know of this one company that decided to move their servers out of a collocation facility. The collocation facility hated to lose a good customer so they just locked the company out, disconnected the servers and did not let the company get to them. But they helpfully offered to reconnect the servers if only the company would sign another long term contract. The litigation took many years, so the data on the servers was pretty much lost for all practical purposes.

So yeah ... keep backups and keep them where you can get to them if the s hits the fan.

Regarding the domain name ... I suppose one person needs to have control of that, no way around that. Well, it is possible to set up a trust where an impartial party (such as an attorney or a professional trustee) controls the domain name according to a previous agreement between the founders, but if you have to resort to this, there is probably not enough trust to do a startup.
The funny part is that when I first read this comment, the wrong post (GP) had -1 points. Now it's +1. That's two people smacking themselves. Congratulations.

On a side note: this brings up a great XKCD quote: "Someone is wrong on the Internet". (http://xkcd.com/386/)
That is truly a nice tribute. For those who aren't very familiar with the topic, the background is made up of 'Khadi', a handspun fabric that holds great symbolism for Gandhi's ideals and his ahimsa (non-violence) movement. And the letters are done in Indigo (color dye), one of India's most prominent exports during the colonial era.
Does anyone think bumptop is a good idea? It seems so pointless to me.
Free-flying cyborg insects steered from a distance
CL for work (non startup serious business).
Clojure for Hackey-fun-time.
(I'm currently making sweet fractals in clojure, pmap ftw...)
The real news here seems to be that a company with $20M in revenue (yext) was allowed to pitch at TC50.
Your mother told me to tell you that Facebook called
Ask HN: how do you keep up with your inbox?
I saw a comment just now that said Google Wave might be tough for people who already have trouble keeping up with their inbox. I never really considered the idea that I might not be the only person who is having trouble staying on top of email. This seems absurd, but most people I know don't seem to have this problem, although I don't think they get as many emails as I do.

I estimate I get approximately 100 emails per day, many of which don't just require a reply, they also require me to do something (I'm a web developer and project manager). I'm sure others get more emails than this (and perhaps manage it fine), but I'm finding it increasingly difficult to read and respond to emails in a timely fashion. I'm also finding that email has become disruptive to my ability to get other things done. I often have to open my email to either send emails or to retrieve information, which means I always see all the mail and feel compelled to deal with it.

At this point I'm feeling like various technological solutions (labels, stars, etc.) just aren't cutting it. I am tempted to just start letting certain emails slide, which bothers me from a customer service point of view. What have you found helps you manage the constant barrage of emails? Is there a solution or are we just stuck dealing with this incessant flood of email?
You can always fall back on a shotgun clause for a cleaner ultimate solution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_clause
I've personally found Google Wave to be really useful for communicating and collaborating with others (certainly much more so than any other options: IRC, Email, IM). I've been using it over the past few months in the Wave Sandbox, collaborating with other developers on small projects, and I have to say its features are really useful and nice. It's got even more potential as a platform, and developers are just starting to show some of that with Wave extensions.
Yeah, they sure do hate competition. Remember Huddle Chat, an awesome, free group chat client written by some Google Engineers on Google App Engine in his/her spare time, and the whining from 37signals that ensued? It's ridiculous.
Carpentry Hacking. Computerized box joint jig [video]
I'm really surprised that they managed to grow so big and stay so low profile for so long.
Well, they got in on the merits. It certainly wasn't like HP demoing a new product (like we saw at DEMO); it was a company coming out for the first time. It certainly qualifies as a startup in my mind. It may be a $20M company, but still, no one had ever heard of them before. The look of astonishment on the panelists' faces was awesome.

It may very well have been the greatest gambit to create a competitive bidding process for VC investment in history. Seriously. They presented at TC50, and in less than a month, had a VC firm who they had absolutely no prior relationship with wire $25 million to their account. (Sure, they had previously raised $3.5 million, which marked the IP as safe and the revenues as real, but still.)

Hats off to Yext, as far as I'm concerned.
Rands: Hurry
colors torte
syn on
set expandtab
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set ruler
set ignorecase
set autoindent
set smartindent
set hlsearch
set incsearch
set backspace=indent,eol,start
set laststatus=2
autocmd BufEnter * :syntax sync fromstart
"set hidden
set history=1000
runtime macros/matchit.vim
set wildmenu
"set wildmode=list:longest
set wildmode=longest:full,full
set title
set scrolloff=3
autocmd BufEnter *.rb :set ts=2 sw=2

"let c_space_errors=1

I'm kinda unsure what good posting this will do...
If you don't click on those affiliate ads often enough and buy stuff, you're no different than the worthless lurkers and adblockers as far as actually funding the site go.

Advertising is a nice "turbo boost" for a trickle of revenue. It is difficult to impossible to be the sole source of revenue for a business. All the guilt in the world won't prop up a bad business model.
To paraphrase: you'll be happier working for The Man than working for The Boys.

I think the point here is he's talking about being an employee, not a founder or a partner. The great benefit of running a startup is doing things your way. Unless employees believe in and are able to contribute to the startups direction, they're just as powerless as they'd be at BigCo with none of the upside that stablity brings.
Didn't we have one of these threads a little while ago? Ah yes, here we go:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=821100

Here's a repost of my comment from that thread:

I've been using Vim for over ten years now, across several jobs and platforms and tasks, so my .vimrc and .gvimrc have gathered quite a bit of cruft. I keep them in a git repository along with my various other generically useful config files, and just check them out on each new machine I get an account on.

There's too much stuff in these files to describe what everything does, but there's a lot of comments, so along with the Vim online help you should be able to figure everything out:

.vimrc: http://paste.ubuntu.com/270714/

.gvimrc: http://paste.ubuntu.com/270716/

Highlights include a single key-binding for stepping through every buffer in every tab, consistent mouse-handling between console-vim and gvim, and code to automatically make gvim inherit the GNOME default monospace font.
Some key ones

(setq transient-mark-mode t) ; visually show region

(setq line-number-mode t) ; show line numbers

(setq global-font-lock-mode 1) ; everything should use font

(windmove-default-keybindings) ; shift-arrow key moves to window in that direction

I set up `webjump' to search online API documentation

http://justinsboringpage.blogspot.com/2009/05/emacs-searchin...

I like to send gmail

http://justinsboringpage.blogspot.com/2009/02/sending-mail-w...

I think this is the most important one

(setq visible-bell t) ; annoying beeps off
LipoMax
At a visit to my esthetician, I had a Lipomax treatment and it was amazing. A wonderful cellulite reduction treatment.
Google Tells Employee to Decline Microsoft Award
Ask HN: What do you invest in?
I'll keep this short.

I have $25K that I want to invest, but I don't know what to put it in. I want return within 2-3 months.

What do you suggest?
What would this offer to companies?
I was at TC50 and it's impossible to overstate how dominant this guy's presence was during his demo. No one could believe their eyes or ears that here was this amazing, large, profitable company doing something everyone wants and no one had ever heard of them. I would have offered them money on the spot.
- check mail at most once an hour when programming

- keep your mail unread if it requires an action, don't look back at read mails in your inbox (send old inbox mails to some other folder once a week for example)

- try not to keep old mails without actions for too much time... if a mail will have to wait, send it to another folder so that your inbox is always small and easy to check (around 10 unread mails at the end of each day)

- send mails that require an action to a todo folder; reply mails that require an answer immediately before you forget them

works for me
A shotgun clause is probably the best method out of a bad lot, but it still has the potential for abuse.

If a partner is going through financial difficulty (outside of the company), then the partner with a better financial position can force a sale at a depressed valuation.

Say my mother has a massive stroke and requires expensive ongoing medical care. After a while, I'm financially drained. At that point, my partner can trigger the shotgun clause at an amount larger than my ability to scrape up cash, and wham I'm out. Out with a small payout, but out regardless.

There isn't a silver bullet to these kinds of issues. At the end of the day, people are involved, and people are complicated and difficult.
Integrate Twitter to Google wave : Complete Tutorial
Google new Baby Google wave is full of features and surprises. Here is a guide on how to add twitter to google wave and How to tweet inside Google wave.
they are incorporated, so he himself isn't liable, the corporation's assets may be seized, but he should be fine
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptab...
I can think of much better form factors than a laptop or netbook for reference material.
Similar to what Mark Cuban has said about business (paraphrasing) that it's non-stop competition. 24 hours a day there is somebody out there trying to kick your ass.
Ask HN: How does YC handles similar startups - intra/inter(Alumni) season?
How does YC handle:

startups in the same/similar markets

or

having similar ideas

within the same season and across
seasons (Alumni).?
Nice ending.
Airbnb has a new logo
You're saying a lot of things here but one of your questions is worth answering:

>Do these things really directly descend from pure AI reasearch(sic)?

With the exception of Google's search engine [with whose internals I am not familiar], I can answer an emphatic "Yes". And so would any knowledgeable current or past researcher in those fields. The early AI researchers did a hell of a lot of good work and much of it remains relevant.

As you demonstrate, many if not most people have no idea of what was actually done back then, much less the lineage of their income-tax software or the control system for their digital camera.

Despite funding cuts AI continued to be an interesting and productive field, and remains so today.
Tipjoy never held the money

That does not match with my understanding of their business model.

http://tipjoy.com/faq

Look for their instructions on, e.g., cashing out.
Nothing original, but an extremely well-structured narrative approach to the traditional "call to action" essay.
define return in terms of rate and tolerable risk and perhaps we could help.
Twitter Icons Collection
Murdoch did by proxy for 8 years. It wasn't pretty.
Someone should take stuff like this and make a Really Compact Netbook/Tablet OS. Such a device could undercut competitors by requiring 1/50th the resources. An instant-on grayscale tablet "Moleskine" that just worked and had a gorgeous trans-reflective screen would rule. (Haiku OS might be a better starting point.)
WordPress Guide,Blogging tutorial and tips
Planned update to Dropbox app allows install on iPhone OS 3.0x
Guitar Hero, an overnight success, 10 years in the making