skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An ISP can't connect traffic to an individual. They can't magically prohibit law breaking. They can't perfectly secure their wifi access points.

Yet these laws would hold private citizens accountable if they are not capable of doing these things.

(To say nothing of those businesses that offer free and open WiFi access to all comers.)

It's surprising to me, in democratic nation after nation, that we're hearing these same arguments again and again: The straight-faced assertion that citizens should have a greater legal responsibility than corporations and that they should have inherently fewer rights (to freely share their internet connection if they wish).
Who's Ignoring Those iPhone Ads? Women.
Getting a Phd for the Money
HTML Default Hyperlink Colors
Ever work on hyperlinks on your webpage or blog and suddenly think, "What are the default colors for HTML hyperlinks?". This tutorial answers this question with a handy reference on the default HTML hyperlink colors in their four states.
If I'm reading the docs correctly, you'd have to make a server-side HTTP request from your synchronous app to nginx for each message you want to push to each client. I'm pretty sure that will be prohibitively slow.

It would be much nicer if you could make one server-side request for each event, and have nginx track which clients are interested in that type of event and even queue that event for a while for clients that are yet to connect.
That would not work as you can always delete and reinstall the app in order to reset the counter.
That is exactly what I was thinking. I do not deny that there are many specific areas where Calculus is useful in programming. However most working programmers won't encounter them.
They're working on it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0X1vyWU6bw
Startup Founders Should Flip Burgers
Is Oracle good for Java?
They clearly have a US presence if they're selling to US customers though.

Rather than asking a Tax Attorney could you ask the IRS? They should know! Bet they won't tell you though.
I really don't see the point of these very vague Ask HN posts. Surely all of this has been said before in longer, better composed blog posts. Just read the stories that show up on HN and you'll find answers to your 10,000ft startup questions.

Ask HN is very useful for specific stuff, like "please give feedback on feature X of my site" or "should I pay for service X" On the flip side, I think it's kind of pointless to ask these kind of "How do I do a startup?" questions.
It's probably a good idea to find a good accountant or tax lawyer who knows this stuff and pay them to give you an authoritative answer.
Rare procedure documents how the human brain computes language
Is it really for single-digit dollar values, or is that just an example?

I ask because you could do like $19 or $24 or whatever, which is sort of a compromise between straight-up and psychological pricing. I suppose the single-digit equivalents would be $4 and $9.
N.B.A. Takes Multimedia Rule Book Online
Have there been experiments with creating a pre-compiler that checked that you were using a subset of C++? What downsides would this have (other than longer compile time)?
No. You just set the "push_listener_concurrency" setting to "broadcast", and have as many listeners on one channel as you like.
So anyone has looked into how exactly In App purchases work and how they could help combat piracy?
It seems to me that if one of these measures ever passes, properly peaceful activists should arrange a similar 'experiment' on a larger scale.

See how the ISPs like it when they need to shut down half their customers. See how willfully oblivious the people are willing to be, when they and their neighbors are getting strongly-worded letters telling them that they are assumed guilty of criminal activity.
> They clearly have a US presence if they're selling to US customers though.

I sell to US customers every day and do not have a US presence, please.

> Rather than asking a Tax Attorney could you ask the IRS? They should know!

Absolutely they do.

> Bet they won't tell you though.

Sure they will. And they'll be nice about it too.
We just went through this.

We decided to charge in USD. We have a lot of international users, and while people generally know where their own currency stands vis a vi the Greenback, we surmised that they wouldn't be nearly as familiar with where they stand against the Loonie.

We initially went with the Canadian cc processor Moneris. They support recurrings, although their API support sux. Watch out too for the application approval process which was v slow and v painful.

We do not see the cc numbers. They are passed along to Moneris directly.

Moneris could only support Visa and MC transactions for USD, which was pretty limiting (credit cards are not used nearly as much in countries like Germany and Brazil) so we also went ahead and hooked up a pay by Paypal.

Shortly after we set everything up, Paypal started offering its cc processing service to Canada. They have much better API support then Moneris (although PP’s web UI sux), and since we had already set up the PP payment option, it was a no brainer to move it all over to PP. So PP now processes our cc as well.

Similar to Moneris, we do not see the cc numbers at all. They are passed along to PP directly.

(We took a look at Amazon, but they were not offering their 'Easy Pay' service in Canada.)

If you are a Canadian registered, there is no need to worry about US taxes.
Argh. Not a very useful article. Start with an observation: "Everyone hates C++, and yet it is really widely used. That's odd." Next, 10 paragraphs of people hating on C++. End with: actually wait, no ending.
"In both cases, Apple loses at converting them"

Yeah, once you have accepted a false dichotomy, you can conclude anything you want to. It's very unlikely that the entire set of XP users cleaves nicely into the two categories that just so happen to resonate with your own personal anecdotes.

Edit: I'm not ideologically aligned, here. I was only responding to your tacit assumption that Apple needed to target some sort of "average" user in order to get a return on their marketing investment.
The Halo Effect
I've always done this because of my background as an electronics/hardware hacker (where doing it is great fun :D).

It surprised me when I finally started working at a place with professional programmers that so many just didn't do it at all with code.
Perhaps it's supposed to be interactive .. interestingly I did try and move the spots but then conccluded that it was just an image. Maybe it's a public beta ;0)>
And that's how a quote like "the greatest piece of sh*t of a movie ever" becomes "the greatest... movie ever" in an ad
If you think you haven't found your passion...
Does this explain the disproportionate prestige of .com?
It seems like the easiest poor-man's solution would be to disable booting from external devices, set a strong BIOS password, and fill the laptop's screw holes with epoxy.

At that point, you only have to worry about the strength of the BIOS's password-protection. Any other attempt at circumvention would be self-evident thanks to the destroyed case or epoxy.
I think the key take away of the article is this: Even if you're the "business guy", you should have some technical understanding of what's going on. It's a benefit for actually making strategic internal decisions or simple investor pitches. Sit in on tech discussions, learn the basics, or hell even take some simple CompSci courses at your local community college (basic theory). I know you're strapped for time, but it will be well worth it.
Magic architecture
Did you mean "should know" as in "are likely to know" or "it would be good if they knew"? Based on my experience with them, I would agree with the latter possibility and disagree with the former.

OTOH I'm also the only person I personally know who wound up filing the simplest US tax form along with a handwritten note describing additional income that was not taxable for a reason that could not be found on any US tax form. For the curious, that reason can be found as article XX in http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-trty/canada.pdf. (That is a later form of the treaty than the one I was using, but article XX is unchanged.)
This is something you should test, not ask for other people's opinions.
You might wanna consider adding an address book import feature or some kind of invite sending feature via which you can invite folks you know.

Great concept. All the best
I doubt that position is important if the 3 are directly adjacent one another, or at least not as important as say the appearance of your store front or your prices or your quality or your reputation or your display of well known logos ....

If I walk all the way down the beach 3m further to get to a nicer looking icecream shop is nothing. Indeed I think I'd look at the price of the icecreams first, then the ones people are leaving with and make a cost analysis, then probably choose the one selling pistachio flavoured icecream.
If you have a simple application, then, yes, it's not going to give you a whole lot of new information. However, even in the basic case, you do get the HTTP response headers. That can be helpful sometimes in debugging problems.

The other reason why this is useful is that in larger complex deployments, there may be requests that get throttled, dropped on the floor, etc. as an automatic means of shedding load. We have such a mechanism at StyleFeeder, because we have so much robot traffic. Other times, load balancers and the like will inject stuff into the HTTP request stream in a way that isn't obvious when you're working in a dev environment.
I don't think there's going to be a problem with the demand-side for food in Africa.

It will be critical with how they structure it. Less aid, more investment.
Almost certainly not - that's generally not a good idea and can result in a penalty if the content differs from what a normal human would see.
I believe Joel Spolsky mentioned in an article that instead of marketing one of your options as the 'premium' one, market the other as the 'discount' one. That depends on what other offerings you have and your market segementation, of course.
It depends. Why not split test?
If it's your first start-up, have a business model so you can bootstrap - raising any significant money will be difficult without a reputation. [Though being in YC/TechStars will get reputation/connections quickly I guess.]

If you are doing it in your spare time, plan on it taking all of your spare time.

Marketing is difficult, free publicity (from blogs) is surprisingly difficult to get and when you do fewer people than you think sign up / click though.

Go to as many networking events / conferences as possible meet lots of people and be sure to meet key people like press, bloggers and other companies

Spend some time working out what the smallest, least feature rich version of your app is, with only the features in it would make the product unusable without them. I often find frill features only get 5-10% take up from users, so don't put them in the critical path to releasing the first version - put them in later (or wait for users to demand them).

Do something that is night and day better than the existing solutions currently out there, because if it's only slightly better it's very hard to sell it to people and by the time you've written yours the others will have got better.

Read HN [you got that one already], watch Jason Calacanis's http://thisweekinstartups.com/ every week [on later today], read all of Paul Graham's essays

All feedback is valuable, don't get offended and reply quickly to encourage more feedback.
That tax code only applied to you because you had a presence in the US though.

As for the communications with the IRS, compared to similar institutions in other countries they are absolutely stellar.

Please note that that is a relative statement :)
Depends on what your service is. Certain names work for certain products. "Club" suggests a certain environment that's quite separate from "Premier", and "Platinum" is another service entirely.
You might be making a joke, but you also might have something here. If you can get GPS coordinates localized down to 5 meters, then you can have a mobile app that will let you place orders in places like public parks and on the beach. The app would look up vendors in the same location who are currently "open", and present virtual storefronts for them. The app would send the name, the precise GPS coordinates and, at the option of the user, a photograph to aid in finding the customer.

On the vendor side of the app, you'd have a list of orders and a map of the customers. Done properly, this could be a big win for vendors, since ordering would be easier, increased volume would be likely, and they would be better able to plan production/delivery.

Basically, it's like Loopt but for hyper-local b2c. Instead of hooking up singles or friends, you're hooking up cart vendors and their customers.
Exploring water lifestyle of Mekong Delta
Oh yes, overlooked Ron Paul, Obama too, as religious people. Jury is out on Einstein, hes has made comments both ways. I'm probably wrong about a few others too.

And for some reason I wrote Steve Fossett when I meant Richard Branson.

Long day. Thanks.
Tool of the Day: Manage Your Team Online With LiveTask
Whoa - you can put a class definition inside a function definition?
> Does this explain the disproportionate prestige of .com?

It's part of it. Here's a few other reasons:

1. It's a quality indicator: It means it's more likely that the company has been around a long time and that it's not a scam.

2. People's default surfing habits had them looking for the .com. I had a .net domain for a company I ran and we bought the .com for $3000 after a number of clients told us they forgot our site, and worse - sent emails to the .com address that we never got.

3. This is a more recent development, but with the iPhone having a ".com" button on the keyboard, that makes it even more advantageous going forwards.
Trying to setup a private cloud in China because of GFW. UEC with Eucalyptus is nice for leveraging AWS API ecosystem. Hope to make infrastructure in US (AWS) and China as similar as possible.

Anyone has idea how to make it more portable between AMI and UEC KVM image (or UEC Xen image at least)? vmbuilder doesn't seem to solve the problem.
We should probably apply Hanlon's razor "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." and assume he doesn't understand progressive enhancement

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Enhancement
Thanks for the info (I'm one of the co-founders of PagerDuty).

Which PayPal product are you using? Website Payments Pro? We'd like to chat with someone who's gone through the process of setting this up already. We are also trying to evaluate which provider to use. Can you please send me an email (alex [at] pagerduty.com)?
I've always liked just having a single number e.g. $5 instead of $5.00 or $29 instead of $29.99.

There has been loads of research done on this topic though. Here is a quick link to what wikipedia has:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing
Top Keyword Price Nears $100 Per Click
Beware of account termination fees with moneris.
Well, at least this post and thread got me to go update my GitHub account and create my first repository. I registered forever ago and never actually did anything with it, although maybe that was partly due to the fact that I wasn't very familiar with git back then. Now that I've been using git for my personal projects for the last 6 to 8 months I think I'm ready to start interacting with the gitosphere.
The problem is that you can't let a bank fail, especially a big bank, it would bring the whole system with it.

Since you cannot allow it to fail, you must set in place some rules to limit the risks they take.

(Yes I know about the typo CDS=>CDO, I can't edit myself).
I take it you can only look at your own sites?
Related question: why do big hardware stores, like Home Depot and Lowes, always seem to be next to each other? Same with Walmart, Target, and KMart. Same with gas stations.

It seems like it'd be better to space them out, especially if you're the inferior business. They can't just get up and move like the ice cream scenario. Why do they do it that way?
A whole bucket might chill the oil sufficiently to reduce the risk... But I can tell you a single ice cube does make a mess, and a lot of noise.

First the cube sinks, so you won't be able to get it back easily if you want to abort. It rattles around the bottom of the fryer as it melts and then converts to steam. The bubbles of steam rise and splatter violently.

(I got in a bit of trouble that night, as the patrons could hear the commotion in the dining room.)
Use names that make sense. If you're only going to have one level, this isn't a big concern, but if you're going to have more, use names that are obviously related. Bronze, silver and gold is good. Business, premium and pro is bad. Who knows how they are related?
the only practical reason to price something at $_.99 that i can think of is to keep yourself in a lower payment processing bracket.

for example, amazon flex pay charges one rate for below $10, and another for $10 and up. the difference isn't large, but keeping a charge at $9.99 instead of $10 ends up netting you a few extra pennies, instead of losing 1.
The article never proposes specialized hardware at any point

I never said the article proposes that. But some may be under the mistaken impression that a Lisp Machine-like environment would require it.
Good idea. Except I would point out:

See how the ISPs like it

For the most part he ISP's are actually with us on this one; they don't like these ideas either.
Downs has done some remarkable work in systems theory. He famously observed that the equilibrium between motorists and transit users (and between peak and off-peak drivers) adjusts when you add lane capacity. The Downs-Thomson Paradox states that adding more peak driving capacity draws a corresponding number of people out of transit and into personal vehicles, causing overall traffic to remain the same or worsen.
Because European banks do a lot of business with American banks.

Even banks who did stay out of the "contaminated" credit business had business with banks who didn't.
shrug

I gave you a distillation of the actual opinions and decisions of a not-small number of users, all of whom I interact with on a regular basis. They represent a fairly even mixture of individual and large business clients.

You can take that anyway you want.

I'd love to sit here and continue arguing ideology with you (not really), but I've gotta go meet with some more of my personal anecdotes ...

...and fix their XP issues.
The irony is that for years Dixons have been the place that geeks go to try out laptops before buying them on the Internet. They obviously decided to pay it forward.
I've been here too. This kind of stuff requires the sort of technical experience time and education provides.
There probably was no market .. I think Dyson's brand is big enough to have just created one though. That market is going to be hard to break into for anyone else IMO.
Personally, I prefer Juggernaut (http://juggernaut.rubyforge.org/) for this. Sure, it's Flash, but it just seems like a bit less of a hack than long-polling.
I noticed this as well when I read the book: http://www.cloudknow.com/2009/08/review-coders-at-work-by-pe...
UPS Failure at the colo
Your OS is there to provide protection between programs and provide an interface to system resources.

Why can't the language provide those?

fundamentally different than, say, your web browser, in that OS code runs in kernel mode and your web browser runs in user mode

Having Kernel/User modes is just one way of providing security. There is nothing really fundamental about it. It just so happens that machines are mostly organized this way. One could do away with the kernel mode distinction with a mechanism like capabilities and arguably wind up with better security.
Did anyone else expect this to have something to do with marketing and the Halo franchise?
Interesting that Bill Gates said, "Microsoft is rewriting all its' application offerings to use an advanced HTML interface and no longer the current windows based system," in 1998.

Why are we still not there, 11 years later? Coincidentally, I just wrote a blog post about this last night:

http://shoptalkapp.com/blog/2009/10/15/the-real-web-os
Another takeaway, maybe more relevant to the HN audience: if you're a technical founder, you need to get your hands dirty on financial modeling, customer development, and all the other non-tech stuff that "will ultimately owned by functional experts".
With the current implementation of this hack, you pretty much have to steal the machine once the passcode is sniffed out anyway.
Exactly what I meant. So you just buy stuff with AAA ratings and consider this "your homework". That's the problem I'm talking about.
Are we talking about maids or spies? Compared to a laptop, USB sticks are easier to keep in your wallet, lock in a safe, hide, swallow, etc. So I disagree with that assumption. A maid would need quite a lot more resources to track down both the laptop and the usb stick than the laptop alone.
I think this might be the real story here. Google about and you will find articles from 2003 talking about this nifty 100,000rpm switched reluctance motor and impeller combination that Dyson's people were working on. I think the air mover is just an answer to "so what do we do with it?"

I still want someone to say what the air mover sounds like. 100,000rpm should put all of the sound energy above 1,500Hz, and higher frequencies are easier to damp, so it is possible the thing is quiet. On the the other hand, the ad copy doesn't say "SILENT!!!".
Yep! You can blame marketers, but that's their job, and it works. Until society becomes a lot smarter and more cynical, people will be paid to make things popular, and they'll do a lot of really obnoxiously cheap things, and it'll all work.
I agree re: "10k ft" questions.

I clicked on this post (hoping) for something slightly different, though: a kind of a "startup lint", a collection of very specific problems that people had, gotchas and things that caught them off guard.

"File this form, not that form, with the IRS."

"I thought I had security locked down. I was wrong.
Always check your ..."

"A shotgun clause may seem like a good idea -- but
whatever you do, make sure that your lawyer includes a
clause to specify ..."

"If you're trying to decide between a PayPal or
Authorize.NET solution for processing CC's, make sure
you factor in the cost of ..."

Collectively wide-ranging, but individually fine-grained. I see lots of 10k ft stuff in the comments, mostly not very valuable, but there are a few fine-grained nuggets.
Flying cars -- this deserves it's own blog. Or perhaps blog/ghetto would be a better way to put it. Or maybe just a single Snopes-like blog entry that people could permalink to whenever this comes up.
Part of how C++ is successful is that it retains C compatibility, and C accurately models how the computer actually works (at least computers of the 70s and 80s, which is all we know how to program well). Lovely languages like lisp, python, haskell may be nicer to work with, but they do not model the underlying machine properly, and for so many problem domains that is just not acceptable. It's not just a performance question.

And then C++ implements several programming paradigms (object oriented, generic, etc) without compromising that machine model.

Plus Bjarne was truly correct when he said: "there are languages people complain about, and there are languages nobody uses."
You suspect we would have 100 grossly mismanaged companies - that all fail at the same time - instead of one? I don't think so.

That's exactly what happened. The global banking system collapsed remember?