skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ronald Coase won a Nobel Prize in Economics for asking and answering why individuals choose to form companies over contracting out their work.

In a frictionless, efficient market it is always cheaper to contract out work. But the world isn't frictionless. There are transaction costs. Search, information, bargaining, maintaining confidentiality and enforcing agreements all cost time and money. Meanwhile, overhead costs and the management error grow as in-house functions increase. Balancing labour transaction costs and management scaling inefficiencies results in an optimal firm size. This firm will outcompete less agile and well-integrated small firms and distended behemoths.

http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~jsfeng/CPEC11.pdf
Oh, I do :)

> You can't "do" the product idea and strategy

Most of them tell me, they did marked research as a proof for their idea.
Everyone thinking every other kind of role is worthless is one of the things I've persistently seen ruin and even kill companies.
"ITER has been designed to produce 500 MW of output power for 50 MW of input power" and its construction "will require 16,000 tons of rebar, 150,000 m³ of concrete and 7,500 tons of steel for the building structures." [0]

By comparison, "a MW of installed capacity for wind requires 460 metric tons of steel and 870 m3 of concrete compared to the 98 metric tons of steel and 160 m3 of concrete for coal, and the even lower 40 metric tons of steel and 90 m3 of concrete for nuclear" [1]

So to match ITER's 450MW net with wind power, your turbines would require 270,000 metric tons of steel and 391,500 m^3 of concrete, several times more than ITER will need.

This neglects thermal inefficiency for ITER, but on the other hand ITER is an experimental reactor and the followup DEMO plant is supposed to get 2 to 4 gigawatts with a size only 15% larger. [2] Also, the wind figures are for capacity, not actual output, so the numbers are pretty comparable anyway...it'd be reasonable to assume 30% thermal efficiency and 30% wind capacity factor.

But you're right that ITER/DEMO has a pretty long timeline, which is why I favor smaller-scale alternate approaches (as well as advanced fission).

[0] http://www.iter.org/factsfigures

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/07/01/is-the-ans...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO
How to attract a technical cofounder? Have several of the following...
1. Previous success at starting a company
2. A budget
3. Previous success at raising funds
4. If it's B2B, have industry connections and sales experience
5. If it's B2C, some serious expertise in the field
6. Some sort of evidence that you are a true hustler and not starting a company because you are bored with your day job
Honestly, consider switching banks. Not sure the situation in France, but in the US there's loads of brokerages. It's a very competitive space, and there's no reason to put up with a horrid UI (one of the most important parts of a brokerage!) if you don't have to.
Man, I don't think we could be more opposite because I dream of a world where the web completely disappears and all we have is the Internet and whatever OS I choose to use.

The web, to me, is a hodge-podge of kludgy technologies that have too many gotchas. I like a pure environment where things are not so abstract that we cannot understand them. Instead of typing div, div, div, I want to type MenuBar, ToolBar, FluidGrid. Instead of fighting with Javascript to handle big numbers, dates or something as simple as equality properly, I like to use programming languages that haven't been ham-stringed because they've been designed by a committee.

In short, I like the power, purity and robustness of my native OS and I want browsers to disappear entirely.
"That leaves the you've won a free cruise/insurance/alarm scam companies, but they mostly don't call over and over again."

I was receiving the same robo-call regarding my "innactive Google+ page" that they wanted to build for me for weeks from a different number each day meaning that blocking a number was pointless. Eventually I took the call, and stayed on the line till I got a person who I was able to fish enough information about the business to file a complaint. Filed one with the Better Business Bureau and also contacted the company CEO directly using info I found in an old Whois record that hadn't been cleaned up (their public one had since been masked). I cold called their office till I got ahold of him, and told him about the claim I'd filed regarding their business calling a number on the do-not-call list.

This is what it took to stop this one instance. I've received others. Sometimes I block, but when it's a recurring call from different numbers, the Better Business Bureau is the way to go. Particularly if you can get the name and number of the company that the lead-generation firm hands you off to. It catches their sales guy off-guard everytime.

This all takes time ... but I recently was receiving a lot of calls from people I needed to speak with, but knew I didn't already have their numbers in my phone, so I had no choice but to answer. The ones I've taken-on have been effective and the BBB complaints have been answered and addressed quickly.
Show HN: WYSIWYG CNC wood carvings
iOS App Store search is not much better.
> Companies are supposed to do everything they can to beat their competition. That is simply called "being competitive."

Real competition is stabbing your competitors in the face and taking their stuff. We prohibit that because it rewards the wrong kinds of competitors. Prohibitions on anticompetitive conduct are rooted in the same principle.
> You offered this as a response to somebody saying that google was good for the market, but they clearly were.

Look. If I have a measurably worse email system, and email is a central part of workflow in my industry, then I am not able to compete as well as those who have measurably better email systems.

You could argue that there are equally good email systems, or that there's no possible reason that I could possibly want to not use Google's email system. That would be valid and constructive.
> He felt more like a salesperson than a doctor

This is the main vibe I'm getting from all kinds of laser eye surgery practices. I mean they wouldn't advertise it if it was a regular medical procedure.
I'm not too convinced about the urgency of the issue, especially after reading the article.

They are drawing an arbitrary line between sharing a joke without credit and plagiarism.

It might just be me, but when my friends tell me a joke I just expect it isn't theirs. Unless they explicitly tell me.
Not sure if you're aware, but your Rx example has a few problems:

1.) In the StartSenders method, you're violating the Rx grammar by calling channel.OnNext concurrently. Wrap it on a lock statement.

2) In StartReceiver you're missing out messages the way you handle the channel. Replace the loop with a call to channel.Subscribe
The sad reality is that the "business" guys are often clueless because they don't understand the ecosystem in which their technology functions - note that I'm not saying they're clueless because they don't understand the technology - rather that they're clueless because they don't understand technical sales, or the cost and benefit of development decisions - and if they view technologists as "a bunch of nerds who know nothing about business" - they're in trouble. Technologists don't need to know much about business to be able to provide valuable information that should sculpt your decision-making.

A good business guy realises that the right technical backing and understanding is essential in today's world - if you don't understand the technology, or the impact that your business decisions have on your development - i.e. the costs they incur vs. the marginal benefit - and you're not prepared to talk to your technology team because you view them as valueless... you are unequivocally screwed, because you'll end up coded into a corner with your development staff walking out on you, your customers let down, and you on the hook.
Regarding food growing, I sort of expect that on either Mars or the Moon you would end up using solar panels to feed grow lights. You lose power via solar cell inefficiency but you make some of that back by shifting the spectrum of the light you emit into the wavelengths plants can absorb most easily. It's a hassle, but potentially less so than all the dangers your plants could be running into above ground.

And I figure the only viable colonization sites on the moon are the north and south poles, where you can get solar power continuously.
Important point: AT&T owned a substantial portion of SUN when they did the SYSVR4 move.
Tech Books all Web Developers should read
He's right. I work in a call center (not calling on the phones, I keep up the infrastructure) where we do mostly market research for our clients which involves calling their customers. Utility companies, medical offices, consulting services, they will all honor do-not-call requests and so will any legitimate call center business.

That is thankless work, the people on the phones are mostly not scum, but the number of people that answer the phone and treat them as such makes me feel for them so I'm happy to look the other way at some minor bad behavior like being short with a person or hanging up, when every third person they talk to is some jerk who only knows how to yell "IM ON THE DO-NOT-CALL LIST I JUST TALKED TO YOU LAST WEEK I ALREADY TOLD YOU NOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING IS ILLEGAL GIVE ME YOUR MANAGER RIGHT NAO!!1one" Just because you talked to _some_ call center somewhere, it does not follow that every call center in the fleet automatically knows you are not to be contacted.

We have do-not-call lists, and the best way to make sure you get that treatment is to ask for it. You don't have to ruin your day and someone else's by getting mad about it. Five magic words can liberate you: "do not call me again".

Second best way: when you sign up for services, don't give them your phone number! They can't give it to us if they don't have it to begin with. If hearing the phone ring makes you so mad, seriously just don't give it out to any companies that could just as easily deal with you by post.
To All Drivers, Cyclists and Pedestrians Alike
Is there anyone else noticing the increase in aggressive, erratic and just plain terrible drivers on the roads these days? Shouldn't there be a way to dynamically update a person's driving record to reflect all the shit they do? We thought so, too.
I played a little with Elixir (and Phoenix) months ago and I know the |> operator, which is not exactly what I was looking for in my reply. I'll look again at Elixir and at how it handles callbacks.
To a certain extent, isn't that what an acqui-hire is doing?

(with some extra costs involved...)
I used to have this great little compact cell phone made by Sony. At some point, it just stopped making calls, and Sprint's explanation was that their network no longer supported this phone.
Many (most?) of the business guys who you end up talking with in those situations are idiots. The ones that can execute often already are, and aren't wasting their time doing cofounder dating.

Likewise by the time you're scrounging around looking for technical cofounders, you're at meetups and startup weekends, and most capable technical folks never end up going to those - they're either happy in their current situation, or working on something of their own.
Naming your encoding? So always charset=utf-8 then, right?

Seriously - is there ever any reason to use anything else on the Internet?
High-Resolution Employment Contracts
'Forensic holodeck’ recreates crimes in 3D
|> is (not, see below) mere function composition

function compose(f, g) {
return function inner(x) {
return f(g(x));
}
}

this is not the right kind of composition for something like nested callbacks. For that you need slightly more.

Edit:

It's actually the "apply" operator which looks like

function apply(f) {
return function applied(x) {
return f(x);
}
}

Apply and compose work together nicely. For instance, in Haskell apply is ($) and compose is (.), so you can build a compositional pipeline and apply it like

f . g . h $ x

or like

f $ g $ h $ x

since association goes this way

f $ (g $ (h $ x))
Teensy Z80 Computer – Part 4 – VRAM explained, display modes, simple shell
What are the advantages that language-level tuples would have over the existing System.Tuple class?
Maybe I'm being naive, but there can be something else that the non-technical founder brings that is equally valuable to the tech stuff: paying customers. If they have actual customers that are ready to pay, then the deal may be worth it even for less than equal share of equity. Another is cash investment (not relationships with investors, real cash of their own that they are willing to invest).

I think most of these non-technical founders just have a fantasy about a product idea and it really is worthless. But if they have a good network of contacts and people ringing their phone for whatever they want you to build then that is some value.

If these idea people are so sure of their ideas, they can finance development using freelancers and they don't need a technical cofounder. If technical cofounder is just doublespeak for programmer willing to work for free + equity, only someone very naive will take it.
So, Litvinenko was allegedly working with MI6 after leaving the KGB (and Russia). This seems more like spycraft than a politically motivated assassination.

That being said, this case makes me wonder if political assassinations also occur in Western politics, or if the killing of dissidents is mostly an Eastern Bloc thing.
Well, it looks like it's been enhanced quite a bit. Not saying it's not worth it, but it has jumped out of the "impulse buy" category.
What would the world be like if contract/freelance/part time/short term work were the default?

Many of the replies thus far have quite rightly pointed out that the predominate contract/freeland/short term model actually puts even more power in the employer's hands, and is often used in an abusive, diminishing way. It is full-time employment made worse -- all of the problems and detriments, with fewer of the benefits.

There is an alternative model, but it is extremely hard to make a success. I build systems for financial services, and have a long, proven track record (one of the products I built half a decade ago, barely changed since, was just acquired by another company for big money). I decided to go solo, set up a corporation, and pitch my independent services for short term engagements. The premise is that it amplifies my own motivations, focuses my work, and intrinsically improves my rewards.

A surgeon ready to swoop in and remove the cancer -- focusing on my specialty and utilizing my somewhat unique set of talents -- leaving a well-documented, working, tested, proven solution for your organization to pick up and run with. This can be for load sharing, for capacity extensions, or because certain talents don't exist on the team. It allows me to specialize in a way that I couldn't do in one engagement, and I don't end up whiling my days away reading Reddit (which is the case for a significant percentage of full-time workers pretty much everywhere).

It is extremely difficult to get businesses to buy into this model. The first problem is the illusion of a "learning curve" -- if you have a learning curve in what you do (the classic "employees can't be productive for the first n months), you probably don't actually know what you're doing. I saw this in one firm where everyone was sure it couldn't work because their mystical financial calculations were so complex it would take months to understand them. Only they weren't actually complex whatsoever -- everyone was just blissfully in the dark about how to calculate simple things like IRR, so it seemed like some sort of unique, in house mystery meat.

A bit of a rant -- I could go on for pages -- but honestly most firms can't utilize the contract style employee because their own processes are so broken, their projects so tightly coupled and intertwined and undocumented, that they can't imagine how to separate something out.
They're like unicorns, and the only way you usually end up with these folks is by having them start in tech, and then end up doing business.

I'm a technologist (developer), but over the years have morphed into doing sales and strategic direction for our platform. Sales and technology are a seriously winning combination that most folks seem to shun - but if you look at successful startups, again and again, you'll see that the "technical co-founder" does as much sales and speaky-speak as his non-technical counterparts.

Having someone that actually knows what they're talking about sell a product can be a boon.

It can also be a boondoggle, as unfortunately the words "yes, that is in theory possible", which you will hear from technologists frequently, are taken by pure business folks as "yes, this is possible and can be done yesterday, at no cost". Bitten me in the ass more times than I care to admit, and I'm now very careful with how I state things, but it's still a winning combo.
I'm not a specialist but I don't see how this is so dangerous. Polonium-210, the poison used in this case, has a half life of 138 days and decays into stable Pb-206. So whatever was there has been halved about 20 times. Furthermore, alpha decay is relatively harmless (unless ingested).
True. The technical person can always claim that SEO and call-calling is easy and one can hire an army of cheap labor to do that once the product is ready.
AdTech Startup Launches New Avenue for Brands Through Messaging Apps
I tried to use it, but when sending the link to myself and viewing on my desktop, it would just redirect to the homepage, not view my cellphone's camera.

If that had worked, a suggestion would be to have short url's that I could just type to friends or into my desktop browser. The first time I tried sharing the link I chose a text message, chose evolvesms, but no text appeared in the message. Not sure if this is a problem with the text messanger or your sharing code. It did work with gmail just fine.
I know this is a bit snarky, but honestly: ask.

It is the startup world, there's risks everywhere. Find someone, and if you kick off well with them, then go ahead and try.

If you spend too much time bothering about details like the perfect technical cofounder or non-technical cofounder... chances are you're not putting your time and effort into your actual startup.

In my experience, it's simply been the potential of something that attracts people who actually have a passionate interest. They're the best people. Technical or not.
I like the alupen. Very comfortable to hold. Not sure how fine the tip is for professional drawing, but works great for lessons.
a project like this is probably a bit out of the norm for the HN crowd, but I thought I'd share it anyways.

I've been working on this as a side project for the last few months. I had ran a similar business in university, but most of my time was taken up by validating design files and doing CAM. This time around the backend generates g-code directly, allowing for the production process to be almost entirely automated.
I wish there was a way to send these calls to a specific voicemail message. "You have been sent to voicemail because the number you're calling is not in my contacts list. Please leave a short message telling me whose phone you are calling from." etc.
Dungeon Hero – New Indie Android RPG (source code available on GitHub)
I think where you really want to work is a team where nobody considers anyone else surplus to requirements. Everyone has an understanding of the other fields, even if they are not directly involved.

With this particular guy, I don't think his shop relied much on tech excellence. He talked a lot about how to show people ads that were against the ToS for various platforms. Of course if you're doing that, you won't think that tech is providing any value.
If you think that you realistically would require more than 50% of the equity to make it worth your time then you are better off politely declining and walking away.
Having managed the "global black list" for a major VoIP company (millions of subscribers) I can tell you it does make customers happy. However ... if you implement one you will inadvertently block valid calls. The FCC and big phone companies are correct about that. It's just not possible for someone like AT&T to take the risk.

Real life problems you will see and have to deal with:
- blocking of valid calls from legitimate voice broadcasts (i.e. schools / municipalites)
- managing trouble tickets from other phone companies opening tickets constantly for "blocking the call"
- managing trouble tickets from customers about not getting calls they should have
- how to deal with call attempts that do not provide proper signaling information (i.e. "anonymous" as the actual caller ID and not using RPID, PAI, or SS7 appropriately)
On Android 4.4 (Moto X, fairly stock Android), specific contacts have a setting to avoid ringing the phone. I add spammers to a contact called Asshole with that setting set. Works nicely, and doesn't require installing an application.
In case anyone was curious, they're called Special Information Tones[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_information_tones
There aren't any callbacks in Elixir. The run time takes care of scheduling for you. The code you write looks synchronous but is executing asynchronously.
> this case makes me wonder if political assassinations also occur in Western politics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JghQ0ZcRfQs
Since when is "feeling like an equal" a basic right? Everyone in my high-school had a car and designer clothing. Should the public subsidize that stuff for poor kids? Note that clothes are a much bigger part of "feeling like an equal" to a typical kid than anything to do with computers.

Games are not socially valuable, they're a diversion. Backup software--it's much cheaper to give everyone a USB drive than build fiber out to them. Finally, the failure of rich media in the educational setting has been profound. Text (and static diagrams) is the most efficient and precise way to convey information.[1] In the 1990's, it was about getting "multimedia" into classrooms, and it was a colossal waste of time and money. The value of online courseware is the lecture notes and exams, which have limited bandwidth demands.

[1] I'll note that HN is about as plain text as you can get, and is a place for serious discussion.
Ideas are worthless, its all in the execution. If all you have is cute ideas go scam people on the Kickstarter.
> Because once they've been one once, they don't want to be one again.

Well crap, I'm in my second go-around as startup CTO (and I definitely want to do more), so I guess I'm doing something wrong because I've loved every minute of each startup.

I think the big thing that makes all the work and stress worth it for me is that these are projects I would volunteer for with or without pay. Last time it was a fitness network that helped people develop a sustainable healthy lifestyle. This time it is shaving 10-20% off the installed price of distributed solar. Got way past the MVP stage last time (over a million users), and close to getting there this time (more business LOIs coming in every day).

I love being a technical cofounder. My skills are technical, so I can contribute the most in that role. But the startup has to be something I would volunteer for. So I guess you're right, startups don't find me. I find them.
All the reblogging and retweeting is just the dissemination. The internet is, essentially, for that purpose. It's necessary to spread information in such a way when people seldom look outside of their favorite echo-chamber.
"... as the project grew beyond a boot sector, he wrapped his assembly as C inlines..."

he = Linus Torvalds
project = Linux