skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Partner/Co-founder
I'm looking for a partner/co-founder for a start-up business. The partner/co-founder should be someone with a strong technical background (CTO or future CTO). The ideal person should understand how consumers interact with online services, web architectural experience, and database structures. The online business relates to automotive services (repair and maintenance).

If you believe you meet these qualifications and have strong interest within the respected area, feel free to email me and we can discuss more in detail.

I currently reside in the Northern Virginia (Washington, DC metro area) and plan on self-funding (beta) until some revenues are being generated.

Thanks for considering,

RubberCan

mkelly at alum dot RPI dot EDU
Ask HN: Site Invitation System
My apologies if this has been previously posted about. I tried looking (google as well) but couldn't find anything satisfactory so thought I'd try you guys.

I'm looking to build an invitation system into a site of mine and wondering if any of you knew of a good solution already out there (preferably in PHP, but any language will do for inspiration and guidance). I'd prefer not to have to entirely build my own but will if I need to.

Essentially, I would like a way to easily send invitations to new users, allow existing users to send invites, keep track of said invitations/referrals and also allow for registration codes to be used in bulk numbers to allow for limited user account registration.

Is there an already existent solution out there that I could integrate or use as a blueprint? Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
This guy writes a weekly-ish advice column for Salon. I'm not usually an advice column reader (nor a salon one), but the dude has a way with words and interesting perspective (ex-rocker alcoholic turned writer recovering addict)
Good Ruby Times
It means Amazon AWS is going to keep moving from bare VMs and storage all the way up through every component required to build on the web. And I should have been more clear. When I said relentless, I mean one should consider the possibility that they will move way beyond traditional definitions of hosting.

Is it hard to imagine Amazon providing utility-priced anycast DNS?

How about high volume email delivery?

Why not a Ruby, PHP, or python hosting stack?

Whole platforms, similar to Google Wave?

Where's this leave startups? Mostly unchanged if they're looking at their markets with a very critical, paranoid eye.
What if someone threw you something?
Objective-C Tuesdays: The while loop
Hacker superstitions about software licensing
Or, "the easiest way to make a small fortune is to start with a large one"?
I've just pulled out my H&H and had a look. It's terse, but its explanations are pretty complete. Looking at one circuit and trying to work out why it works I had to back-trcak through several earlier sections, but it seemed pretty clear.

I'm not sure what else you'd be looking for. Pedagogically if you start from the front and work carefully through it then I think it would be hard to beat it.

I can't help but feel that anything more targetted at teaching would be 5 times the size, or cover one fifth the ground. Can you be more specific about how you feel it falls short?
What good are video games? Since I also always wanted to create them (and still haven't created a great one, just small ones): for me I think they are part of a greater quest against loneliness. Sure, creating a vaccine would be nice, but loneliness is also a killer (I don't have numbers, but it is not only suicides - also older people who just die when their spouses die and so on). Maybe they are not for everyone, but games were important for me in certain stages of my life - they helped provide save havens in times of emotional turmoil, they helped to get together and connect with people, and so on.

Maybe games are not the best cure against loneliness, or the only one. Maybe I should have just become a therapist. On the other hand, maybe one day my game will help some other scientist over a depression and enable him to finish working on that vaccine.

I don't subscribe to the notion that only vaccines are "really important" - even stupid things like fashion play a part in the bigger picture. Ultimately, one has to ask what are we living for. Sure, somebody has to create those vaccines to enable us to live on, but working on the question on what to live for matters, too - otherwise, why not just die.
Run the numbers when you consider bandwidth, spare parts, cost of employees who run out to colos in the middle of the night, flexibility. Compared to our current hosting (SoftLayer) for a site that does several million pageviews a day, the spreadsheet doesn't flip until you have hundreds of servers. One big difference though is that bandwidth at SoftLayer is rolled in, this would make Amazon hosting quite a bit more expensive.
a.k.a. The 48 Laws of Unhappiness
At least he recognizes he's lost now, when there's plenty of time ahead to fix it. A lot of people won't see it for another 30 years.
Adobe Premiere for example?
slightly OT, but another good anecdote about buggy RSA implementation

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2008/25c3-2799-en-consol...

*edit: it's about Team Tweezer exploiting the RSA implementation on nintendo's Wii to run unsigned code.
Sorry, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

But obviously the quote's saying that if you're handed everything it means nothing. But if you lose it and have to fight to regain it, you learn its true value.
read a book on design and pay attention to popular design sites like smashing magazine.

Most good designers I know usually have an artistic background. Maybe taking an art class would help too.
Then you can't catch it.
Alexis and Steve: how much of this had to do with the 'censorship' you alluded to when the atheism/front-page and sears/'hacking' issues happened?

I see to recall a comment from one of you saying that you couldn't talk about it much now, but you would be able to 'in a couple months.'
I really want to give the Kindle or Nook a chance. I read a lot of non-fiction and having everything on one portable device would be super convenient. The only concern I really have is whether technical books with all their code, screenshots, and diagrams are rendered properly.
A better link: http://www.ashmaurya.com/2009/10/how-i-built-my-minimum-viab...
Agreed.

Until they implement it, you can use the CustomizeGoogle add-on for Firefox that lets you filter results out on your side.
In general yes, although it's hard to tell how much you're getting in a modern "unlimited" oversubscribed hosting plan.
Entrepreneur invents technique to harness wind pressure from running trains
Entrepreneur invents technique to harness wind pressure from running trains http://bit.ly/1WJe42
The geek threat [xkcd meets The Economist]
You can fake module naming with underscores (ugly but it works) and with duct typing you're only typing the full names of classes sparingly. In Java, the lack of namespaces would drive you insane, in PHP not so much. The lack of namespaces hasn't slowed down the development of very large class hierarchies in PHP -- just look at the Zend framework.

I'm not arguing against namespaces, I'm just saying for PHP they're more of a luxury than a necessity.
The only other thing I would add to someone thinking about getting into a start-up is to really think about the founder(s) and whether or not they may be capable of leading the company to greatness.

It's possible that the founder of the company doesn't meet all of those important criteria, and if that's the case the startup is probably going to be in big trouble down the road.

If you are more valuable than the founder to the company he/she will sooner or later be betting on YOU to carry the business.
The advice given is probably worthless. The student obviously has issues with authority, his goals being dependent on the validation of others etc yet that isn't even discussed. It's basically a generic "feeling lost is good for a while" answer, which every smart 20-year old should be able to give himself.
Internet Black Markets - third Front
A maxed out Gainestown server has 72GB of RAM (due to the triple-channel memory controller) and after subtracting Xen overhead you get these numbers.
A related point: whoever first owns the data from all link aggregators (digg, reddit, mixx, etc) and all URL shorteners (bit.ly, tinyurl, ad nauseum), and weighs those results more heavily is going to have an awesome search engine... albeit better for entertainment than productivity.

Except I'd never find the obscure stuff that Google helps me find every day. I don't think a lot of links to manuals,mailing lists, etc show up on any of the sources you mention.
ah, like the prodigal son.

(I used to wonder if "prodigal" was a biblical term; but it's just related to the word "prodigious". However, I don't know which came first.)
IANAL....

A few bits and pieces of information to collect before you talk to the lawyer. This list is far from complete. Someone with more knowledge can add to this list of fix it, just a way to get your started.

Do you have any correspondence with them? Does any of it show/indicate/imply that they "stole" you work.

How were you employed? Do you have any sort of contract? Do you have a copy of it? Any follow up questions to the contract asked via email?

How were you being paid? Was it by the hour, by the day, a lump sum for the two weeks?
If it was by the hour, did you work on the website during the time you were working as a secretary?
If it was by the day or lump sum, was there anything in a contract that specified the number of hours or the times you would be working each day? If so, did you work on the website during those hours?

Did they ever ask you to work on the website? Why did you even do it? Were you just bored during work and decided to give it a shot?

When they asked you to transfer it to their server, what did they say? Anything in email? Can you get your hands on the email (legally!)?

Do you still have the server with your original work? Can you show that it predates the website that went up? How similar is it to the one on your server (aside from the missing signature)? Side note: I'd suggest not touching the work on your server till you talk to a lawyer. Any change on the timestamps might suggest foul play... even if you can show its not I would think its best not to do anything.

Also, I would not suggest putting the answers to these questions up on HN. I don't know if it will hurt or not, but if you put stuff up in public, it might lead to further problems.
I guess "per calender month".
Document rental service brings "deep web" content to the mainstream
There is a minor irony in that he seems to praise that kind of thing while at the same time making some slightly jarring grammatical and spelling errors.

Of course, English may not be his first language, so I am certainly not trying to condemn him, but it is still ironic in an essay that spends substantial time talking about not cutting corners.
Isn't that what this is? :)
Machiavelli itself is not too bad. `The Prince' is remarkably progressive.
Given society's strict schedule for youth, the timing of getting lost is key. Around college graduation time is a great time to get lost. Your drive has carried you through 17 years of education and you are free to find yourself at that point. Getting lost in junior high, like I did, is just bad timing. High School and college become a holding pattern in which you get lazier and lazier. Luckily it doesn't last forever.
The conflation of doing well in school and brilliance is amusing.

Don't most people figure out the distinction in HS?
Oh, but he also "recognizes" that he's brilliant, the two realization should exactly cancel each other out...
Feel free to email me - bill@justin.tv - if I'm not the right person to talk to, I can help you find whoever is.
No, that's not what it's saying. What it's saying is "all the cool kids sound zen, so here's my shot".

BTW - Folks who earned "it" in the first place know something about value too. There are identities other than the lost princess....
Apparently you can build an immunity to mosquito bites over time. I have not confirmed this with my personal experience...
The women did it to him, I've said it before, and i'm going to say it again. If you want to be king of productivity, avoid girls.
I think viability is yet to be determined. I don't know that he dug deep enough into the problem "parents" have. I think the answer he wanted to hear was that it was a "time" issue, so that's what he took from it.

Many of us have ideas already in mind, then we listen for what we want to hear during our research to justify what it is we've already created in our minds.

At least when bootstrapping, there are few barriers when we need to course-correct.

SIDE NOTE: Personally, the "time" issue we have as parents is at the point of moving those 500 pictures from the Camera to the PC, then someone has to sit there and organize them, tag, and decide which ones are good for sharing and which ones are not. If we skip this process once, we're behind forever.
It depends on how "brilliant" they are!

This whole thread is an endless font for quip abuse, mod me down quickly so I learn my lesson...
don't forget the 50th law!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_50th_Law
Site is working now.
> C++ and Java are not examples of powerful programming languages either.

I never claimed they were, in fact I purposely lumped PHP in with them. I'm not ignoring other languages, but the these criticisms against PHP are entirely wrong. There are languages with a greater amount of cleverness, I agree. And yes, I probably would rather be programming in Python at this point. But PHP isn't bad because it lacks closures or mixins.
To quote the famous (unfortunately hoax) Vonnegut speech:

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.
It isn't the valley, it is the gig. I have been at the heart of one startup and part of several others. I grew up as part of a small business. These experiences have led me to the goofy conclusion that the notion of a "job" with regular hours is an artifice. In a startup, you are likely doing something that has never been done before--it is very exciting, compelling, and as PG says, there is just too much to do.

I would say that the valley culture is an effect of hosting many startups, not the cause.
I guess my problem is that I ended up feeling it's too terse. I read chunks of it years ago when I studied electronics and I've be working through it from the beginning as a way to occupy my bus commute (along with 8,000 other things :-) and there are times when it's a bit infuriating because it's so terse.
Answers my question - in Quebec, the title "engineer" has quite a few requirements, mainly having an engineering degree and passing an exam. Hence my confusion with the text: here, a CS graduate could not call himself a "professional software engineer".
StatusNet Raises $875,000 To Become The WordPress Of Microblogging
I think that learning the theory is more important than the tools we use in industry. Picking up a programming language is pretty easy, if you already know all the hard topics like different paradigms, computability, logic, mathematics and so forth. Sure, you can learn these on your own, but I think its much more valuable to have people who know how to learn, know how to program and have a good, solid theoretical background.

I don't think you can be a great programmer unless you can develop a non-trivial program in a programming language in all major paradigms. The best way to do this, is to know the more abstract details beforehand.

Having said that, I do believe its important to do a lot of hands-on programming experience and feel that universities need to be somewhat more hands-on too. I also think that they should put some focus on team work and collaboration, on tools like debuggers, source control and profilers and also things like unit testing, though it is much much easier to learn these later than it is to learn the theory later.
Garden Furniture Outlet
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Just because it's business doesn't mean it's not altruistic. pg does YC because he wants young hackers to do interesting work and solve the money problem, but he wants a return. Joel wants people to manage their time and get their work done in an organized way, and he believes in that so much that he wrote a product that does it. I'm sure he wouldn't care if you used any great product to track your time, but there's only one he can offer for free.
In the same spirit I would recommend that you try section 2.2.4[1] of the SICP textbook using The SICP Picture Language [2] which can be found here [3].

That section is based on the same original paper, and it is very nice to check on the book's explanation using a modern environment such as DrScheme.

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-15.html...

[2] http://planet.plt-scheme.org/package-source/soegaard/sicp.pl...

[3] http://planet.plt-scheme.org/display.ss?package=sicp.plt&...
Sounds like typical depression setting in, something he's probably unaware that he's been fighting for years. Sometimes your problems aren't new and unique (no matter how 'brilliant' you are), and it can benefit you to reach out to people whom you may not think can help you at first.
This article is a good in conjunction with last week's "I Was Told I Was Very Smart." http://theferrett.livejournal.com/1346357.html

An interesting trend in those labeled remarkably intelligent is a tendency toward stymied feeling of self-worth.
Startpad.org Lessons From Singularity University - Tues, Nov. 3rd in Seattle
They'll be differentiated by the disappearance of their job overseas...

People who fashion themselves into interchangeable parts shouldn't be surprised if they're swapped for cheaper substitutes.
Did that guy just complain about being able to own/drive a Ferrari?
I asked the same thing on the blog, but would be interested to know what the HN community thinks.

Jason and other speakers at Startup School (like Paul Buchheit for example) talked about how they were already building and selling things to their friends growing up.

I did none of that and I was wondering if that's something that's part of one's character, or if that's something that can come later.

Also, I'm thinking one's environment (parents in particular) might influence you in that direction.

I sometimes feel that I grew up in a well-enough family that I didn't need to work for pocket money, but not entrepreneurial enough that I would be inspired. But it might just be my character then…
Cary should have saved his time and just said "join the navy". I'm not advocating military service. But if this student doesn't want to stay where he is, doesn't know what he wants to do and doesn't have the means to relocate, it's probably the most stable situation to let him think about his/her own future.

Just saying...

3 years on a boat or sub and he'll know EXACTLY what he wants to do (and will have a lot more means to act upon it).
Sounds like something from the Tao.
It's free but I think there is limited seating. Anyone planning on going?
"Why should economics be a social science, because it's about stuff?" Yeah, right. For example, and I build "stuff" (from something like "bit substance", I take it?) for a living...

Economics is not related much to physics. On the contrary, it's pretty much metaphysics as its quant is money, which is socially constructed.

It is fallacious to assume that economic growth will lead to growth in energy use. Quality, not only quantity generates value. In other words, if a baker keeps baking better-tasting bread, and a piano maker keeps making better-sounding pianos, the economy will grow. Improving quality does not necessarily need extra energy.
On the other hand, we have John Milton lamenting his 23rd birthday (http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/milton/sonnet7.htm):

HOW soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth.

Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
That I to manhood am arrived so near,
And inward ripeness doth much less appear
That some more timely happy spirits indueth.

Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot however mean or high,

Toward which time leads me and the will of heaven.
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great taskmaster's eye.
I honestly thought this was terrible advice. The problem this kid has is everyone has praised him seemingly since birth and so he thinks everything is simple. The mere fact that one teacher saying his dream was silly could throw his life into chaos shows he's underprepared for the world.

In fact, the only reason he seems to feel lost is because he doesn't stick with anything beyond the initial thrill.

Rather than narcissisticly wandering the world and becoming even further ingrained in this "do what's easy" philosophy I say jump into the real world. Join a startup and realize the joy of working against insurmoutable odds. Where not only do people call your dream silly but a lot of them won't even meet with you to hear you out.

Then he'll get enough backbone to pursue his own dreams
I have always been hesitant on clicking shortened URLs. I have trust issues. It's almost like a box of chocolate, you never know what you're going to get!
Ask me in 20 years.
I have the Kindle 2, and it's basically a non-starter for tech books. The Kindle DX, though, should be better, particularly if you have PDF versions of your books.
Resignation Heard Around the World?
Hacker's extradition put on hold
> If you want to write clean, large-scale applications, you are going to need abstractions that those languages don't have.

That's pretty much false given that nearly all large-scale applications are written in C and C++. Every operating system, every web browser, almost every type of server software, and most desktop software. You might not want to it (I prefer C# for desktop development) but it's possible. And most large-scale web software (Facebook, etc) is written in PHP. So perhaps all those developers know something that you do not.

All those features are just not necessary. They're nice to have, perhaps. You can shoot yourself in foot with them, also possible. But you can build really great and clean software without them. And you can certainly build a massive ball of mud with closures and mixins.
I'm not debating which database scales better. I'm questioning why anyone would use a "big" server for mysql. If you're going to do replication with mysql, you don't need 10 servers with 68 gigs of memory -- you'd probably be better off with 100 servers with 4 gigs of memory.

However, if you're going to go with "big" database servers, one should use Oracle or PostgreSQL since they can actually make use of the memory & cpu cores.
There's a crisis brewing every quarter year of your life, if you let them be your crisis.
There are some crisis that need intervention and help but whatever happened to a simple kick on the butt to move ahead and go do something useful?
The community of hackers seems to be in as much denial about impending energy shortages as classical economists. A shame, because hackers are good at finding novel solutions.
He doesn't sound all that brilliant to me. Anyone who gives up just because someone tells them that their ambition is worthless is certainly not a true visionary. People who really are brilliant are usually knocked back many times before they have their first success.
http://jquery.markmail.org/ seems to have a good chunk of the lists archived. They can probably get you a copy (marked up in XML) if you ask - that might be better than scraping.