skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: validating that the cofounder is the right one
I'm starting to work with a friend from High School on a business. We haven't seen each other in 7+ years at this point, and weren't best friends back then. I've learned my lesson the not so hard way not to accept just anyone as a cofounder. Since neither of us have any background that can really be said to be 100% verifiable, how should I approach like a bailout, or trial period? I'm technical, and we're building software, he's financial, marketing, business, and grapic design. I'll be building the product myself. I realize the other stuff is as important, but how can I? should I? validate that he's going to cut it.

I myself feel I can be validated by having something to show after a few weeks to a month of work.
Or don't. You'll probably work yourself to death building some stupid piece of technology that won't make a meaningful difference in anybody's life. Another social news aggregator aggregator? Why kill yourself over that? On the other hand, if your work is going to make a real impact, then by all means put it ahead of yourself because by doing that you are putting others ahead of yourself.
Well, actually, if you believe Fusion Garages side of things (and I really have no clue either way), there are no legal documents because there was no agreement. Ergo, the lack of legal documents is primary evidence that there was no contractual agreement.

It's actually quite possible that Michael never raised any money, never invested anything significant into Fusion Garage, and therefore really doesn't have much of a leg to stand on.

Saying that you "Worked together on an idea" and "Collaborated on a system" - is a lot different from having a contract wherein Arrington invested $500K into the project, and got a clear assignment of intellectual property.

It will be interesting to see if he files suit against fusion garage.

Meanwhile - why by JooJoo when I have to believe for $300 more you'll be able to get a MacTablet is what I'm thinking...
Probably but if they're mixed in with a fair amount of legitimate reviews it's really hard to detect. It sounds like 90% of their reviews were coming from the same users who exclusively review this companies applications.
SpaceShipTwo WhiteKnightTwo roll-out. 100 people made them. 22 flights already
Yeah, this guy is apparently not reading the same blogosphere as I am.
Where does all that $3M go? College debt + research teams + luxury cars?

Do big law firms have state of the art information tools and their own development team?
Apple can make a tablet for $499 and people will seriously consider it. Heck, I'd go down to the nearest Apple store and ogle the thing myself. I was one of the early adopters who paid 600 bucks for an iPhone, so I don't consider that terribly overpriced.

But $499.00 for a product from an unknown entity like Fusion Garage? eh. from what I've seen of them so far, they don't have Apple's flair for design. So now it's more of a stretch. They'll get some sales from gadget-happy early adopters, but it's going to take a whole lot of feel-good word-of-mouth reporting in the blogosphere before it will hit the mainstream.
Ask HN: Review my twitter search app
This is a formal language spec (e.g. Here is what happens when you call the "foo" method), not a developer certification. Previously, there was no spec, so official Ruby behavior was "whatever the interpreter did". This would have been really useful when projects like JRuby and Rubinius were earlier along.
Hardware is hard. Board design, solutions to space and volume constraints, industrial design, etc. It's not the "specs" of the hardware that are original, it's the specifics.

Edit: software / user experience design is also hard, that was probably included.
Optimism as Artificial Intelligence Pioneers Reunite
A webcomic indictment of advertising based business models?
I know someone who wanted a Master's degree, but applied to Ph.D. programs so he could get it paid for. Things didn't go exactly as planned, and now he's a computer science professor.

He seems pretty happy with the outcome, though.

(I don't really recommend doing this, but if you're strongly leaning Ph.D. anyway and you have some research experience, you should probably just go for it.)
Many American Ph.D. programs will let you pick up a Master's along the way just by completing the required coursework and submitting a form at the appropriate time - generally right before your comprehensive exams / selection of a thesis topic.

It's therefore possible to apply to Ph.D. programs, get accepted, spend the first couple of years figuring out if a Ph.D.'s for you, and then, if you decide negatively, leave with the "consolation Master's" - a degree completely indistinguishable from a terminal Master's, except:

- you were in a Ph.D. program, so you likely got a full fellowship instead of paying tuition yourself;

- you were in a Ph.D. program, so you had an easier time getting grants;

- you were in a Ph.D. program, so you got more access to and were treated more seriously by top-quality professors.

I got my consolation Master's in 2003 from a program I'd probably still be paying for today if I had applied for the Master's directly.
look here to see a picture of grizzled McCarthy and other AI luminaries ~ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/science/08sail.html?_r=1&#...
Off-topic, but I found it funny that their icon contains the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese flags yet they don't support any of those languages.
Huh? No, forget about the coins. I'm talking about the fees that credit card companies are charging the federal government.
Think nosey neighbors. It's, of course, unethical, invasive and rude... but that hasn't stopped any of my neighbors from looking in the windows when they are open.

To me the valuable part is the dictionary. The rest of this is relatively straight forward script kiddy HOWTO stuff. Most people I know have an extra computer that is idling 95% of the time and could run a process for 5+ days. It's the relatively instant gratification and ease of use that I like.
no, because it is FUCKING HILARIOUS
And in Chrome they're the same thing
Yes, loans are useful, and being permanently in debt is useful if you have an investment with a higher return higher than your loan. But it has disadvantages - it's an obligation what you have to watch over lest it runs out of control. It creates instability, as we've seen in the recent economic crisis.

Avoiding debt is just as sensible as saving money; in a way it's the exact same thing. It's a slight pain now for a massive gain later. As for a house, whatever happened to getting the money BEFORE you buy it? It's a perfectly valid choice.
I took two years off from software and did almost nothing but photography. Photo.net is a great resource and great community.
Unfortunately, the transparent compression built into WinXP and, I assume (perhaps wrongly) in Vista and Win7, makes everything slower, even on a system with lots of CPU and a slow disk.
Part 2 is up, & here's the article on it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=981167
Ebay hoped to acquire Craigslist
Come vote on the StartupWeekend Boston startups
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Here's the link to the post on part 1:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974341
Why would it be cheaper than an iphone?
He kind of mentioned that when he criticized fair use. He puts up a pay wall, one person buys a subscription, blogs about it, and there isn't much he can do. He can't copyright the news after all, only his journalists' expression of it.
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Good point. Evolution has replication at its core so perhaps is better for creating artificial life rather than specifically searching for brain designs (there'd have to be a lot of intelligent design to select brains anyway since evolution doesn't 'want' to go in any particular direction by default other than successful replication). Even though it can't forsee or jump, evolution's mass search power might outweigh these pitfalls (its the only known algorithm so far to have proven being able to build something as complex as a human brain.. though there's all sorts of bundled 'non-brain' stuff like arms, reproduction, kidneys, etc. included, which engineering could presumably ignore). This video shows 2 'wheels' of sorts in nature (but of course living things are full of mandelbroit 'roughness' and have compromises and such, instead of evolving perfectly engineered wheels):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmLS2WXZQxU

Those are obvious rare exceptions though, and evolution never built something as fast as a jet etc. and plenty of other stuff that would need foresight. Not sure if there is some sort of somewhat simple engineering principle behind brains/consciousness that we just havn't figured out yet, but if we knew it, maybe we could engineer it like a jet instead of using evolution. A jet seems extremely simple relative to just about any of nature's locomotion creation though.

For the comment below, interesting fractal 'amplification' idea. I've briefly thought about positive feedback loops possibly building something interesting. But mostly just as some vague analogy since I don't have enough programming knowledge to experiment much.
Evolution created the wheel by evolving humans who would create the wheel.
Really? Can you point me to a link where I can buy one?
So in the iPhone version you and your friends will have to align your phones correctly?
SCIENCE OF MEMORY: Researchers To Study Pieces Of Unique Brain
The problem for RethinkDB is that the firmware on Intel SSDs is advanced enough that it can speed up the normal, free MySQL engine (or postgresql, or oracle, ...) to almost the same sort of speeds.

I am yet to see any evidence that RethinkDB's approach is anything but a niche for those who need to squeeze an extra 5-10% that advances in filesystems and flash firmware cannot.
Thanks for this link - I'm usually leery of simple domains that have a link to retail, so I probably would have ignored it in a google search. It seems like a great starting point.
it's nice. would be even nicer if there was some way to cache tweets from my friends so I could search history. searching current can be done pretty well with Tweetdeck, I think. Google Reader is archiving a lot of peoples' tweets. See Dave Winer script to access. Nice smooth UI though.
Sure thing!

http://www.google.com/products?q=touchscreen+tablet+pc
HotPlug allows hot seizure and removal of computers from the field
With (true) respect your business is generating $3-4k/mo after nearly 3.5 years in operation, according to the stats on http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month That's definitely an accomplishment to be sure. Still, that's not even enough to support most single people who live in a place like SF.

I also agree you don't have to kill yourself, but I can't help thinking that you'd be much further along if you quit your day job and were doing 60 hours/week on BingoCardCreator (or something else).
Tablet PCs aren't new.
List of the best Online Image Editors in the internet
Cute. Can you point me to a slim touchscreen tablet that boots directly into the browser?
this does search history from the point you create your account :) thx for the feedback.
"While most of the customer development/lean startup process focuses on product development you can also apply it to your marketing process." Customer Dev / Lean start up is about marketing (ie finding a market) not product development
Computer science or HCI
I'm in the same boat, applying to graduate schools right now for a M.S. in Artificial Intelligence, specifically machine learning and knowledge representation. Just submitted my application for the University of Toronto today. All others in the US I will be submitting around December 15.

I appreciate the insightful and helpful comments, and I agree with m0th87's reasoning for taking the Master's route. Personally, I decided to apply to the Master's because I want to work in the industry for 3-5 years before returning to school to complete a Ph.D. For some reason I feel like applying for a Ph.D to then take the consolation Master's is (in some way) cheating the system, and I can't bring myself to do that. Any thoughts?
I realized that, but I feel somewhat like a long shot to get into the programs I want in the first place (Stanford/MIT/Berkeley etc.), so going for a Ph.D. would only decrease my chances of getting in, as the author notes.

Also, my understanding is most schools provide some sort of TA or RA opportunity even for those in the Master's program. Is this not true?
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I want my health regardless of my wealth.
So, your working on a startup and yet....you do want to charge your users something?

Maybe your just implying that there isn't really any need to read an article from Murdoch unless its free?
That applies to news but not necessarily to in-depth reporting.

Murdoch is right that people will pay for quality.

But there are almost zero commercial writing institutions that produce quality.
I think knowing yourself has a lot to do with maturity. Knowing people who respect your self-knowledge, that is happiness.
Also, don't bother complaining about Google news. Just change your robots.txt file already and then the evil Google will stop aggregating your precious precious content.
I do something similar with my site, but without the extra intermediary repository. On a push, the server-side hook simply hard resets the content of the folder to the tip of a specific branch. The website itself acts as the canonical repository of, well, itself.

http://yangman.ca/blog/2009/08/06/website-management-with-gi...
Actually Lean Startup is more the whole startup methology, about both the problem(customer development) and building the solution(agile, testing and leveraging oss/platforms).
Heh guess I should've swapped out the tumblr theme before posting to HN... apparently experiments in UI design regression are not too well received here
With respect to y'all who live in San Fransisco, Rails doesn't throw HouseholdIncomeInYourPrefectureIsLowerThanMyRentThatJustAintFairException.
I'm betting this is a publicity stunt. This has all been too public for a real lawsuit. They have gotten much more mindshare from all the blogs due to their "fight" then if they had just announced the product in a normal way.
You can aggregate without it being free.

Imagine a website that does news aggregation. To access the website, you have to pay $10 per month. For this $10 per month, you have the right to read all of the news posted on the website.

The website allows individual freelance writers to put their articles on it.

Now here's the catch - the $10/month that each user pays actually gets distributed by that user to writers whose articles he appreciates. So everytime he reads an exceptionally good article, he gets to assign some of his $10 to that article, as much as he wants.

At the end of the month, whether he assigns the money or not, he loses the 10 bucks. If he assigned all $10 to writers, that's fine. If he left some over, that goes to the website and is used to pay for editors, servers, hackers, etc.

This creates a situation where people are paying for aggregated content (you'd have a plethora of social networking, commenting, and rating systems tailored in whatever way is determined to be optimal) and the writers who are most appreciated by the readers are getting paid.

At the same time, the readers get to try out as much writing as they want for free, so stuff is NOT hidden behind a paywall. They can read the article first and if they find it useful to them can award their dollars. If not, they don't. This encourages quality and also encourages a wide readership.

Anyway I would totally pay $10/month for a system like this. I think you would actually see the case that many people would voluntarily choose to pay more than $10/month just so they can contribute more to their favourite authors. The whole "Radiohead Rainbows" effect.

Feel free to steal my idea and make it a Y-Combinator startup.
Wow, these three comments have just mirrored my own recent thoughts to the greatest extent I can remember. I present to you the Infinite Curiosity Loop:

http://funnylogic.com/times/txt/2009-11-infinite-curiosity-l...

And for what it's worth, the definition of intelligence has been on my mind a lot.
I like it. Been looking for an app like this.

+1 for the Trends.
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Designed and developed by a Singapore-based company, Fusion Garage

I'm guessing they were paid for the review?!
"Let me tell you about the history of one guy who bought the greatest apartment in the 80th floor of a super moder building, thinking it would make him happy.

But then he discovered that every morning what he saw in all that luxury was a high place to jump."

Never let your work consume you.
Never let anything consume you, because then, well, there would not be a you to enjoy anything afterwards.
Huh, interesting. Any resources where I can learn more about these firmware optimizations? Intuitively, that doesn't make much sense: it would seem that dropping a lot of the software overhead associated with concurrency, etc, would yield a significant improvement.

Having said that, it's also possible that the actual 'software overhead' is pretty much negligible when compared to disk access times.

Would love to learn more on this.
Support for Master's students really depends on the school. UCSD, where the author works, provides good support for Master's students. I have a friend who is attending UCSD for a Master's (albeit in Civil Engineering) who has received a TA position that covers his in-state tuition (but has to pay out-of-state fees), and pays a stipend.

Almost all the graduate schools I have researched have explicitly stated whether or not they offer any support to Master's students.
Sarcasm begets sarcasm.

You can either wait for Google OS or use http://moblin.org/. I don't know about you, but I'm not going to pay a $200+ premium for someone to install it for me.
Mahmud,

I'm sorry that you feel betrayed by us. We strive hard to bring facts, accurate reporting, and unique insights into social media and beyond. However, we've been changing and expanding our coverage base, and it has changed our coverage scope.

If you ever want to call us out, just email me at ben@mashable.com with your thoughts. I am glad to take the criticism and try to make Mashable a better publication.

- Ben, Co-Editor
Record Labels Face $60 Billion Damages For Pirating Artists
While the major record labels were dragging file-sharers and BitTorrent sites to court for copyright infringement, they were themselves being sued by a conglomerate of artists for exactly the same offenses. Warner, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal face up to $60 billion in damages for pirating a massive 300,000 tracks.
Test him. Make sure he doesn't know he's being tested.

See what he does.
Convert PC Power Supply into a Car Battery Charger [ Car PC Gadgets ]
I believe you specify that in your start up options- even in Windows!

How thin is thin? How thin do you really need it to be?
And apparently, don't worry about violating your user's data privacy!

I felt compelled to write this since I just received the Facebook Beacon class action lawsuit email a couple of minutes ago.

Why the downvotes?
Hopefully this was intended as humor (and it was funny), and not as a straight-faced critique. It is not news that different styles of ad campaign can be effective; Apple has launched a fair few smarmy (Get a Mac http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/ ) or fanciful (1984 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8 ) salvos at the competition itself.

What I learned from the 1984 ad:

The CEOs of all Apple competitors have monkey-like visages and enjoy sitting very close to the camera as they brainwash the world.

The Macintosh makes you proficient at the hammer throw. Incidentally, it also turns you into a woman with orange shorts.
Seems pretty straightforward, conceptually. Sense the presence of AC voltage, and when the AC voltage goes below a certain threshold (e.g., it goes away), close some switches to connect an alternate AC supply in less time than it takes for the computer's power supply caps to completely discharge.

At least that's my guess on how it works.
s/single in SF/family almost anywhere/; What about my main point: do you think you would be further along (maybe even 2x or 3x revenue), if you had been working full time on it over the last 18 months? My feeling is that there's almost always dozen good (but time consuming) things you could be doing to increase revenue, that you're not doing if you're busy elsewhere. Do you really not think so?
In the video you're talking about what you store, but I don't quite understand. You store my tweets? All my friends' tweets? Why? Can I export them from your system? Delete them later on? What happens when I close my account?
"... I was only a few dollars away from having to rummage through Dumpsters to find my next meal. I was -- by conventional first-world definitions -- poor ..."

I was talking to a mate while working on his property ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157621928042355... and the talk moved around to some friends we'd gone to school with. One in particular, "R" went to medical school, expensive anywhere. He mentioned the lecturer asked "R" one day why he wasn't writing anything down and found out he couldn't afford a pen. Now "R" saved for all the required medical books, clothed & fed himself but had nothing left for things like pens & paper. It didn't stop him from becoming a surgeon and rotating as an Army surgeon through the ADF.

"... To me, the van was what Kon-Tiki was to Heyerdahl, what the GMC van was to the A-Team, what Walden was to Thoreau. It was an adventure. ..."

"Kon-Tiki" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki is a papyrus boat sailed from Morocco to Barbados by Heyerdahl as shown the film, "The Ra Expedition" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThorHeyerdahl#TheBoatsRaandRaII
This is not exactly the case. It is true that one cannot copyright facts, but I believe there are some legal doctrines that protect news papers that brake new stories.

See International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215 (1918).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_News_Service_v._A...)

So I think if someone just paraphrased a pay site's stories, the pay site would be able to stop them.
Off the top of my head:

http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=modbook
if you want to pretend that Apple makes tablets.

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/
smaller screen and thicker chassis but longer battery life for $300.

Various Windows laptops, harder to find since noone wanted to pay the premium for a touchscreen.

If you want a browser-only tablet, install Chrome OS or something.

$200 still is in the land of magic ponies and unicorns though.
I agree, put up your pay wall and see who pays. The drawback is it will most likely show that really not very many people are interested enough in their product to actually pay for it. Meaning their stock prices will reflect the true circulation. I suspect they know this and fear that this move just might be the death nail in their coffin. Time will tell.

Instead of digging in their heels and believing they can force their product on the market maybe they should try to iterate.