skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why wouldn't sacrificing profit for growth make sense for Etsy?

This is also just a theory, but this could be perhaps why many web companies choose to pursue growth over profit: if you want to attract the brighest developers, you have to give them interesting problems to solve. A simplistic webapp could be profitable with a small userbase, but they wouldn't have the challenges (scalability, search relevance, machine learning for ad targeting and collaborative filtering) that could attract a top-notch engineering team.

Entrepreneurial hackers are quite different from most business owners in their motivations are quite different. Top technical talent usually isn't very motivated by money alone and hates being underutilized. A small (even profitable) business wouldn't generate that much money for developers anyway. Founders could find a way to cash out from dividends, but that would leave employee engineers with nothing (or at the least, with nothing more than what four years of routine bonuses at Google would bring) to show for years of working long hours on tedious and technically un-interesting problems (which many times still happen to be the problems that customers want solved).

A competitor could delay profitability in the short term, attracting not only a large user base but also a talented team that could execute on a much more scalable monetization approach (e.g. self-serve advertising vs. brand advertising, SMB/consumer products vs. enterprise products).

Incidentally, from what I've heard, before Facebook began seeing serious growth and went beyond being a simple database driven web application (appearance of Thrift and the ability to write back-end services in Python, C++ and Java), they had high turnover in engineering. I'd imagine the fact that they were recruiting top talent but putting them to work on routine web development contributed a lot to that. Of course with the scale Facebook operates at now, the simplest web development tasks are quite challenging.

That being said, companies that start out solving "unsexy" but financially lucrative problems could grow to be billion dollar companies (e.g. SAP). Philip Greenspun has a really interesting piece on this topic (see the third "good reason to start a startup"):

http://philip.greenspun.com/business/startup-tips/

Question is, what would these start-ups have to do to attract talented technical employees (as opposed to founders, who have the lure of "fuck you money" or talented sales/marketing employees who are passionate about customer building a profitable pipeline and closing valuable deals)?
the game breaks should you move yourself into the portal, at the house level to the lava level, in telekinesis mode
OK. We have some female founders. How 'bout some female designers and developers?
I wouldn't consider YC a "startup" in the sense of the word that most people here think of it. Note that YC was just nominated for a Crunchie in the Angel Investor category.
create a ~/.vimperatorrc file with your specific settings
Meaning it's still a rumor.
Here is an example that caused me a few bugs.

// define a new type called md5_t
typedef char md5_t[33];
md5_t g_md5;
// here sizeof(g_md5) == sizeof(md5_t)

void f(md5_t md5)
{
// here sizeof(md5) == sizeof(char*)
}

The type information definitely lost inside functions.
Steve Jobs: How to live before you die
sinatra, heroku and mongoHQ
All the world is play
Ground effect planes are appealing for cargo, but would be far too slow to compete with airliners as passenger aircraft. Speeds for most designs I've seen top out at about half the cruise speed of a regular airliner, which makes sense if you consider that the thing is by definition flying around at sea level.
I was just making light of the... dubious content that springs forth from 4chan. I do understand how he could be quite proud of the fact he created such an incredibly popular site.
BREAKING BREAKING News at 10, people steal designs.

Can someone steal my design, I'd like the publicity
That's pretty much what I did. There is a polymorphic method to_js_tail on AST nodes that asks the node to emit itself as a return statement. Nodes that are values just prepend "return", blocks forward the call to their last statement, control structures forward to each of their blocks and so on.

That just handles returns. I never implemented statements as expressions in general. I was planning to do that by wrapping non-expressions in anonymous functions but if you can do it by injecting temp variables, that's probably a lot more efficient.
This works, sure, but if you do:

char test[1024][32];
printf("%i\n", sizeof(test));

You'll get 1024 * 32 (32,768). It didn't know that it's a 2D array. When you pass a stack-allocated array, it passes by pointer. It works this way because C is portable assembler.
There would be little lost from having to specify &arr[0], rather than having array typed arr degrade into a pointer directly, but a huge amount to be gained - some very much needed help with tracking array sizes.
I think it's a shame they are using these kinds of aggressive tax planning tactics, while still marketing themselves as being Swedish/Nordic. And to put this view in context, Sweden does not have the same social system as the US. But this would be aggressive even for an American company.
Alright -- this is fixed with the latest commit. I've enhanced the --no-wrap option to not emit "var" declarations at the top level. If you don't want the safety wrapper, then you probably intend to make them global in any case.

bin/cs now works like a charm. I might pull it back into the main bin/coffee-script executable. Start a REPL if run without arguments ... --run for executing CoffeeScripts via Narwhal... something like that.
By Thought Alone: Mind over Keyboard
I don't see anything bad with that. IKEA is a non profit and its rules apply. Dereck did that too:

http://sivers.org/trust

Ingvar Kamprad is the prototype of Calvinist, hard working, humble and low expenses man. When he came here to Spain, to visit IKEA's stores, he used regular line airplane, and public bus transport.

IMHO, he don't want to make his family stupid rich(think Gucci family,wasting on luxury, power, drugs, sex, fights for the money and murders between them) when he is dead, but wants them to have something they can make a life from.
"Only one in ten Israeli adults is an organ donor"

Strict interpretations of Oral Law do forbid organ donation though it's my understanding that most Israelis don't consider themselves religious. I wonder where this comes from.

Also, the phrase "incetivized altruism" is not an oxymoron. It simply doesn't make sense if you consider the definition of "altruism".
Happy Christmas HN: Christmas Price Index
I agree with the first commenter in the article. I'm sure there are subtleties to organ donor laws that I'm not aware, but I personally like the idea of a hypocrisy test.

This method guarantees that only those supporting a system benefit from it (those who offer to donate organs are only those that may receive it as well). If you don't want to be in a system, then you shouldn't expect to benefit from it either.

I could contrast this system with Social Security, but the latter has too many other political and financial issues that it'd be a stretch.
More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Price_Index
I think you're still missing the point, now obsessively so. The intent behind the guidelines is much more complicated than the words of the guidelines themselves.
That's my goal too! Your wife is awesome.
There is no logical connection between the use of the `sizeof` operator and differentiating between 1D and 2D arrays, so "it didn't know that it's a 2D array" makes no sense.

Secondly, it's not really meaningful to talk about "pass by pointer". Parameters are generally either passed by value, by reference, or by name. C only does pass by value; to emulate pass by reference, you need to pass the address by value, as a pointer - or as an "array". But the only array type you can declare is missing the crucial dimension length aspect.

Finally, saying that C works the way it does because it's portable assembler does not have strong explaining power. Arrays are not usually machine-level concepts; pointers with appropriate declaration syntaxes for static and automatic block allocations could take their place in C. Since C does have a higher-level construct called an array, it's not a big leap to imagine it being better designed.
Getting married is the easy part. The challenge is in staying.
Yes, memcpy overflows are just as common as strcpy overflows, and structure overflows are more common today than strings, if only because most of the trivial string stuff has been flushed out by now.
I'd say using null-terminated strings rather than pascal style length embedded strings is C's biggest mistake. Responsible for so many inefficiencies (strlen is O(n) instead of O(1) as it should be) and, worse yet, so many incredibly serious security vulnerabilities.

All to avoid having to incur a 1-3 byte per string overhead or figuring out how to efficiently work around a 255 character limit.
You still couldn't chop audio nearly this easily, or move it around visually like you can in Ableton. Most of the manipulations were probably done in the sampler, so they all had to be done by ear, and sequenced out using MIDI. I think the big time-saver now is the "elastic" audio capability built into modern sequencers, allowing you to easily realign transients within the audio.
If I understand US law correctly, a non-profit corporation is allowed to own a for-profit corporation (just like it can own any other asset), but that doesn’t exempt the for-profit corporation from taxes; it just means that all the after-tax profits go into the non-profit’s coffers. And when a non-profit corporation pays its employees or directors, that money becomes taxable income. Does Dutch law work the same way? How much are the Ikea companies actually saving from the taxman this way?
Oh, so it's perfectly fine for you to make a universal statement about aeronautics:

> The lesson is that whatever flying machine we are able to design, it will always pale in comparison to Nature's flying machines.

But when I make one, it's wrong?

Fuck you.
This seems very ridiculous. Google hosting government services, especially at the typically non-confidential city/state level, is less of an issue than hosting services for private companies. Almost everything those governments do is supposed to be open to the public. There is nothing (or at the most, very little) to compromise.

Any organization, public or private, should be backing up their Google-provided services on their own.
I think it made me nauseous playing. Pretty neat though. :-)
I think that the standard when making electronic music has to be, does what I have created bear repetition, without any effects?

In other words, if I distill this down to the simple melody, harmony and rhythm that is present in my music, can it stand on its own?

You can always tell the difference between a musician and a technician.
The Graphic Designer Who Revolutionized the Way We Market Music
Pay off your debts. You have a degree in a field where salaries are high, it won't take long, and you're likely to learn a lot about the dynamics of working in a larger team that will help you in your startup later.

As you say, you can't risk other people's money unless that's what they signed up for. Get a job.
Performance-related pay doesn't encourage performance
Corporations are persons, but they are not citizens.

For the sake of comparison, cities, states, ships and foreign nationals are also persons, but not citizens. Only human beings are considered "natural persons".
mixpanel.com! =)
Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator
Performance-based pay for creative work reduces productivity.
I too would like to know what idea of PG's to best steal. ;)
Firefox 3.5, Ubuntu 9.10 x32 and my eeePC (1000HE) running it fine... Some lag if I instantiate a lot of telekentically rendered matter...
Wholeseller and retailer of  Mini Laser 
High Intensity LED light beam for projector
Handy projection clock, which shine an image of a clock onto your bedroom ceiling
Neat game... Thanks for giving me something to kill time with during this holiday break :)
Apple 'major product' launch set for January 26
They're not differential pairs for no reason. They're differential pairs because they need to be, to keep the signal integrity at the edge rates needed for that bandwidth at those distances.

The system is not that over-engineered, that you can throw away a bunch of the engineering and still have a working link. To look at a single line on a scope is often to see almost no signal at all. It's all noise. Only by looking at the signal differentially, does the data appear.

As for inductive coupling. Even if you used the entire differential signal, you still will fail, I think. The currents are quite low, which means your inductive pickup will need to be extremely sensitive. So sensitive, that I would anticipate the system noise of your inductive pickup to be on the same level as the signal you're trying to read, resulting in too much misread data to do anything with.

Plus, it's not worth it. There's no way to tell that another high impedance device has been added to the system, It won't change the impedance that some hypothetical tamper detection system would be able to measure, in any measurable way, so why not just add it using a direct connection?
C combines the power and performance of assembly language with the flexibility and ease-of-use of assembly language.

However, I was amazed to find that modern assembly language (since I was last in the game 25 years ago) has many high-level concepts in it (structures, loops, conditions etc), and looks... suspiciously... C-like.

But you're quite right about portability. Although C is famously not perfectly portable (int sizes, all those #defines - just some of the issues Java tackled), it is a hell of a lot more portable than an actual assembling language. :-)
chao !
hey there. This is totally irrelevant but i wanted το know how you manage το be so active on HN. Did you take any breaks i missed?
Are you saying that the authors of libraries used should be counted in the credits, or are you saying that Google is going above and beyond the call of duty? If the latter, I applaud you.

But if you believe Google is obliged to credit those groups in any way beyond the letter of their licenses (e.g. share credit during advertising, as we're discussing), you've got it wrong. Do you also believe that Intel and AMD, Dell and Apple, all of the implementers of browsers that came before Chrome, and everyone down to Djikstra should be credited? Because, you know, they contributed in some way to Chrome's existence too. But that is not how crediting in software or any other discipline works.
C's biggest mistake would have to be C++.
Chinese Food and Cooking
Not at all a primary source for the subject discussed.

The usual source is

http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=siz...

and of course the Wikipedia article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...

mentions other sources. But all these sources (the submitted article and the Ethnologue database and the Wikipedia article) overcount the actual number of persons in the world who can communicate with one another in the same Sinitic language ("Chinese dialect"). That is an issue that has been surveyed by the rulers of China,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...

and it turns out many fewer people can communicate with one another in Mandarin Chinese (the standard language of China) than has been supposed by outside observers. This will not surprise any speaker of Mandarin who is at all widely traveled in China, but the reference sources haven't caught up with the facts on the ground in this case.
It is literally the slowest news day of the year.
Worth noting that he has no idea how to make the huge and awesome synth hit/rip, so he just takes it straight out of the actual Prodigy track. He also got the spot to transpose one of the loops wrong.
Isn't this like asking my grandfather which of his eleven children is his favorite?
Actually reach profitability with my News plattform, move the platform oto a reliable VPS , Make my mobile plattform service a standard for bloggers and implement a revenue Model for Bloggers in the plattform. By the end of 2010, the mobile plattform should be a must have for every site out there.
Leelin's right in a way. We think of YC as a kind of of startup. Our m.o. is to treat investing as if it were a technical problem.

If I had to start another startup in the classic sense, I might do RFS 1: http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html

I did consider trying another startup once after Yahoo. I hired 3 hackers during the summer of 2000 to work on a prototype of a hosted application platform. I couldn't convince Rtm or Trevor to work on it with me, though, and I wasn't into the project enough to do it without cofounders.
This isn't as good as the other one on the front page currently, but it is good
Merry Christmas and Happy new year 2010 to all Hackers
Farr Out website - Cape Town
Yea, the vocal isn't synchronized
Any chance you'll allow equal sign as well as colon? For all of us coders conditioned by years of programming to automatically use "="...

Looks beautiful, in any case.
This is a pretty huge step. C++ support in Clang has always lagged behind, but the Clang internals is all C++ -- as mentioned in the blog it isn't self-hosting yet, just self-building, but this is major step in making Clang a true replacement for GCC.

Compilers revolutions don't happen overnight, but rejoice, you are seeing one happen right now.

I personally can't wait to see systems like OSX & FreeBSD use Clang as their default compilers, which might happen in the next few years.
When I was reading this, I thought "Nooo! Don't make the size of an array part of its type!" That has been rightfully shown as a very bad idea by Brian Kernighan, see http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html
Luckily the proposal is about passing a 'fat pointer', really a pointer and a length. I did that often in my C programs too: int process(char *buf, int buflen);

Maybe this fix to C's Biggest Mistake, a.k.a. the 'fat pointer', is just syntactic sugar.
European Car Designers Pimp Santa's Ride
Please see my reply below.
How Online Retailers Read Your Mind
If you own the SVN repository, I agree, it works well enough. However, if you don't have write privileges to the repository or if it is a shared repository with a lot of other people, it becomes much more difficult.

If you don't have write privileges into the SVN repository, you have no ability to revision control your changes without creating a tracking repository of your own. Creating and maintaining a tracking repository is a hassle, especially compared to a DVCS where that is the normal operation.

If there are a lot of people with write access into your SVN repository, creating branches doesn't scale well because all the branches are public. Creating a SVN branch for every experiment rapidly gets out of hand. Again, you can create a separate tracking SVN repository (hassle) or you can use branches, but it is nowhere near as easy as with DCVSes.

The big difference with DCVSes is that scaling across lots of developers is not a problem, branches are strongly encouraged, and merging works really well.
The problem in my experience has always been that management can't just leave well enough alone and make it straight performance based. They have to tie in all these things that they think should lead to good performance, whether they actually do or not.
Unobtainium
This experiment seems fundamentally flawed to me. If they see things they can't explain in other ways, it could be dark matter.Or it could just be things they can't explain in other ways. I must be missing something.
Chrome dev build 4.0.266 on Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix (32bit) on Acer Aspire One 150 works fine.

P.S: Flash videos seem to load pretty slow on Chrome though.
I decided by the time I got to college that I wanted to be the dumbest guy in my peer group.

Because if you're the smartest you don't grow. It's also can be a humbling experience and it sounds like that might be something you need.

As it is I am always hustling to keep up and that's a winning strategy for me.
The US has effectively defaulted, twice, since 1932. Once when gold was outlawed in 1933, and again when Nixon closed the gold window.

Assuming you count the current economic problems as a fiat/currency crisis, it was a period of 35-40 years - 1933 to 1971 is 38 years, 1971 to 2009 is 38 years.

That is a lot less time than a civilization declining or the sun burning out.
Yes, seems a bit one sided, Google should be able handle
technology advances fast and cheaper than the government.
Security, access issues etc, should be spec'ed like everything else in the government.
Sources of income are ad revenue and niche market consumer sales it looks like. No surprises.
> (structures, loops, conditions etc), and looks... suspiciously... C-like.

Which assembly? All the ones I know of - especially the modern ones - have become even lower level over time, as compilers started liking more regularity over more powerful instructions.
Check out InfoBright. It has a free version that has most features you're going to need. There are some bugs, but they're working through them pretty quickly.
Arrays are converted to pointers on the first use. You can't ever use an array in C.
Simple rule: Don't use sizeof on pointers. And don't typedef arrays to make them look like simple types.
Start my business in some way shape or form. :D
My activity level varies. Some weeks I don't make a single comment.

Right now I'm relatively active due to (a) having released a new version of Tarsnap yesterday, and (b) not wanting to start anything major until after Christmas.
I'm happy to see this moment. I don't want to diminish it, but aren't these tools written in a "tasteful subset" of c++, which could mean there are still many missing nooks and crannies?
I am glad you like the article but alas, I stand on the shoulder of giants as it is not my article. My only contribution is the addition of the screen centering method.
I totally agree with your overall conclusion that the article is silly alarmist. However, even government bodies that don't deal with "secret" information house lots of "sensitive" data whose public release would be a big deal. Departments / agencies have lots of confidential and proprietary business information of the private companies they regulate and most agencies have truckloads of personal data belonging to their constituents.

To say that Google Apps, etc is a new and unique threat to it is silly though. At this point between contractors and private infrastructure providers there is little or no government data that is handled only by government employees.

edit: Also, on the federal level one of the big pushes of the new CTO is for GSA to build out its own "cloud" of datacenters with which to host applications and house data for the rest of the executive agencies. While the government might well hire could services from private companies, the goal is to warehouse data inside a government controlled environment.
Had a great time trapping a NPC and jerking it off haphazardly deep inside my imaginary penis. Thanks.

http://imgur.com/4frQ9.png
Hm weird. I'm using an iPhone 3G with the latest software update. It opens the iPhone's QuickTime-ish player plugin when hitting play below the voicemail transcript.
launch my 3 year old web app to the public and watch the data flow from a pile of people using it. Get the code efficient enough that the pile doesn't break the bank in server costs.
A Bank Idea, With Ancient Roots, for Helping Small Businesses
Apple stock soars to all-time high
There's a difference between "which of these do you like best," and "which of these do you think your own skills would be best suited to."