skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you are pre-funded neither PWC nor EY, who do most of the tech accounting in Silicon Valley, will want to engage.
There are a number of part-time, interim, and "rent a CFO" firms who are more appropriate for early stage startups.

Very early on you are better off selecting a small firm to help you with the basics of bookkeeping and taxes until you either raise a real A round (e.g. $4M or more) or have significant revenue. Ask your attorney for a "due diligence" checklist: both funding and acquisition teams tend to look for the same documents and disclosures. The more you can keep all of that straight and documented from the beginning (e.g. purchase agreements, license agreements, major supplier contracts, ...) the easier it is later on.
Baby Wise. I'd swear by 95% of it.
I suppose "inspiring" isn't the right word, but I think a better understanding of what failure looks like and its statistical frequency is important. Behavioral psychology says most people are far more motivated by fear than by greed. I suspect the unknown is worse than what really happens in failure. Well, except for John Fitch; he blew his brains out.
How to Instantly Spend 80% Less Time on Facebook
I watch with great interest. Is this how general AI will happen? or is it more like heavier then air flight was: we will get there, we just need to understand the fundamentals of what makes AI better.
We did have one of the big accounting firms (forget which) so I might have said in a talk somewhere that this helped us seem legit.
A year and half ago, I did some research on MI/IN/OH. There were only 5-6 Venture Funded companies in the three states.

The only way to make a firm grow in the midwest is to self fund based on your revenue. With out that it is just not going to happen.

The one internet startup out of Michigan that anyone here has even heard of (slashdot) had to tie itself to a coastal firm to enable its growth.

Secondly this guy and Grandholm can pontificate all they want on making MI at hub for "cool cities" (thanks a lot R. Florida....) but without a major change in the culture. Its not going to happen.

I really wish that the situation for Mi wasn't so hopeless But it is what it is. I honestly think that the best hope for the state is to let attrition take its toll. Everyone who can get out, move out. Let the state continue its slow decent into the darkness for the next 20-30 years. When the situation finally gets bleak enough, the people there will realize their stuborn redneck ways are costing them, and bring about the change from within.
But we are just going to have to sit on the coasts wait it out.

A 10 year Michigan resident and property owner.
Yes - SPOF on some hardware means I'd like to be able to make DNS edits on the fly to redirect users to a status page in the event of a problem.
Floating Images Code
This is one of the advantages of big companies: they can afford to do expensive stuff even though there is no immediate guaranteed return.
Any evidence for this?
I doubt it. Our modeling capabilities continue to develop much faster than our knowledge of how the brain works.

Of course, neural network modeling can still be of great use. Since we've more or less figured out how the brain does a variety of low-level processing tasks (like coordinating muscle movements, finding the visual depth and texture of observed surfaces, etc.), this knowledge can serve as a starting point for developing exciting technologies at increasingly faster speeds (robotics limbs, computer-guided navigation, etc.). Also, advanced neural networks can serve as rudimentary "existence proofs" for theories of mind and consciousness. For example, a theory that claims that our incredible computing power stems from a recurrent network of thalamo-cortical neurons is strengthened by a computer simulation that exhibits similar large-scale behavior in similar time scales under suitable parameters.

That last sentence is pretty qualified, for good reason. We shouldn't expect to write some code and discover a working brain, at least not until we figure out how it works to begin with.
Why the red eyes? o_o
The day one of these simulators does something unique and interesting that can't be done with other hardware -- I think we will have turned a very important corner.
6% of the online population generates 50% of the clicks

... and the 6% are non-representative of internet users as a whole. This finding deserves to be better known. Why don't you post it in its own right?

Edit: I can't find anything about this besides the press release and blogs that quote the press release. Why haven't they released the actual study? Also, the study was limited to "display ads" - does this mean banner ads as opposed to Adwords/Adsense?
I am wondering what it takes to be a qualified web start-up programmer.

I have less formal computer science training than most candidates for Silicon Valley jobs. However, I gamble I have more programming experience than many CS graduates. So, I am hopeful that I don’t need to go back to school for chemistry straightaway.

I am familiar with algorithms and data structures, but I am certain that many properly educated developers would put me to shame. What is the best way to accumulate this core theoretical knowledge? Are there preferred books on the subjects or will any do? Or do you recommend simply taking few courses before I graduate?

Thanks for your input.
Things like that make me think it's time to make Asimov's Three Laws* a legal requirement.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
http://www.motionportrait.com/e/
I agree 100%. Most entrepreneurs that I know are definitely driven by fear ... fear of letting themselves down, fear of being accused of misleading their team members so they better make this one work, fear of not delivering a working product to their alpha customer who has placed a PO and who happens to be their friend, fear of not returning reasonable upside to their VC's so their reputation might be ruined irreversibly in the valley. And most importantly of all, fear of going home facing their spouse and having to explain (again). Fear is definitely much more immediate than greed (money).
Cooler? You mean in the "my server farm is bigger than your server farm" pissing contest?

I hope you're being sarcastic. Not doing the sort of caching they describe in this article is lazy and wasteful.
If You Build It Will They Come?
Poll: How do you make polls?
* Write the text and the YC AI do the rest

* I have no idea

* Using asterisks

* All of the above

* None of the above
Please help!
Ok. Sorry for being a smartass, I totally didn't see your comment as meaning that at first. From first reading it seemed something some smug prep-school-bred i-banker would say when being dismissive.

My bad.
What's next, age segregation?
This finding and the study that it comes from has come up 3 times in last couple months. I'm surprised it isn't mentioned even more than that!
I'd be curious which 5% you don't swear by.
Facebook, MySpace announce monetization options for developers
Don't thank IBM, thank their clients that pay too much for consulting.
Holy smokes, someone submitted one of my blog posts for me! Thanks drm237!
There is a time-honored tradition of wildly misinterpreting the conclusions of computer science research papers. Example: the waterfall model.
I'm not so sure someone would have come up with this exact approach. Incubators have been around for a while, but they seemed to involve less collaborative mentoring and higher bars for entry. To my mind, YC was designed to address a specific population and problem space simultaneously. On the investor side, that seems very unique. The best analogy I can think of is a magnet school for tech entrepreneurs. The difference is previous attempts thought more about what could they take from the entrepreneurs than what could they give them (apart from cash). To me, the knowledge and support is the most critical element and YC.news is a very nice outgrowth of that. What incubator ever produced a product to help facilitate knowledge sharing among people outside the incubator?
It seemed to be all but ignored when the Google clicks data was released last week.

One blog (I forget which) made a very good point that the market will self-correct for the lower amount of clicks.

Since the clicking area is now smaller and more targeted, one could make a relatively safe assumption that less click throughs are accidental and/or from deceptive web design. All things equal, this should drive up the price per click enough to offset the lower total amount of clicks.

But that only deals with the "click through" problem not the "who clicks through" problem.
I would say there is one good thing about failure. To paraphrase an observation I've heard about why wrestling is one of the better sports to take up in high school: it teaches you to fight with all you have off of your back when you're literally inches away from defeat and get back up again and again and again as many times as it takes, and that's important because if there's one thing life is good at it's knocking you on your back.

So I would say this: between you and some "I've always had easy successes" entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who's had the benefit of every possible advantage, who do you think learned to conserve energey, restart, take it step by step, stick to simple plans one day at time, shake off the blues, etc. - you, or pretty boy success story?

Now who do you think will keep pushing in the economic funk we'll be experiencing for the next 4-6 years and who do you think will be in shock and quit when they realize that things have suddenly gotten much, much harder?

I'd say your failures have taught you how to function and continue despite setbacks. That is valuable because failures are inevitable. If your "failure overcoming muscle" has atrophied due to experiencing nothing but success, it's going to be very tough times ahead.

If you can deal with failure and keep going, then that means you've proven you have a strong mind - strong enough not to be shaken, strong enough to pick yourself up and keep going despite no constant positive feedback.

If I was a VC, I'd probably invest in you more than somebody who had 3 successes during an economic boom.
Admittedly I haven't had much experience in this field, but it doesn't seem all that hard. What am I missing? Is it one of those "the devil is in the details" things?
'Markram believes that he'll be able to model a complete human brain on a single machine in ten years or less.'

Does this mean coding is in its last days? In future, will we just chat to machines instead of programming them?
http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
Don't use Pound for load balancing
Uh, hello? Extortionate certificate fees aren't a technical problem. It's the "getting inclusion into Internet Explorer" problem that actually matters. What possible evidence do these people have that they'd be successful with this?
Google in Beta (screenshot from 1998)
Something about this doesn't add up.

There are bound to be non-trivial administrative costs and considerations involved with being a provider. How do you cover all sorts of complex admin and legal requirements with a free model?
While I'm sure it was not Sax's primary intent, segregating the sexes and shoehorning them into stereotypes is also the answer to "How can we make childhood even more awkward and confusing for homosexual children?".
I deliberately load the code I want to improve in my head before going to sleep to maximize my chances of having a productive night ;)
I think it's entirely possible we'll develop general AI without understanding consciousness or even some of the other functions of the brain.
Why am I the only person who's terrified rather than excited by every new incremental progression of AI? Do you guys actually look forward to the day when humans are made obsolete?

PS: This scientist seems to be exponentiating incorrectly. In ten years he'll have 32-ish times as much processing power; he needs 10 million times as much to get to the level of the entire brain.
Donations? Easydns.net was mentioned in the DNS thread as just as good as the pay competitors, only free. They ask for a $15-$30 donation
Surely there is a cash amount that will get your cert into Internet Explorer.
Maybe I'm missing something but isn't that why we have money?
Ad exec driven to suicide (partly) by trolls
You could just use your middle mouse button to click the links; that will open them in a new tab.
Asimov's Three Laws are a plot device, not an actual workable system for machine ethics. This is a very very important area for further research.
Yeah but DNS management ain't being a certificate authority.

I mean, I have no idea the obstacles. Some that come to mind: having a certified secure location, keeping records in a fire-proof safe, having yearly audits, being bonded at some amount, etc.

I know that some folks would consider these just BS barriers set up to keep the small guys out, but you could make a really good argument that to do what they want you should have to jump through some of these hoops.

Beats me though. I'm just idly speculating.
What Makes A Great Logo
Those are not "half useful." Perhaps a 1/4 of what they could be with better input data and a trivial recommendation algorithm.
They are a very good foundation for a workable system for machine ethics.
Microsoft's Interoperability Principles and IE8
The Real Reason there are no Silicon Valleys in Europe
"In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias." ... "Taught that the free market is a dangerous wilderness, twice as many Germans as Americans tell pollsters that you should not start a business if you think it might fail."
Last.fm just seems like music ordered by plays and filtered by tags (often poorly-done tags). Am I missing something? If you like the really really popular stuff then it's alright, otherwise, no. Further, the plays are skewed by what was hot at the times when last.fm and audioscrobber got big publicity hits.

I'm working in this area so I'd be really interested on anyone's opinions on current music sites.
Jump To Conclusions

I can envision a fun 'mat based' game for all ages here... Score!
They mention on their wiki that a $75k+$10k/year audit will get them into IE, but that is out of their price range now. They are in process for mozilla. For safari the same $75k audit or "equivalent" will suffice.

Perhaps some company will fund them for the PR credit? Perhaps they could take donations? $85k/yr isn't too much. I'd chip in $20/year in a heartbeat.
until fair proxy balancer is production ready (http://www.brainspl.at/articles/2007/11/09/a-fair-proxy-bala...), i really like nginx in front of haproxy in front of the mongrels

nginx => haproxy => mongrels
I think a better way would be to develop a site that used a file to track views.

IE Each story has a unique image and that is inserted into the foot of the article. You could then count the uniques on that.
I would have modded you up if you had said "Foundation". :-)
> Yeah but DNS management ain't being a certificate authority.

Indeed, it's harder in most respects.

Having a certified secure location is actually less good than having a dispersed and challenged base. This is a solved problem for eg. distributed hash tables and the techniques can be repurposed here.

Can you tell me with absolute certainty that Thawte or NSI would not facilitate a man-in-the-middle attack for the right price? And if they did, how would you know?
My thoughts are Sun is doing this to push more developer (Python developers) to use its VM and API, as a way to better compete with .Net (not a sin for sure)

But I am not that convinced they now love Python. Plus they only hired one developer, so it feels more like a marketing move. i.e. they dont seem in a hurry if they only hired just one developer to do it

Better support for Dynamic languages for the JVM is surely a good thing.
jaanix does it already, takes into account everything: views, clicks, ratings, tags.
A fluidics station is not cheap, and neither is the rest of the typical Affy rig (and Illumina is worse), but having set up more than a few, I have to tell you, the cost of the components isn't actually very great. (As in, the parts and labor. The price paid to the company is most assuredly huge.)

If there were actually demand for it, someone could throw together the equivalent of an open-source array reader kit for (guesing, but not without basis in fact) $10K or so. God knows it's faster and easier to work around Affy or Illumina's junkware with R than it is to get anything done with their binaries... but that would be silly because who outside of a hospital or lab really has that much use for one?

But sequencing-by-synthesis methods that can use WGA on small samples are the key to a truly accessible and useful map of an individual's genome. I don't really care how my genome differs from Craig Venter's; I want to know how it differs from itself as I get older, I want to know how it differs from itself as I am exposed to environmental factors, and I want to know how it differs from the baseline for my 'eigen-ancestry' in terms of disease risk.

There are so many statistical piles of shit that have already been stepped in (particularly WRT linkage analysis, but I'm sure we'll eventually see a good laffer from a GWAS of some sort now that they're all the rage) that I'd really rather have the tools to work on my own, thankyouverymuch...
I'm am embedded guy, mostly software side. But I'm not afraid to use a scope or logic analyzer when necessary :)

A more general approach to this problem would be to embed the sensor and a simple core like the ARM7 to handle the image rotation/scaling on a USB memory stick.

Then your product would work with any picture frame.
I'm sorry. I was unable to follow your comment.

DNS management is harder than an unknown amount of administrative overhead for being a certificate authority? I'm not sure I can comment on that one. How would you know that to be true? Do you know all of the costs involved with being a certificate authority? If so, you haven't brought them up here.

The next sentence about "having a certified secure location is actually less good than having a dispersed and challenged base" means what, exactly? I didn't think we were talking about what was good or not. The point was the expenses were difficult to overcome on a free model. And why would having a dispersed and challenged base be good? People who are somehow challenged and live in random locations are good to have? --- not tracking that.

I have no idea what competitors would or wouldn't do. I believe that plays into my point: there are a lot more expenses in being an authority than simply running a crypto routine (from a secure key generator even)

DNS administration is being done all over the place in all kinds of ways. The technology and market is mature. CAs are either mostly new or running a monopoly -- which means there's probably a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes which is proprietary.
It is unfortunate, but learning to disregard trolls (and serious personal attacks that you don't find helpful) is worthwhile. Getting upset about that kind of thing is a large cost (even if it just distracts you for a couple hours per incident).
I'm just beginning PAIP - I finally broke down and bought it when borders emailed me a 40% off coupon. CS books aren't supposed to be readable, but so far this one seems to break that rule.
Yeah, that's a good one. Well written, and a great book to read after you've read K&R and have been programming C for a while. It gets into the corner cases, and has a nice explanation for why certain declarations cause errors, etc.
Every time mankind makes a major breakthrough it makes entire families of professions obsolete. This gives us opportunities to move onto more advanced forms of keeping ourselves busy.

Most of the time when people ask about "obsolete humans" in context of AI, they really mean "programmers" or "doctors" or whatever. Yes, it might. It simply means that there are professions to be invented that will be to programmers as programmers are to janitors today.
We can sub-divide that lower pit into the "Freakishly disturbing". I'm going to have nightmares of that ungodly smile tonight, I just know it.
Company Name First in Microcontent? Sometimes!
We feel strongly about that stuff. Glad to hear it paid off.
Apprehension about progress in artificial intelligence is entirely natural. In fact, I think apprehension and denial will lead people to continually redefine their notion of intelligent behavior so that current computers are always excluded.

Not so long ago many people said a computer could not beat a grandmaster at chess without being intelligent. Enter Big Blue. Others have stated computers will never compose music that is emotionally meaningful to humans without being intelligent. Enter Experiments in Musical Intelligence and other widely-acclaimed composition programs.

Until the Turing test is passed people will be able to plausibly deny any advances in artificial intelligence. No matter how advanced such "brain in a box" models becomes, they won't pass the Turing test without being embedded in a rich environment with which they can interact.
Hmmm....formal training is important, but if you had a website with some kick-ass demos, you'd probably have a better chance of scoring a face-to-face interview.

Algorithms and data structures? If you like proofs, I've heard that the Cormen and Rivest book is great. Personally, I find that the Sedgewick volumes have great explanations of the most common algorithms.

But you haven't graduated yet, so the most effective approach may be to sign up for an algorithms course. Then you'll have the benefit of a prof and students to help out.
Most engineers never implement any of those classic CS algorithms or data structures manually since everything is in the libraries these days. Therefore they're in the same boat as you: general knowledge and a couple of books under a hand to look things up. All they (and you) have to do is to refresh their knowledge since college years.

I've never implemented a linked list since graduation, nor I sorted anything manually using quick sort. Moreover, I never had to generate permutations of anything, nevertheless those are the same damn questions they keep asking on interviews. I wonder why: it only makes sense for fresh graduates, because it's the only reliable way to compare then against each other.