skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
7 was new to me too, that's an odd one

there's also another trick for 11 that comes from addition. 1234 * 11 = 12340 + 1234 = 13574 (or, by digit: 1 (1+2) (2+3) (3+4) 4). that makes 3 digit multiples easy to detect. for instance, 484: 8 is clearly 4+4, so it's divisible by 11 (440 + 44).

it's slightly more tedious for >3 digit numbers. for instance, 1353: from left to right: 3 = 1 + ..2, 5 = 2 + ..3. 3 == 3, so it'd divisible by 11. i guess i explained this somewhat poorly, sorry for that.

it's also somewhat harder if you have carries.
Run with  the ball today
I was saying that safer alternatives to money market funds (i.e. checking accounts) pay 0.25% interest. I guess it came out a little unclear. These were seem as just another kind of money market fund, 100% safe. To keep money in a checking account rather than putting it into a perceived safe investment that paid a higher rate without sacrificing liquidity, would be neglecting fiduciary responsibilty.
Ask YC: euro vs dollar vs export?
Just read in the German newspaper: german businesses are worried that the high euro will hurt their foreign sales. Now I am wondering, naively trying to understand economics: isn't a high Euro a result of high demands for European goods? In other word, is that another example of an extremely absurd headline, or am I overlooking something?

It's just the kind of headline newspapers blurt out on a regular basis, so I would be interested to understand it.
I am on twitter. feel free to add me http://twitter.com/jeffisageek
Hulu.com Goes Live
Isn't it a bit ironic that Lotus Notes is given as an example to good software? I haven't met someone who doesn't hate it.
They're not mistaken to be a bit worried, if a lot of their demand is from the US. To really start understanding these things... probably the best thing is to follow some good economics blogs.
@jfoutz
http://twitter.com/jfoutz

just started using it last week.
No, it's actually used. In this article the creator of Python talks about it:
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4829
http://twitter.com/hackerblinks

Tumblr: http://adam.blinkinblogs.net/

(And, on Pownce: http://pownce.com/hackerblinks/)

(Does this mean I win teh Internets? I have social networking fever. (And the only cure is more cowbell.))

(Need caffeine.)
http://twitter.com/Stammy
Crackers can attack heart devices
on the mouse one, could you not mix wines?

100 bottles, divide into 2 groups, feed mouse...

Separate poisoned bottles into 2 groups feed mouse..

basically 100,50,25,12,6,3,1 ... 6 mice needed.
CRASCH and Flemlord made some great points. I'll also add:

The paying price for your company and your post-transaction salary are separate issues. You wouldn't agree to be acquired for less than you feel your company is worth so why agree to become an employee for less than you feel you're worth.

And don't discount the other kinds of value a larger company can provide. Different positions, your working schedule (4 day week?), company car, etc... Now is the time to ask for what you want.
You may be right, I'm very far from being an expert in these things. That is what I understood from what I was reading though, if I get time this evening I'll see if I can find the place.
YouTube lets developers build their own YouTubes
It depends. When Party A started talking to his broker about getting into the derivatives market, his broker might have said "And what do you do in the event that you're solvent, but dead?" And Party A would get in touch with his lawyer, and see to it that in the event of his death, his assets were liquidated and his debts repaid. Sure, it sounds tenuous. On the other hand, our financial system has the same risk -- without the finance -- because we rely on people to do things in the future that they may not be able to do. Imagine a similar market, but without the derivatives: one guy commissions someone to paint his portrait over the next year, the portrait-painter uses the portrait-money he's getting to pay someone to fix up his house, the house-fixer pays to give his kid piano lessons, etc. Again, a single death or default can break the chain, and the 'notional value' here is the value of all future promises made by all parties -- could be larger than the GDP, though the notional value won't get too high unless you have multiple layers of subcontractors.

Any time people get comfortable making a promise they can only keep if promises to them are kept, you will be able to calculate a scary notional value for these promises, and argue that we're all betting with vastly more than we own. But everyone who makes a promise -- whether to pay $80 for a barrel of oil next June or to finish debugging next week -- implicitly accepts that there is a chance of default, and expects their counterparties to factor this in.

Somehow, despite giant chains of subcontracted promises, our economy has survived. I think it will keep surviving. I think derivatives are not so much a new promises as a way to formalize promises. We might be making more promises than we used to, but we're probably just measuring them better.
I don't have any experience with Fog Creek products but their software should be 70-80% good by now if what he says is true.
http://twitter.com/engtech -- bitching and moaning

http://twitter.com/et -- link dump
These problems are a lot of fun and in most cases there are interesting general lessons in their solutions, but the way the interview system seems to work is that every year there's a new book or sheet of puzzles that everyone memorizes and then pretends to have never seen before when asked during an interview.
For tumblr I am

http://engtech.tumblr.com -- lifestream, kinda messy

http://rubeh.tumblr.com -- ruby/rails links
http://twitter.com/joshwa

Though I think that their potential as messaging glue has yet to be realized-- payloads would be a start, as Winer has suggested, incorporating Yahoo Pipes, Twitterfeed, etc, and make twitter the social messaging bus for the entire web.

My hypothesis is that Obvious is working on this stuff (since it's so, well, ovbious!), but isn't ready to release it until they get their infrastructure stuff sorted out, sign up partners, etc.
Naturally, it get's harder for foreign countries to buy European goods, I understand that. It just seems as if the cause is too high a demand for European goods to begin with, so there is not really anything to worry about? At the moment the statistics are still good, apparently, as demand is still rising.

The other scenario might be that the markets are saturated, like, if Germany were to produce 10 billion cars per year, but there is only demand for 10 million cars. But then they could lower their prices or just produce less cars (thus saving costs), which would probably be equivalent to the Euro falling?
Yes please. This needs to go bye-bye.
I think the problem is more that the dollar is falling than that the Euro has risen, and a lot of it has to do with money flowing around, debt, interest rates and lots of other things that I'll admit that I sort of grasp when I read them, but haven't digested well enough to explain them decently.
http://twitter.com/glasner
this should have been submitted as a pdf ;-)
Why I No Longer Like or Use C++
XMLBuilder: A Ruby DSL Case Study
Astounding that that's not an actual twitter feature.
logoworks.com does good work
You could just submit the HTML version: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340....
See Flickr Pictures As They Are Uploaded All Over The World
Joost: We Still Matter!
Tiny projects keep it new
Twitter is pretty darn cool, especially if you use it to keep friends and collealleagues up to date with what's going on in your world. It cracks me up to hear people ask "how can I monetize this?" If you have something of value to offer it will monetize itself. Nobody truly enjoys being "sold." If nothing you do is of any value, attempts to monetize are just wasted effort.
It is 70-80% good. (FogBugz)
There is only 1 day. Wouldn't you just separate the bottles evenly across all the mice?
The Awesome Highlighter - be nice, highlight
Google announces layoffs?
This is a great article. Two key points for consumer oriented startups: it always takes longer and foolproof is hard to do. Key paragraphs:

[T]wo other key characteristics of the successful entrepreneur: persistence and perfectionism. Mr Bissonette had expected to have the new product on the market within a year to 18 months. In the end, it took four years.

Experience had taught Mr Bissonette that “when you launch a new category, you make one mistake and it could be your last chance.” So each new version of AeroGrow's kitchen garden was tested to destruction with people whose fingers were anything but green. “We kept building the best system we could, watched how people would kill their plants, and changed it so they couldn’t kill their plants that way any more,” says John Thompson, AeroGrow's marketing director.
Is DoubleClick evil?
Ask YC: What would you put on a hacker's bookshelf?
I'll start it off:

- O'Reilly's Python in a Nutshell

- A 12" PB (I use my old PB as a more capable "kimble" and for quick SSHing into my servers)

- And to preempt the half-dozen comments suggesting them: Founders at Work & Hackers and Painters
Yeah, these puzzles are too unique and are in many cases well known problems/paradoxes that candidates are likely to know. Interviewers might be better served by asking a generic, LSAT-style logic game or a somewhat simple but time consuming math problem (maybe polynomial factorization).
One of the problems with Reddit since Wired took over is the dominance of all kinds of political discussions on the front page, both US and world news. It really brought the site down, IMHO.
Dude, I really appreciate that you like my thoughts, but what really belongs on hacker news? Maybe your thoughts? I'm really not sure; please help me!
I think this sentence doesn't really make sense:

"As you work your way forward in the venture funding process, the ratio of help to money increases, because earlier stage companies have different needs."

Isn't one of the points of the essay the fact that, as a company progresses, the amount of help from a VC decreases relative to the amount of money received?
Apple claims 100,000+ iPhone SDK downloads in four days
I would just put a thumb drive and a sticky that says isohunt.com
The Early History of Programming Languages
Great article. This reminds me of the Excite team, after the 6 of them graduated from Stanford, they decided to start a company simply because they want to pursue entrepreneurship, without even having an idea of what they will be doing.

I think it's important to show that entrepreneurship succeeds when you are persistence, have a strong drive to succeed, and have the determination... rather than how media portrait it as random luck (ex. Founder x first started the company because he couldn't find something that does y)
Web Mashups Made Easy
Microsoft's chairman Advises Congress On US Competitiveness
Maybe I'm weird, but I knew right away that 91 = 7 x 13. Apparently you felt the same way.
I'm @mistone

http://twitter.com/mistone

no massive posting activity but not stale
A Heart Device Is Found Vulnerable to Hacker Attacks
I actually figured 91 = 70 + 21 = 10 * 7 + 3 * 7
#5 is impossible. Martin Gardner has a nice proof of this: observe that each domino must cover a black and a white square, no matter how you orient it. When you remove two opposite squares, you remove two squares of the same colour. Imagine you have put 30 of the dominoes on the board, then two squares remain uncovered. These squares must be the same colour (by the above rules), so there is no way the last domino can cover them both.
SNAP Summit 2.0 focuses on the business and design of social applications
i'm thinking about going - decent discount for startups as well - anyone else?
The market is cheap again
Yeah, I usually love Joel's articles, but he lost me after that paragraph. Lotus notes is garbage software.
This makes me feel better about working on yet another CMS/blog/wiki thingie.
In regards to #1, a simpler solution for me is to just use sshfs. It hooks into the kernel's fuse module and allows you to mount any SCP-able location as a local filesystem. I don't know if it supports any kind of caching or not, but it seems like it would be quite easy to build that on top of it.

Fuse also has support for things like curlftpfs, so if you can't get ssh access somewhere, as long as you have a host with ftp access, you can do the same thing.
Yes... no
In Triumph of the Nerds, a great feel-good movie for Internet startups, there is a nice time capsule vignette of the founders of Excite, when the company was just getting started.

In Bob Cringely's documentary. Joe Kraus and Graham (the other co-founder) are interviewed while working in someone's basement. They're sitting in near darkness, illuminated by the glow of multiple workstations. In this brief vignette, they both exude confidence. Joe Kraus, dressed in jeans, seems to be very entreprenurial charismatic. Graham reminds me of a young Bill Gates and demonstrates Architext's technology on Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Later, in the documentary, several months or a year later, Bob Cringley goes to visit the massive brand new, post-VC offices of excite.com. Graham and Joe lead Bob on a tour - and you can see that the founders are still very much the same people - humble but world-affecting ambitious.
Let's Play "Blame The VC"
Misleading title. They only did layoffs at DoubleClick, typical for a merger.
What exactly do they do?

It doesn't really say on their site. Develop a new bittorrent control for streaming? Or what?
YouTube: The Platform
Their comparison of FF2 and IE7 don't match mine-- FF2 is taking up incredible amounts of memory over usage versus IE7 for me.

Probably the extensions, but, man, I'd love to know which ones.
IPhone SDK Downloads Top 100,000
I think that is a good call, when I get tired of just making micro improvements across our project or fixing bugs. It is great to really gett o sink your teeth into a new exciting one of project that gets you deeply involved again even if just for awhile.
That way you could serve 900 bottles. Can you serve more?

Hint: Look at the number of possible outcomes. In this case, each of the 10 mice can either live or die. That gives us 2^10 = 1024 possible outcomes. We can only encounter 1000 possible initial configurations of bottles. Is there a way to set it up so that each of the 1000 possible outcomes maps to an initial configuration?
Definitely shouldn't have to resort to tricks to factor 91. The answer really jumps out (70 + 21).
Joel's using ubiquitousness as a metric of "good", not necessarily if it is liked.
Essentially, they're changing YouTube from a video site to a WWW video platform. The new APIs allow developers to:

* Upload videos and video responses to YouTube

* Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)

* Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales

* Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales

* Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software
This sounds like a Zuckerberg statement....
"Software gets good after 10 years.": "Advertising changes every 100 years."
Help me with red5
I am having some serious problems with live streaming using the latest trunk.
I am using a single server to stream and am using rtmpt for my streaming protocol.
The server is a single cpu 3.0 with about 1 GB Ram.
I am using tomcat 6.0.14 with java 6 as my container to serve with tomcat connector and apache serving via port 80.
Help would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
The message that I took away from this article was that good software has to deal with the likely exceptions it will run into in the real world, using real world data.

When I built the first version of the Ambient Clock (http://ambientclock.com), I groveled through the vagaries of iCal implementations. It was a nightmare.

I breathed a sigh of relief when we decided to use GData: a nice, clean API. But what bit me next was the USER data that was in there. Weirdly formatted, strange timezones, oddball recurrences and other stuff. The nice, clean API can only hide you from so much.

My point is that it is hard to write software that deals with human-generated content, in some structured way. As soon as you hit actual people, you can assume that they'll do things differently than expected: using semicolons rather than commas to break up bands, using a different DATE format when specifying things...

I believe Joel's definition of 'good software' is software that has learned to deal. And so can be used in a vast number of situations, by a vast number of people.
Want to give a couple edifying examples?

PS Have you read any Edmund Burke? Got an opinion of him?
Microsoft: maybe this dynamic typing thing really is kind of handy, after all
Television Will Rot Your Brain (a math problem)
I would add "Getting Real" by 37Signals, for starters.
Why is D/Tango so fast at parsing XML?
What I use for 11 is take the final digit, subtract the penultimate, add the third last, etc. The result = the original number (mod 11). Obviously it works if you start at the MSD, but then you need to worry about whether there's an even number of digits, in which case you need to negative the answer.

Seven wasn't new to me, but I've never been able to remember it. Maybe I will this time.
I would argue that this solves a problem which doesn't exist, how about you?
It's funny that I get upvoted for possessing 3rd grade arithmetic skills.
3rd grade in Bulgaria, maybe. To us Americans, that's like an amazing magic trick.
Free Sofware Download
For 11 there is an easier trick (or at least it's easier in that you can perform it in your head faster).

Starting from the left add every other digit => n1, Starting with the second digit add every other digit => n2

if n1 - n2 == 0 or if n1 - n2 is divisible by 11 then the number is divisible by 11. Example

13574

1 + 5 + 4 = 10

3 + 7 = 10

Since 10 - 10 == 0, the number is divisible by 11.

Even cooler example 155357548018579643

1 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 8 + 1 + 5 + 9 + 4 = 43

5 + 3 + 7 + 4 + 0 + 8 + 7 + 6 + 3 = 43

43 - 43 == 0, also divisible by 11
For the benchmarks, see: http://dotnot.org/blog/archives/2008/03/10/xml-benchmarks-up...
and a history in March '08 and Feb '08.
It's not bad, but it's free on the web. And in terms of "getting real", they could stand to make a real book out of it by getting an ISBN number for it with all the money they made off of people throwing their money at them.

And of course I'll add the obligatory mention of Squeezed Books, which is more or less based on business books I've bought and enjoyed (although there are also others like Good to Great that I wouldn't recommend).
Ask YC: What's your Advice on Performing Market Analysis for a Startup?
I'm in some early stages of a startup concept, and part of the conceptualization involves some pretty intense and detailed market analysis. I would need to contact various hosting vendors and dedicated server individuals and gather information like data transfer rates, processor usage, hardware acceleration, very detailed stuff that goes beyond your ordinary analytics (like what's your typical bounce rate of a user coming from x site).

What's the best way to gather this kind of data without raising the red flag?
Hijacking Open ID-Enabled Accounts
That's what happens when you outsource your bodily functions to computerized technology.
Apple Technology - Information, Review and Discussion About Apple Technology
So is FF3 ready yet? I can install it here on Gentoo, but I haven't yet because I wasn't sure how stable it was. Is anyone using it yet, and if so, what has your experience been like?
And if you're running a software business, ubiquitousness = sales = successful = good. You can't care too much about some cranky geeks if tens of thousands of customers are paying you good money for the work you've done. (Don't take offense, I'm a cranky geek too :) )
What I learned at SXSW
- New Hacker's Dictionary (print version is nice for browsing)

- The Little Schemer (or the whole series, if you really like them)

- The Art of Computer Programming
Thanks for the reference alex_c! If any one needs some virtual Zuckerbucks, let me know and I'll hook you up.

- Adam (owner of Zuckerbucks.com + developer of the facebook app)
Just remember, this is from the slow release-feedback loop of desktop software. The distribution costs and time made it hard to iterate quickly. Web stuff is much quicker, but I'd still hesitate to say less than 3-4 years.

(yes, something can get put out in 3 months, but rich, full software takes longer. pg was still working on Viaweb after Yahoo bought them)
GameStylus | The Most Fun and Free Online Games
Ask HN: Giving raises after a series A round
Do co-founders usually give themselves large pay raises after closing their first big round of VC money?

For example, a startup that has lasted for 1year on 200k of seed and angel money closes a 3 million dollar series A round. The company has 3 cofounders and 2 additional hackers and everyone is taking just a little more than their monthly expenses.

Do you avoid the temptation in order to save as much as possible? Here in Cambridge, hiring top notch development talent costs about 100k or more if a huge chunk of options are not offered to the person.

It seems like a no-brainer to keep your salary as low as possible while you keep most of the equity and your employees get the higher salary.

If I had to guess, I would say that this is not the case in most VC backed startups. If so, then why?
Programming Collective Intelligence - O'Reilly Media Toby Segaran

Art of the start - Guy Kawasaki

The art of war - Sun Tzu
I'd like to keep it up to date, so just a harddrive is inadequate, since all my trusted friends and relatives are 3 hours away. I'd need a whole computer, on 24/7 with some ports forwarded and stuff.

I don't want to impose the... 8 or 10 bucks extra electricity per month a 24/7 comp uses.

(Also, there's the nice side benefit of having a webserver to host my random forays into web design, personal blog, etc.)
3rr0rists
thanks for information
Call me old fashioned but I like my dead-tree products, it's an entirely different feeling to read a physical book than a PDF.

Although I usually have soft copies of all my favorite books, so I can search them quickly.
InkomHolic
I would add a tenth (to get us to one of those lists of ten we all love so much): the martini method that I discussed using here with a very low bar:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121576
Foxit is good - I have it at home...

But at work, IT has the computers really locked down, so anything that avoids Adobe Reader (the only IT-approved PDF reader) is great.
I think selling 55,000,000 copies of a software package (around $500 each I think) qualifies as at least one type of success, probably the kind of success that people around here wouldn't mind to have with their own products.
Ask News.YC: Recommendations for landing page optimization software
Is anyone here using software for A/B or multivariate testing? Or software for dynamic landing page optimization?
Bill Gates Asks Congress to Act Now to Maintain U.S. Innovation Lead
Hmmm, here's a list of books I really like:

Memory as a Programming Concept in C and C++ by Frenck

The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System by McKusick/Neville-Neil

Learning GNU Emacs by Cameron, et al.

Practical Common Lisp by Seibel

The C Programming Language by K&R

The C++ Programming Language Stroustrup

The Design and Analysis of Algorithms by Leviten

Assembly Language Programming for the IBM PC Family by Jones

Essays/Collections:

Hackers & Painters by PG

Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman by Feynman

What Do You Care What Other People Think by Feynman

The Cathedral & The Bazaar by Raymond

Novels:

The Soul of a New Machine by Kidder

Where Wizards Stay up Late by Hafner
Half-Assed Startup: How do I start my company and keep my day job?
for Arc: http://arclanguage.org/forum