skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think increasing cwnd is always the best idea. Have you considered caching the value per IP address and reusing the last probed value when initiating a new connection to the same host?

I think this would get similar results but be safer. I did some limited testing of this approach back in 2000 when I founded a MP3 server startup. I think the only reason cwnd has not been cached historically is that it's done in kernel mode, but on modern machines, it could make sense with the proper cache expiration interval.
I've been programming for 3-4 years now, have memorized tons of functions and operators, across a variety of languages, and have never once needed to use the modulo operator for anything, so I personally don't place it at the top of list of priorities for what someone should know. As an employer and interviewer I'm more concerned the person has a grasp on general programming issues and the ability to problem solve than testing their knowledge of narrow subjects.
I think by now its pretty obvious that every time there was a "glitch" and the green light on the camera flashed, a picture was sent in. I've had macbooks for years and I've never seen the camera light blink like described.

Someone in that IT dept was collecting pictures of students. My moneys on Mr. Perbix, thanks to his overly smug god of IT attitude. This story is going to get much worse before we see its end.
Nexus One from an iPhone Developer's Perspective
It's really too bad Google doesn't allow you to simply blacklist domains from your search results permanently. The thing that frustrates me the most about these SPAM sites is the fact they're constantly popping up and my down voting of the result seems to do absolutely nothing unless I'm using the exact same search query. Just let me blacklist Mahalo and other sites like it permanently. Better yet make it possible to subscribe to a blocklist so the community can pool it's resources and fight back.
I have trouble believing post-IPO Google is still so beholden to Sequoia that they must tolerate "publishers" poisoning their well.
I imagine I'm going to get ripped again.

But as harsh as the comments about this on HN were this weekend, they were also helpful.

I think this will show you what I have in mind.

If you don't want to say anything publicly, email me: mail at awarner dot com
To grow a company, you need to be good at killing things
someones network of contacts > everything
I'm not interested at all in most of the Sports apps. I'm also not really interested in most of the Medical apps. Et cetera. Apple's not going to get rid of those, they're not as offensive to people, right?

It's not about the audience or who doesn't want to be part of that audience. It's about the idea that some people are just so offended at these apps being so popular they can't bear to let their kids potentially access them (oh, did we totally just gloss over the parental controls and ratings? oh why yes we did!)
This is not a small matter, this destroys the internet for the rest of us. The Internet becomes unusable and untrustworthy. And you are doing this in a profitable collusion with Google. You cynically going where Google pushes you.
First, I think you are greatly underestimating the cost of an H1B. It's more than just the application fee. For example, the company must create a job description so narrow that only the desired candidate can fit it. They must then advertise and otherwise attempt to recruit an American for that position, and a lawyer must make sure they tried hard enough. Once lawyers get involved, things get expensive.

As for getting thrown out of the country, it's my understanding that someone on an H1B is in the country for the sole purpose of relieving a shortage of skilled labor. Once the job is gone, they have no reason to remain in the US. They can also leave their job at any time. In contrast, bonded labor can not leave their job until their debts are paid off.

In short, I think you want the H1B system to be something that it isn't. The sole goal is to relieve a shortage of skilled labor. There is no reason we should make it easier for people to leverage an H1B into citizenship.

Now, I certainly think we should increase our immigration quota for skilled immigrants, subject to much greater scrutiny than we already have [1]. But that's completely separate from the matter of visas to provide temporary labor.

[1] I think we do a terrible job of making sure immigrants are a good cultural fit for the US and assimilating them once they get here.
According to a Google Tech Talk by the creator, a few people have switched from vi to emacs to get org-mode. The obvious implication is that there is nothing comparable for vi. However, the talk was in July of 2008, so maybe someone has created something since then.

Here is a link to the talk: http://orgmode.org/GoogleTech.html
Nothing is quite so cut and dry as all that. The KMT is willing to negotiate for reunification, but on such terms that it is pretty surely not going to happen.

This is a fit with Taiwanese attitudes as revealed in polls. Which is overwhelmingly to maintain the status quo. However if forced to pick between independence and reunification, independence is preferred by something like a 2 to 1 margin. But Taiwan is painfully aware of what a declaration of the risks that a declaration of independence would bring, hence the desire to maintain the current status of having independence in substance only.

Incidentally your comment about Taiwan remaining a democracy under PRC looks like a nod to Taiwan remainING a democracy under PRC control with an arrangement similar to Hong Kong and Macau. If so then you should note that in a 2005 poll nearly 80% of the country is opposed to that idea.
Dear New Employee
E-Waste in India To Rise 500% by 2020
I'm compiling a list of founders who have achieved OPP. There are the obvious ones like Markus Frind and Gabe Rivera, but I'm sure there are many HN readers who have also successfully bootstrapped as single founders.

Anyone know of a verified one person profitable startup? Have any YC founders accomplished it?
An even more clear look would perhaps perceive the event as the collapse and bailout of a massive and complex Ponzi scheme.
Did the Austin Pilot Have a Valid Tax Beef About § 1706?
Also, did you know that there is some kind of "internal privacy agreement" that prohibits Google employees use of social tools? I know a lot of people working at Google that don't share any news, don't use twitter and even Buzz. They don't share favourites videos or anything.
Yeah, sedo parking is a bitch tho, since by it's very nature it's tons of different domains. You would need a way to block by app.
On Using Concordance to Estimate Data Quality
Here's a great article about the "single founder myth" that also references pg:

http://www.singlefounder.com/2006/10/23/thesinglefoundermyth...

I'd say that this has a lot to do with the availability of cloud computing, app stores, and powerful third-party APIs. There are probably thousands of profitable single founders out there.
Certainly, I agree (I'm the author of the linked blog, I didn't even realize someone had posted it here).

Those are all things I'm working on in parallel and want to be more careful to take some time to do right, so I've been talking to a number of people I know who've started businesses to get their feedback.

What impressed me was that it's so easy and fast (compared to, say, 7 years ago when I last did consulting) to set up all of the medium-priority operational items on the cloud, without committing to long-term contracts or needing to buy server hardware or install my own software.

And while I'm sure everyone in the audience of this site knows all about Google Apps and so on, I still meet many small businesses who think Outlook, Exchange, Quickbooks, a dedicated phone system, and an office lease is "the way" you have to start a business.
While you've got a point, things like being the 'land of the free' aren't self-enforcing.

We are and will continue to be that because the people responsible for this will:

Have their lives ruined.

Be out a *lot* of money.

Very possibly end up in prison.

Whereas we've recently seen that the PRC's response to people being upset that shoddy school construction resulted in the injury or death of their child (singular, One Child Per Family...) in the recent earthquake is to throw them in jail (or the like).

You're always going to have immoral people in a society who think they're above the law, the critical thing is what you do to correct them and to provide harsh object lessons for others who are tempted.
Yep - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=791285
why does everyone on hacker news think they need to defend solo founders?

if you can do it alone, do it. I haven't done that in either of the two companies I've started, but I like the camaraderie. Not everyone needs a partner.
I think Giles proves his own point. "Stunned" doesn't mean "as surprised as humanly possible." It does imply a very high degree of surprise, but nothing about the word "stunned" implies an absolute human maximum amount of astonishment. Do you really need to sift through Coding Horror looking for sentence fragments to criticize? Are there no actual errors to report? Then I guess Atwood is doing just fine.
How Not to Stop Healthcare Inflation
Yes, but Feynman only started with his approach after he got tired of trying to explain to journalists in easy term what he did. (Or was it so?)
Hello-- I'm the author of the linked blog (I didn't even realize someone had posted it here until I saw my traffic jump).

Yes, certainly-- I didn't talk about that because I already have a strong network of relationships and contacts from my past 6 years consulting in the field and involvement in various industry events and groups. Not that it's ever easy to build business (especially now), but this sort of network building, sales, and closing contracts is something I was doing recently at another organization.

It's the somewhat mundane operational and setup details that I needed to do for the first time, which is why I summarized them. Cheers!
I think if you added some post-production to the older videos, and made sure the transcripts for them were really well edited and convenient to find and search, etc, this would be a great idea - you would be curating something of real value, and I would totally pay for older stuff if I missed it.

Of course "how old" and "how much" are very important questions ;)
Don't really care about ChatRoulette. I gave up using "random web page" as my home page back in the mid-90s.
This isn't just a matter of defending solo founders, but perhaps we should consider using some clear standards like one person profitability to make being a single founder able to be more of a conscious decision than a last resort.
I just took their sample test to see what it was like.

I was disappointed that they disallow the use of external libraries, but then criticise C++ code that is vulnerable to the obvious integer overflow. In a real interview, I would expect a good candidate to indicate that they would pull in a bignum library to avoid this, but there is no way to say that in this sort of test. Likewise, depending on the exact specifications, you might consider using a 64-bit integer type to hold the sum, but that's not portable yet. Presumably, if you're limited to standard C++ (which has no bignum library) and required to pass the overflow test to get a top score, the only way to do this is to reimplement the relevant parts of a bignum type. Of course, that is exactly the wrong thing to do if you have to solve this sort of problem in reality.

It is particularly unfortunate that they would criticise a candidate's code for this, while at the same time making a basic mistake themselves in the specification for the equi function. (If, as the problem states, there may be many elements in the input, then the correct return type for an index into a std::vector<int> would be a std::vector<int>::size_type, not an int. A size_type is always unsigned, so returning -1 in the event of finding no match is a bad idea.)
Thanks for the comment (I'm the author of the linked blog, I just now noticed someone had posted it here). I'll check those out, as I'm not sure the Google Voice voicemail approach will scale beyond a 1-person company.
Not to pull attention away from this post, but if anyone is curious about the Flash renderer I wrote (the one mentioned in the article), I've released the source: http://github.com/daeken/Arienette

In retrospect, I should've stuck with it; I knew that Adobe's iPhone code would be delayed as hell, but didn't think there'd be enough lead time to make my money's worth off of it. If I would've known they were going to delay it this heavily, I could've had a product out and making money already. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess.
That actually makes it more impressive to me: that's 50 million times creation of content, whereas Google is only passive.

Except strictly speaking executing a search is also producing content, of course - but only Google knows it.
Global Logging in Obj-C using Preprocessor Macros
"Old Guys Dig Young Women" & Other Creepy Facts from OKCupid
That's because working on Gnash is forbidden by Flash's EULA.
7 Places to Find Inspiration For Blog Posts
A degree in math may work better. It has more signalling value, since less people who are only in for the money choose it over a computer science degree.
Actually I have been on both sides of the table on an H-1B visa, so I am quite certain that I am not underestimating the cost of the H1B visa. The government fees are $2320 for a non-expedited application and $3320 for an expedited application. Lawyers usually charge $1000. Although this, obviously, will vary by firm and seniority of the lawyer in question.

The narrow job description and advertisements are applicable only to the green card where the total cost would probably reach over $8000, but again it is often shared by the employee and the employer. The job description is a few hours of work by an immigration paralegal or lawyer and newspaper ads should not increase the cost by much more.

I don't want the H1B system to be something it is not, the government has already muddled the intent of the system by allowing H1Bs to apply for greencards. In fact it is probably the only practical way of getting a green card as a skilled immigrant, but government chokes the supply of those at will, making it unpredictable. If the sole goal of the H1B is to relieve temporary shortage of labor, H1Bs should not be allowed to apply for green cards.

In the end, I think we have arrived at the same conclusions: that we should increase our immigration quota for skilled immigrants and establish a system independent of the H1B visa for it. I don't know how you intend to test for cultural fit, but I am open to listening to ideas there.

I was dreading putting the bonded labor comparison there, which is why I added the caveat. But a bonded laborer cannot leave their job until their debts are paid off, and an H1B with a greencard application pending cannot leave their job until they get a greencard (or risk losing whatever life/assets the have built up here). I see similarities there, although, obviously the two are not identical.

It is easy to say that immigrants should not expect to build a life and live here permanently, just because they can apply for a green card. However, the current approach to immigration causes uncertainty which hurts both the country (because very skilled immigrants, given a choice, will not accept the uncertainty) and immigrants themselves (for obvious reasons).
One would hope if smart VCs put in $400M over eight years.
this is getting really old and we're not interested in doing anything black hat or even gray hat. as such we're doing the following:

1. we're removing (or building out) any page in our system created by our users with under 200 words of original content. This will take a couple of weeks but it's tarted.

2. we're not letting users create stub pages (short pages) until we can noindex them and put them in a different directory (i.e. /stubs/) so google can easily tell the difference between them.

these pages are < 1% of our revenue and low single digits of our traffic. we don't benefit from them materially, and I think we're being targeted by Aaron Wall and other SEOs for my "seo is bullshit" comment from 2005 or so.

I guess that is fine... I gotta live with the ramifications of what I say. however, for the record I don't believe that SEO is BS any more... when i said that it was when we were building joystiq and autoblog and we spent zero time on SEO.

All that being said, we're being targeted by a small group of folks who want to take us down. we're only going to get stronger from this because our hundreds of contributors are rallying around building out the short pages.

Topix, Kosmix, NYTimes and Zimbio are all making quality topic pages and are not getting attacked over it. not sure why there is some double standard.

regardless.... this is not a material thing for us. we're flushing all these pages and moving them to a different directory going forward so that search engines know where they are located (i.e. /stubs/ ).

thanks for the ass kicking.... having a horrible day today over this.

jcal

http://bit.ly/jasondown
Becoming Market Leader: Finding and Beating the Competition
CSS Graphs And Charts: 11 Hand-picked Tutorials And Solutions
Pure CSS Graphs and Charts are best way to visualize and present your data. It doesn't require Javascript and Flash. Hence, your CSS graphs and charts will be able to be displayed at almost all type of browsers/computers. Here we share 11 solutions for that.
Austin Still Pinning Its Hopes on Hardware Startups
Donations might be a better way to make a little side cash.

It's a very slippery slope when you get into charging for media content..

I would say using Mixergy as a springboard into something else, like a product, as Joel used his blog as a springboard for Fogbugz.

You also have a great setup for doing promotional stuff but obviously you need massive numbers to make any real money that way.

Best of luck in any case.
Flash - An open interactive medium
For the sake of your loved ones / significant other, make sure you do your documentation, proper code control, and procedures so that they can sell the company if something bad should happen. It's good discipline and will allow someone else to take over (or be prep for when you hire staff so you can go on vacation).
For anyone who (like myself) missed Andrew getting 'ripped', it's over at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1140456
With the transcripts free, is there really that much incentive to pay you money? I know there are advantages to them being available (getting search traffic to your site, for example), but it seems like it would only be for an extraordinary interview that I would be willing to pay a significant amount of money to watch rather than read.

Also, if embedding makes it free forever, what's to keep me from starting a "blog" where I just embed each interview the day it comes out and thus have a free archive of all of your interviews?
Cringley: No Flash in the Pad
To my knowledge, prgmr.com (VPS provider) was and is a one-person company that's profitable, though it has a few employees now. I don't know if he's an HN reader, though he hangs out in some of these kinds of circles. I believe it had a long (~2-3 year) bootstrapping process where he basically supported it out of income from his day job, which he described as "working for venture capital".
We are not there yet; most people can't go to their computer and see exactly what they've done in the past week, month, year -- how it compares to others; and does it match goals that they've set etc. The trick is that it has to be automatic.
Damn, I've been trying to accumulate happiness points. Is there a patch I didn't download?
Yes, the "hit by a bus" scenario. This actually is a good point that should be raised, but just as with the "moral weight" argument if you can reach OPP fast enough then you can start hiring and avoid this problem.
Start over with a new company with a personal bankruptcy in your credit history?
Your method sounds good.

Right now, I use paper. I do create backups (photocopies), although whether I'll buy another paper journal when I fill this one is an open question. One advantage that paper has is that, if properly preserved, it's quite durable; it's not vulnerable to file system changes or anything. A disadvantage is that it's laughably easy to destroy in a flood or fire, whereas data can be searched and backed up.

I also have some irrational quasi-romantic attachment to a journal written in my own handwriting, but I'm probably going to need to let that go.
The point is a mess too to be honest. It misrepresents what was said; we went over and over that at the time. :-)
SEARCH_RESULTS
we're removing (or building out) any page in our system created by our users with under 200 words of original content. This will take a couple of weeks but it's tarted.

or

i'm also getting a list of every page under 300 words and having the page managers build them out in 30 days or deleting them.

from: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1143512

is it under 200 words or under 300? are the goal posts moving already?
Andrew's primary motivation isn't making cash. I don't see the connection between charging for media and a "slippery slope" - what are you referring to? If anything, isn't it better that he charge since then he's unlikely to need advertisers which would then make him more impartial when conducting interviews?
Agreed, you're not "voting against your interests"; you're voting based on principle -- just as people think that the government should provide a welfare state, even if it lowers their standard of living they think it's wrong to steal from others to help themselves.
It's obviously of interest and importance to a number of people involved in this field or troubled by poor quality material showing up in Google. If you're not one of those people, it's pretty easy to identify these links and not upvote them or visit the articles/comments, etc.

There are countless articles on HN that I have no interest in (e.g., I don't even know what Clojure is), but I just don't click through to them.
What's the rationale for the "no debt" condition?

Basically, if a company's revenues are greater than its spending, it is profitable. It doesn't matter if the company hasn't eliminated debt or hasn't recouped the initial investment yet: being profitable means that it's being successful at getting at either of those goals.
Yes. Even with swappiness at zero, Linux will still swap when you don't want it to.
there just seems to be a lot of posts on this lately. I think as far as it being a "last resort", it all depends on how well you know yourself, and, in the case where you're the kind of person who needs a cofounder, how lucky you've been in finding someone compatible.
Edison was the Bill Gates of his age. Even today, plenty of people believe that Gates had a hand in programming Windows. His greatest success as a businessman was marketing himself as a proxy for GE to a public that wasn't accustomed to the idea of corporate research. I think he was honestly talented, but no man could live up that image.
>Also, ballistic missiles have no means of communication with the outside world

I thought there were old research about objects during reentry communicating through the plasma? (I think I saw articles from the 1990s(?) on putting metal into the plasma and making it transparent at some wavelengths?)

You get Google hits for variants of: communicating through reentry plasma

How trustworthy Scientific American is these days is debatable, but this was a recent article.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=piercing-th...

(This discussion wasn't really relevant to your point, of course...)

Disclaimer: This is a subject far from anything where I might really know anything, so I might be barking up the wrong tree.
I'll pay. I enjoy the Mixergy interviews and I always find insight from hearing about other people's business that I translate into my own work.