skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking for startups to participate in an article
Hiya,

Hopefully this is the right forum for this question, but I am looking for startups (or suggestions of startups I could approach), who would be willing to share data for an upcoming article on conversion stats.

Essentially I am looking for startups who:

1. Have an account creation requirement before you can start using them

2. Have a direct revenue model (no advertising)

Our startup (www.eventarc.com) is an example of this, and we will be sharing our data in the article.

Specifically I am looking at conversion rates, so at no stage will we be sharing revenue numbers, customer numbers or website visits.

What is in it for you?

1. Serious link love

2. Serious promotion opportunity - we anticipate this will be a popular article, and it will be seeded across the web (including here on Hacker News).

3. A warm feeling in your heart that you are helping other startups by sharing data!

We already have 5 international startups agreed to participate, including at least 1 big name that you would all know and use. I am looking for at least 3 more, but happy to include others.

Do you know any likely candidates I could approach, or do you run a startup who would like to participate? Please let me know!

I can share more detail via email if you need it. Please note at this stage we are just after expressions of interest, but if we do ask you to share your data then we will definitely include you in the article.

To get in touch for more info, email me at scott at eventarc dot com.

Thanks, Scott.
Tracing cash in the underground economy
Backups are very useful for sysadmin experimentation. Assuming you already do your own backups anyway, you can backup a node, upgrade/install certain packages, do quick tests to make sure everything's working. If there are issues just restore your backup without having to provision and restore your data.

I have accounts on both Slicehost and Linode and until now I could be more cavalier with the former because of the undo button backups provide.
I'd assume the same as a couple paragraphs earlier: "chugging coke and eating pizza at midnight".
How Much Battery Life Does Sleep Mode Really Drain?
Desktop icons in Google Chrome (HTML5)
Facebook is pretty evil.
Ten years ago, if you had told me that Bruce Schneier, the applied math geek who writes books about cryptography, was to become Bruce Schneier, national defense and counter-terrorism security expert extraordinaire, I would have been surprised indeed. Smart rebrand on his part.
It's not so much just the banks. So far SVB sounds promising...am also investigating other banks.

But I just reached out to Braintree and they plainly told me I had to have a US Bank account + Federal Tax ID.

So I am trying to do a little research.

Plus...businesses in general tend to ask for that...so I would rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
Can we please stop calling Metcalfe's "law" a law?

It makes the exceedingly questionable assumption that we value all possible connections equally. Many different approaches to quantifying the value of networks converge on the much more reasonable estimate that value tends towards n log(n) rather than n*n.

See http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-is... for more.
Now if only they added a possibility to clone a repository from GitHub to BitBucket (or the other way around) via the web interface, that would be just perfect...
You should read the rest of the article then. You'll end up agreeing with him in the end, because he concludes that smart programmers do NOT like working long hours.
Metcalfe's Law is Wrong (2006)
From the article: "Men have their distractions, too. They spend about 15% more of their time reading the news than women."

It would have been useful if the article indicated how much time is actually spent on news sites, rather than simply the relative differences.
I definitely agree that the word "citizen" is preferable when a general term for people is required. "Citizen" makes people sound like equals; consumer makes it sound like a few of us make something, and the rest just take it.
> I am working with multiple resources,

First step: stop calling people "resources"
I agree on using startssl, and especially because of their ethos of how they charge: you only pay for the verification process, and after that, SSLs are free because they're automatic.

Also, startssl's founder is the best ambassador - send a help request, and he'll answer in no time.
Programmers working long hours (regularly) aren't doing it right. If they were doing it right, they wouldn't need the extra hours.
Interesting. The thread certainly makes it seem like it will be mutually beneficial. Maybe Facebook is a little less evil than I think, considering they gave a heads up.
All I can say is... cool... very cool... and with 1960's technology too.
I used to have all three sources in the top15 and then some non-programmers said I should remove it...it would be trivial to add that back in. It's really about who I am trying to reach. Ideally I would have different types/sections for mainstream (reddit.com front page, digg.com,etc) and then computer people (proggit, HN, etc). I just wasn't sure which direction to take it. Thanks for your feedback.

I'll make a dump of the data...what format do you think would be best?

Thanks for your feedback.
Swap your home and office (but not employers) with other professionals
Who Needs Flash? Here are Ten HTML5 Games paving the way
Photo Sharing Service with Automatic Domain Registration
Apparently so do their shift keys.
A bit strange but promising.

What can I say about a site where every couple of minutes spent on it I find something very interesting? Granted, some of those were tests of stuff I knew should be in the database, but it's still quite encouraging and the serendipitous discoveries were great.

Don't give it up yet unless you have to!
Given that people choose to install this because they think they have a problem, I'd be curious how much selection bias there is in their sample set.
Because of the way SVN expects on-server merges, you may see some strange looking merge history when working with someone using Subversion.

I'm genuinely curious: what use case justifies this? Correct and clean merges and history are a major selling point of Git. Is this for people on Git-using projects who can't be bothered to learn a new VCS?
Google Invests in Recorded Future
It's been the case for many, many years and remains the case today as well.

Appstore-like pricing is the exception, not the rule.
Take a look at Steven Strogatz's series of articles in the New York Times. He makes learning the foundations of maths FUN and INTERESTING and accessible!

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/steven-strogatz/
This is terrific. That's one more thing off my plate in getting my auditors to sign off on my SAS 70.

Regarding that: has anyone out there done a SAS 70 with Linode-based services? I haven't moved my entire operation yet, but I doubt I'm the first to consider doing it. I know the Dallas colo is audited.
Yes, my boss did thank me. Thank you, self.
Oh I didn't know that was the case. I grew up and graduated in the Philippines with a Computer Science degree, but didn't manage to experience work there. Most of my friends work in HP, Canon and other multi-nationals, and entry-level work is paid dirt-cheap. Although it scales up considerably as you gain experience, though I've heard that it doesn't scale and pay as well as someone on the IT management track, which sucks. Maybe that is also the case in Cebu? I'm only familiar with Manila.

Also, I've always had the impression that living with your mom does not carry the same stigma as here in the US. The only time people release their shackles from their parents is when they get married, even that doesn't occur quite often too.

Why are you working over-time in the weekends anyway? Is it related to your Monday-to-Friday job?
Common Lisp doesn't have that much to boast about in terms of its sequential data structures. In many respects the STL is a much better organized library than CL's hodge podge of generic sequence functions. For example, it wouldn't be easy to write std::copy for CL.
If I work them them, I'd rather the company fire the one who wants to routinely work 80 hours a week. It's not helpful -- and I don't want to waste my time dealing with their code.
Google is rolling out or testing an update to the google interface.
This is interesting I guess as I've been considering scraping pieces of Facebook recently. They are crazy.
Last time I tried firebuglite, it didn't really work in any browser.
When you delete all sequences in a diagram, browser renders a broken image. But I like the idea!
As long as we are picking on portables, my iMac is 340 times faster than my iPhone (original model).

I can say that frequently make a frowney face at my iPhone and wonder what the heck it is doing while I wait, but that I never have done that to my iPad. So while the iPad browser is not in the running for "fastest javascript platform on the planet", it is "fast" for everything I've done in real life with it.
Bill Gates, Warren Buffett praise Apple, US economic outlook
I'm pretty sure all of this has a logical explanation to it, most likely involving the time women spend giving birth by the stove in the kitchen.
File upload progress with Rails and nginx
Second step: stop referring to people as "which". "which" is for things, "who" is for people.

Replying to param, but don't want to spam another comment:

> "b) understand the criticality of the deadlines,"

Why is the deadline critical? For whom? What is the programmer's stake in this deadline, and do your people feel like they have been treated fairly?

To answer the first part, ask yourself seriously: what happens if we don't hit this deadline? Does it truly impact the company and/or team, or does it impact you?

I've seen many a time when deadlines are touted as hyper-critical, but have minimal actual business impact. They were hyper-critical because it was critical for the manager to get it done on-time, otherwise he/she looks bad. This is not something I would normally presume about a manager, but you've already demonstrated some misguided overly corporate buzzword-notions in your post.

I personally am much more likely to trust my manager's prioritization of tasks (and thus, deadlines) when I feel that he is looking out for the team (or hell, the company) rather than himself.
If you mean with my current co-pays:

$60 /mo for co-pays
$15 /mo for doctor visits
$40 /mo ~ for misc (lab tests, new equipment)

But as I'm still pretty young it only gets more expensive from here...
"But these long hours and near-perfect grades really are just a way to compete."

The only thing that the long hours are competing for is favor from managers who don't have the faintest idea as to what a competent programmer does.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating due to context -- the best managers would get rid of the workaholics, and yet most managers reward them.
Commenting on the last paragraph: I honestly believe that one of the biggest obstacles for newcomers to Lisp is Emacs.

Don't get me wrong, I love Emacs and it is truly the superior environment to do work in Lisp. However it has a bit of a steep learning curve just like Lisp itself and fighting two battles (one with Lisp and one with Emacs) is no easy task for someone coming from a Java / C# and Eclipse / Visual Studio background. I know because I've been there. That's why I decided to start work on an open source Visual Studio add-in to support for Common Lisp in Visual Studio itself. I think being able to do the first steps in a familiar environment would be a great help for newcomers. I wonder what you guys think of the idea?
Nintendo facing first profit slip in six years
I think iPhone is hurting them
TuneUp Deutschland - Windows-Design anpassen - Visuelle Stile
I have considered this as well as moving to Canada (I'm a dual US and Canadian citizen).

In both cases this would be a lapse in my US coverage so there would be no going back to the way things were before moving.
I'm going to work at Facebook soon, and I'm paying very close attention to what's going on. I'm looking forward to seeing the other side of the story as it were.
The arrangement with my code is the same as with my text. I create, you consume.
Nice writing! Ok, we'll call it 'Tillys anything but a law' in stead ;)

I think everybody realizes that Metcalfe's law is not a 'law' in the sense that it is a given or an absolute, any of those - including Moores law and others like it are to be taken with a grain of salt.

The practical upshot of all this is that if the value of a network goes up with a non-linear factor when the number of participants increases the reverse also holds true. What we call it doesn't really matter and Metcalfe's law will do as good as any other shorthand description that will convey the point.

Thanks for the interesting read by the way, it's nice to see that even if Metcalfe was maybe wrong in the 'absolute' in principle the concept of non-linear value increase seems to hold true.
Ask HN: Sound streaming in M.Google Voice?
Does anyone know how they achieved sound streaming in mobile Google Voice web app?

Sorry if this is well known, but I'm really curious.

Thanks.
heh, sure. I see how my comment is coming off as bitchy and is being downmodded. However, I am genuinely curious. There are people in my team that are currently just working 9-5. There is one guy who is working nights and weekends because he likes it, and then there is one guy that's working (productivity wise) 25-30 hrs a week while missing internal milestones.

Its frustrating to be in my place, because I feel sad for the nightouter when he picks up for the third guy
Origin of Life Lecture by John Maynard Smith
Well, there's always Canviz: http://code.google.com/p/canviz/
There are two basic theories on relationships.

The first says that the right pair of people fit together, so if you aren't fitting, then you must not have found the right pair of people.

The second says that relationships are constructed. What you get out has more to do with what you put in than with who you are.

While there is an element of truth to both, everyone I know who is happily married subscribes more to the second theory than the first.
Ever try moving a man by pushing on his ankles? How about his head?

Smart programmers use just enough effort in the right places to get the effect they want.

Dumb programmers right a lot of code. The code you never write never breaks, and never needs fixing.

I'm starting to realize that if no one else will give a shit - don't do it. Of course, this isn't a free pass to write shitty code. You don't have to be ineffective to take pride in your work.
Thanks for the input. If you don't mind me asking: what was the approximate monthly cost for your two person company?
True, I hear you. I can't speak for everybody. But I still think there is truth that efficient, sustainable hours can be more productive than long, stressful hours.
Whoever put that together, well, I hope I never have to maintain their code, because it's clear they're the type who document for themselves.
sorry - English is not my first language. (Not fixing the comment to keep yours relevant)

I think my question is being taken the wrong way. Let me try asking again: I have work X to get done. I have a team member who I would like to work on this. I ask them to estimate the work, validate the estimates and then track against the same. In the weekly status calls, if they are behind schedule, can not give a justifiable reason for being behind (like personal reasons, unexpected technical complexity, hardware issues); how does the group manage?
The browser desktop, developer tools
And their kerning.

EDIT: Yep, http://norbu09.org/css/screen.css:

#content p {
line-height: 140%;
letter-spacing: -0.03em;
}
He mentions a convoluted design and calling out to Dot here, so yes, it's GraphViz doing the rendering:

http://kushalhisblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/diagrammr.html
Who would own/host a conversation between you and friend X, you or X? Who would have the right to "delete" it? The point of a social graph is that all the useful information exists on the edges, not at the vertices.
Great slideshow. I voted with my wallet for DropBox after buying my iPhone and finding them in the AppStore. I don't really need 50GB worth of storage, but it's an awesome app that I'll make daily use of, so it seemed a shame to stick to the free account and not say thanks by subscribing.
Yeah, that effort could be put to something more productive :)

...I should get back to work.
I used to work an American company it started to pay well but then the US economy got hit a few years ago.

Working on the weekends is not related on the day job. I do other stuff online to make extra money. It's funny, now that I have thought of it, I have been doing sidejobs longer than my dayjob. I had sidejobs since at the 2nd year of college.

Also, I forgot to post that I am shifting careers. Now, I code on my free time - for fun! I now work for a Norwegian surveying company. I spend a lot of time in a ship inside the survey room. Still computer related but I with less hours :D and hopefully bigger pay.
A hash would be worthless. Just rar it again with slightly different options and you have a different hash.
Amazing how a game that hasn't been released yet has such a vibrant community! Makes me want to be part of it and get SC2 when it comes out.

I used to play SC1 back in the day, but haven't played that many games since (major exception being COD4 on hardcore/tactical servers).
HOW TO: Make Sure You’re Tracking the Right Data
Huge National Debts Could Push Euro Zone into Bankruptcy
Fundamentally, people's expectations have changed. Context, as always, is king.
The Pursuit of Emptyness by John Perry Barlow
That has actually been around for a couple of weeks at least.

I have noticed computers "getting" this new interface at random, but I still don't know when it's updated.

Still waiting for my turn, though.
I'd rather have tracking deeper than the first page of each site, than themed sections, not that it's a bad idea.

I wouldn't mind CSV or JSON data and I'm sure some people would prefer XML. Should be trivial to make dumps in each of those formats.
I think we're agreeing with each other.
Here in France the mandatory health regime (what we call "sécurité sociale") is covered by taxes, and I added around 1500€ per year in what we call a "complémentaire" (which complements the mandatory coverage).

This covers my wife, my kid and I, including a good dental protection.

People here often shout about how much taxes they pay, but I do know why :)
This is pretty cool. It would be nice to be able to edit your sentences.
Compensation is hard, let's go shopping
I think he remains relevant because what he says makes sense and provides a proper balance to a nation so insistent on giving up their liberties to achieve false security.

Repetitive yes, but his voice is still gravely needed.
> "because I feel sad for the nightouter when he picks up for the third guy"

Why not talk to the night-coder? The best bosses I have ever had were the ones who actively told me to work less. It's so rare to hear that in our industry that you may just earn yourself some real loyalty.

[edit] To clarify: the guy not pulling his weight is IMHO a separate issue from the guy who works at night. If the guy not pulling his weight is forcing other people to work more though, by all means don't let that happen. Then you have two problems on your hands instead of one.
Still the most powerful rocket ever built. Which is kinda cool and sad at the same time.

(The coolest piece of technology – despite all the raw power of the Saturn V – is still the Lunar Module[1]. It could land on the damn Moon and freaking start again. How cool is that?)

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/LM_illust...
Not to take anything away from Dijkstra and Liskov, but of course I don't count their opinions as evidence; eminent authority opinion is what one resorts to in the absence of evidence.

I don't have time to watch the video, but it seems rather obvious that the Dijkstra quote has little to do with macros. What he's saying sounds to me like "lexical scoping is easier to understand than dynamic scoping". If anything, that makes macros more valuable rather than less, since macros are intrinsically lexical and macroexpansions don't typically change over time.
Halliburton Could Be at Fault for Oil Spill
BBC to Project the UK General Election Results on to Big Ben Tower
The trouble is that alternate networks to Facebook need a certain critical mass in order to succeed
Yes. The use case is for organizations who have a lot of developers, some of whom want to (or demand to) continue using Subversion for their VCS needs. This can include people who don't really want to use VCS at all, but have become comfortable with some tool like TortoiseSVN or the like. We would obviously prefer everyone use Git, but we want to provide a bridge to help teams get there.

Also, you still have correct and clean merges, but since it's somewhat difficult for me to figure out what your last base version was when an svn client commits, it uses the latest version number of any submitted file as one parent and the current head as the other for anything that needs to merge, so the history may have more parents in it than are strictly necessary. If the merge does not happen cleanly, the server will reject the merge and you have to update and fix locally, like normal SVN. However, since the concept is new, I wanted to leave as much information in the Git history as possible, thus the extra parentage information.
Well, ostensibly, yes, but: http://xkcd.com/224/
Yeah. I sort of took a quick glance at your past comments and found that, just forgot to update. That sounds like an awesome job! I just hope you don't get to pass around the Horn of Africa that much (knocks on wood).
Selling all your details to advertisers.

Constantly changing what is private and what is public.

Getting upset at someone using the data that they provide to the public for research purposes.

There is more.
If you're right, then there isn't much value in abstracting over repetitive patterns. I'd say that is pretty decisively contradicted by the history of software. Why have functions at all then?
Which they have done before now, and will continue to do after. You seem to assume that these are brand new games being rolled out with this pricing scheme - all of them are over a year old, some 3 or 4 years. Do you really believe that they would make the same amount by continuing to sell old indie games at their own prices and without a buzz-generating promotion?
a) Nobody can be "given" the chance to estimate accurately. Either you already know the code and know exactly what you're going to do, or you're just guessing, hoping that the task will prove similar to something you've done in the past.

b) People are used to being lied to about criticality, and "understanding" the criticality of deadlines is usually code for working extra hard to compensate for planning mistakes, unplanned work, or other people's mistakes. The willingness of developers to work unpaid overtime to meet deadlines should be marveled at and appreciated. It's not like we're respected as professional-class people (doctors, lawyers, etc.) We're just "resources" who are usually suckers enough to work unpaid overtime when needed. Don't complain when we actually do the sensible thing and leave at 6pm.

c) Putting in a fair work week and hitting internal milestones "from day one" are not the same thing.

d) Good managers stay in touch. It's part of the job. Just accept it.