skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, it certainly has the money. And the ambition.

But way back in 2006-2007, at the start of the web 2.0 gold rush, I remember being bombarded with non-serious NYC startup offers that were basically "Do all the work for my brilliant <buzzword soup> product. I'll give you 10% equity. Maybe. Sign an NDA."

Since then, though, several really impressive startups have emerged. It looks like their doing a good job sorting the wheat from the chaff.

Question for anyone based in NYC: How difficult is it to find qualified programmers and other tech people? I've heard it's much tougher than it is in the Valley.
Yes, but at least they can audit and track those accesses with a local sysadmin and ask questions when appropriate.
OK, OK. How about this: Whenever the user launches iTunes, a non-modal dialog box that looks like a comic book text box would appear from the system clock and display a message like "You have unused features on your iTunes(tm). Would you like to make things more confusing by hiding them?"
Book excerpt: The Temptation of Facebook's CEO
Ok lessons learned in this post

1) Chasing your passion is better than chasing your money. Sometimes money becomes the by-product of the former.

2) (A hidden message) You need to be talented and committed to successful.
Without worrying about whether adaptive behavior like the article describes is a good idea (I don't think it is), I want to take issue with this opening paragraph:

"Are you the visual type of person that thrive in an environment of photos and illustrations? Or do you prefer listening to a book instead of reading it? Or do you want to touch everything to make sure you understand it?"

This is a watered-down restatement of the "learning styles" theory from educational psychology that, while almost never stated explicitly or coherently, is the view that different people have particular preferences for either visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learning and interaction, and that these learning style preferences are more or less stable over time. The usual implication is that if you determine what a person's "style" is, you can adapt whatever you're trying to teach them to incorporate their preferred medium, and they will learn better than if you used, say, a visual lesson with an auditory learner.

Despite its frequent repetition as fact in lay sources like this one, the learning styles theory has never been substantiated by scientific research. Assessments of learning styles show no predictive validity for individual differences in response to instructional methods intended to focus one style or another. Oxford neuroscientist Susan Greenfield writes, "After more than 30 years of educational research in to learning styles there is no independent evidence that VAK, or indeed any other learning style inventory, has any direct educational benefits."

"Learning styles" is bunk, and casually repeating it as though it were an established mainstream theory is doing a disservice to science.

[End of slightly off-topic rant]
There's a big difference between prices emerging and a crowd that discusses a question to come up with a "group answer".
Are you suggesting that people will make bets in a purely rational way, and only by considering (in this case) what they know about the UK election? I suggest that plenty of people will either bet emotionally, choosing the option they prefer, or psuedo-rationally (i.e. reasoning poorly). I expect many will also use the odds provided on the website to guide their choices.
In Germany a bunch of hackers distributed the fingerprints of politicians in favor of storing the finger prints of all the citizens:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/30/german_interior_mini...

Two wrongs may not make a right, but there is a certain amount of satisfaction in such things.
That book is fantastic!
> […] They also buy a lot of expensive games too, […]

That is the interesting point: gamers aren't divided between full pirates and full legit. Many people are both. In the case of the pirates who surround you, I notice that a significant part of their budget is devoted to the legal game market. So, if they suddenly couldn't pirate any more, would they buy more? To what extent?

Anyway, the fact that people aren't either full pirates or full legit can't hide the elephant out in the room: pirating behaviour is way more effective at downloading than legit behaviour is at buying. So 20% of piracy behaviour accounting to 80% pirated game doesn't sound odd: it just mean that when legit behaviour buys you one game, pirating behaviour downloads you 16.

Also, a gamer which is 80% legit and 20% pirate will download 4 games for each one he buys. And if you turn his pirating behaviour into legit behaviour, he won't give 400% more, but 25%. Significant, but not the catastrophe music majors would like us to believe.

Finally, 20% of pirating behaviour doesn't necessarily mean a 20% decrease in legit behaviour (and 20% revenue loss). It could just be a 25% increase of gaming behaviour (and 0% revenue loss). This is not all. Sometimes, games are pirated prior to purchase, to try them. Sometimes, players buy the game when they are finished playing them, because they liked it. And sometimes, not pirating the game would just mean not playing it at all.

I won't deny that piracy doesn't cause revenue loss. But we can't deny that the loss is much, much lower than the rate of pirated games. I bet that like in the music industry, the biggest costs are middle men. And the internet makes them less and less useful.
Hadoop clusters are particularly amenable to this. A nice setup is to pxe boot all the nodes, reserving the full local disk for hdfs.
"I think a Sudoku puzzle that is harder for humans would not be that much harder for optopus to solve, but I have not tested it."

Try it. You may be surprised. Here's a good one: zonkedyak.blogspot.com/2006/11/worlds-hardest-sudoku-puzzle-al.html

Also try a 5-based instance of the same problem (against the standard 3-base of sudoku, that is, a 5x5 matrix of 5x5 matrices containing the numbers 1-25), and compare performance of that problem to a normal solver.

I'm not going to tell you what will happen, because you won't believe me. Somebody seems to have cast a glamor on GP.
People expect 6 figures. It's not that hard if you can pay.
My order of preference:

Working with better programmers than me > Working solo > Working with others

I guess it is a common preference
Microsoft Delivers IE9 Developer Preview 2
Oh God, eating alone is the worst. Especially at a sitdown restaurant. It's like God teasing you about your lack of friends.
Some good tips in here, we run a fully distributed team and had overcome similar challenges.

One tip I would add is pair-programming on complex parts or sticking points through screen and vim, we have an ec2 instance dedicated for pairing which everyone has access to.
It is the refusal to exploit any specific properties that makes it fun :). Real Sudoku solvers have been around for ages.
Great story particularly because he seems like an average (but talented, obviously) guy in a cubicle farm with a wife and kids and mortgage, not yet-another Stanford golden-child.
Saw this in a software as well recently. There was a grid/table for adding/removing employees. But the title said "Resources".
Agile document collaboration: 5 advice to start on the right foot
Part of it may be the association of Google with web search--people may think that if Google is processing email, it can become part of search results.

My employer uses a hosted Exchange service, and I've not heard anyone raise a peep about privacy concerns. I suspect, however, that if we decided to move to Google Mail, people would raise the same sort of concerns.
Tell HN: Google needs a web developer; position has been open for 8 months
Link to job posting: http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/jobs/uk/swe/web-application-developer-googleedu-learning-solutions-london/index.html

This is an engineering position within the PeopleOps (HR) group at Google, which may be why it remains unfilled after 8 months. Nobody has been able to find it! Also the job as posted is in London, but if you are a strong candidate I know Google will either move you to London or let you work in Mountain View (or possibly New York). The position is with my girlfriend's team so I have a pretty good idea of the problems they are solving and what skills they need. Feel free to email me with questions.

Clickable link is below...
Clickable link: http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/jobs/uk/swe/web-application-...
Matt Taibbi on the SEC/Goldman Case
An In-Depth Look at Clojure Collections
Great. One of the few places in the country that's even less affordable than the Bay Area.

Startups looking for a home: Take a look at D.C. IMO the talent base is every bit as rich as NYC's, and people can actually afford to live here.
Possibly not a site like this. But predictions made by bookmakers should in theory be accurate, since the bookmaker has a financial incentive to make them accurate and no political incentive to misrepresent them.
Interesting ideas buried in a pile of conspiracy theories.
I like to imagine the flow of wealth I can get into more capable hands than my own. I've seen incredible designs and tech with only a few days work. These folks need more $$ and models to move their creations to others in need. I think part of the attractor for a startup is enabling better conditions for people with impressive skills that prefer a job, autonomy, but don't wanna deal with the business side.
Tyrannybook
I disagree somewhat. I dont feel that I "Bleed ones and zeros" but find the solitude in my home office far less distracting than an office cubical, and tend to be way more productive.

I think you really just have 2 basic types of people: those who want to get their work done(and do it well) and those who arent really committed.(for whatever reason, incompetent, lazy, bad work ethic, not interested in the work, etc...) If you have a team of the first type, you will get things done, if not, you wont. A less experienced developer with motivation to get things finished will not let distance get in the way.
Yes, based on these articles it is and always will be the next tech Mecca. ;)
Something else happened in the 1970s: the US crossed its oil production peak and imports started increasing as a share of total oil consumed.
Social Media Examiner: The Biggest Online Magazine for Social Media Tips
Yet they sure don't like being referred to as "Powerpoint resources".
It's not an inside joke, and it is "real" for some definition of "real". I leave you to ponder the question. Email me if desperate.

I should have a photo somewhere ...
Can network boot be done for Windows and OSX? I've looked around and never found a good tutorial or anything to point me in the right direction ( well at least for Windows, I havent really looked for OSX yet ). I did get it working for linux though and it was really useful since I only needed to push updates once.

If anyone has any links or pointers I would be very interested.
That is a nice instance, an optimization solver took 13 seconds to solve instead of the 0.2 seconds for the problem posted by the OP.

Some people in combinatorial optimization are addressing the problem of finding the hardest Sudoku problem. For an introduction of how the problem can be modeled, see:

http://diuflx71.unifr.ch/lpl/lplmodels/puzzles/sudoku.pdf
IPad Brings the Growth of Netbooks to a Halt
I remember looking at their engine 3? years ago. They'd started w/ an OSS engine, then pulled development in-house and left the OSS tree mostly unattended, then announced it would be fully OSS again "real soon."

Glad I didn't wait.
Canadian DMCA in 6 weeks.
Always appreciate stories of people that made the jump, but I was kind of hoping this was going to be about a less obviously monetizable passion.
Silicon Valley has high housing prices BECAUSE of the established momentum in technology. New York is going to have high housing prices as long as it is a highly remunerative place to work. It's possible to address the housing problem directly in the case of low income residents, but addressing it for the middle class has never worked out. Better transit lets people work in the city and commute from further away, which is one way of mitigating the housing expense problem.
I wouldn't consider Nokia as having adapted to disruptive technology. I think Nokia's example is similar to 3M's. IBM may be a right candidate, but I wouldn't agree that it has adapted to disruptive change. Yes it has survived through it.
Genetic algorithms usually do exploit the structure of the problem in order to make crossover/mutation more efficient. This is indeed what the OP says:

For more difficult Sudoku puzzles, I would definitely go with the permutation genome
Not open-source but the ExpressionEngine community is pretty nice. This guy is doing pretty well selling extensions:

http://pixelandtonic.com/
Making the Google Chrome Speed Tests
Nice summary. Completely agree to your points. The reasoning of value network may not directly apply to Apple, but yes Nokia was in the right position to make as much impact if not better than what Apple did with iPhone.
Ignite RailsConf Speakers Announced
while the 10% number of lost sales might be correct, there's one more thing you should factor into the calculation: The cost you need to pay for these 90% illegitimate users.

There's support cost (some pirates are for sure dumb enough to call/email support even though they didn't pay), then there's the cost of infrastructure. Depending on the type of your game this can just be hosting a high score list or much more on the server side.

So depending on your game, a pirate isn't just lost revenue but it will actually cost you some amount of money - in some cases a significant one.

In reverse, that means that honest players are in a way paying for the pirates as the developer of the game has to ask honest players for enough money to run the infrastructure for everyone - including the pirates.
I agree, I'm sure there are lazy seasoned developers that love programming more than anything. People that are likely to get distracted by new stuff and their own projects.

Regardless of skill level there are people that work well from home and others that don't.
"The minimum remote team size is two."

By definition, I suppose, since a one-man shop has nobody to be remote from.

I disagree though. I'm self motivated enough to run with stuff on my own. I've built a lot of big successful things with a team size of one, and I find it the perfect team size during the prototyping and buildout phases of a project.

Sure, once you hit maintenance mode it's nice to have another person along to share the pain and help generate the discipline needed for months of refactoring and slow iteration. But when you're actually building something, I'm all about small teams.

So now we have two datapoints. If I were the author, I would have gathered a few thousand more before publishing this article.
Just curious: have you historically in your career worked mostly alone/remote, or in offices? Or somewhere in between?
Mumble is a great project that works well for teams. Low bandwidth, high quality voice chat.

http://mumble.sourceforge.net/
Beaver dam seen from space
I applied a month ago, never heard anything other than the autoreply confirmation. Just tried again yesterday.
Well that's a poor interpretation of that data.
After having to endure my university's switch to Live@Edu (Outlook Webaccess in cloud) I can only envy those that would be so lucky to have Gmail for their uni email service.
Australia has its fair share too. I remember the Party Party Party Party...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party!_Party!_Party!
To add confusion, where I grew up in Scotland "boy" == "loon", "small boy" == loonie", "girls" == "quines" ...
While I appreciate change and improvements, I just wonder if this is really a good idea. Websites are language specific but URLs were forced to a limited character set. This was making it at least easy for everybody to type it. No matter if the website is chinese, japanese, arabic, etc. (Sort of least common denominator)

Am I the only one who thinks this?

EDIT: Spelling
Eat at the bar if you can. Sometimes its actually an advantage because you can get a single seat at the bar even when all the tables are filled. I do agree with your sentiment though.
As a qualified programmer, I found it much harder to find a legit work in NYC compared to when I lived in Seattle. I know very talented programers in both places, though.
do you mind me asking how much they were willing to pay for the WP version vs. the original 15k quote from other shops.
OS X for sure has network booting. I believe it is referred to as 'netboot'. http://www.google.com/search?q=os+x+netboot
Oddly, at my last job, we used ventrillo. I happened to have a server from playing WoW, and so I just had the rest of the team use it. Cross-platform, low-bandwidth, and worked awesome.
Why Rails asset caching is broken in your app and how you can fix it
How to Create a Productive Work Environment
the smarkets dudes are really smart guys, i work across the floor from them at another startup. you should keep an eye on smarkets and the guys behind it, they're always doing/discussing some technologically cool shit.
Startups, Crawfish & Beer
Opera displays it with the actual characters.
Okay, so where can I buy a bunch of domains?
Turn your iPad into a MacBook - Bluetooth keyboard and case in one
It's much better working on a truly distributed team than being the one remote worker on a mostly-centralized team.

My group at Mozilla is distributed across seven cities (I think) on two continents. We use all of the techniques Atwood listed. At Mozilla, where a large portion of the staff is in Mountain View, it helps that my manager is working remotely just like me - so I'm not more remote from him than anyone else is.
In JavaScript, Arrays are not actually arrays. They're not a contiguous block of memory. They're just Objects (i.e. hash tables) that key on integers.

If you look at the indices it will look like you have a bunch of undefined elements in the array, but no memory has actually been consumed for those indices in the array so nothing is wasted.
At the risk of plugging my own thing, this situation is the reason we built Twiddla, so I'd recommend checking it out if you're trying to build stuff with a distributed team.

Mostly it was to deal with communicating little graphical changes to remote designers without resorting to MS Paint and email, but it does chat and voice too, so it pretty much wraps up the whole "tools you need" section in one thing.
How about windows? I would LOVE to have my home/work windows PCs netboot
There are more comments in this thread (dupe): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1324229
Since this is from 2006 it does not include the excellent Real World Haskell (2008) which is available in print or free online: http://book.realworldhaskell.org/
In the US, we have the equally loony Republicans, who started off on a reasonable platform but went insane around 1980.

The problem is, they're one of our two major parties.
From what I recall, that was due to the DRM used, in an attempt to reduce the quality for pirates. In hindsight, a bad idea on the part of developers.
We're projected to generate a better return on money invested, but we invest much less money, so we're not likely to end up as rich as partners at a successful VC fund.
Contributing to a project on Github
OK, I will try it. And if you had said that it would be almost impossible, because there are too many local minima, I would have believed you.

A serious try with GA would require abandoning Python for a faster fitness function in C, that does not copy dozens of lists back and forth. I estimate that just about anyone could make it more than 100 times as fast. The slow implementation will have to suffice for now.

The interesting part is of course not the absolute times, but if the complexity scales differently. If a real Sudoku solver takes about 50 times as long to solve that problem, I will consider it a victory if the GA does the same.
You just need to be aware that this might cause unexpected behavior when using for ... in

Array.prototype.clear = function() {this.length = 0};
var a = [1,2,3];
var s = "";
for(var i in a) s += i +",";
alert(s);//1,2,3,clear

(not that many people use it this way, but since we're on the topic of little known tricks about js, I think it's worth mentioning)
Since then, Real world haskell (freely available), Hutton's book, maybe another came out

http://book.realworldhaskell.org/

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-in-Haskell-ebook/dp/B001FS...

also: Herlihy , Shavit , Multiprocessor Programming

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Multiprocessor-Programming-Maurice...
Right, it's "experience". Or, if you prefer, "nonrandomly sampled data". That means they aren't representative of high confidence, nor are they imaginary.
That's not how prediction markets work. People aren't supposed to bet on whom they want to win. People are supposed to be searching a profit, that is find differences between the odds given in the current market and what they perceive as the true odds.

People who do this consistently over time, tend to accumulate more money, and thus accrue more influence as time goes on. Also people who bet foolishly, e.g. just bet on who they like to see winning, create opportunities for other people to make money of their back.
"Despite its satirical nature, some of the things that have featured in Loony manifestos have become law, such as being able to vote at 18, "passports for pets", and all-day pub openings."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Monster_Raving_Loony_P...
Is Android becoming a Tower of Babel?
> The user pays money in the hope of winning more back - it's gambling however you slice it.

That describes investment as well.
And of course, you know that users won't see any difference or care, despite never having seen, let alone used it. Just because you think the problem has been solved well enough, doesn't mean everyone does. After all, who needs a refrigerator when you have an ice box?
So depending on your game, a pirate isn't just lost revenue but it will actually cost you some amount of money - in some cases a significant one.

But in most cases an insignificant one. I expect a very small number of pirates are dumb enough to contact or email support. And I expect most pirating is distributed over bit torrent, and are hacked so that they are pirated so that they don't ever report back home (that's half the job, right)

It would be interesting if wolfire too a look at this aspect but i doubt the result is significant.
The irrational bettors will be driven out of the market, and made money of, by the rational punters.
Don't you have a lot of giraffes you should be riding right now?
Mostly in offices. I like it ok - ironically, it tends to reduce overhead because I can swivel my chair to ask a question rather than waiting for an email or IM response.

We all have headphones that we wear as a "do not disturb" signal. I feel most productive on days when I can dive in and wear my headphones for most of the day.

I think I'd like working by myself if given the chance, but I've always worked for fairly traditional companies.
Your skin did not face an every day destruction of its microbe and oil film in its evolution, and may react strangely, including with acne.

Anyway, I'd like to see some statistics, because we can both come up with arguments like that for as long as we like.
Making Mysql safe for transactional usage
> I wouldn’t call Android a failed open source project until it has had a chance to catch its breath.

Here's hoping that all my projects fail as badly Android has.