skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've lived in LA all my life, and I've seen more than my fair share of aspiring actors. I'm sure that their chances of making it big are better here than they are in Kansas, but not by much if all you have going for you is the fact that you live in LA. I'm sure the same rules apply for country singers in Nashville, or dancers in New York. It might actually benefit startup founders to stay out of an environment like the one you described!
There are so many new RSS apps out there but it seems like they don't even admit to themselves that Google Reader exists. The project doesn't seem worth doing if you're just going to provide a subset of that functionality.

Do we want to comment on your site rather than the blog post itself? Probably not. Hacker News is an exception because there is a community of like-minded people here; that will not be the case on a generic aggregator. Solving the community issue is more important than dumping a ton of social features on it.

There are some enticing possibilities around RSS readers, but I think they mostly revolve around the incorporation of other ideas into them. Even a modest follower of RSS is going to hit information saturation after 20ish blogs, so a recommendation and ranking service would definitely be useful.

I looked over the screenshots and they didn't wow me. I would have been willing to try it, like the above poster said, if I could simply access the reader and add a feed to see what it was like. I'd understand that my settings weren't saved until I signed up.
37 hires from across the country. They've talked about telecommuting often. They don't have just resumes/job candidates from Chicago. That weakens his hypothesis.
Jason's point was a great one - historically people focused too much on resumes, and that is often a mistake today because their work speaks for itself.

Except, that's not a great point-- it's a pretty trivial point, and one that was hammered to death by Spolsky, t al., a decade ago.

And, it's not a matter "let's tell both sides of the story", as much as "pay attention to the context."

Fried has found something that works for 37signals. That's good, as far as it goes. To try to generalize from that into "This is the way everybody should do things" is not only arrogant, it's crazy.

If Fried were really interested in doing his readers a service, he'd examine why his system works at 37signals, and outline the context which makes it appropriate-- so that if the reader's context is similar, he can adjust the advice accordingly.
> Or is it for a completely separate kind of side-process than when I would want to write threads in my web app code?

This isn't about threading, really. I'll explain it in terms of Rails's delayed_job because I'm not familiar with the details of Celery:

* Let's say I want to send an email, via the function Mailer.deliver_notice(email)
* With delayed_job, I turn this call into Mailer.delay.deliver_notice(email). This puts an entry into a Jobs table in the database that makes note of what I want to run, with all the details.
* In the background, I have a daemon running that checks the Jobs table every five seconds for jobs that need to be run. It uses the information in the table to execute the deliver_notice function.
* That's it.

In many cases, the job will update some sort of field in your model that you can query to see if it's been run yet or not.
It was a huge success because it was essentially a usable, bug-fixed Vista. Technologically, XP to Vista was a much larger step than Vista to 7.
My current employer maintains and develops several Eclipse RCP apps. Google Earth, last I checked, is Eclipse-based. It's not that unheard-of, even these days.
The fun part about advice is you don't always have to take it
Awful UX for an iPad or touch screen device. Don't know about the rest because i gave up using it after 30 seconds, when i was shown the management panel and noticed how bad it was for touch screens.
Can someone explain to me why this Wikipedia article is at the top of the front page?
I struggle with this question myself a lot. I'm in LA currently and instead of conversations about web startups in cafes - I hear managers talking to talent and hot new ideas for movie scripts.. Pretty cool but doesn't help with a web startup.

The one major complaint I continue to hear about SV from my male friends is the severe lack of eligible females there. Being from the east coast and now living in LA I might find it hard to live in place where I'm surrounded by predominantly male engineers 24/7 who are only talking about tech. I used to work as an engineer at Cisco and I remember that feeling. It wasn't a good one.
No advice is universal and the limited application of the 37signals crews' advice is apparent.

This article is unnecessary.

And it reads like it was written by an MBA-type who is upset that successful people are ignoring the gospel truth he was presented in college. There are very few hard-and-fast rules in any profession.
he mentions some sales position somewhere, so I don't think he's eng
I couldn't agree more, and I think this will have to change if they're to survive for the long run and not becoe the next MySpace or GeoCities. I wrote an article about this a couple of weeks ago.

Digital Sharecropping and The Future of Social Media: http://voltagecreative.com/articles/digital-sharecropping-so...
I'm guessing because people voted it up. Additionally, it's not a peak time right now.
When is peak time?
You're not going to like any of my feedback because our views are polar opposites. :)
Google Docs does this too, btw. AFAICT it only creates a public link for a file/folder if you request it.
brighter please
I don't have a suggestion. It's not obvious how you would make money at it, so I asked.
Design is pretty, but in Firefox 3 for some reason the text is nigh unreadable.
Most hackers don't know about XZ yet, but they should. I still prefer not to see Wikipedia articles on HN since they lack context. A "7 reasons you should ditch bzip2 and use XZ" blog post would probably be better.
LZMA2 has a better compression ratio than bzip2, according to this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Mark... . Seems like it would be a good idea to switch away from bzip2/gzip to zx
> If Fried were really interested in doing his readers a service, he'd examine why his system works at 37signals, and outline the context which makes it appropriate-- so that if the reader's context is similar, he can adjust the advice accordingly.

Isn't that what he's doing? Both "Getting Real" and "REWORK" both present an entire philosophy, with many facets that work together to create the effect that they have.
astroturfing
Oh god please not more "X reasons for Y"
Yeah, I'm noticing a trend - you don't even know basic history, but you think you know all the answers and they're so obvious that you can be smug and condescending about them.

Here's a hint: they aren't. Black and white proclamations about "government this" and "free market that" are used by 2 kinds of people : demagogues, and the useful idiots who follow them. Which are you?
The Truth About "Line-Rate" in Network Analysis
Then why make the point at all?
I left SF/SV because the dating scene was so bad and I felt like my startup enforced "vow of celibacy" had gone on long enough. There are not enough women, and the women who are there do not like you. If you are married or don't care about dating, it's a great place.
As others pointed out only about 1 in 1000 are posting reviews on Amazon so they aren't doing anything particularly great, they just have volume.

I will share one trick that I use on my site UniversityTutor.com, to get more reviews. I saw this in an email that Google Checkout sent out:

1. Firstly, of course you should send an email asking the person to leave a review a week or two later

2. Do NOT require the person to login to leave the review (use a "one time login link"). Removing this hurdle can help.

3. Embed the actual review form RIGHT IN the email. With a submit button.

Basically all this is about reducing the hurdle to leaving a review as much as possible. The "archive" button is just to easy so if they have to leave the email or login you've already lost people.

Submitting forms doesn't work in all email clients so you'll have to also include the one time login link for anyone who can't submit the form right from their email. But it does work much of the time. To generate the HTML for the email form that works across most email clients, the easiest way I've found is to create a new form in Google Docs, and email it to yourself as a starting point to copy from. The HTML they generate is pretty well optimized from what I've seen.

I still don't have tons of reviews on that site though. So it is definitely tough to get people to engage.

Also - the simpler the review the better.

A pulldown will get filled out more often than a free form text field.

Radio buttons will get filled out more than a pulldown.

A simple thumbs up thumbs down will get filled out more often than 5 stars.

And only a thumbs up (or like) will get more than thumbs up or down.

When I moved from a 5 star thing to just up/down on BuyersVote.com it helped a bit with engagement.
In my opinion, I think you're wrong.

In some cases (like mine above) it is unnecessary to specify that it's your opinion, because it's truly and obviously an opinion. But not every statement made is someone's opinion [1]. For example:

"In my opinion, the earth revolves around the Sun."
"In my opinion, Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States."
etc.

Because some statements are clear and simple facts, it can sometimes be useful to delineate opinion from fact, especially in cases where it's not explicitly clear which type of statement is being made. In most cases, I think that it's pretty clear from the context that 37signals' is writing from their own experience and sharing their opinions, and thus littering their writing with "weasel words" would diminish the quality of the writing.

However, in many cases (including some by 37signals), writers intentionally leave out the "weasel words" not because their statements are obviously opinion, but because they know it will get people riled up and serve as good linkbait. Ironically, they often fall back to this whole idea of "of course it's only my opinion, weasel words are bad writing, etc", which strikes me as kind of a reverse-weasel. Write as if you're stating absolute truth (in order to get links), even when you aren't, and then hide behind "good writing" when people complain.

[1] I'm really not interested in the greater philosophical questions of whether it's opinion that the earth revolves around the sun. If you are, be my guest, but I'm fully prepared to just accept some things as fact. The earth revolving around the sun is one of them :)

EDIT: I might have been using "heliocentricism" wrong, so I removed it to prevent ambiguity.
There's a huge black art to interpreting data. It's not just confidence intervals and significance tests: you also need to watch very closely for any sources of bias in your data. Different user populations, unexpected feature interactions, bugs in your logging code, changes in the site midway through your experiment period, etc.
Does greater competition improve performance or increase cheating?
When Pigs Fly: Apache Pig, Open Source and Understanding Systems
How I Graduated from Harvard, Turned Down Google, And Joined A Startup Clicker
An invention a day for the past 4 years
I did, quite quickly. In particular, R seems to be focused on univariate data; support for multivariate data (things like "lego plot" histograms, or any kind of histogram in more than one variable) is patchy at best.

Having said that, I must note that I am new to R, and rejecting anything so quickly makes me very nervous. I suspect that I have not even come close to plumbing the depths, so to speak, of R's capabilities.
It's apparently something new that has been floating around. Some hackers are probably curious about the "new thing" that popped up lately.
Why are they working with Shoutcast? Does having Shoutcast compatibility add that much value to their free product?

I say dump Shoutcast and start promoting the hell out of a competing format.
Off-the-shelf cancer detection: Camera detects cancer cells in real time
Software that was released 9 months ago isn't particularly new.
Your 'maybe it's just me' is a good example of what is often lacking in the 37signals writings. I haven't read rework, but Getting Real is exactly like this article describes: locally, even widely locally, good advice, presented with a presumably more easily rhetorically digestible universality.

The problem is that it's a lot harder to build a following while permitting doubt or ambiguity. So what you have is a number of extremely popular figures who each present what has worked for them without even entertaining the idea that that doesn't necessarily imply that it is the best way to do things, always and in all places. And the gurus often don't agree, but nobody seems to mind too much until the gurus' own projects finally triumph or fail, after which point the correct point of view immediately takes on the property of always having been obvious.

It's not necessarily JF's fault. The rewards for stridency are great, because there is always an audience for it.
They don't call it "Man Jose" for nothing.
The main reason to continue to use gzip is speed: it's an order of magnitude faster than bzip2 for compression / decompression, for a relatively small compression ratio hit. It's fast enough to us inline in web servers, SSH sessions, etc, and if you're just moving data around a single time, often the amount of time for compress / transfer / decompress is much faster than with bzip2.
Agree on the wikipedia articles with no context point. Especially since the article in question is short with not very much real information on why it matters.
There are two reasons to move to Silicon Valley. Serendipity and great tech people.

If you already have the right business idea and great people there is no reason what so ever to move.
Drawing conclusions from the dataset as opposed to descriptive statistics such as the mean, variance, etc.
Reverse-weasel is my new favourite concept.
Ultimately that's what you have to do - you've got two different code paths, so there needs to be an if or function pointer in there somewhere to distinguish. As patio11 mentions, you can hide that with Strategy patterns, closures, frameworks, etc, but I'm not sure it buys you anything. You'd still need to retrofit your code to use those patterns, which may be more invasive than just using an if-statement. (Particularly since you want to remove the code if the experiment doesn't pan out, to avoid bloat.)

Another option is to branch your codebase and then proxy requests through to a new appserver running on the branch. This keeps the individual codebases simple, but merges suck - and if you don't stop development entirely, you'll need to be merging several times over the length of the experiment. (Also, this is one way experiments go wrong - a change to an unrelated feature can often have unexpected results on your data.) It's also a deployment pain if you're just a startup with a couple developers.
They already can be. Tradebot lives in Kansas City, for example.
From my POV as a corporate Java-trained accidental software engineer with an Econ degree, yes it makes a difference. Besides everything the paper mentions, all of which I agree with, there are a few other things it does for you.

I'm not a computer scientist, as the article seems to target, but a practicing software engineer, but I feel more like an amateur hack. The reason is b/c with almost every problem I'm tasked to solve or app to build, I'm never quite sure whether I'm solving or building it the most efficient, robust way (and some times I know I'm not, but am limited by my tools).

That lingering doubt makes me feel like a charlatan, or a used car salesman, hocking my wares while suspecting their quality.

To fix that, I've recently taken a sabbatical just to cram through SICP, PCL, Norvig's AIP, K&R and some other C and kernel hacking books, and Haskell and Ocaml, Erlang and/or Google Go, and probably some of the other highly regarded books on the topic (Code Complete, etc). It was just too slow-going trying to do that while working full time. If there were a degree program with that curriculum I'd go do it, but there's none that I know of.

Consider it your due diligence. Doing it as thoroughly as possible gives you confidence and a valuable psychological edge, be your opponent a tough problem or a ten-cent-per-hour rent-a-coder overseas.

The other tangible benefit is to your personal brand marketing: there's not much more of a clear signal that you are curious, eager to learn, open minded, and passionate about and dedicated to your craft than learning multiple languages, and these things are essentially requirements if you ever hope to work for/with the best programmers and engineers in the business. The only things better are grad school and having built and made money off a cool startup or app. If you want to get away from the slavery of the 'enterprise java douchebag' shops, to quote Zed, this is one good way to do it.
There's just too much noise there, too much "flavor of the month."

I often hear people make this (in my opinion rather facile) criticism of SV, but as far as I can remember I've never heard anyone give any evidence of it.

I've seen thousands of data points about this over the last 5 years, and I have seen no evidence of it. The startup ideas submitted by YC applicants from outside the Bay Area are no less likely (in fact probably more likely) to be derivative than the ones from people who live here.
It's not necessarily JF's fault. The rewards for stridency are great, because there is always an audience for it.

This is such a great explanation for what's going on here. I've often wondered if people who have been really successful at one thing and preach that method only (read: almost all gurus) are perhaps less informed about success and what will get you there than people who read a number of the gurus. Maybe they just got lucky :|
Xz appears to use the same algorithm as 7zip.

Here are some comparisons between the big 3 compression algorithms (taken from http://blogs.reucon.com/srt/tags/compression/ -- he used a 163 MB Mysql dump file for the tests):

Compressor	Size	Ratio	Compression	Decompression
gzip	89 MB	54 %	0m 13s	0m 05s
bzip2	81 MB	49 %	1m 30s	0m 20s
7-zip	61 MB	37 %	1m 48s	0m 11s
I've always been a fan of array-based programming languages, but I feel like that most popular ones (J, K) are needlessly unreadable. I discovered Nial a while ago while researching array-based programming languages and found that it was pretty much what I wanted.

I will try to give you an extremely brief introduction here, but you should really download it from their page (http://www.nial.com/) which has a great implementation guide, as well as manuals in their documentation ZIP package.

> p :+ 1.5 1.6
> q := 3 4
> p * q
4.5 6.4
> * p q
4.5 6.4
> + * p q
10.9

There exists several forms for writing vectors/lists in Nial:

s := 3
v := (3 4)
m := [2 3 4, 5 6 7]

> + v
7
> + m
10 18 28
> each + m
9 18

In the K tutorial they have psuedo-code which looks like Nial code.

> v + v
6 8
> v eachleft < v
[false true, false false]
> v eachright < v
[false false, true false]

Keep in mind, I am lieing here. true is actually represented as 'l' and false is represented by 'o'. Strange, but it works.

> v * m
[6 9 12, 20 24 28]
> + * v m
26 33 40

Function currying is done on the left side.

(2 *) m
[4 6 8, 10 12 14]

Given a list of cashflows c that come at corresponding times t with a prevailing discount rate d, then ...

> c := 0.1 0.1 1.1
> t := 1 2 3
> pv is op c t d { + * c (d power t) }
> pv c t 0.9
0.9729

I don't really follow the last example, and it doesn't translate to Nial because Nial requires the shapes to match up. So giving an array of 4 to PV doesn't work. If they keep it to an array of 3 it does.

> pv c t (1 0.9 .81)
.765585
> pv c t (0.9 .81 .729)
0.581773

This gets a different answer from what they show though. Shrug.

Nial also has indexing primitives like k.

> t
1 2 3
> t@1
2
> m
[2 3 4, 5 6 7]
> m@1
5 6 7

You have to be careful how you define your variables to have indexing work right (which is frustrating). For example:

> a := [2 3 4, 5 6 7]
> 1 2 pick a
?address
> b := 2 3 reshape 2 3 4 5 6 7
> 1 2 pick b
7
> shape a
2
> shape b
2 3
> shape a@1
3
> b@(1 2)
7

When defined the first way, a doesn't understand the shape of the sublists. So you have to manually touch it to see what it is. Lame.

> a := 2 3 reshape link a
> a
[2 3 4, 5 6 7]

LINK forces a into a single list, and reshape changes the shape of A so the outer-most container understands what it is. '2 3 reshape A' will make a shape that is 2 3, but it wont be what you want.

> 2 3 reshape [2 3 4, 5 6 7]
[[2 3 4, 5 6 7, 2 3 4], [5 6 7, 2 3 4, 5 6 7]]

That said, It's likely that the implementation isn't as good/efficient as J or K, but the source code is available.
I think good VC companies is a better reason. Serendipity (by definition) can be found anywhere, and great tech people are in many, many places, plus can generally be found online.
At the moment, you're at a serious disadvantage if you're not across the street from the Exchange due to latency (obviously).
"The one major complaint I continue to hear about SV from my male friends is the severe lack of eligible females there. Being from the east coast and living currently in LA I might find it hard to live in place where I'm surrounded by predominantly male engineers 24/7 who are only talking about tech. I used to work at Cisco and I remember that feeling. It wasn't a good one."

The valley sucks, but San Francisco is loaded with single women. You've just got to make an effort to socialize outside of tech circles (which are skewed male everywhere you go).

Also, it helps to have a level of life sophistication beyond that of the average 20-year-old hacker -- a lot of the single women here are more established, and looking for men who have evolved a bit beyond frat-house antics, or guys who survive exclusively on pizza, meat and beer. A lot of startup guys surround themselves with an entourage of unkempt 20-somethings who have no interests in life outside of computers and heavy drinking; it shouldn't be surprising that women are rare in these environments.
Give me Z reasons why you don't like "X reasons for Y" posts.
So bzip2 and 7-zip are way, way slower than gzip, then?

Bandwidth is cheap. Stick to gzip.
As the paper says:

"The key to building a complex system in any domain is identifying and implementing
suitable abstractions for that area’s core concepts."

Without a broad overview of the key abstractions, coming up with powerful new features is going to be that bit more difficult. They cite the example of Lisp influencing Google's MapReduce framework.
If you installed one of the Froyo updates direct from Google, then you will continue to receive future updates. If you unlocked your phone and installed a modified or custom image from another source, then that image probably has OTA updating disabled and you will need to apply updates yourself.

If you flash back to a stock image from Google, then I believe you will start receiving OTA updates again.
In retrospect, I probably should have submitted the XZ Utils project page: http://tukaani.org/xz/ .

However, that page does not give the same picture of widespread adoption that the Wikipedia article does. That use was what interested me: I'm surprised that it only came to my attention when I was trying to recall the name of the 7z command line utility p7zip.