skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But then you better hope that your tests are near perfect and covers every single edge case you can think of (and most of those you can't). For any given collection of tests it is quite trivial to write code which passes those tests but fails on all other input.
I just took at look at your demo and I think it's a really cool idea, and you have a clean, attractive UI. It seems pretty different from Blippy or Swipely though actually - more focused on products rather than an individual's transactions.

Go for it and just launch! I would love to use it.
"None the less, I'm not sure there's ever been a platform in history that knew so much about people, monitored publisher effectiveness so closely and made subscription so easy for such an incredible number of people."

So he doesn't mean powerful in the sense that it's the best recommendation algorithm, just that it has a lot of data. If having data in your domain is of course a necessary condition in developing a good recommendation engine. But if it were sufficient Netflix wouldn't have to shell out $1M to outsource the task.
They probably will.

Mint.com still seems focused on the consumer market. They just released a new "Goals" feature which helps you reach your financial goals (like buying a car, a home, etc).

Just like with the rest of Mint.com, the Goal concept could carry over for businesses as well. Businesses have goals too. Plus, with the Intuit hookup, having automated bill pay, payroll, etc tied in is pretty sweet.
I'd only implement this for completely closed platforms. All bets are off for hacked and jailbroken devices. The point isn't to provide absolute security. It's to provide an audit trail and some measure of security -- enough to foil an average consumer, but not enough to stand up to concerted attack.

Why would you choose to use a client that correctly implemented the drm features?

To avoid prosecution under the DMCA. To avoid having to jailbreak your device. Because the effort of hacking isn't worth it. Current streaming DRM technologies have a good-enough track record, in part because what they protect isn't that valuable.

Big companies don't have access to perfect DRM, but it does useful things for them. Why shouldn't individuals have access to the same tools to protect their own data against such companies? In particular, big corporations are just as vulnerable to legal remedies as individuals.
I don't have a problem with a "one-issue" writer but I do have a problem with a evidence-be-damned "one-sided" writer.

The author of this article provided infinitely more evidence than you did (something / nothing = infinity). You've provided no evidence that she is selectively picking data which supports her. You also provide no evidence she is incorrect.

All you did is point out that she wrote about similar issues in the past, which would be true of most articles written by most reporters.

By the way, the citation from 1932 that you criticize is consistent with more recent results. For instance:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/321/5888/494

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2889145

I'm going to speculate that your objection to her is more ideological than methodological...
I understand the scoping issue here, but the recursive solution is just all around better:

function countdown(num) {
if(num < 0) {
return;
}
setTimeout(function() {
alert(num);
countdown(num - 1);
}, 1000);
}

Note: I'm aware that the dropbox version shows the first alert without any delay, whereas this waits a second before showing anything. This is slightly different behavior, but arguably acceptable.
Why you should never use a CAPTCHA
"That talk about racial equality is a nice way of saying you just want a better seat on the bus." -- talking heads, 1955.

I don't think you get it. The question is whether copyright is morally right. Rosa Parks sat on the back of the bus. The Pirate bay moves their servers into parliament. People have always protested laws they feel are unjust and you clearly you don't seem to realize that. These guys have suffered considerable persecution for what they are doing so to frame it like "well they just want free copies of Toy Story 3" is bullshit.
Sounds to me like you're already doing it.

The other thing you'll want to do is understand why things work, not just be a "configuration file programmer".
congrats on the launch!
indinero is SaaS, mint is a consumer lead gen company. similar yet very different companies.
Congrats Jessica and Andy!
Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.

I am indifferent on Shaw, the man, but from what I have seen of him, he only discusses controversial ideas.

He was never the face of Dropbox, not a founding member, doesn't sit on the board, and absolutely has zero visibility wrt Dropbox. Inquiring about his fate with them and his employment status (and digging for gossip) is nothing but prying on the man's privacy, and making his career a public spectacle for his gleeful adversaries.

Sure, he brought this upon himself for being opinionated, but let's cut down on the tall-poppy syndrome here. The man is entitled both to his opinions, and his privacy.
That's why Richard Feynman accepted the Nobel prize. From his autobiography, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman:

I therefore had no idea why someone would be calling me at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning.

"Professor Feynman?"

"Hey! Why are you bothering me at this time in the morning?"

"I thought you'd like to know that you've won the Nobel Prize."

"Yeah, but I'm sleeping! It would have been better if you had called me in the morning." and I hung up.

My wife said, "Who was that?"

"They told me I won the Nobel Prize."

"Oh, Richard, who was it?" I often kid around and she is so smart that she never gets fooled, but this time I caught her.

The phone rings again: "Professor Feynman, have you heard. . ."

(In a disappointed voice) "Yeah."

Then I began to think, "How can I turn this all off? I don't want any of this!" So the first thing was to take the telephone off the hook, because calls were coming one right
after the other. I tried to go back to sleep, but found it was impossible.

I went down to the study to think: What am I going to do? Maybe I won't accept the Prize. What would happen then? Maybe that's impossible.

I put the receiver back on the hook and the phone rang right away. It was a guy from Time magazine. I said to him, "Listen, I've got a problem, so I want this off the record. I don't know how to get out of this thing. Is there some way not to accept the Prize?"

He said, "I'm afraid, sir, that there isn't any way you can do it without making more of a fuss than if you leave it alone." It was obvious. We had quite a conversation, about fifteen or twenty minutes, and the Time guy never published anything about it.
It is still mind-blowing to me everytime somebody launches such a potentially disruptive application on a $35,000 seed capital budget and it looks good and is still online after being TechCrunched! Good luck and nice work -
Don't forget NeXT. I never considered owning Mac until OS X (that is, until I got a functional UNIX OS). Prior to OS X they were for graphic designers and people wanting a better typewriter, I stuck to Sun workstations (before the Ultra-5, past that point, the switch to PCI bus and IDE drives, they essentially became slow commodity machines) and Linux PCs.

NeXT was probably even more technology driven than the startups Bradford describes: formed around an operating system, hardware, OOP and a programming language. Sun was much the same way, but unfortunately they devolved to the extreme of making science projects rather than products.
I second this... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1482244

also, google is your friend for knowing what but often not why.
`More importantly, why is the teacher Facebook friends with her 10-year old students?`

I'm pretty sure photos of you are by-default public. If you don't change any settings and you have friends, they can tag you in photos that show up in "Photos of ja27" and people who aren't your friend on Facebook can see them. In fact, the person posting the photo might not even realize the photo is public; they didn't have to opt-in either.
I seriously doubt 0% is going to happen!
Nope, we were 7 miles apart.
Enable JavaScript. I couldn't see it either until I allowed the domain with NoScript. There's a popup that shows up with a link to the survey on Survey Monkey.
I'll have to admit, we cheated a bit... we won $35k in grant money before getting YCombinator funded this spring. :)

Thanks for the compliments!
What about men who couldn't date a girl with a beautiful face that also had large feet?

This article doesn't spend much time talking about why men are attracted to small feet.
I once worked as a sys admin to a company that decided to outsource all of its development to Romania. The project failed miserably, but not due to the Romanians. They where on the whole professional and delivered what they where asked for. The problem was that management had only a vague notion of what they wanted, changed the spec all the time (and not just small changes), and didn't really know how to make money from the software once they got it.

From that experience I gathered that the reason that most outsourcing doesn't work has little to do with the actually outsourcing and much more to do with the type of management that thinks that outsourcing all their development is a really good idea.
I would do marijuana instead because its a bigger market: coke is still considered a hard drug, weed more popular. Not sure what the margins are, but you can certainly move volume without fear when dealing with college kids. I don't think dealers will try and put you out.

You can also grow your own and wholesale to student dealers. Cocaine your stuck with finding a middleman.
WRT to US startups, how relevant is this anymore?

I.e. with the exception of sports (in the biological sense) like Tesla (also a big political factor there), what new Intel like startups are going to get the serious funding they require in today's political and economic environment.

As far as I can tell, the period of the big VC funded company like DEC or Intel lasted between the late '50s (there's a certain bit of legislation that pushed the concept over the top) to the early '00s, when SarBox was the last straw that ended the game.

Pretty much all of us who are here for the startup game are here for the small capital web/Internet/software type of companies. E.g. I don't see where the next FPGA like think is going to come from (well, in the US).
Or playing chicken? :)
Congrats to Jessica, Andy, Borden, and Chris! Great job so far.
I'll raise you my bleeding edge dsl:

echo $conn->execute('select * from favcolor order by color, name')
->groupBy(L(val)->color)
->map(L(key)->wrap('<li><b>', '</b>')
->append(
': ',
L(val)->map(L(val)->name)->join(','),
'</li>'))
->join("\n");
If you're a worthy customer (id: rich), lots of banks go personal with you. Specially on customer acquisition.

I earn monthly a good salary for brazilian standards (I'm not riiich, but well above average) and when I was researching a bank to open an account to receive the salary from my current employer, one of the bank's branch manager actually said he wanted to meet with me on my own home, and he would bring bread and coffe.

When someone "actually personalise" an email it just means they thought the time spent doing this will be paid when the sale is closed. In this particular situation, it just means Bank Simple reeeally wants the author as a customer. Now I don't know if the author is rich, or well connected or popular (well, his article is featured here) but it's not that complicated. It's not magic, good will or anything like that.

It's incredible what excite some "geeks" (yes, you, HN reader). Ooooh a personalized email from a bank. Gee... It just meant someone ran the numbers and this might offer a nice ROI.
Seriously, though, I'm above average.
I am also very interested in this. I need a JRuby hosting solution and there are not very many out there. Plus I would like to learn how to run my own server.

prgmr.com is out of space though. Does anyone know of anything else like this out there?
Better him than Tiger Woods.
Typo on your real-time slide: "nobody has to do manually data entry anymore."
See, from my perspective it's overzealous to assume that the conscious mind is not materialistic in nature.

With a question as ill-posed as the nature of consciousness, what's reasonable and what's overzealous depends entirely on your perspective.
This reminds me of another study that found that a child of a smoking mother is more likely to end up in prison than that of a non-smoker.

Correlation is not a causation.
I first learned to manage a server using a Slicehost VPS. They have a good collection of tutorials at http://articles.slicehost.com/

A lot of it depends on what you are trying to 'serve' :)

EDIT: Make sure you spend some time reading about security issues (iptables and such). It's easy to miss, but certainly as important as any other sys-admin task
I certainly hope the video demo posted 10 months ago is FAR from what you're doing now: http://vimeo.com/6340992
The challenge questions are to filter out completely inappropriate candidates. They aren't meant to determine if you're a genius or not.

As for the CS degree requirement, not having one myself I run up against this all the time. A good company will be able to test for equivalent capabilities. A CS degree from DeVry in 1995 is probably not the same as one from Stanford in 2006. But by setting it out as a requirement, you're sending a message to candidates. They don't want a programmer that stumbles about their job. They want one with certain analytical skills and a calculated approach to their job. No, you don't need a CS degree necessarily. But you probably want to be familiar with the material that having a CS degree would suggest you are familiar with.

No hiring manager worth their salt would turn away an exceptional candidate because of a lack of formal education unless there were some very specific professional requirements (e.g., you're hiring a professional engineer in countries that recognize them and you need somebody with a B.Eng. degree).
Here is a suggestion for you.

I know I, and at least 15 other people will immediately switch if you make Citibusiness Online support work. Check out this thread from Mint's support forum: http://satisfaction.mint.com/mint/topics/citi_business_not_a...?

To make a long story short, Citibank for business is a major bank and there's a lot frustrated people that would love to use Mint for their business, if only they made it work. Meanwhile, Mint has marked this issue as "complete" and doesn't look like they worked on this in 4 months.

I tried using it on your site and it also didn't work.. (stuck on 80% authentication). I realize this feature is in Beta but it looks like you guys already got further than Mint did - their interface doesn't even ask for right information.

I will sign up my business the second you make this work :)
"I Don't Need A Friend Who Changes When I Change And Who Nods When I Nod..."
The problem isn't that it's hard to get at the REPL (it's not) - it's envisioning how to use Clojure to do a full-scale web project. What's the workflow?
This really makes me question my vote for the pirate party. I really like them, as a voice for freedom on the internet and beyond, and would really like them to lay of the pirate propaganda and start preaching the gospel of freedom instead. Perhaps I bet on the wrong horse all along. Unfortunately I don't know what the right horse is.
> That talk about freedom of speech is a nice way of defending large-scale copyright infringement.

Copyright laws exist to restrict people's rights to free speech and freedom of communication. And in the age of the internet, business models based on scarcity of copies are obsolete; they cannot be propped up except by restricting the utility of the internet.

The copyright cartels (RIAA, MPAA, etc) want every computer to be a DRM-crippled locked down device like the iPad, and for themselves to have the power to kick anyone off the internet by merely accusing them of copyright infringement. If you don't want that future, it's time to support the Pirate Party.
I see what you're saying, but 'expanding the business' is a bit of a euphemism. The article gets almost everything wrong, but I think it has a good definition of outsourcing/offshoring that works: save a ton of money and ship quality software. The article claims this almost never happens, but make no mistake, this is exactly what is happening from the better centers. The cost differences are enormous, Indian cost often being no more than a quarter to a third of US ones. The article has a lot of nonsense about why great Indian devs will 'charge' the same as what US ones do (as if they have the power of market makers), but the reality is that you really can get great teams at a fraction of US costs.

Another reason to call it offshoring is that every time the company stock is under pressure, US top management wants to let go some people in the US and move more to the India office. This is often not what the India teams want. Over the years, they've developed strong relationships with devs in the US office, with respect for their abilities and acknowledgement of having learnt a lot from them, and don't want to see themselves as taking away the US devs' jobs. The best devs in india want to go off and do new things they've thought of themselves, but are pulled into 'transitioning' new stuff. Managements are the same everywhere, and these kind of things don't figure in their calculus.
NOLOH looks great by the specs, I'd probably put some time in to evaluating it if it were open source.
"As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge. If the employees fundamentally trust the CEO, then communication will be vastly more efficient than if they don’t. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust. A CEO’s ability to build this trust over time is often the difference between companies that execute well and companies that are chaotic."

Awesome quote. From my experience, I would say communication is the greatest challenge for startups in general, whether they've just started or have established themselves and are growing. Without good communication, misunderstandings can easily become a huge headache and perhaps a show stopper.
What about relative application numbers?

That's a very good question. I think the study of application to graduate departments at the University of California: Berkeley (often used in statistics textbooks as an example of Simpson's paradox) showed that what initially appeared as a bias in favor of male applicants was actually, when analyzed department by department, neutral admission or bias in favor of female applicants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#Berkeley_se...

The self-selection involved in applying or not for a special program is surely relevant to analyzing bias, as you correctly point out. A different issue that other commenters here mention is whether participation in a school program at early elementary age has any necessary relation to adult career paths at later ages.
Who the heck can sleep for just 20 minutes? Do certain people have a little "sleep now" button they can press?
As a highly skilled programmer, what I really want is a fair piece of the pie percentage wise. Even a high salary for the field compares little to the prospect of making exponentially more. Also, nothing motivates like having the product of your work bring you money or prestige directly.

Because I'm currently only a few years out of school, no one would come close to paying me what I really feel I deserve. Even in the best case, the long term for a programmer doesn't look all that great. This is an extremely ageist industry.

For this reason in my off hours I've been working on trying to increase my prestige through writing books, blogging, and speaking at events. Eventually, I hope this helps me either find a startup with excellent prospects or allows me to charge large amounts to existing companies for consulting.

I can't see doing this with a family though. It's a difficult road either way.
From a branding perspective I think you're right. Corporations have been far too effective at using loaded words like piracy and intellectual "property" as a way to frame the argument.
Ditto for the relative shapes of the racial curves.

There has been some convergence, that is lessening of a gap, among race and ethnicity groups in the United States as a matter of group averages.
Dude - Good Initiative. I am from the developing world. Smart choices- via sat.

Need to think about-
1. whose gonna pay for these devices? If the cost of device exceeds 50$ an year, it has no market - at least via free markets. Tie ups with govts are likely.

2. What's the interface? People in developing countries are illiterate- They can't read their mother tounge too. Forget about English. So the tweets have to be voice based.

I have personally been interested in a device for illiterate people (more than 1 bill of them in the world - my guesstimate). It has to be only images that are very intuitive. There are ATM machines that are made for the illiterate, maybe you can learn something from their design.

Good luck man.
What matters more than whether you are happy or not is whether your users are happy or not. One thing you could try is to launch to a select number of users (generally friends and family) and get their feedback before launching to the general public.
AIUI, you're wrong. MPs can say anything on the floor of the House. This is necessary to prevent them from being hassled by libel etc suits.
That depends on how the setTimeout() actually schedules things in the JavaScript engine. Recall that JavaScript is (before Chrome and worker threads appeared) traditionally single threaded - normally, even when you say setTimeout(fn, 0) - it's just putting your fn()'s execution at the end of the run loop - or whatever the scheduler calls its list of things to do. So, even though your current execution slice in the run loop may take like 1 minute, your fn() will still not execute until you're done what you're currently doing.
Getting a VPS is your best bet. Oddly, even though RAM is cheap these days, they are still stingy with it.

For learning, I'd start with the 256 or lowest RAM setup and plan to upgrade later if you get traffic.

Some of the most popular VPS hosts are linode and slicehost but there are many.
Using Google Chrome's bookmark menu? Get ready to kiss it goodbye.
When I got my first VPS, I read through the articles at Slicehost: http://articles.slicehost.com/

The walkthroughs cover a variety of distros including Ubuntu, Debian, and CentOS and can be quite useful regardless of where your VPS is hosted. The articles emphasize good security practices as well which can be helpful for a beginner to understand.

The other thing to do is dig into the docs for anything specific you plan to work on. I tend to look for tools with good documentation before getting started. I've always been impressed with Apache HTTP Server's documentation (http://httpd.apache.org/) and have learned a lot by referencing it when I've had issues.

Whenever you have questions, ask friendly geeks for help. I always do best with real-life assistance, but IRC is a good way to go as well.