skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> One of the two co-founders schedules a launch right before his honeymoon? Who does that?

Life. Nobody knows what happens next. I have no idea how/what/why this transpired but it wouldn't be far-fetched to imagine that the wedding/honeymoon was planned well-in-advance. And the success of the startup was a last-second thing. Sure, the honeymoon could have been postponed but then again, maybe he wasn't certain about the startup, the other cofounder, or his life in general. Truth is, nobody knows other than the guys themselves. That's why I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Because I've been there. And because if you are in a position where you have to choose between commitments you've already made and dreams you wish to pursue, you have to say "no" to someone.

Maybe the passion did not die. Maybe there were other reasons that the founders do not want to share. Maybe it was personality issues, financial issues, or even health. Who knows? The reason I am giving them the benefit of the doubt is that they came out clean and apologized. That is action and it was direct, honest, and to the point.
which, the original Headline, or me keeping the original headline?
When I read an article about him not wanting to sell out (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/one-on-one-andrey-t...), I was inwardly sad because I believed this to be a fad and that he should have cashed out - fast.

While the title is link bait, I do believe it's probably dead or at most very niche.
When consumers make the decision to purchase Hulu Plus, they won't be thinking about it in comparison to cable. They'll be comparing it to free Hulu, at it will lose.

Sidenote: Cable comes on a TV; Hulu comes on a computer. Does this matter to you personally? Likely not, you're a tech person and would have no issue working around that to get your preferred service on your preferred platform. But most people aren't you, and for them, that difference is called a barrier to consumption. This is the same reason IE remains the majority internet browser. It's the easiest thing in the world to just download another, better browser. But some 60% of the US refuses to. Well, they don't refuse to. They just don't think about it.
Thats great, but anecdotal evidence doesn't really prove anything. CUDA lets you write multi-core code for GPUs, but imagine writing C code for hundreds of cores over a datacenter cluster. C isn't the right tool for that job.
I've been having the worst experience with this. First the client emailed us because they couldn't reach their website due to a "This website may harm your computer" warning. I isolated the script and got that warning removed (it looked similar to the one referenced in this post: http://rayschamp.com/misc/spammer.html - scroll down for the original obfuscated version).

When I contacted Bluehost about it, they gave me a canned response about php script security. I wanted to check my logs for any suspicious activity on any scripts hosted on the site, but the logs for the relevant time period weren't available. Strange, because the Webalizer stats do show information from this period. The current log only has information since the 29th, and the June archive only has information from June 1.

Then I tried to contact Bluehost several times through chat and email to retrieve the missing June data, and each time they either told me it was gone forever (despite the Webalizer stats) or they told me it was in one of the files I explicitly noted it was missing from. Now I realize that ALL of the monthly raw access log archives only have 2 days of logs stored. It appears that their logging system is broken, and no amount of contacting them will retrieve the June 1-29 data (the period in which the site was hacked).

From my perspective, if I can't determine it's one of the scripts on the site, I have to assume the vulnerability is with Bluehost. Bluehost hasn't notified anyone of a breach, so I don't know if they're handling it or not. If they were clear about what was going on, I would probably stay with them because I could tell the client what was being done to resolve the issue. The only logical thing I can offer my client now is to move hosts, which is inconvenient for everyone involved.
It is very high, but fortunately this creates an incentive for other firms to enter the space with creative, competitive offerings.

On the other hand, $1200 per year for any company that is making money is fairly minimal. Github isn't in the business of trying to compete with a $20/month slice with nightly s3 backups and ssh, which is the bargain basement way to do lots of private repos.

So far github has been able to offer value beyond simple git hosting, so the question is whether it can do this for orgs.
After writing an article comparing private DVCS hosting (http://journal.uggedal.com/private-dvcs-hosting) I moved to http://www.codebasehq.com/
Is it impossible to boostrap an audience on the web? I feel like that's where most successful online publications have come from. Techcrunch came out of arrington's boredom and Pete Cashmore started mashable in scottland at 19. I think it's all about baby steps. If your goal is to get 1 million visitors fast that won't work. It's the first 50k or so.

Technology is the less important than traffic/content/readerbase, but it's certainly something you do not want to deal with. Wordpress.com is certainly great, but I wouldn't be running that if I were trying to do something professional (I would use Wordpress though).
Reputation is also a currency. You can use it to get [better] answers to questions. 50 points is the minimum so it can go fast.
And this is where the startup needs to partner up with other powerful conglomerates. Like YouTube going to Google after being relentlessly sued by Viacom.
Pretty much what you describe is my point. That is why the common paradigm in HPC was that you used OpenMP on a node (shared memory model) and MPI across nodes. It's not difficult to do MPI on a node, but nobody wanted to do that. And there were several attempts to put OpenMP on clusters. The most recent one I know of being Intel (http://cache-www.intel.com/cd/00/00/28/58/285865_285865.pdf).

I think it is still a little analogous. The main takeaway is that message passing doesn't make things easy. I've spent many of days debugging message passing applications. You often trade-in one type of problem for another. If anyone is interested in more detail, I can go into an example or two.
The real trick here is to try and process things in as many ways as you need to to work through the problem.
I worked for a for-pay Q&A site a little while back. They had all the incentives of SO and more. For example if you answered half-a-dozen questions a month, you got free access. The reward system. The asker declared how much the question was worth and awarded the points to one or more answerers. Awards could be adjusted by moderators so a better answer could be awarded the points.

There were a large number of categories, added to all the time. An answerer could register as an expert in one or more categories and could become an expert, guru, grand-master, etc. in one or more categories with the badges showing up everywhere.

There was an elaborate email system that kept every one engaged.If you were an expert, you got an email when a question was in one of your areas of expertise. An asker go an email whenever there was an answer of comment to one of your questions.

It appealed to the corporate IT world, but the combination of incentives, communications, and content curation seemed to work quiite well.
Hulu Announces Paid Video-Subscription Service
Interesting idea. Wondering A) how this is done (mturk?) and B) how this will be monetized.
Review: Alex's Adventures in Numberland / Here's Looking at Euclid
LHC: Are We There Yet?
Don't worry, the footnote says that it's only simulated, the actual physical effects may vary.
I'd agree. If you've already built up a high reputation in some area and are a well recognised person in that particular field then possibly the pestering strategy might work - especially if you can provide genuinely relevant hints and tips.

However, I think in the large majority of cases the pestering strategy isn't going to work, because cold calling multiple times soon beings to appear rude.
Yes, but this is wrong ... the sex of the second child is in no way connected to the sex of the first child.

He didn't ask ... what's the sex of the second child? No ... he asked ...

p(boys = 2 | boy >= 1) == p(child = boy)

Choosing a distribution that involves both children in this case is wrong, hence my answer that ordering doesn't matter. 33% is just wrong.
When will FaceTime Roulette be coming out, so you can randomly connect to a stranger's iPhone?
Look for things with fixed downside but unlimited upside. The opposite of this was LTCM's strategy of picking up pennies in front of a steamroller; NNT trolls Robert Merton throughout the book
Something akin to Jeff Atwood's "Personal Brand" [1] -- something I would put on my personal calling cards, my blog, that sort of thing.

The question, though, could just as easily apply to a startup logo.

Right now, the design I've sketched is a stylized version of my initials. Should be simple and flowing, once I work on it a bit.

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/04/your-personal-brand...

edit: I suppose it could be thought of as a modern, personal (instead of family) coat of arms. Right now I have the glider [2] in these sorts of places, but I'd prefer to have something that belongs to just me, rather than a group of people.

[2] http://www.catb.org/hacker-emblem/index.html
In their Reddit AMA I think they said they originally were going to sell a white label Disqus commenting system to newspapers as their product, only to find out that building it would be easy, but selling it would be extremely hard. So they decided to go with the True/Slant/Examiner/Associated Content/Demand Media model of getting a whole bunch of people publishing in one place to pool their collective Google juice.

My sense, from comments made here and there is that they hadn't really been working on the site itself all that long when it launched. Some of the features they said were on the way seemed pretty core to me (letting writers sell their work directly, for example).
Furthermore, there are both network ads and cable/satellite provider ads mixed together in commercial breaks, so both the networks and the cable/satellite companies are making money on ads as well. On my cable TV service, the first block of ads is the network's ads, followed by a few local commercials sold by my cable provider.
It was a good meetup. I actually wouldn't mind doing it every other week or soo. Good people.
I saw the same thing. http://twitpic.com/211wd7
In my mind condition variables are stored under "crap I don't need to know because we have better abstractions". I can understand why RethinkDB will be messing around with semaphores (or monitors aka condition variables) but for most programs there are far better ways to organise concurrency. Java recognises this -- experience showed the synchronized (monitor) approach to concurrency to be too unwieldy and it was superseded fairly quickly by java.util.concurrent and friends. Way back in 2000 we were using Doug Lea's concurrency library, which formed the basis for java.util.concurrent. I certainly could use semaphores but it would certainly take me some time to adjust my thinking to that primitive model.
Hell, with SQLite's :memory: database (which can be persisted to disk using the Backup API).
Another autoconversing only child here. In my consistent experience, the best thing I can do to understand something more fully is to explain it to someone else - even if that 'someone else' is actually myself. :)
CSS is not supported by all browsers.

If you use HTML 1.0 you can render something on most (but not all) browsers. EX: text only browsers will not show you imgs. And yes, these are still in use by the blind community.
That was my plan if my startup failed. Fortunately(?), it didn't.
Dropbox saved my life. I scan everything except for the last seven years of taxes (required in the US).
We're trying to see how startups around the world compare - so that the local scene can work out how to improve itself and be more successful.
Cool URIs Don't Change
Agreed, I'd love to use organizations but paying for 50 repos is just outright crazy. We have a 12 person dev team, and 10 repos. Can't justify 100mo just for that. Will need to stick with unfuddle for now.

Chris/Tom: please provide a lower priced entry for organizations.
And here's my belated response, "Yes, I'll buy a copy". (Thanks for writing it.)
You can't predict any particular black swan, but you know they happen and you can attempt exploit the odds of it. Which is what Ycombinator, and any VC company for that matter, does.
The message passing issue with HPC codes wasn't perf overhead of the messages. Rather it was that developing message passing applications was very complicated. But message passing apps, when written correctly gave very good performance.

With that said, you're right. If you don't care about performance, or if you have very large grains of computation then message passing is relatively easy (although so is just about any model with those requirements). The question is what about when you actually do care about performance and your grains aren't so large that doing communication half-way across the planet isn't acceptable? When I'm trying to get 60FPS in my physics engine, I probably don't want to use a web service interface.
Here's my system.

Every piece of paper gets a number written on it in bold felt-tip pen.

This number is near unique - usually the date that I'm filing it, sometimes a "natural date" such as a date on the paper itself.

I file them all in a single box, in order.

In a file I have a line per item. It starts with the number, then has as many "tags" as I can think of. This takes about 20 seconds per piece of paper.

grep is your friend.

Finding any item is now easy, and there are no decisions to make when doing the filing. I copy the index file to my handheld and laptop. Occasionally I print it, although I haven't done that in ages.

A few items are filed in separate files, but those are obvious.
Ouch. Affiliate programs can be good things, but multi-level-marketing quickly tends towards the skeezy.
The Bodleian library in Oxford is one of the largest in the world, and they have a very simple way of organizing books: They are numbered as they come in, go onto a shelf in that order, and an entries are made in a database saying where to find each book.

I use more or less this same approach: Everything goes into a stack, and when I need something I just do an interpolation search through the pile using the date of the document as a key.
I'd have thought that with the trouble they're having hiring people, an H1B shouldn't be too hard to come by. Even EB2 maybe. (exceptional ability)
Its like asking me if I am a moral man. Do I worry about stealing from other people? Yes. Do I worry about stealing from people that pay their HARD EARNED money into a big pot and distribute it wrongfully. Yes.

If I were to compare this type of wrong doing to another industry, I would put it right along with Gambling. Working for a Casino is a moral question. Thou shall not Gamble. Sure they pay a bunch of money and if I cheat the system, I can get paid better. I only care about my self anyway, right. Wrong...

If people stop caring for other people, then what will this world come to? I would rather do the Moral thing and NOT cheat other people out of their tax money. But thats just me.
Scan or take pics of them and add them to Evernote. Keep only the essentials. Works for me.
Designing a new product? The two most important features are...
Amazon databases down? (e.g., shopping carts, adv search page)
Businesses such as mine can easily afford 100/mo but that doesn't mean we'll waste money buying way more than we need (50 repos is 3x what we'll use). I like the user/permission management part a lot. Just not the entry plan and price point.
First, I suggest you get a Fujitsu ScanSnap or other straight-to-Evernote scanner. Seriously, because once you start doing that you will realise how little you actually need to keep in paper format.

What remains depends on your life situation I suspect, but for ideas, here is what I do:

Some papers are truly important. I like to put those in one of those expanding files with multiple slots and a carry handle. I have one for my personal papers (will, passport, birth certificates etc), one for taxes and one for the house documents. These should be stuff that if the house is on fire, you want to grab and take with you.

Having taken care of the stuff you don't need in physical form, and the really important stuff you must curate carefully, that leaves a bunch of other stuff. In my case that is mostly product manuals and warranties, and personal and travel memorabilia. While I am not a hardcore GTDer by any stretch, I do follow it for filing: get a filing cabinet, a good label maker, hanging folders and file folders, and file the hell out of everything. For example for product manuals, have a hanging folder for kitchen appliances, put each separate manual in a file folder, label the folder with your labelmaker, insert file folder into hanging folder.

General clutter guidelines apply, like handle everything once, think about whether you really need this ever again (this is where scanning really helps you, as you don't have to agonise too much about the decision), etc.
It could have been a huge potential, but what the founder lacked IMHO was he did not heed the advice of experienced pundits who'd like to further develop this space.
That's not exactly bootstrapping though. Those are both examples of organic growth that happened over YEARS. That's very do-able if you are making content people actually want to read.
C and C++ seem to be the languages of choice lately for the interview complaints. I wonder if that's indicative of the language itself or of the number of people who actually program in those languages.

Of the questions / problems expressed in the article, I think I have a decent grasp of most of them, and I don't program in C or language with similar ideas. I did learn with C (and then expand that knowledge to C++), but that's been a long time ago. To not be able to traverse a linked-list, though, that baffles me. Simply shouldn't be appling for a job programming in C or C++ and not understand linked lists.
The market for people tech savvy enough to use hulu.com is probably a bit larger than you give it credit for. I really don't see this as an addition to cable either but rather a replacement and for $10 a month that is a hell of a discount. Besides there is simply no way Hulu could make this service advertisement free.. Hulu owns <i>none</i> of the content. They aren't just scraping these shows off of network sites but they are instead making deals with these companies who in turn impose the ads. Hulu is simply providing them a platform to reach a tech savvy audience and they aren't going to change their ad supported model.

But really, if people wanted ad free content it would cost ten times as much as it does because they are making deals with other business to acquire their content. At $10 a month though its cheaper to me than pirating because of convenience. I guarantee I would save myself much more than the monthly price by cutting the time it takes to find a good torrent to download the entire backlog of a show I want to watch.
Had no idea what Condition Variables were. Honestly. However after reading up on them I realized I've been using them for a looooong time, they just seemed so natural a solution to a problem. Most simple patterns can be derived by yourself without any help because they really fit the solution so well that it feels unnatural to not think of them. Some of the more interesting ones are removing complexities :)
I apologize if my comments sounded like I was jumping to conclusions. With respect to the passion dying, I was just giving an example of something that happened in my past experience. By no means was I hinting that is what happened to you. I just wanted to make that point that people can't blame the founders, especially when they don't know the full story.
Income share vs tax share in the US
"Higher-income groups earn a disproportionate share of pretax income and pay a disproportionate share of federal taxes. In 2007, the highest quintile earned 55.9 percent of pretax income and paid 68.9 percent of federal taxes. In all other quintiles, the share of federal taxes was less than the income share. The bottom quintile earned 4.0 percent of income and paid 0.8 percent of taxes, and the middle quintile earned 13.1 percent of income and paid 9.2 percent of taxes."

from slide 2 of http://www.cbo.gov/publications/collections/tax/2010/graphics.cfm
Sounds like a lot of people are "trash" to you.
You get one chance to make a good impression.

People have moved on. Maybe there will be some killer app (farmville or something) released on top of wave, but I can't see why.

Protocols are fairly easy work. It's getting people to use stuff that's hard.
This is great advice. The market is supersaturated with graduate students that have no hope of getting any kind of tenure position anytime within the next 2 decades and I think the situation is getting worse because universities keep pumping out more and more PhD's.
Definite props for the act of apologizing; less so for the reason sounding so shallow.

Sure, weddings are planned well in advance. Product launches should be, too.

Maybe there were other reasons. Shit happens. But, when shit happens so fast as to lead you to shut down two months after launching, we're deep into the "failing to plan is planning to fail" category.
Since you gave the link, I presume he meant the original was the bait.
I'd say it depends on many factors. If you immediately go out and get hammered and get very little sleep for a few days in a row, the changes will probably vanish much more quickly than if you being regularly applying some of the discipline you learned.
Nobody in America has to do this kind of work anymore. Some do it by choice but usually work on something they are really into, like Pro-Tools or iPhone software, or something where you make a lot more money, like Wall Street (or iPhone software). I have not had to do anything remotely resembling reversing a linked list in C since 1994. Since then, the further I've gotten away from C and algorithms, the more I've gotten paid...

Your best bet is to recruit in Russia/Eastern Europe/India/China.

Edit: before I get downvoted into oblivion, I didn't mean this disparagingly, I am just being matter of fact. It will be easier to hire people from those countries. Most Americans who do this work already have a job. Most Americans looking for a job, don't want to do this, or don't know how. I have worked with guys from Croatia who helped write some database driver code for me and were excellent.