skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As the original blog post author, I figured I would toss in a few comments to add to the discussion - thanks for reading it and the great comments:

1. Most companies are not meant to be VC-backed. If you (and the VC) can't see your company getting to, say, $25M in profitable revenue with under $10M of equity capital (or more revenue for more equity capital) then VC is probably not right for you. I know, not all VCs focus on revenue and profits. Call us old fashioned but we still think they matter.

2. When we look at your business, we not only look at it as an investment opportunity, but, we also compare it to other companies we are actively reviewing. At NAV we are active investors. We have funded 5 companies in 2010 and have term sheets on 2 more. But at any given point in time we may have 5-10 companies we are actively evaluating. So it is not just a question of how good is your business, but, how good is your business relative to the other businesses we are currently reviewing. So on the founder investing their own cash question, no, it is not a requirement. But given two businesses with similar upside, if one founder has put real money into his/her business personally, and the other one has not (but could) then the former scores more points in our mind.

3. VCs don't seek to take on "major financial risk." We actually spend our time trying to understand the risks facing each business, asking how we might help mitigate those risks, and then we compare the risks to the upside. In other words, VCs are risk-tolerant, but not risk-seeking.

4. Here is a post with some more inside-insight into how we think as VCs: http://navfund.com/blog/venture-capital-5-tips-on-how-to-nav...

5. And here is how to find out if your VC really has money to invest. http://navfund.com/blog/so-you-have-a-meeting-with-a-vc-are-...
I think it's just a problem that people haven't tried to fix properly yet. Output from WYSIWYG environments doesn't /have/ to suck, it's just no-one's put in the effort and research to really nail it.
So where do the "best of the best" want to work now?
I use vim with the brilliant eclim plugin to write java code on my netbook. http://eclim.org Lets you run eclipse headless and communicate to it through vim to get the fancy IDE stuff like code completion, automatic imports, etc. Best of both worlds, especially when coding on a netbook and not having the screen real-estate to run an IDE.
Maybe...but

On the game page there is no Mac tag[1]. Also, someone mentioned in the forums that, "POrtal 2 would be their first game to be simultaneously released for Mac and Windows: http://store.steampowered.com/news/3569/[2].

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/630/

[2] http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1611274...
Absolutely true. But -4 on both those comments seemed a little extreme too.
Molyneux is insanely brilliant, but he tends to hype his games so much that the end result falls short of expectations. He's made similar claims about Fable - then known as Project Ego - that never materialized.
My renter's insurance explicitly excludes any damages or theft by a subletter. I think most have a similar clause, though I could be wrong?
That's legitimate, but the problem isn't "your pinky touches the line" its "my grip (and it's not an odd grip) causes my pinky to touch the line".

People making videos of an iPhone on a table, and one finger coming up and touching it are alarmist ways of treating the problem. Not that its not a very serious real problem, but let's be reasonable and only talk about the issues it has when we're actually using it.
I haven't read a (paper) newspaper or magazine in about 10 years, and I'm 54. I think it's weird that people still read paper.

Our local free newspaper still delivers to us each week (we can't get them to stop), but I actually read the content online at their website a couple of days before I get the hard copy version. It just goes directly to the recycling bin, unopened.

Magazines are even worse. Because they typically have a 2-4 month lead time, I've read pretty much everything weeks before they come out, for free, elsewhere.

As Craig Ferguson puts it, newspapers and magazines are like an old papery blog. Set up your feed reader and never look back.
The hints have various useful tips, and the FAQ page too. There is no page with the syntax, because we didn't think that users will need anything special, but we will add one!
Rewarding users for providing personal data
Writing this from a nice, quiet room in London that my wife and I found via Airbnb. We arrived to find that our guesthouse had flooded and most everything not outrageously expensive in London was booked, so we posted to the standby list on Airbnb and had a great place at a great price in less than an hour. We showed up a few hours ago and met the owner, a very (very) nice lady in her 50s who decided to try and bring in a bit of extra cash by renting out her spare room. She made us tea while we swapped life stories and then she showed us around the neighborhood. All in all, a great experience with Airbnb and I highly recommend giving it a try.
To me, the aesthetic of *nixes is the way everything is neatly arranged around the same set of relatively simple abstractions: executables, shell scripts, processes and text files. Yes, there's a learning curve, but once you're around the bend it's pretty flat. Skills are generally general -- once you know how to do X, chances are you've touched a great deal of the tools you need to Y.

Windows is somewhat simple (but unreliable) on the outside, and completely inaccessible on the inside. If you want to interact with the innards of Windows, there's somethings you can do in the registry, some things you need Scripting Host for, some things can be done in .NET, others you need COM for. Documentation for these things are spotty (you might find a guide for doing something in COM, in C++, and need to pair that with another guide on how to do COM in .NET). The learning curve maybe isn't as steep, but it keeps its inclination all the way to the wall you're bound to hit. There's little generality in skills -- once you know how to do X, you're still almost all the way back to square one on how to do Y.
It's not just free - they're also releasing the source!!!
etoro is simply a nice frontend. It is built on top of www.retailfx.com/.
You seem have a problem in Safari 4. If I select the bookmarklet text, then drag it to the bookmarks bar, then only the first line was added as a bookmark.

[NOTE: I just noticed there is an actual bookmark as I suggested below. OK.]

I ended up editing the breaks out of the text to get the bookmark to work.

You should probably bury the bookmarklet text in a link, and have the user drag that to the bookmarks bar.

Also, you are not sniffing Safari 4 correctly. I get a message that it is an unrecognized browser!
I thought this piece did a good job of summarizing the issues, and an especially good job diving into the technical details of this specific example. Those details are sadly lacking from much of the "noise" being made on the topic - the mixergy interview, for example. This post is signal.
and upvoting them...
The City that Ended Hunger
It would be cool if AirBnB had suggested travel itineraries through different countries that integrated with the service. Just a suggestion.
Sign Up for Google BigQuery
ROFL. Let me guess ... you "don't see race."

It seems an article that tells somebody's life story should mention their race. Furthermore, the article centered on the guy's professional carrier, and his race was a very relevant factor there (as you would know if you read the article).
> Most of the data I work with comes from a CCD, which Im almost certain has a linear scale between input brightness and pixel value.

CCDs are definitely less than ideal as a sensor, unless you've calibrated the specific unit you are using and apply a correction curve you can definitely expect some non-linearity.

Some professional grade CCDs apply a correction internally before passing the data to the consumer.

Sources of non-linearity are blooming (the leakage of current from brightly lit cells to dark cells nearby), AD non-linearity and temperature effects.

I'm assuming you are talking about a professional grade CCD with an internal correction, but the blooming issues are part and parcel of the medium and when you have high contrast images as input you really have to be aware of that.
GPU hardware runs software designed for it, so in the end if it doesn't work properly it's not the hardware that's at fault.
The problem is that the technical details it dove into aren't particularly relevant to the underlying copyright question. They show that the user who choses to use a given theme is creating a derivative work, but no one has seriously questioned that. That derivative work is authorized by the copyright holders (GPL allows users to freely mix GPL and non-GPL code on their own systems).

Hence, the important legal question is whether or not the theme, AS DISTRIBUTED, is a derivative work of WordPress. This is a code authoring question, not a code execution flow question. There was little or no insight on that question in the article.
If guidelines were meant to be enforced, they'd be syntax.
yeah Mashery does this and it rocks
> I like the sentiment that people who have built something are sympathetic to other builders.

That even goes for 'trivial' stuff like planing a piece of wood (try it!) and plumbing. It's amazing how much skill and knowledge goes in to many things that we simply take for granted.
I think even a normal user will have to think at least a little bit. A smartphone is a powerful device. You can't just hit the street with your new car either, you need a drivers license.

Just saying - much as I pity the average user for their helplessness, but their is a limit to the level they can be accommodated.
> Everyone tells me all the time "just stick to one project and stop abandoning everything"! I know that is sound advice. I know it! I just don't think of it as abandonment. I think of it as refinement. All of my projects have actually been perfectly inline with a core concept: Helping local businesses leverage the interent.

Good stuff. At some point you're going to have one on your hands that you have a pretty good feeling about and are excited about, and you're going to want to gear up on that one and do everything you can to make it work. Building to learn while refining is a great plan, you might get lucky and catch a really good break and have an idea take off on you. But don't count on that happening - it's actually quite unlikely, you'll have to gear up on one project specifically and pretty some serious focus on it to have it break through.

Good luck and best wishes! You've obviously got the moxy to make it, at some point when you've got one on your hands that you think has a nice mix of good market, offer, and that you enjoy working with, you gear up on it and make it a success.
Look a few lines down:

Page last modified 10:04, 30 Jun 2010 by user01
Not a bad guide, old as it may be. Chuckled a bit when I read, "JavaScript has a tertiary operator for one-line conditional statements..." - been in there since the original version.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_operation
I have to wonder if I spend too much time reading comments here when I read a comment like above and think, "that's something patio11 would say" only to look at the name...

EDIT:
Thought I should add something of value to the conversation...
That is unless you are prone to spurts of procrastination. For me it's good to have things like this on my to-do list to keep me from doing something completely unproductive when I feel like procrastinating.
That's one of the reasons Skype replaced Email as our primary means to communicate.
Congrats on the coverage you guys. Looking forward to seeing what else is up your sleeves.
There's a still a lot of C questions in interviews, plus usually bonus points for knowing it - it can definitely be literally profitable even if you never use it for anything substantial.
Sorry, but the reason that Apple tends to get so much flak is their arrogance, not the ignorance of the common people. In fact that article portrays a certain kind of arrogance, too (even though it does not come from Apple).
Oh, thanks for that, we'll fix it right away!
and writing deeply nested replies...
Do they? I'm not a physicist but I wonder why a friend of mine (PhD in physics @caltech) decided to take a sabbatical and "dedicate a full year" to study Maxwell equations. I'll ask him more about it...
You don't need an IDE for that, but some code analyzers do give you hints/warnings. There's something for Python (google it)
While it doesn't enforce the guidelines, their Closure Compiler enforces the variable types and encapsulations declared in the JSDoc comments with warnings.
http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/

On another note, a Google engineer argues against Crockford's arguments for functional inheritance while pitching the benefits of the Closure Compiler and Library:
http://www.bolinfest.com/javascript/inheritance.php
I find his points are well made.
How about an import feature from google web history. Doesn't it also index the pages you visit for searching? It has a bookmarklet and can crawl all of your web history if you tell it to
I just checked Amazon for that book and it looks like you can get used copies of the first edition for under a buck.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0201563177/ref=dp_olp...
Ah, but think of all the stuff you already know that does not work.

It's like the search for a lightbulb filament, you've probably learned more trying out that stuff than you'd have ever learned if your first trick had taken off. You are so much better prepared to really make a go of it once you find a live one.
Themes cannot stand by themselves

Yes, they can. Sorta. It wouldn't be very difficult to extract the design for use elsewhere, especially a static website. Most designers start designing with tools like Photoshop and HTML/CSS, not PHP and Wordpress code.
A PhD takes about six weeks. Maybe three months. It takes at least three years to work out which six weeks.

(I'm speaking from experience.)
Modafinil
Great idea. I assume you currently aren't saving embedded resources like audio files or flash movies? It would be even more valuable to a lot of people if you did.
I wonder if it's even patentable after Bilski. IANAL, but I'm having trouble figuring out what, exactly, you could claim that would survive reexamination these days? Then again, cleverly worded claims are what people pay the patent lawyers for, so who knows?

Anyhow, I'm glad they found a way to deal with the problem. It's good when people are able to work things out on their own.
Too many people's mental model of engineering seems to be drawn from Green Lantern comics: If a gadget cannot do a certain thing, it must be because its builders don't have enough will to succeed. They need to want it more!

Another, related, effect of most people not being exposed to engineering is a belief that engineers don't make gadgets do certain things simply because it hasn't ever occurred to them (i.e. ideas are everything, and implementation is probably trivial in comparison).
A Succinct Intro to Creating Recursive Descent Parsers
Anti-AGW is pro-science, not anti-science
Mac Developers might like to take a look at my project: Optimal Layout. It gives you very flexible keyboard commands to control windows as well as a window switcher:

http://most-advantageous.com/optimal-layout/

It includes an option to re-arrange a whole group of windows in one go with window tiling and I've got an update coming in the next week to make this process much simpler and more customizable.
This is an opportunity for other blogging platforms to tout that their themes are NOT considered derivative works. And if there are none, then that's an opportunity for someone to create one.

Themes are a major feature to a blogging platform. Stating up front that themes are not derivative of your platform will encourage others to create themes for it.
But in order to properly understand what you could be vulnerable to and the why/how, you should learn how to break into things. Yes, normally, you're working at a higher level of abstraction, but if you want to understand how things really work, you work at a lower level for a while.
What Software do you need that costs money?
Long term result: A net increase in the quantity of individuals demanding the new basic "right", ultimately making the problem worse.
"By way of comparison, on my home PC I used a third-party command shell called 4DOS [...] It had a wonderful command line history mechanism: type part of a command, then press up-arrow."

Want in bash? Add to ~/.inputrc:

# up and down arrows do incremental history search

"\e[A": history-search-backward

"\e[B": history-search-forward
I think you may be outside of the target demographic. The people that would sublet their digs through services like these are most likely not worried about a stain on the carpet.

It's like hitchhiking for houses, just like you wouldn't take hitchhikers in your limo you probably won't sublet your fancy apartment. But a basic place with people that are not too nervous about appearances or that trust their sense of character judgment should be a fine way to make this work. You get to meet new and interesting people, life is risky anyway, this sort of thing seems pretty low on the risk ladder.

Also, in Europe the general sentiment is much less litigious than the United States and someone suing someone else here for small stuff like that is practically unheard of. Usually it would be understood that the party at fault would cover the damage.
If you're a fan of that, try adderall...
Code. My projects need more documentation, always, but I keep writing new things and not adding new documentation until after I've stopped working on it for 3 months, try to get back in, and entirely forget what I was going for in the design.
HelloWorld Application For Graph Databases
A getting started on writing a java application to tag URL's and store the results in a graph database. This article will teach you the fundamentals of graphdb's.
The critic's work is valuable. As a maker it might rankle but as a consumer ready to dish out hard earned cash it is extremely useful. Unfortunately your blood, sweat and tears does not entitle you to success.
No really it was last significantly edited in 2006. Look at the contents of the revisions for the past 3 1/2 years: https://developer.mozilla.org/index.php?title=en/JavaScript/...
Most English majors cannot write copy, unless they are trained to. Advertising and promotional copy are very different beasts than English. Find a copy writer instead and not some random English major.
Techies Reject Coasts for Silicon Prarie
Got API: documentation for everything
I have a nagging fear that someday people will discover I only know four things and a whole lot of ways to rephrase them eloquently.
With regards to the const part of the discussion -

Does anyone knows any research or even a state of affairs of const inference in language design?

The idea is similar to type inference whereby a compiler (or some other tool in a chain) would take care of understanding which arguments/variables/functions are going to be const and generate appropriate warnings based on that. For example,

void foo(int * a) { (*a)++; }

void bar(int * b) { foo(b); }

void baz(const int * c) { bar(c); }

A compiler would generate a warning when baz function, because foo() includes a non-const operation on its argument, bar() is non-const for the same reason, and so it cannot be called for a const pointer.
Nagios does that too. You can define schedules to your heart's content, and it will send email anywhere. Given that basically all pagers/mobiles have email addresses, you're set.

The only thing that this does that is really new is two-way SMS.
If you're talking about renting out a room while you also live there, I can definitely see that reducing the risk. The article seemed to be talking about people subletting out their apartments while they're out of town, though. People around here do do that, but incidence of major damage is not that infrequent (it seems to be a favorite topic of the local paper, and comes up every few months). Often, people require damage deposits to mitigate the risk from that, which AirBnB doesn't seem to allow.

In particular, since I'm near the beach, people like to rent out apartments and houses for bachelor parties, spring-break trips, graduation parties, etc., and those can end up causing significant damage, occasionally in the $10k+ range (beer-drenched walls requiring drywall replacement and repainting, etc.).

I don't really have a lot of choice about whether I'm worried about carpet stains or other damage, anyway. If there's damage when I move out that wasn't there when I moved in, my landlord will charge me for it. It's not a fancy apartment by any stretch, but I'm still not allowed to damage it.
They are distinct issues, to be sure, but, then again, they are part and parcel. Properly implemented, a language with distributed computing primitives buys you single address space concurrency: it's the degenerate case of a cluster. No matter what, a single machine is going to be less in terms of total computational capacity and fail-over ability. Languages that optimize for single machines, however nice, are something of a tease.
How do you know it's fake? I have a Google Alert set up for my name, and see news about at least 6 other people with the same name as me.
As a developer with limited design skills, my number one pain point is front end / UI work. I'm a solo startup founder and I'm currently working on the front end. It's already taken 20% of my total development time and it's not finished. The worst thing is even when it's done it'll be mediocre at best.

I haven't had any luck finding a co-founder and I can't afford to hire anyone to do the work. I'm sure I'm not the only one. I don't know how you could solve a problem like this but it seems to be a recurring theme here on HN and in start-up circles in general.
Sorry davidw it's off Topic but I thought it was something that was worth talking about and others might be interested :)
I really don't get how you reach that conclusion. The project has been running for 7 years and it seems to be mostly free from negative side effects.

This already is enshrined in article 25 of the universal declaration of human rights and as such it is really commendable that this city decided to make it a reality.
Getting a project off the ground
But you don't really need this service for that. Nagios sends directly to those (just like any other email address).

Of course, the two-way SMS that lets you wake up the other guys if needed would break under this.
Do you have a prescription? Or how do you get it?
What do these do? You just stay alert and don't feel sleepy for a while? I've read the article but I'd like to hear some personal perspective...
How do you get Modafinil?
Sifting through someone else's code or half-assed documentation to figure out how to use a third-party library.
YMMV. I was once prescribed Modafinil by a doctor for excessive daytime sleepiness, and it didn't even help much for that... On the other hand I wasn't prescribed the dosages that seem to work so well for the US military.
Actually, I'm looking for a legal and safe drug with the opposite effect: to fall asleep quicker. I waste about an hour every night just waiting, it irritates me that so much time is spent just staring at the ceiling...