skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Simply multiply the % numbers by 853 (total sample size)
Patrick (of BCC) talks about evergreen content. It seems like this set of FQAs has been around forever, but it still gives me a chuckle whenever I read it again. I say this as one who used C++ for a decade.

The clincher for me was reading Coders at Work in which C++ really got slammed by people who seriously know what they are doing.
You know, we've certainly had our differences in the past, but I can't help but think that you've been one of the few voices of reason in this whole thread.

The number of people here who's entire understanding of the world comes from spy novels and geopolitical thrillers is just utterly dumbfounding.
I've done a 6 and 2 biphasic schedule (or sometimes 7 and 3), and I felt better than I ever had before. It's difficult to fit the nap in with work though.

I think in many ways the "Italian" sleep schedule (up at 7, awake till 2, sleep till 5, awake till 2) is very natural. It's no less sleep, but it feels more refreshing somehow.
Under what circumstances does Apple even issue refunds? The app store terms of service is pretty clear within the first few paragraphs that all sales are final.

http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/us/terms.html
After using Surface I realised just how out of touch Microsoft is. Awful.
I've referenced that article in my post - and used the same dataset as they have. The (other) article is about all posts. I've focused exclusively on Ask HN - where the post's objective is not to educate/entertain/inform but to solicit feedback. The hypothesis is that an Ask HN post demats a higher level of involvement from the reader and hence may exhibit different trends.
I pretty much started thinking along the same lines too after I talked to a couple of people. It seems like their pricing structure is exactly the same as PayPal and their API is pretty good. I will most likely go with them in the next couple of weeks. I might even release a little open source library that adds a thin layer on top of what Amazon gives to enable ASP.NET MVC integration. Thanks for all your help!
Indeed, gojomo is not accusing gojomo of posting spam. Nor is gojomo unaware of VentureHacks, as it was gojomo who recommended the VentureHacks link in the first place. On the other hand, gojomo has some pretty whack views, and rarely respects the HN taboo against frivolity. So he deserves a dressing-down every once in a while, and I don't care if he downvotes me for this opinion.
For those who didn't bother to look: http://biggovernment.com/capitolconfidential/2010/04/20/goog...

And here:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/05/is_leftleaning_google...
That may be true, but in practice Apple issues refunds to anyone who asks.
This is a great article, Paul. I have one question, if you do not mind setting off on a tangent. You said that start-up investing is a seller's market now. Why is that? In general "a sellers market" would indicate that there a lot of investor money in comparison with startup opportunities.

Is it because there profitable exists which are bringing more money in? I have been following the news and while the number of buyouts seem to be increasing, many of them are at valuations which would not indicate much profit for the investors.

Also VCs keep telling me that they have trouble getting funds as their traditional institutional investors have soured on the VC investment class. So that would indicate something other than a seller's market.

Or do you think that because there is so much activity with start-ups, investors have already decided that some companies that have not yet reached an exit (e.g., Twitter, Foursquare) are defacto winners, so that there is an assumption of high profitability even without the exits.

Or do you think it is a sellers market because more money is going to silicon valley now that many of the wall street profit making schemes have stopped working.

Or is it possible that it only seems like a seller's market to you because Y-combinator is so successful and popular that investing in Y-combinator startups is indeed a seller's market, while this may not be the case overall.
I think spreading the work over 4 years is too long. I would focus on getting something workable together and online before halfway through the semester. Push them to stay up late and code and hit a deadline. They won't melt if they lose a little sleep. Then have them work on iterating the design and the business based on feedback from adult relatives who login to the sites.

Also, maybe some of the students want to do e-commerce. Maybe you could offer them some flexibility in this area.

Will the PTA flip out if you involve the students with selling wine? Maybe you could work a deal with some local business where the students websites act as a reseller but carry no inventory. Farm supplies, or something. The customers can be local, if the newspaper does a story on this it is free advertising. Maybe somebody's mom cans preserves or something. Be imaginative. It is just to learn and maybe make some money, not corner the market.
"I sealed this terrarium 21 years ago (never opened). It's still green."
Cool. Would be awesome to have something like this for other languages.
Thanks! The low-effort VM clone (essentially fork() for Xen VMs, and only takes 1-2 seconds even for dozens of clones) makes deploying a bunch of almost-identical machines extremely easy.

We've also toyed around with other cluster-scale platforms (see my earlier post) and have a MySQL Cluster HOWTO in the works, but the clustered SQL databases are decidedly more heavyweight - MySQL Cluster doesn't even allow removal of cluster nodes once they're added (without dropping all the clustered tables). Not sure if Oracle RAC has that capability - if so, we might be able to put together a fun demo.
The solidly financial reason for Apple to improve the quality of the App Store is to sell more software, encourage quality app development, and ultimately sell more devices.

In reality, Apple adds sections like this to the App Store all the time, in order to feature quality software. It's nothing remarkable.
Congrats... Tomorrow, the world!
a) no because Yahoo shareholders sure don't feel like they've been on the winning side of that battle. Their investment in broadcast.com netted them -$3 billion.

b) that doesn't change the hindsight bias at all, it just shifts it from individual companies to individual industries. For instance the invaders in grocery retail have done very little.
Only cloudfront, not regular S3.
In iTunes, Go to Purchase History, 'Report a problem'. Give a reasonable sounding reason why, and it's usually granted.

It's widely accepted that there's a 90-day refund policy [citation needed].
Who has the most liberty?
Sorry, skipped the points (don't even know why I did that); will try and update later.
Embed.ly is very cool. It reduces friction and makes embedding content and accessing metadata a snap. The value it offers has tremendous potential.

That said, I think the company needs to explain to developers what happens if they build a hugely successful site on top of the API and depend on the embed.ly functionality.

For example, I see no Terms of Service -- So can I cache the output to reduce requests? Can I re-syndicate it in other formats? Can I power my meta-data scraper through embed.ly? Will they start to charge me? Will they release stats on most frequent API request URLs? Will those be aggregated or per user-agent?

I'm all for supporting new startups, but I'd like to know how they will support me for using them as they grow up.

PS, Please don't comment about how building a popular site or service on top of embed.ly (or someone else's API) is a bad idea – their entire business depends on you assuming it's okay to do that, so I'm just taking that assumption and rolling w/ it.
The optimum MVP for me would just be a website that displays a list of HN users who are currently online in Skype along with a link to their HN profile. I don't even have to change any behavior to become "available" or not on your service.

Office hours as such are a non-feature for me. I will never set any, and I won't look at anyone's unless I'm actually trying to contact them (in which case I would probably write them an e-mail over trying to schedule an appointment).
Another great way to win at Roulette (and a great read): http://amzn.to/bxgmk5
Semi Permanent makeup clinic
Permanent makeup and semi permanent makeup clinic offered by annalou get the professional treatment you deserve.
They're abusing the 'bury' feature by incorrectly flagging as spam. As a solution, it should be fairly simple to detect abuse of the bury, and make those people's buries ineffective.
So, how many different parsers did you want to see in the browser again?

You'd still need to support HTML4 somewhere. Supporting HTML5 separately just means duplicating the common parts of the parser. The simplicity boat has already sailed.
The distinction I usually make is that a "project manager" is responsible for scheduling: maintaining a picture of the current state of the project, the current best estimates for when things will happen next, and make sure that everything that must happen before the next release is accounted for somewhere. It's not a "management" role in the traditional sense (people management), but it's not an engineering role, either.

A product manager's job is to understand why people are (or are not) buying your product. They need to understand the market, keep track of competing products, and be able to make decisions (or offer advice) about which of a list of potential new features are most likely to make the customer's mouth water. It's fundamentally a marketing role, but, especially with a complicated product, can require a fair amount of technical skill to do.

Disclaimer: This is all Big Company language, but not necessarily identical to Google's language.
Yes You Need a Co-Founder
Karmic was such a disaster, and Lucid has been so stable, I like the theme, and I've just gotten Lucid all my machines. I don't see anything here that makes me want to leave a LTS release any time soon.
I'm actually working on this.

It's not in the valley but hopefully we'll be there soonish. More on this soon
Sitting behind an Audio console at work.
"[..] SEOmoz, is one of the most respected names in search engine optimization."

Wait, there are respected names in SEO?
Not sure I totally understand. But it looks like its just a rewrite of MongoMapper for Rails3? Seems like the structure is very similar.

What didn't you like about MongoMapper and/or Mongoid? Starting from scratch is a big job.
It's better than what USA Today would use. They'd tell you that if you converted it into pennies and stacked it straight up it would be the third largest building in the world.
nice! Are they getting a lot of traction? That's a pretty scary space to embark in.
So it is possible to raise VC money from the Triangle. Well deserved, Robbie. :-) Super happy that companies like yours are giving the area a great name! Keep up the hard work.
> Is 21 year really enough time for a new species to evolve?

I'd say it depends on the generational time of the species. It's likely for bacteria and such and much less likely for plants, I'd imagine.
Flagged as random reddit crap.
I hope you don't mind some XKCD, but the difference that immediately comes to my mind between Canada and the web is this: http://xkcd.com/180/
Recently launched by crcarlson: Gantto (www.gantto.com)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1579282

Do you have anything to do with it?
1. I just got 25k$ free and clear. Time to stop worrying for arbitrary goals for at least a month and enjoy life!

2. I'll find an another brain teaser that gives me 25k$ free and clear!

3. I'd do it exactly the same way I'd make $25,000 without being given 25k$ free and clear.

4. If I really would have to do it using the money, I'd donate the money to a random charity and use the fame and good will to organize nationwide boyscout door to door fundraiser in order to match my donation. Nobody said I'd have to make that 25k$ for myself.

5. Ok so I should make it for myself? I'd just add that 25k$ to my millions and millions of dollars, stash them all to a short period savings account and collect 25k$ in monthly interest. Nobody said you couldn't use your existing assets to "help a bit".. Why should skills be any different from capital in this respect?

6. Ok so I have to make the money for myself, I have to use the 25k$ doing it and I can't use any other assets? Oh boy.. I'm really not smart enough to pull that off :(
Thanks for pointing that out Phil. I'm not a lawyer, but I wouldn't call it illegal outright, as you say it may just require a fair amount of upfront legwork to arrange the structure of the service in a legal way. There do seem to be some exceptions the SEC offers, such as the below from their site. I agree it may be impossible to make it work after jumping through all the hoops, but if you succeeded all that red tape would make a decent barrier to entry for others.

From http://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/qasbsec.htm#eod6

"Section 3(b) of the Securities Act authorizes the SEC to exempt from registration small securities offerings. By this authority, we created Regulation A, an exemption for public offerings not exceeding $5 million in any 12-month period. If you choose to rely on this exemption, your company must file an offering statement, consisting of a notification, offering circular, and exhibits, with the SEC for review.
Regulation A offerings share many characteristics with registered offerings. For example, you must provide purchasers with an offering circular that is similar in content to a prospectus. Like registered offerings, the securities can be offered publicly and are not "restricted," meaning they are freely tradeable in the secondary market after the offering."

Also:
http://www.sec.gov/answers/regd.htm
MongoDB && MySQL
The best way to learn is to do. Start by getting them out of the building, and help them understand that entrepreneurship means getting outside of your comfort zone and focusing on things people actually want.

The lean startup machine weekend just held in NYC was like a 2.5 day customer development bootcamp and it was amazing. People pitched ideas, teams formed around the best ideas, and they had to get out and learn as much as possible. The creativity behind all the different ways to test and disprove ideas, and then evolve and improve those ideas, was quite something. Reach out to Trevor Owens who organized it, because he might inspire some great ideas for you.
If I'd known I could do this, I wouldn't be so cautious about app purchases!
Biphasic sleep schedules are arguably the default setting for non-industral society humans - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep - and while it appears to have benefits in terms of mood and alertness, it may not be entirely healthy as a way to reduce the total amount of sleep if you need more.
Shameless indeed. Your game doesn't seem to work in firefox (or at all) from what I can tell.
Perhaps. But the level of risk is so high that the bond would have to pay a very high coupon. But by perhaps bundling startups together the way they do for mortgages it could lower the risk level. We could have SBS's or Startup Backed Securities. Har.
Call me an engineer, but I don't understand why anyone would dismiss security through obscurity just because it's theoretically useless. If you can reduce the lifetime expected value of successful attacks on your system, it should be considered a win regardless of how you do it. (Of course, relying solely on security through obscurity is a sure-fire way to greatly increase said EV.)
While MongoDB has MapReduce
If you are looking to store web logs and then do ad hoc queries you
might/should be using Hadoop (depending on how big your logs are)<p>While MongoDB has MapReduce (built in) it is there to simulate SQL GROUP BY
and not for large scale analytics by any means.
Any idea how Sprowtt was planning to get around the law if it is illegal?

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/sprowtt-marketplace
Generally on Flippa is that sites sell for more when they have at least one of the following (preferably more):

over a year old
high PageRank
lots of inlinks
steady profit
lots of unique content

If you can buy a site with decent traffic and PR for say $300, take 3-6 months to put more content on it (50 x $2/article) , build backlinks ($50), and do a little PPC to increase traffic and Alexa rank ($100), revenue and profit should increase to the point where you can sell the site for about $1000+.
Firstly, MongoModel was started back in November '09 when both MongoModel and and Mongoid were much less mature than they are now. I spent some time contributing patches to MongoMapper but stumbled as I was working on edge rails.

MongoMapper in particular has come a long way since then but still has a few issues in my mind. For example, attributes are converted to/from their mongo representation every single time they are accessed, rather than only when the model is saved or loaded. I also believe MongoModel has a nicer model for typecasting property values (see http://gist.github.com/287379 for an example), and I disagree with the use of has_many associations for embedded collections.

MongoModel isn't perfect either, but it has been the path of least resistance for me in getting my app running on MongoDB.
Yes, it's pretty easy to set this up with security groups, you can restrict ports to only open to machines within another security group.

So lets say you've got memcached, mysql and a bunch of webservers.

On the memcached security group you open 11211 to the webservers group

On the db security group you open 3306 to webservers

On the webserver group you open 80 and 443 to everyone.
The Programming Language Sub-Reddits.
Google gets complete win in Rosetta Stone trademark case
Updated Contact Info:

0. Website: http://sbhackerspace.com

1. Email: sbhackerspace@gmail.com

2. Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/sbhackerspace

3. IRC Channel: #sbhackerspace on FreeNode
This sounds wonderful, but a bit too much wistful thinking.
That ESPN article felt like a better dive into the tech world of gaming than most articles in tech blogs or magazines.

If you've ever played Madden, I highly recommend the article.
This thought has made my day. Despite the petabytes of data going through the web, something about the tangibility of books still has a huge place in my mind.
The Rhino is cheap and has an awesome patio, I'm in ;)
This. Others game social media sites to drive traffic to sites that profit them. This is the first I've heard of people doing it for political reasons though.
Why Facebook (and FB Questions) Threatens Google's Core Business
Does this mean someone has figured out what REST really means besides not using ? and using http verbs?
> Each time we leave this planet we punch a whole in our ozone layer that can't be repaired!

Can you provide a source for the ozone whole claim? Where did I mention socialism?
Nobody bothered to refute you because the onus was on you to substantiate your accusations. You provided hearsay, but no evidence.
A yearlong investigation to uncover a voting ring on Digg isn't impressive, it's bloody incompetence. It shouldn't have taken more than a week, if that. I left Digg, gosh, three, four years ago now, because it was pretty obvious even then that Digg was basically just a collection of voting cabals of various levels of interconnectedness. People were writing articles about it and stuff. People were writing how-to articles, which channels on IRC and how to set up your own IRC-based rings.

Talking about how a conservative group briefly has the upper hand is like observing which pig has briefly risen to the top of the muck pile. Don't worry, I'm sure counter-conservatives will be rallying behind this story to overpower them in another iteration of the endlessly-boring cycle and I look forward to reading about how it singlehandedly proves liberalism is a cabalistic conspiracy on a wide collection of right-leaning sites run by the sort of people who still think Digg votes matter.
It's clearly not just YC. I'm not sure what's happening. It could be the leading edge of a very uneven recovery. It could be a secular trend of more interest in investing in startups; i.e. a recovery from the previous crash. Or it could be due to the super-angels, who are more aggressive in early stage deals than VCs.
Whereoscope (YC S10) Gives Parents An Easy Way To Track Where Their Kids Are
Funny, I thought the exact opposite.

He invested $7 million and five years of sweat to come out with $39 million. If he was a passive investor, a 5x return would be decent. But he also poured five years of his life into the company, earning (presumably) a below-market salary and working 3x as much as a "normal" job.

Mind you, I don't think he's devasted at the result, but I bet he bad been hoping for much, much more.
I hope they also introduce a real "try before you buy" option for all paid apps that wish to support a trial period.

Today's new feature seems like a promotion of apps that offer a "lite" version. It makes "lite" apps more discoverable, but doesn't come close to offering a trial option (and I'm not sure why 9to5mac believes that making a few free apps discoverable will help "fight app piracy")
I checked AdStruct out as well. I asked for a billboard in California: "no results found". Bad. So I said "give me a billboard anywhere". It came up with one result.

It's not great to launch a marketplace that is empty.
Two New Paths to the Dream: Regeneration
Growing up with cellphones was bad enough. Kids need their space. Whereoscope has made the lives of lots of kids slightly worse.
The volume of shipping varied at different times, but it was always a huge component of European economies. There were points in the preindustrial period when several percent of English workers were on ships at any given time. The percentage would have been higher in the Netherlands. And investing in shipping was definitely not limited to the high and mighty; ships were rarely owned outright, but were divided into shares, and I've read of shares as small as 1/64 of a ship.
I sold a website on Flippa for $90k. The site sold a single WordPress plugin I wrote and was selling for $97 per license.
The author says that English doesn't have an explicit way of expressing xor, but I'd disagree. I'd say that the default behaviour of "or" in English is xor. If you say "I'm going to go to the fair or the mall", you're saying you'll go to one or the other, but not both.

Expressing the || operator in english requires extra qualification, like "I'm going to go to the fair or the mall or both".
Wait... hasn't this idea come and gone about 10 times in the last 10 years. I remember when I begged 37 signals to add this as a small feature about 4 years ago and they laughed it off. Also, some of the text in the biographies seem a bit exaggerated.
How To Dominate the New York Times Crossword Puzzle
>Pretend for a second that you realize that girls read HN too.

Honestly, I don't think it's very many. There was a poll a few days ago and I think the male to female ratio was was something like 9:1.

And I'm pretty sure I can sometimes (with very high confidence) identify women who don't read Hacker News.
Nasa warns solar flares from 'huge space storm' will cause devastation
Cool, thanks for the explanation. Btw, mongoid has a new association dsl that I think makes way more sense. embedded_in, embeds_many, referenced_in, references_many. I bet the project would love to see you as a contributor.
Check out the Stanford Sleep Book to learn more about sleep debt: http://stanfordsleep.ning.com/
I don't think kids would care.
Not only kids -- adults care about privacy less and less every year.
Depending on where you live, the hottest hours of the day are usually between 12 - 5. Maybe it's instinctual for predators to not want to do stuff during those hours?
It's not micromanagement.
It's monitoring.

My concern though is that application monitors where iPhone is, not exactly where kid is.