skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that's the point. You're already being served by a one-size-fits-all algorithm at any place that doesn't know you. Those places are guessing at how to treat you based on how other people act en masse. By learning about you, their algorithm can adapt so that it isn't generic.
Well you gotta try DuckDuckGo: http://duckduckgo.com/?t=mattc58

I've switched to it for most of my ad hoc searching. Occasionally I use Google still for some things.

I also though have 4 separate google accounts for email, which I can't really get away from. Well I guess I could but I probably won't for a while.
> Harvard is now cheaper than some states schools, that's ridiculous.

Which schools would those be? And are you using out-of-state numbers?
Congrats on your success! You know you have a good product when people want it before it's even officially public.
"Eligible countries"? Please. This coming from a cloud computing global economy no-borders company?

What kind of a challenge is that? We are a startup based in Poland — neighboring EU countries can participate, and we can't, even though it is the same European Union.

I find it sad that companies so often arbitrarily exclude the majority of the world and everyone just accepts it, rationalizing all the time. I believe that every time such exclusions are made we should stand up for whomever is excluded and shout. We are past the days of national borders as far as Internet goes.
Right place, right time, good product, and a little luck. That's awesome to read, hear, and see. I wish them the best and hope all my endeavors bear such tail winds.
> If no country exists that conforms to his expectations, perhaps he should revise his expectations or design his own country.

Unfortunately, the second option there isn't really possible anymore.

> How can someone respond constructively to that?

Have you never encountered this political opinion? Maybe we travel in different circles, but this seems like a pretty common line of argument to me. However, you're right: it's hard to respond to constructively, because you two are operating on different fundamental axioms: 'initiation of force is sometimes okay' versus 'initiation of force is never okay.' This is a pretty big and decisive difference, made from two different ideologies... there's no real way to argue if one is better or worse.

This is getting fairly off-topic, though. If you'd like a further discussion of the libertarian viewpoint on taxes, feel free to email me. I'm not exactly a libertarian anymore, but I was for long enough to explain it to you fairly thoroughly.
I'm going to second all the advice to keep applying and show yourself off. Programmers are a dime a dozen, but good ones aren't. In fact, good ones are pretty scarce. If you're as skilled as you say you are, you just need some persistence and a few of the tricks discussed here, and I'm sure you'll get hired.
I've been trying to wean myself of the google habit but I find myself returning to them over and over again. So far nobody seems to do search as good as they do.

Maybe the only way to get rid of google is to accept that you won't be finding things as easily any more. But that would automatically give everybody a competitive advantage over you.
Thanks Macca. I'll add this to my to-do list.
Great PR for Heroku and Nezumi:

If we were on a cheap VPS, we would have crumbled to pieces like Cobb's limbo in Inception. As we were on Heroku, we could simply increase the number of dynos. I still vividly remember when our traffic hit. I was away from my desk, so I reached for my iPhone and dialed us up to 20 dynos using Nezumi. A few seconds later, we had scaled.
Hey I'm 18 too :)

Don't you want to learn things like theory of computation, graph theory, or compiler design/implementation?
Nomadic implies you barely spend a couple years in one place at a time. Homeownership to stay put implies that you stay put for decades, because mortgages are usually 30 years. Isn't there anything in between?
Hi drlisp-

Actually, neither Andrey (my cofounder) nor I (Jen) graduated from any of those schools.

I am an English major (with a minor in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies of all things), and Andrey graduated with a CS degree from UToronto (he's Canadian, eh).

We started by bootstrapping the company for 6 months.

You bring up an interesting point about our current reliance on Facebook and Twitter.

We recently added email functionality to help with that, but if you've got ideas about how we might improve we'd love to hear them.
I wouldn't do elance or rent-a-coder for a few reasons:

Firstly, you might not be creating stuff that you will want to put on your resume/portfolio (my experience from that world is clients who want hacks and weird specs).

You will also find that going rates are pretty low because you are competing with off-shore labour (this is not a rant against off-shore, just an observation that this is how common markets work)
I like the idea and love to see it working for a long time, but I totally see GMAIL doing something like this in the future or hopefully buying you out...
Interesting, and this is a suggestion we've heard before. Thanks drlisp.

We're working on a method to get rewards after a verified challenge has been completed - that will launch later this fall.

If you have a specific activity/prize you'd like to see, please let us know. I'll do my best to close a deal for you :).
ATT accidentally turned off SMS on my phone. I use Google Voice (android), so I just enabled SMS checking. Saves me up to $20/mo, though I do need to be somewhere with data service to get a message through.

To me, the phone is a mobile data platform that has a neat voice feature my grandma likes to use sometimes.
Great work guys. Ride the rocket as high as you can!

(You're missing an opportunity to funnel people to your site from your blog. You should have a little PR blurb and link at the top of the page)

Also... Additional respect that you took the time to send some love to your service and infrastructure providers.
QuickBooks proper is nasty, but one very compelling reason many businesses use it is that you can hand over your "QuickBooks file" to almost any accounting firm; they can do your taxes or solve an accounting problem.

This is hugely valuable for companies like mine that don't have full time accountants but do have an office manager that does bookkeeping.

I wish this company the best of luck, but I'm not sure how much room their is between firms that are outgrowing spreadsheets but don't yet need something a big accounting firm will also use.
I got my first job at 18 as a developer, I never went to college and it hasn't done me any harm.

Granted, I don't know much about compiler design and the like -- but all of that would be theoretic for me in web development. Instead everything I know is more practically orientated - real skills directly related to web development etc.

Whenever I've needed to learn something, a few days reading has quickly groked most stuff for me.
Nebulous Notes for iOS, a text editor for Dropbox
Numen Camera 1.0 - iPhone App by db-db
mattmaroon - how about starting with 10 situps? :)
Great write-up. I'd heard of you but couldn't remember what your product was. Have you thought about putting a PR-type blurb at the top of your blog, like "Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox." with an obvious link to your website?
Though, in fact, the US government can loan people $100 in exchange for $90 in ten years.

Or, equivalently, they can print $10 bills and hand them out to people. Simpler that way.

In practice, of course, it is preferable to give people jobs to do in exchange for their $10 bills, like fixing our broken roads or sewers, or building nice public infrastructure. That way we keep our workers and factories in practice, and we don't waste productive capacity, and we distribute the money according to fair rules, and we get some nicely paved streets.

But when you have to stimulate the economy and you're desperate you could literally "fire up the helicopter" (as the metaphor goes) and start dropping dollar bills from the sky.

Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve may not be able to do this. Deficit spending takes an act of Congress, and for various terrifying structural and political reasons the US Congress has punted on the problem of managing the economy.
The concept reminds me of another site I ran across recently: http://endor.se/
"It is likely that in his long freefall of more than five minutes, he will exceed the speed of sound - the first person to do so without the aid of a machine."

If he can reach 120k feet, I bet there is a machine involved in the process. Why not just say he's the first person to do it through freefall?
If you were 18, fresh to the industry and able to relocate, why wouldn't you relocate to the Bay Area - where anyone that can code will probably be able to pull $70k straight out the door.
You're absolutely right about our initial business model. We marketed 'activity campaigns' as an adjunct to traditional online 'ad campaigns.'

Instead of providing CPMS, we sold to Cabot based on a "CPA" model (clicks per activity).

We saw early that this pseudo-ad model would provide us with a nice small chunk of change, but would be mostly a biz-dev company and challenging to scale.

As a result, we're pivoting and moving towards a CPA2 model, where CPA = completions per action (this is where verifying the user has completed an action becomes vital).
Hey, China, we just debased our currency after jump starting your market-based economy, training your next generation of businesspeople and engineers, and taking some of your plastic and lead paint. Have fun with your 2 billion person market, suckers.
To the founders:
Congrats and thanks for sharing your reflections with us.

Is there a Rapportive API in the works?

I would love to integrate Rapportive into some apps I'm currently working on instead of plugging into the Gmail sidebar.
Appsaurus is looking for an iOS developer
Isn't there an equivalent of "Advanced Placement" in Canada? I.e. if you know the material of that freshman course, you can demonstrate it via an exam and be credited for the course.
Front end looks nice and poppy actually. I'm confused as to what to do with it as well though.
I don't know about you guys, but if I were interviewing a candidate, most of my technical questions would be data structures and algorithms. Knowledge of frameworks and languages is good and all, but it doesn't really test how a programmer thinks about a problem. I don't think many people would be able to write a hash table in C without having at least some background from college.
Agreed, wasnt aware of Nezumi before this read.

Well done to all involved.
Thanks tsmith, do you currently use any devices like Nike+ or FitBit or Philips Direct Life to monitor your exercise?

We're examining each device.
Good points. Why not get corporate sponsorship? Can't bikes be kept in designated secure locations? Being able to bike around NYC would be great. Perhaps with a little ingenuity it will become a reality.
Bankrupt means you cannot pay your bills today.

The US has many future obligations, which I'd best characterize as "indebted". We can easily meet them if we war a little bit less and tax people like we used to.
Here's my take on this:

We will never be able to read everything. The question is: will I spend my time allotted for newsreading by reading the most important things, or will I randomly read important and unimportant things. The real problem is the lack of importance information in the RSS protocol. As a feed creator, no matter how many items I publish each day, people will be unhappy - some want more, some less.

Somebody has to choose which news elements are more important than other elments in a feed. And the only entity to do that is a human. We can outsource it to all users (like Google Reader does with its "like" button and the "magic" view, but this only works for very popular feeds in practice). We could let a third party do it (basically an editor. This makes for complicated 3-way protocol, plus this editor probably wants to get paid). Or we could ask the feed creator to give each item an importance value (1-100 or so). The feed creator is in a unique position: he already invested some time writing the entry (so adding a number isn't a lot of additional effort), plus he already has a certain point of view visible in his writing, so adding importance information wouldn't add a lot of surprises.

RSS readers can then work with that additional metadata in different ways: show a cutoff slider (between 1-100), or prompt the user how many minutes he intends to spend reading and compiling a good selection of all sources.

Options: average the numbers of each feed to catch those that try to gamble the system cut their numbers down.

Suggestions, feedback welcome.
Yeah, I'm going to flag this, as I try to do to all non-tech related politics sites.
I agree with the other comments. A simplified UI and some promotion, and the traffic should go up.

So it's a great idea for the site. On the other hand, what's different about this site vs, say, clicking on "Similar" in a Google search results page?

I'm just curious...if there's certain functionality that's better on moreofit.com, I'd personally be more likely to use your site in the future, rather than just using Google.
True, but when you find a Martian index fund that pays better than anything you can find on Earth, be sure to give me a call.

It would actually be a good sign at this point if investors lost interest in buying government debt (from the US or from other governments). Because then they would find something else to invest in... like maybe something that promised some gain, something that would put people to work and make use of idle capacity. The fact that everyone is anxious to hoard cash or cash equivalents, even at miserable interest rates, is an ominous sign: When deflation comes, hoarding cash for as long as you can is a paying proposition, and the economy spirals to a halt as everyone tries to wait through as much deflation as possible before buying anything.
I don't want to discharge my student loans. I just want to be able to refinance them again based on current market rates.
I wonder how are they going to make money off this.
Yeah, I had looked into their API before and it's a good option. Using tags to figure out the related links could give decent results to start off with. The results will be suboptimal though, as any automated approach would be, since "relevance" is more complicated than simply having a few matching tags. I hadn't seen moreofit.com before, seems to give pretty good results, so I may have been underestimating how far you can take tag analysis.
Guestlist link was broken, removed "manage" from the URL and it worked: http://guestlistapp.com/events/27732
Looks like it checks out. Thanks.
Sure, buy a house when you get somewhere, sell it when you are finished there and accept the losses due to that suboptimal process as costs of the lifestyle. You can't be picky when you buy it, you'll have to sell in a hurry, you may have to pay fines for paying of mortgages at an increased rate, etc. However, it can be done.
Tour can be found at http://www.geteval.com/tour/
Jessica, I signed-up about 3 months ago. It took me quite a while to decide or not to give you my Paypal password, but I did. I had a problem with my account (Paypal being in Spain) because you had a problem with the dots and commas. The app thought I had 14.000$ when in reality I had 14.00$ (the problem is still there)

I wrote to you about it and never heard back. I left and haven't logged in again.

Is not that the bug was a big deal, is that you expect me to trust you with my money info, and won't even get back at me via email.

Maybe you should look into this.

Overall, I really like your startup. Congratulations!
You didn't factor in the very high possibility of someone dropping out.

Google "college dropout rates". Consensus figures seem to be around 40% of enrollees don't have a degree 6 years later.
The thing is, only the participants themselves can truly know what their goals are, so there is no one in a position to gainsay

In that case, your entire argument is tautological. Two parties entering into a transaction both benefit. How do we know? Because they entered into it, so it must be good for them. How do we test this supposition? We can't, because there is no way to accumulate a list of voluntary transactions and see whether the parties benefitted or not.

By the same token, we can argue that anyone taking a decision benefits. How do we know? because they took a decision. Junkies benefit from heroin. Consumers benefit from sub-prime debt. Lending institutions benefitted from investing in junk bonds. I benefit from spending time at work arguing this point with you.

I am going to go my way and leave you to go yours. If you believe that anything two nations do voluntarily is automatically good for both of them, who am I to undermine your faith?
Racket's hygienic macro system seems to be a heavier cognitive load as well (although it certainly has its own benefits, and some would say it's essential). I really like in Clojure and Arc how easy it is to pound out a macro when you need one.

I have less experience in CL and Racket. I would think that since CL's macros are unhygienic, they would be easy to write as they are in Clojure. It could be that I just haven't gotten the hang of Racket's macros yet, and that once you do they aren't any harder. Let me know if this is the case.
Kinky!
and any other good webmail alternative to gmail? HN Startup anyone?
Very nice! Some thoughts:
Is the average fuel efficiency really 30 MPG? Seems kind of high. Maybe you could select your car with the average MPG per model?
Could you check local gas prices for more real-time accuracy instead of a stock $2.50?
I think the list should just be cities, and on the results page, you could have
NY - LGA: $$$ / NY - JFK: $$$
because as a traveler bound to New York, I would have to select each NY option, submit, go back, re-submit, just to see which airport would be cheaper. One stop shopping, and all that.
Great job with it so far!
looking forward to my bailout
Well I was really referring to students who's parents are making less then 120k if I remember correctly, tuition is now waved. Effectively making it cheaper. I do not know how many percent of their student body fits this but those who's parent make more than this should in effect be able to afford the tuition rate.

I meant it a tongue-in-cheek.
Thanks Clay... now they have some NICE call to actions.
Managing Complex Changes Equation (1 page pdf)
8 eyetracking studies from the web's biggest blogs.
My perspective is that people are better at what they're doing when they're paying attention. Give them hints (signs) and shortcuts (straight roads), and their minds wander to something else, until something exceptional happens. There are few if any exceptionally good things that can happen in a car (most revolve around avoiding exceptionally bad things).

In becoming a "native" Boston driver, I have noticed that not all drivers pay equal attention. In other places I have lived, the attention that other drivers paid was not as obvious, because roads were straight and everyone was a "good" (rigid rule obeying) driver most of the time. The roads here are twisty, bumpy, often full of holes, merge in odd manners, have roundabouts, unconventional signs, and generally more difficult to drive. Yet I seem to see fewer road-side accidents on the roads that I drive every day.

Drivers new to the area see narrow lanes (more frequent lane violations), reduced traffic control (fewer clear opportunities to change lanes or turn), and faster drivers as chaotic and aggressive. It is also scary for tourists to cross the street in the midst of this apparent chaos (you'll see natives walking right through). So you might say that Boston has been in this sort of traffic chaos for a rather long time, and it has never been significantly more dangerous in reality (certainly in perception). I can only conclude that drivers who rely on a rigid rule-set have difficulty in unexpected situations, but when the exceptional is unexceptional, they will develop a more sophisticated model.

The net benefit of signs might not be to increase safety, but to allow for lazier, more distracted drivers. Some signs are generally helpful (construction / traffic / drawbridge ahead ), but I would like to see a general reduction. People are smart, and only do what is required. We can tell them not to talk on the phone or "drive distracted" with little effect. Give them a couple of (hopefully temporarily) bad experiences while they are not paying attention, and they will certainly pay more attention all the time.

EDIT: I should also point out that many people refuse to drive in Boston, making the driving population more self-selective than other cities. I don't think that this is a problem, but as society becomes more reliant on driving it becomes one. People who do not drive here can still get around by means of the subway, cabs, or plain walking (Boston isn't geographically large). I can't say the same of most other American cities.
well there is zoho
You'll thank yourself for taking this step now. Remember that finding paying gigs also takes time, and beggars can't be choosers (of clients)
Yes, another non-SV based startup funder. If talent and funding can come together, there is no reason we should have to move to SV.
DuckDuckGo certainly does the trick for general web search, but like you I'm really tied in to Gmail/Talk/Reader for my personal life and Google Apps for Business for my work life. Unfortunately, replacing these isn't entirely up to me at this point and I imagine a lot of people are in this boat.
Whatever happened to studying for the sake of it? You know, like learning new things & stuff. When did that shift from studying as exercise for the spirit to studying as a way of fattening your wallet come about?
> Having said that, the EFF's claim that "lawful content" is insufficiently vague does seem fair.

Really? That seemed the least substantial to me: this is a proposal to the US Congress. It seemed obvious that "lawful" means "what our legislators in Congress deem lawful" in that context.

<insert disclaimer about these opinions being my own and not my employer's>
Hey Fred, thanks for your kind words.

Yes, there is a Rapportive API. It doesn't allow for Rapportive to go inside other applications, but it does allow folks to embed their own applications inside Rapportive. Would that be useful at all to you?

For example, MailChimp recently released an integration which allows Rapportive users to see how the people who email them interact with their email newsletters. Checkout http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/mailchimp-in-your-gmail-with-r... and this funky video: http://blip.tv/file/3859911

There are more of these Rapportive applications, or Raplets, at http://raplets.com

You can find the documentation at:
http://groups.google.com/group/raplet-dev
http://groups.google.com/group/raplet-announce
That's not a startup, it's a Gmail feature. Amazes me what gets financing nowadays...
The obvious guess would be sell it to Yahoo/Microsoft/Google, but I hope they have a more creative solution than that.
They mean his acceleration will be without the aid of a machine.
I wanted to like bing and I do use it.

But I find that for many things that I search on (hockey-related, for example) I more often than not get what I consider to be better results from google.
From a quick Google search, the terminal velocity of a human being is roughly 120 mph. The speed of sound (at sea level) is 761 mph.

How is this feat possible?
Thanks :) You're absolutely right, we need to customise the posterous theme a tad. Edit: added blurb, not yet a link.
Interesting you put Apple vs. Repub and Android v.s Liberal in the same sentence.
Drupal Review
We have plans which we're going to test in the coming months. As much as we can say right now is that it will be freemium: we intend to keep the core service you see today free, and to charge for premium features.