skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To the list of things business cofounders could bring, I would also add "deep domain knowledge." For example, if it's a site on selling foos to wumpats, you'd better have spent all of your years before bschool in either the foo industry, working for wumpats, or hopefully some of both.

As a tip, though, I usually just ask bschooler-types a few basic questions like 1) how many foos are bought today 2) how do wumpats make their purchasing cycle (i.e. enterprise, individual, etc.) 3) who are the existing competitors in this space... Most bschoolers, despite having these questions drilled into them over and over during their 60k/year schooling, don't bother doing the legwork to investigate them before looking for a "technical cofounder."
Let's just keep it down to taste, OK? Saying that one OS is clearly better than another is just begging for a flame war. From a technical perspective I can tell you that you are wrong in many cases. For background, I use OS X as my primary system, develop for Linux and the kernel, and work for Microsoft.
Also, I'd like to add that even with the overhead of explicit p and html tags, this ends up being the same or fewer characters and fewer lines than traditional popular template systems including Jinja, django, and ERB
Since when does the shape of a city define it as being "real" or not? Maybe I'm missing something.

Any modern city that had all that prime beach land waiting to be developed would probably grow in a similar manner. Now that Dubai is rather "long" it's growing out into the desert too. e.g. newer areas such as Barsha and whatever that area is called where the dragon market is (edit: Mirdif).

If you don't like Manhattan then it might just look like a strip of tall buildings sandwiched between two straights, but you can't say that it's not a real city.

Dubai is certainly a giant bubble, but it's as real a city as any other city.
Nabi Sulaiman & Jin
Cryptography is usually in the intersection between NP and co-NP: NP means a yes-answer is easy to check, co-NP means a no-answer is easy to check. If you are trying to break some encryption you can usually tell quite easily whether you get the right key or not.

It would be a major breakthrough (comparable to P=NP) if anyone could show that the intersection of NP and co-NP is equal to NP.

Some people tried to make an encryption system out of the knapsack problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle%E2%80%93Hellman_knapsack...). It makes a good read about how a promising cryptosystem was broken.

Some interesting tid-bit: Even if P != NP, it could still be that most instances of NP-hard problems are easy to solve. (I.e. it's possible that even for NP-hard problems the expected running time is polynomial for all realistic probability distribution of instances. For certain definitions of `realistic'.)
It is unfortunate that they didn't set up their procedure in a way that was compatible with informed consent. Surely that could have been done easily, had it been considered in advance. They thought things out pretty well - choosing genes that aren't exactly disease oriented - but just not all the way. It would definitely have been fun for the students who chose to participate.
The one great thing about having started at startup, is that your actually good at building things. 95% of the employees I know couldnt say that.

Use this amazing skill that you now have. Get a job in Manhattan, make 200K a year for a couple of years and then try again.

If your worried that this will make you fat and lazy then theres a way to make sure this doesnt happen:
1. Never listen to what your boss says but be cordial as you would be with someone you met on the street.
2. Do whatever is best for the system and for sales of the system.
3. Say no to office politics in all its forms.

If you follow the above 3 rules (ie no brown nosing whatsoever) then you'll see that, even in a corporate environment, the only reason they'll keep you there is because you know what your doing.
That comment is by a James Katt; the attribution is below the remark, not above.
The Seed Funding Phenomenon Bubble of 2010
Yes. If this is how the rich countries handle these things, imagine how badly the poor countries handle them.
Even in NYC, this is true. The majority of coders are not the mythical hackers of the valley, just as most businessmen aren't amazing. Just partner with people who work hard and are great, as there's enough work to go around in a start-up.
China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy
I hit TimesWire to see whats happening 'now':

http://www.nytimes.com/timeswire/

I also swing by Kottke's blog:

http://kottke.org/
There is a discussion to be had about whether or not the students should receive their test results.

An extremely one-sided discussion. Genetic testing is already very useful, and it's only going to get more useful.

First, there is the issue of our limited genetic knowledge.

Our knowledge is incomplete, but it's far from useless. Genetic testing lets us know what foods or drugs are particularly harmful or beneficial. It lets people know of future disease risks. Knowing about these risks helps people change their lifestyles to reduce risk, or at least plan for the future. While today's test results aren't 100% accurate, they give the best probability estimate based on currently available science. To say that no information is better than this is absurd.

People don't want to restrict other diagnostic tests, even though they can be similarly inaccurate. It's simple technophobia that causes newer tests to be regarded with suspicion.

Also, there's the issue of rights. It's my DNA. I have trillions of copies of it in my body. I am literally made of this stuff. If human beings have any right over their own bodies then they should be able to read their DNA.
I think the parent is spot on.

Just some background in brief: Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP in the singular) are single base changes in the genome. Given the size of the genome (approximately 3 billion bases), the mutational rate, and the time since all modern human populations diverged from a single ancestral group (sorry, no number off the top of my head) we should expect that each position has mutated no more than once. So, for the most part SNPs come in two flavors, a minor allele and a major allele. If the SNP is associated with disease, one allele is called the risk allele, while the other is the protective. Down to business.

For a SNP and a disease, we can compute the odds ratio or relative risk (there is a difference) for that SNP. Suppose you have the risk allele, the relative risk is 2, and the frequency of disease is 1% -- congratulations, you have a nominal 2% chance of developing the disease. Alright, onto the problems: For most complex diseases, this doesn't help us in the slightest and is non-informative. There are a lot of markers, these diseases are rare, genetic risk might well be subsumed by environmental effects. (Good rule of thumb: Don't smoke cigarettes, don't be obese. Eat your vegetables. I'm a scientist, not a doctor.)

If you test someone, you'll invariably get a pile of risk alleles for some disease, just because there are a lot of diseases and a lot of SNPs. This will invariably cause distress in at least some people. The harm done to the subjects would clearly exceeds the benefits to them. Given the study design there's no reasonable way to obtain informed consent from the subjects if they're to be informed of the results. Without informed consent, you can't gather the data in the first place.
But exactly what are people doing in Dubai? What holds up the economy? Is there manufacturing? R&D? A healthy financial district?

It seems like it was all built for "something" to show up, and it never did. So everyone is just busy hustling each other. A city full of nightclub owners.
Thats a good point. I also worry about confusion with spelling and the Webby awards.

The original name was Webify, but I switched to weby because 1. IBM owns the trademark, and 2. Weby is short.

This is all still in development, so if you can offer a better name then I'm all ears. The short name is important to me because I aim for this to be minimal.
CouchDB's killer feature (not mentioned on the linked page) is of course, offline replication. So you can take a copy of the database with you, work in disconnected mode, and synchronize later. And this can be done with any number of users, all writing and synchronizing independently.
Its maybe not entirely true, but still generally the case IMO. You really didnt start seeing the mass of articles critical of Dubai until mid-2008 or so.
I'm not sure that we're talking about the same type of genetic testing. Perinatal genetic testing is highly useful, because you can literally save a person's life by early knowledge of genetic diseases.

Getting GWAS data from 23andMe, on the other hand, is generally not so much useful as it is entertaining.

The best probability estimate for most adult diseases still comes from history and the physical exam, not from genetic tests.

> Also, there's the issue of rights. It's my DNA. I have trillions of copies of it in my body. I am literally made of this stuff. If human beings have any right over their own bodies then they should be able to read their DNA.

I am most sympathetic to that argument.
Only that most people already expect P != NP.

But as you say, P = NP would really make things too easy.
How to prepare for the next major sun blast
Sounds like the relationship between Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.
Building and growing a business often require that a person be able to go without making any money for a quite a while, so by definition, these people are rare. I don't think people with the talent to grow a business are that rare, but people with the talent and a conducive life situation are.

And actually, even building a technically mundane product is quite hard, but more for the same reasons building a business is. It's a prototype that's easy to build, but buckling down to cross all the t's and dot the i's, and perform the boring work to make it a real product takes perseverance.
Sure but, to clarify, by India I meant the sheer population figures of any occupation or other demographic. It's true everywhere if you're competing online, but here we're used to physically seeing it.
Took me just about 7 years. Had ~27K in debt.

The key for me was locking in the low interest rate when I consolidated the 8-10 federal loans I had into one big one at 4%. Made the payments automatic and threw in extra cash when I could. Once I was above the cutoff for being able to write off the interest I started tripling and quadrupling the payments.

In hindsight they should've been done with sooner, but I got into a really expensive hobby after college (long-course and ironman triathlons) which ate into my disposable income.
I think the takeaway is that "Good business partners are hard to find, and good tech partners are hard to find. Bad partners of either variety are plentiful."

Hackers tend to notice the plethora of bad business types, because we're bombarded by them. Business founders tend to notice the lack of good tech co-founders because all their experience is with bad ones. However, we can observe that there are startups with good ideas, good business partners, and good tech partners. They're out there.

If you're a tech or business type and are looking for a co-founder, but can't find one, consider that perhaps the problem is that you aren't compelling enough to attract the right kind of co-founder. Make sure you're bringing all you can to the table, and you'll find someone to do it with you.
Optimize Web Page Load Time
I dont understand why coders have to be mythical hackers. Isn't all it matters is if you can get the shit done? The reason I am saying this is cause lot of times there are comments that for some reason give "hackers" a higher credibility when coders and hackers are essentially same here. Of course there are projects that require real hacking to complete the job, but most of the times a normal coder can do it as well. Maybe I don't understand the difference.
If someone has the luxury of choice they would probably opt for a real DSL, or a language such as Haskell that lets you define real operators.

Also, not everyone who uses Ruby likes crap like this. Just as not everyone who uses Python dislikes crap like this.
You're quite welcome. I didn't think a generic "I did it in x years" post was what you were looking for, since it doesn't really mean anything. At least with some details you'll have a bit of context to compare with your own situation.
By the way, prime factoring is not proven to be NP-complete. So it could turn out that prime factoring is in P, without implying P=NP.

Other cryptography schemes would still remain viable, even if RSA broke down. (As long as nobody proves P=NP.)
Vim 7.3 released
I used to think marketing was BS too, but I've come to think it's just a different sort of hacking.
What purpose did your meta comment serve?
The better justification is just: It's nice to tell people about hard problems. We do not have to expect them to solve them for us.
15-24 month life for HP netbooks?
> I love the people, the food and the culture. I love what I hear from young graduates, I like seeing people smile more and new businesses pop up everywhere.

I am sure I would love the people and the food. However the culture and the business environment is rotten.

> ...but the risks are manageable, especially when you "zoom out" and face the entire spectrum of possibilities of why your business may fail.

When my business fails there I want it to be because I screwed up in my execution, marketing, finance, but not because I didn't bribe the right official enough. If that is the risk, then screw it, I don't want to deal with it there. I am not that kind of a person.

And culture. Well, folklore and such, is great. If by culture you mean a culture of alcoholism, bribery and corruption -- then I don't want anything to do with it.

> Be my guest and stay out, it only makes me easier to compete because I'm in.

Agreed. Will do.
There is more to business logic than database calls.

And there is more to modern web development than your backend language and your templating language (hello javascript, jquery, yui, mootools, etc.).

Again, as I stated earlier, reducing the context switch time can help, and this may be low-hanging fruit for very small teams, but almost every Python programmer will be coming into this having used one of the big Python templating languages. And the moment you get a frontend person with usable jquery, yui, mootools, etc., experience, most of this "oh, try this new templating language that isn't like any other templating language you've probably ever used" is going right out the window; they are going to rewrite everything in the language of their choosing (it happened with our guy and django -> jinja, which was the right thing).
If you're on the fence about applying, do it! YC is without a doubt one of the most transformative experiences in my life. Even if you don't get in, you will learn a lot about yourself by going through the application process. Just do it!
About 2): If somebody gives you the minimal solution and some additional information, you can verify it in P. The size of the additional information is no more than polynomial in the size of the problem.
One example doesn't prove the rule.
Going further than that, given Google hired a number of staff that had worked on the Java implementation at Sun, and given that the head of Google was present at Sun as the Java patent-and-copyright trap was being constructed, it seems inconceivable to me that Dalvik would have been permitted to violate Sun's patents.
I wonder how a startup would handle these any better than the government, especially since there's no money in it.
Since you are looking -- http://quippd.com

Disclaimer, it is my project (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1454934) but I'm trying to stock it with good stuff. Hope you browse.
You're incorrect. People do want to restrict inaccurate diagnostic tests.

The false positive rate for some Down syndrome tests runs at around 5%. True negative is around 80% (Quad test). The rate of Down syndrome pregnancies amongst 40 year olds is approximately 1%. If the quad test says that a fetus has Down syndrome, the probability that it actually does is only 14%. The story is even worse amongst younger mothers (0.1% disease incidence) -- 1.6% true positive rate. Given that the pregnancy termination given a Down syndrome diagnosis is 93% we should care about these numbers.

I can go on. Breast cancer testing in women who aren't in a risk population is similarly dangerous. Biopsies do carry small risks. Most men with prostate cancer will probably die of something other than prostate cancer. If we treat it, it often leads to urinary incontinence and erectile dysfunction.

Bad tests are frankly dangerous and should be subject to regulation.
There is more to programming language choice than syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Like, economics.

Lisp is not a replacement for Java, and never will be. In the same way that a sports car is not a replacement for the municipal bus system.
Well, it did largely spell the end of Java on the desktop.

The comment is by Guy Steele and at the very least by finally making GC mainstream I agree.

Clojure as it stands now seems to be safe, although we just don't know what "crazy" things Oracle will do now that it's "weaponized" Java. Just having to think about potential legal issues now or in the future where you didn't previously adds friction where there wasn't any before, which is never good. We're also seeing a lot more interest in the CLR version of Clojure, and to the extent effort is diverted from the JVM version, to that or to ones hosted on something else, this may not be a good thing.

In the longer term, this quote struck me as the most apt WRT to Clojure or any other language that uses the JVM in unusual ways (particularly the GC of functional languages) http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2010/08/oracle-google-la...:

Forrester Research analyst John Rymer agrees: "I think this lawsuit casts the die on Java’s future," he said. "It will become a slow-evolving legacy technology. Oracle’s lawsuit links deep innovation in Java with license fees, and that will kill deep innovation in Java by anyone outside Oracle or startups hoping to sell out to Oracle. Software innovation just doesn’t do well in the kind of environment Oracle just created."

As Clojure matures, we'll be wanting to do "deep innovation" (such as in GC) and Oracle has cast a pall on doing that in Java/JVM space.
Yeah, but look at those awful buttons and the weird nonstandard border in the top half.
Air Hogs Hawk Eye – A Wheel Webcam
I think he actually makes a good point - remember what James Gosling has been through with the Java/Microsoft scandal. What would happen if Microsoft decided to make their own Android handsets tomorrow, but "embraced and extended" the Dalvik VM to run some special .NET code? If they gained significant marketshare, they could hijack the Android mobile platform as their own, just like they tried to do with Java.

I'm not saying they would do that, or even that they should, but I think this is the line of thinking that Gosling is coming from. Java has always had "write once, run anywhere" as it's motto. Android should try to stick to that ideal as well- it would do the platform good.
Perhaps we could get new upper bounds out of it. Or---perhaps the eventual proof will establish a link between hitherto unrelated areas of mathematics. This link could be used to transform whole classes of theorems and proof structures / ideas from one field to another.
Yes, the 2010 application was this username. The one from '09 was a different username which I abandoned because it was the name of the business.
I think culture plays a big role. When I was in China for a while, it seemed like the government wants to build a Chinese copy of other things. Whatever technology exists elsewhere, they seem to want to have their own version of it that's Chinese.

Philippines is another country with a lot of smart people, but I don't feel that the people in power there really have a building culture. Even with their last round of elections, they bought their voting machines from a Venezuelan.

If technology and startups really are in the culture of a country, there are lots of opportunities everywhere, to try and make a difference.

I guess it's better if things can come from the top down, like in the case of China - to jump start things a bit.

The other thing, with Nigeria. It's economy has been growing steadily over the past decade. But, it seems to be primarily driven by foreign oil companies.

Is there any room for doing start ups related to this? Oil exploration definitely requires a lot of capital. It would be hard to imagine what kinds of contributions a lowly Nigerian hacker could make in this area.
Lastly, I know that India benefited quite a bit by having a large community of overseas Indians. People who came to USA for school, and later stayed on and worked here after graduating. As I understand it, these people provided some of the key contacts as the outsourcing boon started.
Getting GWAS data from 23andMe, on the other hand, is generally not so much useful as it is entertaining.

I mostly agree, although 23andMe did tell me something very useful. I have the two G alleles for rs4680. (http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Rs4680) One research paper said I am likely to respond well to Modafinil. I now find Modafinil extremely useful. While 23andMe is mostly for the coolness factor right now, it's only going to get better. For a small fraction of people, data from services like 23andMe is undeniably useful, since it will tell them things we do know with high probability (drug interaction/metabolism, early-onset Alzheimer's from ApoE4, etc).

The best probability estimate for most adult diseases still comes from history and the physical exam, not from genetic tests.

I meant that genetic testing along with a physical exam is more useful than just a physical exam.
I'm really kicking myself for this. My first semester in college I worked part-time at a corner store near where I lived (with family). I quit after four months because I got paranoid about selling cigarettes - apparently one of the tobacco companies had sent a kid to do a check, and I'd accidentally sold to a minor. I probably wasn't in any danger criminally, because I was told the cigarette companies use "old kids" (i.e. a year younger than legal) whereas the cops use 13/14 year olds and are pretty obvious about it. Still, I got paranoid and started carding so much that people were fairly regularly bitching me out about it and I couldn't take it anymore.

I wish I had kept that job now, since the constant pressure I feel about my debt now is probably worse than "normal" job stress back then.
Actually, I found it not bad. The reason being for each step you were only asked one question. The alternative to that is one page with 13 questions... and I think tests would show more people would finish the one question per page method.
The success of this site will all depend on the amount of females it can attract who actually go on dates.
WSJ ... DOOM TERROR CRASH ... "GOP a 62% chance of taking control"

hmmm, wha?!
"I don't know how he does it" I think you've answered your own question there: "Charlie Rose is a great interviewer, and actually lets people express their full opinion on a subject without cutting them off."

Everyone loves being really listened to.
esciencenews.com :D
Lawsuits like that are stupid as I'm sure if you were straight you couldn't sue a homosexual dating site!
People keep mentioning this. What are some real-world uses for this feature? Who is using CouchDB in this fashion, and what are they doing with it?
> Because software engineers don't work for free

Really?

I'd say the large volume of open source software suggests otherwise.