skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Huh? Money, no mention of the ability do manage money? I mean, it is obviously simple to calculate the cash-flow. I am talking about making the decision: "Yes lets focus on this aspect of our business, because we can expect the highest returns for our time and resources invested."
I understand that especially at an early point it is all just guesses, but some guesses are more probable than others.

Some examples are: income, fixed and variable costs, margins, taxes, cash flow projections and all that other money related stuff.

I suppose this might be negligible for every startup that gets more funding than they could possibly spend in the foreseeable future. Rather this is essential for every bootstrapped startup.

Btw, I am the Business Co-Founder and I just went through the list. I gave myself 7 out of 12 points. (The fact that I have an MBA helped me only with the 4th point)

If the points in the list are equally weighted, the conclusion for me would be; I suck. But at least this list gives me an indication for where I have to improve.

At last I want to mention, I found it to be a great post and want to thank you very much for your free advice, it is highly appreciated.
Fandroids.
Quicklisp intro screencast
I think most of them just skim the description and bid on a lot of projects without really reading them and hope to get some of them awarded. Being non-native English speakers compounds the problem.

Or am I being too gentle? It's hard to miss the title if you know what it means.
He was not commenting on the suit itself but the commentary in the blogosphere. "Many of these blog posts and article talks about how "Android uses Java". Heh. That simply isn't true."
Don't worry, phpdeveloper111 has got this.
As an extensive (and generally happy) user of elance and similar sites, this really made me laugh! This is fantastic example of the pitfalls of such sites.

Whatever the project, you get a bunch of replies (the majority from Indian) who either just say 'yes we can do that' or come back with boilerplate drivel without understanding the requirement.

The Indian guy who responded with a $300 bid and said:
"I can do this for you in php or javascript. If you want this work in one language, I can charge less."
This is why everyone who calls themselves a programmer or developer needs a strong computer science background -- university provided or not. Without it you can't accurately assess the difficulty of a problem, even seemingly simple ones like this.
But bet it doesn't explain why you can't access that website and video from within China's borders!!!
Chinese iPod gadget aims to skin Apple - CNN.com
what it actually shows is that capitalism where much of the wealth is heavily concentrated in the hands of those who accrued it more through property rights than business acumen ignores market signals at least as much as socialist style central planning.
Please do not post links to the NY Times paywall.
The author's point about Google's support is the key one. Even if your site is generating Google thousands of dollars, it's impossible to get a human if something goes wrong. As an AdSense publisher (and purchaser) I'd gladly pay some monthly premium to be able to contact Google support.
It costs money to get there, and money to stay while looking for work. And this economy is so bad that even highly qualified people are out of work, so it's not likely I could get a company to fly me over there for an interview.

I've been looking everywhere for work in the year since graduation with nothing more than an interview at Target (the other candidates had retail experience, so I didn't get it), so starting my own cheap to run web business is starting to seem like the only way I can build a resume.
Leaving this specific example aside, don't you think it's insightful to get a background of the author when reading one of his articles? Especially parts of the background that pertain to the subject being written about?
For people who want to use NGINX caching on top of Apache/Wordpress, I found out this tutorial : http://www.myatus.co.uk/2010/06/28/a-simplified-nginx-apache...
the problem with adsense is 3 fold:

a) ad blindness...people have learned to ignore those text links just like they've ignored the banner ads. The only way to actually profit off adsense is to design your entire site around the ad.

b) adblock - more and more people are blocking ads, so you get less and less revenue

c) ad efficiency - more and more advertisers are starting to recognize that the quality of traffic on the display network are crap so they pay MUCH less for it. The CPC on the keyword tool may be $2 per click...but in reality you'll only get 15-20 cents for adsense

So once you pair all of that up...you realize that it takes 30,000 visitors to make $50 a month on adsense.

And yes at scale you can still make a buck...but why would you bother if there are many better options out there?

Sell a single ad space for $100/mo and you double your profit. Sell 3 ad spaces, and you increase it 6 fold.

Or forget ads altogether and go premium. If you get conversions down to 1:200 after you optimize the sales page/price...that 30,000 people turns into 150 sales. So even if you go with a cheap $5/mo subscription option, that turns into $750/mo...recurring. Or if you decide to charge $19.99, you end up with $3K.

The only reason to use adsense is to have something generating revenue until you decide to get serious with your site.
Indeed, but his startup was not. And that's the critical point. It's unlikely the company would have had a chance at the global market when based in Africa. It's somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as people aware of the lack of chances pursue them elsewhere, spreading the gap even more.
Old joke, but still funny. There was a similar "job" posted on the same site a couple of years ago, only that that one asked for solving the halting problem: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:WVkySfVPHCoJ:b...
NP-hard problems aren't always hard
Brain team contact webandrank.com
As much as I love the Renaissance buildings in my hometown (which are actual Renaissance buildings), building old looking stuff just seems, well, kitschy. The whole effort seems to at least partly be a bona fide cargo cult ;-)

It’s very much possible to build high density walkable towns using contemporary architecture [+]. You don’t have to fake it.

[+] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/earth/12suburb.htm...
I don't think it's a misconception at all. I used to enjoy learning kanji but objectively speaking it's a much worse system than alphabets. The merits -- I can think of shorter text and quicker reading -- hardly outweigh the defects: the sheer number of characters, all the years it takes for native speakers to memorize them, the mess that are loan words and neologisms (unless you use kana), etc.

Now it's too late to change but Japan could have done it, just as Korea did. About homophones:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1198145
Parking Spaces: What is the Free-Market Equilibrium?
rubeng - this has inspired me to do something. E-mail me at neil.davidson@red-gate.com and I'll either refund your ticket so you can come free, or you can nominate somebody to get a free ticket.
Hey. It's business not accademia. When giving a task you have to be prepared that not all of your requirements will be met.
Commuting Is Very Bad for You
Since the post only specified polynomial time and placed no constraint on space, this is actually solvable (e.g., it's not too hard to come up with an polynomial implementation that uses a number of VMs that grows exponentially with the size of the set).
On pharmaceutical companies burying trial results
is there any specific reason that you dont link to the site [1] directly but instead use some sort of redirect using (possibly) your own domain (8n=hn i guess)?

http://phpabtest.com/
Does Oracle/Google lawsuit represent opportunity for .NET?
Start by running vimtutor on just about any system that has Vim installed.
Infosec Island Security News Digest for 8-16-2010
Are the people you're referring to computer science people, or professionals in a different capacity? And do they face manageable debt (10-30k) or a larger (50-150k) sum?
Go find companies that sell programming related products like IDEs and libraries, go to their corporate site, find the person most like a marketing representative, and pitch your ad space to them.
There are vast legions of workers working in conditions which are neither free nor pleasant to produce consumer goods for North American (and European) markets. They just happen to be conveniently overseas, conveniently one remove away from the multinational brands who contribute to the problem in their quest for ever-cheaper suppliers.
Is that $1 ECPM for the whole site, or just one ad spot? I mean, for the whole page, which might have up to five google ad spots, or just one spot, or channel as google calls them.
Yes. And you already could in Python 2.x, what's new Pythonwise is the support for 3.
You've got it right. Derek Sivers recommends doing this for any serious rentacoder/vworker/getacoder projects you post:

"""
At the end of your post, write something like, “VERY IMPORTANT: To separate you from the spammers, please write I AM REAL as the first line of your bid. We will delete all bids that do not start with this phrase, since most bidders never read the requirements. Thank you for being one who does.”
"""
Thanks to the presence of the US military.
Full text: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22serve+their+U.S.+customers...
"PS: The program should run in polynomial time. "

Is that optional?

(Maybe I've been reading too specs that reference RFC2119.)
He could've done it in phpjs and killed two birds with one stone.

My bid was rejected and my account suspended for completing the work before my bid was accepted. I just hope those Clay guys see it so i can earn my $300.
This article should be required reading for anyone building programs with massive memory consumption!

To give some context, this describes how Varnish combines mmapping with a nice memory partitioning scheme to get free caching from the OS, instead of fighting the OS' tendency to cache and managing it yourself.
Bundler, because your gems depend on gems too (Ruby)
RailsJam 2010: Manila, Cebu & Davao (Ruby on Rails Bootcamp)
I don't understand this point. I have an HTC Desire with Sense, i downloaded a bunch of apps from the app Market over the last few weeks, and I never noticed any differences in UI between the build-in spps and the ones I downloaded.

Have you ever had to make adjustments to your apps to make them look good/OK on, e.g., Sense? What kind of adjustments were they?
Ask HN: Chances of making Mulah from a startup!
What are the chances of making a decent amount of money from a startup (say >$150k pa pre tax)?

I know that it is not something to do if you are just after the money - as there are surely easier paths there - but I am still interested.

And regarding the fact that often it comes in a big lump on exit, how much would a successful startup like Dropbox be pulling in (in profit for the founders) a year?
In the real world, taking exponential space implies taking exponential time. The fastest you can transmit information is the speed of light, so it will take exponential time to communicate with the furthest pieces of your exponentially large system.
The Evangelists for Heirloom Vegetables
Link: http://emailyak.com/
Not to mention, by making your own company you're getting work experience. There are no holes in my resume since my first day of work. Not one day. Anytime I'm without work I switch back to working for my own company.
It still might not have been the perfect solution because of import/export taxes on the said vodka though...
Is it really that bad? I get the impression that most are happy with Django (or maybe that is other python frameworks.....).
Ask HN: Prominent software engineers/computer scientist using Twitter
I've recently started to use twitter more and more as a communication/information medium. Do you know of any prominent software engineers and computer scientist that are using twitter at the moment ?
Hrm. Are there any steps in between that and AdSense? I'm not sure it's a terribly efficient solution:

* I'm not a great sales guy, and the opportunity costs (consulting money) are not insignificant.

* I don't have a good idea of how much to sell space for.

* Other people have to have a better handle on this stuff than I do. If they can make me more money than I would alone, why not split it? Or at the very least, make me more money than AdSense and not make me waste my time trying to track down companies ("Hi, uh, IBM, want to buy some ads?")
And even now there's no way of manually expiring a cached page without using a third party unsupported plugin (IIRC)

I still love Nginx though :-)
I only have the good kind of experience here. My co-founder is also my oldest friend. I wouldn't recommend this to everyone, but my experience does mean that I would never co-found with someone I didn't know very well and trust completely outside of the venture.

I would personally say that you are thinking about the problem the right way, but you do need the filtering step as well. Trust isn't (even nearly) enough if someone isn't smart or can't get stuff done.
Well, in this case you mainly need strong common sense and the ability to use Google/Wikipedia. Any programmer that doesn't automatically Google something he doesn't recognise or understand isn't worth his salt either.
Best portable encryption drives
The difference between selling your own ads and using a network is the middleman. Google takes a cut, so you potentially end up with less.

If the paid time that would be lost while selling ad space outweighs the cut Google takes, it might not make sense.

I suppose there's also the possibility of hiring a firm that deals with that kind of thing, but I don't know anything about that. It's probably not cost-efficient if your startup isn't big enough.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Infocom Adventure
Even if Oracle and Google settle in some peaceful way (best outcome out of the likely ones), it is very likely Oracle will continue this avenue of profit. Perhaps IBM is next, given the long time hostilities among both. Or the Android-based handset manufacturers and sellers. There's a lot of shakedown money to be made for Oracle. And it is probably even lawful in spite of it being labeled as morally wrong. Good luck.
Great so there are different kinds of people. You prefer slower pace, I need more ideas per absorbed data unit to keep being interested.

My expeiriences with computers started probably more or less as early as yours (although I can't with clear concience call them business) but It's not about computers. It's about internet content.

I was always impatient but I see my impatience significantly grown over the last few years as I read internet blogs and sites like digg, HN and similar. I reached the point when I can start reading Terry's Pratchett new book, stop after few pages and forget it for weeks or months.

Maybe you don't spend as much time reading internet as I do (I really can't imagine how could I read more of it) or it has less (or no) effect on you but that doesn't change the probability of such correlation occur at least for some people.
DNS is much faster. whois is usually rate limited and a lot of whois services have restrictions on automated querying. Obviously, whois is more accurate though.

So. When I need to test if a bunch of domain names exist, I first of all do a DNS NS lookup. If you get a result, you know the domain exists. If you don't get a result, then do a whois.
AVCHD to iPad | How to Convert AVCHD to iPad?
This article is a tutorial to guide you to convert AVCHD video to iPad, import camera HD Video AVCHD to play on iPad with high quality.
This doesn't really work all the time, as some of them are skimming through the description for this sort of stuff.
There is a spectacular book about the Battle Of the Beams written by R. V. Jones, who was the British scientist in charge of countering the German technical advances.

I can't recommend it enough, although it is a very in-depth read:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Most-Secret-Penguin-World-Collection...
Hindenburg Omen: Is a Stock Market Crash Imminent?
How Steve Jobs prepares for his keynotes (2006)
Coder looking for an artist (generalist) as a cofounder
Hi, I'm a technical person (coder) and I'm looking for a potential co-founder who is an artist (no real focus, more of a generalist.. who has experience with web design but hopefully also with after effects and things like Vue and RealFlow, Maya/Max etc). It would also be nice if you are familiar with writing/SEO/marketing (or are willing to learn). I'm not great at Photoshop but I can get stuff done.. it would however be nice to have someone who is really strong in this area.

If you are interested in "human computer interaction", fitness, and music (perhaps video games too).. then maybe we can work together so email me at thedaywillcome2010[]gmail[]com if you want to learn more.

Notes: Commitment right now can be part time for about a year.. after that I think it should be realistic we should consider this more of a full time thing. And as a full disclaimer I do not have funding and frankly I hope to be able to do without it for as long as possible (maybe we will make it all the way without it :P). I'm located in the Bay Area but you don't have to be.

Thanks guys.
It is funny that the author chose the SUBSET-SUM problem. You may be amazed but this is a special-case of the KNAPSACK problem for which we have:

Fully polynomial approximation schemes.

Pseudo-polynomial time algorithms.

In other words, you may find that for all practical purposes this problem can be solved so fast that it doesn't really warrant the NP-badge in some sense. You can say that the problem is an NP problem which disguises itself as a P problem. It would be really fun to use David Pisingers knapsack algorithm codes, http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/ansatte/pisinger/codes.html and then bait the bidder into finding a set for which the algorithm is NOT fast (hint: That is also pretty hard :)
The OP makes a few points, most of which I disagree with (they're mostly a matter of opinion).

One valid point he makes is: "Confusion on where to put code, and too much flexibility". Can't say how it is in other frameworks, having never used them, but The Django Book had far too many cases of saying "you can do it here or there, it's a personal preference". I don't want to make a choice when I'm new to a framework, I want to be told what's correct and what isn't!
Research Paper Topic Ideas
The topic for your research paper should capture the attention of the reader. There are many sources where you can find research paper topic ideas. A good research paper depends much on the topic. Here are some valuable ideas for selecting a good topic.
Wow, you guys are based in Pune! That's where I'm from.
To infinity and beyond: The struggle to save arithmetic
I can't stand people with those little cartoon avatars instead of just a photo. Why are we reading this guy?

This is a good article. Just for the attempt to define the scope of the Java platform alone. I agree with @plinkplonk when they say: A change (for the worse) how the dev community perceives a platform is (or will lead to) a significant impact on the platform?
75 Percent of Individuals Use Same Password for Social Networking and Email
"But if big companies aren’t being built because of this small thinking, we’ll all suffer sooner or later. "

This assumes that SV has only web and software startups. Certain kinds of companies (biotech, telecom, etc.) do need VC, and these companies are built to IPO. That won't change.
"Without it you can't accurately assess the difficulty of a problem, even seemingly simple ones like this."

And with a background, you'd recognize hard problems?

Sure, very well-known NP-complete problems you'll recognize, but there are plenty of other problems that are equivalent to them, which you might stumble upon without even realizing it (I recently wrote a post about one such problem: http://www.loopycode.com/a-surprisingly-hard-problem-post-co...).
> No. The Chinese realize their language is a pain in the butt to learn and that the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system...

I used to think this, but you can learn to recognize thousands in less than a year with the right methods, and learning to read after that is comparable in difficulty to learning any new vocab in a European language.
On the other hand, the easier layoffs in America make firms more likely to hire workers in the first place. (At least that's what the theory says.)

Germany has lots of problems with the long term unemployed. (Also migrants and women should be better utilized in the workforce.)
This comment is important because it is so offbase and yet is sourced in what a lot of westerners think/know about 'islam'. Frankly, it kind of depresses and scares me a bit how little people understand about the thing that supposedly is causing them so much disruption in their lives.
BTW, debt at interest is totally forbidden in Islam so building an entire state and economy on it - as happens in the west also, of course - is totally 'unislamic'.
How the heatwave in Russia is connected to floods in Pakistan
Generally, probably harder than getting a job domestically. With rare exceptions, this is probably doubly true if you don't speak the native tongue. Many counties have fluency add 'points' for visa applications, some don't, and some merely require enrolling in language classes once there.

A lot of technology companies in various European countries are filled with people capable of speaking English (for obvious reasons) and some with many international hires (like Opera of Norway) claim to operate their business in English full time.

Still, some language capability would make it a lot easier to make sense of what the regulations are on immigration, read the job ads, etc, and higher education (like a masters degree) is helpful. Many of the programs in wealthier Europe require a demonstration that the skills sought are not easily found domestically. More education is not a perfect proxy, but is one thing which is often used (especially for the less experienced).
I just registered a matching .com and.org that I got from here, and they don't even sound Web 2.0-y.
Remember that article a while ago that China was setting up more sequencing capacity in a single building than the whole US combined? For now they're still buying US-made Illumina machines, but I'd expect them to come up with their own technology soon.
Do you have any evidence that shows that, given similar funds only the military could have provided these innovations?

EDIT: Ok, weapons sure, but most of the entries in that list aren't weapons.
This could be said about almost all "polynomial time" algorithms though. The bigger the loop, the larger the variables you'll need (in general), and the more time you'll need to communicate between the pieces.
I think it's a matter of what kind of framework you want to be. Rails is very opinionated: Fat model, skinny controller, and use helpers or you're a fool. Django is less so: Put it here, or there... whatever you like. It really comes down to the philosophy of the underlying language I think. Ruby in general is kind of opinionated, and python less so.
People have been confusing government intervention of any kind with socialism for a long time. The argument against this generalization, by and large, keeps falling on deaf ears.
I think the patent "Interpreting Functions Utilizing A Hybrid Of Virtual And Native Machine Instructions (6,910,205)" is a important arsenal, dalvik or alternate implementation would need to grow to this level some point in the future.

cutting access to a growth path can hold back development of the android platform
You should probably read this:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_31/b41890509...

It's about commodity ETFs so maybe index fund or other ETFs don't have the same problem, but the message I got out of it is that there are plenty of unknown unknowns here.