skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While this post is a bit on the dramatic side, I think the core point is good. I don't blame founders for selling companies knowing their product will be destroyed, nor do I blame BigCos for buying them.

But how is this encouraging startups to provide something useful to society? It's just encouraging them to target products at larger companies, not to actual customers.
How to convert Sony HDR Videos?
Sony HDR videos are mainly AVCHD or AVCHD/MPEG-2 videos, The output videos as the .mts file. However, these Sony original videos can't be played or edited on Mac frequently, so you need to convert them to MOV or MP4 to edit.<p>Sony HDR Video Converter can convert Sony HDR videos with fast speed. You can convert Sony HDR videos to MOV, MP4, MKV, FLV, 3GP, etc. Then the output Sony camcorder videos can be played on iPod, iPad, iPhone, Apple TV, Zune, PSP, BlackBerry, Palm and other mobile players.
Wonderful point. I always find myself gawking at the dated hairstyles of the actors when I watch the original Star Wars trilogy.
And the spec for HTTP-based seeding: http://bittornado.com/docs/webseed-spec.txt
If you want to delight your potential customers, ask for it after the free trial. It's a way to garner instant respect and trust. They're most likely used to being asked for their credit card up front and having bad experiences (or scared of having a bad experience).

I'd definitely be more willing to try and eventually spend money on a product where the company understands the spirit of a "free trial".
reminds me of a friend who was studying for his MSc Physics at Warwick... the students had to do a lab experiment with a radioactive isotope and were warned to only have the box containing the isotope open for a few minutes in order to reduce exposure to safe limits.

Guess who forgot to close this box and after 2 hrs of exposure now has to worry about cancer and/or infertility in later life. True story.

Look at it this way: at least your friend took CS and not Physics and thus is only £500 in the hole.
Im not sure I follow your math, the rates on that page show the cost. Assume its $20-30 an hour 45 people at $30 an hour is $1350, $5400 for 4. I'm having them play live so they can read through a symphony in half an hour potentially, depending on which one.
Having been a Heroku user for a while, and having looked into autoscaling for dynos and workers a few times (but not having really needed it yet), I really think they could do a better job of publicizing that these solutions exist.

I imagine that tons of their user base (especially for small hobby sites that only occasionally, if ever, see high traffic or run background tasks) look for this, and yet there's nothing pointing to it other than old posts on the mailing list. At least put information and resources for autoscaling in the Docs section of the site.

Acquiring resources only as long as you need them, and then releasing them when you're done, should be the standard service - complete user control should be the advanced feature set. They already do this for websites on a single dyno: they spin them down when they're idle for a while. But they don't do it with workers (what effect does the latency of starting a backup job up really have? it's already running in the background).
Jesus, that's horrible. Yeah, I bet he wishes he could pay 500 quid to make that go away :/
I get tons of emails saying "Would you like to buy viagra?". Getting an occasional email saying "You might be paying us too much money" is low on my list of annoyances.
416 West 13th St. Suite 203
New York, NY 10014
Hmm, depending on how fast you run, yeah... It's a good idea, but I can see Gorilla Arm becoming a problem. I'm thinking of buying a recumbent exercise bike to replace my desk chair with, though.
Maybe I'm just nitpicking here, but at a hiring rate of 0.08%, you'd have to accept resumes from ~1250 candidates, not 127. I think the OP meant 0.8% (1/127 == ~0.008), which I don't think is a terribly low number, given that he was hiring for a reasonably well-known startup.

I've been involved in a number of searches for developers at much less visible or "sexy" shops, and would say from my experience that screening 80-100 interviews for every position is pretty normal.
The LoseThos 64-bit PC Operating System
How could there ever be a bad experience, if you just look at YC as buying marketing for 6% of your fledgling company now valued at a few hundred K you'd be spending a large multiple, and you're getting money to boot.

It would be cheap if you gave away your shares. Provided you have a product worth half a chance.

Then there's the network and so on. If you can get in do it, if not bootstrap but it would be very hard to find a 'negative'.

And if there are negative stories about being in YC I'd expect them to be vented elsewhere rather than here.
you seem to be keeping good humour considering the number of patronising responses you've received here
The preference for low quality in Italian academia
Something that keeps coming up over and over in his descriptions is how they kept trying to do this amazing work on a very tight budget. Which is astounding both because of the quality of the result, and how it seems like effects budget today is virtually unlimited.

(didn't we move to CGI to try and cut costs?)
I think 24 hours would be long enough to get the point across. I expect 100% of the students at that university will find other access during the week, but if he kept it to a length that the ADD addled brains of college students could possibly have a chance of withstanding I think he'd have much better results. Interesting idea though.
I agree with you.

However, as a counterexample to the typical user, my Mother has long been a WP fanatic, and loves Reveal Codes (which she picked up pretty much on her own) and decries the modern GUI interface.

There are always exceptions.
I think that in the midst of various edits I lost track of the point I was trying to make in that section about performing arts. I was not conceding theatre, just aiming to point out that there are some very good theatrical companies in SF and a batch of mediocrity. In SF the patronage scene seems to go like this: Opera > ACT > Ballet > SFS > other theatrical companies. I am not sure why this is the case, but people with bluer blood than mine have deigned it to be so.

It seems that in most of these performing arts rankings you have NYC at the top, LA a long way down the scale for a lot of things (mostly as remnants and/or supporting players for the movie biz) and below that places like Chicago, SF, and Boston fighting it out for third place in various categories.

Yes, you will see a better comedy show in Chicago, catch a better opera or weird performance art piece in SF, and probably hear a better symphony in Boston. Either way, I would say that SF is far from the performing arts wasteland you originally suggested...
1/3 isn't correct, and I find the OP's explanation to be overly complex.

The set of possibilities for two genders of two children is GG, GB, and BB. In your possibilities, GB and BG are exactly the same set (order doesn't matter in a set, only membership), so you don't have 4 possibilities, you have 3 total. Since the guy asserted that one of them is a boy, you can rule out the GG possibility. This leaves only GB and BB as possible results, both of which have a 1/2 chance of being the correct one. The guy never makes a claim that the first child or the second child is the boy (but, this doesn't change the possibility that he has two boys, it just changes which one you remove from the possibilities based on the provided information).

I'm not sure that it's that people don't understand statistics (although I'm not in a position to confirm or deny that), it's that people don't understand set theory. At least if you're going to use this "genders of two children" as example.
If you're making HTML5 games you might want to email Martine Spaans at SPIL Games, they're throwing a lot of money around to people building on HTML5.

http://www.spilgames.com/
Which terminates on the other side where everything is plaintext again. https is a transport level protocol, so it protects you from people (trivially) snooping on your data in transit but anybody at google with enough clearance has access to that data.
How this 20-something kid made millions!!! Next on Mixergy.

I'd love something like TED but more informal.
Fascinating article and followup on some of Castro's changing views

"Fidel to Ahmadinejad: 'Stop Slandering the Jews'"
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/09/fid...

"Fidel: 'Cuban Model Doesn't Even Work For Us Anymore'"
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/09/fid...
Is this just a repost of his Granma articles? It goes back a couple of years, and makes me think we'd have heard about it sooner if it were a separate blog.
It was a joke :)

OTOH, I could easily put together a similar list of great restaurants in the bay area if you happen to visit. Let's wait until a reputable third party provides a basis for comparison before we continue poking each other with the trolling stick.
That's exactly what I meant by bone headed: their idea of software is very expensive and secretive, rather than their products forming the skeleton of everything else as I feel they should. They talk about their free version like they're selling shareware.
If that's what you are worried about then it seems like you'd have trouble using the internet in general.
I wish Heroku officially supported autoscaling. I've been using Google App Engine lately and the autoscaling and pay for what you _really_ use is very compelling.
'Let’s consider an example. Suppose that a man comes up to you and says "I have two children. At least one of them is a boy." What is the probability that they are both boys?'.

Am I missing something or in his attempt to solve the problem, does he implicitly assume statistical dependence?

If statistical independence is assumed, with P(Boy) = P(Girl) = 1/2, then the answer to the problem is very simple. P(Boy | Boy) = P(Boy) = 1/2.

Maybe I just don't understand probability :(
I'll see your Malkiel and raise you a Bernstein:

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Pillars-Investing-Building-Portfo...

The conclusion remains the same, however. Oh, how terribly dull it all is when compared to a nice game of craps.
Crashing the Internet
Expedia has this. I once booked a flight & hotel for the wrong month. I was told they could cancel the hotel free of charge, but for the flight they would be able to take care of it just this time and if it happened again it would be $100.
Timing Your Exit - Don't Ride It Over the Top
Looks like a nice little module.

However, just some comments on the (lack of) Pythonicity in this function:

def is_string(obj):
"""Tests if an object is a string"""
return True if type(obj).__name__ == 'str' else False

First, you don't need the "True if ... else False", because == is already a boolean operator which returns True or False.

Also, you don't need to look at the type's __name__. You can just say:

type(obj) == str

But Python already has an isinstance() function which will also work properly with subclasses of str, so suddenly you don't need the is_string() helper function anymore, and it becomes:

isinstance(obj, str)

(Though you should probably use "basestring" in Python 2.x so it works with Unicode keys too.)
There's less variation possible in short hair cuts. Thus it's harder to look dated.

If you want to go all the way, shave your characters heads.
Happened to me on EC2 once. They cut me a break and gave me 20-30% discount. They can though, because the idle machines were not costing them any money.
You should also read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". While the overlap with the movie is quite small, the book is still fascinating.
I think there is a definite difference between positive hazing and negative hazing. Positive to me would be dropping off the pledge class in the woods or something and having them find their way home. Negative would be sexual abuse. I think the former definitely builds bonds and is just a whole lot of fun.
Reduced cost per unit often leads to greater demand.
Rethinking the Reusable Application Paradigm in Django
I'm not worried, it's just that the gggp of this comment mentioned that search history is protected by a password and so it 'should be safe from prying eyes.'

All I did was point out that that data is stored on a server somewhere else and that there are lots of eyes that could be prying there.

I'm sure that there are plenty of people that are concerned about their internet use being monitored, for instance, dissidents and other people that have legitimate reasons to be afraid of having their search history lifted in the future.

Interesting reading on the subject of subpoenas of search records:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5165854

The less information that is being held on you by third parties the less chance that one day you'll be part of some drag-net operation.
My first kickstarter donation as well :)
He said the second one was misinterpreted http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFTRE68C5A52010091...
EPIC Files Suit For Documents Regarding Google/NSA Partnership
Making money on people's mistakes seems like a bad business model. Give him at least discount and you'll have an evangelist.
Not to detract from the YC experience, but I think you can create this sort of rhythm independently, too. Demos in front of a <100% complimentary audience (i.e., not your cofounder/girlfriend/parents) can be enough to force you to develop many of the habits of a successful startup (fail fast, pivot, stretch yourself, listen to customers, etc., etc.) no matter where you are.

That discipline, coupled with an honest daily status report to my team, effectively ended ~10 years' worth of my own bad coding habits (procrastination, under-estimation, and insistence on clever/perfect/fast solutions where "good enough" was in fact enough) in about a year.

The extra pressure of a YC demo day may help increase your pace in the short term, but you eventually need to learn the discipline to show continual improvement without the pressure of a room full of VCs criticizing your every word.
With a loose schedule (once a week), you may risk losing viewers who forget to return. What about scheduling something relevant for almost every day of the week?

e.g. (and just making this up as an example)
Monday - new video goes up
Tuesday - you moderate/seed/encourage some commentary and follow-up questions
Wednesday - interviewee responds in a specific follow-up entry (bit like Ask Slashdot or whatever it was)
Thursday - maybe a text-only interview by email/IM, or a guest spot/entry?
Friday - three curated links of similar about-my-job articles or links (e.g., Reddit)

Admittedly, that does impact the simplicity of what you have now, but I do think a finer schedule could help your stickiness.
malkiel's work is based on flawed assumptions which lead to flawed conclusions -- i recommend reviewing those before spending time on his book.
What's to stop people from signing up for several free trials in a row if you don't authenticate them via a credit card?
If you want to see any money from your web service, get the credit card before, but make it very easy to cancel(i.e. a simple form on your site).
Shop for a fraternity wisely. How well you respect and enjoy being around the guys is far more important than the fraternity's social status on campus! I think that is the most important thing to remember.
I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but every time I read something tech related (google, facebook, apple etc) on the NYT, it's overblown sensationalism. Which is ok I guess except that the NYT always prides itself as the ultimate pro journalism and its website is always shown at google and apple web browsers demos as the reference in good journalism... BS.
The basic formation (which the author argues is not subtle enough to be true) is better thought of step by step.

Suppose a man comes up to you and says "I have two children"

At this point you build a set of possible realities, your model. There are four possibilities: {BB, BG, GB, GG}. This space fully describes a model whereupon there are two distinct, children with genders. Additionally, via assumption of independence and equal likelihood, you can assign probabilities to each observation, {BB:1/4, BG:1/4, GB:1/4, GG:1/4}.

"At least one of them is a boy."

At this point, you update your realities by removing the one firmly contradicted by the new evidence. Your new space is {BB, BG, GB} and when you renormalize the probabilities you get {BB:1/3, BG:1/3, GB:1/3} which leads to the idea that the probability at this point that the man has two boys is 1/3rd.

The author suggests however that during that second step, you should also take into account the possibility that this guy is lying or that the fact that he's proffering this information actually changes the likelihoods of those four scenarios in a way different from just multiplying one of them by 0. So perhaps the likelihood of hearing "At least one of them is a boy" is reflected like this:

{BB:0.35, BG:0.32, GB:0.32, GG:0.01}

And your new belief in each of these realities reflects that like so (renormalized)

{BB: 0.35, BG:0.32, GB:0.32, 0.01}

So now I feel even more confident that he has two boys.
Reclaim the intellectual time loost on daily activities
very snappy, well done! it found all but one of my published iPhone apps, and very quickly, like Google Instant. Of course, one huge advantage you have is less traffic. And you've got less to render. You may also be showing more of a cached, less real-time view of what's actually in the store (guess).
Future of Social Media in Journalism
Beethoven: 9 symphonies... Brahms: 4 symphonies... Sibelius: 7 symphonies... Tchaikovsky: 6 symphonies. That's 26 altogether. I've never recorded an orchestra; based on session musicians I've worked with, I would expect the recording sessions to last longer than the compositions in question, and I was estimating at an hour per symphony in the first place, giving the figure of about a week's worth of recording time (~40 hours).

But as I said, I've never recorded an orchestra before; my guesstimates may well be skewed. Even so, at the numbers you are quoting, that's quite a bit lower than I would have guessed earlier today. :-)
> The set of possibilities for two genders of two children is GG, GB, and BB.

Yes, but there are two equally probable paths to arrive at (set-theoretic) GB. Each of these paths is equally probably to the remaining paths, BB and GG. There are 4 possible paths, and (set-theoretic) GB is the result of 2 of them.

Your application of set theory is inappropriate given 2 independent events.
Warren Buffets letters to shareholders would be a good place to start. Read all of them.

The intelligent investor and securities analysis by Ben Graham are essentially reading albeit abit dry.

I'd also recommend (when looking at equities) that you do lots and lots and lots of research on individual stocks and really get to know them before you take the plunge and fully understand why you've decided to buy.

Also, have an entrance and exit point on all investments. Unless you're going for the 'value investing' strategy buying and holding forever.
Thanks for all the advice. I think it's a good idea to interview at a bunch of places to build up for a dream job. Although I'm on my third 6 month internship through school, the managers basically lied about what the jobs would entail to get me to accept (i.e. saying it's a software developer position and I'm stuck doing performance testing all the time), so there's not much I'm even proud to put on my resume. I've had to search far and wide for a reason to write some code, and that's what I always list on my resume.

Maybe one big problem with interviewing at a bunch of places is that I'm most proficient with Python and not Java. I learned to use it as my primary language because a very intelligent friend of mine was using it all the time, and he worked at Google. Although, the most technical interviews I've ever had were with Amazon where they let you use whatever language you want to come up with algorithms to answer their questions. It seems there aren't many companies that use Python.

Anyhow, I'll definitely apply around to a bunch of places even if I don't find them entirely appealing. They can't be much worse than what I've already endured through my internships, and I've learned to make the best of my time at my jobs by now anyway. I was thinking of doing the Y Combinator Common App today, so maybe I'll do that.

And you're right, it was loads of fun having an actual reason to solve some problems in OCaml. Actually, I'm not so passionate about the language, I just thought it was really cool that they were looking for sysadmins who also knew about functional programming. But I will check out that link anyway.
HP to acquire ArcSight for $1.5 billion
It's because they need to keep a process running all the time to poll the queue for new jobs. So basically, they keep an instance of your app booted at all times for job processing (if I understand how DJ workers work). And that's pretty much like a dyno, except it doesn't serve traffic. And there are no web requests to trigger it to spin up like there are for dynos.
I'm actually surprised they didn't. Think of the goodwill a post reading "I messed up on Heroku, but they were cool about it" would have created.

After all, Heroku could have auto-detected idle instances easily and could have disabled them or alerted the user.

The whole 'dyno' concept without an automated scaling option is a bit strange. Why set an exact number of instances when web traffic is just about the most variable thing you could possibly want to measure. Even apache auto-scales the number of processes depending on how many workers it currently needs to serve your requests.

Auto-scaling and a web app hosting service go together like bread & butter.
I came into my current job having always pronounced it Ess-Cue-Ell. However, not a single person at my job has pronounced it as such. Sequel all the way. I quickly picked up the local pronunciation.
Depending on the product, persistence of data may be enough to stop them.

For example, I'm not going to move all the data from one Backpack/Basecamp account to another just to continue a free trial.
I don't have much to lose yet, with all the success on HN I have only 2 feedburner subscriptions so far. But your advice is good, I will definitely give it a thought.
Registration does not support email+stuff@domain.wut.

It should.
read jack schwager's books, the better biographies on warren buffett (lowenstein's, also snowball effect), lowenstein's book on ltcm is also worth reviewing.

i highly recommend the origin of wealth -- an amazing book

mark douglas' books can be helpful,

how to make money in stocks by o'neil,

steenbarger's book

george soros' books

hank pruden's book

you want to learn what a trading plan is, and you want a trading plan that will work in irrational markets (since humans are not rational etc.), has some risk mgmtn (risk does not equal volatility), rules to buy and sell, etc.

hope this helps,
There comes a time in a business owners life when he realizes that he may be able to take the money from this particular customer but that the PR damage done by that customer may be larger than being reasonable and understanding that mistakes happen. And if there is some egg on the face of the business owner for not alerting the user to their sudden suspicious consumption pattern then there are valuable lessons to be learned for all parties.

So, the adult business owner would likely split the bill with the customer to cover his costs, fore go his profits on this particular occasion, have a very happy customer (who might even write about that!) and would apply the lessons learned to their business.
Hosted in blog format with an RSS feed: http://monthlyreview.org/castro/