skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From TFA:

// The point is... if you're going to invent a
// new Java that breaks compatability, then
// at least try and fix some of the major issues
// like verbosity, invariants, inference, checked
// exceptions, and mutability. Go wild. Everything
// presented here could be compiled directly into Java.
What has lucene won?
You are correct.

As soon as you offer equity (in any form, disguised or otherwise), on a website, you have just made a public offering. The SEC has some strong opinions on how this should and should not be done, it tends to involve large legal and accounting fees.
That is why I added in "reasonable terms."
The terms I've in deals lately seen have been very favorable for the founders. Not as loose as an angel round but much better than I've seen for similar deals in the past. As John Dahl hints, a lot of the deals are convertible debt deals.

I only mention this because from my immediate perspective it seems easier to raise $100-$500K in NYC than it does to raise $10K from Y Combinator. Which is the better deal? I couldn't tell you.
Ask HN: Rate my tool http://r3gy.com
I am very much attempting the release early release often approach. This is phase 1 of my goal to create a domain registrar. Let me know what you think. Thank you very much for checking it out.
How To Obtain Seed/Rounds To get Apps Out?
Corp has three new app concepts to devel, Need Seed and/or venture cap or partnership - located in Chicago (CHIVALLEY).Otherwise will donate to Universities for Entrepreneur Centers. @TableandBoard
Does the 1000 servers a week also include new servers that replace old failed ones?
This might have been posted here before but posting it again - http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimiza... . I found this a very good read for SEO.
Well, sound a lot like Peter Norvigs "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years".
Enjoy:
http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html
At first glance I was thinking this was prototypal, but upon a second look, it doesn't seem to be. It does however, seem like this approach would make it easy to get prototypal inheritance, no?
Browser UI - Photoshop action
Clickable: http://r3gy.com
An update of http://diveintoaccessibility.org would be interesting - this was my start when building quippd, but I'd definitely like to know if there is more that Mark is missing.
I wonder, though, if they've taken steps to make a launch failure survivable. If the Challenger situation repeated itself, what would be the odds of the astronauts living through it?
They aren't selling the email address to third parties - they are letting them access the information for free.
What will AirPlay do?
Here's how this adds up to me:

- 215M users.

- Up to 1000 servers per week.

- Say, they've been doing this for 30 weeks.

- So they need 1 server for every 7167 users? Is this normal for mmorpg type games?

- Are 215M people playing around the clock?

I'm just a little baffled by this number.
I already use Linux on a Thinkpad so it's not much of a leap for me (I have a pretty esoteric setup, though) but I'd be cool with a "required" setup if you're providing the hardware.
Anytime a bunch of people who sit on the same side of the table, economically speaking, get together, even socially, it's some flavor of collusion. Just forming social ties with people you should be in competition with is a little suspect. That doesn't automatically mean it's cartel-building, but it's not good news for the rest of us.

That said, is this a surprise to anyone? VCs are already groupthink-y enough. It is the natural behavior of oligopolies (de facto or otherwise) to seek to erect barriers to entry, and fix prices. We here operate in a sector that is still so wildly dynamic that we have better tools for breaking through that than begging the governmental leviathan to do it for us. We're faster, and can hit harder.
Shouldn't the last one (offset.js:210-rscript), by the same logic given for core.js:023-quickExpr (although you do say there it is negligible), be

/^(?:body$|html$)/i

instead of

/^(?:body|html)$/i
The closure I wanted at the end of the story was for her to meet the thief. For her to explain the hurt and worry and anger he'd caused. For him to try to explain his reasons and lack of them.

Also, I seem to recall this turns out to be incredibly cheap for the amount of reduction in recidivism it causes.
Honestly the biggest problem with Silicon Valley is that 90% of the startups aren't trying to build real businesses, they're just trying to build something that will impress Mike Arrington to compensate for the fact that they had no friends in high school or whatever. At least Dave actually understands the mechanics of leadgen, SEO, margins, and the rest of what makes a business work unlike the rest of the hacks in the valley.
After http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1713616 it seems like these minimum-viable-product passive income streams are becoming more and more popular.
msy: no, our primary market's people who want macro/socioeconomic/industry data – and, yes, that includes journalists (our friends at the Guardian Data Blog have done some really nice work using Timetric).

It's more explaining the thought-process. An economist, or analyst, or journalist shouldn't have to be a programmer to do their job. That's our job.
Intellectually curious for the sake of it. I envy you.

Is this really that rare? I think I've always been that way.
The 1,000,000th commit at Apache is on Lucene, just check the source of the link: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=1000...
Google Webmaster Tools does (well, for Google search anyway).
Once again, any software, or any web browser (be it Lynx, Apple's Safari, or mobile ones) needs to LOAD WEBPAGE FIRST! FULLY! And that's for some users may be a very serious obstacle!
I feel the same way. Though I wouldn't call it angry. I really wish I could learn out of intellectual curiosity (I'm trying to do so with Haskell at the moment) but I can't help feeling like it's a waste of time. I'd rather do something useful. Or at least interesting, as an end. I love reading about new languages, I just can't seem to take enough interest to learn them. I'm going to try to do my next non-critical project in Haskell, see if that works.
What It's Like Having Your Best Friend As A Co-Founder
Our application is used by a lot of seniors. So I'm interested in this topic.

I received an email last week from a 70 yr old lady who was using our software. Not the typical web-app user base.

Outside of trying to close the big knowledge/generation gap when I design for these users, I'm starting to look at accessibility problems, since they are likely more prevalent with seniors.
Referring to this, evidently: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dhc0d/apache_sv...

1,000,000th commit on Apache SVN done by the Lucene project.
I always enjoy websites like this. One has a hard time finding comprehensive starter guides for things that most seasoned techies take for granted. I will definitely be reading through this.
Life = Risk
Ah, yeah, right now it's switched to a map showing the position. Sadface. But the last few days it's been showing an interior view, and before that mainly exterior shots. You get a mission overlay a fair bit, too, which is a shame - I assume this is when video signal is lost.

The Russian radio chatter is ground talking to astronauts in Russian. There's also English radio chatter, too.
I sincerely wish you would elaborate on that.

How do you pick up projects? Where would you find entry-level projects? Do you mean open source project (in which case there have been several posts on HN and reddit about getting started).

Maybe open source work is really the scenic route to where he wants to get - after all he's looking for paid work.

And he seems to making an effort to meet people in person (having joined two user groups). What else / where else can one hook up with other software people (if you say forget the internet)?
As DHH said, that's not true for everybody. Some people are really just curious, and aren't afraid to "waste" the time it takes to play around with it. I'm exactly like you though.
You'd think this stuff could be pretty efficient if done right, defer as much as possible to the flash application. I guess security is an issue if you do to much processing the the flash, probably a lot of servers to just to serve the flash.
There are a number of resources in Chicago that might be able to help you, but may I make a couple of suggestions?

1) When you ask for something, you need to be clear. Please use full sentences and complete thoughts.

2) Give a brief overview of what the app concepts are and what the business around them will be.
I know someone who works for an insurance company that covers credit card and identity fraud. They are actively monitoring these sites for their costumers information. Even though that's a private company, I wouldn't be surprised if government organisations do the same.
I think it call comes down to class resolution. So whether you call it subclassing, versioning, whatever, the interesting thing is when you say that this bird is a "Blackbird," how do we figure out which version of the class to use?

Sometimes we want to take the existing Blackbird, add or change something, let's call it Blackbird2 internally. If we are creating and owning an object, it's a Blackbird2 in our scope obviously.

But if we get handed a Blackbird from someone else, can we treat it as a Blackbird2 in our scope but it is still a Blackbird outside of our scope?

That mechanism is really scoped class resolution or scoped behaviour resolution or something. It completely solves the clashing monkey patch problem.

Anyhow, I guess what I'm saying is that the implementation of versions of classes is one thing, and the resolution of names or references to classes is another (and very interesting) thing.
Is it all written in ColdFusion or something?

http://gigaom.com/2010/06/08/how-zynga-survived-farmville/

Zynga uses Apache PHP on the front end, memcached for active user play and MySQL on the back end. It uses memcached to store key value pairs to deal with active user play during sessions and then later writes it to disk.
" A relationship with someone who can mentor you is the byproduct of everything else you do. " - That is very true. Maybe you should spend a week skimming through different languages, pick the one you find the easiest. Spend the next two three weeks going through a beginner's book for the language and coding some simple programs. Next plan a project, it can be a simple app and code it in the language. And as you are coding, you will keep encountering problems which might need some research, you will refer books, blog posts, online tutorials etc. and will keep on learning.

As you work on the project, you will find mentors on the way, some will guide you on the technical stuffs, others might go beyond that. All the best.
Credit Suisse Downgrades Entire US Entertainment Sector
Oh I see. But that's unrelated to the discussion. Fact is that to produce and sell food outside of the 'home' setting requires a license, for food safety reasons. While we (or rather, other people - myself I'm not so much interested in that discussion) could argue about whether or not that's warranted, fact is that such regulations exist and they are very unlikely to go away.

Now, while technically 'unlicensed' does not equal 'unsafe', the existence of 'licensed' outfits, for safety reasons, does mean that 'unlicensed' means 'we cannot verify the safety'. Which, realistically, is as good as 'unsafe' in terms of pressure against it.

(This is not a discussion about actual food safety, this is about processes and pressures on policy makers and perceptions of control.)

(edit: add 'un' to 'likely')
I much prefer IMDB to check on movie ratings (they're much more user-based and accurate to me, at least): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/

User reviews here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/usercomments

So far it seems positive (though that could easily be affiliated reviewers that got to watch the movie early).
My dad used to teach kids with disabilities. He always used to tell the other teachers that the disabled is a club anyone can join at any time, without notice.
At this scale the performance advantages of a language like Scala start to seem pretty significant.
Definitely domain-accepted, but that doesn't mean it's necessary or best. I'm applying to post-doc positions now and I'm personally banking on the theory that short and sweet (with condensed goodness and moderate humility) makes a better CV.

Of course.. I could be totally wrong. Maybe I'll hedge my bets and apply to a few places with a bloated CV.
A photo tour of the Large Hadron Collider
Why are you motivated to create a domain registrar? What pain will you remove or what value will you provide that makes you different then the million other registrar/hosting businesses out there?
I have no objection to Mr. McConnell joining us, having his say, and explaining why his maxims are a greater good in the domain of PHP programming. Until then, perhaps you may want to make a point that you feel doesn't need an Argument from Authority?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
"Programming in anger" is a very odd way to put it. I think it's best to say "programming because you need it".
Compare and contrast with World of Warcraft: http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/09/18/blizzard-reveals-some-t...

"...it takes roughly 20,000 computer systems, over a petabyte of storage, and over 4600 people. Using multiple data centers around the world, this works out to a total of 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM."

It doesn't say if that's total or just US (since WoW is hosted by different partners in Asia, last I paid any attention).
I'm sorry, non-native speaker here, that's just what it meant to me. Shall we continue in Dutch ?
1000 servers per week number is not just realistic. I will like to believe the author misspoke otherwise it will take more that Zynga employees just to configure 1000 servers in a week time.
That wasn't the point of his counter-argument. That a stance has some merit does not raise it above criticism.
Where did you get the $85k salary from? The article mentions $45k, which has to be paid back to the record company.
Comic Sans would be an ok choice for comic lettering, you know, what its name kind of implies.
The pain is the large amount of upsells. GoDaddy particularly makes me click through many offers to buy extra things I don't need. I won't have that. Also I think there is value in a service that only does domains. I don't need hosting, and I don't want to navigate the UI to find my domains in a sea of other services.
If you want some help getting started with Java, I'm willing to give you some pointers so you can feel confident developing web applications.

I can be found on gary-rowe.com.
Survivors of any traumatic experience can reflect on their experiences in a wide variety of ways.

John Scalzi is not reflecting on his own experiences. He is just as privileged as you or I; he is merely claiming to be so much more aware of poverty that he has the authority to emotionally define it.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/about/a-brief-biography-of-john-s...
> Well, it's compiled using XeLaTeX

That's fine, I'm already using XeLaTeX. Thanks.
The entire thread has been about Dave and his writing.

How many other investors can you recognize by their prose and style? how many do you talk about afterward?

I think the point has been made.
Considering how infrequently I actually interact with other people in my own physical office (especially since we are all very conscious of not breaking each other out of the 'zone') this sounds fantastic.

I have tried to motivate usage of a engineering-team internal IRC channel and spread the use of screen-sharing software, but when people are physically so close the standard response is "why don't you just go talk to him?". Makes sense until you mix in the element of "I don't want to talk to him when he is obviously concentrating." Sprinkle a touch of e-mail overload making that medium useless and you have a strange atmosphere of working in proximity with one another, but not necessarily together.
Hey il,

Thanks for your feedback. The purpose of the post is not to say that one way is any better than the other. I was thinking about the differences between the two types of companies and trying to come up with a way to describe these differences.

You're right on that in general it's easier for a content site to get traffic then for a product site. But as you point out, a product can pay for traffic. Some would see the very fact that they can pay for traffic is a major advantage. Just my two cents here.

That said, your assumptions of my assumptions are also off. The 7 million impressions was the total number of impressions across different ads. That means that the site gets less that 7 million pageviews total. For easy comparison, I left this as is.
and a marquee.
I work in finance and have an undergrad CS degree.

It's common for folks in finance to have undergrad technical degrees (e.g., physics, math, CS) and graduate degrees in something more closely related to finance such as an MBA or MS in quantitative finance. (Although the pure quants will usually have a PhD in math or physics.)

But frankly if you're a technical person IMO finance is a ghetto: once you're in, it's hard to get out. In no other industry can you make as much money to do work that generally speaking is substantially behind the curve technically (e.g., pre-STL C++ is the standard development language and mindset, and most of the time you're just moving stuff to and from CSV files and databases). But if you're disciplined with your spending it's a great way to save seed capital if one day you want to jump ship and try a startup.
Thanks. Any other good tools for SEO?
In house, like Google, will have people on staff who do this as their job (ie costs lower).

A startup looking to sponsor an H1B, based on my experience, is going to be quoted ~$20k in legal + filing fees from a small-medium law firm (ie not Fenwick but not USAVisas.net either [made up site, you get my drift]).
Here's my rant on RT: Their 0-100% score tells you very little about how good the movie is. It simply tells you how agreeable to critics it is.

Because often critics just contribute a binary yes/no review, movies that can get a lot of critics to somewhat approve of them can get very close to 100% (art house movies often score too high because critics would lose face giving a thumbs down). Movies that half of the critics love and half of them dislike can get 50%.

I'd really like to see a site that matches up my movie tastes with a few movie critics that predict my tastes well, and then keeps me updated with their reviews.
Roger Ebert recently wrote a bit about the gulf between fan opinion and professional reviewers. He also touches on review aggregators and what they bring to the mix.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/07/the_myth_of_a_perfec...
Y Combinator is strictly for college kids. The restriction is based not on age, but on money. Older people are implicitly excluded because they can't afford to give up their income to pursue a startup. Wife, kids and a mortgage cost money.

As a result, I think the Y Combinator startup market is only a fraction of what it could be, if older founders could be included. I imagine there would be so many more and different ideas than what we currently see.

I think a Y Combinator-like incubator, that provides enough funding for older founders, would thrive. If funding was in the range of say 70K to 90K per founder, many more companies could be started. And really, that's still not a lot of money for the VC/Angel/Incubator industry. It wouldn't take too many hits to make a profit for the funders with these numbers.

Despite what the original post says, Y Combinator is implicitly intended for college-age kids. And that's fine. But think of how many more opportunities there could be for both Y Combinator and founders, if the funding available could support older people.
Couldn't you just put a second chain on the other side? Or am I missing something in this "symmetry" argument?
Exactly. 1000 servers was probably a peak, probably a week when launching a new title - Farmville 3.0 - Return of the Wheat or whatever.
7000 users/server is actually pretty high for an MMO, though I don't know how Zynga's MMOs compare to something like World of Warcraft in terms of server resources needed. The numbers being floated around for World of Warcraft are around 75,000 cores for 10m subscribers, or about 133 subscribers per core. Obviously those aren't single-core servers, but it's still under 1k per server. Of course this and the Zynga numbers are also both subscriber numbers, not peak player numbers, and I'm not sure how play frequency/duration differs between the two companies' userbases.

Some MMO designers actually really want to bring that number even lower, though lots of other people at game companies are looking at ways to pack more users on each core. But from a designer's perspective, if you typically get less than 1/50 of a CPU slice per user, maybe 1/100, and much of that is taken up by doing basic bookkeeping, it's hard to put in things that even 1990s RPGs took for granted, like NPCs with at least passably interesting AI.
My take on a reply to this is:

- Find a project you want to do. Maybe it's a website that does something simple, maybe it's an iphone app.

- Scrape together a first approach at building it.

- Build it again.

- Learn/read along the way

- Build it again.

After a few iterations you'll start to get the hang of it.
>- startups & investors bitch & moan about price (aka valuation) all day long, but i don't really give a damn what other people think most of the time. buy or don't buy. negotiate or don't. This is America, This is Capitalism, and it's a Free Fucking Country.

I read Arrington's article with a grain of salt, but after that line McClure convinced me he's up to no good. That is exactly what a colluding price-fixer would say to defend his actions. The fact that he denies it is irrelevant.
OK, I will not :-) I'm somewhat confused why some my answers I think are very important for this topic are down-voted ...
>Even if we assume that Silicon Valley seed rounds only
>account for 10 percent of angel investing in the US,

Surely they are way, way less than 10%. I mean tech is less than 10% of the US and the valley isn't the only place for angels. At 1%, which sounds more plausible, we are talking about controlling 50% of deals. That's not an innocuous number.

So, screw the 500,000 angels figure. Anyone with any actual knowledge want to tell us how much of the relevant market the top 10 angel firms control?
Programmers: Working in IT vs R&D
> "Finding a mentor" is a misnomer. You don't "find" a mentor any more than you find a girlfriend or spouse.

That's not true, I've found at least two people on HN by simply approaching them and asking them if they were willing to teach me a concept and both of them agreed readily (and have shown considerable patience with me).

If there is one place where simply asking people that are skilled if they would please teach you pays off it's here.
You bet. It's very much an individual thing, but I also think that with a CS background, you're more likely to be able to create a "sky's the limit" situation for yourself financially. More potential for knocking something completely out of the park, if that makes sense. Of course, the very best people in finance will also be able to write their own ticket. I think the real focus should be on what makes the most sense for an individual given their personality, learning styles, and situation.
RFI: What do people think of quant finance Bachelors and Masters? Obviously it depends on the programme and school, but what do Ph.D. mathematician or pfysicist quants think of them, and otoh, what do traders and such think of them?
That, plus the fact that "Din", "Dax" and "Cocon" look terrible. Up there with Mistral in the "instantly dated" category.