skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's okay, you can downvote me. I understand wanting to believe that it works that way, but it almost never does. You will simply make different decisions based on whether a project is for fun or for profit.

Can we at least agree that projects with no business model and no funding should be called apps rather than startups?
Thinking of algo-trading? Don't trust the SEC to regulate the market
Goes from moderate to "whoa, this is gonna take a little while" too fast. Level 1 looks like a nice casual game, Level 2 looks like I need to get a cup of coffee before I start it.

It might increase stickiness to make the perceived difficulty increase more slowly. Or to even have a trivial Level 1 just to get people used to the controls (they're not hard, but don't assume anything).
Aside from Chrome 6, Opera 10 and Firefox 3, I use Flock on a regular basis. If you count testing, then I use Safari 3, 4 and Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 as well.
Yup - as someone who just turned 45 I can understand that - this year I can ski better then I ever have before (and I've been skiing for nearly 35 years) and I'm having more fun with more different technologies than I've ever had before.
I was hoping someone would ask- it's as useful to hear about the 'failures' as it is to hear about the successes, especially since there are so many more of them.

Tweet my pasteboard and Speed Tweet - two iPhone apps I wrote. I probably spent 50-100 hours on them, and $200 (to be a registered apple developer for 2 years). One was ad supported, one was 0.99. Total revenue about $20. Both are officially dead now that only oauth sign on is allowed for Twitter.

Tankbuddy.com - my first shot at a ruby on rails app. You could enter the details about your fish tank(s), and record readings (ph, temperature etc). I had big plans. Sadly, after a few weeks I wasn't even using the site myself, and was still paying $15 a month for hosting. Traffic was essentially 0 and the project was killed when I cancelled the hosting account.

I have a new project (http://localbeer.me - helping you find locally breewed beer) that I am very hopeful for. I paid for a year of hosting in advance, so even if I choose to ignore the project for a few months it's not costing me anything. This week was big, I had over 200 visitors from a link I posted to reddit.

As others have said, I have many more side projects, but they're not dead, just forgotten. Unlike others, to date not a single one of my side projects has turned a profit.
This is a fun hack. Strangest path that I've found so far:

Sitar -> Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band -> Adolf Hitler
Google is (believe it or not) working on being more accessible to customers, but no, right now, there isn't a number she can call. It's sad that people like your mom are disappointed, and there are plenty more like her out there, but calling up isn't going to change anything :(
http://knifetricks.blogspot.com/2010/04/i-am-detained-by-fed...
It would be cool to display the excerpts where the links occur. I'm confused by several of them and too lazy to read through each entry to find out why they are linked.
You forgot

Not every programmer is passionate about the same thing.
I'm no expert, but it seems unintuitive to have to click 'course notifier' and then 'getting started' to actually get signed up. There should be a 'Start watching courses now' link on the homepage... Most people that go to that sight probably already know what it does and are just looking to sign-up.
http://letsfreckle.com is totally livable for two people right now (about $150k/yr and growing), but since I want to be rich, we're rolling all that money back into expanding it.
If someone cuts his ties so violently as _why did I think that an attempt to contact him for an interview is a form of disrespect.
I agree. Only motivation to do this would be notoriety/prestige. I think it may be also a way to push for people to use the WB data sets.
damn it had a typo in the fib generation for the second number and lost a lot of time trying to factor a _massive_ number that was obviously the wrong one :)
If you can learn the power of compound interest at your age, you're going to retire very comfortably.
Not really. I didn't have much money to use for marketing so I just focussed on getting it in front of people that would be interested and spread the word. That meant sending emails to people I didn't know and introducing myself. Sometimes that's all it takes!
Ask HN: Moving our Startup to Sillicon Valley for Sucess?
So, we're located in Miami, FL and there has been some interest by angels and investors in our product. However, when they learn that we are not in the Valley it kind of turns them down.

Is being located in the valley a good thing?

The startup i'm talking about is this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1748623
I was going to say "google it" but then realized that may not be work-safe :)

Anyway here's wikipedia's description of the movement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_positive
Finding the longest path is computationally impossible.
This is awesome, but I wish you would eliminate the hops that consist only of dates because they aren't very interesting.
Randomly Promoting People is More Efficient Than Using Merit
http://xkcd.com/214/

Congrats. You've just automated the whole thing :)
I should add that this won the Ig Prize this year in the management category.
Depending on remote host, but I constantly get about 3Mbps when accessing servers located in US or Japan[1][2][3]. I'm using an old 4Mbps package here (6Mbps upgrade still doesn't available where I live), I'd say pretty good for the price.

[1]: http://www.speedtest.net/result/983221226.png

[2]: http://www.speedtest.net/result/983225975.png

[3]: http://www.speedtest.net/result/983227297.png
I wasn't able to find more than four until I tried "Justin Bieber", which returned no results. I guess that means it hasn't found a path for Justin Bieber yet?
You're only telling us general trivia. If you've done a wordpress theme, post a tutorial or a how-to.
Maybe I'm missing something but why not just:

struct wtf { int x, y; }

inc_both( wtf& t ) { ++t->x; ++t->y; }

main() {
r := wtf(); // x, y by default 0, string when exists, empty
inc_both( r );
inc_both( r );
}

If you want to keep it C-like, don't do all that public/private things, keep implicit creation of the struct etc.

main() {
r := wtf( 22, 33 ); // assigns to x and y
}

Do you really need to hide variables or make real inheritance in a simple language? "Information hiding" is overvalued and actually rarely really needed on the single class level -- you have to care only about interfaces. Which are probably going to remain too clumsy as long as you use header files (in my humble opinion, I always liked Turbo Pascal (and Modula) modules, more recently Go also manages to avoid headers).

void for return type was needed in ANSI C only because omitting it would mean int in the code written in old K&R. You can make void as default when the return type is not specified and keep the code nicer. Ditto for no parameters. You'll get the slim appearance of K&R C code and the semantic would still be clear to everybody as nobody would assume he's reading K&R C. Or would he in your case, even with strings etc?

Btw C++ since recently has

auto n = 1; // int
auto s = "abc"; // char ptr

but IMHO Limbo idea is clearer and wouldn't introduce any problems (it's really easy to add the new operators for "declare and assign" and the semantic is obvious):

n := 1;
s := "abc";

And I thing I would also allow omitting ; before }.
I didn't know that was within the extent of your powers cperciva
Too late to add this, but it is funny to see this in the news today:

http://www.telegraaf.nl/binnenland/7882974/__Hennepteler_ont...

Hemp growers acquited after police enters their house after anonymous phone call.
It's very difficult for me to distinguish between the gray color of the regular floor and the light-green color of the goals. I'm somewhat color blind, maybe that's why.
reverse substring and compare

D'oh! My is_palindrome(word) just got a lot shorter, thanks :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Rhee
Haven't used it for a while but I have fond memories of that silly fetch audio and trying to convince the system i mean Tom Thumb not Tom Tom Asian Grill.
That's fantastic! Starting a software business is mostly about business, and incidentally about programming. I think this is the reason that people like to read patio11's commentary (it certainly isn't because we like bingo cards). I would be interested to hear more about how you identified your customer base, picked your employees, and decided how and when to grow the business without external funding.
I live in Mumbai with the same overall budget. Except that rent is double but I save on petrol and internet. :)
Ask HN: Brazilian looking for tips on getting a job in USA or Canada.
Hi guys, I've been planning this post for a long time and since I will be on vacation for 15 days I'm plan at looking for some opportunities.
I'm 30 and I currently work on a mobile phone operator in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In the last months I became tired of living here and seeing the great happenings in USA around the Valley, all the startups made me look into new technologies, web applications and stuff like that. I'm also looking for a place I have access to great equipments, great internet access and contacts.

My current job is specialist in prepaid systems and project management but in the meantime I do some development for daily tools in shell script, python and play with some personal projects (currently learning JQuery, CSS, Node.JS, etc).

My resume and past experiences can be viewed on Linkedin: http://br.linkedin.com/pub/carlos-eduardo-de-paula/0/726/a86

Can you guys give me some tips or point out a way to relocate and get a great job?

Thanks for all.
bing 411
I think Google are actually really brave to do this and I for one am proud of them. Lots of corporate companies keep around products in zombie states for years because they are afraid of shutting stuff down and upsetting customers.

Google provides lots of free services and I think it's awesome that they try stuff, innovate and then pull out when it's not working for them.

I think it's good they gave everyone a month's notice and provided a txt based alternative. It would have been nice if they'd also pointed to some voice alternatives provided by "competitors" though.
My girlfriend (and myself, but only at home) use a gym ball as chair. Of course I can't recommend it to everyone, and long stretches sitting on it can be really tiresome. I wrote a blog post at my blog, you can check it at http://www.mostlymaths.net/2010/08/gym-ball-as-office-chair-...

It has worked wonders for small back pains in the lower parts, and also for some head aches related to spine problems, for me.

Give it a try, a gym ball is inexpensive.
http://www.discoverbing.com/mobile/411/
Read some quality history of long dead eras. I find the most intriguing to be Sengoku (Warring States) Japan, the transition from the late Roman Republic to the early Roman Empire, and Renaissance Italy. You can find good narratives and commentaries of these eras, like Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Eiji Yoshikawa's Taiko (historical fiction, but accurate enough jumping off point). Reading a biography that follows one guy around can be pretty good - Julia Cartwright's "Baldissare Castiglione" is pretty good, it's a good read especially if you've already read The Prince by Machiavelli. (Definitely read a commentary/analyis of The Prince alongside it, though, so you understand the pressures on Machiavelli while writing)

Likewise, reading autobiographies and first hand accounts alongside commentaries can be interesting. I like Julius Cesar's autobiographical "The Gallic Wars." I have an electronic copy of Flavius Josephus's Books of the History of the Jewish War against the Romans, but haven't read it yet - but that looks really, really fascinating to me. I'll read it along with a commentary.

Understanding old politics (Roman, fragmented Italy states, fragmented Japan followed by unified Japan) has helped me understand new politics. Basically, the mainstream interpretation of anything political that happened after year 1750 or so is questionable and suspect. By all means, still learn modern history, but there's so much misinformation out there.

If you want a real head trip, go read Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address. That'll show you how inaccurate the mainstream interpretation of events 200 years ago are. Really, seriously, it messed with my head when I read it -

http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html

Read his thoughts on slavery and fugitive slaves in there, and his argument for why nonviolent secession from the union is an act of violence. "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors."

Start with the history of old politics if you want to understand new politics. Everything you've learned post-1750 without verifying from primary sources is suspect. I'm not exaggerating, nor am I a conspiracy theorist - I dig around through primary sources. Ever stop and wonder why the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor after the USA was its closest ally from the formation of the Empire up until four years before the war broke out?

All mainstream views on modern politics are suspect. Start with older eras with issues we aren't emotional about today, then once understanding duplicity and doublespeak, start learning about the modern era. For the record, I wholly support Lincoln and think he was a great President, despite the fact that I have a 180 degree different view of his intentions than most people. (In my view from my studies, he was a pure conquest imperialist, not any sort of liberator... but I still like him and think he made largely the right choice after the secession)
Based on how you described it, I believe that idea 1 will have better traction with restaurant. You offer them a low cost / low risk new customer acquisition channel.

Idea number two discribes a problem that customers might have, but you are trying to sell it to the restaurant owners.

If you go with option 2, you must think how the fact that the menues are boring and lack visuals affect the business.
Maybe customers ask the waiter too many questions, maybe they spend too much time thinking what to order, maybe they return the dish or they simply leave unhappy because they didn't get what they wanted. In short, if you want to sell your solution to the owner - describe the owner's problem.
Without thinking I tried moving the character around using the vi "hjkl" navigation keys, and it works! Mad props for that.
35 mins, but in less than 40 lines of ruby
You really need to give people a way to link to a result set.
Save the money you spend on pills and buy a motorized standing desk.
This is really great to hear! The community here has really been great to me as well and the thoughtfulness and quality of answers is really remarkable.

Awesome that the business is a bakery too!
Have you read the OPAR (Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand)?

Your question seems to assume that Objectivism is a political philosophy, but this is simply not the case.

Rand put it eloquently: "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows. <p> This — the supremacy of reason — was, is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism. (For a definition of reason, see Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.) Reason in epistemology leads to egoism in ethics, which leads to capitalism in politics."

On "food vs. freedom" (I take this to mean that you believe that capitalism delivers material goods, but not freedom): you might be defining freedom incorrectly, or taking the meaning of the word from one context and applying it inappropriately to another context. (Rand makes it clear in her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology that all definitions are contextual.) Also see http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/freedom.html
That's in direct conflict with the NIC.ly regulations:

"3.5 The Applicant certifies that, to the best of his/her knowledge the domain name is not being registered for any activities/purpose not permitted under Libyan law."

Which is based on Islamic law, which is notorious for heavy handed limitations on what people can do in their version of morality.

"4.2 Domain names must not contain obscene, scandalous, indecent, or contrary to Libyan law or Islamic morality words, phrases nor abbreviations."

http://nic.ly/regulations.php

So just saying that that is your mission already rules out a .ly domain for you, even if the actual domain name itself is still within the rules, polyandrous relationships, free sexuality (especially free female sexuality) and so on are likely to offend.

That does not make it right. But you have to pick your battles.
With a lot of effort I think they all could have been successful. But when you have to work your day job to make a living, you need something you can bootstrap on the side without investing huge amounts of unrewarded effort up front. That's why I like to start a lot of things and then see what happens. Sometimes I give up on an idea simply because it becomes uninteresting (e.g. retail). With both Gravatar and GitHub, it was almost immediately obvious that they were ideas worth pursuing. They got people excited, and I could easily gauge the interest by tracking signups. If you're not seeing signups, it means something is wrong and you'll have to decide how much effort you're willing to invest in order to fix that something. Without knowing the details it's hard for me to give any more insight.
You should exclude days of the year if possible, hitler seems to be directly related to most :/
Clojure here.
Great post, truly a comprehensive list of all the differing strategies commonly available to startups and establishments alike. Looking forward to "Metrics Every Startup Should Know."
Moore's Law, as originally stated, is that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months. Flash memory is definitely on that trajectory, and SSD controllers look like they can make good use of increased transistor counts for a few generations.

My comment was directed to Matt_Cutts' complaint that he didn't know when to buy an SSD. I don't think it matters exactly when you buy one. (Though I personally am waiting to see how Intel's 25nm SSDs compare to those based on the SandForce SF-2000 controller around Jan/Feb 2011. Maybe I should practice what I preach.)
it was the case...
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sex_doll&oldid...

just the most recent article doesnt seem to have it
Python, Scheme, Python. Mainly because I had nice functions in Scheme for level 2 sitting around from when I was trying to work through SICP...
If you're writing code to test primeness or generate Fibonacci numbers, I sure as hell don't want to hire you.

Maybe you should have called it the "Greplin Challenge," then, instead of the "Greplin Programming Challenge." It's not a real task, after all; the reward comes from accepting a completely artificial challenge. I'm going to do the challenge before dinner tonight, and before I leave work I could get source code for the solutions from the guy down the hall from me who did the challenge as soon as it was posted -- and you certainly don't want to hire a guy who recodes other people's work for no reason, right?
awesome, thanks :)
What to do about shared passwords?
how do you handle usernames/passwords/api keys across a department/company?

I'm talking about passwords that many people need access to, such as vendors/partners that give you only one u/p for entire company. or server login infos.

do you put in a text file on a network? intranet?who's in charge of them? custom database? some program that I'm not aware of?
Has the Miami community done anything to help you? I made the move from Miami to the valley once. Happy to help give guidance.
I think his dataset is out of date and so the Justin Bieber article doesn't exist.
Why do you keep insisting that the NIC.ly people are part of the Libyan government?

Even the 'victim' in this case is quite careful to make the distinction between the two.

I don't doubt there are contacts between the two and I'm sure they operate with the permission of the Libyan government but they're not one and the same.
I see a lot of people are being turned off by this. My intention was that people who wanted the levels that could be solved quickly would just stick to playing the Microban levels, but I guess that isn't super obvious.

I'll try and find a way to make the ordering make more sense.
that would take a long time, advil and aleve are pretty cheap. but long term, I think it's inevitable to buy such a desk.
I was hoping that someone here would notice this! :)
Facebook -> April 30 -> Adolf Hitler

However it would seem that it's only matching April and not April 30th.

Enjoyed the images though
Weh - all straight out of Daniel Pink's "Whole New Mind" - http://www.amazon.com/Whole-New-Mind-Right-Brainers-Future/d...

What to me is a flaw in the thinking though is, that East Asians are supposedly more right-brained than we Westerners are. So it won't necessarily save you.
What made you decide to go ahead with the .ly domain after you read about their terms of service?

Sure, thanks for asking - and perhaps I should highlight this elsewhere.

So we DID read the regulations (at http://nic.ly/regulations.php). It doesn't say ANYTHING in their regulations that they are going to make editorial decisions upon the content of your site (as I said previously, anything written on LibyanSpider.com is reference and not the article of record, and as it happens they have changed a lot of wording since we registered the domain 13+ months ago -- yes, they had no problems with this for over a year!).

People have written whole blog posts on how we were wrong because it says clearly they won't allow sexual or offensive references in domains. But the wording in that caluse pertains to the DOMAIN and just the domain, not the content of the site. And so the string "vb" in vb.ly clearly doesn't infringe on any issues around sexual or offensive content.

So we're good so far, would you not agree?

The area we considered, and which ultimately NIC.ly said we were in violation of is:

3.5 The Applicant certifies that, to the best of his/her knowledge the domain name is not being registered for any activities/purpose not permitted under Libyan law.

Now let me use what NIC.ly actually wrote to us, rather than this wider peanut gallery speculation that people are putting upon this. As per http://techyum.com/2010/10/official-vb-ly-link-shortener-sei..., Mr Alaeddin S. ElSharif of NIC.ly wrote:

Moving up the Regulations list we find clause 3.5 clearly states that: “The Applicant certifies that, to the best of his/her knowledge the domain name is not being registered for any activities/purpose not permitted under Libyan law.”

Pornography and adult material aren’t allowed under Libyan Law, therefore we removed the domain,

Sure, ok: pornography and adult material isn't allowed under Libyan Law.

We didn't host any Pornography or adult material. The site was a single page, as you can see from the screen grab on the TechYum url above.

So in conclusion I feel we performed the due diligence as per the regulations and stayed within the regs. What I didn't expect is that NIC.ly would interpret their regulations quite liberally (no pun intended) in an effort to close the domain. They claim there was a lot of pressure upon them internally to do that, but what I assumed (incorrectly) is that no matter what pressure there might be if something is within regs then I don't expect the rug to be pulled out from under me.

What do you make of the above, Jacques, seeing as you have been quite vocal on this top within this HN thread?

Thanks