skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN:"How I Got Funded" Panel Discussion at Cambridge,MA
I came across this and thought of sharing it. Its held at Cambridge, MA on Tuesday, October 19, 2010 from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM (ET)
"How I Got Funded" Panel Discussion by Startup Leadership Program & Dogpatch Labs (Free)
http://startupleadership.eventbrite.com/
> Explain the hypothetical boss it is a bit like an ELF format, but for configuration. He does not recompile every executable every time before running it, does he?

That's a good point. Mongrel2 config files == .c files, m2sh == make, config.sqlite == libmycodez.so
Ghd ceramic straightener online shop 
Provides varies of ghd hair straighteners.Having them makes you more beautiful and attractive .High quality and low price.Free shipping and professional servies.
He said that "the universe did not require a creator". Not that we know how the universe got into existence. That's a different statement altogether.

And he is right. Based on our current knowledge of physics & cosmology we don't need a creator to explain the universe. A creator may still be involved but he is un-necessary. So the question is now: "Why should we even discuss about a creator when he is both un-necessary and there are NO evidence whatsoever for his existence?"

PS: I hope I will not hear the "What was before the Big Bang?" question.
Clickable url: http://startupleadership.eventbrite.com/
You're wrong here. For certain businesses, foreign ownership can be the full 100%. When we opened our business here, we actually had the change to go this route, but choose not to because it would have been more hassle though.

But I am also wondering how accurate this list is. And what qualifies as a "business"? Here in Thailand, many small businesses don't requite any form of legal entity and opening a small shop for example would be as easy as renting some space, putting in inventory and open your doors.... doens't get much easier then that. Imagine trying that in the US or UK... The ease of opening a small business here in Thailand beats any country that comes before Thailand on that list...
Twitter CEO: We've “cracked the code” on advertising
Web Upgrade, HTML5, May Weaken Privacy
I think a lot of the value one gets from researching the reporters/journalists/bloggers is getting to know their content and getting a sense of the "personality" of each publication, not just finding contact information. That being said, it sounds like your service would allow people to focus on the important stuff and make it simple to contact whichever people you select (while many journalists make their contact information readily available, there are those that are more difficult).

I wonder about the legal issues surrounding this idea. Last time I worked with a service that provided an email database and sent people emails, it required an opt-out link in each message -- which would be easy -- and it required prior opt-in from the person being emailed -- which would make it a bit harder for you. I was working in market research then (a few years ago), however, and the laws and regulations may be different.

Anyway, certainly this is an idea worth looking into, I hope you go for it and have great success!
Poppycock. You don't neeed to work 10 years in some investmennt bank dungeon programming to know that stuff. You can "self-learn" computer science and you can answer that stuff without much problem. I was more than familiar enough to answer those questions before my junior year in college and really I was close to getting a handle on concurrency, at least to answer the superficial questions that get asked in an interview, before I entered college. If you follow programming languages, the type inference and covariance, etc is not a big deal. In fact, I wouldn't think working for an investment bank is the way you go to learn that.
Yes. Many of us don't give a rats ass about impressing anyone, that's not the point of a wedding.
Ask HN: proportion of effort spent on defects?
I'm currently working as a contractor in a small team that is re-writing a legacy business application (implemented in VBA on top of an Excel & Access platform) in .NET & Silverlight.

As a team we are observing a _very_ high defect rate, significantly higher than on any of our past professional and personal projects. On average in any fortnightly iteration, we're spending around 10% of our development time correcting defects, of which ~ 50% are regressions in previously accepted functionality.

Worse, these figures are from a triaged-defect rather than a zero-defect environment; assuming the cost of fixing defects remains on average the same, and assuming that we fix _all_ our defects before release, we're looking at a truly incredible 22% of total effort that will likely be spent on defects.

The reasons for this are varied, and many are technical. In particular, the .NET / Silverlight / WCF RIA / EF4 tech. stack is notoriously awful in terms of TDD & automated UAT. We can get some of the way using AgUnit, Moq and StatLight but it's still slow & awkward, and the EF4 architecture is not conducive to mocking (but very conducive to mockery ;-) ).

We _had_ built a nice automated UAT harness on White, but several defects in White made our harness next to useless for inspecting what we needed to inspect on the page. (One of my biggest gripes with any web technology that doesn't produce HTML is that I can't test it with Selenium).

The way I see it, 22% is wildly unacceptable, and even 10% feels very high to me. This is the first time I've explicitly gathered this '% of effort' metric but it's the first time I've felt the need to ... I've built complex projects in a mix of .NET and RoR in the past, and defects (especially regressions) have only ever been a very minor concern.

Anyway, there are several changes I'd like to make (technical and methodological) in order to lower this figure, and in order to drive those changes I'd like to be able to point to some numbers to back up my gut feeling and past experience.

Hence my question: what has been the experience of other HNers in terms of proportion development effort spent on defects?

Actual numbers seem quite hard to find by Googling ... I get the feeling that few shops are willing to openly discus the figures (I'm posting anonymously for this one myself).

(On a related note, I now believe that part of the problem is the decision, which I endorsed at the time, to re-write. I'd now prefer to treat the VBA codebase like any other legacy system; test, refactor, incrementally replace components with .NET, ... but that's another story and will probably be the subject of a forthcoming article.)
I tried sending press releases (as the body of the email) and wasn't sure if I should include a short note with it. Or should I just send a brief pitch with no press release?
Yeah, the problem is transparency.

When I have used PR firms in the past, we have left it in their hands to send our news and press releases to the right people. Beyond us sending a legal department approved press release, and seeing it later that morning on Business Wire, the whole thing is rather secret.

I like to think that startups do not need PR firms, they just need transparency and a tool that allows them get the media's attention faster.
Good article.

You know how people tend to forget their stupid ideas over time and think they're smarter? I just want to publicly own that I thought tablets weren't going to be a big deal before the iPad launch. I thought Apple fans would buy it, but then it wouldn't take off. I was mistaken.

I'm already starting to re-write my memory with, "Oh yeah, of course it was going to be big" so I wanted to publicly own my poor prediction before my mind conveniently rewrites itself.
"QuickLisp is solar panels for Lisp, no need to include batteries."

Awesome slogan. I hope Quicklisp appropriates it.

This is exactly what Common Lisp has most needed for a long time now, and may have kept me in the Common Lisp camp longer if it existed a few years ago.
Almost as funny as "You write a distributed map-reduce function in Erlang!".

I think people are reacting out of bad experiences with other binary file configuration systems. Examples: windows registry; Solaris as LDAP client (ok, so the stored files might be text today, but the documentation disavows their format and declares the command line is the One True Interface); Solaris smf (again, text files underneath, but the documentation deprecates their format); Gnome configuration (I'd be grateful if someone could point to useful documentation there, or some kind of road map).
Being Eric Schmidt (On Facebook)
A Breakthrough in Capturing and Storing Carbon Dioxide?
Is there a full version for free? It looks like an interesting read.
Lisbon Portugal
Monthly expenses
flat $700
internet $60 but 100mb/s
food $300
Wage $1400 after tax
To facilitate most of these things you don't need to spend loads of money, you just need abundant alcohol.
Beijing, China

$500 to $1000 in rent, plus equivalent amount food and entertainment for a non-stressful lifestyle. You can pare down costs to perhaps $800/month by getting a room in a shared apartment and eating inexpensively. Add on $2500 annual expenses for visa, entry-exit expenses, etc.

Hiring programmers costs between $500 and $1500 per month depending on skills and experience. Without a legitimate Chinese business it can be hard to attract talent since you will not be able to pay social benefits, etc. Starting a legitimate business costs upwards of $30,000 in a one-time incorporation expense and pushes hiring costs to about $1500 per month per staffer.
A wedding need neither be bland nor short to be cheap; hook-ups, dance floors, embarrassment and kicking it until 4am don't require that much money.
Linux and other modern operating systems automatically cache network drives or can be configured to do so. Probably the best way to address that would be to increase the amount of RAM in each device, so more (or the entire disk) could be cached.
Wow. I don't even know where to start on that one, because that is about 100% the opposite of true.

I work on autonomous driving robots. Teams I have been on in the past won extremely competitive autonomous vehicle competitions. Our robots crashed all the time. ALL THE TIME!

There is nothing deterministic about how autonomous systems work. In fact our algorithms were by definition random number generators! We randomly generated "hypotheses" and then had heuristic tests that figured out which was the most likely trail and then chose it. It worked well, 99% of the time. But that 1% was a killer.

Mind you, since we were winning we were doing better than the other solutions which tried to be more deterministic and use maps or things like that. We were basically stateless which reduces some of the feedback associated with getting messed up in some of your estimations.

The problem is all at the low level, not the high level.

Give a robot a perfect map and it is easy to find a way around safely. The problem comes determining what the hell the camera is seeing (lasers are a lot easier, but not as flexible and more expensive). That is why the bulk of the effort is focused on computer vision not path finding, path finding algorithms are simple.

Sure actuating the pedals is fairly trivial, but to call autonomous systems "deterministic" is scary to someone who knows how fickle they are. I'm a huge advocate of self-driving cars, but we are not there yet, and when we get there we need to do a pile of peer review on the code (which better be open source). You never know what race conditions will blow it all up.
Thanks!

I have been researching for the past 2 hours and I can't find anything that says they have to opt-in to send them an email.

The only thing I can find is that you cannot be deceptive, and you must include a link that allows them to be removed from any further mailings. Both of which are easily accomplished.

But anyways, thanks for the words of encouragement.
Windows Phone 7 launches Monday in crowded smartphone market
Free access to the full version through Google News:

http://news.google.com/news/search?q=%22Technology+%3D+Salva...
"This strongly suggests that it’s a weak labor market for everyone out there, and businesses have no trouble finding the workers they need; they just don’t know what to do with those workers, given weak demand."

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/structural-imped...

People aren't buying things (presumably because they can't afford them), so businesses aren't hiring. Look at the graph. Businesses aren't concerned about "Interest Rates & Finance", which means they can get the money they need. They just don't have anyone to sell things to.

I don't think my accusation that you weren't paying attention has any merit since this is the article I was thinking of at the time, and it's only three weeks old. I apologize. I think there were other things said along these lines, though.
Small correction: Google didn't "map all the world's roads using cameras and a mechanical turk, destroying billions in market cap for map data providers." That is more than a stretch. They mapped SOME of the roads in the US, augmenting existing TIGER data from the US government, and used it in place of TeleAtlas. The "new" data is pretty bad, so I use Bing for directions because of it. They still rely on TeleAtlas (one of the map data providers they "destroyed") for almost every other country.
I used to work for the company, and even employees could access the helpdesk (they definitely ate their own dogfood - everything was done through the terminal).
I don't trust this list at all. I have just formed a company in Ireland and Portugal. Ireland is ranked 7 and Portugal ranked 48. In reality Portugal was about 3 times faster than Ireland, but cost about double.
>The type of thinking in the lab is not the type of thinking done in church.

Says who? How does my belief that God intervenes by the Holy Spirit, say, slow down science. I'm trying to think of a mechanism. [Getting OT] Why is it a bad thing to slow down science - what objective moral law requires that scientific enquiry proceeds quickly without thorough inspection or introspection?

Certainly many of the greatest "Western" scientific thinkers were inspired by God and the concept that knowledge of the creation leads to knowledge/understanding of the creator has been probably the greatest single driver of scientific discovery in the last couple of millennia [speculative I know].

Galileo had to do nothing of the sort. The church felt there was not enough evidence to confirm Galileo's findings (research funded by the Church) and so intervened to prevent publication. Ironically he was sort of wrong, we can choose any point as a centre no reference point is any more valid than any other. It is equally right to say the Universe revolves around one point as it is to say that of any other.

Stem-cell research is an interesting question but one I know little about. I suspect that the variance in attitudes within the Church, say, is little different to that outside it's corpus. I think the stop here is around agreed moral values WRT human life as opposed specific beliefs.

Finally, I'd like to see these figures showing that there are less people than previously ["waning"] that carry out religious practices or use faith in questioning morality. The ascendency of irreligion, for example, does not required the decline of religious behaviour. It sounds like propaganda - I'd be happy to be proved wrong either way but I suspect population studies will bear out that religious practice (faith is currently impossible to measure IMO) is not growing as quickly as it has in the past. Indeed it is possibly growing more slowly than global population growth.
And just to clarify, I never made this point. The first thing I ever said about this topic was (a direct quote):

$ echo '.dump' | sqlite3 mongrel2conf.sqlite > mongrel2conf.human_readable
$ git add mongrel2conf.human_readable

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777131

I only offered to add the -dbtxt option to mongrel2 when I realized the fundamental problem: people hate learning the sqlite file exists.
Facebook loses users, Twitter stalls, Myspace grows.
I don't think it's an if, it's a how and a when. The advantages of a tablet that's easily held in one hand are just too many, and if they wait, the various Android devices are going to noticeably eat their lunch.

I'm sure that Apple has had numerous sizes brewing in R&D since the beginning; the big obstacle is how they'll deal with the software platform. Will devs have three form factors to target when developing iOS, or will a 6-8" iPad have the exact same ratio and resolution as the old one so that everything "just works"?
Posting on their public forum on a Sunday night is not how to resolve this.

I've emailed a buddy at Trend Micro who can get this looked at.
Perhaps I’m alone in this, but I first read the headline as claiming that Microsoft itself is not committed to Windows Phone 7, which clearly is not the issue discussed here (they do seem very determined to succeed).
We really need these kind of applications on the Mac. I love Tweetie and I love the way you can create a tweet using a global shortcut. It makes me forget that I have Tweetie open and as soon as I realize I have something to say - boom (as Steve Jobs would say) - I have the window for a new tweet open on my desktop!
Soft4file.com
Really cool.

I go back to CL each year. Last couple of times I checked I wasn't able to get linedit working under my sbcl via a chain of simple asdf-installs, so CL went into my private oblivion.

Great idea with some QA done to the released programs !! CL always seemed like the people involved hated the phrase "release management". Now there's some light at the end of the tunnel..

Thanks for your work !
Agreed - I see where you are coming from.

To be clear we are not spamming upon login though - so you're ok.
Blizzard Bans Starcraft Players Who Cheat in Offline, Single Player Games
Got a response. They are looking into it now.
Oh my goodness, I totally agree.

Did you know they sell decorative boxes to be cremated in? Nevermind you're never going to see the box, nor will the deceased care which box they're in, all it's going to do is _burn_ but the funeral people are all, "what, you'd burn your father in a cardboard box? How horrible."
I just started using linedit this week, because all I have to do to set it up is:

(ql:quickload "linedit")
(linedit:install-repl)

Before that, it seemed like too much trouble.
Moscow, Russia

typ. exp:

~600$ per each family member for food/clothes/utilities (no fancy stuff)
700-1200$ renting 1 room apt.
20$ internet (10MBit+ is common)

extras:

60-100$ meal for 2 at *reasonably* priced restaurant
15$ movie ticket
10-20$ taxi ride
1$ ramen noodles (called "Doshirak" here)
2.5$ BigMac

avg. salary IT (after tax) $700-1500/mth (mostly around $1000/mth)
Most bankruptcies are caused by medical problems. Long term unemployment causes a significant fraction of the reminder. Saying, credit is the root cause is missing the reality that most people can bay their debts until a major external issue happens. So lending based on the probability of job loss / medical issue is reasonable.
> You're wrong here. For certain businesses, foreign ownership can be the full 100%. When we opened our business here, we actually had the change to go this route, but choose not to because it would have been more hassle though.

Could you elaborate on how it went with your business? I'd like to learn more because I like some parts of Thailand, but I always heard differently. Here's the top google result, for instance:

"A foreigner can form or buy a Thai company, and even be the sole director of it, but Thai citizens must jointly own at least 51% of its shares – meaning a majority is technically under Thai control. Currently it is possible to allocate shares to several unrelated people, who could have no combined effect on the company's business, and this can be arranged by the lawyer, but along with most things connected with business in Thailand, there are considerable risks involved."

http://www.retire-asia.com/thaibiz.shtml

Actually, the whole article is generally very cautionary and negative against a foreigner owning a business in Thailand, which jives with what I've heard people who spend time there say.

Maybe it's only businesses with real estate ownership or leases that come under these terms? EX, no real estate, then don't worry about it? I think regardless, you'd be fine working from your laptop.

Anyways, I'm curious if you want to elaborate more. International business law is one of those things that every little bit you know becomes more helpful in understanding the broad picture of how markets work, imports/exports work, etc. It's something I try to pay attention to, research, and ask questions about when I'm visiting a place.
According to the article:

On October 1, 2010, Blizzard began the unprecedented act of suspending and banning players for the use of cheats and trainers in SINGLE PLAYER games of Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. Users found to be using cheats in SINGLE PLAYER CAMPAIGN MODE and AI SKIRMISH mode were treated the same as if they had cheated in a multiplayer online match. For some, their accounts were suspended and for others their CD keys were disabled and they were completely locked out of playing even campaign mode in their legally purchased game.

This seems utterly ridiculous to me. Players have already purchased the game, and it seems to me that after that point Blizzard should no longer have control of what they do with the game in single player mode, on their own computer.

Perhaps since it keeps track of player rankings they are concerned about cheating in local single player games artificially inflating the achievements and gamer score of some players.

However, I still find it strange that Blizzard should take the stance that they still own the software and can take away your access after you have bought it, for doing something with it on your own personal computer, in single player mode.
As far as I'm aware, the revenue generated by a foreign subsidiary is not taxed again by the US until it enters the US economy. So long as it stays overseas we don't touch it. It's interesting to hear people note the record amounts of cash that US companies have on hand right now, but much of that is in foreign accounts and can't be brought into the US without paying a huge tax on it.
I was playing poker for a while and I actually found Flop Turn River to be an awesome place to go and read about the game. It's a smaller community than Two Plus Two, but there are also way less trolls, and some amazing meta game discussion if you ever get up to some Mid Stakes + cash games. Check it out.

http://www.flopturnriver.com
How did they know that the balloon reached 19 feet in diameter?
Surf sites on your Twitter timeline fast Stumbleupon for Twitter
Fast and non-intrusive way to browse through all the links shared in your twitter timeline. Customize it to show links from your favorites and/or twitter lists. Use as either a stumbleupon for twitter or instapaper for tweets/links.
Changing Of The Guard At The Tomb Of The Unknown Soldier At Arlinton Virginia
Australia in AUD (about the same as USD these days):

One bedroom rent in Sydney: $1200/month (EDIT: increased the rent based on comments)

Food: $400

Wages:$60K-120K/year (gross)

Internet:$50/month

Phone: $50/month

Bus ticket: $3.20

McDonalds Big Mac small meal: $6.45

--

By the way, I am looking to hire a Ruby on Rails developer for USD600/month in India / Philippines / Indonesia to help me develop my ideas.

Please contact me if interested aymeric{at}wiselabs.net
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

I assume that this is for an entry-level position.

Monthly salary : ~ US$650-$950 (Average US$800).

EPF deduction: 11%
Room Rent: US$150.
Food: US$250 (3 ramen sized meals)
Car Installment: US$100 (Perodua Viva)
Petrol: US$50

These are the costs for survival mode living.

Optional
Movie ticket: US$3-5
Internet (1Mbps): US$35
Mobile (300 mins): US$10
Alcohol: Forget it.
Time Lapse From Lake Tahoe, CA