skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By mathematicians, do you mean the tiny fraction of people with math PhD's employed as math profs, quants or "the machine learning guy"?

Or do you include the much larger set of mathematicians who couldn't find a job as mathematicians, and now work as high school math teachers, community college adjuncts or business analysts?

I'm a member of the former set. Most of the people I went to school with are members of the latter. School was fun, but no one is under the illusion it was a good career move.
Yeah I have run into some of those problems already. Thanks for pointing that out. You definately need a SIGALRM handler if you are thinking of doing something like this. But I don't really see how switching to Memcached is going to prevent a DOS attack. Not trying to be defensive, just really wondering if there is something I'm not getting about that.
Rob a liquor store for $40 bucks and get sent away to prison for 5 or more years.

Rob homeowners and investors, like Mozilo of Countrywide Financial, and collect a $140M+ paycheck and the SEC gives you the biggest fine ever of ....drumroll...$67M, $40M of which is going to be paid for on your behalf by Bank of America.

This is roughly the equivalent of law enforcement telling the liquor store robber to pay back $7bucks and we'll call it even.
New Floating Wind Turbines to Make Wind Energy Cheaper, More Reliable?
The "I Wonder" App
I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to "beat" a system. Sometimes it involves a win-win situation.
I have a math degree. I am not a professional mathematician, but I do believe university is useless.
I think it depends on the system. Making a system more efficient often depends on bending the rules. We had trouble coming up with examples for our application, because most of the "hacking" we've done isn't anything to brag about. But at the same time, we do need to show that we're willing to ask forgiveness later if we can't get permission now.
This article touched somewhat on the biggest problems I have with (bad) entrepreneurs these days:

1)Thinking their idea is god

2)Thinking they are gods

The first point was touched upon with the quote "My idea is so good I need you to sign an NDA just so I can tell you", but the second point, however, I feel is even more obnoxious. These entrepreneurs think they are the next Steve Jobs, and act like it without the actual results.

To prove how true this is, search craigslist jobs for "equity" in any city and see what types of results you get. With most postings, you'll find a "creative" guy who doesn't know anything about the technical side, but he has a "great idea". He's looking for a programmer who will take a minority stake in equity in lieu of pay, because hey, the company will be worth billions someday, right? It's entrepreneurs like this that give us all a bad name.
ummm, what history of pc tablet prices dropping below ipad prices is this?

the history i'm aware of is when mac products start out fairly expensive then slowly drop in price over new generation releases.
In our case we have a buildbot attached to a subversion along with a try server.

You test your changes on all the various platforms by pushing it to the try server, it compiles on the various platforms we have set up at the moment (FBSD, Mac OS X, Windows, Ubuntu Linux) and gives you a status report on what if anything broke. If nothing is broken you can push it out to Review Board, at which point someone reviews the code.

Once the code has been reviewed and ship-it has been tagged on RB, the code is checked into subversion proper. At this time the buildbot picks up the change and does a quick (svn update) build to make sure nothing was broken, and then does a full (rm -rf buildir; svn co) build at the top of the hour.

Reports get mailed, code is checked in.
Errors and unchecked Exceptions in Java should not be confused. An Error is typically reserved for the runtime environment for a "this ship is sinking, abandon all hands" kind of unrecoverable error. More properly Exceptions in execution that aren't checked in Java extend RuntimeException and not Error.

The stigma that Java has too many checked exceptions is no longer true with modern Java code. Everyone is using unchecked children of RuntimeException almost exclusively. Of course, there is still plenty of legacy code out there using outdated checked exception paradigms.
About payment processor: Moving my online sales to GlobalCollect
Interesting that the data didn't transfer over to the acquiree. Is that a rule in terms of PCI I wonder?
Amazon is accustomed to operating at razor thin margins. It's one of the advantages they believe they have in the cloud computing business compared to Microsoft and Google.
Right. Like I started forging the report cards I gave to my parents starting in 8th grade. I'm not proud of that. Would I really put that on an application?
It's just better policy to ensure that some engineer like Wally thinking, "I'm gonna code me a minivan!" actually benefits the company if the plan is executed.
Or use buildbot with a tryserver. Have it handle the task of compiling on the various different platforms and giving you back errors.
Google TV being blocked by some TV networks
I was about to post how this list makes me question leaving BigCo. I must be in the 20%, I don't think I have any of these qualities, and behold, my bank account tells me that none of my ventures have succeeded.
I remember reading about it (did not actually used FB till this year) back then and it sounded interesting.
We are not using it and neither did the company I worked before. This feature would probably fit badly for the type the work we do now—most work is done in maintenance mode.
If anyone used EBS it would be interesting to hear about your thoughts about it.
It would be more useful to know how many people with a bachelor's degree are under-employed against their will. A computer science graduate working as a janitor because he can't find a job is a problem. If after his course work he decides he wants to be a janitor, that's a different story.

What their majors were, and what college they were from would also be informative as other replies noted.
Just a note for the American thread readers, 50mpg in UK imperial gallons = 41.6mpg in US gallons.

(And the petrol version of his car gets 31.4 US mpg. I blame the US not getting really clean diesel until the mid-2000s for the lack of mini-diesel engine'd cars in the US.)

edit: the US did not get ultra-low-sulfur-diesel as a standard until 2007.
2 questions on the "friendship" issue:

1. How do you judge whether co-founders are good friends? I'm guessing a simple "how long have they been working together" test is a good indication, but anything else?

2. What level of feedback do you usually give teams that didn't make it? Especially teams that got to the interview stage but didn't make it through? I'm wondering if you've ever told a team your suspicions that they're not good enough friends (I'm assuming if you did, you phrased it better than that.)
-Avoid #ifdefs.

Agreed. If you need, put the ifdef code in a utility/library. e.g., instead of ifdef'ing your code for pthreads and windows threads, build a simple thread library to abstract the two to a common api.
Definitely finding a co-founder has been the hardest part for me. Not living in the valley currently, you don't have as big of a pool to find people. Also, the type of person that makes a great co-founder(smart, determined, etc.) usually have good things going on already. The people that I talked to that would have been great to work with were all doing great work currently and couldn't commit.

It would be really awesome if YC put on some type of match-making event for single founders to find co-founders in person. Like a speed dating event for startups.
I wonder if these janitors are American-born or rather are immigrants without work authorization or adequate language skills.
> Classic problems include overflowing a signed integer, right shifts on negative numbers, modulo on a negative number, type punning for endian checks, etc.

It's not just right shifts of negative numbers. It's also all shifts by the size of the input or larger.

Yes, when 4 == sizeof(int), shifting an int by 32 may have the same value as shifting by 0. Shifting by 33 may have the same value as shifting by 1. And no, this isn't a signed/unsigned problem.
I have no idea what Y Combinator thinks about the answer to that question. But if Paul asked me to help out by reviewing some applications, I'd probably send you an email asking how that was to your advantage.
PHP is a pretty decent lazy language, it just could give rise to bad habits. It also has a few odd irregularities in the naming of functions/argument order. It's just a massive arsenal of functions for everything. For example if people want to manipulate a string or array, newbies will often not pay any attention to how often it gets iterated through redundantly. They just use a bunch of functions that do what they want magically.
The running back metaphor appeals to me. I wonder how far you can take it. Running backs pivot for something that will completely stop them. The fact that getting downfield will take a long time does not make them pivot. Does this analogy make a good rule of thumb for startup pivot decisions?
Employees care about their companies they way teachers feel about their students, they care about their success and are generally enthusiastic but that particular interaction doesn't define them and it's possible to be just as happy somewhere else.

Founders care about their companies the way parents care about their kids.

I've seen this asymmetry cause some issues where founders don't get why their employees aren't as enveloped in the company as they are. A respectable salary and less than a percent of the stock doesn't get the same commitment as a founder does.
A year and a half into our first startup, I can see why determination (or should I go out on a limb and say downright stubbornness) is so highly rated.

We built a decent product in roughly 6 months, and began engaging with enterprise customers. 6 frustrating months of trade shows / cold calls / presentations later, we had a couple of potential customers but things seemed way too stagnant; their intent to purchase just wasn't apparent.

We were running low on cash and the first visible cracks in our patience were emerging, but we stayed put. And that's probably because we've known each other for over 5 years and each of us didn't want to let the others in the team down.

And then suddenly a month later we received our first purchase order. Okay, it wasn't exactly sudden - we'd followed up a million times with the client and iterated on the product each and every time. But nothing else had changed, we hadn't done anything significantly different in that one month. And that had us convinced that patience can be a real virtue.

We've not exactly dug ourselves out of a hole yet, but we're getting there (with several promising leads in the pipeline) and more importantly, a repeat order as well as a testimonial from our first customer.

EDIT: Just in case you thought the story above was manufactured, here's the a link to the testimonial [PDF]

http://creativeriot.com/resources/[Enpower]%20CoreLogic%20-%...
I don't think people here think college education is useless in all fields. In the Humanities, yes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565980

Also MBA degrees are bashed periodically; but I don't think engineering and medical school degrees are.

Edit: and for the Humanities and MBA, the reasons I usually see for bashing are more like "not worth spending the time to learn" than "easy to self-teach".
A good example of the power of competition at work. They wouldn't have done this if they face no completion from other OSes.

In the end, we customers are the real winners! :)
Journal of Clinical Nutrition - the low-sodium hype is Not based on science
Okay, We Got More Money
I do think G-Speak has potential applications in dealing specifically with complex three-dimensional data. It's not going to replace what we use every day on the desktop, because most of what we do on the desktop works in two dimensions, but for actually manipulating visual interfaces that are, of necessity, presented in three dimensions, there's nothing like actually moving in 3D.

If common desktop applications do, at some point, evolve to meaningfully take advantage of 3D visual interfaces, it could trickle down to a system that assumes a more natural posture (try resting your arms on your desk and gesturing above your keyboard: I think that could work). We've had hardware-accelerated 3D on the desktop for a decade, though, and have yet to see anything substantial come of it for traditionally two-dimensional UIs apart from sometimes-helpful transitional animations. Things could change, but I think applying gestures and multi-touch to 2D (a la 10/GUI, naturally) shows the most promising way forward.
I learned one rule as bootstrapped entrepreneur: 30-30-30-10.

30% is product (programming - product must not suck),
30% is marketing,
30% is sales and
10% is luck (there is always some luck).

That is how it is. Yeah that is cliché.

And don't give up.
Java apps are banned from the Mac App Store that was recently announced. It may become the main distribution channel for Mac applications, if not the only one.
I originally thought I would find a technical co-founder who would be as enthusiastic about my idea as I am. Then we would work together, bootstrapping a business and salary would not even be an issue. I guess you could call me cheap, although it would be a necessity for me as startup capital is almost non-existent.

I'm certainly going to be following the path suggested by the OP. I've already been thinking about it for a while.
> Amazon sells _everything_

Amazon itself, sells many things. Everything listed on Amazon is not offered by Amazon tho. Much of Amazon's wide breadth of inventory is supplied by independent retailers. So, Amazon is both a retailer, and an operator of a marketplace (of 3rd party sellers).
The passengers don't exactly just turn up, check their bags, and fly. They need to go through a complex medical check-up to ensure that they are fit for spaceflight. If I recall, the tickets include a two-week stay at the spaceport (to ensure everyone is healthy and ready for the process), and given the cost of tickets, it probably needs to be a nice place to stay.
Thanks! Looks really interesting! In which products http://www.mimsoftware.com/products do you use the viewer? Can you give the percentages of Windows vs. Mac OS users?
Choices that requires commitment and are hard to roll back.
I'm not trying to be offensive either :) I was just warning that putting up a public facing server is eventually going to make you a target. Using a battle tested server will let you concentrate on getting more people to use your app instead of fighting bored 13 year olds trying to bring your server down.

Good luck with your app!
burnaby cabinet

sounds better than "vancouver cabinet" and is technically more accurate

smallKeys

even tho you're referring to small values, "smallKeys" sounds better than "smallValues" (tho misleading)
My accountant (with eons of experience): Worst thing you can do when founding a company is to found it as a partnership

Take it as you will. My personal take is that, if partnership (among several founders) is really strong (friendship from this essay) - then it's certainly better than doing it alone - backed by high profile success stories. On the other hand, I've seen too much companies fall apart because of the partnership - not their business (I have two personal experiences with it).

Question is how do you judge a friendship among founders? Can you spot the weakest link?
Vin (of Yipit) has a similar blog post (http://viniciusvacanti.com/2010/09/cant-find-a-technical-co-...) but from the perspective of someone who actually just got down into it and wrote the entire site. While not uniquely a NYC problem, it was refreshing to be out in the Bay Area and not be at startup events hearing MBAs pitch "it's like Facebook, but for dogs!"

I tell everyone that asks me about finding a technical co-founder to just learn the basics of databases and a web language (PHP, Ruby + Rails, Python + Django). Either 1) you'll actually learn enough to make your MVP or 2) you'll learn enough to figure out what your product really is and what to look for in a technical co-founder. If you don't have any clue what your technology portion is going to look like, you aren't very attractive to technical co-founders and those that are interested probably aren't the best fit.
It's easy to say this after the game has taken off. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to make your game successful after the coding is complete. Ex:Marketing/Distribution strategy. Also, publishers have access to a large base of audience that they can quickly reach out to when a new game launches.

I would compare it to record labels in the music industry. They see a lot of artists and pick a few and hope one is a winner...
Here it is: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jvms/second_edition/html/VMSp...
Bankers got a kick out of the Crunch, says academic
It looked faster, but impossible to say.

Probably easier to teach new cops on the squad.
Did you know that only two, maybe three of those datastores are any good? And did you know that of those three, they're not designed for every workload?
UFC 121 Live Stream
Just bear in mind that the SaaS Rails Kit has been around for quite a while. I don't know if the features page lags behind the actual code, but: "Compatible with Rails 2.3.8"
Made something very similar to this in PHP about a year ago. It's buried in the Drupal project called Boost. It's the multi process crawler. It supports up to 8 processes crawling your site getting the cache warm. Gets call on cron & then 15 seconds after drupal's cron finished it starts up all 8 "threads". I've used it for image processing as well. Very stable will run for days if you give it a big enough queue (millions of pages to crawl). http://drupal.org/project/boost
The second comment covers the interface quite nicely, by linking to this: http://okcancel.com/comic/3.html
Jeeze, I'm doing my best here, C is hard!

I will say no single effort has been more enlightening to me regarding computer science than trying to understand C. I highly recommend it to anyone with any programming experience.
To give an idea of price for boxes (a random fact, but maybe useful). A double-walled cardboard box measuring 18" x 12" x 12", with a logo and text in one colour, costs around 90p when ordering 1,500 at a time. They are suprisingly expensive. And that's with me collecting from the factory.
Java shops use Java -- that's definitely true. But, are there enough of them for Apple to care? Apple doesn't make their own Python, PHP or Perl, and I bet a lot of Python, PHP and Perl devs use macs. I do for Python.
>>Vesterbacka also added that the role of the publisher has diminished in modern game development; "You don’t need publishers."

Angry Birds is a great brand now and so Rovio doesn't need publishers anymore. It is possible that Angry Birds could have become a great brand without Chillingo's help, but it is hard to know that for sure.

Rovio's statement would have been a lot more credible if they hadn't used Chillingo to make their first mark in the app store
To me it gives the feeling of the Mac showing "real things" whereas Windows is showing some illusion, an abstract representation. Of course they're both just representations, but the Mac's solidity helps me forget that.

I think you're spot on when you mention the impression on Windows of the computer having done a tremendous amount of work just to put up that Explorer window. I note that I "irrationally" try to avoid having the computer do unneeded work — for example, if I accidentally kick off an "ls -lR" against the wrong directory, I jump to hit control-C as quickly as I can, even though I know full well that no harm beyond an infinitesimal fraction of a cent's worth of energy usage and wear & tear would be done by letting it continue to run for a few seconds.
There is a good reason to find a talented technical co-founder. Just saying, "Learn to code yourself" is in some ways akin to saying, "Don't hire a lawyer, just go to law school."

Sure, a "can do" attitude is great, and coding is very learnable, however we are talking about Founders starting a business for profit here, where time is actually of the essence in many cases. A linguistic example is how one can learn survival French in a mere 3 months, but true fluency takes years.

I think it is important to realize there are people who are amazing at doing exactly the things you need done, and though you could learn to do it fairly well yourself in a short enough time, why re-invent the wheel? This holds especially true when a seasoned hacker has much more than just recently learned skills but also has a mental roadmap of pitfalls and work-arounds from their years of experience. No amount of study replaces years of "muscle memory" from projects that have both succeeded and failed.
This is certainly the problem for me, I know a glut of excellent, hard working professional programmers.

All of which already have high paying careers. They're young enough to defect, but only if they have a chance to make their mortgage payments.
Actually, the soot in diesel exhaust is much more carcinogenic than that of a (well tuned) gas engine. There are various studies, one california based study showed diesel soot was up to 70% of cancer for californians. Not saying that I want to breath either, but i'd rather suck down a mouthful of gasoline engine exhaust than diesel soot while on my morning bike commute.

Edited to add: After reading a bit more, I see your point. I guess there have been new studies since I last read that show that per unit of mass, the volatile organic compounds in gasoline exhaust are more harmful, they just have less volume than diesels. Seems to be about a draw.
moozeek -

It's 2010 - link the post, not the blog
There is definitely a market for DIY solutions - people can build a site themseles practically for free if they want. There is a market for prefab WP themes and the like at around 300 - deployed on shared hosting etc. There is a market for a 1k website where someone doesn't fit into those other 2 options. Believe it or not there is a market for 10k, 20k, 200k websites. We're always going to have a 1k website option but we plan to include cheaper options too. I think perhaps if you can't fathom someone spending more than 300 bucks on a website, you probably haven't spent very long deploying websites for people.
Top 20 CSS Frameworks
Although CSS is considered a relatively easy language, there are numerous frameworks that make the coding process a lot faster and accurate. This post includes a collection of Top 20 CSS Frameworks. Browse it and pick up your favorite, or recommend a framework that is not listed here. Enjoy!
People still won't buy it unless it is decent sized and powerful. The same reasons why VW didn't bring in the 1 liter turbo diesel that got something like 100mpg. The fuel has been available since 2007, there just isn't much market yet. Drive fuel prices sky high again and maybe...