skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Achieve product/market fit and start fundraising for your next round early to extend the runway.

If you have customers paying for the product/service, why pack up your bags and go home? Once you achieve pm/fit you should be focused on scalable repeatable sales/marketing channels.
I'm not sure what you're getting at as I didn't say anything about the patent being valid. All I did was call out the fact that most people weren't talking about the actual patent. Oracle has some patents related to virtual machines, are they enforcible on all virtual machines?
where does the imagination of 'will this work?' come in? Or do you need to have determination of pursuing all ideas you believe 'will work'. Eventually, one will work?
Higher education isnt necessarily broken - it just serves a different purpose than you might think.
The signalling theory suggests that gaining a higher education isnt meant to equip you with a specific set of skills. Instead higher education simply works as a filter to distinguish between efficient and less efficient persons. An efficient person is able to get a college degree, which in terms signals to potential employers that this student is very productive.
This is especially true, if you consider how little application most of the things you learned actually have in the real world.
See, I think that's an example of the "bad hack" because it has the potential of damaging people, e.g. what if I was standing in that line for 15mins ahead of you and because you took that box of pizza, just when my turn comes the pizza runs out (you think it's unlikely? Then you haven't been to the wild world of college-student-after-event-pizza-eating).

My definition of a hack is to add value to the an existing system by modifying a property, not changing a zero-sum situation in your favor. for example, in your case, the number of pizzas are fixed, so it's a zero-sum situation. A better hack I usually propose in situations like this is to use both sides of the table, simple but generally people tend to pick pizza from one side only.
Define "this environment". I took it to mean handling large amounts of mail, in which case the gmail team has one of the most sophisticated frameworks, period.

As for using PHP, I'm sure it is used somewhere, but it is not a popular language at Google. Most Google developers have better taste than that.
There would seem to be a huge hack around that - I work with a guy who gets _really_ obsessive about stuff, so much so that he forgets to eat, etc.

Maybe you should focus on getting more people who are turned on by an idea, rather than because their friends might get burned.
I'd bet they would in theory get far higher margins if anyone did subscribe to their online paper. Also they get to look like they're ahead of the curve.

I'm just saying, it's hardly an unbiased opinion of where things are headed.
Specifically at this link:

http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/homch1_f.htm

The short answer is, yes, they extrapolate from a sample. 72,000 households from 754 sample areas. Crude calculations here, but some quick linear analysis says they found 1 janitor with a PhD, JD, MBA, or another professional degree.
Does It Pay to Fish, Bowl, Ride or Eat?
"Which is ye surest character of a true Mathematical Genius, learned these of his own inclination & by his owne industry without a teacher."

— Isaac Newton

In many respects, math has a totally unfair advantage over every other subject you could possibly study in college because it can be learned almost without needing any other people. Well, living people that is, as you do need the books of long deceased thinkers. (I'd say this also applies to philosophy, and hardly anything else). You just need to be willing to spend enormous amounts of time alone in contemplation reading.

The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

— Blaise Pascal

There's also a very limited social component layer such as you would find in medicine, law, politics, economics, et al. To become a doctor, or any kind of "professional", sure, it requires a massive social apparatus on top of a high degree of actual learning. You have to have connections, know the right people, say the right and popular things to them, be supported and credentialed by the leadership and their agenda, and basically imposture one's self into mimicking whatever behaviors and traits are specific to and dominant in whatever professional field you're studying. Eventually your identity morphs into this set of learned behaviors, and it's almost entirely built upon your position in some type of social hierarchy.

Not so with math. You either know some theorem and the proof, or you don't. How much you know and how advanced you are is entirely dependent upon what you have worked through on your own. What new stuff you can create only comes from what old stuff you already know. None of this has anything to do with interacting with people. Sure, you can benefit by talking to other mathematicians, attending lectures, conferences, teaching others, etc, but at the end of the day, at some point, you still have to sit down and learn the material by yourself. And if you don't do that, it doesn't matter how much of a social butterfly you are—you can't be a mathematician.

No man is an island, but I imagine a Robinson Crusoe type figure would have no such problems becoming a mathematician on a desert island, given enough math books(and some kind of Internet connection).
Where do you sit? I'm on the 5th floor, by the stairwell.
Let me tell you a little story from the inside…

So, when you build something as big and complex as an operating system, your single biggest enemy is: change. The more things change, the more you need to test and retest to be absolutely sure that those changes didn't have any unintended side-effects. This is why, in the process of reaching a GM build, the ability for groups to change components is gradually locked down. The final lock-down is GM, and this usually happens around 1 month before the first customers see the next OS. This time is needed to "prime the channel". That is: you need to press the disks, prepare the marketing material and the packaging, do all of the final validation testing, and start shipping the software to stores.

In the case of SnowLeopard, that meant that development was done, and GM was declared, in the 3rd week of July. SnowLeopard shipped on Aug. 28th. Know what happened between those two dates?

Flash Player v10.0.32.18 ships on July 30 with critical security fixes: http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb09-10.ht...

Remember all the fuss? No? Here's a reminder: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/snow-leopard-ships-with-v...

In particular, people were incensed that installing SnowLeopard on top of their Leopard systems that already had an updated Flash player actually reverted to the vulnerable version. Why? Because Flash was part of the OS. It was part of the install package that gets laid down fresh, instead of being part of the user installed software that gets migrated from old to new OS. And because Adobe didn't get the Flash update to Apple before GM was declared.
Unless you can explain why it made sense to include Flash last week and it doesn't today.

You may have noticed that Apple cleaned house on Wednesday. They announced the Mac app store, deprecated Java (and listed deprecated-Java as a disqualification to get into the app store), and shipped significant new hardware which offered a clean break on the software configuration, including the end of Flash as default kit.

There's no provision in the app store as currently defined to carry anything except self-contained single-package application bundles, so no, you won't see Flash or any other plugins carried there in the foreseeable future.
Launch48 & StartupWeekend are good for that sort of thing.
In earlier days, I used to run a popular linux and security related forum.

I came in contact with many hackers and geeks through the forums. I got few good friends through the community, and my co-founder found me through the same forums.
With a compression ratio of 14:1, it will be interesting to see if this car requires 91+ Octane (Premium Unleaded). Higher compression ratios are a great way of squeezing more power out of the same amount of gasoline, but raising the compression ratio also raises the risk of detonation.

Detonation occurs when the pressure and temperature inside the cylinder cause the air-fuel mixture to literally detonate, rather than burn (relatively) slowly and evenly as desired. If this occurs before the spark, it is called pre-ignition. When it occurs after the spark, while the flame front is progressing through the cylinder, it is referred to as detonation. Higher octane fuels are more resistant to detonation and pre-ignition, and usually go hand-in-hand with higher compression ratios.

As a side note, E85 Ethanol has a ridiculously high octane rating, among other things, which allows for higher compression ratios and much higher boost in forced-induction engines. I keep hoping E85 will catch on outside of the corn belt so I can effectively get race gas performance from pump gas in my turbocharged motor, but no such luck yet.

There are plenty of tricks that can be played to reduce the risk of detonation using low-octane fuels in high compression motors. Efficient head design with excellent cooling will reduce cylinder temperatures and minimize hot spotting within the cylinder head, reducing the risks of detonation and pre-ignition. Getting the heat out of the valves is particularly challenging as they only meet the cylinder head in a relatively small contact patch. The valves can be filled with sodium, which turns to liquid as the motor reaches operating temperature and circulates within the valve, cooling the valve and further reduce hot spots (pre-ignition points) within the motor. Also, designing the piston and head to thoroughly mix and swirl the intake charge helps create a quick, even, clean burn.

However, to get up to 14:1 on a production motor, I wonder if Mazda is playing serious games with the intake camshaft timing to reduce the effective compression ratio. If you leave the intake valves open long enough after the piston begins the compression stroke, it will actually push a tiny amount of air back out of the intake valves, reducing the effective compression ratio of the motor at top dead center. With variable valve timing, Mazda could just be doing this near full load, where detonation and pre-ignition are problems. At partial load, you can get away with much higher compression ratios (up to 20:1 in certain cases, IIRC) with associated increases in efficiency (and thus higher MPG).

Either way, I'm glad to see more efficient internal combustion engines. The internal combustion engine is a 100+ year old technology, so significant improvements are hard to come by without drastically increasing the cost of the motor. Good stuff.
OK. So, shouldn't Apple remove perl, php, ruby, apache, and every other 3rd party software that it currently ships with since I'm sure Apple doesn't want to spend time maintaining those either.

Curious mind wants to know, why just Flash and Java?
No joke, I know a girl who signed her dog into facebook.
Stigletz isn't suggested we should punish failure with prison. He is saying the penalties need to be enough to discourage deceptive practices that encourage corporations to break the law because that's what's best for business:

"the financial industry was engaged in predatory lending practices, deceptive practices. They were optimizing not on producing mortgages that were good for the American families but in maximizing fees."

Meanwhile, stock-based compensation created further skewed incentives by encouraging executives to pursue short-term stock gains at the expense of long-term corporate sustainablity, Stiglitz said, and in some cases encouraged them to deceive their own shareholders."

We're not talking about punishing failure, we're talking about punishing crime:

Stiglitz explained, the system of penalties generally meant a small fine relative to the full ill-gotten gains, often in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
> 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 wish PG would write something definitive about this.

The people he talks about have often known one another for years. So if you find someone now that you do not know, and have never worked with, it will take you several years, at best to develop a more "long term" relationship. That's great if you're planning on applying to YC in a few years, but comes across in some ways as "trying to find a warm body" if you're applying now.

Granted, there are some people who get married after a few weeks of dating, and of those, it does work out for some of them, but it's a relatively small percentage.
Would Flash and/or Java even pass muster for admittance into the OS X AppStore?
There is a larger issue lurking here. Becoming an excellent developer isn't an over-night process. Tutorials will only hold your hand for so long before you get into the woods with concepts that are over your head (unless you have a math, systems, or compsci/engineering education); learning to program and not just code is a lifelong endeavor - you gotta love it for it, not just because you gotta do it to try building a startup.

The larger issue? The technical illiteracy of the general population. Knowing how to point and click (and nothing else) has brought user's expectations down to a point where they think some piece of functionality that takes them three seconds to interact with is a one hour unit of "coding" when in fact, it's more like days worth of thinking, typing, writing unit tests, and debugging.

My cofounder ATM is handling all of the business, marketing, and customer interaction. She only won my allegiance though because she is technically literate - not to the point of my expertise (otherwise she would be doing it herself) but she does understand that those 40 hours I just spent last week on writing unit tests is worth it instead of breathing down my neck about "let's launch it in a week, this has gotta be ready to make money once it launches, users are expecting it in a week, you just spent a whole week coding and I don't see any changes or updates...".

Kudos to KateRay for taking the reigns; I sincerely hope she/he finds as much joy in programming as I have and do. I also know that in the future, she/he will be more technically literate for a serious programmer to actually be interested in working with her/him.

My only con about this post, as hinted at above, is that it makes out what we [programmers] do to be: "yay I've read the RoR book now I can program!"
People have short memories, though. McCain was one of the Keating Five, yeah, but he was also a candidate for President of the United States of America. As you say, there's no reason to think that the key figures in the Great Recession will endure any lasting stigma either. American capitalism admires grand failure; this is a blessing and a curse.
Setting up Unicorn with Nginx
But you're pretty well known (at least in some programming circles in Canada) and you've been involved in some pretty successful ventures. That should count for something.

--edit by ventures, i mean senior roles in other people's ventures
I'm not sure how your first point applies here. If I get a patent for copy-paste using gestures, does my patent apply to using a mouse or any future copy-paste methods? Maybe, maybe not, it doesn't actually matter here because those methods don't exist yet so talking about them is irrelevant as I tried to point out. If you read the whole of my comment you'd see that I went as far as to suggest the patent itself is most likely invalid.
How about hanging out at your local Starbucks, and offer to buy people a cup of coffee if they spend 10-15 minutes checking out your app and giving you some feedback? A bit scary for the introverted hacker, I admit. But I bet you get enough people to take you up on it to make it worth your while.
Were Woz and Jobs "friends"? Don't Page and Brin claim explicitly they weren't? It seems more like the shared purpose brought those pairs closer together than where they started or where they would have ended up had they never worked together.

That example of Viaweb helps clarify the distinction I'm thinking of. You guys were friends and so worked together despite differing convictions. But what of people who share a common purpose and in so doing become friends? Is there room in your model for that instance of the concept?
> just do what's best for the consumer

Apple got caught shipping a Flash player with known security vulnerabilities, that's not good for "the consumer". They also claim that half the reported OS X crashes are due to Flash - which seem exaggerated, but if true, also bad for "the consumer".
Decentralized pizza distribution is definitely more efficient.
Node.js worked great for me for similar application. Built the web application in PHP and timers with Node.js
You could store the static (non-changing) text in a couple of C strings and then call writev() to communicate everything. That would save you the step of continuously reconstructing the header.
I'm not bringing ideology into it. I'm focusing on the human cost of spending money, that's all.

So lets put it another way, since you want to get into arguments over the value of green pieces of paper. $40k worth of subsidies for education are about 2500 hours of labor from a median laborer. Are you willing to force 25 median Americans to work 100 hours each, just so that their waiter can party for 4 years and maybe quote Beowulf?

The output of those 2500 hours of labor are what makes the green pieces of paper worth something.

But then there is the printing presses, which are guarded and the vaults that are guarded and the software systems that are guarded and the counterfeiting laws none of which you created.

I have, however, paid far more than my fair share for this service, which probably amounts to only a few dollars per person per year. It's also dishonest for you to bring public goods into this. We are discussing redistribution of wealth in the form of private goods, not public goods (such as anti-counterfeiting, police and fire protection).

Now, you might argue there are public benefits to education (e.g., a well educated labor force is more productive). But that is irrelevant for this discussion - we are discussing workers who are choosing not to make a productive use of our investment in them.
So who exactly goes to jail?

Put it in simple terms, a garage working on your car's brakes screws up.

Do you jail the mechanic that worked on the car?

Or the service manager that told him to hurry up?

Or the middle manager that set the targets for the service time?

Or the CEO of the service division?

Or the CEO of the car company?

Or the CEO of the pension fund that is the main owner of the company - and so the one that benefited from saving money on your service?

Corporate manslaughter was introduced in europe after a ferry sinking where a ferry left port with the bow doors open.
The captain was the only one charged - but he claimed the company ordered captains to close the doors while at sea to save time in port.
Under the old health and safety law the managers who gave the orders couldn't be punished since they weren't present

Naturally the only people to have been prosecuted aren't the managers of major industrial accidents - it was a single plumber that fitted a faulty boiler.
I think the ultimate perfomance is found in pure java.nio/C/C++ solutions, but I think having a bit slower perfomance and higher abstraction is better since it makes it much easier to maintain and debug the system. My general impression of java.nio is that it's very low-level and a generally hard to code against and it's the main reason why we didn't choose it.

This said, I think node.js offers great usability while perfomance is pretty good. So if I was developing a new comet solution I would give node a go - you can always rewrite to something more low level once you begin to hit limits. IMO going after java.nio directly is a premature optimization and most projects won't hit limits with node.js.
Doug Lea on the credibility of the Java JCP
Another story with "invented at Bell-Labs" in it.

for shame
Erlang deserves a mention too, although ultimately I'm a bit pessimistic about their chances to break out of the small niche language space.
I visit these book sale quite a bit. It is these 'business people' makes me uncomfortable. It is a hard way to make money by scanning books one by one. If it is truly a 'book' business, the library really should stop book sale and subcontract it to you guys directly and put them on Ebay, Amazon, where ever the profit is maximum. But again, the idea of these book sale is not just for profit, I think.
The Big Picture: France on strike
I was thinking the same thing although current app store rules would seem to disallow installing something like flash and Java. I really hope that Apple does end going this way and let 3rd parties manage their libraries in this manner.
If Moore's law holds and you're willing to wait a month instead of ~9 days, it costs <$1500 in hardware, and you can keep/resell that. Or, again, rent time. Or just use a distributed.net-esque approach and bruteforce using (a lot of) standard PCs. Or...

Seriously, "people aren't going to hack us" is the new "premature optimization is the root of all evil": a convenient excuse to do it horribly wrong.
Accidents as Fertile Ground for Innovation
Speed breakthrough in Solving Linear Systems
I have been talking to people I know, but maybe I need to broaden my search a bit. I think I have been afraid of choosing the wrong co-founder and maybe I have been to selective. PG talks about how important it is for the co-founders to be able to work well together, so I been careful to make sure the people I ask are going to be solid.
I created a site to collect jobs posted at Hacker News.
Riak Search has been released recently. It’s got Lucene and part of the Solr HTTP API built-in.

Basically you push json/xml/whatever documents into buckets. The docs will be indexed, i.e., by field names (json & xml) or simply fulltext. It is pretty cool because it’s based on Riak Core and thus has the same benefits as Riak K/V. Lucene runs transparently in the background - afaik you never even have to touch it.

Read more in their wiki: https://wiki.basho.com/display/RIAK/Riak+Search

Especially: https://wiki.basho.com/display/RIAK/Riak+Search+-+Indexing+a...
The metaphor can only go as far as the person to whom you are using it with likes or even cares about American football.
Contributeto.it - draw a freaking picture
What this does:
1. We look at a bigger image
2. Break it down to individual pixels
3. Give you a pixel (blown up bigger) to draw on
4. Reconstruct the original picture using the pixels people draw..the pixels people contribute-to-it

get it?
Was it an auction site as well? If so which one if you don't mind me asking?
I never used Ubuntu's store, so my natural question is: do applications have to get approved in Ubuntu's store? If the answer is"no," it may be the biggest difference with the most impact on end-users and developers.
Agreed! This one snippet from the fatfree docs dispelled a good bit of my lingering hesitance to revisit PHP after a good while away:

F3::route('GET /about',
function() {
echo 'No subliminal messages here...';
}
);
Except [on Windows, where I use it] it eats about 600Mb of RAM just sitting there doing nothing with all connections closed. Start opening a bunch of tabs and DB connections and you can easily push it into the 1Gb RAM range and it crawls.

Combo it with JDeveloper and a local instance of Weblogic, and you can pretty easily eat up 3Gb of RAM just opening up the standard set of Oracle dev tools.
Amazon P/E is still much higher than Walmart's P/E.