skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was on Usenet enough early enough to get the four-lines religion, and that's enough to get six different ways to contact me in.

(I've elided bits here, not because it's any type of secret - I'm not exactly hard to find - but rather because you know some robot's going to crawl this sooner or later. Seriously: skype spam?!)

http://timetric.com/
tel: +44 7*** 9***** Skype: andrew.*********** twitter: @covert
2nd Floor, White Bear Yard, 144a Clerkenwell Road, London, EC1R 5DF
personal: andrew@withpretext.*** http://withpretext.com/
Given all of that optimization, I think that the last line of the email is a little superfluous:

"You Should Check Out JasonLBaptiste.com"
My signature is company mandated, was done by our marketing department (along with all email signatures in our company) and includes 6 lines of contact information, an image of the company logo, and then a disclaimer paragraph (which only gets attached to external email). I don't know how prevalent this is, but many people may (like myself) have no control over the content of their signatures.
"Instead we reward people for being smart -- for learning more and more details about trivial libraries that will be deprecated in ten years' time."

I get what the author is trying to convey in this post, but I feel he is unintentionally attacking a strawman.

I don't think many developers set out to memorize small details of libraries -- it's just something they pick up naturally over time with more usage.

My take is: on the surface, knowledge based on experience often seems like memorization. That's because when say Alice brings up a better way/library/tool, she's acting as a layer of abstraction.

You don't immediately get to see the internal processing Alice is doing to decide which library to use and why it is the best choice for your specific task. All you see is her output: "here's what you use in this situation". This isn't about knowing trivial details of libraries. It isn't about rote learning. It is the practical application of knowledge borne out of experience.

That experience is what is being rewarded, not the memorization. How to tell the difference? The best developers come with introspection tools: they are able and very willing to explain the reasoning behind their recommendations in detail.
dateutil: Python date-processing swiss-army knife
that's part of my signature. if you've ever emailed with me before that's there.
Literature Essay Instructions
Students do not have to be literature pros to be able to submit a literature essay. There are various companies which provide you with the instructions necessary to submit a good essay. By following these instructions you will be able to write a good literature essay easily.
But still, it's a lot harder to crash a train into an arbitrary building, not just whatever building happens to be at a corner or at the end of the track.
The other day I though how cool it would be to have a Web service that could crawl your site and auto categorize all of your pages (or at least help you to do it). As ever, turns out someone is on the case ;-) Nice work! I think there's definitely a wider audience for this technology.
Wow! Excellent stuff!

Just added it to my Utilities bookmark folder.

Congrats!
I disagree, in the strongest sense possible. Payments are hard for consumers because banks prefer it if you funnel money through channels they make money on (e.g., Credit Cards and accounts with stiff fees).

For large financial institutions, they move money in different and less expensive ways. For example, ACH fees are a tiny fraction of the cost that you use when you move money by credit card, and they're almost frighteningly easy to initiate (there is 0 authorization for these). It's just rare for the banks to expose a way to do ACH for you except in the specific case of billpay (and even then, many institutions handle these as mailed checks rather than ACH).

The idea that finance has to be hard with big ceremony in order to be secure is a clever ruse by big banks. They're not content with the large amount of security-from-competion that regulation gives them. They want your trust, and they're not afraid to scare you into believing that they're the only option.
I cannot trust your declaration of meaningless, since you seem to think that KW somehow matters to his calculation. There is no term that is originally in KW (thus requiring conversion) nor is there any term which he presents in terms of W which is usually presented in terms of KW (thus having a hidden error).
I feel your pain - there needs to be better tracking of actions. I recently had some major financial documents stolen so I signed up for LifeLock to be safe. I completed the purchase but was followed for days by LifeLock ads, even though I'm now a paying customer. I can imagine it would be pretty simple to remove the cookie once a "goal" was completed at the end of their sales funnel.
Yup. One of Mark Cuban's finest lessons: http://blogmaverick.com/2005/05/30/success-and-motivation-yo...
Not having a set work schedule allows us to work when we're most effective, leaving more time available for taking care of personal affairs. If you want to take Wednesday off because your Mom's in town, then that's what you do. We all work hard enough and smart enough that I don't worry at all about our people getting their work done. We love what we do, and that's what makes it all work out.

So far we haven't hired anyone that has been "unreasonable." I hope that we never do. In past jobs, I have had to deal with unreasonable people. That is one reason I was drawn to being an entrepreneur. So I wouldn't have to do that anymore.
What would you be willing to pay in terms of transaction fee for a good service?
Here's how it played out:

-Mike emailed back, asking Alexia to check it out.

-She called me about 30 minutes after.

-Went through vision, pitch, answered questions.

-She needed screenshots in a demo fashion, so we cooked them up in <45.

-Resulting article: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/27/turn-your-blog-into-an-ipad...

I'm sure it doesn't always go like this. This is just one data point / use-case.
In one company, where Scala is used, they decided to refer to Monads as "comprehensibles" (due to Scala's "for comprehensions", which can be used like Haskell's do statement) in their standard library and documentation: lets everybody use Monads without the knee-jerk reaction of "isn't it some esoteric category thing that Haskell people have to use to do I/O".
Wouldn't work with my crew; one of the IT Security/Systems people brews his own beer. The best thing with us is being upfront and not wasting our time or we will find ways to waste your time.
AutoHotKey hack for GMail and Google Apps sigs: http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic31346.html
Ask HN: iPhone development jobs in Japan
I'm graduating this semester with a BS in computer engineering, and am looking for a little change after I graduate. I never travel, and thought it would be a huge and nice change to go to japan. Problem is I have no idea where to look or how to go about it. I have experience in .net development from my internship, but iphone is my passion. I've been doing it for about a year now. any suggestions?
Which size really matters? Market Share vs Profit Share
What are your thoughts on non-technical founders (or early employees) at tech start-ups (like GitHub)?

Are there any non-technical people at GH? Would you consider hiring any? Why or why not?

(Full disclosure: I'm an engineer just coming off of a bad experience with a 'business' co-founder)
Do Github employees get equity?
That's why they make the big bucks, baby.
There is going to be a lot of books in there, so _filtering_ is a must, sorting just isn't enough.

EDIT: I mean this for "Noob ... Expert" selection. Also simple tags would probably be better than those "How to xx some xx"
Nope. I'm not a visionary entrepreneur at all.
I don't want to change the world. While I want lots of growth, I try to minimize risk whenever possible.

All I want to do is create enough value for a certain group of people in my target market to solve a specific problem they have, make their lives easier, and build something they would be willing to pay for.

Is there room in the startup community/YC/getting funded for someone like me?
10 web start-ups (all mine) ... and why they failed
Happy to answer questions. I think these address most things:

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/bdlri/dont_want_...

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/cnce8/duckduckgo...

http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/cncn2/a_search_engin...

http://ye.gg/mixergy

I think a lot of it stems from either misunderstanding, edge cases (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/02/one-in-a-million...), or just a fundamental problem with the idea of referring friends.
I wonder how many otherwise viable little businesses fall victim to this heavy handed approach.

Is this one of the reasons DDG got started?
Take a look a lt Dojo Toolkit's UI widgets (Dijit) - they at least advertise full accessibility compliance, and the set of widgets is rather comprehensive. Might save you some time in the future even if you just use them as a starting point for your own UI.
really? even relatively educated people don't speak in ways that would be particularly intelligible if you just wrote it down. I'm sure this guy cleaned it up a lot.
Reading code is one of the best ways to become a better programmer. You can learn so much so quickly by trying to understand how other people you admire solve problems in code. Making it easy to find, follow, and read code is what GitHub is all about.

In the future, participating in open source will be the best way to land a great job. When employers see that you have a demonstrable ability to code and work well in a team, you have a MUCH more likely chance of getting that interview and impressing the right people at that company you'd kill to work for.
In the past, no particular process, which was part of the problem. Now, I'd do this: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/to-pivot-or-not-...
The real question is, did it pay off? Did going exclusively to TC generate the traffic and buzz you were looking for? Would love to hear more about the results.
Research Proposal Assignment Essay Instructions on Business Plan Developement
I hoped it would be an emacs tutorial. Vim is quite obviously the best editor ever, but I already know vim!
Yup because he corrected it (read his edit)
More interesting to grasp is that even
rand() * rand() / rand()
is less evenly distributed than rand().

It does seem like it should be possible to remap the numbers onto an even distribution if you knew how uneven to expect it to be. That would probably lead to some loss of fidelity at the limits of accuracy of the variable, however.
Rails Rumble, an Intridean Tradition
Had to read the entire article to get to the important part

"...if dissatisfaction is a motivator, they'll end up better off."

I agree. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, but when it comes to your lively hood, I think knowing is better than not.
Yes. Our equity offers are quite generous. Invested employees are motivated employees. Ownership is a huge factor in job satisfaction.
Awesome work mate :)
Being in the red-hot daily deal space probably helped with raising a big round too.

It seems that the key step, other than getting traction is "build relationships with potential investors". Can you elaborate how you did this? Cold calling/emailing?
Most PDFs are a little small on the DX, as well. It depends on the file, of course.

I have the 1st gen DX. The latest DX might be better, if it has the PDF contrast control that the kindle 3 has. The latest DX also has a better-contrast e-ink screen.

You can always turn the DX sideways, of course. Which solves the text size problem at the cost of having pages spread across three screenfulls.
Fancy a beer next week?
Research: Spammy Email Design Mistakes
Agreed. Most companies that do well are started by people who are not "visionary entrepreneurs". I think the point is that having 1 on board can increase the likelihood of either building a really huge company, or completely cratering :) I.e. it increase the overall beta of the company.
Justin and I applied for Kiko Calendar (YC S05) just before the deadline. We only found out about 2 days before that it even existed.

I think we convinced the airbnb guys to apply for YC on the day of the deadline.
WOOOHOOO! I've been waiting for this!
Macros are just another abstraction tool. If you poorly use an abstraction tool, it makes the code harder to read, if you properly use an abstraction tool, it makes the code easier to read.

Here's a function that makes code harder to read:

def sumAList(aList):
return 7

This doesn't mean that functions are bad.

Now there is an argument that macros make code harder to read in that I've yet to see a really good macro system that isn't dependent on the code having very little syntax (e.g. S expressions), since the more different the code is from the AST, the harder it is to manipulate the code successfully.

Combined with the fact that more syntax can make code much easier to read, there is a conflict here.

However, I don't think that's the argument you are making.
We applied approx. 4 days before the deadline. I knew a lot of apps come in last minute so I set a mental deadline of before the final weekend. We're from the most recent batch (GazeHawk, S2010).

The problem was my cofounder and I were 300 miles apart, so we needed to get online and record a video. I was working long hours and he was finishing his masters, so it was hard to both get online at the same time. We ended up recording it around 4am.
Towards a Clojure Autopilot - Guidance
Why not thou? There is simply no downside of applying.
If you don't already know some of product related questions on the application, you should be thinking about those anyways.
If you have to ask yourself whether or not you are, you're probably not.

I know I'm not. But I know people who are, and they're not all that concerned with the title of being a visionary. They're more interested in revolutionizing things, at nearly any cost.
Evidently between those two.
GTK+ becomes a canvas
I'm suprised that effects were very widespread and evenly distributed.

The only people I have ever known to talk about their salary/wage seem to be union members (or other blue-collar professions). Electricians, teachers, machinists, elevator repairmen, etc. On the flip side I have never heard a programmer or other white-collar employee talk about their salary/wage unless they are griping about a previous employer/contract.

Given that most of the hourly university employees probably already know what the wage scale is I'm suprised an official publication of the data would have any effect on satisfaction.
We applied last-minute for Cardpool (W2010) and Anywhere.FM (S2007). Applying last-minute is certainly better than not applying, as YC has been great for us both times :).

We were REALLY worried we'd be way behind everyone else, because we started later (or didn't even have an idea yet in the Anywhere.FM case), but turns out that the pressure of being behind helped us launch by month 2 both times.
So PadPressed has somewhere close to 200 customers total. Not a ton in the grand scheme of things, but for an alpha version we're really happy.

I know I sit and preach multiple customer acquisition methods and distribution, but honest truth is, we haven't done any of that over the past 90 days except for the TC coverage. Our shit has been GHETTO. Literally, I left spelling mistakes, unoptimized funnels, analytics,etc. just to see at the worst case scenario how we'd do.

We launched, got the TC coverage, had an influx of customer support (supporting your startup is so overlooked) from customers, and then a trickle down effect of press. Some say the TC bump doesn't do much, but in our case it paid off. We're doing a real release, the new design is breathtaking, and planning real distribution channels/partnerships.
It's the "last conversational taboo"? Isn't it really just no-one else's business if you don't want to share that info? Most people keep their bra size, weight, penis length, or preferred sexual kinks a "secret" too, and pay is just as personal and private to most people as those things.
Probably needs a bit more functionality and an actual problem to solve.

I've also previously used that space for notification bars that hover over where your product would go (for errors, successful actions, etc.) So your product wouldn't fit on my site because that real estate is taken.

The main thing is finding something useful for this. This isn't a solution to anything, its just a piece of javascript. IMO having one of those floating around gets in the way of my user's experience.
It's all very incremental. I certainly learned a bit from each, but probably learned the most from my first "real" startup, learnection. It was first major failure (really ever) and I took it pretty hard at the time.
How Sweden differs from the rest of the world. Also, backup your data.
There's always room for well-thought-out business models with founders that are able to execute.

Not every idea out there that has turned into a successful company is original and earth-shattering. It doesn't have to be.
We applied 1 hour before the deadline. The Justin.tv guys convinced us to apply that night at dinner but we were worried we might have missed the deadline. I asked Justin Kan to ask PG if it was too late. Below is the original email thread. Once he gave the go-ahead, we applied, and the rest is history.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paul Graham <##########>
Date: Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 5:57 PM
Subject: Re: yc applicant
To: Justin <########>, Jessica Livingston <##########>

Tell them to go to http://news.ycombinator.com/apply2 and apply. They literally have to do it tonight though because we are deciding tomorrow.

Tell them to be concise and to explain how they'll make money; the former is always rare and the latter we're looking more closely at these days.

--pg

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 8:30 PM, Justin <########> wrote:
Hey PG,

Are the YC applications for the next round completely, 100% closed? There's a company that Mike, Emmett and I have been advising for months that I think would add a lot of value: Airbed and Breakfast (http://airbedandbreakfast.com/). They are basically a CouchSurfing.com for money, where users can list rooms in their houses/apartments for rent to travelers. All of us at JTV are big believers in their business and they've proven that they can knock stuff out and are well on their way to product-market fit (and are making money). Any chance you want to take a look?

Justin
I did mention in the original essay that it was only a partial order, in footnote [4].
The 2010 PCI Community Meeting
My biggest beef with most .NET development is that you have to do it on Windows...

I once shocked a Windows "Platform Evangelist" when I told him the only thing I needed Windows for was Visual Studio.
We submitted for Simperium/Simplenote (S2010) at the last minute. Since we were already happy and making money, it didn't really occur to us to apply until a friend invited us to apply with him (for something else). We decided it could be a great opportunity to learn new things and meet great people, and it was.
Wikileaks founder Assange denied residency in Sweden
There might however be a huge advantage for 'underpaid' employee's to know they are not paid well.

if pay equates to skill, or productivity, which in America is the general idea, then underpaid employees are under performing ones.

Companies like GE will fire the bottom 10% annually. This is expensive and requires an administrative and legal cost. Underperforming workers are also usually unaware of there skill deficit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect Releasing salaries might make performance acknowledgement more visible.

As a result of measured ( not actual ) performance being more visible underperforming employees might seek a new job before getting fired or getting frustrated. It might also encourage employees to seek out better mentor-ship relationships.

I have even heard that on some scrum teams, there is a base salary for each employee and then a team bonus that get's distributed by your other team members, entirely in the open. The idea is that as a team you want the strongest team members to stay on your team so that all of you can look better. a sort of 'gamification' and 'collective bargening'.

i've always thought that keeping pay secret was lame. plenty of people in a company can social engineer a way to figure it out, and in a startup it means you have to do a ton more work to hide your financials from others.

i'm all for transparency and flatness.
You would probably entangle him in a two-hundred thousand dollar bet with Scott Aaronson.
Exactly why I advocate PVC for anything beyond aping a web app. I wouldn't say there's _no_ reason to ape a web interface, but I hope I pointed out the drawbacks. I think we're in violent agreement. FWIW, I think you'll see backbone integration with Roweis, but it'll be easy to transition from (¬M)VC to PVC. We're deliberately trying to make Roweis easy to migrate, so having written the above, you ought to be able to switch to a proxy with ease.

Now for your points. You say that making two HTTP requests is less than ideal. Well, that's exactly the point of decoupling the RESTful server and the application. If you control both, of course you can create a single RESTful call that delivers both sets of data. In which case both PVC and (¬M)VC can make one request instead of two.

Caching is as an example of the strength of PVC. I'd also add things like long polling. Let's say we poll for updates to an institution. A change to its name ought to be reflected in a list of institutions along with any page or pages showing the details of the institution, plus any other entity that refers to the institution by name.

A model or proxy for a model resource can handle long polling and all of the appropriate views can listen to it for changes so they can update themselves accordingly. (¬M)VC cannot handle that case at all.
SEO Clients: What's a New One Cost?
Five second "oh crap" window?