skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years.

Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years?

If not, then we can call it a waste.

Wasting "government money" isn't a tiny drop in some gigantic abstract pool of thousand dollar bills. It's hard earned money taken by force from ordinary Americans. It's not government money, it's your money.
> I just think that sometimes we see "Janitor" and think that it's automatically bad.

Some people, sometimes, probably. Me, most of the time, no. Currently I'd be rather happy if I were a janitor. Easy going job, lot's of time to think about neat stuff, no major stress and stable income. Or at least that's how I think it would be, reality might differ.
Um, yes, and this might have been the better link to submit: http://singularityhub.com/2010/10/22/new-video-of-mits-minor...
New Video of MIT’s Minority Report Interface: G-Speak
I actually think that amazon is sitting on an absolutely huge cash cow right now with ec2. They have a very large and growing customer base, and they are in a situation where they can slowly increase prices over the next few years without anyone noticing or minding.

By "raise prices" I mean, of course, lower them slower than their costs drop. that's just how it's done in this industry; nobody actually increases prices.

I went to a talk the other night by netflix; they were talking about how they moved all their stuff into the ec2 cloud. Now, first, this is costing them a huge premium over owning hardware, even as is. Now, just think, if amazon decreases prices slower than their costs fall (which will fall approximately with moore's law) think how much work it is for netflix to move off of ec2.

"But," you say "Power isn't getting any cheaper!" which is completely true, of course, but the amount of compute power I get for a watt of electricity is dropping approximately in line with Moore's law, so as a provider, you can pretty much bank on your ongoing costs decreasing dramatically every hardware refresh.

Amazon is in an excellent place right now. I don't know that it justifies a 67 P/E ratio, but depending on just how big ec2 is, and how many other large corporations start outsourcing to them, it very well may be worth more than that.
Stockholder's equity has grown at over 100% (about 109%) over the last 2 years: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=AMZN+Balance+Sheet&annua...

ie. more than doubled annually.
You expect to find Java apps on Mac OS X which don't leverage the cross-platform angle? Crashplan is the best Java app I use on the Mac, and the Mac is a big part of their business. Apple itself uses them, from what I understand.
It's a bug. I'll fix it when I'm done reading applications.
I think you are confusing two kinds of exclusivity: that from real technical challenge which teaches you something (eg how to correctly disassemble a machine) and that from random speedbumps (eg an exotic screwhead).

Have you tried to make a Torx head? I suppose you could get the shape with some kind of mouldable plastic or epoxy, but that's probably not strong enough in practice. They are designed to be set with much higher torque than Philips, hence the name.
I wonder if we might notice our cliques if our social networks were presented in a graphical format, regardless of the software involved?

Perhaps our lack of awareness of these cliques has more to do with our lack of awareness of our friends' relationships, rather than some deeper lack of recognition of what those relationships mean.
Cool, that's awesome!
Outlook only. The original post was about webmail, sorry.
And it seems like bashing high education is the cool thing to do nowadays.

It seems to be particularly common around here. Perhaps because most of the people around here have degrees in CS, which is something relatively easy to self-teach. If you hang around on a forum with a bunch of mathematicians or molecular biologists I doubt you'd be hearing the same "blah blah, university is useless" memes.
It seems to be a legal designation only in Israel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering#Profession . Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
From "far more than they needed to be" I read that he thinks they changed "far more than they needed" to change in order for the native look & feel. So, he doesn't criticize their work, he criticizes the way they did the work.
Unfortunately, unless someone has some inside dirt on their contracts, unrepentant content-dupers like efreedom, nabble, osdir, mail-archive, etc are not able to be dealt with through that form.

I remain hopeful that Google engineers agree that situations like efreedom having a higher PR for content stolen from StackOverflow is not good for their users, but I still wish that little [X] link was still included with each search result. Until then, we'll have to be happy with these sites silently falling off SERPs, if in fact they do.
That makes a lot of sense. But "infinity"? I'd like to see them enforce that beyond a few light-minutes...
You are forgetting about the virtualization tax. Currently running on EC2 is slower than bare metal because of the XEN environment.
I sometimes eat potatoes with the skin on, too, but carrots?

And at some point in the video he mentions pineapples... surely you don't eat the skin of pineapples?
Video game systems have obviously worked within models like this (software specific to system) for decades to varying levels of success. Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo have also obviously worked in this exact model (download software for dedicated systems) for years.

As a proof of concept, it's already been done and there is nothing to suggest that it wouldn't work for Apple and in verticals outside of gaming.
I'd love to hear Richard Branson at next year's startup school, but I so do not want to see comments with "vote up if you..."
Also because of the need for consistency and latency I'm not sure memcached would be a benefit because it could never be scaled anything but vertically anyways.
see my post here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820590

It's easy enough to produce compute units at a lower cost than amazon. I'm doing so even now... and you can bet your bottom dollar than amazon is going to lower their prices more slowly than costs fall.

But that's why amazon is in such a strong position right now. They are basically positioned to become "the oracle of cloud computing" - Who cares if it's slightly more expensive... if you are a middle manager in a large corporation, paying another 50% or even a few hundred percent more is no big deal if it greatly decreases the chance of a big meltdown. And more to the point, if it protects you from blame when there is a meltdown.

edit:

This is what I hope will happen, anyhow, because if amazon wanted to scrap with me down at the bottom, you are right about those economies of scale. they could crush me like a bug.

But I don't think they will. I think they prefer to just take their efficiencies as profit, and target the larger customers who are willing to pay extra for the comfort of a big name
I just started working for a large enterprise corporation (one of the biggest financial companies in the world). We have a lot of old code written in Java that needs to be maintained. I've been trying to advocate new ways of doing things, but almost every time the other developers will respond with, "that's just not how we do things here."

Java has a very strong culture around it. I worked in academia and startups previously and I didn't realize that there is a huge number Java programmers who do nothing but program in Java. They aren't interested in learning new languages and will only grudgingly learn a new framework. Their biggest concern making sure the lowest common denominator can still maintain the (unmaintainable) code.

An example is unit testing. Our current "unit" tests start up a JBoss instance, connect to the development databases, and take ~5 minutes to run just one test. But I've been told not to waste my time working on anything more modular and that if I'm going to put in any time working on unit tests, I should contribute to the framework everyone else is already using.

It can be quite soul crushing.
Making the Dream Trip a Reality
I think the number 107,000 is the number of janitors and cleaners with degrees, not total janitors and cleaners. Note the author says "Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degree" - 317,000 is in the same column as the 107,000.
That fifth item, like the post originally mentioning as something that dooms startups, gets me every time.

Having a solid co-founder seems to be the hardest part, and honestly, it helps with all the others. It helps you be more flexible since two people can see things more ways. Gives you more imagination by the same route. It helps you be more determined since one can pull the other up if he/she gets too demoralized.

Finding a co-founder is hard, though.

I'm also surprised that none of these points mention marketing - an ability to sell something seems vital in getting a startup going.
Surely for a startup this sort of information is not worth $10000? It just seems like you've got so many more important things to worry about than to worry if someone,s going to spend thousands of dollars figuring out how many users you have (which is likely an effect, not a cause, of any competitive advantage).
I spend 80 hours a week trawling junk shops with a laser scanner
"He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications."

Very interesting.
Optogenetics: Controlling the Brain with Light
The Melting Point of Wax
But because of PHP's internal design, you can't cleanly shut off features or add new ones. You can mentally ignore the parts you don't like, but you can't fix them.

Compare this to Perl, which everyone hates, but which has a modular-enough core that you can override core behaviors. The community has recently added all sorts of new features -- a new metaobject protocol, hooks on opcodes, macros, etc. Every day, it keeps getting better.

I might agree that PHP's flaws, from a language design standpoint, are okay. Who cares what character you use to separate namespaces from class names? But the deep design without any hooks for extensibility is a killer. Every day, the language will get worse and worse, because the other languages can be extended in themselves. PHP is stuck as what it is forever. And that's the deep problem.

(Actually, I'm not willing to concede that the language design failures can be worked around. A lot of the language design quirks are boneheaded enough that they're a deal killer. I had to use PHP for two projects at two jobs. They were both my last project for those companies.)
> Apple itself uses them, from what I understand.

Apple backups their own data to other's company cloud? I don't think Jobs would approve that.
You hit the nail on the head. And "Reopen all windows from last session" feeds the addiction, since you can recover from a flash-crash without losing all your tabs.

Friends and family literally have literally made a novelty of exposing safari when they come by to wonder at how many multi-tabbed windows I have open at once. :)
Cloud based startup
I've put together a new startup (http://LabSlice.com) that uses Amazon EC2 to enable Virtual Demos, Evaluations and Training environments. It's still early days, but I would love to get some feedback here.

The concept is to enable sharing of virtual machines with anyone --- you can just log in, click on a server to share and your customer will immediately receive an email with a link that launches a Unix or Windows box on a timed lease. Easy.

Vendor can use this technology to give out demos, evaluations and POCs to their customers. Trainers can use it to issue pre-built training servers to all students in their classroom. The biggest benefit is cost: Amazon EC2 machines can lease for as low as 2 cents/hr, which makes this concept of VM sharing very attractive, even for small businesses.

You'll need your EC2 accounts to register: http://LabSlice.com/Register. If you don't have EC2 then you can sign-up (Amazon's new deal actually gives Micro-sized machines for free for one year if you sign up this week!) and then come back to the website ;-). Or you could just go to the contact page, tell me you're from YC, and I will add you onto my test lab account.

Thanks in advance for feedback,
Simon @ LabSlice.
It is realistic. I worked on a cross-platform product for nearly a decade that followed a methodology very similar to this. Our code worked on 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit, big-endian and little-endian systems. Following these rules did not slow down development noticeably. In fact it became second nature.
My only exposure to foursquare was there was a point in time when some people tweeted where they are with it, most people complained about those tweets and then it all went away. Haven't heard about it since (I see no point in it). Honestly, it sounds like something that will die sooner rather than later.
Ask HN: How do you use Amazon Web services?
How are you using amazon web services for your starups ?
Even for that application, did it have any advantage over, say, a mouse and a keyboard and a couple of 30-inch screens?
What's the best way to find testers for my new iphone app?
So here we are after busting our back on an app for the past two months. Its a location-based dating app. Its still a bit shaky, but before we put more time into it, I really want to know what my target audience thinks about the app and its functionality. It's been built for folks between 18-30 years of age

Basically, I need to go out and talk to these prospects and watch them use the app and prioritize future functionality (or remove functionality :))

I've been told by friends that the best way to do this is to reach out with an ad on craigslist. This route costs about $10-25 per hour per person. We're doing all of this on a shoestring, so was wondering if you folks know of a better way to get a focus group put together on the cheap, or for free. (I am working with friends, but am worried about bias from that quarter)

Thanks so much for your help.
What about Evidence-Based Scheduling[1]?

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html
It has always baffled me why people needed Publishers on the App Store.

With console games, I get it. But it seems like the App Store's different.
wow, great comparison! So essentially earnings yield is E/P, the inverse (reciprocal) of P/E. Never heard such term before, but the concept looks so easy in comparison to P/E numbers.

Treasuries price moves inversely to the yield, so that should be taken into account when comparing to them. CD is probably a better point of comparison.
I didn't mean to poop on your parade. I love writing servers too but if you have a public facing HTTP server there are a ton of obscure edge cases to worry, like some script kiddy DOSing your server by either opening a connection and keeping it open without sending anything or dribbling out a character a minute to circumvent your SIGALRM handler.

I'd think about switching back to a public interface that has been through these battles before. You could always keep your server up and use Nginx or HAProxy to front it for you and just pass the requests on.
Ask HN: How much of your day is spent writing code?
I know this probably varies a lot depending on type of company/position in company, but I'm curious. How much time do you spend thinking about/writing/debugging code? How much time do you spend wrestling with server configuration/makefiles/other roadblocks? Do you find it varies a lot company to company?

I ask because in the one internship at a 'real' company I've done I felt like I spent surprisingly little time actually working with code, and am finding the same with 2 (sort-of) research projects I'm doing this semester.
As I often say "My 7 year old Rover 25 diesel gets actual 50mpg with 115hp (0-60 approx 9s)... And the wreck only cost me $1500 (£1000 in UK)".

I've a career in Mech/Auto Eng, so I know it's more complicated than that. Nonetheless, it shows how the car industry can confuse with these headline figures.

I will add that I'd probably rather breathe the exhaust of my Rover (with micron-scale smoke particles) than that of a modern car (with more biologically-active nano-scale particles)
The QT libraries are gigantic -- easily as big as the JVM, but unlike the JVM you aren't going to need most of what is there, so your programs will take up a lot less space if you statically link them.

This won't matter if you ship 'em on DVD, but it makes a lot of difference if you provide downloads over the internet.
Right. So you just reinforced the original comment's point. You don't want one because it's too expensive.
The dig at parking attendants is off the mark, I think Parking attendant is a great job (if you angle it right and get a quiet parking lot, say, long term by the airport).

You are free to read to your hearts content, and get paid to do so.
What if I want to burn a CD? Or make something like Cover Flow?
Wish I knew about the emphasis about hacking a system question and I would have elaborated on my application....

Although it is a difficult question to put emphasis on IMO because it also makes you in a way "reveal" your bad morals... which I am sure many people don't feel comfortable doing.

Why would you ever want to openly admit you beat ie. cheated a system be it government, academic, or private? Not to imply that I ever have... err... gotta run!
I can attest to the part about intelligence not being as critical as you might think. The last company I started was with a guy who was brilliant. He dreamed in code and had been hacking since he was 6 or 7. But he had a hard time finishing, and so I couldn't depend on him.

I think the startup failed for multiple reasons and I definitely shoulder a large part of the failure, but next time I do a startup I will make absolutely sure that anybody I start it with is absolutely dependable and determined to finish.
I can see though how someone would think that finding a technical co-founder through sheer charisma is an easier route than learning to code. But usually that's probably mostly ego.
Ah yes, the PHP docs -- where you learn 10 horribly wrong ways to not solve your problems.

But hey, that's what copy-and-paste is for!
I think its great when the 'non-technical' co-founder even knows their way around coding a little bit. Otherwise I find you have to explain every single thing to them and they don't have a solid grasp of the problem.

Getting to know your way around a language like Ruby isn't all that hard.

As a technical person, I run into people all day long that have 'big ideas' which are often mashups of existing sites, "Its like Facebook for FOO", and will never find a technical co-founder because they don't have any idea what the scope of the real problem is, or how to distill it down to something small, useful and graceful. Lots of ideas, but having an idea of implementation is great too.
As someone who switched from the "low educated" level to the "higher" one (and I did that myself, not from Uni. or anything else, but just reading on the web and opening my mind), I do value a lot Higher Education.

It improves quality. Wouldn't it be better if a waiter in Tunisia speaks English well to improve the tourists experience.

The problem is that there is no university for waiters. It seems stupid, but just think twice of it. If you provide them higher language education (how they speak to customers, answer their questions) and formal practice (how they should put the food, ask for payments...). This won't take 3 year, may be only one, but would probably rise their salaries.

And so, the waiter, carpenter, bartender... salary increase. This follow up with a high purchase power, more sales, better companies, higher salaries for Engineers, doctors...

May be I'm wrong? I'm open for discussion about that.
Not opposed to them, and probably have some good points (javadoc/phpdoc is probably, at a stretch, an example of that.

I've got to run now, but email me at mgkimsal@gmail.com to carry on :)
Microsoft wouldn't have bothered if Sun hadn't done the Windows jdk and jvm in the first place. If there were no Java on Windows, it wouldn't be perceived as a threat that needed to be co-opted. Nor would there have been as much hype about Java if it hadn't been on Windows.

Before Java 1.0 shipped in early 1996 (for Windows and Solaris), there were a number of publicly available betas on Windows, which is how the hype was generated.

Also, my recollection is that it was never the case that Microsoft's was the only JVM on Windows, or that Sun stopped work on their Windows JVM. The two coexisted. There was no point at which Microsoft was the only source of a JVM on Windows.
I have a pretty good friend on here that has The Best answer to the "hacked" question, and I would never, ever be co-founders with him because he's impossible. There's often a trade-off between "naughtiness" and "friendship."
Even if you can't fully learn to code, having a non-technical founder who understands the basics of programming is an amazing advantage.
My company's medical image viewer is written in java and ships simultaneously on Mac OS and Windows: www.mimsoftware.com
What is equally interesting is what can be done by scanning neural activity and essentially letting people control games/physical objects without any physical input. Check out the Emotiv headset for an example http://www.emotiv.com. Their headset is $300 and is shipping now.
Agreed. Using git or mercurial would get around this. I worked for nearly a decade on cross-platform code that followed a similar methodology.

Our rule was the code most compile w/o warnings on 3 dissimilar platforms before you could commit it. We were able to do this easily because we had network-mounted home directories, so when you logged into another machine, our development tree was automatically mounted. This made it easy to compile without checking in, then checking out.
Why look for a technical co-founder? Why not just hire somebody to do the technical work? Is it the upfront salary which is the issue?
Follow my progress on Twitter: @box2cash (I'm not dead set on this name at all, I just need something to go at)

I'm in lockdown over the weekend working on this.
It's worth pointing out that even 15 years after the Netscape IPO, it's not possible to write cross-platform networking code for Windows and Unix using C or C++ without using a 3rd party library!

On top of basic socket support, you then have to add support for the common protocols (HTTP, SMTP etc.). I think this alone explains the popularity of networking "batteries included" dynamic languages like Python, and Java's status as the de-facto enterprise standard for network programming. Standardized languages like C and C++ move too slowly for the internet world.
"...unlocked the NASA Explorer Badge..."

And so our space program takes yet another small step towards being replaced by wishful thinking. NASA is scrapping one real exploration program after another, while using precious orbital payloads to study rose fragrances and ant colonies in 0G. If the 470th person in orbit is a "NASA Explorer", then I guess we should just make Neil Armstrong a Deep Space Admiral. Then we can all pretend like we've colonized the galaxy while we play EVE Online.
Apple Is No Longer Bundling Flash Player With Mac OS X
Rock Band 3 review: The only rhythm game you'll ever need
I bet 80% of people reading that list are thinking: This describes me perfectly.
Reddit: Github
5 times we almost nuked ourselves by accident