skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most people don't operate in a 100% ACID environment. However, This has a pretty low impact on web applications, so many of us can breathe easy. PostgreSQL's default isolation level is READ COMMITTED and InnoDB's default isolation level is REPEATABLE READ. While this might seem like a big difference, the SQL standard is pretty loose in the definition of these, and because of their implementations, they have roughly equivalent consequences. From what I understand, most InnoDB users that demand better performance in high concurrency situations switch the default to READ COMMITTED.
My employer, which is probably more 'young company' than startup by now, has had about 2/3rds of its developers in Ukraine since pretty early on. There are a lot of really great things about it, the price obviously one but Kharkov in particular has a really large university system with a lot of well educated talent. The keys so far have been to work directly with the developers, cut out any project manager/glorified-translator role, and take a general 'try before you buy' approach of rolling a trial-month into a semi-probation-quarter into a long term expectations but still month-to-month structure. It takes half a dozen or so positions for this to really work, and you just roll through people looking for genuine talent that shows initiative and communicates well.

One drawback I have noticed is that this works extremely well for creative/features/front-end development, but when you get into architecture/backend things like a sharding design or complex cluster configurations then less so. Most devs never really grok that stuff to begin with, so combined with the language/communication/timezone barriers its hard to do your platform engineering stuff this way.
"This can be avoided as long as you keep the majority of shares."

This is wrong. A board can hire or fire as it chooses. Holding a majority of common shares can mean very little, as many founders have learned the hard way. Protective provisions and board seat election procedures can, for all intents and purposes, define who controls the company.
>>Also, how do cases like Steve Jobs and Harry Osborn occur where they are removed from their own company?

Check out the movie 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' - its about Apple and Microsoft and shows how Steve Jobs got fired.
Excellent tradeoff in terms of cost/benefit. More companies should re-evaluate their need for 5 9s and instead look at cases where they can gain efficiencies by doing LESS. Does every single company really need a huge UPS system and backup generators?
How to get out of quicksand.
Indeed, OS/400 is just wonderfully advanced under the hood. Get one of the cheap used copies of this book for a lot more: http://www.amazon.com/Inside-AS-400-Frank-Soltis/dp/18824196...
I wrote an article about this kind of article yesterday ... its simply not the same thing, and comparisons just aren't fair.

http://www.zachbruhnke.com/androidvsiphone
No reason to regret anything, as I see it. I am the culmination of my 24 short years of experience. Without my experiences, good, bad or indifferent, I wouldn't be the person I am today. And I like that person.
CMUCL was a research project and DARPA financed. Commercializing it was not the main goal. CMUCL got funding for many years (until 1994), when it was open source already. CMU promoted 'free' software in a huge way in many projects. They also provided the CMU AI repository which collected all available university research software in AI, including language implementations.

It was not the Stallman version of 'free' software with a viral license.

Most people fail to understand the role of DARPA funding. Stallman worked in a DARPA (= military) lab - the MIT AI Lab. He worked basically on new software infrastructure for the military. They funded it to get intelligent software for guided missiles, logistics systems, missile defense systems, simulators, training systems, ... The largest batch of Lisp Machines went into the Star Wars project. Promotion of 'free software' was not a DARPA priority, but DARPA was interested to get these tools widely used in Universities. DARPA financed a batch of a hundred Lisp Machines (IIRC) for example and gave them to universities. At the same time they promoted competition, to have more than one source for the technology - so LMI and TI also got money.

Stallman has his definition of 'free software', which shows in the GPL license. Others have their idea of free software which shows in the use of 'Public Domain' as the license. To me the Public Domain Lisps were always more important than the GPLed ones.
0) Desperate 3-man startup needs capital to survival. (gone 4 years w/o salary)

1) After pitching only thing they get is an offer with 'participation'. This means a preset amount is guaranteed back to the investors in an exit event if the % gain doesn't match a specific minimum. I.e. Investors are guaranteed 1,000,000 if their equity doesn't exceed that value.

2) A partner sees the company is weak, knows the founders are rockstars and rolls them up for 1.2 million.

3) Founders get jobs at company X and 200,000 split among 3 of them before taxes.
Hey Sam! Of course I remember you, thanks for subscribing (I'm also Poromenos on reddit).

Psychology has a lot to do with pricing, what you say is true, as silly as it sounds. The problem is that someone might find that the two features that work for him are different from the ones that work for you, so it's a hard problem :/ The best solution is to have pricing packages, but we don't have a clear hierarchy of things that are more important than others, so it's not very easy there either.

Also, aren't you paying $3/mo? The new prices shouldn't affect you, and we sort of ended that experiment and reverted back to the old prices.
Do note that this is not about "hiring devs whevever they are". The article is about co-founding startups, not just about "outsourcing your development". This is a much closer relationship.
Inhouse vs Outsourced Code
Except that the MCAT measures at least some of the core competencies necessary for being a doctor, and includes a lot of vital information which, if you don't have, make it pretty tough to be a physician.

Even then, there are plenty of people whose MCAT scores were high enough to get them into medical school who ended up being terrible doctors, just as there are plenty of people who barely got into med school who ended up being terrific doctors. I can't cite any studies, but I imagine that just like anything else the variability within a score band is just as much as the variability between score bands.

(Similarly: plenty of bad lawyers have passed the bar, just as plenty of good lawyers failed it before they passed. There's enough variability between the Bar exams of different states to make this possible. I suspect the same is true about engineering programs as well).

It may just be that the MCAT is a good indicator of one's ability to become a doctor. Med school admissions are so competitive right now that these schools are able to be pretty selective about who they admit.

It may be that these tests were designed at least in part by the professionals in those respective fields to measure knowledge and competencies that directly relate to the domains in question.

More to the point, this is a specious comparison because the exams you cite are professional vocational exams which correspond to a specific career path/domain.

There's no such vocational test that will adequately cover every child, nor do we even have philosophical agreement about the skills necessary to live a good life, much less the relative importance of such skills, and even if we did, there are so many different ways that things like literacy and numeracy manifest that it'd be downright impossible to construct a test that can even come close to measuring it.

The tests you cite are tests that limit who can practice in a given profession, and while they're not perfect, I'll concede their usefulness. More importantly, they're on an individual basis. There'll definitely be some false-positives (people who are good at taking tests but poor at performing the basic skills necessary for competency) and false-negatives, but those can be corrected.

It's a whole different ball-game when you're talking about a non-vocational test, particularly one aimed at people who are not yet adults and who have not yet chosen a particular career path.
MLG Dallas: Starcraft 2 National Finals
There is also something to be said about a founder not being the right person to a grow a company. A techie might make a great CEO to impress a VC and raise a million bucks. But is he able to make the right deals, find good partners, hire superstars, etc? He is invested in the company, possibly more than most so it is in his own interest to let the VCs place a better CEO so he can focus on what he is best at.
Only if you can integrate it in a useful way and reuse C code from other places. Which I doubt is possible.
Every cute girl I don't talk to on the street that catches my eye. Thats a regret.

Everything to date I am happy about, no reason to complain.
It's not a critique of capitalism per se, as far as I can tell, but the monetary policy of a government.
I think you are right. I think the epigraph tells us a lot. It refers to 'the Sybil' a Greek prophetess who wrote Appollo's oracles/prophecies on leaves which then scattered in the wind before followers had a chance to digest their information. If we take these leaves to represent the deeply significant facts/patterns/secrets of a civilization, the classicist has had time to 'gather the leaves' and make sense of it all. In The Waste Land the leaves of modern times are gathered, but no sense has been made, or some are missing. In fact, as the epigraph says, the Sybil 'wants to die.' The process through which deeper meaning/understanding is generated and dispersed cannot sustain itself any longer, because the dispersal, the scattering, is too violent.

The epigraph actually being written in ancient Greek with no translation provided is the icing on the cake.
You said it yourself: "the danger of a self-signed certificate is that you don't know if it was issued by the site owner".

In the case of someone attacking you on WiFi, that self-signed certificate wasn't issued by the site owner. It was issued by the attacker. If you happily ignore warnings, your browser will just setup a "secure" connection to the attacker. Then the attacker just creates another HTTPS connection to your actual destination, and proxies the content back and forth.

Now, if the attacker can only read packets, then yes, the actual encryption is still secure. But in many places where an attacker can sniff (WiFi, on your Ethernet), they can also inject.

There are lots of problems with CAs and the crappy verification that goes into most certificates. But having a CA cert for SSL still significantly raises the bar and limits the extent of an attack. (If one did get a signed cert for PayPal or Facebook, they couldn't just go and publish it in a program like Firesheep, as it'd get revoked pretty quickly.)
An interesting (albeit fictional) movie to watch on this topic is "The First $20M is always the hardest". Yes, you have to give away equity to get funded. But if you are asked for a controlling stake early in the game, then you are being setup for a big letdown.

Also, although convertible notes are very fashionable these days, consider your position if and when you need another round of financing. You may very well be forced into a bad deal under the threat of liquidation to pay your creditors with the company IP. On the other side of the table your investors got you to pour your blood, sweat and tears into the company as well as the financing, and they ended up with 100%. This is not to say that all VCs are bad, or even most. Rather, that is the substantial risk of a convertible note.
I've loved 2 wonderful women over the last 9 years since high school, but missed out on ever being single and all that entails (one night stands, etc). I just hope that doesn't haunt me when I'm middle aged.
"The below text is a notice from the USPTO about tests they’re removing in order to make it less difficult to pass the test for obviousness. Low obviousness standards (silly patents) is not the mains cause of problems, but it aggravates already-problematic domains such as software patents.

...

In 2007, there were seven tests – the classic teaching-suggestion-motivation (TSM), plus six newer tests. Failing any of these tests would lead to rejection due to obviousness. Those tests were put in place in 2007 in response to the landmark case KSR v. Teleflex. Under its new director, David Kappos, the USPTO has now deleted four of those tests."

I don't see how reducing the number of obviousness tests from 7 to 3 makes it harder to pass, when failing any single test causes a patent app to fail the whole thing. Wouldn't having more tests result in a greater % of failures, and hence more patents rejected for obviousness? What am I missing?
That's so fucking lazy it's pathetic.
> and tons of backlinks pointing to their domain.

That's going to be a problem anyways, since whatever system you choose will probably not use the same URL scheme. You'll either need to break those backlinks or spend the time to write a compatibility layer.
Ditto for Iceweasel 3.5.8
I remember watching a Youtube video of a talk by Jawed Karim on Youtube. He talked about proliferation of digital videos as video cams prices were coming down, broadband was cheaper and flash was something present in most browsers. Guess most video sharing site before that used windows media player and real player.

Guess this is the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nssfmTo7SZg
I love this idea! In the PHP community we've started to have more and more talks show up on the conference circuit about getting involved, but this is even better. I bet in every major city there's people who would be interested in getting involved in open-source who aren't going to go to a conference just to find out, but they might spend a day or two some weekend doing just that.

I can't wait for the material for this to come out. It'd be great if it was on GitHub or some similar service so we there's an open source way to get people into open source.
Hmm, where shall I begin?

I turned down an offer of admission from MIT. Granted, I had my reasons, and had I accepted, there's an inappropriately high probability I would've had to discontinue halfway through. I guess what I really regret is letting circumstances reach that point.

What I really regret is things I didn't do. The girls I should have asked out. The musical instrument I didn't learn to play. I honestly wish I'd made more clear mistakes in high school, instead of constantly playing it safe and thereby skipping important life lessons.

I regret spending so much of my life in front of the computer. Indeed, the hacking skills I developed will help me when launching, but the social skills I didn't develop will kill me. One of my worst fears is that I will get pigeonholed into a being a backroom programmer, and this fear influences everything from my cofounder search to my current distribution of time.

On the flip side, what I regret from the past might not be so regrettable when I consider that I'm not making the same mistakes right now. It goes back to my hypothesis that what I should regret are the mistakes that I didn't make when I was younger, because I may have to make them when the stakes are higher.
We've sometimes used a hack that is a minor variant of the micro-batch processing in MapReduce. We: a) map the latest batch of data; b) in the reducer, join it with a cache from a previous reduction; and c) reduce in part, save a new cache, and proceed with further reductions. (We use our homegrown MapReduce implementation that allows multiple rounds of reduction and access to the filesystem, so I'm not sure this would work in Hadoop.)
Symbolics had a DOS board for their Lisp Machines. The Ivory ran embedded in Macs and SUNs. They had a PC-based offering: CLOE.

It did not help.

The basic limitations of Genera: complex interwoven software with lots of legacy stuff, single user, single image, no security ... just did not scale and was not on a growth path.
It's a whole different problem when the range of possible delivery addresses is within a square mile.
If you like ffffuuuuuu, there's an all-you-can-eat buffet at http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu
Many Austrian economers were able to predict the crash. Their theory is that the main driving force behind the crash was that the FED (and other Central banks) kept interest rates way too low. This created excess capital which, in combination with market interventions of Fanny and Freddie, was the main reasons for the the real estate bubble. I can recommend the following videos for those who are interested:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czcUmnsprQI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECi6WJpbzE
I think the situation is very similar in other new EU countries as well. There is enough talent but the lack of startup friendly business environment (VCs, market) is really discouraging.

So at this point teaming up with peers in NA is one of best options if you don't want to move abroad. I'm from Latvia and was a tech lead of startup which was founded this way and it worked fairly well for everybody.

A piece of advice - working for some international bigco can help you with contacts abroad, which may turn out useful once you feel ready to go startup.
Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis
Dan can you elaborate? If the board is company leaning with say 3 of 4 seats for the founders and 1 investor, how can a founder be fired unless in the unlikely scenario that the other two vote against him/her?
Bruce Schneier - Reconceptualizing Security (video)
Yes. Their warehouses use a Kiva Systems setup, i.e. they have hundreds of little orange robots that run around and lift & carry shelves. Though an ad, this gives a rather good idea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s
I am a co-founder of a startup based in Poland and I disagree with "unsatisfactory job opportunities" you mention.

I think the job opportunities are there all right, and the startup culture is growing very rapidly. Problem is, young people (especially programmers) have unrealistic expectations, not in line with anything you might call a "startup".

First, most young people start working for large companies during the final years of their education. Then, right after they get their master's, they take on a mortgage. Which means from then on their work career is dictated by the requirement of a constant, predictable salary.

Second, when dealing with startups, programmers expect a) a high salary, b) extras. Start telling them about shares and options and see how the conversation doesn't go anywhere. Sure, it's sugar on top of their salary, but (a) is required. Their families and friends only understand (a), so (a) it is.

Third, and this is a European problem, rather than a local one, things happen slower over here. It is difficult to make people work hard and fast and if you do it, people will complain about unsatisfactory work environment.

So, in my opinion, if you are looking for startup job opportunities, there are plenty to be had, but don't expect corporate pay, benefits and work hours.

As to the original article, it is true and well-written (I know the people mentioned, it's a great team). Not everything is rosy, and it is difficult to run a startup across countries and timezones, but it can work out very, very well indeed.

And in my opinion, the biggest problem with the Polish startup scene is not the founders, but the relative immaturity of the angel and VC investors. If some of the foreign, more experienced VCs and angels decided to do business here, I'm sure they would find plenty of good opportunities.
An OPML like exportable format for Todo Lists?
I was running out of resources on Heroku

This is something I'm concerned about. I like a whole lot about Heroku, but the upgrade path is strange and seems illogical. Could use some insight here.

The jump from 1 dyno (free) to 2 dynos ($36/mo) seems excessive. What seems even worse is that the database options are: 5M (free), 20G ($15/mo, reasonable), and then the next step up is 2T at a whopping $200/mo. Where's the in-between? I can imagine running out of space with 20G, but I would reasonably expect a next step that costs maybe $30/mo -- measured growth! $200/mo could easily be too much too soon and would probably force me to go elsewhere.

I've been thinking about going to the next HUG (Heroku User Group) meeting just to try and talk to them about this. Heroku would be the perfect place to grow a startup from the micro stage all the way up to the big time, except for the roadblocks in the growth path.
I've mirrored it at http://www.toxiccoma.com/frozendefence/
Yea, the real number (if I read the article correctly) is that Apple now has 7% of the entire cell phone market, up from 5% last year.
* There are more Android units out there than iOS devices, yet iOS devices yield something like 92% of the dollar sales of applications.*

Android's only outselling iOS in the US, and only since October — iOS still has a 4:1 or 5:1 edge on installed base.

That'll shift over time, of course, but I don't know anyone who expects the iOS/Android revenue split to follow it in short order. Who buys apps for a phone that was dropped out of a blimp?
It helps that Softbank (the only carrier that Apple's supporting) is eating the entire cost of the phone.

Hmm, an HTC Desire HD for 30,720 yen (US$378) on a 2-year contract:

https://onlineshop.mb.softbank.jp/ols/mobile/WOS001Control/W...

or an iPhone for free on a 2-year contract:

https://onlineshop.mb.softbank.jp/ols/mobile/WOS001Control/W...

And that's not even mentioning the other carriers, whose data and voice plans are much more expensive. And the Galaxy S that docomo's selling (for the low price of your firstborn child) doesn't even have a front camera.
This is more of a public journal entry than anything, but I honestly don't regret anything. I only dated one girl before the girl who I married, I'm about to have a kid, I've worked with a ridiculous amount of great companies, I had a semi-nerdy time in school, and none of it has given me any regrets.

There's been times when I've been burned, but most of the time it was from me reaching too high for a position which I wasn't yet ready for. When I failed, it hurt really badly at the time, and I had a lot of regrets then, but now I can say it's been the best failure I've ever had.
The Photo Foretelling Apple’s Doom
google cache
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cac...
Good article. Too many people just keep using the "ACID" term without really understanding what their transactional semantics are.

A good example of bumps you might hit is a problem I encountered a while ago: the default level of transaction isolation in postgres is “Read Committed”, not “Serializable” as the SQL standard mandates. This sounds fine, until you get constraint violations under load because of race conditions. See http://jan.rychter.com/enblog/2009/6/6/postgresql-transactio... if you want the full story.

BTW, I suspect problems like the one I encountered exist in lots of software systems, they just rarely get discovered.