skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you really wanted to see it that way, I think something like Reia might be a more interesting way of capturing it, myself. OTP has too much boilerplate for my tastes.
Flickr Developer Guide
Correction: it's LGPL, with the linkage exception [Edit: I'm wrong. See silentbicycle's comment below]. That's a big difference. Most importantly, it removes any reason to complain about licensing other than dogma, FUD, or ignorance -- libgit2 may be linked into permissively-licensed code at will.

I tend to prefer permissively-licensed code, too, but there's a world of difference between viral licenses with and without linkage exceptions.
I have used AdGrok to some degree, and while I have no interest in applying for the job, I can express my confidence in their can-do attitude and sense of humor. To the Pole!
Ways to Publish Your Own Book
I usually come out pretty strongly against programmer-culture misogyny, however subtle, but here we're talking about a pretty famous quotation and I would answer to your question, "yes". There's a difference between sexism and historically-weighted badassness.

One could argue there's a literacy-filter being applied here more than a gender-filter.
I've used Crashplan for over a year now. Works great on Windows and OS X.
...or it could mean that they really like writing, and that's a useful skill.
As an aside, did anyone read the second post, about turning extensions of the URLs from .php to .html? That's trading "wrong" for "more wrong". Just rewrite your URLs to have a reasonable hierarchy and you're done, no need to add any cruft like extensions.
If school's sole purpose is to create academic machines out of the students, I would not have a comment. But life is more than that; we DO have to deal with other people. Being 'smarter' should also mean becoming better socially aware as well, I'd hope. In the end, there will be different levels of intelligence between people. Communicating and executing the best solution requires some social mean to convince or plant the seeds of evaluation to many other people for their understanding, less we fall back to the an inferior solution (playing on emotions, being 'pc' as oppose to discussing reality..), or worse, violence.

“The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.” --Terry Pratchett
> There may not be enough capital to fund every "white male start-up."

Doerr is not a in a position to fund even a small fraction of the start-ups that apply, neither is YC, nor any other fund that invests in start-ups as far as I know, it's a glut of applicants and a shortage of time and hands to mentor that puts the brakes on.

Capital is not the issue, and it never has been.

> All "white male start-ups" do not consist of Harvard/Stanford drop-outs with no social life and under 30 years old.

No, but those are the large majority of the applicants, typically they are people that believe more in themselves than they believe in working for a boss, and once you cross that line a university education carries an opportunity cost that may be a net loss. So that's why people decide to 'drop out' and pursue their dreams. It removes some of the safety net, but even that is something that you can consciously decide to do. And working without a net is a motivation of sorts (precisely because mistakes will have dire consequences).

> "White male" is probably not the sole criteria, but if it is a consideration, then a "White male star-up" may make it further in the process before being considered based on its other merits.

Typically a VC / incubator fund will look at communication skills, people skills and technical skills long before any personal factors would kick in and if you ever had hard proof (by for instance setting up a false front behind two black females doing all the work) you'd be in a good position to make them look ridiculous. Another option is to set up an all minority fund where you exclusively fund anybody but white males and you outperform the market.

> The Doerr made no reference to a preponderance of "white male start-ups" nor did it suggest that such a preponderance was the basis for his investment preference.

This is a well established fact, I don't need John Doerr to give that information.

There are a lot of applications of people that are essentially without any chance whatsoever in every category, when you remove all of those the number of people left that are a minority of some form or other tend to of exceptional quality.

> It don't think it would be surprising to suggest that most people have a better understanding of people from a similar cultural and social background and therefore are more comfortable working with such people.

That's probably a huge factor right there. The control for that would be to have an investment fund created by wealthy people with a coloured skin and females, we'll see who they end up investing in, people 'like them' or white guys under 30.

What do you think they'll do ?
Why Your Business Should Consider Reverse Mentorship
Watch out, I am going to generalize here...

In my experience, in the US, EMPLOYEES in marketing, sales, management, finance, and operations do much better if they have high "life/social" skills even when their level of intelligence or knowledge are lower than others. However, this pattern doesn't fit IT/software and engineering (hard sciences) where creativity and knowledge are required. Some of the best engineers have the worst social skills. You won't find that in other fields.

Then there are the entrepreneurs who tend to break rules and take shortcuts. But they also tend to prefer to hire rule followers. I used to be surprised by all the entrepreneurs without degrees who require degrees for employment. But today I think good entrepreneurs instinctively know they need rule followers to carry out their vision and provide balance.

The question we need to ask about education: What are we trying to produce?

a. Good employees
b. Innovative scientists
c. Entrepreneurs
d. All of the above

d. All of the above. The problem is... Our unionized government run education system isn't flexible enough to allow these different types of people to consciously choose their own path. Instead, in the past, it tried to turn everyone into a rule follower. Now the approach in the article is trying to turn everyone into a scientist and/or entrepreneur. The answer is to educate and evaluate different people different ways. Social skills are critical for some professions, and others not so much. Rule following is also essential in some professions, but deadly in others.
ClubCompy recreates 80's micro feel with HTML5&JS
BTW, thanks for not using that "no comments" "YC company hiring" thing. It's really annoying not to let people discuss or ask questions about the opportunity in question.
I just realized that Alexis = Reddit founder = kn0thing = the author of this -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isk88nT0sRY

That is one of my favourite youtubes. Big kudos! I couldn't stop laughing the first time I watched it. It's amazing how most of it still applies after ~5 years
Some of our best ideas come from when we are away from the computer totally engaged in something other than work. I think Seth and others will ultimately learn this.
But still, the sales challenge is immense, especially for 3 guys with no sales experience and no money (remember that back then it was nowhere near as easy to raise a bunch of money after YC). Individually talking to every restaurant you sell to doesn't scale at all, and signing on big chains would have been very hard, especially before they had proven that it works and makes restaurants money.

Plus, the problem he mentioned about integrating with other restaurants' systems is a major one. I'd guess that there are many different order-tracking systems. They'd probably have to customize that hardware solution to each restaurant that already had an electronic order-tracking system.

Now, they could have started out with restaurants that were just using paper (with the hardware appliance just printing stuff out), but that would pretty much exclusively mean small non-chain restaurants, which, again, doesn't scale.
The Yahoo toolbar gets installed almost every time I update Java or Flash. It drives me crazy because (a) I want to update frequently to stay secure, but (b) I don't want to get a bunch of crap bloatware and it seems like they use a different "gotcha" technique every few months so I always get duped.

It's infuriating because it makes (some) users want to avoid these updates which are, presumably, in the interest of the entire community.

Can't they get their ad-revenue somewhere else besides critical security patches???
Sold out in the U.S. before they even went on sale? Damn.
Indeed. Go seems inspired by the last 20 or 30 years of computer engineering (it is built from concepts that have been proven to work (and often not work) in the past), and Rust seems to take into account the last 20 or 30 years of research. In my view, Rust has more potential, but Go is a safer bet, at least until Rust has been used for a fair bit of Real Code (tm).
And their offices are in SOMAlia too! :)
It's GPL with a linking exception. That's a pretty big exception, since it means you can use it in proprietary projects.
It may be worth noting that although the expedition was a failure, that was pretty much a matter of bad luck with the behavior of the ice floes.

And as awful an experience as it must have been for the men involved, it's also worth noting (perhaps especially in this context) that not a single person lost his life, owing largely to some incredible leadership from Shackleton, and amazing skills from much of his crew.
Presumably you've read Marx then: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value

But really that's the point of any kind of organization, even capitalism - specialization allows a group of people to create more value than 1 person alone.
There's no obvious indication that the CEO in question is under large amounts of stress. Generally, many founders who work this much do so in a state of flow, which is very much a non-stressful manner of working.
Wow. They have trees now. I should watch out for them.
The comparison really comes down to "what do you need to do to send json over http in various languages". The fact that the service at the other end happens to send sms's, as opposed to causing monkeys to fly out someone's nose is sort of incidental. That said, Tropo does look pretty cool, and a whole lot more useful than monkey-nose web services.

I was kind of hoping it was something to do with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMI_%28protocol%29

I had some contact with a system handling that stuff last year, and it was just screaming to be written in Erlang.
Just so you know, the first link is for Baltimore County, not Baltimore City. They're separate entities, and Baltimore County is considerably wealthier than Baltimore City, having gone to such great lengths to separate themselves as a tax base, that you even have Towson listed as Baltimore County, despite being within Baltimore City.

There's also the issue, unaddressed, of extra per-student costs. For instance, special needs students can be very expensive, often requiring one-on-one instruction, which can greatly skew the per-student costs.
touche :)
> Is the integrity of the quote more important than looking non-biased against women programmers?

Yes, absolutely. It also pre-selects for those that have a sense of humor.

If I were a woman - which I'm not - I would definitely play that to my advantage in my application.
Consumers hated Windows Mobile and loved the iPhone so with WP7 they moved to a more locked-down iPhone-like model.

That makes sense to me - but I think the reasoning might be more complex?

I think UI simplicity and UX constraints helped to ensure the iPhone's interface became so successful. I don't think that this (well considered) simplicity should be confused for openness.

In relation to openness, I'd imagine the main reasons for producing a more locked-down (closed) system, would have been the carrier's desire to control their customer's experience and Microsoft's desire to create a profitable mobile-app ecosystem.

I still think it would be possible to create a pleasing UI and UX, for a (relatively) open OS like Android. I think such a thing could potentially please users as much the (closed) iPhone OS.
No, he got it from here: http://downloads.yahoo.com/firefox/ (or obviously some other non-Firefox update).

More importantly, your talking about apple's and oranges. He's referring to installing unrelated software that installs browser plugins, like Office, iTunes, or Google Earth or Chrome. If you download a Yahoo! branded firefox, you'll expect to get a Yahoo! branded firefox. If you install iTunes, it shouldn't go around installing other software.
The Algorithm + the Crowd are Not Enough
I attend a podunk university in southern Utah, where college life resembles an episode of 'Community', and the phenomenon you describe is apparent.

60% of the students are seeking acceptance into the nursing program. The school claims it is one of "the top nursing schools in the country". This claim is based on their graduation rates (for those accepted, around 80%). The school inflates their graduation rates by leaning on biology teachers to increase the rate at which people pass their classes, and by making the most difficult classes (e.g. Microbiology) optional.

The problem is that community and liberal arts colleges are small enough that the only significant measure of success is the rate at which students graduate. In my school, at least, nursing tends to (by and large) attract the sort of stupid people who are only interested in the certificate. In this the program is surpassed only by Elementary Education. Thus, economic pressures overpower academic concerns.

Side note: I worry about our nurses. I spent the first three days of June in in the Intermountain Hospital, and I caught the CNAs inadvertently giving me someone else's prescription. Twice.
Previously submitted, although no discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1949988

In fact, I see that you, the same person, has submitted this twice, the second time putting a tracker on the URL deliberately to fool the dup detector.

I'm not convinced that's ethical.
Anyone seeking to lead other can do a lot worst than trying to learn from Ernest Shackleton

"but when you are in a hopeless situation, when you are seeing no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton"
I've never had Firefox install Yahoo! toolbar or such on an update, or on install.
This supports that investors invest in the founders and not the idea. This isn't the most compelling application/idea however the founders made an impression and that got them a slot.
Coffe With Sugar Makes You Smart
Super quote, especially given the bits I remember about the 'endurance expedition', that's as nice a metaphor of what it can be like to run a startup.

Hope you end up better than Shackleton and crew and succeed!
Here’s Reddit’s Rejected Application to Y Combinator
What/where is the meetup today?
And of course, no one expects the Spanish inquisition.
Sexist!

Just kidding...people are too sensitive.

http://www.antarctic-circle.org/advert.htm
Google Charts API over HTTPS
One of my favorite memories from high school was from my AP physics class. One of the junior class valedictorians (there were at least 3 girls, all very liberal arts focused, tied for the position at the time) got a C on a test that accounted for a major portion of our grade. After class on the day we got our tests back, she approached the teacher and explained to him that she had never gotten a C before and was generally very distressed about the possible effects on her GPA. He was very understanding, and changed her test grade to an A.

Later that year, another of the junior valedictorians was caught cheating on a test. After some deliberation among the councilors and administrators it was decided that she would receive only an informal reprimand, because to fail her with a note on her transcript about cheating (as dictated by school policy) could hurt her chances of getting into a good school (to say nothing of how it would effect her chances of receiving a National Merit Scholarship that the school loved to boast of its students receiving).

On several occasions it was explained to me that it would be "unfair" to heavily weight test scores, because many of the "best" students, who turned in all of their assignments on time, had difficulty understanding the material and might not be able to do well.

I hate to sound bitter, but even the public university I attend now (I wasn't one of the "best" students. I got A's on tests but didn't do much homework - didn't see the point, since I knew the material) is refreshingly performance based compared to that high school. Other than a few exceptional teachers, I find it best for my blood pressure to try to forget high school entirely.
Windows is not open source so it is probably harder for the carriers to just lock it down (unless they require something in the business deal). With Android, being open source, then the carriers can change it however they want.
Google Should Use This Groupon For Groupon [Humor]
GPLv2 w/ linking exception > GPLv2 > GPLv3

Definitely a big step forward, and the API is pretty clean.
this is not default behaviour, so it's something besides firefox itself -- Google is the default search entity for every firefox install/upgrade I've ever used, and there's certainly no yahoo toolbar.
Both approaches should work, putting version in the url seemed to be more widely used, we will take both in to consideration, thanks for the suggestions
I would have killed for this when living on campus.
Mixpanel - Support Engineer
We're looking for someone to help us handle support at Mixpanel. This person needs to be technical.

Email us at jobs@mixpanel.com if interested.

-------------------------------------------

Our wishlist but we're flexible:

- Knows Javascript

- Knows how HTTP / the web works.

- Knows a programming language other than Javascript and has built something in it.

- Likes working with customers

- Will get their hands dirty in code to figure out customer problems.

- Willing to talk with customers on the phone directly to solve their problems.

- Goal is to make customer response time as small as possible.
US Supreme Court agrees to hear Microsoft appeal in Word patent case
Yes,

The boundary between a file format and a programming language is fairly fuzzy too.

I recently created a custom "little language" as a replacement for some rather fragile configuration routines. It won't need a lot of users to be a win.

(and no, it wouldn't have been faster/easier to use Lua/Ruby/Python etc).
Peter Sunde to setup alt root server to compete with ICANN
Oh yeah, Yahoo is the creepiest among all of them. But it generally happens when you install something from Yahoo, say Yahoo messenger!
Why DNS blacklists don't work for IPv6 networks
That’s a variant of a quote by Steve jobs http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
I see this argument often now: Wikileaks is dangerous because our government needs to have some secrets.

It's an absolutist argument.

Wikileaks is not releasing all secrets because they don't have all secrets nor are they likely to ever acquire all secrets. So this discussion is not "either Wikileaks is good because nothing should be secret or it's bad because some secrets are necessary". A rational view of this discussion breaks down into two primary paths:

1- Is enough being done by Wikileaks (and partners and government) to minimize threats to individuals named in the leaked documents? Any rational review of the evidence to date determines that it does appear that enough is being done in this regard even without the government agreeing to involve itself (no evidence that any individuals have been harmed by the leaked documents and apparent active attempts by Wikileaks to seek guidance and pursue internal review in order to redact specific information).

2- What are the implications of the actual information that is being released? Ultimately, this is the key discussion topic. The rest (save #1) is just noise that some are using to intentionally minimize the relevance of this discussion topic.

In regards to your two choices, the first doesn't exist, never has and there's no indication that it ever will and the second, overstated first because the amount of information released pales in comparison to the amount of classified information in toto, is by all measures preferable to the only realistic alternative: minimal classified information leaked and minimal public engagement, providing ample cover for government misdeeds. Therefore, it is fortunate.
http://anyvite.com/events/home/pypehqiqsd#1

5:30 at Cambridgeside. Bring friends.
It's just nice to see the "mainstream" media recognising that, unlike what the RIAA is saying, the sky didn't fall in as a result of the internet. As a musician myself I wholeheartedly embrace the new distribution methods because they are better for the consumer. The biggest challenge for me is defining what my product is (generally not an easily copied mp3 download) and then making this super effective and properly targeted. This is a good thing, however, as now that the IFPI and the RIAA have been all but taken out of the equation, the freedom we have to make innovative packages is pretty damn awesome.
They are using this as a vector to install Chrome.

That annoys some people, but at least the people most likely to be running IE 6 or 7 at home are also the ones most likely to remain co-opted-in to a Chrome download.
I built my own project based on this with balancing rockets, my fitness function was based on a penalty for crashing and extra points for distance to target, i also added a small bonus for fuel left to let them slowly optimize their flight.
At the present, we tend to be more focused on Twitter, and our models built with tweets. Down the road, we will have a more flexible and comprehensive offering.
Here is what Alexis had to say answering this question in the comments section of his site:

alexis ohanian said...
I believe the biggest thing was the dangers of dealing with both cellphone carriers (this is pre "AppStore," remember) who are notoriously closed and slow-moving as well as restaurants, which aren't typically very tech-curious (all the ones I spoke with were taking online orders via fax).
Wikileaks Moves to Amazon Web Services
> If you install iTunes, it shouldn't go around installing other software.

So iTunes shouldn't install software that makes listening to and buying music easier?

I kind of agree that installing plugins without warning is a problem, but sounds like the fix/interface should be in the browser.
Diplomatic communications.
I can't think of a better ad to attract the people needed for a startup. Kudos for keeping it real, honest and to the point. Wish you the very best.
I think this is an argument for grading students on knowledge rather than compliance. Forcing students to serve time in the school system as though they were felons doesn't teach social awareness. It doesn't teach you how to navigate the bureaucracies in society. It teaches you to submit to authority.

When I talk about 'navigating the bureaucracy', I do not mean 'following the rules'. I mean something more analogous to 'hacking the system'. My definition of social awareness is, to some degree, not allowing arbitrary societal restraints to prevent you from making wealth and meaningful connections. In this sense, the single best lesson a student can learn wrt bureaucratic hurdles is that there is a better way.
This isn't evil. This is inconsiderate. Evil is spyware, data logging and uninstallable plug-ins.

So, really, this is hyperbole.
Though I started with a rough idea several months ago, I did most of my work coding http://www.sparkmuse.com during November. I'm not gonna make it by the end of the month, but I'll be opening the alpha in around 2 weeks. Right now most of the coding is done, I'm just on the lookout for more content to add to the site.