skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The implementation of JRuby should fix this concern.
Those guys are pretty set. They can write any old recycled thing, and people fall all over themselves to proclaim their genius...
The camera behind Google's Street View
from view src on that page:

http://www.robert.shedd.us/ssplaylist.xml
Non-US citizens founders, any advice on immigration law?
Pimp My Code, Part 14: Be Inflexible!
I noticed that there has been a few startups with founders who are not US citizens. I am not one, and this has been _THE_ reason holding me back. I wish wish wish I was a US citizen, just because there are so many laws holding a non citizen back from startups.

How did you guys do it? I'd so greatly appreciate any advice. I already am in the US, working for a large company (on a work visa)
Not saying anything about Rails, just about the right to complain in general. In a way rating a product is Open Source, too...
a freudian slip :)

how do you really feel about posting this spam ? ;)
Why it's so hard to be a startupper (what I concluded after pondering Ev's "choose your game" post)
By the way, am I posting more self-links than is good form? If so, my apologies, and I can cut back.
You can help a lot more people with 1 million than you can with nothing. If I made it I would be happy to give a lot of what I made out to worthwhile causes.
If people don't like them, they won't vote for them. I think the "don't post your own stuff" is lame baggage from reddit. If you're starting a company, I don't think you can or should be ashamed to promote your work, when you've taken the time to create something you're pleased with.
It's not hard to look for potential red flags with any company. Sounds like you guys are aware of these issues, which is good to hear. Thanks for continuing to share your very interesting story.
They make individuals tell them precisely what music they like. This information is hard to find normally. Sellers like to either target people that will buy what they're selling, or alter what they're selling once they know more about the buyer.
Won't more and more users find plugins like Adblock over time? And if someone was to set up a trusted list of URLs to block and the plugin updated occasionally whole swaves of ads would disappear and not be loaded.

Has anyone any stats from their site that show how many people are blocking ads?
Dunno how to edit my own comments but....Code Igniter comes with excellent documentation I might add. Initially I loved Rails but migrated to Code Igniter cuz it's lightweight and loosely coupled(You don't even need to run with a model if you choose to but it follows the MVC structure quite well).

Plus it outperforms Rails in the speed department. It doesn't sport much magic compared to Rails. But that's ok if you're like me and you want to keep looking under the hood and see how stuff runs on CI. And it doesn't constrain you as much if you want to stretch out and really make it run.

It actually made PHP fun to learn(if you don't mind the fugly syntax). It also supports Active Record btw.
'... "Most people," I read, "have spent too much time convincing themselves that life has to be hard, a resignation to 9-to-5 drudgery..." ...'

Most people probably don't want the prospect of being summoned by a boss and told to sit. Just like a dog! ... (straight out of pg's startup '07' talk on ' ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html )

'... I mean, if I'd turned down Gawker Media when they picked me to start Valleywag, I would have graduated, then found a job at a small newspaper ...'

This isn't a bad idea if you want to learn how to become a real Journalist. Where else are you going to be follow a story, learn how to research it and write it up?

'... Both want to stay in charge of their games longer instead of playing by someone else's rules ...'

And that is probably the best summary thing I've read today. I'd read the original article , "decide what game you're playing" ( http://tinyurl.com/2t2roe ) and didn't quite get it.
Why I don't want funding
Tips to keep your Django/mod_python memory usage down
Here is a good link: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=735309

I guess the bottomline is that you can start and invest in a company, but not work for it.

Have you already applied for a Green Card? While you wait, maybe you could invest your free time now in an open source project that you could potentially leverage for-profit services later on, after you get your GC.

Another thing you could do while you wait for your GC is to simply start a savings account and accumulate a little bit every month, so when you get your GC you have enough funds to start a company and survive without a salary for a while (I'd recommend 1 year of living expenses).

Another option is to go get some higher education, which you can do as a H1 / work visa. Because you work for a large company, they probably offer tuition reimbursement programs. Take advantage of those programs as much as you can!

In short, use the time between now and your GC to prepare yourself and your life to eventually start a company. I'm now a GC holder, but I have immigrated to US via a work visa as well... So I understand your frustration, but I don't think you have many options, unfortunately.
Along the same lines of freeing up memory:

A couple days ago I tried changing the swappyness setting of the vm on a box that I have a few servers on:

echo 100 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

Suddenly, a ton of unused memory that my apps had been eating up was forced into swap and my apps have been way faster since then. Anyone had similar results? Would this be something that shared hosting providers with severe memory limitations should consider doing?
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=google&sll=37.403165,-122.049179&sspn=0.095728,0.160675&ie=UTF8&ll=37.422483,-122.08481&spn=0.005981,0.010042&t=h&z=17&om=0&layer=c&cbll=37.420929,-122.084763&cbp=1,301.225264080084,0.6104232618933,2
You can do &gt; to get a greater-than sign. But be careful if you edit the post later, it reverts back; a known bug on the Feature Requests thread.
Considering Hacking constructive
Analyzing long tails
Distruptive potential of web2 tech
How would you measure desperation?
At MIT we had to go through COUHES for everything, including surveys. Psychological harm is still harm.
Hi,
Is there anybody from India(preferably from HYD) or even US who can work with me as a co founder ?
I am from India and unfortunately we don't have a PG/YC equivalent here, but still startupping from India has got its own advantages.
I got the idea , am a software engineer and manage most of the things right.
Reply back if sounds good.

-Saurabh
Lame, lame, lame. All I see is 'get the latest Flash player'. It's not the idea, the information compilation or the base google maps technology. It's the idea to use flash. Flash works on all systems right? Wrong. It won't work on 64 bit systems like my Ubuntu or other 64 bit sytems ( try http://www.google.com/search?q=flash+64+bit+systems ... not without hacking your system & certainly not by default installation) Why? Adobe has not bothered to compile a version for 64 bit systems. It's not open source (Unless you count GNU Gnash. And of course I have to compile, test & install it. Not my first choice) so I can't compile & install myself. So the execution to me, using my system, is just plain lame.
Developer Day with Google
Wasting time on things that really don't matter
I hear you. I too am working on a work visa, though it would be nice if we could start a start-up. The link provided by felipe was pretty useful, but it does not solve the problem. Thanks for asking the question though, it answered some of mine too...
How do you sell CPM rates to advertisers directly?
Amen.

For a much broader view on things that don't really matter, check out:

http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
The tactic paul mentioned for avoiding time-wasting seems like a good approach. I tried a similar approach yesterday, however, and failed. It helps to have a very clear conception of what your top problems are.
This problem of wasting time on things is not important either :)
PG's essay is an interesting, broader view, but I like Buchheit's focus on what the next action is to kill the problem. Having a prioritized list of issues and keeping it prominent is key. It's different from the to-do list PG says to avoid, in that to-do lists don't have to be aggressively prioritized. They get filled with random schleps.
RIA: What is it good for?
Definitely true. See also http://www.bikeshed.com
MVC In Web Forms
My favourite PG essay
You Only Need to Build a $3 Million Company, Part Two
The tricky part is figuring out when you're wasting time on things that really don't matter. The string comparison deal is an obviously easy example, but there's a lot of gray area out there.
I really like this one because it explains how an undesirable human characteristic (procrastination) can actually lead to great things if channeled appropriately.

It also arms me with an appropriate response to my dear wife's objections when I push off things to work on my project.
Re: My would-be career in journalism:

I should have clarified. After Valleywag, I was courted (briefly; I wasn't too interested and they didn't push THAT hard) by several newspapers that I would have killed to get into back at college.
"Maybe that's fun if you don't have anything better to do, but when you're actually trying to accomplish something it can be deadly."

Doesn't that also apply to, eg.: reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Surely, when you're doing a startup, it's a waste of time, but at any other moment, it is worthwhile.

I find that reading arguments about these simple problems is not fun, but it's sometimes highly enligthening. If there are hard technical reasons for preferring A over B, I would like to know.
You know, I read this earlier but never thought of posting it here. Good idea - much of what Wil writes is great.
hiring good employees. iq tests, what else?
planning to hire some people soon.

any recommendations on how to gauge if they are any good?
I need some statistically significant tests that can weed out those loafers. Know of any?
Great video of Human Interface guru Bill Buxton on the design process
Dear $DEITY, don't rely on an IQ test! You need to talk to them, give them problems, see how they respond.
Come on. You use a system (ubuntu linux) that represents a minimal market share and is made for people who like to compile, test, and install their own software.

I use linux at work, but when sites don't work (but they work for 99% of the rest of the world), I don't really complain. It's annoying, but it's my choices that make it inoperable.
Bill is guy worth learning more about: www.billbuxton.com

Among the many interesting points in this talk are his criticisms of the ipod.

Aside:

I'd add one ipod criticism of mine - you have to look at the ipod to find the music you want. Kind of dangerous when you drive. I'd fix this by adding a text-to-speech engine that says either the first letter of the album/artist/song or the first word, or the entire entry depending on scrolling speed.
I think that once you get past the whitespace dependence, python is an incredibly elegant language. No strange variable prefixes, functions as primary data, readable syntax, etc etc. And, if you come from the land of C/Java/C++, it has quicker transition than ruby (IMHO)
No, they don't exist. First of all, your question has no objective test function. Let's put aside that totally fundamental issue. In that case, you would need a test that distinguishes out of a small group of people, and would not have any statistical robustness.

Another way to look at this problem is, if such a test exists, why doesn't everyone use it? The SAT, for example, is very well correlated with intelligence. Most companies don't care about it.

The overarching question, "how do you weed out good people?" is a fundamental challenge of running business. Generally, the advice is to hire people that you personally know are good. If that doesn't work, hire the good people that other good people know, if that doesn't work, maybe you or your pitch is not that good.
actually, i would look at SAT. Not as a major decision point, but just one small factor in the entire hiring process.
IQ test would take another small factor. Personality another factor, Familiarity with the domain you are hiring for another factor. Experience another factor. and so on. This way, even if you don't score well for your SAT, your other factors may make up for it.

isn't this how Google now automate their hiring process (at least in the initial stage to filter out the crap)?

Categorize their current best and worst employees based on these factors. Then get the factors of the interviewees and run them on their bayesian classifier and it will indicate whether the interviewee is likely to be a good or bad employee.
You could test them on their knowledge of Python.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP0sqRMzkwo
I've been pretty happy with web.py for two web apps:

http://www.colr.org

http://www.daltonlp.com/blog_my

And a bunch of small one-off things.

I like it. It's not perfect - the templating system in particular is not as nice as what it aims to replace (cheetah & kid). Yet.

For all the complaining about NIH, web.py has done a pretty good job of playing nice with other layers in the web stack (fcgi/flup, cheetah/kid). The parts that are reinvented have been reinvented in quite different (and better) ways than other frameworks. i.e. Request dispatching and DB interaction.
Has anyone used paste? What differentiates paste in your opinon?
I would think twice about working for anyone who gave me an IQ test. Not because I think I'd do badly on it, but because of what it says about that employer.
what does it say about the employer?
yes. i will talk to them, give them problems and see how they respond. but iq test is still useful. by the way, i'm not asking them to do those full blown iq test. Just those fun-and-games "test" like http://www.lumosity.com. This site really does work. I've test it out on my friends. The smart ones get high score. The dumb... err... less bright ones get average scores.
That they don't really understand statistics.
At this point, there are over 150M adults online in the US. I doubt a large % of them will end up installing adblock.

Keep in mind too, blocking ads isn't necessarily a rational decision for a lot of people in a lot of situations. We can put aside the fact that ads provide economic incentive for the content people are looking for.

The important thing is that ads are often gateways to the things people are looking for (with is one of the points of the article). People buy goods and services. Ads provide a way for people to find sellers of the goods and services they want.

The advertising driven business model is an extremely old one, and I don't think it's going anywhere. People have always had the capacity to ignore advertising, even without technology -- the human brain is very selective about the information it processes and retains.

Some advertising works subliminally/emotionally (most brand advertising), but highly targeted ads, particularly context sensitive pay per click ads aren't generally in that category. They work when people are looking for something, much like the ads from local car dealers in the local paper, which most people ignore completely unless they have an inclination or outright need for a new car.
Think Twitter is frivolous? Ask the protesters in Venezuela.
so you are inferring that there is enough statistical evidence to prove the hypothesis that a high iq person does not make for a good employee.
"I guess the bottomline is that you can start and invest in a company, but not work for it."

Close, but not quite (according to the immigration lawyer I used). You can start a company. You can invest in it. You can even work for the company. But you cannot pay yourself any money for that work. Any work you do for the company must be gratis.

So you need an alternative source of income, as well as a reason to legally stay in the US. Usually these both come from a job, which will of course get in the way of your startup efforts!

If a co-founder or a board-member of your company is a US citizen, they can theoretically sponsor an H1 transfer providing you already have an H1. In practice this is difficult and time consuming.

I opted to wait for the GC...
When you move a little further down the road, you find this:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=google&sll=37.403165,-122.049179&sspn=0....

It looks like a bunch of googlers, waving to the camera is it passes by the googleplex :)

Anybody else find other startup-related easter eggs? What about Apple's first garage or the Stanford dorm room that Sergey Brin & Larry Page worked out of?
I am not sure I agree with everything. The case against premature optimization has long been made, and for the most part I agree. However, the point of abstractions etc. is not only to create useless libraries, it is also to keep the code manageable. For example, the point of private members of classes is not protection against illegal operations. It is to tell me as a programmer that I don't have to worry about those aspects of the class. The dreadful thing that could happen is not that 1000 John Smiths sign up for my application. It is that I have written 100000 lines of code and have no idea anymore what is going on...
You're falling into a trap. Using the vocabulary of statistics does not mean you are thinking statistically. The classic refute, "correlation does not imply causation," applies here. I bet that the top people at top companies have high IQs, this does not mean that a high IQ person makes a top employee.

I'm assuming you're hiring someone at a high level for a small company. Performing an IQ test is too much effort for not enough gain. As a result, you are performing a reverse IQ test. Intelligent people, asked to take an IQ test to join a one person startup, will view it as a waste of their time, and walk away.

Go ahead, ask for SAT score. The most useful aspect of SAT score is in establishing company culture. It seems to me that you want to form a company where employess are the top grads from top universities. This is a classic, and successful model for hiring people. Asking potentital employess to take an IQ test will harm you in the end.
Basecamp is one of the "traffic gainers"... Is 37s really a startup at this point?
It looks like you already knew your smart friends from your dumb friends, so that test wasn't exactly necessary was it?

Don't make them take IQ tests. Honestly, it doesn't reflect well on an employer, especially a small startup. You can usually tell of someone's value and experience by the work they've done, their personality just by talking to them, and their pertinent knowledge just by asking them relevant questions.
A little off topic here, but I have never understood the appeal of silicon valley in terms of a work location. I mean, I'd much rather work downtown in a major urban centre than in a vast industrial wasteland with no people, no food, no energy.

How about everyone else? I find I feed off of the energy of an urban core (in my case, Vancouver BC) when I work. When I worked in a business park I felt lonely and isolated. Does anyone else notice this?
Now we are talking. If I were you, I'd try to look at the bigger picture: do all your pages exhibit this behavior? I bet only few of them do. If ActiveRecord object creation time is your bottleneck, your rhtml on those pages must be very-very thin, because typically rhtml render works waaaay slower than active record.

This tells me that you have pages with very little rhtml in them, but they (somehow) require many DB-mapped objects. Sounds like an anomaly to me. But perhaps this is just a nature of your app, in that case dump the slowest objects and don't use ActiveRecord for them.

Another good suggestion was already mentioned few posts back: when creating your objects, load only those attributes that matter.

Good luck, and hope you'll resolve your performance issues.
I posted a similar question a while back: This is the thread http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=3531
see my comment below. I'm not planning to ask them to take a full blown iq tests. Just those "iq games" that i find are empirically good in classifying the smart from the non-smart
That they can't hire the right people.

Seriously, employers that are able to "feel" out the right people don't need tests, they'll go with their gut instincts, just like smart business people.

Employers that give IQ tests usually lack this skill and have been burned because of it. I wouldn't want to work at a place that I couldn't trust to find high quality colleagues for me to build with.

(This from a person that naturally scores in the 130's in IQ tests)
the gist is to check if the site is accurate
Good luck to you. Seriously, it already appears that you have made up your mind and don't need any more of our advice. 3 separate people have pointed out why IQ test are a bad idea, yet you are still not convinced. There is not much else to say except good luck.
hiring based on "feel" is like trading based on "feel". My back hurts. Damn, short this stock. Oh god. I feel alive whenever i see this stock. Buy!

it's always good to base your hiring on something that is testable. Call me crazy but hiring is a long-term continuous process. It's best to have a program that's testable and verifiable, rather than simply be based on gut feel.
ok fine. if iq tests are such a bad idea, what verifiable tests are there that can be used to classify a good employee and a bad employee? I'm sorry but gut feel just doesn't cut it.
The belief that there could be a universal test that maps a person onto some scalar value ranging from "good employee" to "bad employee" says a lot about the belief's holder.

Sorry if that sounds snarky - it's just the way I feel.
How to measure the profitability of a startup? 3 simple methods.
They're all wearing some scary matching tshirts..
Totally agree, business parks are horrible. Any suburban nightmare that requires a car to get around deeply irritates me.

For a robotics lab it makes sense however. You're going to want space and easy access for deliveries.
it's called probability. It just depends on how you define a good employee and a bad employee and based on that definition, you can prepare a hiring program and test if that program works.

Almost all successful companies have some sort of verifiable hiring programs. facebook has their puzzles as a screener test. It is not a universal test but it helps. If you are able to solve the puzzles, there should be a higher probability that you are a better employee to the company than someone who can't solve the puzzles.

All they need to do is verify if those puzzles are good at screening good hires. If yes, well done then. They've got themselves a great hiring tool.

I'm not asking for the one almighty test that can screen if an employee is good or bad. I'm asking for tests that can help in increasing the probability of hiring good employees. For eg. for a sales job, you absolutely have to do a personality test. If the test indicate that you are introverted and have bad people skills, that you are not likely to be a good hire. Is the personality test a universal test? No, it's not. But it helps.
"I'm sorry but gut feel just doesn't cut it."

Actually, it does. Read Blink: http://www.gladwell.com/blink/ by Malcolm Gladwell for a better idea of this.

I can understand that you're looking for something more cut and dry, but it just doesn't exist. If you've got a problem trusting your instincts, you are probably going to have issues with business decisions in the future as well.

If you want my advice, your first hire should be someone with a track record of making good gut calls, to balance out yourself. That's all I'd look for really - well, besides the need to work well with you. Let him/her hire the people you need, and stick with the analytical stuff that he'll probably hate to do. :-)