skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Best way to build a financial model?
Dear HN community,

For my internship i need to dive into the topic of financial modelling for a technical start-up. I would be very thankful if you could share some best practices in getting the assumptions right and building a financial model generally.
Anyone who is interested in some sort of chat on that topic is also very welcome, it would really help me out!

Thank you in advance!
"The workaround for this new bug is to set all standalone alarms to recurring after midnight. Tests done by 9to5Mac indicate that the bug will correct itself on January 3rd, but until then readers are advised not to solely rely on alarms set on devices using iOS 4.x."

What, "..the bug will correct itself.."? Color me confused but how do you end up with a "self healing 48 hour bug"? Anyone able to provide some clarity?
http://www.locacha.com
A seamless chat room that connects you to the 30 closest people geographically. No sign up and anonymous.
to be honest, the fact that most of the stories were about iphone makes me wanna puke
Clean URLs not just an option ..
Curious - how does background GC eliminate the need for TRIM?

I know it can use a set of unallocated blocks and clean them and swap them in and out where necessary - but without knowledge of the filesystem structure itself (TRIM) - it's always going to be sub-optimal. You'll have some fast write-space available, but not necessarily the full amount you could.
Meetup.com, New York, NY--no remote. We're hiring developers, QA folks and also someone to manage our data repositories (MySQL, MogileFS, HBase). http://www.meetup.com/jobs if you're interested.
Stovetop rice pudding is easier than a can.

One cup arborio rice

3 cups milk (or one cup cream/half-half and 2 milk)

Teaspoon of vanilla if you like

Put in non-stick pan

Bring to boil

Turn down to lowest setting for 25mins

When it's done (depends how sticky you like it)
Stir in a spoon of sugar and a spoon of butter if you're feeling decadent - or jam or maple syrup or whatever
Audiophiles
"Unfortunately, it isn’t just appliance reviews that are the problem. Almost any popular search term will take you into seedy neighborhoods." Quantification? Detailed examples? Link to his research? All missing in the original article.
Google sent out phones to both Gruber and Siegler. What were they thinking? Neither are fair actors, and neither have any credibility outside of the core Apple base.

They are lost causes. There is no value in courting them: Let the product diminish their relevance, which is exactly what has already happened.

Siegler's review pretends that he gave it a fair shake, yet like all Apple reviews it only notes where Android fails, in his opinion, relative to the iPhone. Where, for instance, is any comment on the superior Android notification system (which to me is a dealbreaker of the iPhone), the power of widgets, the granular app permissions, etc.

As much as he doth protest, his conclusion was predetermined. There is no scenario where he would consider it a superior device.
A friend of mine trained dolphins for the military. He would serendipitously slip it into conversation now and again.

"After college I tried pro surfing, when that didn't work I trained dolphins for the military, then I went to med school."

Turns out training dolphins is a really crappy job! Where you have to scuba dive down into pitch black ocean waters at 4am and wait to be "saved" by a rescue dolphin. That is before something else may eat you.
http://www.haikuwik.com

I wouldn't call it a launch but I made it during my break. It's microblogging for haikus.
>A couple of the apps I use the most on my iPhone: Twitter and Foursquare, still lack to polish of their iOS counterparts.

Twitter's Android app is crap, and strangely mine is locked so I'll have to root to remove it. Twidroyd, however, works well.
The author leaves out one advantage of not eating out so much, cost.

It is difficult to spend more on ingredients for a home cooked meal than a nice restaurant meal would cost, and not hard to spend a lot less.

The downside is time, but the upside of is a fun cooking hobby.
My Macbook 13" alternative was to put a 128gb sandforce SSD into the hard drive bay and move my 500gb into the DVD Drive slot (For iTunes and Movies mainly). I also upped the RAM to 8gb.

It FLIES! And the battery life good.

SSD was my best new (to me) technology of 2010 :)
Interesting, thanks. According to Google, ROP is return-oriented programming, where you build up a program by jumping to near the end of existing executable subroutines. The control flow comes from corrupting the stack with a list of the addresses of this code. The example here:

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav/dist/sparc.pdf

uses a stack overflow.

I'm not sure how this would work with just an arbitrary EIP though. Seems to me you need a bit more than that.
Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon MP3 are "built-in" apps in many Android images (e.g. Nexus One 2.2), at most allowing you to uninstall updates to them.

It's a major irritation, really. Google needs to stop that nonsense.
http://www.thumbomatic.com/

An API based website thumbnail service with Amazon like pricing and without random or account based size restrictions.
In San Diego hiring full time LAMP developer for conversion voodoo, hiring Ruby contractor (20hrs a week long term). Both require in office, no remote sorry - email me via profile for details.
Oh I definitely do that. But substitute any activity you enjoy and you will see what I mean.
I believe the parent post is referring to the "Meals For Two" that some grocery stores are offering these days. In my area, two chains--Market Street and Central Market, for reference--have hot food restaurants/delis in the store. They use the same stock that is sold in the store and prepare lunch and dinner servings prior to the store opening and then throughout the day. Those are then packaged in containers, placed into a paper bag, stapled closed and put into a refrigerated display case.

Functionally, these are no different from preparing food at home. They are naturally more expensive than cooking the food yourself, but I can't tell a big difference. There are even services around here now that prepare, freeze, and deliver fresh-cooked meals from a nearby commercial kitchen on a weekly basis.
The Zune had a similar self-healing bug at the end of 2008. There was a fencepost error that resolved itself once the internal calendar code no longer thought it was the 366th day of the year. So, basically, a one day bug.

http://www.zuneboards.com/forums/zune-news/38143-cause-zune-...

Obviously this isn't the same bug, but it's fun to see the broken code and speculate about similar sorts logic errors that could lead to this working like normal in a couple days.
Social Networking for Defense Personnel
To understand what this site is all about, you must be familiarized with the way in which military officers are trained in specific aspects of their profession. You see, they go to staff colleges in which they learn all there is to learn about these administrative, staff and policy aspects that an officer must have a firm understanding of. And what must also be mentioned is that it is usual for such training to take place more than once in the life of the same officer, at different levels in his professional career.

Well, this social network makes for finding the right staff colleges far more directly. All the colleges of such nature available in the US become instantly findable through this website, and users of StaffCollege.com are allowed to discuss the pluses and minuses each of these has got. In this way, better-informed career decisions can be made, not to mention that officers from all over the country have a better chance to begin forming true bonds of camaraderie.
Yeah, my impression is that the MakerBot line is a much easier way to get started, so that makes sense. What you are thinking of was essentially the approach I was going to suggest. :)
Exception in which way? The Germans seem to do a lot of cooking too, from what I know, as well as Spaniards or Italians.
How can we improve? We certainly don't want to hide our choice of licensing. Currently it's at the top of the http://neo4j.org page, immediately after the introductory description of a what a graph database is:

"Neo4j is released under a dual free software/commercial license model (which basically means that it’s open source under the AGPLv3 but if you’re interested in using it with closed source software, then you must buy a commercial license)." (http://neo4j.org)

Also, we have an AGPLv3 logo on our web page, there's a LICENSE.txt in our release tarballs, we mention it at the end of every presentation we give, and Neo4j is tagged with AGPL on sites like Freshmeat (http://freshmeat.net/projects/neo4j).

Please let me know how we can make it easier to find!

-EE
http://app.timessquareball.net
Launched and went off without a hitch. Should be good fun for years to come.. (suggestions for next year welcome!)
Thx for your feedback.
My font-rendering beefs seem quite transient, I've been a detractor and appreciator of plain aliased, ClearType and Mac style at various times. The only consistency has been Linux distro defaults looking gash ;)
Ask HN: Where can I find good language dictionary databases?
I'm working on a small webapp for learning languages (the spoken kind, not programming), and want to integrate a dictionary lookup. I would prefer something on the server to something that makes remote API calls. What are some good places to find language dictionaries?

The only one I found so far is this:

http://www.language-databases.com/

At 390 euro for a language pack (e.g. English <-> Spanish), or 49 euro/month, it's a bit expensive but not out of reach. The content seems pretty good but not outstanding.

Are there any good alternatives?

Edit: to clarify, I'm looking for bilingual dictionaries (e.g. look up a Spanish word and get meanings in English)
This reminds me of the time my iPhone saved my ass.

The fault was completely mine, I'd miscalculated how long it would take me to get from the apartment, onto the BART and into the gate at SFO. I could see I'd miss my flight if I tried to run to BART, so I whipped out Siri and said, "Get me a cab." Within literally a minute or two, a cab arrived at my apartment and I got to SFO with time to spare.

Technology can be a great thing, when it works. ;-)
http://bitorama.com

a Hacker News-like site in Hebrew. Did this as a learning excercise and it's yet to pick up steam. Israeli HNers, where are you?
By all means set her up with a good Logo implementation. Logo is a great way for kids to learn to program. Wikipedia seems to be a good starting point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_%28programming_language%29
I remember when I first started using Linux in 1996, there were several oddball shells that came with the distro in optional directories, I read their READMEs but didn't even try to use them. The ones I remember most clearly were a clutch of them based on slightly different versions of BASIC (I don't remember what any of them were actually called) and Guile which was based on Scheme.
Show HN: Wrote Arduino ruby prototyping API gem on new year (my first gem)
What about a three strike approach like the one that was suggested a few days ago with AdSense?

Domains frequently being excluded by power searchers could be good signal.

(googling to find on that used to pester my search results, kods.net, it seems it has finally got banned. Hooray!)
The first point is a longstanding difference of opinion between different users. The thing is, fonts on Windows in general are sharper but mangle the letterforms, while fonts on the Mac look just how they were designed but have to sacrifice sharpness to do so with current display resolutions.

So, basically, the question is: Is readability more a function of the font's design or contrast of the luminance?
There's a good number of Israeli tech/biz guys on Twitter. Spread the word there.

Be'hatzlacha
You forgot to say where you are. You even forgot to mention it on your web site, as far as I can see.
Hiring PHP/Wordpress skills for a small contract job
(1) Healthfulness of food is a continuum, not a boolean. (2) "Ready made" meals covers almost the full spectrum. (3) Achilles heel of the best (really, all) frozen meals (say, Gardenburger with side of broccoli, or vegetable-centric Amy's) is high sodium. (4) If you cook healthfully (say a reasonably faithful version of the Indian or Italian traditions), your meals will have a much better balance of nutrients and especially more micronutrients than the median frozen prepared meal. (5) Plain frozen vegetables (as opposed to frozen prepared dishes/"meals") are excellent food. (6) See Michael Pollan for more.
Not fully launched yet, but it is in private beta:
http://www.mubdo.com/
We don't cook because our parents didn't. Prepackaged convenience foods have always been something of a status item. This whole "return to cooking" is something of an amusing rebellion to me, since it was something of a stigma in my childhood. If your parents had money, your lunch was filled with tasty items sealed in plastic from a factory.

I used to bake bread in my dorm kitchen. My floormates thought it astounding. This is how I learned that nobody's parents had taught them how to cook. As an only child of a single parent, the responsibility for the evening meal fell to me (as well as my own meals throughout the day). Eventually I set upon the family collection of cookbooks and was allowed to make pretty much anything. Even a recipe from a Campbell's Soup cookbook for oatmeal cookies containing a can of tomato soup (as disgusting as it sounds).

Perhaps it's worth noting that my kids generally prefer prepackaged foods over our cooking. So maybe it's a cyclical thing, in some subset of each generation. But I'm hoping that teaching them to cook will change that.
Burlington, VT

Eatingwell.com

We are looking for a smart, entry to mid level programmer. Geeks are treated well in this media company, this is the last position in a department that will have grown by 300% in the last 9 months by the time you get there.

Php for our existing site and apps, everything new is python. If you can think well, I don't care what your resume looks like. Lots of room for growth in this very profitable company, you report to a programmer, great benefits, food, dog friendly office, rural office setting.
We're looking for python-specific skills at the moment, ideally with crawler and scaling experience.

We have some developers in the UK, but most of our guys are in Russia. The Russian guys have proved to be very very capable. We did not outsource to a company, but found people via forums and then recruited individually (initially) and then grew the team using the initial guys help.
Hey, so what you are basically saying is, "the best computer algorithms in the world" (you know, Google has like > 578690 Ph. D's) are not good enough to have effective search, so we should introduce the human element.

Fair enough. There is the Open Directory Project (which is pretty old) and of course there is Facebook, Twitter, and other, human-curated services. Starting a whole new company to do search and compete with Google (and Bing)? Seems like a waste of time as Google can just copy what you are doing and incorporate it into its already massive site (complete with traffic, audience, and lots of other goodies). Instead, why not get Google to add more social recommendation and feedback features?
I had the same experience with past versions of Firefox, but Firefox 4 is finally equivalent to Chrome on my machine, and in graphics-heavy cases, it's faster with both 2D (XRender) and 3D (WebGL) (in many cases, anyway).

What operating system are you on and what build of Firefox 4 are you running? I am using the nightlies on Arch Linux x64 with kernel 2.6.36.
Thumbtack is hiring engineers in San Francisco. http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs
I bought the top 11" that I could and I love it. It has become my main machine. Not since the 12" PowerBook have I loved a machine - sad as that sounds. The form factor fits me and I've been much more productive with it
My understanding is that OS X/HFS+ already optimizes for reusing already allocated blocks. This means that fast write-space is conserved as much as possible at the expense of larger commit-loads from the OS's RAM cache when writing to already allocated blocks.

Also, what I've read seems to indicate that OS X behaves sub-optimally, but this is still good enough to support snappy behavior under normal workloads.
<cough> facebook </cough>
So true, I guess that is why there are still 800/900 number services that will perform the wake up call in 2011.

http://www.wakeupservice.com/
http://www.wakemeup.com/
etc...
I do not see anything about memory fences. If Jinx does not support them, then it's pretty much useless for verification of synchronization algorithms. I've implemented dozens of advanced synchronization algorithms, and I may say that it's crucial.
Also, if it works on binary level (does not require re-compilation), then it also renders it useless, because on that level you lose information about order of memory accesses, memory fences, atomicity. For example, if you see plain x86 MOV instruction, what is it? non-atomic store? atomic relaxed store? atomic release store?
http://www.carbuzz.co.uk - Not strictly launched in Dec, but v.late November. A site to make it easier for people to choose which new car to buy.
Why would it be so difficult for Google to filter out spam sites? E.g. DuckDuckGo filters out eHow.com results, because they are low quality and tend to be spammy.

Oh of course, it's not in Google's interest to do this, because they make money from the spam sites. So I don't expect Google to really "solve" this problem.... their trick is to stay useful enough that users don't abandon them, but allow enough spam into the search results to provide revenue. A tricky balance...
I launched http://www.cookitlocal.com (serving Metro Vancouver only right now) Dec 21st.

I've got a couple users, but found it much easier to get people to sign up for a newsletter I ran to promote the site. The newsletter offered seasonal recipes and links to find the required ingredients locally.
slexaxton imma let you finish... but amazon has one of the best cdns of all time
That definitively plays a role I think. Though that does not explain why the "bad food" seems to have won. It is easy enough to make great tasting food with high quality ingredients. Granted, that would not be cheap - but then again, we don't buy iPhones because they're cheap either.
SB Nation is a media/technology startup in Washington, DC. We're hiring Ruby developers and visual designers (local preferred, remote considered):

http://www.sbnation.com/jobs/developer

http://www.sbnation.com/jobs/designer

We're a network of 290+ sports news sites & communities. As newspapers are shutting down their sports sections, we're quietly reinventing the media model with profitable, high-quality, innovative coverage by and for fans. Our investors include Accel Partners, Allen & Company, Comcast Interactive Capital, and Khosla Ventures. We get around 16 million unique visitors every month.

Our small product team develops the custom publishing and community platform (built on Rails) that powers the sites. The interesting problems we face range from editorial analytics, to social distribution, to scaling the system to handle our rapid growth.

Here are some of the humans you'd be working with: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mlovitt/4507489423/in/set-72157...

And some recent press:

* Why sports is driving innovation in journalism: http://markcoddington.com/2010/10/08/why-sports-has-taken-th...

* NY Times profile: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/business/media/07fans.html

* Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab: http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/06/sb-nation-ceo-on-how-were-f...
I am hiring remote workers who know Javascript and jQuery extremely well. They would have to do jQuery, jQuery Mobile and Node.js .

http://magarshak.com/contact
I meant the icons and lack of gloss, but clearly I have touched a nerve.
very true. Hopefully I'm not just being bigoted because I am Russian, but I have worked with Russian speaking guys (Ukraine is great also) and I have to say that they care about the product quality. They often pushed back on my feature requests and forced me to discuss them until they were convinced the feature would be good. They want to make apps THEY want to use. At least, get the ones that DO that.
I was going to go this route, but I found it better to just move all the movies and install DMG onto an external drive. For one thing, I like how quiet my Macbook can be when the only spinning thing is the fan. (The MP3 collection needs to be on the internal drive, though.)
I had a Captivate for a while and loved the build. Very solid, it just was light. I don't tend to conflate weight with quality.
Sort of a large-scale corporate procrastination.
I never decided on any goals until a girl I spoke to this morning asked me about it.

Create something awesome, then find a girl(friend) to show her the awesome stuff

The first thing I did this morning was finishing the rubykoans. Fixed a bug in an old python library I wrote. Then ported it to ruby, which is now my first rubygem. http://akash.im/arduino-ruby

Day ends. Year seems to have started off well.

P.S: I do understand that awesomeness doesn't come at first shot. I'll keep trying.
It was a different world back then (both the design and implementation of the Concorde). France and Britain both put billions into the program in the hopes of being on the leading edge of the supersonic revolution. Clearly they were the leading edge, but there was no revolution.

It was the small, slow 737 and A320 that really changed aviation. I can fly between cities for less than $50 (on special) in 2011. Price won out over service and speed.
Agree, it's the most ugliest website out there ranking at top of the search engines. I prefer to use Wikipedia over IMDB.
Isn't that pretty similar to Steve Jobs' original argument against apps on the iPhone?
Chicago (or remote)

Matasano Security

LEAD SOFTWARE DEVELOPER

YOU BRING: experience in a key role shipping a web-based product, systems programming chops, comfort with performant network code. Interest, but not not necessarily expertise, in web security.

WE BRING: deep and commanding mastery of software security, a fun product†, a customer list, a small team with a minimal viable working offering, a profitable and growing company with a 5 year track record and nice offices†† in NYC, Chicago, and SFBA.

†web scale, big(ish) data, search, security; we're a Rails/Ruby/EventMachine shop. We don't care if you already know Ruby.

Full-time in-house non-consulting dev. Health, dental, 401k, commute, &c.

HN is one of our best hiring vectors (ask 'yan, 'wglb, and 'daeken). We hire two roles: vulnerability researchers and software developers. HN has killed for security researchers. Not so much for developers. Ironic!

Just mail me: tqbf at matasano dot com.

††here's Chicago, on top of one of the coolest buildings in the city, with Intelligentsia Coffee and a serviceable bar on the first floor: http://img228.imageshack.us/g/img0226yl.jpg/
re: backlit keyboard

Once you live with it, you can't live without it. I've become so spoiled in my years....
Anything out there for C#/Asp.net/MVC?
Google Encrypted
Why do we need a script for this task?
Yet another newbie script on HN...
I suppose you do it similarly to the way Amazon or iTunes implements it for reviews...you make sure the user is logged in via a Google account.

Sure, it could be exploited, and I'm guessing that's why they haven't implemented it, but there's got to be a solution that would make it work.
YouTube - Deadly blast outside Egypt church
http://en.origoterra.com/2010/05/startup-financial-model-is-...

This may be a good starting point.