skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Where do deadpool founders go?
Background: Fresh out of college, I cofounded a social media startup with another friend. We've been plugging away at it for the last 2 years making all the conceivable mistakes first-time entrepreneurs make. What finally broke the camel's back was actually not money but my realisation one day that we were not capable of executing the plan. There were many reasons for this but to name a few:

1) We were not end users of our product. Dog fooding felt like a chore

2) We caught on to the lean startup/4 steps schools of thought too late and could have saved ourselves a ton of mistakes by just reading the 4 steps

3) Inexperience all through the board from product management to marketing. Bad mentors giving bad advice exacerbated matters

So the question is for me is really what next?

The context for this question is that I definitely definitely definitely want to be involved in another startup at some point in my life. Call me a masochist but 2 years of microwaveable food and perpetual worry wasn't enough for me. I've been thinking about the question for a while and here's where I'm at:

Door A: Join a marquee name marketing agency and get really good at marketing as I feel this is my primary value add to my future startup. At night, teach myself Python/Django so that I can bust out an MVP and try to use that to get seed funding

Door B: Join an early stage startup that has experienced founders. Learn from them and leech on to the product manager like a bad rash. At night, teach myself to code etc etc

Door C: Do you have another perspective HN?
How many officials in any administration are former Goldman Sachs employees? What does that have to do with anything anyway?
Get a book and just get stuck in. Do all the exercises, do not copy and paste.

Search Quora/Stackoverflow/Amazon for recommendations.
There is no single recipe that fits everyone's needs. But it's safe to go step by step, from basic tutorials to coding practice to understanding more complex code. Invest in a good reference book later when you know you will stick to the language.

As an absolute beginner you could first have a look at these pages: http://www.php.net/manual/en/getting-started.php and http://devzone.zend.com/article/627
Then you could play around with some code before learning a simple but powerful framework like Kohana or Codeigniter.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-store-in-china-shuts-do...
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I think that would be a very valuable article. Right now people are basically stuck with TAPL [1], which (while being a fantastic book) is pretty meaty and not exactly cheap. I've been examining the type theory literature myself over the last couple of months (admittedly more from a mathematical angle than a programming one), and there is definitely a dearth of good introductory material. Girard's Proofs and Types is a great book, but it's not easy going and doesn't have a huge amount of direct relevance to programmers. In case anyone else is interested (merijnv, I assume you've glanced at all of these) I have a small bibliography of type theory books [2].

[1] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/

[2] https://gist.github.com/716834
There was no Google Adsense before 1998.

(Other ad players were there, but nothing as efficient and accessible to any website owner/publisher)
> The obvious answer is to rewrite WordPress with Django.

For some reason I don't find this obvious.
Nanotech and 'tea bag' to clean up drinking water
Lack of access to clean water is still a problem for millions of people across the world, but new developments in nanotechnology and a water filter that resembles a humble tea bag could prove to be effective solutions.
People - you forget that the Debian community is not just random packagers but also developers. Debian packagers try VERY hard indeed to produce a stable system that works out of the box for all of their users - and that includes developers of all sorts with all types of development environment for several common programming languages.

As part of that, it's useful to know what's stable and what isn't. Debian tends to track version numbers and look for stable versions for a reason - once released, Debian commits to supporting a release for the lifetime of that release plus one year - roughly three years now. Anything that isn't actually released as stable and thereby fixed will go into testing/unstable - there's nothing to stop you running the latest and greatest at any time, but possibly not on Debian stable.

In another life, I have to deal with developers who say to me: just mirror Ruby and Rails for us on the inside of the corporate firewall. There isn't an easy place to start - if you want to build a Ruby infrastructure inside a large company, with software management systems, management suspicion of FLOSS but committed developers - where do you begin to convince people that this is a usable infrastructure?

Red Hat support a subset of very common packages and will support these now for up to 10 years. That's your banks, stock exchanges, infrastructure companies: if you want Ruby developers and programmers to make inroads into that sort of environment, then you need sane packaging sense or at least a sense of what's usable.

Debian produces a far larger subset for use of the programs out there - and on 13 hardware architectures.

As regards the English/Japanese language flaming: Debian has 1000 or so developers and maintainers, spread worldwide - Lucas is a French speaker, originally, but Debian developers speak and use most common human languages - English is a convenience to a truly distributed, international community.
Ad Hoc Data Analysis From The Unix Command Line
http://mydogbarks.com

For dog owners: Dogs barking all over the web
Ah, this explains why Tara Ploughman has been referred to as nickb's wife.
How about playing duplicate poker to eliminate the luck factor, too? You can even make all bots play all positions.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_poker
Twenty Essential Web Apps for Urban Planners
Using your smart phone is a great way to stay productive whether you’re in the office, at a job site or on the road. Here are 20 web applications we think urban planners will love.
Left wing or right wing? It's written in the brain
This analysis is pretty accurate. That Techflash article was after the first week or so - it gives you a sense of how many app downloads I got per day back then. Another thing to factor in was that this was in the first 2 weeks of WP7 launching.

Unfortunately, the popularity took a dive after the first few weeks so my run rate is much lower now. Also, a big part of my app sales was driven by press which you only get when you do new versions, etc. My wife and I working together on a soon-to-be-launched app also meant that I haven't really gotten back to shipping new updates, etc.
The worst is when the link for review is actually "be the first to review this product!". This isn't the review I'm looking for google.
Favorite Tweets of the Week Dec 27 - Jan 2, 2011
Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.
> OTOH, static typing could make writing some kinds of programs impossible.

Often, these turn out to be incorrect programs or programs without a good structure/architecture. It is my experience that static typing makes it slightly harder to write the first version of a program, but subsequent alterations become an order of magnitude easier. For me, this is worth it, since alteration and maintenance are the largest part of most program's life cycles.
Yes, if a company has stopped growing, then its valuation will go down in time (primarily due to inflation), but then giving dividends just hastens the decline. If a company's value is going down, it makes only short-term sense to give out money. It may just mean some unprofitable assets have to be sold off, or the company needs deeper restructuring.

If the company is profitable and its value is growing against inflation (slow growth), then it's worth having a share in it even if it's not paying dividends. (It's actually hard to find something solid that grows against inflation, in the long term).

>If the company's return on borrowed money is higher than the interest rate it pays on that borrowed money, paying down the loan would be a waste of money.

The company's 'returns' on paying dividends is actually negative, all other things equal.

>Now consider another scenario: rather than the shop opening up a new branch, what if the investors (i.e. the owners) want to invest in a different or new business, with potential for higher returns in the future?

If the investors really think they're not getting their money's worth (i.e. the separate assets are worth more or the management is bad), then it makes sense to initiate a takeover.

P.S. please downvote after you have heard a reply.
Police admit keeping records on people who report crimes
I agree entirely. In many cases it's reinforcing a prisoner's connection with society that reduces their chances of re-offending. A recent study in the UK showed that simply ensuring inmates in a prison had a bank account cut re-offending rates by a third!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-11008453

For me, this highlights the mix of factors leading people towards criminality. I wonder what other things we take for granted we could use to help inmates.
It's actually interesting that they already account for dividends and taxes. Usually if people talk about a 10% return, they are talking about pre-tax returns.

I remember seeing a 'rolling S&P500 results' page somewhere but can't remember exactly where, [0] is what a quick search comes with.

As you can see in graph [1] there was quite a dip for everyone investing for a period of 20 years between 1974 and somewhere around 1994. That is a 30 year period of a total of 80 years measured with bad returns.

[0]: http://allfinancialmatters.com/2007/06/12/sp-500-rolling-per...
[1]: http://allfinancialmatters.com/Graphics/S&P50020-YearTot...
Ok, can someone write that in English again?
They actually use them to organize strikes against the inhuman prison system. Anyone who thinks that prisons are even remotely justifiable should die in a fucking huge fire.
iPhone alarm does not work in 2011
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Like in eating without using your hands or mouth?
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After 9/11 there are no options other than founding a U.S. corporation or visiting a U.S. bank in person to get an account.
Regarding the tastefulness of the prank:

"There's a fine line there but I think we stayed on the right side of it. It could have been obscenities or something in very poor taste, but we didn't do that. So I'm proud of that — that we acted responsibly and nobody got hurt."

It was clever, unexpected, and funny. Caltech lost by 10 points, so I'd say it was well done and all in good fun. I'm glad it could have been that way.
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Show HN: A Job Board for Functional Programmers (Soft-Launch)
I just launched a site/business I've been working on for, well, too long: http://FunctionalJobs.com

After observing the recent GitHub Jobs launch I decided to try a soft-launch approach rather than launch the site with zero job listings, or backfill listings myself for free. Any feedback on my idea/execution?
I am just curious how a bug like this happens. If it was the end of the UNIX epoch, I would understand a little bit. But what is so special about first days of 2011?

Oh yeah, and I almost overslept two days in a row.
The two green squares are 7% annual return or greater, so you can be in the beige somewhere and still be getting decent returns.

It does seem somewhat difficult to end up on a green square though--there aren't that many of them and there are even fewer long runs.
I don't understand this rationale: Posts are limited to 140 characters on a certain website ∴ Everything should fit in 140 chars
The loop in the array initialization is generated by the compiler for the static version, by the runtime for the dynamic allocation version. It's still a loop.

You're just re-using a loop already implemented in the runtime. That's quite the same thing as using map, though a tiny bit clever. But if you qualify map as cheat, well then the constructor trick is just a cleverer cheat.
I turn animations off. Useless eye candy that just wastes the battery.

Also, is it really fair to compare the N1, a phone that's over a year old, to brand-new WP7 phones?
I strongly disagree on the ctor trick. While it's certainly ingenious, you're just reusing a loop, be it one implemented in the C++ runtime. It's little more than a glorified map.
Konica Minolta Launches bizhub C30P Series of Network Printers
American college football game. 2,200 people in a section of the crowd each hold a large card, dark on one side, light on the other. each of these people has an instruction sheet that tells them which way to hold the card for each of 14 'stunts' (as they appear to be called). See pic for an example of what this looks like (think b/w pixel art)

The prank was that 3 guys from one team used social engineering to figure out how this was done, and who had the instructions, then replaced the original instructions with 2,232 slightly altered copies.

Game gets played. First 11 stunts are as expected, but the 12th has the cards make up the logo of the opposing team (not the people with the cards), the 13th has the writing reversed, and the 14th says, big and bold, CALTECH
Last time I looked Haskell and Lisp were totally different languages, with different communities, different technologies, different application areas, ...

Why should this change?
So, who will write the first OAuth Twitter client in 140 chars?
You Are A Victim Of The Rules You Live By.
Another, potentially more relevant to HN MIT IAP this year is the web app security Capture the Flag: http://mitctf2011.wikispaces.com/IAP+Announcement
Although I will say that a small part of me wants to see it transformed into a real-life version of Ironforge.

One would hope that labor laws would prevent you from building something of the sort via manual labor, but what about robots of some sort?
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MIT IAP Web App Security Capture the Flag contest announcement
It's like a Prehistoric cenaries
I'm reminded of a scene from the movie Tin Cup. Kevin Costner challenges Don Johnson by saying something lime "have you ever won a tournament with just your 7 iron?"

Don replies with "why it never occurred to me to try".

This is exactly how I feel when I read something like this.
Hey 2011, where are the flying cars?
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With that I certainly do agree.
I swear to god, I was tired of this argument before I even finished reading it. If you take your example to the extreme, you should consider that a processor also operates in a loop. Maybe every solution is a glorified series of iterations.

Nothing personal, but your argument is always used in these situations, for no good reason. Please learn where to draw the line.
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the goodness of that strategy revolves around its consistency in returning 10% over ten to twenty years

and why would that be "the goodness" of index fund strategy? who told you that?

"the goodness" of index funds is that they're low cost and diversified (sometimes) - so more of the returns stay in your pockets, not get handed over to fund managers. return of the over-all stock market has little to do with it!
That's why I still carry around my old alarm clock wherever I go!
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I just want you to know years ago I vowed to use RSS in all of my websites for the rest of my life. I would hate an Internet without RSS feeds (and Google Reader!)
This is a great visualisation - it's easy to understand, and punches you in the face with information that would be difficult to convey through words alone.

One example is that the first few years give no clue as to your long-run outcome. In fact, the first year may as well have been a coin flip. This shows what rubbish articles with a 1-year timeframe like this are:
http://www.moneyweek.com/investment-advice/share-tips-moneyw...
Why not do this stuff pre-emptively? I understand that moving content out to a CDN when it's not necessary might not be the smartest plan, but shouldn't most sites be optimizing the number of apache procs as a rule of thumb?
Fellow HNers, a real question - what would be the risks of buying Facebook shares in an IPO? Facing (no pun intended) past IPOs like Google's and other tech dears, where the stock multiplied in a very short time and profits in hindsight seem practically guaranteed, what are the risks?
Direct link to book: http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/paulmck/perfbook/p...
"High inflation led to negative returns."

True, dat. Printing money doesn't make us richer.
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It's always the same spammy site that comes up over and over again. Surely they can fix this. At this point even a mechanical turk paid to manually blacklist some spam website could improve the situation.
The point is not that google is worse than something else, it's that it's worse than it used to be, and that it shows no sign of improvement.
I've followed the development of this book for several years, and it has progressed quite well in that time. It currently has a good combination of "documentation nobody else ever bothered to write" on many forms of synchronization, from the simple to the cutting edge, with a bit of a peek beyond that. It has a ways to go before it could become a publishable book, but by the standards of software documentation it represents one of the best references I've seen.
The article notes that solitude should be balanced with participation and awareness of one's space. Upon reading that, I realized that's why sites like HN are so valuable to me: I get both without much hassle.
Just finished reading "A Random Walk down Wall Street" and I must confess I expected more consistency and less volatility in index funds returns.

Great eye-opening graph.

@MarkMc very good point
Gary Bernhardt did a screencast showing an example of this kind of Unix hacking: http://blog.extracheese.org/2010/04/a-raw-view-into-my-unix-... He always impresses me with how quickly he moves from one thing to the next. It's a beautiful thing to watch, to me.
Your idea sound very good to me.
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A less hyperbole-filled write-up:

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Great_Rose_Bow...

This website was mentioned in the LA Times OP without a link.
Funny story, but clearly an adolescent fantasy. "Charles I. Andersen Music Company" -> CIA isn't going around cutely inserting their initials into covert front companies. "careful investigation of the garbage bags from that office revealed that the CIA had suddenly felt it necessary to send all of their documents through the shredder several times" -> CIA used burn bags during this era, the idea that they would have been throwing away single shredded documents of anything sensitive is pretty silly - the weaknesses of shredding were well known to them.

I fully understand that it's popular to portray US intelligence as full of bumbling incompetence due to ones politics, but I think in reality that's rather rare. Wasteful? Often. Machiavellian? Sure. Misguided? Plenty of examples. Chronically stupid? Nah.
You are raising two distinct issues. First, a situation in which you cannot finish your project on time. Second, the fact that the job/company does not meet your expectations.

Before doing anything about the second point, deal with the first. Normally managers should only assign tasks that are possible, relative both to the timeframe and to your skillset. If you have the right skills and enough time, then you should do whatever it takes to finish, even in your own time, otherwise your self-confidence will suffer. If the time is too tight and/or you do not have the necessary skills/experience/training to do the job, then raise the issue with the manager more forcefully and asap. Repeat your message in an e-mail so that your complaint is officially registered and acknowledged. If there is a mismatch between the job description, as spelled out in your contract, and your actual work, this is also a legitimate issue.

Once the first problem is out of the way, and you are again feeling comfortable at work, deal with the second issue. It is always legitimate to seek better work. The best way to switch jobs is to find a new job while still holding the old job. It is a catch-22 fact of life that no-one likes to give a job to someone who does not have one. Also, you will be in a much stronger negotiating position if you are still receiving a salary. When you go to an interview, argue along the lines that the job is going fine (do not criticize your old company/manager) and everyone is happy with your performance, but that you feel you need more challenge/less routine/a better fit to your skillset/a smaller environment etc.

Good luck. Starting out in the world of employment is always a difficult time in life. Things will work out.
it's not an AI problem. It's not wanting to hurt the bottomline. Sites with more ads than anything else are banned from DuckDuckGo, for example. And that is a search engine run by 1 person only, if I am not mistaken.
http://www.cracked.com/article_15028_attack-clones-suspiciou... ?
My favourite interview question
Index investing isn't predicated on 10% returns nor was it ever a guarantee of such returns. Index investing is simply the theory that the markets are efficient and reflect all possible information on a security and that you're not smarter than the market.

Think of it this way-- buying a stock is a way of saying "the market is wrong, I think $COMPANY is worth more than the price at which it is trading". Unless you have information which the market does not (the next Apple product will be a flop, etc) this becomes, by definition, a speculative position.

Index investing is a way of opting out of the highs and lows of stock picking and still take part in the general growth in a market/sector/<whatever the index cover>.

The story merely points out that for some timespans, the growth of the US markets was crap and that (unsurprisingly when you think about it for a second) returns have varied substantially over the past 50 years even for long time-spans.

TLDR; if you think the US economy will keep growing and don't think you're smarter than marketɫ, index investing is probably still a really good way to go.

ɫ hot tip: you're not
I'm also currently interested in this area, and I would recommend Interactive Theorem Proving and Program Development. At the same time, it is practical and theoretical.

http://www.labri.fr/perso/casteran/CoqArt/index.html
Heard of http://www.tuskfairy.com?
Sounds good as a resolution, but sticking to a book may not work for all.