skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why I wrote a programmer's text editor
Amazon acquires LoveFilm, Europe’s Netflix, for approximately $200 million
The data lists US as ranked #1 for health???

Rubbish. Rather than taking real data such as life expectancy, they seem to be asking population "Are you happy with health".

So basically, rather than measuring 'happiness', this is measuring how deluded/subdued the population is.
Unfortunately for the pedants, "the new generation of web standards" does not have the same ring as HTML5. Marketing requires simplification, get over it.
Highly misleading. A visitor is someone who visits a website perhaps 10 times or just 1 time. A user is someone who is using the website more regularly.

The value of a visitor is the percentage who convert into users * the value of a user or s/t like that.
I am surprised Bhutan is not on this list. In Bhutan, they measure growth by GNH - Gross National Happiness and not by GDP:)
Charles Dickens in 1850: A Poor Man's Tale of a Patent
So many of the articles I read are actually devoid of good advice. The consist of generalities and one-off experiences that don't actually resonate outside a specific set or circumstances. The first step to writing a good advice article would be to actually have good advice worth sharing.
We at MathZee (http://mathzee.com/) went through the Chicago based incubator, Excelerate Labs (http://www.exceleratelabs.com/) this summer. MathZee is a mobile platform that teaches math through application. Our math games develop critical thinking skills while assessing a child’s performance in a non-intrusive manner. At the time of the application, MathZee was nothing more than an idea. We launched our first mobile game Piggy Math (http://mathzee.com/piggy-math/) on the Excelerate demo day (thanks to Apple's app approval team for the perfect timing :-).

We wanted to join Excelerate mainly for the guidance we could get from all the leading entrepreneurs in the midwest area. Some of the mentors of the program are Brad Keywell (Groupon/Lightbank), Blair Garrou (DFJ Mercury), Chuck Templeton (OpenTable), Kevin Efrusy (Accel Partners), Lon Chow (Apex Venture Partners), Mike Gaiss (Highland Capital Partners), Pete Wilkins (Sterling Partners). The program is led by Sam Yagan (OKCupid,Sparknotes) and Troy Henikoff (SurePayroll), who are both amazing entrepreneurs and have great connections in the midwest area. If you need their help, they are more than willing to work with you even on a daily basis.

Excelerate's program is similar to Techstars' as the focus is on getting more and more help from outside mentors and finding a mentor-match for the startups. The program is divided in three months -- meet 60-70 mentors in month 1, develop / polish product in month 2, prepare for investor pitch in month 3. The startups are also provided office space and legal help. But the most value comes from the daily improvements your startup makes through strategic and tactical advice you get from some of the best minds in the country. I strongly recommend this program. If you want to know more about the program or want to talk to Sam or Troy directly, then let me know ( namit AT mathzee ).
I'm working together with law enforcement on this one and I don't think it would help one bit if I gave out any information at this point but I will do a very detailed write-up when it is all over, you can count on it.
It's a single-serve website. A $10 statement of position for the "tl;dr" generation.
Is it time for a corporate culture revolution?
If I don't buy the "Feel sorry for me! Prop up my business!" argument when the newspapers make it, and I don't buy it when the record companies make it, why should I buy it when people running websites make it?
Spring loaded folders: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2003-February/m...
What bubble?
How is this website at all constructive? It doesn't even give a explanation of what its talking about.
Thanks for the direct list!

However, there's no way the US ranks #1 in health.
When I launched trackmycv.com I had this exact problem, no one from the US seemed to know what a CV was, I had to buy whoreadsmyresume.com in the end. Almost everywhere apart from the US uses CV, not resumé, but CV doesn't seem to be used at all in the US.
How to write a Killer Affirmation
Technology: A dip in the valley
Or it could be that in these countries suicides are more accurately reported because of it being less of a taboo or sin.
> Can you point to a single instance where a company was forced to commit some act that its managers reasonably thought was morally wrong because of the "law" that companies must maximize shareholder value?

Tobacco companies concealing evidence that nicotine is addictive is sort of the textbook case for this, though you are correct that it is not a law as such. Pretty much every corporation has in its charter a mandate to maximize shareholder value within certain constraints.
Your referer may need to be from Google - try the first link in

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Technology%3A%20A%2...

Last paragraph sums up fairly well:

If it is not to become left behind in businesses such as these, the industry’s leaders say, it is time for a policy rethink. “Simply put, the US needs to decide it is ‘open for business’ and willing to compete in the global marketplace for factories and jobs,” says Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel. “Costs are higher here, not driven by labour rates but rather by lack of incentives or tax credits that are available to US corporations in most other countries.” Without education reform, there will be a “critical engineering skills gap [that] will ultimately translate into fewer jobs and inventions in this country”.
That is not necessarily true. With websockets, you can write a full-functioning p2p client in the browser.
It costs quite a bit, even to deal with trivial cases. Six figures at a minimum for show up at the courthouse, mostly in attorney's fees.
Our startup, CloudFab.com, went through the AlphaLab program, and I thought it was a great experience overall. Main points of the program:

- Mentors / Speakers: They give you access to a lot of local mentors who are great for vetting your idea and making you think straight about your product. They also bring in some prominent connections from outside like VCs (USV, FirstRound, etc.), founders (Eric Koger, CEO of ModCloth) and others in the national entrepreneurial scene.

- Network: You can really build your network in Pittsburgh, but I've also found it helpful for getting some legitimacy outside the region as well.

- Investment: Of course the $25K was very helpful to get my partner working on it full time and to cover other expenses. There's also companies that go on to receive follow on funding from Innovation Works (the AlphaLab parent org) and of course angels - which we were lucky enough to get.

- Space / Community: It's really great to be in the same space other startups and afterward to be able to have them for peer-support.

Overall, I think the experience was great, and my own criticism is that they require you to maintain a presence in PA - which is a turn off to many good people who could end up staying.
Can you supply a link to the proof that all NPC problems are equivalent? I remember learning it, but I can't remember how it worked.
Good for Qwiki! That site blew my mind when I first went to it. I've showed it to a bunch of non-techies and they all have the same "woah!" reaction as well.
What's on Azure right now?
It is bascule's. I don't get it either. If someone posted that content as comment here, it would get downvoted. I flagged the post for being content-void flamebait.
I'm sad that it said I failed when I pressed the "Volume Up" key on my keyboard.. I couldn't hear the waves!
Demian Entrekin, Founder Innotas,Gender Not Problem when Sourcing Venture
The Statistics Of Racial And Gender Gaps
NIH Scientists Advance Universal Flu Vaccine
I don't see why everyone's so skeptical of this.

How is this any different than other social sites? Basically what they're doing is crowd sourcing humor and that seems like a better plan than a lot of other startups I've seen.

Give the huge audience potential (who doesn't like a good laugh?) and their proven record of success (3 years) it doesn't seem like a terrible investment to me.
Investigate the professor, or whoever is actually teaching.

What I got out of my courses depended in some very significant ways more upon how they were taught and by whom, than upon the ostensible topic at hand.

I have great respect for educators who have sincere interest and a passion to convey it.

These are also the people who tend, one finds, to have a better handle on the "mechanics" that are important to and education. Writing, presenting, engaging in dialog and debate, respecting one's conversational partner -- even while endeavoring to enlightened them as to their mistakes and assumptions.

Such people also engage you in the work, so that it's actually interesting and enjoyable to do. It's a lot easier to learn things, including those "mechanics", when that is the case.

That said, do try to get some -- but not solely or even primarily -- grounding in the "real", workaday world. Schools matriculate too many students who have no idea what they face once they walk out the door.
I recently went through the exercise of implementing a Huffman codec. Instead of the heap (or priority queue) I used the method that uses two queues to build the tree. See the second algorithm given here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding#Basic_technique

Even though I was writing it in Java, it was a lot of fun. I ended up with something that I could use on the server side, or compiled down to javascript in the client with GWT.
Might want to revise the Paul Allen entry.
Step 0: Identify your own start-up.

Before I even start reading, I want to know if the article is by someone who has actually done a start-up.
It is interesting how nearly all of the 10 countries in the top 10 are either in North-Western Europe, or have historically been "sprung" from a country in North-Western Europe (e.g. Canada, Australia, New Zealand who are in the Commonwealth and still technically headed by Queen Elizabeth II).

If you look deeper, the top 10 countries that are in North-Western Europe (Norway, Sweeden, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands) are all under the heavy influence of the Gulf Stream which makes their climate particularly overcast, rainy and dreary - probably the most miserable in the world.

So maybe it all comes down to the people of those countries learning ways to "keep themselves happy" over the centuries - an evolutionary technique of psychological survival, so to speak.

Just a thought.
Can you point to a single instance where a company was forced to commit some act that its managers reasonably thought was morally wrong because of the "law" that companies must maximize shareholder value? Personally I think this trope has no basis in fact and cannot explain why Google or any other company is compelled to do things that are wrong.

Really? I'm surprised that you have a problem believing that people who manage companies might do things of dubious moral value in order to maximize profit. But, if you insist...

It could be easily argued that BP, Halliburton, et al... maximized shareholder value over environmental safety concerns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill

The current recession is largely due to financial services companies creating derivatives out of sub prime mortgages. That is, bundling toxic debt and making it look like a AAA rated investment and selling it for profit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-2000s_recession

Enron's "...reported financial condition was sustained substantially by institutionalized, systematic, and creatively planned accounting fraud, known as the "Enron scandal""

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron

Vioxx was a drug that I've seen people die from. It was pushed through the FDA approval process and then withdrawn after people started dying from it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rofecoxib

Classic example of corporations producing and selling a drug that was toxic, leading to thousands of horrible birth defects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide

IBM made a lot of money selling automation systems so the Nazi's could efficiently kill millions in the Holocaust.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
Chiquita Brands has admitted to sponsoring terrorist organizations in Latin America

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v._Chiquita_Brands_Internat...

> Oh, and by the way, the government can have access to all that data without a search warrant.

Don't know where you are getting this from.

Really??? If you insist...

"Under this program, referred to by the Bush administration as the "terrorist surveillance program", part of the broader President's Surveillance Program, the NSA is authorized by executive order to monitor, without search warrants, phone calls, e-mails, Internet activity, text messaging, and other communication involving any party believed by the NSA to be outside the U.S., even if the other end of the communication lies within the U.S." [1]

ref:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co...
Oh, we're doing this again? I'll just link to my response to the ICHCB bubble-bobble-heads a couple days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2114899
People seem to be getting really confused by HTML5/HTML W3 and WhatWG.

It's fairly simple.
HTML5 is the term used for HTML and related technologies. In otherwords, it's buzzword that's been used for some time now, even among tech people. W3 has defined this word, ensuring that it means something that both normal people can understand and that tech people can define. Basically, they recaptured the buzzword before it became meaningless and defined it.

WhatWG then decided to make HTML5 just HTML. This is fine, as HTML5 is HTML and related technologies, like CSS and JS. They could easily do this now because HTML5, a term so many people use already, has now been defined.

If anything, this site ignores both W3 and WhatWG and comes up with it's own definition.
That's only partially true. Even if all you've done is work for a startup for 6 months, you already have something to share - with those who haven't even done that.

If you take even one step on the way, there are a lot more people behind you than ahead of you.
Sorry but that seems a lot of effort to go through. Why would you bother?
The US has very good life expectancy once you slice the data appropriately. Not #1 by any means, but better than most people thing.

A white American male will live 76 years, a white American female will live 81 years. That's less than a year short of life expectancies in Finland (76.1 and 82.4) or Austria (76.9 and 82.6), both of which are predominantly white).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expec...

Similarly, Japanese Americans live 84 years while Japanese only live 82 years.

http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=2...
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le...

The only reason the US appears to fare poorly in life expectancy comparisons is the composition effect. We have a lot of short lived Blacks, while most other first world countries don't.

[edit: Thanks gjm for the correction on Simpson's Paradox. It's only the composition effect (which is the driver of Simpson's Paradox, but is not equivalent to it).]
Making money with a product >>>>>>> making money with consulting, and I say this as an owner of a consulting company. If we had a product like PT (which is excellent, and we use it daily on all our projects), we would stop accepting new clients and gradually make a switch to a full-fledged software product shop, which is what 37Signals did, and looks like PL are doing. Best of luck to them.
The top answer gets many points right IMHO. The only reason I use Python for scripting is because of its superb standard library (which other language comes bundled with a SMTP server?).

But as soon as something with a similar powerful library would come along I'd switch. Writing scripts in Python is not pleasant for me. Alone quickly moving stuff out/into loops/if clauses is just a major PITA. Where in C I would comment out the 'if' line in Python I have to additionally de-indent the block of code.

It's the small quirks and minor annoyances that sum up and make Python really not fun to me.
How much of this discussion would have been easily replaced by "most?"

Most programmers above entry-level try to automate away tedious pieces. However, there's an easier explanation for the miserable programmer paradox: most programmers get good at the pieces they enjoy; thus, those pieces take less time. We tend not to get as good at technologies we dislike (Pure human nature -- if you don't like it, you're not going to play around with it as much). Thus, they take longer.
If you use Chrome, there's an extension called Focus (I think) that works extremely well. The only problem is that it's pretty easy to disable Chrome extensions..
Or maybe give the judge the option of ruling that the patent holder is abusing the patent system, the penalty for which would be releasing their patent portfolio into the public domain.
Just like China's richest man Li Ka-shing.
Why it is important for fail-animals to have a sunny disposition.
I like how clicking the enlarge button shows us a smaller photo.
Shanghai: 1990 vs. 2010, one picture says it all
Talk Tech To Me -- Don't
When I first pitched my idea at the very first DC Founder's Institute, I included a lot of words like "workflow", "automation", "business processes"...
Did they, though? What's the retention going to be on those users?

I signed up yesterday to get the giftcard, and my experience was pretty bad: I followed a link a friend gave me, and it asked me for some info, then took me to a landing page with my city listed explaining how LivingSocial works. It had a link for "Today's deal", but clicking on that link just took me back to the same "how LivingSocial works" page. Finally I clicked on the referral link I had again, and it took me to the Washington, DC page, which had the Amazon gift card. I bought it.

This morning, I received an email from LivingSocial for the current Washington, DC deal, which is some local pizza place. I unsubscribed. Looks like they didn't test well enough to make things actually work for the huge influx of users.

Furthermore, I'm not at all convinced that I'm missing anything. Obviously, the really good deals will be shared on Hacker News and other networks I already pay attention to, so why stay subscribed to a daily email?
Ways to Spot a $100 Million Idea
I've been a LoveFilm customer since 2004. I must have watched well over 1000 DVDs through them. Their DVD selection is indeed very good, and in general I'm fairly happy with them.

My biggest gripe is the penny-pinching changes they recently made to their DVD-postage system. A couple of years ago, if they sent you 2 or 3 DVDs at once, they'd always include spare envelopes so that you could post the DVDs back as soon as you'd watched them (thus getting your next DVDs faster). But recently they stopped doing this, stating that their customers should use their own envelopes when they've run out. It may have escaped their attention, but most homes do not have DVD-sized envelopes handy, or the desire to spend their relaxation time fiddling about with addresses and labels.

When I mentioned it to their support staff they reeled off some nonsense about environmental benefits. Pffh. They have no problem stuffing each and every envelope they send with useless advertising. I call them out on sacrificing customer goodwill to skimp on postage costs. More on this issue at http://www.majorgrooves.co.uk/2009/04/lovefilmcom-film-deskt...

Anyway, in contrast to my somewhat tepid feelings towards LoveFilm, I am practically in love with Amazon - more so with every AWS service I start using. So I too am pleased to hear that they've bought LoveFilm. Hopefully they'll do great things with it.
W3C HTML5 Spinning Logo — Flick with finger or mouse in WebKit
This simple example is using YUI 3.3.0 which has support for high-level, device-independant, gesture events which made it easy to make the logo spin when flicked with a mouse or touch gesture. It is also using YUI 3’s CSS transitions module to do the rotateY CSS Transform.

It works in WebKit browsers: Safari, Chrome, MobileSafari (iOS), Android, and should work on BlackBerry Touch 6.0.

View the source on the page, its short and straight forward.
Is Google manipulating search results - Noooo, of course not
Dreamit Alum here. Served to be one of the best ways to focus and gain some unfair advantage through the awesome community of mentors/advisors that became available to us. Biggest benefit = how effectively they can remove barriers to transition from idea/concept to business. Highly, highly recommend.
A study on the First Mover Advantage by MIT Media Lab professor
Http://www.Google.com/search?q=recursion
Are those percentages of users? How about market share of revenue?
Apple not only company that needs CEO succession plan
There's nothing wrong with writing about one-off experiences. For someone in similar circumstances, such advice could prove to be the most valuable.

What's awful are the articles written by first-time entrepreneurs or wantrepreneurs who have yet to do anything. They're mostly harmless, but sometimes they give horrifically bad advice. As a rule, most of the great entrepreneurs I know don't blog.
I don't mind the effort, but I'm too cheap for the kind of fees he is talking about. Given the price of a white box of almost any capability, better can be had at your corner computer shop...
Learning to use EC2 for development is a great way to learn to use it for production.
Tangential feature suggestion, which you might already have: LinkedIn integration. If you could pull my work history from my LinkedIn profile, that would save me huge amounts of time.

Looking forward to your ShowHN :-)
Wow, seems like Gates treated them like crap and most of them left the company within a few years.
I had to double check to make sure it wasn't me who made that comment.
>http://i.imgur.com/AqNdG.jpg

At first I thought it was strange that they'd removed the high-rise buildings that were already there. But then I noticed that the two images don't show the same area. If you look in the night image the left-most 2 towers are the left-most towers in the day image; the clock tower is just left of centre.
That looks quite complicated and the only benefit I can see is not having to wait 5 minutes for your RSS client to poll the source. Could anybody explain what are the true benefits over our current RSS/Atom polling systems?

EDIT: I also fail to see how this would reduce the load. It just transfers the load to the "hub" node. If a big website runs its own hub node to serve its content, then there's no gain (you just had a layer of indirection and complexity).

There could be big external hub, but what would be the point for them? Man-in-the-middle-ing the streams and inserting ads? Doesn't sound really great.

And if a bazillion micro hubs emerge, then the overall load on the providers will pretty much remain the same.
The Most-Read Blogs By Venture Capitalists
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1226662
The interface is beyond clunky compared to simple taps and swipes that much more closely emulate the act of reading a physical book.

I've often felt that the "need" to emulate something in the real world on new devices and new interfaces has held back significant innovation. Despite that "the desktop metaphor" is supposed to be familiar, people still can't manage their files effectively. And now new interfaces are rare/difficult to gain traction because people are used to the desktop metaphor despite that it becomes less and less a good metaphor.
If you're only 6 months in, you have no idea where your startup will end up. Your advice might be helping others, but it's also possible you're leading them off a cliff.