skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A point that seems to be missed is that Minecraft is a niche game. That niche is geeks. Now, that may be quite a profitable niche to exploit, but a game which is essentially about building things out of blocks will never have the mainstream appeal of a God Of War or an Angry Birds.
I get the impression that this is for when you've forgotten to set up something like screen beforehand.
even if you're not interested in YC, i recommend going through the questions yourself.

they are a great way to methodically think about your team and ideas (like "What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?")
gibsonf1 I agree that a functional approach is equally powerful as an OO approach. I focused on an OO aproach as this is what I have the most experience with and this is what Dojo is geared towards.

The intent of the post is to entice server side programmers to learn JS and to take a rigoruous approach to writing JS code. Whether it is functional or OO is irrelevant as long as you write great code, so your point is certainly worth mentioning.

Thanks for the feedback
It's worked fairly well for music, but in the case of reference material I agree it's a poor substitute to skimming the actual book. Maybe something like a Zune Pass for books would be better. Flat fee, read as much as you want, keep rights to download some for keeps.
If you have a company which has been established for eight years, do you really want to give up six percent of it just to get a bit of advice?
Things Communicated (rebuttal to Al3x's Adobe Air post)
If you look at the bio of the submitter, he writes for ReadWriteWeb and, I believe, wrote the article. Nothing wrong with that; people often submit their own work here.
US Study: Smoking 'causes damage in minutes'
Easy, the one that dumped perl a decade ago. It is truly archaic and has no place in a production environment anymore. The only people still using it are resisting change to a more productive and useful language.
That is too vague to get really good answers back. What position are you in for?

That said, the best practice you can hope for is to INTERVIEW AT A LOT OF OTHER PLACES FIRST. Just trust me on this. Interviews require practice, and the best way to do it is to interview at other places that are good. If you don't trust me, listen to this guy, who says the same thing (and got the job at Google) [http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2010/11/google-interviewing-sto...].

That all said, you will probably want to review your basics of analysis (e.g., big O), as well as things like binary search. You will probably get asked to implement code of some sort, so be really well acquainted with your favorite language. Pick up a copy of Programming Pearls, by Jon Bentley, and work through a problem or two every day. By "work through", I mean try and do it yourself, and THEN look at the answers. The idea is to be thinking well come time for the interview.

Other things everyone knows are, you want to be really well acquainted with what Google is doing in your area. One of the ways they vet candidates is to see who actually knows what Google is an does in practice, rather than asking why they want to work there. A lot of their questions will probably come from problems they actually have.

Brush up on your books from college. Give the algorithms and data structures 101 stuff a quick look over and make sure you understand it.

That's not a comprehensive list or anything, but if you want more material or advice, and you don't want to divulge more information here for whatever reason, feel free to hit me up.
Is it acceptable if a co-founder cannot move to Bay Area for the summer?

EDIT: As someone pointed out on IM, it's acceptable but we're expected to mention it in #9.
Yep geekfactor is correct. The Scala-Java relationship is not analogous to Dojo-JS and this was not my intention.
I believe the team was the same for every application - a smart group of guys.
How much code and what type is enough? All of the perl code I've written is safely behind company firewalls that I no longer have access to. I could probably whip up something of a trivial nature on short notice, but nothing that would have seen any production use.
Eight years seems like a bit much, but if they're shifting focus or going through a new phase, I think they could benefit more than just with "a bit of advice."
I hear you - at this point, 6 percent wouldn't be a whole lot though. We've been operating (mostly) profitably for a long time, but nothing to brag about. I'm just curious if anyone has done it before, and how it worked out.
Oh, whoops, I didn't notice you wrote Katana. Hopefully my comment didn't seem like I was trying to take anything away from your gem.

I'm tempted to give Katana a shot with my next app. Who knows, I might like it more.
Keyless car entry hacked by relaying signal from key fob
I agree that they're not targeting the Linux VPS/Big Oracle Machine market; this design doesn't make any sense. The power they're saving on ARM MPU they're giving right back with multicore nVidia GPU. There are significant HPC applications that leverage CUDA that would run very nicely on this design; and you can see a nice dual/quad core low power ARM MPU with two or three low-powered GPU units being an attractive option for tablet/phone manufacturers, as well.
If you make a product worth > $1B you'll be an exception for just about everything.
Yes - we're developing a new product in a related area (that we can target to our existing customers), but it's really an entirely new direction for us, and really could easily be the start of a "new" company.
Vim, but with a better scripting language. No, really.
It is pipelined, it isn't parallelized.
I do web dev mostly and have found firebug lite very useful for cross browser website fixes including on IE. It has been a huge time saver when it comes to figuring out why things are not aligning nicely.
Only thing the BBC do is serve ads to non-UK viewers. The website is the same for everyone otherwise.

BBC America is just a TV channel; that's why that website is entertainment-based.
Also it's not adding anything, very easy for us to go through to amazon and search for the book. Might be different if the posted recommended a great book that many hadn't heard of before that really added to the discussion, still though it would be better just to keep them off HN.
I do think its massive budget was its undoing. I thought APB sounded pretty fun, but the pricing structure just sounded usurious and I wound up not even trying it out. I don't recall the specifics, but as somebody who has paid for lots of subscription services and games in the past, APB just sounded singularly like they were nickel and diming you.
Which is exactly what I said in my previous comment.
I don't know, but talking to tech professional writers I have responses similar to this:

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/12/bedtime-story.html

Long story sort: If you get more money with the digital version than with paper you don't need publishers, or editors at all, you don't need to give away your copyrights in exchange for access to market by the gatekeepers(publishers) and a minority of the profits.

You don't even have to ask for permission, just let the market decide, like web startups.

On digital you just make an alpha version and send to friends for testing, make a public beta like this book:
http://iphone-3d-programming.labs.oreilly.com/

...And just sell your book digital taking 70% of the money and never losing your copy rights, like you do when you sign with a (paper)publisher.
> the H.264 technology is unencumbered by license fees if
> it's used non-commercially

That's not true, unfortunately.

There may have been no lawsuits (I can't comment on that, though I'd like to see your data). But that's just because the MPEG-LA hasn't felt like suing people. If you're shipping an H.264 encoder or decoder in binary form to people and not paying the relevant licensing fees, then you're infringing on the patents. There's no exception for "non-commercial" use there last I checked. If you think there is, please cite.
I use Facebook for my friends. Why wouldn't I add my real contact details?

I'm not afraid of my friends.
I've looked at this "product" a while back when it showed up on Reddit (It's been around for about three years). If you look for at the background info of the designers, you'll see they have a marketing background, not engineering. And to construct their prototype, they actually took on those shake flashlights apart and stuck it in a ball.
How often have you written a piece of code and known ahead of time that you'd never have to touch it again? Even throw-away code, like data migrations, often gets revisited several times while you're writing it.

So why is your supposedly decent programmer writing crappy code and assuming that they'll never have to touch it again?

Which is my original point. Traditionally the expectation is crappy-fast-and-cheap vs. perfect-slow-and-expensive, but that rarely holds. Instead it's usually the crappy code that ends up being slow to write and expensive, stuck in endless code and bugfix cycles trying to get it right.
Explained with comments: https://gist.github.com/782312
(edit: made clearer).
Thanks very much for that feedback. I'm summarizing the discussion in order to deliver some actionable feedback to the Mozilla team. :)
If you get accepted, do whatever you possibly can to get everyone out there.
More code just increases the reliability of the assessment. Even a very small amount of code is enough to decide whether to skip the resume or follow up on it.

Unless their name is on a (good) Perl book I'd skip over anyone who won't submit even a small code sample.
Just in case anyone else is wondering...

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-do-i-delete...
Well said. The bulk of my recent code is simply not available for public use.
You can write a lot of Perl code without ever needing array slices, but I agree on the last two questions.
If their code is an unreadable mess of slashes and dollar signs they must be a good perl programmer.
No worries. If you do try it, let me know what you think. It adds a few Capistrano-like commands that I find myself using regularly (like "deploy", which pushes your app and runs your migrations).
Care to elaborate? What is so bad about it? What makes it crap?
I think you're right - this is exactly what will happen, but it will take time. Games have been mainstream in a downloadable format for a very long time, eBooks are only just becoming popular, despite the fact that books are ancient.

I'm looking at Amazon to do this - they're best placed to right now. But when, is hard to say. I imagine it will start slowly, with independent authors publishing their own books, until a critical mass is reached where a large number of authors will switch over to self-publishing.
Groupon Poised to Strike a Deal With Chinese Internet Giant Tencent
The thing that amazed me; "1K of memory expandable to 16K". I have yet to see this in a pre-built computer. The best I've seen was back when I had 128MB expandable to 1GB.

Although then again, a computer today comes with a year or more of warranty, while this had a 90-day warranty - which would personally scare the shit out of me today on an electronic product. Today that's dead in 6 months.
We operate a daily deal site here in New York City (Scoop St.) but we've been closely examining mainland China from my co-founder's roots in China. The backstory to this potential deal is quite interesting. Tencent invested in DST's last fund which then invested in the market leader for local deals.

Also of interest here is that Tencent usually "builds" rather than "buys" in their strategy. Tencent has already been testing their own local deals in select markets under Tuan QQ for a few months now: http://tuan.qq.com/
It's announced to users where it matters: when they are asked for permission to share their data.
Checkinstall of Python and VirtualEnv is the only sane way I've found to do python development and deployment when you're developing on Maverick and deploying to Lenny.
Which is what I was agreeing with. Vociferously :-)
I can answer about 1/3 of them and have been programming in Perl for 8 years now. Perl's not one of my primary languages though.
Not Your Father's JavaScript - Better built-in methods for common actions
Someone has rolled this into a script:

http://www.isi.edu/~yuri/dupx/
I totally agree but one of the co-founders is finishing his course & will be busy with finals until July.
Implementing iPhone's slider unlock with input type="range"
That's a key issue; strong GPU + weak CPU is great for just about every market other than general-purpose servers. So is it worth it for Nvidia to build a separate ARM-only chip just for the general-purpose server market? (especially considering that Marvell and Calxeda are already targeting that market)
Damn, haven't heard of Cromemco in a long time! Thanks for sharing this.
Because the capital costs of purchasing and owning cars is huge. No startup is going to be able to compete with that. They literally need to use other peoples money. You could ask why AirBnB doesn't purchase apartments in New York and San Francisco.

A distributed model where other people contribute their money, and the business makes money as an agency is well established in other fields. I know of many holiday properties where each individual apartment is privately owned, but the building is managed by a single entity. The owners wear the depreciation costs and interest charges (if using borrowed money) but get to keep the majority of the revenue from rentals, and any capital appreciation from the property, or wear any losses from a drop in value.

In the same way, a startup can allow others to contribute the capital value, wear any depreciation, financing and insurance, and just take an agency fee. This is really not much different to other rental car companies who presumably lease all of the rental vehicles either off some central owner of the vehicles, or directly from the manufacturer. Or, perhaps they just have a large, revolving credit line which they use to purchase the vehicles. They certainly aren't going to own them, so it really comes down to a definition of title.

I think the blurring here is that most people see car ownership as a strictly private-use phenomonen, whereas in property or boats, mixed private/investment or pure investment is much more common.
You don't have to know about array slices to answer that question effectively. You get a bonus for knowing about array slices, but the most important point is understanding the difference in context.
Did you watch the same videos I did? They have these things lifting sizeable pieces of 2x4's (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBsJwapanWI) and they pull of some pretty absurd manoeuvring (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM) and recovery (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geqip_0Vjec).

Navigational issues resolved, I have a hard time seeing these things having trouble with a modest wind.
No, Facebook doesn't share this information - you do! Let's be clear here. Those who are dumb enough to put their PII data on Facebook and the alike are sharing their information. My God, can we stop blaming someone else for our stupidity?
My only wish would be for the ads to have a high-res version. I'd love to read them.

Some of them I never saw ;-)
Nice. Thanks for that. The only addendum I would make is that the second parameter to open specifies to open the file as writable. Usually the constant is O_WRONLY, but it wasn't working for me in GDB.
It might also be locality. Tunisia is what, 300 miles from France? No matter how inwardly focused they are, you can be sure US newspapers would cover a revolution in Mexico or Guatemala.

(Admittedly, CNN would wait until after the revolution had a twitter page.)
Needs real people on the front page.

Peer-to-peer is "personable". Perhaps have some people e.g., Bob & Alice, and how it works for them. At the moment it is a bit cold and un-personable, and at worst makes possible users wary of the service.

See http://www.airbnb.com, for example: an embedded video with an attractive person. Goes a long way to assuring/soothing the prospective user.
I think calling the Y Combinator experience "a bit of advice" is doing it an injustice ... :)
I don't agree with the solution. What you are looking for is a business opportunity, not another widget idea. Opportunities must be found, measured, studied, then a SOLUTION, or idea, can serve it.

Also, an idea without a profit model is less than worthless. As Mark Cuban said "Ideas are like a-holes - everyone has one".
It's not a long quote of anything. It's me reasoning out why it might be so.

The business model work for her. I myself have validated some aspect of the business model or at least invalidated some of the worries though actual experimentation.

But it's up to people around the world being brave and test out some of the claim for themselves.
Developer Driven Development
14 Year Old Develops Top iPhone App; Dethrones Angry Birds [video]
for xmas 1989 i got a C64. my uncle, big show off, got my cousins (two girls) an amiga. why? cause it cost a bit more. turns out amiga sucked and my C64 was pretty much awesome until i got a 286 a bit later. i even remember begging for 4MB more RAM so i can play rise of the triad ... anyway, thinking back it kinda feels like the C64 was a more open platform and everyone else was pretty much fucked.
> Innovation at it's Very Best

I love glaring typos in prominent national advertisements.
I created the site to solve a problem I had: needing cheatsheets of HOW-TO and exercise videos I found on youtube. I'm growing the site while considering monetization strategies and additional features.
In another video they show 4 of them working together to lift a 1.2 kg structure, and they don't seem to have much trouble with it. It also shows a single copter lifting a piece of 2x4 several inches long, but doesn't give the weight. As just a ballpark guess I'd say these things probably max out at lifting and flying with a little under half a kg, they don't seem to have any trouble with at least .25 kg. The columns in the video linked at the top of the page are most likey a lot lighter than that, simply because there's no need for them to be heavy.

EDIT: that piece of 2x4 looks to be about 12 inches long. Assuming the wood is pine (likely, and also light), and using 350kg/m^3 as the pine's density (http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_wood.htm the lightest figure quoted) that works out to about .55 kg. (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=350+kg%2Fm^3+*+%282*4*1...). Quite impressive.
A New Year, A New Perspective: Web Economics in an App World
Or a violation of the First Sale Doctrine[1], for that matter.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
I'm not involved in the rental industry, but have always been interested in it (hence multiple posts), simply because I've often wondered out loud how they make money, and I've seen many different business models. Obviously people do, so there is a business model there, and it isn't freely communicated to the public.

While some firms operate like yours, with detailed checkin/checkout process, others seem to care less as long as you turn up in something with the right plates on, that seems to be the right make and color. 10 minutes at one of the large rental locations in LA will show this. My thoughts are that these companies just work on volume, purchase the cars cheap, turn them over regularly and just work on pure numbers.

Whether this can translate to a mixed-lot private rental remains to be seen. It is just too easy for a one-time renter to do a lot of damage to a vehicle and disappear, taking their facebook account with them. The reputation model works well in many cases (see ebay with high reputation buyers/sellers) but breaks down at the starting point. I guess it can be covered by a higher premium for first time renters but then that is going to dissuade new people from trying out the service. Perhaps the company can offer cash bonuses to people willing to rent to first-time customers or something.

As for your last argument - I think - despite your valid claims, that a bog-standard rental car can be treated as a commodity, despite the mechanical complexity and insurance / liability issues. It just takes the right mix of legal protection and insurance underwriting. How you get that is the key to the puzzle, and the person that gets it right will win this battle, if it can be won.
Remember that Goldman passed on this deal before allowing to to flow through to their clients. Says something, doesn't it?
Oh, certainly. But it's hard to write a lot of perl code without accidentally writing an array slice. At least, I find it hard.
Expect prices to fall as ebook reader penetration/market share increases.

Already, my (B&N) NookColor shows me variably-priced books as I browse.

Even "Agency Pricing" will fall as the cartel's power decreases in the future.
Concurrency and Multi-threaded Programming in Java – Part 1
If he wouldn't put school on hold in the event of YC funding, he really, really isn't someone you should be founding a company with.
Quite. Total energy expenditure?
I'm familiar with the study and generally give it more weight than other studies by people who dip in and out of the black community solely to collect data.

That said, I don't think it's entirely wrong to think that if you send your child to school for 6-8 hours a day, they should actually come home having learned something.

I didn't have helicopter parents, my parents just watched for grades. No PTA meetings, no reviewing my hw, no private tutors... I grew up and went to schools in the hood, but still got great grades, took a dozen AP/advanced courses, was in IB, got into an ivy league college, etc. etc.

So there was definitely something going on at school with regard to student expectations, curriculum, and teacher quality (I had amazing teachers).
Simulate Threading Using Javascript
منتديات سعودي كول
Sifteo: The future of play might be here
"How will you get users?"

Some unsolicited advice for this question:

For startups that rely on 'going viral': The benefit that users get from telling their friends is...

For businesses that need to get 2+ separate-facing user bases: The game theory aligns and makes it rational for both X and Y to participate because...

For startups doing B2B sales: The reason the X will look like a hero to his boss for making this purchase is...

If I were the one reading these I would also add "What's the one thing that needs to happen for this business to become a huge success?" Not only is this (IMHO) necessary to ballpark how likely the business is to succeed, but it's also extremely good at spotlighting both good and sloppy thinking.
Can international candidates apply? if the answer is yes (and if we are selected) will YCombinator help us with obtaining J1 (or any other applicable)? or at least provide a document as an employer?
thanks
I'd be curipous to see how the "No vacations" rule plays out..

In Australia most employees would deem 4 weeks vacation as appropriate. In France it's probably higher. In the US -- maybe it's 2 or 3 weeks.
Solving problems with proc
The power limitation doesn't seem very difficult to surmount, a drone could just go swap its dead battery with one from a pool of batteries on chargers, and keep working.

They'd need two batteries in a drone to do that of course, or perhaps some other robot could execute the battery swap.
This has been posted before, but is worth reading if you haven't.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1195641 -> a few comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476425 -> lots of comments
This is technically a vertical move. They are offering their books to sellers through the store with amazon (et. al.) taking a chunk. So they set the price.
WillyF, how do you monetize OneDayOneJob?
PagerDuty co-founder here...

The group actually changed a bit from one application to the next. The ideas were completely different for the first and second applications. Applications three and lucky number four were for PagerDuty.
How to react to changing screen sizes