skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How Americans Get Out of Credit Card Debt
I will post next week a blog post about how we made the site (design+video+copy+testing+user feedback) . For the moment, we are 100% focus on how to improve the product and build a momentum thanks to the feedback we are receiving :)
So you are recommending not to reveal revenues right now and instead tell them what auditor says the company is worth?
Jason - My startup would love to participate!

http://www.jollyvine.com We're a complete platform, where public as well as private entities (busineses, governments, schools, and libraries) can share and distribute their events in a social environment, that allows its users to share the events in their own social circles.

- For example mint.com for events in a community
You could probably replace "CS degree" and 'program' with a lot of different degrees and vocations. This is what people seem to fail to understand about collage, anything worth doing takes far more effort then making it through 4 years of college. All college does (at least the first 4 years) is get one ready for the lifetime of learning that is ahead.
Did the 9-5 workday just die?
How The iPad Time Shifts Online Reading
Thanks to HN, I found out that only my persistence and creativity is the limit regarding my software development career. Being a corporate software drone is not the only viable way of having a decent life.
Right, but they get paid continuously, porn stars only get paid when they have a gig- there is no way they're making as much once you consider the hours spent trying to get work.
Why 42?

“The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do'. I typed it out. End of story.”

Adams described his choice as 'a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number that you could without any fear introduce to your parents'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhikers_Gu...
Google Executive Remains Missing in Egypt
Algorithm Uses Ratings to Infer the Meaning of Words in Reviews
http://sleeperbot.com/ - real-time fantasy sports conversations. Closed beta with decent traction and excellent retention.

Pitch:

SleeperBot allows fantasy sports players to have conversations with each other in real-time. We deliver breaking news faster than ESPN and Rotoworld on game days. Our goal is to become the discussion engine of not only fantasy sports, but sports in general.

Screenshot of app (since it's private beta) - http://blog.sleeperbot.com/post/1172171694/sleeperbot-fantas...

Tiersheet tool used for user acquisition - http://sleeperbot.com/basketball/tools/tiersheet/h2h
Wow, great to see Michael Lewis, one of my favorite authors, coming to little ol' Ireland and do such an in-depth piece on us. I had no idea that the insane decision to bail out Anglo Irish was so directly linked to Merrill Lynch's 'advice'.

Interesting fact: I was sitting less than 50m away from the heroic egg-thrower when he went for the kill. Wasn't in the same room unfortunately. We were warned to hide our bank ID badges that day going in and out of work :-)
MIT OpenCourseWare Gets an iPhone App
I like how they emphasize "lack of internet" as a feature. :)

It really can be the bane of productivity.
When I have the choice, I use Clojure's STM or multiprocessing or whatever other means possible for concurrency. Unfortunately, I often can't avoid "hard" multithreading, e.g. in kernel code or on game consoles. I've managed to get fairly good at it in general (and try to avoid being too clever), but I'm always on the lookout for better ways.
...bullied the entire 500-member legislative branch and then President Bush into allowing more mortgages to be handed out to poor people...

Huh? Bush was a huge proponent of subsidizing mortgages, and making it easier for people to get loans without down payments. One of his initiatives: http://www.hud.gov/offices/cpd/affordablehousing/programs/ho...

Barney Frank and a large cohort of liberal representatives fought tooth and nail against Bush's efforts to more strongly regulate Fannie/Freddie, but that's a separate matter. All Bush wanted was more strict regulations of their risks, mainly interest rate risk. All mainstream politicians were (and still are) in favor of inflating the bubble by subsidizing home ownership.
I already have a domain and a couple of minor projects with no commercial potential. Thank you for the encouraging words though, I've accepted that I will be spending most of my time outside of work working even harder on my own projects, which will form my CV.
If anyone sees any gaping holes in this scheme, or has a more elegant solution to the HTTP-for-anonymous/HTTPS-for-logged-in-users pattern, I'd love to hear the critique.
As far as I know an app cant post or send an anonymous notification to a friend of the user.. So basically that kill the whole concept. Initially we wanted to do a facebook but ToS seemed pretty harsh on the subject...
You're unlikely to read it anyway. The ToS uses the most lightest grey text and it's in français.
Might be interesting to look at the total salaries instead of just the headcount. I understand Nokia did quite a lot of cheap outsourcing in the last decade.
Pretty interesting. I also tell my students to imagine a commit like a checkpoint in a videogame.

I try to teach real VCS, starting with simple patches, tarballs and merges and going through git, like it is an "patch/merge automation process". I realize they really like it and I try to improve some techniques to teach real VCS to students.

Glad to hear from people who's passing through same situation as mine :-)
Bing: Why Google’s Wrong In Its Accusations
I can't believe the comments on the article itself. Business impact? The sort of people that care about their products aren't going to boycott buying them because of a silly Tweet that most people found funny, even if they won't publically admit that.
Facebook is not necessarily bad, provided that you don't hold any false beliefs about the nature of this particular beast. Like everything which has a slightly competitive or sociable element to it, it can be abused and folks can become addicted to it. Similar criticisms could be made about online games or virtual worlds, which encourage multiple trivial interactions with "friends" in a tightening web of obligations.

Personally, I'll be happier when decentralised equivalents to Facebook become more of a viable option, such as Appleseed or Diaspora. At least then you'll be able to choose not to live your online life inside of a panopticon where not so trustworthy entities are constantly peering over your shoulder.
The problem with a pure pull approach is that you only know the first things that let you accomplish what you want to do. Sometimes, those first things are good enough to get the job done, but not enough to let you really know what's going on. That's not a problem now, but it may be in the future.

Anyway, it seems more like you agree CS courses aimed specifically at scientific computing would be good and worthwhile.
Actually, every year congress votes itself huge security funds for the conventions of the two parties. They bring about the harassing environments by purposely isolating themselves and having a ridiculous police-to-protester ratio.

Back to "freedom of the press" for a moment, there isn't a single arabic nation that has that. Not saying it's right, but it certainly isn't a surprise to walk around among thugs and be harassed and threatened. If they are trying to prove the thugs are thugs, well we already knew that from all the video from the previous few days.

To me it smacks of the idiot weatherpeople who have to go stand out in a hurricane to prove it's windy. Every darn year, every darn storm, every network throws someone into danger saying "ooh look at us, we are in danger, but don't do what we are doing".
the correct question is 'whois 42.42.42.42'. answer: sk telecom (sktelecom.com). sk = south korea.
Yes, the EU has those advantages, but it's bloated, unwieldy, mainly tries to serve the interests of Germany (biggest economy) and is ill-structured to deal with the type of problems currently affiliating the 'peripherals' (or 'PIGS': Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain). The features of a common monetary policy are great when times are good, but allows the problems of one nation to spread like a virus when times are bad. So it's a double-edged sword.
>That doesn't extrapolate to better products or better anything.

Agreed. So maybe we should be asking how Apple is growing faster than Nokia with fewer resources?
Hey Sam, currently we can support a great deal of customization, but we need to figure out how to best expose that. I think we will post updates to the Redis mailing list.
Ginzametrics (YC S10) SEO API v1.1 with Agency Automation Features
Awesome concept. I was thinking about this yesterday actually (while looking for the pads of paper I like, which are virtually impossible to find!).. I really think for these products to be successful, there needs to be an obsessive level of thought and craft put into how it feels. For one thing, in some of the screenshots you can see a shakiness in the lines... I've found any of the electronic writing surfaces I've used too sensitive, and without enough tactile feedback. There's a certain friction to pressing a pen into paper that makes for confident lines. I'd like to see this sort of product done really, really well... I'd certainly love to abandon my obsession for pen & paper.
Since their server seems to be buckling: http://noteslate.com.nyud.net/
myBeegle please! We are a B2C and B2B option for monetizing LBS. We started testing www.myBeegle.com in November and our registered card program is working nicely now, 750 offers in 5 states, we are launching 6 more states in the next 2 months, over 1000 deals. We also will be offering a complete, end to end service deal, front loaded Daily Deal scenario with back-end loyalty attached to the card, so we can track effectiveness of the campaigns from start to finish, and follow up for new customers. Of course, we will be fully integrated with FB, 4Sq & Tw for the new iteration so people can get info on the deals on the go. Free for users, cheap for merchants, and totally secure, no barcodes, no coupons, just swipes so we don't slow down the POS. WHat do you think?
The Iron Triangle revised to reflect people
Here is how my first acquisition interest played out:

VC: "We want to buy your company". Me: "Umm. Okay. But, I am still developing". VC:"No worries. Come down". I do (plane flight). Show up in this big office. They make me wait in a huge room at a table that could seat 20. One guy walks in with a thick printout, throws it on the table so the printout slides to me and says "This is how we value a company. Read it." I read it and the value of my company would be based solely on revenue.

What I learned: Don't let them put you in the defensive position. If there is a strong fit then revenue and metrics shouldn't play much of a role (at least initially). If you are taking the time to meet them face-to-face then I don't think it is too much to ask for a ball park figure.

Hope this helps.
I think it's a question of the kind of code that people do in science/engineering as compared to CS (my background is that I'm a practicing physicist, but started out with a background in Computer Engineering in undergrad.)
Yes, some basic CS (say an algorithms class) would be useful--but much of what we're working on as physicists is not what a traditional CS program would emphasize. For example, you have people with relatively small data sets that they want to fit--learning a language is about as far as they need to go. Others end up wanting to put a user interface around it if they use it excessively or distribute it for others. While perhaps a course on UI would be of use, for most, it's not what excites us, or advances us in our field.

Now, there are some who are doing high performance computing where abstraction and software engineering become important--but again, at the undergraduate level, how many courses are emphasizing the advantages of say templated C++ programming for scientific computations?

I think a service course on scientific computing would be of more use to most physicists than a general background in CS. For those that will end up working on large projects, then perhaps a course on software engineering. As for math courses, maybe I was a bit weird, but didn't you learn diff. equations in high school :p? But as for things like PDEs and such--I will say that a lot of it is learned as part of the coursework for say a first modern physics course, rather than in a math course...

For us, math, programming, etc. are tools that we use to do what we're interested in...(This is in no way to denigrate math or programming)
> The banks, excluding GM, have more or less paid back their portion of the bailout (this even includes the AIG portion).

I'd be interested in hearing how that happened. It's difficult to believe.
DeskMetrics http://deskmetrics.com/ is an analytics for desktop software which provides real-time information about how software is being used. With DeskMetrics, companies and developers can obtain information about the users’ locations, where they are clicking, which features are most used and so on.
Good article (a surprisingly heartfelt article -- odd for a tech blog). Key paragraphs:
Bing says it does NOT do this. It says there is no Google specific search signal that it being used, no list of all the popular pages as selected just by Google users. Instead, it has a 'search signal' based on searching activity observed across a range of sites.

For example, if you did a search on Amazon, Bing might detect that. A search on eBay might get spotted. A search on Yahoo, that also might get extracted. Any number of searches might be identified. Bing would associate the next page you went to after doing those searches as being a possible 'answer' to those searches.
I don't think that there is really this distinction, because your 'push' and 'pull' methods allow you to acquire different types of expertise/knowledge.

If you are all push, you won't be able to program.
If you are really all pull, you will be able to program, but it will be kind of magical programming.

Ex. If I am all pull: I know that the regular expression matches based on certain rules, but I don't understand complexity theory or finite automata, so I don't understand that I shouldn't use a regex to process xml. I might create a working program, but it is likely that it will be convoluted and take me longer (or be buggy in ways which I cannot comprehend!), because I reinvented solutions to already solved problems, or didn't understand the tools I was using.

If I am all push, programming becomes an intimidating experience. For obvious reasons, I'm going to have difficulty problem solving, obviously -- I've never actually sat down and solved problems. It would be like trying to learn math without having done any practice exercises.

I started as a 100% pull programmer (with minimal formal CS training), and have been pushing through a masters degree in CS. It has helped me by bounds. The concepts themselves are important, but also important is understanding the approach to problem solving that led to the concept. I can apply the theories behind a compiler or database (or anything) in places where a compiler or database would be totally inappropriate.

Point being, I see things differently now.

There are a lot more options for me to look into when I'm initially researching how to solve a problem, and it is a lot less likely to be influenced by whatever the new hotness buzzwords happen to be for the season, and because of that, my results are much better.
YES BUT WHAT DOES IT DO?
The author had lots of stanima though.
I'm a fan and happy customer. SyncPad would demo extremely well at a conference.
The server is in Czech Republic. I'm guessing English isn't their first language.
Huh. I think I just found my new RSS reader, good job.
There are lots of lbs players trying to all fight for the critical mass. We are targeting a very specific niche; social nightlife.

ThirstyVIP is a social nightlife network where you can check-in to share with your friends where you're at and what you're drinking.

We've also built a bar admin where bar management can utilize our dashboard to view important analytics and setup push promotions or drink specials for their most valuable bar patrons.

You can check out our website at www.thirstyVIP.com
No, Cyberterrorists Can’t Open Hoover Dam Floodgates
From my experience, investment bankers don't really know much of anything. I would shy away from this.
According to Asymco's data, Nokia also spends 10.2% of their phone revenue on R&D, versus 2.5% for Apple.
The initial redirect from HTTP to HTTPS is a weak spot. Most users will just type "example.com" into the address bar and an active attacker can strip HTTPS from there. There'll be no padlock icon, but how many of your users really going to notice?

See http://dev.chromium.org/sts to fix this.
Great Web Apps Blog Gallery up for sale
No matter what you say about Nokia, I love them. Here is why:
- Easy designs
- Affordable phones
- user replaceable batteries
- Cheap and fits in with my upgrade cycles
- the N900.
I'm sorry I just saw your comments. Is it still happening?
If I was a fresh grad (or non-grad with some level of self-taught skill) I would be looking at companies that have formal apprenticeship programs. There are shops like Obtiva that do this sort of thing and look to lift people up through the "craftsmanship" approach.
I thought he was a developer that quit working at Facebook.
Yes I agree the reporters should try to be on the scene.

But they should not immerse themselves in the scene.

Now there are thugs coming into the hotels and harassing them, that's news because they are being targeted. But when they walk into the crowd of thugs and get beat up, they are making the news about themselves.
Are You An Early Adopter?
Oh hey, I came up with the exact same analogy about 6 months ago in explaining Tornado and epoll on quora with a bit more technical detail, just replace pizza with pies:

http://www.quora.com/Can-someone-explain-poll-epoll-in-Layma...
Holding interest rates artificially low, and very favorable tax treatment for real estate investments and gains, clearly added a lot of air to the bubble.
I don't think this article is praise for Nokia, quite the opposite. They are saying that Apple is much more efficient.

More to the point, Nokia is losing profit compared to Apple:

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:NOK&fstype=ii

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AAPL&fstype=ii

so measuring efficiency as net income per employee the contrast is more stark.
Really appreciate the feedback!! Yeah totally open to ideas. I'm just soft launching it to see if it gets any traction.
> Explain "web server" to your grandma. Oopsie.

It's like a waiter at a restaurant- you tell it what you want and a few moments later, the waiter (or server) returns what you've ordered.

Good?
Sure - but the VC isn't going to come write code for you, whereas if he can connect your sales team with the right customers, that beats the pants off someone who just flat doesn't know your space.
QuickBooks for my accounting and PayChex for my corporate payroll.
I would recommend not doing https in rails. I use nginx to switch between http and https when needed.

in your nginx config you do this for https setup:
# needed for HTTPS
proxy_set_header X-FORWARDED-PROTO https;

then if you want, you can check in rails that certain controllers received https requests.

using nginx as proxy means your rails app only ever deals with plain text http.

the only issue, with all http -> https transitions is making sure that things you are storing in sessions are placed in your forms if you go from a http page to an https page on form submission. If not you will lose state if you are storing sessions in the cookies.

The part about relative urls is right. Using cdns etc makes things harder if they don't support your ssl cert.

At CarWoo! once you login we do everything behind https. For our user creation form you can be on an http page, but it submits to https.

We created partials that represent our sign up forms (we have many kinds of landing pages) that automatically take important things out of the session and put them in the form if needed. These things are not security risks, but are important for the correct functionality of the app.
RocketMenu: Unobtrusive Search and Reference Tool
If you're ever going to be her: crazygrl+secretpoke@[...]
>Anyway, it seems more like you agree CS courses aimed specifically at scientific computing would be good and worthwhile.

Oh, absolutely. I think there might be an analogy in writing. -I'm no writer, but I can pen an effective grant. I'd really like to be an effective writer too, but that would be a divergent path in light of my work.

There's just not enough time in one human life. :/

BTW, a second postdoc is cruel and unusual punishment IMO. My best wishes to your friend.
Please don't spam. You are probably not seeing the upvotes because of the downvotes you are getting. Creating accounts to upvote your pitch to a third-party person is not a smart idea; it really makes the people who go to this site daily angry.

I am sure Jason saw your pitch above, we do not need 10 new accounts saying "Twinbows!!!!"
Doesn't work if you're using a shared library, though.
Sorry -- that's not mentioned in the post, but that's precisely how it works. Nginx handles HTTPS, and Rails only ever sees HTTP, with the "X-FORWARDED-PROTO" header.
Rainbird: The Way Twitter Counts Tweets In Realtime (Soon To Be Open Sourced)
The last thing I need is another place to write by hand. Handwriting is an incredibly inefficient way to transmit information from brain to computer, especially for me (I'm dysgraphic).

I just want a very long-life note-taking tablet with a decent keyboard. There's a reason the old Tandy 100 is still in use by a handful of journalists. Nothing has really taken the place of it, as far as I know.

The Kindle keyboard isn't comfortable enough to write a book or an article on; phone keyboards are too small and editing too much of a chore (I'd use vim on my Nexus One if it weren't such a damned hassle to hit Esc and some of the other special keys). I currently use a netbook for this purpose, but the battery life is too short at only a couple of hours. I can't go to the park and knock out a chapter in two hours, and rebooting to change batteries every two hours would be a productivity killer, even if I wanted to spend a bunch of money on spares and go to the trouble to keep them charged.

I guess I'm just not the niche for this device, as I can't imagine ever using it for anything.
"How Americans get out of credit card debt."

Don't most of them just pay it off? Sure takes a long time, but eventually don't most people pay what they owe?

BTW, there are only about 1.5Million bankruptcies in the US every year ... that's <1% of borrowers. So I wouldn't use it as the first kind of "traditional option".
Interesting. Thanks for talking about your experience.
First question is, Do you want to sell?

If not drop, then drop the distraction and get back to work.

If maybe, decide if you really want to go work for the big company and if so, hire a pit bull to work out the deal on your behalf, then get back to coding in case it does not go through.

Flirting can lead to marriage, but it can also lead to a case of the clap. If your product is strong, there are "plenty of fish" as they say.
I dig the STS header, but isn't fixing the problem for only a small-ish percentage of browsers ... not really fixing the problem?