skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with this advice. Like all investors we prefer startups that would do better with us to those who'd be hosed without us. Though we have funded a fair number of the latter as well, and some of them turned out to be very successful.
Funny, I got those sort of questions on my first phone screen, and I called them "pulse-checkers". As in, checking the candidate has a pulse and hasn't blatantly lied on their resume.

I would expect anyone who's been through a CS101-level class to do small decimal<->binary conversions in their head, and anyone who's administered a UNIX system to know how to terminate an option list.
What merchants say about Interchange-Plus pricing.
No, because a "point in space" has no definition - without other objects you can't even locate such a point.

You can only move relative to other objects.
Click their username in the post, usually you'll see in the 'About:' section an email address.
I suspect you'll have better luck sharing your thinking behind this book, how you went about writing out, how you're going about marketing it, what sort of results you're seeing, how that compares with what you're hoping, what you're doing to make it better, etc... rather than just selling the book.

I called it spam simply in the context of it being an avert that's not solicited on this forum. We're not, in general, particular keen on shameless adverts. Self-promotion is ok, but try to throw in something useful to the reader!
Not a great comparison. Windows is an OS, the App Store is a channel.

A better example would be Google. What would happen if Google tried to own some of the dollars that flow through the organic search channel? /shudder
Interesting.

Who was/is your meditation teacher? I think I missed it from the article.
I disagree, for software engineers it is becoming more important to have a greater online influence. Employers are looking more and more at how involved people are in open source projects (eg. github profiles).

People with blogs and StackOverflow profiles public expose how much they actually know about software development. Then when they have a greater following or more points that is a validation that what are saying is accurate.
Depends on technically if he just uses Hindu religious concepts to talk about things science knows. Then it's not dogma.

Dogma is a specific set of beliefs about the world. If he's only talking about empirically verifiable things (such as we all must die, etc), then it doesn't necessarily go into dogma.
Montreal has a lot of other nationalities represented beyond the French. It's not unusual to find someone who speaks French, English, and their mother tongue. My wife, for example, speaks Italian, French, and English.
Blazetrak Leaves BETA Cash-Flow Positive, Boasting an $8M Valuation
I'm not surprised at all. Pretty much all of the enterprise software development that I've seen is either Java or C#.
It's not just rookie programmers. Even adding experienced programmers who are unfamiliar with the circumstances of the project will often make a project later.

I do agree with you about adding orthogonal people, provided the project manager can bring them up to speed without slowing down the development team even more.
What about a proprietary solution that can integrate with an open-source stack? I don't mean a service like Google Calendar, but something people run on their own servers.
I can't tell if you're serious as yours is a throw away account. Now, I'm not applying to YC (wrong continent and other issues) But I disagree with your general sentiment.

Clearly you can't put all your eggs in one basket and must always have a plan B thru Z+, however what makes real men or women for that matter is the ability to know their limits and the ability to seek or delegate help to fortify and complement said limits. There is no room for pride in real humans.

Also, don't underestimate the effects of (a) the feedback effects of each successful generation (b) the motivational aspects of being surrounded by like minded, determined, hard working people chasing their dreams (c) the networking and prestige bonuses. The $18k is just gravy.

Real men and women are pragmatic, they put aside pride and do whatever it takes - within reason of course - to ensure success.
I think your use of the term artificial, while apt in the sense of "not existing in non-human nature," is really banking on a series of connotations of artificial that don't apply to the non-natural sense of artificial. Artificial, for example, connotes: unnecessary, inferior to the non-artificial, superfluous, inauthentic. Your point is really something along the lines of linking an ethical system of non-killing to these connotations, which really have nothing to do with whether ethics can be found in non-human nature (which is, of course, a trivial point).

What really matters is why we should inform our thinking with how animals treat each other.
I saw a similar comment in the other thread about this. Regardless of whether or not it was noted earlier, it is behavior that many people consider unacceptable.

Many App developers are being forced to change their practices, and find the new rules too burdensome to continue.
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Interesting discussion. I make a lot of software for Arduinos for my robots and publish it open source on my blog. I rarely get contacted from fellow Canadians (let alone fellow Montrealers). >_>

Arduino is a super example of open source, so if Montreal were to be a "hub", that would entail that a lot more people would be excited about Open Source and would be downloading the code or getting in contact, right?

I find that there's not enough excitement yet. There are ways we could garner excitement, by investing in small companies, creating open source hockey players that can shoot the puck at the back of the net, and gaining more media attention, harnessing power through local politics. Long-term thinking, it may happen!
I tend to think of it as Verizon/ATT's hardware, because they are subsidizing the purchase of it.

Maybe it's a stretch, but I don't feel like I own it until my 2 years is up.
You've made some pretty awesome observations.

Having said that :) I'd like to point out that there were more than 700 attendees at StartupCamp last month. A relatively good portion of those people were not skeptical at all about business ambition. They have embraced entrepreneurship! They are opportunistic!

I think what happens when you have a social circle that contains successful entrepreneurs is you get better at business development and salesmanship by osmosis. You are more likely to pitch a million dollar deal if you're friends with a guy who did that a week ago.

Another commenter pointed out, Montreal use to compete on price and probably still does. I think it will take a while for the low cost crap to leave our bones. But that's already starting to happen ... so we'll see.

>>>Note that I have found that Montrealais ARE very opportunistic when it comes to social entrepreneurism. Witness social events The Strip Spelling Bee http://stripspellingbee.blogspot.com/ (and other productions by Perpetual Emotion Machine Productions, like Slow Dance Night), musical innovation particularly in low-fi and DIY subgeneres, and non-profit activism like Head and Hands.

Hell yeah!
All this is still useful. I have to fix code all the time where the original developer paid no attention to complexity and a algorithm that was fast with the 10 items they tested with is dog slow once it makes it to production and there are 10,000 items.
Microsoft confirms Kinect hackers to get official developer kit
>> When hundreds of companies and thousands of the brightest programmers and sysadmins have been trying to solve a problem for twenty years and still haven’t managed to come up with an obvious solution that everyone adopts, that says to me the problem is unsolvable.

I take issue with the assumption here. What you want, which is obviously "free/open mysql-ish thing that scales indefinatly", is not a problem people have been working that hard to solve until quite recently.

To put it in perspective, 20 years ago, many banks offered no access to your money outside open hours and the internet was not a thing normal people used.

Today, if you go to Oracle or IBM, you'll find that they'll be happy to help you solve your enourmous problem at great profit to them. The thing that's changed in the last few years, is that Web 2.0 guys want the same power (or more) for a tiny fraction of the cost.

This is a good thing. This is exciting. People recognize that the status quo sucks and are working hard on change. The solution will probably involve some SQL, and probably some other tools as well. Don't be such a downer. ;-)
I believe what Apple is trying to do is to head off the possibility of being scammed: app writers can give away their apps for free, but unlock the full potential only when you "buy" a (lifetime) subscription. This way the writer can keep 100% of the price of the app, instead of just 70%.

Do I agree with Apple? No. But I think this is where they're coming from.
"SQL" is not a classification of a database, it's a query language. Some of the databases which use SQL do not scale well or easily, and some databases which don't use SQL don't scale well either.

What Adam means to say is "some of the semantics defined by SQL are hard to get correct while maintaining scalability." Hard is very different from impossible, and there is a large number of very smart people currently solving this problem very well. There is another large number of smart people trying to solve the problem by ignoring the hard parts of the semantics. It seems they will likely come up with something very fast and scalable, but ultimately less useful for certain things which are done easier with proper SQL semantics. In fact, it's not clear in all cases that they are even making something that's more performant: cf. http://sergeitsar.blogspot.com/2011/01/mongodb-vs-clustrix-c...

Saying "SQL Databases Don't Scale" is like saying "oil paintings on wood aren't appealing". Not all oil-on-wood paintings are good, but some are, and some tempera-on-fresco paintings suck too. The logic is simply invalid.
Check out http://devlabmtl.org/

I haven't been yet, but planning on going soon.
Adobe should never have absorbed Macromedia. Adobe's mainstays (Photoshop, Illustrator) have taken a terrible turn for the worse (slower, buggier, non-native UIs), while getting more expensive at the same time.

Adobe's software used to be indespensable to me, but now there's Pixelmator, which carries the true (old) Adobe legacy. Does anyone know if Pixelmator is going to make a vector tool? If they do, lots of designers will be completely Adobe-free!
Once you have purchased your hardware, and have purchased a catalogue of software titles, you are effectively 'locked in'.

It's a bit naive to state that people have choice - because if you have a iOS based device, you (effectively) only have one place to make purchases. Jail-breaking and third-party software sources are beyond the reach of most consumers.

For all intents, if you have an iOS based device, the AppStore is your marketplace - and it is a marketplace which trades globally.

--

"All of his points map exactly onto TV stations. Is that large enough scale for you?"

A TV station purchases or licenses content on behalf of their customers. Apple doesn't operate in this way.

I honestly believe the most useful analogy is a 'marketplace' - however, if this is accepted, perhaps Apple's policies seem more disagreeable than they do if 'tv station' or 'magazine' is used as a comparison. Maybe this is why Apple's supporters seem unkeen to make the comparison?

--

"If you really believe that Apple should provide this services gratis to developers as some kind of latter-day addition to the Bill of Rights, perhaps you should lobby the government to purchase the App Store infrastructure and oversee it instead?"

I think Apple should be forced to allow third party App Stores.
Xoom Debuts Sans Flash: What’s Going On, Adobe?
So what can we do to help the situation?
Technically, we didn't sell the assets. The company sold the assets (income), then distributed the resulting cash to shareholders (capital gains). So the money got taxed twice, once for corporate income tax and once as capital gains.
What does this say about people's perception of quality, though? Sure, you can buy cheap value-brand staples that are probably chock full of preservatives and chemicals that drive down the cost of food on an industrial scale. You can also buy furniture from Wal-Mart that's made compressed sawdust, a binding agent and a thin coat of paint. Both purchases will be relatively cheap, but I wouldn't expect anything more than minimal quality from either.

Over the last 10 years, I've seen a relative explosion of organic and locally-grown food at mainstream grocery stores. I haven't lived in particularly liberal areas, so I think it's safe to say that these are representative of a growing trend of consumer consciousness. People seem to give a damn what their money is really buying in a way that they didn't 20 years ago, for instance. Simple economics suggests that labor will expand to fill this niche, and in doing so, that expansion is going to run counter to the author's main point that efficiency is inexorably shrinking the workforce.

I'm not saying this is wrong, but I'm curious what this niche market for higher-quality, locally manufactured/grown goods means for the trend the author is trying to forecast.
I tend to agree with Apple's right to do this, but I can't tell if it's a genius move or a stupid move.

I think this move could further empower Apple, in as much as to put people like Rhapsody out of business. On the other hand, it makes sense to create a hospitable ecosystem, and right now it feels like they are carpet bombing what was once a nice place to hang out.

More of my thoughts here (podcast) http://bluerize.com/free-market-anarchy-020-apple-subscripti...
I think what Harj means is not so much that you should become good as that if you are a good person, you shouldn't feel like you need to hide it because e.g. you think it would seem unprofessional.
If you allow people to subscribe outside the app, you also must add functionality to allow them to subscribe through the app, and subscriptions through the latter mechanism will cost you the 30% Apple Tithe.

A lot of companies just can't afford to have a group of users who cost the same as everyone else but only bring in 70% as much revenue.
Working smarter
123exchanges.com makes me think "spam site". A new domain is in order.
I'll throw a vote behind the Hag Balans kneeling chair, which apparently is no longer being made but the link below lists other kneeling options

http://www.ergodepot.com/HAG_Balans_p/6035.htm
Can you imagine asking the surgeon: “What is a scalpel? What kind of scalpels are there? Now, cut this cadaver as if you were to perform an appendectomy. Good. Now imagine that there were some complications–show how you’d cut in that case.” I hope you are having a good laugh, because such a situation is unimaginable.

Not unimaginable at all. In a world where surgery was run like software "engineering" [1], we would interview surgeons this way.

Why don't we interview surgeons this way?

(a) Because surgical training is via apprenticeship. For any given surgeon, you can ask "which group of other surgeons taught you everything you know? Which ones signed sworn statements that you are minimally competent?" Then you can find those senior surgeons and ask them candid questions about the candidate. This is always possible. If a surgeon turns up without such references they don't get as far as an interview. ("I taught myself surgery from blog posts, and I practiced on my cats?" Eeeek. NO HIRE.)

(b) Thanks to the long history of medicine and its very serious life-and-death implications, surgery is a very thoroughly attested event with a very definite chain of responsibility. Look at a hospital's records for a given surgery, and you will get a complete list of everyone in the room. If the surgeon was the only surgeon in the room, you can be fairly confident that they handled the operation themselves. And though I'm not sure there's an actual law that forbids a surgeon from handing the scalpel to a nurse, or an intern, and having them do everything, that would (a) not be something they could do in secret; everyone in the room would know and (b) the surgeon-of-record would still be the responsible party: If something went wrong in surgery guess who would be sued?

What I'm saying is: It is hard to bluff being a surgeon. Which is not to say it doesn't happen: For various all-too-human reasons, doctors and nurses do cover for each other, and scandals occur. But it's not like software, where the level of bluff is really, really large. Software "engineers" are often self-taught by necessity, especially in the tasks they actually do all day; their work has no legally defined standards or practices; there are so many ways to solve a given problem that two engineers with the same job title and official responsibility may have completely different skillsets; they work largely inside their own heads where nobody can see what is going on; they can very easily copy others' work, or sit in the corner while the rest of the team does the heavy lifting and then claim full credit.

---

[1] For this post, I'm going to use these scare quotes to distinguish "software engineers" like myself from actual Professional Engineers, who are like surgeons and are not, in fact, asked to build little bridges out of Lego bricks during their job interviews.
So what is the competitive advantage that the Motorla Xoom now has?

And what does it have to justify it's $100 price premium over the iPad?
Time does not exist for the photon, so from the photons point of view it is at both locations simultaneously.
When will Google put the "You" back in YouTube?
Goal of CS should be to make students who build next Google. What if Google changes its interview game and asks people to actually show what they actually built?.

CS goal could be greater than a factory producing employees for big corporations.

The new Gospel is lot better. "Build something useful" Start it on day one.
This is interesting to me.

Is being "good" something that helps you succeed? I hope so. I've been a little disappointed with just how ruthless people at the top tend to be (though I've met plenty of exceptions, PG and JL among them). For every Wozniak who made it to the top, there are 10 Steve Jobs'.

Would love to here more about this-- there are obviously a lot of definitions for "good". Maybe this would make a good essay! :-)
This may or may not exist already, but I'd like http://fakeapp.com, but for use in the simulator, not a browser.
Aperture runs fine on any Mac. 4gb RAM helps, and an SSD.
if a discourse is based purely on direct experience (evidence) and not at all on authoritatively settled doctrine, i feel comfortable saying "with no dogma". Maharaj does not refer to any teachings or doctrine other than being instructed by his teacher to let go of all of the illusions attached to the concept "I am".

His questioners in the book do sometimes bring up doctrine from their personal history, but Maharaj always responds directly from experience of reality.
Breakup Notifier Emails You When People On FB Change Their Relationships
No, it means that the quantum world is very very weird.

It's a strict limit, not an average. It's just that the quantum world has strange definitions of location.
3 letters: XSS
There is no cache of the post, so if you can, please repost their announcement in the thread.
you might want to escape those text messages.
There is a new 'Father of Facebook'? This time, in Egypt
Am I the only one who thinks what he did was not only criminal but morally wrong, and that he deserved to go to prison for a long time?

I realize that everybody likes to call themselves a "hacker" because they can program a computer, but this is an actual black-hat hacker. There are bad guys in the world and he's one of them. He wrote malware. He stole source code and gave it to the world. And this wasn't some evil corporation he was trying to bring to justice for its crimes. This was Valve. All they do is make cool games for the world. It's incredibly difficult work and they do a fantastic job. What kind of asshole do you have to be to shit all over them like this kid did?
if they want to be contactable, they'll put that info in their profile.
Wow, so, I might have shut down the whole room by typing in the chat <script>window.close();</script> That room is a giant XSS disaster waiting to happen.
One way to approach this is for the teacher to model getting to an eventual solution including mistakes and false starts. This gets the students comfortable with the idea that they don't have to know everything when starting or having to present a perfect solution and that the real learning comes with some struggle to get to the solution.
This is actually really cool and would help me quite a bit with my current project; mind shooting me an e-mail as well (in profile)?
The entire point of relativity is that there is no medium. There are plenty of particles that do not interact electromagnetically - the neutrino for example.

The speed of light has to do with the nature of reality, not the method of transportation.
Do you know when the selected startups will be announced ? Couldn't find that information on their website.
As a counter to this I have stopped daily meditation (2 hours a day Vipassana) after about 7 years of practice because I hit a rut where it didn't seem to be improving things. I certainly remained calm through all the years but cannot honestly say that it made me a happier person.

I was certainly content with the results at first but after much serious practice I found it less and less effective. I'd recommend most people to try serious meditation but think that its important to manage expectations - a tiny proportion of Westerners that start with meditation feel enough benefit to continue it for the following years.

In my own experience, Yoga had more noticeable effects and a better 'buzz' - this as someone that also gave up Yoga a few years ago. The advantage of Yoga is that you also feel healthy. I hope fight off my current laziness and restart Yoga again.
I live in Montreal and can attest to our growing ambitions in the startup tech community. Great place to start a company.
The GPL (especially v3) is user-hostile because it comes between developers and their customers. When my mom uses her computer, she doesn't give one lick about the source code behind her word processor. She's more than happy to trade a little bit of money for a product that just works, and is easy for her to use. Fulfilling these goals while taking advantage of the latest technology takes money, so she happily pays. She has no interest in the "freedoms" offered by the GPL - she just wants to get her work done and get on with her life.

I don't think my mom is less of a person (morally or otherwise) for being this way. We're not fools because we freely choose to pay a little bit of money for a lot more convenience in our lives. Nor are we trading any freedom^ - if we were to someday not like the terms we agree to today, we're always free to buy or use something else in the future.

^This is something that Stallman (and a lot of other people get wrong). The concept of freedom only applies to individuals, not to groups. Individuals have the right to assemble into groups, but groups do not have any special rights aside from the aggregate of the individual rights of its members. By using regular software that we freely pay for, my mom and I are not harming anyone. Stallman claims that we are!
Why David Karp Started Tumblr: Blogs Don't Work For Most People
This is going to sound so lame, but... time. My goal was to do it the "right way" and thus I wanted to get through these: http://www.audiodharma.org/series/1/talk/1762/ before I started. Perhaps I should just read something and jump in....