skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is full of FUD and completely misses the point of static/dynamic distinction (flame-war, if you want). It's a perfect example of someone arguing to make a point without even trying to understand the opposite position.

No one has ever argued that dynamic languages are more expressive than static languages. This is impossible, as long as we're considering Turing-complete languages. The fact that Harmony/EcmaScript 5 reference compiler was implemented on OCaml. However, it is equally futile to argue that they are less expressive[1].

"you are imposing a serious bit of runtime overhead to represent the class itself [...] and to check [...] the class [...] on the value each time it is used."

Users of dynamic languages simple trade runtime efficiency for compile-time efficiency. What's wrong with that?

The point of having multiple languages is that different languages make different things simple and easily expressible. Sure, you can do dynamic programming in Haskell or OCaml, but the language is going to work against you in some way, requiring you to specify your intension in a particularly lengthy and awkward way (think Java, except Java makes you do that for any kind of programming).

[1] Ironically, the author fails to point out the one way in which static languages are more "expressive" than dynamic languages: overloading on function's return type. I have yet to see that in a dynamically typed language.

tl;dr: All Turing-complete languages are equally expressive, but different languages make different things simple.
Now that I look at the chart again, I'm a little confused. It says ~3.5 micro sievert 'extra dose from one day in average town near the Fukushima plant as of March 17th, varies quite a bit' in the blue squares, but also 'one day dose (~3.6 milli sievert) at two sites 50 km NW of Fukushima on 3/16, seen again on 3/17' in the green ones.

Even factoring in the variation they mention, that's a 1000x difference. I know the dosage drops off exponentially, but first example must be a lot further away than 50km, which is no longer 'near' in my book. Perhaps the latter measurements were extreme cases caused by wind patterns.
NOOOOOO.
One of the nice things about YC is that they're willing to have an open, public application process. I'm sure you can imagine that supporting that means they personally waste tons of their own time reading applications that don't come close to cutting it. For new entrepreneurs that don't have great connections to investor communities, this is one of the few avenues for getting their ideas vetted by an experienced group of people.
Ask HN: Why Doesn't Y Combinator have an Engineer in Residence?
TechStars has added a role of "Hackstar" which is essentially an Engineer in Residence analogous to the "Design in Residence" role Garry Tan has at Y-Combinator.

Has Y-Combinator considered a role like this?

What is the thinking behind this role for incubators?

Relavant links:
http://bostinnovation.com/2011/03/18/calling-all-hackers-%E2%80%93-techstars-wants-you/?isalt=0
http://www.techstars.org/hackstars/
Yeah, it fits in with these "I am sorry you were offended at what I said" apologies.
Care to post some link to employers hiring in the $165k+ range?
Nassim Taleb had a good quote that can be stretched to fit this. "Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them."

It's more enlightened self-interest or utilitarianism than categorical imperative, but the gist is the same. Don't ignore the people you foolishly regard as unimportant.

To quote from the other end of the spectrum,"The people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances, we guard you while you sleep. Do not f--- with us."
Seems pretty clear that the recruiter provided you with a very valuable service, that the qualified candidates you really wanted to make offers to weren't willing to respond to ads citing the insulting salary range you thought you could get away with.

The simple fact is that if you can not afford to hire qualified developers, you should not be in business. Please leave software development to the professionals who are able to make money at it.
About 1): I think the point was that CL can only sometimes enforce invariants at compile time. If the compiler can't prove that something is always true or always false, it will simply emit code to do a runtime check.
Guard Yourself On Your Holidays Abroad
My AT&T service has three (3) main features, call waiting, call forwarding, and call dropping. Of those, the third feature works best.

Oh, and unrelenting robo-reminders. Those calls never drop and they always leave a message.
Sometimes the best way to learn the rules quickly is by trying to break them. Try to do the impossible so that you can find out what is possible. I think it's important to make a distinction between the actual rules and the rules as they are understood or documented. Our understanding of rules tends to change over time.
I'm guessing he isn't dead serious or he means it in a mutual way.
More broadly, you can tell a lot about a person by the way he treats people who can do absolutely nothing for him.
Kongoroo (an mvp):

http://kongoroo.com
My experience has been quite different. A while ago I was considering switching to T-Mobile so I ordered a SIM, but a few days later I changed my mind. I called T-Mobile to find out how to cancel it, and I was told just to refuse shipment, so I did. Next month I get a bill for a month of service for a SIM card that was never in my position, and thus never even activated. I call up and eventually they dropped the charges (or so I was told). Next month I get a bill for $12. Lather, rinse, repeat. In my experience, the T-Mobile reps, at least those dealing with user accounts, are either unwilling or incapable of performing competent customer service. AT&T, on the other hand, I've had nothing but the best service with. I can literally call them any time of the day and there's someone that answers and takes care of whatever issues I have.
Wow, on a sim-only quit-any-time plan in the UK, I pay £10 per month for unlimited texts, unlimited internet (though tethering is apparently against the TOS) and 250 minutes (I never use these up). And I've never had to pay to receive a text on any network.
Mine works, doesn't exactly rock, more like generates huge amounts of heat. This after a Powerbook g4 that needed 4 or 5 logic board transplants, and a plastic macBook (core 2 duo) that was dog slow.
I generally live by the words "people suck." Then when you see such disgusting behavior as this, it is not surprising.

Even better though, is when you meet truly kind people, it is a surprise and pleasure to work with them.
Sorry, doesn't really make much sense to me...

What about 4 people sharing one Internet connection at home, all with their own Dropbox account? What about someone that doesn't have an Internet connection (and who access Internet at school, libraries or their friends places)? And what about company Dropbox accounts?
I think it works out to the net lobbyist money between a company those on the other side. At least that's what it functions like...
Er, actually money sort of does make you immortal if you've got the right sort of attitude toward cheating at reality. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cryonics.

Money also buys happiness if you know the right things about hedonic psychology - that owning a possession isn't as exciting as the moment of first acquiring it which is what you anchor on when thinking of its value, and that the trick is to buy happy memories, and that you should ask "What experiences would excite me?" instead of "What static qualities would make me happy?", etcetera.

It's bleeping amazing what you can do with money and knowledge.
Now they will be AT,T&T-Mobile.
Someone at sprint is getting fired. Were they not just in the news talking about a network share with T-mobile?
Oil and coal and nitroglycerin have caused similar destruction, yet you don't see comments like yours about them, so I find it specious to suggest that nuclear acquired its stigma honestly. At any rate, we have no better long-term option for power than nuclear AFAIK.
I don't know what I'm talking about, but it seems like X in residence is a good idea if each company needs a little X, but if each company needs a lot of X then they should have their own.
I was only half-serious, but I'll elaborate it into a serious argument anyway.

Allowing insider trading will create asymmetric information in the stock market, and that risks creating a "market for lemons" type situation and reducing liquidity. Say that insiders are allowed to trade whenever they want, on whatever information they have. As an outside investor without that information, I should then assume that I will get a raw deal on any trade that I make. The rational action, then, is to avoid trading that stock at all. Even if there're initially lots of non-insiders to trade with, they are all making the same economic calculation, and will come to the same conclusion. Hence, anyone rational will leave the market, and the only people left will be those with inside information, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. That defeats the whole point of a public stock market.

When you think about economics, you can't stop at first-order effects. The immediate effect of insider trading may be to increase the speed with which information gets to the market, but the long-term effect is to destroy the market itself, as every participant then has an incentive not to trade.

Anyway, the ironic part of my original comment is that I'm actually not an outsider by most people's POV. I can think of a number of people that would pay good money for upcoming Google product releases, were it not illegal (and grounds for firing). So in strictly personal terms, I'd stand to benefit quite a bit from legalized insider trading, but in academic terms, it'd destroy the system that generally works pretty well.
Is it just me or does that Bont logo look a little like the HTML5 logo? http://www.w3.org/html/logo/
44 articles due to Euler, in English, are on the arXiv: http://arxiv.org/find/math/1/au:+Euler_L/0/1/0/all/0/1 It's kind of surprising to be looking through what showed up on the arXiv today and see Euler there.
I agree, the only sensible different screen size is a retina screen with twice the resolution. They might keep the old iPad model, selling it for less than $500. I think Apple will try to keep the $500 price for the main model as long as possible. They don't want to race to the bottom.
That's all true, and even then, basically no-one in the UK pays £90/hour contracting rates for routine software development without specialised skills, not even London banks.
I think it's easier to hide this from kids & teenagers than coworkers, family, and adult friends though. They're generally sheltered from the money aspect of society - they have no reason to be digging around in the financial news looking for their dad's name. But adults read enough of that news (particularly if you stay involved in tech & business) that someone will eventually come across it, and "so and so's actually a millionaire" is a pretty fruitful gossip topic.
I think our economy has pockets of dysfunction interspersed with a few places (e.g. Silicon Valley) where it functions well. On the whole, I'd call it pretty mediocre. We've had great productivity gains since 1975, but all of the benefits have gone to 1% of the population, and only the small fraction of that 1 percent who worked directly in technology could even be argued to deserve it. Still, I'll grant you that we have a good economy; what we have as well in the U.S. is an absolutely shitty society. Far more important than whether an economy is capitalist or socialist is whether it has good people in charge, and corporatism pretty much guarantees that it won't. For whatever reason, Europeans are (now) better at making sure utterly terrible ideas (like Arizona's immigration law, private health insurance, Citizens United, Proposition 8) rarely get into implementation, and that good ones (universal healthcare, federal vacation floor, available higher education) do. I think that that's because the Europeans (and Japanese) had a front-row seat, middle of last century, for what happens when people who think like U.S. Republicans end up in power.

By the way, if you develop health problems that render you unable to hold down any job, you are eligible for SS disability benefits. So your losses always have a lower bound.

What if you develop health problems that render you unable to hold a decent job? (Then there is the problem of defining "decent", but I'm not even going there.) The worst jobs in the U.S. to not pay enough for a person to live on. Besides, for someone like an engineer to end up in retail would be such a waste of talent that he or she might as well not work.
ISPs carry with them an expectation of phone support. That could get messy, and wipe out any profits.
The problem is in the first two - taxes and maintenance. You are still paying your share of them. You are likely paying more, proportionately, than you would if you owned the property directly, because you are also paying someone else to handle them for you.
Software Fallacies
I've been having problems with my Optimus V through Virgin Mobile.

It crashes in call (total power off); data availability hasn't been stable (I would say about once a week I have significant issues where I won't be able to use email, a browser, etc. for the entire day); maps/GPS is iffy; I think there are some interface design flaws.*

I used to have an iPhone 3G. I thought it was great.

I switched to VM for the plan -- $25/month for 300 minutes, unlimited text and data ($40/month for 1200 minutes).

Honestly, though, these problems haven't really bothered me too much. I've found that for $25 or $40 a month it's fine with me if the experience isn't "perfect".

*My friend also experiences these same problems
Is it possible the company may not have more than 6 months of runway? 1000 hours couldn't possibly be a well-scoped amount of work. You're not being given the security or compensation a full-time hire deserves OR the finite scope a contractor deserves. Even if you believe in the company and think the 5% is/will be worth something, consider what specifically you're being asked to do and be very clear with expectations. I'd also break up the agreement into smaller projects, with both cash and equity if you want equity, so that you have the opportunity to part ways on good terms instead of an all-or-nothing equity lump.
I've heard a variant of this as "The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
I wouldn't say off-base. I think we just differ on a few key assumptions, like how effective efficient markets are, how dishonest some people are, how easy it is to prove accounting manipulation and real cheating even with open books, and the subtle manipulations people could rationalize, etc.

But you have interesting ideas and presented them diplomatically, and I like heretical thinking, so have some upvotes.
That's a good point. I would imagine software engineering should be a core competency of every YC startup.
But as a general principal, you can't reliably or consistently do this in a dynamic language in any sort of guaranteed fashion, which was implicit in the original statement being refuted.

Even with a runtime check, you still CAN pass in a bad value, and the program will just fail, either locally or globally.

(Not to mention that the paragraph immediately following the refuted statement starts with 'Now I am fully aware that “the compiler can optimize this away”, at least in some cases, but to achieve this requires one of two things (apart from unreachable levels of ingenuity that can easily, and more profitably, be expressed by the programmer in the first place)...')
The rule of thumb with contracting is to take your base salary, divide by 1000, which becomes your hourly rate.

This roughly coincides with paying your own benefits and 1/3 of annual downtime. Not that you're planning for 1/3 -- it's risk adjustment.
Based on wmf's comment, I wonder if a more specialized role would make sense?

Ops guy?
> Besides, the fear is a real consequence of such disasters.

I was thinking the same thing. Fear/anxiety/depression/despair are predictable, measurable and likely unavoidable.
That's really no excuse. Don't go on 2-3 hours of sleep a night if that means you can't treat people around you with respect. Or, at least, don't venture out among people who don't understand and appreciate the situation you're in.
Using CDMA in the US and GSM in the rest of the world would mean different hardware. Were they ever seriously considering that?
Yeah, it's just a way to better visualize your JSON data so it becomes more readable in a glance.
flipacoin: what is your email so we can contact you to help?
Lies, damn lies and statistics... :-)

In the green area, it says that doses where as high in some places, but much lower in other places. So presumably on average they were low, which doesn't help much if you accidentally live in one of the places where radiation is/was high.
So… what do you think of ycombinator terms?
It sounds like a very cool idea, I think the way to do it is as a value add. Everyone who signs up gets a free account and can then upgrade. It costs the ISP nothing, allows them to market on it, and is pure lead gen for dropbox.

Do not try to integrate into the billing system on Canadian ISPs, I have experience with two of the major providers and it's a nightmare to say the least. I managed to find $3 million in revenue with a couple perl scripts and the expect module. Let's just say you're dealing with operating systems where TCP/IP is optional.

If you really want to pursue it drop me a line, I may be able to put you in touch with the right people.
Yeah, a bunch of those are very much accessible to middle-class people. I think I stopped worrying about mismatched socks and just went all-white when I was around 6. A bunch of Googlers (even ordinary SWEs hired post-IPO) use maid services, because their time is worth more than the money it costs to hire them. A few even frequent outsourcing websites for personal-assistant sort of things like researching major purchases.
For myself it goes one of two ways, I can actually write the layout on a text editor or I like to go to the park when hardly anyone is there and just walk around. It takes my mind off the problem, thus leading to a solution I never thought I would have gotten.
If you are expecting a relatively low chat volume but more than 20 conversations per month, you might find My Customer Cloud's (http://mycustomercloud.com) pay-per-use plan a good option. We also offer SMS chat in addition to website chat.
Very nice, easy to read, and provides a good visual reference for relative scale.
I realised what it was almost immediately, and then read the article because I thought it was clever.
$165k total comp I buy; that factors in bonus, medical, etc. Base salary would be $130-140k or so which is reasonable for (truly) senior engineers.
I think you misunderstood - I didn't say the device would have different resolution, just a smaller screen size if it saved costs. I also qualified it with "an inch smaller at most" so that UI would continue to work at 1024x768. A small change in screen size will not affect the usability of touch interface.

I agree with you, changing resolution would be a huge mistake (unless it's doubled).
"Have a Hacker Founder?" While that is a great idea if it happens to work out that way, what about "Hire a Hacker/Architect"?

Sometimes you don't meet anyone you want to be a co-founder. If that's the case and you are able to raise the funds to pay a good coder what they're worth, then hiring the right person should be an option.
A functioning economy doesn't just lay people off, it finds ways for them to be productive in other occupations. The point of unemployment isn't for people to sit around on their ass all day, it's so they can be freed up for work that is more valuable in the long run.
What this guy is saying about the European mobile market is mostly false. In Europe you choose your phone around what carrier you have. It works the same way it does in the US where you have a choice of phones based on what your carrier is offering, the phone is locked to the carrier, and you cannot switch without a penalty. The only difference between US carriers and European ones are that the concept of buying minutes is just coming to Europe and most phone companies have very similar offerings of phones, just one of the reasons that make the mobile market there highly competitive.
Paying $10,000 for design work at early stage is lunacy. I solved the problem by:

1) Reading the first 100 pages of the Non-Designers Design Book (http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Typographic-...).

2) Using CSS grid systems (e.g. Blueprint) and CSS abstractions (such as Compass) to ease the design process and minimize cross browser tomfoolery.

3) Visiting http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ and browsing lists such as "best minimal designs" and then slicing and dicing parts from my favorite pages together.

End results: www.bolivianexpress.org, www.oxbridgenotes.co.uk

Your end result might not win any awards, but hey you'll have $10,000 more in the bank.
It would be nice -- after the deadline is done -- to have stats about the applications ; i.e. how many applications have been submitted, how is the distribution of application submissions by time/date, geolocation, etc.
More discussion on this sad story can be found here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2346908
Why Women Rule The Internet (by Aileen Lee of Kleiner Perkins)
While reading this my mind pictured a scenario at a booth at Buck's restaurant of Woodside, CA. I've had my fair share of investor meetings/coffees there and it immediately came to mind.

(Scoble talks about why Buck's is a landmark of SV: http://scobleizer.com/2010/10/04/silicon-valley-places-that-... )
Of all peoples in the world, honestly I would cut the Japanese the most slack for being fearful of nuclear. We did drop two nuclear bombs on their cities, after all.
In the article I mentioned that Dropbox would have to source some costs in infrastructure. In my opinion, Dropbox with your ISP would be more beneficial for multiple accounts. Dropbox could have a control panel for ISPs to link their customers to which would allow a MobileMe-esc division of the available space. The ISP could provide Dropbox with the assigned IP address (hashed, of course) so decisions regarding the use could be handled appropriately. Outside of your ISP connection, you'd have the same access with the same experience.
I like http://jsbeautifier.org/
I have heard of companies that actually have their secretaries weigh in on what candidate should receive job offers based on how the secretary was treated when no one was looking.
Is there a JSON microformat for marking strings as URLs which the user agent should be able to follow? 'Cos that's all that's missing from making this sort of thing a generic REST client.
Thats my point - its very useful with SSDs, because you don't need all the RAM, because SSD is so fast at random seek.
I thought this part on Dunbar Numbers was particularly interesting:

"Perhaps none of this is surprising. Women are thought to be more social, more interested in relationships and connections, better at multi-tasking. There is also anthropological research to back this up. Dave Morin of Path introduced me to Dunbar’s Number, proposed by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar. The number is the theoretical limit of how many people with whom one can maintain stable relationships (thought to be 150). But Dunbar’s most recent research shows there are different numbers for women than men—that women are able to maintain quantitatively more relationships within every ring of closeness than men. Knowing that is an important factor if you want to build and stoke social network effects. More female users will likely help your company grow faster."