skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ruby str.scan for YC application word count
The YC application guide suggests that we answer each question in less than 120 words. Which should probably be taken as, please be kind, we have a lot of reading to do.

For those 1-2 answers where you do approach 120 words give the following a try in irb:

"the hipmunk for property management".scan(/\w+/).size
adobe.com
apple.com
google.com
microsoft.com
facebook.com
Not sure of your background or skill set, but Heroku is hiring like crazy. We're now owned by Salesforce.com but that relationship is as hands-off as you can imagine. I think we've got the best of both worlds (startup & big company). Take a look at jobs.heroku.com or send me your info if you're at all interested. Did I mention we're remote-friendly? b [at] heroku.com
The reality of being dependent on other people. It's not cowardice if that's where your next meal comes from. Try a bit of sympathy here?
We were Cingular customers, then AT&T bought them. It was the only wireless carrier that offered a good signal where we lived. Slowly over some time after that happened, the signal started to get worse and come and go like with the other carriers we tried previously.

I'm not sure I'm trying to make a point, but I do not know what AT&T did with the Cingular. Did it use it's network? Did they just engulf it to remove the competition? Maybe someone else more knowledgable of this ordeal knows.

How will AT&T use T-Mobile after they acquire them? What becomes of the T-Mobile network that will soon by AT&T's network?
As pointed out in a comment on the original, this is a well-known source of holy wars.

The interesting bit is that this argument is one of the sides of an equivalence. Dig up the old archives of LtU,

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/classic/lambda-archive.html

and search for the big threads. This direction of the argument (dynamic languages are static languages) was made most forcefully, in my recollection, by Frank Atanassow.

However, the other direction _also_ applies: static languages are dynamic languages. This was first pointed out in LtU, to the best of my memory, by Kevin Millikin, here:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/100#comment-1197

Someone ought to write up the old days of LtU holy wars somewhere. They taught me more about programming languages than everything I ever read anywhere else.

(edit: minor wording)
The YC application guide suggests that we answer each question in less than 120 words. Which should probably be taken as, please be kind, we have a lot of reading to do.

For those 1-2 answers where you do approach 120 words give the following a try in irb:

"the hipmunk for property management".scan(/\w+/).size
I think the bigger problem is because, like your aware, that you would need a lot of capital to compete with the major telco/cell companies like the ones listed, it would be more reasonable to create a company that requires less funding by starting with a smaller market to fine tune the company and then seek out larger investors. The problem with this is that even though you won't be initially concerned about the competition from Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, and Tmobile as you would be applying yourself to a less mainstream (aka: different) market, there are still many competitors that have 'fixed' the complaints about the big companies who have a head start over you (ie: Boost Movile, Cricket, even Virgin Mobile). So unless you have an idea superior to these smaller upcoming companies, it will be a very difficult industry to enter in to and raise capital for.
AT&T to Buy Deutsche Telekom T-Mobile Unit
The only statically typed part of Obj-C is the C part, while the Obj-C types are themselves dynamic.
My experience is limited to Germany, but I had absolutely no problem buying an unlocked Android phone and putting in a prepaid SIM. There are at least a dozen major prepaid providers (resellers of the four networks, but mainly e-plus) offering rather cheap prices (I pay 15 Euro/month for 5GB of data). I can move between carriers at a whim, no contracts.
A weekend chance for entrepreneurs New Zealand
I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, and treat the assholes as outliers. It's too easy to assume the worst, but that's what a lot of people do these days. It's kind of sad.
Yes. Basically it works by using the class hierarchy to define types. And w/ subtype polymorphism you get new types that are also classified under their base types. And with dynamic you now get the ability to join the "uber type" and be classified dynamically.
Radiation is not a static. If a particle happens to decay at your detector when it is detecting, you'll get a massive spike. As the radiation changes between hours, places and the specific isotopes decaying, it's near impossible to get fast and accurate results for average dose recieved.
Event details can be found here: http://auckland.startupweekend.org/
In certain Ethiopic languages, sarcasm and unreal phrases are indicated at the end of a sentence with a sarcasm mark called temherte slaqî or temherte slaq (U+00A1) (¡), a character that looks like the inverted exclamation point.[1]

Make the check out to my name.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation#Temherte_slaq...
"Oil and coal and nitroglycerin have caused similar destruction, yet you don't see comments like yours about them.."

Well, perhaps because my comment did not concern the very real dangers of these things but rather concerned the very real and irrational fear evoked by nuclear power.

What does "honestly" mean in these circumstances???

---> However nuclear power acquired it's stigma, the question is whether any proponents of it has a plan for removing that stigma.
In the field of open source, a good indicator is whether an event costs something. The free ones are full of people interested in having beers and talking about code. The expensive ones have suits discussing leveraging strategic synergies of converging core competencies, or whatever.

In Europe this means that great events to have interesting conversations include Fosdem, the Desktop Summits, etc. I'd love to hear what events in US are like that.
I'm the one who posted up the job ad, and the who wrote the blog.

As @ig1 said (from coderstack.co.uk), the salary is not that far off; £38K goes a lot further in Leeds than in London.

Maybe "Middle-Weight iPhone Developer" would have been better.
> Seeing as WebM/VP8 is only supported on Android really, and won't be supported on other platforms that use these chips (WP7, chinese linux phones), it's a gamble to get them into the mainstream chips. Space on a die is extremely valuable - for example, nVidia left the NEON FPU off their implementation of the ARM A9 in the Tegra2, to the detriment of quite a few workloads, for the main reason of shrinking the chip to maintain high volume and lower cost.

Luckily Android is the most popular smartphone platform. WP7 and unnamed "Chinese Linux Phones" aren't market makers like Android is.
There's nothing wrong with being civil, at any income. Being a dick just because you can makes you (wait for it) -- a dick. I mean, if that's your ambition, by all means, go for it.

The reason I asked though, is that I personally wouldn't want to work with someone who told me 'what I wanted to hear' just because they were dependent on me. You should be able to express your thoughts at any income level, but yeah, there's an art to how that message can be delivered.

"I think we need to rewrite module x. It's too slow."

"Fuck you boss man. Rewrite your own damn module. I'm going to rewrite module Y, which is REALLY the slow one." - makes you a dick.

"We'd probably get more bang for the buck by rewriting module Y first. I think that's where the performance issues really are. After that, why don't we see where we stand?" - is an honest answer, and scores you points.

"Yes sir master boss man sir. I will rewrite module X all day long." is 'what they want to hear', and also, a completely worthless answer.

The point being, having a valid opinion isn't a luxury of the rich. Being able to say 'fuck off' might be, but unless you're independently wealthy, you likely still have customers, or board executives, or SOMEbody that warrants being civil to. There's no value in being a dick for the sake of it.

If it seems like I'm coming down hard on you, don't. I'm just saying what I feel. Also, I'm not even remotely rich. I could have misinterpreted the situation entirely.
Regular exercise works wonders.
Agree. The take-aways are:

- Recruitment agencies that play dirty do so because they are unable to add real value. Avoid at all costs.

- Offer the right salary for the job, and you might have more luck.
In much the same way, though, the classification of bats as mammals is something one dude came up with, while human language naturally evolved to call them birds. Which more accurately identifies their pedigree?
We've had great productivity gains since 1975, but all of the benefits have gone to 1% of the population...

This is simply false. Standard of living has increased dramatically since the 70's. Houses are a LOT bigger: http://www.realtor.org/RMODaily.nsf/pages/News2007032701?Ope...

Unlike 1970, the bottom 11% have flush toilets: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cf...

The benefits of increased productivity have helped everyone consume more. It's only increases to CPI-adjusted income (which wildly overstates inflation http://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/boskinrpt.html ) which is concentrated at the top.

I won't address your complaints about American vs European values, or what I think (but I'm not completely sure) is an attempt to invoke Godwin's law by comparing Republicans to Nazis (or Communists?). Not sure if "middle of last century" refers to the 40's, 50's or 60's.
True, but I don't think it would be any more than the support provided for personal web space. The big difference of course is that Dropbox is much better, more user friendly and much more enjoyable as it is available from your desktop instead of FTP clients.

I also think Dropbox's own support system far surpases the support that most ISPs have for personal web space.
I got such an email from Google. I even responded. I didn't hear back. Fortunately, my response cost me little time, and the invitation itself is still good for my ego.
Your assumption is the natural order of computation are digital computers. I think some will argue that type systems are inherent in the world. Mass has a type, velocity has a type. mv has a type that is a function of mass and velocity.

Computation is about expressing the type system that is inherent in the computation. Modern computers not having types are an artifact of their implementation, but not of computation per se.
No, in broad thrust it is correct. What needs separating out is contracts vs hardware, and prepay vs monthly billing.

Smartphones have historically needed handset subsidies to be attractive to consumers, so they tend to be associated with monthly billing and have locked hardware - but locked for the duration of the contract. After the contract has run out, you are then free to ring up your contract provider and have your phone unlocked. You can then swap out the SIM, unlike what you can do with e.g. a Verizon handset. Alternatively, you can visit your local disreputable phone shop and get your phone unlocked directly (i.e. in violation of your contract).

The hardware itself, because of the SIMs and relative uniformity of radio bands, is switchable. This is key.

You're also wrong about the concept of buying minutes just coming to Europe. Business phone users under contract have long bought minutes. But most phones have been feature phones, and sold in prepay situations, which means that they are unlocked right from the get-go.

FWIW, when I got my first phone, it was an unused one that was rattling around in a drawer. All I needed was a SIM, which was a token purchase and came with call credit greater than its cost; these days, SIMs come free in the delivery box with online mail order purchases, just needing activation.
About your [1] ... dynamic languages can support multimethods (i.e. method overloading on steroids) so I don't get how a dynamic language can't do overloading based on return type.

The difference between a static and a dynamic language would be when this dispatch is made (compile-time versus runtime).
Please note that this is only an encoder, not a decoder, and therefore not what most seem to expect from the announcement.
Apropos:

The saying "It is not sufficient that I succeed. Everyone else must fail" has been associated with Larry Ellison so often that most people think it originated with him.

Actually, it came centuries ago with Genghis Khan. Ellison has referred to the quote in conversations, then laughed rather unconvincingly and tried to distance himself from the sentiment. But it sticks nonetheless.

http://www.forbes.com/2003/11/26/1126southwick.html
I've tried it across Oklahoma City and Dallas, and I got brilliant quality. (Except for a residential area in Farmers Branch (Dallas), but that's kind of a cell dead zone, as far as I can tell- Sprint gets horrible quality there too)
Google Chrome OS: Extended Use of the Cloud
This is perhaps one of the best things you learn by founding a startup, whether it succeeds or not. You have this freedom. You don't need to be rich to get it. You just need to be willing to go without income until you can find your next source of income.

Say my boss really hated me and fired me. So what? I would be in exactly the same place as when I took the job, except with several thousand dollars more in the bank, a lot more useful skills, and a few tangible accomplishments that I could use to get my next clients. I've been meaning to found another startup for a while now; this would be just the kick in the pants needed to actually make it happen.

After all, I went without an income for a year the last time I founded a startup, and nothing bad happened. There were plenty of jobs waiting when I folded it up (even though it was the dark days of late 2008 when everybody thought the economy was ending), I didn't go bankrupt or have to pay back massive debts, and people didn't look at me like a failure.

Immigrants have this same advantage, as long as they have that green card. If someone fires them, then they end up without a job, possibly without money, without anything but the skills in their head - which is generally exactly how they came to this country. If they made it before, they can make it again. The only problem is that many immigrants don't have that green card, so getting fired means getting deported, which sets them back all the way past their start point.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
"Honestly" means "without a strong effort to incite fear." People fear nuclear because they are told nuclear is scary, not because it has caused a relatively small amount of destruction.
I think it's rare to see JSON HyperMedia data formats in the wild, XML seems the preferred choice due to its use of attributes for metadata annotation.

Here's on of the few examples I've found that uses JSON:
http://restafari.blogspot.com/2010/10/evolving-hal.html
Along a similar line is one of my favourites: "if you lend a friend $20 and then never see him again, it was money well spent"
Those laws were more enthusiastically enforced then...
The most highlighted passages of Founders At Work by Kindle users
It also blows hiring. I was eating lunch with the CTO on my interview loop, and he was pitching me hard on the company. He treated the waitress (who gave us perfect service) so poorly that I instantly knew I would never want to work for this guy. Thinking back to every profoundly bad manager I've ever had (not bad in terms of 'ends' but bad in terms of 'means'), they all correlated with crapping on anyone they encountered in the service sector.
Really, a compliment to the Marines? You've decided to go from 'somewhat obliviously-overwrought metaphor' to 'self-absorbed foot-in-the-mouth'?
Although I dislike the use of XML in Ajax/SPA applications and very much side with Douglas Crockford in the JSON vs XML debate :)
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Heretical-Open-Source
Good points.

Equity (options) aren't anywhere near as popular in the UK as in the US.

Yeah, I'm not sure about the laundry list either. You have to start somewhere with these job descriptions, but it's a learning curve.
Consider how much the large telecoms in the US fund our politicians. I'm sure this will go through without a hitch. Sadly :(
Just out of curiousity: why do you think that was missing from the post? I thought it was very much there by the end.
We Live in a Google World
I agree with the author that it's probably best to learn rules before you break them, but is there any inherent value in things produced by breaking rules you know over breaking rules you don't know? Or is it merely that by knowing the rules you'll be able to break them to better effect?

Would a work of Shakespeare be less great if it were written by 1 of infinity monkeys?
Google LatLong: Sign up for imagery update alert
PyCon 2011: Threadless, Disqus and OpenStack Plenaries
Please, please don't refer to Picasso as a "surrealist."
so down-clocking means, losing a bit of its power?
Add mobile discussions to any physical object
How to add mobile discussions to any physical object via QR-code
The prevailing winds are to the NW. Presumably the smaller doses are for towns in other directions, but that would be a rather biased average.
You can define the term "functioning economy" in all sorts of ways. By michaelochurch's definition ("a competent person will pretty much never be involuntarily unemployed for more than 6 months"), the US economy seems to be functioning (more or less). By your definition, it is not. There is no point in debating definitions.

However, I do find your suggestion interesting. Would a "functioning economy" (by your definition) also not discard obsolete machinery? Or does your definitiongive human labor a privileged position relative to other inputs? These are all perfectly fine things to do. Taking different definitions doesn't change the underlying reality, I'm just curious about the thought processes leading to yours.
Microsofts Kid Corner to teach children about programming
That's a very good observation. If the fear of nuclear power came about because of the harm it had done, the Japanese should have hated it like crazy. And yet AFAIK they're generally much less cowardly than we are.
The advantage of a BSD style license over any version of the GPL, even LGPL, is that the developers don't have to worry about compliance, they can just focus on their design and code. That is the primary reason I prefer the WTFPL license; even if what I want to do is permitted by a more restrictive license, under the WTFPL I don't have to even spend any time or thought trying to figure out whether or not it is permitted.
HamptonHack, a summer opportunity for student-devs
We are a group of NYC students who have secured funding and found a house in the Hamptons for 4-6 weeks during the summer. We are looking for other creative students to join us and work on their own ideas.

This isn't an incubator or accelerator, and students with ideas (but not yet companies) are encouraged to apply. Talented coders will be provided with simple necessities (space, food, and mentors), and will be given the freedom to develop whatever they'd like in the comfort of a great environment and the company of great colleagues. There is no plan to take equity or make business agreements, only to support the growth of the NYC startup ecosystem.

apply @ http://hampton-hack.appspot.com
Isn't this a property of the implementation rather than the language, though? Couldn't you have a compiler option to keep the type tags attached to the bits, sacrificing some of the speed benefits of static typing but keeping the primary advantage of proofs/testing?
jMockups Can Now Automatically Create Detailed Specs Of Your Website Mockups
Yes, in fact, they approached Verizon about the iPhone before AT&T.
Some ISPs-- like Telenor in Norway, for example-- already offer a similar (but not identical) service.

Personally, I use Dropbox instead of the "Telenor Online Backup"-- and I can't say that the billing method has made much of a difference.
That's a very rough rule of thumb, because it depends a great deal on the tax regime you're operating under.
In particular, dynamicity is necessary whenever data live longer than the code manipulating them. If you want to be able to change the program arbitrarily while not losing the data you're working with, you need dynamicity. In dynamic languages, the data can remain live in the program's address space while you modify and recompile the code. With static languages, what you have to do is write the data into files, change your program, and read them back in.

Not completely true. While I don't know of many use cases for doing what you're talking about, there is at least one that I know of, which is debugging.

In the case of debugging, you can change code with static languages almost arbitrarily while the data stays live ine program's address space. Although one thing that is not possible to do, with current implementations, is change the type definition. But otherwise changes can be made to code w/ data never leaving main memory (I probably do this 10 times per day).

Now it is theoretically possible to also change type definitions, but that would require a notion of constructor that builds the new type from the old type. In some cases this can effectively just be an interface, then its really just a noop.
Don't tell everybody. It's a great way to identify people I want to avoid, and you ruin it by telling everybody.
Those are hardly typical employers writing typical mobile apps. Three of them write mobile operating systems, after all.
The trick is finding an effective way to include this in your story. YC isn't, or shouldn't, be your only incubator option and others will require you to communicate your story with very few words. (And just because YC doesn't require it doesn't mean that you shouldn't keep it in mind.)

I run an international SAR team (www.1srg.org) and kept forgetting that it was a startup. I've been trying to include that experience while not adding too many words. The resulting story is much tighter, and hopefully more compelling.

Invest in good prose....
Oh, the legendary ATI drivers.
How do you get that?

"Google yesterday released a version of its VP8 video encoder and decoder designed to be baked into hardware."
Interesting article. I'm basically a socialist and see everything through a Marxist lens, but it seems like everyone loses-- rich and poor-- when money is such a dominating factor in peoples' lives. Living in a stratified, money-centered society sucks no matter who or where you are.

What we should do is make society more like college, where people have a lot of choice in what they work on, and where successful people help the less successful people but one's level of success isn't seen as an important thing about oneself. I was "successful" in college (3.9 math major) and it wouldn't have been weird or awkward to sit at the same table as someone with a 2.7. I didn't even know what my friends' GPAs were, and I didn't care when I did know. Yet we live in a world where most people don't even have a single friend outside of their social class.
I would love to see twitter/facebook integration so you could have a shared folder with your social networks... i.e. napster with a legally defensible position.
Good point. And that's something I'm not terribly good at yet. I tend to use too many words when communicating. I need to learn to tighten things up a bit. :-(
The book is Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life. You're referring to the review's title. It's customary for editors to give witty titles to reviews. But can we please talk about the content instead?
Comprehensive Analysis: Google vs. Content Farms