skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Random thoughts:

1) Not everybody here is actively engaged on a startup. It's a common misconception that I fell victim to for a long time while I lurked. There are hopefully plenty of people to help you out on this that are either freelancing, between gigs, or what have you. Good luck.

2) Are you tied to Java? You may have better luck if you go language agnostic. I don't know if you're already entrenched, or what the decision was, but it doesn't seem like the most popular language around these parts.

I can't help, but I hope you get the guy you're looking for.
Java's younger cousin C# also has this with Select, Where and Aggregate. But sometimes the foreach and even the for loop actually makes more sense, in particular when dealing with very imperative algorithms or are not acting over a (full) sequence at all.

I'm usually only reading and not writing python but I think list comprehensions are more idiomatic. Based on some comments I've seen here I also kind of get the impression comprhensions are abused.
The issue isn't how you parse the query. The issue is how you choose to execute it.

I'm not sure what tptacek is thinking, but here is an important case where you really want the execution path to change.

Tables often have a very uneven distribution of data. This can mean that the right query plan will depend on the data provided. Consider the following query:

SELECT ...
FROM lease l
JOIN property p
ON p.id = l.property_id
JOIN management_company c
ON c.id = p.management_company_id
WHERE l.created >= ?
AND l.created < ?
AND c.name = ?;

Pretty straightforward query, right? Now here is the question, should the query plan start by filtering leases on date then flow forward to finally filter on the management company, or by getting the right management company and then flow backwards to filter on dates.

It turns out that there is no right answer. You want to start with whichever restriction eliminates the most records, quickest. If the date range is wide, we want to start with the management company. If the date range is narrow, we want to start with that.

So let us simplify our life:

SELECT ...
FROM lease l
JOIN property p
ON p.id = l.property_id
JOIN management_company c
ON c.id = p.management_company_id
WHERE l.created >= '2011-02-01'
AND l.created < '2011-03-01'
AND c.name = ?;

There is still no right answer! Let's suppose some company, call it 'AIMCO', has a huge number of properties with a lot of lease volume while other companies generally have 1-5. Then it is better to filter on dates first for 'AIMCO', and better to filter on the company first for anything else. Getting the order wrong gives an order of magnitude performance difference. (This is a real life example. I really did have a bug that basically read, "Make this report run for AIMCO." And this was exactly the problem.)

Most databases will pick one query plan and go with it. But Oracle allows you to turn on Adaptive Cursor Sharing. With this it will analyze the data, see that AIMCO should get special treatment, and actually execute a different query plan if you passed in 'AIMCO' than if you passed in something else.

So now you have a data dependent query plan.
Just so you know, before clicking on the link, it's just an online commercial about yet another bottled water product.

I thought she'd step in and make a point about how she could convince us that water is a precious resource, joking that she didn't need any data to back up her claim because she's just too hot for data.

Nope. Nothing like that. Just a mindless commercial, trying to be funny with self-references to being viral and all. Jennifer Aniston is hot, though ... so maybe it's worth watching. =)
Protip: If you find someone to buy an iPad, don't delay giving it to him till the day of the launch. Lesson Learned :)
Blizzard Entertainment: a 20 year retrospective
We tried creating an Old Spice type commercial. http://www.youtube.com/user/whiteyboard#p/a/u/0/JUi2bLcryfc
If you're paying that much for non-targeted advertising, you might as well just get junk traffic (it's cheaper).
Pardon me if this is a dumb question: how do I hookup Rails (3.x) with it?
I realize Google is averse to endeavors that might necessitate a customer service department... but in my opinion if Google bought it and invested a few billion into infrastructure improvements and discounting, it could potentially offer some incredible products with bundled 4G, etc.

Google is one of the few companies that could really benefit from doing analytics on all the call and internet traffic data, and I don't predict a future world in which people happily pay $30/month for each connected device they own.

Google has the chance to define how the game is played and leap ahead of the competition (mostly Apple) by creating a product and service mix that Apple's carrier parters will refuse to match.
Well, if you don't want to work with the whole sequence, you can filter it.
But yeah, in those cases and some others, the for loop may be more idiomatic and better performing.
My point was only that there are many ways to fail when achieving "graphical perfection" is included among your goals for a game. Performance sucks, the world is shrunken, gameplay and story suffer; these are just examples. As always, "something's gotta give" and when you decide it can't be graphics, things that are far more core to the game experience end up on the chopping block.
check out the launch statistics!

http://hoursales.com/images/LAUNCHDAY.jpg

Its a start :)
Warner Bros to rent movies on Facebook
One lie after another:

- "Is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed?" : Capitalism greed has been powered and carried to present levels by the capitalist system. Indigenous societies ran mostly on a community of people working together to satisfy the community's needs. There was an "ours" instead of a "mine". Socialist societies (when implemented correctly, nor Russia or China are) are an example of the pursuit of a "common wellbeing" rather than a "only my wellbeing".

- Citing Einstein as an "individual achievement" is incorrect, to say the least. Of course he was a genius and achieved a lot on his own, but most of these scientific achievements are performed through a team of colleagues, not by a "lone cowboy".

- All of his remarks point to a unregulated market, which was the seed of the 2008 crysis. For more information, see the "Inside Job" movie. There's no need to say anything else about that. I think the facts speak for themselves.

- "Do you think american presidents reward virtue?" And do you think american enterprises reward virtue? Or do they reward friends and family instead?
Sleep while you can. I've heard stories about newborns who sleep 8 hours at night, but I've never personally seen it. I hearken it to the yeti.

The system that worked best for sleep schedules for us was splitting duties. Mommy was on 'input', i.e., feedings, and I was on output. It gave Mommy a sense of relief (because she will almost certainly feel overburdened) for me to take the baby, even if just for a short time.

Clean the house -- your wife will appreciate every single thing that she doesn't later have to do.

If you cook, try to cook enough that there will be leftovers. Even better, if you can make any re-heatable meals that your wife can find and reheat during the day, that'll be gold.

As for the actual child-rearing, the only advice I can think of particular to me that seems to have worked is that we never spoke 'baby-talk'. We always spoke in full English. Anecdotally, we believe that contributed to our daughter's ability to speak significantly younger than expected.
Showing that one developer makes more money on Android doesn't really prove anything. There are more games for iOS than Android so logically the games on Android should be making more money.
Those are called Safe Haven laws, and every state has them in some form or another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe-haven_law
As beautiful as this demo is, I think the push for realism has harmed the game industry more than it has move it forward. One of the few developers in recent memory that has managed to focus on both visual fidelity and gameplay is Bioware with the Mass Effect series; for the most part most developers aren't this successful and end up producing beautiful but lifeless, dull games.

Also consider that producing art assets for an engine like this is a huge undertaking and adds a substantial cost to development. Publishers are less likely to take risks with innovative concepts given film like budgets, increasing the tendancy to stick to formulas that they know offer a good ROI. The "hollywoodisation" of the games industry hasn't had much to offer me as a gamer, and increasingly I find more enjoyment with wee indie offerings like Minecraft over the AAA titles.
I think you could replace C++ with many, many things involving computers in that sentence.
How is this a bad law or dumb? It seems pretty reasonable that people shouldn't be allowed to bug their ex-spouses houses.
There's a saying that the one law that always passes is the law of unintended consequences.
It seems like the more horsepower that these consoles/video cards have, the more opportunity exists to create tools that create part of the graphical experience. IE a toolset that handles creating realtime dynamic forests or cities or hair etc
Yes I'm talking about being able to stop early for one example. Or if the thing you are dealing with is not actually a sequence for another.
bill: i recall viewing a startup school 07 attendee wiki and being impressed with your self description. i think you went by "bill bland" back then. good to see quality people doing great work.
I'm all for protecting privacy, but this looks like it might have some unintended consequences.

1. It might give US companies (those without presence in EU) a leg up on their European competition.

2. It introduces legal uncertainty when using cookies. Cookies clearly have other uses than tracking users (my very first web app, an web-based dictionary, stored user-configurable display settings (like color) in a cookie because it was the simplest way that somewhat worked). They seem to recognize that in the bill and allow exemptions for "strictly necessary" cookies, but who's to decide what is and isn't necessary? Hence, uncertainty.

3. There are work-arounds. Cookies are just a way to associate a piece of data with a user, to work-around stateless nature of HTTP. There are other technologies that allow that: I can encode data in the urls instead, I can use flash storage, html5 storage. Smart people will invent ways to achieve the same functionality without using cookies. Will legislation be updated every time comes up with a new way?

4. It might lead to "popup blindness". It's a well know fact of humans interacting with computers: when a computer shows an information and asks for a decision, most people don't bother to read and comprehend the information and make plausible, not informed, choices to dismiss them.
Github for product design
A short time ago, there was a lively discussion here about getting designers to contribute to open source projects:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2267861

Yesterday, we saw an example of an independent contributor "mocking up" his ideal notification interface for the iPhone:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2298585

Question: Is there a tool that would make it easy for multiple folks to collaboratively design stuff and iterate on a design? Github for product design? Multiple designers suggesting things for one feature, and some way to collaboratively edit stuff, with history on the decision making process?

As a "product guy" myself, I am constantly designing stuff using Balsamiq mockups. I'm eager to use the forthcoming myBalsamiq, which seems to have some group / collaboration features. But I think I am suggesting something far beyond what Balsamiq is working on.
what ad service did you use for the reality star ?

for those talking about the campaign or the non targeting, I think the example he mentions about using another service is relevant.

I'm not familiar with MyLikes, but are the influencers that are used for advertising, are they able to be chosen by the companies, like ad.ly ? How transparent is the process of what influencers are running the ads ?
I don't agree with your opinion at all. Your claim that coffeescript is somehow 'better' than javascript is just false. You prefer one syntax, fine, but don't assume that it is somehow 'better'. I prefer Javascript. I do not prefer Coffeescript at all, and I get javascript, and have gotten it for 14 years.
With 12,000 views it looks like a far more engaging campaign... and probably cheaper. Curiously, what were your landing page/sales rates from this?
Why would you even do that? You could just dynamically generate serialized JS and load it with CoffeeScript.
Clickable links:

Getting designers to contribute to open source projects:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2267861

Mockup of "ideal" notification for iPhone:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2298585

myBalsamiq:
http://balsamiq.com/products/mockups/mybalsamiq
I've gotten the impression that there are, in a sense - in python, list comprehensions are usually preferred over for-loops in places where you would use map and filter, and the most common use cases for fold/reduce are covered by functions like sum and join. List Comprehensions also tend to be preferred over higher order functions, perhaps for readability, but also, in python 3, the higher order functions return generators, which don't always play nicely with mutable data.

For-loops are still suitable for actions (which mutate state or for some other reason need to be evaluated in order) - you see this in Haskell, too, though, with Control.Monad's forM_ and the like.
you should try it, impressive MMO for mobile.
Totally. It often becomes a trade-off of doing an alright job, e.g. approximately, optimizing the loss you're really interested in vs. doing a great job optimizing a tangentially related but much less appropriate loss.
This is a copy of the second half of
http://dawnwires.com/politics/saudi-king-to-buy-facebook-to-...
that is a humor article.
FWIW: With Socialcam, Eric implemented unit tests for the API (which powers the client apps), and initially for the website but later we decided against them for the site. Having them on the API definitely has been worth the initial cost as the backend has needed to be very stable for client development, and they are easily testable.

Tim, perhaps you should have made your point more vigorously when you were here :). That said, I think that many / most of our projects fall into the bus count 1, cowboy coder hacking (at least, initially), so we've been able to move fast by not having them.
Oh nice, he beat YouTube to a seek feature that's been in QTSS for a decade.
It's still being worked on by the community, there is a build from 2011-01-27.

https://mozillalabs.com/ubiquity/2010/03/10/community-mainta...

I still use and love this tool every day.
The best way to get absolutely top dollar for your used machine is to offer a high value package of hardware and software and advertise it in a persuasive and aesthetically pleasing listing. I've had tremendous success with this method selling my old Macs.

First you'll want to clean the machine: Remove all the dirt, dust, and hand oils. Make sure that the hardware is as clean and close to new as you can make it. Of course, you've probably already overwritten the drive by mounting it in target disk mode and using Disk Utility. When you reinstall the OS, name the user "Admin".

Next, take some well composed, focused and tightly cropped photos of the machine against an uncluttered background. If you have any accessories you can include in the sale (which will really help differentiate your listing on Craigslist) be sure they're clean and photograph them too. Host all your photos somewhere you can hotlink to from Craigslist, so that your prospective buyer can view them in glorious hi res. Be sure to photograph any scratches or dents.

Write an easy to read, factual and persuasive ad describing the main features and benefits of the package you're offering, and the general history of the machine. Include details about its warranty and repair history. Point out any damage, scratches or dents. Include the original retail value and purchase date. Link your images. Price it a little higher ($50-100) than you're comfortable asking. Post!

Write up or download a simple bill of sale to use for the transaction.

It's best to screen your buyers through email and then speak to the motivated ones on the phone. Get a feel for if they're serious, and whether they have the cash on hand. I prefer to agree on a price before meeting (another reason for the hi res pics), and will usually knock off that extra 50 or 100 bucks over the course of negotiating over email. Accept only cash, and meet in a public place like a cafe for the sale. Ask to see their license when they sign the bill of sale, and show them yours too. Bring a nice shopping bag in which they can carry their new used computer away.

Bottom line: Most listings look like crap, many machines sold are dirty, and some buyers are insecure. Take some time and you will get both a good price and make someone's day by providing a good value and experience!
Likely eBay. Which is why you should never sell your stuff to Gazelle. They consistently, ahem, ALWAYS underprice items.

The best tip for finding what the value of your item is to sign in to ebay (yeah, make an account). Search for your item, then click in the Advanced search options to the right and choose to view Completed Listings.

Make sure to filter by auctions only that have ended most recently. Those prices are often the best you are going to get, and you can average out similar listings to get an average price.
Cyberduck Adds Windows Version, Azure, and Dropbox
Steve Jobs uses "post-PC" to drive a brand wedge between the previously dominant Microsoft Windows/X86 platform - the PC, and IOS/ARM - the iPhone & iPad. He wants customers to regard the "PC" as old-fashioned, behind the times, and unable to catch-up. Post-PC is a brilliant marketing slogan that fully illustrates the positioning of the Apple mobile platform brand.

Microsoft and Intel are indeed faced with the innovators dilemma. Both are fully constrained by their legacy product lines, which respectively define their brands. Intel went so far as to sell off its ARM CPU business to Marvell in 2006. Intel's Atom, even if eventually energy competitive with ARM, will face commodity pricing rather than monopoly pricing. Likewise Microsoft already has ARM-compatible Windows CE and Windows Mobile. These do not run typical cash-cow Windows applications. In order to make the leap to the Post-PC era, both Microsoft and Intel must leave their cash cows behind, or worse, participate in their decline.

We are at just the beginning of the Post-PC era, and I'm very excited about the multitude of sensors and potential actuators that can be coupled with, and enhance the usefulness of, smartphone and tablet devices. The GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, speaker, cameras, and NFC are just the starting point. Expected in a few years are barometric pressure, humidity, and temperature sensors. Most of these don't these make sense on a PC. Furthermore, smartphones and tablets will mesh with each other and with the increasingly intelligent devices encountered in our everyday environment.

The Post-PC era is additionally characterized by responsive cloud services that offset the limited hardware capabilities of ARM mobile devices. For example, Google is rolling out a real time speech translation app that simply wraps up the microphone input, translates it at a server farm, then immediately sends the translated speech waveforms to the speaker output. Your Post-PC device can hear and talk. Likewise, imagine what happens when the video camera output is processed by a powerful cloud server - we have product and facial recognition, and beyond that I expect general vision capabilities to arise.
This might be a very important upgrade for Foursquare. Of course, my views are biased, being in SF and with many of my friends heavy foursquare users.

The release brings to focus some uses of foursquare that were only tangentially possible:

- What coffee shop in [neighborhood I only occasionally visit] do my friends prefer.
- Searching for a bar similar to my neighborhood bar in Seattle when visiting.

- The rankings page was a pain to get to, and most people find it hard to understand what they meant.

- Once a mayor, mostly a mayor. foursquare has been changing the points and mayor mechanics so often, that it seems almost random. Hopefully they will extend mayorships to be different titles. It seems they are starting with the different Loyalty targeting options for merchants.
Well when did we first start hearing news about the PSes 1-3, relative to their release dates? The PS3 was announced on May 16, 2005 (wow, that's so long ago!) and was released in Japan on November 11, 2006. That means that if a PS4 will be coming out on schedule, we should be hearing news very soon.
Thanks Kevin. I'll check Forrst out.
Two CEOs duke it out over Twitter & YouTube
This is very impressive, though I wonder how much of their success may be due to the significantly smaller amount of competing games on Android vs iOS?
Fair point. We have the finer details section under each item. How can we make that more clear?
1. As in you cannot easily reproduce, and it is a good, useful technology.

2. Yes, there are 3-4 different applications. Thanks, I know Sean, he is a good advisor.

3. It does need polishing but many seem to advice finding an early adopter who is open to new technology. I will definitely seek out early adopters.

4. As in if we had the last leg of product finished, we would be selling today and already making revenue. Instead I feel we are wasting time.
WhiteyBoard is a physical product. Get it on the shelves of Walmart, then use social media to build brand awareness. Otherwise, stick to intent based advertising like search ads.
just to clarify (I do _not_ work for Google):

Chrome includes password sync as part of Google Sync. Google Sync is not on by default.
I'm a new grad (PhD CompSci) looking for a job in Dublin - where did you advertise your position? Where would you suggest I look? Any tips?
Profitable, fast growing W11 company looking for someone to do administration / customer service
We're a looking for someone smart and ultra-responsible to handle administrative operations and customer service.

Responsibilities

- Administration - Handle basic accounting, paperwork, pay vendors, and
many misc. tasks.
- Answer customer emails, instant messages, and phone calls and resolve
their issues very, very quickly.
- Shouldn't be afraid of doing occasional sales.

Be ready for your responsibilities to grow with the company.

Requirements

- You should be morally offended by bad customer service.
- Able to juggle dozens of time sensitive tasks without missing details.
- Have a knack for organization.
- Patience & empathy for customers
- Ultimately you're someone who, given a goal, will find a way to
make things happen.
- You really want to work at a startup.
- Based in SF

To apply, send an email with "Customer Service Hero" in the subject with a resume and brief introduction to throwaway1222@gmail.com
The reality star was just a friend of my co-founder.
Early Stage Startups and The Dangers of Whale Hunting
I have had some success with glassdoor.com - it also at times has comments that can most euphemistically be called 'candid' (see Netflix: http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Netflix-Reviews-E11891.htm).
Goes almost without saying that Epic develops great game engines; however, IMHO, Crytek's cryengine at GDC was more impressive and has done a better job of rendering outdoor environments and foliage better than the Epic's Unreal engine; Unreal still has top spot in market share but I think Crytek will make significant gains in the next couple of years;

That said, Tim Sweeney is still a hero.