skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seriously? Trying to predict a tech trend that is 4 years out?
This is one of the best startup articles I have read in a while. Some real gems in there. The metaphor by Martin Fowler that the article mentions is particularly noteworthy.

Imagine you’re tasked with building a computer controlled gun that can accurately hit a target about 50 meters distant. That is the only requirement. One way to do this is to build a complex machine that measures every possible variable (wind, elevation, temperature, etc.) before the shot and then takes aim and shoots. Another approach is to build a simple machine that fires rapidly and can detect where each shot hits. It then uses this information to adjust the aim of the next shot, quickly homing in on the target a little at a time.

The difference between these two approaches is to realize that bullets are cheap. By the time the former group has perfected their wind detection instrument, you’ll have finished your simple weapon and already hit the target.
Excercise daily!
Some are famous for bad reasons, but many are famous because they are great. Fame gives you the ability to direct many people's attention where you like, which seems pretty valuable to me, no matter what you do.
What's the difference between this and Pricegrabber? "The difference between Sparkbuy and so many other shopping comparison sites is how it phrases your gadget requirements."
> None of this has relevance to the ability to compile to machine code. It does however, have implications for the efficiency of said code.

This is a tautology. You can always "compile" a script to machine code by just making all the generated code call back into the interpreter. The only point of compiling to machine code is if it can be more efficient than interpreting the code.

> Object has to dereference the speak function for its class, and then call it

That's exactly what the interpreter would have to do. So what are you gaining by ahead-of-time compiling to machine code, again?
Which is great until you discover that your needs can't be fulfilled by the ORM and you need/have to use SQL.
Can a society become unhappier with an increase in wealth?
first impression: too fidgety.
I hope this is the product of having your brother in law's second cousin's nephew do the work for you and not the result of paying someone. But... they probably paid someone for this.
My process was the exact opposite. I did my two technical interviews back-to-back on a friday afternoon (4-6pm EST, so late in the day), and had been accepted to the applicant pool within the hour, with a host matching interview being setup 30 minutes after that. I interviewed Monday with my host and his manager, and was told that they were willing to host me and were going to start the approval process for an offer. I had the official offer by the end of the week.

So in under a week, I went from initial interview, to official offer. This is by _no_ means typical (and my recruiter even commented on how unbelievably fast it was), but it _does_ happen.
Ask HN: Has anyone here dabbled in non-tech entrepreneurship?
Has anyone here dabbled in non-tech entrepreneurship? Can you share your experiences? In the end, what made you choose/not choose tech entrepreneurship?
If you've been lurking on HN for a while I suggest taking the many resources you've seen and hastily get into mobile app development. Of course my real advice is to just follow anything you're passionate about. If you love what you do you'll inevitably be good at it and people pay for things others are good at.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/EulerFormula.html
Great point how beyond the key roles of making money and hiring and firing a CEO basically has to take on the role that is most missing from the company at any point in time. If the company is heads down getting the product out the door, you're a product manager. If you are in the midst of a marketing launch, you are the VP of Marketing...
Sounds very similar to the section of The Pragmatic Programmer on "Tracer Bullets". There's an interview with the authors that has more discussion here -> http://www.artima.com/intv/tracer.html
I'm overweight and I blame myself for eating too much and not getting enough exercise.
> People seem to forget that running out of money is the #1 reasons startups fail.

Don't think this is true. #1 reason startups fail is the founders giving up.
IDC predicts Windows Phone will top Apple's iOS in market share by 2015
Thanks for the comments, we moved the news section up a bit more. Glad you like our implementation, if you have any feature requests let us know.
I use Spotify on OSX, and interestingly enough some ads get blocked by clicktoflash, which I use in Safari.
It depends on how the test was given. For example, did they ask you to write quicksort == you submit a version and then they grade it. If so I can imagine a lot of little mistakes... from the integer overflow issue (if they did pick a language), to off by one errors, to not handling empty lists, or the case where the item isn't in the list, or other errors that if someone were to say, "it doesn't work with this input" you could easily fix it, but if not given a chance for correction many could easily get wrong.
Regardless of whether you like what he writes, you can't knock the hustle here. Gruber found his audience and a way to monetize.
Not at all.

If you feel that you need a disclaimer, why not improve the post to the point where you don't need a disclaimer, before inflicting it on HN?

It's one thing to rant to friends over a beer, but at least try to go through a few drafts or reviewers before inflicting such nonsense on the internet, permanently. Maybe try to address the first level of obvious criticism?

Re: me ... I have 0 dollars in outside funding, and some number of users who like my work. Unless you're saying that games are ipso facto useless, I'm not sure how this is relevant.
Faster Interactions with Backbone.js
my rubric is, if they sell it at the gas station, it's not food.
Having done the internship application process this year, I believe that's the one he's talking about, yes. It basically asks you to rate skills on things relevant to Google, and give location preferences and such.

I don't think it was optional, though perhaps I'm mistaken and filled it out assuming it was required.
Like $40 million for a simple paywall.
Yeah, maybe the 100+ validation errors in the markup are like a honeypot for web designers too ... I've not seen 1x1 gifs for a few years now.

And leaking the MS SQL server errors and IIS errors are just adverts for MS (I only did genuine searches, "hotel" got me to an error page).

I'm sure the silly long names are part of the ruse too.

There is much that could be done with this site. Perhaps I could drop them a CV.
I'm starting to think the time-of-day you post on HN is critical

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2378099

Though admittedly this title is better.
It's not integer overflow that makes the problem difficult. It's off-by-one errors in the predicates (< vs. <=) and indexing operations (n/2 vs (n+1)/2).
Why did you go through the expense of marriage, to a woman you have to support, when you can't even support yourself?

This is not a troll, I genuinely don't understand why so many people make life choices like this.
Real World Haskell is also online, by the way, so you can check out the chapter on FFI right here:

http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/interfacing-with-c-the...

It walks you through making some basic PCRE bindings, which is a big enough example that they manage to touch on the important issues. It's a pretty good introduction, I would say, especially in the part that covers interfacing C strings with ByteStrings.
Worst. Spelling reform. Ever.
According to the WHO information it appears that deaths due to intentional injuries are relatively low in comparison to most other forms of disease and illness in Afghanistan:

http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/estimate...

Even when looking at Males 15-59. Though it should be noted these numbers are from 2004. Additionally, I really have no sense of how accurate these numbers are.
NoSQL  Netflix Talk (Part 1)
How to post an effective job listing
The top story right now is about a "highly profitable" YC company looking for a tech lead. That sounds exciting but the ad doesn't answer enough questions to be a useful ad. There are a few big items that the writer has left out. (I'm not looking for a new job, but it drives me crazy to see job postings that are missing such important details!)

Since Hacker News doesn't allow comments on job listings, there's no way to prod the author for more information. So, here's a plea for more information that would help people decide whether to apply to jobs listed here.

1. What do you do? You could be doing something social, or something super-technical, or anything in between. That makes a big difference when people think about their relevant skillset. I'd be terribly unqualified at RethinkDB, but maybe a lot more qualified at other YC companies.

2. Who are you? A little about the existing people would help someone know if there's any personality fit. Is the culture sales-driven or tech-driven? What's respected at the company, formal education or youthful enthusiasm? Are you in the "get something working quickly" phase, or "get something designed well" phase? Are you searching for product-market fit, or are you scaling up?

3. Where are you? You could be in Silicon Valley, or the east coast, or outside the USA. Even Silicon Valley is a big place, and someone living in the Mission isn't gonna want to commute to Los Gatos every day.
Copyright troll Righthaven's epic blunder: a lawsuit targeting Ars
Um: DropBox has an API. DropBox does version control. DropBox syncs.

Cloud Drive has no API yet. Doesn't do version control. Doesn't sync. (But it is half as much per GB as DropBox.) Oh and it has a half-assed media player.

The problem is that unless you give us 50GB+ for free, the space difference and cost difference are pretty much irrelevant.
How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing
Work At TechCrunch
You want to qualify your relationship with a founder based solely on the answer to a single question about a popular Hollywood flick?
This is a great article. I especially like this:

Here’s a seemingly paradoxical piece of advice for you: Listen to your customers, but don’t let them tell you what to do. Let me explain. Consider a feature request such as “GitHub should let me FTP up a documentation site for my project.” What this customer is really trying to say is “I want a simple way to publish content related to my project,” but they’re used to what’s already out there, and so they pose the request in terms that are familiar to them. We could have implemented some horrible FTP based solution as requested, but we looked deeper into the underlying question and now we allow you to publish content by simply pushing a Git repository to your account. This meets requirements of both functionality and elegance.
It looks like a personal shorthand to me.
Forrester yawns at Amazon Cloud Player
Komodo island is the new 7 wonders of the world Vote 7
IDC/Gartner and S&P/Moodys should be required to invest based on their projections. I imagine the amount of fluff coming out would drop significantly.
This is an important point. Don't be fooled when the outliers are the only ones left.
There's Always the Google Vortex
Kissing Steve Ballmer’s feet
Yeah, send me an email (see profile) and I'll try to let you know.
The perpetual use of military hardware might have something to do with life expectancy in these countries however. I think your counter point to the argument is valid, but you support it with a stat that is completely without context in this discussion.
FeeFighters was amazing when I was setting up my merchant services! They even wrote about my company http://bit.ly/h9sESp
Healthy food costs more per calorie. But most people with unhealthy food habits are fat, and therefore eat more calories than they need. Clearly they are not optimizing for cost.
War, especially when it lasts for a generation, causes a lot more than gun shot wounds.
I've experimented with Facebook a bit and it just seemed excessively expensive. I didn't try the CPC options, though, so may try those out.
I'd rather be a rich nobody than a poor rockstar. If you keep solving real problems, I'm sure you'll be fine.
The real issue is child morbidity. There are plenty of old people in most poor countries but if 10+% of the population dies before age 5 the average life expectancy get's far shorter.
I wrote fairly recently about SQL Injection in Python at http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/learn-sql-server/sql-injectio... .

I do not address web stacks directly there, but Python itself will happily let you use prepared statements, it is up to the programmer to take effective steps to prevent SQL Injection.
Thanks! I'm going to use this as a way to determine if the person I'm interviewing with is an uppity douchebag.
This, times 1000. The only reason it's so cheap to eat at McDonald's is because of subsidies given to industrial beef, corn, and soy.
discuss: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2360454
Here are a few obvious criticisms:

1) "Change the world" is a red-herring. There's a lot of very valuable and helpful work that people with a "change the world" focus will miss out on. A lot of people writing craplications believe they will change the world. It's a content-free sound-bite at this point. It doesn't translate into any world-changing behaviour.

2) The value of a thing has very little to do with how hard it is to make. This is a common trap that techies fall into: I worked really hard and didn't get rewarded while someone else spent a few hours and did get rewarded.

2b) If you're going to argue that we're incentivizing the wrong behaviours, well, that's an interesting argument that you didn't explore.

3) Unintentionally, your rant is analogous to the very apps you're criticizing. I.e. it seems you just kind of pooped it out. You apologize for pooping it out, but you don't do the things that could turn it into an insightful or useful article.

Just as various app stores are saturated with crap, news sites are saturated with random half-assed comments that would be funny over beer, but just clog the internets.
I think a better question would be based on having watched Pirates of Silicon Valley (but then again I'm old school)
Online game development Language
I have an idea of developing an online version of a game we play here in my country.I have never developed a game,but i have good experience in development.Which langauges do you recommend,if you have examples(of gamed developed using the langauge) wolud be better
The Inuit also traditionally live in the Arctic wearing Caribou and seal skin pelts. They are the hardest m-f'ers I've ever seen, and I can guarantee that a large part of their "health" is due to the tremendous amounts of energy used by the body just to stay alive.

Eat like an Inuit and live in Florida and you'll probably resemble something more like a manatee than a man.
Go ahead at full speed — the best time to start a startup is when everyone else is running away.
The part that made me sympathize with the twins was the way Zuckerburg lied to them - telling them he was working on their project, but actually working on his own. He purposefully led them on, so he could get a headstart.
Airplane-mode is your friend.

But why are carriers storing this tracking information for more than 24 hours, unless of course it's by government demand.
It seems like another indicator would be requiring anyone you want to share the idea with to sign an NDA. Unless you're sharing an already developed algorithm, or something as special sauce, the NDA just comes across as "My idea the important part here".
Echo the idea about the landing page, but I wouldn't spend the money on adwords. You've got a lot of resources through forums and friends to push your idea and a ton of blogs to reach out to.

Peldi from Balsamiq has a great primer on how to market a new start-up on his blog titled Startup Marketing Advice. Read. Implement. Learn. Rinse. Repeat.
For these types of decisions (picking co-founders, hiring, etc.) you want no false positives, which means that any legitimate red flag should be a deal-breaker.

The cost of passing on the right person is far less than the cost of saying yes to the wrong one (e.g. passing over a good biz dev guy who goes on to succeed at another start-up vs. hiring a jerk who ruins your business then sues you)
Show HN: PressBackup - cloud based wordpress backups
What was your methodology for getting freq.png?
I went through the Google process too and it didn't come out nicely.

First, I have had almost no actual CS lessons in my university, because it was more focused on general engineering and IT management than on code writing.

However, I've done quite a bit of code in various open source projects and I've touched quite many technologies...

I went through the sets of interviews, and I really seemed to work quite well, even if many design-patterns where unknown to me (I didn't know their names). But the last one wasn't the best one.

Therefore, I got the mail telling me that they got no positions for me, which I understood and accepted easily (I had another engagement at the time).

However, I dared to ask "why?". Was it my technical skills, my personal skills, my logic skills or the way I answered the process, the cause of my rejection?

They refused to even discuss about it, which is not even reaching the minimum of politeness I expect from a company. When they asked if they could keep my Resume, I told them to go away...

This recruitment process does not seem enough respectful for me and gave me a very bad opinion of the company.
A few quick SEO tips
There was a post a while ago on HN about how a very large of the people applying for a given job are in the bottom fraction of the total talent pool. Essentially, the good people get hired quickly (or are never looking for someone else to pay them in the first place), and don't apply for lots of jobs, whereas the people who don't get hired keep applying for other jobs, thus stinking up the statistics.
Wow, that's a great article. Perhaps even more interesting because of Github's growth in the three years since it was written.

I wonder if he didn't publish it because he started with the idea of publishing ten lessons. Might have been better to assign the number after the article was written.
I built and owned a nightclub, if you have anything specific--business related only-- feel free to ask away
I'm guessing ROT13
So we're giving HN friends a discount 50% off 3 months, use code: hnfriends

We built this as a competitor to Vaultpress by automattic. It backs up your uploads, themes, plugins, & db. Would love your feedback/suggestions.
Diapers.com and the the very specific ones are great but can't scale. So you sell diapers and do extremely well, can you sell baby powder? You can but at some point the name is overgrown. Color is cool and ambiguous enough
Great read, but I think that if the VCs can resist the temptation of investing too much too early there does exist a positive outcome.

We might just see feature development moving away from teams in big companies into smaller, independent teams. These will raise small amounts of money from angels and micro-VC's and get bought out en masse for mild sums by companies looking to add features and products.
http://infotrope.net/2007/07/31/how-not-to-write-a-perl-job-...
Metcalfe on the Social Bubble
I really hate spaghetti code, but that is because I'm a developer. The sad truth is that the reason a lot of developers like you are hired to work on this kind of team is that somebody was smart enough to release software quickly and make a business out of it...
There is some possibility that you eat too much because you are fat. It goes something like this, (details are surely wrong, but just so you get the idea. Google gary taubes for more info):

1. Your body is expecting a certain amount of calories at any point during the day which is either being pumped into your bloodstream from your fat or food in your gut.

2. Your fat doesn't work right, (probably because you eat too many carbs), and doesn't release enough calories, so you get hungry.

3. You keep over eating until you have enough volume of fat so that even though your fat doesn't work as well at releasing calories into your bloodstream, you make up for it by just having more.

4. Voila, you have reached homeostasis. Your body conspires to keep you at this weight. You are either hungry and thin or full and fat.

As for exercise, well, I can only offer up a personal anecdote. I lost 50 pounds. At first by starving myself with a calorie deficit and now I've figured out how to keep the weight off with the food I eat. (I no longer calorie count -- hooray).

During this period of weight loss I attempted to increase the amount I exercised to speed the process along. It didn't work. The only thing that moved the scale was either counting calories or eating a low carb diet, (paleo to be exact). If I had it to do over I'd just start with changing the things I eat, although because of years of calorie counting I'm now very aware of what I put in my mouth -- a good habit to have.

Edit: I do actually believe exercise can help you lose weight. I am currently training to race bikes. I go for very long rides (3-4 hours twice a week) to train my body to burn fat. This is critical for endurance sports. But I don't think it's realistic to ask everyone to become an endurance athlete.
from that link:
"Please note that in June, 1998, long after the exokernel was a working system, the exokernel CVS repository was discarded..."
Which makes me think his award comes long after his involvement in the project. What's the most up to date project to hack around with? Is this it? (the last tarball is dated 2000 and most of the pages on exokernals are dated 1998).
Yea, I'm thinking about the university route. I don't have a ton of money to spend (without making money through the site), so need to be pretty particular with advertising dollars. Trying be creative about other ways of getting the word out there.
In effort to spur some discussion please answer few questions in your mind:

When Microsoft took their first patent who was inventors and what it was for...

Great lets check answers
1986 (10+ years after founding), S.Balmer at al., ant they patented a book holder!
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT4588074

Next question how much does it cost to proceed with a patent litigation?

($3M to $10M)

And a multiply choice one:
Patent give you
a) protection
b) ability to attack someone

And the answer is... you know.

So patents are excuse to NOT do something rather then any help. When you will grow to really big company there will be other rules of the game. Check on Apple Nokia recent patent war and how Apple "did not infringe any of Nokia patents" and not paid royalty to most of the players in the field.

So if you want to start something that might infringe something-something go ahead and, on the way, get some patents on what you are doing if you have time to bother...
I'm asking this sincerely, but don't people from traditionally healthy Asian countries eat a hell of a lot of rice? That's my first thought every time someone mentions how bad carbs are. But I have trouble finding any non-antecdotal data.

I want to believe the obesity problem is more of a portion control thing, for example, when McDonald's opened, did a normal adult actually eat a hamburger and small fries for lunch instead of a big mac and large fries? But once again, I always have trouble finding any real data to verify my hypothesis.
Some companies refuse to discuss that on principle as a way to protect themselves from lawsuits. So you shouldn't take that too personally.
My blog helped me but mainly connections and returning clients. I do Facebook application development.
As far as I can tell both Zotero and Mendeley tackle the personal paper management space. Did they also move into being peer-review platforms?
You've heard of itunes, correct? Pandora? Grooveshark?