skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks, though "good" is subjective. (Especially here on HN.)
clickable: http://www.grexit.com/
because supporting additional browsers usually doesn't require an entirely new code base, compared to mobile platforms.
the title should have been: "Student accepted to MIT without high school degree thanks to his software code"
I wonder if comodo is an RSA secureid customer. Odds are they are.

Comodo revoked the certificates on the 15th, RSA announced their compromise on the 17th, but presumably rsa et al. were aware some days before the announcement.
* One practical question is whether you can do a _useful_ subset of your stuff as open source... if the open source part is worthless without the "proprietary icing" then nobody will care about it, so you get no value from open source.

* A related practical question of course is whether there are customers who will still want to buy the proprietary icing even though there's an open source useful subset.

* How hard is it for competitors to replicate your proprietary icing? Is the community likely to replicate it?

* One of the main competitive advantages of most open source companies is that the key upstream developers behind the project work for the company. Do you have these developers? If so others will be at a disadvantage when it comes to offering support and services.

* Do you want a business that is based on license fees or one based more on support and services?

* Do you have a good way to market the product and get a lot of people interested, other than through an open source project?

* Do you want to spend time on community building and ensuring outside contributors can be productive? Can you put development discussions in the open?
> "So stop networking, showing off and prancing around and start attracting customers and make some money."

> "The pitching, networking and attention from the press is all nice and can help your business. But be careful not to lose yourself in it."

It WILL help your business. The title of this article is a bit harsh and doesn't match the overall point: "But be careful not to lose yourself in it."
Well...I can't say I didn't see it coming (recent ex-Apple engineer here), and I'm happy for Bertrand, but Apple is loosing an extremely valuable asset.

Bertrand is a truly amazing and, I feel, wholly under-appreciated engineer and manager. He knew the technology better than pretty much anyone at Apple, and he stayed involved in all of the nitty-gritty details including participating in some of the internal engineer mailing list discussions.

One story I can relate that I think illustrates the point: Inside Apple there is a system to search the source code for every product they ship. The idea is that when you need to track down the definition of that primitive method that keeps crashing on you, you just go to this site, type in the function name, and get the source laid out in front of you (nicely syntax highlighted, of course). Well, one day I got the idea to use this tool to search for people, instead of functions. For a while now the policy at Apple has been that engineer's names don't go in the public headers that ship...but there's no rule about internal code that the outside world will never see. So I typed in "Bertrand Serlet" into the search, and the first thing that popped up?

malloc.c

Seriously! The rest of the list was equally impressive including the original implementation of NSObject, a bunch of CoreFoundation, and on, and on. Avi Tevanian often gets credit for the work that he did on Mach, but Bertrand was most of the brains behind Cocoa.

Anyway, I could go on, but I'll just say that if I could have one wish as a programmer it would be to get to work with Bertrand Serlet again.
A few thoughts:

1.As a general rule, founders like notes and investors do not. The reason notes are more often used today than before is one of power and control. Founders today have more bargaining power and can insist on going with notes. Investors may not like this but, if they like a company and want to invest, that is their option. This reflects a longer-term trend by which quality startups have become easier to launch with comparatively smaller capital needs, and this has enabled founders to keep more control through the early stages of a company's growth. I believe this trend is becoming permanent, which is one of the reasons for pg's observations about the predominance of notes in today's climate.

2. Building a startup is a teaming effort and the ideal cases consist of founders and investors who work together to build a great company while keeping their interests aligned. But this point only goes so far. Just ask any desperate founder who is under a cash crunch how much investors are prepared to give their cash on founder-friendly terms in the name of "alignment of interests." At a basic level, the issue with funding centers about power and control. Founders use notes because they can, and investors allow it because they have no choice if they want to invest.

3. The main advantage with notes is that they come with few strings. Once you set up preferred stock, investors become a dominant (even if not controlling) force within the company. Many things that you once had freedom to do you are no longer free to do without investor consent, and that includes choices about future funding. In addition, with notes, you don't have to reprice your stock price or fool with such things as 409A valuations too early in the company's history. With equity, you inject added costs and complications, and many founders want to avoid that in the very early stages. Such things tend to be distracting and tend to put more emphasis on fund raising as a process than would otherwise be the case. Again, just ask the YC companies who are getting the $150K notes with almost no strings attached. The main benefit: it lets them concentrate up front more on building their products than if they had to hustle up survival money right up front.

Bottom line: most founders will go with notes when they can because of power and control and intangible factors such as alignment of interests with investors, the educational value of learning to manage a board, etc. will not normally sway them in the other direction.

All that said, this is a a splendid dissection of some of the key factors affecting the use of convertible notes in early-stage funding. A very nice piece.
Just tried that here and I can’t replicate (10.6.6).
Class-based generic view is a nice addition. I remember when I was learning Django and going through the official tutorial, that was one part that took me a while to understand. Kudos guys!
I have two side project sites that make about $500/month, mostly from LinkWorth links, but some from AdSense was well.

LinkWorth is nice because you an make decent money without any traffic. You need to have the right niche, a modicum of pagerank, and it helps to pay the small fee to promote your site. It also takes a long time to sell the links. My first one took 3 weeks.

But the last few months have seen a decline. Perhaps people aren't buying links as much any more.
It worked in Futurama, Hermes got an entire slave-labour mine to be run single handedly by an Australian man. If it works in a cartoon then social convention dictates that it must be true!
I have had a very similar experience.

First 1 I spent 12 months developing and only generated a few hundred dollars.

Few more in between all not generating much interest.

One took a few weeks of dev time and a bit coming out of it, still big potential there so I will pursue it, it just involves getting out to more businesses.

The most recent one built in a day to test the waters. Lots of positive feedback, 1 more day to polish the site (ie. make it look pretty) and now a large company is getting on board and lots of small businesses jumping in. (2 days work total) Obviously I have a lot more days of dev to keep expanding it.

I think the actual thing you learn is don't reinvent the wheel, just do something better than everyone else. And second start VERY simple, then build. Otherwise the app is too complex to get a quick and rapid user base who will then spend the time to use your app more.
It tripped me up too, but for the (to me more obvious) reason that the "he never got" is repeated.

Does that make sense to everyone but me? Or am I just being silly/obnoxious for complaining about (what I think is) an editing error in an article with an actual point?

Or is meant like "he never understood that he never got a high school degree"? I'm not a native speaker of English, and the missing "that" in the linked-to article makes this interpretation feel unlikely to me.

Confusing.
Did you read the article?

Lucas's post says: "This was really naive and irresponsible of me." That doesn't sound like he's shifting blame to me.

You say: "I summarize what went wrong, how it should have been prevented and what steps I will be taking to prevent it in the future."

The article is essentially just that, with one exception; they didn't list steps they "will be taking" to prevent it, they listed steps they have already taken in the last 3 days.

As for Credit Card:
"Credit cards – We have never stored credit cards on any PHP Fog server. There was never any possibility that credit cards could have been compromised by this attack."
For me it was the speed of Chrome that made me switch. On Windows, Chrome opens faster than notepad.
It's literally the fastest starting app I have.

Firefox is quite the opposite.

The difference was enough for me to forgo the whole list of extensions that I used in Firefox (this was before Chrome even had extensions)

I switched about a couple of years ago - maybe things have improved since.
Ask HN: Startup ideas based around education
Hi guys,

I'm looking to build a company around education and would love some ideas or thoughts from my fellow HN'ers.

I personally think that education is an equalizer and something that can help individuals get out of poverty. That's one of the main reasons why I wanted to get into the education industry. There are too many youths out there today that don't get the help they need.

Anyway, my main goal (sorry if it's extremely vague - I am trying to figure things out right now) is to build software that is geared towards education. Maybe a web application with a mobile component later on. I like Blackboard and I think it's a good way of how technology can help schools and universities out but I'm not sure how I would even penetrate that industry. I could also develop software that either assists teachers or actually teaches but I'd like to hear more opinions.

Cheers and thanks!
Not to belittle those whom the school system is the failing, but he wasn't in the school system. The blog post notes there was no school close enough for him to go to. It could be since the area was rural the majority of the kids engaged in agriculture/worked after 8th grade with a minority leaving to attend school in a nearby town.

Perhaps you could argue the school system did fail him because there wasn't one close by. However, I think your comment was meant in the spirit of schools that fail there students like so many do in Cleveland (where I live).
I think the lesson here is that (often) good test code is much harder to write than good runtime code.
I have plenty of runtime code I would post publicly and be happy to defend.
That's much less true of my test code.
What type of costs added up to $7k for your first attempt? Did you use outsource'd talent?
A Comparison of the R and NumPy Array Types
Everything seems easier with alcohol. :)
Z80, using HEX only. That was great. And no internet needed, just some magazines and BBS printouts.
I agree and actually the first thing I looked for when opening the article was the pricing (which was on the very bottom).
As a recruiting manager, I never really made any distinction between BA/BS/B.Sc/whatever. A degree from a good school with good grades is good enough, it isn't critical what the degree is called exactly. CS isn't Physics where you should have lots of years of study to actually be able to do something useful.
Free Online Pakistani Newspapers
http://www.onlinenewspapersz.com/2011/03/free-online-pakistani-newspapers.html
Given enough automation and artificial intelligence, that'd theoretically be possible :)
Rising Wealth Inequality: Should We Care?
You don't see that many states declaring war on the United States because of Guantanamo or the immoral treatment of Bradley Manning. So, let's forget this moral bullshit scenario we use as an excuse and give correct references to Hobbes and Machiavelli.

In other words, we attacked Lybia because we are stronger than them and because we thought that the costs will be smaller than the benefits.
Ask HN: Has anyone used content generation to jumpstart community?
When Reddit was first starting, the founders used to create dozens of fake accounts, and talk to one another.. It helped give a sense of community, and get people to use the site.<p>There are a number of services out there, such as inb0x.com that do paid forum posting to try to help replicate this same process.<p>There are also text-focused services such as Textbroker, or even Mechanical Turk..<p>Has anyone used such services to get started?
Were the posts any good?<p>Did it help at all, or did it just look cheesy?
I can't replicate that in FF4 on Linux, even by zooming out. Text remains legible at all sizes up to the point where it's simply too small to see through the pixelization. The computed font shows as '"Liberation Sans",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif'; perhaps you've got a bad render on one of those?
i felt they apologized rather well. its difficult to apologize and explain what happened at the same time without sounding like you're making excuses or trying to skirt responsibility.
For those who've never seen him: a funny clip of Serlet dissing Vista at the 2006 developer conference: http://tumblr.frijole.info/post/4044018611/bertrand-wwdc-06
I would have to agree with this. More likely, the same design team was on both projects and they used a set of proportions to create a visual harmony across the entire product line.

Phi doesn't change, why should your proportion change if it's nailed?
Better than wanting to punch me! I'm curious what language you program most often in? DI, and this artificial modularity for the sole purpose of testability, is a common pattern and limitation of static languages. In fact, most .NET and Java developers don't even realize that DI is a form of IoC. Most think the two are synonyms.

If you move this example to a dynamic language, suddenly artificial complexity and the verbosity of the code shrink to something of (relative) pure beauty.

As a ruby developer, I've made this argument many times before. As a C# developer, while I every line of code I write, I feel the same frustration that you do, I don't see much that can be done.
Delis are our Coldplay.
This seems to be the archive in question: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090227065224/http://colin...
Looks like lot of top level changes at apple. If rumors/reports are to be believed, just this year --

1. Steve Jobs out of action for a while

2. Jonny Ive not wanting to extend his stay in the US and going back to England

3. Oppenheimer out, looking for a new CFO with deal making capabilities

4. Bertrand Serlet out and an internet veteran taking his place

[2] http://www.tuaw.com/2011/02/27/ive-due-30m-stock-windfall-ma...

[3] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-07/apple-s-overture-to...
A better article, in my opinion, is Martin Fowler's "Mocks Aren't Stubs": http://martinfowler.com/articles/mocksArentStubs.html.

However, I disagree with some of the basic premises. For example, Fowler says that using mocks ties the test to the implementation. I don't see how stubs are much different - you test the state of the stub, and this requires knowledge of how the implementation will use the stub. Any internal interaction testing will be tied to the implementation by its very nature.

I suppose the argument is that mocks can be even more coupled to the implementation by using expectation matchers. I find this is a bit disingenuous though - any decent mocking framework will make these matchers optional. But when you really need to test that specific interaction, it can be very handy.

So perhaps "mocks aren't stubs", but I would say a stub is a mock - just a dumber one.
10% is a huge impact if you depend on the money. And you're likely to lose 10% every month if you stopped blogging, not just the first month.
They keep sending cakes, Firefox will keep eating IE's market share cake!
Actually yes when IE hit 4 a good deal of web developers favored it over Netscape, I remember the shift well.
Agree completely. Also the same point of other sources:

From 37 Signals' Getting Real[1]: You need people who are passionate about what they do. People who care about their craft — and actually think of it as a craft

And from Software Craftmanship Manifesto[2] :Not only working software,
but also well-crafted software
Not only responding to change,
but also steadily adding value
Not only individuals and interactions,
but also a community of professionals
Not only customer collaboration,
but also productive partnerships

[1]http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch16_Start_Your_Engines.php

[2]http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/
> One in thousands.

What if that one person is one who thinks "if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"[1], and who just happens to be the CEO of the company? Would you still trust the company totally?

What the head honcho of the company says _is_ its agenda.

I love Google for the cool things they have done and continue to do. But it does get scary to think how big they have become.

[1] http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/48975
I did it for http://www.StatusCrap.com when I was just getting started with it. Definitely helped on the SEO side with dynamic content and also with creating the sense of community effect. There's no shame in it :)
I was actually considering developing something like this myself. :-). Im a social entrepreneur with a focus on technology and like the education and game markets. Ill bookmark your site and try to follow the development.
I think the point is that networking events aren't usually chock-full of potential customers. They're often an early-adopter circle-jerk and unless your customers are early adopters, you get diminishing returns on such things.

You need to build up a network, and so getting out and pitching to folks is a necessity early on, but remember that networking events are mostly just practice for pitching to the people who actually matter.

I'd suggest also that a lot of people are convinced that their target customers are early adopters because it's easier to imagine that their customers are like themselves. This is often wrong, sometimes dangerously so. Do some soul-searching (Are these really the people that are most likely to give us money? Do they even have any money? How much?) if you find yourself in that spot.

There are a lot of "entrepreneurs" that get caught up in the social aspects of being an entrepreneur without actually going out and getting traction on their business. It turns into an ugly form of cargo-cultism quickly.
Teachers and others in the education field may be a better source of information from you.
> I took no time to do homework, and instead spent time reading math books and programming

vs.

>I got an extra recommendation from a professor teaching the math class I was taking, whom I had asked to explicitly let them know that I was mature and a hardworker...

These statements are irreconcilable. A hard worker does work that he/she is assigned, and does not make pre-mature value judgements on the worthiness of said work. Being smart does not mean you're a hard worker. That was a pretty irresponsible recommendation by the professor, considering you didn't exhibit the qualities you claimed to.
BitCoin advocates tend to get very angry when I point this out. I think it's because they have no answer to this

Who got angry over this? I happily concede that bitcoin have no intrinsic value.

("So why's it worth so much now?" It's in a bubble generated by all this publicity. What happens the first time this bubble even threatens to pop? That's when you'll really find out who is right, me or them. Oh, and I'd predict an even larger burst of publicity and public braggadocio if it looks like that's going to happen; that will be the only way to forestall the inevitable another few days.)

When the price of bitcoin rose so fast, it is only natural that a correction followed.

At some point, BitCoin faces some dip in currency confidence. Not because it's "BitCoin", but because all currency face periodic confidence crises.

Let see if your hypothesis bare this out.
I'm a Rails dev, I do mostly test driven development, but my current bit of heresy is that there are some tests with low or negative ROI that are not worth writing.

Here are some examples: I almost never test at the view level, and barely at the controller level, and instead skip to the integration level. View, and even controller-level tests are brittle. If I'm going to spend time on brittle tests, I'd rather it be at the highest level. My thinking is, if your app can run a marathon, it can probably also walk. I'd also rather my test be married to output than to implementation details, as that gives more ways the code can change and still not break the test.

I feel like some folks view testing like a religion, or code coverage percent as a "score" in the game of coding.
anybody else hearing Also Sprach Zarathustra?
I agree. It is very difficult to figure out where and who to show your code too.

When I applied to undergrad 5 (or was it 6?) years ago I applied to CMU. I submitted with my application an "abstract" about some software I wrote. The software was really good. In fact it got me a job my first year in college (at a security consulting company). But, I don't think it got to the right people at CMU. They probably looked at a low score I got on a test and passed.

Maybe I should have tried MIT instead of CMU. I didn't know anything about colleges so I only applied to three Case Western, CMU, and Northwestern and they were all near where I lived. Only when I was in college did I learn about other good schools out there.
Ed Fredkin has a somewhat more impressive story. He became an MIT professor without ever getting a degree — even an undergraduate degree. But by that point he'd invented a fundamental data structure (the radix tree or "trie"), worked at MIT for years on defense contracts, and made enough money off a high-tech startup to buy a small island in the Caribbean. Not metaphorically. He actually bought the island. He'd also been teaching at MIT for some time.

He's at CMU now.
I always try to appreciate the context of the times when a story was written. Learning a little more of the external context within which a story was written can, at times, enhance the understanding of the story.

This might be a story that lends itself to that. Maybe. I read this book in high school and thought it was ok then, but I didn't really understand why the people I knew who read it thought it was so great. I didn't do any research about the era this was written in though, so I don't really know if it'd help or not.

It certainly is trippy though and an entertaining read in the least.
I'm really astounded by some of the comments here, almost as if I was browsing the TechCrunch echo chamber. This is certainly not bad advice.

The ratio of "we just got funded" to "we actually developed a valuable product" stories I see in the tech press is getting to astronomical levels. I view this piece as being in response to this trend that really ought to be clear to anybody.

When the bubble pops, having a working, profitable product will be far nicer than having a contact list stuffed full of VC contacts that are now( post-bubble ) scared shitless of doing any deals for any valuation whatsoever.

Then again, pg says there's no bubble, so disregard this and party on. It's different this time.