skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
North Carolina House passes bill banning community fiber infrastructure
if its java, wonder why they chose it?
Yeah she's been advised to go through Google's projects herself and let the recruiter know what she might be interested in.
It's clear that there have been a lot of power struggles at Twitter. It's not clear how much of this departure is voluntary (i.e., the departure itself may be voluntary, but the conditions leading to it might have been a loss of control).

Finally, great companies have been built without their founders. Cisco and Intel lost/forced out their founders relatively early.
Stop signups and throw out bad users over time. That will stop the problem.
In-App Billing Now Live on Android Market
Wireframes for UI, informally written use cases for features. I try to get working prototypes up on screen as quickly as possible.
Startup Pricing Study at MIT Sloan
Trusting my bill payments to a third party is a big deal, especially if it means I have to reroute all of my bill emails to them.

Chicken/egg problem here: I wouldn't sign up for this until it had plenty of established customers that would guinea pig out all of the bugs. And I don't mean testimonials, I mean word-of-mouth.

Also, what makes this easier/more useful/more failproof than just having a Gmail filter for the companies I expect bills from?
One thing I've learned is often times when people post a snarky comment like the one you replied to, they think they are talking into the abyss. Replying with some maturity and respect can often unmask the non-snarky person they actually are and make them feel bad when they realize what they said actually was towards a person who exists and is affected by their words.

What you did instead was insult them back and now you can be sure they will not have anything nice to say about your company. To do it on a place like Hacker News is quite shortsighted since you never know who you're talking to or who is reading your posts.
I second that. That's one of my favorite gags in the entire book.
Meet Angelpad's Newest Class
Would be interesting to know exactly how much $ was spent on the "very small ad buy" and any other paid advertising that occurred.

Along with the other commenter who noted that a previous site (with existing membership) already existed on the domain it's hard to determine if these techniques or other factors were at play here.
It comes from lam meaning to thrash or pound. So you're stomping your feet running quickly.
to fight the lowering quality of comments, maybe you could make a meta-comment feature to describe what is wrong with the way they commented (as opposed to the content itself)

maybe making it public would stop people from making repeatedly bad comments.
Here's a page of the sign-in interface to the app

http://29f.zapd.co

(And yes, that's a page made with the app)
Do you really want books? Are you really a book kind of guy? I bought a bunch of books when I first wanted to learn how to program, but actually didn't read any of them. I didn't have the patience to read, I wanted to just DO.

I learned via the copy, paste, google and osmosis method, and it worked great for me. (:

So I guess my advice would be... before you spend your money on books, since time=money, the X hours you spend paying for the books might be better off "just doing it".

But, not relevant if you actually are a book guy.
Guys takes down craigslist, because he's pissed at their spam filter
/ book person. (: Sorry to assume you're a guy! (:
No Starch has really been knocking out of the park lately with Land of Lisp, Eloquent Javascript, The Linux Programming Interface, and now Learn You a Haskell. They are also one of the few publishers who's typesetting doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out.
If your skills are in web and/or mobile, contact design firms and show them projects you've worked on. When you work as a sub-contractor, they find work for you.

Deliver quality work and stay on schedule. Build relationships with multiple design firms and you can pick between projects.
There are already people in place there. Determining what is wrong for HN has been pg's job since the beginning.

I'm not saying that signups should be closed, just saying that it would solve the problem of degrading comments. It might introduce other problems.
Fundamental Problems of Lisp
Everyone seems to have their own idea of what makes a bad user.
Yeah, please do. And if you can, please, I need to know if it's possible to do it remotely (or with a meeting or two at most).

- I mean, I'm not from a developed country. Is that still possible that I can take advantage of mastering both skills? I'm currently a Medicine student with good programming skills. -
My boyfriend (@andjones) insists that I need to read The Little Scheme, too, there's a vote for that one. Despite my ADD about programming book reading it's on my list.
Wouldn't surprise me. Most of the code written these days is modifications or additions to pre-existing codebases. Projects are usually started from scratch by just one or a few coders, then as it grows a great deal more are hired to specialize in building out certain parts of it - front end, backend, db, etc. The ratio of from-scratch engineers to codebase developers is probably pretty small.
I also found it slightly austere in the bouquet, yet volatile in texture, almost reminiscent of a late harvest.
have you taken a meyers briggs or similar personality test? Surprisingly those things are really accurate. They can definitely help to identify what you might be good at. For example I am an INTP. This means that I love to invent systems, but am not that decisive. I also am not good at repetitive stuff. "Architect" is the archetype. Many/most hackers are INTPs which is also a pretty rare type. My wife is an ESFJ, she loves tradition and maintaining a social calendar. If it werent for her I would stay in my room and program day and night and wouldnt have any friends.

I know it seems dumb but it isnt. The hardest thing to do in life is to "find yourself", these tests can actually help to understand yourself better.

The one at pesonalitypages.com is pretty good for the interpretation but they are now charging for their test. Here is one at http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp which should work ok.

By the way our admin makes 40K + benefits so dont sell yourself short.
> Regarding obesity, exercise is far more important than diet. You can eat all kinds of, well, crap, and if you exercise, you'll still be physically fit and probably even look healthy.

Sounds nice, but do not try this. Ask people who do this sort of thing a lot, or even for a living. E.g. bodybuilders. They have a saying: "you can out-diet bad exercise, but you can't out-exercise bad diet."

You need both, diet and exercise, dialed in reasonably well.
Soft skills get you jobs at big companies.

Hard skills get you well-paying consulting jobs.

You need the latter.
Patriot Hacker The Jester's Libyan Psyops Campaign
I'm guessing from the description that the company is in the public eye (i.e. post-public launch), so revealing what the company does or too many details would identify the company.

Early stage YC companies with revenue are rare enough that someone could make an educated guess and identify them anyway, those details would confirm it. And I presume there's a reason they don't want to be identified (if for example as ffumarola suggested they've lost their tech lead; which if made public could damage product sales).
Magnetic Truck Signs
Moving trucks actually reach a wider audience out of the people in the streets. If your advertising campaigns are directed outdoors, magnetic truck signs would be an easy way to get your message across.
I'm almost certain this is why I failed my phone interview. It wasn't that I implemented an inefficient sort right away, its that I didn't talk about how/why it was and what I could do about it with more time.

I really don't like the idea of solving contrived puzzles, but I'll never make the mistake of keeping my thought process hidden again.
That could also represent JRuby, Jython, Scala, or any other language that runs in the JVM.
Telling someone in journalism that they should go into PR is an insult. There is gaping chasm of difference between those two professions.

You also made a huge assumption about my existing CS knowledge and what I'd like to do with it. I was asking if I should persue a degree in it, not whether I should study it at all, and the main factor here is the time involved, not the difficulty of learning it.

Aside from that, your language was dismissive and presumptuous, and what you said, more or less, was "better stick to journalism, kid, anything else is too much for you."

Re-read what you wrote and really think about what it says.
I'm not sure how useful it is yet. I've looked at the website quite a bit and have downloaded the IPhone app.

On one hand, its true that certain places are known for good deals for certain items. If there is a specific cleaner I buy for my house, it doesn't matter which store it comes from as long as it's the cheapest.

But food is different. I'm more concerned about quality, shelf life, ease of shopping experience, and availability. There's probably a reason why strawberries at CVS cost $1 vs $3-$5 at Whole Foods. However, if there is a Farmers Market 2 days later and they sell strawberries for $5 - $10, I'd hold out and pay the higher price because I want to support the community and I know the strawberries might actually be better.

Maybe there is a way you can tap into the social consciousness. For example, my mom is very proud of her ability to compromise quality and price. She will tell me something like "go Safeway to buy bread items, but go to Nob Hill if you want meats".
Nope, not here. Another YC applicant just asked me this offline today, too.
I finally got contacted today after 2 months in said pool :).
Code Complete is a great read. It will help you out a great deal no matter which language you choose.
Not all carbs are equal. The glycemic index for rice can be much lower than the glycemic index for bread or flour. (Glycemic index varies based on type of rice.)
I think you underestimate how mindblowingly awful many people who call themselves programmers actually are.

Jeff Atwood references a good example: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...

The sad truth is that many people who program professionally simply cannot so basic programming tasks. If anything, I think top 10% might be overestimating how many can do it - I suspect 10% might have some kind of idea of how binary search would work, but most of them will fail with edge cases etc.
I suppose that if they wanted to say, they would have.

Otherwise, you know exactly what's posted in the job posting. You know that they're YC funded. You know that they're profitable. You know that PG and company think they're a good idea.
Bingo. Cmon people just laugh and move on.
http://i.imgur.com/ulaQV.jpg
Something to mention is that the movie does not mirror reality and the fact that Zuck sandbagged the shit out of their project purposely screwing them over. They've received their share in court I believe, but there is a matter of morals. We don't know all the facts, but that's why this is a stupid argument.
Show HN: My first webapp: Humans Vs. Servers
Could thorium make nuclear power safe?
Really? It's not hard to imagine any number of reasons. The obvious answer would be love. The next most obvious answer would be she got knocked up and it was better than having her family disown her.
This isn't normally the type of app HN sees, but I figured I'd show off what I've been working on.

It's written in python using web.py with a mysql backend. Lighty is the HTTPd running on FreeBSD 8.2.

It hosts games of Humans Vs. Zombies and Assassins.

I actually finished it about 5 am Monday morning, but I've been waiting for a license to host HvZ games before posting it to HN.

Humans Vs. Zombies is basically a giant game of tag (600 players is not unheard of, though my uni has yet to break 150) played with nerf blasters. It's insanely fun, and played on a lot of college campuses. http://humansvszombies.org/ has more info.

Assassins is a rather smaller game of tag (usually no more than 50 players), and wikipedia has a great article on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin_(game)

Why I wrote it: Gnarwhal Studios Inc. (the guys who own the trademarks to HvZ) already have their own (free) HvZ hosting software that my school used for a game of Humans Vs. Zombies. From the perspective of the average player's experience using the software, it's fine. However, for various reasons, their software didn't really like our admins.

One of the major deal breakers was that, midway through our game, four students/former students died in a plane crash (my uni has a pretty good flight program), and in honor of those who died, the admins decided to put the game on hold for a day. Gnarwhal's software offers no way to pause the game, and prevent the "zombies" from starving and actually dying. So we had to manually add time to the zombies. It was not fun.

Pretty much immediately after our game ended, I decided to write my own engine for hosting games of HvZ.
I spent the better part of my winter break (read: all but 3 or 4 days) researching what all frameworks existed for doing this. I had prior experience with django, and I didn't like it. It wasn't until mid-january (and making the dumb decision to just write my own stuff from scratch - no framework, just straight C code) that I finally discovered web.py. At this point, I had about 3 weeks to re-write everything to work with web.py. Fortunately, webpy is an absolute joy to work with, and this was (and still is) some of the most fun I've ever had programming.

By the time our game happened, I had a basic app that didn't much other than log kills and figure out when people were deceased. I then spent the next month and a half just going through my required-for-a-release features (one of which was kill/check-by-sms, which was dropped in favor of releasing soon).

At the urging of a friend of mine, I expanded to allow games of Assassins. Assassins is almost feature-complete with HvZ, however HvZ has automated graphical analysis of game data. (see http://hvz.humansvsservers.com/fit/analysis/ for an example using data from my uni's last game) This is something I plan on adding sometime during the summer.

Shameless plug: I'm a freshman in Computer Science at Florida Tech, and currently looking for an internship preferably in a Silicon Valley based startup (my parents live in lovely San Jose, CA). It's a bit late to apply for one, but better than never.
More helpful tip. If you're going to make a snarky comment, use the app so you know what the fuck you're talking about. Too many comments on hacker news are from people who are completely uninformed or just haven't taken any time with whatever it is they are commenting on. Disclaimer: I haven't tried the app personally but only because I can't stand apps posting on my Facebook or twitter stream.
No, let's not. The company obviously wants to remain private.

What value is served to anyone by identifying them ?

Identifying someone who wants to remain secret isn't good behaviour and is damaging to the community, the ability to post anonymously means that a lot of information and questions get shared on HN that would otherwise never be shared. If we start attacking that anonymity then we risk losing a valuable part of our community.
They are. They're called hypervisors.
The way I hear it Xen et alia are the new hotness in deploying Windows across the org in IT.
My ex military buddies pointed out something I hadn't thought of and that is the fact these things do not have keys. Military trucks don't even have keys, these I am sure do not.

Also my major concern would be hangar costs.
I run a couple of CEO roundtables so have worked with around 25 people that run non tech companies. What are you looking for more specifically?

One more interesting one is a guy who had a company in china make free samples of 10 types of products. He put them all on amazon forsale and one of them took off so he made more of that one. His net profit is around 300K/year after just one year.

Another one uses prison labor to manufacture electronic components. The recidivism rate among the inmates who go through the program is much lower than the average. Other industries include:

pet products, doggie day care, health insurance, HR consulting, hair salon, convenience store, restaurants etc. Most of them were never in tech, but some were and just wanted something more traditional. For example, the hair salon netted about 50K/year. One wouldnt make a living but 5 or 6 would.
A photo-sharing app that gets $50M+ in VC and spends 500K on their primary domain.
Please link to whatever article this came from - or you accidentally linked to the Craig's homepage (which is back up).

Sounds interesting, I'm interested in reading it.
I've seen this before on the other end. Someone learns a mostly useless design pattern then begins to architect every solution using it.
with or without the drug sales ;)
Excellent points.

Bodybuilders know a lot about diet, especially in the context of controlling the body fat percentage - mostly because in their case, the diet must work, or else they lose the competition. They can't rely on the latest fad on Oprah's that may or may not actually work. So the stuff they do tends to have a solid reality-based backing.

Any bodybuilder will tell you that low-fat diets are bullshit. Carbs are probably more aggressive fat-builders than fat per se, mostly because carbs are absorbed quickly, while fats are absorbed more slowly.

It's interesting to see the convergence from various sources. E.g., some diets recommended by weightlifters for "maintenance" (only to preserve a certain physique), and the diet recommended by Ray Kurzweil on health and longevity grounds, are similar in that the recommended daily intake of macronutrients is 33% carbs, 33% fat, and 33% protein as percentage of calories, or roughly 2:1:2 in weight.

As a comparison, that's slightly more protein that most people normally eat, a heck of a lot less carbs than the average intake, and a fairly average level of fat intake. I actually did this; reducing carbs was hard at first, but I got used to it after a while. It's amazing just how high you can raise the total caloric intake, if you keep the macronutrients at 33/33/33 relative ratios, without starting to gain fat. I was eating over 3200 cal / day, with 3 hours of lifting weights / week as my only exercise, and I was neither gaining nor losing fat (but I was gaining muscle).

In my mind, there's no doubt: By far the easiest way (in terms of effort spent, hours in the gym spent, etc.) to lose fat is to reduce the total calories by reducing the carbs intake (don't bother with tweaking the fat intake), and lift weights either 2 or 3 times a week, between 30 and 60 minutes each. 2 x 30 is the minimum that produces results, 3 x 60 is the maximum that allows you to keep it up a long time without burning out.

Don't eat carbs below 25% of your daily caloric intake, or you'll start to feel pretty weak. In other words, reduce carbs, but don't be a carbs nazi.

EDIT: This message was edited several times.
Here's what helped me:

1. LOVE what you do. Figure out how to love what you do.
2. For the stuff you aren't as crazy about:

- If you're on a Mac, download SelfControl. It permanently blocks websites in all browsers for a certain period of time, making it appear pretty nonreversible. I block facebook, twitter, and of course, hacker news. (:

- Use a to-do list. Make it consist of a reasonable number of bite-sized tasks.

- Take care of yourself - get sleep, eat right, exercise.

- Give yourself a time limit so you HAVE to let go. Transfer the perfection from the task itself, to getting the task done efficiently. If you're on a Mac, download Vitamin-R. It forces you to chunk out blocks of time, and explain exactly what you're going to accomplish in the 45 minutes of focus you probably have. Read the Vitamin-R manual, it's actually really helpful.

- Study the Pomodoro technique. That's something you can do on Win/offline; Vitamin R makes it dead-easy.

- Make a chart for yourself. Mine's big, neon, and plastered on the wall in front of my desk where I'm reminded of it. Every day, give yourself a mark about how focused you were, and whether or not you accomplished everything on your to-do list. This'll help you learn what realistic to-dos are.

Good luck, you can do it! (:
Last company I worked for got excited about dependency injection. Only problem is that only one developer really understood it. Then he quit.
Looks like an amazing group of founders. Good luck to all of you guys running your companies.
The iPhone client is written in Objective C.

The Android client is written in Java.

The webserver appears to be written against the JVM, so it could either be plain Java, JRuby, Jython, Scala, or any other language that runs in the JVM.

DJ Patil however, was LinkedIn's Chief Scientist, and LinkedIn is a heavy Java/J2EE shop, so my guess is that it's vanilla J2EE.
Different people, different strokes. What is wrong with that? I also wouldn't put Mark Zuckerberg in the "class" of entrepreneurs you mentioned. If anything, he is a counter example to your argument.
low fat + plenty of carbs = recipe for disaster

Literally.
No text reflow and no text selection turn the web into a giant set of PDFs. Tab mechanism is cool. Otherwise disappointing. Uninstalled.
DJ Patil is LinkedIn's Chief Scientist, and they're a big J2EE shop.
consulting is hard :) That is what I do for a living. My first job on my own was from a previous employer. That let me hire a team including sales people. It also let me make a bunch of costly mistakes. Eventually I found a sales person who got me additional clients.

I would say to make it in consulting you pretty much have to have a network. These days you could possibly use something like odesk or elance, but I dont have any experience with those.
People seem to forget that running out of money is the #1 reasons startups fail.

-I keep hearing this and it makes zero sense. That is like saying the #1 reason why people die is because they stop breathing.
They are not scared of sql injection cause they have Styled Scrollbars!!
> I'm asking this sincerely, but don't people from traditionally healthy Asian countries eat a hell of a lot of rice?

They're not sedentary, and the portions are usually small.

You still see obesity in those cultures, particularly among the rich - and bingo! those groups are more sedentary and can afford to eat more.
You're only at approximately 11 times that now, so I'd venture to guess that it's a bigger deal than you're crediting it.

Most people would kill to have a ~4,000 startup base to spread the word.
Ask HN: my understanding of the dating sites industry
I'm wondering if people here can confirm my understanding of the dating sites industry.

The way I understand it, is that the gorilla in the space is match.com. When a new service, especially a free service, has some success, they buy them and then send users who are leaving their (paying) service to those free sites, park them there until they can "re-activate" them. At the same time, there are a few successfull free dating sites that make money of advertising.

Correct/wrong?
Netflix's New Killer Feature: Crappy Compression for Canadians
If a salad contains any dressing, it's not a salad anymore, it's a dish.

The only exception I allow is vinegar + olive oil. That's pretty yummy salad dressing (especially with balsamic vinegar), and pretty healthy.
Do you offer specific skills? Do you have a website outlining those? Link it from your HN profile.
BarCamp Boston - Boston's geek unconference.
Healthy, cheap, and time effective.

Pick two, at most two and a half.
How much was the domain?