skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Generally good advice, though I really don't agree about printf(). First, it certainly is possible to use objects with it; you may need a "%s" and a call to stringObject.c_str(), but it's no big deal.

There are many reasons to prefer printf() variants or other functions that use format strings, over the "standard" C++ stream mechanisms.

The main reason is that they're actually more convenient than stream classes in many cases. It is easier to see at a glance what the output will be, and it is a hell of a lot less kludgey to make certain things work. You also don't see stupid type problems like I did in a recent Linux port, where "object << std::string" had worked fine with one compiler and OS but not the other (an "object << C string pointer" definition was temporarily needed to bridge the gap).

C++ streams encourage code that constructs a lot of temporary objects; just look at the tricks required by standard-library implementations to get manipulators that take arguments, like "setw(int)", to even work! It is not impossible to avoid this, but programmers are not likely to, which makes it a bad paradigm.

Though not possible with printf() itself, format strings in general are more flexible than sequences of data. For instance, localization-aware code uses format strings because it's very important for another language to be able to say "%d %s" even if the English version uses the ordering "%s %d" (see for example CFStringCreateWithFormat() on Mac OS X, where substitutions can be placed arbitrarily). You also want to be able to swap in an entire translated string, and not have to piece together tidbits that are in between "<<" operators.

About the only defensible use of streams is for files, because by default they support RAII and make it a little easier to automatically clean up. Of course, it takes 2 minutes to write a wrapper class that does the same thing for any other kind of file representation, and then you have exception safety anyway.
1. Use http://foundrs.com to split equity early on, before your project gets traction. It has vesting built in. And it forces co-founders to have that oh-so-feared discussion early.

2. I respectfully disagree with Joel on certain aspects. He is very unclear about how to split equity among a few founders. He seems to advocate 50/50, which I strongly advise against. Fairness is one thing. But my litmus test is: if you quit, would the project die instantly? Then you are the CEO and you should get more.

I have advised tens of founders on those issues, including convincing some to fire useless co-founders. It's painful, but usually pretty clear when an outsider (like me) listens to all sides.
Bad link used. Use this one instead:

http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-17350-9_things_the_ric...
Hacker Monthly is great. It's a great way to catch up on the gems that I missed even though I read HN daily.

Awesome support too. For some I never received a couple issues and they were able to quickly get MagCloud to send me new copies.
CMIIW, but square is for physical world transactions (that is, you swipe the card).
40 Ways to Simplify Your Life and Be Happy
For anyone having trouble following, the article author's webpage provides a nice introduction:

http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/wordorder/
Angry Republicans 2012
+1 for Stripe
Is it time for virtual clustering instead of geographic? I feel like software like YC's own Convore allows for the gathering of communities regardless of their member's physical location.

Is that virtual proximity enough to build great communities? There's only one way to know, isn't it?
Some vertical error bars would have been helpful on that plot, but having read the original article (from behind the pay wall) I'm pretty satisfied that they thought about all the obvious problems being discussed in these comments. I am a practicing experimental scientist but with minimal knowledge of statistics, so factor that into whatever I say here.

They point out that a negative ruling ("no" or "almost - come back next time") is much easier to deliver. There is less thought involved, nobody will raise eyebrows and the paperwork is much lighter. So the trend is more about mental energy than grumpiness. They note the significance of the breaks, but do not attempt to disentangle the role of mood improvement / a blood sugar boost / rest.

They explicitly discuss the possibility of hidden variables:
"A key aspect for interpreting the association ... is whether an unobserved factor determines case order in such a way that yields the pattern of results we obtain"
The dip and spike patterns in the rulings are quite pronounced, and similar graphs in the article for parameters such as the gravity of the offense, presence of a rehabilitation plan and the number of previous incarcerations do not show any such trends. This addresses questions about case scheduling by the clerks. Besides which - even if the clerks did organize easier cases for later in the day, this would manifest as one long trend over the entire day, not the spike/decay sequence shown.

So I didn't see any gaping holes, and more importantly it seems quite a plausible conclusion to me. Surely you must have had a similar experience going Christmas shopping - you start out thinking very carefully about getting the perfect gift for every person, but after 3 hours trudging around in a mall you'll just buy any old shit so you can go home. As you get tired you just start taking the easiest options.
The fact that native speakers of a single language disagree on the validity of certain utterances does not invalidate the concept of Universal Grammar. No two individuals learn their native languages in exactly the same way. The language that they pick up is shaped by their unique experiences with other people using the language, so it is unlikely that any two individuals have the exact same "instance" of the language (a more technical way to put this is that everyone has their own ideolect), and thus may differ in the judgements on whether particular utterances in that language are valid.

Even though individuals may speak the same language, because the concept of this language in each of their heads may differ slightly due to their individual experiences, one could say that a few of their parameters differ. If groups of individuals are separated from one another, these parameters can end up diverging between populations, leading to differing dialects and even separate languages over longer periods of time.

From reading the Ars Technica piece (I don't have access to the original Nature article), it seems like they've shown that language features are highly dependent on lineage, but I don't see how this result is incompatible with the concept of Universal Grammar. Because a language has to be relearned by every individual born into the language environment, there is a lot imperfect copying going on, leading to individuals having slightly different parameters of their Universal Grammars. There is a direct biological analogy here: imperfect copying of DNA leads to mutations which can lead to speciation over time. The values of the DNA base pairs are the parameters, but the mechanism by which the DNA is translated into proteins by every individual is still the same. This mechanism is analogous to Universal Grammar translating parameters into the actual spoken language.

It is true that Universal Grammar tends to look at statistical occurrences of features across languages in order to deduce universal statements about them. This is the weakest part of the theory, because the absence of a feature across all languages does not necessarily mean that such a feature cannot arise, nor does the presence of a feature across all languages necessarily mean that it must always be present. Perhaps one of the worst results of language extinction is the fact that there will be fewer data sets to test proposed language universals against.

To address your other assertion, the concept of Universal Grammar does not only apply to syntax. For instance, there are phonological universals, which are deduced based on phonotactics of known languages. For example, all known languages have at the very least the minimal vowel system of three vowels /i a u/ or slight variations thereof.
I think ceil(sqrt(points)) would be a better choice.
Yandex.Fabric to Invest in Startups
Perhaps the length of the comment text can be factored into this heuristic. I mentally correlate lengthy posts as tending to be well thought out and coming from people with experience in the given area.

While a lot of insight can indeed fit into a sentence or two, it still figures to me that those who take the time to write long comments are probably contributing more to the thread than those who leave short replies.

Anyhow, it's just a heuristic that springs to mind.
By "opinion" I assume you refer to "what I find relevant" rather than "what I agree with"...?
Sugar isn't 'bad', too much sugar is bad. Lustig says that the sugar in fruit is fine, and is the same sugar found elsewhere. It's fine in fruit because it's wrapped up in a fiber package, that prevents your body from absorbing most of it.
"He revamps his "program" every few years because he recognizes it as wrong. I'm not sure why you cite that as a bad thing?"

The "bad thing" is not the person who decides that he was wrong; the bad thing is the theory that was wrong and the "modern linguists" who still promote it. The notion of "universal grammar" came from the original version(s) of the theory: Everyone knows a fantastically complex rule system perfectly by some very young age, which can't possibly be learned from noisy, real-world experience in so short a time, so language must be innate, like teeth, and since humans are all the same species, the language must be a universal language, which must have some parameters to explain the illusion that they aren't the same.

By 2002, there were not enough legs of that original theory still standing (still believed by even Chomsky himself) to support the notion of a "universal grammar."

Yet despite the fact that nobody starting fresh with what we know today would ever propose a theory of innate, universal grammar, we still have most people calling themselves "modern linguists" claiming to believe it.

Universal grammar is nonsense, and modern linguists' failure to drop it is the "bad thing."

"...you have to start with a theory at some point."

Yes, and you have to drop it at some point when new evidence keeps making it less and less plausible. That point was years ago.
Consider only offering enterprises a yearly pre-pay option if they want invoicing. That reduces your paperwork and lets you put the cash to work. Once you're only dealing with yearly invoices, the collections challenge is simpler.

If the product is SaaS you have the ultimate power to resolve non-payment: stop service.

Just send a polite note to their accounts payable team or whomever is your main contact say "We really love you as a customer, but our invoice is overdue and forcing an automatic stop of service on XXX, XXXX (30 days from today). We really don't wish to loose your firm as a customer. Please contact us as soon as possible so we can avoid a service interruption" Make sure the subject says something like "30 days notice: Automatic Stop of Service on XXXX for non-payment" They should jump to action. If not, remind them again in 2 weeks, then if no action stop the service.

If your service is important to them, you'll be impressed at how quickly things get paid.
I'm pretty much on board with these points. Here's an interesting explanation of the absence of hints: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/database-soup/why-postgresql-doe....

Also: FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE really need IGNORE NULLS to do proper, high-performance rollforwards for things like time series data and periodic analysis.
An H1-B holder is free to leave their employer at anytime and move company, providing that new company agree to file the change with USCIS

------------------------------

I think you oversimplify ... that company has to pay about $1.5 - 3k just to file for that transfer ... and you bet they factor it in in salary negotiations, sometimes in unfair ways. They also have to think about the fact that they have to do it again in 3 years, then theres fact that if they decide to invest in you for longer than 6 years they have to pay even more money to get you a green card.

A lot of companies (smaller firms, almost all startups) will not touch H1b's with a ten foot pole ... so when a h1b applicant gets a gig, they tend to not cause ripples unless they absolutely have to, and that includes being slightly underpaid.

Long story short ... its not easy.
What the hell is happening in my city, specially, around ME - IDEA
I was wondering about the below idea about how potential it would have. I know there are services available which resembles to this idea in the internet already, but I want to target for "RIGHT NOW" events. I guess i have found nothing as such. Please give your valuable feedback.

Problem: One night I decided to go to a club, but I didn’t have any clue where to head at. Sure, you can argue that I could have looked for the best night club around ahead of time, but the point is I didn’t plan for it; maybe I didn’t have lot of time to do so, and I need the information right away. And, moreover the quality or fun in the club depends on that particular night rather than saying best clubs would always be best on any night, and bad clubs cannot be good on any night, not necessarily. So the point is to get the best of everything in particular period.

Solution: What if I can receive such information from the person who already experiencing right now, is there any service providing such information?

What if there is a online service which would allow everyone to share the information with others which they are experiencing about anything currently so that other might as well interested in experiencing the same stuff as you. Let the world feel what you feel.

This would be applicable to anything for that matter which is happening today or mostly right now.
REST-Easy: A chain-able dsl for testing any web-service in #nodejs
$499 for a 7" tablet is too much. $399 needs to be the starting price for a 7" tablet. That's max. $299-$349 seems more reasonable -- especially since I could've bought a 10" iPad refurb direct from Apple for $349.
I quickly scanned for another reference to this, but didn't see anything - pardon if a duplicate.

It seems that you can vote for both options. After I voted, the other choice still has the 'upvote arrow'. I didn't try to see if it worked since I don't want to vote for the other option.

Is this intended? I never noticed on any other polls, but maybe I just wasn't paying attention.
Many of the tricks used to lower taxes on the wealthy are available to small and medium sized business owners. We can borrow against unrealized gains. We can distribute income that is not subject to social security tax, If one can get a real estate loan these days, we can shelter real estate income with depreciation. We can even pay ourselves rent, thereby changing it from SS taxable to not. Indeed, in the internet industry we can certainly keep gains unrealized much as Hedge fund managers do. All it takes is some education and a creative, thoughtful accountant or tax lawyer. The article makes it seem that one has to be rich to take advantage. In my experience that just isn't true. The laws are applied equally. Its the employee that takes it in the ear. Not the employer.
World PC shipments fall below forecasts
WOAH you just suggested a Palin-target style game, except instead of a map, you use images of people. Too soon, my friend.

A funnier idea might be an app to throw elephants at donkeys in their straw houses, and another app to throw donkeys at elephants in their glass houses.
From the looks of it their DNS hosting is $30 per domain (let me know if I am seeing that wrong). As just a small entrepreneur and someone working for a low hourly wage that is a lot of money, especially with the 14 domains I have.

I've heard good things about their service, and would love to try it, but unfortunately it is out of my reach.
it's in the OP. But also http://ray.wenderlich.com
I daresay Zuckerberg seems to be doing fine dealing with legal problems.
The last time I saw the numbers (several years ago), they varied between ~$80k and ~$150k, depending on job title. I would imagine that they've gone up some since then.
Earthquakes and Downloads: Shaky Foundations?
My opinion on this: it is very difficult for me to add value via coding the world's best possible rebilling user experience and backend admin code. It is orders of magnitude easier for me to add value via either marketing (which I need to do more of) or adding features to the product that get it in the hands of more customers.

This strongly suggests that I should not be writing billing code, ever.

You need a bunch of pieces to do billing. I use Paypal Website Payments Pro to physically charge people's credit cards, and Spreedly to tell them when to do it. I interact with Spreedly through a REST API that is wrapped with a Ruby gem. My entire interaction with them is one form, three model actions (which handle account creation, status change, and expiry), and a callback for when customer status changes. This took me a few hours to implement, once. Aside from a bug on my side (not charging Mastercards because I am illiterate and failed to read their documentation correctly), it has been pretty flawless.

This seems to come up way, way too often. Would anybody be interested in a blog post about how to do it in a practical, pain-minimizing manner?
I second Boston.
I'm actually planning something similar. I want to start my own business, and when I get to the point of bringing in other people, I want the company to be cooperatively owned.

Each person hired will get an equal share, but I'll probably put in some sort of probationary period (3-6 months), just for safety.

As for governance, it always makes sense to divide up responsibilities instead of making every decision via consensus, but for the big things (taking on a big financial risk, selling the company, etc) the employee-owners are the board, and get to make the decision.
I'm surprised they still released this after the twitter "don't build clients" email from a few months back.
Well, the latest update to the official app doesn't have a #dickbar either.

I love the Tapbots aesthetic... it reminds me very much of Dyson products.
sounds like a multi-member LLC with a well-outlined operating agreement?
Yes, I fully know that. I read Chomsky's politics far more than linguistics. I was making a joke where the analogy was that:

A: Languages were the 5 factors of media control cover in MC.
B: "Consent" was a common set of language principles representing Chomsky's linguistics.

Too much of a reach?
NoReset - Chrome extension to hide HTML reset buttons
Depends on the recruiter, but that can be true.

I based my remark on the knowledge that the range of H1B salaries covered everything from new grad to very senior positions. New grads are nearly all going to fall into the low end of the range at a company like MS, and there's no point in trying to negotiate into a higher pay grade until you've got experience.
Your LLC may give you a net worth over $1MM, but that does not mean you have liquid assets (cash) to invest in a company.

How would you invest in a startup using your LLC? You can't. You need cash to invest in a startup.

I'm not sure as to how much of your net worth of at least $1MM needs to be cash and how much can be other assets though.
Pretty much every gateway has some kind of tokenization solution (or reference transaction solution) that accomplishes the same thing. They all call it something different and try to make it seem like it is unique, which can be confusing.
You've done a stellar job building community at YC. The thing that led me to create Mexican.VC was noting that the hacker community was really taking off there - Mexico City alone has thrown some 20 DevHouses, and over a dozen locations across the country have done them. (Including Guadalajara, Merida, Obregon, Hermosillo, Morelos, etc.) So the community was really the draw for us from square one.
Daring Fireball: Tweetbot 1.0
Tweetbot’s Got Personality — Shawn Blanc
Hey Aaron, loved the article, although my comment is unrelated. If you press cmd+ on your computer, it makes the font the perfect size. Might be good to increase it by 2-3px? Makes it a lot easier to read.
Nedis: Redis Implemented with Node.js
You can restore data to a table from a dump using pg_restore without recreating indexes. If you have a couple extremely large tables, you should consider partitioning them. Partitions are true tables in Postgres, and you should be able to use parallel restore on them.

Bruce Momjian told me on Monday that Robert Haas was leading the index only scan effort, and that this (important) feature should appear in the 9.2 time frame.

Most hints are a bad idea, they represent leaks in the relational abstraction. Further, the DBA's knowledge of the performance characteristics of various tasks is transient, and often quickly mooted by changes in technology, data scale/statistics, or even simple hardware/software reconfiguration. FIRST_ROWS is a reasonable hint, since it speaks to the logical intent of the query, and says something about how much of the data it intends to use and how it prioritizes the results. The planner can then work towards the stated optimization goal.
I also think it will help that NYC has a very competitive private education environment. Many parents will do almost anything to get their kids on track to the Ivy Leagues, which obviously includes tutoring. Also, the fact that you are from there so your networks are more established there makes it a good choice. Best of luck!
It seems to me that this is really the beginning of the end for RIM.

Based on this review and the video, it is clear that they're so behind with their tablet that they've already pretty much lost the game. The same can be said about Blackberries.

Their die hard user base is now starting to look at Android and iOS very seriously and their number of new subscribers per unit sold is constantly declining. If I owned $RIMM, I'd definitely pack up and leave.

A great article about the decline of RIM can be found here: http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2010/10/whats-really-w...
…why?
+1 I was going to post the same thing. I thought maybe it might just be my old age.
Not sure if I'm missing the difference between this and the official Twitter client.

They basically took the official client and reskinned it.

I'm not a fan of the Tapbots style, so maybe it's not aimed at me, but I much prefer the cleaner official client.
What's your business? Probationary period sounds reasonable.

Yeah, consensus is something I'm toying with. I'm writing a CEO into the bylaws who, in spirit, should be the vision guy; not sure how powerful to make him or how influential. But the board is elected by the members, have short term limits, and I'm making it really easy for members to review board members and officers. The trick for all this working is vetting prospective new members. Until we get more than 10 members, the board meetings will also be membership meetings (sorry, you 3: you have to sit this one out).

Third Coast Workers for Cooperation is a great organization to help out with the pesky legal details and bylaws; I'd give them a ring.
from http://startuplawyer.com/startup-law-glossary/accredited-inv... ...

The federal securities laws define an accredited investor in Rule 501 of Regulation D as:

5. a natural person who has individual net worth, or joint net worth with the person’s spouse, that exceeds $1 million at the time of the purchase, provided that the value of a person’s primary residence may not be used for such net worth calculation, but any indebtedness in excess of the value of the primary residence shall be used in the calculation;

6. a natural person with income exceeding $200,000 in each of the two most recent years or joint income with a spouse exceeding $300,000 for those years and a reasonable expectation of the same income level in the current year