skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article's title "The VC Presentation Grader" is more accurate; the elevator pitch is just the first of 16 items on the list ending with "is this greed-inducing".

It's a good list of the kinds of questions most investors will have in although in practice there range of answers is a lot more nuanced than a yes/no.
I daresay Zuckerberg disagrees with #1.
IOS and Android Development Compared
Can libraries survive in a digital world?
I think it was Jon Steinberg from BuzzFeed in a recent interview with Marc Suster mentioned that the hard part of recruiting is that you find so many sales guys who really want to be a business dev guy and so many engineers who want to be a product guy. What you really need are craftsmen, which I completely agree with him on.

But beyond that, I actually want enrollments to go up even more to create even more noise and change how interviewee assessments are made. I feel like that's what it will take for recruiters and hiring managers to focus their attention on platforms where the most engaged people of their crafts are. Not in the campuses of Stanford or a smaller community college, but rather in some online forum where people of all ages and geographies interact.

YC has started this with contribution to HN being a factor of admittance, but I'd like to see more of that happening in other fields as well such as mathematics and physics while using stackoverflow, quora, disqus, etc as the platforms to find the next will hunting.
Please post in the following format:

Company Name: Bitbucket

Company Size: 10

Company URL: http://blog.bitbucket.org/2011/04/13/summer-internship/

Position: Intern developer

Contact Email: jonathan@bitbucket.org

Skills Needed: Python / Django developer
It looks super usable to me. I agree with some of the suggestions below such as adding the most used social medias to the top of the social tab. Love the easy customization of colours and all the options. 180+ social networks is great too. Never seen that many in one spot before.
#4 seems to go against a lot of other advice here [RE: Don't Sign NDAs, which is my personal stance] Almost everyone with a crappy idea wants an NDA, so much so that I have a stock `why I won't sign your NDA` email.

That being said, There are times when I know an NDA is well thought out, and necessary, but this is the exception, not the rule.
insidestartups.org
one of them said to me during a lab, "I mean, really, PHP? Who wants to work with THAT?"

You speak as if disdain for PHP was a bad thing. I know a lot of very experienced and competent programmers who feel the same way, and it is not a slight on their competence that they do.
Wow, I just looked at the company profile. That's some list of advisors. They must have more money than they know what to do with, and sit on very nice chairs.
I tried Play last year and it completely changed the way I thought about Java - hey, it's actually a nice language if you don't make the libraries so stuffy.
I'm with you now. The example on the homepage isn't MVC, but I see from the further documentation that you can incorporate views. Nice.
But to be fair to RIM, the conversation seems to have been more like:

India: Give us access to your secure messaging service
RIM: Sorry, that isn't technically possible
India: Give us access to your secure messaging service
RIM: Sorry, that isn't technically possible
India: Give us access to your secure messaging service or we'll cut you off
RIM: OK, we'll do everything we can
How food-breaks sway the decisions of judges
I'm sure if they legalize it, people will grow it outdoors.
Three strikes law rushed through NZ parliament
The key here is "You need a mix of people with differing perspectives but shared values." to which I would also add differing demographic backgrounds. As the article says, you need at team that is cohesive because of its differences.
I don't know any thing about CoffeeScript, but static analysis tools like the Google Closure Compiler can help you take care of global variable problems and a whole lot more. Using Closure Compiler, you are forced to document your code with their enhanced version of jsDocs, so CC will make sure that if your method returns null or a list of strings, that anywhere that method is used, you don't try to treat the returned value as a string or object, for instance.

How does coffee script play with existing object oriented JS libraries? Is there compile-time type checking?
The Augmented Reality Conference Call
This is a nice piece and Connie Bagley is a gifted lawyer and teacher who has for years now published a good legal guide for entrepreneurs along with Craig Dauchy of Cooley (we also had worked together at the same Big Law firm in the early 1980s).

A few observations:

1. Founders are much more aware of 83(b) elections today than they were in 2003 when this piece was done and failure to file these on time is much less a problem today than it was then.

2. The biggest problem by far among early-stage founders that is not mentioned here is failure to assign IP into the company at the time of formation when shares are issued. This is commonly overlooked when founders take a do-it-yourself approach. Normally, it is easily cleaned up but, in cases where disputes have arisen, it is a painful and expensive problem to deal with.

3. I would add as well trying to "do it yourself" without even consulting with a good lawyer to get strategic guidance. This can lead to problems that are easily avoided at small cost by consulting up-front with a lawyer, even if you intend to defer hiring a firm in the earliest stages (see, e.g., for an example of what can go wrong as a founder candidly discusses why "incorporating my startup [in Delaware] was my worst mistake": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2399139).

As a point of comparison, here is a link to a similar list (equally good) done by Scott Walker and posted on HN a while back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1418300 (as to which I made a detailed comment touching on LLCs, Delaware, vesting, and tax).

In general, founders are much more savvy about legal startup issues today than when this piece was written but it is always helpful to review the major issues as a double-check when starting.
Actually, CoffeeScript does generate more efficient code than the vast majority of JavaScript developers write by hand -- that's one of the goals. There are a couple reasons why this is the case, for example:

Do you tend to write your "for" loops with an "each" ? If you're using "$.each", "_.each", or "[].forEach", your loops are running a good bit slower than they could be. This CoffeeScript:

for item in list
item.marked = true

Generates this JavaScript:

var item, _i, _len;
for (_i = 0, _len = list.length; _i < _len; _i++) {
item = list[_i];
item.marked = true;
}

... where you have a nice length-cached loop that runs about as fast as JavaScript is capable of.

Similarly, lots of JS developers avoid using prototypes because they're such a pain in the ass to type out manually -- preferring to manufacture objects via closures instead. This has a huge runtime and memory cost. CoffeeScript's "class" keyword makes it easy to work with JS prototypes effectively, without having to type out "Klass.prototype.method = function ..." all the time.
I don't think these guidelines would apply the same way at a larger established company instead of a startup. Skillset would have comparably more interest to a company already invested in legacy systems which wouldn't be the case with a start-up.
I am doing some work for a Java EE 6 shop right now, and find Play (on my own time) to be refreshing. I am not dissing on Java EE 6, but I think that agile interactive development platforms like Play may end up eating Java EE 6's lunch.
I am in my early 40s. I have started family young. With my son in university now I feel that I have the same amount of time (if not more) then when I was 20 and yet I have far more commitment and experience. There is a burning feeling to make something grand at this stage of life - working at an industry giant does not qualify as such.
Canvas and 4Chan on steroids  Sketech Piston
Because I'm only vaguely aware of the issue it isn't until this moment that I realize the seriousness of the question.
Great writeup. Looks like you've got some predisposition to programming since you've already learned a whole lot in a short timespan. Hopefully, we'll see some original indie hits from you in another six months or so.
Here's mine:

scrambled eggs --> poached eggs --> raw eggs

jogging --> sprinting

sun cream --> no cream

metal pots --> ceramic pots

pasteurized dairy --> raw dairy

Australia --> Israel
If nothing else, the core team's decision to make it default has piqued my interest in learning CoffeeScript. Anyone know of any good resources off-hand to start digging in to it?

I assume their website is the best place to start... (http://www.coffeescript.org)
Mark Suster has a more in depth post about hiring based on attitude not aptitude. http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/03/17/whom-should-yo...
All things considered, does RIM actually want people talking about the PlayBook? If it's positive, I'm sure they don't mind, but given that the thing doesn't actually exist yet (right?) I dont see them gaining much ground on the PlayBook PR front until they ship.
Great workaround, but ultimately I'd still want the cause fixed.
I apologize if it came across that way! I was impressed by their desire to work with cool tech and on interesting problems instead of being dominated by economic fear and just going wherever they were most likely to get a big payout (whether or not joining Facebook now will get you a big payout is another question <grin>).
I don't understand his reaction, especially when RIM's position is perfectly defensible.

A reasonable response: "I want to assure our customers that the BlackBerry platform is, and will remain, secure, but it is necessary for RIM to follow the laws of the jurisdictions we operate in".
again a syntax error, you can't have generics in an expression in which operators such as > are allowed, the java syntax is really simple and unambiguous to parse.

On the other hand, [] is used for arrays in java so it _would_ conflict with something
I would add

-Overtime policy

-Expected work hours

-Sick leave policy

-Internet access policy.

I have been bit at all of those, from companies that expected 60 hour weeks as a default and expected 90 hour weeks when things went to hell, companies that only give three sick days a year, and finally, companies that by default block much of the internet.
Also, "experience" is (a) inherently age-biased and (b) often somewhat subjective, so prone to assessor's bias. An example where experience is subjective is how to count something in an adjacent field -- businesspeople going into politics or vice versa, or a PR person being considered for a marketing role. So it's not a panacea.
Legal realism is so fantastically obvious as this study easily shows.

The law is what judges do. So your lawyer had better know how to "manipulate" the judge.
Deleting Aliases in PowerShell
Please note that this post talks about Neo4j Community. Neo4j is now split into three editions:

* Neo4j Community, a high performance, fully ACID transactional graph database – licensed under the GPL

* Neo4j Advanced, adding advanced monitoring – licensed under the AGPL or a commercial license

* Neo4j Enterprise, adding online backup and High Availability clustering – licensed under AGPL or commercial

See more in the 1.3 announcement (http://blog.neo4j.org/2011/04/neo4j-13-abisko-lampa-released...) and our licensing guide (http://neo4j.org/licensing-guide/).
Soft stuff:

- Why do the people who work there work there? Is it just a job to pay the bills, or are you on a mission?

- Are the people there "cool" (aka, around my age, similar interests and mindset to myself)

- What are your work hours? Can I work from home occasionally?

- Perks? Perks.

Quantitative stuff:

- What is your management structure? PMs? Engineering Managers?

- How much freedom do I have in choosing my own work?

- How is my performance measured?

- What are the current challenges you face?

- What is the development environment?

- Does your office look nice (differs from person to person, for me it means lots of natural light, open concept, nice chairs, desks, and tech everywhere)

- What hardware (work computer, ergonomic set-up) will I get?

- How big is the company? Are you growing?

- Is there a potential for promotion as the company grows?

- Will I get stock?
It should be called a privacy issue or something like that. I think the CEO wanted to avoid having his platform deemed insecure as in has security holes.
IRobot to provide Navy with bomb disposal bots in a deal worth $230 million
"Software that is vaguely similar to some of the techniques used in Watson used in Hospital" would be a more accurate headline.
That's probably the best approach. If you tell students it's 'not hard', they'll immediately suspect your motives and come to the conclusion it actually is hard. If you tell them it's hard, most will believe you. Probably better just to not qualify it and slip it into the lesson when they're not expecting it.
I almost want to come up with my own counter-agreement which states "if i turn out to be a flake i'll pay you $1000 for every hour of your time i wasted"
Security Incident
default bad mood => default good mood

pessimistic => optimistic
The law would create a three strikes system for copyright infringement. Triple violators would be disconnected from the Internet without due process. It's not a national disconnect system, but could lay the technical grounds for one if implemented.
They didn't post much details, but if you have accounts at wordpress.com/.org, you know what to do (change passwords, etc) :)
I'm in the middle, thought I'd be more at the bottom. Was happy about that for a second until I realized that being at the bottom would actually be a good thing.
I love this kind of stuff, but at the same time, it presents a huge problem for software maintainability and building a scalable development team.

When I go to hire somebody it is a near certainty that they are very proficient with CSS. Sass? Probably less likely. For the sake of argument let's say I could find somebody proficient in Sass, what about all the other boutique technologies I have in my product?

At some point your product can devolve into an opaque and indecipherable hodgepodge of 'cool stuff'. Sometimes it really is better to keep things simple, even though you are causing yourself some personal pain.
I think the best solution for this problem is don't collect email addresses too soon.

I am not of fan of too much time between submitting my email address and getting a launch email. Like others have pointed out, I totally forget about the company in question.

However, it also greatly annoys me to sign up for a notification list only to start receiving progress update emails. I'm never that excited about a startup. I always unsubscribe from emails like these.

I think progress updates are be better dealt with on Twitter, Facebook, or a blog - depending on the audience it's intended for. Don't turn what's supposed to be a one time email into a newsletter.
The issue that the interviewer was asking about has nothing to do with smartphones. It's about governments wanting more access to Blackberry's records (from what I understand.)

Yes, they haven't had a good response to iOS or Android but that's completely irrelevant to the article at hand.
There is going to be some overlap of concerns once all of Sproutcore has been integrated into JQuery.
More on the 83(b) election: http://www.quora.com/What-is-an-83-b-election

Of particular note is you have 30 days from the date of the stock purchase to file. I miraculously remembered this on the 27th day.
I found Play when looking for a monitoring dashboard last year, an intern from Digg released something using the Play framework: https://github.com/digg/awacs

It's been not too bad to use.
I suspect the number of programmers and admins to grow fairly slowly over time. In many ways we are still in the early days of the revolution where everyone needed to tack on indoor plumbing, heating, and AC to existing buildings. Not only are there huge gaps but all the tools suck so everything is a custom job. However, now days it's become a fairly standardized and when building from scratch you just include plumbing, heating, and AC as part of the initial design. EX: Modern auto factory robots are more capable than needed for most of their jobs but a better tool means less need to customize.

PS: Consider the number of poeple projected to know HTML in 1998 vs actually know HTML in 2010.
Hi,

£18,000 is what I got at my first job over 15 years ago. I know things are tough in the UK for you young 'uns now though.

Commercial experience isn't as good as having some nice websites in your portfolio IMHO.
My team has built and released one app built on Play with another about to get started. It's an excellent choice if you need to deploy on the JVM. It's everything you love about Rails, but built on Java.
Open Spark Project: Your Music.  Played Through Lightning.
The doors are open on the Open Spark Project, a rare opportunity for musicians around the world to see their music turned into lightning. Cleveland-based performance engineering group, the Tesla Orchestra, launched the Open Spark Project last week, to let people around the world in on the fun of playing with giant musical bolts of electricity. Already Girl Talk (pop mashup star) and others have signed up to enter songs into the project. Thanks goes to Paul Buchheit (Google Employee #23 and inventor of GMail) for sponsoring all this excitement!

http://opensparkproject.com

Entries accepted until May 2nd, and then on May 14th the musicians and fans around the world can watch a live video feed at opensparkproject.com as we play selections from the entries on our two giant musical tesla coils. Musicians, come see your music turned into lightning!

Scientists and Engineers might wonder how the music is made. A traditional (non musical) tesla coil involves a series of resonating circuits, building up voltage higher and higher until it discharges through a spark. Part of that circuit is an air-gap switch that lets the first resonant circuit build up a high voltage before transmitting the energy to the second resonant circuit.

Now, replace that air-gap with a set of giant transistors, capable of sustaining thousands of amps of peak current, and you can now control when that spark can fly. Our musical tesla coils resonate around 30khz, discharging sparks that are several meters long. Using the transistors (called IGBTs) to turn that spark on and off at say, 440hz, will result in a 440hz tone, or A4 on your standard piano keyboard. The same holds true for other frequencies, and so the tesla coils can reproduce any note on the piano.

Any noise that you can turn on and off can make music this way, and the DIY Maker community is full of musical projects that use printers, hard disk motors, you name it, all in the name of music. We happen to like making music with giant bolts of lightning, and we hope you'll enjoy it too.
You should have gotten an error for missing an indentation on one line. For example, given this mis-indented script:

if one
if two
two
oops
one

The error given is:

Parse error on line 4: Unexpected 'INDENT'
Show HN: Postoz - Build email driven apps.
The Beijing 2008 marathon was run in extreme heat and humidity. The times were pushed back severely and some elite runners refused to participate. The last one to finish was 2:41 and the rest were DNF'd.

Actually, I was too generous. He only did 3h10.

From forum comments (not mine):

I have to say after being an early supporter of this project I
totally lost interest. I initially felt inspired by Vero's enthusiasm
and drive and a feeling that "anybody could do it" in an American
dream kind of way. Not sure if it was injury, but why didn't he
run Amsterdam?
I had the same annoyance with all of the 'company confidential' jobs ads on Monster, craigslist, etc. as well.

My solution was to develop a web crawler that scrapes job adds directly off of the 'careers' pages of company websites. This way I know their not fake ads and I can gather information on each of the companies that I care about, like number of employees that work there, awards the company has won like Best Place to Work, etc...). I wrote up a quick front-end to search the results - and voila - it's a way to bypass a lot of the job boards/recruiter spam entirely.
Most of my impressive stuff has come from being nice and treating everybody, students, counselors, and business people like they are people too.

Example 1: Went and talked to my teachers a semester early. Set up an extra credit project on a whim that let me data analysis on a Berkshire Hathaway company.

Example 2: After a failed business deal, I called up a vendor and explained what happened and why we wouldn't be working with them. After the sales rep heard what happened and heard that I didn't have anything to do this summer, they offered me a cool internship working on a way better project.

The basics for academics: http://calnewport.com/blog/
The yellow and red books were great. Haven't read the white book yet though.
This sentiment is identical to what I experienced interviewing and hiring Stanford CS grads, even though it was back in 2002-2005. Not all, to be sure -- one of my top-performing college hires was a Stanford CS grad! -- but it was certainly the trend. Unlike MIT grads, who were just drooling to find a good problem and required intervention to worry about things like career trajectory, etc.

I think it's more of a cultural bias from certain universities than a global economic trend in the field.
Should Venture Firms Invest In Robotics?