skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lot's of VC firms do fish for information.

I don't have much experience, but I would say "We're very busy right now and as a bootstrapped startup, all available funds are funneled into improving our product and delighting customers. Airfare isn't an affordable option right now, but I would love to meet the next time you are in the area."

If they really are interested, they will offer to pay for the tickets right there. If they aren't serious, then they probably won't.
Should have used www.logobids.com - way better!
Hmm, I tried it in LISP and did fine until step 4. There were no side effects and it didn't iterate...
Ah. Yeah, that's definitely not the tenderloin, but is a wasteland. If that's the case, my whole stance changes and I'm not sure if Brisbane is such a bad option.
Skechers  shoes
Great points. There is definitely a shake-up in Education on the way. The high-cost, middle-tier, universities are already feeling this and it will only expand.

The key to self-education is effort. It's much easier to be forced to take classes, do assignments, sit through lectures and take exams. It's much harder to have the self-discipline to do this on your own.
Direct link article here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2413254
Actually, San Francisco got it right.

Instead of giving Twitter a tax break, they're giving anyone who moves into mid-market or the Tenderloin a tax break. Mid-market has been a blight for decades and plans to revitalize the area have never panned out. The Tenderloin (especially lower Tenderloin), isn't any better.

I think this is a great alternative to the city dumping money into the area. It'll create a powerful incentive to move there regardless of the blight and the effect of a few thousand engineers moving into that area will be dramatic.

I just wish it was for more than 6 years since I think it'll take longer than that to revitalize the neighborhood.
IMHO, this entire 1.5% payroll tax should go.
And while we're at it, lets bring the property tax below 1%.
And sales tax should go back to the 8% that it used to be.

Yesterday I got an email from SEIU (the government employees union), asking me to write in opposing this deal. It turns out there are over 14,000 city employees in the City + County of SF. For a population of under 800,000 . Wow. And in last years election, they were pushing hard for a ballot initiative that would have slapped an additional tax on hotel rooms.

There is just too much bureaucracy in this city. As revenues have gone up, the bureaucracy has ballooned. The City's annual budget is $6 Billion; and yet they can't find the $300K to support the SF Botanical Garden? In the meantime, personnel costs keep skyrocketing. Politicians keep hiring their cronies. For example: a local politician served before there was a law providing for healthcare benefits upon retirement for politicians. So he was hired for a month on the City payroll; his previous service counted, and voila! Now he has subsidized healthcare for the rest of his life.
Lucrative Parking Garage management contracts are awarded at below market rates to cronies, who make a tidy profit.

Abuse is rampant all across San Francisco. The only way to stop is to stop the flow of funds that enables such abuse.

[edit: I had written 34,000 earlier; corrected it to 14,000 City employees]
Also related, feeling lazy? Use Steve Hanov's word-removal tool to remove unnecessary words from your sentences: http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=52
Not in this case, would rather they spend the time money making the rockets than the website.
Tobacco General - Products
How do they decommission a lab like Fermi? Does private industry by the particle accelerator and use it for some other applications?
Clickable link http://twitter.com/YCnews
The soon-to-be released Lenovo x220 fits your list very well.
Are there any software packages or web services that help with this? Writing is a huge part of my job but because I'm english second language I'm lacking the intuitive sense for such rules. Especially since I learned most of my english in my formative years on internet forums...
I'd ask them what they want to meet about. Why have they contacted you? Do they have specific questions? What would they like to cover in the meeting? Can it be covered over the phone?

Who initiated the contact? If they contacted you then you have the "hand" and can ask all these questions. If you have been chasing them down asking for a meeting then probably you have to do as they ask.
It is really hard. John Carmack has been talking for years about how much easier it is to get good performance out of a console, where the hardware is a known quantity, than on Windows, where you have to make really difficult tradeoffs based on the dozens of differences between hardware configurations.

iPhone is easier like consoles. Android is harder like PCs.
Surprised since the only change I did was add padding to the top and bottom. Wonder how that changed threading. I am not using one line of JS for this.

Any suggestions as to what could be causing this?
Just for what it's worth:

* Fantasy numbers do help when they illustrate the scale of the dollar figures we're talking about. It is helpful to measure things in "Twitter employee lunches to break even". It's actually more helpful than "$250,000" is, even though the latter number is more "factual".

* If you don't believe it matters whether the city will even out in side-effects†, you're basically arguing there's no point to discussing incentive programs. All of them are cost-benefit investments (or gambles). Make the argument that they're bad gambles, sure. But it's probably not worth making the argument that the city shouldn't try incentives; you'd be howling into the wind, since every city in the country has, in the city council and at the ballot box, decided this already.

† And, tip, which I learned here the hard way: watch out for the double quotes; they can mean, "reader, this is what the person who I'm responding to just said; would you get a load of it?". You'd be surprised how irritating this can be to people. I re-learn this at least once every couple months.
Thirdly, they want free steak dinners and tickets to ball games on company time while a salesman reassures them that they're buying the best option.
Thanks for releasing it as free software. https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc
Is it our fault that their engineers decided 8 engines just wasn't a cool enough number of engines?
I'm not trying to do type inference (yet, that might be a direction of expansion for next year), and, anyway, my program is demanding type annotations in docstrings.
Pandora has an XML service that can be used to find similar music
Take another approach - set up other meetings with other VCs in the same city around the same time to justify the trip. Taking a trip on your own dime for one VC firm isn't as cost effective with your time, unless you're in the later stages of talks and even then if it's going well then they will fly you out with their money. My initial thoughts are to either do that or search close to home. If they're really interested they'll make it happen at all costs.

It's a HUGE red flag that they're reluctant or ignore the questions in the email thread a couple of times. If it's not a policy of theirs to pay to fly out a prospect then that's fine, but say it up front. I personally wouldn't want to have anyone invest in my company that hems and haws around a pointed question.
Pandora - hidden endpoints
Our Google Apps for Business account is often slower than my personal one, and I've only had the business one for a year.
Drivers may provide you semantic uniformity over a diverse set of hardware, but I think Sweeny sounds more interested in performance guarantees, which they may not be able to provide, depending both on the hardware and how well the driver has been optimized.
For me, the teachers will enhance my interest, but the grades aspect of it will muffle it. I'm not exactly sure why this is.
> The ISS is not on a particularly useful orbit for this and the only reason I imagine to stop by would be to use the extra helping hands of the resident crew to do the required assembly.

That, and the living quarters. If it's going to take a couple months to put stuff together and test, you don't want to be living out of an Apollo-sized capsule.
Cocoa's NSMutableArray changes implementation based on the size of the dataset
I will never forget that video RAM started at location 61440 on the Osborne 1.

I should forget, but I won't.

Googling that number reveals various BASIC sources--where's the Osborne 1 emulator?

Here's one more difference: the Osborne 1 was AWESOME. ;-)
This may finally lead to outright combat between the ChromeOS and Android groups.

Chrome the browser itself is fairly successful, as are Android phones. But Chrome OS vs. Android...that is a huge showdown. ChromeOS is a minimalist OS, whereas Android is a fat client. Philosophies are totally different.

Attitude within Google right now is "let the market decide". Only a company with the free cash flow of Google could build two operating systems intended for mobile devices and take that kind of approach.

I'll get my popcorn.
I was talking about profit, not revenue. Here's what I'm talking about:

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-microsoft-op...
I'd imagine it's more a commercial restriction - they really, really, really don't want to kill someone on the first few dozen flights.

(they don't want to kill anyone ever, of course, but an early death would be an inordinately huge blow to their potential success in the market)
Because sometimes you can drop words without running the risk of being confusing, often because the context fills in the blanks.

For example, if I write something and John responds "That's interesting. Would love to talk to you further about it" -- it's not made explicit who would love to talk, but who else than John could it possibly be?
If on the other hand John's reply reads more like: "I liked your post, and my friend Steve found it particularly interesting. Would love to talk you you further" -- in this case you risk being confusing, because would John or Steve like to talk to you?

There's a similar effect with a sentence like:
"That's an interesting observation. Might be good to get some more data." You've shortened "It might be good...", but that's OK since there is no risk of confusion.
one click http://code.google.com/p/dapper-dot-net/source/browse/SqlMap...
Users in powers of 10
I disagreed with him in many places, but I still thought he made a good argument.
I've been planning my move of a 25gb MySQL db over to RDS.

I decided to have a downtime window in the middle of the night, versus doing a live move. I am moving from a dedicated datacenter to AWS all at once, so I'm in a different situation than those moving from an EC2 mysql instance to RDS, which should be a lot easier.

I followed the instructions from the RDS instructions, which tell you to break up mysqldump files great than 1GB and use mysqlimport to send them over.

I did some benchmarking and found the import time wasn't linear on file size. This may have to do with the fact that I was using the 1.7GB instance (which i'm upgrading to 15gb for the live site).
No, only that once you have your core features in place, building more won't improve your product and won't win or keep customers. Meanwhile, as a non-tech business, your competitors can easily copy the features you built, so how do you win? In the long-term you have to beat them on sales and support, and outsourcing that to someone without a deep knowledge of the product (as in the article) makes that hard.
Excited to see some mobile traction for HN, but posting the same link three times a day might be frowned upon.
The root of the problem is not how open the source code is – it’s to do with how liberally the Android trademark is licensed.

I think this is a key insight and I hope Google realizes this. What's strange is that they got this right with Chrome and Chromium!
Tutorial: Write a Message-Board system running on 5 database machines
I ran across this earlier today and added a small feature to it[1]. The author is very receptive to pull requests, so I highly recommend forking away!

If you're interested in contributing and stumped for things to add or fix, check out the included TODO file.

[1] https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/commit/01bc7bf30c10a2abd8f0...
Interface Design Bootcamp Presentation from Future of Web Design workshop
The maybe you can create a startup that revolves around your 'addiction'.
Some people successfully writes blogs for startup news such as HN, e.g., http://blog.louisgray.com.
https://github.com/languages/C%23
I think the main difference between India and, say, the West (US/UK) is that in India, students pick a profession based on the earning potential, or what their parents what them to do. Very few people pick it based on what they want to do.

So you have people getting CS degrees, but their hearts are not in CS. So there's no passion, no excitement, no enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, colleges also don't light a fire inside their students. It's all rote learning. One of the few colleges that really teaches people how to think independently is BITS Pilani http://www.bits-pilani.ac.in/ (I may be biased a little ;) ). Even though I got a Mechanical Engg degree from there, I learnt enough CS that I was able to get a full assistantship in the US in CS (where my heart was). I am grateful for the education I got there.
Try living in Upstate NY. My school taxes were $2,500 in 2007. With no change in property assessment, they are up to $3,400 this year. And we just found out that the local library wants to jack their portion of the tax by over 25%.

This place was a boomtown in the 1960's. Today, the booming business is in demolishing abandoned buildings.
Great article.. One additional task for a CEO is getting out there and recruiting. A startup CEO should aim to get at least one meeting with an engineer and sell them on your product and vision. Like Mark Suster says ABR, Always be Recruiting.
There is also http://ihackernews.com.
I'll be honest and say that I'm a CS dropout who's never felt like any kind of maths wizard. I didn't enjoy the CS course I took back when I was 17 but that never stopped me from pursuing a career in the field that I'm passionate about.

Since that time I've taught myself everything I needed to know and never really felt the poorer for it. It's not easy and a degree is a great foundation but it's exactly that, a foundation. What comes after graduation day is a lifetime of learning.

If you really want to pursue programming, to any level, it's your passion and willingness to keep learning and pushing yourself that will ultimately determine how successful you are. Degree or no degree.
I agree completely. And, yet, I did exactly that.

Why? I'm not sure. A more logical choice would have been to wait a few days, choose a new title, and then try it again: maybe find something that HN would agree with the first time around. Or maybe I should have finished it completely, released it on the App Store, then posted a link to that. Who knows. But at this point it's too late, so all I can do is apologize for messing with HN like I did, and hope that this contribution offsets it. :(
Nice work, this is the new best HN iPhone client.
Elon Musk (co-founder of PayPal and Tesla Motors) plans rocket launch
The components of the accelerator have other uses but a lot of it will likely end up on the scrap heap.
I don't think they should be letting Managers or Engineers run things. I think they need to have... I'm not sure of the title... lets call them Vision Carriers. In the video game industry we call these people Creative Directors.

These vision carriers need to understand the product they are building and the people who will use it.

They don't need to be good a managing people or budgets, they don't need to write code. They need to understand what is good and what is bad and they need to be able to clearly communicate it to the team.
Reminds me of this article that popped up on here last week: http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...
In that case the drivers were too abstracted and to really eek performance out of the ps1 over what others were doing at the time they had to bypass graphics drivers from sony.
Mongoid_fulltext: full-text n-gram search for your MongoDB models
Java garbage collection: Understanding weak references
How Does Using A Self Storage Unit Affect Your Moving? 
Sometimes there is no place for items when you are moving into a new home. A self storage unit is the most affordable and dependable way to store items until you need them.
Miss Bee - The Automatic Online Competition Entry Service
Hey Guys,

This is my new website I created over the past month or so.

It is an automatic entry service for online competitions. For only $20 per year, Members are signed up to over 1000 online competitions to win anything from a $500 supermarket voucher to a vacation to Paris.

When members are signed up they are given a new email address which will be their competition email and all that is required of them is to check it every week or two to see if they have won any of the competitions we have entered them into.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

http://www.missbee.com.au
Things to consider.

- Feynman got involved in the belief that the Americans needed to build this before Germany did. Which Germany certainly had the talent, motivation, and resources to do. In short if the bomb was going to be used, he didn't want it used against his country.

- Once the nuclear bomb was exploded, and Feynman realized what he had helped do, he fell into a significant period of depression.

- In later years he publicly criticized himself for getting caught up in the project and continuing it after Germany surrendered and it was clear that there was no race.

- Feynman died believing that his work on the nuclear bomb is what caused the leukemia that killed him.

It is easy to paint a picture of black and white and make people out to be pure villains. But reality is seldom so simple.
I couldn't find a way to agree with this.

The difference between mediocrity and brilliance --in ANY field-- lies in something that has nothing whatsoever to do with a formal education. I have met so many people with impressive pedigree's that are clueless to not need further proof. I have also met a good number of people with what I would call "interrupted educations" that focused so intensely on a particular field of study that they truly became masters within that field.

In engineering or cs there's also what happens before university.

In my particular case, I built my first computer way before I saw my first college textbook on the subject. And, by "build my first computer" I mean that I wired the CPU and ALU from discrete components (Who knows how a diode matrix can be used as an instruction decoder?), created my own machine language and coded instructions bit-by-bit into memory.

After that came wire-wrapping 6502, 8080, 8085 and 68000 computers, again, before seeing my first college textbook. And so, it only stands to reason that the focus and drive once in college and out of college was very, very different from that of someone who never had any such experiences and came to college with a blank stare waiting to be taught something they knew nothing about.
At Google we call them product managers.

(Aside: I think the original article does not understand that product managers aren't "managers" in the traditional sense of the word. Much of this discussion should be predicated on this fact!)
It's a fair point about Haskell's learning curve. Haskell is different enough from the languages most people have grown up using that--at least in my experience--there are times that simply understanding a few lines of code can take minutes.

On the other hand, that fact has always seemed to me a mark of why it's worthwhile to persevere: as when you are learning mathematics, things can seem entirely opaque until they 'click', but then you've really made an advance in your understanding.

Probably most people are aware of it, but the O'Reilly book _Real World Haskell_ by Bryan O'Sullivan, Don Stewart, and John Goerzen, is a great way to get started. The book is on-line at

http://book.realworldhaskell.org/

Chapter 8 discusses (one of) the Haskell regexp implementation(s), and in particular addresses one of the puzzling aspects: polymorphism in return type. The whole book is excellent.

(I should also point out that another book _Learn You A Haskell_, has just been published, and is well-regarded. I think it assumes rather less programming experience than RWH, and also covers less of the "real-world" aspects. It also can be read on-line, at

http://learnyouahaskell.com/

and in fact there is a coupon code on that page now for 40% off.)

Also, the Haskell community is, in my experience, extremely helpful and welcoming. People should come and join!
I was telling someone about the safe cracking "algorithm" he had. Sometimes a problem seems hard until you recognize special pieces of information that dramatically change the constraints. In the case of the safe, he realized that the precision of a safe was to the closest multiple of 5, which reduced the set of combinations from 216,000 to 1,728) and then later that certain combinations are far more common than others (e.g. the default combo). It makes you realize that real brilliance is generally in understanding the problem and its constraints, not in solving it.
I moved from icombinator to ihackernews since ihackernews acts more like a normal web app (icombinator locks the page as it reloads and makes it hard to come back to articles). However, it has a hard time grabbing comments (most don't work right), so it's frustrating to use.
From the article:

"Flexible working environment. We're based in Mountain View, but working remotely is not off the table."
Have you considered trying to hack some sort of 'double buffered' style approach to transitions? You could conceivably open a hidden player that's loading in the background while the visible one is playing, and flip between them, dumping the previously visible player's video and always buffering the next chunk in the hidden bit.

This idea has been something my friends and I discussed a lot at one time or another, it's really cool to see it in action.
In San Francisco, a 2-BR condo goes for around $800K. At a 1.16% property tax rate, you'll be paying $9000/year in property taxes. How's that for a tax rate?
Yesterday I got an email from SEIU (the government employees union), asking me to write in opposing this deal. It turns out there are over 34,000 government employees in the City + Country of SF. For a population of under 800,000 . Wow.

Why does this surprise you? SF has SF State, UCSF, Hastings Law, the 9th Circuit Court, USGS, GGNRA and is home to many other government agencies. Also, corruption and patronage aren't exactly new in SF, they have been part and parcel in the city going back to before the 1906 earthquake. If anything, SF is a lot less corrupt now than it was during the dot com boom when Willie Brown was mayor.
U.S. Sees Array of New Threats at Japan’s Nuclear Plant
How to improve at starcraft 2 1v1 efficiently
Looking for good Rails code to read
I haven't been working in Rails for several years and a lot has changed. I've read through the Rails 3 Way (very good), but I'm looking for some good open source Rails code to read and/or get involved in. Can anyone recommend a project for some good bedtime reading?
What happens is my IP gets blocked by YC. So until the traffic dies down or I change my IP address, it errors out while getting the comments (YC serves me a blank page).
Because the alternative is to become just like HP -- where technology and engineering is just an advertising slogan. And one HP is enough.
Fivefingers