skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
proof by googlization
> I think you'll find the size of the market, measured by number of customers, to be much smaller than you think.

I worked for a politician for a while and considered writing a desktop application to do some of this -- basically CRM for electorate offices. At one point I dug up the figure that there are approximately 600,000 elected positions in the USA. The market is largish for an SME.

The pricing seems suitable for a bottom-up disruption strategy, but I'm not sure whether it would produce enough cashflow to sustain that approach. Maybe tiered pricing based on the election should be introduced.

Eg:

Tier 1: National (President, Congress) -- $5,000/mth
Tier 2: State (Governor, State Congress) -- $2,000/mth
Tier 3: Local (City Council, Mayor) -- $500/mth
Tier 4: Grassroots (School boards, fire chiefs, sheriffs) -- $100/mth
I'm in Louisville and we have had a hell of a time trying to hire quality developers. The pool of quality talent here is much smaller than the demand.
Priest?
Another day, another ginormous funding announcement from Andreessen Horowitz
This isn't an April Fools post is it? I mean seriously, if you're willing to pay $50M or $100M to keep a single employee from walking, what happens if they die on their commute into work? What sort of risk are you carrying anyway?

And I didn't think I could be amazed by 'Google scale' any more, sure proves I was wrong on that.
My guess is you are looking for a discussion of ChromeOS ? This isn't that discussion. :-)
At least a third of the people on Hacker News. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303726.
'O'Farrell noted that some of the firm's portfolio companies have a voracious appetite for capital in order to hire, make acquisitions and expand internationally. Andreessen Horowitz believes the best way to meet those needs -- and not have to share equity with other investors -- is "being able to write a check for whatever amount is required."'
"a retarded 30 year old user of site" Whoa there. I hope you meant 3.
OK, but you still need to make it clear on the homepage that it's a tool for organizing and expanding a group of people, using social media, around a cause. From the homepage I thought it was just another company trying to bundle all my personal social media together. I shouldn't have to go to the faq.
Tim Ferriss' new book had some 5* reviews go up with people saying they had only read the first 15 pages, etc etc
The Story of Linux: Commemorating 20 Years of the Linux Operating System
Does not seem useful to post downages here in HN. Let's not do this.
US atom smasher may have found new force of nature
What goes around usually comes around
This is awesome! I'll join in a few minutes.
If you care at all about being able to bring up new servers at mission-critical times, you should have local networked copies of every package that you would normally get from distro repos or PyPi.
Since when did TechCrunch become a tabloid?
n= the number of years you'd work at $co

$requiredCoSalary = the least amount per year you'd need to work at $co (negative if you'd pay to work there)

$offeredCoSalary = their offer

$requiredStartupSalary = the amount they'd have to pay to keep you if there was no acquisition on the table

$offeredStartupSalary = ...

E(ROI)=probability of acquisition times the $ of acquisition

If [n($offeredCoSalary-$requiredCoSalary)]-[n($requiredStartupSalary-$offeredStartupSalary)]>E(ROI) then take the $co job.

(Sorry for formatting - typed on phone)
I love the link to OTCC (the Obfuscated Tiny C Compiler, http://bellard.org/otcc/). It frankly blows my mind.
I agree that it's an outrageous amount of money, but it's not just a case of losing talent, it's also about losing trade secrets to a competitor.

The $50M/$100M still sounds a bit out of whack.
Michael Caine on the Power of Not Blinking (negotiation)
Ask HN: Where to go to find out who's who in Austin Startups?
I'm about a month away from graduating from college and I've got some good ways to find out about Bay Area and NYC Startups: HN, Startup Foundry, ( though controversial and gossipy they may be) Techcrunch

But I hear Austin, TX has a pretty good scene as well and I want to talk to and find out more about companies there as well.

Any Thoughts?
About 2007/2008 by my recollection.
Process exit code after crash
The only other place is NYC.

Other locales have spokespeople who talk about how they are desperate for programmers and how great it would be to work there. Then you find out the reality and it's 50k top salary programming tps reports in an office park in the suburbs.
Pedantic: Maybe you meant to say tit for tat. Tête-à-tête, literally head to head, is a meeting or conversation.
The chances that the players in this game are using careful leaks to TechCrunch, either with real or fake information, in order to make moves against the other players is very high. As readers we shouldn't really trust that what Twitter sources tell TechCrunch is totally legit, or the same for what Google sources are telling TechCrunch - playing TC or other members of the press in order to help tilt the direction of discussion one way or the other seems like a pretty obvious move.

For example, Google Competitor X sending TechCrunch fake information about Google's desperate-sounding counter-offers helps reinforce the perception of their desperateness.

Also, these two sentences don't really add up:

Google may have paid as much as $150 million in stock grants to retain key product employees Sundar Pichai and Neal Mohan, say multiple sources. Both were offered the chief product role at Twitter

Regardless, the fact that large fortunes are being handed out to mid level technical managers is somewhat of a red flag in general.
Google's indexing problems remain Google's problems though - the internet at large has demonstrated again and again that large portions are not going to update, whether it's Flash video, malformed HTML, canonical issues, duplicate content issues, dependencies on JavaScript or worse specific versions of specific browsers, etc etc.

Just like with browser vendors fixing bad HTML themselves in their rendering engines this is something Google has to fix themselves, because it's one fix for the whole internet instead of 11 billion fixes being delegated to people who just aren't going to do it.

It's a shitty job but they volunteered for it. And make billions doing it.

I am sure there are massive sections of the internet that are never going to get more than incidental traffic from Google - all the sites that just don't know/care about SEO, not to mention all the ones that just can't outdo the adsense and affiliate spammers and content farms.
11-year-old boy arrested over a stick-figure drawing
Programmer; it's the modern-day carpenter.

http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Master...
The problem in 1997-2000 was idiotic investment, not a strong job market. Amazon wasn't one of those overvalued companies then, and I certainly don't think it's overvalued now.
Linux development to get high availability push
I typically generate css with php, usually in the header but sometimes in a linked file. Using this method I can easily alter site wide color or fonts, etc or feed the style atrributes from a database. This method also allows me to create blocks of css for different page elements and include them as needed - forms, menus, etc - or dynamically include definitions when conditions are met. This offers a lot of flexibility in terms of organizing and making changes to the css.
>In my Eiffel days, I was encouraged to write "integer", not "int", "character", not "char", and so on. I believe Java encourages this practice too. Supposedly clarity is maximized. But how can this be if we do the opposite when we speak? Do you say “taxi cab”, or “taximeter cabriolet”? Redundant utterances are tiresome and worse still, obscure the idea being expressed.

I see this argument a lot, and they strike me as people complaining because they don't use tools their language provides.

Typedefs are the answer to excessive name length, and they're nearly everywhere. Just create a couple typedef files, and import them as needed - future programmers get the full names easily, while you can program in your pseudo-K version of C for maximum keyboard efficiency. I have a handful of such files, they're endlessly useful - why write `Pop_froM_lIsT_WhIch_COntaiNs_speCiFik_type_X`, doing battle with naming-scheme-X that only employee-Y uses (and their associated spelling errors) when you can do so once, and write `pop` from then on, unambiguously?

The upside of typedefs for this comparison is that they're precisely what we do with spoken language - nobody knew what a "taxi cab" was until someone told them it the shorter version of "taximeter cabriolet", or until the full phrase was well enough known that it could be inferred accurately by the average person.
FYI, you've prob seen this, they have a good domain, but I used to subscribe to this guys email list.

http://cyclerides.com/

He does lots of ride stories and photos.

The ultimate for me would be lots of photos or even better yet, maybe video (thinking about getting a gopro)
If you are young or single and dont mind renting it is pretty good. I've done the math numerous times and always come out ahead financially with jobs in the bay area.
If you have kids and/or feel the need to buy a house it is probably an entirely different story.
I have nothing against society but I do have something against the OP. Clearly he and his friends have the technical expertise to make something but instead of doing something worthwhile they have created another weapon for the spin doctors. And yes he will make millions because campaign managers these days manage more money than some hedge fund managers but the rest of us won't be better off because of it.
There's an IRC chat and a Google Group that you can check out when you start on your project. Both are linked directly from the home page on http://aspen.io
does wompt keep a history? I feel like I missed a bunch of the conversation already.
I would have thought the charging circuitry takes care of this?
Although you might prefer to start off with "Starting Forth" first.
What I'm saying is that you can't do something like this in C++-derived OO languages

class Test
{
Test( int count ) {
if ( count > 5000 ) return new Implementation();
return new OtherImplementation();
}
}

you'd have to use a class method, whereas you can do that with the standard alloc/init in Objective-C.
The "Power" section made me think of Blub. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
Just call it a pre-emptive talent acquisition. Since both Twitter and Google know that these product guys could go start their own venture, raise $20M, and then sell the team to the highest bidder, they are just preempting the process. Gotta think ahead to overpay talent before your competitor can.
Reset links can have an expiration time.
Look up @edash on Twitter. Dude is connected to Austin startups.

Also...AppSumo/Noah Kagan is looking for a sales guy/gal in ATX.
Agreed, my initial thought was this was a sim-nation style game.
Wompt does keep history, but we have not yet built in a way to browse it. At the moment, you get a bit of the backlog when you join the channel.
Ask HN: what's the catch with opentok?
opentok.com, formerly tokbox.com, has raised another $12m in late 2010 to allow anyone create video apps with 'unlimited' number of viewers for free.

what I cannot find, is that, what's the catch?

it seems their business logic is to throw lots of money to encourage people to create many many video apps, with the hope that one of them would be a killer vidapp, like chatroulette.

now the question is, then what? would they claim that the app belongs to them?
He'd be on Phish tour slinging phatty grilled cheese and icy cold water
Usually I go straight to HN comments to read the first few ones to determine if a posted article is worth reading. You guys/gals rock because you help me avoid tabloid stuff and save precious minutes of my life.
My favorite one of these comes from physics.

Simple harmonic motion impossible to deal with? Voila, assume |sin(x) - x| is small and just deal with x instead of sin(x)--magic!
Well, let's see:
- http://www.tether.com/
- http://www.compilr.com/
- http://www.wakeful.com/
- http://www.spyreveal.com/
- And a video game!

Yes, I'm still sane...
I guess it makes it a bit easier to charge clients a fraction more (say $50/2yrs) via the same registrar and they don't necessarily feel like you're screwing them.
How do you know it's due to Fukushima?
Motivational speaker.
Maybe I was too subtle. The message is: our yes or no school system fails to award perfectly reasonable thoughts such as that 10 plus one might be 101.
It's "strong" here in Chicago, although employers aren't anywhere near as generous as they are in the Bay Area.

My friends tell me it's pretty strong in Austin, TX too.
Math: You'll Be Grateful that You'll Never Be Done Learning
First of all: Sorry for the late reply. I somehow didn't notice your post before now.

I was actually replying to jbrennan who said "If it's possible for an application to bring down the system that sounds like the system was poorly designed." and burrows who said "And... you've essentially discredited windows, linux, and os x.". I didn't notice what ootachi said until you pointed it out. I consider "bring down the system" to main exactly that, kernel halt or panic.

The links you provided where about processes crashing and/or processes with memory leaks, which I could in no way consider to be "bringing down the system" (unless it's a very poor system where such things actually do bring down the whole system), and it would be completely insane of me to claim that processes cannot crash on nix.

My point was simply that kernel panics or anything that "brings down the system" very rarely occur, and normally occur due to hardware errors on nix systems, and as far as I know on newer Windows systems as well (again, never used OSX so I have nothing to go on there).

Simply put: When jbrennan said "bring down the system" that, to me at least, means anything that the _only_ recovery from is a reboot of the system, no more, no less, and that is what I was responding to.
Given that Java doesn't have typedefs how would you reduce the verbosity of :
ConcurrentHashMap<String, Integer> foo = new ConcurrentHashMap<String, Integer>();
According to Werner Vogels' (Amazon's CTO) Quora answer, the excess capacity story is a myth. http://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-clo...
"If you're a Google employee and you aren't out interviewing at Facebook, Twitter or Zynga you are a moron"

This is why this has to be false. The precedent would be destructive. How many employees will go out looking for a job to use as leverage, not get a google counter offer, and just leave?
Has anyone noticed salaries rising in correlation with this supposed demand? I personally haven't seen salaries rising as much as I would have thought...
Yes and no. Developer shortages are caused by company creation outpacing new developers entering the market. Generally its a leading indicator of growth, and precedes an inflationary trend in salaries.

If the increase in startups is do to economic expansion around new markets, then the overall increase in jobs can be durable in the sense that they are for viable businesses. If it turns out that the creation of startups is due to rampant speculation from capitol chasing better returns in an irrational way, then the jobs will disappear again when the market corrects.

So far, in this 'extremely reminiscent of previous bubble' non-bubble expansion, the source of capital has been, in theory, from investors who are making risk / value assessments in line with information about the business models they are investing in.

However, there is also evidence to suggest that people who have acquired excess capital but did not experience, nor learn the lessons of, that previous bubble, are in the process of redistributing their new found wealth in unsound ways.

As the previous explosion lasted about 6 years ('95 with 'Netscape' to '01 with 'nuclear winter'), and it was sustained in part by the unbridled enthusiasm of untrained investors, investing in IPOs. If this particular trend continues with simply VC/Angel money we should no in a shorter period whether or not the expansion is durable or illusory.

Check back in 2015, you'll know if it was like 99 or not.
Okay, I have no idea what the site is about, but it's beautiful. Who designed it?
How database replication helps me sleep at night
> losing trade secrets to a competitor

Wouldn't this be illegal?
When they realized it sold more ads + took less time to write the pieces. Then AOL bought them and it became official!
I think min.us may be the real dropbox killer. Dropbox is actually hard to understand for non-techies. Easier than ftp and stuff but still hard. There's a lot more innovation possible in this area.
The design (while nice) and fake example data hardly discourage that impression.

Could be geared around a planning desk or war room theme (without connotations of violence)?
I would argue that you don't really need to, since auto-completing code editors and displays with enough resolution to support more than 80 columns are pretty ubiquitous.
I'm deeply conflicted about this article because I agree with many of its premises. For instance: that C is superior to full-blown C++, that object-oriented programming is no panacea, that simplicity is good.

I have serious concerns, however, especially with the first page and the first few chapters.

- They support the biases of the myopic programmer who believes that now he or she knows C, they know everything one must know about programming. I know that isn't the entire point, but you can get that from the article and I have met such programmers. You don't want to work with them, even on projects written in C.

- The "C Craft" section largely describes hacks to work around shortcomings in the syntax or semantics of C.

- The languages used for "vs" comparison are: FORTRAN, C++, Java. Fish in a barrel, anyone? Haskell, APL & J are presented as curios. Python is only mentioned in passing, as an inferior choice to Haskell for rapid prototyping of mathematically-oriented code.

- Go is presented as the "better C", which is encouraging but I'd feel more encouraged if the author showed they were properly familiar with some additional modern programming languages and the cases in which one might use them.

- The assertion that "you can write object-oriented code in C" is accurate, although I think a better point to stress is "you can write mostly-well-modularised code in C, and that's what you want a lot of the time."

- The author also ignores the reality that object-oriented C really only scales up to a certain amount of object-orientatedness, and then it becomes very unwieldly if you are not very careful. Unwieldy at a scale where using a small subset of C++ (ie "C with classes") would remove the overhead, improve the code's signal-to-noise ratio, and still not bring in most of the "bad C++" that the author is talking about.

- The author seems to have chosen to define certain terms as they see fit. For instance, simplicity is defined in terms of brevity & terseness but the example used to prove the point is that Eiffel requires "character" and "integer" whereas C only requires "char" and "int".

For an alternative point of view on what constitutes "brevity" and "simplicity", see the common C idioms for filtering or mapping any variable sized data structure. The only time it becomes less brief is if you rewrite it in C++ w/ STL or Boost. ;)

- It's also telling that in Chapter 2 the Fibonacci counterpoint to Java is in Haskell, not C. That's because a full C program would look pretty similar to the Java program quoted, albeit without the sore-thumb of wrapping it all in a class .

Anyhow, I should quit ranting but IMHO (a) you should know C, (b) you should respect C but (c) you should know some other languages and use C only when you actually need to.

(c) may not apply if you're a super-whizz genius C programmer, some of those people seem like they can carry off ridiculous use cases without making horrible messes. Most of us are not those people. ;)
"Mistakes were made".
Fixing the little things in Gmail
I love twitter, but I wonder how many of these 155 million tweets/day are spam?
It's nice to see that the things he describes as C's greatest virtues are the same things we carried over into the design of Go. (http://golang.org/)
Can you talk more about your VAN integration?
As an early player of minecraft I have always had a nagging question to ask: why did minecraft succeed while second life "failed"? In a sense they offer similar creative expression but with different gameplay philosophies.
I was challenging that; I think that the reason Montessori kids do better isn't because Montessori is genius, but because it's more in tune with how kids learn naturally. It's more that standard education is bad, not the Montessori is good.
The Programming Historian
Alternatively, you can use PAE.
Yes, probably. Doesn't mean it wouldn't happen.
"I spend more than that on coffee."

LOL. Every web service is pitched to me at "less than the price of a cup of coffee a day"

Here are a few -
1) LinkedIn Business account
2) Emusic subscription
3) Adobe PDF writer
4) Freshbooks
and the list goes on...
It doesn't matter what she knows, it matters that you encourage her to learn more and follow where her mind takes her.

For my boys, (3.9 and 1.5 years) I looked into Waldorf and was actually completely turned off by the fact that reading was completely ignored until much, much later. (7 years) For my eldest, who is already reading 2 and 3 letter words and phonetically sounding larger ones, this would be such a set back that he would be discouraged.

I think it isn't important where he is right now, but more so that he is encouraged to continue learning and continues to have an enjoyment of learning. I think that's really where our schools fail and why a self-motivated Montessori child can be a high achiever.
I really can't make up my mind about this one.

On one hand it's very obvious to me that things like this need to cause a reaction, on the other hand it seems insane to handcuff a _child_ and put him in a cell for something like this.

Seems to me like this would be more of a job for a medical professional or child services. But I'm still very unsure what the correct action to take would be.
http://wompt.com/chat/yc/
Water does not get significantly more dense under pressure. According to Wikipedia, at an ocean depth of 4km, its volume is reduced by only 1.8%. That's not going to have to have much effect on the speed required to get lift.
There you're largely screwed, but Java is well-known for being extremely verbose, and of course there will be languages that don't have basic features others have had for decades.

The closest you can get in Java is to wrap it in a private, internal class. Which also lets you rename some verbose or frequently-combined operations, say:

foo.someoneCouldntComeUpWithAShorterName() -> wrapped.succinct()
-- or --
foo.store(val);
foo.store(val);
foo.store(val); // I hate void functions...
-> wrapped.store(val,val,val);

But yes, it's a pain. Java's largely a pain.
When I see this kind of money being offered, FB valuated at $75B, Groupon at $25B etc etc..I remember the 2000 IT Bubble. A lot of similar things happened then and it was scary