skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Accounting, financial app for SaaS companies
I've been working on a startup idea dealing with online accounting. I've been struggling to define the sweet spot MVP to launch with in a continuum between full-featured QuickBooks and no-accounting inDinero.

One pain I've realized is that existing products aren't designed for recurring revenue SaaS companies. The easy accounting sites generally cater to freelancers and other service-based small businesses.

Would an app that shows graphs of revenue for recurring customers based on plans be something of value? Would that solve anyone's pain but my own?
NYC is not a software development hub. However, there are a lot of programming jobs there because media, finance, fashion and other "New York" industries all need programmers. These industries all have a lot of money so salaries for programmers are good.
In a similar vein is Thomas Metzinger's work.

http://www.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/metzinger/
If it turns out to be true, I will probably sell my Google stock. I'd always felt that it was a pretty safe holding, but any company that could piss away money like that is not one I want to hold.
PyPi is notoriously fragile, and is down an awful lot. That is why those of us who use it for deployment regularly use the mirrors.

In other words, this is not newsworthy.
15 Windows XP Top Secrets
Show HN: Building a web app in 24hrs
I see the same "loading" message briefly at the top when pressing the new Refresh button.

You can also get the same behavior if you turn keyboard shortcuts on with either "u" (to refresh current view) or "gi" (to go back to the inbox).
It's probably worth reading the Preface.
Registration now open for Google Code Jam 2011
At my kids' Montessori school they begin using computers in 4th grade and are required to own one in 7th-8th grade, so my experience is the same as yours. However, I wouldn't call it a "counterpoint" since Waldorf and Montessori are different.
You can easily beat "static const volatile signed long long int bar" with a function pointer (and without the unrealistic redundant indirection of "int const ... const foo"). Start with static const volatile signed long long int (*foo)(static const volatile signed long long int bar). :)
Html5 Fractal
(A) The weather in NYC is definitely not as extreme as ANY of the places you listed. I have lived in all five for varying lengths of time.

(B) Many more creative types than just developers are attracted to NYC such as fashion, tv, finance (if you don't think CDOs are creative then look closer).

(C) Because of the diversity of people you get really interesting experiences and ideas you couldn't get anywhere else. The Bay Area's idea of diversity is hackers that like to wear black t-shirts vs VCs that like to wear Polos.

(D) For being a much bigger city, New York is much more compact time-wise because you don't have to drive everywhere, which makes it fundamentally more liveable.

And (E) as for Boston, as an MIT alum currently still in the Boston area, I can tell you that nobody wants to stay here after graduation....the city is tiny and the bars close at 1 AND it's freezing 8 months out of the year.
We would love to get your feedback on our project - thanks!
Doh! I'll have to fix that :)

As for the questions, I'm following a method Sean Ellis advocates. You know you've hit product/market fit when 40% of your users would be "very disappointed" (haha, spelled it wrong again. thanks browser spell checker) if your product was no longer available.

If you're interested, you should definitely watch the interview with him from venture hacks:

http://venturehacks.com/articles/sean-ellis-interview

http://venturehacks.com/articles/sean-ellis-interview-2
Gary Johnson is speaking at my house in LA this Friday and you're all invited
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbaOFkC8tQE
You may not actually need to sleep. I find that just lying down for 30-60 minutes in a dark, quiet room provides ~80% of the 'recovery' value of a real nap.
Thanks! Wow, that's a great forum. Thanks for the tip.
An excellent resource to get a more comprehensive review of ANNs is Neural Network Design (http://hagan.okstate.edu/nnd.html). Unfortunately, the book itself is out of print, but that link has some sample chapters and used copies are floating around. The book was written by the authors of the Neural Network Toolbox for MATLAB, so naturally all the examples and demos referenced are in MATLAB.
If that's what we're worth in economic terms then that's what we should be paid. I'm all for rumors like this because I want to be paid for value. Should Lebron James work for free because he's playing a friggin' game for a living or should he be getting hundreds of millions of dollars because that's just a fraction of the revenue he generates?
You're overthinking this. Yes, in principle we do known the fine structure constant to something like 9 orders of magnitude both experimentally and theoretically.

However, when would you use the pi = 3 approximation? Certainly not when you're in front of a computer, or if you were preparing some experimental results for publication. But, if you're in the lab and need to quickly make some calculations, or just to see if something is feasible and worth spending more time on, pi = 3 isn't so bad.

Example, measuring the fine structure. Sure, you can predict where these energy levels are supposed to be to probably whatever our error on knowing the mass of an electron is. And because you know the fine structure so precisely, you should be able to make a very accurate prediction on where that is. However, throw most of those digits out the door, because a lot will be hidden behind doppler broadening. So when you make your measurement in your fabry perot etalon, you'll probably make a precise measurement

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fabry_Perot_Etalon_Rings_F...

but how accurately can you really measure the position of those fringes? Sure, free spectral range probably lets you get down to about MHz region or so, but the doppler broadened linewidth is probably an order larger than that. Which brings us back to, you've got these experimental errors, why care about 9 digits of precision if you just want a quick and dirty calculation to get things set up?

Anyways, that's all he's trying to say. In most experiments, there will be some sort of experimental error hurting you. Be sloppy in the beginning just to get a feel for things.
disclaimer: I have not tried these. Totally pulling these from a quick googled-refresher of macros.

#define withZip someoneCouldntComeUpWithAShorterNameWithZipcode
#define dictWith dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys
or
#define dictWith NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys
so you can [dictWith: key, value, key, value]

:) I forget, does XCode intelligently handle macros? Or does using a macro destroy its helpful features, like code completion?

I actually have a "hashWith" utility function for my .NET code. Saves me a ton of ugh-induced headaches.
Way to completely forget about taxes.

Also, if hackers were 1/10 as unionized as teachers or other public sector employees OR GM employees the median salary would be double that.
Do something like the Google Collections Library does:

HashMap<String, Integer> foo = Maps.newHashMap();

The return type of newHashMap is determined by the type of foo, so you don't need to repeat the generic types in angle brackets.

public static <K, V> HashMap<K, V> newHashMap() {
return new HashMap<K, V>();
}

http://google-collections.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javadoc/i...

(I'm not a fan of Java myself, but there are some tricky ways to cut down on its verbosity)
Many of the things the article mentioned were not mistakes.
I understand that research into something as complicated as education can't control all variables. But I can immediately think of numerous other variables - what about the other children at the schools backgrounds? what about the level of funding the schools received? the level of training of the teachers?

I think Montessori and Steiner are far more dogmatic than sense dictates - but stay this way, despite the negatives, in order to give their system a magical quality. Determining the quality of a school is hard. So people are willing to cling to a belief because they don't know any better.

Just one example of negative; Montessori doesn't use imaginative play. It's been shown to be a great tool to give kids better concentration spans. But the writings of Montessori are against it and the dogma has to be followed.
I have to give you a +1 for that and wish I could give -1 to myself.
So it matches what some people in this thread think of the project so far?
I hope NYC doesn't become the next silicon valley. I hope another city does. Or why not a country?
The thing is we should decentralize the different powers. Yeah, leave NY to your lawyer but why not creating a new hub at a tropical place like... lets say... Brazil.
A place with very low life cost and super high internet access + super nice weather where hackers could be doing their 'thing' all year long and then maybe take a plane to meet investors from NY, Europe or China..... or just skype them.
A neuromorphic AI could be constructed without understanding how the brain actually works. You could run that faster, but even with a billion years subjective you still might not be able to come up with ways to improve your own mind if you aren't smart enough in the first place. Of course, the intelligence threshold for self-improvement is lower if your mind is simpler...but the clearest (and fastest?) route to something you could reasonably call AGI may be dumbly reimplementing a human brain.
Could you detail your experience more so we can compare its statistical significance to the scientific study cited in the article?
The Birth of Linux: How Linux Got Started
The Best Directory List: Poll Results
Celebrate 20 Years of Linux With Us
Linking to public profiles:
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/neal-mohan/0/278/520
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sundarpichai

I would expect a statement from Google on this (whether its an April Fool's joke or not). There is no way they can let their other employees think that 2 guys are making bank here. Its just not sustainable to let employees think that this is the way forward to negotiate salaries
Like HN but for Social Media News. What do you think?
Just because someone is not an American national doesn't mean that they are on a work visa. If you google his profile, you'll see that he's been working in the US for a long time (long enough for him to have a green card by now)
There were more than enough crappy dot com companies hiring executive chefs turned "programmers" after taking a community college class on MS Front Page to say that the job market was also inflated. The number of unqualified people that were employed in some type of IT position during the boom was very apparent to anyone that had to deal with filtering resumes during the beginning of the bust.
The words "Young man, you're going straight to the Principal's office!" spring to mind.

Of course, I think most of us when we were kids might have occasionally joked about killing the teacher. Hell, at my school we had songs about killing the teacher. (Ooh, the internet wins again: http://www.citizenofthemonth.com/2005/08/04/a-tribute-to-tea...). Of course if this kid is really fantasising about killing the teacher (especially at age eleven) then he's probably a bit disturbed, so it's time to have a meeting with the counsellor and the parents.

I really can't see any circumstances under which getting the police involved is anything other than a waste of police time, though, unless he actually has a gun.
Another excellent resource (a Git tutorial) by the same author: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/
2011 Top Tech Investors
I would like to believe that the US visa laws are insufficiently moronic to be defeated by such a ploy... can anyone confirm?
Hi David,
Nice post by the way. The results are really suggestive but what leaves me wondering is that there is a million of things that can be going on at the same time.

Also, why did you ended up doing ILRS/LAD instead of more straightforward methods?

Cheers,
Sergio
I think they are saying that you will allow them to log into your application and check it out if it's password protected.
Poll: Should TechCrunch articles be banned from HN?
Lately it seems like every article I read on TC devolves into some sort of speculation or gossip. I can't help but feel like the quality of HN goes down a little bit every time one of these articles gets to the front page. For example, currently #1 on the front page is a completely tabloid-esque TC article about Google making counteroffers to key employees getting courted by Twitter. It's almost like the "who's dating who" section in US Magazine.

Certainly I find some of the content on TC useful (for example, launch announcements), but I feel like a lot would be gained if the median TC article just never showed up on HN.

Thoughts?
Multiple sources close to Twitter have said that someone with access to Twitter’s most confidential information, such as who they are interviewing for key executive spots, may be leaking that information directly to Google. In this case, Google may have acted on that information too quickly. And people at Twitter, say these sources, are steaming mad.

I wonder what google services twitter hiring execs and others use. In the "privacy is dead" age you seem to be able to find out an awful lot about an awful lot if you're willing to go out and piece together public data.And in the realm of open source intelligence gathering, it's unlikely there is a bigger king than google.

I wonder if multiple people at twitter can be found googling the googlers in the days or hours before they meet for a hiring discussion. My money would be on yes, and that's only one of many possible sources.When I was on campus in Redmond a few years ago I was pretty impressed by how tailored the google search ads and even some SERPs in terms of trying to poach from MS.
Indeed. AMZN was my major stock loss in those years.
API Ecosystem: Quarrel, Kiss, then Makeup
I've heard this before and it makes basic sense. So here's my question: what do I do to become a "great" developer? Are we talking "any specialty beyond PHP?" Hadoop knowhow? Advanced statistical algorithm knowledge? Database theory? Or is the bar absurdly low, and if we can just find a !@#$% developer who can code fizzbuzz and isn't an idiot is the thought process?
It was a weird time. I remember briefly feeling like a celebrity at parties when I said I was a programmer. All kinds of people that had never expressed an interest in software before were suddenly chasing after tech certifications.
Yeah, and congrats, now you have to hire people who already know what a foo is.

The great thing about ConcurrentHashMap<Long,String> isn't writing it, it's reading it. Even if you're not a Java programmer you know exactly what that is (and FWIW it's world-class on implementation). We could do with some syntactical sugar to make that constructor line a little simpler, but declaring the type and calling a specific constructor, not masking either with personal shorthand are both Good Things if someone's going to have to read that code later.
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The analogy is flawed. I'm not a basketball fan, but it sounds like James is the best living basketball player. No one else can do his job. You're claiming the same is true of a couple of mid-level product managers at Google? I don't buy it.
Talkatone does exactly that. Free phone calls to regular phone numbers in US and Canada. You can even make calls while you are traveling abroad. SMS will be added soon.
Photo #5 shows a man writing "tried for pi" and I badly wanted to know what the ending was. Hilarious that it was "tried for piracey" (as shown in #9), given he is genuinely dressed as a pirate.

Awesome overall idea, too.
More to the point, it's not your dividend they're taking, it's a direct dilution of the value of your shareholding. A small tax levied on all other shareholders.
My friend just left Google NYC to start his own company. He didn't give Google enough to give him an official counter offer -- he had already made up his mind -- but they did say that it would have been significant.
Work for EFF's Activism Team This Summer | Electronic Frontier Foundation
That's too bad. I really like the idea but not at $400.
PeteSearch: Save the world with data
I think for share packages that large they'd need to make disclosures to the SEC, wouldn't they?
Koch Brothers [video from ABC programme Hungry Beast]
Thanks for not using Techcrunch's title insinuating that there is a high-ranking Google mole within Twitter.
I don't believe it! What about abstinence education? Because that's all that's federally funded, and often all that's state funded, too.
Let's see how crazy this is or isn't. From http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:GOOG I see that Google has a market cap of $184.61B. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google Google has $46.24B in equity, and 24,400 employees.

Equity tends to add to market cap 1-1, so Google's market cap from ongoing operations and potential for growth is $138.37B. That works out to about $5,670,000 per employee. Considering that Google's stock price still reflects a market belief that they will have a lot of growth in their future, most of that market value lies in the actual people. The average Googler is worth millions to Google.

I have absolutely no trouble believing that key employees with a lot of talent and institutional knowledge are worth many times the average. The main thing that is shocking if this story is true is that Google has a good enough understanding of who is worth what to the company that they can properly recognize and act on that fact.
This is a really neat tool. I love how it forces you to display your real name.
How to build a Tropo-powered speech app for hamradios to save the world
Convert XML to JSON with JavaScript
First case of sexual transmission of an insect-borne disease
nothing, got a response on twitter and he said he borked it but will fix next release
The laws are moronic, confirmed.

I don't know what gave the GGP the idea that salaries are publicly declared in visa filings (which are not public anyway). The laws are not THAT moronic.
TweetHit (http://www.tweethit.com) - Tracking the most popular products on Twitter

And PerformanceEngine, the layered storage library (local instance cache, memcache,datastore) that powers TweetHit. (https://github.com/ocanbascil/Performance-AppEngine)

I'll probably submit it as a Show HN thread but until then, any early feedback would be helpful.
Great, now my cat is a security risk. Nothing like a warm chair to exert an almost magnetic pull.
He seems to have been here (in the US) long enough to be either a permanent resident or naturalized Citizen. So that wouldn't apply, unless someone knows otherwise for sure.

Wrt Visa rules, I know you have to disclose salary information to the INS when applying for a work permit, don't think that's publicly available though.
I can't say I have a ton of experience with Mysql, but I am a huge fan of Postgres. I think especially for people who just want their database to work, having to worry about which of the storage engines you should be using for MySQL would be a headache. With Postgres, they focused on one storage engine and making it work as broadly as possible, and I think that is the right way to go about it. In addition, administration + configuration is really nice, the community and mailing lists are active and helpful, and the performance has been great for our usage. We also use it heavily for geospacial stuff (using PostGIS), and I think Postgres is ahead of MySQL for that.

I'm sure there are places online that do a much better job comparing them, but from my experiences with Postgres I would have no reason not to use it for any relational database needs.
The Convore team also just set this up https://convore.com/yc-s11-apps/
Great node app.
I just suggested to them that if I send an email and it bounces, that I be asked if I want to remove that email address from my contacts.

I have a lot of non-working email addresses in my contacts, and it is a PITA to clean them up.
Markus Frind did this way back when and suffered for it when Plenty of Fish got hacked a few months ago, big risk.
Not to be a smart ass but... ./configure, make, make install.
This is genius. Need this in every city.
Judging by his blog (http://benlynn.blogspot.com/) it looks like he has considerable affection for many languages beyond C. And I think you may have misinterpreted his comparison with Fortran: rather than showing how handily C beats Fortran (fish in a barrel), he seems to be saying that even with some C99 improvements, there still are places where Fortran has the advantage (refreshingly heretical). It's definitely not a piece for beginners, but I think it may be a more balanced picture than you present.
May I point you to the etiquette guidelines for the proper way of shooing someone away. You have hurt my feelings by the blunt way you have expressed yourself.
Love it! Can't wait to use it. I wonder what the impact is going to be now that Ubuntu is doing it's own UI thing. That's the vast majority of Linux users; so who becomes the premiere Gnome 3 distribution? I was hoping to get a System76 as my next desktop but now I'm not sure; depends if Gnome3 is included in Ubuntu's repos going forward.
It's not inspiring unless it moves people to action. I hope those that wrote on there are on their way to figuring out some way to make their dreams and goals come true.
If you try to equate C and C++ by saying C++ can compile to C (not sure if that's what you're saying but it sort of looks like it), you might want to change your argument a bit. Haskell can also compile to C, but that doesn't make C strongly-typed, functional, or garbage collected.
IPad 2 sold out in the afterlife as Chinese pray for the dead
I really happy to see the option to disable auto-saving contacts. Now what about fixed-width fonts in plaintext messages? :-)
Hmm, great idea for a web project that can go viral real quick.
Or just plain bot activity.
I did come across this a few days ago and thought it was cool. Would not have expected something like this to make the front page of HN.
I haven't worked a lot with XCode, but I remember using macros without problem.
"Google is at a stage in their corporate life where they need people who aren't primarily chasing money."

I find myself wondering what possible trigger point for that transition you could have in mind that has not already happened.
Found this - not quite as good, but lots of pics: http://www.beforeidieiwantto.org/usa_other.html
Sad to see they didn't fix my "one thing": nothing should take more than ten seconds.
OpenStreetBlock
I don't think any domain should be blocked.

Feel free to post any link, the community will decide.
what happens if they die on their commute into work?

Then their estate would inherit whatever %age of the vesting period that they agreed.

So if they had agreed, as was written on TC, $50m over two years and they died after 6 months then the estate would receive $12.5m unless there was a cliff agreed.
I suspect this distinction isn't clear to most people, who see "check for new emails" as an action to be performed.
Newton's calculus is just one example of a calculus. A calculus is any set of mechanical rules for manipulating mathematical symbols. Calculation is the process of applying those rules. Cf. the lambda calculus. The branch of mathematics involving limits, functions, derivatives, and integrals is analysis.
Find a nearby hackerspace, and start visiting it. NoiseBridge in SF and Resistor NYC are two excellent examples. http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hackerspaces