skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, the best way to attract VC investment is to not need VC investment and have success on your own. If you can build your business by bootstrapping/angel financing the VCs will come to you. When they come to you you'll:

1. Get better terms
2. Close the deal fast
3. Not worry about your pitch

The pitch should be a formality to get them excited, not a way to get them excited in the first place.

Unfortunately most start ups start running out of money/savings and then start looking for VC investment which puts the VC in control of the conversation.
Motion activated camera for iPhone catches neighbors dumping garbage
I know the phrase is WSJ's and not Brooks's own, but I take issue with "...the next Industrial Revolution." It's such an overused and seldom-realized promise. I've heard it said about robotics, about nanotechnology, about quantum computing, about cellular biology, about green tech, and about everything from cold fusion to lukewarm superconductors.

Point is, there are any number of potential gamechangers already laying claim to the title. I have little doubt that any of these things, past a certain inflection point, could indeed bring about a new Industrial Revolution. But from an investment standpoint, which one actually has the clearest path to payoff in the shortest window?

That's what VCs care about. Most of them aren't in the business of placing general bets on long-term trends. They'd much rather invest in specific companies or technologies that show specifically accelerated promise within a given sector. They don't want to invest in nanotech, for instance; they want to invest in the best company within nanotech, and at the right moment.

[For what it's worth, I applaud iRobot and Brooks for being a leading company within the commercialization of robotics, and not just being wild-eyed cheerleaders for the overall field.]
Whats your favorite inspirational movie scenes?
Movie scenes that inspire you to move forward in life.

Mine is this one from Rocky Balboa.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z5OookwOoY
www.glassdoor.com does this pretty well...
"Officially I’m not supposed to worry because the evidence isn’t conclusive, but I do."

Wow, that was a content-free article, borderline scare-mongering, eg. "when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer day, you may be doing them more harm than good". There's no information about what sort of doses are really bad at all, and so nothing useful to learn from it. I have 2 kids who will eat as much sugar as we give them, so this is a serious issue for me, and I'm disappointed by such articles.
DARPA's new telescope could see the aliens on Mars
Rory Cellan-Jones, the interviewer, is a former colleague from my days at the BBC. Just to give some context, he is one of the BBC's most experienced business news journalists, in addition to being a more recent technology journalist.

But in a word of sound-bites and short-quotes, I'm surprised Rory didn't consider - or at least pick up after the initial rebuttal - that if Lazaridis in any way answered the question pivoted around security that it could cause a significant PR issue and even effect the share price of RIM (given it's a core value of RIM).

I'm totally across the issue being refereed to and to be fair, it isn't a security issue to RIM. Sure, it is a security issue to its users, potentially. But it's not that RIM has a security issue with its technology, it has a privacy issue from draconian laws while operating under certain government conditions.

But my reason for mentioning Rory is an experience business journalist is that this is not a technology matter, it's a subtle business-related matter, which I'd have thought Rory of all people would be cognizant of.
Wouldn't AP CS then satisfy such a definition of "in the curriculum" then? (Granted I know a lot of schools don't offer that class - it still exists).
Clickable version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z5OookwOoY
AppBrain works really well for this. You still have to do some clicking, but not nearly as much.
My cofounders and I met through Founder Dating last April. Then we met at a coffee shop to hack out & release a product in 12 hours.. pretty good so far. We kept working together all summer (evenings & weekends) before deciding to move in together for 3 months and start a company (Curebit) together. At the end of those 3 months we had customers & traction, so we got funded by YC. Now we just finished demo day, got additional funding, and are happily growing.

So yeah -- Founder Dating works. If you're looking for a cofounder, check out the Founder Dating event in SF on April 27th. Apply by April 15th.
Relevant historical information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II
Being tentative about drawing conclusions is not the same as being content free. Considering how often past dietary advice has been wrong, it seems like this topic could use a little more tentativeness.
Amazon pushes back against record labels on Cloud Player license issue
I think it's likely that if you have to keep your list "warm", you probably launched your holding page too early.
Are the articles meant to be sorted by their respective companies (like the financial info)? Because I see some stories that are meant for one but under the column of another. Maybe I am misunderstanding how this is organized?

Any any event, I like the idea a good deal. It would be neat to see this expanded and perhaps customizable so that users could pick which companies to place in their "3some".
World's Greatest Hacker Sanctioned in World's Worst Lawsuit
I can't find a link now, but I remember some research being done that had runners in a lab swish a sucrose solution in their mouths and then spit it out. They ran longer than the control group who got artificial sweetener. So something happens to your metabolism before the sugar is digested, and no one has studied how tasting sucrose might be different from tasting HFCS. It's just weird and complicated :)

Edit: here's a quick explanation of some of those studies: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/fitness/exercise/...

Edit2 I found the research, but it's behind a paywall. http://journals.lww.com/co-clinicalnutrition/Abstract/2010/0...
In addition to the Joel Test, expected hours, etc. I'd be interested in:

- Do they expect a lower salary in exchange for equity?

- If the job offers equity and if so, is there any way to quantify it? In other words, do they offer X shares but won't tell how many are outstanding?

- If they say they want to hire the top N% do they intend to compensate in the top N% or are they looking for a "deal"?

That last question could be made into two:

- Are you looking for the top 1% of coders?

- Is your compensation package in the top 1%?
Brein: Stop believing in fairytales
SCSS lets me migrate an existing css file without rewriting anything and drop in random snippets I find on the web without translation. It solves exactly the problem I have (limited expressiveness) without introducing a new one (new syntax to learn).
Hear Me Now? The Verizon Guy gets his life back.
AOL Mail
I don't think this is true. I wrote a blocking queue implementation for the purpose of limiting the # of messages or amount of memory used by a queue.
Yeah RJS was a clusterfuck, but hindsight is always 20/20. At the time it was a new idea that was being explored that just didn't pan out. The Prototype dependency dates back to 2004 when no framework had AJAX support, and the code just started getting stale from there and didn't get any attention until Rails 3.

Anyway, I agree that Rails core has traditionally been far from the savviest of JavaScript developers, but the nice thing about Rails 3 is that they've finally achieved reasonable modularity with all the components, so there's not much pain in getting around Rails opinions anymore.

As for CoffeeScript, I'm still on the fence, but it's clear that Jeremy Ashkenas knows his JavaScript, and his work is not done out of ignorance, so I'm glad for it to get more exposure.
One of my favorites is this one from The Social Network:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC5wVJrhzl0

Another is the scene in The Fighter where Micky Ward is talking to his girlfriend and there's the "I'm tired of being a fucking disappointment, I told everybody I was gonna win that fight and get back on track, blah, blah" bit.

And plenty of scenes from the Rocky movies, Vision Quest, Rad, The Karate Kid, and a few others...
Cloud9 IDE supports npm (node package manager)
Blender 2.57 released (first stable release with completely new UI)
Rory asked an intentionally loaded and HuffPo-like question;

"Can I move on to the problems you've had in terms of security...and your various arguments you've had with the Indian government and a number of governments in the Middle East"

This is like asking Craigslist about their "issues with revenue" since it's free to post anything outside of jobs, and being free is one of the key features that defines Craigslist. Craigslist doesn't have issues with being free, OTHER PEOPLE (like newspapers) have issues with the fact that Craigslist is free. Same with RIM, OTHER PEOPLE have issues with the fact that RIM is very secure. The question implied that RIM has issues with their security.

Worst is BBC then tried to act like he wasn't sensationalizing with their take on the question Rory asked...

"...he asked a question for BBC Click about RIM's problems in India and the Middle East, where governments want to gain greater access to the tight security system used for Blackberry's business users."

No he did not. The above question is framed correctly, and I'm sure would have gotten a response.
Don’t Mimic Real-World Interfaces
Ask HN: Any interest in a startup book review site?
(Treat this as a customer discovery phase)

After searching for some non-trivial amount of time I have yet to find a good review site/blog that caters to books of interest to the start up community. Since we're always strapped for time, I wonder whether it would help to create a site that would serve as a hub for these book reviews.

The core value here isn't just the reviews themselves but other related resources - TED talks, slides, HN discussion threads, case studies, links to "I used the advice in this book and this was my experience" articles, etc.

A peripheral value here is this site/blog would be indexed, categorized and of course searchable.
It sounds as though you are suggesting that journalists should not ask CEOs questions about issues that might affect PR or the stock price.

Am I misreading you?
I would bet that people who are good at working with pointers in C are drastically over-represented among great functional programmers, so you won't actually lose that many.
Using the phrase "low level" to describe someone gaining complete control of your systems is not something you see in a general PR release for an incident. The friends and family I have recommended wordpress.com to are likely to misunderstand the importance of this event.
Assembly : C :: CSS : Sass

(:: Javascript : CoffeeScript) would be a bit of a stretch IMO)
Space Debris Solution du Jour: Launching a Cloud of Tungsten Dust Into Orbit
This is true and obvious to some extent, but there's some real downsides to the legal realism movement. Legal realism starts off with a correct premise - that judges are flawed and human like the rest of us - but some people go further and come to the conclusion that, thus, no justice is possible and we should just game the system as much as possible.

It's an absolute fact that the American legal code has become more much more bloated, and in my opinion, more haphazard, disorganized, and prone to severe contradiction following legal realism becoming a popular philosophy.

It's immediately obviously true in its premise, but some of the conclusions following from legal realism seem to make the justice system worse.
If you intend to use the service across a variety of different platforms, why wouldn't a web service be enough?

I'm having a hard time figuring out a good reason to justify writing client software for even 'the big three' platforms, much less one for your PowerPC Mac. And I'd think that, honestly, having it be a web service is the answer to that need.

I understand that saving to Dropbox gets you access to the same data everywhere, but if you already have access to the same data everywhere, without having to involve Dropbox (which not everybody has), why would you want the added complication?
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend to be one of those deaf-mutes
Brain-Like Chip May Solve Computers' Big Problem: Energy
http://hn-books.com is on the same lines.
i know what i'm using for my next project now.
Tips para lograr el abdomen soñado
How can one buy bulk glucose to use as a sweetener instead of fructose or sucrose?
I only knew Eric as a TA/grad student at Harvard (I was undergrad--this is back in the Stone Age--mid-70's), but he was already then a fantastic, enthusiastic teacher. I imagine he's only gotten better.
I also do this. Not just on forums, but on pretty much anything where I write a decent amount of text. I also use a clipboard manager in conjunction with this habit (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clipboard-history/id420939835...) that has saved my ass numerous times.
These articles are important because he makes a persuasive argument that this is a very important issue that badly needs more study. You can't learn very much from it, but the studies will not be funded unless a horde of concerned parents starts pressuring the FDA, the USDA, Universities and others who could fund such studies. Also pressure is needed to counter the very influential corn growers associations who will try and kill such studies.
Free Content Is Killing Media (And Advertising)
One of the niceties of CoffeeScript generated code is that it's totally readable and idiomatic Javascript with a dose of JSLint on top.

To misquote the "Pragmatic Programmer" book... don't use wizard code you don't understand. The opposite applies in my opinion.
The headline says "Is Sugar Toxic?" That's not just a hook to get you to read the article, it's a description of what the article is about. This article asks the question, "Is Sugar Toxic?". It helps you think about that question from chemical and physiological perspectives, gives an overview of research, describes political and economic interests of the major players (so you can consider how those might influence their actions), and so on.

If anyone's wondering what a liberal arts degree is good for, this article is an excellent example.
Toxicity as a concept is entirely defined by dose. Bleach is not toxic if you take a small enough dose. Conversely, water is toxic if you drink too much of it.

Unfortunately toxic, like so many other of our perfectly good scientific words, has been hijacked by quacks trying to deprive the credulous of their money.
what differences / or benefits have you seen from sprinting instead of running/jogging ?
The ShareCam 'Side Hustle' - The Story of Victoria's Comet Coast
I actually found it to be content dense. It was a bit unactionable, but a good amount of content. Of course he also gives you the names, so you can look up the studies, although he also pretty much tells you that its not applicable to your current diet.

Again, maybe not actionable, but definitely content. Especially for a mainstream newspaper article.
"Considering how often past dietary advice has been wrong"... ...I would argue that writing news articles about things with no conclusive evidence is worse than irresponsible journalism. It's downright harmful, in the most literal sense of the term.
VodPod Founders Launch Showyou, A Flipboard-Like Social Video App For iOS
This is only a problem if you take an absolutist line, which I don't think anyone really does. Even the toughest libertarians still want a police force and law courts.
This is already happening in Finland: http://articles.cnn.com/2009-10-15/tech/finland.internet.rig...

A rising tide floats all boats, so I really don't see why this is such a big deal. If the government was willing to build an ISP or subsidize existing providers, this would be a win-win scenario for everyone-- it would accelerate the spread of information, increase literacy, give people the ability to self-educate.

If you think people should have access to public libraries and public education growing up, I don't see why you'd disagree with this.
We get it. The title is wrong. I am rather disappointed by the low quality of the discussion here about a rather interesting article.
To be fair, most legal codes become much more bloated over time. You can hardly blame the legal realism movement for this correlation.
yeahhhhhh.... i think they would get Eric Roberts to teach a fucking class on Word/Excel. That sounds completely reasonable.

to clarify: 106a is java, basically an intro to OO stuff and 106b is C++, getting into data structures, etc.
Attackers Gain Root Access to WordPress Servers
How much of that AAPL stock is owned by MSFT?
The scene in October Sky when the first rocket they make explodes destroying the fence.
Google voice forwarded to a sipgate account works wonderfully well for me.

Skype is getting more expensive everyday. And now with added connection fee badness.
Their opinion is wrong. There's no value to rewriting history because one's tools can't handle a sane mode of operation.

Git could fix this fairly trivially, and should. (Or, rather, they could fix it fairly trivially if not for the peculiar insistence on the use of rebase operations.)
I would say this was just as true in the 90s as it is today.

In my experience, it is much more true today. If you see an artists or designers with actionscript or javascript on their resume, it's a plus and hardly surprising (unlike 10 years ago). Scientific computing has exploded in the last 10 years due to the availability of data and computing resources. I hardly know any science researchers who don't at least collaborate with people who have programming and computer science skills.
Karo corn syrup is mostly glucose, if you -really- want to go down that road.
The Lean Startup - a Review of Eric Ries' New Book
I think he's saying that they weren't tentative enough — that is, either they have enough substance to write an article about how sugar is bad for you, or they shouldn't be writing an article about how sugar is bad for you.

This goes back to the rule about news articles with question headlines: The answer to the headline is "no." If it were "yes," they wouldn't couch it in a question.
One advantage of an art school degree is that you have to survive several years of critiques to defend your design work. It also helps you discover the language needed to talk about design with clients. Anyone lacking this prep is really handicapped when they start out their career.
I've just been browsing through news page and I stumbled upon this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2443089

In one of the comments on reddit ascheinberg wrote:

Like every single site like this, the problem is that the public is ready to ingest content faster than content becomes available, or rather, faster than worthy news is made, so in the lack of real gripping news, things of general interest fill the gap

So maybe we should try to slow things down by limiting number of votes/submissions per person per day?

If someone could submit only one story per day maybe he would do that more carefully?

The same applies to votes - with limited number of votes available someone would consider more carefully what to spend his votes on?

And as additional benefit making things slower on HN could have positive effect on our productivity ;).
Google Search in 2 Separate Languages
I'm a mechanical engineer and don't know anything about coding except basics of C. This has inspired me to learn programming. I just downloaded Python and that free ebook mentioned in the post. I've finished the 'guess the number' program and 'dragon realm' program. Interesting stuff.
" Cloud Player is a media management and play-back application
not unlike Windows Media Player and any number of other media
management applications that let customers manage and play
their music. It requires a license from content owners no
more than those applications do."

Very much unlike Windows Media Player, as Windows Media Player doesn't play music stored in SkyDrive. Look, I'm on your side Amazon, but this is different. In a good way for consumers, and in a crappy way for record labels.
Look for dextrose or corn sugar. Here's one link: http://www.nowfoods.com/Products/ProductsbyCategory/M004079..... Personally, I just do my best to avoid anything that tastes sweet.
Interesting, 5 year change:
AAPL +400%
AMZN +400%
GOOG +40%
MSFT +4%
It must be pretty awesome to be a guy who invented a human right.
This kind of argument infuriates me. Mr. Market wants lots of things, some of them are good, some aren't. Besides, would a talented English major even want to be a full-time developer? Would you want to work with them?

Not everyone lives their lives according to the principles of capitalism, just consider yourself lucky that at this moment, it's working out in our favor as developers.
That's good to know. I've always suspected MIT students to be hard nosed technies above all.
That article wasn't content free. Read the part talking about how glucose and fructose are metabolized differently, how excessive sucrose intact overwhelms the liver (processing fructose) and leads it to produce fat, and how that ties into diabetes and heart disease.
I think this is cyclical, and to be expected. I had a conversation ~2 years ago with the head of a CS Dept in Boston who was anticipating this. He explained that enrollment in his department had grown by an order of magnitude (or more) during the dot-com bubble and shrank by a similar amount after the bust. Just as Lehman et al. was occurring, he was bracing for the same thing to happen again...and here it is.
Warning: don't click on the epub file expecting to see anything useful. Your browser will gobble all your available memory to show you a binary zip file.
Internet access and especially personal internet connections is a luxury that almost the entire world has very limited or no access to.

To call it a basic human right when it's only really accessible to an elite slice of humanity is just silly.
Agreed, I think that was a poor choice of words in this case. To be fair, communication skills often take a temporary hit in these situations when you're still actively coping.
how does one go from self-doubt to awesomeness or little or no self doubt ? thanks.
Any self-recursive algorithm (and possibly mutually-recursive - I haven't thought about it enough) can be expressed with an iterative algorithm if you use a stack-based structure to maintain state.
I just made this - a parametric sculpture generator for Minecraft - using Three.js: http://bit6.net/minetricks/minetricks.html
Seems to be missing one of my favorites: Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule.

I've been thinking about making a tool based on that idea: http://makerscheduler.com aka http://msched.com
True enough, but people should know how much bleach and water is needed to hurt themselves; death and/or pain provides immediate feedback. The problem with sugar is that the benefits are so immediate and the drawbacks so distant that it requires a strong will to avoid.
The Big Bang in a Box
Ok but you don't have to 'change' any 'defaults' to use regular plain javascript. You just don't write coffeescript. The new 'default' is to include the coffeescript dependency and generate script stubs with a .coffee extension. Write a js file and all will be as it was, with a slightly fatter bundle.
That is in fact the key difference between libertarian and anarchist.
I don't understand your analogy: in the Craigslist case Craigslist has no issues being free, but others have issues with it being free. Craiglist is not making changes to their free model to appease others.

In the RIM case the system is secure except when they are giving access to the system to governments - making it not secure (at least in many people's eyes).

How are these similar?