skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you the same person as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2505144 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2506130 by any chance? Both of those refer to a post where the user "defended PHP as a language where it was being bashed," and the first comment to be killed in TimothyBurgess's comment history is the same thing.

If so: you've posted about this three times in the last day. Stop, relax, and take a break. Wait until PG responds. He might sort it all out, or he might not, but complaining so much is not going to increase his opinion of you.

If not: Relax. Wait until PG responds before you start posting threads complaining about it (or, you know, don't post threads complaining about it. If your original account gets reinstated, great; if not, start a new one and calm down).

Also, a sidenote: from one of your comments as TimothyBurgess (item?id=2470350): "the majority of people on HN (and other elitist "communities") are shortsighted, closed minded, and generally mildly retarded." While that doesn't appear to be the cause of your account being killed, based on the chronology, what did you expect to happen?
Well, here's one reason why not: http://www.schneier.com/essay-306.html
How Do You ID a Dead Osama?
Great post! The thing that really rang true was the part about the fundraising/depression/derailment, and how that can lead a start-up to consider some random/terrible offers that would otherwise be totally bogus. Paul talked us off a few bad-acquisition cliffs as well.

We certainly went through all of that at Jamglue. It's absolutely true that being a founder, especially the fundraising part, requires a really thick skin.

Each time I think about doing another startup, I start having flashbacks to broken termsheets, bullshit EBITDA projections, and VC's telling us that they could introduce us to Quincy Jones (I swear, at least 7 different people told us this). When we came out of our fundraising stint (penniless), we realized that our product had suffered and we were completely broken people.

The ability to be self-aware about the emotional roller-coaster is invaluable, and essential to forward progress. Thanks for this honest account so that others can make some sense about what they are feeling.
I have a feeling there may be more people interested in doing the reverse of this: Startup Workaway: 20 founders, 10 days, 1 house in Palo Alto.
Be Careful What You Wish For
Playground Equipment Made From Recycled Milk Jugs Gives A Boost
Why Charter Schools Are Complicated
I just logged in to say the same thing. You should be charging the asker 30% more - so the answerer might "see" get $35 but the asker is actually paying $50.

Subtle difference ... but it's how I feel about it.

EDIT I've also got a real worry about the "Fuck You, Pay Me" aspect of this project (reference: http://vimeo.com/22053820)

What happens if I post a correct answer, this person tries it and decides "that's not really what I wanted", "I've decided to get out of that line of business" etc...

Or just figures he can back out since I've given the product (the answer) and all they've got to do to keep their money, is keep their money.

Maybe it's another 'elance', 'craigslist' or whatever ... but I don't know that it stands up to the FUPM test.
that's why I say "of actual investor meetings." doing all the intros, and phone calls, and scheduling leading up to the meetings can take quiet a while and are necessary. But after you get to the "meeting phase", you really don't want to be spinning your wheels too long.
Yes, my bad, edited
URL Driven
Now that he's sold TechCrunch to AOL, I'm not clear why anyone would expect that he would not invest in start up companies. TechCrunch is no longer just him or him and a few bloggers, it's part of a major media organization. If their rules allow him to invest in the companies he covers then that is a problem with their journalistic policies, not with him acting in his own best interest.
Every SSD I see on Newegg mentions that it has a 3 year manufacturer's warranty.
To make various computations, you generally need powers of a given quantity. It seems to me that when you take large powers for intermediate results, the precision in fixed point arithmetic will rapidly drop, no? Furthermore you need to put together various quantities with different scaling factors. IMHO, that would make things very error prone (or you can again sacrifice precision).

I am not aware of any physical problem that actually requires 128 bit floats. I can make up some, but those would be either chaotic (in which case precision does not help), or I would be telling you about a solution that looks like it can be improved. There are of course some problems for which we have no physical insight, then high precision provides a nice safety buffer.
For people who need reliability, SSDs are clearly not the wise choice. For performance, they are, IF you are willing to replace them frequently (at GREAT expense) and have downtime. Not to mention solid backups. The cons far outweigh the pros for me. I like stable measured performance. My computer isn't a hot rod, it's meant to be efficient.
Focusing on the hard parts is a commonality to just about every successful startup story. It's not always pretty or interesting, but the business flows to their doorstep because competitors can't get the hard stuff right or keep up. Startup security is doing both what is hard and not attractive repeatedly until it looks both easy and fun.

Great reminder patio11
Back then the internet hadn't penetrated the mainstream like it has now where we're always connected. Relative to that I think they're not incomparable.
These bootcamp style hackathons foster a atmosphere that gives me that little extra boost I sometimes need to create.

This reminds me of the Buddhist idea of a 'Sangha' which translates roughly to "community with common goal, vision or purpose". One of the most important things that emerge from these communities are relationships that will be forged.

This is the hacker right of passage that I have been yearning for in the subconscious parts of my mind. I will be there, and I will make something beautiful.
One of my issues is that, although my grades on projects, exams, assignments, etc., are well above average, I tend to zoom in on the mistakes that I make and beat myself up for them. Weird kludges, or silly bugs, etc. So I don't brag about projects that have flaws, which is all of the nontrivial/interesting ones, because I feel like I'll get judged just based on those, and anything I did right won't count. I think this is partly a gender thing and partly a parenting thing. (HS Me: Look, I got 98% in Japanese! Dad: Where's the other 2%!? Me: sadface.)

Guys brag about their projects a lot, and what they say sounds really good, so I often assume their projects are better than mine and that they're better programmers. (Even though I probably got a better grade, and when I actually get a chance to dip down and see their source code it's usually not so hot either, at least by the standards I measure myself by.) End result, even though I might be 'exceptional' grades-wise, I have this mentality that I'm just good at school, not good at programming (compared to peers). Extremely stupid, but if you really really don't want to believe in yourself you can always rationalize it somehow. Your GF is above-average just for being there, since most female students (or potential female students) get scared off, and she's still getting it done.

"Victory belongs to the most persevering." - Napoleon Bonaparte
I second this. If you have ever waited tables or tended a bar, you know that speed is everything.

A fast illogical system is better than a well organized system that requires several actions to get a result. You can front load the work an illogical system requires when you aren't busy, by memorizing the location of menu items, etc.
Summer 2011 Meetups/Hackathons/Startup weekends
Dearest HN,

What are some awesome startup events planned for this summer? I'm graduating in two weeks and will have a fair bit of free time that I'll fill with personal projects and general hacking until I start grad in August. But I'd also like to attend some events to network and keep my finger on the pulse of the startup world. The e-pulse is nice and all but sometimes it goes flat (looking at you, amazon).

So post your summer events! Any size and any purpose is welcome. East coast events preferred for me personally, but I'm just as interested in hearing about west coast events given who reads HN!

Here's to a summer of hacking,

Ian
What a bloody good read......they say nothing in life that is worth having ever comes easy....stay there chad...grit it out....you'll reach where u want....success will come..good luck have fun
Wasn't Zuckerberg actually quoted in an email he wrote as saying his first users were complete idiots for trusting him?
people rarely engaged with it

IMO user engagement is one of twitter's biggest issues.

As it stands right now, twitter is a great tool for journalist research and other niche research. That's been true for a few years now. The problem is twitter has done little to break beyond it OR to completely own that space. It's similar to if facebook never really broke out of its college roots or had high account abandonment rates for non-college crowd. Both of those were proven wrong for fb; fb long ago made critical product decisions to break beyond college(such as complete removing course listings) and working country by country to ensure penetration and engagement.
Get your wiki on
"By programming in iOS you are requiring companies to purchase expensive mac products to run your POS rather than inexpensive PC products."

Lame. There will be a market for iOS/OS X POS because there are people who prefer them to "PC" products. If a restaurant owner wants the $299 Dell rather than pay a bit more for a Mac/iOS device, they probably aren't a customer he'll want anyway.
OAuth security flaw for Windows Phone 7, iPhone and other Mobile platforms
Engineering school: The costs and benefits for each problem must be analyzed and decided on a per-case basis.

The cost of bring full, absolute perfection are absolutely staggering. One of the biggest ones that is easy to miss is that you rigidly limit yourself to current implementations; consider the case of writing your perfect specification in 1998, then spending a lot of time right now wishing a metaphorical half your 64-bit machine wasn't sitting there idle. The benefits of this absolute purity vs. what we already have right now? Pretty small next to the costs. But that's just one example.

Besides, fixing some of those all but requires a new hardware and OS platform. Floating point is intrinsically nasty from a mathematical point of view, but as long as it is what the hardware supports, it's going to have to be in your language, for instance, unless you just want to give up on numerical performance. Some of the os module nastiness is hard to actually kill without going not merely the full-on JVM-as-OS route but beyond, as even the JVM exposes some OS differences.

But I am serious about the case-by-case thing. There may be some things that are wrong and are worth being fixed. My previous paragraphs dismissed the idea of fixing the totality of the problem but that doesn't mean any given thing may not be an improvement.
Racket has an awesome macro system and people have managed to do amazing things with it.

This paper(http://www.ccs.neu.edu/scheme/pubs/scheme2007-ctf.pdf) demonstrates how they made an explicitly-typed dialect of the dynamically typed language Racket.

Truly awesome stuffs.
That last comment you've pointed out was partially referring to the PHP haters and their bandwagon jumping. Thanks for taking it out of context to make it look worse than it was!

complaining so much is not going to increase his opinion of you.

You really think he's gonna read all of my posts on the matter? He won't. The idea is to get his attention just once so he can fix it, and leaving it alone definitely isn't going to make that happen.
Please rig the house with cameras and make this a reality TV web show!
For those like me that were too curious to wait for an interview to know more about this startup : http://nextmontreal.com/gush/
Even in the magical cloud, you still have configuration -- listening port at a minimum. Cloud does not remove need for deployment management, as a rule.
Make Simple Glossy Effect
Sony closes SOE site over security 'concern'
Do you want to see all sides of a story? Get early access to TwoSides.co
If you want to simulate a galaxy, the smallest scale that you can resolve is much much larger than size*2^(-128). Since you need floating point arithmetic for many other computations, increasing the precision in your coordinates will cost a lot of extra computing without any gain in accuracy.

When precision in coordinates becomes an issue, you make a transformation and use relative coordinates anyways.
Not at all. As someone going through very similar struggles, I can relate 100%.
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learn why kettlebells is so good for weight loss
Their rules don't, they made an exception for him after the fact according to allthingsd.
TechCrunch had never been an impartial reporter of startup or tech news. Their coverage of startups even before Mike Arrington started investing is based on how connected the startup is with VCs/angels. The users don't necessarily see all startups in that space covered equally. For TC, it works well since it guarantees access to other news stories before anyone else.
The Functional Web: May Article: Warp: A Haskell Web Server
Wish I bought this contract yesterday morning:
http://www.intrade.com/jsp/intrade/common/c_cd.jsp?conDetail...
'MACDefender' malware targets Mac users via web links | MacNN
I left my job to work on my startup full-time, and agree with all of this. It's one of the hardest things I've done. I had to detach myself from material possessions and live frugally. I don't have much of a social life anymore because it's expensive. I've had to force myself to work when I didn't feel like it days at a time. Programming was no longer fun.

If you're not ready to sacrifice everything you have, possibly including your health, then work on your project on the side. You really do have to be crazy to be an entrepreneur.

The positives: It's thickened my skin, I manage my finances better, I appreciate things more, I treat people better.
"The rumor that China used a system Google put in place to enable lawful intercepts, which I used as a news hook for this essay, has not been confirmed. At this point, I doubt that it's true."

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/02/more_details_o...
White, black iPhones same thickness say Phil Schiller, Consumer Reports
Owning your data is the only way to keep "other people" from owning your data! A distributed F2F (friend to friend) graph of nodes (people) in which every node (person) has the "software" to connect with the other nodes and share information with their social graph.

The hard part there is securing it. But, with an underlying framework (like http://gnunet.org) that handles anonymized, F2F, and encrypted network topology you can build a "distributed facebook" that can share photos - events - stories - timelines - videos - &c... The cool part about software like that is the individual user is in 100% control (if it's open-source) of their data and what is done with it (want to share that sexy-time video with just your gf?).

GNUnet is a viable solution at this point because the project is building an open-source framework that handles the really hard features of a distributed, secure, and anonymous F2F (or P2P if you want, but that's less securable) stack on-top of the network stack. With GNUnet, all you need is to build the "features" on-top of it - the other cool thing about it too is that it would be a desktop application (not through the browser).

There are other issues to overcome with such an implementation, but, in short that is how you would do Facebook the "alternative" way. It's how Diaspora is "trying" to do it (without much success because the underlying network topology and security is a very difficult problem).
How to get a random line from a file in bash
Peel raises $16.7M, turns smartphone into TV's best friend
New York, NY (Brooklyn)

Carrot Creative - http://carrotcreative.com/careers/

We're looking to hire in multiple full-time positions immediately. Carrot Creative is a new-media marketing agency headquartered in Brooklyn, NY, specializing in social media strategy, design and development. Our campaigns can range from iOS app development, web software, to platform applications (FB, 4sq, twitter, et all)

All applicants are strongly advised to work on-site in Brooklyn, NY (DUMBO neighborhood) - which usually isn't an issue as we think we provide a fun atmosphere which includes full kitchen, game room, kegerator and beautiful views of Manhattan, BK Bridge and Manhattan Bridge.

Our technology stack is project specific but looking for people with experience or interest in nearly all stacks. Our projects range from Ruby & PHP builds, iOS development, to front-end dev. Our preferred tech stack typically involves a framework of choice (Rails, Sinatra, Fuel, CodeIgniter) and fun supporting techs like Mongo, JQuery, nodejs, and anything else that might best serve our clients.

Full-time Positions include benefits and competitive salaries. We are currently looking for:

- iOS developers
- Sr. Web Developers
- Jr. Web Developers

Please check out - http://carrotcreative.com/

Questions - kyle@carrotcreative.com / @kylemac
What will happen to us?
In what ways? It would be great to hear more...
Thanks. We chose to self-publish because it was faster, and because we originally launched it as an ebook only, hoping that a publisher would bite later. That didn't happen, so we just pushed it to print on our own.
Pokerstars.com to cash out all US players; domain back online
I'm going to give it a go. I like the idea and I love CR!
There's a meme to be spawned about things that work like the parole narrative in The Shawshank Redemption, where good things only happen when you decide to stop giving a shit about them. Deal closing of all sorts definitely fits it.

In the meantime, perhaps console yourself this way: you haven't found the pitch that's opening investor wallets yet, and maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the pitch you're using isn't your best bet; maybe a "yes" at meeting 38 would have put you on a bad path.

My friends and I got a high-seven-figures "yes" in '99 that ultimately killed our company.

Meanwhile, Matasano went through exactly what you did in 2005; every company that found a "yes" got dead as a result. We're relieved to have dodged the funding trap.

Best of luck to you. You don't need gatekeeping investors to succeed.
No, this is a real problem.

Lack of precision of floating point is something that comes up often in game development, now that levels are larger.

If you have a level that is 1-2km across, and you store all your positions in floats, then you will notice that animations for instance are quantized.

Near the world origin, everything is fine, but far from the world origin individual vertices in the character and props will become quantized to the smallest representable delta.
This results in atrocious geometric fizzing and popping.
Does anyone know if he has stock in Facebook? Or MG? I've watched them post about every single increase in Facebook valuation from $20 billion to $80 billion.

"Facebook now at $20 bn..."
"Facebook now at $25 bn..."
.........
"Facebook now at $75 bn..."
"Facebook now at $80 bn..."

I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say they made a post every time Facebook's valuation jumped 5 bn. I thought it was pretty excessive and dubious. I was wondering if it wasn't actually their posts which lead to the next $5 bn increment every other week.

It gave investors the idea that Facebook's valuation will keep rising. It created a loop. I think $80 bn valuation (or $70 as it is now) is way too inflated for the kind of revenues Facebook is making, and I think some of the investors are realizing this and are starting to cash out now before all the others figure it out.
This is not true. I am a French software programmer, with the cadre status. I have 9 days of RTT. With the 25 paid holidays, I have almost 7 weeks of holidays / year (34 days).

As a cadre, I am not paid by the hour: I am paid to attain results. If I can do it in 35 hours, great. If I need to work more, so be it. I often work 40-50 hours, but it's a choice. And I have relatively flexible hours, as long as the job is done.

Now, while the actual number of hours worked varies, and nobody keeps count of those hours... my employment contract still specifies that I am supposed to work 37,5 hours / week. Which is more than 35 hours. Which means I get 9 RTTs / year.

Some cadres have contracts that specify they should work 39 hours / week, and they get 18 RTTs / year. Regardless of the actual hours worked (since they are paid by the results).

Some companies have contracts that specify their cadres work 35 hours / week, and they get no RTTs... Even though they often work a lot more.
Sigh. More (WP7) software update problems
Did you reapply? Is yc taking another cut (ownership stake)?
This sort of thinking is one of my favorite features of Rails.
I used runbox for several years a long time ago. I was very happy with them then and would definitely recommend as well.

Also, rackspace has a hosted email offering - http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/
all this evil isn't done by some special evil people. It is you or people like you who does it.

people like you write the laws mandating backdoors, people like you force companies to implement it, people like you actually implement it. After all that, you dare to express displeasure with the thing you done pretty much by yourself to yourself. Man up and take responsibility for your actions. Next time you're groped by a TSA agent, you can find a relief in the thought that you (or your friend working at Google) groped the agent's Gmail account. Tit-for-tat.
LOL. That would be a show I'd enjoy watching.
Google has best reputation among Americans
Using Pipelines to Streamline PowerShell Commands