skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FathomDB Seeking Talented Developer (San Francisco)
Who We Are:

We're currently in stealth mode so we can't offer a lot of details here except to say we're working on the database of the future.

We Want You...

if you’re an excellent programmer looking for exciting work in a start-up. We need someone who’s great with Java. You should also have experience with web scale scaling and/or in-depth database knowledge. You must be super motivated and be able to learn quickly.

We can give you...

an opportunity to work in a fast paced, creative, flexible, autonomous environment. You’ll be the second technical employee so you’ll get a true sense of ownership by helping to shape both the product and the company. We're offering salary + equity, lots of challenging work, and the ability to wear multiple hats.

To apply, please send an e-mail describing yourself and your skills (attach your resume if you have one) to alicia@fathomdb.com
I miss monkey bars and swing sets. :(
great, thanks, you have the most thorough gig listing for Pittsburgh shows I've seen in one place.

I was actually price hunting for Radiohead tickets for tomorrow in Toronto. ;) I think they are a bit out of my pricerange everywhere, the worst tickets are selling for twice as much as I scalped my extra, amazing tickets for Philly.
most of those logos look so similar, are they using the same designer?
That would provide great return on investment.
Yeah, we've had more problems, than I'd like. (I'd say we get great load times 80% of the time. the rest of the time it can be a little slow.) We're currently with Dreamhost, eying Media Temple.
Ramen, if even that. (Hence, the scaling) We've all three got day jobs, which we'll be keeping for a while. (We've also got mortgages and such...)
Best of luck to all the groups presenting their work today.
I always thought the craziness was just better channeled by other cultures.
Can you upload Rudolph's commentary to scribd?
Honestly, that conventional wisdom is a little hackneyed.

I'm not sure most folks would call C "wonderful" for low level code. It's warts are well known, and really don't need to be there: the structure syntax is needlessly complicated (. and -> are separate operators for no good reason); the calling conventions are backwards to support a varargs facility that almost no one understands; they underspecified the type conventions, leading to perennial confusion about the sizes of ints and longs or the signedness of char; etc... If you were starting from scratch to write a language to live in the same space, you probably would fix most of those.

But conversely, it's not "atrocious" for "application" code either. Plenty of good software has been and will continue to be written in C. It's probably a poor choice for code that handles mostly string data. It's doesn't have a whole lot of advantages for an architecture with lots of parallelism (i.e. one which doesn't need to worry about single-CPU performance issues). Since those two criteria generally define "web development", you don't see a whole lot of C used for the kind of problems YC startups work on. Just recognize that those defined a very limited notion of "application", and that lots of people in the real world are working on "applications" for which C et. al. are very useful, eminently practical languages choices.

Really, C is there to abstract the CPU. If the CPU has an instruction to do something, you'll probably find it as an operator in C. If it doesn't, you won't. If your problem is appropriately targetted at that level of abstraction, you'll think C is great. If it's not, you won't. I guess that's hardly a surprise.
>The conclusion was that the minimal speed of hypothetical spooky action at a distance, under plausible assumptions for this experiment, is at least 10,000 times greater than the speed of light.
Most logos on the web look similar.

Those are just put next to each other.
Michael Phelps, the billion dollar man?
RIAA pays Tanya Andersen $107,951
Reminds me of the old interactive HTML tutorials. Those were the days. Back in 1997, I took in an old French major classmate of mine. I ended up teaching him HTML and Perl coding and he wrote an interactive HTML tutorial app using Perl CGI. He eventually took over my Perl coding job!
Siano raises $17.5M for mobile TV chips
This is neat stuff.

Actually we (reviewgist.com) could also do with something like this. Infact, we spent some time working on a similar system for our needs, but anticipating a dis-proportionate consumer response dropped it. But if you go through our site, you would know exactly what I am talking about.

Also to answer your question, imo go with 1.
RE: Job Alchemist - their homepage copy is impressive and persuasive. Thanks for the template :)
Hmm, how about a bluetooth remote controlled clothing clasp that can release itself on command? You could sell it along with an iPhone app and name it "Wardrobe Malfunction."
Most of the design is done by the groups, but sometimes outside consulting is done for 'touch-ups.' At least that is my understanding.
Well, to be fair, they have taken that article and generalized it in a broader way, but based on what firsthand experience? Oh, right... firsthand experience reading the original article.

It's so funny that people can take one or two articles and use them to build a case -- kind of like when DHH found that some successful companies were not run by MBAs and declared that MBAs don't really add much value (paraphrased).

Here's the thing: The press prefers to report about things going wrong because that's what people like to read. For example, they'll report about people getting killed in traffic accidents, but they are unlikely to report on how many people didn't get killed on any given day. Should I therefore declare that people shouldn't drive cars and prove my point by linking to two articles about traffic accidents? I'd be laughed at, but then again, I'm not 37Signals.

I have firsthand experience with the type of acquisition they are writing about. The experience was amazing! The company worked really hard to make us feel like part of the family, brought their best people in to help us scale everything up (including putting one of their founders on the team), and they drove tons of traffic to our app. Their stock climbed-up 10x over the course of my time there (but cashing out is all about timing, unfortunately), and I now have a network of really great friends in the industry -- many of which are now running their own successful startups. Ouch, right? I really got burned.

I'm just one datapoint but, IMHO, one firsthand datapoint is all it takes to prove that their sweeping generalization isn't really worth paying attention to in this case.
It will take me about 2 hours to drive to (null) from my house apparently.
from the pdf:

cat . doesn't work anymore (readdir vs. read).

Does anyone know when this last worked? I'd love to install whatever version of UNIX had this and see the output from it.
It's binary gibberish. It's also the answer to an old DE Shaw interview question --- how do you tell whether you're on an NFS-mounted filesystem or not? ("cat ." will fail on NFS).
Ben - All of those are sitting behind a publisher paywall :-( Do you have a quick summary of how this goes beyond previous tests of the Bell inequality?
Friendfeed came from former Google employees.
"two-week design cycle"

Fortnightly then ;)
Frogmetrics reminds me of the little "evaluate my work" devices at the customs inspection stations in Chinese airports-- five buttons, each with a smiley (or frowny) face, with helpful captions like "inspection time too long" and "extremely satisfied".
article:

At $15 per game, that’s $825,000 in first week gross sales. Microsoft takes a cut -- we don't know how much -- but that's still a really impressive debut.

comment:

I think Microsoft takes a 33% cut.

article:

Jonathan said that with his projected sales (which he didn’t break out), he should be able to make game developing a full-time gig.

For half a million (post-MS but pre-IRS) dollars I'd consider quitting my day job and giving it, oh, say five years of a shot.
That's certainly true, but at the same time I rarely spent much time at home on schoolwork either.
More musical chairs: Facebook’s Benjamin Ling returns to Google
Good luck guys - don't forget that its a marathon, not a race!
BeginUp.com - Digg meets YC News
Applied Semantics -> AdSense, AdWords
I was just joking because I found the sentence humorous.
A Barely Accessible System
There is some pretty decent kit around at the moment, e.g. Sun's x4500 and x4600, but that's fairly recent, it wasn't that long ago that an x86 "server" was a desktop PC in a rackmount chassis. If even that, I remember datacentre racks full of desktop PCs on shelves. Even now, there are only a handful of tier 1 vendors making kit where everything from the RAID acceleration to the 10gigE works right out of the box.
I am very curious about Snipd, is there more information available? Any chance for an alpha invite? :)
>The SAT is (or was) a covert IQ test.

Is there something wrong with that? What else are you supposed to test?
Digg meets YC News... Isn't that YC News?
We use Mediatemple and they are great. If you want a contact, email me at shafqat at newscred.com and I can put you in touch with someone to get a discount.

(I have no affiliation with them, nor do I make any money - they've simply been good to us)
"1. What is the best thing about Unix?
A: The community.
2. What is the worst thing about Unix?
A: That there are so many communities."

I can't say i agree. Why are there so many BSD's and why are there even more Linux distros, and why are there so many 'buntus? Well its my opinion that having that many choices is an advantage. I can't stand 90% of the Linux distributions, but some people might think that my choice(Kubuntu) is a bad one, some would say that choosing Linux instead of FreeBSD or OpenBSD is a bad idea. Choice is good, sometimes more choices are confusing, but if you just go for the most popular choices and ignore the less popular ones, its easy to make them. Will we have one unified Unix one day? If it runs gnome i'll switch to vista, no tanks Ubuntu, KDE is MY choice, its good to have one.
It wouldn't be that hard - 3 year olds commonly memorize entire songs and rhymes they hear.

You just put the numbers to music or make a rhyme - how much you want to bet there is a little industry making CD's for this?

But it is totally pointless. Learning to memorize stuff is useful, but learning to memorize a single thing isn't.
Compared to most architectures, X86 sucks pretty badly. Thanks to good compilers, though, you don't have to care about the lameness of the instruction set (eg, there are ambiguities in the encoding that need to be disambiguated by register prefixes, there are lots of subtle and pointless variations in the instructions, etc.) Good software lets you pretend that the instruction set you're using isn't actually complete crap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_(video_game) has a basic description of the game itself.

http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3169204 and http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/braid/review.html are some good reviews of the game.

For my part, I'll be playing it this weekend.
Intellectual Property Ruling Could Validate Open Licenses
That's possible, but part of the "craziness" is intentionally choosing things that are destructive and anti-social.
Aging, Evolution and  the "developmental drift"
CAPTCHAs work—for digitizing old, damaged texts, manuscripts
What about us isn't an accident of evolution?
Packaging gone crazy
Maybe you can give us some insight into what your differentiators are.
What is going to make Begin Up different from say 'killerstartups, launchfeed, etc.

the challenge in this space for anybody is getting enough users to make the community valuable.
I think something like this is needed, but in many ways already exists, but doesn't have enough traction to make it effective.
For example, on killerstartups, nobody ever leaves comments, but the site does decent traffic, so personally I find the value of the site to be minimal.

I agree with aaroneous - digg meets YC news = YC news.
Penny Arcade had a good blurb on it too, I think.
Design-based Web Applications Development - The Essential New Paradigm
Using CAPTCHA to transcribe books
How old are the people claiming all the fun is in the city?

If you are in your 20s, living in a city is where all the other people your age are. Cities are where they work, and therefore where they play. That's where you can find other people your age to play softball or soccer or even dodgeball or 4-square. It's where you have a selection of quality, live entertainment any weekend you want and go out dancing afterwards. It's where you can make friends and stay active.

But the resulting traffic of adults doing things makes it difficult for children to find room to play and explore. They can still do it, but it's more dangerous and less rewarding. That's where the 'worry-warts' come in.
"When Google hands over six or seven or eight figures for something, they obviously have a plan for how the technology and team fits into their "master plan"."

I have heard that Google will pay $1m+ per engineer if they like the team and what they've pulled off, even if they are going to dump the technology (or want it rebuilt from the ground up).

I think once you get into eight figures, though-- you're probably right.
I'm imagining this film about the progress of human knowledge. Somehow we need to express this continuity across the ages -- from the Monks who transcribed classical texts on parchment, to centuries later when junkies are fooled into deciphering fragments of those same parchments for access to porn.
I had to doublecheck the comments to see if it was up previously. After seeing the article on the 404 test, I get very suspicious.
I'm sure Google promised these founders all sorts of things once their application was assimilated into the borg that is Google. And with lots of money on the table I'm sure the founders grinned and asked where to sign.

Closing your doors to new signups is practically like suicide. As a founder I would never agree to that if I was taking a smaller buyout in exchange for continuing to work on my application as an employee of Goog.

Now if they backed up the money dump truck and sent me on my way I wouldn't care so much (although I'd probably have thousands of users who'd hate me but probably also wouldn't blame me)
they obviously have a plan

That's not actually true. The thing about giants that acquire startups, is that a) they had the resources to build this thing themselves; b) they didn't.

So ask yourself why didn't they build this thing. It wasn't lack of resources. It wasn't lack of intelligence; they keep tabs on everyone and they go to SXSW too. There were forces that stopped the giant from innovating in this direction. Some of them are technological, but the real issues are usually cultural and political.

Once acquired, the startup is now exposed to all these forces -- with double intensity, since it is an outsider and has few friends in the organization. Unless it's already profitable, has a large userbase, or has big fans among the top execs, it has very little power.

I think these recent articles about how giants "ruin" acquisitions do not take culture and politics into account. The technical issues are not the problem.
The story is essentially saying that "aging" might not be caused by incremental damage to cellular systems as we age, but is instead caused by systems that work properly when we are young but become unbalanced as we age. As examples, the author refers to some species of tortoises and whales which can live hundreds of years. All animal life on earth utilizes the same basic cellular machinery to function, so things like free radicals and environmental stressors should effect all. However, their preliminary experiments don't support that idea.
I think his point is that IQ is not increased by killing yourself studying.
I think the article states that it isn't always a shitload of money. Sure it beats your part-time gig at Starbucks but why sell your app for 5-6 figures when it could be worth 7-8?

If Google is interested in your application now, why wouldn't someone else snatch it up 6 months later when you have more users for a higher price?

Sometimes winning the buyout lottery is selling yourself short.
Key word being 'former'. Seems the brilliant work comes either from people who aren't yet an employee, or already were and left.

Is Google just a giant Y Combinator?
Huh? Lots of startups come out of there.

http://www.google.com/search?q=ex-googlers

I think two founders in our YC class were Googlers.
Philip Greenspun might be a good subject of an afternoon of reading for you. He went from academia to startup and back to academia. He's been pretty successful in both fields.

Randy Pausch, of "The Last Lecture" fame, talked about the subject in that lecture. Though he was coming at it from a slightly different perspective: become an Imagineer, which was a lifelong dream, or go back to teaching...he chose teaching. Working for Disney is not quite the same as starting a startup, though I imagine for some folks it would be the same kind of personal satisfaction...that of building something real.

I don't know that they've ever answered specifically why they made the decisions they made, but it couldn't hurt to get a feel for their thoughts.

Two other quick points, before I become a preachy bore:

1. If you're getting success in academia, you will probably also be able to get success in other fields, if you apply the same passion and excitement. The question shouldn't be "what will make me most successful?", it should be "what will make me most satisfied with my life?" As you get older, you'll recognize this more and more clearly...better to spot the trend early. Success will usually follow.

2. Academia, at least in technical fields, does not generally frown on success in the "real world". Success in business can be as good for your academic career as the papers you would have written and the research you would have done during that time. Again, follow your satisfaction and your excitement.

3. (I know I said 2...I discovered this one just now.) You will never be in a better position to take risks than you are now. As you age you collect responsibilities: Family, kids, parents needing care, mortgage payments, etc. These responsibilities are the things you can't risk to pursue your dreams...so, when you're older, you can't put as much in the game. You can still start a startup, or change careers, at any age, and experience certainly has benefits, but when it comes to risk, younger is better. Without family and kids, the risk is practically nil.
Hearing your story brings back painful memories of when AOL bought Winamp and drove that wonderful software into obscurity (and forced guy like Justin Franke to skedaddle)
Little League is structured play to begin with. There's a lot that is fun, valuable, and risky about baseball without worrying about a rule meant to protect kids from trying things they aren't ready for yet-- breaking wrists and ankles in the process. It's not stopping kids from learning to slide on their own if they want.

That other stuff seems pretty dumb, though.
I was commenting on the headline, not the article
Very nice design. But:

"Server Down on localhost:9009
Please visit again in a couple of hours."
Accounting and Budgeting Tools
Watch this with the sound turned off, and without the expectation of actually seeing much, since the guy filming this is annoying to listen to, he can't keep the camera pointing at the shuttle, and because of that, his camera cannot stay in focus...

I would absolutely love to see an official video from a military plane where they can keep the camera actually focused on the shuttle the entire way up...
The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Premature Standardization
One of the Dept. of Defense's logistics systems did something comparable. Is it still doing that? (Sending individual batteries with ridiculous amounts of packaging?)
edited to something less linkbaitish.
The Web Entrepreneur's Customer Service Toolbox
pg has said that of a few YC startups. Justin.TV was the first I know of (and it did sound pretty damned crazy to start with...now that there are dozens of imitators, it seems perfectly normal).
I'm actually with you on this one. Here's a quick analogy: It's like if you were raised from birth until 5 years old completely locked in a cell with no contact with the outside world, and someone told you to draw a pink elephant eating a chocolate ice-cream cone. You're so far removed from knowing what the basic concepts are that there's no way to even begin to start working on the details.

That being said - the term "cloud computing" may be overhyped, but the reality is that there are lots of businesses making lots of money on it right now, and it's only going to get bigger.
Is Geek Tech Going Mainstream?
There are so many gold specks in this interview. Here's some about blog/marketing

"If you go to South by Southwest and just ask questions, after a while people are like, “At least this guy’s honest about not knowing certain things.” Then eventually they’ll say, “Who are you again? What do you do?” And I’ll say, “Oh, I’m writing a book.” They say, “OK, what’s it about?” Da da da da da. Bump into them three times and they’ll say, “Hey if you want you can send me a copy of your book.” This absolutely works very, very well. Much better than doing the usual, “Hey, I’ve done this, I’ve done that. Let me send you a book. It would be awesome if you could review it on your blog. Yeah thanks.”

"So you use marketing to acquire customers, and product to keep customers. You need to use those two in tandem. You need to learn how to sell around your product. This is particularly true with bloggers. It’s true with producers at Oprah. It’s true with people that get inundated with sales pitches. You need to learn how to sell around your product...

If your product is your music, how can you sell around it so that you avoid the aversion people have to hearing, “Buy my shit, buy my shit, buy my shit!”? The way you avoid that is to have an interesting story to tell."
Response to "The Surprising Effect of Distance on Download Speed"
It's a Delta 2, not the shuttle.

Relevant "It's on the Internet so it must be true" discussion at: http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2008/08/todays_video_sh_1....
It's definitely the conventional wisdom that X86 is inferior to MIPS, SPARC, and PowerPC, but I rarely see that opinion backed up.

There is a lot of legacy crap tacked on to X86 instructions, which X86 CPUs don't actually execute directly. There's also legacy crap built into other instruction sets, like register windows in SPARC, predicated instructions in ARM, and bloated call frames on PowerPC.

Can you be more specific about what you don't like about the X86 architecture?

(A couple years ago, you'd have an easy win with "the bus").
Adobe Screwed By EcmaScript Standards Agreement
Doesn't a Sun X4x00 cost ~$50,000?
Real time real time raytraced Rome on cell processors
Thats the idea I am applying with - hopefully you don't encourage any competition!
Crappy article, probably not HN worthy.

Besides, aging aka anti-cancer mechanisms, are often very much designed to work that way. Working on those mechanisms could increase longevity, however it will not cure aging.

We only have two copies of our DNA, and if you live long enough and cure every cancer, you could* still* end up with a left arm that genetically drifts from your right leg. And they both drift from your immune system.

Deinococcus radiodurans has 4 copies of its genome, but it's only a single cell. We'd need something like that but with a central place that decides what's you and what isn't you.

Think of it as RAID for your genome somewhere deep inside your chest. But we are nowhere near anything like that. So I wish the best of luck to Ray Kurtzweil and the rest of us, but I am not at all optimistic about the singularity.