skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another minor nit:

You can still do a fit to a bell curve and find a chi-squared value. If your chi-squared is horrible, obviously you should be considering a different probability density function as your model is incorrect, but if it's decent enough you can omit the features and call it a "bell curve"

That being said, I could see this as a composition of two gaussian bell curves with the means correlating to the ages of people in college and their early/mid career (let's say 23 and 28 respectively)
I'll definitely check it out. Thanks!
Does anybody any HBR know how to write a clear headed statement? You can tell by the little mistakes that the writer is not thinking hard enough, and only writing to flex. Lines like this, for example: "Now, in the past, these efforts might have impacted technology that only involved the consumption of movies and music."

Now! In the past! Together at last!
He is definitely on a different level. He is like a superstar athlete at the top of his game. I expect Rage to be a hit because of the passion that John Carmack is investing in it.
The bell curve can be choppy when you've got too little data or bad data.
Because the First Amendment protects a class of political speech that has been defined by statute and judicial opinion. It does not give everyone the right to broadcast and discover whatever information they want. This is a common misconception about the First Amendment.
According to the article, it doesn't sound like they really keep track of redeemed vouchers.

Because some merchants track redemptions on paper, Groupon has no way of knowing how many unredeemed Groupons are outstanding.
It probably works out as high as regular gift cards. They're easier to find (just search your email) but they're easier to buy so one can get much more of them. I have friends who bought "pay $X for 10 workouts" but only end up going once before it expired.
I'm Carl, the one the article mentions, so I can answer questions if anybody's got any.
Interesting. I'd love to see the presentation if you (or anyone else) end(s) up finding the link.

It's interesting to consider the threshold for the sort of social discomfort I described above. In my case it hit around 2/3 of my current friend count.
WPSumo 1.1.4 Available For Download
The questions your pitch must answer
They make a lot from vouchers that are never used. (The term of art for such revenues is 'breakage'.)

For a stored-value medium that's like a gift card, many states prohibit an expiration-to-zero-value. Groupon has been sued a bunch of times over this; at least in those states, I think their current policy is that the business must still honor the Groupon for the original purchase price (but not the ~2X face value).

This blog post by Andrew Mason suggested lawsuits were unnecessary because customers unhappy for any reason, including expiration policies, could always rely on 'the Groupon Promise' for a full refund:

http://www.groupon.com/blog/cities/groupon-organizes-class-a...

However, if you try to get a refund on an expired Groupon, they'll reject your request. So Mason's blog post and 'the Groupon Promise' are deceptive... and Groupon probably deserves to be sued over the gap between the unequivocalness of their 'promise' and the way they carve out exceptions in practice. They talk the talk of a 'customer is always right' retailer, but their model seems to require them to be stingy with refunds.
Only 30% of YouTube Users Skip Pre-Roll Ads
Messaging server for Twitter
I don't disagree with the conclusion: people who aren't as dedicated to or good at programming transition to people or product/program/project management[1]; the remaining folk receive additional experience which allows them to capitalize further on their passion and talent.

However, this isn't exactly proven by the data: what Stackoverflow shows is that older developers are better at talking intelligently about programming. That's extremely useful (and helps career wise), but it isn't the same thing as being a better developer. Sometimes it correlates (the best programmers I've known have also participated in organizations like IETF, written RFCs and have also thoroughly documented their work), but it isn't a total ordering (I know plenty of programmers who are better than I, but who don't participate in any public forums).

On the other hand, I've yet to find a successful programming language made by someone before their thirties. Contrast it, on the other hand, with some of the most ground changing academic work in Computer Science and Mathematics being done by people in their twenties.

[1] There's nothing wrong with that: Google's APM program particularly is a great example of "engineers who don't want to code" being extremely useful. See also "The Russian Lit Major" by rands: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/09/06/russian_his...
I would have called music the least likely one to be making money, actually. A common usage pattern is buying one or two songs in a sitting, at which point transaction charges really become significant, and it has always seemed that the record labels take the lion's share of the payment.

iTunes TV, on the other hand, is probably more profitable, due to higher unit cost. Books almost _must_ be profitable, because they're in the same range as Kindle books, and Amazon wouldn't be pushing ebooks (and thus damaging their traditional book market) so hard if they couldn't make a profit on them.
I've been refunded a couple of times from other deal sites when the business went bankrupt. It's just good customer service to do so.
This Week's Solar Flare Illuminates the Grid's Vulnerability
For context on what the OP means by "this makes the document structure completely flat to screen reader users", I highly recommend this video. It features a blind web developer navigating websites which do and do not make proper use of headings:

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

It literally changed the way I thought about web development and accessibility.
In my case, they've helped to destroy my ability to focus (or provided interruption and excuses not to develop it)
Grats Garry!

=]
I'm really puzzled how anyone expects to gain a foothold in a currency market with an instrument experiencing this type of volitiltiy. Popular currencies move fractions of a percentage per day. A 5600% swing is like financial base jumping.
you mean someone like george soros & his dealings with the british pound?
Is This the Future of Food Guides?
It seems that with each session, YC takes on more and more companies. Will this extra help continue to make this a YC norm? Has there been an upper limit defined?
A very interesting observation.

Especially since there's no laws protecting it.

There are a couple of things to point out:

* How well do traditional laws hold up in this new distributed, de-centralized model. In particular, if bitcoin is to take off are protection laws (like traditional currency) necessary?

* How does Bitcoin's anonymity help or hurt such a legal protection? If people decide to mess with BTC will its anonymity come back to hurt it?
You are right, the problem is undecidable in general. If the compiler is unsure whether a constraint is satisfied it will have to add a runtime check.

This is similar to the behavior of array accesses in Java: If you access an invalid index the JVM is required to throw an out of bounds exception. In practice this would be unacceptably slow and if the compiler can prove that such an exception can never happen, the check will be removed.

As for the "simple" example of testing "y == 0", this is actually already undecidable. If you are interested, you might have a look at Nielson's "Principles of Program Analysis", I think that this particular example (undecidability of MOP Constant Propagation) is worked out there. Also, the book is a nice introduction to the subject.
Ask HN: How can you make a demo video look good using freeware?
I've been playing around with making a demo video for my startup and had a few questions -- I'm trying to do it as cheaply as possible, so try to keep software recommendations to freeware / low-cost software.

What software do you use to record screen video? Why? Currently, I'm using Fraps b/c that's what I used to capture video when playing games.

What resolution do you set your desktop to when capturing video your planning on sharing via youtube / vimeo? I've been shooting at a low resolution between 1280x720 and 800x600.

What FPS rate do you use to shoot? I've been shooting around 30FPS and that keeps the file size more manageable.

Should you shoot at a resolution w/ the same aspect ratio as the video box on your website?

What software do you use to edit video / add audio? I've used Windows Movie Maker, Windows Live Movie Maker and the editing tools on Youtube.

Can you recommend any good startup demo videos?

If you have any other tips that can help make the video better, I'd appreciate it.
"I've worked with a lot of old code from self taught engineers."

Wait until you deal with code by university educated engineers who follow the rules of software development to the T. Design is emergent. If you see 5 different functions doing the same thing it sounds like you should go refactor it. Private variables that are unchecked? OMG, you might want to add a few asserts and a couple tests. These problems sound insurmountable.

It sounds like you're dealing with production code that makes money, probably so much that they can afford to pay you to improve it.
But if you started programming at 50... that's different than having done it for the last 30 years.
'63 was a good year!
What if there's a filtering effect where lower-quality developers are less likely to stick with the profession past age 27?
Those are the 'current' books I wrote about. I think keeping the knowledge in them is likely a good idea, somehow or another, but see no compelling reason to keep physical copies of them.
Don't forget that IBM is HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey if you move each letter over one on the alphabet.

(H A L) - (I B M)
I can't comment on the $25k price tag, or if SmugMug is as open as you describe it to be, but I DO want a service where I can share photos online without losing my sense of control over them.

I have a DropBox, and if there's a service that automatically picks up photos I place in a specified folder and make those taggable and publicly available, I'll use it.

I don't like facebook or the effort it takes to upload photos to whatever service. This sounds easy and convenient to me.

It is of course possible that there's other, easier and/or cheaper ways than the proposed solution.
Report: One Out of Four U.S. “Hackers” Is an FBI Informant
fyi, there is no contact info in your profile.
LulzSec hackers demand hats, threaten release of Brink user data
> Lots of businesses have excess capacity that costs them nothing to utilize.

I dispute this assertion or, in the very least, see this as being far more complex than you suggest, for two reasons:

1. Customers who might otherwise pay full price will end up using these deals, which is a direct loss to the business; and

2. The inventory may be used up by such offers to such an extent that customers who might otherwise pay full price may not be able to do so.

> The problem with groupon is that it has no moat.

On this point you are I agree.

As for being "win win", apart from the above, you have to look at a number of factors:

- Do Groupon customers return?

- What word-of-mouth do they give to businesses as a result?

- How much do they spend (initially and on repeat visits)?

- Are they people brought in by Groupon representative of your existing or desired customer base? There is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggestings "Grouponers" are "cheap" (both in spending habits and tips).

The "offer marketplace" providers (Groupon, LivingSocial or whoever) seem to be missing a golden opportunity to mine useful data here by tying an offer redemption to an actual person.
Here's the previous HN discussion for the (likely) article in question:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1867807
Something Awful's Unintentional War Against Bitcoins
I see your point, but I'm not quite sure that the two things go hand in hand.

If the vast majority of developers were publically financed and had LIFO laws, I'd imagine that there'd be calls to end that practice as well. In both cases, though, I'd argue it's outliers that are the source of the consternation.

I think most education reform advocates would agree teachers get better as they gain experience.
Why Does the Linux Desktop So Lack Proprietary Apps?
Or there might be a revolution in "print-on-demand" making it possible to do for $1 per book someday.

Insert previous book for recycling credit, which gets pulped later, new book prints on recycled paper but with ink that can also be easily extracted later.

Babylon5 had a newpaper printer I think where you inserted the previous day's paper and got a new one. People will always like hard copy for some casual mediums.
You are 100% right, a developer is a developer, so it's not bias. It could even be argued that the reason there are less older developers is because the better ones went into management and are no longer active developers.

Now, this all assumes that developer activity on Stack Overflow is correlated roughly equivalently over most ages. If it is, then these plainly state that for any random developer you would interview, they are more likely to be more knowledgable (according to the definition extracted by Stack Overflow activity) the older they are. The fact that there may be fewer developers at an older age is irrelevant.

Disclaimer: I'm 25
Microsoft's preview of Windows 8 has developers 'horrified'
I find the cartoon of the child behind the CEO desk at the top of a large building to be rather ironic given the article's contents.
Use Node.js as a full cloud environment development stack
People confidently predict that humans will be able to explain the universe.
Stick to the budget, man
I thought I had a counter example with Yukihiro Matsumoto and Ruby, but Yukihiro was born April 14, 1965 and Ruby was released December 21, 1995. Thirty years an a handful of months.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_%28programming_language%29...
The one thing XML is great it, as the name suggests, is markup. And I am in favor of marked up text continuing as the basic model for content in any next generation web platform.
The TRW entry caught my eye, because it was back in 1984!

Here's some more information from wikipedia:
TRW Inc. was an American corporation involved in a variety of businesses, mainly aerospace, automotive, and credit reporting. It was a pioneer in multiple fields including electronic components, integrated circuits, computers, software and systems engineering. TRW built many spacecraft, including Pioneer 1, Pioneer 10, and several space-based observatories. It was #57 on the Fortune 500 list, and had 122,258 employees.
TRW’s roots were founded in 1901, and it lasted more than a century until being acquired by Northrop Grumman in 2002.

Interestingly 90 million records accounted for about 40% of the US population at that time.

Here are some news articles from DataLossDB.
http://www.textfiles.com/news/trw
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=ehwIAAAAIBAJ&sjid=h...
What do you want to be? I studied Business and ended up getting into programming instead. I keep thinking carefully analyzing my past might have had me realize i wanted to get into programming earlier: i loved computers and looked up to people who could do "computers" well etc. But in the end i'll never know, important thing is i got into it: I begged for a job at a web-dev company earning little to nothing the first three months and started learning learning learning. Like you i didn't have any educational background to go on. I'm sure there are some people on here that will give you a job if you can show that you are willing to learn and have the motivation and drive.
I think there might also be another selection bias here, in that StackOverflow might be a bit self-selecting for developers who know their stuff.

It's hard to say what this says about developers as a whole, including the ones not on SO, which I assume is a large number.

An alternative hypothesis might be this: Good developers get better over time, whatever that means.

I would suspect that people who form bad habits early on don't enjoy the same benefits of experience as those who built on solid foundations.
SmugMug (while a great service) isn't any more open than other photo sites with an API.

I have thought a bit about sync services. Not planned atm but I have the same sentiments. Unsure if you're an iOS/OSX user but iCloud's syncing is an interesting feature I want to look into - unsure what their photostream API allows though.

As far as cost - I didn't break it down to the hour. But I know that there's a lot more than $25k of work to build a really great photo service.
this is probably the most unoriginal suggestion, but you could always have a moderately popular site and get money off google ads or selling ad space to local businesses relevant to the site's subject matter?
Ask HN: Do I must have a preferred programing language?
Currently I'm developing in Java,C# and Python, and I like all languages. I keep hearing useless debates about which language is better. Is it ok to enjoy all language and apperciate them? or it's like cheering up several sports teams?
It's not really possible to shut it down. They may be able to chill it substantially with sting operations on buyers, but that's not going to stop it.
Still, he doesn't seem to think very highly of zoo trips.
Couldn't Sony do something like the iPhone? The device could get a refresh every year or every six months, while all of the games would keep working on it.
Not really as Apple made sure searches happen in the first place.
>Were you even modestly observant you would know that isn't true, and there are examples floating everywhere (eg Medicare's provisioning of medical services, community broadband in many localities)

P1: You'll notice I mentioned the advantages of everyone using the same infrastructure. Those apply in both of the examples you have chosen.

P2: East Germany.

I would be interested to see an example where government outperforms the market in an area that is not infrastructure dependent. The least infrastructure dependent industry might be software, and here we see the market run circles around the government. Even Anonymous remains relevant!

>-1 for 'surveillance worries'. Is this a glibertarian talking point?

Yes, it is. That's partly why it depresses me. But it also reflects the fact that we've come to expect the government to spy on us, which is not how things should be in a supposed land of the Free.

You may have read my post wrong. The evidence I've seen seems to support broadband Internet, and I had hoped to show the reasoning behind my decision.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gz/policy_debates_should_not_appear_...

In this case it looks like the common-infrastructure benefit outweighs the ordinary benefits of the market. That is not to deny either effect.
You're right. Relevant outside the web startup world. Here, it don't matter. At least I dont think so.

"entrepreneur since i was 12" <--You could probably teach an MBA course. ;)
Hey Mike, question for you related to my project.

Curious, but do you (or do you know of techies like you), who sometimes feel obligated to help when friends/family come to you for desktop tech support, even when you can't quite afford the time to troubleshoot and hand-hold them through simple PEBKAC problems?
Maybe I'm missing the point of bitcoin. I read through the Bitcoin FAQ and it sounds an aweful lot like they're trying to create a system where I can exchange my dollars for bitcoins and use them in transactions.

Am I wrong to be confused? Am I supposed to buy in to bitcoins with confidence, given the wild swings the currency is experiencing?

I'm not trying to take some random dig at bitcoin. My statement about their volatility is based in fact. I want to be educated on the matter. I find the idea fascinating, but it seems that providing stability should be a goal near the top of the list. Am I wrong about that?
Kratko.js analyzes your page, hints at refactoring
Design with out a goal or design with out a purpose is not design.

Design can mean so many things these days, it's hard to fault the author or give him a hard time, but the remarks he makes at the end of the post are worth reading. To succesfully utilize design, you need buy-in from throughout the company. What I don't like about those remarks is his approach to design that seems to say it's an all or nothing affair. Design is definitely not an all or nothing endeavour, and you can easily incorporate good design principals, without spending too much time or resources on it.
but the value prop of it seems to be diminishing as it grows

Just some of the things that have become better as YC has grown...

- guaranteed convertible debt money waiting for you after YC

- meetings with the best VCs

- tailored advice from (more and more) folks who have done it again and again

So even in the worst case scenario where your point re: access turns out true(I do not think it is), there are many, many things about YC's offering which get better for each coming batch.
And even if it isn't charged, you just need a standard micro USB cable, not anything proprietary. I can use the same cable (including the car charger!) for my phone and for my Kindle and for a number of other little peripheral devices.

That, and the only time I've ever had my Kindle go dead on me was when I accidentally left the WiFi on and used it constantly for like three weeks.
but the value prop of it seems to be diminishing as it grows

- guaranteed convertible debt

- meetings with the best VCs

- tailored advice from (more and more) folks who have done it again and again

Just some of the things that have become better as YC has grown. So even in the worst case scenario where your point re: access turned out true, there are many, many things about YC's offering which get better for each coming batch.
API Tools & Service Providers
Playable Archaeology: An Interview with the Telehack's Anonymous Creator
Apple's revenue is $1.3 billion and since they about break even their costs are about $1.3 billion. Your second thought is consequently not in line with how cost is usually defined. If you are using the usual definition of cost the title of the submission is not misleading.

Price is what you charge your customers, cost is what you have to pay to make the product, revenue is the number of sold products times the price, profit (or loss) is revenue minus number of sold products times the cost.
Integrating with External APIs
>> The fact that SmugMug and Dropbox use S3 is irrelevant because they don't hand you their AWS key and secret.

Exactly. So, why support one (dropbox) but not the other? Is it only because DropBox files are sync'd to a local machine? SmugMug has a "download all" option and most users keep all their original files locally anyway. Plus, considering SmugMug offers unlimited storage, you can argue that it's more affordable than DropBox or S3 once you reach a certain threshold.

I get the decoupling argument but every service is a gatekeeper to some degree.

I'm not trivializing building a great photo service–reading the project description simply didn't strike a chord with me as a "great service that solves problems". And I don't mean that in a mean-spirited way.
>(not that this is a 100% accurate process, see for example 4 Hour Work Week).

While I got a chuckle out of this, given the financial success of the book, it's a good book from the publisher's perspective.
I'd agree exceot for #8, everyone is actually talking about it for once and generally in agreement. It is sort of surreal.
Movies didn't cause theatre to disappear completely.

Light bulbs didn't cause candles to disappear completely.

Printed books will get a feel of classic/high end/fancy. Parents will be reading to their kids from printed books (as well as electronic ones) for a while.