skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to agree with this.

A typical top-tier business school graduate in the US leaves with $100K in debt that costs at least $800-$1000 a month to pay off. That's going to eliminate a lot of great potential entrepreneurs right off the top, and it's going to make things painful for those who do try.

I did an MBA in 2002-2004 and went into banking after. I would have loved to go do a startup, but when you have that kind of debt, and someone offers you a job, it's a lot harder to turn down.

I did have a number of friends who launched businesses successfully during school - they essentially used the two years and the debt incurred to bootstrap a new enterprise. But in most cases they had those ideas before even arriving at school and I suspect they would have been successful without going.

That said, getting an MBA provides an invaluable toolset for leading a corporate enterprise (if you pay attention.) I just don't think that learning to be an entrepreneur should be one of the expectations. Similarly, getting a CS degree will teach you how to code, but it doesn't necessarily give you the capacity to build products people love.
I think it's really difficult to rigorously evaluate that sort of thing. Different websites serve different purposes and need different designs.
The rapid pace of Rails is a turn-off to me, and I do bounce between it and the more "sane" Django.

But I think that's more a reflection of myself (being an "old" guy who's "been there, done that" several times over and resistant to change and trends) and not the fault of Rails. So I try to keep up.

But Rails is good for the web. The web was pretty stagnant at one time, and it sucked, and didn't keep up with the needs of users and businesses.

And that's why I don't have a real problem with Rails' rapid pace. It keeps everyone on their toes, including their competitors.
Scanning the raw data, I see the Toyota Sienna has zero reported deaths in any category (Minivans seem to do well in all categories).

Like others mention, this likely has to do with some degree of selection bias (i.e., Drivers who are safer choose certain vehicle types like minivans) as well as (in the case of the Sienna) a very small sample size, likely due to the model redesign that fell within the period, limiting the data - survey only chose most recent model data during the period).

What's also frustrating is they don't mention all deaths/injuries. For some insight into that, it's probably best to look at the IIHS other reports on insurance losses per model:
http://www.iihs.org/research/hldi/composite_intro.html
Maybe you have latency to their data centers? For me (in Mountain View) it's hard to imagine it being any faster. The page appears within 200ms and all the boxes are completely filled in including images on my main page probably in under a second.
I am so glad I can't afford an expensive sportscar.
> often have to make follow-up phone calls because their written English incomprehensible.

Was it a joke that you missed out the word 'is'?
This guy's experience reads like something out of a William Gibson novel. If BTC takes off, I wouldn't be surprised if the world got several orders of magnitude nastier, malware-wise. If the value of breaking into someone's machine is not merely the computer's connectivity or, worse, information to enable identity theft but actual, untraceable value-holding currency, you know the incentive to compromise computers is going to skyrocket.

Are we prepared to live in that world?
Ask HN: How do we get the right alpha users?
Hello! Our startup is at the point now where we could really utilize some real-world testing but a problem we're having is getting the right alpha users. We essentially have two different users - a car buyer and a dealership. The problem is facilitating a test environment without it actually having to be launched... so all transactions would be 'pretend'.

Spoke with a YC startup last night who we are close friends with and they suggested to forget user (car buyer) testing and focus on dealership testing. In a sense, our 'alpha users' would be the dealerships and we could equate how many potential users each dealership would represent. Thought the idea was brilliant.

What would you suggest? If you need more info, I'd be happy to provide it - didn't want to hardcore self-promote. :)
Thats how Rails is ... I fought it at first, but you either come around or you don't. There isn't much middle ground with rails, you have to accept that and plan accordingly.
Clean Code presentation [pdf]
And there really can't ever be one. A bank requires some way to offset risk (insurance, etc); If it gets robbed, the insurer pays out; In this case, an insurer would need to physically keep more bitcoins than the insured on hand in order to handle a payout situation. Since bitcoins can't be 'printed' like dollars, there's no way to simply have an 'FBcIC' without allowing them to substitute something for those bitcoins in a payout situation (e.g., the USD cash value).
I would definitely recommend people check out the author's memoir on his cancer diagnosis : http://www.amazon.com/Council-Dads-Daughters-Illness-ebook/d...
Post-Artifact Books & Publishing
I've found Lanyrd to usually be the best bet for finding conferences - unfortunately, they don't list any either.

http://lanyrd.com/topics/common-lisp/
Measuring The Quality Of Abstract Art
The ReadyForZero Programming Challenge
Mixpanel Streams: Watch What Your Users Are Doing On Your Site, In Real Time
In PHP's defense ... Development on CakePHP has been chugging along like a champ for a while now.
I'm currently working on this. So far, recognition of encrypted text and decryption works fine. However, it breaks Gmail if the text is part of an email there - only reloading get's it to work again.

Since I have zero experience with JS, I'm thankful for any help. Code is on: https://github.com/Mononofu/CryptoChrome

The plugin I'm using was compiled on Ubuntu x64 and probably doesn't work anywhere else. It was written using firebreath, basically it's just a wrapper to gpg.
This is just my experience but the reason I don't use facebook is that the novelty has worn off. After seen status update after status update in my timeline I could care less about, I realize why I don't socialize with my old coworkers and people from high school. We have nothing in common, just like we had nothing in common back then. If facebook wants to continue to grow they have a very tough task ahead. They're going to have to redefine the user experience for people like me who have been on the site for a while, yet retain enough of that user experience to attract new users. I really think they missed the boat letting Linkedin IPO before them. The long slow slide to irrelevancy has begun and that doesn't look good on your S-1.
As the post mentions, the worst is when people can't even take the time to write an original birthday wall post and just copy/paste one from somebody else. I've had strings of the same message over and over again on my wall. I've since made my birthday private.
Very cool stuff, Brian! It'd be interesting to try to cluster users based on what bits of the page they look at (women 65+ look at navigation breadcrumbs significantly more than average, say).
Dinner with Werner Vogels - CTO of the World's Largest Lean Startup
Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm still reading the readme and the code, but I think Elixir is closer to Erlang (the language) intents, being immutable and 'more functional'. Reia has some object-orientation built in, with stateful objects and "types" that mix data and code.

Here's a very good blog post by Reia's author talking about the 'non-Erlang' things in Reia:
http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2009/03/is-reia-object-orien...

I personally think that they're both amazing from what I've been seeing. I gotta dive-in more and do some tests, but it will be a joy to see Erlang getting more adopters. :D
I'm going to save the world. Where's that Hummer showroom?
It's classic human behavior to look for some cause of whatever is happening. Sometimes it's to transfer the blame (smoking your whole life and lung cancer is somehow not your fault) and other times it's simply looking for any explanation because we as humans want explanations (it's gods plan, everything happens for a reason, etc...).
LulzSec takes down Eve Online, Escapist Magazine, and Minecraft
Meet Amazon.com’s first employee: Shel Kaphan
Love this! But I really only see a mobile use for this, rather than a desktop use.
Seattle area 15-year-old sells startup to ActiveState
If your the trusted advisor-type of the family (brother / sister, best friend), make sure the business affairs are taken care of. Sometime the spouse is too far gone (male or female) or just not experienced enough to deal. It will help what comes next if the paperwork doesn't drift.
The importance of working on your best idea
These items all help to complete an "ideal" landing page, but the honest truth is there is no recipe or checklist. While a site developer USED to get points for including all of the aforementioned accouterments on a landing page, today it is standard fare.

As far as reaching out to your target market, see if you can arrange some sessions with people in your market. Show them the site and ask them to talk about their perception, thoughts and questions while they look around. There are sites that offer a service like this but don't necessarily target your market appropriately. I haven't used many of them, but I've heard great things about askyourtargetmarket.com.
Google Censorship Initiative Thwarted by ‘Gee No Evil’ Add-On
JC Penney nabs Apple's head of retail to become its new Chief Executive
Why not just add people who you want to associate with, and not people aren't significant in your life any longer?
During my final year project for my BSc, I tried to address the problem of losing the temporal data from eye tracking in heatmaps with an accelerated replay, heatmap animation. Here's an example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L319pLmzHVc&feature=chann...

This video shows a selection of sittings from radiologists reporting on chest xrays.

If I recall correctly it is sped up approximately 5 x realtime.
Those factors affect a bitcoin’s exchange value: for the purpose of exchange, a bitcoin is arguably more valuable than, say, an original haiku. But the difficulty in double-spending bitcoins is irrelevant if there is nothing to spend one on in the first place.

(On the flip side, there are things whose use-value exceeds their exchange-value. If, for example, I am hungry and I have one fresh fish, I would derive benefit from cooking the fish and eating it, but if I’m not standing in a fish market, it’s probably not worth the effort for me to sell it.)

The overall bitcoin protocol has some use-value: even if people stopped trading bitcoins, the protocol for running the system would be a worthy object of study for cryptologists. But you can derive that kind of benefit from the protocol without owning a single bitcoin.
Free and open source technical books
GazeHawk intern here -- I wrote the post. Our post next week is going to be focused more on using different clustering metrics as a way of making the data easier to understand.

We definitely have plans for running some big studies where we can do demographic comparisons, since that sort of information helps us bring a lot of value to our customers, but it might not be for a few weeks.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2654065
This point has been beaten into the ground so hard that I don't even know where in the backlast/forelash cycle we are with it anymore.
You might wanna take a look at dispatch_apply with striding:

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin...
If you thought the climate change debate was crazy before, well this will take crazy to a whole new level.
But that's okay, because entrepreneurs themselves are special. Otherwise, everyone would be one.

But I don't believe this article anyhow. Sure, Google wasn't the first search engine... But they sure did it better than the others at the time.

And likewise, every idea could be the same. Get all the little factors right and you could be the next big tech thing.

Or you could fail miserably.
amen. what i like about this article so much is how real it is...the writing is raw, honest, and speaks to you
The thing is, with diseases such as yours or others that are hard to find the cause and/or cure/treat you have to become your own doctor. First, realize when people offer up suggestions they are trying to help you. Second, while 3 doctors may have spent their career studying something it doesn't mean that a specific diet or treatment will not help you.

A friend of mine has hives. He's seen a ton of doctors and none of them have any clue what is causing them. Other than having a few hives almost all the time he's perfectly healthy. So he has had to become his own doctor and at least attempt a process of elimination with foods and other things that he comes into contact with on a regular basis. At a minimum he gets some illusion of control and is working a process that may find something.
How To Make $1 Billion In One Summer And Get Whatever You Want
Oh, for goodness' sake. We know. Stories like this need to just go away.
For those who don't have time to read the article, "mini Ice Age" literally means that winter will last longer, and be more prevalent at lower altitudes/latitudes. Mildly sensational, but an interesting read.
As long as the extension does not then place the cleartext back into the DOM. I would also want support on my Android phone too. So I guess basically, it's never happening.
Your first point on adverse selection is by far the biggest reason. An entrepreneur at 27 or 28, will be working his/her ass off to build a business. We ultimately have a very limited window in which to pursue starting a business, and simply making the MBA decision narrows that time window significantly, even if you leave knowing a lot more about business.

I'd be hard pressed to turn down McKinsey, Bain & Friends if I was $100k+ in the hole after leaving b-school.

By extension, the same argument on adverse selection could be said for YC as well. Although I'm certain YC adds great value to its participants, many people who applied would have done well even without YC. The magic of YC is to be able to get a concentrated group of smart/ambitious entrepreneurs and amplify the success that they probably would have had without it.
How popular are social games?
> By itself this data isn't much use though, I suspect. For years Concorde was statistically incredibly safe, then one crash made it statistically incredibly dangerous, simply because there were only 14 flying in the first place - small datasets are rather prone to wild swings.

They don't have the metrics you mentioned, but all of those cars have at least 100k registered vehicles, as is stated in the third paragraph: "The study looked at vehicle models from 2005 to 2008 that had more than 100,000 registered vehicles and examined the driver death rate between 2006 and 2009."
Ha ha ... That's a great tutorial and a brilliant idea. It could prove to be quite useful. But, somehow I can't bring about myself to using it - seems like loosing my last bit of humanity.
Using the example of GazeHawk, it looks like they claim to work using your system's built-in webcam. Being interested in eye tracking for non-advertising purposes, I did a few calculations, and I fail to see how this is possible at typical monitor distance and typical webcam resolutions.

Does anyone have any insight as to how this is done? Currently, I'm highly skeptical of that these heat maps are the least bit accurate.
Except most people think: iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4. There's an argument to be made that the iPhone 4 is the 4th generation of iPhones.
Every time we have one of these debates (as well as offshoot debates, such as having separate Software Engineering majors in addition to a CS department), we get into the whole fight about teaching practical skills in universities demeans such fine institutions, turning them into little more than vocational schools.

Let this be the opening comment for that debate. Does it demean universities from teaching theory and structures and so on with Scheme courses, and turn them into industry-chasing Java schools?
Free Internet Marketing Tips
If this feature is Google-specific, as in, it only operates on google results (by something within the Chrome code), then I think this represents a profound change in the generally content-neutral view of websites, and gives them an unfair competitive advantage which may pose regulatory issues.

Edit:

Okay, it seems to be part of a new HTML API ( http://code.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/prerender.html ). Just add the tag:

<link rel=prerender href=somewebsite> and it'll render and fetch a page in the background so navigation to it will be fast.

Also, apparently prerendering automatically aborts whenever plugins are found on the page, so this may be bad since many slow web pages are slow because of the use of Flash.
I wonder how much of Israel's VC money is domestic and how much pours in from the US.
The thing about Ad-Block is that is does have the problem with differentiating between content and ad's from time to time. One example is when trying to watch a video on Yahoo or Hulu. Ad-Block does not have the ability to disable those type of ad's and for the most part those are the type of advertisements the general community would want to eliminate. I myself use Ad-Block and the biggest benefit I see from it is blocking the ad's on YouTube videos that everyone seems to hate. With that said I also disable for certain sites because I see the power in having tailored advertisements i.e. Facebook so for them I leave it disabled. Selling it as a service would be difficult because for the most part people would only pay if it was a big inconvenience and for most people it's not. The fact that their is at least a marginal benefit for the ad's they see also makes it much more difficult.
I don't think 'censorship' is the right term here, the sites are still indexed and displayed. Google is just doing the minimum possible to appease the record labels (and the politicians they sponsor) and get a content deal.

Initiatives like these browser extensions show how ridiculously futile these efforts by the content industry are.
I have to say, doesn't this story go hand-in-hand with the CS education article?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2652795
I have to say, doesn't this story go hand-in-hand with the business education article?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2653331
My pleasure. :)
The problem is, fundamentally, that entrepreneurship is not something which can be taught in class. Skills helpful to entrepreneurs can be taught, but determination and mental flexibility don't come from school.

You can't assign an essay on how to not give up when all hope seems lost.
As seemingly benign as a "slightly longer winter" seems, I would venture the consequences of this will be larger than we anticipate.
Annual US Aid to Israel is $382.97 per Israeli and going up.
Just curious, but what are you comparing Netflix's P/E to? How do you conclude that Netflix is overpriced?
That's a brilliant experiment. Proves my point.
But, not keeping ones birthday listed prevents the true contacts from reaching out to you. I've people who call me up on my birthday who although reminded by facebook at least called me up. Granted, it's not sincere, but at least we have fun catching up.
Where does high-minded ivory tower academic-oriented theory end, and code monkey industry-oriented practicality begin with CS?

Also, he actually addresses your criticism:
Computer Science is not a vocational program, and it's important for students to graduate with a deep understanding of the field. It's true that you can do amazing things with existing languages and tools without learning much about the deeper theory and foundations. Still, I think it's great to attract students with a fun, application-oriented course that gets them excited about the field, and hit them later with the more abstract ideas that might seem less relevant at the outset.
Try France & Germany: €629 all included, that's $910 USD.
Betting on sunspots to reverse a century of adding carbon to the atmosphere via fossil fuels is a bit of a long shot bet. Right now we're still in high gear contributing to global warming, but predicting sun spot activity isn't a sure thing.

I'd like to think that as techies we see not just the humanitarian potential but the business potential of energy efficiency, new storage techniques and even new sources of the stuff. It wasn't long ago when we used substances like whale oil and trees to produce fuel -- if we limited ourselves as a society to those sources we wouldn't be where we are today. This is a time where those who embrace disruptive technologies are needed more than ever (and not just for energy but for water and food as well).
Here are the 2011 stats by country for Google's CodeJam contest: http://www.go-hero.net/jam/11/regions. China had 1689 entrants, of which 97 made it to the third round. India had 1525 and 3 respectively.
Here's an interesting article about image hashing and fingerprinting algorithms: http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/432-Loo...
Well, assuming they're correct in their predictions, quite possibly.
that seems a little confused to me.

there is a certain amount of short-term churn: people who signup and then leave again. if that rate hasn't changed we can ignore them, since the number leaving this month is made up by the number arriving now who will leave next month. it comes out in the wash.

then there's the slower loss of long term users, which needs to be balanced by keeping a few new signups.

so far, the above is more-or-less consistent with what you say. but then you end with a comment that somehow mixes the two, trying to explain a mismatch in the second process with people who "even out" in the first.

it would be better to say that one or both of the following (which describe decline in terms of the two processes outlined above) is happening:

A - the amount of churn is falling off. so the people present for only this month are less than the people who were only there last month.

B - long term uses that drift away aren't being replaced by new users.

because (B) eats into the entire user base, while (A) is relative to the new users per month, only (B) can explain a sustained decline (the first process can't explain a loss of more people than sign up per month).

so we can simply wait and see. if the decline is prolonged then it must be long-term users that are leaving and not being replaced.
Yelp is looking for a Release Engineer
http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oMclVfwY&s=Hacker_News
It's not actually loaded, it's prerendered. The rough details are here: http://blog.chromium.org/2011/06/prerendering-in-chrome.html

The salient bit seems to be: "The browser fetches all of the sub-resources and does all of the work necessary to display the page. In many cases, the site simply seems to load instantly when the user clicks."

I'm not sure if impression tracking gifs would be loaded (I'd hope not), but it doesn't seem to run any of the JS.
A different syntax on top of Erlang VM? That sounds awesome. Syntax seems to be the number of critique of Erlang. Hope they don't drop many language features.
That's still very cheap. It won't go for less than 1300 USD in Brazil, which really feels like 10000 USD if you take in account our average salary.
Indeed, considering that the much-feared "global warming" constitutes an increase of one degree per _century_.
Repeat customer.

I generally only eat at small family owned joints anyway, so that helps as well.
Nice visualization! We have something similar that we generate:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/gazehawk-public/example_track.mp4

Definitely a step up from heatmaps, though I think there's a lot to be said for providing data as a static image rather than a heatmap, especially when they are being added to a powerpoint or PDF.