skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you may have me confused with someone else. I rolled my eyes at Reddit back when you launched (thinking it was yet another Delicious clone :-) ) but fortunately never put those sentiments in writing, so I didn't have anything to recant when I changed my mind a couple of years later.

The post you cite seems to be by some guy named Lucas?
That's good PR. If it seemed that way, it would read as an advertisement.
Does YC prepare startups in any way in talking to the press? Or is that more informal?
Space shuttle tracker
The multiplier has changed over time. It started out as a tenth of a penny and has been reduced several times, so you can't really math out without additional info. Not that it's stopped anyone.
Less than 0.1 percent of the people in my hometown (35 of 42,000 – it’s a small town in Germany) have signed up, so few that I could actually count them and look at all of them.

No one I know has signed up or expressed desire to sign up. (I was, however, not asking anyone to sign up. That’s not something I would ever do.)

It will be interesting to see when the first person I know signs up.
What kind of infringement is that then? (I 'm not a lawyer, just wish to know)
Toolchain: MinGW, gcc 3.5, gdb 5.2

Yet it only runs on Windows? Thanks, but I do virtually all my C programming on Linux. The only thing Windows is useful for is to cross compile to other targets (it's usually more work to set up Linux to cross compile to a target).

Why anyone would write C on Windows for Windows I have no clue.
My point being your life may be in danger but the thief is just as likely to die too.
Freedom price
Someone called Humourisok posted this, but it is dead for some reason. I thought it was a good idea, so repost:

----

Humourisok 20 minutes ago | link [dead]

from the tech point of view you have an open platform to share and annotate scanned docs. Sort of "web 2.0 Sharepoint". The niche that I see for such a service is legal. Lawyers can receive, annotate and remark on clients drafts for proposals, contracts etc. So it's something like Scribd+ or Docstoc+, for closed network of service provider & his/her clients, where a lot of paperwork is required. Legal services seems like the case.
----
joshu had to deal with orders of magnitude more users and a crazy growth rate. Just the fact that he could keep the site up under that pressure impressed me to no end
I find the efficient version much clearer, too. It extracts one layer of abstraction: a beginner may wondering, how can a variable being less than a function (a<func()), then find out, that the function returns a value, etc.

Two more lines worth it.
Ask HN: When did the idea of an app store first come together?
I was just reading this old profile:
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2007/09/02/introducing_the_google_phone/

And this passage stuck out:

Mark May, an equities analyst at Needham & Company who follows Google's stock, says he doesn't expect Google to manufacture the phone itself, but rather provide an operating system and a suite of applications that "would appeal to consumers and professionals," like the mail and word processing applications it already provides to PC users.

"That's a natural extension from their core business," May says. The operating system is expected to be open not just to Google's applications, but applications developed by all sorts of other players - a real problem with many cellphones.

September 2nd, 2007. Apple's store didn't come out until July of 2008.

Since I wasn't following along, anyone have insight into whether this was a general trend in thought then, if rumors of Apple spurred this analyst to think about Google along similar lines, or if some other company had already launched the concept?
Could you buy a wimax router and put it at the furthest in place, like a rangers office or whatever has a phone line?
When I see this sort of optimization I flag it to wonder how much "help" the student got during the assignment. Years ago I saw this on a student F77 assignment

y = x + x + x

instead of

y = x * 3

The real author the assignment clearly knew that for the particular machine it was executing on that 3 addition ops were faster than a multiply and couldn't help themselves.

When questioned as to why this was, the student couldn't explain the meaning of the expression and the jig was up
> "Android was supposed to be FREE and open; yet developers can’t choose their billing solution"

Maybe I'm going off topic, but dev can choose their billing solution, distributing their apps outside android market that is not part of AOSP (Android Open Source Project) (as Gmail app to cite another one)
I agree that in an introduction course, it is important to keep the code as readable as possible. But it is likewise important to get performance considerations in student's heads as early as possible.
Millions of users of G+ says Eric Schmidt
I avoid percentages because I think they can be a little silly when talking about small absolute numbers. I think we had just over 2k active users last year at this time, for what that's worth.

I am not worried about overpricing the site as long as I think the signup fee represents good value for new users.
Thanks for the explanations. Very helpful.
Lisp for the Web, Part II
HTML5 vs. Native Apps: the Google Plus Thread
It is possible to criticize the change, comparing that rather than the total. Foreign aid, and many other things are judged this way.
The true story of the history of the colon in python
The Great Reset: Why tomorrow may not be better than today
Open government data to fuel Kenya's app economy
Trademark infringement, possibly limited by geography; Apple would be considered the owner of the SM. See my citation above. :)
Oh yes, I'm sure they will if push comes to shove. It only makes sense (from a business perspective) to try to avoid that write-off, at least while the costs are low.
On the bright side, he can now legitimately market the book as "The book THEY don't want you to read"
There are a few factors - whether the academics are in love with some particular language (i.e. Haskell, Eiffel, Smalltalk, or Lisp); whether there is pressure to use a language that will help students "hit the ground running" (i.e. industry buzz words that may be obsolete by the time the students graduate, or Java/C#); and whether it's easy to teach.
At Q42, the company I work for, we have a yearly hackathon. We start Friday morning and then depending on individual circumstances work until anywhere from Friday night to Sunday night.

We've covered last November's hackathon on tumblr: http://w00tcamp.tumblr.com/

One of the resulting projects is http://www.soundmatch.me/ -- enter your Last.fm username and it will generate a Spotify playlist based on your music recommendations.
Their front-end is written in C#, I guess that's what they were most familiar with building GUIs in. Perhaps there will be a Mono version in future.
Solving The Scoble Problem In Social Networks
Agreed. Only one of these ideas has financial potential, and even then it's not an easy market to tap for that particular service.

Still, it's nice to see some idea flow as it always gets the juices flowing.
Part of why Amazon is great is it being a place where you go to research things. I'd hate it if they close reviews to only people who have bought stuff at Amazon - it'll take away too many good reviews.
Context. We also know dates and times - more or less at least, there may be some conversion to UTC if necessary - as well as other information about the event - categories, locations etc.

On occasion there are false positives, in which case Our algorithm is the Borg. They will be assimilated. Their grammatical and syntactical distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.
Rule of Consulting: You can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose
I probably thought about 3 ways he could use the tech and apply it to another problem. He should not quit, he should pivot his startup. I think there is something here. I for one, will download, install and play with the app.
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For me, it's started to. The first days were like you've described, but yesterday, several non-technical people signed on and seemed to attach pretty well.

In fact, my friend's mom added me to a circle yesterday, and she's a choir director.
Great article. I don't think we can repeat this enough:

Hard work != value. Clever code != value. Writing something hackers think is cool != value.

Sometimes I think the hardest part of startups is re-aligning our value system from what we've learned in school and society into something that's actually useful for startups.
For 6 yers I worked as a network engineer for Cisco, primarily with the government and Serpro (Federal Data Processing Service), the biggest IT service provider in Brazil.
I can tell you from first-hand experience that there's no server/networking open source focus there.
Please review my app: personalised sudoku puzzles
http://birthdaysudoku.com lets you make free personalized sudoku puzzles, customized with your date of birth.

So far it's been used by just over 100 visitors to make nearly 200 puzzles.

I'd be keen to learn what you think of it and how it could be improved.

Thanks.
Great point. I am reminded of organized crime outfits who keep two ledgers, the real one being encrypted. There has to be some case law on that somewhere.
If I have something illegal and incrementing on my encrypted hard drive, am I not helping incriminate myself by giving the password? That is the basis of the law, and if indeed you are incrementing yourself by providing a passphrase for an encrypted container, you don't have to provide it; in a nutshell you are dead wrong.

Your metaphors about a password being a locked door and this and that is nonsense, a password is not a locked door. A locked door is a locked door. An encrypted file that is password protected is an encrypted file that is password protected, I don't have to let anyone look at anything If I don't want to, regardless if they have a warrant; they will just bust in anyway.

When police have a warrant, lots of times they don't even knock on the door, but just barge their way in. They can attempt to do the same with the encrypted file, they can brute their way in, but you are not required by law to help them accomplish this.

"Although the only way the password content can be incriminating is via the language of the password,". This is you guessing and making things up. This is you spouting your opinion 100%. If I have something extremely illegal on an encrypted container, than giving the password is most certainly incriminating my own self. This fantasy you have that the only self-incrementing that can occur is if the password itself is a sentence stating guilt is the biggest load of bullshit I've read on ycombinator in a long time, wherever did you come up with this nonsense I'll never know.

Your attitude towards bending over and letting any government official rape you, is unsettling at the least, and a terrible sign of where our society is at the most. I pray there are as little people sharing your opinion out there as possible, else I weep for the future of society.

Also, please tell me what they could possibly do if one claims to have forgotten the passphrase? Presidents for years have gotten away with everything by stating, "I can't recall" on tough questions; who's to say with all the fuss and scary guns pointed at you during the raid, you totally forgot your passphrase? How could anyone ever prove you actually forgot it or not? Charged with obstruction of justice you say? Imagine if the contents on the encrypted container itself would get me into 10,000 times more trouble than an obstruction of justice charge, then obviously I've done the smart thing.
Uh oh. Some under appreciated heroes they are.

> Or does Apple care more about the fact that we’re trying
> to give apps away for free to consumers?

Hardly. Apple also give apps away for free to consumers, if developer chooses to distribute it for free.
Apple still makes money from selling hardware not ads.
What'g getjar business model? Oh, yes:

> We were built by developers, to help developers.
> Not to help sell handsets or search results.

No mention about selling ads? Will having more free stuff attract more visits? Will it give more
opportunities to show ads?
Clickable link: http://birthdaysudoku.com
Very doubtful they could go after that, considering that getjar is registered in Lithuania. But lawyers are crazy.
Ah, cunning! :-) (Or, more likely, a necessity to stop the signup fee being $100 by now ;-)) Good work.
Direct link to article: http://blog.getjar.com/developer/getjar-vs-apple/
Russia's largest social network vkontakte (vk.com) lets you draw "graffiti" on friends's walls, but I wouldn't say they have any design value whatsoever, let alone Apple-grade design.
Autism and Agile Software Development; pt 2
run away from such sites as they obviously store your password in a database. there should be no difference which length is the password since database only stores constant length salted hash of it.
There are a lot of times that it doesn't make sense to write any code before selling the product, but there are also times it does. The whole decision comes down to "Can I convince somebody this will work?"

The less likely your product is to be implementable, the more likely you will need code up front: 140 character mini blogs? Sure, fake it with photoshop. Real, Turing complete AI? You better have a prototype because nobody will believe you can do it.

Most startups tend to lean towards the former, but don't get sucked into that mentality if you lean towards the later. You'll be wasting your time.
Another related one which analyzes 32 post-mortems and identifies the 20 recurring reasons for failure

http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/top-reasons-startups-fail-an...
Very true. I've been thinking that although I started coding to make a business (tho I used to write QBasic games when I was 10 too), I developed a coder's value system.

I can't seem to keep in mind that code is a means to an end!
> We came out of the cave and realized that gender is not a
> simple binary

That's a bad reason to pretend gender differenced do not exist.
Maybe he deleted it because he decided to run with it...
Interesting thought about phd students being a potentially untapped resource for startups. Anyone want to launch phdturk? The domain name is available (for now anyway)
Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic
In Newcastle University, they also did this.

The only advantage over teaching Python was that they planned to teach us Java later, and the syntax is more similar.
The author s looking for media hype and doesn't even have the facts. Put simply, he's playing the martyr card and making a scene just to boost his own sales.

telling people to tweet his page isnt so much a protest against amazon as it is a Marketing Campaign. (a handful of re/tweets isnt going to suddenly incite action on amazons part)

That aside, I dont think i'll be buying the book of someone who cries censorship (/wolf) when he himself doesnt even know whats going on.
we have this embedded in the "recommended" order, which is the default one given on the first search results.
It's an algorithm which considers a few paramaters and gives points. These points are reduced according to the number of hours which have passed since the last calendar update.
So Owners already have the incentive.
Your idea could be interesting anyway. We may allow to order by "last updated calendar". Thanks for the comment!
Indeed, and I thought Douglas H. would get a kick of something that talks about itself (see his book Godel, Escher, Bach for a ton of recursive stuff...).
Does anybody know if there's already something like the world map radio? Can't find anything on google.
as it is now, no permanent damage is done when the calendar is not update for a while.
But actually it would be nice to have a "last 3 months average update time" which means both no permanent damage but also consider recent behavior.
yes, both good ideas.
Tips and Tricks from our first month running
How would you implement the Hacker News Ranking Algorithm with Mongodb
I have implemented Hacker News Ranking Algorithm with SQL in the past, but am totally lost on how to do it with MongoDB. Any ideas?

preferably not using map reduce.
The problem is, these all have his original problem - clients who take years to decide anything.

B2B is difficult for startups, unless they already have good industry connections. On the other hand, consumers and small businesses are a little stingy.
first, astronauts do not really explore space, they mostly operate light machinery. Frankly the mars rovers were the most active space explorers till now.

Secondly, why does humanity need to invest in space right now? I just dont think there's an incentive, people believe life sciences are more important at this time.
I used to work in the higher ed vertical. They have about the longest sales cycles imaginable because so much of every decision is committee led (speaking at the campus level; department sales are a different story). You also can never expect them to just make a decision. If you are selling to the entire campus, you need salespeople who understand the process to work you through it.

My advice to startups in that vertical: make it a department SaaS sale. You avoid central IT and it's committee process hell. If you really want the whole campus, start with a few departments, make them happy, then work your way up.
What The Hell Is Google+?
You are right. The white border is required. Thanks for pointing it out!
Dang great story. I've been working on a few projects here and there. The first one was too big a project and I called it quits after 2 months because 1) I did it for learning purposes and 2) it was too big to complete and launch in regards to other competitors. But 3 years is a long time to spend on a project. There are definitely lessons to be learned here and as long as you don't lose hope, you will eventually find something that works. Your mention of testing if people would actually buy your service/product w/o writing the code behind it is a great idea, much like what I read in the 4 Hour Work Week. Definitely something entrepreneurs should apply if possible in order to reduce the amount of time potentially spent on doomed projects or projects that need to pivot.
I just don't understand it, in this post for example http://tenaciousc.com/?p=1787 he is talking about poking around in the kernel, but then he develops a Windows-only C IDE? Qt is perfect, I don't understand what the problem is.
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Tim O'Reilly: State of the Internet Operating System (2010)
You are right (I upvoted you :).
Given current technology it is not reasonable possible to decrypt strongly encrypted data, however - there is strong evidence that using quantum computers this task is a matter of seconds. This technology is well defined theoretically already, just not reasonably implementable so far, which might be just a matter of some decade of time. In this respect, an encryption is the virtual equivalent of a safe, yes.

There is a complete other point I want to bring to your attention - our computers not only contain evidence, they also (might) contain lot of private and sensitive data, things you don't want anybody to know and where constitutional protection might fit since it's unrelated (I'm not knowledgable in the respective laws though, that's why I say 'might'), like a mental cache, and also hyper-links to other unrelated storages and networks (you can store much more virtual things on a computer than in a physical safe) - this makes a computer and it's disk somewhat different from a safe. It can potentially contain anything and the government would get access to a chain of homes like wandering through worm-holes because they were given one important entry code. This might affect the privacy of several other people, and they might not agree with that procedure. What is the law saying here? Are we going to be forced to use seperate computers for each task? rofl.
How else would you do it?

Leave it in place until concrete evidence is presented.
Is it that hard to imagine that maybe he's primarily a Windows user and has previous experience in C# and not Qt?
Given the accounting and decisions that lead to Challenger plus the political directives from DC, I think "badly managed" is pretty mild to describe how screwed up NASA is.

I still believe if a certain President had said "Permanent Human Presence" instead of "land man on the moon" it would have made all the difference. We blew it all on a race instead of building infrastructure.
Did you really need to include that cliff-hanger? I know it works for TV series, but here it just disappointed me ...

Otherwise, interesting read ...
Yet another online t-shirt shop?
I've teamed up with a great designer who has been making his own t-shirts for quite a while but has no knowledge of the web.

The product is already taken care of: dozens of great designs that he's been selling successfully in market stalls, the t-shirt quality is good and the finished products sells in bulk for 4USD a piece.

What sets us apart?

- Designs: obviously this is subjective but myself and friends that wear them get compliments, "where did you buy it?", etc. The designs sit in a niche between threadless and expensive brand name shirts.

- Price: The low bulk price allows us to offer serious discounts. Buy 2 get one free, promo codes offered after every sale, more promo codes if you tweet / share on FB, etc. Standard shipping is free world wide.

- Social: Initially sell 10 models for men and 10 for women. Then we'd launch a "groupon style competition", showing 5 possible designs that may be made next, asking people to vote for their favorite. If theirs wins, they get to buy the shirt at 50% off. Voting and results get disseminated on Twitter & FB.

- Packaging: Because of the low bulk price we can afford to splash out on nice packaging to make users feel appreciated.

- Support: 30 day no question returns. My partner is in Asia so we can answer emails within the hour, 24/7.

The goal is to set up a break-even business initially. All proceeds go in to advertising. I'm a web developer, girlfriend is a rock star designer / photographer; the website, design and product/model shots will only cost us our time.

Thoughts?
There's a more fundamental flaw, something that you wouldn't have uncovered by interviews....

1. For the money to get someone to review your paper, you can get someone to write it for you. http://www.bestwritingservice.com/ has essays for ten dollars a page. If you're willing to pay someone 20 bucks to review your essay, you're willing to pay 50 to write it.

2. Most universities have writing centers where people will review your papers for free. These places are oddly underused. The people who would go don't need them, and the people who don't know don't realize they do.
CS106B, which is the second course at Stanford CS, is on C++.
So... Python has len() because it would be too hard to standardize on .len(). Any by the way, len() calls .__len__(), on which we have standardized.

Got it.
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The problem with how seasonal this is seems exaggerated. Just rename it hwbuff.