skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All Mint.com really did for 90%+ of people is display pretty charts of their finances in a completely automated way. The "big idea" they had of helping people transform their financial lives was mostly bullshit and never realized IMHO.

It was really: enter your bank account credentials and get instant visualization of what you spend your money on. Useful, but hardly life altering for most people. "Wow, I spend a lot on eating out. I should cook at home more."

If you really want to be the Mint.com of food you would create an iPhone app that OCRs your restaurant and grocery receipts and displays cool charts of what types of food you eat. "Wow, I eat a lot of unhealthy food, I should cook at home more."

I suspect the solution to the problem you've identified doesn't look anything like Mint.com. The startups that are delivering pre-made meals are probably closer to the mark.

It should be possible to affordably deliver quality food to people's houses on a bi-weekly basis. You could take into account all requirements you specified.

You get a package, open it up, drop the meals into a pot/microwave and instantly get a fresh healthy meal. That's the only real "drag and drop" solution.
I debated in High School and College. I don't think you're giving competitive policy debate a fair treatment here.

On the surface it seems stupid to think that an un-refuted argument should be considered true. But arguments are evaluated that way in policy debates for a very specific reason -- the purpose of debate is not to discover the truth, it is to win an argument. That's the whole point of the activity. If you don't like it, you don't have to play.

That's actually the reason I quit during my sophomore year, but it doesn't make debate a worthless activity. Nothing taught me to work harder or think faster.

Debate is like working out. It's not real, so certain considerations go out the window. Under your logic, running on a treadmill is a bad idea because you're not actually going anywhere. But the point of debate isn't to discover the truth, it's to sharpen your understanding and wit.

Where debate goes wrong is when you stay in it too long. After a certain point the skills become harder and harder to transfer to other parts of your life. And a lot of the people in it, as you might be able to imagine, are pretty arrogant know-it-alls.

After I left debate, I had to re-socialize myself back into the world of normal people who don't argue with each other all day for fun. It sounds like I'm exaggerating, but all my friends were debaters and all my time was spent researching, debating, or arguing with them about literally everything. That's just how debaters tend to spend their free time.
Bazinga - Incremental tests for Python
Often consulting clients only want the consultant to validate what they've already decided to do. Sure, it's best if they listen to you; you are the "expert" after all. But sometimes the best you can do is sit back and do damage control after the fact.
I've been using a framework called ChocolateChip-UI that allows for persistent headers (and footers, with a very minor hack) plus almost everything else you'd want. I'm using it to build a Twitter client for the BlackBerry PlayBook.

Check it out: http://www.chocolatechip-ui.com/
The problem is the expenses in building these things are capitalized (or worse, booked at a greater value), so when they do sell at the much lower value, the developers/banks/government will need to take a loss. So long as the selling can be delayed, the losses can be hidden. If these were just private entities, they'd take the losses and go on, but the government purse is much larger.
I too have considered how church specific software could be made better.

My old church uses a program called The City (http://www.onthecity.org/) to create a social presence for themselves. This was a nondenominational church in Southern California that had ~1000 people/week split into 3 services.

In general, I think the implementation of this idea was awful. Younger people are already on facebook/twitter/etc and don't need another account to maintain. Older people have a hard time getting on it and using it, although I think it does help older members of the church keep in touch with each other. This church has had a hard time getting people to sign up and use it regularly despite the pastor mentioning it every week for months in the service and bringing in outside tech support people to train the congregation.

I see two major problems with church software. First, drawing the line at what exactly is a church. I know many Baptist congregations that would be offended at the thought of using the same software as an Episcopalian parish, nevermind Catholic/Jewish/Muslim/New Age Hippie. The needs of a small Baptist congregation and a small Catholic one are going to be much more similar, however, than a small Baptist church and a mega church.

The second problem is how to handle accepting money. It feels wrong to develop church software with a profit motive, rather than a make the church more Christ-like motive. (I've always wondered about the companies that make the Eucharist crackers and all the other church paraphernalia.) I think the best solution would be to offer the software at-cost (whatever that means for software... hosting fees maybe?) to churches, and then have a recommended donation above that amount.

One of the biggest problems I have with the tech-culture of the church is the lack of open source. I think that OSS nearly perfectly aligns with Jesus's ideals, and it is frustrating when religious people don't see that. A service that brought Linux awareness to more churches would be amazing.

I'd love to chat more about this issue. What type of church do you attend? Are you ordained or have you been employed at churches?
So your friends were master debaters?
Justinmind 4.3 is here
I can't blame Intuit. In just a few years, personal computing went from fairly homogeneous (Windows PC) to incredibly fragmented. It takes massive resources not just to make software for each platform but also to keep feature parity among them all.

The best bet for these types of companies is to switch their products to a SaaS and then just build thin native UIs for mobile.
I was thinking about finding out more details about the project initially since I have a ton of free time, but that "any changes that we felt were needed" clause sounds fishy.
They seem to want someone to build the prototype, then re-build it. Why don't they just design it right in the first place?

And paying only $500, and keeping all the rights and IP to boot? Nah, I need cash but not that bad.
Henry Ford did not price his automobiles so workers could afford them, he paid his workers so they could afford automobiles.

The reason he could do this was because of the productivity gains incurred by assembly line techniques. Incidentally, the assembly line techniques also reduced the prices of automobiles to the point where an overpaid worker could afford them.

Possibly the most overlooked aspect of what Ford did is the standardization of the 40 hour work week so that his employees would have the free time necessary to make an automobile make sense.
I was just thinking "OCR" when writing that post, too. But yours is a straightforward solution, that I have not heard of before.

To make sure that YC doesn't get into stupid IP trouble, I took a random snapshot of a public book that I was reading on my PC kindle. Here is the result from google docs:

-------
[...] We neighbors are out of bed." This struck the eeuld net then empley him; but I foolishly
rest, and we s00n after had offers from one let him kngw as 3 Secret that I 50011
Of them t0 Suppl)’ U5 with 5tE1ti0I1e1"Y; but intended to begin a newspaper, and might as yet we did not chuse to engage in shop then have work him_ My hopes of bL1SiI16SS. success, as I told him, were founded on mention this industry the more this, that the then only newspaper, printed particularly and the more freely, tho’ it by Bradford, was a paltry seems to be talking in my own praise, that wretehedly manag'd, no way entertaining, those of my posterity, who shall read it, and yet was proﬁtable to him;

----

So obviously there are some bugs. The whole thing took me like 1-3 min for the first time. Google docs is kind of slow on my system. No I would still have to correct all the mistakes. No idea of the GP's approach is more work. Still a nice idea.
He didn't say it would fail overall. He said it would fail for him and his friends. That is a judgement he is totally qualified to make; a demographic whose desires he is very much in touch with.

I think it's very legitimate to say "I don't normally like social media; so far I like Google Plus; if Google Plus becomes more like Facebook I will like it less".
Hurdles?

1) Language, especially when getting stuff like visas, work permits, incorporation, etc. You can stay on non-work (or business) visas, but it's not terribly legal.

As for the English standard, imagine you have a country with 1 point something billion people, and speaking English was discouraged until about 20 years ago (except if you were in intelligence). How do you teach it? Only young people tend to be fluent. Most English teachers have never left the country, or had much one-on-one interaction with people who can speak good English. Students are great at certain elements of formal written grammar, if it's in an exam setting. Vocabulary can be OK. But fluency can be a problem.

2) Red tape. It's non-existant for the old woman selling wonton soup by the side of the street (as long as she can run faster than the local city management, or can afford to give them lots of free soup), but not likely to be fun for foreign businesses.

3) Talent. I'm sure it's there, but you won't know how to find it. You can't tell if people are bright, unless you can communicated easily. Also,expect programmers with great geometry, good algorithms, and no idea how to work in a team; kinda like most countries, really.

4) Honesty. Chinese believe that "actions speak louder than words". If you don't understand this, and you won't, you won't understand why everyone is telling white lies to you. People may explain this as "face" related, or "high context communication", but to some people it looks very dishonest.
is there a link in which it takes u to the page where u create an account on google+ NOT google profile
Another good thing to know would be any UK bank recommendations, e.g. with a normal website and statements that aren't PDFs and go back to day one. (Amazing in this day that bank websites won't provide a full history to the account holder!)

There's no BankSimple in the UK, but some decent options would be welcome. Heard good things about FirstDirect, but I don't think they do business accounts.
The losses aren't hidden, it's what one would call a long term investment. Because the Chinese government isn't beholden to a two year election cycle they're able to think over a much longer term horizon. Whether this is good/bad in the long term remains to be seen, as a more dynamic business environment might threaten their long term vision.

64 million surplus homes in China could be filled in a heartbeat. China is not America where everyone for the most part already has a pretty decent home. The current US estimates are similar per capita, but the issue is that US doesn't have a massive supply of peasant farmers who would like much better houses in the city.

China has started to reach the point where it is fueling the demand for it's own goods similar to what happened to the US in the 20s and continued in the 50s and 60s as a generation moved from the farm to the city. In the US the fuel was lend/lease and marshall aid, for China it's trinkets for Wal-Mart.

At 100,000 USD a pop the surplus represents 6.4 trillion dollars, if you assume the units are overvalued similar to USD real estate meaning they have a 3.2 trillion dollar bubble. A 3.2 trillion dollar bubble is similar to the costs of the US bubble plus a war in Iraq and Afganistan. The only difference is the Chinese have peasants who will ostensibly drastically increase their economic output and the fact that building modest housing probably has a better ROI than war.
Not overly impressed with the way you've mangled my about info in comparison to the original page:

http://www.findpeopleonplus.com/profiles/1059936479729639341...

Vs:

https://plus.google.com/105993647972963934118/about

EDIT: Also, you've specified that I have 0 followers and am following nobody. That is untrue. I just elected to not share that information.
Is it possible to get one to?
If so send one to xycoster at gmail dot com :)
IIRC patio11 is Catholic. Not going to find someone better to bounce this idea off of. If he doesn't respond here you could try sending an email.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/about/
The State of Functional Programming in PHP 5.3.x
It's worth noting that at least CS140 / operating systems (and I think some other systems classes - networking?) are taught in C, not C++.
I can't compile this. What am I doing wrong? Here is the output:

$ gcc -o donut donut.c -lm

donut.c:1: warning: data definition has no type or storage class

donut.c: In function ‘main’:

donut.c:4: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘printf’

donut.c:5: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘memset’
Congratulations on your company's second appearance in the New York Times in as many months. Care to share how Digital Due Diligence became the go-to source for this sort of analysis at the New York Times and elsewhere?
Feynman's "Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle" [1] might help understand why this is so. Down in the "avionics" section.

[1] http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/challenger-appendix.html
can anyone invite me?
That looks correct to me, to the given number of significant figures. Did you expect to get all 301 digits? I don't think Google Search provides that kind of precision ;p

However, you could easily compute this yourself...

>>> 2**1000
1071508607186267320948425049060001810561404811705533607443750
3883703510511249361224931983788156958581275946729175531468251
8714528569231404359845775746985748039345677748242309854210746
0506237114187795418215304647498358194126739876755916554394607
7062914571196477686542167660429831652624386837205668069376L
When was Google ever called a "one-trick pony"?
Simply maintaining these apartments may be too much even for the average city worker.
|troll-war over how the site is becoming reddit

FTFY

(preemptive notice: tongue firmly in cheek)
You need to go add:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

and then add int directly before the k on the first line of the donut.
I wish my company knew what a hack-a-thon is. That is what I get for working for a fortune whatever to big to fail blah blah...But I agree, side projects spawn innovation, it is an fantastic idea. It is a great way to build techie networking with each other, people who ordinarily struggle with that. big benefit for the corp on that I think.
I built this Nose plugin inspired by Google's CI system: http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2011/06/testing-at-speed-a...

Hope it's useful.
It said I write like Cory Doctorow too. Hey ...
I haven't picked up the 2nd edition yet, but I can attest that the first edition at least, was indeed very good.
Thanks for the thoughts!

My wife and I have volunteered in a local ~800/week church for close to ten years, managing the technology there. We've worked hard to introduce OSS in as many places as possible. Our network servers are mostly Linux, and I even wrote a SaaS (also OSS) similar to The City called OneBody (http://beonebody.com).

So I agree with your thoughts on OSS.

Unfortunately, OneBody suffers from many of the same problems as you describe of The City, only worse since I have no marketing budget, and I'm about the only guy doing the coding.

I think I might like to build a new solution for churches, possibly OSS, that integrates with social media, but is designed for use by minsters and leaders -- not another private social network, which I have decided will forever be a hard sell.

I'd like to follow you on Twitter or get your email address if possible.
not even close: how a $60 bottle of scotch got me an intro to someone who in turn invested 2mm. there, my first blog post is live.
This deserves more attention, especially by those that think Google can do no wrong. Thanks.
Google+ compares to facebook as facebook once did to myspace. Fb feels like a cluttered mess of ads and years of design add-ons. Whether all my people will get on G+ is another story, but its got the functionality to allow for a much cleaner, easier experience.
Current Zynga games aren't that bad. The production values and gameplay are a lot better than the werewolves/vampires style games that they started with. Given a few more years, their games might even be comparable to traditional, non-social games.

I think the HN set is unfairly hard on companies like Zynga. The entrepreneurial of mind should know that a start-up can't always afford to act nobly or to invest in quality. Sometimes the right strategic decision is to make cheap crap and spam now, and reform later once you're out of mortal danger.
I'm almost hesitant to say this because I don't want spammers jumping all over this like they have Google, but Blekko is the shiznit. Yes, it used to suck, but try it now. Tell me if the search results aren't much higher quality.

Mums the word.
To be fair, he said "with me and my circle of friends". I accept user 'bcl' as an expert on himself and his friends.
That did it. Thanks!
Is this statement actually true?

"If you purchased a laptop today, you are more likely to have purchased a Mac over any other type of computer. If you’re someone who makes over $250,000 per year, and you purchased a laptop, you almost certainly purchased a Macbook Pro."

Wikipedia seems to indicate that a reasonable estimate of OSX market share would be around 10%, with 20% on the high end (Steve Jobs claimed 20% in 10/2010).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

If that statement is not true, doesn't that significantly undercut the author's argument?
Cobra Effect: Lionfish-style
It's really cool. This should be at about +8 to +12 IMO.

(Sorry I hate this sort of thing but without comment scores, yes I'm still riding that horse, no one can see that anyone agrees with you).
Interesting. Well, what I did was set up a WinXP virtual machine on my Linux server, and used QuickBooks over the local network.
For every year they sit empty, they depreciate physically and they also need regular maintenance. Those are actual resources being used. And if the buildings are in the wrong location altogether, it may be cheaper to just tear them down than try to find a market for them.
That is corporate jobs, not the hacker community. I don't have so much as a single college credit to my name and the harvard educated CTO of my company didn't even mention it when I got hired. Stop reading monster.com job posts thinking it has anything to do with "hackers".

Hackers care about code, full stop.
First commenter under that article gave a link to http://www.kingdom.com as an example.

I wonder what they did -- that web site is not responsive at the moment.
The sentence is meant to reflect Apple vs. any other laptop maker (Dell, HP, Asus, etc...).
Teen Wolf Season 1 Episode 7 
Teen Wolf Season 1 Episode 7 Aquariums are beautiful in their own right, particularly ones which are large enough to make the viewer feel as
Considering Intuit has an influx of revenue every year they push out this product, it should be expected that they support that years technology.
Unfairly hard huh? Have a look at this and be sure to watch the video: http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/06/zynga-scamville-mark-pinkus...
In order for that statement to be true, Apple would have to sell more laptops than any other vendor. Quickbooks is probably biased towards the U.S. market, so considering that in August 2007 1 in 6 laptops sold in the U.S. market was a Mac, it might be true.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cUjZ_7rlAmKRDVB6GXId73h_...

If you put all of the millions of laptops sold in the U.S. into a big bag, and you drew one out at random and inspected the laptop to determine its brand, the greatest odds are that the brand would be Apple. I believe that was the claim.
Looks great. I have not seen these candies before. Best of luck to you!
Thank you! HN is the best :)
Thanks! I would ascribe some of it to random chance, not in the "Anyone can do it," sense so much as the "We will not likely appear in the Times or similar sources on a monthly basis in the future," sense.

I wouldn't characterize us as the go-to source, by any means. We've gotten some good press, but there are lot of companies that get quoted on this kind of issue. That said, my cofounder and I have been cited by the NYT twice each, in under a year, so we're getting something right.

Here is what I would advise: find a way that you can provide uniquely useful data to journalists. Only contact them when you have something useful to say. It's okay to fact-check people, as long as you frame it more as "Here's an insider's view," not "Here's why this person is wrong." (And, within their paradigm, journalists are rarely wrong--but it's often possible for them to do a follow-up piece that discusses things from another angle. That's where the industry experts come in.)

I also have to point out that Digital DD is in the unique position of evaluating companies as our business model. Our job is to have an opinion, so it's natural that if a journalist wants to talk to someone with an opinion about a related issue, they'll reach out to us. You can't count on this if you're not in the business of researching and analyzing other people's behavior.
Great! I already liked to try Python in the browser and I was thrilled to find the WeScheme that was posted here. But using something, literally so visual as image processing is an awesome idea.

One comment: Maybe, I'm the only person in the world so tired and stupid. But at first I got the impression that it didn't execute in chrome or was so slow that it takes forever. So I fired up Firefox to test it there. Only then, did I realize, that the new computed picture would show up to the right of the code. I had zoomed in too much in chrome.
I guess the average Stanford student is smarter, but if you would force the picture to be below the code you might have one source of confusion less.
The Mythology of Moore's Law
You described several of the strengths of policy debate (an activity I participated in during high school) but, alas, also all of the weaknesses. These defects of policy debate are why I'm glad my son participated in Lincoln-Douglas debate in high school.
The bubble is not illogical to start with. Thanks to currency controls most people have no way to invest outside China.

Now wait a sec. The bubble is illogical. That it involves individuals making rational choices in a distorted market doesn't exempt it at all.

In fact, it is a fine illustration of how distorted, artificial markets produce irrational results despite each person making choices that are logical for them.
For some reason the map travels behind my cursor as I drag it around. This would drive me away if I was looking for an alternative mapping library to google maps.