skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The mistake you're making is treating states as primary. States--and, more generally, federalism--are a means to an end. The purpose of government is to serve the interests of people. Rhode Island is a legal fiction delimited by imaginary lines; you and I are real people. The people who live within the imaginary lines of Rhode Island are just as important as anyone, but those million people are no more or less important than any other arbitrarily selected collection of a million people. Why should it matter where they choose to live, or where the imaginary lines are drawn?

In the United States, states are largely a historical accident stemming from the way North America was colonized. No one actually decided to establish a federal democracy in North America and divide it into states, different people from entirely different countries just happened to colonize different parts of the continent without ever intending that New Amsterdam and Jamestown would ever fall under the same American government. The Constitution was a political compromise based on the fact that thirteen of those colonies broke away from the mother country and needed a federal government. The Founding Fathers weren't gods, they were the same breed of hypocritical, self-serving politicians you see in any era, a scarce few wiser than the others for sure, but the same ugly sausage-making all the same.
What every Programmer should know about the memory system
Offer HN: FREE: I'll make your first 10 cold calls
s/customers/users/; # where applicable

Are you a developer with a MVP / prototype that you're still refining to make it more perfect before you show it to your prospective customers?

5-6 months ago when I started testing my startup MVP, I've had to do something I've never done: make a lot of cold-emails and cold-calls. As a techie, I know that uneasy feeling when you're about to pick up the phone to dial someone. We all know if you wait until you're NOT embarrassed to show your target market for feedback, you've waited too long to get feedback.

So here's my no-strings-attached offer: If you have a barebones prototype / MVP, I'll use that to test your target market for you. I'll talk to at least 5 people, max 10, for free.

If you haven't yet made contact with a single person in your target market, simply testing it with as little as 5-10 people will at least uncover the top 3 major objections that you might want to think of addressing. All the things Customer Development & Lean Startup champions for early stage startups when you're still finding a business model.

That's it. I'll make the cold call, and you'll get valuable early feedback. With luck, we might get a small taste of what a repeatable sales process would look like - can't scale up getting customers without a repeatable process.

s/sales/user acquisition/; # where applicable

Another way to think of this offer, pretend you've got to a point where you've gotten funding and have money to hire a sales guy. Do you know what to do when you actually have a sales person reporting to you? What would the sales guy be doing on his first day? I'm that very early 1st sales guy (where I'm also helping you figure out the sales process).

This can be a very time consuming activity, if you've done any of these initial interviews, you know they can be as short as someone hanging up on you, or as long as a few hours.

Minimum criteria:

* At least an MVP that you're embarrassed of to test with. Could be a landing page.

* At least have a hypothesis of what the customer's problem/pain is

* Give me a list of 5-10 people's contact info to call up or email (usually sales people focus on converting leads into sales, but someone still has to send them the leads to hit up in the first place)

* Specific for this offer, I can't do B2B and/or long sales-cycle stuff where you have to navigate the corporate org chart (time constraint). Maybe in future. My goal is to help as many very very early stage startups as possible.

If you're pouring your blood and sweat by coding day and night ... you owe it to yourself to at least say "I know people are going to love what I'm building, but let me just check-in with real live customers real quick"

Hit me up and let's talk to see if I can help! I would love the opportunity to cust-dev for you.

jay liew at jay liew d()t c()m
Sorry, but this is bull. If you take any information, even if it's an email and password, data security is either tops on your list or you're abusing your users (even "only a hundred"; one is too many!). There is literally zero middle ground on this: you do it or you shouldn't be building web applications. And given how utterly trivial it is to provide proof against injection attacks in any modern language and toolkit, choosing not to do so because it's "hard" as irresponsible as you can get.

This sort of behavior is why the rest of us get a bad rap.
We are physical beings, but we are not just physical beings.

Playing video games may well be a waste of time, but it's not because they're not physical. All the accomplishments which I admire most are informational or abstract in nature, not physical.
"Microchip’s compilers are based on the open source GCC compiler, but they keep some special sauce locked up."

How is this possibly not a GPL violation? Unless they are running their compilers as a service, they must be redistributing the GCC GPL code, in which case it seems they must license their "secret sauce" under the GPL as well.
Thank you for your reply. I had no idea at all that it was based on Gentoo!
Story of my summer
Except now I have couple hundred of lines of "legacy" PHP that's not being written in Python just yet and considering time constraints won't be. It makes crossover projects hard.
I too am having some problems digesting this. I think we are missing something.
When the announced this, I told my friends:

They will drop the price, and every person that owns an iPad will buy one, they might lose their ass on the hardware, but what happens when they release a really nice app store and they have a zillion people now with their product in hand?

I know it sounds far fetched, but.. its working, no? All they need now is the app store (is it already created?)
not out yet, but i like the approach of this book (i got some good tips from the mailing list)

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Bea...
I'm going to rewrite dynamic arrays, a wheel that's been reinvented a thousand times, for some random ruby project?

<roy>Well no.</roy>
Do you mind telling what was faster? I'm really curious.
Playing with Virtual Memory
They are FolderShare for Macs, a little bit nicer and at a time where more people "get" the need.

Fun Historical note: FolderShare was founded 10 years before DropBox. MSFT paid to acquire FolderShare and then squashed all of the good things about it out of the project.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/nov05/11-03Fol...

Second-mover (or N-mover) advantage and clean execution is undervalued, IMHO.
Longview probably just has the one zip code. Seattle has 59, for just over 10000 average per zip code, so we up here are probably a bit worse in a big city.
Generally speaking, studying math, English, computer science, or other subjects is considered to contribute to one's knowledge of those subjects.

Is there some reason to think that studying business will not contribute to your knowledge of business?
Hackers claim to have beaten Xbox 360 Security
VC as an asset class, and programmers indirectly because of that.
Your calculations would be very different if you included the year in the DOB.
I've seen a LOT of "single founder companies" just sort of sit around and never really make any irrevocable moves. It's easy, especially if you have other income, to just keep something at the hobby stage.

The absolute best way to prevent this is to have customers demanding your product now (or by a certain date). The next best is either to be dependent upon the startup for income, or to have other people pushing (and pulling) you forward (or pushing them, at other times). Not sure which is better.
Talking fluff is easy. How many will participate in a Graphs vs. Trees discussion? and Ruby vs. Python?
Utilizing Ancient Roman Technologies
I met my first co-founder in college and my second one through the local tech scene. In both cases I made sure that these were people that I could get along with before anything. Skills are picked up along the way but if you don't work well together it's going to be a painful ride.

Co-founding is like getting married, except without the sex.
Rutgers University Mini-MBA in Web Analytics
October 8th is an odd date. Since it's my birthday as well (long before 1990 though) I have taken note that I run across very few with that birthday, let alone early October birthdays. Is it statistically a low-birth month? I'd love to know.

On a side note, Happy 21st Birthday in just over a month!
Kohana is a little brain-damaged. Good intentions, but it's essentially a PHP5 version of CodeIgniter in most ways that matter. The problem with this is that a PHP5 version of CodeIgniter doesn't leverage the constructs and concepts that make PHP5.3 (which in 2011 is the lowest version of PHP you should be considering) much more pleasant to work with than previous iterations. Kohana, and CI2, are both rather meat-axey frameworks, where the trend is toward elegance.

I'd consider Symfony2 for most applications, or Silex (which is the Symfony2 app kernel, stripped of the majority of the Symfony2 framework) if you like writing the plumbing yourself. Yii is pretty nice, too.
We want more photos.
3 carriers to invest $100m in Isis, a joint mobile-pay venture
What I find interesting about PHP (among many laughably bad things about it) is that one of its key strengths for beginners is the easy mode-switch between scripted and verbatim mode (i.e. <?php and ?>), but all the large software projects whose code I've read used some kind of templating.

I agree with the sentiments around here, though. If the goal is to write software that works and hopefully makes money, do what you know and ignore this year's hot new framework/language. Write readable code in case you need to refactor it later.
Awesome. Will try it. Cheaper than linode. Curious how they perform.
You get more done faster. When things suck, you have someone to cheer you on. Complimentary skillsets (hopefully) — one person can chase deals and funding while another continues to code. Encouragement.
Sure. But if you've built a crap back-end for a content site (that doesn't even ask for emails) and someone manages to inject some alware taht attempts to download crap to your users computer -- then you realise that crappy unprotected php is a really really bad idea. (In my defence - I was very young)
If they have zip+4 info, this gets even easier.
I didn't at first to show the 1:64, and then I added the year (well 50 of them) to show how I got closer to the 87% with my extremely un-scientific and fuzzy math.
Present Time, Photos of Y Combinator
Startup founders get tired now-and-again. Knowing a co-founder is working while you're resting is a source of invaluable relief against the pressure to get things done.

Long-term, this kind of emotional stability prevents burn-out. That's important because startups don't die, founders quit.
As someone who went through YC as a single-founder, then got a co-founder, then became a single-founder again after a year I've been on both sides of this fence. I've been meaning to write an article about this experience, and I guess this post has given me motivation to actually do it. There are so many misconceptions from both sides about the other. Hopefully I can find time in the next few weeks to write it all down. Are there any questions/topics you would want to see included in such a write-up?
Finding slow MongoDB queries with MongoLab
Medical and voting records generally ask for sex, not gender. It would be nice if the two concepts would stop being confused.
>Sure it is. Replace general purpose computers with centrally and permanently connected (It's a feature!) computing devices that only run signed apps. Then whenever someone does something too clever you just revoke their developer ID and everything they've written stops working.

There was this one short story I've read months ago which essentially described this, just with compilers instead of apps. Oh the horror...
Things programmers preach but don’t practice
Birth location =/= mailing address zipcode. Babies are usually born in hospitals, and thus parents from many areas concentrate in one specific building. When you re-distribute these births out to their respective homes around the county, the zip code becomes much more important.
GitHub's Parallax 404 Page
There are situations when a table based layout just works better. Have you ever designed a site that needs to work with right-to-left text (Arabic / Hebrew) as well as English? If you use tables for your layout a simple 'html {direction:rtl}' fixes everything. If you are doing it the "right" way then you have to reverse every float and margin settings from right to left and vice versa. A nightmare to maintain. Clearly the CSS designers did not have that use case in mind.
Recipe: A/B testing with KISSMetrics and the split gem
I realize I'm being a little pedantic, but the original phrasing does read as the probability of it being in India or China is greater than the rest of the world combined.
When two datasets collide, seismic events may occur
Worse or better? With only 10k per zip you'd get very close to a 100% unique identifier.

I realized after looking at both Portland and Seattle zip codes that they seem to be distributed better than the less dense areas so you do have very few zip codes over 20k.
It sounded like the compiler was properly GPL but the libc was closed source.
Always test with IE ("Buy Now" button white in white background)
In towns like mine, however, 40,000 people share the same zip code with the hospital. I'm sure there are quite a few more town like mine throughout the US.
I agree. That said, using actual gender rather than assigned sex only serves to identify people more uniquely. I wonder if that would have an appreciable effect on the stats or if it would fall within error bars.
Oh right I see. But don't you think introducing matrices as a type of transformation between vector spaces is too much too early? One reason maths is so difficult is that our brain simply has no point of comparison to bootstrap the concepts with. You just get used to it over time with effort. Starting so abstract would leave many people lost at sea.

But then again, a lot of why matrix algebra was so confusing at first is it all seemed so arbitrary. Just memorizing a bunch of boring human calculable unmotivated algorithms. I get angry thinking about it. It wasn't till I read about how they came about in 1800s and studied linear algebra did they start to make sense.

Maybe maths beyond basic probability,geometry and algebra - which can be readily motivated to everyday life - should not be taught to everyone. Then less people would find it useless and more people would not be so embittered towards the subject.
My point was not that ORMs are bad, but that SQL is required knowledge to communicate with a databases, including getting around the problems an ORM causes. It is hard for me to believe that someone who doesnt understand SQL can be a competent ORM programmer.

The system I mentioned was well designed with hundreds of tables, multiple replicated database servers, dozens of web servers, caching and all that. The problem was a specific case where knowledge of SQL was able to produce a 50x performance improvement.

I think SQL essential to learn because it bends your mind. You have to think in terms of sets instead of sequential processes. Just like functional programming and BNF are mind stretching.
Does Money Make You Unhappy?
Flickr Announces Geofencing
I didn't even know CFML was an open standard.
Check out cfwheels.org before you comment. It's a RoR like framework, and from 15 minutes of tutorials - it's actually pretty good. It handles APIs better than Django and deals with AJAX in a smart way.

CFML verbosity and the entangled html is a downer though.
What features or services differentiate Bellstrike (9.5%) from WePay Giving (3.5%) or First Giving (7.5%)?
I used my mailing address zipcode, without even realizing it wasn't my birth zipcode :)
Good for you! Congrats on launching and pushing ahead.
I seem to remember the term "manumission" being floated around during the beta process... :)
Bob,

If you're not on 'CFML entrepreneurs' on Facebook you should be.
Note: this is all hearsay. The worrying thing I have heard about MBA programs is that many spend their time studying traditional businesses which essentially sell mass-produced physical widgets. I can note a lot of things different about technology companies but one of the most important, I think, is that technology companies don't follow traditional physical manufacturing processes -- knowledge work doesn't fall especially well into the assembly line model. I would agree that studying business should ostensibly help one understand business, but it doesn't immediately follow that studying Industrial Age business confers understanding of Information Age business.

To those with MBAs, how am I wrong here?
Point of interest: there are 100K possible ZIP codes but only 42K-ish are actually in use in the US. Not that I think this makes it unreasonable for 5K of each to land unique ZIPs.
Actually I bet Apple could pull that off, if they charged more overhead for iTunes (audio & video).
$199 iPad with included Apple TV -- might work.
I wrote something like this to circumvent our filtering proxy at work. I didn't open it up to the public because I was worried about being responsible for their traffic, though.
I'm not laughing, I run several sites on a similar stack and it all runs very well. I do run Railo though just because it runs circles around the native CF server (and I don't use any of the "high level" stuff Railo doesn't include), and I use mySQL 5.5, but all under Win 2k8 Server. I have dabbled in several other frameworks as well but I simply keep coming back to CF to get things done. Be it personal familiarity or platform flexibility or a combination of both, it's never come up short or failed to perform very well and that's how I judge something to be an acceptable platform.
A random restaurant is not getting my email address, for any reason, ever.
Apple confirms iCloud won't offer iTunes streaming
Swarmanoid: Towards Humanoid Robotic Swarms
A list of misconceptions from both sides would alone pique my interest.
Your comment still comes off as needlessly arrogant. You compared Cold Fusion to leech therapy and stated that CF developers have simply never learned any new technologies. You mentioned the business value of newer tools, but you seem to miss the business value of leveraging existing knowledge and getting stuff done.

C is a lot more archaic than CF, but sometimes it's the right tool for the job. Archaic doesn't mean wrong. I certainly don't want to program in CF, but if someone else does and it works for them, then more power to them. As others mentioned, this is at least a nice counterpoint to the Latest-AwesomeYetUnproven-NoSQL-SemiFunctional-Framework/Language stuff that flies about so much.

Oh, and they still do leech therapy. The humor theory was bunk, but leech therapy can indeed have benefits.
What human factors / assistive tech projects did you work on?
For some reason, when I think of human growing population, I always think back to the Star Trek "The Mark of Gideon", which featured a world where overpopulation is a real problem.

I am sure that is not realistic but I worry that the world could one day become like that.
4:4:4 sampling is necessary to preserve color distinction in screenshots (otherwise your icons and text may change color), but since very few photographs will have single-pixel color variation, 4:2:0 is usually sufficient. Don't get me started on 4:1:1, though... I'm glad to be rid of the chromatic curse that was miniDV.
I'm all for the increasing availability of free online education, but it's interesting to note I'm paying 50 grand (partially) for this...
Looks like the site is a broken GoDaddy site. :(

(multiplayerjs.com)
I've been thinking the same thing recently. If the OS itself just lived on the cloud and had local copies it just updated, then your stuff would always be in 'sync' (including settings/apps).

Moreover, you could access the same OS using different platforms (mobile vs laptop) and it could behave appropriately. We're already moving towards this to some extent with more and more sync and push services.

NB Just to be clear, I'm not talking about a pure web-based OS and thin client (e.g all of google's products are like this). I mean being able connect to something in the sky that keeps it all in sync whenever you have a data connection.
You are right that, as steganography isn't really usable right now, you don't need to ban all communication to remove privacy in practice right now. But as governments adopt privacy-removing measures, the people will react devising privacy-enabling measures, and undetectable steganography might be possible in the future.

Let us remember that normal HTTP traffic follows a power-law, with relatively few sites getting the majority of the traffic, so there might be a way, if many of the high-traffic sites on the internet collaborate, of making "covert" traffic look just like "innocent" traffic.

that's simply not good enough to use, in a regime where the secret police can arrest you if they suspect you are trying to hide your traffic content

Even if we accept the premise of undetectable steganography, which is not possible by any possible means today, the arrests will continue to happen. However, I hope they will tend to happen less, as the large number of false-positive arrests would certainly cause high commotion in the general population.

* So, while I think it'd be very hard to remove the ability to send small amounts of text data, from the Internet, I think it'd be possible to make private communication unworkable, in practice, for most people.*

You are correct. Under the current situation, it'll be hard to make all your communication private under the restrictions imposed by, for instance, the Pakistani government, but dissidents don't need all communication to be private, and small amounts of text data might be all that's needed.
Lol, good point. It's kind of ironic that geeks who were picked/excluded/ostracized in school turn on each other in their adult lives and become snob/hipsters, instead of breaking the cycle.

Love and power to anyone doing anything good out there with the tools that enable to do them.

As for the fanatics who can't change the topic (to keep bashing) or change their mind.. I hope you can see the forest for the trees one day.

Imagine what it would feel to be supported by a developer of any language and doing the same for others. We should cheer accomplishments, not berate, belittle and attack others without a track record of our own.

When it comes to getting opinions, I learn a little more every day to ignore anyone who is a perfectionist and hasn't accomplished/launched/profited. It's the enemy.

Scaling/rebuilding/whatever you're afraid of is okay when you're growing and profitable. No business built itself in one version.

Remember, In 10 years you might have forgotten about the tools you're so passionate about today.
We actually provide a full, branded website for nonprofits. Most everything is baked in for them - blog, automatic receipts for donations, etc. WePay is a great service but they don't provide websites - they handle transactions. We use do use WePay's API to handle the transactions on the nonprofits' websites.

First Giving is a great service as well but if I understand their model correctly, it is more of a fundraising page for an individual to raise money for a nonprofit.