skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's because the job of a startup is to find product/market fit, which requires building a lot of shit (much of which gets discarded) but involves very little handling of money, because it's not coming in yet. Typically startups will have lots of money come in in lump-sum capital investments, then it steadily bleeds out through salaries, and the founders have to worry very hard about how fast it's bleeding out and whether they'll have a viable product by then. Once the startup has money coming in on a regular basis and can worry about things like profitability, it's no longer a startup (and that's often when it hires dedicated accountants).

Oftentimes the finance/accounting role is taken care of by the "business" cofounder, along with market research, sales, lead generation, overall strategy, HR, ordering pizza, cleaning the bathrooms, and so on. It's intimately tied in with fundraising, which is usually also the "business" cofounder's role, and so it doesn't make sense for a separate person to do it.
Agree. It first became obvious just how big Facebook would come when they simply breezed through the objections to the introduction of the newsfeed and opening up of the site to high-schoolers.

They've also proved willing to dump more good ideas than most startups have ever had.
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/workshops/

1999, my senior year at UIUC. I remember sitting in this workshop, and I still use zsh today. Good times, great ACM student chapter.
Create deckJS slides directly from markdown
Oh my. My eyes don't know where to go.
I was surprised to see that they put so much emphasis on the searching in the demo. The real value is in the "Goals" interface - which is well designed.
> What is the usefulness of this information?

My guess is that it's there for the sizable population of facebook users who check it compulsively. For a lot of people, the appearance of constant activity is going to be a lot more interesting than the appearance that nothing is happening, even if for only fifteen or twenty minutes. I can see this increasing 'engagement' a lot, and it's easy enough to ignore for people who find it annoying.

And your optimal signal-to-noise ratio is still there in your news feed.
Personally I love the lists function -- adds a lot of utility for me. Subscriptions are a plus too, though I prefer to see content from pages I've 'liked' than people I've subscribed too. I'd much rather have all this info than news feed info from people I'm no longer even acquaintances with. But yes, a bit too much feature creep as a whole. I could do without the Top Stories.
I think MartinCron's point was that everyone always predicts Facebook's demise "three months into the future," and that this will also turn out to be nothing.

If that's the point, I disagree with him. We've seen far too many unstoppable behemoths collapse under their own weight to believe that anything is too big to fail. The difference between Facebook and, say, AOL, Yahoo, IBM, or any other company with a massive user base is that Facebook is run by a CEO with very little experience (compared to AOL, Yahoo, IBM, etc) and no fall-back plan that could let them remain profitable and relevant when their moment on top is over.
The real question is whether the damage Apotheker did can be undone. I think it can, but the window is closing fast. By the time the engineering talent departs to greener pastures, it will be too late.
you get leaky abstractions that have already been proven to fail! :)
Wave failing is my only reason for not even checking out g+ until it is 9 months old.
Im thinking Parallax Inc. might not like that name: http://www.parallax.com/
Bradley Horowitz on the future of Google Plus
An open ended question I've wanted to ask for a while: when a startup (all of a sudden) needs to hire a bunch of engineers, what kind of things do those engineers work on? What requirements change so rapidly that doubling headcount becomes necessary?
Hopefully the email included some paraphrase of the words, "You're fired."
That's why you'd project the UI on the table. Spills? no problem. But, you'll have a projected image on top of everything that's on the table (food, utensils, your arm...)
For face replacement in video, the state-of-the-art is this upcoming SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 work:

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~dale/docs/faceReplace_sa2011.mp...

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~dale/docs/faceReplace_sa2011.pd...

Having worked on this problem before, I know how tough it is to escape the uncanny valley when doing replacement, and these guys have really done impressively well at it (albeit with a fair amount of manual preprocessing and in controlled situations).
To repair a Windows 8 system, you boot a live Windows 8 PE USB drive.
$23/month does seem a bit steep, it'd be cool if you could work in a way for those start ups to get a percentage of the $$, that way we can feel like we are all helping the start up movement. I'd be more willing to spend $23/month if I thought it was going to help a start up in some way.
I love it. I hated getting pop-ups for simple track info, lyrics, etc.
Apache also maintains a list: http://wiki.apache.org/stdcxx/C++0xCompilerSupport

And IBM: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/58...

And Digital Mars: http://www.digitalmars.com/ctg/CPP0x-Language-Implementation...
Now that I'm getting a better feel of what BankSimple is about, I don't think it's that revolutionary an idea. I'm not even sure I will use it. Most of what they showed, and more can be accomplished using Mint. And, Mint offers more choice by being an aggregator.
Our Smartphones, Ourselves: An Interactive Map of the New Demographics
How do professional movie productions do this? For example the Winklevoss brothers in The Social Network both had the face of one of the actors.
I think Facebook will fail. I just doubt that it'll fail anytime soon. I don't particularly like this redesign, but I think it's just going to be a blip that people grumble about and get over in a couple weeks.
Made with:

1. OpenCV 2.0 - C++, C, Python interfaces; BSD license - http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/

2. FaceTracker - C/C++ API; "research purposes only", to download email Jason.saragih@csiro.au - http://web.mac.com/jsaragih/FaceTracker/FaceTracker.html

3. Method Art Image Clone - realtime cloning library (from gts, glew, glib); MIT license - http://methodart.blogspot.com/2011/07/fast-image-cloning-lib...

4. openFrameworks - C++ toolkit; MIT license - https://github.com/openframeworks/openFrameworks

5. FaceOSC (ofxFaceTracker) - active appearance model addon for openFrameworks; "open source" - https://github.com/kylemcdonald/ofxFaceTracker
Wa.tt Chosen by GreenStart Cleantech Accelerator
trademark != patent
Zed Shaw's Learn Python The Hard Way:

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/
Writing the Charm Sales Letter: Backwards Time Lapse Video
Yes, examining the data will mess up the sampling distribution and invalidate the standard Wald test. But it's absurd in the AB testing context to advocate not acting on your data. Of course it's also absurd to look at conventional p-values if you do. So it's a bit of a Catch-22.

All this confusion goes away if you realize you are interested in p(lift | data) rather than p( data | lift=0). The sampling distribution -- the distribution of the statistic under repeated sampling, p(data | lift=0) -- does not play a role in Bayesian statistics. Obviously the "model" (likelihood/prior) does, but this doesn't include the experimental procedure provided that the experiment is only based on observed data.

AB testing, as a decision procedure, is an area where I don't think the standard frequentist - Bayesian debate applies. The Bayesian decision rule is the only profit maximizing solution. That said, I"m sympathetic to being practical. But all the confusion and conflicting advice related to AB testing stems directly from trying to fit it into a frequentist frame.
Question: In the FAQs it says you do your own printing. Does this mean we are paying you $23 just to print whatever startup name on a shirt?

My first thought was that you were getting these shirts directly from startups and not making them yourself. Also, agree with $23 being too expensive. $10 would be more in line with what people are willing to pay.

Props to companies like inDinero for sending out free shwag (LOVE the shirt!:])
Miami Invaded By Giant, House-Eating Snails
If they're a bank, it's definitely possible to use machine learning to categorize the vast majority of your transactions.
Just my own experience here, not sure how much of that is shared with others.

We launched with a duct-tape and baling wire version of an idea cobbled together from mostly stock components. It blew up overnight and kept on growing exponentially for months.

All that time we managed to extend the life of the first version by throwing money at the problem, buying larger servers and tweaking the bits to remove the bottlenecks whenever they popped up.

In the meantime we re-wrote the code until it would scale reasonably well, and this included the re-writing of a bunch of those off the shelf components that had kept things afloat.

That re-write took 3 times as many developers as we had had until that time.

The final version scaled through 4 orders of magnitude growth (in tests, in real life we never got that far) without any major hickups and I suspect it could have grown quite a bit further had we made all the right decisions.

Unfortunately we didn't and that's where we got stuck, around 100K uniques / day.
Someone should snap up the PC division pronto ... in order to sell it back to HP at a 300% markup.

At this point, I'm sure the board would approve it.
Ah, neat. They must have just moved sites, then. Thank you!
Prototype system promises 54% smartphone battery life boost
This sounds like an interesting concept but could be quite dangerous in emergencies or other situations.
Hey Startups: Don’t be Shy About Your Competition
Android Bug Allows Hackers to Install Malicious Code Without Warning
What kind of nonsense is this?
It's the board of directors that needs to be dismantled and reorganized.
I'm indifferent to HP as a company so it doesn't matter to me what their corporate strategy is. However, if you bring in a new CEO to run your company, how can you fire the guy in less than a year, before that strategy has even been given a chance? He wants to focus on the enterprise software business, and I'm sure thats something he must have told them before he came on board.
So then let him do it.
Farmville Secrets Tips And Tricks
Facebook actually has the same policy.
Detailed map of bumps from Bump
it was probably the worst built nuclear power plant in the most dangerous location

I was going to dispute this based on things I’ve heard about Russian reactor operations, but apparently they’re generally placed well away from natural hazards. Since you seem to pay attention to the issue, which do you consider the riskiest reactors now?
How is this legal? You have permission from every startup to sell their logo?
When my dad died suddenly a couple years ago, I found a surprising amount of relief from this poem.

Death is Nothing at All by Henry Scott Holland

Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
that we still are.

Call me by my old familiar name.
Speak to me in the easy way
which you always used.
Put no difference in your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed
at the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word
that it always was.
Let it be spoken without affect,
without the trace of a shadow on it.

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same that it ever was.
There is absolutely unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?

I am waiting for you,
for an interval,
somewhere very near,
just around the corner.

All is well.
Fellow hell-bound soul here. I didn't go nearly as far as you did. I decided it would be fun to have guards in Python and decorators were just the tool. I sketched this out as part of a talk at Open Source Bridge a few years back:

https://github.com/built/Jane-Kelly/blob/master/guard.py

It'll let you redefine functions with different guard parameters. (@when("x=5"), @when("x>20"), etc.) Like you, I would also shudder to see this in production. But it was fun and shows off some of what's possible.
Microsoft: Mango Will Roll Out “In The Next Week Or Two”
It's like a bank & mint rolled in to one delicious package.
Very nice UI... any chance we'll see (i) a remote deposit mobile app without deposit limits and (ii) integration with Google Wallet?
Ars on the Windows 8 secure boot issue
Not only that, but Tweetdeck seems to just be throwing random updates my way.

They could at least leave the API as is...
And this is actually very important to realize before you will begin to understand the completely different paradigm this allow for. It's a very big thing that it's not "just" a frontend. It means access to completely different kinds of data.
I asked a similar question a few days ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3007945 (there are some gems in this thread!). I'm actually on the quest to find out what's the best method to learn programming for non-technical people, but I'm still compiling some learnings.

If you're using Ruby on Rails in your startup, start directly with www.railstutorial.org - it's a great introduction to not only programming but all the side things that programmers do (version control, deployment, etc.)

If you need a Python or Ruby introduction, Zed Shaw's are very good too!
http://learncodethehardway.org/
Ed hardy womens jeans
Crazy hot was the bonus of the FW900 - three cats could sleep on top of that beast during the winter - I just put some cardboard on top so their fur wouldn't get in and they'd sleep up there and roast.
You need to closely screen and supervise your recruiters. Start with an open-ended question: "how would you go about sourcing candidates for XXX position", "how would you screen them", "how would you entice them"? Listen closely to what they say and if you do not feel comfortable this would yield you the candidates you are looking for, fire the recruiter and look for one that would understand your needs.

Recruiters, like any other service professionals, are always trying to sell you on their experience, but you owe it to yourself to closely inspect their claims and methods. If recruiter is any good they won't be offended and would cooperate.

Contingency fee recruiters are especially renowned for sloppy work. If they only get paid when they place a candidate their only incentive is to sell you the first warm body they find. This type of attitude you have to nip in the bud.
This is something that people would want. But I have a question about business model choice here, because I'm curious why they chose to become a front-end to various banks in this way.

Why choose to be a middle-man here (with all of the pain/cost of providing customer service, etc.) when they could be an enterprise software vendor or a SaaS provider? Banks don't actually make that much off of depositors, right? I'm not saying they made a bad choice; I wanted to see if anyone could rationalize it for me.

Surely banks (especially smaller regional banks and credit unions) would pay good prices to have this software power their banking websites so that they could care for their customers in a more sophisticated way. Right now my credit union, in the Bay Area, has a functional but very ugly e-banking and bill-pay platform which has clearly been purchased from a third party vendor and customized (checkfree, I think (http://www.checkfreecorp.com/cda/corp/L5.jsp?layoutId=51501&...).

I guess I don't understand where significant revenues will come from in a model like this.
Introduction to Programming using Python
But it's bad for compulsive checkers, too, in that it doesn't let you peruse every item in order like the old News Feed design did. It's a ticker, and so far as I can tell, that means that when you miss an item it's gone.
Codecademy is pretty awesome if you really want to start with the very basics. The lessons they have so far cover Javascript, but the features they teach you span most languages.

http://codecademy.com

When I started out, though, I had a clear vision of what it was I wanted to do, bought a book, and started hacking away. I learned best by jumping in head first with the hard stuff, but I realize a lot of people learn differently than I do. I would say that if you find the Codecademy courses too easy or boring, you should try my approach instead.

As far as what to learn...it kind of depends on what you're trying to build. Back when I was teaching myself, I was using PHP and MySQL, but the world appears to have mostly moved on from the LAMP stack of yesteryear. I'm partial to Python these days, but I've always enjoyed Java as well. Javascript has blown up in a huge way in the past couple of years and platforms like Node.js have only made it that much more practical. If I were to start learning web development today, Javascript is probably where I would start.
You are missing the very important difference. Bank Simple can automatically track and categorize how you use your money and thus visualize it for you.

You didn't used to do this because it was not possible. The same thing with expense tracking. Believe me. It's a very powerful feature. I know I have created it for one bank already and seen how the customer satisfaction exploded.

Not everything is a better solution to something that existed before. Sometimes innovation is going to allow you to do things you could never really do before.
BankSimple itself does not have a bank charter and is providing its services through bank partners.

http://banksimple.com/blog/BankSimple/partners-funding/
Seth Godin's Talk from Business of Software 2010
These are von neumann machines, not harvard, at all levels of abstraction save for some newer security measures.
Daily Mobile Minute: Proper product engineering
"simple and deterministic" -- I do like that better, although "dead" does indeed convey the essence here: it's not alive, it's not thinking.

Occam had prior philosophical assumptions to support the Razor of reknown, namely his metaphysical nominalism, which I reject in favor of something closer to a reformed Aristotelian formalism, which to me is far more intuitive than nominalism or reductionism.

Lastly, reductionism was actually not a hard sell at all, it had its advocates long before Darwin and in fact the advent of Darwin was really highly desired and favored by this camp. The fact that Wallace and Darwin were pursuing very similar agendas at the same time speaks to this. We had the notion of evolution and atomism since the pre-socratics, just no plausible scientific evidence to give it public political traction and philosophical (in the sense of epistemological) credibility.

So I guess I end up agreeing with you -- it was a hard public sell before Darwin, but reductionism's advocates had been around for thousands of years. Also see F.A. Lange's _History of Materialism_. That also may be of interest to you. Lange was a Kantian who had tremendous influence on other atheist thinkers, especially Nietzsche.
As much as I don't like Apple/OS X, most of my friends do. Everyone got Mac _because_ of OS X.
One got it because of low latency, and because he was "sure it won't hang up for a moment because of some background job". He uses it to make music.
Others got it for its (OS X's) usability.
The value proposition doesn't appeal to me... Slick GUI, and I'm sure you guys work your asses off, but there's no compelling reason for me to switch to another bank.. that's a huge cost.. I am get off my ass to another bank, tell them to close my account, write a huge check to BankSimple, change my direct deposit, buy new checks, etc... Do you guys replace the checkbook? If so, I'll sign up. That's my main problem with the entire banking process. I hate writing checks and signing checks. When I write a check to the IRS and somehow get a single number wrong, I have to rewrite the whole thing. It seems strangely ancient that we still have this process in place today.
Pirate Party Wins Berlin Regional Election - Hackers in Parliment
In an unfamiliar situation a westerner is more likely to go it alone, follow the signs and work through the process. Where as an easterner is more likely to seek help and have a knowledgeable person walk them through it. So yeah a western programmer is more than likely going to read the docs, and an eastern programmer is more likely to have a meeting with the stake holders. They both get the job done just in different ways.
dribbble!
Retail Prophet: What the retail and mobile collision means for buyers & sellers
Good luck to all the teams!
Apple’s ‘iPhone 4S’ will be only new model to launch this year
I'd like to know this as well. Given all the various DSLs that are available for other uses, I'm surprised there isn't one for network programming. Every time I had to do something network related, I've had to fiddle with C.
Also available here: http://sunlightfoundation.com/live/
So some companies do resemble their CEO!
Would love to see a Clojure version of this
Giving Groupon Style Perks to Repeat Customers
My condolences, sorry for your loss.
I'm with blhack on this one - I initially thought it was $23 a month for a couple of shirts a month, which would have been great, but no way would I pay $23 a month for a single shirt.
Yes, we will have permission from the startup being featured for that month.
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I guess it depends on how you use your bank. I never use my bank for anything but netbanking. In Europe checks are more or less obsolete. I haven't had a check book since I lived in the US back in the late nineties and early zeroes.
Netflix streams pretty well over 3G, at least to an iPhone (I would think the quality would be more noticeably ugly on an iPad).
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Yeah, you're right, there's no built-in templating in this.