skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's dangerous when the sidewalks are small and crumbling, and there are no bike lanes.

Not really. Just drive your bike like it's a car. Bike lanes and sidewalks are actually more dangerous than just riding your bike on the street. Most accidents are at intersections; drivers tend to only look for vehicles where they expect them, not on the side of the road (bike lane) or on the sidewalk.
Satellite survelance: Big brother is almost here.
I enjoyed the Dr. Seuss image more then the article.
Use "you are." instead of "'you are'."

For example: If your a grammar police, you are annoying when you say "use 'you're' when you mean 'you are.'"
"What The Interviewer Says: How would you find a cycle in a singly linked list?"

I hate when interviewers ask that shit for web developer jobs. I can explain the intricacies of Javascript and tell you why I use Active Record even though it's shit, but all you want to see is how well I can recite the Gang of Four.
I'm trying very hard to like git, being a Rails kid coming from the svn world. Still, besides the kickass merging, everything else seems ass-backwards.

Remote work especially is bonkers. Push/pull? Easy. Add/Delete remote branch? Off to google for me...
My theory on Eliezer Yudkowsky's AI-Box Experiment
Ummm... since no one seems to have mentioned this,

Use Postgres. Integrated FTS (with the new 8.2 i think versions). Complete transaction support, full ACID support, more obvious behavior and drastically better scaling.
Don't. Use a gateway that can do this for you. Authorize.net does this pretty easily. The API is called Customer Information Manager and you can store not only CC, but billing info. Makes it easy to do lots of advanced stuff (it's a good option for recurring billing when you want lots of control).

http://www.authorize.net/solutions/merchantsolutions/merchan...
Until they realize there are no profits. Then they don't work at all. Especially if just as they're getting close to profits, a new "adult" CEO is brought on board at 5x the salary that the people "close" to the profits were being paid, and breaking even gets pushed 5 years (and 2 rounds of dilution) into the future.
I am not sure about the other but #3 is completely superseded by gcc's optimization algorithms. Besides, is this kind of low level stuff really something a developer should be wasting their time with?
The prospect of hiring someone who can't do the job well is terrifying.

Job interviews are about allaying this fear.
You're right, of course; doing full-stack development, no matter the target platform, involves a lot of unsexy busywork. Browser incompatibilities are an issue as well, and there are certainly a number of layers of technology beneath any finished application.

That being said, I don't think it's fair to argue that desktop apps are easier to develop, test, and deploy than their online counterparts. Furthermore, information-sharing features that are trivial to implement via the web can be rather more complicated to build into a desktop tool.
I remember when Jim Cramer was saying "Bear Stearns is fine. These people who say Bear Stearns is failing are crazy." and then Bear Stearns crashed 10 minutes later.

I wish I could fuck up as bad as Jim Cramer does all the time and still have people take me seriously.
Good. Some of the most useful reports in Google Analytics ("Recency", "Loyalty") are also the most opaque. This could be refreshing if it makes it easier to get at stickiness and returning visitors out of the box.

Also:

Drill down on branches to follow visitor movements down to a single visit.

GA doesn't show you individual user visits. This would be stupendous, as right now we are forced to write our own middleware to capture this granularity.
a) Find out how to partition your data.

b) Can you pre-process some of the queries and make the data available to the algorithm in a BDb or some such?

c) Can you make your heavier components into independent services?

d) You know what they say about premature optimization... :)

HTH.
Don't pick on Aerons. My back has been thanking me every day since I acquired an Aeron from the Arthur Anderson bankruptcy auction many years ago. Given how long these things last, and how little they cost relative to the cost of employee retention, even new, I think it's a no-brainer. Good chairs are mandatory.
I'm a Rails fanboy, but that doesn't fool me into thinking that's what will make or break my success in this market. This is a time to be a good programmer in any language.
Yahoo Closes At $13.76. What A Train Wreck.
I've got a compact folding bike that I take with me on public transportation if I have to or anywhere really since it folds into a compact carry on. I'm always in shape and would never want to go back to driving a car again unless I'm forced to. Great fitness, great spirit, very civilized, extremely frugal, the fastest and most pragmatic way of transport in the city. There's a social bonus as well: almost every day I have a chat with a stranger (yes, chicks too) who get impressed by the idea. Highly recommended.
Call me a marxist, but the first thought that came to mind when I read this, is "Are the LPs (correction: GPs) at Sequoia going to get frugal?" Is Mike Moritz going to reduce his (most likely seven digit) salary?
Thanks, but I was actually hoping not having to compile my own PBX ;) . Something as simply as plugging in a phone into the Ethernet jack...
Seems to work well for what it's advertised for.

I like the inclusion of local (IP-based?) results -- you should make those more prominent IMHO. At first I mistook them for Adsense, but it really makes sense to automatically find tickets for the closest venues for upcoming events.
Both metaphors definitely have their advantages. There are things that are trivial in one setting that are painful in the other. I'm not trying to argue for one or the other being altogether better; I think that's really context and user specific and as I've said before, I definitely think it's easier to build a business around web technologies.

To tie this back to the original topic: great desktop hackers can throw together desktop apps quickly, and know the quirks for developing cross platform (just like great web hackers know browser quirks). In contrast to most of the crowd here, I'm pretty darn good at desktop (and server / systems) programming, and mediocre at web programming, so I just see the other side of the coin.
Mike Moritz is a general partner but not an LP I think... an LP is the institutional or individual investors who put money in the fund.
It's like TicketStumbler, but with venture funding.

You guys did a great job with the interactive maps and including long tail brokers.
Oops. You're correct. Sorry. I edited it but in a way that still makes your comment relevant.
You realize, I hope, that Sequoia cannot be accused of either being a "bandwagon VC" or not being profitable.

Sequoia is, by most measures one of the best, if not the best, VCs in the world, in terms of success and respect from peers and the companies they fund.

So, pick on the VC model all you like...but this is an article about something Sequoia has said that effects pretty much all of us. If Sequoia-backed companies are being told to tighten their belts, then we'd all be smart to do the same. Sequoia hasn't gotten to where they are by investing in companies that waste money...so the assumption that they're saying, "Stop wasting money, as you've been doing lately." probably isn't the right way to take this advice. It should probably be taken as, "I know you all run a tight ship, and you're doing the best you can to maximize returns without being wasteful, but now might be the time to focus on outlasting your competitors, rather than outgrowing them."

The companies that survive will be the ones that will be best placed to become market leaders when the market begins to recover. That's the points I'm taking away from this, anyway. I guess I could be wrong.
I couldn't agree more with the basic sentiment of this post. I'm so sick of how knowing how to solve these test-the-basics questions is supposed to determine whether a person will do a good job for the company.

This approach favors ambitious geeks who like to study tons of these problems before hand, and only mildly helps those who are really bright.

Rather, the author has it quite right.

"Talk about projects, see if the guy gets animated. Combine that with some pre-submitted code samples, and you can get a genuine idea of how suited the candidate is."

This favors candidates who are genuinely interested in the particular job. The best way to determine the aptitude of a candidate is to see how enthusiastic he/she is about providing solutions to basic problems the company faces.

With this, I'm of course not implying that your company should hire any random idiot, so spare me that. But I am saying that the virtues of the traditional Spolskyan model are highly exaggerated.
There are two differences. One, gold is impossible to counterfeit. The Fed can print more money, companies can dilute their stocks, Topps can introduce new lines of baseball cards, but short of building a particle collider, you can't make more gold. The chance of a new discovery affecting the price of gold is rather slim. The Earth is pretty well explored at this point. The second difference is that gold is a natural Schelling Point (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schelling_point). Society needs one object to serve as a store of value. We call this object money. Throughout the ages, this object has consistently been gold. Currently, we are in a historically abnormal period where the store of value is a U.S. Federal Federal Reserve Note. If it looks like the U.S. government is abusing this privilege by diluting the currency, people start hedging back towards gold. On the other hand, if someone like Paul Volcker starts running the show, faith in the dollar is restored, and the price of gold collapses.

So yeah, gold is like the ultimate baseball card. But the emphasis is on the world "ultimate", and that makes all the difference.
I'm curious to hear what PG and others may think, is it worth it to take the hit for early stage startups now. Give up more equity than normal to get guaranteed money in the bank- even though these same startups still had the same leverage they had 3 months ago?
What's the best way to learn about these openings?

I am looking to relocate in the next month and I want to get into Rails development (as in, for money as opposed to a hobby).

If you or anyone can give advice (particularly about these two attractive locales), shoot me a note at jraines@gmail.com
I'm a developer for a large e-commerce site. We require users to input their credit card for each purchase (no save functionality). We store the credit card for the duration of the transaction. Which is usually a few seconds. The time it takes to do run an AUTH ONLY. During these few seconds cards are stored with 256bit encryption on a server not accessible by a public IP. We use the mcrypt library in PHP.

I understand you want to save the cards for future purchases, but you should definitely give customers the option to input their card every time if they so desire. If you dont need the card in the future, theres no reason to save it. Most processing gateways will return a transaction id which you can use to take processing actions in the future. You can run voids, refunds or settle payment. For our site we settle payment once we ship the goods and its all done with transaction IDs. The only thing we hang on to is the last 4 digits of the card number as a reference.

If you are going to store the card numbers use a good, well known encryption algorithm. Hashing isnt encryption, plus a one way hash will not work since you wont be able to recover the number to process.

Its important you become PCI compliant, especially if you are selling a hosted solutions to other businesses.
The Fuzzy-Wuzzy World of Tech Spy Shots
Try doing few usability studies with client-side software (I'm really talking Windows apps) and you'll see how much pushback you'll get. Consumers just hate installing apps. They absolutely loathe it. Everyone seems to be afraid of viruses and software. Now, this can be overcome to a degree if you're a huge company and have a well-known brand name that people trust and you can also overcome it by targeting a specific segment of the market that are computer knowledgeable and are willing to trust you. I'm not sure but I think that Firefox addons have less push-back than regular apps (just a guess, have no data).

So in short, make sure you do several usability studies with people who fit your market segment.
Curious to hear what the investors, PG, and others think on HN- it's not as if VCs stopped deals that they had already signed off on. Are their LPs revolting?

If that's the case, then it means there is less cash to go around. If you're still a bad-ass startup, it still seems that your valuation would still be relatively the same at such an early stage, right?
you need a major redesign for the main page. I know you are trying to go for the simplicity of Google, but flashy design seems pretty important for the space you are in.

Also your layout jumps to the left after you leave the homepage. So its kinda odd
Best Buy's "Enterprise Twitter"
Mollom Leaves Beta, Hits 10 Million Blocked Spams, Launches Paid Plans
How Technology Can Help Aleviate Economic Fears
Ask HN: How to build a twitter/irc/real-time app
Hi HN, I have to do a project for a class I'm taking and I had a pretty neat idea before going to bed last night, but I'm not sure what technologies I should use to make it happen.
Basically, it would be a kind of twitter/irc for mobile (iphone/android) with dynamic channels based on your geolocation. Channels would consist of everyone in a certain radius (specified by the user) of the user location.

I was thinking XMPP would be the way to go to receive and push the messages, but I don't know much about it. Can you multigroup broadcast? How could I create groups/channels? I looked at xmpp4r and started checking for xmpp servers but I'm not sure if this is the way to go.

Any link, book, info would be appreciated.
Out of All the Possible Answers...
Three ways to know when a MySQL slave is about to start lagging
Cleantech is a luxury good, pursued by people and their politicians when they feel wealthy. I don't envy your situation at the moment.
I would also look at RabbitMQ as the messaging service and the STOMP protocol to talk to everybody.

As far as getting messages down to the browser.

Use http://orbited.org

It gives you a simulated TCP socket called WebSocket(soon to be standard in HTML5)

http://js.io has some work on many common network protocols including XMPP and STOMP.

If this is a very small deploy, you might skip RabbitMQ and use the sister prject of Orbited, Morbid.
Andreessen has a great post about the process of job interviews: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/how_to_hire_the.html . He recommends not to put too much weight on skill tests, and instead focus on things like drive, passion, ethics, etc...

Having recently been through an interview that was a complete waste of time, I can sympathize with the author of the post.
Since the general partner has full liability for all financial obligations, I imagine the general partner would be another limited liability type firm and Moritz would be an executive hired by the general partner entity.
I don't see what that has to do with the companies his firm funds, marxist.
OMG. I got the EXACT questions from a recent interview. (maybe it is the same company/person). And, yes, I gave the person a very good and practical answer, but the pedantic answer is to have to pointers going in different speeds, (one one step, the other two steps at a time), and if there is a circular loop they will eventually meet.

Also, where you want to be in 5 years question, I answered: "Well, honestly I don't know. I try not to plan so much in advance, as coming from an ex-communist country I know first hand that 5-year plans just don't work. But I know in the next 2-3 years I would like to work in the server side at this company."

I also, have been to an interview where the interviewer seems to have made up their mind right before the interview. Really weird.

The few interviews that I have enjoyed, was a very informal one, and nothing esoteric. I was given two assignments, to solve. Real problems that they had to solve, that involved multi-threading, queues and such.

Very cool. And I actually got an offer from this company.
As everyone else has said, this is not a good situation. You don't want the overhead and risk of providing software security let along physical security for the storage of personal information unless your business model depends on shaving the fractions of a percent that it may save you in processing.

In all seriousness, get set up with a major processor and get on with your business. (PayFlowPro would work well for the recurring payments you seem to need as a feature.)
Thanks for your response, I will look into those solutions.

I should of said that it would be a native mobile app (iphone/android).
Just why did people start using Python anyway?
Well, I missed out on Aerons the first time through. Maybe I'll find some cheap ones in half a year or so. :p
Is it Time to Get Emotional Over Software?
The Startup Success Podcast
Albania. Until 1991 there were no private cars in the country. Only government cars, and taxis. I remember when I was a little kid, that I would go with my friends in a road, and play/count if the next car plate was even or odd. Even in main roads, cars would come only once or twice a minute.

After 91 everyone could buy a car. My parents got their first car in 96, when traffic was pretty light. I started driving then, and it was awesome. Parking was easy. My high-school friends were impressed. I could go to the beach on my own timeline, and no need to get into a bus, or a van. And enjoy some really nice scenery going to the south.

Fast forward 2007 (last time I was back home), there is traffic everywhere, parking is hard. Lots of shiny cars, that can't go more than 10mph b/c of the traffic. smog/pollution increased . Etc.

I have a friend, that switched to bikes to get to work (he still has a car, but uses it only for out of town trips), and another one that bought a scooter, as they are much more practical.
SpaceX Update on Falcon 1 Flight 4
It strikes me as something that would be far more accurate in a job where a predetermined set of steps are repeatedly performed, and the time taken for each is known before hand.

For jobs where cognitive effort is the fuel behind productivity, measuring such effort by time spent in a particular application or lines of code written over a fixed period of time strike me as at best a middling approximation to what is produced. The lines of code ,or the end artwork, or whatever creative output you see may be the result of an rather involved and complicated thought process. Sometimes I can spend hours banging my head against a problem, and make very little progress on it. Sometimes a solution will come to me after I focus on something else for a while and let my subconscious chew on the problem. Sometimes solutions to a problem involve doing things that look to most people like anything but productive work.

Honestly, I think you can gauge far more about your employees' productivity by talking to them about what they are working on than you will by looking at aggregates of a limited number of data points, and trying to get a numerical representation of productivity based on that. You're likely to get a more accurate and well-rounded idea of the employee's actual productivity, while at the same time improving their morale, motivation and lessening to the feeling that they are just another cog.

This is not to say RescueTime doesn't have value to the worker or the employer. I think the value is far greater for the employer who trusts the employee to manage their own productivity, perhaps recommending RescueTime to help that along, than it is for an employer who imposes such a tool on their employee as a mandatory productivity metric.
New Cappuccino version (0.5.5) released
You should have put it all into the highest yielding (and thus riskiest) money market accounts. The government ended up giving them the same coverage as your CDs (not that you could have known that would happen...).
Respectfully, I'm not going to go through your comments; I'm just going by what I remember reading over the past year. (By the way, I don't think that mentioning your company as often as possible is necessarily a bad thing, as I had alluded to in the parent post.) If you think that's a reasonable measure, though, go through my comments and find where I have ever been a troll before calling me that. I'd expected more from long time posters. Maybe you'll even find a congratulations post to some of your company's announcements (I'm not sure if I did in this case, but that's what I typically write.) To rephrase my question, have you ever considered having the app track how often one mention a certain keyword in their posts, as you are already tracking their browsing history? That way, you could say at the end of the week--"I mentioned RescueTime 20% more than last week." Of course, it wouldn't necessarily all be in one post in one day on News.YC--maybe in blogs, or gmail, and maybe once on average per html form post. Isn't that a cool idea? Thanks.
That's true to some degree. However, much of our infrastructure are designed for 1000 year timescales but rely on technologies with far shorter timescales.

There are plenty of alternatives to powering our cars, but none currently (and none on the horizon either) that are as good (cost effective) as petroleum. The cost-benefit analysis will be changing, but we won't be able to adapt because our communities rely on cheap fuel. People will have the unenviable choice of paying an arm and a leg commuting, or letting their exurban communities (and the massive investment they represent) fall back into farm land.
Are You in Marlene's Passion Party Circle? | Passion Promises
You forgot mac games!!! Huge oversight.
remember, when marketing to morons, you have to make sure not to let the morons know you know they are morons, or you have to distract them with shiny stuff so they quickly forget the insult. :)

This is a good example of the second strategy.
Ahh I've definitely thought about that but I don't think I have the balls for it. It would be so much faster, though...
don't forget that the radius of one user is not the radius of another user. so, you and knuth are both near me, but knuth isn't near you. so when i respond to you in the "channel", should he see the updates? now, if you want to have me join and leave channels based on my proximity to a fixed location, that's a slightly different problem.

you could do this all with xmpp.

the wireless client reports location to your dispatch server, dispatch server responds with list of MUCs. the client does whatever filtering the user has setup or whatever and initiates the joins to the MUCs (basicly, the channels to use your terminology.)

which xmpp server and client libraries, well that's up to you. ejabberd has a lot of inertia.
Emotional? Does not compute.
An interview with Leslie Lamport
Maybe Jerry Yang should give Steve Ballmer a call and see if he's still game to buy Yahoo at 43 a share (or whatever it was).
Ugly Betty 3.03: Crimes of Fashion
When a horrible accident occurs, everyone at Mode becomes a suspect. “Crimes of Fashion”, the new episode of “Ugly Betty” will witness the search of the guilty one that causes pregnant Christina to fall down the stairs.
CSI NY Promo for S5E03: Turbulence
Click here for more information
In six years .... not terribly different. Though we can look at current technology thats up and coming and place bets that by this time such will be popular.

Look at Facebook, it has been around since 04 and four years later we are now just seeing the early majority hop on board. Adoption takes time and bureaucracies slow new and better tech down. i.e. alternative energy and telecommunications
You just pretty much described brightkite.