skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it interesting that traditional media likes to complain about a shrinking consumer base while at the same time they write this story insulting the younger generation every couple of months. Have they ever thought that they would lose fewer costumers if they stopped insulting them?
Microsoft Live Labs Web Sandbox
Amazon's Mechanical Turk can get you beta testers and first users for $.01-.05 a piece. It's generally cheaper than using ad sense.
There is a demo at http://131.107.155.233/Samples/ScriptErrorSample.aspx which is very impressive
"We plan to release an interactive AWS management console.
We plan to release new load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services."

how will that play with management providers like rightscale. they go on to say :

"I think it is important to note that load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring will each be true web services, with complete APIs for provisioning, control, and status checking. We'll be working with a number of management tool vendors and developers to make sure that their products will support these new services on a timely basis."

small conciliation, but i think it was always a danger that aws would walk up the value add food chain.
Agreed. Which easily explains their first couple of fund raising events. But they've been profitable (according to themselves, of course) for over 2 years.

Something weird is going on. I honestly don't think they're profitable.
I think you nicely describe the planning part of marketing - but you have to include the execution where you reach out to your target market. Advertising (in all it's forms) is a crucial tool of marketing.
Thanks! Nice find! I actually recalled this from reading about Google in some article four or five years ago, but it's nice to have a link to the information straight from the horse's mouth.
I think you could easily ask a few indirect IQ questions to see if the guy is suitable for the job.
7 Quick and Easy VBA Macros & Tips for Excel
2008 Startup Compensation Survey Results
There can be actual shortages. Take Gmail as an example. Such a service requires a lot of resources - storage, computing power, support staff. . . It's a lot easier to provide those things for 100,000 people than for 10M people. The invites provided them a way of ramping up rather than having to meet all of the demand on day 1. It also allowed them to see exactly where they needed to optimize before they got millions of users.

If it was just a marketing thing, why didn't Yahoo and Microsoft roll out their increased storage all at once? No, those two increased their storage gradually because it's the only practical way. By limiting invites, Google got to increase storage in a similar, gradual way.

With Apple, many stores were at fire-code capacity when the iPhone came out. Apple didn't sell out of iPhones at most locations. The lines were due to the fact that Apple can only have so many people in a store at any given time because we can't have two different pieces of matter occupying the same space at the same time. So, trash Apple if you want, but the lines were real. More people wanted to get a peak at the iPhone than the stores had capacity to fit people in.

I think the iPhone is a defective device and want an Android phone when my carrier gets one, but one needs to be objective: the iPhone generated buzz that the G1 isn't. There are many factors including the relative size of T-Mobile and AT&T and the fact that the original iPhone allowed AT&T users to buy new wherever they were in their contract while the G1 mandates in-contract users have to pay an additional $220. The fact remains, the iPhone generated buzz that the G1 hasn't. The lines were real. People were excited.
Not all kinds, but more than what currently is.
Git global ignores
Make sure to watch the video at the end of the article (about 8 minutes).
Joel is giving away his software to Y Combinator startups
Or wore a yarmaluke.

Seriously though, Ford's test sounds silly. I'm sure he had some kind of justification for it, but I doubt it really did a good job of screening out who would and wouldn't be a good employee.
The "salt test" is a popular and older than I am story\method, but why the name drop of Henry Ford? So far as I can tell, the evidence tying it to him is non-existent, just like all the other people\groups you hear it tied to. Regardless, why not let the method stand on it's own, and give up on the name dropping? Bah, rumors...
Why does it seem like computer jobs require such a higher standard of competence than other jobs? I've been on interviews for both computer and non-computer jobs and most of the time, non-computer job interviews really don't give the employer much to go on. Computer jobs always have questions about algorithms, data structures, and shooting the breeze about some technologies.

Is it that there are lots of people who lie and say they're computer people when they aren't (compared to the rates in other occupations)? Is it because you can't fake computers like you can fake other jobs? Is it because computer people are used to being mistreated and undervalued in a way that is unacceptable for other people? I'm really curious if anyone has thoughts on this.
A little collaboration can stop world hunger and poverty
Thanks a million for the info. Really good stuff there :D
This article is pretty bad along with most NYT financial news coverage.

A lot of critics blame everything on deregulation. But the big banks were the most regulated part of the financial system, and they have imploded. Meanwhile hedge funds have the least regulation, and while they haven't been making money, they at least are not threatening to destroy our financial system.

The Economist had a much better article on hedge funds in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...

Particularly, hedge funds have not been allowed to hedge! If the government bans short-selling in the hardest-hit stocks, don't be surprised if a hedging strategy doesn't work any more.
As far as I can tell, the actual paper that this story is about is http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~guestrin/Publications/JMLR08SensorPla... - it was published months ago, and was actually submitted in 2006, meaning they probably thought of this and did the research 2-3 years ago. Given that, it's almost hard to call this 'news', although it is interesting.
I agree that they basically would have to go public. Who would want to buy them for a couple of billion dollars when MySpace is looking like a bad investment at 500 million?

I thought their valuation last round sounded awful high, but I don't know very much about their business. Raising yet another round of funds seems like a sign of trouble.
I'm only down 2%. You can give me all your money and I'll invest it. Or rather, I won't, but that will save you even more money!

(And then you can curse me when we get hyperinflation, the stock market shoots up, and all that cash becomes useless.)
I hope they talk to Livingston.

I still remember Bebo when it was just a glorified address book. As the founder said, I signed up, but never went back.
"...and thus parting with their money."

If I'm not misunderstanding the Y-Combinator philosophy (for lack of a better term), this is premature optimization.

Focus on making something people want, and you will then be able to find a way to persuade people to part with their money. 1 - 3 above should, I think, be highly correlated with "make something people want."

(To pre-empt charges of "appeal to authority", consider this an argument with a proper citation. :)
They're pretty similar. Both have a home screen with icons for programs, a button to return to it, and a similar touch-screen web-browsing interface.

Notable interface differences are the slide-out keyboard on the G1, two-touch zoom gesture on the iPhone, the hardware "back" button on the G1, and the "system-tray" at the top of the G1 that notifies you when a background process has something to say, like you just got a chat or an email or a download finished.
There's also a new student and startup version that is free to use for up to two people (the YC version is the same deal, but unlimited people).
Reasons to move to a startup
Dogma vs. Data!

Do you want to hire someone that does things 'because that's what they always do', or because they collected data and acted appropriately?

I'm not saying salt is a good indicator - there are a million other ways you could test it - but I think that's the gist of it.
Launchd was just one simple example. Applications that use PackageMaker are using it because they need to do more than have the user drag and drop a single app bundle. PackageMaker exists for a reason.

Launchd is Apple's recommended way of launching applications on startup. If you know something better, I'm all ears. If "apps shouldn't be using launchd" why would launchd possibly exist, and why would they repeatedly recommend it as a replacement for cron, xinetd, mach_init, and init?
It's because, like the sea, the computer is a wholly unforgiving bitch.
I have a lifetime bid for a fraternity (I didn't join, probably won't) as a result of a legitimate receptionist test. I was hanging out waiting for a friend and some senior member started cursing at his laptop. He had apparently lost an essay and I was able to rescue the contents, safely transfer it to disk, help him back it up just in case and give him advice on avoiding the problem in the future. Won me some points.
Von Braun’s Spaceship from 1952
This methodology is so simple that it is brilliant. My favorite one was the file extension problem... of course ubuntu would solve everything. No file, no problem! I am surprised he didn't tell the receptionist to roll on the floor saying hail linux while he did a witchdoctor dance. Now only if my office had a receptionist so we can do this.

As to why computer jobs require competence, it is because any engineering position (computer, or otherwise) requires competence. Would you live in a building without knowing that it won't collapse tomorrow because the construction company didn't know how to calculate the required strength of the steel beams needed to support the structure?

A company won't go under because a secretary does not know how to make perfectly formatted word files from the get-go. Where as it will fail if a software company's key product is managed/coded by incompetence.
This also isn't talking about an "uninstall button." That would be ridiculous. It's talking about including a double-clickable uninstaller bundled with your app. If you don't want to uninstall, don't double click on it.
This is why I left Pittsburgh.
FWIW, my personal experince...

I have interviewed over 2500 programmer applicants, all having passed a "resume screening". I terminated 50% of the interviews before reaching the coding test because I knew by then that it would be a waste of time. Of the other 50%, 90% couldn't pass the simple coding test. I ended up hiring or referring less than 100.

Anyone else have similar experience with these percentages?
That's why I love computers.
As for the sea, people were just not made to be sea-faring. We just came up with really cool ways to get around this limitation... Stupid requirement of having to do things like breath air.
I asked someone to redevelop Linux from scratch for me on eLance.com, and a Romanian company quoted me $487.22. Bargain!
Did you cash out because you suspected the market was due for a big correction?

Or were you just lucky to have assets in cash at the right time?
War stopped being immediately profitable (in the pillaging and slavery sense) a long time ago. In the west the Napoleonic wars were the last I know of in which commanders got rich. And yet the biggest wars were still to come. Which implies immediate profit was not what drove them, and thus war becoming unprofitable will not cause it to stop.

I'd argue that the biggest cause of war in the last 200 years has been power struggles between politicians. Sadly I doubt we've seen the last of that.
It's because of the PopSci "Brilliant 10" list: http://www.popsci.com/category/tags/brilliant-10-class-2008

Came out today, so today would be a good day for a local paper to report it. The Post-Gazette can't vet the importance of individual CMU research projects, but they trust PopSci to.
International science community to establish global virtual library for scientific data
What videogames teach us about security
Why online advertising sucks, and is a bubble
Google Maps: Polling location information goes live
By some accounts you have just described 37signals.
I beg to differ. As far as recent financial reporting goes, this is a pretty fair account. Although the financial system in general is regulated, hedge funds are unregulated as compared to mutual funds. If you want to know more about a given mutual funds, you can login to your online broker and see the prospects, asset allocation, turnover, financial statements, etc. Not so for a hedge fund. This is not to say that they're unsufficiently unregulated, it's just a statement of a fact (if hedge funds were more regulated, they'd probably cease to exist!).

Another important point is that many hedge funds are, or at least claim to be, equity-market neutral. They do it by short selling and by investing in other asset classes. So the fact that S&P is down 40% is a perfectly good excuse for a index fund manager, and a fairly good excuse for an active mutual fund manager, but not a very good excuse for a hedge fund.
In fact you can see some hedge funds apologizing for the bad performance:
http://dealbreaker.com/images/thumbs/TPG%20Axon%20Investor%2...
http://andrewchenblog.com/2007/11/22/why-bloggers-and-press-...

Interesting contrarian viewpoint. I don't agree with it entirely (the truth always lies somewhere in the middle) but the important takeaway is that active promotion is expensive as hell (either time or money).

I'd say the most important thing is to BE WORTH TALKING ABOUT. If you're yet another project management app or bugtracker, this is challenging. Have a twist, have a story.

Next, try to find a viral loop (read more Andrew Chen if you think your app has potential here... Most don't).

Be an SEO genius. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

Learn about direct response marketing (best way is going to marketingexperiments.com and playing the adwords / landing page game). This only works if you have a product to sell, of course... Unless you want to play arbitrage games, which have gotten harder.

The trick is (after a very brief push for your spike of attention and accompanying SEO-juicing backlinks) to find a systemic way for business to come to YOU.
Thanks for posting this. I read Hacker News a lot and was surprised to see this pop up. I just started writing a few days ago and am glad that people are reading already. It might be the only good thing that happens today, and judging by the way my boss is staring at me right now... it probably will be.
Socialcast -  Gritty Yammer Alternative
Sounds like theoretical versus practical. In fact, the point of the story was that many candidates could easily handle all interview questions, IQ-centric or otherwise. This is a practical exam, of sorts. It will prove someone is unworthy of the position (but will not necessarily prove someone _is_ worthy of the position).

It's a weed-out class.
"But the big banks were the most regulated part of the financial system, and they have imploded."

I think this is not true.

It is my understanding that it was the big, less regulated investment houses that got into a lot of trouble with mortgage securities. The heavily regulated retail/commercial banks haven't suffered nearly as much.

Unless we are defining "banks" differently...?
I just gave a presentation on this at Barcamp Atlanta. The slides are up on my blog if you're interested:

http://blog.aisleten.com/2008/10/18/generating-buzz-without-...
This reminds me of the 60 minutes segment on millennials which, amongst other things, accused us of being unable to use a fork and knife. I kid you not.

http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/113/millennials
It happens because there is also a silent run on hedge funds that are forced then to close their positions, bringing, even sound, assets down.

The other reason is highly leveraged funds when the margin requirements went up after interest rates raise.
Hedge funds exploit the system, as we, hackers, do.
JavaScript Will Save Us All
Score!...now to get accepted by Y Combinator...:-\
Virtual Murder results in Arrest
I highly recommend Moniker.com. They have an excellent record on domain security (more to say about that) and are priced reasonably. I think I pay $8/year for registration and $1/year for name privacy for Social.com. To get this price, check the domain name forums (Namepros.com, DNForum.com) for forum member discount announcements.

I was originally using Namesecure prior to Oct. 2006 when they allowed someone to use some social engineering to steal my domain Social.com. Took me almost two weeks to recover it.

Besides an excellent track record, Moniker just came out with an additional security product that allows you to specify offline verification to further secure your domain.

GoDaddy I would stay away from. I hear nothing but bad news about dealings with them.

I'll have to take a look at gandi.net. Had not heard of them before.
Another, higher rated post here on HN today is on marketing yourself.
"The One Thing Every Software Engineer Should Know"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341095

Despite the quality of the article on Dr Guestrin, he's a legit computer scientist who got in the press. That's a "good thing", right? There is a large portion of the population who only uses computers for emails and web, and this article at least opens them up to the _basic_ idea that computers and computer scientists can help people.
Why are these things even called hedge funds? What they do is the opposite of hedging.
I think war can still be profitable, but you need to carry it out. If we showed up and killed everyone in Iraq taken the oil and left we could have made money. (And pissed off a lot of people.) However, we have started calling police actions / occupations like Iraq "war" without treating them like war which is just going to fail slowly.

Most of the world does not think like us so the idea of spreading democracy in societies that are ill equipped to handle it is a stupid idea. As is propping up petty dictators who do things we like. But, such actions might be profitable for some people in terms extracting money from US taxpayers. So pseudo war can make some people a lot of money.

PS: South America and Africa over the last 100 years have been vary profitable for the US even as we used military force to persuade people to do what we wanted. Now what the long term results of this are is hard to say but it's an approach that has worked in the past.
Not to mention the ever-popular "millions of hungry and homeless people whipped into a nationalistic frenzy by sociopathic zealots"...
Japan and Germany gained a lot at the start of WWII, but they failed to quit while they where ahead.
obviously they DO work then, since most indices are down 40% on the year.

Hedgefunds are designed to outperform benchmark indices. Outperforming by 23% is phenomenal.

By the logic of the poster, a year where the SP500 returned 50% and a fund returned 10% would be proof that hedge funds DO work. That fund manager would be immediately fired.

Hedge funds have outperformed for the last 10 years. Taking a one year performance that loses money doesn't mean anything.
Windows is now available

Introducing 'Cloudy Computing'
I thought your posts were pretty funny. Keep up the good work. Good luck with the rest of your day - it sounds like you are going to need it!
Yeah we are defining "banks" differently - I was considering both "investment banks" and "retail banks" as types of banks. You are right that retail banks haven't suffered as much, but considering Washington Mutual and Wachovia collapsing and several others signing on to the government equity purchase program, they're definitely costing the taxpayer more than hedge funds are. So far, at least....
Derrida came to Stanford when I was there. His talk was at the largest hall on campus, and when I got there it was so packed you couldn't even get a spot on the floor (the aisles and every spare corner were covered with people). He was so important they couldn't just introduce him: they had to introduce someone to introduce him (that was Rorty, who himself talked for quite some time and said Derrida was the most important thinker since Wittgenstein). The moment he started talking, I saw dozens of earnest students writing notes so quickly that they must have been trying to capture every word.

After a few minutes, the first person got up and left. Then another, then another. After 15 minutes, you could get a spot on the floor because people had moved into vacated seats. After 30 minutes, there were empty seats and after 40 minutes there were a lot of empty seats. It was a steady drain of people. The note-takers were still furiously at it, though.

After an hour or so I left. I memorized a bunch of the best (i.e. worst and most convoluted) things Derrida said and for a few years I would pull them out to make people laugh, but they're long forgotten now. Anyway, I had a fun idea. I stood outside the exit and asked people as they came out: "Excuse me. Did you understand a single thing he said?" Most people laughed and said no. A handful looked suspicious and said yes defensively. I wanted to follow up with "Oh yeah? What?" but that would have been mean.
War is immensely profitable today. For the contractors and civilian service-providers who live off the military-industrial complex.

It's just that the coffers they're plundering are our national budget and future debt, rather than some combatant nation.
Check out http://osx.iusethis.com. Filter on genre, sort by popularity, read comments and download apps.
Wow text book example of win-win.
A little of both.

When I was first starting my startup, I figured I ought to rebalance my portfolio just so I could forget about it while I worked. Tallied everything up, divided them up by asset classes, and figured out what dollar value I wanted in each fund. And I moved some of it around, into bonds and out of individual stocks and such.

But when it came to putting money into an S&P 500 index fund, I just couldn't do it. I had the Vanguard website open, everything ready to invest, form filled out, but my gut told me that there was no possible way that the stock market was worth what the ticker said it was worth. I'd previously worked at a financial software startup, so I had all the stats on market P/E, record earnings, leverage levels, etc. So I closed the window and forgot about it.

This was on Oct 5. The S&P 500 peaked on Oct 11.

So yeah, a whole lot of luck, and maybe a little knowledge thrown in. I tell this story because everyone here's coming up with excuses for hedge funds: they're "only" down 17.6% when the market is down 40%, or they got those outlandish returns with less risk, or they're really really smart and so should be compensated for those sophisticated quant models. But excuses don't matter in finance - only your return. Ultimately, it's a whole lot of luck and a little knowledge - for everybody. I predict we'll see many, many more hedge funds do a lot worse in the coming year.
God damn it - we already paid for it.

Seriously though, FogBugz has been awesome and well worth the one time charge.
This is astounding. Another reason I respect this guy so much.
This is for the "On-Demand" version, which is hosted and costs $25/user/month, not the standalone version.