skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An infographic on the number of people startups that offer beta invites, the number of actual users that use the invites, and the retention rate of those users would be pretty cool. It would be an infographic for the startup community as a whole to see. Whether is is doable or not, I'm not sure, but thanks for the offer camz! It is nice of you to help out HN.
Agreed. How can such garbage get on here?

This reminds of those infomercials at 3 am. "I made millions of dollars following my system, now just pay me $60 and I will show you how to charge other people $60"

Smells about the same.
And laws can't be written without Congress. That's the first step. Without Congress, there are no laws for Obama to sign. That's simply how the American government works. Sure, Obama just signed a patent bill into law - that does not give him the authority to change that law before he signs it.

Yes, I suppose Obama could start a push to change software patents, but frankly, there are more important things for him to deal with at the moment.
NYC, New York - World on a Hanger - Full time (Rails/Mongo)

I’m looking for an exceptional Rails developer to help build a niche SaaS application within the fashion space. We’re somewhat distributed (between the US and Europe) but the core management and development team will work out of NYC. You should love to build projects from scratch, choosing the right technologies/languages for the job. You should be a little obsessive over user experience and good design and be happy joining an early stage startup. Founded by YC alums.

Email: tom.riley@gmail.com
First Lessons in Trying to Finish 4 Years of MIT in 12 Months
Redis includes a benchmark utility (http://redis.io/topics/benchmarks). I ran it on my MacBook Pro a couple of weeks ago and got north of 50,000 req/s with a bunch of other crap running. I don't think the utility has any tests for hashes, though.
In the context of a conversation about module foo and all the KeyError exceptions it's raising, a charitable person would interpret "more test coverage" as "write tests that look for KeyError's in module foo." An uncharitable person would make the leap I described in my previous post.

Note to self: don't hire pedantic employees who interpret my statements in the most unreasonable way possible just to prove a point.
The Strange Dynamic
Getting Your Financial Data With Node.js
Get control of all your financial statement data with node.js
I would have thought they will treat the idea with professional courtesy and respect your wishes if you ask them to keep it secret, but they cannot sign NDAs on every pitch, else they would soon be unable to do their jobs, because they would be legally unable to talk about or fund anything—ideas are not so unique.
Fogbugz/Kiln financially scales way better after 40 users.

E.g., if you have a 200-user company, that's still a flat rate of 15K initial & 5K/year for Fog Creek's stuff (plus maintenance).

But for github, that's 50K/year.

Github is a high-quality product, no question about it. But the price is steep compared to Kiln/Fogbugz, IMO.
It's written using Ruby on Rails and Erlang. My guess is that it's compiled or partially compiled. You can probably hack it and decompile it, but for all that work, you might as well just use an open source alternative.
FishEye actually has built-in git management as of the last release, but everything else stands. Plus, FishEye's git handling has always been a bit odd, particularly how it handles branches.
Lua: perfect for malware
Out of hundred million people somewhere between 6 and 100 might develop cancer? I guess we worry about the risk for the same reason we keep buying lottery tickets (while eating french fries cooked in hydrogenated oils)
I would suggest that asking a mentor to sign an NDA is inappropriate. You are already asking the mentor to do you a significant favor by providing ongoing advice and guidance. To then ask a mentor to sign a legal document is placing an unfair burden on the mentor.

The two solutions are to either (a) find a mentor you can trust with confidential information or (b) keep your "secret sauce" information private until you have created others barriers to entry.
Someone joked that they'd sell a lot more at $4995.

I second that! People, don't under-estimate the issue of signature limits! My old signing limit at one job was $5000, meaning that I needed to get my boss to approve something like this, whereas if it were a dollar cheaper, I could approve it myself.

So it's no joke.
I think he's essentially correct on the macro trends that will move the world more to this kind of model.

On the specific point on what's holding back a more distributed/networked model of production, I think one obstacle is that labor is not easily "commoditized" in a way that facilitates trade (see
http://crowdresearch.org/chi2011-workshop/papers/horton.pdf
for more on this).
Except the machine is your own "house" (bank accounts), right?
Yeah, ClearCase is very spendy.
Windows Kernel Zero Day Vulnerability Found in Duqu Installer
Ask HN: Who gives a fck if you're a programmer? Do your job...
Is it just me or is everyone arguing semantics at this point over the "I am a programmer" vs the "I'm not a programmer" issue.

Maybe I'm just old school but when I grew up working I was told very simply, "Just do you fcking job."

When I asked what was my job, they told me that it was, "Make my life easier."

Who cares what you're being called as long as you do it well. Quality work is always self-evident even if you don't always the credit due for it.
If I learn Haskell well and start writing code that's idiomatic for that audience, I'm limiting my audience to the few people who also know Haskell (and the particular Haskell idioms I'm using). It's like writing in Esperanto instead of English. My ideal is more along the lines of the Python examples that Peter Norvig writes, which can be understood by pretty much any programmer, even if they're not all that fluent in Python.
I remember I first bought a Java book to learn to program when I was around 15-16. I tried for days but couldn't figure out why the first example program wouldn't work, it was because it wasn't System.out.print1n but System.out.println. In the font the code was written in, I couldn't tell. Because of that it wasn't until at least a year later that I didn't try again.
Seeing as it is neither enterprise software nor the fruit of an overpriced acquisition, Leo Apotheker must have been ousted before he had a chance to kill this project as well.
haha true....When I talk to women at Bars...I am an iPhone/iPad Artist....They dont realize that that involves tweaking LLVM flags and debugging segmentation faults haha!
Max Levchin Underpants Stealing Gnomes
Don't be a Startup Gnome. http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298808490
Firewall Install used JRuby to precompile our models and controllers; GitHub Enterprise uses code obfuscation with MRI.
It helps by reframing the question. Instead of asking people what they want, ask them what kinds of problems are they having with their existing solution. Often, they will tell you solutions, and you'll need to work backwards a bit till you discover what their pain points are.

Once you thoroughly understand the problems they're having, you have a much better shot at crafting a great solution.
Adira Asuransi Kendaraan Terbaik Indonesia
Adira Asuransi Kendaraan Terbaik Indonesia - merupakan perusahaan dengan produk asuransi kendaran no di indonesia
Ask HN: write for your own blog or to give away ideas for press coverage
Hi HN,

I've heard people recommend writing articles to pitch to bloggers so they can use them as their own. The benefit being you build a relationship with the press and I possibly get a link back to your site. The alternative is to write the articles for your own site. I suppose with the latter you potentially have less reach but get the links for yourself.

What's any ones experience or thoughts on this?
Marketing mobile apps
As I am not "enterprise", these questions are more out of curiosity than anything else:

1. How often do you get updates? One of the things I love about GitHub is the constant stream of new features. Do these make it into github:enterprise fairly soon after?

2. What happens after your "subscription" runs out? That is to say, if I pay for a year, then don't pay next year, do I simply not get any more updates/support? Or is there some kill switch and I lose my content too? I'm sure the answer to this is similar to all enterprise products, but again, I've never experienced anything in the enterprise.
No, I'm commenting from experience on the preview that GMail had.

I'll watch the video when I get home, but Google is having a love affair with white space on this new layout, I'm doubtful about the padding on the email list.
ShortStack is Crunchbase for public software and government entities
Initself's point still stands ... you have the opportunity to do something now, however small it may be, about whatever things are important to you.

Instead, the author seems to be saying, "I want someone else to change their policies that impact the world so I can feel less guilty about the fact that I am doing nothing."
BGR: Lighting Science Group CTO Fred Maxik Chief on the future of light
No.

I'm surprised my post got downvoted when I'm trying to prevent HN Freelancers from investing a significant portion of their time to be left out to dry, as I've done with this client.
My name is Ousama and I am not a terrorist
A lot of debate has been raging whether or not the Valley has racial undertones that inhibits minorities from succeeding.

This post is purely my opinion on this topic, coming from my perspective as both a business person and entrepreneur of middle eastern descent.

Before I jump into my personal opinions, I wanted to give you some background about me. I started a company in college and sold it to Chegg in 2006. I worked in various roles from product marketing manager to my current roles as VP of Marketing for Kno and have either had discussions, worked on projects with or interacted with a number of Venture Capitalists and entrepreneurs throughout my last 5 years in the valley. Meanwhile, despite some success I also have been rejected from YC twice and have failed to raise money for some of my projects for a number of reasons, none of which I believe had to do with the race card.

Here is what I learned from the valley:

1. It's much less about racism, but rather more of an issue of pattern recognition. Investors are looking for people that follow a particular pattern. For example, did the entrepreneur go to Harvard, did they work for Google, are they an active member of Hacker news, etc. This is not because they are racists, but rather because this is cognitive instinct, its what they believe works since it's what they are most familiar with. It's the same patterns that sport scouts use to find raw talent. There are also a lot of examples where world class founders broke stereotypical patterns of what makes a great founder and the rule of any great vc is their willingness to break any rule.

2. The valley isn't a meritocracy but rather a referal-tocracy. The valley breathes with referrals. Every meeting I had, every opportunity I got was a result of a referral, rather than the work I achieved- great work is expected. Nobody gave a shit that my name was Ousama, it's how do you rate this guy in terms of quality, intelligence and determination and his idea. And if they were skiddish for any reason, which I don't believe so, then open their fucking eyes, by proving your not what they expected!!!!

3. Educate people about your culture. It's amazing how often people have misconceptions about things, if they do exist, it's not because they are inherently racist but because they simply have had limited interactions with a certain type of of person. Whether it's their culture, religion or academic background, don't be afraid to open conversations about your identity with the people you work with, investors or other entrepreneurs. The valley is one of the most open societies i have seen, and trust me I grew up in a small redneck town in Wisconsin, this place is like heaven.
I agree with your short list of goals for students new to programming. Language should not matter for learning the basics of programming and Computer Science concepts. That being said, certain languages do make exploratory programming much easier than others:

The biggest issue I've faced with my courses where Java is used to teach the material is having to deal with Java IDEs and boilerplate code required to test tiny bits of code and the resulting behaviour. Interpreted languages or those with REPLs tend to not have this problem from what I've observed.

Note: I know about BeanShell, but I've had poor results with it. Maybe my environment is at fault, but it seems to miss functionality as basic as command history, which makes editing commands very tedious.
You can find similar examples -- ruby code for the "exact" implementation as described by Instagram -- of this and other redis, memory optimization(s) at the Redis site: http://redis.io/topics/memory-optimization
New York. Full Time. Sales Position.

Wholeshare is a web startup making local and organic food more accessible to everyone. We help people who live or work near each other organize into groups, which buy directly from wholesale natural food distributors and farmers. By buying in groups, our customers are able to bypass supermarkets, save 20% to 30% off the retail price, and have the food delivered directly to their communities or workplaces.

We're an early-stage startup, and we currently have a working product with passionate customers and recurring revenue. We are based in San Francisco, CA but launched our pilot program with a partner in New York state; accordingly, we're in the process of establishing an East Coast office in upstate New York. We are proud to have received seed funding from several prominent venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz. Wholeshare was founded by three Brown alumni who previously worked together in creating two other startups.

Read the full job description here: http://www.wholeshare.com/sales

Contact us at jobs at wholeshare dot com if you're interested.
I think the closest you can get to this is Mechanical Turk, which works for a large volume of relatively menial tasks and that's about it.

The fundamental issue here is that work is increasingly shifting into knowledge work, and knowledge work requires personal relationships and trust. Even assuming you can somehow bridge the trust and fraud gap to create a viable micropayment system for this work—and that's one overwhelmingly huge if—you still have the problem that the newcomer doesn't understand your company culture and the nuances of how you do business.

The idea that there are people out there who can magically solve your company's problems is horse shit. The few really talented people who would "get it" and hit the ground running probably are already super busy. Otherwise people need time to learn how to do the job. In a startup this is done with (hopefully) a smarter tight-knit team iterating rapidly. In a huge company this is done by policies and procedures laid out over time to allow people to be more interchangeable. But in either case you need long-term personal relationships for the employee to realize their value to the company.
Hey, Boston -

Do you guys offer relocation to Honolulu?
so most likely the speech-to-text startup was not funded by ycombinator
Representatives are in the legislative branch. These petitions are to the executive branch.
This is actually a very detailed article that delves into the people running the company (Samwer bros)
Ask them if they can lend you one that looks promising. Then run your workload on it and do some benchmarks. You should never rely on vendor-supplied data to make your decisions
Pete Townshend's John Peel lecture
It's hard to argue with SciPy's success--it is well engineered, relatively easy to use, highly useful, and well documented. Though SciRuby should be able to do most of what SciPy is capable of, we don't plan on SciRuby being a SciPy rewrite. We all pretty much use matlab, R (and scipy), as well as ruby, so these are all influences.
Very interesting! Do you think because of a sense of community and 'industry solidarity', or as a function of outright competition. That would be a really compelling distribution to analyse. I guess 'build an app' doesn't necessarily mean 'that monetizes' right, so could be fun! +1 for me :)
Pretty sure I always go with D as in Delta, unless I'm on the phone with someone who I'm fully aware will know what I'm talking about (various friends, etc who will do the same thing).

They understood it well enough, but from my POV I was shocked, because never in my life did I have to spell my first name. I know in the US to always make a clarification of the spelling of my last name.

The normal line I give people in the US when they are looking up my account (perhaps at at bank) is, "My name is David Fisher, with no 'C' in Fisher" (since some spell if Fischer) and that normally does the trick.

You do make a good point however that just because the NATO phonetic alphabet is standard for NATO, doesn't mean it is something understood worldwide, anymore than I'd understand Kanji.
The bunkers are cool structures.

The people in the video are crazy.
Exact same thing happened to me when trying to do my first cs problem set. It was some filename that I was sure had a 1 in it but it was an l. It's almost as if courier tries as hard as possible to make the two look the same.
...win over customers with 100% marketing and no technical details...

Hasn't the enterprise market worked that way for years?
Yes, it is a real server.
What do you mean by "app freeze"?
Actually, it is relevant that I was researching something else. I have published papers on research; in that process one crosses all the ts etc. In this case I am saying - here it is - if you are interested you can run with it. That is very different and so I think it is quite reasonable to expect constructive rather than negative criticism.

As for the G1, I have chosen to continue and look at the issue in more detail. So far, it would appear that I cannot find a situation where it offers a benefit over other collectors. However, I am happy to accept that there might be one out there. I will switch over to the Popper approach and attempt to disprove that the G1 performs badly. If I get conclusive result either way - I will report on it.
Using promises to escape from callback hell in JavaScript
How to make wine at home
Great Blog, I like reading your progress. I'm new to Android Dev myself so it's nice to see how others are doing.
SEEKING WORK - Argentina

My name is Victor, a 28 year old developer living in Argentina.

Expertise:

* PHP

* MySQL

* JavaScript

* HTML 4 and 5

* C#

* Unix administration

Secondary skills:

* Java

* DirectX and OpenGL

Background:

I've been programming LAMP based sites for about 9 years and I'm currently working for a very large mobile games developer for 4 years now.

My work in there consists mostly of the following:

* Integrating customer billing for mobile sites, both North American and South American (closed carrier APIs and gateways such as Paypal and Amazon Payments)

* On-call support outside office hours (in which I solve issues with firewalls, programming mistakes made by developers, etc)

* Shop development and design. Basically, these are websites that display content and allow purchases with the aforementioned billing methods.I also focus on improving our custom, in-house developed framework that drives most of the websites.

Previous endeavors include:

* PHP programming and Unix administration at a large South American portal (from 2002 to 2005). It proved to be immensely informative, since we had to deal with a site that gathered several hundred thousands pageviews per day.

* PHP programming and database administration at a credit-report company (from 2005 to 2007). This also proved to be quite helpful, as I had to deal with an ill-maintained IBM Informix database, with poor normalization along with hundreds of millions of rows.

You can contact me at ar_freelancer AT yahoo.com

Thanks for the opportunity!
I don't really understand how this video in any way explains how they got their first 10 million users. Seems like a the standard straightforward plug for a ycombinator company on TC that we have gotten used to.
What’s Wrong with Groupon?
What about pythonbrew[1]?

[1] https://github.com/utahta/pythonbrew
Your Startup Failed. Why?
I've wondered this too. I wonder whether "doing" with some hints like Code Academy or watching videos and then doing is more helpful for programming and then how that applies to other disciplines like writing, math, etc. Seems like eventually we'll find a way to converge where I can do both side by side.
Why didn't you choose to go the JRuby route again?
Yet at the end of the day, Arrington was still unable to answer the question.
I'm neither calling it good nor bad

That's the real issue at stake. You should be calling it good, because it's progress.

It's somewhat conceivable that there can be times in future human history where there are large chunks of people who aren't capable of doing any productive work, but they probably won't be lasting. [1]

And for everyone who can find productive work, more efficiency in the global economy enables more production, thus more progress, and is therefore a plus.

[1] Partially because if we do things right, population will gracefully degrade in times when fewer jobs are available. (I'm not advocating more social controls to achieve this; providing additional money per-child to those on welfare, for example, goes strongly against this.)
That's most definitely a cop-out, or more accurately "the run-around". It tells a pile of people who have already expressed their views to wander elsewhere and express them again, deflecting the original effort. That blunts the force of the original response. Oh, and the linked site wants public comments within the next week or two.
in addition to jergason's response, sciruby allows/facilitates:

1. better chaining of commands
2. blocks and enumerators
3. integration with rails and other web services
4. a dynamic community

see http://www.floss4science.com/interview-sciruby-team/
Thanks. Glad you found it useful.
DuckDuckGo's Reddit Challenge
Thank you for your thoughts. Definitely holding back the secret sauce is a good idea. Also, I am fairly far along in the project development which I hope the momentum will create at least a small barrier.
Improving Customer Service with Problem Users
Long-time lurker, first-time submitter. Gave this talk to a bunch of C# devs last weekend, and it seems like the kind of bleeding-edge JavaScript stuff HN is interested in.

This is my first talk since switching from academia to programming, so any feedback would be lovely.
Asus Transformer Perfect Tablet Prepared to Take on Windows 8
NASA looking at building tractor beams for space
Same here - also it doesn't really explain what level of expertise is expected to achieve the goal.
How to track who's tracking you across the Web
Oh, I've seen other redis benchmarks. But it's always nice to see more -- that way when someone wants to guess how fast their problem set will run on their hardware they will have a more similar benchmark to compare it against.