skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You could have asked this question anybody who tried to write SciPy or NumPy before they existed: "if you're doing science, why would you want to use python over fortran?" Or, befor ROR existed, "if you're doing web development, why would you want to use ruby over java/perl?". Your question is basically asking why anybody would ever try something outside of an established ecosystem.

The reason is, they like ruby so much that they want to use it for number crunching too, and not to have to use a less appealing language. They want to build an ecosystem so other people can join and contribute and grow together and maybe outgrow python. They want ruby to win so much that they are willing to work on duplicating a framework existing somwhere else.
I have a question related to MIT-LL: How particular are they about GPAs for graduate school? I'm given to understand they filter heavily on them for undergrad, but is that still the case for MS/PhD?
Fisheye is $800 for 10 users, $1200 for 20, plus the required JIRA install, which is $1200. Add a Wiki component (Confluence) and you can add another $800. The proper code reviewing tool (Crucible) is $800/$1200. Thats (roughly) the feature set of Github, without the source hosting/ssh-key-management stuff.

So summed up:
10 Users: $3600
20 Users: $4400

So, they are definitely cheaper, but I'd say that $5000 for 20 users is a competitive price for such a huge infrastructure.
We're using Gitorious at Forbes, which has been great for us. $5k is more expensive than free, but I think Github has the development community mindshare (more free tools) and, in some cases, a technology advantage, such as managing pull requests.
"It's also considered completely reasonable behavior to work at a company for 3-5 years, and then move onto the next one."

I believe this is the norm outside the Valley as well.

I'm trying to find a blog post about how, after 3 years at the same job, the challenge diminishes and it makes more sense to switch (if management doesn't recognize the need for growth).
Actually research has shown that it does make a difference: [Why complicate things?: introducing programming in high school using Python](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1151880)

They found that students who were taught Python instead of Java scored higher on their tests. Languages like Python and Ruby make it far easier for people to jump straight into the code. If I'm learning about linked lists why do I need this main method? Ruby and Python have lots of abstractions which make it easier for someone learning to be able to focus on the problem at hand.
Grasshopper founders take on SurveyMonkey with PopSurvey
Yeah, I see something similar about the capital gains debate. You only pay capital gains when you /sell/ your business. If you want to take money out of an existing business, you have two options; issue a dividend (and pay both corporate taxes /and/ capital gains taxes, which usually makes the second option attractive) or pay yourself bonus/salary at the usual tax rates.

A lower capital gains only helps you if you are building to flip.
I disagree. Apple's cultural disdain for philanthropy is well known and comes directly from the top. The most valuable company in the world gives squat to charity when compared with their corporate peers (Microsoft, Google, etc.) and they look even worse when compared with financial equals like Exxon or Walmart.
The the code the article links to for zipmap.c (https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/zipmap.c) is rather literate.

I haven't dug extremely deeply into the sources for many F/OSS projects; the code I'm interested in reading has been inevitably opaque (at least to my inexperience). This particular source file (and maybe the rest of Redis?) is really good. I think I'll be taking many more looks at Redis (code- and usage-wise) in the future.
ABC signs new deal with Netflix and Amazon
No. Take it as a strong positive signal that there is demand and ask yourself how you can differentiate from your competitor. Will you have a better UI, a niche market to address, etc.?

The question is how you position yourself in respect to the competition.

If you believe that there is indeed absolutely no hope for your startup, then... there's not much to say. If you want to take this battle, you'll find a way to position yourself.

Edit: I just saw that your competitor is UK-only. Are you based in UK too?
IBM's Watson supercomputer bests Harvard, MIT; New challenge ahead in medicine
I can't edit that link anymore. Would suck if the Wordpress install was hacked. I'll try to contact the author. Thank you for the heads up.
The OVF format is a large change.
I was going to do this last year but lacked inspiration and got distracted.

But this weekend I had some time to spare and so got playing around with some idea, and actually got around to building a quick prototype and trying it out.

I was thinking about taking the spare time I have this month and plowing it into pulling the prototype through. I was in the middle of compiling a lessons learned document when I got your reminder email. So count me in!

(Now to go and cringe at the Java/C++ hybrid mess that is the prototype!)
Is Triactol Effective as breast enlargement solution?
On Bottle Poppin: Analysis of champagne featured in hip hop
This site has the exact mechanics of a slot machine.
I know that you're fighting the good fight, but I just don't have it in me to sell the concept that I'm going to produce software to solve someone's problems.
I'm only interested in joining teams where the decision to write high-quality software was already made - and I provide my skill to people who know that's what they need.
If I said I wanted to raise taxes, would you start posting bullshit about what would happen if all property belonged to the government?

Of course not, because you wouldn't be trying to set up a strawman to attack if I said that.

"it's incumbent on Cheez to make a less simplistic argument if he doesn't want to be subject to reductio ab adsurdum."

Bullshit. Bullshit in any circumstance.
How do they ensure that their code is not stolen? Any insights on that?
Personally, I'd like wikipedia to stay the way it is, but others can build on top of wikipedia's content. They are having trouble as it is, with getting more contributors and spam.
Preforce is a steal compared to Clearcase (https://www-112.ibm.com/software/howtobuy/buyingtools/paexpr...) which is from 2500 to 5000 a user.
The reason why say MPAA has unprecedented access to politicians is because MPAA is used for political propaganda, overall consistently favorably portraying the government.
There is a lot of interesting analysis regarding possible responses to declining oil production. If you respond to a 3% decline in production by building infrastructure to produce energy by other means, you only deepen the energy deficit because that infrastructure takes energy to build.

Check out this article: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8526

You might right though. Sperm whale oil is still used to lubricate satellites.
One of my takeaways: If I use a different set of accounting metrics internally, in the event of an IPO, use common accounting standards.
I had similar problems on my small screen with Google Voice. I found a Greasemonkey script which solves most of them. Once Google starts forcing me to use the new Gmail interface, I'll probably make something similar for Gmail.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/114048
Find a specific genre of publishers to target as your primary users. Talk with them and solve their problems. You will make your service more compelling to those users by solving their biggest problems and building the ideal product for them.
Microsoft Research shows Augmented Projectors
Thanks for writing this detailed description of the expectations of your interview candidates. I'll probably apply once i'm 100% comfortable with the requirements (like knowing Ruby, writing my own fuzzer, etc)
Pardon, here's a link that works: http://clojuratica.weebly.com/
I find this especially true in labor markets. I've moved from the central valley to the silicon valley and back several times during my life, and yeah, silicon valley has higher wages (and higher rents) - but you know what? it also has higher expectations.

I noticed that whenever I went to silicon valley, I was, well, mediocre. I had to put some effort in just to stay in the middle of the pack, and I've had some jobs where it took my all just to keep my head above water. In the central valley? almost everywhere I worked, I was like a little god, even without all that much effort.

Sure, the average worker gets paid more here in silicon valley; but if you hire the average silicon valley sysadmin/programmer, you are getting a whole lot more than the average central valley sysadmin/programmer.
I don't think the Panda update got it right with respect to the duplicate content problem though. I still see a bunch of StackOverflow content scrapers rank as high as StackOverflow and basically link back to StackOverflow. To the same post that is ranked number 1 for that particular query. Don't have examples right away - checking my history for those instances

One site I can remember is bigresource.com which is an aggregator of sorts, it seems

The larger problem being, sites with duplicate content still rank as high as the original.
List of Gyms and Health Clubs
How Are Colleges Using Social Media [Infographic]
What I learned from the slideshow: nscrtbl nspllbl names have spread far beyond the valley! (Ibuzzn? Sqord? Wefiends? Scholr.ly?)
To widen this templating-aspect perspective to yet another extreme, here's more fuel for the fire.

http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/19-promising-php-template-e...

List of nineteen promising PHP template engines. Nineteen. And this isn't even tip of the iceberg. The templating diaspora can partly explain how MTV was received.
I have lived for 25 years in US. Never encountered racism ever - am from South Asian decent. That is saying something. Of course - there will be some people who will be racist. US, after all has 300M people and it defies probability that it will not have any racists.

However, generalizing racists and saying racism exists based on these extreme edge case doesn't make logical sense.
Ask HN: Any Examples of SaaS Companies Adding Products?
I always love the feedback in HN and thought of a good topic for discussion.

I am part of a startup that has been doing very well since 2007 and we are close to touching $2m in annual revenue. We are in a great position to explode next year and we are preparing now.

We will continue expanding our current product but are now starting to think about adding products for 2013/14 to maintain our growth.

Does anyone have any examples (successes and failures) of SaaS companies adding products? We see several opportunities but I would love to learn from others to compare our focus!

Thanks!
Steve
There was a HNer who was looking into translating code into formulas. It's theoretically possible, and has a great outcome: Because mathematical formula aren't patentable. Does anyone know where that guy went?
I hope they're going to offer pro rata on seat volumes between multiples of 20. If I have just 25 users it's $10,000 (assuming their pricing widget is completely accurate).
Even for a default template, the padding seems too much. Do you think it's the right default?
140bytes: A Community Curated Collection of Tweet Sized JavaScript
Palestinians hit by cyber-attack
HAH! That was my first reaction to this. I hated doing a search and ending up on that site, and they owned a lot of page 1 results for many keywords. I cringed every time I would realize I had ended up on that site, could see the clearly user-provided questions, and then the annoying way they hid the answers and begged for money. If that's the result of Panda, Google gets a big cheer from me.
Wow this is an amazingly well-done site for 24 hours. Simple design, good UI/UX from what I can tell, and it is clean and neat. Not really spending much so I didn't get into the 14 day free trial, but still cool.

Perhaps make it free for a limited time? I mean, allow everyone to come try it out for the next 2 months or something. You'll be able to gain traction and maybe get the word out / get people hooked on using it.
Notably:

- Enterprise is delivered in an OVF, which means it's a fully contained VM. This simplifies deployments astronomically from the previous FI architecture.

- We've spent a lot of time on the runtime and packaging of Enterprise in relation to how it runs the code. It's now much faster.

- We've changed how we merge the two codebases (.com and FI/Enterprise). Effectively, they are the same now. This means new features that come to .com will come to Enterprise quickly/immediately. Previously we had to do hard, manual merges which meant new features got to FI very late (3, 6, 8 months later).
San Francisco, CA

Sociable Labs is building the future of social commerce and we're looking for a few more engineers to help. Your technology stack is less important - we're looking for smart people with great communication in a passion for learning.

Our product is essentially a more advanced version of facebook's social plugins, with a strong focus on analytics, A/B testing, and ROI. See a couple of examples at http://www.backcountry.com/mens-clothing ("These people have asked their friends..." section in the center below the fold) and http://www.active.com/running/stockton-ca/run-and-walk-again... ("Connect with friends" section on the right)

We have a modular JavaScript front end that works with the Facebook platform and makes use of cutting edge technologies like localStorage and CORS (cross-domain ajax).

Our back end is Java / Jetty / Postgres on Amazon EC2. We're using Guava, Guice, and a number of other interesting pieces to keep clean, testable code. We're also using Apache Hadoop for analytics.

We offer competitive pay, great benefits (including the best PTO policy I've ever seen), and an enjoyable working environment.

More details about the company and the jobs here: http://www.sociablelabs.com/Careers

I work on the front-end but feel free to ask me questions about anything. If I don't know, I'll get you to the right person. Reply here or email nathan@[company site].com
What do you mean by scale?
A quick run through the site with Firebug's XHR and Dependency Logger didn't show any Porn or P2P links or strange script calls.

I'll see if the site owner wants to reach out to you view email; thanks so much for speaking up.
Announcing the Winners of the Apps Against Abuse Technology Challenge
Back when we were getting started with Redis, the readability / concise nature of the project was one of the things that most excited me about it (here's what it looked like around then: https://github.com/antirez/redis/tree/0b420168b485d0a9c4b66d...)
I think that this may in part be due to the fact that the idea of "inviting someone over for dinner" is beginning to erode away culturally. Some of my best friends have never been inside my home, and visa versa. I think this is a large part of why establishments like bars, skating rinks, coffee houses, LAN cafes, and court clubs are so big in most of the cities I've lived in: a lot of their business is driven (I suspect) by the fact that they provide a neutral socializing ground, more than the actual service that they provide. When I think of the idea of "taking someone to dinner," the idea of bringing them to my house never really crosses my mind.

I've never lived out of a city with a population of less than 100,000 so I suspect that the social dynamic might be somewhat different there.
Retirement homes in 2050: Hell on Earth
Just as a response to Ave's comment above,

I've chatted with Alex a couple times and he is a good guy, so take my good data point with the bad.
New York, NY. Full time.

We’re hiring at Shelby.tv… like lots of other companies. So why come work with us? Because you want to put a dent in the universe. These are some of the things we do at Shelby:

Work with (and watch tons of) online video
Process updates in real time from a growing list of firehoses
Use the best technology for the job (Rails, Mongo, Node, Redis, Beanstalk…)
Develop and contribute open source
Love the modern web (HTML5, CSS 3, JS, modern browsers)
Stay the fuck away from IE < 9 and Flash
Love every screen (monitor, tablet, phone, tv, headrest, IMAX)
Focus on building an exceptional team that builds something people want

We're looking for great people that never want to stop improving. We'd would love to find a bad ass front end person (own the product UI and everything else our community sees) who is looking for a wide range of opportunities & responsibilities. But these “positions” are buried in this post because they’re more like guidelines.

We’re backed by some of the best investors in the game and we hang our hats in our own office at 23rd and Park in NYC (though we’re cool with people working remotely).

More info here: http://shel.tv/qWsIxv
I visited this site and had no clue what to do after 5 minutes.. Is this like Mint? I need to link all my accounts so they can verify it? I get points for reading the articles? It's just a lottery? All confused... horrible intro.
Advertising? It can be done
San Francisco, CA. Full time. H1Bs welcome.

Academia.edu is an engineering-focused company whose goal is to revolutionize the way that researchers share research. We are the largest and fastest-growing platform in the world for academics to share research. Over 700,000 academics have signed up, and 90,000 are joining each month. The value that the site provides is that we help academics distribute their papers to a large audience quickly, and we also help them keep up with the latest papers in their field.

We have about 2.7 million monthly unique visitors, and that number is doubling roughly every 7 months. The journey is 1% complete - we are just getting going.

We're a 6 person team based in downtown San Francisco. We have a strong engineering culture. We're a Rails site, and we also use Redis, MongoDB, Beanstalkd, Varnish, Solr, PostgreSQL, Node.js and Memcached.

Familiarity with our technologies is a plus, but it's not essential. It's far more important that you are a quick learner who can pick up new technologies quickly. There is more information about the company on our hiring page, at http://academia.edu/hiring. The kinds of things you would be working on include:

★ building new features (a conference feature, a discussion feature for papers)

★ enhancing existing features (News Feed, Profile page, paper upload tools)

★ building back-end infrastructure to scale the site

What we're looking for are:

☀ 2+ years of web development experience

☀ Experience with the full engineering stack

☀ Passion for engineering

We have raised money from Spark Capital (investors in Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare), and angels including Mark Shuttleworth (from Ubuntu) and Rupert Pennant-Rea (Chairman of The Economist).

All the strategic decisions in the startup are made collaboratively, whether they are about hiring, new feature development, user growth, user retention, funding, or revenue. You can participate in those general startup decisions as much or as little as you want. We have found that our decisions are much better as a result of everyone contributing to them. If you like having an impact, you will enjoy the Academia.edu culture.

For anyone interested to learn more, please email me directly at richard [at] academia.edu.
What a depressing read.

If you have an iPad you might be interested to know these guys are trying to bring a taste of the Courier to Apple's tablet: http://tapose.tumblr.com/
What A CEO Should Do
My first thought is who needs "social" features in an enterprise VCS? I love GitHub and think it's biggest benefit is the ability to {easily} fork and watch projects. Does this really translate to the enterprise? I can't imagine a corporation where its a good think to have two groups disagreeing on a direction and causing a fork. Management would have a cow!

The bottom line is what does GitHub Enterprise buy my over something like Redmine or Gitorious? GHE is probably easier to install but I still have to manage my own hardware & drive space. And with the open source alternatives I don't have to worry about licensing and can crack it open to add adapters to other software (#include "standard open source header").
Not what I expected when I reluctantly clicked. Well put.
I only had time to briefly skim this, but I didn't catch anything about reforming the compensation system for patent examiners, which incentivizes the granting of patents without giving them sufficient review. Anyone else find any info of this nature in the PDF?
I like Github and use it every day but as a longtime advocate of Fog Creek's software I'm a little sad to see Github continuing to move in on Fogbugz/Kiln territory (not to mention competition from the Australians) with not much response from Fog Creek to compete on the lower end of the market. Github enterprise Pricing/features are about on par with the Fog Creek offering. Git vs. Mercurial but it's still DVCS and though I would consider Fogbugz/Kiln a bit more advanced as far feature implementation all the major types of features are in both products.

http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/for-your-server.html

What I would REALLY love to see is Fog Creek compete a bit more in Githubs space with their hosted service. I think there is room in the market for a Fogbugz/Kiln lite product and the competition would do everyone, especially the users, a lot of good. I think Joel even wrote an article on pricing and market segmentation [1] unfortunately they may have already figured out the sweet spot with their current price points putting the prices in the range of me being able to get the bank I used to work for to use their product but not the little bootstrapped company where I currently work.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...
Time changes all things.
From what I've read in the petition responses, it seems to me the whole system is designed to spread information about what Obama has already done or positions he's already taken to a targeted group of people.
Have you considered perhaps that you're the edge case?

I've lived in the US my entire life. I'm East Asian. I've encountered racism.

Given two persons of minority descent, one who claims to have first-hand experience of racism, and another who claims that racism is largely a myth, why would I believe the second over the first?
I think your service is, to paraphrase Job's words about Dropbox, "more a feature than a product".

It's probably great and very useful to many people, but I'm not sure that you could generate large revenues from it, and it looks like something Dropbox could easily re-implement.

My opinion: the problem here is not so much about the publishing platform but how you drive traffic. After one of the articles from my blog hit HN's frontpage and got 10k visit, I could feel the magic of it.

Publishing stuff on the web is easy. The question is how you make people read it.
Just by email from one developer you cannot judged that all Indian developers are bad. It could be a student who is learning.

If Indian developers were really bad, I wonder how they are managing a 23 Billion dollar in-bound service contracts each year.
No he's actually right, Alexa provides unbelievably bad results, completely irrelevant to anyone.
Interesting. $20/month/user seems pretty damn cheap.
2011 Linux kernel summit surprise: Android code may be merged after all
I used OpenCongress. It's similar in that it will email your congress members based on your address.

http://www.opencongress.org/contact_congress_letters/7509-H-...