skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting story and well-written article. Thinking about the massive amount of footage this project has generated, I'm hoping they've spent the money to store all of it. I would love an interactive movie or a full-on video game (anyone remember the Tex Murphy series?) based on this.
I thought mail forwarding was done at the initial address scan, not the final address scan. I did a bunch of research on this a few months ago, but unfortunately I can't find a source right now.
There's too many unknown variables here to give any real adequate advice. Without knowing much else about the team, market, what constitutes as growth by your definition, how you define customers, what is your financial state, etc... among a sea of other things to consider... It makes it difficult to really provide any real feedback of value.

The best answer I can provide under such circumstance is "it depends".
Ssh, don't tell him about Nios et al. cores that let you write C again, or MyHDL to write Python that compiles to Verilog.
MVPs force founders to (1) talk to customers and (2) actually ship something.

Most early-stage founders I meet are working in a vacuum. They have ideas, but no way to validate those ideas against reality. Mostly, they're just wasting time on half-baked visions of world domination. The game doesn't start until you ask a customer for money.

It's a bit like whitewater kayaking: You can float around all day looking at the rapids, but eventually you've got to let the current suck you downstream towards the waves and rocks.

Now, maybe in Scoble's world, the rules are different. He sees so many startups that anything less than perfection on the first try is a failure. But this suggests that Scoble's market is getting saturated—perhaps we already have enough mobile/social/local apps for tech bloggers?

Maybe it's time to listen to patio11, and find markets where any solution at all will make users climb across their desks with a checkbook in hand.
Ask HN: What on earth does "start-up" mean these days?
I know this seems like an odd question, but once upon a time a start-up was a company with no employees, save for the founders, and practically no income, and never any outside investment.

Maybe I should qualify the question: once you have been running for a year with revenue surely you cannot be considered a start-up - you are a real business.

When I hear that "start-up X is hiring" I find myself asking "how the hell are they going to pay them?" Many of these companies haven't yet launched or have launched with unfinished propositions with no prospect of revenue. It just does not make sense.

Please don't come back with an answer that says "they get VC funding" because that's nonsense too. Are VCs blindly throwing money at embryonic businesses on the promise of a great two-line summary and a Launchrock page?

Something doesn't add up: where is the money coming from? Am I missing something that's happening in the "start-up world" or is it all just hype?
I'm inclined to trust LiveDrive, Two reasons;

1) LiveDrive are a well respected, well known company with a good history of service and customer support. I use them as my main backup service (I never actually used Backify, just wanted to see what it was like) and trust them as such.

2) I just tried to log into my account and can't =)

If LiveDrives concerns about cards have some substance last nights message might have been a last ditch attempt at getting as much information as possible
Ask HN: Unable to stay motivated on one particular thing.
Hello people.

I am facing a huge problem. I am unable to stay motivated with anything for longer than 2 weeks. I usually start things out of interest, give them my full effort and dedication but somehow I always end up switching to a new problem to solve and leave the previous one in between. A couple of weeks back I started learning Java on my own with the idea of building apps for my ideas. I kept on with it for around 3-4 weeks before I got bored of it. Before that I started a couple of books, which I thought would be real interesting reads. Finished through half of them both and left them.

Its an ever-repeating pattern. I just don't understand what to do. Any suggestions that you guys might have would be welcome.

Thanks.
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Backify.com loses software provider: is my data safe?
Went with this backup provider because of their free/very cheap service. Their service ran using software branded as Livedrive which I thought strange at the time.
The wrote to me this morning saying URGENT: All free Backify accounts will be closed on November 22, 2011
So I paid for an upgrade.
Then Livedrive wrote to me saying Backify are no longer a reseller and their users should get their payment transaction cancelled.
Livedrive said:
We would also like to advise you that we have received a number of complaints about BACKIFY.COM from their customers and from industry organizations

My question is - should users be more careful about trusting their confidential data to startups - when if fact they have no idea if these startups are legitimate organizations?
Readers may also enjoy this discussion of how many moves a chess player has to make before he is playing a game unique in human history:

http://www.radiolab.org/2011/aug/23/rules-set-you-free/
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In defense of semantic value (a 2-in-1 rant)
Well for a verbatim search of
map(call())

I wouldn't expect google to filter out parenthesis.
More than ever now that code search is dead.

"map(call())" would work either.

So much for verbatim ...
Java is entrenched for the same reason the Cobal on mainframes it won the enterprise mindshare battle. By in large this has more to do with how these types of business function than anything else. Business work best if they have predictable cost based on revenue. So for custom software they need X amount of work then the business can hire Y developers. If a factory needs to make X more widgets it can hire Y more factory workers. There is a lot of evidence to point that software does not fit this pattern however this gets withing a few managers up the chain. Startups and valley companies handle this better because they focus on this at the core.
I will make some points about the Java / JVM that I have found working with it for the last 14 years:

* The JVM is fast compared to VBScript type languages and slow compared to language that use C libraries (Python). There are benchmarks about how JVM is very fast at crunching numbers however in practice I have written very little code that is math I tend to use a library (math libraries written in C/Fortran). Most applications are moving bits around and are thus IO bound and so languages that can quickly be modified to use better caching or more complex data access algorithms will perform better. Enterprise web apps that use Java and are fast are the exception not the rule.

* JVM is a memory hog. Now this could be blamed on all the dependencies but even writing a very simple JSON web service is going to cost you a lot of memory. This makes compilation slow and development slow.

* Dependency management is a mess. Maven is helpful but is exceptionally slow with just a few dependencies.

* Multithreaded Java has never been as robust or fast as multiprocess applications I have see run in other languages. I have seen robust multiprocess Java applications but they tended to run per node because of memory usage and performance. I would say I am above average developer and have written and rewritten a good amount of thread code and the more I do the more I am convinced it is a horrible concurrency model for non super human developers.

PHP may make some inroads over time since it has a good base of people that can be hired. However I see it mostly to be used as an outsourcing tool when a project need to get done quickly. This is just my experience over the last 14 years so YMMV.
Here is how I see it:

The first wave are the tech enthusiasts, these people are not big app buyers but are interested in finding a good SSH tool, or an mail client that supports PGP. These were the main customers of the first iPhone.

I'd say we've been in the second wave for the last couple years. These people are seeing TV the ads and are curious. Their friends buy iPhones, it makes sense for them too as well. They're not "hackers", just people that are willing to try apps. These are your Angry Birds players, and where the main revenue comes from.

The third and final wave will be moms and general folk who will never sync with iTunes. It's those people that are never going to buy an app because they won't know what an app is. And that's fine, they'll like how their phone talks to them and how they can Facetime to their kids.

I don't mean to say that all iPhone 1 users are "hackers", just that a higher percentage of them were than are now iPhone 4S users. A lot of those people likely went off to Android in the recent years, anyhow.
I'm definitely interested. Thanks. I've now bookmarked your blog.
Thanks for your answer.

I'm very aware how to search an array in Perl. I really concentrated to much on searching in my text, whereas the critic should have been for array handling in general which i find far more inferior to other languages. From my other comment:

Example: Looking for an element and deleting it? (Taken from perlmonks.org)

my @array = qw( your array here );
my $search_for = "here";
my( $index )= grep { $array[$_] eq $search_for } 0..$#array;
splice @array, $index, 1

I'm sorry, but this is hideous, really. Just to show you an example of what "modern" languages can do:

array = ["a", "b", "c", "d"]
search = "b"
array.remove(search)
print array
['a', 'c', 'd']

They may have nearly the same amount of loc but imo the second one is by far more readable and not as error prone to typos or simple bugs as the Perl one.
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I've found that CrashPlan is the best of online backup- I can backup attached external drives as well as my entire computer for a complete backup at a reasonable price. I'd suggest that people also wait a bit until Black Friday, where they sometimes discount their plans even further...
each of those outsourced functions is done on a much more quality level than if the company tried to do it all on its own

Ho ho ho. There is a long, long list of companies who have discovered to their cost, the opposite. And amusingly, it's getting longer.
I've struggled with this a lot. But ultimately I decided I want to create the best product possible, and charging more helps me do that. If I gave it away for free I wouldn't have the financial ability to focus on it and put in the time to make it better.

Thanks for the feedback.
Well I agree. There are billions of bucks to be made in the domains of enterprise and industrial applications, and social network integration is not really a business case there - maybe just a potential security issue.

Since when did start-up become synonymous with consumer application start-up?
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There is a project which brings a matlab like environment to Scala. We can import many java numeric libraries as toolkits - check this
http://code.google.com/p/scalalab/
Here's the code -- pretty simple:

#!/bin/sh

# by Jason A. Donenfeld
# www.zx2c4.com

if [ $# -ne 2 ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 url output-pdf-file"
exit 1
fi

set -e
documenturl="$(echo -n "$1" | xxd -plain | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/\(..\)/%\1/g')"
viewerurl="http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=$documenturl"
pdfurl="$(printf "$(curl -s "$viewerurl" | sed -n "s/.*gpUrl:'\\([^']*\\)'.*/\\1/p" | sed 's/%/%%/g')")"
cookiejar="$(mktemp)"
curl -s -L -c "$cookiejar" -o "$2" "$pdfurl"
rm -f "$cookiejar"
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You say you got bored, but you don't say why. Are you getting bored or is life just getting in the way?

Also the fact that you are concerned about it seems to suggest that it's something "you feel you have to do". Like if you don't do it then you're not acheiving something.

I've been working on a project for years, still get enthusiastic about it, life gets in the way, and I still manage to pick it up where I left off. If this is definitely not you, then Id suggest you are trying too hard.

Stop looking for things to do or be, and just let them happen.

the problem with chasing targets is that there's always someone or something better out there and it can be really depressing when you find out someone else does something with ease (I know I just gave an example) but the point is that by stopping comparing yourself or trying to better yourself because you think that its the done thing, you'll feel a lot better, and the chances are you'll be able to just find things that interest you without trying.
It should be noted that while the first Atomico fund was mostly an internal fund from the Skype founders, the most recent fund was raised like a typical venture fund from a group of limited partners. Also there are folks other than the Skype founders involved and from what I gather they do most of the work with the portfolio companies.

The post makes it sound more like a large angel investment from a single Skype founder and given that a lot of angel investors style their investments as "Something Ventures" without actually raising a fund, it seemed worth clarifying.
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1. It's estimated to come out a year later than AMD's Radeon part which will boast similar double-precision floating point performance. Both could be delayed, though if Southern Islands comes out on time & Knights Corner gets delayed, by the time KC sees the light of day AMD or nVidia might have another part out by then that will offer even higher DPFP performance.

2. I am not sold that modeling the cores after x86/SMP means special care won't be needed to feed the Intel MIC architecture properly. I'd like to see some real world numbers on purchasable hardware.
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Thanks everyone, reading through your answers and thinking through the bugs I've solved has lead me to some interesting conclusions.

(The language I'm using is Ruby).

The problem is not that Ruby isn't statically typed. It's that what I think of as type errors in Ruby pass without incident. The most irritating example of this is that if you don't pass enough arguments to a proc object the other parameters get filled in with nil. In my mind this should throw a type error, but in Ruby it doesn't.

Perhaps this is why Rubyists are so keen on testing, because their language is full of implicit behaviours.
I guess i'll have to repost this here. :)

The correct answer should've been:

@list = grep { $_ ne 'dogfood' } @list;
You are right in a so many ways. From a business perspective it isn't the best model (I am looking for ways to add recurring revenue), I probably made minimum wage if you break down my time, and I don't have many customers.

But here's what I do have: emails from customers every single week saying how what I built is changing the lives of their child. Does anything else matter beyond that?

I'm working on something I care deeply about and am able to still provide for my family while doing it. That's the position I want to be in.
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The Soviet economy was in practice run as if it was one huge company, with each industry being one division of the company, all the revenue flowing up to HQ then being allocated in budgets for each division, targets for each set, and so on.

This is "efficient" as it reduces friction - but when HQ makes mistakes in budgets or targets, the entire economy fails, whereas in the West, the failure is isolated to one company, and over the long term, that redundancy is massively more productive. In fact in the West, the assets of the failing company would most likely be bought by a rival, and no productive capacity would be lost. In the Soviet system, you might end up with a million tractors but no crops to harvest!
It takes an awful lot of work to be the sixth most impressive thing Scoble (or the New York Times, or Techcrunch, or $PICK_A_GATEKEEPER) will see this week. It takes much, much less work to offer a better user experience than a) an Excel spreadsheet sent over email, b) having your office manager act as the endpoint to a REST API, or c) doing anything involving actual paper. These are frequently the competition in underserved markets.

There's a million fun, valuable, important problems to solve out there which you go grow old and die without ever reading about on a Valley blog.
Seriously? wtf
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The following line from the email is a little but more worrying:

"We would like to advise you not to provide any credit card information to BACKIFY.COM. If you have provided credit card information to BACKIFY.COM then we would suggest contacting your card provider and informing them that your card may be used fraudulently."

So Backify are asking you to join a payment plan with that huge green button and LiveDrive are saying not to give your details to them.

Mixed messages are never good.
It's a quite common problem, I faced it myself some years ago. Basically, changing your target without any achievement like you did means you're avoiding to complete your task by starting a new one.

You may flag this as procrastination or not, but you're asking us here how you could stop changing targets while you should ask yourself why don't you want to complete your tasks ?

Usually, when you start something and guess how much work learning something require, you underestimate it.

When you're halfway in, you got a more precise estimation. That's where you may get bored, faced to the great amount of work required to complete it.
Regarding the "perl5 not in parrot" citation, i found some pretty good hints at this problem:

From the Perl Wikipedia page:

It is often said that "Only perl can parse Perl",[49] meaning that only the Perl interpreter (perl) can parse the Perl language (Perl), but even this is not, in general, true. Because the Perl interpreter can simulate a Turing machine during its compile phase, it would need to decide the Halting Problem in order to complete parsing in every case. It's a long-standing result that the Halting Problem is undecidable, and therefore not even perl can always parse Perl. Perl makes the unusual choice of giving the user access to its full programming power in its own compile phase. The cost in terms of theoretical purity is high, but practical inconvenience seems to be rare.
Other programs that undertake to parse Perl, such as source-code analyzers and auto-indenters, have to contend not only with ambiguous syntactic constructs but also with the undecidability of Perl parsing in the general case. Adam Kennedy's PPI project focused on parsing Perl code as a document (retaining its integrity as a document), instead of parsing Perl as executable code (which not even Perl itself can always do). It was Kennedy who first conjectured that "parsing Perl suffers from the 'Halting Problem'",[50] which was later proved.[51]

Also interesting is the proof that Perl cannot be parsed:

http://www.jeffreykegler.com/Home/perl-and-undecidability

In general the saying "only perl can parse perl" has to have some root... http://www.google.de/search?q=%E2%80%9COnly+Perl+can+parse+P...
I don't know, he doesn't sound like he would've given a damn about PageRank if Sergey and Larry had gone to talk to him back then. He might have dismissed the first version of Google because they didn't index as many pages as the leading search engines. Look at his own example:

> Another company tonight that I met showed me a similar app, when I started it up (I do that while you talk to me) it gave me an error. Gone.

For all we know that company might have created some revolutionary technology but, who knows, their build system is still crappy and they forgot to change a symlink somewhere?
Sounds like a great idea minus the fact that you have to pay! Which is probably worth it for a large company it's not worth it at our stage.
I think having downvotes public is an intersting idea. It would certainly force people to justify their downvotes, anyway.
more interesting concern..

What happens when all the developers with extremely low debt loads are snapped up by the Big firms to start-ups attempting to acquire tech co-founders and dev talent?

It is not that anyone is over funded, its that those with low debt loads and dev talent is in fact a finite amount and when its gone from the market prices adjust upwards..
Scala could be a better choice since it is compiled and not interpreted. It would be very beneficial to run huge programs which runs for large duration as apposed to running programs which runs for smaller duration often since the java run time does a lot of optimiztion when it does the JIT. There is a even a project which brings a matlab like environment to Scala where we can import many java numeric libraries as toolkits - check this http://code.google.com/p/scalalab/
This piece really dropped the ball by failing to mention the unethical ways certain startups (I'm looking at you, Zynga and Mark Pincus) preserve equity, such as clawing back early options to key employees on pain of firing. Sleazy.
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