skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Technology is always booming, but individual technologies aren't necessarily. The startups that Hacker News promotes tend to be largely SaaS productivity apps. I would be surprised if there isn't a bubble in that area. I recently noted that a startup with the sole purpose of providing other startups with "coming soon" pages has $800k of funding. How on earth can they expect to become profitable after sinking 800k into a very niche service. There can't be that many startups in need of a "Coming soon" page, can there?

In the victorian times, the technology booming was railways. There was always a market for railways (until the car came along, but that wasn't really for another seventy years), but the real issue was the number which they built. There was passengers, but not enough to support the frantic investment that people were making (it was, after all, the next big thing!). This is where I see the VC backed SaaS startup investment market going. Frankly, there cannot really be a market for every SaaS app we see traipse through here with $10m of backing. The real question is, how long until the failure rate becomes high enough that people panic?

YCombinator has the right idea. Start with a small seed, build a good app and perhaps only once you have something launched, start looking for more investment. A website can generally lead to profitability either by being loss making but really, really popular, or by having revenue from day one. What worries me is the websites that have very little revenue from the beginning, and yet are attracting multi million dollar investments. That cannot last.

As an aside, we're thankful for those rail investments now - the UK not only has a very large railway network, we also have a very large bicycle path network built on ex-railway lines!
If HBO wasn't hopelessly compromised by their dependence on cable networks, the smart move would be for them to use their proprietary content as the lure for a full-fledged competitor to Netflix streaming, similar to the way that Valve used their own games to get people using Steam. I'd be willing to pay the $8/month I give Netflix just for access the HBO back-catalog, assuming it didn't require a cable TV subscription that I'm never going to pay for again.
Does anyone know if Reddit targets ads based on the content of the sub-reddit in which the ad appears? That seems to make the most sense to me. Some advertisers will pay good money to advertise to people who are already interested in their type of product/industry/genre etc...
> Telling the user to write something in two different ways,
> depending on the argument being passed, isn't simple.

Huh? Sure it is.

Fun fact: Any algorithm you can write in JavaScript can also be written as a single function, full of nested whiles, if/elses, fors, labels and breaks ... does that mean you should write your entire program as a single function? Nope.

I'd like to think that CoffeeScript functions read better without an "ending delimiter":

$('button').click ->
alert "hello"

# Or:

app.get '/', (req, res) ->
res.send 'Hello World'

In any case, if you're interested in using CoffeeScript, but the lack of an ending delimiter is putting you off -- I encourage you to add one in your fork.
Ya, many of my English papers are graded on factors like thought and understanding, supporting evidence etc. While, these are still subjective, for these and the measures you were marked on, it much easier to explain what a five out of five, what a four out of five is etc. rather than say effort. But, ya, it's way harder to come with fair, objective criteria for Humanities papers. (At least it is for my experienced high school mind)
5 Do's and Don'ts for Managing Distributed Teams - A Tech Lead Speaks
Customers can be lost on the trip home from the store. "Nah, I guess I don't really need that."
1. I notice your solution uses recursion (at least I assume it uses recursion - I am not a ruby programmer). I think this would be an issue for large values of n (stack overflow).

2. I think an iterative function for fact would be more efficient.

3. I notice you do not memoize the result of fact even though you are calculating it twice for each call.

I suspect that you are trying to show how compact a solution can be, but in an interview situation, I would probably be more impressed by someone who is aware of the issues above.
One huge problem, though, is that shit (specifically racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, fat shaming, ableism – oh, I guess that list really isn’t all that specific) tends to crop up everywhere. It’s a very reddity kind of shit.

Encountering blatant (and highly visible because upvoted) sexism (for example) in such harmless sounding subreddits as /r/soccer or /r/minecraft really kills all my fun. There are a few nicely moderated places, though, so not all hope is lost (and /r/soccer is at least usually devoid of shit).
One? I suppose you are aware of /r/gonewild for starters
The visualization itself is sort of interesting, but the good part is the story of developing it: A bug via code-reuse; performance issues in Ruby; and fast code in C. Oh, also that Stackato compiled his C on deployment, that, I thought was very cool.
Power line crews are often very well paid to compensate for the fact that there is a real risk of serious injury or death.

Engineers usually work under more controlled conditions, but I know electrical engineers who consider the power line guys insane for the risks they take and wouldn't trade with them.
Teagueduino now exports directly to Arduino
A nice development machine is always awesome. I think the magic part of "Come solve hard problems at XXX" is the 'xxx' part where xxx is associated with a great incubator and/or great funding and/or great founders (past success). I don't think they are looking for folks already making $100k.

"Unless your after college dropouts" sounds cynical.
Extra bonus points if they reduce quadratic to linear time with something like

def pascal_row(n):
row = [1]
for i in range(1,n+1):
row.append(row[-1]*(n+1-i)/i)
print row

(and more if they can talk intelligently about additions versus multiplications and divisions, the cost of [].append(), when if ever linear-versus-quadratic actually matters, bignum arithmetic, etc., etc., etc.).
> We all know 4,9,25,36,49 are the squares

2^2, 3^2, 5^2, 6^2, 7^2

4^2? Did I miss something there?
Layer 7 is Looking for Some Seriously Talented Developers
Wouldn't that be a really hard line to draw? The barista example is solid, but isn't the spectrum so broad that it'd be impossible to really say what is and is not their field of study [for many people/cases]?

I'd sure like to see such numbers, though.
I don't write code on a whiteboard, you might be comfortable thinking like that, I for one am not. I think it's likely that I'm in the majority.

Until I get a keyboard with a tappety tap tap under my fingers my brain is at all stop.
As time goes on The Lean Startup thing is starting to look a lot like the lifecycle Agile went through doesn't it?

- A good idea comes along that makes a lot of sense

- Starts to gain traction

- Some people get a bit too religious about it which annoys some other people.

- Some do it well and lots do it badly

- The annoyed people try use the examples of it done badly to make generalisations about it, smear its name and generally miss the point entirely.

- on and on we go
Symantec Investigating Claims of Norton AV Source Code Theft
Circle (http://circleci.com) is doing a similar thing, but hosted and managed. If CI/CD appeals to you, but you don't want to manage it yourself, drop me a line.
Some aspects of HN are very similar to the way reddit was four years ago. The topics covered are slightly different, but at least half of the HN main page is normally not directly startup related, and the discussion threads are almost always interesting.

Hopefully it'll stay that well. Childish and one line comments seem to stay away, which is absolutely fantastic.
Here's what I do when I want to watch a show:

1) Check out Netflix Instant.

2) Hit up Amazon VOD.

3) Check out iTunes

IFF those fail, then I go to the bay.

I prefer to use legitimate services to get content. But I'm not moving away from my keyboard to do it, and I'm not paying for HBO/Showtime/etc just for the one or two shows I want to watch.
Is there a good (fast, secure, stable) Apache or Nginx SPDY module yet?
I always wanted to be a Linux Kernel Developer. At least, help them with the most tedious task. Where can I start?
Clickable : http://cnnr.me/b/2012/01/my-blogging-process/
I love the honesty and refreshing look your post delivers. It hadn't occurred to me until I read it that maybe there is a programmer personality type that actually likes being on display, coding on a whiteboard capable of doing recursive algorithms in 2 minutes flat. Thanks.
Your consistent B- grade was a measure of the class, not your work. Sorry that the world is so unfair, but humanities courses (particularly 101 level) are rife with this.

I once got an A in a philosophy course where I never even turned in any work. I think the teacher knew I was generally smart and argumentative, and just gave people marks accordingly.
Give Your Employees Unlimited Vacation Days | Inc.com
Customers don't care about "free stuff" or even prices. They care about service.

I would love to see some data on that, because I have a really hard time believing it. Otherwise I'd struggle to explain how Walmart has ever been successful.
because, coffeescript is a joke
It'll be in Firefox 11.

http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-57351535-12/whats-comin...

Just grab a Nightly if you want it now.

http://nightly.mozilla.org/
I knew I was right.

You were going to deceive people with an aggregate of technical non-senses and obviousnesses mixed with some good links.

I knew that your initial post was as empty as what you are saying now: the server is sending data (and the right one bob!) to the client, then the graphics card is composing the images (Dude!) and the cpu is executing some special instructions.

Good-Boy, right?

But.

It's a fact, people penalized me. I understand, (ultra)positive attitude is prefered over kindof technical and scientific honesty and demand. Even my bug report has been down-voted a lot =) Bugs are negative gnaaaa :>

Why not. I guess I have to apologize then.
Want To Revive The Economy? Open Public Buildings To Remote Workers
Well, that's true. I use jQuery and similar libraries as I primarily work on front end development for websites. I was speaking more of working with raw javascript and digging into the array without a library. But if you asked me to do what map() and reduce() ultimately do, which you say would happen more or less, then I'm fairly certain I could complete the task. It was more that I was saying I was unfamiliar with those two particular terms.
Yes, I don't think I ever implied that that the flow is unilateral, but I feel like this is indicative of the broader point.

The sensitivity to US exceptionalism has made it hard to say something seemingly trivial like "the US is a huge, rich, politically powerful economy and contributes a huge fraction of global medical research" without having to caveat against "You know, other people contribute as well."

No reasonable person (certainly not me, reasonable or otherwise ;-) suggests that the flow is unilateral.

If anything I feel like there's a reverse statistical bias here. If we assume the UK is equally productive in research per capita as the US, you'd expect about a 6x research contribution from the US relative to the UK just based on population (never mind that the GDP per capita in the US is about 50% higher, as is the number of "top universities" per silly metrics like http://www.usnews.com/education/worlds-best-universities-ran...). Assuming no intrinsic difference in ability between the US and the UK citizens, it would be extremely surprising for the UK's contribution to be comparable to that of the US just based on population, university density, and economic output. This is not a judgement of UK researchers; it is merely a statement about the aggregation of people that is the US vs the aggregation that is the UK.

Anyway, I will reiterate that I recognize important contributions from all over the world. That doesn't directly bear on relative contributions and the net flow of research benefits.

(edit: clarified second-to-last paragraph with final sentence)

(edit 2: having looked up the relative GDP per capita on google, my 50% was an overestimate... 25% seems about right).
Ah, (map + (cdr L) L). That's excellent!
Just take a look at how Mootools or Node.JS takes care of their documentation. Same principal. There is no need for comments/documentation to muck up code.
Reddit has a much bigger list of dos and don'ts than does HN: http://www.reddit.com/help/reddiquette

As memes are appropriate for many of the subreddits, they're obviously excluded. Still, HN is really no different than a subreddit run under the same rules.
Watch An iPad (And GoPro Camera) Survive A 100,000 Foot Drop
Specifically, SPDY is available in Firefox 11:

http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-57351535-12/whats-comin...
I admit that it's hard to measure this in an absolute way (and I agree pageviews is a flawed metric), but I submit that in two years, reddit will be as popular as Twitter is now.
I think some of your code is missing (like where N1 and MAX_ROWS are defined).

Here's mine:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

long *pascal(int row) {
long *ret = (row == 1 ? NULL : pascal(row - 1));
ret = realloc(ret, sizeof(long) * row);
ret[row - 1] = 1;
for (int i = row - 2; i > 0; i--)
ret[i] += ret[i - 1];
return ret;
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
int row = atoi(argv[1]);
long *data = pascal(row);
for (int i = 0; i < row; i++)
printf("%ld ", data[i]);
printf("\n");
free(data);
return 0;
}
I personally adore riddles and algorithmic puzzles, but I too have had to confront the reality that they simply don't provide much information about the candidate's actual coding talent. Instead, where I'm working, we combine a few different strategies to gauge an applicant's overall potential:

1. Nobody gets an onsite interview without solving a coding problem first. These are designed to take a couple of hours for a competent programmer. For each applicant, we send the challenge most functionally relevant to the position they're interviewing for. Despite the negative comments elsewhere about "take-home" problems, I think they expose a lot of information about a person's coding style and thought process that whiteboard code does not. For instance, we recently received a solution to a simple graph-related question that was technically correct and usually fast, but contained at least five nested layers of loops and took forever on a certain class of edge cases. The candidate obviously understood the problem, but seemed oblivious to the fragility of his solution. You can't grade for style or really pound the edge cases in an onsite interview, because candidates usually have their hands full enough finding any solution.

2. At least two of the interviewers spend the majority of the time on big-picture, conceptual, and software design questions.

3. I split my interviews between puzzles (the 17-minute bridge, the 200m building with 150m of rope, etc) and algorithmic questions. However, I don't care about whether the candidate answers my riddles correctly or not; I'm only observing behavior and process: in other words, whether they remain calm despite uncertainty, and whether they ask relevant questions that reveal more information about the problem and make observations that narrow the possible space of solutions. (For example, in the bridge question, realizing that the slowest people should cross together is as good as a solution to me.) I do care about their responses to the algorithm questions (e.g., find a subrange of an array that sums to 0), but mainly to determine whether they have a reasonable idea of which data structures to use, and how effectively they detect problems with the rough solutions that go up on the board at first.
Show HN: Get Startup Advice from Steve Blank
It really depends on the expectations that the business sets. Customers go to Walmart for the cheap stuff. Some people may go to Starbucks for the experience. If you go for the experience and you get bad customer service then you will never go back.
Thats hard to say, because I don't know what google was really going to buy. 51% of the company for 6 billion? Or were they going to acquire everything?

Right now I believe Groupon's valuation is around 25 billion, but they only offered something like 10% of their shares for public bidding.
It would be a lot easier if done in javascript
If you do it right, then yes it will help your reviews. I suggest actually using iRate (https://github.com/nicklockwood/iRate)

The advantage of these libraries is that you can ask at a specific time, say the tenth launch.
This is a tangent but why is sudo needed != usable?
Low reporting of clinical trial data in key U.S. database
> it cost me a few thousand dollars to delete my millions enities from the datastore after a migration job (ikai never replied my post though...) and im still paying since the deletion is not completed yet (spending 100-300$ a day for the past 2 weeks now!!).

I don't know much about GAE, but a datastore-as-a-service that takes 2 weeks to delete your data and charges $300 a day to do so just seems... absurd.
Software engineering is an interactive endeavor most of the time. My regular day-to-day work often involves getting in front of a whiteboard with another engineer or two and drawing pictures, writing code, iteratively designing things, etc. If you can't think in front of a whiteboard, your working process may not be a good match, at least not for me.
Exactly...the source code for your BYOB you used to learn python say? Or even a fork and pull request to a project to fix even a small bug or add a minor feature.

On the one hand I'd agree for students/juniors it isn't a deal breaker. But students/juniors that do have it are showing a great deal of enthusiasm and passion for programming.
"You just need enough other people's money."

The point of a tax is that it is not your money. It is societies money. "The public's" so to speak.
Anyone willing to turn it into business?
Put comments in code, and then run your code through YUI or similar to strip the comments and whitespace when deploying.
I don't really like your website. Specifically the image of the iPhone. It's a good size but most of it is the iPhone bezel. There is no way to understand specifically what the app does and how by looking at it. Make it the full iPhone height and add obvious arrows to let the user manually progress through a 3 step "this is what it is" in the form of images.
Mozilla Preps First Extended Support Version Of Firefox
Do you need to test this in more than, say, 5 cities? If not, why not get 1 month of 5 of the cheapest vps's you can find, and proxy via them.
[LuaJIT author here:]

I'm not so sure the business model of LuaJIT can easily be applied to other open source projects. I mean, I've been running a business for more than 15 years. I basically downscaled consulting as I've acquired paid open source work. It pays less, but I'm happier now.

I think you'd have a hard time doing this from zero, without some backup plan or enough funds of your own. Well, have a look at the price point of scripting languages, toolchains and such. Getting a vague business plan for an open source project in the toolchain/middleware business through a VC round? I don't think so.

Business knowledge was essential, too. Negotiating open source sponsorship contracts with corporate lawyers for half a year is not that easy. Some companies were extremely easy to work with, but I guess sponsoring open source projects is simply not an established business procedure at most companies. I don't think you could possibly afford to hire an international IP lawyer to do this for you.

Actually it was the economic downturn of 2008 which triggered all of this. The (rarely followed) advice is to invest in a downturn, because you'll be the first one to come out ahead in the following upturn. Ok, so I invested my time and knowledge into a new project (#). It worked out for me, but in retrospect I realize it was a high risk investment.

Final words: you think we're seeing some kind of downturn again? Carefully assess the risks and the potential for yourself. But don't be shy if you're onto something good. Innovate, don't replicate.

(#) LuaJIT 2.x is a complete rewrite, using the experience gained working on LuaJIT 1.x, but very little of its code. It's been on my backburner since 2007 and the first public release of LuaJIT 2.0 was at the end of 2009. One might say it's about a two man-year investment before it started to pay back. Most of the time was spent on doing research and prototyping rather than writing code. I coded and then threw away almost three complete virtual machines in the process, because these approaches turned out to be dead ends. I bet you'd need a lot of courage to explain this to a VC. ;-)
It goes right into the review page by using a special url.
That would still involve knowing an IP address that the GeoIP database would associate with a particular city.

@no4clipper: If it doesn't matter WHICH city (so long as it's a different one, and you can independently verify that that city is correct), then I'd be more than happy to click on a link or two and take some screen shots for you.
Asking FizzBuzz is a lot easier than reviewing code, which may or may not be theirs.
2012 Guide to Google Webmaster Tools – Analytics Integration, +1 Metrics
iRate works on the Mac App Store as well (https://github.com/nicklockwood/iRate)
It takes more effort to understand the nuances of code written using significant whitespace than it does with a C style language where statements are clearly broken up for you. There is less room for ambiguity, and less room for user error.
Funny, that's a question my friend asked me the other day because he couldn't figure it out in an interview. Took me half an hour to solve this thing. Would definitely have failed the interview question myself, imagine doing it when someone was watching your every move!?
Why Siri is all hype
The state of programming is so awful, that I'm literally just looking to know: do you write fat controller actions..or whatever equivalent exists for the specific technology you used.

That, to me, is 100x more important than "how many zeros are in 100 factorial"
The reviews I've seen for the Lenovo ThinkPad X120e have been pretty good. Better-than-Atom performance and high build quality are the highlights. It's not in the same ballpark as a Core-based machine, but PC World's reviewer wrote, "Given the choice between characterizing the X120e as an underpowered ultraportable or as a wonderful netbook, I'm going with the latter." Here's the review: http://bit.ly/flRyih

If you can swing the price, the X220 splits the difference between netbooks and regular notebooks, and uses Core (i3-i5-i7) processors.
5 minute Erlang version:

-module(pascal).
-export([tri/1]).

tri(Depth) ->
tri(Depth,[[1]]).

calc_row_rest([_]) ->
[1];
calc_row_rest([X,Y | Rest]) ->
[X + Y | calc_row_rest([Y | Rest])].

calc_row(Acc) ->
[1 | calc_row_rest(Acc)].

tri(X,_) when X =< 0 ->
[];
tri(1,Acc) ->
lists:reverse(Acc);
tri(Depth,Acc) ->
NewRow = calc_row(hd(Acc)),
tri(Depth-1,[NewRow | Acc]).

Returns a list of the pascal triangle rows:

> pascal:tri(10).
[[1],
[1,1],
[1,2,1],
[1,3,3,1],
[1,4,6,4,1],
[1,5,10,10,5,1],
[1,6,15,20,15,6,1],
[1,7,21,35,35,21,7,1],
[1,8,28,56,70,56,28,8,1],
[1,9,36,84,126,126,84,36,9,1]]
The file isn't lost, it's just not seeded from S3 anymore. It's not a backup service, it's a way to transfer large items to family/friends. If it had existed at the time, I'd have used it to send my wedding photos and videos, for instance, instead of burning them to a dvd and mailing them.
Clearly you aren't their target market. The "instead of an ad, here's x" pictures have proven to be fairly popular.