skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A startup is not a 5000 person corporation and shouldn't be run as such. I remember the author posting a Show HN last February introducing his company. At that point in time he was still in a full time job. Now, I don't know what's happened in the life of his company over the past 11 months, but I would venture to guess he has less than 10 employees. I'd even venture to guess it's somewhere less than 5. At this stage you're more looking for collaborators, not people to manage. And when you're looking for early stage employees you should really be looking for a true personality fit, in addition to the required technical prowess (which, incidentally, doesn't necessarily mean "knows ruby").

Yes, hiring is hard. Yes, as an early-stage startup it will take you a very long time to hire. But you have to remember those you're hiring today will make or break the company tomorrow. Their "5 yr plan" should have no bearing on whether or not they get a job at a very early startup, but by the end of the interview you should know not only that they're technically capable, but can roll with any changes you foresee the company making, and that they have the right personality to mesh with you and the rest of your team (you'll be spending a lot of time together - could you grab beers with them?). You should also know that they're so sold on the idea and vision of your company that their 5 year plan and your 5 year plan become one (or are at least related). Realistically, your startup probably won't even be alive in five years.

Of course I know a lot of people look at things differently, and I have complete respect for different opinions and methods (and love reading about them). We're still trying to figure out hiring ourselves, but I think the best engineers come with all sorts of non-corporate eccentricities. If we had followed the author's suggestions, we wouldn't have hired either of our two founders (including myself) or our first engineer. I'll leave it up to the reader to decide whether that would have been a mistake or not. :)
I am in the middle; our candidates are screened by HR (a process I'm not super fond of), then they come to me for various levels of tech/cultural fit interviewing. Then my comments are forwarded for final approval. Generally, if I say "hire", they hire. If I say "run", they run.

And yes - trivial programming questions do weed out a fair number of candidates. However... it's tricky. A trivial programming question can look different to many different people, especially if they have varying skill levels and depending on their level of comfort in interviews.

I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. If one question stumps them, I'll try to gauge their understanding with another similar (but different enough) question. If that doesn't work... sometimes I'll give them another shot, but usually I'll start winding the interview down.
To be honest, I do not like the idea.
I do not use node much, only played with it a little.
Now about CoffeeScript, I CANT read it, hurts my brain pretty bad, and I fail to see how can it be good.
I'd be curious to see whether there's any substantial performance differences
"For some reason, the logic on the east coast, and even in a lot of SV is, 'If you can code, then you can only code. Forever.'"

Unfortunately, that's not only an east coast thing. It seems to be related to the size of the company. The larger the company, the more they seem to feel/act that way :/
No, there is not and we don't plan on adding any when we submit them to Amazon.

Here's Peter's/our take on DRM: http://www.peterarmstrong.com/?p=257 (this is slightly out of date, since Peter only talks about PDFs in the post).
It's the same way the Obama administration forced ACTA (some copyright related treaty) on some countries, mostly in secret. And now they are trying to get it passed in EU, too.
Appeals to genetics are usually made by the successful to convince the unsuccessful that their success was inevitable.By doing that they help ward off potential competitors.
Not to take a thing away from Reddit, but there are a lot of bored people out there and they don't know that many great places on the internet. To compound that, mobile devices have created more time when you can be doing something else (i.e. between commercials, on the bus, etc.).

It's not that there aren't a lot of great websites out there, it's just that most people I know only go to 2-5 regularly. Reddit is a great site, but I know a lot of people who go there 30 minutes after they just clicked through 100 links hoping there's something new (and then when they're bored posting about it - http://www.reddit.com/search?q=blue+links). I'm not sure why, but either people can only remember a few websites, other sites suck or they can't be found.
No no no no no! This kind of thinking is for those in it for the money. If you're in anything for the money you won't get very far. It's not that this is wrong advice. Things do work the way he says but no one should be following this advice. Would you encourage your child to grow up to be mediocre or encourage the kid to be the best.

If selling a mediocre product is what you're passionate about then by all means go for it but do not look for the easy buck by doing so because it's just not there. Time and time again we're reminded as consumers that we don't know what we want until someone shows it to us. You can give the people what they want in a way that changes the world.

This whole thing is just wrong. It's hard to argue because it's right in a sense but at the same time no one should be approaching things in such a cynical way. Let's all just forget this was ever written and hope no one listens.
I'm curious -- how does a company come to own the likeness of their former CEO?

If anyone would be suing, wouldn't it be Steve Jobs' family? Or did Steve Jobs actually sign rights to his likeness over to Apple in perpetuity?
Are you serious?

That's like saying you it's better to own a website, rather then own Amazon EC2 or <insert any datacenter here>.
98% of toilet paper rolls the US come from virgin forest? And the only source for this is the Daily Mail? Riiight.

I did a quick search, and found a more reliable article[1] from the New York Times that states that 25-50% comes from tree farms, and most of the remainder comes from second-growth forests, not virgin forests.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/world/americas/26iht-paper...
Coding Contest Could Get You a Job Interview With Facebook, Apple and Amazon
OR...

having one large company on the internet be the "distribution" company for a bunch of media creators sounds a lot like cable TV doesn't it? I think we actually DO want the media fragmented across multiple providers. We should look at it as a Good Thing that media creators distribute their own media, no matter how big they are.
The alternatives often seem to come in the form of communities splintering. e.g. /r/gaming, /r/gamingnews /r/games, /r/truegaming etc. The expansion and decline in quality (i.e. rage comic spam) is usually followed quite rapidly by new sub-reddits being created and communities forming with stricter areas of moderation.
$1CPM for the whole page (all the spots) would be very tough for a social news site, doubly so for one with porn and triply so for one with porn and reddit's demographic.

To put that in perspective, if Facebook were to get $1CPM they would be bringing in over $1B a month from just advertising. Facebook's revenue is about a third of that and doesn't all come from advertising (Facebook Credits and what not). It's even more bleak considering that Facebook has the ability to target advertising much better than reddit.

They can certainly make a bundle of cash, but it's a tough nut to crack.
Why not an if statement?
Is there such a thing as a good developer who can't write pseudocode because he is unable to look past bugs, bad code, and correct APIs? I've never heard of such a beast.
The UK NHS is usually regarded as being extremely efficient, but not the most effective health system e.g.:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/aug/07/nhs-among-most...

Private health care in the UK really isn't that expensive - I have it for our accident prone family of 3 and I don't think it's more than about £400 a month, with pretty minimal excess levels (about £100 per treatment). Note that I get this as part of my pay from my employer - which is fairly common.

Note that for anything like an emergency or a child birth you will want to be in an NHS hospital - for a variety of reasons...
I know they suffered a big drop when it came out that they were manually curating the links on their front page. I don't remember the details, but that's what did it for me.
I find Twilio's calls to be very expensive. If you're serious about keeping costs down(and writing an app that is primarily voice), a better solution is Asterisk in the cloud with say, Adhearsion (https://github.com/adhearsion/adhearsion).

I don't think Twilio is a serious threat to the old telecom companies. But I am a huge fan of cutting out intermediaries.
That's awesome news!

Learning about Custora just now - would it be a good fit for a SaaS business?
Height is heritable yet highly subject to manipulation at a young age.
To be crystal clear, HBO content has never been on Netflix streaming. This story is about HBO making it harder for Netflix to lend out the DVDs by not selling them to them at a discount.
It isn't like that because paying money to someone in exchange for merely being evaluated is an easy way to fall for a scam: the evaluator has a significant incentive to offer this deal to people who will fail.

It is much more like having to travel 90 minutes each way to get to where they want you to interview. That could be very offputting if you do enough interviews that three hours each adds up to a big number, but at least you don't need to worry about them being tempted to rip you off.
That is a reasonable theory, and I was always personally very concerned about that, but in practice it didn't seem to be the case. It seemed that the opposite occurred: people who didn't even want jobs did the puzzles just for fun, and asked us if they got the right answer.

Of course, we couldn't easily do A/B experiments, so we'll never really know how the true attract:alienate ratio.

Trying to look at it objectively, I would probably be somewhat put off by being required to do a puzzle to "prove myself", but would then find the specific puzzles offered to be pretty interesting, and worth playing around with. Perhaps it's not tantamount to a $300 tax on ones life it is seemed fun and valuable in its own right?
Condé Nast had no idea what they were buying. The best decision they made, one I'm sure that was the result of the Reddit team making the case for it, was relatively hands off mgmt.

I suspect CN still doesn't really know what to do with it other than sit back and not screw it up.
It requires a subscription to HBO. HBO is only available via cable companies.
Building Timeline: Scaling up to hold your life story
Justin.tv Moves Domains from GoDaddy
Ok, but where does the if statement go, particularly if it's reused in a few places, from different classes? Putting it into a util class by itself seems like a reasonable thing to do in that case.
note: I will reply to your emails in the next 24 hours
I agree, for some things it's better to be centralized, but not too centralized. I wouldn't want it to make it simpler for them to convince the "leaders" of EU to adopt a law for the whole EU. The balance in EU needs to be weighted very carefully between centralization and decentralization, and centralization should have the minimum necessary power for the actual good of the Union. Too bad that knowing politicians, they always get carried away and think more centralization = always better.
must be nice to have such a large pool of people to interview to fit your needs perfectly, especially for technical people. The OP's points are valid and I feel the same way about _almost_ all of them. Even when I worked in the large corporate(s), I always hired people as if they were working for me in an intimate setting like a startup. Hiring capable, yet diverse, people always provided me with a winning team.
Carte r4 pour ds
Nintendo DS is one of the best gaming consoles available in the market and people are looking for the best carte pour ds gaming console to playing all the available game and enjoyed a lot.
"Doctors in all NHS systems have limited salaries."

Senior doctors in the UK NHS often work "on the side" in private hospitals to boost their income to extremely comfortable levels - their basic salaries aren't too bad when you consider that the cost of medical training in the UK is nothing like as expensive as the US.
If you want to do it yourself, it's a somewhat involved process where you get an account with Amazon, provide a US tax id (annoying for those of us out of the US, but we got ours in less than a week) and then upload the mobi file through a web interface.

When we get the feature completed on Leanpub, it will involve you filling out a form (we need to know a few things like the description and what categories you would like your book listed under) and clicking on a button on Leanpub. We'll do the rest.

We'll charge a one-time fee for the service, and you'll get an ISBN as part of the deal, but you will get 100% of the money from Amazon or Apple -- we won't take a cut of the sales.
Why I Brought Back Simple Desks
Wikipedia (with sources tha may or may not be better than the Daily Mail) says the average American uses about half a tree worth of toilet paper a year[1]. I don't know about the virgin forest bit, nor how hard it is to find toilet paper from recycled sources (it is one of the lowest grade papers, so I think would be easy to produce from recycled fibers).

If you're worried about the environment, some other possible resolutions:
* eat vegetarian one day a week
* vow not to drive for errands less than a mile away
* switch to low-energy light bulbs

(Caveat: Un-sourced claim) I suspect any one of those would offer a benefit for mother nature at least an order of magnitude above not using toilet paper.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper#Environmental_cons...
I started working on a Computer Science textbook about a year ago.

I found out that people were not interested in using it.

This is what I had made so far:

http://opentextbook.info/

Interestingly enough, I posted this info on Slashdot and it was removed almost right away.
GAE and Heroku have different kinds of limits.

Heroku limits you to one dyno, which is equivalent to one server instance (mostly to one server process). So if your app is serving requests from Ruby, then on the Bamboo stack at least it can only serve one request at a time. For static content this doesn't bother me though, as on the Bamboo stack you also have Varnish, which has great async behavior a really good performance for serving static assets.

GAE has daily limits. For instance you have 28 frontend instance hours, which get depleted quickly when using multiple instances. You also have a 1 GB bandwidth limit, which apparently is really insufficient for serving images bigger than small logos (looking at their dashboard now). And the list goes on. It's OK for low to medium traffic, if you're not doing lots of background processing and if you're not serving big files.

AWS's free tier allows for renting a micro-instance for a whole year. However the micro instances, as I discovered, have really poor performance characteristics. They work in bursts of available CPU. So one minute they may have better performance characteristics than the next instance type and the next minute a micro instance can get completely frozen with pending activity.

I don't like AWS micro instances. You're much better off paying for a small Linode instance, something like $20 / month.
Facebook pay-to-play for brands? Not really...
Relevant:

In December, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told an investors conference that HBO's online viewing service, HBO GO, was "the competitor we fear the most."
nice post. Can anyone share the tools/hacks that he is talking about? what worked for you, and what didn't?
Very good example of why developers are dumb for writing mobile apps. It makes zero business sense with the exception of the very few who sell hundreds of thousands.

Apple screws the developers and we all bend over. What a joke!
The trouble with monads
Absolutely, correlation between college degree and employment does not show any causation between the two. Not only is intelligence a factor in going to school and getting a job, but so is parental income, responsibility, upbringing, etc. If only more journalists had taken a statistics class while they were at college we might not see these same fallacies repeated over and over in the media.
Frontier and Comcast to name two...
This still ignores the fact that Twilio or MagicJack or I'm On Crack all run on a physical backbone. You can't connect to the internet through the cloud - not sober, anyways.

There is a difference between Twilio, a telephony retailer, and AT&T, a telephony retailer an distributor. These services may hack you away from the retail arms of the telcos' retail arms, but it does nothing against the distribution businesses.
How Banks Are Using Your Money to Create the Next Crash
diffstats are misleading since it looks like he stripped at least 20 lines of comments from each file (license blurb). If Coffescript really did remove that much code I would seriously consider switching. Most research has shown that bug count is pretty heavily correlated to source line count.
Still that is a suboptimal divide, and leaves a discovery problem. Someone will solve it and replace reddit in at least some profound ways.
Another article from the New York Times states that less than 2% of TP for at-home use is made from 100 percent recycled fibers. In the other 98% of TP, it appears, contains some paper derived from wood from virgin forests. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/science/earth/26charmin.ht...
I wish I had your problems :)
But actually as a "wanna-be" entrepreneur I am probably more qualified to answer your question since I probably spend more time than I should fantasizing about what I would do with my free time if I somehow managed to escape the black-holeish gravitational pull of a 9-5.

In terms of my own goals I would try becoming better at things that I currently don't have time to work on. And this of course is different for each individual. Personally, I'd paint :)

I would also share my knowledge with whoever was willing to listen. The skills and experience behind your success is something that I'm sure thousands of less-experienced entrepreneurs would kill to have access to. Invariably you will meet new people, hear new ideas, and this in itself should prove very satisfying. It might even give you that extra bit of inspiration you need to restart your own next big project.
The most surprising figure to me is that 65% traffic is from the United States. I think for a lot of the biggest sites, that number is much lower and going down.
I always write working code (at least after debugging), I have a hard time understanding why people cant see the logical fallacy here. Have a programmer write code that may or may not work to test their ability as a developer. When their ability as a developer is measured by being able to write working code. I personally would rather see working code and an explanation of what they have done. I can garner someones ability to write code from that.
Firstly, Congrats! You're in a position that most of us can only dream of. :)

Ok, so now you need to pay attention to articles like this:

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1383376

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2275643

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=398597

- http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/azgs6/iama_guy_who_sol...

- http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/

- http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/05/what-to-do-with-you...

Hope these articles were give you some insight. Again, congrats and lighten up! There is more to life than working.
Recently I found myself counting the revenue streams of local businesses. It's been an interesting exercise, so I thought I'd try sharing it.
^^ What he said.
"hurts my brain" == "don't understand"

*I use vanilla JS.
So 98% contains some virgin fiber, versus 98% coming from virgin forests. A significant difference!
Hi guys, Paul Hontz here. I had a bit of a setback that's forced me to take some time off from TSF, but I'm finally back in the saddle. Things are going to start picking up again next week. Thanks for all of your support!
I left in 03 so AFAIK the researchers using SystemX were coming from ICAM and the Bioinformatics department. The professor I worked under (as a gopher) had a 4way G4 cluster doing protein synthesis. He was very excited to get processor time on this supercomputer.

But whatever, some publicity stunt. They were stupid enough to waste money upgrading and expanding it because no one was using it.
Groupon Chasing $25 Billion Mirage
The training wheels came off | Aslak Hellesøy
If you are going to require a programming test, be prepared to evaluate it.

I agree. It is possible the reviewer didn't think your code would run, couldn't get it to compile, etc. But, nevertheless, you should have received a fuller response than that. If I were still COO at ITA, I would ask someone to look into your particular case to understand what happened.
It tends to reduce LOC from JavaScript by about 30%-50% ... nothing near this as extreme as this auto-generated version.
I think being part of Condé Nast makes monetization a bit weird as well. From what they've written in the past, some of the decisions were due to how Condé Nast views things internally, e.g. Reddit Gold was introduced in part just because it gave a "paying subscribers" number that made sense to a traditional media company's executives and reporting methods.
I didn't prefix or append 1 to each row, like you did. Instead I added the edges of the previous row as special conditions and this caused a lot of trouble.

Realizing and taking advantage of this property of Pascal's Triangle significantly simplifies the problem. I guess it should be obvious, but I didn't consider using it. I don't think it's because I'm stupid (though I might be, I'm not sure) - I think it's because these kinds of problems are far removed from what I work on day-to-day.
I'm learning piano along with my son. We have been using a mix of software and hardware for the last year, mainly Synthesia and a little Piano Booster. His first lesson is tonight, we're interviewing teachers for the next couple weeks. My question for you: does Etude support a midi controller via the ipad camera kit? Or is it just the sheet music, detached from any external inputs? The app page says nothing about this issue.
Here's a way to do it in Haskell:

let step row = zipWith (+) (0:row) (row++[0])

let triangle = iterate step [1]

take 10 triangle
Seven UX Best Practices of Community Design
Regulating the Social Network
I spilled my beer while reading this article. As someone who worked in the "Death Star"(TM), I can tell you what the other commenters in this thread have already stated, but I'd rather make some vague generalizations. Firstly, at&t is huge and have a large number of businesses operating under the at&t umbrella. Secondly, the advances in providing everyone wireless access to phone and data (i.e. pipe), at even today's choked (v)DSL speeds are not even close to being achievable in today's radio technology _theory_, much less experimental implementations. Thirdly, Twilio can and will be reproduced by someone else, and even at&t business solutions. Can Twilio bundle pipe, hosting, cellphone, and advanced app solutions for business into 1 bill like at&t? No.
Don't get me wrong, Twilio is cool, heck we even use it at my company.
SecondCrack now available (static website generator by Marco Arment)
My concern is that this stand may hurt profitability.

I don't think any of us want harassing or pestering, but have come across companies that it is a pleasure to read their email or invite friends.
Simple Desks redesigned, recoded and relaunched