skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
don't be cheap. either pay some, or give some equity. I know the job market sucks, but great students have jobs for sure.
http://startuply.com/#/QA%20type%3A%22Engineering%22/1
Why Obama should ditch YouTube
I think new startups launching is more interesting than new features, but I do think new features are great to hear about.
We're hiring at Ning, more or less all roles: front and back end engineering, operations, product mgmt, UX, QA, various management roles. On the eng side we have java, ruby (not rails (okay, there is one rails app)), c, php, and whatever-or-not, the focus is on getting the job done with the right tool for the job not the language or framework.

http://about.ning.com/jobs.php

Email me if I can answer any questions -- my HN username @ning.com
And when they do finally get it working, very nearly everything they praise is also true of other DVCSs. Mercurial, in particular, is already quite well documented and significantly easier to use, with very little loss in features (look at the extensions).

Git has the buzz, though, and many people fail to notice anything else.
Just saw Alan's post -- hi Alan!
To add to Tony's: http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/11/using-adwo...
Probably lucky outliers.

Any data mining driven approach that shows good returns is arbitraged out of existence almost immediately, unless it's niche and thus unscalable to a larger fund. All the blackbox systems end up doing pretty much the same thing and getting low returns. The markets are simply too dynamic for a pure data and algorithms system to work. One needs to use theory to win, and the guy picking the theories in the program is exactly the same thing as a manager in the first place.

The only way to get rich from a naive blackbox is to twist the risk knob up to 11, which always goes badly eventually.
I've often thought something like this would be useful, but I'm missing a few things (and you have a bug, I can't leave my e-mail blank because it says that e-mial is already taken).

1 - I can't figure out how to add a bookmarklet. I can only add you page
2) I wouldn't go to a page to enter in the sites to save, that is too much of a pain in the ass - a browser plug-in would be much better.
I'm mostly talking about the lower level code monkeys. And sure someone can have dollar signs in his eyes, but still leak some information anonymously if they think its something unethical
Another problem is consumers, and investment in general has been made on frivolous things that don't increase are productivity.

I guess the easiest way to explain this is by looking at how people invest their time. We would be better of if the nation invested time in becoming a better worker, learned a skill, fixed things than if the the nation spent that time watching tv, drinking, or destroying things (war).We have spent our money on houses that are bigger than we need, cars that are bigger and less fuel efficient than we need rather than plants that we need, investment in companies building new products, even arguably infrastructure.
In the common case, if you've looked at thousands of job listings, you're probably not a programming hero.
I disagree. Words like 'hero', 'rockstar', 'ninja' convey a certain attitude. They also imply that the applicant (if qualified and hired) can take the technology in a new direction.

Basically, these words often mean a senior position, at a (relatively) small company, for low pay.

If you don't mind the pay-cut, you can probably leverage your work there and make a name for yourself.
Maybe this is too far outside of the question, but particularly if you aren't going to be merging the large files, have you considered mirroring them with rsync (http://www.samba.org/rsync/) instead? I'm not sure tracking really large binary files is best handled by a VCS. I'm trying to read between the lines in your question, but would e.g. periodically making dated snapshots of the binaries and otherwise automatically mirroring around the newest version suffice?

The Mercurial page on binary files (http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/BinaryFiles) doesn't say anything about especially large ones.

Also, has anybody had good experience importing from p4 to hg on Windows? I've tried using tailor and some scripts from the mercurial wiki, but no success yet. One of these days I might write my own importer script (mostly because I need to import from five or six major branches, about 50k commits), but haven't had the time yet. (I'm working on Windows for similar reasons. Mercurial has been great for typical VC usage.)
If it helps, I tried modelling 37signals' revenue a while back. Based on some of their posts and a few guesses I think they've got about 10k paying Basecamp customers, and across all their products will have about $8million in turnover this year.

My original blog post is here:
http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2008/02/25/37signals-is-one-...

You can play around with the spreadsheet I created, though I hope to update it soon.

I think it's absolutely easy to see that you can get 5000 users paying $20/month if you provide $20/month of value to your customers! Are you saving them that much per month in other costs, or generating new revenue through your software?
Paul is the Walrus... Who is the entrepreuner?
Because if you're interested in buying an iPhone, you probably are not currently browsing the web on one?
I do know that Scribd launched, got a lot of fanfare, and then DocStoc launched a remarkably similar thing. But that could be just coincidence. Their CEO being an MBA? I'd call that proof!
With automation, markets become exploitable.
Ha. The Virtuozzo Lorem ipsum is pretty hilarious. Didn't notice that before.

True, they have horrible presentation. They should definitely focus on that more than lowering their price.

However, their services (the server itself or the customer service) so far has been great, so I have nothing to complain.
Twitter Acquires ‘Values of n’, Adds Rael Dornfest To The Team
I do several tech events in SoCal through Mixergy.com. I just did one in OC last week. It was held at a PR company's office. There's a growing tech community in LA, OC & San Diego.
Ask HN: Which platform for managing an opensource project (Firefox extension)?
All the data that comes in to our web application is from a Firefox extension that I outsourced because it fell out of my skill set. However I would like to make this extension opensource and manage all the code on my website so when a new stable version is created I can let the users now.

What is the best way/service to use to manage an opensource Firefox extension project. It should allow me to centralize everything in one place.

I was thinking Sourceforge, maybe Google Code? What are your experiences and which one would you recommend.
Right click (or the equivalent on your platform) on the link labeled MarkitForLater Bookmarklet, and add it to your bookmarks. Optionally if you have the bookmark toolbar enabled in your browser you should be able to drag that link to it.

Can you elaborate a bit on #2? I'm not sure I get what your getting at.

Edit: And thanks for the bug report, that should be fixed now!
Maybe there is a secondary objective for excessive interviewing:

"Hazing is often used as a method to promote group loyalty and camaraderie through shared suffering (male bonding in fraternities), either with fellow participants, past participants or both."
I believe travelfli.com/ is going to be doing a similar thing, so make sure you market a lot to get the market share
Give Jason a little time and then go back to this graph. He said in his post that LA entrepreneurs are rabid, but I think Jason is one of the hungriest in the area. Some of the bigger sites, like TechCrunch, already use docstoc on a regular basis.
I'd love to talk to someone who could do some flash work on a freelance basis in the NYC area. Not for a startup, but fun stuff.. Imagination a big plus!

gavin at gavinbrown.com. Include a link to some work.
It would be interesting to hear about what features you identified as good indicators (I'm working in a similarish area).
Does it really matter seeing as if the product takes off, everyone will get rich, and if it doesn't, no one will? Seems like the time would be better off spent coding.
Call me a bluff old traditionalist, but I really fail to understand new economy 2.0. Companies that have no revenue buying other companies that have no revenue and rejecting purchasing attempts from other companies who have no revenue who would pay for them in shares the value of which scarcely exceeds the value of the paper they are printed on.

Is there some ultimate strategy that the twitters, facebooks and youtubes of this world have that I'm too narrow minded to see but will make these companies bigger than Jesus, or is this the same business model as new economy v1?
NYSE:FED is not the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. It is a bank in California.

And the US cannot bail out the Federal Reserve. The United States borrows from the Federal Reserve and pays the Federal Reserve interest on that money. In other words, the US gets its money from the Fed.

A bailout of the Fed would require the US to borrow money from the Fed, who doesn't actually have any money because they need a bailout.
Good point about the lower-level guys, but I'm not sure if that's the majority. As for the leaking, they won't leak if it means jail time or fines, I think, even if the $$ are huge.
Semantic analysis for Exoself
That site is hilarious. Cheering for startups to fail is like depressing teenagers (or shooting fish in a barrel if you prefer).
Twitter has plenty of room to continue growing, this is only the first of many offers they'll receive.

Honestly, that deal is almost as bad as me starting some BS company, getting it valued at several billion by a few generous accountants, and then trying to "buy" a few companies with my inflated value.

Basically there's really nothing of solid value in Facebook right now (especially given this economic situation), other than their hard assets in servers.

Until Zuckerberg comes up with a business plan and turns a profit, I'm sticking to Facebook existing as just another social networking bubble.
I started using Git as a filesystem long before I started using it as an SCM, so I never really went through the 'choosing' process, however, from the people that I talk to about this, Gits popularity tends to be because of the cheap local branching. There is no other system out there that is nearly as good at this as Git. Baz, Merc, Darcs, SVN, Perforce, CVS - these are all patch or changeset based systems where branching is tacked on in a complicated manner. Even the Hg Book recommends cloning for real branches over the local branch system it has.

This functionality is truly a deal-breaker for most people, and completely changes the way you develop and think about development. There are very few people I've ever met that have learned the git branching system (which is not hard to learn) and then went back to another DSCM. The fact is that none of these other systems are nearly as good at this as Git is because they way they think about history (patches/changesets vs DAG snapshots) is simply not well suited for it.

That, plus the fact that Git usability has improved so much recently that it's hard to argue that any of them are really easier to learn, and super powerful features for more advanced users like the staging area (which I also would hate to live without) I think explain why Git is becoming more popular at such a fast rate.

It's not that the other systems aren't getting love, but that it's getting harder to argue against Git and while all of them share largely the same basic data storage mechanism, Git's is entirely different, so while Git can always make the UI better (and it constantly is), the other systems are having a really hard time trying to catch up with the features Git had from day one.

Others may disagree with me, and will normally argue that it's just a fanboy bandwagon koolaid whatever, but I think that the real reason is that when most people learn Git fundamentals they realize that they become more efficient and none of the other systems can do that for them in the same way.
I found my job through nextNY (Bug Labs) and my girlfriend found hers through new-tech, and the connection from that job led to the one she is currently at.

Anecdotes != conclusions, but for us it worked very well.
Show some respect during the interview process. Possibly make their point of contact an engineer rather than an HR person.

I absolutely agree here. There's nothing which turns good people off more than feeling unappreciated, and HR people simply don't know what to appreciate.

communicate the type of position you're looking at putting the person in before lining up their in-person interviewers

I'd go a step further than that. If you're interviewing someone really good, don't put them through the standard interview process. Invite them to your office and talk to them about what you do. Show them around; have them talk to people in a variety of areas (if you're a large enough organization for that to make sense).

At the end of the day, ask the candidate where he/she thinks they could help you most, and ask your people where they think the candidate could help you most. If there's consensus between the candidate and your people, that tells you what to do. If there isn't consensus... well, then that person wasn't actually the great candidate you thought he was.
What if your business partner dies? I thought everyone needs to confirm you are dead? What if they are dead?
I wrote up a blog post with the story, it was on HN earlier this year http://dmix.ca/2008/06/7-reasons-why-my-social-music-site-ne...
The best idea I ever had remains figuring out how to write content my customers wanted to read. The second best idea was figuring out how to make it scale with regards to dollars invested instead of my time. Everything else about my marketing is commentary.
Like dating, it's a numbers game.

Exactly, business and dating have more parallels than people like to admit, it all comes down to forming relationships.

Numbers are good, first impressions are better, and solid performance are best. Once you have a track record it is a lot easier, because woman .. err .. businesses always want the guy everyone else has.
What does acruw mean or stands for?
If you want one of these people, don't waste their time with phone interviews and things like that, just get them scheduled to come in as soon as possible.

I wouldn't worry about skipping the phone screen. But if your phone screener comes away saying "wow, this guy is amazing", bring them in for face-to-face meetings as soon as you can.

It's far more important to make sure that when you bring someone on-site, you make good use of that time. I'll forgive an hour spent on a phone screen far more easily than a day wasted because I flew down to San Francisco for a day of interviews with the wrong people.
Is it my data, or am I giving it to the startup? Why is it OK for me to not have a way to get my data should your service die, or get acquired, or the terms change? Would it be OK for Apple/Microsoft to not allow you to back up your data in a reasonable, portable format?

These are still things we as users of these "cloud" services have yet to really question, yet it's going to be important as we move away from desktop applications and more towards the "cloud." It's scary.

And, to answer your question, if I was running a popular startup, I would want to keep that popularity by being reasonable when users of my system asked for things. Seems like a reasonable request to me.

> even if it was counter to your business model?

What kind of business am I running if I don't listen to my users? Probably not a profitable one.
Value of a reminder before your meeting? Priceless. Value after? $0.
Working on a slide deck and looking for other examples of the rapidly decaying value of information.

Any ideas? I'll buy contributors a beer at Ireland's Four Courts pub in Arlington, VA.
This is like gossip on a scale I've never seen
accrue? as in accruing miles?
Yeah we're using mercurial, what of it? Did I mention we use mercurial?
How's this different/better than Instapaper?
Hence the footnote. It's a little in-joke that it seems you didn't find funny. I encourage anyone who's turned off by that part of the job post to please apply anyways. My above post was made as an individual, not as a representative of the company, and cannot be taken as a representative sample of Disqus's mean level of seriousness.
Probably should plug my own place huh?

In NYC

http://buglabs.net/jobs

We're often putting up new jobs. At the moment we are looking for a QA engineer and a business intern (that one is probably San Fransisco but I'm not sure).

I'm not very in tune with our hiring but for a while we were looking for development engineers too. I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to drop a resume if you have experience with embedded Linux development (OpenEmbedded especially), JavaME/PhoneME, Eclipse plug-in development, and a passion for open source.
Why would infertility in males result in fewer males? Since reproduction requires both, wouldn't it result in fewer males and females (assuming otherwise constant rate of reproduction)? I can't think of any evolutionary explanation.
I just recently saw a presentation by a guy out of Harvard at the University of British Columbia. He found the a full 1/3 of High-Tech startups divide the equity equally and that an equal division was a predictor of future trouble later on. Insert generic correlation is not causation critique here, but still the results are interesting. We were under direction not to distribute the paper otherwise I would link to it.
Ironically that Google search you link to now shows your exact post as the top result ;-)
Rael Dornfest's (Values of n) Goodbye Post
woti.com
Computer Scientist (all levels) -
Crystal City, Virginia

Design and develop high-performance, data exploitation and web-database applications following a standard life cycle development model, including unit test development and quality assurance. Experience with Linux, Python, HTML, and SQL is required. Javascript or C++ language experience is a plus. Oracle database programming (and preferably performance tuning) experience is also a big plus. The ideal candidate will have strong written and verbal communications skills; ability to work effectively in a team environment, including a strong ability in troubleshooting production software.
woti.com
Buying Twitter in $500m or less
My joke was just meant to illustrate that taking on too much debt was exactly what got us into this mess.
Mechanical_fish asked the right question: What do you want to build? Once you know what you can get passionate about, figure out what people commonly use to build apps in that arena.

Some suggestions:

Rich media websites? Flash/Actionscript

"Desktop-class" web apps? Cappucino or SproutCore

Business web apps? Java or C#, SQL

Aiming to work at a startup? Rails/Ruby or PHP, SQL

Desktop apps? Objective-C or .NET, SQL

Looking to expand your mind? Erlang, Lisp, Haskell, or OCaml

Hardware or Operating Systems? C, C++

Hope that helps. This is by no means a complete (or even totally accurate) list, so others please jump in.
This is the important one. Instapaper offers an RSS feed and a top-notch iPhone app, too.
"If we can deal with programming languages, text editors, and operating systems here then music people should be just fine."

I certainly hope you posted that from a Ruby script written in vi on Ubuntu.
"In fact, we have almost as many graduate degrees as we do college drop outs!"

Hmm... This post is difficult for me. On one hand, I don't want to negatively impact Justin.tv. On the other hand, I feel obligated to let everyone know that if you don't have a college degree or other qualifying credentials, you probably won't get hired there.

I went in for an interview, and as far as I could tell, I passed. But afterwards, Justin took me to a bookstore across the street and told me that their investors felt they needed to hire "more qualified" developers. So I wasn't brought on board.

My credentials: I dropped out of high school when I got hired in the gamedev industry. When I went in for the interview, I had been in the industry for about three years, and had been programming in general for 8. So if you have credentials similar to mine, it would probably be better to not waste the time in the interview. But if you have credentials that would convince an investor that you should be hired (college degree, etc), then go for it.

Sorry, JTV. I wasn't going to say anything until I saw "we have almost as many graduate degrees as we do college drop outs" ... this gives people a false sense of hope, from my point of view.
yes! send me a line - email is in my profile.
Branching was by and far the winning feature for me. SVN made branching and tagging very time consuming (making a full copy, to the server nonetheless). Merging correctly on SVN? Never the first time! Usually took 2-3 tries before you got the syntax correct. Dry-run never really helped either. SVN merging was leagues harder to learn then the entirety of git for me.

The simplicity of making a local directory versioned is wonderful too. It has use far beyond code. I can quickly version my documents folder, easily recover from mistakes, and with one little push I have a backup! To even try to do this in SVN was another headache, and it required an SVN server somewhere... with git I don't have to push if I don't want to.
The has_many_polymorphs plugin is also broken in 2.2 as of right now.
Thinking about it. But I can't code. :(
There is no "being sure" before you start learning, because in order to determine what you like, you first have to learn your options. It's better to just pick something and start than to forever wait for the "right" thing.

Personally, I made a choice between learning Ruby and Python based mostly on emotion: I found most Python code samples more aesthetically pleasing.
I imagine it's the incredulity over a company being continually financed without a revenue model.
Yes, they work wonderfully. Start with simple, quick-to-solve and quick-to-check problems, since the vast majority of applicants can't actually code.
Hello, HN!

If anyone is looking for programming work near Eugene, Oregon, they should definitely check us out:

http://eugene.craigslist.org/sof/898533379.html
http://www.otsys.com

(I'm a HN lurker and happy On Systems Employee.)
I use Rails, but would add Django/Python to the "startup" list
Our import from p4 doesn't have to work in windows. We're comfortable in Linux, we just can't develop in it.

You are correct, the binary files will not be merged. Some of them are large encrypted databases and can't be merged. The database is built based on source that may be merged, but the merge will happen in the source, and when the source merge is complete we'd rebuild the databases and check in the result. The largest number of binary files are compiled programs and very rarely change.

You're suggesting something a lot of other people in this topic have suggested. I would love to implement some kind of binary file management system; it just isn't going to happen. These binary files don't need to be merged, but they will be changing semi-frequently and are likely to be different between branches. We don't have the time and manpower to implement a system that would work for us. Either the VCS needs to handle these files or we can't use it.

I think I found a config setting deep in the dark heart of git that can make a repository friendly to large binary files. I'll check it out, and if it works we could create a set of repositories for these binary files. I'll try this and see how it goes. ( http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/archives/git/0607/24058.html )

I'm really trying to find a way to use Hg, but if it can't handle our use-case we can't use it. That doesn't mean it's a bad VCS. I really like some of its features and the fact that it is far simpler than git. I also really like that it has file explorer integration. It just needs to handle projects with an obnoxiously large code base and large binary files.