skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was my second thought too (my first thought was to upvote the comment), but at least in the 2-die case, the modulus takes care of it. If you work out the probabilities, the chance of getting 0mod2 = 1/36 (2) + 3/36 (4) + 5/36 (6) + 5/36 (8) + 3/36 (10) + 1/36 (12) = 18/36 = 1/2. Same goes for getting 1mod2. So you end up with a fair result even though the chances for each individual outcome are biased.

I didn't want to go through all 5^7 possibilities for the 7-die case, but I figured it's likely enough that he's right that I'd keep my mouth shut.
A whale of an opportunity
Habit Industries (YC 07) is :)

http://www.fuzzwich.com

http://www.habitindustries.com/jobs
How's the New York scene for tech jobs? I'm going to try for a job in New York at some point (more in direction C++), but New York is not particularly know for being a tech hub in this sense. What's your personal impression about the availability of non-web related programming jobs?
I wonder if patent trolling could be patented? A time machine would be fantastic.
Us college kids are going to need jobs soon too! Anyone looking to add someone to their team come June?
Kaizen for Developers: Lot Size One
SaaS marketing is expensive. Don't look at 37s or JoelonSoftware as successful models-- they have built in advertising for their exact target market with their blogs/content.

Can you spare $500 to find out? If so, do this:

1. Get an adwords account.
2. Research keywords with their keyword research tool. Are people searching for what you're building? How much advertiser competition is there? This will give you some idea of demand (this part is free-- or $5 for the account setup).
3. Build a landing page that explains your value prop as best you can and your pricing. Have a sign-up button that is BIG at the bottom that goes to a "we're in private beta right now" page with a "give us your email address to get an exclusive invite".
4. measure how many people click on the ad. Then measure what percentage click on the signup button. That's a pretty good indication of demand and pricing sensitivity. The email is a bonus-- if you dash someone's hopes and they still are eager enough that they give you an email addy, then there might be some classic "hair on fire" problems that your purporting to solve.

Oh, and +1 for businesses. I've heard 37s say that the vast majority of their revenue comes from biz accounts.
Er yeah what you said.
Understanding Adobe Alchemy (C/C++ to ActionScript compiler)
Ask HN: How has the current economic situation affected your startup?
Has the economic downturn had significant effects on your startup? If so, what kind and how are you dealing with them?

I wasn't sure what effects we would feel at the startup where I work (a "high tech" startup with physical products), as we already had a number of long-term contracts. Our company is self-funded/bootstrapping and apparently has been getting loans to cover payroll. This is where we've been hit, as we can no longer secure those same loans, according to the founder. Needless to say, that's led to major work hours reductions for some and some layoffs (the chief engineer was the most expensive employee...). They've put a lot of employees in a difficult position,which is that they don't think they can pay them (non-core employees) until the next product ships. The problem is, of course, do you work now, hoping to be reimbursed (assuming the company will still be around), or go looking elsewhere...

Edit: What struck me was that this wasn't really a primary problem of our business (or at least our core technologies), but that we ended up getting hit by the wider credit problems anyway.

Any other stories?
5 Ways to Get Usability Testing on the Cheap
You can't evaluate history out of context. In the 20s and 30s everyone was a Fascist or a Communist. It was like in the 60s everyone was a hippy, in the 70s everyone was into disco and swinging.
The 10-person startup I work for, SnapMyLife, is looking for a Rails developer outside of Boston (Needham). Check it out:

http://www.snapmylife.com/static/jobs#rre
Frankly, if you need money fast, then don't sell subscriptions. People pay much quicker and faster if it's a one time fee than if it is a subscription - what you then have to do is that once a year, you bring out something so compelling, that the users are willing to purchase another 'chunk' one time.

After trying the subscription model, and noting the pains the users would go through to NOT have to pay a subscription fee, I switched to a fixed one-time fee.

It makes you work harder to have something new each time, so that the users go through the upgrade cycle.
f * f gives you 25 boxes, number 11, 12, ... 15, 21,...25...55. Assign 3 each of 21 of those to 1..7. If f * f doesn't fall into one of those 21 boxes, repeat until it does.
AFAIK, there's Safari 4 preview for members of ADC Select and Premium.
also see monit / munin
Yes that is the core of our business, the purpose of our blog is to keep people up to date on the happenings in the software marketplace and help with the job search. Not really spammish
Mark Granovetter's Weak Tie in action! :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Granovetter
Here's my shot at a solution:

;; * SPOILER? *

(defun rand7 ()
(loop (let ((result (+ (1- (rand5))
(1- (rand5)))))
(if (< result 7)
(return (1+ result))))))

;; * SPOILER *

edit: If it doesn't work I'd like to know why...
There may be layoffs, but is there any info on what positions are being eliminated? There's a big difference between laying off janitorial staff and laying off product engineers.
We are always looking for top-notch developers in Chicago. We build trading systems on a variety of platforms, including C++, C#, Java, Ruby, and RoR on Windows and Linux. Full-time positions and internships doing agile, test-driven development. Send your resume to my HN username at connamara dot com.
Soaping away your outer dirt may lead to inner evil
If you want a spoiler:

http://ariya.blogspot.com/2007/11/random-number-15-to-17.htm...

He gives a few different ways to solve it, most with uniform distribution.
...business model?
I've found quite a few startups want people with 3, 5, or more years of experience, and not so many that are actively looking for grads. It's somewhat understandable, but those looking for soon-to-be grads (esp. in the NYC area :) should speak up.
Dumb/obvious idea: Generate 7 random numbers, pick the index that had the highest value. (If theres a tie, run it again!)

(Note: not guaranteed to terminate.)
We are happy to take some angry laid off rails developers )))

http://supercoolschool.typepad.com/blog/
It's not the general intent ("sharing") or the community that differentiates them to me. It's the action. Adding a bookmark to del.icio.us is quite different to saying "Wow! Check out this awesome site http://example.com/" on Twitter to my followers - not at a technical level, for sure, but in terms of potential effect.

Of course, it's all semantics really ;-)
People pretend that there's a rational reason that Twitter's model matters to them. One good reason they give is that they might want to build a business on top of the Twitter API and they need an assurance that the company will survive.

I'm pretty sure, though, that most people who post about the "need" for Twitter to have revenue are are actually driven by emotion. Jumping on Twitter is a chance to pretend you're smarter than them. We went through this same cycle with Twitter and their architecture problems.

I'd like to get past that, because tackling the "need" for a Twitter business model is actually kind of interesting. What would you do in their situation? I think they have runway and probably enough support for another round of funding?
Sounds really neat. Please share your implementation with us :)
As a consulting firm (Viget Labs, http://www.viget.com/careers), we have a slightly different relationship with the economy (some companies are more likely to come to us, some are less so). As a result, it hasn't really affected our hiring priorities at all. We're looking most actively for a senior-level Ruby/Rails person, a front-end developer, and some marketing folks...
Ask HN: I'm going to a Uni preview day - what can I talk about?
I'm going for a university open-day tomorrow, I'm applying to do CS, and although I'm not being asked for a formal interview I am trying to think of a few topics to chat about.

I've looked through some news sites, compsci.reddit and a few others but nothing's really struck out at me. I do have a web-application I'm developing on the side that I'm prepared to show them if I can slip that into conversation but what are your suggestions for topical stories?
That's a brilliantly evil way of conducting market research. Well Done!
As a fellow blogger, I'm sympathetic for the bait&switch of clever headlining but... seriously. Saying someone "rebuilt twitter" when you meant only twitter's client-side? That's like saying you re-engineered the space shuttle with a coat of paint.
That's a nice story, but it doesn't apply here. The guy who wrote the article is just dumb.
I would say transparency is very important, for the government as well as Federal Reserve. Fed is responsible for the nations money supply, they are responsible for printing currency as well as deciding at what rates it should be lent(even to US Government). To me these are the powers with which you can control the whole country and its people.

Print more currency, make it easy to borrow which results in people borrowing to buy overpriced things(due to inflation as money supply increases) which sooner or later results in Bubble. When the bubble bursts, people lose their jobs and the value of overpriced things comes back to normal and people end up with Debts. We are in the phase where people are in debt and are losing jobs every quarter, by giving them more money or to the corporations which fired them, it does not make sense at all. In Simple words, It was a Bubble, it Burst. It really does not make sense when someone is infusing more money in the markets assuming prices of houses will go back like they were during Bubble or corporations will hire people assuming 40 or 50% growth every quarter, It's time to wake up now and think rationally. If growth is not organic, its not growth at all, It's Bubble.
Check the Fuckedcompany blog (comments too!) for more info on that. Lost of details and they are not pretty...
Google SearchWiki is Not a Wiki
Sorry, url: http://www.fuckedstartups.com/2008/10/23/leaks-google-to-sla...
Brian Epstein is Not John Lennon, and Neither is Your VC
It is important to know when to tell your VC to back off and let you run your business.
So far the only effect the recent market turmoil has has on tarsnap is that one customer lost most of his savings due to icesave, and decided as a result that he couldn't afford to use tarsnap.

As far as I know, at least; there may be lots of potential customers I don't know about who are potential rather than actual due to the market conditions.
you'd get 98% of the value with 10% of the time invested.

Hard to say. The economics of hiring aren't intuitive - a bad hire can do a lot of damage, esp. if it's a management position (which this wasn't, I know). It's probably better to nicely turn down 10 people (and nicely ask them to re-apply in 6 months) than to let in 1 charming, but conniving and free-riding bullshitter into your team.
We're looking for a Ruby rock star here at Devver.net (http://devver.net). We're a small venture-funded startup that focuses on cloud-based developer tools. We're based in Boulder, CO, but we're comfortable working with a distributed team. If you are interested, contact us at contact@devver.net for more details.
1) Given a number 1 to 5, get a new one if it's 5, else throw away the MSB, you get 2 bits of randomness per number. Subtract one and call it a.

(Now you have two bits of randomness evenly distributed among the set {00, 01, 10, 11})

2) Get another number 1 to 5, toss it if it's 5, take the LSB. Call it b.

(Now you have another bit of randomness, evenly distributed among {0,1})

3) if b == 1 and a == 11, start over. else return (4b)+a+1

Python implementation (with the -1 then +1 factored out):

def one_to_seven(debug=False):
a = one_to_five()
while a == 5: a = one_to_five()
b = one_to_five()
while b == 5: b = one_to_five()
b = (b % 2) * 4
if a+b == 8: return one_to_seven()
return a+b
Actually there's a beta release of Safari 4 for ADC members. I'm running it right now: http://img116.imageshack.us/img116/4453/safari4pq3.png (I changed the icon)
Saas is a great business model as long as you can handle the deferred revenue part of it, essentially you are financing your customers purchase of the software. This can be painful when you are cashflow negative but once you go positive it is terrific as you have a steady and predictable cash flow stream.

I think the biggest benefit of Saas is that it matches the incentives of the vendor and customer far more closely than traditional packaged software. Rather than the sell and run approach of packaged business process software you focus on getting successful deployments and making sure the customer stays happy and around for a long time i.e. low churn rate.
...economic bailout funding model?
Yeah, French culture of complaining at the bar in the NYT !

Our culture is spreading in the USA !
We are (Ning): http://about.ning.com/jobs.php

Software developers (front end PHP focused and backend distrubuted Java focused) and QA engineers are especially needed.
Here's a related question: I'll posit that there is a higher density of "very desirable" top-notch hackers being thrown into the job market than at any other time in my 15-year career. You know the people: the ones that rarely hit the normal job market because with one or two emails, they can line up their next gig in an afternoon throught their network or friends-of-friends.

For those of us who are hiring, what strategies can we use to ensure that we in-person interview more of those candidates (with whom we can generally sell them) and spend less time on the "perma job seekers" that seem to form the bulk of the job applicant population. I don't mean to sound overly elitist, but if I've only got 1 spot open, I want to take a shot at selling the very best candidates, and spend as little time interviewing the also-rans as possible. (This is in regards to professional hires; our college-level recruiting program is in good shape, and there's less change from last year there than in the landscape for professional hires)
Sure, who want's an internship (unpaid, see my profile)?
I'm QA & looking for a job any ideas?
"16384 PB ought to be enough for everybody!"
experimental evidence says that it is in fact a uniform distribution:

r = random.Random()

def one_to_five():
return r.randint(1, 5)

def mod_seven():
return (sum(one_to_five() for x in xrange(7)) % 7) + 1

def test_dist(lst):
return [(x, lst.count(x)) for x in [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]]
Tell that to Jim Simons, math PHD and multi billionaire founder of Renaissance Technologies- a hedge fund based entirely on computer trading. There is certainly room in finance for quants.
This city does has non web related businesses. New York is known for finance and stocks. I have a friend who writes financial modeling software for a hedge fund. The scene does exist, but you have to go look for it. If you expect to go into a cafe and be surrounded by developers and tech folks, you will be vastly disappointed.

The more events and meetups I attend the more I realize that this city is full of great talent, interesting companies and even some reputable VC's. The biggest "problem" for me personally has been weeding through all the non tech people to find others who are doing things that interest me.
Evidently, "to the pure, all things are pure."
Thanks for the suggestions, everyone!

If you need a Rails consultant, contact me. :) http://andrewcantino.com
tough time to be in finance...it looks like there's a net job outflow from Wall St, including for engineering positions.
As others have mentioned, the key distinction is whether you're targeting individuals or businesses.

Typically you'll have a tough time convincing individuals to part with $20 per month and typically there's a free alternative.

It's much easier to convince businesses to spend the same amount and, as a bonus, many will be suspicious of free offerings. In fact, others will subscript to a higher premium tier purely to "buy the best for my business."

I always refer people to this StartupSchool talk by DHH of 37signals which outlines their business model, and explains their focus on small businesses:
http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hans...
Proven is a very strong word. Care to state your proof?
Which basically means to say that the entire security of the site is based on the ability of my designates to have my best interests at heart... and also not to have installed a spam filter, moved, changed email or otherwise become unreachable to a service that pretty much becomes forgettable after 6 months or so.

I'd much rather trust myself to manage things, to be honest.
Good God, the smoking nannies have got to France, too!
As has already been mentioned, LyX and TeXmacs are possibilities. Try plain LateX a few times before jumping for the wysiwyg option. It may be nice to see the final output immediately but the benefit of macros combined with the advanced capabilities of editors like emacs makes pure latex a breeze to work with once you get the hang of it.
If he's programming before he's potty-trained, it's all your fault. ;)
Me: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/11/i-am-hiring-in-london.html
Executives?
A plam for splam
Star Trek, suicide and Bush voters
from bjornelasse (below): http://supercoolschool.typepad.com/blog/
voting and such just like reddit, HN, or DIGG but with embeddable songs to listen to...

http://cherrypeel.com/
Tools for User-Driven development (letting users decide which features to develop next)
Fowler: Rethinking databases aka Database Thaw
Twitter, a time gainer or waster?
What do you think? Is Twitter a time waster or gainer?
This article and the articles it links to are garbage. They are one-hundred percent speculation and rumor-mongering. Please go back to ValleyWag.
right after I posted I saw that I had missed you already recommending this site. Yeah not the disourse, but a well done and interesting way to find good new music.
To be more clear, that is my overall take on New York. I cant really speak for the current NY job market as I haven't been searching. But I do have a few friends who have been laid off (interestingly none of the very qualified folks).

The job market isn't all that wonderful anywhere else either. What I think will happen is some the people laid off from the various wall street positions will go start boutique shops... Long term they will be bought out and merged together to create larger groups...
No, thank you!

You can take your good food and functional health-care system elsewhere!
A little sensationalist?

The article: Google laid off hundreds with rumors of maybe 1000 to come

The headline: Google Layoffs in the thousands with more to come
and contact info?
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". - Baron Acton

I am sure, Google in the very near future will prove this quote right if not already.
well how else would ibankers make their money?
Are Computer Languages Irrelevant?
On the rails job front, over at Rails Forum we also run a job board for rails positions @ http://www.railswork.com/

I've actually seen a fairly steady number of job postings the past couple of months (it's always been a somewhat low volume jobs board -- 3-5 new posts per week, I'd guess -- but the volume hasn't dropped off).
We're hiring! Looking for exceptional, detail-oriented engineers and product managers to help us take over the social world. We're profitable, too.

Jobs page here: http://www.lolapps.com/jobs.html (sorry for the lame-ish job descriptions). Drop me a line if interested (email in my profile).
Twitter spurns Facebook's $500M buyout offer
The forums at www.waffles.fm -- I have never seen a place better to make a post "I like such and such obscure bands/types of music; please give me recommendations." I've also discovered a great amount of new music by watching the internal top10 lists.

Email me, I have some invites...
Yes, it works. How well it works really depends on a lot of things. It does take patience and you do need to know your market.

I actually think you don't need to be in a huge market to be hugely successful. We serve a niche market (professional photographers) and, by most accounts, are successful with strong growth.

We have 2 main products/services that have a monthly fee. The first isn't a true SaaS (it's more Saas+web hosting), but we have several thousand customers paying monthly.

Our most recent product (nextproof.com) is a true SaaS and is also doing well. We launched in June and should hit the 1,000 account mark early next year.

The thing I like about being in a smaller/niche market is that it's easier to find and present to your target market. If you're product is good, it will sell–you just need to make them aware.

Here's some things I would suggest based on experience:

* Find some "connectors" in your market and partner with them. Give them free accounts and VIP treatment in exchange for referrals
* If you need some cash up front, consider selling a limited amount of "lifetime" accounts. They pay $500 (or whatever) and get an account for life. We've done this and people jumped all over it.
* Explore the possibility of tweaking your app for even a smaller niche market.

I've got lots more ideas ... but that's where I'd start. But, yes, I'm a firm believer that it can work.
Google has a lot of non-technical staff, many of which are not permanently hired: Ad sales and customer service especially.
Who knew they had actual people doing customer services... I have only ever dealt with pseudo-related email template responses. I figured they engineered a solution to the people problem long ago.
First impressions: I really like the overall look & feel of the site: approachable, modern, clean, and not needlessly "web 2.0"

I have trouble knowing from your messaging who your target audience is, and whether I'm in it. E.g. needs for someone who travels casually and who is accruing miles towards a particular vacation would be very different for someone who travels for a living and has dozens of accounts to keep track of.

For me, I've mostly standardized on United Mileage Plus and therefore make sure that any reward programs I participate in are compatible with United's program. Therefore, United's site serves as the aggregator for all my mileage/reward programs.

I'll sign up and see how it goes.
luke at startuply dot com, i'd love to get in touch.
excellent. i am ready for hyperinflation. are you?
I'm impressed. I just started with FB ads. I wish I had that kind of conversion rate.
Get out and meet them (and their friends) in person. Nothing beats networking. I personally only work through my network when I'm searching for a job.

The other key is to move fast. 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.

At my last two companies we would bring people in for an afternoon of interviews and have an offer ready for them at the end of the day if things worked out. That's the kind of process you need to have to snag people like this.

As a simple case study, the last time I decided to get a job I had 3 offers within two weeks. All through my network.

Currently, I left my last startup in the middle of last week. I haven't started actively looking for something else to do yet, and I've already had one offer through my network.
Maybe it was Visual C++ you were programming in.
^ is for a handle to a object on the managed heap so it's almost the same as pointer. http://msdn.microsoft.com/de-de/library/yk97tc08.aspx
why the "concern" about inflation? this is a "gimme" get-rich scheme for anyone who understands how inflation works. gold at 4000, oil at 500...it will be a triviality to make money as hyperinflation works through the system