skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree on the intellectual scene - it depends where you are in Saint Louis. The Metropolitan Area is most definitely socio-economically segregated and that is going to have an impact on the distribution of intellectuals. In the area there are some fairly solid institutions as well with intelligent researchers and employees working at them - atleast two med schools, two business schools, a handful of other misc. universities, a world class hospital system (BJC), some renown programs (e.g.,WashU DPT), and some respectable companies based in STL (e.g., Monsanto). Startups might be another issue but I imagine with the business schools there would be some, albeit small, community.

Whenever I meet people that come to STL to study, I find they rarely leave the immediate campus area and if they do they usually only go downtown or to the big college spots like the Loop. The city has the worst of the urban elements, and if you go too far out into South county, you can get the country-folks stereotype. North County is pretty desolate these days as well - but there are a lot of good areas here too. "STL" means more than the city proper and a lot of people live in the counties. We're spread out. Where exactly did you live in the area?
Haha is that a stab at the "worry about the business model later" attitude in tech, or am I interpreting it wrong?
Bad Taste In Music? Crowdsource Your Next Party Playlist With Anthm
Interesting forum for finding like minded individuals. I have been near applying to YC several times, but never pulled the trigger due to the fact that I have no partner to bounce ideas off of. Would be interested in applying this round.

I am a great generalist. Currently work in marketing and fundraising at a nonprofit (an orchestra), hack on side projects (just launched on the app store), and have a degree in classical music and an MBA.

Contact info is in my profile.
I don't think addition and subtraction are too bad in this model. The slides mention that there is a simple circuit computing F(t):=log(1+2^t). So if you have two numbers x and y, represented by their logarithms log(x), log(y), the log of their sum can be computed using F as follows: log(x+y) = log(x) + log(1 + y/x) = log(x) + F(log(y) - log(x)).

Whether this is better or worse than multiplies in the current linear-scale representation depends on how hard it is to compute F, I guess.
I think he is criticizing Microsoft for pointing their fingers to their arch-enemy while failing to mention their partner.
No, I'm not "joking". The default license for content without an explicit license is that it is copyrighted. There are existing tags for looser licensing (e.g. creative commons). This is an obnoxious demand, and the "we decide whether it benefits you, and thus determine how we violate your rights" is a garbage way to proceed. No kidding it serves pinterest, though.
Why? Because this is the internet. I shouldn't have to ask permission every time I want to create a hyperlink.
A slight aside, but I'm seeing a lot of comments about how the cash isn't really enough to tempt people. They're probably correct.

You know what I'd love to see? States being able to set their own special immigration policies. I live in New York and am very happy here, but it's very difficult to create my own startup because I'm on a restrictive work visa.

However, if St. Louis had the ability to request a special exclusion for foreign nationals to create a startup in their city, you'd better believe I would be looking at it very closely. From talking to other people in similar situations, I doubt I'd be alone.

(Of course, if St. Louis had the power to do this then I suspect NYC would as well- and Bloomberg is a very vocal supporter of immigration reform. But still...)
Do you think Google Image Search is bad, too? If not, what's the relevant difference?
This exact issue is addressed in _The Secret Life of Pronouns_ (Pennebaker).

http://secretlifeofpronouns.com/
Sup fellow Billiken.
It has nothing to do with creating a hyperlink. It has to do with misappropriating copyrighted content for commercial purposes.
I have lived in Kansas City for several years and would partially agree with your statements. I have seen most of the best people I know move elsewhere, primarily to larger cultural hubs, leaving behind a large portion of people who lack vision and tenacity. There are definitely still bright spots, they are just more difficult to find.

Reminds me of the Onion article about Saint Louis adding 4 Million jobs: http://www.theonion.com/articles/us-adds-4-million-jobs-but-...
Contact info added. Thanks.
Hi there!

I also live in St. Louis (moved here about a year ago after six years in SF), and I'm quite fond of thinking. Shoot me an email if you want to meet up sometime, if nothing else I can probably introduce you to at least one other person here who is into quantum mechanics.
ever heard of "fair use"?
Filling out the YC application thoroughly and thoughtfully will do more to make you think about your business than writing a business plan. You don't have to submit it, but answering the questions as if pg were going to be evaluating it is a great mental exercise!
It seemed pretty clear to be that Jason was talking about squatters — that is, people who intentionally buy domain names just to exploit the low actual cost of a domain name for greedy purposes. If you buy a domain name and just have trouble getting around to using it, you're maybe a bit disorganized, but you're not intentionally screwing somebody over. But if you buy a domain name because you think it's likely somebody will be willing to pay a ridiculous price later and in the meantime you can park it and leech money from unsuspecting visitors, yeah, I find that morally questionable too.

It's like the difference between an old person getting lost and wandering into somebody's kitchen and a thug busting in with a gun and demanding money. Technically they're both invading the kitchen, but there is an important qualitative difference both in their actions and the effects they have on people.

(BTW, I accidentally downvoted you when I was trying to scroll. Sorry about that. Although I disagree with you, I do appreciate hearing your point of view.)
It's worth mentioning that CoffeeKup lets you write HTML templates in CoffeeScript: http://coffeekup.org/
You get 20 free articles/month. If you exceed that number and are poor, just erase your NYT cookie (or spawn a new set by viewing in privacy mode). Alternatively, if you make a decent salary consider getting a subscription.
Speed wasn't really his main selling point. He was mostly just pointing out that speed isn't a disadvantage for his method.

That being said the speed might actually make a difference with mobile browsers for some applications.
> All software ships with bugs

But some software ships with a lot more bugs than other software does.

Xcode has all manner of funky little bugs like this; maybe not in and of themselves worth a blogrant, but Xcode also does routinely crash (every single goddam day in my experience, and that of many people I work with); it does claim unit tests passed without running them; it does corrupt the internal structure of complex projects such that you have to manually start over adding source code and resource file references; it does have many more bugs that require a significant amount of time to track down and work around -- far more than any other software package I use.

So I definitely would not begrudge any Xcode user a cathartic rant (although perhaps it's not something that belongs on the front page of HN).

(I find myself blog-raging about Xcode's horrid timesinks from time to time, too, e.g. http://masonmark.com/the-xcode-fairy/)
what's next? meta name="browser" content="nolink" to not allow deep linking? or linking at all? this is stupid.
It's like saying being indexed by Google should be opt-in.
There is no pro-Google bias. What is observable is passionate people who downvote any comment they disagree with, sometimes downvoting comments from the same author.

I've seen more civilized days.
The overwhelming tone I'm getting from the comments defending STL here are along the lines of "come on, St. Louis isn't that bad, and at least it's cheap". Which is quite different from the sales pitch you get for Silicon Valley, which is "everything you could possibly need is right here". The choice between "not that bad" and "actively helpful" is obvious.
I had an interesting experience with these scammers.

I played dumb and got from automated to first line qualification to second line qualification to the person that closes the deal. At each level you could tell that the savvy-ness of the person went up dramatically. When I got to the closer, he was smooth as silk. He asked me for info from my credit card statement. I kept him on the phone a good 10-15 minutes playing dumb, then I hung up. He called back immediate and said "oh, we got disconnected" and I basically told him he was scum and I did this because I asked to be taken off their "list" about 20 times. He said "you'll regret this" and hung up. At this point my phone rang again and someone started screaming at me. He had redirected the complaining victims like myself to my phone #. I unplugged my landline and called AT&T on my cell. They really couldn't do anything, which I found amazing. After 30 minutes I plugged the phone back in and didn't receive any more calls.

Then, googled "card services". It took me a while, but I found a law suit against some company from around 2002, and even found a PDF containing the complaint by some lawyer in TX, complete with a phone number. I figured, what the heck, I'll call it and see if anyone answers. Some old guy answered on the 2nd ring and I explained the situation and he was very surprised. He said the company had been shutdown soon after the law suit. I told him they were back, with a vengeance. They had been calling me at least once a day for a year. He told me to start a case with the FCC (I think... it was a few years ago), which I did by filling in a form on their website. Never heard squat.

After the incident mentioned above, I didn't get a call for more than a year. Then, they started up again. Now, I just hang up immediately. I'd say I get a few a week at this point.
Not a good example: Github thrives in part because it's a community, not something you can achieve if everyone is hosting their own git servers. They don't simply make an hard process easier.
GrooveMac: A GrooveShark Downloader for OSX
Dropping hashtags would be suicide. It's one of the elements that make Twitter unique, and it's even managed to break into mainstream culture in most countries. It doesn't matter that they're full of noise, people just love to tag #somerandomstuff and see it spread (or not), gives them a feeling of belonging, the holy grail of social networks.

Us nerds, we won't care one way or the other anyway.
Our Lists is a neat app idea. I keep thinking everything that could be shareable already is but I am always surprised. You can find my contact info in my profile.
St Louis has a city income tax?!
Rephrase, Everyone on the internet shouldn't have to ask permission when they want to create a hyperlink on a public site.
Excuse me but I don't see that being possible in Windows
In kde it was mac I have no idea but your solution only works in some places.
Has anyone had any experience acquiring a name that's being squatted on? Our nonprofit has the .org for a domain; a squatter has the .com. We'd like to get it from them so we don't have confused users.

Should we write them first? Have our lawyer write nicely? Sternly? Or just skip this and go straight to UDRP?
I agree (from personal experience and obvservation). The cumulative effect of all the little indignities a developer suffers at the hands of Xcode build up like steam in a pressure cooker, until it has to go somewhere. (A rant on a blog, a mouse hurled against a wall, chairs kicked over, whatever...)
I would've fallen for that. Thanks for the heads up.
Why Mobile Matters
If you're a one-man shop, there's little point taking any funding, and it's doubtful even these guys would fund you.
How the NuCaptcha video scheme was broken
This is, in my opinion, even worse than writing straight HTML in JavaScript. Before I get into anything, I just want to point out that with jQuery, you can do the same thing:

$('<div id="foo"><span>bar</span></div>').appendTo('.baz');

I'm not one to condone the over-use of the bloated jQuery, but in this case I sure would.

Anyways, my biggest gripe with this whole thing is the fact that writing any markup in your JS, or anywhere other than an HTML file, is just plain ugly. Beyond that, it's a pain to manage, and totally screws up the whole "separation of duties" paradigm that the web community seems to be quickly forgetting as of late.

Keep your markup where it should be, in your HTML files, because as we all know, HTML is XML and XML is meant to give semantic meaning to data. JavaScript should be a means of transport for data to its relevant structure, not means of giving visual structure to data. Leave that to the HTML and CSS.

Even templating doesn't do it for me 100% of the time and there are better ways. I'm a heavy believer in separation of duties, and any JS programmer should be too. Every time I come across any heavy-handed DOM manipulation in JS I cringe.

As for this article, there's 523637483723526334632 other libraries/frameworks/micro-frameworks that do this same thing, and if you're going to do it, just use what you're already probably using: jQuery. You're probably already abusing it anyways.
Hey, we're using jekyll (0.11.x) to generate http://dev.af83.com/ which is about 320 posts. It always takes less than 30secs on my laptop (Lenovo X220).
No, I'm being serious. Thinking about your business model is useful, and planning is useful, but the formal practice of writing an official "business plan" (with revenue projections, etc.) is from a bygone era. More than anything, business plans give people (in this case, Arch Grants) a false sense of security.
Thanks a lot! Very helpful. I'll use that then, since it's part of openssl - then i can claim rightly that i use industry standard crypto, rather than my bcrypt/sha256 mashup that i dreamt up myself.
It is a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg type problem.

Best case, 10 startups pop up all at once as a result of these grants, and more follow. I think this is actually a reasonably good try at jump-starting a startup culture.

The nice thing about a web startup is that, aside from "culture" and government regulations, there aren't really any reasons you couldn't run your startup out of a cabin in remote Alaska with a satellite internet connection.

Of course, it does go deeper than just an initial seed. There also needs to be a government with policies that won't restrict the growth of startups.

For all the complaining in Maine about college graduates leaving the state, I would love to see them try something like this.
A lot of good information in this thread; the only bit I would add is that this is a grant and not standard equity-trade funding like you would find the valley.

So $50k in cash as opposed to $50k of investment for 33% of your company can be two very different things.

FWIW, half my family is from STL and there is definitely a difference in culture between the west coast and mid-west.
Russians regenerate flowering plant from 30,000-year-old frozen seeds
I wonder whether groups like this hadn't ought to stop doing grant/investment programs like this. You can't just buy a startup community, at least not for any amount we've seen spent to date. It has to grow organically.

What seems likely to happen here is that adverse selection will allocate these grants to companies with poorer prospects than the total pool of startups, thus creating a track record of failure for the area.

Maybe a better approach would be to offer the grants to any startup nationwide, with the proviso that they employ N people in STL.
Sites that use Google App Engine
People who believe in immortal souls don't believe in true death, you can't talk to them about it anymore than you can get them to imagine there's no god; they can't, it's just outside their worldview. These are people that can't be reasoned with because these beliefs aren't based on reason. Adapting their language but meaning different things by the words doesn't help you communicate, it only feels that way, because they're agreeing based on what they think those words mean, not with what you mean by them.
Taking biofuel from forest to highway
A relatively tiny site is demanding a site-specific meta tag for them to not commercial benefit by violating your copyright. Google, in contrast, observes long existing, cross-industry tags and behaviors.

And Google is hardly the example counterpoint: Many of its activities do border on very questionable. In Google's ideal world you never leave Google.com as they're filtered everyone else's content down to everything you need.
A great physics game: Shrink It 2
Shrink It 2 is the sequel to the Shrink It physics game. Your goal is to guide the blue face to the star by shrinking and enlarging objects in each stage.
If you're raising $50k, you'll probably want to raise $500k if things go well. Doing that in STL is unquestionably harder in STL than SV.
I believe 2012 will be remembered as the year that the education revolution took off. Rising education costs and poor quality of instruction are the catalysts for educational innovation. Current products fall into video lessons, memorization and digital textbooks. They all use visual stimulation and repetition as the primary means for learning.
Yeah, but this way they get to write a blogpost that's basically...

"So do you guys know how popular we are? SO popular."

But they get to do it under the cover of being both helpful and community-minded. It's clever.
Keep in mind, not everybody is running a desktop browser with that sort of cpu horsepower behind it.

Half of the iPhones ever sold - something like 80 million devices - are pre iPhone 4. There are a lot of low end Android devices on the market _right now_ with worse browser performance than an iPhone 3 (I've got a <6month old Huawei U8110 here as an example). Sure, top-end Android devices compare well against an iPhone4S (I'm pretty impressed with the Galaxy SII I've got here), but the bulk of Android devices in the wild are not late-model-top-end devices.

I had to drop an entire development branch from a project late last year due to insufficient performance of mobile device on-handset ajax. (We fell back to on-server html rendering and innerHTML updates, and even _that_ is annoyingly slow to me on low-end phones.)

And unless you have gathered data showing otherwise, this _probably_ really does apply to you. I was collecting some mobile use data last week - across ~70 websites that I've got Google Analytics access to, the average mobile visits was 14%, and the peak was just over 28%. This was across a range of markets and a variety of levels of "mobile friendliness" of the web design. (Biggest and probably most obvious takeaways from that exercise: B2B sites are a standard deviation or more below average for mobile visits, personal/leisure B2C sites up to one or two SD's above average. 80+% of mobile visits exit on a page with contact details - a phone# or address.)
Showing up in an image index (generated by crawlers) is different enough from showing up on Pinterest (curated by humans) that allowing one to make the choices independently is totally reasonable.
There's a saying: plans are useless but planning is essential.

I think generally it's good to think about these things because the process is more valuable than the plan itself.
Building an iPad interface for Overtone in ClojureScript
Seems to be down. Here's the cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
If it really happens, Windows and Linux users will probably have no choice if they want retina display laptop. At least for a few years.
The problem is that beforehand you don't necessarily know which features you are going to need to use. I am constantly discovering new useful features in most of the programs I use, having to install plugins for every feature I wanted to use would quickly become a pain , hamper discoverablity and the program would probably just end up back where it started in terms of size.

Besides when you have a program with a long load time, this is not necessarily correlated with the number of features, it's more likely that it's some core part of the program that is taking a good chunk of the initialization time.

The consistency argument is important, especially to anyone who has ever worked on telephone tech support. Being able to give somebody instructions on how to perform an action without having to worry about which of the 1000s of possible configurations their program is in is important.
This is probably one of the big reasons desktop Linux never took off.

Most professional programs like IDEs or photoshop are intended to be used by professional users anyway who will be likely to have a reasonably fast computer and will have invested some time in learning to operate the program properly.

Adobe has actually had quite a few competitors over the years, currently there are programs like PixelMator and in the past they have had JASC , Corel, Macromedia (until they bough them) and of course GIMP to contend with.

Joel Spolsky has a good article on this.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
NSAutoreleasePool is not a garbage collector, it is merely delayed deallocation. There is no such API as NSPool.
In their case, yes, but the potential speed gain by pushing a lot to the client-side is great when properly harnessed.
It's not a hyperlink, pininterest is either hot-linking or making a copy of images to which it has no copyright for and for which the users who added these images do not have copyright access to.
I tried to watch Game of Thrones and this is what happened - The Oatmeal
Good. Now if they would get rid of minified urls they would be done with their damage to the web.
Here in Europe we almost exclusively drive standard shift cars only. In fact, I've never driven an automatic shift car until very recently when I've visited my American girlfriend's parents the first time and found that's it's simply impossible to rent a standard shift car in the US. After a few hours I had to realise that modern automatic transmission systems these days are so good that unless you have special needs, there's simply no need to drive or even to learn to drive stick shift anymore. They're incredibly smooth and clever and completely abstract away the complexity of changing gears. It's like magic.

However, ARC is not quite there yet. It's a very useful tool but it's still a rather imperfect abstraction. You have to understand the problems with loops in object graphs, strong and weak references and why they're needed, bridging and all the other things ARC can't do for you yet. Maybe in a few years it will be possible to completely forget about memory management but today you simply cannot write a well behaving Objective-C application without understanding what's happening under the hood when it comes to memory management.
>It's not a hyperlink, pininterest is either hot-linking or making a copy of images to which it has no copyright for and for which the users who added these images do not have copyright access to.

More likely than not, hotlinking. Also, lawyers ruin everything.
That's not really true anymore. I run mostly DELL U2711 monitors (2560x1440 on a 27" panel), and it's been available since 2009. Before that, I used (and still use some) DELL 30-inch monitors (2560x1600, 30").

It's true that there are more low-res monitors in the market, but that's just because they cost a lot less. I haven't used a monitor less than 2560 pixels across for six or seven years, and the last Apple monitor I bought was in 2007.

EDIT: but I too would welcome a resolution arms race. I moved from the 30s to the 27s because the pixel density is slightly better... but it's a very modest improvement for all the time that's passed.