skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a single founder you can write off funding until you're actually making money, at which point you'll start getting unsolicited offers you'll reject because you no longer need the money. The downside is poverty while you're bootstrapping and emotional issues like depression and isolation.

Regardless, if you think you can get revenue without funding I'd say go it alone because you don't NEED anyone else and you can always bring people on board (even as employees) later. A business that can get a few thousand a month within a year should be able to scale up into hundreds of thousands in annual revenue through word-of-mouth alone. At that point you can live without answering to anyone else. The other route of taking investment and cofounders means you get locked down and need a much larger exit to have the same level of freedom.

If you can afford to spend $5 to $10k over the next six to ten months, you might want to look at something like Start-Up Chile. They don't take equity so don't have the anti-single-founder bias that seems prevalent elsewhere, but the social nature of the program makes the startup experience less alienating because it makes you part of a cohort, and the funding can be useful for experimenting with different approaches to distribution and marketing you wouldn't be able to afford as a bootstrapper otherwise.
Same here, here's a screenshot of my Ubuntu desktop:

http://i.imgur.com/QklQb.png

The only thing is if I click, I hear a sound, but otherwise it just stays like that.. what should I do? I want to try the game.

Nevermind, just discovered that it works fine in Firefox nightly. Super slow on my netbook though, I'll give it a try on a better computer later.
Not my article, though I do think it raises some valid points and would prompt interesting discussion (hence submitting it).

More broadly, it seems as though a lot of people on HN often respond to posts as if the author and submitter are one and the same. I recently saw a post, submitted by Jeremy Ashkenas, about why the author doesn't use CoffeeScript. The top comment directly challenged the submitter, calling out 'his statements', as if he were the author.
I think in this case, "take this array of numbers and sort them" would do just fine to see if they know the basics of the language, much like "take this hammer and nail that nail" would for basic hammer knowledge.

Another option would be to email the candidate a chunk of average code while you're on the phone with them, then say "walk me through the code and tell me what it's doing."

"I think of these as "what color is the door" questions. If you tell me you've been working at Company X, I expect you to be able to tell me the color of the front door, or where the bathroom is, or something about the place. Not that I care, it's completely irrelevant to your skills, I just want to find out if you're really the person you claim to be before I waste time with a serious interview."

That's what references are for. FWIW, I can't remember the color of the doors to ANY place I've worked, except for our current office which has quite a peculiar door. And besides, how are you going to know that I'm not bullshitting when I say the door was green and was right beside the elevator?

The problem with nano questions is that they assume that these few tiny tidbits of trivial and often overlooked factoids are representative of knowledge on the whole, and thus are prone to false negatives. They are heavily biased towards what YOU tend to notice, not necessarily what others tend to notice.
It's easy to tweak the Bootstrap defaults, but trying to keep things as cohesive as the defaults can lead you down the rabbit hole of dependencies. BS 2.0 is a big step up, but I've found that playing only with the values in variables.less doesn't cut it quite yet.

I've tried to hit a sweet spot with Bootswatch (http://bootswatch.com), keeping it a quick-start solution for hackers while adding variety to the defaults.
Don't buy him a parrot!
Why I CAN test my own code
I think I agree. Bootstrap is not bad but using the default visual scheme brings noise and unwanted association with other websites which the user might have seen.

At the minimum, pick a different color scheme from http://bootswatch.com/#gallery
Silicon Valley leaders take up the Dream on behalf of young migrants
Sorry, but do you even remember the days before Bootstrap where developers come to showcase their work? Most of their crap are severely under-styled. Some forms in admin sections don't even have labels because the developers knew what the fields were for, so they never bothered to make it remotely comprehend-able for the rest of the team.

I agree, sites should be styled. Bootstrap makes it amazingly easy for those developers who want to build an MVP. Tweaks are nice, but if you have zero design skills, they may or may not be necessary.

One would be a fool to simply ignore a web project because they were built on Bootstrap. If it's not relevant to your needs, sure, ignore it. If it can help solve your problems, pay attention to the app and don't worry about the design so much. If it makes a ton of money, I'm sure they can re-invest some of that back into making it look better.
The best Apple Livestream today
> The sad part of this is that it's so easy to make your Bootstrap site look a little different, even for non-designers.

You have to redo your changes for each new Bootstrap version, right? AFAIK, Bootstrap is not themeable and you better extend it than change it.
How to be effective (Philip Guo)
EVE had at least one other great story from the early days, the Nightfreeze scam:

http://www.wirm.net/nightfreeze/part1.html
>Not discussing user interface design, it's about visual style. Button should look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your site with someone else's.

If you are relying on the style of your buttons to distinguish your site from all the others, perhaps you should be spending more time on building out the content/functionality of your site.

I often find that designers are more worried about how a site will look in a portfolio than whether the end users will get anything out of the site.
Thanks Giang! I got a great start here on Hacker News and we've been growing great the past few months.
I assumed he meant a for(obj in list), not for(int x = 0; i < foo....

It's pretty natural to forget the first syntax if you haven't used it in a while because there's no real standard for it across languages.
I was a Master Armorsmith on Lowca I would bring in 20mil credits/week that had a value of around $200 on Ebay. I made thousands selling credits from SWG on eBay which was great for a teenager (I was 17 - now I'm 27) They killed the game in 2005 trying to make it "assessable" and that's the last time I played SWG or any MMO. I have fond memories of the economy and learned a lot that has helped me in the real business world (taking care of customers etc..) I actually had been thinking about writing something similar to this about SWG for a while now glad someone took the time to write it.
How To Watch Today's Apple iPad 3 Event Live
"Perhaps it's lack of knowledge on my part, but I don't see what will stop atomic bombs from being as common as handguns in 30-100 years. Fissile material is ubiquitous; there's no barrier but economics and engineering, of exactly the sort near-term AI could unpredictably disrupt."

You guess right--it's your lack of knowledge.

Fissile material is not useful for making nuclear weapons (of any more than the dirty bomb variety). So far, we seem to have converged on uranium and plutonium, and while at least uranium is relatively common in the Earth the processing and dredging required to get a useful amount of it, and then the refining to get the useful isotopes from that, is nontrivial.

Engineering and fast computers are great and all, and will get you arbitrarily close to the physical limits--but we're there right now, and physics says you aren't getting a centrifuge with meaningful output in your garage.

More troubling is the idea that frankly we've had the technology to build sports cars in our homes for decades and decades now. It's called buying a lathe, an arc welder, a mill, a forge. Despite the availability--cheap!--of these things to the general populace, not only is it not widespread among those who can--and there are damned few of those even with this magical Internet thing telling you how to do all of it--it will get less likely as people focus on cat pictures and tweeting.

We aren't worthy of a singularity as a culture.

EDIT:

Thank you for attaching some interesting facts. Allow me to do the same:

The useful fissile uranium isotope (235) accounts for bout .72% of naturally occurring uranium (http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium/guide/facts/).

Your hiking source claims uranium metal, but points out that it is completely locked up in slag and that only at large-scales does the approach seem tractable.

Even allowing for that, the amount produced is negligible.

That's just for metal--we aren't even talking about a usable isotope yet.

Take 7/1000 of that result from the blogger, and wave a wand to make it pure enough to use.

Now collect the (at least) several pounds needed of that to make a functioning device. Now do the machining on the rest of the device to make it function correctly (have fun with the berylium dust, if you go that route). Now do the timing electronics, and the charge shaping (if you go that route).

This.

Is.

Not.

Garage.

Technology.
I wonder if Github will offer anything similar? Or will 37signal and GitHub merge one day?
Hi, I'm one of the developers of Pangool. The idea of Pangool is not to be yet another higher level API on top of Hadoop but rather to pose a replacement for the low-level Hadoop Java MapReduce API. Pangool has the same performance and flexibility than that of the Java MapReduce API although it makes several things a lot easier and convenient. There is no tradeoff, just advantages. There will be cases where you'd want to use Pig or Cascading. There will be some other cases where you'd want the flexibility and efficiency of MapReduce. For those cases we conceived Pangool. Nowadays only very advanced Hadoop users could write efficiently-performing MapReduce Jobs. Pangool hides all the advanced boilerplate code needed for writing highly efficient MapReduce jobs, making things like secondary sorting or reduce-side joins extremely easy.
If someone has a pathological aversion to documentation then relying on an IDE may be more of a symptom. However quality of documentation for programming tools/languages varies so much that I can understand where this may come from if you have mainly been exposed to the bad kind.

Plus sometimes it is nice to have a bit of "magic" to do some of the work for you when you have something you need done on a deadline and don't have time to grok the details of everything. It can be useful to go back and try and grok some of the details later but you won't usually grasp this until you experience the pain of working with an incomplete understanding first hand.

I have also met programmers who are almost the complete opposite of IDE addicts. Usually people who come from a PHP/Javascript background and have become used to doing everything using EditPad and debugging with echo statements. It's often just as difficult to make these people realise that they could save time and gain more power by looking into more sophisticated tools whether they are parts of an IDE or command line tools.
But what about servers ? memory bandwidth is the biggest problem facing servers, and stacking solves it nicely.

And when you put chips side by side like xilinx's new chip, the heating issue is solvable.
GOTO operator and PHP
Awesome, glad you like that aspect. We think it's pretty important to users.
Ha Ha! we won't lol!
Oh, owch. You had to go mention "The Sims: Urbz", didn't you? I was hoping that was long forgotten. But yes that's a very good analogy between SimCity Societies and Urbz. An unfortunate case of brand dilution: Societies was developed by an outside company, and it didn't have much to do with the original game.
It will still take time to build
Bring in new customers who are using Hipchat
Bring in new talent.
This exactly.

The rigid separation of zones drove me nuts when I last played SimCity 4. Here in Vienna it's completely normal to have flats, shops and offices in every building. As far as I know this is even more extreme in Asian cities.

What I would love to see would be a triangle slider for zoning where you could for instance say this block should be 60% residential , 25% industrial and 15% commercial. Maybe some industries or commercial venues will require higher percentages to settle but this could also be an interesting tool.
Oh? You've seen bootstrap and now feel like leaving a site? Congrats you are in the 0.001%. Am I supposed to care?

Truth is I've heard moaning and bitching about bootstrap on hacker news for the better part of a year now. I have never touched bootstrap myself, and so even with all this familiarity I have no idea what a bootstrap site looks like and am absolutely unable to pick one out of a lineup. If I can't do it with this amount of familiarity I doubt you'll find one in 10,000 ordinary users who can. Hence --- who cares.
We're underestimating the risk because we're using Net Present Value to determine the value of future events. While it can be useful in business to determine profitability of future endeavors, it isn't useful when we are unable to correctly calculate all the other things that get wrapped up into the word "externality".
I imagine that multiplayer interaction would be similar to the 'neighbor deals' system in Sim City 4, with a few additional features.
Send your code to the final frontier and catch objects tubling in zero-G
Seems like mission accomplished for the FBI if this is the general state of mind.

As I said waaay back [1], if you start picking on law enforcement (and the AZ dump was where I first noticed it) then you really change the game considerably.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2690297
If you buy Bostrom's arguments, you could make a donation to his research group:

http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/donate

I still can't believe that "trying to save the human race from destruction" is being allocated such a tiny fraction of the world GDP.
Hmm, I didn't see a warning about Chrome, and it runs fine here on Firefox 13.
A New Look for the +1 Button
The world population growth rate is not exponential; in fact it has been declining for decades. It seems increasingly possible that the human population will stabilize or even decline in this century.
Half of your dev team uses IE o.O ??
"Confirms" is a little strong for sigma 2.2
iPad 3 event liveblog
I do something similar with Chef. Chef creates a local_settings.py file that outputs python with the server ips and ports for the various services.
And don't ask him about his breakfast plans!
I would hope the total required is from revenue generated by your Unity project, not total revenue of the company. If not, that's a huge mistake on their part as it would encourage companies with unrelated revenues to go elsewhere. Which was exactly your response.
they don't have the same layout. They usually have the same nav bar at the top, but the content area can vary almost as much as something made from scratch.
ohhhh this is terrible news!!! I am quiet possibly going to get NOTHING done as soon as this comes out.

So long progress, relationships and work...hello lost hours and regrets.
I don't know why you are getting downvoted...

Maybe people don't read as much speculative fiction as they used to (or books in general, for that matter, but I digress...) but it seems like lately I've run into more than a few people acting surprised about concepts that, frankly, have been explored to death in books as recently as half a century ago.
I had an idea a few years back to build a multi-layer sim-world game

You would have players create families of Sims, where they would have full control over their individual Home and families, then add on the ability to get elected to a sort of community leader role with control over neighborhoods, then elected Mayor with full control over the entire city. Maybe even add Governers that have some power over collections of cities to for a state and wold be able to build certain infrastructure between cities. Maybe add another tier above that where a few selected players would be able to become Leaders of Nations and create laws and create national Infrastructure and the like.
Of course in this system, all players are elected to positions, creating a sort of Sim Government kind of thing.

Theoretically such a game would appeal to a wide range of gamers, from the casual gamer just creating a couple Sim families to the hard-core gamer with being able to manage huge and complex societies amde up of other players.
Changes everything, eh? No hyperbole here.

Let's get this straight: it will make a fantastic looking device look even better.

I thought Gizmodo's example graphic was particularly telling yesterday, because it's exactly the kind of image that springs to mind when I think of my iPad.

http://gizmodo.com/5890999/witness-the-amazing-difference-be...

So the cutesy games my kids play on it will now be even clearer. Wow - total game changer.
> IMO using the first approach you concede that you aren't skilled enough to meaningfully evaluate the previous work/ skills

Only to those who confuse a test on details with ignorance of a field.

There is a wonderful scene in The Seven Samurai. The leader is testing the prospective candidates one-by-one as they walk into the "interview" room. There is a junior fighter hidden behind the doorway who attacks each prospective samurai as he walks through the door.

Most of the fighters dispatch the junior fighter without much ado, and forgive the "interviewer" understanding that he must test each one of them. There is one candidate who stands outside the door before walking in and says (paraphrased): Please, skip the attack that I know you have planned; It is a waste of energy. He does this in such a way that it is clear he will dispatch the junior fighter even before fighting.

Then there is one candidate who is unaware and gets whacked over the head.

The scene is a wonderful summary of interviewing candidates. (And a great movie too, fwiw.)
> Note that you cannot use the non-pro version if your company has a turnover above $100k/year.

Hmm, 100K is about the salary for one developer - how can a gaming company not have revenue of at least that amount? Unless it's a side project people do in their spare time?
Can you give an example of a job that would be difficult or impossible to perform efficiently with Cascading, but Pangool gives an advantage over raw MapReduce?
Yep, we're getting started, but we might get an EULA soon, stay tuned
Your 'lacks' are features not imperfections.
Yes, but the problem is that most of developers underestimate the point of branding.

And there is a myriad of bootstrap-based websites now that look exactly the same.
It doesn't give us a same standard, it gives us Twitter's version of a standard. You're points are almost totally right and certainly reasonable but the big problem is that a lot of sites are ending up just looking Bootstrap clones of each other with different names and logos. Standards are great and I'm all for them but for the love of god, please at least make it your own. Making it your own does not mean you have to deviate from any standard and that's a big part of what the author was getting at.
If it's just for the project inside the company, a big company could set up an internal "project" for just the Unity stuff, and not pay for the full version. So no one would pay for the full version.
Al Qaida (and similar groups) want to be seen as always successful. If there's regular news about their plots failing, their backers quit backing them and move on to a group that fails less.
Jersey RESTful webservice practices [Stackoverflow question]
> You can find desktop monitors in the 20-inch range that sport resolutions of 2560×1600

really?

edit: on a related note, does anyone know where and when I could get monitors like this 20" 4k2k monitor http://www2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/prModelD...
Bootstrap is great for what the name implies, but when you are delivering the product to the public, it's not good enough.
The perfect example is iOS apps. Can you imagine your designers simply copying and pasting from iOS's default theme? It's very bland, it turns off users before they even use it (which in effect, is bad UX. Bootstrap has both + and -, good UXer will see this and adjust accordingly/depending on the phase of the product). I use this resource for my wireframe/mockups http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/iphone-gui-psd-v4/ Personally I won't ever use it in a beta product/website as is.

There's nothing wrong with bootstrapping to map out user flow, and give clear indication a button is a button, a list is a list etc. But when it's time to up your game, give access to the public, default bootstrap visual/color needs to go.

Humans judge a book by its cover. If you release your bootstrap website, users will have to work and over come the barrier of your bland looking site and then decide if it's worth it to try your product.
PS: The point about lawyers have crappy websites and yet we still use them is because our expectations changes depending on the organization. Do we expect government websites to be wow and dazzle us? Do we expect a new Apple product's website to use bootstrap? Do we expect a 2 month old startup website to be featured on Behance's frontpage?

And remember who your early adopters are – if it's people that scours HN or see countless bootstrapped sites, what are they going to think when they see your site? Would they be understanding and go 'Oh its okay - they're a startup, I'll give them some leeway when it comes to visual design' or 'Would they go eff this, these guys don't care about design or visuals. I'll come back later'.
Most people will never even know what the hell you are talking about with the word "Bootstrap", so just because we can recognize these things as developers/designers does not mean it has any influence whatsoever on your users. I'd much rather see a generic bootstrap site than a piece of crap design personally. I would hope many of you would agree.
Environment variables work extremely well when deploying on Heroku [1]. You can't exactly commit a local_settings.py file to your repo, so setting env variables is the only way to exclude sensitive keys and passwords from your source control.

[1] http://rdegges.com/devops-django-part-3-the-heroku-way
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Dark Matter, Dark Energy And The Shadow Universe
a couple of links that came to mind with this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple_space

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_(coordination_language)

http://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Worlds-Software-Universe-Shoebo...
Right, that's also possible, but I like the new key every boot as it gives forward security. Even if the key for the whole image is cracked (which is easier to bruteforce than a completely random key as it is usually human-memorizable), it will not be possible to access the swapfile/temp contents.
It's a game, what did you except?
The idea is nice but in theory but that would be a _huge_ security risk. You'd be providing anyone you know with your encrypted password, as well as the encryption method.