skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sites like sologig might work.

Have had pretty poor luck with universities; professors are busy chasing down real funding, students tend to flake out even with real money on the line. The best way to get performance out of universities is to tie the product to a junior or senior design project that the students get graded on (coordinate through the professor). This isn't fast but it can be almost free; often the department is just happy to get projects that have real-world applications.

You can also get free consulting from national laboratories in your area through some state or local governments (you keep the IP). Also not instant and not guaranteed, but free.

Would sure be nice to have a YC for non-software-engineer engineers.
The whole purpose of FourSquare and Facebook is to show off information about yourself to other people. You sign up for FourSquare because you want to tell people where you are. You want other people to know where you are. You sign up for Facebook so you can show other people your photos and see other people's photos. You can talk to them, interact, and share your beliefs.

Both services make it possible to limit who this information is shared with. Saying "it's confusing" is a pretty poor argument as to why that makes these things creepy or dangerous. Most people WANT this information to be public. That's why they signed up for these services in the first place.

Personally, I feel MUCH safer that people know where I am and what I'm doing. If I ever go missing, there will be a solid documented trail of where I've been up until I go missing.
FAKEGRIMLOCK seems very relevant to this site as he created a brand out of nothing and I find most of his short comments insightful. So the interview is a nice read on his tactics even if it's a bit shallow.
I just hope we don't have tons of clones of his persona. It works only once or twice.
Yet another one-sided Bitcoin article. Yawn.
Majority Female
I think it's safe to say. Arrow functions have existed in many different languages, but this particular flavor of using the fat arrow to declare a "lexical `this`" function, where the value of "this" within the function body preserves the value of "this" outside, is in CoffeeScript:

http://coffeescript.org/#fat_arrow
1) 'This is what makes most complaints in the facebook-makes-money-off-of-you vein a complete misunderstanding of technology. [...] For the purposes of advertising, facebook does not need you to disclose relevant information to anyone but facebook.'

You didn't understand cstross's sentence. He said that the social networks are motivating their users to disclose information [that is] relevant to advertisers; he didn't say that they are disclosing the information directly to advertisers.

2) Handwaving about applications and like buttons aside, it's pragmatically trivial through the facebook ecosystem to capture a great deal of data about individuals that they might not natively believe they are exposing. I know this because I personally do this (for benign reasons).
but don't you have to pay the blackberry monthly fee or something?

Groups are convenient I guess.
I'm actually quite curious about your viewpoint, and why it seems so difficult to shift - set in your ways, so to speak. So let me see if I can't let Charle's Stross give it a try:

"You're right in principle, but you're right for the same reason and to the same limited extent as if you said "people have a responsibility to be aware of the locks on their front door and windows and to use them". Which is that you omit the other side of the social contract: we all have an obligation not to exploit our neighbors' negligence if they leave their door unlocked by burgling them."[1]

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/03/not-an-a...
You're not the first young person to smell a rat and assume that everything is ok because some senior people say so.

Your lessons here: 1) gut feelings are usually correct, and 2) many startups are run by delusional idiots with impressive backgrounds.
SpiderOak IAMA/AUA on reddit.com
The spideroak.com team answers questions from the reddit community.
Why do you need an app to find girls AROUND YOU! I find them around me all the time.
This service is developed by GoogleJapan.
So, April's fool is earlier than the US'.
I can relate to a bad-mgmt experience. But 8:30 to 6:00 is nothing to complain about in startupland (or medical, legal, finance, consulting, etc.). In fact, I'd call 8:30 - 6:00 light (even very light).
Absolutely. I stopped reading a couple of pages in because I didn't want to forget where I live.
People seem to be building their own or using Bit-Pay (2.69% fees; interesting).
Exactly. It wasn't a typo, it was a misunderstanding of the use of the word.
Should You Consider API Starter Kits for 3rd Party Platforms
I hate everyone on HN
Download bitcoind and learn to use the json interface.

When a buyer comes, generate a new wallet for them. Poll the wallet to see if payment comes.

That's how you accept bitcoin payments.
My best new car buying experience was using the methods described in the book "Car Buyer's and Leaser's Negotiating Bible" by William Bragg. The book is out of print but basically consisted of faxing/emailing dealerships within a 300-mile radius and asking for a quote on your chosen vehicle. Then, after getting the lowest quote, inform the higher dealerships and they almost always go lower. Repeat as needed.

http://www.amazon.com/Buyers-Leasers-Negotiating-Bible-Editi...
Let me spare you some trouble. Here's what this article says:

* 10-15% of all transactions are fraudulent. In other words, something like $150Bn-$200bn/yr, or up to 2 times the entire market cap of Cisco Systems, is being lost every year to online fraud.

* Banks are investing in multifactor authentication systems to try to do away with passwords.

* But that won't work, so the only solution is to scrap the entire financial system and start over...

* ... with Bitcoin, for which there is "no payment fraud", "no paper work", "no merchant accounts", and "more privacy".

This argument isn't even coherent enough to be wrong. The types of mainstream attacks modern banking authentication systems are trying to deal with assume customer machines are actually owned up by attackers. They'd be happy just to find a way to make it harder to automatically extract value from accounts using standardized malware. This isn't a problem Bitcoin contemplates.
tyvm for feedback. What country are you writing from? Is court action common place when a site is compromised in your country?

I'm guessing you are from the US?
Hopefully Mozilla's WebAPI[1] will bring us those.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI
I have no idea what you are trying to say here. This is an engineering discussion, not a dorm room debate.

What you've tried to argue here is that we should add new HTTP verbs to express "this endpoint shouldn't allow cross-domain requests". Or, more generally, that we should add HTTP features to allow browsers to prevent CSRF attacks.

But CSRF isn't a browser security problem. It isn't even necessarily a cross-domain problem! (CSRF is in that respect misnamed.) The specific changes you've suggested would drastically change the HTTP protocol but couldn't even theoretically solve the request forgery problem, not just because of intra-site CSRF but because your suggested locked-down HTTP requests would also break otherwise viable apps --- meaning that many apps couldn't use these features even if they wanted to, and would have to rely on something else for CSRF protection.

The fact is that having browsers police request validity just doesn't make sense. Even if they could do that, they still obviously have to rely on serverside signals to determine whether a request is or isn't valid. If the serverside knows a request isn't valid, it already has the means to block it! Why on earth would the server punt this to the browser?

Your suggestions have the appearance of not being familiar with how CSRF protection works in apps today. It is almost a one-liner in many modern frameworks.
GOOD QUESTION
We don't store your operating system or apps primarily because without taking a complete disk image, you wouldn't be able to reinstall them typically anyway. Thus, it would take more of your bandwidth to get the files backed up, but you wouldn't be able to use them. (And you may get a false sense of security about them.) In general, our goal is to backup your data - the things you can't get back.
I currently have a blackberry torch. When the phone works, it's amazing, and I'm very satisfied with it. However, there are a lot of little glitches that make using it a terrible user experience. Furthermore, a lot of the features on it are only able to be used with a blackberry data plan, such as social feeds and bbm, and most apps explicitly require data, and cannot be used if you do not have a data plan. If they fixed these issues, I would love my torch completely.
In some cases, you are correct. For instance, if I am hiring someone to sell cars, I need a person who I can expect to be liked even by the most racist people.

But say that I am only slightly racist. If I knew you were Black, I probably would not go out of my way to say high to you. But once we are having a conversation it's easy for me to relate to you and my prejudices are more likely to be overridden.
Spooning by bitbucket
Things have been changing really fast in the last couple of years in the football world and nowadays most clubs use all kinds of tools at their disposal. Some examples I can think of: GPS technology to track the training sessions, relying on OPTA to provide detailed statistics about matches/opponents/players and even using the database of a game such as Football Manager for their scouting network. Rafa Benitez is an example of a coach who takes it one step further but there a loads of other coaches who rely heavily upon statistics. It's an industry where there are still a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs.
I just switched from an android device to a BB9900 and it does exactly what I need. Hasn't crashed a single time yet (vs the weekly crashes on my Android phone), the keyboard is wonderful, battery life is fine (~ 3 days) and the core features work flawlessly (messaging, email, calendar etc).

I don't see RIM competing successfully in an environment where Angry Birds & Plants vs Zombies is a crucial part of the experience though so I'm not all that optimistic with regard to their future. Smartphones have gone mainstream and the mainstream wants Angry Birds not encryption.
As I wrote, I'm one such person who does not understand and use Facebook privacy settings correctly.

Halloween will be much easier this year; I can come as a mythical creature without needing a costume!
Recent versions of CoffeeScript greatly improved compilation of fat arrows.

This:

x = (a) =>
y = (b) =>
z = (c) =>
@q * a * b * c

Becomes this:

var x,
_this = this;

x = function(a) {
var y;
return y = function(b) {
var z;
return z = function(c) {
return _this.q * a * b * c;
};
};
};

Instead of this:

var x;
var __bind = function(fn, me){ return function(){ return fn.apply(me, arguments); }; };
x = __bind(function(a) {
var y;
return y = __bind(function(b) {
var z;
return z = __bind(function(c) {
return this.q * a * b * c;
}, this);
}, this);
}, this);
It's true that backups will take a long time too, but you're often in much less of a hurry with them than when restoring.
Their browser is bad now, but I sometimes wake up at night having nightmares about how bad it was previously. Pre-os5, the browser was unusable.
Idea for the structure of a tutoring site
I don't have any real coding ability and I certainly don't have time for a side project but I was hoping to get some feedback on an idea of mine:

Upon visiting the site you would be asked to register as a student or as a tutor. Upon registering as a tutor you would select your areas of expertise and take a few diagnostic tests, perhaps pulled from khan academy and other sites. You would be encouraged to buy a low cost usb writing pad to assist you in your teaching, and you would agree to accept no payment for your first 20 or so tutoring sessions. This is because you would be proving your abilities as a tutor to students who had agreed to do sessions with tutors of unproven ability (this would also serve as the free pricing tier). After each session the student would rate the tutor in several categories, allowing them to build up credibility and desirability among the students. Once they are proven the students who would like a more professional experience can submit reasonable payments before their session through stripe or some other simple payment system. The sessions look like a split screen with a video feed of the other person on one side and a virtual paper display on the other. Tutors can log in and do sessions with available students whenever they want, or students can subscribe to specific tutors at given times if both parties agree. I can see this having a problem with an initial lack of tutors/users and also a library of diagnostic tests would be difficult to build up since this idea isn't limited to standard subjects. I'd love to hear HN's ideas on this, thanks for reading.
Groupon’s Shares Fall on (accounting) Revision
Unfortunately, nothing in computer vision's ever as trivial as you might imagine, or as it should be.
Google will abandon Android
Remote backups are generally far more expensive – the monthy payment quickly reaches higher than the cost of hard disks. If you only told people of the possibility of remote backups, many would consider it too expensive and give up on backing up, whereas they might be comfortable with local backup.
Yes, I've heard the 'collaboration' justification, too. In my experience, a lot of programmers hate the open-floorplan noise, to which they're told "just take a laptop into a spare conference room, or work from home". The upshot is that half the team is now taking up conference rooms or working from home.

It's the worst of both worlds: we're paying for both cubicles that nobody uses and big conference rooms being used as single offices, and people are even more isolated than if they'd just been given normal offices to begin with.

It reminds me of situations like Prohibition (and I'm sure you can think of others): we don't like X, therefore we'll legislate against X, and ignore the fact that people are going to do X anyway, and so our legislation actually makes things worse.
As a developer who's actually implemented this, I can say that the hot frameworks do have good libs for it -- and the bitcoin daemon has a trivial JSON RPC interface for which you could easily write whatever bindings you like.

And as amazing as Stripe is, getting working Bitcoin payments is even easier: generate key, show to your user, and query your daemon for payments.
Notice the map data for that location is copyright Square Enix.
Agreed that backing up only in transit can be sketchy. Most online backup services (including ours, www.Backblaze.com) encrypt your data on your client. Also, we provide an option to use a private key in which case not only is it encrypted, but only you have the key. Of course, if you forget it the data is completely unrecoverable.
Exec is hiring a lead designer and engineer.
I want to pay for Facebook
The reason it is stored client-side is that it is just a demo app - there is no login, no truly persistent characters (I can't play the character I started at work from home), and no PvP.
You...and 94% of everybody else I'm afraid: http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/12/94-of-computer-users-st...
It depends on what you're into and exactly what you think your prospects are for each. I'm graduating from a different MIT program in June (SM 16/SM TPP), and I absolutely loved it here. If your experience is anything like mine, you'll meet tons of brilliant, awesome folks (that means you'll always be able to step out into the startup world).

YMMV.

Also, vonsydov had a good idea. I know a lot of MIT programs let you take a 1 year deferment. Maybe you can take a cut at the startup, and if you go belly up, go to school. If you end up a billionaire, buy vonsydov a beer.
I remember that. The nice thing about those comments is that most of them seemed to be focused entirely on correcting journalistic exaggeration, and not on maliciously bashing someone, even if that was the way they were perceived. I know, that doesn't really sound like a nice thing, but I've seen enough actual malicious behavior to much prefer the "inhumanity" of only acting like an asshole as a purely accidental side-effect of being persnickety about technical correctness.

There are a lot of aspects of the Human Condition that I'm not too fond of, so feel free to act inhuman with good intentions around me any time!
Good lord, nothing's made me miss Zelda and SimCity as much as this. Kudos Google.
WTF Python?
One option that Backblaze (and some others) offer is the ability to order an external hard drive with all your data via FedEx. That way, if you need a terabyte of data back, you get it quickly.
I explain why I think Scala will be giant to people by saying it is Java's C++. It's as painful or nice as you want it, one company's use looks nothing like another's and it is building on years of pain points to solve problems in a different way while still using the current ecosystem(s).
You can also do this with most Flash games. A few companies encrypt the data, but in theory, the encryption key can still be reverse-engineered since it's on the client side. It just usually isn't worth the effort.
Not sure why I got the downvotes. The author literally says the people who aren't getting screwed over are using the internet. And he took way too long to tell that story.
I personally think that Microsoft should either buy or merge with Facebook, wipe the slate clean, redesign it Metro UI style, and charge for it. No ads, just a better overall service. I wouldn't hate Facebook so much if it were actually fun to use.
Learn how to increase your conversion rates with A/B testing
For a more technical description of the best algorithms to do this (and more advanced compensation) automatically, see:

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/pr_any/

BTW, these algorithms have been well understood and described by the research community for many years now. I think some companies targeting the high-end segment have incorporated some of these techniques, but I'm not sure why it's not filtered down into low-end consumer tech yet.

Actually, I think there's easily a startup or two in using your smartphone to calibrate a projector. The math would only have to be slightly modified, and if you could make this process seamless, it would be pretty cool.
Watch out, we got a local storage cheater bad ass over here. Now seriously, people had cheats on games like WOW, Lineage etc witch are online (DB is online) and could cheat. The best ideea is NOT TO TRUST the client. But still is just a proof of concept and playing and not cheating was nice, 30 minutes tops to finish it (all achievements)
But then you have to wait for browser adoption. Maybe you'll safely be able to use this syntax in 4 or 5 years.
The main overhead for MongoDB's storage is that the "column name" (keys) is stored in every record rather than just once as with traditional SQL database and some of the other NoSQL solutions. That is why you'll often see developers using very short key names, and one use for an "ORM" to translate between developer friendly names and short stored names.

Of course this can be solved fairly easily by the MongoDB developers by having a table mapping between short tokens/numbers and the long names. This is the ticket:

https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-863

This is someone's measurements with different key names:

http://christophermaier.name/blog/2011/05/22/MongoDB-key-nam...
Something similar to this would be nice. http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/30/2883925/an-alternate-windo...
I didn't downvote, but novelty accounts are not exactly a part of the local culture. I doubt there's any insightful or substantial point that can only be made by writing in caps with bad grammar.

Yes, it might make you think that it's a dry and humorless environment. But at least it's not overrun by 20 copies of CaptainObvious or JokeExplainer.
Yeah the music in the video really brought me back for a second. I was just thinking about my old NES wondering where in my parents house it could be and if I could play earthbound.
I found CarMax to be pleasant to deal with, but they have awful prices, both when buying and selling. For example, they offered me $5000 for my car, which I ended up selling pretty easily to some guy on Craigslist for $7500. Of course there's more hassle with a private sale, but not $2500 worth of hassle.
Tying a new language to the JVM is basically like helping a drowning man by throwing him an anchor. Scala the language is decent, but the JVM-induced clusterfuck of complex stdlib/IDE reliance/maven makes for a non-starter.
Ive been having a similar experience to you. I work for a big corporation with over 20k employees and the process is suffocating. Its hard to do my job sometimes because there is so much process. The people as well are super secretive with things they are working on to protect their status at the company. Its a completely toxic environment and I also applied to Ycombinator. I hope to see you there!
Here in Jamaica, and I've read, many other less-developed nations, Blackberry phones are the most popular. By far. Overwhelmingly, this is due to BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM. It's almost like a small social network in and of itself. A friend of mine runs a phone sale / repair business via BBM. Every morning, he broadcasts items for sale and daily specials. Deliveries and payments are also co-ordinated via BBM. Party promoters also put their BBM PIN and QR Code on fliers, and keep you updated via BBM. My bank is on BBM...

Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) is also affordable. My BIS plan costs ~17USD, which gives me email access, unlimited data, and BBM. Normal data plans for use with an iPhone / Android phone would cost approximately double that, and most are metered.

I use my Bold 2 (9700) with Google Apps for my personal / business email. Works great. Email, Contacts, and Calendar entries sync seamlessly out of the box. Email is instantaneous. From here in Jamaica, over my home WiFi, if I send an email from Gmail's web interface, in literally 2 seconds it shows up on my phone as a Sent Message. I can also 'star' messages, archive them, label them and it supports Gmail conversation view. The browser in OS v6 is ok...I haven't experienced much other mobile browsers. ihackernews.com is a lifesaver, and my home page....

I don't have access to all the apps in the iOS ecosystem, but I'm actually quite satisfied. And I love the keyboard. When data plans get cheaper, though, I might switch to an Android phone running CyanogenMod.

FWIW, my PIN is 21C714C2. Always happy to chat with a fellow HNer.
You have a very good list... I would like to add one additional blog to it:

http://highscalability.com/
My first look at it had me thinking of Earthbound, actually.

But it's not so similar that I would call it a copy of anything. How long has it been since you played LttP? Those trees aren't at all the same and the ground is much too flat.
Really lovely UI. But was wondering why the title "Dropsend" seems not aligned with the rest of the page content.
Will Winning the Lottery Ruin Your Life?
this is complete text of 1st edition, written for scala 2.7. Probably about 1/4 of the text is unchanged between editions, maybe less, but will give you good feel for writing style, depth of coverage.

http://www.artima.com/pins1ed/

The 2nd edition is an excellent learning and language survey resource. Also, the books' index is superb.