skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're equating complexity with support assurance.

From what they have written in the past, everyone has a share in providing customer support so that the developers don't become disconnected from the customers actual needs. Small annoyances are easy to ignore when there's a layer of support personnel insulating you.

I've been in a similar situation developing a SaaS ecommerce application, so from my point of view what they are saying makes perfect sense. It's an assurance to their customers that they have proper escalation and continuity plans in place, and should anything out of the ordinary arise there are developers rostered on. This kind of setup would be easy for them to implement considering their employee's are spread across many timezones.
The Harvard Business Review: An Entrepreneur's Dream
No one has been accepted yet -- interviews come first.
I feel it's money flowing from the left pocket to the right pocket of the same pants.
[show HN] send websites and apps from browser to phone
Well, that ultimately comes down to preference. I would rather have a job than extra time to spend in my personal life.
Wired Article: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/online-drug-market-...

Cali DA press release: http://www.justice.gov/usao/cac/Pressroom/2012/045.html

Full indictment (66 pg. pdf): http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/04/WILLEM...
Silca RW4
It's funny because it has "future of gaming" and "console" in the same article.
I'd jump to the schedule more quickly lest people think it's just another gig index. I was pretty unimpressed until I got to playing around with selecting acts in the schedule.

I like the "similar to last selected" bit though I wasn't sure if it always worked very quickly.

Also, on a typical screen, it required a bit of scrolling around to see the day plus the "next day" nav. I wonder if you could tighten things up a bit for fairly busy schedules?

Showing promise though. Don't give up.
I hope people get just as excited to make things with the RasberryPi as they do with DCPU.
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I would offer a somewhat more optimistic take: humans are still better learners than machines are, and our algorithms still do not capture well the way our thinking (and intuition) works. Really, we have only started with machine learning a few decades ago; catching up with millions of years of evolution can be expected to take a bit longer.
Rise in Scientific Journal Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform
Someone requested a shirt:

http://www.zazzle.com/read_the_source_tshirt-235957482677132...
I agree regarding the Django tip. Does anyone know why manage.py was moved outside of the main project directory?
Congrats! One of the first to post as far as I can tell.
The Challenge of Going Vegan
Moody's is a joke. When they screw up they claim "free speech" so they can away with it.

How's the phone for those HN-ers that have it? That is the only thing that matters. Uncle Ballmer is loaded, he can bankroll this thing for quite a while, make no mistake about it. 1 Million phones X $100 price drop = $100 million, or almost chump change for http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MSFT+Key+Statistics . Microsoft can take a special charge of $1 billion for a year or two to bail Nokia out or to lower the price so people are enticed. Will the investors say anything when you are minting over $20 Billion a year? I doubt it.

Declare Microsoft dead at your own peril. The world is moving to doing a lot of stuff in their phones and Microsoft is not about to roll over in their turf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile
There are also rumblings that those rumblings are nothing more than rumblings...

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120413PD205.html
Hopefully they will move to the ARMv7 archicture with the next-generation Raspeberry Pi chip. ARM11 which is based on the ARMv6 architecture is so old, and many popular apps don't want to support it anymore.

Adobe didn't want to support it with Flash, Google won't support it with Chrome for Android (even on ICS), Mozilla didn't want to support it initially, but eventually changed their mind probably because they are desperate for market share on Android. Canonical doesn't want to support it in Ubuntu as well. So yeah, I'm hoping for a Cortex A7 or at least a Cortex A5 to replace the ARM11 CPU in the 2.0 version.
pg says in the application page: "The ideal company would have two or three founders. We'll consider those with four or five. We're reluctant to accept one-person companies, though we have funded a couple." so I hope that wasn't the reason why we got discarded. But if it really is a hard rule it'd be a strange rule, any 4 person team would pretend to be a 3 person team and include the "extra person" immediately after getting in...
thanks, will do...
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but at least in the case of Google Talk you could argue that the client software has been superseded by web-based interfaces and/or browser extensions.

And other programs like Google Earth and Picasa have received continued updates.
"I'm a programmer -- or at least, of all the things I've done in my life, that's the one I've been paid the most money for."

Nice. Pretty much how I see myself. Also, FYI. After many years in the industry I realised I was stagnating so I decided that something needed to change.

After a lot of thinking I managed to negotiate a 4 day week with my employer. I wanted an extra day to work on other projects and to learn new things. Eventually I signed up for Uni and am now working on a masters part time.

I'm thinking about pushing for a 3 day week next semester.

Just remember that anyone can do this. If you are a good worker most employers will do what they can to keep you around. More often than not, you can do in 4 days what 2 juniors can just manage in 5 (you may not realise this, I didn't).
> accepting payment through PayPal

Uh. How did they expect to remain anonymous with a PayPal account?
It seems to me, the problem with AI as applied to gaming, is that just having "good AI" doesn't mean having the smartest AI that can kick the player's butt, it means having AI that the player can observe and formulate strategies against. If it doesn't behave in a human way, and make it's decisions clear to the player then it's not fun.

In short, for gaming the measure of good AI is "fun", not "intelligence".
They can't take away something that was not there in the first place.
http://viewlo.com/
Crowdfunded internet television and movies.
We were super stoked when we came up with the idea a few months back, and even more overjoyed when we learned Ycombinator's focus this round of funding as we fit the criteria exactly. We are comprised of 3 college level engineers and still have a future ahead of us so no big deal. Really thought they we would seal the deal with our alternate ideas like Instagram for video(that doesn't suck)
http://i.imgur.com/QbS7o.jpg
Find a startup! I'm sure there are plenty of lessons to learn :)
No way, "high-end marijuana". Crazy. Extremely dangerous!
How 17 Equations Changed the World
2-dim vs. 1-dim dictionary efficiency in Python
You might want to checkout ziplist. Most of the apps in the recipe/grocery space are pretty horrible but that site does a reasonable job, has a solid team as well as Martha Stuart as an investor. Not an immediate competitor to what you're doing but worth being aware of. I applied to YC with something close to what they've built although I wasn't aware of them when I applied.
That's a shame. These guys' lives are going to be seriously messed up by this, and from the drug list, it looks like they were selling fairly ethical stuff; according to the article, they sold "LSD, ecstasy, fentanyl, mescaline ketamine, DMT and high-end marijuana".
I just recently commented about this in another thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3841211), It makes me really happy to see a company that's doing this.

Unfortunately I've just begun learning rails, and am not in the bay area (yet!).
5,200 orders valued, in total, at $1M. Over a ~2 year period. That's it? Hardly seems like much of a story. Particularly since Tor is of limited use when your system depends on electronic payment systems.
New Udacity.com Website
It's dangerous to compete with state-protected real drug cartels.

In all seriousness... does anyone think the present-day prohibition racket isn't just as corrupt as what was going on in the 1920s? Drug Enforcement Agency... who do you think they're enforcing for?

It's almost impossible that it wouldn't be that corrupt. There is just too much freaking money involved, the stakes too high, for massive numbers of people to not be on the take.
So how long before we get Minecraft implemented in DCPU-16?
For those sites, I'd agree with that. They're pretty flippant. But this is different (I felt that people could make career decisions partly based on these votes) and I found it uncomfortable choosing "Awesome" for an idea that I thought could be OK, maybe.
Simplicity and speed are the advantages.

Compilr, Coderun, and Ideone all look like great in-browser replacements for a full blown IDE. The builds even take as long as a Visual Studio would. They're great for when you want or need the full IDE experience.

But there are many times when a developer might not want that experience. Maybe you're brainstorming a new implementation for an algorithm and you just want to get an idea of what it might look like. Maybe you're in the middle of a presentation and someone in the audience asked you a slightly off-topic question, and you don't want to spin up a new instance of an IDE just to help them understand.

This tool is for those situations like those.
The comments here are really hitting home to me how self-aggrandizing and toxic hacker news is becoming.

This guy got off his ass and started a real business. How about a pat on the back or words of encouragement?

Here's a dose of optimism for you, OP: Good for you. You got this far, you will figure out the challenges ahead of you.

“It is not the critic who counts" has never been more true.
And also forced us to make videos that make us cringe :)
I agree, who says he has to scale? He can get to comfortable position and stay there with loyal customers.
hahaha...seriously? with PayPal? i suppose it could (maybe) be done with prepaid credit cards, but still.
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> it looks like they were selling fairly ethical stuff; according to the article, they sold "LSD, ecstasy, fentanyl, mescaline ketamine, DMT and high-end marijuana"

"Fentanyl is approximately 100 times more potent than morphine, with 100 micrograms of fentanyl approximately equivalent to 10 mg of morphine and 75 mg of pethidine (meperidine) in analgesic activity."[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl
Nitpick: you mean `if (!a) {r = a} else {r = b}` (or switched blocks).
Serious question for Jeff - If I gave you a 500,000 line app (any language) with zero documentation and asked you to start adding features and fixing bugs, you'd be cool with that because you had "the source"?

Also, how did you get so far in your career as an MS developer with such limited access to source code?
Interesting. My experience with Java is that the only thing that gets in the way of programming in Java is the verbosity, which an IDE with powerful refactoring tools (eclipse, IDEA, eclim) gets around nicely. I would argue that in many ways, Java is easier to program in than a lot of other currently hot languages because there is so much tooling around it (although I would trade basically any python package manager for ivy any day), it is statically typed, and its behavior is generally boring but extremely predictable, and not hard to reason about, excluding the threading library which is not super fun. What have you found is frustrating about using Java?
State-protected real drug cartels and prohibition rackets... can you expand? These drugs aren't just illegal here, are similar drug cartels running countries around the world?
tl;dr
The world needs ditch-diggers, too

Thanks, Ty (or was it smails?).
Making shit work is everyone's job
It wasn't, the generated package is now wrapped in a directory. Before, it wasn't.
Did you just make a new account or are you trolling? Your profile was created 30 min ago.
I got rejected, I'm close, I'll go. Just sent you an email!
Stop Cyber Spying Week – Join EFF in a Week of Action Opposing CISPA
I am waiting as well.
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Previous Kickstarter here. I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, blablabla.

You might want to have something in place (S-Corp or LLC) before your Kickstarter launches.

You can be sued for any number of things other than the obvious. If your product is significantly delayed and you don't deliver on time (been there), you can be personally liable if you don't have a structure in place.

Also note that an LLC itself isn't enough to protect you. We did the whole legal zoom thing and one day a lawyer asked us about our operating agreement. Naturally, we responded with "Whatchu talkin' bout, Willis?". She informed us that an LLC without an operating agreement isn't really a legitimate entity and won't pass the "corporate veil" test if anything should go down.

TL/DR: Talk to a startup lawyer.
Ask HN: Review the idea - Personas Connect
Hmm. I just realized that my email address in the profile wasn't completely filled in (dangoldin@gmail vs @gmail.com). Wonder what I should do now...
8x life in prison for $1M in drug trafficking?
Okay, that's an exception. Scary stuff. (My sympathy is still with the guys running this service, but my estimate of their virtue went down.)
While SpaceX is getting all the press, Orbital is working on the same thing.
This looks great. I'm also surprised you didn't make it through the first round. Where are you located? Who is your team?
The trademark will transfer to the foundation. It's just a way to ensure that anyone claiming to run an OpenStack compatible cloud is indeed doing just that. It's good for an OSS community to trademark brand assets and protect the name and meaning of their project.
Construct Your Business Ideas On Web
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Already done: https://github.com/trevs231/0x10c-Files/blob/master/minecraf...

(Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uViEhLNJ_8Y )
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I think it's included in the non-Pro version by default versus being a paid (that's how I'm reading "economical") add-on to the Pro version.
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If these guys were using e-gold or some other alternative payment system, the Feds would raid the currency operator's offices as well and seize servers (as they have done in the past). Not so with PayPal and Western Union (I'm not disagreeing with the lack of such action).
They don't "run countries," but there is massive corruption.

Prohibition is basically a price-fixing scheme, and makes illegal drugs obscenely profitable. Years ago I knew a friend who got into it, and he made over $20,000 in one weekend by simply driving a car across the border once. (He ended up getting in trouble unfortunately, though he's much better now and no longer involved.)

If a person is willing to put up with the risk, there are few more profitable businesses.

I've heard recent figures around $400 billion per year globally. So you've probably got cartels that were they legitimate businesses would be on the Fortune 500.

With profits like that, large-scale operations have a lot of money to throw around to bribe cops, judges, government officials, etc. So as a result, the large cartels end up with a privileged position. Smaller operations that cannot afford to have such people on their payroll get targeted preferentially.

Look into the history of bootlegging in Chicago in the 20s. It's the same kind of thing.

The horrible thing about prohibition is that it's such a potent force for institutional corruption. The naiveté of the soccer moms that support it is disgusting. They all need to be beaten with a reality stick.
A friend of mine used to work in a dinosaur pen. He's moved up, but he is still rotated through on-call periods because of his familiarity with the particular outfit he works for.

He receives several hundred dollars over his base salary per week to be on-call; he then receives a minimum of three hours pay at the maximum penalty rate when he takes a phone call.

Given how stressful being on-call can be, I think he earns every dollar. His social life is constrained; getting a 2AM phone call and having to login or drive to the data centre to troubleshoot is hell on sleeping patterns.

The expense of calling him in also encourages the relevant shift managers to think carefully about whether they need to bump the issue up or to recheck it themselves.

If I was in the position of requiring on-call staff of any kind, I would endeavour to have a similar set of rules in place.
I personally would choose TrueCrypt, but I understand the "let's go with default version" even if it's $100 or so more (upgrading Win 7 Home to the Bitlocker version costs about that).

I suspect the ones with Bitlocker will do well if MS scares the crap out of big corps about losing private information
The money goes from the tobacco, and alcohol manufacturers to the lobbyists to the reelection campaigns for the politicians that eliminate their competition. Pretty decent racket. There are similar rackets for Hollywood movies, petroleum, automobiles....

As api points out, there are also drug rackets and cartels that sell the nominally illegal stuff. Those guys can bend cops to eliminate their competition as well.
Has anyone tried to consider the numbers involved with this business?

About how long does it take for two maids to clean a house (or in other words, how many houses can two maids clean in one 8-10 hour day?)? Also, about how many maids do you have working for you?

In trying to come up with a ball-park figure: My guess would be that each pair of maids could bring in about $600-800 a day in revenue (cleaning 4-5 homes). Of this it would seem that about $400-500 goes to paying the maids (say , $200-250 per maid), with about $75 dollars going to daily expenses (gasoline, cleaning materials, etc), leaving whatever remains going to other major business expenses and profit.
If his workers are busy 20 days a month, it would seem that a bunch of the so-called monthly costs of being an employer (say around $750 per month per employee) only comes out to be around $75 dollars a day (per pair of maids). I have no clue as to what this value actually is (or how much of it would be part of their hourly wage), I'm just guessing.

All in all though, I would guess that for each maid he has, on average it is costing him around $275-325 per day while bringing in around $300-400 per day. If their is any truth to the numbers above (which one number being off could dramatically mess everything up), it would appear that he is bringing in about $50-75 per maid. If he prices his service to keep that profit in mind (to make at lease $50 per maid per day), then having a staff of 10 maids could end up making around $100-150k a year. And I suppose the scaling would seem to work pretty linearly; if he doubles the number of mades or how much he brings in per maid, then his profit would double as such. Of course there are things like insurance and training (perhaps those costs total 10% of each maids daily wage and is included in that value)...

Based on these numbers though, having 10 maids would require having 25 homes to clean each day (or about 500 per month). I see that he has given out 2254 lunches so far (if I really wanted to make an accurate estimate of the business he is doing).

Anyhow, is there anything major that I'm missing in these numbers? I'm just trying to make an estimation..
Use forged documents for everything (including your bank accounts), and keep really small balances. Maybe also do business accounts, ideally also with forged info (particularly for US businesses, people don't check the documents very well). I assume PayPal does lazy checking, and will not check a low balance account as much.

Linkability is the real enemy of anonymity.
Costing society probably $100K/yr/each to imprison them.
> They don't "run countries,"

Look at Mexico. They might not run the country yet, but they're giving it a go for sure.
Seriously. Why don't you just wake up and get a grip.

The majority of the countries on this planet have similar drug policies to the US. They aren't all corrupt and in many countries the policies are quite effective. So to rant on like a crazy person about corruption and conspiracies just makes you sound unstable. There are many practical areas that the US can focus on like better border controls rather than opening up the can of worms that is legalising all drugs.
No. No no no no no.

Karma being valued is a major part of WHY reddit is so awful.
They're a geographically spread out company with employees spanning multiple timezones.
They work in small teams and cycle their programmers into the support teams to get them on the front lines.
The programmers in the support teams are "on-call" for issues that come up, skipping the need to send the issue over the fence and take someone off application development.

Whats the controversy? Despite the name of the position, it sounds like its just the role they assume in day to day work rather than fighting fires every couple of days.
Aside from the fact that this simply links to a Reddit story, I don't at all subscribe to the "only say nice things" philosophy.

HN is about sober reality. It should be about people rationally checking ideas. The alternative is that we all essentially engage in fantasy, which is the sort of (failing to find any other term) masturbatory circle-jerk that does nothing but inflate foolish ideas.

I'm not saying that the GP is right or wrong: I actually haven't read the linked story. But the notion that only positive responses are acceptable rubs me the wrong way.
Muni bus cameras issuing traffic tickets in SF.
I wish 0x10co.de and the other DCPU-16 code sharing/emulator websites had existed when I took my first CS "systems programming" (or whatever the introduction to CPUs and assembly was called back then). The professors struggled to get the students enthusiastic about programming in assembly when they were used to high level languages.
"Hotshots" have better things to do with their time than argue this nonsense.
It will surely come eventually, but only when it fits with their goals. Price is a huge constraint on the project, so it will mostly depend on the forward march of Progress bringing down prices of comparable chips with ARM11 cores.
- StumbleUpon
Which countries have policies like the U.S. that are quite effective?

I only know of Singapore, where drugs carry a death penalty, and that's far less ethical than any kind of drug trafficking.

Also: I find it kind of amazing that there are still people naive enough to call me a paranoid conspiracy nut or "unstable" for suggesting that... gasp... there might be corruption in the world.

A paranoid conspiracy nut is someone who thinks that the world's leaders are shape shifting reptiles or that everything is run by a secret cabal linked to some kind of ancient secret society. I'm just suggesting that a large-scale illegal business with profits in the hundreds of billions and cash flow probably near $1 trillion might have an interest in putting a few people on the payroll.
So were they actually selling the drugs or were they just operating a marketplace similar to Silk Road?

Also, why the hell would they use PayPal?! At least SR uses bitcoins.