skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always wondered what the deal was for the 'chum'.

Sounds like 44% is the max you should ever offer, and even so I'd have my attorney add a clause that said that if a shark invested ABC would have 60 days to either join the round or pass. Of course they probably would tell me that I wasn't an acceptable candidate then :-).

Having dealt with many people starting companies over the years it is amazing to me how often folks get hung up on things that are 'known' by folks who do this a lot.

Perhaps there is an opportunity for MBAAcademy. :-)
I really like this!

I'm building an app that will eventually use hstore for data. I say 'eventually', because I'm currently using serialized columns on the $15/month shared plan, and hstore is not yet supported.

At $50/month, this is cheap enough for me to use as a staging server or as a pre-release server to get hstore across my entire environment.
Google Chrome is not supported by Yahoo Finance
Absolutely agree that that is the first priority, but there are many factors you can keep in mind during development without slowing it down much, and this is one of them.
My dad asked me once why I would ever leave my good paying Finance job to start a company with a 1% statistical chance of success. I told him that if you want to belong to the top 1% you have to take the 1% chance of success.
Wow, if you click on the cartoons, if brings you to a fullscreen view of the magazine (print edition). And from there, you can right click on each page and save a copy.
What is the best time to share content on social platforms?
How To Optimize Firefox For Better Performance
Not saying you're wrong, but that article mentions one specific instance where the deal did not go through.
Get a real computer or quit your bitching.
They often do short clips of previous "contestants". Quite often, their business has grown successfully, even without an investment because of the exposure they gained on the show.

I'd say that if you get on the show, present well and have a decent business model -- you're going to gain a ton of interest after the show airs.
If the features hadn't been useful, it wouldn't have worked. Are you seriously going to argue that their strategy – their explicit strategy – was not incredibly harmful to innovation and competition?

Also saying they "invented" XMLHttpRequest is a stretch. If I make a browser with a nonstandard rot-13 function, did I "invent" JSRot13?
I'm at the circus graveyard right now and there is no headstone for Morty Smith! I would post a picture but "I'm going old school" and left my phone at home. ;)

You gotta love this guy's story. It's really well done.

Now, suspend your disbelief for just one more moment... maybe Nate is actually sending us all a cleverly delivered message:
If you invest in Facebook you are a sucker. Or if you don't invest you're a sucker. Or maybe it's some other message. Choose your own interpretation.

But you can be sure that almost every element in that story is there for a reason. The choices of PT Barnum, Honest Abe, and Facebook, and of course refused patent applications, were not arbitrary. Suckers, honesty, researching connections between people, lack of any protectable intellectual property, etc.

Just really well done.
> In the five years I worked in avionics, the only time I saw a while loop was in code review where the person who wrote it (always a new person) was directed to take it out.

I can understand the concern about loop termination, but what is the alternative? Are for loops without a hardcoded upper limit allowed? Or must all loops be unrolled?
I don't understand how AWS services keep being described as 'lock-in'. Shouldn't this post be titled: Appfog Offers Alternative to AWS With OpenStack?
Then new dev plans support hstore: https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2012/4/26/heroku_postg...
With IE, a testing environment costs my company about $300 per developer.

I.e., miniscule relative to the cost of actually having a developer.
Our Next Era (Garrett Camp steps down as CEO of StumbleUpon)
Thought the article was going to be a question as to why. But I wholeheartedly agree as to why Python is a great forst language.

The simple fact that it's syntax light will always be the #1 reason it's a great introduction. Worry about the syntactical hangups once you have the core concepts of programming down.

I never understood those CS courses that have you diving in blind with C++
Rich Hickey proves again that he is among the leaders, if not the leader in careful, industrial-strength application of excellent theory. Bravo.
"Once" isn't a news story. It's something you already know but need to be reminded of from time to time. Giving it a functionally descriptive title would spoil the effect.
2% of "operating profits" is zero dollars for all businesses since no startup makes operating profits. In the event they are not acquired and actually IPO 2% of profits for most businesses is still a very small number.

Why even put that in the document? Further, the document leaves so much open to negotiation it is basically guaranteeing if you are successful you will have to go through a lengthy legal proceeding. Its almost as if the attorneys wanted to figure out a way to make more fees later.
But that doesn't explain why Python and not C#. Can't a C# programmer be up-and-running with Python in a day or two too?
Galaxy S3 - US Version Coming With Dual Core Processor
I need a bit more than the approx 5MB of data - much more, but currently less than 20GB.

I'm kind of in a no-mans land of Heroku data plans - until today!
If you are on an older ronin or fugu you can't. But you can from all other plans and newer ronin/fugu databases. The limitation on older ronin/fugu databases is related to: https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/37
Can somebody clarify which heroku plans are best, as you work from development through MVP and initial traction? My current understanding is:

Development Stage: Use the free plan.

MVP Stage: When I have an MVP that I'd like to show people and get feedback on, I'm not sure if I should stay with the free plan, or if I need a paid plan at this point.

Gaining Traction: Still low overall volume, but consistent users. What is the cheapest paid plan that works for this stage? Is it the $15 plan, or the $50 plan?

Increasing Traffic: At this point, it's a little more clear that you choose add-ons to match your specific needs.

I would love it if someone could clarify what kinds of loads each of these plans could reasonably be expected to handle.
I personally prefer Dotcloud. I don't know if their new pricing model is rolled out all over, but it basically allows for unlimited 'development' sites so getting everything up and running should cost nothing until launch (though it will be memory constrained).

Post-launch, you basically pay for memory usage, so early traction costs very little, and you don't really have to worry TOO much about pricing until you've gotten enough traffic to be considered 'social proof'.

Ignoring cost, I can't necessarily compare it too strictly to Heroku as I've only used Heroku for rails. Anecdotally, Django was one of Dotcloud's reference applications, and Python support has been there for a lot longer.
"The Shark Tank Entities" get to choose, and in some cases the 2% royalty is superior. There are many companies that come on the show with a lot of revenue (and profit) but the sustainability of the company might be questionable.
Damn, this is nice!
Thanks Heroku! I love the service, but 200 bucks as the lowest price point for a dedicated db didn't always make sense to me, especially in the startup world. This changes everything.
SLOCStar - SLOCs per author stats generator
A dummy stats generator that shows how much lines of code (SLOC) belongs to who in the latest snapshot of git repo (currently limited to github repos only). It was written in a humble attempt to play with resque and posix-spawn.

Any suggestions, critics, responses are very welcome. :))
Well yeah, this is TV... the same way they filter out the smartest and the dumbest candidate contestants for game shows and use the middle quotient.

You never/rarely see an entrepreneur enter 'the tank' who is Harvard MBA trained and shit hot. They weed those guys out during the application phase. (not saying a Harvard MBA makes you a good entrepreneur however)
As someone who uses Facebook messaging for some of these things (not the best solution since the reminders/tasks etc. get lost in other conversational clutter), I think this is a great idea and execution! I would like to see the more practical features expanded on.

For instance, if there's a new todo/reminder/etc. added is there a notification sent out? There could be a problem if one person uses the app updates it a lot and the other doesn't check it as often.
Understanding the Legal Impact of Publishing Your Game
> Part of me wishes MS forced updates like these.
> Sure it would probably break a few ancient
> mission critical ActiveX apps, and
> my god the outcry would be immense and furious,
> but it would be better for everyone in the long run

YOU tell the famous doctors in hospitals you're going to break the medical-imaging app they use that depends on IE6. I'M not telling them that. Seriously. It's not as simple as ripping off a band-aid.
FWIW: The actual limits of the dev plans aren't set yet.

But what is the use case for a dev databases with 'much more than 5MB of data' ?
There is no double standard. If any single browser had the marketshare that IE had in its heyday, it would be irresponsible and anticompetitive for them to implement nonstandard features. But marketshare is spread much more evenly among the players today, so it's pretty much understood that a production site cannot rely on a browser-specific feature. Hell, most people don't even rely on modern standard features because they still want their stuff to work in IE6. Comparing experimental features today with the IE-flavored-web of 2002 is comparing apples to geese.
The point is that the stated 0.5% is an upper bound, so even if none of them also bought a ticket, as you speculated (and I find it very unlikely that this is the case), they would still only make up a 0.5% difference in the box office revenue.
Your company has a 1% chance of success? Where do I sign up?
This just adds even more work for me. I already had to open my mail for no reason. And here I thought the hacker dojo was maybe undertaking a project to keep that stuff from my mailbox.
I never quite understood why people think that teaching beginners programming through languages like Python and C# is a good idea. It's really hard. Think about it.

It may seem easy to start writing programs in those languages, but understanding what is actually going on is sort of difficult for someone who has no idea how things work. When you're implementing a linked list or a binary search tree for the first time, it's important to understand how your data structure is laid out in memory, otherwise it's a pointless exercise. Higher-level languages are convenient, but they hide a lot of what is going on, and that, in my opinion, is bad, if you are learning.

I think the best language to start with is C (and not C++, of course). One must understand pointers and bytes and bits and memory management and all that shit that leads to segfaults and many hours of debugging to be a programmer. I would even go as far as to say that one should start with an assembler and not C, but given the immense complexity of contemporary hardware, I understand that such approach is infeasible. However, teaching kids programming with a physical (not emulated), really simple, toy CPU is probably a good idea. Too bad I don't know any such CPUs.
I was curious and the list did not disappoint: https://postgres.heroku.com/pricing

With that said I'm not sure how squid managed to be more dangerous than a kappa.
>Kappa are usually seen as mischievous troublemakers. Their pranks range from the relatively innocent, such as loudly passing gas or looking up women's kimonos, to the malevolent, such as drowning people and animals, kidnapping children, and raping women

~wikipedia
Perl 6: Rakudo passes 22k of 24k spectests.
80 days ago I wrote http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3607225 ("Perl 6: Rakudo, Niecza pass 20k spectests...")

Since then Coke++ has pushed PUGS (Perl 6 on Haskell) from around 0% to around 40% passing of the spectest suite.

And Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot) today passed 22k spectests (of 24k) thanks to kboga++'s nice surprise, a 10 file patch making Real a role, which added 200+ tests in one swell foop.

Visit the #perl6 IRC channel on freenode for more info.
The naming of the sponsorships (based on how much the recruiters or their organizations give to the dojo) is quite appropriate: ninja, guru, and rockstar.
Judge nixes "Oil Orgy" scheme to scare P2P users into quick settlements
I am not a fan of using discipline to get things done. I think it is akin to brute force. Come up with a reason to do the task. Think about the users you will please, think about impressing your client or boss, think about the money you will make.

Essentially discipline is the ability to do something even when you don't want to. However, I believe an unwillingness to excel at your work underscores a larger problem: you don't like what you're doing

This doesn't have to be an objective property of the work. With the wrong attitude, the wrong physical and mental health, the wrong financial situation, the wrong sleep, the wrong anything, it is possible to dislike and even resent rewarding work.

Attack the disease, not the symptoms. Discipline is only a plug in the deck of a sinking ship.

We all need autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Are Chinese gamers addicted to crack?
I have an app that has a number of test users with a set of data for each of them that shows off the app. Since the users interact in specific ways, I need to have several users otherwise the testing isn't useful.

My dev machine has a much smaller set of data, but on Heroku, I run stage servers with reasonable amounts of real life data that I need for final testing
For anyone looking to upgrade from the shared database to one of these, I believe this is the procedure:

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/migrating-data-between...
Use it all the time. Love it.
How is everyone condoning this?! This is fucking insane.

The logic is NOT we give you free advertising -> you owe us monies. The logic is you provide amusing filler in the context of a targeted program and we sell advertising the audience of that show. Just like every other show on our network.

So any return ABC would get from this is logically abnormal, and I would argue morally abhorrent. On what other show does this happen? Would American Idol demand rights to future royalties of all auditioning acts? Would that be seen as fair?
Pirate Bay claims record traffic, posts advice on getting round court block
Garrett Camp Steps Down As StumbleUpon CEO, Will Serve As Chairman
Zuckerberg a no-show for IPO Roadshow in Boston
How Comcast is killing the cable killers
I agree. The PGM class is much more challenging than the machine learning and algorithm classes, even though (or perhaps, because) Tim and Andrew are doing such a terrific job with the videos of ML and Alg, respectively. One also notices a steep decline in the number of PGM quiz attempts in the published statistics. However, I think that some of the difficulty of the PGM class should be attributed to the rough edges in the programming assignments. We rely heavily on the forums to collaboratively decipher them (as well as some ambiguous questions on the problem sets). But then, this also shows that Coursera's platform enables positive student interaction...

I probably used every curse I know while working on the 5th PGM assignment, but I am the first to admit that I did learn a lot, and I'm sure they will fix the rough edges for the second run of the class. Moreover, the entrepreneur in me is very inspired to see fresh-from-the-oven code. Sure, I've already seen apps that were lacking some features because they were released fast, but here I have an opportunity to actually see some fresh code (since we are basically asked to "fill in the blanks" in Daphne's implementation). I admire Daphne's entrepreneurial courage to publish something even if is is not 100%.

Also note that the PGM class has many more pointers to recent research in the field [1], which I think the OP would find interesting.

Finally, I think the OP is missing a bit of the bigger picture - comparison of undergraduate studies in Israel and the US. I could probably write a long post about this one day (I've taught science undergrads in both college systems), but at least I should point out a couple of things. In Israel, there is much more focus on the major; about 95% of the classes are in the major field of studies. (One chooses her/his major before applying to college). There are (almost) no GE classes [2]. There is probably no one attending CS classes who does not major in CS (or double major). There are advantages and disadvantages of each system. But as a result, you can put more challenging content into CS classes in Israel.

Therefore, it would probably be more fair to compare a CS class from the Technion to upper-division or first-year grad class. That is, instead of comparing it to Stanford's CS161 (or any other 100-199 classes), it would be more fair for the OP to compare it to the level of CS228/CS229A (or almost any other 200-299 classes).

[1] Not all of these are plugs to Daphne's research- I even remember some pointers to Thruns' papers. (he's sort of a competitor.)

[2] Perhaps this is to allow 3 years college, and save some time we spend serving in the army.
Looking At The World Through Twitter Data
Something tells me you just made highway robbery (and worse) quite a bit easier with this scheme.
Bit disappointed that it isn't gonna be another actual Space Quest starring Roger Wilco, I'd definitely be up for that.
Companies choose to be on Shark Tank. Nobody is forced to be on the show. The show is just a giant informercial; in primetime. It's definitely an informercial that I love to watch.
I could be wrong, but I looked into Shark Tank a little while ago and I don't remember this 5% equity or 2% royalty demand. It is something that would have really stood out to me. I think it's new and based on the popularity of the show. There are a few companies that I remember specifically (ChordBuddy and Scottevest) that I have a hard time believing would agree to appear on the show given those equity/royalty demands (based on how the founders acted with the sharks). It's going to scare away many potential businesses, and I can't imagine going on that show knowing that you're already down 5% in equity...

Can anyone confirm if this is new or not?
It's a rather pleasant shade of blue, and a Syracuse, NY telephone exchange. Other than that, no significance I can gather. May well be an arbitrarily chosen random number.

http://www.colorhexa.com/315475
http://xkcd.com/221/
I'd love it if you used the new dev plan for your staging/dev db needs. This can help us drive the final limits.
> morally abhorrent

No coercion. If you don't like the deal, you're free to avoid it.
The specific terms and conditions of the Option,
royalty and warrants (e.g., exercise provisions, rights to documentation, shareholder rights such as pro-rata rights and
anti-dilution protections, etc.) shall be set forth in one or more further agreements between Producer and me.

Seems a little wishy-washy, doesn't it? What happens if they can't agree, or do they decide this up-front?

It also seems to imply that they want preferred stock, which strikes me as bit odd, to say the least.
WARNING – Your Twitter Account Might Be Hacked #infosec
Brazil’s Startup Industry: Impressions, Insights & Lessons from Israel (Part I)
I would even go as far as to say that one should start with an assembler and not C, but given the immense complexity of contemporary hardware, I understand that such approach is infeasible.

Someone could make a similar argument about starting in C. And make similar arguments that you made for the benefits.

You have to start teaching somewhere in the stack. I actually disagree that it's infeasible to start with assembly. I don't think it's wise, but it's certainly feasible. I think people tend to have a bias that beginners should start at the same level of abstraction that they did. But I think that in online discussions, we place too much emphasis on where to start. I doubt it matters as much as the other factors, such as motivation of the student and the patience and care of the instructor.
Yeah, I actually twittered Paul Reiche about kickstarting a real Star Control 2 sequel. SC2 might not have the biggest fan base, but I would argue it is probably the most passionate :)
I don't understand the rules. What stops the liar from telling the truth?
I basically use tabs as temporary bookmarks. I don't try to look through them very often. If I want to go to website, I just open a new tab and type the name/URL into the address bar rather to look through the tabs I have open to see if it's already open somewhere. When Firefox opens a switch to an open tab, I do take the option.

I browse through the tabs I have open at leisure, finishing the business I have with them as convenient. I can easily end up closing 200 tabs during a period like that, since afterwards they're not useful to me anymore. When I am done with a website (say, opened all the interesting articles and comment pages from the hacker news frontpage) I do close the tab, instead of leaving it open and looking for it later.
How is that different from American Idol?
login to my account: hackernews@mailinator.com:bacon123

is that a crime?
Andreessen Horowitz Confirms Its Scout Program
Many numbers are.

Fair point.
Well may have gotten traffic but did it get sales? Goodwill?

Attracting traffic because you are being a dick is not the same as attracting traffic because you are making a world-changing awesome product.
In my case, because Opera seems to work better than the others under Linux (Safari isn't even available).
There's a line up out the door with decent companies to take their place. It creates a lot of pressure for the company to just sign it as soon as they can.
Typically, though not always, the businesses that are torn down the hardest by the sharks have poor fundamentals and little traction.

Five percent equity taken from these businesses is unlikely to ever amount to anything of significant value, although naturally the entrepreneurs presenting their businesses may feel otherwise.

And if your business is in so poor of a state that it gets mocked and humiliated, there seems to be little downside to just re-incorporating if you truly believe in your idea. In this case, wouldn't ABC get nothing?

I understand that in the real world, legal ramifications and damage to one's reputation mean this rarely happens -- but is ABC really going to make a stink?
Agreed - the only way to get a really favorable deal, where favorable is "the best kind of deal they offer, but not necessarily good" is to have a large order that you can't finance and to not need them for anything else.
DynaSpring : Spring without XML (A Lisp DSL instead)
Mazel tov on your acceptance!

Unfortunately, good subletting opportunities can be quite difficult to find most buildings explicitly prohibit the behavior.

I'm not sure how old you are, but depending on your age, you may be eligible for summer housing through studenthousing.org. NYU and Pace also have great summer dorming options, but they only offer housing for the entire summer rather than for specific time frames (which will likely be a problem given the nature of DreamIt's Israel-NYC time split).

Usually short-term rentals are very expensive (AirBNB certainly is), but http://www.nyhabitat.com/new-york-apartment.html seems to be the most reasonable provider around.

Of course, Craigslist is also always an option, but there are no guarantees and it helps to know a bit about each building/location first.

If you have any questions, I'd be happy to help out!