skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good questions.

Heroku vs EC2.

Honestly, going through YC you get a bunch of Heroku credits. You also get AWS credits but getting a production app on Heroku is very simple, especially with rails. I also have to build and manage fewer parts of the infrastructure/deployment when you are trying to scale up and down. I don't think it's that expensive if you have optimized parts of your stack. Use web for only serving API, single page app, optimized assets via CDN etc.

Extend vs Mixins.

For Picplum we are building multiple front end's that use the same models and view logic with slight modifications. For example on our new homepage (coming soon), you can upload photos, add recipients and send out photos without having to goto the app. This is our new on-boarding process. Extending makes a lot more sense her. Homepage Batch view vs App batch view, Homepage Recipients vs App Recipients.

Require.js

We are still in the middle of figuring out a stable production setup with require. It helps you structure your Backbone app more efficiently. The tough part is to figure out how to bundle your js files effectively. You probably don't want every single JS file loading asynchronously since there can be 20+ files just for the homepage.
Depressing, maybe, but it's definitely accurate being "the front page of the internet"
Google page 179 "Hedgehogging" by Barton Biggs.

There's one whole chapter in that book that's an indictment of Meeker, Blodget, Quattrone, Glassman ( the Dow 36000 guy ) and the rest of the folks who supplied the oxygen for the previous bubble. And now Meeker's back...so that should signal something.

The key incident was the conference were Biggs was asked "Is the internet revolutionary ?".Biggs said "No". A collective boo from the audience. "Ok so what is revolutionary ?". Biggs thought for a while and said "The Air Conditioner. Without an AC, the entire south of the USA like the Carolinas, Florida & parts of Texas would remain unpopulated"
Biggs was laughed at. A month later the Dow plunged 2000 points over a 2 month period. Fun times ;)
I'm not sure about that. There's nothing wrong with a business that's going to burn out in three years, provided everyone knows it will, it's making profit now, and there's an exit strategy in place.

A fairly common strategy among certain types of entrepreneur is the news-driven mini-venture. See major news, make product to capitalise on it, expect revenue to dry up as it becomes old news, move on.
I don't know if it's this black and white.

If your'e pursuing a whole new paradigm of doing or using things, yeah, money won't be at the center of it.

For the majority of businesses and successful tools, there is thought about money. Maybe it's just me but it seems easier to stop asking this when you have enough money not to ask this question.

It's fine not to ask, but will not asking pay anyones bills in the meantime?
[edit: content removed as the site is back up]

HNed, it appears.

Google's Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
please rebut:
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...
Looks pretty awesome.

Avoiding ORMs that assume a chatty connection make pragmatic sense, and they note the code complexity trade-off of having to explicitly fetch the data up-front.

I like that they basically added aggregates to the SQL schema, I'd been hoping a RDBMS would come out with that feature as a way to transparently handle sharding.

I'm pleasantly surprised they allow (AFAICT) transactions/joins across aggregates, albeit with 2PC.

I would have been just fine accepting transactions/joins only within aggregates, as even if the application code has to handle coordination across aggregates in an eventually consistent manner, as long as each aggregate itself is consistent, I think programmers can still easily deal with/reason about that sort of model.

If I were a VC, I'd give $40 million to a company building this product over MongoDB. Enterprises (who spend money on licenses/support much more than startups do) historically want features like schemas and transactions (i.e. there is a reason relational databases have been popular for so long).
Nor would it be welcome on HN. It's courtesy not to post about your votes, rather letting them speak for themselves.
Increasing performance with Cassandra compression
On linux, it's

echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

http://linux-mm.org/Drop_Caches
Shortening Your Links & More
Most or all of the points suffer from:

Let's address them one by one.

is that actually true?

In every case, yes.

does regular a/b testing not also face that issue?

For the big ones, regular A/B testing does not face that issue. For the more complicated ones, A/B testing does face that issue and I know how to work around it. With a bandit approach I'm not sure I'd have noticed the issue.

was it suggested that you must "set it and forget it"?

Not "must", but it was highly recommended. See paragraph 4 of http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=132 - look for the words in bold.

are there no mechanisms for mitigating these issues?

There are mechanisms for mitigating some of these issues. The blog does not address those. As soon as you go into them, you get more complicated. It stops being the "20 lines that always beats A/B testing" that the blog promised.

I was doing some back of the envelopes on different methods of mitigating these problems. What I found was that in the best case you turn into

would using 20% or 30% mitigate the issues?

That would lessen the issue that I gave, at the cost of permanently worse performance.

The permanent performance bit can benefit from an example. Suppose that there is a real 5% improvement. The blog's suggested approach would permanently assign 5% of traffic to the worse version, for 0.25% less improvement than you found.

Now suppose you tried a dozen things. 1/3 of them were 5% better, 1/3 were 5% worse, and 1/3 did not matter. The 10% bandit approach causes you to lose 0.25% conversion for each test with a difference, for a permanent roughly 2% drop in your conversion rate over actually making your decisions.

(Note, this is not a problem with all bandit strategies. There are known optimal approaches where the total testing penalty decreases over time. If the assumptions of a k-armed bandit hold, the average returns of the epsilon strategy will lose to A/B test then go with the winner, which in turn loses to more sophisticated bandit approaches. The question of interest is whether the assumptions of the bandit strategy really hold.)

Whichever form of testing you use, you're doing better than not testing. Most of the benefit just comes from actually doing testing. But the A/B testing approach here is not better by hundredths of a percent, it is about a permanent 2% margin. That's not insignificant to a business.

If you move from 10% to 20%, that permanent penalty doubles. You're trading off certain types of short-term errors for long-term errors.

(Again, this is just an artifact of the fact that an epsilon strategy is far from an optimal solution to the bandit problem.)

are you not allowed to follow the data closely with the bandit approach?

I am not sure what you mean here.
BitNami Releases Node.js Stack - free installers, VMs and AMIs for Amazon Cloud
pretty awesome slide show
OverDrive Reader turns your PC, tablet or smartphone into an eBook reader
Making money from an IPO offering (a one-time event) is very different from making money from a customer base (an all-the-time event).

IPO means you can have cash in the bank. Customers mean you have a business.

Facebook did pretty well on Wall Street, but I wouldn't expect those following suit to get the same opportunity.

Making money is not commoditized. Startups who plan on changing the world with no metric to measure so other than VC money are.
Product vs API
Haven't tried it. I'm using postgres on a project right now and was looking at this as an option if I need to replicate my DB based purely on a description of its features (that was dumb, I know). I guess I'll have to rethink that now. Thanks for the heads-up!
Profiling startups using GA data.
Growing the startup to the point where I can do it full-time is my ultimate goal. I'll admit, it's not easy to stay focused at my day-job. It's not easy to stay focused anywhere for that matter. But I've had to learn to ignore the voice in my head when it's work/family time. Again, not easy, just one of those things you have to do. Learn to live with the excitement eating away at you. My situation is probably similar to yours; my day job, while not in software development, which I'd prefer, nevertheless gives me a lot of time to work on my startup, since I work close to home and have basically no commute, meaning I get home around 5pm everyday.
Yeah, I'm sure I accidentally clicked on a few ads in the days before I deactivated my account. So put me in that minority.
I can't see it working well in a game scenario, but the vast majority of CRUD apps out there could be safely implemented using Parse's security model (as described in lacker's link).
For parallel gzip there's pigz (pronounced pig-zee).

http://www.zlib.net/pigz/
>It also kills me that when talking about ways one makes money he mentions Stripe, Boku, and Kickstarter in the same breath with ad networks. Those are not business models. They are just ways that money travels. It's like saying one's business model is accepting checks.

This. I'm really having a hard time seeing how these are relevant at all. They're ways to accept/raise money - not generate it.
Client side vs server side rendering is pretty straight forward for us. Anything that is static, like the homepage, pricing, about is rendered server side. These pages don't change that often. Almost anything that is dynamic is client side. I would say 80% of the rendering is client side. Although the server does all the JSON handling and template rendering (handlebar pre-compiled templates).

Initially we had inline handlebar.js views wrapped around script tags. Now we precompile all templates into JS objects (http://handlebarsjs.com/precompilation.html). These templates are compressed and Gziped into one file and downloaded on page load. We will have two sets of templates now (common views used across the site and application specific views like account profile).

Blog post coming soon :)
Now I'm waiting for someone to create a service where I don't have to waste my time with HTML+JS+CSS and focus on the application core :)
My last company car was 'pick yourself' - and I got a Golf GTD (I'm not sure if it's sold outside of DE).

It's a little less of an economy car than the TDI, but .. it handles the Autobahn quite nicely. I came from an Audi A3 and couldn't complain about the overall quality. Going back to DE soon I might go for exactly the same thing again.
This sounds really cool and might lead to some changes in user behavior and usage patterns - since users would have the ability to judge objectively on their usage.
"those receiving it paid for"? I don't think you understand how Social Security works. Look up "Ponzi scheme" for more information.
>Can you imagine your average PHP web dev trying to grok monads

Your average PHP web dev is not the cutoff for the 95th percentile. But yes, I can imagine them trying to understand monads. I have also observed them succeeding at understanding monads. They aren't hard to learn, just something you need to learn. Being able to learn simple things doesn't make you the top 5%.
No other reason? This is Apple we're talking about. This very same app got rejected and sat in limbo for weeks a couple of years ago for the heinous crime of transmitting app and computer icons from a Mac and displaying them on the iPhone. Predicting what Apple will find fault with is really tough. Just because tons of random internet commenters feel comfortable with speculating doesn't mean these guys should.
The Beetle is hands down the worst mainstream car ever made in my opinion (and the opinion of many others). It's what happens when you design a product for a "lifestyle" and not a purpose.
its not that non-free software is more polished, its just that Apple software is more polished. I don't care for the freedom that much as long as I still have my linux servers and mac laptop on which I can literally install anything, but I really can't bear the lack of polish of an Android device. each time I have to touch any of those makes me cringe. its not that apple if without problems, but after using apple for a while its really hard to go back. you kind of expect the level of polish not found anywhere else.
Trying to get the server back up. Geeez.
can't for the life of me figure out why any legit business (maybe that's my answer) would do that

I think they're hoping it'll "go viral". And they pronounce that with the quotes.
Five Fun Apps for BlackBerry Users
This piece very easily could have been titled "Whistling Into a Tap Recorder" and had sent the same message (and a worthy message at that). After all, neither New York not the East Coast are mentioned until 90% through the article. But then again that title likely wouldn't have gotten as many upvotes on HN b/c apparently everybody likes a rivalry.
The point is, if you have the audience, you can find the revenue – it’s getting the big audience that’s the main problem.

Cash in the bank /=/ revenue. Also, have people forgotten you don't need a billion users to make not only a business, but a substantial sum of money. User count are not the only way businesses scale.
Penguin, Macmillan respond to DOJ in e-book price fixing suit
Those are "assets" in an accounting sense but they do not represent capital held by the government. Those assets can only be redeemed by taxing citizens.

Social Security is only "solvent" in a conventional sense if those assets can be redeemed without taxation. Since Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system, the cash-flow definition of "solvency" is appropriate.
It's perpetually annoying that people make this an East Coast/West Coast thing (as if "East Coast" can even be generalized about... I'm sure Atlanta has a much in common with NYC as Mountain View has with Eugene). It's very small sample set of people to make any kind of good judgement, and seems to just be catering to stereotypes.
Show HN: I converted my Backbone/Rails app Cloudedit to Parse in 5 minutes
The problem is that other government programs have borrowed from the trust fund as if it was a piggy bank. Social Security would have been perfectly solvent had both sides not treated the trust fund as a slush fund. This is not social security's fault.

In fact, if you eliminate social security, you will almost certainly have to raise taxes to create a new piggy bank for all the programs that are currently run off the social security one.
Is your startup disruptive? A guide
Stop Embarrassing Yourself With a Brand Persona That Doesn’t Make Sense
What did that entail in the early days? I only showed up a month or two before comments did and the community was already rolling at that point.
Snark on HN gets upvoted faster than puns on Reddit.
I forgot to point out that there are infinite resources for teaching entrepreneurship like Stanfords E- corner, etc etc. the two I mentioned were there because of the large amount of time and focus spent developing and building them...
Thanks for sharing. I appreciate the part about providing for family. It's never easy when you have other people who depend on you and so it's comforting to hear of others who are in a similar situation.
interested in the numbers
Yea, but that can be solved by using separate bonuses for each role.
Are Startups Career Suicide? 3 Myths Debunked
Printing money means inflation and inflation is bad for debt owners (unless the debt is in another currency) and indeed also for "matresses".
Compute Between Display Resolutions, Graphics Dimensions, File Sizes
What does "'wireline' compatibility" mean?
The draws aren't independent. At any given time, the probability of assigning a user to a cohort is dependent upon a function of the previous observations (in other words, it's a markov model).

The standard confidence tests -- t-tests, G-tests, chi-squared tests, etc. -- based on distributions of independent, identically distributed (iid) data.

I'd have to think about it more, but I believe that btilly's examples are also the most intuitive reasons why independence matters. If your data is time-dependent, then assigning users to cohorts based on past performance lets the time dependency dominate. There may be other good examples.
Wow - that is exciting and readily applicable research which can save many lives in a short amount of time.
70-80 MPH collision?

Do you have any reliable source for working systems that protect you at that speed? I'd consider collisions at that speed lethal - or it's your lucky day. Ignoring the body material. In DE you are told (not that I can confirm that by experience) in your driving lessons that collisions > 30 KPH (K!) are very, very dangerous and that the statistical 'you might be heavily injured' line is somewhere around there. So .. I'm having trouble imagining something that hits anything else with 70-80 MPH.
Secure Linux: Part 1. SELinux – history, architecture and operating principles
You're conflating two separate arguments I made about two separate topics. The first is about per-project vs per-user pricing. The second is about tiered pricing. They are independent.

First, per-project pricing:
Any pricing scheme creates incentives. You get customers' money when the benefits outweigh the price. Per-project pricing makes it easy to get your product in front of as many eyes as can benefit from it, which can create internal network effects that boost internal adoption, which in turn leads to more use. Per-user pricing does not have similar network effects, because you associate a cost directly with adding people to the network.

(Which doesn't mean that per-user pricing has no place ever--that's absolutely not my point--just that it's not something that always makes sense.)

Second, tiered pricing:
It absolutely makes sense that your customers like per-user pricing: they've already self-selected to use your product, which has per-user pricing. The people who don't want per-user pricing are probably just going to ignore your product in the first place, and you'll never know they exist. Tiered pricing is preferred by a certain class of customers. Some of the reasons for that are listed in my initial post. It's unsurprising that it's not preferred by other classes of customers.

Again, I am not arguing that tiered pricing is a universal good or anything similarly silly. What I'm doing is arguing against your suggestion that tiered pricing is always bad.
I'm still disappointed that Toyota doesn't make their diesel trucks available in the US. I would kill to have a diesel in my 4Runner (before they made the 4Runner covered in plastic and less capable). 35MPG and torque from here to the moon... why Toyota? Why?
A Man: ... Jeez, stop asking how they'll make money! They'll make money the same way you'll make money! By getting their numbers up! Any fool will be able to see that they'll be worth a lot more than, than this valuation anyway. (Points with derision.) And believe you me, they will have no trouble finding someone to pay them what they're worth.

A Man (cont'd): Guys like Sequoia Capital. Who, by the way, have already asked for a summary. Then the company will have a whole lot more runway - enough to figure it out. Enough to make it to an IPO, even. (Thinks longingly.)

A Man (cont'd): Not to mention what your shares will be worth by then. Just look at this. (Points.) Can you imagine what it'll be worth by the time they IPO? That's how you make the money. Who cares about them? Fuck them! Isn't it time you thought about you for a change?

A Man (cont'd): Look at you. 'How will they make money.' Jeez! (mockingly) 'How will they make money.' 'How will they make money.' It's like you're TRYING to pop this bubble! (Becomes silent.)

A Man (cont'd): I don't know what else to tell you. Just sign the papers, will ya?
Voeding: dit mag je eten tegen teveel vocht
A Showcase of Free Backgrounds Design for Websites
A free backgrounds is applied keeping in mind the main theme of the web property. You can genuinely try out various alternatives to give your website.
New Digital Mural in Toronto Features 10,000 Twitter Handles
Facebook threatens to 'Zuck up' the human race
What is "unreal" about current NoSQL Databases?
Precisely. The ethos of the Facebook notion of sharing and privacy is antithetical to what a financial service needs to have.

One big reason I trust Paypal for everyday transactions is because they make money off of each transaction directly, whether through direct fees or merchant fees. I can understand their business model, and the service has a certain simplicity.

The OP wants me to give financial data to a company where my data is their product, and who is always trying to prise more "openness" from me through a byzantine privacy UI and borderline surreptitious app installations? I'll pass, thanks.
I agree.. it's not easy to find good developers in India. I have come to understand the social circumstances which make them treat software development as just a job and not something to care about. The good developers cannot stand writing bad code and letting bad code go into production. The good developers look at code as an art form.

But the crux is just to know how to attract the right talent.. referrals are a common way of getting good developers. But, there are many other ways to do that too, if the companies are willing to make the effort.

I currently work for a cool norwegian offshore company which has a open and flexible work environment as do many of the international companies doing business here. They know how to hire.

Most companies here in India have a notice period as part of the employment contract.. but it is ALWAYS both ways i.e. employer and employee both have to serve notice or payout. Some of the comments here suggest otherwise.. but that is purely hearsay or ignorance.
huh? I'd believe this kind of nonsense only if it were coming from a founder who had exited via this strategy and was buying a round of drinks for the bar.

The thesis lacks any real sustainable evidence to back its claims.
(I was going to write you offline but you do not have an email associated with your HN account.)

I too am developing a turn-based iOS game using Parse. I've found the entire process to be painless. It's a shame Game Center's turn-based API has so many issues [1]

Perhaps if iOS 6 is announced at WWDC some of these Game Center issues will be included? For now it's easy enough on Parse to do the equivalent work "by hand".

[1]: http://ishamrock.com/post/20122762136/words-play-reflections...
rs-turn-based
> There are perfectly good babies out there that need love and care, and by making your own you are basically saying "fuck them, the one that shares my DNA is better".

Or to phrase it another way, they're behaving the way animal species have for millions of years.
We have that problem with Github. We're a three person company and we do most of our work on iPhone apps. We spend 95% of our development effort in our main repo for our main app. But we have some other repos for the website and for some contracting, and for some experiment projects that make the most sense in their own repos, but Github penalizes us for that.

We'd probably have 30 projects on Github if their pricing was set up differently instead of cramming it into 20. We're already paying them 50/month, which seems high.

If we were a larger company that worked less with outside people we could just have one repo that was a misc catch all, and put things in folders inside that, but we often need to manage permissions with outside people.
Valencia Dentist
Welcome to the office of Valencia dentist, Dr. Patricia Guerrero.
I've since added a bonus explanation for just why I concurred with the parent.
Survey: Windows IT Pros Give Thumbs Up to Windows 8