skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
sorry, I was not putting as much thought into the specific numbers as you are - or into my particular phrasing - I just tried to make the numbers round, specific, and illustrative. Use different numbers by all means.

I think it's fair to say you must spend something on customer acquisition and infrastructure to service them: it's impossible to spend $50,000, get to 10k customers, and not spend another nickel but three months later you have two hundred million of them. There are a lot of variable costs and acquisition costs, even though they get factored into your total expenditure.

I mean, what fixed costs does a 3-person startup actually have? 3 times 160 hours @ $0.00 per hour, i.e. the founders' time, sure, and then what? If you get to two hundred million customers, every item in your budget is much greater. I can't think of a single service that can get those customers for free, and on a paying-for-conversions rate a few bucks seemed realistic (rounded to factor in all your variable costs broken down to customers).

I think though that pretty much any numbers you pick you will see that if a startup is 'taking off' it needs more money to address the money left on the table (from the rest of its proven, addressable market) if they want to do it fast. (Whiile the iron is hot, while they have momentum and maybe press coverage, while they're young and hip and new, while market conditions don't change due to unforeseen external changes, and finally before well-funded competition arrives on the scene, including from big companies who will enter if the growth holds out. Big companies don't just enter any market that has 10k customers, they might not even do market research yet, which you already have. Etc etc etc.)

What startup can you think of in which if you bootstrap to $100,000 in revenue from 10k customers, and let's say miraculously have the complete $100,000 to spend, you can magically address the whole 600million person market your 10k customers are in by the end of the following year?

I think that's what I meant by the word 'all told' - factor in every cost into those 10k customers. (Except your fixed costs of 3 x 160 hours @ $0, of course! And a $10 domain name.)
Alternate titles...

Paul Downs: Dreadful Employer
Paul Downs Cabinetmakers: The Dickensian Workshop Reborn!
As others have pointed out, Gow isn't really a Cygwin replacement; it offers over a hundred *nix apps compiled as native win32 binaries. A similar project from yesteryear - might be of some small use to one or two people (max):

The Berkeley Utilities - 40 unix commands ported to DOS
http://web.archive.org/web/20090304003628/http://openetwork....
"The Berkeley Utilities follow rigorously the unix System V syntax and include all the options found on any unix system plus a few carefully chosen ones. They used to sell for $200 and are now free." Great documentation, but sadly no source.
Square root is a fundamentally geometric idea: you need to have a concept of area before you can find the ratio of an area to the side of a square. Much better than talking about what is or isn’t absurd in terms of pure symbols (like √-1 or whatever) is to give some geometric motivation of the definition of area in terms of orthogonality, which brings in the link to rotation, and finally results in complex numbers. By embedding complex numbers in so-called “geometric algebra”, you put them in their proper coherent and comprehensible context. http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/OerstedMedalLecture.pdf
There is no script. It's all done in C++ with the project broken up cleverly into DLLs which can be reloaded at run-time without interruption. And I believe the lava flow is done with animated meshes.
> Motorola’s contention that the term has a “plain and ordinary meaning” is ridiculous; Motorola seems to have forgotten that this is a jury trial.

Look who's talking.
Teenage entrepreneur finished his nuclear reactor at 14
It is still split up that way, but I think that is for more advanced students. For students not focusing on math, they may just make a text that generalizes on many topics without focusing on a specific subject.
:-)

It is true. One potato was enough to supply all the mashed tubers for the extended-family Thanksgiving dinner. Bonus: we happened to grow a ginormous beet of comparable size, used at the same huge meal.
This stuff is really fascinating. Does anyone have any recommended reading or general advice as to how to learn more about game/graphical engine implementation? I mean, from the ground up. (I'm a CS undergrad and the closest we've gotten to learning about this has been the computational geometry chapter in CLRS, but that was a mildly esoteric introduction to everything that is possible in this field.)
I actually have a bot that has been doing this for several years. It stores word relations and keeps track of what words are used with others. It then can rank potential words that it has seen from your query before and use those as a subject to build a sentence from or as a highly targeted query for searching.
The Risky Hire: Which employee should you hire?
"VS is not a Metro app: All versions of Visual Studio run on the desktop"

That was my understanding. I guess I expressed myself poorly. I was wondering why a piece of software that is apparently explicitly for 'Desktop' (as in creating things for it) would sacrifice sensibility for the sake of any Metro concepts.

I don't know, the entirety of it is weird to me, so maybe this makes more sense to somebody who understands the reasoning behind everything else about windows 8.
I need help with hubot-irc adapter
I created the NPM package for hubot-irc adapter, but I did created the adapter. Lately, I have been receiving a few pull requests that I think are good. I'm not a coffee-script/js coder.

Is there anyone that would like to help or want to become a commiter please let me know. You can contact me at meme+hn@fernandoortiz.name.
I also especially liked this:
Part of the Employee Handbook:
"Reasons for termination include but are not limited to the following:
[...]
• Other reasons not listed here"

And then his comment:
"As you can see, these are clear boundaries"

Yeah, very clear boundaries there: You can be fired for anything, including "reasons not listed here".
Another thing I would mention is don't assume your restricted to apply for the 'student' jobs at Google because of your age, I have a friend that got past 3 phone interviews, and the personal interview.

He was 22 at the time and only had 2 years of 'real world' experience within the area, it's all about your written/verbal/personal presentation and of course CV.

In the end he didn't make the cut, however that was more because they noticed he was interested more in the salary than the challenge of working at Google :)

---

Just remember "keep calm and carry on"
Thanks again, reddit.
"Next" might not be the best choice for a computer hardware trademark. I'm going to bet somebody else owns that trademark already.
But some plans can have an unlimited number of sites, I think.
Awesome - thank you. It is great to have so many choices
Monsanto's lawsuits against farmers are aimed at farmers that did not buy Monsanto seed.

Monsanto says that because their seed and their plants are growing on a farmer's land, that farmer must have stolen the seed and is benefiting from stolen property. So they want a cut of the gain from the stolen property.

The farmers say that pollen goes where the wind blows it and plants and their DNA spread naturally. The farmers say that they did not intend to grow a Monsanto product but because the Monsanto products grow in greater densities and are more robust than naturally growing soy and other crops, the Monsanto products crowd out the farmer's naturally growing products.
It is quite insidious. Consider:

We told the veterans to help the new people whenever they could, but none of the old heads really wanted to be bothered

But that contravenes:

Employees will try to increase productivity in operations whenever possible.

He's got them all over a barrel.
Coming from a film background, it is clear there is a lot of conflation happening in these articles between light that 'behaves' like it would in the real world, and 'good' lighting. That is why you get quotes like in this article 'I light my scene by dropping a sun in'.

In reality, there is a whole lot more to lighting then simply having lights and materials that behave naturally. Sure, this gives you more realistic looking results out of the box, but it doesn't mean you don't have to sculpt and massage and tune your lighting to achieve the artistic result you want, especially for interiors, or scenes with characters in the foreground.
You should also check out Cloud IDE (http://cloud-ide.com). It supports a few different languages, integrates with Git, and lets you deploy to different PaaS.
Judging by the screenshots here (http://www.theverge.com/microsoft/2012/2/9/2787365/microsoft...), this is being done for "compatibility" with Office 15.

(I don't know anyone inside Microsoft who likes the all caps, but at least Office apps have only 5 to 7 top-level menus.)
Is this a hypothetical question or based on your experience?
Hackers who love to learn the latest and use the best often seem to be angered by this kind of thing. But isn’t its continued existence evidence of its success? Maybe it’s just hard to admit that a language’s success doesn’t depend solely on its quality.
It's Catch-22!

If they don't help, they're not trying to increase productivity.

If they DO help, their OWN productivity will suffer, and if they are truly in, say, the 10%, they are probably more productive than a newbie will ever be.
This resonates a lot with Spolsky's "How Microsoft Lost the API War": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
Thanks for your comment.

Visionary skills - especially in children - are often discouraged harshly as "slacking" in our productivity obsessed culture.

Like any skill, it needs to be nurtured and encouraged. It takes tremendous self-confidence and guts to voice that you see something could be improved. The world is not normally kind to these people. True visionary skill isn't often seen until the college years. Interestingly enough, it's in college that this type of skillset starts to be rewarded.

It also needs to be practiced, and this is where I think you react too heavily in your judgement.

Flipping channels on the couch all day, not so much.
Standing around the ramp and pretending to skate isn't.

The fact is that in many cases, there might be a hell of a lot of activity happening in that child that isn't immediately evident to you. The child might be thinking of how it would be really cool to have a laser like that guy in the cartoon and pondering all the things that could be accomplished with such a device. The other kid might be looking at the skateboard and wondering if the board could be shortened half a foot to make landings easier.

Yet, you've discarded these kids. They are slackers that you don't want your child to associate with. They don't produce anything after all. That's a poor lesson to teach.

Be clear, this isn't to say that there aren't some kids that are just lazy couch potatoes, but the point is that you can only figure this out by getting to know the child. The idea that becomes the seed for your child's life mission could very well come from the person you've told him to avoid. How sad is that?
Note that you can also run commands right in vi with the ! extended command, piping a range of lines through them. I use this with fmt all the time, and tend to prefer it over ctrl-z when I just want to check something.
> Do you agree that keys or peppers decrease the risk of passwords being revealed if the key or pepper can remain secret from the attacker?

I'm not familiar with this term 'pepper'. I take it to be a key with which you encrypt a password has as in your construction?

> Assuming that keeping a key secret is much easier than keeping a bunch of hashes secret, which is a fair assumption,

I don't know that it's such a fair assumption. For example, where does the server software get the key when it boots? From the hard drive? Is it something that is chosen or typed in by admins? If so, how do you ensure this key isn't itself simply derived from a weak password? If it's a password, how likely is it to be the same as the root login password or master database password? If the app developer re-uses this key or password in multiple contexts it's an additional exposure.

> shouldn't such a method increase the security of the system?

I think it could help and might even be a good idea overall.

That said, I don't think we should consider it an intrinsic part of password hashing security because:

a) It might help some with pure SQL injection exploit scenarios but anything beyond that it probably won't help at all. So any security benefit it brings is very hard to quantify.

b) It could apply equally to any sensitive database field that didn't require join capabilities.

c) It imposes a work factor to the defender which can be bypassed by the attacker.
Well, I would consider myself pretty well-informed. But, no, I did not have the Gates Foundation's education and malaria funding top-of-mind. And after some brief research am still not quite sure what the money is going towards and if it is accomplishing much.
If you have internet access, hang around on-line communities that get shit done that interests you. Open source projects are the trivial example, but there are other options too.

For instance, I do participate in flashmobs organized via Facebook and I didn't know anyone there the first time I went. Some friends are the core group of a well known latin-american mailing list dedicated to crack software (and most of them learned how to use cracking tools by hanging around in the list). These friends are from small towns around Argentina (where usually there are very few interesting people). Also, lots of charities and political parties are open for people who want to do things and organize via internet.
- 95% of your blog should be on the same topic, and in the same style, stay consistent.

If people come back to your blog it's because they like an existing post, so if your writing about programming 95%+ of your posts should be about this.

Thinking about writing about another topic as well? Start another blog!

Note: This is actually something that I fail at :)
I've been lurking HN for a while now. In moderation, it has helped in many ways, although in ways not particularly measurable.
Obviously I don't know all the details but you've got two disparate but important things to take into consideration here:

(1) A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. To have the job now even though it's not exactly what you want is important for the aforementioned reasons. Not to mention the possibility of transfer. I would lean this way.

(2) HOWEVER, I am the type of person who won't shine unless I'm doing what I love and am passionate about. If you are the same and think that might have a hinderance on your performance then hold off. If you have the discipline to buckle down even though you don't like your job then refer back to #1. By judging your opportunities, I would surmise you have the discipline that I lack.

Good luck.
NeHe's OpenGL tutorials used to be a good (although now kind of outdated) starting point. Shaders didn't use to exist back then. But still a good start:

http://nehe.gamedev.net/

A game engine is much more complex than a graphics engine.
Maybe somebody can point to guides for creating physics/sound engines and AI/gameplay stuff as well?
I don't understand why this exists. Between BlueEyes, Spray, Unfiltered, Finagle, and probably others I have forgotten, I don't see the need for yet another asynch HTTP library.
Holy crap. apt-cyg.. where have you been for the past 13 years!
"Becoming a good Visual Basic 6 programmer took much less time than becoming a good C++ programmer."

I love this line because it implies that you can actually become a good VB6 programmer. Sure, you may not be able to sort a linked list, but you can still learn about encapsulation and ... actually, just start with encapsulation; that's going to make your code SO much easier to read :-)
> In reality, there is a whole lot more to lighting then simply having lights and materials that behave naturally.

For example? (genuinely curious)
Definitely looks nice, but it wasn't all that easy to use with a mouse. I take it you can only flip pages from touching the corner of the page, if anything this makes it less useable on a browser. And do we really need pretend paper on our browsers and devices?
It's been my experience that slackers are often demoralized visionaries. When you tell someone that they have nothing to add for long enough, eventually they start believing it.
There's a big opportunity to solve this problem. I've always thought that a combination of expert reviews, combined with user reviews and those found on other reliable sources (Yelp, Amazon, etc) that were weighted via an algorithm could provide a more fair "review score" for products and services. Just like anything, the more data you get, the easier it is to provide a fair quantitative assessment.
I thought Kismet was pseudo-script (albeit with a GUI).

Edit: http://www.unrealengine.com/features/kismet/
Mini Google Docs + Mini Pastebin
I think that's exactly what annoys people--that language "success" is not dependent on quality. It's particularly annoying because a lot of people assume a language is well designed just because it is popular.
I would be really interested in reading about a 14 year old that created a fusion reactor, and how that reactor worked, since they can't get them going at Princeton. Even if he was just recreating Fermi's fission pile experiments that would be interesting. But since there is no information, on the kids website, or elsewhere, about any of these things I'm a wee bit skeptical.
This is worth reading for that video alone. Mergesort was particularly cool.
I'm going to guess that a non-trivial fraction of people that get things done don't bother tweeting about it.
Ha! At least they know they are being played and are not as foolish as they look! :D

So very true though! Even if nothing comes of the lawsuit, the amount of time, effort and money that is wasted in defending these must be colossal!
It's not limited to MS either. Running "cc" on a modern linux box still accepts 35+ year old K&R code by default. The bourne shell has been officially standardized since POSIX 25 years ago, and as a practical matter has been backwards compatible much longer than that. Xlib code from 1987 still runs unmodified...
So it's been posted again, 186 days ago. So what? Not everyone visits HN every day, and not everyone's been here since the beginning. Reposting useful stuff for those who might have missed them is a good thing in my book.
Gow is great because the install time is much, much shorter than Cygwin. Cygwin is a beast.

However, I don't see that Gow has been updated since the last time it was featured on HN.
600M Windows 7 Licenses Have Now Been Sold
Sorry, it's not possible now. Microsoft's technology is not there yet at MacOS.
Fair enough. Though I do think that 10k is less of a sure thing than 8 million customers. The latter proves the model a lot more efficiently, and probably gives enough data for a better overview of the market.

In my example, you're actually asking the VC to speculate on what you say is the size of the market. Sure you can grow from 10k to 30k easily. The question is the size of the market you're trying to get them to invest into.

Whereas, at 8 million, the question is, do you really have a model that you've proven? Or, have you been spending more on getting the customers than you can ever hope to get from them? (wihout mentioning any names!)

If you're doing a good job being competitive and ensuring high customer satisfaction, it's hard to see how you can quickly grow organically from 8m to a size of market of 700m (say), if that is the size of your market, in just a couple of years.

I mean, you have to be providing these customers something, and at a competitive rate. that has to cost you money. no business just explodes without any marketing or other costs to a size of 700m (say). This is where VC money comes in.

in the concrete example of an 8million user organization, it would be impressive of them to get to 9m, 11m, 12.1m, 13.1m year-over-year all organically. It would be impressive of them to, profitably, get to 20m from 8m in 10 years, all organically.

If, however, the size of the market is more like 200m, this is a good place for VC money instead of that 10-year plan!! Especially if competition might end up better-funded.

(also see my cousin comment here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4085660)
Nope. :(
Combinator v2.0 - A simple Hacker News reader for Windows Phone
Assuming that your passwords are going to be stored within a database, log the number of requests to that database or even better the database table holding your authentication data.

Look for spikes in requests and also the number of rows been returned per database request (for a MySQL select).

Specifically see if you can compare these database requests to authentication events (login/logout), for most applications you would expect a 1:1 ratio of 'authentication events':'database requests'.

Finally and what most people forget, secure your backups, as these will hold all of your authentication data as well!
Raytracing for one.

Also, none of the graphics engines really capture the wave-nature of light - intereference/diffraction etc. Radiosity captures a bit of this but from an intensity/energy point of view.
Correct. All the digital signage I've worked on in the past couple years was Flash/AIR based.
Just remember that life is what is happening while you are busy getting shit done.
Again, thanks. Definitely something to think about. I very much to have the capacity to 'buckle down' and do something that isn't my number one priority, if it has the potential to pay off in the future. At this point, thanks to your comments, I'm leaning to just applying for both positions and just seeing what happens.
Fluent: An innovative new interface for Gmail (from ex-Google Wave developers)
This is how everyone defends reposts, but for an experienced engineer that's been reading HN for a while it means the front page is often full of uninteresting links.
Presumably it is purging machine specific (targeted) configuration, code updates, and spooled data too, i.e. not just the virus code.

Knowing specfically what the virus was looking for, which machines were infected, and what data was snarfed is of critical importance to the targets.

Purging makes the targets job of forensics much much harder.

Edit: flame code is not monolithic - forensics would be very interested in getting code for all modules:
"Later, the operators can choose to upload further modules, which expand Flame’s functionality. There are about 20 modules in total and the purpose of most of them is still being investigated." - http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2012/05/28/flam...
Looking round my man cave, I'd say I have a lot of stuff as well; several tonnes of books for a starter.

Time for a declutter I think...

Clothes: I like the smell of heavy wool jumpers and (Donegal) tweed jackets.