skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It does look really exciting -- but I agree, it's too early to say they've been successful. FC and AngelList both seem worth consideration.

It's insane that everything else about startups has progressed so much over the past 20 years, but funding (especially the range past early seed incubator/friends and family/etc. and before Series A) is still so rube goldberg. (Series A and later is also broken, but the main limiting factor there is board seats for partners at VC funds, so it's a different problem; great telepresence might be what fixes that, like the iPad based telepresence robot.)
Maybe the title should say "probe it". Just saying.
I saw a fully motorized height adjustable desk for about 550€ at Ikea (Austria) the other day. If I had that kind of money laying around I'd much rather buy that than the Kangaroo (which is overpriced IMO).

Why do good ergonomics have to cost so much?
Ask HN: List of Revenue Models?
Does anyone know of a list of (all/most) possible revenue models?

I was hoping for something similar to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations which purports to list all of the possible dramatic plot primitives.

I've got a great idea for a (web-based) service, and need to figure out how to make it at least minimally self-supporting before I go any further. I was hoping to use a list of revenue models to generate ideas/brainstorm.

Thanks!
Testing is Bullshit - a manifesto
Love it,
Who is the presenter in the videos? the voice sound really similar to Vi Hart or is it just me?
I am looking into dropbox alternatives, and from the above I chose to try owncloud and aeorofs.

1. Tonido is out of the game, because the file syncing is limited (2 GB) so it is useless for me.

2. OwnCloud looks very good. I am going to try it..

3. AeroFS - In theory what I need (but unlike onwcloud is not open source) but in reality the experience was terrible - sometimes it didnt sync my files for no apparent reason, sometimes it eats too much memory.. I didnt like the experience very much..

4. Bitcasa seems too magical, I dont know how it works, I dont trust it..

5. Spideroak looks just like another dropbox, dont need that..

6. Sparkleshare is good idea, but using GIT as syncing mechanism means that it is not suitable for media files, so it is out of game for me..

So my hopes are with OwnCloud :)
Interview with Workflowy Co-Founder Mike Turitzin – a Y Combinator startup
Recently, we managed to catching up with Workflowy Co-Founder, Mike Turitzin. This is one of my favourite interviews, not only does Mike have some great advice, but he really draws a vivid picture of what it’s like to start a company. During the interview, Mike introduces us to Workflowy while also sharing advice abut the business plan process and applying to an accelerator program. Workflowy is part of the Y Combinator graduating class of 2010.
Do you have any pictures of your setup? That frame looks fascinating.
Hey - I'm one of the interns that worked on this.

I have my own reservations about JavaScript the language, but after seeing what John had built when I started, I believe that this is undoubtedly the right way to go.

If we wanted to use another language to accomplish similar goals, the options would be:

1. Run the code on the server. This dramatically increases latency, introduces more security concerns and would dramatically increase our costs as this would inflate our server load dramatically. Really, its the latency here that makes this a no-go. As you use the number scrubber, it's re-executing several times a second, and that's just not going to work out with client-server communication (even with websockets).

2. Run a different language that compiles to JS and runs in the browser. As it stands, the overhead of doing this is also too much. It would be shipping a compiler or parser down to every client. CoffeeScript may be the most reasonable option there, but it has many of the same warts as JavaScript anyway. Any parser/compiler needed introduces an extra step in the pipeline and would inevitably reduce responsiveness.

While JavaScript the language certainly has its problems, it's what it lets you do that counts here.
Don't miss the link to Bret Victor's lecture on responsive programming: http://vimeo.com/36579366 . I found it to be very enjoyable and it further shows what is possible with this paradigm. [minutes 2-23 are most interesting and relevant]
Sal Khan and John Resig are narrating the video.
Yeah, but sometimes "vicariously" doesn't cut it, you have to "do the work," you have to grind it out.

http://raganwald.posterous.com/what-ive-learned-about-learni...
A Calvin Klein campaign by Diego Rios
If Tastemaker founders are monitoring this, in your FAQ's the question 'What if products are back-ordered or sold out?' has a totally unrelated answer.
> No real world code is simple and elegant enough that you don't need to think through the complex invariants of the code

in my experience working on enterprise biz apps the opposite is true. comments are what you do when you don't have time to make the code explicitly match your mental model of the proper solution. "don't have time" is a bit of a euphemism, as a lot of people don't realize that it is possible to write code that explicitly matches our mental model of the solution, but whatever.

here's an example: python lib requests vs urllib2. one of these could probably use a comment. the other is self evident. https://gist.github.com/973705
I completely agree with you. However, the updates are the symptom, and the OP was remarking upon the disease.
My turn! What is a web-designer?
It doesn't rely on the JOBS act now, because that's not possible yet. But I doubt they'll rule out that option in the future.
I know, I talk about the actual videos, e.g. this one http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/intro-to-drawing/848372201
Plasmyd does this via crowdsourcing, it lets users comment on papers so that researchers can point out anomalies or post their inability to reproduce the same results. It also gives the author a chance to explain their work.
Google Adjusts Search Results To Appease Copyright Owners
> Specifically there's no straightforward way to develop a vanilla Android app in Android.

How is what you want different from what AIDE offers?

With AIDE, you develop an Android app more or less like you would in Eclipse, and it compiles it and installs it into the system like any other Android app. It's in your application list, and you can run it like any other Android app.
This is entirely unrelated to the TSA (which is a social welfare program with the goal of security theater rather than actual security).

Although your comment is correct, it applies to all forms of security. The polygraph, for example, is a form of interrogation that measures physiological response to hostile stimuli. Trapwire is very similar in that its measurements may be indicative of someone unpleasant, but the vast majority of criminals will have no problem evading it.
An economics professor of mine said that, besides food subsidies, another reason rich countries have few famines is livestock farming.

There's a lot of energy lost in the process of feeding corn to cattle and turning them into burgers; you could feed more people by eating the corn directly.

So when there's going to be a corn shortage like this year, livestock go to slaughter ahead of schedule, which reduces the demand for corn, and increases the supply of meat.

On its face, eating meat is a luxury, but it actually serves an important function as a buffer against shortages.

If vegetarianism ever became a very popular lifestyle (I'd say, very roughly, if it was adopted by a majority), the risk of food shortages would increase.
The Internet giant's greatest ever Search Easter Eggs
The temperature at the LHC and RHIC are many orders of magnitude larger than at NIF. As aroberge mentions, temperature is roughly a measure of energy density. (Here, you should probably think of it as energy per particle rather than per spatial volume.)

NIF is applying a large amount of energy to a small but macroscopic amount of matter. The LHC and RHIC are colliding mere nuclei, so the amount of matter is roughly 22 orders of magnitude less. The LHC and RHIC collisions are vastly higher temperature (energy per particle) than NIF, but the total energy is vastly less.
You can also import the unsafe package and mess with pointers directly. Neither of these are problems.

Go strikes a nearly perfect balance between saving the programmer from accidentally shooting his foot off and getting the hell out of the way when the programmer is absolutely sure that the proper solution involves bending the rules a bit.
It's not a tutorial in the traditional sense of the word, so there are a lot of differences.

A better description would be sandbox.
You might like this article: http://norvig.com/21-days.html
// remove more clutter
#define O printf
#define R return
#define Z static
#define P(x,y) {if(x)R(y);}
#define U(x) P(!(x),0)
#define SW switch
#define CS(n,x)	case n:x;break;
#define CD default

Thanks for that. The comment makes it classic.
I saw, couldn't find the name of the narrator

I'm talking about the actual videos, not the intro one (narrated by Sal Khan and John Resig)

e.g. this one

http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/intro-to-drawing/848372201

Sounds Vi Hart to me...
The Evolution of Teaching
There is fairly strong evidence that NLP is not effective: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming#Sc...
NIH = Not Invented Here, in case somebody else is wondering also.
I just noticed the Khan academy website has no logo
Volatility-on-demand algorithm
Yeah, that's a major issue with more loaded machines, especially with older/worse virtualization technologies. It seems tolerable on Twilio, and I've run asterisk and freeswitch on virtualized machines (with HVM) which work ok.

My reason for not wanting VoIP gateway on AWS is that I want to use it for AWS-hosted-app error reporting, so having dependencies on AWS is a problem.
Thanks for the recommend! The book 1984 also paints a world like that.
Yes very good read. thx for sharing.
Link bait is Bullshit - a comment
Right, because your backup is a VERSION of the code that you want to keep around, in case you need it right?

Some version control tools don't let you create local, private versions. That is too bad. That doesn't mean that doing so is not a version control concern.
Ask HN: reading list for high school students interested in CS?
I teach some intro programming classes, and I have a couple students so far who already know they want to go into software development. One is in high school, one is in middle school. More students will come to us this year as we steadily improve what we offer.

I would like to put together a reading list. The list will be much more complete if it comes from HN than if I just make my own list, and students will take the recommendations more seriously as well.

I imagine a mix of non-technical books that students can read, such as Just for Fun and Richard Stallman's essays, along with more technical books.

What books would you recommend to students who know they want to go into CS, but have no idea yet what they will end up focusing on?
Having everything run in the browser is a _huge_ win, because it allows students to share what they've made with their friends. Post to facebook "Look what I made", which includes the source and makes it easy for others to modify it and share that themselves. Viral loop!
You might want to throw a disclaimer up that is legally clear what you're offering.
As a viewer, I generously read all six paragraphs.

And I learned nothing about the product.

~~~

If you're going to spend six paragraphs making claims, which is in my opinion a dangerous thing to do[1], you better have the user saying "yeah!" in their head successively louder as each paragraph goes by, because you're delaying the part where you actually tell the user about the product. But this page doesn't really say anything about the product.

[1] Making one claim after another is dangerous because it gives you a chance to say something stupid or disagreeable. For instance their claim:

> I’ll wager that Facebookers spend 50% of their times on tests, time which could – in an ideal world – be spent on product.

Serves to make them look a bit ridiculous. If the product is a polished app then spending time on tests is spending time on the product. It seems silly to suggest otherwise.

Stop claiming things and tell me what your damn product does. If I have to look it up what it does I'll probably find a list of competitors alongside it.

(edit: which is exactly what wikipedia shows http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration#Software)
While I have been critical of Google Fiber, this author was on the board of directors of ICANN, and is an extremely well-regarded professor of internet and communications law. She represents a viewpoint that I disagree with somewhat, but she is articulate and very well read in this area. Previous submissions regarding Google Fiber seem to have been announcements from Google itself, which were, to put it mildly, devoid of critical assessment.
They're narrated by Jessica Liu, more details here:
http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/
Well, Vi Hart works for Khan now.
What website are you looking at?
Use This App to Create Anonymous, Disposable Email Addresses
"Does Kindle lending limit you, in some way, to lending to certain people, though?"

Nope. That would require that Amazon have some way to investigate whether someone was really your "friend" (how is "friend" defined?) and be willing to spend the money to carry out the investigation. Not likely for a $1.99 ebook.

Perhaps they could limit you to a list of friends (a maximum of ten or whatever) but that wouldn't allow you to (e.g.) lend programming books to one set of friends and novels to another.
I agree, it's so early in the game for App.net and its community that it's hard to say it won't solve anything.
Cane: Ruby code quality thresholds
I disagree. We're working towards the goal of having a comprehensive Computer Science curriculum and this is just the first step. I talk more about our reasoning and methodology here:
http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/
And yet most CS graduates can't even (allegedly) solve fizzbuzz ...
Two weeks after launch, Outlook.com obtains over 10 million users
Mmm, a title tailor-made for the HN frontpage but disappointingly lacking in content.

It's just a thin layer on top of a call to action for this new CI service. The service itself may be awesome but I didn't learn anything about it from this.
They are narrated by Jessica Liu (as mentioned in the blog post).
So, what is the problem this article is pointing to. The only damage to the home owners in this story is that they have to put up with their home being a crime scene. This is enough of an inconvenience that I would not use the service if it was likely to happen, but, if I understand the article correctly, the concern is that people might use the house for illegal things, and not get caught. If this happens, then I don't see why it is an issue (for the home owner).

Having said that, there is also the case where damage is done to the home, in which case I would hope that Airbnb has a compensation system set up.
I don't think I've ever had an "epic mobile gaming" moment - I can, however, remember every epic BF3 or DayZ moment.

What games are we talking about here?
But that's nowhere near as fun.
This is a good question. I look forward to responses.
> Testing doesn’t really help our customers. At best it helps indirectly, in the same way that HR or payroll or marketing does.

I agree with this, but I think this applies to source code in general, not just tests. Software is different from many other crafts in that there's a strong separation between construct and artifact. The metaphor would be that the house you live in is actually an artifact/result of a different house somewhere else, that you might or might not have access to, and changes to the house you live in requires change to the "source" house. And the source house looks nothing like the actual house. As Rich Hickey puts it, users of your software rarely gets to look at the source code and be satisfied with how pleasant it is (or isn't).
Interactive numbers in the UI: seriously awesome. LOVE that they did this. Hopefully we'll get live updates to code in more systems, it's wonderful.

Lack of a 'course' to go through: ? I have no idea where to start. Nor can many of these be applied outside of the little editor with the 'tutorial'. Elsewhere, KA has a nice 'do this, then that (or that)' set of branching paths that give you a reasonable path to take. I see none of that here. Am I missing something?
Toronto proven startup hiring Web App Developer (rails w/ backbone)
I can't imagine working at a standing desk that doesn't transition to something I can sit at as well.
Agree, the title is poorly editorialized. Proofs and validations are very different things. Validation is about being confident that a model can make useful predictions.
Machine Learning - The Complete Guide [pdf]
It's hard for me to imagine learning Javascript as your first programming language. It's always felt kind of crazy and bizarre to me (especially when you try to do anything requiring more than 20 lines of code), but I think a lot of that is just failure on my part to shake off the paradigms I'm used to. A generation of coders who are actually trained from the start to think in Javascript... almost scary honestly, but in a good way. We need more John Resigs pushing the web forward :-)
Hey Jcampbell,

Thanks for your comments, that's good feedback for us. You're right, in the way that you described it, Iron.io would only be overhead. Cron is built in. Memcached is easy to setup. So is Resque, Gearman, RabbitMQ, Beanstalkd, and a host of other great pieces of software.

We want to not only eliminate the need of setting up Workers/MQ/Cache/Scheduling, but autoscale them, make them elastic, redundant, multi-zone failover, and erosion resistent (Heroku term). And then we'll provide layers of monitoring, management, and alerting out of the box.

Time savings on "setup" is minimal, but time savings and headache as you grow and scale is priceless.

In any case, thanks for taking the time to check us out. If you ever want to chat more, email me chad[at]iron.io or jump into our public chat room monitored like 23/7: http://get.iron.io/chat

Chad
Show HN: A simple way to send vectors over networks
i'm only 23, but knowledge gaps I've seen in friends/coworkers without degrees are compilers, what needs to happen to go from c to machine code, and to a lesser extent calculus/linear algebra, discrete math, and the stuff covered in an upper division algorithms class.
You can also get other versions of the book here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Machine_Learning_-_The_Com...
A) The idea is that the "rubber hose collection" leads to you revealing where it is, and B) if it's a generated password, how will you stop the deadman's switch in the event of getting away?
If you don't want to use PayPal (why not? everyone uses it) keep it traditional - bank transfers and cheques.
Vi Hart does work at Khan Academy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi_Hart#Khan_Academy
Rubynerd!! Hope all is well. Thanks for the comments.
In my experience working on enterprise applications, the worst code is that written by programmers that think they're so smart -- and their code is so good -- that it doesn't need comments.

No programmers are that smart, and no programmers are that good. I'm innately distrustful of any argument that's predicated on "be smarter than average".
Thank you, we'll take a look!
I noticed this implemented pretty well on the cloud OnLive gaming service. I am curious to know how they are recording the actions though. Is it capturing the frame buffer directly with OpenGL? There'll be a bit of a performance penalty associated with this but for 2D games it might not be so bad.

I'd suggest supporting something like MOAI (getmoai.com). Its cross platform and open source.
The Authors Guild is not a 'lobbying organization.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild
It seems pretty clear that it's for practical reasons: you want that sort of rich in-browser experience, it's going to be easiest to provide using JS.

What I think is a more interesting discussion is why they're not using CoffeeScript or some other flavor of JS that glosses over a lot of the idiosyncrasies of the language and arguably offers a more beginner-friendly syntax.
I don't know about gp, but the most common ones I see are:

- Algorithmic complexity analysis ("big-O")
- Being trapped in a single paradigm
(e.g. loops vs. recursion)
- Not understanding the underlying hardware / protocols,
what they guarantee, and what they don't guarantee
- Software design knowledge can be spotty; someone might
know about high-cohesion design, but not know about
use-case analysis.
- Not valuing version control, though this is rare now
it used to be very common

Now, it's not at all true that every self-taught developer has all of these problems. Some have none of these problems; they are just the most common I've seen.
Maths is not about conventions. It is a dynamic writing style. All operators get replaced by adjacency after a few lines as writing them is boring. Computer verifying proofs is very hard for notation reasons.
Here's a quick port to Khan Academy's new CS scratchpads: http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/lorenz-attractor/966238447
I was about 17 when I encountered The Hacker's Dictionary. It hasn't been updated much for years, but I think it would still provide an easy-to-read gateway into the way programmers think and some interesting tidbits of history.

Reading or watching Guy Steele's Growing a Language talk could be fun.

The Little Schemer could be a good choice.

Van der Linden's Expert C Programming covers some serious C topics, but is also generally educational and enjoyable.

You could introduce them to Knuth's writings in an easily-digestible way, like maybe having them read and implement the Easter date algorithm in Volume 1.

Maybe have them read [excerpts from?] something like Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing and put together a small database web application.
Should we trust Google when it comes to piracy and search?
If it's just a vm is the any reason it's using xen rather than $FAVOURITE_HYPERVISOR ?

Either way - pretty impressive and I like this concept.
User Motivation Determines the Best Color Scheme for Your Website
I remember one of the big war simulation companies, like Activision, having a Google IO session about how awesome their share moments to YouTube feature turned out. Users were happily sharing videos of their game all over the freaking place. Massive grass roots advertising and engagement. Someone will play the same thing 50 times just to record the perfect one to show off on YouTube.

I wish it was easier to implement. Taking screenshots and encoding them seemed too resource intensive for mobile. I did start tilting my app architectures toward streams of events that could be sent to a server and the graphics reproduced, though.

Maybe that's what is happening here. Instrument all Cocos2d calls and replay them to regenerate the video.
In case the OP doesn't mention it, he won the LSRC hackathon with this idea! Congrats!

He also had a pretty funny presentation, pretty tongue-in-cheek.
Hmm. that makes sense. because browser have been handling js for a longer time and so there would be more support for a in-browser js interpreter. I have seen some python in-browser interpreters, which are good though.
Yammer Cofounder: Microsoft Is A Great Place To Work
>> FUBARed the Java implementation <<

// deliberately *not* using StringBuffer / StringBuilder,
// as a real app would have many transient string variables
Best part of the intro video:

"Welcome. I'm super excited about computer science. it's my favoriate thing in the world... except for pot".

QFT.