skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone have more info on the gaming site mentioned?

From the tone of the article it seems like it's no longer earning, Google slap? The old Adsense ban? Game fell out of popularity?
NSA's Open Source Spin-Off Lands $2 Million in Funding
A key point that's not emphasized in the article is the extremely large amount of data we use for our algorithms. We collect 3 orders of magnitude more data than other similar apps - 300M+ data points of high resolution location data are used to determine relevant content.
I wonder if homeowner's insurance would cover the retrieval fee if your computer/hard drives were protected assets on the policy.
If Apple's stuff wasn't incredibly overpriced they wouldn't have $100B in the bank. Steve's ghost would be sad and they wouldn't be able to bankroll all their lawsuits (which would also make Steve's ghost sad).

Apple USED to be good at marketing. Have you seen those new ads? The ghost of Steve just barfed in his mouth a little bit. Quick! Someone call Justin Long and John Hodgman, that was working okay...

Rounded rectangles are the new lucite, and therefor not relevant in any way. Apple's lawsuits were based on Steve Jobs being a big baby about how well Android was selling. Now? Who knows how the Apple lawsuit of the day gets kicked off, but you can bet it involves Androids (and not the Star Trek variety).

Now you're just being thick, the first GUI was done by Doug Engelbart (Stanford Research) in '68. It was perfect. Any CS student who took an HCI knows that. Extra points if you know what HCI stands for and don't have to google Engelbart to verify, but I bet you do :)

Some people who use Apple devices just want some of the discretionary income that hipster, fanboi (and fangrl, you sexist) and cultists seem quite happy to part with. Will that be cash or credit?
I can really relate to this. I have a site that provides a service, does about 175k uniques & 900k pageviews per month and generates revenue from paid accounts ($1k), adsense ($4k) & partnerships ($10k).

Do I consider it a startup? Not really. But I don't really consider it to be just a website either. I guess my definition of a startup is an entity that has a team behind it, provides some type of service & could be substantially scaled with funding or revenue.
Facebook Exposes Itself in Oregon
Fair enough, but that still doesn't seem to agree with "we're just changing the way we describe our services". Just inconsistent messaging.
You can get the "What is HTML5" book on kindle from amazon for free right now:

http://www.amazon.com/What-Is-HTML5-ebook/dp/B005ISQ7JM/ref=...

You could read it in two hours. I see a nice incremental improvement and standards for UI controls (canvas, etc) but nothing that blew my mind. Given the context, I'd say that would make the article spot-on.
Agree - this could be a huge difference in total package value and it's glossed over.

At my company we have what I call dental "insurance". As in, it covers about 0-10% of any given procedure.
Paying someone for developing a (IMHO not really fancy and useful) webapp isn't the same thing as leading "real" startup. A "Startup Guy" works on his product 24/7, talking to investors, partners, costumers and much much more...
Yeah, and I'd take $20k/yr + a winning Powerball ticket.
I'm just going to disagree with literally everything you've posted here, as it goes against everything I've dealt with over the last 10 years or so when putting together my own machines. And my experiences with Linux as well.
Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive. The Cukoo's Egg is good as well.
Curated Linux package repositories are all about making painful things slightly less painful, including:

- Managing complex dependency graphs. There are often incompatible changes in the nodes of the dependency graph that require wholesale updating of every node linked to the changed one.

- Managing complex installation. As per UNIX standards, the files which comprise a single software package are spread across the file system in such a way that it's effectively impossible to clean them up without a package manager properly tracking them.

Apple's "curated package repository" is something else entirely.
It's up for me...4:15 EST
I think unless you're a computer scientist or engineer at google, fb, etc. most of the theory you run into at the university level you're never gonna use. Having said that some "theory" is important for me as a developer, but really it just boils down to 2 subjects Discreet Maths and algorithms, so I would try to emphasize those two areas in the program.

As far as employability goes, I think having a strong understanding of networking (TCP/HTTP) and Data/Databases, is really the core ( ie Data & Application layers) of most development these days.

Also I know its kind of experimental but if possible I would actually teach go as a programming language instead of the usual c/c++/java (for the systems level / networking stuff). Go in tandem with javascript (both server and browser) for web applications, allows you to deal with just about every programming concept there is at an abstracter level and both languages are not overly difficult to grasp.

So to put these thoughts together. Maybe you could center the program around networked software development? This lets you teach things like webkit, browsers, js, networking, servers, and databases while all staying in one (though very broad) medium. I think this could be possible for 1 prof.
So for instance, in "interface design" you're in the browser and delve into webkit and user interaction, or for "computer graphics" you can go into "webgl". For "databases" you're still dealing with server / client architectures for which you can examine db structures different types of web applications.

I'd love to have had an option to do a pure web engineering compsci program. Maybe some of my ideas will help, good luck!
How Mint beat Wesabe, or why your name matters
no, but seriously, this will be the best to-do list app ever
This worries me every time I use AOP, but I mitigate that risk by writing integration tests which assert that the aspects are doing what they are intended to, and also to raise an alarm if somebody unknowningly breaks them.
Isaac Asimov: The Last Question
This is one of those things I wish I could watch. Any chance we can get a stream of it or something next year?
AES is huge. It's the difference between "let me resume that VM for one second and suspend it again" and "well, I'll just wait until the next time I resume it and hope I remember what I was going to do". (Given VMs that live on an encrypted drive.)
Good to hear he's been assimilated into Microsoft culture so rapidly. He'll do great there.
NB: the actual URL is http://refer.ly (not http://referly.com as linked in the article, which seems like a weird typo when the article is about the company)
Find the most used verbs in your Git commit messages
The change was that you no longer eat to renew health, you have a food bar that when full, or close to full, results in you being able to regenerate health. Doing nothing doesn't cause you to lose food points, but walking, sprinting, mining does and at various levels (sprinting burns more food than walking).

At first the food mechanic was a little annoying but it has added a nice touch to the game. You tend to be a little more careful than before and you have to devote a little more time to food resources. But this is slightly configurable based on the difficulty setting as well.
More Bazaars and Better
How much will you be making at your new gig?
Both the OP's and that guy at the conference's attitude is wrong. One demeaning someone's work, the other chasing a ghost.

Where did that revenue-generating website go?

That said, this might not be the case, but if your work is creating the same value as the standard car salesman (i.e. none), you'll get corresponding respect.
You may never use most of the things you learned. But they almost certainly had an impact on how you thought and developed. I'm surprised how many times silly theory of computation things come up and maybe don't force me to change my solution, but get me to think of it at least a little differently.
YC S12 Companies - 64 and counting
A company with a goal of making revenue and dividends is a normal company (or 'a website' in some cases). It may be a large company or a small company, growing or shrinking - but not a startup.
A company with a goal of making huge (not 100%, but 100 times) growth is a startup.

100k company aiming to be a 200k company is not a startup;

100m company aiming to be a 200m company is not a startup;

100k company aiming to be a 200m company is a startup;

0$ company aiming to be a 200k company is a startup.

IMHO. Does it make sense?

P.S. and it is often determined by the actual business ideas. There are some ideas that can grow and scale if everything goes well; and there are some ideas simply that have a market ceiling of, say, a few million even if everything goes perfectly.
Storify gets App.net integration
That that also means Quora, Yahoo, and WebMD are also lifestyle businesses. All rely on advertising. Heck, all are glorified blogs that depend on having as many pageviews as possible.
> I'm not sure what you mean by this. What's the difference, syntactically, between a convention and a specialized structure?

The big difference is how people look at it, not what it really is. JavaScript has a built-in key-value map data structure. An assoc-list isn't a built-in data structure, it's a way of using a more primitive data structure (lists). In particular, assoc-lists don't really look different than normal lists, so it's a slightly larger mental leap to think in terms of them. Furthermore, Lisp doesn't use assoc-lists as often as JavaScript uses key-value maps, preferring flat lists instead, so even if there were a specialized reader-macro for assoc-lists it wouldn't have been as ubiquitous.

I agree that XML and Lisp grammars are basically interchangeable. My comment was answering a question about the emergence of JSON, and my comments about assoc-lists were only in relation to JSON, not XML.
Yes, maybe I should have mentioned proofs/theory of computation seperately I kind of just included them under the general algorithms umbrealla term :)
According to this article, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strate... :

"In 1996, 1999 and 2000, for instance, the California Legislature increased the state’s research and development tax credit, permitting hundreds of companies, including Apple, to avoid billions in state taxes, according to legislative analysts. Apple has reported tax savings of $412 million from research and development credits of all sorts since 1996."

$412M on the hundreds of billions Apple has earned since 1996 are pennies. That doesn't seem that much... Are there more?
Yeah, I figured this would be used to possibly provide some Just In Time help. Can't say I'm surprised people read that as "people posting questions detected to be closed will be shot in the face and fed to the SE Inc pet Unicorn"
I really think that this could work. It reminds me of a "Web of Trust" system, where you have a few known trustworthy individuals, and the reputation propagates out from them.
That's an impressively succinct way of mapping types to JSON, but it's still a mapping. There's one step for the developer between obtaining the JSON and using its data. In weakly typed languages there is no such step, the JSON data is the object you interact with in your business logic.
Can you elaborate?
What data do you collect, and what data do "similar" apps collect? What are the similar apps you refer to?
Thanks!
"found my holy grail Django books"

Curious - what are these?
Dev Bootcamp is the future of our industry
Sorta kinda. You can get a ballpark idea by figuring out the answer to "who are we going to sell this to?" Once you have that, you can find out how many such customers there are. Note: there will probably be a fair amount of inference, if not outright guess work in this, depending on the scenario. For example, if you're trying to sell B2B and you know your target market is "Bolt, Screw & Nut manufacturers in NC, SC, VA and GA" then you can get a reasonably accurate count of how many such companies exist. OTOH, if you're doing B2C, and your market is "Adolescent boys with self-esteem issues who like the color purple" then it's going to be tougher.

Anyway, you you know the number of potential customers (TAM, or "Total Available Market), you then have to figure out pricing for your product. Again, this is a heuristic process, with a fair amount of guesswork. But if there are any similar products to yours, you can find out how much they cost, and approximate based off of that. You'll also have to know if you intend to compete as the "low cost" option or as a "premium" option or something else.

Once you have # of cusomers and prices, you can just multiply to get a theoretical maximum revenue for your product. If there are 10 customers for your $200.00 product, you probably need to try again. If there are 2,000,000 potential customers for your $5,000,000 product, you are probably onto something.

Of course you won't actually get to all of your TAM. Your competitors will snag some business, some just won't feel like they need what you're selling, some will want it but won't have a budget for it, etc. But this kind of "back of the envelope" stuff can give you a baseline to start working from.

If you're US based, various US and State level government bodies have demographic info (business and consumer) that can help you size your market, and for B2B there are companies like Hoovers that you can pay for data that will help out.

There are also market research firms that specialize in doing this sort of research.
Human wants are a bottomless pit. Even if we automate every single industry, people will still want something else. There is always an angle.
IMHO No, that does not make sense at all.

Think about the word "startup." The etymology of the word means, literally, "start up [business]". A new company that has yet to prove itself is a startup. The Merriam-Webster definition is "a fledgling business enterprise."

If that's not a startup, then calling what you're referring to "startups" is very counter-intuitive.

It's as if I had referred to a recently founded car manufacturer as a "new business" and then subsequently everyone started referring to 20-year-old car manufacturers as "new businesses."
Early on, I actually attempted to run a webserver on the Arduino and have Twilio POST to it. However, I couldn't find a good/easy way to make it publicly accessible (tried no-ip, dyndns, etc.) - and while I could get it working on my own router I couldn't find a good way to describe how to set it up in the tutorial
It's time for Hacker Hostels
App Engine 1.7.1 Released
Breaking Down Google's Top Advertisers
I am in Dallas, so this is interesting. Is the signup just for the Beta? If not, first thing, cut the cutesy landing page and let me find things. Craigslist might be dated and spam bloated, but I can find/price things quickly.
That's a good thought. It's going to be a mobile product that would displace products on both desktop and mobile.

Would it be appropriate to place the valuation somewhere in between the current mobile and desktop products?
This trend needs to change. There's too many guys out there running Wordpress blogs on shared hosting plans and/or making Android (or iPhone) apps, just to call it a 'start-up'...my Facebook friends list is full of these guys, calling themselves with ridiculously random titles like CEO/Founder/Co-Founder/MD of <insert-wordpress-blog_or_mobile_app_here>

Back in the days, a start-up was something different, something the society looked down, you know...a real challenge (which is why the society looked down). Today, the scenario is like as if its cool to run a Start-up (and fail).

X: "Hey dude, I run a startup..howz about you?"

Y: "Cool story bro..I runz one too..wanna be my co-founder?"

X: "sure thing bro...right away"

[now X can call himself a 'Serial Entrepreneur' because he sabotaged his old start-up for a new one]
I would like to know as well. I can't find anything about it on any of his sites.
We feel your pain!

Our integrations are typically at the SIS level, but drop us a line and maybe we can help.
I would say you're right for most cases. But not for gamers or "power users":

* Game developers constantly up the ante. Try playing Battlefield 3 at 2560x1440 on Ultra on your 2008 PC and see how you go, if it even starts at all.

* Virtualisation has resulted in consolidation (for me at least). Whereas I might have had to keep around a Windows box to do testing, now I just fire up a VM on my laptop.
> Correlated with being the best batch yet!

I very specifically didn't say that. ;)

I know you probably meant it in jest, but really each batch has some great folks in it, and no batch is really "better" than any other. I wouldn't want anyone else to get a complex, since startup founders can be a sensitive bunch. :D
Wiggle in the Gravel
You think that if a company offers a sizable equity percentage as part of their comp it signals something negative about that company?
Facebook brings mentions and tags to the Open Graph of 3rd party apps
Agreed. My theory is that people irrationally value free stuff. I spend about 3,000 dollars a year on work-time food (250 work days * 12 dollars for lunch/an afternoon snack). The way people talk about free food at some tech companies you'd think it's worth way more than a few percent of a typical developer's post-tax income.
True. But you get what you pay for. The Raspberry Pi is extremely low end. Slow CPU, tiny bit of memory.

If that works for you then awesome.

However, if you want something that is more in line with today's mid to high end phones then the Pandaboard probably comes closer.
I constantly hear has-beens saying that because of some personal experience or their general malaise about something, an entire industry/area/field is "over"

Wired wrote about the death of the internet. People write constantly about the death of websites and the rise of apps. Or about the death of hardware and the rise of software being all that matters. Or the post-computer age. Or whatever crap they're trying to hock or stock they're trying to inflate.

They're all wrong. Most of them just come off as trying to blame a changing environment for why THEY didn't succeed. In Yammer's case, it sounds more like "see, we did the right thing by cashing out and becoming a part of a giant corp, because we're just fleeing a sinking ship" rather than "we were getting out ass kicked by other social networks and this was a lifeline".
If you're talking to investors, he's right -- it's better to avoid referring to your company, startup, product, application, etc as a "website".
Stone Spray research project wants to print bridges with sand, solar power
My dad is an acoustical and electrical engineer who works for heavy vehicle industries.

On one project, a burner controller, he used a PIC microcontroller. I think the capacity of onboard storage was 48k. He didn't add any extra storage.

I could be slightly wrong about the exact specs. I do arduino mainly.
I had tried scrolloff=1000 for middle scrolling. I liked it for a while, but got a little tired of the jumpy-ness. I'll give 5 a go.
Something I wrote on the matter:

http://www.kludgecode.com/index.php/startup-in-the-silicon-v...
Sounds like the same kind of MBA talk that has people calling bugs "challenges."
"And I can't even be sure if I learned everything, because nobody graded me."

How would you know if you learned everything, even with a grade?

Any course worth its salt is going to contain way too much material to test in full detail on a two-hour final exam.
We took a lot of feedback from our original show HN post and rebuilt the service. No more Facebook Connect requirement!

It's come a long way - more feedback would be great.
PopCap Update
You think because they're engaged that she was more likely to get a favorable offer?
Source: Nintendo Power magazine to cease publication
But, it has not been as stable as you might think. During the 1300s, the popes resided in France.

As recently as 1870, during the Italian unification, the church was stripped of its power to govern Rome after an armed confrontation between armies at the gates of Rome ("XX Septembre"). During this period, the Pope (the ninth Pius) seriously considered fleeing Italy.
Mind telling us more about your site? :)
A direct quote from iFixit: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-Retina-Display-Te...

"Apple did not design and build a 1.5 mm thin LCD panel. They did, however, do something exceptional with the design of this display: rather than sandwich an LCD panel between a back case and a front glass, they used the aluminum case itself as the frame for the LCD panel and used the LCD as the front glass."

Remember your whole theory about iFixit debunking substantial weight savings? Turns out iFixit agrees with the OP and not with you.
If they have people reading their wordpress blog or users for their mobile apps then they are already ahead of many of the startups featured here.

You might want to look up the No True Scotsman fallacy.
What's the time horizon on something like FundersClub being open to non-accredited investors due to the recent law being passed that takes away some investment restrictions?
Skype Releases Photo-Sharing for iPhone/iPad - Trying to Disrupt MMS? iMessage?
A Markdown Quick Ref, Now With 100% More Potato
ha! This is the most brilliant and inspirational thing I have ever read on Hacker News. I'm printing your gem of a quote out and plastering it above my computer!
Considerations in a Digital Photography Computer
That's about $8/day. I probably spend close to 10x that on food living in Manhattan. Granted I go out a lot and that's including drinks at dinner, but even not going out to eat at all and fasting every other day I have no idea how I'd only spend that much.
Like Apple’s Find My Friends, but better. The key differentiator then was that Glassmap uses a proprietary, patent-pending technology

Your mother must be so proud.
Sure I'd be happy to! We collect location data that might help determine what's interesting content for you to see - such as where you spend time with friends, where you take pictures, etc.

By similar apps I meant other location sharing applications - whether they're check-in style apps or other passive location sharing apps. These other applications, usually in an attempt to reduce battery drain, collect data at a much lower rate. Our relay framework lets us collect lots of data without sacrificing battery performance, letting us make much more informed decisions for what's interesting and what's not.
Disclosure: I'm one of the founders of Keen.

With respect to the housing subsidy, you've got part of it right. We do work out of a big house that some of us live in. But the rent subsidy was put in place for one main reason: one of the main drivers of employee happiness is commute time. They're inversely related, and the rent subsidy is our way of incentivizing employees to live close to the office.
I know HN loves anecdotes, but they're a great example for me. As an overweight guy whose relatively open about it (read: happy to discuss my weight and weight-loss difficulties) I'm constantly having this site recommended to me by non-technical non-early-adopters.

Figuring out what makes that happen is the magic key to plentiful riches, not so much tech-industry blogs. Of course, positive coverage in the tech press is unlikely to hurt.
Words mean different things to different people.

Startup. Ninja. Hacker.

There's absolutely nothing to be gained by arguing about word definitions, people treat definitions as axiomatic. People don't logically derive what a word means through etymology or historical usage, they define it as what they understand it to mean.

Telling someone that their definition of a word is wrong is like saying their preference for one colour over another is wrong. It's a personal view, accept it and move on.
The Worst Job At Google: a Year of Watching Terrible Things On the Internet
JavaScript + mod_rewrite to serve retina images