skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the feedback. I also pinged another entrepreneur who had offered this opinion:

Often 1/4 to 1/2 is vested immediately. Typically you will have accelerated vesting in the event of an acquisition. This can come in the form of a single or double trigger (first trigger is when the acquisition happens and second trigger is if you are fired or quit from the acquiring company).

Assuming your non-immediately vested shares have a one year cliff (no vesting until 1 year worked) and 4 year vesting (month by month after the first year), you should consider not having any vesting in the event of an acquisition.

Acquisition probably won't happen until you've been going for a couple years at least, and much of your shares were vested immediately so fractional vesting of the balance won't make a big difference to you. On the other hand the fractional vesting might make a big difference to an executive you hire between founding and acquisition and you can assume that a big time hire will negotiate to match your accelerated vesting provision (might really erode the value to the acquirer to not have that exec with golden handcuffs).

If you have FF shares, those should represent 1/4 to 1/10th of your total holding and you should make sure that these shares are all vested immediately at founding.
I went back and forth on whether use read() or fread() in my example, and I wasn't sure which to choose. For the purpose of this example, I don't think there is a functional difference between them.

In current Linux, I'm pretty sure both of them use the same underlying page cache. fread() adds a small amount of management overhead, but read() does just as much system level buffering. mmap() uses the same cache, but just gives direct access to it.

But it's possible I'm wrong, and I don't seem to be able to find a solid source for this online. This page references this, though:
http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/page-cache-the-affair-b...
I feel like I've read other more explicit descriptions, although possibly offline.
This is an interview I did with Andrew Warner that I feel is super valuable for anyone that is a young entrepreneur.

Andrew asks me excellent questions about how we were able to bootstrap our company, hire 30+ employees without paying them monetary compensation, and how we dealt with obstacles in our way.

Hope you guys learn a lot!
Ask HN: How to get bloggers to write about your product?
I'm trying to launch my app, and I want to know
what's the etiquette for asking bloggers to write about your product?

Do I write a short description, a press release, etc...?
When I interviewed Seth Godin, he reminded me that one of the best things about a recession is that your costs go down too. Jun's doing that by inspiring people.
Your help page throws an error.
how come half the kansas and half of nevada is missing?
stdio does its own buffering, which is why you have to turn output buffering off with setbuf() when you want to do debug prints. But I may be on crack in the read case, vs. the write.

I don't follow the rest of your caching arguments, though. read(2) exploits the buffer cache; in fact, the rap on mmap() is that it makes worse use of the buffer cache, because it doesn't provide the kernel with enough information to read ahead. Apocryphal, though.

The big issue is that the mmap() case is much more demanding on the VM system. You're thinking only of the buffer cache when you talk about caching, but the X86 is also at pains to cache the page directory hierarchy (that's what the TLB is doing). Hopping all over your process' address space rips up the TLB, which is expensive. There are also hardware cycle penalties for dicking with page table entries.
Doing an autocomplete for that is no problem. Just use YUI autocomplete and set up a remote JSON data source.

That's what we do, and we have millions of names to complete: http://www.trailbehind.com

Here's the YUI library: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/autocomplete/

I can send you the code for my autocomplete widget if you want. Email me at andrewljonson [at] trailbehind [dot] com
This does violate craigslist's usage policy.

craigslist permits you to display on your website, or create a hyperlink
on your website to, individual postings on the Service so long as such use
is for noncommercial and/or news reporting purposes only (e.g., for use in
personal web blogs or personal online media). If the total number of such
postings displayed or linked to on your website exceeds one hundred (100)
postings, your use will be presumed to be in violation of the TOU,
absent express permission granted by craigslist to do so.
> I'm assuming it's an arbitrary choice that you're using "prev" instead of "next," correct?

yes, in effect it's a doubly linked list (circularly doubly linked), so you could remember the id of the first element of the list and then traverse in any order as long as this id does not reappear.

> Unless, of course, you want to insert the record first and then modify the update to exclude the item you just inserted.

yes - in this case you would get a violation of the unique constraint:

begin;
insert into l (id, prev, mydata) values ('G', 'C', 'data for G');
update l set prev='G' where prev='C';
commit;

this would violate the unique constraint for prev, because after the insert (but before the update!), both the new element and the element not yet updated have prev set to 'C' - the transaction will then be rolled back.

In standard SQL this would be possible because it allows to declare unique constraints (and I think other constraints, such as check clauses) as deferrable, too - PostgreSQL doesn't implement this, it allows deferrable only for foreign key constraints. But usually it's no problem to order the commands in a way that only foreign key constraints get violated during a transaction.

> Right now, I'm using MySQL.. I only have 4 tables,
and product is not launched. Would you advise
switching to Postgres?

as an entrepreneur, you should probably do what's best for your customers - and they will likely not care which RDBMS you use:-)
Perhaps you could play around a little bit with PostgreSQL on the side and (perhaps) make the switch once you are comfortable with it. And keep your JSON-based lists - if the system works, why bother with a rewrite / schema change (for now?).

Considering momentum, I think PostgreSQL is gaining steam while MySQL is losing momentum (some key developers left after the aquisition by Sun) - of course, that's my subjective impression.

Technically, of course I think that PostgreSQL is better - here is a good comparison:
http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/MySQL_vs_PostgreSQL
for amusement, read the discussion here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/764fp/mysql_vs_...
Nobody lives there? There probably isnt a craigslist to cover those areas.
Postgres does somewhat better than MySQL on a single box with multiple cores ... mainly because of the work Sun put into scaling it before they bought MySQL.

That's not really the case. Sun has some some benchmarking, but most of the work on Postgres SMP performance was done by others (mostly Tom Lane, who works for Red Hat, and various EnterpriseDB employees).
Are you sure about that? I think we have all the cities that CraigsList maps in the US.

Does Nevada have more than Reno and Las Vegas? We have both of those, in opposite corners of the state.
I think the limitations of Newtonian physics where only discovered as people built devices that broke them. There is a great time line for that period, but when you consider the instruments required to make the discovery's you see they are based on specific assumptions about how the world operates. It's only when their design reaches their limits that meaningful discovery's can be made.

http://timeline.aps.org/APS/Timeline/

"The Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes finds that mercury loses its electrical resistance at temperatures near absolute zero. This low temperature effect is observed in other materials as well."

That takes advanced equipment to reduce things to that temperature, an expectation that resistance is effected by temperature, and an formula that works at higher temperatures to notice the discontinuity.

PS: Consider all the benefits high speed computing has provided when designing aircraft. You need a lot of wind tunnel / real world tests to build a model, but with that model and lot's of computing power you can design aircraft out to the limits of your simulation. At which point you need to collect more data.
I've pretty much stopped purchasing CDs. The only way I support artists is by going to their shows when they come to town.

Do you guys still buy CDs?
Wow this is quite an undertaking. As a test, I went out to my state's website (NE) to see how easy it would be to scrape legislation info. It looks like there's plenty of information available online, however every document they have is available in PDF. Hopefully they aren't encrypted...
I agree completely with the spirit of this article.

Eric Lippert also provides an interesting view of the varieties of exceptions:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/10/vexing-...

If you follow the philosophy of this article and classify exception's as Eric suggests, you should be in pretty good shape.
P2P?
This is good stuff.I like how the list of ads changes as I pan around the map. What else does Trailbehind do?
Sony Ericsson C702 James Bond Edition 
Sony Ericsson C702, the upcoming handset to rule in the word of wireless technology and will provide you the entire feature. The C702 is the phone which has very suitable feature like 3.15 MP of camera, image resolution of 2048×1536 pixels, autofocus, video (QVGA@30fps), flash; secondary QCIF video call camera let you snaps your all flattering moment.
I still buy vinyl.
Some favorites about mathematics:

Concepts of Modern Mathematics by Ian Stewart

http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Modern-Mathematics-Ian-Stewar...

Numbers and Geometry by John Stillwell.

http://www.amazon.com/Numbers-Geometry-John-Stillwell/dp/038...

The Pleasures of Counting by T. W. Körner

http://www.amazon.com/Pleasures-Counting-T-W-K%C3%B6rner/dp/...

Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction by Timothy Gowers

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Short-Introduction-Timothy...
When VOIP is pervasive on phones, I think it will start to make the cell network the secondary choice to WiFi (already is for me). The only value the cell network for me is a phone connection. This is providers' moat.

I'd like to see a cell network embrace the fact they are a pipe. Pay line and connection fee (like the current internet). Forget data/voice plans. I imagine manufacturers and software developers for the Android, iPhone (after the 5 year AT&T deal) and Pre would go ape. More subscribers to your network because of new devices and beautiful software. The barrier of entry is much lower.

I kind of see it like the newspaper industry. Which company will gamble first and jettison the print medium? Which company will leave the old cell model behind? My guess is the weak ones...file for bankruptcy, change their model and re-emerge from the ashes. I'm crossing my fingers it is a phoenix.
Suggestion: Open ads up in a new window, when I click back after viewing an ad I have to re-select city, etc.
Well there is the "cost" of having an unwanted item clutter up the aggregator (or store, etc.). Things like collaborative filtering help with this, but are still (shockingly, really) not used, even by HN.
I don't think the problem is with upvote inflation as much as dilution of individual-to-individual recognition. Limiting upvotes wouldn't address that.
Probably, although I'm not sure she gave him the same kind of grilling that he got by the prosecution.

Also, did this make anyone else think of Randy Pausch?
His Stanford web page (http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/) identifies him as a "Ph.D. student".
Too many words about nothing!
Since this topic is right where my startup (http://www.klictrack.com/mdt) is trying to push things forward, please check us out and tell me where we need improvement. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
No, not in our profile set, but because of our locking system (where readers don't block writes and writes don't block reads) I believe it should hold up well under moderate write conditions (in the case of recommendations applications, we assume that writes are infrequent relative to reads).

Still an untested assumption, but the system is architectured to hold up well in those situations and I think that it will reasonably scale there.
Flot looks good but I'm concerned about its use of a Canvas emulator in IE (as opposed to writing natively to VML). Such things often don't work well, and we can't afford to have second-class behavior in IE.

Can anyone here speak to whether that is a problem or not?

Alternatively, does anybody have a different favorite charting library they'd care to mention?
It may be a powerful shell, but I wish the examples were a bit more practical and enticing.

First of all, what's missing on Windows is a useful interactive mode for the command prompt. Do they really expect people to type these kinds of lines at the prompt? If I wanted a verbose, object-oriented interactive interpreter, I could use Python right now, on Linux or Windows or Mac. What I really want is for Microsoft to ship something in the box with Windows that is as useful as having bash or tcsh with a collection of Unix utilities.

The article's 5+ lines of Windows PowerShell could be replaced with the Unix command "date '+%m-%d-%Y %H:%M:%S'" to get roughly the same result. If you want to add 10 days (as in the article), "date -v+10d '+%m-%d-%Y %H:%M:%S'". If Microsoft wants to win over practical shell users, they'll have to come much closer to something like this.
While on diet, you need more vitamins than usual.

Fruits and vegetables has calories too. Look at tables: http://www.fatfreekitchen.com/calories.html

1 apple is about 200g (five apples per 1kg), thus it is equivalent to 2 tablespoons of sugar.
Enom have had several large scale outages in recent memory.

We've got nearly 3000 domains under our enom reseller account, I wouldn't touch any our domains on their nameservers.
It's true that you need additional skills to grow a successful company, but without the product/technical skills, you can't start recruit or sustain a company. A technical company is primarily a function of its people and its products. As companies mature, more adults that aren't as product focused come in and think it's entirely about brand, marketing, sales, etc. It's true that those things that bring in the money, but once your focus shifts toward those areas, you'll inevitably turn into a EBay, Yahoo, or Apple (pre-Jobs). When Jobs came back, he said the only thing he did was shift the company's focus toward "product" not marketing or sales.

I've had many non-technical friends that have had a "great" idea and wanted to recruit programmers. It's never worked. It's best if you have the skills yourself.

A lot of people were surprised that Amazon not Google dominates cloud computing or that it branched out to the Kindle. Amazon has always had a technical culture focused on great user experiences. It's not a surprise at all when you take a look at it from that standpoint.
Another case study for security by obscurity. A crypto-DRM system would not necessarily make a developer's life easier, and would probably be of limited value (and more CPU expense).

As a potential dev, I applauded the unlocked dev phone offer. But being unable to download paid apps dramatically reduces the utility especially for a small-shop, not yet Android committed dev. If hidden folders was the "launch-ready" store solution, it may be a while before this is corrected.
Last time I checked they charged per 1,000 DNS requests?
Thanks for the suggestion! I implemented it :)
Good job, I'll be looking for a place soon! I have a few question/comments:

- Open links in a new window.
- Have a date picker or a dropdown with 1 day ago, 2 days ago, etc.
- Where are the nearby photos near?
- Show photos button, why is it different than the checkbox for dogs/cats? Its kind of confusing.
- Change it so when you click from list of adds, the map moves to the ad's location on the map.
- When you click on an ad on the map you place a pin on the map. What can you do with this? I'd rather see pics/summary information and then I would decide whether I want to save this ad.
I've been toying with a Creative Commons like service, one where as an organization, you can choose the criteria which meet your privacy policy. This would have a "visual vocabulary" akin to the CC badges or nutrition facts on food for different privacy models. It seems like a missing component is clarity and transparency when it comes to understanding the implications of several facets: collection, storage, and use being the big three.

This paper by Irene Pollach [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1284627] delves into some of the details and weaknesses in privacy policies and how legalese can weasel out of a real policy.

Schneier's article makes me even more concerned about storage -- which I think most people dismiss if the use argument is addressed.

I think a privacy vocabulary would be wonderful.
VCs challenge Obama plan to up carried interest tax
Diomede Offers Green File Storage In The Cloud For A Fraction Of The Cost
Draft: Recommended Security Controls for Federal Information Systems
Why The New Watchmen Movie Will Bomb
Whiners that Fail
What if they don't come to town?
All good suggestions

1. I implemented open in new window 5 minutes ago

2. I'll add my calendar widget to replace the data selector

3. I'll overlay the polygon of the photo search area.

4. Good idea for images for cats/dogs.

5. I had it set up to pan to the point originally, but now I just open a new window, so I'm not sure that's useful anymore.
Porn in the USA: red states are the biggest consumers
I'm part of the Neo4j team and I'm puzzled about the import problem. I don't know about the size requirements you have but you mention 2.5M nodes and 60M edges and we run systems in production with a LOT more data (billions range). So it definitely shouldn't blow up. Maybe you ran into some bug in an older release or something else was wrong.

It's also important to note that Neo4j through the normal API is optimized for the most common use cases: reading data and transactional updates. Those operations are executed all the time during normal operation, whereas an import is typically done once at system bootstrap and then never again.

To ease migration, as part of our 1.0 release (June time frame) we will expose a new "batch injection" API that is faster for one-time imports of data sets. This is currently being developed. If you have feedback on how an API like that should behave, feel free to join the discussions on the list:

http://neo4j.org

Cheers,

-EE
I thought I read somewhere that housingmaps had a special agreement with craigslist... But I hope you stick around because the lack of cities on hm is really annoying.

Craigslist really needs an API... and global search. PLEASE.
Great interview Jun. Leaned a lot from your interview. I was able to hear and relate to a lot of your situations. Now, I just need to find a co-founder that would allow me to express myself too. Thanks!
Sorry, dreeves, yes we didn't put this in place as a way to gamble. I personally like gambling maybe more than the next guy :) , but Inkling was really not created for that, and we don't condone or support it on our sites.
Facebook opened their blog to user comments
Little Things We Still Can’t Stand About the iPhone
siong1987 thanks man! it was fun doing the event. i hope i wasn't too harsh to our hosts when i said that, i don't mean whatsoever that all these events are useless. i've been to my fair share of these startup talks and many are great. and this one was a great opportunity for attendees, but a balance needs to be found.

i still even find myself reading more articles on "news.ycombo" then i should be and get caught in the too much analysis/thinking phase, and not enough doing. it's like an addiction for most people to get stuck in that too, so these events and all the blogs talking about how to start a business should almost carry a warning label :)
We've had our own set of issues managing user feedback on our blog. Never to the scale of this, though. It will be interesting to see how they moderate this forum.
TraceVis: performance visualization for TraceMonkey
Imagine following example: you signed contact to guarantee 99,999 uptime - 8-9 hours of downtime per year. First your downtime is 12 hours. Now you need to work more than 1 year without any errors. Any "500" error code can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

How you will do error handling and exception handling in that case? If there 1 chance per million that something will work incorrectly due to solar radiation or power fluctuation, how much such temporary failures you will see when your system handling more than 100 millions of requests per day? If you restarted database and all connections to database are broken, should all your current users see 500 error code?

PS.
That is real story. ;-)

PPS.
I used RecoveryManager to handle errors in the my system. It is very simple: when it receiving an error, it uses it configuration to determine action to take (e.g. call helper method) and responding to caller with code to indicate what caller should do: throw exception to higher level or just try again for few times.
A few bits of advice from a journalist who has covered technology before.

First, read as many blogs and publications that cover the field your app is in as possible and start paying attention to the bylines and names of the writers you have written about related products. Few things irritate a journalist more than getting pitches directed to the wrong place. An email saying something like, "I enjoyed your piece about X, here's what I thought of it. By the way, I'm working on a cool project that does (related Y), would you be interested in finding out more?" will generally be well received.

Press releases style emails can also work, but keep in mind, we're used to getting those shoveled at us through a mailing list, so it'll be much less likely to draw attention than a personalized note.

Either way, keep it short and simple. Explain what your product does CLEARLY in the first sentence. Don't use superlatives or make outlandish claims. I can't stress this point enough. If a press release goes on about how a product will "revolutionize this" or "reinvent that" without specifics, it's headed for the spam pile. Don't include canned quotes or statements. If we're interested in finding out more, we'll get in touch. So do include as much contact information as you can.
Why not just keep the crontab file in your repo? A rake task that does `cp #{project_dir}/crontab /etc/crontab` would be sufficient to meet the same needs.
Can you elaborate on that, please?

I'm not challenging, just curious. It seems to be pretty widely accepted that news aggregators have, in general, deteriorated; particularly digg & reddit, too new to hackernews to have an opinion. I hadn't noticed the same phenomenon with stumble ...
I like that the author mentioned colleges outside of Boston. He seemed to name benefits that are the same throughout Massachusetts.
It seems like your site is not showing the majority of the adds. If I look at my neighborhood (El Cerrito, CA) there are hundreds of listings in the last week on craigslist but setting the cutoff date to 2/20 on your site only displays 3 or 4 results in the same area.