skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC : What's the best code repo/VC access strategies for a startup hiring interns ?
i'm sure several of you have hired interns, or temp dev's but we're getting interns for the first time at hover.in

While im going to be turning their focus on pretty stand-alone projects [1] - am wondering how to juggle :
- wanting them to learn/contribute to the main product code base
- as well as keeping 'some parts' of the codebase restrictive

suggestions ?

should i just make a new repo ?
some tricky branch dance ?
will git 's pull method or some feature within svn help in the restrictive part ?

[1] PS: one of the generc project is btw over at http://hoverin.github.com/26th
As so many others have said: yes, good people are expensive. And if you expect to grow to a non-trivial size, hosting/servers/bandwidth are going to cost you.

There is also the issue of leverage. If you need $500k, you don't raise $500k, because when you run out and start looking for more money, your negotiating position is very poor. Instead you raise $2M, then start to talk to investors again when you have spent half of it.

In my experience marketing is not a significant portion of expenses for a startup.
It's not backed by nothing. That's empirically, objectively false. You just don't like what's backed by. In another comment of yours,

"In my world, goods and services I purchase are the final goods, not the money I need to purchase them."

This is also objectively wrong. Sorry, the dollar is backed by the US government and I'm afraid those things are derived, not fundamental.

You are mistaking what you want to be for what actually is. And because of money's recursive nature, regardless of what you think about that, the fact that a dollar can be used to pay off Uncle Sam means it's usable to pay for a loaf of bread, too.

Furthermore, it doesn't matter what you base a currency on, it will always work this way. Base it on something like gold and the currency will still have higher order effects that aren't directly connected to gold. That's the entire purpose of money, to reduce the problem of trade to a single universal currency and thereby enable an economy to develop, instead of being stuck on barter. Barter may be concrete, but that's just about the only positive thing going for it.

(Even a barter-based economy will still prove vulnerable to bubbles and all the other problems of a money-based economy, it just won't also generate enough wealth to survive such things. Some things like economic cycles are fundamental to economies themselves and can be seen in economies where Man has no participation at all. Ecology can be seen as a degenerate case of Economics with no intelligent participation.)
Entrenchment. The main product I work on is 3.5 million lines of C++, built with MCF and ATL. We can frankestein other technologies into there, but its expensive and clunky. The cost of rewriting the whole thing is prohibitive, so C++ it is.
Heh, yeah, the edit link disappears after two hours, regardless of whether anyone has replied.
I fail to see how any but the third is web-specific. Any app with a server component will have scaling issues, at least there are well-developed mechanisms for spreading HTTP unlike a home-grown protocol. I've seen plenty of absolutely horrific native client UIs, and I'm looking at you Lotus. OS vendors and OEMs call the shots on native apps not to mention the nightmare of poking arbitrary holes in a firewall. And the last point is just a joke. There needs to be restriction on web access just as there is for applications. I can't install WoW on my work PC, why is facebook somehow different?
On a saturday, no less. :)

I think the suit-and-tie thing goes back to the neo-conservative's "Turn Back The Clock 30 years" aspect of their movement. While today most companies don't care if you're in Khakis and a button down unless you're in front of TV cameras and/or clients, and most CEOs are aware that workers in casual dress are productive (or so i've heard).

Bottomline: 30/40 years ago, before women's rights/civil rights/gay rights/gun regulation, you'd wear a suit if you were going to the White house. Period.

Thank goodness we have a much more modern CEO of the US gov, now. He's at put sensibility over tradition in some respect.
It's possible that meetings aren't scheduled back-to-back. If there's a 15+ minute gap between meetings it's possible to end one late and still start the next one on time.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Black Swan" had some pretty good insights into the "unknown unknowns" of military combat.

http://www.wajapi.com/books/80
1981 News Report on the Birth of the Internet
metafilter.com gets around this by just telling all of its members to use the "metafilter46/metafilter" account.
Unless, like carter, he orders solar panels for heating/cooling on the white house, which seems likely.
I use GTD tiddly wiki. And I wrote about it on my blog http://chanux.wordpress.com/category/computinglife/
Well you can carry around gold chips which have a lot of value. A gold coin is worth quiet a bit. Can't say the same for a steel coin. Have to carry around a lot more silver (in volume) to get the same value.
> 3) He sat down and advanced the state of free version control a decade over the course of a weekend.

I'd say that's a bit of a stretch. Remember DARCS and Mecurial were both out when he wrote git. Though Mercurial wasn't that old:)

Read this: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/version-control/version-con...

Many people prefer Hg over Git, though I prefer Git, and it was written before Git.

I'd agree that Linus helped "advance the state of free version control", but certainly not by a decade when compared to other pre existing free version control systems.
Thanks for the summary, but you will be missing all the humor - it takes a lot of energy, coffee and cigarettes to add humor. And no, I don't feel bad that I spent an hour writing it :).

PS: No refund offered if article not found humorous
A good article, with a lot of interesting points, but am I the only one who felt a little skeeved out when he admitted to having no interest in European History until he saw "Sophie's Choice"?
We've been wanting to do this where I'm at for a while. While I hate to put human beings out of work, they really do make too many mistakes for shipping things perfectly.
Rate My Startup: DomainPigeon.com
Memory addressing capabilities are determined by the processor. A 32-bit processor can only use up to 32-bits to represent an address. That means it can address 2^32 (4,294,967,296; 4GB) distinct bytes. But the memory is managed by the OS. So it's possible to have an OS that won't use more than 4GB even though the processor can handle more than that.

Also, most modern x86 processors have a hack - Physical Address Extension (PAE) - that let the 32-bit processors address up to 64 GB.
The short of it:
Domain Pigeon helps you find unregistered domain names for your websites. Please let me know what you think.

The long of it:
In March of last year I was in the process of writing some poker software and trying to decide on a name for it. I wanted a good name and also wanted to own the corresponding domain name so that people could easily find it. I used Ajaxwhois, a great site that lets shows you the availability of domain names as you type, and quickly got pulled in trying to find a good domain. I would spend hours trying things like “pokerguru.com”, “pokermaster.com”, “pokercalculator.com”, “pokerexpert.com”, and so on. After a lot of time and energy later, I found “allinexpert.com”, which became the name of the software.

Fast forward to about July. ALL IN Expert had just flopped and I was trying to decide on a new project to work on. I had several ideas in mind and again, I wanted a good domain name for whatever it wound up being. It was kind of sick: I wound up going back to Ajaxwhois and using it as the tie breaker. If I could find a good domain name for one project and not the other, that would be what I worked on.

It was crazy. There's got to be a better way. I wrote a small piece of software that played with various word combinations and displayed their availability. Surprisingly, there are a lot of decent domains out there... you just have to be patient enough or resourceful enough to find them.

Then it hit me: This is something other people could use too. I put the other ideas on the back burner and started on this one.

Domain Pigeon, an eccentric but hopefully memorable name I discovered with the same software, is intended to make finding unregistered domain names easier. It has been my learn Rails/JavaScript/web development nights and weekends project over the last few months. I hope you like it.

This is round two of its launch. Last week I posted a link to Philly on Rails, a local group of Rails aficionados, and received a lot of great feedback. The result is what you see today (hopefully, depending on how DreamHost does with the traffic).

I've got a list of about two dozens features I intend to add over the coming weeks, which will be modified and prioritized based on your feedback.

For me, Domain Pigeon has been as much about learning the process as it has been about the releasing the product. On that note, all feedback, positive and negative, is welcomed. I also keep a blog, mattmazur.com, where I write about Domain Pigeon and its progress for anyone that is interested. I try to be as transparent as possible, as that's the best way to get valuable feedback.

On a final note, a lot of the design decisions for Domain Pigeon were adapted from feedback given to other people launching their sites on HackerNews and for that, I owe you all a thank you.

Please let me know what you think.
Web apps were a temporary fad. They are good for some type of applications that are similar to document based (e.g facebook, flickr, HN news), but for others, web apps are terrible (twitter, photo editing, making phone calls).

There is space for both types, and web apps are not going to replace desktop apps.
Actual study of mercury in corn syrup [pdf]
and we've seen what adobe things "smooth" is from when Fireworks/Photoshop "smoothens" text.

Not at all.
Could be, but its probably also a cultural thing. Most Americans don't view oral sex as sexual contact, and yet, most STIs are transmittable from it. This, alongside sexual education in schools that focuses on that 1% (used correctly) failure rate of condoms and lack of hard scientific evidence it will prevent the spread of HPV, leading them to think "condoms are unreliable, so why bother?" has led to a thriving youth culture of unprotected oral sex...and later, when they become sexually active, unprotected sex.

And it just so happens one of the primary ways women catch HSV-2 is through a partner infecting them orally. There are "virgins" getting herpes in America.

Now, again, culturally, I've been told that Aussie men are incredibly chauvinistic, so maybe a smaller percentage is likely to engage in oral sex. I'm generalizing and speculating here , so take it with a grain of salt. In the UK, the sex education could be better. From talks with my friends from southern states, it seems you'd have to deliberately try to do worse.
I study at an engineering uni and finding an internship is the easiest thing ever... nearly every professor doing research is looking to hire more students for his projects. This includes computer/software engineering. It's paid work (if you have decent grades anyway), and you get a chance to publish articles.

Don't forget to look inside the school itself!
Pipl.com: people search so good it will scare your pants off
IPhone 2.2.1 Software Update
> I thought the point of online anonymity was that it allows people to be judged based on what they say and do, not by their name, nationality, certifications, or whatever.

I agree, in general, and you provided a nice argument in support of your position. Sometimes, however, you can’t help but express a strong opinion and nothing else, as I did above. Then your post shouldn’t be anonymous. Another example is when you give advice, such as in "Ask HN". Then the reader would certainly like to know your background.
Well for the past year Microsoft stock has continued to slide down.
Then somebody else has to get rid of that currency. That's the whole plan.
JQuery API for iPhone. Caches data in local sqlite db
Yahoo Leaving Santa Clara Offices : Vacating 400,000 Sq. Feet
Apple's latest wired keyboard +1
HPV is a cancer caused by the presence of a virus.

Diabetes Type I tends to occur in people that contain a certain blood virus (often they're born with it.) The next time you donate blood, look at your donor card. It'll relate your viral status just like it does your blood type. Apparently, they've discovered that children tend to develop diabetes if they're transfused with blood that contains the virus. (Sorry I can't remember its name. I just know because I asked about my status last time I donated and what it meant, and they explained "Basically, we can use your blood safely with children.")

Keep in mind its not a direct correlation: You might have the virus, but not diabetes. Or vice versa.

And outside of humans, Feline Leukemia is transmitted from close contact (such as fighting or sexual activity).

Hopefully this research, and research like it, will lead to breakthrough that allow us to better target virii and protect ourselves from them. The goal here, aside from eliminating life-impacting diseases such as HIV, HPV, and Herpes, but also eliminating the "common cold".

Finally people will no longer be able to say, "They can put a man on the moon, but they can't cure the common cold...".
110+ Best Twitter Tools 
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. There are so many tools, Plugin, Scripts and App Available on the net for Twitter, which are really helpful for twitter Users . So am here posting some good List of tools.
I don't think there is an upper bound on the number of people working in creative fields.

What proportion of the world's chimpanzees work in creative fields? You don't think that humans would be in competition with AI's in the creative marketplace of the future?
I think 4chan getting admin access to your accounts is going to be even funnier/embarrassing than twitter.

Beware, sometimes your website exists only to serve as a visual warning to others...
why do you want to be restrictive?
It’s an old handle. If I was to sign up today, I’d probably use my real name. I put info and links in my profile, as a compromise. -- Peter Saveliev
Things Ruby isn't concerned with that people typically have problems with in C++:

- No compiling or linking phase in Ruby. Linking problems can be hairy in large systems.

- Header file hell

- The static keyword (there are four different contexts)

- Difference between a pointer and reference

- public, private, protected inheritance

- Differences between dispatch (and underlying impl) of virtual and nonvirtual methods

- method hiding

- diamond of death

- visibility vs accessibility

- casting idioms (static, dynamic, const, reinterpret)

- ugly libraries (STL, ATL, MFC, COM) yeah, i said STL is ugly.

- templates (Ruby doesn't need templates since everything is dynamic)

- No language level string data type (our product has at least six representations of strings here and there that need to be converted at the bit level).
Oops. Seems I erred a bit there - I was trying to make a general point but dirtied it up by applying it to you personally, and in error, obviously.

In my defense, I did say "if he finds that site offensive in some way". Re-reading your blog post, you don't mention the word offensive - I had assumed so, since you singled out that site as "nasty", but obviously not. Yeah, it is kind of boorish and try-hard, I agree! I guess my hair trigger impulse to attack anyone who finds "offense" in swear words misfired pretty badly in this case :/

Anyway, sorry about that. Oh, and by the way, I think any Ruby programmer worth their salt has heard of you, so quit with the "virtually unknown" false modesty .. ; )
don't know what they did to you but apparently you seem pissed at them for some reason. It's just software mate.

You are welcome to find alternatives and no google has nothing even close to this. No one really has when you look at it from a holistic point of view, which I would normally recommend.
how are you defining good?

one peeve: I can't copy and paste the domain name text.

campdeal.com is available? wow.
America's Most Correct Internet Conspiracy Theorist Calls Next Market Crash
Hrmmm...interesting but I'm not sure how useful this is. I do all my development on a machine with an internet connection and full-sized browser. Although I can see this helping settle bar bets related to certain aspects of the jquery api :D
'Immortal' jellyfish swarming across the world
Huh? At best, animals in the wild are equivalent to humans subsisting on nature. That life is hard, and you don't have time for much else.
Saw this - http://www.joesgoals.com/. I have not used it before. Why not try it out and let us know?
Ask HN: Review our startup - Taxi Mogul, a persistent browser game
While I suspect they could have done a lot of good, the market is going to start making $100 netbooks with long battery life real soon now. It won't have the feel good emphasis on education, but the important part is the kids get access to computers, and Acer can build them much cheaper than a OLPC I suspect.
Why pay for basecamp when unfuddle has a great free version?

I strongly recommend avoiding dreamhost. A Small Orange .com are far better, and only a little more money - its a balance.

I read advice, and agree, that you should never have to pay to apply for angel investment. Seems bizarre - If I were an investor and someone had just spent $250 to ask for more money ... Angel Investors try to make themselves as accessible as possible - go network! :)

Just my thoughts.
animals in the wild

No. Chimpanzees. Their intelligence and creativity are just below those of humans. They compete in today's society against humans in creative fields. http://images.google.com/images?q=bedtime+for+bonzo

What proportion of them alive today work in creative fields in today's society?

today in the future

chimps < humans humans < AI

chimps:humans::humans:AI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy
SMS loans are becoming a national problem for Estonia
looks cool, super slow though?

How are you gonna make money?
Here's some good information from an old thread (there's more links and information within the thread):

Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=410830

1. It is needed for industrial/electronics purposes.

2. It is internationally recognized as being valuable, regardless of culture. That is, cultures as diverse as India, China, England, Russia, pan-Arabic (i.e. non-Jews in the Middle East) have all viewed gold as having value, and that over at least 1000 years of recorded history each.

3. It does not corrode or rot the way paper money does. In Israel they recently found some Byzantine-era gold coins, aside from the obvious numismatic/collector value they still retain value for the gold itself.

4. Gold does not require a government to enforce its value. It's value is innate or intrinsic to the thing itself. As such if a government falls or decides to modify the value of a paper dollar (as Mexico, Argentina etc. have done in the past) then the value changes. Gold that you have in your pocket cannot have its value modified by a government order.
> You need to confirm your email address to play Taxi Mogul. Please proceed to the activation page.

ugh.
Run a taxi company? Thanks but no thanks -- that sounds far too much like work to me.

I'm sure this game must be more entertaining than it sounds, but you might do better if the website makes it more clear where the fun part of the game is.
While older books may be interesting, they are totally archaic. I would read things by communist revolutionaries and other practitioners of asymmetric warfare. There are going to be very few 'real' wars in the future, because the countries that could engage in them all have nuclear weapons, which basically precludes a full scale engagement of any kind. However, large countries still have belligerents that are too small or close to have to worry about being nuked, or are intermixed with 'friendly' populations, or the state is precluded by international pressure/bribery from engaging in anything overt (ex: Israel).
If I were saying so, I'd be using a universal quantifier as well.
holy crap well said
Artificial intelligence, facial recognition and bees
UToronto Distinguished Lectures (incl. talks by Alan Kay, Eric Brewer and others)
VPS hosting (at first, I like linode, slicehost, or vpsfarm), some kind of project management (bug tracking, Trac is fine for most things probably).

The main thing to pay for is Adwords, a small investment that only attempts to bottom feed can be worth far more than you pay for it.
You don't get what I mean. YouTube is representative of the general internet, and by extension, the general attitude of people.

You don't get what I mean. There is no general Internet. There is only the Internet. Youtube is no more indicative of the entire Internet than MetaFilter is. The places I frequent look much more like Metafilter, in fact.

CNN and Fox are not civil and friendly. They are heavily filtered - they don't allow their readers to say anything.

That's what I mean by civil. They're popular because they don't let external sources muck themselves up. And it's working for them.

And please stop patting your back that this community is so smart. It's just a bunch of HTML makers who want to become rich by joining Paul Grahams incubator. Slashdot has people with real indepth knowledge about topics commenting, here it's just a bunch of opinions from people without deep knowledge.

The one Slashdot article that stuck in my mind was the article where CmdrTaco called the iPod lame upon its announcement. I don't frequent the site because the articles that don't interest me, but the few times I've read the site it seems like the people are no smarter than people anywhere. The Slashdot people merely have more time to kill.

"Smart" isn't the right word, though the people here certainly are smart. "Mature." That's the word I want. A bunch of people with ideas who don't steamroller over each other.

The entire premise behind this community means that it's not smart - it's a bunch of college kids with ideas gathering here. There's a lot of talk, a lot of ideals and little real knowledge and experience.

Ideals are what matter. They always are. The people that move the world forward are very rarely the people who've spent 20 years doing generic work, it's the people who think they can do everything, then do. Hacker News has got some old and experienced people, and it helps temper the community out.

So stop patting yourself on the back - go to usenet, you'll see real smarts. The comments here are really not that smart.

Usenet? I've been there a few times. 99% of it is spam. What's more, it's ugly spam. I've never seen a Usenet interface I like. And I'm one of those people who thinks that a part of intelligence means flocking to something that feels good to use. Pretty sites attract people who care about pretty, and I care about pretty.

The problem is that when your measuring yard is reddit, even this place seems smart by comparison. What other sites do you visit that you use to measure this place by? Do you have an appropriate yardstick?

I measure everything against everything. I don't compare HN to Reddit: I don't care much for Reddit. I compare it to Tumblr, SomethingAwful, Metafilter, Slashdot. I compare it to the blogs I read. There's not much more I can compare it to.
Summary: most success has been in Latin America with some potential in the Middle East. Leaving Sugar development to the Open Source community. Striving for no-cost connectivity. Trying to build a library of 1 million digital books. OLPC 2.0 to distribute specs so others can assemble and distribute?