skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm reading TechCrunch regularly before entering the startup scene. Nowadays, I'm not reading it like before.

TechCrunch may provide misleading information for some. But when you're in a "startup" situation, you know will know what is right and what to believe in.

On other side, TechCrunch may mislead you, but they can be a good source of inspiration. They are talking about acquisitions, fundings, and successes. Why not use them as your inspiration? Strive hard, to achieve those.
The Tetris board game is Russian. The Game Boy game is Japanese.
I only read TC when their linkbait titles end up on the frontpage of HN.

Stopped following their feed, once I came to the same conclusion as the OP: being overly funded is (almost) the only way to go get featured on TC, these days. The times of roaming the edges of startup-land and posting about the nitty gritty startup struggles are long forgotten.
The HN code removes outliers.

(def update-avg (user)
(= (uvar user avg) (comment-score user))
(save-prof user))

; Ignore the most recent 5 comments since they may still be gaining votes.
; Also ignore the highest-scoring comment, since possibly a fluff outlier.

(def comment-score (user)
(aif (check (nthcdr 5 (comments user 50)) [len> _ 10])
(avg (cdr (sort > (map !score (rem !deleted it)))))
nil))
This tells me nothing of Wayfare. From the tagline, I assume that this service is some kind of gamification. Do you really want your target audience assuming much about your company?
Picking an EEC country is a good idea because (Other things aside from the tax...):-

Talent pool. Higher unemployment at the current time.

It's also part of the Euro so a good base (rather than the UK) for collecting payments from the Eurozone countries.

Native English speakers.

Easy for other European citizens to go work there (no visa issues).

Irish passport holders can enter the Green Card Lottery (you can't with just a UK passport) so it could make relocation to the US easier for some.
Did they control for drug (caffeine) consumption?
If you write quality comments, karma begets more karma because you'll sort higher on the page. For example, Patio11 usually writes helpful posts, and because of his obscene karma, he sorts automatically to the top of the page. Which then gets him more karma, etc etc.

But after you hit like 1000 karma...you just don't care anymore. At least, I've pretty much stopped looking at my karma score.
This man is a victim of corrupt authorities.
You top up during the month.
This was Fourier's big theorem, that every periodic, non-pathological function is "simply" the sum of phase-shifted sine waves of all necessary frequencies. You can remove the "periodic" if you allow infinitely many frequencies, and so on. The phase-shifting is taken care of by having a sine and a cosine at the same frequency, but (possibly) different amplitudes.

So start with a periodic wave and look at how much sin(x) is in it. Do this by integrating:

Integral from 0 to 2.pi of f(x)*sin(x) dx

That's a dot product of your function f(x) with the sine wave, and that tells you how much of the first frequency you need. Subtract off the result, and then go again with sin(2x). You find the residuals get less and less. More, for something nice like a square wave or triangular wave the coefficients you get form a predictable sequence.

Interesting note:

integral sin(k.x)*sin(m.x)

is 0 if k != m, and 1 otherwise, so the basis elements have dot-product 0, and hence are thought of as being at right angles. They also have "length" 1, since the dot-product with themselves is 1. So they are an ortho-normal basis.

So the question is: what functions can be reached by adding and subtracting multiples of sine (and cosine) functions of different frequencies? In Linear Algebra terms, what is the space of functions spanned by these basis functions?

That's harder, but it turns out to be "everything non-pathological".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_series#Hilbert_space_in...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space#Fourier_analysis

Edited for typos
JsFiddled version: http://jsfiddle.net/ter7G/
> they could have scored some major plus points on the day Public Accounts Committee in the UK

There's nothing like politicians calling businesses who are obeying the law "insulting" in a play to stir up outrage to attract new businesses to a country. Come here, and be publicly harangued.

Instead Dropbox seems to have scored major plus points with IDA Ireland.
Besides the conflict of interest, I find the fact that a significant portion of their articles are about themselves, or other tech journalists, extremely irritating. Like when a documentary is about the filmaker making the documentary instead of the subject matter.

I wish people weren't so obsessed with celebrity.
I agree, it's good to hear another human wasn't killed. Death is sad.

Though I'd rather not see his exploits on HN. I feel like I'm stuck reading this man's life-as-opera. "He's a criminal" "He's a smuggler" "He's an antivirus genius" "He's dead" "He's feeling better". What's next with this romance? Will we start hearing "He paints" "He owns llamas"?

So much of this man's activities in life aren't relevant to my own. Drama doesn't belong on HN's front page.
TL;DR content (of comments and most of all stories) is king.
The iPad's publishing poster boy "The Daily" to be shut down.
They are saying 'Spanish' before that, so it is unlikely.... They are also saying French.

I am Spaniard, and I have NEVER heard addressing the different languages spoken in the Iberian peninsula as "Iberian". The languages with official recognition are Spanish, Portuguese, Mirandese, Catalan, Valencian, Aranese, Galego and Euskera (Basque), plus English in Gibraltar, add a few more for unofficially recognised ones I think I am not missing any ;-). French is not an official language in Andorra (only Catalan is), although is quite used
The H on the end confuses people because it's usually not really a H, it's a modernisation of the séimhiú.

I can't find any decent articles on it, but basically it used to be represented by a dot over the letter it was affecting. Unfortunately I'm not good on the recent history of the language, but the change was made some time in the last 40 years (between my parents attending school and me attending school).

The reason we have so many vowels is to match broad vowels (A, O, and U) and slender vowels (I and E) across consonants. I'm fairly sure this was a change introduced in recent history too.
Multiple MySQL database Zero-day vulnerabilities published - Hacker News
The one you know best?

For me, that would probably be either PHP, JS, or Perl, depending on what functionality I needed.
Node.js Versus Apache2: Bare Bones Test
There's been quite a bit of analysis as to what's happening here, if anyone could do a breakdown (or provide good examples) it would be awesome for people like me who are amazed by the power of the maths involved here.
Total amount pledged: $550,189
...
Number of cameras sold: 2,346

In relation to the cameras "sold" (i.e., promised) to backers this figure seems much more down to earth. It comes out at about $235 per camera. Depending on how much the production will actually cost (I didn't see any estimates), this may even be quite tight.
You're right, I'm off by a few magnitudes. 29.7 exabytes if they use every square foot for servers JBOD. And that is with current disk tech.
Lately HN is full of lame remarks, unhelpfull criticisim and general arrogancy.
Xsyon, the sandbox MMORPG, now free to play, Kickstarter campaign ongoing
All I see in both of the two parent comments is:

[INSERT BASELESS SPECULATIVE CLAIMS HERE FOLLOWED BY LACK OF ANY REFERENCES WHATSOEVER]
My 1cent feedback.

So basically you built your own in house orm or alternative to orm using what you call repository objects . well done if it makes you win and makes your life easier.

Does it really matter whether you are using orm or repository objects provided you app is providing business value. Unfortunately, technology alone does not make an app win. So to my mind it doesn't matter whether you use a framework or not. It doesn't matter whether you use ORM or not. Just demonstrate business value to your would be customer.

I think a blog post focusing on the business value of your app will be better than any blog post on ORM bashing or rails bashing. How does anyone's use of ORM stop them from paying for your product. If it doesnt then don't alienate anyone from your customer base by trying to make what they are comfortable using to look bad. I think Stripe is using ruby but without any framework or orm but that is not the basis of their marketing communication.

If you can have a series of blog post on how to use the metrics you provide to make businesses look like consultant in the eyes of their customer, it might do you more good on the road to traction.
One may dismiss Gate's success as due to the resources of his parents. However, Microsoft was not his first foray into entrepreneurship. I suspect that bootstrapping was always the plan. Just as Apple always anticipated taking venture capital.

Jobs had the good fortune to be raised in Silicon Valley. Had he been in Topeka, there would not have been a viable market of hobbyists for Apple I kits. Then again, he wouldn't have known Wozniak who actually built the damn thing, either.

Luck played a factor in the fortunes of both men.

The funding of Gates and Jobs is a parable. The extended version includes the prodigal son's return.
I noticed after reading the repo that it doesn't support partials or streaming. Still a pretty nice effort, but I suspect for many lack of partial support is a big issue.
Intellectual Curiosity in Our Schools
I am completely unfamiliar with this situation. What has actually been going on with McAffee lately, and how does this situation tie into it? Is everybody sure that we're not getting all worked up about what will turn out to be a psychiatric diagnosis?
Cool idea, good job on executing so quickly (2 weeks!).

Small note: this is totally fine for the MVP you have, but I found sorting items alphabetically to be annoying. Why would I want to see things that happen to start with letters nearer the beginning of the alphabet first? As you iterate, might be something to think about. Maybe price point or popularity would be more helpful ways to organize the stuff.
But it looks like I've got better at writing comments people vote up. Or perhaps the community has just grown and the number of upvotes has gone up for a well received comment.

Or people have noticed that you tend to write comments that are either well-designed, or that others widely agree with -- and because you've developed that brand, some people now upvote you because they recognize your name instead of anything to do with your posts.

Basically, people get used to seeing your name as one of the top comments, and upvote you more often, even if they believe your comment to be equal to others.
The Next Workplace? Behind The Wheel
I remember articles asking for this in the 80's. Shame no one listened. Guess we were all to busy programming to worry much about what the IDE (if there was one) could be doing. Here is an interesting example http://www.sorting-algorithms.com/ I've always resented as a code documentarian that I got no help from the one thing that knew what the hell was going on---the compiler! Sigh...
There are more people just in London than in all of Ireland. And London sucks in the ambitious and talented from the rest of the UK and to a lesser extent Ireland. It's also pretty accessible and attractive to the rest of the EU and not that hard to move to for most Commonwealth citizens.

And two of the world's top ten universities are in commuting distance. At a guess London's student population is larger than Ireland's too, and besides the aforementioned Oxford and Cambridge, London has two other top 100 universities, King's and Imperial.

The talent pool they'll be hiring from will probably be the EU anyway.
Is developing open source software a viable route for a startup?
The startup where I work is developing enterprise type software. The software itself is great, and have been selling ok in our home marked (Scandinavia). But now we want to venture out in the wider world. Unfortunately we are having a hard time reaching out to potential customers that are located far away.

We feel that we basically are left with two choices:

* Hire more sale and marketing staff to get the sale pipeline going. This is a known and safe route, but may require more VC.

* Make our software open source and hope that it spreads in the wild.

Does it make sense to follow the open source route for a startup? Can it somehow come back to haunt us (for example making it harder to get VC founding in the further, because we got no ipr)?
Yes, both sides are bad.

But only one of these can lock you up in jail for whatever reason they want whether or not you're guilty. Besides, if you want to avoid having your data collected and possibly sold without you conscent just stop googleling your thoughts.

Now, the real question. How to avoid governments taking over our rights?
If you want to become the next evil overlord, it's quite simple really. Whitelist known traffic.
More than that. [EDIT: When I wrote this, jgrahamc's comment said only "IIRC the HN algorithm removes outliers". Since then he's added much more. But I don't believe in deleting comments merely because edits to their parents have made them less valuable.] The "average" in the HN profile is something along the following lines: take the 6th to 25th most recent comments, throw away the one with most points, and take the average of the others. So it ignores old comments, it ignores very recent comments, and it ignores some kinds of outlier. Oh, and it's only actually recalculated every few days.

Personally I don't much like this: average karma is a fairly good proxy for what I want to be optimizing in my HN participation, but the way HN reports it more or less pessimizes it as a feedback tool for me. (I'm a fairly infrequent and "bursty" commenter; HN's reporting of average karma isn't up-to-date enough to tell me what HN thinks of what I've been doing recently, nor is it long-term enough to tell me what HN thinks of me overall.)

The right answer, of course, is not to care much about karma. This is made easier by the fact that the correlation between HN karma and my own judgement of comment quality is weak, and I'm arrogant enough to think the latter is more accurate.
Is there a special reason why you're asking this?
I do not see any use of the user's karma in the sorting algorithm for comments in the published HN code.
I just feel that sometimes on HN people forget this.
Thanks, glad you seem to like it.

Yeh we'll definitely sort differently in the future. We'll also allow users to drag tiles around and arrange their list in anyway they want..
Thanks, yeah it's been hard so far but hopefully we struck a magic balance between trading and selling.

NOTE: the following is a rant because I love giving motivational speeches

BOX'NGO to me is not a startup or a business but a real solution to my own problems. I have 2 semesters' worth of textbooks just laying around and my girlfriend loves rubbing in my face how she sold her old ones to buy new ones.

I think about selling mine and I just hate the stress of it all. The process, the complications, finding the people, etc. in fact I've hated online selling but always wanted online selling. This is a solution to my own problems.

We might fail. The numbers hate us. But to me, the coder, my girlfriend the business idea person, and my other partner the people guy, this experience whether it be 2 weeks, 2 years, or the rest of our lives this is going to be a heck of an adventure.
I think Paul Krugman's belief in Keynesian economics will "set America on a path of inexorable decline" quicker than Rubio's lack of conviction on the age of the planet.
MIT Startup TrueLens Reveals Google VC Round, New Social Marketing Tech
I've never understood this argument in the context of AGW. It sounds like saying, "What if we clean up the air and breathe easier for no good reason?"
Thanks for the typo. Ill fix it when I get home tonight. Yeah, all the items listed are by my girlfriend who is an avid etsy seller.
Feeling like a fraud while doing startups
Exactly what were trying to do
I've been here for a little while now and there are many usernames that I know, but that never influence my upvotes, it might influence how much trust I put into what is said, but not my upvotes.
Why I'm No Metrosexual
The design came as an afterthought. Whenever I see my work I think it sucks so thanks for the compliments !
Yes - but ONLY after they got slammed in the media about their surge pricing, and were told they may be subject to fines for price gouging.

"They're a young, inexperienced company"

True. But they're also challenging regulations saying they shouldn't have to play by the same rules as everybody else. Here they got burned, and they have no-body to blame but themselves.
I think that's the challenge of good UI - being visually informative without overloading the user.

Subtlety is a difficult thing to achieve in any field. Silence, however, is anything but subtle.
Personal Finance App Dev Competition
How is that a bad question. Yes he could have looked it up but it wouldn't have hurt to have "Minecraft creator Notch trying jsFiddle" as the title, would it?
I'd say its closer to finding out the single guy is in a gang and since he spends time with crazy people you don't want him. But I guess your point is at least a bit valid. That being said, it seems only a few states have a problem with using married status in hiring.
Mercury, Saturn and Venus aligned on Dec 3, 2012 with the Pyramids at Giza
Boston, MA Full-time, On-site Developer
Ruby, Python, Java or front-end web development
-Job Details: http://ripariandata.com/jobs/#section1
-Riparian Data is a Boston-based startup spun out of SoftArtisans, a 15 year-old software company. Our mission: use big data technologies to make enterprise software smarter, faster, and friendlier. Our recipe for success: supremely talented employees, lean development, boundless pluck, and a close-knit, collaborative environment.
Thanks for your post, appreciate it. One follow up question if you don't mind? If Ireland ditched its "debts" and left the EU, in addition to the negative credit rating impact, wouldn't it significantly lessen US companies' interest in investing and hiring in Ireland? My impression was that EU membership was one of the primary drivers of this phenomenon, in addition to the tax situation and great workforce.
What's most interesting to me about it is that the convergence occurs from both sides. Both autocracies and democracies converge toward an oligarchy. Democracies devolve because there are a lot of people who don't care enough about most issues, which means there are "cheap votes" that are extremely easy to sway. Access to cheap votes (control of the press, political party leadership) is not democratically distributed, but the opposite. On the other hand, even the most vicious autocrats need lieutenants who eventually learn how to take advantage of them. Either way, you get to something that looks like the "square root of N".

TechCrunch is powerful because it has a nut-hold on the cheap votes. The same goes with the prominent VCs who lead the herd.

The best you can do, often, is to create genuine competition among the oligarchs. Then there is a real market for talent, which often comes from the common people (the demos) and this means that the oligarchs can't treat them too badly, because pissing on the people is a sure way not to be able to recruit talent when you go to war against other oligarchs.

That's one thing I dislike about VC-istan. Rather than competing with each other, the VCs talk to each other about who's hot, who's not, and what kind of terms to offer. So you get vertical competition (class warfare) instead of the horizontal kind.
Instant Motivation
The study doesn't seem to be claiming that videogames have an exclusively bad influence on sleep, merely that they have an influence on sleep. Where's the crock?
Are you certain that a user's karma factors into comment sorting? It's clear that more recent comments will be sorted to the top (temporarily), but I definitely haven't gotten the impression that existing karma scores affect anything. I don't know the factors of the real algorithm.

Edit: This could be related (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), comments are allowed some time at the top before they "mature."

(let mature (table)
(def delayed (i)
(and (no (mature i!id))
(acomment i)
(or (< (item-age i) (min max-delay* (uvar i!by delay)))
(do (set (mature i!id))
nil)))))
HN discussion of a version of this essay originally published on Wired.com from 7 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4831842
Out of interest, why do you go to Perl instead of Ruby?
Here's a relevant paper called Why Johnny Can't Encrypt[1], which does an excellent job of defining understanding and usability problems with encryption. It's certainly dated, but I find that its main points are still very true today.

[1] http://www.gaudior.net/alma/johnny.pdf
"Though I'd rather not see his exploits on HN." <--- this

I have no idea whether he really is, but all I read about this situation makes McAfee seem more and more like a crackpot. I can't say I've cared about his company's products for a long time and the man doing a Richard Kimble while nothing has been proven either way is just meh.
The History Of Lean Startup
Those were the days when the news was about the startup itself, not the financial value of it. We are living in a time where companies are valued by their annual turnovers instead of profits. So, totally agree to what he says, don't read TechCrunch. Focus on your startup, the value you provide and the profit you make.
Learn Something New Everyday by Email
The 2012 Perl Advent Calendar
Hit the nail on the head...
> Comparison is not valid, since I'm considering many new projects.

If C++ had never been considered for new projects, it would have been in sharp decline, which it is not. What I said was that most of the growth has been elsewhere, like in web where there is hardly any C++, and mobile apps, where there is relatively little C++ (some on iOS, but Objective C dominates there).

My main point was that as long as the whole industry is in growth, you may not notice that the world has moved on, at least not if you measure the health of X by the "still new projects in X".
Note that he's referring to Norman's use of the word "affordance," more correctly referred to as "perceived affordance." Both are important concepts in design.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
Creating 3D Brain Tissues in a Lab Dish
The Art of Being Still
Customizations and creation of sites from templates - MS SharePoint w/ .Net
TANSTAAFL.

The next Microsoft is very unlikely to be a YC company because YC purchases meaningful equity upfront and its template is built to serve the needs of venture capital, e.g. demo days and more recently, convertible notes.

There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with removing the beer goggles and acknowledging it, either.
thanks. any idea why? more money? visibility?
That's a lot of buildup just to say you feel the interface to be unintuitive.

We know how to interact with different items because of experience and common signals -- not all door handles are alike, but different interpretations of the 2 major types (knob and lever) are similar enough to visually signal to us their probable use-case (opening a portal in the wall).

Similarly, I could go on about how the "stop, wait, go lights" at the top of windows in OSX are counterintuitive because they are in the same location as their Windows counterpart, but have different functions. It's not intuitive because the same visual signals provide different outcomes.
I agree, i would be very interested to see the effect of hiding usernames (an ID that lasted only for the thread), I bet it would distribute points significantly differently.

There is also the timing aspect however; habitual commenter are more likely to be in early to a thread.