skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, and two further failure modes introduced by URL-shortening-middlemen that are hinted at but not explicitly mentioned by Joshu are:

* political censorship pressure on the URL-shortening service

* terms-of-service frame-ups, where a legitimate URL is reused in a spam sense to trigger its disablement

(I mentioned these in my case against URL shorteners, ["TinyURLs are evil URLs"|http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2006/02/tinyurls-are-evil-urls.ht...].)
Yeah.

"To continue reading this article, please register – it’s quick, free and without obligation..."

It's not quick compared to like, NOT registering, it's not free if you value your time, and you're obligated to register to read the article...
There are other constraints on the size of a program, though. All other things equal, larger programs tend to be harder to maintain, and proportionally buggier. This is completely independent of the cost of memory, the size of processor caches, etc. -- There's nothing like Moore's law affecting the human brain's ability to understand sprawling, tangled code bases.

Also: Bugs in device drivers tend to affect stability much more than in userland programs.
Technology choices for the majority of programmers are often not based on technical merit alone, but rather are based on historical influence (legacy systems, existing libraries, interoperability, et cetera,) managerial perceptions (nobody gets fired for picking Java, it is too hard to hire good Rubyists, the smalltalk vendors are unstable, et cetera) and cost.
37 Essential Viral Video Tips, Posts and Sites
Dark comment: Could this be the perfect opportunity for a genious hacker with enough "fuck you" money (yet doesn't care about their own reputation afterwards) to sneak behind enemy lines (whatever that means), work for nothing, and provide a totally unexpected mentor experience - possibly have them running around in circles and setting up a bunch of startups for failure?

"You're using PHP! That doesn't scale! You'll need Java. I'll show you how."

"You're using Java! Performance will grind to a halt! You'll need PHP. Lemme see that keyboard."

An infamous HackStar, indeed.
Paying for GitHub, AWS (Ec2, SimpleDB, S3), LightHouse, Vonage, DreamHost.
Admittedly, I havent read TC directly for a while. But I'm ok with the few that pass through the HN filter to me.
I use Slicehost, after looking at Linode's pages these features seem to be missing:

Bandwidth is pooled between all of your slices.

Money is pooled -- if you pay a certain amount, you get the "annual discount", but then you can use that for paying for whichever slices each month. And you can bring slices up and down whenever you want to, and pay a prorated amount.

There's a nice API so you can automate a lot of your activities.

On the other hand, Linode does seem to be a bit cheaper on RAM and a lot cheaper on bandwidth.
How do you measure an entry-level candidate salesperson otherwise though? In CS you can ask theory questions and ask them to program something for you. In sales you... ?

I agree it may be a lousy metric, but that doesn't mean it's not the best one they have.
Recruiters are often the first victims in a downturn. So I would say the effect would be even more pronounced. Besides consolidation among smaller firms and layoffs of in-house recruiters, many independent recruiters have moved away from recruiting temporarily and may or may not return when the climate changes. This happened in the early 2000s also. The net effect is a dramatic drop in duplicated job postings on the major job boards which, to an outsider or a Techcrunch writer, is interpreted as a dramatic slump in tech hiring. As usual, statistics are easy to misinterpret depending on how willing you are to look beneath the surface.
I remember getting 1 mb of memory for my 386. A whole megabyte of memory!

(Firefox is usig 110mb at the moment - I started it about five minutes ago.)
Thanks very much for the feedback.

What I fear most finally comes true -- not even HN users can immediately figure out how to use the site (which was purposely left out from the brief)...

How about some hints like you can get all news regarding social networking websites:

http://bit.ly/dc6ko

or compare DISQUS with Intense Debate:

http://bit.ly/3Qhr9s

Now I definitely need to rethink the usability issue.
GoDaddy, BrainTree Financial, Quickbooks
I wouldn't try.
As a user the most frustrating part isn't waiting for the page to load (due to the third party) but just not knowing where I'm going. URLs have gone from being cryptic to being titled seo/human friendly to cryptic again. I like knowing the title of an article before I click on it.
We hire people through internships. So do a lot of other companies in our field. Of course, we pay the interns. Because we're not, you know, assholes.
You still need to be smart to be a good salesperson, and what this article is claiming is that you can't really compare grades at one highschool or college to grades at others, but the SAT is one universal test given the same way across the country. Its biased and imperfect, but at least its comparing apples to apples.

That said, I'd also like to see research on SATs as a predictor of job performance, either way. You say they aren't...do you have a link to some research finding that?
There can be a huge barrier to entry for new stuff. A new editor is likely to be ignored unless it 1) has compelling new ideas, and 2) can already do most of what e.g. Emacs can. Likewise, any new operating system has the burden of porting over numerous major programs, protocols, etc. that people expect.

"I estimate that 90-95% of the work in Plan 9 was directly or indirectly to honor externally imposed standards." - Rob Pike, "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" (http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~ejones/writing/systemsresearch....)
Install multiple versions of IE on your PC
It's hard to tell when you are on the inside. :)
Nobody with "fuck you money" got it by caring that much about what companies in a third-tier seed fund are doing.
Poll: Proper valuation for Twitter?
What's the largest valuation at which you would still invest in Twitter and hope to get at least your money back?
less than $1M
$1M to $10M
$10M to $100M
$100M to $1B
over $1B+
A situation like the OP's would run in an infinite loop even in Scala. There's no compile-time error in Scala when you have a method call itself, which is what the OP is describing, and his variable also wasn't named the same as the method: "@name" vs "name".
But the iPhone is only available on O2, why is T-mobile even getting involved?

PS T-mobile let me use Fring on their handsets, no problemo.
If you really want to commit 15 hours a week to doing free work for an up-and-coming startup, don't do it this way. Make a list of the top 20 companies you're fascinated by, and contact them directly, one by one.

If you can't be bothered to "sell" free dev/tech work to the companies you're most interested in, you're not going to make it as an entrepreneur anyways.
You mean I'll finally get to meet Paul Graham?! No wait... that's not TechStars...
Robot Theorizes, Proves Own Scientific Discoveries
When I went to the Techstars for a Day thing last year I did notice that many of their teams were light on developers. Several had people who learned to program right there or one person who could program a little but all had at least one who knew what he was doing. This may be more of an unofficial way to fill out the teams a little as someone else noted it would be hard to do only 15 hours a week. Either you are in all the way or your not serious therefor likely not reliable except maybe as a programming mentor if you drop by once and awhile.
So someone with absolutely no experience can apply for and get a job with your company, work however many hours they want, and wouldn't be expected to produce work that you could charge for...and still get paid?
Absolutely not. I use them differently. I get things I know I want via RSS and get random, interesting links via Twitter. (And use twitter as a sms-to-web gateway and as an IM, but that's beside the point).

Twitter AND RSS have taken over more than 50% of my browsing habits, though.
Agreed. Their articles are a really great resource as well (and aren't Slicehost specific). They have a ton of step by step guides for OS setup, Apache, MySql, Postfix, etc...

http://articles.slicehost.com/
>political censorship pressure on the URL-shortening service

Couldn't this be mitigated simply by establishing credibility for a given service, in the sense in the sense of making it known to be hosted outside politically supressive jurisdictions or by parties resilient to political pressure? For example, I would trust a URL-shortening service hosted by The Pirate Bay or Wikileaks to be free of political censorship.
I recently cancelled my cable because internet video has acceptable quality, unmatched variety and isn't marginally more expensive than my existing internet bill.
One server per box is worth money to achieve. When you have a git server running on the same box as (say) your web server, you cannot reboot, upgrade, reinstall, power down, or power up one service without affecting the other. You can't switch server hostnames or IPs without potentially affecting your git users. You can't develop on an EC2 instance that you spin up and down as needed because git needs to be more reliable than that.

I guess it might be okay to run git on my mail server. Except I don't have a mail server: That's outsourced. (Way too much trouble to run for oneself.) All I run for myself is local machines (not about to serve from those -- poor uptime, firewalls are a pain) and web/database servers, and I don't want the constraint of even having to remember that git is running on one of them. I want a git setup that is out of sight, out of mind, and far away from my bumbling sysadmin (a.k.a. "me").

And we're haggling over the price of github, here. It's dirt cheap.
bonus points for raising these issues before Twitter brought them to the forefront.
and what if you live in a country that blocks that url-shortening service hosted by the pirate bay or wikileaks?
This is a bit surprise to me -- I thought all HN users would have Adblock on all the time :)

In fact, the AdSense is there just to align the user expectation from day one. Anyway, I can't agree more how annoying they can be and am going to turn them off now.

Thanks for your advice on the summary.
Both of those have gotten shut down in various locations at various times.
I'm surprised at how long your SAT, but more importantly, your GPA, affect getting a job.
You've gotta be kidding me. Being poor prevents you from having a high GPA?
Unemployment is the lagging indicator, not job postings.
Well, then you've got bigger problems than URL shortening. I don't mean to be flippant; if you're in that kind of country then maybe you can't even trust your normal DNS.
How do I find out about future HN events in NYC?
I don't read HN every day, so an email would be best.
Sure, shut down...but they've never published/made available politically censored content.
I used this http://decafbad.com/2009/01/twitter-friend-faves-opml/ to create an OPML file, and then edited it so it contained status feeds instead of favorites.

I just stumbled up on this too, which is probably a better idea: http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley/?p=408
I almost always use tinyurl for that reason since I can enter a descriptive name.
That is quite impressive. I wonder what will happen if you send a picture of a real dog or of an interstate sign or of, say, PG. I don't have an iPhone. Can someone try?
I agree with you 100%, and my reply nearly included that if one believes in free markets then one can't call it unethical. The only thing that gives me pause is that interns are often young and inexperienced and may not realize that their skills have value. While the burden of such education is on the interns (intern candidates, young 'uns, hackstars, whatever), it still seems morally questionable to me for companies to intentionally exploit that inexperience.
Yes, you don't have to pay first year franchise tax, but this doesn't make a big difference, unless you're planning to have a company for one year only. Some friends of mine took more then two year to get on revenue (not profit), but $800 is really something you're liable for whatever happens.
First, I am trying to envision the reactions of all the companies that live and die by internet access (myself included)...

Second, I am trying to envision Russia's, China's, et. al. response to the United States of America flaunting this ability...
Ask HN: How to predict 3-year revenue and growth for an early-stage "search" company?
Our startup is pre-funding, and still in the prototype phase. We have not deployed.
A potential investor has asked us---among other questions---for a 3-year revenue and growth forecast.
Obviously, this is educated guessing, but I would like to ballpark it by comparing to similar successful ventures.
Could anyone suggest points of comparison and other techniques for predicting 3-year revenue and growth?

To situate what we are doing: We are developing an information finding tool that complements search.
Every place on the internet that currently has a search box, could also have our tool in addition (not as a replacement).
Our tool has that sexiness factor that could lead to viral adoption.
Besides having a standalone site, we are also targetting enterprise, and writing an API and plugins for blogging+CMS platforms, Facebook, and iGoogle.
Tru2way is a crock of shit.

It is the re-branding of OCAP that was touted as the internet killer for a decade but never got deployed. I got sucked into wasting time about three years ago learning it.

Tru2way sucks because the MSOs' control all the apps that can be deployed. There is no room for 3rd party developers. You cannot have background processes. Development tools cost 10k per license. Did I mention I doubt it will ever be deployed?

All cable has going for it is the content but sites like Hulu give the content creators control over distribution and they would like nothing more than cutting out the middleman.
Some people also call this slave labor.
i don't think it is off-topic because "coder" is exactly the terminology the author used in the blog. I believe it reflects his general misunderstanding of programmers/developers/hackers
my point (and i think that of the person you originally replied to) was that if you have to go through a url-shortening proxy to get to a page that is not blocked, but the url-shortening site is, you will be blocked from accessing a lot of content simply because you don't know its real url.
Traditionally in sales you hire a ton of candidates, give them hefty performance goals right out of the gate, and then fire over 80% of them in the first month. Rinse and repeat until you have your organization staffed.

It's a brutal field.
If anyone asked for my SAT score I'd laugh in their face. I don't even remember my score, honestly.
If it's a "startup", then no: monetization should not be an afterthought.
If it's just a project (even if its a very involved project) that you'll benefit from in other ways, then maybe.

Right now, I'm (barely) working on a (project|potential startup) that I know that me and a few friends will have a ton of use for. I have a few ideas re: how to monetize it, but it's less of a concern for me right now. Right now, I'm just building a killer project for less than 100 people to use. If other people find it useful, awesome. If they don't, my goals will be reached with the project anyways.
what is its business model?
bah. I didn't take the SAT and I'm a PhD candidate at a major public CS research department. Yeah, not taking that has really impacted my life, let me tell you about it.
Silicon is obsolete, monolithic CPUs are obsolete, suppling high voltage AC to each machine is obsolete.

In engineering obsolete means "it works".
Anecdotal, but recently one of my old college roommates who I remember had a score of somewhere in the 1400-1500 range tried his hand at a sales job. I think he lasted 3 days before getting fired. Honestly, thinking back through my college best friends (the only group of friends whose SAT scores I ever knew) I think our sales ability would be in inverse order of SAT scores. The one that had the lowest scores currently does non-profit fundraising (meaning she regularly pulls in donors signing tens to hundreds of thousand dollar checks).
Ask HN: Berkeley or Urbana Champaign?
I want to do web entrepreneurship. I want to be a hacker. Unfortunately, I applied and got into the Honors business track for U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I also applied and got L&S for UC Berkeley. I'll be switching into computer science tracks ASAP, regardless of what school I go to, but a friend tells me it's easy to do at Berkeley and I'd lose 12k worth of scholarship if I switch at UIUC.

UIUC costs 17k because of my scholarships.
Berkeley costs 50k and 40k are in loans.

My parents earn less than 100k annually (and a sister in college). Should I take the loans and go to Berkeley or stick with UIUC?

Complication: I met a girl named Jessica Mah and am interested in working with her, and this dilemma was actually caused by her talking me into thinking Berkeley would be more conducive for toward my efforts than I originally guessed. Originally, I was going to say, oh heck, I'll go to the cheaper school. But now I'm seriously weighing the pros and cons.

Anyone have some insight? I know most of you here are from the valley, anyway. Jess says many valley people either went to Berkeley, Stanford, or both. Not to mention she says she'll hook me up with people I'll want to meet...? ;)
Maybe Alan feels comfortable with his position as an innovator-sans-entrepreneur, and is contributing greatly to the world at hand?

Don't get so stuck on evaluating ideas by their brand name (in this case, Smalltalk). Alan's ideas have influenced Java, Ruby, etc. considerably...
Well, how old are you? If you're in your 40's, that might make sense. If you're 22, not so much.
A few months ago, a guy from DePaul sent me an email and we got coffee. His "weekend" was during the normal work week, because of his shift job. He was looking for something to do during that off time. He had no work experience in our field. We picked him up. He's been excellent.

So your (somewhat strange) questions, broken down:

"Apply for and get a job" --- Check.

"Work however many hours they want" --- You need to make a commitment; you can't just come in Wednesday this week and Friday the next week. But if "however many hours you want" means "I'll give you days X, Y, and Z of every week", then, Check.

"Wouldn't be expected to produce work we could charge for" --- I have no idea what this even means. Who produces work for no reason at all? Of course we're going to want you to do real work.

"And still get paid" --- Check.
We use Dropbox, Wufoo, CO2Stats, and Etherpad (which will soon be paid). The only one we have to pay for is CO2Stats, because they have to buy power certificates, which cost them money. But we'd pay for all of them if we had to.

Www.ycombinator.com is a machine at Pair Networks, and News is at The Planet. We use EasyDNS for domains.

We used to use Highrise (we may actually still be paying for it) but we abandoned it because it wasn't flexible enough.
As another poster mentioned, sales is very performance oriented. Either you make your numbers, or you dont. This sounds like a bad way to hire, but actually it works very well and is fair.

Also, per your own example, they ask you about theory questions. This is, in some sense, a job-sample test. Many developers are asked to write code during an interview. That is a job-sample. Salespeople are often asked to sell something arbitrary. Job-samples are VERY valid predictors.
For Twitter (the service) I'd vote $100M to $1B.

For Twitter (the company) which could build and/or partner up with other services I'd vote $1B+. (my actual vote above)
Sorry, I put this in as a submitted question.

Could you add a media type categorization to the submit page? I'm on a work computer without sound. Would be great if I could pass over the video and podcast links and only go to the blog/news stories. Nothing fancy like a filter - maybe just some radio buttons on the submit page for text|video|sound| that would appear in the listing.
Thanks Omar. I think you make some great points. However, as much as google would like you to believe that AdWord buys are more successful than the top ten organic search results, that's just not the case. Organic search results have higher conversion rates than adword buys. Hands down. I'll give you the SpyFu inaccuracy, however, it's some insight into adword spending.
Also, although the post helps market tippingpoint, we're much more eager to spark a debate and engage in an active dialogue.
Thanks again for your insight.
That's ballsy. I like it.
(disclosure, I've received a lot of free help and advice from David Cohen and Brad Feld, two of the main TS backers)

I would have changed the way they presented this but the idea of opening up these sort of programs to the wider community is a good one. TechStars offers a _lot_ of benefits to its members, this is another door to getting involved.
If I am asked (other than, say, at a standard carbon copied HR job application form -- where I will leave these fields blank) for my SAT score or a GPA, that will be last question I'm asked by that company.
Thanks so much for your comment. I too hope they’re doing some real testing and tracking to make sure they’re seeing a big ROI. Too often I’ve seen agencies hand deliver reports to clients that are ’stretching’ at best. All the client cares about is that they’re performing ‘better than the benchmark.’ As long as that’s the case, they don’t dive much deeper.
It's entirely possible to garner every result on the first page of search results, if the content is REAL content of value it can be done.
Thanks for the comment. Really appreciate it.
The lesson learned was to not to avoid companies that aren't currently profitable. It was to avoid companies that could never be profitable-- e.g. because they were buying users. Facebook and Twitter aren't doing that.
MPAA President to be Thrown Out
Thanks for your comment. You don't need to buy the Caveman keyword... that's my point. What you need to do is convert people who are looking for caveman content at the height of it's popularity, and turn them into Geico loving insurance consumers. That IS the goal of the ad campaign, I would assume. I'd be surprised if their keyword campaign is THAT effective. If they don't buy the keyword, I'd imagine they see little to no drop in conversions.
Thanks again for the dialog.
Appreciate it. Ballsy is fun.
Both IQ and SAT are time constrained and prohibit the use of third party reference materials and other people. That's very different from work environment: you can stay after hours or come in earlier and most importantly you work with other people and with all sorts of reference materials available.
Bandwidth at Linode is also pooled for Linodes withing the same datacenter (of which they have 4). You can also bring up any number of Linodes and bring them down whenever you want. You will be charged for the full month but if you bring them down, they will give you credit for the unused portion of the month (rate is per day). Linode also has an API for their DNS service but I haven't really used it so I won't comment much on it. In short, Linode is a pretty good deal.
The dark secrets of Whopper Sacrifice
Currently in the GTA, but I'd never rule out a move out of the GTA in the future. It's a bit crowded by my taste, but then I moved from #50 to #227 by population density. Hopefully I don't end up moving from the most populated part of Canada to the least... I hear it gets mighty cold in the arctic circle.
Rhino?

I'm guessing; I have no numbers on how it compares to actual Java.