skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
physics is a pretty common major to lead to internet/tech startups, I know quite a few guys that made that transition.
From what I understand, this has to be in the userland threading library, unless you're a Windows developer. Wouldn't this functionality be provided by glibc (i.e. pthread_mutex_lock), in Linux? It's not reasonable to expect them to touch that library, whether it is glibc or the Solaris counterpart.

So correct me if I'm wrong but then the solution would be to either hack their own version of mutex_lock or change the call. Actually, both involve changing the call since you'd have to call your new in-house mutex_lock.

That is really not reasonable either. I would expect that they'd have to do it anyway, since MySQL is that mission critical, but the Proper solution following that is to make MySQL dependent on a version of glibc that has a mutex_lock that is patched against the damned Opteron, and issue an immediate patch release.
What do you think is wrong with technical puzzles?
I didn't know that. I just figured selling a CD or DVD with the OS on it, in addition to their own computers, would only make them more money. How would this not be the case?
ARM is so small Intel could license ARM's IP and build an ARM core inside an Atom processor, sacrificing a tiny little bit of the cache memory. If the ARM core could use some logic on the Atom side, the sacrifice would be even smaller.
Why not just use nginx for everything, like http://www.rkblog.rk.edu.pl/w/p/hosting-django-under-nginx-s... ?
It isn't as easy as encapsulating text in HTML. How would you deal with SMS? etc, etc.
The MySQL bug report is for x64 Linux. OpenSolaris is used as an example of where AMD's bug has been detected and worked around.
Only 49 companies went public last year, the fewest since 1992, depriving venture firms of the source of 45 percent of revenue and 90 percent of profits, based on data from 2007.

Japanese funds, which together manage 1.04 trillion yen ($10.6 billion), get more than twice as much revenue from IPOs as U.S. and European firms, according to Venture Enterprise.

From 5 minutes googling the firms mentioned as the largest Japanese VC funds they appear to be more along the lines of exchange traded funds, or at leat they appear to be actual companies themsleves that are traded on a stock exchange, not something I think you can do in the US (SEC rules etc., must have mucho money to be an accredited investor) This means they can't go "Right, so we'll sit on our money for two years then" like a consistently profitable, but not Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins level fund could in the US. They're vulnerable to the stupidities of the quarterly results driven market, and could theoretically be bought up for market cap and the individual components sold off at a profit[1].

This screams money to be made to me. Not by me, unfortunately, but if someone had fluent Japanese and English and was enough of a hacker to do a proper appraisal on some of these companies could get together with someone with VC experience, IPO and M&A experience they could do an analysis on portfolio companies and make offers.

Summary: With a Japanese-English bilingual team, Techs capable of doing technical due diligence, and finance people with domain expertise, assets could be bought for very good value.

[1] I have no idea if this is likely to happen to any of these companies or not. It's mainly illustrative. Also, sometimes having a market cap lower than book value is sometimes correct. GM has been in that situation since the 70s.
Some good ones that I would check out are 1.) The Econometrics of Financial Markets (Campbell, Lo, MacKinlay) and 2.) Time Series Analysis (Hamilton). Note that I would check these out from a library before buying them as they are pretty advanced.

That said, it really depends on what types of assets you are looking to trade. At the risk of stating the obvious if you are doing any type of derivatives, you'll need pricers and data for those.

As a start, look for what is the easiest way to obtain a near complete data set and go from there. Good luck!
How do you compete with a site which doesn't aspire to be anything other than what it already is... which is precisely why it's growing.

As soon as you try, you've already failed. :)
Perhaps we can stop endlessly posting everyone's post on someone else's post on URL shorteners and figure out something to do about it. ;)

One objection, though: "Over the past few years SEO efforts lent to longer and more descriptive canonical URLs for content pages. During this time URL shorteners such as tinyurl.com and others came in to help undo that trend and make URLs fit into limited 140 character situations for sites like twitter.com or SMS messages."

Back in the real world, there are plenty of links like, oh, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7984762.stm that tell me very little at all about the link I'm going to follow. Mm, BBC news...involving Europe. There can't be much of that, can there?
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.

Also from the guidelines :<}
Add objective-c to the list, of course.
We once purchased estimated telecom subscriber data for many regions, then when we started to analyze it (growth rates, variances, etc) it turned out that the data was not as granular as expected - for example, growth rates were clearly estimated for several regions at once (i. e. all regions in the same macroregion had the same growth rate)

So make sure you're buying real data, not researcher's assumptions which you can assume yourself.
I believe he's talking about Octopart. They were doing well the last time I checked.
Came here to say this.

When I first landed, I thought the buttons on the right were something like what digg has, then I thought that they were the dates of some blog posts. I finally realized that they were points like digg has (I think?).

An about section would be a good idea too. Is this place for short stories? Novels? Comics? What?

Also, the meat of the page seems to be too...centered? For some reason my eyeballs like things to be on the left side of a page and not in the center.

Just my 0.02
You are absolutely right, and I apologize I didn't clarify. When you ask for second degree references -- always ask your candidate for permission before you contact them. In fact, when you ask the first degree references for additional references, you should make it clear you will get permission from the candidates.

First degree references usually have nothing but good things to say about the candidate, but you will get a much much more accurate picture from talking to someone who isn't on your candidate's top list.
A visit to id software, 1993
Just put those on different servers.
Yeah, ARM/Linux servers could only capture half the server market. I guess it's not worth trying.

A bigger obstacle for ARM servers would be the lack of 64-bit and the 4-core limit.
Maybe. But as a paying MLB.tv customer, the Silverlight implementation was TERRIBLE. Despite having all year to make improvements, the thing never worked even remotely correctly. I scolded myself as I signed up this year, but there really aren't any other options. To my surprise, I started up the first game today (go Tribe), and couldn't believe how much the player improved. Judging by how many more (functioning) features and polish are in the Flash player than were in the Silverlight player, I suspect it wasn't just market penetration.
This is a straw-man argument. MemcacheQ is a straightforward mash-up of two very stable software stacks.. memcached and BerkeleyDB. The lines of code to accomplish it are trivial. So what.
Nothing, I just think it's more practical to ask the candidate to solve a problem you are currently facing, rather than trying to solve an arbitrary puzzle. You can also gauge how well the candidate would work in your team when you are bouncing solutions/ideas off each other on a real problem you are facing. It's just a personal preference.
I'm rather surprised they don't support Gears' built-in Wifi geolocation support.

But yes, right now it's incredibly hit or miss. I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Rochester, NY and it pegged my location as San Jose.
BOOKmarking this for sure. Puns aside, this is a "20 best" list but doesn't necessarily say WHAT makes them best. Is it because they've all been fairly recently updated? Anyone want to suggest their favorites too? I'm ready to read ...
We're all geeks (and most of us are also programmers and webdevs) here.

Howabout a technical description of whats going on instead of a canned response?
The auctomatic guys had studied PPE and Law I think. It wasn't till at or after YC that they merged with a hacker. Or maybe I get the details wrong...
I'm just looking to create the system and then simulate running it. Have you had any expereince in doing this type of thing?
Michael Dell looks lonely.
the set of talented techies != the set of website designers
If some of us using an older browser is going to break stuff serverside then I think you've probably got some major issues to work through.

Howabout a "No, thanks. I'll risk it. LEMME IN!" button?
Over the past 6 months I was working on my startup with a private equity investor. One of my consistent responsibilities was gathering market and industry data. Even though we could afford it, it was something we never paid for. My mentor/boss was always of the opinion that it all existed for free, and it was just a matter of finding it yourself. That said, market research is beyond valuable, but nothing is more important than customer development.
There sure isn't. But that isn't this thread.
Before the web, the AP provided a valuable service for newspapers. They provided national/international articles to newspapers who might otherwise be unable to provide national/international news, due to the expense of having reporters in every major city in the US/world.

Post web: what value do they provide in selling articles for publication (on the web, specifically)? It's just as easy (if not easier) to just link to an AP article (say, on the AP site itself) and not pay (that is, if a web-based newspaper run by a traditional print newspaper company could grasp that it's okay to lead people off their site) the AP subscription fee? The AP model now falls apart.
or (3) everyone making source available? Could a more heterogeneous processor market drive people towards open source purely from the practical aspect of being able to built the right version to run on their kit?
I've always seen YC as a place that's not based on rigid requirements. There may be a trend, but what I've learned is that history does not always dictate what the next best thing will be based on. Just because he's not a hacker doesn't immediately give him a disadvantage.

YC is also a place to get feedback, constructive or just plain encouraging. Negative comments about someone's profile is pretty bad in YC, let alone in common decency.

What you read on the internet is never a good indication of who someone really is.

Good luck to all the applicants!
Want to be Rich? Then Educate Yourself. Why? Here’s why
Please: it 'raises' the question.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=538942

Maybe just in this one lonely forum we can recover and preserve the meaning of the phrase. To beg the question is to make an argument that has a circular dependency.
Ah, that would be helpful.
Adobe has more at stake in seeing Flash succeed than MS does in seeing Silverlight succeed. This may be reflected by the amount of Adobe support and development committed to the Flash platform. I'm sure the Silverlight team is way smaller.
maybe cell phone carriers could enter the 2009 and offer people linking in texts. How hard could it be
http://www.economist.com/ and http://seedmagazine.com/ have great reputations... at least in my book. They have a very high ratio of signal to noise, in my opinion. I often enjoy http://www.physorg.com/, though it's frequently a little over my head... at the same time, I appreciate that they don't pull the punches, so to speak.
http://jobs.plasis.co.uk aggregates about 10 freelance job site, and is always good for finding work.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=447529
All the best to everyone who applied, lets just hope we see some amazing new products grow from whoever is selected.
I wouldn't. I like HN, but any random link could be one of a thousand topics I don't care about.
The Best Free Linux Book around (and which didn't make the list) is Linux® Quick Fix Notebook find it @ http://www.phptr.com/content/images/0131861506/downloads/Har...

And don't let the Quick Fix bit fool you! It's a pity that the Bruce Perens series seems discontinued
That headline is mind-bogglingly stupid. Cheap, powerful chips as a refutation of Moore's law? Buh-what?

Of course, it starts off by an entirely-fabricated misquote of Moore's law. Wikipedia's article strikes me as pretty good and there are a number of reasonably good ways of looking at it, including component density over time, or price-per-transistor. Note that neither "raw performance per CPU" nor "MHz" show up in any formulation; nothing in Moore's law says whether you need to take your X nanometer process and make a hundred Opterons or a thousand ARMs per silicon wafer.
A web service to unshorten short URLs, in modern Perl
Pex Tubing 
GTGlobe Industries is a manufacturer of PEX tubing, manifolds, and fittings for potable water plumbing and radiant floor heating systems.
I love how the original article is rhetorically asking if he's building a Digg killer, but it's been changed to Hacker News for the purpose of posting it here.
I posted this so that people can see what Perl applications actually look like these days. A lot of folks here haven't looked at Perl since 1995, and assume it's the same now as it was then. It's not :)
I think you're right, Major. But those two had founded and worked on an eBay clone for students prior to that.
The funny thing is that we're not using the standard approaches to recommendations, though in an introduction to how the systems work in general, it seemed best to take the simplest explanation. Part II has something on graph-based approaches, but in general, the class of algorithms we're using tends to, at least in my opinion, produce better results in a couple orders of magnitude less time. I loved Greg's post here:

http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/22925-what-is-a-good-rec...

It's a valid question to ask, "Will these algorithms really suss out my personal taste?" And I think the answer is, a lot of the time, they'll get close enough to be interesting.

When we started Directed Edge, one of the tipping point moments was seeing how bad some of the related films shown in IMDB for my favorite film were. It was a real watershed moment this week when I was running our algorithm against the Netflix dataset after adding 15 of my own ratings to the system and my two favorite films (which I had not rated) came out at #1 and #5, respectively, and at that, with 300x less computation time than a standard item-to-item recommender requires. (We've got implementations of a lot of standard algorithms that we use for benchmarking our own.)
(Simple, Applied) Ternary Search Tree in Python
Yep this was Kulveer and Harjeet Taggar from Auctomatic, as far as I know they only met up with their hackers (Patrick and John Collison) once at Y Combinator. And Auctomatic was an extremely successful investment, I doubt we've seen the last of those guys.
Is there anything -- besides looking badass -- that carriers do that couldn't be done by a swarm of submarines or stealthed high-speed catamarans equipped with cruise missiles, SAM, and drones?
so we've gone from changing twitter messages to changing SMS :)
Fox Reality looking for dates from internet nerds for Cindy Margolis
I'm surprised at how many "experts" STILL equate technology with community...just tells me how many still don't "get it".

Spot on. The value here is in the members, the ycomb founders, the community, the discussion, and the moderation of new people to enforce culture.

Just comparing this place to techcrunch comments yields dramatic differences.
Both are GREAT schools and consider yourself lucky to have a choice. I did my masters at CMU (and have lived in Pittsburgh for 4 years) but for the past 8+ years have been in the bay area.

The cost of living is very very cheap in Pitt, no doubt.
Personally, I like having four different seasons - so weather was not a big deal for me. If you want consistent weather and clear blue skies, palo alto, it is. YMMV.

In CMU, you are very close to a whole lot of other big cities and universities - so travelling is lot easier.

So all that said, now to the important part: the important decision will be based on what your interests are.
CMU is very strong in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence
fields of study. Similarly, Stanford has its big specialties as well. So if you already know that you might major in Computer Science, try looking at the profiles and research interests of the computer science faculty at each school. Give yourself as much flexibility as possible here, because what you think/know now will be lot different in 2 years, 4 years and 6 years from now.

If you are entrepreneurial and you want to do a start up, then just close the circuit and take the shortest path - the bay area.

Or if you still want to do that, but take the road less taken, come here via CMU.

In anycase, read Robert Frost's "Road less travelled" poem. :)

Good luck.
It would be nice if all the TechCrunch trolls could go back to TechCrunch.
Getting merchants to sign up should be really easy. But, how do you get them to pull the plug on Visa/MC? They'd have to be sure that they wouldn't lose too much revenue, and that would require a significant portion of the card-holding population to have a revolution card. And, you'd have to deal with corporations that only have one of Visa/MC/AmEx for corp purchases.

I suppose merchants could feature Revolution prominently to increase its use, but they can't make it too hard to use other cards or they'll lose out. And, given my 1%-2% bribe for using my Visa/MC, why wouldn't I look for the little button down in the corner?

Discover (Sears) was able to introduce a new card, but they too the opposite route -- they bribed consumers to use it. So, even though it has basically the same fees as the others (IIRC), consumers could see an effectively lower price through its use.
> it would be practically impossible to sell custom collections of printed articles.

Well it might not be the safest undertaking and certainly the product could not be sold in corner bookstores but I can imagine such a business in today's world. To be sure, we're talking about an app that lets customers print "protected" works sans owner permission and compensation. Technologically there is precedent for this sort of racket; a lot of very profitable web businesses sell digital content they don't legally own. These startups are cheap to launch and thanks to the wonders of abstraction and obfuscation the thieving operators cloak themselves in relative obscurity. Add a dash of print-on-demand, update the legal contract to ensure absolution if questioned and what you've got is the world's cheapest print store for copyrighted content. It's just Kinko's in the cloud.

I think your idea of shipping documents to customers for free needs more explanation. The cost to deliver analog archives to physical addresses is huge and if you open up the order floodgates do you really think ad revenue would support the print and delivery costs? How would you deal with, for example, all the pranksters? Maybe if you defined extremely tight parameters on customer requests you could make it solvent but I would challenge you to define a single use case. If you can paint that legal, lucrative story maybe you've got an interesting business idea.
Title should be Why people don't install firefox after they've downloaded it.

I was interested in this but 300 people is a small sample in the computer world and I was hoping for a write up on why people are sticking with IE and such after knowing about firefox.
Still, I wonder if seeming easy to quit is just a trick that coffee plays on us. At least for me it works: since I now think that quitting is easy, I don't quit, because I am so sure I could easily quit any day. Without seeming easy to quit, coffee might not be as widespread as it is.

I have read somewhere that among "addiction experts", having successfully quit means being clean for 6 months. I only went 1 month max so far...
yeah I love the posterous-way of publishing things. Maybe pinging (technorati/twingly) is the next step?
Clearly, you havent heard about web 4.0 -- with extra rounded buttons, and fonts starting at 48px. We're talking about community driven concepts here, that synergizes our enterprise collaboration dynamics, and causes a dramatic paradigm shift of long tail immersion.

All kidding aside, I'm totally with you.

I'm also amused when people talk about 'Mobile Web'. There is no such thing.
Here's my personal advice. While there are plenty of companies hiring strategies to look at to get ideas on how to accomplish getting the "best person" I would first take a step back and evaluate on what's important to you and your team and then filter based off that - be creative if you have to in order to get what you want.

While Frocer touched upon a majority of what we did, I'll throw in my interviewing experiences. We are partly in the video game industry so my #1 requirement was the applicant MUST have video game playing experience (of the 'core' variety) and the more the better. I just couldn't see anyone who only played Wii Sports or Bejeweled on the iPhone could comprehend what we do and therefore unable to help the team in any sort of discussion beyond the technical. So that was what was most important to me and that was what I filtered on and not surprisingly, I had a good feeling immediately after each interview on whether or not I wanted them.

My interview consisted of no stupid puzzles or whatever cause it was of no use to me. Show me you are technically proficient (of which a lot were, otherwise why waste time applying for the job) and then show me you understand video games by carrying an intelligent conversation with me about let's say your favorite xbox 360 game, which smash bros was the best, or why world of warcraft is both the greatest and worst game ever, etc. You'd be surprised on how many people couldn't do that.

Also I'm seconding the reference/portfolio thing. The more you can find about their past, the better the idea you will have about their future.
It would seem that if the shortened URL is known as a shortened URL, then it's just a mask for the primary URL.

In terms of the link structure of the net, it would seem that crawlers just need to know that tinyurl is a mask.

The bigger problem is the iframe for Digg and Facebook. The NYTimes used to actually bust out of that stuff when we created it back in our previous startup so that you couldn't run an ad alongside the publisher.
That answer would be a bit more useful if it actually included examples, particularly if there's "tons".
Hey, believe me I know its not that easy! I'm no real estate guy but I know you can't repay the loan in 3-4 years. The comment I replied to was deleted, but I was addressing it, which said 'breaking even in 3-4 years is not a good investment,' by saying 'no, paying for the property in 3-4 years would be GREAT.'

I know its not possible :)
It's more likely to drive people to use a JITting virtual machine.
Since these guys really don't know anything about the web, you could throw up a simple HTML template and charge them 5K...on a freelancer site that same job would go for $200
A nail in silverlight's coffin.
PG is a well respected persona, MA is not.

The day I see PG mudslinging is the day I declare HN dead.