skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ever heard of Lisp Flavored Erlang? Ever heard of the Common Lisp Object System (inspired originally by Smalltalk)? Ever heard of Clojure (Haskell inspired STM, and lazy data structures)? ever heard of GOAL (Lisp assembly)? etc., etc. etc., etc., etc.
I am going to reserve judgement on this for now, but I am really going to be surprised if this works out well for the TS companies. The old adage, "you get what you pay for" is especially true with developers/UI designers who are interested in startups. Without some sort of compensation, whether it be cash money or equity, I wonder if you are going to get the "right" kind of interest.

You have to ask yourself, who is their target talent here?

The real talented AND motivated developers/designers in Boulder and probably Boston (AKA "The Gurus"), who have an affinity for startups and TechStars probably applied to the program themselves and didn't get in. Either way, they know the value of their time and are hard at work on their own startups.

The other talented and motivated people are probably consultants or working full time at a company. Despite this being a poor economy, I've found that there is no shortage of work for the "right" people.

And of course, there are a fair share of those that fit a combination of the above.

This leaves us with the last two groups. The people that are either talented and unmotivated, or lack talent, but have the motivation. My suspicion is that you will get people volunteering to the HackStars program who are TechStars fanboys at best. They like the idea of doing a startup, or being a part of the "startup culture" but in truth may not want to put in the work, or worse, are benched because no one wants to work with them.

I may be totally wrong. Either way, I don't fault the TechStars team for test driving an idea like this. But if I were a founder who made it in to the program, I would be very skeptical of the value of the volunteers.
Image Search Preview Page Overhaul
EngineYard (hosting)

Fogbugz (bug tracking)

Github (scm... paying but included with EY)

NewRelic (perf monitoring... paying but included with EY)

Protx (payment gateway. Awful customer service, don't recommend them)

Easyspeedy (test server that we should get rid of, really)
"Most programmers only know how to program in obsolete ways"
-- This actually illustrates for me the problem of "progress" in programming approaches. Any "new and better way" that can't be grasped quickly and easily by a good fraction of programmer isn't really "better". The path to new systems flows along the line of least resistance. A better programming system is one which can flow close enough to the lines of resistance that most programmers can adopt it.
Well, that's a good plan. But it doesn't exactly erase the unfairness of the practice. Lack of sleep and stress will cost you both happiness and performance, though you may not recognize that when you're nineteen ;)
GotVMail is a good value.
Something that's too big today will seem trivially small soon of course.
I think part of the problem is that some hackers might sign up thinking it will give them an inside track to TechStars in a future round. But, giving 3 months of part time as an uncompensated intern is a high price to pay for the possibility of a second look at your application.
+1, Hilarious Insight Into The Compositional Process
Twitter Wouldn’t Sell For $1 Billion, Says Source
That's fair. I should explain myself better. I don't have a problem with twitter accounts that are exclusively clones of other feeds. Then I know what I'm signing up for, it wouldn't be fair to call it spammy.

But when I follow a regular twitter account I expect short, self-contained tidbits. When people decide to leverage their twitter followers to get traffic to other services, that's what I find annoying.
You'd need some kind of giro for the z-axis. Right now the iphone can only tell if it's facing uyp or facing down, but can't tell by what degree. Maybe in later edititons they will make the z-axis giro like the others. Alternatively, you could make a device you can attach to the iphone that tells it its position along the median plane.
This is quite amusing: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06...
I'm not arguing any particular specifics here, just saying that any sysadmin work - user management, server management, code hosting, smtp server (ugh, that shit sucks) - always takes longer than I expect. If you're a great sysadmin, go for it. If not, outsource as much as you can afford.
Totally. When I'm looking to buy something, I often click on ads google places. Often to buy.
S3 for data backups and file storage. CloudFront as a CDN. A few EC2 instances for data processing and Elastic IPs for them.
I looked at it for a few minutes and I get no idea what the site is about or what I can do.
May be a welcome page with some blurb will help.
Scripting PowerPoint with Python
Engine Yard, New Relic, GitHub, Lighthouse.

Typical Rails shop stuff, :)
This (and the rest of the article) is just ignorant cheerleading — an attempt to justify the lackings of the author's chosen technology, and thus resolve cognitive dissonance.
Just to make sure you are measuring the right thing:
You made your measurements after passing a few hundred thousand messages through the system to give the JIT in the JVM enough information to act upon? And using a server VM?
With which GC?

Benchmarks on the JVM are notoriously tricky...
I guess I have a different idea of what 'great sysadmin' means:-) Any competent hacker ought to be able to admin 1 or 2 unix boxes. It takes a great sysadmin to run hundreds of them.

Also, my point depends on an assumption that may not be true for everyone: that you have your own server that you run.
I'm launching a site next week for Internet-related job listings in the SF Bay Area for just this reason. The bigger sites annoyed me both as an employer and as a job seeker for the reasons you mention. I reached out directly to friends and HR folks at local companies and have a pretty good number of listings to start. Hopefully this will be a bit more targeted. I'll post to Ask HN for feedback, post-launch.
This is offtopic, but...

...the problem, as always, is that the words have different connotations depending on the community.

As you probably know, the word "hacker" means "computer criminal" to the majority of the English-speaking world. As a result, calling yourself a "hacker" only works if (a) you only care about your reputation with other hackers, or (b) you are trying to cultivate an ambiguously dangerous persona. It is not a word I would put on my resume if I were applying at SAP, unless I were already well known for being Steve Wozniak.

So you're down to "programmer", "developer", or "coder". My impression is that most people use "developer" as a highfalutin synonym for "programmer"... but in some environments it connotes "a person who spends a lot of time talking about software but never uses the computer except for Outlook, Office, and Twitter". So, if you want to emphasize that you actually spend the majority of your day in emacs, lean towards the other words.

Sometimes "programmer" carries too strong a connotation of "code monkey". I find it best to just avoid places where this is true.

I don't like the word "coder" -- it doesn't offend me, but it's ugly. So I use the other words at random as whimsy strikes me.
It is always tempting to point to a big company and to try and argue how stupid they are and how they waste money etc. but as most of the comments here have already pointed out, there are fatal flaws in their argument.

I will add one more to the list. The difference in click-through rate for the top result from the second result is 3.5x. ie. Top result gets 43%, second place gets 12% CTR. Ranking first means a lot.

Also the spikes in trends for the caveman keyword being linked to Geiko is very speculative at best.
Omniture for metrics, ExactTarget for email campaigns.
Someone should come up with a 3D text editor for next year's April fool's day. It would probably be fun to write some code in 3D for about the same amount of time that it would be fun to visit websites in 3D (one day).
I suppose it's then weird if I use twitter's RSS feeds. There's some accounts that only talk about new releases and things like that, and it's easier for me to follow their twitter rss feed (and not their unavailable or spammy regular rss) than to follow them on twitter (where the one tweet gets drowned out by the rest of my following).
Why does something this "simple" (compared to photoshop, at least) have a learning curve?

The problem, especially when it comes to web-based apps, is never the user when it's a question of findability or usability. The onus is on the software interface designer and information architect to make things usable and findable. Especially for something so easily organized as "Courses, users who can access the course, assignments and turned in assignments, tests/quizes and grades, communication between students and students, and students and teacher."

Blackboard is an incredibly inefficient and confusing user interface for what it is.

The concept of blaming the user for usability problems is disheartening...
Do you have a source on that? Carmack rarely updates his blog. The only info I've seen about Wolf3d on the iPhone are the development notes released a little over a week ago.

Edit: The dev notes are here:
http://www.idsoftware.com/wolfenstein3dclassic/wolfdevelopme...
Humanoid robot helps scientists to understand intelligence
no but I have :) (GM script - I think it is on userscripts somewhere I modified it to work an another site too)
Google Apps for Education is much cheaper, and they know something about search. I showed just regular Google Apps to a few people in academia, and even the free version would be better than what they are doing. There is the annoyingly low file size limit though, that made uploading large data sets quite painful.
Bingo for the parent!

There are indeed some people who say "uh, nice syntax, readability, uh, big deal". Those are the folks who fail to grasp the point that programming is a human endeavor and that having your code read by other humans is a crucial element.

Lisp may indeed attract a large group of nice, intelligent people who don't get this. That is a further, fatal problem in the language.

Ruby has many problems itself but it gets that readability is important and it gets that, by extension, the humans relations that a programming language generates are important. Lispers don't seem to see the problem in an exclusive attitude and essentially closed community. The ruby community understands the need to have a good community open to people even if the Ruby community doesn't always succeed at this.
It all comes together
Top Web Companies Competing for a Charitable Cause
On the other hand, it's important to note that Berkshire's insurance companies have been unusually profitable. Their combined ratio (ratio of expenses to premiums collected) is often below 100% -- not especially common for the insurance business. However, that average incorporates more volatility, and more deviations from the norm.
This wasnt presented as a rumor (yes I know they said it was but the wording gave it an edge of "this is more than just a rumor guys!!!!") at all.

It's not just this story that has triggered my reaction: there has been several in the last few weeks that makes TC just too much effort to read. Why take the time to extract the real information from their spin when there are much better blogs / news sites already doing that for me :)

EDITL: here you go - they even wrapped the retraction into a sensationalist headline :) http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/03/twitter-wouldnt-sell-fo...

I do have to hand them the crown of best at marketing themselves - and that's great, why not. But I dont have the patience to read it any more :)
SAT scores can have impact beyond college
I put tens of thousands of messages through it before noticing it was slow. And yes, using a server vm (sun's latest)...

I haven't given up on it... just posted the above comment b/c I had assumed that Kestrel would just be way faster b/c it's java, which turned out to be quite an erroneous assumption.
FBI Seizes Servers at Dallas Data Center
Dynamic Hadoop Clusters - SmartFrog
Introducing Digg’s IDDB Infrastructure
Lessons in Graphic Design Theory
"If I mean method call, it is very unlikely that I would forget the parens in a language that always has parens for method calls."

If I mean instance variable, it is very unlikely that I would forget the @ in a language that always has an @ for instance variables. :-\

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see a fundamental distinction between the two purely on the basis of consistency. I think an argument could be made that the parens on a method are a more meaningful and representative syntax element than an @ on an instance variable, making it easier to remember. Then again, someone could argue that braces are a more meaningful syntax element than indentation, and we all know how that goes. :-)
Handy Tweaks To Make GIMP Replace Photoshop
FinancialStability.gov | U.S. Department of the Treasury
It's just an angle to the story--and a clever one, too! Would it have showed up on HC if it were just "Wolf 3D Launches on iPhone" versus "Carmack Made iPhone Wolf 3D Without his CEO Knowing"?
It might not be impossible for everyone, but it's certainly a huge disincentive, and not everyone has the skills or energy to hold down another job that actually pays the bills, or to contract out. On top of that, many internships (like in finance . . . or least like finance used to be) would expect interns to work 60 or 80 hours a week, which would make any sort of additional paid labor basically impossible.

Just because some people manage to make it work doesn't mean it's not hugely discriminatory.

The thing that really galls me is that most of the time the companies that do this sort of thing are perfectly capable of paying their interns, at least well enough for them to eat and pay rent, they just choose not to because they can get away with it; there are enough college students trying to get a foot in the door and who have other support systems.
Invent FTL and some cheap/limitless form of energy.
Also, big companies like Google have offed their recruiting arms, or at least large portions of them. This is a red herring metric, at best.
Jeff said it best when he was asked the question at an event in Boston, "What is better, YC or TechStars?"

Jeff's answer: "You can teach a hacker business, but you can't teach a businessman how to hack".

'nuff said.
I switched to Linode after reading your blog post. Also, Slicehost had some serious downtime last December.

The "community" section of the Slicehost website is really exceptional though. Insanely great.
Unethical is way too harsh. This is NOT class discrimination. If you ask me,judging on the basis of GPA alone is class discrimination. Poor people don't stand a fighting chance.

But that's a slightly different argument. Unpaid internships don't impose requirements that would keep you from getting paid elsewhere, so regardless of your economic situation, you can decide how much you want to work. My employer doesn't care if you work 30 hours or 2 hours...they just want to see how much you enjoy doing the work.

Any smart and hardworking individual wouldn't be at a disadvantage because they could find a way to make it work.

For the record I'm pretty poor myself. I have two jobs to pay my bills. But I don't see anyone who has significantly more money having more of an advantage than me.
yeah right, twitter is nowhere close to being worth a billion bucks. A few hundred mil...maybe....and even that is generous
The Humble King of "Good Enough" Turns 20
I think this is a great point. At the stage a TechStars company is at, they need founders and advisors. Anything else is going to create inefficiencies. And if they're lacking in hacking talent such that they need one of these interns, then they just don't have the right founder mix.

If a team is missing some key capabilities for producing a functioning prototype, then it should bring someone else in and provide some equity.
The problems with url shorteners
The reasoning offered for this law is that communications infrastructure is too important to let go, and therefore the President should be allowed to ignore privacy laws in "emergencies." Does a similar law exist for the postal service, suddenly allowing them to open everyone's mail if they feel like it?
Google May Buy Twitter. Or Not. But Why is Twitter So Hot?
Trying out 'Amazon Remembers'
Fetching URLs mentioned on Twitter. It scales great, but turns out the part where I save the results to a central MySQL DB does not. Surprised that you max out your InnoDB UPDATEs after only around two thousands per second. Will try memcachedb.
One problem is that they will not get good developers. According to Joel Spolsky, good developers never look for jobs (they re always working), so they are not likely to work for free...
I have a MBA and guest lecture MBA students at several of the better universities in Australia.

In Australia, non-resident MBA students account for a large portion of the total income of the university.
Think American football except the games are rigged so "ever paying player gets a prize" or Australian residency.
This is really useful information for me; I'm probably just going to go and do the paperwork by-hand, mostly because I'd like the experience of doing so.

Also, I'm fairly certain that S-Corps can waive their first year minimum tax (the $800), although they have to pay in their second year of operation.

Anybody else done the corporate dance in California?
Eating chocolate can help improve your math
Perhaps the startuply guys can provide some data?
Why people hate phone companies
Ask HN: What's the state of universal internet connectivity?
I've done some poking around but I'm sure you guys out there are much more well-versed in the space.

As a consumer, I'm simply wondering when universal internet connectivity will roll around (i.e. wireless broadband quality internet access as ubiquitous as cell phone signals) and what platform is most likely to take us there.

I've seen FON's offering, and while it seems like a good stopgap measure, it doesn't seem scalable enough. 3G currently doesn't deliver a great experience (at least for me). MuniWireless seems to have stalled.

What's holding us back and who will make a breakthrough?
I recently had a phone interview stage with some consultants who asked about my SAT scores (note: I graduated college in 2002).

After following through and discussing other aspects of the job with them, I'm now inclined to give out low SAT scores when asked. It will be a great filter to avoid interviewing at places I would hate to work at.
The same way why ease of use of something makes that something better (or more pleasant to work with).
Marc Cuban Is Psyched About Cable
Later in the interview: "How did the launch for Quake Live [the free browser-based version of the circa 1995 ID Software game]..."

Way to do your research; Quake 3 came out in 1999.
what is the benefit of real time search, when the matching results are written by Shaq?
My sense is that the split from BSD was necessary because of licensing wars over proprietary code going on at the time. It wasn't until after Linux got going pretty well that BSD was established as being free of proprietary code, with some formerly proprietary parts rewritten (hence, FreeBSD).
Ask HN: How Many HN Readers are going to the Startup Weekend at SF today ?
Twitter HashTag: #swsf09

- if they are going, what's in their agenda ?

- if not, what would they like the products/projects come out of this ?

ps: I am going, will probably try to build something over FB platform or something that use's Twitter.
The first time the Internet is shut down, you can bet that two things will happen:

1) Big companies will complain very loudly, and probably cost the government and ISPs a lot of money defending lawsuits. (Can you imagine what would happen to Amazon if it were shut down for a day? Not something that's good for their bottom line...)

2) The damage will be routed around. Right now, we trust ISPs because they are convenient. But IP over amateur radio is certainly possible, as are mesh networks and other things like that.

Remember, the entire point of the Internet is to route around damage.
No, GNU-led projects have had plenty of drama, GCC especially -- there was a huge forking fracas in the late nineties, and the FSF's politically-motivated crippling is largely the motivation behind LLVM's clang.
He's making the assumption that Geico hasn't done any sort of testing to verify that this is optimal. You can use urls in adsense to track which of your traffic comes from there and which organic.

My guess is that Geico isn't spending $90m blindly. But, like everyone in the tech industry, the author assumes that everyone not in the tech industry is stupid.
Agreed. I would actually laugh at someone who asked me for SAT scores. I'd want to see actual research documenting that SAT's are actually a good predictor of job performance in the long run. (Hint: they arent). In the consulting field, I would expect people to do their research before they pick arbitrary metrics of selection. They might as well ask you your favorite university or sports team. That (might) be barely classifiable as a culture fit...

Its really amusing to me that companies use this as a valid benchmark. Especially, as the article states, for SALES of all things.

Configuresoft Inc., a Woodland Park, Colo., systems-management software company, requires combined scores of 1,400 in CR and math for applicants applying for sales positions. A spokesman for the firm said the company's clients routinely demand salespeople with high test scores.

I declare shenanigans. When (in the course of a sales discussion) does the salesperson's high school SAT scores come up? How about never.

If anyone knows these guys or has seen these practices, I'd love to hear the actual basis for this from an HR perspective, since I dont believe the research on the topic puts SAT's anywhere near predictive, especially in sales.
Twitter HashTag: #swsf09

- if they are going, what's in their agenda ?

- if not, what would they like the products/projects come out of this ?

ps: I am going, will probably try to build something over FB platform or something that use's Twitter.
" What is going to happen
is that they will gradually take over from the 80x86 line. They will
run old MS-DOS programs by interpreting the 80386 in software. (I even
wrote my own IBM PC simulator in C, which you can get by FTP from
ftp.cs.vu.nl = 192.31.231.42 in dir minix/simulator.) I think it is a
gross error to design an OS for any specific architecture, since that is
not going to be around all that long. "

Shocking how wrong he ended up being about the x86 line. It makes me wonder what predictions we make today will come out to.
Really dumb title.

The best part of the article is the spam comment advertising an anti-floor-squeak device.
Um everyone mentions that the money isn't the real value of TS or YC. This lets hackers that didn't get accepted into the program get many of the benefits. They get to meet the mentors, see some of the presentations, spend time working with and getting to know the community. I don't see how that is considered so much worse of a deal than the actual program. Consider hackers still in school, hackers not ready to make the leap and start their own companies...

It seems like an interesting way to become involved and learn a ton about the start up process.

(disclosure I was part of Techstars 08)
Those giant 800k floppy disk games, those really amazing 160x120 QT movies at 8fps, remember how colossal Myst was, a whole CD-ROM!
This article was very weak on any hard science and was not that interesting. Basically, the university just got a robot and they are going to hook a "brain" to it and see what happens.