skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What you say is hardly the case. Top 8 VC firms compete with each other incredibly hard for the best deals. The top-8 as a group make up 80% of all venture capital returns so maybe that should tell you something about their decision making criteria.

The best VC firms do pick and choose what to invest in, and this is based only on what they think will make them the most money. Perhaps that isn't equivalent to "technological progress" but one can hardly call it collusion.
Most of your points are
environment specific

How so? .Net can't magically discover the types of values or prevent developers from abusing the format.

you don't have to be
zealous and put every small piece
of data in a separate element.

But then you're layering a complex format with a custom application-specific parser, with an unknown syntax (e.g. spaces vs commas, are ranges supported, etc). It obviously can be done, but it's a mess.
"Spend" is a very misleading and even distracting metric. Before going to deep into this, it's worth noting that you should never rely on advertising as your sole source of traffic generation when bootstrapping. It gets expensive, and it generally doesn't generate immediate returns. Pay-per-click can be an exception, but that's also an expensive game to get into.

Unfortunately, much of our advertising experience isn't going to be relevant due to how long ago it was. We advertised primarily on FusionAds and Daring Fireball, which has increased from $2,500 to $8,500. We don't have a daily advertising burn, and we never really have as we just dabble in advertising from time-to-time.

I'd be willing to bet that advertising has at best contributed 10-15% to our growth. Given the amount that we've spent, that's a very high cost of acquisition. However, it did help generate some awareness. There's a whole lot of context with advertising. The first $5k was relatively more effective because Sifter was so new. It was great for generating awareness. However, after that initial awareness is generated, unless you're going to spend heavily (more than $10k a month)on a branding campaign any additional impression-based advertising to the same audience generally won't be as effective.
Most inspirational quotes, including some (if not most) of these, are bogus in the sense that they've been falsely attributed to the famous person. Your site would be better than the rest if you tracked down sources and dropped the bogus ones.
Contemporary art tries to describe some kind of distorted reality.
We live in really fucked up times, more fragmented and complex, better documented and infomercialed but at the same time less understood in it's entirety than ever before.
Modern art tends to describe this condition rather then to appease or to gloss over it.
But that is nothing where people in 300 years will look back as something beautiful ( try to listen to ancient greek music, you will know what i mean ), point.
There are certain ways to write Java that are both more expressive and clever (and therefore more fun), as well as more dangerous in terms of future maintenance. Various dependency injection frameworks - e.g. Guice - are known for introducing some "magic" into Java code that sometimes may exceed the tolerance threshold of less experienced programmers.
Offer HN: I will work for free in SF this coming week
I'm staying in San Francisco and will be here until the 6th of March; I came here to expose myself to a different culture and perspective (I'm from the UK) and I would love to visit your startup, I would even be happy to do some work for you for free!

To give you an idea of what I might be able to do for you, my background is I:

- have a PhD in Machine Learning (graduated in 2010)
- am a software developer (primarily full-stack web)
- run a small SaaS business in London
- recently started building iOS apps
- have experience in industry in the UK and Japan
- have some understanding of the Japanese market

Of late I'm particularly interested in idea validation (ala Startup Weekend) and data-driven business intelligence, e.g. use of split testing, cohort analysis and other techniques used in lean startups to learn and improve as quickly as possible.

I'm open to any and all suggestions (including just grabbing a coffee/beer!). My name is Stefan and you can reach me at styrmis@gmail.com

Thank you!
I checked over the reddit thread mentioned in one of the comments, and a few of the comments here, and notice people mentioning how outdated the information is.

Out of intellectual curiosity, what resources (books, sites, etc.) would be recommended for modern, best practices C++?
The Naive Bayesian Approach to Machine Learning
If we want to help those kids, we must address the fundamental reasons those kids were shot. Drones detecting gun shots is a technological bandaid with the side effect of empowering the State even more.

People don't want to address the fundamental problems because they're hard and ugly and uncomfortable. It's much easier to dream about technology solving all our ills, when a lot of our problems are an effect of immorality.
Agreed, ideas like that sound great on paper but just don't translate to real life in most instances.

And I encourage anyone dreaming about working abroad to go and try it for at least a month before making a big commitment.
Tips For Tech Recruiters, From an Engineer
In 500 lines you can write a self-hosting compiler, a checkers AI, a usable text editor, a compiling-to-DFA regex matcher, Bayes net inference, or a ray tracer, to mention the first examples that come to mind. (Ordinary lines, not golfed.) Most programs aren't so polished, but when yours gets 10 times longer than a Lisp compiler, it's worth asking why.
shudder

My first introduction to functional programming was with J (APL but using ASCII) during my sophomore year of college and I definitely didn't have the chops to understand it at that point. I was scared of functional languages for another year until a different professor introduced me to Haskell.
Interesting, but I hope he's read all those books and isn't just listing any he's found...
The language comes with a small number of simple but widely applicable containers.

That doesn’t negate dons’ point that if you need something other than those containers there is relatively poor support for defining your own.
Ugh. These C++ bashing articles, although being highly popular, are extremely grating. All languages have issues. The End.
I can't tell from your question if you're asking for a simple "performance" or "redundancy" answer or if you're asking for a deeper explanation about application architecture. So, I'll try to answer both.

The short answer is redundancy. With virtual servers, problems on the host machine due to neighboring virtual servers can be frequent. This can slow down the application server and lead to performance problems. With two load-balanced application servers, this isn't as much of an issue.

For the database, I'd suggest reading up on replication. In addition to the master/slave databases, we also have hourly, daily, and weekly snapshots stored offsite because a slave database isn't enough protection from some types of data loss.

Application architecture is a whole beast unto itself, and my real recommendation would be to find and hire a professional to handle this kind of stuff for you.
Yeah, because you can write hard real time code in Python or JavaScript.
I like the idea. This is useful to generate stubs.
I can vouch for Montreal.. pretty sick entrepreneurship culture.
This is terse but not expressive.
They did remove the link that the author asked them to remove. That just promoted another link to a pirate version of the book up the list.

A useful service might be something that helps tell Indonesian colleges that they've allowed directory traversal open, and that they have copyright violating materials available to the world.

Or a tool that helps gather a list of all the IP owners of a collection of material at a site (the site in the image also has other books, as well as a 4.3 GB iso called "IBM_RSA_V803" (I'm guessing it's IBM's Rational Software Architect?) and then helps with coordinate a collaborative request for IP takedown effort.
Why not just fill a bug report?
You should check out Julia[0] and Dylan[1]. Both are dynamic with support for gradual typing and parametric polymorphism (multiple dispatch and generic functions). This, in my opinion, is the best of both worlds.

[0] http://julialang.org/
[1] http://opendylan.org/
Speaking of the video you posted, go to 8:43.

"I know someone who is working on a Ruby implementation and making very good strides and is not talking about it publicly at all--and I think you'll be surprised when you find out about it."

Is Brian Ford talking about Topaz [1]?

[1] http://docs.topazruby.com/en/latest/blog/announcing-topaz/
I'm not the parent, but one reason could be that the feature is more about collaboration of different languages for different purposes on a shared ecosystem (JVM, CLR, JS as bytecode, etc).

Which Go doesn't play well with.
We agreed something like IRC would be good, so I thought it would be easy in Haskell to make such a thing.

Or you can use any of the thousand services running IRC servers ;-)
No, but it's on the ToCheck list, right after Go.
Thanks a lot for this. The point about not going open-source probably just saved me 6 months-1 year of potential time spent. I knew something was bothering me about making my idea open-source at the same time I am making it. Although I'm an idealist, and like open source software, having money doing what I love was my whole goal in the first place.
Why don't MLs get enough credit?
Nice. Time to use to_hash.
>Various dependency injection frameworks - e.g. Guice - are known for introducing some "magic" into Java code that sometimes may exceed the tolerance threshold of less experienced programmers.

A lot of "dependency injection" BS can also exceed the tolerance threshold of more experienced programmers.
Ever tried D? (don't believe the hype)
The problem with our data obsession
The previous discussion about these: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4594264
Better stated, there are applications where you can't use JavaScript or Python due to timing requirements - software defined radios for instance.
It's very easy to verify experimentally that e is likely the correct answer.
I bootstrapped my company over 2012, and we now employ three full-time people and adding more.

What we did to get out first few users was simple: we wanted to build cool software, and we had a few ideas. We took our favorite, built a cool landing page that spelled out the features with a demo, and then set it free on Twitter. We had 1500 early beta signups before we went into private beta. We now have over 100,000 users and we never spend money advertising.

In terms of getting our first paying customers: we just charged for it. People will pay for things that they think are valuable. However, pricing and the pricing "model" have been the #1 source of missed opportunities and optimization points for us (though we have fixed a lot of that), so they are really important to think about.
I totally agree about refinements being a terrible idea. Brian Ford (of Rubinous) makes an excellent argument: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BagNfTbXn3w.

What is the best way to let Ruby team know that refinements are a bad idea?
Hi thanks for this, I am aware of these facilities but they aren't ideal as they require too much manual work for upgrades and downgrades, also not good for UX - what i'm looking for is a happy medium which handles automation of upgrades and downgrades, creation of subscriptions and failure or cancellation via paypal without the headache but not a solution which requires merchant accounts and or gateways which costs more money. thanks
Virtual machines most certainly do not require bytecode.

GHC for example targets the "Spineless, tagless G machine" by compiling to native code that calls runtime services defined by the (abstract) STG machine ISA (the "primops").

Similarly, Go targets the Go runtime, by compiling to native code that calls "machine" services like collecting memory or scheduling threads. It might be a thin wrapper over the underlying processor architecture, but the compiler is clearly targeting the Go runtime as its target "machine".
>I do think there is a cultural component to innovation. My fascination is India. There is so much software development talent there.

Yes, but also so many mediocre, I-cant-believe-those-people-are-paid-programmers too.

Maybe the problem is that the most talented Indian programmers tend to go working outside India.

>I know a lot of developers from India who participate in the success of international firms like Adobe, Google, and Microsoft, but I'm surprised that we've yet to see that sort of company, a real, international powerhouse of software, emerge from India.

Dunno. Do we even see some "real international powerhouses of software" emerge from the US that often? You mention Adobe, Google and MS, but all three are over 12 years old, and Adobe and MS are actually more like 22 and 30 years old.

Not to mention that while MS and Adobe are "software powerhouses", Google is much less so. It might have a lot of talent nowadays, but 95% of its success lays in its initial foray into the search engine market, which was the work of a very small team, and owned much to network effects, ability to get funding and infrastructure etc, and much less to raw programming chops. And modern success stories like Twitter and Facebook are even less "software powerhouses" -- more like glorified web services, where most of the problems are related to scaling and administration of a large server base.
In what way is REST self-describable? REST is not a standard, but rather a widely accepted convention.

I have seen a few RESTful servers self-describe, (ie. GET /api/v1/ returns ['/users', '/posts']). However you can't claim this is a key feature of REST clients because there is no agreed-upon standard to have services describe themselves. HTTP is not sufficient.

If there were a real standard here, we would not have this problem. Like it or not, everybody is calling their custom API a 'REST' API nowadays, and without a real standard, nobody is wrong.
Personally, I'd use PayPal. However, if you're going to create a SaaS and are using PayPal, I highly recommend that you create a new account for the business (You are allowed 1 Personal and 1 Business account separately with PayPal[1]). The reason I say this is because, if you ever decide to sell your SaaS you cannot transfer the user subscriptions with the email to the buyer as, they are linked to the PayPal account - so you either have to give them the PayPal account or they're going to lose a lot of existing buyers (People sign up for these types of service and forget they're paying).

[1] https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-c....
15 years ago, Java was to C++ as Ruby is to Java: much slower, used by startups, touted for claims of programmer efficiency (garbage collection!)
> Made people think the company in question was doing what it needed to do to protect its users.

So raiding hacker's houses is the IP equivalent of the TSA?

"Look at us, we're doing something!"
It's not that the countries won't welcome you, it's that the US punishes them for it. (At least as it comes to bank accounts.) This makes a foreign bank account a bit of a prized possession for Americans.

I know that some countries (particularly some of the post-Soviet ones) make it a criminal offense to have a foreign bank account, but I thought that for the US it's just a question of sending in an extra IRS form. Or is it not?
>Now, you know what IS inadequate? 240x320 phones. They are genuinely useless for web browsing.

As an owner of a Nokia E5 phone with a 320x240 screen I beg to differ. From personal experience I have come to a conclusion that 320 by 240 phones are only useless if you are using a desktop-like (or even an iOS Safari-like) browser. Opera Mini for the E5 tries to reformat pages to fit the main text content a single column and uses Symbian's own fonts to fit more text on the screen, which makes browsing the web surprising adequate. I wouldn't call it a great experience but it's far from useless. It is particularly noticeable when you contrast the results with using Android's Browser or even the Android version of Opera Mini at 320x240, especially since you don't have to touch the tiny screen.

In short, I'd say it depends on the platform.
For any development SSL shenanigans we've had very good results with Pound[1]. This has nothing to do with certs, really, but it takes some pain away from fiddling around.

[1]: http://www.apsis.ch/pound
This thread is full of people saying "I use (python|ruby) and (ruby|python) seems fine. There's just no reason to learn it" and you respond excitedly to this comment as if it's representative.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
This reminds me of the musical "The Producers". Raising money for ventures that often fail leads to intentionally raising money for something that you hope will fail to hide corruption.
Thanks for sharing but it seems pretty expensive in terms of transaction fees
Suck it, Google. This is what you get for being control freaks and abusing all the other players. You cant own everything. You are going to lose the billing, application distribution and DRM battle for sure now. Your burgeoning YouTube-based media empire cum ChromeOS/DRM wet dream is destined for failure. Wake up and smell the roses. You are evil. We hate you.
Fair enough. Definitely not a personal attack or anything. I used to have the very same thoughts until I really learned how powerful many of those confusing things are.
Thanks for highlighting this. Would you say that the paypal api is overly complex and a bit of a headache with what im trying to achieve?
Deals Missed
I think Google is already doing this using a form of JSON-Schema:
https://developers.google.com/discovery/
I'm in the process to make one here in Spain. It is hard, yes it is. I like it because Barcelona is a great central point, full of foreigners who embrace english and all kind of european cultures as well latin america. What I am looking for? an american partner. It will be good for various reasons as I think startups should be done.
You say you want that, but you also say you don't want to pay for the services that automate it for you, and you also think the APIs are too hard to do it yourself. You have to choose.

This "too much work and bad UX" got me my first 300 paying subscribers and really involved almost no work.
Perhaps a useful compromise would be to implement W3C's ISO-8601 profile http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime
Your observations here are very similar to Venkatesh Rao's blog post on "Return of the Barbarian". He has a terrible way of redefining words to suit his own meanings for whatever narrative he is on at that moment, but I was reminded of that post through out my reading of this reply.

P.S: Both of you agree on one thing: As I recall, "I don't know how to turn this into anything actionable, but it's an interesting observation." was his conclusion as well :-D!
Not really an issue if you live in the right areas, in my experience. Cape Town in particular is quite safe as long as you don't go into the townships (like Rio's favelas).
"All his hard work" ?? Blah, more B.S from steveK, the guy is a total fraud who has barely done anything on value on ANY project. Look at all his contributions there's barely anything more than a docfix or merging someone ELSE's pull request: https://github.com/rails-api/rails-api/commits?author=stevek...

Hell, even "shoes" and "hackety hack" the two projects that made him famous he's barely done any work on, and the work he has done is just (you guessed it) merging other people's pull requests. The guy is a fraud.

Far as i can tell, all he actually does is crying about gender equality and babbling on twitter. He's not a real programmer. He's a full-time "celebrity", a fraud.
ERANYC might be a worse deal - they don't charge to pitch them, but they want 8% and anti-dilution, for $40k investment.
Personally I'm partial to http://jschema.org/ (also see http://jschema.org/rpc.html) because it seems simpler.

My naive impression is that JSON-Schema is trying to be just like XML Schema, but in JSON. Which doesn't seem like a good thing.
Sponsorfied (YC S12) is hiring front and back-end developers
We’re building a revolutionary new marketplace and platform that changes the way brands do offline business online, or as PG put it, we’re doing for sponsorships and brands what Google did for targeted advertising. Sponsorfied (YC S12) is growing fast and we’re looking for a Python/Django developer as well as a front-end developer. You’ll be joining a team of six (half product and half business/marketing) and working out of our office in San Francisco.

We launched our beta over six months ago and have worked with some of the worlds largest brands (Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies). We’re working on extremely hard but exciting problems and we’re building out our product team.

What We’re Looking For: Python/Django Developer
- Solid web application development experience
- Experience balancing performance versus design quality
- Experience building APIs

What We’re Looking For: Front-End Developer
- Solid front-end development experience (HTML/CSS/Javascript)
- You’ve worked with Django, Rails, or a PHP based templating language and feel comfortable in anything MVC
- Responsive layouts are in your vocabulary and you enjoy working with frameworks like Bootstrap
- A good sense of design and layout

Tools we use: Git, Heroku, Solr, Django, Vagrant

We offer a generous salary, benefits, equity, whatever desk setup you need, a beautiful office in downtown San Francisco to work out of, and a never-ending supply of free goods from brands we’re working with.

To apply: jobs@sponsorfied.com
Github profiles welcome, but at the minimum attach a paragraph that tells us something about you and of course a resume.

Press:
“10 Best Startups from YC S12” - http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/21/best-of-yc-demo-day/
VentureBeat Demo Day Coverage - http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/21/sponsorfied-says-well-do-f...
TechCrunch Launch - http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/25/sponsorfied/
VentureBeat Launch - http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/25/sponsorfied-launch-sponsor...
ML is actually the poster child of static typing with its Hindley-Milner type inference.
5 out of the top 10 mobile providers in the world are on that list

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operator...
Why pass up the opportunity for a valuable learning experience? Even if it doesn't pan out, chances are that you'll learn something, no?
Yeah - I don't see why people are so excited about this. To me, it looks like the Firefox OS will end up being a carriers' vector to try and assert more control over the phone ecosystem again. Without a big player like Apple, Google, or MS to enforce some ground rules, the carriers can just completely screw with any phone.

I think this will be a miserable experience for consumers - think about it - why else would carriers be so excited?
Oh, I meant 240x320 touchscreens. I used to have a 320x240 touch screen + keyboard phone, that worked fine (Samsung Galaxy Y Pro).
They can always sweeten the pot for the best ones. Some have said that Yahoo needs to fire as many as 10,000 people http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-yahoo-marissa-mayer-needs-...