skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The research behind this article is pretty flakey. Measuring accelerator success by exits only works when you do cohort analysis, not when you compare companies created 6-7 years ago (YC and TechStars) against companies created in the last couple of years (the others accelerators).

YC's scaling back of class sizes wasn't anything to do with the quality of the cohort dropping, but rather due to YC's ability to handle a cohort of that size.

First-time startup founders tend to make the same mistakes as each other, and that's one area in which it's easy for accelerators to add value (some do and some don't).

Clearly some accelerators are better than others, and some will undoubtedly fail, but this article doesn't really provide any compelling argument for it.
Perhaps rather than "be more productive" he should have said "feel more productive"…
I like the model of udacity classes; they don't have an end date so one is free to be as slow at completing the course work as their schedule allows.

Also, I would also like it if there was a better way to collaborate with fellow online students. I think one learns best when bouncing the topics between a group of people.
Yup. There's a winner-take-all dynamic with social networks and cloud productivity services.
The way in which ties are resolved is very important. I had assumed that in case of a tie, neither player won the bidding war, so they had to bet again. Under that interpretation, the worst case is that O always bets the same as X, trapping the game into a non-productive sequence of tied bids. The only way to avoid this is to always bet more than O can possibly bet, which means we need more than 300.

Fortunately, Gil Kalai has added in the comments that tied bids are resolved with coin flips, so if you can find a winning strategy in both sub-trees, ties are fine.
Never head of ScraperWiki. Took a quick look, and it looks they do provide this kind of service. Regardless, that hardly means the market is saturated. Businesses need this kind of thing A LOT. If you do it right, it could prove quite fruitful. I'd remove all the stuff about phantomjs / headless browser and all tech jargon from the home page, and just focus on how you can provide fast value through this path.
What's wrong with using the OSS stuff? It's free and that's the price that you want to pay. If more people used the OSS stuff, and helped to improve it then we'd all be better off. By stealing paid software, you aren't helping anyone but yourself. Even simply using the software and asking questions helps to build up the knowledge base. e.g.

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/emacs

http://askubuntu.com/
TechCrunch Pump n Dump
Again, what's the alternative?

Take it from the >100k bank accounts. Only from the >100k bank accounts.
After 16 hours, you must have gotten a lot of users? Will you share the total user count now?
Sorry, that's my bad, it should be { silent: true }. I translate myself and mix CoffeeScript into this. I guess that's a proof of the fact that I cannot live without CoffeeScript. I have corrected in the post.
You should also do the quick calculation:

YC originally gave something like 10K for roughly 6%, giving a rough valuation in the 180K range. HackFWD is giving, for two people, 110K for 30% which implies a value of roughly 370K. On the numbers alone the deal isn't as bad as it sounds.
Like I said, it's a great start, but Chrome Inspector still does a lot more (right now), and I'm more apt to stay there -- but this is inspiring, and if it gets closer to feature parity with C.I. -- well it will be a no-brainer then, and I'd happily pay for it, too.
Sadly, the next step appears to be:

-> using Turbo-C++ for DOS (to learn pre-1998 C++) at university
This is true for private companies. Public companies are owned by shareholders and I don't think many of them buy shares because company does some cool stuff, for example supports open standards. Shareholders want profit only, excluding all other considerations.

This does not include shareholders that are also employed by the company, they may choose to optimize for something else, not only financial profit.
This was an EU country with a bank deposit guarantee similar to the FDIC guarantee. The guarantee is being voided. How many more EU bank deposit guarantees are untrustworthy? How many depositors will choose to no longer trust them? How many banks will be run?

Personally, I don't have a clue as to the answers to those questions, and I doubt that those who are imposing this tax have a clue, either.
There are many different incarnations of "live reload"; it is definitely not OSX only. The concept is simple - refresh the front-end / back-end when and edit or save occurs.
Me too. I love CoffeeScript, but even after writing tons of it, I occasionally get frustrated by some whitespace/precedence issue.
The Botching of the Cyprus Bailout: Worse Than Lehman Brothers
Ha. When I read that example I thought "poor guy, he should have chosen a better one, now this will be nitpicked to death".

He is just demonstrating how `if` is also an expression, the comparison and return could be anything.
David Brin's position is incredibly naive.

The rich and powerful can always buy themselves privacy and security. The rest of us won't have that luxury in such a "transparent society".
I think it was language religion above anything else, but my memory is a bit fuzzy from those discussions.

Personally I have a sweet spot for the Pascal family of languages and their strong typing, so I only started using C and later C++ when forced to do so.

My first contact with C was at high school (Turbo C 2.0 - 1992), after knowing already a few Assembly versions and Turbo Pascal. Shortly thereafter I got to have my hands on Turbo C++ 1.0, and since then only used C instead of C++ at the university classes that required it, or on a few projects at work. My last application done in C was around 2002.

Nowadays I use a lot of languages depending on the project, but in what concerns C and C++, I will always pick C++ unless requested otherwise.
The breathless enthusiasm for Google Glass among certain circles, and phrases like "wearable, context aware, augmented reality is our future" reminds me of the videophone mania of the 20th century.

The videophone was "just ten years in the future," every year, at least since the 1950s. We were all going to give up voice calls and replace them with video calls, any day now.

In reality, it took over sixty years before practical two-way video calling became commonplace, in the form of things like Skype or FaceTime. Even now, video calls are by and large relegated to fairly specific work purposes and a fraction of personal communications.

Something like Google Glass will be a reality at some point. What's not going to happen, though, is a world with everyone walking around wearing head-mounted augmented reality gear everywhere they go in some Vernor Vinge-inspired nootopia. At least not in this decade. I'm sure it's "just ten years away," though.
Basic SEO Tips You Must Know To Optimise Your Website Content For Search Engines
Although sensationalist title, always good to remember that attacks only get better - some angle might show up that changes this to be practical in some special circumstance. The takeaway here is to plan moving away from RC4 and there is still time to do this in orderly fashion
A co-worker who had worked at the 3M plant at the time told me this story in 2010. I emailed him, he knows David Swenson so maybe I can get David's opinion on the article.
I'd suggest that using a home grown team would reduce the risk of ending up with a bad team.
> when credit collapses (which is what this is) then the price of things bought on credit will collapse. Real estate will not be a good store of value in the short term.

I agree.

> Long term it is an excellent asset but don't think it will hold value though this.

Do you expect people will stop needing roofs over their heads?

I agree that real estate seems silly. But I don't mean swapping houses. I mean buying few properties over course of your life, renting them and passing them to your children. That never was a bad strategy and fortunes of few most wealthy families come from that.

You don't care how much property costs if you never intend to sell it. You just have to find poor bloke to live there and give you better part of his pay whatever it is.

> Bitcoin....you have seen the volatility on it lately?

Sure I bought bitcoin near its peak 2 years ago just before it crashed. Guess what. Today, I'm still having a profit on them because I never sold them.

> And the other week the miners were all asked to rollback a recent build because the crypto broke?

Oh my! That surely must have cause the price to plummet! No? Huh. I guess it's not such a fragile eggshell.

> Bitcoin is for speculation, not wealth preservation.

Trading bitcoin is for speculation. Buying and holding bitcoin is wealth preservation. Bitcoin is as durable as useful p2p network. Which have pretty decent track record.
Reminded me of my favorite bug:

http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
true, but my point is that YC will add WAY more value then the 190K diff.
You are right. I should. This is definitely not a good example of showing "Everything is an expression" is CoffeeScript.
I wrote a 140,000 line operating system with compiler by myself. I also discovered God. I made God's temple.

God says...
Brazil lure GUTENBERG-tm conceit cries swelled capacity
science intemperance awoke lathe prose True contemplating
wonted shadows gladly others heads depraved unliker kindly
restraining plot distilled jealous hand-writing irrevocable
state Creation solemnity doubtless pleasest GRATIAS sale
shed poet I'm_beginning_to_wonder examined low THAT pant
boundary bethink games returning accomplished Intelligences
what_do_you_want Lay

Fucken shrinks.

God says...

women may be taught not to do after your lewdness.

23:49 And they shall recompense your lewdness upon you, and ye shall
bear the sins of your idols: and ye shall know that I am the Lord GOD.

24:1 Again in the ninth year, in the tenth month, in the tenth day of
the month, the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 24:2 Son of man,
write thee the name of the day, even of this same day: the king of
Babylon set himself against Jerusalem this same day.

24:3 And utter a parable unto the rebellious house, and say unto them,
Thus saith the Lord GOD; Set on a pot, set it on, and also pour water
into it: 24:4 Gather the pieces thereof into it, even every good
piece, the thigh, and the shoulder; fill it with the choice bones.

24:5 Take the choice of the flock, and burn also the bones under it,
and make it boil well, and let them seethe the bones of it therein.
> If I'm to be honest, after compiling and writing this entry I'm actually in a state of disbelief about how much we've managed to get done in such a short space of time.

That is the magic of having and utilising the power of free and open-source software. Imagine not having three.js, QGIS, PostGIS etc.

Gorgeous work and a highly interesting "how we are doing it" insight. Thanks! Please more!
I don't agree.

Modules and closures are needed in any serious JS development out there. Believe me. I worked in a codebase where they thought they "still need not know a single thing about those things" and boy was that a mess.

No wonder JS devs are considered crappy coders with that kind of mindset.
This comment probably won't go down well considering the audience ... but here goes:

Yes the internet is a surveillance state ... and that is terrible ... except ... except ... is it?

My long held belief is that in an age where even the most tech-savvy cannot possibly remain anonymous all the time our best hope for privacy is in the simply overwhelming volume of data being collected. Unless I do something worthy of government attention I have reason to believe no human is going to closely examine my gmail - why on earth would they?

Therefore the only breach of privacy is by a parser collecting information for an algorithm. So I get a few ads in gmail ... 90% of the time I ignore them ... the other 10% of the time I would MUCH rather they were targeted at my interests than just meaningless drivel! Furthermore - if the ad revenue collected by these companies allows them to continue to improve a free service I love then power to them! People bitch about ads, without considering the reality that without them most of the service we value which make up the internet would not exist without them. You can't always have your cake and eat it.

Lastly I would like to address the point of privacy invasion by a government body. This is nothing new! It has just become easier. I live in the UK - a tiny island with 4,000,000 CCTV cameras. There is probably an accumulation of hundreds of hours of footage of me throughout my life... So What ?! I have done nothing wrong, and if the existence of that footage allows the prevention or solving of even one crime then I'm all for it.

If a government body wants your data - the chances are they are going to get it. Through warrant or some other means. The acceleration of this process is not necessarily a bad thing. They are, after all, the elected officials.

Anyway /rant (... runs and hides)
Interesting.. It has more practical application to IMAP or POP3.

http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/3451/is-rc4-a-prob...
For many it is - just take a look on GitHub for the massive number of static site generators people have written for various languages.
It's a bit quiet, but salaries have gone up. Hell, they've gone up even just since I graduated college.

When I saw that rise was when I started believing there really is high demand versus the supply. It does happen sometimes.
> this is not a terrible deal.

Nonsense. The EU just made the depositors junior to the bondholders of the bank! On what planet does that not have permanent implications for trust in the banking system?

Every EU depositor (esp in Greece, Spain and Italy) should start thinking about where to store their money besides the "insured" banks. Hell, with 0% interest in US banks, the FDIC should at least make some high-profile statement saying this would never happen in the US.

Edit: As near as I can tell, Nemo gets the real rationale correct - https://self-evident.org/?p=962
I really don't understand why coursera and edx classes ask me x hours per week. My amount of free time is not constant through time, so I can't enroll in edx AI class with realistic expectations and this really bugs me.

I think that all online classes should offer two paths:

1. one for people that can follow lectures and homeworks, meeting deadlines and everything. This is what edx and coursera are now offering.
2. the other for people that can't keep the course pace, allowing assignment submissions without deadlines.
Regarding quality of life, this may be my personal standard but I consider it highly relevant. I would think a company like RedHat would undergo a lot of pressure from big clients, and that does not amount to quality of life for me, especially in upper management roles.

Though obviously having the huge market of enterprise servers, which serves huge businesses, is why they have become a billion dollar company, I wouldn't want to become such a profitable company on those terms. The way their business model work, the companies that would be great to have as clients (say, small startups) don't need RedHat since they are in fact too good to work with--they can do it themselves. What's left (the billion dollar market) are the huge corporations who need stability and urgency above all. These must be a real pain to cater to. I say from the perspective of working for a company that serves Walmart with software.
You're entirely right. What I've learnt most about this project is that by utilising and combining free data and software you can quite quickly knock up something amazing. However, free and open stuff doesn't fix performance and all the little detailed issues that took up most of our time this past month.

I'm glad you like it, we'll make sure to write up more as we progress.
Thanks! The vehicle path side of things is something I'd love to explore in more detail at a later date. Right now it's all rather basic but it could certainly be a whole lot more interesting.
This really is an interesting piece of software, i can see something like this being used for targeted ads; for example, I see allot of car pictures in my area meaning an ad company could only display car related ads if the user was from my area.
This can also be used for stalking. Allot of people take pictures at home and you could be able to find their area by their username.
Worked for me in Firefox nightly.
I don't have any special insight. I'm just articulating my surprise that all the turmoil hasn't triggered a bank run sufficient to cause a crisis. When you can lose 7% of your savings overnight, even money in the mattress starts to look more attractive than a bank.
Not a default build from Mozilla but the Tor Browser Bundle[1] is exactly this.

1: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
Better Colleges Failing to Lure Talented Poor
Fascinating read, thanks for that. For those that like scribd as much as I do, here's a direct link to the report (PDF):

http://www.bcg.com/documents/file87307.pdf
1) The city does not matter. At all. Go by price and portfolio quality. Don't assume that designers in NYC and SF will automatically charge more. I used to live in a market where developers are in demand (Austin) and now I don't (Omaha). Guess what? My rates have gone up recently.

2) I would use google to search for "[US tech city] web designer" and browse portfolios online. Where [US tech city] is SF, Austin, Boston, NYC, Denver, LA, Portland, Seattle - it really doesn't matter - just pick a big city starting with the above.

I know some folks who have had some unbelievably good luck (repeatedly) using Odesk, even with US based designers. $300 for a website design kind of luck. There is a bit of a hassle in finding the good, cheap designers, but at $300, you can afford to miss a few times.

3) In my experience designers are all over the map in terms of rate, and rate is not a good indicator of quality. I've seen decent work from $25-125/hour or more, while most seem to settle around $85/hour. Don't be afraid of fixed price. It may cost more, but at least you know. Typically, it seems a basic web design - an overall theme (3 to 4 pages) will cost between $1,000 and $3,000.

4) Do not hire an agency. They are one of two things - a) very expensive b) very expensive and very bad.

The bottom line is to ask around for referrals, and review their work. I've yet to meet a designer who can come up with a wide variety of styles that look good. Usually, their work has a distinct feel to it (like an artist) and you're going to be stuck with that, so you better do your homework and like it.

And finally, my email is in my profile - I can recommend a good one in Austin.
Show HN: turning your Raspberry Pi into a retro C64 juke box using SIDPlay
Well, that could've been written better. There's clearly a conflict of interest, but on the other hand Mailbox seems like a useful application. Even great products benefit from hype.
They need to publicize this more. It was really fun in 2010, and I didn't even know they decided to do it annually since!
I also welcome anyone's anonymous cowardly downvotes

;-)
Hey, sorry didnt check HN comments till now. I will push a fix up for this today.
You guys are friggin' wizards.
You've got a point there. The other thing that just occurred to me - what if they pull the plug, a few years from now? After all, that's what's happening with Google Reader.
There are almost no bondholders. The junior bondholders have probably been wiped out, it is unclear. The senior bondholders there are (very few) are secured (covered bonds) which are senior to depositors.
But the reality is that Apple makes the lions share of profit in the industry and that is unlikely to change any time soon.

How long will that continue to be true if Apple definitively loses the platform war?
Who knew about webcomics? A short PBS video talks to online authors
By the way , i'm reading your canvas book and making a framework out of it ;) , though i'm not using javascript direclty but Haxe.

Keep on the awesome work.
If I bought land, I could develop it and make it productive, I could also invest in science to grow more food, or whatever. If we want to hedge against economic collapse, I could invest in assets that are likely to survive the collapse, or better yet, are useful in helping a recovery along. So machinery, tools, a factory, a bakery? Or just upgrade my skills a bit.

But gold just sits there and does nothing, you are at the mercy of how others value it, since it doesn't have any productive value otherwise. Just like money actually.
I don't know much about literature, but I know philosophy is very important to the sciences. Especially the philosophy of science. Philosophy also deals with important things like logic, inference, etc. I took a couple philosophy courses, and was surprised how rigorous and technical they were.
They still have it installed on some of the PCs at my school, but it's never used. But yeah, they way they deal with whatever they do teach is pitiful. No generics, exception handling, threading etc with Java. :-/ (worst part: kids are taught to tack on "throws IOException" at the end of the signature every method "where they want to use I/O" without any explanation of why that is the case.) They still use an ancient (and bugged) version of JDK and insist upon using deprecated classes.

The main problem here is that the teachers themselves aren't up to date and don't really know what they're teaching that well.
Deposit guarantees were designed for one off failures of smallish banks, not systemic debt crises where large proportions of the total debt in a country is worthless. None are trustworthy in this sense, but some countries are worse off than others. Cyprus has a bankrupt government with no access to debt.
kaichanvong's response wasn't the most appropriate either.
Yes. This.

These guys always assume the government only takes freedoms from the bad actors, but, that logic is completely circular. The entire point of our system is that the government doesn't get to make that determination unilaterally. When they do, and in particular when the Executive alone does so, it's called a dictatorship.
> And be patent trolled out of existence if you ever used it.

No, reverse engineering is legal, and projects like Samba or my company full reversing (4 products) of closed source Microsoft projects hasn't be sued. More on that: we have been contacted by Microsoft if we need something special that they can test for compliant on newer operating systems.

Try the same web scraping the google search engine (something more "benign" and they will show you a page saying that you can't automate the search process.
Is Crowd-Funding the Answer When Investors Decline?
Yeah, But adsense publishers share the money with google. Same way blogger (blogspot) does.
I looked at Mailbox about a month ago and couldn't work out what it did that Gmail for Android didn't already do.

Then I looked again a few days ago after the hype about the sale, and I still can't work out what it does that I don't already have available with Gmail for Android.

About the only email addition I'm currently excited about and finding useful is Streak.
Hold on. MG Siegler and Arrington were investors in Mailbox? This kind of conflict is really unacceptable. Bloggers need to get real about ethics if they want to be taken seriously as journalists.