skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"the government will have ever greater incentives to force whatever they think is healthy (at the time) on you in order to save a buck"

You mean, as opposed to the way the health insurance companies reduce coverage and claim pre-existing conditions and in general do everything they can to make you pay more, and get less, in order to save a buck?

I'm sorry, buddy. The free market has failed. I'll take government-style health care like they have in Canada over what we have here. At least then we can vote the sons of bitches out if they pull shenanigans.
Reverse a 100 GB file
Why SaaS will prevail by 2015
Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure
A Tour of Broken Wall Street: A displaced banker guides tourists through the carnage.
Maybe if we were both more clear about the point we were trying to make, we would agree :) Fact of the matter is that age isn't a sole determining factor of one's entrepreneurial mindset, but it nevertheless plays a role, albeit small or significant depending on the person. I've partnered with a mid-30's guy who in the end wasn't fulfilling his responsibilities because he was in the midst trying to get a job and feed his wife and son.

I'm now experiencing a partnership with a mid-50's guy. I'm working alongside him and several others my age. What can I say? I am experiencing exactly what I speak of right now. We have different personal goals but the beauty of it all is that no matter our personal goals we are all headed in the same direction.

So no hating here. Both young and old make for great entrepreneurs, just many times with different personal goals. What exactly are we arguing?
Good point. I think what he meant to say is that the article made sweeping generalizations about the quality of human decision making, resting on a few superficial stats and questionable assumptions. It also fetishized tricks to change folks' behavior while pretending that Obama's public policy goals are indisputable. Since one man's ideal world is not the same as another man's, and the form one's ideal world takes is generally governed by first principles that can't be proved, and since public policy is the means to transform the world into one's ideal, the notion that the administration's policies can't be criticized is ludicrously silly. Sure, I'm interested in the means, but it's by no means settled what the ends should be. (Nor will it ever be, I should add, as long as people are free to disagree.)

Anyone who has followed Time Magazine at all knows that this is typical of its writing.
I agree with you. Unless I misunderstood the question; the theoretical "right" answer is just wrong.

Let's make it more practical.
There is 100k in the table. A guy tells you, head you double the money, tail, you stop, and get what is there, but you have to pay a fee.

Obviously, up to 100k for the fee, it is no brainer, head you end up with at least 200k, tail, you go home with 100k, same as the fee you paid.

BUT: are you willing to pay 120k? 150k? Mathematically, you should, as the probablity of winning is a lot larger, but realistically you have 50% chance that you might loose 50k right away.

Assuming that all your savings are 100k, would you have the stomach to a accept this risk?

Most normal people, probably not. But according to this lawfirm, you should. Maybe this thinking got us in trouble in the first place.
Time, Not Money, Needed for Money-Makers
I've heard it's very valuable for shopping for shoes where sizing must be very precise, i.e. rock climbing shoes. Order the 3 sizes you usually dance around, and keep the one that fits you best.
Windows XP does not ship with an h264 codec. It is actually quite difficult for a user to find an h264 codec for Windows if they want to playback videos.

Another issue with H.264 playback is the licensing costs. According to the mpegla website, after 31st December 2010 content producers will have to pay money just to stream content, let along decode or encode to H.264.
Disclosure: Downvoted for ass kissing.
It bugged me too, but hey, that's journalism.

My gut said 3 bucks. That's about as much as I would want to lose on a Martingale bet.
When I search something it says "Want to sell through the TapInko network? Click here."

Since the words are already a blue hyperlink, you can probably leave off "Click here."
Ask HN: Obsessive Asian Parents
This isn't meant as a rant. This is also meant to be on topic.

From personal experience (as someone raised in an Asian culture), it appears that there is a strong tendency to take a "stable" route in life (i.e. doctor / engineer / lawyer). In the case of CS majors, this maps to "work at google / yahoo / microsoft" ... or "go to grad school and get a PhD", with startups looked down upon.

If you are in this category, or know of people that are in this category ... how did you break out of this (and deal with the opinions of parents / culture you were raised in) to pursue your startups?
I think a lot of people saying that the money is important really mean that a socially acceptable framework for quitting your job/school is important.
Maybe I should have said "they don't have type inference".
As kyro said, being accepted or rejected by YC should not be a determining event when it comes to "should I continue". Yes, you should continue, in the same way you would have if YC had never existed.
the question is not one of 'should continue' it's one of should I go out and organize and start building the legal entity now, or should I code for 6 more months and try again.
Blocking Google is a gambit to get aggregators (Google, others) to negotiate a licensing fee.

(Aggregator license revenue + site revenue + declining print revenue) > (site revenue + declining print revenue). It's a tourniquet.
When I click on "sign in" it does not auto-focus me to the username box.
If I can offer an alternative to post-rejection angst: just implement it. Do it on nights and weekends, scale down your feature expectations to the bare minimum (for 1.0, anyhow), maybe plan on something that actually has a chance of taking money from paying customers rather than playing the VC game, whatever you need to do.

Its quite viable, particularly for small team sizes, and you will learn quite a bit about business, which will serve you in good stead no matter where your career or further ambitions take you.

You'll also note that there are plenty of imitation-worthy businesses out there which were in your shoes once. Basecamp got written as a side project between consulting work. Balsamiq Mockups was a one-man band. I could bore you to death with stories of niche software firms that do pretty well for themselves.
Just to clarify, Reagan's tax cuts were actually a revenue windfall for the Treasury, as it unlocked a ton of capital gains that investors had been sitting on and resulted in an economic expansion that, aside from a brief recession in 90-91, pushed through the end of Clinton's administration[1].

[1] Not that Bush Sr. and Clinton deserve no credit, of course, Some folks have unfairly vilified Bush Sr., but the fact is, economists agree that the US was emerging from recession before the end of his administration
holly adsense-laden batman. that site is unreadably over stuffed with ads.
Risk is factored in to expected return.

Based on running this code a half dozen times, I'd pay up to $8 to play.

http://codepad.org/z4LALzhr

EDIT: Although I am aware that mathematically, the potential upside is infinite.
Valve Source - Multiplayer Networking
Webhostingpad vs Lunarpages (budget cpanel hosting comparison)
Webhostingpad hosting is one of the best budget cpanel hosting provider, and one of its direct competitor is lunarpages hosting which also offering cpanel hosting plan at nearly/similar price range.
I believe that bluetooth support on Android is currently limited to headsets.

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2008/08/some-informat...
not sure if this is a limitation of google maps API, but zooming in/out with the scroll wheel would be nice.
Fox News Columnist Fired for Reviewing Leaked Wolverine Movie
nice post, I think we were at the same sessions. I thought Eric Gilbert's talk was the best talk I saw today. Although, it's funny how simple his method was though -- really he just took a little bit of social theory, and then ran a regression against ties on facebook and the R^2 turned out to be interesting. (very clean study though).

Let's hope tomorrow has more to bring. Good questions at the talks, btw.
No, it's not all that admirable. It's nice, but I see nothing to "admire" there. And I don't think it's "brilliant" either.

It's easy to get eyeballs. Microsoft could get a million visitors right now by replacing their homepage with a black screen with a smiley in the middle. The question is, do they benefit from these eyeballs? I don't see that Skittles will.
I've spent time working at one of the "best" Wall Street banks as a student. I'm considering taking a full time job. At the time that I got started down the path I just applied to companies that had the reputations for having the smartest people.

I did indeed work with some very bright people on some challenging and cool projects. The smart people and cool projects notwithstanding, there are still annoying quirks/red tape/etc anytime you work at a big Wall St. firm.
Also, there is this conveyor belt system that if you've been around Wall Street you probably notice. Many of the people I worked with follow a similar life pattern: attended a "prestigious" college, landed their first job out of school on the Street, they work hard to get significant promotion after X years, then they work their asses off and finally after 2*X years get a corner office and a major promotion.

I actually asked some of the fellow interns/new hires I worked with point-blank: if you are this talented, and can work this hard for the firm... why not go off on your own and let your ability take you as far as you can go? I got laughed off, and I felt a little embarrassed for even posing the question at the time (this was before the complete sub-prime collapse).

As I mentioned above, I'm still considering a full time job. I think my reasoning is based primarily on the good pay, access to smart people, and interesting projects. Do I think I could be doing better for myself? Heck yes. Why do I settle then? It's hard to get off the conveyor belt.
the single most attractive girl from class

Apropos of nothing, I started doing competitive forensics in 8th grade to get over a speech impediment and generic social anxiety, and continued doing it through college. It worked like a charm.

I never considered using the same techniques for, e.g., chatting up young ladies until about this year. Works like a charm. Effity I wish I had realized that ten years ago. (Some of the techniques, anyhow. The whole play-to-crush ethos, not so much. Eye contact? Sounding confident of what you are saying? Intently listening and coming back to things you've both said later in the conversation for emphasis? They work great.)
Related (though it was on here so you might've already seen it): http://en.chinaelections.org/NewsInfo.asp?NewsID=19911
Most "money back guarantee" or "cancel before being charged" sites count on one simple fact: 90+% of people won't either ask for their money back, or cancel their account.

It's pretty much a no-brainer to offer a money-back guarantee to consumers - and maybe even to businesses.
I went to grad school first. Now, time for a startup. ;-)

Actually, my parents have been very supportive of whatever I want to do. I think yours will be too -- just speak from your heart. Try to convince them how you feel about things. Most parents only want what's good for their child. However, often this leads to making/forcing decisions on the child -- but only if they feel the child may be directionless. State your goals succinctly. Back your reasoning vigorously. You may be pleasantly surprised.
This strikes me as relatively good journalism.
I'm not asian, but I have a number of asian friends. In fact, my first cofounder and my current cofounder are both from Hong Kong.

I think the "stable" pressure is present in Europe too. It's not just an asian thing. I'd argue that asians actually have it easier than europeans, because at least asia (well, China in any case) has a strong tradition of commerce and entrepreneurialism. In fact, I think that if it wasn't for my asian friends, I probably would have stuck with the normal, thing, to get a steady, stable career...
That I can't answer, since I'm not familiar with the legal kerfuffle surrounding incorporation in the US. In the UK, incorporating takes about an hour and costs £50, but I hear that it's a lot harder and more onerous in the US.
Sony Ericsson K330 phone with a difference
It lets you enjoy lasting talk time and standby times. You would simply love the Fm radio integrated in to the phone and the torch light feature that helps you see in the dark. The phone is a great buy in all sense.
Wow, I read through the discussion. No way in hell anyone would be able to answer that in an interview, unless they'd seen it before.
Perhaps you missed the word volunteers. Habitat for Humanity has helped a lot of people; nit picking the source of the volunteers is uncalled for.
It would be a good thing. Whether or not it's achievable is entirely a different matter but if that genie could be put back in the bottle it'd be a wonderful thing.
I don't know about incorporation, but an llc takes about as much in the US. it's not really an easy question generally. I'll probably end up waiting until closer to a 'production' release
just talk to them.

express to them what you want, how you plan to get it, and what you're sacrificing (both short-term and long-term) for it.

you'd be shocked how supportive they might be.
Ask HN: Using Scalr
Searched HN on this topic and most comments are around console-like management. Has anyone used its auto scaling features? If so, please share experiences.
Just between you and me, stability is a myth, its a freaking jungle out there, and if you don't adapt to that reality you're tiger-food. However, that never flew with my mom, either.

a) Business skills give me an excellent fall-back option to $SAFE_CHOICE if the business thing doesn't work out early in my career. (Where early is "age plus five years" and updated accordingly.)

b) I considered going to graduate school but I was worried that going into debt for it wouldn't be financially prudent, so I decided to better myself by hard work and independent study. You can appreciate the value of hard work and independent study to avoid debt, right?

c) Microsoft et al would scarcely consider hiring someone who didn't have experience doing this. After all, they'd be seen as someone who had insufficient drive to do the work. I'm just looking out for my future.

(I'm not Asian, I'm just a Japanese salaryman.)
Maybe the key is convincing them that you know better? I knew one girl born in South Korea whose father (still living in Korea) was totally hands-off, with an attitude of, "Whoa, you understand the USA way better than I do; I'm out of my depth here; do what you think is best." She said it was night and day compared to how he had behaved when she first moved to the US, but she didn't say what had changed his mind. However, I know she had survived some really bad shit that her father was totally powerless to help her with, so maybe that experience of helplessness convinced him, or maybe watching her handle it gave him respect for her. Either way, not very helpful for you, I guess.
yes, we'll introduce the "refer a friend" + "import your contact list" in a couple weeks
I disagree. I think the most popular use case for Twitter involves following a bunch of people you don't know, or barely know. For tech people, this works great because you can follow people in your field (may or may not be friends). For plain ol' Jane and John Doe, they can follow celebrities or people that align with their interests (may or may not be friends).

Unless Facebook allows a more one-way relationship, it won't really compete more with Twitter. Until then, they'll overlap in a few places, but I think they'll each keep succeeding at what they're best at already.
Looks like throwing bill collectors and lawyers at people that don't owe money, or fully paid their bills is the big growth industry right now.

Between this report, and all the reports I've seen of AFNI try to collect (and harrassing if they refuse to pay) paid Verizon accounts...

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/3/31/6553/40643

http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/258/RipOff0258146.htm

It appears the way Corporate America's new growth industry is demanding people pay bills that are already paid, or never owed in the first place, and harrassing them if they refuse.
Well, I think its mixed.

I would think my parent(s) qualifies as having the traditional asian mind-set. But the general consensus I find among them is that starting your own business and being your own boss gives you more security\freedom than working at a big company. However that varies greatly depending on what type of person you are.

In my family, those that did some kind of engineering or medicine are generally thought of as being smart and capable of rising in any company but not really the type to go out and start their own business. However those that tended to do more business\arts related streams are encouraged to start something on their own rather than get employed somewhere.

Or maybe my family just has weird stereotypes.
That's just one line of code, which I had enabled, but I turned off because it confused people in testing.
Practical web programming with PLT Scheme - Serving XHTML
I am an Asian American CS major from a good university. I am working full-time with 3 other Asian American engineers on our first startup straight out of college.

My parents are super liberal and I am truly thankful for the opportunity that I was given growing up. They saved up enough for me to go to a private school, but I chose to go to a public one instead. I used that difference to do my first startup, and I am happy to say that we're 4 full-time employees at ramen-profitability 2 months after graduation.

My advice is that doing a startup full-time is probably the hardest thing you will do in your life. But if you love what you do, and I do, you will forget about what your parents and peers are going to tell you to do and just do it. You live for yourself, and I'm sure that when you make it big your parents will accept your choices.
Tools for Analysing and Tracking Your Competitors
Practical web programming with PLT Scheme - Custom dispatchers
I wasn't sure whether he meant words as in the data size unit or words as in English words. However, since we are assuming it's ASCII, 1 char = 1 byte.
Reverse the order of the bytes in each word.
Reverse the order of bytes in the file.
[edit]If you're doing 1 word = the unit of size, the first step isn't necessary since all words will obviously be the same length. Just go through and swap the 1st word with the Nth, the 2nd with the (N-1)th, etc.[/edit]
Since you are doing in-place swapping, you aren't using any extra memory aside from a 1-byte (word) temporary register.
If you want to be really clever, you can use the XOR swap algorithm and not use the byte at all (at the cost of more CPU use).
This will work in O(N) time.
The trie doesn't require a limited set of words. Counts can easily be used or not. If you were to write the entire path to disk, you'd be optimizing the time complexity while probably hammering the filesystem (and greatly increasing the (externalized/ignored) FS portion of the time complexity). If you do a left-biased traversal/generation of a trie in tiers, you get a merge-like sort and reduce the space cost of a normally distributed set of data.
Your merge files should be offsets of the original file. Divide the offsets into an appropriate number of divisions (one for each of the characters in the set).
Using the offsets, divided into sets of N starting characters, you'd get 256 (for first byte) or 64k (for two bytes) (sub)sets. You can continue the pattern, if appropriate, or just do the merge sort.
Your first-pass cost is the generation of the first level sets, and then your additional costs are limited to the division of each set as you reach them. Create sets by the next character (an additional 256 files), and keep moving down. You're creating a tree structure on disk and creating/traversing it in tiers.
Your worst case for this is a common prefix. In the most basic implementation, you'd end up with NM comparisons, in NM^2 space, across M files (N:words, M:prefix length). A reasonable implementation would delete the parent file, so you should stay near the 2NM space for disk. Your in-memory cost is almost zero though, since you're relying on M in the worst implementation and '1' in the best.
Ask YC: What Non Web Application Startups have been picked?
I've seen a lot of YC Web App startups, but I can't recall one that wasn't (given I don't keep close track). Can anyone tell me one? Non IT? or even just systems programming. I'm referring to the entire history of YC, not just this round.
It would be great if a startup could help artists emulate the process that Trent has pioneered. A few artists are really using the internet to connect with their fans and make a living, but it seems to be individually reinvented by each artist.
I am all for preserving HN's sanctity, and I agree with and appreciate most of the points you make. But your tone makes the whole thing sound almost exclusively like "losers, please keep your rejection sob stories away from HN". I wonder how rejected applicants will take your well-meant advice.

Rejection has a human angle, and refusing to acknowledge that people respond to it in (seemingly) irrational ways doesn't help those who need encouragement, validation, or just knowledge of the fact that they are not alone. How is asking other hackers 'which web framework to use?' any 'better' than asking other YC applicants rejection related questions, given that this is effectively the only public YC forum?
I've had some problems diving into Perl land, and I'd appreciate your thoughts. While it's obviously very possible to have clean and elegant code in any language (corollary: you can write cobol in any language), I've found that when I'm stuck and I go to Google for a hint, the piece of code I'll end up with will never follow any common style guidelines -- it's always different.

In contrast, Python seems to have more style conventions designed into the syntax and the language, and when I last did much with ruby (pre-rails) it seemed pretty intuitive overall (something about "principle of least surprise").

I don't have much skin in this game: I'm a sysadmin by trade and tend to stick to the traditional Unix tools, but I would like any suggestions you have for people who want to develop good taste in Perl syntax and program design.
Just hold on for a few few days? No one has been picked yet. Patience :)
I agree that the current system is broken. I actually think that "health insurance" tied to employment as it currently stands is the opposite of free market but I can still switch health insurance providers much more easily than I can politicians.

I know 2 different Canadians who have flown to the US to get MRI's instead of waiting the months required to get them in Canada. I'm not convinced "Canadian style" is the best way either.

What I'm most afraid of though, isn't another failed healthcare system, Ayn Rand style, or People's Republic style. Its when a politician decides that my body in some way belongs to him and he can decide what I can eat. That's what I'm gettin at here; I'm certainly open to debate the merits of different healthcare systems. I just wanted to point out that particular unintended consequence/perverse incentive.
Can Google queries help predict economic activity? [pdf]
I'm talking all time, not just this time.
Couldn't agree more. Just talk to them, tell them this is exactly what you want to do. They will understand, hopefully. If they don't then tell them that you just want their support :)
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