skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pittsburgh, PA. There's still a surplus in housing from the steel days, so you can buy or rent for next to nothing. Carnegie Mellon along with 5 or 6 other colleges are there, so there are plenty of smart people. The city is making a nice turnaround from the old steel days to be a technology and medical research center.
I misread, sorry. I thought $4 paid one minute for 276 servers.
What's ironic is that that's barely even the case today. A few years ago, one of my friends who was a reporter had blogged something political on his personal blog that got noticed by some major political blogs and then went "viral", in a not-so-great way. Yet it was a couple days later that his bosses even knew about it, and only after getting a higher-than-usual number of hate mail and death threats in the company inbox.

But today, it's not the major media you have to worry about, initially at least...random Tweeters and Facebookers could ruin your life through retweets and wall posts. Here's one that happened a couple weeks ago...the person in question not only had a controversial Halloween costume, but at some point in time, when she was just another random person, she had tweeted a photo of her driver's license:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelzarrell/what-happens-when-you-...
ART X SMART
I really love the surface design decisions taken here. Particularly

* ML-like syntax for algebraic datatypes and matching. ML got it right; it always seems a bit off when languages try to make ADTs look like some other syntactic construct

* the cyclic and graph declarations

* accessing datatype variants using an OO-like syntax. simply brilliant.

* non-significant whitespace. for all the pros and cons, autoindenting is something i hate to give up.
From my experience, I would open the discussion with them and be honest about where you are trying to go with the product. Offer up potential partnership arrangements/rev share (whatever makes plausible sense.)

In my opinion, if they could (and it's rare that they would) knock you off overnight, then maybe you don't have a business to begin with. YMMV with that one, but thats what I generally think about it.

Although everyone will say, don't let it be a distraction. It's a HUGE distraction. Your motivation to continuing building the product may wane, you may start to devote a lot of time to the negotiation strategy. It's a distraction.

Now should you get to the point where you think the acquisition is a good route for you, really the only way to improve the offer is to have other offers (whether that's raising money, or a different acquisition offer.) If you have little revenue to speak of, I'm not sure how you argue you should get a 5000x multiple instead of a 300x multiple.
You need to add to your seat of the pants concept how the government is going to control the payment of subsidies to prevent fraud. Those result in direct payments from Federal fisc to insurance companies....

Right now the Federal system is doing that for everybody, Healthcare.gov and all the state exchanges (single point of failure as Verizon's goof demonstrated). In theory insurance companies will get access, but it's said to be a very low priority.

Then there's, oh, the straight out fraud problem, i.e. you sign up, pay your first payment, then come January you or one of your fellow enrolees find out when you try to get services or prescriptions, the insurer you thought you signed up with has never heard of you. That pretty much requires starting at a blessed government site, I don't think your stopping at a government booking site would work since that could be spoofed, right? So could close the loop snail mail confirmations from insurers.
I have a sneaking suspicion that these sorts of fine-grained admission processes only apply to "SLACS" and other small competetive & probably private schools. I have never heard of anything like this from a State (public) university.
it tells you how to make a market where the components of a pencil could be bought

As I recall, the point of the essay is that you simply can't make a "market" that would produce a pencil at all. No one can. It happens organically, or not at all.

The strength of markets is that they are self-organizing to a large degree (given the right conditions, e.g. political stability and preservation of capital), and that the sum is greater that the parts—in the essay, the 'sum' being the pencil, which no single organization (or government) can produce on it's own.
> I think because there's very little celebrity worship on HN compared to other sites.

Glad you added the qualifier "compared to other sites" there .. because I see a lot of hero worship on HN. (Steve Jobs, Paul Graham, &etc.) However it seems to be a lot less robotic.

I hope we can one day get Mr. Johnson to answer a few questions - I agree with other commenters that he is indeed an inspiration and it'd be great for my kids to know more about him. Oops, there I go, creating a hero to worship .. ;)
Thanks. Let me know if you have any feature requests.
All true, but the issue isn't really that they could improve algorithmic complexity with more technical skills, it's that they could improve their overall productivity.

There's a huge resistance to using source control, so lots of time gets spent searching through deep folder structures and finding just which 'file1_v3 (4).doc' is the right one. Data gets lost due to simple mistakes.

They spent 20 minutes coding the Runge-Kutta algorithm every time they need to run a numerical simulation without realizing or caring that (a) they could spend 25 minutes to create a function that they could reuse or (b) that the function already exists.

In short, the issue isn't computing time, it's researcher time. But the idea of spending some time now to save time later is so foreign because of the focus on getting the publication out as quick as possible.
Don't believe everything you read.
Good thing Facebook were smart enough to buy Instagram. And more importantly, have been smart enough to not screw with it (just look at all the Google+/YouTube blowback)
Puppet has implicit ordering (for example, a file will depend on its parent directory) as well as explicit (arrow syntax, new in 3.0, I think).

But really, I don't understand the complaint. Writing explicit dependencies literally what Puppet -- or any other config management system -- is about. Puppet cannot possibly know what your intent is. So you have to tell it. Just like you have to tell the OP's system. It's simple enough.

Having used Puppet for a few years, my biggest complaint is that it's not quite modular enough. For example, in one system I have a way of declaring an "app". An app may have some dependencies (Postgres, Memcached), settings, users, etc. I have two choices, I think; either have one large, monolithic define allowing me to instantiate the app from a bunch of config:

apps::app {
"someapp":
environment => 'production',
uses_unicorn => true,
db_name => 'someapp_production',
db_user => 'someapp',
memcached_servers => [...],
# etc.

...which means that every setting has to be a variable that's passed around and used by the define. Or I can split it up into pieces:

apps::app {
"someapp":
environment => 'production';
}
apps::memcached_config {
"someapp":
servers => [...];
}
apps::db_config {
"someapp":
host => ...,
db_name => ...,
db_user => ...;
}
apps::unicorn_config {
"someapp":
;
}

The problem with the latter approach is that eventually, much the configuration needs to be collected into just a few actual config files. Let's imagine that the app uses a single "app.conf". Normally you would build it using a template. But with the second approach, you would have to build it out of fragments that come from multiple defines; probably you would collect them in a conf.d type folder, and then use an "exec" definition to concatenate them into "app.conf".

Puppet is very modular, but it's a bit awkward when it comes to this level of modularity -- or I haven't found a better way.
I can't help but feel that university admissions officers should stay the hell out of determining the bounds of acceptable discourse for their applicants, since their determinations are inevitably going to be loaded with political connotations (especially when the story specifically mentions tracking an applicant "involved in a political cause"). See http://thefire.org/ for copious examples.
This just brought me back to HS and doing this on all the computer lab C64's (usually contained 3/4 of the way into some Basic program...) After a few weeks of this, there was a nice note posted to each monitor to kindly refrain from killing the machines...
Have you thought about adding some kind of QuickCheck-ish model where test cases can be randomly generated for various types?
The elephant in the room, for many of us: What would be my physical environment?

I like a challenging problem. I don't like fighting a bunch of extraneous noise and distraction while trying to concentrate on it. (Collaboration is just fine. Noise is not.)

I've yet to see a clear formula for addressing this concern in a neutral fashion (or, perceived as neutral or acceptable).
If the tests are pages long, that might be a sign that the function could be refactored. Also, the optional type annotations and refinements seem to decrease necessary testing quite a bit, compared to the typical scripting language. I would use this all the time.

And as other people mentioned, you can always use the check statement out of band, too.
There are many cities in the US that are relatively inexpensive, but I'll name a few that I've experienced:

Atlanta, GA:
Good tech community. It's home of Georgia Tech and while it's no Silicon Valley, it is the home of a few startups, StartupRiot, and other startup-related activities. The weather is warmer than most places, but it still has seasons. You can find a place to rent pretty cheap here and the city is large enough to have some of the amenities you're looking for, including a million or so singles in the dating pool.

Charleston, SC:
Probably not quite as cheap as Atlanta, but it is beautiful and still quite cheap. Smaller in size, but not "middle of nowhere" small. Plus, there's the beach.

Florida:
Someone mentioned Miami, but if you seek warm weather and reasonable cost of living, Tampa, Orlando and other cities in Florida are great. The down side is that I don't think there is much startup activity, the upside is I've heard it's great for singles and there is beach, beach, theme parks, beach and probably a few other things to do in between hurricanes.

Athens, GA:
Smaller city, but a college town. See jboggan's comment.
Full Screen Mario Takedown Notice
The rest is "mere algebra" as one of my classmates used to say ;-)
Sorry if I'm being insensitive, but how is Chinese Restaurant Syndrome "absurdly racist"? If people were having health problems as a consequence of eating corned beef, I would, as a Jew, have no problem with that condition being called "Jewish Deli Syndrome".
Reddit gold began in July 2010: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html

4chan passes are pretty recent.
One line you could draw is whether there's a prior relationship between the patent holder and the defendant (or the successors to those parties). BUT FOR Lonnie Johnson's work, Larami (and by extension, Hasbro) could not have made Nerf guns or Super Soakers (or at the very least, it would have taken some longer to come to market).

In contrast, you can't make any similar statement about what IV, Lodsys, or other trolls do. For the most part, business don't find out about those patents until after a lawsuit has been filed. There's no benefit derived from what IV or Lodsys "invented" and that's why it seems unfair.

This is basically the idea behind an "independent invention" defense -- that is, if I can prove that I independently invented something without assistance from the whoever previously patented the invention at issue, I should be able to get that patent suit tossed out.

Unfortunately, that's not what the law currently says. Moreover, thee's a fair amount of legitimate pushback against the idea. It's hard (but not impossible) to prove someone knew about a patent before they made something. And the question of whether something was independently invented usually isn't a binary one. If the patent holder tells his friend who tells her friend who mentions something in passing to me which inspires my invention, did I invent my product independently of the patent holder? Hard to draw a bright line there (but not impossible).
At the other end are definitions of which several fit on a single line:

data Color = Red | Black
I think most of "flyover" country would satisfy you question, but here in New Mexico, you can find a decent apartment for $500/mo (my mortgage on a house with a quarter acre is $800/mo) I'm in the south, but most of northern New Mexico would be similar. You wouldn't be living in the top neighborhoods (though my house is in a historic desirable little town) but despite what you saw on Breaking Bad, nowhere in NM will have bad crime, except some very limited spots.
I remember first seeing a Super Soaker in a Toys 'R Us sometime in 1991 (I think), and thinking 'That's genius'. I'm glad to know the guy who made it 'got paid'.
Análise Kit Ganhe Dinheiro Online
How many people taking intro to CS at MIT do you think are beginners who have never programmed before?
Indeed; according to this author, the guys at Naughty Dog were "awful" (writing their own compiler) during a period where I would have killed to work with them.
Well I'm self-taught so I have to start somewhere. I'm not sure I could put together a stand-alone tool and still complete my Ph.D. program. Anyways I've found most stand-alone tools just aren't flexible enough and I don't feel like making something I wouldn't use myself.
What'd the comment say?
a better question is "Was your yahoo mail NOT hacked?" In the past year or two, almost every @yahoo friend in my address book has had their account compromised sending spam to everyone in their address book. That yahoo's gloriously compensated new CEO didn't make this priority one on day one shows how unconcerned they are with user experience. They must be experiencing a flood of outmigration to other email account services (yes to icloud and gmail)...just plain dumb.
I work remotely from home in the middle of Nebraska. I get paid a SF-like salary but pay little in rent in comparison.
>“To me, it’s a huge problem,” said Bradley S. Shear, a lawyer specializing in social media law. For one thing, Mr. Shear told me, colleges might erroneously identify the account of a person with the same name as a prospective student — or even mistake an impostor’s account — as belonging to the applicant, potentially leading to unfair treatment. “Often,” he added, “false and misleading content online is taken as fact.”

This is the bit that troubles me. In fact, a similar phenomenon nearly cost me a job while I was in grad school. I applied for a position with the CS department, and my future boss had received some emails from a guy with the same first and last name, but different middle initial that were, let's just say, quite unprofessional. It's only because I was told and given the chance to point it out that I got the job.

I could probably have lived without the job in this case (it was only a 20-hour a week student job, after all), but what if it weren't? My name is common enough that unless you know something about me beyond first and last name, you won't find me on the internet. I'm practically John Smith (not my real name, obviously).
Spider-drones weave high-rise structures out of cables
This makes me so infuriated! This site is great, it's exactly what needed to be done, it works, and of course, it was NOT designed by our government, because it works, and that just makes way too much sense! I used the CA site before to look at available covarage. It's much more dificult to use, and it hides from me the more affordable "Catastrophic Plan" for which I do qualify, because I am under 30 years old. They do not want people to sign up for that plan, so they just hide it! This is outrageous beyond belief.

All this site now needs is the ability for the insurance companies to upload information about their plans directly to thehealthsherpa.com and we can forget about healthcare.gov all together. People signed up for years for insurance coverage by phone, directly with the companies, and they can continue to do so. The exchange should be just be an informational tool. This site does the trick.

I think thehealthsherpa.com should provide links, or better yet, add pages to the site directly, to explain the different plans and regulations for different states, so it can be more of an information hub. Great Job!
Yea, in the Netherlands nobody wears a helmet, but it's far safer to bike there than in the US. People find it almost as strange to wear a helmet on a bicycle as wearing a helmet for walking or driving in a car.
Thanks! I'll definitely check it out!
Performance Comparison of Web Map Services
Somewhat of a surprise... Google maps ranks bottom in all categories
Google Translate is by no means a counter-example. Certainly, it's flawed and imperfect. But Google Translate is the state of the art. You will not find any existing purely automated system that does the task better. Sure, some hypothetical, possibly AI-complete system with rich language understanding would do better. Good luck building that, especially without processing a huge corpus.
Well, as I understand it the subsidies result in direct draws on the Federal fisc by the insurers, and the latter can't afford to wait till the next calendar year to get paid. And there's certainly a desire to avoid fraud given that schedule of payments, if I'm correct about it.

Erk: if you're right about estimates and it depending on that years tax return; what do you do if you lose your job and can't afford to pay the unsubsidized rate? What if you earn a lot more money, spend too much of it, and then get hit with a huge bill next April 15th?

I'm disabled and on Medicare so I haven't been looking into these fine details ... this all sounds unworkable to me at first glance, unless it's retrospective based on ... the last year's tax return, but, erk, can't do that either since that don't be doable before the mid-December deadline necessary to get you into a insurer's system.

WTF???

ADDED: this probably explains why the Federal system has to do this, access to IRS payments data (e.g. withholding) is required, it's sensitive data and only they have all of it. Although Experian has a income verification role (people without credit, like sick young adults who can't leave the nest are at last count thoroughly screwed because the Federal site isn't handling this manual intervention well or at all), but I assume that's a double check. Maybe not? Maybe they couldn't get that info out of the IRS's generally high latency (often weeks and months, sometimes years) computer systems?
In MATLAB, R, or numpy, it's the difference between `mean(n)` and manually looping. It's not an issue of algorithmic efficiency, it's an issue of lost productivity because they don't even write a function to reuse (all they understand is scripting) they recode the loop every single time they have to sum or take the mean of something.
I'm playing devil's advocate here, but a full-time front-end designer might care deeply about such things. I would not, for example, take a J2EE job even though I know Java because I know they are not "just the same." I could see a designer caring about the stylesheets they'd be working with even though it's all fundamentally CSS.
Had a friend who was recently in a similar situation minus the YC part and basically it turned out to be a massive waste of time (and legal fees) when they decided he wasn't the 'right fit' for their culture. It was more of an acqui-hire, but the lessons learned are still relevant here. Start discussions but don't let it take over everything as they might just be testing the water.

So in summary, continue business as usual while you negotiate and be skeptical of their motivations.
@sherr Thanks for the kind words and encouragement. I guess I should have clarified that by NO MEANS do I consider myself a Software Engineer, I am still VERY much a junior developer who has the awesome opportunity to get to work on an awesome development team at ZipList! I love getting to learn and be mentored by the senior developers at ZipList. I only wrote this article and blog to show others not to give into the naysayers and that regardless of your prior experience or education you CAN learn, and get hired even if you don't have a CS degree or any degree for that matter. Everyday I am SO excited to get the opportunity to really start to learn this wonderful craft at a great company....keep coding peeps, you can do it! :-)
I've heard that the sickness associated with MSG is more likely due to ingesting old rice.

If you want to get glutamates in your food, when cooking with meat proteins, add mushrooms, seaweed, or even a single prawn or anchovy.
I originally wrote this for a computer vision application (averaging frames attenuates low-light noise) but I'm curious what other use cases people come up with. :)
> your body is actually better at processing MSG than salt

A citation or source would be much appreciated.
Yeah, if the USG feels fine about spying on our allies' governments for mere economic negotiation advantage, it's just a short hop to spying on opposing lawyers in domestic cases.
Honestly, if you're making $100k and this is something that you're thinking about, you're living paycheck to paycheck and you need to learn how to manage your money.
Why Do Brits Accept Surveillance?
There was a long thread at metafilter about MSG fairly recently, and I found this comment from a biochemist to be a really good, straightforward primer on what exactly MSG is and how it is metabolized:

http://www.metafilter.com/131105/Dorito-Powder#5147903
I for one am flabbergasted by things people post to their public twitter accounts. Granted, you are well within your rights to post racist, homophobic, or sexist things to your account just like schools and employers are within their rights to look these things up and make decisions based on what they find.

When I have kids someday I'll remind them to post like everyone in the whole world is going to read it.
Hermann Rorschach’s Original Rorschach Test
Really impressed with results for words like 'twirling', 'homoiconicity', 'ferromagnetic', 'mahler'.

Unimpressed by 'sandwiches', which surprised me.
Longest streak I know of - my friend Mahmoud is up to 297 days (for public projects): https://github.com/mahmoud
Single page:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/business/they-loved-your-g...
> should help provide a reference point for political debate

So the official healthcare.gov is by design then.