skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please review my Numbrosia 3 puzzle for the iPhone and iPod touch.
i'd think in this way:

y = operator+(x, operator++(x));

and therefore operator++(x) would be called before operator+()
I'm particularly interested in knowing whether the tutorial is good enough.
The modern US justice system, conversely, assumes that almost noone can be rehabilitated. At least, nobody that's committed anything resembling a serious crime.
No RSS feed. :(
Er, "undisputed" is not the same as "indisputable". Just sayin'.
great angle on this story from SiliconANGLE.com lots buzzing on why this happened. Its an example of the misinformed blogosphere. Thanks for clarifying the story
By that logic no one should bother voting, in which case the entire system would fail to work at all, obviously a flawed outcome.

An outcome you do not prefer is not automatically irrational. You just don't prefer it. The solution is not to wish everyone would act against their own interests to produce your preferred outcome, but to change the incentives so that your preferred outcome is the natural result of rational choices.
Foreigners Attending US Grad Schools Way Down: Wake Up, Xenophobes
And their "future work" is also very interesting:

"We’re currently working with the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies on a version of an Augmented Reality version of Videotrace that you can use while walking around. The idea is that you’d use a camera as a modelling tool. You would then walk around a city, modelling it as you go. Good progress is being made towards this goal, with a prototype system in the making."

http://punchcard.com.au/wordpress/?page_id=18
Twitter to Introduce Pro Accounts?
Not really that impressive, esp. compared to the product offered by Caustic graphics that has been posted here before, http://www.caustic.com/ they do realtime ray tracing with a piece of hard ware a kin to a graphics card that fits in a desktop.
I suppose that would depend on what ISPs you're buying transit through.

Technically, the smallest block you can announce that won't be filtered is still /24, and many do, including networks that punch holes in their own aggregates, or their upstream ISPs' aggregates for redundancy, etc.

However, with the global BGP table coming in at just shy of 300,000 routes now, there's pressure to filter small prefixes more and more. There's kind of a de facto gentleman's agreement among the sorts of folks that are in NANOG that /22 should be the new de facto "smallest prefix" wherever possible. I really think getting your /24 announced and propagated (if it's truly a provider-independent block from a RIR, e.g. ARIN, and not just a Class C subnet from an ISP network) might be encumbered by hemming and hawing from routing administrators that are constantly keeping the dwindling capacity of existing routers to hold full BGP views - especially multiple full views from multiple peers - in mind. You can definitely do it, but the appeal of a /24 is slightly diminished in light of that.
The silver lining may be that the survival rate is about the same in expansions and recessions, says Dane Stangler, senior analyst at Kauffman. ...

Research from Kauffman in June found that more than half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list in 2009 and nearly half of the companies on the Inc. magazine 2008 list were founded during a recession or bear market.

This makes either perfect sense or no sense at all. Would it also follow that given the cyclical nature of the economy, about half the time we're in a "bull" market and half the time we're in a "bear" market? Not sure how useful this statistic is. After all, it takes many companies awhile to get to the Fortune 500.

(Edit) My brain must still be stuck on Seth Goldin's 50-50 Suburban/Prius math problem from yesterday. I guess what this article amounts to is anything that can be construed as good news would be encouraging to the entrepreneur!
A-Line Collection
From your article:

You could see why some of TipJoy’s backers, which include BetaWorks, the Accelerator Group, ex-Googler Chris Sacca and the Y Combinator start-up factory, might cry foul.

Have any of them actually cried foul? I recommend following up with them if you are really interested in the facts.
I will accept that Facebook did not think this way (ie. it is cheaper to hire developer than acquire). But to be fair to me, until this parent comment, nowhere had you actually mentioned that you knew exactly why Facebook passed on the acquisition. Until you mentioned that fact, it was reasonable to assume that one party in a negotiation does not know all the motivations of the other party.

Having said that I would still let my thesis stand while withdrawing the Tipjoy incident as any kind of evidence of that thesis: given the proliferation of start-ups and the buyer's market, it is reasonable for acquirers to think that way.
Looks like a good start! Thanks for the link.
It may look unintuitive, but it's just an optimmization problem. When you optimize, you always begin with the most resource-intensive element, because that's where most of the gains are.
How the hell does it know my nearby access points? I'm running it on Ubuntu. Sure, it's possible, but how does it have access to this information? Does it contain code to access every wifi-manager API in existence?
Not all of us do.
Well again, the news site saying the law was approved, is not from Mexico (TribunaLatina based in Spain). All law updates are published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación http://dof.gob.mx Searching that site for 'droga', or 'marihuana', 'posesión', etc. turnes out nothing relevant. Will have to call the family over there later to get more insight.
It's quite impossible to predict those numbers, as it depends on so many other factors outside of "it's a social web application!".

For these kinds of things the only thing you can depend on before launch, for better or worse, is your own common sense.

In an industry that tries to be successful by providing value for free, all bets are off and the old rules don't apply anymore.
Undefined depends on the language. In many languages, the precedence rules are explicit enough that this code is clearly defined. In Ultilang (my own), Boo, and others, this would be parsed as x + {x += 1; x} and processed left-to-right.
Wadden Islands are as varied as the islands themselves.
Most Exciting Web Apps or Services (What else should be on the list?)
Looks like they want to make more people blind with that awfully small font and a lot of cluttered text. A bit sarcastic that a product for the blind has a pretty universally inaccessible site.

Anyway, really cool and useful gadget. I hope most or all people who need it get access to these devices in the future.
Tasting the Light: Device Lets the Blind "See" with Their Tongues
It only requires flash for rendering on browsers which don't have native SVG support - i.e. everyone except IE gets native rendering, and on IE it uses a flash object to do the rendering. There's really not much alternative to this - people forget how backward IE is, in many respects. The only other way to do this really, is to use IE's VML 'support' to do the SVG rendering, which is what Dojo.GFX (http://www.dojotoolkit.org/book/dojo-book-0-9/part-3-program...) currently does. The drawback to doing that, is that MS has been successively sabotaging their VML support with each IE release, degrading it each time, presumably on purpose.
I would expect 22. On a related a aside this reminds me of a time in school where I wrote a recursive function that I called using the post decrement operator as follows, some_func(x--) which was supposed to stop recursion when x reached zero. Of course, it never did and went until it filled the stack. One of those things that stares you in the face and yet takes hours before you're like duh.
Free book/lecture notes on AI metaheuristics algorithms
Not having a model is better than using a model based on imaginary data, which is what you'll have until you launch your site. As other people here have pointed out, traffic for new sites is very bursty and depends in large part on who links to you when.
Whatever estimate you come up with, will be BS, and if investors know their way around, they'll know this. This is true not only for your user base, but your sales and revenue projections as well. Probably the most accurate number you can get are expenses, and even that won't be very good.

But all of the above doesn't mean you shouldn't do your homework. So you still have to do some research, learn how other startups grew, estimate your market and market penetration in time. What investors really care about is the reasoning behind estimating those numbers, rather than the numbers themselves.

Here's a good series of posts with useful tips for pitching a VC:

- http://bothsidesofthetable.com/pitching-a-vc/

Good luck!
Mark Logic is more than legit, they have some very sexy stuff. They also power, to demonstrate their products foo, Mark Mail which is becoming one of the most widely used mail archive tools: www.markmail.org.
These people?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataPower

I suspect that Google Protocol Buffers, Thrift, etc. are sufficient workarounds for anyone who has a current need for one of these things. If you are using XML as your payload and worried about shaving off milliseconds of latency, then you've done the wrong thing. Perhaps large IT organizations are forced to suffer the consequences of vendor-provided interoperability schemes and buy products like this to make the best of a bad situation.
Dividing equity between founders
RateMyMD.com appears to be a parked domain. Maybe they mean http://www.ratemds.com?
Dunno, but I actually found the site to be very pleasantly straightforward and relatively easy to read. Ctrl - Scroll UpDown in the future to change font size; it's a nifty thing.
D. Crockford on JSON: "An influence was Rebol, a shame it’s not more popular"
JSON had a lot of influences on its design. It didn’t just come out of my head. It’s based on a lot of things that I had observed over the years. The first – maybe the greatest – influence was Lisp. The thing that was brilliant about Lisp was it used exactly the same representation for programs and data. Originally, the idea was that you would have programs that could act on themselves as data, and do interesting things. … Another influence was Rebol. Rebol’s a more modern language, but with some very similar ideas to Lisp, in that it’s all built upon a representation of data which is then executable as programs. But it’s a much richer thing syntactically. Rebol is a brilliant language, and it’s a shame it’s not more popular, because it deserves to be.
I understand what the author is try to do with the headline, but I think it is literally impossible to accidentally start your own business (especially when you incorporate it). These people saw a problem ("I lost my job and I need money to live off of") and a way to solve it ("I can spend some time making product X and setting up a website to sell it online") and then consciously decided to go ahead with that plan.

Successful people aren't successful by accident.
If you really think that's all they're doing then you have very little understanding in just how subtly awesome some of the stuff they're doing is.

Peter Norvig does a better job explaining some of it than I ever could. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4
Excellent idea. It's doesn't guarantee accuracy, but I think that it would go a long way in making the site more accurate.
The Apple II was kind of special, though. BASIC was available to you within a few seconds of turning the machine on, and it was built-in. The availability of the language kind of prompted you to try things out and explore the system.

I see the learning curve as being a lot higher for kids these days. Computers are more accessible and prevalent, but the amount of effort to get something running, even "Hello World", is much higher.

Someone (was it Bill Atkinson?) once said he wished HyperCard was built into the ROM of every Mac. I wonder what the world would be like now with a whole generation of kids playing with hypertext and simple OO concepts.
val x = unsafePerformIO $ readIORef x

inc x = unsafePerformIO $ modifyIORef x (1+) >> readIORef x

main = do
x <- newIORef (10::Int)
print $ val x + inc x

The result is 21.

Edit: an explanation. GHC runs on graph reduction, and will do "normal order" reduction in the normal case. + is strict in both arguments, so (val x) will be fully evaluated before (inc x) is evaluated.

If we replace with a lazy operator like (:), then we can get different results. Here is a program which will evaluate the (inc x) first:

main = do
x <- newIORef (10::Int)
print $ reverse $ val x : inc x : []

the expression is not fully evaluated until it is printed, and then it is evaluated in reverse order, so inc x runs before val x. The result is [11,11].

Of course, none of this can be relied on. GHC does a lot of optimizations, and unsafe operations are unsafe.
Not really. ++x (as opposed to x++) is expected to return the incremented value, not the pre-increment value. So your choices are

(+ x (incf x))

and

(do
(incf x)
(+ x x))

depending on whether the language evaluates arguments in order, or if it builds the arguments as cells to observe and then reads their values (there's presumably a technical term for that which I can't remember - I blame sunday :)

So in C it's undefined behaviour because the compiler should be permitted to handle it whichever ways it wants, but in perl you'll get 21 as expected.

C is great fun for this - people often expect things like function arguments to be evaluated in the order as written but since it's a low level languages the compiler is allowed to do something completely different if it wants (note this something is still "equivalent" in terms of the C spec, just not in terms of the developer's expectations).

This is one of the many reasons -O3 can make apparently correct code start crashing all over the place.
Already posted (by its author):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=779799
Electron Transistors Turn Up the Heat
Dunbar’s Number and the Future of Communications
Make Money From Blogging With Google AdSense
Correct, but knowingly filing a false takedown notice is technically a criminal offense. You are swearing under penalty of perjury that you are the copyright owner.
Regarding no. 4 the accepted thing to do is to put your e-mail (and homepage, blog, etc.) in your profile. That way people that want to contact you can do so.
You should try to bundle or partner with a tablet maker like Wacom. Or get bulk discounts of their cheap 'bamboo' tablets and sell a package on your website.
Ask HN: Best plugin for Jquery edit-in-place
Best plugin for Jquery edit-in-place?
Ask HN: Haiku?
Reply in haiku.
See one you like? Upvote it!
Gather points to win!
"And nearly every CEO will tell you how much added cost and hassle there is in hiring a foreign-born worker—they do it because they physically can not find enough appropriately skilled workers in the U.S."

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. A lot of people say killing the H1B program would instantly create 50,000 new jobs for Americans. Ask the next person that tells you this to solve a deeply technical problem for you, just to see if he can actually perform the immigrant's work. There should be a notion of the difference between skilled and unskilled labor.
Hacker News geyser:
Insight and inspiration
Bubble from the depths.
While it is technically impossible to accidentally start a company, it is quite possible to accindentally find oneself in a position where starting a company seems like the best realistic option, which I imagine is what the title was hinting at.

Like my girlfriend, within a relatively short time frame she lost her job, got turned town at the last minute for this other job she had been promised and then met a guy who also was thinking about starting a company and who not only shared the same professional interests she did, but had a complementing skill set. All of these where unplanned circumstances which all accumulated in her starting a company.
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=780543
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=780468
where there are also a few comments already.
Any resources on how to leverage this? Their FAQ offers no info for developers.
XSS is not a feature
Indeed, I'd be grateful if 78.86.95.* was unblocked also please.
I've also thought of SMTP as the ultimate queuing system. It really covers all of the bases for persistence, async delivery, bridges to every kind of network imaginable (think back to FidoNET, UUCP -- revive the bang path!), built in fault tolerance, etc.

The only thing really missing is delivery order guarantee. It isn't uncommon at all for a message to fail delivery, get stuffed into a retry bucket, and then a bunch of other messages get delivered without problem before the retry occurs. But even this is just an implementation issue. The underlying architecture is nearly perfect.
Twitter's bid to trademark 'tweet' fails
After prohibition, it was the illegal smugglers that became the new businesses that ran the trade. They were notorious for lobbying against mariguana and other drugs' legalization, but, on the bright side, no longer killed people.
What does PF mean?
And the technology is being commercialized already:

http://punchcard.com.au
How to unit-test asynchronous operations?
Yeah, I was blown away by this as well. I'm guessing the ip address is enough. Google Chrome pinpointed my location down to the apartment block. Kind of scary, actually.
UBC Researchers: why the brain loses capacity to re-grow connections
Ask HN: How to Sell Yourseslf at a  Conference?
So I'm speaking at the Agile 2009 conference this week in Chicago http://agile2009.agilealliance.org/ (Topic: Agile won't work: Applying Agility to Non-Standard Teams)

I've never been to a conference before -- sounds strange for somebody who's been in IT for a while, but it's true.

My "day job" -- the reason I'm at the conference -- is that I teach/train/mentor/coach technology teams into becoming high performing teams instead of the death marches they sometimes end up being. [Insert lots of lessons learned from start-ups here]

My question: how do I leverage this free conference appearance into some sales or leads? I don't want to look like a used car salesman -- for my work it would be very counterproductive anyway -- but I don't want to lose a good opportunity either.

Any hints, tips, or tricks out there that I could use? I figure this is something lots of folks who attend conferences would like to know.

I figure I'll need to bring business cards. Perhaps have a sign-up sheet for people interested in more information? Any other ideas? Somebody mentioned that I visit the booths and ask other people how things are going -- might be a good way to pick up a lead. Is that really a good idea?
That's not the whole story. I'm based in Copenhagen but for some reason my IP belongs to a Swedish batch, so I'm constantly being served Swedish ads instead of Danish ones. This service got my location right to within 100 meters. Also, I have a 3G wireless connection that plugs into my laptop, so that I can take it anywhere. There's noway that an IP address can convey my exact location.
Code from Google: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-location-servi...
We do not live to breath, but we do have to breath to live. Profit is necessary to make your projects sustainable.

As you can see, as the article says often important inventions do not lead to a lot of immediate profit, but they have to make at least some money to survive.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466433
Flash is required only on IE, where it is the only realistic option.
This is the sort of thing I'd be wary of using jQuery for. An activity like this demands high performance and the cruft added by jQuery is noticeable in tools like these that I've tested. contentEditable (and its IE relatives) is pretty easy to get the hang of, why not just write one in straight JS?
The formal answer for C and C++ is "undefined", because the + operator is not a sequence point (meaning that the side-effect of ++ may or may not flushed). So my favourite compiler would issue a warning :)
"Make no mistake: This is a huge blow for the United States, and particularly Silicon Valley."

This is not a new phenomenon: graduate programs saw a similar decline immediately following Sept. 11, and it only turned around a few years later when certain internationally hostile components of the Patriot Act and other national security legislation were reversed.

Second: there is nothing about this blow that is "particular" to Silicon Valley. When graduate students are being denied visas, all programs and professions suffer. Our culture and economy are as adversely affected by a scarcity of engineering candidates as it is by a dearth of humanities scholars.
You're entirely responsible for your own actions. Don't blame the community for your deciding to be an arse.
Start-ups must focus on innovation even when their founders leave
They've also been accused of storing passwords in cleartext: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589852
I agree with the general sentiment that traction beats a prediction, however, I think its valuable to understand the relationship between the key metrics before you start.

Thats not to say that your model will match reality, but its certainly valuable to understand the dynamics involved.

I'm working on a series of blog posts that develop a virtual world business model. However, the principles also translate to freemium & social business too.

I recently wrote a post (with google spreadsheet) illustrating how the addressable market size (network carrying capacity) effects the viral growth of your application.

The theory goes that as the network becomes saturated the viral invites, paid acquisition, etc starts to fall on players who have already evaluated your service. Over time the success of your marketing and viral actives decline.

Check out the post at: http://dubitplatform.com/blog/2009/7/30/calculate-how-the-ad...

The google spreadsheet linked in the post illustrates how I've set about modeling viral growth, paid acquisition, ARPU, churn, and so on.

The model applies to any viral application - but its worth noting that products relying on advertisements can expect a significantly lower ARPU, knocking into your paid user acquisition.

You may also find this post interesting: http://dubitplatform.com/blog/2009/7/26/calculate-how-much-y...

It goes through the relationship between ARPU, LTV, and how your viral coefficient effects how much you can afford to spend acquiring a new player.

I think paid acquisition is a under utilized strategy within social networks - Zynga aggressively bought FBK users.

Hope it helps!
Write in serial, not parallel.
I used this one on a small project and it worked well:

http://code.google.com/p/jquery-in-place-editor/
"I wondered if the point of your linking this old essay was to emphasize the contrast and make clear that writing is still a marginal business regardless of where it's being distributed or what neat technical gadgets are involved."

It wasn't, but if I'd been smarter or had greater foreknowledge it would've been!
"As he listened in on the party lines, Weigman began pressing random numbers on his phone, just to see what would happen. Once he held down the star button and was surprised to hear a computerized voice say, "Moderator on." He had no idea what it meant. But when he hit the pound key, the voice suddenly began ticking off the private phone number of every person in the chat room."

Security FAIL! Would it have been that hard to require a NIP for access to that feature?!

---

"If he heard a supervisor's voice once, he could imitate it with eerie precision when calling one of the man's underlings."

Why can't computers do that yet? Are we close?
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I agree that physical books for fluent readers are becoming passe. For struggling readers, however, you need a "knowing other" sitting right beside you. The tutor can do all the modeling: 1 to 1 matching, moving left to right across page, return sweep, framing out word chunks, etc.