skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. In the (pre)stone age, it was very dangerous to wander around in the night. So humans (and other such animals) that could keep still at night were at an competitive advantage. Sleeping is the ultimate keeping still. And evolution just improved on that, using the sleep for other stuff, which then became unskipable.

It seems for me that many of those who accept evolution, still thinks in creationist terms: that however the human body works today, must have been the original purpose. And that we are not the result of an evolutionary history filled with random input and short-sighted adjustments, thus ending up with something that could never have been conceived in the beginning.

Sometimes stuff "just came into existance" without an (initial) purpose. Purpose is not a pre-condition for existence.
No, though I think there may be a good concept in them somewhere.
Goole uses C++ and Java while people focus on the static help system written in Python.

So.. if you want to build a static help system...
So they're not start-ups in your sense of the word, but they're businesses self-started that make a living for the person/people in question.
so why didn't the ensemble win? in the rules it says, 'At the end of this period, qualifying submissions will be judged (see Judging below) in order of the largest improvement over the qualifying RMSE on the test subset.' this isn't the icfp. i assume the person on the leaderboard is in fact the leader.

the difference between the 'test' and 'quiz' sounds b.s. to me. at this rate, i know i won't even be contemplating netflix prize 2. at the very least, netflix owes it to the community to explain why they (at this point, seemingly corruptly) made the decision they did.

i suppose they say they'll post the final 'test subset' scores on the leaderboard. it doesn't appear to be a very 'open' contest if they don't actually publish exactly what the test subset is and how the rankings are determined. when it's that close, everything should be shown to be exactly done within the rules. otherwise, they really risk delegitimizing the whole contest, imho.
Filling Machines, Bottling Machine, Capping Machines, Labelers, Conveyors 
Inline Filling Systems builds filling machines and automatic liquid filling machinery equipment, bottling equipment and bottle fillers for the food, beverage, chemical, cosmetic, and pharma industries
Entrepreneurs don't count unless they build web sites?
This is great and all, but it still thinks I'll love Once: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0907657/
The upload process is already time consuming. Doesn't hurt it much to include the resize processing with the upload. People want the images to appear quickly every time. Disk space is cheap and you want requests to images to go to the regular file serving (.jpg or .html) rather than through dynamic serving (.php or .aspx) to reduce load on the server.
Ask HN: How many YC startups use BDD or some kind of testing framework?
I would love to see some numbers on which startups use testing and if they do at what point did they start testing.
I did a search on Google, but couldn't find the reference. Care to share?
In short, the bliss of selling and giving up your business is overrated. It’s a long life and it’s often best spent enduring the ups and downs of pursuing something of significance. Don’t be so eager to give it up.

Hmm. Recent posts seem to be 37Signals attempting to rationalize their business model vs. recent sell outs for large amounts of money.

I'll stand up and say I'd happily take a $40m pay out so that I could be completely financially secure and get to do what I want. I have a short list of things that I would be very happy doing other than working for money.

To quote Einstein: "We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about."

But I'll take the comfort of knowing that I don't have to work, and get on with the cool stuff.
What you say is logical, but doesn't quite square with the macho attitude described in the other comment. If you're tired and you realize you're going to do stupid stuff - that you're past your limit, you've learned that lesson, it sounds like.
I'd love to hear more about your methodology. Could you give an example of a problem that you ask the candidates to solve? What types of questions do you ask them when they are done?
Mistakes we made when naming our computers
Posh-Delicious - The PowerShell Library For The Delicious Bookmark Service
This is now fixed (was not paying enough attention and it was too early on a Monday).
I believe social factors play the biggest role and not biology. An example would be me. I am the last person in my family from the Caribbean islands. Academically, I am successful, my brother and sister (both US citizens) are wandering in and out of college. Because I was always treated different from them, socially and academically, I grew up with a different mindset.

It was drilled into my head that I should feel lucky to be in the US. My siblings don't have that problem, they are part of the US. I notice that these social changes can happen to any group and is not specific to black/asian/hispanic. One of my high school friends, 2nd-generation India-American, is going to be in jail for a long time. He has fully absorbed the gangster culture even though according to most race-based sociological studies he shouldn't be in jail.
From what I remember reading about the contest, the problem was that when comparing movies and using movies that were similar to others as a way to suggest movies people either hated or loved Napoleon Dynamite and it didn't match up at all with their previous movie ratings. Thats how I understood it at a basic level.
I don’t think that person exists as often as the idea of the artist-beneath-the-suit would romance us to believe.

That's a huge assumption to write off the entire reason people would want to sell their company–to pursue things other than money.
I'm not familiar with the details in any way, but it sounds like you could probably produce an algorithm that produces a perfect result for the rest if you give it a subset of the publicly available data. That doesn't mean your algorithm is good in general, that just means you essentially encoded the test data set into your algorithm. The real test is always going to be how well you do on data that you've never seen.

As for why the intermittent leaderboard shows results based on the public dataset: using a specially crafted algorithm, you could leak information about hidden data through any feedback you get from the test environment. Such information could be used to create an aforementioned algorithm that does well in this specific case.

see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting
I think amazon.com does something like this. I read an article that dissected their product image urls to explain how their image service worked but I can't find it now. If I remember correctly the service could resize/rotate, add sale "stickers," and a bunch of other stuff.

EDIT found the article: http://aaugh.com/imageabuse.html
Amazon is a relatively cheap and easy way to build your customer base without doing much else. List your products on Amazon and give them 15% of the first sale (which may consume all your profit). But you own the name now. Drive susequent sales through your own website and keep the 15% for the life of that customer.
The bliss of knowing that your kids college tuition is fully paid for, no matter where they get accepted, is not overrated. Thinking like DHH indulges in this post is a luxury.
"Instead of learning from your mistakes, your kid(s) just inherit the animosity."

True, that needs to be avoided. I guess I hope they would have a good time at school - basically, that they would figure out how to make the best out of a miserable situation.

Even most of the stuff that is being taught can be interesting or useful - just not always in the way it is being taught. I guess going away from "I have to learn this to get good grades" to move to "hm, while I have to do this, I might as well have fun and learn as much as I can" is what I really have in mind. I just wouldn't count on schools getting this right. So the kids would have to find a way to learn independently of school.
I personally call "startup" a company at the stage when it attracts venture capital funding (i.e. high-risk investments). Palm, Inc. at the stage of developing and releasing Pre fits into this category (and I bet the people in the Pre departments were working like in typical startup).

The respondents' businesses probably attract low-risk bank credits instead (i.e. the money entrepreneur must pay back at some point). This makes things different. Those businesses are probably into retail, or consulting, or something similar; the potential leverage is lower there. And these are not the sort of businesses that get most of the attention on HN.
I'm not sure I totally agree with you on the 37Signals comment. I think it's actually refreshing to see that they are posting a counter point to the cash-out posts we've been seeing lately on other blogs. I doubt that some of the crew over at 37s would even have to work anymore and this could be their way of saying so. I could be way off base there, though.

With all that said, I'd also be happy to take a huge pay out and put these ideas to the test.
My desire to grow a successful company and cash out is not because I want to sit on some island - it's so I have more freedom and can get back in the game again, the next time around with more experience.

I love my current company, I'm extremely passionate about it and what I do, but I also know that it's not the last thing I'm going to do.

And I seriously doubt that I'm alone in this.

Whatever community they're trying to appeal to with this post, I don't think it's this one.
Surely this can't be sole reason for all occurences of this effect on the interenet (and even in books). ;-)
They count, and it is an interesting report when viewed through a macroeconomic lens, but a guy who starts a plumbing company or a screen printing shop is in a different situation than a couple Stanford PhD's working on a highly scalable business. The former is extremely valuable, but just not what people who frequent this site think of when they think of starting a company.
The sad thing about this list is that the best barbeque in the country is just 20 minutes south of Austin, in Lockhart.
Facebook winds down Beacon, hopes nobody notices
In this thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=829583

Jason from 37signals said they'd have a post that FU money is a myth. I hope this isn't it.

The point of FU money isn't that you'd actually quit everything and walk away. Its about the ABILITY to do so. Once you reach this point everything else is about being able to make your own choices, not being backed into a corner because you have bills to pay.
Product shops should be evaluated under a different light than service shops. Their existence shouldn't dissuade you from looking into the market; sometimes companies are stagnant ghost-ships that haven't done anything for ages. Other times they're an incompetent bunch with outsourced workers for a development team. In yet others, a product company only caters to one big client or two, or is geographically focused in one area.

If you don't see their name in industry publications and trade conferences they're as good as dead. Google their products and see if anybody is looking for help with them online. If they have a small user community, you can get a feel for how well they're doing. If there is no visible user community, well, there is either no market or the "company" is just a brochure website for vaporware.
Why would that lend weight to the genetic argument?

Also, I have seen a lot of claims. I have seen claims that IQ is not even distributed in a bell curve.

In the actual book "The bell curve" there is also a small (non-normal) spike for very intelligent blacks, if I remember correctly.
Google Is Searching For Beautiful Minds at MIT
How to react if somebody writes about your brand online
Obama mandates FCC to support Network Neutrality
It's the author's own fault. He/she starts off with "(think Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.)", then proceeds directly to show the survey reflects a variety of industries. There are vastly different considerations for real world business versus Internet based ones, and that affects the profiles of founders for them. (e.g. PlaySpan.com founder was age 10!)
I'm a Rubyist, not a Pythonista, but the same principles apply. I love really really strongly/statically typed languages (Haskell) and really really weakly/dynamically typed languages (Ruby).

Generally, it's not a problem. I have a hard time articlating why, exactly... I guess my code just tends to be short, sweet, and to the point. It's very rare that when I code in C, for example, that I try to do something that the type system wouldn't allow anyway.

That's a terrible answer, my apologies. Maybe this would be better: could you provide an example of a situation where you feel that dynamic code would cause a problem?

Mabye a bit of back and forth will help me figure out what I'm trying to say.
This makes no sense. I don't understand why the 37signals folks seem to willfully ignore that the amount of money that a successful acquisition gives a founder means you can do whatever you want for the rest of your life, including solving interesting problems. You can even solve interesting problems that aren't profitable to solve. Unless the company is almost guaranteed to be valuable enough for the foreseeable future that a sale (or other exit) will make you financially independent (e.g. Facebook), there comes a point where it is clearly better to sell the company.

Since the Mint acquisition seems to have inspired this series of posts, let's take a look at it. Mint is successful because banks have crappy online products. Banks are perfectly positioned to end Mint's customer growth, and there are several other competitors in the industry as well. There is not a particularly high chance that Mint will still be successful in 5-10 years. If it is successful, the marginal utility of the increased worth for the founders declines pretty rapidly. Selling now seems like it was clearly the best idea, and disproving that is going to take more than the false dichotomy this post presents.
It seems to me that a much of the criticism could have been defused with some slightly different methodology. Some statistics that might been good ammunition (each gathered with rates of several different cohorts: white, black-non-immigrant, black-immigrant, non-black-immigrant)

* # of hours spent on homework
* # of hours parents spent with children on school-related activities
* Rate of parental participation in school activities
* Absenteeism rates
* rates of student failure to complete homework
* rates of student participation in school-related activities
* all of the above plotted across grade levels (do any of these statistics vary over time as children become more susceptible to cultural forces from peers?)
Is it me or is it really slow?
This post seems to make two separate arguments:

1) A driven individual won't be content to idle if they get a big exit, they will likely jump right back in. If you think what you want is an eternal vacation, you're probably wrong.

2) Therefore, a driven individual shouldn't pursue a big exit, if they already enjoy what they're doing, because they'll just jump back in.

I agree with 1), but not with 2). I enjoy what I'm doing, but the list of things I want to do is growing at a faster pace than my ability to work on them. I'm just not built for the "one true lifelong obsession" model.

Edit: the more I think about it, the more I realize why this post bothers me.

I'm really starting to think that 37s and HN are preaching to completely different choirs - which is strange, given how well 37s posts do here.

Some people thrive on routine and order. They love to get up in the morning and know what they'll do that day. To have a successful system figured out, and to follow it. And yes, there are always new challenges, and yes, the system is continuously improved - but to some extent, it's routine.

Others thrive on tackling the unknown. That initial rush of carving out an answer, starting with a blank slate. The uncertainty of not knowing what you're doing, the high chance of failure, but also the joy of not being constrained by what came before you.

In programming terms, it's the difference between maintaining code and starting a new project. Some people obviously enjoy one more than the other.

Seems to me like 37signals is preaching code maintenance over starting new projects. Sure, in many cases that makes a lot of sense, but which one's more FUN?
I've never even clicked a tag cloud.
It's pretty wild, and the inside is confusing with the spiral and all the glass. In fact, it's more impractical than anything, some classes face windows facing the sun and have to wear sunglasses in class.

I mean, it's a very nice building to be inside, but the way it's designed is like how a programmer would design a UI. Kind of fitting as the CS building funded by Microsoft money...
There needs to be like a deficit score for any article that contains "is dead" in the title or "considered harmful"

Just off hand, can anyone think of a company that legitimately could have succeeded but failed because they chose the wrong programming language? Like they had a really really great idea and they had a really good design but the language just got in the way?
* It’s a long life and it’s often best spent enduring the ups and downs of pursuing something of significance. Don’t be so eager to give it up.*

I don't want to give it up, I want to give up having to do it.
How to follow Seedcamp Week 09 online
Seedcamp Week is an intensive week-long event held in London every September and is targeted at young entrepreneurs from across EMEA.

I put together a few links for those of you who want to follow the Seedcamp Week 09 in London:

Live video from the Seedcamp Week by the "GeeksOnAPlane" group and Dave McClure:

http://www.justin.tv/geeksonaplane

Seedcamp TV

http://stupeflix.tv/seedcamp/

Twitter search with official Seedacmp hash tag:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23scw09
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23seedcamp

Seedcamp on twitter:

http://twitter.com/seedcamp

Some of my latest Seedcamp twitter favorites:

http://twitter.com/basti/favorites

TechCrunch Seedcamp coverage:

http://search.techcrunch.com/query.php?s=seedcamp
It'd be refreshing if they were well-argued counterpoints.
In corporate america, all you do is take care of your own small corner of the business

That's true, but you still have the opportunity to learn about other aspects of the business even if you're not responsible for them. I talk to people in other departments, go to their (open) seminars, read about what's happening. Not to mention large corporations have many, many training classes in various areas. I'm a software developer, but I took in-house classes in Finance, Recruiting (improving interviewing skills), Communication, Influence, and more.

Don't just sit in your little corner and you may be amazed at how much you can learn.
http://www.last.fm/music/Juli%C3%A1n+Porta/Detr%C3%A1s+de+la...

FL, Audacity and that's it.
With jquery UI:

<div id="foo"></div>

$('#foo').dialog({modal: true});

One could tweet jquery tutorials, that's how beautiful it is.
There's also the NACA project: http://code.google.com/p/naca/

A European company's IT staff built it over a period of several years, and it looks like a fairly impressive bit of engineering: http://media-tech.blogspot.com/2009/06/naca-presented-jazoon...
For some reason, I've heard the exact same thing from residents of Chicago, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, etc.

So does "average" exclude major (maybe East Coast) U.S. cities? Should I look at cities of smaller scale... say Oxnard, CA? Which criteria should one consider when deciding a city is "normally" segregated? Just want to know how things are different in the average American city with a significant number of ethnic minorities.
Earl Grey.
I think that it says that money is not the root to all evil when used to help those who are in need...give for the sake of giving!
Luckily, there's an rfc for that http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html
Great initiative. Some time back I wrote a letter to Gates Foundation citing that when 85% Indians do not have any bank account it is very unlikely that your money is actually reaching the poor.

http://tr.im/kJHv
I agree. But imagine the outrage when your schema is wiped out. How about a wordpress release which can automatically "disable" the feature/page/plugin/script that express the vulnerability? And throw in an SMS page when an update happens so it wakes them up right away instead of waiting for them to discover it in the morning.
This tends not to be a significant problem--if you pass the wrong type you find out the first time you run the code, which is probably not any later than you would have compiled it. A much more common problem are null references, but Java doesn't do anything about those either.

Java is great for the enterprise because it's stable, mature, and doesn't leave any room for cleverness to fly over people's heads. However the compile-time checks don't do much to prevent difficult-to-debug errors. A more powerful type system like Haskell is much more interesting in this regard.
Umm, isn't this the same as Linux????

You have to "harden" a Linux box from most distributions.

OpenBSD is a nice flag carrier, but it comes with most services turned off.

Would you leave default configured Fedora smbd/bind/sendmail running on a server in Production???
I don't know if it's too late to mention this; but this posting has all the same fake user reviews like matclayton's other post did.
Fred Brooks' on COBOL's success: http://bit.ly/jrnXp
Money's not the root of all evil. It's the _love_ of money that is the root of all evil which, fwiw is a biblical reference (1 Timothy 6:10).
I think they're great, personally. Occasionally there is some astroturfing, but I think that's a rarity.

I like seeing what people are working on; and it makes me want to keep focusing on the stuff I'm working on as well.
Actually, the opposite is probably true. I have yet to hear of any country where it's easier to start a business than in the USA.
The only time I've ever liked them was for finding trends when working with analytics.
Honestly, if it wasn't for spring and jpa/hibernate I wouldn't be too interested in java. Spring has _really_ made a great impact on java and people have noticed.
I want to work on interesting stuff. But...

Here's the fallacy. I don't believe that what our startup is doing is the only interesting stuff I could be working on. Some of the interesting things I'd like to do have no obvious, direct economic benefit. For example, there's a bunch of important work which needs doing in emergency technologies which isn't the kind of thing you can build into a scalable, VC-type business.

If I had the freedom from economic uncertainty to work on those problems, you bet I'd consider it.
Correct (although some wheels only have 0, no 00). With both, it's a 5 point something house edge. Also, the martingale (doubling) strategy falls apart with table limits, even if you have the bankroll.
I am finding humor in this link, because earlier today there was an article "Is Java Dead?" Why not an article "Is Cobol Dead?" probably because everyone assumes it already was dead, but in reality is still going and will be for another 50 years.

What people don’t understand is that languages of any kind don't die easily. New languages don't kill the old ones either, people transition to different languages because they better solve the problems of today, but problems of yesterday still exist and so do their solutions.
> score the same on standardized tests

Statistically that's not true. I don't understand what you're trying to say.