skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They have an online self-care system - you use it to signal a problem and the system runs diags on the Freebox, phone line etc. Yup, completely automated.

Unfortunately, if your problem falls between the cracks (something new, that is not in their list of common troubles) then it can get tricky, and you need to replace the Freebox. They'll replace it for free, of course, but it's still a hassle make the demand, get the delivery (UPS usually), install the new Freebox, send the old one in. This is all completely automated again, and the Freebox warehouse is outsourced to a specialized company. Free only has engineers : hardware, software and (lots and lots of) telecom guys. BTW, one of their top VPs wore a teeshirt saying "Go away, or I will replace you with a small shell script". So yeah, these guys love automation, they are hardcore engineers, nerdy to the core.

Anecdote : some time ago they launched a new version of the Freebox. It was supposed to be for new subscribers and replacements. People (especially geeks, but mostly everybody) asked for replacements, because the new version had a bigger harddrive and some new features. Free had to replace many more Freeboxes that forecasted. So many of the consumer reports among the lines of "My Freebox broke so I had to have it replaced" should be more like "I invented a problem to get the free upgrade".

Furthermore, you can replace the HDD with a bigger one or connect an external HDD - that's how you recognize a geek in Paris - his ADSL modem is tuned.
Not sure billboards is effective "marketing" these days especially for Web services.
The article said 6.5 million uniques. The URL you gave claims 150k. I have always been confused by the various rankings but that seems a big difference.
SearchMe results were too spammy. A flashy interface for a messy back end does not work it seems.
Jon has definitely done tons of cool stuff: http://yesthat.com/
Wow how ruthless. If this is true then I wonder if it will make people more weary of doing business with them. Especially, their venture fund.
The Chinese and the Russians or the Indians will reach Mars.

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2009/01/05/China-Russia-Mars...
And Quantcast says they only have 9.2k US uniques!

http://www.quantcast.com/dailybooth.com

Obviously the data on these sites is crap. Whatever number Jon is quoting is presumably the most accurate, since he has the actual logs.
Yeah well, when you have a flight sim in your program, you almost have to do something useful with it, not ?

I just wonder where they got the time to build it in the first place. As far as i know, it's not like Google had a flight sim in their portfolio before.
That's a great point - I hadn't thought of that. 10 years ago I just put up with and accepted a lot of weird stuff related to programming because I was pretty much a novice and just got on with it. Now I've reached a point where I can question things.. just a bit too much though, it seems!
duplicate:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=828992
I think the point is that it was done without the help of ice-breakers.
Amazing. Thanks for the info. I think I love the company already. The t-shirt was funny. The free trademark is also clever. The freebox is also an interesting piece of equipment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebox
Whoa, over generalization alert. That said, I've had a lot of experience on both sides of the pond and.. I do feel a lot more conservatism here in Europe. The UK is far more crazy for Microsoft than the US is on average. Sure, there are plenty of progressive companies and open source developers here, but it's not even in the same ballpark, ratio-wise, as the US from my personal observations.
I agree, maybe they think that it won't make any difference to them in the future but I'm not so sure.

This does not reflect very well on them. They cleaned up pretty good when they sold their project to ebay, these lawsuits are very ugly indeed.

Kazaa was spun out in a pretty sneaky fashion as well, they jumped all over the place to stay ahead of the law, then they made skype on the back of the tech they wrote to make kazaa work. So effectively all this harks back to the kazaa days.

Ebay messed up royally when they bought it, but as far as I know it was paid several times over, no need to try to do another round of extortion.

Skype is a pretty good product on top of a nice piece of networking code but nothing that could not be done again.

By risking the future of skype (and possibly even ebay) they really show they don't care about anybody but themselves.

Not the best tag to have on you as a business person.

In Europe everybody that wants to be somebody is still fawning over them though, I wonder how long that will last.
that, and .app files are directories rather a single file.
Writing a compiler in Python using Lex, Yacc and LLVM
Open books
That didn't come out right - I meant that sometimes people get the impression that make is incredibly complex because they look at makefiles generated by the autotools. Those makefiles are typically very different from hand-written ones.
I figure between 150K and 200K uniques (daily) based on Alexa and 5 sites that I have access to log files of.

Alexa is pretty lousy in an absolute sense but if you can compare with known numbers it gets a lot more useable.
Come to Canada, starting in Quebec! It's even worse here.
Not worth reading... since when was Europe united enough to have a single style. Some people need to get out more.
It is a disservice to Plato to assume he lacks the ability to make a distinction between a (written) correspondence and text.

Plato's statement here is likely more subtle than superficially apparent. Specifically, note that he refers comparatively to painting, which (certainly in his day) required a subject (whether mental or natural).

"[W]riting shares a strange feature with painting", in that dimensions are collapsed; the subject is 'framed'; and viewer perspective (e.g. "if anyone asks them anything") is rendered irrelevant and "continues to signify just that very same thing forever".
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You mention you need partners. Do you think one person is more important than the other to the success of the business?
Honestly, those aren't even the right questions he's neglecting.

For example, you can't just add PayPal integration and be like "now I'll get paid". The questions are: what's the MVP for the free app? What am I going to hold back for premium, and why? What do I think the right price is there, and why?

If you're making an app just for yourself, and you want to share it, post the code on GitHub. If you're trying to sell a product, let me tell you something: blog posts aren't marketing just because you posted something you wrote.

All "business guys" do is resource allocation. We talk to customers to prioritize features; we talk to potential partners to try to enhance distribution; we do the customer service (which helps us further talk to customers); and, yes, sometimes we do the paid advertising and PR and sales calls and marketing stuff.
"I have a huge support from my three grandsons. Michal bough me an iPhone as I mentioned, then they gave me a Mac, because I had a Windows PC. One of them is studying IT at university, so he is my adviser sometimes. And all three of them are watching everything I create and give me feedback. They've also made the videos on my blog."

not that that means its not true, but still.
Beyond the temporal distance, there is the fact that the astronauts were under constant surveillance by HAL. Perhaps Frank Poole did not care to be demonstrative under the circumstances.
Ask HN: I seem to get colds/flus more often than most people. Suggestions?
Okay, I admit it's sometimes because I've stayed up late hacking for a couple of nights in a row. But often not. I seem to have a weaker immune system than many people, and get a fairly bad cold or flu every couple of months.

Anyone else have the same problem? Any ideas for things to do/take/eat to hack your body into getting sick less often?
Part of what makes MIT stand out from the rest
http://www.sevenforums.com/chillout-room/19652-kde-4-3-linux...

This is much more fun, I guess.
(And the original source is down. Information does rot from the internet:(
Sleep longer.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01...
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What does TweeMiner do? The video is too slow for me.
Like most stories, there are two sides to the issue.

It seems like the P2P tech was a big "insider info" advantage that enabled Volpi to close the deal. The fact that he knew Skype could be implemented without the P2P backend was reassuring enough to the investors that they purchased Skype.

My understanding is that the very fact Volpi had that information is kindof sketchy, kindof "insidery." In other words, Skype might never have been sold if the buyers didn't already know they could cut out the P2P backend, but they would never have had that knowledge if Volpi hadn't worked so closely with Skype's tech.
Amazon creates series of house brands, latest is consumer electronics
Coincidentally a similar thing is occurring at the moment in Canada.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/the-minnow-in-...
"Canada's telecom giants are fighting a pitched battle to keep Globalive out of the wireless pool. But CEO Anthony Lacavera and his Egyptian partner are determined to bring competition to the industry. Is this the beginning of the end for the cozy wireless establishment?"

Unsurprisingly the three existing companies are trying to lobby the government to keep this new entrant out.
From the Data Liberation Front to the Principals of Web Navigation
I guess these are nations that have something to prove in this area, especially China and India. Putting a man on Mars will certainly confirm you to the general world population as a "real" new dominant power.
Agreed. I really enjoyed AOLServer. It was rock solid, really fast and reasonably resource efficient, did everything we needed for our particular deployment, and was reasonably well-documented.

But, it also had some limitations that made it less promising. It was intimately tied to Tcl, which is, let's be honest, not growing in popularity, had some old school architectural choices that would limit extensions and be hard to overcome (Apache had a lot of the same issues early in its life, but overcame them through brute force...when there are hundreds of active developers, all problems get smaller). It was designed for a very specific purpose, and it showed. So, I don't think it's a codebase I would consider spending time or effort on, if I didn't have really strong reasons for sticking with it.
Yea old TVs and CRT Monitors...
Ask HN: How much does a senior engineer get at startup
equity wise that is.. both pre-series A vs post-series A
Amazon develops and patents own kitchen chopping block
Don't Shutup Your Brain
Josh Silver demos adjustable liquid-filled eyeglasses
Sure his method sounds easy, but are the results actually worth anything? It looks like an over-simplified version of ACT-R, with some made-up cost values. To me, this has no advantages over my gut feeling on usability; it's just that the numbers add some false sense of reliability.

For actual design decisions, I'd much prefer a method that has developed for thirty-some years, is based on actual cognitive models and has been empirically validated.

Besides, it's not that difficult to use. Building and testing your interface in CogTool would take you about an hour the first time, but it is easy to learn. You can even import HTML and record your actions. The results are pretty accurate, and you get automatic interface optimization (e.g. on widget size, location, types) too boot.

So, the author had a nice idea, but it has been done already. (At least for the user testing, the accurate results, the "codification" and the books; I don't know about the consulting company.)
To put this in perspective, the daily wage for planting and protecting these trees, 100 rupees, can buy a weeks worth of vegetables. If they offered a similar plan in the US i would want to participate :)
How much did it cost to develop and launch Mint? A million bucks? Probably less. You'd be lucky to compete in telecom with $1B to startup.
I think the distinction isn't between family and friends- it's about the way different relationships work.

It would be okay to loan money to your parents or your children- there's a clear power relationship in both of these, of obligation both ways. It would be less okay to loan money to a sibling, where equal footing is a necessity for a healthy relationship.
"Navigating it without the help of ice-breakers has only become possible because of the thawing of the Arctic ice - caused, some say, by global warming."

More like "Caused, say 99% of scientists, by global warming"
A reply to the article: http://robotr.tumblr.com/post/192059426/dont-shutup-your-bra...
Perhaps there's no reason for a Google specific Java style guide because the Java style guide from Sun is pretty good.
I haven't done much of a survey, but I stumbled into this and looks promising:

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

I found this book a very enjoyable read (edit: and a lot less intimidating than the Wikipedia article!). Be warned, though, that it's one or two chapters worth of technical detail. The rest goes to motivating the subject and exploring its philosophical implications. And that is OK, because the algorithm is actually quite simple.

http://tinyurl.com/lns85a
YC W09..
Wash your hands after every contact. Vitamin C and Zinc, If you have young children, you are just out of luck.
Be ready for influx of "startup founders", that would bring to the country taxi cab drivers, gardeners, all kind of "engineers" from India, China, Mexico, North Africa and so on..
Did you forget that very recent scandal with Satyam... They did what I just described...
Heh, I do have young children. :-) However, surely there's more to it than that, because plenty of people with young kids get sick less often than I.
34.9%

Not really, questions like this can never be answered directly; it depends on number of co-founders, what each person is/has contributed work and capital wise, what is the definition of senior engineer, what the investors want, ... so many factors.
I'm not sure this counts as a hack, but try eating a balanced diet, exercising regularly, and getting plenty of sleep. Bonus points for avoiding tobacco and enjoying alcohol only in moderation.
This "evidence" isn't anything new. Ultimately it boils down to a question of semantics.

Apple verbiage says that they've rejected a "binary". That leaves the door open for negotiations and possible approval of a future "binary" for the same app.

Indeed, many developers have had their binaries rejected and then their app goes on sale at a later point of time (with a new binary).

The bigger question is whether Apple has a right to regulate/control its app store and whether it is appropriate for the FCC to intervene.
If you actually have to ask this question ... stay corporate.
Citing Paul:

By definition these 10,000 founders wouldn't be taking jobs from Americans: it could be part of the terms of the visa that they couldn't work for existing companies, only new ones they'd founded. In fact they'd cause there to be more jobs for Americans, because the companies they started would hire more employees as they grew.
-----
Of course they will not be hired by other companies...Legally...But USA is not the country where illegal employment is punished.

Every time when you open access to your (rich) country to poorer people think about how the system can be abused.
I agree. You have to pursue what you have a passion and obsession for. This is how you become great.
I wonder if the crashing software he mentioned towards the end of essay was amaroK.
not sure i understand your concern? the proposal we're working on is a modification to the EB-5 Visa, which currently requires a $1M investment (or a $500K investment in economically targeted area).

even with a lower capital rqmt of say $100K-$250K, i don't think many people would be willing to put up that kind of cash for a taxi driver.

on the other hand, it might be useful to make sure the source(s) of capital are from accredited and/or institutional investors, in order to prevent abuse.
It's an RSS reader fully integrated with Twitter. It makes it easy to follow your RSS feeds and click a button to Tweet stories (and schedule those Tweets)
Impractical:
1) The compiler is gonna be very slow;
2) If you make compiler for low-level language, such as C
you need precise correspondence between data types used in cpu, datatypes used in compiler's implementation language and datatypes in the target language.
Why are Indians so obsessed with the IITs? What's the point of addressing someone as IIT-ian? Do we call Obama the "Harvard-ian Obama"? Honestly, who cares which college you went to? There are tonnes of people who have graduated from the IITs who have not done anything remarkable in their lives. When will this obsession about IITs & IIMs go away?

Disclosure: I am an Indian.

PS: Mr. Majumdar is also from UC Berkeley. Why not call him "UCB-ian"?
... to tornado.
I don't understand why the sale of Mint is regarded as the end to Aaron & co.'s great adventure. They're now free (and funded) to tackle another interesting problem, and let Intuit handle the inevitably boring business of running an established company.

I don't hear anyone criticize pg for selling Viaweb, and that sale was obviously what opened the door to the Y-Combinator experiment (which is much more interesting than running an established company).

There's a reason founders leave when the company "makes it", and its not the money.
classic. well i guess things turned for a worse for big 23. Lost his marriage. Lost his kids. His brothers clearly aren't pleased with him now. What a douche.
This was a terribly written article. In an article about Jordan's acceptance speech there was only one quote that I can find. This one (directed at his family)...

"I wouldn't want to be you guys if I had to," he said as they squirmed in their seats.

Other than that, nothing. Was he just playfully ribbing people? Was he outright insulting them? I have no idea after reading this article.

(For the record I wouldn't be surprised if Jordan is a prick, many great people are coughSteveJobscough)
Sure, but citing an outlier as an example as something that could happen isn't really meaningful, since it is so improbable.
In fact epoll was created specifically because select does not scale well. That is, if you have lots of open connections, and an event happens on one of them you have to iterate all the file descriptors to see which one was active.

With epoll, only those descriptors are returned which were active. With 8000/s (as in the tests) this really makes a significant difference.
You can find the speech on YouTube. I watched about half, and thought it was nowhere near what was characterized in this column.
Ok but I read that founder should own only 10% of 250K
which means 25K - 1 year of illegal work on gas station in NJ.
Did you read the post? The guy was writing this for an academic project where speed didn't matter and secondly he was using LLVM for code generation. low level details don't really come into play in compiler construction until the code generation step most of the work up to that point is text parsing, syntax checking, and AST creation. In other words tasks suited perfectly to a language like Python.
She knows how to code a game. She has learnt objective-c, Xcode, the iPhone sdk api and the chipmunk physics library. She also does her own graphics (a blog entry is titled 'How to polish your game', in two parts) with a style that is clearly made by a twentysomething and that would require a very sharp eye.

But she couldn't operate a video camera?
There's some data on VentureHacks, but really it depends.
"If he succeeds in disrupting another business, the establishment may have to acknowledge him."

"He forced the incumbent cellular providers to innovate."

The article relies too heavily on tropes like these, IMHO.
Erlang uses epoll on Linux, kqueue on BSDs, et cetera.
Of course they will not be hired by other companies...Legally...But USA is not the country where illegal employment is punished

People who choose to work illegally do so today by arriving for free on a tourist visa. Why would anyone put up capital and start a company in order to do it?
Those makefiles wouldn't have to be as complex if automake only targeted GNU make. A lot of the messiness is there to support conditionals.
Sadly, planting trees does little to help with the global warming problem. Flora are only temporary sinks for carbon; as soon as the tree dies it will go back up into the atmosphere. Since we're releasing carbon from fossils, what we really need to do to restore the carbon cycle is put the carbon back into fossils. Sadly, this takes a really long time.
Generally speaking, you should get a stock allocation equivalent to the value you will add to the team. If you are adding a 5% net increase in the value, you should get a 5% stock option allocation.

Most likely you will be looking at numbers in the range of .25%-1%, give or take a bit. This will also depend on the total number of engineers likely to be hired during that funding round, and the background of the founders (founders who are more experienced will generally not give as much stock as founders who are less experienced).
as soon as the tree dies it will go back up into the atmosphere

That implies combustion which doesn't occur.
> low level details don't really come into play in compiler construction until the code generation

--
Not true. modern compilers do a lot of optimization long before code generation, and you really want to have for example floating point to be behaving exactly like in target language - if you collapse operations on constants such as 1.0D + 4.0. And aside from optimization, lexer - it has to distinguish single-precision and double precision floats.
Anytime you're dealing with "doomsayers", you can almost bet that that person actually wants their variant of doom to occur

That is an excellent observation.
um, huh? what are you talking about?

please cite a link or reference.
Oddly enough, all my coworkers and I felt it was one of the most heartfelt and funniest Basketball HoF acceptance speeches we'd heard in awhile. And, by the laughter, I think Charles Barkley would have to agree.

Anyone who knows anything about Jordan knew he was competitive. The speech matched his personality perfectly.
Besides diet and sleep, a specific possible factor may be a low or deficient level of Vitamin D. If you suspect yours may be low, e.g. from not enough sun, consider getting your 25-hydroxy levels of Vit D checked. Supplementing with around 2000-5000 IU of Vit D a day could boost your immune system significantly if that is a factor.

Avoid Flu Shots, Take Vitamin D Instead by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD

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It's sad how the founders visa isn't even close to reality yet, and already has vocal opponents bringing up bogus reasons why it's a bad thing. How long will it take until somebody complains about "foreigners taking away startup opportunities from Americans"?
An upstart entrepreneur is breaking the market open with a radical price-lowering plan, with the full support of regulators ("To their credit, France’s authorities have backed Mr Niel all the way")? I'll believe that when I see it.
This appears to have started with PG's Founder Visa essay. Be sure to read the original HN thread about that essay: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=556908

At the time, I thought PG's idea was so flawed that I nearly registered just to point out why. Fortunately, bokonist did a great job of explaining what was wrong with the idea in that thread.