skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nope, that ends up with $100 too much. The proper way is documented here: <http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_sum_of_the_first_100_p....

One way of computing it in Python, using a loop approach like you did, is like so:

sum = 0
for p in xrange(101):
sum += p
print (sum)

This uses better variable names, and a simpler looping construct. The reason for the 101 is because it starts at 0.
Big companies have fraud, just look at Enron. The sexism isn't overt for legal reasons, but that doesn't change the end results. One very big, very old company I worked had a manager who loved hiring attractive female interns and another who almost exclusively hired people from his home country and all but openly admired to preferential hiring based on nationality.

When someone at a big company is conveniently let go before their green card is approved or that big bonus is paid out, it isn't a "firing," but a "layoff" as the company "right-sizes." Bad bosses abuse underlings when they think the job market lets them get away with it and will not hesitate to punish those who step out of line.

Come to think of it, I've seen everything you describe at some of the many Fortune 500 companies I've consulted at. Sadly, human nature defies corporate size, and bad behavior can even creep into very big companies.
I wouldn't say that the medical profession uses as a "dead" language that is "no longer under active development". In fact, they invent new words in it all the time.
No, it just means that you won't be disappointed if they actually do ;)
US price levels 1665 to 2005, with 2005 = 100
The Idea is to provide a platform where all your tweets can be data mined and regularly update for searching, trend analysis and sharing. Off course twitter have a search tool, the question is how do you get relevant information from the maze, how do you see what your buddies talked about today while you were busy?
PR hacking sure deserves to be on the front page of HN. Flag it if you don’t agree.
First-employee equity grants are normally limited to the 1-2% range (at most), as opposed to getting 10% and higher grants made to founders, for the following reasons:

1. First employees usually work for standard salary/benefits and therefore do not take anywhere near the level of risk taken by the founders.

2. First employees normally have no role in conceiving the core business model that, in a good startup, will be perhaps the most valuable asset available to the company.

3. First employees normally compete with many other potential employees who are ready to market their services to the company for salary/benefits, plus some modest equity compensation.

4. Once founders have reached the stage where they want to hire a first employee, they have usually gotten past the stage at which the risk level is at its highest (for example, here, someone obviously had to decide to pay you for a year's worth of consulting time, which likely was not cheap, when the prospects for getting any return on that investment were at their most speculative).

Having said this, there is no magic formula in this area. To the extent that the above elements do not apply to your case, you can argue that you should get a larger grant in exchange for taking greater risk, for being indispensable, or whatever.

In this type of scenario, you will likely get a restricted grant or an option grant. The former is immediately taxable, the latter is not. Both constitute equity grants and both will be subject to vesting. Thus, you will need to negotiate not only the size of any grant but also the associated protections for your position (how much to be immediately vested? what percent, if any, accelerates on any termination without cause? or on acquisition?, etc.).

For a few basics on restricted stock, see http://grellas.com/faq_business_startup_006.html.

Hope this helps.
Maybe I was being a bit obtuse. But the data under scrutiny here formed a key part of the famous and influential Hockey Stick graph, which would not have garnered so much attention - or looked so good - if it did nor have a dramatic uplift at the end. This article suggests that the uplift was a consequence of cherry picking of data.

If only I could make my website's traffic graph look like that. Actually, with a bit of statistical abuse, maybe I can!
Who cares about the "Average user" when you're only looking at a 1% increase in market share? Honestly...
RFC: A Plan to Use Social Networks to Buy Back Congress
Calit2’s Larry Smarr on the Internet -- The Way We Were and Where We're Going 
Xconomy has 2-Part story based on interview with former supercomputer guru Larry Smarr, now director of Calit2, on his role in the evolution of the Internet (Part 1) and his 4 big ideas where next-generation Internet will prove crucial. http://bit.ly/4kJrw6
I suppose it's a good thing, then, that I've apparently been saddled with the leadership aspect of my own venture. Sure, it means I have to make all the decisions (and yes, there've been a few nightmares), but at least somebody making the decisions, right?
Are Django Templates really that worthwhile to be compatible with? They seem quite annoying to me...
Thanks for the tip. I didn't realize that was such a turn-off for people who read blogs.

Found the setting and disabled it for this blog.
I think that was his point. Even though JavaScript had been used in web apps for years, as soon as "AJAX" caught on people (who didn't know better) started referring to anything that used JavaScript as "AJAX". I still get people asking me if such and such website is written in "AJAX".
:-) Thanks again Lucas and maybe you will do a favor by upvoting the first "thanks!"=-1 and I can say thanks! for that in advance.

Lot's of thanks in a sentence, someone will double downvote it!!...LOL :-)
Twitter sentiment of Airlines
Unix pipe was my first thought.
Heck, let's just ban employment and force everyone to be an entrepreneur!
I'm inherently weary of anyone who claims that dynamic languages with loose types are the end all be all.

I can only speak from experience with PHP, but at some point your app+framework is just so big that I've almost wanted to sacrifice some development time for a little type safety. It really sucks not having a guarantee that somefunction() will always return an array of some object.

Or even worse, taking 5-10 mins to wade through library code to figure out what to call obscure_helper_function() with.
I've been following William Kamkwamba's blog (not written directly by him) about his progress for the past year or two. It's amazing what a little bit of knowledge can do. Before meeting the reporter he was fighting for books ways to learn. Eventually he was brought to the city and showed a computer and he cried. Plans for windmills are all over the net and he struggled for very long time to build his own from a photo.

I'm personally no longer interested in the publicity he's been garnering (I recently stopped following his blog.) but I'm very happy that he managed to get hooked up with the right people and that was able to talk at TED etc. I hope his mentors teach him well and he's able to bring the change he wants to his country and his people.
Ask HN: Review my site - Rate Expectations
It does if you accept the premise that your instincts will cause you to go easier on the people you like. For example, if you get the impression the candidate really knows their stuff, you might be tempted to skip over a bunch of questions because you assume they would get them right anyway.
I can relate to this article.

I have experienced working for startups and large businesses. In my experience I have preferred working for large businesses. For me, I actually find a lot of the "perks" of startups to overall be worse for the environment. Sure, I can show up whenever I want and dress how I like, but overall is this really a good thing? Or does it just trend toward laziness and lack of personal responsibility? What's so bad about a little structure -- I grew up in a structured educational environment and learned to thrive in it.

Beyond this though, what I really like about larger companies is the expertise at my fingertips. I think I'm a pretty good programmer, but I can't do everything, and I don't have the experience to be good at everything.

At Corporation A, adding a new feature requires the following process: marketing identifies a need, project manager creates a plan, software architect decides how it should be implemented, programmer implements the feature, designer spruces it up, QA ensures that it is correct, and sales creates a pitch. Money rolls in.

At Startup B, it works like this: Investor X identifies a need, Investor Y disagrees on implementation, 95% of time is spent discussing exact wording instead of the usefulness of said feature. Programmer implements it, no one remembers what it was for, it gets dropped at the next redesign.

People say they don't want to just be a "cog in a wheel", but I see nothing wrong with being a cog in well-oiled, efficient machine. I find it very satisfying to be a small but significant part of something larger than I could ever create on my own.
Summer olympics: same thing.
Ignore instincts during the interview.
Trust instincts when you are down to the final decision.
Very neat, thank you for your reply.

I knew of the shortcut to increment a variable, but I had no idea you didn't have to declare one for a loop. I also didn't not know of xrange, I will have to look that one up.
Hypothesis: possible partial cause of the sudden spike ~ 1945 - 1960 where the graph takes off:

Introduction of television into mainstream society. Fueled by advertising, everything "costs" more: entertainment is fueled by advertising. News is also fueled by advertising. Advertising places a new layer of "value" on products, causing the sudden perceived need to pay more.

Interesting data.
not to encourage, but You simply jailbreak the iphone, once you have Cydia - then find read up on installous (which is a pirate version of the appstore) works up to 3.0 and had 90% of the most popular apps.
That's an interesting point - pirates mostly don't actually use their stuff!

Essentially pirating is a way to try the app out, then I guess the percentage of pirates who buy it is pretty high. So why not make trying apps more convenient?
It seems sloppily done:

The total number of participants is not stated.

What's with the overlapping or gapping ranges?

The full-time categories all list 0, and 0-1, yet omit 2-4.

Many range end-points are included in two ranges.

"If you raised money, house [sic] much did you raise..." (#14)

etc.
Interesting how little funding the participants received: Only
18% of were funded (#13), and 25% of those received less than
$5k (#14).
I'll wait for a bit, we're kind of scared of the bleeding edge :)

As soon as it hits the mainstream and people have been testing the hell out of it we'll surely follow though. Second best is good enough for production.
and that's why China has 5th largest desert in the World and 1st largest in Asia - Gobi desert.
Some Common Mistakes in Software Design
True story: I worked for a startup that was acquired by a large company, which then went public, and a bit later laid me off (and everyone else in my division apart from a few poor chumps kept around for maintenance). I got more in severance than I got from my stock options.

When you also consider that the same large company took one look at my skillset and responsibilities and promptly doubled my salary post acquisition, it's not nearly as clear what the downside is.
They do this every City Day in Moscow for some years already.

This year it failed for some reason, tho.

They also did that at MAKS this year.
Methodology?

My experience with flying are overwhelmingly positive (and I fly > 50k miles per year), but Twitter does not give me enough space to say why I had a good experience.

(My airline-related tweets are not descriptive enough to make conclusions without knowing me; I say "arrived in HKG CX lounge" when flying KA, or "op up to J" without mentioning the airline, etc. Both of these are obviously positive experiences, but there is not enough data to really know what airline I was speaking positively about.)

Generally, about half the flights I take are better than what I consider average and about 99% of them are better than what most people consider average. (It's been a long time since I've not been upgraded to F for free, for example.)

Thinking back to my own very positive experiences, the situation either did not fit into 140 characters (and I explained on FT instead), or it happened in the air so I did not think to tweet it when I landed.

So I just have a feeling that the data is biased negative, and bigger airlines are hit more negatively than smaller ones.
You've missed the main point of the article, which is that startups can become pathological work environments in ways that are not an option for large companies.
The Mindset of a Problem-Finder
This graph seems off to me. I have a hard time believing the 80 years from 1665 to 1745 were a period of constant deflation.
That's true, but what's also true is that virtually every bigco has checks and balances to address that problem, whereas the job of HR in a post-A-round startup is mostly to screw you on health insurance.

Whether those checks function well or not, there's usually nothing you can do about an irrational or abusive CEO or VP/Eng at a startup.
All of those problems can also happen in large companies.
The sexism isn't overt for legal reasons, but that doesn't change the end results.

Hmm, Oddly enough, I think that laws on sexism, racism and reasonable behavior by employers actually influences their behavior. There may still be sexist attitudes, say, at a large company but the norm is to make a serious effort prevent them. Believe it or not but laws actually matter... Laws don't prevent bad behavior but they certainly mitigate it. Also, I suspect that one sees bad behavior most often the very top of the large corporations, since those with the most power are naturally mostly likely see themselves as above anyone's else's laws. But the top of a large company is a small area compared to the vast middle.
Here's the same graph with a logarithmic scale, which is better for comparing rates of change across time:

http://oregonstate.edu/cla/polisci/faculty-research/sahr/pll...

And here's the source of both graphs, with links to raw data and more figures:

http://oregonstate.edu/cla/polisci/faculty-research/sahr/sah...
maybe they are a bit more careful after bag with cement failed to pulverize in 2008: http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSHAR758445...
I don't quite get it. What is this data based on? What goods are included?

The price of food, for instance, has fallen dramatically just in the past 50-75 years. In both percent-of-household-budget and real dollar terms, it's dirt cheap compared to what it used to be. So any CPI-type "basket" that includes food ought to show price deflation over time.

In the meantime, many things that would have been unthinkable luxuries have become regarded as necessities of one sort or another. I suspect the average number of square feet of living space has gone up dramatically, as has energy consumption. But to just factor that into "price" doesn't seem particularly fair, since the 'average' standard of living in 2005 is so much higher than in 1795.

The chart is neat but it needs more context.
Big companies have infinitely more to lose. Something else I've seen repeatedly in my career: even frivolous claims of harassment are settled with cash, because the cost to fight them is too high.

You can't do that with a tiny startup because there's not enough to sue for.
100 is really only a few dozen :)
The graph "takes off" where it does because economists figured out that deflation harms the economy by encouraging irrational hoarding of money. Modern central banks aim to keep inflation predictable, low, and positive; several banks have explicit targets (usually 2%) which are chosen largely by asking the question "given that inflation rates have inherent volatility, what's the lowest average inflation rate we can have without volatility regularly pushing it below zero?"
This is a great idea. Can anybody recommend a place to look for help in sprucing up the visual design?
The end of AI winter?
You can't install cracked stuff through Cydia, you have to use something like installous via hackulo.us.
amcharts is the one we picked as well
Oops. Didn't know that.
Amen. Especially 3D pie charts.
I couldn't agree more. Actually, it doesn't even have to be funding that changes the dynamic of the team. I worked at a startup that had 3 people (2 founders and 1 employee) in 2007, and 15 by 2008. That changed everything.
I wouldn't expect it ever. Rapid development not rapid execution. However, I didn't expect the difference in speed to be so large, considering it is calling into the Java lucene.
via Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding
reduce(lambda x, y: x+y, xrange(101))
As far as I know, all are on the long list.
I completely agree, except for the last line. This chart is worthless without any details as to how the numbers are calculated.
Cool idea. The name is very clever; are there any plans to expand it beyond a simple "login w/Twitter or facebook" app?
Thanks for that. Inflation is a cumulative effect and makes a lot more sense on a log scale.

Interesting to note that the rate of inflation during the civil war dwarfs anything else, which is what one would expect. I also noticed that there was a huge amount of inflation prior to the Great Depression. The post WWII era is interesting not for the huge amount of inflation but the absence of any deflation.
The Next 4 Billion Connected People Won't Be Using HTML
Every year since 2000 has been proclaimed that it will be the year for Linux to break into the mainstream. I don't see how Moblin is going to change this "winning" streak.
Dinosaur eggs are found in India
When people say "dynamic languages" what is it that they mean? The typing system? If so, how can typing really effect productivity as drastically as this article (and other people I've heard) claim?

It seems to me that what is really at play here is good language design, good libraries, good sample code, good tutorials, a good community. I honestly don't understand how a statically typed language would be at such a humongous disadvantage to a dynamically typed language.

I ask in ignorance. I spend most of my day in Java and I hate it, but I rarely curse the types... What am I missing here!?
My first exposure to programming
Is this supposed to be proving any sort of a point?

Serious question; what's the point here?
If you look carefully, it's not constant deflation in that period -- over those 80 years there's an average deflation rate of 0.6%, but at many points the price index jumps 10% above the trendline.

I find these numbers to be entirely believable -- after all, this is a period when the American Colonies are expanding rapidly, with resulting effects in terms of specialization of skills and self-sufficiency. It's going to be far cheaper to have something produced in 1745 by the local expert X-maker than it was to import the same item from Britain in 1665.
Not at the moment, but later on, who knows. For now, I'm using the Twitter/Facebook login as a simple way to keep people from voting twice on the same movie.
If you take the official network classes from Cisco then you do spend a lot more time on real equipment than buried in a book.

// finished 4 semesters of CCNA instruction only to be too poor to afford the testing. :)
> and real dollar terms

What does that mean? Obviously, you need more US dollars today to purchase food than you did in 1950, due to inflation. Does "real dollar terms" mean adjusted for inflation?

http://www.gti.net/mocolib1//prices/1950.html

1950: Beef is $.43/lb

http://www.gti.net/mocolib1//prices/2009.html

2009: Beef is $2.99/lb
a.k.a. Al Capone
Perhaps the OP would be happier again working for an organically grown startup (rather than a "well" funded one). In such companies "Real money is being made and lost" - and a lot more directly than in a huge company (with all its inefficiencies). What each employee does matters, and stupidity is punished.
Ephemerisle: The Seasteading Institute's floating art+politics festival
This is true; regarding this specific time period, however, there were definitely some large historical events that contributed to prices rising. The logarithmic scale reveals it as well. Vietnam, yes, but also that whole patriotism thing, news reporting, and "Buy American" which was, obviously, fueled by the birth of the advertising age.
I've found there doesn't necessarily have to be one founder who's in charge, just that founders have to be able to cooperate. If the founders can't work together, it's not likely to solve the problem to designate one as the boss.

Nor is the problem limited to groups of 2 founders. You can have groups of 2 that work together well and groups of 3 that bicker. I'm guessing the author just had a limited sample size.
Coders At Work: Simon Peyton Jones
"Governments do all sorts of things (e.g. running the legal system, maintaining basic regulations on the market) which tend, on the whole, to increase levels of happiness."

You seem to have missed or not understood the point about protecting my right to pursue happiness. This entails things like keeping the criminal justice system working, and a military sufficient to defend the country. Everything you outline except taxes fits into that framework.

Where things go off the rail is when "the ability to pursue happiness" as a metric for goodness is replaced by "happiness" as a metric for goodness. This is not the same thing at all. Once you permit that as an argument for letting (or requiring) the government to do something, you're in a different domain.

Taxes is an example of government making me less happy. You speak as if the government by default owns all my money, and I should be happy about what I am graciously permitted to keep. No, I am unhappy about what they take. I acknowledge the need for it, but it would be fairly odd if it made me happy. Failing to make me less unhappy is perhaps in some sense increasing my happiness, but I'm not ready to accord them much credit for that action, in the hypothetical world in which my taxes might go down anytime soon.
For myself, using C# in the corporate world and Python for my personal projects, I enjoy developing more in Python, and I am therefore more productive (or at least I feel that way.)
Bankers aren't good at recognizing risk but are incentivized to embrace it
Eh, this game is being pirated more than the average app.

From what I heard at Greg Yardley (PinchMedia)'s talk at 360idev yesterday, the average piracy rate is 34%. My personal experience with Boxcar lines up with those numbers, along with a 0.056% conversion rate from pirated to paid. The "average" there, again according to PinchMedia, is 0.043% or 1 in 233.

They're taking the right approach in that, well, the truth is if someone is going to pirate something then even if you try and dissuade them they'll just move on to the next one. In my particular case, I send a push notification letting them know we've detected that they are using a pirated copy, and then disable their account. If they purchase the legitimate version, their account will automatically be re-enabled.

If I didn't have a backend server with monthly hosting costs, I wouldn't care that the application was being pirated. They use it, then move on. Based on the conversion rates I've seen myself and have heard of from others, it's just not worth the effort to try and get someone to purchase it.

Those conversion rates also invalidate the entire "I'm just trying it before buying it" argument, which is complete bullshit.

Pirates discuss it on Twitter: http://twitpic.com/jor06

And I also get emails about it -- angry ones: http://jdg.net/post/160979167/retard

http://jdg.net/post/151845213/some-people-just-amaze-me-unfo...

http://jdg.net/post/142912680/yep-dont-buy-this-piece-of-cra...