skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hype aside, there's no denying that the number of business offering and consuming services built on the cloud model have increased dramatically recently.

But no, instead of debating what the new services, platforms and business models are going to actually mean to the industry, let's quibble about the terms people are hyping for it.

Well played, Mr. Ellison.
According to him, the pirate users only sampled a little bit of the game before moving on. As the OP states, pirates are more interested in the novelty of it.
The issue is that generating all possible images would tie a lot more resources than generating them on the fly -- only for the combinations that are requested. Also, caching will help if the image is requested multiple times.
How to make a graph look good
I would change that to 'a service of which you don't care how it works.'
A meta-comment here: why down vote someone that is asking a legitimate question?
>Consumer point of view: Moblin? A new OS? Scary and confusing!

Only if you think of it as a computer.

If you think of a netbook as web-browser/emailler/ebook reader then the user doesn't know/care about an OS.

Nobody refused to buy an iPod/iPhone because it had a new OS.
Otherwise windows mobile devices would have won.
This is a huge discovery. This shows that there could be a common ancestor to apes and humans. The skeleton found, Ardi, doesn't show capabilities of an ape (hanging off trees, bone structure etc.) so its a very plausible explanation.
This sounds suspiciously like what one tells oneself to avoid considering that startups might have different and more severe risks than big companies. If those terrible risks weren't there, why would startups have this mythical "upside"?

Also, while there are shitty bigco's out there, you can switch bigco's with less career friction than you can switch startups. You have lots of choices, and a lot more information about company culture with bigco's; the founders of a startup probably can't reliably tell you what the culture's going to be like next year.
you've never talked to anyone in chicago before, have you? zing!
Use Dropbox iPhone app to sync with Yojimbo
IMHO, C is nice because it doesn't force you to break your code into many small little pieces.

Although I agree that in general it is better to have multiple classes/modules -- if the project really requires it. This is not the case here.
"We" know insomuch as the Discovery Institute wrote a document setting forth Intelligent Design as a method to do an end-run around the establishment clause and get Creationism into the classroom, and then later admitted that they wrote that document. What's left to suspect?
No, there are some things that happen in startups which absolutely don't happen in established businesses in North America. I've seen fraud, overt sexism, early-stage employees fired the week before they vest, and tyrannical abuse of underlings.

That said, the author of the post works only in the LA area, so I think all his experience has been with media-oriented startups. I have a feeling there's a higher degree of frat boy douchiness in that world. San Francisco startups tend to have a more placid, nerdy, bike-rack-in-the-lobby atmosphere, although they can ultimately be just as cruel.
I have a little speech I give candidates about how bad life is going to be at our little company. When you find someone you want to hire, especially if you've been looking for a long time, your brain switches to a mode that says "don't screw this up!" Which is bad, because the thing that's worse than not managing to hire an excellent candidate is hiring an otherwise-excellent candidate who can't handle the company you're running.

It's actually worse to hire someone who is awesome and a deal-breaker culture mismatch than it is to hire someone incompetent. The incompetent you can send on their way. With a real talent, there's hard feelings and reputation hit.
I hate to look really amateurish, and please correct me if this is irrelevant to the thread, but would the following python code equal to the amount of money received if each shirt was sold for one design?

(It's python, and I'm very new to programming. Criticism is welcome.)

a,b = 1,1
while a <= 100:
a = a + 1
b = b + a
print(b)
Google Wave Bids Ripped from eBay in Failed Pay-to-Play Move
Where does the article say "How to make a graph look good" ?? Is this simply your take on this issue?
How to listen to customers and your community
And the downside potential.

Announcement - everybody in cubicles 1000-1999 are fired.
We just merged with a competitor or had a management consultant report/market survey that said this business unit is no longer a core competency.
So you're all out, doesn't matter how good you are - the shareholders have decided.
If you have to pierce abstraction by stripping away the IDE, you've got an issue with the design of the language.

Take python: I don't have to write getters and setters, but if I need to tinker around "inside" one, I simply write a function and decorate it with @property. But that code is only present if I need to create an exception to the general case, rather than having everything, including the common cases, present in source and hidden by the IDE.

Edit: Check out Project Lombok (http://projectlombok.org/), which tries to address some of these issues for Java (including the exceptional case, rather than hiding the general case). We discussed it a two months ago at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=738958
Rails is pretty mainstream now, though, isn't it?

I think it's tough hiring good Ruby/Rails people because they're all busy. And those that aren't, are probably not good to begin with...

(I think the OP mentioned "hasn't worked out as planned" with regards to hiring Rails talent, not erlang)
I think as long as you make it clear from the start that your site isn't going to be free forever, you won't get any significant customer backlash

Perhaps it would be helpful to put a price on it from the beginning, and offer invitation-only free accounts?
Textrar: Introducing Tweets search/analysis and sharing
You're missing the point. Here's the basic transaction paradigm for remote resources:

try:
remote_resource.start_transaction()
#dostuff
remote_resource.commit()
except e:
remote_resource.rollback()

How do you do the same thing when modifying a local variable? You might try making a copy, modifying that, and then assigning back, but that's boilerplate, and it's easy to get wrong. Worlds are a more primitive mechanism that would be baked into a language, such that building a generic transaction api for local actions on top of worlds would be trivial. The fact that it could look exactly like the transaction api that you currently know and love for remote resources is a feature.
RIM, Queens form research partnership
Google Expands Search Control With New Options
Google Launches 9 New Ways to Search
Its also possible that within a big company you can build stuff that no one uses. I've seen it many a time.
And in a big company you lose that other important thing ... whats that called ?? ... Oh yeah ... your soul.
As you ascend the ranks its just one big political game.
That's what everyone says when this discussion comes up, but of course:

* It is far more likely that your pre-cash-flow-positive startup is going to die, abruptly, with no severence, than it is that NYSE Euronext or Coca Cola is going to cut 1000 IT jobs.

* If you can hack it in a startup, you are worth enough that finding another job isn't going to be hard. If you're doing it right, you're always going to have another job in your back pocket.

A point that this "debate" often misses: just because you're doing a bigco career doesn't mean you get to be lazy. You have to actively manage your career either way. The debate between startup life and parking your ass in the same cube for 15 years is a straw man argument.
One thing that I think is often missed in the discussion around LOC and features like closures is that, while sometimes denser code is terser, often it's more expressive. For example, the code:

List<String> userNames = new ArrayList<String>();
for(User user : users) {
userNames.add(user.getName());
}

is not just more verbose but also reveals the programmers intentions less than something like:

var userNames = userList.map(\u -> u.Name)

Java programs often devolve into a lot of for loops, which all kind of look the same regardless of what you're doing, and you have to read pretty closely. It's nice to replace a bunch of loops with explicit methods like "map" or "find" or "reduce" or "each" or other things that explicitly declare the intent of the programmer.

I write a lot of Java, and we also have an in-house Java-like language built on the JVM (that we're working to open source), and we added closures to it in order to gain those sorts of benefits. Even though IDEA or Eclipse can write my for loops for me, it can't read them for me.

There's no technical reason why you can't have a statically-typed language with excellent tools that isn't unnecessarily verbose: all you really need to add are type inference, closures/first-class functions, and properties, and a little bit of metaprogrammability (instead of code generation) is also both feasible and helpful.
Pandora? They are in a very competitive industry but they were sticky enough that most people didn't go to a competitor.

Also Hot or Not. They started as a free dating experiment but when they were overrun by spammers they switched to a paid model. Membership was still free.

I don't know if any of that's relevant to you. These are "freemiums." I can't think of any examples off the top of my head on a completely free to paid. Maybe the lesson there is you need to keep something free?
When you say "first and only technical employee" ... should I take that to mean that the four founders are non-technical? I assume so, if you'll be the CTO and one of the partners will be the CEO.

Based on that assumption, and what you said about marketing, planning, and "the website is the company" ... why do you need to be an employee? Why not just compete?
Did your friends actually get into Wave or are they just on the (very very long) list? There's a huge amount of invite begging going on but it's not clear that these "invites" are worth anything.
A) Not hacker news

B) You have to put your email address in the "about" box if you want anyone to see it. The "email" field is only visible to the admins.
I respect your opinion, but I must respectfully disagree that the government should have no role in funding research. Certainly, the current system of public funding is not perfect, but market driven research is no panacea.

Take, as a case study, the pharmaceutical industry. Research into new pharmaceuticals is almost entirely market driven. This goes a long way to explaining why a program to develop a medication reducing the damage caused by heart attacks was more-or-less shut down after it was discovered that one of their candidate molecules gave men erections. Why spend more money to cure heart attacks, when old men will pay $10/pill for what you've already got? It also explains why we have a plethora of statins on the market today to fight high cholesterol, a disease of primarily affluent nations, and not even so much as promising drug candidates to fight the plethora of neglected diseases afflicting the poor nations of Africa. Finally, and probably most scarily, it explains why there hasn't been any serious research into antibiotics in the last couple decades. Everyone expects antibiotics to be cheap, and they'll only take them for a week or two. Statins are covered by insurance and you have to take them for a lifetime...

...so I hope you can take comfort in the ideal of market driven research when Vancomycin resistant Staphylococcus aureus becomes prevalent in the community and we haven't developed any new antibiotics to treat it...because where's the profit in that?
That's not an argument, it's a My Chemical Romance song. If your work doesn't mean anything, you change jobs.

You can do everything right at a startup and still fail. In fact, even if you do everything right, you're probably still going to fail. You have many more opportunities to correct in a bigco career.
We've had some success with http://www.simplechart.net

It's fairly easy to use and can generate charts in PNG and JPEG format.
Was there ever? I mean, they were running Apache, PHP, and MySQL. This makes no sense to use Windows, especially when you factor in the extra costs for the instance.

Sure, if you have some sort of Windows specific code you need to run, it _might_ make sense, but even in that case, it could be easier to run N Linux web facing instances and 1 dedicated Windows instance. For example, if you needed to run SQL Server, you could still access it from the Linux boxes.
The cloud mostly works, while NCs never did.
That is exactly it. They seem like they know what they're talking about. Not because of some clever trick about the way they presented themselves, but because they actually do know what they're talking about.

Which means the way to make a successful video is not to focus on the video. It's to do what Scott suggested: work on the company. Then you'll be able to just sit down and do the video in a single, unscripted shot. And that is so much more convincing than someone sitting reading from a script.
Why we are not that concerned that our app has been pirated:

I think it takes a small dev studio or independent developer to have enough feel for these reasons why piracy isn't so bad.

I feel the same way about my book - I like seeing people pirate it, even if the publisher doesn't! It doesn't seem to hurt sales and raises awareness, as these guys have found.

That said, ripping off a PDF to boost print book sales is a different kettle of fish than ripping off a game that's identical to the legit version.. I wonder how this will fare long term.
+1 - I dunno how many times I can say "the plural of anecdotes is not data". This guy either had bad luck or was really terrible at vetting the startups for product quality/traction and founder quality (or both).
I'm definitely happier in startups too. Being in the middle of a startup with traction [1] keeps you sharp. I tell myself that it also makes me more valuable in either a bigco or another startup.

At some point though you need to seperate the emotional from the rational. And building up career qualifications in challenging startups stops meaning that much when you lose sight of any ways to deploy those qualifications down the road.

[1] Important qualifier.
its kind of a pain for the users, but the best solution might be to have them re-verify their email addresses on maybe a 6 month term.

its how my 401k account works, since your email address might change at any given time along with your job.
Social media's success formula
Seriously, how do you vet a startup for "founder quality"? The entire tenor of the company can (probably will) change after the next funding round. Seen it happen, heard it happen, it clearly does happen. Steve Blank wrote it up really well.
There doesn't have to be deterministic screening for scientists to get the message. Events like the one described in the link below don't exactly impart confidence in an evolutionary biologist that they'll continue to get funded if they stay in America:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6...
Sorry are you serious? Why would a Hindu that is pro-arranged marriage be on a dating website? Arranged marriages were a severe form of keeping the caste system in tact but that's not applicable now.
But then again your type of logic can probably explain why Islamic people aren't liked since everyone is anti-terrorism.
Most start-ups are usually founded by close friends who hire more close friends and so on... So one can hardly avoid nepotism in start-up sphere, at least this is my experience.
Here's another one: employees that vest, buy out their options, and have them made worthless despite mid-8-figures acquisitions.
Ok... maybe it's because I like to program the functional way (in imperative languages), but I've never found a reason to rollback local variable changes. That's because local variables don't "fail" and don't need to be rolled back. I see why it's a nice solution but I've never really seen the problem.

What I normally do is: operate on temporaries (or copied parameters), change remote resource (it's safe to just rollback resource changes and exit here in case of problems), then change "the state" when operations cannot fail any more. Is there any real-live problem that needs local variables rollback? (that is shorter / nicer than returning the result from temporary locals) I'd really like to see it.
Here is the publication

http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v3/n10/abs/nphoton.200...
Python is not even the best example here, in Common Lisp and Perl (and probably lots of other languages) provide even better abstractions. If you want to modify the behavior of one accessor, you can modify it with method modifiers. If you want to create a new class of accessor-generation behavior, you can write a new metaclass that works exactly the way you want. (And of course, you can write your own "defclass" macro that always uses your own metaclass, if you desire.)

In Perl, we can even compose meta-roles into metaclasses; meaning that even tiny changes can be made easily reusable.

This is generally preferable to editing code in an IDE.
I've read a few articles/posts about piracy rates, and it seems that a piracy rate of 90% is "normal", at least for PC titles. So to me it seems like piracy on the iPhone is lower than it could have been, and a lot lower if it drops to 50%. Still a problem, of course, but if Apple keep making it more complicated to jailbreak the hardware it might actually be moving towards 0%.
Depends on the application domain and design.
Let's suppose that the results of that study are accurate and generalizable, so that (1) teachers with at most two years of experience are dramatically worse than ones with three or more, but that beyond that there's no advantage to having more. And let's suppose that although the study talks about "less than three years experience" and is written as if there's no such thing as a teacher with less than one year of experience, what they actually mean is "first two years", "next two years", etc.

So. You are proposing to throw teachers out after six years of teaching. Then, assuming every teacher stays the full six years, 1/3 of all teachers will be in that low-experience category that teaches so much less effectively. At present, according to the study you cited, the figure is more like 1/5. It seems that your proposal will result in 65% more pupils being taught by teachers who do not do a good job.

This is not the only reason why your suggestion seems to me unlikely to be a good one, but it seems a pretty compelling reason.
I wouldn't say placid. ALL the nibbles I get since my last contract have been up front about 70+ hours/week. Is that standard? Seriously!
Sorry, it was 2 thoughts conveyed poorly. Question 1 was whether he was having a hard time finding rails people or just that he didn't need more people.

Then my statement was more directly referring to the Erlang piece of it.

One of the things that crosses my mind every time I start leaning towards one of the more exotic languages is whether or not I'll ever be able to find someone to maintain the software later.
The tiny minority I'm talking about are the ones who decided to invent the public attack on evolution and use it as a tool to gain power by controlling those 53%.

I really don't think it matters if some individuals choose not to believe in evolution for personal reasons. The problem is when extremist rhetoric is used to control the electorate and force things to happen like John McCain picking Sarah Palin as a running mate.
I will suggest make it a three phase deal.

In phase I

0. Keep in mind your expectations and the fact that they are not to be let loose in this phase.

1. Put the (very) brief of what you have done for the company in the last one year, so that all in the room are in the same picture. Also that you like the company and the people and would definitely like to continue.
This will help you in point 3 below.

2. let them know about the problems you are facing with the over hours from what was commited (40 - 70).

3. Express your intentions about joining with equity and are expecting something fair that compensates for the extra efforts you have (and will be) put, as specified in point 1,2.

4. Ask them to put a proposition on the table.

5. Try to scrounge here and there a bit, see if they have something more in mind that has not come out yet.

6. If the deal is at your liking - take it.! - done.
Else, just tell them that this is less than what you expect and you will get back to them in a couple of days.

This will also give them time to review and upgrade the offer. Since you didn't like it and as you said that they know your value, hopefully they will consider upgrading the offer.

------

Phase II

Talk to people or ask on HN at that point again, you will get better advice with better information at hand.

Prepare two cases in mind:

1. Worst: If they don't think that you are that important as you think and no negotiation is allowed - no analysis paralysis - just Y/N

2. They are looking to upgrade the offer:

2.1 Avergage: Not to your likeliness but to some midway
Decide you lower limit and keep one thought in
mind for anything below that - Y/N.

2.2 Best: To your likeliness - Y

Remember: this is where the lines are drawn, you cannot go back on the Y/N of 1, 2.1 once decided form here.

Give them a call to check what have been thinking, are they looking for an upgrade in offer or not and accordingly fix the next meeting.

---------------

Phase 3

With completely figured out Y/N for all 1, 2.1 just behave and negotiate hard in the room.

If the meeting has a conclusion - good.

Else, if they ask for, give them some but limited (a week max) to turn around.
but is it worth being on the front page of HN? Maybe for reddit, but I come here looking for HN-specific topics.
Devices Claim to Teach Babies Before Birth; Experts Unsure
I don't buy the argument. You'd need to show not only that fake mopping-a-dirty-floor is somehow more imprinting than fake shooting-the-enemy, but also that mopping a dirty floor is a detrimental activity.

Additionally, the game only glorifies household work to the extent that you think it does: you do household chores to make your Sim happy, so that he can advance his career, so that you can buy more stuff, so that your Sim is happy, etc. You could interpret this as a game that glorifies housework, but it also glorifies consumerism, hedonism, and career ambition.

Or you can play it for other reasons entirely -- like to observe the character interactions. (When I played it, it was mostly to build interesting houses...)
Court order served over Twitter
I agree with everything you said... except useful stuff part.

There is much more stuff being thrown out or made totally useless in a year at big companies than all failed start-ups have ever produced!
I have yet to find a way to get my car in a test sandbox* where success doesn't result in the loss of the car.

*Note: for this to work, you will need a large sandbox. If it is too small, your car will be fine, but just try explaining what happened to the sandbox to your kid.
Sometimes I browse in IE because Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, Arora are full of tabs that I have yet to digest.
I don't mean to be Debbie Downer here, but things like this really irritate me.

Are you sending a portion of your sales to the copyright holder of each image? Do you cite any of the original research into each animal? Or are you simply stealing their content and profiting from it?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852219

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852231

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=849323