skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hilarious, persuasive, constructive, and insightful.

Oh wait, none of those.

(And I say this as someone who thinks Java is the second-worst programming language available today.)
How are people cracking and using cracked applications on the iPhone? Am I just living in the dark by using the App Store and clicking "Install"?
The honest truth is that it's often unsettling for people to work at startups. They are chaotic and messy.

It's not right for everyone.

The best people we hired into our startup were often refugees from the cubicle world looking for a little adventure and ok with making less money. In the interview we would try to paint a picture of daily life in a startup, the true odds of success, or even survival, and how different a work experience this was going to be for them.

And what an adventure we gave them. Some stayed, others ran back to cubicle farms. Some had been at such bad places that in our worst moment they still said "this isn't that bad.. I've been in worse jobs!".

I've been taking a 'break' from the startup world at a large gaming company and I totally understand the appeal of an established company.

There are times in your life when you don't want work to be an adventure.
If there's a real reason to do that, I don't really understand it. I don't use Posterous; we just sent the video there since that's what the application asked for.
http://www.reddit.com/r/csbooks/ is a useful subreddit for tons of free Computer Science ebooks.
EC2 estimates: 40k servers, 220M+ revenue
"So it seems that in general twins weigh roughly the same."

It should be easy to study the eating habits of these twins. In most cases, why should they differ much, if they have been raised in the same household?
Summary: Working in a really bad start-up is less good than working in a really good corporate environment.

There are shitty, corrupt, nepotistic, lying corporations and there are also sterling start-ups. The world's not black and white.
MTU is the maximum Ethernet v2 packet size (1500); MSS is the "payload" it can carry (1460). If you see 1492 for your MTU, you are maybe using Point to Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) which chomps another 8 bytes.
Should games like The Sims be banned?
These games glorify household work and can have a damaging effect on players as a result (e.g. wrt to career ambition).

In fact, one could argue that they are worse than violent games.
Typhoon Ketsana/Ondoy Disaster Response using Google Maps
I don't see this getting traction with Google entering the market and Microsoft finally getting it's act together with Windows 7 (which works very nicely on my 1000He).

I'm not saying it looks bad. But using Linux requires a sacrifice from an average user and I don't see anything that makes this special enough to justify that sacrifice.
I have heard very good things about it including Dan Weinreb, long time lisp guy, who is very excited about it.

I would be inclined to work with clojure if I had any java projects or seriously threaded projects.

My multi-core stuff these days is done the easy way--separate long-running processes, loosely coupled.
This Facebook app's stats show that happiness climbs steadily during the weekend, then drops as soon as Sunday reminds us that Monday is coming. Once the doldrums have past, happiness begins a steady rise.

Also, I wonder if any of these are tied to the sudden dip in happiness on January 22nd, 2008: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2008#2008_January_22

Heath Ledger, perhaps?
RailsBizCast - Learning business of web development with Ruby on Rails
Service oriented REST architecture is an oxymoron
3 Tips for Cloud Companies Riding the Hype Cycle
Site wasn't made for IE users, it was made for developers.
Except that engineers are supposed to use precise, unambiguous language. I blame the computer guys for knowing jack of signal processing / communications theory and misusing the technical terms due to plain ignorance. It wouldn't be so bad if the ignorant fools in question weren't so arrogant...
Site went down, but coral cache has it:
http://www.dragthing.com.nyud.net/blog/?p=285
Priyanka Chopra wallpapers
Application of PG's "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" to dating.
It is a great site, glad you like it!

The founders are coders, and MBA's. Smart guys, not their first startup.
Ask HN: What do you do when emails are no longer a one to one relationship?
Recently I've been working on a website that uses users school email addresses. Many schools will reuse your email address once you graduate. This means that an email is no longer seen as one email per person. A single email could belong to multiple people over time. What happens when a person with a reused email address tries to sign up for your site?

People who have been in this situation, how do you handle it? Do you try to set some sort of "you've graduated, what's your new email?" or do you send some sort of alert when someone tries to sign up with the same school email?
I really didn't need the introductory material on how he bought the notebook that he wrote his diary in either.
This might be true if the application asked for a 10 minute video, but the extreme time limit makes it such that production value means next to nil (as long as you can understand what they're saying...)
Fabulous post, wmeredith - thanks.
Glad you like it, I'm stoked for it to get to other phones (so I can use it). On their roadmap, just will take some time.
There are various ways but you might look at this for ease of use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydia_%28application%29 (nearly 500k daily visitors sounds like it is pretty popular)
Before I roll-out apps to the folks who will really torture them in production-like servers, I play with about 100 simultaneous connections.
eschew "my IDE will write it" in favor of more powerful abstractions

But he specifically said that this breaks down when you need to pierce the abstraction and he's right. You can often accomplish the same thing by doing the "non-abstracted" code in a lower level language and linking to it, but that's not always convenient or safe.

I'm of two minds on this topic. I like the "smarts" of a good IDE that hides stuff that I don't care about. But at the same time, I'm afraid that if it breaks (bug in the IDE or library), I don't have the ability to find the broken part and fix it or work around the problem. This was exactly how I felt when I started playing with WCF.
As I said I am not that kind of employer.
Acard (acard.com) sells battery backed RAM/CFcard solutions for well under $500. There are compromises. It will fit your budget, but may not fit your needs.
"Lesson 4: To paraphrase Jamie Zawinski - if your code can get people laid, you're off to a good start."

Say what you want, but it's true.
No. I've had a wavesandbox.com account since late May or early June. Yesterday in my wavesandbox.com account there was a Wave with a one-time-use link to create a normal Wave account.

These normal wave accounts (@gmail.com) are what everyone is getting now, and are totally separate from the previous @wavesandbox.com accounts. (Yes, one day, probably every Gmail account will be a Wave account - but not for a while).
Invoke dynamic is a nice start, but it too is geared towards Ruby/Python style dynamism. It does almost nothing for Clojure.
The amount they've invested is some what irrelevant, except to maybe establish a minimum valuation.

I figured that the website was the company, but thanks for confirming. You also should establish how many other people in their world could have done what you did (and be realistic here). The less uniqueness you bring to the scenario, the less valuable you are overall. This is simply a datapoint.

On the plus side, it does sound like you are a valuable player to the company.

You probably do NOT want equity though. Equity has immediate value, which means you will have to pay capital gains taxes on that. If the company is valued at $500K and you get a 10% stake, that 10% is worth $50K. Are you prepared to pay taxes on that amount? Options are probably better. (IANAL, and this is a gross summarization).

You mention there are 4 partners. Let's even say that you all are equal (and in reality from what you described I think they would value their stake above yours). If you each got 10%, that sucks up 50% of the stock and will (again, summarization) make raising any future capital more difficult.

It also sounds from your other posts that you are somewhat very green to this kind of negotiating, and that can hurt you. I would spend a LOT of time googling and reading about topics like equity vs. options and golden parachutes and the like.

Based on the few words that you've posted, I would probably look at something like:
5% stake as stock options. 1 year cliff, 4 year vest
110% market rate salary
Some sort of MBO bonus (either on top of the salary or a 90% salary and MBO plan to get you to 105-110%)
Contract assuring you 6 months severance plus 1 month for every year of employment upon termination for any reason (basic golden parachute and not terribly uncommon).

10% seems high for stock. 5% is probably more realistic. In any case you'll likely end up with no more than 75% of what any of the founders have allocated to themselves.

Given the situation you should get a salary slightly above market. This is "fair" for everyone.

The contract would be a negotiating point and you'll probably have a hard time with that one. But I would personally probably still ask for it.

A lot of this hinges on how experienced the founders are all well. If they are also new to this they may be offended and think you are over-reaching. If they've done this before, probably not. I'm also assuming that you carry yourself day-to-day in a manner that is commensurate with my suggestions. If you act like a child and have a cube full of action figures, it's harder to negotiate...
You should reach out to Natty and Nate (the founders). They are really nice and smart guys.

Travel space is crowded, you are right. They are in bootstrap and listen to their passionate users mode right now, with the site improving at an impressive rate.

I'll ask them about AdWords!
I don't get it either. My guess is that people install a cracked version through Cydia to use on a jailbroken iPhone. I'd love to have this confirmed though.
iPhones can run unsigned apps after only a few minor changes, even if they're not jailbroken. The most games and popular apps are widely available through the typical piracy channels.
I'm a programmer, so I have a tendency to sit on my ass and snack. Why would I want a shirt that draws attention to my waistline?
I've flown this month with Ryan on the JetBlue deal, he is working, and traveling a ton.
>The government does not have the power to make me happy, in any useful sense of the term power.

I'm not sure what you mean here. It certainly doesn't have the power to guarantee your happiness under all conceivable circumstances (and neither do you, and nor does any other entity) but it can certainly make decisions which either increase or decrease your happiness. You would be happier, I assume, if the government decided to cut your taxes, and less happy if it decided to increase them. (Or pick some other example if that particular one doesn't work for you.)

>The article's point is once you start arguing against the preceding two paragraphs, you really ought to be aware that you just threw liberty out the window

This is the alarmist part. Efforts on the part of a government to make its citizens happy do not necessarily entail "throwing liberty out of the window". This is simply nonsense. And in general, saying that anyone who fails to agree with your "preceding two paragraphs" is inherently opposed to liberty is a rather childish rhetorical tactic.

>The only way the government can make you happy is to exert an awful lot of control,

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. I don't know if this counts as an "awful lot" of control, but it doesn't seem especially unjustified or sinister. Neither does the particular form of control in the case at issue, which is nothing more than a minor market regulation of an unremarkable sort. You are talking as if the aim here was for the government to somehow guarantee the happiness of every citizen, but of course no-one is proposing that it either could be or should be so. Some people do think that in those cases where a government policy may reasonably be expected to increase people's general well-being, it might, typically, absent reasons to the contrary, be a good idea to enact that policy. But this sort of moderate position is of course too radically pro-statist for the doom-and-gloom libertarians.

>I'm also reacting much more to the British thing

What's the "British thing"?

>That is to say, this is a feel-good measure for the lawmaker, I don't see how it will actually change anything.

If it's not going to change anything, what is there to get so upset about? I suppose it is a good chance to jump on the usual "gub'mint outa my 'shop" bandwagon.
I entirely agree, OCaml is a particularly fun one for me. I suppose my word choice should have been better, but "dynamic language" was a fairly lazy and easy choice to contrast against big, bad Java.
It's interesting that they claim that piracy was largely responsible for an increase in sales... I wonder if this is more because people are using piracy to sample the games before they buy or because the pirating users are increasing the buzz behind the game?
You know, I think the real insight in the piece is about the two startup founders where no one is really in charge. I think it's a good kick to remind founders that there needs to be a process for decision-making so you don't end up in stalemates.
Have a percent in mind when you come in, but try and make them offer before you say the amount you have in mind. It's good negotiation to get the other guy to say the first number. Then, if they come in way below what you want, tell them that this number represents significantly less then you were hoping for.

Keep in mind that if they do lowball you, you can always walk and start your own company. You now have the experience building a site from scratch and you can do it again yourself.
It might be interesting to know that it's not entirely unusual for people to learn Swedish but stick to speaking English making English optional for the locals. I know of at least two people in my small city of Skövde that does that because they are more comfortable with speaking English (one is Icelandic and the other German). There was also a mainstream TV show a few years back (maybe it's still running?) about home improvment where the lead designer did the same and I'm not sure it was even subtitled.
Exception catching. Worlds only handle your local memory (and remote resources via destructors if you can use them).

But even if you could rely on world destruction, do you really want to deal with situation where 2 worlds have to roll back 2 different remote resource modification? Can you do it reliably? If you need to write more than 1 line to do it, how is it different from old-style "except ....: ..."?
I was in changchun, shanghai, and kunshan. There was always a thick haze blotting out the sun. This was in the summer though.
Ask HN: Examples of sites which start free and later switch to paid?
One example of such a site is Meetic, which started as a free dating site for a couple of months and then started charging a subscription.

How do you prevent customer backlash? How do you protect yourself against a competitor jumping in with a free alternative?
Hi HN, I'd like some criticism of my iPhone app. I'm a bit ashamed of it, and yes, it's not rocket science, but it has been in the top 100 in the lifestyle section for close to 3 months, and brings in a decent income. Check the child comment of this for promo codes to try it out.
T9Y4K63H6REF

L7T9493RFEHY

73TEEA6LATEW

HAW6EMXYPMHF

WPM9MAPAJEEK

AJKEXRLYTHXW

K9MMMKA9FM6R

If you need more, happy to post more.
There's a level of difficulty difference. When one has the proper tools, training, and support, these things are much easier.

A kid in Texas doing a science fair project probably has supportive parents, a knowledgeable science teacher, and access to a machine shop--not to mention having enough to eat every night.
Thus in reader agreement, once the writer has switched one with the other, the reader will also turn the presented opinion into their fact.

Furthermore, any form of disagreement is less attractive as the reader is inclined to believe they have to argue with a fact, which is not attractive to do if they they presume the writer has done more research.

Result: the reader is obliged to agree, and turn another's opinion into their own fact.

Solution:

- have writer frame their viewpoint with "I think."

- have reader ask "prove it."

- have reader be aware of mental state of writer
I think Malmö(in Southern Sweden) is next to Stockholm.
Project Indect Set To Monitor Europe Like it’s 1984
Quite correct.

In the scenario I described above, with each new release of their operating system (RT/M for Sigma 5) I had to go through and change any code that masked out the timer interrupts and verify that it did not cause harm in any part of the os. And this was designed to be a real-time os, which it otherwise was.

The delay in the 2ms interrupt caused by masking out the timer interrupt was estimated to be several times the quantization noise, an unacceptable result.

I don't know what the numbers are for Linux, but I would suspect there is a release that provides something workable. I would imagine that there are real-time OSes out there now.

Yes, but keep in mind that a 4mhz PIC is faster than the hardware we were working on then.

And yes, silicon is cheap. The multiplexing A/D converters we were using cost $40,000 each. Today you get the same thing for maybe a dollar, retail quantity one.

And XP is so bad that it can't key morse code reliably through the printer port for just the reasons you mention.
10 Creative Magazines With Blog & Twitter Friendly Websites
would you mind sharing your blog address ? i tried looking for it in your profile, but couldn't really find any pointers to it. thanks !
I would say most of these are considerably more important than the choice of programming language. I write a lot of Java, and though it makes life painful at times I spend a lot more time trying to figure out how things should work from the user's perspective than I do figuring out how to translate that into Java. Distilling to the important features, then making them work together elegantly is tough!
The Relentless Trend Toward Solid State Devices
85% piracy rates. Ouch. It hurts me to even read that, although part of me has to point out that when you're developing for an audience which considers $2 expensive and $5 highway robbery, going in with the expectation that people will happily pay you money is a little optimistic.

On the plus side, you can't possibly have a worse piracy problem with your application than China does with everything, and you'll probably eventually do what Chinese software companies do: put the real meat on the server, let everyone have your client for free, and let the users who prefer to Own Their Games Instead Of Renting Them cry to themselves in the corner.
Having worked both, I can say I too definitely prefer working in a startup environment. I give this guy in the article a few months before he changes his tune. Working for a large company, I often felt like slamming my head against my desk. If you enjoy bureaucy and make that work for you, then you'll probably do well otherwise try a startup. Personally, I enjoy consulting now but in a down economy it can be tough yet BS free. Work is work at the end of the day, you have to do it. Nose to the grind stone.
This is maybe the muddyist thinking I've ever read. He tries to draw a distinction between SOA "Services" and REST "Resources" but it doesn't work because a "Resource" is just the end product of a "Service". So really he's just jumping through his own mentally created hoops (I bet he's the type that writes 40 pages of Workflow and UML diagrams before he ever writes a line of code)

Whether you use SOA or REST it's still still just an interface to the same functionality. How you choose to think about it is all in your head.
Ha, this might sound silly but I'm on Linux so I can't see your app through that link. What is it, what does it do? Curious.
Consumer point of view: Moblin? A new OS? Scary and confusing!

Developer point of view: Moblin? A new OS with all components under the GPL? Developed by Intel and released to The Linux Foundation [1]? I can now port it from power hungry and inefficient Intel Atom hardware onto handheld ARM Cortex powered devices? Sign me up!

[1]: http://linux-foundation.org/weblogs/press/2009/04/02/linux-f...
Interesting discussion here. I don't buy into the conspiracy theory at all. We all have a deep respect for YC and HN, and I don't usually try to press stories here (it is their sandbox after all, and I don't think it would be too respectful to jump up and down to press the startups).

If there is something we can share, teach or learn, we are here.
Not very convincing. You're going to have to provide extraordinary evidence to support such an extraordinary claim. You've only repeated one of the critiques of the game, which was actually much worse in the original Sims game. So in a way, they've already addressed the issue you have with it.
Doesn't PyLucene call into normal Java Lucene anyway? If so, why would you expect that the Python version would be faster?
What upside potential? The notion that a startup is going to make you a millionaire (or even --- what you're telling yourself right now --- a hundredthousandaire) is one of the most misleading things about startup culture.

You will make more money plugging away diligently at a career in the Fortune 500 than you will spending the same 30 years in startups. I use the word "will" here in the same same sense as you "will" win with KK facing 72 unsuited. Anybody here capable of starting a company is equally capable of walking in the door at six figures in a big company.

The reason this "upside" notion is so pernicious is that it's fed by powerful biases. We read about the successes. Even the failures we hear about, we're reading about them by and large because they were "successful". The overwhelming majority of startups won't get fundng, won't get significant customer traction, won't feed their founders 2 years out, and won't get enough press attention for us ever to hear about. Their stories are also boring.

As for what you accomplish with your life, remember this: over 10-20 years at a big company, you will build things that people will use. Over the same years at a startup, you're inevitably going to pour your heart and soul into code that nobody will ever see. If you're unfortunate enough to "score" any funding, even after the company dies, you're probably not going to get to do anything with that code.
Rambly while still communicating:

+ the problem
+ market size
+ distribution
+ salient features

I'll take this 2 minutes over most of the TC50 demos.
Here is an alternate link: http://appshopper.com/entertainment/freakish-animals-that-yo...
The startup culture at Posterous
No game should be banned. Period.

Just as no book or movie or song should be banned.
I meant conduit, thanks for pointing out
Tarsnap started out in free beta before moving to paid beta -- but this isn't quite what you mean, since at that point it was still a private beta (tarsnap became publicly available the month after it moved to paid beta).

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 -- simply because those people who would provide said backlash wouldn't sign up in the first place. Whether this is an effective business strategy is an open question, but it certainly seems like the most honest approach.