skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow. Creepy, seems illegal, and quite possibly disruptively brilliant. Nervously keeping tabs on this concept.
Allocate 1MB of memory upfront. When OOM happens, free that memory and run recovery mechanism.

No OOM recovery is fool proof. What if the OOM situation is caused by another process constantly consuming memory? As soon as you free your 1MB overhead, the other process could immediately consume it and again you're in an OOM state.

Granted, the likelyhood of this is slim, but then again, so is an OOM situation period. In the world of virtual memory and swap space, it pretty much takes a rogue process to trigger an OOM error in the first place.
False dichotomy FTW. There are tons of businesses that can extract tons of value from free users. Freemium, lead gen businesses (Mint), and (yes) advertising.

Getting paid in ego is pretty stupid, but amassing free users isn't necessarily so. No reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater just because of Ashton Kutcher, etc.
Banner Ads on Flies
Well, there is opportunity cost. Could the time and effort spent on Java be better spent elsewhere?

It may be because I'm still feeling the glow Java had when I learnt it in the late 1990's, but I really like a lot of things about it. It's a very simple, safe and easy to use language, it's C++ without the broken glass, it's C with automatic memory allocation, bounds checking and a nicer package/interface system. API's are separated and enforced. It used to be bemoaned as slow ("knock knock" "who's there" "................java"), and now it's seen as fast. That's pretty cool (it's partly because it's relatively faster than python... but it also has been made actually faster).

Many early adopters left it for python/ruby a few years ago when the small language that Java was became uglier with extensions, esp generics and annotations. Perhaps an important reason people left is because it became successful, and it became associated with unpleasant mindless corporate programming.

If you care at all about what qualities a language needs to have in order to be wildly adopted, Java has something to teach. Some people say it was just Sun's marketing... but Sun marketed it as a web language (applets), and it never took off there.
MLS
This is an awsome article. 21Very basic but extermely effective movements to build a great body
As far as a restaurant is concerned, why would they really care? It might annoy customers, but as long as the tables are still filling up, I feel the restaurant is more than happy, because they're still making the best of their available resources (tables and wait-staff).

It's a valid point how the artificial constraints are the envelope and the time, because the way she listed the rules was, clock starts when you open the envelope - it's almost a a ploy, or a method of trying to distract someone.
Imagine, if you were handed an envelope and were told "there's money inside there", wouldn't you immediately start to wonder "how much?" and you would immediately want to open it. She restricted this thought by applying a 2 hour time constraint, from the time you open the envelope, which almost forced the students to think twice about jumping to the money. Instead, all the groups achieved something without ever really having to open the envelope. I think it was interesting, and a job well done.
True. I believe in references. If a friend of a friend can vouch for you, then we should get to know each other.

The amazing thing is that in Silicon Valley, it's not 6 degrees of separation, it's more like 2. You and I probably have a friend in common! It helps to establish a co-founder relationship.
The Wall Street derivatives guys smell big money trading carbon credits and they will never let it happen. Even Al Gore who called the idea "nuts" has a conflict of interest because he owns a carbon trading firm.
"Personally, I found the presentation glib and condescending, and the solutions immoral and dishonest."

Welcome to business school.
Because it's not really ready for public consumption. It's still pretty buggy. To roll out now would make all those flaws public.
Ask HN: Best eCommerce Platform
I've been working on a pretty hacked-up osCommerce site for about 2 years now. We've basically outgrown the current site and are looking to move to an alternative. I'd love to hear people's opinions on specific eCommerce systems. We're currently heavily considering Magento, but after having worked on a PHP site previously, I'd really love to get away from it and move to Python or Ruby. However, it does seem like Magento has a ton of useful whizz-bang features, and I haven't really found any other mature alternatives in other languages.

So, if you have experience working on Magento, I'd love to hear your thoughts, but really I'm looking to hear about other eCommerce platforms that we should be considering. I'd really hate to end up in the same position we're in now.

Some features that we'd love to see in our eCommerce platform (most of these we've created ourselves for osCommerce):
* Hierarchical Products - not sure if that's the best way of saying it, but we need the ability to have individual products as well as products that consist of other products. Basically, we sell computer parts as well as pre-configured systems.
* Procurement System - A way for us to track stock as well as manage Purchase Orders that are out to suppliers, receiving, etc.
* RMA System - Need a good way to handle customer Rmas that fits in well with normal order processing

Those are the MAJOR things I can think of, but we'd also like the frontend site for customers have to good search capabilities, the ability for the customer to configure their own system with compatible parts, cross/upselling, filtering using product attributes, etc. etc.
My experience with these in-class group presentations is that most groups tend to shut out the presentations of the other groups because they're focused on waiting for their turn to present and last-minute prep. So unless it's a really good presentation most of them probably fall on deaf ears. Now these students will present a company pitch for a company that wants to actively recruit students from the class. I'd probably listen to that.
SirsiDynix OSS FUD Report
I think indentured servitude is the wrong way to look at this. The key difference is that the investors don't dictate that you need to achieve a certain level of returns, or that you pursue a certain line of work. Instead you're still free to do whatever you want.

Since these contracts don't impinge on personal freedom, they should be legal. And I dare say that any number of highly motivated and intelligent people would jump at an opportunity like this (myself included), especially with the buy-out clause.
Would be cool to have Australia, New Zealand, South Africa so you can learn to spot the differences
Indeed - it's not a beta, it's a "preview". Really, it's a late alpha.
Scariest Things About Running A Startup
What's good about using JavaScript and known libraries is that you can just write a userscript to reduce the framerate. With Flash, it would be all or nothing.
doing something a lot more worthwhile.

This is narrow minded. The same thing could be said about most any of the great thinkers of history... specifically those in Mathematics since it's so abstract. Arguably programming like this is closer to Math than hacking industry software.

There are of course a handful of exceptions like Benjamin Franklin who tended to be pragmatic. And there is nothing wrong about only being productive in a way that is economically quantitative. But I think there should be room for both.
When I started my company I asked my boss from my internship what hints he had for me, he said; "You need to have way too many expenses, it keeps you on your edge."
Ofcourse he didnt mean that as, buy $100 lunches, buy overpriced crap. But buy the equipment, rent an office, buy what you need to buy, if you are afraid where you'll get the money for the next months rent you'll work that much harder to earn it.
You're absolutely right.

I hacked up a prototype last night that creates a reverse index of:

tags => item GUID's => a precomputed bloom filter for all tags in that GUID

Each tag has its own reverse-index, which is stored in a separate file assembled using O_APPEND. The entries in each file are pre-sorted based on a predefined ranking algorithm.

Queries are mapped to cluster nodes using a CRC32 hash modulo across the number of cluster nodes.

Tag conjunction queries are run by computing a bloom filter for the tags in the query. The tag with the fewest GUID's is determined (approximately) through a LUT stored in main-memory. The query bloom filter is then sequentially compared using a bitwise-and with each of the bloom filters in the appropriate reverse-index file.

After 10 matches are found, the results are rendered.

No check is done for false positives.

The problem I'm having now is in prepending new entries to the start of a reverse-index file. This operation is not performant. Since it's out-of-band with the query stream, it's tolerable for the time being.
well you can still have different levels...but take cell phones for example, you have a thousand different cell phones and each of them uses a different adapter.

I'm not even complaining about the actual power supply, I get that it varies, my complaint is that you can't use the same exact power supply(look identical) because the end part is a tiny bit different.
The system relies on honesty.

I'm not so sure that it does. It relies on filling the tables at the restaurants. The restaurants don't care if the people who come to fill your table aren't the same ones that originally booked the reservation. Nor do they care if a certain number of reservations are no-shows, if the number of no-shows is smaller than the number of people waiting at the door.

As I said above, you obviously can't take this all the way to the edge case or you'll have a company that buys up every single reservation, sells none of them, and then cancels them all at the last minute. Then that company will go out of business, either because the restaurant stops them or because the restaurant goes broke, taking the company with it. ;) So, don't do that! Just because your business plan fails on some edge case doesn't mean that it has to fail for you...
We're not talking about the implementation details here, we're talking about the perception of dynamic garbage collected languages, which this summary helps to shift from an unfairly negative to a more balanced light. I'm well aware of why generational GC could be a faster choice for this kind of record processing (then again, we simply do not know from the description given how much information is shared).

As for the comparison being unfair, the person who initially made that comparison was you, sir. Bringing real-time visual simulation into the equation is unfair for a variety of reasons, including the fact that a lot more research has been done in that field's optimization. I'm not sure exactly what you want from a simple high-level example that "Yes, Clojure can be used to do real work," but I don't think anyone here is going to give it to you if you set such outlandish goals as the tip of a heavily funded branch of computer science and mathematics involving real-time rendering.
Google talent search: error 502?
If I am reading that correctly, "Marge" must make an average of $250k each year for their investors to merely break even. That seems like a lot, but obviously they must really believe she'll strike it rich somewhere along the way. Seems like a good deal for her, and an incentive to take off for the Bahamas for a while. I wonder how old she is, and whether that's an important factor for investors to consider.
Pretty much everyone that cheated the system was rewarded by the keeper of the system. So this sounds like a good lesson to learn. "You don't get ultra-rich by being ethical and honest."
The deeper message "invites should go out to social circles" is spot on. Gmail's rollout policy worked because our network was already accessible (via other email providers).

For something inherently social without a pre-seeded network like wave, it only makes sense to roll it out to social clusters.
Ok so two points.

"Freemium" makes sense, cos there is a revenue stream in there somewhere. I'm talking about startups that don't have any business model.

Secondly, for every Mint I can show you a ton of startups that have got no where. In fact Mint is fairly unique because it uses the data for lead gen, as you say -- but most free startups aren't smart enough and/or not hoarding the right type of data to get into that business.
It seems like there would be serious problems in the enforcement of a contract like this. I don't see any reporting requirements imposed on the entrepreneur, and it's pretty unclear what a court would do in the event of a default on the entrepreneur's part.
The App Store will nail you for pre-existing conditions too
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=907961

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=908005

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=908091

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=908162
If I cut off my right hand, will I enjoy my left hand more, or will I just be a cripple?

(This sounds the same.)
Gambit Co-Founder Reveals His Biggest Startp Mistakes
Not that I disbelieve you or find your post implausible, but do you have a source on that?
This would really make sense for students. A lot of kids go through universities and wind up scared about their college debt. On average their expected improvement in future returns is more than enough to make up for it. But individually people are running a scary risk. If you can solve that and spread risk across many people, it should average out in your favor.

If you have enough money to do this and seek to invest, I would highly recommend going after academically successful but poor kids. They are the ones who are most likely to drop out of university or go to a community college instead because student debt is too scary for them. That is because their belief about likely future income is based on people they know, which is far out of whack with what educated people can make. But their life choices are likely to leave them at what they expect.

At a practical level this means that you have room to structure the deal so you get better average returns than a loan, they are better off after accepting your deal than they would be if they don't go to university, and they are better off than they would have been if they earn what they think reasonable. Everyone wins.
Everyone who has ever worked with me in sales or marketing is going to giggle to hear me say this, but it's really bad form to make your pitch on your competitor's negatives. Every point that salesperson had to make could have been made purely on positive terms, like:

* "I think you'll find our support is hard to beat, because of our advanced support portal you can see [here], and because we offer 24x7 phone support."

* "We're convinced that we currently offer the best pricing in the industry for your expected usage; [explain here]. If you're getting a better price for that usage from someone else, we'll beat it."

* "We have a different architecture than other cloud providers, because we provide OS-level isolation from other customers. No other customer app failing in our cloud will impact yours, because [etc etc]"

And on and on. The direct jabs at Heroku here just make me think this guy is skeevy.
The problem is that the amount of that student's future work you can reasonably consume is far less than the cost of their education.
It would be awesome if YC set up a cofounder "matching" service. Not anything they would have to manage, just a way to share what you bring as a cofounder, what you are looking for in a cofounder, and ideas you might have. It seems like a lot of these meetups end up being filled with "Social Media Experts" "Consultants" and "Idea Guys". A filter could ensure that hackers, designers, and other people who can contribute at an early stage could meet up.

I submitted some ideas to HN as a post a month back and met a lot of awesome people. Some way to help make connections (without having to resubmit ideas/info) would be great. Might also be a way to strengthen the applicant pool for YC too.
Creepy, but I think we can make it more creepy:

If you do this investment and the person takes out a life insurance policy on themselves, and they die, do you get 3% of the life insurance policy?

Although, I dunno, isn't this what having children is for?

You pay upkeep on them until maturity and when you are old and senile they pay to put you in a home and have you fed applesauce or whatever.
One could stipulate that the person you have a contract on would be required to carry term life insurance made payable to the fiduciary.
I'm assuming that those percents are historic, not current.

In the past, men were far more likely to die in war than today. I'm curious what that would mean in terms of evolutionary biology. Would Darwinism suggest that we self-selected a more peaceful human race by breeding men who stayed home, or a more aggressive human race by breeding men who were more successful at fighting wars and then returning?

I realize that evolution works over extremely long time periods and we've been fighting wars regularly for our entire recorded history, but only recently has technology really started to remove humans from the business of fighting.
Easy... I'd buy a Sharpie, a piece of cardboard, and some ragged clothes at Goodwill, and stand out on a street corner. It's not uncommon for bums to make upwards of $200/day around here.
I wish I could mod this up twice. This is, like, Confucius deep.

If a student weren't allowed to sacrifice their entire life and all of their resources to excel at this one stupid class exercise, it wouldn't be a very good simulation of the entrepreneurial experience, would it?

You know what would have made for a great class? If one of the students had invested $2 million out of pocket to create an additional $100k in two hours. They would have presented that to the class. Everyone would have to agree that, objectively speaking, in dollars and cents, they would have "won". The next question to ask them is: do you feel successful? Have you accomplished whatever it is that you wanted to accomplish, when you signed up for a class on entrepreneurship? And does that make you happy?

Whatever their answer was, it would probably be educational.

For me, a take-home lesson from Startup School was that a lot of extremely talented and successful entrepreneurs are still searching for their answer to this question. They've invented something great, or they've made N millions of dollars, or both, and yet the question persists.
Good luck getting that money.
Good comments all round.

Consider this scenario:

Against all odds, a working, stable product has been built, the business has modest traction but yet to really hit the ball out of the park, the business needs external funding.

How does the single founder overcome the "one founder is too risky" stigma?
This is what starting a company feels like.
Hi there Peldi here from Balsamiq. You know, you're totally right. I wasn't happy about how it came out either. Using it was a lazy move. Let me go back and expand it.
Hi. I'm the author of that post. Wow. I wrote my opinion on a message board and now it's everywhere. On some sites they are referring to it as an "article." Ah, the risks you take when you post stuff on the web...

In any case, I think some of you make good points below about weaknesses in my argument (which, if I WAS writing an article, would have been more rigorously researched and reasoned), but I stand behind the majority of what I wrote.

Feel free to ask questions, challenge me or call me a narcissist. It's all good.
Brilliant. I've always liked Jobnob's "find people to help with your startup for free" events, where the participants can preview the companies and see which ones they would like to work for as well. I think it would also facilitate things if we had some kind of public wiki with which to display companies and/or individual's backgrounds.
Do you need them all in the same location? If so, you could use multiple sensors per device. Or, leave out the LCD... once the device is working, you shouldn't need any display. Or you could make that part modular and plug in an LCD only when you need it.

We have some temp sensors setup to monitor the temp of our server rack (poorly ventilated area), and the box we have takes 4 temp sensors (and a few open/closed sensors like power/security). It cost us around $400 for the entire setup. However, it looks like I could have made one for much less...
Reality has gotten there first. In a number of states (Texas being famous among them) companies can take out life insurance policies on their workers. A company with such "dead peasant" policies now has an incentive to provide bad working conditions and poor health care support because that goes straight to the bottom line!

http://deadpeasantinsurance.com/which-employers-bought-polic... has a list of companies that did this.
I'm guessing that a personal bankruptcy may get you out of this debt.
Traffic Server is finally here (Y's http proxy/cache server)
4. Anything Sony makes requires different adapters, different batteries and different memory cards than the rest of the market.
Does anyone know of anywhere else with similar properties? I've never come across anywhere with such a huge variation of accents and dialects over a relatively small piece of land, but my experience is limited.

To me (non-American), Americans' differences are far more subtle (and the variations are nowhere near as numerous as in the UK), even when comparing between regions that are far-apart.
I know we've been over this a million times before, but the whole "FAIL" thing really turns me off. I actually agree with the points but had to force myself to click the link because I immediately assumed the OP was a linkbating troll.
Eh, these all seem to violate the rules.

They have time to make money from 2 hours after they open the envelope. If you make your money outside of that time, how is it supposed to count towards the money that you made for the project?

Why couldn't they just never open the envelope and work 9-5 jobs for a couple weeks? Then say 'HAH! see! we made 2,000 bucks each!'
I have something somewhat similar for people in LA: http://www.meetup.com/hacker-codejam/

It's more of a mixer/pair programming thing to test other people to see if they're compatible with you.
I was looking for this just the other day on iTunes U and the Stanford website but couldn't find it. Thanks for this link =)
I saw them clearing some blackberries near uw last year. And it was quite a spectacle. Since the area they were clearing was along side the burke-gillman trail everyone walking/running/biking stopped to take a look. Entertaining /AND/ environmentally friendly!
Now, that's Cloud computing in action.
Ask HN: What do you wish you were better at?
For me it's 3 things: regex, regex and regex.

EDIT: my social life
Superstitious Beliefs Cemented Before Birth
coding from scratch, not procrastinating, eating more
Google used goats not too long ago as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=588740
A very lucky universe
It makes me wonder if the software can generally "understand" something is wrong, or if it just has a bunch of modules that look for various exploits (say a buffer overflow attack, a XSS attack).

If it's the latter, it just seems like a version of lint that runs on the binary and produces patches on the fly. Granted, that's still a big achievement, but it still relies on people for "unknown" attacks.
Are you implying that none of the aforementioned people can contribute to a startup?
Interesting article.

But does anyone else find the finished design (the vertical shown on the bottle with the leafy 'V' then the letters 'ero') just looks like the product is called 'Ero'? It's certainly the first thing I saw.