skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly. That "docking station" wouldn't be any cheaper than an iMac; if anything it would be more expensive.
My favorite part of the linked video is, if I'm understanding him correctly, he uses the word "plague-ettes": as in, spreaders of the plague.
Cynical answer: by making you wait, they encourage many people to hang up, reducing volume at peak hours, and allowing the company to hire fewer CSRs.
Single founder on my 4th start-up, my first alone.

#1 - Two of us. A package for specialty manufacturers. I wrote the software, he sold and implemented it. We agreed to make it a product business, but he sold it as a service. Totally different animals. We were always behind and had no chance of building any equity that way.

#2 - Four of us. A package for continuous manufacturers. I was one of 2 programmers along with a designer/analyst and a business guy. I should have been spending all of my time programming, but I spent 75% of it refereeing among the other 3. I kissed the ground when I left.

#3 - Two of us. A package for job shops. Things were just taking off when he died.

#4 - I'm taking everything I've learned from the other businesses and from my customers over the years and writing a self-service web app that builds enterprise quality systems for small & medium businesses. Single founder is the default. I'd gladly have a co-founder or two, but only if the fit is (almost) perfect. One of the many reasons I came to hn was the possibility of meeting co-founder(s). Who knows, it still may happen...
No. There's no part of being a successful businessman which means you can't care about the environment.
Least similar users
... and 4: apply the same thing to twitter (!)
Though perhaps there's a selection bias at work? Maybe 'competing' venture funds are doing more thorough IP due diligence?
I got a great list. Neat.
I'm a single founder.
Perhaps somebody could submit one and report back.

Well... I'm sure somebody has submitted one. We just need for them to kindly report back.
I don't know how meaningful this is, because I was fully employed for all the time under discussion (and going full-time while only ramen profitable would cause me to have a very unpleasant discussion with the immigration office regarding my worth to Japan), but here you go:

I coding in late June 2006 and launched on July 1st. Ramen profitable where I live is about $1,000~$1,200 a month. Off the top of my head, I spiked up to that on October 2007th, and have sustained it since about October 2008th.

You can check my numbers to see if my memory is faulty or not: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats . Sales and expense graphs are on the left hand side. I don't have a profit per month graph simply because it would show wild swings just because of the timing of expenses -- sometimes AdWords will have two bills in one month and then none in the next, for example, just due to minute differences in timing.
That isn't what happened here. Someone submitted an app purporting to be from the bank.

I'm presuming that Apple will at least perform the diligence of making sure the app author is who they say they are.
> A 15-person start up like Heroku could never support its thousands of users for a measly few million in venture capital with traditional hosting

I wonder if this is true. If they work with 22 virtualized instances, maybe 10 good servers can provide more or less the same performances. Let's forget for a moment if EC2 is the way to go or not, and all the benefits, but I can't see how a company with a few millions can't afford running 10 big linux boxes instead to use EC2.
This is probably one of the few things I would actually purchase, because it seems like it would make my life much easier.

However, you do need integration. If, for example, you could integrate with mint, you'll be gold.
I think your leaderboard dial was set to 11.
Very cool.

My matches using the default settings: pg, swombat, mahmud, wheels, SwellJoe, edw519, mattmaroon, gojomo, davidw, mixmax, unalone, tptacek

Did you get permission to scrape the data? (I tried once without asking with mediocre results: http://www.mattmazur.com/2008/08/the-wrong-way-to-get-notice...)
This might be horrible idea from a security perspective, and if it is, please tell me, but what about allowing the hashed password in the password field, that way, you could copy it from the db, and sign in?
I had the same result. Perhaps this is not measuring similarity after all. :)
Evolving Firefox Extensions
It will be interesting to see if the "People's" government will try to limit viewings of the film; if not countrywide, then at least in certain areas. Wouldn't surprise me at all.
If you mean 'earns enough to cover monthly living expenses', about thirty months for the ad-supported bedbugregistry.com, and one week for pinboard.in (thanks to an enthusiastic plug from Daring Fireball which resulted in a large number of paid signups).

My limited experience with project revenue is that it's quite spiky, so that you have to be earning considerably more than a minimal amount before you can have confidence that you'll be able to cover your bills in a given month.
I would really like to see something along the lines of a TED talk in which the presenter stands up, spends a couple of minutes demonstrating some kind of really interesting new technology -- something that could really help people, either in their lives or in their jobs -- and then the presenter would pause for a moment and say, "...but none of you are going to get to use this", and continue the talk but on the subject of patents.

I don't think people really understand the extent of the problem. I think they need to see exactly the damage that's being done before there will be any energy put into fixing it.

I do think that patents hold a valuable place in certain areas of research and development, but there are also areas in which patents are crippling development.
Listened to about a dozen of loops, they all sound pretty much the same - in the "OK" category.
I'm sure that some of the patents I hold would be obvious to many people here. Just sayin'
Everyone's correctly assuming that using this for hosting a public service on the internet would be an awful idea.

But if you have a desktop Mac or iPhone app that needs a localhosted web interface or HTTP API, this approach could easily be way better than dealing with a second language runtime.
Video: Building TrendingTopics.org using Hadoop and EC2
You're still sending the password I entered back to me in an email in plaintext, even if you're not keeping it.

This is considered horrible practice.

I was excited about your product until I received an email with my password in it.. it just killed my enthusiasm. At some point I'll look back, but for a site that stores financial data...kinda scary.
Interestingly, nostrademons and pg are the top two for me, so I wonder what would produce one but not the other. I'd love to see if comments could be separated into [user1]-like comments and [user2]-like comments.
This thread reminds me of a quote a friend of mine says "If partners are so great, why didn't God have one?"
Various data compression patents seem reasonable to this untrained eye - MP3 & LZW compression come to mind. Of course the duration of software patents is ridiculous, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I remember my father opening up our black and white vacuum tube TV to clean it from dust. He would tell me what each component did, how electrons flowed ... for me it was the best time in the world listening to him. And I really liked taking things apart to see what they are made of.

Nowadays I mostly work with software, the interesting components are algorithms and data structures. They are abstract and intangible but just as fascinating.
This is fun to consider. Are you thinking of people who have completely different interests? Or folks who are interested in similar things but disagree?
I'm really not sure. I was naively thinking whatever the opposite of the existing algorithm is.
As someone in the comments on your pages also notes, you could use the google cache. But it would still be nicer to ask first.
Interesting, similar to:

edw519

btilly

patio11

pg

tptacek
How else can she afford all those clothes?
This doesn't affect your point, since ObjC does still deal in raw memory addresses, but it has supported garbage-collection since Objective-C 2.0 (i.e since Leopard/10.5)
Seth Godin makes his living by giving advice to others, rather than acting on it himself. I think it's better to solicit advice from the people who have succeeded in what you are trying to do.
I'm truly shocked that there was not one person in their crew with the capacity to realize that the very existence of an "availability zone" indicates that you should spread your resources across several of them. How many other "lessons" are waiting to pounce on them? They really need to cultivate their sense of paranoia if they plan to deliver consistent value to their clients.
Seems like you've hit on a great idea here.
They may adhere to the stereotypical image of unkempt hair, bad posture, slightly overweight, glasses and laptop.
Well, the generation we have doesn't. We just built some DVI connectors with a resistor on the back, to make it behave similar enough to a connected monitor.

Mac minis are fairly different depending on the generation.
pg was number one for me :D
Why?

In my wife's field, early childhood education, there is a dearth of male teachers.

Why can't people go into a field of their choosing? Can we admit that people are smart enough to choose their own career without these kind of ridiculous stunts?

And really, Barbie? Computer science? The epitome of women as sex objects with an impossible anatomy straight out of a comic book? Really?
I think there is still a subtle bug in there somewhere.

When I set the sliders 'semantics' all the way to the right ('word choice') and leaderboard all the way to the left, then check I get this:

- patio11
- mahmud
- nostrademons
- tptacek

- mahmud
- edw519
- swelljoe
- davidw

Shouldn't the relationships be symmetrical, so 'edw519' would get 'mahmud' as the first match and 'mahmud' would get 'edw519' ?

edit: also, your 'match' is case sensitive, so 'riderofgiraffes' won't work but 'RiderOfGiraffes' does.
People like to be green, but I'm not sure they want to literally be green in colour ..
Depends on what the meaning of "is" is, actually.

What falls into the category "under attack"? threat of litigation? actual litigation? in process of settling? having settled?
>The problem is that it's often very difficult to refactor synchronous code to be event-based since it requires an inversion of control. An attempt at changing clear, intention-revealing synchronous code to work asynchronously frequently results in ugly, hard-to-follow callback hell.

This is true. There's some merit to the argument that you should plan for your IO code to be asynchronous from the beginning and structure your program that way.

Havoc Pennington had a nice post about that: http://log.ometer.com/2008-09.html

"Using async APIs is not premature optimization, it's correct design."

Some languages provide constructs that make it cleaner to write asynchronous code in a way that looks more natural.

F# has an async monad for this purpose. I'm guessing it can be done in Haskell as well. Lisp\Clojure macros may also be able to handle it.
http://cofoundr.com/
Nop, too complicated for an Apple product.

It will be just a 10" iPad specially designed for reading magazines, newspapers and books (99cts on iTunes), playing movies and videos (1.99cts on iTunes), but above all, believe it or not...

...games!
I really feel for smaller companies here as I know people with great products who have been trolled out of existence.

I wonder if there is a non-legislative fix available because I've heard about programmers wanting patent reform for as long as I've been programming and I believe almost no substantial progress has been made.

Brad mentions that larger companies have more resources available for fighting patent trolls. What if VCs set aside a pool of capital for defending their investments from patent trolls as part of raising their funds?

The idea would be to create a pool money whose size would ward off patent trolls. I'm sure it would take a few victories in court, but it could establish a precedent and change the game.

It certainly seems easier than attempting to reform patents.
But apparently salt water is fine. No shortage of that.
Baidu, China’s Largest Search Engine, Hacked by “Iranian Cyber Army”
I started a startup first, found a cofounder who subsequently completely ditched out when the economy sank us and we ran low on cash. Been running the product on fumes by myself ever since

Though I've admittedly almost burned out on it. I certainly understand why almost all my advisors insist on the necessity of a cofounder. When you hit the lows and there's no one there to balance off of you can just hit rock bottom. I think a lot of the single founder success stories are guys that had a lot in their favor when they started.

But maybe its also harder to kill a company when there's only one person. Like the business currently makes nothing but I could keep it alive as a hobby for 4 years and then sink money into it again when things change. Thats an advantage that a lot of startups don't have or think about, "slow cooking"...
Agreed, that's a whole lot of eggs in one basket. I'd be interested to hear their reason for not spreading across multiple availability zones. My first thought was that m2.2xlarge nodes, since they're relatively new, might still be restricted to a single AZ; on further investigation, however, this does not appear to be the case.
Based on what other people here are reporting, I wonder if there's a bias towards matches with a large number of comments (e.g., pg, patio11, edw519, etc.). Perhaps there's some normalization needed?
That, along with finding out who Binet is (if you weren't already aware), makes it pretty trivial to solve.
I don't think it's true.

The article also mentioned $20,000 per month in hosting fees. The average T1 costs around $250/month, less if you're savvy. You need a physical location, because colo rates are still ridiculous IMO, so ... say another $2,000 / month, which is plenty for a small office in a warehouse district somewhere.

Even after lots of other goodies, you'd still have, let's say, $10,000 a month to spend on ... what? More machines? A bigger generator? Huge parties?

I don't think that "the cloud" is appropriate for certain applications -- and theirs would be one of them -- where you have large amounts of persistent data and large, sustained, ongoing bandwidth requirements.

Realize that, for what Amazon charges currently, you can buy an equivalent 1TB disk drive every single month. (Their monthly charges for storage alone, not including bandwidth, work out to a little more than the cost-per-GB for a good quality terabyte disk at current prices.)
Ditto. I never pay attention to the name either. Usually it takes 30 levels of nesting before I realize that I'm conversing with the same person.

The only name I recognize is pg, and since I save my username and password, sometimes I forget my own username too.
I am completely shocked by "her" casual admission that Facebook employees have in the past logged in as other users on a whim, and potentially continue to do so via database access and user-switching.

In some countries -- for instance the UK -- data protection laws mean that viewing personal data without a specific business reason is itself illegal, even if that data is not manipulated (this may be why the new user switching system requires a reason to be entered). Even if this casual viewing was done before they opened a data center in the UK, this seems a pretty shocking admission to make so casually.
Calling Yahoo a pure sales and marketing site, with a worthless brand, is silly.

The big moneymakers at Yahoo continue to be content-driven parts of the site like sports, dating, and classifieds, and the brand is one of the company's biggest assets.

Rather than having one product and focusing on it, Yahoo is still a big Jello mold of a company, with various tidbits (Flickr, jobs site, delicious) suspended inside it with no clear rhyme or reason.

Disclaimer: used to work there, don't anymore
We had just deployed a new version of our app to Heroku as this happened. I thought our release was incredibly buggy and constantly crashing until I noticed Heroku's status update. They came back quickly, and for us it is a known risk of having our server in the cloud.
Nurse Outduels IRS Over M.B.A. Tuition
Not that I would suggest writing such a thing, but I did happen to look at the vote while httpfox was running. They seem to be using google analytics events to track the voting. There was also a request to scorecardresearch, but a quick look suggests that is just a general market research site.

But with that said, they're not showing any results here. My suspicion is that the process for selecting the winner is something like "1)take a quick look at the voting totals to gauge public opinion. 2) Go with whatever some random manager in the marketing department likes best".

Still, the fact that it even made the options to begin with is probably a positive sign.
Theodore Roosevelt Biography - Biography.com
Yeah - he should just make 10 louder.
I could probably turn this into a blog post (and will later), but there are a lot of microoptimizations of default settings for B2C apps that make huge differences in conversion:

- Defaults should be almost sufficient to use the app. (i.e. if it has some workflow, you should be able to pretty much hit "Next next next" and get it to work. Bonus points for making the number of nexts as low as possible.)

- Pick something that results in visually impressive output rather than a blank page. See Balsamiq for inspiration here -- they start you with a mockup in progress that demonstrates most of the highlights of the software.

- Ever seen Firefly? I really like how they use the word "shiny". Ideally, your defaults should show the shiny in your app. In Hollywood they have a saying: make sure your budget makes it onto the screen. In B2C apps, make sure the stuff you did all the work on makes it into the user experience most of your users will see.

- Assume your user is a novice at both your software and the problem domain until you have evidence otherwise. A lot of people ask the user "Hey, are you a novice?" That is one way to do things, but it makes your core workflow one stage longer and every stage costs you conversion. I prefer "Assume they are and give them a discrete 'skip ahead' button" or "Assume they are and watch them for evidence that they are not".

- If your app is supposed to make the user feel like they just killed an effing lion, then your default settings better have a lion bound and gagged sitting under a forty-ton weight suspended by a weak string which passes through an open pair of scissors next to a sign saying "Snip this."

- (Do this if nothing else.) Track actual usage of the app and modify your defaults based on actual usage. Bonus points if you can do it dynamically, if that makes sense for your app. For example, if you pick A as the default and 25% of your users go out of their way to change it to B, then that probably should have been B. (You can split test and see how many people would have changed it to A if it had defaulted to B.)
The app would have to be signed by someone who presumably would have paid the $99 to get the developer account with Apple and thus there would be a way to trace (somehow) the app to some real person. Now, the identity used to get the account could be faked, but that's no longer trivial, assuming Apple has done things properly.

I don't quite understand however why this does not also apply to the Android app market - surely whoever put this up there has a known identity. If not, the whole point of the market place is undermined. All this has no bearing on the "evilness" factor - Apple's market place is evil because it is a self-enforced monopoly. The Android market place could have policies controlling their apps ten times as fascist as Apple's and they would not be as evil, because we can always go elsewhere (and maybe will, if this continues to be an issue).
Seriously? Did an application like that really require such a fancy flash setup?
Looks like you're aiming more for chapati profitability.
Your username is chrischen, FYI…
You keep mentioning filtering… are you sure we can't ask? I'm curious.
These are the 12 'farthest' from you, rms:

osteele
erikstarck
zedshaw
atarashi
matthavener
clemesha
alrex021
cliff
NateLawson
jefffoster
mrcharles
fix3r

This was done with the karma effectively off (same as the karma slider in the middle). What do you think? Anybody there you think shouldn't be?
That's an interesting idea for a company! An company that insures against patent lawsuits. It would have be staffed by lawyers who know whether there are any possible patent violations but it might work.

As you said, the fact that you are even insured by this company may already signal to the troll to back off.
Could you provide a reverse search -- who's lists do I show up on?

How about displaying the values used to order the result set, so you could compare weightings across users?
reply
Move over Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. The right has a new hero and it's ... Phil Greenspun? Who knew!?

Now Phil is surely much smarter than I. No argument there. I would never have the confidence to go to Harvard and try to straighten out the PhDs there about how Massachusetts should be run. They would call me names like Carpetbagger and such.

Where does Phil get his 10.5% tax rate number? From the Tax Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Foundation. Where do they get their numbers? It's vague. Does it include sales tax and workman's comp etc.? The same foundation complains about California Corporate tax burden being the highest in the nation at an outrageous 8.3%. Hmmm. 8.3 < 10.5. And don't give me any of that trickle down baloney about not taxing corporations.

Pensions are a great boogie man of the right wing. They cost so much. It's much cheaper to stop paying those folks. If they haven't amassed fortune enough to retire using that huge 40k salary by now, tough luck.

I had better stop now before I get all worked up. After all I'm just a dumb old computer programmer who doesn't know much about economics. Phil's a s m a r t old computer programmer ...

Sigh. I'm actually a bit of a fan of Phil's. It's just that the harsh conservative position is hard for an unemployed 50+ programmer to swallow these days. I don't have a "fat" pension. When I go for interviews I rarely see anyone over 40. Good luck to you all, and don't look down on us "over the hill" workers. Just look away.
I'm a single founder as well. I've learned the hard way that even those who initially seem to have the same drive and capabilities as I do usually don't in the long-run.

I started my first two companies alone, then started a third as a partnership with three others where I was a silent partner, then closed down my first company, then brought in a co-founder for my second company and renamed it, then took over the third company (the partnership) through buy-outs, then desolved my partner for the second (renamed) company.

It's kind of confusing, but the punchline is that every single co-founder who I at one time had a lot of confidence in has not held up their end (all of them admitting they hadn't at one point or another).

That being said, I would love to start a company with someone who shares my drive and capability.
Reconsidering how the UFC should deal with Piracy