skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some small things:

- I'm not sure what you mean by "for Google Apps." Do they provide a platform like Zoho that you can plug into or does this simply mean you use their Google login and take advantage of Docs, Gmail, etc? This may be obvious to most, but not to me.

- It would be better to use an obviously fake company name, like Acme Paper, on your sample invoices. The way you have it now (with the Rhino Accounting logo) could imply that my invoices will all have your logo on them. (This sounds ridiculous, but we use Quickbooks Online now, and they're quite overzealous about inserting their branding where it doesn't belong)

- The second screenshot is confusing. It looks like I'm about to send an invoice to a company named Paper Supplies for several thousand dollars worth of paper.

- On the 3rd screenshot, why is the Businesses tab highlighted (3rd tab) but the heading says People (2nd tab)?

- As others have pointed out, there's some inconsistent capitalization. Two that I see remaining:

- "Data is Secure" (homepage)
- "Lake view Furniture" (1st screenshot)

- Navigation menu in the top right changes from page to page. Click through the Sign Up flow to see what I mean.

- On the blog, your headings are overlapping the date line below

- Also on the blog, you're showing ads in the sidebar. I know its a free service, but if this isn't a significant source of revenue I would kill it.

- Also on the blog, you have a "Powered By Google App Engine" logo, but on another comment here you've said you are not using App Engine. Which is it?
No need to wonder, have a look at the source code for them both and it will become clear exactly why there is such a performance difference. Lua gives you raw C numeric types which makes a big difference right there. Other people have mentioned a few other good reasons too (no costly method dispatch).

I haven't looked at LuaJIT yet but considering how small it is I'm sure it meets or exceeds the quality of the code behind Lua.
I don't think they needed to say it. Everyone knew who they were talking about.
I don't think any long-term conclusions should be taken from the data he uses. The 2008 data basically captures the market downturn, and the 2009 data captures the recent bull market. It's not really representative of larger trends.
There is truth in that second point. Startup financing is a hands on business. So is HFT. There's probably a reason why a lot of firms engaged in HFT are clustered around lower Manhattan, and it probably has something to do with the necessary capital requirements and the short path to market information.

It should be obvious then that markets are not perfect; they require information to operate and some markets are particular sensitive to the distance from the necessary information. Anyone cannot just invest in anything from any city. Just ask PG.

It's also not just investors. It's the people on the ground writing your code. Zed did mention that.
Who says that the customer would need an account with the carrier? I'm not sure if AT&T does it, but Sprint (Kindle), Verizon (all sorts of industrial shit), and T-Mobile (Peek) all sell bulk low-use data access to companies for use in embedded products.
It's amazing how the design of the website almost cries "don't read me".
I think Vancouver is a great place to build an Intrenet company - tons of engineering talent and many local success stories like Flickr, Club Penguin or AbeBooks.
Payroll may be difficult to move to the cloud. Like HR it is very personal data. Reporting is potentially a big winner. Taxes too. Very interesting project. Good luck!
Perhaps, but you can't blame "The Chinese" responding to what they said at face value.
All of these are implemented in Parallel Linq, though they're called "Take", "Select", and "Aggregate" (slices are the one I'm least familiar with, I could be flubbing that)
"Finance companies get government bailouts and are more likely to succeed."

You are painting things with a very broad brush. How many hedge funds are there? Thousands. How many of them got bailout funding? Virtually none. How many top tier investment banks are there that got bailed out by the government? 5 or 6? I rest my case...

Besides, Finance is a very vast field. Hence, the words Finance companies means nothing. A hedge fund is, essentially, a startup... and the likelihood of failure is high. By contrast, a bank is anything but a startup. A boutique investment bank and a boutique HFT hedge fund are both "finance companies", but their cultures are more distant from one another than what you can imagine.

You are thinking of GS, MS, City, ML and the like, and generalizing that all finance companies are like that... which is utterly absurd.
It's been a science fiction like dream of mine that at some point public transportation will consist of a fleet of autonomous taxis. Each of them being aware of the others' movements, working as an intelligent swarm to transport people more efficiently.
Opera and Firefox downloads soar after IE alerts
Depending on your application, a good compromise might be to use soft max if the numbers are nearby and a hard max if they are very distant (though you'd need to find a suitable definition of distant and nearby).
#1 simply illustrates one of the reasons why rich people without particular interest in technology would prefer investing in finance rather than startups. It's a generalization, but has some truth to it.

In theory anyone can invest in anything from any city, in practice they don't. Investors tend to pick companies that are located relatively close to their offices. That's why the concept of hubs - from Silicon Valley to Hollywood to NYC - exists at all.

Actually, if geography didn't matter, New York would be much worse off, since the costs of living and other inconveniences of being where so many others want to be would make it a relatively poor choice to locate a company.
No, in this case, a convex function is one where you can draw a straight line between any two points on its graph and not have the line intersect the graph at a third point.
Santa Teresa Discovery
"... If there were some evidence gardens help achievement... she reports there's never been any evidence -- beyond the supporters' anecdotal warm fuzzies ..."

Yet there is ample evidence that obesity in school age students is on the rise. It's in the UK where a dyslexic chef decided to do something about it, "Feed me Better" ~ http://www.jamieoliver.com/school-dinners/my-manifesto It doesn't matter if its removing "junk food" from school menus and revising them with healthier alternatives or creating gardens outside to show how food is grown.

"... What evidence do we have that participation in one of these programs—so enthusiastically supported, so uncritically championed—improves a child’s chances of doing well on the state tests that will determine his or her future ..."

To not see the link between better understanding food, nutrition, health and learning shows a fixed and narrow mindset.
HN User offering hacker-friendly office space in downtown Wash DC
Hey HN, we're the creators of http://www.AppMakr.com and we just moved into an awesome new office at 14th & Q streets in NW Washington, DC. We're renting out 12 desks (8 left) for $250/mo. each. Includes wifi and conference room plus a great tech-entrepreneur vibe, tech classes and speaker events. You must be a technology business to rent space. Check out what we're doing w/ the space at http://vision.1410Q.com. Lots of pics at www.1410Q.com

- DROdio
Daniel R. Odio
A loyal HN user :)
> At least the US had a freaking law about the action

Not on wire tapping, they made a law afterward though to forgive everyone.
Objectivity may be an unreachable goal, but it doesn't mean that journalists shouldn't aim for it. The Hunter Thompson model also includes making stuff up - I'd very much prefer a story that tries to be unbiased, even if it fails, to a story that's written completely from the point of the writer's personal affiliations. It can be great literature, but it's not reporting.
Hey HN, we're the creators of http://www.AppMakr.com and we just moved into an awesome new office at 14th & Q streets in NW Washington, DC. We're renting out 12 desks (8 left) for $250/mo. each. Includes wifi and conference room plus a great tech-entrepreneur vibe, tech classes and speaker events. You must be a technology business to rent space. Check out what we're doing w/ the space at http://vision.1410Q.com. Lots of pics at www.1410Q.com

- DROdio
Daniel R. Odio
A loyal HN user :)
In the case of real-valued functions of one variable (which is the case at hand), if the function has a minimum and is convex then the minimum is global. If the function is strictly convex (also this case) then it will have at most one global minimum.
The build quality on this one is not as high as I had anticipated (considering the cost). Though it is still good for blowing a mind now and again.
My parents walk on the treadmill and watch documentaries on Netflix, daily.
In one line you're inciting a religious war and a "religious war"
The nature of peer-to-peer networks is that personal use is distribution. Treating file sharing as equivalent to mass-producing unlicensed DVDs contributes to the public's outrage.
This isn't definitive, but search economist.com using Google for the following:

Keynes - 1640 results

Adam Smith || John Stuart Mill (classical economics) - 992

Hayek || Milton Friedman (Chicago school economics) - 858

Mises (Austrian economics) - 431

Of course it's better to read it and form an opinion from the actual content for yourself but I think these results are fairly indicative.
Do you need to "launch" ?
I consider it evil to initiate force against another individual. Therefore, specifically, I consider it evil to incarcerate someone for not paying money into a giant pool to be spent by other people.

I consider it good for individuals to engage with each other in purely voluntary ways. That is the source of happiness, wealth, health, and life. All else is a waste of my limited time on earth.
You're right. Downloading is much easier. Shoplifting requires one to:

1. Get out of the house

2. Remove an actual product from a physical store, so the loss will be physically noticed

3. Defeat the RFID tags on the merchandise (most stuff worth shoplifting is tagged)

4. Walk past the store greeters without looking suspicious (something an average mostly-honest person would struggle with)
>Is it sad to say that a comedy network has become what I believe to be the least biased news?

Both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report are very biased, by their own account. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but they can't really be seen as unbiased.

Personally, I think the rise of comedy news shows isn't a good thing. Stewart & Colbert's first commitment is to entertainment, and they choose stories that are good comic material, not ones that are necessarily important.
Do you have a link to a site with screenshots or a QR code?
hmmmm... http://www.grupthink.com/
Thinking about it... Couldn't the protocols not advertise the parts of the file the sharer has, but, instead, receive a list of wanted parts from the downloader and respond with some, but perhaps not every, part of the file? What would happen to these lawsuits if nobody ever shared the whole file with anyone?

This relates to an idea I had: create a "fair use" file sharing network, by posting carefully-chosen 10 to 30 second "review" clips of songs on various web sites, then distribute a tool (script, program, whatever) that can locate the pieces and reassemble them.
I was paraphrasing Zed's article. Maybe Zed was "painting things with a very broad brush". Lets give credit where credit is due.
You will like this one :
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-...
I stumbled upon it here on YC, so just stay tuned here, there's almost daily a post about iphone app store economics.
The part I think Zed got right is that the cost of doing business in New York is not worth it for most startups. More expensive than silicon valley with a fraction of available (ie. not working in finance for $250k) talent.

The part that is really wrong is that finance is New York's heroin. No, finance is America's heroin. All the super rich are tapped into it, and the government is bamboozled into supporting it because the bankers have the bureaucrats convinced that the obscene profits of the financial sector are the backbone of the economy. Here we sit borrowing up to our eyeballs just to prop up the GDP so everyone can pretend everything is okay, while the smartest among us dream up new ways to create paper profits and China keeps a steady focus on actual real-world productivity and standard of living.

New York, much less the U.S. is not going to kick the heroin habit, the whole nation is going to keep shooting up until we actually lose our position as a financial superpower, the dollar loses its power, and the reality of that situation comes home to roost with the Fed's options finally exhausted.
Extra memory means a longer start-up time (for small apps) ala JVM, and makes hosting much more expensive. Lots of web hosts are memory / IO bound, not CPU bound. And you are sacrificing memcache size for python speed if you increase python's footprint - not always a winner.
Amazon Cracks Open the Kindle
What do you guys think of Seed magazine? I've seen the ads for it a million times on ScienceBlogs, but never gotten a subscription.
I just tested a meta refresh inside a noscript tag. It works (in FF, at least). I'm sure it would make some validator angry, but it would make automatic redirection easy for the js-disabled case.
actually, both the iphone 3g and 3gs were first spotted 'in the wild' by people noticing unusual user-agent strings in their webserver logs. seems uncharacteristic of apple, which is normally very secretive about unreleased products, but it happened.

i can't find the right search terms to google up supporting evidence, but i remember hearing about this in one of the apple sites i read: ars technica, tauw, etc.
And look at that, he even had to courtesy to review the app in the app store after his ordeal.
Why are all the comments here fixating on financial minutia? Zed puts it as well as it can be put - NYC is obsessed with Finance (and Design and Publishing to a lesser degree) and really expensive, and these combine to create a harsh environment thats prone to failure. Its tough to get people excited about money when the next guy is talking about orders of magnitude more. But there's a huge variety of activity overall, and that makes life fun. None of this is surprising if you're familiar with the area.
That's the US GDP divided by the US population, which is not the same as mean or median earned income.
Companies Race to Rule the E-Books
2-3% of 4 million is still very high - about ~100,000. Most of the companies struggle to get even this many free users. Very impressive, dropbox!
rich nerds are the best hope for major change IMO (a rather randian outlook I admit). humanity is currently stuck in a quagmire of democracy and egalitarianism that doesn't seem nearly as beneficial as it would have us believe.
Too bad the website is terrible, and that lame people from Vancouver keep submitting bad stories.
If so, why not address those points rather than deploy ad hominems?

I don't see it as ad hominem. Talking about "economic freedom" is basically pointless unless one comes out and admits what definition of "economic freedom" is being used. The WSJ story notably doesn't do this, but it's not terribly hard to infer that the economic principles applied are likely informed by the strongly right-leaning political views of the institutions behind the study.

Or, putting it another way: the study attributes the "loss" of economic freedom largely to the response to the recent economic crisis. Which corresponds with a time when the political opponents of the sponsoring organizations had just cemented control of two out of three branches of the federal government. If the New York Times and other politically-left-leaning organizations published a study which claimed a drastic decline at the precise moment the Republican Party gained the same level of control, would you assume objectivity on their part?
“Apple has also been planning a revamp of its iTunes music service by creating a Web-based version of it that could launch as soon as June, say people familiar with the matter. Tentatively called iTunes.com, the service would allow customers to buy music without going through the specialized iTunes program on computers and iPhones.”

I was just thinking about this earlier today. If Chrome OS pans out, Apple will almost certainly want iTunes available on it (and other devices that don’t have iTunes but do have Internet access).
Unless you consider about the fact they've totally ignored the gmail hacking incident and the various espionage activities.
As a former New Yorker that spent 20 years there, all I can say is "spot on". Don't get trapped in the specifics of his numbers. He did a fair job characterizing the main markets, the types of people in the startup scene, the personalities and degrees that are valued by the average business person in NY. Oh, and the girls (sadly).
Company Offers Free Robots for Open Source Developers
1Password Alpha for Chrome
Determining the Size of a Buffer
Full article (via google, click on search result):

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Apple+Sees+New+Mone...
Nidokidos Official Forum
To not be willing to let a theory stand or fall according to empirically gathered evidence shows a fixed and narrow mindset.
Adobe Co-founder on the Competitive Advantages of Aesthetics
Same here. Oddly it seems the older generation was much more flexible in their thinking.

What's interesting is how agile the CCP has become. We call it 'communist' but it no longer resembles any of the Marxist ideals we usually associate with it. They react quickly and have been using capitalism/modernization/nation-building as a very effective carrot. This isn't the old stagnant hard-line Soviet communism by any measure.
Bulb Or No Bulb?
Obama DOJ Sides With RIAA Again In Tenenbaum
This is great news. I've been hoping for an SDK ever since I got a Kindle DX as a birthday present.
Except that the predictions that actually came true are the obvious ones (e.g. smaller faster computers everywhere predicted in 1999) while the ones that didn't come true (e.g. "Translating telephones allow people to speak to each other in different languages" ) were the ones that were derided - rightly so.
David Heinemeier Hansson, 37 Signals - Unlearn Your MBA (Audio)
I read "American Scientist," which because of the similar name is confusing, but the content is more rigorous.

http://www.americanscientist.org/

It would be helpful to have some science background in reading it, but most here hopefully have that.

I can't vouch for the site itself one way or another, I get it in dead-tree form.
Security and the City - What Women Want Video
Security and the City, ComodoTV’s clever parody of Sex and the City, with Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda discussing what women really want and how to get it.
The Artistic Freedom Voucher: Internet Age Alternative to Copyrights

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-artis...
Sorry for the threadjacking, but any HNers doing caloric restriction? I'm at a normal weight, but a checkup a few months ago revealed a personal-worst blood pressure of 128/75, so I've been on CRON since then. Latest blood pressure is 110/65.
I don't think that's right. Sure, there is jewelry that retains value, but that jewelry is composed of three things - gold, silver, and diamonds. It's the material that's retaining value, not the item.

We are already seeing a huge wave in the crossover between electronics and fashion accessories. The Motorola RAZR heralded the beginning of this wave - a phone that was "cool" to have. Apple is riding this wave with it's line of designer laptops, phones, and music devices.

Accessories, which includes cheap jewelry, follow the same value path as electronics: expensive and quickly depreciating. I don't know if I would have predicted it 10 years ago, but it's certainly happening now.
There's a typo in the 2nd link. It should be:

http://www.funnyandjokes.com/top-country-and-western-songs-o...
I live in china. I have lived here for 11 years. I am western. I have friends who are in Shanghai and Beijing they are fully Chinese and either own companies or are judges or (sometimes) criminals. At no time and in now way have these people been shy about criticizing the government or swearing at the traffic jams created by state visits etc. At no time have I seen or experienced censorship. In many drunken evenings or in business meetings any and all topics are discussed openly. There are rules however, yes, the government needs to be involved in things. Yes it can act in unusual ways - for example banning online games. (seemingly because one high level official did not like the amount of time their son was spending on WoW.) Yes minorities are persecuted and yes they shoot criminals. It's is a long way from perfect. But... 1.3 billion people. There are 12 cities in china with a pop of more than 5 million (in the city local area) . These cities have highly complex local governments which do not always follow the central government. China is a lot less one country than it seems and it is certainly not policed or controlled with any obvious force.
In many ways it is also free. Sometime more free than other places.. this may sound weird but Hong Kong is again the freest place to do business in the World. It is many regions, many languages and cultures. As in the US, the government is distinct from the people. And the government has a hard job keeping it together. The only thing I agree with in the article is that going the Russian way would be bad for China. As for Google... as always the real story is probably much different from the one told by either side. But i am more inclined to believe it is something silly rather than serious.
PR agencies are what corporate managers hire to justify their marketing budgets. You're a startup. Be scrappy. Be creative. Think outside the box. You'll come up with ideas and ways to market far far more effective for your market than most PR agencies.
That's hardly unique to Bill Gates. People rarely re-examine what they presume to be correct, and when people call that a "problem" I tend to think that it just means "he's wrong and pig-headed." Which he may likely be, but let's at least speak plainly.
AbeBooks is Victoria, and Club Penguin is Kelowna. For those with a SF reference frame, those are roughly equivalent to Sacramento and Sonoma, respectively. But yes, Vancouver is still a great place to do a startup :)
You probably don't need to write a driver if the controller plugs into the Xbox's controller port. You can just download the Xbox controller drivers written by others.

That said, you may find the following resources useful (I certainly have):

Linux Device Drivers (a very helpful book, but the kernel API has changed a bit since its release):

http://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/

Windows Driver Development Kit (use Google to find the XP or Server 2003 versions if you need to develop for XP):

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/WDK/default.mspx

libusb (write cross-platform USB drivers without touching kernel code):

http://www.libusb.org/

http://libusb-win32.sourceforge.net/

If you want to create a new device that's worth writing drivers for, start here (the USB Bit Whacker):

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...

http://www.curdes.com/gnupic/GnuPic.html

http://www.microchip.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=123533
For anyone that finds the posted site painful on the eyes, here's another introduction to SVD that is all on one page by default and isn't crowded by advertisements.

http://www.igvita.com/2007/01/15/svd-recommendation-system-i...
Did Ustream start this campaign? If so, clever.
Amazon to Launch App Store for Kindle
Boris, I don't even see where there are stories on the VX site - or did you mean techvibes?