skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is interesting how their social game play will be developed. [http://www.facebook.com/civnetwork?v=info]
8 Ways To Work Smarter and Be Happier
I agree on the native front. I'd prefer to be online so I can collaboratively create these mock ups with either members of the team or the customer themselves.

The preference would be real-time too.
So people can make links to game theory, signaling, and other HN topics?
The nice thing about this is that they only keep three pricing tiers so folk on lower tiers get bumped for free:

10 -> 20Mbps

20 -> 50Mbps

50 -> 100Mbps

And unlike DSL you don't get some fraction of this dependant on your location, you basically get what's advertised, consistently.
Ah yes, but you'll only get 1Mbps or 2Mbps for your upstream (if past and current offerings are anything to go by).

Not game-changing... I never tax my 50Mbps connection because without a decent upstream I cannot take advantage of what I have.

I imagine I'll downgrade my package when they bump me up so that I just continue with what I have for less cost.
Relpost - Handpicked related posts
I must have missed the memo where copyright law had changed so that abandonware was legally downloadable and playable for free before the absurdly long copyright term (thanks, Disney) expired.

The rules may not be actively enforced, but they still exist and there is always the possibility that someone could wake up to the fact that they now own the copyright, and they could create grief for you. An admittedly unlikely scenario, but still possible.
Eh? Don't you know that nerds are cool? Teslas are also VERY cool. Any member of the opposite gender that does not share these views is _not_ cool.
What advantages does it have over mockflow.com ( collaborative web based balsamiq competitor ) or even over balsamiq itself?
Why not be offensive? My dismissal is based far more on my state of knowledge than on that of true or aspirant experts. It took me an hour to get through the Hardy-Weinberg Equation and that was recently. I'm relying upon the fact that Tooby, Cosmides and Pinker among others do not respect Gould.
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/CEP_Gould.html

I see no special reason to rate Gould as an evolutionary biologist. As an essayist and polemicist, I rate him, and I'm as qualified to do so as anyone else. As a palaeontologist, I rate him because Harvard did. As an evolutionary biologist, ttbomk his contributions boil down to coining "punctuauted equilibrium" i.e. adaptation does not proceed always and everywhere at a uniform speed.

Why would I, currently ignorant as I am, read the work of someone who I do not trust to put science before ideology? If I ever reach a stage where I can say I'm not ignorant I'd obviosuly read Lewontin first.

Spandrels: Complexity that is not conserved as such but that arises as a consequence of some feature that is selected for. Thus any mutations that effect the spandrel but not the parent feature will have no selective advantage or disadvantage. As such the spandrel will decay or be repurposed in some adaptive fashion. It will not be conserved as such.

Male reproductive skew: How many calories does it cost me to deposit some sperm and then bugger off? How many does it cost a female to bring a child to term? How many more to bring it to sexual maturity and/or independence? Given the diference in minimum investment, and the 1:1 sex ratio that arises as a consequence of Fisher's Principle a very small advantage in mating will have a much greater effect on males than females in terms of number of surviving offspring, and will as such be more strongly selected for.

Alternatively, why do we have males and females rather than interfertile hermaphrodites? Given that we do, why do we have so many males when a tenth or a hundredth as many would do to fertilise all the females?

Apologies for the late reply.
From my reading of the situation, the odds of making a living from the sales of consumer apps for the iPhone are worse than winning the lottery. The price point is too low, and the competition is too high.

However: there's a lot of money to be made custom-coding free, branded apps for companies who want the exposure/traffic an iPhones app can give them.

And, there are definitely opportunities for using the iPhone as the last link in the chain in line-of-business applications.
Not google, it's a redirect to http://ajaxian.com/archives/feeling-touchy?
PositionApp for iPhone: An App for Users, Developers, and Bloggers
With the 200,000 apps in the App Store, it is becoming increasingly difficult if not impossible for users and developers to keep track of new apps. This has bred a whole new genre of app discovery tools, such as Appboy and ustwo’s latest app, PositionApp.
When they came out with themes I went through every theme they had until I found one with a fixed width font.

Admittedly everyone laughs at the terminal theme. But it does the trick. And the green on black is surprisingly comfortable to read.
Have you tried Civ Revolutions? I've got the iPhone version, haven't touched it on a console.

It's a weak and terrible imitation on so many levels - BUT - it feels like a cross between Civ IV and Civ I. And it is certainly shorter than Civ IV.
I know of Dafont.com's Handwritten section. Maybe you'll make a find there: http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=603 . Although I don't know if the usage of these fonts is restricted by a license.

It's nice that you listen and respond to such light criticism. Please note: No offense meant with my comment above :). It was just one of the first things I noticed (next to the lines) that reminded me of Balsamiq. I hope you can find an alternative font.

Update: You also can make your own handwritten font using http://www.yourfonts.com/, bypassing license restrictions that come with other fonts
Both really good questions. That was started almost two years ago so we've worked on a variety of different types of projects since that initial study--from simple websites to high-availability, rich applications. Some have required more internal knowledge of Django than others, but I can't think of a time where Django itself was an impediment or a bottleneck.

With regards to time series...me too! I don't have enough data to make any statistically-backed claims, but anecdotally Django-based sprints do start off with a big bump in velocity, because you're handed a tremendous amount of functionality upfront via the framework itself, Admin CRUD, etc.. Once a team gets moving their velocities tend to stabilize, which is one of the reasons story points and velocities are such powerful estimation and forecasting tools.

That being said, C# teams seem to have larger standard deviations around their mean velocity. One thing I have noticed is that refactors tend to have differing impacts. Major refactor efforts and rearchitecting almost always noticeably hit the C# team's velocity much more so than the impact on the Python group. Having done refactoring and and rearchitecting in both environments, I tend to think it's a function of the syntactical overhead associated with the C# language.
From the FAQ:

What is Abandonware? Is it legal?

Wikipedia: "Abandonware is computer software which is no longer being sold or supported by its copyright holder. Alternately, the term is also used for software which is still available, but on which further support and development has been deliberately discontinued."

Since the software is no longer sold or supported, the copyright holders are not directly harmed in any way. This is why abandonware sites are, for the most part, ignored by the law.

The distribution of copyrighted software however is, and will allways be, illegal!

Why not try Freeciv instead? http://freeciv.wikia.com
1. Love the fast native desktop app feel.

2. You cannot just say "any similarities with Balsamiq are probably not intentional". Your mockups look identical. If you want to keep it that way, then as rksprst suggested, compete directly and make it cheaper. Show the comparison on your buy now page.

But you also say "As for pricing, I think it's the last differentiator companies should think of...". Your software doesn't show that. What differentiates you from your competitors? For your specific market i.e. mockups, the look and feel is important. You can't afford to be a copycat there. I'd say, go the opposite route to Balsamiq. Make it funky, make it stand out. Charge more.

3. Feature requests: Rotate objects. Export as PDF. Unlimited undo.

4. Get rid of those annoying popups asking me to buy. If you want to sell, then sell properly. Make a video, buy ads, market your product. Don't make the user's life painful.

Your target market is developers. And the one word you don't want them to be thinking when using your app is "SHAREWARE".
So what was the objectionable content?
How To Integrate All Your Google Services From Gmail
To understand this you need to know that back in 2005, Ning wasn't as restrictive a your-own-customized-social-network service as it is now, it allowed you to build several kinds of social, "web 2.0"-ish pages like hot-or-not type rating sites, restaurant review sites and social bookmarking sites. You could "clone" the sites others had created and you even had some level of access to the underlying PHP code.

You can find references to that in old blog posts: http://blog.ning.com/2005/10/rate_my_anything.html

It's these applications that according to the article Ning later turned off, after they had moved to a new model.
If your Noodles are mostly / only refined carbohydrates you are buying the wrong Noodles. Look calories are not bad, it's ingredients that only contain calories that get you into real trouble.
But I just downloaded it for free. I do not understand!? :-)
Actually I'm wrong... more digging around and I've found this:
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2010/02/25/virgin-media-uk-...

"Trials of faster upstream speeds, including up to 20Mbps, are also underway as they prepare for increasing demand for faster broadband."
I tried Freeciv. For a free game it's hard to complain, but it's very little like Civilization. Worse yet it's buggier and less fun than even Civ 1.
Seconding mockingbird, It's awesome.
Coding horror still links to the ning site that was erased, which is now parked by spammers.
It comes across to me as quite a vitriolic rant.

>The post office is a private, push system - if I want you to receive something by post, I have to send it to you personally. No one knows what's in the letter until you open it.

Not true. Ever heard of junk mail? I get post from animal cruelty charities that I don't want and it has pictures of abused animals on the outside.

>Well, if someone made a dangerous product, they can be prosecuted. But we don't normally hold companies responsible for misuse of their products.

On the other hand, we do hold companies responsible for what they publish or facilitate the publishing of if they are negligent.

Google runs a publishing platform. It doesn't send out individual videos in boxes that were used to hit someone. It has ongoing control over that platform in the way that the tissue-box and camera manufacturer do not.

So the writer is against common carrier protections for internet firms? The camera makers, electricity suppliers, computer manufacturer were all also part of the chain enabling the publication. YouTube is a tool.

Google made a mistake, if his claim to the 2 month delay is true, but the real crime was that of the perpetrators of the bullying and of the creators of the video.
Part plane, part trike -- a new way to get to work
It should be reasonably easy to make a custom stylesheet for this feature.
They didn't work so well for him when he put that final gun in his mouth.

Look, I'm a big HST fan, and the drugs, alcohol, violence and insanity sure led to some great times for his readers. For his family, and in the end for himself--not so much.
Manage Twitter
Road Transportation Emerges as Key Driver of Warming
Noooooo, fixed width font was the best!
My citation says that there are 6 in asian and 2 in Africa. How is this false? And Iraq has way more than 1000+ deaths a year.

Living in Africa does not make you an authority. Point to some proof for your statements.
No! Truth is absolute, wrong is relative. Asimov gives it away in the title. There are wrongs, and more wrong wrongs. We simply refine our knowledge to be less wrong and (maybe asymptotically) approach the truth.
The Bloom Box – innovation or replication?
This is a good suggestion. Unfortunately many handwritten fonts don't have full Unicode versions, which is important for us. Maybe we'll consider buying a license from some foundry, but they might cost too much for us at this time.
Wealth Hackers: How Flow and Info Master Money
Trillions of dollars are traded on electronics Forex markets each day. Trillions. (And, yeah, each day is correct, too.) Yet, these coins or bills never touch a hand.
73% of Android users are men, versus 56% of iPhone users
Wordpress has packaged some things together into BuddyPress, a modified Wordpress MU solution.
Snake-oil supplements?
To correct myself, Fred Wilson points out in his blog post that it will be anti-immigration people against this bill, not specifically populists, and the anti-immigration people will be against the bill... so this doesn't come to inside baseball, and people writing to their elected representatives might make a difference.
I would steer clear, the code is pretty bad, support is close to non-existent, documentation is lacking, and its not very well architected.
I was going to give you a snarky answer, because one of the preconditions for the paper is that it's CPU vs GPU operating on an in-memory database (so there's no disk access by definition), but in thinking about it perhaps it's not even CPU bound but cache-miss bound, and you could trade the latter for the former by compressing the data into a trie or something smarter than just a B+tree.
Why do you use the term the Italians as if all italians wanted this to happen?

Unfortunately here in italy the vast majority of people don't know english so they can't even be informed of what's happening outside the country.
Engineering business card
Oh, I was just working 16 hours instead of 8 (mmm... that actually didn't change after I quit). My case is different cause mostly I'm a designer/front-end developer so I couldn't have done it all by myself anyway.
A step in the right direction. If the US (once again) starts to embrace qualified immigrants, there will only be one way to go from here - up.
I'd say, go the opposite route to Balsamiq. Make it funky, make it stand out. Charge more.

I agree with you. For the first version our differentiator that it's a native app, but not offering more features (or fewer, but targeted for specific audience), is pretty weak, but it's just the beginning.

Thank you!
Paul, I'm in the UK so I guess this is not for me. However, I am interested in knowing how this could be useful to anyone. I don't quite get that from your website. I think you should make a video explaining what your product is. It doesn't have to be a flashy animation, just you talking would be great.

I couldn't find an email address on your website. You don't have one in your profile either. You definitely want to make it easy for people to get in touch with you, especially when asking for feedback. Considering you are building a communications product...
Students to Business Career Streams
This is great. Helping out the economy and creating jobs that stay in the US.
How hard can it be to program a Civ clone/lookalike? Is it a good project to learn functional programming, for example? Would it take days, months, years?

I'm thinking I could kill several birds with one shot - learn something new, make something fun, and maybe contribute something to my country's OLPC project which is a bit short on games - it could even teach some history :) .
Secret Mission: The Forgotten Island Game Download Free
Ok, I'm an idiot :) I didn't see the sarcasm in your comment at all...

However, I do now want a converted gas pump soda pump!
Congrats on both your hard work and what looks like a very cool product. It's encouraging to see others with families making their product aspirations work, even if at a slower pace than a FT startup. Best of luck!
Techhub London opens founder memberships
Mandybill: innocence restored, fines for copyright cockups
Humour Sans
I think the idea is that they still store details but it makes it much easier to pick them up afterwards. With a traditional skimmer you maybe have to remove it to get at the juicy stolen details which is a whole load of extra risk vs. just walking by with a laptop.

I doubt anyone is waiting in a parked car across the street having details streamed to them in real time, you never know though...
Whoever brings it to market and gets it into a very large number of homes and businesses first at a reasonable price will likely claim the innovation trophy.

Unfair? Perhaps, but energy inventions and technologies over the last several decades have always had a nasty tendency to be "10 years away" or "thought to be viable within 3-5 years", etc, and then promptly disappear off the radar.

It's not enough to merely invent and talk about it, marketing is important. Just look at the tremendous push that Bloom has done over the last several days.
I don't really see why a person would want to use a desktop application instead of a web based application

Heh, maybe because it works? And works everywhere?
Auction it on eBay! You'll be rich!! :p
> How hard can it be to program a Civ clone/lookalike?

UI: Easy. AI: Not so much.
It's sinking in that Sun is gone
they've misspelled "digs."
Heh, when I read the story I assumed that MG's source was an executive at Loopt.

If Facebook is truly doing due diligence on Loopt, MG's article will get the attention of others who may come and take a look and create a competitive bidding environment. Anonymously slipping TechCrunch a tidbit is the easiest way to do this without being caught shopping the company and irritating Facebook.
What operating systems the Plan 9 Google guys are using
I like it. Nice website, native apps are fast. A suggestion: Allow different widgets to be importable, so that I can do windows styles apps, mac style apps, etc.
I work at a start up about 2 minutes from where it happened and it scared the crap out of me. Some people say its not terrorism but that's hogwash.

While it might be impossible to detect and stop these types of acts, domestic terrorism is serious, and probably a sign that our government and country as a whole could do a little better.

When US citizens are flying planes into government buildings post 9/11 people need to take note.
But probably still capped at 2GB/day before 8pm. If you go over that amount before 8 they throttle down to something very slow for 5 hours (even if you just went over at 7:59 PM, how does that make sense?)
Then, I'm a pirate since 1991. I need to update my CV.
"Well, there's a billion people in China. If I can just gain 1% of that market, and sell one soda per year to each of them ..."
Creating An NFS-Like Standalone Storage Server With GlusterFS On Fedora 12
Because it means that we end up producing more Ph.D's than can be supported by the job market.

No, we have more Ph.D's than can be supported in the academic job market. It's not the same thing.

I'm a math PhD. I've got 3 job offers in the pipeline, and I haven't even started actively looking [1]. My experience: people assume I'm smart given a PhD, but perhaps overly theoretical. A coding test lets me refute the second guess. A math PhD does help you find non-academic jobs.

Yes, a PhD is hard to get, though if it takes 7 years you are just lazy (and you do get benefits). Tenure, aka permanent lifetime employment with almost 100% flexibility in your work life is hard to get. Uh, yeah, jobs paying $500k/year are also hard to get. In general, the better a job is (in terms of job security, work conditions or pay), the harder it is to get.

No one is an indentured servant, and no one is stuck in PTL hell. A person stays in PTL hell because every semester, they choose to apply for more PTL positions rather than applying for jobs as coders or quants.

We gone from this model to the current model where a person pays for the chance to get a piece of paper in the hopes of getting a nicer paying job.

The piece of paper doesn't get the job because we give out too many pieces of paper. We give out too many pieces of paper because when you subsidize something, you get more of it.

[1] Passively looking: Notice someone mention they are hiring on HN, send an email. Visit stackoverflow once, notice their job board, send out a resume or two.
"Asynchronious message passing is old and great idea. Instead of synchronizing objects and dealing with deadlocks we try to isolate objects and let them exchange messages. Erlang proved it to be extremly powerful tool applicable to wide range of highly scalable mission critical applications.

In JVM landscape big interest to this approach started after introducing Scala actors. "

That statement is so very poorly informed! JMS ("surprise"?) has been a sign of "interest" in "Asynchronious message passing" in the "JVM landscape".

I am not up on my Scala, but the author fails to convey (based on what I do know ;) the competence level that would lend weight to his attempt to address (much less support) the topic.

For those interested in other JVM alternatives, Kilim seems quite promising and seems to hold its own quite well in benchmarks against Erlang.

http://www.malhar.net/sriram/kilim/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37NaHRE0Sqw

http://sujitpal.blogspot.com/2009/01/more-java-actor-framewo... [scroll to end to see the impressive results for Kilim.]

http://osl.cs.uiuc.edu/docs/pppj09/paper.pdf

[edit: added pdf link]
New moderators and flair on Answers OnStartups
Cryptome.org taken down by Network Solutions and Microsoft
Google 101: The Ultimate List of Google’s Services and Products
Viagra makes hackers smarter? - Yes
The Five Stages of Oracle buying Sun (with apologies to the Joy of Tech):

http://bens.me.uk/oracle-buys-sun
Microsoft Global Criminal Compliance Handbook (Leaked Document)
Google facts and figures
Unsurprisingly, OSX or Linux and the old Plan9 text editor.
I recently upgraded my Virgin Media 10Mbps broadband to 20Mbps to get a price reduction, and to be honest, I don't notice it being one bit faster.

I seem to get about 3 - 4Mbps max download speed, which is what I got before. Maybe there is something wrong with my setup, but I have one box connected directly to the modem with 100Mbps ethernet and I have never seen it go even close to 20Mbps unfortunately.
Customer Development for Web Startups
> If implemented correctly, a hierarchical system is extremely unlikely to fail.

You should go show google how they're doing it wrong so they can keep app engine up.
Facebook is already a daters delight. It has facilitated more hookups to date than Match.com.

You can browse your social graph, find out who is single, check out their pics, their profiles, and the minutia of what they ate for breakfast last Tuesday. If you like what you see, you can send them all manner of messages through platform features (would you like to "poke" Jennifer? "Poke"? Really?). And if you wind up in a relationship with this person, you both can mark that on your profiles (and later, so can you mark your Bukowskian divorce).

Facebook Connect, Farmville, and the fact that your Grandmother signed up for an account has not changed the fact that Facebook's roots are in helping college kids hook up for date.
The Man Who Refused To Die.
One little nitpick...is the screenshot on the main page supposed to be a joke. "Launch at mario's" as opposed to "Lunch at mario's". Sorry if I'm just being one of those guys that ruins the joke.
Looks nice. However, it looks exactly like balsamiq. That being the case, why should I buy the challenger (you) over the incumbent (them... with a track record)?

I think it would be a good idea to make your app look different in an interesting way.

nitpick: You spell "lunch" as "launch" in your screenshot.