skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps they were getting a merchant account as well? When we got our merchant account they had a checklist of things they had to check out on the site to make sure we were inline with Visa / Mastercard requirements.

Though, it's still mind boggling how the leap could be made from, you know, mentioning gay folks to ... I don't even know ... treating it as porn? The blog is totally tame.

The only thing I can think maybe happened is that they hit the home page, and then falsely referred to it as "the blog". The wording on the home page is sparse and ambiguous enough that it could be misconstrued (especially if we're already talking about someone who fears teh gays) as being a hook-up site.

That said, I hope Jason and crew ride this one for all it's worth; it's like the perfect storm for generating buzz pre-launch. :-)
Their linkedin page says they have 18 employees.
by the way, I just realized this could be interpreted wrong- I don't mean to disparage crazy russian hackers. It just seems like a feasible explanation for the number and magnitude of cool or impressive things I've seen come out of russia.

Ya know, Occam's razor and all.
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Yes, it's likely I would if it weren't too difficult.

I implemented the "Oops, do you want to send an attachment" feature in mutt years ago, and sent in the patch, which, sadly, was not accepted.

Most people don't hack on stuff - no argument there. But some of us do, and I think that we occasionally make the world a better place.
The more power to ya then :)

No disagreement here. hackers have made my world a much better place many times.
Yeah agreed. The edit was intended to concede that your statement about only being able to use strings was technically correct and mine about using objects was misguided :)

One good use case for objects as keys in hashes is functions. When you use a function as a key it is reliably converted to its definition, cross-browser. Doesn't make your point any less valid though.
Valve Launches New Steam Client in Open Beta
To be honest, I even don't know my remote passwords. They're completely random. I just use SSH keys.

1Password and encrypted text files serve well as a backup.
There is only one question that remains: How do we get Virgin Media onto US soil!?

That kind of competition is exactly what we don't have today.
That makes more sense :-)
A lot of people are using Akka for this instead: http://akkasource.org/

From http://www.scala-lang.org/node/4791: "Akka is now 2-3 times faster than Scala Actors (both event and thread-based) in shootout benchmark."
Iceweasel hullabaloo, part eleventy-two
I was wondering about this myself when I read the article. I live in the UK and while you very occasionally see the odd person sitting in the corner of a cafe on a laptop, it's nowhere near as common as it seems to be in the US.

It's certainly pretty much exclusively a city thing - I know what short shrift I'd get if I walked into a cafe in my rural town, bought a £1.50 cup of coffee and whipped out my laptop to spend a couple of hours working. (The lack of wi-fi isn't an issue - people here heavily use those little 3G USB "dongles".) I really couldn't say why there's such a marked difference, though.

Slightly bizarrely, last time I went in a McDonald's in some grim Manchester suburb they had large signs advertising free wi-fi. Don't we study and work hard so we get to work in places that aren't McDonald's?
Exactly. The overwhelming majority of all jobs in any sector probably suck.
Losing the fixed-width font is annoying to me. I frequently have code or logs in emails, and these are horrible to read in a variable width font because columns don't align, and ^^^ indicators don't line up. I'm curious why this was abandoned.
If the investors would appreciate the fact that they are the second person, then no one would have anything different to say about single founders, because any extra load would effectively be taken up by the resources that the investors give the true founder (adding someone to the team when there is too much load doesn't make them a founder just because it's early on, they can help in just the same way as if they were a normal employee).
That would lead to a black market for defects. I've heard the stories.
Eh, I give Crockford all the respect in the world as one of thee js guys, but I've always found that object function downright disgusting. I am still trying to understand what advantages his prototypal toolbox has over his classical one.
There was a presentation tool used at PyCon during one of the lightening talks that used an interesting 'zoom and rotate' concept.

Any HN folk know what this is?
Also the investor should (and is in a better position to) act in the same manner than a second founder does by encouraging and prompting the founder to deliver - it makes a huge difference when someone respectable with power is just saying "so have you got it done yet?". I think a second "founder" plays a large role in this respect, through just small actions.
I'm in the same boat. Knowing and repeatedly experiencing the fact that most startups fail, I have accepted that the time spent is not wasted, even if I never make a dollar. I've already seen positive results in contacts made and experience gained. However, I still have those days when I think the guys "wasting" their time playing WoW or xbox are getting the last laugh.
Ask HN: Review our UI mockup tool, ScreenSketcher
http://lesswrong.com/lw/pk/feynman_paths/
We acquired this product a while ago from TwoDesk Software (http://www.twodesk.com/), improved it, and releasing the new version today.
I know, we're going to a kind of established market (think Balsamiq), but we just love native applications, and we think that
making mockups is a good fit for a native app, and there's a market for a native Windows tool.

It's written in Delphi, so it is fast and tiny (1.3 MB). Every mockup element is drawn by code, so it scales well (you can resize and zoom in and out), and there's "automagical" grouping: e.g. when you put a button inside a box, if you move the box, the button will be moved as well.

What do you think about our prospects in this market? Any suggestions on the app itself?
That's why you need the game master :)
Have you looked into workflow engines at all? If a company had any of those deployed, tracking the metrics would be easy.

I don't think the problem lies in tracking the metrics. It lies in managing and organizing the "game".
R.I.P. Location in Signature. Was an interesting feature for those that traveled a lot (and thus not require us to explain any long delays in email reply time). Although I did forget about it from time to time. Boy did she not like seeing "Sent from Las Vegas, NV, United States" in my sig..
Spare Backup needs spare change (@$7m)
Big banks are at least as evil as big telecoms; switching to a regional bank might be a good move and result in far better service.
The problem with this is that (AFAIK) there are no 100Mbps wifi routers around over here in the UK, so unless you want trailing cables or to have cables fitted professionally you're still only going to get approx 54 Mbps
Point taken. But the market of lowly routine workers is much bigger anyway, right? :)
You should also check out mozart/oz and alice/ml which are better in most respects than erlang
I think the most appealing market are government agencies and large corporations with lots of paperwork, such as insurances.

The process of managing a customer request in an insurance company goes like this: file the request, create a template mail, press "send", have it printed. Why not stir that up a little?
The Startup Visa (update)
Unfortunately, there are a lot of jobs that are pretty mindless. Let's help these people out :)
California's high speed rail dream
The sad fact is that most users don't care about vendor lock-in and it is not in the interest of these companies to make it easy to export your data for use with another service.

I based my first startup around the fact that my users could pack up and take their site anywhere at any time and made it a one-click affair to do so. Unfortunately, this really wasn't enough of a pain point to have a significant affect on sales.

Major kudos to the dataliberation.org Google engineers for addressing this issue.
Did Your Boss Thank You For Coding Yourself to Death?
Why Italy was right to find Google guilty
I can't try it because I don't have a windows machine, but I think you don't have to worry too much about competition because as you said you love the product you are building. Maybe you could play around with price instead, if you are going to target regular users.
Make a living selling iPhone apps?
Is this possible, advisable, who is doing and any advice if you already made it?
Are you saying that the GPL forces anyone to do anything? It doesn't. You still have the choice not to use GPL code.
Small Planes and Lone Terrorist Nutcases
I just did a quick check on amazon.co.uk and I see plenty of 300Mbit-advertised 802.11n routers... is there some regulatory problem or something else I'm missing?
The people who spring for 100Mbps will hopefully be aware of this already- they will hopefully be techies!

And, finally, maybe one day people will understand that 'wireless' is not a kind of internet, and it does not even necessarily correlate to fast internet. (For a few years everyone I spent time with used 'wireless' to refer to any fast internet, and also presumed if it was wireless it was as fast as money could buy. GAHRGH!)

edit: hell, it's already an issue- Virgin offers 50Mbps, and wifi only offers it's (theoretical!) max of 54 when you've got excellent signal strength.
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The artifacts created with this tools looks exactly like those created with Balsamiq...
Snow boarders cause more accidents and add risk and higher insurance premiums to skiers around them. In europe at least, there is enough demand, mostly from older people for such a ban, in more than one resort (i believe).

I don't want to sound like some old-fuddy duddy (i'm not that old), but i was injured quite badly by a snowboarder.
You are using an unrelated but true argument to make your case by attacking my supposed criticism of the visa rules. I am not criticizing the rules, only pointing out that the deportation clause of the visa has consequences on control.

Yes, there have to be measurable metrics to gauge traction. Yes, I agree that 2 (3?) years is an acceptable time to create 5 jobs OR earn a mil OR raise a mil. Yes, unless those who don't meet these rules are deported, the rules won't have teeth.

But neither of those points has anything to do with the argument that deportation is synonymous with losing position, authority and likely control.

Maintaining control of a startup that is funded is a challenging job even when you are in the country. It should be. In my opinion, it would take a genius to remotely manage a startup. Even if you continue to be a majority owner after an investment, it would be very tough at best and foolish at worst to try to manage it from another country. That is assuming that it's a decision you alone can make, and your investors have no actual say in the matter.

The bottom line is that at the end of 2 (3?) years, if you don't meet these metrics, you will be in a different country than your company and very likely unable to control it without large scale changes in business model and/or structure.
Or even: how do we get Virgin Media onto the rest of the UK's soil?

Their network coverage, being made up of piecemeal local networks built in the '80s and '90s that have slowly merged and been taken over until they eventually became one company, is rather sporadic. They cover some towns and not others, and I even know of some people who have Virgin cable access down one side of the street and not the other!

They don't appear to have any plans to cable any further areas on top of their existing coverage. So while it's fantastic competition in cabled areas, in much of the country BT still have carte blanche to continue their half-arsed "let's perpetually do a trial here and a pilot there and never actually launch anything" approach to fast broadband.
1. Encourage your visitors to download the product, put more screen shots that looks dynamic and interesting (may be a slide if you wish).

2. Good size 1.3 MB

3. product

- I can only resize objects horizontally, the button should have a vertical resize.

- Why drag and drop to add the object when I have already selected it?

- Let me chose a selected tab (you selected the first one)

- I can zoom, that's good, but why doesn't it display percentages, how can I know the real size?

- Why shall I purchase the software, if when I click done (when exporting images for examples), it does export it? I mean your trial version is broken, hackers don't need to pirate your software!

Overall it's not bad, but why pay $60 for it, while I can get a 100 time better software from Microsoft (design + web + encoder : expression suite) for $150??

prices here http://www.microsoft.com/Expression/products/Purchase.aspx#P...

and product here http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/SketchFlow_Over...

Considering the features and comparing it to sketch Flow: $9 or $12 are good.
Interviewing the front-end engineer
No wonder fixed-width font goes away due to not being used. Why did they have to insist on setting the message's font to "Courier New, Courier, fixed" instead of just fixed?

Courier is even worse than the proportional standard. Why not respect the setting that was defined in the browser?
I'm on a Mac, so I can't review your application. Most of the developers that I know are on *nix/ OS X. We're in different circles; I'm sure you'll have clients.

I don't really see why a person would want to use a desktop application instead of a web based application like Balsamiq. I honestly believe that the next step to improving Balsamiq would be to stop using Flash.

(Edited to provide more clarification than just: "I'm on a mac.")
No More Religion, More Tactics for Civilization V
here is small rant about v8 in nginx by Igor: http://sysoev.ru/prog/v8.html

It's in russian unfortunately... Probably google translate will help? In short - article says that V8 is not ready to be embedded in servers because of certain shortcomings.
"Completely apart from that, there is no absolute truth. Nietzsche and Wittgenstein destroyed what remained of that possibility."

How is the statement "there is no absolute truth", not itself an absolute truth?
At the time I created that library, JSAN was a dead site. There were rumors that it would be revived some day, but it hadn't happened.
you have to renew your "TÜV" (the vehicle is safe and in good condition) and your "AU" (the pollution nis in certain limits; helps detec engine failures etc)). every two years. i think for every week or two you#re over your due date the fine rises up to a point where they take the vehicle of the road until it passes the inspection.
And although there are tons of fonts you could choose to use, they've chosen Comic Sans, which is also used by Balsamiq...
Linux kernel worth €1 billion
These are drawn in code, so any similarities with Balsamiq are probably not intentional. This is because both our product and Balsamiq try to simulate hand-drawn lines :)
I started opening an account with HSBC in the states last month and they were noticeably wary until they saw a web page for my company - the Patriot act was specifically mentioned - it seems that the due diligence requirements for new accounts is very high.
Balsamiq seems to have more features that are important + being a native app is not an advantage unless you are equal on all other fronts.

Besides for that it looks like a nice "copy" of balsamiq. Because your products are so similar, I think the best way to drive customers is to make your product significantly cheaper than balsamiq.
My fresh Windows XP installation doesn't have any fonts other than Comic Sans that look similar to sketch style writing. What font would you suggest?
Any real languages targeting PHP as a backend? this piss poor excuse for a templating language is making my life harder than it needs to be.
I never managed to get it to actually say where I was - it would frequently decide I was in London or some other random place hundreds of miles away where (presumably) my ISP had a presence. On one particularly memorable occasion, I got an email reply saying "why are you in Southend-on-Sea? We're supposed to be meeting in Manchester at 2pm". I quickly turned it off after that - the lack of accuracy made it more of a problem than a useful feature.
the issue i face is, when i start working on my side project at 8pm i just want to keep working on it and before i realize its 3/4am and now i am late for office next day :(
http://www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet
Such a good idea, and It's made an excellent start, it would be great if this got through. Although I can imagine that it would be difficult to keep it air-tight to its purpose (as you pointed out with immigration abuse)... but doesn't mean it shouldn't be in effect.
Video: The Early Days Of Pyra Labs / Blogger (Featuring @Ev Williams)
I feel like you are not responding to what I wrote.

My statement is that having a widely known repository is still useful for random libraries which are simple enough to not have dependencies. I completely agree that having a standard way of loading dependencies would make such a thing much more useful still, but it still has utility without that.

Seriously, if you need to be able to calculate several standard probability distributions to 5 digits of precision in JavaScript, you can do it today with the library that I ported. Either embedded or server side. Doesn't matter. Go ahead and use it. (If GPL/Artistic doesn't work for you then I'm sorry. I can't grant a more generous license than the Perl version I started with.)
Another breach of privacy and trust courtesy of Google Buzz.
The gist of it is this. If you include the minified version of the CoffeeScript compiler on a webpage (43k, gzipped), it will compile and evaluate the inline coffeescripts on the page. That documentation site uses it to hook up the menu and the "Try CoffeeScript" demonstration in the toolbar.

If you view source, you'll see something along these lines:

<script type="text/coffeescript">

window.repl_run: ->
try
eval window.compiled_js
catch error then alert error

close_menus: ->
current_nav.removeClass 'active' if current_nav
current_nav: null

$(document.body).click -> close_menus()

</script>
I can't tell if you're joking, but in case you aren't:

To treat them as a view of what is "really happening" is a bit misleading, especially to an audience that is not intimately familiar with the oddities of quantum mechanics.

There is no simplified layman's view of any complex subject which is not at least a bit misleading.

And at the very least, some justification for ignoring the higher level Feynman diagrams needs to be offered

Audience. The post starts out by mentioning that he's talking only about stuff that could be done by school children, or the whole family. It's a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I didn't get the impression that he was completely unserious about that.
New ad model threatens the world's biggest ad-driven media company
Thanks for your feedback! This is why we posted here. What features do you like to see that are important?

As for pricing, I think it's the last differentiator companies should think of, and it's the easiest to change (in software business, at least).
This may date me, but I've played all 4 previous Civ games.

Although the games have improved graphically and added interesting concepts. However, the games have become VERY long. I used to be able to sit down and crank out a game in an afternoon or 2. Now it seems to take days to complete a normal game. Time I just don't have.

I think there's an opportunity for someone to make a turn based strategy game with the original CIV concepts. Just make it playable in one sitting. There isn't much else out there in the turn based strategy genre. Seems like wide open category.
That's true in the US as well, except that we no longer think of other states as "overseas", and a generation or two into the EU, neither will you guys. ;)
I don't have a single peer using Windows either. As a fellow escapee of the windows world you may be interested in a (non-flash) alternative to balsamiq called Mockingbird (http://gomockingbird.com/). It uses the Cappuccino framework (so that's 'Objective-J') like 280slides -- that means you'll need Firefox 3.6 or Chrome probably, but I know you're already on top of that :)
The changes sound to me like Civilization is evolving into a completely different game. A big part of the appeal of the original Civ was the simplified combat. I think this may open that niche to other competitors.
It's worth pointing out that the early blogger software was really quite terrible. It was only a very short period of time after google bought blogger before they had completely rewritten it (from the ground up based on the evidence). I believe strongly in quality engineering but historically there are many examples of horrible steaming piles of kludges that nevertheless managed to function to some degree that were the technical foundation for quite impressive business ventures.

Never forget that shipping is a feature.
Sounds about right without the kids.

Btw, if you have a blog you should probably take the opportunity to pimp your own site with a little seo magic. looks like your first keyword is "power use" and the chances of putting someone else putting that in an "a" tag aren't that likely. Also a direct link to the site rather than just the blog entry would be helpful for real people.

Google will take the first link to [a href = "gridspy"][/a] and take a look inbetween the a tags, and consider that a relavent term for searches so [a href = "gridspy"]power use[/a] would help increase your search ranking for that term.
The Apology by Plato talks of the trial of Socrates and the Phaedo of his subsequent death:

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedo.html
Not true, 802.11n is widely available here.
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For those who are interested, Civilization 1 is abandonware and now (mostly)legally downloadable and playable for free:

http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/14/Civilization.html

It's a 16-bit DOS app so there's a pretty high chance you'll need dosbox to play it.
One of the selling points of Scala is that actors were created as a library without special syntax or compiler support as described in this paper:

http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/128406

One of the advantages of this is that improved implementations can be provided by third parties such as Akka and Lift. Its a shame the current default implementation is so slow but for me this doesn't reflect badly on Scala the language.
You might want to check out Rise of Nations -- it's an RTS but it incorporated Civilization like gameplay better than any other game of its type that I have played. If anyone knows of a more recent similar strategy game, I'd like to hear about it.
Napkin look and feel for java predates them both by years. Balsamiq doesn't have a trademark on hand drawn ui's.
So how is it different to Balsamiq? You're £4 cheaper at the moment (£47 vs £51) though you've hidden the price on the website. Balsamiq is available as a desktop application (via AIR) - not strictly "native" but who is going to notice.

Your website looks nicer than theirs FWIW.