skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My problem is rather simple actually. We currently track events in a local database very similarly to the events we would send to the Mixpanel. These events have been analyzed only superficially until now. If I wrote the code to analyze and plot the data, it would work on new data also and would make Mixpanel somewhat redundant (dealing with updates is a non-issue, it's the logic that's difficult, not dealing with more data).

However, I don't want to reinvent the wheel, or to invest a lot of time in something that other apps like Mixpanel, NuConomy already do very well. I suspect Mixpanel uses the timestamps of the events for billing and if so they might require some non-trivial changes to their business logic to allow historical data. I hope they will, someday. Until then I might settle on sending them only new events and using R on the historical data.
The issue is that our society worships the hell out of money and the making thereof, at the expense of all else, creating an environment where the business people become "high priests" and get orders of magnitude more compensation, influence, and power than equally qualified and responsible people in other industries.

Large companies also use the creative, interesting work as a reward for doing well at the upper-grunt (middle management) level, so it goes to the most loyal, and those best at playing the "business game", rather than the most qualified.

The current arrangement makes as much sense as for particle physicists to tell Michael Jordan how to play basketball.
A sensationalist article title, for sure. My answers to the three "dangers" listed in the article:

No separation between home and work: in the late afternoon I shut down my computer and have a glass of wine and snacks with my wife. Work day is officially over.

The prevalence of distractions: earphones.

Lack of human interaction: I broke up my work day today by spending 90 minutes at our local shooting range with my wife and three friends. On Mondays and Thursdays I go on 2 to 3 hour hikes with several people. (Anyway, human contact is probably over rated :-)

The bottom line is that people should do whatever works for them. One caveat about working at home: you either really have to love your work or to have a strong work ethic.
Neo? Doesn't that mean "new"? Wouldn't a neo-expert be an expert on new things? Or a just a new expert?

It isn't the prefix that needs adjustment, it's the word "expert" that needs replacement.

And there is already a term for these sorts of people. Polymath
downvoted because there are already browsers in the app store that "replicate functionality already present in the iPhone"
I liked your response a lot. Thank you. And I was almost persuaded by it. In fact I was persuaded for about 5 minutes after reading it. But at the last second, a thought occurred to me: if there's a deficiency in Unicode that prevents its use for Japanese, isn't the right solution to just fix that deficiency?

I mean, Unicode is meant to be an abstract representation of glyphs, separate from any encoding, that works for all of Earth's languages. It's tailor made to be a programming language's internal representation of a string. This is its raison d'etre.

So it seems to me that #2 is definitely The Right Way™ and that if there's some problem with Unicode that has kept Ruby from adopting it, they should have worked on fixing it, rather than breaking Ruby. OK, "break" is probably too strong a word for the state of Ruby 1.9. And in the real world, fixing an international politicized standard like Unicode is probably impossible. So I can see that this pragmatic solution might have been the only one available. But still, it seems wrong to me.

Out of curiosity, what exactly is the deficiency in Unicode that caused Matz to go with option 3? I presume there are epic flamewars all over the internet about this issue, but I just haven't been paying close enough attention.
I agree with you - I was just trying to answer the parents question.

I also would have modded you up until I read the last sentence. Relax, there's no need to be so aggressive.
Money quote: <i>Currently, a person must have a net worth of $1 million or an annual income of $200,000 if single or $300,000 if married (and filing jointly) to be an accredited investor. The senator's proposed bill doesn't say what inflation adjustment will be used to convert these numbers, established in 1982, to today's dollars. But if we use the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator to adjust these figures on the basis of the consumer price index, then the annual income requirements for accredited investor status would become $449,000 if the investor were single and $674,000 if the investor were married, while the net worth requirement would become $2.25 million.</i>

So, in other words, the bill's not even finished being drafted and they made some noise about maybe adjusting some figures, but they have CPMs to sell so they'll just assume "adjust" means "multiply by 2.25" and get the snappy headline.

That said, Dodd clearly shouldn't do anything to hurt actual startup investment.
In 1990 it was.
How to Pack your Backpack for a 9 Month Trip
Increase Your Adwords Profits With Google Adwords Optimizer
- What problem does Dodd say this is going to solve? Is he trying to reduce the workload of the SEC?

- Whatever the problem is, is it a problem?

- Does this solve it?

- Who is paying/lobbying Dodd to do this? I imagine it wasn't on his radar until someone who stands to gain brought it to his attention. Is it just Tourette legislation?

- If the result will be as bad as the article says ... how/why do we let Congress get away with fucking things up?
What to Do When Your Partnership Sours - Entrepreneur.com
TajTunes: Live singing telegrams, outsourced to India
I think the DataMarketplace is a great idea.

I wonder if quality or customer satisfaction will be an issue. I imagine there could be some datasets that don't quite meet up to the expectation of the buyer. But there isn't a real good way to refund money since there's nothing to return.

For example, how do you verify that the dataset really contains 'Every Target Store' in the US?

Perhaps they have an ebay-like seller rating feature planned?
I don't think these are safe business model companies.

Call me a cynic, but it may be more of a case of "built for investors/acquirers in SV".
One example:

"Our goal is to do what Gmail did to Outlook: replace a popular desktop application with a better online version."

is badly begging the question. I'd be surprised if gmail + Google calendar had more active users than Outlook.
I think developers need to treat math like any other framework - continue practicing. When I was an undergrad and then a graduate student I was always doing math. Now that I work in the business world, not so much (although I do use my statistical analysis skills often). My math skills have degrade some because of it.

As an aside, the picture at the end of the article gave me flashbacks to when I tore my ACL doing backrolls on the wakeboard...ouch!
Treating finance as a game is only an option for those who are already wealthy enough to never worry about being comfortable.

Plus, I sincerely doubt Warren Buffet is likely to give up finance in favor of Chess anytime soon, even if he came to the conclusion it was more interesting (not saying it is, just drawing a comparison.)
The data is in a mysql database (persisted from an ActiveRecord event model). We track things like what was done, by whom and on what object (i.e. user_id, target_type, target_id, action and other stuff).

What we need is a system that goes through all these events and lets me plot a graph with logins/day for users with a free accounts vs users with a premium account (for example). Mixpanel does exactly this. There is no need for any kind of standardization on the data. Just go through all these events with properties, and aggregate them to plot interesting graphs or to gather other actionable data. The only real requirement is some id to aggregate these data points on a per user / per account basis, and a timestamp to aggregate them chronologically.
I think the team is by far more important than the two sentence summary of the idea, so in that sense it's too early to judge.
And in Ford's heyday, it'd have been accepted just as readily. Nintendo's reliable about delivering what they claim.

It will sell. Backwards compatibility is the most important part right now, because it keeps DSes and games selling. Imagine what their sales would do if they said it wasn't.
Ask HN: Your favourite (oldschool) software?
Personally, mine used to be XTree gold for dos back in the day (it was the bees knees!)

How about you?
You are attempting to fit a square into a circle here.

Working in a "smelly garage" or from a "friends couch" as a founder in the USA dreaming of success is Apples to Oranges vs. living in a roach motel, on a dirty mattress, turning away visitors from behind a closed door, in Russia, since 2003.

One is the romantic prototype of an entrepreneur, one is an unimaginably harsh and depressing life from which this guy has completely denied himself sanctuary.
Because single-player games don't exist on consoles? Or because they're so rare, nobody has them?
I'm pretty interested to see what the CHROMAom guys are going to come up with - Are they going to build something new?

I'm a fan of http://colourlovers.com.

Maybe they'll make affordable... long lasting... PANTONE books.
Thanks. I asked questions based on the conversation here on HN. I should have it posted tomorrow.
This is totally a marketing move. There is no doubt it will be approved. My company's approved iPhone app is not only a Firefox browser but also has Flash and Java support.
Don’t always tell your customers the truth
And here's the original thread on Babz fashion:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=381646
It is very true that serious users of mathematics (engineers, scientists, even mathematicians themselves) don't really rely on their ability to do calculations by hand; indeed, a lot of them suck at it. Doing it by hand while learning the subject matter gives you a much more visceral experience of what's actually happening, though, even if you use a tool to do it for you most of the time.
It doesn't actually browse the web. It is a viewer for the Opera servers that are actually browsing the web.

Just because most people take greater risks with their email doesn't mean that Apple should support the endeavor. In my opinion breaking the SSL/TLS security chain is a big no-no. Unless their app doesn't support HTTPS sites, that's enough for me to support Apple denying it.
I am not saying he made good choices but it's hard to picture all that many well balanced people working when they don't need to.

Let's say you are 18 and make 20k / month and that's the tip of the iceberg you are going to get another 50+ million by the time your 40 even if you do absolutely nothing. Do you really think you would aim for an office job? What's your ROI for "wasting" one of the few thing you can't buy time? Are you going to do a startup when you already have more income than your lifestyle requires?

PS: As soon as you realize you don't need to live in an expensive area and most expensive items are more about status than quality you realize money quickly has significant diminishing returns.
http://golang.org/pkg/exp/spacewar/

I can't decide whether that's cute or forced cute. (Standard Library...really?)
You can take a look at this : http://www.rubyfleebie.com/encryption-with-alphanumeric-outp...

It cares more about readability than security but I guess it is safe enough.
Petty power struggles and office romances. You don't even have to be a participant for these to add massive amounts of stress to your day.
I'm with you. The article takes a tiny piece of the much larger financial reform regulation package which has been a bipartisan effort with Republican Richard Shelby very much involved, amplifies it through some hypothetical number crunching, and then attributes it all to Dodd.

The blog post then takes it a step further by adding a layer of incendiary drama. Might cause one to forget the whole point of financial reform which is to prevent the sort of economic crisis we just went through from happening again--a crisis that has surely done more damage to startups than the proposed legislation could ever do.
No. In fact, buses don't go far enough out in some places here, and they don't stop close enough. Plus, I believe they can't afford to run all their buses anymore.

I didn't have my own car until I was a senior in high school. I got dropped off every day (12 years ago now.)

Where we are people live far enough from the school that it's too far too walk, but it's just as far to walk to catch a bus. Getting kids home from school is equally as difficult but most kids are forced to take the long treks by foot or bike. And in the winter, we sometimes get 3+ feet of snow at a time.

It's a big world, I know I shouldn't have started this argument here. I'm frustrated about the education my own kids are getting, and I hate seeing so many people agree with studies that cause sweeping changes in schools.

I'll read the article again. I'm pretty sure I read through it the first time with my mind frustrated with this headline anyway.
I bet they have more happy users.
Why the false equivalence?
Bootstrapping a Lean Startup
I'm really interested to see what happens to Crocodoc. Back in high school a programmer friend and I built a rough website to do joint collaboration that we called Collaborate. In our minds it was mainly a solution for all the peer reviewing we had to do for English class, but it follows the same track as Crocodoc. We ended up shutting it down because Google released Google Docs and a number of other real-time collaboration services sprang up. We didn't really have time for marketing/didn't know what we were doing, so it was kind of ridiculous to compete. I'm not really sad about it (we wrote it in PHP, yech), but I'm wondering how Crocodoc will deal with the same problems.
I'm forgetting - which author wrote about 'Friends of Privacy' who would create false profiles and websites in order to protect the populace?

Question for you - how much would you be willing to pay for your name, user accounts, and other specific information to never come up on the first page of Google, Pipl, or other search engines?
That's one of the first things that surprised me when I started fiddling with OSX programming. Interface Builder is so ridiculously easy to use, an angry monkey could make something that's relatively HID-compliant. The guides are accurate and informative, even the first time you encounter them, and just chucking controls onto a panel with a little organization and letting them fall where they snap will get you 90%+ of the way there.

WPF looks interesting, and I like a lot of it, but * ick *, XML. What is it with Microsoft and XML? HAML's popularity should be some hint as to how much people hate HTML, XML is worse.
You do business with the people that will bring you a profit. In theory, it doesn't matter what personal views the person across the table has if they adequately provide the services you need. Learn to identify the wants/needs of those people that operate around you and plan accordingly.

Business is about profit, not feeling good about the people you buy/sell services from/to.

Defend yourself if you see a need. Don't avoid people just because you don't get a warm feeling when you exchange services with them.
Anything else to add?

Yea, plenty.

- I impose discipline upon others. Since you can't just poke your head in with an "idea", you have to think about it first (imagine that). If your email doesn't include enough data for me, I say so and hit "reply". Same for phone calls and voice mails. Signal to noise ratio increases dramatically.

- My performance metric is WorkCompleted / WorkPlanned because that's all people can witness. Not 101 other meaningless metrics like number of sessions running, time spent on internet, time spent BSing, time spent on cell phone, time spent at lunch, shirt color, or droplets of sweat on forehead.

- Wake up at xx:34 a.m. Start work at xx:37 a.m. (if I want to).

- Wake up in the middle of the night with an idea. Log in and work on it immediately.

- No meaningless team building, HR, or mandatory meetings.

- I eat what I want, when I want, where I want. No more vending machine or carryout crap.

- Headphones or speakers? Oh wait, never mind.

- Casual dress, gym shorts, or warmups. Again, never mind.

- Cats often make better companions than cubicle mates.

- I hate shaving.
Group #1: Social Media Scene people. You'd meet them at any networking event in San Francisco, like tonight's SF Beta

Group #2: These are your friends who work at Facebook or Google.

Group #3 ???
PSP LONG LASTING GAMES
"Why are we willing to buy phones with such restrictions, then?"

To use the house analogy the alternative in SmartPhones seems to be a house with an ugly paint job, the floors aren't quite level, the doors squeak, the roof leaks, and sometimes the locks on the doors don't work and you come home to a house full of shady individuals peeking around in your underwear drawer. We're almost 4 generations into the iPhone and arguably Android 2.x is the first real good "open" alternative -- even though it's not nearly as open as people like to think. I'm all for open platforms and freedom but delivering wonky products is a great way to push the mainstream market towards walled gardens. No one wants to run anti-virus and anti-spyware on their phone, or deal with a task manager, or deal with apps that crash a lot. Those days are over with. People just won't put up with it anymore. The open platforms gotta deliver a good experience or they're doomed.
The knowledge gap in the early days of PCs
I'm Not A Programmer, Because Programmers Don't Exist
Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End

ReputationDefender.com/MyPrivacy

It appears to be very cheap. I have no connection with this company or anyone who works for it, ttbomk.

MyPrivacy protects you from stalkers, scam artists and direct marketers, by continually tracking down your personal information and removing it from databases on the Internet. MyPrivacy removes your name, address, age, phone number, past addresses, and names of relatives from websites that sell or give away your personally identifiable information without your permission.
Backpack page leads to a carefree honeymoon for web app developer
My picks for the ones that will be successful from the idea only, without looking at the bios of the founders or the websites:

- Notifo

- Zencoder (If they drop their prices. Those prices are horrendous for the REAL market they are targeting)

- Nowmov (with name change)

- Crocodoc (will sell, but will not have too many users)

- Gamador

- Cardpool

- Chromaom

- Answerly

- Zenedy

- Data Marketplace

- 140Bets
How TechStars Came to Seattle (applications now open)
I used to like working with MathCad, but I haven't needed it since ~1995.
How the Tablet Will Change the World
It's entirely a free speech issue, just not at all for the developer.

The freedom of speech lies with the publisher (the final actor in the chain), not the author unless they are one and the same. The right of a newspaper to print whatever stories they want is concomitant with their right to not publish any particular story -- the right to be censors themselves.
Amazing. Well done. Thank you.
Yes, indeed. Spot the buzzword:

We make social games.

a social data request and fulfillment system

adding social data

leveraging social media

identify active social networkers

Infoharmoni visualizes the real-time social web

social sports (and soon pop culture) betting applications
Interestingly I saw Cardpool featured on my local news the other day.
Maybe the pressure of having to present something tangible with only 3 months of ramen noodles makes people reach for the low-hanging fruit.
And it's already on the Google CDN. http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/documentation/#jqueryUI

Curious, does the Google CDN version contain all widgets, effects, and themes? Or what?
Positive first impression - website is nicely done. I thought the video had good energy and a thoughtful message, but I didn't hear anything about mechanics. How do you set up an account? how do you manage the interactions with your brain trust?
Is this the 37signals business? if yes, that is certainly okay because that has proven to be a great business, but if no, how is it different?
I think the popularity of Gmail is overestimated by a lot of techies. Campaign Monitor posted user stats for over 300 million people last summer:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2839/email-client-p...

Gmail came in at only 5.5%.
There have definitely been more people who've chosen to use GMail and GCal than have chosen to use Outlook. Most Outlook users have it forced on them by their employers. (They don't necessarily object, but they weren't given a choice.)

If you include Outlook Express, then you have to consider that it had the same tying advantages that IE had over other browsers. Even so, it's been months since I ran across someone who uses Outlook or Outlook Express for personal email. Thunderbird and Apple Mail are somewhat more common among the people I deal with, but the majority of people I deal with use some kind of web mail for their personal email, with GMail completely dominating among those who are at least slightly technical and among kids.
I'm surprised you're getting downvoted. I completely agree -- the existence (and demise) of these companies are largely dependent on the circumstances of the time. For instance, a majority of the top companies were branded web hosting companies like GeoCities, AngelFire, etc. This market has shrunk considerably, probably due to the rise of blogs.
It seems strange that there have (so far) been so few ideas that leverage the high productivity that ought to be possible with technology and the highly interconnected economy. (So far, day-trading is the only one like that.)

How could one be very productive for only a few hours a week--enough to genuinely earn US$24,000 a year?

Is it Timothy Ferris or nothing? Has anyone gotten his "Four-Hour Work Week" to work?
I managed to arrange a flexible schedule at a few companies I worked for so far. My problem is that there's not much left of the day after 18:00. It's a bit harder to arrange for 4-hour work days. Peers that have to stick around the entire length will be demoralized or envious (even though a lot of them are never effective more than 4 hours per day)
I don't know enough about the legislation to comment on it specifically but I do know politics -- it appears the Republicans are pulling another HCR strategy here and simply letting the Democrats go forward on this unchallenged on substance in an attempt to score a political Waterloo 2 (since the first one didn't quite work) Pretty sad state of affairs I think. I'm willing to accept Dodd's bill isn't great (or even good) but the response of trying to make it purely a political issue with dishonest speculation of repealing it later is pure lunacy from the opposition. People are desperate to see some major financial reform so it will be extremely popular no matter what's actually in the bill. The political narrative of saying "the people who caused the meltdown oppose the fix" is political gold. As a committed liberal I'm actually a bit worried that the classic check & balance of right/left is getting out of whack due to the massive failure of the Republican party to put governing over politics. They need to come to the table with honest intentions and substance and try to be part of the solution.
Scraping Google is against their TOS, so your point is null and void.
Kind of sad to see so many products that are derivative, either directly (we scrape twitter!) or indirectly (We're going to do what X did, only for Y!)

Of course it probably all makes good business sense and I wish them all luck and to be happily bought out.

I just wish there was something original - X because it's a good idea and will bring great good, rather than X because Y...