skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I may have accidentally implied the semi-retirement angle more strongly than my point regarding tending to the first business as if a garden instead of trying to scale it, which was more what I wanted to focus on. Apologies if that wasn't as clear as it could be.

Perhaps I should also have mentioned that he is diversifying, where diversifying is certainly distinct from scaling the first business up.

As far as his first business goes, I still think it is worthwhile questioning the common automatic assumption that the next goal should be to scale it.
YouTube is down Http/1.1 Service Unavailable
After re-reading this article, I'm still not clear on how these snapshots ended up in _his_ EBS account. Can someone explain (in terms that a non-EBS user will understand)?
I thought about the topic before posting, but I thought it was a dangerous sort of hacking.
We used this in SUSE Studio to decrease build time. Worked well.

There's also MPIBZIP2 which uses (IIRC) libmpi to do bzip2 compression/decompression across several machines. We messed with that too, but it wasn't worth the added complexity.
I have updated my profile. I have seen a couple of posts looking for unpaid interns so i thought for some companies its sort of routine to actually get people in as unpaid interns then hire them.
Youtube redesigns video page for all users
Screenshots of Debian-based PureOS 2.0
Phone: Blackberry Storm 9530
Text: Received
Link: Loaded
Barcode: Nada

I just got a little outline of a box with a message trying to convince me that "this is my ticket." If you want to know more, my emails in my profile. I'd love to offer up some overall feedback. Overall, I love the concept.
I like the new page; it's clean, and I love not having to scroll through a small box of related videos, and it's nice having the video right in the center of the page, with no cruft surrounding it. And being able to get to my favorites page easily is a big improvement in usability, for me anyway.

There's a lot of complaining, but I think most of it is just people being temporarily pissed about having change suddenly thrust upon them. A month from now, everybody will be used to the new page layout.
Horrific iPhone Performance On AT&T Was Partially Apple's Fault
Crashed the tab's process in Chrome!
People in hospitality do that with their inner voices rather than blowing up at customers all the time.
If it means transparent fee structures and straightforward trials that don't require the intervention of a salesperson (and the ensuing followups) then I'm all for it.

Some of the sites you linked to suck for far worse reasons, anyway - why would I want to see AMPC's pricing when the homepage gives no indication of what they actually do? (something to do with postage and "exclusive industry benefits" apparently)
DPI metadata in PNGs is even worse than Gamma 'correction', since it serves no purpose whatsoever.

DPI is only remotely meaningful when dealing with something that was once printed (set it on scans so you know the original size), or soon will be (know how big to print it). In practice there's so much completely bogus DPI metadata out there that little software will respect it on output. For further brokenness, DPI is cleverly stored as a Rational in most formats, but nearly all metadata libraries expose it only as a float!

There's a ton of software out there written by some twit that read on the internet somewhere that "Macs are 72dpi, everything else is 96dpi", and then goes on to set that in every file it outputs depending on the platform. Inkscape does this and it is incredibly obnoxious.
The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators
You're soaking in it.
Microsoft’s $100 billion Nokia acquisition: Absolutely unbelievable
Homework copying can turn As into Cs, Bs into Ds
"I'm not a member of an organized political party. I'm a Democrat."

-- Will Rogers
My logic there is that impeding political speech makes the law vulnerable to legal challenge. My opinion is that such a challenge would succeed, hence my view that, one way or another, it will stay out of areas like trade and political speech.
Google Goes to Jail for April Fools?
Ah, love that list! My favorite, though, is still RFC2324...

...and now, through the magic of Rack, you too can have an HTCPCP compliant web app: http://github.com/toolmantim/teapot

:-)
Definitely brings back school day memories!
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That looks really cool. I don't know how much of an afterthought touch is since you can clearly buy the device without the keyboard and mousepad.
It's not just about the negative. A lot of us have grown up with machines and technology, and we often forget there are humans involved in the simplest of transactions, such as shopping or customer service.

Instead of fuming that you have to phone up to get your phone account cancelled, rather than click a button online, it's amazing what you can achieve if you put on a positive outlook and remember the other person is just like you, but working some shitty call centre job to pay the rent. Since I had this "eureka" moment (and I find it awful that I had to have one in the first place), I've had much better experiences - negotations, discounts, amazing customer service, etc.
During a job interview. . .
According to the linked page it's pig-zee.
Google Street View Goes 3D
Looks good. I'm keen to use (and pay for) a service like this - if its reliable and quick. With a ruby gem its particularly attractive as all other rails to pdf solutions are incomplete, require a pdf specific dsl or are very expensive.
The command lists the EBS snapshots available for you to mount. Just like with VM images (AMIs), Amazon allows customers (and of course themselves) to make EBS snapshots "public" in order to allow other people to use them.

Here is an example: http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/

So when the author says "My EBS Snapshot account was filled with hundreds of snapshots" that is technically not accurate. The output was of things strictly in his account as well as all the public ones available for use.

Some of those were marked public by the owners when they should not have been.
Presumably another April Fool's day prank. Click on the streetview man to lower his glasses. For more fun, ask for directions which involve paying a toll...
This is a reasonable way for a sole founder to start but there is usually more to consider when a founding team is involved - I explain this issue here (http://grellas.com/faq_business_startup_001.html).

In essence, with a team, you will need to consider so-called "restricted stock," where a founder's equity interest vests over time. Because the stock can be forfeited, this requires the filing of 83(b) elections to prevent nasty tax problems. It also means that founders need to discuss and negotiate whether there will be acceleration of vesting if there is a termination of a founder's service relationship with the company without cause. Likewise upon acquisition. On top of all this, you need to get IP assignments from all founders who did pre-incorporation work on the startup's IP and you need to set up work-for-hire provisions to ensure that all IP subsequent to the founding is captured for the company. Finally, you normally need to have an equity incentive plan to be able to make grants to second-tier people who might join after the founding team. All of these steps are above and beyond the normal routine steps of corporate setup (filing of articles, doing first minutes of directors, adopting bylaws, getting EIN, doing securities law filings, doing indemnity agreements for directors and officers), which in themselves normally cost you anywhere from $1,000 to $1,500 if you set up in Silicon Valley (maybe half that with an online service, which does nothing to guide you with the process), for example, or more if you incorporate in Delaware and need to qualify as a foreign corporation in your home state. And this is not to mention the time it takes to explain all the issues and options to the founders so they can make informed decisions on these issues (including whether to incorporate at all, as opposed to doing an LLC, for example).

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for austerity at the start and (even as a lawyer) strongly believe that founders are foolish if they spend too much on legal when they don't have to or if they front-load such expenses when they can be spread.

However, with a founding team, doing a proper setup with lawyer help will definitely cost more than $500 at the start. In my experience, with a savvy founding team, the costs can usually be reduced to $2K or $3K (if you do all the pieces described above), more like $5K with a large firm doing the work. With a sole founder, the budget approach you describe will work and has much to commend it.
So rather than using consistent language, so that users learn that no matter what SaaS site they are on, to look for the “See Plans and Pricing” link, each site should come up with their own copy? Do you even understand UI/UX consistency at all?
Also self promoting your own crappy blog on HN is pretty lame.
because it wasn't a priority? They feel their talents are better used elsewhere?
I watched people playing this for about 15 minutes at GDC. Didn't try it myself and I didn't know at the time that it was 4D, thought it was just some weird xform of the world.

Looked amazing but was completely unintuitive to me. I didn't get it at all but if playing for a while helps me learn to visualize 4D space then I really want to try it.
First of all, I don't know how well wkhtmltopdf works, but there are many, many solutions to the HTML-to-PDF problem, and most of them suck. It's not surprising the creator decided to put together a library from scratch, it's the special sauce for his business.

Also, the "value add" comes from the fact that wkhtmltopdf is a library, and PDFcrowd is an API.
The Politics of Plunder in Plato's Republic
I'm Australian, and I'd pronounce it "pigs".
I just got a beta invite and was planning to spend the weekend moving my real estate listing data to the service to try it... at these prices I am happy to do it myself.

I feel like the pricing is aimed at funded startups or mature businesses, not bootstrapped startups.

The site design screams Metalab. Did they design it?
Technically you're spot on and I up-voted your comment -

But something feels sour about that headline to me, it's finger pointing at an individual which smokescreens the fact that the same agency / laws / etc are still in place that allowed for the abuse to happen to begin with.
Sounds perfect. When can I start?
http://jnovy.fedorapeople.org/pxz/

It's definitely needed since XZ is fairly slow.
This guy is so bent on being unique that he uses an unreadable scrawl in a link rather than the actual twitter logo. Aren't graphic designers taught that things that are alike should look alike?
You should read http://corte.si/posts/security/hostproof.html and http://corte.si/posts/security/crypsr.html. Was also discussed here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1226277
Oh, it gets worse fast.

I hate street address validators that insist you live in a house or apartment with a number on a given street.

Because?

I live in flat m at street number n on Foo Street.

Here in Scotland -- where I live -- there are three ways to put this on an envelope, all recognized by the post office:

Flat m, n Foo Street

m/n Foo Street (this is the one in the Post Office postcode lookup database)

Flat xFy n Foo Street (where y is floor number and x is apartment number on that floor, e.g. 3F2, 12 High Street)

... So why do so many Javascript address validators throw out m/n or xFy format addresses for having an illegal character in the middle? Including British ones, that back onto the official Post Office lookup database?

Address formats aren't standardized internationally. They aren't even standardized within countries with a unified postal service.
Published by Ewan on Thursday 1st April 2010, 00:09.
Fair article but really: no pics/examples? This isn't an old BBS - we can handle visuals...

Also, the author says this:

One field: Name. If you need to split the first and last name, simply split it along the space. If they enter in a middle initial or a middle name, you can detect that and store it as needed. Essentially, you are given more information to work with, and can still provide all the needed information.

Not quite so easy with international names. What about Mary Katherine Van der Graff?
Voice synthesis? Not exactly what you were asking for though.
Excellent. Now I can say, "I'm using Oracle" and still get some work done too.
Not sure how many people have tried to actually make international address forms, but it's really difficult. Despite a lot of searching, I have yet to find any web site or book or library that can handle all international addresses properly while still letting you validate that the data is reasonable (city/state/postal code) etc.

It's not that American-run web sites don't want to support international formats, but when 95% of your business is from America, it just doesn't make business sense to deal with the complexity of international addresses for 5% of your revenues.

I'd love it if someone can point me to a library/book/tutorial of the appropriate way to handle this situation. NOTE: I haven't looked that recently, but did about a year ago.
This gets into dial semantics vs. number format, which then becomes an element of user behavior. I don't know how user behavior is in a large number of other countries, but the U.S. I know typical reaction to "enter your full phone number" is area code + number, not 1 + area code + number.
How does that prove that men are "easier" than women? It only indicates that within Okcupid's membership, men are more likely to initiate communication with a potential partner. Perhaps women are no more selective than men, but simply typically prefer for men to initiate the conversation, as your parent post claims.
April fools day joke?
Is that actually 3D or just an offset on the images? (I might just have bad 3D glasses)
Yes, most definitely an April fools joke.
I'm still watching this, but before I forget: The statement about launching Basecamp on svn reminds me of Max Klein.
Gallery of Blogs with Art Directed Posts (Heart Directed)
Could somebody with an Android phone please determine whether they went all the way through with building an Android app? It appears you can only search the marketplace from a handset.
I'm eagerly awaiting my copy. Brooks' previous work, 'The Mythical Man-Month', is still one of the best books ever written about building software. I re-read it every few years, just to keep those lessons fresh.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the book, Brooks was the manager of IBM's huge OS/360 project in the 60s. The system eventually shipped, but it was massively overbudget and late. He took the lessons he learned from the debacle, and wrote 'Mythical Man-Month' in 1975.

It's shocking how many of his insights still apply: Adding people slows down projects. Keep teams tight, and structured around your most productive programmers. It often pays to think deeply about a problem before you tackle it. Don't overbuild.

It's true that dynamic programming languages, tools like git, and rapid prototyping have made some of his examples feel dated. However, the underlying principles are still solid.

Hopefully 'The Design of Design' is a similar goldmine. Even if it's only half as good as MMM, it's still earned a slot on my bookshelf.
It looks like Google is already keeping up with their April Fool's Day tradition...
SaaS sevice to help you cheat on your wife & manage your midlife crisis
When looking up, we clearly see a box
Document Links Styled with CSS Attribute Selectors
CSS attribute selectors provide an additional method of setting CSS styles outside of ids and classes. Learn how an attribute selector, when used with a hyperlink, can increase your clicks.
Reasonable People Disagree About Meat
haha, I wish I had the guts to do that in a interview.
Journalists’ E-Mails Hacked in China
i hope this is a bad april fool's joke...
Yes, but those 10 guys don't waste time writing long introductory letters in an effort to initiate conversation. Faster rejection based on a simple 'attractivess' filter means less wasted investment on their part.
Imagining an Apple Tablet in 1989
Stop using Windows Notepad
I don't know if you'll find this helpful or not, but there is one deceptive aspect in the video. Visually, you see a world composed of cubes, but geometrically that is not what is actually happening. In fact the "cubes" are actually points being represented as cubes on the screen. The game world is actually 10x4x6x4 in a discrete grid of points. (The 6 for height is an estimate.)

When the first dimensional swap is done, if the world was literally as it appeared, the big ring would become a two-dimensional square ring as you swapped out its depth for the 0 it has in the fourth dimension. Instead, since it is really just a structure composed of 12 points represented by 12 cubes, the points remain in your 3D space and it seems untouched. That is because it was 2D in the first place, despite being drawn as 3D, and swapping around the two dimensions it didn't exist in in the first place leaves it untouched.

So to some extent it is cheating a bit with the fourth dimension, in the sense that you aren't actually dealing with a continuous world, you're dealing with a very coarse-grained discrete one that is being represented as if it continuous. (I am not objecting. There is no practical other choice. I am just pointing out that if you are already confused, this unavoidable deception may make it more difficult to understand what is going on.)

I will be intrigued to see how well the puzzle designers learn to cope with 4D. I was initially excited, but I'll want to see more than what they showed. I want to rotate the fourth in on the other height axis. (Now, that's a sentence I don't have the chance to write very often.) Keeping gravity constant would require that the height dimension be held constant, and that would probably be an acceptable compromise, vs. freely rotating in all directions. But we've seen a mere minute of a game, so who knows. (The number of people in other discussions I've seen about this video that implicitly assume the interlocking ring thing is somehow the only puzzle that could be given is driving me nuts.)
Well ... one approach would be to find someone like my father (who's 77 now and happily retired). Give him a 1/3 commission, agree on the minimum terms (i.e. the above plus a price) and stand back.

However, anyway you look at it, unless you're willing to spend some number of months to do it right, you're not likely to get a good deal. It's always possible, but I wouldn't count on it.

And that's one reason to hire a specialist, someone who can play the game without conveying that you want out yesterday. And I've seen my father do this sort of thing, it can be done.

Good luck!
Maps Just Got OCCA
Any citations here?
This really just depends on your definition of computer literate. I don't buy that having a facebook account makes you a computer wiz. Neither does owning a smart phone. There are computers in my car and I have'nt a clue how they work.

What does computer literate even mean? If it means comfortable with the command line / terminal, then I absolutely don't beleive that tomorrows kids will fall within the classification.
Yes, it is that time to just ignore the internet for a day.
Introducing Google Ad Innovations
Look to Japan for making technology appliances.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197702

This is a country where high speed Internet connection is common but from my observation, a lot of households to not have a general purpose computer.
I'm having a real hard time believing that. It seems like, at the very worst, a "broken" site will simply make your visited links appear identical as non-visited ones.

Do people really have layouts that rely on visited links changing size or shape? What Javascript uses visited link styling to do something useful?
I don’t understand the downvotes. I wasn’t trying to imply anything in particular about the amount more plastic, or where the trade-off actually sits. Indeed, my naive guess would be that soda vendors aren’t idiots, and probably currently do whatever is most efficient.
The Meaning of April Fools Jokes has Changed
Sure, but how could it "break" the layout? How could you possibly have a layout that requires links to change size to work?
Andrew, if you see this, the link to the mp3 is broken. (Same with the Kevin Hartz interview)
April Fools' Day is the day for avoiding the internet. And other people in general.
There are funny April Fools jokes... and then there are this.
That is my point, and because of that, I find your blog post disingenuous. You ignored the stated purpose of their post and presented it as something it was not.
Wikipedia over DNS
Mac Users: Live SMS & Twitter Feedback in Keynote [YC 08]
They really did build an app: Cat to English - "Why can't they call it a door, I mean cat flap is so degrading"
Uh, "a2ps file.html"? Doesn't even need an API key...
Yes, they did. http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-google-andro...

You can choose the Target animal (e.g. Guinea pig), press the listen button which "listens" for four seconds and outputs translations like "I could really do with an extension. This place could use some wooden decking." and "What is that thing anyway? Can I eat it?"
According to the site, it's actually pronounced "pig-zee."

(I quite dislike the name, myself. And I think everyone's actually going to pronounce it "pigs".)
I used this for a major company's site-edit auditing system. (No, they didn't want HTML snapshots of each revision. It had to be a screenshot of the browser...)

It works really well. The only quirk is that it needs a fake X server (for font loading), but Xvfb works just fine for that.
Nanofoods in you plate; monsanto kills mother earth
They've probably thought about this, but what about siblings?

a:visited + .sneakydiv { /* ... */ }
Beer label art matches the character of the microbrews
Walmart earns more than half of income on groceries
I need this for my two-year-old.

Which setting is "inside voice"?
If only the internet and other people could contain it to one day.
Couldn't somebody make a fortune by re-issuing Bing Bang Boing?
Sharia compliant private equity: added regulation or added value?
We hired consultants from McKinsey & Company last summer and after 9 months of working with us to learn how we operate, it was obvious that Twitter was the right choice.

Your April fools jokes need more subtlety.
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Peak Copper
For all the naysayers ("this will break so many sites!") a challenge: Can you find even one site that applies a non-color style to visited links? Two? Ten? How long do you have to look to find it/them?

Are any of these 'broken' besides not being quite as pretty? Is any content or feature invisible, unreadable, or unavailable?
Ok, but everything handles the UTF-8 "BOM" just fine. Adding it only causes problems when you ./file.sh that has a BOM, and haven't setup your binfmt_misc magic properly. Fix that, and it works fine.
Great. Now if only Ireland's RTE could follow suit. They actually show ads in Flash video, which any browser can show, and then switch to Real for the actual content.
dear google,

please add an option so I can invert the x/y lookaround axis like I can do in a video game.
Best reason for canceling order: "I was too afraid that guy would come in the box with it."
Early experiments with JRuby -- it's so much more expressive than vanilla Ruby
Five lesser known Firefox add-ons for web developers
The new Path API in Java 7
Walt Mossberg's Apple iPad Review
I've already prepared a laptop with my sawzall, just like Arrington! Apparently it'll ship out tomorrow, and I can't wait!
Today is the best day of the year.
David Pogue’s Review of the iPad from 2 Angles
I'd love to have a Chris Farley shouting version of the Bible.
The point I liked the most is that business majors are far more apt to try to copy than science or engineering students.