skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SaaS means much software has become a commodity product, like shoes. You can still hit one out of the park by selling 'shoes' however, literally and figuratively.

One of the reasons Zappos did so well was because they took commodity (shoes) + software (online store) + CS (where CS = customer service, not compsci) = purchase.

Most tech markets now are trading commodity products; even content is a commodity.

But you can still overcome the commoditization issues by finding something else to sell that's hyperspecialized - and some of the most interesting e-commerce marketplaces of the last decade scale precisely *because they commoditize long-tail items and create a barter platform that lets those locked out of the speciality markets participate in the trading.

Empowering individual sellers in a commodity market, aka 'normals' seems like it was a relatively efficient mechanism for growth in the last boom. Examples = information/ads (Google), long tail book purchasing (Amazon), and distributed social interactions (Facebook).

The more interesting question: are we seeing a return of selling to geeks, aka hyperspecialization?
Since 37s is so ruby, reading this title, I was briefly hopeful that _why had returned.
How to make a car break rotor using 3D Studio Max
In this tutorial I'm gonnna show you how to make a car break rotor using poly modeling. The video is in Hd Format with streaming from YouTube.
This works in both apps, and many other apps.

Cmd-shift-}
Cmd-shift-{

It even works in the version of emacs that I use.
I'm starting it.  I will describe (almost) everything 
Hello HN. I decided to start my own small, very small 'startup' which will provide web services. The goal is to make it in 60 days with no funds. The problem is that I have a full time job.
I will share the most I can do on a blog especially made for that. Please comment !

blog : http://www.socialmkt.net/

Edit : Oh yeah and please, wish me luck !
Ah, there it is.
And it's good to be able to inspire other people.
Sometimes the angry sounding posts online are just a front. When I was a teenager full of angst, I'd write stuff like this online too. If you ever want to get a beer, and you know, share your feelings--I'm here for you man.
The Kegstool - Crunchgear profiled my college startup I sold.
Excellent article.

I support an iPhone app and occasionally get emails where the person is obviously not expecting a real person to read it.

Almost without exception, I write as nice an email back as possible, and usually people are disarmed. As I say, a great article, since it brings to light something that people won't generally see until they are supporting a web-page or app at arms length.
Sorry, I missed this reply. What made me want to comment? It seemed dumb. That was enough.

Do I actually have the experience necessary to judge this? Well obviously I think so. I know what a phone is. I have used cell phones before. I have used cell phone apps before. I have developed cell phone apps before. I thought this was enough. I did, however, for my sake and the sake of the reader, point out my own status in case I'm being stupid (which is a strong possibility, particularly since I can't actually try the app out for myself, and the article may be (was?) misleading).
I use t (one of my own projects): http://stevelosh.com/projects/t/
Apple: iniziano le spedizioni degli iPad
Confirmation is OK, but taking a hard line is a no-no. I've had endless problems trying to jam my Irish mobile phone number (for a long time, my primary phone) into UK phone number fields.
If what matters is the money you take home at the end of the day, the USA is still vastly superior to any other countries in his list.

If you look at the % of USA GPD/Person and compare that against the % of USA take-home/person, only Japan has an increase (from 70.7% to 71.4%). What does this mean? That it's pretty d@mned good to live in high-income/low taxes USA. I'm going to take a look at the rest of the G8 countries.
A Complete Guide to VPS Hosting
Stop pretending about passion
Sorry, I’m using a German keyboard. Didn’t actually think of that – the German keyboard layout seems to get you inconsistent shortcuts.

(Now I know why the terminal has those weird command+Ö and command+Ä shortcuts, Ö and Ä are presumably where { and } are when you use the US keyboard layout. Those pesky umlauts. By the way, { and } are alt+8 and alt+9 – also where the normal brackets are when using shift – on a German keyboard. Oh, and command+Ö or command+Ä totally don’t work in Safari. You have to use ctrl+tab.)
I started this badboy during my junior year of undergrad at Boise State. Sold it last year to launch my web startup, www.niblink.com. <-- had to plug :)
The difference between $0 and $5 is pretty huge. We would have sold some (maybe even lots) at $5, but about as many? I can't imagine that.

The decision to make it free was a result of the market (how much other apps cost) and our goals (revenue, usage, branding, growth, etc).
That's how I begin to feel about the community here. When I wrote about selling our product for 25K$ (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1212966), some people wrote that it couldn't work and things like that. If I would have been new in business, it would have hurt me a lot. Now, I just say to myself that these people are just bitter. They don't seem to care how much they can hurt others.
that can of carbonated corn syrup got shipped to you, probably over some distance

True. Of course, the water which comes out of your tap travelled some distance, too. The water in the diet coke I drink travelled, from reservoir to bottling plant to distribution plant to store to me, a total distance of under 100 km. Compare that to someone drinking tap water in Phoenix, and tell me who has the greater environmental impact.
it's a reflection of the reality that men are much easier than women

Despite what so many people believe, no such reality exists. But it's easy to console oneself by thinking so.

The situation was summed up quite well by a (female) friend long ago: "it's easy to find a guy to sleep with. The much harder part is finding a guy you'd want to sleep with a second time."

I've known a wide variety of people (intimately speaking) and I don't believe that men are easier, it's just that we're socialized to be the initiators and women the receptors. Many, many, many women would love to be the initiators (my friend above certainly), but societal pressures inhibit most of them. Thankfully that seems to be changing, but I'm married now, so lot of good it does me :-)
You're right. I was being a bit pedantic about it.

I want a Ferrari and a 300 ft luxury yacht, a private helicopter and jet, eat 4-star meals 3 times daily and a closet full of custom made Italian suits and a private trip to the ISS on board a Russian rocket followed by time in any one of a dozen top-end apartments in major cities around the world. I want those things so bad I can feel it in my bones but because of financial reasons I own a practical family car, take a cruise every so often, fly coach most of the time, eat 4-star only 2-3 times a year and I shop at an outlet mall for my clothes which I keep in my boring suburban closet and when I travel I get a reasonably priced hotel with clean sheets and free breakfast in the lobby.

Am I living a mediocre life because my ambitions have outpaced my bank account?

Not really.

Are those fun things to shoot for as long-term, fantasy filled life goals?

Sure thing. I think that lots of successful people are successful because of a general dissatisfaction with the status quo. Their life is great, but can't it be just a tad better? And I think that's fine as a motivational tool.

But just because I'm not followed around by my own personal string quartet to provide atmosphere while I'm eating lunch doesn't mean playing the same music on my laptop somehow makes my life just oh so not worth it all.

I disagree with the basic sentiment that, "I didn't get everything I wanted, whenever I wanted it, all the time, so I'm living a mediocre life." That's a bunch of nonsense. By this definition, nobody lives beyond a mediocre life. Not the Sultan of Oman, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet or Kim Jong Il.

I think a better definition is this "are you on the path to the things you want? if not, you live a mediocre life." For example, I really want to eat 4-star meals 3 times daily. To do that takes lots and lots of money. I don't eat that way now, but as I move up in the world, I make more money and can thus eat 4-star meals with a higher frequency. I'm pretty satisfied with this. Next year, I plan to eat more 4-star meals than this year. And the year after, likewise.

Now supposing, all I could do is eat at Taco Bell every day (I've been there). I am not on that path. I can't even taste the sauce of a good bœuf bourguignon. I'm living a mediocre life. This motivates me, how do I get my bœuf bourguignon? How can afford to eat at Chez Francois and taste that succulent dish? I would save, but I barely make enough money as is. I know! I'll make more money! How do I do that? And on and on and on....

Eventually, I get on the path and my life is fulfilled. But I may have had to do things that I didn't necessarily want to do. Like work full-time, or take fewer vacation days, or commute an hour each way. Tough, that's life, that's not mediocrity.
I'm a big fan of Sequel Pro (mentioned in the comments), and use it daily.

http://www.sequelpro.com/

I'm waiting for a high quality MongoDB GUI to take its place though ;)
Do you also plan to make an android app?
You're confusing what I was saying. In an HDMI situation if you use a cheap cable and the picture and sound are fine, buying a more expensive cable isn't going to change anything. With HDMI in particular, if the cable is failing you'll know right away with either a poor picture or sound. It won't have the gradations that were possible when pushing an analog signal around - i.e. the picture looks could, but it could be sharper with a better cable.

I'm not sure why you brought ethernet into the mix, but generally you're talking about much longer runs than HDMI and it's often not as easy to see when your are losing packets without specifically checking if you are dropping packets (IMHO poor network performance IS failing outright, but not as easily seen as a bunch of blocks on the TV). Even then, the cable you use is either delivering all the packets or it isn't (up to an acceptable level of errors/loss for the length you are running). Delivering a stronger 1/0 isn't going to change anything as long as it's strong enough for the receiver to differentiate. That's where it either works or it doesn't comes from.
Xkcd Makes 4D Miegakure the Most-Sought Indie Game
I can't speak for some of these (like craigslist-- until recently I have lived in very out of the way places). But for others, I have existing solutions that work well. For example, in the case of being owed money I just let them pay me back whenever. Generally it works out that maybe we go to play poker and he pays my buy-in in exchange for that lunch I bought him, or he grabs me a drink when he goes outside for a smoke, or some other timely, convenient thing.

Such is the case, I guess, for pretty much everything. Bump itself replaces things that already exist, but in its case it seems like it can do clearly better with few barriers to adoption (e.g. games), while with the paypal scheme it's not so clear. My reactionary tendencies pick up, "don't fix it if it ain't broke". But, you're right, time will tell. Just because the existing solutions seem perfectly fine doesn't mean Paypal's system won't become easy enough and commonplace enough for everyday use. Because, yes, it does have some advantages.

It still seems so pointless to me, but then I guess, so do/did a lot of established things.
70% 18-49
Serious and funny video and Microsoft's vision of the future.
XKCD comic = 1000 words: http://xkcd.com/438/
Pixelmator. It's amazing, it's like Photoshop only $600 cheaper and I think it even has a better user interface. Can't live without it.
Yes, Android app is coming. It's already in development.
I haven't tried MultiClutch, but from what I can find on the web, it looks like it lets you re-define what the built-in gestures do. This is fairly useful, although it has the downside that apps that are designed with the multitouch gestures in mind lose that functionality.

jitouch doesn't change any of the built-in gestures; it just adds a bunch of new ones, and lets you configure those. I find this to work quite well, because many of the gestures (both the standard ones and the jitouch ones) are very intuitive defaults. (eg. the pinch zooming and the rotating. Re-defining these seems like a kludge.) Now that jitouch lets you define character-based gestures, such as drawing an S with two fingers to perform the equivalent of cmd-S (Save), you can get your touchpad to do a lot of stuff without needing to resort to esoteric gestures.
Not to knock your suggestion, but I've had similarly great experiences with http://monoprice.com . It seems similar to RiteAV, but much bigger and their prices seem on par (maybe 6-10 cents more expensive):

http://www.resellerratings.com/store/Monoprice

Marginally higher rating, but more importantly a MUCH larger sample size (2338 lifetime reviews vs. 25)

Also, as someone north of the border they do ship here, whereas (as far as I can tell) RiteAV doesn't.
We picked the area because of the large numbers of nice amenities very close by. There are about 5000 homes here all with the same kinds of walk-ability. A very nicely designed area. There are areas just a few miles away that weren't designed quite as well.

I'm very glad to be seeing the recent movement in design that calls for walking friendly areas. But with a good understanding that people need to park somewhere as well.
Yeah giving an end-user a free-form open box to enter their address as they see fit is a GREAT idea. Let me know how that works out for you.
>"Digital" signals are analog signals

True that's why I reject TVs with a video chipset, I want a TV and a DVD player that uses valves for the video processing.

I wonder how big an MPEG-2 decoder in valves would be?
The idea is to minimize incorrect information. A 555 number at least tells you something that a number in an unfamiliar format doesn't - whether this was intentional or mistyped.

I'm very much for allowing people to enter any format, but seeing how badly people mis-enter NANPA phone numbers, it is simply wrong to not acknowledge that you will see far more mistakes from an open input box.
And yet, almost all of use are products of this school system without having suffered too badly from the problems described in the article.

Rather than looking for any kind of radical reform, which would likely be highly improbable, we should look for how to improve the system.
Majora Carter - TED Talk
Very inspiring video.

Successful entrepreneurs must share this passion.
Unrelated to what he's trying to accomplish but, for this simple application, I think it should rotate the object (molecule) instead of the camera view, it would look better.
Also an interesting company: http://www.inkling.com/
Being rude usually means you care about something. It's better to get 10 angry ranting emails, than not get any emails at all.
The second finding isn't very recent or reliable (it's in vitro); I assume it's the same as http://www.rense.com/politics5/caff.htm. Live rat studies find that caffeine reduces hippocampal neurogenesis - e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17400186 - which is apparently either a cause or effect of certain types of learning (they actually measure performance on various learning-dependent tasks). Unfortunately I don't understand precisely what kinds of learning are dependent on the observed growth in the hippocampus (this article: http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/22/3/635 tries but fails to satisfy my curiosity).

It's interesting that anyone would presume that spindlier dendrites as a result of a drug will make the brain function better. It could be the equivalent of The Shining's 100s of pages of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." So the studies should attempt to show an actual increased or decreased facility in learning some task.
That's definitely the right way to think about rants - at least they show someone cares.
Seems like it's time to randomize questions. And technology could be used for this, too.

It wouldn't be too hard to come up with something that changes a few key numbers in each question, and reorders all the questions. This could be used to automatically generate the answer key for the professor, too. Each student could be given a personalized assignment, that is useless to copy from anywhere else.
I think he means "Stop caring about random strangers on the internet".
How much will it cost?
IMHO, seeing sparkles on the screen means 'does not work.' Hearing audio errors means does not work. When pushing a digital signal around if you have significant errors you'll know quickly at the receivers end if the cable is bad. If you hook up your cheap cable and don't notice any of these errors, getting a better cable isn't going to make the picture sharper or sound clearer like in the days of pushing analog signals around.
I did read the article. Was looking for real world experimentation or maybe a comment from people at Bump. Bumps don't need to happen phone-to-phone, and geolocation data isn't all that accurate.
UK 'Climategate' Inquiry Largely Clears Scientists
The transform isn't that simple. For example, UK numbers start with a 0 to indicate STD (long distance) - but that 0 must be stripped for calls from another country. Ie, 01234 567890 is dialed from abroad as +44 1234 567890.
Haven't tested this, but great idea. I've used a couple of the PDF creation tools and it seems so tedious to build out even a simple table view on a PDF. Good luck with this!
That's a non-trivial task. There are no such objects like tables, styles, lists or paragraphs in PDF so you would need to reconstruct this kind of information. Also, text and vector graphics is positioned absolutely. Tagged PDFs contains some meta-information about the document structure which could help but still it is a lot of work.

The fundamental problem is that PDF stores the document presentation while html defines the document and the presentation is created by the browser. And obviously, to restore a document definition from its presentation is hard as lot of information is missing.
At least you don't even have them. We (Albanians) have them, but neither the govt neither the professionals know about them!
Best of Stack Overflow: Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi
OTOH How healthy is it to get hung-up/offended/upset about random internet strangers?
It takes all kinds of people to make the world go around, and birds need a left wing and a right wing to fly. So long as people just talk about visions of the future with people acting "the way they're supposed to", "responsibly", whatever...it's quaint. And if your name is Plato, people still might read and talk about your ideas 2,400 years later, but whenever people have banded together to bring these visions about it's resulted in distopia.
They did run like crap, but most people left Myspace for Facebook for one of two reasons; 1) Facebook was cleaner, and 2) Facebook was used by high status people (started with Ivy League students).
One of the best things about my co-founder is that he's thicker skinned than me. Some of our user email makes me really upset, but he just cheerfully replies so I don't have to dwell on it.
Soros & co. back wikileaks, kosher mob & oval office
I'm not down-modding you, but I am using AMQP in production on http://tweeteorites.com/ with RabbitMQ.

I need persistence and flow control, as my consumers are unreliable and production rate is highly variable. This will become even more important as some of the new Twitter data streams come online.

It took me about 2 days to completely reengineer my backend around RabbitMQ and a custom daemon to serve stream requests. Granted, I already had RabbitMQ set up and routing background tasks for celery ( http://celeryproject.org/ ), but it's still pretty trivial to set up and get running. The easy case, which I'm at now, is pretty easy, and I've got a good path to scalability with fan out exchanges.

That said, faster is better, and I'd be interested in zeromq if they had some of the features I need.
My team has to write code that will accept and parse data from sources we don't even know about today, and continue working with minimal maintenance over a 15+ year life cycle. I don't think that's an uncommon situation. There's a lot more to software development than just toy web applications.
It is not unique if too many people are bumping at the same time (e.g. comic con or something).
I've read exactly one semi-scientific comparison of popular DVI cables of varying price. Amazingly, the conclusion was that Monster Cables really are better. However the difference had no effect unless you were running a high-bandwidth signal (>=1920x1080x60Hz) over a long distance (>=12 feet? I don't recall exactly). The cheaper long cables would work for low bandwidth signals, but would lose sync and fail at high rez.

Either way: monoprice.com
I like it, but my site didn't come out correctly (www.convertyourcds.com). Perhaps my html is screwed up?
Good timing.

On OkCupid I was just told that I am an asswipe, that I have no personality, and no respect. Brought back some bad schoolyard emotions.

Thanks.
it's just that we're socialized

Okcupid has the data, and men are more likely to message women than vice versa. Whether or not it's innate is irrelevant to this conversation.

But since you like anecdotal evidence so much, here: http://www.wetherobots.com/comics/2008-01-07-Misinformed.jpg
Here's another one: "In the real world, I can look things up, so why should I have to memorize things for this exam?" I heard this one a lot in CS courses, and I tended to agree with it. But then again, if you put in enough practice/study, you're generally going to have it committed to memory after a time.
Why no PHP API binding?
My personal favorite store to get cables from: Fleet Farm.

Typically, you can find almost any kind of cable for $5-$10, some of the common ones for less. I think my 25-foot flat ethernet cable came in at a whopping $12, but it's been the most durable I've owned.

They've also got rational pants, which my wife in particular likes.
SimpleGeo Launches
Wow, thanks for triggering some memories from 20 years ago, haha. I am trying to remember where I first heard of this...grade 4 or 5?
So, when I buy a TV, it's effectively being subsidized by other people's cable purchases.
Oops, I meant A million open doors, not Altered Carbon. Both good books.
Sorry, don't know why. Your site does not validate but it could be problem on my side as well.
I miss the promise of IrDA.
Because chapter one in the databases for dummies book used address as an example, with fields for address, town, state etc.

Then you stick them altogether and print them on the envelope, thus covering chapter2 = report generating.
I didn't say I wouldn't be tempted - of course I'd be tempted. I just don't think I'd take it. 3% could be huge over my lifetime.
Out of interest, did you sell it? Also since your asking for CAD, I assume you are Canadian, do you mind me asking where in Canada you are from?
Larry Ellison was touting the concept of "Internet Appliance" back in 1995. I don't think think his were ever mass manufactured.
I'm a fan of Acorn myself, but the suitable-for-most-uses Photoshop alternatives that have cropped up over the past few years are great.