skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've (4-man "lifestyle" software company) been using QuickBooks Online since the beginning of the year, and it's worked out well for us.

It's mainly used by one of us (myself, as president/chief bottle washer) for sales & general accounting/reporting/payroll stuff, but any of us can use it for quick reports about sales, A/R, etc.

Other than some extended downtime (several hours over a couple of days) recently, it's been quite good.
yeah i kind of guessed that was it, it must be pretty hard to find a word that is witty and works well in both languages.

if you guys are serious about it being a failure, im sure there are a few HNers who would gladly take it off your hands and grow it into a biz (after rebranding it of course).
The most promising was offering a paid tool to Spanish and English professors...

Did you talk with your users about this and your other ideas? Do you know what roughly what proportion of your current userbase is made up of Spanish and English professors? If you want freemium to work, you need to be sure that you have enough "power users", and that those users have a hair-on-fire problem even if the majority of your users do not.

You can find out these kinds of things by running surveys, and by reaching out to individual users if you have their email addresses. You might be surprised how easy it is to get insanely valuable information for free this way.
capitalizing on the most loyal users seems like a good idea to me. if they could make a business on it and you could skim off the top they'd be incentivized to grow it pretty quickly.
JavaScript Publisher
That's a stupid title. Is it really an omission on Apple's part? What other software did they "not include"? That's like saying "iD Software made millions because Microsoft didn't include a first person shooter in windows."

How about "clever man makes money providing a simple but functional program for a new computing platform"?
Not thinking about it for myself. Just trying to figure out what people might be rushing into in a mad panic.
> If any violation of terms of use is criminal, users who shave a few years off their age in their profile, claim to be single when they are married, or change jobs or addresses without updating Facebook right away would also have violated the criminal law.

From the EFF. Very convincing (IANAL)
I think they also had lower wages, statistical process control, concurrent engineering, the Taguchi method, the five why's, just in time manufacturing and many other innovations going for them as well. You can't say their success was due to subsidies without eliminating the effects of all of these other things.
Yes, we had several people at my office say the same thing so another programmer and I wrote a couple of plugins to hide it (FX and Chrome only): http://www.seotools.com/hide-google-options/.

I personally like the sidebar, I think the date-based filtering is great.
I think the argument against it is:

Most of the art in games could be extracted from the game context and the art itself would suffer no consequence. i.e., Most of a game's story could be told in film, the interaction adds little to the art itself.

I don't agree, but neither do I think we've yet arrived at a mature medium. Technologies on the horizon will increase the immersivity of games (Natal, DS3D). Combined with better writing (we're finally getting there) and better applications of present tech (most wii games suck), we'll probably see our Citizen Kane before 2020.
Just to clarify. I'm not shutting down Lenguajero. It will keep on running (at least I'll still use it to practice my Spanish :)), and maybe we'll come up with an idea on how to monetize.

One of the challenges we faced in monetizing the site was monetizing our international members. A really big chunk of our users are from Central and South America. When it comes to advertising we don't make any money off these users (say $0.05 per click versus ~$1.00 for someone in America). The majority of these users also don't have credit cards or paypal so getting them to pay for a premium version of the site would be difficult.
A black swan is an unanticipated event (typically grounded in some fundamentals) - not an error of judgement or algorithm.
That turns out to be one of the central questions of Micro Economics. If the demand is elastic, they would have sold more than 10 times the amount and would net a profit by decreasing the price. If the demand is inelastic they would have sold less than 10x and made less money. Ultimately this is an empirical question that can be tested and validated. Once you know the elasticity of demand (as it is called) for a product, you can calculate the optimal price. e.g. the price that will yield the highest profit to the company.

It's very easy to say what you think the price should be, but the preferred method is to empirically test it and get the optimal value that way. It's a lot easier for the OmniGroup to run a sale and test the change in sales once they have some baseline sales numbers. In almost all cases it's better to be on the high side of the optimal price point and come down to it.

For those interested in starting their own company, it's easy and tempting to start with too low of a price. That low price diminishes the value of your product in the minds of the customers and it is really hard to increase your price later.

Anyway, those are my 2c, and for the record I'm one of those who bought it at the higher price.
Report From "Grand Challenges" Tech Summit in Seattle
Unrelated: I didn't know Apple actually had a trademark on "Multi-Touch": http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=7...
[string1 isEqual:string2]

works just fine. String concatenation is no harder than a format string. Writing a category on NSArray to add join is pretty dead simple as well.
I'm just as glad that they didn't. There's a rule of thumb among Mac developers that you need to charge at least $20 to be able to make a decent living off your indie software. Given that we can write more desktop-scale apps on the iPad, I'd guess that it's going to be similar for the iPad.

Anything that helps establish a standard of apps actually costing enough that I can run a reliable business off of the platform is better for me. I'm interested in developing for platforms where I can create a sustainable business, not a hit based one, which is exactly where lower than sustainable app prices lead.
I think a mockup tool would be pretty useful on the iPad as well, especially given iPad's interaction model.
40 Free Fantastic Sans Serif Fonts
working on enterprise web applications
the future is not rendering and linking documents on the Web. the future is rendering and linking data on the Web. and there is nothing here to make that experience any better than it is today (which is lousy). in many ways, the HTML5 effort makes it harder to build linked data applications since most will need to continue to rely on heavily scripted Web apps. and "over-scripting" is another sign that the common Web browser is an out-dated product.

Considering that the HTML5 effort was originally called "Web Applications 1.0" I rather think he's missed the point.

HTML5 isn't (just) about rendering documents - it's a full application development technology.

I don't find his statement that "over-scripting" is another sign that the common Web browser is an out-dated product particularly compelling - in fact I don't even understand what it means.
Mozilla Jetpack 0.4 Roadmap (simpler extensions for Firefox)
Google Releases Vulnerable, Bug-Ridden Microblogging App -- On Purpose
What Gripes about Apple tell us about Computational Literacy
Cool! PDF version is free.
I'm pretty sure C is considered weak in it will automatically cast from one type to another.
Or in more concrete terms, customer problems that need solving.
From the clustering page of the Wiki:

"The pymq cluster is not designed to survive a master crash. If the master is to crash, all bets are off. However, clients that are already connected to the individual nodes can continue to operate normally. It's just that automatic failover and queue discovery won't work (which is basically what the master does)."

This is not fail-safe, unlike most enterprise messaging systems. Though you could stick the master on a VMware cluster with FT enabled and survive hardware failures, there is nothing preventing data loss from software or networking failures.
<device>? I think we won't see this tag soon.
High-Frequency Trading. When your margins depend on squeezing every last millisecond of performance to beat the speed of the market itself, you don't have time for an extra conditional branch instruction.

An exaggeration, but not a very large one. The stock market is a high-speed game, and a lot of players are willing to cut safety features for raw performance.
Failed startup? Did you imagine failure before you started?
It looks like the CSS Styles did not load for you. Are you able to access this link: http://sportmeets.com/css/css.css ?
Bee Keeping, Food Rapping & Growing a Reliable Bear Quickly are all generic skills.

He only needs to change a few names & characters to use the same awesome application for different openings.
Because that's what Bruce's background and experience is in. He has never worked in most of the other areas -- he's never held a position doing physical security work. I've got reservations about "security" being all the same thing, and about Bruce being a presumed expert in every area of it. It'd be like a veterinarian doing surgery on a human. Related? Loosely.
The Go Language YouTube Channel
With a nifty demo of making and installing packages including pushing to and from github.
To learn how a practical computer works: MMIX

To understand the mathematical theory of computation: Turing Machine Tape

To follow the subject from its roots: Babbage Analytic Engine Heap

To truly grasp algorithms: Psuedocode

And which of the two editors -- EMACS or vi -- should I use? Paper and pencil.
Correct, here is the second one which goes more in-depth:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1321562
I guess somebody forgot to put a check in the software that says that if a share trades at 0 there is no use selling it.
I 'learned' C first, never did anything useful. C is not beginner friendly simply because it provides no instant gratification. Python is instant gratification for newbies. You can make a GUI in five minutes. In C you have to READ A BOOK first. Console apps don't thrill young people. GUIs do.

My two cents, take it for what it's worth.
I would say almost none of our users are Spanish and English professors (presumably they speak both languages quite well ;)). The idea was to get them to use the tool in their classrooms, where their students would be the users. They would have special accounts that would allow them to monitor their students use of the site without actually participating.

We did (and still occasionally do) run surveys and ask for member feedback. The feedback was great, and we made a lot of changes to the site based on that. I'm not saying that there isn't a way to monetize the site, I'm just saying that our two main ideas (ad revenue and a teacher tool didn't work out).
I'm guessing you're referring to languages like Haskell here. I think the work people are doing on types in those languages is fascinating but it also seems like work in progress and I wouldn't recommend those languages to a beginner. The key concepts in the lisp-like languages (closures, higher-order functions, garbage collection etc) are easier to understand in a dynamic language IMO.
In the second part, I cover this very briefly. Basically, there were so many other holes to exploit from 1988-1995 that you didn't need to learn a whole new exploitation technique. Also note that it took a few years for buffer overflow exploitation techniques developed on Linux to hit Windows -- the systems were far enough apart that it took a little while to port. So an entirely new exploitation technique (not just new platform) would require much more work, and thus be a larger barrier to entry.

Also, Lopatic was a creative thinker. Sometimes it just takes being shown something is possible to challenge many others to try to replicate it.
Paper and pencil are great, until you realize you have to insert a couple of lines of code up there.
I just tried the site and it's broken on WebOS. The thing I was looking forward to the most was being able to use Scribd on my Pre, so that's what would make Scribd the best reading experience for me.
For comparison, here's the same pdf as viewed in Googles pdf viewer: http://tinyurl.com/33339j8

My own feedback so far: Clicking download, should allow me to download the document. It should not require me to create a dummy account, jump through 'invite friends' 'look at these other documents' hoops.

Also I really like the way Google has a scrollable list of thumbnailed pages. Makes navigation very easy. Also search, and ability to change size of pages with a simple click to allow different reading modes.
Plus with Google, when you click [download], it downloads. It doesn't try and get you to sign up.

Scribd looks like a big improvement on flash definitely though. The fact it's using fonts rather than fonts rendered on an image is lost on me though. Copy+Paste of text works fine in both viewers, and that's all that really matters to me.
The quote is misleading. The 2-5% figure refers to what percentage of the genes of modern non-Africans were inherited from Neanderthals, not merely common to both groups through a common ancestor. Most of these genes are inconsequential, as they exhibit very little variation even between species. The wide range in the estimate exists because it was determined by extrapolating from the small portion of the genes which do show variation.

The corresponding value for chimpanzees is 0%, as they are not our ancestors, though we share recent common ancestry.
When will banks fix their insecure systems?
It's a shame that the demos are in Flash!
insanely great.
I would suggest typing the up and down arrows at the bottom to two keys, j and k would be appropriate. Then have the mouse-overs for those buttons include the keyboard shortcuts. Yes, you can accomplish the same thing with spacebar and arrow keys, but it is annoying to jump to a spot halfway through a slide then have to scroll.

The functionality is already there. But I personally don't like to have to aim my mouse to navigate when I'm reading a long document.

Another idea to consider is creating an iframe version of the page, which would allow you something closer to the old experience. The nice thing about that is to allow third party websites to transparently embed scribd documents in their pages.

Other than that it looks good and is more pleasant for me than your flash interface.
Just for the fun of it does anyone want to throw out some new names for the site? Lenguajero is pretty bad in English. I think we fell into the trap of speaking Spanish everyday and thinking that it just sounded cool (and a bit witty). Ideas???
I disagree. The Internet had grown enough by 1988 to host the Internet worm, which exploited a buffer overflow among other things. So that doesn't explain this 7-year gap.

The best explanation is that there were plenty of other Unix holes (race conditions, rhosts, etc.) to exploit that didn't require inventing an entirely new technique.

The second part of the article goes into this in much more depth (HN link).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1321562
One thing I've never got to the bottom of is: do the vacuum'd in documents (link the links added to HN submissions) get stored/archived and made accessible on Scribd?

That's never felt a very comfortable thing to me; though I admit my main awkwardness is in how it is automatically appended here.
I have wonder whether any of that software crashed from divide by zero errors. :-)
C's type system is restrictive enough to get annoying occasionally, but doesn't protect you from loads of things it could, since it is not strongly typed.
If you're closing out a short, 0 is a perfect time to sell.
This is second in a two-part series on the history of buffer overflow exploitation. It covers three eras: academic computing (early 1970′s), rise of the Internet (1988), and x86 unification (1996 to present). The changes between each era influenced the changed exploitation of buffer overflows.

Here's an HN link to part 1:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1316782
Gosh, who would've thought that I could install plugins when web applications needed access to bits I don't normally want them to have access to?

http://cyri.systemrequirementslab.com/CYRI/
they don't

2010-03-29 - Subsequent Final Mailed
2010-03-29 - Subsequent Final Mailed
2010-03-26 - Subsequent Final Refusal Written
2010-03-02 - Teas/Email Correspondence Entered
2010-03-01 - Communication received from applicant
2010-03-01 - TEAS Response to Office Action Received
2009-09-01 - Non-final action mailed
2009-09-01 - Non-Final Action Written
2009-08-13 - Teas/Email Correspondence Entered
2009-08-13 - Communication received from applicant
2009-08-10 - TEAS Request For Reconsideration Received
2009-08-10 - Ex parte appeal - Instituted
2009-08-10 - Jurisdiction Restored To Examining Attorney
2009-08-10 - EXPARTE APPEAL RECEIVED AT TTAB
2009-02-09 - Final refusal mailed
If you’re reading this,
you’re using Scribd in HTML5.

Not so much, no..
Startup failure != you as a failure.

It's 2 separate events. Associating startup failure as you as a failure is a very slippery slope; because eventually you won't get out of bed because everything you can possibly do when you get out of bed is going to result in failure anyway, so why get out of bed. Remember - 2 separate things :)

And as others have mentioned, many other startups wished they had 7K of passionate users.

Keep tryin! :)
On a separate note: the new reader looks great. One comment; it;s a bit wide for netbook screens. I appreciate it is not possible to support all screen sizes but us netbook users are a reasonable share now :) The page content fits but the tools/info is off to the right.

In fact everything on this screen appears "larger than life" (Chrome Dev channel on Windows XP, Samsung NC10)
Simple things that browser developers can do today to make HTML5 Apps real
Curiously, the up and down arrows threw me off. I expected left and right buttons.
Insufficient capacity? Bad cell tower hand offs?
I don't see anything in the original Yahoo article that mentions DRM is the culprit. I think the change in manufacturing from "when we ship hardware, it's permanent" to "everything can be updated over the Internet" leads to more bugs in 1.0 devices and thus more frequent updates.
I can't tell you how great the experience was! The one minor UX issue (and its more of a feeling than anything else) is the controls at the bottom. It just kinda feels like I can't see something. maybe the actual controls are too close to the bottom of the page (maybe its my monitor), who knows.

But the experience was excellent!
Selecting text is a bit odd for me- on slide 4's bottom text, for example, selecting a large part of it selects the whole slide. (Chrome w/ beta channel)
Thanks jayliew. I don't actually think I'M a failure. I was just trying to express the gamut of emotions that one feels when a startup doesn't work out.
According to Bloomberg that was a real trade that went through.
We have discussed some really cool things to do with page thumbnails. It is one of the features I am particularly excited about, because I feel that navigation of online viewers has a long way to go. How do you like the slider/scrubber in terms of the nav experience?
Graduating in June from high school. Going into computer science.
Sorry, I'm not quite sure if I understand your comment.
What would you like to see them doing? If anything, I'll learn from this and hopefully, the founders might find a good idea or two on these comments.
Except that to close out a short, you are the buyer, not the seller.
No idea, I'm afraid. I don't monitor them so closely.
I think people may be missing the bigger picture. While this may certainly be the result of a trade error (NB: This has yet to be confirmed), what we did see is a precursor to what may happen should another of the dominoes fall over in Europe. There are now rumors that Italy may be headed for a downgrade:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/36986983

If less-than cooler heads prevail, an actual economic event could trigger the exact same response we saw today.
There are some oddities with selections because of layering, but this is something I often notice in native PDF viewers. Have you seen any particular patterns which cause this?
I don't know what it is either, but guessed along the lines you are guessing. Of course, a Z-value of 3.09 would put you in the 99.9 percentile, so that seems far fetched.
The results were made with my software. ;-)

(I've been on the team that did this since we staffed up engineers, and did the first functional demos of the new design.)
Excellent point about the netbook screens. Thanks!
I was thinking about that.

If I file a W-9, I will have to pay taxes in the US...won't I? I want to pay taxes in Jamaica, not the US.

How do I achieve that?
Wow thanks. Yeah that needs to get improved. :O
All documents uploaded to Scribd (either automatically or manually) are stored in S3 and are available on Scribd until the document is deleted from Scribd. If you find your content was uploaded to Scribd without your permission, you should contact our support team; they'll take care of it for you.
Clickable: http://www.scribd.com/html5
I'm not sure if this is happening to anyone else, but I'm thinking the viewmode default should be on 'slideshow'?

Otherwise looks great! I can't wait to see it formally launch. Is there a way to upload documents in different formats now to test it out?
Really glad you are enjoying it. Are you talking about the toolbar auto-hiding? That was a decision we went back and forth on, so I would imagine it is not set in stone. Would you prefer it expanded at all times?
Search Engine where content opens on the page. Javascript?
Oh, come on, who is ever going to guess your 6 letter password?

After all, nobody in their right mind would use a dictionary word that is only 6 letters long, now would they?

And it's great they allow only letters and numbers (case sensitive?), all those special characters would only lead to confusion.
For me, the slider thing duplicates the functionality of the scrollbar(browser generated), without adding anything else useful.

Also I'd much rather see the viewer separated from all the other clutter. Didn't it used to be?
I was actually a fan of the "horizontal bars" design they prototyped... Guess that one didn't have enough personality
Totally hear you. For the first version we focused on making it work on browsers that support @font-face. The next version will be all about making it work pretty well (if not perfectly) on browsers that don't.

That's a great point, though, thanks for letting us know how important that is to you.
Good for them! OmniGraffle is the main reason I will always keep a Mac around.
I thought we'd done away with Quirks mode, but looks like Google has brought it back.
why are traders complaining about clearly mispriced stocks? if you see P&G fall 40% on NO NEWS, there's a good chance that you're about to make a bunch of money, because the stock is going to rebound.

old school uncomputerized trading shops like Themis get their asses handed to them by faster, smarter algorithm developers, and have no choice but to get regulators to bail them out.