skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the Commie bastard's site:

http://www.startbreakingfree.com/

A real hot bed.
The internet and Digi-Key replaced RadioShack for me a long time ago.

Digi-Key sells everything, and will let you buy in onesies and twosies without screwing you on the price. Maybe Monoprice for cables, but that's rare.

The one time I needed a DB-9 gender changer in a hurry and paid freaking $20 for it was the day I decided I was done with RadioShack. You served a great purpose, dear friend, but times have changed. I still have my Pocket PC-1 for the memories.
We picked up a couple of couches at Salvation Army for that purpose.
This article struck a chord with me, because of this. My home became my office, and my comfortable bed had to be thrown out to accommodate the server rack. Not a lot of room in Tokyo apartments.

So, I was sleeping on a foldout bed, next to the servers. The first night, I woke up after an hour with my head about 15 degrees celsius (59 fahrenheit). The air conditioner to keep the servers cool had been pointed directly at my head, and I went to sleep without noticing.

So, I groggily switched orientation, and I moved my head up to be next to the servers. The servers were a little noisy, and my feet were getting cold, but I was tired.

I went back to sleep, and everything went fine. Until 30 minutes later, when the tape backup cycle started.
One common misconception is that all censorship is done automatically based on keywords. While it's true that internet searches in particular, and visits to banned websites are greeted with a connection reset, the censorship of message boards is done by hordes of low-paid individual workers (the "50-cent party" [1]) that are local to each district. Your girlfriend's post (which was a one-word post, and an inflammatory one at that) was probably spotted by whichever worker(s) were responsible for monitoring that message board.

When such a post is removed, it's typically referred to by netizens as being "harmonized", a play on Hu Jintao's "Harmonious Society" slogan [2].

You should check out the archives of a site like chinasmack or chinahush[3], who have translated summaries of popular chinese message board topics and gives a good feel of the day-to-day life of a chinese netizen.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonious_Society

[3] http://chinasmack.com http://chinahush.com
Exactly. If it's hogging the CPU, it's hogging the CPU--it's irrelevant if it's more or less a hog than something else really.

Truth be told, I'm only running a Mac Mini. That being said, iTunes seems to be more efficient at streaming audio, video. Other desktop applications seem to do a better job at graphics in general.

I guess part of the performance hit one experiences with Flash is due to the overhead of a nice cross-browser, cross-platform, web-oriented runtime. Java applets, which do more or less the same thing, are also pitifully sluggish, in my experience.
I'd be interested to do some guest appearances if my background and experience might be relevant to any topics you're doing.
Video: Jailbroken iPad Runs SNES Emulator with WiiMote Controls
What’s So Great About Being Public, Anyway?
This is one of the tips espoused by the Hacker's Diet. I used this more than a decade ago to drop 20lbs:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html

The concept should be familiar to those in startup land, though: "You Can't Improve What You Don't Measure"
I think you're on the right track, and a 'document' oriented interface is what I think the next step will be, as opposed to Apple's dead-end app-oriented interface. Your meta-document is similar to something I have been envisioning... the current way things work is that you can either:

a) put some photos in a folder, and to view one you open it which launches the default application to view it.

b) open up your photo application, which either knows where the photos are, or asks you to point it to where the photos are.

I think the future is where the folder becomes the 'application' by the mere act of putting a bunch of photos in it. But it wouldn't be an application in the current sense, but rather a collection of separate and customizable ways of interacting with photos. The average user might just want some buttons to print photos or email them to friends, but for a web designer you could extend the meta-document by adding commands to resize images, change formats, crop, etc -- not by buying something massive like photoshop, but simply by downloading (or creating) mini-extensions that do exactly what you need to do.

So yeah, the way I see it, we'll move away from some shell which organizes files and applications that interact with the files, towards a system where the 'shell' itself evolves into whatever 'application' you need it to be.
A proposal for a distributed, secure, social network
It's a great looking site but I can't do anything unless I signup. I entered my zip expecting to see some results but all I get is a link to sign up form. Is there a demo that visitors can check out? Or maybe allow Google/Twitter/FB logins so I don't have to sign up?

I do like the idea of growing my own veggie garden. The site concept and design is very promising. Good luck!
Cool, but... BeOS is 10 years old. And its GUI was dated even then.
No upvotes? No problem.
There is no evidence they are intentionally blocking the startup. If it was it could be for safety/trust issues as your files are uploaded to a third party, and viruses can be spread easily as files are synced in realtime.
You're right about A, sorry.

In response to B, how about Adobe's own Shockwave? O3D is another. Java unfortunately requires external libraries (and thus there's a security prompt), but they could easily integrate them.

I think the lack of another cross platform framework speaks more to the futility of trying to build market share with a plug in rather than any technical reason.
OpenGL?
Very cool concept - a few comments:

a) The "buy" page screams out for some pics - people eat (and buy!) with their eyes :).

b) "We choose seeds that are perfect for your climate and the time of year" then the next page asks me to select my own choices? A little confusing - maybe you're building a list of options dynamically?

c) Consider for future "upsells" on the buy page or a more expensive $99.95 starter pack that includes soil, pots, etc. for people that have zero knowledge but like the idea - not sure if that's your audience or people already gardening?

Great concept and I think you're on the right track - a "starter pack" would have got my money.
I can so relate to that:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/content/story-behind-wwcom-camara...
Bar Raised for Law-Grad Jobs
I did some work for a monthly publication about Amsterdam for pocket money, we had two September issues in one year, it nearly killed the company.
This one looks a lot different then the one you posted to IRC earlier but its nice to see support for functions! :)

EDIT: Great work though!
I was hesitant at first too, but really wanted to try it. I've been really happy so far and don't mind paying for it.
we're bummed about this. it's probably a fruitless exercise, but does anyone have any insight into how to get unblocked?
Genes don't know about tattoos. Maybe memes do?
When engineers genes collide
No One Is Safe
Might be an entrée into management, where your IT background could give you a leg up.
its a holding action...not sustainable...hopefully, they'll pull out of this heavy-handed tailspin they've been in the past year...but...this behavior is mostly driven by fear of problems with the wide economic divides and its going to be a long time before things get better on that front...so no telling where this all leads.
Chatroulette fits the YC model perfectly. Cheap to run, started by a young guy, builds an audience without marketing. Perhaps YC should build a Moscow office.

And the monetization will come. Twitter is valued 1B+, without making any revenues, I believe. Building the audience first is more important.
My main problem with FringeDC is the lack of a steady meeting space... Let me know if you have any ideas.
More like lisp by another name. Clojure for instance.
Personally, when I start going round in circles that's a hint to start coding. Also, if I start speculating about performance, I like to get some actual measurements, which means writing code.
Thank you Thank you Thank you. I think it's time for another break from Hacker News :)
To run a program from emacs, just start a shell in a buffer:

M-x shell

To run multiple programs in emacs, each in their own shell, just rename the shell buffer to something else and start another shell.

An added benefit to doing this is that you can use emacs' incremental search to search back through the program's output for errors or other interesting output.
Filesystems were never quite ready for it.
I'm not knocking the price and I'm definitely not rendering judgement as to whether or not it's worth paying for.
Genius concept. Wish I could use it, outside of the US.
Thanks for checking it out!

a) I know, I've actually got the illustrator working on some illustrations for that page. That page is 1st on my list for some design love.

b) Ah, interesting. So, you choose whether you want tomatoes or cucumbers, but we pick the right variety of cucumbers for your climate. I'll think about making that clearer.

c) Yea, that's a great idea! Definitely targetting first time gardeners. I don't think I want to get into stocking bags of soil in my living room, I'll keep the starter kit idea on my radar as I look into drop shipping and such. For now I want to try to get traction with the seed mailing, but we'll see how it goes.

Thanks for the feedback. This is exactly why I launched. :)
Not for me. The most recent 24h is never available...
Futility? The whole issue with Flash right now is that they do have market share, because they're the only one in the market. Either something has Flash (desktops, possibly Android), or it doesn't. And the non-Flash platforms are currently missing out on a significant portion of web content. So the idea that browser plugin as a 'futile' way of building market share seems like nonsense to me.
I like the ideas expressed in this article except it lacks specifics, examples etc. For instance, he says "about 4 to 5 months after quitting my job I was already ROI positive in terms of networking, learning and satisfaction." And he leaves it at that. He doesn't expand on how he networked, whether they're from school, social group or whatever.
And it's short. No offence but I don't see how this article got this much upvotes
This is true - when I post articles on HN I usually get between 5 and 30 click throughs, and it also does wonders for the speed of Google indexing.

Having said that, I ensure submitted articles remain relevant and of interest to the community. We're releasing three new articles this week - I'll certainly put one up here, but the other two are less relevant. They might garner traffic to my site, but I don't want noise on HN so why create it myself?
What is puzzling to me is that although there are literally millions of Chinese people living abroad, apparently there's hardly any human-rights activism done by Chinese expats. I'd love to hear of counterexamples.
"Hence where available. And it wasn't available on the mac because Apple hadn't opened up the APIs to do it."

VMWare and Parallels were able to use HW accelleration right? Why can't Adobe?
That house is awesome. I've seen it before, but for some reason I've never saved the link...
Except if you'd read the article you'd know that when running HTML5 things (apps?) that do similar things to Flash, the CPU gets a similar hit as to when Flash does it. This is the point of the article: multimedia web content along the lines of what flash does (excepting video playback) is by its nature something that utilizes significant CPU power. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
If you look at the front page of his blog, you can see that he's blogging about flash quite frequently. For any normal viewers of his blog, they will already know about his Adobe connection and the stances he will take with flash. We're just in the unfortunate position of popping in for this one blog posting.

One solution would be if he had a brief bio in the sidebar beside each blog entry, but otherwise I would not expect him to put a disclaimer on each post he makes.
Yea, there's a link on the plans page to preview your calendar, but it's not coming up because of a bug I overlooked! Fixing....
I always hoped that poor fellow ended up ok after that. My gut tells me that no one ever heard from him again. I don't think any other photograph defines courage as much as that one.

As for the business restrictions, what can you do? I do admire companies like Google that can take a moral stand against Beijing's censorship.
The look and feel of the site is fantastic. Good job there. What's it built in?
Interesting. Reminds me that I should look at Quartz more closely some time...
Here's the non-paginated version: http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/1797847
OpenGL isn't really in the same class as Flash for this context -- we're not talking about Flash just as a method of rendering graphics, but as a content/application framework that can also render graphics. If OpenGL did the other stuff Flash does, we wouldn't be in this situation to begin with.
I find it more than a little disturbing that an entire nation can look on as their government plans to implement censorship on a massive scale with apparently little public outcry.
For those of us who aren't in the US or don't want to sign up, can you add an example or a video of the other side of subscription jump?
In many cases, blocking foreign sites is an opportunity for a Chinese home-grown competitor. Blocking sites that only foreigners use isn't impeding business much.

If you want to target China as a market, you have to have a company there and pay into the system to play. You don't get to run your U.S. or EU web site and have users/revenue grow in China without taking a chance that you will get blocked. Them's are the rules...without regard to censorship...China takes care of China.
yeah, email chris or me -- we've done it before.
Why computers crash but we don't
OK, it's fixed. So, once your calendar is ready you can click "preview your calendar" and see the calendar.

I definitely want to streamline the site for non-signer-uppers. Basically I'm planning on having a page for every city in the US (automatically generated) with a planting calendar that people can check out right away without signing up. I think that will be good for SEO, too.

But that's a few notches down on the todo list.
It's more than relevant whether something hogs a CPU compared to another program that does an equivalent thing. No one complains when Crysis hogs the CPU, because we all expect 3d games to hog the CPU. People complain when Flash hogs the CPU, but seem to forget that HTML5/JS apps that do equivalent things often hog the CPU just as much, if not more. That is the relevance.
It's Ruby on Rails, deployed on Heroku.
Beautiful design, and neat concept. I think you are on to something good. Keep it up! If only I had a yard, I'd be signing up!
People will probably bite back saying that exercise doesn't correlate with weight loss. That is true, but less important than the ultimate result: persistent weight loss. And exercise corresponds damned well with persistent weight loss. Cheers!
how bout drop.io? are they blocked as well?
Absolutely true about posting only relevant articles. I try to keep even my comments to myself unless they actually add to the discussion in some way here on HN. Each post I made recently I felt was actually relevant, I wouldn't post anything I didn't think was interesting.
I've seen plenty
Great concept - good luck!
I've been re-reading 1984 and almost posted a comparison until I read your comment.
There's not much on the other side yet. :) It looks like this:

http://sproutrobot.com/gardens/426/calendar

I am in the process of adding more instruction and more interaction, but right now you just get a planting calendar and, if you pay, seeds.
What gets measured gets done.
Well the patio plan is only $19.99. ;-D
So, does that mean that you are implying that the irreducible complexity of tasks which were non-taxing to 15 year old computers in the early cd-rom "multimedia" era (e.g. various 2d animations and interactivity and video) in some way fundamentally require 100% CPU usage on modern multi-core multi-gigahertz processors?

Frankly I don't buy it.
I love that upon error, you have your name and cell-phone number available for support. (FYI I tried a Canadian postal code thats why)

Refreshing!
And we go round again, sooner or later someone will complain that the tags and folders are too difficult to deal with.
This is a cool idea. I know all of this is probably in your todo list, but here are my gut reactions:

1. I only read as far as the "tells you when to plant" before I entered my zipcode, then spent pageload time wondering how you were going to make money. I was pleasantly surprised by the options on the signup page.

2. The payment page needs something visual to differentiate the choices - either photos or illustrations showing the difference (if it's illustrations, they can just be relative).

3. I felt like the green blocks on the front page needed a very faint border or something - the point where the green meets the blue of the background clashes strangely.

4. The frontpage green blocks (again) look like separate items, similar to the ads at the bottom of the apple.com frontpage, so I read them right to left and missed that they were a sequence. For the same reason, I felt they should be clickable.

5. Clicking on the logo should take you back to the front page.

6. Site speed seems all over the place - sometimes pages load near instantly, other times they take up to five seconds.

7. The sign up and sign in pages do not feel like they're part of rest of the site.

8. I'm not clear whether something like this would be useful for someone like us, who live in a garden-less (concreted outdoors) house in Palo Alto with only a few pots that we grow tomatoes and peas in. I wonder if there's an opportunity in starter kits for people who have absolutely no idea - you ship pots, soil, seeds, we supply the water.

9. I love it and I sent it to all my friends who do have gardens.
All your "Instructions" pages go out to "Feeling lucky" google searches. That makes the site seem very incomplete. I'd consider getting all those setup in a Wiki or similar page on your own site so you can keep everyone here.
Excellent description of the public sector dimension of the current debt crisis.
I've done it a couple of times when launching my previous startup. Just in case anything went wrong. All the founders went to the mattresses. Man, those were fun times.
I can confirm this. I weighed myself every morning since the end of December 09 and I have dropped 53.2 pounds (240 lb to 186.8 lb).

Obviously the weighing in didn't make me the lose the weight, it was the reinforcement and the notice of a gradual change (or gradual increase day-over-day) that kept me going with my new eating habits.
What I'm saying is that building a competing platform (with, for example, 3d acceleration) is futile not for technical reasons, but because you've got the mother of all chicken and egg problems trying to convince both end users and developers to use the platform.

O3D was already superior to Flash for making games, with I'm assuming less than 10 man years invested. Haxe is a superior compiler to Adobe's command line mxmlc, and it's written by one guy. If gaining traction wasn't so hard, I'm certain Flash would be in serious trouble (the Flash IDE being the only thing saving it).
Same here. Every time I've had to crash at the office it has been due to incompetant managers. Nowadays, I just say no and go home.
It's a Good Time to be a Startup That Interests Google
Are you on EC2 or other shared hosting? If you are then try getting a different ip. Lots of shared hosting ip's are heavily abused before you have used them.
I Want to Like the Ipad
In Uganda, AIDS War Is Falling Apart
I'm curious as to how you finish a CS program without learning to be at least a partially decent coder?
If you're interested in pandora without flash, you might want to check out pianobar - http://github.com/PromyLOPh/pianobar - it has pretty much all of the functionality without the overhead.
I'm surprised people have been using dropbox from China. Most SaaS run from the U.S. are too slow and long connections are very likely to get dropped. I suppose the dropbox client must be highly fault tolerant.

As to it being identified as a 'circumvention device', there are many reasons why it could have been blocked...some automated methods and some that require a person. It could be as simple as someone published a file with certain keywords in it and that file link got posted in a few places...then bam...automatic block. We don't know the rules to the system. And there are actually several systems, run by different government departments...with support from many more non-government employees of web sites.
Love the idea! Love the simple and appealing site design. Don't over-polish it!

Wish you nothing but the best. If I can get a raised bed set up in time, I'll be a customer in a few weeks.
Programming news with high s/n ratio (similar to foldl.org)
I just wanted to say good luck, and as soon as start supporting international please let us know, because my wife's parents would love this , but located over seas.
My zip is 10005 and you recommended a small garden, but i would almost expect recommending a patio garden for my zip. How to you decide which of the 3 options to recommend?
Phone Fields &raquo
Mobile Phones Link Internet and Physical World
Yeah, := should be assigns, and == should be equal, and = should be an error.
Congratulations on pushing the button. You've done something incredibly rare and you and your team should be proud. A few suggestions- get on the new Facebook connect (facebook login) right away, and add a few social features (like add a check box that says "also post this on my wall" when you guys email people) so people can easily share what they're doing. That has a huge potential effect. Also, for what it's worth, target women (that sounds awful but most gardeners are women), I think that's your target demo. Anyway, best of luck, I'll share your site with the 2 or 3 garden clubs I indirectly know of, although I'm not sure if you're targeting beginner gardeners or advanced. If you post your email on your profile or here, I can get you some direct feedback from advanced gardeners, FWIW.

kevin (kapauldo)
I agree with this. In my mind the ideal workflow is Zip Code -> Choose your Veggies -> Show your Personalized Calendar in the top half (with more details than just "carrot, June"), show signup options underneath.
The page comes up funny on IE 8
Do you have a facebook page? Would be nice if there was a like button on the homepage. Really like your concept! I stumbleupon.com it too.
So you're probably too young to remember Heathkit, then. That's what separated the men from the boys.
Really love it! My wife and I have started a couple of raised beds, and this is just a fantastic idea!
The small garden is a balance between feasibility and ambition for the novice gardener.

In other words, I'm just emphasizing the plan that makes me money. :)
Great job! Fantastic design! I'd love to peek at the back-end code. I know my fiance would go crazy for this too. The only thing I hope for is that you don't go out of business and I lose my seeds :(
Agreed with the facebook integration. I generally dislike Facebook but this is a great way to get more users for this type of service.
There is a big difference between users clicking and users reading. Not everything that causes clickthroughs is a net win.
How to value something without revenue?
Sure, I'll take all the feedback I can get! They can reach me at erik@sproutrobot.com.

And thanks for the tips! I agree Facebook integration would be great for spreading the word. It's a good reminder for my todo list.