skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But that is if you sign? I was thinking they would pay me the money as a test, and then I would decide if I would like to work for them or not :-)
Same here. For me the fonts are even completly unique (the "one in x browsers have this value" column is >840'000). Yet I'm using a fairly standard install (I can't remember installing any fonts). Maybe some programs install a font automatically, making you uniquely identifiable quite easily.

But I still wonder how fast the birthday paradox/problem would hit such an identification system. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem)
I would love a streaming video.
It depends on how what your goals are and how much time you put into it.

In November, I was feeling annoyed that there was no easy way to see exactly what charge my phone's battery was at (at least none that were acceptable to me). I'd been curious about Android development, so I decided to "scratch my own itch". I spent 4 or 5 hours building a little app that would display my exact percentage in the tray at the top. Most of the time was spent tweaking the icon -- I'm not a graphic designer, but I eventually came up with something that looked good enough.

I decided it would be worth the $25 fee to get a developer account and share it with the world. Programming is just a little hobby of mine, so while I've been using and loving open-source software for over a decade, I've contributed very little back to the community. So I figured if one or two people a day downloaded this little utility, I could feel good about myself. I put it online and went to bed. Eight hours later, over 700 people had downloaded it.

Over the next couple of weeks, I got a lot of feature requests that I personally had no use for, and I'm a busy student, so I didn't think I had much time or energy to add a bunch of features I didn't need myself. But then my friend suggested I make a paid version of the app with the extra features. I thought that was a neat idea -- I figured that if I averaged one purchase a day, I could make $20 a month (Google takes 30%), which to me is a lot of money at this point in my life.

It didn't take long before I was averaging 15 downloads a day. It stayed there for a while, until about month and a half ago, with no explanation I'm aware of, it jumped to averaging 50/day.

I carefully and courteously respond to an average of 2-3 emails a day, and I release updates when I can find the time. But that's still not very much time put into this, and I'm making almost as much money as when I used to work full time. (I don't have a college degree and worked in retail.) The free version averages 1000 downloads a day.
To whom?! To all the same people who purchased their own email servers for personal use? That should be about zero people total.
Some people have the notion that when you have a good idea, all you need is some money and time in order to be successful. It's not like that. You can have all the money in the world (look at big corps like Microsoft), and you can have great ideas, but unless you can execute, the money and ideas don't matter.
Banksimple also won't sell subprime mortgages
Recommendation is really hard. It's not a matter of execution, it's a matter of research -- and that's a risky proposition, because the research may not pan out. I know because I tried it (recommending news, but the problem is similar).

I had two or three ideas for recommendation algorithms. My cofounder had quite a few more than that. Over the course of a year with very little income, we iterated intensively on recommendation engines -- we tried four or five completely different ideas, and refined each one until we got stuck. We had a small, but active, community of people who would try any of our recommendation engines and give us feedback. And the feedback was always "this isn't good enough."

I don't know how to solve the problem. The Netflix Challenge results were not especially algorithmically impressive; most of the benefits seemed to come from iterative tuning to the dataset. I admit that I haven't followed much recent research. I think we need an algorithmic breakthrough (on the order of PageRank) before recommendation startups will succeed.
He wants something to find the perfect product for him, even if he doesn't know there's a need for it.

I guess that's a nice desire for someone with lots of disposable income. I really don't want anyone offering me anything to buy right now, because I don't have the money to spend on a 1800's table instead of what I'm currently using.

When I do have money, then I have my list of priorities about where to spend it. Fix the roof leak, change my car tires, etc...

That's why it's called "buying mode". Offer me a 1700 table today and I will tell you to get real, and get out. Offer me when I actually have the money and desire to buy, and you've made a sale.
It was an example of one situation that is described as terrorism, not intended to define the entire class.

That said, I don't think my comments necessarily apply to the IRA, but Timothy McVeigh probably fits the bill.
That's more or less it, yeah. But I've done some simplification for the blog post. A quick web browser control will get you started but obviously there's more stuff to fix...

I'm hoping to create a unified method for everybody stuck on IE6. But I need more data. :-)
Down voted, huh? I guess I need to add one of those little eye-winkie things ;) for the sarcastically impaired. :D
I'm not sure if what you're looking for exists--it depends on what angle you're looking to approach it from, for one thing. TAOCP is a classic for certain kinds of rigorous, formal reasoning about algorithms, but it can be a bit intimidating. One of Knuth's famous quotes is "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it", if that gives you some idea of his style...

On the other hand, if you want to reconstruct computer science via symbolic logic and very abstract math, variations on Church's lambda calculus (from which most functional programming languages derive) correspond closely to intuitionistic logic/the internal logic of some cartesian closed category. That stuff is liable to give even some mathematicians a headache, though, and it's easy to lose sight of more practical corners of CS that way.
Oh yeah, let's blame the poor people,
they make bad decision, but brilliant minds on the Wall street are just hurt victims.
The Register's exclusive interview with Apache Hadoop creator Doug Cutting
I see your point. And you are right.

I suppose in a sense the problem is fb try to leave everything open by default. And, so, that also is something we need to argue against.
Great stuff! Aren't there licensing issues involved with making arbitrary fonts available over the web though?

I'd talked to a few font foundries in the past, and very few would let me use their fonts with a @font-face (or, in their eyes, distribute their fonts indiscriminately).
You are absolutely right in forcefully requesting the refund. They're jerks for making you ask twice.

Absolutely do not threaten them in anyway. Do out them in public if they don't make it right.
I don't know you, but I've been happy with the Kinesis Contoured keyboard. I'm comfortable making this recommendation based on the fact that we're both on Hacker News (and therefore probably have some other things in common). If I knew your HN voting history I might be able to do a better job.

Taking advantage of social ties and external sources of information is definitely something that automated recommenders should be able to do. Few of them actually do it, however. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, recommendation algorithms just aren't very good. Once they get good (and fast), all sorts of external information will instantly become useful. Recommenders will be able to find significant correlations between the browser you're using and your preference.
>Imagine for a second if Apple rolled out the ability to pay for anything on the web (that made it past a review process-- ha!) with your iTunes Store account?

I also believe this will happen quite soon. Developers will just digitally sign the web site resources and that will be enough to satisfy the review process, be secure enough and, most importantly, allow iTunes payment.
Both of you are agreeing with each other.
We're really in agreement. I actually wrote about this before, back when that Kanye thing hit HN: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/why-bother-creating

It's rough being out there, but you're absolutely right. You have to grow a thick skin. But that doesn't mean that everyone is able to do so.

Oh, and you were going to write a µkernel? That's awesome, I help out two of my friends with an exokernel. It's been two years of hard work, and like you conjectured, we've had a lot of naysayers. But it's coming along really nicely, I'd say...
I'm of the school that your program should respect the conventions, style, and guidelines of the platform it is running on. Anything else is disrespectful of the user's buying decisions.
Discreet shipping and quality aren't very different. The quality service (phone, live chat, and e-mail) also play a part in our difference. Or so I like to think...

I tried free shipping for a while, maybe two months, and found absolutely no increase in sales or average ticket. This was after tring a flat rate, $5 for all orders, 1 item or 40. No real change there. When I said "Screw it!" and switched to a calculated Priority Mail, I saw a 200% increase in average order - and I've stuck with that.

Maybe I should give free shipping another try, I can do some A/B testing with free shipping and see how it goes for conversion rates.

The biggest problem is attracting new eyes. Google ads are just far too expensive and not netting any real results (1-3% conversions).
I suspect that not charging overdraft fees will result in adverse selection-people that have no money and therefore can't be used to build a loanable savings asset.

I really hope this works, but due to switching costs, BankSimple will have a very uphill road to climb if they aren't planning to pay very high interest rates or otherwise attract people with some savings.
How about all the people who pay for Wordpress and MovableType?
Rotating text by generating custom font files with pre-rotated characters and putting each character in a separate absolutely positioned div element is more "practical" than CSS transforms? I find that difficult to believe.
Haven't tried this keyboard yet, but it looks promising:

http://smartfishtechnologies.com/products-keyboard.php
To me, that's where the pyramid scheme sounding stuff starts. It has always seemed like the ones getting rich are the ones telling others how to get rich. Where is the actual value being created?
You can already drop in a nested comments system with Pinax super easy. But if you want to write your own, use {% include %} tag to render them recursively using multiple templates. This also allows you to implement AJAX loading\closing of subcomments much easier than if you came up with some macro to display\load every single comment in one template
SocketObjC: A Networkable Messaging Library
Unclear Metro Maps
"The illness effects memory"
Another comic comes to mind:
http://xkcd.com/326/
Understandable concern. For now let's just say that we have a blog post in the queue (part 3/3 of the HTML5 series) that describes exactly how (and to which degree) we store and (re-)distribute fonts.
Making A Living (Comfortably) On The App Store (aka The Numbers Post #2)
Anyone else dislike the color #ff0f93 more than #ff0e95?
Same here. It had me thinking, "Are there more than 5 people in the world with the wisdom and self-assurance to actually pull this off?"
Yes, a very nice read.
:) I am not rich enough to file a lawsuit. At least, I do not know how that works.
LIVE Today at 7:15 PM EDT: World Chess Champions Karpov, Kasparov & Carlsen
It's always fascinating to hear Rasmus talk about PHP and hear how radically different his view of the platform is when compared to common usage patterns "on the ground".
Google and Doubleclick just give you a cookie, though. They don't need to be nefarious.
Who knows how to make love stay?

“When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on--series polygamy--until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.” -- Tom Robbins, "Still Life With Woodpecker"
Eh. Milan Kundera, going on to "And as she voided her bowels, Tereza was overcome by a feeling of infinite grief and loneliness. Nothing could be more miserable than her naked body perched on the enlarged end of a sewer pipe.”

Although today Google gives Philip K. Dick running a close 4th.

I take it you haven't seen a German toilet. A small kink in the porcelain forms a delicate watery bowl holding your offering, so that you can examine it before committing it to the underworld.

That probably explains a lot.
I totally agree. Perhaps, it is a boon in disguise.
- Don't give away free gift cards -- make your audience earn it by doing something for you (e.g. have 10 of their buddies friend you on Facebook, etc.)

- Try to have an ongoing conversation with your customers using your distribution list. I don't mean just advertising sale items in your email; something like "see how our customers are using this" or interesting info/stats they can read without complaining about spam. Of course, you need to make sure your emails go through via abiding by all requirements of an ethical sender.

- Did you try affiliate sales? If your customers are mostly male, affiliate sales from male oriented sites might be significant.

- Did you try offline advertising to get to a female audience? Magazine ads in Cosmo, etc.?
I think software engineering is probably an area where academia's at the most disadvantage in studying it, because it's so applied and context-specific. A truly successful software-engineering researcher would have to be at least part anthropologist/sociologist, and spend a lot of time on field work. Sort of similar to academic study of the business/management field.

Areas where you can decouple at least some parts of the theory, and apply them later, have more luck, I think. For example, Knuth does perfectly fine inventing algorithms in academia, because it's a pretty academia-friendly sort of pursuit, and many of them later do make it into the real world, so it's not totally ivory-tower.
Thanks. I usually don't. Just felt it's unfair post for these Diaspora guys.
These are the minimums you need to have for any company these days... Not a significant differentiator for you, unless everyone else sucks in your industry...
One reason that Dole didn't come close to getting elected in 1996 is the strain of libertarianism in part of the Republicans. Among libertarians, Dole was often referred to as the "Senator from ADM".
Hosting on ones home PC is not an option. First, it needs it to be turned on 24/7, and limited upload speed of ADSL is a waste of bandwidth and would be impractical. Also you can look at logs and spy on what is being uploaded, unless there is an encrypted copy of all your files that are sharing.

Hosting on google or similar, would defeat the point of a decentralisation. As more people join it, setup their nodes and share files, there may be redudant copies of data. It is just faster and cheaper to host it on a single big server.

Normal users want to communicate, they do not care about installing software or anything more complicated than a simple web registration form.

A feature I would like is to be able to export a copy of all the data I can see and use it offline e.g for backup. Currently Facebook does not have this option.
It was not playing, but a genuine opinion, but easier to judge as troll. I believe it's not more attention but a real blow.
For me, the harder problem is finding a partner who will not detract from my substantial existing fulfillment.
I think it can hurt them.

You see I thought 10k was a good idea - a little cash to keep them going over the summer while they build something.

I mean, I don't think they have entirely the right solution - but it's interesting enough that I would happily have funded them 10k to see what comes of it.

Several hundred thousand is another matter - that can become a distraction. Look at other startups that recieve disproportionate funding and lots of hype then peter out.
Do people consider 415 (San Francisco proper) part of Silicon Valley?

I always thought he Valley referred to the cities in the actual valley south of SF. No?
> I'm not even going to write about how this applies to hackers and why it could be a good lesson.

...How does it apply to hackers?

Either I'm extremely dense, or everyone is projecting their own opinion on your vague comment.
Onion: New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users' Ears
How Much Tech Companies Spend On Lobbying
I wish I would have made them earn the gift card...

We do have an affiliate program but I'm not very familiar with operating one. It's been a pretty solid flop... maybe one sale in the past 3 months through it... I've made a lot of effort to make it work, weekly e-mails and updates, new banners and link suggestions every week. We have one of the highest commission rates around, up to 26%, but it's just not very successful.

As for advertising in Cosmo, thats sadly beyond our budget. We've been mentioned in some pretty major media though, but had pretty much no financial return from it. A mention on Ellen, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Health, Cosmo, Latina, ABC news, and quite a few others but the return on the effort to get mentioned there is so intense and the return so minimal I've all but stopped the PR train. Further, most media don't allow us to advertise with them.
Your being paid for your craft, so someone (shareholders) finds your creation "meaningful".
Well. We're talking about making this work in quite a number of different browsers, including IE6. So yes, it is.
Well I rate your rating -1
even "git gc" will not do it for a while. the old history will still be referenced from the reflog for some time (I think default is 30 days)
“Go trekking in Nepal. Build a yurt in the back meadow. Turn the garage studio into a man-cave. Get that drum set you’ve always wanted. ..."

Is there anyone else who finds this a very condescending and nasty thing to say? This ought to sound to her husband like fighting words.
Gah! I wish I could have the mental capacity to learn all of this stuff at once. I'm busy with Python, C, tons of code that I want to explore, plus I'm interested in D (waiting anxiously for the DPL book). And then there's all that talk about Haskell and Clojure which really sparks my interest. I fear if I try to read too much, my head will explode (or worse, I'll simply forget what I've learnt).
I am soo surprised by this invention not hitting the market years ago. It surprises me to the fact that we still used just basic sticks for the blind. We are trying to fix their biological conditions, but never have we tried to just make it easier for them to get around while they wait for the biological part...
If it shifts air as fast as you shift news, how will I know when it's on and when it's off?
I rather enjoyed Windows 3.11
I just figured IE6-only applications are a myth, like Bigfoot, aliens or courteous government employees. I look forward to a final count or list (if possible)
Most do suck. Most of our competitors have dismal websites filled with naked women and men. They have a no-returns policy, offer no support at all, and many (maybe 80% of those we've evaluated) don't even publish an address or phone number on their website.

That's why I got into the industry, I felt I could offer something different, something better. Now I'm feeling like people want the craptastic websites and piss-poor support.

*these statements are pretty much anecdotal.
Thanks. I went with 650.
I believe they suggest you write custom logic as a template tag, rather than in the view. However, I do agree that the naming conventions are unfortunate, to say the least.

In my experience not doing this separation encourages people solving controller-level problems on the view level, just because they can. Of course, it's just a "quick fix, I'll fix that properly later" everytime that happens. This philosophy is what drew me to Django in the first place, I really dislike HTML fragments in code, and having done enough rewriting of code when it's time to redesign the web site makes this a big feature for me.

Of course, being Django, it's loosely coupled and you can easily switch out the template language to something else.
That's interesting.. because while I agree, I rarely look inside of my SD card. I've rooted too, so use it frequently for that purpose (flashing a rom). I agree more with the previous commenter though, because while Android does have their own UI guidelines, no one seems to follow them. There are a ton of really ugly and poorly designed (not just in a pixel sense, but workflow sense) Android apps out there =(
What would make you buy from me instead of from a trusted/bigger brand?
From 6 and 7 months ago: http://searchyc.com/dyson+blade

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=878046

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=878374

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=878605

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=878650

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=879800

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=879806

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=879820
The included simple_tag and filter decorators should be used for simple tags and filters. More sophisticated tags can specify a separate renderer class, which must be what you mean by "boilerplate."

from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
from django.template import Library

register = Library()

@register.simple_tag
def menu_item(req, viewname, label):
url = reverse(viewname)
cls = ''
if url == req.path:
cls += 'active'
return '<li class="%s"><a href="%s">%s</a></li>' % (cls, url, label)

Using the tag:

{% menu_item request 'accounts.views.profile' 'Your Account' %}

The only part of that I don't like is passing the request, but I'm willing to bet there's a simpler way to access the request object from the function.

A simple filter:

@register.filter
def subtract(x, y):
"""Subtracts the arg from the value"""
return int(x) - int(y)

And maybe in a for loop for overlapping elements:

<li style="z-index: {{ 100|subtract:forloop.counter }}">

Yes, I use two spaces in my Python code too.
CarWoo Team Just Boarded An RV To Tour Zappos HQ
This is not a complete list of the investors as I understand it... I heard from someone else that they were also an investor and they are not listed in this list of names.
This is _extremely_ unlikely. Not only is it far more technically complex than you let on, it goes completely against the ecosystem Apple is building.
latest from www.twitter.com/tpb http://newteevee.com/2010/05/17/the-pirate-bay-forced-offlin...

There are many torrent spiders/indexers that host torrents from many websites. e.g. http://www.torrentz.com/ and nearly all torrents use DHT and multiple trackers. Taking 1 site down temporarily doesn't affect anything.
I fear if I try to read too much, my head will explode

That's how you know you're learning - your brain rebuilds itself around new concepts. If you push it hard enough you will start hearing a hum in your ears after few hours of continuous learning.
Wow, ask them to pay you what you're owed and what they promised, absolutely and finally. If they still beat around the bush, remind them about the reputation of their company and how you feel that the public disclosure of the way they treated you would not benefit their recruitment.