skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We scaled a rate that took us all by surprise. Obviously, some things are less important than others and we had to prioritize. We're getting around to updating the peripheral pages soon.
That's valid ... sites like http://www.kongregate.com and http://www.armorgames.com have some pretty amazing pieces of work on it.

Disregarding the many legitimate but ultimately fixable gripes against it Flash is a great and above all versatile platform to develop on whether it's animation, rich media or applications. It's a massively streamlined path from idea to prototype to finished product - we can prototype games in day(s depending on the scope) and that can include animations, audio, cut scenes and everything else.
absolutely. i've had "build a better credit bureau" on my ideas list for a couple years now. it's a multi-billion dollar industry that could be waaaay more consumer-friendly.
Next up: a direct api for interfacing with BigTable?
I was thinking the exact same thing. I got through most of the first paragraph, then quickly scrolled down through the article looking for an obvious summary. No luck. I just went back and clicked the link to the Unicorn readme ( http://unicorn.bogomips.org/ ) and that had a decent summary at the top. Still, it would have been much better for this summary to have been in the article also. Perhaps they were expecting anyone who read the article to have already known what Unicorn was.
He makes good points about video codecs, but it's nonsensical to imply that a 486 could handle anything like modern Flash usage.
Kreci.net
Freckle earns nearly $10,000/mo in revenue: http://letsfreckle.com/

Our blog is kinda sparse now but I'm fairly open on HN. :) And I'll be writing more about business specifically at http://unicornfree.com/.

EDIT: Totally bootstrapped, launched Dec 2008. There are 4 of us, but I'm the owner. We have a profit-sharing agreement with our partners.
Thanks! I'll check them out :)

We actually offload right to Akamai so the s3 integration isn't a big deal for us, but anything to drop the price of bandwidth or encoding is a win these days :(

Tho I must say the encoding guys are awesome so it will take a damn good product to make me leave them.
"In gmail, google reading my email tells them to sell me product x and we think that's the end of it."

I don't want to put on a tin-foil beret, but how much revenue do they actually make from ad-words on the side of GMail? I can't imagine it's much, but then I'm probably biased in that I don't even notice they're there.

The pragmatic part of me realizes GMail is a service that improves 'lock-in' to the 'Google Ecosystem'... the paranoid part of me thinks about how valuable a "search everyone's inbox" rather than a "search my inbox" feature would be.
That is very true. Google's interests are very simple to fathom: They want more people on the internet. Anything that helps (in this case making it easier to develop internet oriented products) towards that is a worthy product to develop.
Do they really pursue this as a startup?

An extension for a browser with 2% market share?
Top 7 Wordpress 404 Plugins
I consider that a bug. From what I've heard, Android makes handling app switching straightforward to handle from the programmer's perspective.
Ask HN: Diaspora Seeds, Proliferation and Cost
There appear to be two main options for Diaspora: hosting your own seed or renting a server.
Obviously not everyone will be able to host their own seed, for a variety of reasons. That means to truly penetrate the "social sphere" enough to reach a tipping point of mass adoption many people with have rent a server. Like with any other use of a server, there are operating costs that must be taken into account.

My question(s) is(are): Among those who choose to rent a seed (or lack the resources to host their own) will there be a willingness to pay for the use of this seed?

If there is a flat rental cost, will that ultimately deter so many people that a tipping point can't be reached?

Is there a privacy-centric mode of generating income that will effectively have these seeds pay for themselves?

There seems to be a fine balancing act between whether the added privacy and benefits of decentralization will outweigh the costs of renting a seed to the point of which a mass-adoption can still take place. But where is that middle ground?

What are your thoughts?
That's a valid point, facebook-defender.
I think AppEngine and storage are developer bait. What's notable in the TechCrunch article is bit about authentication via GoogleID. Let's say Google entices 100K developers to provide applications of some sort which rely on a Google ID for auth. A huge segment of internet users would acquire a Google ID _AND_ recognize that they have one. So, Google becomes a de facto record of the world's identity (much like Facebook?). What sorts of services could be built on top of this? How much is that worth?
The Nature of Procrastination (scholarly article, 2007)
The San Francisco graffiti scene + SF graffiti gallery
In the first 2 examples the result of the && operator isn't used.
"Since the industry doesn't use Gimp, those students would be putting themselves out of the market."

Your making a chicken and egg argument. The reason the industry doesn't use Gimp is because no one in the industry uses Gimp. If a whole graduating class of students skipped Photoshop and used Gimp for price reasons then the picture could and likely would change.
still figuring that out. I think we're lighter and easier to post with. We also don't offer any blogging tools other than pasting links. We think we can do comments and content discovery better.
Ever heard of busybox? RTLinux?
But that's not the code I was criticizing. In fact, it's precisely because that's the idiom I associate with boolean operators in JavaScript that the code snippet I posted struck me as unintuitive.

As to "pushing some strange variant": Guilty as charged. Have you tried CoffeeScript? It's fantastic. The code you gave above would be written as

(x) ->
x ||= someDefaultValue
This is what I had thought about. If you don't care that the API is published/sorta-standard, it's not a big deal to deploy a lightweight pass-thru app to AppEngine.

The pricing model is what will be most interesting about the announcement.
I wish every tech company would embrace your separation idea. The company I work for takes the open plan to an extreme: every floor is completely open, no one is separated from anyone else. For a span of about 4 months, I worked right next to HR recruiters, who are on the phone ALL DAY LONG. It was pure hell.
The tricky part is staying above the cost. I know it's relatively low, but I have no idea how much a loaf of bread costs Panera from wheat-to-customer.

I wish more food stores operated on a minimum charge as opposed to pay nothing or whatever you want. I suppose that loses the "give a lot" mindset.
Davis -- the human identity-theft honeypot.

We need more of him.
I doubt JIT will do anything to speed it up, since it's likely that the browser component is 100% native code.
Assisted Serendipity - Your Foursquare powered wingman
Funny how anarchist dreams never turn out quite as well as envisioned. I'm sure the free market will take care of things if given enough time.
There's something that I don't understand about these identity theft cases. If I didn't really sign any document, why should I be held responsible just because someone else used something public (non-private) about me?

P.S. To be more clear: the company giving the loan should prove that I signed the documents, not I that I didn't sign them. The presumption of innocence if you will.
I just get annoyed whenever I'm asked for my social security number for something stupid. They always ask me for it at blood drives, and if I ask why they need it, they get really mad and have never given me a decent answer. If I refuse they assign me a different tracking number but treat me like dirt the whole time.
Here's my legal threat to The Pirate Bay: http://i.imgur.com/0359H.png

(Anyway, TPB has nothing to do with the content. They are a search engine)
> there have been clashes between Euro and Spanish fishing vessels.

Spanish fishing vessels are not Euro fishing vessels then ?
ScaleWell is having a party...Again
It is tiresome now in itself. It is a far more interesting topic to look at from a different point of view though. It is amazing how people will ally themselves zealously when really the sides they are picking are corporate entities vying for future profit margins in one way or another.

It's kind of a holy war of pure capitalism in a way.
As someone who has developed both for Flash and Cocoa: Yes, Flash (and its IDE) is better suited for game development. (2D, sprite-based games, that is. Not 3D.) That said, Flash is horrible for the kinds of programs you would typically use Cocoa for (ones with UI controls, data, etc). Flash's UI controls look and act glitchy. Not a good experience, for developers or users. Flex die-hards may feel otherwise, but I try to stay far away from Flex and any other Flash-based UI-centric apps.

Flash vs XCode is apples-to-oranges. They target different use cases.
ops, that comment belongs http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358144
> Do you have an alternate explanation as to why smart product designers would make privacy controls complex/powerful rather than simple/less-customizable? Do you really think they are TRYING to confuse people?

Sure. I think it's in Facebook's best interest to make their users' data as public as possible.

It would run counter to FB's interests if they had privacy settings that were as simple as:

- "Hide all my stuff"

- "Show my stuff to friends only"

- "Show my stuff to friends of friends"

- "Show my stuff to the whole wide world"

I've yet to hear a good explanation as to why the default FB privacy option has become more and more open, while they added more granular privacy controls. Which likely means there isn't one that benefits users as much as it does Facebook.

> Do you really think they are TRYING to confuse people?

No. But I do think that responsible product design is about making difficult decisions for the benefit of one's users. And Facebook is shirking that responsibility by putting its own needs ahead of its users... while putting the onus on users to restore their privacy settings to what they were when they signed up by using confusing tools.
Is Firefox Headed Towards A Massive Decline? Its Co-Founder Thinks So
I agree, and DRM isn't always a bad thing. The GPL qualifies as rights management in my opinion.

As a Steam user I admit that convenience and reduced price can be make the negatives of DRM negligible.

This doesn't change the fact that DRM has little effect on piracy.(currently, at least)
I guess I'm a successful bootstrapper by your definition. Revenues vary, but tens of multiples of your definition at this point (am I the only one that still feels weird about divulging this info in public?). I'm a single-founder.

The startup is http://www.ratemystudentrental.com, which licenses private-label subscriptions to universities. I also have a consultancy that builds web-based software, and that consultancy has a new SAAS app (http://www.leadnuke.com, which actually started as a solution for a problem my startup was experiencing).

I haven't blogged a ton about the internals of business specifically, because I find it somewhat dry (which means I rarely motivate myself to write about it). I do blog about life and the emotional roller-coaster that I've experienced in being an entrepreneur, though.

Blog about technical stuff (and sometimes entrepreneurship): http://www.alfajango.com/blog

Blog about entrepreneurship, life, and whatever else: http://jangosteve.com
At least it's not legally required. Every company needs to have an alternative from my understanding. Not sure where this is stated, but at least every company, aside from financial institutions, has allowed me to not use an SSN. It just usually takes a conversation with a couple supervisors and a callback.
The cynic in me says that they don't mention it because that won't generate as much funding for autism research.
Heh.

There was such a product provided by Debix (http://debix.com). It relied upon a law called the Fair Credit Reporting Act which allowed consumers to place a fraud alert on their credit file, which the creditor was supposed to call. Debix placed the fraud alert on behalf of consumers, but directed the creditor to call Debix which delivered the credit request using exactly such an authentication mechanism that you describe. This was 2003.

Lifelock used the same mechanism (though without the phone authentication, IIRC). Experian sued Lifelock saying that the FCRA did not allow for companies to set fraud alerts on behalf of consumers, only consumers were allowed to set them. In May of last year, a judge agreed with Experian, and Lifelock later settled and stopped using fraud alerts. http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=20078

Unfortunately, this ruling also meant that Debix could no longer set fraud alerts, so they had to cancel this product.

The truth is such a product creates friction in the instant credit market, which is a huge source of income for credit bureaus. So they have very little incentive to slow that process down and would rather just catch any exceptions using monitoring.

The credit bureaus are an industry crying out for disruption. These guys are dinosaurs and are living it large because there is no real alternative. Unfortunately, they also seem to have plenty of political capital to prevent any real legislative reform in this area.

Disclosure: I used to work for Debix and have ownership in the company.
Thanks for the link...So very inspiring.
Gmail's New API: Email as Enterprise Platform
http://status.linode.com/ had updates all throughout the issue.
How to cheat on any test | Diigo
If there actually is a link to economic status that's actually very important to know.

Lots of diseases are linked to economic status, but I've never heard of autism being one of them.
Instead of posting these sorts of content-free posts, try http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
How many kids with that SSN will pop up in a decade or so?
> It’s not fair to [AT&T] because they’re losing a pretty substantial amount of money.

AT&T isn't even bothering to check photo ID. Being defrauded is a risk they have eagerly assumed. Presumably they make more money this way, despite fraud.
I would argue that politics have actually gotten cleaner (in the US). Violence used to be commonplace in political races, and now are virtually unheard of.
Does anyone (trustworthy) offer a decent centralized interface for managing these credit freezes? I'd happily pay a little extra for such a service.
No emergency exit from the north (bottom) side? That seems odd.
I have this on my account, and you don't need to go online to "thaw" it. The bureau calls you and asks "did you just apply for an auto loan at a Hyundai dealership in Florida?" and you reply "no, no I didn't", they say "okay, have a nice day", and that's that.

At least that's what happened when somebody tried to use my identity to buy a Hyundai in Florida.
The Visual Guide to Cognitive Biases
Sexy female robot voice. Like in the movies. No, I am not joking.
I suspect that is the vast majority of justin.tv's audience.
That is a problematic definition as well. First, intended by whom? Is alcohol a drug if I drink it to get hammered, and not a drug if I drink it because I'm thirsty? Or is it the intention of the producer that matters, in which case how can any naturally occurring substance be a drug?

Looking past that, wouldn't hair gel or plaster used to make a cast for a broken bone qualify as a drug under that definition?

Maybe the word actually does have less meaning than you suggest. I would suggest the following definition: any substance included on Schedules I through V of the Controlled Substances Act.
"Your making a chicken and egg argument. The reason the industry doesn't use Gimp is because no one in the industry uses Gimp. If a whole graduating class of students skipped Photoshop and used Gimp for price reasons then the picture could and likely would change."

no. I'm saying since the industry doesn't use gimp, it's not in the best interest for the students to use it either.

How Photoshop actually became the industry standard is another topic.

If a whole graduating class used Gimp, the whole graduating class would be disappointed when they went to find a job and couldn't find one due to lack of experience.

Students don't set the industry standard. They follow it.
The Bat Sex Story
Viking battles to keep manufacturing in U.S.
We meet those requirements here at GitHub: github.com. Along with the official blog some of us also talk about the business on our own personal blogs: http://tom.preston-werner.com and http://ozmm.org.
I've come to the opinion that "if you have to say so, you aren't." If the tofu were really yummy and tasty, you wouldn't have to say so on the package. (I like tofu, btw)
Amazon Creates Translation Publishing Imprint: AmazonCrossing
You assume the deep fish wont be caught when all the convenient stocks have run out?

Anything that isn't edible will simply be fed to salmon in fish farms - or flavored until it is edible.

Plus any fish that live that deep are going to be slow metabolism, long living, long reproductive cycle species - so we will be able to wipe them out very quickly.
Knife-wielding robots could invade the kitchen
Um, Carbonmade is profitable enough to have an NYC office and hire employees. Seems successful to me.
A lot of identity theft occurs when people just make up an SSN and use it to gain employment or credit. If they are lucky, the credit file doesn't exist yet and no one is the wiser.

The "theft" part occurs when someone is assigned that SSN starts using it and finds out that they have $300,000 in bad loans on their credit file. This is usually a kid who is applying for student loans or their first car loan. Then they must spend time/money cleaning up their credit file.

http://news.debix.com/index.php/2008/11/teenager-tarnished-b...

Discolsure: I'm a former employee and current investor in Debix.
The way there economy is going (or not going) they won't be for long
Skype API reference
Three years without oil
> Down for Maintenance

I guess this proves that unicorns don't really exist.
Congrats Trevor!
Ron Shaich, Panera's chairman says he's “trying to find out what human nature is all about”: http://stlouis.bizjournals.com/stlouis/stories/2010/05/17/da...

Not sure if this is a reference to how employees and customers will behave in the context of the new store or to whether or not the store will manage to stay afloat at all.
One of the biggest users of social security numbers for identification is the US military. When my dad was in the army, my mom and I both had his SSN memorized because we had to use it so often on paperwork.
Would you recommend Debix's OnCall service? How does it work?
Flash iPhone app developer gets iPhone Developer fees refund
> It's only when the 20th century rolled around, and meat became cheap/available everywhere, that people started eating meat once a day, leading to a spread of all kinds of diseases, heart attacks, cholesterol, cancer, etc.

It's not that simple. The Inuit are an obvious counterexample. In fact, if you look at many hunter gatherer societies (Ache, Yanomamo, Waorani, !Kung, etc), almost all eat some form of meat (I'm including arthropods as meat) almost every day.

Cancer, heart disease and other afflictions that appear later in life are probably more common in the 20th century largely because life expectancy is so much longer than it used to be, not because of regular meat eating.
We (productwiki.com) are 100% bootstrapped - no debt financing, no government grants. Though this year we finally started doing tax credits, so that's not a bad influx of free money. We aren't transparent about the numbers but I can tell you that we have 5 full-time employees (including the founders) making decent to good wages, and a few regular contractors. That should give you a ballpark.
I was thinking about games and (potentially design-heavy) simple apps (quizzes, educational apps &c.) mostly.

Regarding the "feel" of Flash's standard UI controls: I agree (and apparently, so does Adobe, as they continue to ship a completely new framework with just about every major release).
Caffeine is good for your brain
The best resource that I know of is addressdoctor.com.

See their demo here:
http://www.addressdoctor.com/lookup/default.aspx?lang=en

Via a web service, they enable you to produce the right address form fields on a country-by-country basis. I've met with their CEO in person and kicked the tires and would highly recommend them.
That was my first thought as well, but it looks like this is (possibly) a change to actually simplify things and improve the defaults, rather than make it even more open.
I also think it's unlikely that the intern actually weighed his argument and decided against it, and would have been in a position to make it happen had his arguments convinced him. Most likely he was told which features would not be implemented and is spewing that out to customers.
Seems like http://www.lifelock.com is getting a little slow.

Everyone is seeing if his ss# is still there?
I think diaspora is missing the boat on that one.

Nobody said they couldn't show some ads to make it pay for itself. All that is needed is a change in transparency and some kind of safeguard against abuse.

Facebook is doing pretty good, except for those two points. Diaspora wants to fix things that don't need fixing and will spend a lot of their work on it as well as limiting their chances of success by adding an immediate barrier to entry, either in the form of a 'seedbox' (which, for instance where I live would be against the t.o.s. of most providers) or by having to pay a relatively large amount of money per month.
I've found Flex, particularly MXML+Binding, to be one of the nicest GUI frameworks I've developed with.

However, I'm surprised at how little Apple has emphasized Flash's fatal flaw for mobile: memory use. CPU and Battery are debatable issues, but Flash has serious memory management issues. On a device like the iPhone or iPad, with a max of 256mb of RAM, no swapping, and a browser that has trouble keeping a few "tabs" in memory, adding Flash to the mix seems like a recipe for disaster.

It'll be interesting to see how Android handles this. Hopefully it'll spawn some much-needed improvements to the Flash VM.
Why can't everyone host their own seed? If it's a binary I have to install and download and message propagation is done in a p2p way?
Facebook Zero, a free, low-bandwidth mobile site for emerging markets
AMD Fusion sampling soon, arriving in 2011
Apparently AT&T and Verizon wanted Todd Davis's business ;-)
Read the fine print. This covers Lifelocks costs in trying to restore your credit, not any loses you sustain due to having your identity stolen.

http://www.lifelock.com/our-guarantee

Money quote: "Under the Terms and Conditions, NO money passes directly to our LifeLock members."

http://www.lifelock.com/about-us/about-lifelock/terms-and-co...

"LifeLock will retain and pay for those third party professional services that are reasonably necessary in LifeLock's judgment to assist you in restoring losses or recovering your lost out-of-pocket expenses caused by such fraud. "

Disclosure: I worked for and have ownership in a competitor to Lifelock.
Ask HN: Learning Ruby/RoR -- Which open source projects should I learn from?
It's ruby time! I ditched xp for ubuntu to streamline my quest into ruby/rails. I followed the guides @ http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ which are very helpful, thanks!

Can the rails veterans recommend some open source projects I can learn from? I'm looking for best practices and well structured code to model after. Thanks HN.
Legally, you aren't. The issue is the time and expense in proving that you didn't sign anything.
Why did you dupe your own submission? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353754