skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone else find downloading and organizing digital media to be time consuming? If so wouldnt u prefer to just be able to stream everything from the cloud to ur Internet devices (iphone, apple tv, pc, etc..)?

I use to download now i find myself streaming what I want from the cloud. I.E. Im not hyper on quality so listening to music/songs and playlists using youtube on my iphone suits my needs.
Poll: Where do you live?
Hacker news is an eclectic community, let's see how varied our locales are.

Maybe one country lends itself to hackers? We'll see.

(Take into account that HN is in English, so English-speaking countries should be at the top.)
Roamer/Floater/Jet-setter/Mars
I completely agree. Part of their problem is absolutely a branding thing.
Defationary collapse of a massive debt bubble != down-swing of the business cycle

They look pretty much the same from the perspective of July 2010. What's the big difference?
http://faculty.tamu-commerce.edu/dfunderburk/428/readings/Th...
When you're setting up a central storage for all your home content, 100GB is nothing -- you need to start speaking in terms of TB's. So, for now, the best thing is to do local=realtime, and cloud=selective backup/cache.

I've set it up like this using Windows Home Server. I use a few backup services to point it to some of the folders on the server that are important to me (my work folder for instance).

WHS has the ability to stream remotely, and I haven't found any speed issues doing so from my local network. I would like what you're describing, which is local=cache and cloud=realtime, except technology isn't there yet -- disk space in the cloud is still too expensive and ISP <-> home bandwidth still too slow/throttled/capped.
No disagreement on any points :)
It's okay to take a day off.
And in one paragraph Dawkins shows that he has no understanding of postmodernism what so ever.

So far as I'm concerned, no-one -- including everyone who's ever called themselves a postmodernist -- has any understanding of it. There's no "there" there, only a few trite remarks about absolutes and a race to see who can out-jargon, out-pigeonhole and out-frame whom.

(all of which makes me incredibly glad that I earned my degree from a program which leaned heavily toward the analytic tradition; analytic philosophy has certainly had its big screwups, but A) it tends to be much more honest about itself and B) it still manages to occasionally produce useful results in spite of that)
I love this kind of transparency. Making it much easier to be a founder :)
I've been told that yes. I'm still working on how to do it, someone suggested that I just update the preview window.
Linode's backup system includes a snapshot which can be triggered whenever you like, as well as the scheduled incremental backups.

The UI looks like this: http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/3251/linodebackups.png
I am not religious but I do believe that religion has its reasons.
Most of the problems in this world are caused because people do actions without a proper purpose. If everyone can stop and ask themselves the simple question 'why?' for every action they do, and if the answer is because of money, fame, sex, or anything selfish or 'sinful' according to religion, then it is not a valid cause.
You entrepreneurs in Hacker News, of most people, should know that the concept of entrepreneurship lies in the desire to solve a problem and change the world for a better place.
Do you believe that everything you do ultimately leads to have a higher purpose other than yourself?
Most people are lost without purpose and they need some moral values, call it religion, family values, beliefs, etc, to follow. Only some people are lucky enough to know what their purpose in this world (I do believe everyone has one) early enough in their lives, and it is those people whom we follow, whom inspires us.
Religion's purpose might be for those people who are lost, to find meaning in their lives so they can contribute, in their own way, for the better of the society.

Thank you.
Notepad.cc is good, but it doesn't give you Textile/Markdown, custom CSS, automatic media embedding (through oEmbed), and the other features I've included in Wrttn.
Yet nobody uses it.
It's a very stirring quote, and one I used to like. But the only way to do novel work is to go far enough in one direction that you get past the problem space all the specialists have already covered, and that seems hard to do part-time.
The number of pre-IPO nanotech firms is very small. The number of pre-IPO nanotech firms which would actually be a good investment is much smaller.
A few thoughts:

1. You need a reason to keep people coming back - some sort of hook to keep people interested. Off the top of my head:

-private stories (restricted to a group)

-solo stories (one sentence a day for one user)

-stories limited to people with a certain birthday

-graduation class stories

-drama/english classes

-let people upvote/downvote/move sentences

-publish a blog of anything that turns out good

-allow combination of random sentences from different stories into new stories

2. The "Anything Goes" section could easily turn into porn/adult content. That can make advertising revenue difficult and make it unusable by schools, etc.

3. If you get a lot of traffic, this blows up and becomes hard to manage. A story could grow very rapidly if you're not careful. Although on the edge of "premature optimization" I would keep an eye ont his as you work.

Fun site. It will be interesting to see if you can take it from "interesting curiosity" to "something I check when I'm bored".
Curious, did you ever get it running in Titanium?
In my mind the biggest question is "do your managers see this and understand it to be a problem?"

If your managers think that a meeting culture is a good/desireable thing, no amount of lobbying by a single engineer (or even a small group of them) is liable to fix the situation. On the other hand, if your managers agree with you, you have readily-available allies in your fight to fix the culture.
Oh snap - I guess I shouldn't have tl;dr - ed. 1 million PV / month is awesome.
If you always pay off your credit card in full on time, then it's effectively the same as a debit card that has fraud protection and cashback built into it.

There is a really simple way to avoid getting behind on your payments: don't buy things that you can't cover with the money in your checking account, and pay your bills on time. Heck, if you can't do this with a debit card, you'll get socked with overdraft fees that are on par with what the credit card would get you for.
Can you add safe HTML as a markup option? Loving this. Nice design.
Very nice, looks clean.

One suggestion for the home page, the styling for the text link accompanying the ad looks out of place. Perhaps remove the underline unless hovered, change to italics (it's a quote/statement of the ad client) and break the text where the image ends.
If you consider speed and storage as orthogonal dimensions it would be quadratic.
By the same token, we should be amazed that most shops use Mac and Linux, even though Windows has tremendous market share. Or why we aren't using Java.

> Enterprise and startups aren’t mutually exclusive – they’re just different stages in the evolution of software

I think that if you told most startups that 'Enterprise' was another stage, a future stage in the 'evolution of software', they'd hang themselves.
The project site: http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/
Thanks. I'll look into it.
I've been using Notational Velocity which is an OSX only app. I like that it's UI is keyboard driven and that it encrypts and syncs your notes to the cloud.
User Experience Deliverables
The author asserts that Visual Studio is a much better development platform than everything else. I use IntelliJ, emacs, Unix cli, Perl, etc What am I missing? I'm sure Visual Studio is good but even if it's better, how much better is it?
It would be interesting to see a reconstruction of a steam cannon. There's no mention in the article of anyone actually building one, and I'm at a loss to imagine how you'd use ancient metalworking technology to build the valve which holds back the pressure that's sufficient to fling a projectile any significant distance.

Also, if they were such a great weapon, able to set ships alight from the shore, why did nobody ever use them again?
I once had to visit a doctor in Japan. Everything went fine until they went to print me a prescription and tried to enter my name. After explaining that no, I can't provide my name in kanji they went ahead with it in English.

My name broke the layout of the form on their screen and when the prescription was printed only the first half was shown because the rest ran off the side of the paper.

I guess they don't get many foreigners showing up at the local family doctors clinic.
Thanks. You can use HTML.
I started a Canvas based game framework of sorts a while back:

http://github.com/ashleyw/Game.JS …super original name, I know!

You do all the drawing yourself, it doesn't add another layer as such to that, it just helps with scheduling background tasks, keeping a smooth time stepping, sounds, etc. It's very buggy though, with very little documentation and no tests…but please do check it out if you're thinking about creating a Canvas based game soon, it's not that complicated! :)

(btw, it doesn't require Ruby, I just use sinatra to serve all the files easier!)
Depression may double risk of dementia, study says
First start taking some meetings. Unsolicited pitches in my experience are less investable. Do some advisory work or something like that.

There is no accreditation process - you just are allowed once you meet the rules.

Please understand, though, that if you have a $1m net worth, you probably can't allocate more than 10% of that to angel investing, which means being in just a few deals if your minimum in is $25k or whatever. And it comes back to you slowly - I've been investing since 2006, in 38 deals so far, and I've seen exactly one exit so far.
Well said. You ARE losing your first investments, and it will take 5-8 years to get anything back.
Why does Perl 5 need a Rails? Despite the existence of Rails, Perl 5 is still more widely used than Ruby. (Perl 5 and Ruby 1 came out around the same time.)
How Steam stopped me from pirating games and enjoy the sweet DRM kool-aid
In my experience, companies raising > 500k aren't hiring fast enough to grow rapidly. And if they are, they're almost certainly raising again almost immediately.

There's plenty of business that can be built for that small amount, but they tend to be lifestyle businesses and as such are not particularly suitable for investment.
The headline, of course, is pretty meaningless.

If I had one user yesterday and two today, I'm growing at a rate of approximately 2^365/100 = 7.5e105 percent per year, but that's still nothing to brag about.
Building a search engine using Redis and redis-py
Sorry, but it's Iowa / the Midwest, not Southern California.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American#Regional_home_...
Yep, the problem with their brand is that it's not Google or Apple. If Apple or Google were to release a clone of Opera tomorrow it would have significant higher usage stats and buzz.

Lets face it, as much as we would like to believe we judge technology based on it's merits, the truth of the matter is we're just in High School 2.0 and what really matters is that we're hanging out with the cool kids. In this case Opera isn't a part of the in-crowd, a real shame.
With pure gold twisted pair?
As someone who has done both Enterprise .NET and startup work, I have to say that the reason we didn't use .NET is much the same as the reason you don't rent a 2-ton backhoe to dig up a flower bed: cost and overkill.

Yes, the backhoe might dig the flower bed faster, but it costs $5,000.00 to rent, there's a one-week minimum rental, and its treads tear up your yard to get to the flower bed. On the other hand the shovel may be slower, but you can borrow one from a friend and it doesn't tear up your whole yard.
Let's near in mind these are start-ups with limited capital and no time to fill in the holes that your treads tore up in your front yard.
Thanks for posting this, I have a bunch of algorithms to learn. :)
Idea, Timing & Execution: Lessons Learned from Launching a Groupon Clone
Wow, this looks gorgeous in fullscreen mode. Can't wait to start reading :)
I think a big difference is how we define small, e.g. Wikipedia tells me:

In the United States the Small Business Administration establishes small business size standards on an industry-by-industry basis, but generally specifies a small business as having fewer than 500 employees for manufacturing businesses and less than $7 million in annual receipts for most nonmanufacturing businesses.

When Microsoft makes something for small business, that's what they are imagining. For a boot strapped hacker working on a website, 500 people and $7 million is a long long way away...
Flash running on iPhone and iPad. Closer.. closer…
DNA Project looking for Programmers and Coders
>A key insight in ethics is that truly ethical decisions almost always go against the person making the decision.

What? Which theory of ethics are you using? I don't agree with this at all.
Tonido + XBMC fits your bill
I'm using .NET ... most of the tools are provided free and the full versions provided free by BizSpark, which I joined for free and now have a 3 year MSDN subscription that entitles me to a load of stuff.

It was only very recently that I stopped running http://www.swfstats.com/ on SQL Server Express.

I think the real difference is it's just not front page news you're doing x with .NET. The web just likes to amplify and exxagerate certain 'accomplishments' ... doing your job in C#, Java, MySQL etc aren't on that list.
I wonder if it's a beneficial thing to add extrinsic motivation to view a work of art. Shouldn't most of the value come from the work itself?

I imagine some people thinking: "This show sucks, but if I watch 3 more seasons I can get the badge like all my friends." Then the notion of Netflix could shift from highly individualized recommendations to novel social game to lowest common denominator social chore.
Aversion to computers in the social sciences: the story of ethno-telephony
When Game Mechanics Go Bad
To be brutally honest about .Net, and I use it and like it myself, the reason there's no startup market in it is because until MVC there was no point developing in it.

ASP.Net controls, postbacks for everything, view state, a general hiding of the actual power of ajax and an obsession with using tables made .Net a terrible web development environment if you had any clue what you were doing. The html it spat out was a bloated horrible mess, web services were anything but unless you really slogged your way through some pain, ashx pages and the directory structure just felt plain wrong.

That said I'd almost, almost, switched to using python/django and then I had a look at MVC and it did everything I needed. Full control over html, nice code separation, a nifty ORM for taking away the pain of basic crud. An alright templating system easily extensible using extension methods. And 3.5 brought some tricks using LINQ and anonymous methods.

I still know I need to learn a few more languages, but MVC has allowed me to copy everything I felt was the 'right' way of developing webs apps from rails/django without having to actually learn a new language and dev environment.

If you weren't worried about performance and didn't want to learn how to actually program, the old ASP.Net was ok for very quickly throwing out web apps for the 10 people in HR. Much more than that required an in depth of knowledge way beyond most .Net programmers, with most of those people being multi-lingual anyway and tending to opt for the cleaner code the alternatives offered.

I don't feel that's the case anymore, but it's way behind in adoption at the moment.

You still hit the occasional WTF in MVC where if feels as if someone wrote a part of the system without reading the memo about flexibility (the validation solution in MVC, for example, is terrible, although not finished and LINQ to entities can be frustrating).

tl;dr;? No startups because until recently good web development in .Net was actually really hard. MVC's changed that.
Why nit just know your place? Microsoft is fine (or at least was fine with) targeting massive enterprises and signing lucrative contracts with lots and lots of zeroes and lock-in. Why not adopt some unix philosophy into the ms ecosystem and just do one thing well.

I was willing to sympathesize with this article until the visual studio destroying everyone else feature set wise comment. Despite what you may think you are about the topic, you are just inviting a holy war.

As someone who has used visual studio, eclipse, and text mate regularly I would be hard pressed to say that visual studio destroys anything. I would prefer eclipse since it can do things like "open type" and "organize imports" natively. Things that come for free in the free and open source eclipse ide require you to buy the $80 resharper plugin for your $400 ide.
Ask HN: What do you think of my startup idea?
I will keep this short and sweet. Basically Mint for businesses that will pull data from Quickbooks/Freshbooks/etc...

Would you use it? To what extent?
For sure, but I don't think you can go beyond truth as correspondence. In so far as our brains are physical, and changes are wired up through physical causality with our senses, you can't break through to some notional Platonic ideal, where Truths are Relations on Forms in a mathematical way, and still have those truths apply directly to the way things "really are".

Truths about e.g. mathematics, on the other hand, I would say are analytic in the Kantian sense. They are a different kind of truth, and in many ways are like self-contained games. Useful as formalisms for theories about the world, etc.
Fixed, thanks for pointing that out!
A suggestion for that would be to make parts of the site using your notepad app. Place text in notepad asking the user to edit it and allow them to add their own content.
Tonido Plug + Drobo methinks.
I think I need to change the name of my repository now. I am now the author of "phlisp" http://github.com/shaunxcode/phlisp to avoid confusion. hah. It is cool to see a different approach to the same problem! I am going more for source -> source, quasiquote macros, TCO, some arc-esque syntactic sugar etc. and back to php4 compat. Definitely a kick in the ass to release it now as I have stalled since april due to "work".
Why does Ctrl-F “crypt” not find a single hit on this web page, neither in the blog post nor the comments (there, or on yc)? Are you guys really not concerned about security at all? I’d demand industry-level encryption on both the storage device and the communication protocols. Stealing the device should leave the thief with nothing but worthless random data, decryption/encryption should completely take place on the clients.
Nope :( I couldn't get Titanium Mobile to push to either my iPhone or my Android (and can't afford the $200/month support). Bummer, maybe someday.
Agreed. The advantage of this approach is that it also works in IE 6-8 using VML.
In my case, this device is a Mac Mini + a Drobo. The Mini is connected to my TV and a receiver and is pretty much always on ... I can access the files pretty easily with MacFuse using SSHFS.
Queen tours RIM
Thanks, I'll let Josh know! BTW it might interest you that he put his music up for sale! http://joshuamorse.bandcamp.com/album/bombada-original-sound...

He's great, I'm a big fan of his.
I've read several books by Deleuze and Guattari, but haven't had any formal instruction on postmodernism. They're hilariously opaque, but also pretty interesting if you have the patience.

At one point in A Thousand Plateaus, the authors say that vaginas are just penises travelling faster than the speed of light. Does anyone think this is meant to be analyzed scientifically? To say that there's no scientific rigor in this statement misses the point; scientific rigor has almost no impact on how people live their lives.

For someone analyzing human beings, the truth of science is much less interesting than how scientific concepts can be misunderstood, and the authority of science misapplied. The co-opting of a precise scientific term can be frustrating to someone who has spent their entire life studying it, but that doesn't mean it's all hot air and empty words.

Most feminist criticism is pretty silly, though.
I sort of know what you're saying but not really. You mean having text inside the textarea (with, say, textile/markdown basics? though I added a textile reference) and delete it on focus?
The Next Phase of TV Will Look Like This
As warfangle pointed out, I'm not working on Diggy anymore. Reason being: I'm working on a canvas JS engine now! :D Might have something ready for other developers in a few weeks ...
Ehum. How so?
Uhm:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1482178
I've been to 2 dotNet local conferences already ... the presentations are centered around Office / Sharepoint integration, plus company-sponsored propaganda (also targeted at the enterprise) that made me wanna` puke out of boredom. Even the presentation on Silverlight was focused on data-binding and how easy it is to build boring forms out of clicky-clicky actions.

This is especially telling considering I did work for "the enterprise" and I'm still doing it as a consultant.

Of course, personally I don't need more propaganda and advocacy.

Just last month I created an app for managing the webcams of a client. I used Red5 (the open-source Flash streaming server), in combination with Apache / Django + a MySql database. Besides my billing per hour, the extra cost to the client for the licensing of this infrastructure was $0.

And for my app, while I would love some of the stuff in .NET, I don't want to pay extra for those Windows servers, even if they provided extra-value over Linux (which they don't).

Putting your business hat on ... as a startup or as a pragmatic consultant, paying extra for Windows servers is not worth the price, unless the cost of switching from .NET is big (and really ... which other technology has such a big cost of switching?).

Sure ... it's easier to blame the lack of advocacy. The Perl community is also doing it (and I would rather go with Perl apps hosted on Linux servers than suffer the Windows licensing hell).
Unfortunately they have non-transitive equality when used with standard dictionaries. For example, if O and R are ordered dictionaries with the same entries in different orders, and D is a standard dictionary with the same entries, then O == D == R but O != R.
A Neuroscientist Inside A Psychopath's Brain (3 Parts)
there is a whole generation of developers who came out of college with the notion of Microsoft being evil.

also the trends setup by VC's like YCombinator, good college/university like MIT is, you can make cool products with open source ecosystem.

not sure how much you would remember, about 15 years ago it used to cost a large chunk of money to build scalable apps as 70% of the investment was sunk into datacenter acquisition.

another cool aspect is lot of new popular apps like posterous, started out as a single usable idea were implemented over a weekend and polished with multiple iterations.

licensing cost is still a big negative for those have discovered the power of open source technology, also the community is lot more evolved in sharing the expertise.

application frameworks like Ruby on Rails played a big role in getting the best practices like MVC Architecture, source code management, TDD/BDD, code generation, reuse in open source web frameworks

cloud computing infrastructure like amazon web services and linode VPS maks people experiment new projects at lot less cost.

Personally I have problems with many .Net developers who are "fish out of water", when it comes to living without the Visual Studio IDE. standards and features like XHTML, AJAX(prototype, jquery others ) came lot later in .Net programmers toolset until Internet Explorer was the leading in developer mindshare.