skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People created frameworks before Rails. They continue to create frameworks now. Someone will be the Rails of Node.js, for instance. But calling 37s a successful "framework company" seems sort of inept; their customers, by and large, do not seems like Rails users. Indeed, Rails users seem like exactly the kinds of people who think that Basecamp and Campfire are trivially reproduced and not worth the money.

All I'm saying is, if you think that having a popular blog is the key to 37signals success, then go start a popular blog. Nobody is stopping you. God did not reach out from the heavens and give SvN to 37signals.

Meanwhile, how many people work for Github? 4? What parts of 37signals' advice clearly don't apply to them? Are there no other examples of small companies with strong revenue that we can come up with?
They're only linkable AFTER you choose to get the link for them.

Remove linked items here: https://www.dropbox.com/share#tab:linked-items
It need not integrate tightly with other business systems. Especially as we move into an era of big data, it need only integrate well with databases.

I am creating a website that allows the general public to create reports on how the climate has changed, such as:

http://i.imgur.com/o8fTg.jpg

PHP, PostgreSQL, R, and JasperReports to analyse 273 million rows of data across 8000 weather stations spanning The Great White (soon to be Green by the looks of it) North for the last 110 years.

The trend line, shown in orange, is calculated in R using a Generalized Additive Model. There is no way I was going to (or even could) write such a complex algorithm myself. When I started the project, I was using MySQL. I migrated the database to PostgreSQL specifically so that I could use R for the analysis. I migrated the database before learning R.
You see the same sort of thing and worse in new game console launches and (big) movie release dates. People camp out for days sometimes. A few hours is nothing, these Apple fans are either line-n00bs or flat out moderates compared to those.

Also remember that some of these may be developers, so getting it before their customers could be very important to their bank account.
Working with NinePatch Stretchable Graphics in Android
The likelihood that your project will grow beyond what you want is very low. After all, you can always close it to new customers.

Our app (http://letsfreckle.com) was growing only slightly per month, until we really started promoting it. Now it's growing how we like.

But we could have coasted along at $5k/mo forever.

There are lots and lots of small web apps making a nice tidy living for their owners, but yes, they don't get talked about because it's not sexy enough for the tabloid nature of "startup" news coverage. Only the extreme win, extreme fail, and extreme weird (bingo cards, teaching your parrot to talk) get major traction over time.
I always make sure to leave little details like that in my comments. ;-)
Have you looked at zencoder.com or similar?
It would certainly help parents regulate their children's access to adult material (simply block .xxx through your router for whatever machines your kids have access too). However, this is in principle and will never work in practice.

Sure US legislators can make it mandatory for porn sites to have .xxx, however there are roughly 265 countries in the world. You'll never get every one of them to agree on regulations.
It is pretty surprising that Apple hasn't been called on this cheap PR. Every person standing in line is being used as a stooge by Apple to get press, and the media always abides. This is the first article I've seen yet that points out this obvious exploitation of the Apple faithful.

It's positively archaic.

Just to be clear, as the article notes the people standing in line RESERVED a phone. They already have their spot. Apple makes them prove it by standing in line for 6 hours for the television cameras.

When the Motorola Droid was released, in comparison, I remember a lot of articles mocking the lack of lines. Yet somehow they sold 250,000 in the first week. It's kind of amazing what modern fulfillment processes can do, even if it doesn't lead to cult-like turnouts.
You don't have to create Rails. Create something else. Anything else. Release it. If it's good, it'll get attention. Maybe the attention will be less. Doesn't matter. Some attention is better than none. Now, leverage that. Release something else. Leverage it. Go back and improve something else. Pimp one of your things in front of the audience to another one of your things. And vice versa.

Rinse. Repeat. Grow, incrementally.
I have been reading the whole thread, but this one made me jump in. I own a VAIO Z series and it is a kick ass machine. I have windows 7 running without any problems by using most of the Windows XP drivers from the Sony website.
I agree that Sony are morons for not supporting future OS and linux, but we all know that there is always a way around. Also want to add that the Sony laptops, and particularly Z and F series are very well designed and very sturdy compared with the other brands that tend to make their new modesl cheaper and cheaper looking and feeling.
If you look at a previous comment, I'm transcoding video for iOS devices.
You're seeing these posts for two reasons:

1) Posterous was funded by YC

2) People know that if you write and/or post something about a YC funded company on HN you will likely get visits/karma

It doesn't go much deeper than that.

Edit: One way to tell this is true is to look at "similar" communities on the Web. Reddit, for instance, has no recent submissions in technology or programming about Posterous (and they'll discuss just about anything). In case you think I'm against Posterous, I think it's a good service. I just know a pattern when I see one.
Hilary Mason @ Web 2.0 Expo
Native vs Html5 Mobile Applications
It seems like everyone is doing native apps now. Many people I know ponder about whether to learn Objective-C on the one hand or dive into the Android platform on the other hand.

A tough choice as both of them already gained a significant smartphone market share and are growing fast. Clients actually demand native apps even while most of them could easily be implemented using html5.
I can appreciate your desire for brevity, but I do believe the OP had a larger point than just "posterous has balls". Ultimately this covers the issue of competition that many entrepreneurs constantly fret over. Many people loathe being compared to any other product or service--they want to be truly unique and game changing. The fact is that this simply isn't how it works 95% of the time. You need to embrace your enemies as sort of a standard to measure yourself against. Don't be different for the sake of being different--be something better.
Nope, can't get a credit card. I would also like to work with an investor who has advice to give, not just money.
Because your uptime is spotty, you absolutely should have some means of restarting the site back up if the servers fall over. If I were your investor, I'd want to know that somebody was responsible for making sure the site's up.

At the same time, I'm sympathetic to your cashflow situation. Even with the tax deduction at the end of the year, that doesn't affect your monthly bills right now.

What I would do would be to set some objective metric for uptime that you and your cofounders agree upon. Until you get to that point, you cover the internet. Once you hit that point, the company covers the cost. I recognize that this is inverse of the actual work/money relationship (arguably, the company would be paying for the time when you need to have access to the site to get it going again), but I think the incentive is pretty clear that you want to get your uptime rock solid ASAP, and I think it aligns your objectives with the company's objectives.
"If the instapaper_body class name is present, the automatic selection and automatic stripping processes are disabled, leaving full control to the site’s author."
You didn't read carefully - not Sunspider, V8 benchmark:

Firefox 3.6.4 494
IE9 1200
Safari 5 2644
Opera 10.54 3393
Chrome 6.0.437.3 5148

Saying that Chrome is 10x faster than Firefox on the basis of V8 benchmark would be as misleading as saying IE9 is "orders of magnitude" faster than Chrome on the basis of fishtank demo.

Though it certainly makes great headlines.
I can't reproduce that in my Safari 5 either, so it doesn't seem to be a general problem with that browser.
Ask HN: Number of iPhone apps you published & income you get from them 
It would be useful to see the level of success HN'ers have had with iPhone apps. Several articles mention general statistics, but what is the level of success for a population with the background of people who read HN?

So, if you have published iPhone apps, can you tell us

a) How many apps have you published?

b) How many are paid vs free?

c) How much effort have you put into marketing them?

d) What is the level of income you get from them?You can simply use one of the following levels: negligible, small, decent, large, or huge, or you can provide more details or actual numbers if you'd like

Thanks in advance for any feedback.
Meanwhile Google search results are going back to the Altavista days thanks to dumbing it down to help newbs and so many SEO sites. Very often I have to put quotes and plus signs in searches or else Google will just tell me something similar (not just a simple "do you mean Y" link.)

There's a need for a better search engine or a google management shake-up.
Consider doing this as a WordPress plugin. I suspect there are already some syndication plugins that do similar things already though.
Really? Ultra thin font with light gray coloring on a gray background?
You just typed what I was going to comment almost word for word. Great insight, tptacek.
I think your bigger problem is that you seem to be in the "me versus them" mindset when you define the fact that Internet access will come at your own expense. In a startup of five, with only three permanents, I'm sure you've been asked to make all sorts of sacrifices.

If $40/month, or about $1 a day is really causing strife between you and YOUR company ... not your employer, but YOUR company, then maybe it's the job and not the access expectations that are the bigger problem.
Made it happen without trying, left hand. Gratis bumpers seem like the quick fix solution.
Do your part - Flag the post.
Insight, "Klout:  Enunciate"
I've never published an iPhone app personally, but at my last job we hired TakeFiveLabs to make an app for us (Veritas Prep GMAT app), and though it was completely free, it brought in $10,000+ in signups for our $1500+ course and tutoring
we can't launch Foursquare both in Silicon Valley and in New York City and see which has the better outcome.

Well, I think the OP's point is that you aren't as likely to get as far as launch in, say, Houston than you are in SV.

The problem is that it's hard to get a quantifiable handle on the question, not only because it is hard to count startups that never got off the ground, but also because it doesn't have to be true; people just have to believe it to be true.

In other words, if everybody who wants to launch a startup moves to SV because they think they have to, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, irrespective of whether it was originally true.
http://djangogigs.com/ has new jobs showing up every few days, despite being an ultra-niche site. My experience is that the Django job market has been very healthy for several years now.
Worse yet, if your probe's OS crashes at the wrong time it could lead to loss of the probe or missing out on a lot of data that would otherwise have been gathered. If a probe's electronic brain crashes due to cosmic rays and goes into a "safe" state it may fail to maintain attitude control, potentially pointing its solar arrays away from the Sun and/or its high gain antenna away from Earth. This can lead to "bad things" such as the probe draining its batteries and dying before controllers have a chance to fix it (this has happened quite frequently in the past, though not always due to cosmic rays). Worse, the probe could reset during a critical course correction manouver, end up failing to go into orbit around a target planet, burning up in a planet's atmosphere, or merely ending up in the wrong location on the wrong trajectory.

Avionics systems use ECC memory and other techniques to avoid being impacted by cosmic rays causing single event upsets. As far as parity and ECC errors on laptops, I don't believe ECC ram is common on laptops.

That being said, this particular article uses a gross overestimate of SEUs for memory, which is really only applicable if your 4GB of RAM fills an entire room in multiple full sized racks (the studies he bases these figures on come from the 80s and the author fails to adjust for physical size when extrapolating to modern memory sizes).
Duct tape is the quick fix solution.
Certainly not their first major recall -- I remember my iBook's battery being recalled as part of that exploding battery debacle. There was something with poor soldering of motherboard components, too, that affected the generation of iBooks previous to mine.

I wonder if Apple could keep costs down here by shipping those rubber bumper cases to everyone. Unless this is some bizarre feedback issue that can be fixed in software, I don't see how Apple could recall the iPhone 4 and truly fix this short of a major redesign. And I'd hate to see that happen, if for no other reason than it would seem such a waste...
VDI: Going the way of the floppy disk
Posterous (pronounced either post-er-us or paw-ster-us, you choose)

My apologies for focusing on minutiae, but really? I always thought it was post-er-oose (oose as in moose)
Ultimate Strategy Guide For Playing Wild Ones
Apart from the developers, does it hint at a certain emptiness in those people's lives?
In practice that could go wrong in a number of way, but I don't see a problem with it in principle.
You hit it. Additionally, when reading 37signal's stuff I hear "and I hope more of you do it too (or something similiar), because I belive this would be better for our industries, our work culture and the economy as a whole.".
Also, at the very least going rate ($.10/12) his website is worth $146. That's more valuation than most startups (i.e., the countless failures) :)
But in both cases, the product still sucks. Saying that your product has "caught up" gives the customer a greater incentive to question any future improvements and any other marketing material coming from your organization.

After Domino's said they did better and after a taste-test I discovered it was still worse than Papa John's, I mock the Domino's commercials and will never visit a Domino's again. Same with Bing.
This was also discussed yesterday:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1455073
a) 0
b) 0 and 0, respectively.
c) none
d) $0 per payout.
ah I would be bummed to have to buy one of those ugly bumpers, I like apple devices the way they are bare.
Hm, if I was an iPhone developer I would try to create an app for that. Organizing the queuing, I mean. Could we come up with some self organizing numbering scheme (assuming the shop doesn't collaborate, and everybody in the queue already has an iPhone (pre-4), which seems reasonable)?
A problem could be that people would forget to check in once they had their turn at the counter, so maybe it would have to be some kind of dead man's button ("yes, I am still queueing").
The picture couples well with the revealing self-description in the first sentence: 'like a dutiful customer'. As a _customer_, you have no _duty_ to the vendor. Oh, wait, it's Apple we're talking about. Never mind. :-)
Not to mention, Apple nearly lost the market entirely during the g4 era, and sales in that segment of the market have been largely static since.

The big winner in that was actually Linux though, not Windows.
It's a phone. That's a class of produce so "in demand" that phone companies give you a new one every year, even if you don't ask for it.
You got it in one.
Yeah. This is why I don't buy anything that I can't get from Amazon.

Step 1: find product
Step 2: click "2-day one click"
Step 3: the product arrives at my house
I thought Foursquare did exactly that?
You can apply for a Y-Combinator-like program in your area. But wouldn't it be a lot less risky to use the money from sales and subscription to pay for, say, one of Linode's heavy-iron (8-20GB) instances month to month? It seems to be a relatively small premium. And have you thought about letting your clients (or at least the desktop clients) do the transcoding for you?
Two sites that I've put up in the past 6 months have yet to be crawled by bing (it indexed the main page of one, but has absolutely nothing for the second), despite it indexing links pointing to those sites and me submitting them to be indexed months ago. They are both completely distinct, unrelated and on separate servers. Meanwhile, google started crawling them immediately.

Interestingly, on the one that eventually got the home page indexed by bing, the bulk of the content is still not linked from the main page, but can be fully crawled via deeper links people have posted elsewhere. Google crawled it via those links, Bing still only sees the front page.
AT&T hacker released on bail after drug arrest
Of course, if you consider this an elaborate resignation from the military and into politics, it makes a lot more sense...
Makes one miss the truly passionate product fans of days gone by:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajlTIMBbdTg&feature=PlayL...
I think we should have a big argument about the right term we should use to refer to the selection scheme, to pass the time.
I feel that the market right now for Django is still too small for something like this to really work. Even the open Django job boards like http://www.djangogigs.com are pretty barren. How are you going to convince employers to fork over money without proof that there are lots of talented Django developers behind the walls of your site? And how are you going to convince developers to go through the trouble of opening up their code and submitting to tests without proof that it might get them access to lots of top-notch employers?
Can anyone say why this momentary "flash crash" was a big deal? Who cares if people or computers trade securities under market value for a short amount of time? It only affects the idiot that is selling them at that undervalued price. The value of the underlying company is unaffected and market forces will always quickly correct it. The people or firms that sold the securities at those prices are probably either fired or lost their own money and they chance it happens again is unlikely. Use buy and sell limit orders, you should be already.

Should we worry about all online retailers because Zappos had a computer error and lost some money? - http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/05/24/pricing-error-costs...
XServe is really not much of an indicator, since it's always been a pretty poor seller. Apple never did figure out why the likes of Dell and RackSaver rack-mount server solutions cost 2-4x as much as Apple's, and why everyone else kept buying them instead of Apple's far cheaper solutions -- and therefore Apple never fixed their big problem.

You don't pay a premium in that market for nothing -- your rack-mount server has a CPU go up in smoke, and Dell WILL have someone in your datacenter replacing it within 24 hours. That's the part that Apple didn't get -- shipping your box back to the manufacturer just doesn't cut it.
There is the SDCH spec: Shared Dictionary Compression over HTTP. Google Chrome uses it, and the Google Toolbar adds support to IE.

The server supplies a pre-created dictionary (template) which gets cached, and further requests get a diff to that dictionary as a response.

I've only found Google search using it on the server side, and the browser penetration is fairly low, but it seems promising. It makes requests very fast.

I've also noticed that Google search serves image thumbnails as data:// URLs directly in the original response. They are going a long way to ensuring each page loads entirely in one request.
Compare "We have caught up" to "We took longer, because we wanted to get it right". I think Steve Jobs delivers it even better, but I am too lazy to look up the exact sentence. Both is saying the same thing, but the second version (in Steve Job's variant) can make the competition look bad.

Bing needs to work on their marketing...
Despite all the enthusiasm around decentralization, I think it's a failed option. It creates the illusion that power doesn't exist, when it's only been hidden, making it harder to fight. I've written about that here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1389356

I agree on accountability. There will always be elites and the people need strong collective institutions to hold them accountable. The fact that government hasn't always acted in our interest is no reason to hand over everything to the elites.
Testing them all on -9 is perhaps not a fair comparison. For example, according to http://changelog.complete.org/archives/931-how-to-think-abou..., gzip -9 saved a tiny amount of space compared to gzip's default, but took significantly longer.
>But, with the exception of a rare few, it seems that neither male nor female programmers give a rat’s ass about fashion.

Being what this post would refer to as a "programming woman", I can attest to this. And I think this is one of the primary reasons I (and other women I know in the computer industry) got drawn into computers - no one cares what you look like or where you're from. Heck, most people in your industry might not even see you physically. You don't have to dress up (if you do, that's totally fine). That's just crazy cool for an introverted nerd.
The issue with iPhone 4's "yellow spots" may have a simple explanation. Users at Apple's forums have reported that the issue just "went away". Perhaps this post at the Apple Insider discussion forum sheds light on what's happening:

-- quote --
by user: austingaijin
The yellow blotches will disappear
Apple is using a bonding agent called Organofunctional Silane Z-6011 to bond the layers of glass. Apparently, Apple (or more likely Foxconn) is shipping these products so quickly that the evaporation process is not complete. However, after one or two days of use, especially with the screen on, will complete the evaporation process and the yellow "blotches" will disappear.

How do I know? I was involved in pitching Z-6011 to Apple.
-- end quote--
Cool site. I like this one http://www.antiyawn.com/stealmyidea/socialnewstime.jpg against the eternal september.
Didn't pg do this and found it made no difference in the quality of the posts?
Ask HN: Glossy displays, form over function?
I'd like to share my pet peeve against glossy displays, because nowadays it is hard to find notebooks with matte displays.

I suppose people like (or don't mind) glossy displays, which I find intriguing. To me, their reflective properties are very distracting.

To reduce eye strain, I prefer to use dark backgrounds for my editor & cli, and this makes things worse.

The other day I was watching a World Cup match on a restaurant, and all the LCD TVs had glossy displays. They reflected the internal illumination in a way that made it hard to follow the match.

Perhaps my brain is wired in a strange way, but I think this a plague! What do you think?
Yea YCombinator and the like would be nice, but many of them require full time participation, and that's understandable, I just can't afford to leave m job, two kids and a wife.

Funding base on subscription is a good idea as well but I still need a bare minimum of investment to float me trhough development. Also I would investigate usig an encoding service, but it costs almost as much as renting server space.
Yes, we all hate glossy displays and the masses love them. As much as I agree with you... flagged.
Exactly my thoughts! ... Not happy with getting the ideas from xerox, he also got the looks to sell them.