skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You answered your own question. Its not a fair comparison.

I am guessing:

- its more expensive to distribute service when population is spread out over larger area.

- There is no genuine competition which keeps the price and service at same rate year after year.

- In major cities (like here in NY) there is no prospect of major competition since cities make long term deals with operators.

- lack of proper regulation (at present but I know they are working on it), that encourages operators to provide faster connection and cheaper price.

- I am 100% speculating here, but I think I remember reading somewhere that in countries like Korea and cities like HK the operators are heavily subsidized to provide faster internet connection at lower price. Not sure if its still true.
Same thing happened to me, and it was my older her sister who pulled me out. I can vividly remember looking up and out of the water.
Clickable:

http://img697.imageshack.us/img697/6882/screenshot20100706at...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492475?
My favorite trick is using DTerm[1] to hybridize graphical and textual interactions. More of a meta-Terminal trick, with a keyboard command it brings up a floating input for terminal entry with some intelligence to the context you initialize it from.

Common uses include starting up Terminal with a command instead of just carte blanche, using a globbed rm to clean a folder I'm viewing in Finder, using ls/grep to find files in a current Finder window, &c. &c.

[1]http://www.decimus.net/dterm.php
Like that famous quote about advertising expense...

I think about half of the time I spend here is wasted and half extremely valuable. The problem is that it's usually not clear which is which until after I've sunk the time.
This is a damn good idea, better than the existing noprocrast.
I know exactly how you feel. A few more thoughts.

I wish I knew how much "design" was the threshold for users to accept the site as "professional", basically what I could get away with.

I think I get tripped up because I don't like those 2.0 designs. I call it "frosting" or "cheese". And I prefer the less frosted sites like HN and craigslist, or even google.

I get especially annoyed when my frequent sites get redesigned to look more 2.0. The worst was slashdot. They threw everthing in there, gradient, bars, rounded corners. To me that looks much worse than before, but I wonder how many people find it better.

The word needs a study or focus group on how frosted a site needs to get to be appreciated by its users.
Off the top of my head, I would suggest:

-- restaurants that do a lot of take-out or delivery business (pizza places, Chinese/ethnic restaurants, lunch places in financial districts of major cities). When people want delivery food, they need a menu on-hand.

-- restaurants near colleges/universities. High usage of smartphones, lots of eating out.

-- restaurants in areas with particularly high smartphone market penetration (Bay Area, New York City, Boston, Seattle)

A good menu/take-out order system for restaurants is something I've been thinking about on and off since I was in grad school (and that's been cough over a decade now).
Delay is the amount of time (in minutes) between when you hit submit and when the comment is posted, its for people (like me) who post something than immediately decide to edit it.

From http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html:

...There's a new "delay" field in your profile that lets you specify the delay (in minutes) between when you create a comment and when it's visible to others; this was added because many users edit comments immediately after posting them.

Also

7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features

Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.
In hindsight, and after taking more advanced courses, it became quite clear that scuba instruction was all about teaching the students how not to panic. I hope they make that clear to the instructors, as I only went for personal instruction.
Customers can serve their own content to others, or proxy content to other nearby customers
It sounded like they were planning to do something closer to that, but the higher-than-expected demand made that not a viable option:

from http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/04/26/questions-answered/

>As previously stated, we misjudged demand for this product. Having too many people wanting to buy your product is a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem. Our original method for assembling and shipping devices simply wasn’t scalable in terms of cost and time. It was no longer good enough to get easily accessible parts, buy a few hundred or a thousand of them, and pay somebody to assemble them; time and expense would be too much.
letseat.at - are you worried about this competitor? pretty high-profile company, offering both a desktop and mobile site design for roughly the same monthly price point.
I think offering a sweet Internet connection to the whole neighborhood would be the "what you can do for them." Makes it more attractive for people to live there — and as a bonus, if people are paying their broadband fees to you and you live locally, it keeps in the money in the local economy, which most governments like.
Not really because I'm fairly keen to move away from the Microsoft platform.
Yeah, Jetpack is so much better than Greasemonkey. Firefox 4 beta is whole lot better and feels faster too.
It doesn't help that they have an uncanny ability to piss people off with every major blog post.

They haven't even reached their first major shipment yet, but already:

* They told people in January that shipping Q1 actually meant shipping July 31st.

* They mentioned "premium analytics" or the like and gave everyone fears of having to tack a monthly fee on top of the $50 they had committed to paying for their devices.

* They said that they haven't taken any money from customers yet when they actually have.

None of those are really that bad on their own, but the fact that they've had 3 of these gaffs before the first major shipment understandably gives some people doubt.
Reminds me of something Aaron said after he left Reddit:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/everythinggood

While we were developing Reddit, we always used to run into people who’d recognize us and come up to say hi. “Oh, wow,” they’d say to us. “I can’t tell you how much your site has killed my productivity. I check it a hundred times every day.” At first, we just laughed these comments off. But after a while, I begun to find them increasingly disturbing. We’d set out to make something people want — but what if they didn’t want to want it?

Last year I actually dumped HN and reddit and instead read a weekly digest someone from the coding subreddit created[1]. It was very well curated. Unfortunately, he abandoned it after several weeks.

1: http://www.foldl.org/
I have been in a position where I felt like I was drowning and I was able to call for help. But I'd agree that if it had been worse, the results might have been as described.
Laying the fiber costs something like $1,000 per house and your uplink will cost over $2/Mbps/month (fortunately you can oversubscribe it 100:1 or more). That's not counting any of the equipment.
To follow up on that further: PayPal quickly limited the account, hence the move to Google. PayPal funds remain in PayPal and are used to process refunds.

To make it 100% clear: the only entity to profit from pre-orders has been PayPal, from interest earned on locked funds. We have not made a single dime.
Hong Kong housing is in large clusters and extremely densely populated. Taking only three of the large private housing estates (Mei Foo, Taikoo Shing, Whampoa Gardens) gives you a population of roughly 150,000ppl. So the providers can be reasonably assured of a large market, although they commonly use some aggressive sales tactics.
Updates on Apple appstore hack
Out of curiosity: could you prove it by sending an email to a system you don't control, like Gmail? If you kept gmail logs of your creations / thoughts, and can't fake the date, it seems to me that'd be proof.

Or can you fake the date with Gmail? If so, know of a possible alternative? I'll probably end up using it.
Honest question here and I apologize if it comes off as snarky. I'm just curious. But why is Wakemate pursuing this sort of business model as opposed to say, producing a few prototypes and shopping those around to gadget makers who would manufacture and sell them? Gadget makers are notoriously good at making gadgets, and notoriously bad at making web sites. Even if they were to steal your idea for the gadget, they'd still farm out the web site and probably pay $250K to some agency to get that part of the job done. So partnering with you would make a lot of sense. You might even have been able to get some up-front money out of the deal.
One thing I do wish is that they'd stop mucking about with the security model in places that weren't important. Ever since they stopped allowing local xml files to render with stylesheets, my life has grown much harder.
Articles say Google's fiber network is estimated to cost between $3000 and $8000 per home. So at that rate, to wire up a block with 50 homes would be between $150000 and $400000.
Providing service to a neighborhood is considered "redlining" because it discriminates against all the neighborhoods that you don't serve. Thus the local government will probably require that you serve the entire city/county or nothing.
Tim O'Reilly accuses New York Times of "flamebait reporting"
I ran a crawler on the Alexa top 200,000 a couple months ago, measuring how many sites referenced jQuery and how many used a CDN. I haven't published the results yet, but will be sure to submit that post here when I write it.

Keep in mind that the version fracturing doesn't increase the likelihood of a DNS lookup.
No, it's not. You need a WoW subscription to have access to the WoW forums, but you don't need to have access to the WoW forums to have access to WoW the game.

> Official tech support forums are...on the forums.

Currently, yes. Which has no bearing on the future setup.

> Yeah, not part of the game. Right.

I was unaware that after landing in a city, you logged onto the forums in game.
I'm more concerned about memory leaks.

It is almost solved with the memory fox plugin, but I still need to restart Firefox 3.x every month instead of every week.

I hope that Firefox 4.x will address this problem.
Considering the fact that you can't buy 1gbps of transit in a carrier hotel for anywhere near $26/mo, there's bound to be problems with that idea.
Stress-Facts. « Ramanan50's Blog
But <20% of the preorders paid $5 for the product (source: OP). Couldn't they have assembled at least those and shipped them out by now?

Or, to state it another way, didn't they wake up one morning and realize they had enough preorders? It would be a lot easier to convert the preorder form to "Sign up for more info when we have more units available!" than to convert it to GCheckout, another way of preordering, which is what they did.
Hey thanks for your comments. I though of the backlash that comes from denying something, as you say, with an iron fist. I intend to shape a culture in my home by addition of a bunch of activities which I feel will be beneficial, rather than simply subtracting video games and such.

As to me confusing cause with effect, I though of that too, and I think that the purveyors of media entertainment aren't simply providing what people want. Why do your crops die on Farmville if you don't log in for a few days? Is that what users want, for their crops to die?
Because the Michael Robert account getting his name changed to Chang Chu isn't going to help Michael when he tries to get his account back. Chang sends his documents saying "Yes, this is my account."

Rarely will a person have their name completely changed.
mine too, but then I type hackerne.ws
That's odd; we reply to all emails. Where did you send it? Also, check out help.WakeMate.com; we're very good about managing that as well.

I clarified your question in an above comment.
Ask HN: hacker day jobs in NYC?
A few weeks ago I was bit by a bug of a personal project I feel I must finish before I die. However, it's 10:45 pm EST and I'm still in the office. If there is one thing I've learned in my somewhat ridiculous career as a startup engineer, it is that you don't have time to work on your own stuff when you are working for someone else's startup.

This is probably not a typical request for the type-A Hacker News crowd, but... Where do I find an easy job, suitable for a hacker? I would like to leave by 5pm. Part time would be even better.

You might ask why I don't just quit and have no job. That is a reasonable question, and I might do just that. However, I live in New York and I have to find a new apartment at the end of October. Such a feat is hard to accomplish without an employer, even if you have enough savings to live for a while.

Any tips would be appreciated.
Wow,

While Apple isn't the only company subject to fraud, this might change the perception that the App Store's walled Garden is safer than the wide-open Internet.
I like the idea but customer service and uptime guarantees could be a problem. It'd be worth paying a bit extra for customer service who will converse & troubleshoot with you knowing that you're not clueless.

A proper data centre provides many benefits though. Two big ones (excluding security) are redundant networks and power. A good UPS would probably suffice for power though. I think I would try it with a hobby site or two, but nothing critical.
Jeff Ma’s Keys To Success In Business: Blackjack And Sports
> For example, you can't re-use the same image in other CSS files without duplicating the image's download cost as it's the surrounding CSS file that's cached, not the image itself.

On the other hand, you could create css classes like

.someImage { background: url(...) no-repeat; }

and stick them in a sitewide stylesheet.
You know, that's a pretty good point. Most console games have some "completionist" aspects that usually encourage some degree of cleverness and persistence, if nothing else. I know that I always enjoyed that aspect when I was a kid, although I don't know if it's the prevailing mindset.
Scala + Lift + REST: Hello World
Except HN is far from Anonymous, and excels not because of anonymity, but because of real people. Quality posts here generally come from people that can be traced. HN would suffer if everything was anonymous.
I'm confident that Craig could have spent all his time soldering, but then we'd have a far inferior product right now. Obviously the initial delivery estimates were way off but we have a much better product for Craig's efforts sans soldering.
What You'll Wish You'd Known (2005)
Less than a year ago me and a few friends of mine were about to drown and I had accepted it before I got out. A few of my friends were at shore, I was able to wave and yell for a bit, because I had realized I was going to drown before I actually did start to (there was a rip current and so it was pulling my friends and I backward very quickly). From my perspective, it was amazing to me that:

1) I was Yelling and screaming, and my friends at shore continued to stare toward me like everything was completely normal.

2) I was not thinking clearly that the noise from the ocean and waves would not allow my friends at shore to hear me.

3) I was stupid enough at that moment to waste energy by waving and yelling rather than trying to stay afloat.

4) Knowing how to swim well in a pool had little to do with knowing how to swim well in the ocean.

5) During the panic, I did not try to lay on my back on the water, knowing salt water keeps you afloat without much movement necessary

6) Having friends with you is no benefit at all during such a situation. In fact, it's usually a bad thing, because everyone is fighting for their lives, and no one cares what they need to push down to pull themselves up.

Admittedly, we had had a few drinks and lots of food before we went in. Luckily we all survived, but we had all accepted the worst possible outcome. I was able to get out without a lifeguard, but needed to go call one for 2 of my friends who were in worse conditions than I was.

If you ever get stuck in a rip current, swim diagonally toward shore.
If you look in the center of the court you will notice the wear patterns. He explains that in the 80's there were more players rushing the net and relying on agility vs. raw power from the baseline.
Their terms and conditions specifically prohibit operating servers. They do not provide static ip and prohibit you from bringing your own ips.
They shouldn't be able to override a pingback URL if you're using encrypted URLs. The issue I'm finding is that many shopping carts and libraries aren't using encrypted URLs. :/
I like it. It has a nice ring to it.
How about starting with an html or Wordpress theme from themeforest (www.themeforest.com). You can get a decent one for $15-$40.
Thanks for the kind words! Documentation of the whole process is underway, including the lessons-learned along the way. "WakeMate: Origins" is a vast undertaking and I've only been here since January. The original founders have even more stories.
I'm the only one to blame for clicking on that techcrunch.com link, knowing it's not worth it.
ZooBurst Lets Kids Make Their Own AR Pop-up Book
Stephen Wolfram - Computation and the Future of the Human Condition
Think I'm reading too much into a CYA legal document?

Definitely not, without even reading your link. If it were "How to keep Them from suing you," I'd call it a CYA document. This, on the other hand, is "How to keep Us from suing you."
I hear the right security guard job can involve doing nothing but being there. Bring your laptop and do your thing on company time. As long as you look up once and while, you're OK. Not terribly well paid. The gigs most likely to involve doing nothing are at night - but you'd be able to develop at the same time.
A very useful time management technique for programmers. http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/
This has happened before to a few small businesses. Most notable was the family in Michigan (?) selling hot sauce. Likewise, they created a Reddit-only discount and then rode the lightning by reporting back with the sales figures. This just goes to show that proper usage of social media can be worthwhile if you spend the time to create value (and play into the community).

Edit: It was Legend Larry's from Wisconsin: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/aaaxe/reddit_i_h... and http://www.reddit.com/r/iama/comments/aff1u
Guess I'll stick with mesh networks and the barely-palatable porridge that SBC and Comcast are willing to give Detroit. We need some stimulus money up here.
Oh, no, they're not part of your in-game experience. They're part of your overall package you get for subscribing...but that's still part of the game. You don't HAVE to use it, but then again, you don't have to advertise your ICC craftables or do any guild recruitment on forums or talk in general realm discussion or submit bug reports either. Right? (But yes, I have hope that they'll at least make this separate from the forums in the future if they insist on this stupidity.) It's optional in the sense that you can probably go forever without ever posting once, but it's pretty unlikely for all kinds of reasons.
Yes, WoW is full of immature people who may use your real name to harass you (so is middle school). Getting harassed sucks. Maybe you're fearful enough of that possibility that you'll never post on the forums again. And maybe the forums are so important to you that you'll quit WoW without them. Those are perfectly legitimate ways to act, and I'm not arguing otherwise. As you said, it's your choice.

What I am saying is that it's not an invasion of your privacy for Blizzard's forums to be based on RealID; they are not "bad guys" for doing so. In addition, many people feel it's next to impossible to have reasonable discussions in the forums as they are right now, where otherwise-reasonable people create anonymous accounts for the sole purposes of trolling and spamming.
It should be possible to log when a customer calls through the (app-provided) phone number to the restaurant.

You could also offer to store a contact for the restaurant.

Google voice is free, each restaurant could use a call to GV as a way to track leads generated by your app.
A corollary is when it feels like you've just wasted a bunch of time, when in fact you got a lot of work done. A common example of this is when you spend 18 hours trying a dozen solutions to a very hard problem, with none of them working. At the end of it all you tend to feel like a failure because nothing worked, but in reality you went through the very necessary process of narrowing your solution space and learning about the problem.

I guess in general our emotion mechanisms misfire a lot.
There's also typically a big price difference between domestic and international bandwidth.

From just quickly glancing at the website, the 1Gbps is only for local servers, and they don't seem to guarantee any international bandwidth.
I'm sure this came from an old HN post but:

We'll See...
There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit.

"Such bad luck," they said sympathetically.

"We'll see," the farmer replied.

The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses.

"How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed.

"We'll see," replied the old man.

The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.

"We'll see," answered the farmer.

The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.

"We'll see" said the farmer.
I wonder if cooking falls under this category. I feel like I should do it to save money, but I wonder if I spent the time doing something better, I would have a net win.
don't get me wrong...I am proud of my ability to solder surface mount chips by hand. that said, certain SMT packages (FBGAs, LGAs) are pretty much impossible to solder by hand with a conventional iron.
I read that post twice and created an account just to leave a comment. What a brilliant guy--saves app developers from having to hack up their webservers to support their choice of backend AND provide incredible insight into (and granular control over) connections.
I think Writing to Learn by William Zinsser:

(http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Learn-William-Zinsser/dp/00627...)

would also be a good choice.
I get into the office around 10 to 10:30 (not mentioned in the article). So, leaving at 7:30 is around a 9 hour day (pretty reasonable I think). On some occasions I leave later (last Friday we were at the office until 11!), but that's certainly not every day.

Also, generally we don't work from the office on weekends any more.
DEFCON Hash Cracking Contest
Is anyone from HN going to DEFCON? There is a hash cracking contest this year that requires you to be present or "have a team member physically attending". I have some code that I'd like to try (basically to see how it compares to the other password crackers) but I'd need to work with someone who is attending in order to participate... anyone willing to submit my results and exchange a few emails? http://korelogic.com/defcon_2010-contest.html