skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's still a thousand transactions, in a very short order of time. Not too shabby.

Given your profile, I feel a little weird giving 'advice'; did both of those companies happen in the last 18 months?

Regarding NotaryCRM, I'd start by fixing the layout so that it renders properly in Safari; the signup button requires a horizontal scroll for me.

Don't sweat AJAX too much; it's a useful tool in the toolbox, but a lot of people go nuts on making everything load dynamically, which gets irritating really quickly.

Your contact page is a form; I don't know about other people, but this always puts me off a bit.
What is an application tracking tool? Are people searching for this type of product on google in any great volume?

If yes focus on seo with a little ppc in the short term. If not you will have to identify where your target market hang out and then work out how to get exposure there.
I've thought of free-will as related to computational complexity. A complex (e.g. NP-hard) problem is one that cannot be solved by an algorithm significantly simpler than brute force. Analogously, a "free-willed" human's actions cannot be modelled by anything significantly simpler than a full simulation of the human and its environment.

This definition hinges on predictability, not determinism. You can have a 'free-willed" human in a fully deterministic world, if no one has the computational power to predict his actions.
Regressive is the term used here for describing property taxes. While not entirely appropriate, for the sake of communication commonly agreed upon terminology is used by politicians and the media.

Yes, the taxation of property needs to be tied to market value, but it needs to be capped in some manner to prevent abuse. For example, pro-rating the tax against a sliding scale based on income.

The problem is that people get old. Bizarre concept, I know. Once people retire, their incomes tend to be fixed. As property tax rises uncontrolled (and unpredictably) year to year, the people that are the foundation of the community are forced out. Friends and neighbors leave - not because they want to - but because they have no choice. When the taxes on your home become 30%, 40% or more of your gross on the home you've lived in all your life, what do you do?

It still might not be so bad if new people moved in. However, if the taxes are too high home sales in a recession become difficult or impossible. Homes sit empty as people walk away from the properties. They become run-down, and the neighborhood degrades. To compensate for the loss of revenue, local government raises the tax rate continuing the cycle.
No problem, thanks for the article. I signed up for the Sokanu alpha, although I can't quite figure out what the product is.
YouTube - Moonwalk One, ca. 1970
Ask HN: What if Facebook released a "Status Update Open Search" API feature?
I think the game would change. Twitter would be somewhat doomed related to it's "Trending Topics" feature. It would be a huge leap for brands to study their market and targets since the user base of Facebook is so much bigger.
That is, from a practical perspective, that is more money than one could ever spend.

There are lots of things which cost more than a billion dollars which makes this statement false. Not individual items, of course, but buying a billion dollar railway is both possible and spending.

I don't think philanthropy (as in, charity) goes far enough. It isn't thinking big enough. Imagine what Buffet could do if he spent his fortune on a Manhatten Project for room temperature superconductors? He could nearly start a lunar colony for that money.

The fundamental reason the government can't do the same thing is because they would be voted out for 'wasting' money on speculative ivory tower wankery.

Anyway, so what if Bill Gates got lucky, this just sounds like sour grapes. Is he not allowed to get more lucky than you approve of? Whether he 'deserves' it is neither here nor there - it's a non question, like does he deserve two feet or to live past 30.

P.S. This is not for those who believe that the government can do nothing right

I'll just note that here in England, our recent government scandal is on what MPs had been taking from taxpayer money for their expenses. It included one MP expensing £1600 (>$2000) on an ornamental floating duck house.

They do a lot right, but just giving them money because they will magically spend it better than any normal person is not something I can go along with.
The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets (30 Tricks)
It’s great to see Windows 7 Beta finally released to the world! We’re very proud of what has been accomplished over the last months; in many ways, it sets a new quality bar for a beta operating system release. Building on top of the Windows Vista foundation, Windows 7 adds a great deal of polish and refinement to both the user interface and the underlying architecture, while at the same time introducing many new features and improvements that support new hardware, give power users and casual users alike better tools to manage their digital lives, and enable new classes of application experience.
>> I'm really skeptical of this new fashion of claiming that the US's worst problem is that our standards of healthcare are too damn high.

I don't think anyone is advocating lowering of standards. The Aravind Eye Care and similar success stories are all about innovation in the model of delivering healthcare. They excel in lowering costs through scale while ensuring high standards. The founder of Aravind was inspired by the process standardization of McDonald's and succeeded in replicating that in healthcare. The doctors at Aravind are actually considered to be among the best in the world simply because they perform far more surgeries than doctors elsewhere. Others like Narayana Hrudayalaya are replicating the model in areas like treatment of heart disease in India with great success. So, there's definitely room for process innovation which can improve the standards while reducing costs at the same time.
I generally "print to pdf" if I want a pdf of a page, or use the firefox screengrab plugin to make png images of full page-length (super-awesome!):

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146/
The right answer is -54767/66192, so whichever program said -.827 is probably right.

There was a good discussion on the list: http://groups.google.com/group/emerginglangs/browse_thread/t...

Basically if your language uses floats by default then it will get that challenge wrong, and if it uses fractions or arbitrary-precision decimals, then it'll get it right.
As far as I can tell, when people say the iPad is for consumption and not for creation, all they mean is it's hard to type on, at least compared to a full-sized physical keyboard. (In that sense, it's probably true, too.)
I think the difference between www.peerfx.com and currancyfair is that the later is already doing transactions peer to peer while according to peerfx they have not launched a p2p service yet. Maybe peerfx.com where too fast with a MVP.
Sencha Touch is a bizarre mish-mash
Google has two courses for Nooglers (I believe they were called "Life of a Query" and "Life of a dollar") which cover the search process from the perspective of both a user and advertiser down all the common branches, all the way to the metal, and back to the user. Despite being a strong engineer, I recall thinking "computers are magic".
Ask HN: How fast do you code?
I sometimes read reports of people "wrapping this in an evening" or "writing that during lunch". I don't consider myself a fast coder by any means, but it makes me wonder, as a student, whether there are certain expects of how fast (and how sloppily) things should be written by competent developers.
This is cool - I've not used illustrator, but it doesn't have a button with "Ok" or "Cancel" - I assume you can quickly create those in Illustrator and I also notice it doesn't have buttons which are grey - again, I assume you could create your own colour swatch.

Very neat though - do people think it would be quicker to wireframe in this or in HTML?
The real reason why consumers won't pay online
Hi. I don't really know the best way to do this, though I have thought about it over the years. I think things like Google Gears will be a big help with this sort of thing. But it should also be possible to write smart client-side libraries that let you you modify objects locally and only sync when they can. That would certainly be fine for new objects you create, and for tags you have control over, but would be more involved if you (and others) were offline changing tags over which you all had control. Those kinds of things tend to run into difficult issues - which is mainly why I say I don't know how to solve this (fully). Running a mini client-side FluidDB shouldn't be too hard, especially with things like sqlite being built into some browsers. But again, lots and lots of details.....
News like this keeps getting posted like it is a bad thing - but it isn't. At this rate everybody will have access to targeting drones soon, which will prevent plenty of wars as it will make it possible for even a third rate nation to target anyone, anywhere (outside of bunkers).

This is good news.
What other enterprises similar to AirBnB that aren't regulated?

Restaurants? Regulated.
Car rental? Regulated.
Retail? Regulated.
Banking? Regulated.
Hotels? Regulated.
Bed and Breakfasts? Regulated in the state of New York.
Bars? Regulated.
Movie Theaters? Regulated.

Name me one thing that isn't regulated, subject to zoning, subject to inspection, subject to fire and/or safety codes?

It isn't a matter of big government or whatever weird diatribe trip you are on, it's a question of consumer protection, it's a question of taxation, it's a question of safety and fire codes, and it's a question of the rights of other tenets living in the building to not be subject to a random rotation of people in their homes.

http://politifi.com/news/Students-young-professionals-duped-...

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2010/03/26/party_boy_bounced_f...
I would say that by the time he said this, his children already have their own businesses, acquired some good wealth of their own, and have been groomed well to run them (and as well as handle/invest money wisely)
As far as DB management, I don't buy the whole Rails kool-aid as far as DB constraints go. I still develop constraints, set up foreign keys, and hack around AR when it's expedient to do so. AR is marvelous at solving 90% of the standard boring CRUD without any headache, but it isn't a silver bullet, and you can still shoot yourself in the face performance-wise with it. Don't be afraid to overstep its bounds when necessary, but don't prematurely optimize, either.

I've worked in CakePHP since learning Rails, and I have to say that more than anything, it makes me really dislike PHP as a language. The framework is pretty decent, but Ruby is so flexible and malleable that it really makes working in PHP painful.
The key is a long cast to a string, and the value is an int. So 2.23GB of data became 24GB. Quite a large loss factor there.

Calculation the load capacity seems like it should be a trivial exercise and shouldn't require a test it approach.
This roadmap looks pretty nice! I actually jumped right into Rails without knowing any Ruby, but I didn't have too many problems. That's probably because I'd been programming in other languages for years, and I had a good book. Still, some of the stops on this roadmap look interesting and I'll probably run over it myself. Nanoc and Sinatra look interesting, and I never did give Heroku a try.

By the way, has anyone else noticed that "nanoc" is "Conan" backwards?
> One caveat is often the audio and subtitles will vary (e.g. tu vs vous); I'm not sure why they do this.

I'm not sure of the reason behind this, but there are also often minor differences in the English audio and subtitles of films, even when the film was originally recorded in English.
I agree that language influences way of thinking. In Russian language words (verbs, nouns, etc.) often can freely swap their position in sentence without changing meaning of the sentence (just slightly changing emphasis). Questions usually are made using intonation only. English has very rigid structure when verbs, nouns and other parts must be put in a certain order. This results in clear, sharp and unambiguous way of expressing thoughts typical for english-speakers, that always amazes me (native russian).
Good news as long as it really reduces the number of civilian deaths and reduces the number of all out wars.

But if it makes first-strikes easier and cheaper, it could actually help start more conflicts where one side would have otherwise folded before an armed confrontation ever took place, but now decided that they can cheaply stay in the fight.
Types of Comments to Avoid Making when Programming
Exactly, with the BASIC in my Spectrum (1984) I was able to draw over the whole screen in full resolution (at that time even the very "bitmapped" screens were novelty, other computers had special regime for drawings and another for letters -- Mac, who broke that, came only in 1984, PC users stopped using text modes only with Windows, which got popular only around 1990) -- one single statement to draw the line, one single statement to draw the circle... to put that in the loop you needed only two lines more, or you could even write it in the same line. And no special editor needed, you just type, press Enter, and the result appeared immediately. And no icons, no toolbars, title bars... Command, result. Or a few lines of program, result. Try now to draw something. Try to produce the sounds of notes with it. It was simple, now it's not, that's why it's not THAT.
It's sad that it's so hard these days to do some basic stuff, like only a few typed words to draw something etc.
Today even languages that should be simple aren't. Import libraries, reference modules, only to evaluate abs(-2)? Failure of modern language incarnations...
I agree with this quote from the link:

>>> Moreover building a hash over an Array object is potentially dangerous. If anyone extends Array.prototype with enumerable properties (as, for example, the Prototype.js library does) these will be read in during for…in iterations, wreaking havoc with your logic (or at least requiring you to make use of the clunky hasOwnProperty method). Build hashes over Object and nothing else, since by convention Object.prototype is not augmented.
I could really use some help with http://freeciv.net, if you want to participate in an open source web game. Please get in touch if you are interested!
How is indentation relevant in any of the items I listed?

I think the key is to quickly get to something that does something interesting and can be changed in minor ways.
Agreed. Even worse are the comments talking about how difficult Mandarin/Chinese is to learn compared to English, so let's just stick to Spanish and French. Well, I wonder just how many people learned English or a similar language as their first language. Some people fluent in some languages are going to find another that is completely different to be difficult. Welcome to reality. (Although if my high school foreign language classes were any indication, similarity of languages was something most people had a very hard time grasping...only a few could see that Spanish/French/Portuguese had some things in common and took advantage of that to learn languages faster. We had a mandatory Spanish 1/French 1 freshman year curriculum, and some people just struggled the whole year long and chose the language they struggled with less for the next year.)

> In this day and age of internationalization, exposure to a variety of cultures beyond what's within walking distance is extremely important.

My first languages were English and Korean, and I had no difficulty whatsoever in a couple semesters' worth of Mandarin classes, and I'd like to think I can hold some kind of basic conversation in Mandarin and understand basic written Chinese text. The downside of trying to use my knowledge though, is realizing just how little i18n/L10n support there is in applications out there (for starters...TextMate completely fails because it assumes fixed-width - see http://img.skitch.com/20100724-kcjdt411djee6u59p4pc9x5qe6.jp...). If for that reason only, hackers should care :)

For what it is worth, I've taken a bunch of language courses just for the hell of it. Languages intrigue me, even if I never end up speaking it ever again (ask me how often I speak Spanish in Los Angeles....never...). I never did it for any economic advantage, I'm probably never going to spend more than a week of my life in China as a tourist, but it's interesting. I can walk around in Chinatown and understand what signs say, I know how to address people correctly, et cetera. That's all.
You can't say, "Oh, this library has that feature!" Thats not good enough. It has to be built-in, not optional, core to the language

CPAN is core to the Perl language and deliberately so. If you don't like this ethos then Perl isn't a "language" you should consider.
The Many Lives of Frédéric Bourdin
https://launchpad.net/launchpad-project/ always needs help and is a great project to work on.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1513929
I think you're taking a bit of a leap with what I said. I'm not saying it's only the idea that is important at all, I'd be the first to argue that ideas are actually worth next to nothing by themselves. What I was trying to say was that their idea and their implementation are solid -- specifically I'm saying the part of the implementation that counts is solid. Server infrastructure problems are a minor detail compared to the app itself IMO.

And to the last part about the mashable article... I would absolutely say that article is 'severely dating' itself. Twitter isn't going anywhere (again IMO) and some server problems aren't going to change that. In a year that article will be a slightly less embarrassing "no one will ever need more than 640k of memory" piece of writing.
Defcon. Las Vegas. It's later this week.

http://www.defcon.org/
Who knows, in the end the uberhyped old spice campaign might have lost them customers, whereas the despised Dr Pepper campaign might bring a huge boost of sales.
This is one option: http://pdftohtml.sourceforge.net/
David Mark? Sounds familiar... Ah, here we go:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993300
I agree with most of what you said, but why is random rotation of people is bad for other tenants.

Also, isn't this a part of what New York is? I'd love to live in this city for a month or two or what is possible on a visa, but this will make such dream impossible.
I read the page, and don't disagree with the conclusions.
The myth has already been sufficiently clubbed to death.
But if by extension this topic invites us to ask how much energy there actually is, there are some things missing from the analysis. The distinction between farts that burn and those that won't is a huge variation. In the case of farts that don't burn, the easily extracted power may be only what a micro-turbine could produce.

I'm not sure why my comment got negative ratings. It wasn't meant as a troll or flamebait and opens a related area of scientific analysis to the topic.

I think it would also be interesting to ask what could be potentially powered by farts? Is it possible to make a thin fuel cell in underwear that can produce some power? What useful things might be run with the expected amount?

To whoever down-modded me... please try to be a little more open-mined. Otherwise a fart in your general direction...
I assume that this is like, e.g., Taleo or CATS. If so, you're lucky because most of the competition sucks. Unfortunately, switching costs are high.

I would suggest Adwords and/or SEO, depending on whether or not you have free time. For Adwords, you can probably A/B test your way into getting whatever audience you're targeting (in-house, individuals, big companies, etc.). SEO is more time-consuming, of course, but it can get you a ton of credibility. Links are endorsements; getting a link from ere.net will boost your rankings and impress recruiters you talk to.

Actually, shoot me an email. I used to be a recruiter, and I currently do online marketing. We should discuss this!
listening to the women that sewed the suits worn by the astronaut, I can't help but think of the virtues that made this accomplishment possible.
How to Write Great Microcopy - http://huffduffer.com/thinkvitamin/22025

Basecamp landing page breakdown - http://www.unmatchedstyle.com/gallery/basecamphqcom.php

Using your Sign-Up Form as your Qualifier - http://bokardo.com/archives/using-your-sign-up-form-as-a-qua...

Mike McDermott talks Web App Marketing Metrics - http://carsonified.com/blog/business/mike-mcderment-of-fresh...

Seven Steps to Remarkable Customer Service - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html

Obviously there are alot more but these are the ones I've saved in Evernote to go back to.
Build Web Apps for iPhone using Dashcode
Just use Mouse, a lighter Moose. Or use Any::Mouse (whichever is installed).
... I haven't seen anything like this for iPhone and its great that it is free.

This is roughly equivalent to Cocos2d for iPhone. Cocos2d is also being ported to Android.
It is more, because the cost is incurred when you try to exercise your rights. The GPL allows costs to obtain the work in the first place. Otherwise there could be no GPL for software that runs on computers that cost money.

Once the costs are incurred for obtaining the work, there can only be nominal charges for replacing the LGPL covered library (cost of media, for example, is ok).
Thanks!

I think that if you have prior web development experience, you can just jump right into Rails. If you have prior programming experience but not web experience, I would visit the HTML/CSS/DNS/JavaScript section of the roadmap. If you have no programming experience, then I would recommend the full roadmap.
> You're wrong.

No actually i'm right.

> and I can't think of how that could be considered "patronizing".

the part where bill gates accumulates wealth through computer technology, and where computer technology depends on minerals mined under slave labor conditions, or devices put together in sweatshops, and then he gets lauded for "donating" what he dispossessed those people of.

that would be one of many patronizing threads to this story, for example.

> The most productive people in society should be rewarded accordingly,

the non-linear returns of capitalist accumulation do not reward people "accordingly".
A bit more language meditation
This just isn't true. Generally the most popular comments here are the most valuable. Not always, but it certainly correlates well. I certainly wouldn't want comments ordered randomly.
Ask HN: Where are the hackers?
Hello HNers,

I shifted to bay area couple of months ago from Boulder, CO. During my grad school years at Boulder, I used to see/meet lot of people in coffee shops, restaurants, etc. Although, I never worked on the same problem as them but it was fun discussing with them about their next web app or open source application.

Before shifting to San Jose/Santa Clara, I was expecting to see 100x times people I saw in Boulder. But unfortunately I have seen very very few of them here. Am I visiting wrong places?

So here is my question: Which places (coffee shops, sandwich places, etc) do you guys prefer in and around bay area?
Doesn't look anything like how a browser renders it. I'll just use a PDF print driver.