skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just because you are not aware of what is being used, does not mean that it is not used. Scala startups: KaChing (follow http://twitter.com/eishay for more info, he talks a lot about the Lean startup practises on Kaching as well) and Etherpad (wave-like product, bought by google last year). Eishay also gave a great hint for startups looking for scalable technologies: http://twitter.com/eishay/statuses/20478841811

Flightcaster, which is funded by YCombinator, uses clojure and Ruby on heroku (more on their infoq profile: http://www.infoq.com/articles/flightcaster-clojure-rails).

Most startups are not actually vocal about what they use. Most of them actually are not heard, so they could be as vocal as they wanted and still noone would hear them.
Just out of curiosity, is there any new progress in the collision discovery of SHA1? Can you provide some references so that I can dig into?
A body caught on Google Street View?
Facebook Rejects Google/Verizon Neutrality Proposal
Scaling a voice app that goes viral
John Carmack demos Rage on iPhone
What about genetic algorithms? We are starting to be able to co-evolve drugs and bacteria in computer simulations, allowing us to simulate future battles ahead of time.

Certainly the bacteria have an immense amount of computing power at their disposale... their evolution is being developed and tested in a massively parallel way. We will likely never have the computing resources they do...

But their search is quite random. We have the ability to target specifically promising scenarios and focus our limited computing resources on solving those.

And we also have the advantage of being able to analyze hypothetical scenarios. The bacteria can respond to what's happening now, but we can respond to what might happen in the future.

Not to mention the fact that we're just plain bigger, and have "cheat codes" like "use soap and water to wash the bacteria off your hands" that don't require antibiotics at all.

Not saying we're not in a precarious position, just that we have some advantages on our side of the fight.
The stock market is ownership of various kinds of assets. The demand for those assets will change. However, it is world-wide. And, there are income producing assets. Folks are saying "I'd rather have an iPad than $400 even though I know that that ipad costs only $35 to make".

T bills are a claim on future US tax revenue. That's very different.
You're missing the point. The genius of the iPod, and the reason it neatly destroyed all of its competitors for years, was that it offloaded complexity, like adding music and editing metadata, to a general-purpose computer. The only things the iPod did were things it was good at.

Whether such complexity belongs on a general-purpose computer or in the cloud is orthogonal to the choice Apple made, which is to put the complexity not-on-the-device.
This is getting ridiculous.

Demand Media is negative because they used their money to acquire perpetuities (aka. cash-cow niche content sites). What do you think happens when they stop acquiring sites?

Profits.
I am, among other things, pwelch@gmail.com.

Of course, this means that every Patrick, Patricia, Pedro, Paul, or Penelope Welch who leaves a numeral or something off their email address thinks they are pwelch@gmail.com. Or one of their colleagues or friends thinks they are pwelch@gmail.com.

Long story made short, some idiot set up a Paypal account on my email address and now I can't get it off. I've contacted Paypal and nothing came of it.
Is there any protection against software piracy?
Wikipedia has branching now in the form of "approved revisions", and it has a lot of long standing TODOs like annotate that would be solved by a SCM.

The storage backend for articles is its own mini-scm with a revision table + text storage. There's no reason why a Git based backend would be any worse of a fit for a wiki.
What release? It's another blog post.
> I'm sure your microlanguage is superintuitive to you, because you wrote it, but I, as a new coder on your code, don't want to learn it.

I'm sure your API is superintuitive to you, because you wrote it, but I, as a new coder on your code, don't want to learn it.

I'm sure your library is superintuitive to you, because you wrote it, but I, as a new coder on your code, don't want to learn it.
The article answers the question:

"Adjusted to OIBDA - or adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization expense - show the company made $36.8 million in 2009"

As noted otherwise here on the board, they are profitable sans aquisitions and related expenses.
Well, this isn't a totally new thing for Android; it's more an expansion of the voice recognition capability Google's already been adding into the system for some time now.

I'll be perfectly honest -- my gut reaction is to agree with you. That said, I've been surprised by how many people I've encountered that talk about how much they love using voice-to-text for things like sending SMSes while driving.
One thing that people seem to be forgetting with this whole Google-Verizon net neutrality cluster is that companies are here to make money – not to help consumer

Helping a consumer is the number one most effective way to make money.

In that sense, companies that don't exist to help consumers are usually replaced by those that do. This is the business cycle.
MIT's "Copenhagen Wheel" transforms ordinary bicycles into hybrid e-bikes
Whoa, dude. What a case of a kettle calling the pot black. You've just said that: you are befuddled and sickened by my post, everything I write is wrong, my post is bizarre, my opinions are tinfoil hat and too silly to be true, I have an utter misunderstanding of the stock market, I am confused about basic accounting concepts, and finally, how dare I express my opinion.

Add to that how you open your posts. I started my response to you with, I think you are making some very valid arguments however I disagree with the principle of your position. You started your 2 responses to me with, There's all kinds of things wrong with what you said, and Your post reads like it belongs on Seeking Alpha, with its mixture of bizarre rhetoric and utter misunderstanding of the stock market.

Do you see the difference? I acknowledged, even complimented, your arguments, and expressed a personal difference of opinion. You on the other hand, started both responses with a categorical judgement that I am ignorant, wrong about everything, and crazy to boot.

And you think I have e-rage? For real?

Ok, on to more reasonable conversation.

First, I did not mean "recession" when I said "devaluation". Why would you take a word I actually used and say that I meant a different word? What I wrote was, I am not the biggest authority on the stock market but is there not a clear consensus that the current devaluation was caused by.... Which part of "stock market" was "not obvious"?

Second, of course I did not compare not getting free money to rape. Again, you've completely twisted my words (especially since I apologized for the dramatic comparison ahead of time). My point was, blaming investors who become victims of accounting fraud is similar to blaming rape victims. In both cases, the focus is shifted from the crime onto the carelessness of the victim and I think that that's wrong.
That's the best thing about having a nephew, the Legos.
> We don't get to hear their side of the story. The customer has no idea what's going on. That's a pretty bad business practice.

That is the problem with pay pal. Dealing with them is like dealing with a roach motel: data and money go in, but nothing comes out. A sign of how abusive they are is that you cannot get a telephone number for them. There is no one you can call. No one you can send a certified/registered letter. Everything has to be via email.
Ask HN: Unmetered hosting, anyone?
Hello! Anyone tried "unmetered" hosting services, such as nqhost.com? If so, what were your impressions? What are the average download/upload speeds? I can only imagine such a model with a bandwidth limit (explicit or not), after which we are talking at most of kbps, right? But even assuming low speeds, did you find the service to actually be available consistently?

Thanks!
I don't understand why people equate Google winning or losing with its net neutrality stance. Google has been hugely successful on the net. Surely it would be in their interest to not have net neutrality and to have their traffic favored over competitors, but they're not advocating that. I really don't follow your argument.
My problem is that the code linked in the article looks ugly as hell. Even the micro-language created.

Compare this ...

(filter (and (< :table1/a 5) (= :table1/b "x")) (collect :table1))

To this ...

from row in table1
where row.a < 5 and row.b == "x"

Also, compare this ...

(collect :projects :invoices [:projects/id :projects/name
(as :inv_id :invoices/id) :invoices/date])

To this ...

from proj in projects
from inv in invoices
select { proj.id, proj.name, inv_id => inv.id, inv.date }

For me the ideal programming language would be one readable by humans.
I'm thinking of filing an IPO. I mean, I'm more profitable than that, I actually make money, and maybe I could make a lot more if I had some more.

Apparently, any person with some public credibility(?) can pull that off.
Ask HN: Your thoughts on co-registration / CPL monetization schemes?
Just got off a project for a guy who makes a LOT of money off of co-registration schemes (aka on signup, user is served a CPA / Cost Per Lead ad). Have any HNers have worked on coreg monetized sites?
Binding a 120k software developer to a desk is expensive when you only need them for a few months out of the year. The rest of the time a 50k developer would do just fine.
That is a novel solution to the issue of malicious, or at least irrelevant commands.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-04-24/

(while searching for that comic, I found coverage of a MS speech recognition issue, whereby malicious sound recording could speak commands...)
But are you complaining about Lisp syntax in general, or this DSL implemented using Lisp macros in particular?
So you are saying that each search result page are handwritten by Google editors?

Of course they are not, they are simply re-published snippets of the websites along and Google surrounds the results with ads.

While it's a symbiotic relationship that most websites want - sharing their content for placement in Google's webpages - it's not necessarily universal and ROBOTS.TXT is hardly a "contract" covering your data's usage.
You didn't even begin to address my question, you just threw out a bunch of hand-wavey silliness about how "ownership" and "assets" makes everything ok.

What happens to the prices of those assets when the baby boomers retire and are pulling out more money than there are young workers putting in? You have the same problems as SS. What if we had all of that SS money in the market? It'd be a disaster.
You used to look like a giant dork checking your calendar on a PalmPilot.
Being "around women or trying to meet women" does not imply a serious relationship, so I think the standards are a bit lower there.
Computer Assisted Jenga (or tension tower)
As anamax points out, you could say the same thing about a well designed anything, so this isn't an argument against languages, so it isn't an argument at all. It reminds me of how most of the objections people make to macros apply just as well to functions.
UC Berkeley waters down DNA testing
I love this community. Thanks
Eh??? Paying for a faster connection??? What are you trying to say? That if I own a website then it's ok to be charged money by an ISP to get an extra chunk of the last mile to the user???
Admitting ignorance is opening up the cap on your personal store of knowledge, providing an opportunity for new knowledge to flow in. If you always pretend you are always right, never wrong, and never ignorant of anything then you will keep that cap sealed up tight and you will have far fewer opportunities to add new knowledge.
Does this thing work as well as he makes out? If so, very cool.
Science and the Compulsive Programmer
Wow, someone has a Stephen Wolfram-sized ego going on there.
I was really disappointed that this article was yet another iPhone article (don't get me wrong - love my iPhone 4) and not about Mad Men.
You can do that with the Nexus One in the US, but people don't. Possibly because the carriers try their damndest to make sure nobody knows about it.
Could you clarify what you mean? You'd like to write a book about GitHub?
My girlfriend is a chemical engineer. We both try to talk to one another about what excites us about our work. When she starts talking about nanotech materials, she can't help throwing in a lot of technical jargon that fly over my head. She's always good about thinking of an analogy that I can understand. On the flip side, she rarely has trouble understanding what I do as a web programmer. I think the fact that her work involves all this sci-fi future black magics makes it a little harder to explain.

I love having that we have such 2 distinct passions in life. Sure, there's some overlap in engineering, but the subject matters are totally different. As a result of what she does, I get to travel to where her research takes her and meet people with backgrounds completely different from myself. It's freaking awesome.

The 2 of us are moving down to Pasadena next month because she's starting at Caltech. It's a bummer to leave the Bay Area, but I'm excited about our new adventures.
There seems to be a lot "how tos" that are just slightly expanded help documents.

TLDR; RTFM: http://api.jquery.com/category/selectors/basic-filter-select...
Or they could have missed the possibility that the originally claimed "equities premium" never existed.

As I recall, many claims of a historical equities premium vanished when the listing and de-listing of stocks was taken into account.
I wont believe that it is as accurate as the video portrays until I see it with my own eyes.
Speaking as Oracle consultant, very often you have no clue how much work is going to be there until you are there.
We are very lucky if management actually listens to what you need. Which is often very simple things such as fix reoccuring errors, upgrade components that keep crashing, put decent monitoring in place, make sure the backup strategy makes sense and test the backups.

I've been in situations where I was contracted for 30 hours to "just help us deploy X", discovered what the database looks like and have been able to upgrade my contract to 300 hours of upgrades, monitors, automation, backup verifications, etc.

I can see how this looks like a contractor trying to create lots of work, but all this work did have good reasons behind it.

I have to sell my rationale for extra work to the customer and it is not always trivial. Often it is easier to say "well, its your data, its not like its my problem that your backups are untested", but I wouldn't be in this business if I didn't care about data being safe.

I completely agree that contractors are more focused than employees on getting the job done well.

Once I've overheard two developers talk about me: "Well, of course Gwen is always cheerful and always happily does what we ask, she's a contractor - thats how they do their marketing.".
I'm proud of cheerfully and competently doing my job. I'm always wondering why many full-time DBAs act like they are doing you a favor when they create indexes, clone production to development and generally do what they were hired to do.
How more and more women have an inflated sense of fabulousness
Some hedge funds have reduced the maintenance fee and increased the carry because they could count on continuing success.
I do really like that iTunes keeps a complete backup of my phone. It could probably be done over the cloud someday but it backs up everything even the read/unread status of text messages, icon placement, settings, etc. Everything.
Carmack's ego is well deserved.
I would be stunned and amazed if e-ink readers were NOT $99 this Christmas.

Hell, I bet next (2011) Christmas you'll be able to get them for free (eg. buy 1 Kindle for $100 and get a $100 e-book gift card free). The money's in the content.
See http://paulgraham.com/progbot.html
>1) Never solely rely on PayPal for your income.

This is VERY important to remember. If your business is making a good chunk of change a month you should be able to afford the card card processing fee your self. Get a REAL bank account, preferable somewhere local so you can go in and talk face-to-face with a person if an issue arises- more likely to get results this way. It's also easier for you to get scammed by scammers with paypal, not so much with a real bank as they will fight for you.

I am not saying, "never use paypal". As your business grows and matures make sure the way you handle your finances does as well. If you are able to process cards yourself you can also sell that service to other people or use it in another business venture. Build your empire, not someone else's.

Also hire/lease accountants. If you must use paypal for business ventures buy the business account. A lot of stories I've heard were from people who still used a personal account for their business.
When a supposedly whole-hearted net neutrality supporter flips overnight to a watered-down proposal with the fastest-growing market excluded from consideration, you have to question whether they have any credibility at all. Particularly when their partner in crime is the number one enemy of net neutrality and someone Google is almost entirely dependent on for Android's success.
Credit Counseling
But for people without that specific psychosis, they're pretty good rules.
A LTE release might be good for exclusivity, especially if it means the iPhone being the first LTE-enabled phone. Uncongested airwaves for first comers. They could also put in a dual-band radio; IIRC the Evo has one for where WiMax isn't available.
Both I think.

I'd like a language that lets me define syntax that's readable by kids with basic english/math skills.

From the languages I've tried, Boo came closest to that, but the error messages it throws are awful, and development seems to have stagnated. Maybe Perl6 will be that language, who knows?

Haskell also seems to have a macro-system, but I wouldn't call Haskell a language readable by kids.
Carmack is the 3D engine GOD. There is no-one like him.

Seeing that, on an iPhone, holy crap. I'd love to see what it's like on an iPad (as he nicely describes for us).
But can the sql be made to work w/ a non-sql storage engine? The lisp code facilitates this abstraction while raw sql is just that.
I highly recommend Steven Levy's book, The Perfect Thing, for a more in-depth look at the iPod. Levy did a mini article-ized version of his book for Wired a few years ago:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/ipod.html
I was thinking the same thing. A bit strange to see gruber using an euphemism here (if that's what I think it is -- a jones for LTE?)
Chuck Moore has said almost exactly this about Forth. I think this is a property shared between all the low-syntax, high-power languages, including Forth, Lisp, Smalltalk, Lua, etc. But the downside is that there is an inevitable tooling issue where you can achieve concise constructions that read well, but the language and development environment don't "really know" what's going on in the problem domain's microlanguage and can't enforce the concepts or help to debug in the ways a specialized language implementation can. And so as your needs get bigger and you want to make a polished, easy-to-use package, you inevitably drift from libraries, to macros and meta-programming, to data files, and then towards the full parser/compiler/interpreter gamut.
A close friend of mine works on a medium sized site that does this. A few of my thoughts:

* They seem to make a good amount of money selling leads (for example to moving companies, consolidations loans, etc).

* They drive traffic through SEM, but this has proven difficult recently because Google drives down Quality Scores for lead-gen and affiliate sites (I believe they call them non-value-add sites) which has made it harder and harder to stay profitable and competitive with original vendors.

* It's hard to get much traction in other channels (SEO, Affiliates, Media) -- so they tend to be dangerously tied to one marketing vehicle -- Google SEM.

* The whole area seems to have a bit of shady undertone to it, and I'm not sure my friend really gets much satisfaction out of it -- he'll probably be leaving shortly even though the pay is good.
HN bug?
Why is Intridea so awesome? Seriously, they make the most useful Ruby gems.
I read their financial statements with interest. They have a charge in the $2X million range for the latest year for amortization of non-tangible property. Here's some semi-informed speculation for you: when you or I buy a domain name for $8.95 a year, we can generally get away with deducting 100% of that on our taxes for this year (IRS guidance is unclear and, hey, nobody cares about 30% of $8.95). When you buy a domain name portfolio for $40 million, all of a sudden the accountants get cautious about rules. One cautious treatment of that purchase is to treat the $40 million as a capital investment and amortize it over a period of years.

This is based on the assumption that capital improvements, like say a factory, have a certain defined useful life, and that spreading out the cost over the useful life of the capital improvement gives a better picture of the actual state of the company.

The problem with amortization for domain names is that domain names don't really have a useful life and, to the extent that they depreciate, they depreciate negatively. The economics of large domain portfolios that are not just garbage and virtually any developed domain means that the domain gets more valuable over time. They also can be maintained, indefinitely, for a pittance per year.

What this means concretely for Demand Media is that when they buy a property -- let's say SchmeeNow for $10 million based on their current revenue of $500k a year -- they book 10 years of $1 million accounting charges. That will help to decrease their apparent profits for the next 10 years, but in those years the money will not be actually leaving their pockets (modulo quirky financing deals which sometimes happen in the high-end domain market).

Software is dealt with in a similar fashion, although I think software tends to be closer to factories in terms of having a measurable useful lifespan.

The above comment ignores Demand Media's single risk factor, which is that there are probably a few dozen people in Mountain View which could, given management approval, end their company with a mouse click.
We use Password Safe http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/ in DropBox shared between my husband and myself.
Gmail in china gets hacked by Chinese government?
Personal finance on a napkin
Entertaining, but after reading a few articles from this site, I feel like this commenter sums things up pretty well:

> According to you, everything is narcissistic and there is no possible way for anyone to avoid being a narcissist. You may as well complain about people drinking water or sleeping. (http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/08/narcissism_run_rampan...)
"Look at him, he loves it...Just like it said in the encyclopedia!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ4B7G8Rw3Q
[nsfw language]
Same. I thought it was about Betty Draper :(
Ask HN: shareholder registry (shares + options) 
A question to all the startup companies out there:

What software program or system do you use to track company shares and employee options? I've used Excel to date, but it's somewhat difficult to ensure accuracy, print out statements, and ensure everything is proper.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.