skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yahoo finance (last year) had 20 million unique readers. That probably gives you an idea of the scale of how many people are individual investors or interested in investing.

http://gigaom.com/2009/07/16/yahoos-number-ones-so-much-more...
Infrastructure? What infrastructure?

http://almacz.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/living-in-eire/
I wrote something up about this a short while ago, hopefully some of it is some use (I particularly like using the Facebook Ads data to estimate market size - it's easy, accurate and free):

http://contentini.com/web-app-strategy-why-market-research-i...
Google wanted Firefox to succeed as much as Mozilla needed the money basically, they backed them as a standard-compliant, opensource alternative to IE, they even advertised them on the homepage back then.
Yes, I see the drama you're talking about here: you're saying, "Oracle could put the screws to most web software companies by forcing them to open source their app code".

Because of the way MySQL works, that's almost certainly not true. But stipulate that it is for a second, and, what's your point? Stallman agrees with Oracle here. Web software companies are ripping other developers off by building apps derived in part from free software but keeping their own code closed.

I don't share Stallman's outlook, but I see where it's coming from.
In that case maybe the foreword is half of the book.
The Best Circuit Diagram Ever
Developers and users could just switch to the last MySQL version released under the GPL and keep using it and maintaining them separate from Oracle. Drizzle is such a derivative, pure GPL, fully independent from Oracle.

Free software is software cannot be killed or highjacked.
Both SSDs where from Patriot.
If you're running an insecure version of Firefox on a shared network at a security conference, the security implications of Firefox auto-update are the least of your concerns.
...or don't just live in the Mission.

Honestly, most of the Mission has those kinds of social issues - and to choose to live there is to choose to accept (and embrace) them ...

* Homeless and crazy people around the BARTS and most of the Mission St corridor,

* Sureños and Norteños turf battles around 21 street

* The projects in the middle

* Drunken hipster fucks riding around with pointless fixie bikes with no breaks and no gears (dude, didn't you study physics at school? can't you see we have hills in SF?)

Where in Mission can you live without any of these issues before you are getting into Noe Valley, Bernal Heights or Potrero?
A webapp storing data in a version of MySQL licensed under AGPL is not touched by its license and needs not to disclose its source code.
Warning: Mini Rant

It's funny that out of nowhere, all these ruby developers jump on the band wagon after reading a few blog posts. Then they immediately complain about it being so terrible.

The original version of vi was written in 1976.
The first version of vim was released in 1991.

The 19/34 year old defaults of vim/vi aren't good enough for the hipster rubyists. However they seemed to be just fine for the hundreds or even thousands of systems developers and hackers who developed the foundation for the systems the take for granted. Rubyists are the loudest, most complaining, annoying group of egotistical developers to have ever existed. Vim is an editor, not emacs, not Textmate. There is no reason to use it or blog about it, or utter it's name if you don't think it fit's your work flow. Really, 99% of people don't care about your opinion on vim at all.

Also a small observation:
Every Textmate user I have ever met (who all also happen to be rubyists) depends too much on "bundles" and snippet features.
> You can see some good results of that in Xcode4.

No, I can't. It's proprietary and probably won't ever be ported to my platforms. This kind of crap is why I don't contribute to BSDL projects unless I'm being well paid.
Phone needs to be rooted with cyanogen mod.
I use one of the salt crystal rocks for deodorant, you wet it and rub it around on your pits, it works by far better than anything else I've tried for eliminating odor, especially in warm humid climates.
While the author of this paper does not appear to be a crank, nowhere in the entire paper does it discuss why the fundamental barriers of naturalization, algebrization, and relativization don't apply to the work, making it seem unlikely that those barriers have actually been overcome.
I would think Zurich would be pretty good for the following reasons:

* ETH (availability of talent from a good computer science research university)

* Good transportation alternatives (you can get a direct flight to/from Zurich from/to most major airports, direct high speed trains are also available to France and Germany)

* Business friendly tax rates (relative to other European countries)

* Switzerland, in general, has high quality of life

Side note, Google has a sizable office in Zurich and is able to attract and keep talent from both Western and Eastern Europe.
I meant "why". I thought that was obvious from how I asked my question.
Will Chrome updates go through a caching web proxy if one is configured?
I understand this. Which part of this particular Gruber post was new, interesting, analytical, etc? It was repetition of news that surely everywhere here is aware of, along with Gruber's double think to explain that an antenna antenuating when touched is not a fundamental flaw of an antenna.

"seeing what other HN-ers opinions are on Grubers posts does interest me".

This seems exceeding obvious at this point, the comments are nearly identical on any of Gruber's latest posts.
The Individual Plan is $59/mo and the family plan you're on is $79/mo.
Any similarities with these?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=638026

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=440180

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=351903
I've had an HTC Wildfire for a couple of months and love it. It's basically a smaller version of the Desire. I develop on it too. It works fine. Best phone I've ever had by some margin.
I think I've read every single thread on the subject, but they either don't apply to me or have conflicting/vague information. Here's a few for reference for anyone else researching a move:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1510553

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65936

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=54034

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=102933
Ask HN: Automatic memoization, is there a language that does this?
Hello HN,

Is there to any of your knowledge a language that automatically memoizes the results of functions, for instance by storing a hash of the functions name and parameters to the function in order to speed up the execution of programs?

I mean this not as in a bolt-on or a hack but native to the language itself.
Well, first, most of those are very old. Second, did any of those actually innovate? My personal opinion of Word is that it was great as a Mac application, through version 5.1, and has been shit ever since; I refuse to use it, after too many horribly frustrating experiences. Excel killed off superior spreadsheets, and is arcane and needlessly difficult to use. MSN and now Bing get market share just by being the default in Windows; not sure that says much about them.

The problem (from my consumer perspective) is that Microsoft’s existence (at least for the last 15 years) doesn’t result in any products that are fundamentally better than those that would have been around anyway. The comparison to Apple (the original topic here) is like night to day.
http://code.google.com/p/nacl-llvm-branches/
There's a really nice microkernel OS out there that you can play around with, it's called QnX, unfortunately it's not open source. QnX is huge in the embedded world, but it also runs on x86.
There's a weekly Muni pass, though it's harder to find and intended for tourists.

http://www.sfmta.com/cms/mfares/passports.htm

BART has no passes, but if you pay $10 extra for a monthly Muni pass, it'll work on BART within the city (only). That's what I did before I decided the mission was too grim'n'gritty.

To the original poster: Muni buses are notoriously unpredictable, as in sometimes they just don't show up and the next one is filled to capacity. Muni trains are pretty reliable (except for some complaints that the N-Judah can turn back before the outer sunset), and BART runs like clockwork (off grade FTW).
Please: one new design (by the French :-) is having teething troubles (at best), exacerbated by starting or trying to start construction of additional reactors before the first is fully designed and licensed (the two go together) let alone operational hardly supports the leading question that makes the title of this item.
Both of my officemates got the N900 right when in came out in the US. They were very happy with it for the first month or so. They are now very jealous of my Nexus One. I think mostly because of the app selection and overall phone quality.

I have been running Linux exclusively since the late 90's and considered a Maemo phone, but decided to go with Android because I thought that it would have much more momentum and my phone using life would be easier.
Ask HN: Resources for creating a pro forma?
I'm about to start fund-raising for my startup, which means we're going to need some financial projections. (We're pre-revenue.) I know the basics—start with your core assumptions, see how they play out, think of it as a learning exercise, etc.—but I'd like to know more specifics. For instance, how should I go about estimating fundamental numbers like the cost of customer acquisition?

I'd really like to see some real examples of startup pro formas. There must be some out there. Has anyone who's gone through the process written a good guide, or a detailed reflection on their experience?

I'd also like to know if there are any good alternatives to using Excel. Or is that sacrosanct? Are investors likely to require a spreadsheet in .xls format?
I cannot really think of a more insane move that would be currently possible.
that would be a person's philosophy regarding smartphones and how that person uses them, not with respect to an entire company (Apple)
It isn't "calling someone a name". It's pointing out a fact. They are clearly ignorant about the Android security model, and they're ignorant about the checks that Apple does.

Your claim that they are lies is humorous, however. Ignorance casts a wide shadow.
Managing Your Processes with ProcLaunch
Not really arguing with you. But for a lot of countries, the colonial experience is a lot more recent than that. More to the order of 50-60 years than 150. This does mean that a generation of people who lived under colonial rule are still alive in these countries.
Might I ask who you are and why you are asking? I get enough phone calls from CDN sales people that I don't want to give them more ammo or a bigger target lol
Here are some general ideas (applicable to any space) and then some thoughts specific to your domain/sector of investment.

General ideas to help sizing efforts in any market:

- Are there any public market comparables? If yes, their P&L and financial statements may be useful. Even if there is not a pureplay public competitor, if they have a business unit that competes with you in some sense, you might be able to download their 10k (annual report) or 10q (quarterly) and get some insights in the notes that management must provide or business unit level financials they might provide. This is available for free on sec.gov or even Yahoo finance I imagine.

- If there are public market comparables, look for equity research about them. In particular, look for reports entitled "Initiating Coverage". These reports when a bank or fin institution starts covering a company usually start with a market overview which can be pretty amazing for intel about the market. Warning: These reports are expensive so best to find a buddy on Wall Street with access to Bloomberg or Reuters who can find download them for you.

- As a proxy for interest in the space, you might want to see if VCs have recently invested in companies that are similar. Their interest is both a good validator of the market and based on their investment size, it's a proxy for how big the market opportunity might be. This doesn't get you to your specific numbers but maybe a proxy for market interest.

- Google it. Kind of lame, and I'm sure you've done it but just google "number of investors in the United States" and you may get some places to start. Sometimes even eHow or yahoo answers will be the first breadcrumb to finding something useful

Now to more specific sources for your market:

- Goto the website of FINRA which is for Financial Industry. It's mainly for brokers and wealth managers I believe, but there will probably be some line on there about how Finra was established to protect the X million US investors. There may be other regulatory bodies with data. These government sites are a treasure especially if you dig around. They'll prob give you investable assets, # of people, etc etc.

- See if you can find the going public documents of some past successes in the online investing space. I believe TheStreet.com went public. Maybe you can get their S1 filing for when they went public and you can find some stats in there. They are trying to "sell" their IPO at the time so they may provide some stats on how big the market is.

Hope that is helpful.

Have you found research reports that might be valuable but are too expensive? I'd imagine a space this big would have tons of research reports about it. Perhaps an incorrect assumption.
The link is exactly the same as the link submitted in the second posted link.

I'm not sure how HN let's me post it.

I apologize for the link I posted.

You are somehow always able to find links that have been posted earlier. How do you do it? If you tell me how, I'll do it before I post a link so I don't duplicate.
I'm currently in Northwest Arkansas. Skype calls work just about as well as SIP calls over 3G, which is to say the same quality as regular calls over GSM. I've used my old Gizmo account with SIP, as well as Callcentric and Skype. No issues.

With respect to maps and email, you have a point. The N900 is not up to speed there.

It's a good geek phone, but not something I'd recommend to my parents.
We host paid video content. We support pay-per-minute, pay-per-view, and a variety of DRM technologies.

We offer native "paid video" streaming to Android, iDevices, and all flavors of personal computer. We support the current HTML5 video stack, including WebM. Our datacenters run Wowza Pro, IIS Media Services, Windows Media Server, Darwin Streaming Server, and other less well known services. We don't make customers share a slice of "a server", we're providing hierarchical video caching and distribution across an International footprint for even our $19.95/month customers.

We are a CDN -- or a VDN, actually:

http://www.advection.net/

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/servic...

We like helping startups, so do Edgecast and BitGravity. If you don't need quite as much flexibility, Limelight's got great video infrastructure, while Akamai's the largest scale if you've got the budget.

http://www.edgecast.com/

http://www.bitgravity.com/ (home page is Flash)

http://www.limelightnetworks.com/

http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/products/streaming.htm...
Plus the bit about billion dollar companies.

Billion dollar companies are making HTML5 a second class citizen to their own app platforms.
Fair enough. Though I think this goes beyond Nicholas Carr. WSJ's been doing hit pieces on cookies and online advertising pretty regularly the past few months. In that case, Carr may be someone they invited to join their attack team.
>You called the original poster out on making an absolute statement

No, I didn't. I called them out for stereotyping why someone would choose something other than the iPhone.

It's akin to saying "The Nexus One is the best device, but I can understand that if you're gay, a follower, or strongly susceptible to marketing pressure, the iPhone might be a better device for you". (You know, instead of finding it to be the right device for them)

The outrage is about the strawman.
OP mentioned being a Linux user. The iPhone, lovely as it may be, is a non-starter without access to a Windows or MacOS machine, at least to set it up. If you are willing to forego backups and your stuff lives in the cloud, you can make do after the intial startup.

But really, Uncle Steve needs to give us the ability to use an iPhone without an iTunes computer.
I second your opinion - I switched from 3GS to Samsung Galaxy S. Completely correct that it's not polished like the iPhone, but being able to mount the phone as your choice of device is just, as you said, liberating. Have an AVI movie? No problem, just drop it on the device, it plays. Oh, it's in MPEG? No problem.

Swype is cool too, I now can't live without it -- in fact, I stopped using my native tongue in SMS form because it's THAT much easier to type in English.

Oh, now I also have an SFTP client, an SSH client, turn-by-turn navigation, WiFi analyzer -- all for free. Pretty soon, I will get tethering. The only downside to my particular phone is the AT&T crapware you can't get rid of, and it infuriates me that I have to root the phone to delete it. But even that is better than having to deal with iTunes.
editorialize |ˌɛdəˈtɔriəˌlaɪz| verb [ intrans. ]
(of a newspaper, editor, or broadcasting organization) make comments
or express opinions rather than just report the news.
• offer one's opinion, as if in an editorial.

Since you cannot infer from the title I chose, nor the comment pointing to the particular place in the article I was talking about, my opinions on that part of the article could you please explain exactly how it is editorializing?

Alternatively, could you explain exactly how one should submit for discussion something that appeared in a longer article that discussed many unrelated things?
Some background on the P ≠ NP problem:

http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem

http://www.claymath.org/millennium/P_vs_NP/
BZZZT: MIT administers Lincoln Labs just like the University of California administered Los Alamos and Laurence Livermore (exclusively from the beginning, now in a consortium). And there are many other examples of this method the Federal Government uses.

You simply can't consolidate the pass-through budget of Lincoln Labs with MIT proper and I gave up on this article after that tendentious attack.
> playing HD 1080p content at 60 FPS would skip a lot.

Did you get VDPAU set up? http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU

I've just set up a myth box for my sister, my advice is research tv and video card before buying components. saved 20 bucks and got a cheep card... but it doesn't have drivers in stock ubuntu kernel. it works but takes some fiddling. also stick to nvidia for video card.
American Association of Individual Investors has 150K members. http://www.aaii.com/aboutaaii/

Though most likely, there is a specific segment of that 150K that will really like your product. I'd try to pin down their profile. How do you do it?

Hustle to get a list of names/phone/emails of 100-200 of these individual investors. Call them and collect some demographic info about them along with some industry specific info. Schedule a demo of your tool. After you do a few dozen demos, you will pick up on the trend of the profile of your ideal client who really needs your tool.

It's the general process I'm using right now to do sales and it's working out well in the initial stages.
Attn Government: This Is How Businesses Are Created
Help me, help others
I get that, but that's a shame. It's like stating that the Sun (the magazine) or the "Bild" (german magazine) are well written and respected journals because they are read by millions of people. I always hated how those magazines can be read by so many people.

Or to rephrase that:
If it's news (it's Hacker NEWS, right?), the first and most important point is that the article is objective and neutral. Atleast for me. And that's why i don't like those links on the frontpage, just as i don't like the suns, the mirrors or the "bilds" frontpage.

Or to put it yet another way:
daringfireball.net is the subjective opinion of a single person who seems to rephrase a lot of apples marketing talk. It's not journalism, it's not news, there is often no objective proof, no scientific proof, just the personal opinion of a single person. It doesn't belong on a page that has a certain quality. In a news magazine, i'd rate that as bad journalism, bad news. And again, this page is for news, i thought.
Ask HN: Review My App: 3 Degrees of Wiki, about memory & enlightenment
The Wall Street Journal is famous for always having been a on-line subscription site and apparently a successful one. Murdoch would only care about this in the context of his trying to transform the WSJ into a replacement for The New York Times ... and I'm not sure how that would work....

(On the other hand he has more than a few other newpaper properties where he thinks he has a problem, something he's experimenting with by putting the London Times behind a pay-wall in stages.)
I read this twice. Being that I currently live in Austin I can't ever imagine leaving. It's pretty much perfect. SF, on the other hands, makes my insides crawl. Each to his own, I suppose.
Use the Smileys
Just to confirm: You believe that touching an external antenna doesn't detune or attenuate the signal. That's a fascinating belief that goes completely against all antenna design.

It's interesting that the iPhone 4 is the first device with a touchable antenna, and that was done purely to reduce the size of the device. Must be magic.
David Beazley on how the Python GIL actually works
Python Concurrency Workshop 2009 presentation about how the Python GIL actually works and why it's even worse than most people even imagine.
This is actually more accurate than you'd think. While everyone used IBM PCs as their personal computers for many years, IBM was harmed massively when their PC BIOS was reverse engineered and then copied by Compaq (and subsequently many other computer manufacturers.) In fact, arguably, because that happened, we had a cheap IBM PC boom where software would work on multiple hardware platforms made by multiple different companies. This led to Microsoft's rise. Arguably, if they only sold on IBM-sold PCs, they would have made a lot of money, but nothing as meteoric as they did.

Yes, not having a patent on something actually created the behemoth which is Microsoft.
I think having shorter times for copyright and patent to expire would be effective. With the speed and turnaround of the current markets, patent law ends up stifling innovation and in general harming the economy as a whole.

This is a prime reason countries which are lax in enforcing copyright law as rising economically in the world.
BlackBerry Applications:TellMe v.1.1.1 | Technorox
The Importance of Not Thinking Too Much (2003)
I've read that, for some systems, they use microcontrollers and opamps to precisely emulate the original tube's current and temperature response characteristics.
I'm not sure if it is or isn't weird that he hasn't published on complexity theory. I recall Gasarch publishing a poll in SIGACT where a handful of the researchers polled claimed that it'll be resolved by someone outside of the field.

Regardless, from reading the synopsis of the proof, I'm skeptical to the point of disinterest.

(I apologize for not providing a link -- but the only URL I was able to find from Google: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/papers/poll.pdf is broken.)
Software is easily copied and manipulated enough that small businesses which are flexible and innovative will remain competitive against larger businesses which may steal some of their ideas.

The only real concern to me is that smaller businesses don't have the sales and marketing team as the larger companies.

Right now, large businesses can flatten smaller businesses (See MS vFAT decision) if they even remotely become competitive through patent lawsuits. It is very rare to happen in the reverse.
Regarding Carry-On Baggage