skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The least common denominator has been increased. In a few short years, hardware accelerated HTML5 will be expected. 95% on ACID3 will be taken for granted. Really fast JavaScript, ... you get the idea.

Sure some people will hang out with IE6 for another 5 years, but most sites can now be optimized for much more functionality.

Finally, for those people(companies) that will only use a Microsoft browser, they now have a really good HTML5 browser.
When glancing at a site like this, I'll give it 5 minutes. Usually the 5 minutes are spent reading headings/paragraphs, watching an intro video, checking pricing / features.

But in this case, I spent the 5 minutes actually using the product. (because that's ALL you can do!)... (which is good)

I like that you don't have to create an account - I was able to get in and start building a site in less than a minute.

I also liked the "Text Style" and "Color Set" pickers. (I like that they're combinations of heading/paragraph styles, instead of having to choose them separately).

I also like that you don't have a bunch of different layouts too choose from. Picking a header image should be enough for most users to start with.

Very impressive!
To me Bill Gates will always be a modern-day Rockefeller: he clawed and trampled his way to the top, then once he was there he gave away his money -- a lot of it, to be sure -- and will always be remembered for that, rather than the ugly methods he used to get it.

It's laudable when somebody gives so freely and I don't want to take away from that, but I find it hard to view him charitably because I know that even now, this is all about him, making him feel better about himself. Many others sacrificed much more for the good of others without having to tread so heavily.
Strong passwords fine, but not necessarily necessary
There's a lot of interesting psychology in pricing. There was a case study (don't remember the link/source, I think it may have been in a TED Talk) a while back about how the existence of an option that people would be dumb to select can dramatically influence the outcome of the two options that make sense.

Paraphrased example:
There was a newspaper selling three packages:
Newspaper only - $40
Online only - $60
Online and newspaper - $60

There is no intelligent reason to select the "Online only" option, as for the exact same price you could get the print version as well.

However, when this professor did two polls in several of his (large lecture) classes. One group was given the three options, another group was given just two options, print or online. The group given three options, predictably, had 0% selecting online only, with (these numbers are from memory) 70% selecting both, and 30% selecting newspaper only.

The group that was given just the two options ended up dramatically preferring the cheaper option with the numbers essentially reversed, 30% choosing online and newspaper. (I looked for the talk to confirm the numbers but couldn't find it - I'd love if someone could point it out and get the correct numbers).

The idea was basically that you could have a throw-away option that actually GAVE MORE (perceived) VALUE and TOOK AWAY VALUE to other options.

This situation may not entirely apply to this example, but I wonder if what's going on is basically:
Trying to increase the perceived value of the more expensive product by having a cheaper product right there, even though he acknowledges there is no additional value.
False dichotomy alert!

You can be a graceful businessman and still make a profit, further a healthy market and win on it through a superior product instead of doing so through shady backroom deals that border the criminal.
The feedback on the design section is really helpful. We have been thinking of how to redesign the design section because of the issues with discoverability and these comments clarify some other issues.

The Insert URL issues has been noted. Thanks.

In terms of username, we did this to prevent somebody from just squatting all the good names. But clearly 'sjf' is not something we need to protect. I think we'll just take the most common first names and 1000 or so most common dictionary words and protect them though.
> So, would you say it is no different than when companies offshore development to reduce costs?

Yes.

>I rarely counter as there is no guarantee they won’t come back sometime later with an even higher offer, and so on and so on.

If I'm a builder and the price of wood goes up--but it's still the cheapest material for my needs--I keep using it. If it keeps going up, I keep paying more and more until there is a cheaper alternative.

Yes, it can be argued that there are key differences between people and wood, but you haven't identified them and why they are important here.

>What if your employer did the same sort of thing and came to you and said – “hey, someone with equal credentials and experience told me they would do your job for less, so you either need do it for the same or I will replace you.”

I would be bummed I was no longer as valuable of a commodity, but I wouldn't fault the employer.
I completely disagree with you. While there are certainly uncertainties in global circulation models, they are based on the laws of physics. Stock market modeling is not, it's entirely based on unproved/ad-hoc statistical models that likely have no relevance to the real world.
I haven't lived in (or been to, for that matter) the US for twenty years, but still...

I remembered the dollar coin as George Washington, silvery, larger than all others. And quite uncommon, especially compared to the dollar bill. Still really not something you'd confuse with quarters. Has it changed that much?

And what are those feminism attempts you seem to refer to?
Not necessarily. It can also just be a vast amount of data, in which case bandwidth (which is generally pretty good), not latency, is your limiting factor with mapreduce.

Also, you only need one part of your infrastructure to require mapreduce's parallelism in order to argue for using it across the board. If you have simpler problems to solve, you may as well solve them with mapreduce since you'll be thinking in that computation model anyway, and you can easier use the results later in a computation that may require mapreduce.
> Genetic advantage, financial advantage, it's all the same

In Bill Gates' case, it's more or less giving a machine gun to a young John Dillinger than having a genetic mutation that made him a superior businessman.

Lack of empathy or remorse are not genetic traits, are they?
I see - they should write it like that in the rules, though.
The fastest route- for greatest traffic in shortest time - spend 1000 USD on ads in porn sites ;-)
I think that this has a lot to do with the emotions felt when thinking of the color red (fire, exciting, passion) or blue (calm, simple, soothing). It's much harder to define a brand with green (leaves? slime?), as people have become used to the above two.

From experience, it's also much easier to combine red and blue with a grayscale palette (iTunes icon, twitter to name two), which may also contribute to their popularity.
Beware that advertising on a "job site or two" amounts to spamming the post everywhere.
Storage. AWS gives you EBS volumes, of practically unlimited size. With Rackspace, you get the size you get, 40GB, 80GB, etc, and have to pay for a bigger instance if you want more storage. There's cloudfiles, but its not as useful as mounted disks.
Does anyone have airplay working yet? I was kind of hoping that it'd support streaming music from iTunes to the iPad, but that doesn't appear to to be the case. =/
I worry that in your example, vs is passed in to reducefn as an array. A generator would be more memory-efficient (though from the example it isn't possible to differentiate and I haven't looked at the source).
So yeah, there is a huge fear of nerdiness among women

I suppose my only problem with your story (or the conclusions you draw from it, really) is that you could substitute "men" or "boys" or "people" or "high school students" or "college students" for "women" without any real problem. Lots of people are afraid to appear smart in public.
The biggest indicator of "oldness" is no longer making big plans, no longer looking forward to things, but instead spending increasing time with some form of nostalgia, or focused on the mundane.

People like Frank Lloyd Wright and Georgia O'Keefe just keep working and making plans like they were going to live forever. They had the right idea.
I think we are in for another jump when they expand Ping to the App Store / App Developers. The self promotion possibilities tied directly to the "buy now" button are going to be pretty interesting.
I think he's looking for traffic and for participation. Have a better suggestion? Post it, you don't even need an account.
Very impressed, been looking for something like this for a couple of weeks. Are you planning on adding 'comments' functionality.
How about I take the easy way out and buy the integer that the Russian Mafia contracted the malware authors to steal from your less technically-inclined family members? They're just integers; who cares how I got them? You violate contracts, I buy them fifth-hand from people who don't track where they came from. 1452373618202299713253502665406299980733506930, right?
Why are you blaming Microsoft for what IBM did? Microsoft's plan was for the world to run on Unix, with Microsoft selling Unix software--they wanted to be a tools and language company, and were tired of having every different manufacturer have its own operating system. Gates tried to get IBM to pick a processor for the IBM PC that would support Unix, but they weren't interested.

Your hypothetical 1% productivity increase has to be balanced against the productivity loss of dealing with a bunch of different Unix variants on a bunch of different processors. The dominance of Windows surely delayed innovation in operating systems, but arguably spurred innovation in applications.
Do you use a Real Editor?
Yes, but stock market modeling is also based on the law of supply and demand, which is pretty well proven. The trouble is that, in both cases, the base is far removed from the superstructure, and there's a chaotic system in between.
Will it be possible to design a template from scratch in html?
FOSS advocates will
why don't FOSS advocates state in their wills that all of their work must be released free after they die?
Or red (anger, blood, propaganda) or blue (cold, sad, depressing) ...we all have different personal associations with color... And add on top of that cultural.

As for green (money, health, fresh)
It's very neat. I had a minor issues with changing text formatting. I would make sure they're smooth.

Also the UI updates are mildly slow, e.g. when you press enter for a new line. Could make that a bit simpler/faster.
Hell hath no fury than a woman scorned :-(
Suggestion:
Provide the user with starting templates based on their goals
e.g. blank, wedding, blog, Company Information...

There templates will contain a default theme and the structure inside, which I could use as a guide when editing.

In any case, fantastic site! I'll try and do my wedding site with it.
Best Cydia Apps For Videos & MMS | InfoMov.Com
trying it out right now.

How do you share once I make it private? it wasn't obvious to me.
I was referring to PG's post above. He said that YC has a good idea of who is successful at the next stage after YC (the number who are either able to raise more after YC, or don't need to because they're profitable). If more and more YC applicants are profitable on the way in, the number who are profitable as they exit YC (one of PG's definitions of success as described above) will necessarily trend up.
> New customers don't feel like they're getting ripped off - the prices are falling all the time, and you "buy into" a whole discounting structure.

But then don't old customers feel ripped off for having paid "too much"?
Seesmic responds to the new Twitter
Cool tool! Now linux/shell tutorials doesn't have to be dry and non-interactive anymore. Just a quick comment, in your tutorial video, the audio is a bit out of sync.
Google hopes to launch music service with downloads, streaming
This will certainly help streamline keeping my rig up to date. I'm generally poor at keeping all my drivers up to date since it's a bit of a hassle. I'm loving this idea.
(insert snarky comment about how it'll crash even faster now)

This is honestly a good thing, one thing that porting programs tends to do is help find bugs.

For example, one of OpenBSD's goals in supporting all the hardware it does is that bugs may crop up on a sparc or vax architecture that wouldn't be found if everyone was running on x86.

Hopefully, this will lead to a more stable version of flash.
I think you've confused research with product development.

The person being interviewed is not a product developer. He is a computer scientist who did pioneering research in touch interfaces going back the to '70s.
Blue is also a popular choice with Apple’s icon designers: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4073000/dock.png
Keep in mind that 32-bit instances are highly advantageous for many web applications that use interpreted dynamic languages (Ruby, Python, JavaScript). Almost everything in those languages is an object, and every object is a pointer to a value, and pointers on 32-bit machines are half the size of pointers on 64-bit boxes.

In a Rails app (for instance), the overall performance of an application is often constrained by how many instances you are able to run in parallel. If a 32-bit box can run 50% (or 100%) more instances of your application than the equivalent 64-bit box with the same RAM, that's great.
Click "Settings" at the top then "Users". Maybe we need to make that more obvious.
One way would be to get rid of any rules which prevent retailers from passing through the cost of credit card charges to credit card users in an obvious way. Like by saying that credit card transactions will cost 2-3% more than cash transactions. I think this is either discouraged or prohibited by credit card issuers.
We don't feel obliged to fund every profitable company that applies. I'm sure we've turned down some.
I don't want to sound unappreciative, but _it's about time_.

I do notice they're using additional hardware acceleration in IE9 only. I wonder what the limitation is in NPAPI that prevents them from supporting other browsers. (And whether/when that limitation would be resolved.)
Free is Not the End
Because human brain has two halves-left and right.
Not a remotely sensible answer?
No?Can there ever be one silver bullet?one answer to this question?
I dont think so- And I think, anyone who says otherwise is lying to himself/herself.
"Yeah, because Surface has been so successful and doesn't mirror anything the DIY crowd hasn't been doing for years and for thousands less"

Cite?
Cool. Looks like http://keynot.es is doing the same thing as well.
Profounder: Micro-investing?
Where is your traffic coming from?

Have you figured out yet why menupages.com and allmenus.com have a lot of traffic, but your website don't.

Their websites rock on search engines, but your website is nowhere to be found.

I search for restaurants a lot and I never saw your website before this thread. Mostly, I go to Google and search for "$cityName restaurants" or "$restaurantName menu". This is where you want your website to rank, and this is what is going to bring you tons of free traffic.

I went through your website, and figured that search engines can not crawl 99% of your website's content.

Your website has a nice idea, product and content; but inefficient design in terms of SEO. I see that with a lot of startups. SEO is not something that you can just get it done from a consultant at a later stage. It has to be built right in to the product, your product/website should have a Search Engine friendly structure and design.

I have years of experience building SEO friendly websites and web applications. We leverage search engines to get traction and tons of free traffic. I can help you with SEO. Contact me at ravish at realgeek.com
Probably not. Our focus is on simplicity and on the 20% of features that deliver 80% of the value.

Is that a deal breaker for you?
Because the pigment is what protects what's under paint from UV light. With no pigment you have in effect varnish. Also, without some kind of pigment you might have to use excessive amounts of binder to get a sufficiently thick coat.
Yep. That's on the list.
Just came across these guys. Looks interesting, to say the least. Former Kiva folks involved too, so they know how to do the micro thing. Curious from thoughts/experience/feedback from other HN types that have worked with these guys.
So they don't have to pack 6gb (or whatever ridiculous size it is on OSX) of printer drivers in iOS?
After I read this, I felt like I was the one writing it.

I am in a similar situation and am still struggling to find a way out. I have tried to work on stuff on the side but it always fizzles out after a short while and I lose all motivation to work on it. The main problem is that there are no people around me who are in a similar situation / think like I do: which kind of make it even more difficult!

I was thinking of just taking a month or so off and just relaxing and starting on a project. Not sure if it'll work but I know that just whining and not doing anything about it isn't going to get me anywhere. Just keep working at it and something will work out. If I try, I risk failure, if I don't, I ensure it!

Feel free to get in touch with me (email in profile) if you want to discuss more.
How many of 500+ people will have negative experiences which they will share online?

That's the danger of an event like that.
If you deliberately make your software a pain in the ass for legitimate customers, your product had better be absolutely amazing or someone who treats their customers well can easily come along and do you one better just on that basis.
I was just kidding. I guess was not obvious from couple of smileys. I have a huge respect the SO folks and blogs they write. Have learned great deal by just reading there blog. Thanks for downvoting though!!.
A sheet of glass!? They could install the device in windows, instead of installing windows on the device.

(sorry)
I'm curious what the months-to-profitability was at Google. They were incorporated in September 1998, and turned a $7m annual profit in 2001. Were they profitable in 2000? 1999? They don't give data going back before 2001 in their own reports (http://investor.google.com/financial/2003/tables.html has 2001-2003).
Yes, that Microsoft. The totality of damage in the Comes case, IMO, is very isolated. And a lot of what they was pushed against MS was tough talk, but not in itself illegal (but a lot was illegal too... I'm not letting them off the hook for that, but I'm not blindly jumping on them for everything).

Your recollection of the history of software is different than mine. I recall Microsoft being one of the biggest pushers of COTS software. At the time I was starting in software development, and there was certainly this notion that money was NOT to be made writing software for sale at the store. Those were for toys. It was services provided through companies like IBM. MS, along with a few other companies, showed that real money can be made writing software only.
I don't understand it: why does it mention things like todo lists or trip organizers, when it is just a web editor?
It's puzzling me beyond belief. I first saw, of all things, using netcat! I don't use IE... but that showed up there. Now I'm a level-1 rookie, and I know my VPS security settings are very lax (e.g., I use root all the time), so I could only understand it with a benign intruder. Beats me...
I am an old hacker, and proud to admit that I have never owned a Microsoft product.
I wished that Apple would release PATCHES rather than having us download the entire SDK + Xcode every single time.
Tech startups are a special breed of company in that they are very inexpensive to start (sometimes all you need is a laptop, a server, and an internet connection), they can run leaner than other types of businesses (ramen, hosting, and lots of Mountain Dew), and they can scale very easily from a handful to hundreds of thousands or millions of customers (open source and Amazon AWS).

Contrast that with other business types included in those SBA figures, like restaurants and liquor stores. Those businesses start out in debt because of leasing costs, equipment purchase, payroll, licensing, insurance, etc. It is also much harder to scale a restaurant than a website or app (because of geography).
"added brightness control to the multitasking dock"

Hooray!! I turn the brightness all the way down when I use it late at night or early morning and this will be much easier then Home > Settings > Brightness
Damn kids. Get off my lawn.

/30
As I noted in another comment, we can compare MLB with the English Premier League. MLB and the EPL are considered the best leagues in the world for their respective sports, but that does not mean that the U.S. and England produce the best players.

Except that that's never what I said. I said the MLB is a more competitive ball league than EPL. With the internationalization of trade and sports I'm not sure it's terribly important what the nationalities of the players are.

The World Baseball Classic is the only serious competition we've had to compare national styles at the highest level, and so far the Japanese system has won out. Granted, a sample size of two is probably not significant, but it seems all we have to go by.

As a good statistician would say, a result with an insignificant sample size is worse than no result at all because it can fool one (as it did you) into thinking it has any significance at all.
The more interesting post would be how his old app is doing financially.

http://www.appannie.com/translate-y-the-language-translator/...
Exclusivity & scarcity yield media buzz,PR and demand. What google did with the initial Gmail invites - the concept is the same, but gotta say - this is so much better than simply running a media campaign.

I mean, the 10 folks who got invited to the exclusive cruise - they'd so emphatically describe their experience to their friends / family (just like this blog post).
Once this price goes down, it goes down for EVERY SINGLE customer, including those who bought it during the high initial price. I mean, the vendor does have the customer's credit card numbers. Do a residual, scaled, periodic refund for every single customer, based on the differences between the current discounted price and the original price at which the customer bought the good.
I think that when you combine it with their 0.5% acceptance rate it's not too conservative. The only recourse would be to fund more startups.
OneRiot Trending AdBubbles: Visualization of trending topics
I think that kind of read:

"Dude, you fucked me bad.Real Bad-But,hey- I am still alive!"
For some extremely narrow definitions of "geek god", that is...
Yeah, you definitely need to have cash with you. Plan on visiting the ATM often while there, especially during Golden Week. The Suica card makes it effortless to travel on Tokyo Metro and the JR lines.
I hate to make a "me-too" comment, but I'm rather interested in this. I hope they're legit and aboveboard. Its hard to find people worth investing in.

How does this comapre to Kickstarter?
For one: Linux packs them quite small and somehow Ubuntu fits everything in it's 700MB ISO. Second, you could have the more obscure drivers download over the air, or as a package from the app store.
Cities do grant permits to place fiber lines to competing companies, but this is seldom done to run fiber into the home. The consumer market requires massive capital to achieve economies of scale that few companies outside of existing utilities can compete with. How do you compete with infrastructure that's been bought and paid for many times over?