skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Compiz copies the effects present in OS X (and Windows 7), but they seem to ignore the reasons behind them.

Mac OS uses the 'shrinking window' effect to show you where your window has gone, and drop-shadows to give you a sense of depth. Translucency in menus gives a subtle feeling of impermanence, and subtle transparency emulates the effect of paper-on-paper, where you can kind of, but not quite, make out the letters on the page below the one you're viewing.

Compiz, however, seems to be based on the philosophy of 'Now that windows are textures, we can do arbitrary transforms on them' and throws in a lot of effects that make little sense. Menus that wobble into place, windows that behave like they're made of Jell-O, and so on. They're neat conceptually, but I tired ages ago of people pointing out how Linux was better because I could configure my windows to burn up in a puff of smoke whenever I closed them.
I have no idea what the precise financial situations of the world's orchestras are. But I do know that many of them are perpetually crying poor but never actually closing their doors. I can't think of any major orchestra which has ever actually had to shut down due to a lack of money coming in.

New recordings must be, I imagine, a rapidly-dissolving revenue stream anyway. Any piece which is actually popular among buyers already has a number of "definitive" recordings which it would be difficult to top, and anything which isn't already the subject of a zillion recordings will probably never sell much anyway.
Not that I can detect.

For instance: หาเมนบอร์ดช๊อคเกต775 returns 42k results, and is not exactly a common combination of words on google.com.

Extra points if you know what it stands for :)
For your client, why not just print out a copy of the GPL, put a big "CERTIFICATE OF AUTHENTICITY" and then have someone sign it?
I found this web page:

http://www.moscow-orchestra.com/rates.html

The parent article here implies they will be recording, e.g., all of Beethoven's symphonies, etc. Off the top of my head, this project sounds like at least a week's work, even assuming the players know the music well.

40 players + 5 miscellaneous (conductor, recording engineer, whatever), say, 45 people for a week at $11,000 comes out to around $6/hour. I'm not saying the guy is lying about it, I'm just amazed at how inexpensive this appears to be. Even double that rate, or triple it... that's some pretty awesome work you can get done for that amount of money.
Nobody ever wants to hear this, but I have to say it anyhow: read A Random Walk Down Wallstreet, give up, and invest in index funds.
It's relatively easy these days to make sites that use JS in a smart way to dynamically load content. In the case of this personal site, if JS is on, then all the links do is request a "stripped-down" version of only the content of each post, and then swap that into the main content area. There are no http requests then for the images, background, css, and so on, which is nice for the server.

That's all well and good, but then I have to go back and make that also all work for noscript users. So, for example, I can't just have a list of items on the left, and then on page load, have JavaScript just "click" the top item in the list. Instead, I have to put in extra effort to get the backend to handle the default home page, and so on.

On this site, that wasn't really that hard. On more complex sites, it can be very hard.

...and I'm one of the "silly" web developers, that actually tries to work with the .5% or so of people that have JS turned off. With jQuery and everything else out there, most web developers don't seem to bother.
Understaffed Beats Wrongstaffed
Prying eyes on your side of the connection you mean.
"It could be worse" is always a valid rebuttal to any complaint.

But it doesn't actually move the conversation forward at all.
I give it 24 hours or so. These things seem to pop-up near instantaneously.
I am not surprised that they didn't give a refund; most businesses wouldn't. However, I think businesses these days should start integrating a one-time "whoopsie" allowance as part of their customer service (within reason, of course. It may or may not be feasible depending on your business model). You're probably going to have people that try to take advantage of this, but there are some people who make honest mistakes, and I would give them the benefit of the doubt. Just treat people well.

I believe if you take care of your customers, they'll take care of you. In general, the one thing that people will remember for life is how you make them feel.

The benefits of providing awesome customer service outweighs the cost IMO (I haven't done the math, but that's my gut feeling). I remember reading a story on reddit yesterday where a gamer experienced the almost exact same situation with Steam:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dcnp7/one_of_many_re...

that provides a good example of how news of awesome customer service can be spread, and possibly grow sales (Zappos).

For example, I have several sites hosted with WebFaction.com and I'm unbelievably happy with their customer service. They respond within 10-30 minutes on any support tickets. I'll continue to use them in the future. (see how that was a good example of what awesome customer service can do?)
so who's going, and what are you working on?
I'm going to go against the grain here and say it's partly Heroku's fault. If a customer is paying hundreds of dollars a week for a feature they're not using, that's the time to send a friendly automated email saying "Is everything okay?".

This is especially important with a service such as Heroku, where users will be changing these settings all the time and so there's a high probability of human error.
I don't get it, not having an immediate mental picture of the haircuts in the various Alien movies ready to hand.

But is the fact that movies with short hair look less "dated" just due to the fact that we live in a time where long hair is out? In thirty years if long hair becomes popular again will our short-haired movies look horrendously dated and Luke Skywalker look up-to-the-minute?
Personally, I wish someone I like, like Colin Percival, would start an email service. I like the way he runs Tarsnap.
It is not because I just love making ad hominem arguments that I articulated the above claim the way I did, but because the prevailing attitudes of the types of people holding the idea are intimately relevant to my argument.
I would suggest checking out Octave, a Matlab compatible language. It doesn't have the rich libraries of statistical procedures like R, but it far easier to use to build your own matrix based algorithms.
I've read several pieces on Bayesian stats, and I've done some nontrivial statistics before. It still confuses me that p(data) != 1. I kinda wish the author had gone into detail about how to calculate the probability of an already-observed event.
Have you been able to get that to work with Rails 3? I've tried and failed miserably.
Just use JanRain basic account, it's free. The only thing is you're limited to 6 providers. Check out my blog about this free implementation....... http://jamafriend.com/blogengine.web/post/Adding-OpenId-Logi...
The Bomb Chroniclers
George C. Williams, Leading Evolutionary Theorist, Dies at 83
Cheerleader-Eating Mascot Terrorizes NFL Sidelines
Do it. David and I reapplied after getting rejected the first time. Stay determined - getting in is a huge enabler but stay tough and you will have a company.
Maybe someone will start to make an open-source Twitter alternative.
This reminds me of something my friend did. We had an assignment to try out EC2 with Hadoop and we needed 8 machines, and we were warned in class to turn them off or they'd keep charging.

Guess who didn't turn them off.

So he casually mentions it to me and tells me that he racked up a 500 pound bill, but his CC didn't have any money in it so it was fine. I asked "so did you turn them off?" He said "no, not really, but it's okay because they can't charge me".

So he racks up another 500 pounds, and only turns the instances off when he finds out that he didn't use the inactive CC but another, active one. Long story short, he's 500 pounds out (Amazon were kind enough to refund the first 500, which disappeared as soon as it hit his account, since he owed another 500).
Wowza! That makes for a really different game. I haven't seriously wrapped my mind around chess in a long, long time. I have agreed with Bobby Fisher's assessment, at the grand master level they should be playing with a randomly chosen back row formation. The top players have all the openings memorized, and this would really shake that up.
who knew so many of us were trying for it again!
Add one more little thing to this: a way to expire the original torrent after 24 hours and you have the torrent equivalent of wikileaks.

After the 24 hours have past it's whackamole time.

I started building something like that a while ago when wikileaks did their 'shut down' play.
Foreign Stimulus
What better way to tell the world, "I don't understand technology, and it scares me."
It's tough to say. You really sound like a reasonable person and if you are the model customer you appear to be then I would probably side with you.

I like a very simple rule: Customer retention is far more important than customer acquisition. It may be a flawed rule, I'm not sure since I'm not a successful business person. But it sounds good to me. It seems vitally important to retain your good customers.
What is Penetration Testing? How to do & Why it is Important?
InsidersTalk - Meet people with stories to tell.
I have seen a blank page on Google, too within the past couple of days. Never saw anything of the sort before. It was when I clicked to try a search on News, and I couldn't get that search to come up with anything different - until I turned of 'Instant'.

Oh well, whatever. I'm sure they logged an exception and will fix that soon.

As for people gaming the results, it is a huge problem, but it's a problem that is bound to plague any market leader in search.
3-D Printing Is Spurring a Manufacturing Revolution
I was hoping you'd be at least the slightest bit more specific :) are you working in a proprietary startup? are you working in academia? presumably you're working on a codebase with the intent to distribute it to users at some point?
"Making sure you impress Paul Graham every week, and other YC co-founders is probably the best way to go about your company."

I don't buy it. Can you elaborate?
If I were signing up for said free trial and saw a credit card request upfront, I would be suspicious. Many subscription services promise such a "free" trial and then make it difficult to back out. It also violates my model of how "free" should work to ask for credit card info, so I suspect hidden charges.

That's my experience. Maybe your users are more trusting.
Click "cached", and you get the explanation:

"These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: what we have here is failure to communicate"
No it couldn't. There is no car chase, no explosions and only a couple of violent deaths.

Plus it has all this plot stuff that you have to 'like' concentrate on ...

I'm sure if you went back to read the movie reviews from the year Blade Runner came out, you'd find them full of similar sentiments. "Blah blah, they don't make sophisticated movies any more, people only care about spectacle and car chases and explosions." No doubt people will be making similar complaints in another 30 years while completely ignoring the sophisticated movies being produced in their own time ("Man, nobody makes movies like Primer or District 9 any more, do they?)

(Yes, I know District 9 has explosions.)
This isn't DHHs fault, but I think this is the straw that broke the camel's back w.r.t. my own reading of "startup news."

This advice is worthless.

Everything is possible in business. Get acquired and snuffed out, get acquired and blow up, don't get acquired and run a healthy business, don't get acquired and fade out. Get sued and go out of business tomorrow.

Nobody has any idea how the founders and employees at Doppler feel. I respect my fellow professionals enough to congratulate them for their successes however they manifest, and to trust them to seek new opportunities if their current ones fail.

The acquired founders and employees are oppressed and we should offer them condolences? People would kill to have these problems.
I, too was annoyed when Google changed to automatically 'fixing' your terms a few years back. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes they TELL you at the top, sometimes they don't. It took me a while to figure out that single quotes are ignored while double quotes are taken very seriously. In the meantime, the usefulness of Google went way down for me. I don't mind having to use double quotes, but it should be the other way around - I'd rather click a 'do a fuzzy improved search' box than have to say 'yes this is what I really want to search for I MEAN IT' with double quotes.
Whoops, you're right.

However, that radiator didn't appear to have any coolant in it.
Personaly, I refuse to click on any shortened URIs, especially when using a Windows box. I just don't care for them.
If you could get away with turning up your dynos and workers in anticipation of a traffic spike and then not have to pay; it wouldn't be fun any more.
> However, the answer is not, in fact, 1/3. Why is this?

This seems like a canard to me.

Here is my defense of 1/3 as a correct answer:
http://gist.github.com/578386

> Is Bayes’ theorem wrong?

> No, the answer comes from an unfortunate namespace collision in the word “given”. The man “gave” us the information that he has at least one male child. By this we mean that he asserted the statement “I have at least one male child.” Now our issue is when we confuse this with being “given” that the man has at least one male child, in the sense that we should restrict to the set of universes in which the man has at least one male child. This is a very different statement than the previous one. For instance, it rules out universes where the man has two girls, but is lying to us.

No, we are assuming that the givens are facts that are true.

> Even if we decide to ignore the possibility that the man is lying, we should note that most universes where the man has at least one son don’t even involve him informing us of this fact, and so it may be the case that proportionally more universes where the man has two boys involve him telling us “I have at least one male child”, relative to the proportion of such universes where the man has one boy and one girl. In this case the probability that he has two boys would end up being greater than 1/3.

No, we don't have to consider universes where the man has at least one male child but does not inform of us of this fact. We have a set of givens that are assumed to be true, and based on those givens and the rules of logic, we can make justifiable statements of probabilities.
Why C Is Not Assembly
That's really nice and I like the semi-fluid layout of the site. Trying to burn www.burnbit.com says connect recursion ;)
That big magical goal, or the "fuck you money" of achievements
it's another source of motivation. we each push each other to do more and more. of course the best source is a regular set of users telling you want they want, but the need to show new improvements each week is akin to making parents/friends proud of something you worked on.
Oh no, you mean they have to go to Starbucks or something?
Also we don't have off-world colonies, flying cars and replicants. Judge it as a movie, not as a prediction.

If you really want to fanwank it as correctly representing some future level of technology, though, imagine that in the future radio-frequency communications have been found to cause cancer and have been banned.
Captcha requires you to watch an Ad.
FaceTime and the elevation of emotion over function
That reminds me of a show, where in each episode, the host interviews a celebrity in an upscale dinner setting. Beside the very enticing gourmet meals, the topic also focuses on various aspects of the interviewee's life.

I think a good way to fix the I'm-not-sure-I-want-to-watch-the-next-episode-because-I-might-not-care-about-the-topic problem is to have one aspect of the talk focused on a specific theme, so that people can have expectations.
It sounds like he didn't get to it before running out of steam. Which is unfortunate, because that's really the reason I kept reading.
I still don't know what that is.

It seems like every time I stop paying attention for a week somebody has invented a new verb.
The pension funds of GM are at least as big a problem as the health insurance part.

And GM still sells very large numbers of vehicles, if Skoda could be turned around I don't see any reason why the same could not happen to GM.
This also applies when choosing partners. Being a lone founder is vastly better than throwing together a group that is all friction and no teamwork.
I agree, it is an incredible look into the mind of this leader. Whether you agree with his ideologies or not, it is a fascinating read. (just spent better part of an hour going through each of his posts)
It's a canard, but still informative. I do wish he hadn't claimed that 1/3rd is wrong by Bayesian statistics because the frequentist approach, with the same interpretation of the problem, yields exactly the same results.

It's still a valuable example of how to represent unreliable measurement processes in your model, and the importance of doing so.
You're confusing p(data) with p(data|data) which is, trivially, equal to 1.

p(data) is better formulated as p(data|F) where F codifies your assumptions about the possible generative probability models that you're building your likelihood function from. Or, similarly, F codifies your understanding of the world and the possible things that could occur within it.

This makes p(data|F) a perfect normalizing constant for the numerator of Bayes' Theorem since the numerator implies a choice of a specific model in the family F, but p(data|F) averages over all possible models/worlds/parameter choices (contained in F).
Apple apparently has a one-time whoopsie allowance. According to many reports on the 'net, they will one-time refund an app purchase.
I figured there was a good chance someone would say that.
I thought "smart fingers" would be another "measure your own hands" hack, perhaps with improvements and tips of some sort.

Who exactly would buy these things? They're clearly not designed as a precision measuring tool, but how often do casual users need to measure things? Enough to give up a socket or two to the wall-wart this thing will require?
It's actually our commercial software in question (we have a dual-licensed model for Virtualmin and Cloudmin, with the Open Source variant being under the GPL). I'm going to Photoshop something up for him, with the serial number and license key.

I'm tempted to pirate the Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity, and stick our numbers in there. There would be some sort of poetic something or other in that.
2008 sounds just about right, they can market it as 'google classic' for all I care.

It makes me wonder if, perhaps, Google2010 is just Google's New Coke ;-)
Rsvp'd. Nodejs stuff.
I agree. When trying to coin a new terminology, try not to use one that's already been in use for 15 years or so... <i>especially</i> when they're both related to ways of transferring files. It makes even reading about their product confusing.
Patience Diff
On quick look it looks like this problem:

http://developer.expressionz.in/blogs/2009/07/27/user-agent-...

> Basically , It looked like Google Chrome ignored my CSS Resets
> ( margin:0px). It actually was caused by the user agent
> stylesheet (-webkit-padding-start:40px). So the solution
> was to reset this style by setting padding:0 the misbehaving
> elements .
> A good way to prevent this problem from happening to any
> element is use a global CSS Rest as follows
>
> *{ margin:0; padding:0; }
Who better than the people who built the company can judge the quality of these offers?

The customers almost certainly could, but nobody ever asks them.
Where is this taking place? I wanted to go...
Nope.

It'll work with anything that will give you a direct download link. Since the business model of file sharing sites depend on making you look at ads before letting you download the file, they don't have any reason to do that.
The problem with starting an e-mail service is the crazy level of administration and sysadmin headaches it induces merely to be able to reliably send e-mail to 90%+ of endpoints.. let alone anything else.

The engineering problem is a pretty interesting one, but the headache of ensuring your users can actually get their mail someplace makes it seem dull or insurmountable to solo developers.
> Could this be any more self-righteous?

I believe this self-righteous attitude regarding acquisitions comes from being a bootstrapped startup. When you bootstrap your company starts with a valuation of zero. The only way to increase your company's valuation is to start making a profit. For the bootstrapped guys an acquisition offer means that your company has grown to the point where competitors feel threatened. When you are in this position the only reason to sell is if your company is no longer growing (why sell now when your company will be worth more next year?). That is a tragic situation.

The founders who raise money start with an expected valuation greater than zero. Usually these guys can sell well before they ever meet the expected valuation. I mean shit, the startup SocialThing! sold to AOL for $7 million while they were in private beta. In other situations these companies fail to meet the expected valuation and have to sell in order to protect the reputation of the investors and founders. For example Slide sold to Google for $183 million. My company Quiz Monster (bootstrapped) is a competitor to Slide, has a larger userbase, and is worth $1.5 million at best.

TL;DR: Bootstrapped companies have to work harder than venture backed companies in order to receive acquisition offers and thus feel very self-righteous.
until they pull it for infringement. Also, i want music people can use legally, can you do that with any video on YT?
No problem. My copy of Autocad is owned by XYZ-software installation inc. A wholly owned subsidiary whose only asset is a copy of Autocad, I can sell the company to anyone I want - the license is never transferred.
Yeah, the captcha-ed file hosting sites popular in the segment they're after are a major problem.

Especially if the "web seed" is hosted by burnbit, I think people will end up using this with private Dropbox URLs instead.
I suppose I look at it the other way...the makers intended for it to be called SEQUEL, and because of copyright issues, they changed it to SQL. It doesn't change the fact that they really wanted it to be SEQUEL. Similarly, I still call SciFi network SciFi and not SyFy, because the original name was SciFi, and they only changed it because of copyright issues.

It looks like the Sequel is winning in the poll vs S-Q-L too!
I can think of loads of reasons why you might be legitimately in that situation...

Perhaps you intentionally provisioned a large amount of headroom for a forthcoming expected/possible traffic spike.

In that example it would be annoying to get "are you sure you want to have this extra resource running?" emails.

(sure, you should be building the system to auto-provision but that would have required a better programmer and you just got the interns to build it, etc)
No problem.

It works too, which is even better (though I failed to get a rejection yesterday). Once I've thoroughly tested it, I'm going to introduce it to my employees.
I've heard of Feedburner (and had an account for a few years), and I didn't make the association. It's not just you.