skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would expect them to prefer smaller file sizes, especially in public preview galleries, to lower their bandwidth costs. Someone scraping high-quality images incurs a small one-time bandwidth cost, and they can re-encode the images at a lower quality if they want to save bandwidth.
Strange-looking People on the Coast of the USA
These are some strange-looking people on the coast of the USA. Not only do they look weird but they behave in the same way.
That's easy: This person has no idea why Walmart is successful. Walmart's success has little to nothing to do with convenience. It has everything to do with economies of scale, being able to apply pressure to your suppliers, and efficient inventory tracking and prediction. The proposed website benefits from none of these...
There was some initiative to create an archive of shortened URLs if the provider were to close down. http://www.archive.org/details/301works. But looks like it did not gain much traction.
Without reading the article, I can sum this up in two words: perceived efficiency.
The article was insightful, and describes some of the problems, but is short on solutions. A seemingly good solution would be to allow limited-scope representations with more frequency that is common at present. In Texas, this is permitted by Texas Disciplinary Rule of Professional Conduct 1.02(b) states, "A lawyer may limit the scope, objectives and general methods of the representation if the client consents after consultation."

However, many lawyers are still hesitant to "help out" citizens who want to handle a case themselves but just need pointers. This is in part because many state bars historically don't condone reduced-fee or "partial" representation.

It's assumed by many that if a lawyer helps someone with a case, no matter how slightly, they have created an "attorney client relationship" and are then obligated to provide full representation for that case.

Obviously, a lawyer isn't going to be comfortable doing an hour or two of work if it means he or she will be committed to being "on the hook" for the entire rest of that matter.

My 2c is that we need clear-cut rules for the legal profession that allow limited scope representations without implied obligations of full representation. You can sort of get there now in some states by being very clear in your representation agreement, but the fear of the state bar or an upset client bringing a grievance is a significant concern.

But, with a limited-scope representation you have to think about how that sort of thing gets explained to a client.

For example, assume

a) the client is defending him/herself against a lawsuit
b) a lawyer agrees to "give" the client four hours of consultation on the case at half their normal rate
c) the client goes into court and loses

Does the client now have the right to come back and sue the lawyer because they didn't learn everything in the 4 hour consult that they would have if the lawyer had been on their side full time? Is it malpractice for the lawyer to cut off the representation when the second hand ticks past 4 hours? What if the lawyer knew that there were other issues that would take eight hours to explain? Are they now obligated to provide another four for free?

It's those kind of questions that have led many bar associations to draw relatively bright lines in the sand, even if they seem to be inefficient and draconian.

In the end, I think limited scope representation should be allowed, as long as the expectations are clearly communicated up front. But, that's easier said than done.
What isn't Google trying to build and why
What isn't Google trying to build? A phone os, chrome, url shortener, video, checkout..etc..

It seems like they truly are trying to build a bit of everything.
It's a damn shame there isn't anything like, say, a scroll wheel or a scroll bar, to look at the results below the fold. That would really sort things out.
Well - I bought a car when I was there, too. It's too useful. I guess my overall point is that in Germany, unlike most places in the US, makes it possible to live without one.

Here in Indiana, without a car you don't work. Or buy groceries. Period. You are at the mercy of your friends who do have cars, and it's a real burden for the poor.
Can you advertise a /24 from Level3 at, say, Verizon? Don't the backbones filter advertisements by ASN?

(Back in the dark ages when I was actually doing this stuff, you couldn't advertise anything smaller than a /19 unless you were grandfathered in.)
That is really cool. Thank you for the correction, and for the article.
Maybe.

I think it depends on whether your definition of how spammy something is has to do with relevance or permission. I tend to think that permission has a lot more to do with it.

If I sign up for a mailing list, I've given them permission to contact me. Even if they never send me something I care about, it's not spam (assuming that the email sent is related to what the list purported to be about).

If I have a personal friend who, as an inside joke, likes to send me links to penis enlargement sites, that's not spam, although if it's too common, he might find himself filtered out or not my friend any more.

If someone I have no other connection with decides to contact me with a commercial offer, that's spam. I haven't given them permission to send me that sort of thing. Even if the offer is relevant to me, it's still spam.

Signing up for Facebook pretty clearly gives people who you know to contact you with friend requests. It doesn't give random people trying to sell something that permission, so their doing so is spammy.
IPhone 4 Scalpers Force Beijing Apple Store to Close
I agree that component count and the price of other logic chips were important too. Woz was a genius at that kind of design where you have to do something super-creative to save that last tiny bit of cash.

However, I think I can make a good argument that memory price was the main factor. As a hardware engineer, the only reason you'd ever use tricks like indexed color (palettes), foreground/background color per character (like CGA or the TMS9918), even/odd column color restrictions (like the Apple ][), and all the rest is to save memory.

Once you can afford enough memory to store your full color depth for every pixel in the frame buffer, your display hardware actually gets simpler -- it's just a straight pipe from memory to screen with no extra logic (other than your D-to-A conversion in the old days). No indexing, no complicated bit-packing schemes, no switching of color palettes during horizontal or vertical retrace.

Tons of effort and creativity went into that stuff, but it was all obsolete once memory got cheap enough.
Details On JGate's New Caching Layer
Can we turn this into a 'What isn't Google trying to build and why?" thread. That way entrepreneurs don't have to rethink from scratch this every time (investors tend to ask this question).
The website actually exists, too:

http://globalcommunity.me/

It's worth checking out.

It's almost as though someone built this as an object lesson in the horrors of losing focus. This idea is terrible – and the design tells you all you need. Look at all that. It's like a piñata full of services exploded all over their homepage.

Wal-Mart also has one of the worst customer experiences ever – so we can snark all we want but this guy has succeeded in his goal in at least one dimension.

edit: Also, who is giving this "business" $20k to work with?
Get Rid of the Bad Apples
http://code.google.com/speed/webp/

> The WebP team is developing a patch to WebKit to provide native support for WebP in an upcoming release of Google Chrome.

So it will be available to all webkit browsers willing to accept the patch.
Checking out the site, it's actually pretty impressive. Not in the well-designed sense, but in the having-an-actual-product sense (even if it's, you know, a blatant ripoff of the sites he listed...http://www.globalcommunity.me/blog/ feels like it takes the cake in that regard). I'm curious about where he got his funding from.

Edit: The alt-text for his "Blog" image is literally 'scritter'. My co-workers are giving me funny looks.
Russian firm plans commercial space station
liked it, good job syron!!
I think that at the very least, a super angel needs a halo, tights and a cape.
it is very easy to use... like the most simple app on FB
Matt Cutts explains: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/goo-gl-url-shortener/

Q: Why are you doing this?

A: Google needed a url shortener for its own products where we knew the shortener wouldn’t go away. We also wanted a shortener that we knew would do things the right way (e.g. 301/permanent redirects), and that would be fast, stable, and secure.
"the ultimate micro blogging website"
Um, there is an online one stop shop for everything called Amazon. And there's eBay.

... and he's trying to do this on $20k?

... and he wants to have a global consumer-oriented business website without a .com domain?

... and the whole "one-stop shop" concept stops becoming appealing when going to a specialty store takes two clicks instead of driving two miles.

Also, the design of the actual site leaves ... something to be desired:
http://www.globalcommunity.me/
To be fair, Wave is still functional and Google announced intentions of releasing "Wave in a Box" (1). And they have explicitly said they'll provide a method to export existing data. Either way, their decommissioning of Wave is a lot more responsible than, say, what Xmarks is doing. I trust Google a lot more than a fly-by-night startup to gracefully shutdown their services.

(1) http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-n...
man they will shut it down cuz of privacy breaching.. 1 month tops
Original and much more descriptive title:

"Babson MBA Program Boldly Expands to San Francisco, Where Entrepreneurship Goes “90 Miles Per Hour”"
Lead Developer - Yoopra
Yoopra is the next generation of college daily deal commerce. We’re building an all-star engineering as we get ready to take on the world (launch). We stem from Stanford, NYU, and the Holy Land (Israel). We’re looking for engineers passionate about web 2.0 and agile methodology.
This happens to me all the time when I am venturing into new territory with a language or framework I have little to no experience with and only the docs to guide me.

I can be 100% certain I found out what caused my bug, or how my code should really work. But I am iffy about taking out the superstitious and useless changes I made while I should have probably walked away for a bit... Changes that didn't help but didn't break anything either.
The number of people who pick '12345' or 'password' is astronomical. And forcing them to remember a "strict" password is more detrimental to the user experience than just having a user/password combination.

Besides, what are you going to do if you get dupes? "Sorry, that password is already in use"?
The fact that it takes longer to get to the auction section of the site than to just type in "http://www.ebay.com is a warning sign too. I bet he did this on a free server, because it's really slow.
The URL check is not against a whitelist. My head parses the URL using poorly defined heuristics to decide if it looks safe or not. I rarely get it wrong.
I laughed out loud when I clicked that page. His mascot looks like the Twitter bird on meth.
There are no browser compatibility issues if you use conservative HTTP content negotiation. Browsers which support WebP can say so in their HTTP Accept headers, and the server can serve WebP to those browsers, falling back on ordinary JPEG for older browsers. This was also used back when PNG support was spotty, by sites which wanted to combine the goodness of PNG with the ubiquity of GIF. It's actually pretty simple:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_negotiation

Now that I think about it, there's probably a business opportunity for someone who handles such hosting issues for image-heavy web sites. The porn industry may seem sketchy, but they have a lot of money and a pressing need to keep overhead down.
Entering goo.gl should return itself don't you think?
I recommended this to a new hire (frontend HTML/JS guy, but wants to learn Python). He really found it easy to get into, and appreciated the exercises. Thanks for publishing it.
Lead Developer - Yoopra 
Yoopra is the next generation of college daily deal commerce. We’re building an all-star engineering as we get ready to take on the world (launch). We stem from Stanford, NYU, and the Holy Land (Israel). We’re looking for engineers passionate about web 2.0 and agile methodology.<p>At Yoopra, you will join a startup, soon to be funded. You will work with us on constantly innovating our platform to meet the needs of our users. You will be working with people that are self-motivated, have a passion for web development, and work in a user-focused, highly intelligent, entrepreneurial environment.<p>This is an opportunity for a young tech entrepreneur to have a big impact on a startup; a chance to bring new ideas to the table, implement them, and iterate.<p>Applicants should have the following credentials.<p>- PHP Experience<p>- Objected Oriented Programming Experience<p>- Javascript, AJAX, AJAX frameworks, and DOM technologies<p>- MySQL, or related RDBMS<p>- BS or MS degree in CS, or related field<p>Drop us a note at jobs@yoopra.com
Dupe, although the original got no love:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740340
“Inspect element” is not the same as “View source”
It looks like he intends to create his vision by buying a domain, buying a "{x}.com clone script" for each of the sites he mentioned, and installing them each in a subdirectory of his domain. They're not connected in any meaningful way, be it in terms of unified login or design.
The thing is, it feels like even in those cases, the service should be shortening its own URLs.
Like in the gym changing room there are three levels of maturity:

1. Giggling
2. Prudishness
3. Maturity
worth watching. Would up vote more if I could.
From what I've read about Greece, Ireland's problems are completely different. Nothing to do with a black market, more to do with an incompetent government that let property prices get out of control.
The Ultimate Power Hobby? Playing Professor
Great news, I am downloading and excited to see it. Big Buck Bunny was such a big success, story- and technically wise.
Ha you think that is bad - in Florida you have to get a license to be a floral decorator.

I do wonder how they got that one past the law makers.
It's an interesting ploy, but the success is going to be based entirely on what type of beta tester you're trying to attract.

Personally, as an introverted tech, I'd be interested in signing up, poking around, and filing bug reports, but requiring me to spam my friends list for an invite isn't something I'm willing to do.
That first link just gave us some analytics about the people here on HN. Offtopic: It reported Chrome on Ubuntu as Browsers: Ubuntu
For what it's worth, the battery lasts half as long in Ubuntu than Windows (Dell Studio XPS 16). Also the fan is always on moderately loud even if I am only browsing the web or the lid is closed, and it heats up under the trackpad more than Windows to a degree that is annoying.
Informed Delusion
For someone with your position in the company and prior track record of success you seem very thin skinned in dealing with this guy. Aside from his interactions with you what results is he delivering? I would focus on his contribution and not get into any more petty disputes (even when you are right you are making it seem that you are not fit to be CTO or a board member).
ohh thanks for posting it here :)
and thanks for the points.
to they guy who talked about breaking privacy: no sir it doesn't do that, because it simply uses facebook api...
Did you actually sign up for one? It seems more sketchy than I'm willing to do anything with. Like the next generation of a domain-sitting page.
There are a lot of bootstrappers on the Lean Startup Circle discussion group (http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle/topics).
Jaguar creates electric supercar with jet engine
Just out of interest - do the top level DNSs look at the entire address or is Greenland's main internet supplier going to melt under the load of redirecting everything to Google?
Patent Reform: Heavy Hitters Back Microsoft Supreme Court Bid in i4i Case
I see now that it is a terrible idea. Thank you.
Holy hell... I thought I was a scope creeper...
Why didn't you use a proper link in an HTML email?
I would work for free if my "hazing" consisted of an all expenses paid trip to Antarctica.
goo.gl generates them using the charts API.
It's interesting that you see the relationship between a Catholic and his/her church as analogous to that between a corporation and their "users".

While believers in 'ethical consumption' would say that the moral principles of producers certainly should be a concern for consumers, not everybody agrees. But when choosing a religious creed, the behaviour of the founders and keepers of the faith is surely of paramount importance.

Can you really say that issues of child abuse are not interesting to Catholic followers, because they "just use the product"?
Why does this have "Life Hack" in the title?
Not to take away from either of you, but I had a very similar problem with Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron 9300. I would open my insulated laptop backpack, at least once every few months, to find a computer too hot to touch and the smell of baking foamcore. I have not had that problem with Ubuntu, and it has been running on that machine since 7.04.
" You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you’re protected against malware, phishing and spam"

So if I send you a goo.gl link to goat.cx does Google stop that? What if you wanted to see goat.cx ?
That rule of thumb is based on false assumptions. Here's actual data for September from a campaign I'm running on both search and content. I took the exact same keywords from my search campaign and copied them into a content network campaign:

Campaign:Clicks:Impressions

Search(+partners):9,738:244,005

Content Network:32,648:7,202,056

Adwords tool estimates about 200,000 local searches for my main keywords.
The Adwords Keyword Tool DOES NOT report impressions from the Content Network as a mesaure of search volume, that is just a fact.

Your method is fundamentally flawed. This process will tell you absolutely _nothing_ useful about the size of your market.
I hope your book does not have any similar errors.
great, they have an office in toronto. thanks :)
http://cloudera.com
http://riptano.com
http://couchone.com
http://10gen.com
http://neotechnology.com
http://basho.com
...
I don't know about the rest of you but there are plenty of links in my bookmarks that are probably more than 10 years old that are still active.
You Want A New Semi- Digg/Reddit, Semi ezine? Well Here You Go
You make a good point. We've been thinking about other ways for people to move up in the line that involve some of those things.

We don't require you to spam your friends list for an invite, but if you share the link with your friends, you'll get it earlier :)
Would like to add in another factor into this question -

How long do you want that unity to last? the moment the question of commercialising the output of the project comes up, the competition will come out in the open and the unity will break.

Also, is it really required for the whole humanity to unite to take up a project that can affect humanity? Most of technologies and resources that can enable such a project are in the hands of a very few nations.
Yeah, I thought the browser stats for HN people was interesting as well. We love Chrome and apparently one person likes news.ycombinator.org.
WebP uses the same color model as WebM which "works exclusively with an 8-bit YUV 4:2:0 image format" so seems like WebP will not be HDR capable, which is a pity.
I'm not really sure what this product does, even after watching the video. At first, I thought it was a place I could send all my items from different sites to a central location.. and then, everything would be ship at once. But, then, I was able to view all my inventory, see stats about different things, compare prices...? I'm a bit puzzled.

Everything looks quite clean and is very easy to navigate.

You might want to take a look at how dropbox does it. Even thought there are lots of features, they show mainly the most important ones in the first video.
This here, is a prime example of why we reinvent the wheel every 15 years. Someone decides that they have the market and they are going to exploit it and everyone else packs their toys and goes home.

Then we once again built the ecosystem on the next technology. I personally am looking at who the next guys is going to be. Node looks promising but it is hard to tell. I used to think "sure Java is aging. but there is no huge motivator to move off, its not going anywhere".

Now with each move by Oracle, I am forming the opinion that Oracle is bound and determined to kill it. I don't know what they are thinking, do they think that the Java developers will just go, oh well now Oracle is the only vendor we will get or stuff from oracle? No they will bail, I don't know how they could ever think that it would turn out any other way.

I am dumbfounded by the course of action that they are taking. If it is strategic I can't see the strategy for the life of me (I have not seen the forest through the trees before) and if it is incompetence you would think they would realize their drastic missteps by now.
Have you checked out Bit.ly recently? They have differentiated themselves quite nicely -- they offer URL shortening for custom domains. I don't know if that can keep them afloat, but it's certainly a cool idea.
Everyone who upvoted it. If the upvote links were run through goo.gl the public statistics could tell you.
I used to be a Business Intelligence consultant for enterprises. We built reports, data warehouses, dashboards, etc. From my experience, the article is spot on, not linkbait.

Maybe MongoDB is better once you have a well defined query that you need, but I think the point of the parent comment is that those examples of queries are ad-hoc. NoSQL is not as good as SQL when it comes to report specs that are constantly in a state of flux.

I need my data available to answer questions. When building a product you have a well defined set of operations based on the features of your product. When the requirements shift on a regular basis, NoSQL is too limiting.

When the article talks about a low level query language being too limiting, they are talking about missing things like CONNECT BY PRIOR or SUM(CASE IF col IN ('a','b','c') THEN 1 ELSE 0). These are the same kinds of things that are difficult to do with an ORM.
Youtube would be a silent wasteland.
It's there to remind you that stories about homeless folks and NPR belong on Hacker News.
One thing I like about the bi-annual Ubuntu announcements is that it has provided a sort of mental metronome for the pace of development, and a moment to reflect on when, exactly, I did I last update those servers?
Ask HN: Advice On Conducting A Credit Card Rate Bid
Howdy HN,

Our business is of fair size and 95%+ of our transactions are credit cards. We've used the same company at the same rates for two years now and we signed on with them for free Yahoo ads.

I have an effective ship bid relationship but on the credit card side, everyone I call wants 50% of the savings for 3 years. Ouch.

Has anyone solo'd this process? Are can you point me to good resources to learn or good consultants to help?
There would be a username, it just wouldn't be a part of the login process. I'm inclined to go with a better system instead of what people are expecting, but that's probably bad policy if I want users :) . A randomly generated password might solve the duplicates problem, but I guess I'll just stick to the standard format. Thanks for the feedback.
> The 4 characters they are currently using will only be enough for a while. They'll switch to 5 soon enough.

Hmm... are they sequentially used? Bets on how soon?
Job Searching on Facebook