skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use the Xmarks firefox plugin, but with my own server. It's always supported that. I expect that'll keep working for a while until a newer Firefox breaks the plugin, so I'm still in the same boat of needing to find another sync method. But I might have longer than people who use the service. Or shorter, no way to tell, really.
Stanford genomics startup Counsyl wins WSJ Innovation Award
Which should give it some urgency as WA has a state income tax on the ballot this fall.
I find it strange that there are no buyers interested in your user base. I'd love to hear more about the monetization efforts that you attempted, as I would have imagined there should be numerous ways to leverage those users. But, of course, if I was an expert, I'd probably have the capital to make an offer.
Perhaps, but not necessarily; the YC project is about going big, ultimately -- after all, that's the only way YC is going to make some money.

It is possible to bootstrap a company in such a way as to plateau out at, say, 3 people, each of whom gets a decent market salary. However, that company may not have further room to climb for various structural and/or marketing reasons, lack of appropriate connections, funding opportunities, etc. In principle, the purpose of YC is to address that specific gap irrespectively of how much short-term revenue the startup may be generating.

On the other hand, I agree that the amount of funding they provide per se is not particularly useful if you are already generating enough revenue to pay yourself(ves) a market salary.
This app store fragmentation is going to be bad for both devs and consumers. In the near future, there is likely to be at least 3 separate marketplaces (Google, Amazon, Verizon), with certain apps only appearing in certain app stores on certain carrier networks.

Want the Skype app? Oh, that's only available in the Verizon store over the Verizon network.

Want some other specific app? Oh, that's only on the Amazon store, which Verizon may or may not allow you to install in the first place.
Easiest Guide of Converting VOB videos to MP4 without iMovie on Mac
For Mac users, there may be some troubles for owning some videos that can't be played or accepted by Mac OS X, even the Mac software, such as iDVD, iMovie and Final Cut Pro. You may have some VOB files and want to convert them to MP4 for your iDVD or Final Cut Pro on Mac. Follow this guide of Mac VOB to MP4 Converter to finish your goal.
My Problems on the JetBlue All-You-Can-Jet Pass
Reminds me of the opening to Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
I'd guess a merger that gave him a chance to bury Microsoft might make him sit up and take notice. HP maybe? Their hardware and channels exclusively running Macos would be a juggernaut.
Building a hit, one block at a time: the creation of Minecraft
A 1-approximation is an approximation within a factor of 1. Basically that means that the solution is nearly exact. A 2-approximation would be no more than twice as bad as the optimal solution, and an n-aproximation would be no more than n times as bad as the optimal solution.

This is a common thing to use in randomized or approximate algorithms. For example, solving min-cut by assigning to 2 sets randomly is provably a 2-approximation.
Absolutely none. I need to get my shit done, dude! :p
Android 2.2.1 just pushed to my Nexus One
On T-Mobile, just got the update to 2.2.1. Not sure what's in it yet.
I am now going to repeat what you said, but with more feeling:

We also considered refocusing Xmarks as a freemium sync business, but the prospects there are grim too: with the emergence of competent sync features built in to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it’s hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free.

Ask me! Ask me! Why don't you ask me ?!!!

Native firefox syncing isn't going to help me sync my Firefox bookmarks to my iPhone, is it? Maybe that is worth something to me, ya know?

Isn't it completely ironic, that on top of HN right now is PG's Y-combinator screed, with how important it is to launch as soon as possible with as little functionality as you can in order to let users guide you to what they really want? So users are okay for telling you what features they want but they are not okay for telling you whether they want to pay ??

I mean okay, maybe I am a complete aberration in being willing to pay a few bucks for xmarks. But they didn't even ask. Maybe there would have been enough other aberrations out there to keep it going as a low-key low-turnover service.

This is the thing that bothers me with the start-up world - it seems so bi-modal: make it big or go bust. What about a quiet, modest little service that can pay for itself and maybe a bit extra?

Bah. I'm sad.
This makes me want to add achievements to Ruby Koans: http://rubykoans.com/

Although the Zen masters would probably frown on that.
I think the article was talking specifically about humans, and not other species. In that case, there's a baseline of sleep required for a human. Need more than that? You're a generalist. Need less? You're a specialist.

When you go bringing in other species you have to change the baseline. Sloths and armadillos sleep as much as they do for other reasons than being worn out from brain plasticity.
It took me a while, but now one of two things happen during my naps:

1) I don't ever fall asleep. So it's mostly just resting and relaxing with my eyes closed.

2) I fall asleep 10 minutes into the 30 minutes and wake exactly one minute before my alarm rings. My body somehow learned to do this, probably because the alarm sound is so painful. But I can tell that I wake up (I'm not sure who "I" is; it's more of a subconscious thing) right before I fall into a REM sleep.
What Today’s Housing Market Means to You
If you have faith in our copyright system, it's probably not worth worrying about.

Fulltext of the bill: http://bit.ly/aGMT4L
My guess: $50 Million

What do you say?
We agreed we will "eventually" follow all their existing procedures, but it is really annoying because we would have to switch many of our secure Linux solutions to their required Windows environment, so this "eventually" may mean "in a very far future" for some requirements. Some other procedures are very interesting and we are happy to learn from them.
Here's a very simple algorithm to find your optimal napping time.

1. Buy a device from myzeo.com

2. Go to sleep at night, and review the times that you entered deep sleep

3. Take a nap during the day wearing the zeo, then figure out the time you enter deep sleep. That might be N minutes since you turned the device on.

4. Then, nap for a little less than N minutes.

If you determine that you start going into deep sleep at 30 minutes in #3, then you should set your alarm for 26-28 minutes. You'll feel refreshed.
I don't get distracted by the new search results, but I do get distracted when the search bar suddenly jumps to the top of the screen.

I don't know how it reduces the number of mouse clicks, though. There was one before (selecting a result), and there is still one after.
"Hackers" Movie Viewing in Seattle, October 2nd
Congress To Vote On Great Firewall of America
They use that widely in igoogle and orkut apps.
Great article that provides invaluable insights into Mailchimp's experience with the freemium business model. We are using a freemium model with Domainer Income (http://www.domainerincome.com). Now, we are still in the throes of improving many aspects of the site and conversion funnel, etc but with regard to the freemium model itself, it occurs to me that we have - and anyone deploying a freemium model has - quite a few variables to play around with that will impact the 10:1 ratio as well as overall conversions, sales, profits, renewals, etc. For example, my experience and observations suggest that you really need to provide overwhelming value in the paid version to get people to upgrade. 'A little bit better' won't cut it. Also, you can experiment with the actual free/paid service you provide. One thing we're about to do is give everyone who signs up for a free membership a trial of the premium service before they are 'dropped' back to the free account. These are just two examples. On the other hand, having said this, I am also developing a theory that you really have three target markets: freebie users who will never upgrade, paid users who want the value-added services of the paid version, and a group in between that will upgrade if they perceive enough value in doing so. How big is the middle group, what will it take to convince them to upgrade, is it cost-effective to try to persuade them? These are all fascinating questions!
Facebook starts over PHP or JAVA?
If Facebook were to start over what should it use PHP or JAVA (J2EE)? Why?

Special considerations:

1. Scaling
2. Development speed
3. Maintainability
4. Development tools
5. Development costs
6. 3rd party applications
7. Security
8. Deployment speed
By the 2nd quarter of 2010, RIM was still beating both Android and Apple in market share for Smartphones:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone

It's more like everyone else tried making Blackberry killers, and has yet to succeed.
On Books
TechStars has a new feature at http://ask.techstars.org/ designed to answer a lot of these questions. I was involved in TechStars Boston '09 as a technical mentor and fell in love with the program. Joined with a company in TechStars Boston 2010 - and had an amazing experience!

With TechStars its all about the mentors: Learning from those who have come before you: Both through TechStars, business professionals, funded entrepreneurs, etc.

The connections you gain are for a lifetime!
> Well, that stddev function could be much less verbose:

Sure, it could, but I was demonstrating what it looked like without the use of functions. Your example proves my point just as mine does: sum(), like mean() or variance() in my example, is just a simple function, the kind that I'm arguing for. The fact that it's built into Python (rather recently, I note) doesn't change that fact or reduce the impact of the argument. Your example simply goes one step down the path, and mine goes further.

> To me that's easier to read than jumping back and forth between multiple function definitions.

You don't have to jump back and forth between function definitions. Let's say you don't know what the standard deviation is, but you know what the mean is. You can look at the definition of stddev() and see, "Ah, it's clearly the sqrt() of the variance. What's the variance? Ah, it's the sum of the squares of difference between each element and the mean." You know what the mean() does (its name is pretty clear) and you know what sum() and square() do, so you never have to look at those functions. Someone else who knows what the variance is would never have to look that deep. When someone is reading the stddev() in my example, he doesn't have concern himself with implementation details of functions he already understands. When someone is reading yours, he has to at least read how the mean is calculated. He can't avoid it--it's right there.

> Of course, if you need the mean or variance independently then your way is better.

You almost certainly will in any case where you're using the standard deviation, but that's just an artifact of the example. Other advantages of using small, simple functions like in my example:

* More reusable (as you noted)
* More easily testable.
* More easily comprehensible (as I showed above)
* More easily documented (especially in a language like Python with its docstring support)
* More conceptual abstraction
The changes are pretty substantial when you need them. I wrote a clojure implementation of Base64 that's faster than apache's commons-codec. In 1.2 it was about 5x slower.
What's the best estimate on their revenue?
People that love node.js should just admit that the reason they love it is because of Javascript. The js code slingers finally get their shot at server-side, congratulations! The whole event-driven thing comes naturally to them since that's what they've been dealing with on the browser. There are pros and cons to that style, but that's the story of every tool.
They also have the side effect of removing an item from the collection.
Accessing your friends is not an extended permission as mentioned in another comment, any app you give permissions to can access your friends and get their ID's and Names.
Swoopo works for the same reason slot machines are enormously popular, even though the house always wins.
we've changed prices four times over the years...your learn something new all the time, and we are constantly testing new things. Though...i'll tell you something...we tend to test a million different pricing page designs, and rarely change our whole pricing model. that said, the real lift comes from changing your model - not your design...and I guess this article proves that out as well.
Blackbook2 In-Site Content Networks
It says it right here:

"Synaptic pruning and other mechanisms for synaptic plasticity allow for learning and memory, but they are energetically costly. Indeed, one hypothesis holds that sleep is the price we have to pay for plasticity the previous day. (see here)"

"Synaptic pruning and other mechanisms for synaptic plasticity" -- Being a generalist.

"...they are energetically costly. Indeed, one hypothesis holds that sleep is the price we have to pay for plasticity the previous day." -- Requires more sleep.

Here's the wikipedia article on Neuroplasticity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

It is the process of changing your brain. When neurons fire together they wire together, forming a neural pathway. When they fire apart, they wire apart. So if you're doing one thing - programming requiring high amounts of logic, for instance - a certain bunch of neurons fire together. They start forming a pathway. If you then go do something else in the same day, requiring a different bunch of neurons to fire, say play an instrument or write a fiction story, you'll start forming a different neural pathway. If some of the neurons overlap, but not all, you might end up beginning to break down the pathway you were building earlier in the day.

All of these activities require more energy than simply continuing to use the same series of pathways you built earlier in the day.
It really depends where you're at in the market. Apple and Google are on the attack and RIM is nervously awaiting the siege. If they can't ship they need to at least rally the troops and preach to the faithful. I'm guessing RIM did enough market research to understand that there is a major risk of users/developers jumping ship even in the next 6 months.
whether having separate identities is a net win or a net lose depends on N. Having to maintain say 3 separate identities (N=3) on the web (roughly: one for public social, one for private/secret, one for money/utilities) is a much lower burden than having to maintain say 30 or 300 separate unconnected identities, each with their own username/password/profile/messaging/eventstreams/community-connections.
Based on specs alone and QNX's track record, this seems to be a credible competitor to the iPad. At least much better than the HP slate running on Windows 7.

Going through the Blackberry site, it isn't clear how apps are developed for the Playbook. One page mentions web development using the HTML5 stack and Adobe Flash. Perhaps the apps are developed as a bundled runtime on top of Flash?
This is standard neo Keynesianism (neo because nowadays governments just roll over the debt while Keynes advocated repayment in full at the end of the recession.)

The counter argument to it is very simple: this spending is spending money that comes out of the economy, and taking money out of the economy hurts economic growth. Further, many argue that the spending produces less froth than the money destroys when taken out- lower profits at the personal or corporate level mean less investment in growth via consumer spending or business expansion.

Further we have just witnessed a perfect implementation of this theory- after the dot com crash, government lowered interest rates below inflation, making free money and spent massively running up record deficits. It managed to spark a housing boom and a lot of consumer spending... But the situation we find ourselves in now is simply the hangover from that party.

If we get drunk again, it isn't going to banish hangovers and each time we do it, it gets worse while the body gets closer to death.
Maybe someone could shed some light on this for me, but what's the value of this over, say, a wiki? Other than email support, which could or could not be worth it, the value to the organization seems to be the same: it's an easily searchable and editable knowledgebase.
Do you not find the Adam Tablet compelling? It's going to have the NVidia Pixel Qi screen that can go greyscale so you can see it in the sun, and runs Android.

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

It should be coming out in a few weeks, so it should be one of the first decent iPad competitors.
That is pretty seriously evil. Although, with a little modification it could be made less evil. Such as if they started all auctions at .0001 the normal price of the item. And if they had enough users, so that any one user only bid a couple of times before the price of the item reached a point where people weren't willing to chase it any more. But it doesn't sound like thats the case here, in which case, definitely evil.
I hope they could open source their code or their sync protocol, or at least release a guide how to setup thirdparty sync servers.
The performance alternative was dipping into java. It's sexy enough.
"Visual feedback gives you the illusion of speed, like a progress bar reduces the impression of waiting, but that’s all it is: an illusion."

I read an article once about elevators (
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_... ). It was spun-off the "man getting stuck in an elevator for 41 hours" story.

In the article, the writer cites a particular anecdote about an elevator company installing faster elevators in a particular building. Patrons of the building, however, complained that the elevators were now slower. The company was confused--how was this possible? It turns out, the new elevators lacked mirrors. People couldn't straighten their hair and pick their teeth while standing in it, so the ride felt longer.

People perceive time in odd ways. Google's taking a stab at this perception; the illusion of speed in the eyes of the user counts more than physical speed. The user is the yard stick, not engineers with stopwatches.

The author here casts aside illusion like it's meaningless, but that's far from the truth. Look at the Parthenon, whose columns are tapered to make it look bigger, or magicians, who stun audiences with clever distraction. Casting aside illusion is on par with casting aside mathematics; it may be difficult to understand at times and require a large amount of labor to learn, but neither can be avoided without losing some room to maneuver.
The Ruby movement
All the major players with a mobility presence realize they have to have a tablet in this game for their channel. HP, RIM, Dell - hell, even Cisco has a tablet:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps11156/index.html?

I don't think Cisco/RIM are that interested in the consumer space (initially) - my guess is they have ceded the first couple years to Apple, and will start with the Business Vertical - an area that Apple seemingly has fairly low interest in pursuing seriously (to date - They succeed in valley companies, where 80% of the laptops in meetings I go to are Mac Book Pros, despite themselves. I mean, seriously - how difficult is it to get enterprise on-site support...)
icon and fitness manufacturers do make accessories to their standard equipments. also, the thing is that they already have an installed base at gyms. these companies have a large software team and they will be able to eliminate you over time if they decide that this is big enough of a market to enter.

there are industry alliances out there whose single task force is to standardize protocols of how to make it easy for devices to get online. the current model is using the iPhone/iPod as a remote control to get these devices online so it's not that hard. this means even if your app is better, it won't survive for now, but long term it might not if the only true innovation is using image processing to capture data.

Yes, there will be people who will not want to shell out the money to buy these expensive devices. but that means that you are targeting a population who "do not want to shell out the money". You don't really want to build a device where cost is one of your biggest value propositions.

the last idea - I actually really like the idea of targeting healthcare rather than fitness. I actually want to see family members of these patients pay money to track their progress and see what doctors are saying. Doctors are more likely to pay so that they can get access to their patients' data and monitor their patients' progress over time. and yes, partnership is a big thing here because you want to focus on software innovation. by partnering up with hardware companies, you could benefit a lot from them.

there is also a company called Dossia where they keep track of health records. definitely a good partnerhsip to have some time down the road when your product is ready. it's founded by andy grove from Intel, all of my friends who are Intel employees get them for free. I don't know what type of info they keep track here, but if you allow doctors to update info into these health records, then it'd be really useful...now this product sounds really exciting to me! good luck!!
Everyone in our house gets to read all the iPad books.... First off most of them are drm free books from orielly and pragmatic programmers or PDFs that can be emailed. But even the ones from the AppStore are just in iTunes and itunes syncs our book libraries, so if she adds one to hers i get it immediately on mine. ITunes supports sharing of drm encumbered media this way. Also it means we have a backup in case one of e laptops dies.
My experience with Xmarks was not a great one. I used it when it was first called Foxmarks and enjoyed it. Some time after the name change, I noticed that one of the updates had turned on by default some extra overlays on the google search results page touting their rankings.

The blog post suggests that this was a bonus feature, or a value-add, but that's not how I saw it. A previously well-behaved bookmarks sync plugin all of a sudden decided to impose on my preferred search engine. That's a spammy low-class intrusion into my browsing experience.

I turned off the feature, but every time I updated the plugin thereafter it was turned back on by default. I jumped ship as soon as Chrome presented a viable alternative.
Ask HN: Why not disclose hardware info in web scale datacenter?
I know a lot of large web companies are generous to contribute software project to open source community. Some of them are just for education purpose, not even taking anything back.

Why are they not willing to disclose the hardware specs, or data center operation experience with the outsiders? Do they position it as their secret weapon of competition? Or it's just so boring that nobody is interested at all.
This is false - accessing the friends list only requires "basic" permissions.
Why are you surprised so many people agrees with him? Do you think it might be possible that MG's writing is really bad and a lot of people sees it but you don't?
Inside ThinkGeek, Where Mythical Meat Can Make Millions
It's opt-in for orkut app developers.

It's enabled by default, and enforced on yahoo.com/my.yahoo.com http://developer.yahoo.com/yap/homepage/
Tutorials: A Fine Line Of Design