skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Far be it from me to question Fred Wilson, but I actually believe he is not referring to an API, but is referring clean URLs.

The reason I think this is because the second half (of the two sentences) on the RESTful section says "...every resource on your site needs to have a URL and ones that people can understand". Additionally, there is another section for APIs called "programmable".

Seems like a minor misnomer, but still a good point.
Lab-Sized Earthquakes Challenge Basic Laws of Physics
Study: Thin Women, Heavy Men Make The Most Money
Am i the only one that finds it ironic that they basically recreated a typewriter?
Basically the TV industry could could up with a standard spec for a component to fit into the television so that it would be upgradable. The Apple TV and Google TV units would be sold separately as they are today (or will be for Google), but instead of the "old" mentality of components having to be separate, it would fit into it like a glove.

The great part is that while a standard, the standard could evolve, and then you'd need to buy a new T.V. for the new adapter (it just wouldn't fit in the old one cleanly) creating more of a forced-consumer situation than the big ugly external components with wires that allow more flexibility that we have today. Basically, the purpose to the consumer is style and simplicity (no one who is non-technical likes wires), and the upside for the TV manufacturer and Apple/Google/etc. is that they play off each other and upgrades to the standard to increase profits.
Not really. QM measurements follow probability distributions, but are not dependent on what the experimenter thinks about the system.

Consider a 2-state single particle system, the outcome probabilities of one state vs. the other are fixed by the Hamiltonian and the time evolution of the system, and not by the experimenter's opinion of the system.
Iphone imported from China - real or fake?
Someone wanted to sell the Iphone 4 for less than $100. I asked only once if the phone still in good condition, I could imagine myself at that price any more. I was assured that the phone is not used as much as functioning properly and shows no signs of wear. However, the seller told me then that it was stated that the mobile phone to an import from China, called airphone NO.4.
http://www.everbuying.com/Airphone-NO-4-Dual-Cards-Quad-Band-Wifi-Java-FM-Touch-Screen-Cell-Phone-Black-p-30663.html
Is this actually a real Iphone?
Err you don't . . as the article states their usage and load pattern does. If you want the speed of keeping the DB in RAM you need the RAM available whether it is mongo, MySQL/NDB or memcache. (-1 for not RTFA)
Costco - Food for a whole year - $799 Awesome
Come to think of it, I do actually keep that info around, I just put it in the status line* in tmux or dwm, rather than cluttering my shell prompt with it. I guess that's a different post, though!

* Mine currently says:

3.1 pra | 0:ksh 1:top 2:ksh 4:ksh- 5:w3m* | . 1.45, 1.57, 1.01 . 2010-10-07 23:07

which has system load, time, battery (on laptops), etc. "pra" = "pranaferox", my desktop. (I usually have a lot more shells open than that, but I turned everything off while installing a new light in the ceiling earlier.)
We only use monospace because there is a lot of symmetry in code, and unlike other forms of writing, a single punctuation characters can completely change the meaning of the text (/.!^,;).
Reading monospace text sucks.

It's only good for coding for alignment issues. But reading monospace characters for long blocks of text is hard on the eyes.
(Not to mention that proportional spacing is more efficient -- you can get more text on a line with roughly the same letter forms.)
Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups
* it never becomes inconsistent (C)
* it always returns either success or failure (A)
* sufficiently severe partitions kill it dead (!P)

Or does any system subject to hardware or power failure fail to count as "available"?
Would be funny to see all the world politicians befriend each other on social networks - world peace!?
FBI Gets Caught Tracking Man's Car, Wants Its GPS Device Back
Geez. No sense of humor. It's a line from Idiocracy. Hilarious.
> I think the way it works in most startups is that you agree to an equity split, and if one founder leaves, the company dies or you buy him out and that's that.

It is increasingly common for founders to have vesting schedules to prevent this exact issue. If the founders have a four year vesting schedule and one founder bails after year one, then they forfeit the un-vested equity.

>Now, each time they go out for another round of funding, their old investors are diluted by the new shares created to sell to new investors.

Yes and no. It depends on the valuation. A previous investor's absolute ownership percentage may decrease in subsequent funding rounds. But, if the valuation increase outpaces the rate of dilution the previous investor winds up ahead. For example, Peter Thiel's ownership in Facebook has been diluted in subsequent funding rounds but the value of his investment has increased many times over based off of the increased valuations.

>My thought is that every 6-12 months or so, we simulate another round of funding.

This sounds overly complicated. Rather than the equity gymnastics, why not implement a profit sharing program for your employees? This seems more appropriate anyway since it sounds like you are focused on running this as a lifestyle business for the long haul.

If you are set on providing equity, then why not just create a standard employee option pool (i.e. carve out 10-20% of shares outstanding to allocate employees)? With four year vesting you take very little risk.
No, it's not an iphone... It's an airphone NO 4... when it seems too good to be true, it usually is.
Eat for $2 a day, spend the rest on your startup!
It's not ironic, it's conscious. The typewriter was the blue print for the app. It was supposed to be called writing machine (from German Schreibmaschine = typewriter).
Caught Spying on Student, FBI Demands GPS Tracker Back
This is an interesting model. I just don't see how it fits with Apple's corporate strategy of focusing on integrated hardware and software solutions, and trying to design and control every detail of the customer experience.
Beats Ramen. However, "one year supply dehydrated & freeze-dried food profitable" doesn't have the same ring to it as "ramen profitable."
I should have been more precise when I said observation. In QM, clearly scientific "observation" acts on the system, causing the system to "collapse" into a definite state, but what I meant by observation in my previous comment was that speculative observation, commentary and opinion can affect the state of the system.

That is clearly not true for physical systems.
"The reason failures are hard to detect in asynchronous networks is that permissible message transit times are unbounded; ie they refuse to acknowledge the presence of any partition. If you acknowledge the possibility of partitions, then your system is by definition not asynchronous."

No. Like you say, async means failures are hard to distinguish from delays. If a node's NIC sets on fire, I'm pretty sure no messages are ever going to get delivered to it - hence it is partitioned from the network. It is very hard to tell whether it has failed, or whether it is just running slowly, in an async network.

"This is bullshit. Per the definition quoted in the linked article, availability only means that "...every request must terminate.". It is not required that it terminate successfully."

No. The definition of the atomic object modelled by the service doesn't include an 'error' condition. Otherwise I could make a 100% available, 100% consistent system by always returning the error state, which is thoroughly uninteresting. You have to read more than the quoted definition in the Gilbert and Lynch paper to start calling bs - it is very clear that authors do not allow an 'error' response.
> I'm afraid you're not quite correct.

So then what am I missing? It sounds to me like the rest of your post is reiterating what you just called incorrect.
Ask HN: What happens to a developer's stuff when he dies?
Hi guys, just a general question I was wondering about. Since most of us here have side projects, apps that make money, accounts with money/subscriptions/payments, money owed, etc.

What do you think would happen to all your stuff if you were to die tomorrow? Some of us aren't married, don't have families or wills. You may or may not have a technically inclined family who would think to check your paypal accounts, or would know what to do with your money making assets. They probably wouldn't know how to access/backup and move your domains and server files either.

Its probably not practical to modify your will every time you start a new project. Does this concern you? Have you told others about your accounts and what to do with your projects should you disappear? Thanks
Is Google's Android better than iOS? Is Microsoft's Windows better than Mac OS X? There are no obvious answers.

Now, compare some screenshots of Gelernter's Scopeware and Apple's CoverFlow. In this case it's obvious that Apple's implementation is a lot better, in its presentation as well as its ease of use.

There are dozens of cases where Apple took someone else's idea and improved on it, but I can't think of any good examples where the reverse happened.
I've had good experiences with http://www.bugnotes.com/home.php for bug tracking. Also provides exports of all data in an SQLite DB or in CSV format if desired.
Are you thinking of Lala? It was acquired by Apple and subsequently shut down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lala_(website)
Sugar Labs—learning software for children
> I see a lot of names whom time has failed to vindicate.

And I don't see : Virginia Wolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, Fernando Pessoa, ...
As of 8:15pm PST I've updated the spreadsheet.
The idea of using a monospaced font was to invite the writer to conscious slowness. Reading typography needs speed and ease, writing needs care and precision.
Depending on your disk space requirements and how comfortable you are with building your own distro, you might have an easier time starting with a more full-fledged Live CD and stripping it down rather than starting with something stripped and building it up. It's fairly easy to remaster a Knoppix or even Ubuntu live disc by removing packages you don't need. If you search for "Knoppix remastering," you'll even find quite a few community remastered cds which you could potentially start from.
How Angie Started Her $60M List
How much can using SSD's for paging help with this? Or to just serve the reads, since they're excellent at random access - surely typical of Foursquare's usage?
Indeed. Old school advertising was sort of like a mystery box. What do you think's inside? It could be ANYTHING!

Sort of like the maxim "Half my advertising works, I just don't know which half." Well, Google let you measure which half, and improve on the other.
I've been liking http://www.freshbooks.com/ for invoices.
It's not about reading, it's about writing. Many measures in writer came from studying coding programs.
When I care about the former (and I often do), I just prefix it with time. "time make bench" etc. The real / user / system break down is more meaningful than just wall clock time.
I've taken to setting whatever IDE or editor I'm using to have comments in italic Helvetica, rather Menlo, my fixed width font of choice. It makes comments easier to read, and I find myself writing slightly more of them as a result.
>It is increasingly common for founders to have vesting schedules to prevent this exact issue.

First, the likelihood of anyone besides me being here for four years is pretty small... and next, well, then I've only pushed the problem out a few years. Granted, someone having 50% of the company after four years is certainly more fair than having 50% of the company after one year, but it's still very likely a company death, if someone with 50% of the company leaves.

>This sounds overly complicated. Rather than the equity gymnastics, why not implement a profit sharing program for your employees?

Do you have a link where I can read up on what profit sharing means and how that differs from equity? I do not know these things.

>If you are set on providing equity, then why not just create a standard employee option pool (i.e. carve out 10-20% of shares outstanding to allocate employees)? With four year vesting you take very little risk.

Because 10% of my company right now is maybe twenty to thirty grand. If you could get a job on the open market that paid $130K in salary and benefits, would you instead work for some crazy guy for $30K cash plus another twenty grand in equity?
I'll just file a patent on a business method profiting from patents on methods of organizing information.
This is similar to the question "what would happen to your facebook account when you die" for the general public, and a possible answer is, similarly - there's no value for others to access them anyway, unless you are some kind of celebrity or your side projects are making millions.
What shortener would you suggest others use?
That's a great argument for releasing all of your work as open source. At least that way it has a chance to survive.

People making more than a few thousand/year with their web applications have probably thought of a continuity plan, but everything below that will most likely be lost.
Exactly, I have tried repeatedly to switch to GIMP as Photoshop is the only reason I have a Windows box at home - but I just can't do it.
All the museums are friends! http://twitter.com/smithsonian
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks. The talk itself is way better than the summary.
If it were that cut and dry, Wii shovelware-type games wouldn't be made. Clearly there's money to be made, just perhaps not AAA level returns to be had.
Wonderful Tip for Mac users to Convert MOV videos on Mac OS X
As we know, MOV is Apple proprietary for QuickTime, and the MOV containers use the MPEG-4 codecs. MOV files are compatible on Mac in a QuickTime-only environment. So it has a narrow Applicable without Mac OS X.
Just try out Mac MOV Converter, which can easily convert MOV videos on Mac to the other video formats as required including MP4, AVI, WMV, FLV, MKV, 3GP, etc. for the Sony PSP and various DVD players.
This would make me so happy. Photoshop is unbelievably unintuitive, and in my opinion, the Ribbon improved exactly that for Microsoft Office.
> In June, the patent office ruled in a separate case that TiVo's patent claims for its "time-warp" DVR technology were invalid.

wtf?
Advertise on Facebook for Cheap - Give CPM a Try
Facebook Groups - Opt Out issues
Yes, it beats ramen, etc, but where do you store it? Having space to store all those cans would have doubled my rent back in the day. I would however, have been a popular guy in 1999.
But how does this counter Apple in mobile? That's what I don't get -- buy Adobe for Flash because, err, that'll hurt Apple somehow?

If they just want Flash, I bet they're bummed they didn't buy Macromedia a few years ago.
Unfortunately Iceland provides 1001 horror stories about doing that sort of thing ;-) (take out "cheap" mortgages in Euro, profit, currency takes a dive, oops..)
These are exactly the two books I was going to recommend. Don't Make Me Think is like the K&R of web UX books, and Designing the Obvious is like a nice web 2.0 companion for it.

Also, I'd throw in The Design of Everyday Things -- see http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d.... It was written long before anyone ever thought of web usability; instead, it focuses on the usability of things you interact with daily in real life. Let's just say that you'll never look at teapots or door handles the same way again...
I kinda want to limit it to stuff in wide usage.
Agreed. I don't think Bash allows async function execution, though.
For my part, I'm glad there are still companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe "holding onto the desktop", selling me software that I can run on my own hardware, allowing me to keep my data to myself.
Not necessarily, there are people with mobile and web apps who are making nice sums of money, maybe hundreds to thousands of dollars a month. Some are extremely low maintenance and don't need to be updated at all.
I went into firebug and was hoping that there was a background image on the container object :(.
"As you might know, HTML5 introduced many exciting features for Web developers. One of the features is the ability to specify gradients using pure CSS3..."

Er, no. HTML5 did not introduce the gradient feature. CSS3 introduced the feature (inspired by an implementation in WebKit). This has nothing to do with HTML5, though people these days seem to like using that as a buzzword for "modern web standards."
I think you are missing the point, either copying ideas is right or wrong. The quality of the reproduction is irrelevant. The point is that Apple felt that copying their idea was wrong when Google and Microsoft did it, yet they did not feel that it was wrong when they did it to this guy, in fact every graphical OS from Lisa on was founded on Apple copying someones idea, there whole Mac and later IOS industry was founded when apple copied the Xerox Alto. It seems that Apples compass of right or wrong when it comes to copying depends on what side of the fence they are sitting on. Or are you saying that because Apple copies ideas better than others it is OK for them?
Quora - no external hyperlinks - HN wins.
>First, the likelihood of anyone besides me being here for four years is pretty small...

That is the point. If your employee leaves before they have vested their shares they don't get to keep them.

>but it's still very likely a company death, if someone with 50% of the company leaves.

No, not necessarily. Founders of successful companies leave after several years of service all the time (happened recently with Xobni, for example).

>Do you have a link where I can read up on what profit sharing means and how that differs from equity? I do not know these things.

There are lots of resources if you just do a quick Google search. The basic idea is that your employees would get a % of profits you generate in a given year rather than equity.

>If you could get a job on the open market that paid $130K in salary and benefits, would you instead work for some crazy guy for $30K cash plus another twenty grand in equity?

No. Not because I wouldn't want to work for equity (I have done that before) but because there doesn't be a clear path to liquidity of those options. You've described this as a lifestyle business which typical means no imminent source of liquidity for shareholders. This is why I suggested exploring a profit sharing structure.

If you are saying that this is a business that can't support livable compensation for employees for the foreseeable future, then I think there are bigger issues though.

Sorry if I am not fully understanding what you are getting at.
I have a rudimentary shortener that I use for a couple of personal things (http://linky.com.au) and agree that, to some point, they're pretty trivial to create.

But at some level of complexity in functionality, reporting, etc it'd have to be attractive to people to just make use of another service. e.g., we can build a newsletter system that is OK, but the bang for buck that MailChimp provides is greater and so we often recommend that to clients.
Kickstarter's growing grass-roots food scene
Sure it is, most people don't listen to that much music and there's a ton of 8gig iPods out there and still selling strong. 10gigs might not be enough for you, but it's certainly enough for most anyone's active listening list.
Replace your mattress with it: http://www.collapsenet.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=...
US border patrol wants to boot your notebook often to check for kiddie porn.

I don't have anything, even movies, no pirated software, etc, however I don't want the existence of the true-crypt program alone to be an issue with overzealous border patrol people
Most things come down to luck, both bad a good. One developing a terminal disease and one winning the lottery are both an instance of chance (luck).

To say that Zuckerberg got to where he is purely because of luck is as equally false as saying that luck has nothing to do with it. I think the real issue that people are arguing about is, colloquially, whether the success is "deserved". You have people who look at the circumstances and assert that "given the opportunity I could have done the same thing", to them - it is an instance of luck, and undeserved success.

To others, they perhaps are recognizing that more went on beneath the surface that we know about - perhaps even though technically what went on is nothing special, there may be other factors in play that only a select few would be able to surmount.

The truth probably lies somewhere in between, but the digestion of the circumstances will vary from person to person. There exist many people who could have made "Facebook" and been equally successful; there exist MANY more people who would not have been able to.

I think that the polarization of responses has a lot to do the framing in absolute terms. Whatever attributions that are ascribed to him, cannot be said to viewed with equal validity for all observers.
So... applications that you give your Twitter login information to can then misuse that information? Colour me surprised. </sarcasm>

Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it seems like the author's sekrit hack is forcing people to log in to your wordpress site with their Twitter information, and then misusing that information. But frankly, I'm not logging into anything but Twitter with my Twitter information.
In my experience with things like postgres, yes.

If your working set (the data that you are touching regularly) grows past available RAM, you very rapidly switch from a system where disk access plays no part in most queries, to a system where it is the limiting factor.

Because disks are so much slower, and having queries take only ten times as long can cause them to rapidly queue up, you end up with an unresponsive system. The appropriate response is almost always to turn off features to get the size of your working set back down, which buys you time to either alter the app to need less data, or get more RAM into the box.
I prefer to label successful businessmen as socially or emotionally intelligent. Building a business requires many things, but the type of "genius" that we got from great physicists and artists is certainly not analogous to bringing people together and making money. It's a different measure of intelligence, but one that I think is more able to be learned than a gift for the natural sciences.
It seems a lot simpler to just type "git br" (or, heck, "gb") when I care. Usually I have a good reason for being in a particular branch, though I tend to check before doing merging anyway.

When I want to fiddle with minor configuration details, hey, bash and zsh users have nothing on emacs. ;)
On a practical note, seeing as most of the #10 cans contain 30-50 servings, you'd have a lot of open cans at a time if you wanted any sort of variety.

I wonder if the "6 Cans of Whole Eggs (236 servings per can)" are freeze dried or liquid.

I also think I'm overthinking this...
And I was getting down on myself lately because I hardly ever hit Twitter anymore. How will all my tens of followers remember who I am and what projects I'm working on if I don't tweet about them twice a day? I guess I shouldn't feel to bad, Twitter really isn't doing me much good, at least not as much as just sitting down and focusing on knocking out new functionality for my customers. there'll be time to talk about what I'm doing later...
For backup, I've been quite pleased with CrashPlan.
I really like the concept and the unique focus features. However, I don't have an iPad (yet) so I hope they come out with a web app or desktop application version.
Just like Claude Monet and those big, unrealistic blobs of paint. Such a weakness.
Has someone tried this stuff? I don't know if I want to spend 800 bucks on something that I can't eat.