skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or a bad engineering textbook, god I hate Wiley publishing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY really demonstrates the elegance of bolo ties.
Do you have any experience with Braintree's subscription payment service? How does it compare?
Wow... that's a cool thought.

Even cooler is if you did manage to find a Madagascar that hadn't developed any widespread variant of its own either, you'd have the chance to design and introduce it. It'd be a neat social hack.
Flip side:

If someone takes out a patent and has a tiny, fringe or effectively nonexistent business around actually performing the patent, but sues anyone who independently comes up with the same idea, we call that person a "troll".

If someone chooses a name for a project and builds a tiny, fringe or effectively nonexistent community around it, but complains about anyone who independently tries to use the same name, we curse his vile oppressors.

(Is there just a bit of a difference between this situation and a patent troll? Yes. Is the difference small enough that you can see there from here? Yes. Should people be thinking pretty hard about what precedents they want in this type of situation? You bet your ass they should.)
i can recommend padrinorb.com, it is both young and vibrant.
its pretty lightweight but still has a lot of the helpful shortcuts you find in bigger frameworks.
Regarding link 1, it reports spending as a % of household income. That's a silly way to report the data.

A quick google search suggests the average household income of $70k in greater LA. Treating low income households as earning $15k (an overestimate) and treating all other households as earning $70k (an underestimate, since low income households are excluded), we find that high income households spend 2x more as a result of stimulus. (Rough numbers, but it's the best I can do. They don't provide all necessary data to get precise numbers.)

Link 2 is gated, I can't get in.

See also this paper, which shows the same effect happened in the current recession.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w16246

(Ungated: http://ow.ly/2Fx1i )
HTML 5 and Line Rider can both be considered innovative. Remaking Line Rider in HTML 5 isn't innovative.
This sounds like an opportunity for new or existing competitors. Personally, I'd love to see a service that would store my CC numbers as well so I wouldn't have to fork out ANOTHER $20/mo to Auth.net. I realize that Braintree does this, but the $75/mo minimum in transaction fees make it a tough choice for those just starting to get customers.
PHP, Javascript (jquery) and mysql
First, a proviso: I'm learning. That being said, this is a commercial project, so it's got proper constraints on it.

I'm using web.py, testing with nose, doing database work with sqlalchemy to a postgres back-end. Looking at Paste and wondering if I should be using that as well, but currently a simple apache2 mod_wsgi container is doing ok.

I deploy to Debian stable but develop on Ubuntu Lucid, which means that in order to keep myself sane I've built Python 2.6 and virtualenv packages for debian, and install all the packages I need with pip. I'm still getting my head around this, because I've not used these tools at all before.

Deployment is done by pushing to a remote git master branch, where the remote live branch is what's checked out and running.

Styling is all blueprint.css, and I'm contemplating whether to use my usual Compass workflow or not. So far it's not been needed, but I haven't pushed things very far yet.

I'm not in the sort of space where NoSQL would be an advantage, so I can't comment on it.
Live Broadcast: http://www.justin.tv/harj#/w/459029824
I wouldn't necessarily agree with renting as long as you can.

You can buy a very cheap server that's much more capable than a cheap VPS server. Here are some decent servers for about $300; you can often find good servers for $150:

http://www.geeks.com/products_sc.asp?Cat=821

Colocation at a good facility costs $60-100.

So for $150-$300 upfront and $60-$100 monthly, you can have a capable server hosted at a good facility at a much cheaper cost than the equivalent "rented" server.

You can use a VPS or something like EC2 as a hot backup, setup replication, and have a very capable setup for not a lot of cost.

This assumes that you have sys admin skills.
Longest. Press release. Ever. It would be nice to read a review of the service rather than a press release.

That being said, I think one of the main hurdles a service like this will be user banner blindness. Many people have banner blindness and interactive advertisements don't seem to perform better than passive advertisements.
I was blown away by the newsletter earlier today. It felt like I got punched in the stomach by Rocky Balboa himself.

In the beginning I considered the same billing service providers that I'm sure every other Chargify customer has considered (Spreedly, Cheddargetter, Recurly, etc). The main differentiator was your pricing model. It was the fact that I could launch my product and see if I could get to those first 50 customers before I had to pay you. You made it almost a no-brainer because of your pricing, it was perfect for people like me just starting out. It was inspiring that you were putting trust and hope in your customers. 10 months later, I'm completely integrated with Chargify, have an app in the wild with real users, and boom... All of a sudden Spreedly, Cheddargetter, Recurly, etc are looking a lot better.

Aside from the massive price increase, I (like many of your beta users) spent a year testing out your application and giving you a lot of feedback to improve your product. I have also responded to several of the "[name] is looking at Chargify, can anyone help us out?" tweets and have said nothing but great things about Chargify since day one. I have helped several of your customers via email, support forums, blogs, and twitter with integration issues, and more-or-less evangelized your product. And I'm happy to do that for great services, and I'm guessing I wasn't the only one. But this was all under the impression that what I signed up for was what I was, well, signing up for.

Receiving that newsletter made me feel like I was (we all were) being used to help establish Chargify as a viable option, only to get shit on in the end... and that sucks. It's a horrible feeling.

I understand your needs for a price increase and that you can't support freemium at a massive scale, but to be honest, even $39/month is $39 more than what I signed up for considering the first 50 customers were free. I never have needed (and probably never will need) to call you on the phone, so I'd be happy to be on a plan where 24/7 phone support isn't an option.

It seems like your early beta testers and customers, who shouted to the world how great Chargify was, should if nothing else at least be given exactly what they signed up for. Now I'm just getting started, so I don't know the ins and outs of business, but that seems like an obvious play to me.

Unfortunately, there's now a big lack of trust in Chargify... what will happen to its customers in 2 or 3 years from now when we're even more locked in? After this move, that's a little scary, and potential grounds for departure.
The level chosen seems to be random. Those in http://canvasrider.com/tracks/popular seem to be more reliable.

Although after playing a few levels, the game is partly to blame. It's far too easy to die - I don't think I've had more than a few seconds of play before dying and having to restart. Gets frustrating.
Having trouble not making a Civ joke here.
5 Scientific Reasons Powerful People Will Always Suck
Good point. I have certainly used this approach with words that seemed similar but had radically different degrees of frequency. Having said that, it's also a 'psychological hack' in that it helps me make a decision over which word to use. Somehow, knowing that one word is used even slightly more often than another seems to give me more confidence in using that particular word than if I simply flipped a coin... unless, of course, the number of searches is the same for each word! (Uh-oh, gotta think for myself again...)
Maybe introducing the name like "The language formerly known as Go!" would help?
You liken it to a patent but it is more similar to a trademark. I would think most everyone agrees trademarks are very good things in practice 99.9% of the time.
Gap says it will keep classic logo
Why is evapotranspiration in quotations? It's the accepted scientific terminology.
How about iNine?

Hello lawsuit from Apple
Ask HN: Viral Marketing
Cam.ly is a video monitoring platform. We sell cameras that stream and record video to the internet. You can place our cameras to watch anything and you can watch from anywhere. We originally envisioned our product as a Security Camera, but could work well as a baby monitor, nanny cam, or dog watcher. We built this demo (http://cam.ly/pinata_buster) to showcase our product (keep posted for a blog post about how we did it). We would like some feedback from HN. What do you think of demo? Does the demo help you understand our product? And finally how do we make this go viral?
It's a pretty sweet phone...
Hey folks, appreciate the comments! Another relevant thread you might want to check: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1415480

@metachris sorry the video format didn't work for you, but you're lucky I made quite a few takes with it -- my first try was 37 minutes of unfocused babble (instead of only 12 minutes of unfocused babble).

I plan to have followup videos which walk through coding up an app from scratch. Actually, I find screencasts tedious to make. I'm very comfortable giving talks in front of people, but something about sitting and talking to my laptop doesn't sit right. :)

And persistence is underway. Jo is built from my game UI library that is about a year old now. Jo is also my fifth JavaScript framework, and first to be made open source. I'm in it for the long haul. :)

@karanbhangui Thanks! The nice part about mitigating most platform issues through CSS is that apps should degrade pretty well without much JS fiddling. I plan to continue to push into less capable web platforms, though I really could use some help testing from folks who have those devices.

Check the docs: http://joapp.com/docs/#Class%20Heirarchy a lot of the widgets are up and running. Noticeable gaps which are due to be in the beta are: select (popup selection), knob, slider, checkbox, tab, option, and typed input like numeric and email. These have been lower on my list because they're all extension of core Jo UI elements.
Actually, I think countably infinite sets of sets are okay, too. It's when you're allowed to choose an arbitrary element from an uncountably infinite number of sets that weird things start happening.

(Not that I can call pedantery given the sheer number of who-cares-about-the-details glosses in my original comment ;)

And I don't know that I'd call infinity dangerous so much as I'd call it sanity-stretchingly counterintuitive.

Which makes sense, really. Where would we have developed intuitions for dealing with the infinite?
I defy you to cite something -- anything -- that anyone has done, that's more than a couple years old that's an unqualified success.
I would recommend a standing desk. The Ikea utby (105 cm) is great.
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S49843462
Only during periods of greatly increased unemployment.
That's an "it depends", as tax policy varies from state to state. So if your state has an income tax (most but not all do) you'll have some filing and payment(s) there which I forgot to mention. Some states or localities (county or city) may require something as well (perhaps a business license and fee if you're working out of your home, but it's often best not to ask about this since you might run into a zoning problem).

As a general rule states don't tend to levy taxes on computer services, but many of them are desperate. Maryland tried this in 2007 but repealed it before it could take effect (geographically it was complete insanity since the two big population centers are adjacent to other states) and in a Google search I found that the governor of Pennsylvania was proposing this earlier in the year. They did it from 1992-7....
> I suspect the vast majority of HN users are not only in the USA but specifically in California

I suspect that you have a nonstandard definition of "vast majority." I'd be surprised if even 1/4 of HN users are in California. There's a whole wide world out there! :)
I think a website like this could help validate a lot of mass market consumer driven business ideas. However, the effectiveness of using mechanical turk would rest on who the mechanical turk users are. I don't know if you get the right type of feedback from turk users for b-to-b apps.

I would suggest you take an idea that exists that is not popular and test it out.
It's improved with IOS4 as you can now deploy wirelessly by having the users visit a web site. With 3 the only way to deploy was using the configuration utility or have the users install with iTunes.

What we keep begging them for is the ability to point out users at our own enterprise app store, hosted on either Apple's servers or our own. It's also what I keep telling MS whenever I get a chance.
Those plans do not come with a whole lot of bandwidth, given it is about 250MiB for an "hour" (~50min of a typical TV show).
I'd recommend Rails 3 and jQuery. http://railstutorial.org/book is an excellent resource to learn Rails 3.
Assuming Wikipedia actually performs this duty, that makes it a good way to answer the question of notability (as long as the investigating party is not an agent of Wikipedia, which creates an infinite recursion). If Wikipedia only runs notable things, you use Wikipedia to prescreen notability for you.
Clickable: http://cam.ly/pinata_buster
It's impossible to distribute an iPhone or an itouch as the user interface to custom hardware. It's also impossible to distribute an internal application if you only have 499 employees.
That's because if you don't use your trademark, you lose it. There's no equivalent to "Oh, I used the name in a little-known paper I wrote and now I can sue you." If nobody knows about your trademark, you probably don't own it.
I would make it go viral by doing some sort of contest giveaway. Encourage people to buy your camera and use the service, then make a YouTube video or blog post about their experience.

Tell your users that the best entry will receive _______ where _______ is a product or gift which is worth the effort of making a video or blog post about cam.ly

In this way you get other people to do your viral marketing for you. For even bigger success you can assign them points. For example:

10 points for a blog post about cam.ly,
20 points for a YouTube video about cam.ly,
10 points for a Twitter mention (possibly have some sort of adjustment based on how many followers they have).

This will encourage your users to spread the word about cam.ly to others on their own. If the contest prize is something like an iPad, it could cost you about $500 but chances are you will get far more than $500 worth of advertising value, backlinks, etc from the contest.
I've found optimal submission time to generally be midday london time, you catch the european lunch-time traffic and the US wake-up/get-into-work traffic. I don't think traffic from anywhere else is heavy enough to matter.
I'm in Iowa, so it's central time. But it's not uncommon to see 2 or 3 hour old stories on the front page by 10:30 or so.
> AdKeeper was launched today in beta and is currently available by invitation. The service will be widely available in the first quarter of 2011.

I had a good laugh at this. An ad service so good customers will be begging to try it!
This is one of my oldest, favorite ideas. Damnit. :-)
In my personal time, I goof around with all the new stuff that I'll get to use in 12 years when my clients that I work for catch up.
It seems like an idea with some potential. They charge the ads' publishers based only on clicks or impressions of saved ads. Saving and storing ads is free on both the users end (obviously) and the publishers end, which means ad publishers should be able to get started on the system without much risk.

I'd think the value to publishers would be in acquiring additional metrics about user interest in a particular ad, but I'm sure the pricing will be a critical piece of the puzzle.

They certainly have a number of well-known advisors and large investors (not that that is enough to predict success!), it'll be interesting to see if it takes off.

Direct link to the site: http://www.adkeeper.com/
HN+Instapaper palm pre app
We should let the OP "develop for the future" and keep our sites providing the content for everybody who has any browser.

After some time we can compare the notes.

(I wonder how he imagines that I would even try to access his site with anything else but with Opera Mobile from my phone).
i recommend an accountant. you may need to pay state income tax as well.
This is key: digital edition books are way overpriced compared to second-hand books. Personally, I slightly prefer second-hand fiction books to new books. There's something about the book being a bit worn, having some history in human hands, rather than being the product of mechanized industry and being shipped out of a factory into your hands.

And I delight in having a book that's perfect for lending (usually means gifting) to a friend or family member who I know will enjoy it.
Ahh, it was Cultured Code that uses it. I was looking for fastspring. Thanks, you pointed me in the right direction
Health Tips about Cancer
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You can't go wrong with PHP and Javascript. Those two are basically universal and later on you can transition to other frameworks if the need arises.
Behold, an application with a business model based solely on the naive, inflated sense of importance of people working in marketing.
That's an interesting algorithmic problem. Assuming that you knew the structure of ad-hoc networks in terms of wifi range in a smallish region (for example, by wardriving in a dense urban area), you could pick geographical regions to target for introducing your local "adhoc network meme", which would just involve standing in strategically placed locations broadcasting that ad-hoc network SSID. That would vary with the geographical distribution of WinXP computers in the region. I think the whole social hack could be doable with detailed wifi maps of a region and a laptop. Wonder how much work it would be to implement.
There is no evidence to support this assertion.

The new auto-upgrade model Mozilla has adopted for FF 4.0 (and that Chrome has had for ages) makes upgrade cycles, for all practical purposes, negligible.

Chrome 6.0 was released on September 2. Since then, Chrome 5.0's market share has dropped to nearly 0%, with Chrome 6.0 picking up all of 5.0's share while also absorbing a good amount of IE's share.

If Microsoft instituted an auto-upgrade path for IE and released updates with more regularity, this would slowly become a thing of the past.
I do feel for the guy, but if I'm being honest and practical, it will be less trouble for him to change the name of his obscure and almost unused language than it would be for Google to rename Go.

It would have been nice if Google had avoided the name conflict, but unfortunately there's no central programming language registry and he had done nothing to make his language easily discovered (to the point where it didn't even have a website), so it seems likely that Google chose the same name in complete innocence — at the worst, it seems like they might have thought it was a toy name for a toy language used simply for explanatory purposes, not something anyone cared about.

Essentially, once the name was already associated in people's minds with Google, the horses were out of the barn. He chose to get concerned about Go!'s presence in the public consciousness far too late.
It's a clever commercial. I'm sure they'll get some "can you hear me now?" social echo chamber effect from it. I really hope people outgrow this compulsive phone fiddling disorder but I doubt WM7 is the solution. People aren't caught up in the minutia of the OS itself. They're mostly focusing on SMS & Facebook apps at this point. Maybe games too.
so high unemployment makes irresponsible spending okay?

The other problem with aggregate metrics is that no matter how well you craft them they ignore motivation - for example, I can conceive of situations where high unemployment isn't so bad. Call me a traditionalist, but maybe our society would be better if family units could afford to have one parent stay at home and take care of the children, or the elderly, hell, maybe even pitch in to help take care of kids of single parents in a co-op kind of arrangement.

(to be followed by trite retort about how unemployment is measured)
Raising the interesting question, do manager types or developer types drive people past your product?

IE, professional bloggers and journalists. Are they more likely to be appealed too by the story, or the function? Sure, they're not buying your product, but they're advising the people who do.

And, you're right, some of them ARE technical people, and PREFER the function. But just as likely, more in my opinion, they're not.

If you're trying to market an optional solution (IE, one that adds value but isn't critical... Fun Unit Testing status lights, instead of IDEs) then you might NEED the story to let people know they WANT your product.

I agree entirely it's great to know what something does. I prefer it, but I don't think 'the market' (God I sound like a douche) does.

I often say when out, "What's inside counts... But what's outside gets them close enough to find out", because it's true. Look kinda creepy? No-one's going to want to find out the weird scar is from when you had an accident while drift-racing to fundraise for the "Save the Adorable Baby Panda from Breast Cancer" foundation.
A reader comment from the linked BetaNews page describes it well.

Microsoft's marketing people must have sat around
a table and pondered what features they could
possibly promote about Windows Phone 7.

They couldn't really promote its use for office work, as then people would realize that the phone can't copy-paste text, making it unsuitable for the task.

They can't promote apps, as it is dwarfed by Android and iPhone (where did those Angry Birds go?).

So the marketing people chose to promote the default front screen with its blue tiles as Windows Phone 7's best feature.

Running a negative campaign like this can be risky. You see people frustrated with their phones, you see the Windows Phone 7 logo, and you subconsciously combine the two.

You see someone throw their phone into a toilet. You see the Windows Phone 7 logo, and combine to two events together.

I don't envy the ad agency that took on this unenviable job. It's a bit like taking on the ad campaign to promote New Coke.
Oh my god. Irony is beautiful.
This is cool, but geeky. What I mean by that is that it's cool in the sense that you've basically created an interface to the internet. If you want it to go viral, your best chance is probably to document how you did this and provide any source code, electronic diagrams, etc, etc.

I think you're sending a confusing message. If I were to do this my self, I probably wouldn't buy your product. I'd get a cheap laptop, with a broken screen or an old small form factor computer and roll my own webcam. Your viral demo should be viral to people who are going to buy your products.

What demo could you create that someone who isn't nerdtastic would use?