skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I run a small auto-brokerage / used car dealership called Autolicious, Inc ( http://autolicio.us ). This is my night/weekend gig and is very slightly profitable, although nowhere close to a successful business.

Here are some of my thoughts I'd like to share, especially applicable to a non-software startup:

1. Focus on selling. I know you can just tweet it, or FB update it, but selling something is difficult. Giving something away for free is easy. So don’t focus on getting 100,000 page views. Get only 10 visitors, BUT, convert ALL those into paying customers.

2. Most of my customers come from word-of-mouth. So the website is only a gateway for the random customer to come in. The whole-and-soul of my business is taking care of the customer, so that he or she recommends me to someone else. I focus on that, instead of adding a slick new feature to the website. The website, as such, is a MVP... something to keep me floating, till I make some money.

3. There are some big (YC backed) players in my field now. They have a huge lead (and huge money), so I clearly cannot take them on at their game. The only way I can survive, is by differentiating myself and that’s what I’m primarily doing.
They've buried the lede in this article. Check this out (third paragraph):

> The mistake in the Green Party candidate's name appears on a review screen that allows voters to double-check their selections and not on the screen where the vote is registered. It also is not on paper ballots, Neal said.

This means not only that the voting machine data files are not autogenerated from the same sources as create the paper ballots---which is disappointing but not very surprising---but also that internally, the machines use different data for the "actual vote" screen and for the "confirmation" screen. This fact is very alarming when it comes to potential system hacks and other voting system hijinx.
Is there a charity or a cause you like that we can donate to to thank you for Redis?
can you not already pass in a named array ?

function stuff($a, $b, $sep = null, $clean = null) {

// wooop

}

$params = array('a' => 1, 'b' => 2, 'clean' => true);

stuff($params);

I've never actually played with that directly myself, but I think I've seen it "out of the corner of my eye" when looking at code written by others.

Maybe I imagined it.
Credit Card Processing: How it works, what you need, with Ruby & JS examples
A cordless drill won't last you a 'lifetime' it'll last until the battery pack dies and you discover they no longer make compatible ones.

Buy a good corded drill and extension cords and it really will last a lifetime.
Yeah, I concur. He's talked about it on Twitter (people have asked why he mentions specific products) and he said that he just likes to include things he finds interesting. I think for the current trilogy it actually works really well, as it keeps everything grounded in reality.
We at http://CastingWords.com are an interesting hybrid. We sell human transcription - everything we do is done by hand, and our costs are per item sold, much like a physical product.

Of course we also do it via CrowdSourcing so we're nicely techy, and buzzwordy. But boy is it not a software gig in the traditional sense.
Two measly upvotes?
You'd only need to post one reasonable answer somewhere.
Have you seen 'Calendar About Nothing'? It's a fun way to keep your contribution streak going.

Link: http://calendaraboutnothing.com
Survey Showing Web More Important Than Water Underestimates Web
My startup is the employment industry, but it's more of a media property than a job board.

My sites are:

http://www.onedayonejob.com/
http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/
http://www.foundyourcareer.com/

The beautiful think about a content business is that it's much easier to build traffic—especially through SEO. I've seen a ton of employment industry startups fail because they built software that they couldn't market (I'm not sure that the software was very good either).
مسلسل لالولا الحلقة 28
For given system cost, any marginal dollar spent on cooling requires a dollar less on silicon. Also, cooling isn't scalable so there are seriously diminishing returns above ~130W.
This should settle the 'HN has changed...' arguments once and for all! I think the only thing you really need to add is a way to flag/highlight one article so you can watch how it slips over time.
So in fact, of the top 25 US companies by market capitalization, all but two (Google and Cisco) are at least 30 years old, and even Cisco was founded in 1984.

Indeed, having just looked at the list, it turns out that there are only two companies from the internet boom which have made it to the top fifty: Google and Amazon. Then you have ebay in 94th position and you're done with the top 100. GOOG is nothing but a massive outlier.

So not only is the quoted statement incorrect in its details, it's wrong in its entire thrust; there really aren't all that many companies which are big and new.
make up your own, for $8 or so you can't go wrong.

A domain name is important but not that important, try to make it short and pronounceable.

hyphens don't help, if I can't get the name with and without the hyphen I normally don't bother anyway.
Why Isn't Mexico Rich?
I've never yet met a fun person who goes around telling people how much fun they are.

I must have read a different article then, since very little of what I read was actually about the author himself.
Yup, I sell firearms, accessories, and ammunition - http://www.dallasshootingsupplies.com (I'm also doing software based startups since they're equally as fun).

It's awesome, I've learned a ton, and the firearm industry is met with it's own difficulties.
CODE BLOCKS!
It has code blocks!!!!!!!!!!

No more pasting @ nomorepasting.com

EDIT: Well you do have to go to gist to post code but it does INLINE it into the chat!!!
Perpetually.com Aims to Keep Track of Politicians’ Promises
I run a small publishing company that mostly sells physical books. We're not really consumer facing for the most part so we have no site yet, but we'll shortly open to manuscript submissions from outside authors, so our public site is very nearly ready.
John Sall sets JMP 9 free to tango with R
The OP should take a look at Bonobos. They're a startup in the same space, and they could offer a good partnership opportunity. They sell a lot of other companies' products.
There are numerous simpler automatic weapons. British Stan, Soivet ППШ/ППС, Israel Uzi etc.
I didn't even see this page. I just played with demo and thought: nice start, but it'll be tough to beat officelive, google apps, or Zoho. You need to strongly differentiate between these solutions. This page actually does a good job but it should be front and center.
Unless you're using a framework like .NET where everything is done for you, SOAP is just too much trouble and complexity for simply data exchange. Especially if you're trying to consume it from Javascript or Flash.

I'm not sure how much of the "REST" in the pie chart is true REST, but POX and POJ is so much simpler and easier for cases where you don't need a full blown strongly-typed web services interface.
You have a good point. I'll give it some thought now..

it seems that it's popularity has flooded the server.

Try again - it's not the load but something weird in my Apache setup (I'm suspecting Passenger) that causes it to pass out every now and then load or not :-(
Too Big to Sail?
Starcraft has quite a few more variables than chess and tight time constraints to evaluate position, plan, and act so I don't expect Starcraft bots to get as clever strategically as Deep Blue. On the other hand, bots should be capable of flawless micro.

Is that enough to win a series against a champion of a major tournament? Is there a silicon BoxeR among us?
Here's a few domains I have been sitting on that were going to be used for projects. Email me if interested.

- AmazingCode.com - blog about good coding practices, principles, etc.

- GeekVentures.com - blog or business

- PeerVine.com - social network based on like-minded individuals

- RankWire.com - web app, rank stuff

- SalaryGuru.com - web app, find out what you should be paid

- SnapCaster.com - web app, similar to photokast.com

- SoloDeveloper.com - blog for an independent developer

- USBApps.com - something similar to portableapps.com

- WebCurio.com - web app, bookmark service? (curio: something unusual worthy of collecting)
If only GitHub could solve OSS politics too. :) This 6 year old ticket asking for better logging support in Twisted is just scary: http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/638
What can we learn from the Foursquare Incident?
CRC32 instructions: http://www.strchr.com/crc32_popcnt

String processing instructions in SSE4.2: http://www.strchr.com/strcmp_and_strlen_using_sse_4.2

AES encryption instructions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set

So, if you didn't know about those, give yourself a point, because you nailed it. (No sarcasm.) There's a definite trend there.
Parents use iPad for speech therapy
it requires a plugin to view on IE. That is a negative that is hard to overlook.
He lost me at the bit about it being impossible not to get promoted just by doing good work. Doesn't work that that in any organization, because to be a manager you have to want to be a manager, and you have to want it more than you want to be "just" a programmer, and you have to think being a manager is better than being a programmer.

Getting a promotion is a full-time job in itself. No time left for coding...
Thanks for the heads-up. The trademark issue should be OK as they are not using icarus, plus they're in another country (USA vs. Canada).
It has better accuracy than M14, AK's contemporary foe. AK's reduced caliber revision, AK-74, has it on par with (similarly reduced caliber) M16.
what a worthwhile response!
Hey, I never said Pius condemned anyone to hell for eternity. :)
No, you can't. You may be thinking of call_user_func_array, but once again you can indexed array.

The most you can do -- which is what I am doing now -- is use the design pattern:

function stuff($required1, $required2, $options = array())
{

}

This pattern works really well, and makes the function interface endlessly extensible. If we implemented named parameters in PHP, it would turn every EXISTING function into such a pattern, which would make functions evolve nicely instead of becoming monstrosities with default parameters in an arbitrary order:

stuff(1, 2, null, true, null, 0, array(), '<br>')
I love bpython. It's "just enough" for me, versus ipython, which feels like an 800lbs gorilla.
Also, we're using Prototype.js, not jQuery on Freckle.
The Brain's alarm system
>>> UPDATE: Google confirms (see post by sean_lynch below): Google here, confirming this is an issue with the Users API on App Engine. On-call team is working on the fix now.
<<<

>>> They rolled out a fix at 12:30PT. <<<

Ok will read up on that, thanks for confirming. We still cannot repro the exact issue, however.

Here are our repro steps:

- Inside an Incognito Window in Chrome, created a new Gmail account, signed out, signed in and checked "remember me".
- In another tab, visited wattvision. Clicking my house brings up "wattvision uses google accounts for sign in" log-in window which asks for password.

Thanks for your help and support here!

-s
Fred Wilson jumps in the music space
too many seem to think there's no potential for music startups, but it's a shame that the ones that don't require licensing are grouped with the ones that are doomed from the start.

the fact that the hottest B2C VC in the game, fred wilson (twitter, foursquare, zynga, etc), has decided to enter the space could really change the general perspective for the better.

USV is about to lead a round of investing in soundcloud according to peter kafka: http://bit.ly/aDYSxJ
Thank you tptacek, this is definitely a cause that I like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_(NGO)
Goliaths are the standard response to mutalisks, as goliaths are Terran's strongest anti-air unit. They have a pretty good dps vs air, and they significantly outrange mutalisks.

The Berkeley bot's mutalisk micro was just too good.
Really needs a TL;DR
Free speech in the marketplace of ideas
CPUs are getting faster, even if they have the same clock speed:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
Domain names aren't case sensitive. You can write your domain as IcarusSystems.com without breaking anything.

This technique seems to be underused on the web, and I don't know why this is - perhaps no-one knows you can do this?
Ask HN: Any Black Founders/Co-Founders?
Please Stand Up
The Fear of Fear Itself
Dr Code, will this book be on Safari Online? How do you get paid if I read the book online or have it bookmarked as one of my favorites?
The prototypical example of a REST API is a web application. They use a standard content type (HTML or XHTML), hypertext to link resources, and typically don't require any out-of-band technical information to work.
I have indeed heard good things about Dojo; I just didn't want to recommend something I haven't used.
I like it. Will you be shipping internationally? Just a note, the size comparison is not very useful since I:

1) Do not know how large that particular candy bar is. It could be a tiny one or it could be a huge one.
2) I have no idea how large that Reddit toy is.

:-)
Ahh, I see - good point. I misunderstood.
Just use a different browser for the new account that you created. So many users reported the problem.

Incognito mode is not the one you should test with.
People who has shipped stuff has a portfolio/track record of stuff to show, thus they don't feel the urge to sound overly impressive when meeting someone the first time. imho
Clever android app
I don't know about the BlackBerry, but as Android basically uses the same rendering engine it should be roughly equivalent, and now that iPhone developers can't simply hard-code resolutions anymore, everyone wins.
We launched CallMe! Staffing (http://www.callmestaffing.com) in January, a staffing and recruitment firm for the call center industry. We have since added http://www.callmejobs.com - a job board focused on the call center industry as well as a few other call center related services.

I am a avid reader of HN like you in that the marketing and business tips can be applied to all kinds of businesses!
Yes. Although build orders are not a very good example --- because that's on area where computers can be made more flexible and random without too much difficulty.

I guess that bots' micromanagement will become superior to humans, if it isn't already. A bot won't have any problem coordinating three or four battles at the same time. For humans it's quite hard to fight a multi-front war given StarCraft's UI.
And how'd that work out? Not very well. Standard top of the line is 3.2-3.4.
I created a nutritional supplement to help me code longer and be more productive:

http://www.getinstantfocus.com

It's been an incredible learning experience in terms of building an ecommerce business from the ground up and putting all of the pieces together.

Plus I got to code a custom CRM for the backend because I couldn't find anything to fit my needs.

But I'm running into the serious limitations of having a physical product business-inventory, shipping, returns, phone support, etc. For example, due to various regulatory and logistical issues I can only sell to the United States, which severely limits my market size...I've had to turn away more than a few Canadians...so I'll be jumping into the SaaS startup world soon.

ECommerce is a LOT of work- for anyone choosing between selling a physical product or software, unless you have an awesome idea I would recommend software- a lot of the issues traditional stores face are automatically taken care of in a webapp.
The "teach a man to fish" argument has been around for a few millennium. But saying that philanthropy ends in giving away fish seems to me like an excuse for people to abandon charity altogether. Isn't Kiva still a form of philanthropy, even though it's just a loan? Charity cannot be about cementing poverty by creating dependence, but can work if it's a reallocation of resources (outside the free market) that results in more balanced partners.
This is a pretty great idea. Nice work!
I have to agree wholeheartedly. Upon reading the article, my first thoughts were, "I wish this guy actually knew what a cult means"....and then later realized "oh, he doesn't care what it means, because he's just going to decide what it means".

Sort of like saying "I believe in miracles...if, by 'miracles', you mean completely expected outcomes that everyone thought would be the most likely result."
Facebook has said that they don't want to put in features that would discourage participation. If someone updates their status and lots of people "dislike" it, they might not want to update their status next time.

For HN, I'd like to see a "track it" button - I don't want to upvote a lame article but often the HN community has a lot of interesting things to say so I'd like to keep track of those article's conversations.
I actually like your terminology more but I've generally heard the term Hi-REST and Low-REST in this context

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=0df3b4...
resourcein.com - a place where people can share their networks and resources with their network

Still a work in progress
I think that's part of what YC funded wufoo provides:
http://wufoo.com/
It can definitely help in certain domains, but adding special-case instructions in silicon can sometimes complicate a chip design enough that it slows it down overall. The trend for a while was in the other direction, towards not implementing in silicon things that were even already in the x86 instruction set, like the transcendental arithmetic functions, and doing them in microcode instead (the "RISCification" of x86 processors). It's possible that trend is now reversing, though.
Estranged Facebook Co-Founder No Longer At War With The Social Network
Real estate's 'Amazon premium'
I'm interested and sent you an e-mail.
Mixpanel is looking for a front-end engineer
This was the best thing I've read all week, full of nuggets of wisdom. Who cares whether he calls himself fun or quirky or whatever else? You could get about 80% of what you need to know about life and work from that one collection of paragraphs, which mean's it's pretty worthwhile read as far as I'm concerned.
I once tried to get REST apis adopted in an enterprise setting (as part of a tiny Ruby team). Talking to people in Java and .NET teams soon revealed why there was outright hostility to REST apis:

- lack of knowledge about REST
- poor support (if any) for REST apis compared to SOAP in the vendor tools.

Of course, getting .NET and Java services and clients interoperating with each other using SOAP was always problematic - but the teams I spoke with tended to work within pretty vertical technology stacks and services. So it was Java clients talking to Java services, or .NET clients talking to .NET services. So they saw SOAP as a good, familiar solution.
If you know of a non-pedantic way to write and be gender neutral, I'm interested.

Just use "he." No, hear me out.

I hope it's fairly obvious that "language is usage is language." Given that, one could very well keep using the plural pronoun as neuter[1], and, if it gains enough popularity, it will be grammatically "correct."

An alternative is to continue using the traditional neuter pronoun, which is also the male one. My disruptive proposal is to use it for all situations, especially when the antecedent is obviously female. Don't have separate pronouns for the sexes, and all pronouns become neutral automatically.

Another alternative is to use the pronoun "one." It may be awkward, especially with echoes of the passive voice, but, for me at least, it's more comfortable than hijacking a plural pronoun to use in the singular.

A final alternative is to use "it," but, besides a potential for being derogatory, it carries a significant risk of injecting confusion about what or who is the antecedent.

Disclaimer: I am male.

[1] I'm not entirely comfortable with "gender-neutral", since I'm aware, as I'm sure the OP is, that there are non-English languages that have a concept of word gender separate from sex. My first language, Russian, even has a neuter gender, so even that's not entirely satisfying a word.
Except that that's way worse (currently) than the main article's effort. Ow.
Ask HN: How do you deal with deadbeat clients?
As a result of an old ALA post that Zeldman recently brought back up (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/gettingpaid/) it got me thinking about the never-ending war those of us in the services business deal with - just getting paid for the work we've done for our clients.

It raised a number of questions for me - Is it just a matter of patience and perseverance? Knowing that eventually all the chasing you do will pay off with the amount you invoiced? Are there ways to mitigate this issue?

The first comment I normally get when I bring this up in conversation with peers is that you have to have a ROCK-SOLID contract and statement of work drawn up for your clients. Sure, this helps people understand that you mean business, and will normally help with the majority of your business relationships. But there's that fraction of clients that will laugh in your face and drag it out for however long they want because they know you can't afford to retain a lawyer to fight them.

So what are the other options? cap deploy:web:disable? Backup and delete everything? That tack, to me, is a very last resort but still reeks of legal quagmire. You, obviously, wouldn't want to be brought up on charges of "hacking", right?

The only other option I've considered - public shaming/outcry. Designers and copy-writers who've had their work stolen/plagiarized have been quick to post on their blogs about it and circle the wagons w/their communities. And quite often it works. But what about posting about that deadbeat client? Does that smell of desperation, poor business practice, and would it be a reputation killer?
No, I think it's just that you read past the introduction.
www.kegstool.com
Yes, it does. Crappy jobs won't be correlated with awesome people -- which was andrewljohnson's original claim -- to any meaningful degree given the billions of unawesome people. Since correlation is symmetric, awesome people will not be meaningfully correlated with crappy jobs, either.
It's complicated, difficult to understand, requires large tools (expensive ide's) to be productive with, different vendors have different interpretations of SOAP anyways.

Basically, it's a bunch of extra work and requires more documentation due to the complexity of it's implementations.

Also, SOAP libraries (e.g. Soap4r) are problematic (doesn't talk to Micro$soft's version of SOAP properly).

REST is over HTTP. Just about all programming environments have a HTTP library.
Google: Protecting your data in the cloud
It's one button away... as long as you have the same technology on both sides (and then, why are you incurring all this overhead anyway?) Maybe this has changed in the last 3 or 4 years, but the last time I tried to get .Net and Java stacks talking via SOAP was a royal pain.
I'm very excited by this project. Politicians have a tendency to present their positions differently depending on who's listening.

If it keeps only a few politicians a little more honest, we'll all be better off. And considering the qualifications issues we've seen with Mark Kirk, Christine O'Donnell, Richard Blumenthal and others, a little more honesty wouldn't hurt.
This is pretty interesting. Where was this?

The teacher was a retired sergeant who taught us sharpshooting even though his eyesight was so poor that he had to wear two pairs of glasses, one on top of another. True story...

Ha, sounds like my dad. He used to coach the local junior rifle team. Retired Marine and old enough his eyes got tired after taking one or two shots, but a very good coach.
Like patenting the patent trolling? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/10/halliburton_patent/