skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the preface of God's Debris, Scott Adams assures the reader repeatedly that the book isn't really his idea of how the world works. When I read stories like this, I have to remind myself that it's not really how the world works.

Sometimes I feel a little claustrophobic thinking about how connected things will be in 30 years.
Has hollywood taught you nothing of the showmanship of courtroom law?
How many hours until someone sets up a pro-PNG site with a deliberately crappy SVG image for comparison?
Also, we'll look into annotation - curious if you can tell us more about how and why you'd use it :).
I'm not sure why what you wrote matters. My comment was that the assertion "but if you've got nothing to hide then the above article is a non-starter." is completely false.
New: Distributed Open House the day after Startup School
The original image is crappy even before being scaled up.
Part of this looks interesting - is this making it easier for me to organize my browsing? I've been trying to keep track of links for a work project as I browse, would this make it easier for me to store those sites to share or find later? That could be hugely useful.

Or does this make it easier to share those links with other people? If it's just for sharing, I can't tell if it's like Shareaholic or something new.

I'm having a hard time figuring out if this is more for publicly sharing content/links or if it's for my personal storage and organizing? Looks interesting enough for me to look at the beta - send it my way if you want.
Sorry for the late notice. We only thought of this a few days ago. More startups will gradually get added.
Is your child a Hacker?  --#8 "Lunix is hilarious." ROFL @ 0330 Hrs
solar's strength will always be in its decentralization, not its efficiency. If we can get the best of both worlds to some extent (e.g. car charging overnight from batteries charged by a rooftop home solar array), that's a going a long way towards 'daily' sustainability.
Italics are obtained by putting words in asterisks.
They're gone. I interviewed the founders recently, the story was published on my website today: http://eagereyes.org/criticism/the-rise-and-fall-of-swivel

I'll also be following up with another story soon about the when and why the final decision was made (the story above mostly talks about how they got started and mistakes that were made, not the specific reasons they shut down).
Ask HN: Review this startup by a coder beginner
The Weezic startup is developing a website dedicated to classical musicians.

They have just released a webpage to explain the concept through a video and a demo example.

http://weezic.com

I met the two founders (Nico & Greg) a few months ago. They had the project set up but needed to code it. None of them had ever coded (both having a more business-oriented background).

As experienced web developers, me and my partner advised them to code the website by themselves and we started giving Nico a few lessons and mentoring him on a regular basis.

One month later and tons of coffee drunk, Nico is now able to code like an average web developer in html, css, rails and begins with javascript and JQuery.

We would like inputs on: 1. Is it interesting? 2. How to get traction? 3. Any feedback you could have !

Thanks
Interesting. This could be useful.

The developer portion of the site seems kind devoid of hard info: http://tapzilla.com/advertise

The article says it costs the developer $1 per download. Who is actually paying the money that is credited back to the customer? Does the developer need to fund this (in addition to the $1 per download), or does TapZilla?

If TapZilla is funding the customer credit with the developer's $1 per download, can this be used for apps that are more than 99 cents? And how is TapZilla making any money?

If the developer is funding the customer credit, then the developer would need to pay TapZilla $1 + cost for each download? If so, is this prepaid or postpaid?
It does.

ETA: I originally posted a link to the crappy data URL for that PNG to appease the URL shortener-averse, but it killed this page's formatting.
"A request that I just made on my staging instance took 13s (!) to render the front page. That's on its own cache so it should be slower than the live site, but that's still pretty ridiculous."

I'm actually seeing that kind of speeds on the live site front page.
Just add water.
I actually would be interested in seeing results of testing this video vs. a voice actor and maybe even against a set of videos that were split up and shorter.
The developer pays $1 + app cost, they in turn will receive 70% of the app cost from Apple. So the effective cost per user acquisition for a $0.99 app is $1.30.
Typing "what's with the fish" into the search box had interesting results...
I'm dabbling with FreeBSD on a VM right now.

I plan to build a router/fileserver on FreeBSD at some point in the near future. ZFS looks sweet.
Try explaining to a potential investor: "We lost the market because we were busy making sure the last 2% of potential customers could use the site".
developer pays them $1.00

they pay users $0.99 per app

they drive 1000 apps per day

= $10/day?
You are "building a personal brand" to assist with your current position. If, your work asks, that is..and if you can "spin" it that way. Perhaps you wish to look current for when asking programming advice.
Make anyone code.
I wonder how much of that is related to the psychology of the cost. That is, the more a product/service costs, the more the user is likely to assign value to that product/service that they otherwise would not note.

Psychological studies have been done that people who pay for something - anything at any price - always look more favourably on it than those who do not. One such study involved payment to see a film. Those who paid their own way ALWAYS had more favourable reviews of the film than those who were provided with a ticket for free.

Obviously, there is a limit to the psychology, but I wonder how much the feelings of a class' attendees can viably count toward evaluating the value of the workshop. Price is naturally where the willingness of the buyer to buy meets the willingness of the seller to sell, so the price of the workshop is beyond dispute in a free market context. But there are limits to what is rational, and I suspect there will be a significant percentage who will feel the workshop to be worth it merely because they paid a grand to be there. This "prestige" factor, after all, is one of the main components of a premium pricing plan.
What if instead of looking up each user in the thread to see if they are a friend, they just serve the same page to all users. Then a bit of javascript loads up your friend list from the server and uses dynamic css to change the style of your friends username to the friend style.

That way everyone can share the cache page, and the dynamic icing is separate.
Good point about 70% of the cost being returned by Apple, I forgot to include that. That makes things seem a lot more reasonable.
Just to add more points to the dataset. I've used my laptop on a linksys, checkpoint, two different rebranded qwest routers.

Has anyone had such problems and then everything magically worked when switching to an apple airport express or airport extreme?
Absolutely! However, I would argue that if you are looking to conserve energy, moving the sshd port is not something that should be at the top of your list. :)
Your vital signs, on camera
I am so glad to see someone that is not totally full of shit answer the "how much did x take to develop" question. I have made a few iPhone apps and I am always amazed by the low time estimates that non-iPhone developers give. Also, keep in mind that these are really good top notch developers. Double his time estimate for idiots. I probably fall somewhere right in the middle.
Please link us to the standard plug that every other European country uses. :)
Great idea! We're actually running an Optimizely experiment on the http://www.optimizely.com homepage right now. I won't give away what we're experimenting with but we'll blog about it once the experiment is over and share what we learned.
A tale of two stock charts: Apple's long road to $300 per share
Froyo source for Galaxy S available
The author of the post also says that the EC2 network is "slow". Does anyone have numbers about the performance of EC2 network in general, and why this is so?
Not exactly:
The developer pays $1 + app cost, they in turn will receive 70% of the app cost from Apple. So the effective cost per user acquisition for a $0.99 app is $1.30.

1000 apps installed per day = $1000/day
Because the young people, in question, go out and do it themselves, the stupid managers try to make others do the work based on a vision of things that the people actually doing the work don't share.
Really? With bindings you get to write so much less glue code for labels, button states and other UI widgets. It's a dramatic time saver for UI minutiae.
They could add that feature to Reddit Gold, both boosting their subscriber base and reducing their load. (But who knows; maybe there would be tremendous backlash. I'm just suggesting this because I don't personally use the feature.)
Richard Feynman Messenger Lectures
Very impressive. I will definitely share this among my peers.
Good list. I think it'd be hard to overstate the importance of #4. The mind relentless tries to make sense and rationalize everything around it, whether in creative work or anywhere else. Unfortunately the world exists in a state of ambiguity, confusion, and even paradox. Being comfortable moving in that kind of state will increase your effectiveness in just about every way.
Was there some informal pact by the stealth YC companies from the summer batch that they launch today?
I think social sharing is a good first start- people like the stuff their friends like. For example, I might read your facebook feed (if I didn't hate facebook) because I know you, but I'm not going to go read some randos facebook feed. That would just be boring. and weird.

My point is, social only gets you so far. You share with your friends, your friends share with you- but then it actually does break down. If you look at preceieved sense of authority, trust drops almost 2 fold when its a "friend of a friend- instead of a friend. You run the risk of having all of these "cells of authority" that don't interact.

But the good news is, traditional forms of authority can solve this problem. People seek out and read content all of the time that isn't recommended by their friends. They read it because they think its a good source of information. And because they think the person who is writing it is an authority (or at least entertaining).

I think you want to make sure that your platform encourages this kind of authrity as well. You want people to have shared web channels that people read like they read tech crunch or the wall street journal. This is important because 90% of all content consumers (and in my opinion, its really more like 99%) are passive. All they do is read. They don't create. They don't share.

But the do click your ads. So its smart to think about how this product is for them.
2%? Is that supposed to sound significant? I'm sure Yahoo would be doing fine, give or take 6 million users.
I'm one of those 2% for different reasons(open for discussion): - it blocks 90% of ads, because most banners are JS driven ... disabled JS saves bandwidth

These are my usual reasons. I've run into a lot of sites with orders of magnitude more ads, fluff, formatting scripts, etc. than they have content (e.g. thereifixedit and related sites typically take me a full minute to load with JavaScript and often under a second without). I don't make much effort to block ads that don't make the page load much slower.
I'd normally recommend a ThinkPad, but they've been pretty disappointing lately. Two very recent experiences:

T410s:

* sound doesn't work in latest Ubuntu, need a kernel update for a new PCI ID.

* battery charge percentage goes from 0-10%, where 10% is "full". Apparently the embedded controller decided to change which units it reports current in.

T510:

* black screen when booting Fedora or Ubuntu installers. Caused by lack of drivers for the embedded DisplayPort connection to the LCD panel.

* display backlight brightness controls don't work

* suspend doesn't work, because it has a USB3 controller which fails to suspend, because the upstream kernel doesn't have any suspend/resume support for USB3 controllers yet.

Sigh.
It sounds pejorative and a bit belittling in this instance. It doesn't sound professional, and it makes the security researchers sound unprofessional. How about calling them 'computer experts'?
It'll introduce changes people don't like, but have the tag line "love bites"

The goes to 11 quote is Spinal Tap, btw
Publish your computer code: it is good enough
Basically he’s just using JavaScript’s built-in objects and making the initializer function call the prototype's init. The advantage vs. Crockford’s "module pattern" is that if you plan to make many instances, the functions don’t all need to be recompiled every time, or take up extra memory.

I would advise the GP poster to pick up some class implementation (or roll his own), and use some bind function instead of all the `self`s (if only because other JavaScript programmers will recognize the style better). One that seems to work reasonably well for simple use cases is John Resig’s suggestion, http://ejohn.org/blog/simple-javascript-inheritance/ though one thing to keep in mind with that implementation (just as with the poster's) is that new instances must be created with `new`.

That one is supposedly inspired by base2: http://code.google.com/p/base2/source/browse/trunk/lib/src/b...

However you decide to do it, the prerelease versions of Resig’s upcoming book are quite helpful in understanding how these designs work and all the tricky corners of JavaScript closures and object inheritance.
Facebook’s Notice To Shareholders On Stock Split And Transfer Fees
Great service, have tried it during the closed beta period. Good way for devs to get early users.
Yes, I overlooked that, but I do not think that argumentation is applicable to this case. The Wikipedia page about that case states:

"O'Connor states that copyright can only apply to the creative aspects of collection: the creative choice of what data to include or exclude, the order and style in which the information is presented, etc., but not on the information itself."

and

"the standard for creativity is extremely low"

For a map, the creative aspects are way stronger than for a phone directory. Therefore, I still think that copying significant parts of a map would be infringement. Trap doors would help strengthen the case that copying took place.
Out of curiosity, what kit are you using? I'd be interested in giving something like that a try.
Microsoft's Facebook stake: Maybe not so crazy
It mentions that they have plans for an Android version. That is a much more difficult area to venture into because of the 24 hour refund.

- I get the discount on the app paid out then return the app. Free money!

Overall I do like the idea, very useful.
مسلسل سيلا الحلقة 35
Plus, the friend list isn't that dynamic, so even it can be cached. (but on the client side)
> Consider GMail. How awesome would it be if you didn't have to wait for its "Loading..." progress bar?

Well, taking a look at "Basic HTML view"... considerably less awesome.
someone needs to do a little escaping there...
Sure, you can argue that they would have been better off not rolling out new software, or that they don't need new features. I'm just saying that the answer to the (sometimes implicit) question of "why does Digg have so many more people than Reddit" is that some of them are designing features and writing code, and there doesn't seem to be much of that going on at Reddit.

Personally, I'm in general agreement with you. And you can rebase the whole argument: take MetaFilter, with 4 people on the payroll (and not all technical). What is everyone at Reddit doing?
Ask HN: OpenGateway for recurring billing instead of Chargify/Recurly/Spreedly?
I ran across http://opengateway.net/ , which is a $99 installable framework for recurring billing. In light of the recent Chargify pricing changes, it seems an attractive alternative since it's a one-time upfront cost and no monthly charges - in other words, the pricing is a known quantity.

Apparently it doesn't store credit card info locally, which was my biggest concern.

Has anyone tried it? If so, what did you think?
Clickable link: http://www.opengateway.net/
Maybe they should stop developing them in the dark for so long?

What would it be like if they had a completely open beta from the point that there was a playable client and gave long term testers access to end-game prestige content on official Day-1, or a free year of game time, or something else?
Two words for 10.7: Touch.

Ok, that's one word, but you get the point. Multitouch trackpads and gestures in 10.6 are only the start.
Not to be difficult, but I don't understand this reasoning. At the end of the day, you're charging someone, just not the end user. Why is charging advertisers preferable to charging users?
Awesome, I'll give it a try!
How to Create a Successful MMO
Hi Reedlaw--I'm not able to reproduce this. I'm assuming you mean you created an experiment on dropbox.com and that the play button somehow gets larger every time you hover your mouse over it. What browser are you using? Thanks!

Pete
Can you elaborate? You develop for which platforms (iOS, Android, Symbian, etc)? What type of software (games, utilities, etc)?
Thanks
Seems like JS is a hot topic today. Let me try to argue in favor of disabling JS, using the very same three points.
I'm one of those more strict JS disable people, but feel free to correct me if I see things wrong.

1) Using JavaScript is insecure: Without doubt JS had security holes in the past, and they continue to show up.

2) JavaScript is a privacy threat: This has a lot to do with what you define as privacy. To my knowledge it is possible to track my cursor in the entire website, while I'm on it. This is a example of what I call a privacy issue. Some people my not care about that. Interactive parts of a website always expose the way I interact with it. Sometimes this is fine, because the product needs it to function.

3) JavaScript saves bandwidth: I think that not so much because of the initial load of a webpage. JS enables a webpage to costantly query back to the server. An example is gmail, and the notification for a new email, while you are logged into gmail.

People should not take this too personal. If your webpage is truthfully, or offers something I'm eager to use, I'll give it to you.
Does anyone know how this compares to Cartelligent (http://www.cartelligent.com/), which seems similar but more expensive?
What's the best way of dealing with the chicken-and-egg problem of initial login when using PKA? Should login be denied until the private key is uploaded via something other than ssh?
Great stuff, the video made me want to jump right in and test stuff; too bad I don't have any medium/big sites to test :)

For us folks with small-traffic websites (ie. your Bronze plan), an useful addition would be a suggestion to people to not try too many variations at the same time. (I don't have the math, but I assume less variations means less datapoints until you get significant results)

Perhaps, as another commenter suggested, by estimating how long (in time or visitors) it will take - and by showing this estimate while adding variations.
But how many of those 6 million are bots and scripts like mechanize scraping the site?
Awesome! Will there be some kind of transportation between some of the startups? I recall at last years startup school there were buses between the after parties in SF that were held at the different startups. I'm curious if such a thing will occur for visiting the multiple startups in SF or Pal Alto on Sunday.
He probably sees very little of these. His lawyers probably say "YAY, ANOTHER ONE!"
Technically, not too special - ISTM they're selling convenience rather than innovation per se. Going here to get your score certainly looks more pleasant than hunting for a public domain version, though I'd miss the lack of MIDI or other alternative formats.

Marketing-wise, it's pure gold. I think they could do very well, except that I wasn't too clear on what the commercial proposition is.
I'm using the one developed by Oliver Drobnik called AntiCrack: http://www.drobnik.com/touch/anticrack/
$1500 is incredibly low for any kind of bespoke development.

Incidentally, at $15-$20 an hour, you're severely under-pricing yourself, if you're in any major market in North America that I can think of.
But it would demonstrate a homework well done and a genuine interest in the company.
This is weird :) We recently moved to github (where recent is a few days), so I wonder if that's linked

Also, numpy is not mainly written in modula-2.
La Stupenda
Eyeballs.js: Lightweight MVC framework for building fast, tidy web apps
I've just bought a cheap Acer 4741G (something like that anyway?) to run as my dev machine with Ubuntu.

It's not exactly a high-end machine, but my logic went like this:

1) 15" is too big, 13.3" is too small. This is a 14.3" widescreen, which seems perfect.

2) Decent, if not outstanding specs. i5 430M processor, 4G RAM, 500GB HD. (Most Google results are for an i3 version, but it seems the newer ones are i5)

3) Cheap enough (< $800) that spending extra to get a SSD to use as my boot drive makes sense (arriving today).

4) Has an internal DVD drive, which I'm going to replace with a drive caddy and the original 500GB HD.

5) It even has a dedicated (NVidia 310M) video card. I'm not a gamer, but CUDA support might be fun to play with.

I haven't installed Ubuntu yet, but I did boot it off a USB and all the hardware seems ok.

The disadvantages:

1) Low battery life. It's only a small, 6 cell battery and lasts 3-4 hours. This isn't a huge issue for me ATM.

2) Screen resolution is 1366x768. This looks fine on a 13.3", but on the 14" a little higher might be nice.

3) Not as nice looking as a MacBook Pro
I'm really surprised by this as well. These mistakes were exactly the same ones that ZenDesk made. Obviously they didn't take the time to learn from that particular fiasco. Had they paid attention to ZenDesk's problems, they would have avoided almost all the problems they had.

As a counter example, I signed up for Backupify during their beta. I recently checked their site and saw that their free plan is fairly limited, but my account shows I'm at the premium level, which currently has a monthly fee, though I pay nothing. They grandfathered in my account without even telling me there was a pricing change. In other words, only new customers were affected, not existing customers. There was no uproar because it didn't really affect existing customers.
This looks brilliant, you just need to nail your pricing structure.. perhaps consider per test or limit the number of tests and variations? Either way, congratulations, some serious skills on show form your engineer(s)!
@ax0n: yeah, the grid-connected solar farms and large-scale solar thermal projects are really starting to come in. a ton in the pipeline too.