skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the past few years, I've been using a Sony Z590. My major concerns with a laptop are battery life, portability, and screen real estate. For the Z590, I get 8-10 hours of battery life (8 with wifi on, 10 on a plane). The machine is a 13.3" laptop, and it's light, so portability is there. Those two features can be found in other laptops, but the screen is a 13.3" 1600x900 display; I haven't found any laptops from any other manufacturers that do that on such a small laptop. The new Sony Z-series have full 1080p displays, so they're a bit higher res at the same size.

The machine runs Linux well enough; suspend works, all the hardware works except for the fingerprint reader and the built-in camera. The video is a hybrid graphics with nVidia and Intel; IME nVidia sucks under linux, so I've just had it disabled and use only the GM45 card. I've heard that the latest Z series users are sometimes having trouble with their video, but I think the latest rc kernel has the support required (always the case with linux and latest hardware...).

As far as using Linux on a Macbook, how do you get around the lack of a middle and right click? Is the multi-touch/gesture stuff actually in the touchpad hardware so Linux sees a proper three button scroll mouse, or what? I think I'd go mad trying to use Linux on a single-button touchpad.
Ohloh shows scary decline in open-source project commits
About.me: A Social Networking Profile to Rule Them All?
Expansion -> More stock photos :-)

See http://smarkets.com/
If you classify redesign as "one thing" you become eligible for a "How I increased signups 40% by doing one thing" submissions!
Microsoft Acquisitions and Investments (Data Visualization)
Apparently, it's an insulated membrane that only lets protons through. A proton can move through the membrane more easily than an electron can. It has more to do with other properties of the material and the ions than the effective size of electrons vs protons.
There are a subset of people who are just loud. And they like everyone to know. Malcolm Gladwell called them 'mavens'. These are the type of people that when they try a new cool restaurant, want to tell EVERYONE about it.

Never piss these people off.

They are insanely helpful in getting early traction for your business. But piss them off, and they feel personally offended and make it their personal mission to 'get back at you'.

I can't find the thread right now, but there was a guy on reddit who made a post like this. His insurance company screwed him out of a few bucks. He then told the agent he'd tell all his friends to leave their company. The agent laughed it off. This guy went on a vendatta against the company emailed all his friends (A LOT) and ended up costing this company a few hundred thousand dollars a year (at least) in lost revenue. He could have made it worse by naming the company in his thread on reddit, but I guess he called a truce at that point.

Find these mavens in your business and treat them well. Even if they're "pathological"
The Blub paradox applies to operating systems, not just languages. You can only avoid the Blub paradox by truly immersing yourself, and I was making a genuine attempt to do that.

Macs are truly not right for me - if I gave up and switched to linux 3 months in, I'd never have known that.
Leadership is a Form of Mental Illness
Call me crazy, but I'd really like to see pitches implemented in a reddit/HN style system.
Another nice thing about the X20x, and Thinkpads in general, is the keyboard. It's well laid out, the key action is decent, it has a handy light that actually illuminates the keys in the dark. Also, there's no optical drive, so you get a fast machine that's also seriously small -- you can pick it up by pinching the top of the screen.

Also, We had a Tandy Coco when I was a kid, I've had enough of chiclet keyboards. I'll be happy when Apple moves away from that.
Usable vs. Useful? Online Energy Modeling
Usability vs. Usefulness and our Online Energy Modeling tool.
Try SizeUp for resizing and positioning your windows.
You can see them on the 2nd page of http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F600.pdf

Rather more than I might ever need, but that comes with the territory of Unicode.

• 3 variations of cold sweat.

• 9 variations of cat faces, mercifully none of them include a LOL.

• The {see,hear,speak}-no-evil trilogy is represented.

• Weirdly, the iconic smiley face, two dots and an arc in a circle is not present. You have to pop over to 263A and get that one.

• To encourage adoption, I will start using 1F645 in real life to indicate NO GOOD, though no one will understand why I impersonate a walrus.

Sadly, there is HAPPY PERSON RAISING ONE HAND and PERSON RAISING BOTH HANDS IN CELEBRATION, but without both a left and a right one hand or a pair of leaning two hands we can't make the emiticons sway back and forth to music. Oh well, unicode 7.0. (And I think PERSON RAISING BOTH HANDS IN CELEBRATION looks like he is the victim of a stick-up.)

Handy Link: http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/ wherein George Douros gives you free use of his many fonts of obscure unicode symbols, but he hasn't drawn the Unicode 7 ones.
Governments would never agree to this. For example, in the U.S., The CPI drives so many parts of the budget (inflation indexed bonds, Social Security payments, real GNP vs nominal GNP, etc.) that they would never give control of this to an external party [/conspiracytheory]
Ask HN: How to build a business around other companies' ever-changing policies?
It's seems every time I begin work on a plan based on someone else's platform there is some disastrous change to the API, they block my account on a whim, or some other problem arises that destroys my startup plan.

Example 1:
A product search engine. Before I had a working iteration, Commission Junction (who we were counting on for affiliate revenue) blocked my account. I had not even used their service once and could find nothing in the TOS to explain their action.

Example 2:
I have an online store selling electronic parts and an AdWords account that I opened with a $100 coupon sent by Google to my inbox. I deposited $10 into the account as per the requirements of the coupon. I then started an ad campaign and was curious why no ads ever showed up on Google. After a while I contacted customer support and they told me my account would be shut down, without explanation. Once again I could find no violation of their TOS--there were no copyright words in my ads (other peoples' ads have the same words) and I never clicked on my own links (they were never up).

Example 3:
A social wishlist startup. I spent days learning about Amazon's Product Advertising API, installing Ruby/AWS, and getting a simple Amazon Wishlist importer working. Today I find no mention of the API functions I was using on Amazon's site and I find out in a forum post that Amazon is turning off the crucial ListLookup and ListSearch functions (there is no other way to get at someone's Wishlist).

What do you do when you experience this kind of frustration with other companies services? They build powerful APIs and services, but I don't dare use them if they are going to be shut down or blocked. Should I only focus on startups that require no outside components to function until we're big enough that we won't be so dependent on these services?
The easiest way to make money is to ask for it directly from the people it benefits.

I suppose I could try selling user data or use advertising. Either require massive number of users and a lot of upfront time to get going.
I sometimes find this nicer to read when I just want to collect a property from an array of objects (yes, map would work too):

var ids = [story.id for (story in stories)]
Iterate does look nice, but to say that LOOP "really sucks" is a bit harsh.
Pizza Express Employees Get Flirting Training
This sounds to me (mechanical engineer but not in this field) a lot like the light bulb problem Edison faced.

Until Edison found the proper filament material, he had an empty glass jar with leads in it and a theory. As soon as he found the proper filament material, he had an invention that changes the world.

The concept here is great. Heat hydrogen to create differential pressure, extract ions by forcing it through a membrane, repeat. Note that the key part of it is the membrane. The primary problem in fuel cells is the same thing - the membrane.

It becomes basically a materials problem at that point.

That is not to say that it is easy, but that it is different. Once I have a few square inches of the proper material I no longer have just a proof of concept or a prototype, I have a full fledged device. The whole issue is figuring it out once and that might take a long time.

(Sure there are more issues, like extracting water from the fuel cell or increasing efficiency or lowering cost, but the bulk of it is that first initial problem.)

It might turn out that whatever it takes to make this membrane is crazy expensive, and that it doesn't make economic sense. Or maybe it will start out expensive and it will become cheap like the filament in the lightbult. I don't know but I do know that he will probably need a heck of a lot more funding before he can show a proof of concept, and anyone waiting for it to work will be far to late to get in on the action.
I would feel a lot happier with a display port and a cable for vga than the other way around. :)
There you raise an excellent point which enables us to relate Facebook back to the real world where I think our intuitions and laws are better.

Suppose a plain-clothes USCIS agent comes to find you in a place you are likely to be and chats to you - say in a bar, or your place of work. Is anything they discover during that chat admissible, even if they don't admit to being a USCIS agent? Because if that is okay, then why should a social network be any different?

On the other hand, if that would be inadmissible, or require some evidence beforehand for them to mount such an undercover operation, then viewing your private online data under the pretext of friendship should be out too.
Where does the "500 servers" number come from?

Are they compute nodes? Are they webservers(5)? Webservers and appservers(10)? Web, app, database(12)? Web, app, database, back-end processing(15)? How much redundancy is built in(30)? Staging environments(60)? Development environments(120)? Standard IT infrastructure like DNS and email(125)?

"We run over 500 servers" sounds a lot like "we have 500 servers in our datacenters" not "it takes 500 servers to handle 200MM page views."
I really like the approach here of extracting the core functionality of js mvc and data binding without the bloat of a huge framework. I plan on using this on a project soon. Well done jashkenas and co!
Won't the dealers still be sleazy when you go to pick up the car and pay the agreed price? Won't they tack on extra things, say the price they quoted doesn't include a warranty, or who knows what other tricks?

Also how does CarWoo handle trade-ins? What about financing?

I really hope this work out though. I swore off buying new cars after my last terrible experience at a dealer. Hopefully something like this might let me buy a new car yet.
So you'd prefer ritualized penitence to insight about his business.
Chile miners may face range of health problems
This matches some of my thinking about services that I have considered using for my own projects. 30 days always seems to short of a time period to try and integrate something into my life. 60 or 90 days would seem like a better time frame to get a user hooked on your service. After 90 days they are either in love with your product, or not using it at all. So cutting them off from free at that point would be a reasonable choice IMHO. If they choose to pay right away, they can have full support. if they are not paying, they can use the community support. It has worked for OSCommerce, Magento, SugarCRM and a whole long list of others.
I think the common wisdom of what's possible is only broken by breaking one of the links in the chain of reasoning that makes people think it's impossible, and all those links form common wisdom in general.

Usually, when you think something is impossible that turns out not to be, it's because one of your assumptions was incorrect. But looking for the bad assumption is usually like looking for the bad stone in a pyramid - each assumption is in turn held up by other assumptions, and so on. And it's made more complicated by cross-relationships which can add an exponential aspect to the problem.

Usually, the bad assumption looks obvious in retrospect, but it's seldom that way before the insight.
Agile certification and quantification is a myth
CASHCASHPINOY.com -- another Groupon clone? get great discounts in Philippines.
In many cases they are. We offer a few free WordPress plugins that get us some very interesting emails. You'd really be surprised at the level of entitlement some people have when you offer something for free. On the other hand, paying clients really respect their time and our time.

I'm not saying it's all their fault. It's your responsibility (as someone who chooses freemium as a business model) to make sure you don't allow them to be jerks to you. That means putting limits on how much resources you allocate to supporting them and having clear revenue channels that allow you to make your revenue goals.

Still, many freeloaders can be plain jerks at times.
> They shouldn't use it at all. There should be some proper non-discrimination laws, and you should be able to sue them, if they disrespect them.

Why not? What is discriminatory about looking you up on facebook? Is the issue the pretext used to get the information, or getting that information at all, or how the information will be used? Your vehement desire for "proper" laws and the ability to sue "them" lacks detail — do you know what you really want, and if so, what is it?
Wow, none of my mac using coworkers told me about this, through all my complaints about not being able to use the keyboard in dialogs (escape, spacebar, enter, arrow keys, seriously?). You may have just solved most of my problems. Thanks!

I'm still getting a ThinkPad for personal development projects, but my work laptop just became much more usable.
I disagree.

In many, many successful startups, the people who make the money and the people who did the work are only loosely correlated. In particular early employees who were duds get paid well, and later employees who were key to the success get only modest payouts.
"recount each of the failed attempts in the last 20 years to solve the problem can be a boat anchor on insight and imagination"

Anyone who thinks like that should read some Karl Popper on the weaknesses inherent in inductive reasoning.
How to Make $37,000 in a single day
Yet, oddly, you can't do this with Gmail for Domains. Your only option there is to upgrade everyone in the domain to premium at $50/person/year
First off, I had high hopes for chargify as I had chatted with Lance on a few occasions and he comes off as a great guy. But David here comes off as a total ass. He literally stated that only 99.1% of their users are free users, and then proceeded to rip on free users like crazy. I can understand the pain of servicing free users. I have 10+ messages/questions a day from free users and they often are rude or incredulous. That doesn't mean I can say "all you people who bug tested our software, reported deficiencies and helped ensure our service doesn't suck, go take a hike!".

Just because you got your use out of the free customers (their time dealing with your buggy early release software) doesn't mean you can jettison them. You have to ease them into a new pricing system, stop future people from being free, etc.
My guess is that Reddit won't be able to innovate much with that level of staffing, they are basically just keeping it running - but maybe that's ok, since they have already been bought. Slashdot has been the same for a long time too, but they are also not looking for a big exit.

Digg has had $40m in funding [http://www.crunchbase.com/company/digg] and so unless it sells for $200m+ the investors will most likely see it as failure. Kevin Rose seems to be advising people to take less money [http://www.zdnet.com/blog/weblife/kevin-rose-10-tips-for-ent...] or no money, presumably because Digg was over-funded, at least for it's current position.
So lets do some math:

From http://chargify.com/blog/why-we-changed-our-pricing/:

"Grasshopper Group has been supporting Chargify for 15 months, and Chargify is now supporting 3,000 merchants - again, the large majority of whom are paying $0."

And from the linked article:

"We should have shared the data we collected for over a year that demonstrated quite clearly to us that only 0.9% of customers were paying us at all, and that there was a direct correlation between those that did not pay anything and a high volume of support requests."

3000 merchants total * .009 paying = 27 paying merchants

Now, these numbers could be off in several ways, but even if they're off by an order of magnitude (and I doubt they are) - ouch!

So many lessons to be learned from this:

- Freemium's applicability is so over-rated. I couldn't be happier that we've had a (cheap) pay-to-play structure at Spreedly since the beginning. Personally I think freemium should always be a strategy introduced post-profitability, never before.

- It's been said many times, but I'll say it again: the "overnight success" is a myth. Most businesses take 2-5 years to reach any kind of profitability. Selling to startups? Better keep that in mind.

- Capital infusion causes market distortion. Not saying that's a bad thing, but it's worth recognizing. Spreedly noticed a definite drop-off in signups when Chargify came out, and why not - wouldn't you take the free option vs. Spreedly's pay to play? And wasn't that some great marketing they poured a lot of money in to? And yet their free option and their marketing were only possible due to the Grasshopper Group's investment.

- Put that all together and you end up with this: you've got to keep your burn low until you find your product/market fit and your scalable sales model. Or you've got to have a sugar daddy. Or you've got to win the investment lottery. Spreedly is still alive because we've only allowed costs to grow as we're able to handle them - that's the nature of the bootstrapped startup, hard as it can be at times.

One more bit of math: if my numbers above are correct, Spreedly has 6x as many paying customers as Chargify. And we've had zero outside investment. And, painfully, we're still not ramen profitable. But: we have a pivot in the works that will blow the doors off of what we've done to date (and it doesn't involve raising prices on existing customers - promise!). So stay tuned - this space is just starting to get interesting.

Oh, and if you're an angel investor: we'd love to have some capital to use to distort the market in our favor for a change :-)
I'd not build a business on a non-.com name unless I intended for it to be a part-time/passive business whose primary traffic stream was SEO. Also while the URL hacks are cool to us, our parent's just don't understand them and will type the site name + .com.

I usually like to get the .net and sometimes the .org of my product, but seldom go beyond that. While it's in the domain registrar's interest to sell you .info, .biz, .us, .co, .whatever else, I don't see a lot of benefit. The one exception would be if you are marketing to a non-US country (eg. if marketing to the UK, perhaps get bot the .com and the .co.uk).

If a domain doesn't pass the "ear test", where someone hears your name and must be able to find your domain on the first attempt, I'd definitely get other popular variations.

If you do buy a lot of variations in the beginning, be sure and forward them to your main site while tagging them with Google Analytics. That way, you can check GA and see which ones send traffic before deciding if each is worth renewing. Shameless plug but I wrote a blog post on how to do this at http://www.keepingitrural.com/leverage-unused-domain-names-b...
Amazon CBA - Checkout By Amazon
A site that posts links, has voting and comments vs a site that posts questions has voting and comments is hardly apples vs oranges.
Where does the "500" come from?
Even though the C program might generate optimal assembly, it doesn't generate optimal assembly for calculating a CRC32 checksum -- that's the whole point of the article: new Intel processors have a single instruction to do this.
Are you me? 'Cause you sound just like me. I've even installed Ubuntu on a separate partition via Boot Camp, but I haven't had time to get all the stuff that doesn't work out of the box working. Maybe that will be my weekend project, we'll see... Good luck to you...me?
if whatever you're building on the primary domain is successful, you'll end up purchasing the variations down the road anyway and usually at a huge premium because someone else will have bought them up to hitch a ride on the gravy train. Might as well buy them early and save money.
Where is Kevin advising people to take less money? If you mean the $80 million comment, that was almost certainly before the Series C, so digg had less than half the funding.
Yeah, I think adding something horsey wouldn't hurt - just to immediately express what the topic is, I'll mention that, thanks.
We've built a reputation system, which, in short, helps ward off a lot of bad dealer behavior. I can get into more details if anyone's interested.

If you have a trade-in, you can describe it and the dealers will include a quote for that in addition to the quote for the new car.

They can also give you an estimate for financing, although for the most part that is still handled at the dealership. Financing is one of those last-mile problems that we haven't totally solved yet, but we're working on it.
Guys, we should put our money together and invest into this.
Twilio (#sf) is hosting API Hack Day on October 24th. It's just one full day, but should be really good: http://apihackday.eventbrite.com/
I feel stupid whenever I sit down at a computer without multi-touch and spotlight now. The software of a mac is just so nice and polished.
A somewhat tangential point, but does anyone else feel that if wave had been integrated into gmail and buzz hadn't, the two products would have had a much better chance at success?
According to the "How it Works" page, "we know which dealers are the friendliest, which ones will give you the best prices, and which ones to avoid completely." Presumably they wouldn't send you any quotes from known bad dealers, but obviously the question is whether or not they can execute on that promise.

True, the dealer can still haggle you on trade-ins and financing, but removing the "price of new car" variable simplifies that negotiation quite a bit. One of the current tactics that works very well for dealerships is trying to throw as many variables at you as possible (Google the "four square method"). Plus you can always sell your car to someone else instead of the dealership, and/or get a loan from your own bank.
2 problems. George Dantzig got them both.

http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp
Absolutely. Every time someone trots out "And Reddit only has 7 guys", I think to myself that they're innovating as if they had 3. Say what you will about Digg, but at least they rolled out new software.
It's really naiveté. More experienced "smarter" people will know how difficult some task really is and may not even start it. Someone young is likely naive, perhaps over confident in the simplicity of a task, and will drive head on into solving it. Of course once progress is made that becomes motivation to continue.

This doesn't mean that being naive is perfect. The majority of the people who try the difficult task will probably still just crash and burn, but the naiveté compels more than normal numbers of people to risk it in the first place.
Wow, that truly is amazing.

On a funny note: I wonder how many of those questions were answerable by the first result of a simple google search? :P