skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds like this is meant to apply to people running their own datacenters/servers. (e.g. if amazon.com ran a datacenter in Texas that was serving up their website, this would apply to them; but if amazon was buying hosting in Texas from a 3rd party, this would not apply to them)
The first time I saw Quantum Corrals-

http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/images/stm15.jpg

Watching an Open University TV programme about James Lovelock and the Gaia Hypothesis-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yvQVD7sgn0

Stumbling upon cybernetics and Metasystem Transition theory-

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/mstt.html

The first time watching each of The Matrix films and picking it apart in realtime, and yes, the ending of Revolutions is a Metasystem transition.

Lots of synchronicity in my life, a few examples, when I first heard about tuple spaces and Linda, and pulling out Mirror Worlds by Gelernter from my bookshelf as I had bought it a couple of years before and not read it yet, then again that has happened a few times since, the last time was when I was getting interested in classification and found I had Sorting Things Out by Bowker and Star, I keep buying books I don't know I'll need, until that time in the future that I do. Someone else mentioned the Asch conformity experiments, which I came across on YouTube and then within the week I was reading the book Poker Without Cards and the experiments were mentioned in the book, even though I hade no idea before hand, there were other instances of synchronicity with that book, but I don't want this post to end up as tr;dr.
There's a product called RealBasic that's been around for years. It started on Mac but now runs on OS X, Windows, and Linux.

http://www.realsoftware.com/
Twitter & the social network: more effective than reason, lawyers, police
The atoms I consisted of a few months ago have been replaced by different ones. It's the pattern that makes me.
With the recent Texas "Sales Tax" changes regarding Rackspace, etc..., here is the Texas franchise tax. It is a privilege tax imposed on each taxable entity formed or organized in Texas or doing business in Texas.

This may, or may not, apply to you also.

This has a no-tax-due dollar threshold listed in the FAQ.

Texas has no income tax, so this is how they collect revenue.
If my webhosting is in Tel Aviv, but my business and warehouses are in the USA, does this mean that all USA customers have to pay import duties to the US government because 'the sale happened in Israel?'
Well, obviously I have not more numbers than you. But Suse (and later OpenSuse) was very prominent for a long time in Germany (according to empirical references providing the best l10n experience combined with commercial support).

They lost a lot afterwards/in the last years, but I'd still say that they are relevant (mind you - without running Suse here.. I'm running a distribution that didn't get mentioned here and has no commercial support..):

- The OpenSuse BuildService [1] is really awesome. Think Ubuntu PPAs, just without the limitation of being for a single distribution/release. It's basically a build system that serves everyone and is still actively improved day by day. Want to build packages for Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora? It can do it for you..

- If you have looked at Suse Studio [2] once, live, you'll agree that this is an awesome product for a lot of deployments. Think "Let me create my linux based appliance with a few clicks using a nice interface".

- Novell still funds a lot of desktop stuff. Granted, RedHat is probably bigger. But if you think "Gnome" you probably see right away that they are both deeply involved and actively moving the platform forward.

- Suse improved zypper (the yum/apt-get/aptitude alternative) by _huge_ amounts concerning speed and usability and it is now for all intents and purposes at least equivalent to the competitors

- Remember the outcry of the open source community after Novell made the agreement with Microsoft regarding the patent protection (fail to find the correct words, you probably know what I mean) for .Net technology: If you are afraid of the risk there, you'll be a customer of Novell I guess.

I agree that RedHat is probably the bigger one (and the "we gained 5% claim is therefor maybe misleading), but - pulling numbers from ... nowhere.. I'd rather put them at 30 (Novell) vs 60 (Redhat) % of the market.

1: https://build.opensuse.org/

2: http://susestudio.com/
"Scrum requires a stable team that has a consistent velocity."

I guess this is a problem when you have a work environment where people are leaving because of the process. Even if you implement Agile, people are likely to continue leaving, making a "stable team" harder to find.

Perhaps the overall take-away is that sucking as a company can't be fixed by a methodology.

...And this is totally beside the point. It's great to see someone customizing their process in lieu of following it cultishly.
Ask YC: What is an appropriate valuation for a startup that is brand new?
If there is just an idea and a bit of research, what is a fair valuation for an angel investor to invest in a startup at?
There's no need to use a complex plugin to provide logins with Facebook/Twitter.

Use the oauth2 gem and write it by hand. My FacebookAuth controller is only 20 lines of code and it works perfectly.

I've set up fb/twitter logins in 4 different apps and have tried all the gems/plugins.
If they have your phone, they can likely read your email and have your password reset or email address changed anyways.
... What are you talking about? They have plans for a web interface that does the equivalent of app-to-phone like chrome-to-phone. They have acknowledged problems with app discovery and with the lack of a proper ranking system/algorithm.

This was all discussed at Google IO when they announced JIT/Froyo. How can you say Google hasn't indicated there is a problem? I guess they're just planning a complete revamp/redo of the market for giggles?
That isn't the case with xslx files. Only the old binary xls files have that problem.

Excel 2007+ ------- 1,048,576 x 16,384 (rows x columns)
Excel old-2003 ---- 65,536 x 256
What a weak argument. Vendor X suggests that vendor X and Y are plenty of choice, that you don't need vendor Z.

A better blog post: Oracle just screwed your J2EE ecosystem, hope you don't deploy their version of linux for even deeper vendor lock-in there too.
> Costs should go down for small businesses, significantly.

Obamacare's congressional supporters are not claiming that these days. If anything, they're saying that it won't reduce spending and wasn't intended to.

What do you know that they don't? (Note that they'd like to claim savings for political reasons.)
With the caveat that they'd need to older, but not old-fashioned. Mental inflexability is too damaging, especially when coupled with an easy defense like "Oh, but you're younger and not as wise".
I haven't look too closely at this space, but someone here at HN made the claim that bank APIs are sometimes inaccurate, which is why Yodlee scrapes in the first place.

Can you confirm/rebut?
Anyone here know how to hack speed?
Why blogging still matters
One thinks of Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture, "Reflections on Trusting Trust", paragraph three:

"That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty. In the ten years that we have worked together, I can recall only one case of miscoordination of work. On that occasion, I discovered that we both had written the same 20-line assembly language program. I compared the sources and was astounded to find that they matched character-for-character."
You'd be gobsmacked how many big companies totally missed the boat on core, defining technologies, due to failure of vision, switching costs, or just belief that it did not matter for them. Hopefully they will be made into lunchmeat by their competitors, but that is not a law of nature.

There are banks that still require humans to make credit decisions with $2,000 of maximum risk to the bank. There are airlines where rebooking a ticket requires getting three humans together on a telephone call. There are retailers who do not know how much of their bestselling product is on the shelves. There are retailers who do not know what their bestselling product is right now, but who can give you a pretty good guess two weeks from now. There are e-commerce companies who do not do A/B testing yet. There are newspapers who do not SEO. There are publishers who think that paper is the future of their industry. The list goes on and and and on.
What's Google IO? What's Gingerbread?
Fairly mind blowing to me at the time I heard it: Reno, NV is farther West than Los Angeles, CA.
Your Ex is Dating Someone Else
You try hard to convince them to give you a second chance so when you are doing all this, it can be rather difficult to see them dating someone else, moving on in their life without you in it.
I think likening this person's work to a "patent troll" situation is kind of disrespectful.

The thing with project names is that they're used by definition. To draw a better analogy from trademark law, the standard is not "is the name in use", but whether use of the name for something new would cause confusion. In this case, the overwhelming majority of material on the original "Go" consists of articles complaining about the name conflict. The actual community around it seems to consist of the guy who came up with it, and so few other people as to be effectively nonexistent. Thus, what is the likelihood of actual confusion occurring?

Which gets me back to the question I wanted people to think about: what level of use of a project name should qualify for "nobody else gets to use this"? If anything anyone's ever used -- regardless of how much notoriety or traction they gained in doing so -- is off-limits, we're going to have to resort to random strings of characters pretty soon, and start moving our way up through the Unicode planes as we do so :)
Apple Publishes a Band’s Guide to Ping
Congratulations Michael! Thanks for all your hard work! The Rails Tutorial has already been an indispensable source of information for both students and developers. It cannot get any better now when augmented by the screencasts!!!
I'm not sure this patent is very strong. Anybody who did motion estimation on video frames prior to the 2004 filing and did it with a co-processor could probably claim to be prior art on the idea of GPU accelerated motion estimation. The independent claims are quite wordy. This makes me think they were probably made to put in specific claim details that weaken the patent by making it narrower.
Small nit-pick, but Biz didn't actually create the Fail Whale.
Tangent:

I always thought state sanctioned lotteries were highly immoral. Sure, they want the tax revenue, but poor people are disproportionately the victims of what feels like fraud. The people believe that have a chance at winning what they most certainly do not.

It's like reverse welfare- taxing the poor and uneducated for the benefit of the masses.
Hey, you asked for it. I don't mean anything by it. I am sexist too - I like women lots more than men.
Speaking of inventors, does anyone know how inventors ever get a foothold? I had a cool idea for heating swimming pools to ambient air temperature (think giant heat sinks).

But do I get giant heatsinks built for me to test? How do I find out if this is already patented? How do I sell it?
Getting Sassy (quick intro to sass)
Right - surely they can get a scale model of it working. I take all these announcements with a grain of salt now. We're always reading about these breakthroughs, then nothing. I mean, if he had even a small working prototype, he could be on the news and gaining investors and traction.
Unfinanced entrepreneurs (part 1)
It's definitely a regressive tax. Generally it offers worse odds than the numbers guys did back in the day.

One could argue that it's better than legalizing casino gambling and inviting Steve Wynn to come into your state and help write the laws.
Be You Be You Be You Be You BE YOU.

These people will spend most of your waking life with you. If they don't want YOU, the real person, you don't want THEM, the uptight company.

The cover letter is obligatory, not because they want it, but because YOU need it to do anything other then be a set of keywords.

Talk about why you're a good fit for the role they're asking. Look at their company site and see what culture they claim to have, and write to it. Write how it will make you productive and encourage you to bring value.

Best of luck. If you become a startup guru, hire me, I'm hard working and a good lateral thinker...
I present to you the iOS date picker side by side with the Android date picker:

http://i.imgur.com/PcNGf.png

One has a beautiful touch responsive scrolling display while the other requires you to pick out small + and - symbols and tap repeatedly on them until you get to the right date. Mis-hitting the square below brings up the keyboard with a jarring UI-rearranging effect.

This kind of stuff, as well as the fluidity of the UI in general (jerky scrolling, transitions sudden instead of animated) is what they need to address.
That's an unanswerable question the way you put it.

There is absolutely no information even about size of the potential market, business model, competitive arena, price points, required capital investment and so on.

You will have to do a bunch of homework (such as a minimalist business plan) to give you an idea of what you expect to do with your business, then you can go and put a value on it.

Garbage in -> garbage out.

YC has turned the angel investor game in to a horse race, they bet on the teams, to a much lesser extent on the ideas.

'conventional' angel investors will likely not be able to evaluate you (and possible co-founders) as a team, but they may be able to understand the business proposition behind your idea once you can explain it to them.

That will be central to the valuation, as well as your expertise and skill relative to what is needed to develop it and take it to market.

A couple of weeks of hard work should get you to the point where you will be able to answer your own question, after all, you're the one that's being diluted so you should know the value of what you have better than anybody.
Invoice weekly on 30 day payment terms. Offer a bug fix (not new feature) warranty that is conditional upon on time payment of invoices. One week prior to the invoice becoming due give your key contact a gentle reminder that a warranty is provided if the invoice is paid on time. 2 days prior to invoice being due, give them a personal phone call to gently remind them of this again, remind them that it is in their interests to have the warranty.

However, you must negotiate and get signed agreement from the client before you commence work. You can't negotiate terms after you have started work for a client.

Politely and without emotion let the client know that for practical reasons you can't do any work when invoices are outstanding. If such a circumstance actually comes up then politely but firmly remind them that you can't do any more with the invoices outstanding. Don't waver from this.

You should write all this stuff up into your terms and conditions document which the client signs before you do any work for them. Never do any work without a signed agreement. You might want to post to HN asking if any other freelancers are willing to post their terms and conditions documents so you can see what others do. Get a lawyer to check your T&C's.
Another consideration: if you sell desktop software and use a payment processor, many of the full service payment processors like Fastspring, Plimus, Avangate are resellers. So the customer is actually buying from the reseller and not you.
Open Source legal database in beta seeking code contributions
How would this work? Surely sunlight can't create enough heat to ionize a gas (creating plasma?).

Why don't the whole hydrogen atoms go through the membrane to the lower pressure area?

How does he alternate which side is heated? How does he cool the other side?
Or Unix's mmap, which predates Vista by a couple decades. (It was designed around the time of 4.2BSD, i.e., 1983* .) I'd be shocked if Windows hasn't had a similar mechanism for years, as well.

* _The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System_, McKusick et al., p. 29-30.
If you haven't read SuperFreakonomics and you're interested in this comment, get a copy of the book: the first chapter is about how the "decline" of the education system is linked to rising professional opportunities for women.

It used to be that highly competent women often became teachers because that was the only thing available to them. Now women can be professors, work in business, etc.

Note: this is not an argument for restricting female choice or anything else. It's about diagnosing how one (good) thing can lead to unintended consequences.
TC Teardown: 13 Ways To Get To $10 Million In Revenues (Part II)
Who exactly stands behind Mono after Novell is sold (if and when)? Isn't there a significant risk, beyond the present one of MS making some move against them, that it will be left to stagnate by a new owner? And even the MS risk hasn't been cleared up for me. Please don't give me the stuff about MS promises against suing, it's totally unrealistic. Sure, you can argue it's not probable, but you can't argue that it's impossible or an insignificant risk - it's real. Who exactly has mono installed anyway? All that market share on.... which device or platform? The web? Mobile? Some small percentage of one operating system and basically nothing on the others? The Linux community doesn't just not have it installed they are actively hostile to mono.

What I am peddling here is FUD, but it's warranted FUD, there are too many unknowns for what amounts to a buggy C#. Isn't the C# selling point that it's a better Java? How does that value proposition hold up for a B-grade C# with patchy coverage of the forms et cetera, with a patchy install base and an extremely uncertain future. Mono has totally failed to gain a critical mass, so there will be no openoffice.org=>libreoffice. When the takeover of Novell comes it will die a horrible and withering death getting further and further behind the parity with the MS implementation which it has never yet matched. I am sorry to say it, I wish the legal situation and Novell situation were otherwise and people could just choose on the basis of technical merits: but that's not the case, and anyone basing a startup or business on anything to do with mono is certifiably insane.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novell#Takeover_Bids
Gotcha. That clears it up; thanks.
> Men win the marathons

Among those who run marathons, the top men put in better times than the top women. However, I know _far_ more female marathon runners than men. (OTOH, I know far more male distance cyclists, so I wouldn't jump to any particular conclusions from either data point.)
What should they use instead of EC2?
I like it if candidates know about testing and OO. If they don't know Moose yet, that's fine. Catalyst and DBIx::Class are not something I would expect. Not everyone does web/database stuff. I don't, and I wrote a freakin' book about it!

It's a little odd if you know OO Perl but don't use Moose, but not a deal-killer. Honestly, I've found that there is a large faction of Perl programmers that refuse to leave the 1990s behind, and those are the people I don't want to hire. If you just don't know something but are willing to learn, then that's perfect. It's the "I will absolutely not use Moose" that == unemployment :)
I wrote the following as part of an email to the USPTO when it was requesting comments for Bilski Guidance a few weeks ago. I threw it together on the last day so it's not entirely well thought out, but I'm curious what's the HN take on the general idea of such a framework like this:

"One framework for thinking about software patents is the
Edison Criteria - inspiration vs perspiration. Thomas Edison said:

'None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.'

This statement illuminates the fact that there are several domains under which inventions can be categorized:

1. Easy/inexpensive to derive, and easy/inexpensive to implement or produce (ex: Amazon 1-click check out)

2. Easy/inexpensive to derive, and difficult/costly to implement or produce (Google Search)

3. Difficult/costly to derive, easy/inexpensive to implement or produce (pharmaceuticals)

4. Difficult/costly to derive, difficult/costly to implement or produce (Saturn V rocket, Large Hadron Collider)

Easy and difficult are, of course, relative values, and there are certainly grey areas in between, not every invention or innovation falls neatly within one of these criteria. However, if the objective of the patent system is to promote the progress of science and useful arts, then I suggest the PTO allow patents only for #3 and #4, but not
for #1 and #2."

The idea is that #1 is obvious and easy - others would likely come up with the idea independently and implement it, creating competition, improvement, and falling prices. Patenting inventions in this area would hence harm progress in the 'useful arts'.

#2 has a natural moat (cost of implementation) and hence does not need additional protection from patents, and may fail the obviousness test anyway.

#3 is costly to derive and has no natural moat (as demonstrated by the generic drug industry) and hence needs additional patent protection to preserve the incentive to make the large investments required for progress in this domain.

#4 is both costly and has a natural moat, and I'm not entirely sure how patents should apply here, but it's not relevant to issue of software patents and Bilski.

What do you guys think of categorizing inventions/knowledge like this for purposes of deciding what can be patented or not?
Prediction: SocialText 2.0.
I'd say that the educational system is uneven: elementary and high schools are just "good enough" to not completely screw the country. The university system, though, is really good: http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp .

Think "good enough."
1 • Save your iMovie project •

2 • Go to File > Export • The exportmovie dialog box appears.

3 • Select QuickTime •

4 • Select Expert settings •

5 • Click Share • The standard Save exported file as...dialog box appears.

6 • Name the file that you are going to export and navigate to the Movies or the Music folder to save it •

7 • Export: select Sound to AIFF •

8 • Click Options • The sound settings window appears.

9 • Select your Sound Settings •

Format: Linear PCM
Channels: select stereo or mono
Rate: 48.000 kHz
Sample Size: 16 bit

Click OK

10 • Click Save • You're done.
IPhone's Trainyard developer share his story on how he got featured
> I'm not sure what the article is suggesting as the reason for the increase in revenue.

The typical economic argument is a variation on the general principle that when other people are making irrational decisions (e.g. not hiring the best candidate because of their gender), you can do better / take advantage of them.
Or the unobtainable person fantasy... btw I hope the parent parent poster means he learned about this from Dan Savage, sex advice columnist, and not Randy "Macho Man" Savage, professional wrestler. Although that stuff is totally homoerotic, so maybe.
A nonsensical comment. Software security is one of the many things that can be purchased using money. Facebook has a lot of money, and they have used it to buy serious software security talent. I trust Facebook with my data more than I trust WePay. And I like WePay.
True Size of Africa
Not interested in Guy-to-girl ratio (I get the right ratio for me at every nerdish meetup I attend), but now I know there are 3 Whiskey Lounges in SF.