skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Relatively young companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Google are huge drivers within our economy and each rank in the top ten of all public companies in terms of market value, according to the 2010 Fortune 500. Remarkably, none of these companies even existed a mere thirty years ago.

Microsoft: 1975.

Apple: 1976.

The easiest way to feel old is to get excited about how new stuff is--and stay that way while it gets older.
Either that, or the power company might start an investigation with law enforcement to determine if you have fitted the power meter with a device that misrepresents your electricity use.

I can only imagine the look on my meter reader's face if he saw a device like that attached to the meter.

One would hope that Wattvision launched(s) an education campaign aimed at the power companies to let them know of this device.
The left part of any graph that shows exponential growth looks linear. You could just as well argue that the growth has been exponential from the start.
This doesn't even deserve the jokes. India government at it's pathetic best.
Hmm, I can't find one. :/
Wind chill doesn't affect things that don't attempt to maintain a warmer temperature than the environment.

Wind chill is the effect of cool air passing by a warm object taking away it's heat energy more rapidly than stagnant cool air surrounding the object.

Wind does not cause an object to get colder than the air around it.
For Google, Capex Costs are Worth The Money
If you define "preventative" to mean "lifestyle factors", then you are correct that drug companies won't spend much effort researching them. Similarly, if you define "search" to mean "searching for oil", then Google doesn't do much research on search.
I think it's the small tiny gray "demo" button thats the problem, it should be just as big as the orange button imo.
37 signals is long enough on it's own that people know that 37 is a number. 20.com on the other hand noone would expect the site to be on the # domain
I think he's just fascinated by certain things. The Phaeton is an amazing car and outside of VW's normal lineup. The Hilux is huge all over the world, and virtually unheard of here. And yes, the Jankel armored version is pretty impressive:) Having met him, I HIGHLY doubt he's paid for product placement. I think he's just INTO things in a very geeky way. He focused on Curtas more than Phaetons anyhow:)
I know it was not frivolous. That does not stop people from attacking it as an example of "what is wrong with the world."
As a Muslim, that was my first reaction. It seems very odd. I can imagine African rebels, or South American rebels getting into the tattoo thing, but in Afghanistan, it just seems out of place. They ban the Beatles haircut, but tattoos are okay?
I noticed a lot of Raphael love lately. What about jquery.svg?

http://plugins.jquery.com/project/svg

I do not know if it is still true, but jquery.svg offers over Raphael the ability to import SVGs, and your twines are all the events that jquery already offers.
I have searchably.com if anyone is interested in search related projects?
Ask HN: advice on link widget startup
Resubmitting this as an Ask HM.

I just closed down my first startup SkreemR.com to focus on a new project called LinkGym.com.
The idea is that you submit a link to your website and in return you get a small widget of other links (similar to a blogroll) to host on your own site. We will ensure that all links have an even distribution and receive an equal number of page views. Ideally, we want this to become the easiest way to get traffic to your site, particularly if it is a new site or startup. With one submit, there will be links to your site from all over the web.

I am trying to gauge interest in such a service and get feedback on what people think of this idea.

Over on digital point forums, people were concerned about being penalized by search engines for using the widget.

So, I'd love to hear your feedback and if you are interested in the service please sign up to be notified when it is ready at LinkGym.com.
I want to put named arguments into PHP. Thoughts?
Okay so I am thinking about submitting a patch to PHP that would enable you to call functions like this:

stuff(1, 2, 'separator' => '<br>', 'clean' => true);

and define them like this:

/**
* function to do stuff
* @param integer $a
* @param integer $b
* @param string $separator
* Optional, you can override the separator
* @param boolean $clean
* Optional, if true then things are done more cleanly
* @param integer $cool
* Optional. Overrides the default coolness level of 7.
*/
function stuff($a, $b)
{
var_export(func_get_args());
}

so that the call

stuff(1, 2, 'separator' => '<br>', 'clean' => true)

will output

array(1, 2, 'separator' => '<br>', 'clean' => true)

see the consistency? :)

The way I plan to do this is by changing the parser to notice arguments passed like 'a' => 'b' at the end of the argument list, and pass a hidden array variable on the stack, so when func_get_args() is called, it will merge this array on top of what func_get_args would return. I also want to make another function, func_extract_args which will basically extract the optional arguments, so I can more easily refer to them as $separator, $clean, etc.

What do you guys think of this? Would it be useful to you? I really hope for this feature to make it into PHP 6, so I might sit down and code it myself, to show it can be done.

The reason I really want this to make it into PHP 6 is because I noticed that function parameter lists just grow with time, and they provide a poor mechanism for designing nice interfaces. For example I'd hate to write this:

stuff(1, 2, null, '<br>', true, null)

as it provides no clue as to what the values are for, and also there are lots of extra "null" values I had to pass just so I can specify some optional values. And if the function had defaults like this:

stuff($a, $b, $c = null, $separator = "\n", $clean = false, $cool = 7, $more = array())

then that would be even worse, as I'd have to re-type the non-null, and if they ever changed, I'd be out of luck.

All this is solved in a way that extends the array( ) syntax to function calling (well, almost ... I think it would be cleaner to put all optional arguments at the end of the argument list, as opposed to interspersing them).

What do you guys think? Would this be useful to you? I personally would use it all the time and wonder how PHP was without it, but perhaps other people couldn't care less? Maybe it has some negative side effects that I haven't thought ot?

Greg
added a warning about the not-safe-for-workness of photos. thanks.
I totally agree with this sentiment, but you do have two ways that people want to interact with the data. Scrub by day, scrub by hour, depending on what level of detail is wanted. You might need still two controls, but they should at least be the same type of controls.

Alternatively, you could add a drop down to select the granularity and then use a single slider control.

Edit: This is based on just seeing the reddit one, BTW. I tried to check out yours, but it seems that it's popularity has flooded the server.
I'm surprised that's what you took away from it. I thought they were good anecdotes about corporate culture and life at microsoft, as well as what we should aspire to, from someone who has seen a lot of people come and go. Each paragraph (and sometimes sentence?) stands fairly well on its own...

Still, even if he's stuck on himself, it is _his_ farewell letter after all
Wave was a great product, still is actually. I liked it a lot too.

But let's get it straight ... Symbyoz is far from being Wave.

Wave is an awesome brute force of technology. We're not even close.
Wave intent was to replace email. We don't (meh ... Google is a legend, I'm a lone hacker).
Wave was a self sufficient (closed?) communication and collaboration tool. We aren't. We talk to Facebook, Twitter and GMail right off the bat.
Wave target was to rack up every e-mail users out there. We obviously would like to dream about it, but ... :)

If Symbyoz grows, it can become a lot more like Wave. For now, it's just a social platform to quickly jot down ideas and share with friends.

I think of it more as the secret child of 43things and Evernote who's being raised by Facebook.

(And for the rotating comic, I'll definitely take care of it :))

Thanks for the feedback !
why is everything so over-complicated? Doesn't REST just mean that everything has an http end point? and isn't soap just plain awful? end of story?
You work for AT&T marketing don't you?
I believe the main reason is CPU micro-architecture (note: I have had way too much exposure in my life to the design of the CPU in your phone and in your laptop to have a non-biased opinion)

What does that mean? Essentially that the race for deep pipelines has ended, with 20-40 stages being the optimal depth. After that, miss penalties just hurt too much. Therefore, when you can't make the pipeline deeper, you can't make the frequency much faster, you are stuck with following process progress (which is already pretty good). So it's more tempting to go after multi-cores: same pipeline depth, more silicium, more efficient overall.
I was about to pipe up that I've been working on a non-software product, not yet a startup, but it's not quite as "out there"[1] as yours, since it's still primarily based in computer technology.

Still, I expect to face some similar challenges due to the fact that my initial capital outlay won't be epsilon, unlike with pure software.

[1] That is, divergent from the typical HN startup.
When Soviet Union still existed, we had weekly "civil defence" classes where we were taught a number of interesting things such as what to do in case of a nuclear attack, why we will win the war and what to do with the weapons (boys) or how to cater for the wounded (girls).

Disassembly/assembly of AK47 was one of routine exercises, we even had competitions on who could do it the fastest.

Those were mandatory classes, just like regular subjects (math, physics and etc) with the exams and grades counting towards your equivalent of GPA. Some schools had after hours clubs where those who were interested could learn more.

I liked those classes a lot, because we got to shoot some weapons (mostly air guns, but sometimes small caliber rifles) for free.

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...
I was thinking more along the lines of Buzz. Something that could be used to post the contents of your bowel movements, if you so choose, but also something that is conducive to debate with the kind of immediacy that blogs don't offer. A public conversation between two people, for example, debating about the goodness of payday loans, in a format that was specifically built for that.
I didn't make any progress :)

The idea was to connect your different affiliate accounts to give you real-time, rich data about aggregate sales. But in order to access this information on behalf of the affiliate marketer you need to overcome a huge trust barrier (eg. with access to their cj account you can view their ssn).
REST means a bit more than just "everything has an HTTP endpoint"; it means everything has HTTP endpoints that behave in approximately the same way, using approximately the same conventions.

SOAP is just plain awful, though.
At this point it's getting heat out of the CPU to the heatsink that's the problem. How close the various transistors are makes getting heat around them and out of the CPU.
I read the whole thing, and thought it was valuable. For example, little snippets like: "Turns out that there’s a strong correlation between a student’s grade and their assessment of the professor’s abilities." were new ideas to me. I guess some of this comes from the management and leadership books he's read.

I didn't think he talks particularly much about himself or how quirky he is either.

Also interesting that this is the second person at Microsoft I've read about this week complaining about benefits being reduced. Michael Kaplan (interesting blog on internationalization issues at Microsoft besides) says "Microsoft, multi-billion dollar company that it may be, has no spine whatsoever to speak of.":

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/10/09/10073622....
Also, the term REST is usually used by people who don't know what the hell it actually means. For instance, people say that Twitter, Amazon, Ebay, just about everybody have "REST APIs" but they really have "POX" (Plain Old XML) or "POJ" (Plain Old Json) APIs.

I've had both good and bad experiences with SOAP. I remember wasting a few days figuring out how to get a PHP app to authenticate against an ASP.NET SOAP implementation... I did get the auth to work, but then I ran into other problems, and we found these bozos had a competitor that had a simple POX api that took five minutes to get working.

On the other hand, there was the day I pointed Visual Studio at the WSDL file for the Salesforce.com API and was quite astonished to see it build all the stubs for a very complex API with just the click of a mouse and no hitches at all.
Not worth it; not for $250 and certainly not for $5k. I'm not sure why you think the one with the hyphen is better than the one without, but I think it's harder to remember and using both will probably confuse users.

I'd dump the "systems" and come up with a name that you can buy a one-word domain for, if at all possible (nothing too cutesie), and it's not too late or too expensive. Better to get a company name that's unique enough you can own all domain variants of it, including the one that's just [name].com.
Is there a start-up that makes embeddable multiple choice questions?
For the purpose of quizzing users who have completed a certain portion of the site. Google gives me hideous ones, it seems like a place a 2.0 start up might exist.
Yeah, the expert sex change site has NEVER gotten me to sign up. There is one site though that has links to being able to chat with "a real lawyer", "a real doctor" etc. in realtime, and that is very tempting. Especially when their ad is exactly on an article where you need to find something out. What about that?
The above two answers my question.Thanks.
Eh, if you do well at your first company, and have selected for the interestingness of the work and the degree of responsibility you get to take on rather than salary, you'll have a killer CV and an employer who'll give you a fantastic reference etc. for your next job. Your next employer doesn't need to know what your previous salary was, certainly not before they've made the offer.
I'd be happy if someone else was also interested in this feature and we could do this together. I'm new at hacking PHP internals.
Imagine if "Dislikes" exceeded "Likes" of a particular marketing campaign...
When the inconveniences of normal daily life stop you from doing the things you like to do, that's a sign of depression, not normal behavior.
It's called functional verification. Some say it's 70% of a project. I think that number is exaggerated, but maybe 50% is more realistic.

My previous startup (http://eve-usa.com) sells million-dollar boxes that are essentially debuggers, just like gdb is for software, but for chips. Very cool.
Can you explain why? I mean, sure SOAP has its problems, but is anything else really that much better?

You move the action and some parameters into the request itself. You change the representation from xml to json. You get rid of schemas and namespaces (which makes the service either better or worse, depending on its size). People seem to be very upset about SOAP wishing it death. What is it that you're actually complaining about?
StartupSchool schedule
The thing about SOAP is that you can practically push a button in your IDE and get a SOAP

Sure, I am not supporting or detracting from SOAP, just highlighting the trending I am seeing in the SaaS space and I used Salesforce as an example because it is one that has made huge inroads into the enterprise space. It is the champion that got business executives looking at the advantages of SaaS. It is a logical conclusion that Accounting, HR, etc. will be adopted by the enterprise once someone mixes the formular right for SaaS in those spaces.
Ping confirmed that you are using google appengine.

>ping www.wattvision.com
PING ghs.l.google.com (74.125.113.121) 56(84) bytes of data.

When you use federated login, google appengine is behaving as if request came from the same google assets. This is a major hole. However it is recommended you use following login method.

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/users/overview....

EDIT: Just reported the bug with appengine groups. http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-python/brows...
From TFA:

>While the expert player was capable of defeating the top performing bots in the competition, the results are quite encouraging.
Sweet! We installed one at Anybots and it's surprisingly useful to know how much power the building is using. You make what you measure, or in this case use less of what you measure.
If we were optimising for conversion/sales there wouldn't be a signup with e-mail button at all - it would be a big instant demo button.

At the moment I am optimising for conversation - and I need an email to trigger that.

So now I would rather have 10 people sign up that I can talk to and 90 walk away because of the email than 100 anonymous sign-ups.

So the little demo button is just a little add-on...
Learning Python – day one.
"(Western) Rome wasn't around in 1000AD, Europe was."

True, but your original claim was about Rome ignoring a technology that wasn't available until 524 years after Rome fell. And I'd still like to see some evidence that gunpowder existed before 476 as well so that Rome could ignore it.
Ask HN:  Help - looking for someone to help my interns learn Ruby on Rails
I have 4 interns who would like to learn Ruby on Rails... they have no idea where to begin or what is the best website, forums, books, etc... please advise!
Ballots will be fixed to read 'Whitney' instead of 'Whitey'
Large study shows females are equal to males in math skills
I find Fielding's writing on REST opaque to the point of unintelligibility. This is a prime example. He actually has an example of a HTTP/XML interface he doesn't like... but he can't bring himself to talk in specifics, and instead hews to academic jargon.

So, can you translate his bullet points for me? Or can I safely assume that, yes, Roy Fielding doesn't believe these interfaces are "REST", but that I can safely ignore that fact and use the term "REST" the way the rest of the world does (RPC that uses URL patterns instead of WSDL).
I own the domain lifelytics.com

At some point, I wanted to start a startup doing life analytics. Sorta like RescueTime, but for your real life and not just your internet life. Instead of your browser, it would use your phone (which most people have on them 24/7) to collect metrics on your life.

I'm probably not going to get around to doing this in the near future, so I'd be willing to sell it to someone who would have better use of it.
No I've used java because it was faster for me to code something functional. There's no other specific reason.

The slowness is due to the tons of non-minified javascript loaded, to the not-yet optimized number of requests to the back-end, and also to the fact that my VPS is not a competition server.

It's actually a miracle already that it renders the way it does. I understand only now how sensitive the HN community is to these aspects, I should have understood it already I guess ... hackers like clean efficient code, and it's all good feedback.
"That one looks like a bunny! I'll call him Fluffy."
Its 2 part permissions:
* pages
* views

So I can see:
* a page as spreadsheet view (change everything)
* a page as a wiki page view (only change cells that have been wikied)
* a page as a webpage view (change nothing)

Toggling between them is one-click.

Access is by e-mail sign-up.
World's Richest Man: 'Charity Doesn't Solve Anything'
The Rise and Fall of Provigil
I think you're wrong to dismiss most developers' efforts at a REST API as cargo-culting. A half-ass REST API is better than XML-RPC or SOAP, at least in my humble opinion.

Out of curiosity, though, do you know of any examples of what you consider "true" REST APIs vs. examples of "ad-hoc XML-RPC masquerading as REST" APIs? Maybe I don't have enough experience consuming true REST APIs to be able to fully appreciate their merits.
While I agree SOAP will remain dominant in the enterprise space, so is Java. And there are Java frameworks out there like Restlet that make publishing RESTful APIs nearly as easy as SOAP for those in this environment.
Make sure they don't own some registered trademark, as part of the same prior acquisition, that could cause you troubles.

Assuming they don't, you could get started without the hyphenated form. Your trademark would eventually make their hyphenated version unusable by anyone else, and then you might be able to get it more cheaply.
If we just stipulate that "REST-ful" means "REST-ish", can we avoid an unproductive academic debate?
We're doing hardware... a toy for kids that connects to your iPod/iPhone: http://xachipet.com
I actually wasn't involved in much open source in the past but I've been contributing something nearly every day for the past couple of months because of GitHub.

Another great contribution from GitHub is the way it's founders help push better standards for coding: TomDoc, Semanic Versioning, etc.
I started http://www.littleheroes.com a little over a year ago. It's personalized books for kids. Running a company that involves "real" stuff definitely has its challenges (sourcing suppliers, shipping, customs etc.) but on the plus side, I enjoy the fact that we create something real and that our business model is simple and doesn't rely on AdSense or premium subscriptions.

With that said, we are making an iPad app because our customers want our books to read on-the-go for their kids.
There has been very little progress on forums since twitter and facebook grabbed the spotlight. Forums with moderation, up/down voting, usage limits (suspends you if you post too much too fast), reputations etc.. would be a start.

Most importantly you'd want to start off with top notch members and the tech gimmicks would help you keep them.

I only know of one "modern" forum, http://vanillaforums.org/ where there are some add ons which let you do some of these things. Reddit source may also suit the task, but voting on "threads" would have to be de-emphasized and it's probably harder to add/remove voting, usage limits etc.. Same for HN source.

There is this debate forum http://www.volconvo.com/forums/ that covers political, religious topics. It's old vBulletin so it's nothing you haven't seen if you've seen internet arguments. Everything depends on the quality of members and moderators.

Not much you can do with that which hasn't been done since usenet.

As far as update streams, like twitter but with more characters, more activity than old school forum format, I'm not sure it would improve the debate. Quora's approach of sending updates about activity around your answers could increase activity without making a mess.
No because we provision across a pool of servers based on load.
I own RECTOID.COM, a colleague was trying to describe a shape and he came out with that. After a giggle I checked whois and was surprised it hadn't gone. So I ordered it and done nothing with it. It has a certain goatse tone about it.