skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's assuming that you can actually get 5-7 dealers to compete :)

There are few things to take into account:

1. We're working with real dealers behind the scenes, calling them if we have to. We don't use automated systems (not because it's impossible, but because it leads to a poor consumer experience). So there's a cost aspect to it.

2. Since dealers can see each others' offers, there's some competitive dynamics at play here too. The nth dealer to join often thinks that s/he has a worse chance of winning the deal because other dealers got there first. The effect varies proportionally (possibly exponentially) with the number of dealers participating. We don't want to promise 5-7 dealers if we can only realistically get 3-5.

3. We split-tested the value propositions for our plans, especially around # of dealers. What we've got now seems to work pretty well in terms of driving people to pick the plan we want them to pick (Plus).

4. We've found that with 3-5 dealers, buyers generally reach the local (in terms of geography) minimum w.r.t to the price of the car. Adding another 2 dealers doesn't get the buyer much and only wastes the dealers' time.

That said, we will continue to monitor this and test it. Thanks for your feedback!
Young or old, people often suffer "analysis paralysis" and cannot take that first step.

I think this old joke sums it up.

A woman prays every day, "Oh lord, please let me win the lottery." Months go by, years go by and still nothing. No matter how often, how loud or how hard she prays, she still doesn't win the lottery. Finally one day in tears she cries out, "Why won't you let me win the lottery? I've been good, I've been faithful..."

A voice booms out of the clouds... "First You Have To Buy A Ticket!"

TL;DR If you don't put yourself into the game you cannot lose, but you cannot win either.
And the joy of OS X is that you have both a polished GUI and a solid shell.
Overseas design is great for production stuff like "make me more pages that fit this style". It's horrible for logo design where the key is to reflect your brand's identity.
The Long Beard's Revenge
Discount (http://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/Code/discount/) is a very fast, C-based implementation of Markdown (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/).

I have a Lua wrapper for it, but just noticed that I don't have it on my github page. I'll post it soonish. Somebody else has a Lua wrapper for an older version of discount, but includes the discount source in it (!), and it's been updated due to security-related bugs, so that's out.

Talking about reversed brackets, look at J (http://www.jsoftware.com/). The only language I've seen that uses ], [, {, and } as unpaired operators. Pretty serious heresy. Cool language, though.
I'm quite serious. I am however also aware that I'm upsetting the entire Apple fanboy segment in here. (with slight intent admittedly)

MacBook Pros are premium indeed. But unless you're looking specifically for the "premium" look, then there's no reason to default to Macs.

Please bear in mind that I base all my comments on first hand, personal experience.
As stated I've been running on a tiny, flimsy, plastic thing for years.
My trusty machine have been thrown around and even landed on a stone floor from ~2m, with me onto. I have the marks to show for it, but the machine merely chipped at the edge.

Your argument about the LCDs being inferior I simply don't follow. What makes you think you're getting a different LCD in your MBP than everybody else does? It's the same technology as in all other machines out there.

I know specs are easy to dismiss, but honestly, it's not the extra shine that makes your computer run faster.

You hit the nail on the head (pun intended) with your analogy - why should the carpenter choose a specific brand or hammer just for the aluminum handle? Inexpensive is not the same as "cheapass".
You get plenty of quality machines at half the prices of a MBP.
Cat names Apple has used/will use:

Cheetah (10.0)
Puma (10.1)
Jaguar (10.2)
Panther (10.3)
Tiger (10.4)
Leopard (10.5)
Snow Leopard (10.6)
Lion (10.7)

Cat names left unused:

Cougar, Ocelot, Bobcat, Lynx, Serval

Apple still has quite a few years to go before running out of cats. Lynx and Cougar are both already trademarked by Apple. http://www.macrumors.com/2003/07/24/apple-trademarks-lynx-co...

Semantically, Cougar might be problematic (Cougar and Puma are the same animal) but it doesn't really matter--for instance, there's no actual cat species called "panther", it's just a generic name for big cats, and the black panther is just a subspecies of jaguar. (However, interestingly enough, snow leopards are a completely different species than leopards.)

There's other synonyms for "Cougar" you can put in there ("Mountain Lion") to extend the queue. In fact, Mountain Lion might be a minor upgrade on Lion just as Snow Leopard was a minor upgrade on Leopard.

EDIT: Fixed taxonomical error.

EDIT: Turns out "black panthers" can be melanistic jaguars OR leopards.
I/o Ventures, the Hip Mission District Take on a Tech Incubator
In my opinion, you have the ideal product for advertising on photography websites and blogs. Your ad dollars will go much further than with AdWords in my experience, with a much lower CPC. I am a big, big fan of being able to reach pre-qualified buyers like that with direct ad placements.
Precisely. There are a lot of other possible revenue streams, even if we never charge the dealers (which we'd like to avoid because we are a consumer advocate and don't want to be beholden to the dealers).
The one thing about large enterprise projects is though, you can usually convince the mismanagers that it's good for their career, and the mismanagers end up disliking the competent programmers. If you're a vulture or a hyena a large IT project can become like a elephant corpse, easy pickings. Convince the mismanagers to move competent people to your team in exchange for your yes men. Then find a piece of infrastructure you need for your project and offer to build it for the larger project. This is basically an excuse to use their infrastructure, db servers, test servers, etc. Use this to get buy in to slip your own schedule so you have time to deal with the inevitable feature creep. Go to the design and planning meetings and suggest new and exciting technologies that they can figure out. When it doesn't work, take the hardware they req'd off their hands for the infrastructure you offered to build them. Make sure you integrate your project to the infrastructure first (you can always pitch it as reducing risk to the large project) so they can't make any changes to it with out breaking production code.
Good idea, I forgot about that.
Bing search gets social with your Facebook friends
None of above. Marketing is about reflecting your USP and solving your problem effectively (and communicating it.
I'd rather spend that money improving the app and providing good support.

Word of mouth generated that way (slow but most powerful) will be AWESOME!
Just FYI, this has been fixed, we're now using radio buttons. You can see my response below as to why we were using checkboxes in the first place.
"Never have a meeting without a clear agenda."

This is the only one that I agree with.

I hate meetings. But I have to admit that they serve a purpose: Getting people to spend some time thinking about a problem and working on it collectively.

When I send out an email, I get very few responses until I start poking people. And then I get just enough to get me to go away.

When a meeting is called, people are forced to be attentive and actually contribute because their boss is in the room. (And yes, their boss was CC'd on the emails above.)

For some things, meetings are the only way to progress them. For others, email works just fine. The key is to figure out which are which and act appropriately.
I had almost exactly the same experience. I had a Mac (Powerbook) for almost 3 years and could get work done, but development was sometimes a hassle where it shouldn't have been (just to upgrade gcc one had to download 2gigs of XCode; installing exotic C/C++ libraries had to be done by hand; any X11-app, like inkscape, is a real pain to use; things like that). And in the end I was only using apps that have a natural home on Linux anyway (vim, latex, ocaml, java, inkscape).

I now run Ubuntu on a Thinkpad and that "Just Works" for development more than the Powerbook ever did.
I serve around 50 million requests a day using 4 servers on a system built using PHP and MySQL on one of my services.

Requests/Pages per server is a bad metric to determine efficiency when every persons problems are so different.

If your utilization is so low why do you have the additional servers?
"...vaguely bothersome post on an obscure blog..."

Hardly obscure:
http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-...
Black Panther has some serious semantic baggage to overcome, I can't ever see it is a product name.
Garmz was my fav company at Seedcamp this year. Looks & sounds like it's moving forward well -- congrats.
Yep, I'm wondering the same... Sammy has routes, but no real models structure. So I assume the two don't overlap too much?
$ cp /misc/music/Johnny_Cash/American*/* /media/generic_non_ipod_music_player/

You lose me there. Why would you want to manually copy individual directories to your music player? How do you handle playlists, or worse, smart playlists?

I'd go insane if I had to manually move files over like this.
Yes, I agree and we have done that in the past. Our app is mainly gear towards wedding and portrait photographers.

The main problem I run into is that people with popular blogs in our industry (a) charge a lot for ads and (b) are likely to use a competing product. Should I be worried that they aren't dogfooding what they're peddling?

Should I try to negotiate some type "Pay Per Signup"/affiliate program with sites?
They held the obvious big cat name back for this special purpose! .....Yes, I'm going off the rails now.
"Every minute you avoid spending in a meeting is a minute you can get real work done instead."

I'm probably being a bit too nitpicky but this statement stuck out to me. Two sentences before that the author tells you to do x instead of having a meeting, so you're not going to get every minute back by simply not having meetings. There's no need to exaggerate like that.

Although I do agree meetings are time sinks, and are overused.
Various iOS SDK header files contain references to MAC_OS_X_VERSION_10_7 so I strongly suspect it's the former.
It's like CarsDirect, but paid for by the buyer instead of seller. Hard to judge its usefulness without buying a car, but there's room for a lot of players in this space.
I just started using gpg-agent to do my ssh authentication via my crypto-stick (An OpenPGP smartcard with the reader built in.) I'm totally sold on it. It's got a hardware lockout so it can't be brute forced. The actual private key never touches the client machine's memory. And its reasonably cheap.
I think you'll find that's actually pretty damn efficient for such an app. If you add interaction with a client changing their mind, etc (v. common..) then it could easily be higher. Much higher.
Huh? Kevin sold several million dollars worth of stock, enabled by raising more money than needed, and gave up more control to do it. Now he advocates that others raise as little money as possible. How is that "experience?"
I thought this was going to be about todays Mint.com episode:
http://satisfaction.mint.com/mint/topics/why_did_you_receive...
That's good for your mac mini, but not a normal use case for a server running sshd (needing to be quiet, that is). Something that might also work for you would be to limit inbound access from known-trusted ip ranges, as well.

Running sshd on a nonstandard port isn't in itself a bad idea (other than the potential difficulty of logging into the server later if you forget the port or something), but it shouldn't be considered a strong security measure at all.
I said specifically in my post that OS X is UNIX 03 certified.

http://www.unix.org/version3/

The Open Group owns the Unix trademark, which is what we're all referring to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Group

So I don't know what UNIX means to you, but where I come from, it's based on a certification that adheres to a defined set of standards.

What you posted is an unresolved bug report that doesn't prove or disprove that OS X is Unix certified.
Geithner: National Foreclosure Moratorium “Very Damaging”
Trap Rooms: Deliberate errors to catch copyright infringement
Couldn't the decline just be more or less the shredding of the economy in the past 2-3 years? Fewer companies with extra cash around to have people spend time contributing back to OSS projects.
I understand what you're saying but I should be clear that this money is not taking away from our development budget. We have an ongoing list of new features based on user feedback and we're putting development efforts towards it.

As for support (and not to brag) but our main company has one of the best customer service reputations in the photo software/online tools arena.
I haven't had first hand experience with lawyers here, but if you go to UW you can try meeting with the ombudsman for a recommendation/referral.

Some business lawyers in the Waterloo area:
http://www.waterloo-lawyer.ca/index.php?lawyers=business
I have not had problems with Dell's wireless for the past 1 year.

If you are using Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10, I havent seen a Dell laptop where the wireless wasnt out-of-the-box.
Well, Twitteriffic for Mac still was unable to do retweets last time I checked. Ditched it for TweetDeck. I know this is kind of off-topic, but after seeing these large figures they are moving, I feel something close to unimpressed.
Similarly with Cougar.
No kidding. Lua has been used in production in industry for over 15 years.

http://www.lua.org/history.html
I don't think it's Cocoa that's slowing them down, so much as that it's a really, really, really good phone app.
And now that question would get closed and marked "Belongs on ServerFault" before anyone could answer it.
Thanks, and yep I meant newtwitter. (How long until we can call it twitter? :)
Agreed and understood (and upvoted). It was a first draft. I think what I've learned by going through this one round already is that you have to have at least one concrete word.

I don't know if "tracks storms" is it though. People track storms driving around in SUV's in the midwest during tornado season.

I think the element "tracks storms" is missing is that it doesn't smack of any ambition. Microsoft's "a computer on every desktop" and Google's "organizing the world's information" do.
They seem suspiciously tight-lipped about how much money they take, then there's been a few articles detailing how the royalties earned by musicians/publishers per play are minuscule. And just listening to the service, the adverts that get played are by charities and government for the most part, there doesn't seem to be any big contracts there. Plus the free service is excellent so I can't imagine there conversion rate to Premium membership is very high. And even if it is, the small amounts they charge, compared to the vast amount of intellectual property they're making available, and the bandwidth needed to provide it, doesn't make it look like a good business for the industry to get involved in.
How about giving an average price that recent buyers have gotten on that car/trim/location?
My MBP went through the window of my car when I rolled it 4 times. Still works great.

One thing people say about Apple products is you pay a premium for the same hardware. I was talking to a friend and told him about a few unique bits of Apple Hardware.

1) The touchpad. There's a reason people now use the Apple Touchpad on desktops. It works really well.
2) Battery Life. I frequently sit through 5-6 hours of class on a single battery charge. My MBP is a mid-2009. I've heard the newer MBPs last even longer.
3) The unibody. I think a few other companies do this now, but the MBP is very low profile, and is built solidly.
4) Backlit keyboard. I remember my old days of groping in the dark for various symbols and things. The backlight makes a difference.

OS aside, if I were looking for a new laptop, these are the things I would look at. CPU speed doesn't effect me nearly as much as Battery life. 4GB RAM is pretty standard these days.

As far as OS X is concerned, I develop "in the cloud". I'm a heavy Vim/gdb user, so if I need a low level environment, I've got plenty of servers I can ssh into. If it's something like Rails or Python, it works perfectly in OS X.
Yes,

It has a few decent suggestions but I'm annoyed at generic advice that has little to do with habits in particular. IE, How is "lack of confidence" a habit??
Well, it could be as simple as modifying the theme based on the location - or even modifying functionality (say, provide extra features to people in particular regions).
“Public Media” $100 Million Plan: 100 Journalists Per City
Duck Duck Go makes this a bit easier, just say !so xyz.
> " two instances in the same window, so that drag+drop doesn't require multiple windows."

Why wouldn't you just use copy/paste?
Here's a link to the moving story you're thinking of: http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2007/11/animalc...
A lot of application DMGs feeling they have to give the Finder window a custom background image directing you to drag the .app to /Applications/ does indicte the paradigm is a bit shabby.
Facebook and Bing’s Plan to Make Search Social
I wouldn't necessarily call it a "problem" with a our service. Some people prefer to do things on their own, some prefer the convenience that CarWoo! provides.

At the end of the day, if you try to do it yourself, you'll spend a lot more time (especially if you drive to a few dealerships).

Plus, if you do it yourself, you'd have to give your email address and/or phone number to a bunch of car dealers. And, don't take my word for it, take stjarnljuset's in the post above this, if you give a dealer your contact info, you'll be getting spammed for quite a while.
> This is unfortunate - that seems like a lot of work for a relatively simple, albeit well-done app.

It takes a lot of work to make things look simple. And even more to make them well-done.
Looks like it automatically comes back if I revoke it.
Exactly. You have access to quite a bit of information about the user when they make a request, so modifying the response based on any of that information is really very easy. IP address, cookies you set, browser type, there's lots of info stored in the request headers, you just have to decide what you want to look for and what you want to change.
> My wife's company is in the process of outsourcing their financial work. Utter failure. I can't even describe what a fucked up process it is with internal financial work being done in 2-3 developing countries. But why outsource it? So managers can cut costs enough to get their quarterly bonuses.

Replace "outsource" with "computerize" and you have a common complaint from 15 years ago, made by people ignorant to the possibilities of computers.

Outsourcing is not a silver bullet, and it's not easy. Does that mean that outsourcing is always a bad idea, and only ever decided by stupid managers? Of course not. Just like the fact that many software projects are failures doesn't make software a bad idea.
Being able to stream arbitrary data as JSON already get you a lot of flexibility. Can you stream Javascript functions, though? (You can in Lua, but doing so w/ closures is tricky.)
Look up the demographics of your users that bring in the most money. Are they professionals? Are they students? How did they find you? See if you can tell how most of your purchasers are coming to the site. Facebook? Google? Direct links?

Use this to get some idea of where to start. Might be smart to invest some money in increased ad spend where your high volume sellers are coming from.

Alternatively, cut directly to the people you're interested in. Virtually every university sustains some kind of picture taking business, at OU it was http://partypics.com - they go to all the parties and events and then sell their pictures online and do well enough at it to stay in business. Target these companies to become their exclusive ecommerce provider. A single one may seem small, but there are thousands of universities just in the US.

Draft a nice sales letter and send it to every college photography business you can find.

Seach google for wedding photographer + area and harvest addresses or phone numbers. Assault them all with sales letters and calls. Start actively reaching out, don't just place an ad and sit back.

After you've started making calls and sending letters, start split testing headlines and opening paragraphs. Always ask yourself "How high is high?" Don't settle for a 10% ROI even if it pays your bills.
Most people I know call it OS "EX". In fact, I'm one of those people, even though I know perfectly well it's OS "Ten".

OS 10 doesn't ring well with me, perhaps because I never really used any of the Mac OS versions that preceeded it and feel that OS X is not from the same family (being mostly NeXT with a reworked UI).
Ask HN: Rate my Startup:  Search Stream
http://www.searchstream.co

Search Stream is a social search engine. It's a search engine that has an integrated social bookmarking and notes section. it use your search terms as the tags.
FWIW, I don't think that was a Carwoo business partner.
clickable: http://www.searchstream.co
73.8% of Android phones now running v2.1 or 2.2
They do great work in many areas, but the best ones (IMHO, as a systems guy) are the systems papers. In non-systems areas, folks from universities could conceivably do the same research, but for OS/Distributed systems, Google research is the state-of-the-art. There's no point even trying to find fault with their evaluations, because papers are usually submitted well after the system is deployed and operational within Google.

Three recent papers at this year's Operating Systems Design and Implementation:
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/10/google-at-usenix-...
Yes, they could work together quite well.

However (and this is another conversation altogether), I don't think that you really want to structure your client-side application around faux-routes. Maintaining browser history with "hashchange" is important, but hardly the central aspect of a JS app. Usually you want to reserve history changes for special states that deserve to be bookmarked, not for every single action performed.

For the record, this is the little module that we use to record and listen for "hashchange" events:

http://gist.github.com/624773
Even if it's "ick factor", what does that have to do with lesson quality?

Also, I've found that not assuming the worst possible about people I disagree with helps a lot in creating a world view that isn't completely black and white.
A/B Testing You'll Actually Use: Optimizely (YC W10) Launches Out of Beta
It was three months ago to the day that we announced our private beta. We were thrilled to see thousands of people sign up for the beta. We've worked hard to improve the product over the last three months based on their feedback and we're now ready to come out of beta and launch to the public!

Our goal is to make it as easy as humanly possible for you to create and run A/B tests on your site. All you need to do is enter your website URL and point and click on what you want to change. Absolutely no coding or engineering required. You don't even need to create an account to get started.

We're working hard to improve the product every day based on your feedback-- just reply to this comment or shoot us an email at feedback@optimizely.com and let us know what you think!
HTML5: Anchor Content, Not Anchor Text
Have you found out how to get Linux/Windows Alt+Tab behaviour on OS X? It's one of those things that slows me down 10% whenever I'm on a Mac.