skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I too am supporting my Apple Gadget fix (http://logicpretzel.com). Working on some new apps and hoping they'll make a bit more money though. Small contracts for development help too.

Fingers crossed that it will afford me to go to WWDC, but being one the east coast and in Canada makes it a little iffy.
http://www.viemu.com, and it now supports a second full-time developer too. It's never going to grow much more but that's ok.

There are many, many apps that generate more than enough to sustain one or one hundred people.
Q&A: Google's Andy Rubin Talks Android
If an employee leaves prior to a liquidity event they have to exercise their vested options, which involves spending their own money. The employee who stays on does not have to take any such financial risk. I don't know what problem you are really trying to solve. You mention employee retention at the end, but the rest of the piece makes it sound like you're really trying to eliminate some sort of hypothetical sour grapes. I don't think the latter is really worth solving, and the former has proven to be mostly unsolvable.
If there were money in solving real problems, there wouldn't be any real problems!
The same reason they comment on social news sites.
Chrome 5
>> Is it because everyone wants to know what the business is?

Yes.
Chrome 6
Chrome 7 (Beta or Dev channels)
Firefox 4
Safari 4
Nice twist on the traditional to-do list, cool idea.

I would consider adding the to-do list creation form right to the homepage. Since registration isn't required you can get the user engaged right away, without requiring a click-through.
in beta testing http://www.getjoined.com should sign up and get a beta login
Does Twitter count?
Spreading the change over 40 years ran the risk of having a new pope reversing the decision. Sweden tried to do it this way and failed.[1]

I would also suspect that vanity played some role. If you start the slow transition you don't get a new calendar named after you.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_30#Swedish_calendar
Safari 5
Years ago I started to wonder how long China could keep this whole game of censorship. I thought that they would inevitably become more open as their contact with foreign countries increased.

This hasn't happened, has it? What I see instead is an ever increasing and pretty scary control apparatus.
WebKit (nightly or other development)
Opera 9
Opera 10
I'm not sure I understand the hubbub over this. When you register a domain from a country where.. um, "reasonable dispute resolution" can't be expected, caveat emptor.

If this was a dispute with Network Solutions, or GoDaddy, I can see the outrage. But it's with a domain associated with Libya. I say again, Libya.

Lower your expectations, and then lower them even more.
Goodbye to an old friend: 1-800-GOOG-411
The New Yorker article that Easterly condemns does not "gush" or "fawn" over the Chinese government or economy. It is a piece of reporting, primarily about the current chief economist of the World Bank, Justin Yifu Lin.

Lin takes a favorable view of the Chinese economy, of his government's management of that economy, and of its slow movement on issues that Easterly would prefer had been the article's focus. Lin also pushes that government-oversight approach, through his position at the World Bank.

However, reporting on a person's support for a strategy is quite different from supporting that strategy. Contrary to what you might conclude from Easterly's "review of the evidence", the article does touch on criticisms of Chinese policies, both economic and domestic. It points out that those policies may not translate well to other countries, for a number of reasons (and it certainly does not "recommend" the approach, as claimed). The article also points out their environmental consequences, and considers predictions that China's suppression of democracy, among other factors such as income imbalances, ultimately will prevent its economy from growing at pace.

In short, while it was not as critical of China's human rights position as some past New Yorker articles, it certainly is not the praise piece that Easterly portrays. His position statement reads like he didn't finish reading to the end.
Javascript - Event order
This is what I keep coming back to. When you register a foreign domain, you are at the mercy of the laws/whims of that entity. Eyes wide open and all that.
Google instant not saving you precious seconds? Try this.
There are a lot of side projects listed here which made it HUGE, not just big :) To lighten it up a little: I started http://uwrobot.com which is a small niche app for finding course openings for students at UW. I started this 2 years ago, and now over 25% of the entire undergraduate population at UW uses it, and in one academic quarter registration period, it is able to pay my rent for the year.

Its definitely not big, nor huge, but its very profitable. Just some motivation for those of you out there who have little side projects that just want to make a small side income.
Modern games are written in huge swaths of C++, tiny bits of SIMD compiler intrinsics and individual pieces of very special-purpose assembly.

If you want to feel impressed, check this out http://benfry.com/distellamap/
A quick question: do you have a site for your work? I ask because I've been using a pretty bogus, standard theme for my hosted Wordpress blog (http://blog.seliger.com) and could probably swing $400 for a real theme.
Good luck with that--I believe that if _why wanted to tell people his reasons for disappearing the way he did, he would have done so. What you are proposing is pretty much the equivalent of interviewing Salinger about why he withdrew from the limelight.
Selling to restaurants themselves is going to be your biggest hurdle.

I have a friend that has been doing a startup very similar to #1 (with a nice online menu, as well, though not quite #2).

The biggest hurdle seems to be the sales process to get in to each and every restaurant. Many restaurants owners already do advertising/gift certificates in all the standard magazines, Entertainment Book, etc.

Over time, he has accumulated a great list of restaurants in his hometown, but it has taken a great deal of time (i.e. multiple years) and pounding the pavement to get to that point.

And after all of the sales process, I'm not sure about his take, but how many gift certificates does a specific restaurant have to sell to make the sales process profitable? I don't think you get quite the mass numbers of something like Groupon.

On the positive side, he has eaten very well over the past few years !
Refollow has been blocked by Twitter
Sorry dotBen, but you're being a whiney crybaby on here. OH NO, LIBYAN GOVERNMENT DOESN'T RESPECT US RULES!

No shit...

Move on from it. Otherwise go join a political group that fights for women's rights in Libya.
He was doing a lot more than just living off it, Tweetie was the #1 Paid App for a long time and was in the Top 10 for all Paid Apps for months. He was selling thousands of copies per day for $2.99.
You're probably right, but I figured it's worth a shot.
Student finds GPS tracker stuck to car, FBI shows up to reclaim its 'property'
Hey Guys,

I hope it wasn't lame to comment, but I saw a tweet about this question and figured I'd give you guys my jam. I just wanted to note that the company I work for (Dyn Inc.) has two DNS offerings, so I'm constantly talking about outsourcing DNS with people daily, so I figured I'd give you my understanding.

We have two DNS platforms. DynDNS for consumers (you've probably heard of that one given its popularity)... and Dynect for enterprises (not as well known but it is a top tier provider in the DNS space).

With outsourced DNS, you can do all kinds of cool things that would be hard to do with Rackspace or in house because of the programming/specialties of those companies etc....with our Dynect Platform...there are some really neat advance features like active failover (redirect traffic to a back up server), round robin load balancing, weighted load balancing, and global server load balancing that can make DNS queries get answered faster, while ensure they get answered.

So if you are using Rackspace for hosting, and you want to load balancing without buying hard ware...with outsourced providers...you can do it at a much more affordable rate.

Dyn has been fortunate enough to have great engineers that have designed a network that actually has experienced 100% uptime on both DynDNS and Dynect... and to help work with more start ups, we just came out with DynectSMB which is our anycasted enterprise platform stripped down without advance features for start ups.

Hope this didn't seem like a pitch for Dyn...but most other providers can do a lot of these tricks, I just know for fact Dyn can do them the best. I may seem bias though since I work here..but we definitely care about the awareness of DNS increasing. It is an important layer of the internet that is often forgotten.

If you guys want to read more on it... check out http://dnsissexy.com

Sorry if this made the forum too businessish. I just wanted to plug advance features with outsourced providers... (from a bias perspective haha)
Google Code University (http://code.google.com/edu/) has some good resources.
With your approach, they get penalized if your company takes too long to sell/go public.

Sure, it aligns everyone's incentives with getting the company to an exit (not necessarily as quickly as possible, but if it's going to take a long time, everyone should have the incentive to make it a big exit). Is that a bad thing?
Back in 1997, my decision between postgres and MySQL was made for me by the fact that Postgres was pretty much impossible to install on my Windows box, while MySQL had a sexy InstallShield.

When you are trying to make your technology attractive to a broad base, it's important to remember that newbie developers will always take the simplest path, and that 95% of all computers are Windows boxes. If your software is not very, very Windows-friendly, you will lose first-timers to technologies that are. This was also one of the big, big factors in PHP's success.

Obviously, running a website or a database on Windows is a bad idea, but you need to learn how to code before you need to learn that fact.
Google Code University (http://code.google.com/edu/) has some good resources
I brought out my lawyers (parents) on it. Teacher felt he should fail me on the science test because I refused to accept what was in the book.

The agreement was that part wouldn't be marked on my paper only, and telling other students about what I found in encarta and some other stuff it wasn't going to happen.

As a side note, it wasn't actually highschool, this was grade 7.
NewMogul &#8594; Markenomics &#8594; Forlue
It would be nice if you could set some approximate times and have it email/SMS/dm you to do those things.

So at 5pm everyday you'll get a text message to goto the gym. And at 9am you get one to check server logs.
Oh no. How am I supposed to legally look up an address while driving now?
...will a court uphold you trying to rescind a third of his stock when you exit in another two?

That sounds pretty much like reverse-vesting, which is a fairly common practice (my Justin.TV stock has reverse-vesting). You transfer ownership of 100% immediately, but the company has the right to buy back unvested options for a very low nominal price.
I have three side projects (classifieds sites) making $400+ monthly

Expenses are:

1x 256 slice on slicehost for $25/month
1 hour of maintenance/day
I've just checked his markup: AFAIK he doesn't use anything bad (never specifies Comics Sans or whatever). If you saw problems try checking the defaults of your browser, I have a slight impression you haven't adjusted these. You should be able to configure the default font etc. and even styles in most of the browsers.
Schneier on Security: The Ineffectiveness of Vague Security Warnings
7 points 18 minutes later. People really want to know! I imagine it will stop when/if it is answered.
http://stormpulse.com was completely nights & weekends for the first couple years, but is now supporting two full-timers and growing. For stats on hours invested, traffic, and revenues, see: http://wensing.tumblr.com/post/1215873671/bootstrapping-stor...
I believe CitySearch was also spun off. That one isn't going so well.

I know there are a few core products that were results of acquisitions, namely PowerPoint and Visio. They've pretty much integrated deeply into Microsoft, so that's always a possibility here.
‘Linspotting’ – Linux ad spoofs Trainspotting
Unfortunately, the blog post author is lots of peoples' first exposure to the Clojure community. Not a great first impression.
Did you ask your CS professor this question?
… My advice, stay clear of putting your business interest in the hands of countries like Libya. These guys are still decades from simple notions as the rule of law, no direct offense to Libya and Libyans.

[EDIT] It may be hard for everyone to understand my point because of cultural differences, BUT I lived in similar country, I’m talking from experience not common sense.
Dershowitz & Reingold's "Calendrical Calculations" touches on this. The book goes describes how to represent calendars, and how to convert between them (Gregorian, Julian, Ethiopian, Islamic, Hebrew, Hindu, Mayan, and French Revolution, among others). Includes Lisp code!
Late-comers would, like everyone else who stuck around until the exit, vest 100% on exit (ignoring things like cliffs for now). This might seem a little unfair given they didn't put in much time, but of course you get to play with the size of the option grant, and make it big or small depending on how highly qualified they are and how much they're really adding to the exit.
Can you solve it?  The Greplin programming challenge
This reminds me of the classic conversation between Don Knuth and Steve Jobs (according to a folklore story - http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Close_Encounters_of_t...)

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Professor Knuth,” Steve said. “I’ve read all of your books.”
*“You’re full of shit,” Knuth responded.
>> What would be the benefit of offering Flash for Linux, or Mac OS for that matter?

Presumably it would be the same benefit that caused them to make Silverlight available to multiple platforms and browsers.
Useful article.

I agree that testing UI on the physical device is essential, and obviously faster, than the emulators (though they can be skinned). Once we have better automated testing tools, functional testing will be much easier.

Fighting the native widgets isn't a good idea. Users of the platform are used to them, so change with care, even if _you_ don't like them. You're also creating a maintenance overhead.

But there's lots of notes in there that are definitely of use. Thanks.
Number 1.
http://www.cardpool.com has started doing similar. (but not competing with your ideas) When you buy one of their cards they will instantly email you the card's details so that you can use it online while they send you the physical card in case you want to use it in a brick and mortar.

Number 2.
I would take a look at http://www.foodspotting.com for a potential source for an initial image database. Providing a professional photographer would also help.

They both will require quite a bit of footwork to get enough restaurants to buy in on the idea. Good luck if you decide to do either of them.
I think in this case they did good to all of humanity by removing it ;p ( I used to think free speech was above all until I forgot my account log in for 5 mintues once at work and someone wrote a script that pulled up firefox and goatse every 5 minutes ;p)
Why Y Combinator is a waste of time
What does "sex positive" mean?
what are the dots for? you need to write up a bit on why the dot would turn red, how it turns green when you've checked off a task, etc.
I've tried a lot of side projects but none of them panned out, because I couldn't focus on them long enough to get them to a state where I can leave my day job to fully work on them.
Doing successful side projects requires taking small steps and a good amount of focus over long stretches of time, even if the rewards don't initially come.
There are downsides to very low TTLs. I'd advise against them.

Best practice is to set a high TTL, and as you plan to make a migration that involves DNS, set a lower TTL so that when you make the change it propagates quickly. When done and all is stable, raise your TTL again.

The longer your record is cached, the better off you are.
I like (1) quite a bit for the following reasons:

a) Restaurants are responsive to the idea.

b) You can bundle your fees into transactions, rolling the product out at zero cost to the restaurants.

c) Once you build the core platform, integrating new clients is dirt cheap, eg add a logo / description, it's live.

d) You can build an overarching brand HUB as a connector to all the different clients.

e) Build in a viral component - instead of building for specific restaurants give restaurants a directory on "dinnerdiscounts.com/restaurantname/" and give restaurant a stack of cards to include in their diner's checks, or charge $10 - 15 to do a custom card.

f) Build a model around breakage where you require $100 in account accrual before you issue a check to the restaurant. This makes for incredible cash flow and margins.
Gah, this whole article is really nit-picky. The author sounds like some sort of perfectionistic, elitist prick. Definitely a Type A and way too focused on the minutia.
Also: http://xkcd.com/386/
While we are on the topic of text games, I highly recommend Jason Scott's (textfiles.com, BBS Documentary) documentary on text adventures: GET LAMP

http://www.getlamp.com/

It might seem expensive compared to the latest hollywood movie but think of it as enabling a computer nostalgist to preserve our history.
Cool app. Reminds me of http://www.nowdothis.com/ only it show one item at a time.
That's an epic bootstrapping post. Even though it's a bit of a reality check, it's also quite inspiring. It shows how far pure determination and persistence can take you!

Well done.
I really like this question! How many failures does it take before a success?
I just gave that a quick look -- where does the money come from? Ad sales? Something else?
So, what would it take to detect such a device?
If your goal is to create cool stuff now, you don't necessarily need to learn how to program. You can build prototypes in PowerPoint or Keynote. My partner and I built http://www.thankthanknotes.com in 8 hours using Wordpress, a pre-built template, wufoo, paypal, and almost no code.

Now, if you have a genuine interest in programming that's a different story. I do know it's taken me years to become a half-decent developer (I come from a design background). So, have some patience. What do you do now? Did it take 9 months to be come proficient? But don't let a lack of dev experience/knowledge keep you from building something cool.
I feel silly answering this because there are much more qualified people here to give advice, but I'll answer because you asked and because it's also useful for me to reflect. I hadn't really done it.

In random order:

Employees watch what you do very carefully. Their behavior is strongly influenced by yours.

Having several conservative ways to make small amounts of money if necessary is good.

Emotional stability is an important skill. The ability to dampen both optimism and anxiety is something that comes with experience, I think. Multiple backup plans help with the latter.

It is relatively easy to siphon off pieces of business when the market is large. Profitable competition tells me that I can probably find buyers, so long as I can think of a twist.

Being a generally friendly, helpful person, even to people who you think have nothing to offer you in return, is good for business. I'm a much friendlier person now than I was when I started. I've also found being friendly and helpful just makes me happy.
It will be interesting if CBS decides to buy a big chunk of Hulu on the public markets :)
The dots show the trends of a particular task for the last 7 days.

So when you check a task, it becomes green for the day. By the end of the day if the task is not checked, it becomes red.

The grays are the days before the task was added.
> It's partly the several different ways of configuring defaults (four I think)

Which ones? I only know of using the xmlns attribute to set a default namespace, though as I mention above (in my formatting-broken-by-HN text) attributes playing by completely different namespace rules is... annoying, to say the least.

> Is it harder in XML because arbitrary XML documents are commonly nested?

That's about the only difference, and I don't think it matters much, in my opinion (nor do I think Java's namespaces are very good).

And XML namespaces are actually unique, unless you do very stupid things you can't have namespace collisions though you can have namespace-alias collisions (and as I noted above, using Clark's notation is a great way to understand how things actually work)
How do you manage yourself in a new city or country?
If you visit a new city or country, how do you manage to get familiar about that new city or country. List the ways you prefer to get familiar with that place prior to leave, including google ;)
I think this would be an incredibly interesting interview. I bet it would help if Techzing assured him of complete anonymity.
Yes OpenLayers is the leading OS project for web maps, in my opinion. PostGIS/PostgreSQL DB backend is also used often to offer writing/modification, besides WFS-T. But to draw/digitize the spatial data, it could be more practical to use a desktop software, instead of a web app.
Thanks! I should add, however, that my next post in that vein is going to explain how much was timing and circumstances we couldn't have imagined.
I agree - some of the things I envisioned - to collect metrics data on which dishes people are clicking on / engaging with the maximum. This can be fed back to the restaurant as well as the users can be presented with a 'most popular dishes' option as well.
Talk about a first world problem. Who cares how the blueness is distributed in your needlessly maximised browser window?

It bothers you so that you won't even read the blog post, swoon!
> It's able to handle anything in a DTD and a lot of things from XML Schema.

Which would be great if those two weren't basically the worst schema languages available for XML.
Don’t be outsourced – How the right-brain can make you invaluable
It's not simply Libya.

This country's full name is Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
Take some dollars to get a good website. This one is the default Drupal(?) looks, you want something more unique. And make the screenshots full resolution available at least when clicking on them. I would highly suggest making a full resolution image the default, maybe crop it, because it just looks nicer.
As well as DnsMadeEasy there is also DeadSimpleDNS, which I have been using with some success recently.

As with the other comments; I think the advantage is having DNS disconnected from the domain registrar. Plus such businesses are focused on providing DNS services only - so I suppose the theory is better service.
There's also a Scala version: http://github.com/cscotta/Octobot-Scala

Which I find weird because you can write a task in any JVM language for either of the Octobots. Cool stuff.
yeah, adsense and direct advertisers. i sell stickers, too, but that hardly generates any revenue
The FBI probably has a spider bot which searches for keywords. Ooh, they are high-tech. Too bad they don't review the effectiveness of the "threat" detection.

Our tax dollars being put to good use.
To be completely correct, you'd need to normalize the prizes over the population of each country at the time each prize was awarded, since population growth (or decline, for germany) patterns are not the same for each of those countries.
I was living off of my app ShoveBox (wonderwarp.com/shovebox) for most of last year until I made another app.