skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't a FLOP a "Floating Point Operation"? If the chip has no FP unit, it does 0 FLOPS.
Chillingo Acquired for $20 Million by Electronic Arts
Just tried it, it doesn't have support in it.
There is no way to show an arbitrary 20x20 image in a 19x19 or 21x21 pixel box without it making some of them look like crap. So, yea you can make a generic app that works ok in on most Android devices but you are sacrificing both looks and functionality to do so.

PS: The minimum screen size is (240x320) but if an image has 1 pixel height or width, it may not be shown on the screen due to rounding issue. So they actually force you to waste a fair amount of space on a very limited device.
FacebookBlocker
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/212323/
This would be a viable product. I've worked on a custom Web HR system for a Fortune 500 company, back before the dot com bubble came about and burst. Those ERP systems are way too complex, have lots of bloat, etc. for a small shop to need.

Building something with base features of job posting, collect resumes (no forms to fill out, let people upload PDF or DOC), track applicants (notes, schedule interviews, etc.)

Maybe build in features to allow applicants to link-in their internet profiles from Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Find domain specific things to add - like for programmers it would be OSS/github linkage, lawyers might be some sort of link to case work?

Maybe allow some calendar integration with the existing team so it would auto-schedule phone or in-person interviews. For example you just tell it to setup interviews for Thursdays or Fridays and it figures it out, contacts the applicant, blocks your calendars, etc.

Allow applicants to then save their info, and then they can apply any other companies using the SaaS.

Focus on the Applicant experience and the hiring manager experience aiming to simplify everything.

I think the 37signals guys mentioned this problem space as something they might consider... as they grow their team I can imagine they would build themselves a tool to make their lives easier.
As a Bostonian since 2005, November, December, January, February, and March are pretty compelling reasons to move.
This is almost as cool as the dreams I keep having of a Vim port for the iPad.
It will be interesting to see how virtual currencies evolve and compete with more traditional economies. There's an interesting Q&A on Quora about Facebook emerging as a global currency: http://www.quora.com/Does-Facebook-Credits-have-the-chance-t...
I wouldn't worry too much about people thinking the price is too cheap. I'd wonder how many of those people paying $2.95/month would also be willing to pay $9.95/month, $19.95/month, etc.
> standard, common sense 'batteries' ... even Haskell feels 'modern' in that way

Glad you noticed! We've been working hard on this: http://haskell.org/platform
Indeed.

Get older, not old.
Is this the start of the cloud computing dystopia that Stallman warned us about?
You mean evaluate people based on who they are versus what they say? No thanks.

I interpreted the title to mean Google Groups was going away. I was not aware that there was a separate "data" concept.
I'm not sure whether $3 is too cheap, but I've noticed a few sites use ~$25 annual subscriptions.

http://flickr.com/
http://backpackinglight.com/

I sure there are many others.
Who the hell downvoted this? I don't have any idea why this wouldn't be considered legitimate advice.
Implementing good scrolling with textareas not reacting to touch events is kind of hard. I will implement import of external files though, maybe not complete repos in the first step though
That is clearly not the case for the commenter whom I was addressing. He knows, so if the files he is worried about are deleted, it's due to his inaction. I don't want to see anyone just throw up their hands and accept victim status when there's a better option.

As for other people, I thought Google added a notice to the Groups files page along the lines of "Hey, dude, you might want to download this stuff before it goes bye-bye". I don't use the service, but that's what I heard. Was I misinformed?

EDIT: Yup, it's there. The notice, in bright red at the very top of the page, reads: "Google Groups will no longer be supporting the Pages and Files features. Starting January 13, you won't be able to upload new content, but you will still be able to view and download existing content. See this announcement for more information and other options for storing your content."
Most do. Though they aren't hitting the part where Lorents transforms deviate from Galileo transforms.
Short guide for Startup Software Engineers in 2nd/3rd World Countries
Why do these observations of a site being down get downvoted so harshly? The observation is accurate for him, and it could be for everyone...
So why does this only run for a few months - until the end of the year?

If you want to encourage investment in startups doesn't this have to be permanent - not just a hand out for deals that are already in progress.

(assuming it's not just a technical point that it needs a special bill for the current year and then becomes permanent as part of some other legislation)
No it didn't. It (largely) concentrated around the x86 instruction set. But there's 32-bit and 64-bit, Intel and AMD (and in the past Citrix, etc.), and let's not forget about the ARM chips.

But that's just the CPU. Don't forget about all the different expansion bus designs (ISA, PCI, and a few others through the years), memory bus designs, graphics accelerators (and their interfaces), mass storage (IDE, SATA, a plethora of SCSI variants). We've got multiple types of interfaces for mice and keyboards, printers,

The set of computers that I could buy to run Windows on my desktop has a huge degree of variety.
Who is the source of your weather data?
It's an interesting approach, because presumably Applane continues to own any customization work they do and can feed back changes into their core product. Essentially subsidizing the company's cost of development.

Plus given the customers are paying for the new features, they know it's features that their customers actually need (as opposed to want).
Network Analysis in the Cloud
If Apple Spun Off The Mac Business, It Would Be #110 On The Fortune 500
You still need to go to Chrome extension website right? It's not that when you go to a website that has FB connect, the Chrome asks if you want to block it or not. That would be effective though.
I use it a lot and prefer it to "Ask HN:"

HN is better for discussing third-party content. Quora is better for Questions since that is what is was designed for.

The quality of both communities are comparable and I'm sure that many people on Quora use HN and vice versa.
"Beware of the Leopard."
Another big one is to automate common tasks. Get some software that tracks everything you do, and make a list of the most common things you do on a day to day basis. If you find something that takes up a lot of mental energy or time. Then build a program to automate that and bind it to a hot-key and popup input box.

For example, I often had to identify bugs against weird data in the database, I made a program that would take a snapshot of a bunch of database tables, and then run my code which would change them, then I could click a button to restore the buggy state and try again.
Ask HN: how to sell an early stage startup?
I'm part of a startup that hasn't got the founders' interest anymore, so we're looking to sell off the company with all of its technology assets.

The assets include the source code (obviously) for both the web API and site as well as additional user software created for the desktop. Of course, the existing userbase is included.

What are some methods used to sell small enterprises such as this? What caveats are there to consider? I know that this topic has been raised before but the answers have mostly covered website-only sales (without software).

Are there brokerages as well as online 'auction' sites?

Thanks in advance.
Rant HN: Apple is unhinged 
Remember when the iphone was first announced? No SDK? No native dev? What would you need that for, Apple said. Why would you need an SDK? The future is open web! HTML5. Open. Free. Libre! Bla bla bla. So I hit the link for today's live stream of the "Back to Mac" event and for some reason it ain't loading on Chrome. Didn't have to dig far[1] to find out that you can only stream to Apple products, namely Safari on the Mac.

I don't know about you but this really burns. How "open" is the web when an apparent "advocate" of free web limits it's own live news feed to it's own products. Apple has single handedly demonstrated what a world devoid of net neutrality will look like. Not only that, they have demonstrated the reverse, what a world of end to end domination by content providers will look like. You need to consume content as instructed. Yes, we have seen this with blue ray and hd tv with the drm flag. But common, streaming video on the web? Web based content? What if Google said youtube can only be viewed on Chrome, etc. This is just getting ridiculous.

[1]http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/10/20/apple-to-livestream-todays-event-to-apple-devices-only/
seems like 99% of consumer web/mobile based startups win with this bill!
Saying you're lazy seems absurd on the face of it. :-)

But: ideas mean nothing without execution. What if the great ideas are only offered as git pull requests? Or are based on Clojure 1.1.0, but the author is too lazy to do the work to rebase/merge? Or are pasted into a gist and linked to in #clojure?

There's lots of criteria that are applied to whether or not a patch gets in, totally aside from its technical merits. The CA just happens to be one that gets a lot of ink.
I'd be happy to take a look at it. Feel free to email me.
Hopefully there's some bosses's bosses out there that say "why am I paying someone $150 k who is not qualified to evaluate programmers?"
I would think it depends not so much on whether your users can afford it, but whether you can sustain development on $2.95/month. The price difference between 0 and 0.01 is huge, but between $2.95 to $8.95 is minimal. If you are going to charge for it, charge for it so you can keep supporting it.
Startup Lessons: The bike accident
I don't have data to back this up, but I imagine sales increase more when a product is "on sale at a low low price" rather than the market price actually falling to that low low price.
Guts? That would imply that he had anything to lose by doing this.
If damping is profitable, someone will do it.
Hum I see Google not making a big fuzz about it now, but saying that Google is obfuscating the announcement and the it destroys trust and all that is a false assumption until it actually happens.

I'd expect email notifications and notifications inside the app to let me know the feature is being removed and how to move my data some time before the actual feature removal happens. I can't say Google has burned me until they do actually not inform me and 'destroy' my data. I think it's too early to say "Geez Google you're evil now!", and for the most part, this could be a small "Hey FYI, we're removing those features... we might not even be sure about it so we're not doing a big deal out of it yet."

If this article was written 2 weeks before data was removed I'd understand, but as it is it comes out somewhat sensationalistic.
"The investor must not be a corporation" seems key. Do angel investors really invest out of their own bank accounts or do they form LLCs for this?
In terms of scaling, if you're having to screen so many employees that it becomes your bottleneck, then it'd be a business on the path to success. It doesn't need to scale non-linearly, because each candidate screened is worth, on average, some dollar amount.

I see it as an analogy: YC is to Angels & VCs as <this thing> is to Companies that are Hiring. If you get into YC, you are definitely a noteworthy team. Furthermore, YC is able to prune down 1,000+ applicants to under 40 in a short amount of time. They probably turn down 75% of all applicants in 20 minutes or less per applicant. If it's your job to discern, you're going to figure out how to do it efficiently. They also attract very good applicants.

Why can't there be something like this for brilliant people seeking jobs just like YC is for brilliant people seeking to start companies?

You're right, though, about building connections with companies. Though, in this case the "connection" has more to do with reputation of "offers only Google quality candidates, via a rigorous screening process" than "hey, they are hit or miss but have provided some good hires in the past".
Great tutorial, but I wish he'd given some context for these. The even/odd is a well-known one, but propagation of rightmost 1-bit? I have no idea what that, or most of these, are used for.
Steve Jobs' business card from 1979
I mean not so much my inaction as I am no longer running those groups :-p

Actually what I was concerned about wasn't the disappearance of the data, but the disappearance of the feature. I chose groups because those features made it really easy to manage the entire group. I worked hard to set up a process around how the google groups worked. So the sense that the organization is "screwed" is that they will have to completely change the way the function internally and find a new centralized portal for managing there stuff.

As far as the warning goes they gave plenty of warning. I am just disappointed the feature disappeared.
The $90k could be price anchoring in order to have leverage when negotiating a deal with a chain of restaurants ( so they end up selling them at $20k / ea since they are selling so many).
I disagree. I have a friend whose mom died when she was in College. In the year following, she kept all her journals and poems in emails in her Yahoo mail account. That's a safe place for them, right?

The years went on and she got a Gmail account, but she would log in to Yahoo every year or so to read through her old journals to help process what was going on in her life.

Only one year she tried to log in and her account was gone. Yahoo, she learned, simply deletes your email if you don't log in for a year. And she had gone 14 months.

Personally, I think deleting data like this--especially when the storage requirements are so tiny--is unforgivable. I can think of many, many reasons why someone would put something important on Google Groups and then not log in for six months. There are people away for Peace Corps right now. There are people deployed in Afghanistan. There are people hiking the Appalachian Trail (well maybe it's a little late for that).

Many thousands of people will feel completely violated if Google does this. Google can count on that. For those people, Google will have simply destroyed their most precious data without warning.

I used to think that one of the selling points of Google Apps was that I could leave my data there and trust them to protect it. No more worrying about crashed hard drives. But it's become clear that's not the case.
Great for pushing myself to think about what I really want and how I can achieve that.
Tablets, unions, and education – part one
Old Military Planes Could Drop 900,000 Tree-Bombs a Day
It works, for me, in mplayer:

mplayer http://qthttp.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1010qwoeiuryfg/sl.m3u8
Has always worked for me on the iPad. Funny, how that works out.
I wonder if Matt is one of Toronto's "App Kings": http://www.torontolife.com/magazine/2010/11/
The only difference between Blossom and Koi is the size of the database. The only way to improve performance is to increase the number of dynos or workers you use.
Does this mean the end of the DejaNews Usenet archive as well? The transformation of that unbelievably helpful resource into "Google Groups" was a crime.

Geez, but I miss Usenet. Having _one_ forum on which everything related to a topic was posted was unbelievably helpful.
Another way: pace around or sit outside after writing new code.
Nothing, really. DC power supplies are available for routers and switches, as well as blade enclosures. It's only less common with single rackmounted servers.
He is probably not interested in talking about stuff when he could be doing stuff.
My thoughts exactly - but my point was that I don't think they should be considered responsible for our actions (or lack thereof).
I suppose there are a few applications where e-books are handy, but if I'm traveling I normally read magazines. The idea of reading while commuting would be bad: I live in the Midwest--there isn't much in the way of public transit.

I'm not in college anymore, but I sold the books back unless they were particularly interesting. Even now, I prefer to buy programming reference books than using online references. If I can only find a manual online, half of the time I wind up printing it out and putting it in a binder. I write lots of stuff in the margins of reference books.
if you're young and unmarried, you don't have that many bills to pay
This is really interesting. Have you started applying it to work as well as your personal life?
I don't know why I'm getting downvoted. That quote from the article was funny.

I should preface this next statement by saying, I'm not trolling, this doesn't apply to the Valley in particular and this is serious food for thought:

Does anyone worry that all the sharing of tips about what worked for company X and what new thing company Y is doing actually stifles innovation by creating an echo chamber of sorts?

Do these tips and tricks become "rules" that keep a person's thinking inside a box? Are the innovations just re-applications of existing ideas?

Not in every case, but certainly in many. Not to pick on anyone in particular, but let's look at Posterous. It's an email gateway for a blog. It's simple and elegant to use (I use it and love it), and they obviously rock at the biz/dev/marketing aspect of the business --- but is it really that innovative? How much does Posterous further the evolution of the Internet?

How about Quora? Again, great site --- but it's a question and answer app. It's been done at least a dozen times before. Does Quora increase the pace at which the Internet evolves?

I remember reading something from PG about music startups (paraphrased), that "the music industry is a just a vacuum to suck your VC dollars." Hence, he's not super stoked on investing in music startups.

He's obviously seen his share of failed music startups and has talked to others in the Valley who also have first hand experience with failed music startups.

But, is it possible that the Valley isn't thinking creatively enough about music startups? That maybe the Valley can't think creatively enough because it innovates between the lines?

It's also crucial to recognize that most disruptive businesses don't start in the Valley. They move there so their VC can keep an eye on them.

I don't know. I'll probably get banned from HN for thinking a little dangerously and questioning the established thinking so openly.
How about homepagehotness.com?

Even though it's a bit long, the name makes me smile, and it seems like it may be memorable.
The problem here is that if you really want to work in a company like that and you're young, you probably still are going to try to move out West (at least this is what I did).

It's possible there is somewhat of a brain drain occurring due to the lack of startups from East to West, I don't really know of a lot of people that have moved the reverse.

I went to Northeastern University and the coop program is great, but it always seemed like established companies (I worked for 1 startup which was an amazing experience, and 2 defense contractors) were a lot more aggressive about hitting them up for talent instead of startups (which could have taken advantage of young, cheap, aggressive engineers).
Cambridge is basically a micro-silicon valley. Although I think Boston will continue to remain a strong contender for the #2 spot in tech, I don't think it will eclipse the Valley.

Boston does however already eclipse the Valley in terms of academics.

Simply put, schools are what Boston does best. Startup activity is and will always continue to be a side effect of the strong academic presence here. In the Bay area, it seems to be the other way around.
Sorry to lead with a criticism but the use of the data- attribute in these examples is kind of ugly. I understand their motives, but if you're going to use data- in a "declarative" way, why not just have multiple declarations of the data- attributes? For example: data-bind-value="firstName" data-bind-text="firstName", etc. I'm sure I'm missing something.

That said, this looks like an interesting library and worth playing around with. I'm loving the huge amount of JS framework experimentation going on.
This is a perfect example of one of the Freedoms we don't have with web applications. Even with Microsoft Office you have the freedom to keep using the software today in the way you did yesterday.

Even open source web applications don't have this freedom... If wordpress.org were to do this, those users would be in the same boat.

I've been working on an open source infrastructure project to fix these issue for a while, but it's still pretty nascent. My "manifesto" on that is here: http://bit.ly/forkolator
I needed Google to decipher this excellent comment. In case it helps:

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
Lame. This has nothing to do with Net Neutrality, and this no more violates the "open web" than a password protected website does.
It's not around as `python2` on other distros though, which is the problem. Either all other distros have to change to conform to arch, or arch has to change it back to how it was.
Sounds like both were programmers. Wonder how non-programmers can make things work. Also, wondering if RedLaser is coming to Android. The Android "Barcode Scanner" App seems similar.
Exactly. A parser for each programming language is the cheapest, simplest part.

At root, programming languages all come down to a semantic graph. Manage that! At the same time, you would be able to render the 'code' as any language you like (within reason).
Well, I was counting on the viral aspect where you saw a rating and said, I want one of those. My gut says that most people who do that will not want to install a browser plugin. Even if I made one for all possible browsers.

It's also hard for it to spread through the plugin directories because the people who download it would be too geographically fragmented.
ReactOS 0.3.12 Released
Even without that second statement, $12 is well below market rate in India, where the IT talent market is extremely competitive. There are some great people there, but expect to pay somewhere in the range of $40-50 for "first-quality" software developers, which is still well below US rates for comparable talent but not the cost advantage it might at first seem.
> Now, what does Apple say about user experience again?

That you'd have a better one if you were using their products.

That's the whole sales pitch, after all.
Comcast tests IPv6
Why did Apple make Facetime an independent app?
Why didn't it include it with an upgraded iChat?
Show HN: Try my script if you use noprocrast
I'm not sure if this is an appropriate place to post it, but I figured some of you might like it.

I decided to give the HN noprocrast feature a try the other day and it seemed to work. In fact, I liked it so much I wanted it on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and all the other sites I shouldn't be on. I looked around for a plugin or script that does something similar, but didn't see any that were particularly compelling so I made my own.

It's on GitHub at http://github.com/mjschultz/beyond_procrastination.

And on userscripts at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/88448, and it should work in Firefox and Chrome.