skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is as important to have a path to market as it is to have a good product. Actually, it is better to have a path to market. No good products will be on the shelf because someone with the path to market owns the shelf space.

The market you are trying to enter will be next to impossible to penetrate without contacts. A big distributor of light switches won't buy from you because 1) they don't want to pay anyone but themselves, 2) will only do business with big companies, 3) and so on. The same goes for the light switch manufacturers.

The only way they will buy from you is if you can show them a completed product that looks exactly like it will on the shelf, in the exact packaging that they will sell it at. Even with all that, chances are less than slim.

Friends often ask me ways to get into home automation, which is a similar field to what you want to do. My suggestions is always this: Get in with a local builder. Supply your switches to him to put into his new homes. Develop relationships with growing amounts of builders, hit the shows, etc. Once you start affecting the market with your sales, then the big companies will talk to you. Until then, status quo is serving them pretty well.

Regarding provisional patents, I am not an attorney, so you will need to talk with someone knowledgeable in the legal field for that one. Be conscious of first sale doctrine and other things that will invalidate later patent claims.

What my company does is make our products into reality. We see a market, target it with a new product, and then shop it to the large manufacturers and distributors. They put their name on it and everyone gets money.

The reason why we don't do it ourselves is that we make more money working with them. The people we sell to own shelf space and end caps at Walmart, Target, etc. We aren't getting in those stores without our partners. Other partners have distribution arrangements to specialty store markets. Others are large purchasers of TV ads. We work with all these people to get our products to market.

There isn't secret sauce in our products. We make new stuff, cheaper and faster than others, and that is why our products get on the shelf. But without our distribution partner relationships gained from many years in the industry, we would have no path to market and would not make that many sales.
You already submitted this 2 hours ago... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1835073
Good for them. The asynchronous master-master replication dynamic of couchdb is exactly the right solution for a barely connected federation of clinics. That said, the last paragraphs talk of "instant" as pointed out by Maro is a touch disingenuous.
That's what I thought too: "what? icons within rectangles!?"

But maybe the intended parallel is Program Manager's [1] MDI[2] interface. Maybe the author thinks Lion and Ubuntu are re-invinting MDI?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_Manager

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula--for that was his name--was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex--just to show her.

And into one end, he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other, he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain, but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
Yup, soon. Those are going to be preferences and enough folks have requested it that it will make it in within the next couple of weeks.
Are there any good Android tablets that are iPad size? I don't care about spending near iPad prices, but so far all I've been able to find is 7" crap Android tablets.
PayPal also has a micropayments feature: 5.0% + 5c

The dividing line (between the traditional macropayment and the micropayment) is supposed to be $12. The only drawback is that you have to run it from a different PayPal account.

For a $2 transaction, the macro works out to 30.058c fee, while the micro is 15c fee. For small stuff, it may be a better deal.
I read somewhere that the IE icon is a symbol for web access in general in some parts of the world.
I think the equally important message, albeit not as shocking, is that 7 of the top 10 brands are shared between both political lines. This is not a small number. In other words, intensity of sentiment aside, there is not much fundamental difference in brand perception in regards to political allegiance.
Why waste it? It's a perfectly valid state of consciousness. Look into dreaming techniques such as lucid dreaming. You might find creative solutions to problems or new ideas to integrate into your waking life.
because that doesn't solve the problem.

there are all sorts of choke points between your vpn provider's output and your destination server where unencrypted packets can be read, and many of them are not guarded well. BGP even is not particularly secure. You should treat an unencrypted packet as less secure than a post card.
I have been working at a treadmill desk for around two months now. In the past two weeks I have walked over 60 miles at my desk. Usually I sit for only an hour or two during my work hours. I find walking while working very productive.
The big one - will maziesoftware.com be around next month? Next year?
Here is a link to Men's Health's 10 Standards to Access Your Fitness Level.

http://www.menshealth.com/mhlists/be_fit/printer.php

It was linked in the article. It is very interesting, even if you workout some of these might be hard to obtain.
It's a common misconception that the paleo diet means no carbs. It's just the type of carbs that they prescribe or proscribe. All plant matter is predominantly carbs and is where most of the carbs in our diet should come from. Breads, donuts, pancakes, sodas, etc are highly refined carbs that bear little resemblance to the carbs our paleolithic ancestors ate. On top of that, there is growing evidence that a grain based diet is highly detrimental to our health.

Regarding cattail flour, there are several things to note. One, it was coarsely ground which is in direct contrast to the majority of flours that we currently consume. Whole grains are in general better than overly processed grains if you're going to eat grains. That being said, the evidence for our ancestors eating cattail flour comes in around 30,000 years ago. The Paleolithic period goes back 2.5 million years and the evolutionary history of our digestive habits is largely without any grains. Just because we have been eating grains for 30,000 years does not mean that's what we ate throughout the majority of our evolutionary history.

I'm not a nutritionist but I do eat a predominantly lacto paleo diet and the changes in my body fat, sleep habits and energy levels have been extraordinary. Anecdotal? Yup but it can't hurt to give it a try. That's usually my advice on the paleo diet. Far from being a fad diet, it's much more like a lifestyle change that seems to make sense in my experience.
Rhyme is but an ornament, hung from the branch of a greater, elemental thing.
To the extent it's not consumer positive it's like Windows and IE, vs Netscape, et al. Windows and Word, vs other word processors, etc.

By Google integrating and promoting their own information service at the top of search results it's very similar to Microsoft bundling, promoting and defaulting to their own in-house equivalents to what would otherwise be third-party apps sold by separate businesses. Is that a net win for consumers? Not sure. It's both good and bad. But it's definitely a chilling effect for those other vendors -- assuming they don't get a juicy buyout or licensing deal in order to be adapted into the very thing they would otherwise fear. In this case, an integrated travel search promoted by Google.
its pretty kool. where deos the name wibba come from
Context: tsort is a topological sorter, which is nice for handling & finding loops in dependency graphs.

IIRC there's an example in _The Awk Programming Language_ implementing a toy make out of a topological sorter. (Edit: pgs. 170-8.)
Interesting article, some of it went a little over my head but I'm pleased to see articles like this as I've always wondered how people make that transition in Haskell from writing fibonacci sequence generators and one-line FizzBuzz functions.

Would be interested to see if this thread becomes popular and has the incentive for people to post their Haskell projects and how they did them
We are starting to see China enforce US IP rights. We sued one knockoff company and won. China officials went into the offender's factory, took all the knockoff goods into the street, destroyed them right there, and then left. Every other factory saw what happened. We didn't ask for this. They did it on their own.

That being said, we are starting to file for China patents now that they are actually enforcing rights. Before it wouldn't have mattered, so we didn't waste time and money.

Oh wow. Just remembered a story. Last year we sent a plastic part out for quote in China. The price to make it came back less than the spot prices on the resin needed to make the part. Of course that means they were going to knockoff the product and sell it elsewhere, and they didn't even attempt to hide it.
If you're going to mount it in a car, just plug in a USB GPS.

I'm skipping this one as a car computer because I bet the screen is junk and the memory is awfully small. In a year there should be a bunch of good ones to choose from.
They look like $5 bills to me.
Make sure you avoid people like this for a while! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Turner_(murderer)
hehe, thanks :-)
Well they managed to tell the governor of california that they couldn't change the code to give themselves a pay cut.
LOL! I wish :)
I find it hilarious that the picture on every page of austintechgeeks.com is a picture of Cleveland:

http://tiscleveland.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/e4th.jpg
Along the same lines as Paul Buchheit's "Serendipity Finds You" piece, except Rejection Therapy is the actual prescription to beating (what he calls) ego-fear. Fascinating.
I thought this would use mobile numbers, since it involves texting. But the entry form appears to require a US Landline number.
Yet Another Zero-Day Attack On Firefox
ahh ok, that's true. Hadn't thought of that. Is there a caching solution that supports https?
try out a Dell Streak, using it now. great phone, tablet and laptop replacement. I think they are under $400 in usa. not super cheap but powerful enough to meet the alleged 3.0 gingerbread release. still on 2.1 in UK, but 2.2 should be out by xmas

any questions let me know.
The main way of launching applications in Program manager was a program containing a grid of applications. Replacing the Applications menu with a dedicated grid of applications for Ubuntu, Applications folder with dedicated grid of applications for OS X. Which is basically what Program Manager was.

(Yes, I know plenty of people probably do this ad hoc with their desktop anyway, but you were _supposed_ to use the proper methods)
Ask HN: How do you find good designers for your projects?
I'm wondering what techniques you've used to find good designers for your projects.

I've tried Craigslist, but ended up with a lot of spam and a lot of ... let's say not very experienced designers.

I've tried various well known designers, but the costs very quickly become very high.

I've tried oDesk with some limited success - much better than the local craigslist crowd - but nothing I was thrilled with.

Is there a way to find reasonably priced designers who are actually good? What's the secret?
I wanted to test a different title and I'm hoping to not get lost in the stream of new submissions. I'm proud of the app and I'd like to show it off to HN.
I have easy access to the tip jar in restaurants. How do I know that this money which I have easy access to is not free to take? Convention. How do I know that I can take from the penny dish? Convention.

That a web server is an explicit, external interface is a technical reason. How we expect to use that interface is a social reason.
Exactly. the augen ships with a stylus which is annoying to have to pull out. I literally have an impossible time dragging down the notification shade on this thing.

One nice thing about the Augen is that there are some custom roms for it that speed it up considerably. As soon as I get my Galaxy tab, i'll probably donate this one to some hacker cause.
The summary of those 75 words is "I want to watch for file changes but am too lazy to write a Perl script. Look at this. `man watch`"

I guess we just disagree about what part of the post is useful.
Several people have mentioned the Workfit which looks intriguing but I've also thought about getting a GeekDesk. Anyone have experience with either or both?

http://www.geekdesk.com/
Right, I should have said.

EDIT: Topological sorting is one of those tools that really comes in handy -- it's easy enough to implement, but I didn't want to spend the time either (a) writing it in zsh or (b) rewriting the rest of the shell pipeline in Python or something. 'tsort' to the rescue! I just wish I could remember where I read about it so I could go buy whoever was at the other end of the Google search a beer.
Darn American measuring system. I wish I wasn't metric system handicapped... After slowly and sensibly dragging from small to large, it's cool to whip rapidly too! :)

Edit: Uh oh, I seem to have angered the downvote police. Sorry, uh... yay fractions?
Now that EC2 is free, it's hard to justify any of these super-cheap VPSes.
TMTC 38 - BDD and TDD: Integration and Unit Tests
Not now, but I used OS X for a few months. Various programs installed some daemons, including VMWare (I see no reason why) Little Snitch (okay, that one's justified) and various other things I can't remember right now...
Duh, IE = The Internet
jibes.
I'm one who would probably benefit from this sort of radical treatment, but I'm way too chicken.
Things Paul Graham is wrong about
Jessica Simpson Hairstyles
Jessica simpson hairstyles are the perfect example of elegance sophistication and beauty
Well done! Edutainment at its finest. You should publish that for physics teachers.
I'm using FogBugz. It's free for small teams and startups. http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/
Nobody has ever really had success with that sort of project, though I've been reading about people trying for the last 10 years or so.

Earth LCD is your best resource for LCD hackery. They have a controller kit that will drive certain LCD panels. It's $200 and will drive a panel at a rez up to 1024x768
http://store.earthlcd.com/NK-GM2221-421-LCD-Controller-KIt?s...

By contrast, I just bought a brand new 32" TV at Best Buy for a demo monitor. It was $450 and does 1920x1080.

Laptop LCDs use a variety of different interfaces, so it's hard to make a generic kit. By the time you do, the volume demand for such a kit is so low, you end up with having to price it in the $200-$300 dollar range to make your R&D and manufacturing costs back. For about the same money you can get an LCD monitor of similar size/resolution to the laptop display in an easy ready-to-use package.
Definitely don't do that (putting the money in your account and then transferring it to others). At one point, I was in the process of doing just this and once I talked to Braintree, for example, they let me know how horrible this can turn out to be. They gave me a term for it which I'm now forgetting. In any event, Braintree as the payment processor, also let me know that I'd be violating their terms of use (along with those of PayPal and various other payment processors) if I did process payments on behalf of other people.

Besides being a violation of their terms of service, it leaves a huge liability in your lap. If, as an example, you're taking payments on behalf of Person A and Person B who gave you money to give to Person A suddenly wants the money back that you gave to Person A, how do you handle the case where Person A is nowhere to be found? You're on the hook for that money and now, multiply that over the course of several instances of refunds and disappearances--it could be costly and problematic.

To mitigate this problem, PayPal introduced Adaptive Payments where you can have someone pay you and you share that payment with others. That's one way of dealing with it.

https://www.x.com/community/ppx/adaptive_payments

If you don't have to "touch" the money yourself, there's no problem.
Also, how many silicon startups have there been as of late?

In general terms, it's my impression that the days of the US VC funded, high capital requirement hardware startup are over with the closing of the IPO window.

Lots of HN style consumer internet companies can hope to get bought by Google, Facebook, Twitter, whatever, or just thrive on organic growth since their up front capital costs are relatively modest.

As I keep asking, who's going to be able to create the next thing like FPGAs? (As least in the US.)
One solution is to have a "Todo" page in your Trac wiki-- but I agree, Trac isn't a great way to manage long-term planning and short-term todos.

I use Redmine (redmine.org). It's got a great wiki and decent issue tracker. It also has forums, an internal blog, and a few other goodies. May be overkill if you have to switch your whole project over.

Basecamp has a free plan. The very small link on this page: basecamphq.com/signup. $49/mo is a fairly large commitment for to-do list and idea board, but you might be able to get by on the single-project free plan for a while.
Google TV is coming to 10,000 lucky developers
I'm pretty sure you can install all the dependencies with macports, but you can't put the wireless card in monitor mode using the 'iw' command, because there's no iwtools on the mac AFAIK. And monitor (or promiscuous) mode is necessary.
The fact that someone isn't wearing a belt doesn't mean they deserve a pantsing.

Perhaps not, but, to stretch your metaphor a bit, if someone's fly is open, they might appreciate having it pointed out to them.
Some of the Best Online Invoicing & Billing Applications Reviewed and Compared
Over the years there has been a gradual shift in the way invoicing is done by professionals across the globe. The shift towards the use of web based invoicing from the traditional excel based invoicing has captured the attention of many and now the use of online invoicing and billing application has almost become indispensible.
We all have GeekDesks at work, and love them. I usually switch from sitting to standing once or twice a day (less so recently because I did my knee playing hoops), and it's a nice change. I got into the habit at Apple because I had a bad back and standing really relieved the discomfort; I'm thinking of getting a WorkFit for the house (because space is constrained.)
Top 12 suggestions for staying motivated in Sales and life: the journey
social anxiety is a staggering problem. I've read that 1 in 4 adults have it (citation needed, too lazy to look it up).

If this gives people hope, an alternative to gobbling prescription drugs, then all the power to it.
Check the profile. :)
EuroPriSe certified version of Privnote
I agree with samwillis.

Here are some tool numbers that I have: US cost = $30k, 8-10 weeks. China cost = $5k, 6 weeks. That is for a tool I quoted last week.

I slightly differ on where to manufacture the parts. Because in my industry pennies matter due to several mark-ups in the chain, we manufacture in China. But as samwillis said, it may not be needed in your business.

samwillis is right when s(he) says that parts and power costs don't change much, but labor does. Labor in the US is $25 / hr burdened, and in China less than $4 / hr. If your parts are labor intensive, it makes sense to be there in China.
Every time this toy shows up, I try to remind people that it doesn't have the grandest scale right.

First, the observable universe. From WP:

The comoving distance from Earth to the edge of the observable universe is about 14 billion parsecs (46.5 billion light-years) in any direction. The visible universe is thus a sphere with a diameter of about 28 billion parsecs (about 93 billion light-years). Assuming that space is roughly flat, this size corresponds to a comoving volume of about 3×10^80 cubic meters. This is equivalent to a volume of about 41 decillion cubic light-years short scale (4.1 × 10^34 cubic light years).

Now for the whole universe:

According to the theory of cosmic inflation and its founder, Alan Guth, if it is assumed that inflation began about 10^-37 seconds after the Big Bang, then with the plausible assumption that the size of the Universe at this time was approximately equal to the speed of light times its age, that would suggest that at present the entire Universe's size is at least 10^23 times larger than the size of the observable Universe.
Depends on one's perspective. Not long ago the meme de jour was that open-source transparency & fork-ability was the ultimate protection to corporate evils.

By the standard you're setting, the only safe compiler would be one you wrote yourself and revealed to no one. What compilers do you use?
looks great otherwise. I'm an android user (and past my happy hour days). Would have used it a few years back.
I checked out their site and services. Not all that impressive. Some useful but very basic stuff. Not seeing where they can even be classified as competition to PayPal.
European Privacy Seal for Certified Privnote
I'm not sure about that. 'phpocco' just doesn't have the same ring.

But I jest. It would be most welcome.
I recently saw a comparative review of budget standing desk options, and I wish I would have bookmarked it. It was from someone who had evaluated a ton of them, put them up as his own personal opinion.

Anyone know what I'm talking about?
I survived on 4-5 hours a night during grad school and was pretty successful, but I feel much better with 7. I also usually get at least one night a week of 9+ (on the weekend).
"I wish all investors had a list like this posted somewhere in their linkedin/blog."

Agreed. I think it could also be interesting to have a platform where the founders rate each angel/VC on a 1-5 scale on 20 or so categories: technical knowledge, introductions to additional funding sources, access to lawyers, PR experience, management expertise, etc.

This type of feedback happens to some extent on sites like The Funded, but it's not broken down as accurately as it should be.
Google recently mentioned that we get 1B visitors each week (and 1B+ queries each day), so 140M is way low.

You can find out more information here: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/ and the blog post we did about the subject is here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/greater-transparency-...
'Intelligent Design' in the Human Sciences?
My company makes several components and entire products in the US. When we pitch new products to distributors/retailers, they ask "Are you in China with this?" I tell them yes because it isn't worth the argument that China is not a magic bullet that will automatically reduce your costs.

Sometimes it just makes sense to be in the US, and we take full advantage of that.
Choosing the dealer in poker - is dealing to the first ace a fair system?