skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
citi link were the best when I used them, we sent out over 1 million GBP of stock per year. zero problems, all other companies were loosing stuff all the time.
Maybe I misunderstood your initial statement. I thought you were suggested a "paid support" model, where the users pay to get technical or customer support, much like some hosting companies charge.

By "paid support" did you just mean premium accounts? If so, I 100% agree that premium accounts are a great idea.
Neither company is open to releasing stuff that is, basically, its secret sauce that it makes money from.

Google makes money from their page ranking algorithm and their ad-placing algorithms, which they use to sell your attention to advertisers. You'll never see them open those up.

Facebook makes money from your personal data and connections, which they directly sell to advertisers and other partners. You'll never see them open that up.
Trophy Entrepreneurs Can Land Trophy Investors
Yes, very frustrating. HDNL has only successfully delivered me 1 package out of 3 this year. Have had no trouble with Royal Mail. I no longer use Amazon, until they offer the choice not to use HDNL.

Amazon's statement on the matter: "Currently, we do not have the ability to assign certain carriers to a specific customer or address but will continue working with all of our carriers to drive improvements for our customers."
I wish goods could be teleported to the buyer! I've often thought that it's a shame that the awesome virtual convenience of web commerce has to hit the sucky reality of transit and delivery ;-)
Looks like I'm being down voted for lack of citation, so here you go: http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-diapers-price-war-2010...
Yes this will be an increasing topic of debate in the press as genomics, medicine, nanotech, designer drugs and robotics fields' progress in the coming years.

Funny thing is that your's and my opinions of where the line should be drawn are irrelevant along with the opinion of sovereign governments' (opinions and related laws). The scientists to do this work will do it anyway and anywhere based on available funding and their personal moral compass.
I've never heard them called "mRNA polymerases." RNA polymerase should do just fine.

In fact, wouldn't helicase do better?
Austin-based website caters to small investors, start-ups
Not dogma, but the conclusion of reason and experience. You don't build a bridge and a house with the same tools. Why should software be different?
Dup - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1877596
The Google Cemetary
I agree. Really think about the copy on the homepage. I didn't read the second paragraph because the first didn't say anything.

"Mogade gives your game achievements and leader-boards in 10 lines of code." One sentence with a bunch of screenshots of games using it. If you don't have anybody using it yet, make an Acme Widgets game to show people.
I am a casual game developer, and I second mshafrir's statement. The only verbage that gives any hint what is this service offers is the somewhat vague: "Before you know it you'll have the best leaderboards, achievements and social hooks available."

In my opinion, this should be your opening line, and everything that follows should expand on it, and what sets you apart from your competition (i.e. ScoreLoop, OpenFeint, GameCenter, etc). I looked around the links, but couldn't find additional info. Maybe an about, faq, or info page might do the trick?

Additionally, I can't tell if you specialize in mobile gaming, desktop or other. I think this needs to be more clear.
Definitely needs some kind of case study. Right now it's a bunch of marketing speak. Prove to me that you know what you're doing and that it's actually worked before -- and that you're not going to steal my email address and sell it to those damn Nigerians.
Actually it is not in this case. It doesn't really matter.

Isn't it generally accepted that both will be hugely successful and in the top 5 of all mobile phones sold?

And who benefits anyway? Apple gets more plump AND Google + manufacturers make more money at the same time.

All mobile developers should be developing for both at this stage anyway so it doesn't even affect them who "wins".

Both have already won. The actual title is just a pissing / ego contest by users and bloggers.
whoa! Very impressive. I'd buy one of these if it were for sale.

I sometimes wonder why someone doesn't reissue the old Sinclair, Commodore, BBC, and Amiga machines as a "retro special edition"(licensing issues?).

My first computer was an ZX Spectrum and I'd gladly pay for a brand new machine.
Abusing Twitter
Remember its a battle of OSes and not devices. When will we see iOS or Droid built into our TVs?

If it were just devices the iPhone would be out-selling each individual phone independently.
Oil doesn't rot? Are you kidding me? Compact discs rot. Rocket fuel rots. And fungi do it.

Anyway, fries aren't just oil. They're carbohydrates and proteins too. Fats take time but eventually you'll see fungi grow on butter.

To the person above, thanks for linking to my experiment. :)

sparkasynapse.blogspot.com
I'm an old 6502 guy myself, but this is seriously cool. I love projects like this-- I hope it inspires others, especially the young'uns, to take a look at some of the chips of yesterday.
I (as a consumer) don’t care who “wins” as long as nobody dominates the market. I even think that’s a distinct possibility but I don’t really know whether my prediction for a fragmented market (kind of like the car market) with no clear winner is merely wishful thinking. As is I (as a consumer) would be slightly less intimidated by an Android dominated market. (Which is funny because if I needed a smartphone I would buy an iPhone.) It’s harder for three players (Google, handset makers, carriers) to be evil than for two (Apple, carriers).

I don’t expect the market to develop very analogous to the PC market at all and I especially think that you can’t just point at that and say it will happen again.
Do you have a relevant link with the plumber story?

What's next, postmen's union suing too?
Hertfordshire
Web design blog with graphics and web design articles.
True. But if you eliminate all the water from anything, it won't rot. No one is getting worked up about the bags of sugar, pasta, rice, and dried beans that have been sitting in their cupboard for years, either.

Sorry, folks. French fries rot if you just seal the container they are in, whether made at home or McD's. http://sparkasynapse.blogspot.com
Framing the headline that way is misleading as the Google gal is the alleged victim in that incident.

The story was trivialised on TechCrunch, and putting the twitter-trial/tech-spin on it seemed insensitive specially since the author was female. TC shouldn't have covered it in the first place, it’s something that lowly Gawker would go after (which they did), so let the bottom feeders have it.
Fred Wilson: Competing To Win Deals
I don't know about that. I think the Mac market share is pretty good where it's at right now. Certainly it doesn't need to get any bigger.

It's big enough that people need to consider Mac users as a part of their user base. And, it's small enough so malware producers and scam artists stay focused on Windows.

As a Mac user, I don't really see what I'd have to gain from an increased Mac market share. And I don't really see what's in it for Apple either; I mean, they're doing "ok" as it is. Certainly Apple could increase its market share quite a bit by compromising more, but that's just not what they do.
Originally I/O was fixed to the IDE port allowing master and slave drives called IDE0: and IDE1: but now drive names are more virtual and are assigned to devices (“DRV0:”, “DRV1:” etc)

Is that wise? Shouldn't they be prefixed/suffixed with forward slashes?
An upgraded version of the Osborne 1? :)

http://oldcomputers.net/osborne.html

5" screen...Z80...
You are right the medium is free but it cost time. If a company hires a consultant for social marketing it cost them but on the other hand if a startup founder has time to spend they can do it themselves (for a while).

It can 'some-what' level the playing field because a small firm can play in that game unlike the advertising space.
Partner global with amazon sell cheap products and high quality
This may not be historically accurate - ie not what Bill Joy originally intended, however I think of the "vi model" as the modal editing style which is what differentiates vi/vim for me.
"Developers in Europe have a culture and work ethic similar to that in the US and working together with colleagues from across the ocean has never been a problem."

The "colleagues" is key.

India has such a (deserved) reputation for low quality code, thanks to the entrenched bodyshops that hire tens of thousands of barely capable devs with piss poor work ethics, and ISO/CMM "experts" and lots of mangers to herd them all, that really good devs (who want to stay devs) are lost in the noise, emigrate to the USA or become managers.

"because the EU team is not just "hired" by the US company, but we're actually all in it together, as a mixed team of Americans and Europeans pushing our business from both sides of the ocean."

This is the right (the only?) way to do it no matter where you hire from.
Front: (a^n) + (b^n) = (c^n) true only when n <= 2 if a,b,c are positive integers.

Back: I have discovered a truly marvelous proof but this shirt is too too narrow to contain it
The author seems to think that because there will be 20 or 50 viable androids they will somehow dominate. It seems to me that this is much more a branding/marketing problem for android.

Categories like this tend to support just two or three brands at the top of consumer mineshare. Think coke vs pepsi or BMW vs mercedes. The problem with android is it's not really a choice for a consumer. By picking android they really need to make a much more complex choice of which actual phone to get. The real choice the consumer is making is iPhone vs droid incredible or some other specific phone. In the end all the manufacturers under the android umbrella are competing with each other as well as the iPhone for mindshare.

I definitely agree that android will have more units out there than iPhone eventually, but I think the iPhone will easily be the brand with the much stronger mindshare in the category. Normal consumers will still see it as iPhone vs all those other phones. Apple will also have the biggest profit in the smart phone category as a result.

Remember, google is selling eyeballs to advertisers, not phones to consumers. They're playing a different game than apple.
Our Banana Republic
Ask HN: Hosting personal site on a VPS, or in the cloud?
I'm a software developer currently in the process of setting up a new personal site. The goals are 1) Google insurance (somebody who searches for my name should find some good, real info about me) 2) A place to put content I'd like to share (personal programing projects, slides of talks, language reference sheets etc) 3) A place to point people to so they can see what kind of guy I am before meeting me (both personal - blog, pictures etc and professional - resume)

I was planning to get VPS hosting, and run everything myself (Apache, MySQL, Wordpress, Gallery, Svn-Server, Trac etc). But in the process, I realized that almost everything I need is available as a cloud service: Blog on wordpress.com, photo gallery in flickr, code hosting on github, slides on slideshare and so on.

It's 2010, is it still a good idea to run your own webserver for a site like this?

Main advantage of cloud hosting:
A lot less work, leaves more time to create content.

Main advantage of my own server:
You gain experience on the admin side, too. And you're fully independant if a cloud service is shut down.

What are your thoughts on this?

Also, if you run, or know of, good examples of such a site, I'd be thankful for a link to it.
It took me a while to notice the aliens hands...
I can't imagine why they would do this. Was the article badly worded or something? You're certainly not libelous for saying "Person A says Person B sexually assaulted her" if Person A said so publicly on a blog.
Years ago, three friends from Poland decided to visit relatives in the US they had not seen for decades. Since this was a once-in-a-lifetime trip, they did in grand style, on the Concorde.

Of course, there was trouble on the flight and of course the flight attendants asked if any of the passengers had experience with aircraft, and of course one of our friends did. He was taken to the cockpit to save the day, wherein he looked at the myriad dials and gauges and controls and turned to his friend and said... ...wait for it...

"I am but a simple Pole in a complex plane."
In terms of t-shirt type statements, I think this is the best I've read on here.
Costs of living are different across the world, so people can live on the same level with smaller wages in less wealthy countries.
Your obvious mistake was going into this sector, unless you are targeting either pre-k or graduate students. Otherwise get out now, unless you're just doing lead gen or something.
All the website really says is "Here's a solution, just install our code in your game. It's easy!"

If the problem is just that I don't have third-party code in my game then I guess you got me. Otherwise I'd probably need to know what problem is being solved and how.

From reading your API page, it looks like you're building something sorta like Xbox Live (and now Open Feint and Gamecenter). Managed leader boards, achievements, ,maybe buddy lists and invites, etc. Is that correct?
Indieconf schedule/sessions
Costs of living matter to salary like costs of goods matter to software, which is "not at all".
"insensitive specially since the author was female."

So what?
The problem is the word 'beat' in the title. Markets aren't zero-sum. Apple has thrived over the past decade by focussing on rich margins and on expanding markets, rather than by competing for a bigger sliced of a fixed-size pie.

There's no reason Apple and Android can't both "win" in the phone market. But we'd need to define "win." For Apple it would mean selling a lot of devices and making a good profit on each device. For Google it would mean, uh, some kind of complicated bank shot where more people click on AdSense ads from their phone. (It's hard to see how they'd even know if they won.)

But note that Google would be fine with a future in which the iPhone is still very popular, as long as it doesn't completely dominate the market. (People do a lot of Google searches from their iPhones.) And Apple would be fine with a future in which Android owns the low end of the phone market, i.e. the low-margin commodity devices that are given away free or very cheap with low-end plans.

But of course, stories like "It's X versus Y in a cage match to the death!" are very appealing, even when they're wrong.
I'm sure WP7/Symbian versions are planned or in the works
Study suggests Android handset makers will suffer the fate of PC makers
To be fair, I think most people kickstart their 'unwrapping' of The Waste Land by reading the notes Eliot supplied himself - which are fairly detailed, though not exhaustive (but neither is this webpage. for instance line 25 mentions 'the red rock' I believe is a reference to Mars-->The God of Wa-->/WW1). I agree one should read the pure text to start with, and try to make sense of things by yourself, but you're going to need help at some point.

What I like about this is that it lets you see viscerally how interlinked the text is. I like to visualize modernist poems as crystalline datastructures floating through the heap of culture with pointers to other objects in (public) memory.

Here is a recording of Eliot reading the poem for anyone interested:
http://town.hall.org/Archives/radio/IMS/HarperAudio/011894_h...

Also the text on its own is here
http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html

I was only a teenager when I first read it (plus it was my first exposure to modernist texts), but it did take me quite a long time to even get past the 'wtf?' stage, until it eventually clicked.
Thankfully yes, and hopefully the entire thing disappears from the web.

This sort of issue should be resolved through the courts, not through blogs and twitter.
That's a good idea, and very easily implemented. We will pursue it, thank you!
YMMV of course but, in my experience these light-hearted free books are better than the For Dummies books, which are also for-profit, and tend to feel factory-churned. That being said, I've only skimmed one or two, and that was in high school. I feel like there is a difference in spirit and motivation which sets them apart.
GameTales: Axe Attack
The smartphone segment suddenly had exploded — up to 50% of all new shipments were now smartphones, and in another year it will be closer to 100%.

You may laugh at that last statement, but it is more likely to happen than not, and all because of Android. I realized this when I saw the LG Optimus, an Android smartphone now on T-Mobile for $30. Thirty bucks for a smartphone.

That's like saying Mercedes are going to take over the world because the first instalment is only £500...

The LG Optimus costs £175 without a contract. That's very much a mid-range phone. Show me a smartphone that actually costs $30 and I'll take that prediction seriously.
So much for a personal site?

If you really wanna ship it (the site) then even shared hosting is enough.

But if you want to dive into something bigger for sake of it and you like more control then go VPS.

This really is more of a personal choice then technical decision - since you don't need either Cloud or VPS. Shared hosting is enough for personal site (unless you are Paul Graham, of course)
I object again! Statistics say there are slightly less men than women in the states. Therefore, the average person has more than one breast and less than one testicle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...
Could you explain why?

For me it seems I'd prefer to work for 1000$/month in Poland, than in USA.
As far as I know its a one of a kind, set up by a hobbyist. It draws on the notes Eliot supplied himself though (they are actually linked alongside the lines they correspond to); and no doubt on the work of other scholars to unravel the poem's mysteries.

There are other good candidates for this sort of treatment though: poetry of Ezra Pound, lyrics of MF DOOM...
Q: Did you hear about the constipated mathematician?

A: He worked it out with a pencil.

This one always gets someone to cringe. I love it.

Alternately:

Q: How many mathematicians does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: One. The mathematician hands the lightbulb to two blondes, thereby reducing the problem to a previously-told joke.
I wouldn't run my own VPS because then you have to worry about security and patching. If getting sysadmin type experience isn't high priority, go fully hosted.
Strictly speaking, the Taylor series won't even do what you're wanting them to do for smooth functions. (Consider the function e^{-1/x^2}, whose Taylor series is zero at the origin. In fact, given any sequence of numbers, you can cook up a smooth function which has that sequence as the coefficients of its Taylor series at zero.) If you want the Taylor series to agree with the function in an entire neighborhood of a point, you want the function to be real (or complex) analytic (at least in a neighborhood of that point).
same here, I started on a ZX clone and really regret selling it for the equivalent of $15 when it was still working but I got a 386.
A realtime tracking service would do! I bet half the drivers have their own iphone or android anyway. How many failed deliveries does it take to offset the cost of the mobile/data services for their drivers?
Anyone Need a Ruby on Rails or Lisp Developer?
Brief bit of backstory: Was working for AMEX publishing, father got horridly sick, moved back to Michigan to make sure things were good. It's been a few months since then and well, I can only toy with so many ideas before I get bored and boredom has struck.

I am now back to looking for a gig, and since I don't have the Twitter followers I did at one time (Killed my old account as the signal to noise ratio was getting a bit high for my taste) I can't just tweet that I am looking for a gig and get like 3 DMs in a couple of hours.
Basically, Ruby for almost 10 years now, Rails for 5 or so, Lisp for about 10 and Javascript seriously for about 3-4 (Mostly jQuery, but I have worked with a few other frameworks as well as straight JS). I have dealt with traffic as high as 150million uniques with 50,000 active users at a time, and dealt with databases that required 20-30 table joins (Don't ask) to get data back.

As I said, in Michigan now but have nothing stopping me from moving (Dad is in good shape, and my lease has run out). Will relocate for a good opportunity, and in fact will do so at my own cost.
Kindle 3rd Generation Review: Likes
I'm not sure if this helps in your pricing analysis, but personally I'm always looking for a discounted annual rate for services that are around your price range. Thanks for offering one. It's a big plus in my mind.

As I subscribe to more and more web services I frankly get tired of seeing the recurring fee show up either in my inbox, or in PayPal or on my CC statement.

There is definitely value to me as a consumer to pay for a service as I consume it, to spread out cost and risk, but there is a threshold where the convenience of an annual payment outweighs the pay-as-you-go pricing.

I just don't want the monthly reminder that I'm paying for something. Keep in mind, that before SAS, apart from recurring utility bills and rent/mortgage, most people's model of a subscription was a magazine. Most of those are annual payments.

BTW, I think the annual vs. monthly threshold for me is somewhere between $40 and $70 per year. It's dependent on the service itself, but for services in that range I'd opt for annual.

Edit: Removed duplicate word.
Ask HN: anyone using World Bank API's?
http://data.worldbank.org/developers They recently opened this up, I'd love to hear of anyone using these.
How to Overhaul US education system
Startups and Nihilism don’t go together
HDNL are brilliant. I ordered something from Amazon last week and wasn't in when it was delivered. A card was duly popped through my letterbox to say the item had been left in a "safe place" - my grey wheelie bin, on bin collection day...
It's a shame that the stats for > 12hrs ago seem to have been wiped. I bet we'd be seeing a marked improvement on our ms/request stat.

Just click the left-facing arrow next to the date. Here are the stats for 11/5: http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/datastore/201...

and here are the stats for 11/4: http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/datastore/201...
The major problem with 'in the cloud' assuming you mean something like EC2 or Rackspace Cloud is performance.

Many of those types of hosts use a similar setup for file-systems (Amazon might not, but not sure): GFS. Now, GFS has suffered from problems, and even huge, expensive hosts like EY got hit with it. In fact, the last time I worked with cloud hosting (I much prefer my own box) load times for static images could take up to 200 ms due to the design of GFS.

My suggestion is either go shared (If you don't want to learn sysadmin tasks) or if you do, go with a good VPS host, or get a dedicated box.