skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is this counting Windows? In 2008 there were 1.3 million Windows tablets sold. Not sure of 2009/2010 data. But even at 1M that puts them at much larger than 5%.
You seem to be looking for drama where there's none to be found. Two guys wrote an web-backed iPad app and wanted to share it. If I dinked around and came up with something like Chalk, I'd want to blog it too.

Yes, 37signals is wildly more successful than most people on HN, and yes, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference between their "attempts to change the world" blog posts and their "look what I did with my 3-day-weekend" blog posts, but: it's a blog. They don't owe you anything more than blog posts. This is an above-average blog post; it came with a new app!
Direct democracy is best left at an extremely local level. Otherwise it's glorified mob rule -- Tyranny of the Majority.
Got my start on Linux way back when it was still called "Fedora Core"

Wow, way back in 2007? Did you have to enter your programs on punch cards back then? :-)

I use Fedora, and for the past few years it seems like every couple of months an update breaks something, like sound or wifi. Upgrades from one release to another are practically guaranteed to break something. So a while ago when I got a new laptop I installed ubuntu on it instead, hoping that things would be better. But after living with ubuntu for a while I didn't feel like it was any more stable, so I went back to Fedora just because that's what I know best. The vast majority of the bugs I run into are introduced upstream and both distros just pass them along for me to find.

Apt is still faster than yum, and Ubuntu still seems to have somewhat more packages available than Fedora, but Fedora has closed the gap in both areas in recent years. All in all, I don't see a strong argument for either one over the other.
I find that such goals, for me, don't work. I make daily and weekly goals (sometimes monthly) as that is about as far out as I can realistically plan. Anything much longer and I'm just fooling myself (and it has taken me a couple of decades to realize this).

Now, I am not an especially organized or focused person. My wife, who is laser focused and organized as precisely as the layout of a microchip, can make such longer term plans. I'm usually just pleased to have remembered to hit the bathroom far enough in advance of my noon meeting that I am not late for it and not left squirming in my chair halfway through (I'm serious).
are you sure its the flash that is smooth? I got have the same firefox on osx, and flash is laggy compared to the smooth js version. Flash is left, remember?
The mathematically (but not morally) correct way to deal with big debts is to figure out how many cents on the dollar they can get back from you with a debt collection agency and offer them slightly more than that.
One of the parties in US elections gains a lot by discouraging people in general not to vote, because it tilts the results in their favour.

This implies that you believe that the other party (from whichever one you were thinking of) would always win if voting were mandatory. This seems like a result of interacting almost entirely with those of the party you favor, like people in 2004 who asserted that since no one they knew had voted for Bush, he must have won by fraud.
Well, as said, it's about the message and not like google would actually have to pay out such a high amount very often.

The question remains: If they care to set a bounty at all then why so low?

$3k feels more like a smack in the face than a reward. One can probably make more on google ads just by blogging about the incident...
Ask PG: Adding team members
Hi Paul, as this is the eve of announcements for second round interviews, this isn't the best time to ask the question, but I'm curious nonetheless.

The question is: whats happens if people are added to the team after the app has been submitted? I'll use myself as an example. when I submitted my app I submitted as a single person. After the deadline I added two critical co-founders to help execute the technical side. Since then, I've been concerned that the app would have been considerably strengthened had I included the other co-founders in the app. What are your thoughts?
I don't think you know what you are talking about. Google "dod open source".
I missed the part of the blog post where they said "this will revolutionize the way you do work!" It seems to me that they called it a "fun little app".
You also get different loans if you walk into a bank wearing a suit vs. a hoodie.
Ask HN :Domain Name Idea
Wanting to build a simple app that I'd like to use. Having read Think and Grow Rich I want to build a simple app that allows me to store my daily affirmation or auto-suggestion text, and it gets emailed to me every morning to read. A daily affirmation can be something like:

You are great at...
If you keep working hard at.. you'll achieve...
You are a confident person, go and ....

etc

Hopefully others might find it useful too.

I can't think of a good domain name though. I'd love dailyaffirmation.com but it is gone (and I don't really want to splash lots of cash buying it), and can't really think of anything else...

Any ideas out there?
> This video contains content from Comcast Entertainment
> Group, who has blocked it in your country on copyright
> grounds.
Nothing there:

"This video contains content from Comcast Entertainment Group, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds."
Feedback:
Positive: Great simple design with easy to understand concept. Good headline & good job of marketing the message on the front page.

Negative: Font looks crappy on Windows/Firefox. Gray color is too light. Skip the Olark box (adds clutter).
One sticky issue: you may not know what the interest rate actually is for the chunk you paid.

e.g.

1. Charge $100 at the grocery store, 12% APR
2. Pay off $10
3. $200 Cash advance from ATM, 20% APR
4. Pay off $10

Guess what, you have several $10 chunks to pay off, but at various interest rates. Most issuers pay down the lowest APR first, regardless of any chronological ordering. So if you know the policy, you should be able to figure it out, but if you continue to charge while you are paying down your debt, there could be a lot of chunk-juggling to maintain a sane view of what you owe.
Great Hi Tech Businesses Like Conduit Also Create a Better Society
It's a reference platform, it's job isn't to sell - it's to be the hardware that programmers buy to test their chrome apps, so that when they don't work on random chrome-os tablet you know it's that tablets fault.

Back in the 386 days Intel used to sell PCs, they were expensive and not terribly good but since IBM didn't ship a 386 based ISA bus 'PC' you needed an official standard PC so you knew if it was Microsoft's fault your code didn't work or 'random PC maker'
I was actually just thinking of a movie plot. A serial killer tortures his victims, then erases their memory of the experience. From their point of view, they came home, then woke up in bed missing their legs, or covered in horrendous scars, or something.

But so far, that's all it is. Any new scientific breakthrough is terrifying. I think I'm more scared of biological research than I am of this.
You're taking a single-issue view of this. No matter who I vote for, I will not be happy with the outcome. And it's roughly equal, all around. So the distinction is irrelevant. I am powerless to effect any kind of meaningful change.

Asking me to vote is like asking me "Do you still beat your wife?" in some sense. There's no good way out. The best option is to not reply.

That's not even getting into my philosophical issues with government in the first place.
Bringing the Scheduled Web to Internet TV
Huh?

Start: $40 @ 0.8% ($0.32 daily) + $1000 @ 0.07% ($7 daily)
day 1: pay $19 on the small debt; $21.32 remain (and $1007 on the other)
day 2: pay $19 on the small debt; $2.49 remain (and $1014.05 on the other)
day 3: pay off the small debt ($2.51) and pay $16.49 on the remaining one ($1004.66 remain)
day 4..n: pay $19 on the remaining debt
balance goes as X=X*1.007 - 19; paid off in 67 more days

Perhaps it would help instead to think of them as investment opportunities: opportunity A pays 0.8% and has a limit of $40 invested, opportunity B pays 0.7% and has a limit of $1000 invested. First you max out opportunity A, then you start putting money into opportunity B. Ignoring opportunity A means you miss out on up to $0.04/day.
There is an aspect to theory that's comforting, though. I'm sure I would sleep better at night knowing that my application was using an O(1) hash table as its map rather than an O(n) alist, even if the constant factors are higher. More hardware helps out constant factors; it doesn't do anything with quadratic algorithms.
I claim that my daughter recognized me by voice at birth when I first spoke to her.
Kids can start programming a lot earlier if their introductory experience really minimizes frustration and time to gratification. Python is probably a good starting language for teenagers, but for pre-teens, who are much less cognitively mature, you'll have a lot more luck sooner if you introduce them to an IDE with great code completion and the power to make a GUI. Obvious candidates are Visual C# and Visual Basic, but I would strongly consider Adobe Flash as well. Children love making animations with Flash, and Flash's scripting language, ActionScript, has all of the features of a full-fledged programming language.

You can start even younger with HTML. HTML isn't programming, but it's relevant training for a developing brain. Balancing brackets, thinking logically, paying attention to detail, and the "write, run, debug" routine are all present when writing HTML.

My path to programming started when I discovered a copy of FrontPage Express (an old WYSIWYG HTML editor) installed on my computer. I quickly went from FrontPage, to HTML, to Flash/ActionScript, to Visual Basic, to C++. Obviously, that isn't the logical way for a teenager or an adult to learn programming, but for a child, it was incredibly natural.
Where's the touch screen version?
Github.

Yes, a big factor of it is "populist shackling", too. But being popular doesn't just mean that a lot of other people use it, it also means that a lot of other people use it to share code with you. Which is an important step beyond the popularity fallacy.
I take it that you mean put the "Get Started" button from the home page on the promotional page? Agreed and done.

On the second one, it's a good point. Originally we required a credit card even before trying the service, which obviously turned some people off from it immediately. We then moved the credit card requirement to the point where DNS services are activated. I'd like to be able to move a step down, however there is potential for abuse if we start serving DNS records with no payment (it would require a small amount of work on the part of the abuser, but it can definitely be done).

We also can't really allow people to register and transfer domains without some sort of payment on file since there is a cost associated with those actions that are essentially irreversible.

Thanks for the suggestions, we'll keep thinking about how to improve the sign up and payment flow to encourage people to try and eventually register for DNSimple.
I was there 2000-2001! Small world.
Your Launch is Not an Event
I think you're just throwing drama-spaghetti at the wall. It's not going to stick. While it's true that most pro vuln researchers aren't going to stop everything to go after $500 XSS vulnerabilities, I'd challenge you to find one of them that thinks a $500 XSRF is a "slap in the face".

(I can only speak for myself, my friends, and my team members when I say that nobody I know thinks this).

A million dollars for a web app flaw is a wildly inappropriate number. I think you missed the part of my response where I said that half that amount gets you many, many weeks of Mark Dowd and Dino Dai Zovi. How much do you think Michal Zalewski and Neel Mehta make? I bet it's less than $500k. So: why would they be offering six figures for individual flaws again?

The market for app security research is hopping, but it's not that hopping.
Learning from being employed is sensible and risk-averse but not the only way to learn. Why not learn by starting a company? If you happen to be driven by risk and easily bored by safety, it may be the fastest way to learn. It is also the direct way to validate what experience and knowledge you actually lack. While employment gives you the opportunity to learn a lot of stuff quickly, you also spend a lot of time not learning.

And the field of learning is narrowed down to your job description. Might be a plus or a minus. Starting a company enforces multiple broad and steep learning curves. Might be a plus or a minus.
In Sweden you can vote for whatever you want. It's quite humorous to read the results of these votes after the election, when they are published online. Normally this would be used by new parties who can't afford distributing printed ballots. Being Sweden someone of course had the xkcd-inspired(?) idea to try XSS and SQL-injection.

http://alicebobandmallory.com/articles/2010/09/23/did-little...
Sure, but evolution isn't exactly perfect. Pain serves a purpose, too, but what good does pain do someone who's in the final stages of dying of an aggressive cancer? Similarly, PTSD evokes emotions unnecessarily. Being afraid of bears because it slashed your leg is good. Jumping when a door slams because too many explosives went off nearby doesn't do you any good.
Enthusiasm can be shown in several ways. One interesting tidbit from psychological research is that praising children's results often leads to their own paralysis. Instead, parents should praise how hard they tried.

See Berkeley's Half Full blog:

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/raising_happiness/post/the_r...
Sorry I didn't precisely mean understandable. I mean that's now how your average user wants to learn the system. If I can't figure it out in 3 minutes I go "screw this, it's complicated" and go away back to "File-> save as-> TheEntireProject-Backup2-version8-March11-2009.code" again.

But maybe I shouldn't be concerned with programmers like that.
There are some schemes, nothing quite as advanced as Y combinator.
- Seedcamp http://seedcamp.com/
- Launch48 Launchpad http://www.launch48.com/launchpad/

But there are lots of places one could hang out and work on an idea:
- Accelerator London: http://www.accelerator-london.com/
- London Hackspace: http://london.hackspace.org.uk

Shameless self-promotion, have a look around here about London based startup resources / opportunities (look at the schmoozing list!)
- http://londonstartups.co.uk/
What happened for me when the ball went from the flash side to html it got faster. The when it went from the html to the flash it got faster. Thus just getting faster and faster
It's not a business without revenue, it's a hobby. If I were you, I'd look at lucrative niches and find out how you can do it better or cheaper or just as good and just grab some market share.

As a graduate of CS, you have a mind that functions in a unique way. If you set your mind to water delivery, a dry cleaner, or real estate, you would likely approach it in a way that few of your competitors do. Capitalize on that.

If you have to 1. create the market and then 2. create a business on top of it, you are making twice the work for yourself.
New York Time's columnist David Carr on branding yourself with Twitter
So which browser is the equivalent of a tuxedo? A suit? A hoodie?

I'm not so sure browser choice is an accurate signal of a person's worth (In this sense, worth could mean anything).
Ask HN: Why is my review startup page dead?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1860963

What was wrong with the thread so that it was suddenly killed?
An Optimal Life
What is your optimal life? Are you close to living that lifestyle that you call optimal? If not, what steps do you take day by day to optimise your life's options as much as possible?
Partial Flash Support Comes to iPhone via Skyfire Mobile Browser
I think the real gem is at the end of the article:

"Many things that don’t look optimal are in fact optimal once you take the necessary constraints into account. For example, software that seems poorly designed may in fact have been brilliantly designed when you consider its economic and historical constraints. (This may even be the norm. Nobody complains about how badly obscure software was designed. We complain about software that has been successful enough to criticize.)"
I understand where you're coming from, but touch changes how you interact with a device. I personally wouldn't want people judging my work based on their experience dealing with an interface I never designed for. Everything about the project screams fast and easy, and I'm cool with people doing fast and easy things for fun that don't work on all platforms.

edited to add - and I don't own an iPad.
wouldn't that defeat the purpose?
I respectfully disagree. A start-up is hard. If you're doing anything other than putting maximal effort into your current endeavor odds of success go down.
Not quite. What this does is reduce the strength of the fear response associated with the memory. So, after administering this to a person, they would still remember the traumatic event, but they would tell you that it wasn't so bad after all.

Therapeutically that's the important part since it will help the person get on with their lives. That's why this discovery could potentially be revolutionary for recovery from PTSD, rape, and even phobia. But it's not the same as 'erasing' the memory, and arguably would be better for therapy.
Oh sorry I never meant to say Google is a saint, I just said Oracle's motto is now the opposite of Google's regardless of if Google is evil or not.
Ask HN: accepting submissions via email - usability/security concerns?
I just put in place the ability for users of http://ridewithgps.com to email a GPX file to our site as a method of posting their file. I implemented it in the easiest way possible - a single email address for all uploads, and I determine the account based on the From field. In a service like posterous, this is an obvious security issue, since the From can be spoofed. I am not so worried in our service, since it's mostly a private record keeping system. However, I would like to add some security as long as it's not greatly inconveniencing.

I'd prefer to keep it a single upload email address rather than let the user set their own custom address, for simplicity/rememberability. Additionally, I am wary of a passphrase, though this isn't too bad.

What do you guys think of sending a confirmation email for the submission, and then processing/posting the submission when a reply to the confirmation email is made? Seems like the easiest for users, even though it's a two step process. Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?
Lesson here: Be sensationalist when dealing with the media. Ham it up and call yourself a ninja or rockstar. Tell the journalist that you stay up til 5am drinking Red Bull. Don't actually do any work, though, as that's straight-up boring.
More concise and more accurate. You're a genius!
No need for any plugin. It's fairly easy to do it yourself:

http://jsfiddle.net/treeface/Z63Yt/2/
Safari is a hoodie
Seriously, I thought you were being tongue in cheek in your comments. If you're serious, then your idea of rating people according to some measure (you advocate some hazy notion of informedness, but it's not important what it is) and denying people who score low is outrageous. In fact, in principle, this is no different than saying blacks, or women, or gays, etc. should not vote!

Let me state it simply: Voting is a right given to a citizen who meets certain definitions (i.e. inmates cannot vote). It's not up to you, or me, or the government to dictate or judge what they will do with their vote. They can roll a dice, use Tarot cards, be influenced by O'Reilly, whatever. It's their right to use however they see fit.

Ideas like yours do great damage because they provide fuel to idiotic movements like the Tea Party.
That's exactly why this method exists on Android. They have a similar testing tool called Monkey:
http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/monkey.h...
Here is a good approach: Answer every question he asks. Help him find his interest. And as Patrick says, read to him now. (Just not Knuth).
To be honest, since opinions with which I disagree often seem stupid, I see downvoting when there is disagreement as a natural reaction to a certain extent.

Philosophically, downvoting should impact the karma of the downvoter.
Just out of curiosity, is there any proof out there that airline companies discriminate based on browser choice?

My thoughts are that since airline companies are the quintessential example of price discrimination they would most likely have such a system in place.
I don't know that I'd go that far. It looks like Graham has found plenty of first-time startup workers that have gotten on base.
i can certainly attest to this. thanks for the laugh, best comment i've seen in days.
Related: Luke Halliwell's Weblog, http://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/ (Found via: Ex-Realtime Worlds Employee Examines APB Fiasco, http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/103563-Ex-Realtime... )
PG at Startup School, 2006:

The median visitor will arrive with their finger poised on the Back button. Think about your own experience: most links you follow lead to something lame. Anyone who has used the web for more than a couple weeks has been trained to click on Back after following a link. So your site has to say "Wait! Don't click on Back. This site isn't lame. Look at this, for example."

http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html

I'm not sure how it got its current epigrammatic form, but it's surely become more succinct in the course of being repeated to hundreds of YC companies since then.
My parents challenged my brother and me (when we were kids) by limiting our time on the computer, but only when playing games. The rule was essentially this: you can play games for an hour a day, OR you can try to make your own games on the computer for as long as you want. We were naturally engineering-minded and attracted to the magical black box that could do anything, so we took the challenge.
It might be safer if the fear could be 'erased' without erasing the memory itself. Or even better - if it were possible to reduce the overgeneralization of fear associated with the memory to present non-threatening situations.

Removing memories themselves seems like a dangerous way to deal with fear, and an easily misused technology. Think governments protecting secrets etc.
> Voting is a right given to a citizen who meets
> certain definitions (i.e. inmates cannot vote).

The European Union has declared that preventing inmates from voting is an infringment of their human rights.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11671164
Why I chose Android
It might be safer if the fear could be 'erased' without erasing the memory itself.

See my other comment. That is what's going on.
Polio: The Deadly Summer of 1956
http://www.affirmationfortoday.com/ ?

("todaysaffirmation" is taken, but for sale.)
Another place to "hang out and work on an idea" is http://techhub.com @TechHub, a little like a KickLabs but without a fund. But Y-Com 'equivalents' would be Seedcamp (takes 8-10% of a startup) or The Difference Engine programme which is moving to Cambridge (just outside London)