skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just signed up for your contact list. I'm itching to move off of Google App Engine, but not looking forward to jumping back into the sysadmin game, which is what I'd need to do in order to move to AWS or Rackspace or whatever.

I have no idea what your pricing will be like (and I'm guessing that you don't either, at this stage), but it would be great if you had something for micro-ISV type shops (read as: cheap).

As a solo dev, I'd love it if there were a service that would set me up with a linux image on AWS, nicely configured for MySQL/Postgres, JBoss/Tomcat, SSL cert, firewall rules, etc. If I could pay you a one-time fee for that, and then be off and running it would be very attractive.
Steve Martin's audience gets a refund prompted by emails during the show.
I did alright, I got the technology built and am working on getting customers to use me as the UI.

http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2010/11/customer-1-without-lau...
You can say it's the property of the people who died if you have an ancient Egyptian view of the afterlife. Everybody else says you can't take it with you. What happens to someone's former property after death is a public policy question.
The Big Downgrade
Chrome Extension store – is Google brewing another fail?
Ssssh, you prescriptivist!
Engadget attacks the study:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/02/55-people-think-the-ipad-...
Your browsers JS engine would not process the comments, there before it's valid.
http://dhtml5.com/
ProFTPD Distribution Server Compromised, Sources Backdoored With Root Shell
A very clear technical discussion. Great diagrams!
The APL literature seems to be pretty insular, including terminology.

I've been investigating it as a fascinated outsider. Tim Budd's _An APL Compiler_ (http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~budd/Books/aplc/) covers some issues, but goes into much less depth than I hoped. That page has the source accompanying the book, though.

This guy's site (http://home.earthlink.net/~swsirlin/apl.html) has some further thoughts loosely based on that book and its compiler.
I did a corkboard concept over a year ago but it was mostly a UI exercise that incorporated mouse gestures for input (there was no backend). http://blog.pekpongpaet.com/2009/04/13/concept-virtual-corkb...
Flash-haters don't hate
My understanding: that is what makes the silence deafening. If it's probable that the universe is filled with other intelligent life, and we see no evidence of it, that means that these civilizations are all ending before they can get radio or long range space flight. Or shortly after.

Does not bode well for us.
The live announcement will be viewable here: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
Picking up a new paradigm is also harder than picking up a different language within a paradigm you know. But you'll get pretty far with the imperative languages you mentioned.
I assume you are an accountant for Google and know exactly how the ink looks on their finances right? No?
Concurrency with Actors, Goroutines & Ruby
RC Plane Buzzes New York City Landmarks
Huh! Biochemistry major here... So I guess that the bacteria just rarely uses Sulphur-Sulphur (thiol) bonds in it's proteins, since Arsenic has a high affinity for it (and that's what causes arsenic toxicity in everything else).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic#Biochemical_basis_of_ar...

"suggesting the possibility of a biochemistry very different from the one we know"
Seems like a bit of an exaggeration, but news will be news. Thiols are important for the structure & enzymatic activity, but this bacteria is proof that there are ways around it. Besides that difference, I'm guessing they're the same.
Top Startups of 2010
GCHQ spy centre ‘could sell’ security expertise to private sector
NASA 'alien life' announcement streams live from 2pm EST (7pm GMT)
I put up a MVP at bzzard.com a couple days ago. The problem that I was trying to solve is that I have a bunch of small websites, and I wanted to see all my sites stats on one page. So, I’m just scratching my own itch.

The site is pretty simple to use. Think twitter for your app. Just send a message containing 140 char message, a double, latitude, and longitude. Then login to create a dashboard where you can display gauges, charts, and message streams. You can filter on the message and the double value that was posted. You can also create counts, sums, and averages in the charts and gauges. There’s a messaging system that allows you can set up status logic to send of messages if certain conditions are met. The dashboard and messaging evaluates metrics, updates dashboards, and sends out messages pretty close to real time, 20-30 seconds.

The site is up and running. You can check it out by going to bzzard.com and logging in as jerry@bzzard.com and password of jerry. I have page view and application restart messages from bzzard.com displayed. It’s still a bit buggy, and it is sitting on the cheapest godaddy server. But, I’m still pretty surprised at what I was able to accomplish in such a short amount of time.
I think your "free typing test" might be sort of a marketing vehicle if you could provide embeddable badges of results for blogs, or shortened links to your results for a Twitter stream, FB, etc...

Or maybe not. The sort of people showing off their mad typing skills probably wouldn't also be people who want to buy your service :)
Interesting analogy. However, what if you're handing out a dollar bill to everyone as they enter your store, but then they're coming in and buying your product?

That's more how I view the Google situation. They make these profitless attempts at getting people on their sites, which then generates massive amounts of advertising profits for them.
I got http://wantmyjob.com in passable shape, and realized some new things I should really have done with it. It's a peer-to-peer job search site -- asks questions about your jobs, recommends other people's jobs to you based on what you say you like.

I'm making those upgrades in December, which some of us are continuing into :-)

Right now you have to make an account to have a look (that's one of the things I'm fixing in December), but it's pretty neat.
Here's one, and they cite some others in the paper:

K.A. Ericsson et al. "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance" (1993).

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.169...

It studied the links between the practice habits and attainment levels of violinists at the Music Academy of West Berlin. They concluded that practice was the dominant factor in attainment and there were no individuals who's "talent" would make up for reduced practice.

Of course other factors (e.g. talent, quality of teaching) could have affected admissions to the academy in the first place, but the studying suggests that these are not significant once a certain level has been achieved.

This was mentioned in Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" which mentions other studies including the birthday distribution of professional ice hockey players (clustered towards the start of the academic year) that suggest that practice is more significant than genetic ability.
From everything I have read so far, it seems that this is not so much a case of life evolving separately, but rather a simple, albeit unique, case of natural selection.

If a bacteria could evolve to tolerate arsenic, it could then use arsenic as a substitute for phosphorus. That appears to be the case with the Mono Lake species.

Yes, it opens up the possible chemical signatures for life to be found elsewhere, but I would hardly call it "alien life".
Should just make an app for facebook for dating :) have all the people you need.
Needs localStorage.
FBI warns of new twists on twisted hitman, handgun and adoption scams
The Guardian's new developer blog
Technically, it's not DNA, as it lacks the phosphate groups that are in DNA/RNA nucleotides.
I too have a consultancy, I too see bright young people at the door with the same issues.

I tell them "Think of the skinniest chicken you can possibly make, that will still get up and walk, and make that first". They won't, or at least they don't. They cannot imagine their baby without All the bells and whistles.

All I can do is educate them on the process, help with archicture, and maybe (but not always) help out with the coding - I charge a lot and they generally shop the rest out.
What does Julian Assange have to do with this? I didn't see any mention of him or wikileaks in the article.
There was lots of corruption back in the day.
Be very careful, expect if you were specifically engaged to fix that kinds of issues, that's fine. Otherwise you might end up in the role of the guy who is disatisfied of anything he does.

Get some things out first, once you get more confiance from others, it'll be ok. Keep in mind that they have no reasons to trust you more that people that have worked with them for month, years before.

Beyond there might be extra issues/constraints that you do not know, that might have lead the code to end up in the state it currently is.
It would be nice if you allowed us to rename our corkboard (corkboard.me/[my_name_or_whatever]) to something more meaningful, then I can get to it from work or home without checking my delicious account.
Andrew Carnegie (the later steel magnate) was also a superb telegrapher at a young age. He was one of the first to telegraph directly by ear, instead of using a ticker, according to a biography.
Felisa Wolfe-Simon's name is going to end up in the history books along with Leeuwenhoek and Darwin.

Talk about a life-changing discovery!
You are right to be skeptical.

The reason why i say it is doomed is (i'm not sure it's this plan so i could be jumping the gun) because one of the plans that is being implemented we were interviewed by one of 'LPs' and the info about how the 'funding' works was very sketchy.

It pretty much boiled down to pick 4-6 companies and give them loans that can be called back at roughly anytime and are personally guaranteed.

When we (my partner and I) looking for money in portland and working on our start-up at the same time even giving BrainTree a few thousand bucks as guarantee was out of the question. The idea that any young, early start-up wants loans with personal guarantees makes no sense. If anything just get 5-6 credit cards and max them out to finance it. It's easier.
Close the Washington Monument
I tried your app once and loved it. I just bought an account. Congratulations!

Please keep working on it.
2011 Cloud Computing Predictions from Zenoss
What's wrong with good ol' inittab?
Apple actually pays a subsidy to Foxconn workers above and beyond the wage being paid to them by Foxconn, based on a device's profitability. That being said, the assembly workers manufacturing the iPhone 4 and iPad are the highest paid among all Foxconn's laborers.

If the workers were not happy with their workplace and conditions, they are free to leave, or even better, organize a labor union.

Also, be advised the GE could also pay their chinese laborers a bit more, if you would be willing to pay more for your microwave, you water heater, your light bulbs, your cookware, etc. It's not going to happen. Let China enjoy being the manufacturing capital of the world while we still have fossil fuels, k?
This makes me wonder how you would write an AI to play other games without having access to the source code. Any ideas?
> Remember the day when Anti-Virus worked?

Actually nope. Back in the day on DOS 6 I had Microsoft AV and like half a dozen virii on every other floppy disk. Did it ever work?

Plus: I don't get the most targeted platform thing. Everyone says that since decades, but Macintosh now is a major player in consumer hardware and Linux/Unix is on more servers than Windows. So why is Windows the most targeted platform? I guess, because "it can't be secured". Sorry, nhangen(;
That might work. I'll look into it - thanks.
This is very easy to do. Will be in the next release. --Tim
You don't think that the discovery of the first organism to use a different element than phosphorous is a big deal?

Cynicism is cool and all that, but this sure sounds like big news to me.
best to free lance those types of sites (groupon) since they don't require that much programming
How Anyone Can Fake an ATM and Steal Your Money
I think I remember my dad telling me of this as theoretically possible in the early 90's (he's a biologist).
[citation needed]

After having two jailbroken iPhones, I have to say, I didn't really see any killer accelerometer apps in Rock or Cydia.
I'm using raphael for a visualization project and it works great. The big advantage over canvas is really more significant when your drawings need to be interactive since you can tie event handlers to graphic objects.

The problems with it are more related to the cross platform nature like the radial gradients in the article. Also translucent shapes don't seem to be transparent in IE. Another thing that I am missing out on is having some kind of scene graph. Raphael has groups of objects but it is a far cry from what you get in SVG.
"You've been given more freedom - don't be stupid with it."
The main problem I see is that filling in information sucks, and you have to fill in a lot of information to get an answer. The other problem is that people who bother to keep track of all that information probably already use something like Mint. Mint already has a Goals feature that let's you do something similar, and they already have all your data.

To get around this problem you could make a bunch of assumptions and just present people with some good financial tips in the form of questions.

For example, let's say the person says they want to buy a $10000 car.

Your app would respond:

Are you paying in cash? If so,

- Do you have enough saved up for an emergency? You should have at least 6 times your monthly expenses saved for emergencies.

Are you going to make monthly payments? A 3 year loan for $10,000 at 6% interest will cost you about $300 per month.

- A car should cost no more than 1/3 of your annual income, do you make at least $30000?

- Your monthly expenses shouldn't exceed your income, do you make at least an extra $300 per month?

- Some of your monthly income should go towards retirement. Are you saving at least 6% per month?

Etc.

Then you could offer people the option of putting in their information to make the feedback more accurate and personalized.
mysql

https://gist.github.com/717904#LID6094
That's pretty different from what I remember in the movie. Oh, Hollywood :)
In canvas's defense, canvas and SVG/VML are different tools for different jobs.

You make good points, however I don't think this entry was particularly negative towards canvas, or merit it needing a defense.

However I have to comment on the "different tools for different jobs" bit, as that is a response that comes up in every NoSQL/SQL discussion as well. If you drew a Venn diagram of the optimal uses of SVG and Canvas, just as with NoSQL/SQL, you're going to have a lot of overlap where it's a judgment call. They are different tools that have arguable merits for a lot of the same jobs, which is why it's important to know about both of them.
My intended market was the kind of person who googles "learn to type", finds Mavis Beacon, and then orders a CDROM from Amazon. That's what I did a couple of years ago, and it was a painful experience.

First I bought a downloadable version, which then sent me on a wild goose chase for Stuffit Expander, which was required to uncompress the image. Then when I finally got that, it wouldn't run on my OSX Mac.

Finally I learned that there was in fact an up-to-date version available for Mac, but only on CDROM. So then I purchased THAT (yeah, I paid twice!) Ultimately, the software was great, but getting it installed was a major PITA.

I imagine that there are a lot of traditional desktop apps like this that you can only get on CD (or dodgy software downloads). That's the "niche" I'd like to target.
Couple of bugs in Opera 11 beta.

New notes only appear in the middle of the entire board.
When I close a note, it pops up a new one.
Show HN: Review my project: Bubl Tube,overlay comments on You Tube
Here is the site: http://www.bubltube.com/

This is a site that lets you search for You Tube videos and then add comments that will display over the video while the video is playing.

This is my first public project so I'd appreciate any feedback.
Perhaps, but I doubt many choose to time their death to minimise estate taxes ;-)
Dear friend, please don't solely depend on technology to nurture your life. Checking your e-mail every other minute might destroy more of yourself than you might think.

I say that with the greatest respect. And yes, I'm also an Apple user (Mini, MBA, iPhone). I even bought my grandfather an iPad which he loves and uses regularly. But he wouldn't take it everywhere he goes. Neither would I.
... and likely accurate assumptions, if the last 100 years is anything to go on.
The problem is not really specific to your company, we've been in the same situation also, although we were quite experienced, and I guess it happens to lots more companies. Fortunately we managed to turn it around.

We've started our company ~4 years ago and got our first customer immediately without even having a product. We build carrier-grade VoIP platforms for internet service providers, so it needs to be really reliable, and it needs to handle hundrets of thousands of customers. So we started out building the platform on a tight time-line (~6 months from nothing to go-live), taking all actions necessary to deliver. It was a great success, but it was really tailored specifically to that customer. Immediately afterwards, we did another project of that scale, and then another one. All of them worked really well, we've always been profitable, but it was quite hard to maintain them, let's put it that way. Beside that, it was next to impossible to scale the business in a reasonable way while keeping up the product's quality.

In order to fix this issue, we decided to make a bold move and planned to release the product as open-source (we're quite deeply involved in different large open-source projects, so we know the business behind it quite well). This forced us to convert the platform into a stage that literally everybody can install and maintain it. We hired two people to help us ripping apart all the different parts, review, package and document them, re-put them together in a standardized way and create a software bundle which allows reproducable builds (there are like 100 different software components involved, half of them from other open-source projects, half of them from us, and they need to be integrated with each other really tightly).

The result was a clean, well-documented platform, which now can be installed within 15 minutes with very small manual intervention. It now also allows seamless software upgrades, and we can plug different commercial modules on top of it to still have a viable business model. We're going to release it to the public next week, so we definitely succeeded cleaning up our mess. It took us 18 months to do so though, so it's hard, it costs a lot of resources (money, time, dedication of the people behind it), but it's definitely possible.

We did a presentation (sorry, German only, but you'll still get the idea I guess) about the concepts of it, see http://glt09.linuxtage.at/slides/hochverfuegbare_voip-system...
For some reason though, Chrome doesn't sync passwords.
Shut down an app in the store implies they pulled the app or activated their over the air kill switch.

Google Voice was rejected. It was never in the store. (Although, it is now.)
I think that this argument is much stronger than your original one, and in fact, one that I would make myself. Although I still don't see how it helps your firewall example, because I can't understand how circumventing a firewall can be considered "using it in a surprising way."

Actually, on rereading your original comment, I think I misunderstood that paragraph. The exact wording is still very confusing to me, but what I think you were trying to say is that edw519's implicit argument (for all X, X should be open because it can be used in surprising ways) can be applied to network connections, where network connections are the X. I thought you meant that firewalls were the X, and that idea is what I was arguing against.
"Deficits are just deferred taxes."

That has to be one of the most depressing things that I have read this week. The logical leap off a cliff surprises me. To think that someone simply believes that government deficits are simply because the government hasn't collected enough taxes is enough to sign up for Prozac.
Thanks. I forgot the name when posting this.
This is now probably the gazillionth time I've used this old data point, but Amazon was in the hole for 6 years before they even turned out a profit, often losing hundreds of millions in a quarter alone.

The "strategic expansion" can also be spun as "category killer" management. What large business in their right mind would try to compete with YouTube at this point? VCs would scoff at anyone wanting to do a video-sharing startup now. It's a loss leader in the way Bing is to Microsoft or Cyber Monday is to Amazon: It grabs eyeballs.

Case in point, Susan Boyle's debut album was not heavily marketed in the US; and her performances were originally broadcast only in the UK but made famous through YouTube. The album went on to sell more than 6 million copies worldwide. That is reach and marketing (even when it's unintended). YouTube now strikes _actual_ marketing deals for its front page, and has actively stepped up inserted ads in a huge way this year. And, they've been very close to profitability this year.

All in good time, I suppose.
Automatic location-time tracking for iPhone
Was one long night away from launching www.rankoro.us on the 30th when the power chord for my laptop died. Ordered a new one but we're in the middle of a snow storm in Dublin so it's delayed. With a bit of luck, break in the weather and a solid nights work i should be up in the next few days.

Sprint was a great idea and the last two weeks were my most productive in yesrs.
I created "Airy Canary Free" for iPhone and iPod touch: http://www.fizzbuzzgames.com. It went live in the app store on Nov 29th I believe.
I'm in Austin, have a company that's tiny but growing and have a few friends doing startups. I'd love to help any way I can.

Email me! It's in my profile...
Maybe but not for this work. This wasn't the 2nd origin of life story that was predicted.
To further abuse that analogy, it's more that programming languages are like shoes in general. You can play basketball in cowboy boots, but it's a less than ideal setup.

That said, Kobe Bryant could probably beat me at basketball wearing a pair of cowboy boots. Likewise for programmer skill vs. task vs. language appropriateness.