skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True RE: large files that don't really need to be versioned. I use a mix of shell scripts that manage rsync'ing large files and mercurial for anything that isn't binary.
Turns out the page is a reference to a certain Fail Whale -- http://www.whatisfailwhale.info/.

The thing that's bothering me about the fail whale -- all the strings that hold the whale are curved. Is this physically possible? (Assuming the birds can hold the whale in the air). Shouldn't at least one of the strings be a straight line?
Glad to hear that switching to Mongo worked out for you. I remember talking to you a while ago when most stuff was running on SqlServer.

For our project we went the Windows Azure route and store our 'events' in their NoSql Table Storage. I must admit I have been tempted to switch to MongoHQ due to the lack of query support from Table Storage. Funny enough, we're also working on a custom leaderboards feature for our customers and the lack of secondary indexes really makes it difficult.
To echo your update on the original question: while AeroFS is a distributed filesystem with quite complicated mechanisms underneath, we work very hard to make AeroFS dead simple to use. Following this philosophy, we've implemented the features that you mentioned but they're currently disabled/hidden for the sake of simplicity.

Regarding offline computers: if the only computers that host a file are offline, the file data will be unavailable. Currently, offline files are invisible in Finder/Explorer/etc. Because the current system only supports full replication, having offline files should be a rare case.

Regarding performance: it's crucial to us. Lots of efforts has been made (and even more to be made) to ensure the filesystem has comparable performance to local storage; sync performance is another area that we invest a lot of time in.
Huge Magnetic Filament Erupts on the Sun
Yes. This will rank the best deals as they will emerge via the high amount of clicks via the social aspect and sharing.
> Americans allow this because in general it's much cheaper to buy a phone subsidized over contract

Subsidized phones are very popular in Europe, but the phone doesn't really enter the equation when choosing a network.

I actually think Europeans are cheaper than Americans ... over here people choose networks based on reliability and monthly bill, which is influenced by included minutes or bandwidth / area or demographic popularity (since voice minutes in the same network are cheaper).

I also have an iPhone, and in my country iPhones are still exclusive to a single carrier. But I did what every one of my acquaintances did ... bought one with a cheap monthly contract for 199 EUR; then unlocked it. And I didn't even pay my last 2 monthly bill (haven't used it, so I felt like it was unneeded); so they can sue me, but I don't really care because lock-in is not seen favorably in Europe and they've got customers with actual debts to worry about.

Of course, I wouldn't give this advice to other people ... just saying that the phone doesn't enter the equation; and the marketing campaigns are reflecting that.
The rest will simply laugh at the Herman Melville reference.
Focus On Your Science
Good news, but why is your landing page exactly the same as Evernote (mac book pro, mobile devices, search bar)?
Right. In the great rock-paper-scissors game of ideology-nationalism-money, money wins every time. South Korea is a much better trading partner than the black hole in the ground that is North Korea. A hole in which China has dumped billions of dollars with pretty much no return outside of fulfilling a desire for a cold-war style buffer zone. Plus the bonus of South Korea not really being a threat to China anymore (you could debate they weren't ever a threat and the end to the Korean war was a big misunderstanding but that's a different debate).
Do you, for instance, have a routine where you sit down and think about new ideas every so often? Or do you just wait for one to hit you?

Sorta both. I don't exactly have a routine that's dedicated to "new idea generation" but I have routines around reading and studying... and I find that a lot of my ideas occur when I'm reading (whether reading a book, or a website, or a magazine, whatever). So, I tend to read in bed before going to sleep, and - a lot of times - after I put my book down and turn the light out, some idea will come to mind. So I keep a notebook by my bed just for jotting this stuff down.

The other scenario is when I go up to Barnes & Noble, order myself a nice caffeinated beverage and sit back and read / listen to music / think of ideas. I also keep a notebook with me on those occasions.
Ask HN: Pre-Release Linkage
Last weekend, my friend and I successfully competed in the NY Times Open Hackday, and were able to emerge with a working prototype that we (and the judges, evidently) were quite pleased with. We were just sent an e-mail from the New York Times, asking for permission to post our project, and asking what kind of post we would be comfortable with (a URL, screencaps, etc.).

My partner and I agree that our application is not ready for public release. There are still interface changes to be made, and the code that is providing our data feed needs to be optimized. However, we are torn on whether we want to get the link published. On one hand, it would be great publicity to have a link affiliated with the New York Times; on the other, it could appear half-baked to anyone considering using it right now as a serious application.

We have come up with a compromise that I believe is appropriate. Since we are both students, we simply don't have time right now to finish the application (but probably will a couple days after the post goes life, i.e. this weekend), but want the publicity. We think that having a notice come up, explaining that "we're still working on it" or something of the sort, and that we know bugs exist.

Thanks for your thoughts!
> "3. Founders themselves are far more savvy today, on average, than was the case a decade ago."

I've heard this a bunch of times. Why is this the case? Is it the information available to founders, the quality of people choosing to do startups, or something else?
Sounds like The Admiral's Pipe: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brada/archive/2005/05/12/417064.aspx
Marc Caron, on your Board of Advisors seems like he would have the connections.

I deal with this on the IPSP side. TPPA really isn't difficult from your merchant bank's standpoint, the risk factor is what they are trying to prevent. Being the intermediary between purchase and sale carries a greater risk if you aren't shipping the item yourself with confirmation tracking. Since you don't know if your vendor has drop shipped the item, or the quality of the item that was shipped, or if it was even the right part, the onus is on you when you do TPPA.

Address that risk and how you plan to fix that with your merchant bank. Your bank will generally require a larger reserve, financial guarantees, or perhaps a longer hold on your funds until you've established trust/a low chargeback percentage. You will pay a higher discount rate.

Braintree offers this service, did they tell you why they won't offer it to you?
Our goal at StartUpLift is to help startups get some exposure and solicit feedback. Often times, the startups featured cater to a niche and not everyone can provide a meaningful feedback. In this case, we have featured SeqCentral which is seeking feedback on its API page. I am asking HN community to participate and provide some feedback.
Yes. I can only assume that they're not strings, they're hyperstrong super-thin curved rigid bars.
And even then, it only counts once the rain starts.
"Over the course of 18 months that single Avast! Pro license was shared and used on 744,651 different machines. At the current cost of $34.95 per pro license, that’s total lost revenue in the region of $27,074,052.45."

No no no no no! You cannot prove that every single one of the illegal users would have bought the software legally had they not found the key. This is the same confounding logic the RIAA/MPAA keeps trying to use and it's still wrong.

Anyway, it is an interesting little statistic though I have to wonder if they can actually litigate anymore given they let this go on for 18 months. It is really illegal anymore?
My sincere apologies, we've been releasing invites at a slower pace in order to give us some time to solve some pressing bugs. Invites should start coming out quicker now :)
In part because of YC, but in general because of, well... the internet. Stories spread.
What an opportunity! Those pirates obviously like your software but might not be willing to pay for it. Rather than simply killing the key (turning off the user base) they are trying to slowly convert these people to paying customers! I like it and thank goodness they had the sense to do it.
According to this article, nearly half of China still uses IE6. Does anyone know if that's true? Any other sources or studies?
Later in the article:

"You can’t count all those users taking advantage of the license as lost revenue, like the music industry does with song downloads. The Avast! Pro license was there to be used, so people used it. If it hadn’t been on P2P sites then the vast majority of users would have gone elsewhere for protection."
Wow, you are right. I signed up for the Even More Plus on the web when I got my Nexus one six months ago, but now it's gone. Back then it was a breeze, I just picked "Sim" for my phone option and that was it. That's kind of annoying.
In short, copyright infringement. Wikipedia has more information on specific laws: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement_of_softw... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
After-tax would be around $2k (the effective tax rate for the self employed is 19%). You can live very comfortably on this in Poland.
Rumor: Verizon Paying Apple to Keep iPhone away from T-Mobile & Sprint
I bet most of the speed comes from 2.3 - Moving 2.1 to 2.2 on the N1 gave a gigantic performance improvement. I am looking forward to see what 2.3 will bring.

As for feels great in the hand: that's really a minor improvement.

I am happy about what google is doing with android. More than happy, enthusiastic. I think we reached that point where most of the difference between competitor mobiles will be played at software level, not hardware.
Cool - glad to see the challenge paid off in finding some new talent. I remember having fun doing it when it came out!
If you made it an opt-in, that might be doable... though there would still be the danger of pages cargo-culting into the opt-in.

But at that point you're also asking browsers to maintain two separate line-wrapping codepaths, of which one is not used anywhere to a first approximation. Browser vendors seem to be somewhat resistant to doing that sort of thing.
If the strings have any mass of their own, they will be curved.
Anonymous attacks PayPal in 'Operation Avenge Assange'
crocodoc link for in-document commenting: https://crocodoc.com/g30tgl
My startup offers online surveys, which are mainly used for research, company and employee evaluation, and feedback.

I don't consider the service so glamorous, but I think its useful and I'd like to spread the word as much as possible. I come from a programming side, so I can make all the website magic happens, promoting my website does not come so naturally to me.
what about micropreneur?
http://www.micropreneur.com
I believe the term you are looking for is Statistical Relational Learning.

One formalism for this is Markov Logic.

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/pedrod/papers/pilp.pdf

Alchemy is an implementation of Markov Logic.

http://alchemy.cs.washington.edu/

Both of these are from Pedro Domingos, who does a lot of research in this area.
Probably some variation of copyright law, depending on the country.
+1. I had thought homepreneur was some new way of selling houses or people at home employing other people, like maids/cleaners/coooks...
That was pointed out later in the article.

Even so, the actual number is still interesting, because if a few percent converts, it's real money.
Asking what value a particular app gets from an ACID store vs a non-ACID store as part of a comprehensive analysis of two competing technologies is a GOOD THING.

As for banks, exchanges, credit cards, packages, etc:

When non-trivial sums of money are changing hands, ACID stores offer tremendous benefits as a building block in a larger system.

Yes, things go wrong. Even given ACID building blocks, building huge banking systems is hard. Forcing bank developers to worry about consistency not just between systems, but also within systems isn't going to make that job easier.
To be fair, I don't believe that was done to stop people from rooting their phones. One of the most common ways for phones to become damaged/bricked is for OTA updates to fail; the HTC Vision/G2/Desire Z method means that if that happens, the phone still works. Which is obviously better for the average user.

That said, it's not much of a stretch to believe it was a nefarious attempt to block rooters from rooting either.
Wiimotes don't always have to be re-paired with the Wii.
Tumblr down, and the Web goes mad
I'd be interested in talking, if you send a quick note to fhashemi@gmail.com i'll forward my resume

Or see linkedin.com/in/fhashemi
Crowd-sourced translation engine for Rails
I have worked closely with all sorts of founders over the years and can say that it is not the quality of the people choosing to do startups that is making the difference (though the current group is certainly as bright as any other).

It is just that founders were pretty much in the dark about how startups worked and about a lot of the business principles that tend to promote success.

Today, forums like HN (and many others as well), together with all the social networking services that connect people instantly, allow prospective founders to gather an enormous amount of information about such basic things as how companies are set up legally, how good business ideas are formed and executed upon, how marketing works, etc., etc., often tied directly to the very niche they are targeting. Founders also know a lot more about funding and funding options, where a decade ago most of them needed detailed explanations just to begin to understand what preferred stock or restricted stock or similar items even were.

People make the same types of blunders today that they always did but, with the greater information available to them (and the network of people with whom they can readily connect), the smart ones don't need to sit on the sidelines guessing or trying to get an introduction to some remote and removed VC to try to figure it all out. This has indeed made a great difference in the relative bargaining power of founders today as opposed even to a few years ago.
If you prefer to see it that way, we can pretend anybody cares.
cool - thx!
That's not the problem with predicting there's a bubble. The problem is that any such prediction automatically carries an implication of, "The bubble will pop soon." Unfortunately, timing bubbles is a tricky thing, and the market has a way of staying irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Numerous commentators correctly identified the tech. bubble of the '90s and the housing bubble of the 2000s. However, very few of those commentators were able to successfully time the popping of these two bubbles (and the ones that did make correct predictions may have got lucky).

For my part, I don't think another tech bubble has inflated. In the '90s there were numerous companies whose entire strategy revolved around making an unprofitable business model profitable with internet magic. I don't see as much of that today. But who knows? If advertising revenue declines sufficiently, even Google could be in trouble.
Not sure I trust anything from these folks. They are the ones that said "an unnamed source" said Groupon sold to Google for $2.5B last week.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1949584
You'd have to have lived under a rock for a few years not to be familiar with the twitter fail whale.
Congratulations on the new office, which looks nice, but... I have to admit that the most exciting aspect of this post for me was finding out that there's a restaurant in SoMA devoted entirely to grilled cheese sandwiches.
Preaching to the Choir
"Turns out"? I'm sorry, isn't it obvious that the page is a cross between the Fail Whale and Moby Dick?
Right, but with free alternatives available such as the fantastic Microsoft Security Essentials, so you can't say that the industry lost $X in sales because of the license.
Still no GPU accel for the GUI?
Not if their starting point is directly above their ending point and there's no wind...
I thought that was a cute touch.
ShmooCon: You’re a Jerk
Fail Whale fail, "Whale Fail" fail.
I don't have to feel too bad because at least you're not right across the street from an awesome brewery

Oh wait...

21st amendment and a grilled-cheesery!!! Not Fair!

Awesome that you are expanding and I can't wait to see what you guys do next.
This Venture Hacks article explains how to go about it: http://venturehacks.com/articles/board-structure
Ways Your Startup Can Deliver Support That Will Increase Sales
SuperNews! did an awesome parody of Twitter and their Fail Whale (4:28 long): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w
I strongly agree with this comment. Sure, all us nerds know the Fail Whale. And Twitter is sort-of mainstream, but has nowhere near the adoption of Facebook — and those mainstream users, even when seeing the fail whale, may not know it goes by that name.

Now while I enjoy the artwork here, and it’s clever, this error page strikes me as

1. Overly nerd-centric / in-joke (Edit: I am referring to the Twitter reference, not the use of the word “fail” here)

2. Unprofessional (the word “fail” used as a noun)

3. Derivative.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. I'm sure the coders at Pets.com were working their asses off too. It didn't make the business model any more sustainable.

In fact, that's actually the problem with the labor theory of value. It ignores the fact that all the work in the world is of no value if there isn't someone willing to pay for it. That, in a nutshell was the crux of the dot-com bubble. A lot of people put a lot of work into making cool things, but totally ignored how much people were willing to pay. Raw enthusiasm gained them followers and investors, but enthusiasm cannot mask the lack of profit forever.
I wonder if someone will raise a fuss over the harpoon? It would actually not surprise me.
Google Nexus 2 is a compelling Android smartphone
That's exactly how it's done. The problem is getting a payment processor (or more accurately, their acquiring bank, who takes on all the risk) to approve you to operate under that model. Since the merchant doesn't have control over the product or service being purchased (as in the cases of airBnB and yardsellr), there is a greater risk of chargebacks. Generally, acquiring banks won't touch these business models.
On a slightly different note -- and if your LaTeX needs aren't too complex -- I'm working on a clone of Emacs' Org-mode that runs in Vim. Org-mode has a kick-ass export to LaTeX/PDF that adds a good portion of the markup based on your outline structure and some other simplified markup ( http://orgmode.org/manual/Structural-markup-elements.html#St... ), so a lot of the messy LaTeX markup can be left out of your main document.

I originally started work on my Org-mode clone in Vim because:

(1) I was a Vim user and couldn't quite make the switch to use Emacs' Org-mode,
(2) I loved Org-mode's export to LaTeX/PDF, and
(3) when I switched back to Vim from Org-mode I gave LaTeX-suite a try, but it felt a little too "low-level" for me.

So my thought was to write a simple outliner in Vim that was basically file-compatible with Org-mode (which was not too difficult), then call out to an Emacs server when I wanted to print to LaTeX/PDF. (Same principle works to export to nicely formatted HTML document or any other export Org-mode has.) This works very smoothly; assuming I have my Emacs server running initiating the export from Vim is just as fast and easy as if I were working directly Emacs.

Now I'm moving on to the more difficult task of duplicating other functionality in Org-mode, but if you just want a great way to author LaTeX docs in Vim my clone is already a decent solution for many uses. You can alter the LaTeX preamble defaults and enter LaTeX commands directly in the Vim Org-mode file, but I'm not sure how usable it is for more complex documents. Could do a little checking into Org-mode newsgroups to find out. . .

Anyway, for info on Org-mode's LaTeX publishing functionality see here:
http://orgmode.org/manual/LaTeX-and-PDF-export.html#LaTeX-an...

For a blurb about my Org-mode clone you can check here:
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3342

Best way to get it is from github:
https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer

Caveat: The project is in its early state, there isn't much documentation, and there are of course bugs and incomplete features. But for a basic export to LaTeX PDF or HTML all you need to do is (1) start up an Emacs instance to work as your server, (2) write or load an Org-mode outline into Vim that has the VimOrganizer ftplugin, and (3) issue command :OrgToPDF or :OrgToHTML.
I built an app to make podcasting suck less. What does HN think?
Good article Nathan but I take just a slightly different view: real joy in life is how much you help others, how many people you love, etc. (and not the reverse of how much help you get, how many people love you, etc.) I am in my 50s, and I wish I had figured this out earlier. I have also been very fortunate in bosses and employers treating me fairly and it has worked out well in that I tend to work for the same people multiple times.
Which part about the enemy in question makes them not serious?
Unison is unfortunately no longer under development.

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/status.html
No, it doesn’t make sense, even if you are familiar with Moby Dick. How is the whale failing? How is there any “fail” associated with the whale? The wording only makes sense if you are already familiar with the Fail Whale meme.

Edit: Thanks for pointing out the color of the whale. That does make more sense. But still, I object to the unprofessional and derivative wording. Having any sort of whale on an error page is homage enough, without beating anyone over the head with it or confusing people. “We’re having trouble locating that <del>whale</del> <ins>book</ins>” would make more sense, IMO.
With 750k users, you could use A/B testing like Wikipedia did to find what prompts result in the most conversions. Wikipedia managed a 1.84% donation rate with an average of $26. If you could get that same conversion rate on $35 sales, you'd get $483k.
That depends on what it means for a business to fail. My dad had a small consulting business at one point, it gave him some income, but it has been shutdown now. Is that a failure? Would a small business which never made money, but which the owners learned a lot running a failure? Is a business that took full-time work, but which the owners never made more than minimum wage running a failure? What they were unemployed at the time and closed it because they had found a job?