skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can definitely vouch for China. I lived in Shanghai and Xiamen respectively. Both cities with different attitudes in their way of life. Personally I love the hustle and bustle of Shanghai, most of my customers are in Shanghai and we all agree that it's the place where the most action is happening in Asia. Although it is not without it's bumps.

First off I naively went there hoping to get a piece of the action by introducing our web app to local companies. Result? Zilch...too much misunderstanding led to deals that either took way too long to process or have fizzled out.

What I discovered though and almost by accident, is that it's the foreign companies who operate there, became our primary customers. Which was a relief cuz I would hate to translate our web app to formal mandarin(actually people on shanghai speak a different kind of mandarin note the distinction.)

Xiamen OTOH lacked the hustle and bustle of Shanghai. It seem more laid back and the people and their customs reflect that attitude. The highlight of Xiamen is the Gulangyu University in Gulangyu island and it's deep history of producing some of China's most talend pianist and musicians.
Actually it's pretty good. If they just add ability to post a message into feed (other than coming/not coming) that woudl be even better.
I think at this point in time Authorize.net seems to be the best choice. Feel free to correct me on this though.
Pollan warns our diet is killing us
You seem hesitant to talk about your product publically - why?
Thanks for your letter to Cambridge (Boston). I grew up in Boston, raised by parents who told me two things with more regularity than anything else 1) Go outside 2)Read more. I've lived in San Francisco, New York, Burlington VT, and Nashville and could not agree more than Boston is a city that people consumed with ideas come to really appreciate - even as they shovel out their cars in March.
I coincidentally met one of the principles of Dharma Merchant Services when I was considering which way to go. She was incredibly upfront and didn't push her service ('look at other options and let me know if we can help').

I try to make decisions relatively quickly when the consequences are mild for a sub-optimal solution so that attitude sold me.

Highly recommended:
http://www.dharmamerchantservices.com/
A point in the right direction
if any one has a useful site for info on web hacking i would appreciate it

thanks
Sounds like "web-based groupware for small teams" -- a space crowded with offerings (and littered with startup corpses). To succeed, you need a unique angle -- like 37signals' minimalist "elegant interfaces and thoughtful features". And even then, it might not offer growth warranting investment beyond small angels and bootstrapping.

If it's something different, that needs to pop out so you can't miss it.

Cutesy photos can work for crowd presentations but investors want to cut to the point: team, market, product/tech, competition, plan, ask. Specifics help, euphemisms and hand-waving generalizations hurt (eg "square peg in round hole" "gluing together ad-hoc solutions" "awesome developers... making great things that increase the productivity beyond our imagination").

HTH, good luck!
see my anti-biotics comment. They don't do a damn thing for the common cold. I don't know what I need all the time. But I'm starting to get pretty good at learning what I don't need. But they still like giving me that stuff.

A second opinion? can't afford the first. I've gotten pretty good at knowing what's gone wrong with my own body over the years.

I'm no pharmacist for sure, or a doctor. But every time (that I recall) going to a doctor I get a prescription. Why is it I get a prescription for the common cold? or the flu. No prescription can cure those (at least that I'm aware of). Better to tough it out.

why is it exactly that you trust MD's so much? I don't trust them any more than I trust mechanics, and my body is more important than my car, and more complex.
This is what YouTube used to style their box headers until maybe a year and a half ago.

Note that if you're using it to make a vertically compact title box, you'll have to do even more CSS funny business. That's because the rounded-corner header is a separate entity from the box below it, so you need to tweak the text to appear above its normal position in the box.

Confession time. Yes, I know because I myself admired YouTube's rounded corners enough to peek at their CSS and implement this technique as well. Hugs, not drugs, kids.
ASK HC:Best Wordpress Themes? Willing to Pay
Looking for great wordpress themes... hopefully with three columns and 'widgets'. I am willing to pay as well!
I guess the "save these changes" button needs to be made more obvious. A lot of people seem to be missing it.
New Word: Vistaster
I was actually worried that if a new demographic of readers (or the perception thereof) found xkcd that Randall may tone down some of the geek humor in favor of something more universal. I hope not.

mainstream attention kills in most things is the ability for early adapters to consider themselves elite.

Wow this sentiment has been cropping up quite a lot lately. Kind of like a snobbish backlash to snobbish-looking elitism thing. Meta-snobbery?!
If I sound a little sensitive on the subject, here's why:

As long as I've been doing this, 100% of the time I had problems implementing, it was always for the same reason: not enough software. Whether analysis wasn't sufficient, features were missing, testing wasn't complete, whatever, we were always deploying before we were ready. I understand that there's a school of thought that says to push like this, and naturally, I know how important the non-coding items are, but still...

I never had project difficulty because an invoice wasn't mailed, or a meeting was missed, or a prospect wasn't engaged; it was always, always, always because we simply needed more time/people/resources to have more software.

Imagine swimming the English channel and realizing you had other things to do. Would you stop swimming? Of course not. That's how I feel about coding.

For a software endeavor, coding is the critical path. Do other stuff, but don't stop coding.
Why don't I even see a down vote button?
Is it more about trust or quality and pricing? You might not trust google - but they already have access to enough information / data that it's relatively moot... to me it comes down to speed, quality and utility. ultimately, my trust level is equal on this front.
you need more karma. I'm not sure but you may have to have more karma than the person you are wanting to down vote. The only way to get karma is to post.
It's kind of fun to look for pairs with the biggest number of links. And challenging. I can't seem to get above 4 clicks.

GWB and random phrases are fun:

http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=cleo...

http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=amyg...

I found some weirdness with case:

http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=lake...

returns an error but

http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=Lake...

does not nor does

http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=Lake...

nor

http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=Lake...

which is weird. Overall a pretty cool timesink. Perhaps more...
Earn More With Pay Per Click Advertising
You can now earn more with pay per click campaigns by actually paying less. Know how...
Range has been verified, I think. If it hasn't already, the range of the hybrid version will be verified by automotive X-Prize officials.
Vista Is Good
Yeah, I dunno. I'm down with Erlang but I like examples that I can copy and paste.
Why Agile Doesn’t Really Work
I lived in Amsterdam for half a year ten years ago. It's very walkable and beautiful. You walk the streets and people smile at you. It's a happy place. I think the message is something like, "Be happy."

Also, I believe it's the only country in Europe except for the UK where everyone speaks good English. In most big cities in Europe you will eventually find someone who speaks English, but in Amsterdam the odds that it will be the first person you approach are no worse than in London or California.
You can downvote someone if you have less karma, but you have to have at least 25 (I could be a little off on the exact number). Nobody can downvote submissions though.
Making the Web Searchable: The Story of SearchMonkey
like this one: Idea, Profit.

http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=idea...
Have you see Paul Stamets's talk about mushrooms on TED? He proposes -- and as he demonstrates, justifiably so -- using fungi as an effective measure against global warming. It's so ridiculously awesome that if he starts a mushroom company I would want to work there.
I pretty much raised my son according to these principles--you met Zak at the Stanford Y-combinator start-up seminar--and he is still the one I go to for rational discussion on almost any topic. He is able to take himself out of the equation and think about the problem at hand--even recognizing and ignoring his biases. Thanks for promoting rational thinking.
Here's my attempt (and boy would it be fun if it actually gets implemented):

Think Green!

Want to save time, money, and the environment? Its easier than you think– just THINK GREEN.

Gasoline consumption in the US is the largest contributor to global warming and one of the largest expenses. Top Economists at Harvard University have determined that the best way to save on gas and cut down on pollution... is ignoring red lights! Only when the path is completely safe, of course, but the gas savings from avoiding unnecessary braking and reacceleration adds up to over $20 BILLION dollars a year!

Being smarter at stop lights and stop signs may only boost mpg gallon by a few mpg (think about it: cars get better mileage on the highway then in the city because of less stopping and starting), but the amount saved can really add up! Here's the math: America buys 150 billion gallons of gasoline each year, and with gas at $4 a gallon an estimated 22 BILLION DOLLARS can be saved by smarter driving, saving every driving American $100 EVERY YEAR. Not to mention the time saved!

Even better, if less gasoline is used the laws of supply and demand force the big oil companies to LOWER THEIR PRICES. So you will need to buy less gas, and will help make it cheaper!

Worried about getting a ticket? If you are not endangering anyone, police will give you a free pass if you remember to mention the Think Green program.

So what should you do? Avoid unecessary stopping and acceleration. If at an intersection where it is safe to go but you see red, THINK GREEN and go!
By each of us doing our part and acting efficiently, we can reduce pollution, save time, and save some serious money at the pump.

So next time you are coming up to an intersection: Think Green!
Our visual entertainment would be confined to things like Star Wars Kid.

He forgot "Ow, My Balls", I think.

Seriously though, I think live music and recorded albums are actually disconnected and septate products. What will happen is that there will be no more soccer moms going to $100 million dollar REO Speedwagon reunion tours and instead there will be a resurgence in small venue, local music scenes."Pop" music as we know it today, when it becomes a free commodity, will be seen by most people as a product for children.

This can be good because although there will be no more "Madonnas", hundreds of smaller acts will take her place and offer much more variety. I can't wait.
http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=idea...

(You knew it was gonna be THEIR fault, didn't you, you just wanted to be PC and not say anything ;-))
Amazon really wants your business. They want to make a fortune in the compute supply business. This seems like another Google offering that they don't take particularly seriously - that they can offer for free at some level of service because of the enormous river of advertising cash - but you know its not much of blip on their business radar. Mostly these services aid recruitment and keep up Google's profile but I don't expect them to be actively chasing down customers and getting better at what they do like Amazon does.

There is only one business sector in which I'd be scared to compete with Google and that's search.
Agreed. After ~9 years in Pittsburgh, I can definitely confirm the 'nice' factor ;)

Perhaps it's even more noticeable because I live in SF now, especially in the Marina filled with mostly pretentious folks.
I think pg should let someone run Hacker News as their YC idea with the % equity for YC would being significantly increased. If the founder also released quarterly numbers and CPM rates we could all benefit from being part of the start-up in a meaningful way. This would achieve the intended benefit of allowing pg to focus more on the start-ups.
I think its an improvement. Not generally a fan of things being centred, but its better to be properly centred than sort of randomly near centre.
How was this downmodded? An incredible rise in gasoline prices would surely have a profoundly major upward effect on energy pricing. The entire economic structure of American society would be utterly destroyed.

Technology isn't so great if people cannot afford or even get access to food. A more productive exercise would be to imagine that we simply had to half our personal energy use. Merely shifting away from gasoline is not the answer.
I've been to Urumuqi. Nice place. The Urumuqi men have a reputation for selling marijuana together with their meat though.
I use race for dramatic effect. It underscores the societal and cultural differences between the one group of people and the other. I'm sorry to not conform to your American way of never mentioning anything related to race or ethnicity.
Pitchmonster Investment Pitch Advice
Thanks for the Hanover shoutout! Life is great here!
I hope web browsers for Windows 7 will support multi-touch. The richness of desktop apps is so often quickly lost on the web, and it would be fantastic if we could be building multi-touch web apps right out of the gate.
A lot of good points here. I think his best comes from the notion that business customers' slowness to upgrade "...was the case last time. The reason is that enterprise customers don’t upgrade much."

So true.

Apple's taken the tact in their "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" adverts that Vista's a failure for it's lack of penetration among enterprise users. Nice work, Matt, for pointing to the fact that while little penetration may be true, it may be irrelevant.

Edit: What was worth downmodding here?
Well there are more problems than pointed out in the blog. Many of the "problems" cited are actually just effects of the real problems. Corporates not upgrading and OEMs offering XP are not causes themselves.

One problem is that the UI changed quite a bit from XP but without any added value. Why rename My Documents to Documents? Just for the heck of it? Why change the network connections dialog? For the first time in my life, I had to spend more time setting up a wireless connection in windows than Linux. Change in UI can be good but only if the changed UI offers something new. Just renaming things or moving options around without any reason is plainly annoying.

Second problem is bloat. Why is the OS eating up so much RAM. Isnt the OS meant to run applications on top? Or is the OS just meant to run(or in this case limp) itself somehow. Again I dont see what Vista is doing with all that RAM. Is it doing something useful which XP didnt do? Then go ahead and use the RAM. But if it isnt, then why is it eating RAM?

I havent faced much problem with hardware incompatibility thankfully and as pointed out thats an issue with any OS upgrade. UAC is annoying but can be useful.

edit : I feel the blog only raised strawmen and then beat them up but did not tackle with the real issues.
Too much slack in this article.

Which is not to say that Microsoft didn’t make some mistakes in launching the OS. They clearly made a few. For one, they gave OEMs too much leeway in deciding what they could or could not slap “Vista Capable” stickers on. And even though it wasn’t entirely their fault that manufacturers screwed this up, it reflects badly on Microsoft. It’s just like when a program crashes your PC. It might not have been Windows’s fault, but you get pissed at it for not preventing it, because that’s its job.

Microsoft told the OEMs exactly what they could stamp Vista capable. It is entirely Microsoft's fault.

If a program can crash the OS, it is the OS's fault. (regular user mode program that is, third party drivers are a different story).
I don't disagree with using the extensions...

... but ...

if you're actually writing 15 lines per box, you're doing it wrong.

refactor refactor refactor
"For one, they gave OEMs too much leeway in deciding what they could or could not slap “Vista Capable” stickers on. And even though it wasn’t entirely their fault that manufacturers screwed this up, it reflects badly on Microsoft."

That, in and of itself, seems to be almost the single point of failure on Vista. OEMs selling Vista Capable computers that don't have nearly enough memory to run Vista DOES reflect very poorly on Microsoft, and its something, that although may remedy itself as processing power improves and becomes cheaper, may not be erased from a lot of people's mind for a while.

As a longtime Windows user (and Apple Fanboy opponent), I certainly am almost ready to make the jump.
Ask HN: Program to build webpages?
i have an application that isnt too heavy on the webside of things, it is mostly the "program" that is the application.

now i wan to put it online and i im just bad at webdesign. im halfdecent at html but i just cant put together a goodlooking page.

is there a program that lets you build css/html/javascript pages easily?
doesnt need to be advanced at all as long as it is correct html4.0+
Implicit here is what I feel is the fundamental problem of "agile"-- that it (completely and totally) depends upon a customer who is willing to commit completely to the agile methodology, and all that it entails. I'm sure that if the customer is on board and supportive, most agile methodologies would work fine-- but I'm sure of this in the same sense that I am sure that if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle.
There will be a pay version of Scalr released soon for a very small monthly fee for those who don't want to install and configure it themselves.
Also to note: no additional languages will be supported.

$@*!.

Well, looks like Heroku will hang around for a while...
The feature that Matt says he likes (searching, eg poker) is much better implemented with Quicksilver on Mac OS X.
Not exactly on the OEMs.I suppose it's impossible to tell who had how much fault, but there's clearly some blame on both sides:

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/02/mi...

As for crashing, depends how you define "fault". If a program causes Windows to crash, where it wouldn't have without that program, it could be said to be the program's fault. I tend to agree with you, since the point of Windows is to be a platform on which programs run, and found myself on that side of the argument against a number of PalmOS fans not that long ago.

You could easily say either party (or both) were at fault, but Windows will be the one more damaged by it. Microsoft would tend to agree too, which is why they spent so much effort making XP resilient to that sort of thing by SP2.
Someone on the Joel forum recently lamented the lack of decent prebuilt web app templates:

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.632032....

I quite agree. Open Designs: http://www.opendesigns.org/ has bazillions of blog and corporate designs, so I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to expect a few more web app templates would be collected somewhere.

I suppose I should be the first to mention Weebly: http://www.weebly.com/
I've used it to bang up a quick UI and it's fine if you can accept its current limitations.
Aho dishes the dirt on AWK
There was actually just a bunch of discussion about BrainTree on one of the mailing lists I read:

http://groups.google.com/group/rails-business/browse_thread/...
Can you easily downsize your product to where it's substantially less than what X, Y, and Z will want, but more than what one-man Joe is offering? This would also give you the possible future opportunity of selling more features as add-ons.
Does it search inside of files? I did like Quicksilver a lot. But it isn't fair to compare an OS against an OS and a third party program.
Blackouts after nuclear shutdown
We are looking into a different product line that has reduced features for a different type of application in the same vein, but when that option was posed to our decision maker he said he wanted all our functionality and wasn't too interested in a stripped down product....
"Corporates not upgrading and OEMs offering XP are not causes themselves."

Agreed, which is why I explained why they exist. I just take issue with the tech industry assuming that the cause of them is Vista sucking, when in fact if Vista were a good operating system, those issues would still exist.
Call by Need Lambda a Poor Man's Macro?
"Can you expound on what's you find horrible about the points and the arrows."

The way they look. Your assessment of the problem is good. You gotta connect the points with the arrows. BUT, the way you does it looks horrible. I don't know how else to say it. FSJ says "It harshes my zen" and that's about the best I can do. Like, in just this one little corner, I'm flashing back to AOL in 1995 or any of a million badly designed games from windows 95. You have a good grasp of your problem, you just need a cleaner looking solution.

I actually think having up and down arrows is too much, but I doubt that's the kind of feedback you are looking for.

If you keep the domain where it is you should make the fonts clash less. Make that look the same as the other stuff on the line. Then it flows nice. It doesn't flow nice when the font is the same as the metadata but you aren't treating it like metadata (I think).

It's obvious you've thought through the redesign. Is nice to see signs of intelligence!
Its code hacking, a part of what hackers do. If it was actually Digg material, it would have been on the Digg frontpage by now.
You don't win by being "good". You win by being outstanding. MS died and stopped being relevent to anything much a long while ago.

What features does vista have that XP doesn't that are worthwhile? What is pushing people to upgrade? Nothing as far as I can see.

Now you can buy PCs without an OS, and some very cool portables like the asus eeepc using linux, I'd expect MS dominance to take a major bashing over the next years on PCs. Not to mention the march of Apple.

You can't really start an article with "As Apple fanboyism has spread throughout the tech publications" and expect to be taken seriously. Especially when you then churn out obvious Microsoft fanboyism.

I think to be honest the whole point is becoming moot. The operating system is becoming irrelevent. Everything is moving onto the web (Despite ms trying hard to stop it by adding bugs and incompatibilites into IE ;) ). Luckily though IE is nose diving in usage.

Add to that the new motherboards that ship with linux for a fast startup into a browser, and what is the reason for most people to boot into a full blown monolithic beast such as vista?
To my eyes it's an improvement. Not perfect.

I think you should put the arrows to the left side, use simpler arrow graphics, and indicate the arrows are linked to the points by making them the same color. Then, make the 1, 2, 3 a lighter color that is there, but more in the background, and delineated in function. You also need to center them between the points and the left edge of the screen. They are slightly too far to the right to my eyes. This would meet your informational requirements while clearing the clutter that is harshing my zen. I think you should keep the change in the screenshot too. The balance is just so much better.