skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did you find that you needed fewer after the upgrade? I'm in the middle of moving my 2.3.5 app to 3.0.3 and am finding that there are fewer plugins as some are now part of rails or made redundant; jrails and subdomain-fu come to mind.
Ask HN: What to do when you're "too early?"
It's a common axiom in the startup world: "Being too early is the same as being wrong." I'm a product guy (mediocre coder) with some ideas on how I think video is going to evolve. The problem? Structurally, there are some existing elements that haven't yet been solved and, I think anyway, will impede the progress of video[1].

My passion is enabling anyone to create TV quality productions on a less-than TV quality budget. Rather than developing ideas into a startup too early, I'm instead focusing on working with other startups, getting a Master's in Professional Comm[2] and enhancing my poor coding skills by pushing some ideas into code form.

Since I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels like they see a trend before it's fully developed, I'm wondering if there's any wisdom for people who are too early. I'm not someone who wants to start startups just to start them, but instead I'm focused specifically on the world of video, and how I want it to progress. Are there any words of wisdom to help someone who's waiting for an ecosystem to mature?

Asides:
[1]- I think the structural issues are all production related, ie waiting for DSLRs to mature to a point that they're feasible for most people to use, and increasing upload bandwidth. On the distribution side, video player frameworks / HTML5 / EC2 have taken care of a lot of the encoding / distribution hurdles.

[2] - The Master's will help me experiment more with the presentation of video, rather than give me some marketable credential, in my view.

[3] - If you think you want to change video to be better, and make it so anyone can create awesome quality video content, we should be friends. email friends@vidplusplus.com so we can pay attention to each other's projects.
CNBC Catches Onto The Fact That Amazon Is Selling Compute Power
Hackers find new way to cheat on Wall Street
50% of people who visit sites having StatCounter thingie present. Not quite a data to consider.
I don't work there.
Top 5 Free Blackberry Games | InfoMov.Com
> I have not looked into this, but does anyone know if it is possible to lock a remote git repo (aside from the automatic push lock)? If one could manually lock the repo, the process would be to lock, pull, push-delete, push-for-real, and unlock.

Or maybe if Git could do a "test and set" on a ref? For example, instead of two step delete and recreate, how about "git push origin +master": forced update, but your Git sends "update master to 1234abcd iff your current master is 5678fedc" where 5678fedc is where origin/master points on your local Git. If someone had snuck in a new commit Git would then fail and you could deal with it. (Of course, on a busy shared repository "deal with it" could take a while if people keep sneaking in commits; but I suspect that kind of commit volume is very rare.)
Seems like a few companies have chosen WebFaction for email hosting. Any specific reason?
Makes sense. I'll do that after I'm done with the meeting I'm in now.

Edit: Changed. However, the number of companies with A records in netblocks that are owned by "Slicehost" is pretty small. Perhaps Rackspace has been working on changing the names on the Slicehost netblocks?
If you're new to running a mail server or linux server, then yes, lots of troubleshooting, etc... If you have someone who knows what they're doing, it's really not a big deal. I don't think I've had to spend any time on any of my mail servers in ages.

Not sure what you mean by additional storage? Local corporate e-mail might take up ~10GB per person after a few years? Most of my servers have 1+ TB of local storage + SAN. Takes a lot of e-mail to fill that up.

Spam and malware filtering are both pretty easy. yum/apt-get install clam and/or spamassissin/razor/pyzor/whatever. If you're running your own server(s) anyhow then backups, user admin, etc... are a sunk cost you've already spent.

If you're running your own servers anyhow, it's really not a big deal. I have a normal GMail account and a enterprise google apps account and both of them have pretty frequent IMAP outages (usually just for 5-15 minutes, nothing serious) whereas my mail servers haven't been down in years (minus planned server migrations). Also, if something does break, I like being able to go in and fix it, without waiting for other people.
As far as I know, Loopt is a 100% Microsoft shop. When they started, large scale hosted Windows subletting wasn't wide spread.
Google gives full 10 minute demo of Android 3.0 Honeycomb at CES
He should have received right at $250,000,000 in dividends on his Disney stock since selling Pixar. He's certainly not hurting for cash, frugal or not.
It seems you're not cognizant of the impact and impression a name like that can give people.

Take some social responsibility. And be prepared to deal with concerns like mine as long as your game has that name.
72 character lines is unnatural to read for long sentences (especially in web browsers).

Also, less has line wrapping and who develops using 80 character terminals anymore? Maybe the author has a time machine back to 1981? I want access to that!
I worked under the same corporate umbrella as the thinkgeek guys before :) If I'm not mistaken, all of their production is outsourced. In this case, though I think the design is partially outsourced, too, since it's a little more complex than a guitar shirt with the bluetooth and all.

I don't really think the April fools stuff is being explicitly used as test marketing, btw, though I think it's a neat side effect. Those guys just really like April fools stuff.
Ditto - the firt few tools were small and only used by my team, the next few were big and used by everybody eventually, working on round 3...
Video: What is an APU? | insideHPC.com
Why? If you improperly implement a system, you don't have to have any reasonable expectation of success.

So you truly believe that forcing everyone to purchase low deductible medical insurance is so deeply flawed that it will not reduce medical bankruptcies at all? Good to know.

That would be incorrect, because medical bankruptcies are the result of medical costs directly.

According to Elizabeth Warren's criteria, anyone who spent $1001 on medical expenses in the 2 years prior to their bankruptcy is classified as a medical bankruptcy. So for example, Michael Vick's bankruptcy was a "medical bankruptcy" by the criteria of the study we are discussing.

(For those unfamiliar, other contributing factors to Vick's bankruptcy were spending wildly on consumer goods like mansions and boats, going to jail, and losing his job as NFL quarterback as a result. But nevertheless, Elizabeth Warren believes this was a medical bankruptcy.)
Any data on Amazon's route53 DNS offering?
Indeed, however if you're running your own server(s) then firewalls/monitoring/IDS/etc... need to be part of your typical setup anyhow. I wouldn't suggest someone who doesn't admin their own servers to get a server for running mail on, but if you manage/secure/backup servers for other stuff, mail is pretty easy to do.
Finally, sad to say, the majority of job applicants are not competent to do serious engineering work.

I've often heard this claim. I have no data for denying it.

However I have a suspicion that when people make this claim the observation that it is actually based on is that "the majority of job applicants aren't very good at answering programmer interview questions.". They are hence making an implicit assumption that not being good at interview questions implies not being competent to do serious engineering work. I think this assumption is highly suspect, because of the extreme differences in stress levels, time scales and general context between interviews and actual work situations.
" I used to love drinking soda. Drank it by the gallons. I stopped due to weight gain. Now I don't crave it, I am mostly repulsed by it"

I've had a similar experience. A few months ago I moved overseas and as a result have drastically changed my diet, including large reductions in salt, sugar and caffeine. The results have been mixed:

- I get huge sugar cravings at times which I've never had before,

- I can't stand the quantities of salt I would have eaten before and it makes me physically sick,

- I have no desire to consume more or less caffeine but when I do have it I can't sleep at all.

I don't know what any of these particular changes mean but I've been surprised by the strength of my bodies reaction to the changed diet.
It should be obvious what he means, which is that the number of X in a piece of technology is multiplied by Y every Z <period of time>.
Simple obvious holes in their DRM solution, even if it is an implementors fault, damage their branding and the perceived value of their app store to businesses. My take on it is, even if it is the developers fault for failing to program their system correctly, it is in Apples best interest to perform some basic validation to prevent the DRM being perceived as useless (even though that's not the case).

Lastly, if the DRM scheme is so dependent on a the 3rd party app to function correctly, it seems like a failed system design.
Host is determined by the name of the owner of the netblock that the IP address of the A record for that domain is in...
Kickstarter: Monadic Design Patterns for the Web (one week left)
Agreed. I spent years thinking of ideas and dropped many of them because I felt they weren't good enough. When one hits that is good enough, don't stop, just do it.
Unlike Shopify, we did not start during the beta days. Certainly we were aware of what was going on and experimented, but our Rails3 branch didn't exist since the spring or anything.

Looking through our git logs, I believe early September is when we really started to look at Rails 3 in earnest. We landed the branch in the second week of November. The code work was a solid month plus, and we spent nearly as much calendar time, and probably more actual person-hours, in testing and fixing thereafter.
automated attacks are easier to prevent, whereas dedicated attacks are harder, and google are much more likely to be the victim of a dedicated attack
Hulu Plus is Coming to Android
Karl Sims: Artifical Evolution for Computer Graphics
Most of the big tech companies have massive amounts of cash. Sure some give a dividend but its small amout and once you do that you stop being seen as growth company.
Twittad: One wild and crazy ride
Motorola’s new Android
Moving from 1024x768 4:3 to 16:9 1900x1200 was an experience and a half. I remember when I only had 256x192 to write code on. Even on the Amiga you'd normally have 320x256 (in PAL land) or at most 640x512 (and a headache from the interlace).

By contrast I can take my 1900x1200 laptop anywhere, fit a full eclipse session with windows and tabs everywhere or have multiple word docs side by side, or terminals everywhere. It's endless, and it's incredible.

Some people prefer 4:3, some 16:9. I think the author's points on total pixels are valid, but claims about missing height, not so much. And if height is such a concern, move your dock/start bar to the side.
Opt in to YouTube Topics
Celebrity Invention
Completely regardless of "social responsibility" or "over-sensitivity" or anything like that: what effect does that name have on sales/downloads? I wouldn't think it'd be good.

And, yes, that's "unfair" since it's a play on Whack-A-Mole (which I've never heard complained about)... are moles more OK to whack than kitties? Still, that's the way the world works, and I wouldn't have used that name for my own game for that reason alone.
A Guide to Stealing Any Movie You Want on the Web
No, I meant in bash. I guess as a developer he spends some time there (that might be a false assumption, of course).

I've been using Shift+PGUP for ages and absolutely despise Laptops where it's buried under FN+Cursor - which usually requires both hands to press.

Perhaps there's an alternative key combination that I don't know about - which is part of why I ask.
Doesn't YC have a special discount with one or more of the hosting providers, which might be influencing decisions?
I'm a guy, and I like both hardcore porn and erotic stories with plots and emotions ... really depends on my mood.

And about Internet porn: those people can barely have sex properly (does anyone believe the "screams" of those women?), making them act (something other than sucking, pumping and taking it) would be a disaster.

IMHO that's why the state of the art is the way it is ... it's cheaper and it gives you a piece of reality (i.e. people with imperfections, instead of models that can't act).
Would be more interesting if it were "Joe Blow, CEO of ABC Widget Co."

Steve Jobs is such an outlier, we'll still be reading his quotes with Einstein's and Yogi Berra's in 150 years.
I object to any executive making $59 million of the stockholder's money. It either goes back to the stockholders or is reinvested into company operations.
I don't think we dropped a drastic number of plugins or gems. Probably a few, but then again we added a few as well to keep old features active as we transition out some deprecated Rails patterns.
Tim Cook is worth every penny.
I've been thinking exactly the same thing, but giving investors the option to get shares. Something like micro-angels, offer a pool of 1000 shares valued at 5% of your startup and sell them for say $10 each, or something like that.

Easy for people to invest in ideas they like and still being able to own something from the startup.
thanks to Chrome
Im guessing they will use the cash reserves to fund their own growth. They just bought HP's old campus in Cupertino and will spend quite a bit on the build out.
If you have a narrow use case for a vast XML API/file format this is always the right approach (whether it's SOAP or not).
"Flavour of the month" might be a bit harsh. It certainly is popular these days, so it's not wholly inappropriate. But it's worth noting JSON/REST is popular with, and largely because of, people who've learned the painful lessons of earlier messes like SOAP.

It's not (just) a hot new thing used by new faces who've never really known any other way.
I'm imagining that you were the surgeon. "Appendectomy? Yeah, there's an app for that."
Figure out a way to get real evidence of whether or not it will work before the decision is made purely on the basis of your internal beliefs.

Reframe your criticisms from "This is bad." to "This aspect needs improving because of the following problems: , , , ."
Oh! I made a mistake. You do not have to delete or use the special config flag if you use --force for your push. I wondered why I remembered doing this on side branches. With --force, we do not have to do this. Also, I think you need to make sure you have -u on this kind of push so that you maintain your tracking connection, but I am not 100% positive.

Don't do this:

git push origin :master

Do this:

git push -u --force origin master:master
Pump power storage facilities have been online for decades. They are often near nuclear facilities which can not easily throttle up and down:

http://www.nypa.gov/facilities/blengil.htm

I think your analogy to a battery is correct for these pump storage operations while a container of batteries is, by analogy, closer to a capacitor: able to deliver high pulses of current quickly but only for a very short time.
You can't talk yourself out of talking yourself out of ideas. What's happening is that your mind is telling you that your overall approach is wrong. You're thinking of ideas in a bottom-up, depth-first manner. You think of a product, and then your mind races through a chain of obvious conclusions of what the product and its features should look like. Then a few hours later your mind rejects it as crap. That's probably because it is crap, since in practice it's not how great products get designed.

Instead, try to think of it in a top-down, breadth-first manner. Pick a market you care about, and the best product in that market. Then think for a week how you could improve that product by an order of magnitude. List ideas. Throw them out. List more. When we're talking about disruptive improvement, thinking about it in terms of "orders of magnitude" is hard, so try to think about it in terms of what huge, meaningful thing the users could do that they can't do now. Design a new product that has a fundamental reason to exist (doing the same thing differently is not a reason).

This way, instead of trusting in your idea, you'll have to put trust into the fact that you can design a great product. I found this to be much easier - in this case all you have to do, is do your best. It's hard for anyone to do anything more than that.
Bolo
Even with the 30% coupon it's still not cheaper for the first year or following years.
I think I know what Apple's 1B Data Center is for
one could argue that giving the executives those shares is investing into company operations.
20% are working poor. 35% are children. Of the remaining 45%, half of them are women, almost all with children. Often the issue with working when you have children to take care of is the inability to afford childcare if you take a job. The costs of childcare for two children can easily make a minimum wage job untenable.

What's propaganda is the idea that ranks of the poor are populated by low-life do-nothings, and if we only just ripped what little safety net they had out from under them, they'd all be startup entrepreneurs writing Twitter mashups like good citizens.
Yeah, this bug has convinced me that, when I get an Android phone, it has to be a Nexus.
What Did JavaScript Get Wrong?
I was going to mention, I found it hard to believe there wasn't a single Startup using Linode.
The PR2 robot seem to be overpowered and overengineered, making it cost too much.

I think the robot could do better by being easily producible by hobbyists and by using off the shelf component.

That being said, I am not an electrical engineer.
It is but I value my time more than the one dollar difference between GoDaddy and namecheap... I don't want to spend time navigating through all the bunch of upsell crap from GoDaddy and then pulling my hair dealing with their awful dns settings...
* This list is generated by our algorithm, it's the most important sites which our algorithm thinks are spam. The point of making the list public is so that you guys can tell us when we're wrong. Google has a list like this, but they don't show it to anyone. Transparency in action.

Thank you all for pointing out false positives in the list. That is what we hoped would happen.

* The "nocrawl" sites are human-picked by us. Geocities is on the list because it was a very spammy domain. Even though they've (finally) removed the data, we still have old data indexed, and will remove them from the spam list once all that old data ages out.

* BT is the hosting company for comparethemarket.com
We're not 100% Microsoft. Probably 80% though.

We do it for security and privacy reasons. It matters less now, but for getting early carrier deals it was key, and now those agreements still bind us.

I use Amazon EC2 personally and would love to use it for more at Loopt, but can't.
> Do you think they don't have a text box on an internal webpage to search all of Gmail?

That kind of thing would leak out sooner or later.
I don't think its much at all. I think WP7 gets about 600K downloads per day, and that's WP7.

The iOS store gets over 16 million downloads per day.

Given the existing user base and with it being the launch day of the store, 1M downloads looks pretty mediocre.
Tim Wu on Net Neutrality and Technology Life-cyles
It may not be vague for a user who knows the current context, but I still think that using a descriptive verb is better than the generic 'submit'. For "Create Account" even "Create" would give some idea as to what will happen when the user presses the button.

I remember being impressed by the Mac HIG that said all dialogs should have buttons with a verb instead of the typical Windows "Ok"/"Cancel". It informs the user slightly more and, I think, reduces the likelihood of automatically clicking "Ok" as some interfaces effectively 'train' a user to do.
It really isn't that difficult. Except for spam; that one's really a kicker, and is the reason I finally switched to utilizing Google.
Apple made $14 Billion last year....
I believe in that philosophy, personally, but I doubt it has anything to do with why Steve Jobs takes a $1 salary. It's not as if Apple would suffer if he were to take a bigger salary.

I think it has more to do with the "Zen" of Steve Jobs. The bottom line is that Steve Jobs doesn't do it for the money, and he has all the money he'll ever need.

http://books.google.com/books?id=9zzvMOF4PEwC&pg=PA44...
It's just investing in the executives. Actually investing in company operations means spending money to get things, not giving away money. Giving Tim Cook a ton of money doesn't actually get Apple anything. He could quit tomorrow and Apple wouldn't feel it at all.
Hidden device distorts news on wireless networks
Funny ... however Freud was a fraud :-)

Seeing as my wife and I share all funds, it would not be "me" buying "her" something, as us having a discussion as to whether this was an acceptable purchase.

HK is huge in Asian countries especially, which is where my wife is from- I readily admit to confusion over HKs appeal.

BTW did you know that HK is the weight of 3 apples and the height of 5 apples?
Of course the startup might not be registered yet, so the legal aspects must be studied with care. But having a list of 'donors' and honoring that list when the startup grows is the right thing to do.
I can't remember which dialog it is in Windows, but the most hideous example uses the standard Yes/No/Cancel buttons out of context but explains beforehand what each one does, like this:

-To continue closing the program and save the document, click "Yes"
-To continue working without saving, click "Cancel"
-To save and then continue working click "No"

Which takes you five minutes to read and could have easily been replaced by set of a "Save and Close," "Save and Continue" and "Cancel" buttons.
Whacking any kind of animal is not cool.

But I wonder, with all the creative possibilities in the universe, why would someone design a game around abusing kittens?
A common platform for robot development could really boost innovation in robotics. I smell disruption.
so deeply flawed that it will not reduce medical bankruptcies at all?

Yes, which is why I support a national health care system, like France or Germany. A public option, which Massachusetts lacks, has also been shown to work better, although I don't consider it ideal by any stretch.

According to Elizabeth Warren's criteria

First off, we don't need to use Elizabeth Warren's criteria to recognize how medical bankruptcies affect people. There's plenty of studies out there which use different criteria, but none of which conclude with Zero.
It still isn't if you want to be using the latest and greatest. Even Amazon only offer Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. We're using the R2 editions of both.
Aren't there SEC issues with this in the USA? It seems like I heard something about non accredited investors that limits this type of system. But I may be wrong.
I'm interested in seeing aggregates of technology choices like: primary database, main programming language(s), frameworks, etc
Everybody already knows what I'm going to say but by golly it is the right answer: test which one performs better for your site. 2 + 2 = 4, in the time it takes two highly paid people to debate "Submit!" versus "Sign up" you can have the A/B test already running and be back doing productive stuff.