skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
good enough isn't something apple seems willing to compromise with on their displays. they were pretty clear about the 300ppi benchmark and it's significance when they announced the iphone 4. my guess is they never dip below that again on their phones.
I have found this exact thing to be true. I launched my first (fulltime) startup this past summer, and the insight of my "core group" was simply brilliant. I ended up asking 3 of them to join my board, and they have not only helped me avoid mistakes, but steered me into a profitable direction as well.

Great article Brian, the breadth of this article is fantastic.
I am talking purely from a market perspective. The X10 was hotly anticipated and was set to make waves...but then it was announced that it was coming with 1.6 and that balloon deflated almost instantly. It is a gorgeous device, but a simple software misstep seriously hobbled its adoption.

Dell has suffered the same outcome for its entrants into the Android field. Clearly they were trying to enter the market on the cheap and it hurt them.
I've got the 'tag, push, rebase, restart' and 'oshit, rollback, restart' as ordinary rake tasks, so it's not like there's much cognitive load there. I've bothered with cap in the past if I've been pushing to more than one server, but it's not that much more effort to just do "ssh in a loop" and avoid a dependency.
I agree, but I would add that they're overhyped as well. I think Facebook's value is somewhere in the middle between current expectations / valuations and a fad. So yes it's big, it will continue to be big, but it's not and never will be Google big.

I could be completely wrong though considering the engineers who've left google for facebook, but then again, maybe that was just for a massive payout?
The podcast mentioned in the article is excellent. I think the HN crowd would really enjoy listening.
What sort of business are you in?
If you're on a mac, you already have rails and ruby 1.8.6 (osx 10.5) or 1.8.7 (osx 10.6).

Just sudo gem update to get the latest version and you're good to go.
Finland – Freezing Cold, But So Hot Right Now
A new structured way to plan apps sounds good, but what makes your site unique and impressive?

My first impression is that it's a flow chart in the form of an outline. The outline looks like something I could just as easily type into any text editor. Why not make it a visual flow chart?
Practical Semantic Web and Linked Data Applications, Common Lisp Edition [pdf]
HTML5 logo created using HTML markup and CSS
Is there any sane, non-exploitative reason to offer someone 1% as a cofounder? Or was the author just using that as a reference point?
Before I clicked the link the title seemed like an article which would argue why a real chalkboard is better than computers for planning.
We are planning to release the next batch of 50 coupons on Friday! Stay tuned...
I'm on Sprint with a Samsung Moment, forever stuck on 2.1. The Moment was officially dropped by Samsung 9 months from release with the only recent update being a fix* to the radio driver because the CDMA radio would die so badly it couldn't call out (including being unable to call 911...an FCC violation) and it required a reboot to fix.

Sprint has been known to replace it for free with an HTC Hero if you throw enough tantrums and demand enough replacements of the same model, but really, Samsung is to blame here. I will never own another Samsung phone and have prevented others from buying them as well. I've personally given up hopes of the problem ever being rectified, but I'm switching my family to Verizon/iPhones at the end of my contract.

* It didn't really fix anything. The radio still dies randomly, just slightly less often.
U.S. Cellular at least just announced it will be rolling out Froyo on a bunch of their phones: http://www.gizmocrunch.com/android/4707-android-froyo-htc-de...
Rate my pseudo-startup
I used an easy reddit-like website creator called slinkset to create a social news site for events in NYC:

http://www.youvoteevents.com/

I made it on a whim to create a web property for the real start-up I work for, reco jeans. All of the content I added myself a while back.

What do you think, HN, does the idea have potential? Should I actually focus on bringing users to it or abandon it?
I'm not sure what you are suggesting can change. You cannot completely bypass the big banks with just proximity payments. That's where the money is. Apple can help you move your money, from your bank account, to a merchant, into their bank account, but that's just Paypal level of functionality, nothing new.

Proximity non-card payments will change the situation for the debit/credit card operators, and possibly to a degree for Paypal-like services. Big banks are here to stay, and if they change something, it'll sooner be reasonably priced wire transfers to cut out the Paypal/cheque alternatives from hell.
In fairness to Samsung they do incur non-trivial cost doing this.

Imagine this situation Verizon says, "Our Samsung Galaxy S phone must get 2.2" while Sprint says, "No need". Should Sprint have to pay for what Verizon is getting?

The issue is that you're going to pay, whether its Samsung or HTC. Some companies will build the price into the phone, others will price it in some other way (or some companies could eat the cost -- but that's probably not sustainable).

Charging directly to the end user seems like the best way to do it. If I want 2.2, then I should pay for it, and if I'm happy with 2.1 why should I pay for other people to get 2.2? But short of that, charging the carriers makes sense.
He's using a local survey and comparing it to Groupon's full statistics. Very biased comparisons.
We have the fastest server we could conveniently get about a year ago. But I just asked Rtm if we could get something better.

Unfortunately processors don't seem to get faster at the rate they used to. Now they just have more cores, and I believe MzScheme can only use one core.

I think the solution is to make the software faster. There's probably some small hack we could make somewhere in the guts of the system that would make it 10x faster. I'm thinking of having a make-HN-faster contest, but first I have to release a more current version of the code.
dup, sorry: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2116692. Deleted.
Don't be wrapped up in creating the next Paypal. A very small business can be a big thing for you and your family. Once you've created a healthy income from full-time self-employment, then you can start changing the world.

I've known from an early age that I wanted to work for myself, and I've structured my life to make that possible. I've always had side projects going - through high school, college, and two full-time jobs.

When the side projects grew profitable enough and we had socked away enough money, I quit my job to work on my business full-time. My wife was about twelve weeks pregnant when I gave my notice.

That was a bit over a year ago, and I haven't looked back. I'm financially conservative, so I probably waited longer than others in my shoes would have. I had enough income to support a basic lifestyle (I call it "pork-chop profitability"), and if the income dried up we had enough savings for a couple years. It was a high bar, but with a baby on the way I didn't want to be reckless.

Start working on small, attainable side projects with immediate revenue potential. Pick two targets: self-employed income and non-retirement savings. When you hit both targets, it's time to go full-time. And most importantly, make sure your family supports you and understands your ambition.

Best of luck.
You can deploy it to your own instance of EC2 or Rackspace or GoGrid or you can run your apps directly on the http://NodeFu.com hosted platform.
Doing It For a Living
"He should use Groupon once to make more money. He should not use it more than once because it will devalue his service. Also Groupon takes a huge part of the business"

There is a thing called customer acquisition. Yes some people are looking for deals. But even if you get 5% of people who used Groupon to come back again you got your self a constant source of revenue.

Companies kill for those type of clients.

That's why you have contracts for services and companies throw massive $$$ just to acquire you as a locked in customer.

So unless your charts keep track of all the customers Groupon sends to you and tracks their purchases at your store/whatever for a whole year, you can put those charts in a bathroom just in case toilet paper runs out.

They are useless.
You could change the HN title, to begin with ;-)
David, that's a great question.

We actually started out by displaying user flows as flow charts... we quickly realized that flow charts are an inefficient way to display a comprehensive batch of sequential user actions and application flows. It IS easier to type outlines in a text editor than mess around with flow charts.

We transferred that realization to this web app.

Our user actions are linked to application screens, which gives you a good overview of how your user interacts with your application.
Just bought a Vibrant last week. After all the reported issues...I'm on the fence on whether to return it. It's a beautiful phone and seems faster than my Droid 2...even running Eclair. Still, the GPS is weak to non-existent at times, and although I can upgrade the phone myself I'd rather have an official version. Ugh.
Wait, didn't everyone like XP more than Vista? I know I used Windows from version 3.1 right up until my experiences with Vista convinced me that spending an extra $1000 to get a MacBook Pro instead of a Vista laptop was completely worth it...
I haven't read the article, yet, but if you encounter this situation, the form is subject to man in the middle (MITM) attack on the way to your browser. Given access to that datastream, the destination can easily be changed. Do you check the destination for each such form before you submit?

(Not to mention, the page can be compromised to sniff your activity even if you never actually submit.)

It's bad UI because it breaks users of the habit -- that took some time and effort to establish -- of looking for a secure connection before entering sensitive information.

It's bad security for -- amongst other things -- the reason described above.
Sometimes the only way to address problems with entrenched interests is to change the playing field, technology can serve this purpose. So instead of having to fight tons of battles against teachers unions, implements some technology that drastically weakens their position -- in this new landscape political battles can now be won.

I of course think school vouchers is the end all be all of school reform since it allows anyone to open a school and to compete with any ideas that they think might win...
Mark Twain probably had the same teacher
Could Native Client be the way forward for this approach?

Link: http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient-sdk/
Major change in FFmpeg maintainership and governance
The burden is really the complete opposite here. Certainly someone shouldn't have to defend a definition? That said, I've always considered "client side" a sufficient encompassing terminology.

If we repurpose the term HTML5... what precisely, then, do you propose we call HTML5?
It's actually much worse than that. Not only would whatever created it have to live in a universe that allowed some form of intelligence - which is unsatisfying, but not all that much worse than "big bangs happen"; not only does it need a creator, it needs a creator with a universe that is computationally far more powerful than our own.

After all, the only way in which we can simulate physical phenomena well is by actually running the experiment. Sure, computer software is very helpful when building a plane, but we still need wind tunnels. I'm convinced that we will create more powerful computers, but I'm not aware of any claims that a particle can be used to accurately simulate two particles... or even one millionth of a particle. (Note that reality doesn't seem to have accumulated any rounding errors even after running for a couple billion of years.)
Google had the same issues with AdSense in the early days but was able to tune the product to normalize value to an acceptable rate. For example, at the network level you can apply discounters per site depending on the ROI of ads on this site vs network-wide to reward the higher quality sites on the network. I'd guess that Facebook will make a move towards advertiser value at some point and find some way of discounting around performance, or allowing for differentials based on the demographic being targeted.
I use an iPhone daily, and have only played with friends Androids, but the Android back hard key doesn't work as well for me. I think it's asymmetric position works worse for people whose thumb is on the other side of the device (if they're a lefty). No such issue with iPhones home button; there's no wrong option.
If Groupon makes money by taking it away from advertisers, these numbers are compelling. Just consider John Wanamakers famous line: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

The fact that this quip still has plenty of currency a century later indicates just how exposed the advertising business really is.
this is an example of one of my more "wholesome" projects
I actually find Touchwiz to be a few steps above the default Android experience. The colors are nice...the icons are beautiful. My vanilla Droid 2 running Froyo looks dull comparison.
Eek, A Male
In Michael Lewis's _The Big Short_, some of the people buying CDSs (unregulated "insurance") on mortgage backed securities that they didn't own did the trades with brokers that had never done it before, but figured it out.

All it takes is a willing accomplice with the right connections.
PS3 hackers make Modern Warfare 2 'unplayable,' Infinity Ward cannot patch a fix
It’s not nearly as clear as you make it out to be. Of the randomized controlled trials that I know of [1], one study has shown that reducing class size from 25 to 15 has a large positive effect, but another has shown that reducing class size from 40 to 30 has no effect. Also, assigning a teacher’s aide, so that a class of 50 is taught by two people also has no effect. The problem is that such studies are expensive and hard to generalize. Is it really that going from 25 to 15 always has an effect and that going from 40 to 30 never does, or was there something about the particular circumstances of those trials that made class size matter in one case and not the other?

Another problem is that even if reducing class size is effective is that, in the short run, there’s a fixed supply of good teachers. This isn’t a problem when you’re running an RCT on a few schools, but if you want to initiate state-wide (or nation-wide) reform, it’s not clear that throwing a bunch of unqualified teachers into small classrooms will help.

[1]Hacsi’s Children as Pawns: The Politics of Educational Reform has a good summary of evidence to date, as of 2003
87% want to quit because of low performers
Interesting. On a related note, Gabe shat all over the ps3 when it came out and said Valve would never develop for it. [1] I wonder what made him change his mind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR8CVLVmKQs&feature=relat...
See also:
http://bgpatterns.com/ and http://www.stripegenerator.com/
1. It would be awesome if you incorporate transitions between the single page design elements instead of jumping back up then back down.

2. On my 13" the screenshots are too big, then I have the chat widget overlaying on top.
I like the idea. Some nits ...

- I don't like the idea of a dedicated logon. Have you thought of using a person's Facebook, Twitter, etc. logins? And how about using Facebook connect to tell me which events have been upvoted/submittedby my friends.

- How do you prevent spammers?

- What are the incentives of a user to submit an event? I can imagine there are times where users don't want an event to get too crowded (e.g. Tim Burton exhibit at the MOMA). Or only have my posse know about it.
"Evolution in real world isn't so drastic."

Remember that elephants (and all other life on this planet) evolved from single-celled organisms (and even from non-life), which are far more different from elephants than even apes are. So drastic evolutionary changes do happen in the real world. But they just take a very long time.

The problem is that not only do we not have millions or even billions of years to evolve our artificial organisms, but that the environments in which our artificial organisms grow, their representation, and the operations performed on them during their "lifetime" and during breeding are incredibly restricted and simplified compared to what happens in the real world.

It's very difficult to model even a tiny fraction of that (see the supercomputer time dedicated to creating a detailed model of even a single neuron, for instance). And, as for the programs that are evolved via GP, it's rare for them to be allowed to create completely arbitrary code. Their instruction sets are usually very limited so as to reduce the search space. They are also usually given quite limited data to work with, are modified very little during their lifetimes (if at all), and the sorts of things that can happen during breeding are similarly curtailed. So it's really no wonder that their existence and evolution is not always so spectacular as what nature has been able to achieve over the millenia.

Now, the problem you mention regarding the disruptive nature of mutation (crossover can also have this effect) is also important. The attempts to solve it have generally focused to finding ways to reduce this disruption (usually by making the crossover or mutation less random). I recommend searching Citeseer for "destructive crossover" to see examples of some proposed solutions.
Sorry, but mail me for this piece of information...
Thanks for the positive feedback and endorsement..after working a couple months on Chalkboad, its really nice to see people appreciating it.
ruby 1.8.7 is required for Rails 3; so Leopard/10.5 users need to install ruby 1.8.7 manually to get started as if they didn't have ruby installed at all, I think.
Am I missing something here? Because Nodejitsu's logo is a bonsai tree and NodeFu's is a ninja ...
Instant Tagging for Your Site (review my MongoDB powered startup)
Volvo's 'Road Train' Automobile Convoy Technology
HP webOS tablet leaks
Why do people read this drivel? Its Corporate PR in the form of a blog.

The collective "fuck" that he felt had nothing to do with steve job's health and everything to do with hoping there is an iPad mini unveiled at the next keynote.

While he idolizes steve jobs, it is apple that brings him his beloved products, so he is hoping that one of his Kowtow yes-men will be able to step up and be the narcissistic "rock-star" and keep delivering updates of his overpriced yuppie toys.
There was an article on this I read a year ago called Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement

http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/11/awesome-by-proxy-addicte...
This is an outstanding article. The idea of a core group containing people genuinely interested in all members' success is absolutely compulsory to launch a great product. The whole thing is true honesty and openness; you have to be able to completely trust, on many levels, the people in your group.

My group contains friends I've known since college, from a variety of unrelated majors. We all work on different projects, but we keep in constant contact and offer to each other the brutal honesty that members of our respective teams could not otherwise offer. Additionally, we use each of our unique experiences to identify new problems, and new areas that might be worth pursuing. It's an incredible feeling.

Actually, for a long time, I've been thinking about creating a site that facilitates pairing people together for this purpose. I've been throwing around a few ideas for it, and have a pretty decent idea churning in the back of my mind. How interested would you guys be in a site like okcupid for entrepreneurs?
but first I have to release a more current version of the code.

Please do that, some people are dying to see some of the stuff that goes under the hood. Of course things like hell banning may not be released, but some of the ranking and "ask" page stuff would be awesome to look into.
Is College Really a Million Dollar Investment?
I only post stuff to Facebook that I would tell any random stranger, like I had a good trip somewhere or I read a good book or I saw a movie. Even if I was convinced of the privacy of that site, I still want there to be a bit of mystery.
I have the Fission ROM for the Droid X and it looks completely stock. You can get certain parts from Gingerbread, such as the status bar and Launcher ( the Launcher app is basically the home screen ), or you can stick with the stock ones from Froyo.
Bring Goldman some cash and tell them that's what you want to do. Oh wait, they're long Facebook so they wouldn't want to create a derivative like that. Oh wait.
It's hard to review the app without bias when I immediately had to scroll to the bottom to see if 37signals created this product. So much of the website, sales pitch, and product sensibility has been inspired by 37signal that there is some serious brand confusion. It makes me wonder how well you know your own product, or how unique it is.

After registering, I see the value. 10 years ago, I used to have to plan websites by mocking up each page, printing them out, and taping them all up onto a giant wall with post-it notes explaining what the user can do on each page. This was the only way that management could really visualize and understand what changes we were making. This allows you to do that without the wall, and the collaboration is a nice addition. It's also a great way to look back and see how a project came to light. I often jot down these sorts of notes when planning a web app.

I recommend you reconsider being so inspired by 37signals that it's hard to tell your site apart from theirs. I think I'm being kind in how I'm describing this to you. It's very confusing for any user who is familiar with 37signals and it makes your product less trustworthy.
What a terrible idea.

I'm sorry, I know this sounds very low-tech of me, but high-school aged kids need an authority figure, who is clearly in charge, teaching them material. Lecturing in-person. Building relationships. I, for one, even at my age, cannot long burden myself with CBT. People just don't take it seriously enough. Let's face the reality of humanity: we are what robots will ultimately become, and some things are just better between humans than between a human and a computer.
Sorry about that! Regarding switching elements, there should be a TOP button located at the top right of each element. We'll get this fixed as soon as the HN burst stops, I'm very sorry, Jerry.
Venture Capital's New Normal
Wikipedia 10 Years: The State of Wikipedia [video]
So if you add in the time it took to find your Core Peer Group who could make all that happen in four weeks, how long did it really take you?
But if Honeycomb (somehow) makes its way into smartphones, the struggle might well be over for Android!

For reference:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/07/exclusive-interview-googl...
Sure, a key-value store would work. My point is that the OP's system is not such a store. He just stores 10 PBs of raw data with no indexing and no duplication, so there is no way to retrieve data and comparison with hard disks is meaningless. My post was an answer to his "please correct my math".
I made a screencast of that for anyone who prefers that method: http://www.rubyinside.com/how-to-install-ruby-1-9-2-and-rail...
In cygwin, the mintty terminal has great looks (ansi colors and pretty smooth font).

http://code.google.com/p/mintty/
No, my blog post is standalone and doesn't need Koza's software. Then again it doesn't even begin to approach his GP software in abilities.
Anybody know the Frank Kim who wrote the article? I tried to contact him to say that his captcha always says "invalid" but he doesn't have any contact info on there that I could find...