skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think "every other country" is wildly overstating the case.

Here is an article on alchohol and homicide in Russia: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447353/
Some of us will never be able to really accept the idea that $30m isn't a metric shitload of money, for anything, let alone a faddish humour website.

Whenever I see these numbers I can't help but think about how much food you can buy for $30m. I know economics is obviously more complex than that, building wealth helps the world etc. but I still find it impossible to get over this. Just being honest.
Not only does it take several keys, but the placement of the keyboard is just awkward (I have a DX). If I have to take any meaningfully note I have to place the DX on the table/lap/somesurface and I chicken peck my note out.

Not to convenient, but I still love my Kindle for pure reading.
This simple example is using YUI 3.3.0 which has support for high-level, device-independant, gesture events which made it easy to make the logo spin when flicked with a mouse or touch gesture. It is also using YUI 3’s CSS transitions module to do the rotateY CSS Transform.

It works in WebKit browsers: Safari, Chrome, MobileSafari (iOS), Android, and should work on BlackBerry Touch 6.0.

View the source on the page, its short and straight forward.
Wikileaks May Have Used P2P Networks to Get Data
That wasn't my point. I know they are safe. But you have to yield, and that breaks the "train".
It opens one new attack vector I think---any exploit targeting an Android phone could be used to deliver a different exploit to the computer the phone is connected to. Given that this requires a kernel driver (on the phone side), it would have to be pretty great exploit. You would have to be pretty motivated to do this instead of, e.g. sending 1 billion emails with an attached virus.jpg.exe, but it is a new vector.
Not if you get a lawyer to take your case for a % of the eventual settlement/suit. Which I think is a relatively common practice. Not sure how it works and I am not an expert, but I imagine a lot of enterprising lawyers would be willing to take that deal. Twitter will likely settle to end it, and they can take a good percentage.
For New Social Networks, Sharing Can Be More Focused
I have been doing this for a year with a Linode small instance and it works like a charm - although I only use it through a Putty terminal.

I had initially set it up to code small ruby scripts remotely that help me with my day job (mostly to scrape websites with the excellent Scrapi gem). Since IT would not let anyone install anything on their computers, but still left port 443 wide open, I gave it a try.

The added benefit is that working on a linux box through Putty forces you to learn a real terminal text editor - in my case Emacs. I guess I can thank IT now ;)
Without Forbes' editorial slant it's an index of prosperity rather than happiness.

Without any empirically verifiable data, you've basically got an index that's hugely dependent upon subjective perceptions and influenced by cultural views of how one ought to feel.

Does anyone really believe that Europeans are less "well-rested" than the Chinese who work 12 hour days to put cheap consumer goods on their tables? Is greater American scepticism about "working hard gets you ahead" because Chinese society is more meritocratic and entrepreneur-friendly, or because the Chinese have a greater cultural imperative to work hard? Is it fierce patriotism rather than a lack of violent political dissent in the past few years that leaves Thais more confident in their judiciary, finances and free choice than Westerners? And do the British really have little more reason to be confident in their financial institutions than the Zimbabweans, or are we just a nation of cynics?
Things might get better thanks to the new Azure Appliances (which are only 6 months old).

I said it when Azure first started: No one wants an abstract cloud. Because it means they're stuck with that platform. If I'm on EC2 I can easily move to rackspace or my own private server. But with Azure I'd have to rewrite the whole darn program.

The Azure Appliance doesn't completely solve that but at least it gives you the ability to move to your own data center. Which in turn should make Azure a little more viable

(Though Amazon's stolen Azure's best trick with beanstalk)
Many many fewer HTTP requests.
That list seems to mainly just punish the biggest consumers and reward exporters. Meanwhile, if the USA (#114) decided to be responsible and stop consuming so much, a lot of people in China (#10) Vietnam (#5) Brazil (#9) and Saudi Arabia (#13) would become very unhappy very quickly.
None of your links provide any evidence that the company was legally obligated to do any of those naughty things.
Many people do this. If you see a website for a product developed by a single person, more often than not they will use "we".
I think Qwiki's main website should have been linked here, not the story on TC.

I would vote up that one.
I approve of this idea. It would need a good way to hunt down real owners behind shell companies and such though to make sure they aren't just cheating.
Looking at the raw data, this seems to mostly be down to the outlying high level of healthcare spend (which is for most nations strongly positively correlated with better outcomes).
"Companies do bad stuff" != "Companies are legally required to do bad stuff".
Regardless of whether we should or shouldn't emulate the real, I still stand by my statement that swipes and taps are superior to the Kindle interface. Perhaps in your case despite rather than because that interaction is more like reading a physical book.
Actually, I think I figured out why the US ranks well in health. Rather than measuring outputs, they also measure a weighted average of inputs, outputs, and opinions. Opinions include features like "Satisfaction with Environmental Beauty" (I'm sure the US is close to the top here).

http://www.prosperity.com/health.aspx
How To Write The Perfect Meta Article
Like most reporters during the bubble, in my early startup-focused writing, I lavished too much attention on the investors. My then-editor David Churbuck would call me into his office, sit me down and tell me that investors are a good way to judge if a company is worthy of a story. He would tell me that investment dollars and investors help you define a story, but they are never the story.

http://gigaom.com/2010/11/09/repeat-after-me-investors-are-n...
Ah, the classic "Holier than thou" attitude of some technical people. 375 million pageviews a month, between ads and merchandise sales I'd be really surprised if they make anything less than 7 figures a month in revenue. Hate the company if you wish, but investing in them is far from an indicator of a bubble, in my opinion.
Seems like there's an important lesson in here:

"As Bill Gates was attempting to correct this egregious error, he was introduced to a black-haired gnome by the name of Gordon Letwin, who proceeded to chew him out in front of a group of about fifteen people. Letwin, the author of Heath's BASIC, felt his turf was being violated and by the purveyor of an inferior product to boot. Bill Gates nonetheless prevailed, selling Heath his BASIC and FORTRAN for H-DOS, a proprietary operating system Letwin had developed for Heath. But Letwin had instinctively understood how to win the favor of William Henry Gates: Stand up to the guy. By the end of the year Gordon Letwin would come to work for Microsoft and begin work on a BASIC compiler."

I read a similar anecdote about Steve Jobs at Next. He was interviewing candidates for a finance position, I think, and would basically belittle their previous experience and question their competence. The first guy who told Steve off to his face was the guy he hired.
well, my sister does the bookkeeping that doesn't require an accountant, you know, dealing with buying equipment and such, and we're still sorting that out (I'm having the accountant train her, so it's probably more expensive, for now at least, than a regular bookkeeper would be, but that will change once she's up to speed.) Really, though, that's not the problem. Yeah, I buy equipment every month, but not that much equipment. For a while I was having the accountant do that bookkeeping for me, and it worked okay (though that was a whole lot more expensive than a regular bookkeeper. Accountants charge a lot more than bookkeepers.) You are talking in the low tens of transactions a month, if you don't count my small customers, so accounting for my expenses and income from large customers can be done manually even using rather expensive labor.

But I have a rather large number of very small customers. my median customer is probably close to $8 or $12 a month. Considering that I've got to pay for power/hardware out of that, really, if it requires /any/ human intervention for every monthly bill, even if that human bills me at bookkeeper rates rather than accountant rates, I'll have to raise my prices, probably above that of the competition, which uses custom in-house billing software, as far as I can tell.
Also see the comments on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2124193
I did a whole series of interviews with companies that recently finished Startupbootcamp in Copenhagen, Denmark about their experience during the program:

http://www.mo.com/ben-johnson-and-james-hobbis

http://www.mo.com/artas-bartas

http://www.mo.com/juan-moreno

http://www.mo.com/ciprian-borodescu
But they're already profitable and have a proven business model (gain attention, sell it to advertisers). I have serious doubts about their ability to make good use of $30MM, but I don't think it's vaporware, either. This could be a case of smart founders taking liquidity in an era of cheap money.
Excelerate is good, most of the companies have raised money as a result.
>First, SMS is reliable transport.

Not particularly. I've had messages dropped a few times--especially when sending from AT&T to Verizon. I've also had messages delayed a day or more, which was as bad as dropping them.

It's more reliable than some of the old paging systems (some of which didn't do retransmissions), but it's much less reliable than voice, which is its main competitor today.
Bob was my best buddy freshman year. He's a great fellow, though I've lost track of him lately.

He left Microsoft because he was never able to break into the tight "inner circle" of Gates, Ballmer and Allen, even though he was classmates of all of them.

I guess I shoulda taken his advice and joined MS as #8 way back when... ;-)
> But the fact that US citizens accept third-world level healthcare is baffling to me.

US healthcare, even the free stuff, is well above third-world level. The typical is very comparable.

Yes, the US life-expectancy stats aren't fantastic, but healthcare isn't the only variable. (Look at the disease cure rates - we do very well on cancer for example.)
Development and production can run on the same network then, which depending upon what you're doing can make development way faster.
To give a counter-anecdote, the organization I work for bought several Google Search Appliances and we have had excellent support. Granted, GSAs are not cheap. However, I do think Google has the organizational capacity to provide good support when they want to.
Why would I need a desktop in the cloud?

Everything can be done much faster via an ssh command line. I don't get it.

Very nice tutorial though, good intro to EC2 for newbies.
But that shouldn't stop you from sharing your experiences, so long as you include the right amount of context so that others can make their own judgement about the topic.

Ultimately people have to become smart enough to make their own judgement about the information you provide. So long as you don't present yourself as an authority when you're clearly not, I don't see anything wrong with sharing your point of view. In fact, it is, among other things, a great way to learn - from the feedback of others who might read your points and explain why you're wrong.
The title of this made me think it was the subject of the next Dan Brown novel.
Floating on Air: The Ford Mach I Levacar
The debugger, after your brain, is probably the most powerful tool in your arsenal.

They allow you to evaluate state and often see things you'd miss otherwise.

Plus they can do what prints can do, but even easier. I can use tracepoints to print anything at any point in code, including the callstack. The nice thing though is I can turn the tracepoints on and off while never pausing/breaking the code.

Additionally I can attach a debugger to a running process.

Plus with more modern features, like historical debugging), I can go back to predefined instances of time (like a past exception that was thrown) and examine the callstack then.

And the other thing you can do interactively is (a) change the value of variables, (b) change the code, and (c) change the instruction pointer. I regularly do (a) & (c) -- (b) less so. It's a huge time saver when you step over function foo() and realize, hey it didn't set ABC. So then just set the IP back to foo(), but this time step into it.

When I would consult I would often find and fix bugs in a day or two with oode that I'd only seen for the first time, while others had been looking for weeks in code they had helped build. I'd look at their debugging techniques and it was obivous that they were often just not at all efficient.
You do realize this breaks the ability of www.example.com to track its traffic? They have now lost the information as to how their search rank is performing on Google, and have acquired incorrect information that they think you typed in www.example.com directly.

You're entirely within legal rights to do this, of course. But if everyone did, then sites would have no idea where their traffic is coming from. Morally it is a bit questionable: your browser is blatantly and directly lying to www.example.com about how you got there.
That's why (at least in the far north) people make it themselves.
That's only Simpson's paradox if black people in the US are living longer than black people in other first-world countries. If what's actually happening is that the US has more black people and they're not living as long as their counterparts in (say) Finland or Austria, that's a different matter.

(Though the effect that drives Simpson's paradox could still be the largest cause of the US's not-so-good performance in overall life expectancy.)
Other easter eggs:

http://www.google.com/search?q=anagram
http://www.google.com/search?q=ascii+art
Yes, but how many web developers are in a position to decide how their documents are cached, and of those, how many care to? If it's in the web browser I can determine how sensitive data is handled so I don't have to rely on all web developers to do the right thing.
Hmm, private key posted fully in the image...
But data from web analytics firm Compete shows that Wilson’s blog now ranks second in average monthly uniques. The top spot belongs to Paul Graham, who runs seed-capital firm Y Combinator.

Alright, way to go pg! And thanks again for all the great advice and information you provide.
Yes, you can haz several
http://google.blogspace.com/archives/001066

Terry noted that when she searched for "Google" and clicked I'm Feeling Look and nothing happened! "In Computer Science we call that recursion. [...] Sergey's giving me a dirty look." And then Sergey suggested it was "idempotence".
HTML5 is Dead
I suppose webapps such as google reader query only once the source for all the users subscribed to a certain feed, effectively reducing the number of HTTP requests on the upstream provider. Isn't it a simpler and well tested solution to this problem? It basically makes the google server the Hub and your browser the subscriber to use the website's terminology.
Why You're Probably Less Popular Than Your Friends
This in the definition of NPC. What you have to prove is that a language is in NPC.

This was proved for SAT first: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cook%E2%80%93Levin_theorem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP_complete
I was thinking about writing an article giving advice to people who want to write articles giving advice to people who are writing articles that give advice about startups. I'm short on sources though. If anybody has any, please post a link. Thanks.
YUI 3.3, now with 100% more spinny logo
The best (but not the only) example of a corporation acting immorally to maximize shareholder value is Ford.

Prior to the release of the Ford Pinto, Ford's managers were fully aware of a design flaw in the Ford Pinto. As most people know, the gas tank on the car made the car explode in a ball of flames if it was involved in a rear end collision.

Ford's management compared the costs of a redesign to the costs associated with wrongful death lawsuits resulting from this design flaw. It was cheaper for them to pay the wrongful death lawsuits, so that's the decision that was made. It's very clear that this decision was made in an effort to maximize shareholder value, and did not take ethics into consideration whatsoever.

More information on this topic at the link below (Link is "Let Me Duck Duck Go That For You, since DDG is the primary topic of this thread):

http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=ford+pinto+lawsuits
It's true that lolcats could be viewed as "faddish", but if so, it's a very long-lived and popular fad.

Guess what a long-lived and popular fad is? A gold mine, at least for a while...
Do the Hokey Pokey
Friendfeed provided a great example of the benefits here. The shorter your feedback loops between publishing and commenting, the more conversation you see around published content.

http://jungleg.com/2009/07/27/pubsubhubbub-wordpress-feedbur...
When I saw this comment my first thought was "more TechCrunch bashing". But it's not. Rare these days :)
I think Wired picked entirely the wrong privacy issue to highlight in this article. Yes, my browser spews the refer(r)er all over. So what?

The referer isn't giving away any private information that the URL of the site isn't giving away already, and as a web publisher, I understand the value of knowing the exact set of terms the user used.

However, I love DuckDuckGo, and try to use it wherever possible, because of other privacy concerns that matter much more to me. The biggest thing I like about DDG is that it doesn't collect or store search history.
I've had a Linode for 3 years and love it, too. I spend about $240/year for a node with 512 MB of memory. But EC2 is more economical, providing 3x the memory for nearly the same price, plus much more CPU power and great disk IO performance.
Invalidated by newsgroups and Jeffrey Dahmers posts.
Well, consider spies in WW2, specifically the "loose lips sink ships" variety.

The spies that saying warns of were not crawling around in vents with night vision goggles, they were your friends, neighbors, and coworkers who would relay semi-public information to a processing center that used the info towards harmful ends.

I see this situation as a direct analogue. We communicate naturally with a supposedly disinterested or trustworthy party, who then collects that information and distributes it to others, without our best interests in mind.
If you have floating credits, take something that you are interested in learning, not something you think that will help you in the long haul.

I talked my way into a 300 level (non-entry level) Buddhism class because I wanted to learn about it but didn't have the pre-reqs my senior year and loved every minute of it.

I learned about cultures I'll probably never see and ways of thinking that have only improved my ability to reason about complex problems. There's something to be said about learning for learnings sake!

TLDR; Take something you don't know much about, but want to learn about and it'll expand your mind.
For reference, the $120 in backpay that Bill Gates was screaming about in 1980 is about the equivalent of $317.56 in 2010 dollars.

http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
We've been using Azure for a few months now working on a .NET REST API and data service to deploy to it. In the end however while we are building it for Azure we may not end up using.

1. Mediochre deployment story

Honestly, it could be far worse. Azure is deployed by uploading a compiled package via an HTTP(S) REST API. There are PS tools allowing this to be scripted too. In fact, all of Azure can be interacted with via their REST API which is one of the good things they did. Despite this, it is nowhere near as nice as a Heroku deployment or any of the other push deployment PaaS providers.

2. The SDK isn't all that great

The SDK (now at ver. 1.3) is yet another example of Microsoft's tendency to write nigh untestable APIs (mostly concrete classes, almost no interfaces, etc.). They also apparently don't keep the docs up to date on the latest REST API changes (it was actually suggested that we could use fiddler with their Silverlight management console to figure it out).

3. Azure storage is neat, but in the end insufficient and SQL Azure is missing key features and is expensive

Personally, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to build most cloud based applications on top SQL, but that is for another debate. In the end we've chosen to run Mongo on a worker role for our storage needs. I really can't wrap my head around how Azure tables could be useful, and blob storage is really just I way to upload files for CDN or provide storage for VHDs.

4. It's kind of expensive compared to the competition

Not much else to say here, but the only reason I can think of for this is that MS doesn't feel the need to compete with the other PaaS providers, which in turn would imply that the typical developer that utilizes PaaS isn't their target market.

As seems typical for MS, they are targeting the less competent enterprise and business markets and trying to sell them the cloud like it's the next SQL server, offering lots of integration points (painful as they are to use) with existing Microsoft technology (e.g., you can actually use local AD servers to authenticate with Azure).

Bottom line, AFAICT Azure isn't for us.
Hacking an iPhone or Android through the phone's radio firmware
There's a maximum limit.
This may be an obvious statement, but why not try both?
I assume you can get domains for both and test it out.

I work in finance and I've seen CV and resume used interchangeably. But more resume than CV.
Also consider that they sell merchandise: tshirts, calendars, books, etc. There are companies that do nothing but produce the joke a day calendars and crap humor books by the checkout of Barnes & Noble. Many of them have 9 figure revenue numbers and most people wouldn't say they are on the bleeding edge of comedy. My wife bought 4 "Cute Overload" calendars for Xmas gifts so don't discount the revenue potential in physical products.
If it bothers anyone that much I am guessing they would not buy it. That doesn't seem to be the case though.
Probably not the one he actually uses.
As someone that's owned 4 Apple laptops over the last 9 years I've never, ever had to remove the battery to 'fix' any of them. That includes the Macbook Air that got sat on hard while sitting open and the 12" Macbook Pro that got dropped from 2m onto concrete.
While i don't often use debuggers, i find your argumentation to be false, at least for me, for one very simple reason :

A debugger can be a very fine tool for understanding how code you don't know works. Sometimes better than just reading it. Always better than litering the code with print statements.
Cowclickification - Anything you can click you can cow click
JavaScript Interview Question
A great reason why you shouldn't use concurrency...