skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I understand it, Samsung isn't the reluctant party to update. Samsung bills .x upgrades to the carrier as feature releases and most others consider them maintenance releases, which means the carrier pays the phone manufacturer much less money. Verzion et al are trying to put the squeeze on Samsung by refusing to pay for 2.2 or 2.3 as feature releases, and thus give their competitors an edge, until Samsung relents and starts considering these releases as maintenance releases.

Presumably such a problem doesn't exist on the Tab, since carrier permission isn't needed to distribute an update.
Can't go wrong with being on the cutting-edge :)
I sure hope it's not down! Otherwise the Hacker News monitoring system is doing a better job than all of our existing ones.
Congressman Issa Wants to Track FOIA Requests
man, I suck today. It's added now. If you are interested I'm at cindy at clinkclank.net
When you say you will focus on startups will this be on the emphasis of startup launches? Or will you report on already launched startups?
I looked into Forex a while back and came across http://www.babypips.com/, which seems like a pretty thorough introduction/guide for beginners.
Nokia is no more the top smartphone platform maker
Nokia, the largest mobile phone manufacturer, has lost the position of top smartphone platform maker that they had for 10 years. Google is now the leading smartphone platform maker followed by Nokia and Apple. The research firm Canalys published this survey on Monday reporting that 32.9 million handsets are running on Google platform.
you don't get it.

It is the value, ie. money, generated somewhere are coming to America as an investment. Humongous amount of money in the world is trying to find any investment worth investing. Think why a Russian investor invests in San Francisco Silicon Valley instead of, for example, Russian government promoted "Russian Silicon Valley" :)

"The large returns generated by start-ups "

Don't worry - these large returns, in the form of high paying jobs, technologies, experienced teams, and large share of profits reinvested - the things all other countries are scramble for - it will be left here, in the Silicon Valley.
As several others asked last time, have you considered posting under a name other than "g0atbutt" for a more professional look?
Good Job Paul. startup foundry all the way!
Anyone have a beta invite?
I was at DDD9 on Saturday (Community MS conference) and there were a lot of startup folks there. I think it's too easy to get caught up with a subset of the community (say the mobile startup community or the rails community) and lose sight of the bigger picture.

Certainly among b2b startups BizSpark has encouraged a lot of startups to go with the MS stack where they previously would have gone with Rails, etc. While consumer startups seem in general to be more often based on non-MS stack there's plenty of MS stack consumer startups (PlentyOfFish, Just-Eat, StackOverflow) which have become the dominant players in their field.

When it comes down to it, for most startups it doesn't really matter what your stack is, just pick the stack that you're most productive with.
Egypt's Communications Crisis: An Update (Update: Noor Down)
Is the primary problem that you're out of ingredients and don't realize it, or that you see a bunch of ingredients and aren't sure what to do with them?
Actually the Mail app is open source:

http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/packages/apps/Emai...
Yes, occupying and imprisoning an entire nation with military force and keeping them in poverty is in a totally different league than genocide.
and please no Quora news anytime soon.
And yet, because the iPad is priced quite aggressively, you are not going to find yourself buying one for quite a while, and competitors like Samsung are between a rock and a hard place.

It's kind of remarkable how Apple's used its old reputation as overpriced as a competitive weapon here. If you're expecting a wifi-only tablet to cost significantly less than an iPad, then the subsidized version of the same gizmo on a contract can't cost any more than a Happy Meal. Nobody can make money selling that device.
Canv.as is still anonymous. You just have to log in via Facebook.
Installing SQL Server Express 2008 R2 on Windows Azure Cloud + Usage Scenarios
How about installing SQL Server on your Windows Azure VM Role and using it instead of Azure Table and SQL Azure to store data? Not really a good idea but in my opinion, it can be a good idea for the temporary storage of data.
Sorry if I'm being presumptuous, but I hate it when founders say with Salesforce in particular we felt that we would have an opportunity to make a larger impact than what we might be able to have done independently instead of IM RICH BIOTCH!!!
I also like my Tab for the same reasons.

It actually fits in the pocket of my jeans in a pinch. It's kind-of like putting a book in my pocket, but at least my hands are free.

The battery life on mine is ridiculously GOOD. I charge it maybe once a week, but I play games on it at night, I surf the web on it at various times throughout the day, and I'll read my books on it too.

I'd personally recommend the tab to anyone wanting a tablet. Maybe not to people who are in love with some of the games on iPhone, but otherwise, it's just slick and wonderful.

And dare I say ... FLASH. I can actually view Flash on websites when I need to. It's rare, but I can if I have to and that's a nice thing.

EDIT: Some Flash works. I can't watch Hulu yet for example. Not sure if that's a Flash thing or a Hulu thing.
It's wonderful, if a little odd, to think of the NYC subway as a plucked guitar, versus the familiar steel-on-steel "ka-chunk, ka-chunk" as the trains rumble on the (unwelded) tracks.
Facebook’s Groupon-Like Service Goes Global
IM RICH BIOTCH

That's the assumed part.
Looking for co-founder
Our socially-minded for-profit fertility charting company is looking for a Technical Co-Founder to help us create the best fertility charting software available anywhere.

Fertility charting (also called Fertility Awareness Method) is a system of recording female fertility signs to gauge fertility on a daily basis. When practiced correctly it can be used as effective hormone-free birth control, for natural pregnancy planning, or to expand basic body literacy.
Who we are and what we’re up to:

Conscious Cycles LLC is a start-up based in Brooklyn NY, founded in 2010 by Kati Bicknell and Will Sacks. We’re creating a beautiful, easy-to-use, fertility charting web application that will allow women to practice Fertility Awareness in less time and with better results than ever before. Stage two will be mobile applications and a patent-pending medical device.
We will talk about both. If it's relevant to the startup world, it will be on The Startup Foundry.
Did you enable Flash? I had the same problem at first, but after enabling Flash it worked fine.
If you have a data fetish then you should stop reading anything else on this page and email me personally at jferguson at yammer-inc dot com with your resume and tell me why you love it.

Big data, we've got that. Social networking, we've got that too. If you're tired of only dreaming about using data to iterate on a real product at a startup that is crushing everyone else in their space then you should get excited right now because Yammer is that place. Distributed databases, real time data streams, ruby, rails, scala; this is the position you've dreamed about your entire life! How many people get the opportunity to come work on a data team at a startup? Stop sitting around thinking about doing awesome things and come do them.

Also the food is delicious.. no really.. it's that good..
So what you're saying, is that it's good to be king?
If you lived through the first dotcom as a foot-solder you now have some experience and wisdom behind you and access to lots of cheap, unsophisticated labour willing to work long hours.

Sort of like Mark Zuckerburg now.... Maybe he is smart after all.
Ditto for me in Firefox, with adblock and flashblock running. I suspect one of the two is the culprit.
Building any "real world" AI involves a ton of busy work. AI systems are kludgy things at best, involving loads of scripts to deal with every edge case. In the case of StarCraft, there are so many different issues going on that you would have to busy-code to tweak every single one of them. How do you code in something general enough to stop the gas-steal? How about path finding?

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/01/skynet-meets-the-... is a great article that covers a lot of issues that I would not have immediately thought of that need explicit care to deal with and prevent your AI from having fundamental flaws.
If you are offered more money if you get it, even if the extra money doesn't come from the original source, more people will be tempted to apply. "I can do more with more money", "it's not as risky as before", some will surely be thinking.
Hasn't this existed for over a year now?
Down for me too.

Just kidding.
Any ideas how to memorize that name? Does it have a meaning I don't get (non-native speaker)?
I wouldn't think you could provide enough power via solar to make up for the weight of the panels. What's the expected life on these?
Ideally, you don't store credit card numbers at all. If you need to do recurring billing, there are platforms that will do it for you, otherwise, process the transaction and remove the number from your system. Storing this kind of info securely and in PCI compliance is not trivial, and takes engineering resources that are better used on something that will distinguish your product from competition.
Ditto, because it's a fucking non-answer. For one, a company always cares about the safety of their employees - unless they're incredibly cheap to replace. For two, they can't not say that.

It's like asking your significant other if these pants make your ass look big. You'll never get a "yes" for an answer.
Eventual consistency often gives up the ability to develop applications against the system, because more reasoning about the state of the system has to be embedded in the application logic. For a better description of this problem, see this post from an AWS employee:

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/02/24/ILoveEventualCon...

Note that his "right answer" for performance (not availability, so it's a bit of an aside from your comment) is to dynamically repartition, which is what Clustrix does. Note that we can actually do this type of repartitioning on just the "hot" data, using MVCC to avoid any downtime (unlike Mongo, which blocks all writes).

By the way, the Google Megastore project I believe you're referring to is not actually eventually consistent in the same way that, say, Cassandra is. Megastore is fully ACID within an entity group, meaning that lowering eventually consistency down to the per-node level was not the solution that Google went with. BigTable is also not eventually consistent.

*Clustrix employee
Intel chip recall may cost company up to $700m
Or how it'll be superior to Disqus.
Etacts is shutting down today. Guide to its alternatives.
If I may offer a suggestion, such a summary would have been tremendously clarifying in the original article, IMHO. Maybe try to add something like that in future posts? :)
This webpage is not available.

The webpage at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/huge-isps-wa... might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.

More information on this error

Below is the original error message

Error 101 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET): Unknown error.
Hiring a technical Co-founder
I'm hiring a second co-founder who is knowledgeable in PHP/MYSQL and has worked for a top website company in the past. This is the 6th time I've posted this request on Hacker News just going to keep posting it until someone listens. I'm building a website and I have 104 lines of code I was thinking we could trade off the work until it is finished. Meaning that since I just wrote 104 lines of code you would go write 104 lines and pass it back to me and we would do that back and forth until the website is finished. I'm working to have the Beta out by August. If your interested email me @ klownkeeper@gmail.com or tweet me @KeithClark_ thanks!
Stack Exchange launches Quantitative Finance site
Public beta launches February 7th.
If $150k makes you somehow feel like you won and can ease off the gas, I don't think you were made to win anyway. For the few (maybe 1/4, more?) of the YC teams that this does make fat and happy, it's just cost of doing business for Milner to access the other teams. It's a brilliant move by Milner/Conway.
You've done a really great job with the site. Three things:

1) I reaaally hate the yellow buttons. Surely you can code or find some images that look better. :)

2) I'd love to be able to follow/track a person and the events s/he is arranging.

3) I'd also be interested to track events by some other measure - topic or location perhaps. A lot of things don't happen in my country outside the US, so I'd love to be able to monitor events in the capital without using RSS.

All in all a great job - there have been people before you to think of this, but none of them have made a site that was genuinely interesting and useful.
I am not a serious spreadsheet user. But I am curious. In what areas have Google Spreadsheets surpassed Excel? (Collaboration tools is probably one)
A few observations:

1. A convertible note, however favorable its terms, is still fundamentally a loan. This means it will have a due date at which the holder may demand payment unless the amounts due have been converted into equity before then.

2. Item 1 in turn means that there will be no coasting for the YC companies upon receipt of this money or even necessarily a break from the pressure of fundraising. Why? Because the investment is not from a relative who is looking to get a high-interest-rate return on his investment but rather from a venture investor who fully expects that the company will make a good-faith effort to raise funds as appropriate to meet the minimum funding threshold at which his note will convert into equity. That means there will be considerable pressure to do a Series A round within the term of a typical note of this type, which means within the first 9 months.

3. What this money does then, in my view, is strengthen the negotiating leverage of the YC companies in terms of getting further bridge funding to carry them out to Series A. They won't need to worry about survival money during their first steps and they can in turn be more selective about whom to talk to and what terms to consider in taking further bridge money for their early build-out.

4. The terms of these notes will undoubtedly have provisions covering what happens if the startup is acquired before a triggering event for the note conversion. Those terms might vary widely but my guess is that they will be such as to motivate the founders to push for funding so as to effect a conversion. There is nothing wrong with an investor building in reasonable safeguards to make sure he doesn't get abused and the safeguards here might be such as to make it unattractive for the founders to exit via M&A prior to conversion, which again means that there will be great pressure to get the larger funding.

The biggest impact here will be on those investors competing for early deal-flow and on what should be a broader pool of applicants who can now seek to go the YC direction. I doubt that it will relieve the fund-raising rigors of the YC companies themselves very much, if at all.
This is very cool. Here's our way of visualizing buses driving around in a novel way: http://labs.transloc.com/streetview/
Has any of this been used for natural disasters where the internet (but not necessarily telephone or power) went down?
Signed up for the newsletter. I am excited to read about all of the projects that are brewing from HN.
As long as the focus stays true to "actual" startups I am excited for this! :)
9 Ways to Simplify 'Sign-Up'
Also, developers in Toronto (and all of Canada) don't have to worry about affording health insurance if they join a startup instead of some BigCorp, leaving talented engineers free to pursue the companies and causes that interest them rather than just the ones big enough to get insurance at a discount.
The grandparent is saying that POF should be considered to have been written by one developer, because that's what it was until 2007.
Works fine in the latest version of Opera.
if it's still down for you: http://www.pastie.org/1516308
Explore Fractals in HTML5 with Google’s New “Julia Map”
The Letter Given To The Valedictorian of Harvard College
Wearing Contact Lenses For Fun And Profit
> The upcoming Honeycomb devices are far more convincing, however.

Really? I must be missing something, because I just don't see the appeal.

My Nexus One appeals to me because I can't put my laptop in my pocket. My laptop appeals to me because I can't really type on my phone. A tablet really just sounds like the worst of both worlds. Not trying to be a buzz-kill, but genuinely curious: what's the driving factor here?
The term "rows" could certainly be replaced with "tuples", "objects", or whatever else you prefer without changing any meaning of the post. If you look at the benchmarks posted on Mongo's site

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Benchmarks

you can see that most of them compare Mongo against MySQL. Certainly "rows" are being inserted into the latter.
Should I work for free flow chart
> I saw a video the other day of some guy at Google giving a talk about the database behind the app engine. At one point someone in the audience asked about scale and SQL. His response was "Well, how well does SQL scale?" Everyone in the room laughed.

Sell your strength, don't attack others weakness. Demonstrate how your product is actually very similar to megastore (strong consistency, use of distributed transactions) and differs only in the query language ("GQL" itself is very similar to SQL to the point where an application developer could care less about which one is using). It looks like this is case the case (except I believe you guys are using 2PC instead of Paxos, in which case you want to clearly state the availability scenarios which Paxos addresses and at what costs).

Of course the problem with systems like megastore is that the overhead they introduce is seldom worth the compromises the application developers have already made. Incidentally, form what I hear, Megastore is not used very frequently outide of the app engine: application developers at Google itself are comfortable with using Spanner/BigTable directly but aren't comfortable with the additional overhead of distributed transactions as used by Megastore. App engine, customers, on the other hand aren't particularly interested in low a in the first place but aren't used to design patterns used on top of systems like BigTable.

By the way, I think Clustrix is a great product. I remember reading the white papers/specs when it came out and I'll make sure to scan it over again. Just why in the (imo, useless) SQL/NoSQL marketing circus rather than focus on the product's strength?

I personally think MongoDB is a poor comparison choice: it has the buzz, but there are some serious flaws in its distribution architecture (namely ill defined consistency and partitioning model) and the outdated disk persistence story (Mendel Rosenblum wrote his dissertation in 1992; building a log structured database is no less risky than cloning circa-1995 MyISAM). Comparison with another strongly consistent system like HBase or HyperTable would be more fit.
I always thought this would be a situation where people would be far more likely to settle. When you're facing the prospect of going to court to defend against a lawsuit for downloading porn, you'd like to keep it discreet as fast as possible. It's so close to being shame-based extortion, I can't help but admire the beauty of it.
How Matt Cutts Used Stack Overflow/Hacker News In Redefining "Content Farms"
Maybe NYC could start with a simple URL
The CIA is not a law-enforcement body and would not be involved. The FBI has offices in a number of countries:

http://moscow.usembassy.gov/fbi.html
The post asks the question "could ‘Facebook Deals’ be the app that kills Groupon?" I believe they are both going after separate things. Facebook wants users to check-in and explore their world through the Facebook portal and by doing this you get rewarded with little perks (deals). However, Groupon wants users to explore their world cheaper. They offer deals to services and products not known about before.

Groupon = Explore A new World.

Facebook = Take advantage of a world already explored.
The Hobbyist Business Model
More than that, the wording on their signup page suggests that this is only in effect during the beta. It seems a reasonable way to keep people from spamming accounts, particularly given the association with 4chan.

During the beta period we are using Facebook Connect to validate users and handle invitations. Canvas will not display your photo or information anywhere on the site and we will only store your email address.
Ubertooth One: an open source Bluetooth hacking tool
"And Milner/SV Angel say they intend to offer this for each Y Combinator startup in the future, too." from http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/28/yuri-milner-sv-angel-offer-... Not a guarantee though.
Registrant ID:DOT-Z21GM2Q2ZICY
Registrant Name:A C
Registrant Organization:
Registrant Address:13 Charter Street
Registrant Address2:Apt. 3Front
Registrant Address3:
Registrant City:Boston
Registrant State/Province:MA
Registrant Country/Economy:US
Registrant Postal Code:02113
Registrant Phone:+1.2154175999
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant E-mail:chenalex@seas.upenn.edu
Seems to use flash. Disabled flashblock in chrome, reloaded and worked fine. Not all html5…

Nice work though.
Sorry but I think the guy sounded sincere. He referenced other big companies that had wanted to buy them. If they'd held an auction I am sure they could have gotten more cash if money was all that mattered to them.

Unless the news comes out that they were being pressured by their VC's to sell I think its correct to assume they figured that selling to SalesForce would help them advance their goals faster.
"The Facebook crowd" is...everybody.
Foursquare (NYC, SF): http://foursquare.com/jobs/

We have positions coding for our mobile clients (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry) and our server team. Our server code is all in Scala (booyah functional programming). It’s a superb team in fun work environment, full of exciting projects, and with an amazing dataset.

Feel free to send me an email at the same username, or apply through the web page.
For a single ajax request this doesn't save much (just call the functions you need to call from the success() method). In fact, if used poorly it may obfuscate the program flow. However, the "when" example looks interesting. I'm new to JS and JQ, so I haven't run into that problem yet (and known it!), but at this point I would have to, for each ajax query, set some sort of "state" bool and call the function I want to run. Only when all the bools were set to true- meaning all calls found success- would the function execute. The "when" approach is much more elegant.