skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Overall, another solid comment.

As for RPC, whether the client is informed of success or failure has nothing to do with atomicity. The guarantee is that the transaction either happens completely or not at all, and nothing more.

Agreed, it can be very frustrating that under certain failure scenarios, it's unclear whether the transaction completed or rolled back. Still, given atomicity, a correctly designed system can't be left in an inconsistent state. At times, it's up to the application to discover (or re-discover) that state.

Systems that offer atomicity for single record operations can actually make the same assurances, but may require complicated escrow systems and compensating transactions.
I can't afford to make a popular browser, though. Sure I can fork one in a second, but if people started using it a lot, I'd be screwed.

Only make a popular browser if you're rich enough to support H.264, I think is the lesson.
Almost everyone under 35 I know who has met a long term partner online and used a dating site used OKCupid. I've known some older 40+ people who used match.com.

I'm still holding out for a hackernews, quora, flickr, github, bay area riders forum, scubaboard, highroad, make, seasteading, xkcd, combination dating site.
Would be interesting to see some stats on how large percentage of the users actually find their way there and enable it.
Funny timing. I like the layout of the results, but their number of stars and number of reviews is piggybacking primarily off of yelp (as well as others like urbanspoon and citysearch). When that data was being aggregated in search, it didn't seem too strange. However, now that they're directly competing with yelp, it seems unfair to be "stealing" their review data.
They are based not far from Leeds, and a friend of a friend worked there. So while at Uni I used to be able to ring up about 4pm and get it "delivered" at about 6 :)

But, yeh, they were also pretty impressive for me outside of that.

Computer components is a niche that Amazon aren't quite king of yet (sorta).
7 Classic Foundational Vis Papers
So Microsoft gets a 50% discount on a tax that already benefits larger, incumbent companies by protecting them from up and coming competitors and it's incompatible with many open source and freeware business models used by competitors. And this is presented as if they're some kind of selfless saint for paying into this racket?
That's true. But not everybody needs open source their software.

And i'm not judging against open sourcing software either.
Straight out of the Dilbert mission statement generator.
The IE blog post in question (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/02/html5-and-web-...) seems more interesting than the media stories suggest - here's what appears to be the most substantive paragraph:

"Ultimately, Microsoft remains agnostic in terms of HTML5 video as long as there is clarity on the intellectual property issues. To make it clear that we are fully willing to participate in a resolution of these issues, Microsoft is willing to commit that we will never assert any patents on VP8 if Google will make a commitment to indemnify us and all other developers and customers who use VP8 in the future. We would only ask that we be able to use those patent rights if we are sued first by somebody else. If Google would prefer a patent pool approach, then we would also agree to join a patent pool for VP8 on reasonable licensing terms so long as Google joins the pool and is able to include all other major providers of playback software and devices."

The question of indemnification seems pertinent to me, but I've only been superficially following this issue - maybe it's a red herring and Google has good reason not to offer indemnification etc. I'm curious to see the case for that.
I opted for 1day once when I needed a new monitor ASAP. When you're already paying $250, $4 for one day shipping seems cheap. Two day shipping occasionally gets here in one day, but sadly I'm late in the UPS delivery route so nothing shows up until 4pm in the afternoon...
Authors of The Agile Manifesto discuss its Tenth Anniversary
Corporations get numerous specific legal benefits enforced by the power of the state. Nobody is required to organize as a corporation, so the benefits must be worth the cost. Corporations pay taxes because they get benefits nobody else gets. These should be give for free? That doesn't make sense. The real crime is it's the little guy who can't setup the multi-national tax-swaps or invest billions in "inefficient investments" that end up paying the top 39%.
Isn't your mailbox technically federal property? Therefore, it's just the post office storing garbage on their own property.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but existing versions will continue to be offered and will be free - is that right? I thought Lutz Roeder agreed with Red Gate that RG was free to improve upon Reflector and sell it, but that the original had to be offered for free. Obviously the version upgrade counts as improvements, but the original should still be offered for free.
They get to screw Apple. Apple has built an existing HW ecosystem and has a highly tuned sw tools for H264. With WebM Google gets to say, "Throw all that away -- now you're behind us technologically Apple."
wish it distinguished free from paid.
Hello,

You need to craft a clever marketing plan to get free traffic. A combination of SEO and Social Media Marketing is required. I can help you out in crafting and executing a marketing plan for a monthly fee. If you really want to get the word out, you need to spend some on marketing.

My email is contentpro [at] [google's email service]. You can contact me if you like.
This is the fourth year that we have run this conference, and every year PayPal have restricted our account.

"I keep hitting myself with this hammer, but it keeps hurting! What am I doing wrong!?"
I find it interesting that Google and Facebook got their start by getting data from other sites and then presenting it in a new way. Search engines and social networks don't start from nothing. Now that other people are grabbing their data to present it in new ways (like they once did or still do) what will be their response?
many people keep money in there and treat it almost as virtual currency. They can just use paypal money to pay, it's secure, etc.

There's a whole class of people who can't get a credit card in the first place, but they can use paypal tied to their bank and move money in.

Paypal is more universal around the world than most other cards. Someone may have a JCB card or a Switch card - my standard merchant account gives me a harder time with those, and charges me a heftier fee, and in some cases I can't take 'overseas'-based cards at all (Solo cards, for example) - but those people in those countries can use PayPal - and they do with me.
"The free version will continue working until May 30, 2011."

http://www.red-gate.com/products/dotnet-development/reflecto...
Lawsuit - AT&T overbills for data
We're doing the same using Google Chrome Packaged Applications, which is based on Webkit. We use FireBreath NPAPI extensions for any OS specific enhancements. The end result is noticeably faster than AIR and less resources.

Chromeless sounds like a good idea but Google's V8 engine has been spanking Mozilla's engine for a while now.
By that logic IE could send the entire page of search results back to Microsoft and it wouldn't be a violation of robots.txt. Because hey, it was a user-agent doing it, not a robot! If this is so in the clear, why not have Microsoft do that also?
Their built-in support on my Panasonic Viera TV has been quite good: simple to setup, no fuss to buy, and HD looks good enough for me. Amazon has given me a few $5 video credits and enticed me to watch/buy a few more movies and tv shows through. I would definitely be interested in this.
I work at MailChimp. The answer is nope.
MailChimp are very diligent about spam. If your emails get reported as spam more than %0.5 of the time you'll be banned.

So "Unlimited" has a built in limit.

(We use/love MailChimp, definitely recommended.)
I met my Girlfriend (of a year this Thursday) on OKCupid. I've always been impressed by the extremely high quality of the matching on OKC. They're by far the best online dating I've seen.
This sounds a bit, well, stupid. It assumes that the only long-term benefit to knowing how to play the piano is that you can then earn money as a musician. Bull. He cites a paper that finds that learning Latin does not affect other test scores. He twists the results in this article by saying "X" instead of "Latin" -- which is dishonest of him, he should have quoted what he actually said in the other article. Numerous studies have found correlation with musical ability and math test scores, although I'm too lazy to look them up for a comment on HN. The other thing going on is that by practicing so intensely you are getting better at practicing things. That is an extremely valuable skill, or an extremely valuable habit if you wish to look at it that way. Now I don't have any studies to back this up, so take my assertion with a grain of salt.

What's most sad about this article is how little he sees his own cultural bias.

He says that playing the piano is a worthless skill. I don't see how that statement can be anything other than a value judgement about culture -- music is culture. He says "Cost-benefit analysis is not a Western prejudice." However, the particular cost you assign to training and the benefit you assign to the resulting skill is inherently relative, and his judgement that forcing a kid to learn piano is bad and knowing how to play a piano is worthless IS a prejudice.

His main attack on the science of the book is that he says there's no evidence that parents have any effect on a child's personality. Let's assume this is true. So what? What about skills and habits? Aren't those important? (He mentions skills but not habits. I assume that you can give a kid habits, such as brushing teeth before bed.)

It's also torturous to have to read how he discusses questions #1 and #2, which are presented up-front in the source material and don't really need 23 cm of article dedicated to them.

Now I'm not one to say that Amy Chua's method of parenting presented in "Tiger Mother" is superior. I suspect I'd find "Tiger Mother" to be just another pop science book. But this cost-benefit analysis is a particularly unsound attack on the practice.

I want to see evidence, one way or the other. Sadly, it's not likely to come any time soon.

</rant>
The Daily launches
anti-match.com is open. The world is your oyster :-)
I work at MailChimp. I don't worry about that.
"Of Egypt’s 80 million people, 10% are Christians. Some Muslims have been guarding Coptic churches while Christians pray, and on Friday, Christians were guarding the mosques while Muslims prayed."

This.

I hate it when people use that - but if anything deserves it, it is "This."
I like how they didn't say when she was coming back.

I hope you e-mailed them back, told them this was unacceptable, and asked to be transferred to someone who is actually there.
Indemnification is not likely, but MS asks for good reason. They probably suspect (or maybe knows) that WebM infringes on some patents.

The patent pool, just as it does with H264, gets every player in the game to effectively commit to not assert patents.

Good move by MS. And certainly shows that they're more willing to play than anyone else has demonstrated so far.
Just a theory, but I think before Google's move, hardware decoder would be ubiquitous. Think ION. Think Atom. Think Tegra 2.
The first time I read this, the middle of the book tried my patience and I wanted it to just get to the conclusion; I started skimming a bit more until I got to the end.

The second time I read the book, I had planned on just skimming the middle again, but this time without the drive to know the resolution (since I remembered it from last time), I discovered that the middle of the book is really the best part. It's very detailed and well-thought-out, and the second time I didn't even have a problem with the pacing. It's just a very big book, in a good way.

The only other book I know of that I have had this reaction to was the Lord of the Rings series. The final denouement feels like it's taking forever the first time, but subsequently, the only thing I routinely skip over is the foot chase through Rohan. (Which I remembered as being 50-60 pages long but turns out to actually be only about 12. Still manages to feel 50 pages long to me. YMMV.)

Strongly recommend, and despite being listed as a "prequel" you do not need to have read A Fire Upon the Deep first; only a handful of throwaway details will be mysterious as a result and none of them matter much to you. Vinge does not fall into any of the usual "prequel" issues that for instance the Dune prequels did ("Remember that expansive universe you loved that so carefully managed to feel like just a small part of the totality? No, it was the entire totality and the only people in the universe up to that point were the direct ancestors of the people you loved.") or other things. This is truly a prequel, a story that took place before a later story, and temporal ordering is honored.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've been lead to believe that in the US at least, if you are the only member of your company (which I believe Patrick is), then no corporate structure is going to to protect you from liability. I think even with only 2 people it's a bit iffy (especially if the other person is your spouse).

If you are by yourself, Sole Proprietor is easier and simpler for taxes and the like. LLC is more complex and may offer NO extra liability protection.
Jennifer Aniston bromea con los rumores de adopción
CC chargeback.

for the average consumer, obviously, you would want to avoid it. for TC doing some journalism on a company they once supported and gave praise, PR, traffic, and the buzz to get funding, i would've expected a bit more.

but maybe thats just me.
YC-Backed ReadyForZero Launches Debt Management Platform To The Public
Mozilla has been using the term chrome for a while now (http://www-archive.mozilla.org/xpfe/ConfigChromeSpec.html).

"Chrome is the user interface parts of the application window that are outside of a window's content area"

The name Chromeless makes sense.
That's a good point. Here is the payment history:

The maximum annual royalty (“cap”) for an Enterprise (commonly controlled Legal Entities) is $3.5 million per year 2005-2006, $4.25 million per year 2007-08, $5 million per year 2009-10, and $6.5 million per year in 2011-15.

…and you're right that there is a footnote saying. "Annual royalty caps are not subject to the 10% limitation" which is important.

I do find it a bit strange to hear people say the license fees are unknown. Even if you assume an unlimited cap, you can schedule out what the pro-rated fees will look like for you for the next 5-10 years based on your projected growth. You can argue that they are too high, but I don't think you can argue that they are unknown. If nothing else they are bounded on the high end.
Good for the OkCupid team — this gives them a cushion to play again in this otherwise-desolate space before too long.

Brings back somewhat rueful memories of spending too much time browsing around sites like Match.com (meh) and eHarmony (zero. matches. ever.) Wasted several years and hundreds of dollars.

Met my fiancee on OkCupid. :)
The Blackmail/Extortion Business Model
Really, this is too easy to game to worry the cynics - the site owners could log in and continue a few conversations for a bit to make the bad publicity go away.

If I was running this kind of operation I'd probably ensure some conversations continued for a couple of messages after users paid up, just to make sure they didn't cancel or file chargebacks. If I assume men preferred their hot women to pass the Turing test I could probably outsource the flirting to someone in the Philippines at $5 per hundred messages.
Your traffic sources have a half-life
Stop Referrer spam in Google Analytics
pssst.

http://carlos.bueno.org/2008/08/save-web.html
The agile approach to writing a one-page executive summary: Getting started
Twilio Releases Subaccounts for Multi-Tenant Apps
www.howaboutwe.com is an intriguing player in this field. They are built around date proposals. Nice way to introduce local deal and minimize the 'stalker' factor.

Apparently, they have a decent base in NY, but currently their Midwest member-base is limited.
There's a simple AppleScript which lets you do it though. I'm not on my Macbook otherwise I'd leave a link.
Cost-benefit analysis of various parenting styles seems like a good idea but, when the article goes much further than that and claims that Chua's parenting style has no benefits whatsoever, its arguments fall flat. The crucial passage:

"But hasn't all the musical practice indelibly shaped Chua's children's characters? Highly unlikely."

is supported by three claims, and when you follow the links that support turns out to be rather shaky.

Claim 1: "Behavioral genetics finds roughly zero effect of parents on personality."

Supporting link: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/01/implausible_wim....

The claim is implausible (if such parenting can make the kids neurotic, other personality changes must certainly be possible), and the link is to an article where the blog author is not convinced by a book arguing the contrary of this claim. The argument is roughly analogous to saying the heliocentric theory has zero credibility because "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" didn't contain enough measurements.

Claim 2: "contrary to teachers' fantasies about changing their students' lives, learning is highly specific"

Supporting link: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/01/the_case_agains_...

The study cited here seems to show that German students who take Latin as a foreign language perform no better on general intelligence measures than those who take English. Again, the non sequitur is staggering. The analogous argument is that practicing the piano is useless, because people who practice the violin get into colleges at least as good as those who practice the piano.

Claim 3: "the effects of environmental intervention erode over time"

Supporting link: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/11/fade-out_teache....

The link shows that good teachers can make students a lot better on immediate test results than on longer-term measures of subject mastery. While this is interesting, it has zero relevance to the main argument, which was that grueling hours of practice have no effect on students' character.

Overall, the question posed and the approach are very interesting, but the subsequent argumentation turns out to be shaky and implausible. What a disappointment!
These posts are written by one of the Clustrix founders.
^ Can't reply to your post, but I'll just do it here.

Of course, I told them that asking prompt replies, especially on non business days (with the threat of limitation) was unacceptable if the same courtesy was not going to be returned, and asked someone else take over.
Bingo. Microsoft and Apple support H.264 for the same reasons that Walmart supports minimum wage increases and Mattel supports extensive product testing regulations.
the effect is the same as intentional scraping and outright stealing

The google engineers intentionally sent this click data to Bing, so is Bing really stealing? It's odd to act surprised when Bing uses the data that was intentionally sent to it. Bing could specifically ignore Google search results pages when it is tracking clicks, but is that legitimate? Google scrapes everything, why shouldn't Bing?
The Pro version did add support for debugging which is pretty awesome. The only problem is that you can't add breakpoints into arbitrary points in the IL. You have to be able to access it via the object browser, which requires a public class/method. If they fixed that it would be worth twice its price. Now, I think the technology is great, but not useful for me.
It seems to be widely accepted that WebM is a minor variation on H.264 with changes specifically designed to avoid the H.264 patents, which as you mention have been openly published and well documented for years.

Since large segments of H.264 were simply dropped for WebM, apparently there's only about 49 H.264 patents total (out of over a thousand) that could even remotely apply. That seems a reasonable number for On2 to work around, and for Google (and everyone else listed on their supporters page)'s lawyers to double check.

So now we are speculating about a random patent troll who happens to hold a patent that doesn't read on H.264 but does read on a simplified version of H.264 with some minor patent avoiding variations. Seems to me that if you're arguing H.264 is clean, then so is WebM.
Who is to say that ethically challenged businesses cannot be legitimate targets for investors? I hate these sites, but my bet is that they pay off for investors as well as your average YC company...Investors are in the business of making money, not making judgements about ethics. Legal challenges are the ones that matter to a business, not ethical ones.
Thanks. Okay, maybe I just slightly disagree with them. I mostly agree with the "create value, money will come" philosophy. However I would say create value and if the value is very substantial, the money will come. However depending on how substantial the value is, you may have to work to make the money come along.

I am not saying they are wrong, I would just put a little more confidence behind Guy's statement.
Less graphic body scanning machines tested at 3 airports
They'd be able to deal with fraud much more effectively (and cheaply) if they weren't so busy asking the same legitimate customers for the same information year after year. Yes, the job may be hard, but they're apparently also disorganized and incompetent.
Thanks for your answer. I imagined so. But I could also think of some legitimate heavy-duty users who could threaten your profitability. Is there any fine print for those cases?
The problem isn't financial; it's ideological. The GPL says that no additional restrictions must be placed on the end user. The H.264 license says that only personal and non-commercial use is allowed.

I'm not sure whether they legally conflict, but the H.264 license is obviously against the spirit of the GPL.
I could be interested in building a Reflector clone if somebody would write an F# plug-in to the project. I would probably start with looking at the CCI-Metadata project on Codeplex, and the Microsoft Phoenix compiler framework. Mono has similar libraries, but I only know a very small subset of Mono.Cecil API.

Cheers,
Z-Bo
True, but open source developers aren't known for the piles of money they're sitting on.

Besides, F/OSS has never been a huge threat to Microsoft. They're the ones that set the price of things like web browsers to $0, and they came mostly late to the party for serious server deployments (vs. IBM, SUN, Linux, etc.)
This is quite a day for news from MailChimp. We had already decided to go with MailChimp for our bulk email needs and have been on the fence about Amazon SES vs SendGrid. But with us already leaning toward Amazon SES, this pretty much just seals the deal.
No more awkward than Apple using Samsung to fab its chips.
Watch Rupert Murdoch Unveil 'The Daily' [live]
I Reflectored Reflector once and I found that the source was obfuscated. I don't think that would be a trivial task.
Amazon's a nice IaaS provider, though, right? It should be easy for Netflix to migrate to a different cloud...unless of course I'm wrong, and Amazon has them locked-in somehow.
Are you saying that last year, you could have predicted the licence fee cap would have been $6.5 million and not 5.5 or 7.5 or 10.5? If you couldn't then it was unknown until they announced it. Similarly, what do you predict it will be in 5 years and each of the next 20 years till the patents run out? Are you sure?
Understanding the Intent of PCI Requirement 6.1
Fingers crossed for Canada. Fingers crossed for Linux.

Maybe someday.