skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as founders go I don't see much psychological difference between "doing a startup" in the VC/Angel sense and "doing a startup" in the "I am a business owner" sense. The personal and financial risks are similar, worries about money, long hours, the fear of failure, etc. Yes, a startup in the Silicon Valley sense is structurally organized in a more ambitious way, but three guys in an office trying to figure out how not to run out of money is going to produce the same stresses whether they are programmers or plumbers.

Hiring and firing suck just the same for both groups. Borrowing money offers the same temptations and one's family doesn't stop whispering,"when will he get a real job," just because it's a startup.
Rasmussen's hint would work were the number parsing in Oracle's JDK implemented in in C.

Volatile keyword in Java does not guarantee writing to memory and reading it back (http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/classe...), but using strictfp as a modifier to the method should cause the usage of strict IEEE 64-bit floating point.
Since there is discussion about the upcoming bubble 2.0, I thought this article was worth a read.

To give a bit of context, at the time Buffett was one of the few people who would not join in the frenzy and was heavily criticised for it. The fact that he was proven right and the clarity with which he argued his case with foresight is what contributed in large part to establishing his reputation with the wider public.
What do you mean by 'safe environment'?
As for usefulness: pyplugin is useful if you want to build a gui with python and rely on all the mozilla goodness to help you along:)
(disclaimer: I'm the author of pyplugin)
Search for "hacker news" on both. The results are quite different. One might argue Bing is better because they don't have a duplicate result at the top.
But you will have to pay for the license fee no ?
The Flaws of Comics on Mobile Devices
What I mean is pricing isn't always the same on the pure product for an individual. Not everyone can load up a huge dresser into the trunk of their mini and get it to their flat. And if those places have delivery charges... =)

IKEA was founded on solving that exact problem.

That being said, I wish I had the room to do my own wood work. One day, one day. =)
I like the article for the added perspective of going elsewhere. But, like recent anti-tax blog posts I have trouble believing a $6-figure salary is that bad. No way you only have 4k of disposable income. How is that calculated? Even in NYC you do not need to spend 30k a year on housing like his percentages would suggests. People should stop trying to describe the plight of the 6-figure earner.
Fatboy In A Lean World
Doesn't this make Bing practically useless? I mean I go to an alternative search engine to get alternative search results...
Popular Non Google Business Web Apps for SMBs
You're crazy if you think every player in this space won't opt into "shady" if it means a better user experience. This is just a "shady" we get to hear about.
Fair point. FWIW none of those places charge delivery in this case.

You are right; IKEA sell cheap. And they also sell convenience - and market economics means that cheaply convenient is more expensive than cheaply awkward.
There will be NATs, one way or another. Nobody plans to start everything from scratch, so IPv6-to-IPv4 gateways (NAT64) seem inevitable.
If you enable the "show PR" thing on it, but that is (or at least was when I last used it) off by default. And Google specifically say they won't use the data for this sort of thing.
DreamPlug adds major hardware to ARM-based plugtop computing.
EMC offers Greenplum data warehousing tools at no charge (for R&D)
http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

To take an example to the extreme, it would be wasteful if Warren Buffet hired 10,000 painters to paint a portrait of himself everyday. The GDP would go up, but it wastes effort, effort that can be allocated more efficiently. (Using his own example here)
It may not be illegal or 'cheating', but it's incredibly stupid for the same reason cheating is: Without the person you are cheating from, you can't pass the test!

In the case, the customers don't get relevant results unless other potential customers use the competition! In short, Bing's results are only good if Google is popular.

Why would you invest time relying on your competition? Shouldn't you be striving to match or beat them, rather than trying to piggy-back on them?
I've had a Galaxy Tab since they first came out, and I use it just about daily, in bed, on the exercise bike, in a jacket pocket out to Starbucks. I think the size is perfect, and with only one exception (TMZ) the apps have scaled to the 1024 x 600 screen resolution.
The big advantage of the Tab is that it's here and got good reviews. I waited just about all of 2010 for an Android tablet, the Adam, Joojoopad... and I'm skeptical of any Android tablet's ship dates. Maybe by the 2011 holiday season I'll have the choice of good quality Android tablets I thought I would have at the 2010 holiday season, but I'd have had use of the Tab for a year.
My real complaint with it is this is my first experience with Verizon. I'm supposed to have a "month-to-month", no contract data plan, months I don't want 3G I just don't pay, but my account seems to be accumulating past due amounts? Any ideas?
Re: the font size, in this sub-thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2163862

All the comments are normal sized except for keiferski's, which appears smaller. I don't see any obvious reason in the stylesheet, and it seems to only happen on the iPhone (and not in Safari 5 on the Mac), so perhaps it's a Mobile Safari rendering oddity--maybe something to do with tables. It does only seem to happen on rather short comments.
Hmmm. Let's say that Bing sets up a script that sends queries to Google and then records the results. That's clearly copying. But what Bing does is when you use its toolbar, it watches what you do and uses that information to rank results. Is that really copying? It showed Google's Honeypot page because Google's engineers were clicking on the Honeypot page with the toolbar installed. That isn't copying Google's results, that's copying the actions of Bing toolbar users.

This can easily be demonstrated. Google can set up a second honeypot but instruct its engineers not to click on the link, ever. If it shows up in Bing's results, then Bing is watching what Google returns and scraping its results.

But if the second Honeypot doesn't show up in Bing's results, then clearly Bing isn't copying Google's results, it's copying its toolbar's preference for links.

The entire thing is moot to me. The takeaway in't whether Bing copies Google. The takeaway is that Bing's toolbar is spyware :-)
Why is it important that Megan McArdle wrote this?

(Her name is in the title, should I know of her for some reason?)
I suspect that, as with last time, I'll get to meet some people who conflate criticism of an unreliable source with ad hominem attacks, but this is your official reminder that:

1. Megan McArdle has a pretty lengthy documented history of playing at least somewhat loosely with her facts (and, frequently, of just outright misrepresenting or getting them wrong).

2. As such, it's probably a good idea to do some fact-checking as part of the process of evaluating her arguments, as the factual premises from which she reasons may not be sound.

Examples of McArdle's past factual issues:

* http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/01/22...

* http://inversesquare.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/why-andrew-sul...

More such can be located through your friendly local search engine.
Feeling stuck? Read this...
Lex Friedman speculates that Sony may have tried to add a webkit-enabled quasi-browser based in app purchase feature, arguing that it was the same as Kindle and other apps that push you out to mobile Safari to buy ebooks. But it wasn't push the user out to Safari...http://blog.lexfriedman.com/post/2856721037/apple-hasnt-chan...
MS has a long history of stealing and sabotage. This doesn't surprise me one bit.
Ask HN: Review my startup, crowdsavvy.com
Long story short, just launched a company, CrowdSavvy. CrowdSavvy is a mobile app tool that enables developers to proactively engage with users with survey questionnaires via an iPhone (coming soon, Android!) SDK. Think PollDaddy for mobile.

The idea came from my mobile consulting business as numerous clients would launch a mobile product and then ask “What do people think about my app?”, “How should I prioritize my feature enhancements”, and the very basic “Who are my users?”

At which point, they were forced to either hunt and peck iTunes, blogs, and review sites or go the expensive route of focus groups, research teams, etc. Our aim is to allow both small and large developers better access to their users, with an end goal of making smarter decisions based on data instead of guesswork.

I am looking for feedback on product/market fit. For example, Do you find this product valuable/Are you interested in including it in your app? If not, what is missing?

We have posted a quick video tour since our product requires a bit more tooling to setup* than others due to its B2B and developer focus: http://crowdsavvy.com/take-a-tour/

In return for your time and effort, I am committing to create some thought-provoking articles along the lines of OK Cupid’s blog, highlighting mobile data trends we have been able to uncover. Not as sexy as dating, but hopefully enticing to this audience.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.
-Brian

http://crowdsavvy.com/

*Actually, it only takes 6 lines of code
insight.ly - integrated with Google Apps, looks great, simple to use, tons of potential and in active development - we are testing it now - so far so good!
Sure, but if it's the default in whatever app/browser you're using, you might not bother switching to Google as long as it gets decent results.
They really could use a few words on some of the instructions, but that would violate their "one package for all countries" philosophy.

Also, have you ever tried to hang a pair of doors straight? Their hinges have like 9 degrees of freedom, which doesn't really help. Plus I don't think it is actually possible on this TV cabinet I have, since it isn't actually square once you put a TV on it.
Thats progress baby! See what Bell knows, and what you should know, is that tech is like fashion, everything old is new again. Look for UUCP and VAX to pick up steam again in the next 6-9 months, and brush op on your z/OS skills for 2012.
I don't think that's true - at least, I've not seen any evidence. There's a good chance the Google toolbar sends back browser data, but I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that Google snoops on what people are searching for on Bing, and what results they end up clicking on, and then adjusts their search results on the back of that.
Mobile Banking Takes off in Kenya
but the link between the obscure query and the click on the page wouldn't have been made without bing knowing the user first searched for the query on google, no? if it were simply boosting page clicks that would be one thing, but how else could rim.com rank 1st for "mbzrxpgjys"?
As a painter, I am tremendously excited to be able to take a closer look at some of these paintings than I could in their galleries, and to have so many works from so many collections in one place. I'm itching with anticipation to look at each individual brush-stroke. I'm actually giggling with glee.

I love living in the future.
Why all the downvotes? I only wanted to point out that the old bookmark worked fine for me. Is it due to the JavaScript I posted (in an attempt to help a fellow commenter) "breaking the page"? If so, perhaps that is more the website's design's fault rather than mine. (I'd edit the JS it into a gist if I could but the editing time has passed; additionally, I can't delete the offending comment.)

Perhaps next time you could point out why someone has been downvoted as well so as for them not to repeat their mistake again?

I'm very sorry for the inconvenience!
Make the Internet Smarter at Helping Us
Sunday's "60 Minutes" interview gave WikiLeaks founder his best platform yet
I got to play with M-Pesa when I was in Kenya for Christmas. Very cool system, especially the fact that it works on all the cheap dumbphones that people there have instead of requiring fancy NFC-capable phones and payment terminals.

http://www.qaiku.com/channels/show/FutureStore/view/a1ff6df4...
This is addressed in the article. It says that google uses toolbar latency to determine page load latency and that is the only way toolbar data affects page ranking.
Kind of indicative of where the internet is heading these days, a few big platform players which everyone else is piggybacking on. Like Windows Live Messenger attempting to stay relevant by combining facebook chat with it's own network.
Don't forget to see this comment! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152203

As well as this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152047
This reminds me so much of the old Emily Litella character that Gilda radner used to play on the Weekend Updated segment of SNL!
Safeguarding Your Data From Hackers and Intruders
This looks like a great tutorial, but please, for the love of maintainability stop stringing (pun intended) your views together by concatenating a bunch of lines together all over the place.

Underscore.js (which is required (and from the same team) for using Backbone) has a built-in templating with logic feature. In your html make a <script type="text/html"></script> with your template code inside of it, which will be overlooked by the browser during rendering, but you can still select and get the contents of it by slapping on an id. Then it's just a quick call to _.template() with your data object and it renders out beautifully. It feels analogous to your usual MVC structure, and is much easier to debug and update.
Have you tried gitk, or https://github.com/shoes/shoes/network , for example? What would you like to see?

I don't work for GitHub, I've just never really had this problem, so I'm curious.
Someone Is Trying The Pets.com Idea Again
That's really surprising on the health care front. I think many westerners (myself included) think of Japan as a paragon of efficiency and effectiveness in nearly everything.

Can you elaborate on what's wrong with the system?
That sounds all well and good, but in terms of cost vs. benefit, it's way easier to make a good application by stealing the years of hard work of the industry leaders than it is to reinvent everything and try to come up with your own clever tweaks to improve it. If you could do it without getting caught, it would practically be a no-brainer.
We've got quite a lot of public economic data: http://timetric.com/.

If you're up to something in the economic data space we'd love to talk. Happy to take this to email (andrew@timetric.com) if anyone's interested.
I apologise for the inconvenience! Is it due to the long JavaScript? I didn't think it'd break the formatting, and now that I have realised I can't edit or delete it.

Could you please tell me why you want to downvote my comment? Thanks!
Well yes there is a hard link happening between a google search result and a link being clicked, however googles argument isn't as strong if it turns out bing is doing this for all search engines. It might be that they aren't targeting google specifically, but instead they're targeting all search sites generically.
So basically the same thing Vista was doing (prefetch, and admittedly it did a shitty job with >1GB ram), except since its Linux, Oh its all fine guys, we won't destroy the OS' reputation.
Heh, nice site.

Note I find this useful for showing how much RAM apps really are using:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ps_mem.py
Well, the article suggests that there is more to it than just mere copying. The way I see it, Bing is basically taking a look at what is that the user does when it searches for a term that is unknown to Bing. Once they have this initial data, they are able to filter it as they see fit to avoid getting spam results.
You make some great points here, especially with your last sentence: "So what's going on? Suster is working way too hard looking for the secrets and, thus, is getting way off the track."

A vision and the will to embark on the journey is common to all businesses.

Sometimes the vision is more about the benefits of the business, and in that case, grand success may be a bit more elusive until the entrepreneur learns to focus on the business of business itself.

But again, it would be ridiculous to expect every entrepreneur to be "prepared" before starting a startup -- of any kind.
I like the content of this post, but I take issue with the idea that the debate only matters in a failure condition. That's academically true, but practically misleading. When developing my app, I have to assume any part of the system could fail at any time. Thus my whole app needs to be written with failure in mind.

In an ACID system, that means my transactions either happen or don't, and it's on me to figure out whether they did or not. Sometimes I'll need to do some investigating after a failure to find out what succeeded and what rolled back.

In an eventually consistent system, I need a contingency plan for every operation on the system. Now that contingency plan might be very simple, such as "Whatever happened, happened and last writer wins." The CALM conjecture paper does a decent job of describing when this might be a workable contingency plan. More complicated operations require increasingly complex contingency plans. This is why Cassandra is now offering counters as an API feature, because something as simple as counters is really hard to get right in all failure scenarios.

If you fit the CALM description and require multi-data center availability, then EC is probably a good bet. It may still be a good bet otherwise, but the availability comes along with a much more difficult app development picture, failures or no.
What about http://ckan.org/ ?

The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network! Pretty sweet resource really.
Right, the only thing wrong with Windows Vista was its RAM caching strategy.
Steve Case: Looking for 'Speedups,' Not Just Startups
From my understanding Apple spent a lot of time getting the form factor right for the iPad. A lot of thought went into ensuring the OS was adequate for the device.

The device is too big and too heavy. The OS far from optimal for the device. That the Galaxy Tab is a pretty marginal device, with a slew of weaknesses, in no way validates anything that Apple has done with the iPad.

The iPad is a superior device to the tab. However I, and billions of other people, haven't opted to buy it. The market waits for something that fits our needs better.

It's as if companies think it's the shape of the device matters more than the experience of using the device. I guess knowing this

What does this even mean? It sounds like some sort of iPad-owner defensive reaction to a smaller tablet. Samsung couldn't suddenly make Android tablet-ready, but as above you're drawing the wrong conclusion.

A 7" tablet with a unoptimized OS does not invalidate a 7" tablet. A tablet with an unoptimized OS does not validate every facet of a tablet with a more appropriate OS.

As one aside, and to go slightly conspiratorial, the lack of decent Android competitors to the iPad falls largely on Google's shoulders. It strongly seems like Google was of mixed emotions about tablets, desperately wanting devices bigger than a smartphone to be owned by the ChromeOS project. They ignored the market, undermined the market, and only came around after lots of delays, all while ChromeOS slowly pushed its way into the light.
All this startup world is funny anyway. If i tell my friends i regularly work 50-60 hour weeks they call me crazy, tell me i have no life and whatsoever. Then you come here to hear that under 80hours of working you cant get anything done until the people working 100 hours/week share their stories...
I bet you can even find people claiming 120 hours/week, hell why not, after all the week has 168hours so theres plenty left!
Sort of petulant on Google's part to release this, no?

Of course your competitors are going to copy you. It's not innovative, and you might consider it 'cheating' if you forget that each and every one of us are building off of a foundation laid by other people. But it works, and that's why it happens and will continue to happen.
Photos: NookColor Running Android 3.0 Honeycomb
PlentyofFish Hacked: Dating Website's Owner Says It's Blackmail
A good way I read somewhere was "Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Linux uses it to speed up your disk and gives it back to programs when they need it".
Help us build the "No nonsense" social business network
Share your ideas here. Thanks in advance!
I am not sure about that - how do you hack the SAT? I know there are a lot of companies who have tried for years, but wouldn't one of them have had a breakthrough by now, if it was possible?
Wouldn't it make more sense to just include the RAM used for disk-caching when calculating free memory? After all, the whole reason it's being used for disk-caching in the first place is that it's free! The Linuxoids that know what this even means can always explicitly look for the line that says how much memory is being used for caching...
But then still, the Bing toolbar is watching what you're searching for and recording that information. That's a pretty big privacy issue
Google likens it to the digital equivalent of Bing leaning over during an exam and copying off of Google’s test.

Isn't that basic classroom solidarity?
Sounds like sloppy practise if it's true that passwords were in plain text! Spaghetti code?
The page is about explaining a correct behavior, not justifying some bogus memory usage. There's no reputation at stake. All modern operating systems are expected to behave that way, free RAM is wasted RAM.
I agree that Mark's article is full of great advice, and that he is not explicitly answering the question for anyone.

This blog was my genuine reaction to Mark's list of characteristics, which is something that in the past I may have read and felt discouraged.

It's a shame to discourage when I now know the truth: that none of those characteristics must be identified in order to get started and eventually succeed at a startup.
Does the Apple-Verizon Deal Change the War on Carriers?
…you used HAML
"Presumably not every intelligent person will subjectively find Australia's culture versus the US's culture either a win for Australia or a tossup; some may prefer American culture. Some people may also place utility on things like "living in my home country, where I don't feel like a foreigner"; though of course other people may consider living in another country to be an inherently positive experience."

Fair point. I'd like to add, though, that even within the United States, there's a lot of cultural variation, adn even among larger trends there are quite a few smaller pockets. I find, for example, that I'm happiest in big-ish cities in the Midwest, but only when I can engage with the arts scene and a little bit with the tech scene.

What I mean to say is that I think you're right in that the author does not offer any qualification for those points, but will also say that living in Perth or Darwin is likely to be very different from living in Melbourne, if for no other reason than location, demographic, and the purposes that people have in being there.
Ironically, the admissions people are currently being gamed by applicants by way of their essays and "portfolios." There is a whole college application advising industry equivalent to "SEO" companies.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/30/college-application-tips-li...
The relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/793/

90% of what people do in a job is mundane, simple stuff an interested hobbyist could figure out to do. That last 10% is what people get paid for.