skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel that the author just didn't try any other technologies.

> I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation

I find this hard to believe. Again I think the author knows his way around Microsoft products, and is biased towards it.

> Hiring quality coders on a bootstrapper’s budget is easier for ASP.NET than it is for anything open source. It just is.

I find this statement self-justifying and false. If a product is more scarce than others than it will probably be more expensive, in other words: if there is bigger competition there are lower prices.

The premise is true, no one cares about the server side technology expect maybe programmers who will have to build on that... wait what?
I can't be the only person to notice that not every angle on the instructables example can be 60 degrees.
Online influencers- who really has clout?
I believe there is a difference between being in "stealth" mode and having people sign NDAs.

I have a startup I call in stealth mode not because we do not get feedback from users or have advisors and investors sign NDAs, but because we want to grow on our own terms. We want to get direct feedback from our target market with out opening the flood gates where noise enters into the equation.

I completely agree with your statement about NDAs are a load of shit, but stealth as something else is not always a bad thing.
Zune is a great name! Very catchy, and they spent a pile of money to get it out there.

But that's also the problem. Zune has been reduced to a punchline in popular media. That's what happens when the product doesn't match up to its marketing. Fair or not, it's become an embarrassment for the company. And the same thing happened with Vista.

So I think going forward Microsoft will rely on the Windows brand for their underdog products. It's difficult to write a catchy punchline about, say, "Windows Music Device 7".

Or, they could just call it Windows Xzyxxz. You can't write any jokes about a product that can't be pronounced.
Startup Genome Project Aims to Crack the Innovation Code
Linux's 'failure' in getting people to spend "that kind of money" in a consumer context is most likely due to the fact that it's not a centrally-owned commercial entity with a product line and shareholders (i.e. what Apple Inc. is), not due to do any actual 'failure'.

I'm not saying that the users of Apple products and those of Linux distributions don't differ in their purchasing habits (and I'm not saying they do, either)--I'm just pointing out the flaw in this line of reasoning.

And I don't know why you keep repeating this "biggest non-Exxon company in world history" argument, too. It's sensationalist and by two of the most common metrics, false:

* By market capitalization they've been the biggest in only three quarters in history (most recent), all of which are smaller than other companies in history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporations_by_market_...

* By revenue there are many, many non-Exxon (i.e. oil?) companies bigger than Apple: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_revenue
Oh you're right, I was thinking of the MySQL bindings (don't know where the original ones are at)

https://github.com/brianmario/mysql2/tree/master/ext/mysql2
I've been using this for a while now and it's absolutely brilliant.
A Line Discount Wedding Dresses on sale at wholesale price
While Scott Guthrie is in charge of ASP.NET team -- ASP.NET would be a good choice (even though Microsoft overall is stagnating).
Who wants cheaper books? (Help the Domino Project)
I've noticed many HN readers mentioning books of all sorts of varieties.

I'm a member of the Domino Project Street Team. Seth Godin along with Amazon is trying to disrupt the publication and book distribution process in a big way.

One of the things we're experimenting with now is how to build a list and market to folks in a meaningful way. To get people interested in the project and spreading ideas, Seth is offering to lower the price of his first book, "Poke the Box." For every 5,000 people that sign up for the mailing list, he'll drop the price of the Kindle copy by 1.00. Right now the price is 7.99. He'll go all the way to .99. The Kindle version can be read on nearly any device / computer, but if you want a hardcopy, the book is still at a reasonable 9.99.

Just for clarification--I'm not here to sell books. I'm here to spread ideas and come up with ways to get better books in our hands faster and cheaper. If you have no desire to read Seth's book, but want to help us validate (or invalidate) ideas on how to better reach people to keep book prices down, please let us know.

This is but one experiment. We've got other ideas and eventually other books will be published through the Domino Project. Please comment in here and ask about the project or contact me, my info is in my profile.

You can subscribe to the newsletter at http://bit.ly/h3C0vv .

More info on the Domino Project at http://thedominoproject.com
Worry about the "nobody cares enough" problem long before worrying about the "oh crap, too many people care" problem. User apathy, aka "not enough traction" kills far more startups than inability to scale. Pick the ecosystem with which your company will be most efficient and agile, and cross the scaling bridge if you come to it. We've rewritten substantially all parts of our codebase and key infrastructure 2 or 3 times in the last 8 years. You'll get the pleasure of doing the same iff you have users...
Clickable - http://bit.ly/h3C0vv
There are four levels of anonymity on the Internet

1) Complete anonymitiy, e.g. 4chan - there's either no name, or it's trivially easy to change one's name. This removes any consequences from what you write, and hence often results in immature discussions.

2) Pseudononymity, e.g. HN - your writings are connected to an account, but that account isn't linked to any real-world person. People who spend a lot of time building up their pseudonym have an incentive to post constructively, but at the same time those who haven't put a lot of time in can post without consequence.

3) Unenforced real names, e.g. Facebook - When everyone's using their real names, there's a psychological pressure not to post things that are inappropriate or offensive. When are posting with people they know in real life using real names, there's a pressure to interact in the same way they would in face-to-face conversation. When people are interacting with strangers using real-names, there's pressure to interact in the same way you'd interact with a stranger in face-to-face conversation.

4) Enforced real names, e.g. official statements or blogs - When someone writes something in this form, you know that they mean what they're saying, and are willing to be held accountable for it.

Less anonymity means more valuable posts, on average, at the cost of increased consequences, less openness, and greater risk. In 4chan you can speak your mind freely, but the vast majority of the content is worthless. In official publications, you have to be careful about what you say, but it's probably going to be worthwhile, or at least grammatically correct.

One issue tangentially related to the article is that it's very difficult to prove your identity on the internet, and make statements in category (4), without sharing things that should not be made public, such as your social security number.
Google for "Rethinking the First-Mover Advantage"
So is there any information on how they actually implemented watson? My understanding is it's a bayesian machine learning system, but I still don't know how it parses answers, or really does its magic.

Also, if there is anyone who thinks silicon valley has the smartest people around, this type of stuff should change your mind. Facebook is short trousers compared to this. and it's just a tech demo.
Maybe Google doesn't want holes appearing in their searches when major sites go behind paywalls (newspapers?).
it does have tagging!
Software is part of Science
I swear, all this box worship makes me think of The Prisoner, Episode Six, "The General". Patrick McGoohan had the right take on this forty years ago.

At the risk of repeating myself, trivia questions are a game, not a source of wisdom. They are a highly constrained genre: a good trivia question requires no special expertise, can be answered in seconds by a human, and - most important of all - has a single, unambiguous, indisputably correct, short answer. In other words, it is the least important form of knowledge. They call it trivia for a reason.

It is doubtful that Watson will be particularly better at answering such questions than Google plus a half-educsted human would be. It might be faster than that combo, but how often are fractions of a second of the essence when Googling? It might not require the human to do as much, but humans are a dime a dozen on Mechanical Turk.

Moreover, taking humans out of the search loop is self-defeating: Google makes money because a human must filter the results. Humans are susceptible to advertising. Watson won't click on ads that he glimpses out of the corner of his eye, and even if he did advertisers wouldn't pay for those clicks. So what is WatsonGoogle's business model?
The real takeaway from this story seems to be that Microsoft reads and responds to #HN
There's also TheHackersDigest.com
Too true. The debacles I've been involved in that caused me to post the above were all hastily constructed WebForm apps at their inception.
The craziest thing about it is they removed the old `filter` hacks for (bad, but hey) text shadows without replacing them with their modern CSS3 equivalent. (I should clarify: I mean in IE9’s IE9 mode, naturally.)
Why hasn't a massive antitrust case against Apple been launched? Their behavior strikes me as far more anticompetitive than that of Microsoft during the "Browser Wars".

Apologists: I don't care that Apple created something this profitable--that is not the issue. Desiring complete control over the mere act of computing on your own machine* is the problem. Apple is doing a wonderful job of absorbing a large swath of the marketshare and turning it into a closed ecosystem for developers, content providers, service providers, and owners. Apple should not have the authority to control everything one does with their devices. Why is this happening?

Maybe I worry too much, but I don't want to see our electronic freedoms erode.
>Telecom, as an industry, is still the #1 or #2 source of political donations.

Its not even in the top 30.

http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/mems.php
Not sure what you are trying to say. I’m in Chrome 9 and it looks pretty great.
I have to agree.

I was an avid FF user for many years. I shied away from Chrome for quite some time, until this December. A fresh FF install with no addons was painfully unresponsive, given 'too many tabs'. Those same tabs in Chrome chugged along.

I hope FF can get back on track(relative to Chrome:P) and reduce some of the bloat.
The horrible flash-of-unstyled-content suggests that this is not a good use of canvas. :P
Is youtube.com down right now?
What the hell? Never seen that before. If it's just me, let me know and I'll delete this post.
It is an unfair advantage, and it's frustrating to watch. For most of the answers, both Ken and Brad were trying to buzz in, but Watson always had better timing and buzzed in first. I'm sure that Jeopardy's buzzing system didn't take robots into account when it was designed, so it technically isn't against the rules. But it does give Watson a huge tactical advantage.
If you protect your keys well enough, you can protect the content of your emails. If they're stored on an IMAP server, downloading them will do you no good without the keys. Additionally, compromising a single machine may only yield the key to some subset of a company's emails.
It is certainly unfair and has pretty much ruined the competition for me. Watson can instantly detect when he's allowed to ring in. This is no different than a car "racing" a human. In theory, a human contestant can try to time his trigger to coincide with the end of Trebeck speaking the question, and catch the light just as the timing person releases the question, but in practice this is fraught with peril--if you're off you can't ring in for several tenths of a second--and requires much more of a human's energy, which he can no longer devote to figuring out the question. You could see Jennings attempt this on the first day, with mixed results. These episodes are commercials for IBM and it's clear who is supposed to win.
Infra-red Eye Tracking on a clip of There Will Be Blood
> The "racism" probably comes from description of the black riders, but black describes their clothes; [...]

I think you're hung up on the wrong idea for 'racism' here -- I don't believe that Tolkien was necessarily drawing explicit parallels to skin color, and I don't think that's the right place to look for racism.

I do, however, believe that the single trait which is most fully described any given character is that of their race (as in 'hobbit/orc/human/elf'). It's usually the first thing you learn about them, often before their name. When an important character acts, the author nearly always takes care to point out their action as (a)typical of their racial tendencies. And so on.

In other words, LoTR is deeply racist in the simple sense that the author prioritised race above individuality.
Your endusers may not care. Not directly. But they'll care when your site has problems or is slow. This part, in turn, is heavily influenced by the quality of engineers you have behind the scenes, and the choices they make. The nature/quality of your engineers will be influenced by what kinds of technical choices are in place at the time you start trying to hire them on. As a general rule, for example, a LAMP stack is going to attract a different mix than a Microsoft stack would. Lisp will attract different than PHP. Therefore, tech does matter. Does it matter as much as making a product people want and are willing to pay for? Probably not as much. But if/when the time comes and you want your site to scale, or have lower problem rate, then your engineers and your tech are going to matter.
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/youtube.com

Looks like no, loaded up for me.
It would help because the private keys needed to decrypt the emails would not have been kept on the server, and, even if they were, they'd still need a passphrase to get the content of the private key (though, it could have been the same insecure passphrase used elsewhere).

Also, a common policy of encrypting and signing emails would have stopped the social engineering attack completely, as the sysadmin would've known not to accept an unsigned request to give out passwords.

Kind of mind boggling that people don't do this generally already.
Most places can take the few minutes of SQL blocking resulting from an index rebuild in standard edition.

I know we often jump towards 5 9 solutions, because it feels like the "Right Thing(TM)" to do, but you can afford a lot of episodes of few minutes of blocking for what enterprise edition will cost... (we do run enterprise edition on our needed-by-cash-register DBs)

I'm a big fan of MS-SQL, and would encourage people to think about the value of chasing that 4th nine of uptime. It doesn't make sense for most companies, IMO.
I have been using the beta and it really works well. rsync backup could not be easier than this!
I think the way they did it in Japan was really good. Obviously, any industry that leverages legally enforced right-of-way or geographical exclusivity is already regulated, so it makes sense to try to do a good job regulating.

They've done that here, although it is hard for me to imagine the government in the US doing nearly as good a job. Pipes are essentially scarce, whether fiber or DSL or cable, and so pipe owners are required to make them accessible to different providers.

I just recently switched from SoftBank YahooBB fiber-to-the-buiding service (synchronous 100Mbps, I'd get 10MB/sec downloads) to NTT fiber-to-your-router service (200Mbps down, 100Mbps up, now getting slightly over 20MB/sec downloads). This is about $50 per month, and I had my choice of something like 40 different providers to choose from when they installed the new fiber terminal in my room. (1Gbps "business" service was also available, but that cost $400 per month and my future wife vetoed the idea.)

It was a similar deal in 2005 when I had fiber installed here at a different Tokyo location, though. That time the fiber was owned by the electric power utility, and I got various competitive offers for IP service.

For work I have also set up connectivity at a few US locations, all DSL or cable since fiber isn't widely available. The problems with Internet service in the US are mainly political, not technical. Regulations create artificial oligopolies where you usually must choose a.) the local telephone monopoly, b.) the local cable monopoly, or c.) an esoteric solution like a leased line or some kind of wireless service. There are often reliability issues or huge costs associated with that last one, so in many/most US locations it is a choice between two monopolists whose respective pipes are protected by government regulation, but which are not under the sorts of regulatory obligations that they are here, which create real competition in the market.

Without real competition, there is little incentive to make major infrastructure investments and so you end up with the US being a pathetic backwater banana republic in terms of Internet connectivity. (For that reason, I hate trying to work in the US almost as much as in mainland China.)
They have nothing to worry about. Take this from someone who is going bald at a faster rate because I needed to assist in porting an chrome-only app over to support IE9. FF, Safari, Opera were no problem, money was all spent on IE
"And more fun = easier."

That's the thing though - you and I think programming is fun and awesome, whereas this guy thinks business is fun and awesome, and programming is just a means to do what he wants to.

What I think is a valuable lesson here though, is that he stayed focused on his goal of "put out the site", whereas with hackers it's easy to have a real goal of "Use technology X and write some awesome code" with a tertiary goal of "ship a product". Always be focused on getting your product out the door, even if you don't make perfect technical decisions.
I've been trying to think of a way to redesign the buzzer system to make it more fair, but I haven't been able to come up with anything. Tricky problem.
Great post.

I agree that execution is everything and an idea without a proper execution is worthless. So any smart ass MBA's with "game-changing ideas" but absolutely no idea about what it takes to actually build something from nothing need to take a long hard look at themselves and stop being bullshitters.

However, the title of the post is not 100% accurate as the term "stealth mode" does not specifically relate to not launching, protecting a non-existant "IP" or being unwilling to share your ideas.

Launching a product in "stealth mode" (as in avoiding significant public exposure and media coverage during the first stages of the product's life) can in some cases be a good marketing strategy and I can see why some entrepreneurs would choose to launch to a smaller group of customers and test their ideas and implementations before contacting Techcrunch, going onto Mixergy or wasting time meeting with VC's who want a piece of the action before anyone knows what the action is.
It's a nice idea. I wish you had chosen another name, though. When I see ClueDB I think of a database product; I don't know what non-developers think of or if they'll remember the name.
There is an update for the firmware on the Sony LiveView. (I own one, and it made a big difference in connectivity to my Nexus One.)
I live in Hong Kong, and the people I know get paid roughly what they would get paid in the US. Most goods and services cost roughly the same as they do in the US as well. Some things are cheaper (taxis) and others are more expensive (imported beer).

There are a lot of people working for way less than what they would get in the US though -- domestic helpers are a prime example.
Getting customer service issues resolved
I'm getting some weird traffic coming from one of the caches. It's been super slow for me.
Of course. This isn't a match of equals, this is one of man versus machine. As fans know, most responses in a game of Jeopardy! are known by multiple players. That's especially so in a game of this caliber, so the knowledge aspect is really quite minimal compared to the ring-in factor. Both these guys slaughtered their opponents by being quick on the buzzer.

Watson is being granted first crack at the questions 90% of the time because of its electromechanical advantage. IBM may not have the mean brainpower that Google has, but they can clearly build a computer that can press a button quicker than Ken Jennings.

Knowing that a computer can consistently beat even the best to ever play the game to the buzzer, the IBM team could be pretty well assured of success once they got Watson performing well enough.
You could just give Watson a hard 200ms handicap.
The absolute number one bottleneck in software-based startups right now is the availability, interest and affordability of good software engineers. The number and quality of engineers you're going to be able to attract will be heavily influenced by your tech choices upfront. There are some engineers who are so desperate they'll say yes to anything. There are others who have lots of choices and get to pick which to say yes too. In general, you'd rather have the second kind. So yes, tech does matter. The exact shade of the color blue you use in some image somewhere? Probably not matter too much. Your tech mix? Hell yes.
What if Hudson loses its plugins?
I think the trend is shifting at least when it comes to projects hosted on Github. Forking there is less of a divergent path, but more of a way to tinker and make changes and push them back to the main code source. At least that is what most people do, and I think it is better for it.
I just took an introductory course in web security. This explained many terminologies that fly over my head on HN.
Given the schematic and gerbers, I'd be willing to make a version of this watch that would talk to un-jailbroken iPhones (and other iOS devices).
Yep - and MonoDevelop will run ASP.NET just fine on any platform, or just use gVim and make
Just means they've never had experience being attacked before. Always offense, never defense. In their minds, they never considered someone would have a reason to go after THEM.

They specialize in thinking up new ways to attack OTHERS, using OTHER peoples' tools. It's a huge problem in DC. A bunch of people telling other people what to do, without little idea or experience how to do it themselves.
Clickable: http://cluedb.com/
I'm surprised nobody here has mentioned Dynawa, yet.

http://www.dynawa.org/
You mean people might have to build a product that people will buy in the long term rather than trying to flip a quick buck? Madness I say.
Ask HN: Should i room with a potential co-founder?
So, I have to decide rooming situation for next year at my college in a couple weeks, and I'm not sure whether or not to room with a friend of mine who I may start a company with in the near future.
My current roommate is not a technical person, so I won't be co-founding with him, but we get along great. It's also a possibility that I continue rooming with him next year.
Will I be missing out on opportunities by not deciding to room with someone that I could start a company with? I see a lot of potential productivity occurring when I live with the person I'm working with because I hear about everyone saying "When you're starting a company, starting the company is your whole life."
So what do you think HN, is it a good idea to room with the potential founder, or would I be more productive with the startup if we roomed separately.
oh sorry somehow I missed them
Okay, it was down, but now it's back. I guess nevermind. It's just I never ever see it go down.