skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Back in the day, when a $10 million IPO was too big and you wanted to raise only a million or so one of the places you turned was to the Vancouver Stock Exchange. (It was also the place to lose your shirt or gain a fortune betting on penny stock mining firms).

It's changed hands and is now known as the Canadian Venture Exchange, and is still a great place for sub-$10 million IPO's. It's last IPO was for a mining firm who raised 5.75 million dollars selling shares at 50 cents a pop.
"Of course Rhapsody can't sell their stuff for a 30% margin. It's not their own stuff!"

Yeah. The original article talks about "calling Apple's bluff" as if this is some sort of choice on Rhapsody's part, but anybody who literally can't make a profit with a 30% cut off the top from Apple isn't "calling a bluff". There's no volition involved.
I'm not happy to have predicted this in comments early today:
(some slight paraphrasing)

The current state of affairs - where Apple provides a nice sales channel (marketing in a sense) on their already highly profitable devices and where service providers bring attractive service to the platform - is a fairly even trade. Apple is asking for such a drastic renegotiation of this "trade balance" that I predict services will need to reprice for iOS or abandon the platform. Content services are already struggling enough - and Apple has too many viable competitors! - for me to imagine them simply submitting. Sony's withdrawal of their app was the writing on the wall, I'm afraid.
... I wish Google allowed me to globally exclude the domain from my searches ...

You may have missed the news about this plugin for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbd...
Uh, no. No, it isn't.

To quote from section 8, "Conclusion": "Four distinct transput primitives have been identified: passive input, active output, active input, and passive output".

The point of the paper is that usually the passive primitives are not available to the user. Their "read only" simply means passive out, active in - which supposedly reduces complexity in most cases.
How I made it onto Tim Ferriss' Blog
I signed up. I've gotten countless StartupDigest e-mails that I've learned to ignore every Monday. If this LinkedList has relevant events, I'll actually read the e-mail.
While it may have an extensive legal jurisprudence, this issue is total separate. The rights protected in the constitution relate to the state.

For example, we have a right to assemble and the state can not deny that. However, a private entity can prevent us from assembling on their property.

In the same way we have a right to anonymous speech and the state can not deny that. However, a private entity (Quora) can prevent us from making anonymous speech on their website.

The reason for this is obvious, would you want newspapers to have to allow the rantings of a raving lunatic if he used a pseudonym to sign it because it can't prevent anonymous speech?
Make sure you use a real fake name. Not a fake fake name.
You can if you run Chrome. They just released an extension to do just this.

(someone posted this on HN recently)

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension-...
Treat yourself to `Lolita', if you want to read some flowery English prose written by a Russian.
IIRC, there was a time when EE pages didn't provide any answer at all without registration.

To keep their search ranking up, they'd show this hidden content to the Googlebot, but not to unregistered users.

Google cried foul about this, and thus was the long scroll to an answer invented.

EE's web site was never designed around giving the user an answer as quickly as possible. It has always been designed to maximize its tiny paid account conversion rate. That's a spam business model, no "borderline" about it.
amazon offers magazine subscription for kindle. Besides, I think Apple has been known to ignore or allow exceptions. For these SAAS companies, I imagine Apple will allow them to slide, but by their own terms.. it sounds like they shouldn't. I think their only main concerns are profiting from companies that compete directly with Apple revenue streams, music, movies, and books.
Outsourcing your Decisions: Virtual Focus Groups
I'll do one better than email Steve. This will be my last iPhone.
It seems like 90% of the EE questions I see, the asker has vanished before accepting one of the answers - in those cases this patented system is effectively worthless since I have no idea which answer is best. At least on SO I can still get an idea if some answers are better (or if some are flat-out wrong, as happens).
Crippling functionality in response to jailbreaking is a bad move. Basically, you're pissing off exactly the people who have the ability to embarrass you. Just detecting jailbreaking is tremendously powerful in itself, and can be leveraged to great advantage. Crippling functionality isn't one of these ways, though.
Also gives you wings. That's a plus.
> Just take any project dependent on something on the list in the original article, and implement it on IE9.

OK, but in that case, what you really mean is a web app built for browsers that haven't even been released yet. I'm sure for some people/projects that is a serious issue, but I think your characterisation is a little unfair.

> But there are also a number of things like rounded corners, transparency, and event handling that are irksome. Thank God for jQuery.

Sure, those are annoying, but as you point out, solutions are easy to come by.

> IE8 and below were simply too feature-poor to even begin to run it (start with missing canvas, and work from there).

http://excanvas.sourceforge.net/

You're welcome. :-)

> When I read your last sentence, though, I see "the problem is with everyone else, not IE".

Not everyone else, just a small list of specific groups whose specific rapid-release policies keep moving the goalposts. Coincidentally, those groups hold much of the market share not held by IE today, but the point isn't that IE is somehow superior to everyone else, just that I don't like the policy those particular groups have adopted for the reasons I have been giving in this discussion.
Actually it does affect the Kindle and other non-subscription apps, as confirmed in this report:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9209580/Apple_s_new_A...
Moda Hombres
I agree with your comments about Luna. About the #ifdef proposal, I think a better solution might be that your server-side model object has a method like getSlaveObject() that gives you a version of the model that is acceptable to be seen on the client side.
Seems like you can get this data for any month or year (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2010/11). I am not expert on this, is there anything special about January 2011?
The thing is that people think of browsers as a single market with all browsers competing directly with each other.

In reality, I think we're starting to get to a point where browsers are differentiating and targeting different groups of users. Chrome uses automatic updates to drive innovation and chase after the "power user" types who care about HTML5 and having the latest and greatest. On the other hand IE needs to maintain its core user base which is enterprise and business users where stability and support are far more important than <canvas> support. Automatic updates would be a horrible idea of IE because it would alienate these users.

Hopefully people are starting to realize that there is not one "best" browser, there are a number of different browsers, each with their own perks and downsides, and it's down to each individual user to pick the one that best suits their needs.
Rupert Pupkin, anybody? Experts Exchange is not a small site in general, and has been around for like 15 years (per the article), so I'm a little curious how this guy got so jaded on VC such that he "got the t-shirt."

Is EE really run by movers and shakers riding deals every few years in their spare time? Until finally tiring of the rigamarole and retiring to their first love, Experts Exchange. Isn't it more likely that they've hired various "been through an acquisition and/or IPO" people to try and give them business ideas over the years? No wonder the site is so annoying, these people would have been bleeding the founders dry while suggesting a full campaign of popup ads that worked a peach a few years back at Ask Jeeves. That doesn't work, so they move on to the next guy who totally worked at Twitter in the early days.

I'm thinking lashing out at the world is at the unpaid end of the spectrum of BizDev.
God I love how Stackoverflow kick those guys buts, and they don't even know their concurrency enough to tell bad things about it, most things they said it's theirs super duper feature is already at Stack.
We don't care anymore.

Who is "we" here? Am I talking to the official spokesperson for all non-enterprise web devs? Last time I checked Facebook, Google, CNN, NYTimes, and Twitter all worked with IE.

When webpages that people actually care about break in IE then I'll believe you. Until then, I think people will go where the money is. Now maybe you won't support IE. That's your choice, but I suspect you're not the director for webdev at Facebook.

In fact, if you let me know what your sites are, I can add them to my blacklist to avoid us both the trouble of your sites showing up in my Google search since they may take down my browser at any point in the future.
> Now suppose that in about five weeks, Google push a breaking change in the new release of Chrome

No, I refuse to swallow this particular strawman that you've been using throughout the thread.

I'll elaborate. Web development projects should be undertaken with reference to the current state of support across browsers for current and emerging standards, with the expectation that such support will improve over time. Basing your tests on the rendering characteristics of a single browser at a single point in time is simply wrong-headed. So this 'breaking change' idea is not just wrong but incoherent.

Obviously 'breaking changes' can happen in the context of browser UI but (a) that has nothing to do with web development and (b) rolling release schedules are actually better at catching those problems than epoch-making version releases.
My point is that Apple doesn't see in-app payments as merely payment processing. They see them as App Store purchases which are delayed in time.

Everyone keeps anticipating Apple becoming a payment processor, but it hasn't happened yet. They're still a platform provider.

This kind of reminds me of some of the TripAdvisor reviews you see on resorts with a championship golf course and all kinds of amenities. There are always people annoyed that because just wanted a simple room and don't want to have to pay for the amenities. They argue they should be able to pay a lower rate. But they just stayed at the wrong place.

A 30% rent is a great rate for what the App Store provides, but if all you want to pay for is a better payment processor, yeah, it does seem outrageous.
Wow! I just read something on Expert Exchange and i didn't even have to pay any money!

Expert Exchange is actually a legit company? I had no idea. I don't think i know anybody who's ever used it. Hell, i've never heard of anybody who's ever used Expert Exchange.
Here in Jamaica, the equivalent of USD $38 gets you 20 Mbps down/1.5 Mbps up. You can get 50 Mbps down for USD $105, and 100 Mbps down / 5Mbps up for USD $129. It's not bad at all, all things considered.
Quality is subjective. I'm Irish born and bred, have lived in west and east London, spent many months in in the Bay area, and travelled around northeast US.

Weather better in the northern CA? Sure, though it has its rainy season, and that's a lot rainer than London.

Food? Variable, but at its best in major metropolises, of which SF is usually a far distance away, and not less expensive than London.

Culture? The car / mall nexus does severe damage to the US's livability to me. San Jose isn't really a city so much as a grid of road intersections in the shadow of an interstate junction. Santa Cruz is out of the way over the hills. SF is where it's at, but again, it's a fair bit away.

Essentially, I feel I have a better quality of life in London than I do when I'm in the US.
This sort of thing is fun, but it sounds more simplistic than Tolkien's universe and philosophies. I will read it with interest. Can someone comment as to the quality of the Russian version?
Think quickly, because for every hour that key system is down and all the staff are stopped from working, the company could have hired an extra web developer for an entire year.

True.
The best stack to use is the one you know you can build to a point of getting traction/profitable with. The toughest barrier to startup success is getting traction/profitable, not the stack you use. Technology, esp. in the realm of computers, works such that there is almost always a workable solution given enough time or money, both of which come a lot easier once you've solved the hardest barrier which I've just outlined.
A really fundamental data structure
This is what I do at my day job. It's fun. :) Here are some of the interesting/tricky parts:

- Everything needs to be lightning fast. You don't have time for 15 calls out to MySQL to figure out what you're going to do. NoSQL is your friend here.

- Relating to the above, implement a timing/profiling system that operates in production early on. It'll save your life more than you think.

- Keep track of budgets and ads served per advertiser in a way that's quickly accessible and can handle being shared. Hint: if you're going to run more than 1-2 campaigns, you don't have time to hit your DB every impression to get this.

- Make sure you fully understand cookie mechanics, especially relating to third-party cookies.

- The amount of events in online advertising is enormous compared to other fields, so make sure your reporting can scale horizontally.

- Understand how TCP and HTTP connections work and what stages they go through. You're going to have more connections from more different hosts than most normal load profiles, so optimizing your web stack and load balancing is critical.
It's impressive to me that when the great minds behind Experts Exchange make their voice known, they talk just like the kind of slimeballs you would expect behind such an operation.

It's shameless. In their shoes, I'd just sit there quietly, take the snub on the chin, keep plying my spammy trade, and have enough introspection to realize that the reason no one wants to talk to me is because I've created one of the shittiest, most user-hostile content abominations in the history of the entire internet.

I guess the dangerous thing about dirtbags is that they have no idea they're dirtbags. My only comfort in all this is the knowledge that Stack Overflow has delivered us from evil.
How's Rhapsody affected, if they don't offer in-app purchases??
quote:
"Today, Rhapsody subscriptions are available for purchase exclusively via Rhapsody.com"
Forcing exclusivity would be a bad idea, but incentivizing it (giving back some of that 30%) would be a smart move for Apple.

If they than limit this program to popular apps they can negotiate prices one by one (e.g. give Amazon a great deal if they don't sell on Android).

You'd end up with an ecosystem where the key apps are exclusive and the rest of the apps pay 30%.
OpenX has an open source offering which has a plugin framework for adding your own functionality to it.

Building an ad server that'll meet the needs of larger online advertisers can be a real pain, especially if it's just a single component of your business.

If I were you, I'd see if I couldn't just extend the open source version of OpenX with a custom plugin. If it turns out that you can't, well -- you can still learn a lot about ad servers by playing about with OpenX's code.
>...Or really: who actually uses this thing? ...

The image I have always had of the userbase of EE is a middle aged vet wearing a vest with a lot of pins and smells of cigarettes who sits in his trailer on The Internet Forums answering computer questions such as "Which is better - a 3 1/2 inch floppy or 5 1/4 inch floppy" and is known to the other folks in the park as "The Computer Guy"

His goto answer for anything being "Well, you're gunna hafta go ahead and reinstall windows, because your monitor driver is out of date which is why you cant change the resolution back to 640x480"

I also imagine them to be the type of person who is still hanging onto that 386 with the bad math co-processor because its still worth something.
I think one of the best uses for this product would be its secrecy.

For instance, I work at an establishment which bans the use of cell phones, but due to the fact that sometimes emergencies happen, a lot of people tend to sneak it in, anyway. So when our pockets buzz, our only option is to ninja it out of our pockets, hold it out of view of others, yet in our view, and check the notification.

With this invention, we would be able to simply hit a button on our watch, and not risk losing our jobs just to read a "hey how r u" BS text, or a missed call from an unknown number. Now we can tell whether or not we need to leave the office to return a text or a call without even touching the phone.

This is what I would use it for, anyway.
Then use Redis (perhaps via cl-redis), if that's what you're comfortable with and it meets your use requirements. Most of the major NoSQL databases have CL bindings. Most of them are also easy to use. It really depends on what your specific data persistence needs are...? All of the db engines have different strengths and weaknesses.

There's cl-mongo (MongoDB), cl-tc (Tokyo Cabinet), de.setf.cassandra (Cassandra), chillax and clouchdb (CouchDB), etc. etc. [Some are more complete and performant than others, but you can find a usable CL binding for almost any NoSQL db. Use a search engine and/or ask on IRC or comp.lang.lisp for pointers.]
For anyone searching for it, including today's show:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Rashad8821
> As an alien to English culture, I always wondered why LOTR is so popular amongst all sorts of non-conformists and bohemians. I had an impression that the essence of the book is racism and classism: how good a person is, is pretty much determined by his birthplace and pedigree.

It's not just LOTR & fantasy; SF has problems of its own. I mean, there's obviously _The Iron Swastika_, which everyone knows was written explicitly as a parody.

But Frank Herbert says over and over again in interviews and whatever* that in _Dune_, Paul was a terrible horrible no good thing to happen to the human race and we were not supposed to be rooting for him - but fans do anyway. Paul is supposed to be a deconstruction of the superhero myth, but instead, even the fans swallow it hook line & sinker. It's no surprise that _Dune Messiah_, which really rubs our nose in this, is one of the least popular Dune books.

* He says this explicitly in 2 or 3 interviews, and repeats himself in the mini-essays on the backs of the vinyl LPs of him reading excerpts from the Dune books (which I saw today in the SF public library)
it can be up to 3 days

If that's their optimistic estimate then I'm not sure I want to learn how long it lasts under real world conditions...

Have you considered adding a crank?

(actually only half-joking, although I fear the machinery would not fit into such a small device)
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6064978

IANAL, but it appears that simply having a "question and answer" site doesn't apply to this patent. If you read the patent, it's mostly related to the idea of asking a question costs points and giving the best answer, as chosen by the asker, receives points.

Any variation on this scheme, such as a general moderator or the public via voting choses the best answer, or not having the asker assign points to a question to be received (avoid the economy, still have asker chose best answer) can avoid this patent.
Gesture controlled actuated surface
As an alien to English culture, I always wondered why LOTR is so popular amongst all sorts of non-conformists and bohemians. I had an impression that the essence of the book is racism and classism

It isn't: if you have to pick a political/social philosophy to define the novel, pick one closer to non-conformist libertarianism. Do whatever you want to do as long as it doesn't impose on others.

The "racism" probably comes from description of the black riders, but black describes their clothes; on Weathertop, for example, when Frodo can briefly see the other side because he's wearing the ring, they're described as white. White and black are chiefly used as synonyms for light and dark, as in the day and the night.

how good a person is, is pretty much determined by his birthplace and pedigree.

Given Saruman's pedigree (a powerful spirit from Valinor) and Sauron's (another Maiar), this is somewhat odd; the nominally highborn often behave badly (Saruman, Sauron, Boromir), while those of low birth (all the hobbits) often do quite well. Notice too that Aragorn and the other characters are scrupulous about the limits to their power. I actually wrote a paper on this called "The Paradox of Power and Defining Good and Evil in The Lord of the Rings."
Cluster: Extensible Multi-Core Server Manager for Node.js
One provider's traditional Cable as well as Fibre broadband plans: http://www.starhub.com/broadband/athome.html#tabcontrol-1

1USD ~ 1.3SGD
Unfortunately FIOS is a commercial failure and is not being expanded to new markets. So SF etc. are permanently out for FIOS.
> Then you won't be getting many contracts from large organisations

I would appreciate it if you and the other guy would stop making this personal, but I'm not expecting much.

Nowhere did I talk about development practices. What I talked about was the justification often held out to web developers that such-and-such state of affairs is absolutely and perpetually necessary. My professional conduct has nothing to do with that, thank you very much.
Easy beats open: a reflection on walled gardens
What do you think about "Local Search"?
I have been follow local search for more than 5 years and see YP industry collapse and as general search is consolidated by Google while LOCAL SEARCH is NOT & wild open for all contenders!
imho, Q&A will be a key element!
Drop a line to see how do you think & any good suggestion for local search? killer ideas? thoughts?
That's a case where there's real immediate risk of something breaking, so paying more for the warranty is justifiable.

And I know what I'm doing next time I'm at the mall.
If you are a big company like Amazon this sucks.

However, if you're an indie developer Apple's infrastructure is pretty awesome. You don't have to set up your own payment system, which sucks nuts, or use one of the existing retarded payment services, which have worse terms and worse user experience. Neither rolling your own nor using someone else will get you 99-cent payments.

I do wonder how this affects rdio, though.
(Gizmodo, Lifehacker)WTF, Gawker? You Redesigned All Your Sites?
So we had a January that was out of the ordinary. I'm sure you wanted to make a point, I'm just not sure what it is.
Possibly the first time I've gone to an EE page and didn't have to scroll down several pages to see content.
OpenCola - Make your own Cola
No. It's people not being in /new enough and voting up good stories after actually reading them. That way, the "linkbaity" stuff is more likely to get voted up. But this is a problem most vote-based link sites have, alas.
They just made one of my favorite sites, Gizmodo useless.

Cheers, It would be incredibly hard to make me stop going to Gizmodo an Life Hacker(browser thru it the whole day for as long as I remeber) but YOU DID IT !
No, a payment processor is exactly what they are in this case. Consider what Apple is attempting to do to Amazon's Kindle service: users can purchase Kindle ebooks directly in-app but Apple takes a 30% cut of the payment. Amazon still hosts and provides the content, all Apple does is act like a payment processor like Visa or Paypal. Clearly Apple wants to shove out competition to it's own iBooks, iTunes and movie services.