skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not all monarchies are bad, but most eventually turn worse. That's where the comparison to the iPhone platform is relevant. Apple has a lot of control over the platform, and so far people haven't been overly concerned about that. But over time people may start to realize that Apple is not as benevolent a company as they've been led to believe.

Yes, people can go elsewhere. And I think that's precisely what will happen. Apple has had the lead in mobile app development as a platform up until now, but their restrictive and short-sighted rules and policies may very well sap much of that momentum.
I think you could get pretty far (even reproducing some of Watson's errors) probing a full-text index of a local copy of Wikipedia. My reasoning with examples is here:

http://memesteading.com/2011/02/16/ibm-watson-overprovisione...

Apparently the open-source Apache UIMA and Hadoop projects are key parts of Watson's preprocessing and live operation:

https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/apache_innovation_...
I suspect you meant the word 'ever' not 'every' in your quote.
The decline and fall of physical media retailing.
Here is a list of actions I can think of (in no particular order):

1. Check with (the IT/Computer departments of) local universities/colleges

2. Find a few local computer/hardware/software/networking/web design shops (via Yellow pages or online search) and check with them

3. If all else fails, 'roll your own' :-). Sign up with Meetup.com and form/announce a group meet (a few weeks forward) - the results might surprise you; they sure did me once.

HTH
Google Elbows Apple, Woos Publishers
I think the better all round solution (in terms of privacy, functionality and maintenance) is to go with a free private git hosting provider like assembla.com. I have tried both the dropbox solution as well as setting up git+ssh on a vps, and assembla is now my goto for personal and side projects.
I realize you may also not want to answer this, and that's also alright, but I figure I may as well ask, as I really am curious (and maybe someone else will answer from the perspective of their company): why not? Whenever anyone has asked me for a stat on Cydia, whether it be active devices over some time range, daily revenue, costs related to <insert-subproject-here>, or what have you, I tend to break out a quick SQL query and provide an exact answer (assuming the question is of something I an measure: not all are); is this stupid of me? I've noticed a ton of companies refuse to disclose numbers, and I've always assumed that the result will be that anyone listening will just assume "ok, so almost none then" unless you give them a good answer and back up how you calculated it, but does this actually "hurt the cause"? (I do not have the benefits of the years if startup experience that you have access to by being a part of Y Combinator, so I try to get advice whenever I can ;P.)
No amazon is worse. They don't allow you to set the price.
Cases Against Thousands of Alleged BitTorrent Pirates Dismissed
I didn't look up the technical definition of "business model" but it's pretty clear to me that their goal is to dominate vertical search and be a trusted source of information.

They are following the same path Google did. When Google started the didn't know how exactly they'd make their money. Their goal was to be the best (and least intrusive) search and monetize later. Being the primary, trusted source of information in a bunch of vertical search areas has obvious value.

One potential avenue is to become a sort of university. They know the areas that people are asking lots of questions about and could setup a course to cover the topic. They don't actually have to be the ones to setup the course. They have the information to sell to someone who would setup the course.

The preceding is just an example of how being the leader, that is having the information, is the business model (or goal if you will). Trusted information has value.
Great. I'm in Vegas and there's 7 stores in this town. The one they're closing? The store right next to my house. FML
Brick & mortar bookstores usually have contracts that stipulate if the books don't sell, they can return the books for more or less a complete refund. The books you see with considerable discount are often those taken back by the publisher and then sent back out as 80-90% off. Softcovers aren't even returned--- the bookseller just rips off the covers and sends those back to minimize shipping costs. In high school, I worked in a B. Daltons (a now defunct Barnes and Nobles subsidiary) and it made me sad when I was tasked with tearing up a cart or two of books every few months.

I imagine the inventory will either be returned, destroyed or else shifted to their still remaining stores rather than a circuit-city-style liquidation sale.
From usability standpoint, they have this google-instant-search-esque thing going where they produce instant search result with text as soon as you start typing.
So unless they are hitting the APIs of every provider you authorized to them and searching through them in near real time, they are storing the data.
Random github idea: show pull requests on the network
Downsides to VPS

1. You pay stupidly high *monthly* costs based on RAM.
This makes little sense, as RAM is ridiculously cheap.
2. You pay masses for bandwidth if you go over.
I'd counter with: Natural selection in the classic sense ceases to have any meaning in an environment where all members of a species survive into adolescence, and reproduce.

Now natural selection is still occurring, but it may be leading to specization rather than intra-species evolution.
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TimeSolv Outsourced Legal Billing includes a range of features that accommodate every need of the legal profession.
maybe it's because it's late, because i'm cranky, or because i'm feeling elitist.

but i'm not going to read an opinion about physics on wired.com

i've got to have some scientific standards, right?

edit: ahahaha, i go to the link actually. LOOK THEY ILLUSTRATED STRING THEORY WITH YARN. GET IT? GET IT?

and the article doesn't say much more than the headline. oh well.
I am working in a web agency, and people are definitely very excited here by this product, but maybe not to use it exactly as intended: we have lots of clients who have paper magazine and who would like to create an iPad version.

Currently, the tools that I have seen convert every page into an image, and create an application from it (sometimes overlaying some links over the images). It gives poor usability (impossible to select text, or to change the font size for some part of the text). We would definitely be very interested in a tool that could take our documents in pdf and give us back the html5 code so that we can edit it manually (embedded videos instead of images, adding some interactive feature) before packaging it as an iPad app.

There is definitively a market for tools allowing to do things like that. I am wondering if Crocodoc has plans in this field.
The 'should-ness' of you fundraising
That would never happen.

The problem is that Amazon has no operations in certain states to avoid charging sales tax. Buying Borders would put them in every state.
> For example, in some cultures, smiling/grinning is a response to embarrassment.

I'd have to ask, then, where is that not true? I know that happens in the USA and a friend of mine from Japan also does that.
This is just phrasing it in a disingenuous way. My 'freedom' to own my car consists of the my right to 'restrict' others from taking it as they see fit. My 'freedom' to walk around consists of preventing others from beating and locking me up. The whole concept of ownership means that you can restrict others from doing things that infringe upon that freedom.

So yes of course law exists to regulate what individuals can do to each other or each others' property.
Oh, now it works and links fine! Tx for the update

//edit:
btw, do you work with the new messages? I got an annoying bug there - as you type, often the cursor jumps to the end. annoying as hell when you edit sth in the middle of the sentence.
What do you mean exactly with responsive and snappy? Not loading fast enough?
There is definitely a problem when using this game on a mobile device with a 3G connection, but on a normal dsl/cable connection, at least for me, it runs very smoothly.

I chose maps because it has a good api and it is something everyone can interact with. You don't have to learn a new technique, just click, drag and pinch or scroll. It is an unlimited source of interactive backgrounds for the game.
That reminds me of the good old 80s, when URLs were 8+3, web pages were scripted in GW-BASIC, and we spent our youthful evenings in Space Quest Online.
Data point. In the world of photographing private events, about 70% of the potential revenue comes from weddings. I would expect that something similar to hold for invitations.

Therefore it really makes sense to focus on weddings first.
Cancer has returned? Steve Jobs may have just six weeks to live
"a shebang (also called a hashbang)" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_%28Unix%29
I'm going to have to explain to my children what a bookstore was. Sad, because I'm not sure anything can replicate that feeling of being surrounded by knowledge and stories or browsing aisles of obscure magazines. Neither I suppose could anything replicate riding a horse down Market Street or jumping on a ship departing from from Pacific Street.
Nonsense, because the supposed 'freedoms' of the others (anyone except the author) hinge on the author creating it in the first place. They're all derived from the work of the original author, giving that author ownership of his creations, and therefore the right to determine what happens to his property.

I'm not sure where your 'free speech' argument is coming from. Reproducing the words (or music or whatever) of someone else is not free speech. Free speech is about ideas, copyright about a specific incarnation of ideas.
... and unfortunately, it once again reinvents half of Lisp's features, but poorly
A hypervisor is just an operating system (arbiter of resource use) relying on legacy operating systems as compatibility shims, because it has a native API nobody wants to deal with. It seems strange that we see resource contention problems when applications try to coexist on an operating system, and our response is to give each app its own guest O/S and then try to make those coexist. Why do we expect an improvement? I can't believe the existing O/S schedulers and paging policies were so poor that anything similar written from scratch for a hypervisor will automatically make better decisions despite less visibility into what's going on.

That said, I can certainly see a win in virtualization for testing. If your production system will have a large set of discrete machines communicating, you can simulate that with a much smaller pool of QA machines (maybe just one).
Gmail - Inbox - chriscarroll825gmail.com
>Is there some way to validate what these businesses are searching for?

Use Google keyword tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Enter some words/terms/phrases related to your products/service that you think your potential customers would be searching for.

Look (closely) at what suggestions it comes up with, dig deeper, always keeping an eye on monthly search volumes etc. - I think that'll do the trick. :-)

>Also, did you think of making the product and then go out to find the businesses or did you identify some inefficiency that these businesses have and exploit them?

About a decade ago, I did the latter and grew the startup from 0 to ~$2M revenue/pa in a bit over two years, finding customers (businesses) only via cold calling until referrals started pouring in too.

Your mileage, naturally, will vary, depending on the business sector you're targeting and/or your product/service.

HTH
I wouldn't say twitter must or must not expand the limit, or even if they should or shouldn't, but I would most definitely welcome that change. Sometimes 140 char limits is too limiting and that's the reason for other microblogging platforms like tumblr gaining popularity.

Of course, twitter has more important issues at hand like monetization, and it's not very likely expanding limit has high priority.
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I've built http://www.tweethit.com
Basically it's TweetMeme for online products. Processing Twitter Streaming API, about 400k tweets per day.

Having some problems with failing cron jobs without any error messages though.
OF COURSE you can stage in hunks. That's why the index is so awesome in git.

Try git add -p (or -i, I prefer -p though) and you will see (and incidentally, never ever use commit -a any more)

And to alter commits before merging, use rebase -i and make use of the edit and squash options.
The whole idea of making interaction harder via command line irregularities w.r.t usage is incredibly stupid. Windows powershell has somewhat of a good idea by using object pipes formating is eliminated; a better idea would be to extend this system wide and 'pipe' even UI's to different formats such as javascript + markup or terminal output, this would require something completely different from unix, linux or windows.
For what it is worth, I feel like a huge part of having a startup is to have some outrageous goal you want to achieve. My goal is to own a pair of dolphins that I keep at my beach house area and ride around around the ocean in my spare time.

I'm glad to know that I will be able to develop deep relationships with them as planed :)
In my opinion, SO's main competition is technical forums and not EE. So while SO takes away from other Q&A sites, they're also taking forum traffic and monetizing it better.
bend spoon into a u-shape and stick the other end in a cup of liquid nitrogen
If you are completely honest about it, you'd have to admit there are million upon million people who are simply unable to be information workers. And as technology increases in sophistication, information workforce will be shrinking as well.

One popular idea of dealing with this uncomfortable idea is Singularity, where all those now-useless people will vanish from eyes in a giant brain-hug. So unsurprisingly this 1-2-3-?-profit kind of recipe became popular with techno-futurists. But IMO a Great Unrest or a new Great War due to social tensions, followed by surviving clique of humanity drowning in machine-supported hedonism is more realistic.
I think this is one of the better design directions MS has taken, but I have one major beef. Typography is not just type, but it encompasses layout, treatment of text, text as UI elements, etc. I just notice that there are times where more information can be placed on a single screen, but less data is displayed requiring me to interact more with the device than necessary. I feel like WinPhone7Series keeps a content focus at times and then loses it at others.
Errr... libraries? (at least for being surrounded by knowledge and stories)
You can't possibly be serious. You don't know of Microsoft's long history of copying software that other companies had made, putting them out of business? And three other people as well apparently.
I would honestly like to know what "wreckage" Google has created? Granted, I probably haven't experienced the most likely types (domain gets a penalty, webmaster doesn't understand how to fix it, or that sort of thing). Most of the time, they spend their days trying to make information open and accessible to everyone, which I love.

In contrast, given the chance, Apple would control everything I do on my computer and charge me for it. No doubt that computer would be beautiful and it would work very well, but I prefer to manage on my own.
While using git and dropbox might appear to work most of the time, and shouldn't lose data, it's not an ideal pairing -- have a look at my answer to this stack overflow question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2199637/is-this-plain-stu...

TL;DR: Git's hashing means that everything's going to be there, packing means that it's going to be a very inefficient sync (and you'll wind up with multiple copies of the same data) and branches may not behave as you'd expect.
A locally-hosted Greplin-like service is already available. Checkout http://www.cloudmagic.com
'Copying software'? Well, no, I'm not aware of Microsoft's long history of doing this. Surely you don't count Excel as a 'copy' of VisiCalc or Lotus 123 right?
Why would you need DRM for a web app with a subscription model?
A marriage made in heaven (or was that hell?) the joke US National Enquirer and the joke UK Daily mail.

If anything they say turns out to be true it will be a blind co-incidence and probably a shock to those responsible for the text.
Having something of value isn't business model in and of itself.

If SO doesn't monetize their traffic somehow, they'll go bankrupt despite providing value to their users.
I really hope this is unsubstantiated gossip.

Wish him the best, and a full recovery.
Why don't you just pull the changes onto your laptop from your desktop, rather than pushing to the server then pulling back?
Memory capacity is typically dedicated (e.g., Linode), but memory bandwidth is difficult to allocate statically, and can be a huge problem even if you're fine on capacity. For example, a simulator I like to run has a 50-60MB working set, much larger than on-chip cache but well under my allocated 512MB of RAM. However, other concurrent users can disproportionately use up DRAM bandwidth, depending on their access pattern and the OS scheduler.
Integrating the amazon web store with Borders would put them in every state. Conceivably they could still buy Borders and operate it as a subsidiary without having it affect amazon.com's ability to operate without having to pay sales taxes in every state.
What sort of books are you looking for?! I've got my share of complaints about Borders, and they certainly didn't always have the particular book I was looking for, but I don't think I've ever gone to one where that had absolutely no books I was interested in. Usually the problem is not spending too much money.

And I've definitely never noticed B&N to be any better on that front. When I had a choice, I'd almost always go to Borders first, unless I was already in the B&N parking lot for something else.
> the true threat to our livelihood comes not from those working to change our society but from those [...] who define the correct view to be equivalent to the view of the majority.

Take care with that. Political implications could be huge. This can be read as declaring Democracy being a threat to our existence. Must be my bad english though...

Thanks for the non-paywall link btw.
How ~75% of PirateBay traffic is seeded by 100 people driven by profit
Wow, you'd think this was the end of all physical bookstores. People should calm down.

First, other retail bookstores still exist. Barnes and Noble is doing just fine, for example.

Second, used bookstores are doing pretty well actually. And with the ability to sell their inventory online through amazon, alibris, half.com etc. a lot of used bookstores are seeing a renaissance.

If you want to keep your favorite local bookstore in business I suggest paying them a visit and buying a book.
Thanks. I really need to improve the sign up process. Can you let me know what went wrong? It'd be very helpful.
OCZ Vertex 3 Pro Preview: The First SF-2500 SSD
Do you have a source for that $2bn/year ?

Best I could do was this:
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/hiring-human-resources/staff...

$2bn just for finding developers (that must include non-programmers) sounds plausible, didn't realize recruitment is such a large industry.
I find it kind of sad posting rumors and gossip about somebody's health on HN even if he is Steve Jobs that definitely has huge impact on technology.
This workflow always seems backwards to me. "git add -p" lets me stage partial commits in the index, where I cannot build or test them. What I want to do is stage them into my working copy from somewhere else. I wonder how hard "git stash apply -p" would be to add....
It used to be this way, didn't it? It seems to me I remember people used to often ring in with an answer before Alex was done reading the question.
The novel Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut explores this theme in an interesting manner.
I don't think the answer is as simple because we don't know Oracle's side so to speak and from what I've read, I don't see where all the evil-ness is.

So, I don't know who's getting screwed here, but I'm siding with Oracle.

I wonder how would you feel to pay somebody full time for years to work on a project and then, when they leave your company, they fork the project and try their best to alienate all your users. Now, I've heard of burning bridges, but this takes it to a whole new level. If you think about it now, what exactly did Sun pay for when Kohsuke was working as an employee on Hudson? Apparently nothing.
Brilliant use of CSS drop shadows
I've been advocating something like this for ages (albeit I use Mercurial) [1], it is a really really wonderful meeting of technologies. My approach is slightly different; to use a remote repository for version control storage and sync my development environment with dropbox. Some thoughts...

The approach detailed here is totally unsuitable for team work; you will end up running into issues because you are handing the Git "server" off to a technology that is unsuited to handle it. You are much much better off, unless certain no one else will push at the same time, using a proper Git server.

The point of meeting these technologies is to give you the advantage of a personal shared workspace (amongst development machines) with the power of proper version control.

I can be playing around with a personal project at work.. and when I get home simply pick up where I left off if inspiration still grabs me. My productivity has gone up a noticeable amount.

1. http://www.errant.me.uk/blog/2010/04/a-nifty-way-to-manage-c...
A big problem for people self-learning complex/powerful interfaces is that they often have no way to gauge how long it will take to reach a useful level of proficiency. For busy people or for urgent tasks that means allocating time to learn the thing is a risk. The deadline may have passed by the time you figure it out, or you may be interrupted by other tasks and end up cognitively back at square one.
The difference is mostly between those who work with the OS and shell directly (mostly programmers and system administrators) and those who simply need to interact briefly with an application program. Those who regularly use tools like word processors and spreadsheets are an in-between situation where either paradigm could be better depending on how and how much they use their particular tools.
That's ok. I'm sure Watson prefers vi.
> Some people try to buy fair trade goods, and don't mind paying more for locally made items

Some, yes. I'll wager it's a minority though.
In-depth book reviews for (primarily) cs-theory books
Facebook's MySQL infrastructure: 4ms reads, 5ms writes
Ask HN: what internal memes do your startups have?
I'm fascinated by the language used within small companies and how it shapes the culture of the company (and big companies as well I suppose though I have less exposure to them). I recently wrote a post all about the internal memes we have and how language and behaviour are very closely linked:

http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/40478/Startup-Culture-Memes-Do-You-Have-A-Duck-Of-Awesomeness.aspx

Some of the memes we have within distilled:

- breakfast of champions
- getting shit done
- delivering change
- the duck of awesomeness
- getting close to clients
- phone ninjas
- the skiing trip
- labs
- you can't outsource giving a shit
- actionable insights
- communication solves all problems

You can find an explanation of some of these in the post. I'd love to know what memes and language patterns have appeared in your startups?