skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Either view the designer as a temporary cost of supporting your partner, or figure out a way to train the guy into greater competence in his role. At a minimum, it sounds like you'll have to be the bearer of bad news if you let him go. Do you have a way to do this and save your partner face?

It would be rather simple to set up a list of skills this guy is going to be required to get versed in to actually execute his job rather than be a resource black hole. If this guy can't get versed then there's clear reasoning to let him go and save your partner face. It's not being cruel or unkind in anyway, it's simply requiring him to do the actual job he was wanted for.

You could always be exceptionally mean and just force this guy to quit, but he'd likely do a lot of collateral damage on the way out.
Two answers:

1. Will the future of the Internet be written in Chinese? Some, maybe majority, but certainly not all.

2. The Chinese still makes up the majority of the world population. It was bound to surpass English sites at some point and considering China's majority of Internet userbase are twenty somethings, this will continue to rapidly increase in time
Umm? Fosters? Really???? The only people who drink Fosters are the English.

I do not know a single friend (yes, I'm Australian) who drinks Fosters. I don't even recall if many of the bars/pubs here in Brisbane even have it on tap.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosters_Lager:

"While popular in many countries, particularly where it
is brewed locally, Foster's Lager does not enjoy widespread
success in Australia."
These guys tried to recruit me out of CalPoly. One of the most disgusting, slimy companies on the internet, and the people behind the site are every bit the sleezeballs you think they are. I believe this blog post adequately supports my assertion.

(Also, who can resist the old internet joke about their original domain name? expert sex change dot com made for good chuckles in Staley's class.)
Scaling the horror, and stepping through
Yep. email me at dbeyer@chart.io and I'll bump you ahead of the beta list :)
No offense, but your imagination is pretty elitist.
You Can Watch Any Movie on iPad Now
See what are the best video conversion solutions for enjoying any movie on iPad?
Link to download the book:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/a75r7u
It looks like the main domain is ranking for everything but the most random queries. Interesting to see the AJAX crawl in action.
Mikecane's Next Greedy Move: Predicting what other people will do in the future, then writing blog posts criticizing them for it.
Shhh.... you're ruining the joke.
I've often had exactly the inverse experience on trips to northern CA: so many places, I ask for a Coke, and get told that they only have Pepsi. Mind you, in UK pubs these days, if you ask for a Coke, you'll probably get flat Pepsi out of a hose dispenser - flat on account of the violence of its expression.

I'm not a fan of Pepsi at all, in a similar way to how I don't like any of the diet colas - the sweetness is too much, and it being flat only hurts it further, removing some of the carbonic acid.
Pretty much. I was able to get my personal belongings back the same day by providing copies of the lease (which I had signed) and our business license filings to the sheriffs office. An officer came down with me and convinced my partner to let me in, with the officers escort, long enough to get my belongings. Everything from that point on was handled by my attorney.
Ask HN: What are some great startups that started out "in stealth"?
I might agree if Apple didn't force developers to make the price in Apple's ecosystem the same as the lowest price available elsewhere. If you want to take 30% of my money for the service of "exposing" my app (which I think that means "not banning" in the context of a walled garden), I need to charge 50% more just to maintain my profit margin.
Of course, I had forgotten...
They might have cheap broadband, but when people are only earning $800 a month in a city whose GDP per capita is comparable to US...

In the streets of Mong Kok (very high density suburb), there are youngsters standing on the side of the street for the whole day trying to sell broadband packages. Those broadband companies don't have retail shops; They pay a small wage to people in their early twenties who did not get into university / cannot get another job, to just stand there in the street (equivalent to $800 USD a month, 4 days a month off), to provide support as well as sell internet to new customers.

In the afternoon there's this shopping street closed off to cars. The internet salesmen move into the middle of the road, set up their portable sign, and work. Sometimes they bring a small chair.

At least they have cheap broadband.

Source: I'm in Hong Kong at the moment.

P.S

If you had only 4 days a month off, and your friend only have 4 days a month off, then you have a 1.8% chance of having the same day off each month. It equates to having one day to go out with your friend once every 2 years.
Brilliant. Is there an equivalent in SF?
"What do YOU think makes this site different from other Q&A sites?"

Why, at one time, I was one of the highest ranked volunteer 'experts' on the site, having amassed the EE equivalent of a zillion karma, or whatever they're called, and then, literally, the first time I go there to ask a question, they're all of a sudden premium? I literally helped build that site's content, and not only got nothing for it, but I have to pay to see the answers that I populated the site with?
They would bother if they could get 30 cents on the dollar instead of their measly 2
CalTrain publishes annual financial reports just like publicly listed companies. Compare fiscal 2007 with 2010. Then check out how much of their total revenue comes from subsidies vs fares.

http://www.caltrain.com/about/statsandreports/Comprehensive_...

They also provide a quarterly CapEx breakout:

http://www.caltrain.com/about/statsandreports/Quarterly_Capi...

And a breakout of ridership per station (check out page 11 of the 2010 report):

http://www.caltrain.com/about/statsandreports/Ridership.html
"I can only imagine what they'd dare without any competition."

I don't remember anything evil during the height of the iPod era.
Behind the scenes at Pixar Studios[video]
The reason film and music operate like this is because consumers have loyalty to individual actors and musicians. It is also very hard to imitate having a specific actor in your movie. It isn't hard to imitate another developers application style, and I don't think consumers have too much loyalty towards their app developers. I don't see it happening.
Solar Treepods: Science Fiction or Coming Soon?
I'd love if it that was true, but the evidence isn't really there.

For instance, Chrome Web Store offers a payment/installation for web apps, and it doesn't seem to be taking off like a rocket.
I'm comparing it to a retail model. So I included sales but not advertising.

Every retail outlet is different, and App Store purchasing has a very particular set of advantages. If you don't need those advantages, the App Store still provides a great value by letting consumers access your service through a free app.

If neither of those work with a particular economic model, then I guess it's just not App Store compatible. So yeah, there's definitely room for a better model of app store that suits more developers. But I think Apple is more concerned with getting a broad selection of content than making the economics work.
> They seem to price things with much consideration, factoring in their position, value-add, and what the market will bear.

If Apple had different categories of content that required different rates, I might be able to see that point. However, this looks like they just said "let's get our 30% from subscriptions as well".
this is awesome! I really hope this hits the fpage.
I was only thinking recently that "background tasks" might be a missing ingredient for HTML 5. They probably don't make sense with traditional desktop browsers, as it is sufficient to keep a tab open with the app. But on mobile browsers it is a different story.
When framing arguments about Apple, I find it helpful to ask, "Would this defense apply just as well to Microsoft in the '90s?" And as far as I can see, your arguments apply better to Microsoft in the '90s than they do to Apple today. All Microsoft did was create a Web browser, create terms favorable to their interests and ensure that their Web browsing experience was the default. Unlike Apple, they didn't require competitors on their platform to pay them money or GTFO, they didn't require competing Web browsers to use a restricted subset of Explorer's engine, and they certainly didn't demand a cut of any revenue from transactions done through Netscape.

And yet Microsoft was convicted of anticompetitive behavior by pretty much every court in the world. So even if Apple really is on the up-and-up, your reasoning doesn't come close to showing it.
Let's be fair, there are better deals even in Canada. I think the Bell 25/8 is around $80/month if it's available where you live. Generous 75 GB/month!
The Avogadro project and the roundest object in the world
Referencing objects isn't a problem since dnode doesn't do replication, it just makes copies, but referencing functions when the client disconnects can occasionally be bothersome. You do get a hook when the client disconnects:

conn.on('end', fn)

so that helps. At browserling.com all of our backend and frontend spanning lots of processes over several servers is tied together with dnode, and we haven't had any big problems tracking references that I can think of.
Bathtub U-Boat by Skimbal
How I Almost Failed a Facebook Turing Test
Wholesale Consumer Electronics - www.qfelectronic.com
HONGKONG QIFEI Industry Company Limited is a specialty trader of a variety of Wholesale Consumer Electronics, Such as MP3 Player, MP4 Player, Digital Photo Frame, Spy Camera and HDD Player, Expecting to cooperate with you.
It's tonal, so speaking it correctly is quite hard for Western people. I'd say try and find someone. Without someone to talk to you'll have a very hard time pronouncing it correctly.

One of my friends tried http://www.livemocha.com/ for a language and had a positive opinion of it.
That's a good point but it's chicken / egg. Now every new boulevard in Greater Detroit is divided so that it can be filled with Michigan Lefts.
I think the first person who makes a "hard drive" with an iPod/iPad connector that emulates iTunes so people can backup their iPads without owning a computer will make a lot of money. It's the only thing keeping an iPad from being a general-purpose device for a very large demographic (or Apple could get with the times and allow a true cloud sync).
So let's turn it back to Hacker News for a moment.

You're slaving away in a startup, working insane hours and getting paid way less than what you're worth. There's equity in there somewhere. Maybe. You've finished up another 12 hour day and there's the wife glaring at you at the kitchen table: "When is this job going to get us somewhere? Why can't we be doing/having <x> like your friend Bob who works at <consulting firm y>?"

The social status thing makes sense. And you're working your ass off to try to make that next step up, or cash out, or whatever.

So what do you tell her in return?
"A monopoly", "unethically created"... Apple's platform and its success are the result of the work of Apple's employees - the platform is good, this is why developers like it and use it. Any great innovation that comes first to market is alone there. Why? Because no-else had the same skill and vision to create it. It is successful. Why? Because it is good. If you classified the above as an unethical monopoly and killed it, we would still live in the dark ages.
Ooo... I've never had their tonic, but I have a fresh bottle of Hendrick's right here...
Cribbed from the linked list of the pundit-who-shall-not-be-named: http://twitter.com/gassee/status/37642355649675264#

Apple’s game is to make things that are friendly to the user, much in the same way that Google makes things that are everywhere for the user.

The other side is always seamy, because we can see the stitching and sometimes it rubs on us the wrong way.
I'm tired of Detroiters blaming white flight for everything.

I brought up 8 mile as an example but Woodward is just as bad dividing the white people in Royal Oak from the white people in Berkeley.

You can't walk across the street with those huge boulevards. That's the point.
I think he's refering to all the 'lesser men' especially all the men who allied with Sauron. Basically, the book discribes them all as short and with darker skin.
Depending on what you mean by it, every one.
Can IBM build a more intelligent search engine than Google? Probably not, but IBM’s Watson computer appears much more capable than Google's search engine. Though the data analyzed and processed are primarily for a game of trivia, the impressive performance thus far by Watson cannot be underestimated.

If Google's search engine is the best we (engineers) can do for searching digital data for answerers to common and repeated questions, then we are way behind the curve, and Watson could prove insightful into where Google (or a more creative, intelligent startup) should be heading with data analysis and search.
They are based in San Luis Obispo, CA, and I have met a few people that work there. It's interesting to hear all of the complaints from people who work there right out of college (Cal Poly is near by). Apparently they are not very nice to their developers and many burn out after a year and quit.
Flash pros/cons aside, it's a shame Apple blocks any and all browser plugins on iOS, which could help mobile web apps innovate faster.
See Tim Bray's essay, which should be titled "Are You a Sharecropper?" http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...

tl;dr: "[Apple] owns the ground you’re building on, and if they decide they don’t like you, or they can do something better with the ground, you’re toast." In this case, if they decide the rent covers your garden plot as well as the fields, you ante up or die.
Anonymous speaks: the inside story of the HBGary hack
Well, there was the iPod accessory rings to jump through, but that’s fairly standard.

What’s seen as evil here is really a preference for the user over the content provider, and it’s the content providers who are whining about not getting everything their way.

You never hear any users complaining about subscription plans not automatically giving away their information.
That is correct. I lived there for 3.5 years and now live in downtown Toronto which is the opposite of suburban Detroit in terms of population density and sprawl.

Don't get me wrong, I really love Detroit but its city planning is a huge contributor to its most pressing issues.

Visit Detroit though. It's possibly the most interesting place in the world.
User Experience Trumps Pretty URLs, The End.
The problem with this is that you're betting an investment in design, development, and marketing into a loophole that Apple could very well close.
"I guess the dangerous thing about dirtbags is that they have no idea they're dirtbags."

This needs to be said again.
The poor schlubs who sell their books as apps haven't cut out the middleman.

With Kindle (or iBooks), the author simply uploads his/her work in a commonly exchanged format. Everything else is handled - distribution, payment, formatting, device compatibility. The works.

As an author who wants to publish their book as a discrete app, suddenly you're engaging with a different middleman - the inevitable app vendor. The vast majority of book authors aren't coders and wouldn't know how to publish an app to save their lives, much less on multiple platforms (Android, iOS, webOS, WP7, along with their phone and tablet variants). Inevitably they will buy this solution (which, in essence, is largely of the same nature as Amazon/Apple) from someone else.

And what will we, as consumers, have seen from this situation? More confusion and a worse experience overall, as every single little piece of content now floods the app store, obliterating any sense of discoverability while making the UX much, much worse (downloading a discrete app, along with all of its code and media, every time you want to read a book?!)
Search for Trademarks Easily
Markify seems to have made trademark research free. I think its an excellent resource for HN.
> 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."

Tolkein grew up largely in and around Birmingham, which likely gave him a mix of good decent country folk (farmers) and the powerfully rich city folk (given Birmingham has largely been Englands second biggest city and for a long time - IIRC the 70's is when this ended - it had the highest household income, even exceeding London).

He likely got a first hand look at the corruption of the powerful and the earnestness of country folk.
Unicode FAQ on GB 18030
I am mostly a coder, but running a small start-up, I encountered a need to configure 3com and HP switches and routers (VLANs, routing, BGP, etc). Those devices have a complex OS, and the documentation is usually cumbersome. To my surprise, the only site where I got exact answers on this was experts-exchange. Google did not help, stackoverflow did not help. I was about to hire an consultant for a few thousand, but discovered that I could do it myself, paying about $30/mo for e-e.
http://www.facebook.com/Zune/posts/183517868352402
Seems to be a good answer to me. I want something that works and is fast. I could care less what technology it is using... as long as it does what I want it to do.
Javelin Venture Partners Closes New $105 Million Fund
I was thinking similar things all the way through the article.

We have a start-up in the works. The technical side is fairly easy, and many people could do it. Our value is built on the non-technical stuff, which relies on a network of people and resources that have taken years to develop. We've also done our homework, discreetly, so we really aren't worried about having to pivot dramatically on day one or about not being able to handle running costs for long enough to establish the product.

The biggest risk in our business plan is that we are relying to some extent on time over money, because we're self-funded. We know of no-one making a similar product to us, but there are businesses making other kinds of products that would naturally compete for the same money from the same customers, which makes us mutual threats. If one of them heard what we were planning, they could throw way more money than we currently have into moving sideways, and potentially sabotage our network before we reach critical mass, even if they didn't then establish an equivalent product themselves.

Given the nature of the markets involved, there is a very real prospect of that happening. If you were in our position, would you not keep things quiet until that window had passed?
I like the idea, but I'm not a fan of the website design. I'm not a web designer or anything so take my advice with a grain of salt, but the concentric circles and red makes the site feel really in your face. I'm using google chrome and the ad shows up as a blank brownish box.

While I like the idea, I probably wouldn't use the service on my blog because if no one buys ads on my blog I'm just advertising your service. Maybe let advertisers choose categories and if you have a blog about that topic you can present it to the advertiser?
UTF-8 in China
I don't understand how they can defend that position. Yeah, it's their job and they might be very proud of their work, but they can't be that dumb.

Haven't they learned the lesson? Everytime they try to come with something, the community backfires even harder. Let's just remember what happened with the IE9 team[1] and the Hotmail team[2] on reddit's AMA.

1: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/related/dkk3l/iama_we_are_membe...
2: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ej32l/we_are_the_hotma...
Steve Jobs: "The developer agreement has been altered. Pray I do not alter it further."
Is there a way to see a sample chart without signing up?
And for those who don't need the help with payment, distribution, etc Apple is forcing them to take it. Do you think Amazon really needs Apple's help in processing or distributing any of their content? I'm pretty sure the WSJ has plenty of experience handling payments as well.

I paid several hundred dollars for my iPad, and for that price I'd like to do whatever I want with it and be able to take advantage of the greatest things people have built for it, not what Apple approves of being done. The issue I have is that Apple's feeling of entitlement inherently blocks out many incredible things from that iPad. E.g., I bought a bunch of books on the Kindle app so I could read them on any device. Apple could have done the same by getting off their asses and building iBooks for other devices, but they chose not to. And now that advantage of Kindle is gone because Apple wants to take every last dime from anyone doing anything on an iOS device? Many business models cannot survive having to give up 30% of revenues. It is a poor model.

Edit: I guess I wouldn't have an issue if there was an alternative way to get native stuff onto your device other than Apple's app store. But there isn't.
That's absurd. How difficult is it to connect your wifi-capable, smartphone to the Internet?
So its like a media buy "auction" for small sites?
I shouldn't wonder if then conveniently enough Apple follows on with a subscription service of their own...
The SSE Experience
Music Hack Day New York Video Recap
can someone provide some context for this #! thing, for the uninitiated?
There is also an earlier cry baby article titled "Blekko Bans Experts Exchange....And No One Cares". Too funny!

http://www.experts-exchange.com/blogs/EE-Tech-News/B_3838-Bl...
TechStars Network Wants One Startup Application To Rule Them All