skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So is it a 'deceptive ad' or a 'clever adwords hack', or simply 'marketing'?

Adwords is pretty strict when it comes to techniques they will and will not allow.

The advertiser paid for the clicks and the press release. I assume the person clicking on the ad is able to read, as well.
Travis: Distributed CI for the Ruby community using Rails, Websockets, and Redis
Great story. How many users sign up when you had the website put up? Also, were the users still helpful when they realized you don't have the app yet?
Not if you are part of the highway bandits!
Because they want to make more money off the apps so they can reduce the price of their phones to stay competitive with android?
Faster web browsing on Mac OS X with alternative DNS and a local cache
> 2) Add youtube videos and other music players

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this was MySpace
Yes, that's it exactly.

I've grown more and more averse to implicit state. I like that in Lua, all my interactions with the interpreter are mediated by the lua_State. If I want to run two at once, I can. If I want to store a Lua object for later use, I can stash it in there. If I want to have a globally-available state for my programs, I can implement it myself as a global. Nothing is mucking around with the call stack looking for things that "look like a pointer."

A few years ago, I wanted to embed a scripting language into a monster of a multithreaded C++ application, which (oh joy) was using RogueWave threads rather than straight pthreads. I tried python, but couldn't figure out how to get the thread locking to work properly; python had its own ideas about how the threading should work.

Then, I tried Lua. With Lua, I could just implement a pool of properly-initialized interpreters, then assign them out to each thread on need. It worked very well.
You're No Dale Carnegie (Why the independent publishing is broken)
Well, they've been talking about it since September 2009: http://goo.gl/zYSzH
You're only insulted because you misread outsourcing to mean offshoring. Boeing farmed work out to other companies, and it bit them. The fact that some of those companies were based in other countries is not a point mentioned as a contributing factor.
Physics SE: Should you really lean into a punch?
"First mover advantage" is still an 'advantage'. E.g., Hughes Tool. Xerox and their photocopier that they made for about $1500 and sold for about $29,000. FedEx had a nice first mover advantage: They were flying under CAB regulation Part 91b for unscheduled air taxi, intended for mom and pop air charter operations. So, their planes had to have max gross takeoff weight of 25,000 pounds. With an exception they got 28,660 and could fly the Dassault Fan Jet Falcon DA-20 and quickly bought about all there were. Bigger planes? Illegal for them to operate trucks. That first mover advantage was key for their success. Then Carter appointed Kahn to the CAB, and he killed it. Then FedEx and everyone else, e.g., UPS, could both fly large airplanes and operate trucks. The guy who comes second or later might win, but being first can still be one heck of an advantage.
I'm not sure "similar" capabilities will always be enough. If Apple succeeds in chasing off Amazon and B&N, then WP7 and Android phones will look much more attractive than iPhones to Kindle and Nook owners.

Netflix availability so far has been an advantage that iPhone/iPad has over Android, but that'll turn around completely quite quickly if Netflix get's chased off the IOS platform by Apple's 30% cut.

Let's get serious. iBooks and iTunes are good, but are they really going to be able to take on Pandora, Rhapsody, Last.fm, Amazon, B&N, Netflix, Hulu, etc. all at once?

By pissing off all the content providers at once Apple is basically gifting a huge chunk of the app ecosystem to Android and/or WP7.
Twitter’s Biz Stone: “We Are Not Valued At $10 Billion”
I'd respond, but I'm afraid I'd lose Karma points :)
I write a lot of hand-optimized Java code, and have found that while Java as a language can be pretty fast, and its HotSpot team is to be commended, Sun's libraries are often atrocious. For example, until Java 1.5 (I think, maybe 1.4) ArrayList's get(), set(), and add() methods were not inline-able, and a one-line fix to the problem languished for years on Sun's bug forums. Sun's decision to go with type erasure was also a huge mistake in my opinion: as a result we have hilariously inefficient boxing and unboxing operations in poorly written Java code. Sun's push towards iterators hasn't helped things either.

If you eschew all this and write strongly optimized code, I think the single biggest spot where Java is unquestionably slower than C/C++ is in array accesses. In Java, to set a slot in a two-dimensional array Java must first test to see if the array is non-null, then test that the X bounds are correct, then test to see if the appropriate Y subarray is non-null, then test to see if the Y bounds are correct, then finally set the value.

In C the compiler does a multiply and an add and sets the slot.
who is behind this? Who or what am I donating my hard earned domain to?
Hidden commands in windows …
one doesn't spend the kind of effort they've spent without a goal.

Never credit to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

I personally believe that pretty much all democratic governments are slipping towards fascism, not because any one or any group has that as a far vision, but because all have short term goals which create the emergent long term effect of a slow slide towards fascism.

Ever bigger law enforcement in the name of "Save the Children" is a prime example. I really do think the motivation here is primarily to help, not drive America towards fascism. The secondary effect is just not something the prime movers want to bother their minds with.
Well this guy is a Google employee, so his bias is obvious. But I'm not optimistic about Google if most of their employees can't differentiate between the difficulties in doing database queries and constructing an answer from a question. It's a FAR bigger jump than when we went to Google from Alta Vista -- especially since, coincidentally, IBM had the same virtually the same technology that Google had at the time, but they weren't focused on search -- they just thought it was interesting technology.

And let me add, if this is so incremental, I'd love to Google just turn this feature on. Let me ask it any question and just have it return the answer. at the top of the results page w/o me having to click a link. I don't think we'll be seeing that from Google any time soon.
People can still vote down a comment even after it's hit the -4 floor. It's still counting against your Karma even after hitting that floor.
> It costs Apple to distribute (and market, and support) your App

Give me a break. You used the weasel word "costs" which is technically truthful, because it is greater than zero. But it is not material, IMHO.

Because developers PAY $100/developer to get on the Apple developer program. They spend their own money/time to develop the app. And sell it to a user who's PAID for his phone and net access. Apple is serving as a glorified download.com (which btw also does reviews and ratings for free).

Apple "markets" apps: again a weasel word, since in your universe listing your app in their directory is "marketing". Ditto "support" (they test your app cursorily to reject things).
Nice article, though I disagree with the "while in school" part. Not only is it possible to build a successful business while studying, it's often even an advantage to start in school. The key is to find alignment between your studies and your start-up function. Then focus on those aligned functions and find partners for everything else. This can work very nicely for true technology start-ups but is harder for operational/execution start-ups (e.g. websites, services, etc.).

I am not sure if this is allowed on HN (new here), but I wrote a while ago about ways to mesh university with start-up activities: http://bit.ly/hJmCEQ
Normally a free market comes up with these things.

The argument above (and in nearly every conversation on this topic) is, the Apple market is NOT free, is designed for Apple's financial benefit alone, is capricious and repressive. And the iPhone is the only market like this.
I don't know about Finland, but in the US there are many laws which make shareholder activism very difficult. It's not usually as easy as simply buying up 51% of shares and voting.
Thanks. In around 4-5 weeks of having the landing page and pricing page up without the product existing, I got a total of 120 emails. I sent an email when they gave me theirs explaining a little more about the product and how I needed their help to shape it into something truly useful. They were delighted to be shaping a new product, and were certainly not negative about it not existing yet. One mistake I made was telling people in that email that it would be live in a week :) In the future I won't be telling people time scales!
Publishers Are Not Your Friends
Yeah, we have that too, they call it stealing work. But it has to do with unions and exclusivity deals they work out with companies.

I worked for a company that only union members from facilities were allowed to rearrange your office. So moving a file cabinet was impossible. You couldn't do it without stealing work, and there was no way your department would pay to have something like that done for you. The same went for changing the height of your height adjustable desk, getting a whiteboard screwed on the wall (instead of leaning against the wall while sitting on the desk) or even moving your computer from one side of the desk to the other.

Sometimes you just had to do it anyway and hope the union guy who empties your trash doesn't notice.
I feel like most execs are still concerned about their long term credibility and legacy ove their ability to pump some of their stock at a higher value in the short term. And I say that with full cynicism - it's simply suboptimal for them personally to do so.
21st century mercantilism.

One problem with the modern system is that it seems to be an unstable equilibrium - it's more efficient, but what happens if the global logistics infrastructure breaks down because of war/rising oil prices/political turmoil etc? It seems that we (meaning communities/regions/the US) have given up self-sufficiency in exchange for this increased efficiency, which surely has some sort of cost.
err yes. or closer to 43, but yes.
...and send me money! And 10 people will send you money! And forward this to 10 of your friends...
Remind HN: Delaware Franchise Tax due March 1st 2011
If you own a Delaware C Corporation, March 1st is the deadline to file the 2010 Delaware Annual Franchise Tax with the Delaware Division of Corporations.

" For Corporations, failure to file and/or pay an annual franchise tax report by March 1st will result in a $125 late penalty imposed by the State of Delaware. For LLCs/LPs, failure to pay the annual franchise tax by June 1st will result in a $200 late penalty imposed by the State of Delaware. Interest is also added each month and if the tax and penalties remain unpaid, the company will be voided by the Secretary of State. "
Exactly. Minimum viable ;)
Ah! Thanks.

I didnt know that -4 was the lower display....
It's distributed, but not really peer-to-peer. It's almost completely hierarchical.
They didn't grow to be successful businesses, but that they are too young is not the reason. One of the ideas and papers was, and remains, a candidate for a successful, new business, but it would take a little more cash than I have to get it going: There were interested customers. I gave a nice presentation at one. But the target customers would be only the high end server farms and networks, and developing and selling to them are expensive, even if the software from the core research is done, and it mostly is.

My current project is based on my original rsearch; we will see in coming months if I can build into a successful business. About three dozen VCs are eager to see a prototype. For good or bad, I didn't write a prototype and, instead, wrote production quality code. At this point, I need to develop only a few more simple Web pages and the VCs will be able to see it. And the original research is just crucial for the project and has high promise of a high technological barrier to entry.
Four of Sequoia Capital's Top Management Quit to Pursue Own Venture
Quick Proxy Detection
Thanks for sharing your story. Congrats
Yeah the note about "commute hours" cracked me up. Did they mean the time Caltrain employees go and leave work?
I'm assuming Marketwatch have some sort of financial incentive for reproducing press releases verbatim too.
Mobile World Congress: Dick Costolo on the future of Twitter
Great post, thanks for sharing.

I Am here in Brazil, crazy trying yo start something just the way you did, Twitter here is very hot (2nd place in the world in tweets after USA)I think you should try to market it here a bit, people here doens't pay a lot for online services but with more than 81,3M internet users you should hit some.

If you need help, fell free to ask.
Most tech stays the same
If affected you should do this ASAP:
http://torrentfreak.com/google-helps-seized-bittorrent-site-...

It seems .com is no longer safe for business on top of being ridiculously expensive for no good reason and already filled with domain squatters.
Last minute Kansas City HN Meetup tomorrow night? (Thur, 2/17/2011)
Hey everybody, I'm throwing together a last minute Kansas City Hacker News meetup tomorrow night (Thursday, 2/17/2011). I apologize for the last minute nature if this thing, but I happen to have the evening free (which rarely happens for me) and I would love to hang out with like minded folks again, as the last KC HN meetup was awesome!

I was thinking 5:30PM, somewhere around downtown, but I'm open to whatever the group wants.

So what do you guys think?
What payment options would you suggest? Apple only accepts credit / debit cards too (well and gift cards which are also primarily purchased with credit cards).
I like how they provided a live example in the second page.
IPad Accounted For 12% of Global Mobile PC Shipments in Q4 2010
I had an urge to implement something similar while ago using OpenID. Since OpenID authentication has a handshake between a content website and an identity provider, it would provide the perfect channel for handling accounting. Paying to read an article would be as simple as logging in.

It is undeniable that Google has enough gravity as an identity provider to encourage publishers to adopt such a model.

I don't really see how to get people to pay for an article sight unseen, though. Familiarity with content by known authors may be enough for some.
Thanks :)

That's really great to hear. We want to expand as quickly as we can globally since we think many people will find Buffer very useful, so any help would be hugely appreciated.
As someone said in the HN comments for the TechCrunch article, CrocoDoc uses their implementation of a document viewer to support annotation.
From Prison, Madoff Says Banks ‘Had to Know’ of Fraud
Google Announces Payment System for Digital Content
Alan suggested Pizza Bella, which is fairly central, has free wifi and tasty pizza.
That was my first reaction, too. What could possibly go wrong?!

While I can't definitively say the free market is more intelligent than the USG, at least its actions aren't backed up by force.
I'm using the dev version of Chrome on Linux, currently "10.0.648.45 dev". The developer channel has always been surprisingly stable for me.
Now take that and move that to Amazon's domain. The currently offer insanely low prices. Selling each book with a 30% to apple can make their profit margin zero or less.

There's a new ecosystem waiting to be born here.

My read is that Apple is looking ahead at a future full of small/startup ebook publishers.

At the local iPhone dev meetup, I met this college kid with a modest little Catholic prayers and affirmations app. It's basically the electronic equivalent of a pamphlet. He doesn't put any effort into marketing it. It makes $150/month. Granted, that's a small amount, but a very tiny amount of investment went into that small return. With a little effort, I bet there's a lot of independent authors who could make a living publishing this way, and that the big players in ebooks and publishing are actually in the way of this ecosystem coming into being.
And if you criticize it in even the lightest way, the religious fervor I mentioned before brings every free software supporter out to impale you. I can't tell you how many times I've been called a corporate shill or, quote, "M$ fanboi" because I don't agree with the GPL on principle.

This thread has devolved into the same kind of thing, and to be honest, I'm surprised I'm still participating in it. Just watching the karma on my previous comments swing wildly back and forth has been enough of an amusement this morning.

I don't begrudge anybody their beliefs, but holy cow, give me the same respect.
Ask HN: What's a good way for my startup to accept credit card payments?
Anyone have any experience here? Purpose is for services subscription (no site live.)

We're fine doing a front end UI if we have to, I'd just prefer not to redirect to something like paypal for the payment.
Thoughts on iOS Content Purchase
Pinning Down the Cloud
"Totally unique ideas don't make it." Sure they can and do. You didn't read what I wrote. E.g., the first Xerox photocopier is a great example. So is the Hughes Tool drill bit. So was penicillin along with other many other drugs.

You are just insisting on your own definition of 'idea' as close to a new 'market' as is clear from your "You can't build a business on being ten years ahead of the market". Just total nonsense: A totally new idea does not have to be with, ahead, or behind "the market". Your "ahead of the market" is nearly a meaningless concept.

The crucial core 'secret sauce' can be "totally unique" even if the problem, customers, and market are all old.

E.g., carbon fiber parts for airplanes -- lighter and stronger. So, you will refuse to fly on an airplane that has some carbon fiber parts? Why? You likely won't even know where the carbon fiber parts are. Titanium now for some auto parts -- recently titanium got much cheaper. A high bypass turbofan engine with special materials for higher compression ratio and better fuel economy -- you will refuse to fly on such an airplane? A car with fuel injection directly into the cylinder with extremely lean mixtures at low power level -- you'll refuse to drive such a car?

Generally if there is a big problem and have the only good solution, then will get a good reception, and your "ahead of the market" is just nonsense.

Again, by a "totally unique idea" you mean essentially just what the customer sees on the surface, likely for a new problem, where the customer has to do something really new and different, for a new market, etc.

You're just having fun laughing at new ideas.
So it's the same as Apple then. "Can you distribute GPL?" "No."
If the free linuxes can do it, im sure MS can handle it. It's not much of a hassle to add an extra menu item.

I think the real problem is unlocking & GPLv3. MS was never GPL friendly either.
I wouldn't say Apple got away with it. My beautiful wife is looking for smartphones at the moment and asked for my run down - the antenna problem and Apple's ongoing efforts to pass the buck (both in this instance, and in a lot of App Store criticism) were the first things I raised.

Having said that, she'll likely still get an iPhone. Ultimately, she'll benefit most from what Apple do best - closed garden simplicity. So by that measurement, you could argue they did get away with it.
Boo, not going to be able to make it this time. Wish I can be there tomorrow.
> 1. Payments. Using conductors to check tickets on a mass-transit system is asking to loose on fares. My commute is long enough (3 zones) that I get my ticket checked nearly every time. But many commuters who only travel one zone could easily avoid paying altogether. Conductors simply don't have the time to canvas the whole train between each stop.

I travel one zone (MV to PA) and they ask for my ticket 10-20% of the time. What is the fine if you get caught without a ticket? $200?

> CalTrain ought to realize that it's in the business of mass transit, not leisurely travel and implement a tag on/off system (i.e. Muni).

Uh, isn't that exactly what they've been pushing for the last 6 months, and now just stopped selling 8-ride tickets, and soon, monthly passes as well?

> Oh, and driving saves me at least 2 hours of commute time/day.

Are you telling me you can drive from MV to SF faster than the bullet train during rush hour?
I'll drop by... Pizza Bella is yummy.
GigaOm's report[1] links to an article that suggests Google have been planning a micropayments system for "news and media companies" since 2009: http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/09/google-developing-a-micropa...

[1]: http://gigaom.com/2011/02/16/google-pitches-one-pass-micropa...
Logical wager for final jeopardy should have been $0. Why did Watson wager $947? Does anyone know?
Normally I would do a video and spend some more time on the marketing page but I thought I'd put together "something" before sending it out. I had no idea so many people would be checking it out. There are some examples on my blog http://jeff.io so I think what I'll do now is bring in the screenshots into the landing page.
Whereas PayPal and iOS App Store customer service are famously excellent?
But by that point they are on to version 2, which is way better and which they can be somewhat more secretive about, if they so choose.
Yeah, I'm sure me owning the CannedGoat.com domain is just killing a small business owner in Manitoba, just dying to sell his fine line of preserved goat meat products.
No, Section2 (of the GPLv2) allows you to either distribute the source code along with it, or written offer to where to get the source code.
The problem is people attack the GPL hold up the BSD as if it's without restrictions. But it is (granted, the restrictions are fairly simple to address, their are restrictions places on you, and if you don't follow them, you are in the same boat as the GPL).

> There is no free with restrictions

In this case, the only option is to write it yourself, as even things put into the public domain can have a catch (Actually, I think their is a license that basically does with you'd think putting something into the pubic domain does, I just forget the name).

So basically...

> So he isn't free to do what he wishes with the software.

This is true of pretty much all licensed code, including BSD.