skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: My local startup hub just launched an online magazine
I'm part of a local startup hub based in Iceland. We just released an online magazine titled "Nordic Innovation". It's focused on startups, innovation and design in the Nordic countries.

Our plan for the future is to release it using treesaver.js, but this version is a simple PDF based version.

We would love some feedback on the magazine, it's contents, implementation or the website itself.

- http://www.nordicinnovation.is/

Direct links to the first issue:

- pdf: http://www.nordicinnovation.is/issues/pdf/nordic-innovation_2011-02.pdf

- web/image based: http://www.nordicinnovation.is/issues/web/1
That's awesome advice.

I've followed advice 2 and 3 before, but failed at advice 4 and 5. Will do that next time, especially 5.
> Very interesting findings, but it doesn't really answer the question of how important these people are to the pirate ecosystem.

If they account for 75% of the downloads, then they are VERY important.
Why your enterprise application should have a solid API
I use Perl every day in product/home and have contributed numerous modules on CPAN. The "Ratings" argument is very very thin. Yes, CPAN does have a ratings system ; nobody uses it. Even very very popular and well-written modules, for example Data::Dumper, have below 10 ratings.
Sure, endanger the lives of American and coalition troops, how does that make someone an asshole? As long as you're doing it for PR and profit.
Companies don't feel a pressing need to change if they still make a lot of profits. Quite frankly, mobile games are not yet eating into traditional gaming company margins. The gaming markets iOS and Facebook have created are largely made from new converts and have different demographics.
Infinite greed, torpedo their link backs
I noticed it for the first time yesterday when I tried Google Shopping (against my better judgement, my mother wanted me to get her pajamas and online was easiest). Then I saw the same layout, with the wheeled cog in the upper right hand corner of my screen etc. using Chrome browser 9.0.597.94 beta running Windows 7, on GMail, Google Moderator, and Google Docs just now.

Hmmm, second thought: it seemed like Chrome browser's frequent updates have been EXTRA frequent of late. Wonder if that had anything to do with this rollout, particularly since I'm using the beta version?
When I saw heading "For great justice" all I could think was All Your Base. I think Al Jazeera just got trolled.
I'm all for clear and simple and I do get frustrated with Firefox's growing slowness, but....

Chrome just doesn't have enough features. It's too stripped out. I miss Firefox's better bookmark and history handling. I miss that I can open huge numbers of tabs and still see them, not just have a squished list of tabs with no information on them. I miss the better dev tool infrastructure. I hate the way Chrome periodically just blanks tabs and forces a reload.

Chrome to me feels like a better IE; OK, but basic. Not what I want from a browser.
Venture Capital Deal Buzz - Don't Rule Out LivingSocial
Surely there are some regular motions which could be approximated using a spoon which would more efficiently move the hottest parts of a liquid to the surface than random turbulence? My intuition says sliding the spoon down the side of the mug, then turning the flat side upward and lifting it in the middle of the mug would be one such more efficient motion.

Does anybody have a supercomputing cluster we could use to run an optimizing search across a whole bunch of fluid flow simulations?
I have used .NET for all my start up endeavors. Like others have suggested, it just works for me since I have background in .NET and windows development.

Although I have experimented with Ruby and Python both I never felt like the incurring the cost of learning curve while trying to complete a project. In my opinion my customers do not care about the language the application is written in as long as they are accessing it from a browser.

One thing I want to point out is that the monthly costs for VPS are much higher compared to linux nodes and it has a significant impact on hosting costs every month.
There's some bit in the comments about wanting the Desktop OS to adopt some of the ideas, and the mobile team taking jabs at desktop. Ironically, Apple is in a better position for ideas to flow from mobile to desktop. Apple and Android would be well served from a UX standpoint to move from their tool-centric view to a content/information centric one, but I'm a little hazy on how one supports a market and developer ecosystem without a lot of tool-awareness in the UI.
in an infinite region of coffee...
The question of what employers usually claim can be found recently on HN - you may find the discussions either here on on the linked articles interesting:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208056

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2209181

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2209905

As to the question of what you "should" do, that's different, and up to you. What you "should" do is talk to your manager and say that you're not happy with outside work being verboten even when it doesn't prevent you from doing your "real job," and doesn't compete in the same space.

Make it clear that you understand their position, but try to get some acknowledgement of yours. You want to engage in these outside projects because you ened to keep your skills up-to-date and progressing. You don't want to be worried in case one of the side-projects takes off and makes money.

Start a dialog, and ask yourself how you feel about it.
Good idea, but there would have to be cheats, be it for urgent tasks or because of a reinstall.
Do you really need to live in London? If we're talking the classic example here of ramen profitability, you can do that for about half as much cash by moving out along the train lines and commuting in when you need to. I'm about an hour from the city by a relatively reliable rail service, and weekly season tickets really aren't that expensive.
Hipsters are the most persistent, insidious type of this phenomenon. They are quite literally the epitome of the phrase "let's be different, just like everybody else".

Their affiliation/identity is based on artificial or perceived scarcity. It's no different than the type of people that walk around flaunting their bespoke clothes and car, and talk about the singular performances of operas and ballets they've attended (but probably don't really understand).

There doesn't have to be any actual substance to the trivia they know, only that know that to fit into their affiliation they must adhere to certain guidelines regarding scarcity.

For hipsters it's unknown bands, a certain psuedo-bohemian style of clothes pastiche and a few other odds and ends that mark their affiliation. But the attitude is not really any different.

What's always striking about hipsters is that when you see a lot of them quickly, one can't help but be struck by the boring sameness of it all.

Reminds me of this site: http://www.latfh.com/

What makes it particularly insidious is that once somebody joins this affiliation, how completely consuming it becomes. It affects everything that person does down to their transport. But in the end it's really just a quest for personal identity by people who are unable to self actualize that identity for themselves.
Google becomes part of Glenn Beck’s caliphate conspiracy theory
Yes, More Are Seeing Google’s New Navigation Bar
Really love the content, some fantastic and well-written articles in there. It looks great but yes Treesaver would be a bit easier/nicer to read.
Would love to see more like this from other startup hubs around Europe, well done.
You could apply to http://springboard.com/. It's a startup accelerator in Cambridge, which is a little cheaper than London and only an hour away by train if you ever do need to be there. Application deadline is this Sunday I believe, so ideal timing ;-)
Ask HN: What site explains their complex value proposition/process best?
Many technology products and web businesses have complex propositions and features that are difficult to convey and often difficult to implement simply. And yet some complex processes are implemented in such a brilliantly simple manner that the user cannot fail.

Here's one example to get things started:
Tivo - You find the show you are interested in by title. Then to record every episode, they don't ask you to respond to "record at this time/channel for how many weeks?" (which would result in wrong recordings, repeats, etc.)...instead they say "season pass" which by default means every episode of your show and each of which will be captured by date with description.
I can understand Apple wanting to increase revenues. And even getting a bit of the subscription pie. But this whole thing seem wrong. It feels like Apple didn't really look at the whole ecosystem to see the ramification. Or that they did, but are overly confidant in their platform and reach to be able to force subscribers into this model.

I don't see this ending well.
How Much do Music Artists Earn Online?
Most people don't have their performance or efficiency being monitored or have any internal/external motivation to improve that efficiency.

That's one of the things I enjoy most as a programmer is having the tools to easily monitor my output (LOC per day or something) but also the power to improve or create better tools.
I'm sure the tree that was cut down in the first place would be smiling at the demise of paper-based books :]
Thanks so much for the advice! I was really hoping to find out how common this type of arrangement was and if people were comfortable working under it. The posts I've seen have mostly focused on the legal aspects of it.
Entropy is logarithmic with respect to degrees of freedom, and since degrees of freedom is (usually but not always) proportional to the energy of the system, the temperatures of the tea and of the room will approach each other faster when the difference between them is greater, but the heat exchange will slow down when the temperatures are similar.

EDIT I meant to say that entropy is proportional to degrees of freedom, which is logarithmically related to heat energy (except in some weird cases). Anyway, the conclusion was right :-)
SPAM confirmed.
Creating the F18A – An FPGA-based TMS9918A VDP
But most of those companies are not dependent on direct-to-consumer sales for their revenue. You’re never going to see “Oracle Database, Standard Edition One—$6,000” on the App Store directory. I suspect that even Microsoft gets most of its software revenue from either OEM deals or big-business hundred-seat license packs, rather than from over-the-counter sales.
Reminds me of someone putting an external hdd into a Moleskine, complete with Moleskine icon on the desktop. Pretty sweet.
2 Minute Strategy of the Billionaires
People who own an iPhone or iPad bought it because they perceived it as their best option. Whether they buy something else, or just grit their teeth and bear it because there's still nothing better, they're being hurt when their best option gets worse.
Super Priority Inbox
Help desk 2.0 – How to provide fanatical support from anywhere
10TB/month averages out to 32Mbps. From what I've heard, try using anywhere near that on your typical "all you can eat" provider and you'll either be QoS'd enough to never achieve it or you'll suddenly be in violation of some finely printed Terms of Service.
I have the same thought, but had really wanted a "book safe" since watching The Matrix. Enter an old college textbook. Selling for $0.01 on Amazon and now 3 editions old. It was a fun project.

Any book still usable though, I don't have the heart to cut into it.
I have to agree. It just reads wrong, like some ineffable North Korean press release, maybe. Either Al Jazeera's editors favor a Neo-Stalinist writing style, or they got trolled.
Dan Shapiro: What you probably didn't know about non-disclosure agreements
It makes no sense to push to the server before they're done, why do you do this? Are you afraid your hard drive is going to go kaput while you're on the plane, or you're not taking your computer with you? That's the only reason I can think of to do this... git is not like svn, where commit and push are the same thing; on git, a push is the same as publishing for others to see, the commit is what's important and it doesn't require a net connection.
IBM's Watson supercomputer crowned Jeopardy king
When you put it in these terms, it seems almost impossible to justify copying music.

You expect a company to put in the time and money necessary to develop a good bicycle so they can sell one and then have it copied forever? How can a system like this possibly survive?

People in the developed world have lost almost all sense of the true cost of what they consume. We buy gasoline without paying or knowing the cost of undoing the environmental damage. We buy plastic cups and bowls and plates and forks and knives and spoons and bottles and packages without even thinking about the cost to recycle them or hold them in landfills until they decompose (if they even do). We buy clothes without considering the wage of the person that made them. We buy meat without concern for the suffering of the animals or the environmental degradation from the production of livestock. Or the impact to the soil from monoculture farming. Or the impact to our health from the monoculture farming. We buy technological gadgets without even knowing what chemicals they contain, where they come from, and what their global supply looks like. Then we think nothing of throwing those gadgets in the garbage five years later. We rely on minimum wage workers every day to stock our stores and clean our offices (and many other things) without caring about the struggles of low-income families.

And yes, we copy music without considering the financing required to produce art.

No, no one loses their bike with a bike copying machine. But quite a few people lose their jobs. And everyone loses the benefit of their innovation.
I feel the same way in some sense but the idea of desecrating a book usually only arises for me when it's being used as a symbol for some unpleasant cause. This particular book is now serving a new purpose and is loved and appreciated in a new way. Also, for me owning a Kindle certainly hasn't diminished my love of having and reading from printed books. I'd really like to see Amazon offering bundle deals where I could buy a physical copy and get the digital version included.
I love the author name on this article.

Anonymous Last Modified: 16 Feb 2011 16:59 GMT
I think CSI qualifies as bad scifi. Not only the user interfaces are ludicrous, but they also employ "sufficiently advanced technology" in just about every episode.
Social games have nothing to do with social, if you want social, go for World of Warcraft or any other MMO, that has no Facebook integration, still they got millions of subscribers. And you can actually enjoy real game play with other people, not just clicking on static images and spamming your facebook-friends. In this case saying that Acti-Blizzard doesn't understand social is ridiculous.

Facebook may have zillions of users but that does not mean that it's exactly that great of an opportunity is. A country having huge population alone does not mean that it's a viable place to do business.

Mobile is still immature, iOS is a daunting place, you need to either give up 30% of your profit or charge 50% more for your game, Android is ... well fragmented. The PC market is the best there is for games.

If you buy Star Craft 2 today, you don't even need the DVD to install the game, you can always download a digital copy, again this reinforces my claim that Acti-Bliz understands the 21th century, it's not perfect, but calling them clueless is ridiculous.
I don't see the full text, just an abstract on that page.
A smaller top panel? Really?

I switched to Chrome because of 3 major things:

1) I can open and close it at least 3 times in the time that it takes Firefox to open. If a Firefox extension needs updates, then it's more like 12 times.

2) I had to occasionally open all of my bookmarks from a folder (15 or so). Doing this in Firefox would take something like 15 minutes, and most of the tabs would just fail. Chrome would do it nearly instantly, and act like it was no big deal.

3) The newer Firefoxes completely broke the shift-reload to clear the cache option. I still haven't found a decent way to force a complete fresh page load in Firefox 3.5+, which means it's a nearly useless for development. Chrome works great this way, and Firefox used to, but now Firefox creates a duplicate tab instead with the same shortcut? Wha? (I'm not actually sure which version of Firefox broke this)

Combine this with things like the fact that Chrome will let you have a regular session PLUS one or more Incognito sessions (extremely useful for developing websites with login or other state, or even just for keeping two different GMails open), or that the default tab behavior in Firefox has always been pretty weak, and Firefox just has a long way to go to win me back.

It makes me sad, because all things being equal, I'd rather support Mozilla than Google any day.
ShowHN: an easy way to track your packages
I fired up a VM with Windows XP with IE8, that's how it looks there: http://ge.tt/4bP3tEZ/ie8.png

Firefox 3.6 and Chrome all good though.
Rate my Startup: Golem Technologies Web Security
Hi HN! Looking for feedback on my first launch
This is a completely subjective judgment. You don't think 30% is too much for these services.
I'm the one quoted there (RJ). It's worth pointing out that I've not worked at Last.fm for a couple of years, and the chat log (which I posted) doesn't mention Last.fm at all.

That said, I still think my analysis is bang on.

What Apple have done will really cripple anyone reselling/licensing content (Spotify, Last.fm, Netflix etc).
Whoa! That was fast. A good working application in a few weeks.
why not get a 3-6 month contract, live normally, then use the surplus as runway funding? contracting rates in london are normally pretty good.

that way, you don't risk financial ruin, and you can bootstrap yourself.

(i did this succesfully over a period of 2-3 years, while not London I am UK. pm me if you like!)
Push to your own fork of your project on github (if the project is not yours and you don't want to push incomplete things to the main repo), you can have multiple remote repos configured on your local clone and seamlessly switch and merge between them. Or if you don't want to fork, push to a work branch. That's why git has branching, forking and multiple remote repos features, it's not only a "version control system", it's a "distributed development system". Distributed means not only multiple people all working on one thing, but you also distributing your work.
That is one awful article. Arbitrarily cut in 4 pieces and never getting to the point. It is about a paper: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2010/CoNEXT_papers/11... [pdf] which from a first glance is not very good either.

Also the traffic is not what this is about but users uploading things.

Did anyone read the paper? Worth a second look or is it rubbish? "We demonstrate that a small fraction of publishers is responsible for 67% of the published content and 75% of the downloads." suggest the ladder. Not to mention that they talk about Bittorrent but actually mean The Pirate Bay.
"The page design is a model of minimalist design: plain and simple HTML that will render correctly in even the oldest browser."

And then there was Google.
I think it's probably within Apple's rights to use their own private APIs.

People don't seem to get too upset about Facebook or Twitter not providing access to their own internal APIs, yes it's limiting as a developer but them's the breaks. You get to choose between system-level access (Android) or money (iOS).

WebOS doesn't give you access to private APIs either, which I suspect will actually be a really big benefit to their ecosystem.
I suspect Apple may have to back down over this...

So much of the value they paint of the iOS ecosystem is in the apps - 'There's an app for that' was a large campaign last year. Yet they're now threatening to make a number of their more popular apps economically unviable according to their creators.

In-app payment will mean a new app, no? Which won't get approved if it contains a rant against Apple on that screen explaining the price hike they need to make it viable. Yet the current versions contain links to web-based payment, which would be relatively easy to update to include a page saying 'Apple are thieves' and explain why.

I'm well aware that many / most customers would see such a message, give a stereotyically teenage whatever reaction and move to a competitor, but a good percentage won't and we've seen how fast bad news travels now. Enough providers that customers value enough are now angry enough with Apple to try their luck at this, particularly with a competing platform available and growing without the same restriction, and I wouldn't like to bet on Apple winning this.
Perhaps they're hoping that this will force some of the subscription businesses off their platform, forcing people into whatever services Apple can give through subscription (iBooks, music). And then the businesses that do remain can actually pay.
In the short run, I can't imagine users would care very much if they could only get their books from apple and not amazon, and it would probably help Apple lock in users. But, lock-in and anticompetitive behavior probably don't make for a good experience from the user's perspective in the long run... So, maybe they have a different angle.
Any reason not to keep going as you are? Or, perhaps you could request to reduce your work time to 50%? This can be tough to do, but many places would rather negotiate than see you just walk out.

Funding yourself (with job, contracts, etc.) is rarely discussed here, but it's a much more reliable way to get money than seeking investment. It's tough to find the time balance, but there's something to be said for having a basically endless runway.
If you don't want to do the work yourself you can also buy pre-made ones: http://www.etsy.com/shop/vintagecovers
Entrepreneurs Need to Recognize Their Limitations
Anyone can submit anything, this will just get you in trouble.
Double faux pas: It's not subjective, because I provide quantitative arguments (Apple not making money on the app store initially) and facts (recurring billing is much more expensive than regular billing, which is common knowledge to billing experts). Also note that I did NOT say 30% wasn't too much, I said it's not as much as people think.
300+ Free Newsletter Templates
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So this is an appeal to get taken up for google summer of code? Doesn't google have pages for these kind of requests?
Ask HN: What's the best way to use HN on an iPhone (or other mobile device)
I'm a fairly recent consumer of HN, and I'm looking for the best way to read/vote/comment on my iPhone while commuting.

http://www.icombinator.net/ is quite nice but doesn't let me vote/comment

There are a few paid apps on the app store with no reviews, and a free one that also doesn't appear to let you contribute.

Any recommendations?