skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I am sure you could. I could probably set up an Asterisk server that would meet our needs in about a day.

What I've learned from working for a big company is that they only want to save money if it makes their employees more miserable in some way. An example is turning off the lights and heat at 6PM. This saves a few cents, and makes anyone who wants to stay late miserable. A job well done.

With technology projects, though, the goal is to spend as much money as possible. For an individual to make money, he needs to be promoted. To be promoted, you have to have a big team. To have a big team, you have to have a big project. So the incentive is to make small projects into big ones. The easiest way to get a big project is to buy some Very Expensive software or service, and then hire a team to "customize" it. This way, your line item at the end of the year is at the top, so you must be Very Important and will get promoted.

Also, conference calls already "save money" -- you can have the important business people in the expensive financial centers, and you can have all the programmer monkeys somewhere cheaper, and they can still communicate effectively. (Not really, of course, but it looks good on paper.)

Anyway, this is a long way of saying, I doubt we will use your service any time soon. Maybe if you make it cost more than what we have now, which a separate service like I originally described would :)
I didn't know what you meant. But that's by the by. A larger question has to do with HN changing as its userbase changes. Things change. Sometimes for the worse:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Eternal_Septe...
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...

And sometimes for the better. There was a time when the PC web was all about the newcomers, the barbarians beating at the gates of the establishment. The web was the same way. I can't rule out the possibility that if HN is flooded with newcomers, some of them might be vandals wrecking everything, but some of them might also be ushering in a new age, the new new thing.
I would look at MooTools, their approach to OO JS abstraction keeps your JS heavy web apps lean and mean!
Ask HN: Got a site that could be massively viral then fade -- how do I cash in?
I just had a light bulb moment on the way home, checked GoDaddy for availability of the name I wanted, and lucked out and bought it. The site has MASSIVE potential for virality based on an already highly widespread trending topic, but I suspect it's going to very quickly fade from public interest.

Given this information, what can I do to cash in? I doubt anyone is going to be very interested in buying the domain/app (due strictly to the potentially very short topic lifecycle), so then what?

I've thought of:

- Ads (duh)

- Cafepress store, which would be great except it would be best to have an option for user customizable text to print on the clothing (this is going to be a lolcats-alike thing to begin with)

- Uh... that's all I've got.

Any other thoughts? If I go with the ad model, is AdSense going to be the best option? Can I really expect a return on a week or two worth of ads? Do I hope for a buyer and/or a longer lifecycle?

Can I expect a return at all on something that fades so quickly (if it does)? It's going to spike the hell out of my servers, obviously, which is going to cost, and I'm pretty broke.

Look forward to any thoughts or feedback at all!

- John
At this point, even if you're competing directly with FB, it's very hard not to integrate FB Connect.
Kontagent (San Francisco, CA)

We are looking for sales and engineers!
http://jobvite.com/m?3zGZ1fwZ

Kontagent measures people, not pages, and is a leading analytics platform for
social application developers. The platform has been built to provide deep
social behavior analysis and visualization that provides actionable insights via
a hosted, on-demand service. It works with many of the world’s largest
developers and brands, tracking thousands of social applications and games with
over 100 million monthly active users and over 15 billion messages per month.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/10/facebook-analytics-platform...

http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/28/kontagent-launches-real-ti...

Email me waiyip.tung at kontagent.com if you need more information.

Wai Yip Tung
We're not using AppCircle, so there should be no UDID shenanigans. I've asked Flurry to confirm this.
posix-spawn: a faster fork+exec for ruby
I personally love what I'm using now so it'd be extremely difficult to switch to anything else much less work with an online base IDE (which I'm not fond of; translated as I don't really care for an online IDE).
Useful Rails Resources
The Apple specs say specifically "FaceTime HD camera", which seems to suggest they believe transmission of HD chat videos is possible http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/specs.html

Also, who says I prefer framerates over picture quality? Perhaps a reduced framerate is the better tradeoff in exchange for high definition images.
of course, haven't found anything that great
jQuery Smart AutoComplete
He is one of these guys http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2245692
The author must've missed the entire range of keynotes from the late 90s through the mid 2000s when the highlight of each was to have a shootout between a Power Mac and a Wintel PC at Photoshop.

My memory is poor but they seemed to stop this practice maybe 5 years ago.

So, this practice is really nothing new. It's marketing. Google did the same thing when they trotted out specs about how Android browsing is much faster than the iPhone during Google I/O. Horses for courses, etc.
Ayatana overlay scrollbars: new in Ubuntu "Natty"
Ask HN: What data sources do you report from that helps make business decisions?
For more established start-ups and medium size businesses, I'm wondering what data sources you pull data to determine the health of your company and also help make business decisions. It could be from multiple sources such as Google Analytics, MailChimp, Salesforce, and/or organic KPIs on Excel sheets, etc. Would be great if you can shed light on the reports that you, your executives and/or employees religiously review, and where the data came from. Would it be beneficial to deliver all these data in one unified dashboard or iPhone app?

For example, our startup (just a two person shop) mainly looks at

-Google Analytics
-Some metrics such as "% of active users" pulled from our own db.

Manually putting those together isn't overly complicated. But I can imagine larger companies wanting to view large datasets from email campaigns, CRM, and numbers from their transactional databases, etc. Where else do you pull data from?

Thanks a lot in advance - let me know what you guys think!
First of all, get a new server. It takes only a few minutes with most hosting providers. DNS updates will be a while to re-map but maybe your "old" provider can help you with a temporary redirection. Get this up and running as fast a possible, even if you use a temporary domain name. Go, do it. Now.

Then, the post game analysis. Server apocalypses happen. There is a deeper lesson here.

On the technical side, there are some things you can do to prevent this kind of failure. Running fsck for hours on a live server is really inexcusable both from a technical as well as a service point of view. Most small hosting providers simply rent some rack space, put in their standard Dell server unit and call it a day. This way lies madness, total data loss and possibly the early seeds of an anxiety disorder. I'd suggest you look into inherently redundant hosting offers (like MediaTemple's grid service) or some high-availability virtual hosting (like Amazon EC2).

But the core of the issue is unrelated to this technical stuff. Telling everyone at once was a mistake. There is a reason why most projects start out gradually, starting with a beta phase when everyone still has a lot of compassion for bugs and crashes. It's tempting to send invites to all possible contacts once you're finished, but it really has no upside because you're introducing a single point of failure. I'm not even talking about having only one server and no backup. In this case, the blitzkrieg launch date itself was that single point of failure. Even if the server hadn't crashed and burned, your app is very likely to still have bugs and kinks to work out. Bringing potential clients in one by one would have given you the opportunity to collect valuable feedback so you can show a more refined version to people who come in later.

When it comes to handling this issue from the CR side: don't send out apologies for the outage. Instead, check back with high-potential contacts in a few days and ask "did you have a chance to look at my new project?" and when they reply they couldn't access the server, invite them to try again and concede there were some outages but the problem is fixed now. My guess is, you'll be surprised how few people were actually affected and noticed that the server was gone.

In my opinion, it's unlikely that your bad luck actually ruined anything. Most people don't look at random invites in their mail right away. If they're really interested in the product and/or know you personally, they'll check back again later even if your site is offline at first. Interested people will still look at your stuff. Chances are, those candidates for your first mass invite will not even turn out to be your most valuable clients. Nothing is lost.
I don't think they're paying all this money for the fun of it
Netflix is the killer app for me. They go off the iPad and I'll probably buy something else when I buy a new tablet.
Can't you buy ebooks through some other service and then display them on your kindle?
Cool to see Project London there. Looks like a nice indie action movie in the vein of Firefly.
He Keeps Ancient Apples Fresh and Crisp
Here's the full announcement: https://gist.github.com/e0d36c881e6efc57514b
UN Declaration of Human Rights (ratification varies by country; your mileage may vary) enshrines a right to control of the exploitation of your works, yes.
Smartphones perhaps, but other mobile phones have had swappable covers forever (e.g. nokia).
Going to the ER? Text Ahead
And lo, at the slightest bit of Apple bashing in the media, suddenly the floodgates open and the hatorade pours forth.

Do any of you Apple haters hold any other company to the standards you claim that Apple or Jobs has violated? No, you do not. You huff and you puff on their vapourware, but if Apple puts a single foot wrong you pounce.

Why?

Why the double standard?

I'm not defending Apple†, and I think perhaps if all companies were held to the same high standard that you hold Apple to, the world would actually be a better place.

Let's hold all companies to the same standard.

†They're big enough to fight their own battles, and as I've said before they are far from perfect and there are plenty of valid things to complain about, just not the ones that people pick on (for some bizarre reason that escapes me)
If I steal your car and then destroy it, it's not right to say it was "just destroyed". In both cases the original possessor is deprived of something.
Finding ways to blow up things and especially your own code is an important skill for every developer and designer. If I learned one thing in my first serious programming job (where we couldn't just do a quick deploy on a central server), it's that you should always try to come up with scenarios that will make things break, both in the planning and in the testing phase.

I thought that's common sense, that's why I am not getting the hate. You can learn a lot from projects like this, even if it's only the approach.
First they came for the fart apps ...

The problem with Apple's recent fumblings is that it leaves the iOS platform wide open to slippery slope scenarios. While Readability was flat-out denied upon app submission, others were yanked post-approval, which creates a Damoclean sword in the minds of every current and prospective app developer.

You don't need to play the degrees of separation game; Marco's Instapaper subscriptions can be rendered null and void at the whims of Apple's incongruous and incomprehensible "policy".

---

As a user, it's also unsettling, because I honestly don't know where this leaves current and future apps. I recently read that Apple allowed a tabloid's app that contains a daily photo of a nude woman. What happened to Apple's no-pornography policy? Remember Steve's e-mail that replied that people looking for such filth could try out Android?

This is the App Store brouhaha all over again, except it now affects approved apps as well, meaning that we as users and developers will live in perpetual fear of a trap door opening beneath the most cherished apps. Not for sake of consistency or "policy", but the behest of whatever incomprehensible whims the guys at Infinite Loop have.
Demo Wrap Up: 7 New Social Startups to Watch
Unfortunately, medical devices don't really allow incremental development. Studies are incredibly expensive, and relatively minor changes can completely invalidate them.

Even Steve Blank recognizes the model doesn't fit for medical devices.
Some of the lighter grey must be changed. You don't want your users to have a hard time reading and searching for links. Yes try changing the content of the homepage. Styckyd was built by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts, this does not explain what the website is. You can put it somewhere else. Try using 5-10 words intro to capture your users attentions. Like " A marketplace for ... built by ...". Make sure your audiences know you're communicating directly to them. Good luck
I currently use emacs and love its ability to be customised

however I love what the cloud9 guys are doing, I have started building a very specific editor (for couchdb couchapps) using the underlying ACE editor and I would love to see cloud9 or similiar turn into an emacs like generic editor that is suitable for any platform and fully customisable.

I am moving more and more of my apps to web based equivalents and would really like by the end of the year to be using a web based ide full time (and by web based I do not mean that it runs in the cloud, I mean built with html / css / js, I run cloud9 locally)
Glad I could be of assistance!
More grant money available, yes. But the reason for that is probably more political or cultural than intellectual or scientific. And a quick Googling shows there is plenty of research done by psychologists on creativity, too.

http://www.google.com/search?q=psychology+creativity
That's a little fuzzier, though. Steve said he's not trying to get a chunk of SaaS. So is Instapaper a content subscription or SaaS? Seems closer to the latter to me, but definitely concede the point that this uncertainty is bad for the platform.

At the same time: Paying out $2 billion to devs and having 200 million credit card accounts means never having to say you're sorry.
No disrespect to Mr Jefferson but this management method does not work.

It always results in a pyrrhic victory and resentment from the other people on the table from being made to look incompetent (although the truth is that indeed, they are for not coming to meetings prepared).

Let me explain

My last job was President of a College Newspaper. It was a pretty cool job. I had lots of power and I felt like I was "the one" who would usher this paper into a web 2.0 era. I came up with this grand plan and all. Unfortunately, much of the rest of my board was largely incompetent (or this was what I thought). Also, running the college newspaper wasn't as much of a passion for them as it was for me. They all had better things to do.

Ofcourse the natural resulted. Lots of meeting where we would not make quorom. Discussions without reading the background material however earlier on we had sent out a padded agenda etc. Naturally also, I was the most prepared for most of the meetings. I knew our Byelaws and PnP in and out and ofcourse, I knew the operations and management procedure for the newspaper, start to finish at the back of my hand. I got my way at meetings a lot of the time because no one at the table knew better and the people who knew better knew I was (mostly) right.

Soon enough however, resentment had begun to build. I was "arrogant" and an "asshole". We were always moving "too fast" even when it was clearly the right management decision (often taken 2 weeks after it should have). My VP was beginning to overrule management decisions we had discussed at meetings she had failed to attend for one reason or the other. In short, it was chaos.

I started work in May. By October, I was insane, overworked, single and had not spoken to my family in months. I resigned.

Long story short: If you are banking on the ignorance of your team to succeed in a project by pushing through your agenda. You have already lost. Surround yourself with people smarter than yourself, who will come to meetings as prepared as you are. Watch your project, team, committee soar. Surround yourself with morons who are too slow to keep up with you and you'll always be lagging behind.

You can trust I took this lesson to heart when I started building my own startup.
I agree that this will be fascinating to watch, but I'm also surprised it took this long. From the moment the sale to AOL was announced I've been waiting for the backlash from the writers, asking for their piece of the pie.
from how I interpret this you're saying this is all guessing, and you actually haven't executed anything ? This makes no sense, just do it. Right now you are worrying about things that may never happen, and is holding you back from actually getting it done. If you do get this massive traffic, come back here and personally message me, and we'll figure something out.
After reviewing yesterday's iPad2 announcement, where they were talking a lot about the 'post PC' nature of their product line-ups...

I concede your point. You were closer to truthiness than I was. I apologise and applaud your insight/foresight.
Those were the sites in the top 100k list by Alexa...
Who is the host?
As I recall, HuffPo's traffic isn't dominated by the blogs, it's dominated by being a link aggregator / discussion site. In terms of its web genes it has more in common with Slashdot than DailyKos.
Charlie Sheen? It's already been done.

http://livethesheendream.com/

If not, that site is filled with good ideas.
We use Opacity for everything, everything. It's fucking fantastic. I'm torn between telling everyone how great it is, and trying to keep it my secret to give me a competitive edge. Way worth it for the expensive version.

Integrate it with Xcode and treat your vector artwork as source -- when you build the project it will spit out all the little PNG files you need at all the different sizes. Your artists just tweak the opacity files, and when you build the PNGs get made. So awesome. We had to buy an extra copy for the CI server, but it was worth it to never again need to sit around and export png files.

Plus, if you need to draw something with Quartz, you can mock it up first in Opacity, and then have it generate the source code for your drawing, which you then integrate into your class. We quickly made classes that implement dynamically blurred drop shadows, customized numeric "badges" of any size, shape and color, and so on, just by drawing the effect we wanted, generating the source code, and combining the drawing code into a custom class. So awesome. Feels like cheating. (You have to work around Quartz's lack of Unicode support, but still.)
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC947LL/A?mco=MTY3ODQ5OTY

All colors with the two iPads in ridiculously high resolution. Click (twice!) to zoom in all the way.
Sure. For example there's BESEN, which is a complete implementation of the ECMAScript 5th edition standard. Programmed by a single person in Object Pascal.

http://besen.sourceforge.net/
Personally, I don't feel it's the freedom, or anything of that nature. A 30% cut of anything is just too much. 5%, 10%, ok, maybe even 15%, but 30% to be listed in an app directory, come on. The payment processing is at most 2-3%. Demanding 30% of your revenue is outrageous and borders on mafia-like. Terrible.

Unfortunately, all the above applies to Android, and others. Apple gets the blame IMO because they set the precedent. There's no reason they couldn't have made their initial cut 10%. 10% is still high, but reasonable.

Furthermore, it wouldn't be so outrageous if they provided some value or tangible services for it, but they don't. They don't give advice, or contribute in any tangible way, it's essentially an outrageous tax without any real services in return.
There was a study in a CS dept. somewhere that had a pretty convincing test. I can't remember where I saw it or the school, so I'll just try to recount it.

The test was given to students before the first bit of instruction in computer science (and for the sake of simplicity, let's assume it controlled for those with previous experience). Basically, students were given a problem set of code snippets in a non-existent language, and were asked to write what the code evaluated to, i.e. 34 @@ 14 --> [2], followed by possible answers.

It turned out that the students who performed well in their subsequent CS courses were not those who got the right answers, or those who got the wrong answers, but those who answered consistently. The best single predictor of a good student of CS (not strictly equivalent to a programmer in a startup...) was forming a consistent model of what they were looking at, and sticking with it.
I started on Mercurial but have since been convinced that Git is definitely just as awesome, and a tad more flexible. The thing is, I will be sticking with Mercurial for my own projects because with bitbucket I can get private repository hosting with unlimited collaborators and it is free, whereas with Github I'd have to pay to get private repositories.
We seem to get a lot of hang-ups from customer service people. You wait 20 mins, to speak to them, you ask them something that's not going to be on their first script page, they ask you to wait and hang up. Or you wait for them and then need a few seconds to grab a pen "please hold" put them on hold for 10 seconds, retrieve the call and it's dead.

The other good one is cancelling a contract where they ask you to wait and simply keep your line open and don't let you make any calls for the next 20 mins ... always a joy. AFAIK there's no way on our phone system to force an incoming call to terminate.
One is true, the other is a lie.

So yes, very different.
I looked but I can't find a link to this "retail stores". Where is it?
While I agree with the unlikelihood of "The Sure Thing" he claims, I think he's just trying to be prepared. If it's true that it hypes on a grand scale but will only last a week or two, I would want to be prepared with my monetization so to not miss a day of it.
I just find this CSS to be not evil enough, but don't have the time to make it more malicious. Something more along the lines of upside-down-ternet would be better... make it available but laughably unusable for your target sites/audience.
Thank you. I think I like White iPad + Red Leather.