skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would have to say Dan, Ajay, and I all agree. After reading blogs and articles (including a great one from Fred Wilson) we know growth comes in step-wise functions. Press coverage/big-story etc will spike growth, then it will level it down a bit. The better the value proposition, the less it will drop. Also we understand that sites with features get viral bumps, and it is up to the entrepreneur to keep building and keep them their for a sustained business (i.e. Instagram).

All that said, WhereMyFriends.Be was truly a fun web app that we wanted to put out there. We made it for ourselves to see if we could do it, then when we thought other people would enjoy it we started making it public and releasing it. As of now, we still have no intention of making it into a sustainable business [unless any of you have any suggestions...]. We are just looking to have a little fun, and give people a fun thing to play with.
The quality was different however. 2D bar codes couldn't really take off in the US until mobiles came with hi-res cameras with macrofocus. As evidenced by the ubiquity of QR in Japan, Japan was pretty far ahead of the US in that regard.
AMA seeks to maintain members' monopoly over interpretation of DNA
Voxer were using Twisted and found it too slow. Matt told me he had VM issues with Python.
It's up to the writer to communicate their thoughts clearly. A writer should only blame their audience for not understanding if their statements are obviously unambiguous. However, you were writing on an online forum about a topic that was only tangentially related to the subject, began your post with an inflammatory statement, never clearly stated what you were even talking about, and then blamed the lack of comprehension on the other end. If you're communicating in text to strangers, it's best to err on the side of being overly specific, especially when speaking about a different topic than the one being currently discussed.

Sorry if this comes off as harsh, but people blaming their poor communication on others is a pet peeve of mine.
Initiators #1
This is a good point. One of my pet peeves is receiving mail with poorly thought-out subjects. Whether it's a phrase that doesn't mean anything to the recipient, or something that's incomplete as a summary of the contents.

Often it's a sentence fragment, such as "Can you," followed by a continuation of the sentence in the body.
I was having lunch with a friend the other day and we came up with an idea, but the person who took action would need to be a travel agent--which neither of us are.

We love the shows "Best Thing I Ever Ate" and "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives" on Food Network. There are tons of foodies out there (like my friend and me) who would love to go on a tour of the restaurants from those shows. She could organize tours of a certain area of the country and the people on the tour could eat at two or three of the restaurants featured on those shows.
New Andreesen Horowitz Hire Keeps Focus On Entrepreneurs
How I would design the perfect desktop app store
My Android phone's weather widget gives me the current temp, the daily high and low, and a general icon (sun, snow, freezing rain). Here in Massachusetts, it's accurate enough to be useful.

The spatial resolution on the weather data is pretty good; it distinguishes between my town and the next one over, and gives separate forecasts. The forecast is always a little different at home than at work (about 30 miles), but not too bad. Maybe it'd be a problem if I lived in the Bay Area, where the punchline of the "don't like the weather?" joke is not "wait 5 minutes" but "move 5 feet".
'Xooming' In: Researchers Say Cameras, Display Add to Costs
The 10 Python Conferences Happening at PyCon 2011 (part 3 - Python and NoSQL)
My thoughts exactly, also that of story reminds me of many articles published in the bubble era, as do many valuation and funding stories lately.
EuRuko 2011 tickets batch 1 sold out
I was waiting for it. I started pressing F5 at 7.55 Greenwich and now what? The tickets were sold in like seconds :/ Some people made wtf because there was still displayed a number of tickets, but apparently these were in queue, already booked by people, still not checked out.

Peace... waiting for next batch.
The problem with other even-driven frameworks out there is that they have too much existing codebase that is blocking, which is why Ryan Dahl went with javascript. It had no preconceptions how to do things, and didn't have a large library of modules and code that it would need to interface with that caused it to block.

Python isn't slow by any means, but I think for what they were trying to do, node.js really fit their use case better. Being able to hook up so many different types of functionality all into one 'application' is really freeing especially considering how approachable it is.
Beautiful theory collides with smashing particle data
Boxee scores $16.5 million investment
I think web design is a really good trade to have and you should not stack up a list like that. If you are on HN, I imagine you have grander ambitions of doing your own things, so if I were you I'd learn to respectfully say no more often. I learned this one the hard way, but once I started saying no, it was no big deal, and I was helping others, but in reality these tasks take away time from my own coding projects, and it's not worth the trade off.
Python:

max((s[start:end] for start in xrange(len(s)) for end in xrange(start, len(s)) if s[start:end]==s[start:end][::-1]), key=len)
Facebook To Share Users' Home Addresses, Phone Numbers With External Sites
> "One concern is that if the U.S. decides Syria is behaving badly, then they could make all Web sites using Syria's country code domain - .sy - point to freedom of expression sites, for example," said Avri Doria, an ICANN group chairman. "Countries say, 'How can we subject ourselves to that?

Besides the fact that we haven't done this to any of the Arab countries currently in revolt, I haven't heard of anything like that happening to countries we've been in actual shooting wars with.
> I sincerely think the blind spot about SEO and reflexive distaste for it is the biggest marketing opportunity startups are routinely missing.

Maybe you should brand what you do differently then, as some kind of 'marketing'. What do marketing guys say about hanging on to sullied words?

Find the right words, and you could really stand out from the crowd.

> SEO is called black magic

One reason it's called black magic is because it's a "platform" that appears to be built on shifting sands: Google's algorithm. Or at least that's one way of looking at it. The only people who know what goes on with Google are working there and aren't sharing it. You come across, with your A/B testing and general knowledge, as more of the 'real thing', but a lot of those guys seem to be trying to resell the Google webmaster guidelines for high hourly rates.

> Savvy use of techniques like scalable content generation

Can you go into this in more detail?
I think that is the most important question. How many, or rather what percentage of the free users stayed on 2 weeks after the article?

How much other press did you get? When i look at at site (and a lot of Gen Y) I look for at least 3-4 pieces of "social proof"...Mashable would definitely be one, but i am looking for a handful other before i "buy".

If i were you i would use the Mashable effect to parlay it into more press at other small/medium size outlets, That is how you could really get the most value out of the hit.
According to the article the question was something I would translate to: "To what degree do you accept piracy of music from the internet on a scale from 1 to 10. Not at all accepting = 1. Sceptical = 2-6. Accepts it = 7-10"
Find a different way to pay it forward with friends and family rather than offering your professional technical skills (if it's becoming too time consuming, maybe you'll have down time some times, and you'll know you can pick it back up).
Somehow I don't think rolling their eyes at developers discovering a need for what they have to offer will do the Erlang community any good.

If they sincerely believe that Erlang offers a superior alternative to Node for what the influx of new Node developers need, then they should be looking to provide resources to help these devs "graduate" to erlang.

Not once have I seen a blog post saying "Like Node.js? Then you're going to love Erlang! Let me show you why it's better, with some snippets to compare and contrast."
Learning node.js: my experiences and helpful resources
1 million workers. 90 million iPhones. 17 suicides. A tour inside Foxconn.
Wow - I like this a lot. A very simple idea that's actually useful! How long did this take to create? Aside from Twilio and GroupMe what are you using to power it behind the scenes?

One note - if you're going to have people turn over their phone numbers to you - its probably best to include a privacy policy of some sort that explains how they will (or won't) be used.
One aspect was especially confusing last time I used it: I had a voucher to redeem on United, so I selected United on the dropdown for which airline to use. Lo and behold, all the flights were from other airlines.

Talk about easy to use!
It looks like he's using APIs, which means that he can only index as much data as the services are willing to provide. They can squeeze him out of business by shutting down or reducing access to the data whenever they please. Or just add to their API TOS that keeping a cached copy of the data is a no go.

The service would lose a lot of relevance if suddenly one of the main players like Facebook decided that they don't want to be indexed by Greplin anymore. Without long-term partnerships or contracts with all the stakeholders, I wouldn't bet on that horse.
There is code that really needs to be rewritten. If it's so creaky that you can't make any change without breaking other things, and you aren't allowed to refactor, that's trouble. I don't take on projects like that. But in my experience it's more common with web applications to find code that has lots of room for improvement, but isn't really falling apart. Most freelance developers/consultants immediately go to "we have to rewrite it," which the business can't afford right now, and therefore deprive themselves of the maintenance business.
Google acquires Zynamics
Calling all Flex engineers - openings at sliderocket
I did manage to solve all three problems and I really liked the way the problems were put up on the website.

Anyway, I would still suggest trying for some more time before looking at the solution that that I have provided here - https://gist.github.com/849813 .

The first problem itself took me most of the time. All this time I was trying to come up with a optimal approach (and was stuck in some boundary condition in implementation for Approach 1) until I realized that even a brute force solution will work in this case because of the smaller text input.
Non-Dilution Rights are Wrong
I'm not sure the simple SEO steps described here will really add "millions" to your valuation just like that, but this article really was more interesting than the somewhat link-baity title might suggest.
im a UI/UX designer. do you need one specifically in India?
You'd probably be better than most other basketball players.

If you want to be the best in the world, it's true that factors outside of your control come into play. If you can "settle" for being in the top 10, top 100, or top 1000, instead of #1, you probably don't need much besides a lot of well-directed effort.

In my experience.
I seem to recall that when I first visited Japan in 2003 and attended a concert, loads of people were attempting to surreptitiously take photos with their mobiles. I don't know what their comparative quality was, but they definitely had cameras on their phones in 2003.

Oh, and flip-phones have been all the rage for as long as I've been going there. I look forward to going back to see if iPhone form factors are gaining popularity yet. You can't swing a dead cat in the US without hitting an iPhone or iPhone knock-off.
Google acquires zynamics.com
This recent submission and its discussion is relevant to your claim, "General factor of intelligence g, a Statistical Myth": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2210147

I disagree with your claim about Lebron James, but I don't think there's enough data for an evidence-based debate. I do think, however, that people want to believe that others who operate at the genius level in various activities have genetic gifts. It gives us an excuse for why we don't.
No, you're not comparing apples to apples.

What NTTDoCoMo is specify everything from the electronics through to the user experience. In other words it is a holistic approach.

What Verizon does is say to the handset OEMs "slap on some extra icons, applications and a button to your existing experience" if you want to get your phones on our network. It's anything but a holistic approach and simply degrades the original experience the OEM/OS provider made.

As referenced in the Quora answer, the carriers in Japan are making good ARPUs and so it is in their interest to be providing the end user with an overall good experience.

Verizon, like all of the carriers in the US market, makes slim ARPUs and so from a corporate perspective they are more incentivized to tack on up-sells to increase ARPU which is exactly what all the V-Cast stuff is about.

In many ways it's similar to the Apple experience vs Dell (+ all the pre-installed bloatware) experience.
Just so you're aware, TXTMob is historically the name of a famous-in-very-small-circles group SMS service from 2004. Released as an activist digital art project and used to organize protests, it's often cited as one of the original influences for Twitter. It's not a name that the average person on the street would recognize - and fortunately TXT won't be confused with Text by search engines - but it's worth being aware of it. (Unless you did it intentionally, in which case, love the shout-out. :) )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob
Two words: Daniel Robbins ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Robbins#Microsoft )
It was posted to HN ages ago. Several people, myself included, passed it. Brute force is sufficient; you don't really need any clever algorithms.

Just spend a few minutes thinking about what you know about palindromes and what they look like and it shouldn't be too hard to code.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1324937 - sorted list of TED talks by @igrigorik
Most of you probably haven't the faintest clue who Zynamics is. They're based in Germany and used to be called Sabre Security. This is Halvar Flake's team; they sell BinDiff (the most popular binary diffing tool in reverse engineering, used by teams around the world to back security patches out to learn about flaws), along with BinNavi, a popular debugger-based reverse-engineering tool.

For the past few years, they've been working on an engine called VxClass that uses control flaw graph analysis to automatically classify malware. One presumes this is what motivates the acquisition. Google already scans content on the Internet for malware.

Or it could be mostly a talent thing. Google's been on a hiring tear. Extremely strong software security talent isn't easy to come by. Lord knows Halvar's got it. Zynamics is hugely well-known and respected in the software security world.
I would love to read such article!
Austin, TX (not remote)

Quickly growing startup making test and measurement equipment in solar industry. http://www.atonometrics.com/careers/software-engineer
Thanks. Yeah, I created this over the course of a few hours. It is hosted on Google App Engine and uses Twilio to setup the Groupme numbers (by sending an SMS)

To clarify, I am not going to use the phone numbers in any way. I do send them over to Groupme (to add to the group) so I cannot speak for them. This is more of a pet project currently and am not going to be spamming the phones or anything. I just wanted to see if people like it.

I agree. I should throw up a privacy policy. Any easy policies to throw up?

[Edit] - I posted an explanation as a placeholder Privacy Policy. No legal language, but it at least clarifies things.
The very non-tech people I've shown have loved it. I wonder if it's a generational thing?
The last time it was posted, they had an alternative. I don't know if it's still up, though. I'd check the previous story, though.
I posted this as a comment on the blog, but it kind of disappeared... so whatever.

I mentioned that sometimes the 800 pound gorilla isn't as slow or bureaucratic as you would think. With PostageApp, we have several large competitors (SendGrid and MailChimp) and they are frighteningly good at pivoting and offering new and exciting features.

I'm having a really fun time watching the developments of all the players in our industry. If you can take something away from fighting with the 800 pound gorillas, it's that you will learn a lot.
Thanks. I have never heard of TXTMob.

[edit] - after reading that I do remember hearing about this while reading about the beginnings of Twitter. Unfortunately when brainstorming domains I did not recall TXTMob.
Just as this story came up I was watching the video of Ryan Dahl explaining Node.js (someone had shared this link in the recent thread about the event loop)

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=dahl-node

In it, Ryan makes an important point about JavaScript being a natural fit because it was designed for a constrained environment. In particular, there is no way of doing I/O in JavaScript's traditional browser environment without providing a callback argument (I'm not counting interacting with the DOM as I/O here, and a couple of pedantic exceptions pointed out by judofyr below), and for the way in which the browser guarantees that only one callback will be executed at a time.

I think this idea of a constrained environment is very important. If blocking I/O functions are strewn about the APIs you have at your disposal, then programmers tend to default to using them.

The other point he makes is that often evented APIs are just missing from the underlying platform. Does every way of doing some sort of I/O in the universe of Python APIs have variants that take callback arguments? Even if the answer is 'yes' (which would surprise me) there is a minefield of blocking calls one would need to avoid in a disciplined manner.

...which may not be easy. Tell me: does myAwesomeFunction() do some blocking I/O under the hood? You can't tell from the name. Do the docs always make that clear, and provide an alternative with a callback?

Edited to include judofyr's exceptions — which bolster rather than undermine the point, because note that window.prompt's raison de'etre is to block for user interaction, and document.write is a RAM operation rather than disk or network I/O.
It may discourage trolling, but I expect it will also mean 90% of comments are made by people who are oblivious that they're trolling with their real identity, people who dont care that they're trolling WTRI, people with big egos, and of course 'social media' people promoting their 'personal brand'.
Although it is based in part on the DropMocks code.. I know that the backend is entirely different. Everyone cites min.us as an image sharing service but I use it everyday to share HTML, CSS, PHP, MP3, AI, PSD and more files.

IMHO, leaning on someone else's UI is fine... taking someone's backend (the harder part) is robbery.
which two questions?
I wondered what all the fuss was about... indeed it seemed like the guy copy/pasted the Gruppled Lockinfo theme and popped some text on the page to describe it all.

Lockinfo became too much useless info for me to have open all the time. Notified Pro with Statusbar plugin is the minimalistic approach I was looking for, although not perfect as yet.

Edit/ Unsure what year the post was created. Might've been before Lockinfo.
But my mistake...was not listening to my own intuition enough
There's an inherent tension between people's desire for granular control and their resistance to exercising that control, ie I want robust lists, but I don't want to have to manage them. I kind of feel like once list/group data is portable between services/networks, it won't be as big of a problem, since you'd only have to do it once, and management after that can be at the time of contact creation/connection.

I also think using the physical place metaphors more explicitly could be interesting. Like you could make a "bar" place, where your bar friends gather. Functionally I suppose it would be identical to Facebook groups.

What I'm really hoping for, though is that in the future once identity data is portable, the existing social networks will be more akin to places. Facebook will be the place for shallow, bland, regulated, cursory interaction. Twitter will be the place for shouting loud and pithy aphorisms in public. You could create private places for different purposes as the needs arise.
Yes the GS code was HFT, but the article is discussing the MS case where there's no indication the code was HFT, the article mistakenly assumes all quant trading code is HFT.
I don't think that's accurate. They're laughing at us, not with us. They don't need to understand "geek-culture" to laugh at us. We just need to be different.
Two innovation universes, one amazing video ~ Innovation Investment Journal
I wonder about the reduction in trolling, too, considering a lot of the comments I've seen on Facebook. I always thought identification would reduce bad behavior, but anecdotally I've found that not to be the case.
Knowledge of SQL is definitely needed even when using ORMs, but I agree with both of the other commenters. Instead of starting out with bending the ORM to your will it is better to use the API of the ORM in the way it really is intended.

In my experience with Rails ActiveRecord the usual suspects are N+1 queries, repeated queries that hit the query cache (they are really quite slow in Rails 3), and missing indices.

But intricate knowledge of SQL is most certainly necessary when using ORMs in conjunction with anything else than a trivial data model.
One of the best reasons I can think of - is that it's good to be able to divide tasks.

If you code using tables - you can't easily hand your front-end work over to a front-end developer, because they won't be able to build an interface without modifying your code. It might be difficult for your business to scale as a result - but as you state, YMMV.

I'll be quiet now :) If you ever do find yourself stuck with a CSS problem, feel free to drop me an email.
>We're still a long way from a 1.0 release. Version 0.4 arrived just last month.

If memory serves, 1.0 is not so far way... half a year? When node hits 1.0 and there is a perception of API stability, third-party development will likely explode.
Best of luck javruben - you'll have a lot of haters who won't understand the value prop, so you have a lot of difficult marketing ahead of you.

I thought about going into this market awhile ago, but there's a huge battle to be fought against ~20 year old editors that have been around the block and have become an external growth to some developers.

That said, you guys are headed in the right direction, good job charging and getting honest feedback on the utility so early. I just hope you're able to differentiate between 'features' and 'benefits' while going forward.
There is no way of doing I/O in JavaScript's traditional browser environment
without providing a callback argument.

What about `window.prompt`? Or `document.write`?
Well, let's hope they learned something. I think Gianugo probably is more experienced in terms of 'high level business' stuff too, having run his company for several years.
Kinect + 3D TV = Virtual Reality
Running JavaScript on Node.js from NetBeans IDE