skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sales 101 really applies here. That fear of rejection needs to be overcome. This is especially true for something one or a few people are building for potentially hundreds or thousands or even millions. There is no way for those few people to completely understand the needs of many. You WILL fail. You WILL be rejected. It's not a matter of "if". It's a matter of how yo learn from those rejections and failures.
Precisely the reason I wrote the very useful "human.txt" captcha: http://www.mrspeaker.net/2010/07/15/humans-txt/

Stops those pesky humans wasting precious robot bandwidth and is quite a bit harder than the Quantum Random Bit Generator captcha ;)
Show HN: Review My Startup - PaperPhobic
Will gladly accept any tips for features, monetization, etc.! Thanks guys!
PaperPhobic is a cloud-based receipt organization system. No signup is required, you can email photos of your receipts (or e-receipts) to receipts@paperphobic.com. We also have a free iPhone app you can use.

Notable paid features include transcription of price/date/description/categories, and super-quick expense/reimbursement report generation.

We are not the first to enter this space, but we feel we can compete on ease of use for the receipt uploader.

Would greatly appreciate feedback on the service and product. Thanks!
Don't forget games, though. You might not use them, but many people do. Gaming is still way superior on iOS in comparison to Android.

Although, for non-gamers, I fully agree with your argument.
it's been a long time since 95
We can have some fun taking the Justin Bieber-is-a-startup metaphor a little too far. Like... he better hope that Microsoft doesn't acquire him for his intellectual property and then kill him off...
The site is now live at http://sheenme.me -- would love feedback!
The problem is as an UX programmer everyone in the company gives you their 2 cents (the bike shed issue).

However as a backend programmer you are left alone to do the job at hand without either specs changing at the speed of light or having to explain/teach people why an idea may have issues and finding websites/case studies to support your argument.
This is one of the best books I've read about software engineering, along with Code Complete.
I completely agree with the conclusion of the review, every programmer should be required to own and read this book.
How do you work out what server spec you need?
It seems like you have to know a bit about everything these days to get up and running. Unfortunately I don't :)

Specifically, I'm taking about servers. I recently started receiving pubsub data feed from etsy. It averages around 250 notifications per minute. But obviously, when the USA wakes up that spikes quite heavily.

I want to be able to deal with those spikes (about 3 per day) but the rest of day is fine.

What's the best method of getting the right server configuration. My current approach is to keep upgrading until the server stops dying... next leap is:

- Processor: AMD Phenom II X6-1055T HEXA Core
- RAM: 4GB DDR2 SDRAM
- HD1: SATA Drive (7,200 rpm) (+500 GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive)
- HD2: SATA Backup Drive (+500 GB SATA (7,200 rpm))
- OS: Linux OS (+CentOS 5 64-bit)
- Bandwidth: 6000GB Monthly Transfer (3000 in + 3000 out) (+100M uplink port)

Is there a better approach?
Excellent points about how Apple's perception of iPad has changed in a year. I also loved this:

"Good iPad apps can make the iPad feel not like a device running an app, but like an object that is the app. GarageBand isn’t a musical app running on an iPad. It turns an iPad into a musical instrument."

So true. But the most insightful quote is at the very end:

"But there are other things any competitor could copy, easily, but seemingly don’t even understand that they should, because such things aren’t technical."

That's it! In order to compete effectively, you need to fully understand your adversary's strengths, which I don't think Motorola, Samsung, and others fully grasp. They still brag about the dual core, and this or that technical detail. I have yet to see apps as polished as iPad's on Android. When they come (and when Android has a better app store), then Apple needs to be worried.
For your analogy, he couldn't write "hello world" in C before writing the article. Before finishing the article, he was able to write software better than the vast majority of developers. While writing the article, he received training and advice from the person who trained the best developers. I'd sure pay attention.
Some people for sure - like the 20% who buy
MP3 players other than iPods, but most people bought Android in tbe beginnig because they couldn't buy apple or because apple was more expensive.

Now, Android phones are genuinely competitive with the iPhone, but they got there because they had real advantages in availability and price from day one. Android tablets don't have those advantages.
Really good examples. It also matches with recent discoveries in quantum physics where they proved that reality is shaped by observer. Whatever we are focusing on it will make it grow. So if our focus is on the problem it will make it bigger, if our focus is on solution it will grow too.

That's why we say that we are in control of our own destiny, it just depends how we observe reality.
The VPS figure was for serving static files. So, a lot of the stackoverflow content isn't static.
Ask HN: www.thesearchpros.com
Does anyone have any feedback on companies which promise to get you on top of the search results for Google?

The above company is one i've been looking at and quite honestly i feel like there is no guarantee and their service is no better than any other SEO hunter. Weird thing is that they claim to show you on google's paid advertisement section to the right of the search results.

Costs:

$25 a phrase
$99 setup fee (for what? they say it to integrate your website onto that first page under as many phrases as i want)
Buy 3 phrases and he won't sell those to anyone else
Blah and blah

Gut feeling it's a scamp and if legit, it's with no results.

What do you guys recommend?
The ubiquitous spread of smartphones throughout the world is not world changing?

We're talking about platforms that struggle for mastery over an emerging market that will be bigger than the PC revolution.
I'm also trying out Google Analytics for the first time. I'm still waiting for some data to show up in Analytics. They say it can take 24 hours.
Unless they become popular and the answers are too easy. Then you can guess the answer without even understanding the problem.
I disagree with your statement about dying in a short period of time if you catch malaria. I grew up in a country with a high malaria rate (Papua New Guinea). I caught malaria several times and didn't die. Malaria is a curable disease, all though it is evolving against the current cures.
As a side question, why are captchas using alphanumerics? Any reason why you can say, what is 1+1?

And flip the terms and answers for each captcha.

Is it because a person can't solve 3+8?
I had a multivariable calculus class with Dr Zeilberger and he was one of the best math professors or teachers I've ever had the privilege of being a student of. More than other teachers, I got the feeling that he genuinely cared about everyone succeeding: he ran multiple early morning study sessions several times a week, and didn't slouch this duty off to his TAs but was there himself, from 7am until the lectures started at 10. Not to say that my other teachers didn't also care, but he really put the time in to show it. I was always impressed because this was just a sophomore undergrad class, and I'm sure he had "more important" things to do.
My grandmother fed me homemade butter biscuits and sausage with eggs any time I visited. The southeast is full of terror and deliciousness.
You should be asking this on server fault.
I hate to say this, I really do...because I am a MAJOR fan of Seth Godin's work.

But I got NOTHING actionable from this talk.

Am I missing something ?
KDE Software Compilation 4.6.1 Released
He doesn't seem to have tried Tsung which is a good solution for this scale of testing.
Picosecond financial trading.
So you're saying that people who buy iPads buy mostly iPhone apps to run pixel doubled in order to save money?
No offense intended, but my first impression on the headline was that it was probably announcing that Steve Jobs health concerns are concerns no more, after he presided over the launch. That to me is a big announcement considering that a lot of investors and apple product loyalists have a sense of urgency when it comes the apple chief's health.
It's not that the USA isn't democratic enough. Quite the opposite. The problem is with public choice economics, and rationally-irrational voters.

The problem is that the government wields sufficient power that it's (very) cost effective for those who have sufficiently deep pockets (corporations, unions, other special interests) to woo the legislators for special privileges and rent seeking.

On the other hand, while voters collectively could wield power to counter this, it's diffuse, and any one particular voter has approximately zero influence, and thus has little incentive to make the significant investment in educating himself about what's going on. Thus, the electorate is generally ignorant (and rationally so), and does not know about (most of) the shenanigans going on with their government.
When thrown, the iPad 2 is also less aerodynamically stable than a Frisbee, therefore Apple must have secret holdings in a toy company.

This is some powerful mojo. It's like I'm finally seeing the real world.
Ask: Reducing web app barriers vs comment spam?
Hello,

I'm building a new app that will have your standard cold start problem. In previous ventures I have witnessed people (through analytics) clicking to participate then bailing when they find they need to create an account.

What should be taken into consideration when designing an end user web application to reduce participation barriers.

A few options are.

1) Let anyone contribute anonymously in the beginning but monitor all messages for spam.

2) Do #1 but take an email address on good faith so I can attempt to get them to register a a later date.

3) Rely on facebook, twitter, oauth? There is still a price for this from the user's perspective.

Any other options I am missing?
This focus translates into the questions we ask to begin with.

What are we asking ourselves when we solve something? What questions are asking when defining the problem? If the problem definition is askew than ...
It's happened, you just don't hear about them.
"But the CEO's 40x salary was put in place by the elected representatives of those who did put financial risk on the line--stockholders. If they see that salary as a good investment based on their risk why should they not be allowed to make that investment?"

This does not address the argument that rewards are being disproportionately bestowed on someone who took no risks, and arguably, produces less wealth or value on the whole than the people who actually do the work of creating and building products and services.

"Similarly if a company wants to build a product it is "forced" to hire employees and thus reach an agreement on salary. This too, by your line of reasoning, is a form of coercion."

Not at all. Coercion implies a disparity of leverage. The company has money (the means of survival, in this society) at their disposal. The employees do not, or else they wouldn't be looking for a job, would they?

In the worst case scenario the company doesn't get to make a product but still retains it's money, but the would-be employees have nothing, and are either reduced to subsistence level living, the charity of others, or simply starve.
That's very interesting. It's listed in the disputed section of Gandhi's page on wikiquotes:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi

As a thank you, I offer this personal favorite that I like to bring up whenever someone talks about stealing someone's thunder:

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/steal-ones-thunder.html
Because a computer is very good at solving basic maths questions?

All this does is simplify the captcha for machines to solve, whilst complicating it for humans (basic maths is easy for most but it's still one more logical step then 'type out the 5 letters you see'). Instead of 26 upper and lower-case characters, and often just a random string (so we can't make a best guess vs a dictionary), we now just have ten characters and maybe 2-4 mathematical operators and it must make sense (it can't be "42+-" for example).
Unless all of your users are working from your desk, you're 'typical ping' is worthless.

This ping tool would be far more valuable if you could see the ping times from different clients over time. Then you could actually make a judgement call if AWS is or isn't a high performance option.
This is great. It would also be nice to see ping time to S3 vs CloudFront.
Gmail - Inbox (69) - clamgungmail.com
From a technical standpoint, probably not. But those we apps don't exist today, and people are buying tablets now based on what apps can do for them.
>This article is a backtrack, tail between the legs moment for him I think

Why? He doesn't say the Xoom is good. Just that it's easier to get a few quick sales in before the crowd of apps appear.

Just because the device is not up to par with the 'best 'doesn't mean it will have zero sales, how much ever Apple wants to convince us. Biggest example, Android phones.
nevertheless he's great. i've learned to be critic with the things i'm learning from the others and one thing is true: no one is going to be 100% wrong nor correct.

there's something to learn from everyone.
Apps on market.android.com show a tab permissions where you can find what your device needs to use the app. I agree it's very hard to find out the supported resolutions. The screenshots will tell sometimes. But for a free app I don't think it's a problem at all. Don't like it: delete it.
I like it. Just installed the app and will try it for a couple of weeks. I've been looking for something like this. The iPhone capture is killer - no lame scanning of receipts.
This is a pretty awesome tool.

You should consider recording everyone's times + their IP/Location. Displaying that information would be very cool.
Has the web expanded our horizons?
The only one currently available from last year is Peldi's. http://businessofsoftware.org/video_10_peldi.aspx
When I read about this I always think about Joel Spolsky's observation about 15-minute distractions that affect programmers. When you start thinking about your day in those terms, telling the people talking to you to get bent (in nicer terms) starts to be justified.

Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html

The entire discussion about the zone is enlightening. If you haven't read it, do so; it'll make you think during your day.
I started going to gym 3 years ago. My weight was 55kg (122lbs) and height was 182cm (~6ft). Very underweight. I knew nothing about training. So I paid for a personal trainer. He made me program where almost all exercises were on the machines. At least he put squat and bench press there too. I trained when I had time, 2-4 times a week.

Last summer I did some arm wrestling with my friend. I lost. I thought what's wrong. I weighed less than my friend, but he didn't do any weight training. So I started looking how to get more strength.

I started doing core strength (Squat, bench press, dead lift, press, power clean, pull-ups). No more machines, biceps curls, calf raises, wrist curls, etc. Also, I started eating much more. With last 2 months I've gained 4kg (8-9lbs). My squat is currently 102.5kg (226lbs), that is ~1.4x of my body weight. I've gained more strength and weight with 2 months than I usually did in a year. And what's most important, now I beat my friend :).
I'm looking for remote development jobs. Preferably groovy related, as that is my current strength and interest, but am a very fast learner of different technologies. I'm currently located in Germany but am currently looking for a move. A link to my website with more information about me is in my profile.
*All luxury car companies' cars have letter + number combo names. Well, until you get to ultra-luxury, bently, aston martin, etc
I actually was pretty fond of this:

https://github.com/newsapps/beeswithmachineguns

I don't remember how I came across it but it's the same concept: fire up a swarm of EC2 instances to pound the shit out of your site.
I read this and for some reason I read it like an instruction manual on how to do things right. Given the chain law enforcement followed, the "advice" you can take away from this is:

- Always, always, always use a prepaid credit card. You can buy them everywhere. Pay for them with cash. Don't buy them in a store with good surveillance;

- Make sure you register them with out-of-state addresses and fake names (if you even have to). Use a different card to pay for different things so the trail covers multiple states. This complicates law enforcement;

- Use a foreign intermediary. This GREATLY complicates law enforcement;

- Have that intermediary be an innocent-looking site, like for sending large files. Use a different set of cards for that site;

- If you're not interested in real-time as such you could greatly complicate efforts to obtain a warrant by uploading different pieces of the content to the intermediary site using a variety of networks.

- Encrypt the upload. Have individual pieces meaningless without the whole.

- Upload those pieces via multiple accounts on the fake foreign intermediary. Maybe even use two or more intermediaries.

Not that I have any interest in such things but the engineer in me sees such a post and naturally looks for ways to solve the problems.

The piece about encrypting and uploading different pieces as a background task that simply looks for open networks as you wander around actually sounds like an interesting technical exercise.

Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if such a thing exists already.
One of the nice things about software drivers is that you can spend as much time as you want training a module for driving with, say, a given tire blown out and then swap that module in when actual conditions match the conditions that its trained for.
Show HN: The New jMockups Mockup Editor
Short version: '"We need the internet to connect us and introduce us to new ideas and people and different perspectives," he continued, "and it’s not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a web of one."'

It's an issue I've been noticing for a few years, but I could never come up with the right words to describe the problem.
I hate commercial gyms. Give me a barbell that I can clean and a tire for me to flip and I'm a happy guy.
No support for punctuation?
As you stated: If computer wanted to hack it - sure it is easy enough. But I was looking for a easy way to do some verification.

I asked this because I was creating a reddit clone and wanted a captcha system. I detest the ones that exist right now.
Since you'll probably run these tests several times to get a true picture, it'll be helpful if the previous results are not over-written in the UI when the tests are run again.
It would be great to see you give a keynote.

About €3,000 total registration and travel costs - I'll have to mull it over some more (not related to your keynote, just on a general note of costs!).
I got to compute a derivative. In the spirit of reCAPTCHA, wouldn't it be more appropriate if the Captcha consisted of symbolic integration?
I seriously don't see how competition can catch up with Apple any time soon. They build such infrastructure and line of products, all tight extremely well together, looking amazing and they keep improving it almost every 3 months so that from competitors perspective even to decide from where to start is extremely puzzling.

I can tell for sure that Android will take most of the market, maybe even 60-70%, but this will not be because of quality or user experience, it will only be because of cheaper prices, low end products and trying to please mainstream. But I'm pretty sure that Apple will be happy with their part of the cake with high quality products, high margins and very loyal and happy costumers. Just brilliant from any point of view.
Nice idea, I'm not crazy about the "paperphobic" but its smart to not try to use the word receipt in the name.
Pretty sure this paragraph should be on the website.

I had to come here to really understand what I was looking at.
You should quote the entire paragraph.

"Cardio machines are innocent enough, as they won’t actually make you any less fit, but maintaining cardiovascular fitness doesn’t really take much more than breathing uncomfortably hard for about 20 minutes, three times a week. And we all know that swimming, hoops, bike riding, and even Ultimate Frisbee can get the job done, and that treadmills or elliptical trainers are a pale substitute."

Perhaps he made an incorrect claim here. But to be fair, you should go for the point of the paragraph as opposed to one sentence from it. What he is saying here is that the cardio machines in the gym are little better than maintenance for cardio and are a poor substitute for other ways to get the same sort of workout. I think this argument still fits within your own here.

The overall point of the article is that for strength, muscle mass and muscle endurance, there is no substitute for the basic free weight exercises. That's not to say that you should only do those exercises and that you can't benefit from more specialized training, but that everyone still benefits from those exercises and should make them part of a core program. The same cannot be said for cardio machines.
Best Social Media and Tech Sources: Beyond Mashable
FYI chart doesn't display fully on iPhone
> I believe it's a CrossFit thing.

Based on this claim I assume also that Crossfit invented the barbell, the bumper plate and gravity.

The sudden outburst of anecdotes about how your Crossfit gym rooly trooly emphasises form seems to have come after years of sustained criticism by strength coaches and Olympic weightlifting coaches.

It's as simple as this: nobody -- not me, not you, not your coach, not the pros -- nobody can pump out high rep Oly movements without steady and ultimately dangerous degradation in form. The force plate studies, the EEG studies, the eyeballing of experienced coaches demonstrate over and over and over that it is a flat out stupid idea to do snatches or cleans for reps.

And yet in Crossfit gyms everywhere, this idea of smashing out 20 clean & jerks still keeps getting circulated.

You cannot do this and learn to do the movements precisely enough. You will only train yourselves to do it messily. Under heavy weights you will fuck up and injure yourself.

Given that I love Oly lifting, I don't want people getting injured and then blaming the lifts, when they should be blaming a faulty training technique.
But this runs right back into Joel's supposition. If only 1% of developers are capable of doing this well enough, then why do we still have a booming software industry?
Just an FYI. To the best of my knowledge Amazon does not permit the use of their trademarked services within the domain of the URL. I'm working on a project that augments EC2 and ended up having to change my domain name to err on the side of caution.

IANAL but do checkout http://aws.amazon.com/trademark-guidelines/ and read section 9 and section 11.