skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What would you do? Release or Polish more
I am working on a project that I've been thinking about for a few months. I finally got off my butt and started coding it up. My time is limited, as I have full-time job and big family. I'm giving it all I have, but I need sleep and just not enough hours in the day! :-) I need your advice.

My product is scratching an itch that I have. The challenge is that I think it's scratching an itch that a lot of other people have too, because every day I see announcements on here from other people launching things trying to solve the problem – albeit via a different approach. To date, I haven't seen any of them with the features that I think will set my site apart and really get some traction. But I'm also aware that unique ideas are not so unique. I dread the day I read ShowHN with something that is nearly identical to what I'm doing. The particular feature that sets my solution apart is one that isn't developed yet – as it relies on other features to be completed before it can be implemented.

Further, I'm not a designer. So my site is completely minimalistic. I have two images only! :-) It makes HN look pretty! Actually, I think HN is pretty in its simplicity, but was trying to get a point across – my site is very basic and not like the visually cool things I see launched regularly.

My questions:

1.Should I release w/o the killer feature that I think will set it apart - to at least get some initial traction and feedback? I could describe it, and mock it up, without real functionality behind it. Or would this be a bad move – in that someone with more time can implement it quicker than me? I know I shouldn't worry about copy-cats – but I don't want someone to copy an idea that isn't even working yet!

2.Should I release w/o a visually nice design? The eye candy factor is important and I don't know if my minimalistic site will deter people because it isn't pretty. I'm no PG – and don't know the tolerance level people would have for a site that isn't backed by such a popular group of people.

3.I'm completely bootstrapped, and I would like to remain that way. However, I don't have extra income to pay a designer – so should I give up part of it for design help? If so, how much?

4.Release Early | Release Often – a principle I understand. But how early is too early?

I look forward to benefiting from your collective wisdom. Thank you.
I worked on a fairly large GWT based project. Once your project crosses certain size, the entire compilation of Java to JS is royal pain and really affects your productivity.
New Antitrust Charges Against Google in Europe
LessBookClub
That sounds correct. I wonder if you're missing anything?

Hopefully he'll post his savings in a few months.
or rethink and rebuild the product before it falls behind.

You mean like Netscape did?

oh, wait...
Not much different than building an iPhone interface programmatically. They recently bundled the GWT Designer, which is a WYSIWYG layout tool. UiBinder is another option that let's you build interfaces in XML.
Whoops. Well, even better!

In slightly related news, I wonder if this is what came out of the TechCrunch rumors last year about free Kindles for Prime customers: http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/12/amazon-wants-to-give-a-free...

Maybe we'll see Amazon add book rentals too as a prime perk, even if it's a higher tier.
I remember exactly one doctor's visit in my 20s (bad dose of poison oak), one in my early 30s (bad bouldering fall), then nothing until age 39. So yeah, your mileage may vary.

Needless to say, I never came close to hitting my $5k deductible. (or even my $250 annual deductible in the years when I had company-sponsored insurance).
Lanyrd (YC W11) launches session planner / coverage tracker for SXSW Interactive
Just had a pair of major surgeries in my immediate family. When we offered to pay cash, they immediately knocked 50-66% off all the costs. That included anaesthesiologist, room rental, and doctor's time.

This "retail rate" mentioned in the article is crap.
So why does this method supposedly save energy with a house heater? E.g., you should turn down the heat when you go away?
Would a tiny fighter jet be able to kill an unarmored human?
I can't remember specifically the example, but there was a recent case where someone recorded the conversation with a police officer without the police officer's knowledge or consent. This ended up getting the person in a lot more hot water than the original issue. If someone could provide specifics, would be appreciated.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone blame the 80s videogame crash on raw number of available titles. Everything I've read to date points to the nose-dive in average quality.

i.e. People weren't driven away by the array of choices. They were driven away by bad experiences.
Interesting. I had a shower idea(tm) one morning where the combination of a rating and user-supplied biographical data at the time of the rating (e.g. "I was a novice with Python when I read it") determined a book's effectiveness.

The idea was founded on the tendency that people are skill-biased when rating books. They might dislike a book for being confusing or too easy because it wasn't designed for them at the time of reading. This was an attempt to figure out which books were just bad, and which were only rated bad because they were read without proper experience (or too much).

Ultimately, using community data, a visitor would be able to discover a "bookpath" of great resources that syncs up with their level of skill.
The GPS recorded his maximum speed aswell, which was under what the radar gun said.
Social Security had plenty of loopholes when it was first passed, too.

If Obamacare had merely outlawed discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, then premiums would have gone through the roof, because lots of healthy people would have put off buying insurance until they got sick. So the law needed to include a provision requiring everyone to buy insurance. If everyone has to buy insurance, then there also have to be subsidies for people who make too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford insurance. If there are subsidies, then money to cover the cost of subsidies has to be found, through a combination of tax increases and cost savings elsewhere in the system. Those are the pillars of Obamacare; everything else is gravy.

Also, one of the sad realities of the American political system is that the only way to pass a law that pisses off some powerful interest group is to buy off other powerful interest groups at the same time.
Could you release it to a small set of people ? That's what I did with HackerBooks.com (I setup the DNS only a couple days back :-).

I find that it's useful to get feedback without going fullspeed.
Vietnamese food is both delicious & cheap in Silicon Valley. I would say it's authentic in San Jose, but I'm not qualified to judge how legit it is. Vietnamese food may not be as familiar as other cuisines in America, but it is one of the best comfort foods.

Pho (Beef Stock with Rice Noodles) - About $6 with satisfying broth and exotic cuts of beef
http://www.yelp.com/biz/pho-tau-bay-san-jose

Banh Mi (Very Cheap French Baguettes Sandwiches) - No more than $3[1] and comes with your choice of meat
http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=banh+mi&ns=1&fi...

[1] - Here in NYC, there is a dearth of good Vietnamese food. NYC Banh Mis are easily $6-8 for a subpar product. Contrast that to paying $2.50 in Milpitas for a giant Banh Mi.
Obamacare implementation timeline
This looks like an incredible tool--congrats.

Would you mind explaining more about how it works behind the scenes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_in_the_American_Revoluti...
Conversion Rate Testing Effects on SEO
> "I don't trust Apple."

You shouldn't trust any platform vendor. If you're too small to get a contract stipulating that they can't pull the rug out from under you, you should start developing only after making a careful calculation of risk/reward.
Intrinsyc Joins Linux Foundation
I had something similar in mind for http://learnivore.com earlier on.

I wanted to create a community-edited wiki page providing a "training path" which would involve screencasts, books, articles.

I think it would really be useful actually.
"The Reformation away from the Roman Church was also similar in spreading. Not as ostensibly political, but the Church and State were much more intertwined at that point so I'd slip it in."

AFAIK, in many countries the decision to reform was very much indeed a political one. The local sovereigns desired independence from the then considerable Papal influence, as well as an excuse to "acquire" the (also considerable) wealth of the national Catholic parishes.
Another cool trick: Integrating Cloudkick tags with Fabric. Using the Cloudkick API - you can express things like "run certain_func on everything tagged 'loadbalancer'".

https://support.cloudkick.com/Integrating_Fabric_with_Cloudk...

We dog food this for all of our production deployments. For example, when we ship a new version of cloudkick.com, we just run "fab ship", which looks for all servers tagged "cloudkick.com" and runs the appropriate deployment script on each of them.

Tagging can be done through the CK UI, automatically with the agent, or with things like puppet or chef. This allows you to fully automate deployment and other tasks around groups of servers.
Is it a tad odd that this comes from the RoR guys? Ruby + RoR in the mid to late 2000's was _the_ next language/framework.

So it's ok for next as long as _you_ benefit, but not if it causes you inconvenience.
rel="shortcut icon" considered harmful

No, it isn't.
Three words:

In-N-Out
I don't want to drive the thread down super-deep, but if you have any questions or there is any way I can help, please shoot me a line. Perhaps all of us doing this can compare notes some time.
Sony PS3 Hacker Geohot Starts a Blog, Raises Cash for Legal Defense
Quick answer: Because in a water heater (2) is very small compared to the energy cost of (1). In a home, which is infinitely less insulated than a good tank, maintaining temperature is a lot more expensive.

Edit to add: I'm not claiming zero energy savings -- I'm just saying that, compared to the other opportunities for savings available, this project's energy savings are likely to be tiny.
Hong Kong residents can also drive from one side of their country to the other in ten minutes! I demand that Big Transportation in the USA enable me to drive from NYC to LA in under twenty minutes!
Ask HN: Two HN accounts, close one, change the other?
I have two hn accounts. I'd like to close one, and change the username on the other. Are either of those things possible? Can anyone from HN answer this?
Brewing beer in a coffee maker on an oceanographic research vessel.
I like it. I would love to see the comments without having to click through to hacker news or stack overflow.
Hehe - good point. We should chat later on yes, always good :)
Do you use Netflix? A while back I bought a Zotac Mag to have as my entertainment center. I set up Ubuntu on it, my usual dev tools and Boxee. I found out that there was no way to make Netflix work on Linux, other than through a Windows VM (which the Mag's cpu couldn't deal with).

Because I had to have Netflix (my wife uses it all the time) I took the Mag to the office and bought a used Mac Mini on Craiglist just for this.
Tweaking relevance is not super-easy with Solr. We designed IndexTank to have a very simple way to play with ranking. You can modify your formulas in your dashboard or through the API and see the results order change in real time.

I really love what you got here. I'd be happy to help you try out IndexTank and make it better. It would really take the Solr configuration burden off of you.
I agree with Thibaut. Release to a small group. Adding your killer feature is one more feature which you will have to maintain and worry about. I would launch to friends (and anyone who responds to this post) now, start getting feedback and continue forward. I would try to refrain from giving up equity for projects until your product has been tested and you have a better understanding of what it will need to get off the ground.
Ok, so the book description is written manually?

Was justing wondering if the content might be touched by any copyright issues etc.
I have a lot of local video files, and I've (briefly) tried the Boxee software a couple times. It has a feature where it tries to identify that media, but I've found it to be comedically awful at doing so, especially when it comes to TV series, where it tends to pick out maybe one or two episodes from a given series directory, then for some reason completely ignore the rest, even though they're all following the same format in their respective filenames.

Does anyone know of a way to just turn this off entirely? I already have things organized by directory/filename. From what I can tell, the current 'solution' is to manually go through each file and fix whatever stupid information was auto-detected. Which is backwards, because if someone's anal enough to deal with that, they've likely already got things meticulously organized how they want by directory/filename, so why not just go by that directly?

I get the strong impression that they didn't really make local media playback a priority.
To my knowledge most developers aren't exactly earning a mint from either platform. There are success stories on each platform, although as the iPhone at one time had more users it seemed only logical to go for that market.

Android is now at a point where the average user couldn't care less about OS having open-source aspects. The reason few people buy apps for Android is because while there are a lot of apps most of them are awful or have free alternatives. This is what separates the iPhone experience from the Android experience, and in my mind this is why people don't spend big on Android, and why people would if the right app came along.
Facebook has an XMPP endpoint. However if a user has turned off chat within Facebook they won't even show up as at that point they are really offline.
Aaah - I see :) The book description is provided by the Amazon API itself; I'm not aware of any issue with publishing it if you are a registered API user.
Usually you have to at least tell someone they are being recorded, but they don't have to consent to it.
We're using an interesting combination of replicated Solr, Redis and MySQL for the core sessions-your-contacts-are-attending feature, I'd be happy to expand if anyone is interested.
Another fail safe method arises to due a logical reason:

1. Off the record (OTR) chats are not recorded.

2. There is message delivery notification in GTalk.

Putting these together: if you chat OTR with X and later, if you send a message to X (who is invisible) and you get a red error "X did not receive your message", then X is offline. For a normal offline contact, it would have been delivered as an offline message, but since the conversation is OTR, it cannot be recorded and hence you get a notification. :-)

On the other hand, if X is online, you don't get the red message.
You will never be able to stop spam (I assume you mean email). A few years ago I realized this when looking through my logs I saw emails to ... bob@domain.com ben@domain.com berry@domain.com ... etc Blindly trying the most common. I knew then that if I wanted the account name ben I could never 'solve' spam on top of our general email system we have today.
My favorite (although not the most efficient) Clojure version of this is:

(defn flat [s]
(if (sequential? s)
(apply concat (map flat s))
(list s)))

(flat '((((1 2 3)) (4 5)) (((((((6 7 [8 9])))))) a b c) {:a 1 :b 2}))

;=> (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c {:a 1, :b 2})
Book Pushers
Fabric maintainer here -- Tav's been quite active on our IRC channel while developing much of this, and it's great to have more people excited about improving the tool!

As tswicegood says in another comment, some of these changes (@task, parallelism, etc) aren't unique to Tav's work, so when it comes time to merge we'll draw on the various implementations to see what feels best.

The features unique to his fork will be evaluated like any other contribution and merged in if they fit well and are generally useful (which many seem to be).

The plan right now is post-1.0 (1.0 is scheduled for Pycon or earlier) to round up a lot of major contributions and get them into core, so people like tswicegood don't have to work off of their own forks quite as much :)
Really? I love the design of the box and the remote.

For me, the experience with boxee has been great. I use it everyday and love it. I have it hooked up with a NAS and indexing files etc is pretty good.
There is no end to what if's.

What if Dropbox screws up? Data is gone!

What if your building catches fire? Those documents will burn with pleasure!

What if your hard-drive decides to get a heart-attack [crash]?

What if world ends?

Paper is so 90s thing. Even in offices, yes.
> but they also have communication they never had before

Funny you say that. People in 1848 also had "communication they never had before," and they could "organize efficiently as they never could in past".

From _1848: Year of Revolution_ by Mike Rapport:

> The speed with which the wave of revolutions swept across

> Europe was due to the wonders of modern technology. In

> 1789 it took weeks for news – carried, at its fastest, on

> horseback or under sail – for the fall of the Bastille to

> be relayed across Central and Eastern Europe. In 1848,

> thanks to steamships and a nascent telegraph system,

> reports were being heard within days or even minutes.
Damn, I wish I was going this year when the program is finally in a format I can make sense of!
Why is less than a year too long? Is dummynet missing functionality?
Hello there,

First of all, good job on the application. It is simple, but has many features. The iPhone application is also very useful.

There is one problem, like you mentioned in your submission, you have many competitors. I would try and find a strong competitive advantage to attract users to your site instead of going to Pingdom or UptimeRobot.

Your site is inexpensive, but people can always go to a free alternative such as UptimeRobot.

The larger companies would rather pay more money to use a more trustworthy application with a large portfolio of clients (ie Pingdom).

I would also work on the landing page for the website. A more attractive interface could also help users trust the application. Create a separate "Pricing" page with an attractive comparison table. Remove the pricing on the home page and show some screen shots or some of the main features. The call to action button could also include "Sign up for your free account" and underneath you could specify that no payment is needed to sign up.

I would also place more emphasis on the iPhone application. It shows that your application is innovative.

If you need any help, let me know. I would be glad to give you a hand.

Good luck!
I'm just glad there's a Fry's in Webster, Texas modeled after the ISS. Such a wonderful place to go with friends before a LAN party.
Steve Jobs Says In-App Subscription Rules Only Apply to “Publishing Apps”
No, shut up. What statistical programming languages can learn from Dropbox.
you can also type their name in the box at the top of your gmail integrated chat.
Common Lisp has MAPCAN:

(defun flatten (list)
(mapcan (lambda (item)
(if (listp item) (flatten item) (list item)))
list))
I highly recommend everyone attend this talk: http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7538
WP7 App : List it Do it
Nice WP7 App
Yes this is true.. Another thing that people don't usually consider is that any hot water system actually contains a gradient of temperatures, all the way from whatever your water heater is set at, down to almost room temperature where the faucet is. Somewhere along that gradient is the temperature that Legionellae will thrive, so it's a good idea to let the hot water run until it comes up to temperature before using that water.
On the upside, there's long phases of "just add more of the same" in scaling these things. The fun comes in waves, every time when you hit one of the various physical barriers (namely latency and bandwidth).

That is to say the host-count in isolation is not the most interesting figure. I've seen large sites run on 20 machines or on 500, depending on the skills of the management- and developer-team, and how much they care about the infrastructure cost in the big picture.

The host-count becomes more interesting when you relate it to the request rate. 17k/sec is absolutely a worthwhile workload, even when (as likely in the disqus case) reads dominate writes by far.

That said the relation of 100 hosts / 17k rps seems about reasonable.

However (not meaning to narrow their achievement) the engineer in me can't help but wonder if perhaps even a little more could be squeezed out on the caching front? I was a bit surprised to not see varnish on the slides; fragment caching on the perimeter can achieve mind-boggling results.
Show HN: See the music your friends listen to
the desktop version/integrations do not have video chat. that's one reason.
Average faces of Women from 46 Nations
Generated using the data from Face Research (http://www.faceresearch.org/)
Hi!

well I considered using IndexTank earlier on, especially because I didn't know yet how to deploy Solr. The relevance is mostly done already, I just needed to learn to use formulas :)

One thing that put me off is your cap in queries per day. The smallest paid plan (50k items in index) is capped at 1,000 queries per day.

Isn't that an issue for most sites ? Do people usually cache your results ?
Using the latest tools for the work that you're doing is great if the tools actually make your process better.

Adding new features, chasing empty trends that people don't want is quite different.
They don't breed, but worker ants contribute to the survival of the colony. If all/many of the workers die, the breeding ants would die, too. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder for worker honey bee disappearance killing the hive (not suggesting any death-spiral/circular milling connection).

But yes, a few hundred (or thousand) worker ants dying isn't a strong enough evolutionary signal to matter to the healthy hive.
reheating a stale tank to a target temperature would use exactly the same energy input as holding it at the target temperature the whole time anyway

Essentially this same line of reasoning was used during the 1970's energy crisis to argue that night setback of a thermostat wouldn't save energy. "You spend as much energy to reheat the house as you save by letting it cool down."

Unfortunately, that argument is incorrect.

Think about the overnight cycle, during which no water flows in or out of the tank, and the water ends up at the same temperature as it started. The total energy you have to put into the tank equals the heat lost through its insulation. That heat loss is driven by the temperature difference between the hot water and the surrounding air. Lowering the water temperature means the tank loses less energy over that time. Therefore you have to put less energy in.

In other words, you were right to identify your assumption (a) as incorrect. The tank's heat loss does, in fact, depend in a very direct way on the water temperature.
Does anyone know if jacquesm is helping out with this project? Since he helped archive Geocities (see reocities.com), maybe he can help archive Yahoo Video.
You're accusing them of mercurial morals, but did they ever previously promote the idea that "next" for the sake of "next" was a good thing?
It's amusing to see a place I grew up written up as a tourist attraction.
Thank you for this input. I will reach out to you within the next week.