skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We use EBS snapshots as a last-resort backup. They're really convenient that way. We have a more robust backup system, but in the unlikely event that something goes wrong at least we have those snapshots, even if they're not perfect.
Mozilla is trying to position FireFox a as superior alternative to IE9. Therefore, there's no cognitive dissonance at all with Mozilla saying that 1) IE 9 is worse than Firefox because it doesn't run on XP and 2) IE 9 isn't really modern while Firefox is.

Mozilla doesn't want IE 9 to be modern, but more than that, it doesn't want users to think that IE 9 is modern. Mozilla doesn't want IE 9 to have any compelling features whatsoever.

A negative marketing campaign will always backfire to some portion of your audience.
This is pretty neat, but the description fails to mention which languages it supports. I tend to look at githubs for a lot of weird languages and if this thing can properly highlight F# then I'm installing it on all my computers.
Was posted earlier today with a large set of comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2340275
I don't know, but I assume moderate. I guess it wouldn't be terrible to lose 20% of his investment if there's an 80% gain chance.
Yep, the only thing I'd add was to specifically call out GTK# on Linux desktop apps
What's a diversified portfolio these days?
Baby names based on domain availability
"Sigh. You do know that almost all of us are on your side, right?"

If you mean random people on HN, definitely not. Nearly every thread on women in the industry here devolves into rants about how stupid, weak, and whiny women are, and many or most of the posters who don't drop into open misogyny instead pretend we're in a perfectly equal world (or, at least, a perfectly equal industry) and that sexism is a moot issue that only conniving lib'ruls try to whip up out of nothing.

Now, if you mean people you work with, I'm willing to believe they'd like to do the right thing. However, a big part of actually DOING the right thing is entertaining the possibility that you're doing it wrong, and that involves not being defensive. That includes such things as not trying to foist the blame on the women themselves (as TFA did) and not trying to shout down people who point out problems (as you did).

"This isn't actually a male or female issue"

It's not a strictly racial or sexual issue, either, but this is still a setup where a bunch of mostly straight white guys will end up giving much better odds to similar folks than they will give to equally talented people who aren't straight, white, and/or guys. Not "there are fewer of them in the first place", but straight-up "we are making this harder for you if you're gay, black, or a woman".

Suggestions?

1) Think of it as marketing. Try to look at finding talented people beyond the standard pool of straight white guys as something that's on you in order to make more money, not some problem you're saddled with that just benefits them. Look at the positions you're offering as something you're trying to sell and see how attractive they are - and think of things like "almost no women apply" as "we're failing to attract a major segment of the market".

2) Don't emulate TFA. Don't patronize the people you say you want to recruit. Would you try to sell something by squinting at customers who turned you down and saying, "Let's try this again"? That sure wouldn't work on me, why would that work on women?

3) Keying into that "possibility that you're doing it wrong" - when you can, find out why women aren't applying for something. If you had good rapport with one or more of those six programmers you mentioned, why did she or they not want to apply to Y Combinator? They all had reasons.
I tried to submit this excellent podcast: http://castroller.com/podcasts/BigIdeas/2085839-Craig%20Kapl...

And it failed. What exactly do I need to submit?
> I wonder when the first Perl-style one-liner chatroom will come out?

Does "<iframe src='http://www.pubnub.com/blog/build-real-time-web-apps-easy>... count?
Batch Convert Your Music Collection on Linux
As much as I'd like this to happen, I bet they would sell fewer tickets. A certain number of travelers sort ticket results based on price. If they added even just a few dollars to each leg to pay for perks, they would push themselves down on the results page and sell fewer tickets.
Yeah really. I wonder if the "prominent technologist" quoted in the article realizes how condescending and self-serving he sounds when he says "There’s nothing wrong with being a small software company.... It’s boring, but there’s nothing wrong with it. Don’t expect anyone to celebrate you for doing it, though."
And not the sort of introduction they're looking for - it's an extremely bogus example.
It's mostly a settled issue, I wouldn't worry about it.
Yes. That is one advantage that I had working at Zoho for nine years. Everyone in the team has worked with me at zoho. 3 of the 6 people had worked with me at Zoho and had moved on to other companies. They came back to work for Freshdesk as they believed in the ability of the team to ship products.
A great example of why the funnel is often a completely incorrect, inadequate, and even misleading metaphor for measuring conversion.

Example: "I'm having trouble optimizing the last step of my funnel." Did the first four steps of your funnel consist of showing pictures of naked women while the last step prompted the user to refinance his house?

Unless the steps of your funnel are real, meaning they actually represent bounded, uni-directional escalations of qualification and purchase intent (think a 3-step shopping cart checkout), then thinking of the 'flow' that way is defeating.

What Chris is talking about here makes a lot of sense, and to my mind boils down to something like this: the airline's win comes through offering the greatest perceived value to the customer, so tread carefully as you unbundle low-cost, high-perceived-value features for a small (unguaranteed) marginal gain.

Setting false expectations is pretty egregious as well, and in addition to losing the good will that would have been generating by offering the DirecTV for "free," the airline generates ill will that could, of course hypothetically, result in angry blog posts being written and shared.

Here's the funnel for an airline: be amazing, underpromise and OVERdeliver, and book flights like a mofo.

Loyalty is no longer post-purchase.

The next time I fly across the Atlantic I will fly Virgin, the next time I make a restaurant reservation it will be Bondir, the next CSS I write will be in Sass, the next phone I buy will be a Samsung, the next vehicle I buy will be a Toyota, the next time I go to NYC I will take a Bolt bus.

I am 100% sure about these purchase decisions, and I have never flown Virgin, never eaten at Bondir, written in Sass, used a Samsung phone, bought a Toyota or taken a Bolt bus.

How do I know these are the right purchase decisions? Because I trust my friends' experience, and a delighted customer turns into a priceless evangelist faster than we often realize.
Might be worth noting that there's already a podcast called Podcastle, so that might present some naming issues - I was confused for the first few seconds.

Also, seconding what roryokane said, your design does not look good. It's bland, it's boring, and it looks a bit spammy.
SEC Sues IBM Alleging China, Korea Bribes
How close are projects like Wine or ReactOS to full XP compatibility? Is there an opportunity here?
PadKite, the first multitouch mobile mouse.
In spite of all the other, technical ways of doing this (see your sibling comments), I fear that this is what they're doing.
Really, when you compare some of the "not really a business but it just might work" type ventures the term "lifestyle business" is intended to compare and contrast you with, I'd take it as a compliment. Sure, there are people who earn more per day literally and metaphorically playing poker, but I know who I respect more.
It'd be illegal wiretapping if it were the government, perhaps, but I'd imagine the standard contract with AT&T permits this.
Read more about the backstory here: http://www.richpalmer.org/naming-your-baby-is-hard-let-us-he...
I've been helping someone start their business in India, so I can give you some info.

Your company should be incorporated in the US. You get tax rebates (not available to Indian companies) if you pay for services in USD from a foreign account. Typically you'll pay a local company directly and they will pay your workers (something like a ghetto version of Ambrose Employer Group in the US). Labor is cheap, but often of low quality. Lying on resumes is rampant, and filtering the wheat from the chaff is very tough. Getting good people can be tough for a startup, most people will want to work for bigger company [1]. Pay can be considerably higher in bigger cities. Bombay is more expensive to live in than NYC, and pay can be comparable for great people (though the spread is much wider than NYC). If you need top talent, go to the Valley. If you need commodity talent, go to India.

(I'm not saying top talent doesn't exist there, I'm just saying you probably won't find it.)

Often you can get a package deal - office, servers, workers with a single payment. The SLA will usually have terms like "you don't have to pay workers while the servers are down." My friend exercised this clause several time - between power loss, workers tripping over wires, broken DSL (!!!) connection and the like, he has about one 9 of uptime. Just accept it, plan for outages (read: no MongoDB) and move on. Production servers live on linode/EC2/rackspace, not locally.

You want to avoid a permanent presence - if you can't easily walk away you are at risk of being shaken down for bribes. "Sorry, but the electricity is down, and it will take 2 years to fix it, though maybe I could do a personal favor for you and push you further up the queue." Same thing if you need permits, want to incorporate locally, etc.

Short version: living is cheaper (not as cheap as you think), commodity talent is cheap, but quality will often be lower. Look for bargains, and be aware that it isn't the valley or NYC.

[1] This is true for both cultural and economic reasons. Short version: a) working for an unknown company can mess up your prospects in arranged marriage market, b) family might be disappointed, which is a big deal and c) risks are a LOT higher so stability is valued.

On c), in India, you have a LONG way to fall. Utter destitution in the USA (i.e., bottom 5%) is roughly comparable to upper middle class status (top 95%) of India, in terms of PPP-adjusted income. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t...
Is there life on Mars? I talked to an employee at NASA, and he said, "Probably not, but I guess its not out of the question". Then I wrote a story about it.
Corel DESIGNER Technical Suite – cost-effective solution
Corel DESIGNER Technical Suite helps in creating and delivering the standardized technical documents which supports all the popular formats. This helps in increasing the workflow and productivity.
The problem wasn't the $6 for Direct TV.

The problem was that it was presented in such a way that it seemed like a hustle. People would rather do without than think they've been taken advantage of.

Just announce the price before passing out the headphones. That's all. Conversion will increase without spending another nickel.
That's going to be rather awkward for California's coastal nuclear plants, which IIRC are about 80 feet above sea level. While I'm generally pro-nuclear, I've always doubted the wisdom of siting plants in earthquake-prone areas. Although the San Andreas fault in southern California is not thought to be capable of generating such a large quake, the Cascadia fault (off the coast of Washington state) probably is.

Plus, the fact that they're operated by PG&E fails to fill me with confidence - the company has a mediocre public safety record, and both plants were beset with construction problems: in Diablo Canyon the seismic supports for one reactor were built backwards, while one of the reactors at the San Onofre plant was also installed backwards. both plants are said to be safe for anything up to a magnitude 7 quake right next to the reactor, but hearings that were due next month to extend operating lifetime have just been postponed pending resolution of the situation in Japan.

The historically unusual size of the quakes at other locations around the 'ring of fire' (Chile, NZ, and now Japan) is naturally worrying to disaster planners in California, and the problems at Fukushima demonstrate the potential severity of a cascading failure. The 50 mile safety radius recommended by USG would include ~7.5 million people if applied to the San Onofre plant, which is midway between Los Angeles and San Diego, and right next to southern California's major freeway. Diablo Canyon is about 60 miles north of LA, albeit in a hilly area that is unlikely to be affected by a tsunami.
thank god -- I wish it worked on my end, but I'm endlessly forced to empty cache in Chrome to avoid broken images, stalled scripts, etc. -- which makes it altogether unusable.
Its like the other phrase I dislike "Rockstar programmers". Now my idea of "rock stars" is that they are temperamental, have low self confidence, and spend 90% of their time complaining. I've met, and occasionally worked with, programmers that fit that particular shoe and frankly I wouldn't try to recruit them.

I am sure the HR/Recruiter is trying to convey a sense of urgency that keeps you at the top of your game, but I agree with most of the comments that companies that create their own urgency by not planning is the more common occurrence.
Not even close! I spend most of my waking time thinking about how to improve and grow. It is the last thing I think about when falling asleep and the first thing I think about when I wake up...and has been for 8 years. I love what I do everyday - but I am far from satisfied. To be honest, I can't imagine ever being "satisfied."

My main point is: Our business does not address a large enough market to create a $100M+ business - but that does not mean it should be called a "lifestyle business."
SecurID Company Suffers a Breach of Data Security
he says it is in reclaimed part of tokyo bay. so wouldn't have skyscrapers ALL around, but should have some in a few of the shots.
Note, I'm the developer of CastRoller.

I was able to submit that episode by getting the RSS feed from the podcast's main page (http://castroller.com/Podcasts/BigIdeas) and submitting that directly.

I don't know if PodCastle is able to pick up the MP3 on the CastRoller episode page.

The episode is on PodCastle here:
http://podcastle.us/e/CMB5V
Whenever I hear someone call someone else's business a "lifestyle business" - I personally get the feeling that it is a direct dig. I am sure some people disagree with me and I am sure not everyone means to belittle someone else's work...but this is how I feel when I hear it/read it.
here is miguel's post on the mobile options: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-14.html

i'm more interested in the cost for each; i think monotouch and monodroid will be $400/seat while the rest are free.

edit: don't forget about the gaming-oriented platforms using c#: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Mar-07.html
Nice, thanks instakill!
Doing this right now, have just submitted for YCS2011 :-)
PasswordSafe 3.25 released
Very inspirational story. May I ask what software was used to make the "Fresh Office" video? Looks polished.
Have you seen a doc? No shame in that.
Do they still provide a job guarantee these days? The Dutch flying school stopped doing that quite a while a go; even the 'prestigious' KLM Flight Academy doesn't guarantee a job anymore; only an interview and grading (last time I checked, which was back in 2006/2007 when I started flightschool).
CNN Sending Eight Times More Staff to Royal Wedding Than to Japan
In such a situation I think all tasks should be globally sorted (according to business-determined weighting) by the metrics:

- how much do we expect to gain if we do it

- how much do we expect to lose if we don't

- how much (black swan worst case) might we lose if we don't

- how easy is it

and then programmers should just pick off the top of list, updating the tasks metrics if they subjectively change.

That way there are multiple tasks queued but only one in play, and context switching happens when a task changes importance.
Microsoft’s IPO, 25 years ago, and what happened after that
Great. I think it also helps that you were at a senior position in Zoho. Apart from the visibility and a large network, it probably makes it a little more convincing for people who are on the fence when it comes to joining such a venture.
I just used uslegal.com , only cost around $400 I think.
A Therapist for Blocked Screenwriters
Also there's a redraw issue with vertical sliders.
Wish I saw this before I spend hours writing and testing a comet server in C# for IIS. I still can't believe Amazon doesn't have this as a webservice yet.

Still, I wonder how their lib interacts with mobile OSs because running comet in the background for these devices can kill the battery life.
That would be fine if I had a server sitting somewhere constantly checking for prices. Currently I just push all the code that would be processed on the server onto the client. I'm not expecting to get millions of users but I'm also not interested in managing my own server. Making the whole process decentralized and getting the application on the phone to manage itself is a much better solution. There is no equivalent way to do that for a web app. No matter what I will need some kind of central location for people to push and pull their alerts from if I make a web app and there are plenty of services like that already.
Using EBS has other features that are hard to overlook, such as snapshots and ability to quickly move your volumes to another instance when an instance failure happens, or if you needed to change the size of an instance (which you couldn't do directly until very recently).
Agreed. The blog post was great. We use tender for our support, and I took a quick look at freshdesk. Having tickets with priority, type, building and group are way overkill for us and one of the reasons we left zendesk. I'd encourage you to carve your niche in the market by having an opinion and sticking to it, not by emulating zendesk's features and slapping a cheaper price tag on it.
Great focus on MVP and a lean team. Designing a usable service for outsourced "enterprisey" software is challenging because your customers (a company's HR dept, in this case?) are not your users (support desk employees and the company's own customers). These three sets of people will all have different feature requirements.
startup idea?
Just the simple iPhoto slideshow on Mac and screenflow for screen capture
Change the Name in the CommentBox in Excel 2007
Does Traffic = Ad revenue?
That's not going to be useful for identifying that obscure song at the bar, is it?

The original post is pretty unspecific. Did the professor claim that creating a general system with a large database is impossible? That it's impossible as a term project? That creating a proof of concept system with 3 GB of music from your personal collection is impossible? That simply identifying a song given a part of it and the source file is impossible?
We've been looking at moving some or all of our stuff to either Amazon EC2/EBS/S3 or Rackspace cloud hosting, and it has been interesting.

Amazon seems more flexible, since you buy block storage (EBS) independent of instances. If you have an application that needs a massive amount of data, but only a little RAM and CPU, you can do it.

Rackspace, on the other hand, ties storage to instances. If you only need the RAM and CPU of the smallest instance (256 MB RAM) but need more than the 10 GB of disk space that provides, you need to go for a bigger instance, and so you'll probably end up with a bigger base price than at Amazon.

On the other hand, the storage at Rackspace is actual RAID storage directly attached to the machine you instance is on, so it is going to totally kick Amazon's butt for performance. Also, at Amazon you pay for I/O (something like $0.10 per million operations).

Looking at our existing main database and its usage, at Amazon we'd be paying more just for the I/O than we now pay for colo and bandwidth for the servers we own (not just the database servers...our whole setup!).

The big lesson we've taken away from our investigation so far as that Amazon is different from Rackspace, and both are different from running your own servers. Each of these three has a different set of capabilities and constraints, and so a solution designed for one will probably not work well if you just try to map it isomorphically to one of the others. You don't migrate to the cloud--you re-architect and rewrite to the cloud.
@lux ...curious...do you have a link to last weeks 'chat room n 15 loc'?
Heh -- you mean to say that shitty HTML coding caused a problem in IE8. Did you even try it in IE9? I get this from crashie8.com (note -- no crash):

---
Internet Explorer has stopped trying to restore this website. It appears that the website continues to have a problem.
RED is a safe bet!
The headline case seems highly unlikely, but there is a fund in London that trades on Twitter sentiment, an idea which sounds like something out of a Bruce Sterling satire. You can always sell shovels to traders and the media, though - hire a few PhDs and a graphic designer and crank out some infographics and popular attention is assured. Emphasize risk and caution regularly and sooner or later events will prove you to be a genius, at which point you can do an IPO.
Look great, nicely done. I wasn't able to find a listing of compatible browsers though, that would be helpful, or maybe a mention to how this is handled in older browser such as IE6.
I guess Larry Page was inclined to create something with web pages the way people like Dennis are inclined to become dentists :-)
Google to enforce SSL encryption on developer APIs
No it does not. The linked article relies on a naive assumption about NLP and is devoid of any content.

To substantiate: entity resolution [1] is a widely studied research area in NLP, and it's fair to say that researchers aren't as naive in their methods as the linked article would suggest.

But even if naive "NLP" methods were being used, it would be silly not to mine the link structure of news articles (or sources) to disambiguate Anne Hathaway and Berkshire Hathaway [2]: there aren't too many news sources that mention both in the same article, and are outweighed by the ones that mention only one or the other (e.g., Us weekly vs. WSJ).

But even if there were some habitual false positives, no researcher or programmer worth their salt would unleash their mining algorithm on the whole web. More likely, you would target low-latency news sources like Bloomberg's financial feed.

So I would say, no -- anne hathaway news almost certainly does not drive berkshire's stock if text mining and NLP are the methods, and shame on the Atlantic.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_resolution#Name_resolution...
[2] (PDF) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.66....
You can't do multi-master with MySQL? News to me - we've been using circular replication between two servers, each a master and slave, for quite some time now.

Not possible with RDS, unfortunately, but works fine on two EC2 instances.
Doctors use Microsoft's Kinect in OR
Really loving some of the things happening in the "podcast" space lately (check http://said.fm/ for another approach). Does make me wonder why it's taken so long for these types of services to come to market though, I've been after decent way to discover interesting content outside of iTunes for years.

But was obviously not motivated enough to do anything about it myself :/
Right. How active do you think he is with his email client? Does that mean he's not working?
I admit to not actually being sure, but I bet Kevin flies the other way every month, so they actually shoot every 2 weeks.