skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Drizzle Hits General Availability
Read patio11's comments here, amd read his blog. It's an example of a simple lifestyle business
Classic hacks
If num is an integer, it returns num + 0.5; otherwise it just returns num. I don't see why this is called 'round' or why it would be particularly useful behavior, so it's probably a bug.
As a cordcutter for the past year+ I've tried a lot of options out there. Unfortunately if Moki.tv is limited to a website for the foreseeable future then it's appeal/reach is going to be extremely limited. A website absolutely sucks to use on your TV.

After trying Boxee, XBMC, etc etc my perfect setup would be the speed of Hulu Desktop with the selection of Hulu + Hulu Plus + Netflix and using Kinect as a navigation device. The Xbox 360 is getting there, but they won't integrate Netflix and Hulu into one app, and the Hulu on Xbox 360 will only have access to Hulu Plus content.

Services like Amazon Video and iTunes where you have to purchase a la carte I have absolutely no interest in.

You guys obviously have a great database and recommendation engine going on. Now get a slick 10-foot interface on top of that and you'll be good.
It's interesting to note that Tesco's CEO was formerly their CTO.
95% of Information Workers Use Self-Purchased Technology for Work
It reminds me of when I was in High School and everyone started listening to Nirvana. The "early adopters" were pissed when that happened...

I think there is a significant difference between being annoying that your 'cool' community of people has gotten too large as opposed to people liking the same 'cool' band you do.

Just take online forums. Large, popular forums are much different than smaller, hidden ones. Though they both have their advantages, these advantages are different and both generally have very different atmospheres. I don't think it's wrong to complain when the things you enjoyed about a smaller community are lost as the community grows larger. Because, honestly, a community growing larger changes things, and definitely not always for the better.
Regarding the chances to build something super-successful:
It's more interesting to hear about startups that fail. Seeing patterns emerging from failure is way more useful than trying to pinpoint what Google and Facebook founders have in common.

The problem I guess is that the failures mostly just fade away. A service where upstarters commit to write about their journey, especially if it goes bad, in exchange for helpful tips would be very useful.
I didn't realize that would yield a different result from clicking on the article from a Google News page (isn't the HTTP referrer Google either way?). In any case, that seems like too much trouble (unless there is an extension to automate it), so an option to hide certain domains from Google News would be very helpful.

Not to mention there are certain news sites (Fox News, for example) which I have no desire to visit regardless of whether they are employing a paywall.
Apple alleged web crippling: "not to be fixed by exec order"
First, the business part of music is easily the worst part. If it has been killed, no real loss there. Most of the good musicians aren't making much money anyway.

Second, it would be more appropriate to say that Jobs saved the music business, by giving consumers an easy way to access and pay for music when Napster/Kazaa/Limewire/Bittorrent were quickly becoming the preferred distribution channel.
just because something is less serious than Chernobyl it does not make it "minor"

But that's creating a seriously false dichotomy: Nobody is saying that this situation is "minor", and I most definitely don't think it is, and did not post this to downplay the situation.

I posted it because Chernobyl comparisons are like the Godwins Law of nuclear power. Things can be very bad without being comparable to Chernobyl.
> All we know is that there are a few dozen people right now, fighting to prevent what could become one of the biggest man-made disasters in history.

But how are they going to save the 26,000 people killed by the failure of the Banqiao Dam without time travel?

I'm kidding, but don't let anyone fool you: Fukushima Dai-ichi is still dangerous, but only to the people nearby. There's a substantial risk of further hydrogen explosions and radiation spikes that are dangerous to the people nearby. They're very unlikely to affect anyone not in Japan. Cleanup will be a pain.

But hearing "OH GOD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!" constantly in the media is pretty grating for anyone who understands the real, immediate concerns in Japan right now. Yes, the reactor needs cool and the workers are very brave. They probably do risk significant radiation exposure. But meanwhile, there are many people who got swept out to sea, people who are trapped behind blocked roads and who need supplies and people injured from the quake in remote areas who need care.

These logistical problems are the real disaster and they're being virtually ignored by anyone outside Japan while all eyes are on the continuing problems at Fukushima Dai-ichi.

One good thing, badly under-reported, is how helpful the US Military's logistical support is. And I don't mean just the stuff at Fukushima. Removing rubble from roads and clearing collapsed buildings is not at all glamorous, but a lot of such things need to be done right now.
not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it and getting it home and realizing that there is one good track and 9 shitty ones.

Yeah, good old days.
Only 10% of Your Friends See Your Facebook Posts
Why the Nitro JavaScript Engine Isn’t Available to Other iOS Apps
i assume that the adman behind this ad was a member of the tautology club:
http://xkcd.com/703/
Radioactive metals are still toxic as heavy metals even when they're not radioactive, though. Uranium, for instance, is just as bad as lead, or worse.
This (i think) would increase implementation difficulty. While the walkthrough on "how to use it" at the front end would be an easier on-boarding process, but the complexity of figuring out what unit "more dropbox" was in most sales wouldn't be as easy as letting the seller define any offer and defaulting to the easily understood/implemented discount offers.

re: ethics, if we look at curebit as a platform that's encouraging more ethical referrals (by focusing on pre-built social network relationships and encouraging retailers to use best practices), we shouldn't expect them to have to limit their growth by forcing early users into unfamiliar patterns in order to be the moral police on anyone wanting to try their platform.
When Estimating Is Dangerous
Veil lifted off of webOS 2.0 SDK
I love the example Reddit has made with the Digg/Reddit war. Mostly in that it was never a war. I remember hearing their response when they found out about digg was something to the affect of "oh interesting" then continued on.
Well, we like meeting new people, we probably would have to charge the roommate less and there are different social obligations for a roommate. (For example a guest that stays for a few days is unlikely to leave a mess in the kitchen). In addition any little annoying habits don't have enough time to become tiresome.

Lastly, we can have the room available for our friends and family when they come and visit (which is the point of having a guest room in the first place). My parent stay there (for free, of course) about 2 nights a month.
The pro-market explanation in the case of University of Phoenix et al is that a lot of people want a degree to have the degree, rather than learn. Maybe they get a bump at work for having a master's.

So the market's working. Hence the term, "paper mills". It's much cheaper to sell people a degree than to teach them stuff.
It went from 'impressive and high tech' to 'dull and uninteresting'
The 10 Most Innovative Companies in Finance
I started a lifestyle business. It did that, and very well. And then I became bored.

If a lifestyle business works for you, then that's what you should strive towards. Some would call me naive or childish, but if you're the type of person who dreams about changing the world, don't sell yourself short. Don't grow up, and don't give up.

Go for it.
Simpli.fi Raises over $2MM
I don't care for microwaves, except for heating up water for tea, which it is great for, but I like breads, and microwaves cook away the water inside the gluten making bread rather rubbery. I do like my Dell Mini 9 netbook, and my XDA-found custom ROM for my Nook Color! :D
SMS verification would be a lot more useful if cell companies didn't insist on charging over $1 million/GB for them (well, unless you sign up for their text messaging plan).

Thankfully, Chase does email as well.

(Verizon: 20¢ ea., so 1GB / ( 160 bytes/ea) * 20¢/ea = $1,342,177.28. Though you can get a plan for 250 for a mere $134,217.73/GB.)

I hope I did the math above wrong.
Every now and then you see a company do something and you go "damn that's smart". Trada was the last one for me. I had the same reaction with Klarna. That type of lending basically makes you a micro credit-card company... "issuing" you credit on a per-purchase basis.

Smart.
(Edited for clarification.)

I never said it was a minor deal. My heart goes out to the families of the two workers missing at Fukushima Dai-ichi as well as to those injured.

But I don't get the panic. I mean a run on Potassium Iodide tablets on the US west coast? Seriously?? I don't know if I should be grateful that they at least found something that could be effective or sad that they expect significant amounts of radiation to get that far.

I need to figure out how to use actuarial tables to I can convert these exposure levels to something like "cigarette equivalent risk" by comparing cancer rates.
How many hours a week do you spend on your consulting gigs, how many on side projects, and how many on your personal lives?

Not trying to pull a GOTCHA, SEE, YOUR NUMBERS DON'T ADD UP, genuinely curious.
If it worked well to self-fund giant companies using the income from small ones, we should see instances of it happening in the wild. There is nothing to prevent that happening now. And yet it doesn't seem to happen. Few if any of the big technology companies grew that way. It seems like if you're good what happens is that your initial lifestyle business just grows bigger. E.g. as has happened to 37signals. But 37signals is not Google or Amazon.
Yesterday, I fired one of my PHP developer. It is his 13th month. His team leader reported me that "He got average skills". Shame on me., Because, I hired him. After 13th month we fired him. Problem is really the hiring people (HR, CEO or anyone else). Now., I am preparing interview questions with twists & logic implementations.
Did Google Work Around The GPL?
I think most people who are opposed to nuclear are hoping governments and industry will seriously pursue more sustainable and non-toxic sources of power, not coal.
This seems right up USV's alley too. Marketplaces and platforms.

If I remember correctly, USV didn't exactly pass, but made a play around the time Sequoia did.
Yep. It took us about 3 years to go from zero to $10k in net-income a month. The good news is that getting to $20k took significantly less time.
Talk about a misleading chart, cumulative rides on the axis. Looking at the slope since last November, it's pretty linear, which would imply no growth at all.
About.me for dating + reward = profit. In all seriousness, I could see this becoming a model that, if done right, could be quite profitable for people looking for something to start.
My concern is actually in a different direction: that people will enjoy the restricting tool too much. In the microwave analogy it would be that people enjoy the convenience of microwaves so much that they abandon reguarly cooked food for packaged microwave-ready food completely.

Not that that happened with microwaves, but it seems like the danger's greater with the iPad.

The iPad is designed for consumption (yes, I know there are instances of people creating awesome stuff with the iPad, but I think it's generally true that its basic purpose is consumption) and the interaction bandwidth is so low that it discourages content production by users, which is what makes the internet so great. It degrades the great promise of all of the new technology we've been creating.
Data about Tsunamis around the world
We, at FindTheBest, are trying to build awesome data applications and an awesome comparison engine. I figured a good way to share the site would be to show an application related to current events. I was also thinking about building a Y-combinator startups database- would anybody be interested in that?
Ask HN: Is Geospatial MultiPolygon Data interesting to anyone?
So about a year ago a friend of mine and I succeeded in accumulating Geospatial MultiPolygon data for states, counties, cities, zipcodes, boroughs, and neighborhoods across the US. After getting the data loaded into a PostGIS enabled Postgres database we both got busy and kind of put our little pet project on the back burner.

We're currently revisiting the project and working on finishing up the API. Yesterday a thought occurred to us that we couldn't answer: Will this data be interesting or useful to anyone other than ourselves?

We would love to get the thoughts of the HN crowd figuring that if the data isn't interesting to anyone here it might not be interesting to anyone :)

You can see the data in action here:

http://geolayr.com

Thanks for the feedback!
The issue with sterilizing bottles isn't to protect the kid from germs as much as it is to make sure that if mom has to pump into a bottle and store the milk for extended periods of time (often frozen eventually) it doesn't spoil. It's not any different than making something like freezer jam and sterilizing the jars. In general, pump parts themselves also can be sterilized this way in a special bag with a bit of water.
Not unless you've sterilized it first. But putting food in an insulated container will only prolong its time in the zone between 40°F and 140°F if the temperature outside the insulated container is outside of that range. For example, if the insulated container is in a refrigerator, in an oven, on top of a cooking fire, or in a blizzard. So taken at face value, your advice is rarely applicable.

However, not all of that zone is equivalent! If your non-sterile food stays at 100°F for a long period of time, its decay rate will be much, much higher than if you keep it at 60°F. So a generalization of your advice is often applicable.
Solar and wind are based on our solar energy budget, which puts caps on what we can extract. Granted, you can do space-based solar, but that's still mostly sci-fi right now (though I sincerely hope we work it out).

I'm not trying to minimize the problems, just to point out that nothing is all that simple, and I absolutely support continued research into all the alternatives, because each energy source has its trade-offs and using the right source in the right place is better than having all of our eggs in one basket.
It didn't say it was simple in the post, it said it took 2 years.
The thing is, getting promoted is a full-time job in its own right. You can't do real work and get promoted, you won't have time, because you will be competing for a very limited number of positions with people who do make getting promoted their full-time jobs.

At my present employer, I have been very explicit: I do not want promotion, I do not want to be management (there is no tech career track). Which has the interesting side-effect of making me basically unmanageable by their rules; there's neither carrot nor stick that can be used on me. So I get left alone to get on with real work. I've never been more productive!
Exactly.

And I think that Erlang is most closest to Kay's definition of OOP. (If we can drop "Everything is object")

Erlang processes are objects.
I don't understand the appeal as opposed to having your own personal domain with a very simple landing page.
Why did someone I've never heard of delete something from a site I've never visited? Who cares?
This is nice and all but the real issue lies with getting all families involved in their child's education. All of the technology in the world will not solve this problem.
"More efficient than an otto-cycle, reciprocating, piston-in-sleeve, internal combusion engine" probably would have put you over the title length limit anyway :)
> Now., I am preparing interview questions with twists & logic implementations.

Of course, I know nothing about the candidate, but...

Something tells me that fixing your hiring is going to require a little bit more than gotchas and hotseat questions.

Why not hire based on body of work?
BitTorrent usage in Japan was only temporarily affected by the earthquake.
Surprisingly we see that the change was rather minor, and that by about 6 hours after the earthquake, people began joining more swarms.

I thought people might find this interesting.
Visa sets the rules PayPal has to work under for credit card payments. Most of these issues are account-wide things, so it doesn't matter that some of the payments you get aren't funded by a credit card. If you look risky, you look risky, and there's the chance some of your future payments will be by credit card, so better shut you down. If you're shut down, some of your payments were paid by credit card, so better to have a single policy that says to hold all the funds for 6 months (the standard period to wait out future chargebacks), rather than split up your balance by payment source, etc.
The fear I have is that it seems like I'm being critical, and I certainly don't intend that. You clearly have thought about this, frankly probably more than I have. We just disagree, and honestly its fairly minor for the most part.

In any case, lets not be these ladies if our kids ever do have a party together:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/223360/saturday-night-live-corn-sy...

Although if we were these ladies, who would be who?
Owner
I have Dabble db running every aspect of my business and I need someone to help us take the leap ASAP
PHP and MySQL are back-end technologies. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are front-end technologies. All sorts of useful apps can be written that don't require a data source.
Hopefully Jasons post can help to answer that:

http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/bootstrapping-with-kids
Grapes.
Do startup weekend events help creating startups?
Skype Estonia GM Sten raises questions and shares his own opinion. What do you think about this?
Well, it'd be "low", "low-to-mid", "mid", "mid-to-high", and "high". So essentially dividing every 2°F, but not really, because the boundaries are fuzzy and quite possibly overlap.

Only slightly less cardinality, a phrase that takes longer to say, and much less precision.
I am surprised couchsurfing.org is nowhere mentioned - it was a working example already 5 years ago.
I'd like an invite. My email is in my profile. Thanks!
Which is the whole point of the meme... destroy nuclear's credibility with FUD comparisons.

Both anti-nuke environmentalist groups and fossil fuel mega-corps can get cozy with this campaign.
the article claims standard car engine efficiency is 0.15, so 3.5*0.15 = 0.45
Organize your life with Evernote
Need Help in converting Dabble db
Our entire business is run by dable db and don't know where to start. www.premierannuityprospects.com
We, at FindTheBest, are trying to build awesome data applications and an awesome comparison engine. I figured a good way to share the site would be to show an application related to current events. I was also thinking about building a Y-combinator startups database- would anybody be interested in that?
Visiting RIM’s offices with my iPad 2
Because it's easy to make good-looking things in Flash. Yes, I know that Flash is bad. But you asked the question and that's the answer.
Very, very interested. Please keep me posted (sent you an email).
This is interesting.

I wonder about simply using generic POSIX headers. I realize this would be utterly complicated (knowing C's idea of "modularity"), but I suspect it could sidestep copyright issues?
Problem set quality is not the issue. If it were, I would donate a week or two of my time and build a problem set generator.

The issue is that you need the same problem sets as the instructor. If the instructor uses Stewart and homework is graded, you get a 0 on HW. This is why you can't even go back 1 edition of the book, and why the legacy publishers print a new edition every 2 years with minimal changes beyond tweaking the problems.

A startup idea I never pursued, but one I think has a lot of merit: build an online problem cross referencer. It provides a) free problems to any instructors who want to use them and b) crossreferences these problems with existing textbooks (that way students who don't want to buy the book don't have to).

I'm pretty sure that Int[ 1/Sqrt[3+5x^2], {x}] can't be copyrighted.
If you build a small business you can build a large business. All the same principles are at stake. However, in theory it's easier to build a small business first time round (baby steps). You can swing for the fences on biz 2.
Almost all VC funding is done through introduction. That's the way this game works. It's one of the reasons so many people apply to YC. As a VC, you spend your days trying to figure out which teams will be successful in the future (even if they've never created a company before) and sometimes all you have is a trusted recommendation to work from. I can't think of a single VC who brags about how few people they know, how small their network is, and how they can't think outside the box to reach the person they don't know who could change the destiny of your company.

What we all agree on is that it is a good thing for more women to be in tech. Here's an influential VC who is ACTIVELY trying to encourage more balance in his applicant pool and he gets attacked. Seriously, what's the endgame here? Discrimination exists. He's one of the good ones trying to make it better. The real discrimination is the stuff you don't see in a blog post.

Not cool attacking someone trying to do the right thing.
"If you genuinely have the spirit of an entrepreneur inside of you, something about No True Scotsman".

This article, as much as any feature on Mark Zuckerberg, is entreporn. Is it possible to build a $10k-per-month web app? Sure. Easier than building the next Facebook (which is a matter of mostly luck, a lottery)? Absolutely. Are most people who try going to fail? Yes. Is it possible to get funding for a lifestyle business? No, that doesn't exist. So you need to do it on your own time, which limits your losses but makes your likelihood of success very low. If nothing is lost but one's time, is trying a lifestyle business possibly a great idea? Of course. But is making it sound easy to make $10k per month entreporn? Yes.

Also, as for lifestyle businesses, there are good and bad scenarios. A good lifestyle business provides reliable income at a decent rate (at least $100/hour) and the ability to control how much money you make and how much time you spend; if you want more money, you work harder. If you want a 3-month vacation, you take it but make less money. That's what you want: the freedom to decide how much you work and how much money you make. This is a great thing to have, and if some idiot hipster thinks it makes you a loser that you didn't cash out for billions, who cares? A bad ("walking dead") lifestyle business is one that just turned out mediocre and ends up had-by-the-balls by one or two clients who become, de facto, very demanding bosses. Companies like this exist: single-client consultancies that haven't gone out yet, but never got enough headway above the mediocrity of client demands to take off and become something.
A run on potassium iodide tablets on the US west coast is just plain silly, but the way to combat that is to discuss exactly how radiation spreads, not to try and argue that Fukushima isn't that bad.
See also: General Assembly, http://generalassemb.ly

Actually...it's only a 5 minute walk from Dogpatch Labs. Cool.