skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Both the EU and US regulations will backfire badly. They both interfere with site optimization and advertising targeting, and both site optimization and advertising targeting impact profits.

Rather than taking the hit to their bottom line, publishers will adjust by making explicit user opt-in mandatory. Since explicit opt-in is nice and unambiguous, the targeting itself can then be a lot more invasive.

I really don't understand the desire to mess with the current system we have today, which works well enough. The small percentage of users who truly care about tracking have simple and effective technical solutions available to them. Publishers turn a blind eye to these unprofitable users, since their numbers are small. Finally, since most ad targeting currently falls in a policy 'grey area', the ad industry self-polices reasonably well.

At least there's going to be some interesting startup opportunities in detecting tracking circumvention and forcing compliance.
The single best advice I can give for scaling Rails, and it is applicable to nearly every other framework: give it more memory. Generally, when you run into a bottleneck in Rails, you're running out of RAM first. You can get a couple of 8GB sticks for around $500; just over-provision your server and worry about the problem later.
Thanks! We can import xls files, but only the values right now -- not the formulae or the macros. Formulae are definitely on the cards, we're not so sure about macros -- compiling VBA to Python is doable but might lead to completely unmaintainable code.

Google Docs is something we definitely need to add.

I love the idea of the side-by-side comparison, we'll have to do that.
Ok, I know I need another coffee, so I apologise in advance for being the Grinch here, but...

This is pure CEO puffery. When will these guys get it? When will they start looking up to Steve Jobs instead of treating him like a guy who just happened to get lucky eight times (Apple II, Macintosh, Pixar, Macintosh again, iPod, iTMS, iPhone, App Store, iPad)?

Steve does not talk about what will ship on every Macintosh next year. He might talk about what will ship in the next sixty days if there is an SDK he is shipping to developers today. Steve does not talk about Apple investing in R&D. Steve invests in R&D.

Talking about the future is the action of a person interested in how he looks and sounds, rather than the actions of a person interested in how the company performs.

Steve ships. Leo had better spend less time with his PR people and more time with his engineers. I have nothing against shipping WebOS on every HP PC next year. But please, Leo, just fucking do it. Talk to your engineers, not to me.
Play along with The 48-hour Startup Bus' Stock Exchange game (ref link)
Sounds a lot like Apple right before they bought NeXT.
Steve Blank argues it's time for Entrepreneurship Schools to replace B-schools
PG said it best: http://www.paulgraham.com/tablets.html
I'm always skeptical of a legal solution to a technical problem, but I wonder how this is to keep me safe from trackers on foreign soil? Wouldn't these companies just move there server a country over? What if our ISP allowed us to block traffic from those who don't comply with the don't track header, would that solve our problem?
http://www.webdesignerforum.co.uk/ is another one.
Can I generate multiple api keys to control customer access?
Wow, I think it's been half a decade since I even thought about the PLA...
Styling Texty Inputs Only
they're worth it when you're doing contract web design work and your margins allow you to scale horizontally and still profit with them.

Also, once you've mastered the slicing process, it gets really boring, so outsourcing it is a nice relief
It's been downhill for Gentoo Linux for some time now, http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22Gentoo+Linux%22
North Korea's Digital Underground
I do like the new look, but I wish that they kept the illusion of reflectivity a little bit. I know the matte look is in right now, but the name of the browser is Chrome. They could easily imply simulate a reflective surface using different matte monochromatic shades of the blue.
tl;dr:
There are two ways this could go, using WebOS as an instant-on OS.
Or some form of framework running within Windows to allow WebOS applications to be run, with notifications being forwarded over Wi-Fi from WebOS devices. Remember the new Enyo framework was actually demonstrated running within Google Chrome.
Either way this could be a boast to the developer eco-system, and reduce the cost per HP PC.
Rotating text by 3 degrees is the new marquee (or blink ?).
To understand loop you just need to know in which order to execute its parts. And you see how it reduces, maps an filters your data. You don't need to keep stack in your head. To understand how functional constructs work you have to know a lot more because they are specialised and it's not that easy to track what they exactly do because of recursion. You have to know them and trust them. With loop all internal logic is linear and in plain sight.
A mistake that first time entrepreneurs often make is to try and identify their startup by researching gaps in various hot markets, or they try to identify something that sucks and improve it. These are both good starting points on their own, however there needs to be an additional qualifier: Is the founder passionate about the problem and the larger market area they're entering in? Are they excited to work within this market for the next 5+ years and are they naturally going to spend all their free time thinking about the problem?

I know that I've made the mistake multiple times before of stumbling upon a good idea, getting started on it, only to have it turn into more of a side project than a business. Passion around the market and problem area is something that I wouldn't participate in a business without going forward.
Choosing indexes is a world of compromise ; Indexes slow down operations that involve writing. When you have an index that is rarely or never used you'll slow down writing operations on the table for nothing. So you'll have to carefully chose indexes and there's no way any framework could do this for you ... It completely depends of your application and your indexes can change over time.
It wasn't a permanent cure after all.. Problem is back.
Fair point. But that's the way it's supposed to be. I guess my comment might seem humorously ignorant given the current Android situation, but it'd be tough to argue that it's not directly in Google's interest to get all that fixed up.

On the other hand, it's not in Microsoft's interest to make software updates easy or viruses to go away. They're side problems that other companies deal with. HP's webOS should be more like Android than Windows, at least in the user experience philosophy.
First thing: Don't assume that this means they're going to replace Windows! :-)

Besides the guts of the OS which talks to the hardware (a very slick Linux build) on webOS phones, the platform is basically just HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It has always been easy to run and debug applications in Chromium.

You can download the SDK today and run an x86 build of webOS in VirtualBox. If you haven't played with webOS before, I urge you to try it.

Web developers who care about mobile will go absolutely bananas for it, and their new framework 'Enyo' is an even better experience for developers.

Here's a blog post about webOS I wrote quite a while back:
http://bethesignal.org/blog/2010/06/07/why-im-excited-about-...
If the burn rate is low, why so many rounds of funding? What do you plan to do with the funding to make the company profitable?
I meant top affiliate offers, generally stuff like popular weight loss products (acai and green tea were two big ones 1+ years ago), electronic cigarettes, forex, etc.

go to a site like http://www.offervault.com/ and you can see the details on a lot of the popular offers out there.

Don't fall into the affiliate rabbit hole if you have your mind on other projects though, 99.9% of guys in the affiliate world are broke young bullshitters
Foursquare’s Extra Special: A Revamped, Fully Automated Merchant Platform
A shame that HP are coupling webOS with HP PCs, instead of putting webOS on the Web, where it might better thrive and spread.

With webOS on the Web, Pre3 and TouchPad owners could log in at webos.me (or similar) from any WebKit browser and see their apps and data pre-synced; isn't that a better vision for a company that 'believes the Web is the future'?

HP's new Enyo SDK already allows developers to build apps for WebKit-based browsers that resize for desktop, tablet, and mobile screens[1]; it is a joy to use and targeting multiple screen sizes works great, so it feels like a missed opportunity that webOS developers will spend their time building apps in a WebKit browser, but be unable to publish them for others to use in a WebKit browser too.

If they're trying to attract developers -- the Web offers a much larger userbase than HP machines ever will. I think it worth sacrificing desktop and laptop sales to build mobile sales and create a healthy future for webOS.

[1]: http://www.precentral.net/hp-posts-enyo-development-walkthro...
Backbone.js beginners tutorial and underscore.js micro templating
While other companies could try to leapfrog Apple in the race to the "mature" tablet, they face a company that has been wizened by failure. The big difference between Apple today and the Apple that lost to Microsoft in the personal computer market over two decades ago is that Apple allows other companies to create software--now called applications--for its device.

I can't make sense of this statement. Apple certainly had third-party developers on Mac OS (Classic) since the beginning. Makes the rest of the article somewhat suspect.

If not, then it is up to a competitor with enough foresight and financial wherewithal to leapfrog the iPad 2 and re-conceptualize the tablet as a productivity tool instead of as an entertainment tool.

The iPad has the most serious and capable productivity tools ever seen on a non-stylus tablet to date: Pages, Keynote and Numbers. What are they talking about?
I absolutely admire the work by your team. Startup has those energy which I am hungry for , but I am stuck in enterprise world with lots ...., just watching in sheer amazement.
I run a company called CrowdFlower that provides quality control on top of Mechanical Turk and other pools of workers from traditional outsourcing companies to offerwalls (where people earn in game credits for doing our tasks).

I think this article doesn't reflect everyone's experience with Mechanical Turk. We get lots of high quality work out of Mechanical Turk and lots of other companies do as well. It does take a fair amount of work to get the quality right - that's how we got started as a business and that's why many people still come to us.

As an aside, if the author of the article is reading this thread and wants data, we would be happy to talk about it.
And would things be different if they had called it PrivateVoid http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/help-name-our-websi...
That's excellent feedback, many thanks. I think that you're right that the average user won't get any benefits from Dirigible -- it only really helps power users, so it sounds like we need to be crystal-clear on that, and then make it clear how it can benefit those power users:

- maintainability (which is the real advantage of the whole objects-in-the-grid thing)

- calculation speed (through parallelism and big-iron servers on the backend)

- potentially, larger spreadsheets (we'll need to work to implement that but in theory we should be able to support vast datasets)

Would that improve the pitch, do you think?
4) The logo is a dirigible with some stylized pixelation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirigible
This post struck me as being more of an advertisement than anything else. Does anyone have any less subjective opinions on these types of market places?
Even if you are from a 3rd world, if you can afford a smartphone worth several hundred dollars wouldn't you be able to afford a 99c app?
There needs to be a name for this phenomenon: a phrase being rendered un-Googleable due to overloading by a more dominant homograph.

I'm sure there is one in German...
I was responding to Zed complaining about automatic build systems knowing where to pull their sources/builds from.
That’s the first thing I found after googling for Kno besides their website: http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110221/exclusive-kno-student-ta...
I loved this article on the Mc10:35.

http://www.geekologie.com/2010/03/secret_mcdonalds_menu_item...
$5,000 Challenge: Visualizing the US Federal Budget
I agree to the gist - there is incomparably better selection on iOS.

I recently switched to Android and really can't wait for decent games to come to the Market. By decent I mean stuff like Broken Sword, or any of the other ports of A-quality old games. The new ones from premium publishers seem to be too much oriented to 3D, polish and no playablity :(

I think it's before long, provided the market position Android has in the US. The start was slow, but once the paid model is proven on Android, we'll get it all :)
This is why the Xoom is so intriguing. Motorola and Google are two companies that have proven their ability to see around the corner and they have made it much easier for developers to get applications to market than Apple has with the iPad.

Really, Motorola has proven their ability to see around the corner? What have they been successful with since the Razr? Seems like the Droid is a success much more due to the Android OS than anything related to Motorola's manufacturing of it.

Also not sure why anyone would lump Motorola in with Google as having "made it much easier for developers to get applications to market".

Besides, the innovative features that the author mentions the Kno having, like split-screen functionality or things for note-taking - who's to say future versions of iOS couldn't incorporate those? This doesn't need to be a winner take all, one-shot market.
As a form factor the future may look more like the Kindle than the iPad, Xoom, etc. The killer application for tablet size devices remains the reader and once their economics approaches that of pocket calculators (or MP3 players or digital cameras or other bulk produced electronics), the hardware cost will be competitive with paper in three ring binders.

The tablets based on the iPad model are akin to graphing calculators - there is sophisticated functionality added, but it doesn't really offer improved performance on the tasks for which most people require.
Note that the Turing Award != Turing Test, which was my initial (excited) thought.
> Steve does not talk about what will ship on every Macintosh next year.

Nah, he just talks about where he thinks the entire industry is heading and post-what era we are entering at the moment.

Come on.
Good thing. I'm from Uruguay too :) and I miss the time we were able to visit the US without a visa.

There's also the time when the Pan-American games teams were stuck because the US implemented the visa just at the time they were leaving.

The fact that we can't even transit is very annoying - Miami used to be a big hub for the Caribbean, and flights to Canada are more convenient through the US (I've got family in Canada, and I took the Air Canada Buenos Aires - Toronto flight even though it's more expensive than going through the US, because of the transit visa).

I've never visited the US for that reason (I stood a few miles from the border in Niagara, but it made no sense to go through all that hassle and expenditure for just a day's visit)
You deserve an apology, but let's be realistic here. The internet has developed a sort of culture that thrives on the jeering and jest of others. Going around pointing out how every individual on the internet has wronged you will only get you labeled as something far worse than having potentially poor financial management practices. Americans (likely a majority on sites like HN) get their fair share when we have high profile characters like G.W.Bush and (more recently) Charlie Sheen floating around the nets.

My advice to you (especially if you're an entrepreneur) is to persevere the stereotypes and prove them wrong. Let's get over it and move along. beer
"The future of the tablet" isn't bolting a second screen on it to mimic a physical methaphor - aka the book. As PG said, flexibility is key, not replicating existing technology with digital artifacts. Now, the Kno does some interesting things in software, but shackling that to two 14" displays sounds like a recipe for failure. (And it would barely make it through a day of class on that battery).
>On the other hand, it's not in Microsoft's interest to make software updates easy or viruses to go away.

Huh, why not? How easier updates should get? If set to automatic, they're almost done Chrome style (except for the reboots GRR).
And what about MSE?

>HP's webOS should be more like Android than Windows

With Windows, it gets updated instantly whichever OEM built your PC. With Android. it can take upto a year after getting released, or never come out at all.
This looks very interesting. Have you looked at Hypernumbers? They are building something similar. YC-funded Skysheet was also working on a web-based spreadsheet but they seem to be still in private beta mode.
Suspends and hibernates do not count as the power going out. If they act like you've simply yanked the plug, something is wrong with the kernel somewhere.
You can really make that type do a compile-time check on runtime values?

It would be better to have some way of getting the compiler to optimize constraints, perhaps by proving at compile time that the error is impossible.
It is more like the graphic designers are hooked on inspirational social networks like
http://ffffound.com
http://dribbble.com/
http://emberapp.com/
VIDEO: How to #followup at #SXSW
There isn't any need to thank me. I actually like doing this.

Yes, but the thing is that why can't I just run this locally without having to worry about network lag?

If you target quants then most of the serious ones already have their own setup to crunch numbers. So, why should they use something like that? Or why shouldn't they just write a python script on EC2? And download a raw text file or something instead?

I think that the core of your product is wonderful and it has many, many uses, but I'm afraid that as a market the entire spreadsheet business isn't the best one to be in. I might be wrong as I hardly have any experience other than reading stuff, but the thing is that it seems to me no one will have the, um, otaku in this field to make your product a success (as Seth Godin would say).

I just hope that I'm wrong.
Sleep is more important than food
That a Harvard professor was able to convince an observer he was, in fact, human?
This was actually his friend's comment on Reddit.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ciiag/so_if_my_de...
We did similar things on our server (though with much much less traffic but all dynamic content + API).

We moved from passenger to nginx+unicorn and the performance increase was awesome + it uses less ram (which again means more ram for more app servers!). Our box was a old quad core with 4gb ram so it got a bit tight with everything on one machine. The DB blocking problem could easily be solved with a cheap VPS as a slave DB, then you can do backups off that. :-) Depending on your kind of website, caching with varnish is great, we also made great use of memcached for fragments and other little things. And since our main cpu consuming background task just did one thing in the end it was rewritten in C which also helped a lot. Offloading all files to Amazon S3 is also a very good way of reducing load if you have a lot of them.
--1.9 mode works really well under JRuby now - that was a big push within 1.6 and they've made a lot of progress. I'd call it "almost there".

Rubinius is a little bit further behind, but I've been able to run our Goliath stack on it, and that exercises quiet a few syntactic changes. So, I think both are close.
Am I the only one that is seeing a severely mangled page here? Must be a strange bug.

http://i.imgur.com/qROl4.png

I'm running the latest Firefox 3 (with NoScript). And before you blame NoScript, here it is with JS and friends enabled: http://i.imgur.com/JzPGP.png

Edit: Never mind, it was NoScript blocking a couple of the countless embedded scripts. I think the culprit was addthis.com/sharethis.com.
Based in Africa, i use the payoneer credit card (issued to me by avangate).. however, avangate handles refunds..
MIT Media Lab's new logo has 40,000 permutations
Check out http://www.qbn.com/ and http://www.behance.net/.
Absolutely! Really great group of people running BarCamp Philly. We talked to Alex and the tour will definitely be stopping in Philly - gotta check out these killer after parties.
The great thing about webOS is that it's all HTML5 and CSS based, even the apps. For their mobile devices they choose to run a Linux kernel on the hardware but in principle it doesn't matter what the kernel is, as long as they have some way to show the apps.
* 'Spreadsheet' is a really bad summary of the product. My first impression was 'Great another Office wannabe, NEW with Python', but when I watched the video, I saw it as "effortless desktop supercomputing" .. cool !

* Another message that could be given is "wrangling big data the easy way"

* Focus the product on the niches you have already identified, all the big boys with the hard numbers to crunch. Do not dilute for the Mom and Pop segment.
I doubt this, only because the markets are different

- Phones are considered a "necessary" item whereas tablets are a more optional purchase, especially if you already have a laptop or similar.

- People also are used to upgrading their phones at end of contract, and getting whatever the "new thing" is. Often, on non AT&T, this meant whatever Android phone you could get.

- Phones are subsidized by the phone companies (at least in the US), thus hiding the true hardware cost.

- Tablets parts are in shorter supply, and more costly except for in volume, and nobody but Apple is shipping tablets in volume.

Because of the above, current Android tablets are screwed. Future Android tablets might do better once the manufacturing volume for tablet sized parts is established and prices get driven down.
This is a stupid idea, imho. If you want Windows as the OS, get a PC with Windows. If you want WebOs, get a PC with WebOs. But getting one with both, is just an annoying thing and most users won't really care.

I'm not buying a powerful machine with GBs of RAM and a dual-core processor, to just run that WebOs thing. It works well with a tablet, but a PC is a computer and not a tablet.

It'll be a good idea, though, to install WebOs on Free DOS machines.
Use the StackExchange API, hack together a site aggregating questions from all StackExchange sites by tags, ???, make the world a better place.
That's very, very clear. Ironic given your first post.
Sorry, but that's terrible advice, especially for bootstrapped businesses. Throwing resources at a problem will only scale as large as your wallet is. It's both wasteful and lazy.
or http://www.google.com/search?q=recursion
Tampa is soo on the list!
Also... it seems to me that using 2 screens just to overcome the current modal nature of tablet applications (that have been upscaled from smaller devices where modal makes more sense) isn't the way to solve the multi-tasking problem (reading and writing at the same time).

An iPad is still good for that, the screen real estate is enough to do the job... once the slate computer gets beyond a certain size the modality is what needs addressing.

Perhaps move to a, erm... windows approach or more likely... a tiling app manager so that 2 apps run side-by-side on the existing single tablet.

Seems weird to overcome a current (and probably temporary) software constraint with a hardware approach.
Even More EC2 Goodies in the AWS Management Console
Market interest fades, passion never dies.