skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking for a technical co-founder (SF/East Bay)
I launched a location-based application recently and need help taking it to the next level. I am looking for a Technical Co-Founder to share the load to make this happen. The service, Crumbs, is a location-based service that enables anyone to place notes in any place (not necessarily a business) in the world, thus leaving reviews, recommendations, experiences for others to see -- think of it as a Yelp/Facebook/Twitter of places. The service launched just a couple of weeks back, but we've had some previous good feedback from our alpha testers via TestFlight.

The app is currently out only for iPhone so it's Objective-C. The backend is done as Tomcat/Java Servlets (my forte) with almost the whole suite of AWS services (EC2, S3, RDS, SES), and Twilio (for invites via SMS). However, I am flexible on the technology for the next version. I'm considering HTML5 (for quick Android release), and could consider other backend technologies (my only requirements are extensive framework support and good scalability).

We made a couple of less-than-ideal product decisions that (I believe) have hindered the service's virality. Now that we have launched and have actual usage (we have solid app analytics in place), we can see this in perspective and that's what I am looking to correct in the next version.

Why I am a good co-founder for you: I am both business and tech. Not to brag, but I could probably go toe-to-toe with any technical guy out there. For Crumbs, I've written ~20K lines of objective-C (non-comments), and ~3K on the backend side. On the business side, I work - hard. I managed a team of part-time EECS students, contractors, got the website, and lined up committed angels (though not yet sufficient for a full angel round). For whatever it's worth, my resume looks good on paper (linkedin.com/in/wongjoh).

What I'm looking for:
- Objective-C and Java EE preferred. Potential for HTML5 and other backend technologies
- Good at hacking and at architecting (and knowing when to do what)
- Strong product and UI design sense
- Experience using social APIs (facebook/twitter)
- Location: San Francisco or East Bay based -- we have office space in SF Financial District (close to Embarcadero station) and in Berkeley (a co-working location)

Also to be clear, I'm not looking for a code monkey. I'm looking for a partner who can co-lead the technical side. Working in the same room is very important to me. You can discuss long-term direction one minute, then, draw a component diagram, and then pull up Xcode/Eclipse and start making it happen.

Why is this a great opportunity?: - I am offering up to 1/3 equity in the company (terms to be discussed) - The product is built, operational - A chance to take a project and help mold it into a success - Proven to obtain funding. Lastly, this is a very large market opportunity.

Interested in talking more?? Contact me at johnny@crumbsapp.com and let's get the dialogue started.

[full disclosure: I copied the format of this post from a previous, very good, HN post also looking for a tech co-founder]
The Google Authenticator Open Source project
Apple's MobileMe Will Relaunch as Free Service Next Month
WebOS is hardly Linux. Does anyone know if they're really going to boot WebOS or are they going to run it as an app under Windows?
Well you can't start a biotech in your garage. I was more passionate about creating SOMETHING than I was tied to any particular field.

With that, I cracked open a few books and started coding.
>>"Today marks a significant transition for The New York Times as we introduce digital subscriptions. It’s an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in The Times, one that will strengthen our ability to provide high-quality journalism to readers around the world and on any platform. The change will primarily affect those who are heavy consumers of the content on our Web site and on mobile applications."
They don't even have spellchecking in their browser because the Word guys feel threatened.

I suspect it may have more to do with the fact that some features are easy to do as addins. There are several spell checkers available for IE. Given that the IE team seems resource constrained, it seems more useful to work on things like perf, compliance, security, than features that are easy to add by 3rd parties. I'm not saying it wouldn't be nice to have, but given that IE9 still has HTML/CSS gaps, I'd much rather they work on those.
Bruce Sterling: What Comes After the Future? [video]
I use the Rackspace cloud for a few Windows servers. The experience has been mostly positive, but they disappear for a few minutes each week, which is kind of troubling.
The lost art of total recall
It's hard to make money selling stuff to cheap people, and it's hard to gain users by chasing people who are ok still using XP, for whatever reason.

It's nice that Firefox is still supporting XP, but I don't think the decision should be based on the % of web users still on XP. It should be based on the % of them likely to be interested in downloading a new browser.
I was having a conversation with an editor I work with about CNN the other day, when the following occurred to me:

I feel like the root of CNN's problem is that they have more or less abandoned the pursuit of "quality" reporting in favor of "popular" stories.

In any publication, there is always this tension between quality and popularity. Consider how much has been going on in the world this past week, in particular with regards to the earthquake in Japan and the uprisings in the Middle East. I've been following those stories closely on the NY Times, which in my opinion has done some excellent reporting on both topics.

Now consider the "most popular articles" on the Times right now:

1. The Times Announces Digital Subscription Plan
2. The Quad: Grant Hill’s Response to Jalen Rose
3. Paul Krugman: The Forgotten Millions
4. Pogue's Posts: ‘Chimping’ and Other Photo-Taking Tips
5. David Brooks: Social Science Palooza II
6. Ex-Racehorses Starve as Charity Fails in Mission to Care for Them
7. William D. Cohan: Degrees of Influence?
8. Timothy Egan: Frankenfish Phobia
9. Letter: A Letter to Our Readers About Digital Subscriptions
10. SAT’s Reality TV Essay Stumps Some

You know, I probably end up reading half the articles that appear on the Times's most popular list, and I enjoy them greatly. But if the Times just gave up on doing "real" reporting and focused instead on these kinds of "popular" topics -- well, I'm sure I'd pretty quickly lose interest in the publication and go find another source of news and interesting tidbits.

Which brings me back to CNN. I just have this feeling that this is what their business team was seduced by. Somebody looked at their numbers and said, "Hey, we don't get nearly as many viewers when we run an in-depth expose on the state of women's education in Afganistan as we do when we broadcast Lindsay Lohan's court proceedings live. So let's just ditch that newsy stuff and focus on what our viewers really want."

This strategy of following what's most popular probably works in the short run. But in the long run, it can be devastating to your brand if it comes at the expense of quality.
EBS-RAID0 is much faster for reads than local. Local is faster for writes.
It is important to understand that California earthquakes are extremely unlikely to generate tsunamis. That is because a tsunami (or tidal wave) is generated by a subduction fault where one plate is sliding over or under the other. When tension is released there is a sudden change in relative altitude on either side of the fault, that if it occurs under water results in lifting up (or dropping) a large mass of water.

California has strike/slip faults, that is faults where two plates are moving past each other. They tend to create large horizontal dislocations along their fault rather than vertical dislocations. This does not result in massive water movement.

That isn't to say that its not possible, at some level all things are possible. But locally generated tidal waves (from a California fault) are even more rare than earthquakes of magnitude 8 or higher.

That being said, two things disaster planners can take away from the Japanese experience are; Storing more spent fuel in the pond than the pond is designed to hold is a huge deal, it should be on the inspection list, there should be mandatory fines if discovered and an immediate shutdown until the situation is corrected, and additional backup power options should be available, with infrastructure immune transport (aka helicopters), within a couple of hours.
Microsoft shuts down giant Rustock spamming network
Seriously, I wish I had this (or even thought of it) two months ago when I tried to get a reservation at the French Laundry. I had a specific date and time in mind (tomorrow for lunch for my birthday ;) ), but being able to see availability without constantly looking up reservations at opentable or calling the restaurant is sweet, even if I ended up getting my reservation by calling up amex's concierge with my business platinum card.
Roger McNamee inscribes Silver Lake in the 'Failure Chronicles'
You lost me when you said you liked the idea of 99designs.
A VC's goal and responsibility is to maximize returns on investment. Imo changing the world etc. is just meaningless PR-speak for most of them. They'd be violating their fiduciary responsibilities if they really believed that changing the world was their primary goal and not maximizing ROI.

Now, it is true that a company (like Google) could maximize ROI and yet change the world by being a large independent company. However, this exception doesn't prove the rule.

My point is that a good VC can't afford to be divorced from reality. In practice, VCs do seem to understand that their primary aim is to maximize ROI (and that this aim is more often achieved through being acquired and not by being a large independent company)

Of course, all of this is opinion, but in the absence of data proving otherwise, I'm going to stick with my opinion :)
The Most Human Human, Discussing the Turing Test on the Daily Show
CNN, NYT, MTV et al will continue to trend tabloid as the number of alternative sources of information grows, bleeding away their "serious" audiences.

While it is sad to see this crap get more concentrated over time, it's not really helpful to stress over it. Is the breadth and depth of content apart from television and outside the mainstream getting better? Probably yes.

Cable TV subscriber counts began declining in 2009.
Why downvote? I feel the comparison is inevitable.
I think you touched on both issues. The $6 after the fact (the fact being I already purchased my ticket) seems like such a petty way to make money. I've been on Continental on longer flights (Houston to Quito) and I've thought to myself "If they raised my ticket by $6, I would be fine, but asking for the money afterwards is so annoying." There's this mental block that I have, and I'm sure others, too, that after I've paid for my flight, that's it, no more charges or fees, I'm done.

As others have mentioned though, when it comes to searching for flights, we as consumers have brought this upon ourselves because more often than not, we don't distinguish based on features, we select based on price, so we have given airlines every incentive to pull these kinds of tricks. Once enough of "us" start buying the 4th, 5th or 6th most expensive fare because we like that airline's pillows/movies/flight attendants, then maybe things will change.
They've said as a skin on Windows. Linux on the desktop is dead. Linux in mobile is where it can shine. The Slashdot crowd needs to just concede the desktop and move on. The desktop is all Windows and Apple.
I certainly wouldn't be surprised if that was the case that they're just going after high bandwidth users and not doing packet inspection (yet). I occasionally swap my iPhone 4 SIM to a Nexus One and use the built-in wifi tethering feature, and haven't heard from AT&T about it. On the other hand I only have used maybe 2GB of tethered data over the last year and in general run up no more than 800MB-1GB of mobile data a month.

There are people on that thread showing they used 10+GB/month, connecting their Xbox 360s to Live via their phones, etc. That certainly seems like a way to get "noticed" by AT&T.

edit: one guy on there pasted his usage from AT&T's account manager - 165 GB!
I agree with you 100%. I just wanted to share my thoughts on the subject. Also, I shared some sensitive data so I am not going to share our URL...hope you understand.
Well, that's really just "-setra" and other file system mounting options, and mdadm (Linux software RAID) configuration options. Yes, there's a little bit of a learning curve and pain to get things set up, but it's not completely out of reach.

Despite being relatively old, I think the advice and approach still holds. Clearly, EBS hasn't improved since then and the need to do this kind of striping over EBS volumes hasn't been obviated yet.
KwateeSDCM 0.9.1 is out
what a beautiful and simple theme...I really like this.
I don't think the issue is cost-based pricing vs arbitrary pricing. It's rather charging for providing additional value vs charging for not imposing artificial limits. The second one makes people feel gyped.
So what's all this nonsense about XP being 10 years old and so customers who bought it not being worthy of a newer browser? Do you know when Microsoft actually stopped selling XP to customers?

Trick question, they haven't. Despite several passed deadlines the latest plan, as of July 2010, is to continue selling downgrade licences to businesses up until two years after Windows 8 ships!
Fair enough. Good luck to you, I hope you attain that 20MM dollar exit goal!
It sounds like you're talking about usefulness, not usability. In HCI/UX circles, the classic catchphrase is "useful, usable, desirable."
That’s been the case for 20 years. There has never been enough quality reporting to fill a 24-hour news channel, and so the time is naturally filled with easy garbage like popular scandals and blathering pundits many with undeclared agendas.
Short hairstyles 2011,Short Hairstyles
If you are looking for a short curly hairstyle for your next haircut, here it is. A cute short curly hair style from Jennifer – Beautiful short bob hair style with soft curls.
Congrats Girish.

Unrelated question: as of now your post is number one on hacker news, would you like to share what does it mean in term of traffic on your blog?
The headline is basically all of the content there is in the article. The rest is just digs at Paul Allen, Microsoft, and a few countries. Shameful.
Jimmy Wong Saves the Internet
Show HN: Student-hacker builds specialized HN Newsfeed for Pulse
FINALLY! Thank you so much! The base jQuery UI stuff is not very good at all.
Brilliant point.
News organisations can really annoy me when they send reporters to the scene of an event just to do the same piece to camera that they could easily have back in the studio, and this is further compounded if they don't speak the languages necessary to do proper reporting.

Also, in a country that's struggling to recover from a disaster, every news organisation sending hundreds of reporters to the region might be a huge drain on resources.
Opentable has a lot of tables for 4 for dinner at TFL, the key is to either get these tables 2 months in advance (the earliest you can get a reservation for a table) or to snag a cancellation in time.
matplotlib has an excellent plotting package and I've been using it in publications.
philosophical aside: a low-cost business model is a legitimate disruptive strategy, which many startups follow with respect to physical businesses: travel agents, newspapers, retail, maybe hotels etc. Lower costs enable unmatchably lower prices. I agree with your practical advice; esp when applied to co-disrupters, who also (should) have low costs.
These e-mails from AT&T are almost always smoke and mirrors. I'm on the same data plan I had in the Cingular days and have received dozens of e-mails and texts warning me that I "may be violating my contract" and that they're going to switch me to the $60/mo plan.

I've yet to be switched away from my $10/mo data plan.
I'm not ruling out malice, but wouldn't you say that naivete would be a fairly unlikely reason for this at a place with a big enough bankroll? I've met some hedge fund types and they may be many things, but they're not idiots.
Well I guess in a fast paced environment you are pushed and in a balanced environment you pace yourself. We are adults not cogs.
Yep, it runs in the background.

`script/delayed_job` can be used to manage the process or `rake jobs:work`. Either will start working off jobs.
Funny, I have just been looking into having something similar created locally. I would have had my personal email and personal phone number on it. The QR code would go to my about.me or flavors.me profile, whichever I decided I liked better. That in turn would have links to projects, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Some may say the QR code is gimicky or pointless, but in my case I was going to have the cards to give out while I networked with the local tech and start-up community. So it fits and it is a small differentiator.

It would be great if when you scanned the QR code, your phone automatically opened the default "new contact" screen with your info filled in.
Seeing Interactive (YC W10) Changes Name To OwnLocal, Launches Deals Network
You can't always make decisions based on dollars and cents, sometimes its about just being good to your users and that is one thing that Microsoft has proved incapable of over the years.

For them its always business ... which is why I hope they eventually lose the browser battle.. They act like people on Windows XP didn't also pay money for their copies of windows ... but all this will do is give people a solid excuse to use other browsers on Windows XP as IE 8 starts to age.

Thanks for letting Chrome and Firefox an unencumbered run at your market share Guys!
Xobni Is Coming To Gmail, Android, And iPhone
Hey, definitely. Please get in touch (if you haven't done already).
According to a friend that just got a new work laptop, Windows XP is still standard issue at IBM. I imagine plenty of other large companies are in the same position.
I'm glad that the jquery UI version has improved. I think taitems was one of the first people to port it to css, so it's good to see they kept going.

Now maybe I can just start using the jquery UI version instead of the version I semi-maintain, as it probably does cross browser compatibility much better (in addition to a greater selection of widgets :)

Edit: looking at the network, this one supports jquery 1.5.1: https://github.com/AugustCo/Aristo-jQuery-UI-Theme
Netflix Confirms ‘House of Cards’
Understanding Uncertainty is Vital to an Entrepreneur
Having been running a 200gb millions of transactions per day Postgres cluster on Amazon's EC2 cloud for two years now, I can attest to the fact that EBS performance and reliability SUCKS. It is our SINGLE biggest problem with EC2.

200gb really isn't all that big of a database. It shouldn't have to be this hard.
"Earthquake terror figures rise
Princess Di is wearing a new dress"
-- "New Dress" / Depeche Mode (1986)
Yup, totally agree with you. I'd say it takes more talent to build something and sell it to real people than to give PowerPoint presentations to rich people and build things that may never make any money. But that's just my take.
The sad thing about the internet is that you can insulate yourself from any opinion that you might disagree with.

For an obvious political example, I know people who only read sites like The Drudge Report or Huffington Post. They self align with those viewpoints, and anyone who disagrees becomes the enemy.

It's a tribalist resurgence, and I don't see a solution to this - there are no even handed debates anymore.

Why is this? Marketing wants hits, so you get link bait headlines, and anything that will get hits even if it lacks merit gets pushed out the door for ad revenue.
You can't win if you don't play.
> there is nothing sadder than someone who has lost their mobile phone and who finds they cannot even phone home or call their parents or partners because they cannot remember a single telephone number

Well, I guess if you don't know a single telephone number you can't do much. But if there is one phone number you should memorize (beyond 911 or equivalent), it is the phone number of the number service that will connect to you where ever you want.

I believe that we are largely beyond the age of recalling anything more than how to get to information we want quickly, and I like it.
I have used the libpam support for a couple boxes. A neat way to use two factor auth on the cheap.
http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/source/browse/...
Z-410: How ZFS is slowly making its way to Mac OS X
Post-Japan earthquake/tsunami, blogs fill niches not addressed anywhere else
told through a specific example, then generalized to broader issues surrounding blogging.
India is not the US. And while that seems snarky I mean that botulism is complex. While honey may be the carrier to infants in the US, honey in India, due to several other factors, may not have the same incidence of spores. That is a recommendation in the US or Argentina, may not apply to India or Africa.

Here's a good paper on infant botulism:
http://www.iss.it/binary/publ/cont/ANN_09_20_Fenicia.pdf

From this you'll see that things are not very black and white. It's understanding a relatively rare condition w/ imperfect data.
To add to your line of reasoning, the wedding is of short duration but there will be thousands of (famous people that your average viewer will recognize) people to interview. The japan incident doesn't have that. It is a much slower event, it is all aftermath and ongoing work on the reactor. While the number of people effected is greater the number of officials, pundits, and famous(to their audience) people to interview on location is much smaller.
Probably.

% gem install rubypython
% wget http://thinkstats.com/Pmf.py
% irb
>> require 'rubypython'
=> true
>> RubyPython.start
=> true
>> sys = RubyPython.import 'sys'
=> <module 'sys' (built-in)>
>> sys.path.append '.'
=> None
>> Pmf = RubyPython.import 'Pmf'
=> <module 'Pmf' from './Pmf.py'>
>> hist = Pmf.MakeHistFromList([1, 2, 2, 3, 5])
=> <Pmf.Hist object at 0x7f6681a4f490>
>> hist.Freq(2)
=> 2
>> hist.Freq(4)
=> 0
>> hist.Values()
=> [1, 2, 3, 5]
>> RubyPython.stop
=> true

The above adapted from part of section 2.4 (http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkstats/html/book003.html#to...).
I love this idea. The design on your site is also really really nice. Good job.

Good luck to you!
but are you happy with your successs?
It also seems that in 2008 adding mirroring also hurt performance. I'm going to dive into this tonight to see if things have changed at all with these benchmarks.

"His results show a single drive maxing out at just under 65MB/s, RAID 0 hitting the ceiling at 110MB/s, RAID 5 maxxing out about 60MB/s, and RAID 10 “F2″ at under 55MB/s."

Summary source: http://www.nevdull.com/2008/08/24/why-raid-10-doesnt-help-on...

Data source (google cache): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Vscz-VX...
Smart move. This is probably the best thing a local paper could do to stay relevant in the broader media scheme right now.
Maybe someone out there is using a bag-of-words model. And failing.
That's it, finding co-founders is SproutRobot's new #1 priority
Google's Startup Challenge (video interview with Peter Norvig)
The Nano Hummingbird: Even James Bond Would Be Jealous