skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also the industries aren't comparable directly on revenue numbers. Walmart had net sales of $340 million but the net income after tax was $11 million. That's a very low margin business compared to software, where a typical result might be $55 million in revenue to make $11 million.

http://walmartstores.com/Media/Investors/1976AR.pdf
"No Word for Looting"?
Have less funding than your competitors? Good
I am wondering if this is another case where vulnerabilities in Adobe products were used to strategically infiltrate an organization. Here's hoping for more information soon.

Edit: I referenced Adobe specifically because of their recent security announcements. HN Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2328928

Edit 2: "Another case" in the post implies there are multiple cases. I was thinking specifically of the prominent Google/China hack in which attackers first got access inside the networks of google and "more than 30 companies" based on vulnerabilities in Acrobat Reader.
Source: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/google-hack-attack/
An Explanation of What Might be Going on With Japan's Reactors
It doesn't look like he used 1.0 in the video. Did I miss something?
The security doesn't exist just to stop jailbreakers. It's to stop worms, rootkits, etc.
That is not the argument that Gruber is making. That is his factual summary of the current situation.

The argument that is being made is that Apple currently considers it a security risk to enable the new Nitro Javascript engine for all applications, preferring instead to enable it only for Safari Mobile, and leave other applications using the older javascript engine.

Possibly forever, destroying web apps on the iPhone completely, or possibly just until Apple is able to sort out the security implications of having to mark in memory pages as executable.

You get to chose which scenario you think is most plausible.
I read the post as implying that all entrepreneurs are chasing mega hits whereas some may prefer, or be better suited towards, lifestyle businesses.

" ... to the advantage of almost every player in our industry that we “believe” in chasing the next big thing. They need us to keep chasing it. In the truest sense – the next big thing – is a carrot on a stick that keeps us occupied and keeps them in business."

Whereas in my experience, lots (loads!) of entrepreneurs are chasing lifestyle companies. You just don't see them as much because they need far less from the ecosystem. I can think of tons of ~$10k/mo companies building iPhone apps, wordpress plugins, b2b web apps, etc etc.
Correct.

Take border-radius for instance. It is 'fluff'. It makes no functional difference to the page whether it is there or not.

Now, for Moz and Webkit, I get nice looking rounded corners for negligible effort. In order to duplicate that look on IE there are any number of ways to do it, but all of them involve enormously much more effort, and are much more fragile (anything where you need pixel perfect positioning is fragile and easily broken by different browser versions).

Additionally, the longer WE support IE's blatant disregard of standards, the less incentive they have to adhere to those standards.
When I started working on the Rdio API I struggled to work out how to effectively expose our API through a more classically REST model, but ultimately there was too much functionality that would be significantly more ugly when forced into a document-oriented REST model than exposed through an RPC model.

Hi Ian, if it's not too much trouble could you give an example of functionality that didn't work well with REST?
My favorite question/answer so far:

Question:
this search engine sucks

Answer:
Agreed. It dοes less, nοt mοre, than the οld οne.

Edited to add I like the concept, I was just playing around with searches. Not trying to be negative.
Second video is worth it for the look of contempt on Sterling's face when he compares old-school hackers to new-school (start at 1:00 and watch through to 1:18).
Free software is a third perspective which uses other forms of capital than Amazon does. It's not as fast as a targeted, talented, VC-backed firm, but it does get there; so I'm inclined to interpret the "omg-no-internet" sentiment as hyperbole, even without mentioning public funding sources like academia.
Edit: yay! you changed your post while I wrote mine.
Vancouver data visualization meetup
Three universal start-up truths
What really disturbs me is not the nitro JS performance part but this (from the register article):

What's more, such "home screen web apps"
can't use various web caching systems,
including the HTML5 Application Cache,
which means they can't be cached to
run offline.

I can live with my app being a little slower; after all, I don't really even contemplate writing performance sensitive apps as off line web apps anyway. I can NOT live with my apps not working, being unreliable, or taking ages to load because the user went through a tunnel or tried to use it on a plane.

Not only is this a much worse consequence and far more damaging than slower javascript, it's not addressed by any of the arguments I have heard about security. How does anybody explain this as a consequence of marking memory pages non-executable?

I will be very interested to see whether Apple fixes this and how quickly they do it. If they fix it urgently then I will recall the cynic hound-dogs within me. But if they let this lag for months then it seems pretty clear to me that they are just cynically closing down any attempt to route around the app store, if only by ensuring nobody will try to do so due to the chilling effect of knowing such apps could be broken for months at a time.
I'll do it for $40.
If you are interested in music related APIs, my company (http://www.audiogalaxy.com) has a draft API that lets you browse and play your music collection remotely. We support mp3, aac, flac, wma, vorbis, and get your playlists out of iTunes.

We haven't publicized the API quite yet, but we would love get feedback from anybody who might be interested in it. Send me an email if you are: twk@audiogalaxy.com
The simplest method of creating SOAP-services is use of SQLServer SOAP Endpoint.

Just one line for SOAP from stored procedure or function.

Is it beautiful? I don't think so. SOAP remains SOAP, ugly remains ugly.
I'd imagine putting an always up-to-date links box on your personal site/blog would be the main use.
Get started with your own business
Go figure. A new class of Internet start-ups is trying to turn data into money
In practical implementations we call this code write-only.

It's funny that you bring up mathematical notation because mathematical notation is completely optimized for write-only. Mathematics is so obsessed with one letter variable names that they had to gather letters from other alphabets to continue their opaque tradition.
I definitely agree! the industry is stagnant and ready to be disrupted.
So he's twitterizing Digg? I guess it could work.
Apple's Component Deals Should Help It Weather Japan Crisis
Don't forget that you don't have to cash out of a successful business to move on to other things. You can install managers to grow a business once you figured it out and become an owner rather than a doer.
It's sad that Apple has a disincentive against improving web-based dev tools. On my own project, I keep bumping up against unnecessary limitations on touch and focus events for form fields.

For what it's worth, local caching should still work fine, either in Safari or UIWebView, so long as it doesn't involve natively executed ARM code.
I guess I am skeptical that a "star" rating could ever be meaningful for Github projects. Frankly, the whole thing seems like a bust regardless if you have a thousand reviews; what kind of meaningful information could you get from a thousand reviews all talking about different versions, different use cases, different kinds of "quality"?

However, for the majority of long tail projects that might have a couple pages worth of reviews, it would be useful feedback, and the project owner could address each review individually with ease.
Note also that the Prius engine employs the Atkinson cycle rather than the Otto.
"You have been mislead by a vocal minority and are using msie, which is clearly an inferior web browser to IE6. Please switch to IE6 and sign our petition."
IPhone 5 Might Have NFC Chip After All
Why startups don't go public anymore
You hear these examples a lot. But I think if you look closer you see that these are examples stories being more complicated than their stripped down versions, not counterexamples. The stripped down version still holds to the pattern.

The "real" beginning of Starbucks was an entrepreneur buying Starbucks and merging it with another couple of coffee shops then expanding immediately at serious pace. It went public 5 years after the purchase.

Mcdonalds is a similar story. Bought and expanded.

It's hard to measure the exact beginning of these businesses, they weren't founded with the intention of raising capital and going big. They did however join that trajectory at some point. The interesting thing is that they joined it very close to the launch point - these weren't small companies that slowly became medium then big, these were tiny companies that stayed small for decades, then they became giants very quickly, almost instantly.

edit: BTW, it is definitely possible of finding companies that grew slowly over decades. But in those cases you probably won't find that they were small businesses for a long time. They spent roughly equal amounts of time as 5 person companies, 10, 100, 1,000 - so you don't here so much about their heritage as a small business. They might have only spent a few years that way.
I upvoted you because I didn't think your comment deserved a subzero karma.

But the snark was unnecessary.
Off the top of my head a couple of things that didn't map well were:

* search

* deleting songs from a playlist (safely)

* multidimentional stats queries (eg: http://developer.rdio.com/docs/read/rest/Methods#getHeavyRot...)

Perhaps we could have modelled these in a REST-like manner, but it seemed simpler to make the functionality available through an RPC protocol - simpler for us to implement and simpler for developers to integrate into their software.
I can't tell for sure (Wikipedia has no info, and http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Microsoft-C... only talks about their IPO), but it certainly looks like MSFT was bootstrapped when they nailed their big licensing deals. They then IPO'd after 9 years incorporated to get some more cash on hand, presumably.
Military Developing False Online Personalities to Counter "Enemy Propaganda"
The "home screen bookmark" app is based on MobileSafari, but clearly isn't the same code base. I understand that your company would benefit from improved offline app performance, but it's likely that developer time and patience will fix the problem.
I'm sorry but you can't just throw a name out there like that! They didn't say anything at all that could possibly implicate Adobe. Are you just speculating idly or where did you come up with Adobe?
> but a webapp launched from the home screen is completely controlled by Apple's apps just like if you launched it from Safari

Not quite. In essence, a native app using UIWebView is created on the fly, and past that point it acts just like a standalone app. Only real-deal Safari gets the exception.
The OP said "local caching" not speed.

I'm surprised the local caching hasn't gotten the media spotlight as that's been broken since 4.2.1. and is more important for web apps aiming to replace native apps.
Verbally
Mobile apps that assist the disabled is an interesting trend right now & has been featured by Apple in it's marketing/announcements.

A new app launched last week in this space & offers an amazing feature set & great design for free.

Verbally is the first free iPad app to provide a complete assistive speech solution for creative communication. Verbally is a top-rated Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) iPad app and it's totally free.
Verbally enables creative communication, self-expression, and conversation.

Thank you!
-Ajay
I want to believe this story, but the reality is that the big companies have economies of scale that are very difficult to compete with and they often win.
Are you comparing IE 9 to Firefox 4.0, or Firefox 3.6?
The explanation does actually derive from a security concern. Apps are sandboxed on the file system, so they can't access the cache. If apps were given access to the shared cache, they could pollute it.

Of course there are plenty of ways that Apple could address this problem, just as there are plenty of ways that Apple could address the non-executable pages problem.
Here's how you do it. 1) Stop reading Hacker News. 2) Pay attention to problems people have. 3) Build a solution and charge money for it. 4) Spend 2 years marketing it (i.e., talking to your market and learning) and making it better.

It worked alright for me and my business partners and we spent the first year working part time on it.
As the question is posed, it's not clear to me if the feature is in a product that customers are using, or if this is a feature that just didn't work out and never was in a distributed product.

The two are quite different. Killing a feature customers are actually using can create problems. But in some cases not killing it enforces the wrong architecture on the program.
Poll: How many domains do you own?
I've been working on a few different ideas and keep jumping around between them, and after looking today somehow I've managed to become the owner of over 20. What about the rest of you?
21-50
51+
U.S. Military Launches Spy Operation Using Fake Online Identities
I like this idea. Software changes over time, so I always have to double-check the date when reading other people's reviews. Especially if the software is developed at a very fast rate, such as Redis.

Another option would be to provide a history of average star ratings, similar to the 52-week activity graph. Then people would be able to see, for example, that most reviews have turned positive since the v2.5 release, etc. Tie reviews to versions and/or commits, and allow people to post another review after X weeks, so that the same person can post different reviews of different versions of the same program.
It sounds to me like he's referencing the Google China attacks, but I agree that there's nothing in this post that implicates anyone.
Free NewYorkTimes
Don't open source operating systems have the same problem? It's legally and technically possible to fix or improve the system, but you may not have the skill or time. You also have to convince the maintainers to accept your patch and wait for your users to upgrade.

No matter what system you write for, you have to work with what you've got. All open source lets you do is fork it and distribute your own version of the OS.
Does it really matter in the end? It's not the idea, it's how it's executed right?
Alexander Graham Bell Defends His Butler
I'm really not getting what makes these special, compared to any other type of hut thrown together with available materials.
Two quick updates I'm going to put in the blog post: Know that the server times are in UTC, so your cron schedule needs to be in UTC. Also you need the RAILS_ENV to be set to production in the scheduler as well as the worker.
It is a bit of a slur, but if _I_ had to attack an organization, I'd do it with PDF and Flash. If I were the CIA, then I'd pay for it. What's the market price for an Acrobat zero-day? A hundred thousand dollars?
Well, he's making multiple arguments, and that first one was an argument. My position is that it is a ridiculous one.

I am also not entering the discussion of native apps running UIWebView. I have zero comment on that (mainly because I'm disinterested in the subject).

My only comment is on home-screen web apps, which are 100% equivalent to opening the page on your browser. They deserve more privileges because the user had to make a decision to install them. It makes no sense to me whatsoever that a random advertisement loaded from some insecure URL on a web page is allowed to access Nitro and web cache, but a web app that I trust enough to install on my home screen is not.

Ironically, I'm actually pretty happy with this decision, because I believe all apps should be in the browser. I'm just telling it like it is when people make nonsensical arguments.
Fsync or Swim Part 1: Error Handling
Opera 10.11 on Windows 7 x64.
Report Finds Wide Abuses by Police in New Orleans
Perhaps during the good times build a habit around grokking and/or math. Set an antecedent activity that is always followed by grokking. And a location in which grokking is done. Then when you're having trouble do that antecedent in that location with the paradoxical thought that you are not required to grok or calculate. But allow yourself to.
it's a wix site - simple, online sites using flash. The guy is smart - he's using a simple tool that gets the job done, not spending his time writing a custom CMS.

That's a skill that I need to get better at: pick the tool that gets the job done _and_ takes the least amount of time. Then go do other things.
Disable IE XSS filter with a http header
Waiting ages for your computer to boot? What are you - living in the 90s? There's this thing called sleep mode, and that's how the iPad works as well. Upgrade to a real OS, and then maybe your article won't sound like retarded drivel.
I should probably double-check this with a Japanese first, but I think the words 「強盗」 and 「略奪」 don't mean "looting" in the sense of people snatching whatever they can from stores after a disaster. My (possibly incorrect) understanding is that 「強盗」　is forcible robbery, and 「略奪」 is the kind of looting an army or band of pirates would pull off during a raid.

Of course, words take on different (and sometimes surprising) meanings in different contexts, and I'm not a native speaker.
Heartland Institute's Lehr on Japan's Nuclear Plant - Video - Bloomberg
Q: "And are you saying that networked soceity people and democracy are incompatible?"

A: "Uh, yeah, I don't think they're inherently incompatible but certainly republican democracy with its set of geographical settings, and you know... the power coming from geographical regions and networks, don't work.

The great lesson of wikileaks is that global internet networked soceity, and the international order which is mostly run through diplomacy and kind of... people representing states talking to other states, those do not mesh at all well."
This is a design issue that is basically unsolvable unless Apple fully rethinks the iOS security model. In the current model, you can't give a library separate permissions than the process in which it was loaded - that's the gist of it. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Security as Gruber is spinning it to be - not directly at the least. As with Flash the real reason seems to be bypassing control.

I suspect RIM's security model allows them to do package / API specific permissions and prevent the app from doing things such as mmap(... PROT_EXEC) - anyone familiar with BB Security/Permissions model - care to comment?
That's a sweet idea, but there's a tipping point where the value of being the Nth+1 person on the service doesn't increase your chances of being noticed.

Now, make it a consulting service where people pay you $1000 $5,000 for website / online-marketing / PR services to help land a date? Add in scarcity? That's a cool idea.
I messed around for a while on http://hackety-hack.com/ and now I'm playing with Ruby Koans also.

EDIT: Forgot that I first started with http://tryruby.org/
Show HN: abouthem.com - amalgamates public info about people, bands & teams
A Tale of Two Googles: Race, Labor, and Hierarchy in the Digital Age
Well claiming complete non-awareness of the popular competitor just seems a little odd. It would be kind of like Mozilla saying they weren't aware of IE - sure execution is all that matters, but it's curious why you'd say that.
Woz didn't know it was impossible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyKlNjwR03M#t=7m45s
The Times already cashed out of much of their stake in the headquarters building: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123660214438270341.html

And many newspapers still turn a reasonable profit, it's just that the major metros can't earn enough to pay off all the debts left over from the major consolidations at the start of the decade. One reference to that effect: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-aaron/consolidation-is-n...
How about letting us 'un-watch' a project until a specified bug is resolved?
The most interesting sentence is: "For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles." The question being which search engines is The Times cutting deals with...
Wait, now you're judging companies by their size? Not the exits for the founders? That seems backwards.

Take Mathematica. You don't think Stephen Wolfram is very happy with his "lifestyle business"?
That's not necessarily true. PG says that there's one strategic sentence redacted.

Vacation Rentals is an upgrade from yuppies' airbeds, with commensurately higher margins.

Hotels are an upgrade from Vacation Rentals, with higher margins again.

Did you know that 25% of your hotel booking fee goes to the "Online Travel Agent" that runs your card?
Ask HN: Why aren't the Japanese using robots at Fukushima? 
Many articles on the currently unfolding nuclear disaster at Fukushima describe how the crew at Fukushima is failing to get the disaster under control because they can't get close enough because of the high levels of radiation.

This seems like a perfect opportunity to use robots, since they aren't nearly as vulnerable to radiation as humans are.

For example, here's a description of why attempts to use water canons to cool fuel rods failed:

"Hopes were also raised when several police water cannons, designed for use in riots, were brought in and used to blast water towards the empty pool next to reactor number four in which spent fuel rods were in danger of melting.

Again, the high radiation readings meant the machines could not get close enough to the plant to get the water on target, and at one point the vehicles were forced to retreat, before resuming attempts that had limited success."

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Desperate+measures+kamikaze+mission+cool+exposed+fuel+rods/4458612/story.html

Why couldn't have a mobile robot on treads be fitted with a camera and water cannon and be remotely wheeled in to position to aim the cannon at the pool containing the spent fuel rods?

Or this:

"Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said his staff in Tokyo had been told by Japanese utility officials that cooling water that normally covers spent fuel was nearly or totally gone from an uncovered concrete pool above reactor Unit 4. ...

'We can't get inside to check, but we've been carefully watching the building's environs, and there has not been any particular problem," Hajime Motojuku, a spokesman for Tokyo Electric, said'"

http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2011/03/17/17climatewire-fukushima-crisis-worsens-as-us-warns-of-a-lar-9187.html

Why not use a little remotely operated helicopter or plane fitted with a camera, much like many hobbiests do around the world? It could be flown in to and through the building, or at least in a very close flyover of the building, and have a look inside.

Or, even simpler, why not just use a robot mounted on wheels or treads and carrying a camera? It could simply be remotely directed to drive in to the building and send back a video feed of what the cameras showed.

Japan is world-renown for its robotic technology. And yet in this disaster they are not using robots to go where humans can't because of the radiation risk. Why?
I immediately thought of this service as soon as I read that they disabled the limit for any facebook / twitter links. Kudos to the person that's building this. I want to buy you a beer.
great points. Important message
never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence...