skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for catching that error for me.

HN doesn't allow text with a url submission and i was limited to 80 characters in the title. It'll currently just show you a landing page. I needed to get something out while I work on the concept. This is a response from the following article: http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/20110313/false-alarm-goo....

Sorry for the teaser (i hate them myself) but a good friend of mine insisted that I build and push a landing page out as soon as possible.
Probably for the best, this disaster-porn obsession is pretty sickening.
I think he's not suggesting it's bad to sell your company, but rather that going into a new one with the idea that you're only there to make money is a bad idea.
Depends.

I'm an adrenalin junkie, so if I'm passionate about something, it better be fast-paced, or else I get bored.

But if it's boring already? Then yeah, everyone please chill.
I wrote an online payroll system that helps Canadian families through the employee tax issues they run into when they hire help around the house.

I ran into the same problems when we hired a nanny for our kids, and wrote some scripts to help me out. When the nanny left for another family she asked if I could write down how to do it all because the new family had no idea what they were supposed to do.

I realized I had a business on my hands and turned my scripts into a web service.

So if your company started out as a way to scratch an itch, or solve a problem, telling the story of how you solved the problem isn't a bad idea.
Why don't you go raise a little bit of money and get to that in a lot shorter time? Taking a $500k round and giving up 10% of your company to get to your goal 4 years more quickly is a worthwhile trade-off. If you have $500k in revenue and you have very large competitors then that means there is probably 50x more revenue sitting out there that you could acquire if you had a bigger team and more resources.

If that's really your goal then why are you taking a harder and longer path to that end goal?
NYTimes.com Pay Scheme Has A Great Big Hole
Hi Kevin, this isn't a pivot at all.

It's another product we can sell to our newspaper and local organization partners. We haven't met a newspaper yet that is happy with their daily deal provider. They asked us if we would make a solution and we did.
The original video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96WePgcg37I
Paramount Movie World Premiere on BitTorrent: PR Stunt or the Future?
Well except it's not. I use linux on my desktop and laptop and will continue to. It may remain niche; but 'move on' is a bit extreme.

There are some things linux distros are inarguably better at; and will continue to be as Apple has no motivation for package management.

Linux on the desktop will never 'win' because the desktop will die before it would have caught up.
It's an awful idea. It's too played out to be novel and it's completely nonfunctional. When someone hands you a card, they look at your name first to make sure they heard the introduction correctly, and then your title. Perhaps also your location. These convey information that can be important in the conversation. If a card is devoid of information you might as well just use Bump or a similar app and skip the card entirely. That's a stupid idea for another reason: pro-tip -- write notes about the person/conversation on the back of their card immediately after you finish talking to them. That way you can enter it into your CRM/PIM later and remember why you're doing it.
Very inspiring...Goodluck Girish!
What about R do you think makes it hard?
I was always under the understanding that working retail is a pretty unglamorous job.
The problem is that Microsoft has too many stakeholders. The IE9 team would certainly love to have more people in the world use their product, but company-wide strategy leads to them dropping WinXP support.

This is slowly going away (see the various MSFT iPhone applications), but this mentality will certainly remain with the company. Actually, I'd argue this is a strength under certain circumstances.
Investors Are Job Applicants
I also wonder about using the word "desk" in the name of a competing product.
The article reminded me of a quote I have framed on my desk.

"the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do."
Steve Jobs.

I think Larry is only getting started and it'll be amazing to see what his second act will be.
Let's be fair to Microsoft--their mission statement was "a computer on every desk and in every home, all running Microsoft software". By the time Gates stepped down as CEO, they achieved that. For all its flaws and the sorry state it finds itself in today, Microsoft was more worldchanging than most startups.
Yes. Except, anybody who is doing RAID-0 over an EBS volume for perf reasons is ASKING for trouble.

You need to do RAID-10. EBS volumes CAN and DO fail.
This post is painfully scarce on any real details and doesn't provide a link to a video of it in action, substituting quality for a joke image. If I could downvote, I would. Instead I'll just provide some alternate resources:

Video of Nano Hummingbird: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96WePgcg37I

Nano Hummingbird on AeroVironment, Inc's (the creator's) website: http://www.avinc.com/nano

An Engadget post on the thing (also lacking many expository details): http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/18/darpa-funded-nano-humming...

A Kurzweilai.net post on it (not many details here either): http://www.kurzweilai.net/nano-hummingbird-uav
The path TO hell?
I don't necessarily want to change the world either, but I do want to change my little corner of it. I think that is more than good enough.
If it works, fantastic but I'm really curious if people would submit their email address for something they have absolutely no idea about.
Horrible name! There is a fantasy fiction podcast called PodCastle (http://podcastle.org). Seems like a conflict there.
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pub=nacholibre
Incredible weather information UI
> Remember that the license is a property of the code, not the tarball.

Not really. A license is an agreement between the copyright owner and whoever is seeking permission to do something that falls under one of the exclusive rights granted by copyright law to the owner of the copyright.
I've always gotten comped stuff: Backlight went out, they replaced the keyboard part of the case (dents), iSight went out, they replaced a lot of worn keys, iPod was broken, it was replaced free. I'm a plain-looking dude with old equipment, I highly doubt the amount of effort put forth for my sake was to impress me personally.

Quote from your link: "doesn't that say something about the quality of your products"

You were snippy, they got snippy.
Understandable, but still, when it comes to comparing how IE 9 stacks up to "Firefox" on rendering engines and memory usage, it doesn't seem particularly meaningful to compare the brand new IE 9 to the old Firefox just because IE 9 released a single week before the next major revision of Firefox is slated to. Not that you were writing a New York Times article here or anything. :)

I certainly understand your other point about the single-process design.
Show HN: 2 hour project -- help me finish it?
I was on a completely unnecessary conference call earlier babysitting some long-running tasks, so I kicked off a side project. The result is at loudstartup.com -- which is a tentative replacement for str's shoutstart.com (which has been taken offline, but I really needed it).

What I need to keep it going is:

- What other sites should be on the list? I know of the obvious ones, like The Startup Foundry and The Next Web, but the list in my head is nowhere near exhaustive.

- What other information would you want shown on this list?
This is currently 500ing for me. I also can't get to any code.google.com location. I have two-factor auth turned on for my Google account. Anybody else experiencing this?
or he's a shill for the "very rich" (lol) VCs at ycombinator trying to optimize for homeruns rather than community feel-good 20mm exits
I haven't tracked my development time closely, but I'd estimate my Android app sales come out to around $25/hour (after Google's cut, before taxes). Not as profitable as my day job, but much more fun.
I tuned the hell out of our big postgresql instance a year ago, but I'll be damned if I can remember the rational for every change. I have a list of all the changes from default, but I've long since forgotten/lost the reason for making them.

That being said, we get more bang for our buck by spreading our data across many small databases that don't need much tuning beyond upping the memory defaults. The EC2 cloud isn't great for the uber-server, but it's halfway decent for many small servers.
Best thing Microsoft has done in years? ;)
For me, the rare times when I'm on Windows, this has become, "Internet Explorer is the application I use to download Ninite".
Well, atd would be better, but sure.

Edit: Rubyists! Solving the problems of 30 years ago... today!
"You want to run a little business? Go run a shoe store then."

http://dashes.com/anil/2011/01/mom-and-pop-at-web-scale.html...
An amateur can be very expert. An amateur is someone who does something because he wants to, for love of the work or subject. It has nothing to do with expertise or competence at the job.
>eventually get to the Genius Bar

that answers the question that puzzled me a bit about that name. In itself it isn't a bad marketing targeted for customers, yet it happens to be also successful marketing targeted at the employees. That's really genius, pun intended, as usually help/support desk is very unpopular, churning job leading nowhere and here they turned the tables and made other jobs leading to it instead.
If you want to develop you're Dutch skills I have the site for you :) Our site is used a lot by non-native Dutch. I have some connections to startups in Amsterdam. Maybe I can introduce you to some.
This [1] is an amazing documentary if you have not seen it.

The comments about "biorobots" is very chilling. The bravery of the soldiers who threw bricks into the hole is stunning.

"Each soldier must throw 4 bricks into the hole. Each brick weighs 50Kg. You have to do this in one minute."

[1] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=414073095760658789#d...
>"We usually have to tell them that if they unlock their iPhone, it won't work. That it's going to be like a $700 paperweight, and that the antenna will fry itself on T-Mobile. Of course, that's not true, but that's what we tell them."

I didn't know Apple stores have an Evil Genius bar.
Worked for me, three minutes after you posted this.
I got this link from an HN post a while back: http://blog.traindom.com/places-where-to-submit-your-startup...
Visualizing One Hundred Years of Pacific Rim Earthquakes
My experience has been that EBS handles concurrent loads better, ephemeral drives handle non-concurrent loads better.

Transferring 100gb+ of data on EBS (even with an 8x RAID) is a nightmare. Ephemeral drives, however, it's fairly fast.

Throw 100+ database connections at a few ephemeral drives (even in a RAID) and watch your web site slow to a crawl.
Thanks for the detail. I completely agree, exposing linked accounts is a serious privacy issue (assuming you didn't click a box that says "we will link your accounts whenever you invite someone to a meeting" ;-) ).
I'm in a situation like that currently, but in an open plan office, with a manager sitting behind me keeping me in line.

And since our bug tracker is linked to timesheets, things like refactoring don't happen anymore, unless linked to a specific feature/bug (developers can't create these). The nett effect is that things that used to take me 2 hours now take 8 hours, so I can fill the day. Parkinson's law is not a joke.
Sure, but what about the app itself?
Best thing since Kinect, and, before that, DOS 4.0!
Video of water coming out from ground in japan quakes
"If I could downvote, I would."

Flagging stories is the effective downvote. It reduces how long they stay on the front page, even if the story doesn't get killed.
I don't have solid numbers, just some experience using this. Ephemeral drives outright fail more often than EBS volumes, however, EBS volumes suffer performance degradation significantly more often than ephemeral drives. EBS volume performance is HIGHLY variable, at all times of day, no matter what load you throw at it. Ephemeral drives are very consistent most of the time.

Both types of drives CAN and DO fail, so RAID-10, fail over, and replication are a must have.
Simple JavaScript Inheritance with Backbone
I run a database cluster with dozens of nodes on EC2. Small entries, lots of small IOPS.

From http://orion.heroku.com/past/2009/7/29/io_performance_on_ebs..., "On a good day, an EBS can give you 7,000 seeks per second and on a not so good day will give you only 200."

The ephemeral store will never give you more than a hundred seeks per second. If you're seek-bound, then EBS, every time.
Sure thing - my email is in my profile.
Signing out of my Google Account and signing back in starting at a code.google.com domain seems to have fixed it.
And yet, the PC may be doomed, but the servers that will hold the data and run most of the program logic for our "Post-PC" devices will probably run Linux.
Disney.
Laser beam uses graphics chip to identify and zap mosquitoes
Depends on the people and the location. A good developer in Pune might be getting $15k/year or more, a bit higher in Bombay. Nationwide, salaries tend to range from 1-5 lakhs ($2.5-10k).

2 low end college students for mechanical turk type work outside Bombay/Bangalore/Delhi, they would probably last you a year or two. More if you go to the outskirts. (Note: I'm probably inappropriately scaling down here - in reality, you probably need to rent them 30 at a time.)

An illiterate peasant? You could pay him double market rates ($1-4/day) for 30-120 years on $10k.

By avoiding a permanent presence, I mean having the ability to pick up and leave at a moment's notice. If the phone company, the government or your landlord tries to shake you down, you need to be able to say "fuck you" and walk out. Keep your exit costs lower than the price of a bribe. I.e., don't get into a situation where downtime results in big monetary losses.
The are three cases.

1. Code in Mono that implements things covered by EMCA/ISO standards. These have about the same legal risk as any other EMCA/ISO programming languages and libraries.

2. Code in Mono that covers Windows-specific things, like WinForms. This is your highest risk area, although even in these areas the risk is probably pretty low. That's because Microsoft patents would cover the particular way Microsoft did these things. Mono's independent cloning of the functionality is likely to have done them a different way. If you want to be maximally safe, don't use these parts of Mono. Use GTK#, for instance, for your GUI stuff. (That runs on Windows, BTW, if you want your Mono app to run on Windows).

3. Code in Mono that covers things not in the ECMA/ISO standard, but not specific to Windows. This would cover things like libraries developed after the current rev of the standard, and such. Most of these provide functionality that exists in most other language ecosystems, such as Python, Ruby, Perl, and so on. If Microsoft has patents in these areas, they are as likely to cover Python, Ruby, etc., as they are to cover Mono.

Microsoft has been known to encourage the Mono developers. That greatly weakens any case they would have against Mono.

Bottom line: it's about legally as risky as the other languages and ecosystems that would be its competitors, especially if you stay away from things like WinForms. If you would feel legally comfortable doing something in Ruby or Python or Perl, doing the same thing in Mono should be fine.
ADiatomea - Digitally Engineered Living Systems
So, is this just going to be a new social network? Is the idea of circles any different from, say, Diaspora's aspects?
thanks for putting a inspirational example for Indian startups
Maybe they are having problems, like Apple, with spending money on old operating systems?

Windows XP users would never pay for IE 9, and Apple claim they can't give XCode 4 away to users from an OS released 18 months ago.
It depends by what you mean by API - it's not a "Write Once, Run Anywhere" UI framework, because you wouldn't want that anyways: an Android app should work differently than an iOS app, full stop.

However, everything else does work 95% the same - how you access files / databases, your business logic, all of the non-UI libraries are both consistent, and work really well.
A Seedy New Neighborhood For The Web: XXX Domain Approved
IPad Certified by FAA as Suitable Alternative to Paper Maps
You can also use CoffeeScript to get more "traditional" OOP from JavaScript.
How can you separate the two?
thanks - i really like what you've done w/ async so am excited about this too : )
15 Startup Commandments For Every Startup Founder
Some put it the other way around: you owe the ever-improving network to the heavyweight users [1]. Well, at least Cisco says that -- and you know what they sell.

In any case, it's not the other user that oversold the bandwidth; it's the ISP. They made an unhedged bet, it fell short of working out(predictably), so it's their turn to foot the costs of upgrading the network.

----

[1] http://business.financialpost.com/2011/03/04/bootup-heavy-we...
Not A Waste
That's a fair point, but I don't think it holds up real well. What are the semantics? Do you block until everything is fully backed up on S3? Are you continuously taking database snapshots and forwarding them to S3? What happens if the backups start to fall further and further behind production?

What do you tell the hordes of angry redditors when the last thirty minutes of carefully (or angrily) composed comments vanish?
From Psychological Science January 1, 1993 vol. 4 no. 1 35-40:

"Recent research suggests that dynamic spatial reasoning tasks show more robust gender differences than static spatial reasoning tasks."

From the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, http://www.jstor.org/pss/749620, 2001:

"By 8th grade, girls' relatively poorer spatial-mechanical skills contribute to lower scores in types of mathematics at which boys typically excel".

Come on HN how does this not add to the discussion. Here's some food for thought:

* http://pss.sagepub.com/content/18/10/850.short - action games altering spatial reasoning differences across the genders
* http://rer.sagepub.com/content/65/1/22.short - spatial reasoning appears to be a function of mathematical ability and not gender per se
* http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi... - showing that it appears to be relatively easy to improve spatial reasoning, particularly for females, if there's a desire to do it

But hey stick your head back in the sand and repeat after me "everyone is equal; gender is an illusion".
Sure, if a company isn't going anywhere, VCs will start to consider Plan Bs. Everyone considers Plan Bs when a project turns out badly. But getting acquired is always a Plan B. And when you talk about someone's "aim" when doing things, you're talking about Plan A.

Saying VCs aim to sell companies is like saying that if I try as hard as I can to get an A in a class and get a B, I was aiming to get Bs. That is just not what the word "aim" means. It's more like I accept the inevitability of Bs, since As are hard to get. Similarly, VCs accept the inevitability of acquisitions, because IPOs are hard to get.

In accordance with my new principle that once I have to start talking about the definitions of the words I'm using, the thread is doomed, I'm done now.
Al3x on Freckle, Business and Ambition
Cool, the name change made me think you were moving away from the old business model (as did the submission title).
ICANN Approves New .XXX Top Level Domain
John, do you wanna go to London, report on the wedding, live in the nice hotel, eat at the nice restaurant, all expenses paid? Or there is also another job available - Japan, increased radiation levels, hot water and electricity may be available at the hotel,...
I would totally be open to the possibility of selling my company someday, it's just that they would have to be just as crazy as me to take me up on my terms. Not everything revolves around $$$.
Perl/CGI Video Tutorials By Joshua - منتديات قروب الساهر
Weird. I thought modern botnets are P2P, with control nodes disguised as ordinary infected machines.

Well, it's nice that this was not the case.
The aristocracy represents the worst aspects of Britain - the cronyism, unthinking deference, inflexible adherence to tradition and gigantic social class divisions. As far as is possible I intend to avoid watching or reading anything about the royal wedding when it occurs.
Nintendo 3DS Shipments May Be Affected by Japan Quake
Innovation is only valuable if it improves the situation. Paraphrasing George H Smith, "Inventing a new method of torture may be innovative, but that doesn't make it good."
Radiation risks in the US
yes.

The way I see it, the only way to have sustained positive impact on the world is to allow humans to be more human and entangle it in the worlds economic system so it remains in place.
That construction can only be achieved by a business.
Redesigned Microsoft.com Sucks
How about BC Canada? It's west coast, and tech companies get a lot of corporate tax breaks, and canadian immigration isn't as horrible as US.
CoffeeScript does have really nice syntax for OOP, but I think JavaScript deserves some lovin' too. Well-written JavaScript (such as Backbone) looks pretty beautiful. Another plus is that new devs (if you have to worry about that sort of thing) don't have to learn a new language.
I get your point, but doesn't that seem a tad contrived?
substantial portion of your salary is based indirectly but inexorably on profiteering
term for "pricing what the market will bear"

My dictionary suggests that "profiteering" is a reference to price fixing, gouging, and other unsavory business behaviors -- not market-based pricing.

Moreover, data is data. Charging more for one kind of bit than another is ridiculous.

power companies are regulated utility monopolies that have to respond to state governments

And why not communication companies, then (beyond the small degree they're regulated)? Obviously there's a need.

This shouldn't surprise you, because there is arbitrarily segmented pricing in everything from hotel rooms to canned tomatoes to beer to office space to cars to computer chips.

Every type of product and service you mention has an open market and real competition. If I don't like the price of Heineken I can just buy Coors (presuming I think they're of equivalent quality).

AT&T, Verizon, and their cohorts have the mobile market locked up -- no other company is going to come along any time soon and offer carte blanche data access, because the whole market is engaged in "wink-and-nudge" collusion. They don't have to actually conspire; they just know they can all get away with the scam if they all pull it.
They're not going to do any significant research in Japan.

They're going to take establishing footage of their personnel, then repeat aloud what they're told while showing disaster-porn imagery.
My favorite paper as well!
As a matter of fact, yes and I found them to be both adequate. The university I attended (USA based) sends freshman overseas during spring break for a ridiculously small amount of money. I chose to go on the London trip.
I think an apology to Amy, even just one sentence, would have been good. Calling her out seemed really unnecessary. Otherwise, it seems like a more well thought out comment than the original: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2338911. I still disagree, however.