skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love the product, but I have doubts on whether or not you can make this a long term success.

>>>- How well we're presenting our case.<<<

I think that's the central challenge to your startup. The problem isn't that whether or not dirigible is good (which it is). It's the fact that why should anyone use this?

As the average jane I really don't care about using Python in my spreadsheet or that it can contain other objects than just text or numbers. I really don't care. I have Google on one end, Zoho in another corner and something nice from Microsoft that's as cool as the Office on my PC.

So, why should I invest time to learn something like this? The website really isn't that clear on the matter and other than terms like that why should anyone move beyond options that work okay for now?
Methinks you're confusing the idiots @4Chan with the group that calls itself "Anonymous". They're very different entities.
Daytona Boats
EdgeWater is constantly improving and creatingnew products through our commercial division. By exposing our boats to some of the world�s most demanding applications and environments, we learn new ways to make our recreational products safer and more reliable.
Maybe they can do this for their printers, too... ;)
Thriving on a code marketplace
All high-performance filesystems assume the power won't go out and lose data if it does. If this matters to you, learn how to use fsync.
A tongue in cheek example of what users might face:

http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/eu-cookies-directive-interactiv...
Credit Sesame Raises $6.15 Million Round of Funding Led by Menlo Ventures
If I lived in SF/US and wasn't busy with my own stuff then I would have definitely applied for a job at Dailybooth. Great team and a great site.
GetJar Ejects Opera Mini From Its App Store
What about a local mech turk type program for small tasks? Maybe craigslist or angieslist is filling this need?
NOKIA X1-00 MUSIC PHONE COMING SOON
Excellent! I've been working in VS2010 a lot lately and love python...didn't realize there were so many great tools.
Yeah, that kind of blew me away too. I posted a comment on the article about it. Even if Rails didn't support it natively you can always execute raw SQL statements in your migrations and just use your DB-specific syntax there to do it.
Windows XP.

...It's mostly for gaming purposes. I tend to run Kubuntu when not gaming.

Also, I knew there were a lot of Mac users here, but I honestly did not expect them to have the most marketshare by far!
Do you have any plans to license the software to clients, where we could use it on our own servers? The functionality looks great, but I have concerns about proprietary and confidential information.
no, it's not. facebook, love it or hate it, has contributed more value to the world than the average well raised child. then again, some might say it's easier to raise a child well than to start another facebook :P
It will be so great if HP gets its groove back. It's really sad to see one of the great American companies flounder for so long. Ever since Carly merged it with Compaq they've been basically stagnant, IMHO, I think WebOS might really set them up for a big power play against Apple over the next few years.
ACM Turing Award Goes to Innovator in Machine Learning
Lock-Cracking Robot Is Your Companion in Crime
I use the Cookie Monster addon for Firefox. it provides a similar interface to that provided by NoScript. It blocks cookies by default, and lets you permanently/temporarily accept full cookies/session cookies, on a per domain basis.

I can use news.ycombinator.com because the first time I came to this site after installing Cookie Monster, I set it to accept session cookies from ycombinator.com, and to permanently remember that setting. I don't need to let ycombinator set long lived cookies, and I certainly don't need to let clickpass.com set a cookie on my computer when I visit the news.ycombinator.com login page.
you sort of imply that in order to have a fulfilling life, you should have children, which is not remotely true. I agree with your point that it's utterly stupid to look at raising children from a purely financial perspective, but choosing not to have any doesn't mean you're thinking only about money.
> no worries about viruses or software updates

?
Not originally, it didn't. It appears to have been added as a subsequent edit.
How are these apps stores able to differentiate themselves from their (much larger) platform owners?

Here's one thing they aren't doing but I think would work: Buy a (cross-platform) app on one device and get it for all of your devices. Ex. Evernote is available on several platforms. The ability to buy once would be a killer feature for GetJar.
I'd say check out the free trial, there might be a thing or two you could use. And if not, you shouldn't have to pay for it! :)
I personally think webOS as an OS is better in tablet form than iOS.
If you've invested in getting a well "decorated" PSD then by all means go it is. But for a start-up agile development and Lean UX is the way to go. (IMO)
This is crazy! Say goodbye to HP. Who will be their client base. Google will beat them at the simple platform of straight to the internet! I have the Google Chrome CR-48 and its my first choice to surf the internet.

When there is now an Android phone running Linux when connected to a laptop shell, HP is doing the opposite!
The single best advice I can give for scaling Rails, and it is widely applicable to other frameworks: never block an HTTP request/response cycle on I/O. In Rails, for example, if you have an external API call which routinely takes 3 seconds to complete, then that call costs about three hundred megabyte-seconds of RAM time to service, because the 100 MB or so used by your mongrel is effectively worthless while you wait.

When you run into resource constraints in Rails, odds are you are running out of RAM first. It's a memory munching beast in most common deployment scenarios.

It is much more efficient to offload those blocking requests to a worker process and poll for results, since a single mongrel can blow through lots of poll requests and useful work in five seconds. Bonus points: your web app will feel snappier, because progressive rendering tricks users into thinking 5 seconds is not actually 5 seconds.
Sorry. I meant rails can't do it automatically for you. You will have to figure out based on your queries and add the indexes yourself. Once you have figured out what indexes to add, you can use add_index in your migration file.
Ten Principles Which Spell Continuous Innovation
I think he intended to say that Rails does not (cannot) automatically add indexes to your database, which is true and makes more sense in the context.
Well quite - ideas that others are struggling to match in 2011.
Kaspar the friendly robot helps autistic kids
Prof. Leslie Valiant has done awesome work in complexity theory. Among other things, he:

* introduced the notion of #P [1]. Replacing the "Is there any ..." question in an NP problem with "How many ... " makes a problem #P e.g. "Is there any subset in this list of integers that adds up to zero" is an NP problem, "How many subsets add up to zero" is a #P problem. This class also includes the problem of doing exact inference in a general graphical model.

* introduced the "Probably Approximately Correct" notion in machine learning for analyzing various learning techniques. [2]

* with Vijay Vazirani, stated & proved the Valiant-Vazirani theorem [3] that, in essence, showed that the intractability of NP problems is not related to the wide variation in possible solutions for the problem. E.g. the Satisfiability problem could have anywhere from zero to exponentially many solutions, but this variance is not the reason it is hard.

[1] http://qwiki.stanford.edu/index.php/Complexity_Zoo:Symbols#s...

[2] http://web.mit.edu/6.435/www/Valiant84.pdf

[3] http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall05/cos528/ha...
I can't wait to see the implementation. Maybe they'll do something interesting like making use of Cygwin or virtualization.
FluidSurveys, Google Doc Forms, SurveyMonkey, JotForm
>>>Next time I will just find a freelancer with a high tolerance for repetition.<<<

Can you shoot me an email when you do?

I have the ominous feeling that it will be mind numbingly boring, but nonetheless money is money.
There are places in the world where craiglist even not heard of. On second thought there are some issues with this approach, what if my social circle is narrow? Scalability and Reliability(reliable sources) are sitting on opposite side.
Yes .. thats a great advice. We use beanstalkd for asynchronous tasks (like sending emails or updating twitter) and backgroundrb for jobs that need polling (re-encoding a mp3 file and showing a progress bar to the user)
No personal experience there, but I've heard a lot of good things about Forrst (http://forrst.com). As far as blogs go, Smashing Magazine (http://smashingmagazine.com), A List Apart (http://alistapart.com), and Think Vitamin (http://thinkvitamin.com) come to mind.
Are there any frameworks that do this?
Here's few other ways to optimize your rails application (with the description taken from the doc) :

- https://github.com/flyerhzm/bullet/ : The Bullet plugin/gem is designed to help you increase your application’s performance by reducing the number of queries it makes. It will watch your queries while you develop your application and notify you when you should add eager loading (N+1 queries), when you’re using eager loading that isn’t necessary and when you should use counter cache.

- https://github.com/sdsykes/slim_scrooge/ : SlimScrooge implements inline query optimisation, automatically restricting the columns fetched based on what was used during previous passes through the same part of your code.

- http://guides.rubyonrails.org/caching_with_rails.html : Caching With Rails from the awesome rails guides

- http://guides.rubyonrails.org/performance_testing.html : Performance Testing Rails Applications from the rails guides
So just to be clear, the surprise ending is that they raised another round ?

I am not trolling, btw.
If you're bootstrapping, not at all.

If you're a company paying it's designers/coders a premium salary, probably worth it. You'll often end up paying more in-house in salary (and they can be working on something more valuable)than you will paying a psd2html service.
I'd probably try to write down as much as I could. I don't so much care about not existing after death but the thought that keeps me up about five nights a year is that death is a damned waste.

You spend your whole life developing a mind and accumulating knowledge. You experience things, learn how to navigate familiar and unfamiliar situations, and hopefully you achieve some measure of success as you grow. All of this has immense value to other people because it's already been paid for with the dearest currency of all - time. And then, poof - one day, it's gone. The pattern of your mind is gone, and nobody else can learn all those lessons you've had to learn the hard way.

That's what keeps me up at night, and that's why, if I knew I was going to die tomorrow, I'd spend every waking moment I had telling strangers things I've learned so that, hopefully, they wouldn't have to learn those lessons themselves.
I think the unspoken implication is "for you.". Many newbie Rails devs assume that a line like "has_many :friends" is magic and makes user.friends execute quickly. They won't understand this explanation, but that can plausibly cause a full table scan, or worse, N+2 full table scans if you have something like:

photos_i_am_in = user.friends.map {|f| f.photos.select {|p| p.include? user}}.flatten

(Code somewhat minimalist - don't think too hard about it.)
Foursquare, Facebook, Founders, and Passion
Another resource for Python is the MIT OpenCourseWare class, Introduction to Computer Science and Programming. Some aspects may be a little behind your skill level but it is a quality course overall.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

Good luck!
All of them lose data. XFS risks losing more data than ext3. I don't know how ext4 behaves.

A more important aspect is how well the filesystem recovers from having the plug pulled, and here they all do well. Once written to disk, data is stable in all of the mentioned filesystems. This is in contrast to non-journalling ones where an unclean shutdown can render the on-disk data inconsistent and difficult to recover.
We do. We're using the public version to polish the interface and debug the server provisioning, but a self-hosted version is definitely on the cards.
Barcamp Tour 2011
"What I like/think" != "What everyone likes/thinks". This is hardly "say goodbye to HP" material (besides to you apparently).
CloudCss - Combine and minify your css files on the fly.
One of the most easy ways to speed up your website is to minize the number of http requests. This little tool helps you to do that by combining all of your css files into one big, minified css asset that you can integrate into your website.
JP Morgan: Apple's iPad 2 could cause 'bubble burst' for rival tablets
Is MathOverflow part of Stack Exchange? I ask because Stack Exchange seems to have a different site called "Mathematics Stack Exchange" [1].

http://math.stackexchange.com/
Let the classloader do it. Next ?.
What's a bill of sale? I assumed the transaction was just "you give me the cash, I give you the laptop".
reddits /r/web_design isn't too bad.
Not going to comment on the usefulness of the product but...

1) I love that the website presents a video right away that is calm and clear and explains both the simplicity and the power at the same time

2) What you revealed here about the simple fact that you're running right on top of EC2; I think that you should be made clear on the website because it's a trustworthy brand and a transparent business aspect

3) The light blue background colour hurts my eyes. It's very intense and sharp and not pleasant background for the white logo.

4) What is the logo? I Balloon trapped in ropes? A H2O molecule?
MIT is doing some really interesting research into using crowd sourcing like mturk. Check it out: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/research.shtml#crowdcomp

They are tackling tasks like extremely difficult OCR and collaborative editing and proofreading.

I've used mturk at work to automate transcribing short recordings and have found that it works pretty well. The trick is to qualify your workers so that they pass some kind of test. You can also only accept workers that have a rating above some minimum. Then, critically, as suggested by others here, get each task done multiple times for cross-checking. And make sure that your instructions are clear.
Chinese Chip Makers May Need 20 Years to Catch Intel
Free Cisco CCVP Certification Practice Exam - CCVP Test
Free Cisco CCVP (Cisco Certified Voice Professional) Certification Practice Exams (Practice Tests) and CCVP Study Guide to help Candidates to pass exam on first attempt.
I'll keep donating to the Hang Bradley Manning as a Traitor fund.

Thanks tho!
> During high school and college I've done several presentations on different topics, all of which received good grades.

does not answer

> why you should pay me money to access information that you could research yourself

I've been consistently satisfied with my researching skills. It's nice that you've collected a lot of stuff, but I don't really need you to do that for me. What I need is someone that understands why I personally have problems making presentations and what I can do to fix them. Then I need her to coach me or review my videos.

(Hypothetical customer me, that is. Real me just got home from teaching.)

You should address how you intend to teach people to present, or otherwise display that you have some understanding of where their problems are. I also second the notion that you are going to want a video in your promotional materials.
This response confuses me.

The linked comment is dismissive and, in hindsight, ludicrous, saying that SO won't be around in a year (in 2008).

The only reasonable conclusion to reach from this is that your response is a not-so-subtle derision of my statement, basically claiming it is just as ludicrous. Or am I reading this wrong?

If not, this confuses me for several reasons:

1. It's very un-HN to be so snarky, even petty. You might be confusing HN for proggit?

2. I love SO, the (original) site. Not once have I ever questioned its viability or value;

3. I have however raised questions about the ability of SE sites to gain traction in their respective verticals, a position thus far backed up by your own numbers [1].

4. I actually wish you guys well. I'm a big fan. The snarky response to a dispassionate position/question makes me wonder if I've hit a nerve?

There are two kinds of comments you'll see on the Internet: uninformed hate/trolling like you linked to. You seem to be suggesting my comment falls into that. I disagree but hey, that's your prerogative. Whatever the case, there's no point in responding to those kinds of comments.

The second kind are neutral/positive, arguably informed and generally reasonable. My position is my comment falls into this category. When you respond to those with snarky comments, it actually does you a great disservice, portraying you as petty and small-minded (neither of which, for the record, I believe to be true).

Weird morning.

[1]: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/wp-content/uploads/FebMonthlyU...
I think he means that quitting your day job is an extremely subjective decision and nobody here is likely to be in the same frame of mind as the OP. We can offer our own perspective, but the factors and weights that led to whatever decision we recomment are very likely to be different from the factors the OP is considering. The OP has likely already made up his mind, he just doesn't know it.

It's like saying "convince me to get married." There are good arguments both ways, but ultimately nobody here is likely to know you well enough to make a decision you'll agree with. Either you subconsciously want to get married, and you'll believe the naysayers simply don't understand why their arguments don't apply, or you subconsciously don't want to get married, and you'll believe that those telling you to pull the trigger don't understand the objections that you've built up in your own mind.
Brad Fitzpatrick talks about unit testing as a method of easing maintainability. I haven't read all of the book but of the profiles I did read, he seemed most similar to the kind of developer I aspire to be as a startup worker.

Your article was a very nice read, btw.
The only PC I've ever hated was a HP. Overpriced for poor parts, slow as hell for its advertised purposes and using their provided software, and when parts broke I had to pay for special HP parts because they used custom sizing and screws.
In their own words, GetJar differentiate themselves by "its open market approach , which allows GetJar to deliver applications for both feature phones and smartphones across all major platforms such as Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Symbian among others"

As well as this, they don't take a cut of the developers revenue - http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/03/getjar-touts-no-f... - which is a great incentive for developers to promote their apps on GetJar.

Although, I do agree with the one purchase should count across all platforms idea. I'd even go as far as to say, users would be prepared to pay a slight premium on the app price so it can be used across all platforms instead of paying for the service again.
Run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on Cluster Compute Instances
I believe it means the PC's would run _BOTH_.

> every HP PC being able to run WebOS and MIcrosoft Windows as an integrated experience in 2012

I have an HP touch screen laptop/tablet. It has a mode where you can boot into a "light" OS that just has a web browser.

BTW, I've never used it.

> Instant Web is an instant on software solution that allows users to quickly and easily get to a browser, an IM client, and their media in a secure, fast booting environment.

I believe its based on Splashtop: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splashtop
Yes, so iirc XFS will end up corrupting the data, extN will point you at the old data...
Maybe I missed a link or explanation or just lack the education, but how do they get the parachute to deploy after the balloon pops upon descent?
The future of the tablet:

- Nobody will beat Apple on price until manufacturing ramps up so they get parts at competitive rates, or they pull a game console and sell hardware for a loss.

- Because people buy on price, they'll buy Apple, and thus will obtain apps on that platform, and get used to the interface.

- Because of past investment and comfort, people will keep buying iPads.

To win as a non-Apple tablet company:

- Develop a great product , with a great interface and bleeding edge tech, at price parity or better prices than Apple, then announce it and ship within a few weeks (so you don't end up in HP or RIM's situation - product announced, Apple leapfrogs you even before you ship).

- Give a few thousand hardware units to developers who are known to turn out great stuff, see what happens.

- Pray that you don't have any major problems and that people are willing to take a chance on you.

- Support that product with firmware updates, make promises as such, so people don't feel like next year they'll be abandoned.
Can you elaborate? I haven't seen it.
Are there multiple meanings of "burn rate" at play here?

I can't imagine how paying 20 people fulltime salaries is anything approaching "low" - as in under $1 or 2 million. Of course "low" is a relative term, so it all depends on what the number is you are comparing it against...
Very interesting tool.

Two main thoughts:

I felt that you could remove the word programmable from 'programmable cloud spreadsheet' - since most people will think that spreadsheets are programmable.

I am a little worried that you have only gone half-way to your users. If you are about the cloud and your users understand that, then perhaps you should let them deploy to their own cloud machines, the other alternative would be to not charge per compute time but to charge per operation (line of code).

Beyond that you might need to experiment with a couple of things: Try giving an example of how much a small license will buy me, or just giving me an example per compute time. Try letting me just buy buy time so that you can see what I would do with it, and perhaps don't show the number of concurrent servers in the signup page - just making the decision process simpler. Having lots of options means more decisions that a new user will have to go through - it might work for you if they are aligned with your users, but otherwise it might just mean more work for you to do to get it right.
> Under what sort of jurisdiction would it function?

Websites operated by companies registered in the EU seem like a reasonable guess.

Or maybe they'll go ICE on everyone and enforce this on .eu and each of the national ccTLDs. You never know, better start spreading FUD!
You may want to check out Vimium if you haven't already.
Barcamp Philly all the way! I've attended for the last several years and it consistently pulls in several hundred people from up and down the east coast. With that many people the sessions are plentiful and diverse. Not to mention they throw killer after parties! Come check it out!
Agreed... It's somewhat analogous to the smartphone wars...
Apple has created a new product category and it will take others some time to catch up. I think android will catch up to the iPad sooner than it did for the iPhone though (3 years).
Usually, a pressure altimeter triggers the parachute as the load passes through a certain altitude.