skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The only reason anyone even paid attention to this article at all is because 98% of what everyone hears, all the time, is pro-big startup, pro-VC, pro-liquidity event, pro- this and pro- that.

Perhaps because you're so far out in the (physical) hinterlands of software, you hear a time-delayed different message. Living close to the epicenter of the startup world, I hear very few people really talk about flip-based startups anymore, and the general consensus is to be wary of VC and take it as late as you need it. Indeed, if I had to describe a "pro-" that has infected Valley culture right now, I would call it the "pro-lean startup" fetishism. It gets a little tedious, but it's a far more reasonable sentiment than the pro-flip culture that dominated the Valley back a few years ago.

Really, the difference between the idea put forth in this essay and a game-changing techcrunch-courting startup is scope. I could work on a small lifestyle product (and I have a few in mind that might be fun), but they're not... game changers. I'd like to work on a product that really makes a difference to a large number of customers. Very few independent products have the resources or scope to achieve this.

Coming out of college, people think they have to work either for a big company or a big idea. The truth put forth in this article is that you need not do either, And That Is Okay. Indeed, there is a great deal of freedom that comes with it.

> Look, dominant paradigm: You need to chillax.

"Dominant," you say? Hardly. "Glorified," perhaps. The vast majority of people do what you do; sell small-scale contracts and services to small-scale partners and customers. And that's fine and good and noble and grist for the mill of global economics. But let's not kid ourselves, it is not an ambitious path, and western culture glamorizes (unfulfilled) ambition.
http://www.redcode.nl/blog/2010/06/creating-shazam-in-java/
http://laplacian.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/how-shazam-works/
Another example: business travelers howl and howl about the gauging we take from airlines.

Not just business travelers. You've identified one of the few industries even more disliked than wireless carriers: http://www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&task.... Note that the top ratings are in industries where you generally exchange money for a good or service without subsequent micromanagement of how you use it.
As the parent post mentions, it's also about moving your costs from a mix of capital and operating to 100% operating. This is one of the arguments that has motivated Netflix' move to AWS (and it makes sense for other SaaS): their costs scale more or less directly with their customer base, and thus revenue, with no up-front capital required.

See http://qconsf.com/dl/qcon-sanfran-2010/slides/AdrianCockcrof... for more.
This reminds me of SchoolTool - http://schooltool.org/

It's a project conceived by Mark Shuttleworth, the Ubuntu project founder.
Except for the user interface (again, like tablets). Some still lack "add minute" buttons, or require you to press "Timed cook" or some such before you start typing in the time.
Why ConcurrentHashMap does not support null values
Nice concept, but it doesn't seem big enough right now for me to login and come back everyday.
ANT tutorial part 1
How a Hacker News comment turned into a $10,000 Red Cross donation
So case law is unclear enough that I can create a CSS circumvention tool and sell it to you? No. How about if I create a CSS circumvention tool and then rent you access to that tool on a per-movie basis?

That's Zediva.
The problem is that he said using UA sniffing is wrong. Not only is it not "wrong"--it's damn useful in certain cases and can be a valuable part of a feature detection solution.
Mobile Sensor Actuator Link presentation
Burnout & boreout. The Scylla and Charybdis of most work environments.
How is it that Amazon.com is so reliable if there are so many problems with their "cloud" products? Do they not use the same software to run their site?
Yes, the Arab protester does show the potential of facebook/twitter for productive use. However from my point of view, facebook and twitter will be more like TV. On the surface it looks like it has a great potential for spreading of ideas, but I don't think it would actually reach that potential where it actually improves the overall productivity of society. I hope I am proved wrong...
Why I'm Quitting Security (Part 1)
May want to verify how you're parsing the data set, am finding several ZIP codes which are close, but not quite. For example 12590 is drawn accurately (as I recall, haven't lived there in a decade), but when I enter 12603 I get the same map for 12590, when 12603 should be farther north as it's poughkeepsie. I tried this in two separate browsers so it wasn't a caching thing unless you're caching by client IP.

Another example: 11202 shouldn't have a map at all, it's reserved for the central PO in Brooklyn (Cadman Plaza GPO), instead it's being drawn as a region in North Brooklyn.

Another example from outside Brooklyn: 60515 (Downers Grove, IL) looks accurate, but 60516 (southern Downers Grove) appears to be drawn using the 60517 (Woodridge, IL) boundaries, and when I punch in 60517 it gets drawn using the boundaries for 60561 (Darien, IL).

I haven't played with GIS data for several years but remember than there was a set of ZIP code data sets around 2005 which had accurate latitude/longitude points but the ZIP codes were frequently off by one (I ended up having to manually massage the data because I couldn't find a pattern to the way the ZIP code was appearing in the data).
That is one awesome story, congrats! I was especially struck by some of the stuff you said about product/market fit. To me, this bit is pure gold:

We started engaging with our prospects on what they were currently using and what problems they were facing. In many cases people were telling us clearly what they really wanted to see in their customer support software.

Yeah, that's the key, right? Actually engaging with the customers and finding out what problem they're really trying to solve. This cuts to the core of sgblank's Customer Development stuff and the whole Lean Startup movement.

We were surprised to see that a lot of what customers wanted were their core problems solved and not some fancy features of supporting customers from their Facebook wall or converting tweets into customer support tickets. While we understand that these are definitely the way of the future, many many customers do not need this today.

Heh, perfect example of how us techies can get caught upin the fancy, glitzy, "cool" stuff and maybe not realize that customers are not so concerned about that, as they are getting work done. Really, really good reminder to focus on the customer's needs!

Another important learning for us was that customers did not want to be dealing with separate invoices for their helpdesk, their contact management software, for their customer feedback forums and customer satisfaction surveys. The SMB customer wants one invoice and as much functionality as possible in the customer relationship management solution.

That's gold too... It reminds me that sometimes the "problem" isn't so much a technical problem, as a structural problem with the existing business arrangements. Wanting one invoice instead of 3 or 4 is a wonderful example of a problem an entrepreneur can solve, and it doesn't have anything to do with product features or technology. Reading this is like having a glass of cold water thrown in your face (well, for some of us!)

We also identified underserved market segments (companies with multi-brand support requirements) and segments which were getting priced out because the current solutions were expensive.
So we reprioritized our feature set to what we thought is the ideal product/market fit for us. This means that things like Twitter and Facebook integration can wait. But things like multiple support emails or support for SLAs and Business hours are in.

Very inspiring. Thanks for sharing such details about your experience. I think a lot of people can learn something useful from your experience. You've certainly given me some thoughts to chew on.
This is the battle I fight every day. I'd rather have a workload that's 110% of my capacity than be at 50%, which I generously where I'm at now.

We're an "agile" shop that grossly under-allocates out of fear of failing a sprint.
Sure, that's perfectly reasonable. Just throwing an idea out there. :-)
I bet a lot of people here can relate to this.
Quick R, helped several of my friends try R: http://www.statmethods.net/

Once you're hooked, go to the R inferno:
http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
My vote: microwave metallurgy.
Mozilla actually run the unit tests of most major libraries as part of their regular test suite to make sure that the Internet will by-and-large still work on any new release. So I think the author has a valid point here, new browsers shouldn't break existing libraries this badly.
Tweet later with Delayed Job
How Free Will Shapes Our Politics
It doesn't update over the air?

I know I've read you can activate it in the store before taking it home.

(Edit: I know my mom has an iPad and no Mac.)
This page has a lot of interesting info about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_frequency

tl;dr: Nowadays there are no real advantages/disadvantages to prefer 50Hz vs 60Hz. The distinction is mostly just because of historical vendor lock-in.
Microsoft shuts down spam behemoth Rustock, reduces worldwide spam by 39%
Got a great idea for an app? FundedApps wants to pay you for it
Why Firefox 4 isn’t abandoning Windows XP
Why is this posted on Hacker News? I find it rather offensive as it does NOT seem to belong here.
I was skeptical about this, but some years ago my wife got me to do a taste test, and I had to agree that tea from the teakettle tasted marginally better.
> For that matter, so is a large chunk of the Bay Area.

More specific?
I've been toying recently with the idea of a fail-up, Ie a failed start up which ultimately gets you closer to finishing your next startup. Or perhaps fail-ups are every start up you failed at until you hit success, each one getting you incrementally closer to that success.
Google Public data adds NYC Community Health and Vital Statistics data
Wi-Fi-Only iPads Get GPS When Tethered to iPhone
Reddit didn't start with the cloud, though. Very early, they were on dedicated and found it inflexible to their needs, and scaling a site with the eyeballs that Reddit has would have been very difficult with their first architecture.

The "exit plan" is, really, not marrying your entire architecture to one provider. Spreading the love gives you a bargaining chip and flexibility to see which provider will perform better for you in the long run, and allows you to see the strengths and weaknesses of each. Internet latency is pretty bad, though, so sharding an app across multiple providers can be a bit of a challenge.
Linode, hands down. I've never experienced downtime there in more than 2 years.
Show HN: HackerTable.com, reservations at elusive restaurants (3-day project)
It's to bad they didn't put the table of contents online as HTML. I could download the postscript but I'm bouncing instead (boiing!)
Having been at a startup that used hundreds of EC2 instances and EBS volumes I can assure you all that Amazon EBS performance is downright terrible and Amazon didn't inspire any confidence that they could solve it.

Even worse than the EBS performance is Amazon does not offer any shared storage solutions between EC2 instances. You have to cobble together your own shared storage using NFS and EBS volumes making it sucky to the Nth power.

EC2 is fine for Hadoop-style distributed work loads, and distributed data stores that can tolerate eventual consistency, that's all good. But for production database applications requiring constant and reliable performance, forget it.
The cultural response to climate change
Just for fun, Joe (hn: joe6pack) and I decided to code up a 3 day side project. It surfaces the best reservations currently available in the SF Bay Area. Certainly the ranking algorithm could be improved, but we hope you enjoy this little bit of amusement.

Please review and let us know if you find it useful.
This also happens in those implementations of Agile where they try to pretend that programmers are all easily interchangeable cogs in a machine. The problem is, anybody they get who is better than average or has some natural talent is going to be bored out of their tree.

What I would do, is start picking future cards and then when they come up give ridiculously low estimates for them (because they were already finished on my machine :D ).

"Oh, you want a persistence layer for all this? Okay, that will take... -17 minutes."

Or, alternately, if I didn't want to bend people's minds or break the wills of the junior programmers (messing with the jps is half the fun of these sorts of things :D ), I'd work on some technical debt, since Agile projects tend to accumulate it faster than a sophmore with Daddy's credit card.
I suspect it's because amazon.com has different performance requirements. For instance, I imagine the read/write balance is very different for amazon.com than for reddit.com.
Alternate title: "How not to get a job"

Both concepts mentioned apply in almost any employment situation. A good employer (that is, one that you would strive to work for) will only be as engaged in you as you are in them, and as you are in yourself.
considering the upvote to your comment, there is at least another HN reader who thinks that there are 60K+ rpm reciprocating engines and who don't know what detonation sensor, octane number or cavitation are about... Hope you know your Python better :)
If you understand the limitations of the various products you can build a VERY reliable service. The reddit assumption of a single datacenter and single technology to store that data was an engineering failure. They essentially didn't have a disaster recovery plan in place.
Is Amazon Working on an Android Kindle?
On Monads
Let me answer this as someone who writes non-brittle Javascript code on a 1 year old web app (e.g. I have more unit tests per LOC in my Javascript than most of the Java code that's in the underlying app. AND I run my test suite on all major browsers regularly).

Even if you write solid code, using good architecture, and thorough testing you will find that if it passes on FF then there's a 98% chance it also passes on Chrome and Opera... but maybe a 60% chance that it passes on IE8 (requiring HOURS of work to investigate and fix), and there's some abysmally low rate of success on IE9 from having run these tests against the Beta earlier (we don't plan to announce IE9 support for a while).

So while you are correct old cruft will have to go, brand new solid code shouldn't have to go as well... and that's unfortunately the consequence of IE9. :'-(
Github is the rare exception. I'm not saying that it's impossible, I'm saying that of the set of startups that have changed the world, it's just ... Github that's a lifestyle business. Every other one has taken funding. What does that say, empirically, about the nature of both models?

Note: I'm not arguing one's better than the other, I'm just rebutting OP's belief that 'lifestyle businesses are the way to go for everyone, woohoo!'
Webkit (recently) and Opera (last year) also incorporated jQuery's test suite into their own.
Anywhere that's reclaimed infill: The Marina, most of Foster City, Treasure Island, parts of Fremont, etc.
How do you know the issue was network degradation? Is this written up somewhere?
The 'more metric' 50Hz made me smile. The Wikipedia article on the history of these frequency choices suggests it was increased from 40Hz to 50Hz to stop visible flickering of lamps. It's an entertaining read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_frequency#History
Yet another validation of our (fivesecondtest.com) decision to stop supporting PayPal. No other "financial institution" fails so comprehensibly at so many basic fundamentals. My merchant account costs me a small fortune, but it's worth it for the amount of pain and suffering PayPal have caused us...so glad we're not having to suffer again through this.
If you're using a VPN, that ALSO is a dead giveaway protocol wise.

Good luck suing them. They offer tethering for a price, you're not paying it. I think the chance you'll get away with invasion of privacy on something that they technically should only see from flagged account is about 0.
Did you use Raid10? I would love to see a post on using postgresql with ec2/ebs -- how to setup raid, etc.
Although normally the Agile evangelists are whacked out wierdos, one of them did say something useful to me recently.

He said that "all coding is change". This is simple, trite and deeply profound.

All coding is change. Either you're building something new (change) or you're fixing a bug (change) or you're adding a feature (change).

The whole rhetoric about programmers who don't like other programmers being 'afraid of change' or unwilling to 'embrace change' is nonsense.

Given then, that all coding is change... I wonder what it means to say that some environments change faster than others.

What does this mean? Requirements flip-flop? Staff turnover? Starting projects and then killing them softly with this song?
Was anyone able to find a way to easily contribute to this project? There seems to be no SVN or git repo.
Nimble - a tiny functional js and async flow control library
You really find it "offensive?"

Your account was created 9 days ago, and this is your only comment thus far.
Ok, it took me like 3 attempts to post this link, sorry if I spammed anyone :(
Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan on Boston as the “Next Madison Avenue”
30 Cool High Tech Gadgets To Give Your Home A Futuristic Look
Gadgets are becoming a part of our everyday life and like the mobile phone (one of the first gadgets) we are starting to be addicted, depending on them for our daily actions. As technology advances, so do these gadgets that we are fond of and we are amazed by the new concepts created by young and ambitious designers. These innovations appear from a necessity of solving the problems that old products have and besides new and improved functions, they also come with a beautiful design.
Sharing hardware is an implementation detail. You could potentially build a cloud infrastructure where everyone has dedicated hardware. The whole point of cloud computing is that the implementation shouldn't matter to end uses.
You mean that bridge that's about a foot above the water level and, when there's a really turbulent storm, can have rough water on one side and calm water on the other, and have waves literally crashing over the cars from the one side of the water?

Nooo, I would have never thought that bridge would be dangerous in an earthquake! </sarcasm>

I'm not intending to mock you, though it's probably coming off that way. Outside of the cool special effects during a storm (seriously, the 'rough water, bridge, calm water' effect is quite eerie), I have no idea why that bridge was built the way it was.
definitely agree, explicitly soliciting feedback and input is better than just hoping for response to updates. but even if an investor has 10's or 100's of investments, reading and replying to updates is the minimum commitment they should make to their companies. if they are to busy to read and reply to their portfolio entrepreneurs, they shouldn't be making new investments...
General Motors hurt by Japan car parts crisis
Do you know what that would cost? I'm just wondering if you're talking $300 consultation, $1000 or what?

Even 0.5% ($1500) spent carefully on advice could turn out to be the best thing possible.
Jolicloud makes a splash at Chrome Web Store?
You can definitely create a user and then turn him into a test account manually, I've created many test accounts that way. You have to visit a special URL that turns the account into a test account (can't remember it offhand, and I'm not going to post it anyway since if anyone clicks on it then clicks "accept" without looking, it nukes their regular account).
And Japan went with all of the above at once (they have 120V/50Hz, 120V/60Hz, 240V/50Hz and 240V/60Hz)
From the article:

"Businesses can’t make their products usable by just painting a thick coat of usability over their already functioning complex applications. "

I don't know about you, but I can think of more than a few products where layering on a thick coat of usability might not solve all their problems, but it would be a jolly good start.
As somebody who quite enjoys C#, this is pretty awesome news. This means that with the same language, I can write:

* A Mac app
* An iOS app
* An Android app
* A Windows Phone app
* Desktop apps on Linux
* Desktop apps on Windows
* XBox 360 games
* A production-level website
* An in-browser applet
* An embedded system (using .NET MF)

That's pretty awesome.
Do: Act flippant. If you act like you don't need them they're more likely to call you back - because you're so cool and confident and all the other startups (those whores) want you too.
We've got one cooking at http://www.appnowgo.com. We'll be in open-beta very soon.
> What if you wanted to have a message scheduled to be tweeted 10 minutes before a blog was published?

Why?
There shouldn't be an initial consultation cost, especially with $300k.
Thanks mate! Appreciated :)
Software job postings are full of cliches. Best to ignore the description and instead use the interview to ask how project requirements are decided, scheduled, and delivered. If their process doesn't mention any input from developers other than "deliver" then ask how often morale improvement beatings are administered.
We used Amazon and got bad performance in the beginning too. It is bad when you pull files out of S3. By bad I mean the latency is high.

We tried GoGrid and they lost or crashed our server instance.

I've personally used Rackspace, so far so good, but I've only been doing development on it.
The other quote one should keep in mind is 'The last 10% of getting it done takes 90% of the effort.' One of the systemic problems in open source is that the last 10% is both no fun, and not well regarded in the community (this was a cultural challenge at Google as well when I was there)

In the start-up world you can think of those companies that had a good idea, but couldn't get themselves to finish it, as the primary food source for patent trolls. One need only look at patents assigned to your favorite 'non-practicing entity' vs for whom they were originally filed to see a long list of start ups the flamed out before achieving orbit.

This is also why there are only a limited number of deals available for 'untested' entrepreneurs, sort of the VC/Angel equivalent of 'frequent flyer seats'. Extra risk don't want to over weight the portfolio with them.

So perhaps a good way to start is to think about how you're going to finish and work backwards from there. If you define 'finish' as 'make a lot of money' and you're one of the principals in the start up, correlation suggests you are less likely to reach that goal. If you're the type that can stay focused on the delivery and not the results of the delivery (financially at least) it seems you will be more likely to succeed.
Your pix, brewed perfectly.
Japan's actually got 100V/50Hz and 100V/60Hz.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_mains_po...
yea, it passes, but what worries me is that it keeps returning...
Can the test user then interact with the site in a mostly-regular way? I've never tried, clearly :)
The scaling complexities are great and challenging and require new infrastructure.
It doesn't look like a bubble on the scale of previous bubbles because the general public is largely uninvolved (from an investing standpoint). If it popped now, the burned VCs and angels wouldn't even make the local news.

On the other hand, if the IPO market heats up coincident with a strong economy, then watch out.
Congratulations! Makes me want to do the same thing.