skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN:  Please review my Facebook App
This is a re-release of workola.com. After a few suggestions from HN I decided to rework my marketing approach. To help clarify what the virtual desktop does I decided to build a Facebook application that adds the workola desktop to your Facebook page. I also added a few chrome extensions and a toolbar to keep workola with you wherever you are on the web.

If you work at the computer you might find it useful. Workola is an HTML5 application that works best with chrome and safari.

One of my favorite features is the 'tools section' and the resulting toolbar that appears once you add a tool. Similar to an igoogle page you can add tools/widgets to personalize your desktop. It's a hands on experience, free and requires no account.

click the + icon next to the 'my files' | 'upload files' buttons to see a few more sample tools.

Hopefully this helps a little,

http://workola.com

http://apps.facebook.com/workola/

This is a sample youtube widget for your tools section.
.
<object width="535" height="300">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/cp/vjVQa1PpcFN6q1tu9z-7uJyIW80-_gajJVwbmhyKwf4="></param>
<param name="wmode" value="transparent"/>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/cp/vjVQa1PpcFN6q1tu9z-7uJyIW80-_gajJVwbmhyKwf4=" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="535" height="300"></embed></object>
This is kind of a good point, but I have a feeling that this will change over time. The internet is still fairly young remember, and there are still plenty of middle-aged/older people who have very limited exposure to it. As people of our age (20s/30s) get older, I think the fact that we've grown up with the internet will make the elderly a much bigger market.
Frenzy, a social network built on Dropbox
Yahoo Answers is regularly trolled and the source of some memes, such as "How is Babby Formed":

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-is-babby-formed
Did the bill pass already? The article is not clear atleast to me, since it mentions "draft of the bill".
Windows and Linux users can try this one (color logic was done by smarter people than me btw):
http://teppefall.com/products/colorspace

I know that the OS X build crashes. People complain about upgrades even when they are not paying.
Sounds like a similar content based strategy to Answers.com.

Are you familiar with All Top?
clickable: http://workola.com
Most of the monetary requirements are to stop scams - ie where millionaire's kid bills family company abroad for $100K and gets to stay in the US running his company. It's also the reason for requiring qualified investors - to stop this just being family money recycled.

Although it is a bit silly that if you invented say a malaria vaccine and had a $Bn in foreign sales you would be deported!
Here is what I found worked to get me to be willing to work extra, and it has worked for many of the my employees when I went to management, though of course people vary:

1. An interesting project so the work wasn't drudgery (knowing why it mattered to the company also helped a lot).

2. Incentives. This could be as general as stock options/employee stock purchase so that at least key employees (people able to indvidually affect the overall welfare of the company) are strongly motivated to see it succeed. Promises of bonuses tied to performance, or promotions down the line help, or comp time all help.

3. Food.

4. The boss should be there. At my last company, my boss was there most of the time if he asked us to work late. When I became a manager, I was almost always there if I asked my people to work late. It was a small company, the CEO was occassionally the one bringing in the take-out if several of us were asked to work long hours.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

"How will this software get my users laid"
Coffee, the New Shaky Commodity
1) About mixins and prototypes, exactly.

2) Yes, adding a syntax to easily change instance variable values is one of the most asked features. The tricky part is, we cannot do the following:

@foo = "bar"

Because that is pattern matching and in Erlang/Elixir, we cannot modify objects in place. The expression above needs to return a new object.

I was thinking about something like @{'foo : "bar"}, but I haven't decided yet. Suggestions are welcome. :D
Interesting that this post title doesn't properly spell Dropbox. Is that an anti-SEO measure?
It's only "wasted" time if you didn't learn anything while hacking it together, didn't have any fun, and gained nothing in redesigning it your way. But, to each his own...

Re: the loupe, yeah not sure exactly what you meant, but you can also change the magnification in DCM prefs.
Facebook to launch Groupon-inspired deals service in the "coming weeks"
And these conversions would be correct, wouldn't they? Radians are length ratios, and as such dimensionless anyway.
It's still mind-blowing to me that a politician could read!
Awesomesauce.... This makes it much more likely that I will take the plunge...
Twitter tells developers: stop building apps
The best way imho to do this is to ignore the individual variables and think about what your business goals and objectives are.

When you have a firm grasp of what those are you can then shape the metrics you are looking at to give you insight into how they effect your overarching goal.

Here's a fantastic piece by the ever amazing Avinash Kaushik that highlights this:

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2010/11/web-analytics-maturit...
10+ times? Good Lord, I'm not sure I could own up to that.
It was by design, what do you expect if you are "One of those people", that you can be harsh to everyone and everyone is supposed to be polite and delightful towards you?
Real hackers ship. Developing a project under an open source license should never be an excuse for vaporware, but unfortunately it often is. If GNU Free Call turns out to be any good--and the bar for being better than Skype on Linux or Android is low enough to be subterranean--I'll gladly use it, but I'm having a lot of trouble getting excited at this point.
It's the work of the justice system to punish people who commit crimes, not the job of anonymous people in the internet. Public mocking an humilliation is cruel and unusual punishment.
How exactly does the message delivery work?
Beer geek here, that's search term issues. If you're wanting traditional "beer colors" but not colors from logos and parties, try "malted barley" for an average yellow-orange beer color gamut, and "chinook hops" (a specific variety) for the greens you might expect.
Resources, need, and code audits are the reason to build a simple tool that does the job you want.
This might be from some clever and lazy programmer.. lol

291 printf("numbers from 1 to 1000");jondavidjohn Dec 31 '10 at 7:07
This might not be the most delicate thing to say, but maybe you feel this way because it's true?

For every Zuckerberg there are 20 guys that were near him that think they're great programmers/investors/entrepreneurs, but really they were just lucky to be in the right place/time.

Try a controlled experiment. Do something on your own, so you know it's all you.
On a related note, for anyone using TextMate, try hitting Cmd-Shift-C while editing css. It will popup a color picker right there for you. Really handy.
No, the bill was introduced last year and failed to have any action taken on it. This is the reintroduction, basically the very first step of a many-step process to become law.
Just to clarify things (I work on the iPhone app), the only thing being transmitted in plaintext are the names of the files, not the file data or username/password, and because we are using OAuth, no session cookie is getting sent so you can't steal credentials (a la firesheep). This is also not a technical limitation, we already use SSL in our app so sending metadata over https is a trivial change.

The only reason we send metadata unencrypted is for user experience issues: setting up SSL requires extra round trips , and because cell networks have a lot of latency this makes browsing your Dropbox slower. We are close to shipping our next release and we'll definitely be reviewing our policy before we ship, so what are people's feelings on this tradeoff?
I think a lot of this story can be explained by looking at the size of the contributor lists:

http://git-scm.com/about
http://wiki.darcs.net/DarcsTeam

Git is very polished because a lot of people have put a lot of time into it.
IBM Deal Drought Is Longest Since 2003, Cash at $11 Billion
It's going to hit Vancouver - the place is currently full of startup people that couldn't get US visas
Here's a decent collection I recently came across. (Sorry, kinda ad-filled site link.)
http://www.11points.com/Personal/11_Famous_People_Who_Were_i...

Who knew that at 30, Julia Child was a spy and Martha Stewart was a stockbroker?
5+ times... I've done that... blech
I think you're right, but I also believe there are a lot of different kinds of analytics use cases besides a consumer facing website, and to survive many of these players will probably specialize into those more enterprise-y roles.

Similarly, there is room for an upstart to attack those niches.
Review of The Rails 3 Way
Same here... but mostly just brings back the feeling of dread when I heard about the lawsuits :)

Hard drive failure the week the RIAA scanned the network == lucky break for broke college student
Experiencing an increase in traffic at your web site? Here's what to do next
37Signals' "Rework" in action
Doesn't this give investors a rather disproportionate amount of negotiating power, particularly for the 2nd round?

"Agree to our terms ... or lose your visa!"
Well the batteries are exactly the "electric backup" that was mentioned, although you're also right in that it was never designed to solve the entire casualty, only to last long enough to get other sources of power online.
The details are proprietary, so I don't know them. Having used the system, you validate your identity through sending the Votizen system your last name, city, and zip, which also identifies your specific elected officials to contact.
Blog Entries About Y Combinator Interview Experience
There is one key difference right now: Elixir is much better documented. Elixir also has a well defined Object Model which helps a lot understanding what is going on and makes meta programming easier. I also find Elixir data structure's syntax closer to Erlang's, but that is not necessarily something positive or negative.
This is honestly really cool. This reminds me of the Adobe Ideas iphone app that lets you import photos to get a color swatch (but still doesnt let you export them!!). I'm curious what you're using to host your app?
I am not speaking for PG, but as far as I understand it, foreigners can participate in YC and raise that $150K and go home if they want after the 3-month period.

There was never a pre-requisite that the founders had to be able to live/stay in the US.

Just that they have to be able to visit for at least 3 months.

So I don't see how that would affect it.
I have been trying it out. It is basically a private twitter with file sharing.

The app's website: http://frenzyapp.com/

So far I really like it.
I only have 3 entries on there right now. I'd like to have more. Anybody got any links?
World's first "computer program" was written by a woman
Microsoft Said to Stop Releasing New Zune Models as Demand Ebbs
Well, what do you think about

int main(void) {
printf(" 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8");
return 0;
}

I bet that 1000 was in binary and he was obviously checking the guy's CQ ( compSci Quotient)
>only about my contacts

So Alice has to install Google talk to call you, skype to call Bob and SIP to talk to Carol

Meanwhile Bob has microsoft phone to talk to ....
The answer depends largely on intent (is the bill meant to be exclusively for startups or are the terms more inclusive) and consequently, on how you define a 'startup'.

Let's assume a hypothetical company in operation for 15 years outside the US with > 100000$ in revenue from the US market. 3 American hires now effectively represent an immediate ticket to a Visa for the founders. If I might hazard a guess, there'll be thousands of companies clamoring for a piece of the pie.

If this is intended for, I stand corrected (and I must add I think the bill is revolutionary). But 'Startup' Visa might then be a bit of a misnomer.
Yeah, bummer. I just contacted support about this. Apparently they gave Apple the fix last week but are waiting for them to approve the update. If you're interested in this, hold off for a couple of days.
It's great to see that a book that inspires me in the world of business really does work. The guys at 37Signals aren't just all talk, they provide ideas that actually work as we can see. Thanks for the post!
The Annotated Scala Levels
I believe they are working on pcc (for various reasons).
It makes way too much sense.

Somebody is going to have to ruin some part of it for it to pass.

Yes I'm cynical. I've lived here too long.
The company doesn't have to be be a quote-unquote "Startup" to be a viable business employing U.S citizens. If a mom-and-pop operation moves to the US and employs US citizens, does it really matter if it is going to grow fast?
Reminds me of this Discworld quote:

"DID YOU SAY HUMANS PLAY IT FOR FUN?"
"Some of them get to be very good at it, yes. I'm only an amateur, I'm afraid"
"BUT THEY ONLY LIVE EIGHTY OR NINETY YEARS!"
- Death discusses the difficulties of bridge

http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/Popular/SciFi/Ter...
Wow....there is a lot of hyperbole generated on Techcrunch but this post is spot-on.

If this bill had been passed while I was still in the US, it definitely would have convinced me to stay.

The truth is, that if it is passed, I just might be inclined to go back - under the third category.

We will see what materializes though.

This could be pretty interesting either way.
Ofcourse everybody has a different top. But most stories like this one start with a descent position. But even the crappiest job can be a million miles away when you don't have access to education, internship, a career ladder.
Interesting idea, but I'm guessing the UI is severely broken on Firefox/Windows: all I'm seeing after a search is a long band of colours scrolling across a tiny part of my screen, with no apparent way to see what RGB values they are, which photo(s) they came from, or any of the other interesting-sounding things mentioned by other posters here. What should it look like?
Yes, excellent point. I was thinking about that as well. Just to expand on your comment, it's interesting to think more about the generational differences. I know that my generation (I'm in my mid-20s) was one of the first generation that had kids learning programming and starting internet businesses in high school.

My dad who is in his 70s now studied computer science, but he sees computer science as more of an academic area rather than practical.

I think you're right - the younger generation will continue cutting their teeth on the internet phenomenon throughout their 30s, 40s and (gasp) 50s.

Once again, just because most of the famous billionaires-by-age-25 are internet wunderkids doesn't mean that youth is a necessary ingredient for entrepreneurial success.
Maybe we should do a poll of HN? How many people know the details of algorithm design w/r to the Family of Bachmann–Landau notations?

"It's funny that you also use "real" engineers as an example, because we know that any practicing engineer does have a firm grasp of the fundamentals of their discipline: they had to take a licensing exam which ensured so."

But do they understand the fundamentals in the examples I provided? My Civil Engineering friend (with a PhD such) doesn't know the first thing about QCD and he'll gladly tell you that. It's all just physics though right?

edit poll is submitted.
Here is a link to the W3C spec:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/REC-exi-20110310/
Back and forth between you and votizen, is text messages. They ask you for your name and zip code, and if you're a registered voter. They verify that with voter registraion databases.

Then, if you are a registered voter, they tell you who your representative and senators are, and then they hand carry a print out of your support to the physical offices of those senators and representatives.

The last mile of the message delivery is in meat space, foot work.
I think that it's much less cruel than being placed into confinement with other criminals, a lot of who may actually be a threat to you and society.

Also, I'm just being a pedant now, but the "cruel and unusual" clause only applies to punishment meted out by government - same way that you can't claim that your parents violated your First Amendment rights by sending you to your room for calling your sister a fatty fatty fat fat at dinner, or whatnot.
Indulging in nostalgia can be a dangerous thing.
It's interesting to see this particular comment voted down without any replies...
We've learned a lot since then. Reactors have proper containment vessels and negative (instead of positive) void coefficients these days.

And heck, as bad as Chernobyl was, they managed to operate the rest of the reactors for years after the accident.
That's an interesting idea. Could be useful for people traveling with iPod touches.

Yes, I use and love TestFlight. They really have a great product.
It seems somewhat strange if a degree is required for the startup visa - is that the case?
If the founders are working in their own company, contributing to the local economy, is this really a problem for the U.S?
Hidden warning message found in Samsung’s Galaxy tablet
I think success has nothing to do with age, but everything to do with attitude - persist, learn, grow yourself and success will find you!

I insist, always have a goal though - something almost impossible to reach that will keep you going for many years
The skill of strategy analysis: Uncovering company priorities
You don't need a work visa to get into to YC. They require you to move to the Bay Area for the duration of the scheduled YC programme, but don't have conditions on where the company operates from thereafter (I believe they prefer you to incorporate in the US, but I doubt that's a hard requirement).

YC lasts three months, which is a lot easier from an immigration standpoint than moving here to work long term.

It's still conceivable that YC might become more attractive to foreigners, because the $150k would allow them to apply for a Startup Visa. I doubt that would affect YC's application policies, however.
Personally, I'd prefer Dropbox being quicker to Dropbox being more private. But my guess is most of the techie-crowd will disagree. Also, my guess is most of the non-techie crowd won't understand the issue, but will assume filenames are not able to be snooped on.
> i.e. 100 miles away they measured 0.2 mSv/h which, if we assume a r-squared dependency.

You can't assume an r-squared dependency, as the radiation they were measuring came from the radioactive steam that had drifted out to sea (i.e. the "airborne radioactivity"). It was not from the Fukushima-Daiichi site directly (after all, there's many different radiation monitoring stations nearby that have much better indications of general area radiation levels).

In fact you proved yourself wrong! If being a mile away from the reactor gave you 2 Sv/hour, and no one lives past 7 Sv, that's only 3.5 hours anyone could survive, and there have been workers at the site for days now.
As much as I dislike GoDaddy, I've used them in the past and it was fine and affordable. FYI, if you do use GoDaddy (and some other providers), you need to specify an "intermediate" certificate since their own certificate is not directly trusted by root CAs. This is transparent to the end user as long as you set it up correctly on your box. More here: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=d_r

NameCheap, my current registrar of choice, gives out free SSL certs with domain registrations (and I think transfers.) Haven't tried using their certs yet, though.
Anyone know whats taking so long for Google Voice to become available in Canada? How are you planning to compete with free when it is available? I'd love to see conference calls and virtual programmable ivr as a added service.

Calling land lines is soo year 2000. I need a local number and a SIP number that forwards to my phone or takes a voicemail if i don't answer.
This is so crucially important. Even for an avid follower of politics, it's astounding how something like this can get bogged down in partisan politics.
You are 100% wrong regarding what the problem is. Username & password != file metadata
Votizen has been doing a lot of the political push on the startup visa issue. And, there's a number of big super angel/VC names that are attached to the movement as well. A lot of those guys are pretty connected. I'm sure that helped.
I _definitely_ prefer the speed/smaller bandwidth footprint over filename security. I use Dropbox as a utility for sharing, not a mission critical thing that stores sensitive business or client files (or most particularly, filenames).

I understand that some people do, and How this could be important to them.
Ray Kroc's book Grinding It Out is a fantastic account of his work creating McDonalds. He definitely did his best work later in life, and proof that you can make your mark at any point in your life. It's a great read.

Frank Lloyd Wright, though successful early in his life, had all kinds of rises and falls in his career. He's also a terrific story about Renaissance in your own life.
Poll: Are you familiar with Bachmann-Landau notation/Are you a good developer?
How many people know the details of algorithm design w/r to the family of Bachmann–Landau notations? Scott_s and I are having a friendly debate concerning software engineers that know Bachmann-Landau as a prerequisite for competency as a developer.

Here's the thread in question - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322716
Yes, I know the entire family in excruciating detail (it helps that I have them over for Thanksgiving). My favorite is small-Omega, he's so cute!
Yes, I know and use at least big-O daily, but I really didn't know there were others.
Yes, I have a passing familiarity with the notation. Maybe I learned it once, but I get along fine without it.
No, Bachmann-Landau? What is that? Some kind of legislation?
I've heard stories that Steve Jobs can often be a condescending asshole. I'm certain the same is true for other highly accomplished folks as well; if condescension were linked to confidence, wouldn't highly accomlished individuals such as this be amazingly generous and helpful?

I think the bit about superiority may be true: it is a way to demonstrate superiority, but I don't believe that immediately indicates low confidence.
UpNext Scores $560k From Chris Sacca And Others
Awesome - I got a 403 area code, finally! The front page should make it more clear that there is an extended free trial. .
It doesn't matter if it's effective or not (I agree that's it's not), people vent because they feel it helps them. Feelings are generally stronger than logic, even when they lead you down the wrong path. Most people are ruled by their emotions, not by their rational mind. Showing someone a study that says their feelings are wrong, will rarely, if ever, convince them to change how they feel.

BTW, I'm not a venter, and I wasn't talking about me when I said some people.
Clickable link http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322716
One thing I've seen done here is copy paste the method into a new name (usually with a leading underscore) and then make the appropriate changes. It's not hooked up to the rest of the system (but that wouldn't have worked anyway), and you can still compile it and poke at it.
Is there a lesson to be learned here? When creating a new product, should one choose to code in a language that has a larger talent pool to select from?
makes me think about Morgan Freeman. Its pretty hard to find pictures of him young.
I don't really see why you'd need that. In those sorts of circumstances I'd either add the new version of the function with a new name, or rename the function and add an oldFunc = undefined line to keep the type checker happy.