skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think we have far worse service than the US. North America lags parts of Europe and Asia by a wide margin, but I fail to see how the US is ahead of Canada.

Rural areas here are often underserved and it's no secret we are probably as bad as the US on that front. But worse? I doubt it.

My family in Barnwell, Alberta (pop. 600) has at least DSL these days, and possibly even cable, delivering streaming video and all that without any trouble. There are more remote locations so maybe it's not representative but it's the only info I have personally verified on that.

I live in BC and use Shaw's network to transfer at least 100 gigs per month, every month, at about 15mbps down and about 0.5 to 2 mbps up (like everyone else in North America). This costs $40/mo or something like that. I've done this for over 7 years and have received exactly 1 email from Shaw to inform me that I'm exceeding my limit. The email politely asked that I not do so and I ignored it without hearing anything further.

When mobile I use my phone as a 3G modem tethering my notebook and/or iPad to it using BlueTooth or WiFi. I have 6 GB of transfer each month and regularly use 2 to 6 GB each month. Speeds are pretty good at around 2 to 3 mbps down and something typically abysmal up. I pay $20/mo for the data service.

I have a choice in service on both fronts. Not enough choice for my liking, but a choice nonetheless.

So how is Canada worse than the US? I think we need to establish that the situation is indeed poorer here than in the US before we ask why.

Looks like the % of population online is similar: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats14.htm#north

Any other relevant data on this?
Is there any reason SCEA wants to file in CA other than making it inconvenient for Hotz?
Easiest way: what have they done in the past. Past performance and future performance and all that.
Drepper was correct to close the bug, but for the wrong reason. The correct reason to close the bug is that the original version (the one that produces the non-uniform distribution of permutations) is how the function is documented as working. From the strfry man page:

strfry creates a pseudorandom anagram of a string, replacing
the input with the anagram in place. For each position in the
string, strfry swaps it with a position in the string selected
at random (from a uniform distribution).

This only produces a uniform distribution of permutations if n^n/n! is an integer, where n is the length of the string. This is only true for n = 1 and n = 2.

(At least that is what the current man page says...I don't know if it said that in 2007 when the bug was filed).
I don't know if you're trying to denounce the scientific theory of evolution or if the question you're really trying to get at is, "What is the universally applicable cosmic meaning of our existence?" If it's the latter. then I'd suggest to you that the problem lies in the question.

As far as your past versus present comments go, I cannot tell whether your indulging in philosophical navel gazing about the Problem of Induction, or if you actually have a particular scientific theory in mind that you think doesn't stand up to the evidence. In the former case, you can quickly reason that accepting any scientific principle takes as much faith as picking your nose, which renders the conversation meaningless and contradicts your given definition of faith to begin with. After all, you don't know that the universe wasn't created 15 seconds ago with all of our memories intact. If it's the latter case, and you really believe that there are some important underlying assumptions in a specific area of science that scientists have not stated up front, then I think the best thing to do would be to contribute your insights to the scientific community by writing a paper on it. If you can demonstrate previously unknown shortcomings in a widely accepted scientific theory, then you will be listened to and heralded. If you cannot, then your vague accusations that scientists overstate their assumptions and thereby use "faith" to back up their research are baseless.
Cool find, but it's for a different audience. I'm aiming for people who want a quick data entry form to generate the barcode image. Your link is for a software library. Apples and oranges...
>>There are plenty of free (paper) newspapers that are funded by advertising revenue. I don't see any reason in principle why it couldn't work for the online newspapers, who have lower overheads.

(a) IMHO free news is generally crap
(b) you'll need some facts to support the "low overhead/online advertising" argument. Empirical evidence suggests that is not the case. There are too many advertising destinations for online ads where there are (or were) relatively few destinations for print ads.
Profiling Android NDK Code
How to Customize or Minimize the Ribbon in Word 2010?
How to Customize or Minimize the Ribbon in Word 2010 ?
I think HN broke his site, btw. I can't access or ping it. Will be bookmarking for later to read -- I wish him the best!
I really try hard not to buy Sony anymore. Not fanatical about it, but why support a company that does this, along with installing rootkits and other behaviour of course.
Being a biz founder I picked up technical skills and built a crappy (MVP of MVP's) prototype to pitch to tech founders. If the non-tech founder can't even learn enough code to get anything built then I would be concerned for their level of dedication for their own idea.

Even though my prototype was terrible and even made the other founders laugh, they could see my level of dedication and my ability to get something done.

To me being a biz founder we need to be the scapegoat of the startup, no pride all humility and can sell the shit out of anything.
EBay to Acquire GSI Commerce for $2.4 Billion in Cash
Should High-Frequency Trading Be Banned?
I really disagree with your point on the community valuing monkeypatching so much. Yes, it's a tool. Yes, it has it's place. No, it's not the favorite tool in our belt. And no, it's not something you should use always. At least, IMHO.
I think the real reason most people are mocking color is that they're turned off to large funding rounds. That's really it.

The product: not bad. If you can actually network with it (and I have), then it's actually quite interesting.

The domain name: Not expensive compared to the money they raised.

The funding round: Not a shady play, it seems like a few big partners are just genuinely excited about the product.

So all I'm left with is that people don't like the number $41m, and now they're doing anything they can to to justify that initial judgement by tearing at an otherwise good product.
I want to buy your old/dead SaaS application
Hello everybody, I'm been in the e-commerce field for awhile now and I'm looking to branch out. I'm looking for any up and running SaaS app that you started, but it didn't work out the way you wanted. I would like to buy it and take it off and your hands and try to breath new life into it. This is win/win I can pick of a site on the cheap and you can recoup some of your costs and not have to watch your baby die. Let me know if you got something.

Marc
agreed. Hilarious and brilliant!
Gah! Again IE 7 Fail! That's it I'm quiting this job and going somewhere where they don't care which browswer I use!
If you change your format, you can expect some temporary attrition, but you can't extrapolate that to a constant decline until, well, it becomes one.

I'm pretty potty mouthed on Twitter and have lost quite a few followers over the years but I look at it as guaranteeing that the people who do stay following are exactly the sort of people who I want following me. In the same way, it seems like the sort of people who buy things from AppSumo's offers are the ones staying on the list.. so getting rid of the whiners and non-buyers is a good thing.
Ask HN: List of tech/startup events/conferences?
Where can I find a list of tech/startup events/conferences in the SF/bay/valley area for a specific time period?

I tried Convore: https://convore.com/hacker-news/ask-hn-where-can-i-find-a-list-of-techstartup-eventsconferences-in-the-sfbayvalley-area-for-a-specific-time-period/
Sorry, I meant "if there are sufficiently stroppy senior developers who can knock some sense into the other developers, it is almost never the programmers who decide to incur technical debt".

But, sadly, even that isn't true.

It really comes down to the complexifers vs the simplifiers. The complexifers generate technical debt simply by existing. They can't not generate technical debt, because they love complexity and create it to the full extent that they are capable. Thus getting rapidly out of their depth† and hence the tar pit analogy.

NB: architects are usually, but not always complexifers.

†since there is that old saw about debugging being twice as hard as writing the code, therefore if you write code to your limits you by definition aren't smart enough to debug it.
Hi,

Your keynote was awesome. i have to talk about Ruby ( language + community ) at a code camp in few days. And i have been inspired by things you said :)
thanks for this keynote.
waiting for more !
Pretentious, much? If you don't like it, flag it and move on.
or distinct and even, then guess 68 (think this was an old david blaine trick if i recally correctly)
They may be losing cheap cusomters today, but maybe not tomorrow. Much like OSS, cheap design comes in all different ranges of quality. But no one pays attention to the bad stuff, but will take notice of the good stuff.

Startups will then look at the fact that they spend more money on design than SW tools, yet their competitor just spent $1k for all the design on their site and is doing really well. The only ppl who know they were using 99designs are others in the industry.

Over time this will disrupt the design industry (at least for SW products) -- and I don't think it can be stopped. But I don't think its necessarily a bad thing at all.
There is a PR-heavy video as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfFMpO4f3YM
I find these posts about legal proceedings much more interesting when the facts are stated with actual links to the relevant information.
It's cute, but why do people buy domains for things like this?
Some harsh realities of being an entrepreneur
In such a situation, my understanding is that the more you say, the better. But talk with your wallet.
Groklaw is consistently amazing like that. PJ manages to make complex cases intelligible without dumbing things down so much that you feel like it's just an editorial. Of course there is editorializing, but it's mostly to point out how crazy some of the stuff is that's happening. It feels like getting the opinion of an expert instead of punditry with an agenda.

Oh, and PJ's earlier coverage of this case: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110322114658410
Yeah i know a lot of people rant about monkey patching. It's one of those things the community does but doesn't want to promote. Monkey Patching is the recreational drug of the Ruby Community.
I don't trust a designer with a malformed link on his homepage.
Have you ever actually ever tried that? Unless you know people on the inside, finding the right person within a company to contact is virtually impossible. And if you leave the info in the generic contact form, you can be sure it gets lost.
"What do you think of the suggestion made by the author of the article that, even if we had IPv6 everywhere, we'd still put a lot of networks behind NAT, for reasons of security."

It's utter bullshit. Stateful firewalls will of course continue to exist; doing Network Address Translation in addition will be completely pointless.
I once emailed Daniel Bernstein and received this fun reply before my email was let through:

Professor Bernstein has asked me to reject all bulk mail messages. But I'm a rather primitive computer program, and I'm not sure whether your message is bulk mail.

If you reply to this notice, you are (1) acknowledging that Professor Bernstein does not want to receive bulk mail; (2) confirming that your message is not part of a bulk mailing; and (3) agreeing to pay Professor Bernstein $250 if your message is part of a bulk mailing.

I won't look at the contents of your reply. A simple OK is fine, as long as it's sent to the address shown above.

Lets just say knowing his history, I probably wouldn't spam the man. (I didn't get a reply, btw).
Does Japan have a DMCA-style law?

Even if it does, I'd guess that SCEA has a better (bigger?) team of lawyers than SCEJ when it comes to this sort of case.
http://lanyrd.com/

http://startupdigest.com/
Googles text-only cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Actually the NYT has a pretty sweet tech lab with a crew of guys very knowledgeable about this kind of stuff. Some of the stuff I saw in there was years ahead what I've seen elsewhere.

Of course, actually getting buy in from the organization as a whole is the hard part. Technology is always the easy piece.
Talking about how tired you are of people talking about how tired they are of hearing people talk about Color is so OVER!
Best of David Cohen's blog
Not sure if this is an issue with your site or a limitation of MeCard, but having a single name field (instead of first/last) doesn't seem to work right.

I just created a contact for myself, and tried scanning it into my Android phone, and it just put my whole name into the "First Name" field.

But anyway it's a really cool idea - I like it..
I paid around $50 for my RAZR in 2006 (with a contract). As a phone, it's superior to my iphone 4. Doesn't do the other smartphone stuff nearly so well, though.
I was there and I can certify that every comment we got from the attendees about the conference, but specially your keynote, was super positive. I think lots of people started caring more about their tool's communities after RubyConf UY 2010.
4.1 billion usd please!
Appeal. textaligncentaur.com is more likely to get clicks from Hacker News or Reddit than camerondaigle.com.

If you mean why spend the money... I'd say $10 is worth it for the number of people that will probably click through to his own site.
Canada.zappos.com to shut down April 1
How about a tax on capital gains that is inversely proportional to the time the financial instrument is held?

The biggest cost HFT imposes on the world is the brain drain - there are so many super intelligent people working in the arms race that is electronic trading. Imagine if all of those smart people were doing something productive instead of helping people buy and sell options 1 microsecond faster.
I actually had a hard time trying to find the app in the Android Market, because there's only one search term and it's really generic. Colr would probably have been easier.
I was on NPR today talking about this [1], and while I was the least insightful guest, I think that a lot of it boils down to still thinking like a business with 35% margins and huge headcount, rather than a scrappy underdog (that for some reason has a huge paper-distribution network in the Metro NY area tacked on).

[1] http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/03/28/paywall-debate
And what if that fails to fix the problem?
So he just didn't see any future at Oracle? :-)
Why wasn't StartupBritain.org a hyperlink? That was the most interesting part of the post to me.
Great twist, I was hating you already in the middle of the paragraph and then! You should blog :)
I bypass the pay wall on my browser simply by going to the url address bar, removing the “&gwh=[long-alphanumeric-code]” at the end of the address and hitting enter
I unsub'd after that specific email with a comment that it was too spammy. He got back right away saying:

"Totally agree.

Working on toning that down big-time.

Hope you'll give us another chance some day."

Me: "I'll give you another chance right now, keep it Hacker News grade, and I'll stay. :)"

Him: "Agreed. Short and sweet."

So I resigned up. Lesson learned: You can repair damage. Some customers know you are human and will give you another go.
kevin rose at #1 in authority? hmm ...
Thanks! That definitely adds context to the post. It's funny but I can definitely see some people not caring for the type of humour.
Ruboto: Ruby on Android
Someone parodied it already: http://www.cockupbritain.org.uk/
OT: Jason, the top navigation panel's CSS on your blog seems messed up (in both Firefox and Chrome) : http://skitch.com/hrishimittal/rabki/jlb

It's nothing major, but people might start doubting the publication revolution you're bringing on :-P
I had a friend (who shall remain nameless ;P) that once, while very drunk, was lying in bed wanting to throw up. Getting up to go to the bathroom was a very painful thought, however, but thankfully he remembered something important: he was primarily programming in Java at the time, and therefore he didn't need to worry as he had garbage collection on his side. Needless to say the result when he woke up was pretty bad.
Has any one of these "don't link to us" clauses ever been enforced?
If the non-tech founder can't even learn enough code to get anything built then I would be concerned for their level of dedication for their own idea.

---------------------

I think thats a little much.

Part of being a good business man is knowing where you weaknesses lie, and knowing how to plug those holes in your game. So why would you waste valuable time trying to pick up a skill that you're probably not interesting in having and will probably not put to use, when you can spend that time raising money to hire a developer or get one to come in with you and handle the development?
I hope it does catch on, because until it does, carrier-grade NAT is going to make the lives of security professionals and location-based providers miserable.

To address the shortage of available IP addresses, carriers are going to start giving out RFC1918 (private) IPv4 addresses to their customers. And the NAT could occur anywhere; you might be a customer in San Francisco but the closest public IP gateway could be in New York. (Yes, we have seen this.)

This is going to cause two serious problems for businesses:

(1) Location-based services are going to break. LBS uses the public IP address as the primary key in the database.

(2) DoS protection that is IP-based (counting request rates from particular IPs) is going to break. I suspect a lot more sites that we all know and love are going to have a difficult time staying up after CGNAT is pervasive.
2011 Linux.com Gurus Announced
You're treating all digital content as interchangeable. The New York Times is inherently more expensive to put together than Gawker. Gawker's business model produces enough revenue to turn a profit, but there's no guarantee that the same would hold for the New York Times. There is no such proof that an outfit that puts out the type and quality of journalism that the Times does can be sustained on online advertising dollars.
Nope, true story with speculation added.
Cause we're building startups. Period.

If you were to open a farm in the midwest, would you really hire an IBM sales rep to sell your farm products who never milked a cow before?
One powerful concatenative language is Factor: http://factorcode.org/.

The implementation rocks, although the creator is now also sucked by the Google Vortex.
I think that the aspect of "no-OS" is also pretty much outdated on the current generations of consoles, with each having a Dashboard or an XMB just a button press away. And you probably don't want to maintain the code to connect to PSN or the Xbox-aquivalent for each and every game anymore.

Similar the controllers: the Dualshock 2 is not much different from the Dualshock 3, and the Xbox-Controller, while having a different shape has a quite similar button placement (except for the left analog stick), just with letters instead of symbols. So does my cheapo-USB gamepad.

The thing with "each and every is the same" also died with the PS2 and Xbox360 having a harddrive or not, which I imagine is a rather significant difference.

What I think it often boils down to is competent developers/teams. There are many crappy console-only games with poor performance and low fun-value, as there are also well-done multi-platform games. Single-platform releases are rather unusual these days anyway. I bet Naughty Dog could also come up with a kick-ass port of Uncharted 2 for PC and possibly also Xbox360.

But anyway, thanks agavin, I quite liked the series of articles. I'm even considering playing Crash, now that I know how much awesome work you guys did.
I stopped caring about appsumo because the deals started to suck and be products using appsumo to make sales, whereas before it was products I wanted and the discount made me think I HAVE TO GET THIS. I don't read their emails any more :(
How to Use the iPad 2's Smartcover on the iPad 1
And what if by broadening your appeal, you alienate your current readers without actually attracting any that you don't currently have?

Almost anytime a layman throws out an "obvious" solution for a problem, it is not the stupidity of the experts trying to solve the problem that has kept them from using the "obvious" solution.

This was horribly evident when people this summer kept coming up with terrible ideas for capping the BP oil well based on junk science and engineering, but it is often evident on business matters as well.
Some courts are more favorable in some areas. CA must be the most favorable when it comes to copyright cases.
Don't forget Rob Pike. :-)
An interesting turn of events. However a ruling on this will indicate that if sony wants to sue anyone for hardware hacking, they will have to do it in the jurisdiction of where the person lives, not where sony choses.
Can we speculate good amount of boost to Mirah?
So the NYT spent 1% of their revenue on a project to define their entire future business model? Sounds cheaper than most "lean" startups.
Sort of. What i'm proposing is a combination of CHAP based on mutual secrets and the host IP and key checks SSH does, and after that PKI. (Though SSH doesn't record the IP address of the destination unless you explicitly use the IP, so the DNS address can still be spoofed)
I think you might be missing the core of my point. They ARE big gains for some people... Just not professional designers in Western countries. Globalization at work.

Check out the top designers in the system ( http://blog.99designs.com/tag/top-designers/ ). Note the nationalities and the cost-of-living in those countries. These guys aren't entering hundreds of these contests out of desperation-- they are making a great living. It looks like the good ones are winning 12-20% of the contests they enter.
Small Businesses: Start Your (Marketing) Engines
Does he really needed to finish the article with “Sign up to AppSumo.com to see what our new emails look like.”?

It feels so cheap. He should have added the e-mail he was talking about, I use AppSumo and I remembered the e-mail in question, but I bet many people didn't (and they will not register because of that cheap plug!).

edit: punctuation and grammar.
You're missing the point - it's about proving dedication. Building a prototype, no matter how crappy, tells potential tech cofounders that you're less likely to bail when you see something shinier.

That said, raising money (or investing your own) would indeed serve the same purpose.
I'm a NT co-founder trying to become a technical founder, so this is an interesting read. To be honest, I think the most value that someone like that can bring is a network. If you can get introductions, some PR, and some buzz, then you can get enough cash from sales to buy some of the other necessities.
The RSA Hack: Don't Overreact
Could one of the mods please change the title from "ACM is 95% original content" to "CACM is 95% original content" or alternatively "Communications of the ACM is 95% original content".
I expect we'll be seeing Google Emacs join the Apps suite.
Mobile Boilerplate: a best practice baseline for your mobile Web app