skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At that point, why not just transfer the money yourself? I get that gift cards > cash for gifts, but if you're worried about the issues you mentioned, you might as well give the person the cash and tell them you know this great new restaurant you think they'd love. It's like you're saying, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if there were gift cards that didn't have these drawbacks?" It exists. It's money.
Unlikely. The problem is at the source. Sometimes the "size charts" are off by as much as 4" in the waist size, based on my observations.
Well I hung out with the stoners and freaks, which incidentally was one of the largest groups. I pretty much did give in to the peer pressure, but I was fortunate that A) I had a computer at home and B) I came up right as the web was taking off, so I learned as I went, thereby neatly bypassing the need for academic credentials. I did eventually finish a CS degree, but it was irrelevant to my career path.

My story is more one of taking advantage of opportunities, rather than overcoming obstacles.
You do not hate to shop. You hate the fact that you do not know how to decide what to pick.
Chances are that basing your startup on Scala/Lift is probably going to be a net plus for you when recruiting new staff. It says a lot about the technology culture at your company that you are using a functional language. It's also something of a weeder. If an engineer can't wrap his head around Scala in short order, you probably don't want to hire him. My guess is you'll probably have to hire a lot less frequently than a typical Java shop.
Clickable link: http://xlrun.com
Not to sound luddite, but I hope it won't have changed much. Same for Hacker News. IMHO, it's perfect as is.

EDIT: the first time around, I couldn't read the linked article, as the server was HN'ed. Now, having read the article, I wholeheartedly agree. I do hope, that if YC scales much further, it will expand to Europe. I feel I shouldn't have to move to the valley to create a successful startup. For instance, my hometown is a sister city to Palo Alto, surely there's some opportunity to share the love.
Yes, but why are head and body not required? Just because a page validates without them does not make them superfluous in all cases.
Me: "Kazzafi"

Google: Did you mean "Gaddafi"?

Hmm, I think I have a potential solution...
RailsWizard Reimagined (open source Rails application template builder)
The only review I need that has ads everywhere on the page, and is trying to advertise the link to bring in more traffic.
This looks neat, but being a DIY kind of dude, I'm not sure what this is for. I'm probably missing something--I think I know "what" it is, just not "why". Can anyone give me a brief rundown?
Git-bigfiles - Git for big files
One of the best things about this (and other irish & co. projects)are the explanations and docs. This team always makes reading and understanding what's going on behind the scenes entertaining. It's immensely valuable to a relative newbie like myself.
Get ScreenSnapr to Capture and Upload Screenshots - only $6
ScreenSnapr is a light-weight Windows application that allows you to capture screen shots quickly and effectively, as well as uploading and sharing them with a few simple keystrokes. Once ScreenSnapr is installed on your PC, just press Ctrl+1, drag out the area that you want to capture, and the screenshot will be taken and automatically uploaded to the ScreenSnapr servers.
That's only true if you pay them out of your Paypal account or linked bank account. If you want to pay with a credit card, you have to pay a fee.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-receiving...
Someone who is "a seasoned java dev who trained themselves in Scala already" will have a track record of Getting Stuff Done of course. Also see http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
Ask HN: Is there a list of all the YC-backed founders with education details?
I'd be curious to see a list of all the founders of YC-backed companies, particularly with info where they went to school and the degree they got (or didn't). Is there a correlation between the level of education of the founders and the success of a startup?
Not any more. "Our fees are now the same for all accounts - Personal, Premier, and Business."

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-fees-outs...
How many billions do people spend on gift cards each year? Must be a multi-billion market...and that's constrained by the fact that with normal gift cards merchants must actually opt-in to start offering gift cards. With this it seems like they're able to expand the market by offering "gift cards" to places that haven't opted in or signed up. That's brilliant.
Can't Redis run on Windows proper? I thought I've seen actual Windows builds of Redis?
Squirrel - Timesheet manager for Windows
How Nintendo is reacting: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/33595/Interview_Reggie_Fi...

"I would separate out the true independent developer vs. the hobbyist," says Fils-Aime. "We are absolutely reaching out to the independent developer."

"Where we've drawn the line is we are not looking to do business today with the garage developer. In our view, that’s not a business we want to pursue."
If you are running RC2, you won't need to download any update, because there is no version info to change. All the version numbers in the release candidates just say "4.0".

Mozilla already uses binary diffs for updates, and we already release security and stability updates about once a month.
Me: "Hey dude, there's this great new Mexican place on your block. Here's $30. Enjoy." = free

Me: "Hey dude, check out this website that's going to tell you about this great new Mexican place on your block. Here's $30. Enjoy." = not free
I rather suspect the segment of people who would rather ship dirty laundry via UPS and have it replaced with different clothing rather than just doing their laundry is comparatively small. The people who can afford such a luxury can generally afford to have a washer and dryer in their residence, or at least a straight-up laundry service.

Also, your idea would require used clothing to be laundered and shipped out to other customers. There's probably room for an online Goodwill, but that's literally what it would have to be.
> You're doing your part in the greatest productivity revolution in history :)

Yeah, but we still have to deal with the anti-programmers who create negative productivity with their grotty code before we're in the clear :)
I used to use Ubuntu from 8.04 to 10.10 until a regular security update left the system in an unbootable state. Since I didn't feel like reinstalling my system from scratch I went back to Windows 7.
HTC: 0, Linux Core Dev: 1
True. But my point is that tons of people already use gift cards even though you and I can agree it may not be a rational choice. There's something about the psychology of giving/receiving cash that our culture has not really accepted. It's not thoughtful enough even if you suggest where the recipient spends the money. If they can make Gift Rocket socially acceptable (by playing on the inherent problems with gift cards today) then I think it could be big.
From a validation perspective you're totally right.

But browsers are supposed to create HEAD and BODY elements if your markup doesn't include them. However some do not: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/05/12/autohead-my-firs...

This means everyone's code that does `document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0]` will fail in some cases. Because that is rather risky, we decided to retain these optional elements..

The closing tags for </body> and </html> however...
> The point is not that we are superheroes for knowing how to program, but rather than learning to program is so cool that it's like having a super power, for what it enables you to build and do

Programming isn't a super power. It isn't even like a super power. It's a skill.

It's like any other skill: when you're good at it, it allows you to do things nobody else can do, and you make difficult and challenging tasks look effortless.

I know you say you're standing away from elitism, but things like "even "product guys" should learn how to program" certainly smacks of it. There's no doubt, programming computers is pretty astounding. But so is cold-calling someone and convincing them to give you thousands of dollars for software they may never have heard of. So is building and maintaining the hardware that modern software runs atop.
just great product. looks beautiful and feels amazing.
That may be so, but how readily can you automate server setup? I am getting pretty handy with ubuntu VMs plus apt to get from a fresh install to "entire stack installed and configured" in an afternoon. The fact that nearly all of the software is available freely online speeds things up for me.
All of us involved in the project are pretty much "DIY" kind-of people :)

What we hope people do is to read through the source to see why we made the choices for defaults and pick and choose what they like and keep using them.

There are lots of defaults that were eye-opening to me that were suggested by the scores of contributors to the project.
You don't want to hold out for the flattery and the promise of drinks afterwards? Negotiation is an important skill.
Firefox 4 now available for download
Good points. After all, "shipping is a feature".
Excellent customer service requires fixing broken windows
I was asking for additional info because I can't reproduce the problem in Opera (11/OS X).
Please do not editorialise titles like this.
The Python services probably end up getting rewritten at some point but I want to focus on delivering a product. Right now the Python services can easily be deployed as the don't have that many dependencies on other libs. All further development will be done in Clojure though.

Of course most things can bee pooled into a multiprocessing pool. It's just a matter of the pain you have to endure while doing so. For some tasks it's a straight forward process while for other tasks it can be pretty painful. The crawler is IO-bound but most of the collaborative filtering algorithms are CPU-bound and having nice concurrency constructions in the language is a bonus.
Yeah, but who will then take care of repairing our bicycles?
Ask HN: Would you share your story of a failed startup, please?
I am working on a new project. I think it could be of interest for the public.
It's a place where you can share your story about your failed startup. It will be a detailed review of the project from its start to its end. There is a good approach to think that there is no bad experience. You are not a loser if you have a startup that didn't pay out with money or success. You with your experience can be a more valuable professional than the one who never faced all the hurdle of developing and promoting a startup. More than that, if there are only fewer than 10% of startups take become successful, why there is so little information on the remaining 90%? Together we can fill in this source providing images, statistics, interviews, images. It can then help new entrepreneurs make their decisions more wisely as well as it will make the whole image of startups life clearer. I have almost done the design and coding of the site. I have more ideas for this site to implement when I start it. I would like to hear from you if you have your story to share. And another question to everybody - would you be interested in getting valuable information on this topic? If you would like to contact me directly, please do that over email: sergey@skible.com Any ideas and suggestions are appreciated!
Couple interesting things about that graph:

1. Entrepreneurship doesn't even register.

2. I love how the assumption is that a Harvard MBA makes you incapable of doing anything but bringing down the economy.
From your own link:

Free when the money comes from PayPal balance or bank account.
2.9% + $0.30 USD
when the money comes from a debit or credit card or PayPal Credit
(the sender decides who pays this fee).
php sux. Thats what he wants to say in a nice way.
Just like Jason Calacanis says: "If you have to spell your name over the phone several times, then you need to get rid of the name."

But again, I am not American, so I might be missing something in the name.
Generally speaking, what kind of skills are needed for security jobs?
I think learning from the mistakes of others is a smart thing to do. That being said, if you're confident that you know what your customers want then you should release it as soon as possible. Also, the sooner you can get feedback from customers, the sooner you can make improvements. If you wait for your competitor to release, you might be making your tweaks at the same time the competitor who released is making their tweaks but they're making tweaks based on feedback from their customers and you're guessing.
Compared to WEKA (http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/), waffles look inferior. Weka has a much wider variety of classifiers and filters to play with.
Very cool site! I'd love to see a few more "out-there" patterns.
Interesting. So if I understand correctly, the goal is largely to promote guidelines that improve compatibility and performance?
It's impossible to compete with a national wireless carrier due to a multi-billion dollar barrier to entry in the form of a spectrum license.
An Idiot-Proof Way To Make Email Groups
it sounds more like they chose not to use it just because it's not cool, not because of any technical merits.
Thanks for the helpful and straightforward response.

When you say designs, you mean html/css/js -- everything client side -- right? I assume so, but being a noob means constantly asking dumb questions.
Write once, run everywhere - How to avoid maintaining both CPU and GPU code
Anecdotally, the Adsense revenue for my old startup also collapsed in late 2008/early 2009, from a peak of $1.00 cpm to $0.17 for exactly the same ad and roughly the same mix of traffic.

We went through a similar transition, although we started ours much earlier. If you make your page full of ads, you should be able to scrape together $1 cpm pretty easily, but sell extra content to a good game on that same page and it'll yield $10+ cpm - my latest game is a $50 cpm. That's a pretty serious difference!
The cynic in me agrees, but I think it's reasonable to believe that if the public outcry were enough, regulators would stop this. So why are we sitting here upvoting cynical comments on HN rather than mailing representatives?
In the past, the google challenge results were unfair:

Your bot was ranking based on a single game against a minority of other bots and on a random map.

At least they should have let the top 100 ranked bots played against other multiple times.
This is true in a market with few existing regulations and a low barrier to entry, in other words the complete opposite of the mobile market.
I've heard multiple cases of people selling Slashdot accounts with interesting/low user ID's on eBay, so clearly there's some market for that. It's a stupid product, but clearly the market is there.
So many people I know (my gf included) do this, both buying for themselves or for the men in their lives.
The problem lies in costs. A monopolistic company keeps costs down due to scale. Any other business cannot enter the market on a competitive level because they cannot meet the same price structures.
Seems like you're arguing against gift cards in general. $100b worth of gift card spending suggests other people feel differently. Maybe you're not the target market?

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1005802
Definitely check out appharbor.com, I think their goal is to be a "git push" away from deploying any .NET (F#/C#/VB.NET) app. I've not used them though.
that already massive amounts :)
Actually I don't visit webservers with a uniform random distribution. I come back to some frequently (eg. my bank, HN, BBC News, ...) Maybe that's just me though.
my email is in my profile. pop me a mail if you would like to chat.
It's a lot more like being able to read and write in medieval Europe.
Not so sure about that.

http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html

And if, as nearly everyone who knows agrees, startups are better off in Silicon Valley than Boston, then they're better off in Silicon Valley than everywhere else too.
It would certainly be beneficial if we could reduce our needs for human teachers by means of a tool like Khan Academy.

As a nation, we spend more one education than the military ($972B as of 2007 according to wikipedia, vs about $725B for the military including wars). A 1% increase in efficiency would save a little less than $10 billion, and a 16% increase in efficiency (using 2007 numbers) would be sufficient to balance the federal budget deficit [1].

If the Khan Academy is not striving to reduce our need for human teachers, we should create an organization that will.

[1] Edit: I should note that education is paid for primarily by the state and local governments, so it wouldn't be directly possible to reduce the federal budget by such savings. I was solely trying to make an order of magnitude comparison.
But that's the idea of a gift card, isn't it? Otherwise why not just be handing cash out to friends?

If I want you to go cart-racing for your birthday, you're going cart-racing. No excuses. :)
My advice: forget about making a great landing page--you need a simple page up now, as in today. This is getting buzz. Right now you should go to weebly and set up a splash page for dress.me that just has a simple email capture form for people who want to be notified of your launch. Find a friend or pay someone hundreds of dollars to do this today if you don't know how. If I don't get an email announcing launch, you can bet I won't remember about your service.

Good luck, and it sounds like a great idea if you can make it work!
Furthermore, always ensure authentication is in use with anything encrypted.
I wash my shirts and pants, hang them on the left side of the closet (shirts on top; pants below). Then I wear whatever pair is on the right side.

Since there are a relatively prime number of shirts vs pants, every possible combination eventually occurs.

But this works for me. I don't actually Want to look cool; I'm perversely proud of NOT participating in all that superficial stuff.

So now the target market narrows.
AlchemyAPI Adds Sentiment Analysis to Text Mining Platform
Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog: Where's Our Industry's GarageBand?
The day that Adobe releases CS for Linux, is the day thousands of designers like me convert over. In the meantime, my system runs Windows.

My laptop however, runs Ubuntu.
A fresh take on an icon
I don't know about this. Hook up a &500 iPad to power and to your TV and pair it with the bt gamepad every time you want to play a console game? As opposed to a <$300 device that's always hooked up to the TV and controllers?

I'd say the Apple TV is a much better contender for this market. But still isn't really technically able to push the blow-out titles that the gp is talking about. Not even close, since both the iPad and ATV are on low power ARM processors, while modern high end consoles are basically full-fledged desktop PCs.
If you're into tea leaves you could check Tiobe's Magic Number charts and see that PHP apparently peaked last year:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/PHP.html
Yes, you are right. It just happened that my bank account is integrated with paypal, so it was always free for me.
I don't think most consumers care about the technology they're using. They care about quality (does the phone work) and price. Discussions of GSM vs CDMA seem to obfuscate the main issue, which is that less competition will make the same service more expensive and quality worse. It wasn't until Verizon got the iphone that ATT started to care at all about quality, because they had the monopoly
Yahoo bought Viaweb 13 years ago. The challenges then were completely different to what they are now, as were the underlying technologies at all levels. Frankly Viaweb could've been written in the most widely used, predictable technology ever seen and I'd still expect it to have been rewritten in the last 13 years.
Ok, I took the plunge and I'm definitely in the idea generation area. My strengths are much more in line with CEO/CTO than COO. Here's the test result:

You are primarily driven by Future thinking qualities, and your thinking style generates:

Enthusiasm for fresh ideas; Ingenuity led by intuition; A sense for possibilities; An embrace of opportunities and change; A constant drive towards the new and unexplored.
Unfortunately, the state of our educational system encourages this. Our whole school system has evolved to optimizing test taking, much of which can easily be replaced by videos.
Barry Eisler Turns Down Major Deal
I confess i wasn't living in the US during the last elections, so i only followed the elections from international news sources.

and i have no idea what those names means (paul i may have heard about while reading slash dot)

That also reminds me of that simpsons episode where the aliens take place of the democrat and republican candidates, and when they discover they are aliens trying to take over earth, someone shouts that he will vote for somebody else. the alien just says "go ahead, waste your vote" and the guy agrees and feels defeated.
What do I need to add to make you use this for video chat?
I built a play application this weekend to show off at a Ruby hackathon. It's built using the OpenTok video chat API (full disclosure: I work at TokBox).

I wanted to find out what folks would want in the application to actually use it for their own video chats. It's hosted on a free Heroku instance, and so I doubt performance rocks, but if I need to buy some dynos for folks to test, then let me know and I will.

I just really want to find out what are the features outside of basic video chat that you'd need to use a simple video chat solution like this one.
Twitter: The Great Migration, the Winter of 2011
Never thought of trying different instances of the same size and same style myself, actually... it's often hard enough to find a single instance!

Agreed. It's not something I've done very often, but (for example) when you notice that the same trousers in two different waist sizes has different leg lengths in spite of what the tickets say, it's worth checking another pair sometimes.
US government opposes Microsoft in Supreme Court patent lawsuit
Because I've had to work inside the Linux kernel/driver layer for startup(s). And I've seen the code in there.
I may be an outlier, but I do my clothes shopping online. Let me tell you how they have overcome the problems you have mentioned.

Most online clothes shops I've seen have a really good return policy and free postage. They encourage you to order more then you need, and as well different sizes. So you effectively get sent a whole bunch of stuff to try. You try it on, keep what you like and send the rest back for a refund. It's even better when you're ordering online from shops that have a physical presence as you can just take it back to the store and get a refund instantly.
Print view: http://www.anandtech.com/print/4225/the-ipad-2-review/

I really like Anand's coverage here, especially the 3 different perspectives from different editors at the end. Tablets are a new paradigm of both use and interaction, slotting them in when you're already used to laptop/desktop/phone can be a bit difficult.

I find the iPad to be useful in places where a laptop is too heavy in terms of interaction commitment, but a phone isn't big enough.
Even if a judge is appointed, there could still be public outrage over the perception of low conviction rates. This would cause another judge to be appointed. The same thing goes on with cabinet positions of all levels of government where the public demonstrates outrage.
The casual market's doing well here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/words-with-friends/id32285295...
World-Wide Rapture Pre-Party
Remember those guys calling for Judgement Day on May 21st, 2011. Well apparently there's a call for global Rapture Pre-Party. Takers?