skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How come everyone misses the fact that the app doesn't make the company. I think color actually redefines "social". If these guys are successful in executing their vision, their current valuation will seem a no-brainer. I seriously don't understand all the negativity and backlash around their launch.

This is coming from a guy that couldn't get their app to work. Every time I try to take my picture, the app crashes. But I don't think that really matters.

Isn't this the same community that proclaims, if you are not embarrassed with your initial product release, then you haven't released it early enough. ?
200 revenue, 200 expense, 5 in bank == 37 signals?
Searched "97214" (zip code in Portland, OR).

Got a bunch of results from New York City?
Why Is NoSQL So Darn Popular?
no dumb move as its limited to non-AndroidMarket android apps..unless they had enough guts to use the amazon android app store
Surely this is a tech investment that can either succeed in its own right or be bought by a major player. How long is it till Facebook will need to start propping its platform with startups to keep improving their tech.
I agree as well. I wasn't suggesting that's all it takes, but rather, that was the missing ingredient for me. I think different people are missing different ingredients to success, and that was the one that I was missing.
I suspect the key feature that has the VCs excited is the concept of "implicit social networking". Which is, rather than relying on explicit, self nominated constructed social networks this will grow the network organically - Color will end up with a huge implicit social graph that has a unique authenticity to it (these are not people who are pretending to know each other, they are people who really actually get together).
Why not start with telling how you made your $1M? :)
I can't submit anything. Keep getting errors.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 517, in __call__
handler.post(*groups)
File "/base/data/home/apps/ting-1/1.349207370801614578/ting.py", line 203, in post
title = unicode(title, "utf-8"))
File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/db/__init__.py", line 815, in __init__
prop.__set__(self, value)
File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/db/__init__.py", line 544, in __set__
value = self.validate(value)
File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/db/__init__.py", line 2437, in validate
raise BadValueError('Property %s is not multi-line' % self.name)
BadValueError: Property title is not multi-line
It looks like you can only install Android apps which their developers have uploaded to Blackberry App World (their own store) -- i.e., no Market, and no side loading. I wonder how much this will matter? Android developers have two app stores to think about at the moment. Are they going to care enough to upload their app to RIM's as well? It's not an unmitigated win: it would mean dealing with another payment system and supporting another set of hardware.
Manufacturer: Google's Honeycomb Tablet Strategy Evolving
What's the right way to handle monetary values in code?
I've seen a number of things saying to use integers of the smallest value (say, cents for USD) to avoid floating point rounding issues.
How does that work when you have to do math on them - is it proper to just 'eat' or eliminate the remainders (say, a 33% discount on $1.00USD is how much off? How much off is a 33% discount on $.99?)
Starz to Introduce 90-Day Netflix Delay for Original Series 
The new policy starts next month, with exclusive first-run movies following suit later.
Finally, some sanity in the bubble :) Congrats Kyle!
You've got it right, the article got it wrong.
That's an interesting thought. The Matrix saga may represent a failure of the command & control economic model. False freedom fails, but the machine(machines?) has(have?) a lot of power to just try again.
> No flash or funny animations. Just a smart guy showing what his company had done

Well... the product does come from Holland. Try watching some Finish videos if you want more of that. People in both of those countries are pretty straightforward in life (based both on personal experience and anecdotes, YMMV).
@CaptainObvio.us: There's always room for another great site about ideas, but check out halfbakery.com. You might get some ideas from their site. It's good, not great, but has an active user base.
I'm trying to imagine in what kind of situation I'll need "google" myself, but it's ok. Interesting.
Banking cheats will always prosper
Proxies usually have connection limits. FTP might work.
Has the exact code for a specific device ever been open?

The way I understand it there is 'vanilla' Android which is open and then there are all the devices which, even when they stay 'vanilla', still get tweaks or at very least drivers added and are not 'open'.

It sounds to me like this is just business as usual, the difference being that Google did a device specific release first for the Xoom and only now are producing the 'vanilla' branch.
What people say that?
That is an interesting use case, but I don't know if it's enough to make the case for the company. Given that you can pretty effectively address that problem via Facebook or Flickr today, I don't know that someone would put $41M into a company that came to them speaking primarily to solve that problem.
if you can get a little more, do some altruism and then do whatever make u happy
The definition make sense now: http://twitter.com/#!/Arubin/status/27808662429
Would we see a day where wireless devices have software-defined antennas?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_defined_antenna

The idea is to modulate the directionality of the transmitter/receiver antenna with no bulky or moving parts.
> You can't just start typing and getting instant feedback in Java simply because Java is not interpreted (well, actually, it is, but you have to compile to bytecode first).

This is a great excuse, but uninteresting in discussing the relative fitnesses of Java and Scheme for teaching. Unless you want to take Java down one more peg.

> So, what you're saying about Java goes for just about any compiled language.

That's not even correct, many compilable languages also have REPLs, any compiled language can be interpreted (you just have to compile it on the fly). Haskell and OCaml can be used in a REPL, so can Erlang (though the Erlang console is quite far from a full repl).

> Use "javac" to compile to byte code. Use "java" to run your compiled program. This is all you need to know about these tools to start programming.

That's actually quite a lot, compared to "launch this, and then start playing". And you have to invoke `javac` for every single source file and with the correct options (the main issue for beginners generally being the classpath configuration).

> There are various options for using java and javac, of course, but it's not like you can't compile and run a simple program without these options.

You can run a trivial program without most of these options, but to reach simple you'll very likely need -cp early on.

> Yeah. You have to know a bit of Java before you actually start programming in it. If that's one of Java's shortcomings, well then, there are a lot of languages with the same shortcoming.

Yep. And that makes them worse teaching languages. I am happy you agree.
Wow. It must be very humbling for RIM to allow Android apps to run on their devices.
It was broken as of... a minute ago. And/or the app has become sentient and is expressing its opinion of Portland.
I'm skeptical too. Supporting apps built on a platform they have no control over is a potential headache.

They always need to catch up when Google updates the Android API.
Bing mobile search gets HTML5 enhancements for iOS and Android
I am 41, and recently moved from management into a development role within the same company (a large Fortune 500 company).

I managed a team of UNIX SA's and was doing a decreasing amount of technical work over the past few years. I was trying to learn new technologies with a long-term goal of starting my own firm, but my coding skills were not improving fast enough as I didn't have time to hack at work or at home.

So I found another group within the same company that needed strong UNIX skills in a development role for an Grid application. I basically do whatever they need, whether it is making Windows MSI packages, tying systems together with python or working on the C++ codebase and feeling my head turn to mush.

Sometimes it feels like I do a Google search for every line of code I write, but I get a little better and faster every day. Last week I found myself porting some newer libraries back to python 2.4.
Do squats, acquire sleep.
Because you don't have to download the JDK source, build it and resolve all compilation issues with your environment before using java "from scratch"?
I think that is where the real money lay for Color. The technology behind it doesn't seem like something to stand on its own, rather something that plenty of other companies would really like to get their hands on.
Assuming truncating division:

Round down:

discount = 33 value / 100;

Round up:

discount = (33 value + 99) / 100;

Round to nearest:

discount = (33 value + 50) / 100;
As you can tell from your own reading, it's not the "fad diet" book that SwellJoe claims. The science is pretty clear on how insulin works, for instance.

Most of Taubes' critics mistake his case for restricting carb intake as being synonymous with the Atkins diet, which isn't really the case. (Taubes' wife mocks Atkins as "meat boy".) The logic seems to be: Atkins is icky, Taubes promotes restricting carbs like Atkins, he must be icky too, the science be damned.
i'm basing my numbers based on my experience when I was at yelp - which always presumed a real GPS signal and not using any skyhook (or at least not only using skyhook).
http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

http://railsforzombies.org/levels/1
this funding goes against the (logical) trend of small angel investments and small capital needed to start a web/tech/mobile company.
Well, Portlandia has been known to corrupt code bases.

Looks neat, I'll try to play around with it again later.
> I have upwards of 150 apps on my iPhone. Only 20 can fit on my home screen. I populate it with the apps I use the most.

Unless you cheat like me and use a folder.
Record Industry: Limewire Could Owe $75 Trillion
But the net effect of an event like QE/QE2 is to help debtors.

Let's be serious here. Net effect of QE is 0.
Would I attend my own conference? Getting more women speakers.
It's just awesome. That's why.
When you phrase it this way, there is no incentive for anyone (CEO or shareholder) to prefer layoffs to a big R&D project.

With the R&D project, the CEO gets a big payoff if it succeeds, and loses only his stock options if it fails horribly and takes down the company. Big upside, no downside. With layoffs, the stock price pops for a few months and goes back down years later when the CEO's restricted shares are allowed to be sold. The upside to the CEO is truly minimal in this case.

You write as if the CEO is malicious and willing to lose money in order to ruin a perfectly good company.
Please change definition first: http://twitter.com/#!/Arubin/status/27808662429
Just wanted to post here and say thanks for all the comments.

Our hack day code is here: https://github.com/gareth-lloyd/visualizing-events

I posted datasets here: http://www.ragtag.info/2011/feb/2/history-world-100-seconds/

You're all right about the biases etc. All I can do is throw up my hands and say that's what our algorithm told us :)
If you can make the site focus on celebs instead of normal people you might be onto something — what if you took in all of the feeds of celeb gossip sites?

What's nice about that is that is also much more advertiser friendly...
Great article, I have tried to contact editors before but to no avail, I really have to learn how to hustle
I'd take it a step further, as well - as wide as the friend's friends net may be, I'm still probably not learning anything new. If my group of friends is defined mostly by some common interest, and theirs is too, I'm probably not going to get a good answer to anything outside of that field of interest.

To take the example on the page of restaurants - I'm probably not going to learn about any new restaurants if my friends and I mostly go to the same restaurants, and they go to the same ones with their friends, too.
But which method is appropriate for financial code?
The key to happiness for us grown unhappy is really good psychotherapy/ personal growth systems.
I think the key missing feature is being able to register interest or activity for an idea.

It would be extremely useful to see if anyone else is working on an idea, who they are and what their focus and status is.

e.g. When seeing the idea about selling twitter names, it would be helpful for everyone if I could say "Oh yes, Twitter are launching this next Friday" or "Like the idea, have a prototype, need a designer."

Comments do help, but a structured solution would make things much easier.

Ideally this wouldn't be only first-person, so that people can report other projects which seem similar. You'll need moderation either way (votes or active moderation, whatever.)

If implemented well enough, this could breed a sort of communal start-up site. Maybe the originator of the thread gets to choose from respondents and splits equity among them, at which point the idea is locked.
Sorry, had assertions on. Getting same results now (using my own benchmark function though)

Benchmarking: benchdata/northwind.mdf

snappy: Compressed 2752512 bytes into 726437 (26.4%) at 653.0 MiB/s

QuickLZ: Compressed 2752512 bytes into 620933 (22.6%) at 456.8 MiB/s

Benchmarking: benchdata/gdb.exe

snappy: Compressed 8872609 bytes into 4530844 (51.1%) at 333.1 MiB/s

QuickLZ: Compressed 8872609 bytes into 4056279 (45.7%) at 267.6 MiB/s

Benchmarking: benchdata/pic.bmp

snappy: Compressed 18108198 bytes into 16561772 (91.5%) at 292.5 MiB/s

QuickLZ: Compressed 18108198 bytes into 15784615 (87.2%) at 197.2 MiB/s

Benchmarking: benchdata/plaintext.txt

snappy: Compressed 2988604 bytes into 1657747 (55.5%) at 289.4 MiB/s

QuickLZ: Compressed 2988604 bytes into 1436646 (48.1%) at 238.5 MiB/s

Benchmarking: benchdata/proteins.txt

snappy: Compressed 7344249 bytes into 2964303 (40.4%) at 371.6 MiB/s

QuickLZ: Compressed 7344249 bytes into 2586659 (35.2%) at 321.9 MiB/s
The average person in the united states makes 2-3 million over the course of their entire life.
Your portrayal of hyperinflation in Zimbabwe is questionable.

To understand Zimbabwe, you first have to understand that it suffered from a destruction of supply capacity due to a stupid land reform that had nothing to do with money. The motivation for reform was part good (white farmers who had profited from colonialism were disowned) and part bad (land was given to political cronies who had neither the knowledge nor inclination for farming). Once the supply capacity went to hell, price increases were a simple matter of supply and demand.

Add to that that Zimbabwe had to start importing food, affecting its current account and causing their currency to drop w.r.t. foreign currencies.

Add to that that Zimbabwe had significant US$-denominated debts at the IMF, and the required sum flow of US$ for debt payment plus imports out of the country simply overwhelmed the amount of US$ they could possibly hope to have flow into the country from exports - their exports basically collapsed, because the productive capacity of the economy was largely destroyed.

At that point, instead of doing the only reasonable thing and defaulting on their debt, the Zimbabwe government decided to start the printing presses and print Zimbabwe currency, largely for the purpose of directly exchanging it against US$. Needless to say, supply and demand caused the Zimbabwe dollar to drop in value, which - via increased import prices - caused domestic inflation.

The important lesson here is that initially, it was the hyperinflation that caused the printing of money, not vice versa as people usually assume. Of course, the fact that the government kept adding to demand helped the hyperinflation to continue. But given the desolate state of the economy, simply not adding to the demand wouldn't have fixed anything either.
The idea is so bad and don't have that appeal, srsly.

But getting 5mi from investors made it really look awesome... or we are in a bubble.
You're right about the title.

As for the chosen time period, it's really very simple. We had limited time, and English-language Wikipedia has year pages going back as far as 500BC. Before that, years are grouped into decades and centuries - it would have been possible to parse those too, but hey, limited time.
I wanted to point out that donning Color "just some photo-sharing app" is probably not accurate. The investors saw something else. What did they see?
No kidding. I haven't seen this many useless comments since people were spamming HN with blog posts about Ruby.
How exactly does this cover outsmart Apple's? I can't fold it in half. I can't fold the whole thing over save one quarter, so that the rear camera lens is exposed.

It's nifty, it's another option, but is it better? Better for what? I'd ask, and I'm sure it's more exclusive but from an everyday use perspective, I just don't see it.
Because Apple invented Magnets. And Phones. And MP3 Players.

Did you see this:
https://www.goincase.com/products/detail/convertible-magazin...
Facebook valuation is only $20/user each year (profit).

Simple Valuation Breakdown: Take $80 billion and divide it by an EBITDA multiple of 10 = $8 billion. Divide that by 400m users, for $20 profit/user each year.

EDIT: EBITDA: Earning before income tax depreciation and amortization.
Interesting idea. I'm not sure how I'd go about recruiting celebs to try the dang thing out.

Honestly, I built this thing primarily for fun -- not sure if it really makes a whole lot of sense from a business perspective.
Oddly, their use of an all-capitalised SPAM contravenes the Hormel "acceptable use" terms at http://www.spam.com/about/internet.aspx, as well as looking extremely out-of-place in their text (I originally assumed the opposite, that they were doing it to distinguish from Spam or spam).

Maybe they think it's an acronym?
Could you let me know what browser you're using and what your machine specs are? You're not the first to report the issue, so I'm trying to see where I should begin testing.
Thanks a lot, Jarin! I'll implement this tonight!
No place to comment there but, author, don't weaken a good meme just because you can.
I would use whichever errs in favor of the customer. Its only one cent, after all.
This is common advice, but I find it frustratingly vague. Talk to people? I talk to people all the time. Heck, I talk to women all the time — half my friends are women, I currently live with two female housemates and used to live with a third, and my mother is a middle-aged office manager. After years of talking to them, I can only conclude that I've missed the boat on making Facebook, Etsy, The Sims and Model Mayhem.

I imagine a lot of people are in the same boat. It's hard to talk to people in a way that reveals product opportunities. That's why they make things for the only people who will actually tell them what they want — themselves.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=793

Also, your joke is not funny.
True, but I don't see Craig Newmark getting angsty because of his wealth.
I think the point is that if you own a Xoom, that tweet is empty.
What you need is a fixed point decimal. I found this article asking the same question. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1019939/ruby-on-rails-bes...
Fixed point is what is supposed to be used for money. Databases currently have a "Money" type.
Google Goes After Big Media Ad Dollars With New Video Search Ads
Excellent point! That is the control, based on sex and soma, described in Huxley's Brave New World (hmm, vodka was heavily subsidized by the Russian government and they are one of the most sexually open societies I know of, so maybe the Russian Party wasn't so 1984ian after all).

It has often been commented that out of the two futuristic scenarios, Huxley's is much closer to the reality we are experiencing now.
Is half-bakery meant to be somewhat silly ideas or serious ones?
Scala Quick Reference [pdf]
This'll make law enforcement and corporate investigations a lot easier. Issue a subpoena on one company rather than many. It'll make social engineering easier, too.

As much as I'd avoid this like the plague, I can see the value in it from a commercial point of view - all that information that can be used for advertising is in one place.

$5M? To a 19 year old? (And yes, he now has a team, but still ....) And people are saying that we're not in a bubble?
Window decals for more attractive look
Idsketch.com provides you nicely designed window decals. We offer you an exclusive range of window decal products that can be used for various purposes
try entering monthly revenue == monthly expenses
really?

http://www.neosprockets.com/index.php/2010/01/chick-flick-ge...
are we still doing this? go watch other movies, the matrix was mostly about bullet time fights and sophomoric philosophy
I think the "location" implicit social graph is just one of many. It might be the easiest to grok, but it doesn't strike me as the most useful.

I like Fred's example of people with similar music taste on last.fm. I like the idea of being connected with people who will attend the same event as me, or an event I wish I was at, or whose netflix ratings correlate highly with mine.

I would imagine that eventually, the explicit side of things will more be addressing the privacy issue you mention. But really, I want my graphs to be generated for me with the least work possible.

Instead of a social dating site, what about an implicit social graph approach: show me people in this coffee shop who are open to being approached for a brief chat. Show me people in this city who are willing to grab a beer with a stranger in town for the night who have similar interests.

Lots and lots of interesting stuff will become possible as we start to master all the information and implicit connections available out there even today.
The main purpose of a golden parachute and cash comp is to allow a troubled company in trouble to get good talent.

Lets say Nokia's chances of success are 20%, but you have the ability to improve them to 30%. Suppose your pay package is 100% incentive based, you only get paid if Nokia survives. Why would you take this job? You have a 70% chance of getting nothing. It's much easier to go back to MS, and get a guaranteed paycheck.

In a few years, it will be easy to blame Stephen Elop and claim it is unjust for him to be paid even while Nokia tanks. But it isn't his fault that Nokia is in trouble (he's been CEO for 13 days) - he might be their best hope for survival. If he wasn't getting paid cash up front, he would probably just turn down the job and Nokia would be in even worse trouble.

(Not trying to endorse Elop, I know very little about him or Nokia. Just putting a face to the situation rather than speaking in the abstract about CEO A and company X.)
"If you had more capital, could you get to the future faster?"
"Will $25M help you get five years into one?"
-- @Sequoia_Capital invest in Time Machine

http://twitter.com/#!/nivertech/status/51047798413606912
One could always try sending the domain by email. Or a telegram.
yes, in 2004 the income was median - 44K/year, mean - 60K/year, which is only 25-16 times less than 1M/year (25M equivalent at 4% draw). 20 times more than average isn't "super-rich", it is even hardly just "rich"
Thanks for trying. The title of the page you are submitting must have returns before and after it. I try to catch that error with "strip" but for some reason yours is not caught:

soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(urllib.urlopen(url))
title = str(soup.html.head.title.string).lstrip("\r\n").rstrip("\r\n")

Try another url.
OMG so pwned. :)