skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, if you aren't too paranoid about it, send me an email with some details of what kind of name you need, what niche you're targeting, etc.. I've been pretty good at brainstorming up good domain names for friends' projects over the years that aren't registered yet. No promise I'd come up with something for you, but if I have a few minutes to procrastinate I can give it a shot.

It's getting harder, certainly, but sometimes you luck out.
I remember talking about this at Mozilla Drumbeat NYC last year. It's a very cool project, indeed.
Color is not the sonic scanning mobile device in Dark Knight, it was the multi-lens visual scanner Lucius Fox threatened to quit over and self-destructed when they found Joker.

Bruce Wayne is Nguyen and we are Lucius Fox, but in this case there is no Joker to catch.
Iran Cyber-Army Strikes Digital Certificate Authority
http://color.com/
> Good luck, and may the sun shine on your backs.

But wear sunscreen
Does it matter though? The iOS app already asks to get your location information. It's that same location info that would go into the putative EXIF tag, so Color already has the info. Or is there something else in EXIF that would be relevant in this case?
Has anybody posted a 'YC Demo Day Pitch Deck' online on slideshare or elsewhere? I know most won't want to post it, half the companies didn't even want their product talked about publically. Some must have raised money and gone on far enough that they're welcome to share. Perhaps a class or two ago?
CeBIT 2011 Keynote: The Hidden Costs of Closed Source Software
except narrowcasters... I prefer the term Slimcasting... but they are basically bloggers and podcasts.
I'm really excited for the coming collision of motion graphics, video, and web.

Things like Popcorn.js, CSS3, OpenGL, and AJAX are going to bring dynamic, user-controlled motion graphics into the browser without actionscript. Huzzah!
I'm with you, but stand by my claim that if Adam Lisagor had shot an ad for Color, Gruber's tone would be entirely different.

Here's another post about a photo-taking application earlier this week:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/22/everyday
Although Gruber is summing it up based on a developer's words, they do state this ridiculous data collection in their privacy policy (which is an implied agreement, based on your downloading of the app).

http://color.com/privacy

--

We also collect pictures, videos, comments, and actions you take through the App (“Content”), and information on your location. When our App is active, your Device provides periodic updates to our server of your location, which allows us to show you fresh Content based upon where you are at that moment. We share your Content with others. Sharing Content publicly with others from different locations is what this App is about. If you find this objectionable, please consider not using our App or Site.
The user may have agreed to let the Camera app access their GPS data, but refused to let your app access their GPS data. For the case of Color, no it's not relevant. For the question posed by the (G?)GP, I think it is.
Sure, if you have authenticated users, I'm talking about anonymous users
Up'd rss feed, but I do it via the Newsfox plug-in in FF.
Ben Huh on Cheezeburger, Happiness and Never Giving Up
In my -very limited- experience, the best way to make money with AdSense and/or Amazon is by actually making garbage websites. Nothing better to make a visitor click on an ad than a fugly website.
True, but the reason why I wanted to repost it today was that it unexpectedly got a few things right- Data Miners! Two years before Google, Time actually got it!
By the way, here's the link to the main site:

http://qbix.com
I spent an hour or so selectively reading this book. If you're doing a software startup, it's not that valuable reading. The essential premise is that there are a lot of "entrepreneurs" who start businesses like restaurants and repair garages and fail. They're self-selecting to a certain extent--these "entrepreneurs" are more likely to have smoked marijuana, more likely to have lost their job, tend not to deal well with having a boss, etc. The author even explicitly says something along the lines of "if a guy in his thirties quits his job at Microsoft to start a software startup, there is a substantial chance he will create significant wealth for society and therefore we should encourage this".

I guess you could read it if you're doing a software startup as a morale boost.

If you want to start a different kind of company and you haven't chosen an industry yet, this book could give you a good idea of what industry to pick. (Software isn't the only fertile one.)
...I thought of posting a few I was curious about as well, but that would get silly pretty quickly.

Just about everyone here probably has 5-10 domain names (if not more) that they've registered somewhere along the way with a side project in mind that hasn't materialized yet.

I personally am wondering if anyone knows of a way to put a domain name in escrow -- I had an offer for one of my domains from someone with a side project, and tried to work out a solution where he could have it for free, but if his project hadn't gotten any traction after a few years, it would revert back to me (since maybe I'd have found time for my own project by then...). No dice, though; he didn't know/trust me, the legal aspects were too confusing, and so on.
Heroku Outage Took My Site Offline for 10 Hours
This highlights the biggest problem I have with the rabidly pro nuclear people who insist that we now know how to build safe reactors. They always assume everyone involved has the best intentions, but we know that that is not the case.
I was going to say also - THEY KNOW YOUR PHONE NUMBER.
What is interesting is, if a few person in the graph start identifying themselves on their profiles. Then there might be a way to identify the others in a picture based on his nearby graph, other attributes(like gender + common friends).

Others have already shown how easy is to de-anonymize a social graph from public datasets[couldn't find the relevant paper]
Interesting. I'd never heard of dotLisp. I'd love to know why he decided to move to the JVM.
Back when MySpace actually mattered I don't think they had HipHop, Cassandra etc.
Really great points. Do they add features to those systems rapidly? Cause I think the original premise hinged on the combination of those two desires.
The Secrets of Building Realtime Big Data Systems
I talked to Matt at Pycon for at least 30 minutes in the vendor area. He's a very interesting guy, and stormpulse is a very customer-focused company. It's a great example of building a product in a crowded market but finding success by addressing customer needs.
Ask HN: COLORSNIFFER - sniff of the data leaving our devices to the color cloud?
What data are they specifically getting?<p>Should be easy to do - put the phone in airplane mode - attach to home wifi and take color pics. From the workstation, watch the traffic traversing your home switch.
Top Ten Gameloft Games for Sony Ericsson Xperia Play [video]
I live in a crowded city -- I would personally love an effective location-based advertising engine that would learn my preferences.

The only problem is, these people are doing it wrong.
A location-based app that serves deals shouldn't collect data in indirect ways.
And yet somehow they've magically managed to chop and change just about everything else, and massively delay from when they first said it would be available...

"A factual argument as to why the product might actually be successful?"

Until you get your hands on one, it's not 'factual' it is 'conjecture', or 'speculation'.

"Finally, how is this product vapourware?"

Something that is changed so much, and delayed so often is a good candidate. But these days, and especially with the appalling record of recent tablet announcements and then failure to deliver/materialise, pretty much any tablet should be regarded as vapourware right up until it appears in your hot little hands.

But that's okay, you complain about my scepticism and I'll complain about your gullibility and then we'll all be happy. :D

"This stuff is shipping April 19th... I actually have tried one in Waterloo"

Well, that's good news for RIM.
> I'm not sure it really matters if a site is "developed by Googlers". Why do the users care?

brand matters a lot, especially when trusting a web app with private data is concerned.

more than that there's brand loyalty. i realize this is an extreme example, but i don't use dropbox because it's the kind of internet-feature i want under my google account, not somewhere else. i literally don't want any company other than google to succeed in that space.
Ben is a stand up guy, and one of the best designers I've ever seen, I'm glad to see him being recognized (more).
The tech explains the funding, but I still question whether Color will be widely used. I'm thinking Segway: amazing technology that didn't translate into an experience people enjoyed / wanted enough for mass adoption. This is why Apple does so well: they get both the technology and the experience right.
Samsung unveils Galaxy Tabs 8.9 & 10.1 at the CTIA Expo ; Keynote Video Included
Tell HN: Solum is hiring developers to help change agriculture
Solum is a Khosla Ventures backed company working to revolutionize agriculture. We make soil measurement systems that give farmers
immediate, high-density, high-accuracy information on their soil nutrient needs. Farmers can use this information to manage crop inputs, such as fertilizer, more efficiently, increasing yield while reducing costs and environmental impact. These tools provide Solum with a rich dataset of agricultural information that can be used to further optimize operations, and provide a data-driven, quantitative framework for best management practices.

Our first products are shipping next month, and we're looking to bring on software engineers to develop backend applications to manage data generated by these systems, as well as a web-based frontend to allow customers to analyze and visualize their data. This will form the basis of our long-term goal, developing analysis software to integrate our measurement data with additional inputs--such as weather, satellite imagery, crop yield, seed density, etc--to fully optimize agriculture operations. We're a small team of physicists, mechanical engineers, and chemists working out of Mountain View. We're looking for full-time developers able to work independently and help us define everything from the ground up. If you're excited to work with a cross-disciplinary team on a very big problem with a big global impact, email us at jobs@solumtech.com. You can also contact me directly at white@solumtech.com.

Justin White
co-founder, CTO Solum, Inc

Our development stack:

linux, C, python, and wx on our field-deployed measurement hardware

python, mongo, and amazon ec2+s3 on our data backend

blank slate on the frontend -- up to you
Interesting, however I would point out that Gruber isn't reviewing the app, he's reviewing the founder's quoted claim that the app is a data collection play.

Personally, I disagree with Gruber: Facebook and Foursquare seem to be evidence that people will gladly give up their personal data in exchange for a "social" experience. But whether Gruber is right or wrong is not the point I was responding to, it's whether Gruber would hypothetically like the app if it was hypothetically bought by Apple.

This is irrelevant to what he's saying now. Even if he does like everything Apple does and does hate everything Apple doesn't do, appealing to his bias is the textbook definition of an Ad Hominem:

An ad hominem, short for argumentum ad hominem,
is an attempt to link the validity of a premise
to a characteristic or belief of the opponent
advocating the premise.

If he's wrong, we can attack his argument directly. How can we have a meaningful discussion about what he might say if some hypothetical future acquisition takes place? Worse, what if he's right now and would be wrong if he did change his mind after some hypothetical future acquisition?

In that case, dismissing him because of his bias might rob us of a valuable insight.
Agreed nice to see someone walked the talk. Its interesting whether DRM is broken as a concept or just implementation. For books and songs I can see where people like Tim will accept that the people who were going to pay for his books will pay rather than go mucking through the torrent heap to find the free version. Quote on Techcrunch last month: "Most adults do not want to steal intellectual property if there’s an affordable alternative to doing so" http://tcrn.ch/eywL2E

Still though from a security perspective moving security from the network and infrastructure and to the information is highly desiarable. In this, DRM as a concept is not flawed but the implementation. I wrote some ways this could be fixed last year: http://rakkhi.blogspot.com/2010/08/making-drm-practical.html
Under the Radar: Google launches online magazine
is this extream timeboxing?
I tried a ton of things and settled on xero.com it works well. It also has a ton of documentation which explains both how and why. Reading the docs and using the app, teaches you accounting. Pretty neat trick.

If you're not based in the US, then no US based accounting tool will work for you. The americans don't get VAT or multicurrency accounting. Since it's not there from the start, it gets added eventually as a clunky after thought. US companies also very heavily on Yodlee, if your bank isn't in there, you're out of luck. With xero we wrote our own bridge to the bank because they provided an api.

I've got no association with xero, other than being a customer.
As a company owner I'd be afraid that people are taking pictures with product ideas and information on whiteboards which is leaking internal information and documentation...
Pool for Mega Millions jackpot tonight (E[x]  $1.00)
I've been using it for a few months now. Love it.
Simpletron in C++ and the Linksys E3000
Groupon is down 32% while LivingSocial surges above 50% this month over last
Your comment isn't helpful if you don't provide a value. I'm not interested enough in the politics of the American Republican party to gauge whether you think it is < or > 1%.

As for one strategy making more sense, you cannot simply assert that when you have no numbers to back that up.

You cannot hedge a single bet by definition. Clearly the hedging of risk takes place in the other investments of the companies Bain Capital, Sequoia, and Silicon Valley Bank.

I have no inside knowledge of what Color is doing, nor do I think it's particularly likely that they'll succeed in becoming a multi-billion-dollar industry. But it doesn't have to be likely, when your ROI is potentially so high.
Folk, what 'lighting at night' setting are you using?

Tungsten

Halogen

Flourescent

Daylight
This is great. Does anyone know if it's possible to record video using HTML5? I'm looking for a drop in component that will let a person easily record a video from their webcam and am trying to avoid flash.
One of the cofounders of Noteleaf here:

Perhaps, but one thing we've found as a rule is that people don't want to do work in order to gain something. Only a small percentage of would likely want to write something in a why description and rate it thereafter.

Now if there was something to be gained by the user, like a shot of happiness, bragging rights, increase social capital, then they'd be willing to rate their meetings.

But for the time being, we don't have anything that would be compelling enough for people to do that.
The article, when talking about the disadvantages of MIT OpenCourseWare and other "big OER" projects, mentions that textbooks can cost a lot of money. This can be true, but sometimes it isn't. A lot of courses are using older textbook editions. These can often be bought used for very low prices.

I'm posting this so others using online resources will check to see whether getting the book is practical before dismissing it out of hand.
right? is it just me or is the iPad 1 WAY too bright? it never goes above the lowest setting and I constantly find myself checking to see if i can turn it lower. at night it is almost unbearable.

has this been addressed in iPad 2?
As of about 6:50 PM EDT, this ad hominem attack on the article's author has almost as many upvotes (56) as every other top-level comment on this thread combined (67).

Sad.
This sounds right to me. I've tried lots of non-successful games in the iOS app store, and haven't found one that's much fun to play yet. On the other hand you see game developers who have sublime gameplay, have done no marketing, and succeeded -- most recently Tiny Wings.

It sure seems like fun gameplay is the limiting factor. It also seems like that should be a less scary problem to solve, but I'm not a game developer.

Is it considered hard to assess whether your games are fun? Or just hard to make fun games?
flyt's comment is certainly an attack on Gruber, but I wouldn't call it an ad hominem argument since flyt isn't attempting to discredit Gruber's reasoning by proposing a flaw in Gruber's character.

In fact, I don't think flyt is claiming that this wasn't the reason for Color's funding. flyt seems to merely be noting that, while Gruber sounds cynical and disapproving in this post, Gruber would probably approve of and attempt to justify the product if Apple were to acquire Color.
There's already relevant laws about such things. If I had to guess Color will not be offered for minors to use right away, precisely because of those laws. (At least, that's not something I'd implement before shipping out the MVP.) And when it is, there will be controls for this sort of thing that have been gone over with a fine-tooth comb by some expensive lawyers.

I understand what you're getting at, but I would submit this isn't the secret thing that only a few people can see that will sink the product, it's a pretty blindingly obvious thing that everybody including the Color team plainly sees. If they do ship something that makes the "paedo/stalker threat" easy to implement they'll deserve the resulting PR conflagration.
OMG THERE IS OFFENSIVE MATERIAL ON TEH TUBES!!!

Jesus, BI - of course there is material that you dont like, one it is the interenet - two it is free speech!.
He should consider switching to a digital tabloid as a writer. He might not be great at recruiting or how to identify great programmers but he seems to have a gift for getting his trolling just right.

Some startup here should take him up on the developer vs developer challenge.
Ideas pitched on Garage48 Riga
I believe it's like Google when it first started out. We used to think the data Google collected was use for "big brother" business. I think Color.com is trying to be the Google of visual search. If they can figure out where you are and what you are doing, they can deliver better ads to you. The example Bill Nguyen tend to use is a baseball game. Imagine if all the cameras are pointing at a player that just hit a grand slam, Color.com sees that and bring you ads for the player's jersey from the gift shop.
Actually, my first thought was of the car (Jeep Cherokee).
Gruber's point is that the CEO should not have tried to justify the value of their product by pointing out the data mining aspect. It is not good PR.

(BTW, Gruber blogged the "you are the product" last Sept.)
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/09/11/reece-iad
Work at Socialcam and help the world share mobile video [SF]
What a childish, pompous headline. Turns out the guy was in a meeting at the time and has since called everybody back:

> Update: Gary was in a meeting, he finally called me back and he’s been answering a lot of calls since this post. He was a very good sport about the whole thing.

http://garyvaynerchuk.com/post/4091744015/tech-crunch-adstru...

It's a non-story, it does nothing except maybe illustrate what a dick Erick Schonfeld is.
Im loving this app, if they could add weather settings to it so when it is raining/cloudy/overcast it bumps the monitor temperature that would rock!
Not a phone call, but when I emailed him two weeks ago he responded in about a week. He was brief (i.e., "u are amazing, THANK U!") but personally replied, which is nice and unexpected for someone so busy.

Phone calls don't scale as easily though. It's fully understandable that it would take him longer to honor the promise he made in his ads.
Why is this relevant for HN? Not everything done in TC needs a HN post.
That had occurred to me, and I was going to suggest that it is semantically equivalent to claiming that John's mother wears army boots. Possibly true, possibly false, but irrelevant and off-topic.

However, I assumed (possibly incorrectly) that somebody would suggest that insulting the author in a thread purportedly discussing the author's words is an indirect way of discrediting the words.

I could be wrong, in which case I would suggest that such a comment is not contributing to the discussion.
flyt's comment is not an ad hominem argument, because flyt is not trying to link the validity of the premise (that Color's funding was the result of their data mining potential) to a characteristic of its advocate (Gruber's pattern of Apple apologetics).

In fact, the way I read flyt's comment is that flyt actually agrees with Gruber, but is predicting that if Apple were to have something to do with Color, Gruber's cynicism would disappear.

Unless I'm misunderstanding flyt, this was in no way an ad hominem argument.
I use Postmark at my app and it works really well! Support is good and you know you will be talking to real people that cares. I have no idea how Amazon support works, but I guess that Postmark can do it better.
I am happy to see that F.lux for Mac is still being developed, and the new settings look great, but please allow me to request that the menu bar icon will be changed back to a monochrome one, or at least has a setting for it the same way Dropbox for Mac has.

Thanks for your work. I hope you'll consider my request.
A million points for this.

ANY time there's an accretive process, there needs to be a corresponding ablative process to go with it. Especially around rules, laws, etc.

Otherwise, organizations calcify rapidly.
Shared hosting just isn't reliable. It could be his code, but if the slow performance times aren't constant, it's probably the host. You're sharing a web server, database, email, and etc with at least 50 other people (these days, you're lucky if it's just that) and it's all on the same computer. Each scripting language as many ./configure options enabled as they can, so it will fit the needs of the masses.

I'm not sure if you're attached to the ease of use of shared hosting, but it is advantageous to get a VPS and compile everything with just the options you need. I'm a happy liode customer, and many others here are as well.
You are all a bunch of incredible selfabsorbed losers.
Appple OS, be it for iPhone, Mac or iPad is incredibly easy compaired to really intelligent designed stuff from the much looked down upon Microsoft and Android platform.
As a friend of mine, who is in the bussiness once explained to me: those Apple people think they are smart because they pay dearly for a closed OS, integrated in very flashy and absurd expensive design hardware, but they are too dumb to do some real work: they wouldn't know where to start-just too complicated. No-brainers with too much money to throw around and easily caught in hypes...
Seeing what is written here I can only whole heartedly agree.
Btw I own 3 iPhones, not because they are good to make a call with ( they are inferior to the cheapest Motorola, Samsung or Nokia) but becuse they look so nice...