skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i would argue this isn't a 'free market' problem as professional designers are probably tackling a different market altogether (pricewise and customerwise). Instead, i think the problem is that 99designs hurts the public image of designers in much the same way that rentacoder (and to a lesser extent, topcoder) does.

Which is to say that the problem with these spec websites is that they commoditize design (and coding) work in a way which devalues the process behind the trade, which is arguably what you're really paying for.

And say what you will about the quality of the end product, the damage is that people walk away with the idea that design or programming or whatever is not getting there it's about the destination. For a reason why this is a bad idea, look at why people wax poetic about 'thoughtful design' or any of those sites that focus on the details.

It's not that these sites are actually bad and for someone who wants an aesthetic facelift, i'm sure these are often 100% useful, but the utility and the domain of applications where something like 99designs is pretty limited, so i guess you get what you pay for.
Google Chrome Team Fixes 6 High-Risk Flaws
Startup Pivots - Building the Salesforce.com of Marketing
If I got the implied timeline correct from the original Techcrunch post (http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/23/color-looks-to-reinvent-soc...), it was:

1. Nguyen names company 'Color' and buys color.com
2. Sequoia hears about Color, contacts them
3. Sequoia gives them $14 million
4. Other investors want in, and keeps wanting in
money until the total size of the round hits $41 million.

If the implied timeline is correct (and do correct me if I'm wrong), then the founders were more than prepared to shell out for the domain name even before the round.

And Nguyen chose the name Color as a tribute to Apple: http://www.quora.com/Color-Labs-startup/Why-is-Color-named-C...

A tribute to Apple's color logo from the Apple II. This computer changed my life when I was seven (also a reference to another company name I've used.)

My dad bought one from ComputerCraft run by Billy Ladin in Houston. He was one of the first computer resellers back in 1977. In an odd twist, I meet him in an elevator 15 years later and worked for him. He introduced me to the Web.

Working at Apple was a dream. Color's name is a tribute to Apple.
Google vs MyGoogleApp.com?
How to Become a Superhero (and why I will never donate to charity again)
Thanks. I definitely need both sound ideas and decent code to do the job.
But you have to share it with yourself once you launch multiple instances, which you will if you are paying $10/hour.
I think a lot of people are missing the big picture. For the past few decades, the economy has been transforming to be increasingly technological, moving away from oil and unnecessary manufacturing, transport, and administration. Several technology companies are now worth more than many oil giants. This part of the economy is experiencing an enormous growth, with large companies routinely showing annual revenue growths of 20-40%. They are now making massive investments in technology not seen since the days of Bell Labs and NASA. With such amazing growth comes a form of competitive inflation. To successful investors such as Sequoia, $40 million is simply not that much money these days. It's what you need to be able to get ahead of the competition and be successful, yet small enough for a VC to be willing to take the risk.

The .com bubble was the moment people first started to realize what was about to happen. Being completely inexperienced with this new phenomena, they overvalued garbage and undervalued treasures. Nonetheless, inside the bubble was a core of solid gold. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg was chosen man of the year, only 11 years after Jeff Bezos was man of the year in the midst of the greatest "bubble" the world has ever seen. A few years later, he had revolutionized shopping, computing, publishing, and became one of the richest people in the world. I'm also reminded by the tulip bubbles, which preceded the Netherlands becoming the world's dominant flower exporter for the next 400 years. I think bubbles are a whole lot more rational than people realize.
Which State Will Get Lower Taxes To Get Amazon And Caterpillar Business?
Seems like there's a basic lack of economic understanding .. when you buy a Toyota you don't throw $20K into the garbage- you walk away with capital, a large chunk of metal that plenty of other people would want besides just you. A domain name is capital too- they can leverage it in the course of business, or they can resell it recouping most or all of the cost.

As consumers we are so used to buying stuff and then wearing it all the way out- clothing, computers, soap, food. But when a business invests in capital, that capital holds value. When a textile plant closes, it liquidates its looms, it doesn't just write them off as an expense.
AmEx's answer to PayPal/Square/etc.
Analysis and Exploitation of Adobe Flash 0-Day (CVE-2011-0609)
I use 99designs, mycroburst, and crowdspring because I can't afford a real designer now. I'm not "cheap". I understand the trade-off. Once my startup is making more money, I will invest in a more expensive design but right now, I just cannot afford it. The same goes for programmers. I will be programming as much as I can by myself but outsourcing programming tasks to help get the site done in a reasonable amount of time. Local designers and programmers really do not want to help out a bootstrap startup. I do not see any alternative at this point.
I just checked, and Google gets it wrong even when you prepend a tilde! I.e., ~organise does not find organize. That really surprises me.
Am I the only one that thinks Color is #winning?
Alright, Color's gotten a lot of backlash since launch for a terrible first experience, bad UX, being overfunded, not rolling out correctly, among many other things. Now am i the only one that thinks they're absolutely winning? And I mean winning in the Charlie Sheen sense.

Imagine the other alternative. An allstar team raises a crap-ton of money. They launch a 1.0. and do everything right. We check it out and everything looks ok. Everything is as expected and we go back to our business. At the end of the day, they still have an all-star team, a ton of money and not all that much more.

What do they have now? Now they have a story. A ton of money and gasp a train wreck. They got something we didn't expect and we can't look away. Theyve created a stir with a terrible product. Now, they still have an all-start team, ton of money, and also, they have our attention. Question is now if they'll pull something out of their back pockets before we forget about it.
Kivaloo is said to be based on B+ and to support a "range" operation. So in fact it's more than a key-value store, isn't it?
Please ignore this, it's the key to my big idea that will change the world.
could have something to do with the "scandal" last year where the businesslink website was found to have cost some £100 million pounds to run for three years, making it something of an embarrassment (dare I say white elephant) to the government.
The Shy Scientist
When they say "Hire rockstars!", "Hire the best!", etc...

This is what they mean.

Note: I got _several_ down votes for this... wow...
My suggestion is that concatenative programming languages are nearly direct representations of Combinatory Logic in the same way that Lisp (in its purest sense) is a direct representation of the Lambda Calculus:

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2008-11-1...
Facebook: It’s Bad News for Bigamists
I've been getting most of my news from the Times for the past few years, but I'm not sure I'll subscribe now. I'd have to at least consider other pay newspapers like WSJ first. Or maybe I'll try to switch to Huffington post.

What other online news sources (free or pay) do you guys think I should consider as Times alternatives?
Grab Free one Year Amazon S3 and Using as An Reliable Backup Solution
Here in this article, you can also find the way to get one year Amazon S3 freely and how to turn it into an economical backup solution on the cloud and using it as a efficient CDN service.
It was only a few weeks ago on this site that I was quoting Paul Baran's RAND research note from my memory of studying his visionary ideas during college. This man was an inspiration to the technology world.
PythonTurtle - Logo style interface for learning Python
I agree with your overall theory but not with your conclusion. I think Facebook is making two big mistakes...

1. Thinking that everyone agrees that privacy is dead

2. Still having not found a way to allow users to separate groups in an effective way (e.g. it's now possible to keep Mom from seeing those party pics but it still isn't easy)

I think developers are afraid of Facebooks dominance right now and think it's a waste of money to challenge them which is why you don't see anyone trying to exploit those flaws. But they do exist and Facebooks seen (and largely ignored) the backlash to prove it.
Microsoft Releases A Font Update For The Indian Rupee Symbol
1."Einstein wasn't a genius because he was most skilled in math -- he wasn't"

Pretty ambiguous imho. And it blatantly plays upon that misconception. "Just" sticking with a problem for a long is not an easy undertaking as the passage makes it out to be.

2."David Rock is a thought leader for the brain-based approach to coaching. David coined the term 'NeuroLeadership' and co-founded the NeuroLeadership Institute, Journal and Summit. He is also the founder and CEO of Results Coaching Systems,"

His resume speaks volumes.

3.I was working a matrix multiplication algorithm this weekend. I improved by 13x over the naive case. It ended up being one of the faster ones among my peers. How? I ground it the fuck out. I read 4 papers. I coded for hours on end and when I wasn't coding I was thinking hard about it. You cannot see the vista if you deign not to climb the mountain.
Because it was submitted ~10 hours prior to the link you posted.
Sounds like this might reduce redundancy - if all your instances tend to be on the same machine, a single failure could take them all out...
The question for me has been: how could Gosling not go work for Google?
I jailbroke my 2nd Gen AppleTV and can confirm XBMC works nicely - and you can add different apps to it too. I did the new untethered jailbreak using Seas0nPass, it wasn't to difficult (~30 minutes).

Edit: Oh, and XBMC just gets added as another menu item, so you can still use the regular AppleTV ui too.
Free resources for web, iPhone & iPad designers
Nodechat.js continued – authentication, profiles, ponies, and a meaner socket.io
Follow-up to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2306423
I'm curious why the downvotes here. Is that information not interesting to anyone else?
In my experience, it is helpful to be able to remember IP addresses instead of just urls. Not a dealbreaker, but useful in some cases. Example - I set up a VPS server as a testbed/development server/socks proxy, but didn't bother to register a domain with it. It would suck to look it up the long IPv6 address the whenever I connect to it on a new device, or try to show it to someone else. The ten digit IPv4 address is fairly easy to memorize in comparison.
I said this on the blog, but 99 designs sells glorified clip art, not design
Benchmark battle: Chrome vs. IE vs. Firefox
No, actually you are.

I hate to break it to you but you as a seller do not get much of a say on what value your product has in the marketplace. This is as true for design as it is for anything else.

The value of a product is exactly what buyers are willing to pay for it. Saying things such as "spec work devalues the entire design industry" suggests clearly that your definition of value is not in line with your customer's definition.

When this is the case, you basically have two options:

1. Demonstrate an increased value to the customer that you bring that they are willing to pay for, or;

2. Lower your price to compete.

Walling off your industry to preserve profits that aren't in line with the real value of the product might be desirable but it is unsustainable in the long run in today's modern world. Ask the music industry.
Hacking Last-Mile Credit
Improved Fat/Water Reconstruction Algorithm with Jacket
New York Times Offers Substantial Subscription Discount Ahead of Paywall Launch
Interesting facts. Could replacing the highway patrol by automated radar systems work? I'd like to see a study of that.

Also interesting is the fact that the article title seems to lead to a "no", but the answer ends up being "yes".
I assume log-structured implies 'append-only'. Is that correct?

Yes. (Technically, append-at-head and delete-from-tail only.)

Although its pretty clear why BDB-JE wouldn't be ideal for Tarsnap (starting the the Java thing), why did you chose not to go with BDB?

Last time I checked, BDB was a library. I wanted a server (because a server can cache data structures).

How do you trigger garbage collection?

The code keeps track of how much garbage is present and keeps a running tally of how much garbage collection it "owes" based on maintaining a long-term optimal GC rate. When that value is large enough, it looks for some old pages to clean.

What kind of effect does garbage collection have on the throughput of the database?

"It depends". The optimal cleaning rate depends on the amount of I/O you're already doing, so it turns out that cost-optimization automatically results in you doing more cleaning when the active I/O load is lower. In the common case where the load on the data store varies (either because it's bursty or because of daily/weekly load cycles) there won't be any cleaning happening during the high-load periods.

What kind of performance drop do you see with very sparse trees/logs, for example with workloads that are very insert and delete heavy?

The B+Tree is rebalanced every time pages are written to disk, so "sparse trees" aren't possible.
Google's Disco is an iOS Trojan Horse
Stephanie Hanbury-Brown,Golden Seeds,Raising Angel Investment
One year almost to the day since he quit Sun/Oracle (see http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/time_to_move_on).

That probably means he had a 1-year non-compete built into his employment agreement which he had to wait out (which makes me curious about what he could be working on at Google that could trigger that)
Some key-value stores support RANGE; some don't. I don't see what you're getting at here.
Microsoft launches campaign of epic douchebaggery
6 Tips for Services Startups When Profits Plateau
Apple WWDC 2011, set for June 6-10,to highlight iOS and Mac OS futures
This should add an interesting (though legally irrelevant) twist to the Oracle lawsuit, since they're litigating with some of Gosling's patents.
Is America the most anxious country in the world?
Would it help to know that the NYT runs SAP?
[2] More than enough money to give seed funding to every Y Combinator startup since 2005.

That says it all. Instead of pumping it all into one company, diversify.

If you invest in 40 different companies, more than one is bound to come out on top. 40 x $150k = $6 million

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/28/yuri-milner-sv-angel-offer-...
http://www.crunchbase.com/financial-organization/start-fund
Mousetraps: A Symbol of the American Entrepreneurial Spirit
Sounds great!
Let's find a time that fits and I'll come visit you in Ubud (love Bali Buddha cafe, if you haven't tried it yet).

I have some new developers starting this week which we need to train up, so I'm thinking next week would be great.
Drop me a mail at michael(at)bodekaer.dk and I'll get back to you.
Makes me wonder whether they will bring out a competitor to Java, maybe for Android.
Apparently the domain was registered in December: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/24/color-com-was-acquired-for-...

I'm not sure of the timeline as to when the various investments came in. From what I understand though, they had $14 million and then Sequoia got in: http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/03/24/sequoia-to-co...)

So, you'd be right, it looks like Sequoia did get in after the purchase of the domain, which could indeed indicate that the domain helped them in some way.

Best rebuttal by far.

Though, one could also argue they might not have been so eager to accept Sequoia's capital if they weren't spending $500,000 on things like domain names.
Who Do you hate?
Do you hate someone? Write what he did so bad to you...
But if you just started coding, before you read the papers, you wouldn't have had as much success. You had perspective before you started. Take it to the extreme -- what type of algorithm would a completely naive person have produced?

Insight:
- the power of acute observation and deduction, penetration, discernment, perception called intellection or noesis.

-an understanding of cause and effect based on identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insight)

How would you have been able to come up with a new algorithm without understanding why it works? Perspective is understanding "why".
It is definitely good news for Google. However, as far I as know Gosling was not working on core technical projects for a long time. Maybe he will work more like a tech evangelist like Tim Bray.
Nice web book! I thought the coverage of map reduce was especially good. I also like the more complete book "MongoDB, The Definitve Guide" but this free book should probably serve the needs of most people.
Schumpeter on Corporate Personhood
DIY IR SLR Trigger Is Simple, Easy, Cheap
> I'm not "cheap".

Yes you are, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. It's right for your business at its current stage.
Let me know if you come to Bali and need a place to stay.
I am very interested in such an expat entrepreneurs in Indonesia list.

I'm attending IMULAI in Jakarta on April 8th as an investor (Indonesia's version of Y-combinator) and will be in Jakarta for a few days.
Would be fun to meet up there if you're in town.
EBay Acquires GSI Commerce For $2.4 Billion
If anything, they'll try to continue with Java instead, I'd expect. They're a big user internally.
Thanks. How about real time scan? Is it noticeably slower than the proprietary competition?
Make sure to check out the dada experiments listed as inspiration over at - http://the389.com
Doesn't Google provide a DNS server, too? If it was for me, they could delete if from the DNS server, too. In general I would like to have a DNS server that simply eliminates such sites.

At the same time, they could also knock down all houses that I am forbidden to photograph and burn all items that I am forbidden to photograph.
Specificity: A weapon of mass effectiveness
How to share contact data on mobile
MShare (Mobile Share) is a set of applications let you easily share your contact data.
I am very surprised MS is allowing this project to exist. Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't there a real threat that MS is going to come down on this with the rage of a thousand suns?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for an open source alternative to windows. Just pointing out some (possibly misplaced) concern.
Give Your Finest as You Crop Up Your Research Paper Introduction
A research paper has many important parts. All these parts need to be attended to with strict adherence to requirements. One of these important elements of a research paper is the introduction. As it is the beginning of the paper, great consideration should be given to writing it.
So rather than click once to install your internal CA you'd prefer to click once for every new site you add?
It's probably best to just ignore references unless they are negative (or come from someone you trust).
From Nothing to Something: Story of a Self-Taught Designer
raniskeet has a good point; if you've read and really understand the content of both of those, there's not too much that you'll learn from just reading more books. I'm pretty much in the same boat as you (read The Good Parts, started the Def Guide), and my next step is not to read about Javascript, but to read Javascript. Pick a codebase of something you use or want to start using and learn how it ticks.
SmokeSignals: Lisp-style conditions and restarts for Ruby
You're assuming it would be a single CA. That is, unfortunately, unlikely: we work on a variety of projects for various clients and in conjunction with various other contractors/development teams, and each project will have its own requirements for what needs to be signed and by whom. About the only thing they do have in common is that no-one goes out and spends lots of money on certs for every random development server they're using, they all self-sign in one form or another.
Ultimately the name "color" makes for weak branding, not only because it's already so widely used for so many things (even including a pre-existing software application), but because everyone and their grandma could introduce new applications with variations of the word "color" in the name and leech off color.com's hype, and I expect color.com may have a hard time claiming trademark rights to the word. It doesn't seem like the best plan, and you can't pivot to a new brand without sacrificing your effort and investment on the old brand.
I can't speak for the OP, but as I use a similar system I can venture a guess that some of the following might be worthy of chunk status...

For a website: callouts, user quote styles, tables styles [zebra stripes, etc.], feature lists, intro paragraph styles, Flash/message styles, common control styles, etc.
Programming the First Video Game
Not many people in this world make it such a drastically different place.
Artsicle is hiring art-minded developers
Going to war, web developer style
Crash Bandicoots 1-3 Compared - Squeezing more out of the same hardware
color.com / colour.com are pretty much the best names for an app called Color. Imagine them going big, and sitting at "mycolorapp" (amazing creativity from someone who criticizes that exact point)..
Depends on your business I guess, far more important than a logo to us is the way we present data in our UI and the app backend, the logo is more of a nice to have so we used one of these services and were happy with the result.

So yes we are the kind of cheap client a designer would want to avoid at this stage and these services suit it.
If this is the same project I'm remembering, it's been around for something like 12 years.
Am I the only one who is frustrated by Hacker News' domain abbreviation with links like this? It makes the link look like it's from Google, and not just a hosted google doc. Could the URL abbreviation change to include subdomains as well?
Vanished: a Mystery Game at the Smithsonian (for kids)
Goosmacs?
yeah, color is ubiquitous. Which is exactly why it's a great name if it's marketed well.
Can anyone explain to me why Canada has such poor internet service? I kind of understand why countries like Australia and New Zealand don't have great internet plans, but Canada is right next to the US and yet has far worse service.
Even if Java is thrown out there is still NDK, not to mention a host of other language inventors at Google ;-)
The nice thing about this is that it gives people who want to break into 'design' a place to get their first jobs perhaps, without having to cultivate a a flow of contacts. I imagine people who are already experienced designers will have a more steady and stable body of work from their network.
MS has given them trouble in the past i believe and they've gone through a full code audit to keep running.
I'm not one of the downvoters. But I have a remark: the only Python webserver they looked at in the linked article is Tornado. That's hardly representative, as far as these kind of microbenchmarks are representative in general.