skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to work for work for a decent size newspaper company in a large metro area and they spent over 6 months to come up with a redesign for a home page that involved at least 4 or 5 different execs or managers in constant meetings, talks with an outside design agency about once a week. Oh, the 6 months only involved coming up with the mock ups not actual dev. That was a while another story with how much time was wasted on that.

So i imagine in a larger company, you would have more execs having constant meetings over a paywall, studies with how much profit they can make with pretty graphs to show how the stock price will jump because of the increase in earnings.
Whilst the figure is without doubt impressive, I can't help but wonder how much of this figure is money lost by the poor customers that bought costly, overly complex and hard to customise money-sinks that require specialists to beat into shape...

* cough *

SharePoint
The kivaloo data store
It might be unique to the OED, but they do have historical evidence to back up their case.
Four reasons why Facebook might be overvalued
Except we are talking about a $30 savings for buying Atom over i3 in a media center.

If it was over $100, I could see your logic. But not for $30.
Show HN: radiationinfo.org - Understanding the severity of radiation exposure.
http://www.radiationinfo.org/

As the media continues to cover the situation in Japan there has been an incredible amount of confusion over the severity of the radiation numbers presented. It only gets worse as you come across all the different units for radiation exposure (which are even mixed with the same article). Add in a lack of references to source material and even errors in distinguishing between micro- and milli- units, it's often hard to tell what is really going on.

The goal of Radiation Info is simply to help provide consistency and understanding by putting all of this information in context. This can be done by linking directly to the site, using the bookmarklet, or having the site owner embed the JavaScript themselves.

Technical notes:

1. Written entirely in client-side code. It isn't always beautiful but it works.

2. Entirely open source: https://github.com/wrenchlabs/radiationinfo - Bugs? File an issue and/or send a pull request!

3. The source data is parsed out of a Google Spreadsheet (http://bit.ly/radinfodata) which makes it incredibly simple to update and/or augment.

4. Looks nice on your mobile device too.

Check it out! Please let me know what you think!
I've found WinRM and PowerShell to be a pretty effective "ssh-like" tool for Windows. Plus it's object-oriented.

http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/powershell/powershell_r...
If you're interested in why this sort of approach fails, I wrote a brief post on the subject: http://www.bhickey.net/2011/02/naive-algorithmic-shuffling/
As someone else explained, that's per-region. So if you have a lot of servers in a region, that cost is amortized over all of them.
Use the SOCK_RAW flag on the socket() call and you obviously don't need a bind() call.
Moreover, the domain name color.com is cool, and, the price was not that high to begin with.
thanks! will try to fix it very soon.
The reason the original post gave for getting rid of his old machine was that it couldn't handle 1080p content. The AppleTV can't do more than 720p (with XBMC it can decode at least some 1080p, but downscales it to 720p for output to your TV).
How To Participate in IETF 80 Remotely Via Audio, Jabber and WebEx
SOME domain names matter. I believe that it was a critical element to Mint's success. But in their case it was also backed up my a phenomenal service. If Color can back up their killer domain name with a service people flock to, then their investment will have been worthwhile. If not, its a generic enough name with broad applications that is likely to find a buyer in the neighborhood of what they paid to secure it today.
After reading http://www.yesodweb.com/blog/preliminary-warp-cross-language... I wish it were feasible to implement it again in a more performant language/framework. Would be really fascinating to get solid cost analysis numbers. If you can handle 6x more requests in even Node that could result in a near 6x cost decrease in hardware, is that worth it? I'd love to know.
Ready.js v1.3.0 - Less configuration file, more shell - ready.js
There's nothing silly about it. Domains are important but for brandable terms. Color is far too common a word. It conveys nothing that could be seen as a brand.

Further, it shows that they're spending with the notion of huge scale long before there's any sign that's necessary. (It's what sunk a lot of dot bomb companies.) Yes it might be cheaper now, but it's a risky way to spend their money especially when a brandable term is both more valuable and less expensive.
I would complement this by noting that some people online, particularly at SO, cannot ask questions properly. Optimization problems are often about context, but context is seldom properly presented, if presented at all.

One can always ask for more information, so this is no excuse, of course. Perhaps the patronizing answers are the stupid mode of requesting clarifications.
tell that to apple
It's funny that in other news they're getting flack for including LOL and OMG and their defence is that they're descriptive not prescriptive - and I think most brits would use *-ise indiscriminately.
However some people apparently manage to work at jobs for years without making any friends. This is a useful piece of information to know before hiring them.
Is that a bad thing? Global variables keep cropping up in programming languages, so large objects (context-globals; namespaces) might be just the right compromise between encapsulation and coherence.
Ask HN: I've read JS Definitive Guide, Good Parts. What next?
I've read Javascript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan and Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford.

What should I read next?
Making 40 stable revenue growth driven companies does not trump 1 Google or Facebook.

These companies are not comparable, and cut from entirely different DNA and if you try to compare them, you just sound bizarre.
Did you really buy the domain names? What on earth are you going to use them for? It also seems that someone having my opinion (that domains in that form are embarrassing and not worth the small amount of money you paid) somewhat discounts your argument that domains don't matter. Clearly they do, at least to some extent. Are you honestly saying that if you had $41M in the bank you'd launch your brand with the domain myAwicklanderApp.com ? I doubt it.
ah man! incomplete raw data in tables without graphs. i think i get the picture.
Many new features in GCC 4.6
Excuse me for assuming that you are from western world.

To attain our conflicting goals of improving living conditions for entire human populace, without increasing power consumption the average westerner would have to forfeit 80% of his energy consumption.

So you're telling me that we as species are willing to "devolve" to a standardized standard of living that is somewhere in the ballpark of early 50's? If so I think you are either dishonest or severely lack perspective and knowledge of human species.

I honestly believe that finding additional power sources and utilizing them to satisfy and further expand our consumption of power is the most pragmatic, fair and painless way forward for our species.

To express myself poetically - I believe that god wants us to increase our power consumption up to the level where we will be able to consume entire star systems and beyond. I might be weird, but I also believe that single "purpose" of life is to increase entropy. Thus a perfect life form would expand its power consumption to the level where it would drain the whole universe of its energy potential.

Disclaimer: Proposed 80% is a number I pulled out of where the sun don't shine.
Monoglot developers are like Stereotypical Arrogant Americans
The title might be misleading here: tl;dr: TOR was made by spies to use to transmit information securely.

When I read the title, it implied to me that it was designed by spies as a trojan to leak information back to them. That would have made a much more sensational story, which is why I jumped to that conclusion, I suppose.
I just upgraded my XBMC setup with the newest Mac Mini-its great. Full 1080p playback, hdmi native interface. And XBMC runs very smoothly on it
I always thought that people mocked Color because Color got $41 million dollars and I didn't. I mean, they didn't.
sidebar is not equal aside, and you can have several headers footers on one page.
I understand etymology has to use history to present a case, but I don’t know a single BrE speaking person that’d write a current text with -ize endings. The OED aren’t prescribing current usage with their stance.
> "Water would be a big part of the space coach's body, too, according to the study. Packed along the habitat modules, it would provide good radiation shielding."

erm… doesn't that mean that once you use the fuel (water), your radiation shielding is gone?
From the comments below the article: "I am an American and I do smile a lot. I am happy, content, and armed. I do not fear strangers, and I smile because I am happy to share my joy with you."

He-he... A perfect example of neurotic behavior. And fearing no strangers and being armed is something in the same league with being happy and content - that's really an awesome indicator for an open and friendly culture ;)
Having everyone say "you suck" isn't the kind of publicity you want. If your app sucks, you don't want it to be famous for sucking. I mean, Lotus Notes is famous, right? Are you running out to use it?

With this kind of publicity, you've got an uphill battle to convince people to use it - assuming you can improve it. Which the OP argues you COULD do if you diverted your PR money into actually working on the app.

I don't think there's much of an "awe-factor" in domain names. I heard the guy who made Instapaper interviewed, and he said that his domain and app name don't even make sense for his app; it was a domain he'd originally registered for a different idea. But nobody cares because they like the app.

I think the OP's point is valid: they could have easily come up with a short, memorable name, gotten it cheap, and hired 3 more developers.
Nothing to see here, move along.

Summary: tor was written to help e.g. informants securely get information back to the US government; but an anonymity network that only carries spies' information back to the US government is not terribly useful, so they opened it up. Yes, tor was made for spying, but not (necessarily) for spying on tor users.
Could we please stop writing about Color? As in, just drop the curtain of silence and be done with it? The less buzz there is about it, the sooner it'll be gone from popular consciousness.

But should we generate too much buzz, it may become self-sustaining :-(

Btw., perhaps the 41mln investment isn't just about providing necessary funding, but also about giving people 41 million reasons to generate even more buzz?
This wasn't really an issue back when Apple was founded.
My problem with the HTPC is it was a full Windows stack so it included all the headaches of antivirus, updates, configuration, and UAC prompts required a keyboard be nearby.

This was my main problem with an all-in-one HTPC. It was amazing when it worked, but my housemates didn't appreciate it for the 1% of the time when they couldn't watch TV because of a crash, or Windows Update.
Skype co-founder & chief architect invests in Utopic
Yeah, I did buy them, though I'm not sure what I'll do with them if anything. Maybe I'll point them to the color.xxx slide show. :)

My post was written, not from the perspective of someone that just got $41 million. But instead, how I would feel if I invested that money in a company and that's what they decided to spend it on.
Reid Hoffman had a great line at the last Startup School to the effect of "Most mainstream web users can remember 7 +-2 web services. If this is true (and I believe it is) $500K on domain names is not a bad investment for a few reasons:

1. Easy to say/spell. I work for a startup where I have to spell the name of the company every time I talk to someone. We are a medical company so its not a big marketing issue, but having to explain your site is Colr.com or TheColorApp.com instead of just "Color" will impede consumers.

2. It makes you seem like a real company with the resource to own a short, properly spelled name rather than yet another creatively spelled SocNet. Talk to some non-early adopters and you'll see how important this can be.

My take is that most people are mocking the amount of money being spent on what is initially seen as a photo sharing service rather than a platform that will allow people to quickly assemble social networks of real life friends. in different contexts.
Color may turn out to be a number of grandiose things, but let's not forget the simple problem that it solves: sharing photos that different people take at the same gathering. I mean people do this already, through Facebook and other photo services, but this takes a whole lot of hassle out of the process.

I wish more commentators would acknowledge this basic USP before waxing lyrical about implied social graphs and relationship revolutions.

Incidentally, the other day it occurred to me what a big deal the iPad's back facing camera is. Apple want you to take your iPad to parties and gatherings, cause it's crowd-gathering appeal is unreal. You're more likely to do that if you can use it as a camera. At least if the party's in your own house. It basically transforms more social events into live Apple adverts.
How does the "Render - No IO" case work? Does it take a different code path? (E.g. render "No entries found" instead of iterating over each entry and rendering it?) Or, put differently, what are you measuring in the "Render - No IO" case?
From the first email through the WELL and USENET
In the war for talent, love is a weapon
Seeing this on HN is awesome. I am a mentor on a FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team as well and I have just began reading The New Cool. Amir is an inspiration to every mentor and student in FIRST. We are right in the middle of our regional season so you can check out the robots and competitions in your area by going to http://usfirst.org.
I think what he means is silly is that the post only focuses on the $1/2M spent on the domains vs the amount of expectation the company had pre-launch.

With $41M, color has more than enough cash to pivot onto something that will work - but for me the real reason color hit a big fail at launch was the same reason cuil was - the level of expectation people had about the company due to the fact they raised so much/had so much hype. If color had a different name, and was written by a small hardy team from y combinator or whatever, I think people who have still had some scepticism but would have been generally positive.

I, like a lot of people, looked at that app and thought, "this is $41M of development?".

They can still pivot and do something interesting, but I think this is one of those times that "release early, release often" does not apply. It's a great app for when your at a big event, but as I asked on twitter, what if there is no there, there?
In mainstream usage that's true, but scientific usage leans more to the OED spelling, especially since some major journals (even UK-based ones like Nature) enforce it.
James Gosling joining Google
Same here. My Acer Revo hangs off the back off my monitor in the Vesa mount with Ubuntu+Boxee. I don't see it, and I don't hear it. It's my only permanently on machine at home, and because it's a full Linux box, I also use it for performing nightly rsyncs of my off-site server. It also runs Vuze for downloading video.
Tickets to Apple's WWDC are now on sale
I wasn't really comparing them as much as just thinking about other ways to use that money. Would any of those 40 companies turn into the next Google? Probably not. On the other hand, what are Color's odds?

And like I said, you'd still have 5 million left, enough to give seed funding to every Y Combinator launch since 2005. If you're looking for Google-sized returns, that's where I'd start.
The mobile phone superpower you have never heard of
Yeah, and McDonalds is just a last name, right?
Cool.
This made me remember the first brick game that I've played, Paranoid(http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~north/Paranoid.html). Think that was in 94 or 95 haha
And we can still buy it (:

Anyway, good stuff man.
Their odds are much better than the 40 other companies.
Given the timing of the investment and the domain purchases it seems almost guaranteed (to me) that the investors knew they planned to buy them.

Also, I'm not sure how much of the quality discussion and debate that HN is known for you can expect on the 18th submission critical of color to hit the front page in the last few days.
Structure of DNA repair complex reveals workings of powerful cell motor
When do people ever say, "I bought an Apple computer"? People usually say, "I bought a Mac". Ever rarer will you see someone say, "I bought an Apple phone." (I'm talking about most laymen aka consumers)

Apple's branding value has followed from their high quality and consumer-accessible products. No amount of marketing will support a crappy product. Focusing on marketing over quality is how products die a spectacular death. Remember Kin?
GroupMe Brings Brands Into The Conversation
A Fashion guide for men, this Spring.
> If it causes that much irritation, have you considered making your own CA, adding it to your browsers, and then using that to sign your temporary certificates?

A good fix but under the light of the looming issues describe in the link above: why invest all that time implementing and then defending this feature in the first place - for a negligible (at best) security benefit?
In the post, he asks this question: "What's the fastest way to find the largest, or smallest, number in an array?"

I guess he means fastest code to write, not the fastest code to run. If you have, say, a million numbers, I'd try doing this using concurrency. If there are two CPUs (or cores), find the maximum in the bottom half of the array and the maximum in the top half in parallel. Then return the maximum of the two maximums.

I don't know much JavaScript - does it have built-in support for concurrency?
Indeed - didn't business.com sell for $1M a few years ago?
The fact that all four "top tips" are actually ads for services (e.g. a logo design marketplace) is a bit slimy.

I'm hoping the designer was intentionally referencing the surreal "Top Tips" from UK comedy magazine Viz to undermine this effort.

http://www.cosc.brocku.ca/~bross/personal/vtTips.html
Condescending, presumptive no-info answers are often the top voted in my experience.
That'd be true if we weren't talking about an iPhone app that users will install without ever actually going to the web site behind it.

1st User Experience:
- open App Store
- search for "Color"
- install

2nd - nth User Experience:
- click the "Color" button on your iPhone

Notice how we never visit the actual site. TheColorApp.com would work just fine for them.
HeadJS script? Is it really necessary?
For "Windows-style" ssh, where I just need a prompt, I use psexec:

psexec \\computer -u administrator cmd

A true SSH service would be useful in lots of other situations though.
Build a paywall for the NY times :o)
TechnologyReview:The 50 most innovative companies
While I agree with your summation, that India is contributing innovation, I would be wary about using this one as an example:

One of the few Indian innovations that has received international press is the cheapest car in the world

This is more a product of cheap labor, cheap facilities and cheap materials than any truly innovative accomplishments.
This is just one "layer" of this particular stack, but if you're looking for real-world-warts-n-all examples of Backbone.js, here's a few examples to scroll through:

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#examples

If you pop open a JS console, many of them have models and controllers that you can poke around with.

Conversely, if you have an example that you think should be on that list, let me know.
Yahoo plans to open source code for non-core technologies
Ah, yes, must reduce complexity. That's why we have a basically useless thing like strfry() in glibc. Or memfrob()

Because nothing reduces complexity like code that's completely unusable for any real-world project.
I think that domain names are still extremely important, but I'm curious about the other side of the equation. Do you think that most consumers are just following links from Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and no longer typing in words in the browser bar and appending .com? Just from shoulder surfing at my local library, it seems that many 'average' folks are still typing in keywords and adding .com to the end. For many sites this seems to bring up a (monetized) landing page with search results where they just click on a link that looks like what they want -- and if it isn't they hit the back button and try again or type different keywords in the browser bar. Based on this, it seems that having a memorable .com domain name is worth it.

Being tech-savvy, I'd never just type in keywords and append .com, but I think I'm in the minority on this one.
These aren't really 4 reasons. They're 4 counterexamples supporting 1 reason - that social networks come and go.

In my opinion, a bigger reason is market saturation. Facebook's valuation assumes big growth will continue, but at this point in time, if you're not on facebook, you're pretty unlikely to ever be on facebook.
Drepper is being more than reasonable in this bug. The strfry() function is a joke that only exists for historical reasons; it wouldn't be added today. He is 100% correct that fixing "bugs" in it is a waste of time.
Video: State of the Browser
AppSumo FREE course: Using Google Analytics for More than Pageviews
I'm not sure why this was front-paged. Twice.

I disagree with the premise that a mere mortal can spontaneously boot strap him-self to a higher plane of thinking through a simple change in perspective. Revolutionary breakthroughs are a product of obsession and hard work. Aha moments are built on top of a lot of grinding. The Principia Mathematica stands testimony to this.

This post could have been written in a much more terse manner. There is a very low information density. We don't need wireframes and tangentially related TED talks to understand this stuff. It feels pedantic at best.
> You didn't understand how luck works.

That's a pretty bold statement to make to somebody who built a simulator. Can you point to any specific coding or algorithmic errors?

I think you misunderstood his point, which is that it's easy to burn through your starting bankroll, even if you play well.
Cacophony.js: Make your own Wilderness Downtown-style HTML5 videos
That table is the customary way to present regression results in economic research (nber.org, ssrn.com, ...) There is no graphical way to represent what variables are statistically significant and their various correlations.
I suggest that you educate yourself on the subject with the following link (http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/Econ_113/regre...)
If it comes down to building your own solution, then yes, splurge a bit.

But I think the greater counter-argument against the solution proposed by the author is a pre-built media player device (boxee, WD etc.). Not big on CPU, but sufficient for the tasks outlined in the original post.

Building computers in the low price segments is pretty dominated by "constant" factors, i.e. case, PSU, mainboard. You can easily double your RAM or increase CPU by a large factor with a relative low percentage increase in total price.