skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this is true. I have more than 100 domains through them across various accounts. The service works, the only complaint I have is that to change something in DNS record, it takes at least 30 clicks to get through all their crap. However if I would have to choose again my domain registrar, it would be probably NearlyFreeSpeech.net, they are way cooler than GoDaddy.
There is something very shady about the whole thing. I have worked in video (production) for most of the last decade and the flip was the hottest thing to hit camcorders since the invention of mini-DV. Phones and digicams also do video, but do not compare well for a variety of reasons. Flip hit a certain sweet spot that other products do not, and was poised to continue capitalizing on it.

You pull the plug on a product when you start losing money on it, not because you can see marginal net going to zero several years in the future. I would very much like to know the inside scoop on this one.
I hesitate to comment on a post that I do not think belongs on HN, but I am doing so to point out that the title is incorrect and sensational. I watched the video because I live near Tokyo and respect Dr. Kaku. He did not recommend leaving Tokyo in this video. He said that some of his family are wondering about evacuation while others have already left. He said that a lot of people have voluntary left because they do not trust the government.
The whole crux of the article is that it did sell, and that sales hence could not have been the motivating factor for cisco cutting it.
This x 1,000,000

I'm a business guy (with some front end tech skills) and I found the rant about power imbalance whiny, at best.
Stop calling your tests "stories"
http://www.lesslettuce.co.uk/ is running on Rackspace cloud and we've not had any problems whatsoever with it. Got nothing to compare it against though, haven't tried EC2. But this makes me glad we went with RS in the first place!
Where Did Your Creative Mojo Go? - Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak
Firefox Extension used to test for SQL Injection vulnerabilities
The iPad will see you now: drchrono EHR on the iPad
> 3) Your market may be parents who want their kids to know how to program, especially homeschoolers. I don't know how large that market is, but it's definitely worth exploring.

I hadn't even considered that. Kinda puts a new spin on how I can market this.

Thank you all for the feedback, it's very much appreciated.
Amazing story, made even more awesome that you're a fellow Kiwi providing a great service, globally. Great work guys.
Any documentation out there for Paraglide? Did some searching and only pulled up the GitHub repo.
Are we talking about masters or PhD version of grad school? I could buy it for a masters-replacement. But an engineering PhD is supposed to be producing new basic technology, not learning existing technology, and ideally producing new technology that requires multi-year research to produce.

That's also possible to do in a more innovation/research-focused startup (biotech does this all the time), but it's not particularly common in tech startups afaik, mostly because "multi-year research 'til product" is not what investors want to hear.

Granted, the results are not always amazing in grad-school either, but quite a bit of basic research in PLs, systems, algorithms, etc. does come out of PhD theses. Could you really do something like Okasaki's "Purely Functional Data Structures" within the YC program?

Graham himself is actually doing an outside-of-academia version of PLs research with Arc. But most of the YC companies don't seem to be embarking on Arc-type projects.
I don't think KK is talking about averages that have been brought down by infant mortality. He's saying explicitly that among hunter-gatherers, lifespans were short. Which I believe from what I've read about them.

It's also false that people who made it to maturity in preindustrial times lived as long as people do today. It was unusual to see 70.
Google On Its “Amazing Blazingly” Mobile Business: “We Tripped Into $1 Billion”
You certainly can pay to use Google Documents and do your own backups. It's just that doing so would defy the biggest appeal of the service. The appeal is that Google handles day-to-day operations for you.
An in-depth performance comparison published by an independent third-party: http://www.thebitsource.com/featured-posts/rackspace-cloud-s... Rackspace Cloud appears to perform much better than EC2 in the States.
Paraglide looks interesting, although looking at the main class doesn't inspire me with a lot of confidence:

https://github.com/bgoldman/Paraglide/blob/master/paraglide....

The lack of tests somewhat seals the deal.
Is there an iOS application for patients? It would be awesome for me to walk into my doctor's office and be able to pull up an app. to have a data-driven discussion ...
I think it's an interesting app, but... with all their content provided by other people, and a purposely simple, procedurally-generated interface, what the hell do they even need $50m for? What investor would say "yeah that sounds like a reasonable amount to continue developing an app that is already pretty much done" - I'd like to meet him.
"Companies producing open-source need to make money too -- that's not anything new."

I find this statement ironic. My understanding of 'free software' movement is that only the creation (or modification) of software incurs economic debt, use and distribution do not.

In that model of the world company A is writing software because they need that software to make money. They subtract the cost of making the software from the total dollars they receive and that is their margin. They 'gift' their economic output to the community on the hopes that they will see a return gift in the form of changes that improves their ability to exploit the software to make money.

If you "need" to make money, then you really shouldn't be participating in a gift economy should you?

If you gift me with MySQL and I make a crap-ton of money by creating a web service that allows me to convert some customer pain to dollars, I don't owe you anything in exchange for your gift. I may, if I want the gifts to keep coming throw you a bone now and then. But at the end of the day if you 'need' to make money, gifting is a very uncertain way to go about it.
It does, just not at launch. At launch, you have to use the AES-256 bridge to your existing blackberry.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/29/blackberry-playbook-faq-c...
Schenley Park is an amazing city park. Pitt & CMU kids are lucky to have it.

I took that photo when I was visiting my grandfather at the Pitt medical center a few days before he died. This is actually a nice reminder that I was able to visit him that last time.
>We’ve been running flawlessly for 6 months, paying them $50/user to avoid handling it ourselves.

if you open Excel and put some typical numbers into it (like commodity hardware cost, networks, electricity, data center mortgage, basic maintenance employees, 40% margin, etc...) you'd see that $50/user/month is just basic usage - timeslice to run provided software on provided hardware. There is no room in that number for a real person dealing with your specific issue. An elephant can't squeeze into a needle eye, even if he promised it to you in writing and accepted the money - just look at the elephant and at the needle with your own eyes.
I've started projects that seemed merely interesting and became obsessed with them after steady immersion. Sometimes you just need to see the glimmer of something to motivate you to dig and find the gold.
http://ustream.com also has an app that can do this
I didnt work on that project. I was a contractor, so pretty much only saw the stuff I worked on.
I'll probably post the source on github sometime over the weekend.
Most people do not care that this is javascript only. So is Facebook. However, it feels kind of slow - I'd much rather scroll.
"You always backup" is an oversimplification. If you run a medium-size company, chances are, you don't back up stuff yourself. Instead, you pay someone else to do it. You trust them to do it right. This article raises a good question. Why can't you trust Google to do it right as well?
Despite the author's denigration of Ruby for its "mess of symbols, implied parenthesis (sic), and lack of statement endings," they sure do depend on a lot of Ruby tools and Ruby-based services: Capistrano, Github, Lighthouse, Tender, and Campfire.
Fair points, but I think the essence of the parent's comment was whether higher education's mission is/should be to transform the student's ability to think, such that they can contribute truly new knowledge to society. and whether training for a job can/should be part of that.

I personally do believe in this higher goal of education.
It's actually pretty easy to take a backup of a Google Apps account. I used to do it in a nightly cron job.

There is probably a business idea here.
"laying waste to all before them"

That's exactly what I meant. Thanks for the clarification.
I struggled with the ordering. I wanted to do linear searching first, because i thought it was the most fundamental and important to understand for the other stuff. And then I didn't want to do binary search right away because it's more complex.

I'd like to add more, but as I said in another comment, when I started doing quicksort, it didn't feel right. I'd likely need to build a different UI paradigm to represent more complicated algorithms. Same with a btree, I really want to go over it, but that seemed like a ball of UI hurt. Might still try to tackle it though.
I'm a Joker user too. They're pricey but they haven't ever let me down.
They didn't say ruby sucks for apps. They personally don't like the syntax.
For what it's worth, I ran a trivially complex system on Rackspace cloud about a year ago and it was a total clusterfuck. My machines were rebooted all the time and I would receive e-mails saying they were rebooted by Rackspace because of infrastructure issues or maintenence. I'd say this happened once every 2-3 weeks and I was only running 3 servers. This was a hobby project so to have to drop what I was doing every 2-3 weeks to reinitialize a server was a huge pain. I eventually shut it all down and switched to Linode just so I didn't have to worry about them randomly rebooting my machines all the time.

I've ran much larger clusters on EC2 over the last several years (50+ servers) and can count on my fingers the times that machines have been rebooted. And when they have, it's due to a lightning strike or a AWS failure that's reasonably explainable.
They could simply bundle the programs together so that you need to install all of them together.
Just guessing here, but the reason Rackspace Cloud is probably more performant than EC2 is probably because EC2 is more utilized than Rackspace.
They email your password to you when you use the "forgot" form.

I notified support about this and the representative said he agrees that it's a security flaw and that he had "sent it up the chain", although this was last year.

Despite this, they're still my preferred registrar.
Honest question: could this just be because no one is on Rackspace?
That's just for writing visualizers.
Right, because with PuTTY on your Linux box, you don't need a virtual keyboard on the screen. Most of the complexity is off-screen. Touch devices don't have that luxury. Now imagine PuTTY with a virtual keyboard built in and you start to see some clutter.
Doesn't anyone have a problem with a company going public that has never turned a profit?

I live in San Francisco and have been using Zipcar for years. They're a wonderful company, with convenient car locations all over the city, excellent customer service, and a very forgiving insurance policy (I was in an accident a couple years ago that totaled their car. I just had to pay $500). So I REALLY want Zipcar to stay in business.

But this just really is beginning to remind me of the crazy shit that was going on 11-15 years ago. Companies back in the day that probably could have built interesting long term businesses imploded when they went IPO and built up massive amounts of capital they didn't need.

Please, someone tell me I'm missing something.
For one of our sites, we ran unixbench on EC2, Linode and StormCloud (LiquidWeb)..and I can tell you that EC2 wasn't the best value with respect to price/performance (not by a lot).

I can also tell you that having not picked EC2, I have, more than once, wished for Feature X offered by Amazon. Maybe Rackspace Cloud offers a comparative list of addons/products, so my point might not be too relevant. But, my point is that price/performance shouldn't be the only determining factor.
iPhone4 vs Nikon D700
somewhat related:
anyone know if cakephp is still being actively developed (as a framework)?
American "free enterprise" at work. Why some people worship this nonsense is beyond me.
She wanted a sign bit.
Justin.tv has an app that can do this
GDocBackup - backup all your documents from Google Docs to local disk
Rackspace lets you burst CPU, whereas Amazon EC2 does not. It's not terribly surprising that Rackspace is performing better in that area.

What you need to be careful about is the fact that EC2 and Rackspace Cloud are currently in two different leagues when it comes to controlling your instances. Amazon has a far better control panel (not to mention the API) for exercising granular control of your instances. Hard drive space is dynamically scalable on Amazon whereas it is not on Rackspace (their solution of mounting Rackspace Cloud Files via FUSE is unacceptable).

The monitoring system for EC2 is also far better, and completely non-existent on Rackspace unless you pay them $99/mo out of pocket on top of your hourly usage charges.

All in all, my Rackspace experience left a very bad taste in my mouth when dealing with their support, and it was a culmination of the small and simple things that left me frustrated (the lack of pv_grub support out of the box, etc., etc.) and kept me on EC2 despite the lack of CPU bursting.
Red Hat Submits JSRs for Java EE 7; Looks for the Java Love
In cyberspy vs. cyberspy, China has the edge
This is one of those investments where vcs looking to ride waves (read social/mobile/cloud) + Mike McCue is a serial entrepreneur. Statistics are in favor of those two.

ipad's killer app is still browsing, and magazines. These guys might become digital press for all the magazines and newspapers out there.
How to Check for Input Validation in Visual Basic.NET
Which product dev setup would you choose if you could start from scratch?
I'm currently in the position of making these decisions for a new venture. I have a good idea of what I'd like to do but I'd love to hear what others are happy with and/or what they would do today if they could start from scratch.

The question: I'm curious what technical cofounders or product managers would put in place today if they could pick any set of tools and processes they wanted.

The only limitations or requirements here (though I don't think this will really effect many answers) would be that we are using Python/Django/Git. We're big fans of deploy-> measure-> iterate often.

I'm talking everything from project management tools (features, milestones, issues, bug tracking, backlog, etc) to how you deploy.
The Amiga was unique when it came out due to its custom sound and graphic chips that placed it beyond any existing home computer at the time (1985). Unfortunately, the hardware didn't change all that much and was slowly eclipsed first by graphics (VGA came out 1987 offering more colors) and then sound (SoundBlasters in the early 90s).

The other issue was the operating system, which is really three pieces---Exec, DOS and Intuition. Exec is the kernel, written in 68000 assembly and appears as just another shared library to the system (neat design really). It's small (I was able to recreate over half of it in C in just a few hours) and would have been able to keep up as is until multiprocessor cores became popular, which would have required a somewhat major change (critical sections were handled by literally disabling task switching). It also has no notion of users (being a single user machine).

DOS, the file system. This itself was a port of a portion of Tripos (written in BCPL) which only took two weeks to do (or four; it was a really short period of time). It's a bit quirky (due to it being written in BCPL) but it worked and given the nature of device drivers in the Amiga (a combination of shared library and a potential thread) it could easily support other file systems rather transparently. This is probably the least problematic aspect of the operating system to update for modern machines.

And finally Intuition, the GUI. This was written in C, and unfortunately, was rather closely tied to the underlying hardware. Not only could you specify a new screen (different screen resolution and color depth) but access to the blitters (which were also used by the floppy disk drivers to decode the bit stream I kid you not) and even the raw video co-processor (a three-instruction CPU that could be used to reset the video registers at an almost arbitrary portion of the video scanning beam). Some of the upper layers of Intuition were fairly video independent but not enough of it to survive a major redesign of the video subsystem.

You're pretty much right in that it was a "nice computer" (I found it really fun to program) but it didn't evolve all that much while on the market. Exec would need some work to work on today's multicore hardware and Intuition would have to be reworked from the ground up.
which is a pure loss of $500/hour as whoever bought the machine has already priced the expected performance in.
Doesn't seem likely. VMs impose limits on resource consumption (though Rackspace allows CPU bursting, from what I understand). It's not like the old days where you could get lucky on a sparsely-populated shared server.
Rackspace bought Cloudkick. I would expect the built-in monitoring to improve greatly in the near future.
apologies in advance for the self-post, but i wrote a somewhat-related article a few years ago about how the grad school research world can actually be similar to the start-up world, even though they seem like polar opposites at first glance:
http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/research-and-startup.htm
I don't understand how Spreedly is somehow providing you a "return". They sit on top of your payment gateway so you pay everything you would've paid withluan in-house integration, plus Spreedly's fees. Coding your own subscription billing is a one-time thing as well. Where are you saving money?
I agree the utopian views are mistaken, but I think a purely dystopian one is mistaken as well. There were certainly plenty of kids just trying to get a job, but the universities also were the source of much of the intellectual development that led to early modern science/math. I recently read a biography of Copernicus, for example, which emphasized the impact on his thinking made by his four years studying at the University of Krakow. Other products of that era's universities included Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, and Leibniz.
I believe it is, I haven't met anyone who's used in a long time though. I think CodeIgniter is the current hot framework for PHP.
Out of interest, why 48 specifically?
Which is what libertarians hate. The argument against government is that government unscrupulously uses eminent domain to seize land at below-market prices, which is then handed over to the ISP. Government's intervention a la eminent domain takings favors the most-favored-ISP. So what they're doing now in NC is have government step in to solve government problems, which doesn't solve the cause of the problem.
Totally agree. They make setting everything up a snap. They've got presets for most of the services you might use on the web and if you want to customize your DNS records, the editor is very nice.
Explosive hypothesis about humans' lack of genetic diversity
That situation won't ever occur. Once an individual/organization has chosen Amazon RDS, Amazon support versus MySQL support won't be a discussion. You have no direct access to the servers, so you can't make code changes.
My job interview experience (or how not to interview someone)
thanks for sharing the link. nicely written article. apart from "formulating", "executing", and "selling" i would like to add two more steps in the beginning "survey" and "identify open problems". i would say in startup world also survey (competitive research) and "open problems" (novelty) are important.
The founders/early investors could have been taking $ off the table so it wasn't all new shares... Just a possibility.
You might as well? Isn't that at least two orders of magnitude less awesome?
CodeIgniter has a big following, but so does Symfony2 and Kohana.
That's a start, but there are many other potential vectors for cookie data. See: http://samy.pl/evercookie/
Groupon to Choose Goldman, Morgan Stanley to Lead IPO
Asperger's and Coding
You might already know this already and that's just a typo, but the actual price is $50/user/year, not per month.
On Marketplace this morning someone stated they are profitable where they operate (DC, NYC, and SF?) but have been spending money to grow.
Many people say RIM has an odd shipping model but I just think they're slow. When you look at how Apple ships a product, they announce the product, the details, show off the apps, and then BAM! It's available in two weeks and sells millions.

RIM on the other hand announces something and then every few months teases you with more and more details and then releases some half baked product with bi-monthly updates. By the time the product becomes what they intended it to be I already want something new.

As a Blackberry user, I can't give it up. I love my Blackberry's form factor. At the same time, it's an incredibly frustrating experience.
Yes. The next version (2.0?) is being finalized now.
I just built an app on both codeigniter and cake... and I prefer cake by far. Cake gets in your way a little bit, but it's good for me since I wouldn't describe myself as a "classically trained coder".
I contracted for about 12 years in all throughout my career, and this rule of thumb is also consistent with my experience as a contrator.

you mention freelancing however, I think the rate needs to be a bit higher for freelancing to take into account all the non-billable time.
From an outsider - I feel the parallels are closer to being punched into an elite Finals Club than a grad school.

The alumni network is smaller and likely more powerful.

Admittance into the club will carry more weight in future endeavors.

A very small percentage of hopefuls are accepted.

This isn't meant to be negative - I just feel it is a more apt comparison.
Thanks, I'm trying Ghostery out.
I'd guess: a parade, meeting the mayor, key to city/country, some dedicated accommodation, organisational support in running a major event, etc. Think of it more as a novel way to host a massive launch event or corporate end-of-year party than actually running the country for a day.
I don't like metalworking, but I depend on my car.
So I bought this, didn't much care for it, anyone care to tell me how to kill a connection?
I am slowly getting tired of blog posts, startups, etc.. that imply that they are better simply because their service/website/code is better simply because they're using Ruby.

You can write almost anything in almost any language. Real innovation is coming up things like provisioning virtual servers a-la what Amazon did, and not by doing what someone else did and slapping a "look it's Ruby!" label on it.
Cant you use it on Xoom considering it has a Web interface.
The Wharton School of Entrepreneurship - The Wharton Journal