skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Launching a startup. To-do list?
Sup guys,

Im starting a new "social/dating" project all by myself.
Im a designer so I did all the UI work and now sent the PSD files to convert them to HTML to India.
All the back-end will be coded by a friend of mine in Amsterdam.

My question is.
What should I do while the guy in India is slicing the PSD and my friend in Amsterdam is building the back-end?

Should I "ship quiet and ship often" or start generating some buzz. Although I don't think it will be a good idea to start making noise for a product that is not done yet.

What can I do in the meanwhile?

Thanks in advance
Very cool! I might switch from OpenFire to ejabbered just to use this if it continues to mature.
They say what difference numpy might make!

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?test=spec...

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?test=spec...
I hear there is effort to get Numpy working on Cython, and work to get Cython to target PyPy as a backend. Given the two efforts... maybe doable.
I guess you are right. You do seem to have a comparable problem as you grasped mine perfectly.

So instead of buying google adwords for "website plugin" I could spin it for each industry maybe with relevant anecdotes. looking at it this way, it looks like not being niche is suddenly a great advantage because I can run through each industry.

Thanks :-)
Nothing is set in stone. I do admit that a libevent based asynchronous API is tempting.
PyPy itself has RPython, which is a restricted Python that can be compiled down to something fast. Cython allows you to annotate Python code (inline or externally) to allow compiling it down. ShedSkin compiles some Python directly to C++. So there's a bunch of options (all of which PyPy has to compete with!)
Hilal Import Export - leather and meat bowel - Diyalogo.com
A MetaWeblog API server for Jekyll - post to Jekyll from MarsEdit
If you're a dev, file an official bug and mirror it here:
http://openradar.appspot.com/faq

Brings the incentive back: if Apple doesn't fix things, there is still a public record of the open bug.

Prevents people from wasting time writing up the same bug over+over.

Also increases the likelihood of getting fixed: if somebody else sees your open bug at openradar, they can file a second bug at Apple. Apple detects that they're duplicates, which "votes up" your bug.
Can I please ask why this is being upvoted without being downvoted? I'm not asking out of arrogance, hatred or jealousy infact I think the project is quite cool as its similar to what I have done myself using eventmachine in ruby and libevent in c but is it HN front page worthy? I feel like its been done to death.
FWIW, telling noob designers not to enter design contests is equivalent to telling noob programmers to comment their code. It's 101 stuff. I could go into what parts of his post are off-target (like what you point out) but the fundamentals remain the same.
That's cool. Far too many people ignore what a solid relationship with the upstream payment provider can give you.

Glad the fees are capped. I saw a $100 link, so not sure about what the cap is.

As for collecting CC data, if it's passing through your code, even if you don't store it, you are accountable for it. I've seen the silliest things with people claiming they aren't storing CC data. And yet, you can browse file after file of automatically generated logs that contain raw CC data.

That you aren't storing CC data makes your life easier. However, I'd still review what you are liable for just in case. I don't say any of this bash you (I really like the idea!), but so you avoid any problems that cause you to shut down (because it's a cool idea!). I've been doing this for 10 years now, and as soon as someone opens up a payment system like this, money laundering and other schemes will review how to abuse it. So when I see something like this, I get nervous. I ask: how would I exploit it.
Top Apps And Sites Using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Meh. I think asking (especially young) designers to consider the value of their work before giving it away is a reasonable thing.. but to try to pseudo-unionize to prevent this from happening is silly.

This happens to lots of markets, with similar complaints. It's certainly happened in photography, and the result is painful.. mostly for craftsmen in the middle of the talent & pay scale, who's overhead and value was frankly inflated by a rather narrow market channel and burden-to-entry.

Both disappeared, and the market corrected. Is it sad? Sure. It's a bummer to know that in some parts of the market hard-working people were replaced by flickr searches or microstock, but there's something beautiful about it also. Either way, it's inertia. It's what happens, and what's always happened.

I think the natural result can be a very positive one for the very talented. There's a sharp talent & value contrast this kind of shift causes. People in the middle need to move up or down and take advantage of the changes.

Adapt or die.
Will Google give a higher rank to a website which runs AdSense?
"Anonymous" attacks Sony to protest PS3 hacker lawsuit
Love the show, but I keep reading it as "Annoying".
Startup Founder Lessons: Tomer Tagrin On Raising Money
Is this the new <blink>? :)
Awesome linkbait + paywall

The intro paragraph was definitely written by a scientist
Thanks for your feedback. We felt like the value added features are the convenience that the app affords e.g no scrolling, and the decision to follow or unfollow is done with just one click. We also provide information to help you make your decision such as the average tweets per day that the person makes. As for money this is mostly just for fun to build something that people might find useful and cool :)
Basic submissions can't be downvoted.
I signed up for facebook, friended no one that didn't friend me and that I didn't know personally, told no one about my account, and have a folder of facebook spam in my email box that already has 40 messages in about 2 months.

Facebook spams you if someone has your email address in their address book. Facebook spams you if someone wants to be your friend. Facebook spams you if someone has a birthday. Almost half of my Facebook spams are in Spanish, and I don't speak Spanish.

And I have six friends in Facebook. Six. I can't imagine how bad it is if you have 100.
Threads work pretty darn well, actually. Depending on the libraries you use the GIL may not get in the way (e.g., database libraries, stuff like lxml that releases the GIL). If you have blocking stuff like I/O (socket or file) then threads help. The only time when the GIL really gets in the way is with multiple processors and CPU-bound routines. Even with CPU-bound routines you are often better off with threads as the machinery does share the CPU transparently and relatively fairly.

Threads are a little half-assed, sure, but so are most of the currently offered "replacements" for threads, including cooperative multitasking (which also doesn't do anything with multiple processors!)
Semil Shah, TechCrunch contributor and entrepreneur, talks Color
Paypal released a micropayment platform this year
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/paypals_micropayment_so...

<<The solution was first announced last October when the company said that the upcoming feature would offer "a competitive fee structure for micropayments, with pricing at 5 percent plus 5 cents for purchases under $12.">>
That's not true. If CC data is passing through his system, their are things he needs to be aware of. You'd be surprised at the logs that are generated by people who don't store credit card information. Somehow, that unstored CC information winds up in a random logs directory, unencrypted and open for anyone to see.
"It may seem arbitrary, but the platform an organization uses is indicative to me of a whole lot."

What is he supposed to add here to avoid condescension? He was asked a question, this belief drives the answer. He admits his opinions might not be fully formed ("seem arbitrary"), and claims no general truth for his opinion ("indicative to me", rather than just indicative). And he's giving his basis for preferring Unix, rather than a vague "I don't like Windows". He's actually not negative about Windows at all!
TECH Fort Worth Announces IMPACT Awards Finalists
There's nothing arbitrary about wanting a Python program to work with CPython and Python 3.
Same here. For the first time, I used the feature in iTunes that allows you to set the in/out points, so I could skip over Jeff Bridges VO on 'The Grid'. With that tweak in place, it's my new favorite working soundtrack. I suspect the alteration between symphonic pieces and ones with an articulated rhythm is a bit part of what makes it so good. Also, the amazingly great production.
Anonymous DDOSes Sony and PlayStation.com, PSN Goes Offline
I appreciate your comment, and it's great that you're reaching out to the developers using your platform. I'm excited to try out the debugging features of Titanium Studio, and hopefully it's more transparent in the steps it's taking to build an application as well.

Your second paragraph rings a bit hollow though. I'm sure you all are committed to growing the platform, I'm sure you're making investments. What software company isn't trying to move things forward? But as a user, I frankly don't care about how much better things will be. I just want to get things done, and the current state of your product makes that difficult. Worse than that, the current track-record of development (as witnessed by may comments here!) doesn't show a lot of progress.

I earnestly look forward to seeing improvements in the near future, as I have an application to deploy and support!
If the value is zero the user is being redirected to home, after accessing the link url.
Fair enough, but I do think it's pretty presumptuous of you to speak for an entire industry. I do not think it is unethical, as long as the terms are clearly laid out beforehand.
No, he doesn't seem to mind me. He does have his prejudices with regard to America. (The amis is the derogatory German term.)

Two months ago I had lunch with him, another former Wehrmacht soldier and three women from that generation. The other guy was extremely rude. He said many derogatory things about Americans and American prisoner of war camp guards (my dad was such a guard after the war). I don't speak German and didn't know about this until after the dinner when my girlfriend interpreted for me.

I was pissed at her for not letting me know what he said until after he left. She didn't want a scene to be caused. No one in the group said anything to the man or to correct him or to say that he was full of shit. They all kept cheerfully engaged in conversation.

What's amazing to me is that the great crime of that generation was silence. Few spoke out against racist talk. Few stood up against foolish rantings. Sixty years later here was a group of Germans from that generation still afraid to speak up. Still afraid of causing a scene (and my girlfriend too!).

It was absolutely shocking. I was really pissed because my dad had died a few weeks earlier and it was hard to hear this stuff from the likes of these people. No Wehrmacht soldier has the right to call another uncivilized and he did call Americans uncivilized.

The whole thing caused me to reflect a lot. It's something I'll never forget. My girlfriend's generation suffers from what I call "the German guilt thing". Her father's generation doesn't seem to have ever come to grips with what they did.

This is all anecdotal of course. But in my dealings with other Germans it's clear to me that Germans on a whole do think they are better (or their way of life is better) than anyone else. They won't say this anymore but deep down there appears to be an "uber alles" bent.

Other people have different experiences and come to different conclusions than me. This is all just my opinion. I guess the crux of what I'm saying is that it is easy to feel superior and such arrogance isn't limited to Americans. There are lots of examples in the history of the world of such thinking. It's bad whenever it occurs and the worst form of it is to ignore it in your culture while condemning it in other cultures.
I think overt is not necessarily all that was going on.
10 Reasons You Need to Quit Your Job Right Now
I suggest you grab a beer. First things first.

After that, maybe see if you can get some people signed up for launch notices. Maybe see if you can get some female early adopters. That strikes me as the biggest dating-site problem.

Good luck.
What if I delivered content that gave you something between stopping to read it and only getting the truly fantastic?
(no automagic memory management, no garbage collection, no functional programming).

That's a big drawback.

Common Lisp (SBCL) is very fast already, and one can avoid the GC overhead in a number of interesting situations (though not all). Are there benchmarks comparing SBCL and Lush?

Has anyone found a sane way of doing maths (linear algebra, etc.) in Common Lisp? My experience with the GNU scientific library has been disastrous.
So glad to see more people pointing this out. Titanium sounds like a great idea and they market it well, but when you look closer you quickly discover that it just fails to deliver. Sadly they seem too focused on spending VC cash on adding bells in whistles when their core functionality still doesn't work. Here are a few examples.

Running their sample app. This is the first thing every developer does, so you'd think they'd have nailed this much, right? Sadly, no. Check out all the forums posts about people struggling to get KitchenSink running:

http://developer.appcelerator.com/questions/search/kitchensi...

Some of that is the complexity of getting the right 3rd party developer tools installed. But often projects will randomly stop compiling. Instead of fixing the underlying problem, this is their workaround (it's not just KitchenSink, it happens to your projects too):

http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/53821/kitchen-sin...

They don't seem to have anyone who monitors their forums. When core functionality breaks and people report it, nothing gets done about it for months, even when the fix is as simple as whitespace. This was reported in Oct, and a pull request was submitted in Jan.

http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/82691/run-on-devi...

It was finally fixed last month:

https://github.com/appcelerator/titanium_mobile/commit/510fc...

Open source means the community should be able to pitch in, but there are 16 open pull requests from the last 2 months, none closed or even commented on:

https://github.com/appcelerator/titanium_mobile/pulls

New features are rolled out with sparse documentation and then abandoned. Need to style a bunch of views, try JSS - except it's not documented in detail anywhere. But maybe they dropped JSS and are working on Helium?

http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/91331/jss---class...

Or not. Helium hasn't been updated in months and still isn't documented anywhere on the Appcelerator site. So who knows.

There are many other issues, of course. Ultimately you end up having 3 options: (1) pay them a bunch of money for support, (2) spend more time fixing their software then working on your own code, or (3) just writing native apps for the various platforms (or native web wrappers with HTML core).

I wouldn't mind paying for support if the product worked great, but paying to get support for something that's broken to begin with is frustrating. It's ultimately easier to just find alternative technologies.
I made "Sitting with Darth Vader in a rowboat that's on fire".
This should be good.... : )
Natural Gas Flaring Emits as Much CO2 as 77 Million Cars
http://jarinudom.com/experiments/brainexploder
Convert Facebook Profile to Facebook page
I remever rumble effects like this being very popular in flash interfaces for a good long time. Now all we need is an on hover ramping tansition to a hilight color and transition back and we are set to repeat 1998!
As a dreamer who has difficulty taking projects past the proof of concept stage, I think it's fascinating Rose is starting a skunkworks/experimentation-style company. I would love to have a business like that where I had a staff and we would quickly develop ideas to the proof of concept stage and spin off companies. That's not something you see much in the wild... all you really hear about are the companies where a team took an idea all the way (to scale, if not to profitability).

I find this far, far more interesting from a business perspective than most of the "so-and-so is launching a startup" articles.

And honestly, I think it's far more relevant to hackers than, say, the Path announcement. Rose is basically starting a company where the business strategy is hacking. Not customer development or venture-backed growth... just hacking together cool projects and see what sticks.

So, not flagged.
Ask HN: Would you be interested in flash sales of new products?
My friend and I are working on a new project called Trisse (http://www.trisse.com). Our goal is to do flash-sales of new and pre-release products to help these products get exposure and give consumers a central place to find cool new stuff.

Would you be interested in a service like this? Is the appeal of 'new products' enough to make you sign up for yet another website?

Blatant plug: Right now, we just have a landing page, but if you're interested, feel free to drop us your email (we don't spam).
As a big fan of and small contributor to ejabberd (I run im.wordpress.com), one who has used Jack's excellent strophe.js, and one who is anxious to see websockets in more use cases, I was pleased to read this news.

However, I still consider XMPP as the protocol of last resort when designing apps for the browser that don't map perfectly onto XMPP. I would sooner write a new protocol than set up a new ejabberd cluster. (This opinion is based on the quality of documentation available a year ago and may be out of date.)
Dungeons & Dragons, Marketing, and Everything
Being owned by canadians, an economy that is intimately tied and dependent to the fate of the US economy, speak the same language and are fairly friendly neighbours overall isn't that bad. And if the US really wanted to, they could pass some BS law to retake those land claims.
Bitcoins are already subdivisable to a whole bunch of decimal places.
Sarah Lacy and Kevin Rose: Like two drunks, hammered off of self-importance and attention, leaning on each other for support.
I've been using Titanium for 2 months now while developing a prototype version of our iPhone application (Android later), and while I share the author's sentiments on a number of issues, I'm fairly pleased with the results so far. I'm not an Objective-C guy in the least, but am reasonably good with JS, so it's a great way to go native.

That said, some comments:
- JS Warnings. It's true that one-line ifs, property existence checks, function closure suggestions, etc. can get a little annoying. My solution is to write JS which is 100% JSLint compatible, which is fair IMO.

- Titanium Warnings. These get annoying. I get dozens of "[object TiUIView] has an auto height value of 0, meaning this view may not be visible" warnings which are completely useless and don't identify the offending View for me to fix. Also, I get about a dozen errors like "<Error>: CGContextDrawImage: invalid context 0x0" which give me no indication which is the offending image. Etc.

- Performance. While native, our application runs a little sluggish and certain views are choppy when scrolling, and some style properties have bizarre rendering behaviour (layout: 'horizontal', width / height: 'auto', etc)

- Minor Revisions. The author is right, some minor revisions introduce pretty bad issues. 1.6.0 introduced some very noticeable performance degradations in TableViews, so we're still on 1.5.1 for now.

- Documentation needs work. The API reference is lacking any mention of certain parameters, which is frustrating. The wiki has more detailed information and has essential reads to understand things like TableViews, but I didn't find this resource for several weeks into my project. Many undocumented side-effects exist, like quirky behaviour on horizontal layouts, etc. Here's an example of the kind of confusion which results: https://appcelerator.lighthouseapp.com/projects/32238/ticket... The "headerPullView" feature for pull-to-refresh is currently undocumented magic.

- Barcode support is disappointing. Titanium+ introduced Barcode support, but does not support the usual 1D barcode. The additional libraries that exist (TiBar, zbar, etc.) are very difficult to compile in without XCode hackery, and sometimes don't work on the devices themselves, making debugging very difficult.

- Bugs in XHR with Content-Type and passing Arrays, requiring workarounds when integrating with Rails. Arrays get sent as "( key1: value1\n key2: value2\n)\n" .. seriously :)

- Titanium Developer required me to click "Launch" to start the application until I read Gene Tsai's comment on the original article which gives you command-line aliases to start your application. Awesome tip :)

At the end of the day, Titanium Mobile is a great solution, but be prepared to be patient while the platform matures, and to get creative in architecting alternate solutions when your initial approach doesn't work. I'm confident the wrinkles I point out above will be ironed out in time.
How does this compare to OpenSSH VPN and Socks Support[1]?

[1] - http://wiki.enigmacurry.com/OpenSSH
I don't understand: the article appears to report on the effect of Thioflavin T (ThT), which is not among the numerous synonyms for Sudan I that the wikipedia article lists. I followed the Sudan III and Sudan IV references, and didn't find anything there, either.

I am not a chemist; just curious.
"terrible by design"

Something can be well designed and yet still be misused.
I like his point about what color has to give in return to a user. Right now, that's not much.
This is nice, but Chrome extensions still seem pretty limited to me (or I might just be missing something). I generally browse with cookies, javascript, and plug-ins turned off, and looked into writing a Chrome extension to give myself a toolbar button to turn them on briefly for a given site. But all I could find were ways to interact with page content, and not the browser itself.
Read the article. They say `conventional cars'.
This conversation brings to mind Neil deGrasse Tyson's quip about Titanic, the movie (the fact that they used the "wrong" sky):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICsgjqVvtM0

But I think little things like that do make a difference, even if it's just to a small audience, for example "chip art" http://smithsonianchips.si.edu/chipfun/graff.htm People in general appreciate attention to detail, but mass consumerism has somehow discouraged it - and I think that's sad.
Not really directed to you (unless you have the answer):

Is there any way for regular people (i.e not large corporations or Kevin Rose) to request a screen name from twitter, assuming that they have a registered business with the same name? I realize twitter isn't mandated to do so, but it would be nice if small startups or individuals could request screen names if the screen name is inactive.
What I said reflects solely my opinion on the people who enter the contest. As far as I am concerned, anyone who takes UI design seriously wouldn't bother doing so... Again, I am not expecting you to agree.
Why Growth Companies Stop Growing
Me, too. Being able to tether and not pay extra for it is the only reason I would jailbreak.
Comparing TechCrunch Before and After The Facebook Comments Switch
Very cool. I wonder how hard it would be to port the muxer core to C, and run it under tcpclient / tcpserver on either end of the ssh connection.
Percentage-wise, I'd probably pick a stable country that didn't even respect the UDRP, never mind the RIAA.
Just Google "bitcoin market". Bitcoins are quite liquid, although the market is pretty volatile.
Which units are you using?