skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got a 5 as well, but in my case it was less a function of calculus mastery and more a function of knowing how to program everything they asked for into a TI-89.

(I've since gone through a few calculus textbooks to actually learn everything that gizmo let me fake an understanding of.)
This blog post has a commission link to the service he subscribes to (or is advertising). I've had less downtime with google apps than I had with any other solution and I don't have to spend time managing it. Google spam filters are effective enough that the service can be down for an hour a day and it would still be a good service for me because it saves me so much time.
This stood out to me:

"a spectacular last hurrah for Fermilab’s Tevatron, once the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and now slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it."

I don't know the backstory here, so I won't jump to conclusions. Is there a reason besides lack of funds for shutting this place down?
For what it's worth, I can confirm that Gmail IMAP legitimately is unbearably slow for some of us (conversely, the web interface has always been snappy for me, though I know it's been terribly slow for some). To the point that I gave up on keeping my email in sync and used POP on my desktop for years.
While I had a FastMail account, I distinctly recall at least a dozen instances of it going offline. Though this was early 2000 or so for only a couple years.
Is a minor upgrade in a web framework considered on-topic for HN?

If you use a framework and want to keep up-to-date with new releases then you can subscribe to that projects mailing list/twitter.

Non-users of the framework aren't likely to care very much about it.

Unless I'm missing something all this post is doing is taking up a front-page slot which could be used by a more worthy story.
Yeah, or give metrics.

There should be a startup in here. Paste bad writing in. Get good writing out. Improve income by 30%.
San Francisco's Mid-Market/Tenderloin Payroll Tax Exclusion Area on Google Maps
How much have they seen already? Have they reviewed the business plan and the projections? Have they seen the slide deck of your investor presentation and want to meet you? Do they invest in your vertical, and have other portfolio companies that would compliment your business strategy?

To answer your question, your expenses for meeting with VCs both on a road show and/or individually are typically on your dime. It's a cost of potentially doing business. If you don't think they are serious, you can always request to present the slide deck to them at a predetermined time over the Internet with GoToMeeting or something similar.

That said, as a warning, funding deals go slow (sometimes to run you out of cash to make you even more desperate), and are only done through face to face interaction. FYI, investors typically make decisions on whether to fund based on their confidence to make your business plan work, and then whether they can hang out with you (are you easy to be and work with?). But there are also a lot of tire kickers who will waste your time with face to face meetings just to stay busy and learn what you know.

Lastly, who in the org are you dealing with? A junior partner or associate who's job it is to get prospects into the office, or a partner / principle who has his own 7 digits on the line? All good things to know.

Be picky. Turn them down by telling them you're not sure they're serious, and that you're talking to other folks who are. It makes you more attractive, and will get them off their ass if they are actually interested.
kragen@inexorable:~$ units
2411 units, 71 prefixes, 33 nonlinear units

You have: 4 score hogshead moons per gross of firkin
Unknown unit 'moons'
You have:

Were you thinking lunar months, moon masses, moon radii, moon apogee...?
I believe it is asking what you think is your greatest strength.
I am not sure how you can pay them for the second part, but I found a plugin called Rapportive that replaces ads with more useful stuff: http://rapportive.com/

You should try it. It's really useful for business emails.
I have just recently started using rails for a project and have never had to upgrade before.

I wish they would go over how to upgrade rails in their announcement or link to their own guide. I imagine its just a one-liner. Searching their own site for upgrade doesn't show anything immediate either.

Of course I can look it up very quickly with Google, so its not a problem, but it seems like something they should do.

(I commented there requesting the same)
I didnt think it was being justified though. It was an issue of one guy being charged almost 700k for 30 songs. If anything thing charge him 30 x price of each song (or even some multiple M, say 2, for "expenses"). To truly recover the costs, they should really be charging everyone who pirated the song or actively distributed it instead of who pinning the entire costs on one guy who pirated it or participated in a swarm.
I don't really care one way or another on how he writes, but I do wonder if it presents a problem when trying to "sell" Rails to certain clients. I have pointed clients to rubyonrails.org in the past just to show how big and mature the community is (these were primary Microsoft shops who doubt all open source projects), but if they saw this for an important security update I'm thinking it might make it a bit harder.
Google doesn't need more engineering, it needs better product vision.
Here you go: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2411459
Any technically inclined Gmail user should at least consider switching his email address to a domain he owns plus free Google Apps. It works just like regular Gmail, but you can change providers whenever you'd like. It may take many years, but someday Google is going to be technologically behind or an untenable steward of your data.

Changing email addresses is a pain -- better to do it now, while you can slowly transition with email forwarding. Use filters to auto-label mail that is sent to the old address, ask senders to change your address, and switch over any mailing lists and accounts as automatic emails come in.
I'm not a hardware guy, but it's been my understanding that this is why drivers exist. Drivers are a nightmare, though. I don't miss dealing with them.
Apologies in advance for sounding so pessimistic, but this is just another example of beggar-thy-neighbor tax/tax-break policies that limit government revenue potential.
For most tech-enabled subscription businesses, the core business is support. Your technology is easily duplicable, so your key differentiator has to be how you deal with customers, and how quickly.

Sales is core too, but sales is also a support task - you talk the customer through how you can help them and what they'll need to do in order to use your product. Educating someone into a sale is pleasant for both sides.

Doing support is time consuming, so make sure you factor that into your prices.
Can you really afford to support your product for $9/month? Probably not, your time is worth more. Charge more than $9!
I'm not sure if pointing clients to rubyonrails.org is really the best way to sell the framework, I usually just list off a bunch of Rails sites that I think they've probably heard of. Most of my clients aren't really super duper tech savvy anyway, they just care about the end product.
Newer, better particle accelerators such as the LHC is my guess.
They were threatening to move to Brisbane, as a way to avoid a 1% city tax on payrolls (which, importantly, includes proceeds from stock options). But it's questionable as to whether a company that moves from San Francisco to Brisbane (which, let's face it, is a dump) would be better off moving. How excited would you be to commute down there if you had a similar job opportunity somewhere else? Would it be worth the 1% in payroll they'll end up saving? I have a hard time envisioning it.

It's great that the mid-Market Street area will (presumably) improve after this happens, whenever it happens. I just wish that in a world in which San Francisco is cutting back on the number of days in the school year that they could find a way to balance the books other than issuing big corporate welfare packages.
Also, I predict that after this source code leak, the link to the source code will be put back at his site.
Right, and calling Tim Sweeney an Epic developer is underplaying the fact that he founded Epic Games.

Or maybe I have no sense of humor...
Yeah, well these clients were all very technical folks... but their blood all ran blue. They wanted to see the MSDN of Rails.
> 4 - the "tweet" link does just that. Though perhaps I could have a "try it now"?

I think that's a good idea. Obviously, I didn't even notice that the word tweet was a link; it really doesn't stand out.
If you use Outlook, an under-emphasized feature of the paid service is their Google Apps Sync tool. It provides excellent, fast two-way synchronization for mail/contacts/calendars in Outlook, using an external app that interacts with Outlook via MAPI. Basically, it brings Google Apps nearly on par with Exchange for Outlook users.
Maybe but it's an expensive service to run. Google can make it work because they have the supporting infrastructure to harvest enough data to drive their ad business. It would be costly for a startup to spin this up on its own.
I would love to see something like this. I'm a part of Forrst, but this isn't exactly what they do.

Something more open and mass-appealing than Designsvn would be terrific.
If you have a crappy netbook, like my Lenovo x100e, try playing it in IE9. Works a million times better than Chrome. Never thought I'd ever put that GPU acceleration to use...
Apple became identified with Cupertino before, well, pretty much anything. They could have been anywhere, but it was cheaper than Menlo Park and they needed proximity to HP.

Mountain View and Google is a little more complicated, but back during the first dotcom bubble Mountain View was hotter than San Francisco is today. I remember seeing vacation pictures of people who came here and got their pictures taken in front of the Netscape business park sign.

Google took over Silicon Graphics' wacky old buildings, which is yet another part of Silicon Valley's storied history that has nothing to do with Twitter. In fact, Twitter has none of this kind of history period, so really, if you think about it, Twitter should think "San Francisco" is important. It's pretty much the only real history they have aside from the fail whale and Ashton Kutcher. Think more "Wired Magazine" than Apple or Google.

And really, you're right, they could move to Brisbane and all of my critiques would fall flat. I'm not saying they won't, but I'm also not going to agree that Twitter doesn't see value in "San Francisco." Heck, how many man-hours are they spending in order to secure this kickback? That certainly implies an internal level of value somewhat north of "trivial."
Well what do you know? We can start from there.

If you think I am implying the PhD's do not produce important work, I think you are mistaken.
Regardless of the viral nature of any behavior, a mere participant in the network should not be responsible for the behavior of others.

Edit: I think this raises a larger question: in the modern technology-enabled world, where large-scale crimes can be committed in a distributed fashion and in most cases there is no kingpin to take down, what is the law to do, and what are the people to do, since each individual person is causing very little of the total damage? I don't think holding the members of an organization responsible for the crimes of other members of the organization works in this case, since there is no organization.
It's interesting how common this is in New Space:

Jeff Bezos - From Amazon.com to Blue Origin

Richard Branson - From Virgin Records to Virgin Galactic

Robert Bigelow - From Budget Suites to Bigelow Aerospace

Elon Musk - From PayPal to SpaceX

I'm hoping that this is just the beginning of a trend of successful businesspeople investing in humanities' future in space.
Which is the paper mentioned in the article?

http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+Punzi/0/1/0/all/0/1

http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+punzi+lett/0/1/0/all/0/...
Given the numbers 1 to 1,000

Seems to me like they're asking for integers, but suppose they mean reals. Depending on the distribution, you can still guess the right number with positive probability. It could be dominated by 500!
I think the level of sleep I need depends on what I'm working on. When I was working on a business with my friends, I'd only sleep for 4 hours or so a day. Whereas when I was working a job I hated, I was exhausted unless I slept 9-10 hours a night. I think sleep requirements are a function of brain activity and engagement. It's just a theory but it seems to be true, at least in my case. Another theory I have relates to the sleep schedules of people. I'm nocturnal. I have been since I was 8 years old. And when I was working with my friends, it was at night. So I wonder if nite people need more sleep to function during the day like morning people need more to work nights?
Is it then safe to say you can outsource software development and focus on customer acquisition and support?
You just need to change the version of Rails in your Gemfile from 3.0.5 to 3.0.6 and run bundle. Or, if you have

gem "rails", "~>3.0"

in the Gemfile then I think you just need to run bundle to get it updated.
People who watch horror movies and then complain about being scared have themselves to blame :P
The problem is that other companies, those without Twitter's investors and PR team, still have the pay the tax. If it is bad policy, which it is, it should be repealed for all city businesses.
You're misinformed. The building Twitter is talking about moving to is the San Francisco Mart, which fronts the entire South side of Market St. between 9th and 10th streets. Tu Lan is about a half-mile away.
Can we please stop posting every snarky comment Gruber has to make about Apple's competitors. The comments made by Sweeney are certainly interesting so why not link directly to the article?
Gruber's a good writer and I read most of what he writes on Daring Fireball but he often goes into modes like he's in now, which means we're going to see a constant stream of links to articles saying bad things about Android with a single line at the end from Gruber referencing Fred Wilson or whoever was the latest vocal person to support Apple's competitors.
This is a great example of 2 keys to success for startupts. 1. Hustle. Many people told Alex no before he got that first check, but he kept at it. Hit this milestone, get these sales, blah, blah, blah. He kept improving, kept serving customers and kept hustling. 2. He did what he had to do to get his co to the next step. When it was evident that SF was the place they had to be, the picked up and moved - and fast!
Haha, next time someone wants to see the MSDN of Rails, you should ask them to show you the Github of .NET.
Personally, I really like George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"[0] as a writing guide.

[0] http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
I feel you on the dumb threshold thing. There is plenty of room to improve on monitoring systems available today.
Roommate and I made dating site; Comments, suggestions, constructive criticism?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-05/google-said-to-be-p... could be a possibility
While not the case in this instance, it is completely normal for raising a round to take six months. The "check that day" folks are very, very, very outside the norm. Fundraising is almost always a slow slog.
I don't think he means they're impeding access to hardware. I think he's talking about resources used up by bloatware.
Most entrepreneurs forget this but I'm 100% convinced on the importance.
Conversation #1: Is it ethical to pirate music?

Conversation #2: Is it ethical to sue $exorbitant for pirating music?

Why does conversation #1 always turn into conversation #2?
I'd imagine it still can conduct valuable science though? Kind of like how keplar discoveries are confirmed by small ground based telescopes which are more able to dedicate their time to a single object for a time.

The LHC might be more powerful but couldn't it throw up things that need more detailed analysis that the LHC doesn't have time for with many groups clamoring for time on it? Of course this may not be as true of physics as astronomy, I only know the basics of physics.
All of this company-specific state and local tax policy, which has proliferated in recent years, is highly irregular, prone to corruption, and violates the spirit of the constitution and American capitalism. Governments should strive to treat everyone equally in the business world, and not use tax policy to play favorites and pick winners and losers. If the underlying policy is bad for the city it should be repealed city-wide.

Local zoning is different from tax policy, it is the customized, company-specific tax handouts that are objectionable.
You usually need to run "bundle update rails" when updating the Rails gem instead of "bundle update", but it will gripe at you and let you know if you try to just run "bundle update".
Show HN: Dripi.com - A little web app that won a Google I/O ticket
http://dripi.com

I thought I'd share my winning entry to the Google I/O last call competition with ya'll.

Took me about 9 hours, which seems like a lot looking at it now (my only excuse is that it took place after 12am). I truly did not expect to be one of the winners. My guess is that the YouTube API category had fewer entries than others.

Feel free to let me know what you think!

This was the challenge:

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could create a video mash-up by chaining player invocations that work for both Flash and HTML5 videos ? Well, with the JavaScript API to the <iframe> embed we think you can.

Your task is to build a mash-up player using the <iframe> JavaScript API. You will be given a list of video IDs, and from-to timestamps. For example the following sequence (<xxasdadad, 65s, 95s>, <xxffwwe22, 20s, 35s>), which will trigger the mash-up player to play video with ID xxasdadad for 30 seconds, starting at second 65 and ending at second 95, then proceed to play video with ID xxffwwe22, starting at second 20 and ending at second 35.

Given the sequence, implement a player which will play the sections of the listed videos, starting at the ‘from’ timestamp, and ending at the ‘to’ timestamp for each video.

Try to make the transitions between videos as smooth as possible, and make it easy for users to embed your mash-up player in their own web applications.

I encourage everyone to enter this contest if they hold it again next year. It was a blast!
I see, more numeracy. Let me add: 40. Fantasy numbers don't help, and "maybe the city will even out in side-effects" isn't exactly moving the discussion along, either.
Clickable: http://dripi.com
Even icons make mistakes
Muphry's Law in action.
I've been pretty happy with the Hacker News app by Michael Grinich, but this looks promising and competition is a wonderful thing.
For jython user, jip resolves java dependencies for you.
I have not bought the ticket yet.

But I am not talking abt my specific case. What is standard/typical? I thought that they should pay and the fact that they have not brought it up would imply to me that they are not that interested and they are just fishing.

But may be I am reading too much into it and vc's don't pay. Which is why I want to know what is typical.

Thoughts folks?
Show HN: See my project YCnews: News and Comments "mouse over" apart
Twitter is often my source of Hacker News, but I had a problem of getting just the news without HN comments, which many times are even better than news itself, so I came up with an idea to have news and comments under the same URL.

I parse RSS feeds, put new items in database, get bit.ly short link and post all to Twitter.

Links on twitter are like this http://xcode.x10.mx/?id=2411858 and to see HN comments all you need is to move mouse over the handle on the left side.

What do you think? Like it, have any suggestions, ideas or anything else in mind feel free to speak up.

I'm happily using it and if someone else find it useful too even better:)

http://twitter.com/YCnews
So you just massively increase your price for the same value, put a call for discounts or whatever, offer them the original price and they will be happy to have got such a good deal. Weird how these things work..
I only wish it were so easy.
It's also similar to how Berkshire Hathaway is run; and how Christensen advocates nurturing disruptive businesses - smaller units can get excited about smaller sales that are a rounding error to Big Google (new markets start small); independent units are free to customize their business model and how they do things to what fits the opportunity (instead of fitting in with the parent's model and processes - which has compelling economies, but only early).

e.g. it seems highly unlikely that advertising is the ideal revenue model for every business Google is in. The appropriate fit might be sales, renting, monthly charge, pay-per-use, royalty, per-developer, per-other-metric. It's not necessarily about extracting more money from customers, but revenue that makes sense for customers - that they prefer, that makes sense in the competitive set, that motivates the business to improve along the right dimensions.
by the way I think your comment abt meetings is related to general meetings. If you actually have vc partners troop into your office to invest in you then you are way too cool!!
I just bought that app after using http://www.icombinator.net for a long time. I like the app but wish it did things a little differently--default to mobilized articles, go beyond the top 30 articles, load comments more quickly--so it's great to have something to customize and hack on. Thanks!
Or are they not interested and just wasting our time?

You can expect to have to meet lots of investors, many of them several times over before you actually manage to secure any funding. The ones you meet that don't work out aren't wasting your time any more than you are wasting theirs.

If they've agreed to meet you then it's probably because they see potential, either now or at some point in the future. To reduce the signal/noise ratio be sure not to overstate the progress you have already made as a company.

The value of honesty in self-representation can not be over stated.
Not to attack your post, but I feel as though the HN community is aware of Google's business model by now. I feel as though any time a story appears about Google (or any company that utilizes their model), there are at least a few comments about how ads are what is driving them. It just seems to be restating common knowledge, at this point. You aren't the only one to be doing it either, I just happened to reply to this post.
For what it's worth, I don't think I could possibly read as quickly AND effectively as he talks. What a great speaker! I learned a lot.
Similar story here - I taught myself 68000 assembly by hex-dumping the opcodes out of the only compiler I could afford (i.e. free), and then taught myself calculus to find the tangents along a bezier-curve for my flagship product at the time (a 3D editor/converter, which eventually sold quite well)

I've also had the severe displeasure of working with CS grads who couldn't figure out why a 54MB file wouldn't fit on a floppy disk, or asked "where is the .EXE" when working on a windows web site.

I'd take a motivated "self-learner" over a paper-backed "scientist" any day.
Stephen Fry ranting on language nazis:
Season 2, Episode 3: Language: http://www.stephenfry.com/category/media/audio/

I don't really know who he is, but he make some very convincing arguments.
A multi-hundred billion dollar valuation, a monopoly or two and the founder being the richest man in the world for years is good... right?