skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't get me wrong. It's not about the money. It's about transparency. Maybe you didn't notify me because my account was inactive, but you had the data -- maybe I'd return one day and tried to use the app as usual, just to receive an error that the international service isn't active.

I'm contacting you right now. I haven't really looked up for another service because I've been quite comfortable with you. I'm happy this is really the exception in a very good experience.
I'm surprised this is getting downvoted.

Before I posted it, I did a tiny bit of research on InnerWorkings and ECHO. They are the 2 main companies Lefkofsky has been involved with in the past 10 years. Both are public companies, with around half a billion in annual revenue each, both are profitable, and both seem to have many large, satisfied customers.

If you're going to judge an artist, would you look at their recent paintings or what they made in elementary school?
nh posted a video below which states that based on a $25B valuation, Lefkofsky will grab $5.3B, as he owns 22 percent of Groupon. That's a hell of a lot more than he'd have made in the Google deal.

Courtesy of nh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_UYtYAChi8
great project with very talented rockstars guys
good luck. if you're anything like me you might be pleasantly surprised at how much less competitive things are in the "real world". the flip side is that typically you do have less freedom.
Every company should have a program that can be run to sanitize the live database for use in testing.

+1.

However, modifying or sometimes even a dump/load on a SQL database can change its behavior dramatically.

But the harder part can be getting a hardware setup similar to production. Most places want their newest, best hardware in production for obvious reasons. Few places want to pay for mirror-image production systems just for testing to bang on.

There's the old saying: If you have two systems, 'production' and 'testing', the one with the more challenging load is 'testing'.
SCOTUS is indeed limited to the question raised during the appeals process. Even if SCOTUS thought "geez this patent sucks," they can't do anything.

Why not? Well, for better or worse, the American judicial system puts a lot of weight on trial courts and juries' ability to assess facts. The appeals system was set up in such a way to prevent higher courts from actually deciding the case. If SCTOUS had found that the lower courts applied the wrong rule of evidence (burden of proof here), then the case would have gone back to trial and retried (isn't that crazy?).

And trust me, law school doesn't quality everyone as a guru. I have some experience with appeals, but I'm far from an issue & appeals lawyer (they're pros at this). So, take my words with a grain of salt.
I am not a psychologist, but I've seen some interesting articles on how self-control is a semi-finite resource. The article linked to below was particularly interesting, as it even had a mechanism. Specifically, the participants' self-control was lowered when their glucose level was low and their glucose level dropped when they used their self-control

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/92/2/325/

Thus, the cold shower might not just be followed with donuts for lunch, but the lunch donuts may be necessary to skip having heroin for dinner.

To re-iterate, I'm not a psychologist, so take all of this with a grain of salt.
Want to grow your business? Add scaffolding
Best comment on that article is "THERE ARE FEMALE BRONIES TOO, WIRED!"
Google sued over Chromebook name
I think that investors should be informed about Groupon and its founders. It is especially important if there are issues with Groupon and its founders.

I was actually quite impressed with Groupon initially until I saw its numbers and that its major stockholders were cashing out hundreds of millions of dollars in stock pre-IPO. That raised with me huge alarm bells and it changed my opinion drastically.

My extreme leariness of Groupon is based on facts that I've learned as I used to be a fan, although a relatively uninformed one.
Pre 2000 there was less negative information. Little or no blogger type analysis of anything almost all information came from traditional news sources who ate up positive information. I know because I was able to manipulate them for publicity.

So there is more info now. But the only way that information out there helps is if it makes it to the traditional media which broadcasts it to the regular non-tech site reading public. And that appears to be happening actually.
Not my experience. Sometimes I take a cold bath (ice is involved) after running. With enough ice, I feel quite cold for many hours after getting out -- to the point where I get out an extra down comforter to sleep with, and am still cold.
EU states agree on tougher sanctions on cybercrime
pivoting, yes. Notifo itself is still running, and there is a core group of users that love it, but it is almost too technical of a product to get really big the way I wanted.

BlogFire (and another app or so) is a more mainstream app, which will be monetized with some upcoming features I plan to build into the app, but for now I wanted to release it to see if it is even a product that people want, then iterate etc...
Quick Tip: How to remove unwanted access points on Nokia smartphones.
page 3 has a short table about what services he switched to, how easy the switch was, and how the new service compares.
Well it's either that, and having a high likelihood of spreading the company around 30 crappy buildings all around Cupertino again, or using the large fields as building spaces for new circles.
>It looked like a high school project. I doubt Apple would ever preview their OS with such a poorly produced video.

I think it's pretty good and clean. The iPad UI looks like a scaled down version of OS X in 2001 compared to that now and I've heard the same sentiment from many other people.

Metro looks like that to new people but is very functional once you start using it. Here is a good primer on it.

http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487
This is a minor quibble, but I'd still call paper "technology." It wasn't so long ago that paper was an expensive technology.

The question isn't whether or not to use technology. The question is which technology to use.
Wait a sec - "it was always an interesting experience to turn the store back on after Steve Jobs walked off stage following one of his keynote presentations"

??

Does Apple seriously turn off their store while Jobs talks? Or is he talking about pushing new content out based on announcements?

The former just sounds... Odd.
Installed. Quite ironically, this is more or less what I thought Notifo would aim to be the first time I stumbled upon your website.

While I'm not particularly crazy about receiving notifications from most blogs I read, what I'm really looking for (from a notification aggregator) is the ability to receive notifications from the sources that I care about (essentially, social networks + email + blogs) in one place.

What this means is, I can disable popups (alerts) and enjoy a zen-like experience. And when I do take a break, there's one app that lets me know about everything I've potentially missed out on and need to be updated about. Push notifications create this insatiable itch and the cognitive cost of context switching ensures that life goes downhill once more than a couple of apps have been allowed to notify me.

This is something I'd be happy to pay for (and I admit, I might be alone). I think Boxcar comes closest to scratching my itch, but their implementation still leaves a lot to be desired, so I guess there's an opportunity there.
It's a damn shame all the Ewoks perished after the Death Star explosion poisoned their planet.
Sure, Groupon could go bust.

Me, I have no idea what will happen.

On the one hand, Groupon resembles a lot of fads. On the other hand, I've admired their execution and innovation over the years.

I can't predict whether they will succeed better than a coin flip.

If you can, put some money on it. :)
The building I work in installed a kiosk as the office directory. Normally there's a screen saver running; after touching the screen you get a static list of the 10 business occupants and their floors. I'm not convinced this was the best use of resources.
Whoa. That paper stuff could really catch on! Perhaps someone could print a Bible on it.

(editing this comment after downvoting to add content, and my apologies for being sarcastic and content-free):
Effective data presentation, graphic design and such are technology. Showing all the data at once is often much more effective than hiding it in an invisible database.
Instead of replacing Google services with other online services, I would prefer an approach that replaces them with free (as in speech) software I can install on my web own server.

I don't think Google is evil. But I would like more control over the information they currently caretake for me.
In a lot of cases apps don't delete your account, they just mark you deleted.
I hate to be downbeat but I am using Twilio for my next service and I would prefer to have Twilio stay in business for the next 10 years then to lower prices to a cut rate amount.
Every time I take a cold shower, I get a raging boner.

Is there any physical basis for this, or is it a purely a mental thing?
No. The windows tablets that have been available since the 1990's were simply shit. They were simply a flat screen running windows with a pen. and that idea hasn't changed a bit since windows for pen computing in 1991. Same old windows+a pen interface, and it's absolutely horrible.

It wasn't timing, it was simply that Microsoft didn't get that a tablet was something different.
Be careful of the Aldridge book he cited, most of the helpful reviews are very negative, and the gang at nuclearphynance has similarly nasty things to say.
"Reaching down and turning a knob, then telling yourself that you're building character? Odd."

Seems like something Calvin's dad would suggest.

e.g. http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkypfyWBiK1qczkzxo1_250.jp...
Are Groupon users loyal to Groupon, or do they also use other email list coupon sites? I ask because if the answer is "no", I'm not seeing how Groupon can be that big at all. Google brought something to the table that others could not; Groupon clearly doesn't. Groupon only has on it's competition a small head-start in sales reach. Unless they can some how get exclusivity on small businesses, they aren't doing anything noteworthy not also being done by Living Social or Google or Facebook.
> almost too technical of a product to get really big the way I wanted

I can see how it's too developery/B2By.

> BlogFire (and another app or so) is a more mainstream app, which will be monetized with some upcoming features

I'm glad to hear that, good luck!
The next big service on web, that probably will change our interaction with the web pages and content like CC.
Well done.
He seems like a smart man, but I also think that his cashing out of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock pre-IPO doesn't have a good explanation unless he has reservations about Groupon's long-term viability. Groupon's numbers are pretty horrible and the space is getting more and more competitive.

It is because I think he is smart that I think his cashing out to the extreme is a very bad sign. Otherwise, he should have kept the stock and been significantly richer upon the IPO of Groupon.
Introducing Stud (open source secure gateway)
They've already been released with charges. One of them hosted the IRC server in his own house.

They were not involved in the Playstation network attack but on national Spanish attacks to the Minister of Culture and some other local websites.

He, at least these last two weeks between the cucumbers crisis, and now this misunderstanding on the PSN, the focus is diverted from bonds speculation :)
^ This is a statement of fact and yet I am being heavily downvoted. Just because the threat is overblown, does not mean it's not a real threat.
Very well written job description. I hate the tradition of writing an absurd list of "requirements".
Because he wanted to?
Worth recalling "The Breakfast Food Cooker" http://www.ridgecrest.ca.us/~do_while/toaster.htm
Depends how you define "shame".
I believe the UN's population models predict the world population will peak at ~9B in around 2050 and then fall. Most developed countries already have negative population growth (from birth rate below replacement levels, ignoring immigration).
Hash tables are worst-case O(n) time.

That's important to keep in mind, particularly for DoS resistance. But isn't it really as much of an oversimplification as saying they're O(1)?

In practice, there are inexpensive ways to consistently avoid that worst case. But you do have to know to do it.

Hmm reminds me of some code I should probably go double check...
I asked a friend of mine why he kept hitting himself in the head with a hammer. He replied "because it feels so good when I stop".
I think there's a huge opportunity here, that Microsoft is trying to enter with their "Private Cloud" advertising, for the Software plus Services model that runs against servers you own or lease. Sold properly, that could work very well with corporate clients - "Here, your employees can enjoy transparent sync, always-available-anywhere access, with all data stored securely on your servers."
Also worse efficiency, more complexity, more expense, and more things to go wrong.
flufl.enum attempts to
reject PEP 354, ... [and] defines an alternative syntax and semantics.

PEP 354 was a proposal to add enums to the language, stating:

The properties of an enumeration are useful for defining an immutable, related set of constant values that have a defined sequence but no inherent semantic meaning.

I'm sure someone raised this question while the PEP was being debated: If you are looking for an immutable, related set of (though not immutable or constant) values, you should look no further than the list object.

In fact, most of the PEP could be run through a find and replace, with enum being replaced by lists, or sets, or other types that have attributes from the Sequence abstract base class.

But anyway, that's just a few Python specific things I could think off the top of my head.

My central argument revolves around the differences between Java and Python, and how I've seen enums used. The Java programming language is statically typed, and it is useful to have a basic type that can contain a value, from a set of immutable values. It helps catch any obvious errors, at compile time. For example, using a value which is not part of the enum definition.

Python, being a dynamic language, doesn't have the notion of a compile-time type check.

>I'm happy to learn things from Java and apply them in Python despite the fact that I never programmed Java.

Well, that's a statement that is sure to cause a few eyebrows to be raised.
Actually Neo is not reading it, it is a hollowed out book containing his collection of warez, whether that is a nod to postmodernism or a joke at its expense implying it is a hollow discipline I do not know, perhaps someone could ask the Wachowskis.
Any hope of reducing the outbound calls to 1c/min as well?

It's cheaper for me to use http://flowroute.com/ + Asterisk directly than twilio.
a) You ask. "What is your development process". Places that have a decent process are more than happy to share that with you, usually

b) Read. Talk to colleagues at other companies. Find things that improve your process and introduce them locally for yourself. If it seems to work out, share. Careful of politics there, though. Find out if there's anybody who "created" the process, make sure you get them on your side.

It's always easiest to introduce change if you have proof ;)

If it would be a larger change you can't do by yourself, try to make a compelling case with attached metrics. "If we do FOO, it'll reduce our broken build time by x%". If you can't measure those metrics, start measuring.

And if you're making up how much you'll save, be as conservative as possible ;)
By that measure, the cold-callers who sold mortgage derivatives to pensioners are the greatest entrepreneurs in the history of the world.
Samsung Chromebook gets torn down, turns out it's just an improved CR48
Mentors: Richard Bird
Apple generally turns off the store for keynotes related to new product launches (new iPhone, sometimes MacBook/etc refreshes).
Clean, cheap hydrogen production from water using cobalt catalyst
Yep. During keynotes, the web store is usually "down for maintenance". For simple reasons - they don't want to pre-announce before "The Steve(tm)", but they want to have all the new products immediately available after the keynote.
New genetic mutations trigger many cases of autism
How about ported numbers, do you support it? I pay 8c/SMS on Clickatell but their service is very reliable for intl and ported numbers.
The main advantage of web apps is ubiquity and ease. The former is of extreme importance when it comes to the cloud. If a user has to think about whether they can access a document at a later time, the cloud is failing them. If iCloud is to succeed it has to convince consumers that ubiquity is not that important. That's a huge thing to overcome and I feel it is being brushed aside in these iCloud praising articles.
A Bomb Shelter Office
Microsoft killed their own brand.

Through their own efforts, Microsoft means Office, which means corporate. Unsurprisingly, their best consumer success is only tangentially associated with their name. "Microsoft Xbox" sounds like "Accounting Bouncy-house" to most people. There's a little bit of a dissonance when you remember that, yeah, Microsoft made this game system.

Even Windows, which is used by a majority of consumers today, feels like using a work tool at home, rather than something more personal. The way it communicates with you is like a colleague, not a friend. There are features that are the same as equivalent features on other operating systems, sometimes better, sometimes worse. But they are designed to make you "more productive", not to help you. Even when the mechanism is the same, it feels off as a personal device...

So, it's unsurprising that M advertises the Cloud heavily and it just feels like a "team-building" video, whereas A takes advantage of M's "to the cloud" ads building awareness to do a small press push and a brief description in a presentation and it's perceived as the second-coming.

And here's the thing, the "to the cloud" idea as marketing is a great idea! It's funny, and totally memorable -- but the Microsoft brand just kills it dead.
I have to agree with the Chronicle's basic point which is that Microsoft has talked about "cloud computing" for a long time and not delivered anything. Even a bad anything.

Its a very good example of the Innovator's Dilemma [1] in action, you've got some smart folks who see a future problem, and start creating interesting technology and vision around that problem, and then the reality that the company doesn't "need" it now gets in the way of pushing it from concept into the product stream. So it never gets to the 'commit' point where everyone is on board with shipping it to customers and trying to support it.

Why? Because that is "risky" but just tweaking the current product stream and adding a few features or targeting an adjacent market is much lower "risk."

As Clayton points out in his book innovation always loses in the 'risk' evaluation. So companies that are 'managed' always strive for optimum returns, and since you can't predict the future they are risk averse. Companies that are 'lead' on the other hand have the capability to ignore the risk in order to get to the rewards on the other side.

Startups have the risk meter pegged so it doesn't enter into their management decisions, instead they are focussed on execution and they flame out or succeed as they will and when they succeed they clarify the risk around their idea (if it flops the managers can pat themselves on the back for avoiding that land mine, if it takes off the managers wring their hands and wonder if they should have been able to forecast that success.

I think Apple may have combined some protocols and services into a useful adjunct to their product strategy. We won't really know until later when we see how it fairs. From the presentations and markitecture that Microsoft has espoused it seems like they could have done something similar but they didn't. It does reflect badly on how they are being managed, and that buck does stop at Ballmer. So it will be interesting to see how this affects his future there.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060521996
Lessons From A Beginner Programmer
I never read about it here on hn but I used Cardboardfish.com in a couple of projects. The API is similar to the Clickatell's (they are all pretty the same) but I found most of routes to be cheaper.
Samsung Galaxy S.

I'm sure other factors are involved, too, but my point stands: Why make it harder on the customer?

You can't assume that every customer will have a pristine image to scan, or that they have a nice phone, etc etc. QR was designed with redundancy to help the customer, but this defeats that.
I downvoted you for tone. Your post would be a good one if you removed your first and last sentences.
Overview of misguided science behind cholesterol and saturated fat claims [MP3]
You can port numbers to and from us for free and if they are US local numbers, you can use them for SMS. More info: http://www.twilio.com/faq/porting
Two things I've learned in my years as a developer:

1. Sometimes the best process is old fashioned communication between people with common sense.

2. Never underestimate the power of a rubber chicken.
Ridiculous.

The players are rigging the game. This argument might apply to corporations that don't hire lobbyists.
Just to re-iterate Justin's warnings: while the thought of making everything non-blocking is exciting, this probably should only be used if you're expecting (and can't do anything about it) very slow queries.
Awesome - Thanks for the reply. I know international SMS is a pain in the ass, so thank you for trying to make it easier to implement and cheaper to use!
If you're having problems loading, here's the google cache http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2N7uwSF...
But the reason behind it?thats what iam not getting.
Why is this more interesting for you? I have found living MS free nowadays to be extremely easy. It's not even a conscious effort for me, I simply haven't found an MS product that is the best in its class (or at the very least, best for me). With the exception of the Xbox 360, I do still use that regularly.
It's too bad he couldn't have an simply automatic grid at low speeds and once going the grid pulls or rotates out of the way for better efficiency.

Actually a rotating grid may work using the air as its triggering force, once the air speeds up some sort of venturi force enables/disables a safety mesh across the opening.
Well, not exactly what this is talking about, but after serious exercise, cold showers are better than hot showers for recovery purposes. Same reason applying ice works to reduce inflammation. It's basically a milder form of an ice bath.

That said, taking cold showers and bragging about is kinda... dunno. In my mind, cold showers are something to be paired with other physical discomforts (like beating your body up to the point where the physiological benefits of a cold shower actually matter), not something to just do for the sake of doing. It's kinda like discipline gravy. Wonderful along with something, but disgusting by itself. But this is coming from an athletic background. I guess whatever makes you feel like a boss, makes you feel like a boss.
I like the ambiguity of your response.
What phone did you have?

I gave up on Symbian long before 2007 and I had plenty of 3rd party apps (and developed a few myself). If you took an iPhone, put a capacitive touch screen on it, and made it fat ugly and slow then you'd have the phone I had 10 years ago.