skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have frequent redraw issues as well with Quadro cards. Particularly when moving VS between screens (we have dual monitor setups). It sometimes whites out portions of it. Occasionally as well it just goes batshit and goes white and flickers as well. Oh and the performance sucks on low end Quadro cards. We upped them to ATI FireGL and they seem ok now. Still not happy about the situation.
Ask HN: Are there successfull, ajax-heavy SaaS Apps by small teams? 
I use a number of SaaS platforms daily - none of them very ajax heavy (no single page app type things) other then gmail -- which certainly is not maintained by a 'small' team.

My experience has always been that ajax-heavy apps are more difficult to maintain, and take more developer hour to build and add features to. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

Does anyone have any examples of successful, heavily ajax-based SaaS apps that are built and maintained by small teams?
Genuine question for raganwald: you consistently capitalize it as GroupOn, even though the press and the company itself capitalize it as Groupon.

I know you're a careful, deliberate and consistent writer, so this is clearly intentional.

Any particular reason why?
Groupon is Effectively Insolvent
So what you're saying is it's a game of chicken?
Oh!

My mind thought "Group Buying On _____," but now that you say it's actually "Group>o<n," I guess they mean "Group Coupon."
Ack I don't use R# any more TBH. Dies every 30 mins rather than ever 15 without it so it's a little better... I use the productivity power tools which is good enough.

You can probably find much ranting about R# on stackoverflow from myself.
I suspect this may be true, but if you're Groupon, you're not just sitting around waiting for the daily deals business model to become more and more saturated, you're hard at work on your "next thing" and your next "big thing."

Look already at the flash mob deals they're doing that are location based, the deal they just struck with expedia, the deals with national brands they're starting to do more of. Those are just derivatives of their core idea but also all bring in serious cash.

But then there are things they're likely working on that will go beyond the deal space and in to other services for the tens of thousands of businesses they now have relationships with. Think cross-business loyalty cards, point of sale systems, reservation systems, etc. If you think of a small business' "stack," they're just at marketing right now with the deals stuff, but there's no reason why they can't inject themselves further on down the business stack successfully. Deals will always be a part of their business I suspect, but in 2-3 years not their core business model, just an accepted concept in a much larger offering to businesses.
Interesting comparison between the two movements
I just finished reading the entire Harry Potter series of novels for the first time, as my third son was reading it for the second time. My daughter will finish the series soon.

I also read selected parts of The Good Book: A Humanist Bible

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Book-Humanist-Bible/dp/0802717373...

before I had to return it to the library yesterday. I especially like the section "Proverbs," which I read in full. I was able to find the section that quotes Confucius and Mencius extensively just before I returned the book. It's an interesting concept, but some parts of The Good Book: A Humanist Bible are extremely dull reading.

I am likely to read Quotology

http://www.amazon.com/Quotology-Stages-Willis-Goth-Regier/dp...

next, to learn more about how quotations are traced after being misattributed, a subject I own another book about.

I agree with the OP that A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is well worth reading.
What is the open source part of this? The sketch books on the website? Or is there some software somewhere as well?
Zombie Apocalypse Security Readiness Test
EHR to boost growth of health IT industry
The US health IT industry is likely to receive a major boost with the implementation of the federal government supported Electronic Health Record (EHR) adoption program from this year.
I'd call that "independent thought, art, science, honesty, self-esteem, productive work", and keep the definition of survival close to something like "You're heart's still beating.".
It might be helpful to mention what kind of game you're thinking of. Is it 3D? 2D? Puzzle? Zork 2011?
I did but I don't now. Your solution probably doesn't have 50 projects and quarter of a million lines of c# code in it (oh and another 1/2 million lines of XML and T-SQL).
This. There is no excuse not to teach PDO from the getgo to newcomers, and I've seen some pretty neat little ORMs built on top of it.
I didn't see that at first or second glance, but that does explain why this blog post reads like DHH's Twitter feed from yesterday. ;)
That was AWESOME. There is no other word!
Given the available options, what's the best option for automated backups?
That's an opinion, and it may have merit and be valid, but it still could be the case that people might want to experiment with OO languages, and also doesn't change the fact that people who know FP might just be better in any language because of their interest in programming languages, not because of the merits of FP.
The X200 series are great, the new X220, or a refurb X200/X201. The X220 comes with a trackpad, which is nice, though. I owned an X200 and if I could run a vanilla copy of OS X on it, I'd ditch my MBP in a second.

I spent a little time with one of the new T420 models recently and it was superb, as well.
There is already some precedence for this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Music_Entertainment
One benefit that I see is that this could allow normal business/end users to more easily update content directly, rather than having to get a developer involved.

Obviously, you could easily create your own interface for users to do things like this, but why reinvent the wheel when it is already well designed and available at a decent price?
I use Tarsnap. ;-)
Ask HN: Are there many web-based games that are subscription-based?
A subscription-based revenue model seems rare for a game, especially on the web. I'm curious why. Is it that most games lack the replay value needed for subscription? Are virtual goods more lucrative? Do gamers hate subscriptions?
I can't agree that no person or property is harmed by spam. A lot of resources have needed to be spent to reduce the spam that lands in my inbox. Someone paid for that, and most of us are probably happy that this effort has been made. There is, of course, the time lost in dealing the spam that does make it through the filters. There's also storage space that gets wasted in the process.
Server side. I'd probably pick one or more web frameworks with simple ORMs. Basically take RoR, ASP.NET MVC/EF, and PHP Hello World applications, and add one more models and a couple of pages.
The former Apple Computer Inc. isn't really the best example of that. They make an awful lot of money selling music and apps nowadays.
Ask HN: When do you think to quit an idea?
Hi ,
When do you think , time to quit? . Naturally , I always this think this idea gonna be a next big thing but what are the indications or signal to see , if need to keep working or quit ?
It's a game of Jenga with gold pieces. If you get a piece out, you win your piece. If the tower collapses, everyone still playing loses their money.

And as you can see, the insiders, VCs, and their customers get to play first and leave the game before you get a chance to pull a piece out.

UPDATE: Man, I'm pessimistic today! Don't forget the converse side of the coin: The game may be rigged, but still you might have a good bet to make!
What does the business person do in a startup?
Keep in mind, though, that the Go code shown there is not a good example of how idiomatic Go is written.
The flight in danish news: http://nyhederne.tv2.dk/article.php/id-40453154:dansk-rumrak...
Yes, youngins are not learning shit. Read: brave new world
Linode's London data centre partly down
"We are aware of an issue with network connectivity to some portions of the London datacenter. As more information becomes available it will be posted to: http://status.linode.com"
Without a free tier, I'm out. I want to make the purchase decision on my timeline, not yours. I've operated several freemium services so I know how cheap, easy and important it is.
Should they take customer acquisition out of the "fastest growing internet company ever" title? or just the financial analysis.

Great Write-Up.

I have to imagine the wall in their office with biggest internet failure magazines is a self fulfilling prophecy.
It's easy for us to discount all the non-technical stuff that needs to be done - but without it we might as well be playing with ourselves in our closets.
I cant see their costs coming down anytime soon. Their customer acquisition costs are $1.43 for every $1 spent. And now, with "Real time groupons" launched in Chicago, imagine the amount of deals they will have to line up that would require for them to keep me interested. I dont deny that they are attacking a problem that I do have - "Where should I go out to eat tonight?" and target me with real time deals based on where I am now. But in order to seed enough deals, they have an uphill task on lining up enough businesses (on top of the 50k they currently have) and enough deals. Even with the several thousand sales folks they currently have, its a gargantuan task. I want them to succeed, but I think they bit off too much.
The Role of APIs in 3D Printing and Manufacturing
@cperciva: Thanks for this; now i'll convert my 8char ascii system password to a 10char one. Do you have any data showing how large a password needs to be to make it ridiculously expensive for a TLA (gency) to commit a large amount of hardware to cracking? i.e. how much time past the 10chars does it consume ?
In five years' time, it would not surprise me to hear a television news presenter saying something like "And now, to summarise the news we have been breaking and following online on our news feeds ..."

TV news will essentially become the backwater of news coverage, as most of what we'd call journalism will shift primarily to an online form.

I'll expect some old dinosaurs, desperate to hang on to their fading sovereignty, who will strive to break the news on broadcast TV rather than on Twitter and then Facebook, in that order - but that will be a minority, and that attitude will probably have become all but extinct within twenty years.

The kids have it nailed already. If you want the news, you go online to get it. You don't wait till 18:00 or 23:00 when you get home. If it's happening now, you'll want to know about it there and then, on your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone. Just wait till they're old enough to have kids of their own ...
Adapting a Stroustrup quote:
There are two types of CRM/ERP software: the ones everyone complains about and the ones nobody uses.
By all means, please build a competitor that does not suck.
Thousands of small/medium businesses will make you a billionaire.
Tracking photons through the classic double-slit experiment
Mac Dashboard widgets are the equivalent to Gadgets on Windows. And Windows gadgets are already made with html and js. I don't see why anyone was surprised to see Microsoft continue with this tradition. And I don't know how anyone who has a programming background can think that HTML5 will replace the incredibly large and rich .NET ecosystem. But it makes good sensationalistic news so everyone is freaking out about it.
I understand where you're coming from, but not everyone has the same ethical sense that you do. I think you would be hard pressed to say that people without those things (art, science, productive work, honesty, etc.) are not surviving. Maybe they aren't thriving... but that's different.

I think Maslow's heirarchy of needs is pretty relevant here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslows_hierarchy_of_needs
I think that a lot of it hasn't been released yet:
"We intend to share all our techninal information as much as possible, within the laws of EU-export control. "
http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/mission.php
مكتبة العبيكان
It depends on your KDF. MD5 is ridiculously weak; the standard MD5-crypt is 1000 times stronger; bcrypt is better yet; and scrypt is vastly stronger.

The best source for this my scrypt paper, really.
Chilling. Thank you :)
They dropped "Computer" from their name awhile ago, just for that reason.
If he's an advisor to Groupon, then I'm pretty sure he can't say anything without violating a slew of SEC rules.
The general impression is that the founders sold their shares to a VC fund with the intention of the VC fund returning their capital with an IPO.
Apart from Tarsnap, maybe Duplicity http://duplicity.nongnu.org?
Which, BTW, uses its own proprietary UI framework, not even XAML.
C++ TMP is quite painful to the uninitiated. Outside of that, C++ is not that bad, especially as you build up your project-specific abstractions.
Ys Just Wanna Have Fun (and Flexibility)
Anything less would not qualify as due diligence!
Python might be a bad example, as the interpreter really isn't terribly fast. But with Javascript, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the same naive implementation of a typical web-ish task (lots of strings, parsing, lots of heap churn) ran faster on V8 than it did compiled from C/C++.
But the problem with your definition is that if we go by it, human survival in the long-term is not included.

Your mind's independent thought is ultimately the thing that ensures that your heart keeps beating. Without it, there will come a point where you can't keep making the things you need to stay alive physically.
The key is to not get stuck in the non-entrepreneurial world for so long that you forget how to be entrepreneurial.

I wonder what is the correlation between people that start their companies after 30 and their long-term success rate...

To me, I feel like after my 4-5 yrs of work ex, I am more prepared to handle any situation and also have built a list of people to reach out to for guidance, help and just PR. Its important to have that under your belt so you can smoothly transition.
Link: http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html
Currently:

FreeDarko Presents: The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History

http://www.amazon.com/FreeDarko-Presents-Undisputed-Basketba...
License added. Have at it, guys.
I agree - I think a rule of thumb is that you will underestimate the actual work required for anything outside of your core experience by a factor of two, and that's if you have a GREAT person working on it.
It seems karma may have sent him a DDOS attack, as I can't access his site right now.
I think I would prefer to pay off lodsys rather than selling my IP to Apple.

Not that I like either option, but I'd rather pay < 1% of my sales rather than let apple own it.
Nice work, and good luck. The recruiting market for software is a tough one.
My main concern is: how do I tell my 401k and mutual funds to stay away from Groupon?

I'm a smart investor, I'm strongly deciding to not touch Groupon with a thousand feet pole. But I'm pretty sure bankers in NYC will do it for me. What can I do?
Well I have never seen or heard of an infant entrepreneur so I'm sure they're not born :-)

Seriously though my point is that just because a lot of entrepreneurs get a lot of valuable nurture does not mean there are no innate factors at play.

Almost every genius that has achieved remarkable things in their lives has gone through a lot of nurturing. But there are two fundamental questions. Did the nature determine what nurture he choose to have? That one is almost impossible to answer. The second would be if nature has equipped him with an ability to get more out of the same nurture than somebody else might.

I'm not making any assumptions at all, it's a problem far too complex for me to even have a guess at the solution and I doubt there's anyone capable of.

I just want to point out that studies like that are pretty meaningless, all they tell us is "entrepreneurs do not randomly get genius ideas and the skills to execute them, they actually did put in some effort". Hardly something surprising.
Agreed. There are some things I dislike about duplicity (e.g., its reliance upon GPG) but it's probably what I would use if I couldn't use Tarsnap.
We wrote a blogpost that touched on some of this as well: http://kymalabs.blogspot.com/2011/03/kymalabs-on-spam.html
The Meanest Error 404 Page in the Land
I count 3 negative Groupon articles on the front page this AM.

A quick Google news search finds similarly uniform negative sentiment in the general web.

Brings to mind Warren Buffet's famous quote about investing - "The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can’t buy what is popular and do well."
A number of things can't be done in HTML that can be done in WPF.

Since WPF has a sane architecture, you have access to a huge set of high quality UI components (grids, editors, etc) that can simply be dropped into your applications. 15 years on and web developers still don't have this. The components that they do have don't follow a common object model or anything like what WPF has, so they're much harder to work with. So that is one very important quality that you simply can't have in HTML.
The volume of spam blogs compared to non-spam blogs isn't an indicator of working. The volume is based on two factors:

* Automation at the high-end of spamming
* Creating a wide a net as possible to pull in visitors

Much like the volume of spam emails is there because the conversion rate is so poor, so many emails get filtered. By using volume as a vector, despite the diminishing returns, spammers aim to get a decent return on their investment.

The marginal cost of email or a new spamblog is low (though email is still by far cheaper). That's the basis for them being so many of them. I know the conversion rate for email is miniscule (but multiplying that by millions can generate a decent sum). No idea about the conversion rate of spam blogs.

The source of income isn't adsense, it's affiliate products, and in those areas. Porn and pills are the one that are profitable.

And yes, spam blogs do work, they work well enough that when Google finds a blog farm and drops them out of the index, spammers take some time to figure out how they got spotted, adjust their approach or make a suitable correction, and start again. The methods of creating spam sites and blogs differ over time, but the general approach is still a core spam technique.
Call from VC for my Hacker News post on TripDibs
I wrote a short post asking for your opinion of our new website: www.tripdibs.com

The original title of the post was "YC rejects launch TripDibs", but the moderators quickly changed it to "TripDibs".

Within 12 hours, we got a request from a big VC firm to talk to the CEO! This was totally unexpected and very cool. I shouldn't surprised that VC's read Hacker News…

Has anybody else been contacted by VC's from HN postings? Any interesting outcomes?
That's good feedback. My thoughts were mainly along 3 lines:

1) With the demo on the homepage, you immediately get a good idea of the usefulness of the tool.

2) I'm not really interested in a freemium model where I support a large base of non-paying users.

3) I'm trying to see if this is worth working on, and the number of people who are willing to pay is a good indicator of that.

I'm interested in your thoughts on the benefits/downsides of this approach.
For an awesome parallax demo: http://www.nintendo.com.au/gamesites/mariokartwii/
Here's one that bites every c++ newbie at least once (please forgive minor syntactic mistakes, it's been a while):

std::vector<LargeStruct> things = GetABunchOfThings(); // Why does this take so long?

// Oh well, time to sort
std::sort(things.begin(), things.end(), LargeStructComparator());

...and then your program takes forever and your profiler tells you that 99.9% of your time is spent in LargeStruct's copy constructor. And then you refactor to use pointers and teach the comparator to dereference them, whatever, it's fine, but the naive Python version will just work.

Of course, after c++0x becomes widespread this problem will go away. Yay move constructors.
You may win the award for "best comment I've seen all day", and today has just started.
Gowalla's iOS networking libraries are now open-source
According to the payout statements Jason was also one of the folks who took money out in the last funding round to the tune of 500k (which seems like a pittance all things considered).
For someone with entrepreneurial aspirations, getting a corporate job is a great way to learn more about a business or a market. However, be aware it can be a trap. Getting married, getting a mortgage, having kids, may keep you trapped at the corporation until you're 52, you get laid off and your only asset is old irrelevant or proprietary knowledge.

If you're young, my advice is, find a way to OWN assets. Don't wait until you're 30 or 40 or 50. Start now! Don't trade your life away building valuable assets for someone else. Make sure you get a piece of what you are building.
Dont buy funds invest it yourself. Move your 401k into a self-directed account.
Everyone remembers the Pets.com IPO for example, but no one remembers that it was Merrill Lynch that underwrote it and made most of the profit on the deal.

The problem is the market and VC environment that allows things like these to go down, not that there are unprofitable companies. Those have always existed. But there was a time when people didn't buy into them because they were unprofitable. The way things work now is just wrong and dangerous. But it's been 10+ years since the last dotcom bust, so I guess people will be people and start falling for it again. A fool and his money and all that.
Add the Google +1 button to Your Website: 4 Things You Need to Know
So there's a Google +1 button out there. What does it mean for search marketing and can I monitor it in Google Analytics?
Can someone please explain why people keep doing this?

The government always falls amid the outrage of the people over losing their internet access.

At best you could (not encouraging or endorsing this by the way) build something like Chinese Great Firewall, but if you cut if off your government is going to tumble. Its happened twice already now
I wrote about the other side of it (the interviewee) here http://rawsyntax.com/post/6112439871/interviewing-for-progra...

FWIW, I don't think coding exercises help. I think the employer should require and example project that runs, and the source code to it. Many good developers have a side project that they can show off.
MoJo needs your mojo. Entries for Mozilla Journalism Challenge are due June 6.
I had to use os.popen (Maya, MotionBuilder, and outside) (obsolete by now, but still available), and it seemed much more easier than subprocess.Popen because I simply wanted a file filter.

Basically a coworker had ways to read/write custom ASCII 3D animation and model format, and another one introduced a binary form for it. All I did was to replace his "open" function with "open_model" and "open_anim" (no monkey patching), with something like this:

def open_anim(name, mode, *args, **kwargs):
if name.upper().endswith( ".BIN_ANIM" ):
if 'r' in mode:
return os.popen( "anim_bin2text <" + name, mode, *args, **kwargs )
if 'w' in mode:
return os.popen( "anim_text2bin >" + name, mode, *args, **kwargs )
return open(name, mode, *args, **kwargs)