skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just want to point out there seems to be a lot of Winklevoss-types looking Zuckerburg-types these days, basically everywhere. I thought this trend would die down after "The Social Network" came out, but in fact there seems to be even more now. There are so many startups these days precisely because developers have realized they don't need business-people, venture capital, or any of that overhead to grow a business... and this is primarily what's different about today's tech boom/bubble.

If your business plan is solid enough you would probably need to prove it, by putting the plan onto paper and begin shopping it around to the VC's and angel investors in SF. You'd need to show a developer that your idea is solid enough that you can obtain funding otherwise I can't think of any reason a developer would join a startup from square one at >50% dilution rather than start his own project.
Perhaps a slightly misleading headline. You can't file a patent without inventing something; to be enforceable, a patent must document a "best known mode" of operation sufficient to enable someone reasonably skilled in the disciplines relevant to the patent to actually build the thing.

So this article does not in fact suggest that you can file "hover jellybeans" just because the thought occurred to you to do so. Rather, it adjusts a somewhat arcane dispute resolution system that many of you didn't even realize existed so that the patent system in fact works the same way you thought it did, which is that the first person to file a document describing and enabling an invention unencumbered by prior art wins the patent.

Presaging the "OMG WTF PATENT LOL" stuff, let me say: I don't care. This story doesn't have anything to do with whether software patents are reasonable. Tell me they're evil and I'll agree with you.
Quora explains why Bitcoins are a bad idea
Oh please. So you weren't actually saying that Groupon is in poor shape, you were just debating me for debating's sake?

And that when I pulled out "other facts and analysis" -- like the fact that Groupon must feel they're doing the right thing by spending a ton of money to grow their customer base (duh) -- you've got nothing to say?

And you really think in your post that you were "showing you could create another company with even more revenue?" Because what you're missing is you made up a fantasy example and you're calling it a counterpoint. It had no merit and was nothing but empty calories.

But people are investing a lot of money in Groupon. And their revenue growth that you dismiss is no small part of that, Justin.

Do you have any idea how rare a billion dollar business is?

Look at my comment history. I've got a long history here of reasonable discussion. But you've brought nothing to the table here. You've made no cogent argument.
It's actually the $500 pledge level that gets you feature requests!

Just kidding. So there's been some conversation about sync. Nothing solid yet but a couple ideas include the iCloud photostream API (iOS/OSX only and I need to familiarize myself with it), an rsync style automatic uploader, etc.

There isn't an official feature request forum but feel free to open an issue on Github and include some of the specifics of what you're looking for.

https://github.com/openphoto/frontend/issues
Thanks, I appreciate the advice! This is my first real "startup" attempt, so your perspective is really valuable. I will be referring to this comment a lot in the future. :)
UPDATE: Mr. Troll decided to email me again today, slightly different tone:

"""

Azoff,

There are several options available to you along with an opportunity for you and or your company to make some money regarding your software. Please call me by Wednesday at [ Mr. Troll Hotline ].

Regards,

[ Mr. Troll ]

"""
Thieves Found Citigroup Site An Easy Entry
At 8k USD a month, each day is approx. 267 dollars in revenue on average. So, downtime of 1 day due to a catastrophic event is that much loss. That is the base cost. However, how many premium members are going to be angry if the site goes down for a day? Support costs for replying to angry emails? Losses in member cancellation (I would consider that permanent...they are not coming back)?

IMHO, a standby server is worth it.
ERB is extremely similar to PHP and regular HTML. CSS and Javascript will already be familiar to someone who has done development in other languages.

Call it FUD (despite the fact that I do all my development in Rails) but the issue isn't the reality, it's the perception. You make these the defaults for Rails and/or you write the new user tutorials in them, and you increase the perceived difficulty of starting to use Rails. You make them options that more advanced users can choose to turn on, you reduce that friction. That's all I'm saying.

To clarify: I'm pro HAML, SASS/SCSS and I like the idea of Coffeescript even though I'm not using it. I just think that some of the way the've been going with Rails is not great from the perspective of growing the adoption of the platform.

And yeah, my mistake about HAML. I've been using it so long with Rails I've forgotten it's not a default.
You sound very authoritative, but some of your numbers seem odd. Do you have a source for your 30% rent figure? Most sources I see suggest a much lower number: http://www.4hoteliers.com/4hots_fshw.php?mwi=1661
People, not papers: Rethinking Impact
Anonymous: Empire State Rebellion
" The ability to go from nothing to an up and running web app quickly."

How in the world do the changes lead to a situation where you can't get an app up and running quickly? I don't see that at all.
What do you like to use conditional formatting for?
The Spolsky article was about how Microsoft changes the whole framework on you every few years. Which is why there seems to be some uproar about the Windows 8 information not mentioning .net at all.
If you're hesitant to be an early adopter (AKA "guinea pig") Rails 2.3.x is very stable, and most of the useful plugins in the Rails ecosystem are still maintained for Rails 2.3.x.

Many big names are still on Rails 2.3.x, too. Forgive me if I go astray here, but GitHub and DocumentCloud are two examples that come to mind.
Like the Xperia Play? http://www.sonyericsson.com/mwcnews/xperia_play/
That paper explains that the Scala engineer performed numerous algorithmic improvements, whereas the Java one "refused" to (he reported somewhere else, on a mailing list? that he wasn't told it was for a paper). The paper also explains that using Scala idiomatic for-comprehensions produced very slow results.
Creepy as hell.
Is my design too simple?
The Spolsky article was about how Microsoft changes the whole framework on you every few years

-------------

Judge for yourself.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
College Entrance Essays – Your Gateway To Success
College entrance essays are obviously written for gaining entrance into a particular college. This type of essay has to be written well as the College Board pays significant attention to it. If you wish to be selected, you need to submit a well written college entrance essay.
Interview with Prezi's founders
Hacking Senate.gov: Boss lulz or famous last words?
'Incognito': What's Hiding In The Unconscious Mind
Ask HN: App Store marketing strategies?
Howdy, hackers!
My first App Store release is called Lidpop (http://shinyplasticbag.com/lidpop/). It makes your computer play sound effects of your choosing when you open and close the lid. It sounds silly, but it's surprisingly gratifying.

It's been up in the App Store for a week or so, and I'm trying to figure out how I can promote it. I thought that some of the folks here might have some advice, and I also thought this might be a question that other people have wondered as well. If any App Store pros out there have thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

So, a few questions to get things going:

1. How much have you focused on a web site for the app? How much do you explain there?

2. Have you tried any viral marketing strategies? What works, what doesn't?

3. How did you find your pricing sweet spot? Right now, I'm at the bottom 99¢ tier. I have no idea how I can evaluate whether the app is worth more.

PS: I have some Lidpop promo codes to share. Hit me up at @Lidpop on Twitter if you're interested.
Does anyone know how well Scala can handle the requirements of a typical Node.js project? IE, thousands of network connections and rather light CPU load overall? Can Scala be a Node.js or Erlang replacement?
You do not need to use CoffeeScript in Rails 3.1, it is merely the default option. Just delete the "gem 'coffeescript'" line in your Gemfile and just use regular js.
Groupon and Groupon-like businesses
While the Groupon business model may have started out as a well-intended way to raise brand awareness for small businesses, it is not a profitable venture even in the long run because the return rate just isn't there in this economy. (http://www.bedtimebones.com)
The Twitter Paradox
happy birthday, the establishment!
Hey guys, I just wanted to say that we really did consider the HN crowd when we made this. PG and I had a conversation where it became clear that the core of this project needs to be don't offend HN. Check out the bottom of this page: http://rescuetime.com/intros and our faq: http://rescuetime.com/profiles/faq

We realize that the whole point of this breaks down if it ventures into the creepy side. We'd rather do something creatively useful and beneficial for our users with their data they're trusting us with.

-B
World Cup Football Shirt
The quality of Barcelona Kids Home Replica Soccer Jerseys are as good as original. We offer you the new Cheap Soccer Jerseys with embroidery logo. Welcome to our website luckychinatown.com to buy what you need.
Unfortunately the "freedom" of the US has been corrupted by corporate interest, and thus whilst this is in some ways admirable, there is absolutely no way a sane person could trust the US government again.
Totally understand your concern here. I can assure you recruiters will never see the data you don't show them yourself. It's part of our core values for this project. Hell, I wouldn't want to show recruiters my data without removing some things or highlighting others. That's why we launched with the ability to create your own profile. That's the only thing anyone can ever see of your data, and you have full control over it.
On a "state machine" vs. a "workflow engine"
Steve Jobs Email Says iWeb is EOL
This will be a very bad thing for iCloud. Google's cloud visions is safe
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2640727
ICML11 accepted papers
What it looks like to travel near the speed of light
So, more often than not, you'll catch your state machines attaching behavior directly to your objects. Which sometimes bugs you, because you want your states to be less about "nouns" and more about "verbs".

And eventually you notice that, in most cases, you crave coordination across those "nouns" (e.g.: "a transition in model A provokes a transition in model B"). The real workflow now lies "at the intersection of two models". You start to wish for the equivalent of "process management" in addition to state management.

So this, coupled with general unhappiness for the sort of anti-modular/anti-abstraction problem you see in state machines, might incite you to look at "workflow engines" like Ruote.

http://ruote.rubyforge.org/

TL;DR I am drinking the 'ruote' kool-aid right now. Augment your state machines with a great coordinator in the sky, a few levels higher in the architecture stack.

(BTW: I'm paraphrasing this argument from John Mettraux's "state machine != workflow engine" post, and Kenneth Kalmer's Ruote presentation from this year. Really changed my thoughts on the matter recently.)
FBI keeping 257.5 mln records on pre-9/11 travelers
Shaw Capital Management: The Boiler Room – Logan Square, Chicago
What CPC you have paid on Facebook?
If your advertisement is focused on startups in USA? What are some best practices?
Thailand, NYC or Machu Piccu...
Zero, because bitcoins are processed in six-minute or ten-minute blocks.
From the article:

If we add the content margins from music and apps ---> and assume the store runs at break even <--- we can get an idea of what it costs to operate the store.

Asymco's analysis always seems to have some completely unsupported claim at the center of its logic, thrown in almost as an aside. The portion marked with arrows is the questionable bit this time. While the numbers aren't broken out directly in their market filings, it is both obvious from their behavior, and support by quite a number of analysts that the App Store(s) return significant operating profit to Apple.

Cook suggests they run the service "just a bit ahead of break even" which would suggest that they're up instead of down, but even that presumably dubiously includes a large swath of media buys that are arguably more promotional for the ecosystem as a whole than simply getting iPhone users to go buy an album or app today. There's a reason that they don't break it out: pissing off their content partners.

Think about it. You don't fight tooth and nail for 30% on bringing content in house (ebooks, etc.) if you're somehow only going to break even on it or worse.

Just on the face of it, it's wildly improbable that you could spend over a billion dollars operating ITMS.
Yipes, agreed! That's a pretty long way from what we're doing though, thankfully.
On declarative state machines vs. imperative "workflow engines"
Maybe I'm anomalous, but I use the navigation bar EVERY DAY, because I check to see the free Android app and also check their discounted mp3 album and free mp3. Each one is one click away using the navbar.

I prefer physical albums to mp3s, but if I can get a Grammy-award-winning album for $5, I'll live with mp3s.
Giving away iPhone apps on Reddit
(Hacker) Hipster Battles [Hedge] Funds
From Microsoft Excel to the Cloud
Ruote – not a "state machine", but an "operating system for business processes"
1) Are you suggesting Standby server instead of SQL Server Cluster?

2) Another alternative could be RAID 1 or RAID 10. Catastrophic failure of two drives at once is extremely unlikely.
Still there would be occasional maintenance downtime, but it looks like maintaining RAID solution would be easier than Stand By server.
Lulzsec Hackers Break Into U.S. Senate Computers
910 Titleist
The new 910 has finally arrived. The 910 D2 driver has a 460cc pear shaped head that has a Mid/High Launch with Mid/Low Spin rate compared to the D3 version.
60 websites defaced by SbZ-GHoST TeaM against Denmark ,USA & Israel
Nice work! I am interested in collective intelligence. This is a cool starting point for quickly sharing an idea.

It seems like the reverse of a Question/Answer site; it is almost a Answer/Question site, where someone posts a solution ( or a solution to a question they were asking themselves ) and others ask them about more about what they found- great!

Concerning functionality:
1)How about being able to up-vote comments? Some insights and comments are more valuable to your core community; and it would be convenient for them to be able to see that reflected, as well as allowing them to encourage it.

2)How about being able to merge similar or duplicate posts; so instead of duplicated posts in a subject you would see all the duplicated posts under the most popular/valuable post, as chosen by the users' up-votes.

It is a general-knowledge based site right now. I wonder if you could port it to existing, active sites so that you could get feedback from the wild. Have you considered enabling it as a web service?

It might be cool if there was an API such that I could link the # of "aha"'s that users had attached to my website- similar to the Face Book 'like' and Google '+1' button. Though this would be more valuable, since I don't really want to see all the people that liked a page who I am 'friends' with; rather, I really want to read valuable insight ( hopefully :) ) from strangers!
would like to see better privacy setting info and options
No, it's not programming
What to do When a Tech Giant Decides to Eat Your Lunch
I'm just another peon, but...

I'm a former ASP.NET MVP, a codebetter.com blogger, I wrote Foundations of Programming, I own a handful of .NET OSS libraries. Yada, yada, yada..

All of that is pretty meaningless, I'm not saying to show off (most of that stuff isn't show off worthy). However, by all accounts, I'm an expert C#/.NET programmer who's been in the thick of of any progressive .NET movement. I know C# and ASP.NET (MVP or WebForms) much, much better than I know Ruby and Rails. Yet, somehow, I'm still more efficient in RoR (and thats only getting more true). I can get as low level about this discussion as you want, it won't change my opinion.

The two big wins for me: I write a ton less code and code is easier to test (this is largely since IoC is a language feature).
Prefacing everything with "good" makes it easy to dismiss whatever you want. Greater specificity is likely necessary here, assuming objectivity is the goal.

Anyhow, I don't know why you would put a prof's compensation at $500k because you're including all the people s/he pays, and then not do the same for the executive.

As for CEOs of the biggest oil firms:

ExxonMobil:
CEO:~$30 million http://people.forbes.com/profile/rex-w-tillerson/31576

Some other guy: $13.5 million http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/officerProfile?symbol=...

Chevron: ~$16 million http://people.forbes.com/profile/john-s-watson/18163

So, say $60 million -- and that's just three dudes. They're earning the equivalent of 500 climate scientists compensated at $120k/year.

Say, what do you figure the probability is that you're wrong?
Quickest way I'd be able to make $100 today is to sell something I already own and no longer use.

Another way would be to get someone to prepay you today for a job you will do over the course of the week or something similar.
Microsoft old school page
Another player to watch in this space is NeuroVigil. Right now they're mainly focused on EEG for healthcare applications, but their technology could be modified for other use cases.

http://www.neurovigil.com/
They seem to be using "Appstore" as a proper name.
I've never found it to be that awkward to extend existing classes from java. Part of the problem in clojure are there are so many different ways to do it, all with different shortcomings.

For simple adding of a protocol to a class you can always just use (extend-class)

Proxies are simple and work well in other cases.

the gen-class documentation is a bit confusing, it helped me to look @ some examples. I used a different site that I can't find now, but this one seems helpful.

http://kotka.de/blog/2010/02/gen-class_how_it_works_and_how_...
Great idea for a site, so simple and yet so deep.
Installing Mac OS X Lion in VMware
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088699
I don't think that is a fair assessment; Google's core products are the links that are on the top of the google.com landing page. Amazon's core product is the sale of physical goods, they are just trying to stay on the leading edge of things and get a foothold in digital goods while the getting is still good.

They know that being early to market is insanely important today, even a year delay can end up being the difference between Groupon and Google Deals. It's typically impossible to compete with an entrenched product by one of the big tech corps as they have the engineering man power to duplicate any improvement you make over their formula if you start depriving them of the tiniest portion of their user base.
ASCII diagram creator
This is the best way to do it, and using a continuous integration server to emit a binary as the output of your build, as our ancestors in compiled languages did in days of yore, is a good way to make it happen. You don't even need to commit it; just use the tarball (or whatever) as the artifact of deployment.
I predicted a long time ago that this is the direction the product would take.

It is an opt-in thing for now. But if they become really successful, it will become the norm that if you are not willing to share your browsing/app usage statistics with your potential employer you are automatically assumed to have something you wish to hide. Kind of like how absence of credit history puts you in the high-risk bin.
"...how do you explain how X amount of users are going to keep all their servers running if they want an online presence?"

They don't have to keep all of their servers running. Only one needs to be available at any given time.

The management of servers could be done by the owner, the owner's friend, the owner's third cousin, the gal from Geek Squad, Aunt Millie in Burbank, Comtastic Enterprises LLC, or Arthur Higginbottom Jr.
I would improve the "Subscription Confirmed" email that comes after you sign up. It looks really bare, has First and Last name fields empty and does not match the websites style or color scheme.
Anatomy of a Dying Patent - The Reexamination of Trend Micro's '600 Patent
Fermilab experiment fails to confirm new particle claim
Then what IS programming?
What a stunning oversight. Relying on GET IDs to secure their customer financial data seems almost too amateur to believe. I imagine lawsuits are on the way.
Where were you 4 months ago?
+1 i sure would also like to know more insights here...

i have an app too (not in the app store, but in macupdate, http://bit.ly/ipaUfI and some other sites that publish for free). to support it i created a quick 1 page site, registered a domain and emailed a few writers from design/mac-centric sites i go to. after a week though i can say that it doesn't seem to be working, still no coverage and only getting crumbs of feedback.
Bitcoin Mining Hardware Calculator
Real time updated chart showing best price on GPU's and bitcoin returns.
This was actually one of the key motivations behind starting my tablet case business (www.dodocase.com). I think there are many physical objects in life that create an emotional experience that can't easily be explained, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

I am also a surfer and I found this explanation of riding a hollow wooden surfboard a beautiful description of just this type of experience.

"You obviously can’t actually feel the wood when it’s wrapped in a layer of glass & resin. But beyond the tactile, there’s definitely an emotional aspect to paddling, sitting, and standing on a piece of wood in the water.

You ever driven a Ford truck from the 50′s? Slept on the dirt in wool blankets? Cleaned a big fish? Sipped 40-year old Scotch? Chopped down a tree with an axe? Like surfing a wood board, all of those kinds of things awaken something inside of us that the plasticine era has covered up in layers of shiny dross." Benny http://www.hollowsurfboards.com/Q&A.htm
In fact, the opposite is true. Every single employer we talked to wanted their concerns address that they would be perceived as invading people's privacy by having them introduced through us. In the end, employers are recruiting you. If you're turned off by the way they're doing it, they lose.
RAID is a cheap answer but it doesn't solve the same problems. RAID controllers fail. Motherboards fail. Power supplies fail. Connectivity or power to entire racks fails.

Moreover, humans fail. RAID cannot save you from human error that corrupts the filesystem, for example. RAID is just a little too efficient at replicating changes from one drive to the other. There's a tradeoff between how up-to-date your mirror is and how much time you have to detect a problem on the primary and stop that problem from replicating to the slave; RAID is firmly parked on one edge of the space of solutions.

And, as you have noticed, RAID also cannot help you deploy your new code on one machine at a time, secure in the knowledge that you can fail over to the other machine in case of big trouble. (That doesn't work for every deployment, but it sure is a handy option when you need it.)
Facebook usage drops in Britain and US
That's not their backend, it's just servicing a front-end feature.
Use an issue tracker for this, and reference issue IDs in your commit logs.
Great awesome post. Are you from the Zed Shaw school of trolling?