skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Them shutting down is going to have some interesting side effects with their Github integration. Wish Github would buy them up and continue running the service.
Sucks to see this happen, and to see Convore (which jazzychad wrote an iPad app for) floundering as well.
How about per city which is the level at which sales tax can vary in California?
TrollScript, an esoteric dialect of Brainfuck.
A trollscript interpreter in trollscript:

https://raw.github.com/gist/1204925/743626cf2313690d82243e99...

Have it sung to you on OS X: $(curl https://raw.github.com/gist/1204925/743626cf2313690d82243e99... | say -v "Bad News")
45 Years of Star Trek
The NeTV uses a Marvell SoC, so you're right that it's a somewhat distant cousin.
Dinamit Patlatma 2
What indication is there that Convore isn't doing well? What is the measure for success for it?
Patent reform act passed, goes to Obama for signature
Seriously bummed. This was a reliable and (very) useful service for all of our environments on EC2. We had it tied in with Nagios and it worked quite well to alert us of issues.

Since this is official, we will probably start relying on PagerDuty now.
$79.88, free shipping

A $5 off coupon for purchases over $75

http://www.buy.com/retail/coupon.asp?prid=85094736

over 1,000 in stock at the moment
20 Quotes From European Leaders That Prove Their Financial System is Doomed
True. I think the company will figure this out by the time they have enough information from their beta users. It's really difficult to predict how people will react to a new environment because we often assume we know what we will do on certain situations. I have surprised myself a few times on how I reacted to new situations.
I thought it was because Amazon had an physical presence in the state of new york...
London's 'Silicon Roundabout'
50% of studies can't be repeated with the same conclusions
Headline in two weeks:

"Apple donates to anti-gay rights organization"
(The Salvation Army is a 501c3)
Augmented reality app puts the Twin Towers back in the picture.
Back in March, Chad took the time to write up a history of his developing interest in this space, and I find that history gives a lot of context to what must be a tough decision now:

http://blog.jazzychad.net/2011/03/14/twitter-and-me.html
SesliSerbest
sesliserbest sohbet girişi
HAHAHA as if I would use anything by clear channel - I have been using Pandora since launch and use it every single day on 4 different devices.

The only thing better than Pandora is Saver2
If you write music, it will always be your music, even after the copyright has expired.

Copyright is about the government stopping other people from using a work without permission of the copyright holder, not about identifying whose work something is.
SesliDunya
SesliDunya Sohbet Girişi.
Fáilte?!
Could you elaborate? We have a welfare system in Uruguay, and it is an observable fact that people on welfare have more children than people not on welfare.

Whether that is caused by welfare, idleness or other factors should be subject to studies, but that's what I'm talking about.
This is a classic case of "who moved my cheese." Sales tax used to make sense -- but it's trivial to avoid with the advent of e-commerce. Instead of struggling to preserve the small e-commerce portion of this small revenue stream (California is looking for $200 million in revenue from Amazon a year while the state budget is over $100 billion) the states should find other sources of revenue or cut spending.
Active users?

I had totally forgotten about convore.
Sad to see this go. On a more positive note, I'm really impressed with this shut down notice.

It gives a brief explanation of the situation, clear indication of what might happen next and alternatives that people might consider.

I've had to draft one of these before so I know it's difficult. Especially the part where you mention alternatives because there's no going back after that. The only thing I'd have done in addition is to email the same message to all users (but that might already be in progress - Edit: It is).

Kudos and thanks for the service so far.
A few months ago the UI became noticeably slower. At about the same time, anecdotally, multiple channels that I frequented saw a drop in participation, or at least, not much growth. These channels include the GitHub channel, the Changelog channel, and the Rails channel.

https://convore.com/feedback/convores-ui-is-very-slow/
look at your friends list, find single people randomly assign.
Canadian artist creates intricate algorithms to honour 9/11 victims
I received an email with the same text shortly after reading the post.
Köperliche Beherrschung: Breakdance
And I thought brainfuck was hard to read... Pretty funny.
Whether or not this particular quote happens to be true is largely irrelevant. The fact that the military is paying people to use sockpuppets to post pro-military opinions on social news sites makes me not trust pro-military opinions I read on social news sites. What exactly is irrational about that? How does that represent clouded cognitive ability?

I would trust the military a lot more if I didn't see shit like this on a regular basis:

"One use that's confirmed, however, is the manipulation of social media through the use of fake online 'personas' managed by the military. Raw Story recently reported that the US Air Force had solicited private sector vendors for something called 'persona management software.' Such a technology would allow single individuals to command virtual armies of fake, digital 'people' across numerous social media portals.

These 'personas' were to have detailed, fictionalized backgrounds, to make them believable to outside observers, and a sophisticated identity protection service was to back them up, preventing suspicious readers from uncovering the real person behind the account. They even worked out ways to game geolocating services, so these 'personas' could be virtually inserted anywhere in the world, providing ostensibly live commentary on real events, even while the operator was not really present."

Toppling of Saddam statue? Fake. Pat Tillman? Fake. Jessica Lynch? Fake.

They have spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars producing fake TV segments alone which have been broadcast on the U.S. media as independent news: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/16/opinion/16wed1.html
Ill never have a facebook account, but that is a killer idea.
I read the title as a basketball metaphor, not baseball, and it still worked. The power of sports metaphors.
Awesome. I believe 10% of Apple's profits every month should go to charitable causes (e.g. caring after orphanages, widowed mothers, mass vaccinations, providing water (charitywater.com), sanitation, microfinancing, agricultural development in poor countries, to name a few God worthy causes).
The founder's post: http://blog.jazzychad.net/2011/09/08/fouling-out-moving-on.h...
I am with you, I am 27 and really had no clue what the heck Zagat is. I knew they reviewed food places, but why they are trusted or why I should care? I am more interested in my co-workers opinion.

I don't see this as a great purchase for Google either. They already put business reviews from other websites on their listing pages. I have seen Zagat ratings on various pages. Why couldn't they just pull it in also instead of buying the company?
Damn. Notifio was one of the more immediately awesome ideas I'd heard. Sad to see it wasn't able to become a thriving business.

Good luck Chad. Excited to see what you make next. High hopes.
Isn't it against Facebook policy to use the like button in this manner?

http://developers.facebook.com/policy/

You must not incentivize users to use (or gate content behind the use of) Facebook social channels, or imply that an incentive is directly tied to the use of our channels.
This will be a success. One of the things our church has done is something called 'dinner for 7' which is a system whereby people opt in that they are interested in meeting new people, and the church sets up a group of 7 who then agree to meet and have some dinners together (nominally hosted from house to house). It really helps you meet folks, interact and engage with them. It 'forces' what would otherwise have to be a very random event (you found yourself in a group they were in at some social event).
Is there any way to disable or shorten the animation that happens when you switch spaces or whatever they renamed them to. I like being able to switch between MacVim in one space and my terminal in another and the animation slows me down that by the time it is done animating it has missed all of my keystrokes for running make or other build tools ...
Also, the way they're currently doing it would probably attract the more adventurous users anyway (since there are more unknowns). On balance, I think that's likely to be a better approach for them.
According to this:
http://startupgenome.cc/

They have some stats that say its not a myth.
As mixed as your feelings might be, please reserve room for the feeling of knowing that your journey is inspiring to many many, many others out there.
The First Years Wave Stroller
This is very sad indeed.

It would be really interesting if you could share more of your experiences as a startup founder and some feedback to upcoming founders regarding how your startup ended up this way.

We are embarking on this adventure ourselves, and right now our biggest disadvantage is experience in the startup arena. We work hard, we are passionate and we have great ideas... just like you. But I believe that is not enough.

So anything else you could share would be great.
Kudos for the perfect message. Sad to see it go, though. It works so well and it's so easy to integrate. I'd gladly pay for the service, even the basic level, simply for the ease of use.

Why can't we save notifo?
This is an incredibly pervasive problem. As someone who has worked in healthcare medical informatics for a long time I can report that errant spreadsheets with all sorts of data are floating around in virtually every medical institution.

Informatics in general and information security in particular are participants still new to the table at large healthcare institutions. It will take some time for policy to be formulated and yet more time still for it to be implemented organization wide. I really don't know if there is any one silver bullet here outside of prohibiting all data sharing, which, frankly is not possible.

There are so many different electronic information systems that people need to get data out of in all sorts of different formats, including paper, that the only real way I see this working is for vendors to force de-identification on export. See pioneering work by Sweeney[0] of CMU in this area. There are a number of systems that already do this but it is not the norm just yet. Not to mention the incalculable number of shadow systems that people use just to get their jobs done.

The overarching problem, imho, is simply that healthcare institutions have not adequately invested in their own internal technology teams. By and large, they are thinly resourced and overburdened. Whatever technical leadership does exist is simply not valued on the same level as top medical personnel with MD backgrounds. We will only begin to see a change when medical leadership accepts and invests in technology as an equal partner and not just a tool.

[0]http://latanyasweeney.org/work/index.html
You've just cited a bunch of companies that are separate entities owned by Amazon. US courts have a very strong presumption against attributing the acts, economic or otherwise, of a corporation to its owners.

It would be virtually impossible for California to win in court on the grounds of A9, A2Z, Alexa, or Amazon AWS having offices in California. None of those companies are involved in Amazon.com's separate retail business.
I can't understand why anyone would choose to use this language. Clearly it is unreadable and I highly doubt this scales. Can somebody give me a good reason for using this on my Facebook clone instead of a more mature language such as PHP, Python or Java? Also, I heard somebody was developing a web framework, Trolls under Bridges. Has anybody heard about this?
(At Least) Half of All Twitter Users Are Inactive
Thank you. I worked very hard to make sure that the announcement was as 'professional' as possible. I've seen too many other companies get railed for poor interaction with their users when shutting down, and I wanted to avoid that.

I sent an email to all service account owners with the same information to make sure that they read it, since they will be impacted the most by having to switch to a new solution.
PHP, Python and Java don't have a 'lol' operator!
> Most developed nations have some for of
> consumption/sales tax. In the EU it's typically
> 17.5-25%, in Australia it's 10%, in Switzerland it's
> ~7% and so on. America has this on a state by state
> basis.

1. It's nice in that I live in Oregon and there is no sales tax. :P

2. Canada has provincial sales tax and a national sales tax, so the overall sales tax is still 'state-by-state.'
No, that's unfair, he cares about it. Bud now the loser seems to be AOL...what prevents Mike to just take the core team with him and establish a brand new blog? Most TC readers will just move there and techcrunch.com becomes worthless instantly...
Hey noduerme,
Thanks for the kind words, and no worries, we love getting feedback from smart people like you because it highlights developers' potential concerns and also some issues that we should iron out in-depth answers for.

So you know, we got the gold standard license is because we wanted to have the gold standard and face as little legal/regulatory issues down the road as possible. Our goal is to build a reputable, legal business that operates everywhere that gambling is legal. We have international payment providers and again, assume full responsibility for gambling, so developers have nothing to worry about, regardless of where their game is hosted and where their players are. We specifically cite that this is legal for US developers because gambling is 100% illegal in the US, so this is proof that use of our API does not violate local law.

That said, the legal issues surrounding this are definitely the primary concern among developers. We've been thinking of good ways to communicate this (other than company lawyers of the developing firm, which have given their employer the all clear every time thus far). We hope that this will be alleviated to some extent as the first games built on our platform go live.

We do have partners already building on our platform, such as Lucky Derby by Toy Studio. See here for more info:
http://www.toystudio.com/2011/08/04/lucky-derby-coming-soon/

Thanks again for a great conversation, and definitely ping us here or via email with any more questions (I'm tyler@betable.com)
Funny, I hadn't thought of the basketball metaphor. Maybe that's what my friend meant, and I didn't know it! Just shows my bias toward baseball.
Really? Why don't you tell us then how to ensure 100% ethical behavior on behalf of all non-profits so you and others like you can feel safe to give?
Chad has always been someone I wanted to work with, and now I get to! Hopefully that itch will lie dormant for awhile :)
Here's the original Kickstarter page. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/110stories/110-stories-a...
So very sorry to hear about this.

In the next few months, if you can muster up the energy (and desire) I think the community would love to hear a post-mortem and/or some thoughts about how you could have pivoted into a successful business model.

Keep your head up, the experienced gained is invaluable!
The enthusiasts are questioning if buy.com really has stock. See TW's comment at http://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/forum.cgi?r...
How can you kill that which is not living? For real tho, Pandora is in the red.
You may have already seen these, but here are two:

- http://blog.jazzychad.net/2011/05/02/startups-are-hard.html

- http://blog.jazzychad.net/2011/08/31/applying-to-yc-as-a-sin...

I have a couple more that are written, but now is not the time to post them.
It is an interesting problem of the "new economy" though. Companies won't hire anyone unless they are absolutely one hundred percent perfect, leaving business with thousands upon thousands of open positions unable to be filled and just as many crying for work.

We hear statements like "the people aren't well educated enough," or "not smart enough" time and time again, but it misses the real mark. Jobs of the past were tied to time-based constraints, such as deteriorating products, so hiring anyone to get the job done, no matter how poor of an employee, was better than losing everything.

Coming from an agriculture-based background, farmers are always complaining about the quality of help, more-so than technology companies. However, you cannot afford to wait until someone good at the job comes along. When the crops are ready, you have to harvest them no matter what. That means taking on sub-par labour.

In the information industries, time does not matter. If it takes decades to find the right person, it is better to wait for that person because of the risks you state. Educating the masses isn't going to change anything. Changing the attitudes of business is the only solution if we want to see employment numbers rise again.
It would actually be amazing if he gave some of the money to the Gates foundation - as a way of showing that there are things that transcend competition and that all in all they would all just like to make the world better. (Also, let's face it, who else is even equipped to do billion-dollar philantrophy?)

Still, I hope we're nowhere near the point when he has to do it.
or licensing it?
Thanks for your input Sam. I believe I get your meaning (dealing with a head cold). Any event or club has a lot of potential for engagement, just because it's a closely defined experience - same time, place, activity, beverages, type of clientele, etc.
Ah, but for a company as big and established as Amazon it will be anything but an even field. One reason they're all for this is that it would hinder upstarts the might threaten them.
Yes, I will be writing a post-mortem article about all of this, but it might take a while.
Thats a shame, it was a cool service, although giving it away for free was probably where he went wrong... I'm just sayin...
Hi Massargo,

I'm looking for a way for users to buy stuff through my mobile application. For example If user is shopping for a phone through my application then I want to accept the payment within the mobile application via paypal or any other payment gateways.

Squareup is a card reader which is not what i'm looking for.

Thanks,
That article is a great example on a startup providing a compelling story for coverage by media. I don't doubt that they used the 400$ given by YC for Grouper but the 400$ probably was not the limiting factor.
Get back to me when I can write it in an IDE with syntax highlighting and content assist.
Apple employees can still donate anonymously but this program lets them double the donation at the cost of anonymity.
I did. I think it's reasonably clear in the state tax forms that you're supposed to pay use tax, and the clean conscience was worth the $13 or whatever it was.

Obviously, though, as you say you can pay nothing without suffering any consequences.
Ok I think I found it. Amazon has a service mobile payment service: https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business?sn=devfps/mps
Rafat Ali on Mike Arrington:'You Just Have to Move On'
It is often said that failing with your startup can also be a good thing because it shows at least that you have been willing to try and learned a lot. Frankly speaking, I always felt this mantra a little bit "too good to be true" and that if your venture does not work out, you are screwed.

But after following Chad (and also Paul) with their ventures (even though I don't know them personally) and I just feel like this is one example where it is true: Yes, it didn't work out, yes, a lot of money was invested and not earned back.But ultimately a lot was learned and Chad has shown his development skills and ability to ship something. The business model was not perfect, maybe the market was non-existant. But the way they have run this project and the way they are handling it now gives them more credibility than trying to hide a stagnant startup.
Very good! I can start shopping Amazon again with a clear conscience.

I say this not as sarcasm but as literal truth. I know many HN'ers disagree that they were doing anything wrong -- but personally, their behavior turned my stomach and I was avoiding buying anything from them which I could easily get elsewhere.
In my home town of only 50K (before the tornado, it's Joplin, MO) there are sections of the town with their own additional sales tax, the theory is to improve that particular business district or to pay for the city's contributions to it (e.g. intersection upgrades). On thing I'm noticing as I work with receipts for my insurance claim is that of the three Wal-Marts in two cities we did and now shop at (the one we used to exclusively go to was destroyed and is rebuilding) each has two different sales tax rates (don't forget that rates also depend on what is being bought, e.g. food of certain types is taxed less). And then there is the statewide state sales tax holiday for certain back to school supplied in late August....

This is serious nightmare ... but much less so for a company of Amazon.com's scale than a potentially dangerous to it upstart.
I've always hated it and I tend to revert/like the defaults over time (out of simplicity). A 3 dimensional UI element smack bang on an otherwise 2D environment sticks out like a sore thumb and is totally unnecessary when the 2D variant is both attractive and direct.
View from the Top: 10 Inspired Rooftop Locations 
Luc Besson’s 1997 futuristic movie The Fifth Element opens with a breathtaking scene of a multi-level city. The elevated lifestyle pictured there is still more than a few corners around and in everyday architecture rooftops are downgraded to a functionally-obsolete protective part of buildings.
Ask HN: Let's see your weekend projects
I see a ton of weekend projects posted regularly to HN and some of the stuff produced is just outright cool.

More importantly though, it's a great example of creative thinkers hard at work trying to make even the slightest impact on the world around them.

I'd love to write a post on EntrepreneursUnpluggd.com highlighting some of these projects.

If you're interested in being included, post your weekend project link here and a quick 1 sentence pitch about it.

Thanks!
No one is claiming Honeycomb is open source. Clearly it isn't.

Some people are ok with that, and some are not.
Yes I have read those. We have been following your blog posts for a while now.

Whenever you feel is right, share your thoughts. :D
I don't think this is a language people use in real life. It's more for testing. When I went for a job interview at Alexander Interactive http://www.alexanderinteractive.com/ one of the tests they gave me was to write a short bit of code in Brainfuck to reverse a string. The string they gave me was "Hello World". I was allowed to look at the Wikipedia page regarding Brainfuck. They had an interpreter running, into which I could type my code and see the results. I had 15 minutes to make it work.

I think that is where these kinds of languages are used. I think the idea is to test how fast a programmer can learn something new. (For the most part, I'm doubtful about these tests.)
David, I'd like to ask you some more questions off line. I can't see your email address in your profile.
That's a bummer. Any chance of a public release, to keep it alive? Also, Hacker news will need an update now.
Newspaper chain fires copyright troll Righthaven
I confess I don't understand this mentality. Why do you personally care that Joel took responsibility?