skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mr. Furman gets waves of clients who ask him about patenting the same thing. “In a month, six or seven people come to me with virtually the same idea!” he told Betabeat.

The way that certain ideas are "in the air" is fascinating to me. Presumably a lot of this is taking a logical next step, or combining ideas that have just been discovered/talked about.
I went through this thought process. I really liked Python and auto-scaling, so GAE seemed really appealing. But the combination of lack of SQL and inflexibility of architecture led me to want to create the sort of combination architectures you describe with EC2 instances or whatever.

Ultimately, after a lengthy debate with a friend, I concluded that Heroku was a sufficiently better option that it was worth learning Ruby (which I've been writing more or less as an uglier Python anyway).
Statement Processing
Electronic data processing is the function of planning, recording, managing and reporting business transactions by the use of computers and related peripherals. In EDP data is first taken from source documents such as invoices, revenue receipts, payment vouchers, written checks etc. There after data inputs to the computer where it is entered via the keyboard or other data entry peripherals. The entered data is then processed according to the accounting package in use. As I said earlier that reporting is one of processing features, then it is apparent or undoubted that types of reports produced by different packages may vary from one system or package to another.
http://statementprocessing.com/
Web Worth | Website stats | Whois
Websoutlook.com - Evaluate web worth and provide domain information, Website stats and know top websites according to country. For more info please visit at www.websoutlook.com
Perl Beginner's first step
Alexa Ranking | Server location IP address | whatsmyip | what is my worth
Websoutlook contains a collection of actual number of pageview from other websites. The visitor data is combined with information about number of links that point towards the site, country, Alexa ranking, ip address and other data that is available on-line.
Just a Few Teensy Questions About Arrington and AOL
I think Apple will be forced by market pressure to make the next iPhone with a larger screen (somewhere between 3.7 and 4.0 inches, unlikely to be as much as 4.3 inches), but the same number of pixels, 960x640. Android has a key differentiator with their larger displays, and Apple needs to nullify that advantage. They dont't advertise the specific 326 PPI in their marketing for the iPhone 4's Retina display; even with a slightly larger display, the eye would be unable to distinguish individual pixels, keeping the "Retina" moniker. I really doubt that the pragmatic designers at Apple really hold 3.5 inches to some Platonic ideal.

I also think Amazon is going to do a very successful 7-inch tablet.
That's unreasonably expensive. For $68.46 he payed for a day you can have an "el-cheapo" dedicated box or a great VPS for a month. I still don't understand why people trade a bit of system administration and superb performance for a vendor lock and insane prices.
Why not split the "Freelancer? Seeking freelancers?" thread in two?
Seems to me that you're either looking for work, or looking for somebody to hire. So in the "Freelancer/Seeking freelancers" threads (for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2949790 ), half of the content is not relevant to the reader.

Splitting the thread in two (i.e. into "freelancers" and "seeking freelancers") would make the page easier to read, and it would also make it much easier to search the page for specific keywords.
APIs Take Root in the Medical Marijuana Industry
Scotland Yard Arrests LulzSec, Anonymous Suspects
The hilarious product market fit of U2
> Most people don't take 50 minutes to fall asleep unless they've just slept.

The people hitting the site from web search are probably going to be the ones with sleep problems.
In line with what I've been saying here in every CEO discussion.
The $2.63 a day comes out to $81 a month which for hosting is a non trivial amount. It does come down to whether Google can turn a profit at these levels for someone using this amount of resources but I don't think customers willing to pay $50-$100 a month are ones you want to push away.
sorry, it's inlith@gmail.com
A new game on android market - Number Runner - FREE
It's a number of general taxes (sales, income, etc.) that are identified in the post as offsetting the missing income from being able to jack up property taxes. These are all taxes you're paying whether you own property or not.

If it were something like unregulated rental taxes of some sort vs this limited property tax, then the title would be more accurate.

As it is, by owning property you're still paying more taxes than you would if you didn't. Yes, it's a capped tax which keeps it from going up astronomically, but you're still paying that additional tax, not saving money.
But how about reimplementing R in Scala? Or, better yet, in Clojure? The best of both worlds.
AngelList is an amazing resource that can really not only get you funding, but also provide you with some really amazing connections and even friendships! There is a really great investment community on that site and in general a really great culture as well.

With that said, you need to be aware that going online, setting up an AngelList account and spamming investors won't get you anywhere either. I think AngelList is a tool and it's up to you how to use it. Combined with "old fashioned" networking AngelList makes it much easier to get a seed round (or series financing) together.

You just want to make sure that, if nothing else, the investors you contact on AngelList have at least heard of you somewhat, or someone they know has. You can meet them by trying to go to events where these people are speaking or hanging out. Talk to them about your start up, maybe set up a coffee date. Once you've talked a few people (don't even mention fundraising at first!) then drop the hint that you guys are looking to raise some money. AngelList will then provide the gears, but you've always got to be the engine!
Things are never as fun as they were back in the good old days. :)
In regards to the mac screenshots, I found the key combination a little too much for something I tend to do a lot. On my Win7 laptop I have OneNote and the screen capture with <win>+S was great. Now that I have Skitch, I find it way better because of the key combo and annotation features.
It's also much easier on the user (and in turn, easier on the designer to make it easier on the user). Knowing the exact surface area each control will take up, the exact distance between elements as they will appear in the real world, gives the designer that much greater degree of precision in crafting a human-centered UI.
I'm ignorant on the issue - which treaty are you referring to?
Yeah trading back a little bit of system admin you can get a pretty serious amount of server power on AWS for that amount of money.
Watch Apollo 18 review
watch Apollo 18 review
The story follows three astronauts in December 1974, sent a top secret mission (Apollo 18) to the moon
SEEKING FREELANCER - Remote, SF, or NYC

iOS / Android / Blackberry / Web (Doesn't need to be just one person).

We are in the prototype phase for our startup and are looking for engineers to help with mobile development and web. Our iOS and web need is immediate with other platforms coming later.

Experience with GPS (location based), mobile photo taking, messaging, e-commerce, social APIs, and user generated content database optimization are a big plus.

Please send your development portfolio and experience to hello[at]conwayanderson.com
if a business on the Web needs millions of dollars to get off the ground, then it's probably a business that isn't worth getting off the ground

There are some businesses that you could simply not start without significant upfront investment. True, there are lots of businesses you could start with just very cheaply ($100's or $1000's) and grow organically over time. The easiest of these would be paid online apps/services where you could scale your expenses (servers, bandwidth, etc) with revenue. But some businesses need money upfront to get started. The most obvious example would be anything involving hardware. You could bootstrap while building a prototype, but you would likely need outside investment to manufacture and distribute your product. Even a web only business might need lots of investment to break into a market through advertising or partnerships.
Nice Bowl by Sir Terence Conran for Alessi
I've watched a couple episodes of that, was quite entertaining. I remember the Greek title on a Japanese series caught my eye.
Well, I'm not surprised. I was in their AppUp event. We all got a meego tablet (exopc). All people I know have installed a different OS on it. It was prealpha, and most things didn't work. There was no point to develop for it.
I was just discussing this with my wife last night. My 2 friends and I bootstrapped our company for $300. Knowing that all the success we are enjoying now came from our hard work and that no one else can take any claim to our any part of our success is such an awesome feeling. I talk to a lot of local angels and VCs now and what they offer really doesn't seem that interesting to me anymore. The business I have now will probably never make hundreds of millions of dollars, but I don't feel the need or desire to hit those kind of numbers if it means I have to sacrifice my lifestyle now (a very awesome lifestyle).
People expect their pets to be happy based on human features (shape of the mouth and eyebrows), which don't correspond to the actual mood of the pet.
This is a huge tangent, but I cannot resist asking: which of the mobile OSes is best at allowing the user to customize text size? Suppose for example, the user is old enough to need glasses to read small type, but would prefer not to have to put on his glasses to use his smartphone. Let's leave the mobile browser out of this (because it is more complicated) and focus on apps for calendaring, plain-text email, plain-text notekeeping and texting.

A lot of it seems to depend on decisions by app developers. Unless I am very much mistaken, most iOS apps written by Apple do not allow the user to change the size of the text, but at least one iPad app (PlainText, which is similar to Notes) give the user a choice between at least 2 text sizes.
Using jQuery’s Data APIs
Hire him on a 90 day trial period. Pay him for those 90 days, of course, but after that time, that's when you should know if his technical skills outbalance the "annoying factor." He may be a great guy once you get to know him, and he also may the be best engineer you've ever hired, but you never know.
What I want is something that will parse and auto-categorize my Amazon purchases based on their emailed receipts, and somehow get that info into Mint.com. (Or another app that can replace Mint and also do this.)

Right now Mint does a decent job categorizing most of my other purchases based on vendor, but every month I end up with a huge, opaque line item for Amazon. Really hampers my budgeting.

(I have the same problem with Target and Wal-Mart, but to a lesser degree--they don't carry as wide a variety of stuff as Amazon, and I shop there less.)
I feel like you haven't even done any research on AL at all. Have even opened it up in a browser or read a little about it? You say you want to go the "old fashioned" way through networking... well AL is networking -- it is a social-network for investors.

You should read more about AL. But in short, yes, you should use it. It is much easier to find investors, and if you win one over, it is easier to extend out from their personal networks as well. I'd also recommend you start reading venturehacks.com.
We have standards. Anyone can play an x264 file. Anyone can play an MPG. Wrap whatever media player you like around them.

But... the standards don't have DRM.

If you could buy videos like you could buy MP3s off of Amazon, and nobody flipped out about the DRM, we wouldn't need middlemen to do the job of standing up for their customers and making sure the videos actually work, which they basically wouldn't if the studios had their way, unopposed.
As one of the devs of PhotoAppLink I'm super excited to see this get crunched. If anyone here has an iOS photo app you should take a look at this
Thingiverse Backup: 26GB archive of things you can 3D print
Can someone explain to me exactly what the advantage is of hiding the menu bar contents behind mouseover?
Samsung CEO: We would “never” buy WebOS
Show HN: New tool can track the sales impact of social networking for retailers
Most firms say business analytics boosts decision-making process
My startup's first press. I'd love to get feedback: http://www.addshoppers.com

Thanks guys!
Not meant to be a petty criticism, but the shade of purple used hurts my eyes after looking at it for 3 minutes. Just something to think about.
This post is based upon a part of my book, in which I do mention the italics, but I left it out on the first run. I've now edited to post so I do mention it. Thanks for noticing / commenting!
I was making no argument about why the US has historically supported Israel, to a lesser or greater degree, as you note.

I was merely pointing out that saying that the religious right are the cause of US support of Israel is obviously wrong. Your assertions about when US/Israel relations were at their peak are in agreement with my statements, since the religious right has only become a political force at the national level in the last 20 years or so, and your water mark events preceded that rise to power.

I was just pointing out the obvious wrongness of the comment above mine, not making any sort of political argument about US/Israel relations.
I find Rand Fishkin incredible in sharing all the details of SeoMoz. It takes guts to do that.
Balsamiq, Bingo Card creator and a few others on HN are transparent when it is not a great deal of money.

(I haven't seen Balsamiq post detailed revenue and their breakup lately.)

I would say do what feels comfortable to you. Most likely, it is to keep revenues etc. secret. Revealing those details might get some eyeballs in the short term but not customers.
Seems like it sold at ~ 20x EBITDA and a little over 2x sales. Expensive by the first metric; cheap by the second. Revenue is ~180k per employee - low for an established company.

The weak EBITDA makes or tough buy for a PE firm, who might not be able to make interest payments on the debt required for a purchase.

This is much less of an issue for IBM who would pay in cash.

I see IBM making half the employees redundant an then pushing the product through their existing sales network.

Not a bad deal for them, though it might make Algo a tougher place to work.
Sarcasm aside, the fact that this sort of thing is being developed at what, I'm pretty sure, most people would consider a newspaper company is pretty fascinating in and of itself.
unity is cancer. I loved it when it was just maximus for better screen state on netbooks and a few dashboards... but now, that's a travesty.

it's so wrong that they are adding feature and features to try to 'fix' it. tabs in the bottom, filters on the right... it will became a full window manager on the dashboard soon. just kill it.

i'm happy back to good old debian.
The Truth About Mobile Developer Programs in Mobile Advertising
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/server...

You can get a 256MB slice with root access for about $11 per month. When you need more, you can scale up to 15.5GB. They have really good support (phone, chat, and email).
Jshon: JSON parser for the shell
100% true. You don't really need tech blog press if your market is not tech blog readers.
It would be nice if Apps allowed you to adjust the text size of the entire UI to enlarge it. On a related note iOS has a Zoom feature in the Accessibility options which will make the entire OS larger (you just pan around using three fingers).
Surprised no one's mentioned Atlassian - started by two guys in their garage with $10,000 and now earning over $100 million in revenue per year. More info here: http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/2009/02/from_startup_to.html
some of it yes, but if you write modular code then its a none issue. Doing Java development, GAE supports most Java EE and popular frameworks, so if done correctly porting would not be an issue. I can't say the same about Python stack.
Interesting article.

Reminds me of one of the lessons from Soul of a New Machine: forced scarcity can breed creativity. Too much money allows you to defer hard decisions for too long.
because like I said it's easy to forget when to do that. Example

UIView* view = [[UIView alloc] init];
...do a bunch of stuff
[view release] <-- you have to remember this

vs.
UIView* view = [[[UIView alloc] init] autorelease];

Of course I know about the cases where we have tight loops,w hich is why i said 99 of the time.
mrchess I have done my due diligence and found conflicting reviews. Some praise it as the greatest thing to ever happen to the fund raising process and others saying it is a complete waste of time. That's why I decided to make this post looking to insight from a community of people like myself I trust.
Follow up emails work
Intellectual Ventures' Nathan Myhrvold on Barbecuing in Texas
The CrunchFund: Actually, Tim, We Don’t All Have “Different” Standards
In 1964 he predicted the concept of ape slave labor which was the basis of the plot of the novel "La planète des singes" (Planet of the Apes) by Pierre Boulle printed in 1963.
I drew a random hockey stick. It kind of matches the rise of dubstep pretty closely http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id%3AOjXjy3O...
Startups' revenues
Another thing which the author seems to leave out is the usability paradigms for different sized screens.

As far as Apple goes, with their 2 formats for their mobile devices(x), iPhone and iPad. Things that work on one device wouldn't necessarily work on the other. I can't remember what Gruber said on this subject or if it was Steve Jobs himself, but I think they both said some variation.

On the iPhone, it makes sense for many UI elements to take up the entire screen, for example a list of contacts. But on a device with the form factor of the iPad, that looks stupid. Likewise for the opposite - with a device the size of the iPad, it makes sense to have multiple panes and popovers such as in the Mail application. If that were on a device the size of the iPhone, it would be simply unusable. So things formatted for one device wouldn't work on the other and vice versa.

So, on a device in between those 2 primary form factors Apple has chosen, which approach makes the most sense? I would posit that neither really works. The iPhone's "take up the whole screen with a single thing" seems too large and the iPad's "multiple pane" approach would likely not be usable on a smaller device. Maybe that size screen is fine for such things if the pixel density is raised such that the resolutions match, but I would guess it would feel very crowded if you just took the iPad UI and crunched it down significantly.(y)

So it's hard to develop good UI for these 'tweener screens because in some contexts the UI paradigms from the iPhone fit better and in others an iPad approach would be better. Sure, developers could have logic saying that, in some contexts on a 7" iOS device, use the iPhone UI layout and in others use the iPad UI layout, but that further complicates things.

I won't say that no one could design a UI for such a device, in fact I think the Blackberry Playbook has the best UI of the devices I've seen at this size, but I think it's difficult for Apple because it doesn't naturally fit either the iPhone or iPad UI scheme. And it seems like most Android devices pick which paradigm to use by the OS - those devices which have a Tablet factor use Honeycomb (Android 3.x) and those which just scale up the phone version use Gingerbread or earlier. (Android 2.x) It will be interesting to see how they deal with this issue when they merge the two.

(x) Essentially anyway. Technically they have three when including the iPhone non-Retina and iPhone Retina but since one is just double the other, there is not a different form factor

(y) Remember, it seems like the difference between 7" and 9.7" is trivial, "only 2.7 inches!" one may say, but note first that 2.7 is almost 1/3 smaller than 9.7. Second, note that screen size is calculated on the diagonal. So by the rules of Pythagoras, it is actually significantly smaller.
Nice Link!

I've had experience with Baker College http://www.baker.edu/ in the past, Online Degree... but it was a time-based / attendance base system... WGU "Competence" based accredited degrees seems pretty bad-ass...
The conversation that led to Ruby being called Ruby
Fashion jewellery for women
NASA orbital debris office is struggling to keep up with space junk problem
Don't know why this was down voted, but anyhow.
He's wrong about performance being a possible reason for iOS's fixed screen sizes.

Even if they added adaptive layout a la Lion (truly general constraint-based), imagine how much wildly more computation is going into the existing UIKit/CG/CI/OpenGL graphics pipeline, with stellar results?
Do not hire as employee. The collective cost of dealing with the annoyance will far outweigh the geek's contribution.

However, consider hiring him as an on-call "consultant" for "special projects" in case the team falls behind schedule. It might motivate them to get ahead. :)
parallel thinking
Lessons & Thoughts On My 5 Year Anniversary Of Starting A New Business
> the design of the blog doesn't use whitespace effectively.

Could you be more specific? My blog definitely needs a design refresh (your quote is right – I've been writing a book the past year so haven't had the time to design), but I'm sure you don't mean that the entire blog design fails to use white space effectively :)
The sad part is Stewart covers news better than most so called journalists.
Overstating it a bit WRT Egypt, Iraq, Iran. They played both sides to get the best deal they could, sometimes that was the soviets, sometimes that was us, but notably there was no period where all 3 were sponsored by the soviets at the same time, and more notably they weren't reliable proxies for either side - always kept their own interests first. Egypt even managed to split the US from Britain during the Suez Canal war.

Egypt - entirely US armed after 78

Iran - entirely US/British armed prior to 79

Iraq - a mix but very US-supported post-79 and a pariah to all post-91 (with a few covert non-soviet Russian arms).

Syria - Pragmatist dictator who never happened to line up with us.

Libya - The only case here where the leader actually had an ideological disposition towards the soviets (but only a little)

I agree with your take on the motivations for US aid at that time, though.

One other caveat, Israel did help train US forces but it was their experiences in Lebanon and Palestine that helped, not those with Syria and Egypt. Syria and Egypt had/have iraq-like armies of medium-quality gear and poor quality conscripts, that's conventional warfare. It was the nonconventional stuff that they helped train US troops for on the way to Iraq.
Reminds me of the quote, "Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, deserves to be."

I love the quote, but of course, I am concerned that in our push to move to computer-based learning, we push out the teachers who can't be replaced by a computer.
Oddly enough that is what I have done as well. Squeeze is nice and stable with backports for Firefox/Iceweasel and LibreOffice and Gnome.

Then I started fiddling with dwm as a window manager and dmenu as application menu and have not looked back...
idanb this is just what I was looking to hear. Others have been trying to sell me on the idea that all you had to do is join AngelList and all your worries were over. This makes a whole lot more sense to me as all the interaction I have had with investors go more along the line. Thank you for the great insight.