skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's a good move. (And congrats to the Zagats for executing the sale they couldn't make happen a few years ago)

However, I think it'll bring up an interesting point that we'll begin to see more and more of as Google continues to acquire companies - will they leverage SEO to make their own constituencies appear higher in search results than their competitors (i.e. Zagat higher than Open Table, Yelp, etc.)? Where does that fall in the ethics/morals side of things?

Interesting that if you own the means to information, you can choose what information people find (and thus, the decisions they make).
40 Groovy Examples of About Me Page Designs
I suspect the comment was addressed openly to this guy: http://www.raspberrypi.org/?author=1
http://foundrs.com/calculator/index.php co-founder equity calculator, tells you how to split your startup shares among founders
The initial $185k USD fee is for TLDs, not DNS records on already existing TLDs.
Very sad to see it go, Notifo is probably one of the most frequently opened apps on my iphone. I'll second the sentiment: I'd gladly pay for the service.
Two of the three founders left to do a new startup.
Promoting a cheap computer for education/learning by demonstrating it playing Quake 3 and 1080p video - what a strange combination.
Sounds like either they were messing with you; you are messing with us; or Alexander Interactive doesn't respect their applicants
My intention was to suggest an easy way to view the actual source. I think your example is actually better as an example as it is easy to see the source both before and after the function is called.
The Meaning of Michael Arrington
My friend, I believe you've missed the tongue-in-cheek nature of the parent comment (and, in fact, that of Brainfuck itself).
Raspberry Pi is a charity "to promote the study of computer science [..]

By some HN comment standards, if that were really true, they'd be selling a $25 version of TAOCP.

(All these mentioned people who have access to school/family computers they can't play with because of the risk of breaking? They could use QEMU or VirtualBox and Linux right now).
Atari's Founder Hopes to Hack Three Years Off High School
For http://www.usermood.com, the most effective promotions (in order) have been:

1. Referrals, referrals, referrals. People loving the product has been by far the best way to promote it. I don't mean affiliate sales (where people are incented to refer), just the garden variety friend telling a friend kind. Nothing wrong with affiliates, of course, just a different thing.

2. SEO, to a smaller degree. When people say "SEO", I usually roll my eyes, cause it's often a non-answer. "Get lots of traffic by writing great viral content". Which is essentially a harder problem than promoting your web app. But having said that, at least from a search engine standpoint, it's something that pays dividends slowly, over time.

3. Banner ads/Google Ads - not particlarly effective, and something of a negative ROI investment, but this was good early on to get a feel for what kind of messaging worked best, and what sort of conversion rates were likely from direct ads. So I'd suggest using these to learn, not as a sustainable customer acquisition strategy, unless your price point supports it.

4. Press/bloggers - we got some writeups by a few bloggers, which generated some short term traffic (usually a week or so), then fell off dramatically. Again, good for SEO, and nice to get written about, but this hasn't been a consistent or reliable traffic source.

5. Web app directory/startup directory sites - good for short term launch traffic, generating awareness, etc., but these directories seem more noisy and less relevant over time.

Hope that helps.
Unless they're doing anything significantly novel, there probably isn't any need for yet another programming language.
"The prospect that it's not a currency is what makes it attractive to hoarders. Hoarders/investors don't want Bitcoin to be a viable currency; they want it to be an investment commodity. "

Bitcoin will not be a good investment unless it's a currency. It has no other uses besides as currency. It's not a precious metal with industrial or ornamental uses for example. It's an abstract piece of data that could be useful in trade.

" Both users buy into the market, but they exit the market differently and with different outcomes. And both will only be able to exit the market if there's liquidity in the form of willing new buyers or willing acceptors of BTC in exchange for goods and services. Each of those two outlets has a different liquidity dynamic, too."

An investor who believes bitcoins will drop in value has the option of selling it or trading it for a good/service. Both accomplish the goal of getting out of a depreciating asset.
After reading this article I'm Ghana move there right away.*

* I sincerely apologize for this post and the pun.
Impossible, or seemingly impossible, interview questions are actually quite useful. It can be quite informative to see how the applicant response to such a situation, and what their "Oh shit, wasn't expecting this" emergency problem solving techniques are.
There's Like, Python, which is arguably even more readable than plain Python! http://staringispolite.com/likepython/
Same here - I like both actually. If you foul out in basketball it indicates that you were playing a hard, scrappy game, so again, not too far from the world of startups. The baseball interpretation has the added implication that instead of "hitting a home run" or even a "single" or a "double", you got things off the ground but didn't get past that.

Kudos for having the gumption to write this all down. Best of luck at Twilio. They're lucky to have landed you.
Couldn't you buy from Amazon and then report the purchase (as required by California law) to the State and pay the tax?
I disagree that software development cost shouldn't be considered before hardware cost. The software development costs are so much higher for FPGAs (both money and time) that they probably outweigh the hardware costs for many applications. They are both important and equally worth investigation.
What killed the service for me was the lack of .io domain.
I'm sorry for the founder that this didn't work out.

However, I always find it a bit crappy when services just suddenly shut down. Was there not the option to ask users for more money and/or donations?

Perhaps just being naive here and I admit I know nothing about Notifo... but it does seem like there's a systemic problem with innovative startups suddenly shutting up shop after running out of cash when perhaps they could have turned things around if they'd admitted to their customers earlier that they were short of cash.

Any thoughts?
Sorry to hear the news.

Also, I had no idea Paul Stamatiou left to join Picplum. How often do YC alums jump from a still running startup to another? Is it common?
Chad, did you try to position company for a talent acquisition? Can you lend insight into why this was not a good exit option for Notifo?
> 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 any law.

I'm having trouble parsing that.
Ahh all good reasons, I figured they were still chugging along with Leah still being involved.
Huge Power Outage in San Diego County
Seems like power is down in the entire region.

Remember us when our laptop/3G batteries die out!
So it's not a date, but you do have to have 3 men and 3 women? If it's not a date, then why the gender requirement? And why match on attractiveness?

If it is a date but for whatever reason they don't want to say so (I'm guessing because of the social stigma around online dating in some circles -- check out the description of Blendr: it's exactly like Grindr but it's totally different), what about gay people?
I think this is a case of premature optimisation. Trolls under Bridges is struggling to hit v1.0 due to the limited memory capacity of trolls, but someone is hard at work on a Node.js implementation of the interpreter. This will allow spawning a new worker process, or "troglodyte", for each request, and will be totally webscale (there will be no unnecessary trolling for events).

In addition, there's also a JVM port of TrollScript in the works, which will add a static type system to the language for troll-safety. This should alleviate any concerns that the language would be unmaintainable for large systems. JTrollScript will also have type inference to maintain the terseness of the original language.
Doing your best probably isn't enough. To have any hope you'll have to hire expensive security people and buy lots of insurance.

All you need in order to be exploited is to be using software with 0day exploits. Many known exploits are not public. In a very real sense, you are only protected to the extent that you are a small target.

As the potential payoff of a hacker approaches $1 million, the likelihood of being hacked approaches 90%. Software really is THAT insecure and bitcoin thefts are not prosecuted making it basically risk-free to steal bitcoins.
Chad, I am sorry to hear about this. I understand the frustration and other negative feelings associated with shutting down something that you've put a lot of effort and hope into.

I have a question. You mentioned that Notifo never gained enough traction with publishers or consumers. Can you share with us some of the metrics around this, in terms of targets and actual usage? Also, what are some of the things you tried to do in terms of marketing when it was clear that word of mouth and the other methods weren't working?
People trading goods and services cannot be a sham. Your definition of a sham is "something I believe will depreciate".
The combination of ClearChannel's homogenization and the internet in general means people have largely forgotten the actual cool part of local radio. It doesn't mean that a particular transmitter is located in the Bay Area or that your daytime commute comedy show hails from the Bay Area either -- talk to someone who grew up listening to radio in the 70s. They will tell you who their late-night DJ was and what records they introduced to the area. This person was as important as the music itself -- much like Arrington breaking a story was as important as the story itself (for better or worse).

The rise of music blogs is the closest modern analog -- instead of centering around a geographic area, people center around a 'scene.' One can also get the same experience listening to amateur radio shows occasionally hosted on, for example, http://di.fm.
I'm guessing (hoping) it will use their closure compiler (or something else) to fallback to JavaScript for other browsers.
I REALLY want one of these now - how much to get a unit NOW rather than waiting till you hit the $25 price point?
Given that most estimates of mobile app growth (that I recall) are well in excess of 100%, does 94% growth (lagging the overall market) in any way constitute "exploding"?
Sounds like a great idea, but no matter the temptation I can't get the courage to give third parties complete access to my FB profile. Is there anyway you could have "access all photos" to "access profile photos", or put some sort of limitations on what you access?
So what am I going to use for my HN replies notifications and my retweet notifications now?

I always liked notifo, and this is a sad day for software.
Senate passes Patent Reform Bill
I can ditto that. san diego sharp hospital is out of power.
That's just not _serious_ enough for a name :)
Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others
There were certainly many factors that I don't know about at play here, but it makes me wonder if there's more truth to all that talk about single founder startups than I thought.

Whatever the exact reasons for this unfortunate event are, maybe a second founder could have helped averting this.
Most individual states would disagree, especially when the wholly-owned subsidiary exists primarily to avoid taxes.

If Amazon's technique was legally unassailable, they wouldn't be paying sales tax even in the 5 states where they already do. They'd just assign whatever creates 'nexus' in those states to new 'non-selling' subsidiaries.
AFAIK someone who worked at google researched heavily in the topic of circles. He ended up in facebook. I don't think Google imitated Diaspora as they had given this circles phenomenon adequate research and breakthrough.
The article uses "Black-Hat" and "White-Hat" terms to differentiate them. These are explained clearly at the beginning of the article. There doesn't seem to be any confusion.
What specifically makes you think it is buggy? Did you file a bug?
Sorry to hear that Chad, I've already mentioned it to ya many times but keep working hard, lots of us out there recognize and appreciate the work you've put in (and enjoy reading your code). You'll make it one day even if it was not as easy as you imagined
the economics might not work out. if it brings in $30k a year, it's not worth the long days and exhaustion of keeping the service running.

i'd be comfortable paying about $10/yr for my account (since i don't use it a ton) but at that rate it's hard to make a living and justify the time and effort. notifo is really handy but it's not something many people want to pony up for.
Yes, I did. I'm debating whether or not to write much detail about this in a separate post... but the gist is that the big companies were not interested in acquiring a one-person team, literally destroying any chance of a talent acquisition. Another strike against single-founders.
Proje X Diğerlerinden Farkı
Oh, damn. I honestly thought that Notifo would hit it big. FWIW and if it's of any consolation, Chad, you are not the only one who spent a lot of time on something that did not work out in the end. Been through that and killing a project as hard and unpleasant as it is, it made me feel liberated at some point shortly after. And as they say - what doesn't break you makes you stronger. So there is an upside.

The idea (of a central event feed) still stands, but as with any general idea there is a considerable amount of luck involved with acquiring the critical mass that leads to the exponent.
Putting a whole bunch of existing ideas together into a new form is what innovation is all about.
So GAE turns out not that expensive, we should start to value high quality code
The quantity of money does not affect its flow.

It's not like exchange particles, where lower densities leads to lower transfer of force. Any quantity of money, as long as it is divisible, can attain a sufficient value to be useful as a store of value. A medium of exchange merely needs to be a store of value.

Because of the lack of dependence of the value of the total money supply on its total quantity, nominal spending declining due to deflation does not reduce real spending and the market is always able to sell of the merchandise on the shelves, with the value of currency adjusting to what is needed to serve the role of store of value in exchange.

What deflation does do is discourage lending. This is a legitimate economic problem, but it's not that pronounced. The Bitcoin economy would have 3% deflation a year if the world adopted it. This is not drastic and would still allow significant lending.
Re: Node.js implementation

my buddy has been hacking on this and he says the benefit of being able to troll on the server the same way you troll the client is a huge benefit.
I used to think the same for #2 above, but then read "4 steps to the epiphany", hand your "business guy" that book and s/he will have more to knock out than dev!

Customer development (done right) ain't no joke!
Yes, the single-founder aspect did play a part in the outcome here (see another one of my comments in this thread).
because you need to justify the purchase of your enterprise version of ifttt
It's important to note here that most of the revenue is from HTC and most of that is not specifically from Android but from HTC Sense which is a UI layer HTC puts on top of Android and which was actually funded in part by MS in the first place to use with Windows Mobile - hence why they feel entitled to royalties when it is used outside that OS.

So while it is correct to say that the money is coming from "Android phones", it's a bit misleading to say it is coming from "Android" per se - this is a HTC Sense / MS specific thing.

Of course there are other non-HTC-sense patents too, but they are a much lesser part of the deal.
anyway we can get a post mortem, about what you learned, could of done better or different, things like this ?
We were going to make that news public, but then we were advised against it. So we didn't. I still have the post in my drafts folder. I will post it someday as it does contain some important lessons.
> The Zagat "brand" resonates huge as a trusted consumer brand

Only because they focus on a niche. If they start expanding their ratings to other areas, it could weaken their brand. Rating doctors? Unless we're talking Beverly Hills plastic surgeons, I'd have trouble taking them seriously.
Sure, but doing so is practically harder even than itemizing your taxes. It's not like you can just PayPal the money over right when you make the purchase.
plan9
singularity

both, similar in some concepts, just kills UNIX on the design stand point.

None of them are really used. Sad :(
Eventually we will merge toward them tho, they're the future somehow. Not because they're "new" (compared to UNIX) but because they solve resource and security issues we have today. Also solves a lot of the complexity.
thanks! I've been poking around for how to do that for a week, but hadn't stumbled on it.
This is sweet!! Truly impressed! Care to share what happened between the thought "I'll dive straight into Rails..." and this? I mean the hardships, the tools, the references, the whole process basically - you're as battle-tested as they come, you must chronicle your adventures.
British Social Discovery Site Snog.com Looks To Build A Better Hot Or Not
Author of "Invent with Python" releases rough drafts of two new Python books
I think ClearChannel maybe missing the point. With terrestial radio you only have some many listening options, and CC was voracious in taking over as many stations as they could, then driving costs down by homogenizing across their stations. But the net is all about personalization and choice. Their strong-arming Facebook "like" clicks in exchange for listening is another tactic that might work if you're the only game in town, but they're not. And most of the people I know dislike their mediocre programming. I suspect the only people calling this a "pandora killer" are CC's marketing people.
Monavie health drink
Bitcoins are not simply prime numbers. They are account balances in a system that distributes the validation of account balances in such a way that is cryptographically secure, trustable, and decentralized. Provably correct, tamper-proof accounting balance sheets are nothing to sneeze at and it was really a stroke of genius to discover the algorithmic means to create such a thing that is the cool thing about Bitcoin.

I personally believe that it will never achieve anything other than niche status as a currency for trading illegal goods; it will be used for other types of transactions, but it will be a very small number of transactions when compared to contemporary financial transaction systems like, e.g. credit cards, or paypal. I say this only because in practical terms it is not very easy to use, and furthermore, its benefit of being pseudoanonymous is also is downfall; very safe for the recipient to receive bitcoins but very risky for the sender to send them since the sender has absolutely no insurance or any recourse in the transaction. There is no authority to appeal to for transactions gone bad, and even if you could sue over bitcoin transactions and the courts would understand them, the pseudoanonymity would make it very difficult to know who to sue.
Twitter’s Next Focus: Simplify And Unify All Interfaces
Yes, exactly. As a consumer product the numbers would not add up, sadly. There are other factors on the publisher side that led to this; I'll be doing a more in-depth post mortem at some point.
I think the problem is that people are finding that having that top 10% kind of person is basically required to stay competitive. There's considerable effort on the other side of the coin too, in designing systems from foolproof patterns that 80% of the job market can learn. The fact of the matter is that this is an industry where 5 people from the top 2% of the market can disrupt and displace 500 from the middle 50%. In my opinion that's why YCombinator is so successful.
Twitter CEO On Google+: It’s Complicated
Yes, I'm planning on doing this at some point, but it might be a while.
I think GP was suggesting that there is at least one company selling software that will allow you to compute sales tax on an order, not that companies are selling their order book to states for the purpose of use tax enforcement.

Without endorsing the product, here is one vendor's product page: http://onesource.thomsonreuters.com/solutions/indirect-tax/s...
Has anyone done a proper comparison to Ook ?

http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/ook.html
On a Thursday?

A file manager I have been writing in Vala:

http://i.imgur.com/WulQk.png

Id like to add a "shelf" at some point, but the first priority is getting the details view on the right of the window fleshed out.
Hmm, I would reckon node.js is popular because of its inherent simplicity and tapping the greater javascript community, which is by far the most vibrant and energetic I have seen.

The things that it introduced - asynchronous, modelling as events, single thread execution - are not really new and already exist as libraries/frameworks [varying in increasing complexity] in Python, Java and Ruby.

Not that I am knocking node. If anything, its good more people are opening up to alternative, sometimes better, ways of modelling and execution.
it's an excuse. Thanks to sokoloff for digging it up, but here's at least one software suite that does just what I sugggested:

http://onesource.thomsonreuters.com/solutions/indirect-tax/s...
Ahh I see. Well, either way, best of luck at Twilio for now, and a startup in the future :)
The pyramid scheme has come to Hacker News!
The biggest obstacle to me using TrollScript professionally is lack of testing tools. Troll-driven development is a fundamental tenet of XP which I'm not willing to forsake. Is anyone working on TSUnit or TSSpec? In addition, Cuke4Trolls would be a worthwhile project. I'd like to practice behaviour-driven trolling expressed in natural troll language, so TrollScript seems like the perfect target.
One of the many reasons why I recommend using NoScript. http://noscript.net/
It’s Not That Easy Being Green, but Many Would Like to Be
I've read it somewhere; sorry, I don't have a reference to hand.

You can read about Ellison berating employees and screaming at them in a great book by Charles Ferguson called "High Stakes, No Prisoners". It's a wonderful accounting of building a startup in web 1.0 internet and selling it to MS -- Ferguson started Vermeer which built Frontpage.

See also, for example, Ballmer screaming and throwing chairs.
Sorry to hear that, I was a fan and user. Will any of the code survive as open source with a friendly license?
Are you talking about editing system files through finder? Finder isn't (and shouldn't be) running as an administrator. But it is possible to run finder as root if you really want, just google it. I bet it something like

killall Finder; sudo /application/Finder;
You would have been stupid to spend the bitcoins last year only if the value of having a motorcycle for a year was less than the accrued value of the bitcoins as they appreciated in value over that time. Because people cannot predict the value of bitcoins over time perfectly, and because the satisfaction of immediate needs/wants is often more important than a greater later return, bitcoins would always be spent even in a deflationary system.
Source? (Edit: I believe you. I am just curious what they are doing now)