skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would have liked to see the resize use additional space by bringup an additional column of headlines instead of just expanding the already useless picture.

Here's a nice thread on newspaper designs, shamelessly jumping to my head-to-head of above-the-fold comparisons of the top 10

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
This looks really well done.

I wonder what the motivation is to do this when R is so mature (especially in the availability of specialized packages), and available through RPy.
I didn't downvote but I do agree with you. It's much better IMHO if you take the downvotes on the chin and leave it to someone else to point out (as a reply) that the downvotes were not deserved.
Generally no, to get investment you need to be able to offer a 10x return in a short time frame (3-5 years). Very few consultancy firms can offer that because it's hard to rapidly scale businesses where growth is restricted by number of employees. Scaling a people based business is hard (both because hiring is hard and also you can't stop people leaving to compete with you).
We are currently building some core infrastructure with MongoDB. I looked at Riak, but it was capped collections and ad-hoc querying that really nailed it for us. Riak is a great product, I loved it's replication mechanism where any node was writable, but we didn't require that, so we went with mongo.

We had a 3 node system across a wan, where local clients would read from a local node, and if they needed to write, would write to the master across the wan. The issue we had was there was a significant amount of data being written to the master that one or two of the nodes weren't interested in 100% of the time, but it was still being replicated across the wan (and at cost)

so I investigated how the replication mechanism worked - to see if I could gain greater control over what data was replicated. As it turns out, there isn't, but you can emulate the replication yourself if you're interested. Well this is how we did it:

- master node has a capped collection (we call db.messages)
- slave nodes have a bit of mongo console javascript that execute tailed cursor querying for messages being inserted
- when a message that matches the query inputs is inserted into the messages collection, it gets inserted into a local db.files collection, which clients then read from

The added bonus is that occasionally we do need to replication additional data to particular nodes, so we just craft up a tailed cursor query that finds any messages we can, and pulls them across the wire

we make a fair bit of use of the adhoc querying in mongodb, so that was a massive selling point for us

speed was also a major issue - we have a average write/very high read requirement, and it's really really fast.

finally the platform was a consideration. We're mostly a windows shop, but we'll use linux where needed, and we were prepared to have riak running on linux if thats what we thought was bets, but it just didn't really fit for us.

the only downside was we use Delphi, and the existing Delphi drivers were.. not good, so we wrote our own, which I'm trying to negotiate with my boss so we can push onto github.

good luck!
I have terrible vision, and utilize the browsers zoom function a lot. On their new site, I can zoom without having to do a lot of horizontal scrolling (just in Firefox though, doesn't seem to work as well in Chrome). So, aside from the aesthetic for the masses, there's an element of accessibility here that shouldn't be overlooked.
WP7 AccelerometerProxy in F#
Very similar code exists within PhoneGap. In addition to bi-directional message passing, PhoneGap also provides: 1.) JSON serialization/deserialization, 2.) callback tracking, and 3.) white-listing of domains that may pass messages to the host.

https://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-iphone
The description of what it is feels like a Tumblr with Google+ privacy settings, which is a cool feature. One thing I've always wanted was for my Posterous blog sites to have an RSS feed for just that site instead of forcing users to follow me and have an RSS feed of their reader.
What percentage of people access social networking sites via mobile?
How To Live Like James Bond For A Weekend
> You have yet to show that the increase in voluntary expatriation is correlated with high earnings, much less caused by them.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1983238,00.htm...

While a small number of Americans hand in their passports
each year for political reasons, the new surge in
permanent expatriations is mainly because of taxes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/us/26expat.html

Amid mounting frustration over taxation and banking
problems, small but growing numbers of overseas Americans
are taking the weighty step of renouncing their
citizenship.

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2011/06/13/are-taxes-causing-the...

The IRS doesn’t tell us why people expatriate, or who they
are or where they go. Lawyers say most are wealthy
Americans who have expatriated to all manner of countries.

EDIT: Look, I'm as put off by deeply nested arguments as the next person. My empirical points are primarily two fold. One, the new exit tax is both substantial and yet also just the beginning. Two, many are seeing the writing on the wall and trying to get out while the tax is "only" 51% of assets.

Given the discussion in the United States about raising taxes on the successful* to balance the budget, do you really think this is an irrational decision on their part? Or that it is irrational to infer that this is part of their decision-making process, especially given copious media reports to this effect?
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The Complete Movie-Comparison Directory
Social networks eat up Americans' online time
This is a great responsive design. This works, in part, because it is a news site with predictable image sizes, headline sizes, and very limited GUI.
If you want to build something that is more graphically intensive, with more focus on visual appeal in traditional browser sizes, it gets more and more complicated. I'm working on a project now actually, and it's pain. I'm not saying it can't be done (it can with a lot of work). It's just more difficult and time-intensive the more graphics you use.
You seem to have a lot of negativity - what's wrong with starting free to get a foot in the market? Also, being "on steroids" is and has always been a good thing. They also say that it's an "evolved" version of Instapaper.
Hi Martin,

I'm one of the founders. Thanks for your feedback.

The business model on this is pretty clear. It works like DropBox. Most users are casual users and cost us almost nothing. Heavy users have a clear pain point and will pay for it. Our alpha users have expressed this to us. The hard part with a model like this is, of course, figuring out the right cut-off for a free account which is why we want to see how users use it before imposing any restrictions.

Let us know if you have any thoughts. You can email me directly at avichal@getspool.com if you want to share anything in private too.

Thanks,
Avichal
This looks great. It's awesome that we can make sites like this that theoretically allow us to serve the same pages to desktop and mobile browsers. I'm curious though, is there any significant overhead to having mobile clients parse 1600+ lines of HTML, or is that a non-issue these days? Anyone have any data points on this?
I like this a lot but it does seem more like a feature for Instapaper and (my fave) Read it Later. I would expect them to get acquired or copied.
Bitcasa: Infinite Storage (really?)
We tried to have a more thoroughly describing landing page. But believe me, this product you will get more with just a few sentence than if we described it with a 100 words. If you use the product, i.e. if you log in you will understand it immediately. That's also why we will make a demo video as you suggested, but we can't just afford it.
I agree, free at first worked for PayPal.
You edited out a key part. Here's what you cut:

"The app is free for now (in private beta), while the founders consider monetization options involving freemium services, search offerings and mobile CDN models."

Can you blame them for being free while in beta?

Also remember that Instapaper was a free web app before it was an iOS app, and that Instapaper Free for iOS existed as recently as early 2011. It didn't seem to hurt Marco's sales.
Now that cars are getting more hi-tech, it'd be a great thing to add to the dashboard.

"You're going Xmph but you should be going Ymph to save gas."
I've been using the beta since it was first released and I've never seen any data for released apps, though I suspect it wouldn't be difficult. I haven't looked in to why it only work in Ad Hoc builds. I agree it would be awesome if only to get crash reports and console logs back through TestFlight.
What is the preferred way to report bugs?

I've just stumbled upon two:

1. when mouse cursor approaches top edge of the screen, preview stretches vertically so that it's still square, but pixels are twice as tall as they are thick. That's on an mbp5,5 running 10.7.1.

2. Cmd+Shift+p uses physical location of p key disregarding programmatically set keyboard layout. I've only noticed because I'm using Colemak.
A devotee of est, a faddish self-empowerment regimen of that era

What is est? Google and Wikipedia seem quite unhelpful.

Edit: found it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Seminars_Training
Logitech G27 Racing Wheel
I think NaughtyPotato has brought a needed simplicity to this space. The user can haz a little play or a lot. That very well might appeal to a large part of this extremely small demographic.
When it becomes the state's responsibility to enforce fatherhood responsibility it lessens the need for women to select for decent fathers in the first place.

The times are a changing. http://www.overcomingbias.com/c/10/forager-v-farmer-future.h...
Here's an article I wrote about some of my motivations on the Python side of things: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2790762

The bigger picture reason "why not R" is that R is not very suitable for building production systems. I started building this library while working for AQR, a quant hedge fund, and needed to have statistical computing building blocks integrated with a much larger system. R is a mediocre programming language and has very weak general purpose libraries. But amazingly good data visualization and mature statistics libraries indeed. Using R as a black box (e.g. via RPy, Rcpp, or RJava) is a good idea in theory, but recovering from and dealing with errors/exceptions with real world data is a very thorny problem. Plus maintaining a big pile of R code is kind of a nightmare (believe me, been there, done that!).
I've been using it since the first beta and it's a huge help especially when working with beta testers who aren't tech savvy enough to send back crash reports or to clearly explain what they're doing when they experience issues.
Good work!

What is the preferred way to report bugs?

I've just stumbled upon two:

1. when mouse cursor approaches top edge of the screen, preview stretches vertically so that it's still square, but pixels are twice as tall as they are thick. That's on an mbp5,5 running 10.7.1.

2. Cmd+Shift+p uses physical location of p key disregarding programmatically set keyboard layout. I've only noticed because I'm using Colemak.
Agreed. I don't really think it's good or bad thing but just a good observation. It's a lot like how everyone cranes their neck at a car accident. You don't want to gawk but you do anyway.
Ethan, the author of the RWD article, was actually on the team who worked on The Boston Globe site. He's been giving talks on the project and the process. I don't know if it is anywhere online, but it's very interesting.
I would argue that the program offered by Hulu are still growing. Probably rapidly too. Hulu is owned by NBC, Fox, and Disney after all so will have a much easier time acquiring rights to stream then Google ever will. If the rumor that Google is trying to lock in 10 year access rights is correct then Google will significantly increase the available shows offered on YouTube.
This could be useful. However, if this is done by using Processing.js, then there are some gaps that need to be addressed. Last time I checked, the JavaScript version does not support vlw fonts and loads fonts differently. There is also the file IO that is not supported in PJS.
Agreed, I don't understand how writes can both be fast and asynchronous, and also lock the whole database. Does it depend on what kind of write you're doing?
Review my NYC startup 
I finally built my first product with the help of a few friends. It's a classifieds network primarily for students and professionals in NYC. The goal isn't to make money, but to actually generate a spam free community - I don't run advertising and I don't plan on charging members. Paul Graham says to scratch your own itch... this is my attempt to do so.

Anyways I'm having a difficult time getting traction with the site. It's been up for a while and all the posts that are listed are from friends who did me a favor. I tried contacting recruiters about posting open positions, but nobody seems interested...

Is my site too derivative to Craigslist? Is there a function that should be included? I appreciate any and all feedback you guys have.

connectiii.com

login: ryan@connectiii.com
password: ryan1

Thanks!
Site is currently down for me. Here's the screencast I managed to pull from Google cache.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYn2SAJHeJw

This looks very promising overall. Debugging on tablets/mobile is currently tedious at best.
The site is down but this sounds amazing.
Yeah but how long should I spend on software that I know nothing about the quality of if it's not easy to get up and running? Do you spend a day? two days?

While it's mostly just from experience I find that virtually no one makes a decision based on how easy it is to get up and running with a piece of software but it is an impression that stick's in people's minds and gets repeated when they talk about it later.
AT&T flings half-truths in its T-Mobile deal defense
This is part of what we are addressing with Couchbase Server, an autosharding rebalancing Couch fronted by memcached. For K/V read and write we measure microsecond latency.

We are currently optimizing the views for cluster access, but the design goal is to offer at least the query performance CouchDB offers on small datasets, even on very large clusters.

More info: http://blog.couchbase.com/couchbase-server-2-0-tour-and-demo
Very true. I've done layouts for newspapers before and I've noticed a few things:

1) White space looks wonderful, but for some reason we lend more 'serious creedance' to text that is small and crammed together.

2) Design is good to a point, but then drops off when it begins to feel 'commercial' I think after a hundred years of reading sloppily put together papers chalk full of the latest news, we sort of associate bad design with its 'genuineness' and overly clean design with something desceptive.
For reference, a link to the hn thread discussing the session as it went live:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2988407
Why the idea of a Netflix for e-books makes sense
I agree. Responsive design itself is not difficult. But the sell must have been a difficult one. I'd love to hear it as well. My guess is it was based on a prototype. Seems everyone these days expects you to build one :-S
it doesn't strike you as retarded to make a claim of certainty on a question no one knows the answer to? we're just beginning to understand race now that DNA sequencing is cheap. Oh wait, let's ignore and defund all such research because mkr already knows there are no racial differences. Pack up shop everyone.

There is a major problem because this actually is happening. Research is getting defunded because people are afraid someone might interpret the results as racist. Lrn to keep your normative bullshit out of my science please.
TextOnly.in - Instapaper in a Different way
I was an active developer of ReactOS for about the time period of 2003-2007, including acting as the release engineer for the project for 2 years.

I feel like I can speak from unique stand point as I saw everything from the inside.

ROS is a lot of things, but one thing it is NOT is production ready.

From what I can tell, not a lot in the process has changed since I left. I am sure a lot of things code wise have changed but not enough to make a marginal difference.

One of the biggest issues ROS faces is the lack of testers. Since it can't be used a production OS very few people will actually test it. When I was there, we had 2 dedicated testers. For a whole operating system, that will not cut it.

Another issue is with driver compatibility. While it is true that it runs good on emulated hardware, it has a long long way to go before actual Windows drivers let it run on actual hardware. One small thing in the driver can cause everything to stop working. And with only ~20 active developers at the time, there is a finite set of hardware that can be debugged on. Not to mention only 3-4 of the 20 developers were skilled enough to fix issues with device drivers.

ROS is also fighting uphill battle by chasing Windows when Windows has 100s of developers working on it. I left ROS and worked for Microsoft for two years so I also know how much faster MSFT is going then ROS. Though, even if they got to full XP compatibility it would be one of the most impressive feats I have ever seen of open source, I just don't see it happening anytime soon.

And finally, the last main issue with ROS is the developers itself. There was so few dedicated, we only had ~30 people with write permissions. Of those, only 15 were active. And those 15 were all working in their own area. I worked in shallow (read: non complex) Win32 API and user applications (cmd.exe, control panel, etc...). But everyone had their own section they were interested in and they worked at their own pace with little to no oversight. You either need focus/vision or resources to make real technical progress on a project this large. Without one of those you have no chance. And ROS didn't have either.

All that said, I loved working on ROS. It taught me how to write real code and I learned way more from working on ROS then I did getting my degree. The people on a personal level were great, and some of them were the most technically sound developers I have ever met. Sadly, a whole OS is being carried on their back.
Interesting. I would recommend adding a link to the blog in the box w/ the text.

As far as link opportunities, this seems to me like something that could go in:
- lists of google maps mashups
- lists of cartographic resources
- lists of outdoors resources
- On the resources page of every rafting club and outdoors club in the country - especially clubs at colleges.

Is the whitewater data you're laying over the Google Map yours, or does it come from somewhere else?
Why not link to the original source?

http://www.reactos.org/en/news_page_67.html

It contains much more information.
I'm in a similar position to you, although I'm almost nine years down the line. I've spent most of my thirties raising a family and climbing the corporate tech ladder, doing jobs which didn't really interest me but paid reasonably well. I too have seen opportunities and ideas go to waste because I didn't think there was time to concentrate on them as well as home life etc. What didn't click was that I was spending so many hours at work that home life was suffering anyway. I'm now doing what I can on my own ventures and cutting back on extra obligations for my (full time) job. Previously I'd be the first guy to roll up my sleeves and pull a 24 hour session at work to fix an issue. Not now (although needs must on occasion).

Having an understanding partner can help. My wife is supportive of my efforts as we both realise that despite being financially comfortable at the moment, we will never be rich and I will never be completely satisfied carrying on in my current or similar roles. And who knows what will happen in the next 30 years? I may spend most of those out of work, unable to get a job due to my age. A fear of regretting never even having tried is a big motivator for me.

As others have said here, there is time to be found. Cut down on the TV. Don't work such long hours for other people. Get up an hour earlier than everyone else, especially at weekends. What I've found is that simply by doing 'stuff', I've become more efficient and more productive with the time I have. Ideas seem to be flowing more easily now as well. You can do it. Good luck.
Somewhat tangential, but:

It was at this point that the guy at the end took a hit when he shouldn’t have and I almost jumped over the table and punched him.

Public service announcement – if you’re going to gamble in a casino where other people depend on your play (like in Blacjack), spend an hour or two beforehand learning how to play properly, or ask the others at the table for advice so you don’t screw them over. We gamblers thank you. The more you know...

The actions of other players don't affect you statistically. Assuming the deck is fairly shuffled, it makes no difference to your expectation whether you get dealt the 10th or 11th card.
In fact abusive language is against the HN guidelines[1] under "In Comments":

Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sorry. I meant someone who has a legal residence in Manhattan, pays US taxes, US social, but actually spends 350 days of the year "vacationing" in Mumbai, Buenos Aires, etc? And by "legal residence" I mean paying $100 a month to a mate to collect my mail and occasionally crash on his couch. Believe me, the IRS will back me up when I claim to be a US resident, as will New York State, and they would penalize balsamiq if balsamiq tried to claim otherwise.

So what matters? Is it the law? Or is it the spirit? Is it the quality of work or the location where the person was at the time they did the work?

What if the Mumbai resident comes to a conference in SF. Do you pay them SF rates for that week? What if they come for a month? Six months?

This may seem like I'm looking for (what we call in video games) an exploit. I am of course. But so is balsamiq. It wants to have lower salary costs. It could pay everyone the same, no matter where they live. But it knows that Mumbai residents can't up and move to SF. So it claims to be fair (if they moved we would pay them more!) but the reality is that it knows they cant.

I'm not saying I have a better idea. But I'm not the one blogging about it.
Yes, you're right, I forgot that Instapaper had a free version for a long time. I took out the "in private beta" parenthetical because I thought it was a way to include a link to the beta rather than as a way to specify how long "for now" is. I can see you're interpretation now too.

I will say that the big difference between Instapaper and Spool is that while Instapaper did have a free version from the get-go, it was feature limited. It's going to be hard trying to balance the feature sets between the two when their users are already used to having the whole thing for free.