skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> without easy access to venture capital and the huge talent pool that area has, should consider, rather than trying to copy what makes Silicon Valley work like it does.

This is spot on advice. In Canada, it's a big deal when companies get $25K investments from an angel or a special program.

I still remember a pamphlet from Startup Weekend in which a local fund in Toronto had pictures of startup founders smiling behind oversized checks for $10K-20K.

The disadvantage over the Valley is huge if you try to play the same game.

For example, starting Twitter in Canada is an exercise in futility. You simply don't have the external funds to let it grow.

It's far better to be the 37signals of Canada, and grow the business through paying customers. This way you can grow organically and sustainably and perhaps even get noticed by VCs at some point.
It's way past the 'concept' stage, they've got 50 boards up and running and there are tons of people that would fork over cash today to get themselves one or more of these.
Well in that case I'm even more impressed. It's a pity the article doesn't mention that. What's the frame rate?
We're selling too close to cost to make any discounts workable, but we can discount on shipping if people buy lots in one go.
>"Yeah, it's not actually open, you can see the latest version when we finish it.

You can see the _source code_ when they're finished with it, and bundle it with a product. That is significant, or do you happen to have a copy of iOS 3 lying around that you can bundle with your own non-apple phone?
Kaygetsu is closing :(
http://www.pogoplug.com/mobile/ It doesn't have folder sync. But, a web interface.
The teacher-student-parent relationship isn't adversarial. When you say that parents should advocate for the side of the child, you make it seem like it's a sports game or trial. It isn't.

Imagine you take your child to the doctor, and the doctor says that your child drinking several milkshakes a day is bad for his health and leading him to obesity. If the parent went on and on making excuses for him--"Billy gets stressed out by school and needs milkshakes to unwind!" we would rightfully mock the parent. But when teachers give feedback about how they've observed Billy picking on other kids, parents require proof that their special snowflake would ever do such a terrible thing and, when proven, start looking for reasons that the other kid brought it on himself.

Everyone's on the same side, here. And to be fair, though doctors and teachers are both professionals, the higher status and respect given to doctors is in many ways earned through very hard work. But teachers are professionals too, not ex-convict nanny babysitters who are out to get your kid, and their suggestions and criticisms deserve serious consideration.
I can substantiate as a Yelp elite, that you don't lose Elite for writing bad reviews.
NewSQL Alternative to InnoDB and NoSQL for Big Data Ad-Hoc Analysis
It looks like the Raspberry Pi Foundation is actually Broadcom. There's a Broadcom logo on their board, and this Eben Upton fellow appears to work for Broadcom: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ebenupton

My hunch is that they'll hit the low price point by selling it at a loss, with the expectation that it will be worth it in the long run as a marketing effort for Broadcom. That seems a little skeezy to me.

On the other hand, there could be a lot worse marketing efforts than flooding schools with cheap Linux boards.

[Edit: see response below from liz_upton, who convinces me I'm wrong. I do still think it's weird that they're "having a hell of a time" distinguishing themselves from Broadcom, but haven't tried removing the Broadcom logo from their product yet. If I were really a conspiracy theorist, I would point out the Broadcom logo is a sinc function, and the integral of sinc is pi. But that would be crazy!]
Almost absolutely. We say technical co-founder, but it just means somebody who can build the main stuff. In this case it's creating the right yogurt formula. Somebody making a yogurt will probably go through more iterations than someone creating a web apps.
Ask HN: Review my startup, zoomforth.com
I'm working on a startup idea which I envision to be where a non-traditional Vault Guide meets vimeo. Basically, I want to create a career search engine that profiles jobs through thousands of videos of short informational interviews, and provides users a search tool that uses tagged values to expose users to appropriate jobs.

In addition to general reactions to the idea, I'd love to get feedback from the HN community on specific UI suggestions for laying out content - i.e. how best to have a user navigate the video, as well as text content, that will embody each "job" page.

I'd also love some suggestions (as I have no development experience) for tools that might help to generate search capability in the same way that something like 8tracks.com does.

Thanks for the help!
Chris
Good introductory videos on network analysis
I was just wondering about seeing the Chobani brand everywhere, it used to be just in small chains. Strained yogurt used to be niche, now shelves are stacked with it. This company singlehandedly changed the yogurt landscape but the real test will be to hold up to competition from giants. Dannon has followed the trend, too.
I normally don't go meta with these things, but what are these stories adding? This is the second story about using Prey in the last 24 hours; does it add anything that the previous story didn't? What about the one before that? Or the one before that?

Prey and software like it work well. We get it. Let's move on.
Different editors take different amounts of effort to insert whitespace.
Why do expensive hotels charge for Internet access?
Google could out-Yelp Yelp with this move. Zagat is certainly a more trusted brand than Yelp; and has none of Yelp's unsavory reputation. (All those "don't buy an ad and get bad reviews" stories.)
"All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people." I really like this quote.

That's not the quote. Ironically, it has been bowdlerized: http://books.google.com/books?id=fYDSuENw1BoC&pg=PA189&#...

Besides using correct syntax for 1903, the language of the original is incomparably more alive.

This can't be Hart's doing. A man who devoted his life to preserving original texts (including this quote itself in http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26107/pg26107.txt) would never have had the bad taste to botch it like this. I suppose if whoever did had bothered to quote the title, he would have renamed it People and Superpeople.
Agreed. The best part of Zagat reviews (at least the core reviews in their guides) and what makes users like me rely on them is that they're curated -- the editors collect survey results from a wide variety of (relatively) trusted diners and summarize them.

The problem with "mass" review sites like Google Places or Yelp is that they're reactive -- they don't solicit reviews (and in fact discourage that in some cases). So people generally review only when motivated to do so (either positively or negatively), giving a relatively unbalanced result.

Hope Google can keep the Zagat spirit alive and well...!
It logically follows that the legislative body who produced this law would also have dreamed up the EU's anti-cookie law. It seems that Brussels sincerely doesn't understand the current role of technology in the world. It makes no sense to pass a law that will extend the enforcement period of a law that is relatively unenforceable today. Increasing the persons, actions or time-period to which a law applies, also increases the potential "criminal class" in the application of that law. This is effect these laws have/or will have on previously innocent populations.In this case a big portion of that population are the technology innovators. I have not spent anytime living in Europe, or paying attention to their pop-culture, but I find that this is a disturbing phenomenon. I imagine that if these laws have been able to pass through the EU legislature, they must somehow fit into a larger trend in European political culture. If these two laws are any indicator, I believe that they won't be the last to deter tech innovation and opportunity in Europe
Apple taps Japan court to ban sales of Samsung phones
Google already links to Zagat in their places reviews. This is Google buying a large and influential slice of pie to make it harder for others to compete.
As I already said, and as multiple people seem incapable of reading. It would hinge on being able to determine what a legitimate derivative is.

Also, you don't seem to have a clue what a derivative is. A derivative work is a whole new work based on the original copyright and that original material being necessary for the derivative work. Sequels/prequels/whatever are derivatives, an edited edition is not. I don't get what's so hard for people to grasp about that.

The copyright could be structured so that the copyright does lapse, but in the existence of derivative works the derivative copyright is extended, giving protection from someone writing an unauthorized sequel as long as the new material is in copyright.
New discovery paradigm for homebuying
I think there's a move towards home-schooling, at least here in Texas, partly due to the broken-ness of the public school system.

Sure, there's some great teachers, but there's also a large number who garner poor results year after year and are never fired. The problems of offensive parents and unruly medicated children are obviously pervasive.

The article doesn't even touch on why, with huge unemployment, and massively expensive college costs, children might as well give up hope of using education to attain the standard of living their parents were able to attain.
The last number I heard was more like 56% for the US (can't find the source back, percentage of adults working is a surprisingly hard to find number).

Working people number ain't number of working age people minus number of job seeking people.

It's number of working age people minus (job seeking people, people on disabilities and not looking for a job, people in jail, stay at home parents, people who retired early...)
While I'm sympathetic to the struggle teachers have, the line about taking advice from your child's teacher like you'd take advice from your lawyer or doctor really irked me.

You can choose your lawyer, choose your doctor, choose your auto mechanic etc. You can take their advice, look for someone different or just seek a second opinion.

For parents with children in public school they have no choice who teaches their children.
Expanding: Partners, Experts, and Angels
I grew up in upstate NY and everytime I make it home I hear about this story. It's pretty amazing to read about growth like this from a non-tech company. It's also interesting to think about how big of an impact they have had on the dairy industry in NY(and I'm sure other places as well). Their success has revitalized the industry and helped a TON of farmers get back on their feet.
It's a cine clip, so I think it was 24fps. We can decode 30fps, but it's actually quite hard to find content!
Wow. Hell of a weeks work. I agree about Twitter Bootstrap... Using it on a project I'm working on now. Loving LESS...
I'm quite serious in suggesting that the bar for 9/11 stories should be very high and not driven my emotion. Personally, I am bored with the coverage and believe there will be ample coverage elsewhere.
It is full 1080p, but that clip doesn't have content to the edge of the video frame, so you're seeing black bars at either side (which we are decoding, for what it matters!)
What's with the site not even loading?
Why do you have a hard time believing that? Perhaps your Meyer-Briggs would reveal the answer.
And… you got your nitpickery wrong. A C null pointer is just 0. The exact definition in the statement is "a null pointer is a integral constant expression with value 0".

There are some stddef.h which cast it to a void*, but technically that's just a compatibility hack. See http://c-faq.com/null/macro.html http://c-faq.com/null/safermacs.html http://c-faq.com/null/nullor0.html http://c-faq.com/null/long0.html
Interesting thought about the labels. Mine mostly do not match.

In fact, on my keyboard, N is the most-obliterated key label, followed by MAD<. Also damaged: GHSECV. I think I can blame ASD on games, and E should be obvious. So why are CVNM< so very heavily worn? My best guess is that the labels are on the upper section of the keys, which is presumably the laziest part of the key for my fingers to reach?
"Zagat Survey ... in 1979 as a way to collect and correlate the ratings of restaurants by diners."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagat#Rating_system

Admittedly I haven't tried as their site runs off a "pay to see the full content of this review" model.

The Michelin Guide is actually a 'bunch of reviews written by a handful of writers', which isn't a bad thing in my opinion. Every restaurant I've been to that's even been Michelin rated has been superb.
The easiest way to add unit test to your application
They had originally pledged to only source their milk from New York state, but they've grown so big so quickly that they've literally bought every last drop of available NY milk. The farmers can't keep up. As a result, they're going to have to cross state lines soon.
I've worked on financial systems before. As others have stated, if you're dealing with real money, then you have a big bulls-eye painted on your forehead, and you need to make sure that your system is hardened.

I don't know if you're already doing these things, but I'll just throw them out there and let you ignore them if you do.

Make sure you understand attack vectors and protect against them. XSS, SQL Injection, man-in-the-middle, etc. Make sure your passwords are salted and hashed.

Auditing. Can't emphasize this enough. Things will go wrong, and when they do, you need to be able to tell when, where, and why. In our case, we had shadow tables in our database where we logged changes, and then consolidated and exported that data into an auditing system. We could confirm that a user made X change at Y time from Z IP address.

Also, a bit of a newbie mistake that I see from time-to-time. Don't use double or float with money.
While I agree with many points the article raised,

> Well, of course it's true. I just told you.

this is a very dangerous attitude for a teacher to have. Aristotle said that men have more teeth than women, but that does not make it so.
I used to think this was troubling as well, as I assumed that it would mean new businesses would have trouble competing. But based on the poor results of initiatives like Google One-box (music), I don't find it troubling anymore.

Other than the ability for others to compete, is there another reason you find this troubling?
On a slightly unrelated note: I love reading something linked from HN and then far later receiving a NY Times email alert about the same story. HN FTW.
Financial advice? Consider the advisor (Game Theory / John Nash)
Rampant App Piracy is Hurting Android Developers
I had always thought the yogurt in America was, well, horrible. I thought if I could make something better, people would immediately take to it.

I am kind of surprised that existing food heavyweights, as well as smaller "organic" labels failed to see the opportunity for a premium yogurt that's not loaded with sweeteners.

The interview really didn't get into distribution, but it is quite impressive. A few weeks ago I even saw it in groceries in a very rural part of northern NY. From what I have read about the grocery business, it's extremely competitive and there is huge pressure from manufacturers and distributors to dominate prime shelf space. For a startup to muscle in so quickly is a real accomplishment.

EDIT: The rural NY distribution may relate to the dairy industry connection described by kcurtin and Gaussian.
Too bad I missed out on that Chobani yoghurt deal Aisle50 recently ran. I wonder if writing an article like this was part of the deal to subsidize the price seeing as the co-founder of Aisle50 wrote this article.
For Intercom (http://intercom.io) blogging has been our most effective weapon thus far. We'll give advertising a go soon, just to compare. But right now it looks like a good article that's related to the product drives readers, which we try to then funnel into the site.
Germany Solar Industries in Trouble
I'm a huge fan of Chobani and it's become my breakfast of choice lately -- but I did so for a very specific reason: It's a high-protein, low-carb food, and the diet and fitness routine I'm on specifically requires that.

What I'm curious about: Is that the main reason they've become so popular and done so well? I wonder if many others are following the same diet, or if there's another reason they've become so popular vs. all the other yogurts out there.

Anyone else on HN eat Chobani regularly and, if so, what are your reasons? Any other insights as to why they've done so incredibly well?
That's actually quite scary. If you sell 'close to cost' then your margins are going to be razor thin even with just a little overhead it might not be viable.

Beware of selling too cheap.
I think it will be interesting to watch. I also think there is value in being so specific in what they offer: they only make Greek yogurt. As a result, they don't have trouble branding themselves as "authentic".

Companies like Dannon who make all sorts of dairy products don't have this advantage.
Have you written about your experiences with transitioning from "spare time project" to what it is now? I saw that there is a blog for smallpayroll.ca, but do you have a personal blog that covers the start of your business and beyond?

I'm very interested in transitioning spare-time projects into something real. Thanks for any info, and congratulations on smallpayroll.ca!
How to get tons of Facebook likes to your page
You lecture me on human decency and compassion and joke about jumping out of the window when referring to 9/11?
Newest Twilio Product Launch
so how relevant is this article for startups? Seems to me this is more for owners of mature companies. Or am I missing something?
How To Make a Catapult Shooting Game with Cocos2D and Box2D
Ah yes, 37signals, masters of anything related to online business. Really though, their approach to work and business is one I wouldn't mind seeing other companies mimic.
Creating a Jabber Chatbot that Talks on Gmail
Google's 2010 Power Use: 2.26 Million Megawatt Hours
To add to mootothemax's post, non-repudiation is often important in financial systems. This is the ability, if a user comes to you and says "It wasn't me that made these transactions, so they're invalid," that you have the ability to argue whether they did or did not make those transactions. At a minimum, this probably means logging IPs like mootothemax suggests.
I don't really understand why they dropped Google Hotpot. I mean, it's still there, but there doesn't seem to be much movement or promotion there.

Zagat employs people to actively review restaurants. That's fine for people who have the same taste as Zagat, but it's only one filter and arguably not very scalable.

Hotpot otoh is more like Pandora for restaurants. I rate restaurants and it gives me recommendations for stuff that aligns to my taste as calculated from others who share my taste. It provides a much better filter and actually gets better as more people use it, which is the best kind of scalable. This also seems like a more innovative and Googly way to do this.
I think it's been featured on alot of cooking shows. They launched at the right time as demand was on the upswing and Greek yogurt was getting popular.
Google Details Electric Output of Its Data Centers
Should explain things adequately for anyone interested.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/news/deb...

*EDIT: Hit submit too soon...
Do you have a reference for the technical details of this? Do you know how much power it draws? Are details like MTTF known? Where did you get the H264 decoder from?

Exciting stuff.
"If you're doing a yogurt startup, do you need a technical cofounder who is an expert in yogurt?"

It depends on the category, really.

In this case, it's not as if Chobani invented the concept of strained yogurt. Rather, it practiced the time-honored art of geographical arbitrage: it found a product that had a long history of use overseas (Greek-style yogurt), and introduced it to the US in rather auspicious and on-trend times (the low-carb, high-protein craze). That's more a feat of marketing and operations than one of technical prowess or product development.

I'm sure that there were "yogurt experts" on hand to oversee production, ensure the right consistency, flavor, etc. But it doesn't appear as if there were a "yogurt expert" co-founder in this case. I might be wrong.

That's not to say that product wasn't crucial in this case, because it almost certainly was. But I don't think a "yogurt expert" co-founder would have been absolutely necessary, or that a "yogurt expert" presently occupies one of the top executive spots at Chobani the way a product person would at a tech firm.
Are musicians not incentivized enough in Europe? Or are we trying to incentivize music creation in 1950s and 60s? :P

I can see the court in Brussels going, "Mm, yes. I know what will motivate them to create better music! We'll make sure they own it when they are 105 years old! There's just too little good music these days, and this will make all the difference."

Joking. Obviously it's special interests pushing to make money from their 1950s creations after having been incentivized enough to make them in the first place, at the expense of the public.
Review: Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley
> but the right to copy it's products that were produced, and sold X years ago.

No, it would be the products sold today. Copyright doesn't expire once a work stops being sold. The reason a change has been made is because the works are still being sold in a large enough volume that people stand to loose enough money to lobby government to protect.

Perhaps not taking your company, but when they're taking your product and profitability, they're certainly taking away your production lines. Who isn't going to buy the entire discography of the Rolling Stones for $10 when the band is still charging a fortune per album.
It's probably going to take me a little while to reply to all of this.. Sorry.
Conan Invites You To Live In His Studio
Ergonomic style split keyboard, I'm guessing?

http://www.compkeyboard.com/uploadpic/Microsoft%20Natural%20...
Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit 2011 (Gothenburg, Sweden)
The Raspberry Pi foundation is not Broadcom - we're having a hell of a time getting that message out. We're an independent charity.

Our director does work for Broadcom, which meant that we were able to get a foot in the door to discuss buying chips from them in much smaller numbers than they're usually prepared to sell people (their normal sales to a single customer are in the tens of millions range) once we'd explained the aims of the charity. They did allow to use their parts library to make the alpha boards which you can see in the video. Outside that, we're not receiving any other help from them (we source all our own parts for the final boards). All of us have day jobs and are doing all our Raspberry Pi work on a volunteer basis because we believe it's a project that can make a real difference. (I'm volunteering full-time - I'm freelance, so I've been able to put other work aside for at least the rest of the year.)

We're not selling at a loss. This isn't a Broadcom marketing exercise. Our relationship with Broadcom is one of customer/supplier - and that's it.