skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Irrelevant, if you consider their decision to promote XHTML2 while the rest of the world committed to HTML5 - incidentally, a development that puts to rest the fear that the web can't evolve and stay relevant without a single BDFL.
Does My Ex Miss Me
Many people ask themselves and others how they are able to tell if their ex-significant other is missing them. No doubt everyone wants to be loved by someone and if you have just been dumped, you may still be looking for love from your ex. So it's normal what you're thinking now.
Techstars should include the actual valuations or acquisition values. Just citing number of "acquisitions" is meaningless these days. I know for at least one company listed as an "acquisition" was basically a failure with a few members of the team being hired together by the "acquirer".
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This guy is a better human being than me. I would have used the island for the sole purpose of wooing ladies.
Larger Buttocks on Texas Nude Beaches
Interesting idea once you watch the video. No totally convinced but it's an interesting idea, very much following the lean startup model with the validation and such. But not sure what Launchitnow added other than linking to the site. http://www.sellanapp.com/?r=4p4q1e
The lesson is that you need to make sure you have a market before wasting time building a product. Most tech guys get this the wrong way around (but don't really care cause they like building stuff).
What about non-collaborators, like clients so they can clone repo's and use the ticketing features but not commit?
Important/highly relevant reading: http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-t...
This is rapidly becoming one of my personal catchphrases: "Goals aren't results." There is something wrong with talking about your goals as if they're a foregone conclusion.
Mobile devices have cellular connectivity, so why would you sign-up for WiFi.

I'd like to see stats on if boingo has grown or shrunk in the last few years.
are people using less paid public internet?
The sample chapter on the moon is appalling. This book is designed to make people chronically incorrect.
Best books or articles explaining startup investment funding?
I'm new the startup world. I have a solid grasp of business principles and investing, but the details of the specific ways/methods of initial startup investments are fuzzy at best.

Are there any books or articles that the Hacker News community would recommend that explain in detail what they are and what to expect? For example, when is a convertible note a good option and when should the founder buy it back. Also, methods for determining fair equity stakes for early stage investments.

Thanks in advance. This community has already helped a lot!
It is funny to think about, but most likely the purchase is for the rest of the shares SF doesn't own.
Coach Boots
My most sincere condolences. There is nothing that can be said in the face of such loss.

We all face it one day or another. It never gets better, but we get used to it and we move on.
Laurence Tratt: How can C Programs be so Reliable?
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I know which companies do. I chose not to support them for my software. There are enough other companies to make money without it.
Agreed. But most of the crashes I see are of the former type (I.e developers fault).

I honestly can't remember ever seeing a Flash crash actually bring down the the browser. Maybe I've been very lucky.

I see that I'm getting down voted for calling 'ED' out on his sweeping statement where he did not define what he meant by a "crash". Note that for many users a "crash" is when what ever App/game/web-page they are running stops with some error and they can't continue. My basic point is that many (most??) of these, in my experience, are down to developer error.

Many developers seem to have an irrational "hate-fest" going against Flash. For sure there's a lot wrong with it but, for me, all to often "its not the tool but the craftsman at fault".
I'm part of a remote team, and have had my share of difficulties with motivation.

As best I can, I've listed broad categories of what demotivates me:

First, lack of clarity of what the next task to be completed is, and a perplexing reluctance to simply ask.

Second, a task in front of me that is too large to attack at once and for which I haven't found an angle from which to attack it.

Third, something else is temporarily much more interesting/threatening than work. Facebook and Twitter can be interesting, but I find if I'm spending hours on them it's to avoid something, not because I'm enjoying it. So it's unlikely something temporarily interesting.

Fourth, there's that "wait a second, we're doing this wrong" feeling, which if it's leading to a drop in productivity is probably followed either by "I don't know what the right approach is" or possibly "the right approach is so different from what we're doing now that soon we'll be screwed." The developer senses an impending technical dead end.

Finally, there's disillusionment with the overall goals of the job/company. A "we're doing it wrong" but on a more fundamental level, followed by either "there's no way I can convince the company to do it right" or "I have an aversion to the core business we're in". The developer senses a dead-end job- or lifestyle-wise.

Regardless of which flavor of problem it is, I think mcherm pretty well nailed the solution.

EDIT:

Another possibility is that your developer has been assigned something he hates and is hoping that by avoiding it long enough it will go away. This is a particularly easy and self-destructive (usually) pattern to fall into.
That would be quite the promotion.
You're right. Next time around, I'm starting with a landing page and email list, and I'm only coding if I get a decent level of interest. I spent way too much time on this without knowing if I was on target.
Hi,

Thank you for your feedback. Yes, its a good idea to add a "How It looks" page. I could add a "Try Me" arrow in the home page to showcase the button better. yes, I also have to include other options like to touch on the page. But thats for the future :)
Slides available as PDF: http://media.revsys.com/talks/djangocon/2011/secrets-of-post...
Sounds like you're describing what we're building! (www.rover.com)

That's exactly what we want to facilitate. Tons of people would be willing to watch your dog overnight, but there's no easy way for them to do so.

We're in Seattle for now, but have every intention of expanding in the future.
99Launches Featured Startups
"Let's face facts: the Web will never be the dominant platform."

Hewitt's post hinges on that statement, presented without supporting evidence. But actually the Web is already dominant among the platforms Hewitt mentions (Web, Windows, iOS, and Android).

Relevant stats:

Web - 1.7 billion users as of July, given that 880 million people go to the single busiest website publicly measured by Google, and this site has a "reach" of 51 percent. (You can distill this same total from any of the smaller sites listed via simple division.) http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/

iOS - 38 million people as of April http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/04/19/a-look-at-ipad-users-...

Android - 24 million people as of April http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/04/19/a-look-at-ipad-users-...

Windows - 400 million Windows 7 license sold as of this month, the most popular version of Windows going. http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive... Even if piracy doubles total Windows 7 installs, you're still not halfway to total web users (which means trying to count creaky old XP as the same platform won't get you there, either).

Hewitt is a smart guy, ex Facebook, built their iOS client, so clearly he has a thought a lot about platforms. But he undermines his arguments about the future when he is incorrect about the present.
It's an "or," not an "and," I think. 3mm cap OR 20% discount, whichever is lower, but not both.

These are average standard terms for a first raise, pre-seed. This just allows companies to focus more on building instead of raising.
I really don't like the part where the author rags on teachers.

"I didn’t realize there is a stigma amongst teachers—that they deeply resent having to spend money on their classrooms and careers. Many businesses, both online and off, have special discounts and freebies for teachers. This has warped teachers’ sense of value and fostered a sense of entitlement."

Sorry, but why the heck should a teacher have to pay for their own classroom? If I were forced to pay for my keyboard at work, or my monitor, should I not be pissed? Teachers, especially ones that are starting out, are dirt poor, and for some reason they need to spend money on their classroom? Nonsense.

As sense of entitlement? How about a sense of what's fair. I didn't like the attitude at all.

"I feel for them. I really do. But they’re still terrible customers."

Or, in other words "Teachers refused to pay for my product, so they suck."

I would say the author was guilty of a cliched mistake that many startups make: he built a solution for a problem that no one was interested in, or at least interested enough to pay for.
They carve their logo into the case instead.
Ken Burns documentary 'Prohibition' will debut on iPad and iPhone
My question is who is Dustin Moskovitz (#91) 27yrs old worth 3.5B, oh, I see, Suckerburgs roomate. Seriously, no one 27 yrs old is worth 3.5B, sour grapes on my part? you bet. Damn; wish I had 3.5B when I was that age, ha, what fun that would have been :)
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Ah, yes, that does make a lot more sense. And I definitely agree that $10k is more the size of a rainy-day fund than a "here is my pile of tax evasion money" stash.
Currently html5 audio is a bit limited, especially when you want to play multiple sounds and on time (html5 audio doesn't have latency guarantees). Of course, the web audio api is designed to fix this, firefox also has their own solution. The fact that this won't work on every browser (like iOS or android), means it isn't much of a solution for now.
I just poked around with some of our servers to verify.

In Softlayer's Dallas facility (selected when ordering a server) 10 Gbps is an option.

The maximum amount of bandwidth available is 20TB.

Sometimes you can get more options by contacting their sales people directly instead of using the shopping cart.
air for mobile?
Sorry if I didn't make it clear I meant the web will never be the dominant platform in the future once the current trends play out. I am aware of current market share proportions.
In particular, they should look in other sources like the startup world.
I'm having a really hard time refraining from writing a really snarky "Switch to MySQL" type response, not because I think that MySQL outperforms PostgreSQL, but because there is always somebody on every MySQL article discussion who does this. Ok, that's off my chest, sorry to rant.

I enjoyed this video, even though I'm not a PostgreSQL guy, as it has a lot of good generic info. The advice about XFS and noatime was right on the money, although I don't think he strongly stated enough why you don't want to run EBS volumes over software RAID-0. In my experience this is a really bad idea, because just one of those EBS volumes getting picking up a laggy await (happens pretty frequently with volumes I've seen in the wild) will drag down the performance of the entire array. Also I'm told that the old "RAID-5 is always bad" notion is considerably more nuanced nowadays, and that many of the earlier OLTP write performance problems with RAID-5 have been largely mitigated with modern RAID controllers.
This is not an example of someone following the advice of the smart people and failing. This is someone not following advice and making most of the common mistakes people warn about.

He's a sole founder, working part-time, in Colorado, on a problem he doesn't have, in enterprise software, for schools, with no distribution plan, no team, no domain expertise, in a niche market, and giving up after 1 year.

Of course, he still could have succeeded, but he definitely stacked the deck against himself.
I make my living selling software to teachers, and the privacy issue comes up about 1 in 20 sales. It is an issue, but not a deal breaker. If a teacher has an online grade book they can share with parents, and it gets results, then teachers will buy the software.

Irrational lawsuit paranoia is a real problem, but it is not the reason this product failed.
Manilla does a good job of this - saved my ADHD ass a few times!
In this economy and with global debt crises, they'd do better to show the user how much money was saved.

I've never seen a bank or financial institution advertise spending money in such a blatant way. Instead, banks typically nudge their customers into purchasing products or services for their benefits, but they never mention the word "spend" because it denotes exhausting one's supply.
No wait, it gets better, Ty Warner, #166, 2.4B, wait for it... made his fortune on... hold on... seriously, beanie babies, aaaaha ah hhaaaa hahahahah. OMG, wow, there you go. Forget Haskell, Erlang, Java blah blah blah, make an idiotic stuffed animal and morons will buy it and make you a billionaire !
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Novelty Acts: The sexual revolutions before the sexual revolution
Hear hear! If they did then in real time, I'd login that day - but their little day delay kills my memory - I almost wonder if it's on purpose...
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Exactly the kind of arrogance I cited. You don't want to risk a bad owner so you'll let the whole thing die from neglect by committee. I would rather have Microsoft be the only browser vendor than have the web shrink dramatically.
If I ever strike it big, I'm buying Vancouver Island. (1)

If anyone there wants to hire a Yank, I'll settle for living there (I already bleed syrup).

----

(1) If I get into Bill Gates territory, maybe New Zealand. ;-)
They may be crappy but they are still the organization in charge of the development and standardization of web technologies, which he is arguing doesn’t exist. It does. It just isn’t as good as we’d like.
Note that the story was posted on April 30th, 2010.
Yeah, I've never quite been a fan of the glowing white Apple logo on back. It made more sense on the old white MacBooks.
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My attempt at a story was taking a stance in the ongoing education reform controversy. It earned me the chance to write the post for GOOD, and got the one blogger to cover my app. That one guest post got me all 10 of my paying users.

Story is huge, but I couldn't make it over the hump. Maybe my story wasn't compelling enough.

Thanks for the kind words, the advice, and the offer. Will send you an email shortly.
Stack those bricks :-)
> It's a perfectly valid opinion

No it isn't. It's factually false.
The W3C writes specs, not code. They do not own the actual rubber that hits the road, and so they are only indirectly responsible for what happens on the real web. I want to remove the separation of architecture from implementation and have one entity control both.
You appear to be splitting hairs here. Most folks I know frequently say "source" as a shorthand for "source code". It's not a big leap to tack on "open" in front of that when you mean the source is available for inspection by those outside the person/company who developed it (i.e., not "closed").

If you want to claim that OSI popularized the phrase and imbued it with a very specific meaning, you'd probably have a point, but I don't see how they could lay claim to ownership of such a generic term. At the very least it seems out of bounds to be accusing someone of being "dishonest" about it and "rewriting history".
That's a lot of resentment for a group of people who simply didn't want to hand over their hard-earned for something you offered them but that they couldn't justify.
Why Google+ is losing the social fight
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As someone who worked in Infosec at the 3rd largest district in the nation let me add something:

- Most, if not all, schools prohibit teachers from storing student data in external (non-school based) systems. In fact, our teacher/staff AUP strictly forbid using systems other than the district-provided systems for anything involving student information.
I agree that it's a ridiculous textbook, but these "point and laugh at the stupid believers" articles get a bit tiring sometimes.

I'm in Kansas, a typical family goes to church on Sunday. There are a lot of Christians around here, but I've never come across such a science textbook (you can bet I would have picked it up and looked it in if I had).

To mean anything, the article really should at least try to put some kind of figure on the number of kids actually being educated from this book today. I'm pretty sure it's the exception rather than the rule among Christians to endorse that kind of silly science.

It almost looks like these scientists go out to find the weirdest possible examples they can (and there are some weird ones) and then hold them up as a representative sample. Not a good example of how science should work.

I can't resist linking to this classic article about how even the conventional descriptions of electricity "moves from the negative to the positive" are basically wrong: http://amasci.com/miscon/elect.html
The word "source" is short for "source code." They aren't exactly distinct things, so that is really splitting hairs. If we acknowledge that use of "open," then "open source" falls right out of it.

And there are lot of the dupes you're talking about, but if you filter those out in your search, you'll see that is not the only occurrence. Quickly sifting through, I found these:

From 1995 we have a guy asking for a "modeler with open source code."

1996 has Caldera advocating "an open-source code model" (it even has the hyphen in the right place!), as well as an essay about "Open Source Code and the Early Development of Unix." The former case is interesting because it explicitly defines open-source code as source code that is openly distributed, and clarifies that a small fee is required to sell derived products commercially. (So SCO actually claimed the term before OSI did!)

And 1997 has a discussion about whether "open source cryptography" is better than "proprietary … cryptography" (and in which "published" is used as a synonym for "open source").

So it appears that the term was much less common before OSI — but it was used to talk about source code you could read, long before they came along with their definition.
What's extreme? I expressed an opinion about a selling tactic used on a website.

I realize that one trademarks a name, which is why later in the sentence I used the word "patent" for the process (of the math equation).

Everything in that video was an advertisement. That was the point of it, and good on them for doing so. The simplicity of the design, words used, and the trademarks and imagery of the product. The whole point of the video in the link is to drum up hype and future business.

What I disagreed with was their use of Safe-To-Spend without further explanation on why it was being trademarked. Otherwise it's just a waste of money. They could have called the result anything and leave the silly trademarks for later, unless they specifically had something to sell the consumer on with that name.
A couple of your points are narrow-minded. I have to live in the bay area, work on a team, and work on it full time to build a viable business? Come on, there are other paths to success.

Your points about domain expertise, and working on a problem I don't have are right on. I learned the hard way it's way harder to build software to meet someone else's needs. (Even though 3 immediate family members are teachers, including my wife.)
The infinite scroll example he linked to in the presentation is very nice. Putting the max_id in the URL is a great way to save the state.

http://warpspire.com/experiments/history-api
Exactly. Shows how important it is to bounce your concepts off the right people before you start. Everyone should quickly learn that the guy that says "Yeah, that's awesome!" with dollar signs in their eyes every time is the worst with feedback.
slimming down the traditional banking model and passing the savings (in the form of interest) to customers

That's ING Direct's business model. It was hard to beat until the recession started and interest rates crashed, but even now it's pretty great.
That's... brilliant!
Yelp CEO: Google Is A Monopolist That Screws Us Over, And Here's How
You missed your market. Look at your benefits list:

Demonstrates student growth.
Reveals teacher effectiveness.
Use data to inform your instruction.
Creates beautiful and insightful graphs automatically.
Detailed report card for every student.
Organizes documentation for easy access.
Faster and easier to use than any other gradebook.

Teachers already do all this in a way that is approved by their district via the tools provided for them. And, speaking cynically, they certainly don't want to reveal their effectiveness nor do they want to adjust lesson plans according to data.

That said, as a parent, I would want this kind of information about my child because I could use it to hold my child's teacher accountable. In fact, if I could share it on Facebook or a Yahoo! group (I'm a member of one for my daughter's class), it would help the community evaluate their kids and their instruction.

Call me crazy, but that's my 2 cents.
Why isn't my time zone highlighted on the world map?
Truth hurts doesnt it!

I think Joe is spot on.The web is already miles behind native mobile platforms.Personally I can vouch for iOS.The kind of stuff you can do on iOS now just in terms of UI is just impossibly hard to do with HTML5 or any other web platform.

But then if you think about it.Its not surprising at all.Of course you will have a much more power on a native platform than a web platform which is built on top of a native platform.

In my opinion in the future you will have a browser and type in a url but a native app will open in the browser window.These native apps will be built for different platforms.The web app will be shown by default if a native app hasnt been developed for that platform.
I don't think he resents them as much as he just realizes that he had mistaken assumptions. He heard that teachers often pay for their own supplies, but what he didn't know was that teachers hate doing it.
Highway 61 was the greatest! It combined results from several of the popular engines and provided the best results until google came along.

http://web.archive.org/web/19980205031323/http://www.highway... /nostalgia
I left this out of the post, but my wife, father, and sister-in-law are all educators. I am a huge supporter of teachers. That's why I got into this in the first place.

You shouldn't have to pay for your keyboard, but maybe books to keep your skills current. Maybe a web host to operate a portfolio website or experiment with new code libraries. Everyone in every industry invests money into their careers. Why not teachers?

Last thought about the cliched startup mistake is completely true. I definitely made that mistake.
High-tech criminals target Seattle-area businesses
Understanding Bitcoin by the Numbers
But Flash often crashes way worse than that; it segfaults, or raises a structured exception. It used to take browser processes with it, before Chrome made it popular to have plugins in their own process.

I suspect Flash's (lack of) stability was one of the reasons for considering this design decision in Chrome.
Yep, I totally fell for it. The Running Lean book I linked in the post was really helpful to me on that point.