skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probably just turn-by-turn spoken directions or voice command input, if anything.
Spotify is a Facebook account away from a world of music
It was just really moving to be in a room packed with people willing to throw down everything and start up - one of the YC speakers aptly described the experience as a war.
Super interesting. Didn't realize he had previously founded Business.com before Brighter.
Dropbox, Github, Google Apps for your domain, blogging, financial services and bill pay, photo + music + text + media storage and playback. Just off the top of my head.

I don't want fully self-hosted services, any more than I want fully online services. I want a sandboxed, personal subset of the service that I can add to a physical box I own or a virtual box I rent from a provider. I don't expect a company to give me everything to run on my own hardware, but I want a solution that can take the provider going under, being bought, etc. without tanking the service and having to worry about my stuff ending up auctioned off to the highest bidder.

The N2N project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N2n is an interesting place to start. I started work of some code to do something like what I'm talking about, but that was before my day job ate my life. https://github.com/jwhitlark/unum

I guess the question is can we come up with a system that defines sort of a DMZ between a person and a service, something more than the current all or nothing model.

EDIT: Note that I'm not disparaging Dropbox, Github, etc. They've been quite good so far, and I'm happy to pay. I trust them, to a certain extent, it's just that I shouldn't have to trust them. Isn't there some way that we can meet in the middle?
I know this is going to sound pedantic, however, optimizing by 99% would make them 1% less efficient? Right? Or am I muddled?
OnStar reverses recent controversial ToS changes after backlash.
Do you remember Netscape 4.x? I sure do -- I was supporting it well into 2004 because I didn't have the nerve to tell my overlords that it was cost-ineffective. One day when the CSS (or, rather the JSS written as CSS) recursion levels got really deep, there was a small explosion (approximately one kiloStan yield), and we dropped support. (NS4 users got a usable app, but not the enhanced experience that other users were getting.)

Strangely enough, we didn't lose customers. It turns out that people were using NS4.x because we supported NS4.x. They will upgrade if they have a reason to do so.

If you've written the site/app well, it will work in Lynx, fer cryin' down the sink. It won't be pretty or slick, but it'll work. There is absolutely no need to make a site feature-for-feature identical or pixel-perfect across all browsers, as long as the functionality is there. And if users understand that their browser is holding back the experience, they will change the browser.
Benedetti on Placebos
Chrome makes you to auto-update and you can't disable it.
Exactly. Some of these sites are hosted on my own server. After having numerous PHP sites hacked (and my machine wiped twice) static html is the only thing I trust these days.
Clean Green Manufacturing. It’s Here, and it’s Growing
The insects will win in the end. They are too numerous and reproduce so rapidly that they can out-evolve humans.

Well, it's a fun though experiment, at least. :)

In the The Hellstrom Chronicle, a 1971 Academy Award winning quasi-documentary/science fiction/horror film, a fictitious scientist called Dr. Nils Hellstrom presents scientific-sounding theories that insects will ultimately win the fight for survival on planet Earth because of their adaptability and ability to reproduce rapidly. The human race will lose this fight largely because of excessive individualism.

The film provided the inspiration for Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Hellstrom's Hive.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Hellstrom...
I missed it - I don't even know which email account it went to. I didn't authorize them to move anything, but they seem to have moved it anyway.
The PlayStation Web App
IE6 is down to 1.25% in North America. It's dead. Please stop supporting it so people really get the message.

IE7 is 5.25%. Probably slow moving corporations. Some of these guys won't upgrade to IE8/IE9 until they're forced to. So, let's stop supporting IE7 so they're forced to upgrade.

IE8 will be around for a couple of years.

IE9 is around 11.5%. Probably consumers who will gladly upgrade to IE10.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-eu-monthly-201008...
Ask HN: do we have a startup story board?
1. Anecdotes - Successes / Failures stories 2. Best practises for a "x" activity with Geographical relevance. What works in US might not work everywhere & vice versa
Who would have guessed Anonymous could act as a trading signal?
The biggest single mistake of most software designers is to underestimate the importance of usability. If there is any significant usability difference between two products, consumer selection will favor the more usable product.
Like NULL in SQL...

sqlite> SELECT 1=1;
1
sqlite> SELECT 1=0;
0
sqlite> SELECT NULL!=NULL;

sqlite> SELECT NULL=NULL;
Lessons Learned: 5 tips to help you save on legal fees for your start up
I welcome the death of all mosquitoes. But correct me if I'm wrong:
1. Mosquitoes are the greatest killer of people in Africa.
2. When mosquitoes stop killing people, the population will increase.
3. There will be less food to go around, and starvation will increase.
4. Therefore, food must be increased as mosquitoes are eradicated to prevent this consequence.
Guy Threw 4800 Messages in a Bottle Into the Atlantic Ocean, Got 3100 Responses
If you are going to give such a short response, could you make it something I can Google for a more in-depth explanation?
Relevant discussions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2024778 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2599331
Are there no slides or transcript, or blog posts? It would be nice to have something that can be skimmed through.

I don't use Ruby, so I'm not sure how much of the talk would apply to me, but we use CouchDB extensively at work.
Oh, I see. That's actually pretty common, google "name-based virtual host" for lots of details. I don't think dynamic DNS will affect that.
I assume you mean this one: http://www.slate.com/id/2304445/

Before installing the robot, UCSF needed about half of its more than 100 on-staff pharmacists to administer and check the drugs going out to patients on the floor; now nearly all have been reassigned to different parts of the hospital, where they make IVs, help adjust patients' drug regimens, and perform other tasks that had been neglected when they were simply filling prescriptions

As mentioned there, and later in the article, the pharmacists (and I'm not entirely convinced that they were all pharmacists, as opposed to pharmacist technicians) were freed from their mundane, pill-counting tasks and put out on the floor of the hospital to monitor and "fine-tune" patients' drug regimens.

The article basically lays out how pharmacists had jobs which were largely filled with extremely repetitive tasks -- billing, prescription input, pill counting -- and less of what they're important for, which is counseling patients. A computer isn't going to be able to replace a human in patient interaction, medical demand is rising, and I don't see that he made a case for future pharmacist demand not meeting the projected 17% (if I recall correctly) growth. It just sounds like being a pharmacist sucks a lot less now.
ACTA will be signed Saturday
Perhaps by complementary he means:
- Scala allows you to break away from the share-nothing, strictly immutable constraints of Erlang when you really need to do that for performance.
- Erlang has OTP, Scala has access to the full ecosystem of Java libraries.

Not sure what else is complementary.
A more direct, less cheeky version would be to ask what they are picturing for their website and giving them some estimates.

If a car salesman were asked that question, he wouldn't answer it flippantly because he knows that's a little embarrassing to make the customer feel ignorant to that degree. You're invalidating their question, not answering it.

Instead, the car salesman would say, "That depends on the kind of car that fits your needs. What kind of vehicles are you thinking about?"

There's no harm in making the car analogy explicit, but I'd think prospects would be warmer to more helpful and direct responses at first.
Thanks for sharing that. I had heard it summarized before but don't know how i missed that whole thing.
I read it to mean: only one new phone. I hope you're right, an iPhone 5 and a 4s would be big news.
Apple's IPhone 5 is HERE
At least Javascript has isNaN().

Exercise: Try checking for NaN in C. Then read [1] and see if your method is cross platform like you thought

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/570669/checking-if-a-doub...
I think this bake sale is a brilliant idea, but unfortunately many have missed the point. The bake sale illustrates how SB185 (CA bill that wants to consider race in its admissions) if passed might be consider racist. The good thing is this sale is drawing a lot of attention. The bad though is the attention seems focused on the bake sale being racist, but not necessarily the CA Bill which will affect a lot more people. Rather than focus on whether this bill should be passed people are upset that they are charging different prices for cupcakes (even though the organizers have said that they won't).
Willing to pay extra
Affordability [X]

That's a funny cell.
MYCIN diagnoses only infectious diseases, and does so only with a considerable amount of human input. IMO that doesn't really constitute replacing people. It's basically an interactive book of diseases combined with a statistical analysis expert.
To extend my point, I don't care if the user wants to use Firefox or Chrome or even IE. The rendering should be consistent across the board, and the browser should be about the user experience. Add ons, syncing, other such features.

Imagine if this applied to the world of televisions. If people didn't buy Sony TVs because they didn't display channels as well as Sharp or Panasonic. If you had to render your video with some hacky kludge so the colors displayed right on a Samsung and an LG. That would be insane.
I like the idea that Tim is working on a binary-based protocol interaction with Couch. If the binary protocol integration is generic enough I'd like to discuss with them the possibility of supporting the Universal Binary JSON format (http://ubjson.org)

While the HTTP-only protocol work up until now has been one the nice "Ease of use" standout features for Couch, it also leads to a lot of overhead when you know you absolutely don't benefit from it.

All the work on CouchApps (only CouchDB + JavaScript apps) makes a lot of sense to have the rest-only interaction, but if you are trying to scale out a high read/write couch install and are already using tricks like TCP no_delay and server-side batching along with batch-doc operations on the client there is only so much you can do before you slam up against what looks to be a 6-10K docs/sec change rate due in no small part to Couch (even with its new JSON parser) processing data structures into and out of textual JSON.
It's always interesting to see differences in people's 'base' stacks. Where feasible I like to have the environment on my dev machine reflect production as closely as possible so I would go with Passenger over Pow, but this is a great little guide.
"So, did they clean up on this or did they not trust their own judgment?"

I believe there is a 3rd option there...
LevelDB support! Would love to see how it compares to Bitcask in terms of speed.
I don't think so, since that too was ultimately aimed at preventing human casualties.

gerggerg is claiming there's a big difference between this and previous deliberate attempts to wipe out a whole species. I'm asking, what are those previous attempts? I can think of none for which human welfare wasn't the main selling point.

What I'm ultimately doing is disagreeing with the gerggerg; I'm saying that human welfare doesn't justify any attempt to wipe out an entire species.
Exponential growth on Google+ following public launch and circle sharing
Video was being broadcast in real time at the event which means it was probably also being recorded. I'm sure it will turn up eventually but I got the idea that it was a professional video crew which may mean it will go through some post production before being pushed out. Just FYI.
> lbrandy has it right here. If your definition of

> "tracking" is "web server log analysis," then nearly every

> web site you visit is tracking you.

Of course. The "problem" is that the FB widget is all over the web, giving them the the possibility to track users not only on a single page, but on (almost) the whole web.
I put "problem" in quotes because it's only really a problem if users don't know that. And I think the vast majority of FB users don't know that FB knows almost every page they visit on the web. The same is true for google as well of course.
Any sites that try to fill the disconnected niche will inherently limit their capabilities, which is amusing since it caters to the tech-crowd.
Yes, that's how it is supposed to work.
It depends on the school you attend. The networking effect is bigger than just the people you attend class with, although those connections are often very valuable. Most MBA students aren't studying for entrepreneurship. They're someone who has already had success in the business world and are going to advance their career. Having a network of connections across business domains can be very valuable.

Obviously it depends on the startup. B2B businesses would get more value out of those connections. I stated that it's likely the biggest benefit of business school, not the only benefit. A true cost-benefit analysis would look also at the knowledge acquired as well as the strength of the alumni network.
Learning to Crawl - Idea to Business
Coal Cares about You
Are you guys using any of the replication? If so, have you seen any of the replication failures that are tracked in JIRA right now?

There are 2 or 3 nebulous "replication breaks" bugs that are filed from older versions, but one that says it is still happening on 1.1.1 with no followups from the team.

Filipe I believe rewrote the replication code from scratch for 1.2 so again, it is hard to know if the replication hickups are non-issues or not so I'm curious if you have real world data points here.
"So, did they clean up on this or did they not trust their own judgment?"

The answer to this is one that is oft-repeated: there is no "they" here.

The people behind this new Anon Analytics faction probably had no involvement with anon before this, my guess is that they are people who have been working with/in the markets for years and have wanted to do something like this, and have decided now to do it under the banner of anonymous, for whatever reasons.
Google F*ck with Web
I don't know, but nobody see what Gooogle doing.

G newer promote nothing on own main page:

[FB]
Promote G+ on main search Page

Facebook are now pussy: they can't win the battle or they start promote bing. Next year FB will be the bigger loser like myspace.
FB are now pussy: changing something but not enough

[Firefox]
When use IE - download Chrome 1111
Downloads flash - ads about download Chrome
Firefox are pussy: and they promote Google search engine anyway

[M$]
Waiting waiting and still doing nothing. Still problem with local search eq type in France job and what see job in US ?.
M$ without Bill are just like small kid with candy

_____

Google next year should change own name to THE Internet

Firefox, M$, FB, are pussy doing F nothing when they losse the battle of independent Internet
Most interesting link I've seen today, thanks!

So as long as you log in to Facebook often enough (more often than you install new browser plugins or fonts or whatever), they can cookieless-track you perfectly when you're logged out, by remembering the browser fingerprint you had when you were logged in. And even if the fingerprint changes a little bit, they could use something like Levenshtein distance, combined with statistics of frequently visited sites, to have a good chance of identifying you anyway. In the hypothetical world where Facebook was an evil monster of surveillance, of course. I'm not talking about the real world here ;-)

So what can you do when faced by a hypothetical monster like that? Disabling third-party cookies is only the first step. Is there any reasonable way to anonymize your browser fingerprint?
Unless of course you are Dr James Anderson ;)
Someone at the FT has interviewed them:

http://blogs.ft.com/fttechhub/2011/09/anonymous-analytics/#a...
Jeff Jonas on Big Data and Geospatial Super-Food
Trading a tremendous amount of memory for speed. Try replacing a list of integers with a list of Images. You might lock up the browser.
This guy is a kook. Yeah yeah, ad hominem, etc.
To be clear, I'm only working on integrating a binary data format, which is different from a binary protocol.

HTTP is baked pretty deep into CouchDB, which makes it hard to remove (but who knows, Couchbase seems to be having some success ripping it out).
BigCouch (Cloudant’s distributed version of CouchDB) has the HTTP layer neatly separated through the Fabric library (https://github.com/cloudant/fabric), so it'd probably be easier to add a binary protocol there.
This is of course how it is supposed to work. It is useful to define NaN this way, as a simple test for NaN is (num == num) returning false.

While we're on the topic of NaN, I'd like to mention a lesson from my little book of JavaScript you should never do[1]: You should never use null in JavaScript for the value of a yet-to-determine number. Always use NaN.

Why? It will be easier to detect problems:

var determineLater = NaN;
var blah = 5;
blah += determineLater;

blah is now NaN because (5 + NaN) is NaN. We want this because we want to know if there's been some kind of error in the making of blah

Better:

var determineLater = null;
var blah = 5;
blah += determineLater;

blah is now 5 because (5 + null) is 5. We do not want this because it doesn't let us know that there's been an error (the error typically being that determineLater was - incorrectly - never determined!)

[1] not a real book, just a text file of mis-use cases.
that's funny because if you read the thread a few weeks ago about "how much did you make from your startup's exit", most non-founders got royally screwed, making less than 20k. the tales of VCs screwing people over or founders screwing over employees in SV is legendary
Make sure you read the actual report to get an idea of the depth of analysis they've performed, it's not really given enough promenance in the linked article.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/66444803/Chaoda
Wow, I think I picked a bad time to blog this pro-Bay Area stuff: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3041845
Diebold voting machines can be hacked by remote control
Acting on non-public information constitutes insider trading - wonder if this qualifies.
Don’t use .local for local web dev
Good point. A binary protocol is certainly the ultimate play. Tim has some promising initial estimates, but the gains depend on the document properties (mostly size). In the meantime an alternative solution is to spread the server-side load via BigCouch or some other clustering solution. However, I'd wager that even with slow JSON libs most workflows are still IO limited.
I don't think you can say this isn't a business model without some data to back that up. Just because you are not the target market does not mean that there isn't a target market willing to pay (though I'd like to see updates from them to hear if this works).
Social Cookbook: an open source Open Graph app
Woops haha, that's pretty funny :D
That may mean I'm a poor interviewer

Not at all. It means that humans are complex and ranking them is extremely difficult.

My issue is with the fact that I've met too many very smart people who can prattle on about Big-O and optimal architectures for hours, but when it comes time to get dirty and finish a job, they lose interest, produce unmaintainable, over-engineered nightmares, and/or turn out not to actually understand the platform well enough to execute a clean solution.
The replication is borked, we know. The replicator database introduced in 1.1 only solves part of the issues at hand. Everybody at Cloudant & Couchbase is pretty confident that the 1.2 replicator will be much more stable & efficient, which is why there isn't a lot of activity right now on plugging holes in the old replicator.
>>How do you usually price these things?

You mean, how do you price the total price of a website?

The same way that a mechanic, plumber, electrician, contractor, etc.,etc. estimates the total price of the work to be done. i.e. You estimate the total number of hours you think is going to take you, you multiply it by your hourly rate and finally you add whatever additional expenses you incurred when building the site. i.e. hosting service, license fees,...
i've been using the 9 nightlies now for about month and have had no problems with it -- seems pretty solid.
Show HN: le_tweet_market, measures Twitter's stock market sentiment
A short writeup on my blog: http://goo.gl/Q7pXk

I plan on using this for a project in my Machine Learning class so any feedback would be great.
Building the site is just the start of the process in my eyes. I always give one estimate for the design/development/seo of a site. The importance of keeping the content, SEO and design fresh cannot be undersold to the client. Letting your site anguish for a few years will cost you visitors and business. And today, it happens even faster. A site that sits for more than 6 months is in danger of losing page rank.

For me, the cost isn't in the initial development, it's in the cost of maintaining the site (design/content) and continuing to rank well in the search engines for the life of the site (seo/sem). This also presents the best opportunity to create a long term relationship and an ongoing revenue stream for the developer.
Thanks a lot. I am fluent in the pre req math and proving theorems and build ML based real world systems for a living. I just wanted to take a classic class and see what it felt like. I think I'll wait for the online version of 229 then (if there is one in the future).

Thanks again. You saved me a lot of time. Much obliged. HN rocks.
Tim, is the Couch server still going from binary disk data to JSON and then you convert that to the binary format or is your work actually allowing Couch to skip any textual JSON generation such that all the REST methods are still there, but their response bodies are just MessagePack binary data instead of text?
I'll save everyone the time:

Don't use CouchRest::Database! because it tries to create the DB each time. (Use CouchRest::Database instead)

Don't let multi_json pick the json library! Pick jsonx yourself before couchrest runs.

Don't use HTTPS for internal connections.

For the last 3%... He hacked in a binary format into couchrest and couchdb in 10 lines of code.
OOP also has a way to guarantee that the counter can only be changed by calls from specific parts of the code, it's called encapsulation. For example, the counter could be an object that subscribes to button events, and the counter's value could be a private member variable of that object. What exactly is the win from FP here?
There's a short write-up available on my blog: http://blog.trenthauck.com/post/10402535918/le-tweet-market
The Best Does Not Always Win (Or Why Spotify Will Beat Rdio)
Notice that this is a bit of a pre-announcement:

Riak 1.0 will be available later this month. To preview
some of the new features, download Riak, or to inquire
about a commercial deployment, please visit http://www.basho.com.

Their github page still just has 1.0-rc1 tagged. I'm excited though.
You know what's a simple test for NaN? The isNaN built-in function...