skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1- How long (average)does it take to acquire a company from the time you send the first email to the time the check clears in their bank account?

2- For every company you acquire how many companies do you look into and end up not buying?
He's becoming their Apple columnist, so he's not full-time anymore.
Both, but only as a limited columnist at TechCrunch.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/03/mg-siegler-will-become-our-...
Having done two balloon launches, it is not that hard to find resources that specify what GPS modules will work and what ones won't work.

We used a

Garmin GPS 18

and it worked flawlessly (other than our night launch, where we recorded really low freezing temperatures and we think that our GPS froze because it stopped giving us data).

Our first launch got to 92k+ ft and the GPS kept reporting without issues.
Ask HN: Looking for MySQL / PHP hacker for a project 
We are a marketing firm creating our first consumer facing resource. We need a hacker comfortable with PHP and MySQL to help us take the project from paper to code.

We have created a rough specification document outlining the features and functionality we will require. Currently there is some level of detail still missing however from a high level the entire project is defined. We expect if the project is successful to "bolt" on a 2nd piece to the initial project and we have also defined what that would be so that it will be possible to code with the 2nd piece in mind.

This project is fully funded and ready to go. If you want more information on this project please email me. My email can be found in my profile.
But isn't it by definition impossible to expect that plaintext can replace a markup? (I just wanted to use a strikethrough; can markdown do that?). That's just a niche for developers. Also i believe markdown just started its hype cycle: http://www.google.com/trends?q=markdown
I get a blank page when I use opera, a blog post when I use chrome, firefox, safari, and ie. Is a better browser in order!?
I can afford to upgrade my Github account, but I'm a bit cheap when it comes to doing so.

I do a lot of experimentation and I'm of the opinion that not everything I do is worthy of sharing. I've partially written a web interface for pianobar, a feed to rss translator for reformatting NOAA forecasts (they discontinued the REST service), some wiki-like software, and even some barebones PBX interfaces for an Asterisk replacement.

The work that I have put on Github hasn't seen a ton of interest—not that they're terribly complete. But I did write a simple-but-useful-enough asynchronous "cron"[1] system for Go (BSD licensed). I got only 1 comment questioning how I implemented it with a qualified "good job" (if that).

I'm no Ryan Bates or Linus Torvalds. Several times I've interacted with OSS projects, run into trouble, and asked relevant questions. But because I'm not a linux/unix guru I get flamed (I just bought a Mac 16 months ago, gimme a break).

Why expose myself? I'm not trying to flame you, but I did want to express my long-standing disappointment with the "friendliness" of a number of communities (HN included).

[1]: https://github.com/rk/cron.go
I'm not the right person to speak to overall corporate strategy. For an overview of the context of the announcements today, I would watch the MAX keynote or check out the Creative Cloud product page:

http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud.html
As a fellow Paddy, I salute you.
Looking forward to the service being available in Ireland.
I love MGs writing and from what I know of him (admittedly just online through TechCrunch), he seems like a cool guy.

But I'm failing to see how being a (great) writer translates into being a VC?
Why We Left High Paying Jobs to Found a Startup
Ha, good point.

I love PHP, but I'm in programming like a shade-tree mechanic: I just want a large enough hammer to make something work, I don't care how pretty the end result is.
Huffington Post Announces HuffPost High School; Partners with Teens in Tech Labs
That's funny, we threw it out because it had no effect on conversion and wasn't worth the money. The only logo that seemed to have a solid impact was the hacker safe logo, which we kept.
It really depends--every company is different and has a different set of dependencies between its employees. Both Typekit and Nitobi have amazing teams that we hope will be with Adobe for a long time.
"It's Apache-licensed and hosted on Github, but I'm not recommending that anyone other than me use it at this time. You can learn from it, though."

Wow, patronise much?
Minuteman Library Network - Response to HarperCollins Ebook Checkout Limits
This all presumes networking is necessary; it isn't. I don't have to do it at all.
Unemployment: Structure or Demand?
"Why would they close the doors?"

Very good question, but one that needs a responsible answer. Adobe wants the web to live on using its proprietary formats like Flash while a growing minority is resisting this and switching to HTML5. Adobe's efforts are a good start but have a long way to go. Muse, for example, has good intentions but in practice is a horrible product with extremely convoluted code.

I'm not a Flash hater as I love the fact that YouTube grew on this standard and many fun games are because of Flash but I also see the reason why HTML5 is a much better standard to get behind and why technologies like Flash will ultimately die unless they become more open.
How long did the acquisition process take for each?

How important is conflict resolution during these deals?

(This one is really broad and shows some ignorance)
When you are driving acquisitions, do you treat the deal like a developer would treat a large project? Do you have a set of requirements that you work toward? Do you have to track changes and perform QA?
> macro-style code (where the code is ever-evolving and is practically a media file)

I'm afraid I don't follow; what do you mean by this bit here?
How Adobe is gonna position Omniture's products now that Google Analytics has a premium offer and has a huge installed user base? Are you looking for specific acquisitions in the web Analytics space?
"Hope they change their minds on this."

They won't.

Remember, this isn't the case of some suit or network executive not renewing the show. This is the creative force of the show saying that they've made a good run and that they are ready for other challenges.

Diggnation had a great run, I was an avid watcher for the first few years. If Alex and Kevin think they can better apply the energy they're spending on Diggnation, then more power to them.
Hey cwilson, can you elaborate on why you think "meeting the right people and getting your name out there is just SO much easier" in the Bay Area? Do you mean getting your name out to customers, investors, potential hires, potential acquirers, or some combination?
To be fair, I really, really enjoy a number of the guest posters on TechCrunch - I find the third-party columns to be refreshing and informative. Tom Anderson, Justin Kan, etc...

But you're right, it will be interesting to see what happens to TechCrunch now without MG in a regular contributing position. With Arrington and Paul Carr gone, most of TechCrunch's editorial "stars" have moved on.
Using dropbox is problematic for security reasons, but Joe's solution offers a benefit (over rsync, etc.) he doesn't mention in his post, which is that it places his blog source in the cloud as well, and makes it amenable to editing from virtually any desktop/laptop/android/iphone/ipad out there.

I suspect it's easier to go to a new client and set up dropbox on it and link it in, than it is to set up rsync and any necessary keys or firewall holes or if you are using windows, the cygwin system to support rsync.

There's a lot to be said about simplicity and ubiquity, especially if it's to encourage making a blog post, and not discourage it.

That said, using dropbox for this is terribly problematic in terms of security.
I am paying attention, trust me, but I am a little dubious, too, considering Adobe's past. If Adobe tries to throw money at bringing down HTML5, I surely hope this is not the beginning of that. May Typekit continue to thrive and improve without the bloat and closeness that Adobe likes to incorporate into its products.
Apple columnist seems generous to me. Apple evangelist/advocate seems a lot closer to what he does. He forms what I consider the trifecta of Apple evangelists online: MG, Gruber, Dilger.
The existence of packet radio doesn't necessarily constitute prior art. The patents are far more likely to be on certain very narrowly defined processes that are arguably implemented in a WiFi system than on a very broad field like "digital communication over radio". If the hams didn't use the particular techniques at issue, then that wouldn't constitute prior art.

You really need to read the specific claims in the patents themselves to figure out how to invalidate or avoid the patents.
Technical screening tool for startups, now free
Techcrunch and everyone involved, including AOL, all seem incredibly shady.
5 minute wonders: The ASP.NET membership provider
The server was down initially until I upgraded my EC2 instance from micro to small. Now it's running, but yeah, I didn't test in Opera so I'm not surprised.
The condition will always evaluate to False, a lower-case string can't be in a string that has been .uppper()ed. popen(...).lower() will work.
...Sure, your computer can perform 10 billion floating point operations per second. But most of the time it’s not doing anything at all. Just like you...

This is a great rant. Nice emotional content, lots of technical details, the author qualifies his credentials, etc. Easily one of the better articles I've read in the past few weeks.

One of the things he mentions is the pain of setup -- something I've painfully watched develop over the years. Used to be you could go from a dead stop to programming something useful in about 10 seconds. Now, as he points out, it's not unusual to spend weeks digging around through vendor requirements, obscure dialects, rumor and configuration nightmares simply trying to get started. It's crazy. We've complicated the plumbing to the point nobody knows how to work the damn shower any more.
Fighting The Upgrade Compulsion
It's not supposed to. It's supposed to position the product in the market.
Please, NO. I would cringe at a full version of Jira being included, too. If I want one of those, I will install one of them. I do think BB's issues are under-powered (and it is a major problem), but I'd much rather have a clean, clear, well-designed 20% of Jira.
They should be suing the manufacturers in the first place. Even if we were to assume for a moment that this patent has any validity whatsoever, it would not be the users of the wireless router than owe them a royalty payment, but the router manufacturers. And I seriously doubt that a fair royalty on a single router (such as what you might find in one of these small coffeeshops that they are suing) is in the thousands of dollars.
> In any given 12 hour day of programming, I’d say less than a single hour goes to writing new code now.

For the longest time I've felt guilty of this, until I started seeing my coworkers committing code that I would later have to correct. Our company is such a mess right now.
I suggest anybody interested to read:

No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3068513

for a better idea why the state of art is actually much less terrible than it appears to idealists.

"I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation. We still make syntax errors, to be sure; but they are fuzz compared with the conceptual errors in most systems.

If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet."
I'm glad to read this and hope that HTML5 and open standards becomes a huge priority for Adobe and not an after-thought.

I see decent intentions with products like Muse but its faults outweigh its benefits and I do not expect this particular product to see much life unless its vastly improved or changed.

As a web coder, I heavily rely on products like Photoshop and am disappointed with bloat and inefficiencies I've experienced over the years, so I really have hard time believing the same fate won't happen to Typekit. That said, I am going to try to keep the skeptic in me quiet as I watch what happens to this awesome product.
Celebrating 5th Birthday of Wikileaks (Born : 4th Oct 2006)
I'm a lead developer at a company that creates highly-specialized training tools using Flash. We have an enormous library of content built over the last 10 years that we intend to support into the future. Adobe seems to be considering HTML5 as an alternative/addition to the Flash Player. There's a lot of conflict in the industry about Flash/HTML5, and Adobe is appeasing both sides by continuing to develop the Flash Player while investigating HTM5 export, acquiring and developing prominent HTML5 tools, etc. This is fantastic.

Do you have any recommendations for teams with lots of Flash-based content, to prepare for the transition to an HTML5 environment? Can we continue creating Flash content as we always have, trusting that Adobe will provide a means to migrate/recompile our existing FLAs or SWFs to HTML5 when the time comes? Or should we take any preparatory action to ease the transition? For instance, authoring our graphics using SVG, writing our code in an intermediate scripting language that may be compiled to ActionScript or JavaScript, etc?

I realize you might not be the best person to ask about this, but in your position it seems probable that you'd be aware of the roadmap for Flash. I realize the roadmap is confidential, but any tips or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Alternatively, if you could recommend someone for me to talk to about this, I'd be grateful.

EDIT: Any sort of response would be great. There seem to be a lot of folks here who are interested in this issue.
Un Control De Acceso Optimizado Por Sistemas Biom�tricos
Does the hold true outside of the US? As a Canadian I'm not sure I've ever seen the BBB symbol. Maybe I'm just too young though.
So, complicated things are complicated?

This sounds vaguely like one of the many "We must have a Do-What-I-Mean language" posts I've been reading since at least the 80's.

Yes, many things in the "state of the art" could certainly be better. But the belief that that is only so because the powers that be want to make money is rather misguided. Building better tools and developing better techniques is hard work.

(I'm not even going to comment on the fact that the author in the same article demands a more formal basis of our craft and at the same time thinks PHP is the best language ever. I was slightly amused)
Were one... gah.
What are your plans for build.phonegap.com, regarding pricing, feature scope and API?
I'd throw in Horace Dediu of Asymco and Marco Arment and maybe David Pogue. I don't know who Dilger is.
Wow, I bet people who elected Rep. Lee Terry are proud.
1- It really depends: on the urgency, on the size of the company, on the specific synergies. Big deals can be done quickly if we're confident enough in the high level rationale to figure out the details later. But sometimes the details really matter, even in very small deals. Sometimes only a few weeks, sometimes it's an ongoing relationship over multiple years.

2- For every deal we look at a variety of companies in the space, at least two or three, usually more.
Does Adobe plan more of these types of acquisitions in the future?
Email won't do, you want to e.g fix typos after publishing. I also think that there's something powerful in "all posts in one file" strategy. You might revise drafts more often, read older posts again to expand on them etc. I'm going to try that
They'll do well because they'll be able to get into the hot deals.
Growl 1.3 Now On The Mac App Store: $1.99, Completely Rewritten
Besides being better suited to non-technical users (as joehewitt points out on this very thread), it also has an advantage of running in the background, i.e. you don't have to remember to run anything.

Also, there's this webapp called http://droppages.com/ which makes publishing from DropBox even easier.

Though personally, if I had to help a non-technical friend with setting up a blog, I'd just send him to Wordpress.com.
World of Goo Creator believes Microsoft XBLA is past its prime
The book "Against Intellectual Monopoly" is highly recommended reading for the question of patents (and other intellectual property). The authors make a mostly empirical survey of the effects of intellectual property laws and of their absence in a wide range of industries, and conclude that their effect is a stifling rather than an encouragement of innovation. I think it's especially appropriate because, while my own opinion on the issue comes from moral reasoning (and it's generally frustrating to try to argue that side), this book presents a wealth of stories and statistics that are just plain interesting to anyone who cares about the issue.

http://www.dklevine.com/papers/imbookfinalall.pdf
Nitobi already announced preliminary pricing here:
http://www.phonegap.com/2011/09/30/phonegap-build-moves-to-o...

We don't have anything else to announce right now.
I know, you know, the manufactures know, the lawyers know, but unfortunately the lawyers do not care. They just want to make easy money. This might be a good way to shift the pain to the manufactures.
When the President Can Kill Whoever He Wants (video)
Out of curiosity, what "Apple Columnists" out there would you not consider to be "Apple evangelists/advocates"?
I wonder how true this is outside techies. I'm personally network-agnostic, as I only use my "phone" for data and calls from the wife. I use about 100 minutes a month, so it doesn't matter.

My wife, however, makes at least 60 minutes of calls on more days than not, keeping in touch with friends and family (basically all the social lubrication I do with email and Google+). For her, the network effect is incredibly strong: all her friends and family are on Verizon, so she is very hesitant to switch as she gets the in-network minutes free. It was a huge deal for her when I announced I wanted to leave Verizon (for a Virgin Mobile Android) and how many minutes that would add to her plan.

I think a lot of people are loyal to their network not because of what they get from it, but about the people they know on it.
Hetzner launches new "EX" server line-up
What security problems do you foresee? As I outlined in my post, I created a dedicated Dropbox account for the blog and it only synchronizes files meant for the blog. If those became public it wouldn't be a problem.
Antiquing with the DoD
> incomplete projects?

It depends on what you mean by "incomplete". 50 lines of code which do almost nothing useful are probably not worth publishing. But why not publishing a half-complete project? Publishing may help you find contributors. And the early feedback helps you to decide if your project is worth more intense attention.

> Messy/hacky experiments?

If the code is not too bad, I publish even that stuff (as long as it is big enough to be notable), e.g.

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/vserver

> Completely idiotic/backwards stuff done for fun?

I recently published such a project and got surprisingly great feedback:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3061050

> Play-projects purely attempted for "ha I did it!"?

Why not? You never know who'll like it anyway, e.g.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/hosh/

> Legally-grey (or blatantly illegal) projects?

Depending on how much trouble this might cause, you probably shouldn't upload it anywhere. Even a "private" repository on GitHub/BitBucket might be too risky.

On the other hand, I know about a Free Software clone of a game that used the original graphics and music. Not quite legal, but the game was very old and the right holders obviously didn't care. However, after publishing the project got a little fan base that eventually included graphic designers and musicians, who replaced the proprietary stuff step by step with their own creations. So the game changed from "legally-grey" to "solid free". This would never have been possible if the game hadn't been published.

> Or even school projects?

My school projects were about the first ones I published, and I'm pretty proud about what I wrote in that age, e.g.

http://davis.sf.net/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/voji/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/volt/

Later I also published some notable university project works (sorry, German language):

http://www.profv.de/uni/

However, these are only project works. I will never publish specific solutions to homework excercises, as this would only help cheaters and nobody else.
Linode DDOS - Network issue in Fremont
we are using vlad instead of capistrano and are very happy with it. it is much simpler conceptually. Also from several projects that I converted from capistrano to vlad it runs much much faster for the standard deployment process. I'm not sure what is the reason as I didn't investigate it much.

we have custom vlad plugins for usual rails related stuff, so our config/deploy.rb scripts are usually about 5-10 lines long. see https://github.com/astrails/vladify
The fit solution
Great motivational video on fitness
yeah agreed, in fact I'd say it's the wrong type of person for the job.

a writer on techcrunch tends to cover hype products with no real value

a VC on the other hand invests money into products that have to make money
and trust developers to make good decisions based on knowledge

I would add to that, "give individuals enough room to make mistakes that everyone, especially themselves, can learn from"
I resonate with Zack's rant, we have apparently chewed much of the same bugs.

A quick answer to your @singular's questions:
1) Existing code - this trumps writing everything from scratch.
2) I don't agree, I believe the compuation is straightforward, my belief is that what you perceive as 'progress' is mostly just 'go really really fast.' I showed a Microsoft engineer at the Vintage computer festival installing an RDBMS on VMS while four people were playing games and exploring VMS on four terminals connected to the machine, then I fired up and ran the test code to show the code had installed and was usable. It did not impress him that I didn't reboot the system once, nor did the other four people using the system notice I had installed a new capability that was available to everyone using the OS. Those are not design goals of a 'personal' OS like Windos/DOS/NT, although they could be. The stuff you learn in CS classes about architecture and layers and models and invariants, can make for very robust systems.

3. My experience is that programmers program. Which is to say that they feel more productive when they produce 10,000 lines of code than when they delete 500 lines of code and re-organize another 500 lines. Unlike more 'physical goods' types of industries it is easier to push that stuff out into production. So more of it ends up in production.

4. Not sure where this was going.

5. This is something I like to believe in too, its just code, so write new code. Hey Linus did it right? The challenge is that it will take 4 - 5 years for one person to get to the point where they can do 'useful' stuff. That is a lonely time. I wrote the moral equivalent of ChromeOS (although using eCos as the underlying task scheduler and some of the original Java VM as the UI implementation.) Fun to write but not something picked up by anyone. You get tired.

6. I'd take a look at eCos here, one of the cool things about that project was a tool (ecosconfig) which helped keep leaks from developing.

In the 'hard' world (say Civil Engineering) there are liability laws that provide a corrective force. In software it is so easy to just get something put togehter that kinda works, that unless you are more interested in the writing than the result, you may find that you're spending less time on structure and more on results.