skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He says the problem is design by focus groups. Consumers know exactly what they want, but when a company produces it, they go buy something else more interesting. I've tried using focus groups back in the last century. It doesnt produce anything useful, except when you are looking for flaws in your product.
Good eyes. Thanks!
I really wanted to purchase but would rather not send CC info over non-SSL connections. Are you going to be putting the store on SSL at some point?

Or maybe it is supposed to be but there are some fallbacks being used under the current heavy load.
That application is a joy to read.

One answer stands out for me, it probably was instrumental in the eventual success for dropbox:

# Do any founders have other commitments between June and August 2007 inclusive?
> No; I've given notice at Bit9 to work on this full time regardless of YC funding.

That's really great. Drew had already decided to push ahead, with or without YC, he basically positioned himself to negotiate from strength, in turn increasing his chances of getting funded by YC.

That's showing a lot of business savvy there. Instead of coming 'cap in hand' he's telling YC: "If you want on board you may, but the train will run regardless."
Twitter Accounts Every Startup Investor Should Follow
I think taking the discussion to rights is just a bad idea in the first place. Stick with what's in the law, and argue morality without appealing to rights.
Apple blames iPhone rumors for disappointing results
Not always and certainly not in this case.
Considering that it seems like a large preponderance of startups are trying to be "the next Facebook", I think the guy who started the current Facebook (I'm assuming the Winklevei were unavailable) would be super relevant.
I remember a while back when there was some commotion about Google not necessarily deleting your emails even when you delete them off Gmail. What they did was they kept your email for an amount of time for ad purposes.

Just did some research while writing this post and it seems that Google changed their ToC for Gmail from deleting emails within 60 days of being deleted by the user to "make reasonable efforts to remove deleted information from our systems as quickly as is practical".
Foursquare's Dennis Crowley: It's Still About Growth, Not Ad Money (Yet)
Ten Best Cities For Startup Communities
The only right answer to “How are you different from Competitor X?”
In fact, it's even better than what the author said:

import requests
print requests.get('http://gun.io').content

Only two lines!
require 'net/http'

Net::HTTP.get_print 'www.gun.io', '/'

That's it! In only two lines of ruby, you can grab a whole webpage and print it to the screen. Awesome! - and it's in the standard lib ;)

I agree, when I left PHPland I chose Ruby over Python because the (web) community was larger, there were just more books, blogs, screencasts, etc for Ruby/Rails.

There seems to be more ideas generated out of the Ruby community, I'd add Sinatra and HAML to the list above, like Rails they've both been ported to other languages.

OF course Heroku was Ruby first and it's so good that my PHP/Java/Python friends jumped for joy when their language became supported.
Fado Pub is a great place for lunch! I hate the default iPhone calendar application. I'll be purchasing ASAP.
Yes. Its for people to see what kind of data is readily available and what isn't.

I know someone here mentioned why don't they set up a site where anyone can access it.
In Canada, you should be able to request this information under Section 23 of the Personal Information Protection Act [1](in BC), or PIPEDA elsewhere.

[1] http://www.leg.bc.ca/37th4th/3rd_read/gov38-3.htm#section23
I only have two words to say: Truly staggering.
This looks fantastic, all the best with your launch! It makes me wish I had a smart phone.
Glad I could help you guys improve ;). You can reach me at andrew [at] beeets.com if you want to stay in touch, I'd love to try it out and possibly work with you guys on a fix (maybe something is terribly wrong with my site)
SparkleShare is a collaboration and sharing tool
I agree, I love Python but I've spent untold hours dealing with its unicode issues.
A shameless plug on top of your shameless plugin: We also wrote our own encoding system, called Tootsie (think Dustin Hoffman), which is in production use:

https://github.com/alexstaubo/tootsie

Written in Ruby, based on FFmpeg + ImageMagick, handles both video, audio and photos (we use it for photo/thumbnail scaling). JSON API, easy to use. It's designed to run anywhere, EC2 in particular. MIT license.
The design is simple (in a good way) and attractive, I like it. The idea is fantastic. Glossing over the comments I understand the concern that it's 'risky,' but this seems less risky than direct contact via their phone number which I'm sure some teachers already do.

Giving teachers more ways to communicate with their students is something I'll always be a fan of, and I'm sure even some parents wouldn't mind being on the list for some texts (assignment reminders?).

Congrats on a cool idea and a neat startup.
I, on the other hand, thought the site as quite snappy. My biggest confusion was that I was trying to add multiple sections to be replaced on the first step, rather than delete it later. I would really suggest trying out the "remove the part you don't want" before adding what you do. In my eyes, I always see what I want to remove before what I want to add/change.
Europe has strong data protection laws that the US does not have, so it is entirely apt to say that it is Europe vs Facebook. Could you say that it is Max vs Facebook, yes, you'd be just as right, however these rights affect every single person in Europe that is browsing the internet and comes across a site with a Facebook like button.
How Dropbox Will Die
Is Your Mind Prepared for Wealth? - Adam Chandler Inspired Me Today
Lesson from a Seattle bar: Beware your social media army
Speeding up a Django web site without touching the code
I'm glad to help you with that. I ran into the same problem too. Didn't want to leave my personal info when you're already going through paypal.
A process can't change the address space of another process, period.

Don't forget ptrace.
I don't understand - you can generate html easily with python. Can you elaborate?
I find it funny and a little sad that a single US corp is being pitted against an entire continent. We've all known some corps and individuals have had more wealth than entire countries but this is something different. Eventually I think we'll see the EU become more and more like the Federal US.
>The reason I ask is that the United States has a lot of >trouble enforcing its copyright laws abroad.

Note this is entirely different when a company has a presence in the US, any of the servers are in the US, or even if the DNS servers are in the US.
This got me as well, luckily I saw this post. I went straight to the checkout rather than the cart and never saw the coupon area either.

Bought and anxiously waiting for my email with the books! I've always had trouble writing wishy washy content and need to do a huge update for SEO so this couldn't have come at a better time!

Congratulations, thanks and best of luck all in one!
I wish I could be there to see Drew Houston. He's a role model for startups.
Change the appearance of "GROOOVY FOR IPHONE" and "WE'RE LAUNCHING SOON." at the top there. It's a landing page which is supposed to advertise your service and get people excited. You have a neat logo, maybe consider putting that up instead of mimicking the Arial all-caps font you have displaying your main content.

I actually didn't realize at first you could "scroll" from step to step ... I thought the '>' arrow next to the e-mail input was supposed to mean "input your e-mail, then we'll show you the rest!". People like to know what they're signing up for before giving away personal information, right? So my suggestion is make the steps more obvious, i.e. put them all on one page or have a way to scroll through the steps with the e-mail input always visible so potential users can sign up the moment they are interested!

Hope that helped and best of luck!
Google's WebGL Bookcase
Cryptography: time-lock puzzles
This is a bit of an idiotic question because one is not testing knowledge of computing or software systems, but rather trivial knowledge of an arcane corner of the language.

Keep in mind that this is Ksplice; for the work they do, this might not be meaningless arcana.
Ask HN: Tips on Learning Front End Web Development?
Hey guys. I decided I wanted to start learning some front end development and wanted to see if I can get some advice. I am trying to plan out a curriculum for myself, but I don't think I understand the overlap between some languages and how they come into play. I already know some python and some java. I figured it would make the most sense to start with html/css. After that I am not sure what makes the most sense. Do I learn django(figured since I know python its easier to go to django than rails)? javascript/coffescript? Do I need to learn a database language? If so, which is best? MySQL? MongoDB?

Thanks for the help.
It's when entering them directly, clicking on links, or using bookmarks. The &amp; gets passed through to the server--it's not just an issue with the UI. Annoying as hell.
When people say things like this, it sounds just a little condescending. It's not nearly as stupid as your indifference suggests.

Humans are abstract thinkers. We like to generalize principles from our observations. We often live our lives by these principles, so to the extent these principles effectively predict the future and allow us to manage our lives better, we're going to form an attachment to them. When you make another observation of success based on the principles that you appreciate, this reinforces part of your decision making framework. For fundamental principles, you probably have many, many decisions bound up in their correctness. If a principle turns out to be wrong, it will be very costly to correct all the decisions based on the wrong principle, so it's exceptionally rational for feeling creatures to hope for their principles to be validated by more observations.

Apple is a company with some very public and explicit principles.

Plus, these principles make products. If you think products by a certain company make your life a lot easier, you're going to want them to thrive. Some people actually hold the principle that particular companies are more innovative than others and if they didn't exist, some of the products they like simply wouldn't exist. For example, Android exists today, and some of those phones are pretty similar to the iPhone. But many people don't think Android phones would exist today in anything like its current manifestation if Apple hadn't done iPhone. This is arguable, but that's certainly beside the point. Many, many people truly believe this, and it can't be disproved.

Identifying with sports teams depends. It's hard to believe you don't understand that people usually follow and identify with sports team because of instinctive tribalism. However, you can follow teams for other reason. I'm an avid sports follower, and in general, I glom onto different teams and story lines at the beginning of the season, and it seems to have to do with proving to other fans my predictive abilities. Other reasons I follow certain teams is because I believe the principles by which they're led will achieve a higher degree of success over time, e.g., I admire the core tenets by which the Spurs and Patriots run their organizations.
Your first problem is "completely legal" -- you seem to assume that American law is controlling. Unfortunately, legal is place sensitive.

In order to do business in the EU you generally have to comply with their laws. One of the privileges the EU generally grants their citizens is that companies must, on demand, produce all data they store about that person. Why should this be true? Because EU citizens living in democracies want it to be so.

If fb doesn't like it they are free to not do business there. Otherwise, they have to comply.
The footnote was interesting. Instead of (lambda (x) (* x x)), Smalltalk writes [:x | x*x]. Apparently Church's original lambda notation was very close to that.

This helps more than you'd think. For example,
(if condition
(lambda () foo)
(lambda () bar))
is too verbose, but
(if condition [foo] [bar])
is fine. Simplifying lambda gives you lazy evaluation, and then you don't need syntax for conditionals.
Generally you design a benchmark and pay an "independent" lab to run it and publish the results.
Very nice article and thanks for the intro to Requests. Though, I'm not sure we would agree about Django being the best thing to learn in the long run.

I undertook to move to Python for web development about 8 months ago and embarked on a thorough quest for the one true framework. Obviously Django was the first and most recurrent recommendation. Having briefly toyed with it in the past, I really could see myself commit to it for the long run. The various raving reviews also made the choice all that simple. I was all ready to give it my seal of approval, when I encountered my first complain, which was so compelling that it raised an eyebrow.

It was about an experienced Python programmer explaining that as time went and as he progressed with Django, he found himself increasingly swapping parts out of it for external libraries. SQLAlchemy, WTForms, Jinja2. In the end he had only the routing module and the admin, which wasn't that big a deal for him. He was asking what was the point of using a full-stack framework not necessarily designed with interchangeability in mind, if you end up just using it like a glue mini-framework?

As I dug deeper, I found more similar complains, all from similarly experienced developers, who all ended up adopting something else with a light plugable base approach. I heard of Repose.bfg, Pyramid, Werkzeug and a slew of other ones, that allow you to get down and dirty fast, while still allowing you to get big in the long run.

Just as you, I was recently asked by a friend wanting to get into web applications development to recommend a platform to work from. I also did point to Django, but explained that it wasn't because it's necessarily the best, but rather because it's the gentler introduction. It comes with batteries, crutches, first aid kit and a nice box of goodies, perfect for someone who has no clue what they're doing.

Note that I'm not dissing Django or relegating it as an amateurish framework. I agonized on my decision and still sometimes experience some Django envy (FYI I adopted Flask and don't regret it one bit). Nonetheless, it's hard to deny that it does a particularly good job of introducing newbies to good concepts fast, while at the same time being notorious for getting in the way of more experienced developer than some other frameworks.
I've seen friends try that are currently studying in the US, but are originally from The Netherlands, and Facebook responded saying that they are in contract with the US company, and thus are not eligible to receive said data. I personally plan on getting a VPN in the UK/The Netherlands and asking for my data, to have it sent to my grandparents address. Hopefully at that point they will send me the data as requested.

I am technically a Dutch citizen since I still have my Dutch passport, but I live in the United States with a green card.
Great job on shipping. How long have you been working on this?

The app looks neat. I'm guessing you've used bits of (twitter) bootstrap. I get what the app does almost instantly. The logo/imagery stands out quite well.
I can envision this going viral, after a few tweaks and a little more activity.

-----

I'll be a critic for a moment:

- Homepage feels a little sparse.

- Wish you'd asked for the twitter login early on, and not while I'm trying to take an action.

- Wish there was a more complete example of a story I could collaborate on.

- It'd help your cause to emulate a little activity early on.

- Could you perhaps consider gamifying it a bit. Leaderboards perhaps.

I'd like to see where this goes.
WebGL bookcase
http://db.tt/yNbr8VFa

Great idea
Why on earth I didn't heard about Requests before? How does it compares against urllib2?
Yes, I read Chris' blog every Monday and Thursday. Even got a chance to meet him when he was on his book tour. Either way, he is a great resource. Thanks for posting the link.
http://db.tt/VYdbFzj grazie!
Well...urllib is the same

import urllib
print urllib.urlopen('http://gun.io').read()

And to be clear, you'd really never want to just print the content like that. You'd be doing something like.

import urllib
import simplejson

req = urllib.urlopen("https://graph.facebook.com/some_id")
response = req.read()

json_data = simplejson.loads(response)

(Python is syntactically pretty, imho)
import requests; print requests.get('http://gun.io').content

my god, python is cloud scale.
It was so successful because these useless "Social Media Experts" needed a metric to justify their job.

Nobody asked the techies if this could be a trojan horse.
Isn't Zuck's expertise in being "the actual Facebook," though? Is the conventional wisdom that business (in general) is fractal?
I'm not too impressed. The content is good, but they just seem to give you links to software and then say "Okay, just use this, this, and this and then you'll have an HTML5 app." It doesn't show me how I can use those bits of software. I can find more useful information on HTML5 through a Google search.
I'd guess that's the standard Wordpress account reg email - Wordpress _does_ email you a cleartext password, but it does also hash the password and only stores the hash.

I think it's a reasonable tradeoff - those of us with properly managed password storage can delete the email, but the 99% who _don't_ use some form of password safe can keep using their email archive as their place to look up passwords they've forgotten. (I see this a _lot_ in our clients non-technical Wordpress site subscribers...)
Thanks. We've checked them out and even built a couple of prototypes but was not impressed with video quality.
Nonsense - if it wasn't for focus groups we wouldn't have been able to launch our new car with improved whip holder!
This reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell's piece about New Coke in Blink.
Misrepresentation is similar to neglect in that it's typically necessary for lawyers to argue and juries to decide. In this actual case, to repeat count's analogy, why aren't filesystem users complaining that their deleted data isn't "really deleted" (ignoring that such FS software is probably a no-warranty thing)? I've had to recover rm'd data a number of times myself. I don't think "deletion" has ever meant an expectation of "completely wipe out any traces of" in the digital world. I wouldn't put it past a lawyer to be able to convince a jury otherwise though, but it'd set a dangerous precedent.
Friends & acquaintances can change your mind (literally)
Second that ... NR is great, I'm in there way more than I'm in Google Analytics.
After A Rare Miss, Apple Predicts Record iPhone, iPad Sales
Students can go to https://www.dropbox.com/edu and get double referrals (500mb) and double referral limit(16GB), is also retroactive!
I think Mazzo is referring to a lack of Django's ORM.
Typography for developers
I only use Google Analytics out of all the datasources that you integrate with. I believe the value your product brings to the table is the aggregation of all those datasources.
Hence, I wouldn't get much value out of it, as Google Analytics allows me to customize my dashboard, and provides more metrics.

Regarding my second point, I don't have any specific suggestions, but it was more related to my first point. If I don't use the datasource aggregation feature, then there currently is no added value for me to use your product on a daily basis.
Some ideas would be to create more visual mashups of data, such as illustrating how a user got to your website, what they did, and for how long.

So to conclude, I wouldn't use it on a daily basis with my use case, however, you are probably going after a different market segment, is that right?
HFT: spreads vs liquidity
Hey, I actually work for one of the competitors of the above, and I'm wondering if you had a bit more info about this?

feel free to email me, if you'd rather take this offline :) oren.mazor@gmail.com
Going from secure to non secure currently doesn't even give an indication that Google is sending the traffic, am I missing something?
I'm pretty sure he means that there's no database support built in, ie. you need to go download something like SQLAlchemy, SQLObject, Storm, etc. If you're already going to do that anyway it's not so much of an issue, but for people who are just getting their feet wet, it's yet another obstacle to overcome.
1. Learn JavaScript (the language)

http://eloquentjavascript.net/
http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Good-Parts-Douglas-Crockfor...

2. Learn jQuery (a JavaScript library)

http://jquery.com/
http://www.amazon.com/jQuery-Action-Second-Bear-Bibeault/dp/...

3. Learn SQL (the language)

http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-SQL-Minutes/dp/067...

4. Pick an implementation

MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle

----------------------------------

After that, most application development languages are just syntax. Pick what feels best.

Learn how to use Ajax to tie client-side requests to server-side requests and you're marketable.
The end result with my site looked pretty much like my current site, but with little Like buttons all over. I am not enamored. I'm sure others will find it useful, though.
Don't visit sites that use the Like button, block the Facebook domain. It's not that difficult.
Went through the demo. Here is my advice:

1. The pitch of "instant blog theme to match your website" is a compelling one, and could lead to a profitable business model IMO.

2. For a version 1/MVP, I think it worked reasonably well.

3. However, I don't think it's a compelling enough feature to build YetAnotherBloggingPlatform and convince people to switch. I'm convinced Blogic would be way more enticing if you simply created themes for WordPress, Tumblr, and Posterous and charged $ for it. If you can scrape my site and build a blogging platform, then you can easily create the CSS/HTML/PHP necessary for these platforms.

Besides, do you really want to deal with 1000s of abandoned blogs, battling comment spam, and trying to play feature catch-up with these guys? ("Posterous does X. Why don't you? WordPress has Y. Why don't you?") Trust me, you don't

Of course, this means you're now competing with the likes of ThemeForest, et al. But that's not a bad thing. They've proven that people will pay to make their blog look good.

My $0.02
Copywriting is taken for granted. Period. It's taken for granted in the Fortune 500 world, where marketing departments view it as a cheap commodity. And it's taken for granted at a lot of tech companies (Apple's being a notable exception).

But it shouldn't be. And a project like this one -- not to mention the founder/author's innovation and tenacity -- will help turn the tide.

There's certainly a fair amount of dark art to quality writing, but there's also science. And it's refreshing to see a results-focused approach that seeks to separate the merely mellifluous from the legitimately effective.

Big kudos on this one!
How do you know an admin/mod deleted it?
Where have you been indeed? It's been posted on HN at least twice and made page 1 both times:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2882301

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3094695
Yes, bigiain is right ---- it's standard. I don't keep or store any of your personal information myself... unless you sign up for copy tips, in which case I keep your name and email address (using MailChimp).
Same thoughts here, I also love the Theme Extracting Wizard, very slick!
The interesting thing about such architectures is that the common stdio idiom:

int c;

while ((c = getchar()) != EOF) {

does not work properly on them.
That's great feedback, we never thought about it like that, but it makes perfect sense.