skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More so: the cost of copying and transporting an HD (70mm equivalent) print to a theatre is a tiny fraction of what it is for film. Which enables greater flexibility, as you point out, but also enables more money to go to the theatre or to the artists.
I presume this service is only targeting the USA. Here in Europe, any bank will do immediate domestic transfers for free.
Student progress can be tied to teacher's school
The author takes into account those issues, pointing out that some Americans are already subsidized by transfer payments today.
There is openappmkt.com, but there are certain hardware features which are inaccessible to web apps, so it's a subpar solution.
Audio support is a giant, basic problem. Games have sound.

Beyond that, all the code is in Javascript and out in the open, and the performance of Canvas isn't any better than Flash's software renderer.

You mention that hardware accelerated Canvas is going to arrive eventually in certain browsers, but hardware accelerated Flash has already shipped (as of last week). As well, Epic announced that Unreal Engine has been ported to the platform.
If you can transfer amounts as low as $10 then I think the 5% fee might seem reasonable. Personally 5% of £100 feels too high.
I actually find the simplicity of computing devices staggering and beautiful. If the earth was wiped out tomorrow, one would only need to remember what a turing machine is and how to make a semiconductor to rebuild them.

Also, the rant becomes too broad to have a point.
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/676/
maybe first start by criticizing it yourself to get the ball rolling? i find people are afraid to pick something apart out of politeness.

find opinionated people with a big mouth.

P.S. I'm opinionated with a big mouth but I'm not a hardcore programmer, little bit of ruby on rails, javascript, html, css
Have you considered airsoft or reballing? I used to play airsoft, never played paintball. The land/playing area would usually be provided by someone one of the players knew, private forests, empty barns, junk lots, etc. We all had our own guns. We usually managed to scrape together 5-10 people for our games. Not sure about 100. That sounds rather ambitious for a game(?)

The general trick to owning expensive equipment is to find something with very little depreciation (usually top quality items) and buy used. This makes the carrying cost rather low. For example, my hand planes for woodworking are $300+ each, but I could sell them again for 90%+ of what I paid for them, so my effective cost is only thirty bucks. A brief search on the net reveals one can get 2000 paintballs for $30. Now I don't know if they're any good or not, but that sounds pretty cheap to me. How many shots for a game? 100? That's less than two bucks.

So I think you could do it pretty cheaply if you "invest" the money and do the organizing footwork.
These are all valid points, but they are widely applicable to many types of development, not just iOS. Even on much larger projects where various features can be considered projects in and of themselves (for ex, $interdepartmental_project at $large_corporation). This advice can apply to both ends of the spectrum and anywhere in between.
The creator of DF has spoken out against the evils of these games. I can't find the link though.

And yet: There is just so much depth in DF that if you can play it at all, there is always something interesting to do, build, explore... I've pulled all-nighters playing it, trying to build the next coolest thing. With each season the game throws new triumphs and failures at you. It's not a social game, but the dwarves are individualized to the point that you might start empathizing with them.

Disclaimer: I work for a social games company.

EDIT: This may have been what I was talking about (though it's not actually a statement by Tarn):
http://www.industrygamers.com/news/braid-creator-finds-socia...

“Some kinds of games are very clearly made [to give something] – like Dwarf Fortress is definitely trying to give the players something and not exploit players. That’s very obvious to me in the way that it’s made. [Most of these social games are] the opposite of that,” explained Blow. “It’s trying to take the maximum amount while trying to give the minimum amount. So that’s an ethics of game design question. To me it doesn’t matter if people feel like they’re having fun or feel like they want to play the game, because the designers know what they’re doing.”
Nah, after a while it just becomes automatic. Kinda how toddlers must concentrate on how to walk but adults don't. Actually, I have a hard time writing about money saving tricks these days because it's all automatic/subconscious to me.

As someone else noticed in this thread, it's more of an attitude.

Also to clarify a bit, the method I recommend is more about crushing pounds or dollars than pinching pennies. It's much easier to attack a few large expenses like housing, transportation, and food than worrying about hundreds of little things.
You are healthy and don't have any dependents. I don't think you could take care of the general population on $1100 per person per year, even if you cover the low cost stuff. My rough calculations show we spend about $7500 person/year right now. Obviously we have lots of cost issues and such, but even with efficiency savings, someone has to be making the difference up.
Well, I would dig deeper as to why the feedback is negative. I personally hate existing internet pay services like PayPal due to their red tape, etc but then there are a lot of legal issues with transferring funds online and the government can cause a lot of problems with anyone in this business, so if the negative feedback is related to this then you may want to listen and see how to address any legal concerns
Some more information on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee
The real problem is in people patenting ideas that are of dubious innovation. In fact, the patent office should negate patent applications if identical ones appear within months of one another. This is because it shows that there is no genuine leap of innovation that has occurred.
> "The kids have to study and grow up eventually."

Studying addiction is just as much of a problem in South Korea as gaming addiction is. South Korean children spend a ridiculously high amount of time in class, most of it used very inefficiently. Taking away what scant leisure time the children have and devoting it to more studying is going to have a net negative effect, not a net positive one.
Technology Is One Path Toward Sustainability
People who got somewhat of a buzz reading the above may enjoy James Gleick's new book @ http://around.com
Justbeamit makes transferring large files easy
It's only simple and elegant on paper.

Computer Science is beautifully simple.

Computer Engineering is a gory mess.
I would take swombat's advice to look at query patterns, eliminate repeated queries, and tweak your algorithm to require less data well before I thought about adding indices (or caching, which I agree is the last thing you should do).

You want to make the riskiest, most invasive changes first, because those are the ones that the rest of your codebase builds upon. If you've changed your query patterns and the app still isn't fast enough, it's relatively trivial to add indices on top of that. The speed benefits are cumulative, and none of the work you've done examining your data-access patterns has been undone by making that data access faster.

If you add indices first, however, and it still isn't fast enough, you have to examine your query patterns anyway. And this time, the work you did is undone by your further optimizations. The benefits of indices depend a lot on how you access your data: they slow down writes to speed up certain queries. If it turns out that the queries you're speeding up don't occur frequently anymore, your index is counterproductive.

(That said, since adding indices is often a task that takes 5 minutes of your time, you might want to give it a try and see what sort of results you get before investing a lot of effort in other stuff. If it doesn't work, you can back out the change and then start looking at your query patterns.)
I'd hate to think how long your writes take...
The sound of capitalism
Did anyone else notice that the two theories aren't mutually exclusive? Renders the article sort of moot...
New Acer Ultrabook Ad - It's A Time-Travelling Spaceship?
13 Weird Taxes (And Tax Breaks) From Around The World
I would very cautious moving forward. What you have invested is a sunk cost. You should only analyze how to allocate future resources (namely money and your time). If a lot of people are giving you negative feedback, I would change your idea. There are only two reasons for treading against negative feedback (1) you truly believe in your product or (2) you have a good track record that shows that you know better than the average consumer. It doesn't sound like you are a seasoned entrepreneur and, I'm sorry to say this, your product does not seem like a passion play.

I would pivot.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs
Exactly.

My question then is what would the downside be to just launching and finding out?
And yet it took 50000 years worth of accumulated Homo sapiens thought to come up with a formalism describing universal computation and a model of the Nature accurate enough to understand semiconductors.
Ask HN: Why doesn't every link on the web have a snapshot of the webpage?
Google have snapshots for their search results and Snap.com allow people to do it for links within their individual websites. Is there a technical reason why every link for every website doesn't have snapshots when you hover over them. Has anyone tried?

Thanks
Beware of New Twitter Spam - "Bad blog going around about you"
Do they provide a simple app that you can use easily with a phone? I'd say the "social" aspects are where the benefit is. Being able to let one person pay the bill and everyone else just send their part seems handy.
Was I the only one who was thinking: "Jeez, I've seen some of the code that runs these complex systems, and the really amazing thing is that they ever worked at all!" :)
No. If you made an abstract object that emitted light, like the "linear light source" I hypothesized, it would be a perfect circle, and visible. It doesn't exist, of course, but if it did, it would be visible... ;-)
I think we should be thinking again the floating-point implementations on CPUs. I guess hacks like this directly on hardware would double the battery life on mobile devices. IEEE level accuracy is rarely needed either in number precision or computation accuracy. I guess fast IEEE square root isn't either space or energy efficient on silicon.
Sounds remarkably similar to my life in my early 20s.

Get out. Now. I spent about 5 years in a job that initially taught me a lot about a lot of different technologies, but I peaked very quickly. I felt like I couldn't leave, however, since I was easily the most technical and was responsible for lots of disparate systems. So, I would go to work and spend 95% of my day chatting on IRC and 5% of my day writing a solid chunk of code that made it look like I was busy.

The biggest regret I have is that I spent at least 2 years too many at that job before I grew the balls to change my life. Don't waste another day of your life rotting away in an environment that's doing nothing for you.
2000 mile solar car race across Australia just started
In both cases, they were mergers of acquisitions with existing products that had already been under development internally. The version of Maps that was bought was a desktop product, not all that different from many of the other shrinkwrapped satellite mapping programs available in the late 90s, and it was only when it was fused with the web-based Google Local ideas cooking up internally that it became the innovative product people know of.

It's very hard to identify accurate parentage for anything developed within Google, because the culture (and innovation process) is such that ideas get proposed, refined, merged with other ideas, abandoned, resurrected in other forms, implemented, iterated upon, and finally launched, often by many different groups. Even Google Search (usually identified with Larry & Sergey) isn't really their creation: large chunks were developed by Scott Hassan (eGroups founder and never actually a Google employee, though he had a big chunk of stock), Craig Silverstein, and various other Stanford students and early employees, and the ranking algorithm was completely rewritten early on by Amit Singhal.

Oftentimes the press - or just curious Internet comments - wants a single person they can associate with a product, and so they'll take a name (usually the most famous) and make something up. That's not how it really works, though. Most ideas have many parents.
> Nobody wants the entire Internet encrypted more than the giant banks

Why is so much bank security nothing more than ridiculous security theatre? I agree they have the money, they have the need, they have enough smart programmers; so why do they fail so hard at security?
Oh, sorry, I was confused by the software that preceded gitolite. Disregard that, thanks.
Life Hacks (Infographic)
The technology that civilization creates is only possible because humanity specializes. Humans aren't so smart by themselves, but we can do a lot of thing if humans possess specific knowledge.

For example, one guy specialize and dedicate his life to metalworking. If I try to know everything in the world, I could barely scratch the surface of what that guy learned.

People can even specialize in multidisciplines. They don't know as deeply as a specialist in a subject area but they know two area well and combine them into useful combination.

It would seems that today's problem is more about the limit of human beings' ability to store and synthesize information across vast disparate field. In other words, we generated so much knowledge, but so much is just kept there not being used.

Spaced repetition is a good example. It's a very powerful memorization technique, but it is not being used in colleges and schools, except those who discover it on accident.

It's also a timesaving tool in the programming profession. Instead of googling and wasting 5 minutes for answers to our programming problem, we can save 5 minutes for many common tasks we memorize. It won't save us from debugging woes but at least we get to the important programming problems faster.

There's also a storehouse of reliable information on self improvement written by psychologists who done experiment and research things like willpower and discipline, why it fails, and so on. Instead, we got distracted by techniques that seems to work but have no scientific basis, or we get distracted by self improvement gurus that have no idea what we're talking about.

We are specialists but we miss a ton of useful stuff that would be useful to our specialization. It's like missing a thousand useful book every year because you can never read them fast enough.
You don't need to pay google to be able to access websites that you created yourself, whether for personal, community or commercial use. You don't need to jailbreak your Internet to do it either.

When was the last time you hacked something together for yourself on an iOS device?
Looking at your team (http://about.retickr.com/retickr-team/) it seems rather top-heavy. Two people have the title of "Co-Founder and Vice President" ... VP of what? Additionally, there's a CTO, yourself the CEO, a sysadmin, plus two software engineers. It's no wonder your burn rate is so high. This seems like the kind of app that would get developed by two "devops" kind of people.

Some comments on your home page: it's being dominated by a screenshot that's impossible to read and doesn't convey what the heck it does. There are a couple of teaser bullet-points-in-boxes that gives a high-level view, but I think the home page would really benefit from an in-your-face description conveying the clear benefits. At a minimum, start out by replacing the static screenshot with the video that is immediately clickable. However, this is speaking to user acquisition and doesn't address the problem you state of your 8% user retention rate.

I haven't used your app, but from the description it looks like it doesn't solve a hair-on-fire problem. The problem is that people have information overload. There are only so many things a person can follow that they quickly get overwhelmed trying to keep up. Your app looks to just throw it in their face which only highlights the fact that they can't keep up, and it does so in a distracting fashion by continuously animating the information they already have a difficult time reading. In a way, it sets their hair on fire.

A better value proposition would be to solve the information overload problem by only showing them news that is valuable in a manner that is not interruptive to their workflow. Trivially, this could be done when a piece of news is liked/+1'd/tweeted beyond a certain weighted threshold or for the infrequent news that comes from sources the user specifies as being important, like a friend's blog that is updated a few times a month. Something to the effect of "You only have so many hours in the day, but there are dozens of news sources you'd like to be aware of. Who has time to follow every single news item? Retickr lets you follow as many news sources as you want, then gives you a summary of the top three things you need to be aware of every hour. Then, just click to read the full story. If you have time to kill, our easy to use app lets you browse additional stories by source, topic, author, and many other criteria."
Just checked out Peepcode after reading your comment. This is like everything I've ever been hoping for -- programmers that rock producing stuff for people who already know about programming, but maybe not that particular flavor. Someone who knows C learning Ruby will benefit from being taught by someone who knows C.
Weird. Works great on my (moderately old) MacBook with Chrome.
Most people have no idea that Google own YouTube.
The technology is cool and it works like a charm. However, the approach of using "mystery meat" navigation for an entire website is pretty tedious for this visitor.
Who says MBAs can't do startups?
Don't worry. I'm sure the remaining utility of FOIA will be more thoroughly emasculated soon. Give it a few years.
One of the most comforting realizations is when you find out no one else really knows what they're doing either and that all startup founders are on the edge.
> There's also a storehouse of reliable information on self improvement written by psychologists who done experiment and research things like willpower and discipline, why it fails, and so on. Instead, we got distracted by techniques that seems to work but have no scientific basis, or we get distracted by self improvement gurus that have no idea what we're talking about.

That's a subject where I know that I can't tell the difference by myself - could you recommend some authors? I'd be happy to put in the effort into reading technical papers which haven't been re-written for a popular audience yet if the quality is higher, but I don't know where to look.
Proggit Thread on Faster TCP Slow Starts
My little brother wrote a blog post, which I put into a reddit-ized headline (f-word, hyperbole, accusations, etc.), which actually turned into an interesting conversation. ON FRIGGING REDDIT. Wonders never cease.
This doesn't quite work; some of the most creative, innovative ideas in history bubbled up from the collective unconscious in several minds at the same time. Just look at the number of nobel prizes that get split between people that discovered exactly the same thing at exactly the same time but completely independently.
Quick feedback, on the product - rather than the blog post.

Easy download & quick install.

I am news junkie who works for a large offline & online publisher who needs to keep tabs on stuff as it happens.

The idea of a ticker is interesting, but the usability of a scrolling feed is tough for me - I'd much rather see a series of headlines pop up, and disappear, than constant across-screen motion.

There's no way I could leave this on all day with that motion across the screen - but I could if the UI was less distracting.

Just my 10 cents - good luck with your product.
The patent system is an insanity in the 18th and the 19th century as it is now. You have the same old problem of dubious rent-seeking by entrepreneurs who should be focusing their energy on spreading their inventions, not restricting it.

The problem with the patent system is our failure to understand history, our tendency to focus on the present, and our tendency to repeat the same thing in the hope that it will works.
Interview with videogame developer, Nathan Ostgard
Appreciate the product feedback graupel. We all feel like we are on the right track and the product has come a long way in the last six months let alone the last several weeks. We feel like we have a better understanding of what our users want now and hopefully retickr round two will provide more value..
Occupy Wall Street Protest Culminates With 6,000 in Times Square
I disagree -- the amount of silicon dedicated to this type of operation is miniscule compared to the caches on modern processors. Removing hardware floating point reciprocal square root isn't going to have any noticeable effect on power consumption.
Huh, for some reason, I can't see the comment I submitted with the post. Sorry if this shows up twice...

My little brother (I'm so proud!) wrote a blog post about faster TCP slow starts. He was sad nobody was reading it, so I redditized the headline (you know, f-word, hyperbole, baseless accusations, etc.) and submitted it to Reddit, where it actually turned into an interesting conversation about the actual topic of the post. Seriously. On Reddit.

Wonders never cease.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is."

One of the interesting points raised in the article is that even if we had the tech to shine UV light onto plates of silicon, we'd need to reinvent a previous generation of computers so that we could design modern chips to fabricate.
No, everybody thinks that. I'm strongly reminded of my commentary on Ryan Dahl's rant a few weeks ago - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3056534 - "Everybody can look at a simple thing like a submit form in a web browser, and sigh at the inefficiencies in the whole stack of getting what they type at the keyboard onto the wire in TCP frames, the massive amount of work and edifices of enormous complexity putting together the tooling and build systems and source control and global coordination of teams and the whole lot of it, soup to nuts, into a working system to do the most trivial of work."
Good luck with that.

Just making glass is going to take you a while.

Making semiconductors at a scale that you can start thinking of building a working computer will take you quite a bit longer.

It's simple in principle. It would be far easier to stuff a bunch of people in rooms with paper (assuming you could make that) and pencils (ditto) and have them execute your program.
Credit should go to the Google "IW10" team, which did the hard work of testing this over years and (even harder) patiently convincing people one by one that this is a good idea.

I caution against fiddling with this number too much. Bandwidth-constrained users, and possibly mobile users, might be hurt with a too-large initcwnd.

http://code.google.com/speed/protocols/tcpm-IW10.html
You're a week away from an actual answer. Launch and let the market decide whether it's a lost cause.

FWIW, Seth Godin calls what you're going through quieting the Lizard Brain, and it's something every creative has to go through – the fear of failure and being judged.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/01/quieting-the...