skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Point taken about OrionVM. I worry about their long-term future as speed to the US becomes less of an issue, though.

I see what you mean about BigCommerce. The admin panel is painful (and I've heard that the actual system is hell for their employees to hack on), but they're definitely doing a roaring trade, and the instructional articles and videos they provide along with their actual product are rather useful.

The environment the Australian startup scene is a bit odd. We can't (easily) accept payment from US customers (and vice-versa), so we effectively have a little "bubble" in which we can set up paid products without much fear of the existing US startups stomping all over us.

Interesting times.
A phrase is not deemed appropriate solely because it is common. There are and have been many inappropriate common phrases in use over the years.

The author had an interesting point, but I found his use of "shit work" over and over to be distasteful enough to not want to read his blog again. It is an overloaded and crass term that only served to hurt his otherwise interesting argument.
Hmmm, a lot of negative comments so far. So in light of that, can anybody explain why the CW here is that so much of the Australian scene is a ripoff?
For you, maybe, but that's awfully short sighted. It's an insanely cheap way to intice people to buy a Kindle device. I don't have a lot of time to read, but Kindle's are cheap compared to the price of books. I was considering getting a Kindle but chickened out because I don't read as often as I might like, but now, with a free book a month? I'm probably going to pick it up for Christmas.

I have to think this will convert potential buyers.

Edit: Disclosure, I just flew with only an algorithms book. It's fun to read on the way to the interview, not so much on the way back.
I don't know if this is considered blatent advertising or not. But I worked pretty hard on getting my chrome extension replacement for google reader done. I would love it if people would check it out. I made it because I couldn't stand the UI for Google Reader in the first place. I'm open to adding features like short cut keys ( fairly easy to implement) Please check it out at http://www.digi-dil.com/MESH
There's some justification in deferring to user interface designers with respect to the vision for the interface. An authoritarian system can work, though you should be sensitive to how you present that authority. "wontfix" is socially dangerous to use.

But authority only works if you use that authority to do the right thing. Unity isn't doing that. I am in part frustrated that Unity got _worse_ with the latest Ubuntu release, and I'm frustrated that it has lots of bugs, and the interface is neither traditional nor discoverable. But even worse than these problems is the problem that Unity isn't pursuing a worthy goal. It's a rethinking of how you manage applications and files on the Linux desktop, but the Linux desktop has never been particularly functional or filled out and it falls behind further with time. The major trends we see is the desktop spiraling in on a single application, the browser, and files and media moving to the cloud. Unity is messing around with something that will never win the hearts and minds of new users, while it alienates what users there already are. I've never met someone who loves Unity! There's a couple people who accept it, and a much larger group that hates it. (Personally once I figured out to install gnome-shell I can like Ubuntu again, but Unity really did almost push me over the edge to get a Mac.)

It's not to say that a rethinking of the Linux UI is an entirely useless endevour, but Ubuntu and Canonical should not be pursuing a fantasy of a rich ecosystem of GUI apps. There are maybe a dozen relevant applications on Linux now, and that number will only get smaller. But the beauty of this is that if you just pursue an experience that encompasses those dozen applications, and you dive deep into those applications (which you can because they are all open source!) then something really neat could come out of that. I think people could get behind an idea like that, even if those same people simultaneously felt annoyed with particular changes that came from that. But it's hard to look past those problems when it feels like present usability is being compromised for a misguided fantasy.
> It works especially well if you remap Caps to Escape.

And Emacs users remap Caps to Ctrl. Nobody really likes Caps, it seems.
... 99designs grew out of sitepoint; it was a huge springboard having designers and customers using the sitepoint forums as a marketplace.

99 designs done really well, but freelancer have also now started doing design competitions, and now these guys.

It's an emerging segment, good luck to them!
Maximizing Space through Furniture
Kindle Owners’ Lending Library
The age is a tabloid newspaper (as are all newspapers in Australia - even the broadsheet format ones)
Libabc: Best practices for library writers from Lennart Poettering
> Making art is not honest work?

Making crap art isn't.
It's a sensationalist article from a mainstream newspaper.
The article very clearly notes that the lending program is only available on actual Kindles. It even specifically calls out the fact that applications on other platforms (like the iPad) do not include this feature.
So this article post was libkbait. Gotcha.
I think that the tech "gold rush" is still in it's early stages. It's still hard to convince investors in Aus that new ideas are worth betting on, so copy-cats with proven markets are currently leading the way.

However, on the ground here I don't just see the big guys. There a plenty of smaller bootstrapped companies that are genuinely innovative. I went to a startup expo at one of the uni's here last month and was completely blown away by the innovation of many of the smaller companies. If I had the money there's plenty I would be betting on.

"Just wait" is what I would say.
> If student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy lenders would think much harder about the wisdeom of lending $40k/year for liberal arts degrees.

Not if the lender is the US govt, as it is today.

Not if the loans are guaranteed by the US govt, as it was before.
Makes you wonder what happens at Domainer meetups.

"No, you can't sit there. That chair is mine... And all those other ones too. I'll lease one to you for $50/hour, though."
The funny (sad) thing about DesignCrowd is that they're copying another Australian startup.
#3 is one of my biggest gripes, in general. The Gimp is one of the worst products I've ever taken the time to try to learn. I'm not just tweaking photos, I'm trying to do some work as a professional, working on files given to me by other professionals. Forget about trying to open a PSD with more than a couple layers on it. Don't even bother.

And the interface... I don't mind spending a week or two learning an interface if it will allow me to get the job done, but The Gimp makes me want blood. Decent media software is the ONLY reason I keep a Virtual Box image of Windows 7 on my drive. Well, that and the occasional browser testing, but I find that's less of an issue in recent years.

As for hardware, I've run into Very few problems on a few DIY systems and laptops / netbooks. Graphics compatibility has always been an enormous issue. Especially multi-card for 3+ monitors. I assure you it's possible, as I've done it a couple times, but I tend to fall into a slight depression once the battle of getting it to work is over. Otherwise, I've been incredibly lucky. Install and go.

The battery issue is a major one. I've found that Lubuntu keeps up well on my netbook, and I rarely unplug my work notebook, so I don't run into it much, but you're spot on about the importance of getting that right, or at least making the correction simple.

Fine points, overall.
Consider an infinite string of coin flips. Now consider a subset selected by a stopping rule to meet a particular criterion. And a different subset chosen with an N=100 criterion. The first stopping rule creates a bias: you have a non-random sample chosen to meet that criterion. The second stopping rule doesn't do that, it gets what we call a "random sample".

If someone then takes your dataset and assumes it's a random sample -- e.g. just the same as the N=100 doctor trial -- he's wrong. It's not, it's something else, and that something else is less useful.

You say "how you sample is of no consequence". But suppose your sampling method selectively throws out some data that it doesn't like. That is of consequence, right? So sampling methods do matter. Now consider a method which implicitly throws out data because some sample collections are never completed. That matters too.
Google Start Charging on Google Maps
What's with the popped collars?

I'm an American living in Australia and I snickered when I first saw Australians wearing their collars popped.

I eventually found myself doing it outdoors in the summer because the sun is so freaking intense here.
Insurance purposes, most likely.
Don't forget the "f" key. Even more frequently used under the new design.
That’s one valid way of seeing it. I don’t share it. But a nice derail you did there.
Quick &amp; Easy Flower Arranging Recipes
No way to import?
I want a share-to-G+ that does not involve a public +1.

You can do that. Use "Share" in the upper right of the OneGoogle bar.
I disagree. Projects need these wake up calls and should listen to them much closer.

Firefox is a good example. I have used it since "Phoenix 0.1" came out. Already during "Firebird" times, users have started to complain that it is getting slower and bigger. Mozilla ignored it. It needed Google's Chrome browser to ring the bells at Mozilla and show them that the user complaints were valid after all.

Compare that with well managed projects like the Linux kernel. There its usually the BDFL who does the wake up calls, after having listened to user complaints and suggestions. Not saying that everything is perfect, but the kernel has been hugely successful for 25+ years and is still well focused.

Ubuntu OTOH has completely lost its original focus of providing an easy desktop Linux. They started pushing server versions and now suddenly smartphones. As if the desktop would disappear in the next years.
Huh? They're just talking about selling things in the Appstore.

They're not stopping people who don't distribute this way.
He's right. It definitely doesn't scale down well to small monitors and 13".
FYI I edited my post to mention the issue about the coins (your first point) shortly after submitting it. I'm guessing you read the non-edited version.

> Proper Bayesian result reporting doesn't say "We believe that the coin is biased". We would rather say "The probability that this coin is biased is 60%, subject to our assumptions and model".

I'm not really sure what you're getting at here. None of the coins are biased, by premise, so they shouldn't be concluding either thing.

If you throw in "if our model and assumptions are right" then you can shift the blame (if they assumed their stopping rule was OK, or came up with a model that says it's OK). But I'm not sure how that substantively helps.

Will check back tomorrow for further comments from you.
I'm just in the middle of the learning curve and was wondering if I was missing something.
I'm an Australian living in Australia and I snickered when I first saw anybody wearing their collars popped.

I haven't stopped.
Just look at the trade-offs:

- With non-modal editing, you get precise control of what's happening for every character that you type. In some ways, that kind of granularity is powerful. But what's the cost of that fine-grained control? The cost is having to be explicit about anything "special" you do in an editor with the letter keys. (Namely, you indicate that you're doing something special with the control key.) Imagine having to type capitalized SQL statements in a true non-modal way (i.e., without CAPS LOCK).

- With modal editing, you type in terms of ideas. You insert text when that's appropriate. When it's not appropriate, your entire keyboard (and every combination of keys) is free to do what an editor is actually supposed to do: edit.
Most interesting HTML/JS/DOM/CSS hacks that most web developers don't know
I heard from a reliable source that there were contractors behind the new design. If that's true, I'm stunned. They didn't put an employee on this project?
I think it is great. One free book a month. Say 13$ a pop at 12 months that is $156 a year in free books.

I only read a couple full books a year now. Pre-Internet I was consuming a couple dozen a year.

I already have Amazon Prime for their free tv/movie streaming library (which has more of what I like than Netflix had), plus free 2 night shipping (never mind the $3.99 for overnight shipping which is pretty amazing) I personally think Amazon Prime is the best deal out there right now for a one price multimedia consumption program, with the added bonus of free shipping.

I was on the fence about getting a kindle fire, I think this may be the nudge to get me to buy it.
How much of a threat is this to Twillio? I suppose Twillio is more for building whole systems, this is just for notifications but it'll be interesting to see how/if they react to this.
> Go to an ATM.

Exactly, and you end up using a "card" anyway
Direct Marketing for Selling Lace Front Wigs
wow, great
this opens up endless possibilities :)
> You say this, as every major platform migrates towards apps.

That's the way it goes with these damn computers. In circles. I recommend you unpack a bag of floppies, get yourself some Windows 3.1 and take a good look at Program Manager.
No, that's not what I'm saying.

If you don't separate /bin and /usr, and /usr is a mount and it becomes unresponsive, how do you log into the machine? Where are the login shells and basic file management tools to rescue the machine? That problem exists as soon as you collect tools into one place, whether you choose /bin or /usr/bin to be that place.

But choosing (only) /bin has an additional problem, which is that you lose the ability to easily set up mounts. If you have many machines to keep in sync, they could each have a relatively simple /usr mount; while you could set up root paths equivalently, you would need more of them: either symlinks or mounts in several places on all machines that all have to be kept in sync. That is unnecessarily complicated. The /bin option is only equivalent if you are in fact dumping everything on the local disk and not using mounts. But "standard" hierarchy paths should not assume the architecture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cars

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car_brands . Australia is sort of interesting as is Britain.
For me, a strength of Asana is it's free (under 30 users)
Use Discounts and Coupons to get Free Traffic
I think Google's bigger problem is that they have a hard time keeping people's attention. They throw products over the fence with a lot of fanfare and then they just languish and eventually get killed. I haven't heard a peep about Google Music or TV for months now, for example. Most of the buzz about G+ lately has been the backlash for their ham-fisted and disingenuous handling of the real names issue.

I think they have a lot to learn about product marketing.
I'm currently using JSON to hold feeds but creating a JSON string from OPML should be lemon squeezy... Great idea. Thank you.
Bookkeeper melbourne
Looking for the best bookkeeper Melbourne has to offer. Or cost effective payroll services Australia wide? A &amp; A offers fixed discounted fees.
If anyone's interested in an alternative - here's one:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1834305
EARN points for gifts adn cash
I never really saw the point of Xubuntu--I mean, 10 minutes in Ubuntu will give you the same thing, why have an whole separate distribution when the biggest change is the default desktop environment?
Topics That Will Compliment Your Dissertations on Marketing
Marketing is one of the most interesting topics for a thesis. It is a very vast subject and has many fields. Dissertations on marketing should be based on such key ideas that differentiate it from all the other types of thesis. The following topics will give you an idea for your own topic:
Buy Green Tea Online
Monicas Fine Foods is a best organic green tea suppliers and online sales high quality fresh organic green tea, Organic green tea is a medicine to control diabetes, weight loss and its have many potential benefits.
Or instead of locking it, you could just have a "Last modified" time stamp or a log indicating when modifications were made.
That's not strictly fair. The Age online is absolute crap, but The Age in print is marginally better.

I do, however, think that the media in general in Australia is abhorrent when compared with other countries, though.
Has Apple stated any plans to continue developing WebGL for iOS? It seems like the kind of thing that could compete with their app business.
>at least Microsoft recognized (correctly) back then that a concept of an "app" makes no sense on a modern desktop, and windows is what users want to manage, not "apps"

>windows from different desktops in OSX are mistakenly combined in the same useless giant Alt+tab list

Completely agree. In particular, I used Gnome (2.14 through 2.18) for a few years, then OS X (Leopard through Snow Leopard) for a few years, and the way "tasks", applications, windows and workspaces are managed on Gnome strikes me as objectively better than the way they work in OS X -- with the possible exception that the OS X might be a little easier to learn for users that have very little patience for learning much at all about their computer.

But OS X is better at sparing the user from tedious admin hassles and has better aesthetics. Gnome 2 on the other hand allows the user to set the text size of almost all of the text on the system (the most notable exception being Firefox, which does not pay any attention to Gnome's settings), which OS X does not allow. (Some of the text on OS X, e.g., in the menu bar, window title bars and certain Apple applications like Calendar, cannot be changed with reasonable effort.)

Also, the "annoying glitches" on Gnome are worse. The annoying glitches on OS X consist mainly of the UI becoming unresponsive at unpredictable times (usually signified by the spinning beach ball cursor) whereas the annoying glitches on Gnome 2 consist of inattention to detail on the part of Gnome 2's designers and implementors, lack of consistency including "gotchas" like Ctrl-W having minor mostly-reversible effects in Emacs and in bash while having drastic irreversible effects in other Gnome apps (namely, closing the window). Also, Gnome would freeze, crash or otherwise need to be restarted an order of magnitude more than OS X does. Note though that Gnome and the graphical system on Linux might be much more reliable with a different video card: I only tried it with two old cards.
Skoda Rapid Photos
AVM vs Cybits: Router vendor claims customers can't modify GPLed Linux code
Foro de elhacker.net - �ndice
You can do this from Kindle.. Go to Kindle Store and then to Owner's Lending Library. There are categories and subcategories and books are sorted by bestselling
As soon as I see "available on all major operating systems" I groan, because of course it seems to be a Java app. The user experience for Cocoa apps on OS X blows away that of a Java app. The reason Sequel Pro is great is because it feels like a first-rate Mac app and seamlessly fits in with everything else.

You can make a Java app feel almost native on OS X, like with Cyberduck, but it is really, really hard and you have to prioritize that target in your design. Then what happens, as seen with Cyberduck, is the Mac version coming out pretty good and the Windows version feeling a little "off."
Average Number of Rounds Raised by Startups Up 27% Since 2008
I have to admit I understood why everyone likes vim so much, but never found the time to learn it. mcedit was good enough for me.
This tutorial teached me the minimal important stuff to finally be able to use visudo :)
Then you've never actually done it. It's two clicks. You're just looking for something to complain about.
While it helps that vendors don't (currently) stop users from installing Linux, this still requires users to take additional complex and system-specific steps before installation. That introduces one more barrier in what has otherwise become a straightforward process.
Vim on my 11" Air is excellent. SSD is nice and fast, and I wonder if the total weight is less than the ipad+bluetooth keyboard.
previous discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3043866
Immigration laws are ridiculous. If they can create a successful business that can give jobs to many, why would you not support that? I think the government really needs an overhaul on how they think of small business and entrepreneurs. They are what keep this country afloat. You simply can not create a mega-corporation that employs hundreds if not thousands out of thin air. It starts as a small business (or, more commonly for us here, a startup).

The big problem, I think, is that they know this and it's precisely why it's happening. Lobbying by mega-corps is very detrimental to our economy. Which in turn effects social issues. Thus an all encompassing negative outcome.

Occupy.
Exercise Balls As Office Chairs
> What's with the popped collars?

It's a Sydney thing, I think. They've been suffering a long-term shortage of hats and/or common sense.

> The problem with the Australian tech industry is most of the big players are just copy cats.

Yes and no. There's a lot of small and medium firms doing cool stuff, and several of the giants have offices doing important things. IBM's got a mainframe OS lab in Perth and runs a major Linux lab in Canberra. Google are in Sydney of course. Recently I saw a mob in Adelaide (I know, I know) doing cool things with computational intelligence.

But as for consumer-facing stuff, yes, it's mostly copycat. See a foreigner do it and launch something here before they turn up; ideally to sell to them. It's a proven, repeatable business model and investors like that.
Isagenix Reviews Could Their Prosperity Be Your Ticket To MLM Success?
Point taken about OrionVM. I worry about their long-term future as speed to the US becomes less of an issue, though.

They fixed that speed of light problem? :) We're going to be stuck on 100ms ping times until that is fixed (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sydney+to+los+angles+at...)

OTOH, I'm not sure what they will do when Amazon opens their datacenter (if that really is their plan).

We can't (easily) accept payment from US customers (and vice-versa)

That's not really true. Yes, it is more work than "include this Javascript file and you can accept payment" (aka Stripe), but if you are prepared to do some work it isn't that big a deal. Plus there is always Paypal. (Also, most US countries accept Australian payment. Some won't ship here, but that's a different problem)
Upvoted, but what's your math for 25+ years of Linux kernel development?
iSSH supports escape and most ctrl key combinations now.
I found this story quite disturbing: not only does AVM claim that customers cannot install additional software on the routers that they purchased, but they explicitly claim that those customers do not have the right to modify GPLed software on those routers either, despite taking advantage of those rights themselves.

Quoting the article: "Jaeger said that he asked AVM if it really meant to make that claim against the GPL software, and AVM affirmed that."
iTunes error: "Not available in US store"
Typical Yahoo. Maybe someone announced it so they could claim the buzz as progress?

Didn't you work there?
Not really. Variety is a good thing and nerdy, advanced users often prefer nerdy, advanced products. I would hate to live in a world with just the iPhone and no Android.
Download iTunes 10.5.1 Beta 2 For Windows And Mac [Direct Links]
The on screen keyboard vanishes when a Bluetooth one is connected; the eject button toggles it in and out again.