skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the lesson learned is that switching to a new development platform on a completely different OS then with which you're familiar is not something to be undertaken trivially.

I say this having gone through all his pain when I switched to a Mac but now I'd never go back to Windows by choice.
@zacharycohn: thanks for letting us know. we're looking into it as we speak. hold please. :)
Here's my effort: https://gist.github.com/1368953
great suggestion Hugh. We definitely want to incorporate the time of day and time between stops at some point, both for the reason you suggested as well as to be smarter about the types of attractions we suggest at different times. thanks!
Instead of doing @replies, you can click on the post's "link" and reply there even if the reply link isn't available on the comments list page.

HN hack ;)
No - I state in the post that you can't know this looking forward. You can take educated guesses based on observed patterns though.

Ships don't float around the ocean randomly. They have captains and crews. If they hit an iceberg, there's usually a good reason for it. In the startup world you can track down and talk with founders, CEOs, and investors and pick their brains to understand why something didn't work.

It's very hard to know if something will succeed looking forward. It's easier to know why something succeed looking backwards. To the people who built the business, it's usually pretty obvious why something failed.

The pattern you see in anomalously successful companies is absolutely one of violating conventional wisdom; By definition these companies are outliers because they are successful. But there's always a reason for it. Picking something that people have an aversion to is a great place to start. Figuring out what has changed about the ecosystem or opportunity that may enable it to succeed today where it had previously failed is the critical question to answer.
Backify Removes Free accounts a month after starting them
Original news item: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3110553

Backify just sent me an email saying all free accounts will be closed as of November 22nd.

I only backed up part of my data on there with the free account and the upload speed was horrible (barely 5kbps). Had I actually uploaded 512GB of data, it wouldn't have finished before they closed my account...

What a waste.
I do not think anybody said that build something people want would be enough. Only, it's really essential for the success. How something is done has almost been always irrelevant for the consumer of a service or a product, but a) if it is something that serve them b) economic enough c) easy enough.
I'm running it on a netbook and while it's choppy, it's not that choppy...
It's not to say that you can predict everything that could go wrong, but if that one iceberg is still there and it blocks the only route to port (like, what you want to do is still illegal), probably not too smart to jump in a canoe headed that direction.

If you look at the icebergs that were in the way before and they're gone now, it doesn't guarantee success or mean there aren't other obstacles, but at least you know that the previous reasons for failure aren't still insurmountable.
That's funny you say that. The "time" situation was something we struggled with to find what the best experience would be. The questions we had were:

- Do you stop 1 hour all the time when you stop at a restaurant? What if you take it to-go?

- What if you stop at a stop like the World's Largest Frying Pan for just 5 minutes? Should we allow users to add custom time limits for each of the stops?

- Would we be complicating things adding custom times?

All great questions and things for us to think about. Thanks a ton for the feedback.
Microsoft Research’s Socl Social Network Gets A Little More Real
Fully agree with this. Approximately 90% of the time Google thinks I misspelled something, it's wrong.
Startups Find Providence 31.42% More Wicked Funner
Sri Lanka Beat Pakistan in 2nd ODI to level the series
It's all in the lighting - specifically, having a "light tent". There are lots of DIY light tent instructions available via Google if you want to try to reproduce the effect -
Hey Matt, thanks for listening.

Since code search is gone, I'd really love a “grep” for the Web. Full page search, including headers,js,css,html comments, etc.

If you could pass that along, I believe it would make a lot of us geeks happy.
For some perspective of where I was: bachelors degrees in "Computer Science" and "Engineering Mechanics & Astronautics." And 4 years of aerospace engineering experience. I just barely made it past the official requirements, but I'm pretty sure they wanted someone older/more experienced. I'm also not in amazing shape, but I was Good Enough(tm). Apparently it wasn't enough to warrant an interview. shrug
Higher-order functions. It's like the difference between calculus and arithmetic. If you're adding numbers together you're not going to see much difference. If you try to send a man to the moon... it's going to be a lot less code in a higher level language.
Honestly, I don't have a deep understanding of the post-graduate MBA world. Rumor has it that you have to spend a good deal of time actually in the office or on call.
I do know, however, that MBAs form the typical growth path for larger corporations.

So (thought experiment, not backed with anecdote or data) if I can get a (say), History degree and a MBA and have a similar track as a CS degree and a MBA... I know which one provides a better ROI in terms of time invested.
The recaptcha didn't have any instructions, and seemed to supply a lot of numbers and words. Were you supposed to give a particular one?

I had little difficulty with the others, but the lack of instructions might bias the results against recaptcha.
As it turns out, when I'm not stealing pennies from the penny trays at gas stations, I often shop at businesses that only accept cash and have no issue with it. If a business accepts credit cards, however, I'd rather have that small part of the fee come back to me than stay in Visa's pocket.
It's not. Her comment makes no sense, at least to me. Anyways, I am just curious, couldn't you just lie about your sexual orientation at the time of screening? I think it's awful that you should have to, but if your desire is to save lives, why let our backwards medical establishment get in the way? At the very least you could notify them if/when a match was found, and let the recipient decide...
Lolita complex- why so many boys and girls are facy of Lolita cloting?
FYI, when there are multiple possible routes (e.g. the second when going from Dallas, TX to Surprise, AZ) and you choose one that isn't the default, the "Featured Stops" still show for the default.
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The prospective science major who's having trouble with fractions and basic algebra is, unfortunately, a disturbingly common presence on college campuses these days.

I'm a grad student in English lit, and, if it makes you feel any better, the prospective humanities major who's having trouble with comma rules and simple grammar is also distressingly high. More of them than you might imagine end up thinking humanities classes are too hard, which leads them to business or comm, which leads to problems like the ones discussed here: http://jseliger.com/2011/10/07/student-choice-employment-ski... .

And I've talked to a lot of my peers who say they simply won't teach basic grammar and writing principles, even briefly, because students should "already know them." Which seems rather unfair if the students have already been fouled by the K - 12 system.
There are many benefits to node. Not specifically that it runs Javascript, but that is still one of the benefits - since Javascript is such a popular language and also because it is nearly mandatory to use anyway (client side).
Narrative Review of Winamp for Mac
Here's an official post on the subject: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/search-evaluation-at-...
We've simply implemented the recaptcha code as it was given. The goal is to evaluate how well it would do were it used in the wild, so we don't provide any extra instructions.
@schultzy: thanks a ton for the feedback. here are my responses to each observation:

1. that makes a ton of sense. adding filtering in the future was something we were thinking about and we'll add this suggestion into that list.

2. you can always zoom the window in closer, but we'll look at making the text on the map more readable.

thanks again. :)
The href attribute is still changed. While javascript can't change the status bar explicitly any more, they can set the link's href to the fake URL and change the link's target in the click event.

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/zTRQh/
I honestly don't see NFC being a game changer unless Apple adds support to an iPhone. They likely know this as well, and won't do so until it makes sense for them (e.g. partnerships, etc).
Meet.me Sells For A Whopping $450,000
Nice. But of course, shuffling a deck of cards does not even come close to completely randomizing the sequence compared to the previous ordering (especially if you are a crappy shuffler like me). Thus the sequences are correlated, so it's much more complicated to determine how likely it is to get a repeated configuration.
Individual postal letters have considerably more influence than form e-mails, but I don't know what category these letters would be placed in. I worry that a letter that is sent from an automated website might not carry as much weight as putting your own letter in an envelope, handwriting the address, and sending it out from your zip code.

Supposedly, the constituent contacts that carry the most weight are in-person visits to the congressperson's office, contacts from people authorized to represent groups of constituents (like mayors), individual letters that are not copied from a form, and individual phone calls that are not read from a script.

If anyone has a reason to be in Washington, calling the office of your congressperson and scheduling a meeting with their staff during that time will be very helpful, especially if your congressperson is on a relevant committee, in this case the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.
@kodablah: thanks for finding that bug. a couple of folks have notified us about that, and we're working to resolve it as we speak. cheers!
to be fair, I think that may be part of what they are evaluating: existing captcha systems compared to some others. So the lack of instructions from recaptcha is a flaw in recaptcha, not the survey
I'm a big proponent of naively trying to do what others tell me is impossible and it's served me perfectly well. That being said, if someone's startup was unsuccessful for a very clear reason that still exists today, the point is to understand that cause and your own plan for overcoming it, or don't start dedicating a bunch of resources only to get to the exact same point and realize it's not something that can be overcome.

It would be like starting a poker website now and completely ignoring what just happened to Full Tilt. Online poker is illegal. Until that changes, probably not a good space to play in.
Its really great of you guys to offer this service on your own dime - thank you. Its also very shrewd marketing, and I hope it pays off for you.
that's exactly what got us super excited about it. we didn't want to miss any of those cool unique place when we were going on a drive anywhere.
A lot of astronauts didn't actually fly anywhere. A lot of them have spent decades training and waiting. So it doesn't even guarantee you'll fly anywhere (well except Baikonur or Moscow for training).
Ah, I see that you do believe that the universe came from nothing.

You say that the universe is and that it came from nothing. That means you believe the existence of the universe is not contingent, which implies its existence is necessary. It's also remarkable that you posit that a first cause is an absurdity, yet then postulate that the universe has the properties of a first cause.

I find a logical contradiction in that the universe is known to have had a beginning. By any definition of contingent that I know of, something with a beginning has contingent existence.

Or perhaps you think it more scientific to suppose that things can happen without a cause (e.g. universes). Good luck with that theory. You had better hope that a universe doesn't happen without a cause under your bed. Now you live in a universe where miracles can happen without any reason whatsoever. They just are.

It actually sounds like in your world anything can happen any time for no reason. This begins to look very different from the universe I appear to live in.
Thanks for a great tool.

A suggestion: I'd like to be able to send a letter to all of my representatives and senators at once, instead of having to fill out the form multiple times.
"We’re finally getting close to customer-centric computer shopping, and hopefully more and more manufacturers will jump on the bandwagon."

This is an awful attitude to have. People do care about specs in hindsight. If they have a poor experience with a netbook, and it turns out that it's because of the dog-slow Atom under the hood, they're definitely going to care. Except, by the time the realize that they do care, they've already spent their money and they're probably without recourse.

For those of us that do understand tech specs, we shouldn't celebrate being deprived of the ability to avoid making costly mistakes.
Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors: the net's hidden physical infrastructure
Nice work guys. Thank you for doing this.
Just completed/sent a letter via your link and donated afterwords (and I rarely donate). Nice work.
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The very first one I got was:

Chair is to wall: like 'd00r' is to "mAn" and the An$wer is; bedroom.

I was so flabbergasted I didn't even know where to start, and I had to move on just to see what else was in there---the rest of the captchas all seem pretty mundane.

Edit: found it again, fixed it to be direct quote. I'm looking at it again now and I still have no idea what I'm supposed to do with that.
Not the greatest of reviews. If you take out the gnome3 complaints (gnome3 is awful, we know) there is not a lot to the review.
Hints on programming language design (C.A.R Hoare)
hey zach, we just fixed the bug. just tried both seattle to redmond and seattle to yakima -- worked all the way through. let me know if there's any issues on your end still. thanks!
If you could convince some of your current users to share all/part of their books on the front page of your site, that would be wonderful - not just an example of the product, but also an example of real users trusting you/facebook to gather their data.

As per data, see if you could do it step-by-step. Ask for photos first, let users create something. As they use the product, offer to create more dynamic content and then ask for additional permissions.

Hopefully that will get your users started and once they see some value will get them further engaged.
NFC will only spread wildly if all handset/OS makers as well as the carriers open card emulation and the encryption interface necessary to do banking. Right now, we're stuck in this position where everyone is more than happy to have all the non-secure critical aspects of NFC (like smart posters) where there is little market incentive - and control and monopolise purchasing, coupon offers, membership and loyalty etc etc.
I sent mine off a bit ago, thanks a ton for doing this. Here's to making a difference.
I'm entirely a Linux person and would never want to use anything else. However, I think Windows really isn't that bad as a development platform--probably not the most fashionable idea in the HN crowd. I know developers--experienced ones, at that--who are very efficient on Windows. There are now tools like Powershell that give Windows the functionality you'd need.

While Windows is still proprietary and annoying, I don't think that just having a unix env is enough to be so much better than Windows. Of course, Linux is the best option for me because I'm used to it and can leverage it completely--and I'm sure it's the case for you too--but I've seen too many people efficiently using Windows to just ignore it out of hand. (Well, I can safely ignore it because it's proprietary, but that's completely unrelated to the topic at hand.)
I absolutely love the idea. I cant remember where I read it or heard it, but physical letters do get much more attention. Nothing against SendWrite, but I think even more attention can be gained via distinctive-looking enveloped letters that need to be cut open and unfolded. A stack of similar-looking postcards will have an impact in terms of volume, but will likely be sorted into a bin and never read. If you have the time and have extra company logo-ed envelopes, please consider sending one by hand as well.
I find it hard to believe. I've encountered - both as a student and as a teacher - too many bright, seemingly qualified students who just don't work hard enough and get their work done to accept that claim.
Coffee - Can It Benefit Your Prostate?
Being able to rationalize "why now?" is much easier after the fact, as the OP demonstrates with his list of his now-successful companies. Doing the same looking forward is much trickier.

I agree, and think the retrospective analysis on this is often really sloppy. In hindsight, the iPhone was clearly at the right time, and the Newton was clearly at the wrong time, but the track record of anyone distinguishing between those is very poor. Even Jobs, famous for some of the big wins on that score, was wrong about timing as often as he was right (e.g. NeXT was about as timely as the BeBox with its initial launch).
I've done something similar and flip-flopped back and forth between Ubuntu and Windows. Other than the initial pain of installing Ubuntu and getting everything working just right (which actually wasn't any worse than Windows) I never had any trouble getting things to work beyond finding out what the right tool was. Gotta love apt-get.
Using MongoDB to manage user permissions
Things You Can Do At Home to Fix New Braces Pain
That is still ignoring the fact that these individuals were in fact willing to take a corporate job, when their price was met. Maybe that price included the ego boost that comes with being part of an acquisition ("they really wanted me!"), or the "pedigree" that one plans to parlay into future opportunities.

Regarding the latter point, it seems that "key players" at "prominent companies" don't have too much trouble getting funding for startups when they move on, regardless of whether they were "talent acquisitions" or not.

Speaking from experience, when my previous employer got acquired by a megacorp, nobody was saying "I really don't want to work for megacorp, but maybe I will have an easier time getting funding later." No. It all came down to dollars and cents in the here and now, and the only people who turned down the earn-out offers (less than 10%) were those who had better options available.
Actually, a deck of card is random after 7 shuffles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffling#Randomization
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Thank you for making this a free letter.
Taylormade burner driver
I'd still do it if I qualified for it.

Hence why they don't have to pay astronauts half a million.
I'd love to send people to this site, but I worry people who have never heard of the bill won't know what is going on. Can you embed the explanation video or point to or something?

Edit: I see you just did. Thx! I just linked to it on DuckDuckGo as well as donated and sent my letter. Thanks again.
Westlaw search syntax would be awesome!!!
What is the point of this exercise?
Thanks! Just to clarify, SendWrite letters are mailed in an envelope, so each one will need to be opened. Also we deliberately didn't use a pre-written letter as a template. The result is that the letters we have received are very unique.
Actually, I think lutorn's point is that most people (including him) do not do a full riffle shuffle when they set out to shuffle cards, thus preserving the order of segments of the cards.
Symphony CMS 2.2.5 released
A bug fix release for the PHP/MySQL based, XSLT-powered open source content management system
thanks! we're looking to add more unique location data to make the experience even better.
Though, speaking as someone who started on Unix, moved to Windows, and is now starting to migrate back to Unix again - The plethora of tools can be as aggravating as it is liberating. Figuring out which of 50 different options will give the best development setup for $LANGUAGE strikes me as another chore I have to do before I can really sit down and start programming (i.e., the thing I actually want to be doing) more than anything else.

I'm sure some of that is simply that I'm out of the game and needing to catch up a bit. But it seems like there's something real going on there too. For example, I've noticed that at meetups for Windows developers folks spend the majority of their idle time talking about code and software design, whereas at meetups for Unix developers folks seem to spend a much bigger chunk of time talking about various gadgets and their pros and cons and how to tame them and whatnot.
The names in the DropDownList Control are invisible in IE8: http://imgur.com/7UIbT
Very impressive Nathan.

I like that it is not just another one of those app products that is targeted at the masses.

Instead, you found a niche, talk to customers and found a nice selling price, which from the user's perspective is a bargain.

Congrats