skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
BlackBerry 7 sales stall, PlayBook sell-through remains sluggish
> Topology hiding.

== making VoIP deployment hard/impossible depending on your router and phone model. :(
I dunno, their recommendation engine was scary good -- the technology Ebay's acquiring isn't anything to sniff at. They reportedly have a defensive portfolio of pending patents: http://www.formspring.me/hunch/q/169651283274266480

Ebay's been on a spending spree this past year and I'd say this is one of the better deals they've made, depending on how long they've locked in Hunch's team.
Is ".com" domain still important for startup?
Hi

I am the founder of secQ.me, which we offer personal mobile safety app. Initially, we like to register our domain as "http://secure.me", but as the domain taken, we resolve it to "http://secq.me"

A good friend of mine commented "A large section of the population do not click/trust domains that are not .coms. Every single time we miss out a segment, we lose a potential segment"

Is the statement still valid.. love to hear from u.

James Khoo
Great! I was just investigating AlchemyAPI and OpenCalais this weekend. I look forward to trying TextMinr.

TextMinr seems like a combination of those services along with the idea of 80legs.com? Is that correct?
Optimizing a Online Press Release for SEO
6. Offer surprisingly good customer service.
Don't Ask the Client for the Answer
This would really be useful on many, many levels. Why has this access to such data been so roped-off?
Nokia's Great Lost Platform
The Dirty Dozen of security-vulnerable smartphones
I never really know until it passes. When I'm burned out, I often think I'm being lazy, but when my energy returns, I look back and see that I was really burned out.
For those interested, I delved a little further and wrote up my findings here:

http://statichtml.com/2011/google-ajax-libraries-caching.htm...
Sweet story. A part fell of my earphones a few days ago, exposing the water-sensitive internals. I think I'll order a pack of Sugru and see if I can fix them myself :)
I apologize for not saying where I'm based, (US by the way). But that link is absolutely perfect.

According to the comments on the kickstarter page it'll support 3mm to start with and they plan on having a 1.75mm hotend available for $59+shipping by the time that all the kits are shipping.

EDIT: corrected price of hotend
word. yep, something like background-attachment to fixed when the element is scrolled into view
I think that if the music loses any of it's value to the consumer by being on Spotify, it is that a 'good' artist's music is just as available as a 'bad' artist's music, and all at a small flat fee. This is most likely debatable though as it's hard to measure things like this.

Don't get me wrong, I also think that music is a lower $$$ commodity than most people think but that is easily side stepped by bands having a wide variety of cheap products to offer (merch, live shows, dvds of live shows etc.). I think a large part of this is due to the economy of today but I don't have much basis for that.

I have mad respect for Sean Parker, but when he said "I don't think we're ever going to get it completely right, the world is changing so quickly that it's very hard to get anything right for long.", I think he was wrong. Him and Spotify focus too much on changing the whole music industry, and they focus too much on the music listener instead of the actual artist.

Spotify removes a lot of the personal ownership of music (not buying albums and owning them even if it is digitally), and that is an important bonding experience between an artist and their fans.

More importantly Spotify offers terrible royalty, Lady Gaga made $167 off 1m plays of Poker Face. Word on the street (aka indie label gossiping) is that Lady Gaga pulls in more money because she is on a major label. I don't think Spotify can afford to pay more royalty because of the large volume of artists they deal with, and that sets them into a huge bind.

Spotify has preached about how they care about the indie artist/label, but they are really just enforcing the major label and this is pushing against the huge movement with removing the middle man and getting your music out directly to the fans so you get 90% of the album sale instead of 5%.

Companies like Topspin Media, Bandcamp, and more recently TuneCore may become a much bigger player with their recent steps in becoming more appealing for the artist.

These other services are all convenient for the consumer and offer more for the artist then Spotify will ever offer. The reason you focus on the artist more than you focus on the consumer is because the consumer is willing to bend to the will of the artists as long as what they provide has a good price tag and is easy to obtain.
I think it starts with one question: Am I dreading sitting down in front of the computer today?

If yes, then you're definitely just burnt out. If the answer is no and you're not producing then you're being lazy.
Lytro Camera – Should I get one?
EBay Buys Recommendation Service Hunch To Improve Buying And Selling
Yes, this point of view is well known and well documented.

But the opposite may have some weight too. I think I read somewhere that Google codebase had been rewritten from scratch. Maybe it was early enough, because I suppose rewriting it today would be painful. Are there any other successful rewrite from scratch stories? Maybe vim?
Taking this question further, what did Hunch help you do? I tried it early and passed, really interested to hear what it has done for others.
No Vendor Lock-In and Data Portability as a Step Forward
Self-answer, for anyone interested. It's in the source code [1]:

die "Error: No matches for news.ycombinator.com in ~/.netrc."

[1] https://github.com/bsandrow/hn-profile/blob/master/hn-profil...
You're not helpless. You just think you are. Just hear me out a minute. What would happen if, the next time a client rang in the middle of the night, you just didn't pickup up the phone? What if you just walked out of the office after 8 hours on the job?

I was once in a situation similar to yours. The harder I worked, the more work got piled on me. After about two weeks, I started coming in at 8 and walking out at 4:30. Yeah, it was awkward to walk out when the rest of the team was still coding away. But a funny thing happened. I actually ended up contributing more functionality to the final project than the rest of the team combined. Why? I disciplined myself and made sure that the stuff I wrote worked the first time through, because I had set limits on my time and that set limits on the amount of rework I could do.

These aren't my values. They don't even remotely reflect who I am as a person, or who I was, at any rate, but I'm helpless to do anything about it, as someone has to do all this crap, and I'm not prepared to inflict it on any of the guys we employ, as I'd rather fuck my life up than someone else's.

First, that's a terrible attitude to have, and it ensures that you'll always be in over your head. Second, I'm willing to bet $20 that not all of that work has to get done. If you're really burning out as much as you say you are, you're not doing high quality work anyway. It'd be better to meet with the client and have some very frank discussions regarding the status of the project than deliver something that's complete on paper but only half-works in practice.
Dependency Injection In Ruby
Should you spend money on office space for a software start-up?
Machine learning seems to be a meme on the rise right now. What kind of startups are possible in that domain?
Sounds like utterly losing it is what you want to have happen. What do you think that will give you permission to do that you don't give yourself permission to do now?
No freaking kidding - only thing I saw the founder do was interview people on TC. Never heard anyone mention hunch outside of those interviews. What is ebay thinking?
How The New Mars Rover’s Power Supply (Plutonium Dioxide) Works
Hunch is not for sale. The founders have already sold companies before and have no desire to sell Hunch. We want to build it into a large company.

hunch responded one year ago

http://www.formspring.me/hunch/q/1392572735
Justin Bieber Official Calendar 2012
The design part is nice, but this former HN submission made a stronger point:

http://www.visualmess.com/
Keep in mind that even if you had precisely detailed plans for the entire thing from top to bottom, you still couldn't reasonably build one today, because the plans would be full of parts that are half a century obsolete. Just try sourcing the components for the guidance computer, for example.

I think that by the time you figure out how to replace all the obsolete parts with something more modern, it's easier to simply take the lessons learned and design a new rocket from scratch.
While we're in the vein of FM Synthesizers, if anyone has MAX/MSP, it should come with an example patch called "X-FM~". If you modify things right you can get usable and interesting sounds.

In terms of other similar things to MAX/MSP (a visual audio programming interface, among other things), here's one for unix-likes, I believe (never used it, anyone know how good it is?)

http://puredata.info/
Can't everyone just look up your IP block in a registry somewhere?
Does software for remote monitoring of operating parameters really share nothing in common with a high-performance web app?
Ahh, I missed that very subtle point. Most of my experience with business comes from a taste of the music industry and reading on (most) bands struggling to make a dime, so my bias says that a good point system is the amount of fans you have, but! this clearly doesn't work for most things in life. I think the point system depends on what you are talking about, so perhaps for startups $$$ is the best point system we have available right now.
Look for "decision fatigue", it's a theory saying that people who have to make a lot of hard decisions, usually at the end of the day are so tired in their mind that they can't get themselves together to decide anything.

The interesting thing is that it's usually seen in poor and uneducated people, not big bosses that supposedly has to make alot of hard decisions. It's more the "shit, how am i going to pay my rent this month"-questions that tires your mind. The theory was that because their minds, unconsciously, are so hogged up with these questions they can't get themselves together and change job, start studying, etc and thus get stuck in an evil circle.

Don't know if this applies to you but make sure you have all your basics together before you start diving into more tough areas.
exactly the same thing is happening to me. Used to be better a few months ago.
Honestly, this will be the primary reason I will leave China when I get completely tired of this.. Slowly getting there...
Show HN: Check out QCOkay. Brainstorming + Quality tools + Projects
Manage quality in your organisation with a bunch of awesome online tools. This is way cool.
LEAD GENERATION PROCESS
Never heard of this stuff before - ordering my first pack now!

Will be getting some for friends for Xmas.
> since it would block the vast majority of VPN traffic

Which would be a problem for the Chinese government HOW?

I think those very blunt ways of identifying "unwelcome" connections and then just blocking them looks like exactly the solution a government makes that doesn't twitch an eye at re-locating thousands because they want to build a dam right there.

So far encrypted traffic was a neat way of circumventing the control, now this could be trying to just plug those holes. Even if the handshake message does not say "OpenSSH xx...." at least the protocol response to random data would give them a clue and it is (sort of) more difficult to fix on a larger scale because they could always fine-tune the finger-printing.

Instead of monitoring and analyzing all outgoing connections all the time, they just figure out where they are going and then block the destination once and for all - sounds logical and neat.
I posted this as a reply to Goblin, but I missed the subtle point about it being a point system to 2 decimal places. I also made a point that I think it really depends on what type of thing you are trying to measure, as for bands a good point system is the amount of fans you have. With that said I think it's totally awesome to say that the best point system for startups is $$$.
Sounds fantastic, although given some of the examples (child-proof camera, and dishwasher repair) the fact it's not certified as being food or child safe is slightly disturbing.

I'd play down those two examples if it was me, until it did get certification from a reputable source.
Isn't that paypal's business model? They're doing OK.
Show HN: My iPad Hacker News Client, Hacker News Paper
Granta: HTML5 Graphic Novel Based on a Bolano Story
How is that any faster or better than what comes built in? I feel like I'm missing something.
IMHO this is caused more by broken protocols than NAT in general. There's no reason to have the VoIP packets delivered directly instead of them being routed (on the protocol level, not IP-routing) over a central VoIP gateway.

If the singalling protocols would allow for something like 'hi - my client $foo wants to talk to your client $bar. Please direct your response to me' and the other end would then send the packets with 'this is a packet from my client $bar to your client $foo - as you told me, I'm sending it to you', then there wouldn't be an issue - aside of a very small bit of additional latency and higher complexity of the gateway software.

If these client IDs are opaque, then the network topology stays hidden, but NAT would be completely irrelevant in between.

Now, personally, I'm really looking forward to having a /64 at the end of my cable modem. I will make splendid use of it and I will highly enjoy the additional uses I get from having my machines freely accessible to the internet.

On the other hand, people got good at understanding the feature set NAT provides and, thus, at configuring NAT gateways which also don't allow incoming connections per default.

That way, if I'm just a "normal user" and I buy myself a WiFi printer, I don't have to concern myself with configuring a firewall in order to ensure that it doesn't turn into an involuntary fax machine for example.

This could of course be solved by correctly configured firewalls on these crappy blue box routers, but how many years will it take them to reach "correctly"? Will they actually be configurable enough? Or would they just drop anything with a SYN bit set? How would these crappy firewalls deal with incoming UDP? Block it unconditionally (thus breaking VoIP even more)? Add "connection" tracking? In that case, why not just NAT?

I believe it's a good thing to have NAT back. Will I use it at home? Probably not. Will my parents use it at home? Likely. Would they be affected? Likely not as we already are used to deal with NATed clients.
IMO Spotify is overrated, www.tubalr.com is where its at.
This article is misleading. as Andrewcooke and jsn point out, this is not about web servers, it is about TCP/IP traffic. For a technical forum such as this, it is appreciated when the underlying causes are enumerated. This comes across as marketing with inadequate technical detail.
I'd like to hear some opinions on this myself. I personally don't think it matters anymore, but every time I get an idea for a product/domain, I get told "No. It should have a dot-com." Hm, really? Should it? I like how Delicious went from De.licio.us to delicious.com when they had the money. Most devs can't afford simple domain names.
> I'm just fine. Depressed and exhausted, yes

If you actually thought about what you write, I could belive you. Or even bothered to read what you just wrote. Depression isn't normal.
eBay Acquires Hunch
This probably won't work, as google found out with it's prediction api (it hasn't been used much). There's already enough open source software out there that's state of the art and easy to use.

There's good business to be had in selling data though which is where these folks should probably divert their effort.
I'm not familiar with 80legs, but the main idea is to "democratise" access to this technology and make it easily accessible to anyone who wants to build something on it.

The initial few beta releases will probably be aimed at people aiming to build applications themselves by providing them with API's, but hopefully we'll build out the analytics side of things soon enough so it becomes accessible to non-techies as well.
Ask HN: Is a pricing grid really the best option?
I've seen it recommended more then a few different places that the more choice you give a potential purchaser the less likely they will be to make any decision at all. Why then does nearly every pricing page have a grid of at least three choices? I realize having one choice (with upgrades after the purchaser has signed up) is not always possible but I would think I'd see more of the single plan with upgrade here (on HN) then elsewhere. Any thoughts?
GCC 4.7 adds transactional memory extensions for C/C++
Early Christmas Shopping
Early Christmas Shopping
Christmas shopping done early every year you probably find yourself getting a great deal of mean looks from others around the holiday season.
If this really is true then it's a sad indictment of the state of the startup scene.

Perhaps your hypothetical fellow should focus on building a "lifestyle business" instead of trying to get big and then get acquired...
How to setup a collaborative search ring with Seeks
Staying Abreast Of The Changes In Online Business Marketing
Kindle Fire purchase intent already at one-third the iPad’s level
Will Cloud Hosting Services Work?
Sometimes I tap Settings and I forget what I was looking for while Settings was loading up. When I tap this from the home screen, I know it'll definitely load up what I want.
> What is ebay thinking?

Impressive back-end tech (the recommendation engine) that can now process millions and millions of items on eBay to help increase sales (something like a quarter of Amazon's sales come from recommendations).
Thanks a lot for checking out my app. Here are a few promo codes for anyone interested.

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So, all my tools to do my job are not on my computer on my desk but on a server off in the wild somewhere and my company does not have control over it in any way. If the server goes down does that mean I can go home and still be paid?

Plus, does the licensing agreement on any of that software allow such a thing?
Has this guy ever even read Joel's stuff?

The acronym TDD keeps popping up time and again.

Joel's not a TDD fan last I heard him talking about it (admittedly stackoverflow podcasts a couple of years back). He certainly wasn't a fan of it when the Joel test came out because that pre-dated TDD.

Fact is, while I agree with some of the points in the article, there are things that aren't accepted practice and TDD is one of them.

Personally I think it's a colossal waste of time apart from some complicated methods.

And don't even get me started on the esoteric 'scrum' or 'agile' where everyone has their own pet definition of what it really means.
Know any brilliant geeky friends? Join the Geek Hunt
The Scrappy Guide to Pre-Launch Bootstrapping
Vtech Kidizoom Twist Digital Camera
Ask HN: What yet-to-be-written Erlang analysis tool would you like to have?
There a number of useful tools for random testing, static analysis, coverage analysis for Erlang (eg, dialyzer, PropEr, QuickCheck). Yet, I believe there's still space for other tools.

What yet-to-be-written Erlang static/dynamic analysis tool would you like to have in your code path?
Oh well, that may be the reason I've problems connecting to my VPN and SSHing to my server. Not every time, though.

Posting via https works, however.
Very hard to imagine ebay doesn't already do a good job of this with their years of experience. I mean it's possible, but I doubt it.
This was almost too annoying for me to actually pay attention to the page.
Technically he should be a software developer with a $120-200k salary working at Google, saving money with compound interest and getting company stock. Thats the easiest way as a CS grad to become wealthy - if thats your goal.
A Case for Write Optimizations in MySQL
self driving cars

autonomous helicopters

automated analysis of satellite imagery

search engines

visual search engine (google goggles)

virtual assistant (siri)

speech recognition

document classification (spam detectors)

question answering systems (ibm watson)

ad placement (google adsense)

computer guided surgery

high throughput imaging (chemo/bioinformatics)

product recommendation (amazon/netflix)

acturial science

industrial automation (inspection systems)

intelligent video surveillance
Worst car flops of 2011
While IPSec would solve the technical problem using it would make blocking even easier unfortunately.
Thanks - I've used - 3HLAMPWWE3X6. I'll test and provide a review in a bit.
Literate programming with Github and Markdown
Indeed few boats that size are as maneuverable as a tug. It's a good metaphor for a skilled developer: even with that kind of agility, it can take a while to change the direction of something with a huge momentum. And a software project has momentum vectors shooting off in high dimensional space.
Conclusion:

"The reason why so many whales were killed in the 20th century was the distant ramifications of replacement of whale oil by petroleum. It took another 100 years to find solutions to these ramifications, and only then it became possible to save the whales. Ecological activism did not play significant role in all of these developments; neither did the numerous well-meaning international treaties, moratoriums, and other chest beating displays."

"A chemist who saved the whales has not merited a Wikipedia entry. His name was P. S. Landis and he was a researcher at Mobile Oil."

A really interesting piece IMO.
Making Money With An MLM Home Based Business ...
Doesn't work on the iPad ....4.3.3

Or am I doing it wrong?
first of all, great work. I really like the the presentation, something different. I've got a few issues with the app though:

- It's hard to flip pages, I opened articles often when I tried to flip one. Seems the gesture recognition needs some refinement

- I don't like the font and the header. I think it looks a bit cheap. At least the font in the sub-headline could look nicer.

- Get rid of those standard rounded rect-buttons in the article view. Doesn't need too much effort to style them a bit, and it makes a huge difference.

Thanks for this app, well spent money :-)
Airtel & Vodafone mobile companies under investigation
Agile Modeling: Enhancing Communication and Understanding
Well done Sugruonians!

Fixed the broken side brushes of my Deebot yesterday. With Sugru of course. Very nice material, easy to handle, good results. Recommend it.

-jsl
what is right and what is wrong is different for different people
> Is this improvement over CPython or over previous implementation in PyPy?

Both.
Thanks a lot for your feedback!

The gestures, better fonts, and buttons are three things that are already high on my list to fix, but its really good to hear it from someone else. Be looking for an update shortly.
I'm no fan of Eclipse. I've never used myeclipse, so I can't speak to that. I've used Flash Builder (in a mostly stock way) with varied levels of success. IntelliJ has really nice Flex tooling though.
I'm clearly not the target market for this. I use pretty much every "plugin" they've got with every project.
it is not about privacy, but more to do with providing one (of the many possible) path towards ipv6 migration. although a dual-stacking would be much better imho...
> Would an outgoing ssh request be hard to discriminate from an outgoing openvpn request or an outgoing https request?

No. But the point probably is: it is much easier and more economic to block the receiving end once by figuring out what it is than having to scan every single outgoing connection all the time.