skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to Setup a Failure Tolerant Online Business (Redundancy and Auto-Healing)
A final look at GCHQ's top secret Oakley site in Cheltenham
You are right in terms of SEO. On a funny note if you search Tripl on Google, our SEO is so bad it comes up as domain description we originally bought. Google must of done some re-indexing. We are trying to fix that this week by using a site index.
that was a mistake on my part, I copied the link from our Facebook group where I posted it to our team, changing now!
Chrome Engineer's Follow-Up on Google's Mozilla Funding
Stock Options Boost Company Performance only when given to Executives
Poor user experience. I like articles sliding in and out.
You need to make it work for it.
It's not a very good analogy because parts are portable, but good enough for me:
I can recompile my C program for arm. Doesn't make the x86 binary run.
While this is an interesting contributory factor, the kind of feedback people get regarding pricing is epic. I have a friend who released an app for customer relationship management ("FollowUp!", or something like that; it could also be used to keep track of friends you don't talk to often enough) and got a comment that read along the lines of:

"""This app is amazing. It changes the way I do business. I use it every single day. It exactly solves my problem. However, $5 for an app? Come on, that is unreasonable."""

Additionally, there are good ways to mitigate people purchasing things "blind": in addition to having good screenshots, and a well written description (preferably one you redraft often and are A/B testing), you are also going to want a website that includes more: maybe a video.

I mean, a ton of video games are also "crap": I remember many Nintendo games I used to own that simply sucked, and where you regret having spent $35 on the cartridge. However, people still paid $35 for those cartridges, as the good games spent the time to do marketing.

At the time that meant getting into trade magazines (Nintendo Power! being an epic one, but there were tons of smaller ones that I used to subscribe to); today that would mean being covered by various blogs or online papers. A few years ago, we had a game company, and one of our three people spent most of his time just handling press.

This is no different for iPhone games either: the guy who wrote GeoDefense (one of the most popular and most profitable games for the iPhone platform) talks endlessly at conferences about how what made him successful was hiring a PR firm to handle his press announcements: he was simply covered everywhere.

With things like this in place, users aren't "buying blind": they are making informed decisions about products they heard about elsewhere, and are simply using the App Store as a payment and distribution vehicle.

(Which, seriously, is all that it is good at; too many people try to use it for "discoverability", and then end up with these very problems: users don't really know what their app is or what it does, no one finds it unless you are under top-selling, and before you know it you are stuck in a $1 price category or trying to work freemium; they are bargain-binning themselves.)
So "steve" + "jobs" == "yc" for equal second :D.
The GeoEye site photo gallery gives a good idea of the resolution of currently available commercial satellite photos (presumably the company has incentive to show especially good examples of its photography from satellites).

http://www.geoeye.com/CorpSite/gallery/Default.aspx

The resolution shown is a lot less than the resolution necessary to read automobile license plates from space (a common 1960s claim of satellite capabilities that was surely an exaggeration for propaganda effect). Much less could a satellite read a notebook in a secret agent's hand, or anything of that kind. I think a lot of members of the general public are confused about the capability of satellite photos, because Google Maps displays aerial photos taken from airplanes under the heading "Satellite," which is always incorrect for the more close-in views (which also are seriously lacking in resolution).

The book Physics for Future Presidents and a course handout for a "physics for future presidents" course at a university

http://books.google.com/books?id=6DBnS2g-KrQC&pg=PA204&#...

http://personal.carthage.edu/kcrosby/phys100/worksheet-licen...

both go through the steps for calculating the likely resolution of photographs taken by an earth-orbiting satellite.
Consumer Trends
Today I had an idea that's so simple it could be useful.

We can send a message to the US legislative that things like SOPA, PIPA and the more shady provisions of the NDAA are a step too far. While they will laugh at our numbers, we can promise to volunteer our technical skills and resources to the politicians who vote against laws like that and deny access to the same resources to those who vote for them.

Our community is not large and writing our representatives telling them they lost our vote does not carry enough weight (and it's probably the same everywhere) but we carry mighty claws and teeth in form of our skills and resources.

Any ideas on how to do it?

Note: I live in Brazil and one could say such things have no direct impact on my life, but bad ideas and bad legislation are contagious. The same lobbies that work in the US are busy at work everywhere. We cannot afford to concede them a victory like this.
I launched http://testingbot.com last month. Provides easy cross browser testing by using Selenium.

Not many customers yet, but I think there's a market for this. Everyone needs to keep their website bug-free.
My thoughts exactly. Paradoxically, being closer to the issue and company actually clouds your perception instead of enhancing it.
Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect
I'd note that browserid (browserid.org) solves the "single social login for everything". It also solves the "user and pass everywhere" in fact. It's pretty damn neat.

Unfortunately i'm not sure people will adopt it. It's only good for the user. It doesn't bring money.
I doubt any programmer practices platform, tool and library choice with 100% rationality, so it's not a black and white issue. If I had in fact been trying to convince people and hadn't brought up irrationality myself, your concern would be welcome :)
Very cool. I'm definitely interested. How do you foresee people integrating the API? And, roughly, what do you think you'd charge for it?

(Also are you familiar with http://www.opencalais.com/ ?)
about the google sites speed its mostly all SPDY.
It's hack but it's a good one. Thus it's in Firefox Aurora. Enable with about:config look for stuff called spdy, til its on by default
Also, TC dies on the iPad
most of the ideas that you start with actually change later. So, not a good idea to fit problems to an idea, they would almost never perfectly match.
Actually, in Windows, that "differently in Explorer than it does elsewhere in the system." is not 100% correct: there is no 'everywhere else'.

MS Office does not have a proper clipboard, either. For example, in Excel, open-select-cut-close-paste does not do what one expects:

- cut does not delete data from the clipboard, but
sort-of marks it for a future move.

- close makes the app forget about that move,
clearing the clipboard.

- because the clipboard is empty, paste does nothing.

IIRC, the clipboard is even broken within a single document, but I do not remember details (something like cut-enter data in a cell-select destination-paste?)
Yep, http://www.txtyourclass.co.uk - Remind101 for the UK, teacher to student text messaging. So far so good!
A canistor full of film has very high bandwidth compared to a lossy analogue signal.
i dont think the chrome multiprocess model works well on mobiles yet.
it needs more memory specifically if you start having a few tabs.
Same here. The public library was basically my weekend babysitter and I would read 2-3 books on an average weekend. It's hard to imagine how that would happen at a time when public book availability drastically declines without a corresponding increase in e-book readers for low-income residents.
PPC, MIPS, and Sparc are dead platforms anyway. X86 and ARM is where its currently at, like it or not. So it does make sense to target these platforms first. I don't buy that this is a step backwards. Rather, it is a step in the right direction: So we can run other languages in the browsers, at full speed - untangling the web from Javascript. It is about time.
Any software that has been around a very long time with entrenched data formats. These monopolies create a lot of problems at this point, and having the flexibility to fork the code and create better tools (compatible with the data) would help.

Some examples: Microsoft Word/PowerPoint/Excel, AutoCAD, Photoshop. It doesn't even have to be for the purpose of forking...I imagine Open Document for instance would benefit from just being able to see how the heck Microsoft interprets the data in its files.
I honestly thought it only happened to me. I've pretty much stopped reading TC because of it.

I cringe every time there is a good discussion going on HN over a TechCrunch article, because I just know it will inevitably lead to safari crashing on my iPad.
Perhaps the secrets are in terms of processing capability. They have high resolution synthetic appeture radar. Im guessing that civilian applications only scratch the surface of what that could be capable of.
Most of the time you don't actually care about the exact size of your integer types (especially for signed integers).

At work, we use C90 with a few C99 extensions which can be disabled through the preprocessor (e.g. inline, restrict) and although we stared out with a stdint.h like thing, it is proving to be less useful.
Realtime video chat built over Christmas break using Node.js
>>That's Perl built-in job security right there.

Huh? You mean, this is about Perl because regexps was created in Perl and the Perl regexp lib isn't ported anywhere else?

Oh, wait...

(If you must troll, at least be interesting. :-( )
Definitely. That's comfort for the existence of "long long"!
It will be your Christmas gift :-)
I don't really care that much about the issue, but "I've heard a story" isn't really much of an attack on "we did tests in a lab."
I upvoted you because you explained your downvote. Anonymous voting is what I like least about Hacker News. I prefer that people vote publicly. On my own site, I'm about to start offering actual cash (very small amounts, mere pennies) to people who explain their votes.
more shocking than anything related to the technology, is why they didn't declassify the price for project. I mean, if there's no risk of start a war with previous allies when this get's public, which greater danger may be on revealing the public money used on this?

And in the news reporting, why there's no mention of which legal mechanism allows for such a huge secrecy from the public, at all? should we all just accept that the cold war was the best that could have happened to the world and gladly accept many more to come?
> The main lesson is never build a business based on advertising revenue.

You clearly don't understand, or have skill in that area. Advertising income is very very easy to create a startup from, as long as you understand it and learn the basics.

TBH, the lesson you should be learning is that you didn't make something people wanted. That is the reason those 2 things failed.

If you get the users, then you can make money from advertising. It's a simple numbers game. You failed to get the users (Or you were spending way too much).
How Do Co-Founders Meet? 17 Startups Tell All
Person of 2011: Weal Ghonim, Anonymous and Bradley Manning
Adsense also pays my life...

He's wrong. The lesson is "He's not good at making money from advertising".
I think that publishers which try to make things more inconvenient for readers so that they sell more books are going to lose in the long run.

If a widespread technology makes things easier and more convenient, and you're not able to maintain an effective monopoly, then people are going to choose easy and convenient.
I've seen Kickstarter used for open source apps fairly successfully before. (Sorry I don't remember one off the top of my head.) I don't see any reason to reinvent the wheel here. Maybe even contact Kickstarter and ask if they can build a section for it?

The compensation I get for developing open source projects is recognition in the community, a nice resume padder and a general feel good associated with donating because I generally don't just donate straight up money to anything.

When I can walk into a possible employer and hand them a long list of projects I've worked on then they can see exactly my capabilities. I get job offers much easier without having to jump through hoops to prove coding skills directly.
Another thought: most of us are not made of the same kind of stuff as Donald Knuth.

Whatever origin you think world-changing inventions or intellectual work has, talent or the right mettle to push yourself extremely hard or whatever, most people do not possess it. I don't. And I think there is much less motivation to "go against the flow" if you are reasonably sure that no great benefit will follow from it.
I more admire his balls than his sophistication. Patching out a function called 'FlushChanges' without precisely knowing what kind of changes it flushes? I wouldn't take the chance that it does, as a side effect, increase the risk of disk corruption.
Google is an advertising company, effectively. When your focus is advertising, and everything else exists mainly to support it, that's different.
I would be interested in learning how that experiment goes. Social hacking fascinates me and at one time I spent quite a lot of time performing "private" experiments/tests with regards to influencing forums/email lists. I would be especially interested in seeing a write up done beforehand as to your logic/reasons for doing it and what you hope to achieve and then a write up afterwards to see what the actual results were. The information is a lot less valuable/interesting to me if there is no beforehand piece of it, put in writing before actual implementation. However, it probably should not be published until you get results, just written down. Publishing it could contaminate the data as it could influence the outcome and make it impossible to tell if the money or the article was driving change.

Best of luck.
ISO9000 doesn't require what you describe, though. It requires that you have documented processes for quality management of processes, for recording exceptions, and for communicating exceptions to involved parties (including customers).

The process you describes sounds to me like a measure put in place because there is a requirement that documentation be kept up to date. I did a contract once to streamline updates to the ISO 9001 quality handbook for a large company, and part of the hassle was that while they mostly relied on an electronic copy on their intranet, they also needed printed versions and they needed to be kept in sync.

They wanted to minimize the use of the printed version exactly because they had to keep track of the copies and ensure every one of them were updated (or destroyed) when there were changes, so that everyone were working from the current versions. When I was there, they had ca. 300 ring binders of printed versions, and every time a page was added, removed or changed, someone had to track down all of those 300 ring binders to update them...

All of this hassle was down to the paper versions - the intranet version was a simple set of documents with some basic hyperlinking, and the update criteria were satisfied by simply prohibiting making copies of it.

You could likely satisfy ISO 9001 documentation requirements with an internal wiki - none of the bureaucracy it introduces prevents it AFAIK. What it does prevent is taking a lax attitude to updating that wiki.
An illustrated guide to SOPA, PIPA, and why the Internet needs saving.
You will LOSE all of your money that you ever earned, and then a bunch that you still have not earned. If you’re not prepared to put it all on the line, you’re not prepared for a start-up.

Terrible assumption at best, a lie at worst. Putting everything on the line is not the only way to do a start-up that's successful.
BBVA Bank Will Donate a Meal Just For Clicking - Nothing Else Req'd
Maybe I've had too much "egg nog" (read: Wiehenstephaner heff) but smelling too many apples leads to runny stool?
I don't know why you would consider the choice of C89 irrational. If you want the widest range of compiler portability, you pretty much have to use C89.
I wrote kind of a hybrid static blog setup the other day[1]. You write posts in markdown, check them in along side the app, and then push to Heroku or wherever else you want to host it. It's just a little Sinatra app, no database or anything.

[1]: http://bugsplat.info/2011-12-14-yet-another-not-very-static-...
Show HN: multicasting video chat site I built over xmas break
Ask HN: A modern introduction to JavaScript?
For a project I and a small team is developing, I have to become reasonably familiar with JavaScript. However, searching the Web for introductions to the language, most of the stuff I find is either old (e.g. W3Schools and Mozilla's introduction) or non-comprehensive. Truth be told, I haven't looked much at books but given the nature of paper publishing I don't expect there to be any better books. So much having happened in the JavaScript ecosphere in the past few years, is there a modern introduction to the language out there that also briefly covers modern libraries like Node and JQuery?
Did you write a "looking for tech co-founder" post somewhere? I might be interested but would like to know what problem your startup hopes to solve.
Christmas Launch
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Just went live with the latest subscription model.
This was a trap for my iPhone 4 - I couldn't navigate away because it was so graphics intensive. I had to force quit then quickly load another page on startup.
Confiscated items only make sense if security exercises the slightest care over handling those items. If an object is potentially dangerous, a team of people in bunny suits should be hauling it away from the crowd of people at the checkpoint as soon as possible in a strong protective container and the person who brought it should be in handcuffs.

The reality of course is that this stuff is thrown in a pile and kept in the middle of a much larger crowd of people than you'd ever see on an airplane. Worse, all the "dangerous" objects are allowed to mingle. If these things are actually dangerous, then security agents are being criminally irresponsible by exposing the threat to an unnecessarily-large group. And for that matter, anything actually dangerous should be viewed that way by other people, wouldn't you say? (If an uncaged rabid rottweiler were in the middle of the checkpoint, I guarantee you that people would be paying attention to that, so why not any of these other "threats"?)

As far as I can tell, security is either wasting its time by confiscating non-threatening materials, or being criminally negligent by not treating threatening materials seriously. Either way, there is a problem. And of course I think the overwhelmingly obvious solution is to let people keep their toothpaste and cupcakes so we can get on with our lives.
gus - That's because they are...the site isn't launched yet we are just testing everything. All of those will be removed when we start to roll out the site to the public.
js_startup - Thanks for the comments. What you mentioned about showing the entire circle was being thrown around between my partner and I. Will definitely take that into consideration.
From the Junk Drawer: The Broken Pixel Theory
I find it funny (and perhaps ironic!) that people would want their thoughts kept in some obscure row and obscure column of a remote SQL database.

But perhaps it is better than not storing and sharing your thoughts at all!

In any case...Merry Christmas HN!
This tree is just as 3D as the trees in current state-of-the-art first person shooters.
Thanks. I'm happy you're interested.

The first thing I see this service being used is for news readers. Not having to develop this technology themselves will lower the cost/barrier of entry into their markets, so hopefully they can focus on interfaces. Beyond that, I'm sure people could use it to scrape and aggregate information about what people are concerned with around the web.

On charging for it, I'm not sure yet. I was thinking of using a credit model similar to Twilio for payment. Service might be 1c/unique (previously un-fetched article) and .1/0.1c for each fetched (cached) article.

I've run across OpenCalais before and I think it's a great big idea -- I love the idea of a semantic web.
How is that ironic? Thoughts have to be stored somewhere and databases happen to be really good at storing things.
Works fine (I presume slower than on a desktop; but certainly doesn't crash!) on my Galaxy Nexus.
The academic index equation---probably the most crucial part of the article---could have been more clearly explained with, well, an equation (or two). Instead, it is a 626x752px image of words and arrows and nested fractions, and there's a colored box with ordinal numbers spelled out, and it's oriented vertically. Not to mention that the whole thing is a jpeg, so it's full of compression artifacts. Avoiding equations is not only unclear, it may even discourage scientific literacy.
The truth behind SOPA and bills like it. Get your WTF glasses ready ಠ_ಠ
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- Heinlein
Electric shavers are a really odd addition to that list.
I think a trial is a good idea.

Though screenshots seem to be fair warning against lousy apps. For instance, a lot of lousy apps "waste" 2 or 3 of their screenshots with obscure details or marketing slides because (I assume) they don't really have much in the app itself to show off. Any time I've seen 5 full-screen, detailed, unique, functional screen shots I haven't really been disappointed; a quality app doesn't have any trouble looking that way.

I think developers probably have a little too much leeway over what they can change (since you can't really "go back" once you "upgrade"). For instance, I've seen games change fairly substantially compared to their original versions a year ago, and sometimes it's for the worse.
It's a shame that several years after the term "slashdot effect" was coined, self-hosted personal blogs are still vulnerable to this easily preventable phenomenon. The companies that host the majority of the world's small web sites, such as BlueHost, DreamHost, and (heavens forbid) GoDaddy, have not made any innovations in this department. Most VPS's are no different.

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is really good at handling traffic spikes, for both static and dynamic sites. It combines the convenience of shared hosting with the scalability of cloud computing. You just need to insert more coins when you run out of your prepaid traffic.
Interview with independent videogame developer, Kyle Reimergartin
Concept art gallery from independent videogame developer, Kyle Reimergartin
I could not agree more. It's an irresponsible statement and should only be qualified by those entrepreneurs talking about how much money they started with.

Though, having been to 500Startups and seeing the amount of 20-somethings there, I can't imagine they had much to lose in the first place.

I don't see why this lie of having to put everything on the line is consistently perpetuated within the start-up ecosystem. Yes, start-ups are hard -- but I am getting tired of what seems like a consistently perpetuated lie so that start-ups can feed their own ego -- or worse, justify their failure.