skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right in that most businesses need to grow to increase their value (generally because growth is built into their current valuation) but the narrative you're using isn't on target.

It's entirely possible for a business to give investors good returns even if their business or market isn't growing. Profitability and cash returns from a business can grow as revenues decline if the company either increases operating efficiency, or reduces in investment in recognition of the declining opportunity. MBAs would call this a "cash cow" business - one that should be milked.

We dont tend to see this much in tech because growth is such a fundamental part of our valuations that no company is willing to admit it's in such a position. And you'd probably lose all your engineers over time. But when you look at say, Microsoft, and strip away their non-performing businesses, that's what it looks like: a company that has some assets that produce a lot of profits, but aren't really growing any more, yet if managed properly can continue to throw off gobs of cash for years to come.
I'd argue that if you have no experience running a business, web-based experiments are probably the best bang for your buck in terms of learning the basics with minimal risk.

If anything, though, I'm looking at a much wider definition of "startup" than just the technology kind... so I definitely don't think the "tech stack" is somehow more important...
"""Yes. You need to find/create more markets."""

Actually you don't "need" anything. There are tons of examples of profitable companies that do one thing / product, or several things / products and do it for a century or more, with thousands of employees that do not look to expand on other markets. Even more so for companies with less employees.

"""If I invest 100 dollars in you, I want to receive a percentage back after a certain while. You need to be able to give me 103 dollars back the next year just to beat inflation, i.e. for this to not have been a complete waste of my time."""

Yeah, that's why the stock market promotes cancerous growth of companies.
It's better for the overall ecosystem. Higher quality apps means more time spent on your phone. If we can't duplicate the features of the app that aren't domain-specific, it results in an overall worse feel for the end user.
SPDY is not a good example. Google published the SPDY protocol before they rolled it out across all their properties, and Firefox has implemented it:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=528288
This is an evil bug in Javascript

parseInt('06') // 6

parseInt('07') // 7

parseInt('08') // 0

parseInt('09') // 0

parseInt('10') // 10

parseInt should really return NaN for '08', '09' etc
The Year’s Best Tech Quotes
Newsledge.com is a domain for sale and/or an idea for a startup.

To put it with Ray Kurzweil's words: "Your memory will be constantly, instantaneously aided by the information available on the Internet. The two will begin to become indistinguishable."

Newsledge can be a tool visualizing what's in your head.

You're probably consuming endless information (news) day by day; newsledge would be a summary of what knowledge you have acquired.

Or:

Newsledge is a multi-faceted tool because it knows everything about you.

You can name it Your Personal Search Engine, Your Mind Rate Monitor, Your Own Flow Engine, or Your Quantified Meta Self.

It makes you a Metaman, it makes your digital ego and echo visible, visualisable, analysable and understandable.

Without Newsledge you are a simple consumer with no feedback and knowledge distilled by your — more and more obvious — digital existence.

It is your power, reputation, attention in one place. So guard it with your life.

Read more about the idea here: http://metaman.tumblr.com/tagged/newsledge
Disagree. As a Canadian entrepreneur and someone who has previously worked as a sole proprietor for many years you should absolutely consider incorporation.

If you are a sole entrepreneur looking to go with a Canadan Controlled Private Corporation you should NOT pay a lawyer to get your business set up. Do your research, choose the jurisdiction that fits you best and get to it. It's dead simple and once you've determined the correct steps you can easily accomplish what need in a matter of days, or less.

Secondly, if you are paying $2k+ for your first fiscal year (let's assume that the company has not broken even) then you are being ripped off, plain and simple. You do not need audited accounts at this time. I paid roughly $450-550 annually for the first couple of years for the services of a very competent firm who I would refer in a heartbeat.

Being a sole proprietor is simple, both from the tax and setup perspectives however it is not without some drawbacks. The tax rate is much higher than that of a corporation and you will be doing business as yourself. This has far reaching legal ramifications if you want to accept money from people you don't know (online sales for your SaaS, for example) and many things that you will need to get to this stage are going to require a registered business at the very least. There are also some avenues that will be inaccessible to you because of your sole proprietor status (certain grants, tax credits, etc.) and you will constantly be fighting the little guy image.

The moral of the story is, if you ever want your business to move "beyond yourself", you should seriously consider incorporating.
Octal notation, with an invalid number. Makes perfect sense.

It's not a bug, behaves like specified:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global...

If parseInt encounters a character that is not a numeral in the specified radix, it ignores it and all succeeding characters and returns the integer value parsed up to that point. parseInt truncates numbers to integer values. Leading and trailing spaces are allowed.

[...]

For this reason always specify a radix when using parseInt.
That date conversion mainly happens here https://github.com/Tawlk/hyve/blob/master/hyve.js#L208-211 which is fairly straight forward. I will have to do some more poking around to see whats going on. If you find any specific items that trigger this, please let me know so I can debug them individually.
Yea, many people forget that IE6 actually improved standard compliance over IE 5.5.
There are, certainly, many new features that can be added to the language itself. What exists now is powerful enough to build some pretty robust applications, but more flexibility and power in a language is always good! One of the (many) reasons this is becoming an open source project... we, as a community, can decide what new language features are most vital and add as needed.
In JavaScript:

(NaN === NaN) is false
(NaN !== NaN) is true
Well we use social media to do harvesting, however we will be indirectly supporting a wide range of news and content. If 50 people all tweet the same article from techcrunch, that mentions the word android, then that is a pretty good indication we should call that out specifically.

We will be implementing a lot of features like this soon to give a far more relevant and diverse range of data based on its social media popularity for a given topic.
I love this line from that thread: I probably won't help you get more Twitter followers, but I will help you get more customers.
A JavaScript Library to Utilize Subject Headings and Thesauri on the Web
If any individual browser wins, we've lost the browser wars. As long as chrome and firefox are roughly even and together over 50% I'm content. Honestly I'm not sure I would want it any other way.
I wouldn’t call that a strange feature, just a surprising consequence of an un-strange feature, namely that inheritance involves expressions and that classes are first-class entities.

Folks from certain other languages would be just as surprised to find out that you can alias classes by assigning them, return them from functions, and so on.
a site must wait at least 10 days before restoring the material.

(This in reference to UMG's taking down a news show about the video in question...)

That blows my mind. That means anything at all can be taken down for a couple of weeks without the slightest repercussions to the fraudulent party.
Rebecca Black, Apple Products Top Google Zeitgeist 2011
There actually are a bunch of 3D printers that print most of their own parts!
Thanks, I missed the X before I saw your comment, but still, nothing comes through for me when searching in Chromium 17.0.950.0. Firefox nightly works.
I'm having problems on Chrome as well. Attempting FF and Safari now. unsure what the problem is.
Machinery Manufacturer
In order to be placed on the Global Union (GU) market, the design and construction of machinery must meet the requirements which have been established in the Industrial legislation with a view to protecting the safety of persons using such machineries and their components.
What is found in different tabs of iPhone Greetingz application
This video show that how different tabs work in iPhone Greetingz application.
If you're on a Mac, it seems that Chrome probably won't work. Open up Safari and click on the video stream link (http://mfile.akamai.com/65764/live/reflector:39480.asx?bkup=...) For me VLC opened the stream then. You could probably directly open it in VLC as well, but that isn't what I did.
Startup founders need to be events organizers. Literally.
I want some questions answered by the proponents, lobbyists and Congresscritters backing this thing:

1. Why do you need to avoid due process? The lack of oversight (by the courts) is what makes this like censorship in China, Iran, etc. With SOPA, all anyone need do is claim copyright infringement against some web site and it gets shut down and blacklisted-- correct or not, the targeted site owner is censored off the internet and cut off from their income simply because someone pointed a finger. That's bullying, plain and simple, and it's unacceptable.

2. What punishment is included for abuse of this lack of process? Without punishment, corporations can censor competitors, politicians can censor opponents, governments can censor citizens simply by alleging infringement against them.
Apologies for the perception of trollishness in my comment. The intent was merely to reflect my own personal quest to write better code. Obviously data mining has its place in a shop that produces mountains of code like Google. Not to mention other techniques like unit testing, etc.
Honestly, it is about time that they did this. I worked ont he IE team for a few years, and could never understand (aside from the enterprise argument) why users were not being auto-upgraded. "Hey here's a great new security model to replace the insecure previous version...but no rush on upgrading..."
Unwrapping async calls in Kaffeine
No it doesn't nor does it mean that safari 5 will be available for OSX 10.1 (another OS released around the same time).

What large majority of users still use XP? I'd be surprised if winxp was 50% let alone 80%. It's official there are more 7 installs than Xp so no majority let alone a large one.

If you want updates upgrade to win7, xp is over 10 years old. Ie8 already runs fine on xp.
Keep in mind that they probably submitted this to the patent office 3 years ago
2011: How the World Searched
Just out of curiosity, what observations concerning the way regular people use computers are you basing all this on? Most of the people I'd describe as regular people don't even know what RSS feeds are, and I don't know a single person who uses them.

Then again, a good number of the people I do know don't even understand the concept of a web address or even how to use bookmarks -- nevermind speed dial. Usually when I watch someone try to find a site, they just search for it in Google, and if Google isn't the default search provider, they search for Google in whatever search engine is the default. They also rarely use any browser "feature" except the back button, and they're afraid to try out new features. Even tabs and multiple windows are often underutilized or avoided by simply using one window at a time and closing it if they want to start over or visit a new site.

In fact, whenever they accidentally activate a feature they don't use (history, right-click context menu, rss feed view, gestures, etc.), it often just leads to confusion because they weren't paying attention to what they did to set off the unfamiliar feature's action. As a result, they just close the window and start over, and if it happens again they get frustrated and do something else.

Also, learning new features isn't free. There's a cognitive cost involved and it takes a certain amount of training and repetition to solidify the ability to use new features. For some people, it's higher than for others, and eventually it gets to a point where people like my Dad have to basically relearn the same features over and over again every time they use a computer. Listening to older relatives talk about their computer experiences, it also sounds like most of the time they're too deeply afraid of accidentally breaking their computer by clicking or doing the wrong thing to learn features by experimenting, further reducing the ability for them to solidify their learning through repetition and practice.

By comparison, those individuals I see who are willing to learn new features or who can notice what they did to set off a feature are usually pretty tech-savvy (or soon will be) and would be able to figure out how to use and install extensions anyway.

So personally, I think it's a good idea to aim for a default, minimalist interface and avoid gestures and interactive UI elements that users can accidentally click or activate. But that's just based on my casual observations of people using computers, which is why I'd love to hear yours, since apparently you disagree.
Sounds reasonable and as something only power users would be aware of.

Updating using Windows Update is the biggest pain in the ass, and it's great to see a much more convenient solution.
Debunking a 'hydrogen-powered' boat that claims to run on seawater
Great news for a great framework and a great PaaS.
Have you tried mousing over the pixels?
"Entreprise" is not limited to Windows. Far, far, far from that. I don't know your background, but in software development (let us exclude plain Website just publishing information), most of it is written for enterprise customers, not private consumers. Excel had around 10 developers years long. I understand cloud is making the difference more blury, but there are just so different needs across different countries, industries, etc - work is in the enterprise. Consumer tools scale, you don't need much people to maintain and develop these.
ShareMyPlaylists.com launches Spotify platform app
How ironic that the Internet could be saved from censorship (SOPA) thanks to the fear of cyber-terrorism (the DNSSEC issue).
This is isomorphic to NULLs in some languages (I think SQL behaves this way). Basically, NaN isn’t some specific thing, it’s an indication of something that isn’t a number. So two things that aren’t numbers can’t be thought to be equal to each other, they might be radically different things.

If there’s a WTF, it’s that NaN === NaN is either true or false. If I were writing a language, it might be undecideable. But if you end up with:

Undecideable === Undecideable //=> Undecideable

You are opening up the “Hopelessly Egocentric Null” can of worms:

https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-02-...
Welcome to 1998. That was when the DMCA was passed - signed by president Clinton. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Ac...

It hasn't gotten any better since.
Agreed, even on article's screen it looks like chrome with finder sidebar sticked to it on glue
Providing Distance Education is Easy with Learning Management System
Sorry, but anybody who writes like that is not qualified to tell us what editor to use.

This is a tech forum, give us the technical reasons. If there aren't any, don't blog.
The main idea around Chrome is no significant changes from version to version. If you look at Chrome 9 and Chrome 15 you'll see there are significant changes but they were made in small iterations with each release.

The benefit of this is if they make a small change that causes a large pushback, they can easily stop that path of development and try another.
I wonder if it will keep replacing the shortcuts that I've removed.
StackMob’s Mobile App Platform Is Now Publicly Available
mplayer works. I'm using the command-line version installed through MacPorts.
Within one lifetime, probably so. The next generations might add more money, or spend it all.

There is an old proverb "from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations". (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080114145024AA...)
I assume that the author means to say "40% of the majors in computer science." For what it's worth, the college's own web site says 34% female, 36% class of 2013.
John Gruber’s take on the Galaxy Nexus
Yes, it's not a panacea. But it's a heck of a lot easier to store a generic supply of printer feedstock, than to store one (or more) of every part that might conceivably break.

Suppose that you expect 1% of all replaceable parts to break over some projected lifespan. Then the mass of feedstock required would be 1% of the mass of the replacement parts... and would take up less than 1% of the space.
Need 5 minutes of help-will pay
I need to send out an html email through mailchimp, I have the html code and images loaded, but I don't know how to modify the code so that the links send people to the correct place. (the people who produced the creative did not code in the links)

I can pay $50 via paypal for someone to help with this, I need to get this done asap. My email is in my profile, please email me if you can help. Thanks
Why should we obey physical boundaries? Internet should be for people across national borders. If anything, we should establish our own government for the Internet that actually knows and understands what they're talking about.
Agreed. The entire patent departments of all world governments should be abolished. There is no reason the human race should be putting these restrictions on ourselves. It's completely absurd.
I get the point. I just don't see why it's necessary for someone to point out the disparity in perception every time a story about America's poor comes up. We have different standards due to the difference in national wealth.

Do you see Americans dropping in to talk about how out of touch people in better educated European countries are when they talk about problems in their schools? It wouldn't make sense. People get to aspire to better things for their country, even if other countries aren't quite there yet.
I beg to differ. These technologies come with real, actual benefits -- one of the biggest ones for most of these being speed of execution. Many of them fit much better with agile development methods. Others that you list offer scalability benefits, which will save headaches down the line. If you're a tech startup that doesn't at least understand these benefits and has a good justification for why you've gone with other technologies, I'd have questions about the skill level of your technical team. If you already know PHP, learning Rails to start building is like, an investment of a week (or should be if you're a decent programmer). Have you read up on the hoops that Facebook has had to jump through to make PHP scale for them? The future costs of trying to hire excellent developers when you're bound to a stale tech stack is another significant consideration.

I'm not disagreeing that you can make a good product with old tech, but I'd contend that producing a good product and using some of the newer tools are not unrelated, on a number of levels.
Please correct me if I'm wrong!

But:

>Profitability and cash returns from a business can grow as revenues decline if the company either increases operating efficiency, or reduces in investment in recognition of the declining opportunity.

Sure. When I say growth, I mean "make more money this year than you did the year before". This doesn't directly translate into "make more widgets", of course – that's just the (in an ideal world) easiest and least complicated way of achieving that.

>yet if managed properly can continue to throw off gobs of cash for years to come.

Until! It dies ;0.
Did you read the article till the end? I'll assume you didn't. If you did, please elaborate on your statement. Thanks.
Icon's conditional statements were pretty odd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon_(programming_language)
No such thing can exist in a world of seven billion people. If your model of government requires that, it is doomed to absolute failure. The correct answer is to decentralize more and reduce our need for "leaders" in general.
If you find yourself doing things like this in Python you should probably switch to Ruby.
Maybe 'register' wasn't abstract enough, he means something like (in psuedo-assembly):

ldr r1,4 ;Load constant 4 into register 1
add r2,r2,r1 ;Add contents of r2 and r1, store in r2
ldr r1,5 ;Load constant 5 into register 1

where the value is only temporarily available for the single calculation. Even without thinking of registers, you can refer to the loop variable, but you can't refer to numbers in your operations.

Maybe he could update this line for clarity, though.
Chasing the New Angel Investors
Yeah, but do you have health care?
MySQL password hashing
Glad you're blogging again.
When I have watched hearings in the past it has been to listen to debates (most of which wind up being read verbatim from a piece of paper), but the language used is more natural than that of a proposed bill/amendment.

As for doing their homework, from the events surrounding SOPA which have taken place to date and in reading the list of amendments to be discussed, I don't believe these JC members - save for a few like Lofgren, Polis, Sensenbrenner, Chaffetz - have done their homework.

Two of the most important amendments over the next two days:
* performing a study on the impact of any bill prior to its enactment (why this isn't a part of judiciary procedure escapes me)
* an expiry on the provision of the bill after 5 years, which I think is a wonderful idea.
Indeed. Not everyone has pockets, at least not consistently.
While true, I don't consider it a defense for bad commenting. I would consider actually reading the article before commenting to be a basic requirement of participation on HN. (Within reason; occasionally, entire books or a semester of lectures are linked.)
These are trivial kinds of errors. The big fuckups are invariably more subtle and people / requirements oriented.

When all you've got is a hammer ....
Wouldn't mounting the printer outward from the center axis of a rotating drum solve this issue?
I use Textmate when I'm doing design work (HTMLizing wireframes/photoshop).

I use VIM when I'm writing JS/Ruby and using terminal heavily.
Haha touche!
Interesting C++ tidbit: the ternary operator can yield an lvalue, like so:

int foo = 0, bar = 0;
(cond ? foo : bar) = 8;

This doesn't work in plain C.
I think your biases are showing here. No one said anything about hating anyone. It's about companies (with fudiciary obligations which aren't to the customer) are taking very strong dominating positions in key technologies.

Being Free Software really isn't a concern to most people. Try being a small company that tries to block aggression from Google or Microsoft. Will it matter that Chrome is free? It's not like you can go in and say, "Here I changed Chrome. All users now use this version." For 99.999% of users free software is meaningless.

What would make Chrome much more interesting is if they gave maintanance of it over to a standards body or even a university. At this point "free software" is just nice window dressing.
ISS needs some fuel to combat atmospheric drag every once in a while, too.
I like it, but I'm a minimalist kind of guy in my reading (formatting) preferences anyway. Is there an option for selecting sites? I didn't see one.