skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Collecting data isn't evil. It's the currency of the future, a currency that we provide in order to buy useful services...

For all I know, data is mostly used to sell other services for cash, except a little more effectively.

And blaming Apple for working condititions during manufacturing is missing the forest for the trees. The whole model of short-lived consumer electronics is absolutely terrible, starting with where materials come from, ending one some landfill where children burn valuable metals out of the remains.
I think we could change much more if we would absolutely oppose the notion that it is normal to throw away cellphones after two, and computers after three years.
Would it be possible to build a comsat network in LEO for reduced latency, kind of like the Synapse network in Antitrust?
Hey everyone. Taylor from Imulus here. I'm the front-end developer leading up Support Details.

Thanks for all of the positive and constructive comments. We're really excited to take Support Details to the next level, and based on your comments, I think our ideas on the right track. As of late, we've been focusing on the accuracy and speed of the site (see http://imulus.com/blog/bryce/javascript/support-details-on-r...), but now that we've got that nailed down, we're excited to start rolling out some new features.

As an agency focused on client work, we've struggled in the past to make time for our own products, but we're set on making them a priority this year, so thanks again for the positive comments to encourage us to move forward.
There's SQLAlchemy-Migrate as someone mentioned, and I've also recently released Alembic (https://bitbucket.org/zzzeek/alembic) which is already being used in some production environments. Alembic includes semi-automatic version generation in a similar way as South for Django does.
> Where do the 700,000 Android phones that get activated every day get made? Is Google blameless because they dont make it themselves?

Maybe, maybe not, but with all the hostility toward Google, I think a damning article would have come out by now.
Timeline of Computer Ownership.
Someone needs to chart these on a map, and allow overlaying with a business directory of startups and VC hangouts.
Oh the memories. I'm not going to put my startup in the Dropbox 'successful' bucket quite yet, but our multiple 'Ask HN' posts helped mold IActionable into what it is today.

Its really interesting to look back and see how our company was formed by the feedback we received. Early on we had one idea which we called 'KaBadge' and we asked what everyone thought here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795952

This made us discover an even bigger need. Before people were going to think about karma/badge/point portability they were going to need systems to help award them. We switched gears really quick and went to work. It look a bit of time to convince ourselves that it would be possible. This was way before someone tossed out the term 'gamification' so it was really hard to do any research on this new market.

Then we came back to the community with IActionable: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126780

Unfortunately at that time there was no way we could have moved to California to be part of YC. (families, babies, mortgages, etc) But, we were lucky enough to discover a local (Utah) incubator back in 2010. Eventually my friend and I convinced ourselves to quit our jobs: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1347464

We quickly raised a seed round after the program and haven't looked back. Things are definitely still evolving but its been an awesome roller-coaster ride so far.
No one seems to be commenting about the Stately Manor :) Datacenters come with their own set of interesting problems that are just as much fun to solve as programming puzzles. Thermal imaging goggles to design airflow.. Designing extra redundancy into power systems while adding alternative energy to reduce power costs. In this category, rack space and power consumption are almost as important characteristics as ram/ghz.
> Two years ago, Google offered to buy Yelp, but the talks broke down. Last year, Google introduced Places, a Yelp-like service for listing businesses and collecting consumer reviews.

So... what? At least they tried to buy the technology before building it in-house, which is more than what most companies do.

Apple has run out of businesses a lot of companies by stealing their ideas outright and shipping them as part of MacOS (Konqueror widgets, Spotlight, etc...).
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I entertained the idea once of a file-manipulation protocol based on the Redis protocol (with possibly a bit of JSON mixed in for sending structured data like directory listings). The only downside is that the only way I know of to secure it is SSH tunneling...someone should come up with a way to do Redis over TLS.
What about people who are actively founding a company, work a 9-5 job, and still post on HN? Are we just nuts, or what? :-)
Brevity is the soul of wit. You certainly lose accuracy, but honestly, nobody wants to read a wall of text.

If you want to presume some sort of conspiracy sexist default supremacist undertone in what I wrote, fine, but I think that says more about you than about me.
I wasn't making the argument that prices should remain static regardless of demand, day of the week, or any other factor.

My point was that the airlines have created a pricing system so opaque that it can actually become a deterrent to travel. Why do people sitting next to each other on the same flight pay wildly different fares?
You have a good point about the manual kerning (not sure what's up with that), but I don't agree with any of your other criticisms. This is basically what typeface catalogs are like: a demo of a particular face.

- name of the font

who cares. click through to find out

- style of the font (sans, slab-serif, etc)

you need someone to tell you that? I don't understand.

- who made the font, what style is it based on, what was the designer's purpose/goal with this font

who cares. click through to find out

- how complete is the font, what characters does it support, quite a few of them don't even have most of the basic symbols from lower ASCII, that's pretty important to be aware of or you get unpleasant surprises long after the design is done

Yes, that information is clearly visible when you click through.

Imagine explaining to a client you designed a website for, that if they need to add new content to the CMS, they must manually kern the headlines! ... errr ... manually do the whut now?

Yes, you'd look like an idiot if you did that.
I was thinking that this was going to be a filter on HN that blocked the comments by people you didn't like. That would be kind of a cool project. Basically, you could click "hide" and no longer see comments by a particular person. Over time, it could use clustering and machine learning to decide which comments you should see.
If it's not too personal, can you outline some of your OCD symptoms and behaviors?
I'd like to add that for different parts of your application, or website, it's ok to use different services.

For example, a large majority of tech startups have a WordPress blog that is totally separate from their actual web application. In many cases it also drives the marketing front-end of their website.

So while my main application may be on Heroku or AWS, I like to fire up a free PHPFog (I don't work for them, you could use DotCloud, or likely another alternative as well) account, and have my WordPress install setup there. It's insanely easy to setup (it's all Git based), and the free account will get you a long way.

It's also nice to know that the WordPress install lives on an entirely different server, so if you get slammed with great press, your entire stack isn't feeling the heat. There are security fears here as well, so I like having it separate.
Apple does not care about marketshare as much as Google.

Google is playing the monopoly game and Apple is playing the King of its backyard garden game.

The annoying part of Apple is it sees a rather large chunk of the world as its backyard.

I find Google a lot more threatening to my digital existence than Apple could ever be.
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Ask HN: any good sites for running sweepstakes, and general advice?
Been researching and looking into running a few contests or sweepstakes to get some attention and signups for my startup. Ideally I would want to run it across multiple social media channels, have a nice hosted launch page w/ good SEO, and make the legal, management, and selection of winners easy as possible.

I have come across a few platforms that help with this, such as : http://www.wildfireapp.com/, http://onekontest.com/, and http://www.strutta.com/

I'm just basically looking for any insights into running sweepstakes to generate signups/visibility and the best way to do it with minimal effort. Thanks!
This is against many consumer ISP ToS and they can/will arbitrarily start blocking traffic on certain default ports depending on how draconian they are about it. I agree that hosting on a home server is an option (even a good one) for some people and usecases, but you are still subject to the whims of someone else, and in this case you often have no recourse as you are violating the ToS.
"In fact the economic advantage has already largely dissipated and it's already not cheaper, which is why you don't hear anybody talking about this anymore. The whole "we're all gonna lose our tech jobs to the cheap foreigners" scare is all very 2008; it has failed to happen, and it will continue to fail to happen because equilibrium has been reached and will not rapidly change because there's few to no new markets to suddenly emerge."

Wrong. Yahoo!, for example, has been continuously shedding Bay Area jobs and moving them to Bangalore. Right now, in 2011/2012, they are laying off workers in Silicon Valley and hiring in India. Expect other companies to follow suit.

It is certainly much cheaper to hire in India. Depending on experience, you can get three to five programmers there for every one in the Bay Area. They're just as skilled.
I think you are implying that cloud servers are different than Virtual Private Servers. I am new to this, so forgive my ignorance, but how are they different? Is it just that effectively that with standard cloud server options, you can spin up new/multiple instances, whereas with a VPS, you've just got the one?

Or is it more about how it is all handled in the background?
UX/Interaction Designer Needed at PageLever (S11)
We’re PageLever - the quickly growing, profitable, and amazing analytics platform winning over the hearts of marketers on Facebook worldwide. Customers such as YouTube and MTV ‘like’ what we’re doing.
We’re looking for experienced UX folks who are ready jump in head first into making what we do beautiful and awesome.

Right now, we're looking for someone to take on two specific projects in hopes that it leads to a full-time position with us. One of them will be the cornerstone of what we're doing and be seen by some of the top brands across the globe.

We're based in SF/SV, but would consider any talented person no matter where they're located.

If you're game, please take a minute and tell us a little bit about yourself: http://bit.ly/xVldL3

---
More about us:

What we value: Making software that solves actual needs. Enjoying the team you’re working with. The option to work when and how you want. Contributing social goodness through OSS and/or philanthropy.

We’re focused on growing PageLever into the next generation of software that shapes how we understand social engagements on the web. We’re a fresh YCombinator company with the best advisors a team could ever want. This isn’t our first company, either - both of the founders have experience in solving customers’ needs and know what it takes to succeed.

Here’s some press links from when we launched in August for good measure:

TheNextWeb - PageLever: The Facebook analytics app by which all others will be measured http://tnw.co/nwKCfq

Mashable - New Facebook Analytics Tool Digs Deeper Than Insights http://on.mash.to/nHcgSp

TechCrunch - YC-Funded PageLever Offers Deeper Insight Into Facebook Analytics http://tcrn.ch/obr83t
It's perhaps worth noting that HTTP has essentially the same unspecified directory list problem as FTP. I've seen programs that screen scrape apache etc directory lists (as displayed when there is no index.html). Oddly, gopher was an intermediate protocol that got that right.
Direct link to the FBI's Request for Information document regarding the 'Social Media Application':

https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=7f9abf0ff0fdba171d1130ddf4...
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This is a case where using Bootstrap didn't help them with having a clean design out of the gate.

I like the idea, but there is pretty much no way I'm going to authenticate with Facebook, simply because it looks so unprofessional and ugly.

A few simple changes, like not using the purple on grey, not using the color pink at all (there are lots of sites that will help you generate a good color pallet), and being more consistent with your padding between rows, would go a long way.
Funny thing is I search these services first. If I don't find it, I go to usenet and usually find it. Since it's SSL my ISP doesn't throttle it and the downloads only take maybe 30-50 minutes. Unlike torrents I can watch while it downloads. They really should adopt streaming and move on.
Or, if your Wordpress site gets hacked, your entire site isn't p0wned. I have a friend who had his WP site hacked last week. Fortunately, he hosts his application on a separate server, so there were no (major) security issues.
I've always felt wrecked after weightlifting. Sometimes I feel like I'm close to puking from the exertion and stress. I know it can be like that sometimes, but it makes it really unpleasant. I almost prefer actually doing the exercise to how I feel after.

Who can I talk to in order to shed some light on what's happening?
Interesting video -- watching it made me realize that my ad-hoc "electrodes" were too small (2x2 cm), explaining the mild skin irritation. I wonder if it's common also to have a temporary, very moderate blurred vision in the right eye (only during stimulation)? It would make sense considering the cathode inhibits depolarization there. I'll keep reading.

Thanks for posting, this has been an interesting experience.
Visual Website Optimizer - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876141

Great idea to compile such a list.
No. One of my main points is that "efficiency" is not necessarily the right goal to strive for.

Not to mention that I explained that there isn't a more efficient way to make the same journey without undue effort.
You can find the full voxel SLA here: http://voxel.net/sla

The nice thing about going with a larger dedicated host like Voxel is that they have extra hardware & servers on hand.

In fact, they even have instant-provisioning of dedicated hardware: http://voxel.net/voxservers

I worked for, and have used dozens of dedicated hosts over the years (I spend far too much time on http://www.webhostingtalk.com ), and can totally agree that these are common issues with dedicated servers.

To each their own; just sharing my $.02 perspective on the situation ;)
I too dont like FBs Timeline. Its total Mess. Many other Timelines don't get it either. Timekiwi to some extent is good. I have some ideas for a better timeline. If any hacker is willing to cowork, I can share my ideas to build the Best Timeline.
I don't understand...

How is signing a petition to, well, nobody, going to make such a platform? Wouldn't it be better/more likely to happen if you start an open source project and ask for help?
What dedicated hosts did you use?

We've been using Softlayer for years with ~100 servers and have never had this problem. No host is perfect but overall it's been a good experience and a lot cheaper than EC2.
One more vote for dedicated hosting. It's a sweet spot for people who need anywhere from a handful to hundreds of servers. You have to get very large or have unusual requirements before colocation makes economic sense.
Animation of Global Temperatures 1880-2011 (NASA)
What program lets you watch during a NNTP download?
There's a statement that has been "pretty much permanently" on a whiteboard-covered wall of the computer lab at my college telling a joke about "the difference between a mathematician and an engineer", that goes through the math behind a specific type of prime number generator, calculates the likelihood that it might fail, and then claims the mathematician cares about that while the engineer knows that is orders of magnitude less likely than a guaranteed algorithm failing due to a cosmic ray hitting it in RAM and flipping one of its bits. ;P
Umm, this posting was written in 1993. Actually a totally different publishing world than today's. As some comments point out, it's pretty questionable to claim that allowing tax writedowns that favor overproduction of a product is actually favorable to the industry. But, none of this stuff applies at all to ebooks or to print-on-demand publishing, either. So even with print books, if they're print on demand (aka digital short-run), the whole question of inventory write-down is irrelevant because there isn't any inventory. But the main thing is, even if this stuff was important in publishing circa 1993, which is open to question, hopefully if you're in publishing today you're not stuck in a 1993 business model, because if you are, you have more problems than could fit in this particular tax loophole.
Living without Google
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So Amazon uses some of the same technology (Xen); but their packaging, support infrastructure, and pricing model make it very different than a VPS offering.

VPS you typically get bandwidth, storage, etc. included - and its 'uncomplicated' - You pay one monthly fee, it covers it all.

AWS can be viewed as both fault tolerant, and additional probability of fault due to the extra complexity they've built in (they've gone down for substantial periods due to hiccups in this additional complexity).

A good VPS provider will make the particular system you're on fault-tolerant on its own: dual power supplies, RAID arrays, etc.

AWS doesn't care about making any particular machine fault-tolerant, because their model is that you should spin up a new instance, and throw away the one that failed.

Thats great for a 'web-scale' enterprise that has invested the resources making their site operational for that mindset. For early-stage startups where dealing with a failed instance means their site is down until they create or restart a new one; the advantage goes to VPS IMHO.
Interesting that this post comes up after I watched the CCC video about depression/suicide and geeks.

I train 5 days a week - Monday to Friday. I'm not being dramatic by saying I'd probably kill myself if I didn't do this. Usually by Sunday afternoon, thoughts start to creep in about how I'm a failure and should just end it now.

I'd love to train 7 days but it's overkill.
In fact any big company no matter which company that is, is full of 95% of the people fall into 9-5 category.

The remaining 5% work like crazy, expect to be rewarded extra and find out sometime later that is not going to be the case and they will just have to the burden for the rest of the company. Frustrated those 5% leave, and that 5% keeps shrinking.
Absent any date-format-aware sort controller:

YMD will group results by year, then month, then day.

MDY will group results by month, then day, then year.

DMY will group results by day, then month, then year.

That's why all my filenames look like: YYYY_MM_DD_filename.suffix
No problem! This sort of thing is what Hacker News (should be) all about :)
> No, you are unlikely to need these in practice for most web apps (zzzeek's example (for a generic User<->Address schema) is "Give me all households in New York with exactly two occupants where neither occupant has any residences outside of the city." Really? When was the last time you had a query like this in a web app?)

I write web applications in the financial analysis sector, and the general technique of writing queries where subqueries must be composed together to combine groups of coarse-grained sets into an ever more specifically narrowed down set is very common - we do reporting of a fairly complex temporally-oriented schema and we can throw up bar charts and excel spreadsheets right up on the client, straight from the DB, without loading intermediary objects into memory or anything like that. The queries are highly composed, we're using aggregates to flatten out sets, then joining to that, we're using window functions in some cases, and we can do it all straight in the ORM with not a literal scrap of SQL anywhere. When the dataset grows from 1000 rows to 1000000 we'll be able to scale since we're using the relational database as it was meant to be used.

I learned how to write those kinds of queries when I worked at MLB.com. There, we wrote scripts that generated all kinds of elements of the homepage and article pages, reams of baseball stats, game wrapups, schedules - again all pulled straight from a really, really vast schema spreading over three databases. Before I worked at MLB I barely knew what a join was.

Looking through my source here, I just counted nine such queries just in two source files related to reporting alone. If you come out to Pycon this year, come find me and I can show you some of what I do.

Obviously the example in my post/talk had to be contrived since I couldn't exactly put up code from work. Perhaps I'll try to think of a more real world example for my Pycon talk this year.
This is, of course, not true. Nothing is every universally applicable.

Go to the gym and do a heavy squat or deadlift day and I assure you that you'll feel pretty tired for a bit after the session. This is basic science. You can mitigate this by nutrition post workout, but even so, there will be a lag in time when you could feel drained.
Inventory is a liability, not an asset and the tax code should reflect that. Taxing unsold inventory is simply one more thing that creates an unfair legal advantage for internet delivered content over traditional print content.

The government should not attempt to even the playing field by clamping down on technology and the internet. Instead it should eliminate taxes on unsold physical inventory and eliminate retail sales taxes and retail property taxes.
C++ for the Real-Time web
I don't think it would be fair to subsume shared hosting under "2. The Dorm Room" just because of performance characteristics. A virtual server gives you a lot more freedom to choose your software stack than most shared hosting plans can ever approximate.

Even when it comes to performance, there's a world of difference between the average GoDaddy hosting plan and a medium-sized Linode.
Yeah, it's a pain to setup and maintain. Bizarre idea: a source transformer that knows about a CLI parsing library, to detect your usage of it and create the help option in a scripting language - and also provide the packaging (for the scripting language to start the JVM). Like Google's GWT for compiing a Java subset to JavaScript.

Seems a bit of overkill, but I like the idea of a transformation operating above the level of one language...

I suppose the logical conclusion is compilation of arbitrary Java source to a scripting language, according to the performance characteristics required. It's nice that it would retain semantics and be transparent to the user, while rebalancing performance trade-offs.
I think you forgot the "V" in MVP... If we are free to be assholes in the social network and say what we really think ('cuz we are all assholes deep inside :-) ), the very last thing I want to do is tie it to my real-life account on FB.

Easy for you guys to implement, yes. "Viable"? I think not.
our company wont go android because of the inability to remote wipe and the open android app store.