skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the bright spots of my career was building a distributed system that spanned 64 different nodes and regularly did over 100Mb/sec... Built on machines holding (at the time) a top-end config of 2Gb/ram per machine...

That's more RAM than our entire system had.
We used to have emails that got sent to our inbox every time a user converted. But that got annoying during all of the peak times.

I can't imagine a bell or sound happening.
Ask HN: What sites do you have pinned as an App Tab in your browser?
Currently I have the following as "App Tab"s in FireFox

Gmail for Email/Gchat, Mint.com for keeping an eye on my money & Hootsuite to keep up with Social Networks

Anything I'm working on is just a regular tab.

This keeps me focused on the tasks at hand, but reminds me to stay on top of email, money & social tasks.

I've gone back and forth between a few other pinned tabs, but have slimmed down to the 3 above to cut down on FireFox going insane on consuming memory + to keep me focused/

Curious what my fellow HNers have pinned.
B is small and elegant module for NodeJS that makes benchmarking fun.
I'm going to get downvoted, I can see it coming. However, it must be said, because I'm sick of seeing Taubes used as reference.
Taubes is a loon.

Yeah, well name calling isn't a good argument so the down vote foresight was an easy one to call. http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

At least Taubes uses a few scientific studies to back up his point. If you have better science to backup whatever your position is I would love to see them.
This is exactly the problem here. If you show a=1+1; b=3; a=b; to someone with math background, their brain will most likely explode, because they'll think that every equality has to hold at the same time.

Also I think it's impossible to hold a consistent mental model (whatever it is) if people can't form a logic behind the operation.
Twitter Announces Micro-Censorship Policy
2 Ideas de Emprendimientos Sencillas
Thimble is middleware for express that simplifies modern web development.
Is it possible that we see these as big problems partially because they can't be solved by startups? If these could be solved by startups then they would no longer be big problems and some other problems would pop up which couldn't be solved by startups and would be referred to as the "big problems."
BBC on GitHub
You realize you set your company up for enormous civil penalties here - $200-$150,000.

And, since you've admitted to stealing their site straight up - it might be "willful and deliberate", it could be considered a criminal act.

I'm no lawyer - but one probably wrote this: http://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/penalties.html
Import Export won't be very effective for me. I update contacts on a regular basis and the Google Address book keeps it synced to my tablet, phone, and Home and Work computers.
We'll take it down if DHH insists!

It is personally my fault for not including a credit to Highrise for the design

Lesson to us: add credits

Crediting someone for their property doesn't make stealing it ok. By default, stealing is wrong. Waiting for an objection and/or linking to the owner doesn't change that. This seems like a problematic worldview for a young company.
Thanks Michael, I was having a hard time understanding TDD and git until I went through your tutorial. Also, although I had been programming in Rails for a couple years, it really helped me understand some of the basics of Rails that I had somehow missed.
i definitely think it's possible.... but i still think it's a pretty big problem when basic medical information is harder to access than last week's restaurant reservation
You might steal their 1024x768 representation of a photograph with some of the worst color accuracy possible (because it's a projector) while still looking acceptable! And, with some up-scaling, might even be useful as a laptop's wallpaper. Well, as long as you can get rid of the distortions caused by your angle (maybe you used a tilt-shift lens?), and all the imperfections from the projection surface, fix all the color issues that came from the poor representation, and somehow explain why you needed a tripod in the back of the room. Oh noes!

I jest, but they probably put that their as a CYA :/. Also, technically, all of their slides and images are protected by copyright. They did, after all, create them.

[edit: clarifying, improving grammar]
Don't you mean a spreadsheet?

EDIT: Just to be clear I'm not trying to troll or be difficult. It's a grid with some cells that does some math. I just figured _anything_ would work.

You typically have to start worrying about using specifically MS products when compatibility becomes an issue. This is usually more true for Word than Excel, though, by a long shot (I have deep, painful experience with this)
World's most mysterious manuscript
To be fair, everyone and their mother has ripped off 37 Signals pricing table and this never seemed to bother anyone.
Thank you for that. I shot you an email..
From the draft article:

>There was an attempt to administer the test to another 30 or so students on a foundation (pre- degree) programming course at Middlesex University. That administration failed, because the students – rightly, in our opinion – were incensed at the conduct of their teaching and the ar- rangements for their study, and simply refused to do anything that wasn’t directly beneficial to themselves.

Uh... what? What is the "conduct of their teaching and arrangements for their study"?

That random bit of information is followed later by this:

>3.3 Third administration

Because of what we found on the first and second administrations, there was no third administration.

That doesn't follow at all. The first quote states the students refused to take the test, while the second states a final test would have been valueless. I very much doubt that it wouldn't have had value, as it could strengthen or weaken their claims, so I'm forced to conclude the students refused to take an exam? Something doesn't seem right in this classroom.

Ultimately though, without any information about how things were taught, I'm not sure this study tells us much. With a lot of studies across a variety of teaching styles we might be able to extrapolate something, but a single one just throws doubt on the methods of teaching which is a massive un-controlled and un-known variable to the whole system.
I had a Matlab programming class in my first year of a mechanical engineering degree. What was painfully obvious to me then was that the people with programming experience (some of us had done some sort of computing or computer science course at school) excelled - I got 100% in the course, many of my friends got 95%+ (which in the UK, where 80% is considered excellent, is a very good mark).

Many others really, really floundered. They had no clue what they were doing. I finished the task in about a 1/3 of the time, others were working right up to the deadline and ended up getting 50% or so.

I'm not an excellent programmer. My skills might be above the average in mechanical engineering, but that really isn't saying much. I'd bet that double hump is less to do with some innate ability and more to do with exposure to programming at a younger age.
While the system is, indeed, complicated, there is a reason changing it has not been Ubunutu's highest priority: almost all installation is done via the package manager. I haven't used Ubunut much, but at least on Fedora 95% of what I use is in the repositories and the rest is available as an rpm file which installs itself. I have never had to worry about where to put executable files.

Of course, I have installed things manually from source. But when I do, I only install them locally in my home directory.

So the complexity is there, I just haven't had to deal with it.

Also, I think that GUI-centrism is short-sighted, but that's another matter altogether. In short: command-line tools are just as "modern" as GUI tools; they're just harder to learn but tend to be more powerful.
Also, if you'd like to get feedback and information about the market you are entering, feel free to ask without feeling ashamed:

http://rougefeta.com

This implies you need to find out who can help you :)

(Please don't start extending offers to YC people directly. They probably have their hands full advising already. And we want Rougefeta to be helpful, not harmful.)
My local Best Buy used to have the Apple products (iMac, iPod, iPad, etc.) all by themselves, off to the side. The other tablets were about 40 feet away, with dozens of models of laptop computers in between.

Now all the tablets are in the same area, with the iPad very near the Asus, Sony, Samsung and other tablets. I might enter an aisle and have an iPad on my right and a Samsung Galaxy Tab on my left. Someone might go to Best Buy to buy an iPad, see something cheaper, and buy that instead?

Anecdotally, I have a friend who works at a Staples and she said that many of the people who bought a RIM Playbook returned it. I guess that means you should look at usage numbers, not sales figures.
I honestly have no clue how much extra memory this would cost. I can see it being a big issue on embedded systems. But, with 512 megs being considered very low on modern desktop/server systems, I always thought the vast majority of recent memory use was data rather than code.

Roughly how many processes are you running? Can anyone give a wild-assed guess how much memory it take to boot and load gmail in FireFox on a statically linked Linux?
Excel is basically the best product Microsoft has ever made. Google Docs doesn't work for much beyond the basics, and Open Office is still inferior when doing anything complicated.
Show HN: We let you access your Quickbooks Windows from the Web
40 year old tech (even if it isn't, it is from the outside) probably doesn't help. NASA used to be a driving force behind more-visible tech, now they just appear to be failing to keep up. It has lost some pizazz since the Cold War.
So engineering has no managers or engineers can't be managers?

In most companies, VP of Engineering is inside the Engineering department. The idea that management is its own department is rather odd.
too bad they didn't introduce functional programming to you then. because in a language like Haskell, pure variables are inherently immutable.
This is what I'm getting at. If the US wanted to remove Assad, he wouldn't have much of a choice: a life of luxury in exile, or death. I disagree, however, that it would require tanks. They could do the same as they did in Libya, which is far more justifiable and politically expedient. The dissidents in Syria are gearing up for war[1], so the ever-problematic boots on the ground would be unnecessary.

The US would only have to make Assad think it was serious about another Libya in order to give him some serious misgivings. Get NATO to make some rumblings, which would encourage Chavez to issue one of his proclamations against American Imperialism, then make a backroom deal to get Assad out.

At the end of the day, the Bush Doctrine of democracy-at-swordpoint is simply ineffective. There exists, however, the very real possibility of using soft/"firm" power to encourage the outcomes you want.

[1] http://www.economist.com/node/21543538
Syria crisis: UN Security Council mulls Assad measures ~ Daily World News
Picard said that. Not Kirk, old man :)
My name is Jason Hung. I'm the founder of Levion. We're just getting started, let us know if you have any questions.
Do governments with socialized healthcare not have access to their citizenry's medical histories? I wouldn't have a problem with it.
Www.shoesbay.com.au : Competitor Analysis, Website Statistics, Adsense Ea
Comparing Sega to Nintendo these days is like comparing DuckDuckGo to Google.

I.e., idiotic.

The worst thing Nintendo can do is to release their IP on other platforms. That's like saying Apple should start releasing software for Android.
Ape's execlp() tries first the program name passed to it (be it relative or absolute), and if that fails it prepends "/bin/" and tries again. It ignores environment variables entirely.†

Rc's path variable allows you to easily tell rc to check the current directory when looking for programs to exec. Doing that with bind after each cd would be clumsy. And if your working directory is a remote server, you can set path to just /bin so that you aren't statting the remote directory before each exec. Inferno's sh does use a path variable, but it is typically left unset and the default (/dis .) is used.††

† See http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/ape/lib/ap/...

†† See /usr/inferno/appl/cmd/sh/sh.b:/^runexternal
The value of one eyeball-hour is not fixed. The more targeted the advertising, the more effective and therefore valuable it is. In fact, for sufficiently well-targeted advertising, it doesn't need anything - as when you seek a product. Overture/goto made money like this (google used its ideas for adwords).

Consider advertising on TV and print media: you try to hit your demographic and hope for the best. Next is direct marketing: you can measure your success based on response rates. Then, internet advertising (eg google) accelerated this feedback to be instant.

But it's still hard to know what people want or need to buy right now - ideally, it would go far beyond your demographic (a huge set of which you are a member), beyond an ultra-fine-grained demographic (a tiny subset), beyond what you want right now, to anticipating your need so exactly that you don't have to ask. Like consultative selling (or perhaps a PA/butler), it stops being advertising and starts being a service in itself.

Google has a lot of information, and can do some of this really well; but Facebook is much closer to the user, and so has much more and better information about them, so they are better-placed to do this.

Google has the long-term goal of anticipating the information you want; and they are doing well (e.g. search suggest). But it's primarily aggregate prediction, not personalized. They can (and do) personalize it somewhat, but just aren't as well-placed as facebook, because they aren't as close to the user (people).

People are ultimately where the money comes from. That's how advertisers get it.
It does not make it right but I think to make a real change you have to call out everybody who does it. These sorts of articles are really about criticising Apple and hoping to see them fall.

All the other companies will simply continue to do what they are doing while everybody is distracted by Apple.
Java isn't remotely dead, but oracle being it's new corporate steward doesn't really bode well for it's reputation among hackers.

A lot of points in the original article reference java IDEs to mitigate the verbosity of the language. The fact that the only practical way to write java code requires the use of eclipse and it's ilk is one of the language's biggest failings in my opinion.

I don't think the web would be nearly as accessible to develop for if necessitated the use of dreamweaver (or whatever) to be able to build anything.
Probably 95% of individual returns in the US can be handled by one of the high-end copies of TurboTax from your local office supply store. If Intuit can build it, so could the IRS and offer it as a web app. They could also put the data from W2s, 1099s, etc they receive online for you to view and automatically fill out most of your return with it.

It's a technology issue, just one the IRS has to tackle, not a startup.
My prediction is that everybody will buy these tablets for their teen kids. Kind of hard to break. Easy to use. Heaps of free games. Easier to maintain than a PC. etc etc.
Isn't that everyone? Quantum crypto does nothing for authentication as far as I'm aware, so you still need to identify your recipient by some method. It requires hardware as far as I'm aware, so you still need to trust the sending and receiving hardware. Which leaves you with just the medium of transmission; if it's crypto you're trusting, the medium doesn't matter. If it's quantum effects for communicating, the only trick I'm aware of lets quantum-crypto-communication detect observers, which this 'scuppering' has no effect on.
U.S. Resilience
I am also with Levion. We welcome any feedback from fellow startups who currently use or are interested in getting started with Quickbooks. Levion requires the Windows version of Quickbooks. Since there is data parity between Levion and the Quickbooks file you can discontinue Levion at any time with all of your modified Quickbooks data intact.

We also created a video on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIcs9aXuC1E

We would like to know your honest opinion; we can handle it...Also the software is free for the foreseeable future.
Caustic Graphics got acquired? They seemed to be quite prominent around here, though I didn't see anything about the acquisition.
Space is for whatever you want
For future reference, you can list all of the files associated with a package using this:

dpkg-query --listfiles package-name

Or use Synaptic's 'Installed Files' tab in the package detail dialog.
Steve Jobs,Mark Zuckerberg on Greatest Innovators List
You're still not really addressing Jules's main point, which is that Da Vinci made no major contributions to math or science. To compare him to Newton is absurd, as any mathematician or physicist will tell you. A large portion of a first-year engineering curriculum is spent learning things that Newton discovered (that is, calculus and classical mechanics). I read through the wikipedia page you provided, and none of the scientific results even approach the significance Newton's work. I have no problem with his artistic work being appreciated, but I am always confused about why people seem to think his work in any other area was important.
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According to that presentation sugar is toxic, but remember that the quantity matters, too. Alcohol is toxic as well, but a glass of wine won't kill anyone, whereas a barrel might put you in a coma.
It's not stealing, it's copying. 37signals still has their original. Let's get an upvote here because I know everyone in this forum agrees.
Why the downvotes? The parent poster used $3.8 billion to come up with the $60 billion estimate (3.8 * 16.2 is approx 60). Isn't it true that we don't officially know what Facebook's revenue is? I was merely trying to point out that 3.8 may not be an accurate number. Then I went on to say approx how much revenue Facebook would need in order to have a 16x ratio given the current estimated valuation of $100 billion.
New Product Launch - Is My Port Open
You're right, I agree.

But I didn't say that eyeball-hours have a fixed value. I said that there is a fixed supply (at a point in time).

It is necessary to get the eyeball-hours in the first place. That Facebook may be able to wring more out of them than Google is important; but from Google's POV the attrition of its eyeball-hour supply is more important.
Nailed it. I've been very guilty of writing applications and APIs strictly oriented towards my own understanding. Also, I like how you throw a jab at all the BS metrics companies use to try and come up with a useless startup they can flip. ;)
It would be awesome if Apple would spend a small fraction of their cashpile to buy all outstanding Facebook stock. ;)
In 1997, Apple desperately needed an operating system, which is why they bought NeXT. Having Steve Jobs as CEO wasn't actually what either party had planned on.
Their caching and database still doesn't really imply much about Rails, which is what wlll was trying to get.

Whether it be Rails for BaseCamp or PHP/Facebook stack for Facebook it really says nothing about the database and caching behind it.

A web front may be really great at scaling but it's all up to the database.
I definitely think that's true, but I think that your own construction of the problem supports my point. Last week's restaurant reservation is easy to access because it's a problem that can be addressed by startups. In other words, the reason why medical information is a "big problem" is that it hasn't been vulnerable to the same advancement that we perceive in other industries, mostly due to its barriers to entry. Without those barriers to entry it wouldn't be a "big problem," it would just be another thing that gets better with advancing technology.
This article presents a ridiculous amount of 'evidence' without any sign as to where it has been drawn from - I dont think this lends it any credibility.

I'm not sure the conclusions are earth shattering either. I dont think that it comes as a shock to most that people buy tablets mainly for basic web browsing and social networking, and that they will buy something cheaper if it does effectively the same thing...
I've also been using OIB as a GMail extension for auto-sorting my mail. Glider is a whole new interface, a new way to view your email/inbox. OIB is just a way to sort emails and apply categorical labels. In other words, OIB is an incremental improvement on GMail organization, and Glider is an entirely new webmail experience.
Actually, since they are hotlinking to some assets directly from the other site, they are indeed stealing.

Also, please don't ask for upvotes or assume that others agree with you.
Labor markets don't evolve via discontinuous jumps to higher levels of pay or better working conditions. It has to be an incremental process. I'm not sure how berating companies that are enabling those incremental improvements for not doing enough is helpful. And using a pejoritve term like 'exploit' rather than 'employ' shuts down meaningful discussion.

Maybe I'm wrong though. Any examples of labor markets magically transforming from 'sweatshop level' to 'McMansion/Country Club level' without going through the intermediate steps?
I have a relative working at Foxconn's Qunshan factory. His monthly income is about ￥3000, he's been there for 15 month.
Thanks! Considering backorders as well.
Even though the ipad is 'easier' for a majority of use cases (well, as easy, Android is pretty damn user friendly also!), the fact is that Apple outright disallow anything outside of what they've dreamed up

Yesterday my fiance wanted to watch a film on her ipod and had realised the process would involve converting files (size and movie type), getting it into itunes, and the 'syncing' which is a pain. On Android you literally just drag it across the cable and the thing plays almost any format, or use a torrent client to get it straight from the web onto your phone

Using voip was a pain for a while. Making mobile AP's. Using apps from other markets (or your own apps), even just watching flash or adding a bit of personalisation to the UI

People are realising that Android is actually better, because it's just a shiny most of the time, but when it's time to do something the designers haven't thought up it might be slightly more difficult, but it's possible on Android and probably impossible on iOS

(plus I really think Apple is earning bad rep over those patents lawsuits. Consumers do understand / appreciate choice, even Apple fanbois, and they view it as the evil act that it is even if they don't get all riled up over it)
It is still a political problem as the IRS has not already done it even though the tech is available. But you are right it is not something a startup can do. Though a startup could develop web apps for states. God help them if they do.
I'm not sure I would classify yours as big problems either. We have plenty of food and anti-malarial medicine.

We lack the will to pay for it and the ability to distribute it effectively in the midst of corrupt/brutal governments without empowering said governments. I'd argue that solving the latter is a Big Problem although not one I imagine a for-profit company solving.