skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google does most of these things in fact they do even more. They have their own web server package, custome *nix builds as far as I know, custom file system, map reduce, a programming language, BigTable, etc, etc. So nothing new!
Batch uploading a folder worth of photos to flickr is easy - 3 clicks 1. hit browse button 2. Multi-select all files 3. Upload.

I don't think you're solving a problem that makes people's lives difficult at the moment. There is a huge resistance to change, so getting people to jump from flickr to cloudfire would require you convince them that a problem exists in the first place.

Maybe this product would appeal to a real power user who is uploading lots of photos/videos on a daily basis, but how many of these are there? How willing would they be to swap to a new service (especially given they have probably invested considerable time to build up their existing profiles)? How many are happy to install software and share data? How many consumers are happy to sign up for an ongoing fee?

Maybe your niche within a niche is big enough to build a business - I hope so because despite all the hurdles you have in front of you it looks like you have a nice looking product.

All the best.
Apple could compete with background functionality without giving up tight control over resource use by background processes. Apple could implement a service, where certain code could execute, with each application allocated constrained time slices. Compile the registered callbacks to run on top of a VM, and you can make it impossible for an App to resource starve the system or crash in obnoxious ways. App writers would have a very strong incentive to create frugal callback functions so that they can be assured of consistent results. (Otherwise one function call could span multiple time slices.)
Startups: Managing the Company & Marketing
'10x' is a theory for vetting a startup's business model. This also includes how marketing should be factored into a business model for a startup company.
Oh for sure -- I'm not saying there wasn't tons of branding on the part of the Obama campaign. But this logo was launched at the very beginning, with the speech in Springfield in early '07, before he raised a billion dollars, and even then it communicated a clear message. I'm not sure the same was true of the corporate logos you mention.
On the related note: how do you keep track of which comments are new since your last visit of the thread?

HN/reddit system with comments jumping around based on votes makes it hard just to quickly skim for differences.

Could there be a way to highlight not seen items? I found this a big help for information overload on the sites that do it (e.g. Google Reader, Bloglines).

However, I couldn't figure out how to do it elegantly (i.e. not needing to keep state on the server for each user) for prioritized threaded comments systems like HN/reddit.

For updates of a single page it's easy, you just need to bake timestamps for each item and page creation into HTML/JS and check them against the last page timestamp stored in the cookie.

But this system breaks down for multiple pages, as each one would need own cookie entry, otherwise any site visit would mark all new items as read.

That's btw MetaFilter's problem with highlighting new comments. Though there it's easier to follow the conversation due to linear nature of comment system.

Maybe the solution could be to have some dual way of accessing comments? Like prioritized threaded view for the first view and linear time ordered view for subsequent following?
Year In Ideas 2008 - Interactive Graphic
Good article, but the author is a little rusty on his behavioral economics. The anomaly he refers to is not the endowment effect but the sunk cost fallacy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_the...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect
Magicians And Mathematicians
Remotely operated drones more tiring to fly than real planes
Cubicle innovation: TNT video site "Boss Coming" button.
"... Nice use of a confusing title to get me to click ..."

Reading it again, the title can be confusing. I've modified it to make it clearer. It's always a balance if you edit titles to either make the title clearer (by adding persons name, then a description) or to reduce the title length.

"... Once I actually saw the article, my ulcer came back. (been employed at y! since MSFT rumors ramped up in spring 2007. ..."

Why is this a problem for Y!?
This is like religious people who independently re-derive fallacious arguments for the existence of God (or the necessity to believe in him), and then present them to skeptics as if they were incontrovertible---things like the First Mover argument, the argument from design, or Pascal's Wager. Any agnostic/atheist worth his salt has heard every one of those arguments ad nauseam, and has definitive rebuttals to counter them.

And so it goes; your arguments are as old as cryonics. Here are the answers offered by the Alcor FAQ, in order:

- http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#evidence

- http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq05.html#met

- http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq07.html#overpopulation

To those interested in more detail, I recommend the Alcor FAQ (http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/), Chapter 9 of Engines of Creation (http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_9.html), and the World Transhumanist Association FAQ (http://www.transhumanism.org/resources/faq.html; search for the question "What is cryonics? Isn’t the probability of success too small?").

N.B. I am one of the signatories of the "Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics" (http://www.imminst.org/cryonics_letter/) mentioned by Eliezer in the post.
Concurred. It took me a while to find that saved thing though, it should be more prominent.
Sofa (http://www.madebysofa.com) is really good (they did that excellent Cappuccino icon), but I imagine they're pretty expensive.
Click the button at the top right of the page and it throws up a fake spreadsheet over whatever video you were watching.

This is hilarious and interesting. I'd like to know how they decided to build that feature and how often it is used as intended.
Amish gene 'limits heart disease'
People piled on because they don't like the idea of a teacher being ignorant and forcing a backwards view on their kids. Frankly, I don't blame them, and I don't think the guy or his reaction was off-base. Ranting in your blog is kind of geeky, but whatever.

If anything, it just points to a lack of civility among both people involved. Couldn't the teacher have said, "Hey, what are those disks you're giving out?" Couldn't the guy have said, "Ha! No, this is definitely legal. Here, let me show you what cool stuff we have for free..."
A new and fast way of handling and checking uploaded images in php
Sorry! I was trying to vote you up, but voted you down by mistake instead. Someone else please vote the parent comment up for me.
uh. Any decision that declared the GPL invalid would have to be so novel, and so far reaching that it would probably break all software licenses.

I truly doubt that Cisco (which describes itself as a software company) would want that to happen.

The fact that it's never been seriously challenged in court is more a testament to it's soundness than anything else. A number of brilliant legal minds have looked at it and decided that challenging it would not be a profitable endeavour.
DB2 on Mac to ship before Christmas
"Zoho is an Office Productivity Suite from AdventNet Inc. Founded in 1996, AdventNet is headquartered in Pleasanton, CA with offices in North America, Europe and Asia."

http://www.linkedin.com/companies/zoho
21-Year-Old Game Developer Hits Big Time
Yet another person finds out the hard way that the internet is serious business. When you do something on the internet, it also happens in real life.
So your argument is that the best possible thing you could do with a large sum of cash upon your demise is to gamble away on the vanishingly small chance that a very distant and almost magically technologically advanced society will "resurrect" you?

It's a matter of opportunity cost. What do you have to give up, in order to have this miniscule chance? Which is most valuable:

- putting your kids through college for sure

- financially assisting your still living loved ones for sure

- paying for expensive life saving surgery for someone who can't afford it for sure

- investing in what amounts to a lottery ticket that pays out only in a tiny percentage of potential future universes

Even if I was completely disinterested in the fate of the rest of humanity, I think I'd still choose to go out with a bang now, for sure, than to throw my hard earned cash into a futile attempt to keep me fresh in the freezer.
I'm inclined to just say WarGames. But the closest that I've seen in a more modern tone was Antitrust. None of my computer-inclined friends seemed to respect it though.
9 Songs does not attempt to be porno, i.e. does not attempt to stimulate the viewer, it imitates life instead (as any other art does). Main characters in 9 Songs are having sex like normal people do, unlike the porno actors and actresses.
So this is DropBox for photos? I think that is how I understood it.
Oh, I don't think they'll need a new law in most jurisdictions as soon as they find out about the "Auctions for money".

"Wait, so let me get this straight, people routinely 'buy' $100 for $20 on your service, and you profit $300 from the transaction from selling the 'bidding rights' to 'non-winning bidders'?"

"Yes."

"Oh, thanks. What determines who wins?"

"Final bid price."

"But paying $20 for $100, why, anybody should offer to pay $21.15 right?"

"Yep, you have to pick when to make your bid though, so you are not outbid."

"That sounds totally random, like a lottery."

"No, it takes some skill."

"Ah, thank you for clearing that up. Now, in your copy of the state code, look up 'games of skill' which offer a monetary prize."
Official Gmail Blog: Fast PDF viewing right in your browser
I liked these ones recently: http://abduzeedo.com/clever-logos

In particular; lochness, food writers guild and gotham books. Fedex gets undue praise everywhere and I think it is a lazy design. the F,e and d don't sit sharply anyway.
The note about Loopt on Android not giving you an anonymous xmit feature makes sense, as the iPhone version requires that you explicitly activate it to transmit your location to strangers.
Also, for all that complaining about Linux, anyone look at other Unices?
It's actually a 280 Slides issue, not a Cappuccino issue. The text editor (custom for 280 Slides) doesn't support entry of non-Latin characters.

However, if you copy and paste from another application you'll see the underlying framework handles it fine.
Interesting. I wonder if it's because the "pilots" get all the stress but little of the thrill, especially on scouting missions. Flying an RC and looking for bad guys might be fun the first few times. But how many times can you play the same game? By contrast, I can't imagine an F-16 ever being boring. They have to force the pilots to a desk kicking and screaming.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Just Published
It used to be in the menu.
True, that and the fact that it takes a while before ISPs begin to trust your IP addresses, so if you need delivery to occur right away it's good to go with someone whose IPs have established trust.
Are you asking which infinity is larger?
So does the government and many charities, the entire city of Las Vegas and churches on Saturday nights across the country, every major sports league (not often directly), etc etc etc.

Pretty much every business takes advantage of the fact that the consumer is lacking something, whether that's knowledge, time, money or material. It's the way capitalism works.
That shouldn't be downmodded. The guy is technically correct.
Good point, I forgot to mention that it is a timed silent auction.
Wow. I need to play poker with those people.
Pascal's argument is fallacious because it equivocates between actual possibility and logical possibility. You are making the same fallacy, even given your shaky assumptions.

Another issue is that the idea of revival doesn't even make logical sense. What happens when two bodies with the same construction are revived? Which one has my consciousness?

Or think about it like this: an exact replicant of my body has been revived while I'm still alive. Obviously, the revived body does not have the same consciousness, since I didn't suddenly become conscious of living in two bodies or a different body. Why would this change by delaying revival until after I'm dead? And if it doesn't, why should I care?

So, I don't really see the case for cryonics. It seems to be flawed on both practical and logical grounds.
>Except you CANT guarantee yourself a win, and you certainly can't guarantee yourself a win at any price.

Of course you can. Every time you bid you extend the auction, therefore if you're willing to pay the most you will win. (Now, that amount may be worth more than buying the item in a store somewhere, but that's beside the point really)
But it's no more stochastic than chess.
Yeah, I don't get the "horror" of annihilation. If I won't care once I'm gone, why should I care now?
For a long time I've maintained that Apple's position on system access and background process APIs was purely political - in that there is no technical or security/privacy reasons for 3rd party apps being locked out - just Jobs' control-freak personality. Both Android and BlackBerry allow such access to 3rd party apps and it makes a whole lot more stuff possible than on the iPhone.

My own little Android app (http://phonalyzr.com) is another example. Rather than background processing, it needs access to contact/call log info. On Android and BlackBerry the OS notifies the user the app will access that and the user can make a decision, on the iPhone that decision has been made for the user by Jobs.

When people start to see stuff like Loopt working better on Android or similarly open devices and when none of Jobs' scare tactics (malicious apps, viruses bringing down networks etc) come to pass, perhaps the iPhone will open up a bit more.
That's a pretty hopeless point of view. Why not assume that in the future they'll harness the universe's full computational capabilities and emulate every single being that has ever lived? If cryonics is possible, the simulation scenario is just as possible, since it uses the exact same assumptions. Plus, it is a lot cheaper to believe in:)
The interesting question is - how many of those bids are actually being placed by Swoopo?
If you would give up your life, voluntarily, for any reason at all, then it stands to reason that you do not value it infinitely - you value the thing for which you gave it up more.

I'm not sure if you're putting me on with your response.
I was under the impression that google app's mail systems use of SPF http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ... handled these types of problems well.

I realize this first step only works for sending below gmail's per day send.

My plan was to do the following:

1 - use google apps with SPF to ensure my general personal emails gets through

2 - use my web server's local SMTP to send my registration and other user demanded server sent messages. My plan was to add my server's SMTP info in an SPF compatible way (still don't know how to do this part.)

3 - use a service (mailchimp etc.) for newsletters.

Can someone expand on this thinking? Particularly step 2?
Heh. In terms of the marketing material and the data on the website, it reminds me an awful lot of the startup that I work for... iLovePhotos (http://ilovephotos.com). Very similar indeed.
The unusual thing was that he had a logo at all. That was a clever move. I have to say, though, that the precedents of political organizations having logos are not that great.
I love these guys!
Good point; it's like a stupid people tax.

Unfortunately it's tricky for even smart people to avoid some of them.
In your words, what is not rational about "mind uploading, cryonics, singularity" ?

Even if you don't know for certain that there is or is not "existence after death", are you saying you live your life believing in that possibility?
Yep this is what I do too.
discovered this yesterday. soo amazing. now I just waiting for powerpoint previews
I keep it in Google Reader and just revisit the next time I go through the feed.
It's not just a party game, some auctions are actually run with those rules.
The YC startups don't have any single tool they prefer as far as I know. The reason they look similar is what they put on the page, especially the frontpage. That's partly influenced by YC. E.g. we encourage every startup to think about which link on the frontpage they most want visitors to click on (usually "sign up" or "try it" rather than say "about us" or "terms of service") and to make that link most prominent.
I agree about the comment movements but it has been discussed here before. It would be nice to have the option to keep comments the way they are (moving) or to view them based on the time they were left.
Your entire counter-argument is based on a Ship Of Theseus quandary about what "I" is, and not about the "practical" grounds.
i would think it would take more resources and battery power to constantly ping a server, rather than just run a low priority task in the background. think about it, you'd have to constantly ping the server, if a notification came in about a new message, then the messaging app would have to be launched, this would take more resources than just having a light background task running, that pings the server as needed. i wonder is apple will ever open up background tasking. i would think they would eventually have to, otherwise they'd be alienating a lot of functionality from the users.
There could also be additional cognitive load, because you have to do all the work of orienting yourself using your brain, without any help from your body.
Does the idea of quantum immortality suggest that you would be revived? In that case I guess you're already living in a universe where you WILL freeze yourself (or in one where the singularity gets here soon.)
On Facebook or Google scale it makes total sense. They're using 800 servers instead of 3,200. That's probably $5-$10 million dollars in savings. Easily enough to pay the salaries of a few developers to maintain this stuff even if that was their only job.

It does seem like it's just flimsy excuses not to merge up the changes, but hopefully they'll put more emphasis on it after a while.
Should I add some kind of feature for this?
anyone know when this is going to be available outside the US ?
That would almost certainly be illegal. That's basically a shill bid. Although, I'm inclined to believe the whole service is illegal.
As a grad student, I was a TA for an intro Java class, and I remember the students who just didn't get it. It is hard to say why they failed. Most of the worst students fell behind quickly, and never really had a chance to catch up. It would have been interesting if I had had more of a chance to try and figure out where they were stuck and help them out, but I think most of them gave up trying to understand the basics once they realized how far behind they were and just spent their time copying off other students to get a passing grade (many of them were later caught).

As far as the article goes, it says that no other successful predictors have been found for programming aptitude, but when I looked at one of the references cited, it didn't even include HS GPA or SAT scores. I would be surprised if there was no correlation there.
They're doing something tricky too. It looks like they're converting pages to PNG, but maintaining the ability to highlight text. I don't think there's any Flash there either.

I gotta say, Scribd's PDF viewer is looking pretty clunky now!
Why do programmers talk so much about programming? Hmm, I wonder...
It seems this is roughly the same article as the one referred to in the link?
> I don't prefer women's voices or Indian voices on screencasts. I prefer the British/American male accent.

This is probably a problem with you rather than with the screencast. Not everyone is a white male that natively speaks English, so you might want to get used to other accents.
I use constant contact and like them. We only having a few k people on the mailing list, which at that level is well worth the price. If you're talking millions then you're at the point where it may make sense to do it yourself.
I think it stems from the fact that you actually have to understand a problem in computer science to comprehend it's difficulty. In carpentry, for example, anyone can observe a finely carved piece of wood work and immediately know that it was a difficult to make. In computer science you show a layman gcc next to the Windows calculator program and my guess would be a majority would choose the calculator as the more difficult of the two. This likely makes us computer scientists feel like we have to explicitly state the difficulty of our accomplishments where as for some better understood professions it is implied. I mean there are loads of people out there who think that they know everything there is to know about a computer because they can upgrade their sound card and install windows w/o setting their house on fire.
Human beings are based on stimulus/response more than goal-seeking. My dealing with women has no clear-cut goal, it's an interplay of many different instincts some of which are frustrated at the thought of sex for money.
Me neither. I've seen the free Wi-Fi in Mountainview, it was enough to convince me that while it may cause some people to cancel their tethering or EVDO cards, that's about it.
Set up a server with postfix. Don't to this on EC2. Many just blacklist those IPs. Implement DKIM. It isn't too difficult and if you just google for a how to there are plenty. That way, the messages are signed and nice. I would avoid SPF. A lot more people have forwarding addresses now and most forwarding servers don't play nice with SPF and that causes mail to get rejected.

None of the things you've offered as solutions actually guarantee delivery. In fact, I'll wager that emails sent from an email server that's been setup like you propose will not even show up in Hotmail's Spam folder, let alone Hotmail inbox! Having DKIM doesn't do anything for Hotmail or Y! Mail, for example. Spammers use DKIM too. I wouldn't avoid SPF since some European ISPs require it and Hotmail actually does care about it once you actually get past bigger issues that stop Hotmail delivery. And even if one of your test emails does get through Hotmail, a first Spam report (i.e. someone clicks on that dreaded "Spam" button) by one of the recipients will blacklist your whole server and domain, INSTANTLY! And who knows how long it will take you to get off that dreaded spam list. SPF is a must.

In short, setting up your own mail server and thinking that your emails will show up in people's inboxes is naïve. You wouldn't believe what it takes to have a 95% delivery rate. Those email delivery companies have dozens of people who talk daily to postmasters of major email companies and resolve issues.

We went through this process, maybe foolishly, and it took a lot of work and more importantly, a lot of time. And we still have issues with some email services. It will take you about a month to jump through all the hoops to actually have about 80% delivery rate. If I were doing it again, I'd go with a hosted email service instead. Unless you're sending over 10K emails a day, hosted is the way to go. I might make a writeup on the process once I get some free time... let me know if anyone's interested.
Here somebody who claims to be the CEO of Swoopo tells:

"We are currently shipping items totaling about $1.5 million to our winners every month."

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/09/24/swoopo-entertainment-sh...

(Sorry for no permalink to comment, couldn't find one)

Also Wikipedia entry on Swoopo has unsourced revenue 20 million Euro in 2008.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoopo
Oh, cool. Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't know that was there.