skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FedEx Ground started as a different company (Roadway Package System) -- to this day, it has a lot of contracts, union rules, etc. which make it vastly worse than just a ground version of FedEx. The only FedEx acquisition which seems to be any good is Custom Critical (used for shipping organs, live animals, etc. on next-flight-out commercial service, to get stuff door to door as fast as possible).
Yeah, something stuck in my mind when I read "Fundamentals of Power Electronics" - I don't have the exact quote, but it basically mentions most efficency gains are primarily done to add features, not as part of any conservation effort.

As a power/software guy, i'm mostly looking forward the development of more non-backlit/outdoor readable screens, along with direly needed revolutions in hvac design.
How specific do you get with Voter precincts/districts? The census site has voter districts from 2000 and 2010, but some of those are changed every year.

Any applications built to analyze elections data with map overlays require this data, and it's really hard to come up with some 250k voter districts from disparate sources.
Amazon Prime and Amazon "subscribe and save" are two excellent products. I love reducing trips out to crowded stores and time thinking about shopping choices. I don't have to worry about customer service, returning defective products (relatively, way easier on Amazon), etc. I think Jason Calacanis' article about the "Cult of Amazon Prime" hits on a lot of what has made it so successful, and what will make it successful going forward: http://www.launch.is/blog/the-cult-of-amazon-prime.html
Startup America link: http://www.s.co
Major strength is that it is trivial to set up, and as it runs as an external service you don't need to worry about it afterwards.

For example, this file is all you need to have to test a typical Node.js project:

https://github.com/bergie/zombie-qunit/blob/master/.travis.y...
Use a load-balancer as a first row of defense against DDOS
This is pretty cool; thanks!

My existing workflow for this kind of thing (but not down to city level) has been to start with Wikimedia Commons's SVG-ification of the county/state borders (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USA_Counties_with_FIP...), and then apply appropriate transformations to the SVG file, like shading the counties (tutorial on that at http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/12/how-to-make-a-us-county-th...). I might continue to use that for quick-and-dirty uses, but proper shapefile data is more flexible, and the city outlines are a very nice addition.
Advantage for a beautiful demo. If I'm going to actually build real applications in this way, I don't need to run my development environment on someone else's website.
They have experimented with it, with the AmazonFresh service (fresh.amazon.com). I'm sure it's run by a contractor somehow, but I'm not sure if it's an real arms-length entity or another Amazon tax structuring thing.
Nice pictures. Key is that they're gleaned from thousands over years.

Reminds me of the Sony Qualia 016 sales brochure, more of an art book filled with beautiful images - taken with a tiny 1MP camera.

The artist using his equipment to its potential is one thing, the equipment living up to the artist's potential is another. That's why dedicated cameras exist.
That would encourage people to make their apps bandwidth inefficient
Any internal firewall is a joke. In the investment world, there is a legally mandated firewall between the analysts and the pitchmen. Yet that never stopped analysts from giving suspiciously positive reviews of stocks their bank was interested in selling. The firewall between the Android team and Motorola isn't even as strong as the internal firewall in investment banks. It's simply a fig leaf to cover Google's entry into hardware manufacturing.

Now, whether that entry is a good thing or a bad thing remains to be decided. However, I don't think it's in anyone's interest to pretend that there will be no information exchange between the Android team and Motorola Mobility. If Google was really interested in maintaining separation between Motorola and the Android team, they would have declined to purchase Motorola.
Ask HN: Thinking of quitting to start freelancing. Crazy?
I co-founded a small startup a few years ago. We were acquired last year by a much larger vendor in our space. It was by no means a financial windfall, but we did get decent salaries, benefits, and autonomy. That being said, I'm terribly bored with the position, product/market, etc. After so many years, I just feel like I need a change at this stage to recharge. My cofounder is also leaving which makes the prospect of staying much less attractive.

Lately I feel totally unmotivated which concerns me. I've now started actively searching for opportunities and contacting some people in my network to see what might be available. I'm hoping to start doing freelance Rails development now.

When does it make sense to take the leap? I have cash in savings, and I could go do freelance .NET or Java work in a pinch given it's abundance in my area, but I'm really seeking to stick with Rails as it's been my sole focus during this time and I personally enjoy it much more than the alternatives. I'm a bit constrained in that I'm seeking remote Rails projects as there just isn't much demand where I reside.

I feel pretty confident I could go out and pay my bills to maintain my current standard of living even if the work wasn't very rewarding. Part of me wants to just cut bait and put myself out there rather than keep teetering on the fence between a full-time job and wannabe.

I'm interested to hear others experiences here. How did you do it? Any thoughts or advice?
Gibbets Game is Back in New Style
Just an FYI: This is not the mental model of people who actually pay money for software.

I've been at the table where Balsamiq has been purchased before. Here's a conversation I've had three times.

Me: So here's my concept for a redesign of the $FOO page. You'll notice that I moved the conversion buttons to ...

Engineer: Oh that's cool. What did you do that in?

Me: Balsamiq Mockups. It is a design tool written by a buddy of mine which...

Engineer: How much? (and/or Why not just use Photoshop? and/or You didn't pay for that, did you? You can do it in Excel.)

Decisionmaker: Doesn't matter. Get a copy for everyone, put it on the company card. You were saying, Patrick?

[Addendum regarding strategic use of freebies: Peldi emailed me a license key when asking for a review way back in like 2007. I don't think I ever actually blogged a formal review, but that email has been a big win for both of us over the years. He's got a Marketing For Startups blog post where he discusses that technique in detail. It's still one of the best actionable posts I've ever read.

http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/08/05/startup-marketi... ]
Perhaps this technical post from AT&T labs (http://bit.ly/zFyXTw) discussing their work with Pandora to optimize power & bandwidth consumption might shed some light on AT&T's thinking. It might be a win-win for AT&T to partner with such app producers, optimize their network utilization in exchange for some end user subsidy -- extending the subsidy carriers give to device manufactures to the app developers, essentially?
Wow, great service. The integration is very smooth. Looks like it has a lot of potential.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see many Perl users adopting this. Perl has had a similar service built into CPAN for many years. The big advantage I see in CPAN Testers is that it tests your code on about 50 different versions of Perl on about 20 different operating systems. And the only thing you need to do to use this service is upload your code to CPAN.

http://www.cpantesters.org/distro/M/Moose.html#Moose-2.0402
You are being held back by the rent-seekers who benefit from the current laws. It's not about outdated thinking.
Sprint to Raise $2 Billion in Debt, May Use to Fund Clearwire
CIA is fucked. God is just.

Tormenting me with past shit? Judge as you'd like to be judged.

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\words\AUGUST.TXT

Psalter, and began to sing, our whole house answering him, the
Psalm, I will sing of mercy and judgments to Thee, O Lord. But hearing
what we were doing, many brethren and religious women came together;
and whilst they (whose office it was) made ready for the burial, as
the manner is, I (in a part of the house, where I might properly),
together with those who thought not fit to leave me, discoursed upon
something fitting the time; and by this balm of truth assuaged that
torment, known to Thee, they
Hey, thanks for checking it out! And thanks for the Wikimedia link, I had no idea that existed.

One of the cool things about this script is that it can be extended to grab any of the data from the Census -- for example, I'm using a less-polished version to grab state legislative districts (both lower and upper houses).
This sort of scenario is unfortunately very common. The antidote is never to allow acquisition talks to be the main thing you're focusing on. We advise startups who get approached by acquirers to treat it as a background process, and not to take things seriously until the very last stage. If acquisition discussions are just a side show, you can easily terminate them if anything goes wrong.
Which, interestingly, probably decreases the chances of things going wrong. M&A guys can smell it when you really want a deal, and that makes them want it less.
How I became Amazon's pitchman for 55-gallon drum of personal lube on Facebook
This is why we need to continue to advocate for open government and open access to data.

Weather companies like Accuweather were annoyed by the National Weather Service releasing weather data in KML form -- they saw it as a threat to their lucrative business of selling public domain weather data. Sen. Rick Sanatorum tried to come to the rescue with a bill that would limit their ability to release that data.
Telefonica: Mozilla phone is 'ten times cheaper than an iPhone'
What a messed up system. AT&T is in the business of selling bits. Most sellers want to sell more of what they sell, not less...
Feel free to file a github issue at https://github.com/andreasgal/gaia
And since we work in the open, we also gladly accept pull requests ;)
Tower.js - JavaScript Framework for Node.js modeled after Ruby on Rails
Maybe you don't but many people do prefer coding on the web. There is some very good web IDEs out there. e.x. http://c9.io/

Also you haven't mentioned eval anywhere in your argument. Don't you think a lisp should have an eval?
Smithsonian uses 3D printing to share its exhibits
I agree with you. Buy.com is often cheaper, but the items don't even ship the same day. Why wait around when I can pay $10 extra on a $200 item and get it same day?

Ultimately, Amazon is doing what I think all companies should: compete on value instead of on price.
It's been well established in the academic literature that infrastructure costs in America cities are related by a power law to population. Costs increase about 80% with a doubling of the size of a city. So we generally would expect infrastructure in a city four times the size of a typical 1000 people/mi^2 suburb to cost about 3.24 times as much, or about 81% as much on a per-capita basis.

There are many well known economies of scale to denser urban agglomerations that suburbanization forfeits. That's not controversial. What is controversial is why suburban living, despite its much higher cost compared to city living, has nevertheless come to dominate post-war America.
Ship's anchor slows down East African web connection
Are you sure about that? Amazon spends a lot of money (and screen space) trying to recommend items for you to buy. I have to imagine that they do that because it works.
There's considerable variation in estimates, but most historians don't consider dawn-to-dusk to have been typical agrarian working hours, apart from peak weeks at planting and harvest. Data is really spotty, though, and before formalized hourly employment, it's not even really clear that people distinguished systematically between "working hours" and "leisure hours", so reconstructing it is difficult. To take one minor example, is "knitting by the fire while chatting with a neighbor" 100% work, 50% work, or something else? Perhaps it depends on whether it was a relaxed, half-working, half-chatting sort of knitting, or more industrious, but can we plausibly estimate how much of each was done in the 19th century? Even the distribution of how much of their day people typically took off for meals isn't well established (though it probably also varied by season).
Learning coding from boredom
IMO It's hardly about cognitive dissonance; rather, people don't like to shop around on every damn thing they buy.

So, once you position yourself in customer's minds as reliably having competitive pricing (not always the #1 cheapest, but always close) they feel comfortable ordering from you without shopping around.
The Company could be virtually anyone. I have seen this scenario play out multiple times in multiple industries.

In this case, naming The Company would actually be less helpful, not more. If you go into a deal thinking "hey, I can trust these guys; they're not like those louts from ACME Crockpots Inc. that I read about," then you're setting yourself up for trouble. Much better to approach an acquisition deal thinking that these guys might be 'The Company', and taking precautions accordingly.
Secure, scalable site architecture with nginx, Varnish and vCider.
It's worth noting that not everyone responds to modafinil. If you've had genetic sequencing done (I had mine done by 23andme), you can predict your response by checking your Rs4680 status. http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Rs4680

rs4680(G;G) carriers deprived of sleep respond quite well to 2x 100mg
modafinil in terms of improved vigor and well-being, and maintained
baseline performance with respect to executive functioning, whereas
rs4680(A;A) individuals barely responded to the drug at all.

I'm A;A, and normally have almost no response to modafinil. I discovered, however, that I have significant modafinil response while on an MAOI (transdermal selegiline). I've stopped taking it recently, since I've finally tracked down the primary causes of my excessive sleepiness, (very deficient in vitamin D and cortisol). Modafinil has been a massive help both with fatigue and depression, and let me stay functional and productive through a difficult time in my life while I tracked down the actual problems.
My concern with this has always been that you can never really have any time off if you're supporting a product, i.e. always having to check your email making sure customer questions are being answered and your servers aren't on fire.
You are right, and we mention that in the blog post. CPAN Testers is about testing your releases, but Travis is about testing your pushes to GitHub as you develop. Travis does not aim to replicate with CPAN Testers does, we are more of a complimentary service. :)
Make way for iPad 3: Best Buy slashes iPad 2 prices
Actually, I think the general lessons can be learned regardless. Naming The Company would turn it into mudslinging which would change the tone of the article, and IMO probably not for the better.
Yeah, the article is very poorly written. What they meant to say was that Amazon invests $11 in each customer, and the result is a doubling of purchases. I am sure Amazon makes more than $11 out of every $900 in sales, which makes this a good deal for them.
Nice post!
Can this be used with only ngnix/varnish or some other server end software can also be used.
Oh sorry, yes I forgot that they were in two different sections. Definitely read the one about Functors before you get into Monads.
I buy Amazon because of the certainty. Item doesn't arrive? "Very sorry, we've overnighted another one." Item is wrong? "Sorry, here's your money back, and keep the item." Item doesn't fit? "Here's a mailing label to send it back."

And so on. The consistency of service is why Amazon is good to buy from. You order something and you know you'll have it in 2 days or less.
I haven't read up on web intents yet. I need to check them out. Thanks.
Facebook just created an app store ecosystem where OS doesn’t matter
but then they'd have a local presence in the states they ship to and would have to charge sales tax. they'd lose their ~10% price advantage.
In some stores you can spend your Best Buy gift card on an Amazon gift card.
AT&T’s mad, mad plan to charge wireless app developers
> This is why we need source-neutrality in networks.

No, we do not. There are already laws on the books against "dumping" their product to drive out competitors. It's called price bashing and it is illegal.

If Netflix is able to subsidize their data usage and remain profitable, great. If, on the other hand, Netflix decides to go with this to kill off the competition with the calculus that they will lose money temporarily and hike prices after the competition is gone ... well, that's illegal and on top of everything, won't even work.

Also, AT&T's ploy here won't work either. They are trying to increase data usage while hiding the cost of that usage in 3rd party fees. Yeah. Watch content providers offer two price tiers. One for AT&T and one for non-AT&T. Won't work and a waste of time. You're just shifting costs.

Also, 800-numbers became popular during a time when every street corner had a pay phone. It was about actually letting the customer contact you from anywhere, not about shifting costs.

There is no need for regulation. The market will take care of this stupidity by itself.
Bay Area Startup seeking 3rd Co-Founder (traction, revenue, funded)
Teamly.com is our startup - it's a SaaS tool to help teams be more effective at work. It is built with ruby on rails, less, jquery, chef, MySql, AWS, Rspec, etc.

Where we are - I recently left my very well-paying salary job to work on Teamly with my co-founder. We are now both working on Teamly full time. We have an up and running product, good traction (very active users), paying customers (freemium model), and a ton of user feedback. We are closing an angel round of funding (our first) and have some other related (non-public) big news as well. We are now focusing on our user feedback to really improve the product.

Who we are - Matt Berman (me, hacker/technical marketer) and Scott Allison (hustler) are the two current co-founders. My career background is in growth hacking and coding but I have experience with business as well. I've worked at large corporations and startups alike. Scott has had 3 previous successful businesses and is the most dedicated hustler I've ever met. He is technical in terms of knowledge but doesn't code.

Who we are looking for - We are looking for our 3rd and final co-founder to round out our skill set. We are definitely looking for another hacker to join us. This is not a small equity type position, we are looking for a true co-founder/partner. Expertise with Rails is a must and front end skills are a plus. The three main qualities we are looking for in a co-founder are: expertise/knowledge of our stack, passion/dedication to startups and our space, and resourcefulness (aka scrappiness). We are looking for someone who is in the Bay Area as well.

We believe we are on to something special and are currently at an exciting point for our startup. This is a chance to help mold not only an awesome product but a business as well. If you are interested in learning more, we'd love to hear from you!

Matt & Scott - Teamly.com - matt@teamly.com
No, AT&T is in the business of selling _access_. The less each customer costs them, the better.
Is gaia updated at those times?
Well, Angry Birds runs as HTML5 app already perfectly well.
http://chrome.angrybirds.com/
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1"
Stratfor's Annual Forecast 2012 [Free access]
Whoops I missed that. Thanks for explaining the difference. That feature is pretty cool.
Tip of the hat: you beat me to the punch (though I really wondered about the proper lawyerese for deploying a service like this)...

Of course, the corresponding app, badguy, which alerts would-be criminals to the likely patrol routes of cops, is likely to follow shortly thereafter from the black hats.
Coderwall (YC W12) Wants to be the Reputation System for Developers
Actually, the code maker IS pretty able.

You need to consider that this individual had to create the code and communicate its nature to compatriots on the outside. The code had to be simple enough for said compatriots to use in encoding information themselves, as well as being amenable to manual encryption and decryption. Since we can assume said compatriots probably were not exactly computer programmers or mathematicians. All of these requirements had to be met while keeping the code reasonably difficult for police to decipher.

I think it is, too often, tempting to only consider one side of the creation process in situations like this without giving due consideration to context. Giving full consideration to context, this would, to me, seem a relatively dangerous individual.

On another note, this is another example of how far law enforcement is willing to go, in terms of resources, to get their man or woman. Normally, the vast majority of us are not worth the effort of listening to our phone calls, or reading our emails, snail-mail, texts, or web posts. HOWEVER, once a spouse's body turns up, or ANY bodies turn up ... or maybe a bank goes under ... all of that changes. They will look through EVERYTHING. And you will be worth the effort to decrypt it.

It's not only national security that will get you that level of resource allocation.
The problem is when you sell X bits for $Y, you'll want to keep X as low as possible and Y as high. Now if bits were fully metered they'd have no problem selling you all they have.
Do you guys think Bret Victor built an actual editor for his "live editing" demo, or just build enough of a demo to illustrate his principle?

It seems to me that if what he had built was a real editor (i.e. could be used for more than just his Braid demo game), there would be immense value in releasing/selling it.
More people access Facebook on the mobile web than from top native apps combined
Attorney/client privilege is meaningless outside a courtroom, legally, and practically.
The return type is too small
Yes, exactly. We've gone from buying stuff at WalMart or BestBuy or whatever (with the associated marginal costs of gas, taxes, etc) to basically getting just about everything from Amazon. Small electronics, appliances, office supplies, etc. For anything over $50 or so I do compare prices with other online places, but more often than not Prime usually wins out simply based on the free shipping. For niche-ish things for example Monoprice will usually beat Amazon, but for most smaller purchases that are not immediately required, Prime has paid for itself many times over, especially considering my consumption of their member videos over my Roku.
I've just booted the live ISO in VirtualBox, and the default desktop is clean, slick, and fast. I've got an Ubuntu 11.10 VM on this machine as well, which took much longer to boot and is all around less responsive. Linux Mint GNOME3 is a step in the right direction IMHO, my is still heavy to run on my four year old Dell XPS. Because GNOME3 uses the GPU directly, my poor old mobile series nvidia gets extremely hot and slow to respond when using GNOME3. I'm currently running ArchLinux+awesome on my laptop, but I might switch to Mint12 LXDE since I'd rather have something non-rolling release on my laptop since I never use it, and LXDE might be something nice to try.
I tried provigil for two weeks and it made me feel like a zombie. I was less sleepy but I felt kind of 'hazy', like there was something between myself and my thoughts slowing down the interaction. It did make me slightly more productive, and able to completely focus on boring tasks.

One interesting side effect is that it made me a bit more social and during those two weeks I had dozens of extremely boring (in hindsight) conversations with random co-workers. It seems to lower my threshold for boredom more than anything.