skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Qualified developers" ?
You must be kidding, I worked at yahoo a few years. It is very true that I have met a few outstanding engineers over there, however, the average engineering skill level right there was the lowest I have ever seen.
Have you checked out Bizelo's eRetail Inventory Management solution? (http://eretail.bizelo.com/inventory)? Under $30 / mo.
Video Streaming Services Q1 2012 Comparison: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, iTunes, VUDU
I'll grant you Plus, Offers, Places, and Tablets are due to competitive pressure. But even so, in most of those, they have not gone the route of just cloning the competitor.

Chrome was strictly about advancing the web platform, for users and application makers. Google figures that anything which makes the web better automatically benefits them. And it's been a brilliant success.
Why didn't the guy just use his glasses to purchase the ukulele book from an online source? Say, Google Play?
At least for music, jambase.com does a pretty good job. They don't cover free gigs, it seems, but even for local artists playing small venues their listings are pretty complete, at least in my area.
Thank you for the follow-up, sorry if too many questions, but one more.

If I hold the general consensus opinion here that Groupon is heading to insolvency, and let's say it will be insolvent by January 2013, is it cheaper then to attempt to acquire Groupon stock to short it on margin than to buy a January 2013 put, even if your margin is running at 60%?
From: http://developer.mintchipchallenge.com/devguide/evolution.ht...

Unburdened by the need for a proprietary network, MintChip offers a cost effective solution to consumers and merchants and enables easy person-to-person payments.

So, it looks like, this is the government's attempt to compete with Interac. The site claims it's a replacement for cash, but the last time I used cash was maybe two weeks ago to pay for a coffee. And I know some people who use a prepaid card to buy coffee.
Thanks for that link... enjoyed it a lot.

[9]This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.
Ok fine, as long as in the game you have to start referring to Linux as GNU/Linux whenever RMS is within ear shot lest you lose a day to one of his insufferable speeches on terminology.

If that's the case then I'd say it's realistic.

It's a joke bro, lighten up.
Object oriented, functional, declarative you say it Perl has it. Its amazingly flexible, easy to learn and extensible.

My first programming job was in Perl back in the late 90's. Loved it, but I have to say that the OO facilities left something to be desired. I found them fatiguing. It took Java, then Smalltalk for me to really get OO. Perl requires too much mastery of mechanism just to do objects, so it's not the best environment for learning OO.
We're living in the future now.
Build a Twitter Account Dashboard with Leftronic
I would be interested in a service similar to pantybypost.com, but instead of panties, I would receive cool gadgets, toys, candies each month.
Do you know if there is a reason for that?
New Ventures Should Not Fear Big Players
I want that you make it a platform, expose APIs, and allow developers to create apps for it.
I am more interested to know how you got all those investors to invest on your service. Did they contact you after your launch on HN or do you have to reach out for them yourself? How difficult was to convince them to invest?
guns are fine, as long as you ban the bullets ;)
I honestly wouldn't want to watch it. I just want the technical challenge.
I agree in a lot of big categories - although I think they contribute even when they're nominal competitors more than leaders - but Chrome and Docs were both godsends. Chrome was a huge breakthrough in browser performance and I'll never buy a personal copy of Office again thanks to Docs. If you're going to call those "reactions", then any of their landmark products - search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube (an acquisition but a key one) - could be called reactionary.
Sure there's a way to do it - actually police activity and don't flagrantly flaunt the law. Megaupload is basically the online equivalent of selling weed out of a pizza parlor.
After fielding a custom-cryptography single signon system for your Ruby applications, you think your biggest concern is "how well will the system survive the loss of one of my app servers to an attacker"? Let me help you out with that: you won't survive the loss of one of your app servers. You're going to have to rebuild and rekey everything.

No, the biggest concern you have doing custom-cryptography for your Ruby apps is that the cryptography itself is going to hand attackers control of your app servers. Which, from experience, is somewhat likely. More likely if you haplessly use RSA or DSA.
Two more problems with the model:

1) Groupon taks a large cut on top of the big discount. It used to be that GroupOn wanted a 50% discount and then 50% of the revenue. This is like running a 75% off sale.

2) The customers are poorly-qualified leads. All we know is that they are local and like a good deal. That doesn't give the retailer much indication that they would be a good customer (and I think we have seen that they aren't).
Here's a shorter answer to "how to get rich" - be a successful entrepreneur.

But applying the above: let's say you're at a low-wage, hand-to-mouth style job today.

a) Today commit to being smart about taxation since that is one of your most addressable costs (and study it, there are literally THOUSANDS of loopholes)

b) As a result, save up enough "runway" over several years to go take a swing at a start-up.

c) Reinvest profits vs. buying a brand new status car or whatever and then cash out w/your $$$ at cap gains.
I'm Christian, unless you're gay.
In Sweden cell phones were called "yuppie teddies" and very frowned upon until it catched on.
Created just to post this? Wow.

Anyways...so...would you say the following are all sleazy: braintree, orbitz, threadless (aka skinnycorp), 37signals

Those are the next startups i think about when i think chicago.
Golang binding for LevelDB
Even though this isn't directly tech news I think it speaks well to the debate the tech world is having over gender, humor and discrimination.
But what has Google ever engineered, at least physically, that has set your expectations so high?

Driverless cars.
Funny and Hilarious reactions after Instagram Android release
Message For Matt Cutts
Being concerned with the ownership of code should never prevent you from writing it. Nobody is watching, really. If someone cares enough about your stuff to try to claim it as theirs, that's a high quality problem. Write some more code -- joke's on them, the new project will be better anyway.
How visible is it during the day?
test-plone `tmp`
Like stated before, most adult website owners are average joes, and PHP being easy to learn with a low entry barrier it was the logical reason to get a site up and running fast. Also because many of the tools written for the adult industry were done in PHP. Just like ICQ it won't ever be replaced as the standard for the industry.
This is more or less the way SAML [1] works, at least in one of it's protocols. The authentication server redirects (after successful login) to the initiating service and supplies an assertion-token, often with limited validity. With that assertion token more data can be asked from the servers to the auth-server directly. No account_id's go over the wire, the cookie needs only to be valid on the authentication server. And you should really need it, it's not much fun to implement.

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAML_2.0#Artifact_Resolution_Pr...
Citrix Drops OpenStack Support, Says 'Not Ready' for Major Deployments
Smaller, Quicker, Secret, Robotic: Inside America’s New Space Force
eat24hours.com does this well in some places.
Was it? Or rather is it? Any details?
Where Money Meets Power In Washington
I've been through three audits (of businesses) in the past 12 years.

Their purpose is to "uncover the truth", not to hose you needlessly.

You CAN write off a home office, you CAN write of computers, car miles, travel and entertainment, business meals, etc.

As long as these are legitimate business-related expenses you're in the clear.

As a single-employee S-Corp there shouldn't be such an overwhelming amount of documentation and you can probably push through an audit with minimal headaches.

Probably should add the disclaimer that I am not a CPA, follow at your own advice, but man have I spent enough bucks w/CPAs in the last 12 years to hopefully pass on a bit of hard-won knowledge ;)
Nice, where can I sign up?
"There's a reason why the big banks backed the IPO but didn't take a percentage."
Morgan stanley has 19 mil shares. Goldman has 2 mil shares. They backed the IPO and took a percentage. Am i misunderstanding your statement?
Warning! Warning! Convicted felon detected in oncoming approach 30 feet ahead.

Take evasive action immediately.
99% of the technology is having a really good connection either wifi or your phone company's wireless data.

I remember when I got a Nexus One and tried showing off the Google Translate app to co-workers; one Japanese, one Portuguese, one Bosnian but it took so long to connect it was embarrassing. I managed to get some Japanese translated after about 10 minutes.

Now I have a Samsung Galaxy S 2 (translate still sucks) through my phone company it has HSPA+ (21Mbps) but I have yet to consistently get anything above 3Mbps, I tend to get 1Mbps.

Also imagine this in a movie theatre or some place where they claim everything is copyrighted place or even walking towards police in a country where taking video of police could get you arrested.

It seems simple enough but holy can of worms Batman!
I usually come across people who don't actually know what a passive is[1] or who are completely and rabidly anti-passive, but I don't doubt that such advice is common among more reasonable grammarians. Still, there are sentences that are difficult if not impossible to rewrite in such a way because of context or lack of vocabulary, e.g. "... and the network interface is written in C," is difficult to rewrite because the old information (the software) comes first, the new information comes at the end, the unnecessary agent is omitted, and no active verbs come to mind.

[1]: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3884
iZ
Because it's a funny little stereotype that has a grain of truth to it (come on, you've never heard of "old Lisp greybeards"?) and at least in my mind isn't insulting. At least, if someone implied I was a bearded old programmer, I'd be happy to be included with the likes of McCarthy, Ritchie, Kernighan, and Thompson.

Now, if we were talking about Python and someone said, "the main peril of Python programmers is that they'll get apple juice and crayon all over everything", that would be insulting!
The potential for this kind of tech so far exceeds what's being shown in the demo it boggles the mind. The demo itself is pretty depressing: it implies all this tech is destined for is to provide a hands-off interface for phone apps.

For an example of real-world uses of AR (that don't involve hipsters or food trucks) check this out: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-10/augmented-r...
Panel on Language Design - Paul Graham, John Maeda, Jonathan Rees, Guy Steele
It would seem like some kind of compiler is going to be written before the first beta is even released. Its like a space race!
There really is no challenge...
Copying Versus Backing up computer data
>The physical form of that involvement may have changed, but that doesn't qualify Android as a "knee-jerk reaction".

Android copying the iPhone's user interface, touch screen, form factor, ecosystem, etc. is a knee-jerk reaction to iOS.
I fear that I neglected that for too long. I don't know what is complex enough to impress anyone, but I doubt I can hack something together in under a month that will reach that level.
Saas Math: Customer vs. Revenue Churn
If you're inspired by success, chances of emulating it are much higher. If you believe that someone else's success takes something from your own, you will walk through life being depressed by every success story.
That's cute and all, but there's a difference between starting a business to solve problems and make the world better, and starting a business to convince people to buy shit they don't need to feel better about their lives.
This comment needs a huge +1.

It's really quite easy to serve large volumes of porn. The dataset doesn't change often and 90% of your working set is the first couple pages of content. Back in 2007 when I was in the business, there was only one CDN that would touch porn (LimeLight) and they were absurdly expensive. Today there are hundreds of porn-friendly CDNs and they charge 1/10th the price (no exaggeration).

Storing a couple hundred terabytes of porn is not expensive or complicated.

Sites like YouPorn don't authenticate their content. Most of the high-volume web page content is static. Even then, you're looking at just a few page views before the user spends 5 minutes watching a video that streams from the CDN.

Payment transactions are handled by third parties, and usually abstracted through third-party affiliate software like NATS. Which, BTW, is a piece of junk and the one part of our system which we had trouble scaling.

Big bandwidth numbers sound impressive but the truth is running even a mildly successful social network with heavily personalized pages is ten times harder than running even the largest porn sites.
Are you saying they should license this technology to Samsung and others? If that's the case, I disagree. This is Google's chance to increase their profits and market cap three fold and within a few years, if this product turns out as exciting as it seems to be right now.
I love the style!

The most elegant (but difficult) solution for selecting items would be to detect the focus of the eye.
Symbolic Partial Fraction Decomposition
i'd go for greasemonkey myself since that will work in chrome and firefox if done right. I think it can also work in safari, but i don't know about any others.
What would the traffic be if there these sites were not blocked in a large part of the world?
Nice one buddy. I remember seeing your launch post. How much have you made from your pencil?
That's significantly worse from a user perspective than giving Amazon a credit card number to enable one click checkout or downloading a book from my kindle. It's true you could do anonymous transactions online, but while it's better than mailing people cash it's something of an edge case and I could also buy a Visa gift card and get the same sort of anonymity. Again, I like Bitcoin, but the problem IMO is how to make it both as convenient as a credit card and secure.

PS: Your also describing an adhock solution. As soon as you want to mass produce them to allow significant and convenient adoption you get into regulation issues. And by 'device' I am including just the software to manage your account from a cheap netbook.
New York Times playable space game lets you blow up those pesky banner ads
I have a theory, newly formed. And this seems the best place to share it, because this motley collection of minds generally knows their stuff and won't hesitate to tell me I'm wrong. :)

The only two meaningful categories of currency are "large" and "small". Large currency is cash, coins. It can be manipulated with the hand, verified by the eye. "Small currency" is expressed as microscopic state, and requires complex tools to observe, verify, etc. Both bitcoin and mintchip are microscopic currency. Computers function, then, first and foremost, as a kind of microscope.

My theory is that small currency is only as secure as the microscope used. And 'microscopes' expressed on computers are themselves expressed 'in the small', requiring other microscopes to verify, which can in turn be subverted. It's subvertable microscopes all the way down.

What is the solution then? You need a cheap, 'trusted' microscope/small wallet from a single source. It needs to be cheap so that it can be replaced frequently (lost or stolen). It needs to be from a single source because if trust is ever broken you need to get it from a different trusted source.

Also, it would be smart to limit the amount on a single device to being less than or equal to the cost of physically defeating the device.

Mind you, the MintChip "microscope" is incomplete: it requires a host system to do user interaction. Which, in my view, will always be the primary weakness of any small currency. All you need to do is write a dummy program to fool a user into believing they received the money, and you've won. And that's trivially easy.
Personally I'm holding out hope that Google collectively has enough sense not to torpedo this exciting new technology by turning it into a wearable AR billboard system. While I could totally see voluntary opt-in for merchant ad displays while walking around in downtown, I'm pretty sure it would have to be voluntary.

I'm optimistic that Google realizes they aren't going to be able to get away with anything more invasive than what's considered "acceptable" behavior for a smartphone. Example: I don't have merchants sending me unsolicited SMS whenever I'm within 200 yards of their storefront.
I believe Google has higher ambitions than selling advertising for the next 3 decades. They didn't buy Motorola just for patents, and to me they seem to be increasingly more interested in the physical world. I don't think it's a stretch to think that they want to make and sell physical products.
Why would you ask that?

Did you hear about how Google dogfooded Google+ for months, and when it was released to the public, people used it entirely differently than they had used it internally?

It seems to me that Google is so stuck in the mindset of "Release a Beta, assess the adoption, iteratively improve" that they don't know how to make a product that people will actually want from the start.

Chrome took a while to be adopted because everyone was still stuck with useful extensions in other browsers. Wave had neat interaction, but failed the adoption hypothesis. Google+ correctly assumed the need for a sharing-centric network to replace Facebook, but botched the actual social aspect of it.

Google is the polar opposite of Apple in this regard. They need to learn to keep things under wraps and understand the userbase for the product before it actually reaches them. In the case of Google+, for instance, it's impossible to change the sharing mechanism that has been there from the start, as fundamentally flawed as it may be.
when you sell software or educational ebooks cheaply

Sorry, but I know far too many people who enter new niches with an inexpensive ebook and then once they have built a solid list of customers interested in the niche, they go on to sell products worth thousands of dollars per copy.
If you're just looking at storefronts, how do you know what's viable and what isn't without making assumptions? Looking at real estate turnover tells you something about the location - and what businesses are appropriate for it - but doesn't tell you much about the viability of any particular business model.
or real estate salespeople sharing gripes: http://repp.herokuapp.com/
PASTA SFOGLIA ALL'UOVO-IMPASTO BASE
IPhone crybabies need to shut up about Instagram on Android
Sadly I'm not American. I forgot to add my location, I didn't think it would be important as I doubt many of HN's readers are German, which I am.

If I had the money to fly to NY, gee, that sounds both awesome and frightening. I envy people who can just take the already filled suitcase out of their closet and end up in a distant place without fear or confusion about what to do next.
It really depends on the implementation. You're assuming that all of the functionality has been revealed. For example, it's not completely out of the question that their technology will b, in part, completely mapped and trained co-ordinates (hey, they did it with StreetView). Each road, each corner, each nuance all recorded several times over for redundant accuracy - plus all the sensory, awareness that they have previously shown. There's also the point to be made that the car may know when and where it will have problems (calculating multiple steps ahead) and let you know that a known obstacle is coming up and you'll have to take over. Nothing wrong with that.
Can JIT be Faster?
All the technology you're worried about exists and is widely used. Walk around the streets of New York City. Chances are, you're being photographed by people sharing photos online. My commute involves riding across the Brooklyn Bridge. I'm sure I ended up in 20 separate photographs today, many of which are now on Facebook. Likely with a comment about how I'm an asshole for riding my bicycle in the bicycle lane :) The underlying technology is not going to change once people start wearing cameras. If anything, the sheer volume of photographs being shared will make it less likely that the picture is of you.

As for facial recognition, anyone who can write a few lines of Perl could easily scrape social network profile photos and start matching pictures of people on the Internet to names. It's trivial. And doing this sort of thing manually is popular: search for "human flesh search engine".

Privacy in public just doesn't exist.
Red Hat's $1B milestone - chump change vis-a-vis overall Linux industry
For me, this was the dead giveaway that the person writing the article had no idea what he was writing about:

>Software-wise, most large porn sites will use a very-high-throughput database such as Redis to store and serve videos

No video comes out of a database. Mostly because it can't, but also because it makes no sense to make it come out of a DB.
I have the exact same and I don't see it.
Somebody submitted a patent application[1] about a year ago in Europe for a very similar system called fairCASH[2]

[1] http://faircash.org/fileadmin/dateien/fairCASH_Patent_Applic...

[2] http://faircash.org/
Sponsor: Arizona bill isn't aimed at Internet trolls
Terminal emulator is what I want. SSH into my server, turn on my bluetooth keyboard, I'm 100%.
Things You Can Do To Promote Your Site
Some people see the infinite possibilities to what Google is doing.

While others see only what's wrong to what Google is doing.
Only in China: Transformers Theme Park Made from Recycled Cars
Review: DragonFlyBSD 3.0.1: Part 1: Preamble
Might as well throw my hat in the ring: My site Showhopping.com was basically invented for people like you. Only thing is it only applies to music at the moment.

Give your location, 5 or 6 bands you like, and voila, you get a listing of shows in your area that you can sort by how much you'll like them.

No email. No username. No usership requirements whatsoever. Just use and go. Oh, and I save your selected bands in a cookie so they're there for you when you come back.
Dropbox Referral Bonuses Doubled to 500 MB, Retroactively
No one said the car should ship tomorrow, but the reasoning: "Because you don't ship when it still kills people" is ridiculous. Cars have killed people for 90 years and they still ship. And not every death is due to human error. The fact is, the Google car has yet to even be hit by another car, let alone hitting something itself. It hasn't even remotely injured anything, let alone killed a human being.
Okay, then it sounds like DotSpots :)
Yes there is that on the BBC there was a fascinating program about modern day spying a couple of days ago they even had SIS and MI5 officers speaking abotu their work.

I assume it might end up on BBC America saat some stage
(I've rewritten the GP)

That appears to be wrong, since B, C, and D all execute the same number of try/catches.
Forum: How Creativity Works