skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From Invoice Management to Virtual Phone Systems
My name is Tony Rice and I'm working on a start-up called QuickStart.me(Pronounced Quick Start Me). About two months ago the QuickStart.me Web Application allowed users to simply manage and tracker customers, invoices and payments. Since then we've added a lot of features we believe mattered including currently an alpha service called QuickVBX(Available upon request) which is a virtual phone system for businesses. We chose to implement this because our original plan for QuickStart.me was to make small business management enjoyable and simple. Right now we lack some important accounting features but that's in the roadmap. https://www.quickstart.me/ check it out and feedback is appreciated.
Software stack market share: May 2012
he would need a blog in between to hype the product.An article that talks about how their trucks only use bio-fuel.
Could you go into a little bit more detail on how you think it compares to other editors?

And more specifically: what are your thoughts on the Aloha editor?
Love it. I was just wishing for this recently [1].

Now they just gotta turn it into a protocol and build it into monitors.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3988700
Just another anecdote, but every Dutchman and Swede I've met has a much better grasp of the English language than any other country, and they all attribute it to how much American TV they watch. Probably just a corollary relationship given how English classes start at an early age, but I can't imagine the practice hurts.
Feedback for UK property search engine
Hi,

Looking to get feedback for our UK property search engine. We wanted to incorporate better map/list search facilities than current aggregators. We recently launched and have roughly 500k listings. How is the search experience?
Met Mike during a pitch @ Sequoia 10 years ago. Within 5 seconds he understood our business better than we did. You just don't find that.
Just having the research available isn't the full investment in a book that uses it. If the government further funds the book based on the research, maybe that would be appropriate. If, however, I invest time and money into writing a book that incorporates research, I'd want a return on that investment.
Virtual goods. It is a proven revenue model for social networks.

http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/19/the-worlds-most-lucrative-...
Bill Gates and Paul Allen have both put serious money into life sciences.
That sounds like it would work pretty well. Set up voicemail, but have it mention that the person is deaf and that an SMS or e-mail would be more convenient. The tricky part is transcription. If you want better transcription than Google Voice, you have to use a human.[1] That means Mechanical Turk or a TTY operator.

My main concern is how viable such a product would be. Depending on who you ask, 0.2-0.4% of the population is considered deaf. That's not a very big potential market.

1. I find it amusing that Google Voice transcribes robot voices particularly poorly. I've had voicemails from PagerDuty transcribed as "This is the FBI" when the actual message started with, "This is PagerDuty".
I didn't spend more than a couple of hours on both, so I may be wrong.

But I found it easier to get the dashboards to my liking and extract the metrics I wanted on Google Analytics.
I have the feeling that Scala is actually very elegant at it's core and that it manages to build a wide ranger of functionality upon a few primitives (x). Unfortunately, awareness of those "first principles" is not being put forward by the Scala community.

(x) A (perhaps poor) example of this is how it managed a great syntactic flexibility while having a smaller grammar than Java. (Of course you could point out that Lisp is even better in that regard, but it is to be understood that we actually want some syntax.)
I’d love to get one of these and play with it. Will the SDK and spec for talking to it be freely available after the initial batch of preorders and free dev kits?

As a counterexample, Emoviv gave a TED talk a while ago showing off a headset that lets you control your computer with your mind. When you visit their website you discover that you can only develop with a $500 “developer edition” headset that comes with a single, nontransferrable license to use the SDK (additional licenses are $99). The consumer model of the headset only runs approved applications.
I'm strangely reminded of when people said that Android support would kill Instagram, because of their inferior cameras. (Don't shoot me. I'm an Android user of Instagram.)
This is odd, only because every windows version since 2000 I have removed all skins and fluff. Optimizing the interface for best performance.

But I know I'm not the targeted audience.
Haha, this should be the response to every "really, invest in a company at 100+ P/E?!" comment.
Interesting, I didn't even consider history books. I don't know enough about how history books are written or their economic model, but I would hope the people creating the proposal would research that as well.
I know a blind programmer. He uses a device to read text on a screen. It reads the text very quickly and he usually doesn't have to hear more an entire line to orient himself. He can also browse websites. He's quite functional. However, he uses languages like Perl that he knew before he became blind (he was shot in the face at about 30 years old.)

He hasn't tried to learn a new language, but I imagine it would be quite difficult for him.
The default theme that shipped with XP was awful, but there was a massive skinning community that constantly produced superior designs. You just had to know to look for them.
While I didn't find Aero "dated and cheesy", I found it very confusing and cluttered (in its default configuration). Because the window decorations were almost completely transparent, different (partially overlapping) windows kinda melted together visually. Distinguishing active windows was also unnecessarily difficult imho. I usually toned the transparency down to almost completely opaque, which helped usability. And of course there was the infamously thick window borders.

So I for one welcome the change.
That approach does have the advantage of speed, but it's not really a substitute for physically overwriting all the data.

History is rife with examples of people getting themselves into serious hot water by assuming that the lack of a well-known weakness in a cipher means that the cipher is secure. Anyone who's got an extremely high need for data security is hopefully keenly aware of that.
Facebook rumoured to bring out HTML based OS smartphone.
A variation of this is actually the last quote from the linked page.
I'm not sure how they're handling variance in user perspective, but assuming they've got that figured out, if you were to couple this with a stereo vision setup and some form of haptic feedback a lot of companies doing 3D design (both CAD and 3D artwork) would eat this up. It won't replace a keyboard and mouse, but it would provide a much more "immersive" way of interacting with the media.
you must be thinking of something else. kinect has two cameras, one for laser IR particle-filter type stuff, and then an rgb camera. it isn't stereo vision with two regular 2d cameras, however, doing displacement math. it is looking at the grid of dots projected and seeing where the dots moved in order to create a depth map.
This description in the title would help: "A Simple Lua Web Framework For Mongrel2"
>Every website that sells anything would have to register with the government(s) of whatever jurisdictions apply, and file reports showing that they are meeting the requirements

I think the scenario you paint is completely unrealistic. Most consumer protection laws are not enforced like this. It's not FCC or CE marking we're talking about. Usually it's a case that when consumers complain (e.g. product not as described) the seller is investigated and, if found guilty, fined or punished as per the law.

The rest of your argument, which I realise is for arguments sake, reads like a slippery slope argument because you provide no real examples.
LEGOs don't end up in a landfill. From my observations, they all end up under my couch cushions.
I Want to Do This
Supreme Court declines to hear $675,000 file-swapping case (for 30 MP3s)
"Facebook and Twitter are mediums for sharing and discussion" I quit Facebook because it was a horrible place to have a discussion, people are conservative/not as honest when they have the eyes of that many people on them.
Yeah, no. Kinect uses an IR emitter with an IR-based depth camera, there's nothing stereo about it. A regular RGB camera adds color, but that is all.
Quit Kindergarten, Usher in Telepathy 2.0, and Other Interweb Disturbances
Amazing animations of biomolecules in action
Really? I don't like SmartGit at all? It's so flexible that it's unreasonably difficult to do even simple tasks.

I'm glad Github decided on a core feature set, and made those very easy to access.
Agree. Though I clicked mostly for the "Zedshaw" in the title.
What women want from online dating - and why app developers should care.
VS integration is only the start. Easily/automatically integrated build, test, and work item integration is also pretty attractive.
I have seen a gas station with no less than 9 big flags in front of it, saying that you get $X off when you check in at Facebook. I guess it might work because you read the name of a friend in the same sentence as the business. It might work even better with sandwiches, because that's something you can actually recommend. (Gas is all the same.)

Source: Taiwan
Windows 8's tabletification will possibly end up being a smart move with the introduction of this thing.
This used to drive me nuts, since I only play online sporadically -- having to sit on the phone for 15 minutes to cancel was ridiculous. They've changed it now, but there's still the mild trick of re-engaging the auto-renewal every time you sign up again for a month.
Of course the changes are going to be evolutionary, incremental. MS probably has the Longhorn fiasco in fresh memory. Bringing revolutionary changes is extremely prone to failure.
> 7. Just install and use Git??

I made that point generic for a reason. :)

So you git push to your remote, now you (may) have to tell the servers to reload. Along with other things (database migrations if you're using SQL, compiling native code if you have any of that, potentially updating configuration files if your app needs that, updating assets on a CDN/cache etc).

Yes, sure, a post-receive hook can be wired to do these things, but you have to know that and do the wiring.
"Obviously the iPhone was revolutionary."

The iPhone's marketing was very good. I'm not sure there was anything revolutionary about it.

Edit: Rather than answer individuals below, I'll state my terms here. Revolutionary indicates a complete change - the overturning of all that was before. We already had phones, we already had pocket computers, we already had phones that were pocket computers, we already had phones that were pocket computers that you could get extra programs for, we already had increasing use of them as time went on. We already had.
Was this developed on raw hardware or in a VM running on Linux/Mac?
IndexedDB: Binary Keys
Ampex - concise readable Ruby blocks
EU: Google must address antitrust objections in 'weeks'
I think you and your GP are right on. I edited a short-lived podcast and regularly spent 1.5 hours producing and editing each 25 minute show. Even if you're using good equipment and have a solid connection, producing a tight podcast necessarily takes more effort than is obvious to the listener. That's kind of the point.
Asparagui is commenting on the original article, not the parent post.
> I think the greatest companies of the next few years will be build by teams that consist of people that can program AND can do UX.

I couldn't disagree more. I have never met anybody who can program AND do UX well. Maybe there are very very rare exceptions, but these two skills are pretty much mutually exclusive.

First of all, you need completely different modes of thinking while coding and while doing UX. Left/right brain, and all that. But more importantly, to be a good UX person, you need tons of training - design, marketing and psychology being three main areas. To be a great programmer, you need completely different set of training. Both UX and programming require single-minded attention, dedication and years to master.

To expect someone to do both of those things well is not only unrealistic, but plain WRONG.
It was more that the transparency and gradients were attempting to replicate 'glass'. Why? What purpose does that serve? For a long time people cited user familiarity (I'm sure why Apple has made the skins they have) but I think it's time to move beyond that.
It picked up on my non-GitHub repos and initially, it seems like I can do all the things I would expect a git repo to do.
I suppose the only drawback to using epoch alone would be if you need to remember the timezone the date was stored from. But thats easy enough to fix.
I wrote a response to the Forbes article about my Tesla comic - The Oatmeal
Probably because IE is a giant failboat.
I've been developing web apps for Windows 8 lately using the native -ms- proprietary CSS styles and UI hooks available in IE 10 on touch devices. (CSS grids and scroll snap points!) Let me just say, web apps that follow the Windows 8 UX guidelines are easier to develop and, overall, just feel better to use. That is, they feel like they belong inside Windows 8.

From that perspective, I think they're doing the right thing.
This is awesome. Personally I'm a linux user so git is one of those rare tools that caters to me, but I've been in a few backwards development shops where git was looked down upon because of inferior tool support on windows when compared to subversion.
I'm in favor of anything that helps bring windows users into the git-using fold ;-)
I did not know this, that's reassuring so thanks :)

I can also believe that most users can't do select all or stuff like that; I've seen far too many regular folk copying one file at a time.
A fun story about failures:

fora.tv/2009/05/30/MythBuster_Adam_Savages_Colossal_Failures
I've recently started doing this as well. You also get a performance boost if you define the functions once at the top and then do this:

request.on('data', requestReceivedData)
Would it make much difference? Hardware virtualisation is pretty fast, no?
Facebook has ads and Facebook Credits. S-1 shows about 18% of Facebook revenue comes from Facebook Credits, so Facebook is better than Google in "diverse source of revenue" metric.
A quick way of summarizing your point: the invisible hand is working properly. It's telling us that 1 social investment today plus 5 science investments tomorrow is better than 1 science investment today.
Is College’s Stone Age About to End?
I find the metroized Destkop a bit reminiscent a Whistler era, which I liked a lot before the final bump'n'shine XP theme was introduced.

flat, square, whitespace, larger typeface [sometimes]

http://www.winsupersite.com/content/content/127352/reviews/w...
http://www.winsupersite.com/content/content/127352/reviews/w...
http://www.crystalxp.net/news/img/38.gif
http://www.winsupersite.com/content/content/127352/reviews/w...
http://www.internews.hu/pic/cikkek/whistler_b2410/2410per_00...
http://www.winsupersite.com/content/content/127352/reviews/w...
Ags Cancer | Between Truth and Falsehood
Oh, that's weird; an OS that is built primarily for normal PC users doesn't run well on dated hardware? Who would have thought? Windows 7 is less bloated than the version of Linux I just installed (and removed) On my new desktop.
Ask HN: How to get most out of WWDC 2012
This is my first time attending WWDC and I am very excited. Just like all other attendees, I am curious to know/learn how one can make/get most out of the event. What sessions to go to, what things to do, how to network better, what places to check-out. Any ideas you can pitch-in or your past experience will be great!
That's a good way to motivate somebody to never bother getting a job.
It'll be interesting to see if it achieves that goal. In my experience of watching my parents interact with a computer too many buttons translates to "complicated and scary". I think a more reserved approach might have been a bit better than the nuclear option of bombarding the UI with as many buttons as there are options in the current menu.
Awesome framework! love that it is flexible, light-weight and easily comes with or without a UI kit. Other frameworks create a disconnect between developers and designers where this comes with the PSD's with the guide layers setup so quickly prototyping from the design to working markup/css is fast. Sounds like a bunch of designers who have a ton of 960 experience will love this since its "familiar" yet flexible.
"I once asked Ivan Sutherland, how could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object-oriented software system all in one year? He said, well, I didn't know it was hard!"

-- Alan Kay, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOZqRJzE8xg#t=3m45s
I think this is the article you were thinking about.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/08/26/improvements-i...
I disagree with you on the details a bit, but I think viewing this as good at somethings and bad at others is far more constructive than arguing that this should replace a mouse, keyboard etc.

However, I would make the good/bad list a bit more general: * good for manipulating UI elements that represent 3D
* bad for manipulating UI elements that represent 2D

Maps and camera interactions (CAD) are perfect examples of things that represent 3D elements. Short games are another area that can represent 3D - longer games might also work well, but the user is likely to get tired of waving his/her arms around.

Much of what we do on computers today is strictly 2D. Coding, word processing, most web browsing, email, etc. Pencil tools/drawing tools are similarly usually just a 2D activity, so using a 3D-capable tool and reducing your movements to 2D doesn't really make sense.
Oatmeal responds to the Forbes article that bashed his "Tesla vs Edison" comic
I wonder what recently hired employees have for their strike price.

It must feel terrible to be underwater the day after IPO, if that's the case for anyone. I was at Amazon after the dot com bubble burst, and it was very hard for managers (who mostly had already done very well) to keep morale up amongst the later hires.

Of course, the people who stayed are all doing quite well now -- but it took a decade of patience.
Nice work xpaulbettsx! Great to see a Caliburn.Micro getting some props. We're using it on a large WPF app now.

How many people were on the team? Did you let Phil write any Xaml?
On his website he has "More than 30,000 people have settled their cases for between $3,000 - $12,000. Were you one of them?"

Last year I led a Startup Weekend team for crowd-sourced legal defense, 1) for people mentioned above to pool together a large defense front so more cases like these would end up in court, and 2) for people already there like Joel, who are seriously outgunned financially which hurts society as a whole by allowing bad precedence to be set.

The inspiration for #2 came from George Hotz getting a mass of donations in under 2 days when he was sued by Sony for hacking the PS3, enough that he had to stop taking them.

I still think it's a great idea, although perhaps not legally tenable. In any case just throwing it out there.
Many Windows users are still on XP, which is viewed as good-enough and not worth the upgrade troubles:

http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-xp-market-share-goes-down...

If Microsoft would have written IE versions beyond 8 to work with XP, IE might have been able to hang in at #1 longer since the later versions of IE aren't as bad.

I know I'll be happy when I see IE 8 usage drop sufficiently low in my logs to allow me to stop attending to its limitations while developing.
Windows 8 is a huge, revolutionary change though. They completely scrapped the start menu, start button, traditional software delivery, etc.
How to Measure the Value of Your Email List
There were lots of armchair quarterbacks talking about how "they don't owe us anything".

There were lots of comments from Gruber, Mike, etc basically mocking people for being upset that the show dropped Dan and moved with no warning.

Dan pretty much nailed it: he feels like they owed the fans one last episode to say goodbye and they didn't get to do that.
What about a case where part of your of your effort, say half, in doing the research and writing a paper were supported by a government grant and the rest was supported by your employer or was unsupported. This may be typical of the rok done by a university faculty member or graduate student.
IE doesn't participate in the WPF rendering system, so it would have all kinds of glitches like it sitting above all other controls (referred to in the docs as "Airspace Issues"), as well as unthemed controls (specifically the scroll bar - stuck out like a sore thumb). The markup that READMEs use is really simple, IE would've been fine for it.
No, it's more of an Application. Like the Browser is an app which is a portal to applications, so too is the Desktop in Windows 8.
German mac keyboard layout for hackers
Another one I can add is that certain security packages (coughSEPcough) can do weird things to the SXS repos that ClickOnce relies on. This will lead to applications failing to install with pretty much useless error messages.

Granted, this 60/40 blame security software/clickonce, but it was a complaint nonetheless.
WHMCS Hacked
The simplest one probably is that lift and drag scale with wing area, while aircraft weight scales with its volume. That means that, if you do things at quarter scale, you have 1/64 or about 1.5% of the weight, but 1/16 or about 6% of lift. Consequently, almost everything flies at that scale. The model plane will also be extremely robust, as its landing gear can take 1/16 of the original one, but has to carry only 1/64th.

All of these are, of course, only valid to a rough approximation; look up "scaling laws" if you want to learn more)
Best Retirement Locations
Here's my thing. Facebook is new to advertising (and making money for that matter). Expecting that they start out on the same level as Google is wrong. Dead wrong. Microsoft has been trying to compete with Google in advertising for years and is only succeeding in burning money. But FB is new, has momentum, and has a lot of talented people focused on making the product as best as possible. They will find a way to make boatloads off their product, and I imagine as long as Zuckerberg has a say, they'll continue to be product and customer focused rather than worrying about balance sheets. I think this will win in the end.

Or they'll implode and we'll all likely end up without jobs.
Performance of a Paid Tweet
This seems very strange to me. There are social networks monetizing at much higher ARPU. Why is Facebook different?
That thought occurred to me moments after I posted.
If using dark patterns is more profitable on average than not using them, then firms using dark patterns will outcompete firms that don't, so eventually you'll have nowhere else to shop, or at least your options will be significantly reduced. In some market segments that seems to have already happened.
The RTE for Google Docs is written in Javascript, bypassing design mode:

http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/05/whats-different-about...

The code isn't officially released anywhere, but someone grabbed the source, prettied it up, and put it up here: https://github.com/benjamn/kix-standalone
Obviously you can't use it for anything without a proper license.
So....this has been posted about a few times in the past (http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=tir). Where's the news here?
Pinterest Architecture Update - 18M Visitors, 10x Growth, 12 Employees, 410 TB
Shouldn't this be a problem with whiteboards/blackboards as well?
Out of curiosity, which Linux distribution?