skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
a bit obvious...when you have a huge install base and lots of fans you can so things a startup cant. how the company got there is far more important then the advantages they have now, thats what startups can take from 37Signals and other prominent software companies.

the RoR advantage is not really copyable, and provided them with a huge advantage in terms of fans and press. But it did not win them most of their customers and going beyond a niche of small web dev shops its meaningless. My guess is most of their customers dont know what RoR is.

on a side note it would be nice to do a 37signals moratorium for a month or so, seems like all I see lately on HN lately.
Collection of papers on introductory web mining
If you've got a working prototype of your site, should you include that URL/display it in the video? If so, would you encourage submitting the URL only if it's near production-ready?
just another article explaining that "global warming" is not the best name for whatever may or may not be happening.
They do compensate people for that. I was just on an overbooked flight that was offering volunteers, who would drop out, $400+ in credit and a hotel room if they couldn't be placed on another flight that night.

EDIT: I was referring to the overbooking policy, not cancellation :)
To answer your question, with my current config (Ubuntu Eee 8.04) standard def plays fine. HD from sites like vimeo definitely stutters. Youtube does some sort of resolution detection and always gives a "this video has been removed" error for HD since it thinks I'm running at 800x480, even when I'm outputing solely to an external monitor (and I am certain the video exists).
I wonder, how much in dollar value are the ads in one episode of scrubs. It seems like the TV networks could use something like this technology and just charge a per-episode rate of (X * 1.5).

Based on some back of the envelope using the superbowl ($3 million / (30 second spot * 100 million viewers) = $0.03 per viewer commercial * 36 commercials per hour = $1.08. That's probably an upper bound since super bowl ads have a good chance of making the news outlets, talk shows, etc.

So would you pay $1.50 an episode to watch commercial free your favorite show whenever you want? For Firefly yeah, but I'm not so sure about The View.

Then again my implicit wage rate is $0.03 * 120 = $3.60 an hour so I'm willing to earn $3.60 an hour watching television ads but only if I get Joss Whedon unpaid breaks.
Come on, this link is #3 on the front page. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=440687
Is that as a requester or worker? How hard is it to fake that? How hard is it to get a US credit card as a non-resident?
Ah thanks. I was in the mindset of a hardware product.
One would assume that you only want US institutions? Because nobody else really uses .edu to any great degree of consistency.
in my opinion this article (and maybe the book written by the 37signals guys) only looks at part of the equation. To what it boils down for them is being better than your competition. The old credo was being better in total which the article describes as one-up the other. The 37signals approach is being better at a subset. They say you have to focus on things where you can be better.

What this leaves out completely is the approach of being different. Why do it the way everybody else is doing it? IMHO there is a huge potential in a lot of areas which could be used by a different approach to solving problems that have already been solved.
Buy a Nokia internet tablet. It runs linux and is very hackable.

If you want to go lower level arduino is a good platform and community to get started in.
No one gave us a popular blog, we built it over 10 years. No one gives you anything, you have to spend the time to make it happen. This is another thing we talk about every time we have the chance: All of this takes time. You have to be in it for the long haul.
I find that it it easier to use an RSS feed for all torrents from a (medium-volume) site at once and filter it locally.
If you must spend 80k to make 120k you are in a bad business. EDIT: Really Bad.
oh, I assumed it picked up reposts?!
FAIL
If you really don't want to use a visa credit card, but the company requires it, you can get a visa gift card online. They can be used anywhere visa debit is accepted. http://usa.visa.com/personal/cards/prepaid/visa_gift_card_or... has a list of online retailers.

Edit: It looks like most of the sites certified by visa require bank accounts with the issuing bank, and it looks like all of the cards are physically shipped to you. You can get a virtual visa card number from a bunch of different websites though. And it looks like they can be use for recurring payments too. Though I've read that some websites check the card for the information on the actual billing address, so acceptance may vary.
For Mac OS X you can use TVShows for that: http://tvshows.sourceforge.net/index2.html
I don't know about the Superbowl being an upper bound. You generally pay less for things when you buy them in volume. I'd imagine the per person rate on a normal show (especially one with great demos, like The Daily Show) might be higher.

That said, you can just buy many of them via iTunes. It's clear that adoption there is very small, but it's not clear why. It could be the price. It could be that you can't stream it to an Xbox or any similar product that anyone actually owns. (My guess is the 8 people who bought an Apple TV probably buy some shows this way.)

Also cable with DVR would pay for itself fast if you watch a lot of shows. I don't though, so at $1.50 per I'd still save money over the course of a year. On the other hand, given that the distribution cost is $0 via bittorrent, I would think the networks would take 1x or maybe even less. I highly doubt they're getting $1 per view on Hulu for instance.
I agree that you guys say that a lot, but I was specifically talking about your attitude, which often strikes me as condescending towards those who do not share your views, regardless of your pronounced respect for differing approaches.

In all fairness, some of this may be a by-product of the very close association between 37signals and Rails; for all its strengths, I feel the Rails community often exhibits some of the same characteristics.
I somehow couldn't get filters working well. I was trying on Mininova though which may have been the problem. It was before I discovered tvrss.
SEschmO. Heh, just kidding.

I'm working on a new blogging platform.

IMHO, the quality of my product matters a lot more than SEO, so I spend my time on functionality. But the blogspot blog is slightly embarrassing, so it's definitely on the way out.
Check out Oracle Coherence.
Huh! Somehow I missed whitespace in the source...
It does, but in this case the URLs differ by one character. URL aliasing strikes again.

BTW, you can delete submissions.
Lispbox is a good idea. Target Windows if you can. Setting up Clojure with Emacs on Windows involved a lot of steps and arcane stuff, but now there's a Clojure Box which makes things a lot more pleasant.

I've tried SBCL with the Eclipse plugin and it's been a huge PITA. IIRC, I couldn't get libraries to install when I finally gave up. It may have improved since, but I'm not sure. Of course the fact that many cool-sounding CL libraries had defunct websites and inaccessible CVS repos didn't exactly encourage me...
Who ever is voting this up: Go away.

Seriously, not directed at matt maroon for posting this on his own blog, but I assume most people here have heard of bittorrent and rss before. This isn't new, worthy of discussion, or even vaguely interesting to hackers.

Seems to me that the article would go over great on digg/reddit, maybe you should try there.
The Clash of Community, Company, and Celebrity (perils of corporate transparency)
While all this is true, the process of moving from a prototype into production is a more or less solved problem. For example, there are a lot of companies that one can outsource the actual pick-and-place, assembly and packing to. The same goes for support and sales, I'd imagine. If the VC money is in place, this part should just be turning the crank.
Exactly, which is what things like Slingbox are good for. Even though media creators probably fear that too.
I wasn't expecting this article from Matt, otherwise it doesn't belong here at HN.
Will you now? Databases of tens of terabytes are commonplace now in the relational world. Petabytes are the new frontier.

Now if you had said that there was a correlation between a particular data access pattern and the interest in a non-relational datastore you might be onto something, but size most definitly isn't it, and TPS isn't it either.
Well, okay. I never use Campfire so I didn't appreciate that. Perhaps I got a bit carried away with the Metcalfe analogy...
In a trivial setup it's pretty easy to get the jvm up and running, but making a good cached deploy of apache httpd fronting tomcat and a database server isn't very easy. It's not very easy to set up a server with rails either (easier these days but still a pain if you're a noob). I'm not sure how easy something deploys is critical for the value of a platform. Developers should understand how stuff are deployed but it's not necessary that they know how to do it correctly, nor should every developer deploy their own applications. (I mean, it doesn't hurt if they know how to do it, but it's better that developers spend their main time developing not minding the server farms).
If only there were some good shows to download...

I liked Heroes but this season is whack.
I like the UK Office, Extras, Family Guy, Survivorman. I usually watch the Daily Show/Colbert but don't want to bother downloading those.

Any recommendations?
Canceling is different from overbooking. Generally now if a flight is canceled due to weather or whatever, they don't offer compensation.
Everything is in a class. Everything. Even poor little printf or the main function.
These are people who have had to scale above RDBMS.

We know the limits of MySQL and PostgreSQL, but do we know the limits of RDBMS? Consider the promise of H-Store.
Check out this.

http://shinh.skr.jp/dat_dir/fizzbuzz7.gif

It is a valid GIF image file, but also a valid Fizz Buzz program in Ruby, Perl, Befunge, Z80 machine code, and x86 machine code.
Distributed computing startup, looking for another hacker
We're an early stage, stealth mode, cloud computing startup, our (initial) client base is people with projects that involve a great deal of parallel computation -- so think, rendering, biological models, climate simulations, and so on. Rather than providing the standard "here, have a virtual machine" type of service, we're creating tools that let clients forget about the complexity of parallelism, distributed data, and synchronization, and write clear, concise code that solves their specific problem -- and then run that code using our service. Once that service gets off the ground, we've got plans for expansion that need solutions for a lot of very cool problems in routing, systems programming, cryptographic protocols, and security -- so we're in for fun times.

We're hoping to provide our services directly to clients, as well as build a platform for third party applications. The market is very promising, and we've had very positive responses from some potential investors.

A bit about us: Both of the founders live in New York, and are currently undergrads at Oxford. I'm reading Computer Science, and my co-founder is reading Economics.

We're looking for someone willing to work primarily for equity, who's willing to be a partner in the firm (though we may be able to offer some cash payment as well). You should be passionate about distributed systems, and able to code Python in your sleep (strong C skills are a major plus as well). Any of the following are pluses, too, though not necessary: an interest in game theory, cryptography, programming languages/language design, scientific computing, and routing. The same goes for Java experience, and a good knowledge of statistics. Ideally, we'd like to be able to be in the same place as you, so we're hoping for someone in the South East UK or East Coast US (feel free to apply if you're not though!).

If you join the team, you'll be working with me on our prototype system and initial offering. You'll be working on code that'll touch everything from search for cures to deadly diseases, to predicting natural disasters and saving lives, to rendering the latest CGI film -- it's exciting stuff!

If you're interested, send whatever you've got, (CV, projects, blog) to anoxfordstartup@googlemail.com or post below!
WHAT??? Ok that analysis of IRC is just surreal. like cuil^cuil.
It's pretty funny for you to say they are in possession of the field

Ah, I should have gone ahead and written "the field of battle", which is what I meant. Which, in this case, was their own small piece of turf, not the entire world of online chat. Obviously they don't dominate the world. Nor do they seem to want to. They seem perfectly content to own their particular chat niche, and they probably would be happy even if that niche were little more than "users of other 37signals products talking to each other".
You could register for ALibaba.com and find manufacturers. From there you could buy maybe a few different prototypes for a low amount and start to play with it.
That was sort of my point: eggs from chickens raised on open pasture are not commercially available. If you get a box labeled "free range" it's meaningless. So why bother getting it.

The color of the yolk has nothing to do with free range, but rather if they eat beta carotene. You could simply add that to the feed and it would also change the color.
That is understandable, but you are still not answering the point. A large part of the success of companies like 37s and fogbugz is due to their online following, which is based on a blog and in your case the Rails framework.

Companies that write a blog with 5 subscribers are simply not playing in the same league. Yes, of course, you have to start with 5, and I'm sure you did at some point, but to suggest that you can apply X ideas to achieve Y without discussing these enormous 'external' conditions that are directly attributable to this achievement is not telling the whole story.
That may be the common-sense but from my experience in the advertising world it is not the case. Costs are always paid in CPM.

The Superbowl drives a huge premium because you can get such breadth and volume. Niches on TV tend to be cheaper (by CPM).
If one wanted more of certain lipids, and lipid-soluble nutrients, in his eggs, why would he not simply adjust the chicken-feed accordingly?

And that's exactly what I do (err, buy). I buy egglands best eggs, and that's what they do, they adjust the feed to have less fat and cholesterol. It's costs a bit more, but you notice it in the egg, and it's commercially available.
For this particular course, use these:

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...

(These videos are also under a Creative Commons license and available on YouTube).
RDBMS and Memchash work well together. Using the RDBMS as an index lets you keep the whole thing in RAM, and then store your data in Memchash. You can store a lot of useful information into 1kb or less records and then store 1+ million records per GB in RAM.
Microsoft's Mobile App Store Coming Next Month (MSFT)
careful, t-mobile might sue you for using their color scheme.
"every organization has too many meetings, and far too many poorly designed ones"
This explains a lot, in my mind, about how otherwise intelligent people can get pulled into cults and various other troublesome situations that rely on a prevalent group-think. It's not that you can't think of why something is wrong, but there's a strong natural impulse to go along with the crowd regardless of how wrong it is and you may know it to be.
Does that "92% paid" mean that 92% of the people that pledged ended up actually paying?

If so, thats a pretty spectacular conversion rate.
really?

a 50% ROI seems pretty good compared to traditional businesses
Cult Classic Bush Documentary launches new VOD Platform 
In honor of bush's final night at the White House we're giving away our critically acclaimed and award-winning documentary Horns and Halos for free.

You can stream, download or burn it at http://www.rumur.com/hornsandhalos

iPhone users can stream it at http://rumur.tv/hornsandhalos.html

As independent filmmakers tired of dealing with the awful circumstances surrounding traditional brick and mortar physical distribution we decided to build our own platform.

As an online destination where users can watch independent film and television via multiple solutions: streaming, download and rapid DVD-on-demand, Rumur.com is distinguished from other online video platforms in that it is built around a self-publishing tool, which allows content owners (primarily independent filmmakers and distributors) to automatically upload their titles into the Rumur platform and sell and market directly to consumers - bypassing the traditional distribution supply chain, saving distribution fees and expenses.

Check out the site and let me know what you think. Critical feedback is GREATLY APPRECIATED.

-------

About Horns and Halos

A near perfect manifestation of radical, DIY media intervention, the video doc "Horns and Halos" could not be more timely just as we hunker down for untold years of wartime sacrifice and imperialist self-rationalization, here is a David fable told by the barbarians at the Bush dynasty gate."
- Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

"Here is a rich tale of our times, very well told with an appropriate minimum of means."
- David Kehr, New York Times

"dark surprises...emotionally complex"
- David Ansen, Newsweek

"Fascinating thoughtful and deeply affecting portrait of a screwed-up man who dared to mess with some powerful people."
- Michael OSullivan, The Washington Post
I have only ever heard of one person getting a better offer at Google, but I have heard countless times of people getting low offers or taking a pay cut to work for Google. So to see so many leave because of pay in the end isn't surprising. Working on cool things only gets you so far (six months? a year?) When your friend gets more then double your salary then you for doing something much easier and has a better out of work life it really makes you wonder if there isn't something better. Perhaps not Google, but a nice place to work now that google is on your resume.
That's been my experience. This winter the weather has been horrible in the northwest, and so several of my flights have been cancelled. And the airlines wouldn't give me anything since it was weather related. Whereas recently I volunteered to skip an overbooked flight, and ended up getting a free roundtrip ticket, meal vouchers, and a ticket on the next flight out.
Teach your iPhone to learn words like "Fuck"
I have a similar setup (well, same goal, completely different components):

* 37" lcd 1080p (1920x1080) - less than $1000 a year ago, now $500
* mac mini, apple wireless keyboard, microsoft bluetooth mouse
* a schwin recumbant bike

I can roll the bike in front of the screen, grab the keyboard and exercise while doing my non-coding activities: Google reader, checking social network buzz, watching videos (such as TED), ...

Then when I'm done, I move the bike away and I connect the 1080p display to my laptop (x60 running ubuntu) and I can hack with a large screen and my laptop's screen being for irc/im/social apps.

I had a 30" high res LCD (apple/dell), but found them frustrating due to mouse movement. Having a medium resolution screen (1080p is just about right for the mouse), with not many dots per inch (so you don't squint) for emacs/firefox, and a smaller auxiliary lcd for everything else.

At work I have 2 24" LCDs (rotated so they are taller than wider - 1920x1200 each), which works great as well, but wouldn't work for as well for the biking setup.
I'm not sure you can generalise anything from the Agora ... it was always a bit unbelievable that a minnow sized vendor could outdo every other cell phone provider on the planet to become the second Android phone. My guess is that these "interoperability" issues are more like "we tried 100 android apps and only 1 of them worked on our phone because we really didn't test it at all and now only just realized that we made a complete failure".

But I will say that as soon as I saw it I scanned the specs and figured I would never buy it because of the low screen resolution. That was pretty bone headed right from the start.
Umair is wrong: Entrepreneurs are the problem, not VCs
Well, you certainly have your work cut out for you. Hacking together hardware isn't quite the same as software, because mistakes are expensive. Debugging noise on a signal line with an oscilloscope takes eons compared to watching a value in memory. And if it's a significant screw-up you've got to re-spin the PCB which costs real $$. Hell I have an EE degree and I still find it annoying as crap.

If you're looking at running Linux, don't bother with your own PCB. Even the smallest possible system that runs that is going to be using high-speed data lines, processors with 100+ pins, multi-layer boards...it's just not something you worth spending your own time on. Get one of the development boards people are mentioning here.

However, don't assume something like the Picwing needs to run Linux and Flash and WiFi. Companies like Microchip, TI, and Freescale sell processors that run in the $5-$10 range and have their own built-in code memory and RAM. These things are programmed in C, and although being way less powerful, are more than capable of running a basic TCP/IP stack and graphics/touch library once you learn to think outside of having an operating system. You interface them with external components such as an LCD display, Ethernet or WiFi controller, and an SD card or USB stick for extra storage (or stand-alone serial flash chip, depending on your needs). Microchip for example also provides software libraries that handle things like the TCP/IP stack, graphics/touch interface, FAT file system, etc, and I believe the competitors do the same. (Disclaimer of sorts: I used to work for Microchip and wrote parts of those libraries, so I'm most familiar with their stuff. When I left Microchip's graphics library was limited to QVGA, but I'd imagine either they or a competitor has stepped that up recently.)

Reason I mention this is that this is the cheap way to go if/when you want to get towards mass-production. You can go ahead and develop on the expensive dev boards with Linux while you get the interface right and figure out the business model, but plan to hire someone to design custom HW the right way when you want to do volume. China and India are full of design shops that do nothing but clone iPhones all day long...I'm sure someone around here has a few contacts that could get this done cheap once you can specify exactly what you want.
I've also seen the dreaded 'Too many characters' error a few times.
Cisco Plans Big Push Into Server Market
Who are you? Millions still use IRC.
As other people have said, it really depends on what your goal is.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm not so much into really building a product than learning about electronics. I tend to want to reinvent the wheel just to know how stuff works.

But for the project I had in mind, it would be more to learn the software part than the hardware. For the hardware, I'll probably start looking at the Arduino stuff. Looks very expandable and fun :)
did you try asking to speak to a manager?