skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's almost no discernable network effect for Campfire; a Campfire room can only support a limited number of users, so even if your friends use Campfire, you're probably not talking to them over it.
I love to see people jealous of other people stuff, it shows they are still human. Way to go TC!
Strong disagree; most of the Matasano people who use Campfire have little or no exposure to other 37signals products.

It's just a very solid, inexpensive private web chat that we don't have to host ourselves. It works everywhere, unlike IRC, SILC, and AIM, which almost everyone filters. It is completely brilliant for conducting meetings. We're all smart people; could we have built a substitute? Sure, if we wanted to be in the chat business.
Presumably then in your universe, Microsoft's goal is not to squeeze as much value out of their software as possible. Also, apparently, the business of converting lines of code to money is not the business of writing software.
Government rationing. Difference in population. Differnce in perfornamce: If you want a hip-replacement, in the US, you can scheule the surgery on the same day, in the UK, you need to wait at least a week. The Chances of surviving cancer in the US are drastically higher than in the US. Most drug research is carried out here in the US. Our medical system may be expensive but by some counts, its worth it.
there's contaigo in oil futures

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contango
Sorry for asking such a newbie question, but for my education I'd like to know: why was my comment downmodded? Is it considered off-topic?
For those who don't know what this Campfire-coup-Google talk is about, here's an explanation: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_takes_down_huddl...
Ancient Persians 'gassed Romans'
Snow Leopard to Feature Four Finger Gestures for Old MacBooks
If your contacts own the budget and purchasing, maybe. Otherwise, you're probably deluding yourself to think that personal relationships are going to cut the sales cycle on an enterprise product. The sales cycle on a securty product at a BigCo includes:

* Weeks of presentations and demos (this part you can cut with relationships)

* Weeks of pilot deployment, which in this guy's case will involve coordination between security, architecture, and server IT.

* Weeks of user education and training (something everybody forgets about).

* Weeks of back-and-forth about missing features and requirements.

* Weeks of negotiation for first PO, assuming all the previous stages went well.

* 3-5 months of delay waiting for receivables.

What friendships will do for you in this process is eliminate the hidden "in-between" steps where people get distracted by their real jobs for 1-3 weeks and don't return your phone calls. But most people don't have friends in BigCo's that can simply cut them checks.

Also, when you try to shop this to VC, most of them aren't going to be impressed by the demo and pilot deployments you've secured with your friends.
we measure the success of our startup by the amount of social and environmental good we are generating.

the time to pull the plug is a good question. we are nearing our second year, though only in the past 4 months have we both been working full time. as the product and community matures we will either transition from savings to sustainability, or else move to more sustainable work while still pushing the startup forward on the side (not so many new features, but often the social and entrepreneurial advances are more a matter of timing and connections. constant strategic effort, not full time effort). we'll see though.
I think it'd be really neat to have on that disclaimer page:

"We acknowledge a large part of our own success is due to our popular blog. Unless you have a popular blog, some of the advice may not work for you"

From "Founders at work", Joel Spolsky when asked for advice for startups:

"I would recommend that you create a weblog and have millions of readers every month from around the world that read it. That's not really necessarily followable."

I thought that was a pretty cool honest answer.
Getting listed in the Apple Webapp directory will help with SEO and while you're on page one.

Here's my webapp in the directory..
http://www.apple.com/webapps/sports/ridertech.html

After falling off page 1 in the directory, it'll provide very little traffic so you basically need to promote the iPhone-specific site via your other web/mobile/social apps.

If you have no existing user base or app traffic to draw from, you may want to build a simple mobile-xhtml site first because there are a lot more non-iPhone users. It also helps remove some of the design challenges and focuses your efforts on the core content paths.

Feel free to contact me directly if you want more help - geohelper [at] gmail [dot] com
Steve Jobs Considering Liver Transplant?
Google Sites - Free websites and wikis
Blackberry Storefront Accepting App Applications
one such process is asking the big Q:
If I was offered this company for free would I take it?
yes, that is definitely a downside when you don't or are unable to take advantage of the perks. That is where negotiating your salary comes into play though. If you know that you are not going to be staying for dinner then negotiate up for that extra $2000-3000 to get it back.

i feel the same way about taxes though. I pay them and half the things they go to I never use. I wish I could negotiate them with them government better :)
"an individual's DNA can be used to infer their geographic origin with surprising accuracy--often to within a few hundred kilometres."

impressive
Why Can't My Car Drive While I Take a Nap?
My take on why so many people think alike and any idea you have is usually thought up already; is that people get the same inputs.

We all read practically the same news, read the same top ten books, watch the same Tv. talk about the same subjects. Sure we all have different areas(Software Entrepenuers -> HN) but in reality we all have the same inputs and outputs no matter how special we feel.
I wouldn't say it's all crap I really didn't think he was pushing his clinics too much in his book. And I did get some decent advice about dealing with email overload.
Sex helps in reshuffling the genes so that you can compete against parasites with a much shorter generation cycle.

Still asexual reproduction introduces at least a few mutations sometimes. Even if 95% of all bananas die, there will be some bananas left immune to the disease.
Is this really that innovative? for $299, I can get a Dell mini 9 or countless other netbooks (some of which can be hacked to run OSX). In terms of providing value, give me a web 2.0 tool that helps my business or helps me lose weight or whatever... over this thing.
This is kinda typical of the whole "be successful like I was by doing exactly what I did!" genre of books, etc. Of course, we don't usually hear from the 99% of people who did the exact same thing but didn't succeed because of luck or whatever. I try to take such advice with a huge grain of salt - 37signals's philosophy is certainly interesting but it's certainly no panacea.
It would be "gorgeous" if it was animated, but as it is it's kind of kitschy. Doubt I'll be using this in any of my projects.
You didn't RTFA, did you?
The problem with LinkedIn
Thank you very much, this is all I was looking for. Much appreciated!
It's not that they aren't ready for prime-time necessarily. Technologies like memcached are great compliments to any RDBMS-backed website. For a little theory: an RDBMS will store data and allow you to query it. So, when you say, get me article #15, it scans through its index in approx. log(n) time and finds the row you're looking for, fetches the row and gives it back to you. Memcached, on the other hand, will do hash(#15), grab that row. That's all done in O(1) time and so it's a lot more scalable. However, with an RDBMS you can say something like, "get me the articles written in the past month" and you can't do that with memcached. Memcached allows key lookups only.

A lot of it is a tradeoff between scalability and convenience and using the right tool for the job.
no idea. I only take paypal, 'cause I don't want to take the time to harden my billing system to the point where I'd trust it with other people's credit cards.

Some people complain about high fees and chargebacks, but I've had a merchant account before, and they have the same problems.
This is a good point I think many people are overlooking. (Full disclosure - I work at Google now.) Your project matters too. People working for great managers on things like search algorithms, Android or open source initiatives are much more likely to love their job. People working for managers they hate on things like Orkut, ATS, or cross-browser compatibility testing are much more likely to leave.

In a company as big as Google, different employees can have very different experiences. When you read this group set up for employees who quit, you're seeing the least happy segment of the employee population. I know it doesn't work out for everyone, but I think the average Google employee really likes their job, and I would recommend working there to any programmer who was thinking about it.

Just my 2 cents.
WordPress TV: How-To Videos For WP Bloggers, WordCamp Followers
Ask HN: list of domains for university emails
i'm trying to implement a way to restrict registration based on having a .edu account for specific schools, anyone know of a comprehensive list somewhere? i'm having no luck with my search
Or we should at least separate goals from implementation. I.e. use democratic processes to agree on specific goals and how much resources to devote to these goals. Like 'Reduce unemployment to at most 5%' using no more than 10^10 $. Or 'Raise the literacy rate of people over 10 years to at least 99% in our nation.' for at most 5*10^9 $.

Then the government puts the allocated funds into escrow and auctions off zero-coupon bonds that pay off when the goal has been reached. Of course the bond holders will do what they can to achieve the goal. Or do something that makes the goal easier to reach, thus the price of the bonds rises and the original holder can sell them at a profit.

(The above is a description of Social Policy Bonds.)
6.184 - Zombies drink caffeinated 6.001
Also, it's important to remember that tests are code too. A test needs to stand the test of time just as code does--if the tests are too brittle then you're just creating busy work.

However people who haven't tried methodologies like TDD or BDD shouldn't parrot this as justification for not writing tests. First you need to learn how to write tests, and how to write more testable code. Test-first is invaluable training for developing these skills.

Once you have that experience you are better qualified to decide what constitutes useful testing. Frankly, I find the most value comes from basic sanity tests. Testing obscure edge cases of algorithms is often times not worth it because the mistake is made once and corrected. Having the test case is good (especially if written up front as an excercise in specification), but in many cases the chance that these things will break once fixed approaches 0.
This article is the epitome of technology blogging today: a poorly crafted opinion about a completely non-issue.

How much research went into this beyond simple opinion? I've found the LinkedIn "People You May Know" module to be fairly decent at finding people I actually know (but had not connected with), or people that I might have a likely connection to.

I'm not whiling away my day pouring over LinkedIn, either. I check every few days for new updates/info, and could care less about the fact that this module is where it is, etc.

The "People You May Know" module is hardly "the problem" with LinkedIn. It's an experiment that works better for some people than for others, based solely on the 2 data point study here (I like it, you don't).

One of the things I like about LinkedIn is that they have done a good job keeping it more "business" than "social" oriented. The last thing I want is for LI to become an attention-whoring "modulized" website like so many other "social" sites.
That's EXACTLY who and where they are targeting their apps to. We are the 'geeks' of the business world who reccomend to 'real' business what they should be using online. We're the gateway from 37 Signals' world to the traditional biz world.
Did the gorilla gain 100 pounds? Perhaps I missed something…
Paypal is more demanding than most payment options about the prominence of their brand. They require, among other things, that you use their BIG, BRIGHT ORANGE Paypal button and that if you offer other payment options, the grouping needs to be "Paypal -or - The Rest," and not an arrangement where they're suggested as inferior (or even equal). They also pretty much require that part of the payments process happen on their own site.

All of that put together means that people serious about handling payments and maintaining their own experience for that process may opt not to go the Paypal route at all.
Yeah, I think this is exactly not what they're doing; their feature sets are almost geek-hostile, as is their non-blog PR.
An interesting Twitter application. BubbleTweet.
Implementing jQuery into WordPress plugins
Yes you do. When you are making a prototype errors aren't expensive.

When you are modifying code that customers are already paying you lots of money for errors are expensive.
Do I smell chauvinism?
This down-voting is getting absurd. I understand getting a few for this comment, but -11 is frankly uncalled for. PG even asked people to refrain from doing this many down votes in a recent post. I am learning from my mistake of posting this, but I am relatively new to the forums. At the least I should be given some time to understand the requirements for posting (on this topic, I did find a forum rules page, but I had to Google it to find it, there were not obvious links from the forum afaik.) All I'm asking is that new forum members get a friendly pointer on posting guidelines, rather than being slapped down by large numbers of downvotes. Thank you.
"It's going to be fascinating to watch" is getting to be quite the tired conclusion in blog posts, if it isn't already. What I do find interesting is that this blog post asserts that we've witnessed this kind of competition happening twice before and yet this time it will be fascinating.
I am not sure I buy the "simplicity uber alles" creed either. It may hold true for the UI features (i.e. Google vs. Yahoo) but in general -- if you're solving easy problems, you're readily replaceable by somebody who can solve them either faster or cheaper.
Sorry, just got out of my time machine.
When you type faster than you think or speak, problems like this tend to arise.
The Semantic Web in Action
Incidentially basic income guarantee has some libertarian arguments on its side.
Why is the site down?
Any ideas on this?
I am a web developer who will be in west africa for the next 6 months, and i have an idea for a web/mobile application that allows urgent news and information to be pushed to the web and down to subscribers mobile phones via text messages. The problem i have now is getting a way of sending text messages free to subscribers, since i want to service free of charge (for obvious reasons) and i also want the service to be self sustaining without burning a hole in my pocket.
Thanks guys for your ideas on this.
Isn't competition good? Isn't that what makes products better?
The author praises Scalaris - it promises a lot of things, unfortunately its performance sucks based on my own benchmarks (that isn't published anywhere, but you could try to do 100.000 sets and compare it vs. CouchDB or that like).

One of the most impressive k-v databases I have read about and used is Tokyo Tyrant ( http://tokyocabinet.sourceforge.net/tyrantdoc/ ). It's coded in C, has been in development for about 2 years and is used in production on Plurk.com and mixi.jp. It also offers master-master replication.
Venture fundraising: Going, going, gone?
> I always check to make sure a method roughly works, before moving on to the next one. Most of the time, this means either writing a unit test, or firing up the code and all of its dependencies, and clicking through it looking for bugs.

In my experience, well factored methods are correct 95% of the time. When there is a bug you notice when you test things that exercise an entire host of methods at once.

> Also, and YMMV, I find writing code in a tests-first manner cuts my stress/frustration of coding by an order of magnitude. It greatly reduces the amount of context I have to keep in my head, so I'm not in the state where I can remember 90% of the information I need to effectively write this class.

Testing is not a good way to help with context. A good debugger and well written code is.
You should go back to that article and make a note of every site that is mentioned by name in the article and the comments. You will find a certain correlation between the size of a datastore and their interest in pursuing something other than an RDBMS.

This is not a coincidence. Nor are these people who just don't know about the holy doctrines of RDBMS and blunder on in ignorance, either. These are people who have had to scale above RDBMS.

They know what they are doing, and why they are doing it.
I think I just broke my radio.
DIY radio station, car radio hacking, using a common mobile device
This seems to explain why many brilliant people also have such unusual quirks. They do not gravitate towards this "average" mentality (at least in some fields), and this allows them to develop greater than average ideas in other fields. Of course, none of them can truly be said to be "perfect" in their resistance to to the norm, but there seems to be a correlation. Just my $.02
I would imagine orkut dev is being done by Google India, otherwise it is gonna be frustrating, just like you can't make a shop in India work on Facebook: because none of your friends are using it!
Monads don't need to be methods. In fact every Haskell monad is not a "decorator with method chaining" because there are no methods in Haskell in the traditional sense, and even if you count classes, there's no constraint that a monadic value has to be involved with a class.

If you squint at Haskell to the point that you start seeing methods in all monad uses, you're squinting so hard that the word "method" has lost all meaning and become a synonym for "function". That is to say, I can see how that argument goes, but it comes at the cost of totally devaluing the distinction between "method" and "function", something I'm not willing to do.
May I ask that if you downvote this you explain the reasoning behind your downvote? I don't see any real reason to downvote this comment, but I would like to hear your opinions on the matter.
I'm tired of hearing about doom and gloom, just like the author says... what the author doesn't do though, is look for signs of when the recession will end.

Because you just know what will happen: the media will keep being negative 6 months after the recovery is in place. And only then will they start finding the numbers that explain that "yes, 6 months ago the economy turned around".

Instead of being backward looking, what about you look for the signs now. How would you tell that we have reached bottom?

I'll share my feelings: it's not so bad in mid-January. It felt worse a month ago. Maybe it's just me. But if enough people have the same feeling, we're on to something.

http://fairsoftware.net - where geeks start side-businesses
This mirrors a growing trend in social networks: they have become methods of publicity and popularity rather than places to just talk with friends.
We use TC for our site. The C server is a thin wrapper over it and does 8000 write requests per second on my 1st generation MacBook with the benchmarker running on it as well.

The client is written entirely in javascript and does the expensive operations like joins.

Were hoping we will be able to run the site off of one server forever. People complain that "developer cycles are expensive" but so is purchasing and managing a bunch of servers.
The entire article reads more like a shill for the featured "ambitious proprietary magazine". 2 of the 8 paragraphs are loosely concerned with "Why Can't My Car Drive While I Take a Nap?", while the other 6 are largely dedicated to what reads like a press release for some new magazine.
It is common to have Apache as your static web server to serve images/css/js files and use modules such as mod_rewrite or mod_jk to route to your dynamic context. It seems like his dynamic content server is down (could be the jetty server he was referring to), hence the 503 error code.
From the US point of view, if you can't even get a Mastercard or Visa, you're not trustworthy.

Here (US), my 2-year old daugther receives credit card offers in the mail. Imagine that.

http://FairSoftware.net: businesses for geeks
Paid Twitter UX a mismatch with follower’s expectations
would be interesting to see what kind of fine it'll end up with. $.99 per file or something like that?
Do they have internet access?
No, Flash on a MacBook Air can't play HD without stuttering. Flash imposes an enormous processing overhead. The GPU doesn't even enter into it because Flash 9 does not have GPU-accelerated video decoding. The same h.264 stream plays fine in native players on systems half as powerful.
... because it is so much fun developing for IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Lynx, et al.
Why don't you just check if the email ends with .edu? Edu domain names are restricted to accredited post-secondary institution, handled by educase. http://net.educause.edu/edudomain/
They have posted this twice on GAF and on both occassions have cancelled the ad after a few days. This ad was cancelled on the 18th.

This must be the work of one of those bipolar lisp coders uhhhm sorry programmers(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78739).
It's time to pray for global warming
Fortunately for me there will be no children involved to cause this sort of problem.
Would be curious to see a geographic map of the US with the genetic country of origin of the population on top of it.
It's always good to earn some extra bucks Isn't it?
Is G1 really that cheap?
Because it's fun watching you go bananas in the banana thread.
You're wrong. You've noticed the omission of weasel words, and misinterpreted that as a disagreeable attitude. That is generally the drawback of writing with conviction, but ultimately the benefits to both the writer and the reader make it worthwhile. The alternative is to use smileys. :-(

e.g. saying "My problem with 37signals is..." instead of "I think many people's problem with 37signals is..."

The former gives you possession over your subject, the latter is both redundant in saying "I think" (you wrote it, of course it's what you think!) and uses "many people" as a crutch that requires the ability to read minds to verify. It isn't that it's an false thing to say, it's just empty of meaning, and should be omitted.
But if you're not in the US it's not straighforward to get a US card, which can be limiting, e.g. you can't use Mechanical Turk without a US card and address.
Listen man, I feel your pain, as I also didn't think your "epic" is worthy of -12 score. What you shouldn't do though, is create your own thread bitching about it, because that is worthy of more down-modding.

Just delete your comment to stem the bleeding and move on. Don't worry, if you have a lot of worthy things to say, -11 will be easy to make up.
We need to talk about Tabula Rasa; when will we talk about Tabula Rasa?
Pygame/pywebsite -- a web framework with joystick controls??
I was hoping the included spreadsheet model would be enough to secure funding.
Is that a Zenview monitor? They have an 8 monitor version.

http://www.digitaltigers.com/zenview.asp