skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Still, the website being off-and-on down on launch day is pretty facepalm.

It might actually be a hidden benefit. When I saw the error messages I thought to myself "wow, there is a lot of demand for more news of this..." Therefore, I must know more! (refresh, refresh, refresh... ahh... interesting.)

For all intents and purposes this should never happen on launch day for a groundbreaking product, BUT, in this case the marketing folks at Microsoft should chalk this one up as a success. In a big company like Microsoft, a marketing effort that causes an infrastructure problem is a big win for the marketing guys.

Now, Microsoft has to deliver the product. And the infrastructure guys have to deal with the traffic while the marketing folks are toasting each other with champaign. There aren't any OEM partners at that party though...
SoundCloud: On Startup Culture, Entrepreneurial Employees & Hackdays
Someone on Twitter once described DragonDrop as a "wormhole", which I found pretty delightful. :)
I had a similar idea that used browser extensions to create wish lists across multiple shopping websites. Never got much past the prototype though: http://wantlistapp.com/
Your assumption is that people buy based on price only. Far from it - they still have to physically go to the store to buy it and so many other factors then come into play. Are they familiar with the store? Does it have free parking? Is the service good? What is their return policy?

I agree with your main point that small stores might not like such a system but then to assume that all buyers will make a decision based solely on price is flawed.
Better not to advertise based on age, race, religion, gender etc etc.
Interesting. I didn't realize they were based out of Tel Aviv.
I did something similar with ShoveBox in a MacHeist bundle a couple years ago. See post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=932338

Definitely take advantage of the mailing list if they give you access.

Copy looks great, and so does your app!
This: http://withdjango.com/readers/source/

from this: http://withdjango.com/

Their specific purpose is "to learn from."
> 1. There are always 24 hours in a day.

Can someone explain when this isn't true? Is he referring to leap seconds, or local timezone DST changes? Or something more interesting I'm failing to think of?
Read the post, came back to look at hacker news comments knowing the most popular one would say "This idea sucks", was not disappointed. First sentence, boom.

But hey you know you'll always get some constructive criticism no matter the idea, and that's definitely worth something.
Quill does not hold that you cannot tax items sold from other states and brought into the taxing state. It merely hold that the selling entity must have sufficient nexus to X state to justify the imposition of a sales tax.

However, fundamental to Quill was the burden that calculating a sales tax would impose on the retailer. In the times of Quill, incidental sales (in the case, less than a dozen over several years) to customers in North Dakota were not enough to justify the burden of imposing a sales tax; it would have cost Quill more to figure out the sales tax owed than Quill would make from the sale.

But technology has changed. The concerns raised in Quill are non-existent today; it is trivial and dirt cheap to calculate and collect a sales tax for all taxing jurisdictions in the U.S.

Amazon knows this; that is why it has always backed down when states threaten to pursue this issue in court (i.e., NY, Cali, and Texas). Indeed, Amazon now offers a sales tax calculation service to smaller etailers.

Note that most legal commentators agree that Quill could easily (and probably would) have gone the other way if the catalog company in the case had sold to more than a handful of customers in North Dakota.
It's deployed now. I didn't want to deploy the fix until I got home where I have reliable internets. :)
Discovery is the problem in games
QA: contact a few local contractor agencies. Some specialize in QA. Or contact a few companies directly and say "I wanna do X." You may have to look longer than you're used to if you want a QA position that pays what you're used to.

How to be a consultant or freelancer: dunno. Just some roles that I know some people do, and some of those do it well.
The Power of a Word
Which would have its own environmental impact and monetary cost. I'm guessing this hypothetical water is coming from somewhere outside of the areas affected by the drought? So, somewhere north of Dallas, I guess, or east of Houston. 200 miles, at least, in either direction, at 10 MPG, is about $150 worth of gas ($75x2, since presumably the truck has to go both ways).

I doubt that's what happened, but maybe they made an effort to be sustainable and used grey water. Since Austin won't let you use grey water for gardening (which is a shame), it might also be illegal for washing, but it would be the more sustainable option, if the grey water comes from a source that is known to be safe and contains no chemicals that would effect the river or ground water.
Cool, reading now! MacHeist is the only other bundle I've really had much interest in so far. I love the goofy narrative.
Oh lordy...so this is B2B EDI reincarnated as B2C EDI?

Now we just need a smartphone-based AS/400 and we're back in the 90's again.
The fact that the cover has an accelerometer shouldn't be interpreted to assume that the tablet doesn't.
This idea is exactly Ebay Stores with a B&M component and some easy location filtering. Think about it, if you don't have a store anywhere but on the internet, the admin interface is your inventory app.
It should also tell you that the idea is not a $1Billion one.
guys checkout how much microsoft pays to its employees http://www.visasquare.com/visa-greencard/salary/microsoft-co...
IMHO a default month of January makes rather little sense, and would tend to facilitate subtle bugs... it seems you'd want the user to specify a month always, or maybe have a default of "indeterminate" or "Nevember"; the first position of an enum is very often the "nothing" case.
No Naked Emperors: Have the Hard Conversations
If you're buying a $100 item (let's say a DVD player that a friend recommended) and you've always bought that item from a store previously because back when you first bought a DVD player you shopped around and found this shop had the best service and prices, it's not worth shopping around again because you're probably only going to save $5 or $10 and going to another 5 stores (which will take an hour because they're all over the town). You go to your favourite store because past experience dictates it's probably the best place.

What if you're standing outside the store and decide to check out a service that will price check for you across EVERY store; you type in the item and it says "this item is $90 at store y" and you notice store y is just 2 doors away. What do you do, do you shop at your regular store or do you shop at the new one? The majority of people will go with the new one, it's stupid not to walk an extra 10 feet to save $10, the new store might even be better!
You've just invented the market research industry. Look up Catalina, who has been in this business for ages (as has Nielsen), and is the backend for at least some of the rewards cards in your wallet.
It seems quite clear to me that we are in dire need of a redefinition of 'my data' and who owns it. IMO, if my brain thought it up and you aren't paying me -- it's mine.
Aren't clouds distributed?
guys checkout how much facebook pays to its employees http://www.visasquare.com/visa-greencard/salary/facebook-inc...
I think the concept is inevitable, the problem is how do you get there? To some degree, Groupon's mobile app was supposed to do something similar, but on a more generalized basis.

Here is what I would do (and yeah I've run my own business for many years, always easier said than done.)

#1 Build this produce but make it specific to a specific retailer or chain.

#2 For #1 to happen, the system needs to be pretty much "free to try" and seamless for the retailer. Think about that one real hard.

#3 Build a checkout system where customers walk in to the store and walk out with the product. All sales happen electronically, payments through the application.

#4 Now instead of "Walgreens App", "CVS App", etc, you consolidate the data in to one system. This sounds far fetched, but is very much the business model Google has employed. Tens of billions of dollars of customers flow through Google's platform. Google's method of consolidation include search algorithm "updates", opaque Adwords "quality score", moving Google Shopping from free to paid, and so on.

If no one manages to accomplish #4, retailers will start doing it internally. To some limited degree, it is already being done.

Accomplishing all of this could take a while. Whats certain is the US has a vast overcapacity in retail, and people waste too much time wandering through stores trying to find crap (and then there is the whole driving to stores thing for the rest of the non-urban areas.)
Best laptops and notebook comparison guide
I'll see if I can distill what I've learned so far. It'd be a pretty boring/long post though.
If everyone is dismissing it that's because it's hard and should be done..
The Firefox extension system is extremely powerful, i.e. extensions operate at the essentially the same level as the original browser code, which allows for really useful extensions which can only work effectively at that level. Obviously this means that code in extensions can "break" Firefox just as much as code in the browser proper.

Configurability like this is always a trade-off between power/efficiency and safety/reliability: if you want to allow others to fundamentally extend your product so that the extension is efficient/fast, you're going to need to give them deep access. Firefox has chosen to be more to this side of the spectrum, Chrome/Opera/IE have chosen to be more towards the other.

So the extension "buck-passing" is valid: you should be complaining to the extension author who has a memory leak, or who is running an infinite loop (or whatever). After all, you didn't have to install it.

(That said, Mozilla has recently been putting significant amounts of effort into making it harder for extensions to be "bad".)
You have a tremendous blind-spot in your value proposition, where "free for free" not only doesn't make anybody money, but it's actually a loser on the store side, since by being everything but their POS system you are basically getting their sales data (at least in the form of some aggregated terms) on top of everything else. This is competitive information that is highly guarded in most cases, and not necessarily cheap besides.

Frankly, taking inventory is the easiest part of this. Many places are fine to do it with just pad and paper.
See: http://milo.com. Sold to eBay a few years ago for around $80 million.
Transit directions are rarely available outside the USA anyhow.
\\\\

Edit: failure. That's two stymied people :(
NTS Test forms downloads and registration
The saying is "A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client".
Parsing huge XML files with Go
Fyi, your observation, while perhaps accurate, doesn't add much to the discussion without actually saying why you think the top post is right or wrong.

That's actually a pretty good discussion when we just stop being meta and debate it.
Well, just a few days ago I was trying the new system in our apartment complex where we can use a credit card to add value to the smart card that is used in the local washer and drier systems. I had to type in the url to get it going. Well, I used the smartphone keyboard and got it in with a minimal number of typos which I quickly corrected, but you know what? If they had a QR code that I could scan, it would be just a couple of taps and a couple of seconds and much, much more convenient.
Hairdressing certificate
Many people dream of becoming a hairdresser but not all of them actually stop to think of what they need to become one. Lucky for you, you do not have to search far and wide to receive proper training and at the same time determine if this is a career you truly want for yourself.
Theoretically it would be possible develop your app in Xcode and only ever compile it for ARM and test on the actual device.

But if you use the iOS simulator to develop/test your app (which I imagine every developer does), then you're running your iOS app natively on OS X, linked against a version of all the iOS libraries compiled for x86.
> N+?? The time library in your programming language is correct.

That is almost always a better assumption than “I can write a better one”.
On the frontpage, under the "Real world flexibility" header, the tab reads "Swap any meal you don't like with a nutritionally"

I think it got cut off when rendering to an image.
You boss has no clue what you do all day - here's why....
Speaking as a consumer, I wouldn't expect to use this to find out which store is a penny cheaper. If I'm going for just one item, convenience of location trumps a penny; you gotta have a substantially better price to get me to go out of my way. If I'm going for a bunch of stuff, maybe this replaces grocery ads for letting me find the best prices overall or for finding specials, but next time I'm probably shopping wherever I got the best overall prices last time. At worst, on this front this app is equivalent to grocery ads from the store's perspective.

Where it shines would be for something semi-obscure: "I need a plumbing snake" or "I need some fabric glue". Do they carry that at my grocery store? What about Wal-Mart? Where's the nearest specialty store that might have it? If I can just type the product in and know which stores have it, that saves me a ton of aggravation -- and might, as a byproduct, mean I do some other shopping at that store instead of my normal place.
The OS is fine, except for the lack of a user-visible filesystem. It's the apps that are often limited, compared to their desktop counterparts.
The keyboard is useless without a kickstand.
I would hope that I explained my own opposition to the idea enough that saying it sucked was okay. I understand that negativity isn't great but when it is backed with reasoning then it should be acceptable. Would it be preferred if nobody pointed out problems or is the problem my approach at explaining why I think the idea is bad?
It's a recurring problem, too. These examples are twenty-two years apart.

"Aircraft software can be serious business" http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-down-b...

"The [F22 Raptor IDL] post-incident report" http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=224098&cid=181501...

"[undetected software bug in the] Northrop F-20 Tigershark laser inertial navigation system" http://www.f20a.com/f20ins.htm
Yeaaahhhh...it has nothing to do with gender in this case. Anybody who has experienced the agony of pair programming knows what this feels like.
If you are giving them the inventory management software for free, that is a huge hook for cash strapped small businesses. And once your 'trojan horse' is installed, it's a lot easier to convince a small business owner to 'activate' the product sharing feature to gain an edge over other nearby businesses.

And then as you said, once one business does it, the others follow so that they don't become disadvantaged.

It would seem to me that the key to success is ensuring that your inventory management software is highly intuitive and easy to use for the time-poor business owners.
Idempotence, edge-cases, compliance ensurance.

What if you want to redeploy a configuration change to your web servers? What if you want to ensure such changes get re-deployed everytime a change is made to a config file?
is it now "cool" to evade your taxes?
Quiz: Beauty Potion - Free Online Games
JSONP vs. JSON Benchmark
Not quite:
"On strings, numbers and collection classes, hashCode() always returns a consistent value, apparently even across different JVM vendors. It’s like that despite the documentation for hashCode() explicitly not guaranteeing consistency across different processes"

String.hashCode explicitly guarantees consistency across processes by specifying how the hash code is computed, this is something that can be safely relied upon. (Same for Integer, Long, Float and Double)
Horrible. No code completion. No separation of css and js. I pretended I don't know anything and got to the point where I had no idea what to do next pretty quick and zoned out.
> Ok, your argument is that this stuff works for the other 95% but it won’t appeal to us hackers. My question to you is, how does Apple make ads that appeal to the rest of the world and something like 75% of the hackers?

Asking that question is like asking an Olympic sprinter why he can't be as fast as Usain Bolt, or scolding a successful musician for not selling as many records as Lady Gaga.

Compared to Apple, pretty much every company sucks at marketing. So what? Apple is an extreme outlier in its PR success, owing to a number of unique factors other companies cannot realistically replicate.

How would you answer your own question? Do you think there's a simple solution Microsoft hasn't figured out?
A friend of mine actually had this idea a few months ago and plans to launch it in NYC in the next few months.
I think you're missing a key distinction here:

- there are many items people buy on price and are willing to order online. Such items will gradually become unavailable in stores whether or not this idea is ever implemented.

- there are also many items that people want immediately, and are not well suited for online ordering. This convenience makes them well suited to these local search capabilities, and this characteristic may overcome a good part of the resistance to share data.

This distinction is crucial. It may not overcome the psychological resistance you mention, but it isn't obvious how serious that is or whether it can be overcome by system design. For example, you point out a key feature of this system which is the need for limited query capabilities and no downloading (cue debate on how possible that is).

But you miss the real problem with the idea. System integration difficulties will prevent the system from achieving critical mass and broad coverage. It will be unreasonably painful for stores to join the system for extremely mundane reasons like file formats and the difficulty of mapping proprietary taxonomies. Offline retailers just won't have data as ready to integrate as online.

Not impossible, but the sort of unrecognized under appreciated real challenge of the system.
Microsoft Surface Tablet Might Not Kill iPad, But Will Revive Microsoft
Why we do Kangaroo Care?
Kangaroo care is a technique of newborn baby care in their neonatal term, wherein diapered infant is kept close in skin-to-skin contact with an adult.
Homes for sale portland oregon
You definitely don’t want to do major changes in your house just for the purpose of selling it. Smart Real Estate helps you in solving this issue and for those who are interested in Homes for sale Portland Oregon. So they just try to make your house more presentable, so that buyer may like our Homes for sale Portland Oregon.
Probably not too badly, considering this tablet will likely be inescapably bundled with Office, if it isn't a core part of the system by now.
I talked about something like this years ago to my sister, who actually owns a retail store. As most people indicated, stores do not want to let anyone else know what their inventories are, especially customers.

But also, depending on the type of store you are, inventories are not as tight as you would think. Stores have a general idea of how much inventory they have on hand, but they never have an exact amount. And the thing is, most don't care. That was the part that surprised me the most. They expect a certain amount of theft, misplaced inventory, wrong inventory counts sent from their suppliers, etc, so they don't waste a lot of time making sure their inventory is extremely accurate.
Color Psychology — Infoplease.com
Mark Cuban on His Facebook Shares: ‘I Took a Beating’
Here is a pretty good outline on jQuery from Marakana.com
http://marakana.com/bookshelf/jquery_tutorial/index.html
Given Android's rampant popularity, you would have to come up with a source for that claim.

I know here on HN the mantra is that people buy Android because it is cheaper/"they cannot afford iPhones", but in the real world people deliberately choose things not made by Apple.

Despite the Apple fandom on this website, there is no universal truth in Apple being a superior platform.

In fact, I say the lack of customizability speaks of it being poorly engineered.
I love Launchbar. Still need to try Alfred out.
Everybody in this business thinks of doing it, you definitely not the first one. (edit: everybody == strategists)

1) If you can make a really good software in this space, you can make millions just selling it.

2) If you really want to try this, you should get a deep pocketed friend who will buy a company which already has the software, so you can focus on getting the service running asap, not after 5 years.

3) Retailers are not naive about their data and store experience. And there are countless variables that you will need to accommodate. Even if you have a service in place, it may never fly in the volume that you are hoping for.

4) If it doesn't reach the volume you are hoping for, you will not make more money than you would have made by selling them the software. Perhaps you should have tried another strategy, that is more directly related to the data you were hoping to get your hands on.
25 Napping Facts Everyone Should Know
Guys, it needs a lot of work to compile, but I ported X as an android app a couple of years back intended for this use case: github.com/tmzt/androix
Loved this - the 'NASA Nap': A little group called NASA discovered that just a 26-minute nap increases performance by 34% and alertness by 54%. Pilots take advantage of NASA naps while planes are on autopilot.
Ask HN: what are the launch pads for new websites?
Many new websites gets announced on HN under the Title "Show HN". Are there any other launch pads like HN? If so, what are they?
The way I heard it, Costco basically breaks even on the merchandise, and it's the annual membership fee that keeps the lights on. So they're well-situated to be a subscription showroom service for their members, with or without fulfilling many orders on the spot. It probably helps that their staff are treated pretty decently by retailer standards.
RC helicopter Recommend:Best Mini Helicopters for lovers.
This was kind of what Google Base (Now called Google Merchant Center) was meant to be. It was launched by Google in 2005.

http://googlebase.blogspot.ca/2005/11/getting-off-first-base...

I haven't played with Merchant Center, but Google Base was never good enough that merchants would adopt it in numbers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Base
If you think a little, this is "OpenTable for shopping."

Apparently, all the restaurants hate opentable, but they feel compelled to use it, because their competitors do.
But how much did those adds sell android versus somebody walking into the Verizon store lookinga for a better phone. Can we separate the two as the occured nearly simultaneously?
Does it do landscape only? I can't find an image displaying the device in portrait.