skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stars vs. Constellations – 3 Steps to Building Solid High-performing Teams
Commerce Sciences Nabs $1.8M, To Make Online Shopping More Personal
Exceptions can be modeled by a type like "Maybe" that simply also has the error information in it. So instead of a "Nothing", you have "Left err" with the "err" information in it.

The nice thing is that the same example using >>= above would work with Either's too, because it will just use the monad instance of Eithers, and you will get all the error information that way.

Exceptions, when represented this way, become a way that the error is handled by the caller rather than a different way to return. That way, the result of the function is well-described by its type.
Mitt Romney's website email sign up is down
"Draw Something" is the #55 paid app on the app store STILL. So clearly it's bringing in and has brought in a ton of revenue since the ac (acquisition was in March). Sure not $180MM but it was also an acqui-hire. I think this could have ended up being a great deal for them, despite the negativity. It's not all about one game.
Good, especially considering the trend in notebooks to not even ship with DVD drives anymore..
"All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again."
"C and Perl and Python and PHP and Java and Javascript and so on, ... It feels like a categorically different problem to try to transition a team from one of those to a functional language."

I just have to throw a flag here and point out that Javascript is also a functional language. With Javascript you can declare functions as variables, pass functions as arguments to other functions, return functions as the result of other functions, and use them as part of a data structure. Javascript is much closer to Scheme than it is to a C paradigm.
That's a lot go charge for crippling my desktop UI by trying to turn it into a mobile UI.
[foo, bar, baz, quux] might be problematic if the types of these functions are not homogenous.

foo >=> bar >=> baz >=> quux

is ok and >=> is not a much-worse separator than , here...
Ehhh, that's what I said? In the article he takes about reinvoking make using $(MAKE), having mentioned changing to a subdirectory in the previous paragraph.
I don't think RMAH is so important. Asia has no RMAH at all and that doesn't discourage the sales. It's very very hard to make money from AH comparable to the cost of the game (60$) - a player will need to sell 400$ of goods to achieve that. Not realistic.

You can still sell game (boxes) for cash, make quick cash and forget. That's why they include Russia, for example.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that making arabic translation is going to cost N times the regular translation due to to bidi issues and dialects.

Australia is told to be in US zone. I don't really get how they manage ping. So it isn't excluded.
Despite the heavy criticism on your comment, I actually agree. It's just another step closer to finally getting rid of all the garbage browser people still use on XP. Despite loving XP until Windows 7, when people get off of XP and onto something a lot easier to developer for (IE10).. I will be a lot happier.
Did you try control key instead of command?

Apologies for the apple key on the demo. We'll fix it soon. In non-mac environments, the control key is substituted for all key commands.
Microsoft takes $6.2 billion write-down over aQuantive
Ok I'll bite. Skype isn't and won't be a bad investment. It is installed on most peoples computing devices(computer,mobile,tablet), it really doesn't have any good competitors(maybe google voice), it's used heavily in business world for conferencing, virtual numbers and internal comms, it has a nice technology stack which a few companies were eyeing (fb,google).

Really it's amuch better investment then spending a billion on a revenue less image sharing site or a corporate social network provider.
Generalizing Monad in a language without return-type polymorphism is hard. How do you implement "return" (unit)?
this article is from 2010. have there been any new developments?
If You Can’t Fight City Hall, Code For It
It's sad to see how clueless people are about how companies are actually run.

Do you even know what a board of directors is and what it can do and does? Do you know much power over the company the chairman of the board has? Look at the profile of the chairman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorma_Ollila

Insinuating that Elop is taking a bribe to drive down Nokia is just conspiracy mongering with no basis in reality.
ISC Diary: a first-person sysadmin account of the June 29 storms
Univalent foundations of mathematics in Coq
Count me in on that theory (another member from the peanut gallery!).

The whole story just sounded so contrived from the start and didn't play out much better.

I mean, we know 37signals and reality are not best friends, but just throwing away 220k/yr in nearly passive income if it doesn't sell for the desired price, seemed a little far out there to begin with...

With that kind of money at stake I'd have expected at least a little more enthusiasm in the flippa-auction from their end. No least given how much DHH likes to bash the VC-gambling - how does that jive with playing russian roulette on a product raking in that kind of money, for no plausible reason?

My pet theory is similar to yours; I think they simply had a buyer from the start, and offered to throw in some "37signals original flavor media spin" as a bonus.

Whichever the truth is, it obviously worked out for them.
I am still trying to work out why something approximating (2) can't be done through a simple combination of:

- tried-and-tested public key cryptography techniques

- using e-mail as a buffered delivery mechanism (everyone has an e-mail account that can store plenty of messages until they're next on-line)

- borrowing the typical DVCS copy-the-whole-repo approach so you've got distributed back-ups

- writing a native client for whichever platforms you wanted to support.

If someone wants to make money off it, come up with a neat physical way to connect something personal but memorable to keys of sufficient complexity to encrypt everything robustly: mobile app, USB device, whatever.

The only obvious limitation is physical bandwidth and storage capacity, which would make copy-the-whole-repo unsustainable if people kept sharing lots of photos/multimedia content but their friends don't want to "download" all of it. How much this will matter as data storage and communication network capacity increases is anyone's guess.

In the meantime, if you were willing to accept a delay you could have a request/reply system to fetch larger items, or someone could charge a modest sum of real money to people who want to use an actual centralised escrow-like system that is always available to their friends even when they're not on-line. The system doesn't need to be able to see into any content, just to act as a more real-time substitute for the default buffered transmission via e-mail.
Ever Been Stuck in an “I’m Right; You’re Wrong” Conversation?
So, he doubled revenue over the last 10 years. They were already high to begin with, but lets see...

http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/revenues#series=type:compa...

Even more impressive:

http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/revenues#series=type:compa...

So, basically, Microsoft let its two main rivals close in at a tremendous pace. If I had Microsoft stock, I'd be rather disappointed.
And DHH is not exactly known for his tact.
I'm glad to hear about your attentive private responses.

HN has this culture of entrepreneurial voyeurism. When a unique scenario like Sortfolio gets posted, we like to watch how it unfolds and learn from the process. When dozens of interesting questions piled on without any response from you guys, I was disappointed.

Clearly you're well within your rights to do what you did, but I hope this sheds some light on some of the negativity and speculation. I am grateful for these last few updates you guys have given and I hope you'll consider writing a more detailed report once the dust settles.
Don't make me connect my facebook in order to play music. http://cl.ly/0N1t3A3d013I061v2829 Don't care that it's only 30 seconds away, I don't want to give you my data before hearing some music and deciding whether or not it's worth it.

Also, seeing "30 seconds" in this interrupting popup (even before reading it) makes me think that I'll only get 30 second previews of the music.

That's as far as I got, since I can't play any music.

The model is neat. http://www.ziibra.com/browse looks really cool.
I really like the execution of this. Similar to how join.me allows you to share your desktop session in a friction-less manner; this makes it easy to share multiuser game sessions.
Hey Ron, Congrats!

I have a site in this niche that offers encouraging tips to ios developers and entrepreneurs.

Would you be up for doing an interview? It'll be all text based.

Email me here: tapha[AT]taphamedia.com and we can get it going if you would like to do it!
Redux: Rules From a User to Software Developers
You miss the entire point about why the iPhone was revolutionary. Yes, there were other touchscreen devices (mostly capacitive and plastic). There were fundamental rethinking of the hardware internally which hadn't been done before. However, it was about the software. The software on the iPhone was leaps and bounds ahead of anything that existed. It made the experience fun, beautiful and intuitive which was not how smartphones were previously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Intrinsic_and_extrin...
Oh, I assure you, I know the importance of measurement. I'm an analyst for a large social game company :)

My point is, it doesn't help you to measure something that isn't actionable. And my list above was just the four that I can think of where gender, age, and location details actually helped across many of the applications I've studied.

I agree with you that the goal of analytics is the help improve your products, but its easy to be misled to the wrong conclusions. Sometimes, too much data may actually be harmful to your business.
"your Congressman 'lobbies' for interests within their core voting block. "

This is where I think current "politics" is lagging many decades behind modern society.

Politicians are fundamentally geographically defined. They get voted in (or out) by groups of people with no relationship with each other beyond happening to live nearby. That idea worked out fine when your village was your whole life, and it works OK for "big issues" that affect everyone (like taxation, education, military), but there are a lot of issues where there is more than enough public support to deserve representation but that support is not geographically localized enough for the current system to give the people concerned a voice.

So many of the things I end up shouting at the television or newspapers about are in this category.

What _I'd_ love to be able to vote for:

A Congressman for The Internet
A Congressman for Copyright and Patents
A Congressman for Motorcyclists
A Congressman for Citizens Rights WRT Government & Law Enforcement

I'd like the opportunity to choose to vote for someone aligned with issues that concern _me_ instead of being assumed to be a "constituent" of an aspirant politician just because of where they and I happen to choose to live.

Instead, the issues that concern _me_ are debated and voted on by people who don't give a damn because they know there's not enough geeks/musicians/inventors/entrepreneurs/motorcyclists/libertarians geographically clustered enough to make any difference at the polling booth, and so the only issues that ever get addressed are ones with a local enough aspect to risk having a likely effect on a city/state/federal elections outcome.

Society has spread beyond having my circle of friends and acquaintances being "other people in my village" - and in the last 20 years the internet has magnified that change enormously, political and legal structures haven't changed to reflect that. (and may never - my circle of friends crosses national boundaries in ways that probably make my desires of how I'm personally politically represented impossible)
Awesome tool. Kickstarter has proven that a crowd sourced model like this can work, and it's good that the model is being specialized into certain niches like this (see indiegogo). I'm sure that you will have success with it.

As for critique, I can't tell at all what the big colorful title says. It's cool that you are targeting two different audiences (bands and fans), but consolidate your two mission statements on the front page -- they seem a bit redundant (maybe make each shorter and more pointed?) I would also go into some more specifics on the "How it Works" page, for example by including some details from the video (if somebody does not want to watch).

Good luck!
I tried to make the argument that a cloud router (though not this one) could provide a useful service. I guess people don't agree, hence the downvotes.
I do the same thing on my Ubuntu PC at work. It does seem like we're in the age where launchers and menus are meaningless. At least Microsoft is doing something to keep icons relevant; live tiles are a godsend on my phone.

When I go from W7/W8 at home and Ubuntu on my PC at work to my XP work laptop, it's just an incredibly frustrating experience. I hear people say the only thing that's changed is the looks, but there are a lot of usability upgrades in the newer OSes.

In all the modern OSes I don't need to know what this app is named or what that setting is called. I can just start typing what I think it is and fuzzy matching figures out when I type "resolution", what I really want is what they call "display".
I really hope you're joking or trolling here, though I doubt it... Clearly this would be optional, I don't think it's a valid comparison in the least.
We got more downloads than Facebook or Google on Nokia, what to do?
Hello fellow HNrs, we got tons of downloads and are looking to monetize on them, can you share any ideas?

Thanks a lot

We really really appreciate any ideas!

Jaime E
CPU's are complex and far from perfect, often shipping with hundreds of 'errata' at the design level plus a wide assortment of random manufacturing errors in each chip. So, there is software that has fewer bugs and better coverage than a modern CPU. ex: Grep

EX: Pages 19-73 with 2 to 4 errata per page for a single popular CPU design: http://download.intel.com/design/processor/specupdt/320836.p... And that's just limited to stuff Intel knows about.
Since you're familiar with arrowlets, would you mind having a look at samsara?

[samsara]: http://lcfrs.org/samsara/docs/dragndrop.html
"Anyone who was a qualified buyer"

What criteria did you use to determine a "qualified" buyer?

As someone who frequently deals in transactions over the web for large dollar amounts it is not always clear who is qualified and who isn't. Especially if you aren't doing a high volume of transactions so you don't have a pattern established. One recent transaction we handled for someone started off with an insulting offer of $1000 (from a gmail type account in China (qq.com) and ended up at $38,000 USD)
... it was a roundabout way of explaining how right you were, or at least in my initial reading of it.

I see thing which is called a Car, an instance of which is stored in the Model, which may contain other things, including other types of Transports. The user interacts with the View, instructing a left turn - the controller grabs the Car (why it grabs the Car, and not the Bike is undefined =), and tells it to turn left. None of the M, V, or C understand what a left turn is - but the controller knows that the Car can perform such a thing if instructed. The Controller knows it can tell the Car to turn, because the Car is descended from a Transport, and all Transports have a virtual method for turning.

That last sentence was in my head and unfortunately took over my comment.
Twitter account retweets users who tweet pictures of credit/debit cards
Here's the thing: if the Windows 8 upgrade was free I wouldn't take it.

Not because I have any great hatred of Windows 8-- I got bored one night and played around with it in a VM, it seems nice enough-- but Windows 7 works fine already.

Windows is the thing that I have to run on my computer so I can run the things I actually care about using. As long as it stays out of my way and doesn't have lots of bugs or security issues, I'm happy with it.

Until I'm forced off 7 due to incompatibilities I see no reason to switch.

(for the record, I still run Snow Leopard on my mac for similar reasons).
What's interesting is that the R&D team is based on Ukraine. Atypical of YC companies that heavily based on SV.
Ballmer like most other CEO's up there is playing a completely different game than the one startups play.

Microsoft is so far doing just fine with Ballmer.
technoslut: I did not say that the IPhone is not revolutionary but it doesn't mean it didn't take inspiration from earlier products.
Um, the double standard I was pointing to was you expecting women to "speak out" (which I interpret as, "label themselves in public") without expecting at least the same of men.

Alternatively, instead of requiring every post to be metaphorically coded pink or blue, we could all stop assuming any post not so labeled was written by a man. Your solution requires women to do irrelevant work so that we can continue assuming male-as-default while being wrong less of the time. My solution requires a minor shift in attitude, equally imposed on everyone, that would lead us to be wrong none of the time.

Actually, there is a third option that someone proposed below: we could start assuming every technical blog author was female unless we bothered to find out otherwise and use "she" as the default pronoun.
I really don't understand the negativity around here for this, is it really that hard to believe that somebody paid good money for a profitable business? Now clearly 27 Signals have moved slightly from the original flippa terms, they are not imposing that customers re-ender details which I imagine was a show stopper for any potential buyer.

The subtext to some of the comments here suggesting that its all made up, is really odd! Why would 37 Signals even need to waste ours or their time making this up? They run Basecamp!! they really don't need to impress us with selling a relatively small business! its completely beneath them!

Instead of poking holes in this story, we really should be celebrating it. Building a business of this size is not that hard, a few hundred customers and a solid model and by solid model i mean, Charging for your product is all it takes. If this doesn't serve as inspiration to us all then i don't know what will.
He's not insinuating he took a bribe. He's insinuating he's been on some sort of covert assignment since 2010 and he never betrayed his mission.
It's an impossibly crazy thought, yet it gets harder to dismiss for every day going by...
Oh man. What's with all the conspiracy nonsense? 37 Signals have been nothing but transparent through this entire process. Hopefully these HN comments are not an accurate sample of what most people are thinking.
If that is your metric to judge by, then imagine how disappointed google investors are.
Saw this about a week ago on the homepage of HN. It's a substantial improvement and the reason the logged in view hasn't been redesigned is because Paypal is in the business of making money, if you change anything in the process that makes them money and you annoy or confuse 1% of your visitors when you're a site like Paypal that is a lot of lost cash.

Give it time, there will be a redesign of the logged in view eventually but as it stands I like the logged in view I know it well and it works.
Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter review
As a Node.js developer and a former Rails/MVC developer, MOVE does make a lot of sense. I will be waiting for a MOVE Node.js framework with good examples to emulate/use in my Node apps.
He's a multi-millionaire and was able to do it while acting this way. Therefore his previous experience is that acting like that will continue making him exceedingly wealthy. Getting angry about it won't do any good, you might as well just ignore him. I'm trying to say this in the most neutral, scientific way possible.
I am reminded of Alistair Cockburn's blurb on the bottom of his website about how to pronounce his name...
Gilt Groupe's Recipe for Success in Mobile
I'm not currently doing interviews, but feel free to ask me questions here. I guess maybe this thread will evolve into a reddit-style "ask me anything." :-)
So you know the truth, we didn't have a buyer from the start. We didn't know if anyone would buy it. We'd never met or heard of the eventual buyers.

We tried to sell Sortfolio a year earlier and nothing came through. We decided to try again this time with a deadline and a public price.

This deal materialized because the buyers were interested in what we were selling, we liked their enthusiasm for the product, and we reached an agreement. The deal came together towards the end of the deadline.

It would have been a lot easier and less stressful for all involved had we had the buyer up front. We of course would have taken the up front easy way had it presented itself.
Microsoft bought aQuantive as a knee-jerk reaction to Google's acquisition of Doubleclick. It was comical at the time because

- aQuantive's Atlas was a distant number 2 to Doubleclick's DART in terms of ad server market share

- aQuantive had no plans to create an ad exchange, nor did their market share make that a credible possibility, and

- Microsoft somehow paid twice as much for aQuantive as Google paid for Doubleclick.

All told it was a bewildering acquisition. Either Microsoft didn't understand why Google bought Doubleclick, or Google corpdev did a masterful behind the scenes headfake with regards to the value of aQuantive.

Yahoo at least understood what the DCLK acquisition was about and bought Right Media. Of course, an open ad exchange is basically at odds with Yahoo's premium inventory direct sales strategy, so it has been difficult for Yahoo to really make it successful.

In the end the whole episode was a giant win for Google, and an embarassment for MSFT and YHOO.
Hey thanks for the 2 cents. The title is a mash of genres... we intended it to be jumbled up :) But I like your view on making the mission statements shorter/ clearer... will mess around with some UI stuff soon
When I found Yr.no a few months ago I liked it, but it only is a forecast -- at least for a US location -- and I need current conditions as well!
It's a balancing act, no doubt. But for something like a declaration of internet freedoms I think it's fair to err on the side of being broadly representative. And I don't think it's anywhere as bad as you make it sound, it's ambiguous, but Don't censor the Internet. is not a vague, positive-sounding platitude.
I think it's a combination of:

* the dark top bar;

* the blue gradient buttons;

* it's primarily a 1-column layout with a 3-column segment ('buy into being safer' &c.)

None of those Bootstrap-specific, of course, but they are increasingly common as a result of it.
Thanks for the kind words!

We're doing the Facebook/Twitter (coming soon) login because we're going to add features that are centric to interacting with your friends on ZIIBRA/ your networks.
We were quite open about the whole thing. We posted revenues, the deadline, the selling price, etc. Here was the post where we announced the sale on our blog: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3172-sortfolio-going-once-goi...

A number of serious buyers got in touch, asked a variety of different questions, and we got them direct answers.
Did you even read my OP? I never said anything like that.

They're calling out the platform which has no marketshare and making zero mention of the iPad which has around 60 million tablets sold. FYI that's an ARM device.

So you mean they think iPad users shouldn't have the freedom of choosing which software they run but Windows RT users need to? Right?