skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I caught a lot of flack for complaining that the blink device (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thingm/blink1-the-usb-rg...) was too expensive, and this just proves it.

$21 for two of these things? They're a lot more sophisticated than a USB-connected LED, right?

Sold.
For my day job I work for a university, and I live two blocks away.

Maybe one night or so a week, after dinner and the kid's put to bed I will head back up to the campus library and work.

They're open until 3am, which is later than I can afford to stay up these days. But it means I can still get 3 or 4 hours of uninterrupted work done even if I get there at 9:00 PM.

After so many years spent in school, I have been conditioned that when I enter a library my brain goes into "head down and get to work" mode. So it's a great place for me to get things done.
"Also, Google Docs doesn't really do much for version control"

Why would anyone need something beyond Google's 'See revision history' tool? Sure, you're missing some features software engineers are used to, but I'm not understanding why people would need this.
IntentKit: Intent and app discovery system for iOS
(disclosure: I work with Jamie.)

Nice insight though, I always like a peek behind the curtain at what tools people are using.
Sorry if I'm not clear. I mean you can make a purchase using Paypal and a credit card without having an account. This is separate than having a Paypal account, funding it and then purchasing via transfer("purchase") to another Paypal account.
This is horrifying, and only further dissuades me from ever pursuing a venture built around the freemium model.

Heh, to be fair it's not all doom and gloom, I can't see how so many people would offer it if it was. Even with the paid tools, you will still receive the occasional bewildering email, such as this gem which arrived over the weekend:

Dang!! I love this app sooooo much. I thought it was free. Until i looked over and saw it was only a trial. I'm no longer using this site until it becomes free

Sigh.
Show HN: I'll name your startup for $50
I'm interested in finding such places in Portland as well. I know we have a few hackerspaces, but I've heard mixed reviews on their locations/[most] active hours/the type of crowds that mingle there. If anyone has any suggestions for web folk/designers, let me know.
it's funny how any narrative about taxes comes down to self-centeredness and selfishness

this is true of tax payers and it's true of governments who want the tax revenue

i for one am happy to pay more taxes if it controls the deficit and means we get good public services
Right, but complaining about it to someone that spent a small bit of free time reworking the frontpage for fun seems out of place. He probably doesn't have the skills or access to make the changes that you want.
Do people really read the desktop version on mobile? The hn.gethifi mobile site is excellent!
Intuitively, we know it's fairly rare for something to be provided for nothing. Therefore, it's often assumed that the business model of freemium ventures is either :

1) purely ad-supported (increasingly difficult, imho)

2) generating (at least some) revenue by harvesting user data

3) running at a loss with the goal of being acquired as soon as feasibly possible

2 & 3 specifically could in various contexts be viewed as sleazy. This isn't my personal indictment, but they do represent views I've heard bandied about on a semi-consistent basis.
Usually true, but not always -- for people in "high risk" countries Paypal sometimes refuses to accept a credit card unless you create a Paypal account first.
Comment pages look okay on your iphone when there is six or seven levels of replies? I switch to iheckernews.com if I want to read a long comment thread on the iphone.
Very true. To me this glamour industry is a self fulfiling bubble, just like fashion, in that they are their own ritics, and they give themselves an "A" every time. I was just trying to point out that although what we are seeing might not be what entrepreneurship is really about, it is still good none the less. Any media attention is good as long as you know how to redirect it in your favor.

It's like those Apple commercials from the start of the Olympics. They were horrible, but people were talking about them longer than they were on, which just keeps Apple in everyone's minds.

Crappy commercial = good media attention.
Over the top ambitious startup = good media attention.
Sorry if I misunderstand. Aren't you(paymentiframe) processing the form which is touching the data and then passing the data onto Stripe via their API?
My fiance wants to share how the Internet proposed marriage to her.
I understand. I'm not being critical of you -- just trying to help with what's worked for me in a similar situation. I mostly did squats and push ups, and the extent of my son's involvement was to add a little bit of . . . resistance . . . to the latter exercise. ;)

I understand the difficulty; when you're a sole caretaker, focused time to do things tends to be limited to naps and schooldays, and then it tends to be used for more system-critical things like taking showers. I hope your situation improves in time. :)
So, it's a Segway with FaceTime? The main question is why? Even the video can't seem to find a decent use case. The art gallery idea is ridiculous, why would you physically control a robot that wanders an art gallery when the gallery has a website? Also have you ever tried actually wandering around a gallery? The robot wouldn't stand a chance. What happens when someone knocks it over?

In the workplace this would just be embarrassing. Not to mention a security threat, there's no way any serious corporation would allow roaming cameras in their offices.

If I put my idealist hat on and try to imagine the future with these, I keep coming back to those Segway videos of the hype of a new kind of city, a new kind of transportation.

This really is a technology in search of a use case, that isn't already being addressed. I read comments that say they would use these to attend meetings, how does this robot compare to Cisco's video conferencing, or FaceTime or even just calling in from the car/home. At work we use screen sharing and audio/visual conferencing which seems to work just fine, and where it doesn't it will evolve.

I'm wondering how this robot would push the elevator button to get to a meeting on another floor? There are just so many problems with this idea, not the least of which is who would actually buy one.
What It’s Like For a Girl Gamer
We took good care of all our investors
Maybe the word choice was not right (I am a non native speaker). What I think is the users should always be treated with respect and transparency: everything is laid down on the table upfront. A lot of freemium services are implemented in a way that kind of deceives the users to sign up and grow dependent on the service before letting them know that a lot of things won't work or stopping working if you don't pay.
Ok, that just sounds too amazing. Lol, I'm in Boston, but I live nowhere near a (decent) beach where I'd feel... hmm, safe? doing that.
The java teams are the only teams that have to stop the world for hours when doing server code upgrades.

I will say that this has more to do with the project than the language. Having recently inherited an old codebase at a new job, I've found at least 4 frameworks being used for the same app. Why didn't they just continue using one framework or upgrade when they switched? Don't know and the devs are long gone.

But like all languages it's easy to just half-ass something and leave it for the next guy. That's not something just for Java.
I'll give it a try - I spent a bit of time this spring trying to like ST2.
Do you have the same numbers of users in your free/paid versions? Maybe the free ones are just exposed to more users?
To make them work like folders, you would need a query like "Team and Alpha but nothing else" because otherwise each pseudo-folder would also have all subfolders' documents in it.
I remember reading an article about almost the same topic by Felleisen, maybe Flatt, maybe Culpepper and some others from the PLT group, it was about using DrRacket to teach maths, there was an example involving the take-off of a rocket iirc. Is anyone able to find it? I don't remember the title nor where it was published.
I agree with you. Even though they are checking the length, it does not necessarily mean that they are not hashing.
On a side note, who will actually type in a 32 character password and remember it ? I know thats not the point of this post but still.
I don't see why the software used is particularly important. The point should be the mathematics, rather than specific tools. I don't know how hard it is to transition from Wolfram Alpha, to, say, Matlab, but I don't think it's difficult.
"Olly, the author of OllyDbg, presents his new open source joke"

This page is 5 years old. Glad to see that it finally made it onto HackerNews.
I meant lowering in context of a test but fair point.
You can head this issue off by charging more, because your margins for a SaaS should probably be in the 80~95% region, and if you're finding yourself thinking "I'll just add a 20% markup on top of Twitter's API rates then compete on price" or "I'll make a payment processing solution which charges 0.25% on top of credit card costs" then you can reasonably anticipate that this will eventually happen to you. So, for anyone thinking they might ever be worried about this, charge more. Cost-plus pricing has no place in software.

There's some costs which are difficult to anticipate prior to launch. One is ongoing customer support, and it is entirely possible to price below profitability if you get a lot of pathological customers in on the ground floor. If you've just got a few and the business is fundamentally sound, consider it a marketing expense and let them get weeded out by attrition. If you're like Spreedly or Chargify and discover that a lot of the early adopters in your space are toxic, then it's time to have the "Look, we're not in the business of subsidizing you" discussion. I'd have the messaging for that discussion stress that you'd like to continue offer the old terms but circumstances are tying your hands, and try to be generous on e.g. giving 6 months or so of lock-in to the old prices or assistance in moving them to a provider which is more suited to their needs. But honestly, at the end of the day, if the choices are a) not making payroll for my employees and b) ticking off a bunch of pathological freeloaders, I know what I'd pick every single time.
You can't vote (you have to zoom 3x or you'd accidentally down-vote a poor guy), and the front page is not readable in portrait mode, and only barely legible in landscape mode. Nested comments (more than 4 levels deep) are usually unreadable.
I know, same thing here too, I love working out of the library. I sometimes go to the Boston Public Library, but the place closes at 9pm most nights :S
We used a pair of VGo telepresence robots at our NYC and Philadelphia offices last year. Here's some video from the demo, just before we got them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3tLLzOqKs4

I found the VGo to be a huge help when it came to being present in an office that I couldn't physically go to at the time. I was the head of a department that had groups in different cities, and it was a lot easier for me to feel I had a cohesive team when I was able to actually "be" there instead of just on Skype. It's hard to overstate the value of being able to go join a quick work session at the couches, or go looking for someone in an office where people are always busy and wandering around.

Of course, in a large company where not everyone is an early adopter, to put it politely, there's also an annoying side to having a telepresence robot. Some people spend more time focusing on the novelty than getting to work, and it can be a distraction. A lot of people weren't comfortable using the VGo themselves, even though it was available for anyone. There are definite social hurdles to overcome with some people.

I'd probably like the Double even more than the VGo, because it looks less intrusive, has a larger screen thanks to the iPad, and the adjustable height is a very big deal. I'm looking forward to having one in the future. Love the price, too.
Why it's the right time for a Lean Startup Accelerator
Windows Assessment Toolkit for Windows 8: Performance monitoring for everyone
Interesting. What would be considered "middle-class" in America, about $50,000, would end up paying more under Romney than Obama (assuming married with 2 kids). Not what you'd expect from the party that claims lower taxes are better for the economy. On the other hand, a typical salary for people on this site, $100,000, would pay $1000 less under Romney.
Any info in the best price strategy for online backup software, for companies? Price per server, GB or what?
Show HN: Beautify Craigslist - Chrome Extension
The iframe uses Stripe's javascript to send the card details directly to Stripe's servers -- the only thing which hits the tarsnap server is a token which Stripe returns (and nothing at all goes back to the server hosting the iframe).
Show HN: httpstatus.es, directory of HTTP Status codes
Pioneer introduces the first Wi-Fi DJ system dubbed the “XDJ-AERO”
I have submitted this before but it's now open source and anyone can contribute new codes or changes to specific codes so I figured I should resubmit it.

Repository on Github where changes can be submitted: https://github.com/citricsquid/httpstatus.es
The geographic group listings on groups.drupal.org can be a great resource for finding local Drupal talent.
I was number one at a game similar to Quake2, and it had much more to do with the strong internet connection I had than skill.

Just wanted to validate something that rang true with me :)
I have fond memories from Frommer's... but I last read one of their guidebooks in the 80's (Europe on 30 dollars a day).

So the brand still holds some value (in mindshare, in U$S it's whatever Google paid :) ), and they're right in that all of my investigation is online these days.
OP here: I just opened the site on a fresh machine and it is big! I hope the team fixes it in the future.
I thought re-analyzing Morris's data would be a fun "homework" assignment to give myself as I try to learn statistics. It looks like the simplest approach is nothing like what I proposed above, but a "two-sample t-test." I performed that analysis and wrote it up here, if anyone is interested:

http://illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2012/08/font-credibili...
Ask HN: Collaborative Amateur Video Production App
Hi,

so I was working on a product demo video that needed to showcase different unrelated scenarios of people using our product- Prowork(http://prowork.me).

I was out of office so we used Prowork to create and discuss the story board for the video. As we listed the board titles and descriptions as tasks, it occurred to me that the different scenes could be shot separately by different team members and then put together later in the studio. Now shouldn't there be an app for that?

I came across starsvu (http://www.starsvu.com/) and the youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oETM0rMvqY) is very impressive but basically not what you want for casual/ amateur video production.

so basically the app should do:

1. - create storyboard,
2.- share wit friends,
3.- assign or let them pick boards/scenes,
4.- they return clips,
5.- put them together

and voilà. would love to see this happen, what do you think?
When I planned a trip to Spain, I use the Frommers 3 days guide in Madrid to plan activities.

http://www.frommers.com/destinations/madrid/0056020791.html

I then used Google Maps and created a custom map with all the suggested sites, activities, and eateries. I was also able to share it with my friends and collaborate over it.

I think this is a great opportunity for Google to streamline all this and make another great product.
I assure you /fit/ is all about aesthetics.
The Functional Equivalent of a Solo Meeting
Yes. We have some on sight, for a government agency, as part of a government contract, for which we are the prime.

Additionally, we've taken people from help desk, put them on the server team, then placed them doing host based security and paid them upper 40's (before taxes).

Clearance level is TS.
Some of my favorites:

"Always borrow money from a pessimist. They don't expect to be paid back"

"Money is not everything. but make sure you make enough of it before talking such nonsense"

"Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference"

"If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it"

"You'll always miss 100% of the shots you don't take"
Unless I misunderstood the article, all they're doing here is hiring locals to handle local customers. This is something everybody does everywhere, and is by no means "outsourcing". When we talk about US companies outsourcing call center work to India, it's virtually always referring to serving American customers with Indian call center employees, which is a completely different situation.
> The point I'm trying to make is that using <table> elements for layout is bad and you should feel bad for using them. If you tried modifying something in original HN it would take a long time.

If you made the same point but removed the "should feel bad" bit, the point would be even better.
Got it. Thank you. But isn't this a separate issue and more to card issuance by Visa/Mastercard/Diner's etc? Won't Stripe likely have the same restrictions to cover themselves...or in time after they've been burned enough as well?
Wireless charging technology coming in 2013
I will be nothing less than disappointed if I do not see someone on HN implement 'papernode 0.1' by the end of this weekend. Maybe some more literal multithreading action. Why not do the whole system... servers from fax machine arrays!
I haven't worked directly with any online backup software companies (and wouldn't give you their secrets if I had). In general, I'd try to align pricing with customer success, such that e.g. a big enterprise doing online backup of a mission critical application would end up paying a heck of a lot more per anything than a bride backing up her wedding photos.

This would tend to suggest not pricing backups by weight at all because, crucially, businesses do not value data by weight. 8 GB of bingo cards: doesn't matter if they get rm -rf'ed, I can regenerate them trivially. 200kb gzipped of Appointment Reminder database backups: that literally represents more than half my net worth. The production database for a large enterprise customer? That might trivially be worth $20k+ per month, totally no-brainer, regardless of size.

My most specific recommendation: if the pricing page includes "picodollars", it really shouldn't. (Much love for Tarsnap but darn it I'm right.)
Sorry, that wasn't really my point.

If I started a company up, had no investment, then decided to go work at bigco on the understanding I could say they acquired my company, then it's all quite meaningless.

It's just a shame to see so many deadpooled companies and products through acquihires spun as "yay success!".

Maybe I'm just getting old ;)

As I say though, congrats on the new job.
Merchants are either required to be PCI DSS compliant themselves or outsource their card-handling only to third-party entities who are PCI DSS compliant themselves.

So, one of two things is true:

-- Paymentiframe/tarsnap is a PCI DSS compliant third party

-- the merchant is intentionally violating the PCI DSS rules by sending credit card data to you

So, which is it?
DimensionsApp - latest update, now free for 2 weeks
As an original Droid owner, the Droid was a great phone.

Tying the phone to a brand name owned by Verizon was probably a bad idea, all things considered, causing considerable confusion among mainstream non-techies as to what they should upgrade to post "OG" Droid. And then they also kneecapped the techie market by switching to locked bootloaders (they've since recanted on this, but I still view the Motorola brand negatively solely because of what they did with locked bootloaders in the past).
Wow, this is a really great visualization.
US Gov't secretly spying on Everyone using civilian security cameras
Thanks for sharing! I'm always looking to improve my code and I have to admit, LESS has really allowed me to write less code, but at the cost of producing longer reference chains. :)
>I think that network-of-coverage aspect is one of Wikipedia's strengths as a hypertext encyclopedia, whereas the overview articles are a strength of more traditional linear-text encyclopedias like Britannica.

Hypertext for the win! May the power of the web be with you :)
If you wanted to "tag" files, could you not simply create hard links to the files inside a folder "tagname"?

Of course, using hard links is currently not easy for the technically incompetent, but you could change that, and it ought to be easier as you're just interfacing with existing capability.
Nobody is sending credit card data to me. I'm serving up a form with javascript which sends the credit card data directly to Stripe.
How do you search for files with multiple tags? E.g.: "Taxes" AND "2009"
fwiw, they didn't just submit to reddit and wait. They also submitted it to (at least some) sites directly. Doesn't look like any dedicated rumors sites actually published it. Getting fake rumor submissions is a daily occurrence for rumor sites.

The actual stories were posted on smaller sites which questioned the authenticity. And Wired actually did an article on custom screws and used the image as a jumping off point: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/if-theres-a-screw-the...

So you can look at as either a success or failure.

(disclaimer: I run MacRumors.com)
Destructors aren't a good way to free resources in a garbage collected language.
>I think it was Clay Shirky who once said that it was a mistake to try to solve social problems with technological fixes.

Was this http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html#content what you were referring to?
I agree, it is interesting, but could definitely be another entire article. I've been having similar discussions around testing in this type of article. Angular has an excellent "testing story", with the end to end tests having a lot of baked in functionality. Unfortunately, most articles don't mention e2e or unit tests... ever. On some levels, I feel like testing should be included, even in beginner articles, but the cognitive load is already high...
If they can recognize individuals and track the individual from camera to camera, I bet the NSA has a large number of great sets of the Playmate of the Month. I mean, cameras are everywhere, and even the Playmate of the Month goes out in public, or somewhere security cams can see her. Therefore, every time she goes out in a particularly spectacular outfit, she can be tracked and oogled from all anges.

What a breakthrough!
Just in case you aren't aware, "is bad and you should feel bad" is a meme from Futurama, so the author was probably just trying to be funny.
HackerDojo in Mountain View gives you 24 hour access for $100 a month and is a pretty great place to code at night (and during the day).
Why great buzz and a great product were not enough to convert me?
Yes, considering OOP and exceptions are not dependent on each other.
I think it's because (as this kind of tool shows) you can easily quantify the direct effect on your pocket, but the loss to services and the effect of the public deficit is a vague, unknown, and unmeasurable thing. Because there's no way to see how your bus schedule will change due to the tax cuts, people can't relate to it.
Oh come on. ▼

http://www.decodeunicode.org/en/u+25bc

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U25A0.pdf
Stripe doesn't need to "cover themselves" as much as Paypal, since they have more information about their merchants and hold on to money for a week.
Don't use a domain hack