skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Attach.io, a new way to simply share files
After a lot of work, I'm proud to show HN my first real "startup idea". HN has been a real inspiration to me. Attach.io allows users to upload files up to 2GB (soon to be 8GB) and share them with others.

Attach.io offers the regular file for download, and also if possible, an alternative preview version, so users can view files on their iPad for example.

PSD files get converted to PNG
AVI, WMV etc... to MP4
EPS/AI to PDF
DOC(X), PPT(X) etc... to PDF

This is a sneak preview, and is not 100% complete.

Things I still have on my ToDo list:

Allow users to email link to others, currently they have to copy/paste (not clear for non-tech people).

Add a convert in progress with ETA for preview files. At the moment, a preview button will only be shown when a preview file is available/convert is complete.

Add the ability to pause/resume uploads.

Add warning when files above 2GB are added to the list.

MP4 files can currently only be played in Safari & iPad. This should be resolved within the next few days.

Possibly convert other filetypes too, any suggestions?

Note: This is a one man show, I designed & programmed everything myself, with the exception of the background image. I'm more of a programmer though than a designer.

My current expenses:
.io domain: $100 (Name.com) & background image: $2 (Graphic River), Total: $102

Attach.io is currently running on one dedicated server. I will be getting new strong servers after the Alpha stage.

All feedback & criticism is appreciated. I have only tested this in Firefox, Chrome & Safari on the Mac, so if there are any render issues, please link a screenshot to me, or send an email to hello@attach.io
I love that Reddit humour is prevalent on even the most serious of AMAs.

I can't log in though, which is slightly annoying. Would be interesting to see the traffic stats for this once it's done.
On the contrary, we overeat precisely because we listen to our bodies.

Evolution tuned us to survive in a world where food is scarce and periods of starvation are frequent. In the rare occasion that you have excess food, you eat it and build up fat reserves. The saved up fat will help you survive the period of starvation that undoubtedly follows.
Link: http://attach.io
It's a tough site to run because hundreds of thousands of people have write access to the database and reddit attempts to provide the millions of people reading the comments pages with up-to-the-fraction-of-a-second updates.

It's like running a tenth of a twitter with a 10k char limit, if twitter had 10 people on development/operations
Exactly. Megapixels only really matter if you're doing photo-editing or photo-printing. If it's being down-scaled - and it is, if you are uploading it to whatever social media site - then a 5MP iPhone 4 camera will serve you just as well.
The Startup Karma: Pay Forward and Reciprocity.
But I can have an OS with wonderful package management, developer tools, endless configurability AND a desktop Aaron Seigo and friends created.
> Being enablers of dysfunctional behavior is an acceptable solution?

It seems for most people the answer is a firm yes. They can't think beyond the short run positive (e.g. free food keeps child alive) to see the overwhelming long run negative (e.g. millions die when free food can't be sustained). When you point out the long run negative you usually get a blank stare or a downvote.
Weird... I am guessing that if Obama was going to be on Reddit, they would have given the Reddit staff some early notice, in order to add some extra preparations for the load. Or maybe not, does anybody know if there's any sort of normal protocol around this sort of thing?
At first, I thought that this was for developing productivity habits.

http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se...

I used to like putting stickers on a calendar as a kid for this sort of thing, and I wanted to do that on the phone but found that most electronic calendars aren't so good for that. So I developed an app to let me do that. http://www.ooghamist.com/shinycal/
Yes it can cause all kinds of health problems, but the actual decrease in average age for a moderately obese person is only about 3 years.
I heard Windows PowerShell was decent. No first hand experience though
That looks interesting. What about the expenses of the server?
This is pretty cool...if you like canned PR replies that haven't been repeated ad nausaem (sp?) elsewhere.
I'm very interested in how quickly they manage to bring it back up.

... so naturally I'll refresh it every few seconds.
Check out accountants' Journals, they have lined paper rather than quadrille, but they work well.
The reddit team must be absolutely shitting themselves right now under strain. How the hell do you accurately predict the load when the President is using your site?
I imagine the emotions at Reddit HQ must be all over the place for employees right now:

- This is so cool, the President of the United States is going to use our website to answer questions!

- OMG, the site is down and the President wants to use our site, fix this now!
Among non-ultra-geeky Linux users I know (mostly part-time users), "Linux" does seem to be reasonably standardized as far as desktop components go, because by "Linux" they mean "Ubuntu". It's possible the Ubuntu desktop dominance came a bit too late, though, and still isn't entirely complete.

My own experiences aren't great with Windows, though they're smoother on OSX than Linux. The problem I have with Windows is that stuff does break, but it's inscrutable how and what to do about it, whereas at least on Linux there is usually some way to do something about it if you're tech-savvy. If anything gets borked in Windows, it's wipe-and-reinstall time; back when I used it full-time I probably did that once a year on average.

I find OSX to be poor for package management, though. I've gotten so tired of headaches with installing and managing updates of stuff, and badly interacting upgrades of the OS and separately installed packages and system versions of python/ruby/etc., that I do most of my dev work in Debian in VirtualBox now. In that aspect, it's Debian that's centrally managed with real release-engineering and integration tests, whereas OSX is an anarchic mess of 3rd-party software that nobody's responsible for integrating and testing.
> "well, potential things don't count because I say so"

I would say I don't care about potential things. This is a fairly fundamental moral principle for me and if you disagree with it perhaps we do not have a true disagreement but simply different preferences.

I could point out that a moral principle involving caring about potential things has a high complexity which may be convincing to some people:

If you care about potential things you will also have to draw a line to avoid say, outlawing changing your mind about having sex because that prevents the conception of a potential person.
Sony launches 20 inch tablet running Windows 8
Marketing geniuses for sure.

Success comes with billboards on the 101 in Redwood City.
> There's something a bit... I don't know quite how to put it. Let's just say that I bet she'd willingly trade places with him, cash out, and go enjoy herself instead of cleaning up other people's crap day in and day out.

My mother isn't a cleaner (she's a nurse) but I talked with her before about whether or not if she had the chance she would quit her job and sit on the beach all day doing whatever she wanted and she said that no, she would never be able to stop working because it has been a part of her entire life and if she was going to quit her job and do anything she would open a book shop (I think it was a book shop).

I think for a lot of people work is a part of who they are and it's not as simple as just taking money and spending life on a beach, I'm sure the cleaner would love financial freedom but I would suspect she would keep working. For a lot of people they don't have things they enjoy that have some sort of output (for most of HN that's programming, or design) so working is all they have to feel like they have value in the world.

Maybe his cleaner has financial freedom already (saving, inheritance etc) and chooses to work.
Xerox Star User Interface (1982) -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q
I'm sure this has been answered before, but why does it matter to Craigslist if it's data is being used elsewhere and is clearly marked as Craigslist data?

Say Craigslist is paid for real estate listings: they already have the money, and they don't make any additional money off of advertising, so why does it matter where someone accesses that information?

I'm genuinely curious why this isn't similar to Twitter, for instance, allowing developers to show tweets in their own applications. Except in this case, people are paying to "tweet" (post real estate listings). Also, for this question, I'm ignoring Twitter's recent policy changes.

I suspect I'm being naive here, and the issue may be that they just really don't want other people profiting from their data, but I guess I just don't get it.
How does falling in love with an iPhone show that you don't fully appreciate the value of open source? Tell me about any good open source handset that came out before the iPhone. OpenMoko? I mean, you really had to love open source to put up with it.

Yes, there is still Android but, given how modified the usual handset is, you can't buy a free and open Android on the market as well.

So, where is the problem in using a closed device when "open" just doesn't deliver?
There are already more than enough questions. What I'm wondering is how the president is going to answer anything if the website is down.
Currenty, I'm running on a dedicated server, $100 a month.

Looking at getting Hetzner's XS 29 (1 or 2) to start off with.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/xs29
I can't imagine this hasn't been negotiated by the White House ahead of time.
The 3,000-Pound Fire-Breathing Robot Scorpion
Can't wait for the top post to be another asinine "comment phrased as a question" about legalising marijuana!

Joking aside, I predict disappointment. Reddit users will want hard-hitting answers, Obama will definitely not give them (already the internet freedom question has been fluffy-answered). In all honestly, no-one should expect anything else- the POTUS is not going to unveil new thoughts and strategies through Reddit.

That said, it shows how far they've come from the "jailbait" scandal a few months ago, but I strongly suspect Republicans will refer back to it in good time.

EDIT: Hey, at least PresidentObama bought Reddit Gold. Somehow I doubt it'll be enough to cover the bandwidth, though.
I'm very curious about this. I feel like the community at large seems to agree mongo is a dangerous choice. But then I read articles like this. At what scale do you replace Mongo? Should it only be used for bootstrapping something? Is it something that 80% of apps will be fine on?

I'm in an interesting spot myself right now. I've been hacking on Django since 0.96. I love the ORM, and hate everything else. Python on the other hand is a wonderful language. Rails... I've been spending 8 hours a day for the past month building a rails project. I love a lot of things about rails, hate the ORM, and dislike a lot of the magic.

On the flip side: I've been a Javascript/front-end developer since before jQuery existed, and I love coffeescript. I understand callback-style evented programming and therefore node.js apps make perfect sense to me.

My co-founder and I have just finished some heavy duty design/wireframe/conceptual work on a new project of ours. It's time to build the API.

I am COMPLETELY torn with what framework/language/database to use for this project.

At first I thought mongodb and coffeescript+node would be fun and reliable. But the community seems to think mongo is unreliable and almost dangerous. So I thought, hmm, Riak looks like it will let me throw whatever data I want into it (like mongo) but it's rock solid. I later dismissed that since I figured I'd need to do a lot of heavy lifting on my own. Rails keeps poking me in the back of my mind but I honest-to-god hate ActiveRecord and am afraid to use DataMapper for fear it won't play nice with a lot of the popular ruby goodies out there. I've modeled most of the project now in Django and i'm starting to play with Tastypie for the REST component. It feels too kludgy.

I'm a wreck. Mommy?
The worst job at Google
When have you last used Linux? Drivers haven't been an issue anymore for years now.

I don't actually see any problems with Linux. It's just not meant to be.
I use Windows out of necessity at home to play my video games. I use Linux as choice as my IDE at work.
Video: The Secondary Effects of Automated Testing
There was always a dominate player it seems. Most people used RedHat (before Fedora) over Ubuntu.
> I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. [...] In this regard, both Windows and OSX just work.

Just because it's never happened to you on OS X or Windows doesn't mean it doesn't happen. OS X 10.6.7 broke the output on my 13" Macbook for either of the two external displays I own. Both worked fine previously, when booted from the install CDs, or from Linux on the same machine.

Plugging in my Firewire audio interface on the same machine spun the CPU up to 100% and kept it pegged there. A lot of good having a nice mic pre-amp does when you get a high pitched fan whir added gratis to all of your recordings.

It's silly to pretend that Mac is somehow perfect in these matters. In my experience it's only been marginally better than Linux, if at all. And with Linux you have some hope of finding a solution, whereas for OS X you're pretty much hosed.
Glad to see this article. The recent buzz around convention and best practices in Backbone.js has been frustrating. A lot of the recent Backbone discussion are issues that have been thoughtfully addressed in Ember.js.

I feel that Backbone.js was first on the scene and hence has found its way into the current developer lexicon and toolset, leaving Ember.js unfairly looked over.
I understand the desire to keep a community focused- I'm on HN because of the focus of the content and community.

However, I appreciate some of the seemingly comp-sci and business-unrelated discussion regarding economics, science, and sociology as well, because it helps to create a backdrop of context for startups in real life. We as a community can create the 'front page' that we want by not up-voting vacuous, sensational, or overly political content. I don't think a flag-war is necessary.
???

Customers won't give you, hapless employee, job security if your employers can easily replace you with someone cheaper because you have a flimsy (or no!) contract, nor will customers help you with disputes with management, or wrongful termination, or promotion from within, or even the too-little-emphasized increased potential for synergy between the ranks that unions afford, or any of the many other things that unions afford.

Customers might help prevent a company going out of business, and that, to be sure, is good for job security. But a company that's flourishing customerwise can still have rapacious or simply bad management.
Optimistically speaking, i moved from mac/pc to linux 9 years ago on desktop dragging dozens of people with me. My experience so far is everything gets better year by year. Yes, Apple took away some shine out of Linux since a couple of years, but I see this as a gain, because those people will be unixified and will be better adapted to Linux setups in the next decades.

I never consider OS/X despite some fanciness; it is limited in choice of hardware, it is totally dead on server side, its unix-ness was/is crappy, despite being developed by the (the most valuable) cathedral in the world. its support for open source dev tools is miserable, despite some recent improvements, its game support is miserable (compared to windows) and it goes worse in openness day by day. Just a crowd of ordinary users, waiting to be sold trivial app store apps maybe an appeal to some developers, but OS/X appears like a toy casio personal organizer OS from 80s to the DIY/Linux developer desktop users.
> They just want a system that gets out of their way and let's them do their technical tasks.

That's precisely what Linux fails at. Most minor UI/desktop-related tasks that are hassle-free with Win7 or OSX take far too much time. Time that most people don't have and don't want to invest.

Example: doubleclicking on a .ttf file in the Xfce file manager (plain Debian Xfce) does nothing. Right-clicking offers various unrelated applications. Copying the file to an appropriate font directory does not "install" the font so it is visible to applications. No, I have to shut down all terminal windows and restart them to be able to use the font. Do you see an advantage in this? I don't want to spend time doing (or even researching) this when I could be developing instead (with the best console font known to mankind please!). Desktop Linux just lacks basic functionality and wastes people's time.

Sure, I was fine developing with fvwm2 or twm 15 years ago and did not mind using xfontsel and "xset fp rehash" back then, but today it feels like an unproductive waste of time when Win7 and OSX (esp. OSX) do not "get in my way" in any conceivable meaning of the phrase when I just want to develop stuff in an environment that I can adjust to my liking.

If you think Linux on the desktop hasn't failed for and abandoned by most technical users, you're delusional.
Ecuador and Julian Assange
I should say it is a danger, rather than the danger. Poor wording on my part.

In any case, more people get fat off guzzling soda because soda is significantly cheaper, and are served in virtually every restaurant.
Communication programs would make synchronizing and sharing photos (particularly one-offs) much easier.

Touch-to-focus, touch-to-set-white-balance are pretty awesome and far more user-friendly than comparable functions/processes on today's point-n-shoots (when they're even available).

Applications would be able to extend what are fairly difficult-to-kludgy with todays point-n-shoots (HDR, stitched panoramas, night shots, etc)

etc.
There are better ways to do it, but I use a javascript include tag to render the directory that holds my ember app in the view file of the route I want to render it in.
How does a trust compare to a UGMA/UTMA?
How do you indicate category membership in E-Prime?

What if I want to say "A dog is an animal"?
Which iPad note-taking apps have you tried? There are definitely a lot of terrible ones out there.

Notability, however, is absolutely fantastic. I've been using it with a Cosmonaut stylus since late May and I haven't used a paper notebook since. Rather than failure, it's exceeded all my expectations.

The only missing feature is handwriting recognition, and well, I wouldn't have that with paper, either.
To stress out again; OS/X has the poorest hardware support for 3rd parties; even compared to Linux. Just "think different" and buy some hardware and you ll see what I mean..
No flying cars or moon bases; just average people off the street able to talk directly to the "leader of the free world" on level ground.

Not the future we were expecting, but I'll take it.
Some people take notes to they better remember something. (I did that a lot in college. I would take notes to help me remember what I just heard.) For that kind of stuff, you just want to dump the data on paper.

There's other stuff that you'll write down because you're going to want to refer to it later. (For example, contact information, websites urls, things to put on a to-do list.) I came up with a simple set of margin icons ("@" for contact info, "w" for a www url, a checkbox for a to-do item, the date for an item for your calendar.

If you put them in the margin, then you can cross them off when you put them in your contact list, your calendar, or your to-do list.

You can extend this further with other margin icons. For instance, you can write "M" in the margin to identify meeting notes. or "Q" for a particularly good quote.

The key to note taking is to figure out how you would need the information later and improve the way you capture to support the way you consume.
Maybe. I'd like to hear back from lutusp before I jump to that conclusion.
Honestly, I like Unity. Or more accurately, I like where they're going with Unity. And I would like the thing itself if it actually worked reliably. But here I am, running the stock version of the biggest Linux distro on popular hardware, and I have to log out and in or reboot roughly daily.

I don't really believe developers are moving to Apple gear because of HN. I believe it because last time I went on a hiring spree, a lot of people said, "Oh, you're running Linux? Do we have to?"
Andrew Mason is generally not considered a very upstanding CEO. Why is Fried giving Mason personal favors? Are they cousins?
But if you're not ready to make the smartphone/data-plan plunge, or your smartphone has a crap camera...
Can you elaborate on how a calorie-restricted diet can result in "increased energy and stamina"? Specifically, if your energy intake is minimal, how do you end up with more energy than you had in your previous diet?
I would bet if you ask people what they don't like in their linux setup design would come last. The main issues i hear seem to be compatibility and missing obvious functionality (oh clipboard). In fact , most desktops are so configurable you can actually make them look great.

If you want to make a system popular, start with the people who are actually using it. Linux is used by technical people, so why are they putting us off with silly animations and glossy layers that will break in the next upgrade? OSX is not easier to use either, it has many nonintuitive quirks but they stick to their design and improve it instead of overhauling it.
Maturity is the driving factor. Linux has a lot of immature attempts at a desktop. OS X has one but not a lot of time or manpower spent perfecting it (XCode sucks, Core APIs are weak/incomplete, OS support lacking for fundamentals).

Windows is nothing but mature. Billions of hours running, automated bug reporting, millions of developers, nth generation tools.
> I strongly suspect Republicans will refer back to it in good time.

It will then be followed by a scurry of liberals saying the Republicans did it just to discredit Obama.
I don't know, but I hope they post a graph of the traffic spike.
Not this post again. Those who thought Linux can compete with heavily subsidized windows on Laptops or OSX with Apple's flashy interfaces are dreamers.

Linux has been for those that like to get dirty and it is doing that job quite well. Canonical came a bit late to the party and wasn't large enough to matter. RHEL just went after the servers. To make a fair comparison, Linux should have had a big player backing it strongly on the Desktops / laptops 10-15 years ago (like Google is doing now with Android). HP and IBM did their half assed attempts, but they were never really behind it completely.
Ask HN: Staying in SF during TechCrunch, any advice?
Hey guys.

I'm the Founder+CEO of Qbix, Inc. We're based in NYC and this is the first time I'll be going to check out TechCrunch in San Francisco!

I was wondering if there way anyone here who could hook me up with some accommodations while I'm there. Either a hacker dorm, or maybe a room or something like that. Would be much more interesting to stay with fellow entrepreneurs and hackers than in a hotel room.

Let me know. You can find my contact information at http://qbix.com/about

Thanks in advance!

Greg Magarshak

PS: I realize it says I'm a president and yet I'm looking for a place to stay. I will look back on this later and probably think it looks quaint and cute. Still I like this!
To be fair, it seems to have improved dramatically in the last couple of months.
This more like a touch PC than a tablet at about 5.2 kg ...