skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look in to NoMachine NX (http://nomachine.com/) rather than VNC. For some tasks I use a NoMachine NX desktop on a Linode Ubuntu server from the other side of the planet - it's quite useable. Over 3G web browsing is often faster via the remote desktop than browsing sites directly.
Banking.

Let me store multiple currencies. dont convert currencies but actually let me hold whatever currencies I regularly deal with ie Euros, US dollars, Australian dollars and Thai baht but it would vary customer to customer.

Let me make and receive payments over the net similar to PayPal (act as a payment processor).

Also give me a bank account number for people who want to pay via what they think is an old fashioned bank transfer. If you could provide me with whatever numbers I need so I can receive bank transfers in every country I do business that would be ideal.

I dont need any physical shop fronts. less real estate and staff should keep costs down.

Provide a net based interface and a card that works over the visa network and Im happy.

Do NOT send me paper statements and ads for your latest attempt to take my money under the guise of being my best friend.

The world could use a net-centric bank that assumes you are not limited to whatever country you happen to be physically located in right now. With its lack of physical storefronts this bank wouldnt be for everyone but thats fine. It would be a a bank for tech savy, international business people.
My understanding is that "multi-touch" can't be patented, but a specific implementation of multi-touch can. Am I wrong? If not, what's so bad about that?
We Are All Socialists Now
Great Suggestion about the "Don't worry about competition"... The other day I saw something similar to the service I want to do, and at first disheartened me... but if I don't try I will never succeed or fail, just be disheartened!
;)

"If you sit, sit, if you stand, stand, what ever you do, don't wobble"...
"sort{rand}"

I am not very experienced with Ruby, but this sounds like a really bad idea? In the worst case, sort might run forever?

Don't know what sort algorithms Ruby uses by default, maybe for some it doesn't matter, but it seems best to not make assumptions about the underlying algo?
Re: the web "site"/web "app" split: It would be nice to see someone elaborate on this a bit more, past the "where it came from" bit. In "Snakes and Rubies", I got the impression that dhh just threw that out there, and Adrian didn't really agree or disagree.

Perhaps I can think wishfully of one of them chiming in... ;)
My impression of the article is that the author was saying it's difficult to get into business selling only what or who is nearby, since both of those are close to becoming (if they're not already) commodities. The trick with location-based services is to provide novel interaction or functionality or customization on top of these commodities. Quoting the OP: "As a LBS start-up, you need to think about adding distinctive value for users; differentiating on location is an oxymoron."

There are plenty of companies who will be hugely successful in the LBS space. Maybe Google, maybe Loopt, maybe Brightkite or Yahoo or CloudMade... If you think you can be the next company to track where everyone and everything is (massive infrastructure requirements!) -- this article is suggesting you are probably on the wrong track.

(side note: Yahoo's FireEagle is also something to watch in this space, as are the recently launched developer products from CloudMade.)
You seem like you have pretty strong opinions so I'm not going to try to convince you, I'm just going to state my opinion.

The world is a better place for Zuckerberg acting as he did. Facebook has become an incredibly successful company with great products. He obviously made the decision that he could do a much better job running the show than the ConnectU guys, and he went ahead and proved it. I have nothing but respect for that.

As for stealing code--I think it's generally pretty trivial for any developer worth his salt to rewrite things from memory without having to steal it(given that I think he only worked for ConnectU parttime for a few weeks--not enough time to build a substantial codebase). I'd be surprised if any ConnectU code was "stolen". I wouldn't be shocked if some lines were reused out of laziness, but in general I think a few weeks of code in most cases is useless. A rewrite will often be better and easier.

I would hate it if we ever even considered putting people in jail for branching out because they believe they can do a better job at innovating and leading a business than their current employers. That's the heart of capitalism--creative destruction; upsetting of the status quo.

If you're concerned that one of your co-founders may branch off and compete with you, I'd say the problem is probably with you--there's not a lot of confidence in your abilities if that happens. Zuckerberg from what I've read had been coding for a decade--that's a significant investment of time that the ConnectU guys didn't make. I probably would have done the same thing.
My beef about MySQL used to be technical but in the last 3 - 4 years that has evaporated, and now it is purely about the license. I cannot understand why anybody uses a database for which the only official client side drivers are GPL, rather than (at least) LGPL. Unless you really truly intend that your own app will be licensed GPL and so will every other application / piece / component/ that ever needs to interact with your database in any way, it is a ball and chain around your neck which seems crazy to place there when there are other equally good alternatives.
Required for a mortgage, government protected, and 93%+ of the premium for profit/overhead. Wow.
Developer Zone --> Downloads --> Take me to the Community Downloads
This is the same Zack Anderson that built the warcart (http://web.mit.edu/zacka/www/warcart.html) and created the fiasco with the charlie tickets. He is quite an impressive hacker.
Zillow hardly makes the role of a real estate agent obsolete - first off, their Zestimates are no where near correct in a lot of markets especially Today with all of the foreclosures and short sales. Second, the process of purchasing or selling your home isn't any easier because of zillow - only marketing a home is easier.

A consumer friendly solution is needed - when we purchased our home last year, the amount of times I needed to initial and sign documents and then sign again after changes and again when the conditions were met, and again when we removed the contingencies, etc - and each time Scan & Email or Fax it back to the sellers or a third party; it was just annoying. With all of the e-sign technologies and document collaboration, there has got to be a way to make this process easier, smoother and less archaic.

We got our home for a great price, and used a real estate agent, I could care less whether or not the realtor was removed from the process. What I want removed from the process is the pain.
How To Speed Up Windows Vista
Like any windows, windows vista has turned on unnecessary features. You can get rid of some windows features, that you don´t need and speed up your vista.
I'm not sure why you are being downmodded.

wrt objection 1, I think Smalltalk goes against the model he wants. Methods are "messages", and eventually one object has to handle the "message". CLOS is slightly different -- the message is sent to the MOP, which does whatever it wants to to handle the message. Usually, it finds an applicable method and calls it, but you can override that if you want. The key distinction is that the class never cares about messages -- the MOP does.

I agree with you on point two. I should clarify that objects are not just "opaque structures with slots and metaclasses" -- they can be anything you want. I have a Moose metainstance class that stores integer fields as bit offsets in an integer (or bit vector, if you prefer). So your data looks like a number, except it has some type information (and a metaclass) associated with it. I really can't think of any way to construe that as a bad thing; if you want to use OO to manipulate the data, you can. If you want to treat it like a regular integer, you can. Everyone's happy.

Your third point is very good. Smalltalk completely removes the concept of files, and therefore you can group things together however you want. This is really orthogonal to OO; you could group functions inside a browser too. But OO helps keep things organized, which is always good.

Anyway... I agree with you. It really bugs me that there is so much uneducated hate for OO out there.

Everyone should be required to use CLOS and Smalltalk before they rant about how much they hate OO. :)
mattobrien's explanation was awesome. A lot about the current crisis was demystified for me in an episode of This American Life: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=3...

I'd recommend this to anyone who's looking for a well-explained overview. Set aside an hour or so to give it a listen.
What about compiling ActiveMerchant to Python?

http://github.com/why/unholy/tree/master
Check your layout in FireFox... it's not happy. Good design though.
I'm working on the motorcycle equivalent at MotoListr.com.
> you could have long-time lurkers with no karma that are unable to submit and that could be a problem

I think think that's a problem. If someone is just a lurker they aren't really fully a member of the community the way a poster is. And when has posted plenty of comments, gotten up-arrows for some and down-arrows for others, they have a better idea of what community standards are.
I think it should be at least karma >= 50
This gets worse and worse; now we're quibbling over $20. Yes, 1 GB will suck. Please go away and come back when you are serious.
With adblock and ad sales down the paid model seems more palatable.
We Are What We Do Not Automate
Categories or Tags or both?
HubPages.com, the startup where I work, has recently added three-level categories in addition to tags. This goes against the much of the current thinking in web design right now (for example gmail).

We found in our experience that tags are not enough. We believe that adding categories in addition to tags will increase search engine traffic and make it easier to navigate between "hubs" (our term for articles published on HubPages).

What do you think? Do categories have a place in web sites or are tags enough? So far, the response to HubPages has been mostly positive (see blog.hubpages.com).
How would we do that after the entire human race was wiped out by not being able to use their credit cards?
10 of Microsoft's 10000 patents (who knew they invented the floppy-disk PDA?)
Why iPhone isn't enterprise ready
UI is an interesting problem.

The ultimate solution is to have business metrics drive your UI changes, usually in the form of an A/B test. Then you have a clear winner. This A/B would be run separate from the roll out structure (and indeed, we do LOTS of A/B tests).

Sometimes that's not possible, for a new feature or for content without a clear business metric to evaluate for. Either way we often have someone manually test new UI, so that we're not exposing users to something fundamentally broken. We usually do this by using the existing deploy system, but turning the frontend on only for QA users.

In the end, you do what works and is cheap, and that's usually something slightly different for every project.
Never said it was easy ;-)

But you're absolutely right - the sales cycle is very different. Not only do you have looong lead-times, but you also have to understand all the corporate bullshit, and weird decisions that get made based on the sometimes irrational behaviour of big corporations.

But if you do it right you can make big-corp pay for your development. If you sell it well some companies will give you the opportunity to sell them something you have yet to make, and that they full-well know will make your company very profitable. Nix the VC, go straight to the customer, and make them pay up front.
Twitter: Nothing to Report Just Yet
Nice ... but isn't the "headache" usually just a symptom of the time or money issue?
Thanks so much for taking the trouble to tell me why it's impractical, hard to prove and not interesting. I'll probably remove the webpage. I'll move onto my other (software) projects.
Wait... what?

Looks like InnoDB supports transactions, no?
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/innodb-transaction-mo...
FYI, 1 gig is fine for windows 7.
I would love to see that post. The first question most people ask me is "How do I get there?" and I don't have a great place to point and say "start here"

A well written concise introduction to continuous integration / constant testing would be a boon to this community.
The insurance industry is a technological dinosaur. Many opportunities here.
I once suggested a virtual MIDI interface in WinUAE (the Amiga emulator), after having implemented one in a C64 emulator (Vice). This was mainly for Bars & Pipes (by Todor Fay, who worked on DirectX). They did it, too!
At the time it made perfect sense, however given the current climate it no longer does. His contract is up in 2 years, where I assume he'll transition to a part-time afternoon show, which will leave the lucrative morning drive spot open for a newcomer (or will still be dominated by Stern replays)
Roll of the Dice.com
I think there is plenty of proof that people will pay for things on the internet. However, micropayments, especially "1 cent to read a blog," etc, are worthless. Content is not worth a penny and the hassle of a microtransaction. Your content is either worth at least one or two hundred times as much (aka a buck or two), or it's worth nothing and should be posted for free. (Or you should be otherwise bundling your content up into large enough chunks or highlighted portions that the payment is worth your customer's time to make.)

Price as barrier to entry is less of a concern than people think. The real issue for customers is the presence of a new container of content which must be paid for. It's getting over the barrier of actually paying that's an issue. If you have something of value, and make the barrier of entry to unlock the content via payment extremely low, people will pay for it.*

The "If your content isn't going to be free it had better be DAMN CHEAP!!!" mentality comes from the very loud, very wrong Slashdot-types who said the iPod would fail because it wasn't $89 and iTunes Music Store songs weren't gonna sell unless they were $0.15 each. They seemed to do fairly well. People are used to capitalism. A good price -- when paired with a good, desirable and confidently presented product -- indicates quality.+

If you tell your customer that you think your blog post is worth a penny, or that your newspaper is worth 5 cents, (plus the time it would take to actually pay for the product) why on earth is a customer going to think there is any merit to your content?

* Even a pre-signed in one-click "deduct a $0.05 from my microtransaction purse" is a barrier to entry. It's a small one, but you're still asking people to commit to buying something.

+ Obviously by "a good price" I mean a price which isn't so stupidly high that everyone has decided you're ripping them off, or a price so low that you are presenting your product as below-par, a knockoff, or otherwise worthless.
At least for chase, they will happily send you an email every time there is a transaction on your account. If you want a URL to post to, pull up the history of the account and just refresh that.
I've read your post on unit tests, and I didn't understand what you were trying to say.

Were you saying don't write automated tests that test your code, instead focus on monitoring the actual production invironment?

Or were you saying that specifically the "unit test" class of automated tests are not worth their time?

I can imagine a system that monitors the business metrics well enough to prevent defects from slipping into production (it's a stretch, metrics are soft and squishy moving targets), but I can't imagine using only those metrics to find every bug you ever slip into production. Metrics are so distant from the bug that caused their downturn; you'd waste so many cycles debugging. The gap between writing the code and finding the problem would be much larger than if unit tests found them; that has to slow things down as well.
The completely unrealistic way to solve this problem would be with Mobile IP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_IP

But I don't know if that has ever really been used outside of a research context.
That ruling only applies to the RSUs they give out to employees. If you check out the last page, it's quite explicit that normal Facebook shares and options aren't exempt.
> smooth out their financial numbers

So how will they fail if they don't have access to it?
assets != cash. Also, if the cash reserves die out, they will probably fall short of the reserve requirements in place.
On patents in general, Wikipedia says: 'Typically ... a patent application must include one or more claims defining the invention which must be new, inventive, and useful or industrially applicable'
Well, I shouldn't be shocked, but Twitter really gets "PR" in the new age.
Wow, I can't even begin to tell you how misinformed you are.

Rails is not geared towards web apps, and Django is not geared towards web sites. Both tools are what you make of them; just because Django includes a built-in admin interface doesn't mean it has to be "rejiggered" to build anything else. Both, as full-stack frameworks, provide nearly exactly the same set of tools to the developer: an ORM, a templating language, a routing framework, and the glue that ties everything together.

You are also patently wrong about the importance differences being at a higher level. If you are only using the shallow, superficial features available to you, you are missing out on the differences that do make each framework unique. Anyone who has spent any quality time with either framework can tell you that these "high level" features (e.g. Rails scaffolding or Django's Admin) are almost never used in a real project. Next time, I would highly recommend going beyond the 15-minute screencast and actually reading into the guts of your framework. Who knows, maybe you could become a professional one day ;).
Excess inefficiencies if they have to adjust immediately. They would have to unroll all the debt in a few days instead of the months it would take to unroll the debt in an orderly fashion.
Without a functioning financial system, a modern economy can't grow.

This is a good line - with all the (justifiable) negativity around at the moment it's easy to forget that we still need (good) finance to move forward.
Cms for user moderated picture postings
I am going to build a website for a friend that resembles passiveaggressivenotes.com Basically, this means a moderated picture gallery from registered users. My friend will have to maintain, so I was thinking about doing it with a CMS. Any reccomendations for this type of project?
visas / immigration.

The perceived value of immigrating is high enough that the price is not objectionable to many clients. They just want to make sure it is done right. In a market I used to work, by far the most successful immigration lawyer was regarded as a sleazy guy by most of the other immigration lawyers. But he projected WEALTH, and that was perceived by clients as the ability to succeed with a case. So he had plenty of income to maintain the trappings of wealth, and the cycle continued. Most immigration lawyers have enough technique to do most cases, yes, and many clients (if they are good at reading English, which is not a given) could look up laws and forms on the Web and do their own cases themselves, but immigration lawyers trade partly in peace of mind.
Insurance industry: I have a close friend in the industry and he says there are tons of ways to improve the application, binder, and other processes.

Online learning: Large edu and enterprise players like Blackboard and Saba are due for a disruption IMO (I think the ball is already rolling on this). Schools and enterprises don't want to keep paying huge licensing and infrastructure fees, and students should be able earn an online degree from a combination of online courses (from multiple schools).

Online classifieds: I know this has been discussed here before, but I'm of the opinion that craigslist is due for a disruption of some sort.

Car buying and financing: I just bought a car for my wife. Even though you can apply for financing online, the entire process was a total pain. There needs to be a "TicketStumbler for cars" that includes a financing and insurance option. I should be able to apply for traditional financing as well as peer-to-peer (ala prosper.com) financing all in one swoop. It should pull listings from classifieds, dealer inventories, auto trader, etc.
How to Make Men Spend Longer Time in the Public Toilet Like Women
Blackboard and other proprietary software that colleges use.

Absolutely. My son is a student in an online high school and has taken online classes from other providers. All the competitors in that space are abominably user-unfriendly.
First let me just say this isn't an anti-Obama post. So if you absolutely love him try to hear me out here.

That said the featured post is more about transparency than it is about actually filling the position. On that note I think it's time for the Obama people to realize "Transparent Government" was more a campaign promise than an actual reality.

I mean, he probably intended everything he said but in reality you just can't make it happen. No matter how smart, how well intentioned, how good hearted, or whatever. You still need to play politics and that goal is contrary to complete transparency.

Let me give an example. Money is going to have to be cut from a lot of good programs. So say you're President Obama and you have Aids research and Cancer research and you have to cut money from one. Cancer kills about 570,000 Americans a year (http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Many-People-Die-From-Cancer-Ea...) while Aids has killed about 570,000 since the Aids epidemic began (http://www.avert.org/statsum.htm).

So the President, being forced to pick one, cuts funding for Aids research and suddenly loses the vote of every person who uses that as their hedge issue. Politics is a game of pushing people's emotional buttons and that's simply incompatible with the very rational idea of Transparency.

If Obama supporters really want him to succeed they'll need to come to terms with the fact that he won't be able to fill some of his more ambition promises in the current economic crisis. This woman's view of what a National CTO will be is almost certainly going to be one of those unfulfilled promises.

(I can almost feel myself losing Karma points for this post but it doesn't make it any less true)
The world of Web development is oh so much larger if you just look around a bit.
That seems extremely unlikely at best, verging on a conspiracy theory.
Equeue compared to Lwt
Just in my own experiences at work and with friends, I've found the opposite to be true - people pick up the language to use the framework and haven't met anyone that knew either language before choosing which one to use. Plus both frameworks (especially Rails) have a history of encouraging people to take that route as well.

That also partly explains why I started a Ruby tutorial ages ago and never got around to finishing the series, even though I still get pretty good googlejuice from it:

http://alabut.com/nonsense/2005/03/ruby-self-tutorial-day-1-...
There's already many competitors and real estate isn't exactly an awesome market segment to be in right now. Zillow, Redfin is actually doing something different (replacing one of the agents and returning savings to customer).

Methinks boat left the dock on this one.
Well lets try to answer the question then. The classic disruption model requires cases of 'non-consumption' to start consuming the alternative product.

Who just can't afford/manage ERP but could use it? I think there are a bunch in this sphere.