skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is very insightful.

The startup I'm working on now is in the project management space, which I think is an unsolved and hard problem. And it's definitely something people want. When I started working on it I thought that it would be pretty easy, but I found that when I asked 10 project managers they all wanted subtly different software.

Everybody wanted good project management software, but unfortunately everyone I talked to also had differing opinions on what this would include. The hardest part was getting the details right, not from a coding perspective which is pretty simple, but from an interface and usability perspective. Nobody sees the code anyway.

Solving a problem in detail, and doing it in a way that people want is really really hard. Often much harder than coding it.
They do say that the 300MB is a soft limit to prevent abuse and that open source projects needing more should get in touch.

And with the projects you mention, I'd take a guess that they are actively trying to woo them because of the publicity it would get.
Some performance benchmarks: http://gist.github.com/64391

They're not conclusive, but give you an idea of relative performance.
I realize this is totally derailing the original topic, but I'd just thought I'd correct one incorrect assumption you've made:

Fortunately, all ingredients in a recipe are usually given in 'cups'.

Not even remotely true. Especially with "cups" of water and "tablespoons" of chilli the results can be rather interesting ;)
Remind YC:  It's Valentine's Day.  Don't forget the flowers and card for your s.o.
I'm just saying, some of us can be a little forgetful of such things...
Ask YC: What to do when someone copies your text?
Hi there. They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery. We've just found a competitor (with a nicely designed site) who has taken our text and only slightly re-worded it. Most of it still reads the same as our site and I recognized it as it as it reads just like I write :) To be honest, they've created a good sales site (and I have no issues with competition) but its annoying that they couldn't think up their own ideas for their FAQs or text. Just curious to see what people here would suggest or do I just ignore it and push our own product/site as much as possible.?
"Web 2.0" was coined by a publisher to sell more books and conference tickets.
Google is currently down for me. Tried through proxies and multiple browsers. Google Fail.
Do No Evil... Except on valentine's day.

MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Or is that xoxoxoxoxox?
As The Economy Sours, LinkedIn’s Popularity Grows
Yo Mighty Brand Guy
I post this here because I think I checked out your site here, and as a warning to anyone tempted to do something as idiotic as automatically trying to send me a reminder.

A. This whole idea sucks - I don't want your junk clogging my inbox unless I ask. I know this is frequently a technique used by many sites forcing me to opt-out of emails, but quit it. If I want email updates form you I'll ask.

B. Now your site is effing broke and spamming me incessantly and I can't even reach it to kill any future emails. This will cause me to never use your service again.
I couldn't open the page at all due to virus warnings.
Beware, wbr is not part of the HTML 4 standard (I'm not sure it's part of any standard). The other tags are standard.
Relational Databases Run the World
Flagged for the horrible JS that pops up when I want to close that tab and says "Are you sure?" Yes, I'm freakin sure.
For its time, sure, but the problem is the hype hasn't stopped. It is great if you are a film buff, but not so great if you just like films.
ed is one I assumed would be good. I downloaded a windows distribution of it last year for a problem involving massive files. Turns out that particular version of ed is not designed as efficiently as you might expect.
http://www.google.pt/logos/valentines09v2.gif
And even when you think you have all the details right, people change their minds the next day!
Can anyone explain the relationship between 4:3 and 16:9? I know 16:9 is each number in 4:3 squared, but is there a geometric reason/interpretation for this choice?
Yeah, label is great.

You can associate a label with any element without having to nest the element in the label too; just use label's for attribute with the element's ID. It's useful, for example, if you want the labels in one column and the form controls in another.

Make sure to have the label take the maximum available space; if you have a label centered in a table cell you want the label to span the whole cell so it's easier to click on it to select the associated control.
Seaforth 40C18 embedded array processor
SEAforth 40C18 embedded processor has 40 cores and operates at low power. In fact, the company claims that SEAforth uses 28 times less power and runs 240 times faster than other competing systems.

Chuck Moore, the inventor of Forth language is one of the co-founders.
Back when I liked A4 more than US Letter, it was pretty much because I had a deep need to appear sophisticated by making conscious decisions to adopt exotic, European things. See also self-hating Americans who are against GMO and anything the US or any US company does because some Europeans are against it for political or economic – not aesthetic or scientific or otherwise relevant – reasons.

On another note, the original article writer spends a lot of time on paper sizing issues when resizing a PDF to fit on a different paper size is easy.
They have an apology here:
http://blog.mightybrand.com/2009/02/we-goofed/

I can’t say it particularly bothered me—I just had to click one button to get rid of the e-mails—but it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the service.

At any rate, mistakes happen; I hope it doesn’t cause too much backlash for them. I certainly don’t intend to cancel my account.
YouTube - Cehoslovak's journey to Islam
See 2 YC startups hard at work
If you're using bash, the builtin cd -, pushd, and popd are all handier ways of accomplishing this.
yes, the problem is like the famous quote of judge Potter Stewart when asked how to define obscenity: "I don't know, but I damn well know it when I see it"

Users don't know what they want, that is the problem you have to solve. They'll be able to recognise software that solves their problem when they see it, but they have no idea of what it should look like or what it should do when you ask them.

The hard part is taking all the itches you hear about from users, reading between the lines, inferring, asking additional questions, making mock-ups, etc. and creating a good cure for the itches.

I think that successful execution of this is the primary factor in successful software.
What do you mean? It's working on the OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner hardware, albeit with some driver difficulties, but Google is perfectly happy to work with them and include drivers in the mainline Android development tree.

Not to mention there is no "official Google hardware." The T-Mobile G1's are produced by HTC, and are simply the first Android platform to hit the market. There are multiple other manufacturers looking at, or already planning devices based on the Android platform.

As for being "open", it's always still a problem of device makers and carriers insisting on digital restrictions of user freedoms, such as not allowing unsigned firmware to boot on the device. But as far as everything else goes, Android is by far the most "open" platform available for consumer grade devices as we know them.

Note that as an owner of a Neo FreeRunner, I don't yet consider it a consumer-ready device; hence the reason I have purchased myself a G1, as it is the next-best alternative until Openmoko, or some other group, can get their acts together and actually release a worthwhile mobile distribution.
Significant other? Is that one of the things that come along with taking VC funding?

There's a reason people say that the most important thing for a bootstrapper to have is a good divorce lawyer. :-)
PMOG: Passively Multiplayer Online Game
EmEditor ( http://www.emeditor.com/ ) handles large files very nicely. It has a special 'large file controller' that lets you configure in real-time how to access a file. I've edited 4GB text files (global search & replace) and the only slow step is the final 'save' function.
According to the Intel IA-32 Optimization Reference Manual, integer multiplication has a 3 cycle latency. What's "hopelessly inefficient" about 3 cycles?

( Source: http://download.intel.com/design/processor/manuals/248966.pd... )
Ask HN: Online Dating ROI?
I just recently graduated from college, and my two partners and I have been working out of our apartment on our internet startup. When I graduated, I was single and I thought I would just bide my time, devote myself entirely to the company in the near term and hopefully meet someone down the line. I guess I underestimated how isolating it can be to work all day out of your apartment and I've been thinking about using online dating sites, but like many other entrepreneurs, I want to invest my time wisely.

I recently read in Super Crunchers, that eHarmony only creates marriages for approximately 1% of it's user base in a given year. Granted, I'm not necessarily interested in getting married just yet, but that statistic says to me that anyone who values their time shouldn't invest it in online dating (to speak nothing of the dollar cost of paid sites).

Does anyone on hacker news know the relative return on investment for other online dating services (Match.com, okaycupid.com, etc)? Ideally I'd like to get not just the rate of user marriages but also dating outcomes (where users end up dating someone they found online, say, for more than a month). And as a corollary, it might be interesting to know what dating methods work best. For instance, the most efficient investment of my time might be to join a local book club.
What does he means, an hour to spin down? You pay for a minimum of an hour per node on EC2? I wasn't aware of that... why don't they charge per minute (or second, for that matter)?
I strongly support the part about opening up and not keeping your ideas to yourself.

I'll eventually write a post on this, but if you remember Mark Cuban's "open source funding" from a few days ago, there are similarities. I have a good idea for a product and I posted it on Mark's blog. And the idea got written about in 70 newspapers and magazines within 48 hours.

Is anyone copying my idea because it's public? I don't think so.
There was a new series to the radio play fairly recently. Just for anyone who missed that.
Twitter Could 'Go for Years' Without Earning a Dime, Investor Says
Why China Needs U.S. Debt
The base of ten is the most natural one

It probably just seems that way because we're used to it. At some point when designing a system of numbers, 10 was a convenient answer to the question of how many digits to use. This doesn't mean it has a neurological basis.

I searched the Web a little bit for research pointing to a neurological basis for decimal. I didn't find it, but I did find this article on the brain's handling of numbers: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2007/01/6661.ars

I see the base 10 as the only really important base to us humans (machines may have different preferences...)

If communication is ever established with non-human intelligences, it will be important to move beyond speciesism. When aliens finally land, or AI awakens, we should be able to say "Welcome. All your base are okay with us."
Actually... I really like the all-red Google logo. The usual bright primary colors are a bit annoying after a while.
Pretty odd logic you have there.

Why not just go the whole hog and say Metric is obsolete. After all, the chances of aliens in other universes using it is small, so we're likely the only ones using Metric.

edit: The UK is also pretty non-metric.
Same in Japan -- a little less slasherfest.
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/google.com
What's interesting is this is one of the top iPhone games, if not the top. Compare it to one of the top Facebook games. Mob Wars makes 2x that much money every single month, and unlike iShoot, it won't fall off of the store and into oblivion very soon. It probably took far less work to launch too.
It's more high level than SCons, for example they generate Visual Studio project files.
Hearts, while slightly tacky, would have been better.
Aaaaand... it's empty.

Hard work, that is! I wish I could work that hard :-)
It's nice to see the rationales, such as they are, behind each of these, but in the end we are left with a religious argument. There are good points to each, and they have been mentioned over and over and over again.

Very little will change, and arguing the merits of each system is pretty pointless. Better is to be aware of the advantages, the disadvantages, the conversions and the differences.

It's only units. Be aware, and work with them. There's no point in arguing.
As a result of this I decided to give it a try.
http://twitter.com/vyrotek
3 months for both paid and free contracts. The 2 apps submitted during that time was approved pretty quickly.

The first was submitted and approved in the first month (December). But without the contract, both (paid) apps couldn't be sold. Hell, I can't even provide free apps even if I wanted to. The contract paperwork was only completed earlier this week, meaning the apps can now be sold. I blogged about it here - http://motionobj.com/blog/stopping-development-of-iphone-app... - actually stating that I will state any further development of my apps until it was done. Being without without income due to seemingly simple paperwork delays and with 2 more apps ready to be submitted anytime was very frustrating.

Since the App store is very skewed towards apps which are mire recent (by submission/approved date, whichever), it means that the 2 apps which were previously submitted now hang at the back of the app listings which, again due to the way it works, makes it stay there pretty much.

While there are quite a number of glamorous stories about developers striking rich in the greenfield opportunity of iPhone apps development, there are still a few fundamental pitfalls that can break things if you are not careful. Looking back, I'm not sure what I could have done to speed this up actually, since emails sent seems to go to /dev/null. Not all the emails, but those I really needed responding to never received any.
Klaus, HN is a fine place to look for talent. But your post is not so clear. Are you the CTO?..looking to hire a webdev/designer? Are you the non-tech founder looking for a CTO with good webdev _and_ design skills?
So all the torture, repression, and extreme poverty during the Pinochet era was worth is huh? And there HAS been socialist change since Pinochet. I can't believe you'd hold Chili under Pinochet up as an example of what to do. Good lord.
The problem at the New York Times isn't the "Interface" it's their socialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-american political agenda.
New Kindle, same problems: DRM and longevity
Wow, I'm so glad Primer is on this list!
>Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it.

Sorry but this is a sign of ignorance. Read the biography of Condorcet. Coming up with the metric system was extremely smart. In hacker terms, think of it as a beautiful, elegant fully rescursive and reentrant function that replaces mountains of ugly legacy code.

It's amazing that at the time (1790), each profession used their own measurement system. An ounce for one trade was different from an ounce for another trade. You are somewhat aware of that of course because the difference between the US and British gallon carried to this day.

Finding a way to universally cover all measurements (weight, distance, speed, etc.) so that everything is self-consistent is not committee design. It's extremely smart engineering. It removed the need for conversion constants and factors.

In hacker terms, it was a major code cleanup effort.
China produces more than it consumes and ships the excess to the US. This keeps its economy roaring, but we don't send them back other goods or services. Instead we send them US debt. The Chinese value this sufficiently that they stay in a productive mood and keep on producing, and their economy keeps growing. It's sort of like inflation except that instead of everyone in China having more and more printed Chinese money, everyone has more and more US debt.

Am I the only one who thinks something is deeply, fundamentally deranged over here? If the global economy were a computer program, it would be time to throw out the old code and redesign everything from scratch.
I'm loving the keyboard shortcuts.

Hold 's' to see section numbers.
Hold 'a' to see story numbers.

So to see section 4 (US) just type: 14s
Once you're there, to see story 71 once you're there, just type: 71a
"Creatable" seems to be where the wiggle room lies.
Like you, I find grid layouts hard to skim. Yet other people (e.g. in the comments above) seem to like them, and most newspaper sites use some kind of grid layout.

Anybody know of serious usability testing of these grid layouts? I'd be interested to know if I'm just unusual in finding it easier to read down than across.
I don't think they're replacing anything with the Skimmer, it's an experiment.

The news that has been coming out of the newspaper industry recently is mostly comprised of how their model isn't being as profitable as it used to be and their struggle to stay afloat. I actually applaud the NYT for the experiments they've been playing with. The interactive info-graphics, their openness, and little apps like this Skimmer really do set them apart.

I doubt they just invented this and ran with it. I think they're just coming out with new tools and techniques and just seeing what sticks. I don't see anything wrong with that.
This is a fine essay on the importance of having a marketable concept.

That said, I'm a bit concerned that he's overgeneralizing from a biased sample set: His major examples (besides his own comic) are TV series. TV series often take time to get started; they always have. To pick some examples close to the geek heart: Star Trek:TNG had a crappy first season. Babylon Five had a very spotty first season.

There's a reason for this: traditionally, the first half-season of the typical TV show was written by a team of more-or-less freelance writers who worked from a "series bible": A big book written by the series creator that describes the characters and the setting and some of the possible plot directions. [1] They might also have had a pilot script, or even an actual pilot, to work from. But these writers would not necessarily have seen the actors performing in their roles. They might not even have known who the actors were. So their scripts would form an odd patchwork that would be stitched together by the producer, the director, and the actors on the fly. By the third season, however, things would have sorted themselves out: The producers would have found a stable of writers they like, the writers would have seen the older episodes and have some idea of how the actors inhabited the characters, there would be a canon to draw upon, and so on.

---

[1] This has changed, of course, particularly for drama series. Heroes was awesome from the first moment; most people agree that it was all downhill from season one. Other shows -- Firefly, the new Doctor Who -- also exhibit the pattern of initial awesomeness. This is arguably because the economics of TV series production has changed a lot: The rise of DVD box sets has changed the target audience and the product life cycle for TV series, and the way shows are pitched, produced, and financed has changed. And it's probably also because writers and producers have learned from the experience of shows like Babylon Five and X-Files and, later, Buffy: Show runners seem to have a greater tendency to be highly capable writers who are given much more control over the early episodes, often to the point where they will write most of those episodes personally.
I'm pretty sure you're not going to see any startups up at 9am PST. Coding sessions til the early hours of the morning and waking closer to noon are more of the norm.
It's cool, but is it a real solution to a real problem facing news readers?
In-depth reverse engineering of USB missile launcher
Do us a favor and delete any leading spaces in your comment. The two or more space you have is causing...

the word wrap to mess up.

Please have a heart!
Insensitive clod! ;)
Don't listen too much on users - observe them instead
A decent article, but artfully skirting the edge of the linkbait zone: "Going blind" is typically thought of as a permanent thing. Better to have said "going temporarily blind".
The title (which is the original title), is extremely misleading. The article itself states - "Google says the company "does not make money" from its application store." and "the remaining amount goes to carriers and billing settlement fees".

Google takes $0. Directly, i.e.
> Certainly possible, but the difference is is that regulatory capture by small biz creates an even playing field and can prevent dominance

Except in practice this form merely creates inefficiency that the rest of us get to pay for.

Regulatory capture works to the advantage of the incumbents vs the rest of us, independent of the characteristics of the incumbents.

Me - I don't care about the incumbents, big or small. I see no reason why they should get govt's thumb on the scale.
I understand why this is on HN (eyes are cool and one of the best-known complex biological computational systems, though we've got a ways to go), but I'm at a bit of a loss as to why this is news to the Telegraph. I was taught this twelve years ago in Psych 101. Literally, PSY101 at Michigan State, I'm not just using 101 as a metavariable meaning "low level course". What's my point? Whatever root study this was extracted from probably says something even more interesting, or at least more novel, and the reporter must have gotten side tracked by the introductory material.
There was a syndicate at work when the UK lottery started. I persuaded them, well some of them, the rest went along with it without comprehending, that it's better to buy N tickets in one game than one ticket in each of N games. Further, we used a set of 210 tickets that guaranteed a `match 3 of 6', i.e. GBP10 win. (Tickets are GBP1 each.) So the syndicate saved instead of playing and once we had enough we queued and bought the tickets, causing a few grumbles from the Sainsbury's customers behind me in the queue.

We had just one ticket win anything. It matched 5 of 6, and our 6th was one away from the `bonus' ball. So we won about GBP3,500. If we'd have got the bonus, it would have been 100-ish times more!

I tried to convince my fellows that we were lucky, but, instead of saving gradually for the next play, they put some of their winnings back in so they could play the 210 tickets again the following week. They won GBP10.

Actually, 211 tickets were played, because quality checks showed one has been miss-filled but naturally we didn't want to drop the erroneous one. :-)
Other than making the site more usable for people that can see, the label tag can also make the site more usable for blind people or anyone using screen readers. When you associate the label with a input field then the screen reader will know what to read for a particular input field. This is accomplished by adding a for="idOfInputField" to the label.
I don't like it either. It is not very dense at all. I prefer the list of titles for skimming, like the HN frontpage.
what are the 2 startups called?
I think it needs a woman's touch ...
I was hoping that Hacker News would be the place that I wouldn't have to hear about v-day.

You cruel, cruel man...