skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's 100% true. My uncle owns a fairly large gas/service station. The profit from gas sales effectively paid the rent for the service station. He paid all of his employees (and himself) with money coming from the car repair business. The gas pumps were irrelevant to his own profit, but required a lot of hassle/wasted time.

About 2 or 3 years ago he bought a larger building, hired more mechanics, and didn't build gas pumps. They're just not worth the hassle.

For perspective, the credit card companies made more money per gallon than he did as the gas station owner.
And then your next startup is called Banana. Great idea!
>The other car companies will have non-tech retards as ceo's and will always be playing catch-up.

This is false. Most car companies have been researching electric vehicles since the 60's or 70's when the first oil crises happened. And as for technology, Tesla is not actually ahead, in neither range nor charge up speed.

As an example, this is also a "Startup" thing. An electric bus, that gets better range (everything considered) and faster recharge times:

http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/video/proterra-ecoliner-electr...
Thank you for sharing! Upvoted.

That lucky office you mentioned apparently casts it's glow on its surroundings as well. La Boulange opened a new cafe next door, and 1-2 weeks later announced that Starbucks had bought out the entire bakery chain for $100 million. (I'm sure they had already struck the deal, but the lucky locale makes for a better story!)
Any opinion about SVG? the last time I used it on Google Chrome was very buggy (objects leaving a trail behind)
What's with the categories? They don't seem to be used in either of the primary .m files (cmd+f "mtl"), so they aren't really needed. Do one thing well.

If you want to make a higher order function library, that's fine, but I don't see what it has to do with mapping data to JSON, and I don't think that users of the library should have to get a bunch of modifications to the standard container classes to get the nice model class. Why not split it into two libraries?
>> jruby pidigits.rb 2000 takes 4.132s <<

Why did you measure a workload 1/5th of the workload shown on the benchmarks game webpages?

Each program page shows measurements for 3 workloads, in the case of pi-digits 2,000 6,000 and 10,000.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/program.php?test=pidig...
Election analyzed through Twitter data
Sorry, I didn't realise you were looking for sugar coated feedback. If 15 levels isn't enough to hook your customer into paying a few bucks, then you're doing it wrong.

If you still think giving away 100 levels made any logical sense, then I won't waste time trying to help you out with clear cut advice based on 3 years of app store experience.
Aw, that's precious. Defending the Mormons against charges of bigotry by saying it's the gay rights people who were trying to redefine marriage. coughpolygamycough And you're talking as if marriage hasn't been under rolling redefinition since Gutenberg. Women owning property, being allowed to have a profession, and having the right to vote changed marriage way more than allowing two women to get hitched and have babies.

Also, I don't think the campaign against gay marriage can be anything but bigotry. It's exactly analogous to the campaign against interracial marriage: Religious actors try to use the power of the state to stop people from doing something they think is icky. And they're doing it on the basic of intrinsic characteristics, and with absolutely zero demonstration of harm to anybody. Irrational devotion to prejudice against a group is precisely bigotry.
It's likely server issues. I don't believe the Ancestry.com acquisition will change anything with FamilySearch.
Are you seriously claiming that Linux is "not seen at all" in the "deep web" (in-house corporate development) ?

Hyperbole aside, obviously.

Or am I misunderstanding you?

BTW, if your experience is mostly in the UK then that might explain this viewpoint. It's much less true in the US in my experience.
Golden tip: go and play some Wordfeud. You'll come up with tons of nonsensical abstract words and names that have an interesting sound to them while trying to place your letters. I'll bet you some of those would make for great company names.
With medicine/drugs, there's a financial incentive to call it safe, so there actually does need to be some amount of scrutiny there with risks of enforcement.

With earthquakes, I'd hope that anyone who passed 9th grade science would have laughed this out of court.
Congratulations to all devs, committers, documentation maintainers, supporters, donators, secret lovers and overall alternative ruby enthusiasts.
Musk has a startup (SolarCity) that specifically deals with solar panels and is providing the panels for the Tesla supercharging stations, so he has deep knowledge of the field. He's clearly managed to make the numbers work out, or he wouldn't have made it free to charge.
We use intercom and have been very happy with it. I must admit though being able to combine those features with the power of mixpanel is intriguing.
Call it Eolas, the Irish/Gaelic word for knowledge.

Interestingly yours is the first site listed when Googling "Irish/Gaelic word for learning" so grats on your SEO.
Is this the computer that doesn't have a Delete key?

We already had one moronic brand making those, which was one more than the world needs.
Why was the headline changed?

That is a puzzler. The OP submitted the article with the original article title (that's how I saw the submission when it was a new submission). The guideline here

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

is

"If the original title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link anyway.

"If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate '10 Ways To Do X' to 'How To Do X,' and '14 Amazing Ys' to 'Ys.' Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. 'The 5 Platonic Solids.'

"Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

The last paragraph quoted above appears to be the newest revision to the Hacker News guidelines, just a few months old, and perhaps that guideline revision is so new that some curators here have habits that go back to an older version of the guidelines, which suggested more rationales for retitling articles on the part of submitters or curators. I really like original article titles whenever possible, myself,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4624933

and the BBC is a very reliable source with reasonable titles.
>> I'd argue they are cumulatively more valuable than the above.

If you're trying to suggest Windows Enterprise applications have more cumulative value than everything else that's running on Linux than I think this is more telling of your limited world view than any kind of reality. Java ranks nearly 3x higher than .NET on the latest TIOBE Programming Community Index http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... and that doesn't include all the other languages running on the JVM platform. In the Open Source space, .NET doesn't even make it on the top 10. How you've concluded Windows provides more cumulative value should provide great content for a MS Facts whitepaper.

>> EsEnt, AppFabric, IIS7 ARR, PowerShell cover your concerns above all of which are scriptable and automatable.

These options pales in comparison to what's available on Unix, which are much more popular and require much less tooling and are more scriptable. Big tooling falls down when you need to do something that's not supported out of the box.

Let's identify big companies that rely on Windows? and I'll come up with a few names that host on Linux. We can start with the worlds most valuable companies and work our way down.

>> Also your deployment model sounds odd. Do you check in your production artifacts/dlls and configuration? Do you build on your production boxes?

We use the repos as they are on Git, every project on Git is self-hosting either in NuGet /packages or contained in the top-level /lib folder (we're moving to NuGet for all future projects). We're currently building with xbuild on our servicestack.net server but as we've recently got Mono/Windows TeamCity CI Builds for ServiceStack's projects, we'll be switching to CI deployments. Also unless it's not perfectly clear, because we deploy from Git only the delta's are pulled in each deployment, so libs that don't change aren't pulled.

>> Azure cuts it for the ramp up phase of your product if you factor in the above. We did a proper cost analysis.

I'm still not buying it. Maybe it makes sense for a Windows-only .NET dev team, but factoring all costs Azure would still cost us at least 11x more.
I'm still missing what makes it unfair. Are other modes of AES potentially faster? Does AES provide something that stream ciphers don't? Are Salsa20/Chacha20 unable to be compared to anything because they're native stream ciphers that look like a block cipher in CTR mode under the hood?
If you haven't already, you must watch "The Saga of Biorn", it is surprisingly relevant:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV5w262XvCU
> BUT that is happy to let you write a Windows program or a Mac program or a Linux program if that's what you want.

Care to explain the last bit ? Because Java also lets you invoke native code (and hence platform specific) if you want to.
Sounds like a great network effect that boosts the usefulness of the site as more people join.
>> If you want the JVM to use less RAM, you can turn down the maximum heap size. <<

That's how the programs used to be run with JRuby 1.6.7 and with those same limits the n-body program failed to complete within 1 hour using JRuby 1.7 -- so the brittle RAM limits were abandoned.
Caution and understanding is necessary when choosing any infrastructure provider; AWS is not a special case.
US federal agency dropping 17,000 BlackBerrys in favor of iPhones
I'd like to think the smiley face would make that obvious, but I guess not.
Right but the point is that Samsung makes them, but doesn't put them in their own devices. Imagine Samsung being able to put a retina-quality display in the galaxy tab, or in a samsung laptop. Samsung already manufactures the screens, the only question is whether or not the rights to the technology belong to Samsung, or Apple.
This is why you should think about a multi region architecture to prevent these types of service interruptions.
I love the audio too. Sounds like a real underwater recording. Is it? Creepy (in a good way)
>I see no reason why it wouldn't work.

The highest end Apple products are still affordable by most people. Sure it might be an expensive investment but definitely affordable. So with great marketing they managed to get not only the previous Apple fans but also managed to convince most people that the markup for an Apple iSomething is worth it.

I don't know if the same thing is feasible for Tesla cars which are definitely not affordable by most people. Also, the same marketing techniques might not work for the demographic that would buy a Tesla.
What might be a good idea for Javascript-heavy web apps is to make an Ajax call to the server to see if a refresh of the page is required.
Thanks Jason and everyone else updating us on Startup School 2012. Really good to still hear this stuff without actually being there.

I can just imagine how funny it must have been for Travis Kalanick to whip out the Uber revenue graph like that haha.
I use C# w/ Windows Server for game servers but I'm in the process of migrating to Linux. Why? Because everything else I have runs Linux so managing an extra OS is a lot of overhead. And Windows Server automation is hugely painful compared to Linux. With Linux automation for example, you can go from Ansibel which is a wrapper around SSH to Chef/Puppet that are very very powerful but much more complicated. With Windows, you get crappy Chef/Puppet support and the MS automation tools (from what I've seen) are too complicated for most people. Even setting up remote Powershell access is painful compared to setting up sshd. In short, there's monetary reasons for running Mono as well.
hn doesn't have a database capable of master/slave as such...so I think this will be harder if it ever becomes popular enough. I don't think it gets enough traffic it's ever likely to exceed what you can fit in a single box, from what I know.
I thought at least Reddit had learned the "don't use EBS" rule from past outages - I was bitten by the April/2011 outage and switched everything over to instance storage shortly thereafter.

For most applications I think architecting EBS out should be straightforward - instance storage doesn't put a huge single-point-of-failure in the middle of your app if you're doing replication, failover, and backups properly.

And EBS seems to be the biggest component of the recent AWS failures upon which they've built a lot of their other systems.
Great post! And how refreshing: founders that don't just squander investors' money, but actually live paltry lives while trying to grow.
Welcome to Austin! Austin resident here...

Sixth street lost a couple of staple bars, that said, if you come on a weekend avoid sixth street. Its like Bourbon Street yet somehow worse, probably all the college students.

However Casino el Camino has great burgers. Eastside Showroom for cocktails (go before last call and ask for the Final Word). AppSumo is right on sixth street, email them and say hi!

As for music:

Do512.com and austin360.com will have schedules of whatever strike your fancy. If you want more mellow, Most bars on South Congress, (here, despite geographic density "south" you refers to anything south of the river) are great.

Ill update this post more when im not on a smart phone.
JURASSIC PARK - Evolution of a Raptor Suit with John Rosengrant
Are there plans to open this up worldwide in the future? (and if so, do you have a non-committal, handwavey estimate of how far in the future? A few months/a lot of months/a few years/a lot of years?)
What are they called?

I'm only aware of FullContact but would love to learn about some more companies that do this.

Searching for it on Google doesn't really seem to work well...
By default, these messages will not go to their inbox. It will go to the "other" box (aka spam :) so unless the user will go in and check it manually they will never see it (no notifications etc.)
Also natively supported in WEKA. (Not that WEKA is easy to use.)
But, especially at an early stage, the rate at which equity can enter your name is determined partially by the name itself.
You can do this, depending on your database. I wrote a blog post going over some of the techniques you can use with the AWS stack a while back - http://bit.ly/TD13iH
Hi, thanks so much for the feedback!!

This is great timing since I'm actually working on revamping ALL the marketing copy. I agree completely with your points — I got wrapped up in "this is what a wedding startup would say!" rather than what is actually awesome about us.

Why we're charging monthly for a one off occasion: We actually have a monthly charge and a one-off charge, and our conversions are roughly split between the two. People who are just a few months out from their wedding tend to pick the monthly option, and people who are far out tend to pick the charge-once option. That said, I'm not justifying this — we're still (and probably always will be) in the process of testing out new pricing!

Good points about what you pay for. We actually work with a little over 1,500 wedding vendors (and almost 500 wedding photographers), and we're almost done with our vendor integration into the planning app.

Thanks so much for poking at WeddingLovely and spending time writing your feedback!
I agree. it would be great to hear from smart people who made critical mistakes, the cautionary tales often warned against, but not often told by the players who played and lost.

Jessica Livingston's book (http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-ebook/d...) goes into some detail on this topic. Very insightful and enlightening.

I did meet one audience member at startup school during lunch this weekend who briefly related his story of a recent startup failure and commented that he was recovering from the painful experience. Is it too painful to share??? Could be. But it is the one out of fifty 10 minute conversations I remember most.

Only the very brave are willing to share.

Let's celebrate failure, though, because it is only through many small failures that the path to big success makes itself known.
Windows users trying to write code for *nix always makes me laugh.

Isn't Mono blocked by anti-virus programs? They should.
1. Calculate the odds that a company with the resources of Amazon will be able to provide you better overall uptime and fault tolerance than you yourself could.

2. Calculate the cost of moving to the Oregon AWS datacenter.

3. Reassure your investors that outsourcing non-core competencies is still the way to go.

4. Try to, er, control, your inner control-freak.

;)
Website Traffic Checklist – 25 Concrete Ways to Get Website Traffic
When building a WordPress website one of the big things that you will be thinking about is website traffic. Without traffic your blog or website can become a deserted platform in amongst this huge Internet jumble.

Not one person I can think of would build a website for no one to see. Therefore anyone that has a website or blog needs website traffic. It doesn’t matter what you are doing with the traffic, because that’s your problem, but we can agree that you need it.
> some applications (like Dropbox) don't like to use an SD card.

I'm probably just being dense, but why would an application want to know anything at all about the hardware underlying a directory? (It could probably parse /etc/mtab and make an educated guess, but why go to the trouble in the first place?)
They could, but their goal isn't to make money on test drive fees; their goal is to sell cars.
I don't know the details of YC's investments, but usually investors get diluted on each successive round, which means that YC probably doesn't own 7% of AirBnB, but much less than that.
Technically I've done both, since WeddingLovely was in the 500 Startups incubator a year ago. ;) Just haven't raised any more money since, which is another long and complex story that I should probably write about too!
Github: Latest commit per directory
Failing to block innovation is still a waste of resource and time, although they are less damaging than successfully blocking innovation.
then how come when east goes down, it always seems to take down all the AZs in the region, never just one AZ? As long as the region fails like a single datacenter, i'll think of it like a single datacenter.
I don't think the parent was suggesting that Dropbox was specifically saying "this is an SD card, I will die now."

More likely, it's pattern of fs access aren't ideal for an SD card.
For folks who are interested in this even more, this is a fantastic site about written languages.

http://www.omniglot.com/

and a great text

http://www.amazon.com/Languages-World-Introduction-Asya-Pere...
I read the whole thing and learned absolutely nothing.

It would have been nice to have a conclusion at the end... :)
From AbeBooks' web site:

AbeBooks Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. AbeBooks, an online bookselling pioneer, was acquired in December 2008 and remains a stand-alone operation with headquarters in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and a European office in Dusseldorf, Germany.

http://www.abebooks.com/books/CompanyInformation
Yeap, it's down the day I really need it!
Companies add DRM because people pay for DRM-ed content. Stop giving them incentives* and they'll stop.

Buyers, not pirates, are doing this to themselves.

* (this doesn't mean 'pirate'. Buying physical copies or just abstaining are valid alternatives)
Hey guys you know what is a cool name? HeyZap. There's a lot of names you could call your company, like Zap Hey, or Hi Nap. But I really like HeyZap. You know what looks awesome? Lighting bolts. You know what name has a Z which looks like a lighting bolt? HeyZap. Did I mention HeyZap is a cool name? Do you like the name HeyZap? If you're trying to name a company I think you should pick a name which really has PUNCH, something disruptive, something like HeyZap. Don't you think HeyZap is a great name? Obviously you're not going to think of a name as cool as HeyZap, but if HeyZap wasn't already taken you should really think about naming your company HeyZap. Has anyone heard of HeyZap? It has an awesome name, it's HeyZap. We really put a lot of effort in; we tried HelloBuzz, HiZing, GreetingsEbullience but we finally decided on HeyZap. It's just so catchy, HeyZap, HeyZap, HeyZap.
Can we trust the cloud services?
Hacker loses job at Apple
It's not simply the battery tech. It's all the extra interior stuff like display etc. It's the total package, like apple does. Plus, just like with apple and jobs, or virgin with branson, there's an extra brand factor developing with musk.
Stripe is a decent alternative

https://stripe.com/
I think if you can execute & build out your ideas - it doesn't matter what language they're written in - you have a valuable skill.

Whatever your first language is it will be the hardest, after that, the learning curve isn't as steep. Transitioning to another language is simpler because you're already familiar with the concepts.

Don't get caught up in looking over your shoulder at what else you could be learning. Get caught up in having fun, building & accomplishing something great.
Great looking game, love the music, but I don't want to play a Nazi.
If you truly believe the market is the best way to sort it out, why not let the government compete? Have a single-payer system and let people opt-in. Also, repeal the laws that currently prohibit the government from negotiating drug prices. In a free market, if I'm a major client, I have some leverage to get preferential rates. Then, I'd be all for the market sorting it out. Would you support something like that? My guess is not, which means you aren't really arguing for deregulation, but for a different kind of regulation.
Facebook like Button is a Web Bug
How Windows 8 Changes the Game for PC Security
I expect that some of the time constrained licenses (aka "Book Rentals") will expire even if you aren't connected to the network. The longer term books should be yours permanently, even if Amazon issues a "kill order" - unless you connect to the 'net.
You've missed the point completely. It's not to make money, it's to deal with the OP's problem of get looked over by sales reps. People don't like being treadted like that, that's why they hate traditional car dealers.
Show HN: free-text surveys with automatic analysis
Or, if you stick your "stick" far enough down the toilet you will rain on someone in china. (Er, as interpreted by an American Kindergartner's perspective...)
Show HN: Stop Lying to us Amazon
swappable batteries

-- What is the weight, though? @450 pounds?[1]

___________

[1] edit: source of estimate - Honda s2000 with A123 li-ion was discussed in thread below, estimated battery pack weight was approx 460-500lbs. Car had more hp, though.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4536452
The project was a group effort, but I will take credit for the synonyms part in particular. There's more background on it here[1] and I'd be happy to answer questions.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/helping-computers-und...
I'd guess they COULD do that, but it would be a horrible customer experence and I'd guess they would drop a few billion of market cap if they did that.
Haven't had a chance to test it on IE yet and I don't have access to a machine running it at the moment. I'd be glad if somebody else would be willing to test it or the demo on IE and tell me how it runs.
I agree. I don't see any reasons why I would choose to use Windows 7 over Windows 8. Even if you don't use the Metro interface for anything besides launching apps, it is still a better OS.