skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That the microfilming was accomplished is invaluable - and I understand
that the typical offer to various records-keepers from the LDS family
history folks was: "We'll pay to microfilm your records, you get a copy
to keep, and the LDS gets a copy to use." Win-win.

The transcription of records for indexing is also valuable, but less so,
given that volunteers were working from projected microfilm copies of
(usually) hand-written records (some in beautiful but dated hands).

OCR in the 1980s was not adequate, but Soundex indexing helps a lot,
and if you need to search a small area exhaustively, you can see
many of the microfilm copies of records through a site like
ancestry.com or from the digital media available for use at
local LDS family history centers.

The LDS was also strong in producing the GEDCOM data standard,
which is widely (almost universally) used for family tree exchanges,
and the PAF software package (which now has many competitors.)

Note that research into ancestry has an interesting network effect -
while people have 2^N N-parents, once N gets over 4 or 5 it can
become challenging to trace individuals - but the chances that some
other active researcher shares some of those 2^N N-parents start to
increase - and ancestry.com has done well at providing links
to other researcher's public trees when they become available.

This pattern has the effect of encouraging subscribers who have
already found most of their ancestors out to level N, for whatever N,
to continue to subscribe in hopes of finding a new link from another
researcher, or perhaps a new clue in a newly digitized document set.

It will be interesting to see how the decreasing cost of genome
analysis affects family history research - perhaps helping find
distant cousins, or perhaps revealing surprising differences between
a presumed history and the biological record.
It's hard to say from the description of "fairly standard". Libraries with C extensions may not work with JRuby. A few Rails deployment options aren't available with JRuby, and the ones that do support it may treat it like a second-class citizen.

In short, there's potential downsides that may or may not be relevant to your usage. That said, even if you aren't using the Java ecosystem, the garbage collection, performance, and threading in JRuby may be worth your time. It's all up to what you're actually doing.
They already expanded into a DC in Chantilly, one more in Ashburn and I believe one in Manassas. But they lean on Ashburn for everything they do, and a small problem results in a daisy-chain failure (which because everyone uses Amazon for every service imaginable, means even the smallest problem takes down whole websites)
For the less specialized groups, kind of, yeah.
The emperor has no clothes!
That's interesting that you were surprised that the LDS didn't try any of the usual cult practices of trying to induce you into their fold. Meanwhile, we have a presidential candidate from the same organization...

This might not be an issue if if we actually had separation of church and state in this country, but alas that's a myth (despite what people might want to believe, just ask any grade school CHILD what they do first thing in the morning at school, or look at the currency and see who WE trust etc etc.)

Regardless of any political view, and I'm not advocating any, I'm just picking up on the view that you had cult-like suspicions of a church organization that is a big part of the life of what might be the next President of the most powerful nation on Earth.
The Real Beauty of CSS3 Box Shadows
It's certainly more important to execute on product and market than come up with a good name, however don't discount the importance of a name. Consumers do judge companies by name, and first impressions matter immensely.

Matasano is not a good name for an American company. It is difficult to spell and has no apparent meaning or association. That doesn't mean you can't be successful, but you will have harder time and lose consumers early in the funnel because of various points of confusion about what your company does, the spelling of your name, and what language your founders speak.

Compare mint.com to wasabi.com. Which one will my mother be more comfortable with? Which one will I remember easily? Which one will I go to first if both are equally positioned among a list of alternatives? Which booth will I (or more importantly an average consumer) walk into at a convention?

All of the above is somewhat less important for a B2B company, but still vitally important.

For sure, move forward with your business and product. Don't procrastinate on a name. But do carefully consider what impact your name will have on someone who doesn't know, and probably doesn't care, what your company does.

One analogy - if you want to invite people to a party, are you better off looking like a 60 year old, bald, fat man, or a beautiful 25 year old Argentinian woman? Both can probably get a party going, but one is going to have an easier time, need a less compelling case, and spend less money.
Does anyone here have a link to recorded videos? I would love to see the actual presentations, not just a written summary.
Looks amazing, I bought a copy. :)
At least a few young techies knew it was important...
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/25/ancestry-com-acquires-archi...
http://inflection.com/about/leadership.html
The founders of Inflection were in their early 20's.
What did we expect?

When everything works we all ooh and aah over how great Kindle and a thousand other things like it are. When someone tries to bring a more expensive product to market we scoff and criticize and shake our heads.

Well kids, "cheap" has its price, and the price is shitty, impersonal, bullshit customer service. Amazon has been great at customer service for many years in their physical goods-business, but to push cost down for electronic services, this is what you have to expect.

In the future things will be cheap and human interaction will be at a premium.
Any new technology or novel approach has the potential for abuse. That doesn't mean you shouldn't develop new technologies or novel approaches, though.
Might not be. They might just mean buy 'temporary license' or something like that.
It sounded like pretty engaging conversation. I had a lower opinion of fraternities, but if those are the topics of discussion, well then, society will get somewhere.
Demo uploaded to mediafire because I don't want to completely kill my server: http://www.mediafire.com/?hh5x0jcvvkiwd5i

I tried to get it out fast and just barely tested it, but it should be stable. The demo has three bosses, ~25 areas, and a good taste of the gameplay.

My server seems to be intermittently dying, so Chrome Store link for anybody interested in purchasing (buying through my site would be preferable, though): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/subbania/epnejcjdg...

The demo now lets players skip cutscenes by hitting the Enter/Return key. Z/X/C (or 1/2/3 if you don't have a QWERTY keyboard) control actions and the arrow keys control movement.
I know someone who uses Ancestry.com. You can add as many details about your relatives as you want, upload copies of wills, photographs, etc. A bit like facebook for the dead :-/

Any of your friends or relatives can (by invitation) also view the history of your family that you have generated, for free. They can also receive emails when you update, with links to the new information. If you are really investigating your family, you will have updates every few weeks to months (at least my relative does).

Discussing family is a very popular topic for many people. Extensive family histories might not work for many Americans, who often can only trace their history back a few generations. Many in Europe however can easily trace back to the 1600's or 1700's, when Church records started being kept. This of course varies by country, Ireland, for example has few records earlier than 1800.
Awesome product, but still waiting on agents to remotely deploy installations on laptops that never come to a corporate network.
You sir are a fantastic estimator. The company is public, and their financials are available at:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=ACOM+Income+Statement&an...

$400M is very close to the actual audited number for last year.

I have zero idea why the author failed to mention that is a bid to take an already public company private.
Did you use any existing js frameworks in making the game?

I've been writing a little puzzler/platformer using Crafty JS, and it seems to have a pretty flexible approach.

Fair amount of bugs/undocumented behavior, but hey, I can always go straight to the source. :)
As someone who originally learned to develop with PHP, then hopped around from language to language trying to find something that I could click with that also fixed all the things that were broken in PHP, I eventually landed on Python.

For what it's worth, Python is a great web language, and while sure, there aren't quite as many job opportunities as you might find in PHP, I'd wager that the average pay for the Python jobs you find is higher than the average PHP programming opportunity (even wit Facebook screwing up the averages.)

It's also worth saying that there are tons of Python jobs available, just as there are plenty of big websites built in Python. Regardless, Python is a fantastic learning language, and you'll be in a much better position to learn a new language when you know more about programming in general than you are now (in my opinion).
There's Azure.
Lobbyists have been around since there've been people to lobby, but the more money is involved in getting elected, the more acute the problem becomes.

You can't honestly think the billion dollars required to become president doesn't come with strings attached.

Money buys you influence. Don't think advertising is entirely in terms of media. Campaigns need a lot of people involved, and many of those people have to get paid. Modern media just means you need to spend even more money than you did before.
I fail to appreciate any material difference given that the individual is dead and utterly incapable of accepting or rejecting anything.

If you're expecting a non-passive response from these ancestors, I'm afraid the whole endeavour is a total waste of time and energy. See definition of dead for details.
I couldn't agree with you more. It's really fun to hack a game together in Javascript. I tried out JS + HTML5 two Ludum Dares ago and managed to create something fun within 72 hours[1]. The biggest issue I had at the time was dealing with cross-browser compatibility issues. Although my game would run flawlessly on Chrome, every other browser had at least one issue. I've been meaning to get around to fixing it up, but it's not much fun debugging browser compatibility weirdness...

I suspect most browsers have improved a lot in the time since then. I'd like to use Javascript for another game soon; I really like the language, despite its rough edges.

[1]http://ekun.nukenine.com/two/game.html
The italians on HN might find this interesting: http://evasori.info/ it aims to crowd source tax evasion in Italy.

Their mobile app has recently won an award: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...

(Disclaimer: I've worked directly with several of the people involved.)
second this. When a change involves breaking your promises to people who genuinely relied on them and will suffer as the result - then you have to make sure that they are at least ok with it by giving them alternative options / compensation.

Its not about to be / or not to be inconsistent. It's about making the right choice given new information as well as considering the net effect of the change.
too bad their own dashboard and management interface don't fail over... http://db.tt/BcuoSnPu
That's not the issue here, we include the md5 hash of the content in the url of every javascript / css asset. New pages had all the correct (brand new) urls. The issue is that Google is executing javascript on html pages they downloaded days ago. The only solution I can see is to fire off cloudfront cache expiration requests for all old assets. But that negates the simplicity of including the hash of the content in the url.
There are thousands of volunteers doing this "mechanical Turk"-like work at a pretty impressive pace. http://www.lds.org/church/news/volunteers-make-record-progre...

Also, the tools created to index these records are created mainly by Mormon developers who donate their time.

Interesting story about Mobile apps for indexing: http://tech.lds.org/blog/455-new-familysearch-indexing-app-n...

Disclaimer: I'm a big fan and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon)
Thanks for the link. I've been meaning to get into machine learning and this sounds like a good, tractable problem to start with.
Thanks! That's the only goal I have for it :)
It's supposed to be on http://www.justin.tv/startupschool soon.
Funny, I just did the same: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4685011.
. . . or the problem is inherently complex.
Or better yet, Heroku should offer an add-on "instant failover" service that, for a premium of course, offers a package for multi-site (or, knowing they're 100% AWS, multi-datacenter) deployment with all of the best practices, etc. Seems like a logical next step for them (or a competitor) given the recent spate of outages.
I don't see storage integration as a default. The example talks about having free conformance to the NSCoding interface so you can archive it that way if you don't need the relational baggage. [1] and [2]

Though, there is nothing stopping you from writing your own layer that uses the models here to read and write to another backing store like sqlite.

1. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa...

2. http://www.raywenderlich.com/1914/how-to-save-your-app-data-...
They do NOT "sell" Metro for the desktop.
I feel comfortable arguing that Matasano has never lost a customer early in the funnel because of various points of confusion about what it does.

I am willing to stipulate that there are names that can cost customers if you're a general consumer-facing company. For instance, Casimiroa edulis is the species name for the Matasano plant. If Matasano sold appointment reminder software to people like my mom, and had chosen the name Casimiroa instead of Matasano, we'd have lost business just because nobody could spell the name. It is a true but boring retort to my post to suggest that there are names that will cost customers; of course there are.

But common sense will navigate you away from most of those names. "Braintree" says nothing about payment processing. "Ebay" says nothing about auctions. Those names work regardless.
But he's like Chavez then, who is a nasty commie!

(kidding, no offense, pretty much a commie myself though :))
Sorry to tag on to your comment with a separate thread - but what do you make of the "Freedom Board" [1]? (Cortex-M0+ MCU with 128KB flash, 16KB SRAM, up to 48MHz operation, $13 in stock)

[1] http://www.element14.com/community/community/knode/dev_platf...
Disappointing, but I guess not totally unexpected. Our prod site was down for a bit with many others.
True, and learning on a monday morning is certainly easier than learning during peak hours for some of these companies. It does lead one to reexamine the value of another 9, however. Out of curiosity, does it often cost triple to shift half of the instances/LB's/etc... to another datacenter and implement the proper consistency mechanisms?
I love this comment, but probably for the wrong reason:

For every successful startup that has ran their bank account down to $100, maxed out their credit cards, had trouble fundraising, etc., dozens (hundreds?) more have done the same but ended up in the deadpool.

For me it highlights the insanity of our pursuit. Not only do founders struggle, experience the trough of sorrow, and often not emerge... there are often not even any indicators that things are going to turn around. The feedback you get from being $100 away from failure and $100 away from almost turning around and being huge might often be the same.

It's like fate's deliberate and cruel punishment to those who have elected the startup path, telling you that you can't quit, no matter how bleak it feels, because, well ... you don't even have a way to know if it IS bleak.

It's not over til it's over.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone

EDIT: I see you beat me to the punch.
You have a virtualized platform, on top of which are many pieces like load-balancing, EBS, RDS, the control-plane itself, etc.

You have burstable network connections which by their nature, will have hard limits (you can't burst above 10Gbps on a 10Gbps pipe, for example; even assuming the host machine is connected to a 10Gbps port).

Burstable (meaning quite frankly, over-provisioned) disk and CPU resources.

And if any piece fails, you may well have downtime...

It is always surprising to me, that people feel that layering complexity upon complexity, will result in greater reliability.
It's great to see bigger companies getting reponsive
Absolutely none. Most of my fun comes from solving every problem myself and Subbania was started before such engines and libraries even existed.

However, I probably would recommend something like CraftyJS because it can help take some of the cross-platform troubles off of the developers' shoulders.
>This Chilean system was without a doubt the right solution for the problem

This presumes one can input all the relevant data, the preferences of millions of individuals as expressed by billions of choices every day. It also presumes the people sitting in those funny chairs won't be inclined to "adjust" things.
Studying the world's oldest undeciphered writing
Yes, I can confirm that a lot of what your experiencing is Adobe CS's compromise with the SVG format, and indeed Inkscape is much better in this specific use case. In general, AI predates SVG, and in general is much broader in scope than SVG, especially with regards to integration with the rest of the suite, and blurring of the lines between illustration and photographic effects.
This was the highlight of Jessica Livingston's talk: http://teespring.com/fundraising
The article says the "crowdsourced" constitution was written by 25 delegates. Legislation written Wikipedia-style would be an interesting, if scary, proposition.
Not a fair comparison I've linked here, but if you're looking for popularity, I find google insights insightful some: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=node.js%2C%20ruby%20o...
Yes, it is editorializing. My point is, but I guess too subtle, that the current link text is very much an editorial comment, especially since the content at that link location has nothing to do with the sites mentioned in the link text.
If the cut-off from reddit and hacker news works for the op, then good. But as a general advice it sucks. Reddit and hacker news are both useful and fun. Why get rid of it? The trick is to balance things out, not swinging the axe.
Try running multiple metro remote desktops on two different monitors. You can't.

Metro apps are not made for multiple screens and this is what they are pushing for as future software. All full screen tabs.

There us a lot of hot corner action that is painful when those hot corners are in between the two monitors. I had to offset the screens so I could catch the mouse to hit the start button area.

This is a huge step backwards in multitasking.
To posit a different answer, some of us had kids well before we were bitten by the entrepreneurial bug.

At 35, I don't consider myself even remotely too old to still be doing things, and my daughter will turn 11 next month. That means that she was born about 11 years ago, and frankly, I had no clear idea of a career path above and beyond just working my way up the company ladder. It wasn't that it hadn't been done obviously, but the internet wasn't as prevalent 11 years ago, and there weren't near the resources then as there are now.
Looks cool , I like quirky games.

Since it uses JS , can I use my 360 pad or am I stuck with keyboard?
Interesting. Do you know why is that? Does it have anything to do with the Lisp roots of Amazon technical might?
If anything, I would expect to see Clever and LearnSprout both to enable schools to have a finer-grained control over their data above and beyond their existing integrations with third-parties. At this point, many of those integrations are pretty poorly thought out and, as a result, many schools are likely over-sharing data in order to "just get it done."

Of course, many existing SIS integration tools provide such capabilities, it's just that they are overly cumbersome to implement and use and so very often aren't.

Schools and enterprise businesses have a lot more in common than you'd think...
Yes, because if there's anything the Internet needs, it's more people who remain headstrong in ignorance, to the point of insulting the opposition without investigating alternate views.
We're in the process of porting our Flight Simulator (Infinite Flight - http://infinite-flight.com) from iOS to Android. We originally developed it on Windows Phone.

Porting from WP7 to iOS took a few months, mostly because MonoGame didn't have any 3D support (we added it). We have been slowly porting to Android, it's been pretty good so far, the framework makes it easy and we've had very little issues making external libraries build on MonoDroid.
Xamarin's also been very responsive to our questions and issues.

If you want to see what it looks like, here's a video of what we have lined up for our next update coming out in a few days:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5N_ckb-dXw
What a silly comment.

The idea that proxy baptism for the dead has any effect is predicated on the belief that there is an afterlife and that the individual has the ability to accept or reject the ordinance.
These semi-regular outages are why I am going to use the Google Cloud Platform for my next project.
> If javascript could run outside of the browser, I'd use it for everything.

node.js?
Privacy Preserving FB-Like button in Firefox from Mozilla
Ask HN: Where should I study abroad?
I'm in the third year of my undergrad CS degree, and it's only recently occurred to me that I should study abroad while I have the opportunity. I'm a native English speaker and I understand 90% of Mandarin Chinese conversations, though my Chinese speaking skills have withered away. I'm open to learning an entirely new language. Where do you think I should go?
> Incomplete integration with postgresql.

I'm planning on using it with postgresql - do you have any links to whats not supported with the JDBC drivers ?