skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find the phrase "legally naked" to be suspect. The point is that terms of use statement on a website does not constitute a contract because there is no meeting of the minds and no assent from both sides. Moreover, judges don't accept a unilateral statement that that terms can change at any time. Hence, Zappos' TOS was found to not be a legal contract.

The linked-to article says "Zappos governed by the default legal rules, which aren't nearly as favorable to it. Losing its contract provisions meant Zappos is legally naked."

Naked means unprotected, correct? But the default legal rules include protection, yes? So naked here can only be a euphemism, rather like in the first warm days of spring where I go outside without a coat and feel 'naked' because I'm missing clothing that I expected. Zappos has protections, just not the protection that it wants. This isn't "naked."

Yet I get the feeling that the author believes that the management provisions that Zappos had in its TOS ("its disclaimer of warranties, its waiver of consequential damages, its reduced statute of limitations, its clause restricting class actions in arbitration") are almost morally necessary. These of course are provisions that so-called "bricks and mortar" stores doesn't have.
Apple's Retina displays (in the new Macbook Pros) have very high resolutions. The latest Macbook Pros have either 2560x1600 or 2880x1800 native resolution, depending on when you bought it.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5266
Cut long lines to make it more readable. https://gist.github.com/3980570
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Because I might have more interesting things to learn and completely not care about the topic I am told to learn.
Operating systems are just as hard, yet they are routinely released, patched, upgraded and they usually work.
How 15 minutes of surgery turned my life upside down
Kiln alone has >4 TB of data; you want to SCP that with 90 minutes heads-up?

Having power and/or rack space is not the same as having servers, switches, etc. anyway.

Hopefully it will not be down that long. We'll let you know more when we know more.
NPAPI. You could do the same in Firefox. Or Safari. Even on a Mac.
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Did you by any chance save that? They deleted it…
OK, but that's like saying, "Defeating the aliens is NOT hard... The biological vulnerabilities of human DNA are the problem... you just have to be impervious to ionizing radiation."

Much like machine translation and teledildonics, once you start to try to scale globally, mapping is actually one of the hardest problems that is remotely viable at our current technological level. There's a tiny handful of companies that can do a barely usable job, and everything else is worthless garbage.

In Japan, at least, Apple has gone from the former to the latter with iOS 6. (Maps.app did work great last week on a business trip to Austin, TX, however.)
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>"But don't be surprised if you don't."

Necessary, but not sufficient.

>"The fact is luck, opportunity, being at the right place all matter."

True, this was also a theme of the book.
We don't do flat fee no. We convince clients it's not a good idea for them to do flat fee, because it takes longer, and we build in a margin to cover our risk, so they usually pay more with flat fee. By making every step of the process visible to them, and charging them for what we do as we go along, we can save them money and time.
Interestingly enough, that's also the same length as a typical high-school essay assignment (5 pages). I think the critical difference might be that high-school students don't actually have much to say, so struggle to fill that, while when you have something to say, it's actually quite a challengingly short length.
QWERTY, good example.

Thanks.
There's a difference between "following a process" and "following THE PROCESS".

Outlining the working process means that I and my client have an understanding, and that they have less grounds for being surprised about getting a larger than expected bill. It forces the client to be disciplined in their own behaviour, which they wouldn't be without a process.

On the flip side, demanding clients fill out Form 27-B for Change Requests every time they want something changing is way, way over the top.

In addition, a process can help give a client some confidence that you know what you're doing. This is especially true in the technology business, where clients tend not to really understand what they're working with.
Are you kidding me? If you run big sites like FogBugz then ofcourse you have cross-datacenter redundancy. It's not complicated to host your staging site in another physical location and point the DNS records to it when things go pear-shaped.
Seems already posted a while back

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4010762
We use Fogbugz for all our internal project tracking. The consensus among our engineers is that this downtime is understandable and we'd rather deal with it, even in a mission-important web app, than pay more every month to insure redundancy was available.

Frankly this is just making us appreciate Fogbugz all the more since tracking our time without it will be a real PITA.
Maybe, but YC applicants might have other things on their mind today. And I have seen no evidence that making hard deadlines is any kind if good indicator about entrepreneurial success.

It doesn't sound harsh, it sounds incorrect. People (customers, prospects, investors etc) are flexible and forgiving during times of adversity, it's one of the most basic human characteristics.
Do we really want to web to be a strip mall when it grows up?
Anyone remember BBS?
Sadly they are still broken in big browsers, though. You can still <TAB> out of the modal...
Yes we do. We charge per sprint, not a flat fee for the total project. Once we've convinced them that our way is faster and cheaper in the long run, they usually buy into it. As specially if they've been bitten by flat fee projects in the past, where it becomes an arms race for the developers to do as little as possible, and the client to demand as much as possible. Then tend to then understand that trusting us and working with us is a much better way.
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Ask HN: What do you with customers' feature requests for your SaaS app?
I oftentimes get feature requests from my customers. Examples are customizing e-mails the app sents, GUI customizations ( so that they can upload their own company logo for example ), and so on.

Sometimes these features are useful for most other customers of the app, but it makes the app more bloated ( imagine an app that has more than a dozen settings ) so with new customers I usually tell them my app does not have the feature and try to help them to achieve the same goal using existing features. For customers that have used the app for a few years I have thought of charging them for custom changes although I don't know if that's a good idea.

Only for small useful features that are a big win I have actually done the implementation.

How do you handle customers' feature requests?
I can't imagine that relocating an entire environment for a multitude of applications and services is as simple as scping things over. I'm sure there is a process wherein scp could be a step, but I don't see it being any easier/faster.

Moving the hard drives could be an option, and I believe it is sometimes done, but it assumes there are empty boxes on the other end waiting to receive the hard drives in a similar configuration to how the hard drives came. Also there's separate issues depending how many drives they are dealing with, and what redundancy is involved. If it's very few, then you might as well move the server outright. If it's very many, then there's extra human overhead (and room for error) in keeping the drives together.
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True, but there are plenty of 1:1 replacements out there, at least if you don't care about the quality of your writing: use -> utilize, do -> implement, and so forth.
I'll try to make the time to write up something. It's really a matter of explaining to them why our way of working ends up being faster and less expensive than the flat fee way. With our way of working, there's an assumption of trust, and we keep that trust through visibility of our progress. That way we share risk, and if we can share risk with the client, we can charge less, because we don't have to build in such a big margin in the price to cover our risks.
Minor niggle: Not their parents’ generation, maybe their grandparents’.

Some one who’s 20 today, and entering the workforce, would have been born in ’92. In ’92 lifelong single employer employment was well dead.

I see comments like this (and the WSJ’s) a bit, and it amazes me how slowly awareness of cultural changes percolate in to the mainstream. I’m nearing 40 and my parents didn’t expect life long employment. (Though they clearly desired it and went big time for stable employers: Banks, academia, government.)
Hi guys, Joel from Fog Creek here. We have absolutely no idea what failover means, or what the hell these people are talking about with this "two datacenters in different places" bullshit. Thanks for your money.
That's what a separate thread would be for.
So which of your big sites have cross-datacenter redundancy? Why don't you talk about the decision process that lead to that and costs associated?

Unless you're just talking out of your arse of course and you have no experience with that sort of thing at all.
I'm wondering whether you could apply an edge-detect filter to your input frames and combine it with the hue-based detection. I'd assume that irrespective of the ball color, an edge detect + posterize would give you a video frame with clear spots where the balls are, which should be relatively easy to find. I remember from the image analysis courses I took in college that spot detection is a very common operation in automatic analysis of medical images, and hence extensively researched. After you know where each ball is you could convert the frame to YUV and use the UV (chroma) channels to detect the ball colors.
Yes, I was making a joke you didn't get.
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Forstall is no Steve Jobs.
I recently found the Business Model generation handbook and after reading it only thought, "Why didn't I find this sooner."

It's good to know there is a way for others to learn the 3 strongest startup ideas in 54-hours.
We've (almost) never had the feeling of "running amok". Communication is key, and constant feedback from the client helps us to make small adjustments often. That usually keeps them from making large changes at late stages, because we are evolving the project with them. Changes are usually an evolution, not a revolution, if that makes sense.

The times where the changes were big and late, it was usually down to bad communication at an earlier stage.
This is cool! I'm sure that their is a huge business opportunity here too (I don't watch sports but sure that their must be entire channels dedicated to snooker/pool etc) you could make games a lot more exciting to watch with VR replays of interesting shots etc (check similar companies for virtual sportscasting for America's cup and off-road racing :)
We bring 3D to the web
Does anyone else feel like every time they release a new version of Bootstrap it is never backwards compatible? I feel like lots of divs on my site need different classes than were used before.
Wow, nice timing there.
It would be cool if Drip support also custom Profiles
That deletions you see on there are items that were deleted and undeleted. Anything that is deleted as of the data dump that those graphs were built on is not displayed. I didn't figure that out until after I posted the graph, and I never bothered to go back and remove the delete/reopen data.

The important point I'm trying to make is take a look at the asked and closed graph lines. When a community has to close around 40% of questions, I think something is wrong.
>Erlang does not use a contiguous chunk of memory to represent a sequence of bytes. Instead, it represents a sequence of bytes as nested lists of non-contiguous chunks of memory. The result is that concatenating two strings takes O(1) time in Erlang, compared O(N) time in other languages.

I've often wondered if this was being used anywhere. It seems like such an easy win, but now I'm curious if it would causes problems with cache misses or something.
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It would be nice if you could use simple markup to create the GTK3/Qt/Unity application. That way far more people could contribute to open source. They would just fork the product fix or add something and send a pull request to the maintainer. On the web you can do 'View source' everywhere, why not be able to 'Edit source' on every open source project making it easy to contribute for everybody. You could even have something similar to a DOM inspector to locate a problem fast without spending days getting acquainted with the project's source code.
Neat project.

More fun pool table shenanigans: http://www.obscuradigital.com/products/detail/cuelight/

IIRC Obscura were selling that for $100k+. If the current business model doesn't pan out then I guess GoCardless could always pivot into that market instead :-)
Why would moving the servers be hard? You can fit 100 terabytes of storage in a shoe-box these days. I'd be extremely surprised if you couldn't run all of FogCreek off of a single 10U blade enclosure. That would be up to 128 CPU cores; I suspect they need only a small fraction of that.

On the other hand, with a 1000/Mbit uplink that they were allowed to saturate, they'd still only be able to copy out 1 terabyte in 3 hours.

Essential quote (literally from Networking 101): "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
Are you serious? If that's true I owe you a huge "Thank You!"

Every time I have to put my hands on a friend's Mac (to show/help/diagnose something) the single most frustrating issue is trying to alt-tab between multiple windows within an application (mostly browsers). I do it, and instead it goes to another application.

I have asked every single one of them for such a hotkey get blank stares, and reluctantly use mouse instead. All of my Google-Fu never helped much either.

While we're on the topic, is there a hotkey to toggle maximize/restore of a window in OS X? I was impressed with the way Windows 7 handled it, so much so that I've emulated it in all of my various Linux configurations.
> But the default legal rules include protection, yes?

1. Without a contractual disclaimer of 'consequential' damages [1], Zappos could find itself forced to defend against exorbitant claims for such damages --- and disputes about the underlying facts will usually mean that such claims would have to be resolved via an expensive and uncertain jury trial, as opposed to being disposed of on summary judgment [2] by the trial judge.

2. Different states have different degrees of legal protection for businesses. A brick-and-mortar store generally will be sued only in the jurisdiction where the store in question is located (or a chain might be sued at the location of its headquarters or other, limited venues) [3]. On the other hand, Zappos could be vulnerable to being sued just about anywhere a customer places an order --- the rules about 'personal jurisdiction' are a little fuzzy when it comes to Web sites [4].

So by not having contractual protections, Zappos arguably is exposing itself to the vagueries of whatever the default legal rules happen to be, in whatever state an unhappy consumer happens to live in.

3. The actual business risk to Zappos might not be terrifying here, because the potential harm to consumers from buying an ill-fitting pair of shoes seems manageable (although Zappos does carry more than just shoes). It might be a different story for other e-commerce Web sites. So the object lesson of the Zappos case is worth heeding.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequential_damages

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summary_judgment

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_jurisdiction

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_jurisdiction_in_Intern...
Nobody was really expecting this much of Manhattan to lose power.
If you liked the book, you would love the Udacity Course by Steve Blank
Slick iOS & Android Deployment Server
We are talking about Tim Cook here. A guy that can get a laptop to your door, to your specifications, in 2-3 days from halfway around the world. If you aren't familiar with international logistics (and you being in the military you probably already know all about logistics) that type of thing is practically unheard of.

If he can do his job and do it so well that the company is known for shipping times then what could you possibly tell him about why your product doesn't work? It's too hard?
Simple question.

Will a partner allow the business to grow to $5 million dollars in "percieved" value?

If yes, then giving the partner half the business more than doubles your "on paper" money.

If no, then why bother? Or rather, why bother trying to grow something that won't grow quickly in lieu of starting something together or pivoting which might?

Regardless, any equity should vest over time.

Regardless as well, hourly sweat equity is not conducive to creating determination in your partner.
Trello is now down.
Failing Over Stack Overflow Results
Well, it seems like their confidence was based on their single datacenter not going down. Which seems misplaced.
It isn't even about identifying. Browett has to be one of the worst choice on the planet in terms of executive. I dont even know how he got into CEO of Dixon in the first place. Anyway all that is past, now that he is gone lets hope they either find someone great or simply promote what they already have.
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Sorry for the bug on this one—we're aware of it and will try to push out a quick fix shortly. Thanks!
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Phusion Passenger 4.0 supports JRuby, Rubinius
Couple pain points from experience:

Estimates in $$$ desired before start

-> Leads into defining a complete feature set

-> Desire for all estimates in time for all work (BS number, always)

Guarantees on what will be delivered

-> Getting the client on board with paying for time vs. paying for features

-> Offer minimal feature set + what we can do?

-> Dealing with scope creep

Require clients time

-> Feedback

-> Showcases

-> Many A) or B) given B) is 10 times more expensive
Nobody except the whole world watching the Weather channel.
I'm frankly amazed that Manhattan survived!
Link just goes to a login page.
The two considerations seem to be: path dependency and natural conversation.

1-2-3-4 several points being made (natural)

1.1.1.1.1 several responses to the first point (never get to point 2)

4-2-1-3 Points no longer relate to each other in context (must be longer, self-contained)

Ultimately, you replace one type of "getting sidetracked" with another: "path dependency". Either way, the contextual information content is what you are trying to preserve. Without "exposure", for example, new comments in long conversations won't accrete upvotes to rise to the top, regardless of quality.
The problem is it took him too long to know this as a mistake.
There should be no problems upgrading from 2.1.2 to 2.2.0—no features were removed and none had their classes changed.
> I tried to use Evernote, many times. I tried hard. But I just can't — there are seemingly minor problems with the Mac app and the iOS app that just make it unpleasant and annoying to use it on a daily basis.

Evernote's persistent mediocrity might just be a significant factor in the coming tablet wars. Microsoft has Onenote which is excellent.
Unemployment is now at 32% - higher for those 25 and under.
Porting an iOS app to Windows 8
We're both developers and we work together (a less common situation, I suppose).
I'll be the first to admit I don't really know anything about cross-datacenter redundancy; however, I always thought that was pretty high on the list once you had SaaS products that were pulling in enough revenue to warrant full-time employees outside of the founders. What are the reasons why you would choose not to do it? Are they all financial or are there other implications?
This is a good reminder that no system is immune to failure, cloud or otherwise. Georedundancy is expensive and difficult, so it's a delicate trade-off, but engineering good physical backup systems is also difficult.

Our servers are in a state far away from hurricanes, but in a state with many other natural disasters, including tornadoes, so it's hard to say if it's a good trade or not. Interesting question: why aren't there more DCs in Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, or New Mexico? And is physical location a huge determinant in where you colo your servers?
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Interesting! Constraining tracking to regions of interest is definitely on our list of things to try.
Yes, so this staging site of you has exactly the same databases as your production site? Without customer data Fogbugz and Trello are useless. This means that this simple staging site of yours needs to have all data replicated to it, which means it also needs the same hardware provisioned for it, effectively doubling your physical costs, your maintenance cost and reducing the simplicity of your architecture. Ofcourse, if you're big enough you can afford to do this, and one could argue fogcreek is big enough. I'm just saying it's not a simple no-brainer.

What is a simple no-brainer how ever is to have offline offsite backups that can easily brought online. A best practice is to have your deployment automated in such a way that deployment to a new datacenter that already has your data should be a trivial thing.

But yeah, if you're running a tight ship something things like that go overboard without anyone noticing.

Remember the story of the 100% uptime banking software, that ran for years without ever going down, always applying the patches at runtime. Then one day a patch finally came in that required a reboot, and it was discovered that in all the years of runtime patches without reboots, it was never tested if the machine could actually still boot, and ofcourse it couldn't :)
Numba actually uses the Python AST, so it's not too different. Currently it's also using Mark Florisson's Minivect internally to reason about Numpy arrays and array expressions. This will be much easier when Numba encounters a Blaze array, since the value transformations will be expressed in the AST, and the index space transformations are more explicitly represented in the Blaze expression graph.

Both projects are designed to work very well with each other, although both have applicability outside the region of integration. Numba will compile regular Python functions that consume Numpy arrays, and will not require Blaze. Blaze will produce lazily-evaluated expression graphs and dataflows on disjoint and out-of-core arrays, and can evaluate these efficiently without Numba. (This is what the Array VM is all about; you can think of it as an improved Numexpr.)
Ask HN: How have you been impacted by Sandy?
There have been several posts directly related to downtime and issues coming from Sandy.

ie:

Fog Creek is about to go down: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4717279

Internap evacuates LGA datacenter: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4715889

Even a poll form PG, Should we push the YC deadline back by a day because of the storm?: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4715829

How have you, your company, sites, etc been impacted by Sandy? Such as a service outage, loss of functionality, nothing, complete and utter destruction?
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