skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks! You're right, in SV, people rarely talk about real numbers… even to the point of never discussing how much money a founder actually makes from an $x mil exit. Which, to me, is astonishing, since on the other hand all people talk about is numbers (exit numbers)… but not the ones that count for most people.

If you look at the amount of yearly income you want/need, and then look at products vs built-to-sell startups, it's pretty clear how easy it is to achieve that income on a paid product and how hard it is to achieve it from a liquidity event.
Linux / Unix, Ubuntu, Vim, Sublime Text 2, IntelliJ IDEA, Terminator, Synapse, Android, Chrome and countless others.
Neat trick:

Disregard the stream. It was buggy in Chrome and only mildly better in Firefox. (Oxford can't afford a more robust video solution?)

Tackle the MP4 file instead. Only left click open it in place of downloading it.

Quicktime should take care of the rest.
Interesting how requests from Russia, Turkey and Hungary are consistently ignored, how China is not on the list, and how Brazil's requests have very high compliance rate (similar to the U.S.)
I thought Clean was mostly taught only at Radboud, since it originated there.
Thanks. Elon begins at 06:15.
Paul Graham has brought this up before, in How to be an Angel Investor[1]:

"There is an ongoing debate between investors which is more important, the people, or the idea—or more precisely, the market. [...] The three most prominent people I know who favor markets are Marc [Andreessen], Jawed Karim, and Joe Kraus. And all three of them, in their own startups, basically flew into a thermal: they hit a market growing so fast that it was all they could do to keep up with it."

Paul Graham goes on to say:

"Thermals happen, yes, but no one can predict them."

[1] - http://www.paulgraham.com/angelinvesting.html
only if you love buffering, i'm getting about 11Kb/s :(
Google didn't win because they monetized the best, they didn't. The got the biggest following that nobody could steal because they became and remained THE BEST search engine ever. They then took innovations from other companies to monetize their search engine as a pure search engine, something that the larger search engines, especially Yahoo!, hadn't been able to do because they weren't particularly good search engines.

While not every accelerator program is a good one, this one has proven to be extremely beneficial to its startups, with a near 100% full raise rate after the program and perhaps the best value added in terms of resources and mentors of any accelerator including YC.

I will submit that perhaps I didn't do a good job explaining those two things in my post, so I hope that clears it up. There is no argument that YC is the only accelerator worth doing that matches up with the numbers (although there are MANY not worth doing) and the argument that Google won because it sold ads better than its competitors, who's ideas on selling ads they either stole or bought is ludicrous when matched up to the facts.
Yes. It's also okay to kill animals. Why? Because it's natural. Why is it natural? Because every single animal kills either plants or animals.

And while we as a species can use our brains to resist eating animals, we can't resist eating both fauna and flora.
Electric jets combined with beamed power could be huge. Such craft would be unencumbered by fuel tankage, so there would be huge potential for savings. One place to start, strangely enough, would be with electric tankers. By lifting fuel to altitude, individual aircraft fuel needs would be greatly reduced to cover the same distance, meaning structural weight could be saved, resulting in even more efficiency. Networks of power beaming stations to power cross country flights would result in aircraft so light, that parachute landing systems for the whole craft might be feasible. (Some on board battery capacity would always be necessary for emergencies.)
Ask HN: Review our startup, detectify.com
Today there is a lot of excitement at the office as we just launched early access at the Slush conference. We have been in private beta for about 4 months and this is one of the bigger releases so far during product development. We have changed the registration, improved our encryption, added a few new attack vectors to crawl for and a lot more. Therefore we would love to have your feedback straight away. (How did we do?)

How is it getting through the sign up process?

Did your meta code get verified promptly?

Any vectors you’re waiting for?

And if you dare, can you put out an easter egg for us to find.

Basically anything that pops into your mind when using the service, we would love to hear about it.

Thanks a ton,

Annelie & the Detectify team
Student Suspended for Refusing to Wear a School-Issued RFID Tracker
I've been wondering how long it would be until web sites like this started showing up, where you can listen to automatically generated music on demand.

Hopefully they keep improving until they make the best human composers look mediocre, despite being millions of times faster. Unbounded amounts of new high quality low cost music? Yes please.
Without any trends, or any data to compare it to, what is the point? HN might be a better place to post to get things read, but that is clearly a tech blog, and we don't even know how many followers he has.

Its great that he has more viewers since writing for Forbes (I assume), but I don't know what I can learn from this.
Well given that PG/team has been able to create this awesome community of really intelligent people to discuss such ideas is enough to ensure that he doesn't really miss any of these fringe stories of success.

In this essay sure, but not in the complete picture out there.
As far as I can make out, as long as you have the debug tools and a 'developer license' (just need a MS ID, no fee), you can install arbitrary un-approved Metro apps on WinRT/8. Compilation still has to happen on an x86 machine (no MSVS on ARM; csc is actually on the WinRT image but missing DLLs); it's not great but still somewhat better than the iOS situation.
My Windows 8 App Monetization
You obviously know more about this situation than I do, so I'm not going to be able to win any rational argument unless you choose to disclose more details.

I get your suggestion of hubris here, but again, I'm speaking from experience. I've done the solo technical founder thing, and that came with a whole host of problems that seemed unsolvable and which I didn't have anyone to appeal to for answers. Those are the problems that taught me most of what I know - most importantly that when you run into something that you don't understand, it's an opportunity to learn about it and solve it, rather than to just give up. In the Rails world, where the entire software stack is open-source down to the kernel it runs on, there is literally nothing to get in the way of understanding what's happening at any point of the application's execution.

I'll reiterate that if you want to do a writeup on why your circumstances were unique, and the problems you faced which were so crippling that they forced a rewrite, I'd love to read it. The suggestion that Rails 3 has landmines so critical in it that it necessitated a full product rewrite in Rails 2 is exceptionally weighty and should not be asserted without a very specific cataloging of what those problems are. That particular assertion - "Rails 3 has problems that cost us $XX,XXX and the Rails Core team doesn't have a clue what they are" - is a big one.
Did not know that about Utrecht Uni.
> The one you claim to do on your homepage talks about involving design, which is why I referenced it.

My homepage talks about design doesn't mean I have to design.

> I am not obliged to let you know that. But surely it isn't as shitty as this:

http://i46.tinypic.com/21vfc.jpg

That thing is called a prototype. And you are not obliged to tell what you have built, but when you are throwing shit all around, at least have some credentials. Either don't be an asshole, or at least be correct. When it comes to opinions(and not absolute facts), who has it is an important factor in evaluating it.

> For the rest of the world to see, that's what iRahul has built so far and he's here to critique a designer. And now you know why the search boxes appear the same to him, and probably everything else will, too.

In case it didn't occur to you, rest of the world doesn't give a shit about a petty internet argument. When I did the prototype, it was open for everyone to see. I don't see the point in your declaration about the whole world seeing what I built. Different strokes for different people. Some people build things and move on if it doesn't work; some people post comments on news forums with nothing to back them up and then go digging something to feed their vanity. Vain people are a big pain in the ass, not because they are vain(that too) but because they sustain themselves on putting others down, rather than getting themselves ahead.

> Please keep your profanity to yourself. You just proved you are worth no one's time. Bye.

It isn't like I am being benefited from getting in argument with some random designer on some internet forum. And do you always lobby others to cry for you?(rest of the world to see, "no one's time" rather than "my time")
'Almost Everything That Apple Does That Involves The Internet Is A Mess'
Ask HN: Is Twitter failing to send tweets too often?
I rarely use twitter directly (I use it through apps which use the API), but when I use the twitter.com, I feel like there's an "Oops, we did something wrong" error for every 3rd tweet I send.

Is it only me, or twitter are really having problems with sending tweets. And if so, does this affect the amount of users, or twitter are too big for users to pay attention to this problem?

(For the record, clients using the API don't have such a problem. Sadly, most of them will soon have to shut down due to the new policies)
I still think the PG post is way ahead. I remember why I started using google, it was just massively better than yahoo. It just worked. The same happened with facebook, I almost didn't use my myspace account because it was so limited the way to use it. Also it scared lots of my friends because if you wanted something cool you had to pimp your account. Facebook just was come in and use it, share stuff and locate people easily.
The market was found acter the use, they developed an amazing product and then discovered how to monetize. It doesn't have to be that way, good ideas don't need to be
. But there are lots of broken things around and if you feel amazed(living in the future) that nobody is doing the right stuff then it is probably a good idea waiting to be developed. Of course a good development is a huge part of the equation (and good luck too).
He is right that there are too much picture apps though.
To elaborate, each tab in Chrome can use up to 2GB as it runs in its own process, while the entire Firefox window is limited in a 32-bit architecture.

So the need in Chrome to go 64- from 32-bit from a memory perspective is less.
If you do more functional programming, it will become second-hand to you.
I now have a chip on my shoulder
If you Right Click and "Save As", you can open and watch the downloading (.crdownload) file in VLC as well. Just in case you wanted to have it for later I guess.
Insert Apple maps joke here
The USPTO via IdeaScale: Open discussion of patent policy
My point is similar, but not exactly the same. The best human composers will still be the best. However, the other 90% may be replaced by computers. Or, computers may generate some "skeletons", which real composers can use and enrich.
I think you need to calm down.
Apparently because it makes a good hook for a PR fluff piece?
I thought they said we should give it a rest?
Not exactly, a contract must bind both parties to do something. You cant have a contract which states "you give me money and you dont say anything about it." It must also bond the other side: "and in return I will not sue you for piracy committed on the date of..."
Bitcoin: An Introduction For Traditional Small Businesses
Don't use code that only runs on Linux. Swapping one monoculture for another isn't an improvement.

If you're writing stuff for server use, and it's not being tested on a few Unix implementations, you're quickly working towards being a single-platform monoculture. This limits your options if a platform falls out of favor or is EOL'ed by a vendor.

It's a good thing that OS X is so popular among the hacker set - if it wasn't, I think the quagmire would be even deeper.
What does "no SEO" even mean? That he doesn't use proper nouns in title or h1 tags? That he doesn't have any meta tags? That he didn't turn on a purported Wordpress SEO plugin?
Is there any business reason why the Apple App Store couldn't have comparable terms?
A lot of people do.

It isn't officially released yet, so of course it's not going to be as popular as a released product. Android wasn't popular until acquired and pushed by Google.
Ask HN: At what point did you hire 'ops'?
I have always worked at Megacorps, who are constantly trying to get the op:server ratio smaller. The yardstick management often use is a large scale web company (which is far from apples to apples, but I won't get into that here). But after catching a recent architecture session from a startup who only had ~100 servers I am curious about how many servers per op the average web company has?

For clarity, the persons primary function should be everything below the app layer, but that obviously doesn't exclude people who may also contribute code to the app (ie devops).

Also interested to hear of you are into the 100's of servers and have yet to hire anyone who fits that description.
I think when people talk about functional programming being used more in industry, they don't imagine it replacing Java or Python as the lowest common denominator language everybody uses. Rather, they imagine either small companies or small teams within larger companies using functional programming to be more productive.

So the sheer number of people using functional programming may not be very high even if functional programming is making inroads into industry. Now, I don't know whether functional programming actually is making inroads into industry or not, but my impression is that anybody relatively good at it could find a very nice functional programming job fairly easily.
> It's also okay to kill animals. Why? Because it's natural.

I'm not sure if you're mocking the naturalistic fallacy or committing to it.

The problem of a higher order they have is the underlying axiom of decreasing total suffering. We lack information to asses the full consequences of our actions and so any morality based on the ultimate results will be unworkable.
You're forgetting aSmallWorld
+1 Opera is so underrated.

Posted from Opera.
Why should naturalness inform morality?
You are absolutely right, it looks better now. Thanks!
I eat animals, but I'm not convinced by your argument. We're omnivores, so it wouldn't be unnatural for us to survive on plants. In fact, there are cultures that do just that.
The copyright laws in Spain have been modified from pressures made by the US government ,in fact Joe Biden on behalf of RIAA/MPAA, even threatening with commercial sanctions. I think we can extrapolate those pressures to the rest of the world. It was known as the Biden-Sinde law, now it has changed to Sinde-Wert (name of the ministers who obeyed the orders as seen in wikileaks).
Ah, terrific response, thanks very much. :)

So when I said switch to Redis I meant to replace the 'big sharded Postgres K/V type store that they use' not the part where they actually use relational features of the database.

I'm always curios about the idea of scaling UP versus OUT -- like you mention, going from one Redis instance to two mucks up the waters. So why do it at all? (Maybe a year from now Redis Cluster will finally come out and solve this)

1TB of RAM is going to dip below five figures soon, I guess if you can't fit into that it is moot.

"If you realize a year into your Redis deployment that you want to be able to tell a user how many comments they made per month in the year... what do you do? In Postgres you hit the datetime column index and call it a day."

I would do bloom filters, but point very well taken. No silver bullets. Thanks again for the reply.
What about WebGL? It's catching on, and that means that we could see huge memory usage in a small number of tabs. I'm thinking we'll see 3d games become popular relatively quickly.

Gamers tend to have tons of tabs in their browsers. Couple this with tons of game resources and we have a serious memory hog.
err... do you know that (since 1.4 IIRC) the java compiler is the one written by Martin Odersky?
Introducing the Rails API Project
I thought the same thing. Although it is unsettling to see how copyright infringement is turning into witch hunts this was still probably the funniest thing I've read all day.
In addition, why should naturalness (historical human diet in this case) influence or subvert judgments about health effects and sustainability?
> PyPy was able to eventually outperform LuaJIT slightly, given enough iterations

It would be awesome to save the state of the JIT. It would also be awesome to export the type inference information.
Yes; is happening a lot. But I don't think it matters too much because after they inform you the natural response is to try again; and then it works.
I've got the file. Where do I mirror it? Have fast connection to upload.
"Ruggedized" gear is a requirement here. Emergency services radios need to be very solid, and very easy to use — you're always working on something else and quite possibly life-threatening, and the radio is a tool.

If you can drop it, slam it, whack it, rain on it or even dunk it, cover it with blood or vomit (and clean it), balance your weight on it on a stairway, use it as a wheel chock (unintentionally) and (depending on the particular users) operate it with your gloves on, then we'll talk.

For some users, you further need to allow for heavy gloves.

Or provide emergency buttons, or other features.

As great as it is, iPhone isn't close to providing this.
Probably because he never used one, all his classes came from factories :)
I do use AngularJS on my client side, it works extremely well with Express on the server side.

I really liked how the article mentions Express isn't a framework and doesn't try to get in your way, this is exactly why I chose it!
That's not really possible -- you'll see that the folk crossing that boundary are keeping open several hundreds of tabs at a time.

As memory usage is reduced, these folk will just open more tabs.
The USPTO has been taking some amazing technological steps in the last few years. This is the most recent. Earlier this year they, for the first time ever, released a search function for the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (which is a >2000-page tome that doesn't exactly read like a John Grisham novel). Several years ago, they gave Google their entire database of patents, patent applications, and trademarks. Given that they're a government agency, this progress is absolutely astonishing.
What is a distributed commenting system? An HTML script tag to load a static file that will ping an api that will serve you comments.

What is django? A framework with strong routing, OR-mapping, templates and admin modules.

You need none to build it. Your main concern shouldn't be a coding framework, but load balancing, caching, failover control, more sysadmin stuff than code.

Any language could do. Framework? not needed.

Now, for the backend system to control that monster, then yes, you may use django.

So, use django for complex apps that need routing, data management and UI presentation, plus a powerful admin module.

* I am a python/django developer.
I get those texts, emails, and mailings. They all go right in the trash. Why should you discount something someone is predisposed to buy anyway? You should raise the price instead.
Have you ever thought of using some more complicated algorithm for randomness, e.g., genetic algorithm?

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=genetic+algorithm+music+...
Decline and Fall of the Google Empire
Other than ego, would there be any point to doing SEO for a blog not connected to a product or consulting services?
I am not questioning building a brand. As I said elsewhere, in blind tests, people have a hard time distinguishing google search results from bing. Brand name is one of the major factors when it comes to consumers.

People preferred pepsi to thumsup in blind tests. Thumsup sweetened its drink and faced a major backlash. Thumsup drinkers associated themselves with Thumsup brand and took pride in "not sweet as pepsi".

I do understand that brand plays a major part for the consumer.

What I was questioning was the ridiculous assumption that somehow calling DuckDuckGo as DDG is diluting its brand, and always calling Google as Google is indicative of its strong brand.
A contract is a list of demands (amongst other things). It can't be enforced until you agree to the contract. Until then it's just a demand.
I wonder what kind and what amount of data is released. There's a range from the IP address that created, say, a YouTube video to an accounts entire GMail history to the entire Google profile associated with that account, including visited web pages as learned from ad networks etc. Not sure if they even store the latter in a way that could be part of a targeted request.

A breakdown by product would be a start.

On a sidenote that page has been available forever, it's not a new thing.
I have indeed looked at some genetic algorithms and a lot of papers on the topic (in fact, my former university has a course about that, so I read the coursebook). Most of what I have read is either included, attempted, or in TODO. And obviously, I need to read some more.
Scaling Django webapp with Amazon AWS
Ask HN: Review our startup - peer-review app
Let's say I have a patent for rotating the image displayed on a homepage [0]. You are trying with a straight face to tell us that there is any valid belief that this is an enforceable patent other than the incomprehensible fact that it was granted?

And further, if you do provide competent representation and advise me that this patent is basically null if it gets challenged, present me with the obvious prior art, etc then you believe (again with a straight face) that it is ethical behavior to, on my behalf, threaten another party unless payment is made with legal action representing what you know to be false to that party and more importantly having no legal basis for a positive outcome in any legal proceeding?

There is always room for improving statutes as no crafted law is a perfect instrument. It is clear to everyone by now that the simple existence of a duly issued patent should not be considered on its own as a valid basis for litigation. And, for the most part abuses are taking place outside of judicial purview or being forum shopped to certain favorable jurisdictions. I take issue with the ethical lapses having no consequence, and am advocating for self-correcting behavior by the very body that has that task.

[0] http://1.usa.gov/dR6UBy
Two good options: http://www.youtube.com and http://depositfiles.com/

Note that you will need to provide some identification info (I don't remember what) if you want to upload a long HD video to YouTube. IIRC not needed for 480p.
I'm not sure where you're headed with that.

In emergency services, specialists tend to be communications officers or dispatchers, or the radio shop, and variously assisted by the computers and the radio consoles that are increasingly supervising the radio networks.

To a reasonable degree, radios need to be useful and functional and understandable by everybody in the organization; to all of the users. It's this ubiquity that was at issue with the original article, and it's the radio's UI that tends to be inscrutable.
I think I'm in love with the guy.