skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aren't we missing the elephant in the room here?

Mercurial = Python-based = runs anywhere Python runs

Git = Unix-like systems only

Doesn't Python shelter a decent sized Windows community? (Free, more accessible than the Windows flavors of Perl / Ruby)
Writing a business plan to show a bank and "writing a business plan" are two different things, really.

Looking at 37S, my guess is that they're mostly self funded, so I don't think they ever went looking for loans. I would say this is the "ideal path", even if it isn't practical.

If you do need start up capital, then of course you're going to have to show the bank that you're good for it. You should still cling to the idea however that your ultimate business is about making "something" and not sticking to what you thought you would be making before you started.
The thing I'd worry about is that a collapse seems most likely when the kids are using the pool. It is irresponsible. He should have poured concrete, perhaps on bearings so the whole thing could be removed in the future.
I live in India and my native language is Hindi, yet I mostly use English for communicating over the web. If I had to explain even a slightly technical concept (say, a simple data structure) to someone in Hindi, I wouldn't know where to begin.

Given a choice, I'd always pick English over Hindi as my language of choice, not because I dislike Hindi, but because I'm much more comfortable with English. Why? Because I read books written in English, read English newspapers, watch English movies and TV shows and read a whole lot of technical content written in English. Thanks to the American tendency of "exporting" their culture, English is all I've been exposed to (and I consider it a good thing).

In real life, most (educated) Indians speak a mish-mash of English and Hindi. Modern Hindi itself is a mish-mash of words borrowed from Urdu, Farsi, Punjabi etc. It's actually pretty liberating, being able to express yourself without even having to stop to think how to phrase a sentence. Can't complete a sentence in Hindi? End it in English.
The Bond of Dog Obedience Training
Install CouchDB on Mac OS X (without using DarwinPorts)
The CouchDB installation instructions recommend using DarwinPorts for its dependencies. There is also a pre-built binary. If for one reason or another you don’t want to do either of those, here’s how to do it ‘by hand’.
Irrelevant, really. Most startups, by definition, will fail.
Well, Skype has the network effect going for it. And while iPhone has its quirks and drawbacks, the idea of VOIP on your handheld is pretty compelling.
Why is Git so Fast?
you don't know what sarcasm is, do you?
Flagged as a dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=534959
very sincere and sarcastic at the same time. study the history of the US government, the CIA in particular. they want the people in this country to be powerless so they can carry out their agenda without resistance.
Absolutely. My projects tend to be pretty dumb and over the top...but this rates right up there.

I actually worked building pools during one summer[1], so I would have went a more traditional poured concrete route. I probably would have also had a plan to fill the pool in and cap it with concrete if I planned on selling the house.

Kudos on the indoor garden - I was just thinking of building one, but spring is near.

[1] Caveat - I worked almost every variety of job during high school in a small town...so the 'experience' factor is minimal. Mechanic several times/several farm jobs/baker/librarian/general contractor/factory/etc
My opinion is based on a limited sampling but how a language is taught is key. My wife and I each took French classes for 6 years prior to meeting. Her teachers emphasized speaking fluency while mine emphasized writing. She was taught to use idiomatic expressions and to "improvise" while I was made to memorize rules. We decided to take some French classes together for fun. She was much better able to communicate in general. I can read/write French okay in a formal way. When speaking though I tend to stumble trying to think through rules in my head. In contrast, I took 4 German classes in college. The professor had us watch German television shows and speak in "street" German. At the end of 4 classes, I was fluent enough to hold full conversations with German people when I visited. Even factoring in the regularity of German the teaching method seemed more effective.
Microsoft, TomTom Settle Patent Infringement Battle
There are warts and there are warts. When there are warts in some kind of cool experimental toy, that's one thing, but there are other systems that should be as solid and reliable as possible. Things like backups, and, yeah, version control.
Not creating a business plan and making up prices out of thin air is definitely the most fun and least time consuming. I think DHH nails that aspect of it.

But, how feasible is it to start companies this way? Sure it may have worked well for them and it may even work incredibly well for your business. As hackers though, we know that just because something worked once, twice or 500 times doesn't mean it's the truth or will always work.

It's best to be prudent wherever possible and do some research into your market and pricing strategies. I'm not saying go off and create 5 year business plans, I'm just saying it definitely deserves some of your time cycles.
Well, let's think about this in more detail.

Let's say you have two types of data, customers and orders. Customers have many orders, an order belongs to a customer. This is easy enough with a typical relational database. You have a customers table and an orders table. You can join the tables and ask questions like "how many customers spent more than $300 last year?"

Now let's consider the graph/object database equivalent. You have two classes, Order and Customer. A Customer has a set of Orders, and the Order has a customer. (Cycles are fine, this is a graph, not a tree.) Creating an order works with some method like $customer->new_order_for('some pants'). You store this in the database, and the graph structure is stored and indexed. (Usually, object databases index on class name, but you can always specify other conditions. This makes it basically equivalent to the relational database.) Note that this structure works very well; the in-memory relationship is the same as the in-storage relationship. You can also write the same query as with the relational database. Get all customers, find their orders from this year, and sum the totals. (Instead of writing SQL, you would just write a script here. You can index things like the order year to speed up the query, as well. Otherwise, it's O(n), but so is the relational database without an index. There is no magic after all.)

Anyway, there is no lack of flexibility with the graph database. If you want to query your data, you can. It's just less convenient, since you have to write a program to do it, instead of letting your database management engine do it. (This is actually not true in general, AllegroGraph has a querying engine based on prolog.)

Back when I did data warehousing, we had to move all our data from the web app servers to a warehousing server in a specialized schema so that some GUI software could manipulate the data. Even though we used a relational database, we had to convert anyway. Using an object database would have made the app code simpler, and the warehousing code equally complex. So I think that would be a gain, not a loss.
Yep I think that's the key problem with business plans: estimating sales. You can make a reasonable prediction of costs, but most revenue forecasts are a mix of wishful thinking and random number generation.
Radio Announcement Revisited
Cool Things in Rails 2.3
Do you think the Prozac just distorted your perceptions of reality?

Interesting experiences though - thanks for sharing.
Ask HN: Anyone just feel that earthquake? 
I'm in SanFran. First one!
The media (and some of us) tend to focus on the big hits, and I think the real money (monthly, potentially recurring income) is in a suite of small iPhone apps.

This developer inspires me:

"I have 41 cheap and simple (but useful) apps on the App Store right now and have been growing my catalog since late July. Each app took me less than a day to do. Some days I've cranked out five apps (and no, they are not the stupid "Countdown till Easter, Countdown till Christmas" apps). I easily have pulled $10k/month for the last 6 months in a row, quit my day job, and now do iPhone stuff full time. I have no employees, no costs (besides tax), minimal no-cost marketing, and no time schedule. I work MAYBE five to ten hours per week on this stuff."

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=621564&page...
BitBucket does a web interface for hg already. It's not as social as GitHub, but I'm a fan (and subscriber).
IPhone app is no big deal but Skype’s ubiquity is
Macworld moves to Feb. (and, after 25 years, calls itself Macworld)
Yeah, but what a resource of new product ideas that would be. I for one would love it!!!
Why? Is there an identifiable increase to your chance of success if you have a business plan over not having one?

In the traditional business, I suppose the answer would probably be yes (although I haven't really seen anything that supports this). Working in tech however, is much more of a crapshoot. Most of the time, you can't really research a market you're creating. This alone makes the whole process a giant guessing game.

If forming a business plan is just a series of guesses, you'd be better off moving straight into the part where you're actively testing those guesses with a workable product.
If you're developing Age of Empires for the iPhone then maybe you're missing the boat, but for pong, pacman, collapse, tetris et all it is a great way to make a buck in a week, so you have plenty of time to develop more games instead of a couple of years and a huge team to develop the next Quake or duke nukem.

The iPhone is the best platform to develop games right now and it will get better.

Early settlers will get the best land.

See you in a couple of years looking for a 500 sqft one-bedroom flat in iPhone land.
The "we did it and we do just fine" argument to me is really what's overrated here.

How do you know you are doing just fine? How much of the market have you captured? How big is that market? What if you had created your business plan 5 years ago and today you did triple your sales? Would that extra 2-3 weeks of work be worth it?
I want to see github buy BitBucket and integrate the two cleanly. Being able to use git OR mercurial for any repository on *hub would be awesome.
Looks like a 4.6 - http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsus/Quakes/nc402...
Advice from CEO of Blackboard
I had a chance to meet with the CEO of Blackboard Michael Chasen last week and thought I would share some of advice/thoughts he gave me. (paraphrased)

--

When he was a graduate in an MBA program he invented a program that would allow students to upload papers over the Internet to their teachers. He showed it to some schools and VCs and they wondered why anyone would need that. However, a teacher thought it was a great idea, and Blackboard was born.

He tried to raise money from several VCs, but they turned him down. “I went to 50 meetings with 50 different VCs and I can assure you VCs do not invest in companies that are looking for money to develop their product.”

They found an investor that was a friend of a friend’s brother’s sisters’ wife’s husband… they heard he might invest in the space, and kept harassing him until he said yes.

Early on they found another company doing the same thing (a bunch of graduate students as well) and they merged together doubling the size of the company.

For him it was all about sales. To get started they gave away the product to 2 schools. Then sold it super cheap to 2 schools. From there they sold it to ten at full price, and so on.

If you can sell it once, you can sell it ten times, if you can sell it ten times, you can sell it 100 times.

A lot of teachers approach him and say “I really want to come work for you. The online education space is the future.” He asks two questions: can you program? Can you sell? If you can’t do either then you don’t bring any value to the company.

The product is never finished. When BB started to grow, they had competitors with better products. It didn’t matter. They outsold the competition (and eventually bought them out.)

FB, Twitter, Google they won the lottery. Companies can win the lottery too. He had a friend that was a plumber and won 10 million in the lottery. If he was going to do something that was advertising based, he would rather quit, become a plumber, and try to win the lottery.

The most important thing: sell, sell, sell.
Why would you ever force a system that nobody likes on your developers? "Better" doesn't matter if nobody's happy using it.
I agree, in principle that the most dominant, important technology will be graph databases. The reason I think so is because of experience working in technologies related to the semantic web.

However, there are reasons one might a Distributed Document Store to implement a graph store - it's the index that matters. MySQL is not the same thing as InnoDB/Sphynx. Graphdb product X could be built on mapreduce +CouchDB+Lucene(+somegraphindex) .

The only thing I'm sure of, is that if anything stands out above the rest, Oracle and IBM (and maybe MS) will try to buy it.
Adobe AIR Apps That Can Save Your Time
Are there good ways of measuring your dopamine/serotonin levels?
I think you make the assumption that the tech you are creating here is inexpensive. If you can make your idea with $5k and a few months time, go for it. Make up prices and make up numbers.

What if your new product, that has never been done before, will costs tens of millions? Surely those products have existed, and yet are still somehow able to do the prudent 'guesswork' to convince venture capitalists.
Microsoft Teaming Up With MySpace; What's Next For Facebook?
Thanks. Could you elaborate why you used Kepler and Lua? Was this specifically due to the usage of Lua in WoW addon programming?
I found the top comment in Reddit about this topic to be very interesting:

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/88i21/how_a_mont...

My personal experience: When I was regularly playing Racquetball and lifting weights, I didn't find everyday problems - tough as they were - to be daunting. Then there was a long gap when I didn't have this protection and the circumstances had much greater impact on my mood. I am starting workouts again.
It's really ironic that Wikileaks.org is down...
Writing better commit messages
Good to hear the work been put into it Kepler could be used by doing something else as well. Nice to know the system was well designed.
I dunno, seems weird. 163k hits on google? Doesn't even seem like a particularly common Nigerian name. And there aren't many other given names on the list.
I bet the freedom of internet wont last 5 more years. It is taking a lot of propaganda power for many governments.
I just bought an iPod Touch. I intend to get a developer license and at least make back the cost of the device and the license... but I don't have any great ambitions of making a living out of it. At best I can hope that I come up with a simple but appealing idea in my spare time that will be catchy enough to make some good money on the App Store. I also fully intend to give away some of my work, since I'm really doing this all for fun anyway!
I think he should see how hard it is to get setup selling on Steam. It's not crack-proof either, but I get the impression that single-player games are still selling pretty well there.

I also saw this recent announcement from Valve that sounds interesting to help work around this: http://store.steampowered.com/news/2372/

But it does sound like more DRM, albeit a different take on it.
You can't fill in the pool, unless you want a few foot difference from road height to the height of the garage.

There was no digging involved when putting in the pool, he just put it down on top of the old garage floor.
What if your new product, that has never been done before, will costs tens of millions?

Bluntly, my opinion here would be that this isn't a viable option for a startup, unless they have access to easy angel capital or can self fund to that amount.

Developing an idea with that price tag is an is a risk orders of magnitudes higher than a low cost startup. Having a hit is hard enough, but you'd need a run-away smashing super hit to even break even.

Even if you choose that path, there are still aspects of the idea that can be harnessed and build at much lower costs to begin income generation to help fund the remainder of the idea.

Investing money of that amount into an idea that has yet to prove itself is not my idea of a good move, really.

EDIT - Curious, what problem space are you thinking about/working in that requires that level of funding?
I'm responding to this very late, unfortunately.

But maybe the preponderance of lawyers in American politics is part of the problem. Engineering or science is a far more common background among national leaders in Europe and Asia - and this may turn out to provide a massive competitive advantage over the US in the future. Thomas Friedman in "the world is flat" mentions this possibility a few times.

I voted for Barak, and I'm happy to have him as my president. But actions speak a lot louder than words. If this immensely popular president is a lawyer who encourages kids to be engineers, the kids will who admire him will want to become lawyers who encourage people to be engineers.
Pinkberry's Secret Recipe to Overnight Branding Success
Sounds too much like some guys 'dream' life. Making money like this will eventually fall through especially since he is not building a real product base just simple throw away apps.
When Unix-like goes so far as to include windows with MSys, what does it exclude? And, for windows users that don't like to type, there's tortoisegit (http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/), which appears to be generally functional.
Sarcasm is more biting. What you wrote is closer to irony: saying something and expecting people to get that you obviously don't mean what you say.

That said: irony is really annoying on this site, where people are expected to speak sensibly and clearly about what they think.
It's funny that you bring this up, because that's exactly what Delimitdesign is trying to do now that they have caught wind of my post (I'm the author).

They modified the post slightly to make it look less like a copy/paste job and modified the posting date back about 10 months so that it would appear to have been put up before mine. Too bad I was able to get screenshots of Google cache showing the post before it was altered. :-) If not for that, I'm not entirely sure how I would fight it. Maybe base it off of timestamps on sites like hacker news? Even then it's not a perfect solution since they could argue they simply didn't post a link to their article on the site until later.
Up Close With the Telepresence Robot From Anybots
My Manhattan Project: How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street.
If used with 'Backgrounder' Skype can receive incoming calls. Backgrounder is a Cydia app (available on jailbroken iphones) to allow one background process to run at all times.
Yes: http://www.twitscoop.com/
Damn, of course github goes down right after I posted this. You can pick up an archive at http://bradgessler.com/shorty.zip.
Well, the English language is defined by its usage, and if 99% of English speakers think that a hacker is someone who illegally tampers with computer systems, then that's what it means. I don't know why hackers are always fighting an impossible uphill battle to change public perception of the word rather than just coming up with a new word or phrase that defines the positive aspects of being a hacker. In fact, if done properly, the new phrase could even contain the word "hacker".
That is really interesting. It's fascinating to see the common words people use to describe it (besides earthquake):

felt feeling shaking experienced else(I'm guessing this was "anyone else") etc.

I was home alone at the time so turned immediately to twitter to confirm and less than 1 minute after i felt the quake a page full of people had tweeted it.

How can CNN compete with that?
The thing is that your customers speak English too, and most technical, financial, etc. domains also lean towards English.
Git not working well on Windows is something that continues to tarnish its reputation even though that hasn't been the case for quite some time.

Curiously, this was part of the reason Python chose not to use Git even after extensive research. One would have thought they would have stumbled across any number of projects like msysgit that would have shown them otherwise.
How do you know you are doing just fine?

I'm pretty sure they just look at their bank accounts.

In all seriousness, there's doing fine and being greedy. There will always be a step to climb, a market to reach or revenue to grow. The goal is to do enough to enjoy life and be comfortable, not to be the richest man in the world. At some point, you can do "well enough" and not worry about what "could have been".
What a pointless article. He doesn't answer the question, nor does he even try to. It seems this is merely an attempt to spread FUD about git, probably to promote his own proprietary version control product.

Also the question, without any context, isn't even interesting anyhow.
Everybody already knows that git is mighty fast and the reason is simply because Linus made that a priority.

A technical discussion of how he achieved it - that would have been worthwhile.

But this? Flagged for lack of content.
I'm not particularly working in that type of space, but we are generalizing here.

If you look into startups in the medical, pharmaceutical, chemical and energy fields, you will see very high startup costs while sharing the high risk attached to software startups.

Even in software though, there are companies working on solving difficult problems that would require the work of scientists, engineers and administrators for 1-2 years. This would place you into that multi-million dollar category pretty quickly.
CNN won't compete with it. They'll license it.
It would never be able to take incoming calls while out anyways because I assume using it over 3G is disabled.

One way they could get around this though is to do something Grand Central-esque where the calls get forwarded through a number skype owns and then to your phone number (though, this still uses minutes and defeats the purpose a bit).
"Thanks to the American tendency of "exporting" their culture..." Oh come on, surely the British share some of the responsibility there, if not all of it. Last I checked, we haven't yet liberated* India, so if Indians consume American media (movies, books, music, etc) then they are actively importing it, by their own choice. And its not like you don't have alternatives in India, with its thriving native entertainment industry.

Some countries don't have native content-producing industries, and so you could say that the importing of foreign culture squashes these industries before they can develop. On the other hand, keeping it out is basically censorship.

(* This ironic use of the work "liberate" is a sick joke that I'm not proud of, but it does sum up the cynicism most brain-holding Americans feel about their government's foreign policy.)
I'm sure their investors would disagree.
No doubt he can sell well, but how in touch is he with the customer-support side of the company? is he aware that his products are lousy and inspire anger among its users, and there are bright minds working hard to deliver a better product, and would have much sooner, if he didn't smack them down with patents?
anyone who voted the comment above down is either

a) 12 years old -or-
b) hasn't read any books on the history of the US government

or simply living in some sort of dreamworld where the USA has never done anything to suppress the supposed "freedom" that the country was founded on.