skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sounds like a really cool idea, and would be very useful to the startup culture. You'll have to remember though, startups don't always have lots of money to spend on services, so they usually just do it themselves (if horribly). You'll also have to have acceptable quality, even for a low price.

Hope it works out, this could revolutionize accounting for small business, not just startups.
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Agree with you as well. I think the article really has been misinterpreted by most of those responding here.
So true, I read that and puked.
I agree; his next answer really hits dead on for me: "power is about what becomes palatable to the programmer". This reminds me of the "conciseness conjecture" from On the expressive power of programming languages by Matthias Felleisen (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/article/felleisen90expressive.ht...). I offer the (sub-)conjecture that palatability and concision are correlated.
Xobni takes in funding, exits beta
If you're using an instance as a load balancer it's limited to 1 Gbps.
Ask YC: Can you use QuickBooks to manage a software/iphone dev business?
Quickbooks is based on having customers (for invoicing) and vendors. However as a web app/software/iphone dev company I can't manually enter in all the customers and we really don't have vendors.

Most of the expenses are reoccurring fixed costs (such as hosting, salaries, etc...) and I don't need to (usually) issue invoices...

I need to start keeping better records of expenses/income and am wondering if QuickBooks is the best solution? Or what other startups are using?
Nice to hear about a school with such an enlightened view.
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agreed.
While I'm crossing my fingers to not end up underwater on this house - I'm seriously enjoying some of the stuff we can do to it.
It's up now. Not free though.
We do this for both http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/cogenuity (http://twitter.com/cogenuity) and http://www.code-roller.com (http://twitter.com/code_roller)
http://freshmeat.net/tags/java-libraries

I'm not saying they are all are high quality, or relevant to your task, or that there are no C++ or Python equivalents - just that there is a high quantity of Java projects. Why not have a quick search? Maybe there is a project there that will convince you.

AWT is about the most prejudiced example imaginable - it was rushed out, disowned by its authors, and quickly replaced.

I think one of the key aspects of the java ecosystem is the idea of free reference-implementation libraries, but you can pay ridiculous amount of money for corporate versions with better implementations. For example, the BEA Systems implementation of Java itself and related tools seems pretty good, well-documented and so on.

I find Java itself and its OO style is pretty horrible for writing prototype code that can be changed quickly and arbitrarily - so, probably, any revolutionary ideas that require that flexibility of interfaces will be hard to iterate in java, and therefore we probably won't find many such projects written in java.
I'm very surprised that people haven't noticed that Facebook really screwed up certain aspects to the redesign and instead keep trotting out the "users don't like change" excuse. There's "disruptive" and then there's "poor design decisions".

Interesting to see they've already addressed some of the negative feedback:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/24/facebook-tweaks-redesig...
Sorry, but not good enough for this particular hater of "dynamic content". If a reader wants the content to stay still, he is not going to think to click on it because clicking usually has the opposite effect: to get something static to change.
New worm can infect home modem/routers
This is amazing. I tried to run it in the iPhone Simulator but got a couple errors. Eventually I got it to run by commenting out some lines with functions references in the errors (366 and 405 in opengl_main.c if you have the SDK). I'm not sure what I broke but it works well enough to run when I switched to the 3.0 OS instead of the 2.0 default. It's not that much fun in the simulator since it isn't designed for use with one input.

When I tried to run it on my iPhone I kept on getting a "code signing identity" error with "John Carmack" or "Cass Everitt" mentioned. I spent a while messing around and eventually found Project -> Edit Project Settings, where I changed "Any iPhone OS Device" to the settings for my device, for each configuration setting.

Abra cadabra, I now have Wolfenstein on my iPhone and owe id $0.99 when the app is released.

The frame rate is less than ideal, but the controls are excellent (virtual thumbstick) and the game is very playable. I would actually probably be willing to pay $5 - $10, but a lot of that is for nostalgia and because I owe them for making this open source.
Remember all those graphical workflow generators such as http://www.activevos.com/community-open-source.php and http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/integration/workfl... that were supposed to replace the need for coders? I don't have a problem with EAI. I think it's great. I just don't agree with the overselling of what EAI can do.
Just got the opinion of a real live 21 year old woman on this topic. She uses Facebook on a daily basis and is tech savvy enough to use Gmail filters intelligently and download torrents.

Here is the rundown of what she said:
-Doesn't read online news/blogs
-Clicked 5 or so Facebook adds lifetime
-Watches a copious amount of online TV (Hulu etc.)
-When looking for new services online she googles what she is looking for (budget manager, etc.)

If I was going to go about a marketing plan based just on this anecdotal evidence I'd say SEO is quite important, and perhaps getting some adds during online videos (how expensive is this?) would be good because she seemed very adverse to clicking on anything she didn't go looking for in the first place.
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Who says schools are supposed to be a meritocracy? Schools, especially private ones, can admit whomever they want. Apparently Standford places some value on a diverse student body. Say what you will about this guy in particular, but I don't think anyone wants a school full of valedictorians, which the Standford admissions office could easily make happen. If not, then some overachiever has to get cut.
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I don't like the new home page at all, and I have been visiting Facebook less, but presumably the company has global data on actual user behavior and decides such issues on that kind of REVEALED preference rather than on expressed preference manifested in user complaints. I'm a small enough part of the user base that I could boycott the company forever and Facebook might not care.
Looks like they released it, and at $4.99.
If schools are to be a meritocracy, what constitutes sufficient merit to get into Stanford? That was the thrust of my informational question, and I'd be happy to hear responses from anyone who has an opinion on that issue.
Are you arguing that twitter-to-sms (not sms-to-twitter, which i have never experienced lag with) is a quicker trip than sms-to-sms? My provider is Verizon and my experience is VERY different than what you assert.

And this is coming from someone who has completely bought into the "OMGTWITTER" phenomenon. ;)
I've not found a college on the planet that graduates good programmers. It's something you have to learn from experience, and a college curriculum simply include enough large coding projects for people to become good. I regularly run across code in recommendations stuff written by Ivy League post docs and most of it's pretty bad, even if the ideas it implements are smart.

I think that realizing that universities can't effectively teach programming should be at the root of choosing which programming languages are used in computer science instruction. In college you get loaded up with the right concepts that will later facilitate you as a programmer, and I think languages chosen should be languages that are geared to that end.

Perhaps the most instructive thing I've seen for student programmers, and which pays to boot, is Google's Summer of Code. That throws students in with a bunch of brutally honest and usually seasoned hackers and makes them fare for their own for a summer.
The sum of all clicks on all links, yes. We track when you click one of the links you add to your startpage. The click counts are one of the values available to the themes.
xobni is awesome. I used it when I worked at a Fortune 500 company and kept recommending it to people. I pretty much only used the attachment and contact features though. Good luck to them!
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A great work of fiction is impossible to sum up in one page. You can recount the exact plot of Infinite Jest but it won't give you anywhere near the same experience.
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It's slightly more nuanced than you're making it sound. For one thing, Twitter may very well be more reliable than your email system (YMMV). For another, email doesn't generally beep loudly and alert you.

The idea that an additional part automatically weakens a system is reductive. It doesn't necessarily weaken it at all.
That's not Twitter. That's you. I haven't seen Twitter down in months.
I run a software dev business, too. My needs for accounting are simple: tell me "Am I making money?" any time I care to check, and have substantiation for numbers that I give the IRS every year.

I ended up rolling my own bookkeeping/accounting system, since my needs are pretty simple (cash accounting, no inventory, etc). If they want to know how I arrived at the gross sales figure (which is constantly updated automatically), then I can substantiate that. I put expenses in by hand, with recurring ones getting automated to the extent practical.
yes, functional languages because they're more mathematical
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I had to look up MDA just to see what it is. It sounds like one of the technologies people making "enterprise" software would use. It does not sound like it would actually make software easier to create. That said, I do think that visual programming languages have merit, but they require the same sort of logical thought process as any other sort of programming.

What the article seems to be arguing against is that some magical technology will come along and make it so that programmers aren't needed. I don't think anything short of human-level AI will do that. COBOL was supposed to do that.
Emm..., it depends, my friends are all male programmers, so it is harder to meet my wife to me. :)
Panda3D is quite good. It has many basic building blocks for 3D games. When I used it, docs were ok but a bit sparse in places, but you could deduce much from what was auto-generated.
About time something like this comes out. A humbling perspective.
After his explanation, I asked Sussman why, if that's the world we now live in, it was a bad choice. He responded: "I didn't say it was bad. I said it would make you sad."
Has anyone tried Android apps with PhoneGap? How does it fare?
I find myself unable to identify with -- or muster any empathy whatsoever -- for an individual who received $742,006.40 (post-tax) and can readily afford to donate it to charity without concern for his family's well-being despite the current economic climate.
NZ Phone company hires convicted hacker known as "Akill"
QuickBooks is reasonably priced and extremely mature. It does what it does for reasons that you may not realize now, but you'll be extremely happy that it does them after a few months, like, the first time you need to file corporate income taxes, or the first time you get audited for payroll withholding.

If your only customer is the Apple App Store, well, you have one customer. You certainly have vendors. Anything you buy for the business is bought from a vendor.

If you're paying salaries, you have to calculate payroll taxes (and then pay them). This is pretty complicated. Even the biggest companies outsource it to companies like ADP or PayChex, who don't do a very good job. Intuit's payroll service, built into QuickBooks, will do a great job of calculating payroll taxes, withholding them, filing them with the government, etc. Don't try to play that game where your employees are "1099 contractors." You WILL get audited for this (we did).

You can try to roll your own accounting software, if your time is worth $0.00001/hour, or you can just do what almost every other small business does... use QuickBooks, learn how to do basic bookkeeping, and hire an accountant to check in and make sure you're doing everything right. Tax evasion is a pretty stupid problem to have, especially if it's not intentional!
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Won't be anything revelatory to you veterans out there, but a good starting point.
How long did it take you to "roll your own"? QuickBooks pro was $199. Based on the time you spent rolling your own, how much is an hour of your time worth?
This message and different versions of it have been floating around at least since the final election campaigning week in October 2008. Maybe a propaganda type of stuff.
Would it be different if he was a startup founder whose company got acquired by big finance? Just asking...
Hi there. Thanks for the feedback. We do have a FAQ for the service but I guess we need to make the link in the bottom of the page more clear:

http://www.picwing.com/faq

Here are some answers to your questions:

The pictures don't carry over to the next month. We send you notifications when the shipping date is approaching to remind you to use your pictures. We are thinking of ways of how to solve this situation in the near future but for now if you don't use your pictures in one month you will loose them.

You can change plans as many times as you want. Every time you change plans we ship the pictures that you have in your current plan and we pro-rate the cost according to how many pictures you had when you switched plans.

The sending date is for now fixed, however, we are going to add a 'Ship now' button so you can decide if you want to send the pictures before your scheduled date.

Thanks again for your feedback. We will definitely take it into account to continue developing our service.
1. Buh bye.... don't let the door hit on your way out.
2. With the current job losses, I am sure there will be plenty of well qualified people that can replace him for a lower pay.

You got paid $740k for what? Does this guy realizes that his profession is a lot less valuable right now, and that he shouldn't/can't expect the same amount of money (taxpayer money), even during the bust.

"I know that because of hard work I have benefited more than most during the economic boom and have saved enough that my family is unlikely to suffer devastating losses during the current bust. Some might argue that members of myprofession have been overpaid, and I wouldn’t disagree. "
Sorry Jake, but I don't feel sorry for you.

Well, maybe a little, if your claims about being tarred unfairly with the CDS debacle are true.

But stop whining. All over the USA, people who work hard, who get great reviews from bosses, customers and peers, who were promised bonuses and profit sharing, are seeing instead slashed pay and benefits. That is, if they are lucky, and not getting RIFed.

Your company is in the crapper, and being propped up by taxpayers both explicitly by government bailout, and implicitly by the Fed.

If you worked anywhere besides the financial industry at a company in AIG's shape, you wouldn't be getting a bonus, not because of politics, but because there wouldn't be any money to pay one.

Spare me the false charity as well. People in your line of work compensated themselves as if they were founders and early investors in F500 companies, while holding positions that would barely command six figure salaries in other industries. I'm sure most readers here on HN would like to be in the position to write a 750k check to charity in the face of a depression.

That $100 million a year in equity and commodity trading? How much of that was on the back of the tech and housing bubble, and exploding oil prices? Sans the games the guys down the hall were playing with CDS and CDOs, would your returns even have been so high?
Why? Has he done anything immoral or inhumane? Or do you simply resent the successful?
Saying it would work with mathematics is making a strong assumption about the kind of math classes people would be taking while using this service.
He scored 1,320 out of 1,600 on the SAT.

That's the only part that stood out for me. I did a lot better than that but never dreamed of going to Stanford.
Huh? Charles Dickens was ravenous in the pursuit of money.
I really respect his decision to donate all the bonus payment to charity. I really think that the a lot of employees at AIG are ethical, and did not have much to do with the collapse.

I was very surprised to learn that some of the senior management is only taking a salary of one dollar. Bonuses are probably warranted in this case.

I am not quite sure why Mr. Libby thought he could definitely honor those bonuses though, especially since AIG had said it wouldn't pay performance bonuses to senior executives in 2008. He promised the employees three times in October that their bonuses would be honored. The bailout of AIG was starting to turn into a witch hunt by then.
Really. How about a person who was promised payment for services served and than subsequently demonized and threatened with slander and public humiliation for claiming his just due?
"use QuickBooks, learn how to do basic bookkeeping, and hire an accountant to check in and make sure you're doing everything right."

At the cost of locking your data into QuickBooks, sure. Just be on the watch for a "forced upgrade" every other year or so, with a different set of bugs for every new version.

There is no way to recover your data from QB. if you don't mind being locked into Intuit and paying them money every other year or so, go for it. But be aware of what you are getting into.

And if your QB data gets corrupted there is always this -
http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/helpcenter/prog...

Due Discloure: I've worked for Intuit before and while I liked my coworkers and even my bosses, I know what the code looks like, how customer support operates and what their business practices are. There is no way in hell I would ever use Intuit software for any business of mine. So I am prejudiced, take my advice with appropriate doses of salt :-)
Says the rain drop, "Flood!? I'm not responsible for any flood! I'm just one tiny drop! Its all of that other water that made the flood."
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Now now, don't bring logic into this.
People who grew up poor often feel a responsibility to one's community over wealth. I know from growing up in a middle class family that I feel no real compulsion to wealth. That social worker money is enough, and that's what matters.
What do you think of Office Accounting? Is it comparable to QuickBooks?
If said founder can sneeze at $700.000 dollars like that and write a whiney letter at the same time then nope, no difference to me. I have yet to see that, though.

I don't know what he was trying to achieve with that letter - for me it's just a disgusting testament to how money can detach people from reality.
What company do you recommend for outsourcing my affiliate program?
If the government had not bailed out AIG, it would have declared bankruptcy. In such a case, he would have been effectively jobless. Also, a bankrupt company cannot award bonus. So even as he keeps his job, he dares to complain about bonus. Hypocrisy at its best!!
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I see your point. But assuming he had nothing to do with the derivative crisis, he is just basically cleaning up a mess made by someone else. And he has now effectively been paid nothing for his work.

Sure, he can afford it, and he was a senior vp at AIG, so I am sure there is a lot more he could have done. But he played an ancillary role in this crisis. And this is basically turning into a witch hunt. If he had been at some other bank, this wouldn't be happening to him.I would see some cases where I agree with him losing his bonuses, but not in this one.

It seems to me like the government is going after AIG only because of all the public outrage. I would like to see more signs criminal investigations starting, and system wide changes, I don't want the government to focus on just one company.
Sorry: I was actually joking. I should have capped with an emoticon. But it's cool to know Akamai actually has a triangulation DB: I didn't know it was feasible. So I gave you a karma point:)
How can you tell from user behaviour that people want something if it's missing? That comes from qualitative feedback.

From what I've heard, usage did drop after the release, although I'd be interested to see real data rather than hearsay.
Email startup Xobni leaves beta, raises $3.2M
I stuck with IE thru 6 and 7. I then downloaded 8, and after one day, I made the switch to Firefox.

The thing that pushed me over the edge was the "compatibility" button in IE8, that a user is expected to push when their favorite website won't load. After struggling to view some google sites I frequent, the insanity of it struck me.

Then there is the equally insane meta tag, that I now need to put on my site, to ensure IE8 users view my pages in IE7. IE8 seems to struggle with complex Javascript sites.

And lastly, then I looked up benchmarks for Browsers. IE8 is far behind the Firefox. IE8 is supposedly 35% faster then IE7, but that is little incentive to stay with it, considefing Firefox is something like 5X faster.
Joel, 99.96% of the time I would agree with you here. However, I've got some weird requirements that I was already doing development for. The big one was producing charts for my website.

For the last 2.5 years I've been pretty free with my financial stats. I enjoy doing that and I think it contributes to the success of my business -- for example, one of the reasons I'm a moderator on your forum is that I'm pretty open about things that did work and didn't. However, compiling financial stats every month took a lot of time -- between bookkeeping and posting them to the blog, that was 2 hours I was spending a month that wasn't directly selling software. That makes it a compelling candidate for automation.

So about a year ago, I had the website start automatically tracking sales (this required a quick extension to my IPN code that already maintained customer records for me -- about 2 hours). Then, some months ago, I was getting ready for 2008 tax time and figured, since I can already get the sales stats for 2008 with a mouse click, if I just tracked expenses as well then I'd be done.

It took about 3 hours to implement in Rails, and another 3 hours to hook that into its own charts on my website, and about 4 hours to do 2.5 years worth of data entry for expenses (which I was going to have to do no matter what software I used).

But yeah, if I hadn't had the requirement "webify all of this" and didn't have the pre-existing customer records, I would have picked up QB and called it a day.