skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you have something particular in mind? Its an interesting opportunity and problem. All the solutions I have been considering and working on are in custom applications specific to the problem domain of aerospace.

The general one size fits all solution that is useful but does not lead to the mess Excel creates seems to be what you have in mind.

In aerospace the second most popular tool is Mathcad it seems. Have you seen that?

Although there's rarely enough licenses around (why spend when everyone has Office installed) and a lot of people aren't familiar with it.
Right, but email is ubiquitous now, and people still buy paper greeting cards to send to people. Not because they don't use email -- most greeting cards buyers do use email. But they get something out of a paper greeting card that they cannot get out of email. (Some of them get it out of an electronic greeting card, some not so much.)

I have six online competitors to my desktop application that I know about. They're made by wonderful people. Some of them are even free.

Many of them show ads for my product and they're, empirically, the best places for me to put ads.

(Google will helpfully let you see what websites are making you money. Other AdWords users should really get to be friends with the Placement Report. Fascinating stuff there. Tangent over.)

Given the choice, today, between a no-install, free online application which is staring them in the face and clicking to another website, downloading something, installing it, running it, playing around, clicking purchase, reaching for the credit card, typing in their details, and inputing a license key, a few hundred people have said "Oh, easy -- I want the downloaded one."

Why is that? There are a couple of reasons (which you would be intensely bored about because you've presumably never had to create bingo cards for 25 people), but it boils down to "The experience of using the desktop application sucks a lot less than the experience of using the web application, for at least some users". They get something out of the desktop version that they couldn't get from the web version, and voted with their wallet.

That's just the view from my little, teeny wedge of the economy. Are all similar wedges going to inexorably vanish? Probably, if you come at it from the assumption that everyone will eventually come to work like you. To misquote another Englishman: "There are more needs in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are answerable by the types of products you yourself buy."
Trang chủ của công ty LG bị lỗi
These people obviously weren't well read. Iceland was well to do even 10 years ago.
My review:

1. the drag-and-drop add photos page http://divvyshot.com/event/F2z3/photo/add/ doesn't work, at least for me (Using Linux/KDE/Dolphin/Firefox)

2. the HTML alternative http://divvyshot.com/event/F2z3/photo/add/form/ only allows one photo to be uploaded at a time. I have 7 photos I'd like to upload, varying in size between 1.7 MB and 3.4 MB. I want to be able to tell it to upload the lot in one go, not have to go back to the site 7 times and do it.

3. there should be a command-line application to upload photos. This would only be 100 or so lines of Python. It should of course allow multiple photos to be uploaded at a time (see note 2 above).

4. I uploaded a photo -- http://divvyshot.com/event/hv4x/ -- and can't give it a name or title. I even created an account but that didn't seem to do anything useful.
It's a great way to find early adopters and testers for the product!
One way to test your partner's trust is to deliberately instigate a money fight. It probably will happen later if not now, and now's when there's little at stake. Figure out a few "hard lines in the sand" that an unscrupulous person would really dislike, hold those positions as far as you think you can go without destroying your relationship, then come clean once you've determined the person you are truly dealing with. People will always reveal themselves when pushed to the edge.
> A Desktop client (PC & Mac)

I don't use MS Windows or Mac for handling photos, so this is useless for me. for If you had a Linux client I would probably use your service. (Even a 100 line command line program would probably be good enough for what I want).
Why not store the photos at whatever resolution they were uploaded, and add options for lower-res viewing or downloads? That would provide them ost functionality for everyone.
Also, why the name? A divvy is an idiot -- http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=divvy -- I suspect this is not the image you want to portray
Another one: http://www.osalt.com/
Liars, all of you. :P
An in-depth interview with Steve Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell
Might I add that Ubuntu for all its quirks is a very reliable and easy-to-use OS. Oh VIM is always a win in my book.
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I pirated Windows XP and put it on a machine for which I own an XP license, because the legitimate copy I have just wouldn't work. I tried to do it honestly, I really did.

I use Linux now.
How a Bully Boss Changed
Here's a direct link: http://www.makelinux.net/kernel_map
To address your idea specifically, I definitely think something like that is possible. If the formulas and data where separated such that one spreadsheet could inherit formulas from a master etc. There is so much variation in engineering though its just a matter of working it through and seeing where the limitations are.

In making things better in engineering the first goal is first try and stop people spending so much time managing and moving data around. This really takes up a large percentage of the work done, unnecessarily.

Second is to start getting engineers to see things more like programming where things aren't repeated and data is separated out from the method. If you receive new data (e.g. new aircraft loads and geometry) your goal is for there to be nothing whatsoever required for you to update your analysis. Its already setup, you just point at the new data and it's done. This is rarely the case I find.

Finally, I think is the issue you are talking about which is to tackle the problem of engineering by forming new abstractions and figuring out how to best represent those abstractions with existing tools or something new. This is definitely promising but honestly there's lots of easier stuff to do first that would make a big difference.

The thing that makes it so hard in engineering is that every job has its own set of "approved" methods and the amount of work required for each part varies for a number of reasons. There's a lot stuff you're never going to get the world to agree on but a spreadsheet type thing that separates the data and formulas completely is a good start.
You can get all the free and legal Microsoft software (you even get two MSDN support calls) you want from Microsoft BizSpark. It's really easy to sign up.
The Toyota trumpeters approached the uncanny valley. They have an "X-files" alien species look to me.
If anyone tried such a gimmick with me, it would damage my trust and respect for them permanently. I certainly wouldn't want to be partners with someone who would do that.
Not sure what you have for the Mac client but a suggestion: I can select an album in iPhoto (or event(s) or multiple selects) and then use either contextual menu or menubar app to upload photos. No need to drag and drop.

When I open iPhoto, that's usually the time I feel like sharing.
Yup I'd say those are the biggest factors. I dislike the notion that reading is somehow better than other activities though. Kids need a balanced diet.

Socially, I'd argue that TV is better for kids than books.
He didn't write he's a consultant, but a startup. And that means there is no billable time - you only calculate stuff against your living costs. And then a hundred dollar are no longer an extra hour, but up to 2 extra days. You learn that stuff if you fall on hard times someday - and if you try doing a startup then this is something that occasionally does happen.

Well, anyway, as much as I understand him, myself I still don't work with pirated software. Usually that means I search for OpenSource alternatives and learn to use those.
Agreed that Radio Lab and Stack Overflow are the best ones, but I would add Venture Voice to that list too. Google Developer Podcast is occasionally interesting. Hanselminutes may have a few good episodes, but is usually too Microsofty. There are also some nice language podcasts out there, at least Learn Thai Podcast and JapanesePod101 are quite good. All of these can be found on iTunes.
@m_eiman: and/or allow users to subscribe to other HN users' synopses, such that I would only see my favorite commenters synopsis. And why use mouse over? Simply place it to the right of the link, taking up all that space that is not being used yet; put the synopsis in a more transparent color than the other text- like the <0 down-modded comments.
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I allow 255 max in my various databases (varchar(255)), although in reality I've never come across an email address longer than 50 characters.
VMware's ESX Server 4.0 lost in the clouds?
Virtualization juggernaut VMware kicks off the VMworld Europe trade show in Cannes today, and the opening salvo of the company's own announcements are rather muted because ESX Server 4.0 (or whatever the future hypervisor will ultimately be called) is not being launched. At least not on the first day of the event, as far as we know. Ahead of the VMworld event, VMware gave the IT trade press a sneak peak at what it is up to, and ESX Server 4.0 and its related stack of revved virtualization tools, called Virtual Infrastructure, were not what VMware talked about.
BlackBerry’s fart-app defense: $2.99 minimum price
Would these tests constitute prior art acting against any proposed patents?
I propose a Hacker News podcast, which would consist of progress updates and lessons learned from start-ups. The host could call each participating start-up every once in a while and then assemble these clips to a show. I won't take on the task of recording it, but would be an avid listener.
Turn your text into this:

You and your friends went to a party.

Where do you put the photos?

Right here!

Note the lack of orphan words.
It's tough these days being a developer. I know from experience. If you are lucky you can get clients to pay the development costs and you are most likely going to give them something they like. Trying to break into the shareware or apps for purchase is a whole new ballgame. Customers demand perfection and there's a middleman around every corner trying to sap your profits. That's the risk of the entrepreneur. Fortunately, the web rewards innovation, but it requires hard work. At least the iPhone developer license is nothing compared to a Nintendo or XBox license.

Paul St. Amant
Softomic LLC
I maybe a little naive, but how different is divvyshot from something like flickr ? Doesn't flickr have private groups (i.e. sharing with just a few people) ?

I must be missing something here.. :(
I can't bear to get screwed over again.

I think your only true protection against getting burned again is to deeply face what it is in yourself that created those painful situations in the first place. No contract in the world will protect you from creating an equivalent situation again, if you haven't learned what you need to learn from the previous ones.

Your use of phrases like "getting screwed over", "getting ideas and hard work stolen", and so on, suggest that you believe that it was because other people did bad stuff to you that things ended up the way they did. I'm willing to believe that other people did bad things. Nevertheless it was your own choices that put you there in the first place. As a wise person once explained, it was never really the other person you were trusting; first and foremost you were trusting your own bad judgment, and that's what really betrayed you.

I'm not saying you shouldn't put things in writing or draw up a contract. By all means do. One way to protect against the risk of a relationship going bad is to have shares vest at a certain rate per month. I think our arrangement is 1/48 per month (so, over four years), with a 1-year minimum, and a portion of up-front vesting for work already done.

But that pales in important to the deeper issue: if you don't want to get screwed again, then stop ascribing your painful experiences to other people. This doesn't mean you have to absolve or forgive them, it means you have to be truly honest with yourself about what you did and thought that was wrong. That's been my experience anyway... the only solution that works is fundamental growth.
I don't look at using software you've paid licenses for is piracy. My laptop came with Vista, I've installed Ubuntu on it and the Vista restore disc doesn't work in a VM. If I download and use another copy of Vista, it isn't piracy.
Taking a perfectly ordinary form and breaking it in a completely unnecessary way so that it no longer works for users without JavaScript is quite rude. The same effect can be achieved just as easily with event handlers, and will result in more modular code with greater separation between the structural and behavioural layers.

If you really want to do form validation you'd be better off using something like Ojay's Forms package:

http://ojay.othermedia.org/articles/forms.html
It’s Time To Start Thinking Of Twitter As A Search Engine
But will Flock ever get achieve populatity to make at least a few millions?
If there are two products I think I'll never understand the motivation, those are Flock and Cuil.

"it didn't work at first iteration, we burn a few million dollars... no worries! Let's rewrite the whole thing and pray... again"
You guys should try out www.imagevat.com too
I think they ought to display 1.0333147966386144e40.

Actually, they did show the result by default as floats in scientific notation, it was me who changed number display options for easier visual comparison.

I assumed quants preferred C++ because of performance. When I occasionally have to go back from Python to C/C++, I'm surprised much faster it is.
The utility of an API for this sort of service is honestly pretty limited. If you're doing things right, most of your links should be getting created by casual users (for pasting into chat/email/twitter) - it's not too much of a hassle for them to hit your site and fill out a form.
Looks awesome. Great website too. I'm having too much fun with the Dyno Grid page: http://heroku.com/how/dyno_grid
Obama "delays" promised elimination of capital gains taxes on start-ups till 2014
That number seems to be inaccurate. The Treasury Direct website http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np states that the total U.S. public debt is: 10,943,838,929,434.92 (~11 trillion dollars). The U.S. GDP is close to 14 trillion dollars, making the debt somewhat less than 100%. I'm not sure where that 350% figure comes from.
It's not just the lost profits to the founders that will hurt. The bigger damage might be that angels and VCs will now have less incentive to invest. That means more startups won't make it.
Interesting.

What I think would be even cooler is if disqus went and located all the places that an article has been posted up, and gathered the comments from there (perhaps in a read-only variant, so you have to log in to the sub-site to read the comments).

For instance, I'd love to automatically include HN comment son my blog posts, rather than just including a link to HN.
My parents founded a PC software startup in ~1983, that lasted for ~15 years or so before dying from second-system-effect. They were always quite anal about paying for software, especially my mother -- with her residual objectivism, she even believed in moral rights for software.

When I was cleaning out the old apartment, I found several treasure troves of software and licenses. It was depressing to stumble upon at least a quarter-million dollars (unadjusted for inflation) -- embodied in small stacks of shrinkwrapped paper and enormous piles of obsolete media.
These arguments are even more true for books, where production costs amount to a laptop and the time spent. Yet, we do not see so many novelists circumventing the traditional publishers and publishing on their own.
But there are all sorts of things your hedge fund can't do if it doesn't have national sovereignty.
This touches on one of my pet theories. Spreadsheets were remarkably successful because they never require you to express a model abstractly (i.e. they never require you to write the formulas up front and plug in data later - which is the way that programming languages work).

My pet theory is that people have a love of grids and graph paper -- I remember in grade school how graph paper was, for some reason, a rare thing, and it was treasured. The kid with a whole stack of graph paper and who DREW PICTURES OF TANKS AND DRAGONS ON IT was considered some kind of blasphemous rouge, but still respected because of access to graph paper. It brought some indication of order to the otherwise sloppy handwriting on looseleaf we had to do.

And that love of the grid translated into a love of spreadsheets. It's so neat and clean, ready to be filled up with MY organized madness! All those empty boxes, what fun! Look, I made a list of items! And it's arranged in neat rows and columns! And besides, who needs to be able to join these product ids with sales numbers? We can do that with a hundred clicks or so and create a pivot table!

Everything begins to look like a nail when your hammer of choice is Excel.
Yeah, I have something very particular in mind :) It's nearing launch in fact. You're right that it's a horizontal solution (like Excel, applicable to many domains) and not a vertical one. A lot of custom vertical software is really crappy and really expensive. Vertical systems also tend to be rigid and too hard for people to coax into doing what they need. The more flexible you make them, the more they approach spreadsheets... but then people complain that it's a crappy spreadsheet! (If you've ever heard of Greenspun's 10th Law, one can say that all sufficiently complicated vertical applications end up being a poorly implemented version of half of a spreadsheet.)

The core principle of what we're doing is to build everything around the familiar spreadsheet UI. That UI is hugely valuable for two reasons: it fits the way that users' minds work, and after nearly 30 years it's what everybody knows and likes. The problem isn't with the spreadsheet UI as such, it's with the current generation of spreadsheets that were designed for the problems of 10-20 years ago. The problems have gotten way more complex, but the tool hasn't evolved.

If you think about all the different issues with Excel that lead to messes, in each case you can kind of imagine a spreadsheet that doesn't have that particular problem. Consider the problem of copy-paste creating massive duplication: you can imagine a spreadsheet that gave you the ability to copy something without duplicating it (the cloneage idea). Here's another example: in Excel, it's really hard to do analysis over top of a bunch of different spreadsheets. Even just adding up the totals of the same variables in different sheets is a pain. But one can imagine a spreadsheet that didn't have that problem. Other examples: it's hard to track the history of who changed what in an Excel spreadsheet; it's hard to share Excel spreadsheets or link from one file to another; it's hard to restrict access to certain ranges while allowing it to others; it's hard to modularize complexity. All of these issues together mean that people get into big trouble when they try to do serious work with Excel. Yet it's possible to imagine a modern spreadsheet application that doesn't have these weaknesses.

The question is, if you build this new thing, will it still be a spreadsheet that users recognize and feel comfortable with? Or will it be some foreign thing that nobody wants to learn? That's what killed many attempts to improve on spreadsheets in the past, so we're focused on making something that looks and feels a lot like Excel (but which doesn't create so many messes... or at least makes it easier to create non-messes).

Good lord, I did not intend to write this much. Thanks for listening!

p.s. I'm not familiar with Mathcad. It may well be a good vertical app. Those exist too!

pp.s. Email me (address is in my profile) if you'd like to take a look at what we're working on.
Flash-based MLB.TV launches, looks pretty good, buh-bye Silverlight
12 Must Have Bookmarklets : Google Chrome and IE | The Code Dreamer
Now I am going to have to say that the spreadsheet UI is hugely valuable for three reasons: it fits the way non-programmers' minds work, it's familiar, and... it feels like graph paper!
One of my undergrad classes was for SAS, and they mixed MIS, CS, math, and statistics people in this class. It took weeks for those on the CS track to get that when your code says "proc average", you're _calling_ a procedure, not defining a function. We had no idea where the code was supposed to go. There was a serious disconnect between the students and the professor in that class, who, I later realized would have just needed to say "this calls the procedure average" and things would have been fine. We had no idea, initially, how we were getting results.

Of course, we had to run all this on VMS and print it out on a fan-fold line printer, and it wasn't very interactive. SAS products seem to be more visual and interactive now.
The product home-account says they are providing is not a "let's improve their situation enough to make them a happy customer" but something that claims to be a mathematically optimal way of refinancing your home mortage. Then they will tell you when it becomes optimal to refinance your home again. Already they hint that they will begin competing with mint.com so eventually they'll provide lots of useful services.

The monthly payment is not a bad thing. It makes it much, much cheaper for the customers. It does not change it so the service will suddenly mislead their customers about the best thing to do for their finances.
A R Rahman on Galatta Cinema movie magazine COVER 
Guys (and gals of course!)… our God ARR has graced the cover of Galatta Cinema’s latest March issue… I just saw it online at
Also, I’ve never seen this pic before… have any of you?
WS-Security using Cert Authentication: How to implement a Message Signing Client
This last episode shows you how to implement a WebService Client (using Spring-WS) which is capable to sign outgoing Messages in order to comply with the WebServices' demand for Certificate Authentication.
Searchme: A portal backed by Sequoia
Against some at least.
Skittles Surrenders their Home Page and Brand to Social Media – The Pros and Cons
Proving still retains value. Because you reduce the burden of choosing a good algorihtm to choosing good assumptions.
So it's an updated incarnation of trackback. Well done.
Tax the rich, change carried interest capital gains rules and now leaving startups out in the cold.

Can Obama find any more ways to take the incentive to succeed away from Americans?

He is killing the American dream and trying to implement Karl Marx's dream. Good night America, so sad to see you go.