skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[Walmart] get you to buy things you don't need by their merchandizing

Interesting... how do they do that? I've always found Walmart's retail experience to be about one step above a warehouse club. I tend to go in for what I want and if it's in stock (often times not the case) I buy it and GTF out.
I'll sure miss Fox when they pull off the airwaves said no one ever.
We pay ~$100 - 200 / employee / month for dental & extended health care in Canada. I've heard of some startups in the US with older employees paying an order of magnitude more than that.
I generally don't include companies that have exited. You can view the YC index here and download the data. The April version will be out soon. http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/the-y-combinator-inde...
Japanese Teens Stage Harry Potter Quidditch Games in Photos
These are great and I look forward to you iterating on this - but I fear your over-reliance on Alexa is producing semi-worthless results. I can go into all of the reasons why Alexa data is unreliable but I assume you already know (the big one is selection bias based on who has the toolbar installed).

If you combine Alexa data w/ data from Quantcast, Statcounter and others, it would probably be valuable. But even Alexa themselves would tell you their dataset has massive holes in it when trying to use it as the foundation for this kind of thing.
Well, yeah. That's why it's 2013 and we still don't have our iTV. My prediction is at launch the contracts with the content providers will be fairly unappealing to consumers, once the fine print is understood, and the media will yawn. (HN will predictably announce iTV as a dud because of the content payment model being inferior to X, Y or Z.)

But the UX will be compelling and there will inevitably be a few "killer apps." Once the iTV is in the living room the experience will be frictionless enough people will probably start buying content that is technically more expensive than on competing platforms anyway. (all-you-can-eat vs pay-as-you-go, Apple will probably go for pay-as-you-go to start out.) That'll drive adoption so that Apple will build marketshare quickly enough to provide leverage to pull the content providers into the 21st century. But even the starting point they need to be to provide a MVP is probably tough to get to.

This has nothing to do with the fact that if and when it ever exists Apple will have basically rendered the current "Smart TV" user experience an embarrassment to the industry.
The articles you read do not include technical implementation details because those details are prohibitively complex without reading and comprehending a significant amount of technical documentation. You can learn this stuff on your own, but it's going to take a while. I would recommend comprehending some basic technical overviews and hiring a technical consultant to help you with all of your questions.

There's nothing inherently wrong with weak technical knowledge. A lack of technical knowledge simply indicates a lack of domain experience. Unfortunately, you're asking these questions on Hackernews, where many (most?) readers are technical domain experts.

Most of your questions indicate that you have weak technical domain expertise. Specifically, "Should I set up a server in my basement or use a service?" is a question that indicates a lack of exposure to the wide technical field of infrastructure. For that reason, I recommend hiring a technical consultant to help you with initial planning and setup.
Check out almost any Comp Sci faculty at any major american university -- you will find a lot of foreigners --- especially Chinese and Indian kids. These universities and those kids have nothing to do with bodyshops. To lump all of them with bodyshoppers is just ignorant.
I hear you, and for the startup index we are now collecting 9 data points and v1 of the new one is a labor of love that I will hopefully have out in the next week or so. Iterating like a mofo :)
> everyone has become an entitled developer and not an actual entrepreneur that analyzes a business decision rationally

Wow, this sentence must win some "highest offense:words ratio" award. It insults so many people in so few words!
There's a difference between doing something noteworthy and having some irate customers, and doing something noteworthy and almost routinely actively fucking over your customers. One's inevitable, the other's just unnecessary.
No, but what you are looking for is an indication of future risk. By offering a full refund, Instacart demonstrated a strong commitment to making sure it never happens again by demonstrating that they would incur serious financial penalties upon themselves. Heroku, on the other hand, have made it impossible for me and others to determine whether they are victims of ignorant customers shooting themselves in the foot or whether those customers had a legitimate complaint. Sincere explanation or grin-fucking. The complaints against Heroku seem technically sound, but without me actually using Heroku, I'd never know. I am a potential Heroku customer. After that "apology", I have to add to my pros/cons list a risk that the complaints were valid. Had Heroku taken Instacart's direction, that risk would be mitigated.
Useless outside of N.America
Perhaps she should leave a comment to this effect on the store page: http://www.disneystore.com/alice-in-wonderland-cosmetic-bag/...
Happy Releases with Maven and Bamboo
20 updates is ludicrous. It's strange they don't coalesce that down to one big update.

> So, now, given the option to connect something to the Internet, I probably won't.

That may be going too far. I recently had my XBox360's network disconnected without realizing it and put in an old game I had just bought. I played for a good 4 hour stretch, saved the game and quit. When I came back the saved game was corrupt. Turns out there was an update and I could have saved myself a huge hassle if I had had it plugged in to the internet...
Desperately praying that an Oracle-style slow, suffocating death of the product doesn't ensue.
Of course, but if there was a standardised sort of style used by most applications, then recreating it using Bootstrap would seem like a lot of effort for little benefit. If there isn't much of a standard style, then this is really neat - that just seemed like an odd situation to me. My impression was that there would be a style, and Apple would enforce it, but it's great if that's not true. And fair enough, googling for Garage Band iPad..it looks unique.
I don't think growth in Alexa rank is a good metric, because it does not measure growth as typically defined (in %age increase in raw traffic). Unfortunately that makes the entire table mostly meaningless.
I've heard the roku3 is different, but the roku2 I found really irritating.

First you pay extra for the roku with USB so that you can plug in a hard drive and play local content, but the roku doesn't even support .avi files - in fact it basically supports nothing locally.

The interface is also terrible, but I can forgive that since the box itself is a little under powered. What I found really obnoxious was that they put a banner ad on the bottom of the screen. I don't want to pay for a set top box just to have a giant ad on the front of it.

The only redeeming quality the roku had was the third part channel you can install on it, Plex (http://www.plexapp.com/). Roku should just replace their software team with the guys writing plex. Plex had a much nicer looking interface (with no ads) that connected to the plex server running on my desktop. All meta data was pulled down and all of my directories were immediately recognized and organized.
JVM Biased Locking and micro benchmark
Sounds like what you need is a database for inputting data that doesn't require an "application" to be built around it.
I guess this is what access was trying to be, but it is to technical for non techies and to non technical for techies.

Perhaps even something that looks like excel but is stricter with it's inputs and some easy way to handle relations.

Even showing somebody rails scaffolding can get you a fair way.
In many cases, they're not receiving bitcoins in the first place. BitPay allows merchants to receive the USD equivalent of their incoming payments minus a small fee, and at least one major ASIC manufacturer does it this way.
The idea of an app ecosystem for TV content is enormously appealing to the consumer, but in a world where one half of the internet access duopoly buys a content licensing company, the resistance from entrenched interests is going to be Stalingrad bitter.
NewsBlur's #1 on the spreadsheet, which is crazy talk to me. I've been too busy scaling to even look at my analytics.
Greg Wilson expands on that topic in a book called "Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It".
(rant

My training session begins and ends with "Stop using Excel."

because Excel sucks. Blaming "the user" because they don't how to use it properly is no excuse for this bloated piece of awful software. I've been using and abusing Excel for decades and there are too many things that are wrong with Excel. Here are three of my major beefs...

- cutting/copying and pasting, I think I need to press enter to make that rectangle go away.

- sort. Oops, you only sorted the first column, but you didn't notice that, and a week later you notice something isn't quite right with "the data"

- so many things from a UI experience that could be dead simple, but feel like advanced gymnastics

LibreOffice brings no improvement, it simply duplicates the terrible experience of using Excel. And unfortunately the innovations of spreadsheets from the very very distance past are dead: Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Resolve, Wingz, and many others are long gone.

So no I won't stop complaining about Excel. This is a pain point and maybe there is an opportunity to create a killer spreadsheet app / web app that does not require someone to "train" "the user" "how to use it properly", but I am not holding my breath.

)
I agree that it shouldn't be uncritically accepted. We need to measure, statistically, just how accurate it is, and for what.

Sorry to nitpick, but:

> every attribute but introversion seems pretty meaningless

Every attribute is defined. In fact, every question on the test assigns one point to one attribute. Therefore, implicitly, every question is an example of one attribute and a rejection of the supposed opposite attribute.

But you're right -- too often it's treated like astrology. Too often, people are more concerned with assigning categories than with understanding people and what makes them tick.
'faster' is subjective.

There really isn't much IRC does that you can't do with JabbR.
>So just because YOU think it sounds crazy or insane, doesn't mean it doesn't have a chance at something big.

This is true. I can name half a dozen billion dollar companies I rolled my eyes at when people told me what they do.

"They're trying to make money by having people tell everyone they know what they ate for breakfast? Really?"
Hah, I don't mean to offend anyone, sorry.

I've just been getting increasingly annoyed with the content on HN. We have Slashdot/reddit for developer bitching, why do we need it here?
No, I always wanted to read the paper, because I know that it's a very influential paper. I actually started reading it once, but I got stuck. Now I read this Go code and immediately understood all of it. So I hope it will help me understand the paper.
Yes the current implementation works similar to click to play plugins. A shield icon shows up in the address bar as well as a notice that the domain has http:// content. (in more user friendly terms) Examples of the click to play UI at https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/10/11/click-to-play-p...
It's kind of a shame that WiPro and InfoSys are ruining it for everyone; the quality of work provided by these two companies seems to be commensurate with the relatively terrible wages they seem to pay their visa-holding employees, too. (I've nothing good to say about either of them.)
In the U.S., at least where I've lived, the meter measures gas in cubic feet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas#United_States
By "a long period of stagnation" I assume you are referring to public exposure -- because it's not true that Postgres itself has stagnated.

Postgres has been developed steadily the last decade, and has been a serious competitor to major RDBMSes since version 8.1 (which added two-phase commit, table partitioning, index bitmap scan and shared row locking, among other things.)

I say public exposure because Postgres has clearly been popular among many developers for a long time It's ben beneath the radar for a lot of people, partly due to pervasive myths ("Postgres is slow"), partly due to the fact that, well, a product doesn't sell itself.

I think the reason Postgres has shown up on HN a lot is simply that people are finally discovering it and recognizing its technical brilliance, careful engineering and high performance, and it's snowballing. I myself have used Postgres for web apps since 2003 myself, and I have evangelized among colleagues and acquaintances to the best of my abilities, so I am very happy about this progress.

I don't see why it should surprise you. While I'm sure MySQL 5.0 and its various forks have gotten better over the years, it's hard to argue that Postgres is not technically superior in pretty much every way. Even if you care solely about performance, which used to be MySQL's main selling point, Postgres has overtaken MySQL a long time ago.

> an even more expensive per-connection model than mysql

This is not a practical issue for most people, in my experience. At least nobody is really complaining about it. Rails apps happily pool connections, for example.

If you can't pool connections in the app, there are several excellent, mature connection-pooling proxies around (including a very cool one, pgPool-II, which can also load-balance and replicate at the same time).

> and extremely painful replication

Is it possible that you have not been following the developments? If you don't need per-table/per-database replication, then streaming replication is actually incredibly painless. It is by all accounts awesome. And it scales very well.

If you do need fine-grained replication, there are several mature third-party projects that are fairly painless to operate, including Bucardo and Londiste. (I would not count Slony as "painless", although it's probably the most comprehensive solution right now. Avoid it unless you are a bank.)

There is also a multimaster-replicating fork (PostgreSQL-XC) that is apparently working very well, and implements true distributed ACID replication, as opposed to the kind of "de facto multimaster replication" you set up in MySQL, where you have to make sure primary keys don't overlap between hosts.
Apologies for an off-topic question - how did you go about registering a .ie domain name? I've been wanting to register one for a while, but the last time I looked there was a requirement to show proof of residency (or a business address) in Ireland.

Edit: The reason I ask is that it seems like the developers are living in Zurich and Berlin, not Ireland. I live in SF, so can't fulfil the residency requirement.
The bag, absolutely - take them to the cleaners.

The t-shirt image, you have no claim - it's a lot more similar to the depiction in their own film of Alice in Wonderland, from the stripey socks to the shape of the roses. No reasonable jury would find for a plaintiff on that claim.
What else are people supposed to use?
Sure, but if you're security concious then you're going to notice the lack of SSL. Meanwhile, you've added a VPN provider into the chain. And you still have to keep an eye on the SSL status considering that, hey, maybe they get MITM'ed?

If the site is delivered via SSL, I just can't see what a VPN provides other than anonymity, which is not security.
No. That's 50 upvotes. You know how many people it took to get this up to the front page? 50 people. 50 people does not a culture make.
What your profile pic says about you (Hint: You're a douchebag)
We leverage both SR&ED and IRAP at our company, but it's difficult. It is a huge distraction, taking valuable time away from actual research and development. They requirements are way too stringent in my opinion. There should be tax credits or funding specifically for startups, especially startups still trying to find their product/market fit in the early stages.
This work lacks grounding because the measure of interest, Alexa rank, is not situated in measures that are familiar.

The author, dmor, is not familiar with the semantics of the Alexa rank. Nor are most readers. We know loosely that low rank is good. But what does going from rank 1000 to 100 really mean? How hard is that? Is it a traffic increase of 10x? 100x? What exponential base does it follow?

So this chart shows the YC companies that have the largest Alexa rank delta. Frankly, the rankings look plain wrong to me, based upon what I know of these companies.

Other commentators have suggested that, given the power law distribution, we actually care about the delta log-rank. A priori, I would agree. But then we get a new ranked list, and we still don't know if we're actually learning something or our log-metric is messed up. That's actually quite pernicious, if the results look vaguely correct at a coarse level, so we trust the results at a fine-grained level, and don't realize that the methodology and results are wrong.

We're all just blowing hot air because we don't really know what Alexa ranks mean. Only SEOs who work with Alexa ranks frequently, understand the undocumented warts, and have a gut sense of what they mean, can interpret this.

But right now, we really have no point of reference and the table leaves us without having gained any insight.

Perhaps I'm actually happy that the results are so clearly wrong and not helpful. At least that way, no one will trust them. It would be much more insidious if the results were commonly thought to be instructive, but in fact were misleading.
Well this is the kind of graph I dream about :)
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/newsblur.com#
Bitcoin hits 2 billion USD market cap
Just having a HTML doc with a meta refresh from the distribution to the latest version would make a lot of things easier.

IE have
http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/NUI/
Redirects to:
http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/NUI/0.2.7/

This would enable http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/%s shortcuts
I configured an LG smart tv while over my girlfriend's uncle's house on easter. I found the user experience quite frustrating. My biggest peeve was the OSD keyboard. When using the number pad, numbers on the remote did not have any effect (gf's uncle's qualm. This is why people can't configure their own stuff. It's not their fault. It's bad design.) Then, the OSD keyboard was also super confusing for entering capital letters or punctuation. There was a three state mode key that was always set to one of (abc, ABC, or punctuation) so that at any given time, one of the three states was inaccessible without having to reason about the three way toggle key. I found this incredibly confusing, Since showing both of the other states as two keys would have required the same engineering effort, I was disappointed.

Finally, we found that it had a section of horrible OEM crapware under "apps", including an app called "Angry Ducks". Finally, we found netflix under another section outside of apps called "Premium"

:|
(mistercow was joking.)
Colleges don't limit applicants by age.

However, re-applications are definitely dinged, or so I've heard from reading books/articles about the admissions process.
I am never shocked when people posts these paypal accounts being banned. Stuff like this happens all the time. What did you really expect?
> Why use a VPN if you're accessing PayPal over HTTPS?

There are too many ways things can go wrong even with HTTPS. First, how do you get to PayPal? Do you enter www.paypal.com or https://www.paypal.com? If you do the former you can be sslstrip'd [1]. You can check for the padlock icon (plus the correct domain name in the URL) but what if you forget? All it takes to be pwn'd is forgetting once, and if you're hurrying to get a bid in on eBay you'll probably forget. What if you do go to the HTTPS URL but get a certificate warning? I'm sure most HN users would do the right thing and reject it, but for ordinary users it's probably easier to just have a corporate policy that says "always use the VPN when on the road." And even if you always go to the HTTPS URL and reject invalid certificates, what if the site operator does something stupid like include non-HTTPS content or use session cookies without the secure flag?

HSTS is making things much better, but it's not a panacea - you have to have visited the site recently from a trustworthy connection for it to work. I still say VPN is better.

[1] http://moxie.org/software/sslstrip/
If your site doesn't work, i'd rather block them then give them a bad experience. Lots of site do it but its more common with features like having javascript disabled.
Yup, or finding a technical co-founder.
>I really don't get it why people over here are heads over heels about Apple.

Track record. They released several revolutionary products in the last ten years.

>They most definitely will not re-invent the wheel.

Maybe the wheel hasn't been invented yet. There is a lot of potential to disturb the "SmartTV" market. The current offerings are mediocre, at best.
And going from 300,000+ to 100,000 is orders of magnitude easier than going from 10,000 to 5,000.

#1 on this list went from 2xx,xxx to 2xx,xxx - that could seriously be just noise in the Alexa ranking methodology. That sites traffic could have even gone down slightly and still produced that result.
I disagree with your conclusion. The fewer sites this works with, the quicker developers will fix it. Supporting the wrong way is not the right thing to do.
This is fantastic. Great work… I will be adding this to my repertoire of resources.
I feel that the magnitude of money involved should be weighed in this comparison. Instacart was talking about something like 70-odd people with about a $150 per person membership, which adds up to $10k.
Whereas Heroku-gate is probably worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even millions.
When I shopped for my wedding, I had to convince both my mother and my wife that JCP would have the highest quality at the lowest price. They disagreed, I was proven correct.

Has long amazed me that JCP couldn't brand properly when their other competencies were so strong.

I was absolutely aghast when I first heard what Johnson was doing. It sounded — almost literally — insane, and never for a moment looked or sounded any better. Marketing is marketing. Target and Apple did the marketing for him, so apparently he never really learned what marketing is.
You mean HN is just for entrepreneur bitching? I'm a developer who runs a product, where can I bitch?
Just goes to show, multinationals don't really care about the well-being of the citizens of countries they do business in.
New maps show current state of global DNSSEC deployment
Just to expand slightly: If you type www.paypal.com, click login and then check for the padlock, it may very well show up. https://www.paypa1.com is a perfectly valid site, and you're accessing it over ssl, after all.
I would really recommend you check out Llblgen Pro. The name is just weird but its a really good ORM.

The support it has for all the major databases (SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres) and others is really solid.

Also, there is a full Linq provider that works well.
> If compared on an EPA cycle with US gallons, those cars get closer to 50 mpg.

It's worse than that. Diesel fuel has a higher energy density than gasoline, and is more expensive. Anyone trying to directly compare the two in terms of miles per gallon and cost without the appropriate adjustments is simply speaking nonsense.
Berlin and Zurich seem to be doing great lately. I'm also planning on building a startup in Zurich in the coming months. How about a Hacker News Zurich meetup?