skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Physical stores vs. online shopping - is later a clear choice?
An old-fashioned wool suit would never be appropriate in 100-degree weather. Formal-wear doesn't necessarily mean wool (which also doesn't mean heavy. Wool can be very light and summery). The point is less to dress more formally and more to dress more appropriately for the occasion.
> what approach would conservatives or libertarians prefer we took to the problem of large externalities?

For focussed negative externalities, a fairly common libertarian position is that they should be handled through civil damages in cases brought by those harmed.

For diffuse negative externalities, there's a mixture of a civil damages approaches and assumptions that, on balance, assessing and addressing diffuse negative externalities from market actions by any other means (even acknowledging that the civil damages approach is far from complete) creates additional negative externalities that are more significant than the original negative externalities, so you just have to give up.
Microsoft Takes Botnet Threat Intelligence Program to the Cloud
Ask HN: On transitioning government funding to a kickstarter-like approach?
Congress is currently in control of who recieves funding. What if we create a portal that users could logon and apply votes to the programs they'd like to support? Obviously, this would not be 100% of the budget, but enough to really make a difference. Congress has so many issues deciding who to pay, can we offload that to the citizens?
Thanks for the links; I'll definitely be reading through those later (as this field is very interesting to me)!

I think I may have confused matters somewhat by comparing directly to a 'Like', which is more like a 0-1 rating system, rather than to a combination of Liking and Sharing. How far it goes towards each of those is something I'm experimenting with :)

> Here is a fun one. If a person likes 2 different photos, we can say that is a connection between them of strength 1/log(# photos liked by that person). The total connection between any two photos is the sum of the connections. From each photo we can now find other photos that are in some sense likely to be liked by people who like the first. People enjoy following connections like these.

I can't wait until I have more data to play with and I can start experimenting with ways of connecting photos like you say; I've not often had the chance to try out some of these ideas due to the limited size of datasets I've had in the past.
After rolling, it got stuck at "Please Wait". Fail.
how does this compare to just making a custom, stripped down jQuery 2.0.1 build? you could shed a lot of weight, including the Sizzle elephant.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-01-28-studen...

[edit] even more apropos: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1240760...
Thanks. We know of Koding, we haven't spoke with their team though.

It seems like coding is really focusing on it's social features and wants to become the "facebook for developers".

I can't condemn that, but I think there is more value to be built, by focussing on improving the coding experience and it's simplicity.

We're a two man team, I'm a native english speaker, but taking care of the backend side of things I don't always have the time to perfect the grammar mistakes my co-founder makes.

He's french by the way, and I think he still does a pretty good job :)

Thanks for pointing that out, we'll definitely improve that when things calm down a bit
Interesting, how is synchronous communication ever more efficient than asynchronous communication? It might be more efficient for the person asking, but rarely for the people being asked.
I learned Italian while watching Italian TV and movies with subtitles in Albanian. After a while, you pick things up without any conscious effort.
U.S. Alleges $6 Billion Money-Laundering Operation Using Virtual Currency
Towels could be interesting
Nuanced difference between what you're saying and what the GP is saying. GP isn't saying inventory + $random_feature, he's saying make it a complete solution.
I am aware. rmc said "We don't want any form of sex with children to be legal (and I hope no-one's really suggesting this)." He is apparently not aware that it is legal for some children to have sex with some other children, and for some children to have sex with some adults, and really hopes that I don't suggest legalizing these things. The natural question when someone says "I hope no one's really suggesting <the status quo>" is to ask if they really mean that we should change our policy in that area, I think.
Who let you into the PHP party?
How many phone calls did you have with potential customers?
I'll give you the climate argument :) But I would think that higher quality materials and construction would also result in longer lasting products. As I don't wear my formal stuff very often, I couldn't personally say. But the flip side of custom fit is that if your body changes, it's no longer going to fit. On the gripping hand, custom fit is fairly well known for being something that can be tailored to fit, repeatedly. As for utility, I've got some suit jackets that have more pockets than my rugged wilderness parkas; then again, I wouldn't wear either kind of jacket bouldering or biking either ;)
Agreed, four months definitely is not enough time to be calling this a failure.

I've explained my motivations for calling it a failure elsewhere in this thread if you're interested. I probably should have named the post "I've lost interest in my product" as that may have been more accurate.

As for your other point, a motivated marketer would help me immensely. I'll be the first to admit that my marketing sucks. However, hiring another person to help with this project is simply beyond my meager income. I make enough to live comfortably with my girlfriend, but I can't afford too much beyond that.

Even with the issue of money aside, my core problem is that inventory management for small businesses no longer motivates me, I find it hard to work on the project as it is.
Hey - I wrote pijs.io and would be happy to answer any questions or read your comments. Feel free to post in the comments!
I never liked html-generating methods anyway (it makes escaping more difficult) so personally i'm quite happy if there are fewer of them.
have you (or anyone else) done this and have some experience to share?
The author is an early employee at Quora. He has better things to do with his time than shill for Walgreens.
I find this measure ill conceived. It only protects from unlocked computers and sniffed session cookies. The right way to handle these two problems is to religiously lock your computer when you step away and to serve nothing on port 80 but a permanent redirect to port 443.

As spindritf pointed out, it merely serves to annoy (or worse, forces passwords to be transported via system clipboards which tends to increase the security risk).
> tools out there for OS X

See http://railscasts.com/about under the "Software and Hardware Used" section.

> Tips

Just put down on paper what you want to show. For example, a storyboard [1], I use boxes about 2 inch squared and put a stick figure or what I intended to review with a title or overview of the idea. This will help you work on the flow of the screencast. I find writing the script first (very rough as you will refine after you start recording) helps to frame what video I want to record. I would focus on key pieces of the SDK rather than recording one long video so you can make each piece, short and to the point.

You should also read "How to Spread The Word About Your Code" [2]. This speaks to your exact issue at hand!

[1] https://www.google.ca/search?q=storyboard

[2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/05/how-to-spread-the-word-abo...
In global illumination there are lighting interactions between objects in the scene, but not between pixels. Each pixel is independent of the others, and so can (in theory) be processed in parallel.

In another way of thinking about it, raytracing simulates photons. Photons don't interact with each other, so the problem of simulating photons is massively parallel.
2001-2002: Invasion and mostly conventional warfare against the Taliban. Successful.

2002-2005: Reduction in troop numbers. Total disaster.

2006-2010: Increase in troop numbers. "Control the ground" strategy implemented. Some initial successes, but many failures.

2011-present: Troop draw-down. This is pretty much code for "hand control back to the Taliban".
Awesomenauts is fantastic; I have over 100 hours played on that game alone. After 80 hours or so, I made the jump to Dota 2, where I have 300+ hours played in a much shorter timespan. In my opinion, Awesomenauts should be a mandatory 20+ hour tutorial before anyone is allowed to play Dota, Dota 2, League of Legends, etc. Think of Awesomenauts as the helpful Sherpa/Mountain Guide to the Everest-like skill cliff that is Dota 2.

Hotline Miami is great as well!
Yes, nuclear has a lot of political difficulties. It's frustrating. Politics is a big reason why they take so long to build. To the extent the build problems are technical, factory-built small modular reactors would help a lot.
Have you seen https://koding.com/ ?
FYI, the lead programmer for Awesomenauts has a fantastic dev blog that delves into the inner workings of the game: http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Awesomenauts

(And it's a really fun game too! Easily worth the price of the bundle by itself.)
Here, here! Quoting Linda Grant, "Dressing down, ubiquitously known as “being comfortable”, says that you don’t care about how you look, as if your appearance were an entirely private matter that has nothing to do with anyone else. It’s the exact opposite: what you wear is part of the visible environment, as relevant as the architecture, the decor, the food on the table, the scents in the air."
A grand total of zero. With all of my projects I've been adamant about not doing phone marketing, phone calls, or phone anything.

I realize that that is a crippling problem, especially when my target demographic is small business owners who seem to do everything by phone.
I must admit that it is pretty arbitrary; it's something I'll be monitoring and revising in future depending on how it's used.
You seem to be a good writer and very articulate. However, therein lies your problem. Your blog, too long. Your product page ... way to long.

My suggesting is before throwing money at marketing, get some feedback from some local business managers on your product page. Cut it down to something that takes 1 min to get the gist of. Put more images/icons to help explain or highlight certain points.
If their recruiting is so incompetent, maybe the company is clueless otherwise as well?
you're not the first person to suggest that to me :) although I haven't thought about using ZFS for this. You're not the only one to suggest ZFS. Why that and not compression in btrfs (or something else entirely)?

_hopefully_ the mmap interface would provide the best of all worlds: mongodb continues to be simple with respect to how it handles getting data from disk and the kernel/fs can do it's magic behind the scenes of mmap. Of course, it could be that mmap + compressed filesystem leads to some unexpected (and bad) perf results. But then again, I've never tried :) have you?
Show HN: Popcorn.fm — Movie and TV show recommendations
I would pull each of your headings up a level so you can take lessons into the future:

I built the entire thing before ever announcing it = I didn't talk to customers.

I built a huge feature for my only customer = I didn't have a vision.

I wasted too much money on AdWords and Fiverr = I had no marketing plan.

"If it had @thisAmazingFeature, then I would buy it" = I didn't stick to my vision (because I didn't have a vision to stick to).

Most importantly, I can't relate to my target demographic at all = I don't care about the project.

A plan of action = What I should have had in the first place ;)
The American narrative has always been more George W. Bush than Milton Friedman.
Cloud9 IDE?
https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9/
6 Considerations and Tips for Creating HTML5 Apps - Tech.Pro
This looks pretty cool and I'm going to check it out, but I'm not signing up with GitHub since you ask for access to my private repos by default. Given that I use GitHub for my day job, I'm not really comfortable giving a service I've never heard of access to our code base. It would be great if this was opt-in. (e.g. ask for my public repos now and then ask me later about private ones)
I would think that higher quality materials and construction would also result in longer lasting products.

It's a question of construction decisions, not quality. For example, what fabric does it use? My denim jeans hold up to falls, rock, and dirt much better than light cotton slacks. What is the stitching pattern? Are there reinforcements? That sort of thing.

if your body changes, it's no longer going to fit.

Yup, I've been running into that problem. Thankfully the "problem" is that my biceps are stretching my sleeves, so I can feel good about said "problem".
Fandalism’s Pud Launches DistroKid, An Affordable Way To Upload Music To iTunes
Wouldn't the 5th amendment come into play here?
Right now, we integrate both with GitHub as a "Repository provider" and Heroku as a PaaS.

If you connect your Github account we'll import your GitHub repositories.

And we do have a primitive and slightly awkward way of pushing back to your github repository. That will be improved in the coming days. To make it more obvious and easier.

Thanks for pointing that out. We want to integrate as well as possible with current existing services.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel regarding code hosting and we want to focus on what makes us different.

Hope that answers your question.
Slickmap CSS file to map out sites during design
Looks like standard engineer writing to me. I noticed "Mobile Ready!" takes the lead twice on the product page, but I don't think mobile is a tier-1 need for inventory management.
One problem i can see is you build an isolated system. People when look for a solution like inventory, hopes that in the future they can intregrate it into a bigger system. Someone talk in this discussion about ERP, but i think that build an ERP require too much resources and time, about all for an startup, but is desirable to have a product that have more than just an inventory system. I think you have two ways, first integrate your system with some big alternatives of market [some one mention shopify] or create more systems and integrate them [consider see openerp or openbravo]...
Thanks, happy to hear you like it.

We don't import your private repositories as of now, only your public ones.

I think you did good to point this out, we'll make it more clear and visible in the future.

We're only six months into our adventure so far and we're in beta, but we're definitely improving.

And your feedback is very helpful. Thanks for that
Can't I just make friends on Facebook? This is silly.
Your edit is itself very interesting :) Did the Cornell affiliation of one of the authors cause you to change your opinion in a positive or a negative way, and why?
Are you going to try to save it?

I have some ideas, but they are just ideas, probably more wrong than right.

Your site could probably use some a/b testing for conversion rate increase. see funnel charts. I wouldn't mind seeing a demo as a video either. I also wouldn't mind seeing a feature comparison chart (?) comparing your features to the top 3 inventory systems, and why yours beats theirs.

Or even for a free extra N sales, you can claim on your landing page, "the inventory system that blows SuperInventory1 out of the water!!" (if there was a competitor selling SuperInventory1). (and then of course you buy on all their adwords if you want to needle them a bit)

I think your ads are just hitting the wrong audience.

Instead of a blog talking about small business, you would probably do better in this space blogging about living a ridiculously baller lifestyle, and blogging about women and gambling... you want to attract customers with successful small businesses.

I can suggest marketing to a group of customers have a problem, say buying adwords for "sugarInventory bug" or "I hate inventory".

Maybe give out some licenses free to bloggers or small businesses? (like 10 as a test pilot? I am not sure)

My hunch is this industry is not consumer facing, and most industry stuff recommended is word of mouth, magazine, trade show, or by sales pitch. Typically a for-a-business product has a sales team, with people who hunt leads and make calls, not sure what you can do to beat the competitors who do this, but I would start on the phone.

Gluck
> Synchronous is almost always more efficient.

Synchronous is almost always more efficient when there is very close to zero processing time necessary between receipt of communication and response to it.

As you get away from zero processing time, the efficiency of synchronous communication drops very, very quickly.

Also, that's assuming 1-on-1 communication. Even when a synchronous exchange is between two parties is efficient, every unnecessary party whose work is blocked because they are a party to the meeting drops the overall efficiency considerably.

Which is why meetings tend, in practice, to be very inefficient if they aren't well planned: while synchronous communication can be efficient for certain communications and a properly chosen set of participants, meetings often involve lots of people unnecessarily bound up waiting for other people to complete synchronous exchanges, and often involve subject matter where asynchronous exchanges would have been more efficient even for 1-on-1 communication.
The next generation of toddlers will be the first to understand license negotiations.
> I only interact with colleagues and I can't imagine them
> caring what I wear.

We do. We don't tell you, and if we're any good we don't show it, but we notice and we draw conclusions about you.
Two Videos Every Tuesday
That just means you're not doing a good job running the meeting. If it's not working for you, change the things that aren't working so they are.

When you find you're getting away from something that was working... just go back to it. If there are anecdotes and side stories, develop a system where you can stop them.

If they run long, that's when a timer can be useful. Whether it's a series of 2 minute timers or a 15 minute one.

Don't slam an entire system because "it 'inevitably' stops working," just go fix it.
Ask HN: what time was the original Hacker News launched?
I know that it was launched on February 19th, 2007, but does anyone know what time of day? Morning? Afternoon? Evening?
The account which posted the question is 33 days old. Alas, I have pledged myself to avoid gratuitously beginning my comments with "ironically."

HN is a gateway to and a tool of Ycombinator. The gateway function means that there will always be some degree of endless September by virtue of its purpose.
The regular map isn't too great either:

http://citibikenyc.com/stations

That's right. Light blue for spaces available, dark blue for bikes available. This is what happens when you let your branding trump your user experience design. :P

(I mean, aside from color selection, the thermometer-style idea is neat, but I'd prefer a system that highlights the absolute failure conditions because it's kind of hard to tell the difference between 1 bike and 0 bikes...)
What I dislike about this is how preoccupied people are with how the rules of daily meetings should be enforced. As if it is a given that a) there must be daily meetings, and b) they must be defined as rules. I would rather we focused on the goal instead: The dev team must be coordinated, and they must not deviate enormously from the schedule without the project manager at least knowing about it.

So here's our process for ensuring this:

Nothing.

It turns out that when you have skilled and motivated people working without process handcuffs, they are able, and actually eager to self-organize.

- How do we keep in touch? We set up a HipChat room where we discuss things both on and off topic asynchronously. Is our process "we will use a chat room for daily chitchat"? No. We use it because it makes sense, and when it stops making sense, we do something else instead.

- How do we catch one dev needing help? He says so. Then we can meet up and pair program or discuss the issue or whatever makes sense. Do we have "pair programming tuesdays" to enforce this? No. It just happens when it needs to.

- How do we make sure one dev doesn't drift off procastinating for two weeks? Turns out that's not really a relevant problem for us. We find that skilled devs given freedom and responsibility will live up to it. But on the off chance that it happened, we would notice the lack of work flowing from checkins and code review and work tasks.

- How do we make sure the project manager knows of any problems? We tell him. Simple as that. And usually on the way to luch, he asks "things going ok?" and we answer "yep" or "slightly behind it seems, we might delay task X till next week". Do we have a "pre lunch meetup" process to define this? No. It happens naturally because we all have a desire to cooperate.

- How do we make sure the devs don't shit in the sink while on the bathroom? We could have a process in place with a post-bowel-movement checkup rota. Or we could enforce pair toiletgoing with a senior architect. But we decided not to. It turns out the devs have a sense of hygiene, and therefore shit into the toilet bowl of their own accord.
Then again, flip-flops on a man in long pants is pretentious. If the only winning move is not to play then not playing is an attempt to "win".
Interesting take on viral marketing. Your unique spreading point makes sense but how can you narrow it down to one point when you have whole bunch of viral ideas for your startup?
I'm using the latest chrome for mac. I tested on a different blogspot blog and it works perfectly there.
Since when is it not a useful value of X? Maybe it's not a flattering value of X...

Since the Enlightenment, freedom has meant political freedom. That's why the Bill of Rights has explicit guarantees about the freedom of the press and nothing, textually, about starting a business.

Yes, this is an ethnocentric way of looking at things, but my comment was made as an American criticizing American businessmen.
I doubt it. Working against social habits is an uphill battle that even facebook cannot afford.
Happy to hear you like it.

We do integrate with Github and Heroku as of now.

Expect this integration to involve over time and we'll also integrate with other services (Amazon AWS, DotCloud ...)
Error 500 on redirect back from Github login.
We have a seperate set of (more harmful) admin tools that are on an entirely different login system, but yes, going VPN only is definitely a sensible next step.
I believe 2007-2008 represents the end of one era and the beginning of another. The changes that happened during that time were huge.
Great advice. I admit I had no plan of action when I started building my product.

My line of thought was: "Okay, I'll build it. People will somehow hear about it and start using it. I'll make money which I can then put into marketing the product".

I'm now developing a clear plan of action before I take another step with my product. A lack of one in the first place was crippling.
This all sounds very familiar. I also built a SaaS for small business owners in France (professional filesharing) but I realized I didn't care enough about the product and the audience I was serving (among other problems)

I even wrote a post-mortem here: http://www.sparklewise.com/post-mortem-5-mistakes-i-made-wit...

For me, caring about the product and the people you're serving is the most important thing. Don't choose a project because it sounds like a good idea, but choose a project because it's a part of a bigger goal, a bigger mission.

However, there's also something to be said for persistence and not giving up at the first obstacle. Finding out where the limit lies is not easy.