skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That focus also allows Balanced to build great tools to solve problems that are bigger issues in marketplaces.

They've caught a number of fraud incidents for me which has been incredibly helpful (and obviously saves me money).
I agree that the devices don't change your workout habits, but if you have the habits or want the data then this is a cool thing.

I don't think this post has ANYTHING to do with people who aren't prepared to take car of their pets. It's just a way that people can track over the lifetime of their dog, activity and health. I've got a 9 year old dog and have had her since she was 1. I wish I could see where she's declined in activity over those years.

Also, she blew out her knee. This might have helped me see a decline in activity and begin to worry about my dog even before she began to show a limp.
Not for me, but given it has a Mozilla logo and credits them for "support" I would assume it does for some.
False dichotomy, one does not preclude the other.

You can very well spend time with your dog, and still enjoy the metrics that this thing will give you.
And here's a spreadsheet that implements the formula for amount of time it takes TCP to start filling the available bandwidth for the channel it's using. Hover over the cells to see notes about what they mean.

The main variables to tweak are RTT and the available channel bandwidth. The answer you're looking for is in cell B5.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0An9tG32cwT8UdFZ...
Whoa, this caused the second BSOD I've seen since Windows 98. When I started messing with the options, the windows just flashed wildly for a while, some popup about ATI Radeon driver errors was struggling to spring to existence, and then everything froze.
I've been working on the same thing for firefox as a userscript. It's certainly more equitable then hellbanning, and inane threads about how subject x is turning hn into reddit.
I feel that doing an API this way begs for a middle man to make an app that normal people can actually use to do shipping in their business.

Why, if I want to ship things to people as my business, would I implement some software myself using this rather than buy an existing offering?

Am I missing something? Shipping and accepting credit cards are completely different, I know this API concept works for Stripe, but I fail to see how it works well for shipping.
Poll: Do you simultaneously keep side projects while you grow your startup?
Yes, side projects help me work
No, side projects are a distraction
Factor.io wants to be a sous chef, handling prep work for developers
I suppose that does make sense, if time is of the essence it will help in getting attention.
Some thoughts about the economics (and ethics) of games:

* if a game isn't fun (to me), I shouldn't have to pay for it
* if a game is fun, I should pay for it
* generally, "better" games deserve more money (non-linear)
* ... but I'm skeptical that $500 is ever the right price (e.g. for every LoL champ)
* "time spent playing" is a half-assed proxy for "better"...
* ... but not if you rig your game mechanics around this proxy metric
* pay-to-win games are "bad" (personal subjective perspective)
* if I don't have to pay for a game, I probably won't (sorry!)
* if I'm paying per-month for the game, I feel artificial pressure to play it...
* ... and if I stop playing, I'll cancel
* ... so I can't casually pick it up 3 months later
* ... and I think maybe most people have a limited monthly-subscription budget
* games that have free options have better word-of-mouth marketing

And a few observations derived from these:

* gotta have a demo
* the demo needs to demonstrate the actual gameplay
* getting demo-length right is really hard
* if you have the infrastructure to charge $2/month, you've got options

With all that in mind, here's what I would do (hopefully will do, one day):

* lots of gameplay should be free
* where it makes sense, put roadblocks that players will hit after a while
* .... and then some more after some more while
* charge say $5 to get past each roadblock
* have say 5 total roadblocks
* to assuage cheapskates (5-years-ago me!), give alternatives to paying real money
* maybe crazy grinding?
* even better would be if you could find a way to give players credit-towards-roadblocks if they are helpful to the game community, or to game development

Be up-front about all of this: "Early parts of the game are free! To feed my family I'll be charging progressively for access to the later parts of the game, but I'll never charge a given player more than $25" (or some other promise you are willing to keep)

---------

By the way, $20 is a lot for an indie game, especially up-front. The humblebundle this week includes ELEVEN games, including several great ones, and the "average price" (unlocks all 11 games) is around $6. So no, I will not pay $20 for your game, are you crazy? Instead I'll go buy the humblebundle for $10, give half of that to charity so I feel like a social justice crusader, throw away 54% of the games in the bundle, and STILL have dozens of hours of gameplay, and $10 in my pocket for the next humblebundle.

Yes, I'm a cheapskate. But this is the reality of the market at work. I'm not saying your game isn't "worth" $20. I bet your game is more fun than a movie-plus-snacks, and people pay $20 for that, right? But your game will be compared to games selling for $10 or less.

Man, I just realized I sound like I'm trying to talk you out of a career in game-dev, and that's not what I want (as a gamer).

---------

One more thought:

You said "(not necessarily more powerful, but rather more diverse)". Yeah, listen, when you play my Rock Paper Scissors online game, you get Rock for free, and pay for Paper and Scissors. They're not necessarily more powerful, just more diverse.
Exactly. Investor management takes time and attention away from sales and product management. Event if it's rallying a large group of volunteers, that person is getting pulled away from other vital tasks.
If I wouldn't know better, I'd think Microsoft is trying to game Google search through "exact domain match".
They have ACH debits: https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/?language=bash#deb...
Ask HN: Anyone need a designer?
Recent college grad here, going full-time as a designer (remote for now). I'm based in Connecticut.

Been designing over 8 years and have worked with startups and big companies.

Skills include planning & research, wireframing, interface design & user experience.

Also have experience running a startup and selling.

Portfolio is at http://masswerks.com
Yeah, but we're all geeks here. It can't be that hard to splice together some custom CSS to make hacker news look like whatever you want. Let me just click view source and OH GOD PG FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY WHY ARE YOU USING NESTED TABLES IT'S 2013!!?!?!!111questionmark!

Sorry, blacked out for a minute there.
As vandals deface U.S. parks, some point to online show-offs
End of TV!
A Laid-Off Zynga Employee Trashed The Company On Reddit Last Night
So:

1. Detecting an abrupt change in sleep patterns in humans is useful.

2. Dogs are not humans.

Ergo: Detecting an abrupt change in sleep patters in dogs is useful.

Anthropomorphizing dogs is terrible. It is certainly one of the biggest causes for behavior problems in dogs.

Maybe it is because I have only ever had dogs that were bred for protection but I do not want to think about what my dogs sleep patterns are/were. Does whistle monitor for sounds so that I can disregard the change in sleeping pattern due to a siren? Foot traffic on the sidewalk? Thunder?
This is not an elegant poll.
Azure updates make it great for do-it-yourself development
Why I no longer rely on online news [A confession]
To be quite straightforward it needs some polish. We've got incompatibilities, instabilities, and so on... Currently I would say that Unity is a better choice, but WebGL is nevertheless the future.
Schadenfreude With Friends: Zynga’s Rivals Explain Why They’re Not in Trouble
I am currently starting up with Angular and have wondered the same things. It's why I have considered looking into Ember because there a few large production apps using Ember and it makes it easier to trust the framework. I am starting to enjoy Angular though. So it's tough to figure out.
The best looking isometric games
Dept. of Homeland Security: Laptops, Phones Can Be Searched Based on Hunches
Thanks very much for posting those links, I too am bipolar. Unfortunately I'll have to put off checking them out properly until another time.

Until last December I'd been stable for around 5 years. Now I'm putting together an account of my health over the last 6 months for the benefit of my department's special circumstances committee. With any luck I'll make it through to the next year of my degree.

Thank you for your efforts, I hope to be able to contribute similarly when I'm stable again.

I'll forward this to my wife[1] as I expect she'll find them of interest too (she's also bipolar).

[1] http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/blog/academic-life-mental-i...
I would be happy to look at a couple of extra ads in exchange for the service.
2. Not only do most fail, they don't generally fail spectacularly. They die, slowly and steadily, in a death march that saps the founders of their confidence and has been documented several times to lead to severe depression[1].

My company failed, a long slow death, after 8 years. I was barely able to pay myself during the latter few years, but I had employees and cofounders that I felt obligated towards... and then company debt I needed to work off. While we have shut it down now and I have a full time job, I feel dead inside, and I am having a rough go at being functional. I hide it from my family, and am finding it hard to be productive. I'll just stare at the screen instead of working. I don't know what to do to jump start myself again. I feel so empty and like I am fake. It has been two years. I haven't said this to anyone before now. But I believe you are right about the slow company death, and while I don't believe I am severely depressed, I do feel a bit like Frodo at the end of LoTR, but without a Grey Haven sanctuary to sail off towards.

(Sorry for the rambling and the thread hijack)
We should be friends. Love the concept of Vidpresso; I woud have liked to try a demo but it required me filling out a form. :(
The Tyranny of Email — Tips to Save You
Be a subversive, not a rebel
Great Timing
Decoupling is not necessarily about using different languages for the different components. Smalltalk MVC was all written in Smalltalk for example and that doesn't mean that the M the V and the C weren't decoupled.

I have no experience with React but using JSX (or Javascript) to manipulate the DOM doesn't necessarily mean your view is not decoupled from your controller or model.

I have been looking at Angular a lot lately and this is another example where view components are constructed from a mix of html(templates), the DOM (directives), and Javascript (the code that implements directives). The model is pure Javascript objects and the controller is also Javascript.

Decoupling is an abstract concept that can be realized in many different ways.
Damn, I posted this on hacker news before you.
Well I think the color works really well. Sparse whitespace punctuated with red. It's clearly well though out. And I like it.
Avoid #2 at all costs. Nothing drives me away from games faster than "Please wait X time (or pay more money) before you can continue playing," whether it's a daily action limit, or some kind of "endurance" hack, or whatnot.

You want people to invest themselves in your game, and being multiplayer having more players online at once is only ever a good thing. Turning away players is counter-productive.
Front End Dev Reactions
Wow, those results are telling.
Gmail's IMAP supports the IMAP push extensions. I don't know if Apple's Mail app supports them or uses them, but just because it's IMAP doesn't mean it isn't push.
Damn nice.
Show HN: Gistify - Mac App to quickly and easily make gists
To me, this means that any electronic device you carry across the border should be considered, as much as possible, throw away.

Not that I cross the border all that often.
Oh boy! my first chance to test out this plugin!
"I wanted to offer the service to people that might not be able to afford it, and not have them punished by having fewer features."

That's neat, why don't consider some kind of sponsorship program? A user that can pay, can sponsor one or two more users who can't, that would be nice :)
I think it's working really well, but take all options here with a grain of salt.
Let's assume a few things:

1) The base valuation is high enough to be significant.

2) It's not a passion project.

3) I have other ideas.

4) The IP stays with the company.

5) The employees get taken care of.

As long as 1, 2 and 3 are true, it's worth getting the money to start the next thing. I include #4 because it's kind of a copout to assume you can start over with a forked code base. Then it's not a real choice. #5 is included because what goes around comes around. If the founder takes the money and runs, but everyone else gets screwed, it'll be much harder to start the next business.

#2 and #3 are really the critical pieces. It's the difference between "This is special" and "This is one idea of many." Microsoft, Google and Facebook all would've answered "No" to a similar question. In all 3 cases it was the founder's first company, so they weren't playing with the House's money.

Very good question!
You'd think a site called Hacker News would be more hackable...
The companies you are applying to are not trying to help you as a job seeker. They are interested in satisfying their own requirements.

If companies provided fine-grained feedback on specific deficiencies, it would inevitably create an opening for an argument about those items, which they have no interest or motivation to do.
No I have no intention of raising any money. You need to set your sights a bit higher if you think this is a startup.
I think it depends on a lot of different things, including how over/undervalued YOU think your startup is by other people than Google, and irrespective of financials how excited you are about the idea.

The question might be easier to answer if it was: "Would you sell your CURRENT startup TODAY for 5x what INVESTORS think it's worth (to Google so they can kill it)?"
The only thing I don't like with Sails is the ORM, actually. I was wishing for something like Mongoose.
Are startups like that? Most of the companies I think of as special in tech were their founders' first startups, not subsequent ones started after a significant cash-out of an earlier one.
No, because that should adjust your expected value.
This is "WTF" by OK Go. Back in 2010 they posted the raw greenscreen footage for people to remix.

http://okgo.net/2010/01/20/wtf-video-remix-project/
If you write single threaded applications you cant go above 1 core and so will never hit this mark :)
Perhaps something like this could be done: http://clippingmagic.com/

(discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5682831)
Dammit you've just convinced me I need to get this.

Who doesn't love more data on everyday things anyway? This seems really cool.
Is this a sponsored ad for Dashlane?
On Stealing the Right Thing
Be wise in choosing what to copy/steal.
Would also be interesting to see if they could recreate the effect of the original video in JS also.
I think more coincidence. EasyPost and TryPaper both started around the same time (Q3 2013). Nothing specific on the USPS side has happened.

That being said, one thing we've seen, is as companies have invested more and more in digital delivery, they've 'de-invested' in their physical print & mail production, so it makes a lot of off load it to a S(oftware)+S(ervices) model.
No-one ever cheered for "embrace, extend, extinguish" when Microsoft did it, and no-one will do it for Google either.
That's too bad. Might be worth adding a note about that for now?
Anant Narayanan has been using a mechanism like this as an example in WebRTC spec discussions - basically a distributed-hash signaling layer (if you will, a self-healing incomplete mesh used to connect nodes for signaling a webrtc call) - and the distributed hash mesh could be a mesh of WebRTC connections with datachannels (no media).

The effect might be an encrypted, hard-to-block (barring deep packet inspection at all the edges or shutting off all access) communication tool. Identity verification would be important for some uses, but not for others.

OOB negotiation via any other channel can be used to join a network (see the article on serverless WebRTC)
8-4 Play

Giant Bombcast

Weekend Confirmed

These are my top 3 weekly that I look forward to listening to.
FACEBOOK DOWN - TOTALLY
I didn't ask you for your school rant. I asked for programming advice. You don't understand what this disgusting school is like, it's an absolute scam.
Sorry, I'd hoped that this would be one place where people used the work paedophile sensibly. I'm talking about people being attracted to prepubescents.

[edit as I failed to answer the question] Incidence of paedophilia is estimated at under 5% by this paywalled review, http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.clinpsy...
The "(re)sync" mechanism allows you to add new keys without disturbing the existing keys.
That's rough, I'm sorry. But thank you for sharing. If you ever want to talk to a techie about it, you can email me in confidence.
I'm not thrilled about that at all, either. My dog is from a shelter (it was a no-kill shelter but I looked at kill shelters, too). Basically, I think more people need to take care of their pets and more people need to help sterilize pets that there don't appear to be anyone to take care of. My parents got a few ferral cats in Texas "fixed" and I know a guy in rural Peru who was supporting this mostly out of his own pocket. I think those types of things are probably the best approach (and I donate money to a local shelter and know one of the services they perform is sterilization of stray animals). Mostly, though, I think that's just another sad situation in addition to people not taking care of their pets (a mild form of animal abuse) and think they are mostly separate issues.
I would also put money on something like this. Honda/Acura was the only brand mentioned in the video so I can even guess who lost them.
So, I'm curious how this will compete with free offerings like Flurry which do similar-ish mobile analytics tracking and can handle millions of users per app for free. I got very excited about this Heap announcement but looked at the pricing. Multiple thousands/month for sub-million unique users may be considered steep (but then again I'm a cheap developer). I've been looking for a Flurry alternative (since I just want analytics and none of their ad junk).

Mobile apps are kind of a different beast from websites. Apps can have huge number of unique users, whereas SaaS websites tend to have many fewer users by comparison.
That's what I'm coding right now! :) We're reworking our marketing site.
TSA Keeps Knife Ban After Protests From Unions, CEOs
As others mention, Grand Central has the S and 7 (crosstown) which connect to Times Square.

Grand Central gets 800,000 visitors per day, getting many commuters from Long Island and Connecticut.

Grand Central is also a much bigger stopping point. It's near many more office buildings. Penn Station is in an urban area, and next to the Garden, but I don't think it's quite as dense. Many folks would exit at Times Square.

edit: And OP - Thank you for sharing the data!
"Currently, for a consumer or small business to send packages the following needs to happen: buy packing materials, pack the order, drive to shipping carrier, wait in line, and pay."

Not really. You do need packing materials.. but Endicia, Stamps.com, and even the USPS website will let you print postage. And you can request a free pickup through the usps website.

That's your real competition...
Hey, I've worked on some similar games and can give you some tips - contact me if you're interested.
I agree. I'm starting to look at Balanced differently now.
Ask HN: Appetite for DevOps Screencasts?
Hi,

I am putting together a sysadmin/dev/ops screencast site, the kind of thing I wished existed, when I was coming up as a sysadmin.

I have produced five episodes so far @ http://sysadmincasts.com/

- Am I on the right track?
- Episode ideas? Automation seems to be taking off. Puppet for sure.
- General feedback..

Thanks,
Jusitn
Tim Ferriss joins advisory board of diabetes startup mySugr
Jamie, I am getting about 10 errors a second in my console:

Uncaught TypeError: Object sufio._xdWatchInFlight(); has no method 'apply' reader-29b4dd587f1ca6b5f0d639aac64ce9bf.js:1 e.(anonymous function) reader-29b4dd587f1ca6b5f0d639aac64ce9bf.js:1

Pretty print the error location from chrome:

e.setInterval = function() {
var e = t.call(arguments, 0), n = e[0];
return e[0] = function() {
try {
n.apply(this, arguments)
Uncaught TypeError: Object sufio._xdWatchInFlight(); has no method 'apply' (repeated 1589 times)
} catch (e) {
throw TraceKit.report(e), e
}
}, r.apply(this, e)
}

The proxy at my work doesn't allow web sockets, and I think this might be related.

Also, I noticed that there are at least 3 different third party services being called (superfish, pusherapp and intercom). All of these are ancillary to the main functionality, right?

I haven't even got my feeds imported yet, and the app is already pulling down 2 MB. superfish in particular is super heavy. I think I would prefer a lighter payload.
There is https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-lang-javascri...

Though, it is based on Rhino, not v8 – and it's not sandboxed.
Here's a clickable link: http://sysadmincasts.com/
An idea's time has come?
I've wanted to use heap in the past, but the plans aren't very startup friendly..
Totally shallow poll. I've paid over a thousand bucks to have a bug fixed, and there are things I'm waiting for on GitHub which are probably worth less than $50.
Can you implement a design, or do you only do the layout, color, shading, alignment, font, interaction, popups, etc.?

Or if you only do a selection of those, which?

I'm not in the market for a designer, but I never know what it is the role of "designer" covers, and it would be useful to see a more comprehensive list of skills.
Really excited to see where they take this product. Congrats to the Thalmic team!
>>> I feel so empty and like I am fake. It has been two years. I haven't said this to anyone before now.

When I last felt like that, I did the same thing. I said nothing to anyone for about 18 months. Eventually, I did talk to someone over a few drinks one night - not someone particularly close to me, just a friend. They didn't say anything profound, they weren't hugely supportive, they didn't offer a new perspective or anything from their own experience. But that outpouring of my feelings was, I recognise now, the first step of the healing process for me - a little like lancing a boil. Kind of silly, but that's the human psyche for you. I can't guarantee that it'll work for you, but it worked for me. Think about trying it?
Why Does Facebook Recommend Someone It Cannot Know I Know?
Latest release of javascript book Learn.js: v0.3.0
Show HN: Former relief worker, now building software for humanitarian relief
I don't disagree with your distinction between Google+ and FB, but I disagree with the conclusion that its taking off. There's no doubt that Google+ is trying to occupy a different space than facebook, but I see no proof (I think any of the 'active users' stats Google touts around are more or less fraudulent) that they're doing any better than their two biggest competitors on either side of the spectrum: LinkedIn and Twitter.

it's showing itself to be a better product

How? Because in my mind the #1 feature of a social network, regardless of domain, are the social interactions it enables -- and right now Google+ is losing to the likes of Branch and Quora in that department.