skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I might pay $30-$40 / year for all google services together.

I really only use them because they're free. There are enough other services already I'd switch too if some of them became payware. I'm really not attached to any of the services. My gmail is filled with email forwarded from my own domain, so I could switch my mail provider without changing email address (as it should be).

Now, DNS, I am willing to pay for :).
Vitamins Found to Curb Exercise Benefits
Watch naruto shippuuden episode 109 online
Google's Deep-Web Crawl
Drupal, Joomla and such will do all that for you but the question is what are you trying to achieve in the long run? If you're planning on customizing a large amount of the functionality, then basing it on a large, behemoth CMS might be a detriment when the next upgrade comes out. Just food for thought, but if you're just building a simple forum, gallery, article site then a CMS will serve you just fine for many years.
Firefinder For Firebug - A Quick Overview
I'd pay for my hotmail mainly because it's an established mail account that's used everywhere plus I like what they have done with the windows live mail program.

I'd probably pay for a lot of other random small sites to if a single micro payment provider got universally supported.
> Norway is a relatively small country with a largely homogeneous population of 4.6 million and the advantages of being a major oil exporter.

This probably has more to do with their successes as a country than anything else. Smaller populations are easier to govern (New York's population is around 20mil), and being an energy exporter ensures that there's enough wealth to go around to provide it's citizens with a large social safety net.
The answer is really simple - a solid marketing campaign is missing. They have relied on public attention for every other product they've produced (AdSense and AdWords included).
How we will create our next design
Without intellectual property, why would anyone ever
acquire a startup? Just copy it or poach a few key
developers.

In practice a small organisation won't ever sue a large institution for patent or copyright infringement even when it's in clear breach because they have limited resources, low interest in antagonising the other party (which is most likely to be a customer not a competitor) and better things to do that are linked to survival.

I've worked in a wide range of developer roles, including bitsy consulting work. Copyright and patents have never been significant in the business models of any of the companies I've worked for in a positive way. Conversely, I have been denied the ability to work by a court injunciton accusing me of copyright infringement (settled as soon as the business situation had changed) and I've seen companies slapped down in an anti-competitive way for "patent infringement".

What software customers care about is being able to get people to solve their problems. They want to be able to pick up the phone and get support, and get changes made. The actual build that is live at the moment is just a short-lived tool in their business process.

If you had the source code for an organisation's risk management system or trading system or human resources system it would be near worthless. You'd have to get the code to work in your setting and then bend it to your requirements which will be different. You'd end up with an unwieldy system that is inferior to what you'd get if you pieced one together based on your requirements. Where goodwill is involved the barriers are far greater still.

But still - imagine a world without copyright. Fly-by-night operations would act as marketing efforts for the company who had their act together. Conversely, if a company got acquired and run into the ground, its customers wouldn't be permanently locked into a parasitic vendor. Startups wouldn't be at risk of shutdown from patent trolls. These patterns would be beneficial to startups and consumers.

poach a few key developers

If you don't need to goodwill you'd be better off just poaching the key developers and ignoring their prior source and getting them to write something that meets your need. If you care about the goodwill you need the rest of the business.
"What's Holding Back Google Apps?"

Speed and simplicity.

Microsoft Office is slow and complicated. Google Apps are slower and, in some ways, more complicated.

Need examples of outrageous successes using speed and simplicity: email, instant messaging, texting, .txt files. Google Apps must be more like these, faster and simpler, for widespread adoption.
Can't you just do something because it's interesting and fun?

I'm pretty sure that was the biggest motivator here.
in case anyone hasn't seen this, john carmack (of id software)'s views on software patents are worth reading:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151312&cid=12701745
Thanks for posting this. Always nice to get a healthy dose of "A $ A" with my morning coffee! :-)
Agreed. And some people are already saying that. From the article itself:

“We have become complacent,” Mr. Mork added. “More and more vacation houses are being built. We have more holidays than most countries and extremely generous benefits and sick leave policies. Some day the dream will end.”
Wavesecure Review: the app for Phone Security
Undefined behaviour in c++
All you need to do is give the nurses broad escalation criteria. Anything that doesn't perfectly fit the symptoms of the easy diseases gets escalated.

Incidentally the few states where they are legal, the nurse clinics do very well.
I think a fair interpretation is if you have both conditions:

1. Is the whole code base a maintenance nightmare?
2. Do we have to change all of it right now?

Which occurs, rarely. Most of the time a mechanical transform (e.g. Emacs macro) helps with the annoyances and standards. The rest, a deep refactoring is needed.

Frankly, dumping the source and starting from scratch sounds a little like running away from your problems instead of attacking them head-on.
Dan Dennett Lecture on the Evolution of Religions
as for the proliferation of service comanies if they weren't exempted, I think the market should (and will) determine an appropriate supply of services, not the legislature. The fact that the bulk of these comanies will create negligible exports should not count against them any more than it should count against a product company which is only active within national borders.
WiFi has become important enough—and the interference problem bad enough—that the report recommends creating a new "2.4GHz friendly" logo program to brand devices that are good radio-frequency citizens.

Are they kidding? Since 802.11_ protocols are 'smart' in the sense that wifi nodes exercise congestion avoidance with other nodes running the same protocol, the next wifi standard just needs to be allocated dedicated space in the spectrum, rather than having to share the same narrow common space with baby monitors and AV extenders. Alternatively, the band of less-regulated spectrum needs to be expanded wide enough that manufacturers can create some informal standards to avoid stepping on each others toes.

(And yes, trust me, I know why this is politically difficult, and that it wouldn't immediately help the enormous number of users with current-generation hardware. But really, their recommendation isn't likely to make much short-term difference either.)
Will designer brains divide humanity?
The Case for Clojure
Data Persistence in GAE with Clojure
2 javascripts running the same algorithm with slightly different performance might not actually make a large difference in who ends up winning, or you would see lots of draws just because in the alloted time examining a few but not a lot of extra moves and probably no more moves ahead might not help much.
I agree with keefe that "cloud" should be replaced with "utility computing".

I host my website with Media Temple on their (gs) Grid, but when I use utility comp services, I use Amazon. Why is Media Temple even on here? Utility computing services let you provision servers at will, where Media Temple still has to provision your server for you.

So, to answer your question, I use AWS EC2 as my "cloud host".
I suspect that homogeneity and culture explain why they didn't blow all of their oil money in boom times like other oil producing nations. I wish Americans could see the same type of restraint in their politicians.
Sony Ericsson K610i Urban at unlockcell.com
Sony Ericsson K610i A small and slim 3G phone with all you need to communicate with high-speed messaging and quality voice and video calling – the K610i. Enjoy entertaining multimedia services and a fast and satisfying mobile internet experience
Mozy also offers this service for $5/mo.
38 minutes later they are showing it at 3 (on /classic) and 4 on the home page.
The original motivation was exactly because it was interesting and fun. When we got something working, I benchmarked it on my MacBook Pro and saw 1500 reqs/sec being handled on a single core. Those benchmarks made it much more real and so I decided to put the extra effort into making it ready for production.

It may or may not be as fast as the FastCGI based C polling service that we had been using, but it's certainly more maintainable. I'd much rather manage three Erlang nodes than the 240 FastCGI processes that we were running.

In fairness, we could have written a threaded poller in C and ended up with the same ease of management, but it would have been a heck of a lot more code.
Chromium on Mac OS X
I've thought this for a while. I would definitely pay a monthly fee for an all you can eat iTunes plan. Or something tiered. $100/month for all you can download? They'd have my money. Of course I'm not sure of the likelihood of that ever happening.
And of course the point of this exercise was to show that silverlight running C# in the browser was "better" than javascript.

Neat hack, terrible benchmark.
Sure, all that's true, and are good reasons to reach for Erlang before C when writing something like this. It seems a bit weird to rewrite working code though, and it's unfortunate not to measure it. I would bet on Erlang not being that much slower than C, and like you say, much smaller, nicer, etc... so it would have been interesting to have some data to think about.
Antibiotics are often used as a placebo, since doctors can't prescribe placebos. :)
I'd guess the one that goes first?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess
> the only restriction would be that you have to acquire stock in the company when it is worth less than $40M (easy)

Not really.

Most of us aren't accredited investors, so we can't buy stock in small companies without starting them, working for them, or being related to the founders.

Reduced taxation on small biz stock will make successful small biz more profitable, so it's a big deal for angels, VCs, and their limited partners, but because it doesn't increase the size of the investor pool, it just helps their returns.

This may have a modest effect on the number of funded small biz, but it won't help most of us.

You'd think that the super-genius' in the Obama administration would know about the accredited investor stuff.
Actually, there is NO FreeBSD code in OS X- see this presentation- http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2303.en.h... (Someone posted it on HN some time ago).
The poller works great. Polling definitely not optimal, but Comet isn't without issues of its own. The Erlang poller was a fun project that Jamis and I worked on in our spare time. Transitioning Campfire to use Comet or some other push-based room updating is a much larger undertaking.
This is great, thanks a lot.

Could you also please create a similar filter for newmogul.com ?

It is a HN clone for business/financial news run by "nickb".
Upmodded because I also thought of Hulu as something I would pay for. I do pay for Netflix, and see Hulu as a similar service.
If you are an inventor of sorting algorithms, I'd guess you do that quite often.

But seriously, does it really matter? Short functions or blocks with variables of local significance do exist. Swap() was just the first thing that popped up, probably because I like messing around with algorithms and re-implementing them. Which every self-respecting programmer, umm, should do, I think.
I disagree that MS Office is slow or complicated. It's very fast on every one of my machines, especially compared to Java-based alternatives. And it's extremely simple to use. Granted, there are complicated features but I generally don't use them and they're hidden away on ribbon strips that I never see.
Typical the services cater to one of this:

- application of interest that you need as an individual

- lets you express yourself

- lets you connect with others

- lets you discover more

If you observe all services catering to individual are rated higher.

When it comes to sites that let you express yourself or connect - may be the sites listed are not really niche and sites which lets u express for professional needs. If you had included linkedin, flickr (as against userbase on picasa) etc - may be these would have got better votes

sites that let you discover more content - guess it would be a very mixed response on the value of such sites given no single site would provide me all the material I would like to have stumbled upon.
College grad: "I wish I’d gone to prison instead"
> Google Apps, on the other hand, store data on Google's servers. "That's probably our biggest stumbling block to going bigger with Google," Simpson says.

This is a huge problem for many companies. Some documents you really don't care if Google stores or not.

However our compliance officer told us that we can't by law store rough drafts of our annual report or any spreadsheets dealing with unreported numbers on any servers but our own.

Google really needs to address this issue if it wants companies to move fully to it's solution.
Infiniti has Announced Pricing on the 2010 QX56
Infiniti has announced pricing on the 2010 QX56 full-size luxury SUV. Essentially a carry-over of the model that was last updated in 2008, the base MSRP for the 2WD model is $56,050 (*plus destination and handling of $865), while the 4WD model arrives at $59,150.
IPhone users to walk and read at same time
"Users will pick up on this waffling, smell blood and go in for the kill."

Not everyone is as adversarial as a TechCrunch author. (though I like Siegler's coverage there)
Inertia.

The same thing keeping anyone stuck on outmoded middle of the road platforms like Office. But Google are good enough to be picking folk up in various niches, and there's other smaller players getting play too. Standard disruptive innovation stuff.

Some of this article sounds a bit anti-Google, pro-Microsoft but really if, as far as GE is concerned, Microsoft is simply one of three options for an office suite, and its main plus is local data (rather than say total omnipresence) then compared with a few years ago that's a terrible place for Microsoft to be.
This article is pure gossip rag stuff, but at the same time it gives a nice timeline of events for those of us too busy to follow every little feature-change brouhaha. I wouldn't want to see too many articles in this style, but this particular one is ok, imho.
I predict it doesn't obsolete anything except for power searchers and data researchers.

People are still going to type "how many calories in a big mac" into Google and get specialized sites that answer those questions fine. I don't think they'll go to WA when they have a habit and good success rate with getting those casual answers on Google. I think professionals and power users may use WA in cases they know it will give them great responses, but I don't see it changing many casual user habits.

What would be interesting is if WA actually caches search results and makes them indexable by other search engines like we do with bug.gd (which is similar in the sense that bug.gd is a specialized search service). This proves to create a tremendous amount of traffic and could make the provided/refined content much more likely to obsolete those niche sites.
See also Alice, a Java-based collaboration between CMU and Sun Microsystems (http://www.alice.org).
I don't think we do. Unless, of course, you have something to add to the discussion.
>> "but Comet isn't without issues of its own."

Very high traffic sites manage it without issues.

Comet actually massively decreases the load on servers, bandwidth used, and means people get messages as soon as they should - without a delay.
How to get 62099 visitors to your blog in one day
Wonderful video, however I have a feeling those most likely to benefit from this video are the least likely to watch it (and with careful attention).
Ask HN: Ever run a conference? What's the best software to use?
My company is overhauling our events management and registration processes right now. I'm loathe to build something from scratch, so I'm looking at third party solutions such as Amiando, Expectnation, Eventbrite, and Cvent.

Has anyone worked with any of these products? Any advice, reviews or other suggestions?

I don't believe I've seen this topic come up on HN before so thought I'd ask. Thanks!
Is Apple barking up the wrong tree with Grand Central?
> Patents were to cover inventions not algorithms

Patents don't cover algorithms. They can cover the use of algorithms to accomplish a particular task but that doesn't affect others much.

In fact, the general patents rely on the doctrine of equivalents and are thus algorithm independent.

The closest you can get to an algorithm patent is to claim the use of an algorithm to produce algorithm-specific output. For example, one could patent the use of a new sorting algorithm to produce sorted output. However, such patents are almost all extremely weak because there are typically multiple algorithms to accomplish the same result.

Yes, a patent on an algorithm to solve a specific NP-complete problem in polynomial time would affect others, but isn't that exactly the sort of thing that patents should cover?
Children Need Childhood, Not Vocational Training (2000)
The problem is that you must adopt a standard tab width for this to approach. Otherwise when you mix this with team members who use only spaces, things with become inconsistent. Also, as I pointed out, with languages like Python & Haskell, it is required to fix the tab width.

At this point, where you must dictate a fixed tab width that everyone must use, I fail to see any advantage to using tabs (other than a miniscule reduction in file size).
Problem 8: A server failed, making Twitter unusable for several hours.

Ahem... a single point of failure. Ouch.
"they're hidden away on ribbon strips that I never see"

Because you've already hidden them. Along with that fricken dancing paper clip.

Many people, when initially overwhelmed by unnecessary features, just refuse to adopt and stick with something simpler. That's Google's biggest problem with Apps.
The government enjoys a budget surplus of 11 percent and its ledger is entirely free of debt.

The have a huge surplus and are saving 11% of their governmnets bugdet. At some point their savings could probably fund all government spending at which point running out of oil would not be the end of the world. Granted government spending is only 40% of GDP but 30 years from now they could have 40% unemployment and still have a stable functioning society.
'"Building a sales staff to proffer its applications is a labor-intensive endeavor that hasn't been part of the company's DNA, says Zachary Nelson, CEO of online accounting software maker NetSuite (N). "If you want to sell enterprise software, you have to have salespeople," he says.'

This seems the most concise summary of the problem. Enterprise sales is very different than their consumer facing, ad supported businesses. And adding an enterprise style sales force is probably a mistake, as it runs counter to Google's business culture. Then you have two kinds of companies joined at the hip, one that makes decisions by algorithm to keep cost of sales to a minimum, and another that uses steak and strippers to sell product. It is not clear why you should have one firm at that point, rather than spin off the enterprise products into their own entity.

'Creating new ways to analyze business data inside Apps has been "harder to get up on the priority list" given Google's long list of projects, according to Sam Schillace, a Google engineering director who created the software that's the basis for Google's word processor.'

On the other hand, this seems the place where Google could add value. Surely, there must be Google engineers with clever ideas about how to employ Google's infrastructure and machine learning algorithms to slurp in all the data in a business's spreadsheets and spit out interesting, actionable information that would be difficult for that business to recreate on its own?
What is Erlang written in, again?

Erlang makes it (a lot) easier to write high concurrency code, if that's how you define 'beat', but it's not "faster".
Not all baby monitors are at fault for WiFi interference. In the US you can look up the product's FCCID in the FCC database and it will tell you what frequency it uses.

http://www.fcc.gov/oet/ea/fccid/

I'm not sure if the UK has a similar licensing system search or not.
The typographer Jan Tschichold experimented with this in the thirties, though I think he recommended space-period-space to separate sentences rather than period-space-capital, and not bothering with a period at the end of a paragraph.
The difference is that if you publish a playlist your not a radio station and so have to pay big royalties.
Preventing it entirely would be difficult, but given a list of IPs belonging to Google and TrueSwitch, it would not be very hard to put some serious brakes on the feature. Even reverse DNS could mostly work.
I already pay for my online nusic feed http://dfm.nu/ via the paypal donate button if I had a good month on the freelancing, my good fortune is theirs.
But when things are down they are stil there for me and I appreciate that.
is the content that valuable and irreplacable to you?

I'd argue that HN is a prime candidate for spawning equally good alternatives were it (hypothetically) pay for.
I'd happily pay $20 a month for all my food, but in reality it takes something like $500 to fill me up.
The best way to solve the browser wars..

[Javascript required to view Flash movie, please turn it on and refresh this page]

WIN!!
Sexy Amrita Rao Pictures, Images, Snaps, Wallpapers Gallery
what a whiner. there's no place for whiners in this world. no wonder he's stuck at his warehouse job. and yes, i am one to speak. i graduated college in 2001, in the midst of the dot com bust and graduated with no job awaiting me either. i stuck with it, and made it work due to my passion. if i can do it, so can everybody else. i'm sorry, but complainers disgust me. they should go cry to their mommys.
In some ways, Norway is approaching a post-scarcity economy mentioned in an article that was posted here recently (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607540).
The purpose of Excel is to analyze your business's data to make better decisions. Is there a way to make that not "slow and complicated?" Making it too fast and simple might result in bad analysis.

There are specific uses for Excel that might be made faster and simpler. But I'm not sure that you can replace all the uses of Excel with something faster and simpler. Another way to look at it, Excel is a faster, simpler way to solve problems that would otherwise require programming. In that sense, Excel is already the faster, simpler alternative.
I sincerely doubt it was one server.
PDF presentations on Data Mining, Bayesian Networks, Game Theory, Search Algorithms
Am new to this but:

join <(twidge lsfollowing | sort) <(twidge lsfollowers | sort) -v 1