skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds to me like it's intended for developing custom loads for guns, not calculating ballistics in the field. The target market would be handloaders who sometimes spend thousands of dollars on reloading equipment. An ad-supported web app or a paid GUI app would be very viable.
you're practically forced to seek patents to avoid getting trolled

How so? What if you released something in the public domain and made it unpatentable?
Google recruiter: Company kept 'do not touch' in hiring list
Looks nice.

I've moved away from RubyForge and just release through github. There's some barrier to entry there; folks have to follow directions to add github as a gem server so they can install my gems.

But it's so damn easy, and having my code up on github seems so much cleaner and easier that dealing with rubyforge.org.

New gems are auto-built. If there's a problem, I get mail telling me. I can release a new gem by upping the version number. I don't need a special rake or thor or whatever command to release, just git push.
> Charge more.

I understand that you meant that it's easy to underprice the app, but as a generic pricing guideline this advice is wrong.

Not considering running operational costs, the price should maximize (price x sales) figure, i.e. the revenue. It's true that in some cases doubling the price cuts the number of customers in less than a half, in which case the the "charge more" advice stands. But in other cases charging half of the current price may easily quadruple your paying userbase.

Finding the right price can be done only through trying different prices. At some point Amazon was giving random discounts to their users and trying to pinpoint the ideal price for the item. It didn't last long, of course, as people started gaming them, but it just goes on to show that the price validation is a big deal.

Also keep in mind if you start with $200, see zero sales and then start gradually reducing it to $20, then you basically shoot your own credibility as a merchant as the $200 -> $20 drop makes you look greedy, detached from the reality and ultimately incompetent.

In the end it all very much depends on the application and the target customer base.
Thanks for the response.

I'll now pose a different question. Do people in this community keep their ideas out of the patent records, or do they patent? I come from a finance background and have recently returned to school to pursue an MSFE. In the financial world, new strategies, often implemented through algorithms, are the lifeblood of a lot of quantitative firms. Do people think it is better to not publish a patent if your business depends heavily an a very unique idea?
Well the non-sharded aspect takes 3 forms:

- totally dynamic load balancing on the servers
- cross-game chat at all times
- cross-game market (well, there are multiple regional markets but distance is part of the game mechanic).
We don't use source control on our production machines (which I think is crap), so I use an rsync script from my dev machine. Many people just scp the files over every time they make a change. (There was once a tendency by a few folks to directly edit files on production, without ever checking these changes in to SVN; thank god this has decreased over time.) Work is also too cheap to buy SQL migration tools for everyone who needs them, so database changes are applied by hand. Not awesome.
www.bing.com appears to me on Akamai and they are huge linux users so in some sense Bing is not on a MS stack.
From an MS employee: http://twitter.com/shanselman/statuses/1951354013
Its an aside, but it always frustrates me to hear about the cuts at NASA and how the budget simply won't allow this or that project when every city in America seems to think it needs an $800mm tax-payer funded arena to "stimulate the local economy."

No, you don't get moon bases, hover cars and cures for cancer. You spent your allowance on football, remember?
As far as I am informed, the amount of sleep one needs varies from person to person. I am no expert but I did read some stuff about it. Also on the whole there is not done that much research about sleep.

I did test it out for myself. Without caffeine-intake my body regulates to a 7,5 hours sleep patern, no alarm-clock needed. With caffeine (2 cups of coffee + a tea) and alcohol (2 beers or so) intake I need ~10 hours sleep per night.
"You can't steal time from your sleep schedule, you can only borrow it. Eventually you have to pay it back. With interest. Yes, you have to get XYZ done by yesterday, or... or... Well, something really bad will happen. Take a minute to consider most deadlines you've had. Is the deliverable going to ship the day after the deadline? Of course not, this is just the regular monthly deliverable. By the time the shipping deliverable rolls around you'll be paying back your sleep debt, with interest. "

- bram cohen
Melbourne DJ Brad Hampel
Brad Hampel is one of Melbourne\'s Premier DJ\'s. Brad can cater to private parties, Corporate Functions and everything in between.
I use fabric too, it's easy because most of the developments done here are in Python and writing a "deployment script" in the same language makes sense. The only problem I get with this is the "socket closed" error from time to time.
I recently setup a Rails app to deploy to EC2 with chef and chef-deploy (http://github.com/ezmobius/chef-deploy).

I think chef has a lot of potential. However, I found the learning curve rather high. If you end up using it, you'll definitely want to use a VM with snapshots.
Perfect answer. Thanks.
This is because researchers found out, that there are two tyes of persons regarding the "inner clock": for some the day lasts 23 hours for others 25 hours. Unless you regulate yourself with alarm-clock you will go cycles.
Article URL appears borked. This one should work though:
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12514244?nclick_check=1&fo...
Ah yeah, I get what you're talking about. It's one of the features I've been wanting to add for a while too - filtering the responses by any demographic combination. Not pri 1, maybe in the next version. =)
http://doihavetokickyourbutt.com/
Stops me from zoning out on the web and get back to work.
I really would like to see algorithms black-boxed rather than patented. I should be able to reap the benefits of figuring the same thing out on my own some time later than a competitor did.
Random Walk: Visualizing Randomness
How have I never heard of this filesystem? It sounds pretty awesome. Has anyone ever used it before?
I knew someone would come along and do this better than me! I started this exact thing a couple of months ago: http://termswatch.pbworks.com/

* Every morning my home PC downloads new TOS/Privacy pages for the following sites: http://termswatch.pbworks.com/browse/#view=ViewAllPages

* Then it uploads the plain-text version of all those pages to PBWiki

* PBWiki manages changes to plain-text quite well and does the hardwork of feeds/update-history etc. for me.

But I got busy with work/school/life that I couldn't develop/publicize it fully. I almost bought tosupdate.org / termswatch.org / toswatch.org but thought I should wait for someone like EFF to do it right instead. I wasn't really trying to build a business around it so instead of being disheartened, I'm glad that someone out there felt the need for the same app.
As noted before, it's tough to know that 100% of the responses are truthful on any survey. With PickFu, you can read the explanations to get a feel as to which respondents put some thought in.

I'm sorry you had a rough experience with that specific music-listening job - we've never had a more time-consuming question submitted. Most are in the order of "which site do you prefer?", like this current one: http://pickfu.com/AGSIBT. These get answered far faster by the MTurk workers.
Try Tonido Workspace. It has horizontal information schema and nesting feature u are looking for.
Android founder Andy Rubin on openness as enabler
Yikes, you can sell nothing and break even. No, I actually sold an app for while, then took it down. People would still buy it occassionally, even though it was clearly stated that the app was discontinued.
As much as necessary, and no hour longer.

It's not hours that count, but quality. You have to prepare your sleep time, really shutting down as much as possible.
I can't speak of litigious trolls, but academics have to churn out papers and patents for their own stature and paychecks. Yes, big edu would troll even The Man himself.

Of course, Knuth is notorious for his "churning out" of books; though none are as rigorous as his early VB6 stuff.

http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200002/df20000210.jpg
So how do I opt out of the "social contract", unsubscribe from 911 and the postal service, and give up any protection I get from the police?

Oh. I have to move to another country and accept their social contract, instead. I have to go out of my way and leave the land I was born in and the continent that my ancestors lived in for centuries before these governments were even established, and refusing to do so means I have "accepted" a social contract whose terms can change outside my control and against my most spirited resistance.

I can accept an argument that voluntary human interaction does not scale well enough. I can accept an argument that we need institutional violence to keep a continent-wide civilization in order. I can accept an argument that the benefits of civilization outweigh the costs of this institutional violence. But don't pretend this state of affairs is voluntary. We are born into a system, raised knowing no other way for humans to live, made to recite pledges of allegiance in the classroom before we know the language well enough to understand what we are saying, and as adults, expected to obey arbitrary rules with no realistic recourse of change. And we are expected to believe that we freely chose the shape of the society we live in.

Yes, you can vote. You can even assert your constitutional rights and try to convince five judges, rather than fifty million voters. But even then, the voters might vote to amend the constitution to take your rights away. So in reality you're always at the mercy of authority--be it the authority of the courts or the authority of the mob.

When, exactly, in the Indian Wars did the tribes accept their social contract? Does the fact that your ancestors lost a war really constitute consent to the rule of the victorious government just because that government has conquered and subdivided your homeland?

I'm well aware that blood has been shed to secure what little choice we have under this government. Blood has also been shed to force an entire race, under gunpoint, to live under this government against their will. And blood was also shed to take two steps forward and one step back--no more slavery, but on the other hand, if your entire state votes to opt out of the federal government, it gets burnt to the ground by General Sherman.

There is no social contract. No one freely chose to live under government, though many of us do accept the status quo, and many more simply resign themselves to the belief that there is no alternative. We do have a society that seems to work acceptably, and that may outweigh the cost. Government seems necessary for civilization, and civilization is a wonderful thing. But voluntary? No, sir, it is not.

(Edited)
I would like to see Hacker News data dump. Would it be possible?
I don't understand why you're asking me that--I'm not the one arguing for parachutes.
SQL Server -> ASP.Net web service -> Adobe Flex front end. This setup has been working quite nicely for me.
Stackoverflow, for two main reasons:

1. The obvious reason: for making it easy to find answers to problems I might have.
2. The larger reason: I feel like in browsing and reading thru other people's questions, in areas that I'm interested in, I've learned a TON of new things which I would not have otherwise learned or had seen if all I ever looked at was my own codebase/projects.
This sound like a "shadow ban" to me.
I wrote my own custom python program that pretty much acts like a distributed shell to automate pushes (svn/git,etc)

Its pretty close to this: http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/software/dsh.html.en
It's nowhere near useful.
Exactly, at one point in time the ball point pen was patented, You couldn't make a ball point pen without paying someone.

How is the fruit of my labor any different from the fruit of a ME EE or ChemE's labor? The lot of us practice applied math in different domains.
I've been recently trying out apps to help better synchronize multiple 2 man (developer/artist) teams for casual game development, and this is what we've found so far. (All of these are free, we're not yet big enough to need heavyweight features that are worth paying for, but when the time comes, I'll happily cough up the cash for good 'robust' tools)

I am checking out some of the other suggestions for possible 'upgrades' :)

- Google Docs - for Design Documents where we can both edit/view and see modification histories.

- Toggl - for off the cuff task based time tracking, a bit finicky, and won't let you view details of tasks from other team members, but it's dead simple to use so that's a big plus.

- Subversion - This doesn't count as a web app, it's a lightweight install on a machine in my home office, but it's a necessity for any coding I do, and crucial for keeping the team synchronized.

- Skype - for remote brainstorming and quick Q&As when a face to face meetup isn't possible.

- Unyte - free Skype plugin for screen sharing. Beats the hell out of having to say 'now click Window menu, then library, then go here, etc...

- Basecamp - not often used anymore, but did a decent job of task planning, scheduling and note making... something about it felt a few degrees off, can't put my finger on what though. Is probably a good fit for most people.
This is very similar to googles quality score - that means you can be the 2nd highest bidder on a keyword and still get the 1st spot.

- The problem is if they share the up and down votes; gaming will ensue.
It's a joke. 2^20 = 1,048,576. And the patent sounds a lot like Knuth's scheme for getting corrections to his books...
WebKit tech demo:  transforms, transitions and the video tag
I can imagine that asset creation might easily be as large an expense as building the technology.

However, one of the big killers of MMOs is problems with the launch. With some of these large high profile failures, they've already gone through this and worked out at least some of the bugs, so one would assume that this would make them more attractive to buyers.
How we tap the Twitter Zeitgeist for SXSW & Internet Week
Anecdotally, people I worked with all jumped on the iPhone 3G simply because it "cost less" than the original. $200 up front is a lot easier for most consumers to swallow than $400 up front, regardless of any price difference over the life of the contract.
i love this one, and the fact that it's also translated in french.
You've just explained the difference between a patent and a trade secret. :)
it's a shame people are figuring out things to term web 3.0 before anyone figured out how to really monetize web 2.0
Seriously, most of the fox news types I know think that the earth is 6k years old and Armageddon is just around the corner. What good would 1bn year storage be?!
capistrano.

You should spend time understanding all of the given capistrano recipes before you should start building any of your own since many things are already done for you.

I wasn't able to do this without staring at the capistrano code for a significant amount of time, but it was worth the effort IMHO.
But the Kumo (the code name for bing) days were like this ...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10235400-16.html?part=rss&...
Changed in posting
Why Startups?
Not up any longer.
If you sat down everyone in the industry who had the same amount of education and professional experience, how many of them would have come up with a similar system? Sure there is more than one way to skin a cat, but after years of cat skinning school and years of professional cat skinning everybody comes to do it in close(maybe not identical) to the same way. I would step back and try to consider how unique the idea really is, and how easy it would be for someone with a similar background to figure it out just by looking at inputs and outputs.
Agreed - totally underwhelmed by Google Square.
Depends on your motivation for the degree.

I'd wager a majority of people who apply to MBA programs (or any degree granting program) are more interested in the doors they open vs the knowledge they'll gain.

Knowledge is cheap these days, thanks to that whole blasted internet thing.
You are right on with most of what ou said. However, from the project description page, the author states the purpose as more of a "because we can! its a cool hack!" and talks about even wanting to target shell script eventually. It is just a fun hack!
Our product relies on novel algorithms. That's our "secret sauce," if you will. We publish the algorithms we develop on peer reviewed conferences and journals. There have been improvements made to our work by others and we encourage that. What prevents our competitors from copying our work and reaping the rewards? So patents seems to be a necessary evil from our perspective. It's not the patents that we shall fault it's the patent holders.
I find this a rather strange article. Flash back in time to before Google was All-About-Ads:

Google can not keep subsidizing its search users! Clearly they work great, but the tech demo is over, and its not as effective at selling their corporate search product as it should be, they need to get out of web search and do X!

Its entirely possible that Google will do something other than "charge users" to make Youtube profitable, since Google pretty much hasn't done that for any of their other products.
As a developer of MantisBT, assuming that you've looked at it, mind giving me a summary of what Redmine has that MantisBT lacks?
One of my friends uses this at his work to pretty good affect. The price of the software kind of scares me off though.
Uncommon model for pricing, pay-as-you-use
It's called stone!
In general, I'd put it like this:

A "web application" is a browser-based tool that allows a user to create and consume content.

A "web site" is a browser-based tool that allows a user to consume content.
Best advice. It has to hurt people when they type in their credit card details. If it doesn't, it's too cheap. You'll make far more money turning a few cheap customers away while capturing the surplus of people who actually have a serious problem to fix.

What others haven't mentioned yet is that this also gives you an excellent user base for any future products you decide to create and release. Would you want to market your next product to an existing customer base of a bunch of cheapos, or people who have prequalified themselves as individuals whose time is worth serious money and are willing to pay up for good quality fixes to their problems?
Trading Technologies has in the past been aggressive about defending patents on their trading software.

On the other side of the aisle, many approaches are under trade secret protection.

I think operationally patents don't do what we would like, and that is to give a small innovator some room to profit from an invention. In real life, it is large companies that produce, acquire, and use them in a defensive fashion.
Lately, not enough but usually at least 7 hours.
I would also like to have your comments on the pay-as-you-go model for that kind of service.
Why would 18 months versus 6 increase the merit of the program?
I get anywhere from 12+ to 5 hours of sleep, depending.

I'm 14 and I go to bed when I'm tired. I wake at 7:30 on weekdays for school and sleep for as long as I like on the weekends. The reason for my fluctuation of sleep is that I think most clearly during the night, which is when I get most of my hacking done. So I like living a night life when life is centered around the day and that screws up your sleeping.

There's nothing quite like being alone in a quiet house at 3 am in a room with nothing but a linux terminal.

Anyways, my sleeping habits don't affect my school learning(the days we actually learn stuff), nor my social life.
Bah, you must share the same IP range as a particularly persistent comment spammer I've had for years. I've disabled the redirect.

Sorry about that.
I would be happy just to be able to access the raw responses in a .csv file or something, and do the filtering myself.
Not wearing any galsses. Still no problem with eyes.
It's not a "nesting limit", it's a cooling-off period before the reply link is shown, which increases with nesting. It's supposed to discourage heated back-and-forth replies, which historically have low value. Replying a level up defeats the purpose.

PG, if you're reading: Instead of delaying the display of the reply link, it might be better to instead display the link, but during the cooling-off period make it go to a page explaining why the user can't post right away. (And maybe also make the link a different color?) Otherwise, it simply looks like a bug or artificial system limit.
Way off. That patent is from 1912.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...
Effective vs Efficient Teams
Grooveshark Launches Facebook App and WordPress Integration
Trim is a command that punches a hole in the SSD (much like a sparse file) so that the SSD doesn't waste effort managing unallocated space.
To be fair, once you start arguing against taxes you really have to have a really clever answer to one of the following three questions:

* How do we voluntarily fund a government?

* How do we have an anarchic civilization?

* Are we willing to trade civilization for anarchy?

In other words, the type of person who argues that taxation is theft either has to shrug and say it's a necessary evil, have really clever answers to your objections, or be an anarchist. The anarchist will shrug his shoulders and say "we shouldn't have a US government" and the "necessary evil" folks like me will shrug their shoulders and say "you're both right".
Stack Overflow for Food. My new site for food questions.
The Rotating Globe On The Axis Of Automobile Technology
Automobile Technology - Latest updates on the upcoming automobile technologies
Interesting analogy. I would say the danger isn't quite in students injuring themselves in the classroom as much as it is giving destructive chemicals to students. Sure some of them can handle it, but the deviant ones will create havoc given the opportunity. In football there is a certain physical discipline allowed, where as in science its just the principals office, which can be better than class. Good analogy, but I think far from raising the argument...
"I don't find citing an unknown authority to "disprove" my arguments very helpful. It's a corollary argument to "proof by grad student"."

With the clever exception that, unlike a grad student, Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia is freely available from Amazon.com if you want to read the argument for yourself.

Some points just are too long to fit in a comment post. For example, sometimes people link to Paul Graham essays when pg makes a point they can't restate any better. The parent post is similarly "linking" to a published book.
Beware The Venture Debt: Kadoink Shuts Down For Good
Google's Wave of the future is genius, but will it work?
Ask HN: Connecting developers and marketers
I recognize the importance of a good marketing campaign, but with limited free time I rather be focusing on product development.

If the price was right I would happily pay someone to create promotional YouTube videos, post quality information on forums when relevant discussions arise, etc. I imagine a site where people post their resumes and examples of creative work they’ve done in the past and then visitors can hire them based on the merits of their work and their prices.

Does anything like this exist?
How about taking the money away from DARPA and do some actually useful research?
http://checkvist.com
Why should the workers pay tax, it's the company that's making the profit..?