skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of my must-have applications for a smartphone is a SSH client. I'm really looking forward to seeing if that type of application can be built using the HTML/javascript API that has been such a hot topic, or if there will be another way to deploy something like this, or if it's even going to be possible at all on the Pre.
Perhaps, but with Skype, twitter, budget airlines, etc. it is becoming more of a possibility to run an service-type business away from big startup hubs. I agree that this is not optimal, but if it saves a huge amount in startup cost, then perhaps it is worth it.
all of the below:

sage pay, transfirst, chase paymentech, streamline
Clojure Box (Windows)
I won't contest you in regard to MSDOS, in many ways the Borland tools were superior to Microsoft's and were fairly affordable as well.

I disagree in regard to Windows however, although to be clear, what "competing platforms" are you referring to?
As long as you have a concept of offtopic, I think you have to be able to kill stuff that is, or even with downvoting you'll get topic drift. Reddit showed that.

(Reddit wasn't trying to avoid topic drift. They were trying to evolve into whatever interested the most people. But the goal here is different.)
Yahoo is generally easier to rank on for specific phrases that are fairly rare, fairly focused, and have fairly low search volume. B and C-list celeb names kind of sit in that sweet spot. Also specialized products.

Try searching "left-handed tomato peelers" on Google vs Yahoo: Yahoo's top results tend to be smaller niche stuff; Google has Amazon, BizRate and shopping.msn in the top 6.

All very interesting, but unfortunately the volume isn't really enough for a pure ad play.
if you can deploy your app to Amazon, then it seems to be ideal for what you are asking for. Amazon EC2 for the "deployment" piece, Amazon FPS for the billing, and you tack on your charges...
Business experiences. I would point out I labeled them opinions, but they would match the business experiences I've seen. Getting a true survey would be difficult. It is also quite unlikely that all cultures have the same preferences on the price/quality tradeoffs, and Americans are pretty heavily loaded on the "price" side. (I believe Wal-Mart is having some success overseas, but they had explosive growth in the US for a reason, and I'm talking pre-recession.)
There are tons of people in NYC that are "low earners". Do you think everyone walking around in that city makes 6 figures?

There is some truth to what you're saying but your argument doesn't hold up to defend it at all.
Robot App: Our IPhone Game Development story
Seattle Proteome Center (SPC) http://www.proteomecenter.org/
I was on Sprint for a long time, and am now on Verizon with whom they share. It's pretty much unbeatable. I got 3G coverage in random corn fields driving from Ohio to Cali. And anywhere even remotely civilized, never a dropped call or lack of blazing 3G.

I don't know anything at all about the merits of CDMA vs. GSM on a technical level, but as far as coverage in the USA it's not comparison.
I haven't read the fine print to see if it's allowed by their terms of service, but I just tried setting up a simple UDP-to-HTTP relay on Dreamhost:

% nc -u -l -p 59595 | xargs -I UDP curl http://example.com/path?u=UDP

...and it worked just fine. I would think as long as the traffic is a tiny fraction of what web traffic would be -- and occasional UDP packets fit that bill -- they might either officially allow it or just not mind.
Have to love WP referring to Facebook as "a social networking site intended mainly for college students."
This also links to a couple of pg's themes regarding the importance of Silicon Valley -- see http://paulgraham.com/cities.html and http://paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html .
The 10 Biggest Tech Failures of the Last Decade
You have a point, but you're dangerously close to an argument that people who live in more expensive areas are intrinsically "better" than those who don't, whatever the reason.

Well, no. I am totally fine with making that argument, in a statistical sense. There are plenty of exceptions, but there's a kind of critical mass effect. New York is expensive, so you probably can't live here comfortably unless you're in the top n%, so members of the top n% move here, pushing up prices (and also hanging out with other top n%ers, and coming up with new ways to make money). Some n%ers leave, of course, but the general trend is still there.
I apologize for commenting so much, but there was a serious question here that I'm digging for an answer.

When I go to Yahoo and enter "Allison Stokke", I get bupkis hits from my blog (which is fine with me!) -- even in the images -- but yet Webalizer says that 90% of the hits are coming from there. Any ideas?

There is an SEO question at the bottom of this -- is there some other way to get hits from a search engine besides going to the page and looking at the results? It's outside of my depth. I was hoping somebody here would have the answer. I'll shut up now.
and free publicity from 37 signals blog, isn't too bad for your business either
What are you looking for in a smartphone?
You can live almost anywhere in the States on a poverty income level. But the quality of life is dramatically different in New Paltz than it is in New York City, even in the South Bronx.
It's a statistical argument. On average -- this is hard to deny -- New Yorkers are wealthier than non New Yorkers. Someone deciding where to live has to ask whether they'd be happy there, and whether they could afford their lifestyle. Someone who says "I could only be happy in New York earning $200K. Fortunately, in New York I can earn $300K" will be happy; someone who decides they can't earn that much will go somewhere else, even if that place doesn't have the wage and skill levels of NYC.

This is also why people here walk and talk fast. With the rent so high, you can't spend time drawling or shuffling around. You have to get to the point or destination fast.
This is a problem I've encountered while building my own web app. There most be a way from PHP (or whatever else you're using) to know the real external IP of a user that comes to a site, isn't there? If anyone knows how to do this please let me know.
Is it just me or has the military been going through a complete revolution in the last decade?

Robotics, UAVs, etc. all take the human equation out of the surveillance and even the fighting. This is a completely radical departure from the past.

I just wonder where it will all lead.
it properly responds to "the answer to life, the universe and everything"

http://www88.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=the+answer+to+life,+t...
Ask HN: How many servers do I need to handle 100 mln hits per month?
Hi guys,

I'm trying to build a server farm filled with commodity machines to handle web traffic for a free public information government site.

The expected load anywhere from 50 million to 100 million hits per month.

The site will running on commodity servers with up to 4GB of RAM. It runs in a LAMP stack (plus memcached) and from our tests (under medium load), it processes requests in about 0.3 seconds.

Is there a rule of thumb that can help me pseudo-reliably predict how many servers I will need to handle up to 100mln impressions, and even 1 billion?

Has anyone done something similar?

Thanks in advance.
You know what I do? F12.
Larry Page on Real Time Google: We Have To Do It
If you do like I did--stumble across a woman with an IQ 50% higher than mine--then yes. And if the two of you are reasonably compatible, then you should consider marrying her. Otherwise, there's a good chance that a girlfriend would not alleviate the problem. At any rate, if you're interested in talking to a couple who has similar feelings, you can contact me at gmail.
But then again, Ryan Graves blogged about that particular design style at http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1496-design-decisions-the... and mentioned that "Plus signups are up about 20% over the norm."

Sure, there's a thin line between inspiration and plagiarism, but there's a great degree of openness to Ryan's post.
what service are you using for IP geolocation?
It was a misleading title.
What does a "hit" consist of?

A static text page?

A static text page with a few images?

How many of the hits will be from (and/or NEED to be from) database-driven queries?

How much of a "hit" can be cached?

Are visitors typically repeat (where browser-cached objects could be of benefit) or new (where you'll need to look more at CDN caching)?
Last call for Arc bugs
The issue of metered billing has been criticized here and in other places. It makes for a pretty popular punching bag, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss it as a non-issue. The ISPs have to manage oversubscription rates. It's a real problem. Total throughput is fixed at various points along the network, and there are going to be times when the demand outstrips the available capacity.

So what should the ISPs do? Time Warner's recent foray into metered billing was obviously moronic. Customers shouldn't be penalized beyond their monthly payment for usage. Their plan also didn't do anything to reduce congestion during peak traffic hours.

I think the onus should be on the ISP to make sure that they can actually deliver the rates that they are advertising, which are clearly far too high. The customer shouldn't get screwed just because the ISP can't manage the oversubscription rate that it wishfully dreamt up.

In this scenario, advertised rates would have to drop substantially, but it means that the customer, not the big media partner, decides on his own quality of service.

This is basically how it has worked for business class circuits for all of eternity. I guess I don't understand why they can't apply the same pricing model to ordinary consumers.
I'm not a programmer, but IIRC normal division, as shown (4/5), used to do integer division, but now in python 3 it follows the behavior you show. Notice the "from __future__ ..."line implies that the following lines all follow the python 3 behavior, I assume from 2.6.
You haven't considered income inequality. London has become ever more expensive and the result is that the middle class has been pushed out, but not the wealthy nor the poor. I think this happens because housing costs don't really go up in rougher parts even if they skyrocket in nicer areas.
Driving from the beach to downtown in LA I drop calls on the 10 Freeway regularly. AT&T is terrible in Los Angeles.
Now that Clojure is at 1.0 and a book is about to come out I definitely feel comfortable using Clojure in a production application. It's a thin layer on top of Java and I can easily fall back to Java if I run into problems with Clojure. The IRC channel and mailing list are also available (and very helpful) for asking question.
You may like cream ( http://cream.sourceforge.net/ ).
These tiny robots don't have the radio capability to operate very far from a human.
You can find the URLs they are coming from, which contains the specific phrase and page number by looking at the raw "referer" [sic] field in your logs.

Also, if you are getting this report solely from webserver logs it might be a false positive. Cross-check against Analytics or other javascript-based counter to make sure it's not bots. Microsoft has been spamming people's logs with fake "search traffic" for years.

Also, you have a handful of sites that are hotlinking to your images of this woman. It's possible that's passing PR. http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22Allison+Stokke%22+%2Bwha...
http://www.maxmind.com/app/support

I am doing the IP lookup locally using the Ruby and C plugin.

To do the Geolocation I am using the rails Geokit plugin and google's geolocation service.

Currently using Google's Weather API, but weatherfinder is written so that I can switch to wunderground with 1 line of code changed.
that made me LOL. An ex-colleague started his own company to increase availability of cheap robotic tools in Indian high-schools. I know this isn't what you meant, but it made me think of him.
Ah my mistake.

I tried "9 * average (planet volume) / average(volume of a grain of sand)" now but that's not working either.
Why it will lead to Judgement Day, of course!

Looks like a pretty robust platform. Nice and small, but still usable.

edit: And I wouldn't say that a lot of these technologies take the "human equation out", I would just say they take the actual human out. Most of the time, it's just a tool to aid the soldier. Humans still control most of the machines.
Sure, but if you can identify that situation on a financial asset, you can go ahead and quit your day job now.
"total planetary volume / volume of a grain of sand" gives an answer in "mile cubed shares per picoliter".

Yowch.
2379 of the Alexa top 10,000 sites use gzip compression
Silicon Valley/Entrepreneur/Hacker Poker Night: Wed 5/19, 8:00, Mountain View
I was at iRobot when this proposal was written. Very cool application for mesh networking.

Radio comms are so bad when deployed. This kind of ad hoc network builder is awesome.

That said, this is the first new robot that the Government & Industrial division has put out since I left. I really want to see a deployed Warrior (PackBot's big brother). iRobot is a perfect example of a company that seems to be suffering from inability to innovate as a public company. The talent is there though.
When in Doubt, Create an Interface
Larry Page: Twitter made Google focus on Realtime Search
This could be helpful. Several times I have been tripped up by not quite getting the configuration right between wireless APs configured as repeaters and end up crashing the segment through traffic snafus.
If they can make enough of a splash, they'll be able to co-opt Apple's post-launch publicity. If the Pre is seen as a credible threat, it'll be mentioned in the vast majority of articles covering Apple's new product, and dedicated comparisons will inevitably follow.
> Start putting stuff in likely equations where the units work out to the desired answer.

Working physicists call this 'dimensional analysis' and it's pretty much the foundational skill of theoretical physics.
It's good as a demonstration of your skills, but perhaps it should be a sub-page on your own site rather than having its own domain, since the functionality is kind of redundant. Add Celsius temperatures please. Farenheit is sooo 19th century :)

[SanFranciscoFilter] I don't know how much of an issue this is in other places, but Mrs Browl and I were discussing yesterday how useful it would be to have a San Francisco weather map that shows you weather in different parts of the city - it's not unusual for me to look out the window and find chilly fog (in the Sunset) then go to Potrero Hill and find it's a scorcher. Or the other way around.

If you could find multiple SF weather stations and make it into a widget or iPhone app or whatever, there would be a local but decent audience for it, because a single forecast for SF is basically meaningless.
Look for any book on Finite Mathematics.
From the crazy entrepreneurs that brought you the HN/YC BBQ last month:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=566144

We like to promote the exchange of ideas, contacts, and knowledge. Poker's just a bonus. :)
Is La Toya Jackson a Prime Number?
What happens when two enemy countries/entities have sufficiently advanced robotic troops to have robots fighting robots?
That's what it used to be. You needed an .edu email address to sign up.
It's not often that the site describing the research is more hyped and graphically annoying than the news story about it. I was going to replace the url of this news story with the direct link to the research it described,

http://www.revealingthelink.com/

but after following it I decided to leave the news story.

I don't think I've ever seen research promoted in this way. It's like the web site of a movie. It makes me immediately suspect all their conclusions.
6 months of iPhone App Sales Data and Analysis
Love browseology so much that i became an expert.
For 4: We will be pricing data transfer at about $0.10 per GB.

Any computation done on the images would be priced at $0.03 per CPU-hour.
No libraries of congress per fortnight (yet), but it does recogize Smoot.

Here's Smoots per fornight in cubits per leap year
http://www65.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=smoots+per+fortnight+...
Nice to see this updated to use the Clojure 1.0 release.
Did not have the time to whip up a blog post and found the results interesting. They were obtained using 200 Python threads issuing get requests with httplib2. Took 4 and a half minute on a $20 VPS.
I seriously doubt if SF was ever leading in tech startups. I think you're confusing "digital media/entertainment" with "tech". SF is all about page ranks and eyeballs, just like TV channels are. Twitter is as much "tech" as Fox: each heavily depends on technology but hardly innovates/builds any.

I think Seattle, with their rich ecosystem of Microsoft-centric startups easily beats SV/SF as far as technology startups are concerned. Austin/Dallas duo is also tech-heavy, as well as Boston area.

Internet-media is only a niche and "technology" isn't just an alias to "web site", it actually has its own meaning.
Thanks for the quick reply.

A hit is is approximately about 2Kb of data built by making on average 4 memcached calls per request.

database access is rare.

We have two background cron jobs (per server) that run every 15 minutes.

Cron A - checks for dirty entities and invalidates them in memcached.

Cron B - extracts traffic logs from memcache and stores them in a remote database.

Thanks
If there are N participants, k winners total, and y'all really do choose tickets randomly (proven false, but let's go with your assumption), your chances of winning are k/N. If you know that one of the winners is not you, your chances of winning are (k-1)/N.

EDIT: above is assuming that you can win more than once if k > 1. If not, the math is more complicated than I can be bothered to try to format in an HN post, but the principle should hold.
Like two robotic missiles that can attack the other country automatically? Like ICBMs? Or landmines?

Automated tools of warfare aren't new.

That this is brought up every fucking time a robot comes within a mile of the military is a really tired meme. Seriously. Go read every single issue of wired. I dare you to find a mention of robotics that doesn't bring up Terminator.

It's just lazy thinking.
My Google domain has it already. In general though, it's probably because most Google domain clients are businesses which require greater stability than the average individual.
Newly Funded UserVoice Makes Sense Of Beta Feedback
[For SF] The Wundermap feature of weather underground does pretty much what you say here - http://tinyurl.com/6rxuxo (Zoom in a bit to get more stations/specific weather)
It ain't you. Since the mid 90's especially, most modern armies have transformed into something that wouldn't have been imagined 20 years ago.

There is no intent to replace the human equation though. The human equation is what defines success or failure.
The most interesting thing about Alpha so far is the effectiveness of its public relations. A LOT of news organizations are talking about this. I've honestly been trying to ignore it, but that has been hard :)

Very curious how they built that kind of press coverage. I'm sure they hired a good PR firm, but still.

(It's scary how much I've become fascinated by marketing issues lately. Am I turning into a sales/marketing person?! I'll be the only marketer who VCs his emacs extensions in a git repo...)
I actually think the comments could be useful for certain larger areas (so 50 miles instead of 10). Not only I live in an area with a lot of microweather (it can be pouring at my house and sunny at work, but both work and home are covered by the same weather station and are 15 miles apart); but also we have vog emissions (think like smog, but with natural causes) whose concentrations are highly variable. So I think there would be some interest in having people being able to report local conditions; for example on voggy days I try to find a playground in a clearer area of the county. Mind you, that's not a problem many people have :-)
Daimler Takes 10 Percent Stake in Tesla
One combatant will circumvent the weaponry in question, as has happened throughout our existence. Our capacity to kill each other is only outweighed by our capacity to survive.
You can turn on new services and pre-release features in google for domains - http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...
Sounds like war is about to get a lot more fun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuB3PyjHQFE
I've used the older version, its great. Glad to see it now supports 1.0.
You don't have to. They can push it to you with an update, and damn near everyone has it installed already. PR is hyperbole of course, but they do have a very large installed base, who are used to it being on their machines even if they're not sure what it does.

The trick will be to invite users in such a way that it doesn't look like a browser popup.
anigbrowl: It was a sub page to my personal blog domain for some time, but a .info domain is only $0.99 so I figured I'd get one. Also, it does have Celsius as an option; the link is above the forecasts.
Given how close we came to killing every human on the planet during the Cold War (and avoiding it through dumb luck), I'd have to say our capacity to kill each other far outweighs our capacity to survive.
How true is this? Isn't dimensional analysis basically one kind of bookkeeping like Haskell's type checking?

What makes it particularly important in theoretical physics? Is it "foundational" because equations become unintuitive?
Breathing batteries could store 10 times the energy
In the case of mobile Android, iPhone, Pre & S60 (Nokia's thing) all use WebKit.
Wow... didn't mean to set you off like that. Can you expound on why my comment is an example of lazy thinking?
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pw_singer_on_robots_of_wa...
Nice point. Two months ago i was choosing between ruby, python and lua for a network project. I made a lot of research onto python and ruby, but did not find anything about lua. It should help me alot. As soon as i finish read, i will post my conclusions, now that i´m playing with ruby for two months.
OpenTable and Restaurant Marketing
I thought home poker wasn't legal in California. I could be wrong, though, and IANAL.
"…to push out a significantly better implementation of News…"

HN? If so, will that be a purely back-end improvement, or front-end as well?
Thanks. Too long and very misleading.
In addition to TinEye, they another image search for more loosely similar pics: very, very cool.

http://labs.ideeinc.com/visual/

On this page, you have to select the query image from a set they provide.

On the page linked below, you can upload your own.

http://labs.ideeinc.com/upload/