skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A fun exercise is to hook a randomwalk up to a pretty charting package, show the resulting charts to a finance person, and watch them ask "What stock is that?" I did that all the time when I was working at a financial software startup. (Mostly because I was working on our charting library and needed fake data to test...)
"...you're really closing the "last mile" of open source web site deployment and hosting by automating the process."

Right, and even when experienced developers use the site, I think they will appreciate the automation. A hacker doesn't want to spend time doing all the boring stuff like un/zipping, find, copy, paste, create db, etc... Flooha allows them to skip all the fluff and get down to the fun stuff like hacking. Similarly, normal users can skip all of what they consider BS and just get down to adding their content.

"But, what is the revenue model in all this?"

Well, the free hosting is pretty limited at 100MB. Initially, we'll generate revenue from the premium hosting accounts. However the potential is so much more. Here's a short list.

1. Job listings and rent-a-coder type projects.

We hope to develop a community where users can find designers and hackers to further customize their sites.

2. Paid apps and addons.

Think "iPhone App Store" on this one. There was a story here recently (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=659303) about WordPress plugin developers who can't make any money from their plugins. Well, imagine if they had a way to charge just a dollar or two and thousands of users used their plugin on their website... There is also an opportunity for paid apps like vBulletin, which is the most popular forum software on the 'net and also has tons of add-ons.

3. I've designed the site so that I can basically "flip a switch" and open it up to other hosting companies. So, you could use Flooha, but on your own server or your web host's server. There is potential for partnerships with big hosting companies.

I think I've given away all my secrets. ;)

"Good luck and keep us posted!"

Thanks a lot, I will.
Made to love - para que fuistes creado?? por : toby mac
Looks cool, but while we're on the subject - what makes this better than the established players like Campfire (http://campfirenow.com/)?
Android OS comes to the PC (Live CD / VM)
The philosophical reason to use the GPL, rather than the BSD or MIT licenses, is to ensure that users have certain rights to the software they use.

What rights do software users benefit from with GPL licensed software that they do not with BSD licensed software?

You seem to make the point a couple of times that the GPL is more free and gives more rights to users.. could you elaborate on that as, to how I see it currently, little is more free than the BSD license except the public domain. The GPL places all sorts of restrictions on users if they choose to modify the software.
Great idea. I could see myself using this as a quick way to start new projects... especially with Drupal, as downloading & installing a bunch of modules can be a long process.

That said, I think the interface for adding modules could be more efficient if it functioned a little more like the iTunes search bar - just pull stuff in as I type.

Also, there's no reason to take me to a new page when I add a module - it's a waste of time. Try some sort of lighter-weight confirmation... maybe just add it to a sidebar panel that lists the modules I've added and give me a little flash so I can see it popped up there. Otherwise, I have to wait for this page to load that doesn't tell me anything new.

Keep at it!
the solar technology is here. households could have good efficient solar systems to provide a good portion of the electricity they need. There could also be policy that every new house has to have solar panels (less cost if they are built in in large numbers)

However just like when the oil companies researched, patented and never sold oil additives that would have made petrol (gas) go further (not a conspiracy :) my Aunt was a research chemist for one company) purely to secure their market they are doing similar things with solar tech; lobbying and hiding it :) we worked on a small project at the end of my degree for an energy company I shall not name - they were actively patenting advances in solar tech "for a rainy day" :)

Fair play - no one else bothered to beat them too it. But it does suck.
Please review our Technology & Law blog/podcast
i'm surprised that marriage was a factor - i'd suspect incomplete data on that dimension.
The US and UK used to reprocess. I read recently (I can't remember where unfortunately) than the US has given up on the idea of processing, and wants to look at long term storage (Yucca mountain etc.) and the UK's reprocessing facility (Sellafield) is going offline soon.
Guesses have to do with probabilities, plans with intentions. So, no real connection. I've never seen a good blog post at 37signals, but this is the dumbest so far.
That's an odd definition of "user". What about the person sitting at the terminal, using the software? Are they guaranteed the right to inspect, modify, and distribute it?

That person doesn't know how to inspect or modify it, and largely doesn't pay any attention to the license before emailing it to a friend. That person at the terminal isn't using code, they're using a program. Once you start talking about the rights to inspect and modify software, you've left those people behind, so they aren't the users who are concerned with those rights.

Frankly, I hope the day comes faster -- for it is coming, make no mistake -- when people "protect" their work by contract and technological measures alone, rather than by legal threats and actions. For people sitting at computers and using programs, that day has already largely arrived, in spite of the attempts by the RIAA, et al, to roll back to a time when that wasn't so. Eventually the legal situation will catch up with the cultural one.
A couple friends of mine from law school and I started this podcast to cover technology and the law. We're all nerds, but we were tired of seeing the technology press get legal issues wrong when talking about technology.

Our goal is to provide reasoned legal analysis that's accessible to a technical audience without formal legal training.

We've recorded seven podcasts thus far, one each week, along with a whole host of blog posts on a variety of topics.

We'd love to hear any feedback, ideas, or suggestions as for what we can do better.
No doubt there's someone much more knowledgeable than me, but GPLv2 wasn't specifically anti-attribution, but anti-any-additional-requirements. GPLv3 specifically allows some limited forms of attribution.
"If you want users to have rights"

Depends on the users you're talking about.

The GPL trades away some of your freedom right now to maximize the potential freedom of people who have not yet received the software.

The BSD license maximizes your freedom now at the potential expense of the freedom of people who have not yet received the software.

As someone who builds and uses tools for developers, BSD is thus more useful to me, because it grants the maximum freedom to the people I target -- myself, and other developers to whom I distribute BSD-licensed tools.
I would understand this rant if he were promoting AGPL exclusively. Can anyone explain how (L)GPL vs. BSD relates to any of his points?
The model is freemium. I wanted to work out the bugs with the early adopters (we're in beta), and then reward them with a discount when we launch our premium hosting. It's a chicken and egg problem. There currently aren't any users to subsidize your free site because we've just launched.

If you're truly interested in our monthly paid accounts, you can put yourself on our waiting list here:

https://flooha.com/waiting_list

Thanks for the comment. It seems that the "kick-ass" in tag line might not be a great idea, like you said. ;)
High-tech pea shooting
Assuming that the GPL holds in court (in whatever country/state you're in), my biggest fear is that I wouldn't understand some part of it and get into legal trouble.

With a BSD or MIT license (or even just public domain) on the code you're using, you know that it's free to use any way you want.

Maybe a bit paranoid, but with a large software project, you (or your boss) might not want to take that chance, and you'd be stuck buying a commercial app/library instead.
You should be coding it now, you know what all of the rules are. Come Monday, you would just plug in the desired hash value and word dictionary and let it run for the 24 hours of the contest.

I think I'm going to try to put something together this weekend just for the heck of it. It would be cool if they published the code (with permission) of the top submitters, just to see how they went about solving it.
Thanks, great comments. I've put off adding a lot of javascript goodness simply to get a working beta out faster. Is it just me or is debugging ajax stuff annoying?

"I could see myself using this as a quick way to start new projects"

Exactly. It is also fantastic for testing add-ons. Create a free site with the add-on you want to test, play around and then uninstall it...all in a few minutes.
IPhone App Store tops 1.5 billion downloads, 65,000 apps
I only have anecdotal evidence to back this up but I think dogs and cats are generally as well behaved as their owners force them to. I'm not one to be lax on discipline either and I've never had much of a problem with anyone's pets, even ones that are normally unruly that I have to babysit. They typically learn very fast that the stuff they used to get away with isn't working and they have to be well behaved to get what they want.

Your cat may have tried the baby meow bit in the past, realized it didn't work and moved on.

What will be very interesting is if you have a baby in the future, listen to the cat to see if it starts imitating the baby's cry. If this study's conclusion are in fact correct I imagine it's likely to happen.
Survey Confirms: Bing Will Bomb
This really struck me:
"One low-enriched fuel pellet weighing the same as three pennies contains the energy equivalent of 1,780 pounds of coal"

I knew nuclear had a higher density, but wow, that's a pretty striking way to put that information into perspective. I understand all the fears of accidents, terrorist attacks, etc... but if your goal is to curb CO2, it certainly looks like an option worth considering.

Increasing nuclear plant safety seems like a more tractable engineering problem than figuring out how to keep CO2 out of the environment after you've liberated it from tons and tons of coal.
Q2 VC Investment Jumps 61% To $5.3 Billion
Ask HN: Just out of curiosity, when do have to be at work?
So my workplace has this rule for everybody to be there at 9am. I've developed a bad habit of showing up late but my boss is not happy. I know its relatively common for coders to sleep late, so my question is, do most software company's give their employees a little slack or is it just the exception?

Again, this is not about what time you start to work, it's what time your boss tell you you have to be there.
Automating Browser Testing the Easy Way
I released a piece of web software that had a postcard license (to use or distribute it you had to send me a postcard). I never once received a postcard even though I can easily google and find plenty of people using it.

The closest I have ever gotten to something like that is when someone sent me a dvd off my amazon wish list for my netflix recommendation framework which was pretty cool.
That's what's called "libertarianism" in the US. That's what I meant by my above statement, as in this is what "true" conservatism looks like.
But the costs of scanning, indexing and tracking the paper documents is almost certainly greater than that of producing the same documents on computer. I'm guessing your comment is tongue-in-cheek, but anyhoo...

Police cars in many major US cities have laptops in them, along with a private wireless network, allowing them to look up vehicle licenses, outstanding arrest warrants and so forth. While I'm sure this system does not work perfectly and incurs an IT overhead in addition to the installation cost, I imagine the police officers would prefer to keep using them.

If computers are good enough for police officers to use on the road, they are definitely good enough to be used inside the station. When you get down to it, the requirements are not so very different from a specialized CRM system.

Also: Public records show that the city signed a $432,900 contract for typewriter maintenance with Afax Business Machines in 2008

For >$400k/year I think you could put together a very good IT maintenance team.
Even so, that usually applies only up to a certain point in time. Once the company is big enough, they'll hire an army of maintenance programmers to continue improving the software.

For example, Tom Proulx wrote the first version of Quicken basically singlehandedly, but it's probably a whole department inside Intuit working on it now. Paul Buchheit is normally associated with GMail, but the GMail team is huge. Linus Torvalds wrote the first version of Linux, but hundreds if not thousands of people have contributed patches.
Wiffiti: A pretty twitter feed for large TV screens at live events
The Institute for the Future of the Book: The Almighty Word
I find that marginal costs/benefits for low-priced items are best contemplated multiplicatively, not additively. A $4-5 pint at the bar? Only a couple bucks of markup, but replaceable with 3-5 bottles of beer at home. Out to lunch for $6? that's 2 or 3 home-cooked dinners. 80-cent vending machine candy bar? only 30 cents more, but that's 60% more expensive than walking to the student store. The habit of thinking this way stretches pocket money multiplicatively.
The Best Internet Addresses Will Cost a Cool .Million
I agree Meebo is, in truth, different. But on the surface and at the depth I think most people think about, they see browser chat and browser chat (not to be confused with ceiling cat).
Apple App Store: 1.5 billion downloads in 1 year
Software under the BSD license may be given to a user without providing the corresponding source code, effectively preventing the user (or an agent authorized by the user) from modifying their copy of the software.
You may be interested in Nutch (http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/), an Open Source crawler, which handles indexing etc. for you. Its also based on Hadoop, so it should scale nicely just by throwing more machines at the job.
That's how it's supposed to look…
We looked closely at Campfire before we started, and it's certainly the offering we've found that's the closest to what we're shooting for.

I think the target audience is one of the big differences. 37S, as usual, is targeting small teams with simple needs, and doing so with a diverse set of complimentary products, including campfire. They're doing 80/20, and doing it very well.

We're focusing on chat specifically, and we'd like to add a lot more depth--background room notifications, sophisticated group/room access rules, LDAP/AD integration, marketing ourselves to medium-sized organizations (several hundred users/company) that have higher standards when it comes to integration with existing systems, management ease, etc. We're shooting for a more complete solution.

So, I think Campfire is one comparison where recognize we're competing along a difference of degree, not really a difference of kind.
I don't have a fixed time I need to get to work even though the official policy is 8:30am. I generally get in from 10-10:30am unless I have a meeting.

Getting to work a little later helps me to avoid the morning commute and allows me to sleep later.

However, I find that you generally have to "prove" yourself at a workplace first.

Over time, my schedule evolved into something that works for both parties. For example, managers start to realize that I come in late so won't schedule early meetings or interviews.

In general, if all they are interested in is a 9-5 bench warmer, then that may not be the best environment to work in either.
Welch to Women: No Such Thing as Work-Life Balance
How a year with the iPhone changed my life
Be advised: FF3.5 font exploit found
Your Domain Name Secure? Brand Owners v. Domainers
To the user who signed up as "bobbob", your activation email was returned. You can't use your account without activating yourself. Email me at support@flooha.com if you typed your address wrong. Thanks.
And?

Short answer: because life's too short to read an essay about software licensing that appears to be shot through with commentary about the failings of the Ruby/Rails community. Am I wrong, and there was no RoR commentary after that graf? Oh well.
Comcast to put HBO, Cinemax shows online
Point is that you can no longer use the url's hostname as a document feature for spam classification. You have to actually fetch (or at heast HEAD) the url itself.

Also, I called this one too.
Critical JavaScript vulnerability in Firefox 3.5
If you're making predictions about what other people are going to do, call it a guess. If you're making predictions about what you are going to do, it should be a plan.
Selling locally hosted versions is absolutely 'conveying' and the GPL's text is quite clear.

Selling the rights to the software or the company itself is straightforward -- just because it's licensed under the GPL doesn't mean the company doesn't own the copyright! The GPL text is intentionally unclear about this, as the FSF pretends that everyone is going to assign copyright to them for 'safekeeping'.
Mark of the true policeman: if technology melts down, they'll still be able to do their paperwork.
Further ideas:

1) I appreciate the demo video and it's quite good, but you may consider doing a 30 second high-level overview. The demo is rather slow moving for someone who wants to get in, understand the product, and get out or get in further.

2) Logging. I think you'll be well served by offering logs of all chats to the admins for record keeping.
I saw an interesting article a while back that proposed using the tactical nuclear weapons we have to dispose of the radioactive waste. The fallout from good thermonukes is apparently very small, and if you bury the bomb and set it off around a bunch of radioactive waste, the blast will destroy the waste with a relatively small amount of fallout.

Also, lots of things are radioactive, but they may not be pure enough to be useful unless enriched further. You could probably enrich it, but at this juncture it is probably cheaper to simply get new fuel than to reprocess waste.

Just my two cents.
I liked it better when it was called IRC.
The fact that you need eclipse to manage things bothers me to no end. I realize that Visual Studio is pretty much a requirement in the .NET world, but all the tools are also accessible from the command line and VS ties into the default build tools, unlike eclipse.
Will I be the first one to quote Eisenhower? "Plans are nothing, planning is everything."

The act of planning implies careful thought. "Guessing" implies a haphazard attempt at divining the future. I'll stick with the former.
Your first sentence makes no sense to me. Can you explain what led you to this conclusion? It looks to me like I could use similar reasoning to say, "it looks to me like you really think married people suck at coding, and that's why you're jumping on my critique of the old, irrelevant blog post's data collection methodology".

The fact that we're heading towards this rathole of a conversation is a good reason to flag this post. It isn't newsworthy, and I think I have a strong argument that it isn't sound either.
I think you missed my point. Manual oversight of tens of millions of listings is not remotely practical. The article points out bad data in google, and it hasn't eroded their user base ;) Don't you think there is a reason google hasn't manually reviewed each listing?
But there aren't, and you know it.
I see your point as far as getting those forms into a database goes. But how long does it take to make an editable .pdf form for really unusual cases, and just have a database entry for 'special/unusual case y/n|select/view appropriate form'?
Jetpack: Summer 2009 State of Security, Part 1
you have to back that up with some studies.
I'm glad to see it's a fun challenge and not a "code an app for our platform" type contest. Those have really started to annoy me as they seem very close to spec work.
TL Podcast 7: Malware Blockers; Amazon, Mobile Apps, API; Eric Schmidt/Apple
As a partial answer to your question, I for one thought that Zed's final point made sense (and made me better understand the GPL):

Open source to open source, corporation to corporation.

Basically, you can do just about anything with MIT- or BSD-licensed software. But the GPL tries to make everything around it GPL too. If you build software that integrates with a GPL'd library, you have to release your software with a GPL (or similar) license.

So Zed's plan is to offer his software under a GPL license for free (open-source to open-source), and also sell it without the GPL license for pay (corp to corp).

Good place to go for GPL info: the GPL FAQ (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html)
Sleep by Night of the Week
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Talks Google Chrome OS, Bing
How to Promote Your Blog Posts
Concepts have been dropped from the new C++ standard
Left column, near bottom: "Technologies such as (unreadable) and Cufon... "

Wow, I never thought there would be unreadable _text_ in browser. But this day finally came!
If you can seriously write software and not have to tweak it to run as you go for this type of challenge, then my hat is off to you. Unfortunately, I'm a mere mortal and would mostly likely need to make changes once I see the "real" data / dictionary.
Digg's recent survey shows that a most of their users who are on IE 6 _[and are interested in completing a survey about what browser they use]_ are so because of work.

If someone is already in the aforementioned "installed Win XP and doesn't care about updates or browsers" category, I think it's pretty safe to assume they might be in the "doesn't want to be bother with a survey about their browser" category.
Rob and Ian also did a lot of work on GDB, binutils, stuff like that.
Thats pretty cheap when you consider that there are easily 30 different large precints in variously aged buildings the predate being wired for ethernet and are old enough that they are likely opaque to wifi. As a budget item in a city that easily has a larger budget and population than some states, .5 million dollars for a given department to get pervasive support for any single nontrivial service is pretty reasonable
I think we do see Campfire as direct competition, but we believe this market to be largely untapped. As jamwt mentioned, we do serve a slightly different audience. I think (and hope!) that as more people start recognizing how useful this type of application is to their organization, some portion of them will choose us over Campfire.
Giveaway: Free business cards for your startup
I wouldn't worry too much about the tagline. It's youthful and trendy, which I am assuming is the type of audience you want to draw into your site.

Pick your public face to draw the right type of people in. Don't worry about the rest.
Downvoters: Plug your ears, and cover your eyes. Gotta maintain that state of cognitive dissonance somehow, eh?

MSNBC: "Afghanistan war plans were on Bush's desk on 9/9/2001"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4587368/

9/11 was a fraud. You believe it, you're part of the game.
You're right, tall vertical columns are total shit on a screen.

But fixed-height horizontally scrolling columns are AMAZING: http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/ -- they work so perfectly on a screen when done well, better than anything else by far. The lines always stay in the same vertical alignment, and the columns in the same horizontal alignment, eliminating jitter -- the text changes without moving shit around.