skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are actually companies doing customization in all the niches you mentioned:

1. Textiles: http://www.spoonflower.com

2. Clothing: http://www.spreadshirt.com

3. Food: http://www.mixmygranola.com

4. Wallpaper: http://www.nakedandangry.com (not true customization, more crowdsourced)

Still tons of room for innovation though.
Terminal in 10.5 does have tabs, though.
...but absolutely terrible leadership that couldn't figure out where they wanted to go, or how to get there and ended up going nowhere.
In those cases, there was a legitimate public interest in having them leaked and published. Very different.
do they use the same API as ec2?
The was a public interest element there.
The public has a right to know about those situations.

We may may interested, but we have no underlying right to know everything about a private company's operations and strategy.
Sun - The stanford university network.
They could not sell those products.
How do your own analytics work?
Unrelated Life Lesson: Never say "above" or "below" on HN
hm... does anyone use MySQL NDB cluster, the in memory db? with ram prices what they are, that sort of thing sounds like the way to go. I mean, with 64GiB ram servers being under $4K in parts these days, it seems like it might also be affordable.

Of course, I haven't used MySQL ndb cluster for several years. it seemed solid then, but I haven't used it since.
ech, thanks
On the other hand, the probability that you ask yourself "Am I human or insect" and answer "insect" is very low. Unless you are in a Kafka novel.
This post generated a lot of points pretty quickly. Is anyone interested in working on a startup in this area? If so, feel free to get in touch via the info on my profile. My blog: http://www.replicatorinc.com focuses on this kind of mass customization / personal fabrication. I also have a ton of ideas/prototypes for companies utilizing these technologies that I'd love to share.

Also from: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

27. Hardware/software hybrids. Most hackers find hardware projects alarming. You have to deal with messy, expensive physical stuff. But Meraki shows what you can do if you're willing to venture even a little way into hardware. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in hardware; you can often do dramatically new things by making comparatively small tweaks to existing stuff.
Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!
Sure, they did it to help the 'little guy'.
Page views never entered the equation.
Odd that this just hit HN. I sent him an e-mail regarding his Colbert Report interview earlier.

Hey Rushkoff,

I saw your appearance on the Colbert Report the other day. In it, you made reference to how it would be economically beneficial if a great number of people caught cancer. Are you not familiar with the broken window fallacy?

You're following the flow of currency, which is the wrong way to go about it (mercantilism died in the 1700s). You need to follow the flow of value. When people contract cancer, they money that they would have spent on gifts for their children, personal luxuries, etc. is lost. The time that they would have spent working for their employers, etc. is lost. The money that the HMOs would have spent on whatever-it-is-they-spend-money-on (probably luxuries, but somebody paints the pool) is lost. And if some of these patients die, then we lose a great deal of economic value--years of working, perhaps. All of this to redirect some quick money into the hands of cancer doctors or researchers. This might look good on paper, and it might even artificially inflate the GDP temporarily. But in the long run, the value that is lost has a sharp negative effect on the economy. Effectively, we've sold an appreciating asset below its amortized value, which is always a bad idea unless there's some dire emergency.

Anyways, this is all Econ 101. I realize these sorts of appearances are entirely a marketing thing, but I would encourage you to be more thoughtful in your assertions on the future, even on a "comedy" show. I watch Colbert because he is subtly, deceptively deep.
No one mentioned the Tipjoy part?! What is wrong with you people??

Twitter likes Tipjoy "has good vision" but Tipjoy is missing the "real banking" part.
Paging the Reverend Thomas Bayes...

Seriously it doesn't work like that. The probability of me being an insect is 0 - in fact the probability of me being anybody else besides me is 0, unless you are in metaphysical territory (eg. reincarnation), in which case please stop using Gaussian probability theory as its warranty only covers use in the physical world.
interesting, I knew it had a GPS but didn't realize they had a compass in there.
True for me as well even here on HN; I go out of my way to read downvoted comments when they're barely legible by highlighting them.
Maybe saying you're going to do something is different from saying you're not going to do something. One is easier to verify than the other.
So who decides what is public interest or not?

Twitter has millions of users. We provide some private data to them. Shouldn't we know what is being discussed privately on how they will use it?
I just recently moved all my domains from godaddy to gandi.

If you look through past HN threads, I don't think you'll see any registrar more positively mentioned than gandi. I don't think gandi can be beat on anything but price (maybe moniker if you really think you need bulk tools or extra-heavy-duty security).
I was really excited when I saw this headline stream by on my HN RSS feed. That pricing gives me pause as well, but only slightly.

What really matters to me is how the licensing is handled. I.e., as long as I own full rights and can pull my game out of their system whenever I want (i.e., if I find that my game is popular enough that I think I can self publish or if I find an established company that wants to buy it), then I don't really mind that they take such a large %. It's still a cheap way to prototype and sell to real game players to get feedback. :)

Anyway, this sounds awesome, but now it means less sleep for the next couple of weeks while I pull all those random scraps of paper that make up my game ideas into something more formal. ;)
Clojure Decompiled
The probability that you are human given that you are human is obviously 1.

That's not what I am asking.

Is there some plausible (possibly metaphysical) explanation besides that you were extremely lucky?
> but their margin on hardware is probably somewhere around %40

Maybe, but remember there's a pretty big invisible hardware R&D cost. Things like unibody, multitouch, internal battery, displayport, etc. aren't free. And Snow Leopard probably cost a bit more than $29/seat to develop.
I just enabled that.

It is utterly PATHETIC that I need to limit myself so. However .. humans are weak. You have to trick yourself.

I was thinking of writing a daemon to rewrite HN's IP before I found out about noprocrast ... good feature.
Spread of HINI (Swine Flu) across the United States
Well, wasn't VirtualBox developed outside, then bought? But you forgot Self (it was done by Sun right?), and other cool things :)
Well I'm saying there are none! Twitter is just a centralised blogging service with a gimmick.
It seems like this might be the 'high tide mark' for both of these companies.. Techcrunch has definitely jumped the shark, and Twitter just might be close as well.

Twitter was on Oprah. Google is the new bad. Facebook is parentized. Myspace is still 13. Blogs are overtagged. Digg is all CAPS. Reddit is overtaken with athiesm.

When are we going to start laughing at the social media sharefest frenzy of this decade? It started with blogging, and it's going to end with twitter.

We're going to end up just like 1995, making our own websites with funky counters.
I dunno. Hard to tell, but I hope not. The language might suck, but the JVM is rocking!
Why is his prescience "suspicious"?
Volumes have been written about that question; you can find plenty on this very site, e.g.: http://searchyc.com/nosql

Without rehashing all that, I'll just assure you from my own experience using distributed key/value stores in production as an Amazon.com engineer, that the tradeoff (less expressive data storage engine but simpler scaling/operations/reliability) is often worth it. And many applications are actually simpler to express in a non-relational model.

(And before anyone asks: Yes, for other applications a relational database is a better solution, despite the pain of scaling it and operating it reliably. And I've worked on production systems that used both DHTs and SQL.)
Ask HN:  please check out my django / facebook connect demo app and source
I created this demo app for a django-nyc user group meeting. The slides are available on slideshare and the source code can be downloaded on the site. Please let me know what you think!
time travel shenanigans?
My problem with the first point - Make them Design Something - is that design is a lot harder to grade than the second two. It's easy to see if someone can write fizzbuzz, or find the bug, but it's significantly harder to grade a design.

Good design operates in the face of real world constraints, unlike typical interview questsions (see the article on Apple design about Real Artists Ship).

As an interview question, I used to ask people to design the DB schema for Netflix. Almost everyone could get something that would kind-of sort-of work. Of course there was a gradient of bad to good answers, but a passing or better grade on the question did not help predict whether the candidate would get an offer. Asking FizzBuzz was a better predictor of whether they would pass the interview process.
Running a Subversion Server off your Windows Home Server
But as these companies stop growing, the stock options are worthless, and people jump ship to the next Google where their stock will go skyhigh.
Evernote works great. It syncs to a web client which then syncs to native clients which are available on Mac, iPhone, and Windows.

Not as fast as Simplenote appears to be, but excellent nonetheless. Has saved me in a datacenter without my laptop many a time.

http://evernote.com/
There is no "me" that ever had a non-one probability of being human. There is no great lottery from which each entity is chosen to be one thing or another.
Setting up your own reseller through opensrs.
Because it's easy and it works.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that people don't go to porn sites to marvel at the design.
And besides that, the severity of accidents increases with the speed of the vehicle(s) regardless of the cause of the accidents.
Why do you call this link bait?
I didn't intend anything fancy by this statement.

If someone is doing a piece of the development by which they will get, e.g., 1% of the company (whether in stock or in options exercisable at a nominal price), and if this is fully earned once that piece is done, then the language would say that he gets that piece (without strings and without vesting requirements).

If others, however, will be true founders once the company is formed, will get larger equity pieces, and will anticipate earning out their larger equity pieces over time, then this needs to be specified so that it is not simply assumed that someone's 20% piece, for example, is fully earned at inception simply because that was the size of the equity grant promised as a founder's percentage. In such cases, the general terms of the vesting should be described as well as the size of the stock piece.

This is just another way of saying that, even when put into a term sheet, the terms should be clear on what is to be granted and, if there are to be vesting conditions attached to the grant, they should be made clear (normal vesting for founders is at a rate of 1/48th per month over 48 months, i.e., four years, but there is no rule about this and it can be anything the founders agree to, e.g., 1/36th/mo over 36 months or even no vesting at all).
Not hard to find: http://www.thegamecrafter.com/publish/rights
How 16 famous electronic companies got their names
Great point.

My personal motto: go to bed better (at something) than when I woke up.

It could be programming, personal relationships, health, whatever. Just make each day a productive one somehow.
Java never felt "new" to me: rather unnecessarily bloated and slow and not offering enough high-level language features to justify the performance penalty over C. Managing memory in C never felt "hard" and when I needed something for quick hacking I could use VB and/or Delphi. Funny, but in many ways Visual Basic has been far superior RAD tool for enterprise SQL pushing. Yes, it was garbage-collected, ran in its own VM and produced fast-launching executables.

In mid/late 90s words like "Oracle", "Sun", "Solaris" and "Java" were used predominantly by older fat-faced salesmen types, while cool kids were coding C on Windows or playing with Linux. Yes, Microsoft was fun back then: it felt young, modern and innovative. Gates and Allen were Brin and Page of the 90s.

I was doing some cool real-time data acquisition/analytics on Windows NT with C++ and MFC. Yes, it felt bad-ass. In my geek circles Borland was considered the most exciting software company at the time. Sun/Oracle and IBM with OS/2? Those were for banks and GM.

Sun hasn't changed since then. I have nothing to thank this company for, except that with Java, they dumbed down our profession to nearly data-entry status and introduced an intolerable boredom to the world of software hacking, something it was missing before 1995. I also believe Java suppressed the development and widespread adoption of Lisp, Smalltalk, ML and Haskell: before Java lots of folks couldn't use them because computers weren't powerful enough, but now they aren't using them because schools stopped teaching and switched to vocational java training.

I wasn't surprised Oracle bought them. Their "Oracle Forms" BS always sucked. With Java and armies of school-trained drones supplemented by Indian outsourcers they finally have a wonderful distribution channel to keep pushing their overpriced stuff through. I guess SAP could buy them too. I've been fortunate enough to avoid this market, so I won't be missing anything.
The most common quote I see is: "640k should be enough for anybody. - Bill Gates" and it bugs me every time. Thanks to the grandparent for setting the record straight.
If you weren't extremely lucky, you wouldn't be asking the question.
Think of it this way, if you and 100 million other people all buy a lottery ticket and you win the jackpot you might ask why me? Yet, assume the odds someone would win was 90%, and the odds that the winner would ask the question was also 90%. Now what's unusual about the person asking the question?

nothing

And what's unusual about someone winning?

nothing
It's even more likely that you are a rock. Or a star. Or an electron.

Except it's not, because you can't be an electron, if "you" means "someone contemplating this question" (or any other non-trivial, relevant meaning of "you").
No I won't. I've been refusing to follow any links to TC for a while now and other than the occasional tinyurl'd link on twitter I've managed to avoid that cesspool entirely. If news.yc would stop voting up every article they write to the front page I wouldn't even have to read their linkbait headlines either.
Ask HN: Anyone running a free app want to try a in-ram MySQL NDB server on me?  
Yeah, so there's a lot of talk about how MySQL is 'not enough' both from the Oracle RAC people and the couchdb and other non-relational data stores. Many of these people advocate going to things like SSD, which costs almost as much as ram, while others suggest SAN (which is often more expensive than ram, when you include the infrastructure costs, and the fact that most databases are relatively small.)

A few years back, when MySQL 5.0 was in late beta, I set up a MySQL ndb cluster to handle Dspam for a fairly large mailserver I was in charge of. It seemed to work well, and was really fast. I thought this would overrun the other database solutions with the ease of a man outrunning a small child.

In the intervening years, I've been less involved with databases. I've only needed to touch them for accounting and other performance insensitive applications.

Anyhow, I find the problem interesting. As far as I can tell, NDB is awesome, but I have nothing but synthetic benchmarks. Real load is different.

anyone with real load willing to test that with me? I can donate 3 CPUs and 9-17GiB ram to the project. I would implement on my Xen-based VPS platform[1]. (I'd have the servers on separate power; I can even put them on separate uplinks)

my motivation: well, if I'm wrong, I want to know so I quit giving people shit. If I'm right, and NDB is the answer to MySQL performance problems, I'd like the publicity of saying so.

Also, if the MySQL NDB cluster is as good as I think it is, I'd like to sell it as a service. It's a natural choice, as I'm already setup to host as much ram as possible at the lowest cost possible.

I'm looking for someone who currently has a database that is on a MySQL server with around 4GiB ram, that can't respond to queries in an acceptable timeframe, or perhaps someone who has multiple MySQL servers. If the queries are write-biased, even better (I suspect that regular mysql will do about as well as mysql cluster when it comes to reads, due to filesystem caches, until you start adding more nodes.)

If the experiment is successful, I can continue hosting you for free. The MySQL cluster hosting service will require credibility.

[1]http://prgmr.com/xen/
I agree completely, but there are also a lot of ideas out there that need coders because coders don't have all the ideas . . . I guess the approach may be to find a place to post my idea and see if any coders think it is worth their time to join the startup.
plausible (possibly metaphysical)

Sorry, you just blew my fuse by using plausible and metaphysical in the same sentence. Maybe somebody else can help you with that.

To repeat, luck has nothing to do with it because there is no consciousness allocating lottery. It's like saying "the universe is 99.9[...]9% empty space, ain't I lucky to be on a planet?". Luck does not apply, as the chance of you being born in empty space is exactly 0.
Thanks, I will. Good luck out there!
Very cool, I know what kind of shoe you are talking about. I have only seen pictures, though. They may be the best pair of running shoes you own!
Moths Outwit Bats By Jamming Sonar
Why does it matter whether an entity is capable of asking this question?

What matters is whether it has consciousness/self-awareness.
Need to measure some pixels? Use xScope. [mac]
FPGAs are generally more expensive.
You don't need an entity that is capable of contemplating this question to be conscious/self-aware.
As much as I'd love to see this happen (more power to VentureBeat and ReadWriteWeb and, hell, even Mashable), Paul and Mike are friends so it's not happening. As much as I get my hopes up every month when this debate comes up, the guy who controls the bans has been pretty consistent on his position here.
I was thinking a custom site, set up around a small niche where users "drill down" from entry to entry.

Perhaps a product review site.
Google Says YouTube Can Start Making Real Money, Very Soon. Really
I doubt it because IBM has too much skin in the game. Few people are aware, but IBM produces its own JDK:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/
Upon reading the diss of Marissa Mayer I found myself liking Twitter a little more. But then, that's a very geeky reaction coming from somebody whose friends imitate the Marissa Mayer laugh for fun.
You forgot Open Office which they bought and opened up and which has changed the competitive landscape in many ways. I'm struck by the number of non-geeks I know who use it daily.

SPARC was a great architecture, and the Sun workstations of yesteryear were where a lot of cutting edge research was done... It'll be interesting to see how many more OpenSolaris features Darwin picks up (ZFS?). It has dtrace already.
I found my way of doing it was simply to block reddit, digg, and slashdot from my /etc/hosts. Otherwise I'd just go back if I was bored ("oh, I have nothing better to do for the next 10 minutes anyways...")

My life has improved immeasurably.
Emend: Make the Web a little better
I respect him for that. He's trying to express his beliefs to people he thinks might benefit from it. That's a noble thing to do.

Hell, that's half of why I'm a user on this site. I don't think that time spent encouraging people not to waste so much time online is necessarily a bad thing.
Then you're not really using "social media" - you're exploiting the patterns in a service for your own goal. Not that there's anything wrong with this - but you are by definition not participating in "social media" in this case.

Participating means you're using it for useless chatter.

It's the same as IM. I use IM at work for work, and it's a lot less inane than the regular IM I use with my friends.
Why does it matter whether an entity is capable of contemplating this question?

What matters is whether it has consciousness/self-awareness.
Agree.

Keeping the rights, having full control on publishing/unpublishing your stuff, and non-exclusivity are the three most important requirements when using these kind of services.

Any of these services (with the requirements stated above) is just another outlet - another opportunity to reach more people - and there's no reason not to join.
On average sperm cell you was one of about 280 million sperm cells deposited in proximity to egg cell you in one mating attempt.

Everything about us is unlikely.

http://www2.oakland.edu/biology/lindemann/spermfacts.htm
Facebook is wonderful - but I use it with only 23 people and disable Highlights, so I only see what I want to see.

What I love about Facebook is that if you want to use Facebook "responsibly", you can, and when you do Facebook doesn't nag you to be more supersocial or anything. Ditto Twitter, actually, though I have no need for Twitter myself. It gives you control.

Compare that to other sites - Tumblr comes to mind since it was mentioned in this article - that attempt to force users into contributing more. I've even heard some sites show a leaderboard of their "Top" users, and inherently pressure their users to post things that the largest amount of people will agree with.
Last time I used the MySQL ndb cluster (admittedly, quite a few years ago, so things may be different now), it was a huge fail. It was extremely temperamental, very difficult to configure (the documentation wasn't particularly helpful in this regard) and would often crash out of the blue. Crashing lead to a couple very regrettable things happening:

a- Starting the NDB cluster was a painful and slow process, often taking 45 minutes for very, very little data (1000's of rows).

b- On crash, data was not recoverable and usually resulted in a total data loss.

So those are my experiences using ndb in a production environment. Given that, I would stay as far away from it as I can.

Having said that, I'm sure things have changed in the past 4-5 years, I'd just make sure you test things out properly, for an extended period of time, in production conditions and that you fully understand the configuration of the cluster and all of the little settings that impact performance and recoverability.
My apologies, the figure I was looking at was for cars only. "Exceeding speed limit was attributed to 3 per cent of cars involved in accidents."

I didn't include going too fast for road conditions, because speed traps don't typically test for that.
If it's true that all panels are now 6-bit, that wouldn't matter. Also, specifying a 6-bit display wouldn't prevent them from silently shipping a better one in the future -- Apple has been known to ship faster processors or optical drives than specified.
Um, that would be my app: iLightning. http://www.shinyfish.com/ilightning
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=567966
Humor In The Workplace - Federal Business Opportunities: Opportunities
I think if the universe is deterministic the probability is 1 and if it is not the probability is definitely 0 (like a random real being rational).