skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You misinterpreted most of my questions :/

2) I'm asking if the device can open a direct socket to a host on the public internet. Your answer to (1) implies that the device might not be able to talk to anything but amazon's (potentially non-HTTP) servers, but it might just be for MiTM reformatting (like Opera Mini)

4) Of course the device is tied to your Amazon ID. I'm asking if the modem's permanent radio ID is a part of that

6) That feature is for avoiding the use of the modem, not bridging it! It's only a first step towards tethering. By default it lets the Kindle use the PC's internet connection, not the other way around (which is all that I care about)
Just got home, took a deeper look and had a few more thoughts.

I think the greatest part about these products is the "viral" (for lack of a better word) ability. Someone with a new necklace will have all their friends asking about it... show their 10 BFFs. Same goes for cutbot and name tags. (See: http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2009/07/seth-godins-talk-...) This is something that will be worth noting to people.

I noticed you were pretty specific with what you wanted in a co-founder on cutbots. Did you ever consider that you'd want someone with negotiation/supply chain management skills who has done deals [possibly in China] before? Or if you have before personally, even better. Just throwing that out there.

Lastly, a good way to get some attention and hype when your more finalized would be via http://www.kickstarter.com/. These seem like projects people would want to fund (in return for something... maybe first dibs?).

Good luck!
I thought it was meant to be a variation on "cloud".
Yeah, I figured that might be one interpretation, hence the qualifier :)
You'd still less smug than if you were standing on a segway -- at least you ride this thing.
Thought experiment [on XML]
PCs are not a nice architecture for servers: there are
starvation points all over the system, from registers (AMD64
solves some of it) to memory to I/O.

Could you clarify the ways in which you think a PC architecture will hobble a data server? It looks like the X4500 runs dual Opterons, which relatively speaking have no shortage of registers. And it supports 16 GB of memory, which doesn't seem too shabby. And while I'm not sure how the SATA controllers are connected to the bus, I'd be a little surprised if this was the bottleneck. Which part of the 'PC architecture' do you think is the limiting factor?
NatraTox Colon Cleanser - How It Works
Classic 2004 article from Mark. I somehow wandered onto it just now and was reminded of how awesome it was, and thought people here might be interested if they hadn't seen it before.
PHP and mootools? Not into Django/jQuery? :)
Wales Web Design
Welcome to totally Wales. We are a design studio that specialises in E-commerce, Content management web design and Search Engine optimisation, this is the act of getting your Listing highly ranking.
I'm not sure why, but I'll respond briefly to your three points.

1. It did not need to be open. But I am making a website documenting my journey. Sorry if someone thought it was interesting and posted it to this site where you were forced to read it.

2. We don't really think it's amazingly brilliant. It is remarkable, though, in that most people have never done anything like this. We just thought it would be an interesting way to spend a month and I personally hoped it would help me accomplish some goals: I want to become a better designer and a better writer. This journey will allow me to practice both of those things. I don't have any data, but I think the people on airplanes are more interesting than the people at Dunkin' Donuts.

3. We won't get free flights. We paid our 600 dollars and we are abiding by the rules. We just want to see if they will help us out if their planes are late or cancelled.
OT:

What do the cognoscenti recommend for doing automatic text classification/categorization? I have been looking at Spam filters, and they're mostly boolean type predicates that return Spam/NotSpam results along with a confidence number. I want to be able to do that same for a large number of categories.
What gives you the impression its the former? :) Its actually Django with Prototype..
Check out the seat he has at the US Open:
http://blog.dustincurtis.com/im-at-the-us-open-in-the-front-...

Must be doing something right to get seats like that.
Definition troubles. Flex generates content for the Flash Player. The Flash authoring tool generates content for the Flash Player. So do you define "Flash" as "output runs on the Flash Player" or as "created using the Flash authoring tool?"
Ever heard of candy? My cousin has a big zip lock completely filled with brightly colored beads. She and my brother would sit and make herself, him, or their friends bracelets. This can be time consuming, but she clearly enjoyed it.

My point is that making can be more social than shopping.

ps: That paper cutting slide show it great. I'm sure I'll imitate the style next time I need to create one.
I think its interesting how well the instance based methods perform at comparative numbers of training samples to the SVM-RBF methods. I'd certainly choose instance based methods for tasks with similar data to these tests.
I found it from a link in this post - http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/patent-for-google-h...
30 Days On JetBlue: A Flying Marathon…Helping Kids In Zambia
If it were another unscrupulous airline, I would be afraid that they would purposely be trying to recoup their upfront loss on the ticket by charging additional fees - like missed connections/rebooking fees. just a random thought...

Good luck on your travels
This project's carbon footprint is going to bigger than a microwaved michael jordan doing a lay up for shaq (in space).
Well, of course you can reproduce their design. But reproducing their design won't reproduce their success. If it were that simple, every website would look like Craigslist.

Again: you're missing the point. Craigslist is the exception to the rule. It's a product of its time. For any value of X, if you tried to say "this is the way Craigslist did X, therefore I should too," you'd very likely be wrong. And in any case, Craiglist is pretty far from the romantic notion of three guys in a garage. It's an expensive site to run, even if it's more cheaply run than other big sites.
I agree. Do you remember a company called Bandwagon? http://ridethebandwagon.com/

They had a big splash a couple of years ago about how they were going to offer unlimited backup for all your mp3s in iTunes, all nicely and automatically synced, for about $10/month or something. They were going to do the storage on S3. They offered anyone who mentioned them on their blog a free years' service.

http://blog.ridethebandwagon.com/post/37269480/free-accounts...

I had about 400G of mp3s at the time I think. I thought, "OK!"

Their service lasted about 2 days as they underestimated, seemingly by about an order of magnitude, how much data people actually had.

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/adverse_selecti.html

Then they went back to the drawing board and came up with some lame service where you buy the storage space on S3 yourself and then they sell you the ability to access it or something. Lucky they didn't go out of business.

Anyway, knowing the details of the kind of system Backblaze is using, and the price per gig it breaks down to for them, is evidence they're not overselling themselves, and gives me confidence that they'll still actually be there in a few years, unlike Bandwagon. I'm much more likely to use them because of that. Add in all the discussion they've generated, and it's been a very clever marketing event for them. Kudos!
> But not everyone is a brilliant 23-year-old willing to share a flophouse with three other geniuses while coding 20 hours a day. In the real world, people have spouses... kids... mortgages... elderly parents... heck, maybe they just like sweet tea! There are all sorts of reasons that they won't move to the Valley, even if they have plenty of talent to compete at that level.

In short, they have other priorities. (BTW - Lots of Valley folk are not 23-year-olds.) Maybe that won't matter, but ....

No one is saying that folks can't succeed elsewhere or that there aren't opportunities elsewhere. (FWIW, I've found that people who attack strawmen are fighting at the level that they think they can win....) Instead, they're saying that the valley has some unique properties wrt certain kinds of success.

If those properties or that kind of success isn't relevant or important to you, the valley isn't for you. There's nothing wrong with making other choices, but there are consequences. If you like the ones somewhere else, go for it.
No, it's like asking a coffee producer what he thinks of his competitor's coffee. If he's a professional, he'll give you an honest opinion.

You don't think the FreeBSD kernel engineers are capable and willing to objectively evaluate other software implementations?
Well put - it's so easy to stare at the status quo and assume that's the only way to do things.
Two sides of the same coin. I was just countering what I saw in your comment which was that we can all get by doing the things we love simply for the love of them.
How is MTBF derived? He claims "1.2 million hours normalized on 40 degrees", that's almost 140 years. It seems to me that it's just some extrapolated test statistic being bandied about with no relevance to real world conditions.
the average application reviewer that is also looking at api calls and other internals of applications?
Inventing Demand
I get why there's a lot of hate goin' on, but if you're going to travel around the country on one airline for 30 days and take more flights than their pilots are allowed to it's probably a good idea to at least try to tell the company about it, regardless of whether you should be asking for preferential treatment or a freebie.

It's going to be a documented journey, and for the sake of transparency, why wouldn't you contact them? And why wouldn't you make it an open letter? This is how blogging works nowadays. They just aren't waiting to be picked up by a news spot days after they're back home.

All this is apropos of whether they should be asking for anything, or whether it's a good and worthy idea, or if you like or don't like Mr. Curtis. Feel free to knock them for doing it wrong, but don't knock them for trying.
Why Do Cars Have Fuel Doors on Different Sides?
Men lose their minds speaking to pretty women
In case anyone is wondering - Harvey Norman is a large Australian retailer. http://www.rentoid.com itself is a Melbourne based startup.
i think this is a lovely/fun/adventurous idea.

i'm sure their trip will be super memorable. i can't wait to follow along on the blog.
Neat. Where'd you get the location definitions? Yelp?
I would say this to him. "Dude, your blog is boring."

(Who cares what I think?)
For non-Aussies; Harvey Norman is like Best Buy here in Australia.

I am still a newcomer to Australia (~3 months) and I noticed a good deal of department and chain stores here have their owner's names. In the U.S. we have corporate names brands.
Statistically it would be a rare case for a customer to request a backup restore from a failed unit even if you don't replicate. Bb could handle these with polite mails explaining your data will be available in 24 hours and offering you some free service as compensation - it wouldn't hurt them, they do consumer backups.
He also invented supply!
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Sounds great and the sooner the better.

Are there any downsides to this?
Ask Joyent about the "peace of mind" they got from their Thumper ...
Technically he tapped demand previously unsatisfied in the market.
Going to have to go with Amazon on this one. Why should Google simply be allowed to unilaterally disregard all copyright claims?
i like this guy's authenticity. it sounds like he cares about his users and his business's success. good post, inspiring reminder (i don't usually like these kinds of posts)
Is there a Chinese alternative to youtube? Or does the government block all video sharing sites?
Making something together physically is fun but online? Not so sure.
I've lived here all my live and never really noticed that.. you're absolutely correct however. Harvey Norman, David Jones, Grace Brothers, Joyce Mayne, Crazy Teds..
It takes a foreigner to see ourselves. Which dept/chain stores are you thinking of?

Owner's names: David Jones, Myers, Fletcher Jones,
Woolworths (==Safeway), Dick Smith, Ken Bruce
Corporate names: Just Jeans, Jeans West, Country Road, Safeway
I'm pretty sure these Australian stores originated in the US:
Target, Kmart, Tandy

PS: Back atcha: Wal-Mart was founded by Sam Walton; there's Colonel Sanders' Kentucky Fried Chicken; and Dick and Mac McDonald founded McDonald's.
founder more so than owner.. Thinking Coles, Myer, David Jones, etc here.. Those companies are all publicly listed now..

For current Owner I can think of Harvey norman, Bing Lee (although it doesn't exist in VIC, Ken Bruce, And Crazy John until he passed away..)

Also: Walmart.
Your blog posts are comparing surfing the Internet and using Google to reading/studying textbooks tailored for college courses. You're comparing Apples and Oranges.

The general Internet is only the access point for serious online education - the actual teaching happens within private web applications. Furthermore, online courses or degrees still require the same books, you just might buy them (for a lot less) off Amazon or Chegg instead of the college bookstore.
In order for this to work, you have to accurately estimate the width of your target.
Would you really buy a hackish low-spec solution like this and then place it in a premium rack?

Given the idea, buy 10 and place them at geographically diverse points, you may as well put them in the back room at branch offices or something. Who cares if one goes offline for a while. Hell, put them in countries with good consumer internet connectivity (japan, korea, sweden etc) and just use that.

If you're going ghetto, go all the way!
Sounds like someone vested.

Best of luck to him. It was probably frustrating to see the slow going progress in China and a startup is a good cure for that.
Wireless Power Transmission Test (1974) [vid]
I would like to chat with you, just to see why you think that, but I can't find any email address anywhere. Can you send me an email (hi@dustincurtis.com)?
You are most certainly allowed to question the policies. Armed thugs didn't show up at this gentleman's house and beat him for this blog post. Lack of representation alone is not fascism. They also gave him an explanation which is completely contradictory with your statement justifying your assertion this would classify as fascism. Even if they hadn't given him one it still wouldn't make it fascism.
Crazy John's name was Mustafa.
In many situations you'll be able to find something close by whose width can be estimated -- perhaps a door, a car, a tree...
I think what we've really learned from this is that the current JavaScript security model is not good for what people are using the web for these days.

We really need something like a "<without-scripts>" block, where anything inside could never use JavaScript (including links that are to javascript: URLs). This would make life a lot easier for web developers.
Then XSS attacks would insert </without-scripts> before <script></script> =)

What we need is literal separation of control statements (eg, <script>) from content such that neither can be easily misinterpreted, but that would be a significant departure from existing design.
This assumes that message length is an important factor ... which I bet it isn't (excluding ultra-short and ultra-long messages). How about you correlate reply with more relevant things like canned message/attractive photo/cool profile/etc. -- or at least separate the length of reply vs response based on attractiveness or something.

You can get away with short messages as long as you show a genuine interest and not put out a canned message. And make some effort with a nice pic/interesting profile. This is the strategy that I use and it works out pretty well ...
When working in a higher-level language, it's easy to forget that a lot of the performance disadvantage comes from using data types that are distanced from the hardware, require unboxing, RTTI, etc. Not only do those conveniences eat up CPU, they also eat up memory, which compounds the problem by forcing the data to live outside of cache, regardless of what optimizations the language implementation has.

Hence, I really appreciate it when a language offers some way to drop down to byte-level constructs and build space-efficient implementations where they're necessary. Improvements in memory compactness can often save you the effort of dropping all the way down to C.
I didn't know that. Mustafa Ilhan was his real name, not John Ilhan. There you go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ilhan
tudou.com, youku.com, etc.

http://video.baidu.com/v?word=%C1%F5%B5%C2%BB%AA&ct=3019...
hehe, and probably with his camera phone.
That shouldn't work for the same reason that you can't escape a bound SQL query parameter in a pre-parsed query.
I don't think taint mode is helpful for this. All data comes from outside of your program, but you somehow still have to display it. As we've seen recently, this is hard to get right. Escaping HTML is one thing, but what if you want to let a user type in a URL? Make sure to exclude javascript: URLs. Even if you whitelist only "http://... URLs, how do you know that a browser bug won't allow an attacker to inject JavaScript, compromising any account used by a user of that web browser?

Basically, web browsers need taint mode. The programming language that produces the web page is a whole other issue.
Am I seeing double? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803902
As an example of Steve's commitment to Rentoid, he lists his mobile phone number on the site and actively encourages people to call it. He's had calls at all times of the day and night, however the feedback he gets from his customers through this is second to none. He also gets the opportunity to convert an unhappy customer into a happy one instantly. The phone is still a powerful medium, especially in businesses where trust is paramount.
That would require escaping the HTML on the server prior to output, which is exactly what we already have (and regularly fails, even when people think they're doing it right).

The real analogue to SQL query parameter binding would be an output format that keeps the two distinct.
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Yes - but those people didn't realise they had the need.

The potential demand only mantifested after he created an imaginary supply.
Snarge viz: bird strikes by time of day = migration
with guidance from HN and friends I have changed a little bit. Hope this is better (but still does not feel good enough):

"""The company ticket-web GmbH & Co. KG faces a big step in its evolution. The supplier of technical solutions for selling tickets in different kind of ways wants to create a Germany wide web portal to sell tickets of regional events. To measure and increase the success of this web portal, in this bachelor thesis an application was created. It will concentrate on increasing the coverage and conversion-rate of web users and is called ENTREE©-marketeer.
Increasing the coverage of web users can be accomplished through Search Engine Optimization, information exchange with web-databases and -catalogues and integration in webcommunities. Conversion rates can be increased by adjusting the design and usability to the needs of the target audience. Aiming for higher conversion rates creates the need for extensive and detailed analysis of the users behaviour and therefore the need for a good measurement of this behaviour.
How the marketeer helps ticket-web to create a successful and sustainable web business will be shown in detail in the following chapters."""
This isn't that uncommon in the US either: Sears, Macy's, Lord & Taylor, Nordstrom, Saks, Barneys, Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, Dillard's, JC Penney, Bloomingdale's, Marshalls, Albertsons, Kroger, etc.

Even Wal-Mart and Kmart carry part of their founder's names.
Or encoding all the text in the tag, or <noscript length=XXX>, or etc etc etc.

It's kind of a moot point since it will never happen, but it's not rocket science.
Oh man, it happens to me all the time and I make the same mistakes every time. I just cannot prevent it!!! :(
Well, remember that if you were seriously on a budget you'd just return all the failed drives for warranty replacement (Seagate is 5yrs). The hardware costs would never add up to more than the enterprise, it's that the labour costs of dealing with it would be more, and worse - more likely to lose data. Enough more likely to justify the additional cost? Hm, I doubt it, not for this use case.
I think esty.com may already have become that.
Actually it's pretty easy to defend.

I never used to have travel insurance but after my first intercontinental flight my suite-case broke and I learned the importance of having one.

In a perfect world your support team would be able to distinguish between someone rambling about bytes and an actual security issue. That's hard without a lot of technical knowledge.

I believe that's why the Rails security team responded rather quickly and 37 Signals support team didn't. I'm sure they will do better in the future.
The new EC2 instance monitoring graphs in Amazone's console are awesome
This type of smug response to online education (or alternative education) is frustrating.

It still seems that for-profit and education is taboo in American society...

If Apple can be for-profit and dedicate itself to quality technology products and services why can't a similar company apply their focus to quality, technology, and education?

I see StraigterLine as a small step in that direction. If you don't like where this is headed, I suggest you start donating more money to your Alma Mater - to secure your family spot the old fashioned, nepotistic way.

More importantly, this is going to be a long, iterative process with some missteps along the way (UOP et al).

A case can be made that UOP and its peers invest more money in maintaining enrollment pipelines than the actual education technologies and infrastructures. Which is all the more reason for other upstarts to take advantage of an opportunity...

Online access to higher education has huge potential to redefine the status quo, and that evolution in education requires hackers to keep pushing the needle.
The YC application does specifically have an entry for alternate ideas, so at least in this case it's probably a plus if anything. Plus, pg makes a big point of the way startup ideas change over time, so I doubt that being focused on one idea is too much of a point for him.
In fact, he did invent/fund supply and hoped there would be a demand for his service. He was also spending his own money in order to bootstrap and taking the associated risks. He was obviously prepared to risk that the demand would be very low or zero. One risk he doesn't mention - what if demand had exceeded his physical ability to supply the items he'd promised? Or what if he offered too many of the common items and effectively ended up competing with his own potential users who have something to rent? How and when (if ever) did he decide he'd done enough bootstrapping? I imagine these are all things he thought about and would have been interesting to hear about as well.