skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Canada is a great country too. I'm sure that if you asked many people who have jumped through all the hoops like a circus animal to stay in the US that a significant percentage of them would tell you that it just wasn't worth it in the end.
and there's no currently available system for setting up specially trusted keys

Sure there is. It's called iPhone app dev program. Speaking of which, very little freedom there and a compelling model for any platform vendor to follow if they can.
LISP newbies

Irony alert.

Edit: ok, I lasted 4 minutes. I can't in good conscience be another Lisp asshole. My point is that no one who uses Lisp has spelled it "LISP" for years.
Done patting yourself on the back? You totally generalized all "coders" and sounded like a dick in the process. Not really sure what you were trying to accomplish with that post. I'll try not to generalize all "Business" guys based on your post.
here's the thing -- you built a business. perhaps a very solid business. however, you're not building a startup per the standard definition, which implies the possibility for rapid growth given a certain level of resources. hence the VC.

you have a small business on your hands, not a startup. and there's nothing wrong with that.
Nature is Doomed
I have used Mozilla / Firefox for what seems like forever, but 3.5 just is sluggish for some reason. It might just be my installation, but ever since upgrading to 3.5 Firefox is really slow starting up.

Now I've switched to Chrome but I do miss the Flashblock plugin.
Population Density and the National Broadband Plan
Today I finally gave up Trac for Lighthouse (I need to let customers file bugs). Lighthouse won't take my credit card information up front; I had to get a free account and then upgrade it. I actually found it annoying.

On the other hand I'm sure patio11 will tell you that nothing bounces prospects faster than a credit card signup.
Obama's new broadband blog
I like it, but mainly looking at the other drawings. There's something great about a doodle.
I hope you don't generalize all your customers the way you generalized the HN community. As the other guy said before you just created a business not a startup. You are an entrepreneur. Good for you. I don't see why you have to denigrate the people trying to change the status quo. Nor do I see why you took an aggressive posture to promote your site.

As such, I have flagged you for two reasons: you are going against the civil nature that the site was created to foster and the fact that you are plain wrong about the lack of credit we give to the other "soft" sciences such as business development, selling, and interpersonal relations. There are plenty of those submitted and promoted to the front page.

I do wish you good luck with your site though.
At least with traffic, fewer rules make for better behavior
Ad-supported broadband that relies on manipulating the IP stream is a danger, not a victim.

Why would that be so awful?

Ad-sponsored 'free' TV/radio is a beloved cultural institution.

Ad-sponsored dialup (eg NetZero) is a minor point on the spectrum of connectivity options.

Ad-sponsored search (eg Google) is a fundamental utility of the web.

Ad-sponsored content (from NYTimes to Slate to Gawker Media to HuffPo) drives much of the web's cultural discussion.

Even a novel online utility like Facebook depends on the potential of selling preferential ad-placement to sponsors.

But if some destination websites sponsor faster broadband delivery for their own traffic, that would be the Death Of The Internet, unless the feds make such paid-prioritization illegal? I don't buy it.

It's all part of the economic solution-space competitive enterprises should be allowed to explore.
For a simple premium model with a 30-day free trial, you've got two reasons not to ask for the CC info until you're going to cut off someone's access to the premium product (you want to maximize the number of prospects, especially as a new entrant). I'd just make sure that you just "locked" someone's premium features/data if their credit card lapsed (if you're doing subscriptions) or if they decline to re-up (if you're allowing month-by-month PAYGO payments) - i.e. don't delete it accidentally when you downgrade an account.

And even if you decide to follow 37signals w/r/t the premium version (ask at the time someone upgrades/purchases, but only but actually charge the card at the end of the first period), there's no reason to ask for a CC for the free version; you're making your sales funnel unnecessarily narrow. You can nudge/bother them to upgrade only when they're already customers.

[I guarantee that no one has a more convoluted billing system than does Dawdle, so I've spent a lot of time dealing with this living hell. While we don't require up-front payment, we use credit cards for authentication as a fraud prevention measure for both creating (free) listings and for our "name your own price" StandingOffers. (I mean, if you're going to name your own price, and we want to charge you automatically when your StandingOffer matches a listing, we kinda sorta need your info up front.) Of course, the authentication charges are 1) expensive and 2) piss off customers, but what are you gonna do?]
In hindsight, your question is far more stupid than his "idea". It's called the principle of insufficient reason; we aren't to suppose an a priori difference amongst type without proof - so the burden of proof is on the supposer. That you would ask me to explain why his idea is illogical, without first establishing that his claim is based in logic is justification enough for labeling your question stupid.
This is just a thinly veiled press release from Micro Focus, a COBOL vendor. They try to make these stories pop up every few months (why is still something I don't understand - it's not like they're going to ensnare someone and get them to learn or use COBOL if they read one of these PR fluff pieces), but they really should be ignored.
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This happens to me. Usually after putting to sleep. It just doesn't wake up for a few minutes, sometimes. Very annoying. Gotta admit it's an amazing product otherwise.
It looks like it's more than 1 pixel, since they talk about displaying an "E".
I know it's stupid, but I'm a bit scared of reading Judea Pearl.

Afraid it's going to be terribly brilliant with lots of maths and I won't understand it.

I know, I should just give it a try...
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Linus says Linux has become 'bloated and huge'
Ask HN: Hosts you use for your projects?
I've used webfaction and slicehost quite a bit and have been very happy with them but wanted to check out a few others before I release my latest project.

Wondering who everyone else recommends or likes for their projects.
I think it depends how you're placing your lower-tier version. If it's permanently free, I don't think you need credit card information. If it's a 30-day trial of your paid version, you might want to grab the card just to make sure that no one's signing up, waiting a month, canceling, and creating a new account. I'd recommend not doing the "we'll charge you unless you tell us not to" version. Just make it really easy for them to buy it when the month is over.
uhm... AT&T? Oh, wait, uh....
Happened to me too today after I upgraded. Super annoying.
Just my 2 cents: Javascript gives you plenty of rope to hang yourself with. Personally, I try to stay away from prototypical objects unless the style fits very cleanly with what I'm trying to do. Otherwise,the best way I've found to keep my sanity is to pick whatever language you're developing the backend with, and use as many conventions you've established there as possible.

For me, this means my Javascript looks more like Python -- it can be a little weird, but switching between the frontend and the backend is easier that way.

I'd also recommend using objects as namespaces if you're not dealing with prototypical objects. It makes grepping easier - you can search for 'Graphs.init' instead of 'init' in this example:

var Graphs = {

state_variable: null, // store global state somehow

init: function() {
// Some initialization code
},

refresh: function(img_element, url) {
// some code to refresh the src url
}

};
The problem with anecdotal evidence is that it is skewed by the vocal minority of people that have had problems with a product. I have had my iPhone for about a 1.5 years and it has worked spittingly. I also use it as a development device so I would imagine that if the garbage collector was inefficient/didn't work at all that problems would rear their ugly head on a dev device.
I have been waiting for 10 years now for screens with significantly higher DPI. Remember how the NeXT was the first computer to go to 96 dpi?

I was hoping for 150 DPI on screens ("paper quality" at the time was defined by laserprinters doing 300 DPIs, so 150 for screen sounded good enough). Never happened.

Would it be useful? After all, what do you think is an HDTV? smaller pixels, higher resolution.
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That looks like it was a fun weekend hack.

Kind of similar to oekaki applets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oekaki#Oekaki_internet_forum
I'm the designer for tenderapp.com, and we decided to try putting in credit card information when we need it (after the 30-day trial) instead of up front, like we previously did for Lighthouse. Well, decided may be the wrong word... let's call it a happy accident that it happened that way.

Now that we've had this flow live for a few months, I can't think of a reason a small startup would possibly ask for credit card information up front.

Pros:

- We have one of the lowest barriers to entry to our app. Literally 10 seconds and you have a fully functional install.

- We have lowered the amount of people complaining about us accidentally charging them (i.e. they forget about the 30-day trial and ask for a refund at day 31) to zero.

- We've opened up a lot more channels for follow up. We can contact people weeks/months after their trial expires and see if they'd like an extension or to try again. (In other words, we've removed the negative parts of trying the product -- cancelling)

Cons:

- It's lowered our conversion rate (remember what rate means) and made it extremely unpredictable.

- We don't get to steal as much money from people who forget to cancel their subscriptions.

At the end of the day, I believe in our product and I want as many people to try it as possible. A credit card form isn't going to stop someone from purchasing a product (unless it's really bad), but it sure does stop a lot of people from trying out a product. So I work as hard as I can to remove any roadblocks to people getting their feet wet. From the responses I've had, our customers love it too.
Fair enough, fellas. I don't really care about promoting our company on here, in fact I'll get rid of the link on Twitter right now.

I keep coming back here because of the quality of content and people. That said, it's probably better to stay on the sidelines unless I can add value through sharing high quality content containing actionable insights or interesting ideas/information.

Again, thanks for the feedback. Have a productive week.

Regards,

Dan

P.S. You're right- I'm not building a startup built for VC scale returns according to the classical definition....
As someone who works for an ISP I fully support the President on this. I don't feel like it's a major problem today but looking ahead to the future it seems plausible that there will be consolidation of Internet content just like so many other industries experience after a few decades of maturity. If we were to reach a point were a few powerful companies were controlling the vast majority of online content/services wouldn't it basically be a mirror of the mass media today? Fixing the problem now is the right thing to do.
It goes beyond that you can't get rich in China without being a CCP loyalist, it's that you can't function as a Chinese citizen in China without being a CCP loyalist. The idea of an outspoken political antagonist of the CCP even making it through college is laughable.

Every society has its heresies and enforced loyalties. We have a term in the U.S. for heresy - "politically incorrect". In the U.S. it's hard to imagine an outspoken proponent of human biodiversity making it very far in life. No CEO would dare speak in favor of HBD advocate, it would open up the entire company to lawsuits.

As for as economic intrusion goes, China is really a unique case. They've invented a new form of capitalism that works very well -- the state government owns some companies, the state government owns shares in other publicly traded companies, local governments own some companies or shares in companies, and some companies have no government ownership.

In the U.S. the government exacts dividends from corporations in the form of corporate taxes, and exercises management control via regulation (OSHA, civil right legislation, workplace rules, etc. etc.) The Chinese system of openly owning shares is similar, but perhaps more efficient.
I'm trying Google, as in Google App Engine.
I think all it displays is an 'E', probably because the letter E is traditionally used for vision testing.
* For unit tests, also check out Jasmine.

* +1 on not using the module pattern.
Out of context link bait drivel.
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Linode: http://www.linode.com

Rackspace Cloud/Sites: http://www.rackspacecloud.com
A lot of work was invested in libpurple too in order to implement (reliably) all the protocols.
Are you kidding me? India's green revolution would have never happened without him, and that saved millions of people from almost certain starvation, death and malnutrition.

He wanted to increase yields in order to feed people - saw a global problem problem, figured out a solution, sold it and made it happen - thats why he's awesome.
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How value can be added to a CD is really the million-dollar question for the music industry as a whole I think. Frankly, I don't think there is one single answer. What works for Raster Noton, who has a distinct set of fans, will certainly not work for just any ol' band. Perhaps the key for my startup is to enable the artists to add their own unique flavor as easily as possible.

Also, Derek Sivers posted an excellent article (http://sivers.org/livecd) today on how a CD can be used as a promotional vehicle when given away free. Perhaps we could focus on producing quality CDs as cheaply as possible to make this a viable marketing tool for bands as well.

You seem to have a genuine interest in this field so feel free to email me -- development (at) beatnex (dot) com. I would love to hear more of your insights on this topic.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=827379

Thought you might find the above post useful. Anyway, thanks for this question. I think 37Signals is certainly the gold standard but I don't think I'm going to follow it for my yet-to-be-released project.

They have about 5 or 6 tiers for each app and to be honest I really hate that for the following reasons:

1. because it just seems overly complicated for the user and

2. it seems like a pain in the arse to manage on the backend

It seems to work for them though and people are used to this method of tiered monthly payment plans.

I kind of prefer the Google apps model myself but then again Google is ginormous and doesn't need to price google apps to make profit so I'm suspicious of that. Google apps has 2 versions, free and pro. The pro is $50/user/year and they have no tiers. Nice and simple.
Babies, like people, start to act differently from one another almost as soon as their born (earlier, if you ask my wife).

My friends had a colicky baby, and there was simply no way whatsoever to convince this child not to cry/scream. None. No way. There was no set of jostling, shushing, swinging, rocking, jiggling, singing, twisting, or hopping in place that would stop it. And as for the last one, neither of my two children could ever get the hang of a pacifier.
> I have had my iPhone for about a 1.5 years and it has worked spittingly.

The article is about the latest firmware (3.1) which came out two weeks ago.
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A Push for the Wired Patient’s Bill of Rights
Already mentioned, but django-compress if you're using django:

http://code.google.com/p/django-compress/
I use Linode (http://www.linode.com/) at the moment but will probably move to prgmr (http://prgmr.com/xen/) so I can cut costs — anyone got experience with them?
The statisticians Aaron cites need an epistemology lesson. Mathematics is not a science. Science is about creating models and testing them, models that involve causality. Mathematics is simply the rigorous definition of things (making it the perfect source of language for said models).

"You must learn to distinguish between what is true and what is real." See: http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_8.html#kay
I've thought about using them in the past but was scared off by the TOS. I think they place some restrictions on apps hosted there no?

http://code.google.com/appengine/terms.html
The Social Memex - Mark Carranza's Memory Experiment
Great points

Just curious. For large scale projects, do you suggest building on top of existing javascript libraries (i.e. prototype, jQuery, mootools, etc)?
How so?

> "Uh, I'd love to say we have a plan," Torvalds replied to applause and chuckles from the audience. "I mean, sometimes it's a bit sad that we are definitely not the streamlined, small, hyper-efficient kernel that I envisioned 15 years ago...The kernel is huge and bloated, and our icache footprint is scary.
If you do believe that his work is worth continuing, I recommend donating to the Borlaugh foundation. My wife & I just did: http://borlaug.tamu.edu/legacy/donors/index.php
True, but I was talking less about the firmware and more about the anecdotal evidence skewing opinion of some product. But here is another anecdote for the world; My iPhone works well even with this latest update.
Raphael replaced flash for us. Nice little thing.
Sprockets looks promising if you're using Ruby. Haven't had a chance to use it in a project yet. http://github.com/sstephenson/sprockets
Thanks bringing this up. Demos are something I plan on including for next month (largely for timing/prep concerns) as we're getting close to our meetup this coming Thursday. I'll be sending out an open invite tomorrow.

For those of you that'd like to present or share ideas as to the format for our first Demo H&F in October, please email me: daveambrose at gmail.com.
Absolutely. UI-scalability is not simply an issue of adapting to display resolution. Also to be noted that different resolutions often come with very different devices, which mean a difference in capabilities and controls available.
Wa: The key to clear, harmonious design
Is your brain dead? (Re: Java Dead)
So do I. In fact I wrote a good third of my first startup code in bed at a nighttime. It died shortly after though because I didn't vacuum it regularly :-)

The thing is that I really don't need a keyboard to read a PDF, nor do I need it to browse a couple of dozen of sites I frequent. And this is all I do before going to bed or in the mornings. The CrunchPad-like tablet is not as a replacement for a laptop, it is more of a beefed up (ebook/Internet) reader. Lighter and simpler, both physically and functionally. It doesn't appeal to you - fine, to each his own. But there is a substantial demand for this sort of device, so yay for it.
Netflix's Impending (But Still Avoidable) Multi-Million Dollar Privacy Blunder
Oh I understand that people are going to have problems and such, with my current carrier I cannot send/receive picture messages (kind of a plus in my opinion). I was more speaking of the lack of freedom the iphone has experienced with regards to the app store, I understand the store has very many apps but it is highly restricted and monitored something that doesn't appeal to me.
Haven't you simply assumed uniformity? By the way, you called it an "idea" first, not me. And it's a little disappointing for someone who's new here to be resorting to the use of insulting labels so quickly.
I think it just shows that open source isn't immune to the same kinds of problems that plague commercial software. As the market for a product expands, so too do the features people require for the software to work within an ecosystem of other software. More hardware to support requires more code, bigger systems.
I see. Anyway, I posted this just to warn people about some possible issues with this update.
The big benefit here is that clojure is concurrency safe, where python is not.
Both look like good sites. I've seen Linode before. Like I said webfaction is pretty good but I definitely get an unexplained slowing with my shared server sometimes and I'm not doing anything intensive. Just a simple web app like basecamp with a few beta testers.
Checkout http://www.softlayer.com for dedicated and http://www.vpsfarm.com for VPS hosting. I have used both and highly recommend them.
I recently got a small (128MB) VPS with prgmr. Works as advertised.
+1 for YUI

+2 Grok Douglas Crockford's DOM theory then optimize how your scripts use the DOM, it is very easy to abuse the DOM, don't. Grok the DOM.
>(No Fortran please, I suppose).

I've got a friend who works on simulating air currents around areroplanes real-time. They have to do everything in Fortran but he says that Fortran-99 is actually pretty pleasant. Pretty pleasant compared to older fortrans perhaps :)
Also check this from the webfaction site:

Scale as much as you need
Our unique multi-machine load balancing solution allows you to manage your account on multiple machines from our control panel. You can easily deploy your apps on multiple machines and our system will automatically provide load-balancing between these machines. Some customers have scaled up their sites to tens of machines for a fraction of the price of dedicated servers.

I think that's the reason I signed up.. That and the prices.. It's nice to know you can scale out your solution that way.. but anyway, I still want to have a plan B if it doesn't work out with them.
Does your lower conversion rate take into account people who cancel after one month, or ask for a refund because they tripped over the thirty days?
linode here too, but I've heard decent things about hetzner.de which works out much better from a price perspective if you want more resources.
Yes, it does. We don't generate reports often enough to take into account day-long variations, so it ends up being people that stick around a month or two (at minimum)
That's a good example and shows the crux of the problem. In your example, the article should have said "the average NFL player", which offers a clear category of football player. The term "startup" is not as clearly delineated as "NFL player", hence the confusion.
indeed, it will be interesting to see how this issue gets tackled, if at all.
Probably all of the above. Artificial centralization does have a cost.
Lisp will smoke out everything but C. And there it can get fairly close.

http://xach.livejournal.com/199225.html

http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier/research/verna.06.imecs.pdf

http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier/research/verna.06.labri-sli...
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