skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We did a prototype app and discovered that it's almost impossible to get anyone to download an app. User acquisition costs for apps are astronomical. I've been on a B2B kick for a few years, so I haven't seen recent stats, but it's brutal.

We then moved to being purely social-network driven. There are a bunch of people in this space. Users submit photos on social media using unique hashtags or whatever, and there's a nice organic sharing effect.

That product (which, again, is available cheaply from various companies now) is great. Every event organizer should use it, since most events, including weddings, will try to have a unique hashtag these days. Why not harness all that content that people are posting?

Our service also supported republishing via a JavaScript and/or REST API, so the content could be used elsewhere.

All in all, it was a useful, simple product. The problem was that ideas (or even finished products) don't mean anything if you can't get some early, paying clients. We had a co-founder who had lots of connections to social-media executives, but he just couldn't sell.

The software (native and web versions) now exist only as private repos on Github.
Loose Tweets Sink Ships
type EmailAddress string

works in go
Most comments here are critical and I tend to agree in that 1) it's unclear whether you "requested a refund" or chargebacked and 2) if you don't like someone's work, you still have to pay the hours they spent. That's the risk when hiring someone, unless there are specific requirements that weren't met by the developer.

On the other hand I would like to say that it's good to open the discussion instead of, like most companies would, not responding and letting the legal team handle anything if necessary.
Also good: http://cablemap.info
The article says you don't actually have to fall asleep to feel the effects. Just lay in a half sleep/relaxed state for 20 minutes.
Man born with brain hemispheres disconnected had minimal impairment
Interesting situation. One point to make: CakePHP cannot cause browser compatibility issues. CakePHP is a backend framework and does not itself cause client side issues. I know this is splitting hairs, but a lot of things can contribute to client-side issues. If a design is in bad shape (ie. browser considerations were not made during planning), then CakePHP wouldn't be a relevant point for front-end issues.

That's all, carry on. I hope everyone's bickering and finger-pointing goes well on this fine Friday.
He shouldn't talk about how the code was crap and that he deserved a refund.

But he should say (if true) that they threw out the old code because of reasons, and rewrote it from scratch.

That was the biggest issue raised in the initial allegation: that they were currently using code that they had not paid for.
> Then there's the fact that if humanity survives long enough, it's more likely to resemble the Federation from Star Trek than corporate America where healthcare is only available to the rich.

Citation, please.
You mean these people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palm_OS_devices?
Take protection of your rights in your hands
If you live in California and discover that your purchase is a lemon, than it’s high time to take protection of your rights in your own hands! Make copies of all the documents that will help you to resolve your issue. Those are:

• Proof of purchase or contract
• Your warranty
• Repair orders
• Reports of inspections
• Technical service bulletins
• Your letters or emails to the dealer or manufacturer

More information on http://calemonlawinfo.com/
More like poor Cuba!
These exist in the UK on some motorways as well. However, my observation is that the new maximum speed is always indicated miles and miles before an incident so drivers ignore them anyway until they reach the jam.
Isn't this incredibly dangerous to have publically available? Please take this down.
The New Go Qml OpenGL API
hey what is the difference between this and http://submarinecablemap.com/ just interactivity?
I lived in NZ for two years. It's a great place, but abysmally slow internet was a frequent annoyance.
Hey guys, I worked on this program as an intern in my senior year of college (2012-2013). There are 5 units of the mini-PW's out right now for testing, and I've built all of them. I can answer any questions you might have and I'll do my best to explain the aerodynamics behind it if anyone is interested!
I worked as a contract engineer for several years and here is my take:

Typically in a contract relationship you have alot less obligations than hiring a salaried employee. At the same time, this person is using their valuable time towards your project. As a result of this, they usually ask for compensation which is agreed upon beforehand.

You agreed to a certain amount of compensation, and than chose not to pay. Sometimes contractors do not meet expectation, and I've seen this happen. But if you have already agreed upon milestones it is only appropriate to pay them at least up to the point at which you request they quit or fire them.

If you did not agree upon milestones (which a business with your funding should have.) You should still be paying him for the work done. Your disagreement over his work could cause his family to go hungry for a week. Such is the life of a contractor.

All in all, perhaps both of you performed without much regard to ethic. He did a shoddy job and you refused to pay. But your running the business and as a result have a lot more to lose from a bad image.

Just pay up and move on.
or, you don't know what you're talking about and don't care. Which is fine, but wasting everyones time stereotyping (according to this article) 378 million people is not. Condescesion can easily be construed as childish, so grow up.
Then you already know the answer to your original question.
Eh. It's a few lines of typing to add the additional interface, a line of SQL per function, and a few lines to write the annyoing unmarshalling code.

Frequently, I find that by the time you figure out how to get an ORM to do what you want, you could've just written some datalayer code and have more certainty about what it's doing under the hood.
Show HN: I put together an HTTP service testing tool in Go
The website hasn't been updated in a while, but I assure you that development is still going on.
Not to mention these people will not have to deal with the loan sharks and their huge loan interest rates. Besides, this scheme is not just a bank account but also includes debit cards, which should help people against problems of keeping all their money in cash on them at all times, and an insurance, in most of India agriculture is dependent on the monsoon and mainly by this there is a big problem of farmer suicides in the past.
...what?

in all seriousness: I would love to understand your reasoning behind this.
Yes, I notice that too. The engine layout is a little different though.

The QuadShot seemed a bit difficult to control. The automatic control and/or the larger size seemed to help the Google drone to be more stable.

It is an interesting design choice. I hope to see more updates soon!
This is obviously inspired by dwm, which is cool, but how is it different from dwm?
How to Know If Your Dumb Idea Will Change the World
> the drone drops the package into the chute at it's current hover height and takes off while the chute takes care of slowing the package down to the ground.

Skip hover, we don't need 10cm accuracy yet.

What's the cheapest way I can deliver one or multiple payloads from a fixed wing aircraft at 5000 feet to a 100x100 ft 'package' zone with 99.9% accuracy? (in any weather condition).

we grow quickly by letting people with big backyards sign up to be the delivery zone, then manage the last miles on their own.
Actually an interesting idea. It's so hard to come up with an online service these days that would wrangle user engagement so well done for trying.

Perhaps on the website give some examples of this (can't see in the slideshow). If you have some examples of it working then it might give more impetus to download it.
I wonder do they just drop the transatlantic cables blindly over the mid-atlantic ridge and hope for the best or check that it's not a hot spot or something.

And four cables connect Alaska to the lower 48? I wonder why.
What? How? It's as dangerous as posting a map of nuclear power plants online. It's not like the cables go into unguarded shacks - the base stations are heavily guarded.
Besides lack of any explicit policy / lack of time / legal risks, how does it really benefit the interviewers if they give such (probably unsolicited) feedback?

Most people are incapable of accepting criticism anyway, and nowadays where everyone blogs, tweets or posts on facebook, there is a risk that the interviewing company may have its hiring process tarnished just for giving constructive feedback in good faith. "No good deed goes unpunished".
all five cables landing at that tiny country in the Horn of Africa, Djibouti? they terminate into half a floor of a single building about 150ft from the shoreline. the NSA has been tapping submarine optical cables since the early nineties.

for the patch panels they can't get to, there's always the covert submarine they are purported to have.
WOBAD!

http://www.theonion.com/articles/worlds-top-scientists-ponde...
Yea I'd have to agree with all your points but I meant more of what it actually does better as a piece of software not as a tool that others have to use/understand.
I imagine you can use wget or curl to download the images (or other batch download tools that let you put in ranges), then ImageMagick to stitch them together. Not too hard, but all command line tools that may take a bit of experimenting to get right.
Absolutely not. To glide well, you need big ol' wings. There's a concept called aspect-ratio, which is basically the relationship between the wingspan (left to right) and wing chord (front to back). High AR = better for gliding. Conversely, and in the case of the mini-PW, when you have virtually no wingspan, you aren't going to glide very far. We affectionatly referred to power loss as "brick mode".
Is there a way to see a list of topics before subscribing?
It's less that the priorities are misaligned, and more that Google wasted the time of the content providers by recommending that they do something that is no longer going to be used.
Yale study identifies possible bacterial drivers of IBD
Unfortunately a lot of people start out by going to an incubator like YC before they really realise what they are getting into (the billion dollar exit lottery instead of aiming for a profitable business). Once you go down that path it's difficult to avoid VC fundraising. The entire point of most incubators is to help you get connected with VCs and get funding.
You should do small projects to evaluate developers you hire.
I have no idea, really.

My hunch is that mathematics is more than universal; truths hold regardless of which medium of calculation is used to conclude them.

In any case, our conclusions about our own universe at least hold within our own universe, and are therefore still very useful for our own understanding thereof.
How big this orbit difference is? Would adjusting the orbit be an option at all? Does anyone know? Just curious.
Not really. If the original poster hadn't outed them by name it would be fine, but as it is a very popular HN post directly says that Pigeon.ly are thieves. I think they're reasonable to want to counter that.
It's impossible to say without the specifics of the contract but there are some standard practices that can be assumed. If the contract is for a product, as opposed to time spent, for a product there are usually defined acceptance criteria. A large product will have milestones with their own deliverables and acceptance criteria. Once the customer accepts the deliverable it's considered done and the developer should be paid for that deliverable. If the customer later regrets that choice that's too bad. The customer can usually exit the contract at any point although the contract might specify a penalty for this.
Thanks, this is a good URL to use for a quick test if you have an internet connection, e.g. "traceroute uz" or "ping uz"

(On my Mac, you can type just "uz" in Firefox but in Safari you need "uz/")
> In numeric terms they have invested less than $30 million since last November, meaning that they have been able to leverage an $8 billion valuation gain at a ratio of 266:1.

Holy crap.

Reminds me of "Investment Grade Beanie Babies"
You know, if its a list of one item, its not really a list, so there is no need to pretend to footnote. This silly over-use of citation markup when it is completely unneeded adds to the smarmy faux-studiousness of comments on HN.

Just say Apr 2004, according to Wikipedia, was a long time ago. Don't pretend to use extra markup, don't imply a list of citations where there isn't one, and don't make a sentence for a human look like its been formatted for a computer.
Correct. I was taking notes on their Palm devices over a decade ago.
Currently, I don't think Meteor's main advantage is bringing new capabilities, but rather providing a platform for building modern web apps.

So it is different than any one javascript framework in that it's goal is to bring together a complete set of technologies that are needed to build an app, rather than the developer joining different pieces themselves.

Currently many developers work with separate multiple frameworks, and Meteor brings them together into a cohesive, power, clean API.

Meteor is amazing, and even with the rough edges, and evolving API, it is still a joy to work with. They are thinking about the big picture and it really allows the developer to focus more on the creative aspects of your app. I am excited to see Meteor evolve over time.
> I've also witnessed drivers with several hundred meters of open road in front of them — sometimes road as far as the eye can see — inexplicably brake. I've always wanted to ask them why.

I've always thought that was because some people drive automatic transmission with their left foot on the brake. Your left foot eventually gets tired and hits the brake slightly.
Yes, in which case "the framework was not utilized correctly" could mean "reimplemented all that shittily rather than using the built-in stuff".
I've been wondering the same thing. If they offer free, decent coffee, the price can be similar to working from a cafe (which I do sometimes).
Why women have no time for Wikipedia
Since the position of many cables differ strongly in both maps (their position is obviously sketched rather roughly) I wonder what the real position of those cables is? (or if this information is secret)
I use awesome WM and I didn't need to customize any of the keyboard shortcuts; it uses the windows key as the modifier key and as far as I know no other program uses it.

Also I don't get how the Windows 8.1 window management comes even close to the 2 programs you mentioned (Ratpoison and Awesome WM). With both of those (or any other tiling manager) you can do much more than just maximize and snap a window to the sides. (you have virtual workspaces, automatic tiling, better switching, etc)
Crashing a paid conference, easily
So i suppose you could design a trade-off or balance. Increase AR while reducing the size of the mangus effect airfans.
No one is hand-waving.

"Yet space, time, and causality cannot be proven to be empirically real themselves". This is akin to mathematical axioms that escape proof within a formal system. Of course one can debate whether the analogy applies for space and time as it does in arithmetic, but this is beside the point. My point was that Schopenhauer's quote was not even remotely close to being naive, especially considering when it was said (i.e. years before Godel and others proved similar conclusions).
This long article from Wired in 1996, Mother Earth Mother Board [1], would answer your question. It is long, it took me more than a couple of hours to read, but it's also my all-time favourite article from any magazine, and whenever the topic of submarine cables comes up on Hacker News I often see this link.

[1] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

Edit: Also, it's written by Neal Stephenson for whatever that's worth.
Also very enjoyable, and somewhat shorter (though still very long): 'Mother Earth Mother Board' [1], Neal Stephenson's essay on the laying of the FLAG cable, and related history.

[1] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
Nintendo announces new 3DS and 3DS XL designs with extra buttons, improved CPU
I'm not surprised to see this coming from KPCB. They have a reputation for using underhanded tactics and this is just the latest example.

I unfortunately learned about their reputation too late... they pressured my company into signing a Series A term sheet only to pull it 3 months later (at the end of the no-shop) after THEY messed up a partnership negotiation. Needless to say we were out of cash at that point, but luckily we had some great seed investors who re-upped and a month later we signed a term sheet with another VC. What a nightmare though.
Android L – and what you need to know about stability of prior versions
Or you could tell the car how much you paid when you get gas. Actually, it doesn't matter what the current price is. What's being measured is the fuel efficiency, which is already done.

Screw it, bring on the self driving car overlords.
Somehow I'm hoping that the most important phrase in this piece is:
"The deal, which apparently hasn’t closed yet"...
Interesting link, I can't read it right now, but I'll be sure to check it out later. Thanks!
The front-end issues may have nothing to do with the CakePHP framework but the developer did have to create/modify views. In that case the dev still could have cause incompatibility issues. I'm not picking sides in this but I'm just saying that the OP not understanding what the framework does, doesn't mean that the dev is completely off the hook.
Thanks for the feedback. We tried to keep the slideshow more focused as a tutorial of sorts. But adding the user side of why you should play and what benefit you get is a good idea.
I live in southeast AK. An earthquake near Glacier Bay this month broke one of the undersea cables, which caused an outage for customers of one service provider. I had no idea there were multiple cables to southeast, until I read about the response to this incident.

The Capital City Weekly has a good article about the recent incident, which also includes a short history of communication cables in Alaska [0]. Basically a few companies built seabed cables in southeast during the dot com boom, and then there was too much capacity for a while. One company went bankrupt and another company attempted to buy all the capacity, but concerns about a monopoly prevented that deal from going through. Now when there's an outage, companies can lease access from each other until the broken cable gets repaired.

The currents in our coastal channels are significant, with 8-12 foot tidal swings. Those currents, combined with the silty and rocky nature of the ocean floor in much of southeast, makes for a pretty abrasive environment. Add to that a lot of bottom fishing and anchoring, and cables get broken.

As a resident of southeast, I'm happy for the redundancy!

[0] http://www.capitalcityweekly.com/stories/081314/new_12153949...
Hi,

pyr from exoscale here. we operate a service that is similar to DO and linode, and are really proud of our uptime, our efficient support and the simplicity of our console - we want to be the best cloud platforms for people build SaaS applications.

I'm obviously biased, but I think we're definitely worth trying out :-)
As a CakePHP Core Developer, I disagree with the fact that you can't use the framework wrong. Any utility/library/framework can and will be bent backwards to accommodate the needs of the developer, and in ways the original developer did not imagine were possible.

It's totally possible that the developer in question wrote horrid code - though any browser issues would only be caused by html/css, something the framework doesn't generate for you past having initial admin-type scaffolding.

I still think the guy should have gotten paid and kept the money.
Show HN: GitHub Social, live repository recommendations
The 5 degree inclination change would likely burn through most, if not all, of the maneuvering fuel onboard the satellites. That's not accounting for the peri/apoapsis adjustments.

If they do get them to a usable orbit, they won't have enough fuel to last long.
Thank you!! If you have any feedback for us, it'd be very valuable coming from you.
It easier to get a detailed understanding of the universe, by observing what happens in extreme cases. The very small. The very big. The very heavy. The very energetic. The very quick.
Looks great. I use Highcharts.js responsively by simply setting the chart width to % rather than pixels. After all, scalable is a key part of SVG.

Noting that Chartist is much leaner than Highcharts, how do you envision differntiating this project and avoid feature creep to make it like Highcharts.js 2.0?
How Technology May Be Influencing Human Evolution
Mostly just scammers, though.
Docker Containers on Microsoft Azure
Thanks for your post and link. I recently watched Particle Fever on Netflix and became extremely fascinated with the field. A lot of the information you posted is touched on in the documentary. It is mostly focused around CERN and the years leading up to the Higgs particle discovery. There are also great interviews with David Kaplan and Nima Arkani-Hamed.

You've likely seen it but if not you might enjoy it.
I don't understand why they can't use Google Maps or OpenStreetMaps or some other API to grab city data for other cities. It only covers NYC, London, Barcelona and a few other cities. Nearly useless for anyone else in the world!