skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not quite the same thing, but there are similar stories in my family...

About a hundred years ago various relatives of mine owned oil fields, factories, textile mills, and more in Ukraine, Russia, and Poland. My great-grandfather was apparently the first man with a home phone in Kiev.

But then the Russian Revolution happened and all of their property was confiscated by the Soviet government.

So, if not for that, I'd be very rich right now.

But its okay. I'm planning on getting it all back, myself.
(Not stcredzero but someone else who said much the same as him/her at about the same time:) That might be an improvement, but if you're going to change the title at all perhaps something like "Very long distance telephotography" might be better.
Can You Settle a Debt With a Collection Agency to Raise Your Credit?
I would change it. A better title could be good for its own sake, instead of just being provocative.
Venture Capital Is Not A Road To Riches
Solving transit questions with PHP
Where VCs cluster
Hmmm. My wife is always asking "are the dishes in the dishwasher clean or dirty?" Maybe I'll build one of these when I'm bored and want something to do. Shouldn't take more than a lazy Saturday morning to do.
I liked it OK, but strongly suggest you either use a player with a volume control or process the volume on the music before you make the flash, especially if you're going to use dance music that stays pinned in the red :)
Calling All Transhumanists
Most babies born this century will live to 100
Secure Flight Comes to Southwest Airlines, Six Years Later
Computer Makers Aim to Banish Boot-Up Blues
The bar is pretty low for "enough knowhow" in this case, however. Basically:

1) I have $10M.

2) I don't know a dang thing about investing.

3) I better find someone who does (e.g., Vanguard), and let them manage my money for me while I keep an eye on them to make sure they behave responsibly.

-----------

OT joke that amused me: Stock call? Is that when you stand on the porch and yell for the cows?
Agreed!

I clicked around the site, and I experienced vast content-frustration. I noticed that many of his projects appear to be "exhibits" -- they have physical frames and are or were (apparently) displayed somewhere for the public.

Which is pointless. :P I mean, effectively pointless. I'm never going to see his exhibit, and neither is any significant percentage of the population of interested people, so why not put it all online?

Taking pictures of the unmarked CIA 737's operating from deep in the off-limits desert ... that's cool stuff. Why must there be so little info?

I expected one of the links to lead to a how-to. :P
Windows Task Scheduler: Backwards Incompatibility
Apple plans Mighty Mouse makeover
Except that if his people don't perform they loose their jobs and livelihoods. If he doesn't perform, he'll just stay on. And if he does get booted out somehow, he can just retire to a permanent life in a jacuzzi (my personal dream).
Dropbox Mobile
I conjecture that a detailed How-To would upset the Department of Defense quite a bit. After all, these remote USAF airbases in the deserts of the Southwest are remote for a reason...
Easy Does It: Google Friend Connect One-Ups Facebook Connect’s Install Wizard
How to launch a product
Informed P2P User Act to clamp down on filesharing software
Everyone talks about Jon Skeet's reputation.

But Alex Martelli ("Google Uber Tech Lead") is far more ridiculous. He has netted 37,778 rep / 130 day = 290.6 rep/day.

Jon Skeet only has 102,115 rep / 371 day = 275.2 rep/day.

I know this because I started my goal of getting 10k rep shortly before Alex joined Stackoverflow, and I saw him answering every day, usually within 1 minute of people asking a question, and even when I was on vacation.
Could be a perfect user of a micropayment service.
From Birth, Engage Your Child With Talk
Is Internet Addiction a Real Psychological Affliction?
Bing Gets Dinged, But The Market-Share Game's Far From Over
Architectural History- Great Read
Our Kinder, Gentler Ancestors
So you throw out the ambiguous and obvious patents. It doesn't mean you throw out the entire IP framework.

This is akin to the folks who claim we should go back to physical gold as money because fiat money has been abused. Fiat money isn't evil, it's incredibly useful, but we've failed to stem the corruption in our government that allows it to be abused.

My point is that the abuse of a system does not make that system inherently evil, it just means we need to learn from the mistakes and mature as a society. Lean towards overturning the lame software patents for a couple decades and tighten up the standards for new ones.
Can you upload files to SimpleDB and use it as a free alternative to Amazon S3? I imagine not but I'm curious anyway.
$15,000 in revenue in the first month is impressive.

Unless they made that up.

However, even if it's a fabricated figure (and I'm not saying that it is), they would not be the first company to lie to the press to generate some hype. I also don't believe it would be against the law, except perhaps if someone were to rely solely upon that information to make a decision about whether to invest in the company.
I signed up using the link you provided, but it won't let me use the service, it keeps redirecting me to amazon.

I liked your service. It reminds me of Joe's Goals in a certain way, which is one of my favorite web apps.
Kleiner Perkins to ramp up investments in iPhone startups
There are a bunch of these kinds systems in the government. Palantir's tech is pretty cool and a nice spin on the area (besides looking nice and slick). But hardly new.

It takes a lot of cues from mish-mash systems like this one (warning PDF)

http://www.cjmtk.com/EventRegistration/CjmtkConf08/DCGS-A_MF... (a hodge podge of every conceivable analysis tool and database under the Intelligence sun)

And more unified systems like this

http://www.futurepointsystems.com/ (their page stinks but their tech is awesomely cool)

and other single purpose tools like

http://www.i2inc.com/products/analysts_notebook/ (industry standard link-analysis)

http://tactical.overwatch.com/products/axis_pro.htm (another recent link-analysis tool)

http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/ (the name in geospatial)

And others
http://spotfire.tibco.com/

http://www.oculusinfo.com/SoftwareProducts/GeoTime.html

It's nice that they are expanding out into financial services and geospatial analysis. Up till now it's largely been a glorified (and very expensive) link-analysis tool (see i2's and overwatch's tools).
Unless they made that up.

I've met them and can assure you they're a lot smarter than that.
I'm generally happy nowadays. It was a factual statement about my initial misconception, not a complaint.
If you don't throw too much traffic at it you will be fine using it as a memcached alternative, but you will probably notice the overhead of an HTTP transaction. It largely depends on what you are doing.

It seems like you are referring to using it as a cache only, and on those terms, it really depends on your traffic profile. Chances are, though, with 200k uniques you would be pleased. If you are running in EC2, the bandwidth is free, so you only pay for computation. That can keep things pretty inexpensive.
Taking On a New Challenge At Twitter
Review of Pycon India 2009
The only way to achieve this would be to shard the file across multiple entries. The limit per is 1k, so I doubt it would fit your needs. There is also a hard limit of 1gb per domain, which is not difficult to run up against if you treat it as a more generic data store.
Just so you know, at the time you posted this comment the site had changed from what it was when I posted my comment.

When I commented, the link was to a rant about how the programmer screwed over the business with bad code.
Sam Chang’s Budget Hotel Empire in New York City
> I wonder what's driving it.

Just some guesses/thinking-out-loud:

* people are getting sick of php (well, sicker than usual)

* Python 3 has been out for a while and it's starting to be used by more people

* Perl 6 is seeing regular releases, some tutorial material is showing up out there, so maybe it's having an effect of getting people interested in new languages

* It's possible that some Rubyists who left the ship are now returning.
You could use DB2 Express-C (which is free); you can then store the data as XML and query it at will.
Spring of 1999 I was kicking it at dinner party/get together with a bunch of Netscapees sometime after AOL had purchased us for $4B, but prior to them closing the deal (Final day value of $10B). A lot of the people I worked with were considering going to work with Omid Kordestani, who had worked under Todd Rulon Miller/Mike Homer back at Netscape - they were looking for new bodies at this young company; there was an opportunity for me to dive in. I heard a pitch for this company, and I knew more than enough to explain to everyone that not only was the target market fully mature, but that I would be going to a company where the market was just _starting_ (Oblix - LDAP mgmt) and that there really was very little left in terms of technology development in the field of...Search.

So yes, I know that feeling very well. Very well indeed.
There are actually some backup services that leverage S3 and require customers to have their own accounts. It seems to work quite well as a model.
McAfee offers unlimited online storage
He doesn't have to earn technical respect. If he's a good manager, he doesn't need to handle the technical side. Managing people is an entirely different skill set, one that has little to do with understanding the technologies and more to do with handling expectations, providing a buffer layer between the team and everyone else, etc. I'd much rather work for someone who handles those things very well but has nothing more than a high level understanding of the underlying technologies.

Agile can be two things. It can be a development methodology and it can be a project management methodology. Being good at one does not imply being good at the other. I work with people who are geniuses at managing agile projects but that couldn't code their way out of a shoe box with 3 sides cut out. It's their ability to manage that is important, not their technical chops.
It figures - I wouldn't expect them to canabalize S3. Thanks for the details though.
Crap! I'm sorry, this is the register link:

http://mealfire.com/register?promo=hackernews

(I wish I could edit that comment)
Drugstore.com's 'microsite' strategy
Doesn't seem like anything the Russians or Chinese wouldn't see in great detail using satellites, or with their extensive spy networks.
Newly revealed Apple patent application looks suspiciously tablet-like
The Death of Multitasking and Rebirth of Unitasking
There are places like that. It's called "corporate housing". take a look at oakwood.com. They have apartments in lots of cities around the world. A company would contract with them then on short notice could say "I need an apartment in London for a month". The company only deals with the corporate housing place, not the building owners and the buildings aren't dedicated to corporate housing, most are leased in the traditional way.

Lots of companies use these services for when they hire someone new who needs a place to stay until they move, or if they have locations in multiple cities and have an employee on a short term assignment away from home.
I've had a descent amount of experience with SimpleDb and unfortunately I don't find it as good as what Amazon makes it out to be. The name "Simple" defines the service very well.

There are too many limitations which makes SimpleDb almost impossible to use for complex data storage. A few examples of annoying limitations:

1. SimpleDb is a Key to list value pair storage engine (e.g. Key = Name, Values = [John, George, Ringo, Paul]). Seems good but you can only have 256 values per record.

2. Each value is limited to 1024 characters (512 for double byte)

3. Where clauses of "select" statements are ordered by their ascii values. Makes things relatively complex numeric values. Here's some suggestions from amazon when working with numerical values.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonSimpleDB/2007-11-07/...

and floating points are especially annoying:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/691778/best-way-to-format...

Bottom line, my take is if you want to use SimpleDb for simple data storage, it's a wonderful service and relatively cost effective. If you're data is or will become complex then it's not the service for you. I'd look into Google App Engine for a robust and "free" service.
Rounded corners generator: http://wigflip.com/cornershop/. You may also like the other wigflip utilities, see http://wigflip.com/.

Background gradients (if you make a 1-pixel wide button) and button generator: http://dabuttonfactory.com/ (self-plug).
I think a tablet from Apple is a sure thing, the only question is when. It could be next January, it could be in 2015. Apple generally does not release a product before they feel it is ready, based on their own standards.

Personally, I'd like to see an Apple tablet. Part of the reason I haven't bought a Kindle is in anticipation of this device, but my patience will only last so long...
When I lose heart I reflect on this very fact, and thus I find encouragement to keep going.
Microsoft Bing Loses Search Share
"The once-popular killer ape theory is crumbling under its own lack of evidence, with 'Ardi' putting the last nail in its coffin. On the other side of the equation, the one concerning our prosocial tendencies, the move has been towards increasing evidence for humans as cooperative and empathic. Some of this evidence comes from the new field of behavioral economics with studies showing that people do not always adhere to the profit principle. We care about fairness and justice and sometimes let these concerns override the desire to make as much money as possible. All over the world, people have played the 'ultimatum game,' in which one party is asked to react to the division of benefits proposed by another. Even people who have never heard of the French enlightenment and its call for égalité refuse to play along if the split seems unfair."

Both the title, which I didn't think related as far back in time as it does, and the publication (the Wall Street Journal) made me guess wrong about what this submitted article is about. It's actually quite a thought-provoking read, by a scientist known for provoking thought about these issues, Frans De Waal.
And who are the other big guys in your analogy?
Thanks for all of the great comments. I'll need to do a little reading to get up to speed on these ideas.
What you said is very true, and a good summary of shortcomings, but I'd like to note a real benefit it affords you despite these drawbacks.

While 3. is a pain-point in many systems, the fact that you can do selects with where clauses on a key-value store that scales horizontally is impressive. The indexing they do can be very helpful in certain implementations.
I've heard that the "create tables on the fly" route is bad practice for reasons of optimization, though, I have to admit I'm not sure what those reasons are in practice.
Um, why wouldn't they make it up?
In fact, if you find competitors in your market and they are using a free model to gain traction, don't be shy about taking them on with a paid model.

If customers find you first and you can close the deal, those other free competitors won't pose a threat. The caveat here is that you must keep your customers happy. However, if true customer satisfaction is just not quite attainable and you're in survival mode (due to being under resourced or what have you), simply keep the the level of pain that you create for them below the threshold of pain required to switch from your service to your competitors.
GPush for iPhone versus Google's Gmail push
One thing that I noticed:

- Maybe move the "add X" to inside the box, on the bottom right corner.

I really liked the "create shopping list" feature. The way you do the items aggregation is very useful.
Google Wave? Wake me when it goes mobile…
I presume he means that you should have up-to-date contact details for all existing investors, and that they should be contactable - e.g. they don't throw down the phone when you ring them - and ready to sell.

I know of a mid-sized company which sold to a multinational a few years ago, and it took them a few weeks to round up all the shareholders and get written consent to the deal, even though all the shareholders were in the same country, on good terms and none of them objected to the take over.
I live in St. Louis, although I did not attend WUSTL. I did some web development for two graduates from there. You may be interested in these two local groups of which I am a member: St. Louis Ruby Users Group (http://groups.google.com/group/stlruby) and Lambda Lounge (http://lambdalounge.org/). Also Alex Miller is organizing The Strange Loop Conference (http://thestrangeloop.com/) Oct 22nd and 23rd which you might find interesting.
I have $10,000 and want to turn it into $1 million
Benjamin Heckendorn mods PS3 into Laptop
I specifically mentioned images that really were displaying instantly, prior to fancy UI. In other words, the page did not require the fancy UI, but one was added because someone thought it would be cool. And the result was a less optimal experience.

Web site maintainers should be keenly interested in what their visitors think. But apparently, honesty only loses me points.
Suppose the U.S. is testing a new secret fighter jet. If you don't know when the new jet will leave the hangar for a test flight, your satellites will be useless. Long-distance photography would perhaps provide some intel. Of course, if the test flights were carried out at night, as it happened while the F-117 was being tested, then photography would not help much,

Do note that when most USAF bases in the Southwest were built, there were no satellites at all, and hence, no spy satellites.
Google cannot copy your startup's attitude, most particularly if your startup's attitude is strongly opposed to facilitating the arrest and torture of Chinese dissidents.

If I had a search engine, I'd be strongly opposed to facilitating the arrest and torture of Chinese dissidents. Because after all, I think my American users would actually care pretty keenly on whether companies they do business with facilitate the arrest and torture of Chinese dissidents.

Say Google, what was your policy on that again?
The Games are supposed to be a symbol of international spirit. How could America even hope to win them? You can't claim to be "exceptional" and above the rest of the community, then ask that same community for support.

It would have been a win by hosting and providing an exemplary experience for everyone. Same reason China jumped through so many hoops in 2008 to make the Olympics go so well. They wanted to try and put on a new face to the international community and make it seem like China wasn't as big of a mess as people had thought.

Or maybe to put on a new face and show that what happened in 2000-2008 is not what happens now.

Also, the idea/theory of "American exceptionalism" was coined by Alexis de Tocqueville (A Frenchman, not American), mostly commenting on the US's stance on immigration ~50 year after the nation was formed. Later on, its turned into a term that was exploited by politicians to try and promote American nationalism after WW2. Which is basically what it refers to now. And its hardly like no other nation has ever had nationalist tendencies that were exploited in some way by political leaders.

America was tolerated before, because it had money. Now it has less money, and the cracks are beginning to show.

Not to mention being one of the few countries with an embassy in every country in the world[1], the ability to gather information or intelligence on pretty much every country in the world (even if analysts couldn't analyze it properly), oh, and still the most powerful country militarily even with the problems going on in Afghanistan.

Oh, and the United States is still the single richest country in the world. Even larger than the EU, according to the World Bank (which, admittedly doesn't count all countries in the EU, but rather a "Eurozone"). Though, the IMF and CIA World Factbook place the EU above the US. But, the EU is a sovereign group of countries with a shared economic policy. So it could be argued that the EU shouldn't count in global GDP rankings. The US's GDP is ~3x larger than its closest competitor, Japan.[2]

[1] http://www.usembassy.gov/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin... for a nice chart of all the values next to each other. It links back to the World Bank/IMF/CIA Factbook though.

//edit: All that being said, I'm personally happy that Rio de Janeiro and not Chicago is hosting the Olympics. They're definitely an emerging country to keep an eye on in the future. Its a nice nod to them, and South America in general. Plus, the country looks beautiful and it would be incredible to visit, if I manage to do so.
The quiet genius: Andrew Viterbi (2006) [pdf]
This is a nice way to speed up development. The Haiku community already has something like this in place, with bounties at HaikuWare.com and an annual Haiku Code Drive (which is similar to GSoC).

So far, this has worked extremely well.
US citizens have to do this too. Sometimes the US citizens line is longer than the other lines.

I always enjoy visiting other countries because the immigration folks are so pleasant (except Japan). It catches me off guard every time. The immigration inspector in Oslo actually smiled and welcomed me to their country! Amazing!

When I come back to the US, it is always a lecture about something. "Your handwriting isn't good enough," was my favorite.

(I have always wondered what would happen if I refuse to answer the questions. Will I be deported ... to the US?)
There wasn't anything extra. That story if full of shit.
Lenovo vows 'unbelievably' fast Windows 7 boots
How to exract archives from password protected RAR files?
How To reset/remove/recover/bypass windows password?
I haven't heard a single mention of the hassle it has become for many people to visit the U.S.

It is a hassle to visit China, as well, but that did not affect their Olympic bid.
What do you mean by "add X"?
You really need a real home page. Having a guest account they can play with is awesome ... but it's not a good way to start it off.

When I come to the site for the first time, the first thing I see is an unexplained empty calendar. That's very confusing. You need a "this is what mealfire is and why it's cool" page.

UX is nice. I really like the way you do bulk-adding of ingredients and directions.

Nice idea. I can definitely see using it once I'm responsible for my meals.

Bottom-line, everything is good but the very-first impression, which is what's most important.
Surprising first products of famous companies
Just in case it was ambiguous, that's $60/year... Granted, not entirely cheap but...

You can also consider http://hotspotvpn.com/ (I don't know anyone who has it but it was one of the ones that I researched before getting witopia) - $8.88 USD/month if it's the initial $60 that's an issue.
Website Features That You Can Easily Offload
"Add ingredients" and "Edit directions". I thought both were "Add...", that's why I used "x".
Shanghai is covered in smog
This is a really good idea, and a nice implementation. Like jackowayed said, a better presentation would help with first impressions. Some kind of recipe sharing would be cool, too.
10 GB per domain isn't a hell of a lot of scaling.