skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FYI, less than $75 million is small.

I'll just keep walking along for now. :-)
Great point. I've "Founder" for a couple of ventures from college/hs on my resume.
You already said it:

But Apple can't find the margins in the product line and the equation means that they have no offering for this huge hole in their lineup.

It won't have a good profit margin. Why should Apple waste time on it? They have many other products that are selling incredibly well (with much higher profit margins). It seems like Apple wants to work on those products instead.

Also, its not very good form to insult someone in a debate. It doesn't help further your point, and indicates that you don't have any additional items to add that will help further the discussion. And good discussion is what a lot of people come to HN for, not simply the news.
http://www.justin.tv/startupschool

The Paul Buchheit talk seems to be missing, unfortunately.
> Its like if I sold you insurance for $999 trillion that there wouldn't be an earthquake in California tomorrow. I obviously don't have that much money, just like those banks didn't have the money that they are now paying Goldman Sachs and the guy in this article with taxpayer money.

You're correct about this point. If you sold that insurance and couldn't pay off when the earthquake happened, the bank should take all that you have and eat the remainder. (For "bank", read Goldman et al.)

However, note that the folks selling the insurance in these cases included pension funds, small cities in Australia, and the like. I'm perfectly happy with them losing everything (especially since the alternative is US taxpayers paying to make Goldman whole), but are you?
I hate that. I almost never end up changing the password and it's a pain in the ass to look it up each time. Just ask me for it up front.
Reading the full thread gives me an appreciation for how well some people can aggressively but politely have a mail thread discussion.

Marc's final diplomatic reply:

"So, we're probably going to go with <IMG SRC="url"> (not ICON, since not all inlined images can be meaningfully called icons). For the time being, inlined images won't be explicitly content-type'd; down the road, we plan to support that (along with the general adaptation of MIME). Actually, the image reading routines we're currently using figure out the image format on the fly, so the filename extension won't even be significant."

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...
I've gotten to the point where I automatically dislike anything containing the phrase "Epic Fail."
I think the s is round the wrong way.
You're ascribing a social phenomena to a technical implementation.
Same here, but you should really look past that in this case.
Going with the restaurant metaphor, it is a lot easier to get into profit if you have paying customers but they are losing you money, (Amazon) than if the customers are getting a free lunch. The scalability of the internet can really help with the first case while in the second it still isn't sure if you have a viable business model.
"possibly discouraging repeat visits." --- you nailed it on the head yourself, that seems to outweigh any minor benefit from having one less field to fill out at registration time.

Even worse, if the password e-mail gets spam-filtered or even just delayed a bit, your user loses interest waiting around and just goes to another site which will give him instant access.
It's been in for about five months and seems to be undergoing heavy development. Like everything else nginx I'm sure it will be rock solid, but I don't think it can be considered core yet.
Thanks a lot for the feedback. I'm going to make the small layout changes that were suggested today, and bigger changes in the coming weeks.
When emotion is taken out of the picture, your intelligence is just how fast you solve the problem.
Win 7 is $30 for college students
This was great. Jason Fried, ordinary dude.

I am considering subscribing to Inc. They have some great stuff (like the street smarts column http://www.inc.com/magazine/columns/streetsmarts/)
The term CEO has, largely, lost all of its meaning. CEO is a specific role within a company; it is not an umbrella term meaning "person in charge of things". It makes me cringe every time I turn on the television, read an article, or listen to somebody speak and hear the term CEO used to mean "person who isn't a cubical drone".

This is especially true if you are the ONLY person in your company. Saying you are the chief executive officer at least implies that there are other officers.
I never called myself the CEO of Viaweb. I just used my actual job title, which was president. It seemed silly to talk about someone being Chief Executive Officer of a company with 20 people. But that was over 10 years ago; fashions may have changed.
Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart (why was this killed?)
Your Personal Cloud Server in a Plug
Unicode has its own special line terminator character as well, just for kicks

<clippy>It looks like you're trying to refer to NEL, which is in Unicode because it was distinct in EBCDIC, and who doesn't want lossless round-trips? </clippy>
Yeah it is. That's the one I want to see the most.
Emailing them a password means you have their plaintext password. Please never do this.
Why AI May Never Exist
Dolphins are supposedly known to gang rape, but I can't find a good source.

Best articles on dolphin intelligence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetacean_intelligence

And analysis: http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.com/2009/04/cetacea...
How about using OpenID?
American Startups with Immigrant Founders
I don't see how the article applies only to the humanities. It seems to be about supply-and-demand and self-regulating professional bodies.

I think a lot of the considerations of the article apply to, for example, mathematics.

Science and Engineering is the area with the most immediate application but even here, there's quite divide between theoretical CS and what's practiced in the field.
Seems like the site is down.
Here's the cached version:
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:http://www.brandonpaton...
Lab Demonstrates 3-D Printing In Glass
Nope, Python fucks this up just the same, even in Python 3:

>>> print u'Les Mise\u0301rables'[::-1] #2
>>> print('Les Mise\u0301rables'[::-1]) #3
selbaŕesiM seL

Almost no implementation will fuck up LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE U+00E9, but nearly all programming languages will royally fuck up a COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT U+0301 even in much easier cases like string length. Almost all implementations that claim to be UTF-16 are actually UCS-2, and can't handle surrogates in the slightest.
If you're trying to limit the sign up form to two fields, you can do it the hackernews way, just ask for an email and a password. Just a suggestion.
Plug-sized servers sure are neat. They've been distributed widely for a year or so.

But what makes it "cloud?"
oh, this is the kind of stuff that turns so many people off from using linux as a desktop. I just need my OS to fricking work. No tinker this, tinker that, turn off my network interface before starting vmware, otherwise kde will crash... etc. et.c etc.

Linux is great for servers, where you usually have two apps, your server, and/or the database.
Anything more complicated and it cries like a little baby.

And yes, servers are a lot simpler than desktops, and linux lost the battle for the desktop by a long shot.

I guess, it is doing well in mobile, but only after heavy modifications and hand holding (android, and kindle are based in a linux os).

I guess you get what you pay for.
It Knows Where You Are, and What You’re Looking For
Jason,
With all of 37signals beautifully clean and minimalist design and function, I always wondered why your homepage http://37signals.com is so busy - a bunch of text with little whitespace, icons with cartoon word balloons, contrasting colored boxes on a white bg...

Seems like way more noise than signal. Did some A/B testing prove it superior?
Do you believe the human condition cannot be explored through nonfiction? Would you entertain the idea that perhaps it may be possible to explore the human condition deeper and more profoundly through nonfiction than through fiction?

I think it's actually quite insightful to understand that.

Find me a fiction book more profoundly descriptive of the human condition than The Divided Self by RD Laing.
"If all you needed was a HA load balancer, and had no experience with either ldirectord or keepalived, I’d probably recommend keepalived over ldirectord, as it’s one project and one piece of software to do everything you need."

Having used both ldirectord and keepalived at reasonable scale this strikes me as solid advice. We use keepalived -- formerly to run LVS, now has a pure IP failover solution for nginx -- and it's been a rock for years. ldirectord is great for the LVS side too, but having one less moving part to worry about is a nice plus. Of course, going with what you know trumps as this review states right up front.

I don't agree about the overhead of haproxy and proxies and general. The author's assertion is that proxies are slower than LVS in high traffic situations. He's certainly right, but any performance loss is vanishingly small on modern hardware. We have redundant nginx pairs up front (tens of millions of requests per day, 100 Mbps+) on modest servers that are nearly idle. If there's a difference between this setup and its LVS predecessor, it's too small to measure. In exchange, we get huge flexibility in configuration, fewer moving parts, and end-to-end logging. If we get up to something in the Gbps+ range we would probably LVS up front again, but until then, I'm pretty happy with my proxies.
apology accepted, thank you.

I spoke with my 8 year-old about this and he ultimately found it compelling if it could take place in real-time, at which point my 10 year-old jumped in with an "oh yeah!" And I guess thats the missing piece for me. It's the real-time element. I can see having a story kept as an artifact, but for repeated use, the personal interaction is a key ingredient.
The creators of Windows 7 package design
Your costs would be low in Pune but Bangalore has a lot of startup events that you can attend - OCC, Barcamp, TiE etc.
The concept of voting on questions and answers could probably be a valuable metaphor for most communities. Once you've been on voting sites a regular forum seems lame, what can you do when you really like an answer besides commenting "+1 to OP"?

I think that if stack exchange could be improved to allow customization in more ways it would be very useful, however the sites just seem too generic to have broad appeal in my opinion.
The article really was entertaining. These are all common problems for new C# programmers.

Doubles in .net are IEEE 64-bit (8-byte) double-precision floating-point numbers . I've written a few different comparers to deal with problems like the one he demoed. He should have typed it to be a decimal if it was currency or he wanted it to have an exact value instead of be a double-precision floating-point number.

As for the reverse on the string. He reversed the characters, which are defined in .net as char / byte. Not unicode. If you want to play nice with unicode in .net you need to parse it as unicode. A hugely common mistake for all of us who have done some internationalization in .net.

I remember or sorts of trouble with java.util.GregorianCalendar back in the day. Ugh.

I'm not defending .net or C#. I'm just not surprised he ran into these newbie problems. You guys should see the evilness that is Access, the inconsistencies there make this look like nothing. And it's a black art with almost no documentation anywhere.
oh boy, you're on a losing streak here.

Look at the date of that article, it is from April. Go see what the S&P 500 has done since then (Hint: it is up 22%).

Meaning, the mark to market loss that those derivatives at will have already narrowed quite a bit. He still has a ways to go, but so far things appear to be in his favor.

Also, remember that it is a paper loss, he still has not paid anything out. So he still gets to put those premiums to work in the market, given his recent performance on his warrants w/ GS and others, he is doing quite well.
But Milton, you forgot Milton. I'm reading Paradise Lost. Maybe it is one of those things you're supposed to read, but it's genuinely really good. Like,

"to be weak is miserable doing or suffering: but of this be sure, to do aught good never will be our task, but ever to do ill our sole delight"
He started it!

Seriously, considering that my longer, and more thoughtful reply was rather trollishly shot-down as stupid and overly long, with no counter analysis provided by the complainant, I think I restrained myself rather well.
Watch FREE Live Streaming Online | MLB World Series 2009 Baseball Game 5
The iPhone's pinch zoom lets you control the focus and amount of zoom interactively.
IRFree.com
I don't really see how the comparison to commercial software is useful. Of course there are different pressures when deciding on the feature sets of Photoshop vs Django. Would Adobe make more money, for example, if they gave all their developers veto power over their products' features?
That this shows up in the EU version of android is another red flag that this is about software patents.
With every passing year, I'm more and more convinced a language approaching Haskell's pedantic-ness is A Good Thing. A language where Joda is the most convenient option, where all numerical quantities have units, and you have to make an explicit option to do "unsafe" things. Naturally, the goal of the language is to do as few unsafe operations as possible.

I think lisp is a good example: Most lisps have a full numeric tower that automatically converts between ints and bignums and ratios as appropriate. You don't have to think about the floating-point representation of 0.3 unless you wrote (double 0.3) in your code somewhere. Correctness should be the default, because it's much easier to trade some correctness for performance. Going the other way is much harder, and most people don't need performance.

This goes a long way, but now I notice the biggest obstacle is "legacy systems". The only time I get in trouble with the Clojure numeric tower is when I want to store a Ratio in the DB.
On this subject -- Steve, how about putting your book on a wiki and letting the community edit / rewrite the book? I think there'd be easily enough interest.
Pre-Entrepreneurs Ask, "What IP Does My Current Employer Own?"
My HTC Hero allows me to Pinch-Zoom emails and webpages. Did HTC just implement it themselves?
Not So Imminent: Domain Names in Chinese
At the very elite level I'm not sure it would really change much, but I'm not sure I fully understand what you're implying so I'll defer to you for clarification.

The article makes a good general point but misses many of the nuances that define college admissions. For one, schools, at least at the top, admit students in the context of the class and not necessarily on the basis of individual merit. This explains in part why students at a school like Harvard are not uniform 4.0 2400 students. There is value in diversity, so admissions committee will select students from different family backgrounds, states, race, etc. and adjust their gpa/sat requirements accordingly.

Second, I disagree with the author's premise that students are motivated to apply to top schools because of the per student resources spent. I'm sure this has some residual effect, but the REAL value added by going to a top school are the fellow students, reputation, and post-graduation opportunities. There is not much difference in your large 100+ student general econ class from one school to another.

I wonder instead if the increase in selectivity is due more in part to simple population ratios. Baby boomer offspring have been hitting the college circuit for the past few years which accounts for the large increases in applicants. It also helps explain the contrast in selectivity at the high and low ends of the spectrum.
Do you believe the human condition cannot be explored through nonfiction?

No.

Would you entertain the idea that perhaps it may be possible to explore the human condition deeper and more profoundly through nonfiction than through fiction?

It's not a contest.

Find me a fiction book more profoundly descriptive of the human condition than The Divided Self by RD Laing.

You don't believe his book is an exploration of his own personal perspective on reality and meaning?
Relaxation downloads
Relaxation downloads are available at Innerv.
You must have a debug version of Flash installed. I'll probably turn that wacky display off for the next build. Or if you install regular Flash it will go away and the animation will be smoother, too. :)
I'd feel weird calling myself a CEO unless my company was making several salaries.
Or it means he emailed you the generated password right before hashing it and never actually saved it in plaintext.
Jacob didn't bring money into the equation.

His point was that the quality of open-source software tends to go up, while major closed-source projects' declines. Profit margin and quality don't always correlate, especially in software.
I Have Small Tits
Those two look mostly the same on paper. I've looked at the linked-in profiles for people that I've worked with before. There are ones who absolutely sucked and were a net negative for the team, but who "helped deliver feature X" or "drove completion of project Y", but in fact, they probably actually delayed or at least lowered the quality bar of those very things they tout.
Can we get significant digit support too? That would make my life a happier place.

edit: the joke about the horse mispelling "main()" by force of habit made me chuckle.
Fashions have definitely changed. Unfortunately, for the worse.
I'm 19 and in the process of looking for exceptional talents my age to work with. As I go through people, I find that publicity is never a real indicator of somebody's success. Most people who're really good at what they do never learn to promote themselves; a lot of mediocre people develop the skills and take advantage of media laziness to get mentions.

I've never liked people that pull age. I remember when I was thirteen pretending to be in high school because I thought that high school was a big age on the Internet; within a year I'd started to lie about being a college student because I didn't want to be treated differently than the people I talked to. As a result, when I see people whose web pages brand themselves as HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT first and CEO second and don't list any real accomplishments, I feel a sort of sneer, because I know there're just as many people that age who're quietly learning to do things till they become prodigies at the age of 25.

It is fun, though, when somebody discovers your age and fawns over you like you're some little darling prodigy. Not a wholesome fun, more like a smirking "You care more about my age than what I've done?" Some people do it because they think it's polite, but other people sincerely think that young people must be the smartest people on the planet and young people that know better laugh.
So, I just took the 7 minutes required to give a casual read to every comment you've posted here, and here's what I've come up with:

* I have no idea what your technical expertise is, because you're anonymous, haven't filled out your profile, and have never posted a technical comment here. You have "a lead developer" and an ex CTO that screwed your company, so I assume you (a) didn't found that company and (b) don't lead a dev team. Once you typed the letters C++.

* You really, really dislike Apple. As evidence for that, I submit the fact that you (a) have never agreed with any pro-Apple comment here, (b) said you have an irrational dislike for the platform, (c) haven't used it enough to make sense in an argument about how app focus works on OS X, and (d) tried to win an argument about how overpriced Apple hardware is by linking to what appears to be the worst-reviewed input device on NewEgg.

* Your dislike for Apple currently constitutes the majority of all your comment-words on HN.

I have no problem arguing with you on how effective software protection could or couldn't be on a standardized ISA with a tiny number of valid build configurations, or how microarchitectural profiling works, or what the parameters are for a "win" for Apple in this cat-and-mouse game are.

I fully accept that you might win that argument; I feel comfortable with my position, though, with some fair amount of practical experience to back it. But whatever.

I'm simply not going to do that until you tell me who you are and why I should take you at all seriously. Otherwise, I'm just going to remember you as someone never to talk to here.
You can send out the email and then immediately hash it. It's still bad form though.
Any chance that those remote hobby farms actually have high speed internet available in those rural areas?
"That’s not to say that all shipping code wins; after all, Andrew and Intermedia and HyTime shipped code too. Code is necessary but not sufficient for success."

That's a good lesson to recognize and appreciate.
Define "worse" in this case. It's an irritation at worst, and it indicates that being an entrepreneur is starting to become something kids are interested in. I'd deem that a good change, however obnoxious we cool hands might find it.
I agree, although I never liked using observers. I want to glance at the model and know what's going on. But if you're going to use observers, do it as a practice for all the callbacks on your models. Don't mix inline callback methods with observers - that just adds confusion.
Don't top academics avoid titles in the US? See for example how many top academics have "Dr." or "Prof." in the title of their home page.

I suppose the impression is that an academic would only fall back on his/her title because he/she is not particularly well known and needs some way to impress others. It looks bad.

Why is this different in industry?
Why Google Voice restricts calls to some numbers
Are you being sarcastic? http://www.google.com/search?q=treatment+for+depression is a mire of orthodox SEO'd junk.
It will be extremely exciting to watch location-based advertising and associated monetization models become a reality. I have a feeling Sam and Loopt will be at the forefront of carving out this new frontier...
Worse in the sense that its diminishing the value of being an entrepreneur and CEO. For example, if PHD's were being handed out to kids a 40 year old's MBA is now depreciated. Same goes for the status and worth of the word and title CEO / Entrepreneur.
I've just glanced through it, but the abuse of italics is really distracting, and give it an amateurish feel.
soon, I hope. all the parts I don't buy locally (I buy hard drives locally due to a history of packing problems; newegg, specifically, tends to damage oem drives in shipping, and it's hard to find retail-packaged "enterprise" drives) are in the garage, and I've got one side of the 2 in 1u up and passing memtest. the other side I'm still dorking with.
Thank you! I was just about to use Google to find the link and then realized I'm on Hacker News and if there were comments already on the article, someone beat me to it.

+1 for you, and another +1 for catching legacy media up to speed ;)
Someone commented on the site about this.

The difference between academics and business is that "Dr." and "Prof." are appointed titles, while CEO is self-given without having to meet any prerequisites or requirements.
How Women Can Save the Planet
Was there ever an inherent value in either? Entrepreneur shouldn't be a term thrown around to sound impressive, like doctor is, because calling yourself an entrepreneur requires a lot less. Similarly, CEO should be a term that's no more impressive than your company. So somebody calling themselves the CEO of a two-man company doesn't make Steve Jobs any less impressive, because it's not two CEOs, it's Apple and Smallfry.
Ugh, I upvoted you by accident when I intended to downvote. What evidence do you have of that?