gstar

The taxonomy automatically evolves - so for example during Halloween, words related to Halloween rise into the statistics even though we never manually seeded those words into our system.

Our product is quite niche and B2B, though very much has a technology and internet focus. Ask away with any questions.

For objects though, I especially like Le Corbusier.

I gravitate toward modernism a bit, and I kinda think it was the last interesting art movement that captured the public's imagination. Something about the space age, square things and stuff. Lichtenstein, Mondrian and Pollock are interesting in that respect.

As for music, the list is just absolutely endless. I'd say I like more than 50% of the music that I've heard. Right now I have a funk & soul radio show on, earlier I was listening to old New Order, and before that I had a Lupe Fiasco CD on.

No art in my house or office - but one day there absolutely will be. Probably starting with the furniture.

There's potential downsides in doing nothing as well.

I'd still say it is worth having a word with someone more senior if you are able to. He'll likely lose his job, which is a horrible thing to have on your conscience - but if your sale goes through anyway, and he championed it - you could still end up on the hook. You'll either get tarred with his brush, or outright investigated for colluding with him, which may or may not be a crime where you are.

On the basis that you've written off the sale mentally, talking becomes an upside. It gives you another chance at making the sale on fair terms, and establishes your trustworthiness.

I don't envy you though, horrible situation.

My advice to you is that you should have absolutely nothing to do with this. You should forget the sale now (it's a possibility that it was only entertained in the first place because your associate thought the payoff would be likely).

If you can anonymously tip off this person's superior one way or another, you'll be doing a good thing for everyone (citizens, colleagues, bung-seeker) in the long run.

This advice only applies for government - in private enterprise this kind of thing is pretty much par for the course on very big sales, but in modern times it normally takes the form of valuable free stuff rather than cash.

You don't get much attention time on the web, get in there -fast- .. a 10-15 second video is probably much more appropriate for an intro.

First impressions:

- It just looks like a blog, and I didn't immediately get it.

- Seems to be a group-blog-per-university (isn't that market stitched up by facebook?)

- I looked around, still going "huh?" and clicked on your intro video, watched it for 30-40 seconds of cartooning, and I still didn't get it.

The list is endless!

I have no idea what stage you're at, but is it worth considering just going with websiteapp.com, getwebsite.com, websitehq.com or whatever until you've proven the concept enough to make the purchase worthwhile?

Domain names don't seem to be very fungible, and it's a market where it seems that professional dealers seem to have an unfair advantage (like real estate). Nightmare.

- You could have problems with mastercard wanting to protect their trademark.

- Your homepage is pretty heavy on copy. The copy's a bit long on hyperbole, too. Maybe edit down a bit and add a banner pic/video. Webapp homepages are a bit of an art, but good ones are fairly formulaic, too. Lots of examples out there, smashing magazine is always worth a look for inspiration.

I didn't try your app (not really very useful for me), but I think if you fix your homepage, you could convert really well. It's a problem a lot of people could use help with.

The exemplary demographic willing to have their location disclosed (with the biggest upside from doing so) is the 16-25 year old groups of mutual friends that live close together.

I'd expect the adoption rate to grow over time, but not as quickly as the more anonymous social networks.

It's great - it's fast enough for everything that she does (even for videos etc). You only notice you're on a USB adapter when you drag around a window very quickly, or you open Dashboard, and even then - it's not that bad.

(is this really an Ask YC question though?)

I know nothing of SQLites's internals, but wouldnt it make more sense to parse the query once and then store a compiled version of the query for subsequent lookups? Like you might do with a regexp?

I don't think this called for a suspension of ethics, rather more of a disregard for the establishment.

Look, legally exploiting a flawed system to produce a net benefit for oneself isn't fundamentally evil. In fact, in this situation it seems (fortunately) that his actions eventually bailed out a whole lot of small-time investors.

As for this quote:

He’s just ruined his corporate life forever.

I'd say he's just cemented himself as an incredible strategist that will be fairly in demand!

Web UI is difficult to define (there is no standard, but there are a bunch of competing standards) - and from a RAD perspective it's behind where the desktop was 10 years ago.

You may also get some benefit from looking into web frameworks such as Catalyst (if you know Perl), or Django or Rails (for Python and Ruby respectively). Examples for those frameworks really are very good walkthrus of creating a webapp.

We rather over-specced the reflux column (it was about 1m tall, copper, and ran a water jacket pumped from a swimming pool) and we even asked a friend to put samples thru a mass spectrometer to make sure we weren't drinking methanol.

Never thought of it as a hack though, just a cheap way to get booze.

We flavoured it with oak chips and watered it down. Great hackers think alike? :)

Difficult line to tread, but is it worth it?

Most of all, don't beat yourself up about this - there was nothing you could have done to have stopped it, and he did what he wanted to do for his own reasons.

I'm sorry for your loss.

I'm fundamentally opposed to them, but the reality is that they exist. Because of this, I found myself organising patent protection for our software.

If they are abolished, I'll be upset about my £8k investment - but more happy that sanity has prevailed.

It's really simple to recover from a jammed open throttle (it's happened to me) - and I think it's the kind of thing that ought to be taught in driving lessons.

You have heaps of options, either knock the car into neutral, turn off the ignition (before the steering lock), stand on the clutch (if it's manual), stand on the brakes or as a very last option gently start to apply the parking brake.

Forgive my ignorance, but is a "state trooper" a cop? I can't believe an off duty cop would let the car get up to almost 120mph. Aren't they trained?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mobile_Subscriber...

You'll have a lot of problems with this, both with uniquely identifying subscribers, and ensuring that you are not violating any privacy laws.

Check out OpenBTS and OpenBSC for basic code and feasibility stuff.

Say, like Apple, Steve?

With all the banking (and money) in Melbourne, wouldn't it be the logical place for the startup ecosystem to thrive in Australia?

I really hope it does - if I ever go back to Australia, Melbourne is where I'd probably settle. It's one of my very favourite cities.

I tend comment on HN without consideration for usernames.

I'd engineer the crawler to talk to a persistent message queue, and load the database from there. That gives you a lot of flexibility to move loads around, instrument the queue and you're not reinventing things, either.

Inserts and indices, however are very very fast, and the bug was fixed incredibly quickly and now works in trunk.

It doesn't seem quite cooked yet, but it's a very very nice start, and promises much. I prefer it to the other KV stores that are out there right now, anyway.