jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
If you could have one hire "for free" right now, what would it be?
This question is mainly for early stage startup founders but others, feel free to answer. Assume you have just saved a wizard's life and, as a reward, he's going to give you a free hire.

All you have to do is write down the job description and he will manifest you a competent, 10X person with that skillset that is willing to work for free on whatever you task them to. There's no secret ironic twist to this, you will get what you're looking for.

Do you want a really great designer? A scalability engineer? Someone who has a lot of contacts in your target industry? An operations person? The sky's the limit but you only get a single hire.
Why Facebook should Police their API
http://www.bandwidthblog.com/2011/05/05/why-facebook-should-police-their-api/
For years we have been warned to be careful of what we installed or even what we clicked on Facebook, but as malware on the social network runs rampant don’t you think that it’s time we demand Facebook to pay attention? The malware issue on Facebook is a much bigger problem than they lead us to believe because it strikes at the very foundations of their established ecosystem.
Wordle-News?
am i out-of-band or why is the crowd here so obsessed with all these letter-puzzles recently?
Show HN: Grabbie, time saving app by finding things on your way
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/grabbie/id950953254?ls=1&mt=8
Motivated by the problem of finding the most efficient place to eat along the way. Hope it can help in many other occasions as well.
NYPD systematically games CompStat, their defect tracking system
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/31/nyregion/nypd-leaves-offenses-unrecorded-to-keep-crime-rates-down.html
It looks like a self-defeating practice of bad software development teams has hit the big time. The managers of the police department of New York City are, according to this newspaper article, systematically under-reporting crimes to make themselves look good. This CompStat system, before they figured out how to manipulate it, was successful at helping the NYPD allocate their officers to where they were really needed. But no more.
Ask HN: PayPal vs Direct CC affect on sales
I've heard claims that accepting credit cards directly on your website, using a merchant account, converts better than only offering credit card payments through PayPal's offsite workflow. Can anyone back this claim up?

I realize that there may be other reasons not to use PayPal. But I'd like to know if anyone has more than anecdotal evidence that only using PayPal decreases sales.
The First Twenty-Five Years of Perl
http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/12/the-first-twenty-five-years.html
Interesting in-depth review of the history of Perl.
Ask HN: boardgames or (and not) card games?
I love card games—which will here be defined as any of the thousands of folk games that can be played with a somewhat standardized (according to region) deck of playing cards. And I know that there's a lot of geeks out there of different stripes that are avid poker players. I've even met a couple (terrifying) alpha male hackers and stock-optioned developer types who play Bridge at the highest levels with their scary hacker brains.

But in a general sense I don't see a lot of interest in the wider world of card games and that confuses me. It would seem to be perfectly suited to the Hacker Mind: thousands of different systems, made up of the same or similar parts, each with their own logic. Certain techniques are isomorphic across every family and sub-family.

I know tons of hackers love board games—which have always left me cold in general. I have tried my hand at, say, Carcassonne and Starfarers of Catan, and I can see how there's more _play_ involved than something like Chutes and Ladders, but board games still seem so much more removed and arbitrary than card games. Not to mention more expensive, and more dependent on specific materials.

So, are there any hackers out there who think that card games in general are a worthy field of interest? And for those of you who love board games and not card games, why so?
Get a job if you're an entrepreneur complaining about local investors
http://www.techvibes.com/blog/stop-complaining-about-non-valley-investors-2013-04-15
Article about the global capital market and the valley investors current appetite to invest outside the valley.
Media Temple Hacked?
What is it with all the hosting companies get assaulted? Or maybe it was something they did (have not searched extensively). Anyways just wanted to throw this out there in case anyone has to do damage control (like me..)

www.mediatemple.net
Richard Branson, Kofi Annan, World Leaders Say End the Failed Drug War
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/06/02/136880528/global-war-on-drugs-has-failed-former-world-leaders-say
Smoke 'em if you got 'em
Startup Time vs. Corporate Time And How To Manage Both
http://www.forbes.com/sites/harrisgoodman/2013/05/02/startup-time-vs-corporate-time-how-to-manage-both/
An EdTech adventure into working with the big boys.
Springboard Launches new Mobile Accelerator in London
http://www.kernelmag.com/scene/2472/springboard-launches-new-mobile-accelerator/
Applications close on July 22nd
70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/category/css/
CSS isn't always easy to deal with. Depending on your skills and your experience, CSS coding can sometimes become a nightmare, particularly if you aren't sure which selectors are actually being applied to document elements.
Humor: Worst Captcha Ever
http://depressedprogrammer.wordpress.com/2008/04/20/worst-captcha-ever/
Wow. That is a stunningly bad captcha. Just really bad ... I sometimes wonder how these things went from trying to solve a simple problem, to creating unusable provisioning processes for users everywhere...
Amazon Pricing Error
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Invicta-10299-Spider-Polyurethane-Watch/dp/B006YEATZ2/ref=sr_1_1?s=watch&ie=UTF8&qid=1364383533&sr=1-1
Nice pricing error on a watch. Wonder how many will get bought...
Ask HN: Has the quality of posts and comments gone down?
I've noticed that both on HN and reddit, over the last few years, the amounts of empty/unsophisticated/uneducated comments and posts has been steadily increasing. The "feed me with a silver spoon" user comments and inquiries that can be answered by 5 minutes of googling and research are becoming so common, that it makes me sad and inclined to quit these platforms.

It appears as the adoption of these platforms grows, the quality goes down to the common denominator of the population involved. Not to sound demeaning, but isn't this the downfall of every social media platform?

These platforms used to be for geeks and niche audiences, but as they grew, they attract everyone, causing the decline of intellectual conversations and thoughts and reducing them to low a quality of value content. People then tend to migrate to other newer platforms for a few years, before the same cycle repeats. This is similar and common among social media platforms like myspace, facebook, instagram, etc as the age of the population grows, newer generations want a segment specific platform.
Show HN - socl.in
http://www.socl.in/
Social twist to calendar+todo list - http://www.socl.in/
A few good social features - still in very alpha stage, your comments are welcome.
Quebec Adopts Emergency Law To End Tuition Crisis
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/05/18/quebec-emergency-law_n_1528889.html?ref=canada
"It's the worst law that I've ever seen, except for the War Measures Act," said law professor Lucie Lemonde, referring to the notorious legislation imposed in Quebec during the 1970 FLQ crisis.
Electrochemical sensors in the next generation of mobile devices
It's interesting to look at advertisements in the trade journals aimed at designers of the next generation of mobile devices. A few years ago, the ads were all for MEMS accelerometers. A few years before that, it was GPS modules. The ads I'm seeing now are for electrochemical sensors, very small radars, and spectrometers. What those suggest to me are possible uses around safety, massively crowd-sourced environmental monitoring (with applications both to weather forecasting and WME detection), and most interestingly, personal health monitoring. I expect my phone in a few years will be always listening to my pulse and breathing, sniffing my respiration and sweat, looking for anomalies. Whether that information is reported to me or to someone else is a privacy question of some importance.
Startup Life: Trough of Sorrow or Crest of Success
http://kymchiho.posterous.com/startup-life-trough-of-sorrow-or-crest-of-suc
A response to the pressures of startup life as seen with the passing of Diaspora's co-founder.
Hidden habits of ineffective people
http://www.quora.com/Chris-Wake/Hidden-habits-of-ineffective-people
Trying a bit of my own medicine on some of these.
Immutable Infrastructure with Docker and EC2 [video]
http://tech.gilt.com/post/90578399884/immutable-infrastructure-with-docker-and-ec2-gilt-at
Gilt Co-Founder and CTO Michael Bryzek at last month’s Dockercon14 conference in San Francisco. Bryzek discusses how Gilt's engineering team has been experimenting with Docker to improve and simplify end-to-end continuous delivery of our micro-services architecture.
Ask HN: How much equity to accept as the sole tech co-founder in this case?
This is for a tech company that has a CEO and a CPO without a prototype, customers or any other full-time hires. They are about to close on their seed funding though and I'll be joining after right after that. The equity will be from the founders pool and the salary is somewhat negotiable between 100k-200k per year before taxes. In terms of the other founders, one of them has a gotten their startup acquired before for 10s of millions (I think - undisclosed figure but I put that number together from the parent company's total funding) and the other founder has no prior startup experience. One of them has some limited tech experience.

What would you accept in this case as the CTO?
Show HN: It's like Hangman not Wordle
https://foximax.com
Grey-haired back-end dev has a go at a web-based game using html/css/js only. The interface is (very) similar to Wordle, but it's a different game based on guess-the-word letter-by-letter Hangman.
Ask HN: Mammoth Hacking - just do it?
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/05/mammoths/cloning-interactive
Via http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/waking-the-baby-mammoth-3630/Overview
Functional Programming In Industry
http://marco-za.blogspot.com/2007/10/functional-programming-in-industry.html
"Putting my own experiences aside for the now, the focus of this post is functional programming in industry. As an outsider with an interest in the community I often wonder why it is so small and how the situation can be improved. Everyone keeps going on about how beneficial functional programming is over imperative programming: faster development, shorter code, less bug prone and easier to test to name just a few."
Ask HN: I have a startup idea! What do I do next?
Hi hackers,

I'm sort of in a pickle, and I'd like your advice. My mind is bubbling and overflowing with this great idea for a startup, but I don't know how to proceed. Here's a list of some things I have to sort out:

a) I started working less than a year ago. This is my first job out of college, so I'm hesitant to just up and leave. Not to mention I have very little business and corporate experience.

b) I have a CS background, but I only took one web design course in college and found it very difficult in a completely different way from CS.

c) I don't have friends who are software engineers and interested in doing a startup. My closest friends, with whom I actually want to work on this, are all liberal arts majors and on the other side of the country. I could find some random people, but I doubt I have enough experience to lead a team. (Also I'm an extremely indecisive person, which is terrible for that sort of role).

d) I am like the opposite of what VC's look for in a startup founder. I don't sacrifice my well-being (sleep, meals) for anything. I've never pulled an all-nighter (on the other hand, I've never had to because I don't procrastinate). I cycle through my projects and interests every few weeks or months as I get bored with one or really obsessed with another. In short, I like to dabble. But I'd really like to be the other kind of person. :D Help?

e) I could work on this project on the side in addition to my job (what I'm sort of doing right now), but if it turns into anything, it would technically belong to my company. Does anyone have legal advice on that front? Like at what point should I definitely leave or risk getting sued, etc.

f) I could present this idea to the relevant departments at my company (it's pretty related to what they do), but they move...so...slowly and have their own priorities. I might get really frustrated seeing the whole idea get mangled by bureaucracy and company-focused priorities (e.g. emphasis on company reputation rather than user experience, etc). I accept that, if I'm going to work on this with anyone else, I will have to compromise and negotiate some of the original ideas; but change for the good of the product is acceptable, whereas change for the good of the company could be detrimental to the product. (Btw, I'm totally painting a bad picture of my company, but overall it's really awesome. In fact I don't know of a better place to work... except maybe a startup).

So that's my situation, more or less. I feel justified posting it here because I think it's pretty typical of aspiring startup founders or people who visit this site because it's awesome. Thanks in advance for your input.
Ask HN: Please trash my business plan (non-tech)
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dd93s8qb_49gb92tngq
This is a television show I have become involved with. My expertise is on the production & post production side - the logistics of planning, shooting editing and delivering video. Business and raising capital, not so much.

About half of this is mine; the original was much more sale-sy and less business-y. There are two of us, the host/creator has sunk a lot of equity into it, it'sa good product but it needs recapitalizing. I've been working free on this for the last month. I suck at business; I need to be the CTO and manage the manufacture and delivery of the product, which is plenty of work for one person.

For confidentiality reasons, I've left out the financials. In brief, we're looking to raise up to $500k and thinking of a 10-15% risk premium with full recap in 3-5, plus 1-2% of net. I think YC people are honest enough that I feel safe to post it here.

Thank you for your time. Anything from 'tl;dr' to longer critiques would be welcome. If you prefer, email me at eddy@entertainingpeople.com. If this is inappropriate for YC, feel free to say that too.
CSS Equivalent of Prototype?
http://www.thinkingserious.com/2007/10/13/css-equivelant-of-prototype/
One of our programmers had the following comment in a recent Subversion commit: "Verified to display correctly with IE6, IE7, FF Ubuntu, FF, Galeon, Konqueror". Sigh... don't you hate when you have to do that? Frameworks like Prototype and Symfony has made development life much easier, but sadly CSS cross browser hell still brings the pain. So I ask, can some brave master-hacker create a Prototype/Symfony like framework for us poor CSS/HTML programmers?
Knex computer at Olin College
http://knexcomputer.blogspot.com/
"The K'NEX calculator stands over 10 feet tall, and can perform 4 bit addition and subtraction operations in about 30 seconds. The slowest part of the operation is the user entering the balls. From there the balls trickle down, computing the result of the operation, and then sending that through a 4 bit decoder, which flips a flag that tells the user the answer. Since it is 4 bit, we can add and subtract numbers from 0 to 15."
Sticky Headers with Pure JavaScript and CSS
https://github.com/vhiremath4/Balloon
No jQuery. No other libs. Further testing probably necessary, so submit issue reports if you find any.
Building the first Full Stack Manufacturing Startup out of India
http://blog.sourceeasy.com/post/86578562513/building-the-first-full-stack-startup-out-of-india
What does "Full Stack" Apparel Manufacturing Actually Mean? And where did this term "Full Stack" come from?
Ask HN: What language would you code if you didn't need to make money?
I'm currently a frontend JS/React engineer but planning to retire in one or two years (FIRE) and don't plan to stop coding, only not doing it for money. My language of choice will probably be Clojure.
1 word in beta invite email subject reduces conversion by 14%
http://www.tonywright.com/2007/everything-is-linkbait/
Hey All-- thought any startup folks out there might find this interesting. We're rolling out more and more RescueTime invites and I saw conversion on the invite email plummet on the most recent invite (with the only change being removing 1 word from the subject).
Help the Radare Project Host the Radare Summer of Code
The radare project[1] is an open source reverse engineering toolkit [2] that aims to be a free replacement for software such as IDA Pro and Hopper.

We are currently looking to sponsor some student developers to work on adding some awesome features[3] to radare2, but need your help with funding[4]!
Our goal is to provide 3 slots for the participants in this year (+1 slot from the Google Summer of Code under umbrella of openwall[5] project.

Thanks!

The Radare Team

[1] http://radare.org

[2] http://github.com/radare/radare2

[3] http://radare.org/rsoc

[4] http://radare.org/r/rsoc.html

[5] http://openwall.info
Ask HN: Why is HN HTML laid out in tables?
Hacker News is certainly not HTML5 friendly. Heck it doesn't even validate in HTML4 http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

<body><center><table border=0 cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 width="85%" bgcolor=#f6f6ef><tr><td bgcolor=#ff6600><table border=0 cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 width="100%" style="padding:2px"><tr><td style="width:18px;padding-right:4px"><a href="http://ycombinator.com"><img src="http://ycombinator.com/images/y18.gif" width=18 height=18 style="border:1px #ffffff solid;"></img></a></td><td style="line-height:12pt; height:10px;"><span class="pagetop"><b><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/news">Hacker News</a></b><img src="http://ycombinator.com/images/s.gif" height=1 width=10><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/newest">new</a> | <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments">comments</a> | <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/ask">ask</a> | <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs">jobs</a> | <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/submit">submit</a> | <font color=#ffffff>joeybaker's comments</font></span></td><td style="text-align:right;padding-right:4px;"><span class="pagetop"><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=0uLs1HxN7c">login</a></span></td></tr></table></td></tr><tr style="height:10px"></tr><tr><td><tr><td><table border=0><tr><td> …………
Ask HN: What simple items have you found to be amazingly handy or practical?
Sometimes you discover something that is just so practical you wonder how people get along without it. For example, sitting with the laptop actually on my lap was a problem because of the heat over time. I tried a few different things as heat guards, but one of the best was a $2.00 wooden back-scratcher. Depending on how I placed it I could rest the laptop in such a way to get it away from the body and get good airflow around it. Plus, with the back-scratcher now always at hand, I could more easily fetch remote items, like my wireless headphones from the charger. And, of course, scratch my back when needed.

What common or readily assembled things do you use for assorted purposes to ease your life?
Taking Steve Yegge's Talk to Heart: Learning Bioinformatics
http://thomasharrigan.com/getting-started-with-bioinformatics/
Steve Yegge gave a great talk about why we should tackle real world problems instead of building social networks. This is the first step on that path.
Show HN: Cookieless Conversion Attribution with Pathview
https://pathview.io/example
Morning HN.

I worked on a cloud CMS and then pivoted an analytics feature to a standalone SaaS. Pathview focuses on the conversion path rather than general analytics. I want to help users optimize conversions.

It doesn’t use cookies, contains 160-characters of JavaScript, and leverages HTTP Messaging for a modern take on an old-school analytics approach.

I’m close to launching a public beta test and could use a sanity check. Any advice, feedback, or questions for this first-time developer?

-sb
Computer program can detect depression in blogs and online texts
http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2010/06/detecting_depression_in_blogs.html
Researchers have developed a program that detects depression in text without obvious terms like "depression" or "suicide". In a sample of 200 positively identified texts out of 300,000 which were screened by the program, there was a 78 percent agreement between the program and a panel of psychologists.
Ask HN: How to get initial funding for an idea?
I have a few ideas I think are really good. My job pays me well but the better ideas I have cost a lot of initial money to develop even a small proof of concept. As I understand, VC's want some proof of concept and market acceptance testing before a seed round. Banks require some proof of business proposal validity as well. I have no rich friends or family, how do I get to the stage where I can even think of applying to YC or other VC firms?

To be clear, The ideas I have in my opinion are not high risk (worst case you break even after a few years).

Apologies for my ignorance if there are better sources out there. Asking here because I have received valuable advice on HN from asking similar "noob" questions.
Show HN: Twofer Goofer: daily rhyme game built with Midjourney/Stable Diffusion
https://twofergoofer.com/
Twofer Goofers are pairs of rhyming words that form a nonsensical phrase. Each day, there’s a roundabout prompt that describes a new Twofer Goofer. Players can use up to 4 hints.

Inspired by a game back from my high school English teacher, I built this in the past few weeks with a couple friends. We’ve been using Midjourney and Stable Diffusion (been on waitlist for Dalle for ages) to generate each day’s art. Extremely fun and simple way to leverage these super-powerful generative art tools!

We “playtested” on Google Forms for about a month while building the app w/ Vercel and Supabase. We also use Figma, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Sendgrid. Lots of usual suspects!
German cos think US as bad as China for industrial espionage and data theft
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d1a163ac-fdea-11e2-a5b1-00144feabdc0.html
German companies believe the US now poses almost as big a risk as China when it comes to industrial espionage and data theft, a survey has revealed.
The startling finding of a survey of 400 companies conducted in mid-July underscores the shift in German public and business opinion caused by revelations about US surveillance activities.
Some 26 per cent of German managers, IT and security professionals described the US as a high-risk place for industrial espionage and data theft, according to the survey commissioned by EY, the consultancy.
This was second only to the 28 per cent of respondents who view China as a particularly high-risk country for industrial espionage. Russia was ranked third, with 12 per cent saying it posed a significant risk.
The Persistence Layer with Spring Data JPA
http://www.baeldung.com/2011/12/22/the-persistence-layer-with-spring-data-jpa/
Persistence with Spring 3.1 and Spring Data JPA. Focuses on removing the DAO implementation, manual and automatic custom queries, transactions with Spring Data and configuration.