jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Why investors want protective provisions
http://www.venturehacks.com/articles/understand-protective-provisions
Protective provisions let preferred shareholders veto certain actions, such as selling the company or raising capital. They protect the preferred, who are minority shareholders, from unfair actions by the common majority. However, the preferred shouldn't use protective provisions to serve their other interests.
Ask HN: Best data analysis blogs?
I'm interested in data analysis and I'd love to learn more about it. What are some good blogs to pop into my RSS reader? I only have Paul Butler, the facebook intern who mapped peoples friendships onto a glove, so far. My goal here is to get inspired to do data analysis while also learning about it. Thanks in advance!
Bill Gates, Ray Ozzie Patent `Personal Data Mining'
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2008/0082393.html
It looks like this is a patent on systems for mining personal user profiles for possible data correlation, although when I ran across it I was in the mindset of `mining my _own_ personal data'. Still, seems to be a very broad stroke here, as this could cover just about any multi-user system that implements features that would be cross-cutting with respect to user data. I suppose this is the thrust behind the `no software patents' movement.
Ask HN: Anybody know a good web-based WYSIWYG HTML editor to integrate?
Hi HN,

I've been scouring the Internet looking for a good HTML editor I can integrate into my web app and haven't found anything that actually looks good.

Has anybody here had success with finding a good editor and integrating it into their application?

I'd appreciate any recommendations.
Alternative Number Formats
http://www.mrob.com/pub/math/altnum.html
what happens if you use a url AND text?...
Show HN: Let’s Gym, the app that lets you find a nearby Gym Partner
https://www.letsgym.io/
Hi All,
I recently launched the beta version of Let’s Gym and looking for people interested in using this app in hopes to get feedback.
The app idea came up after I moved to a new city and all my buddies back home were the people I worked out with daily. My drive to the gym suffered since the workout “comradely” was no longer there. After speaking to most people around the city it seem it was a common theme of people moving here and not having a workout partner. There are facebook groups in some cities that try and alleviate this issue but the problem was that you couldn’t filter on the workout goal of the person and responses back was more of a miss than a hit using FB.
We are in a very early beta in select cities in the US and would love feedback.
Fortune Favors Big Turds | Screw The Money, This Is My Art
http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/fortune_favors_big_turds.html
"I think the future of software is in things designed like the Korean alphabet. Deceptively simple with incredibly complex powers that you can’t even begin to explore fully."- Zed Shaw
Investigate onscreen language in about 87,000 movies and TV shows
http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2014/09/screen-time.html
And the corresponding service: http://movies.benschmidt.org/
Ask HN: Resources to study advanced Math
I want to improve my math skills, and looking for some resources primary focused on competitive math. Also any general advices are welcome.
I have an engineering and cs background.
DEMO Presenting Company Contract vs. LAUNCH Presenting Company Conference 
http://jc.is/foFc1I 
I think this speaks for itself.

$19,495 vs. $0.00.<p>

Any feedback?
MusicBox: Effortless Music Discovery
http://www.strikingly.com/musicbox
With MusicBox you'll get bundles of kick-ass songs from new artists delivered straight to your inbox twice per month.

Totally free.
Yours to download and own.
Show HN: Flex – transpile natural language to a programming language
https://github.com/Flex-lang/transpiler
Flex [1] is a transpiler that converts a series of statements in natural language to either Python, Java or C++, and is trained using Rasa NLU [2], an open-source framework usually used for training chatbots and voice assistants.

Flex is a project I made in college in 2018 along with two of my classmates, Gourav and Sanjay. The initial idea was to create a voice assistant you could speak to that wrote code for you, similar to GitHub's upcoming (and a lot more advanced) project "Hey, Github" [3].

We then had to reduce the project's scope to complete it in a single semester while writing exams, preparing for job interviews and submitting reports and assignments. So we settled on creating a Python program that takes a file containing statements written in natural language as input and transpiles them to a valid Python/Java/C++ program. The project design is modular, so adding more languages and statement types is easy.

The next step we had thought of was to hook it up with some UI with voice input to have some kind of voice-driven IDE, but then as college was over and we got jobs, the project got abandoned as we moved on to other things.

Seeing the "Hey, GitHub" project on HackerNews today [4] reminded me of this project, so I just wanted to share it to inspire others to fork it and make something cool. Also looking forward to some feedback on how the project could be improved to make it more useful.

[1]: https://github.com/Flex-lang/transpiler. Not to be confused with FLEX, a strictly-typed programming language with the same name (which was released first, so we should have used a different name!)

[2]: https://github.com/rasahq/rasa

[3]: https://githubnext.com/projects/hey-github/

[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33543946
Tell HN: Things I Learned From Meeting an Angel Investor
So I had a meeting with a potential angel investor yesterday. It didn't work out, but I learned a few things. Here's what I learned:

* Know in advance of the meeting whoever your most popular competitor would be. Be prepared with a damn good answer to answer the question "Why wouldn't I just use [most popular competitor]"?

* Be prepared with a damn good answer to the question "How are you going to get users?" My experience is the best answer is to both have something on your website that can go viral and also have a good way for users to easily refer more people (like searching their address book for contacts, clicking a button to send somebody an email, etc). Tweets and Facebook Likes are not aggressive. You need to use email.

* When you're making a mock-up of your start-up, be sure to make a mock-up of however you plan to make money. The monetization plan is the last thing on the founder's mind and the first thing on the investor's mind. Potential investors will absolutely ask "how are you going to make money?" "We're going to get big fast and then rely on Google/Yahoo/Facebook to buy us out" is crazy talk and your investor's won't believe it. Seriously: Even if you have a good answer for monetization, BE PREPARED TO ACTUALLY SHOW INVESTORS AT LEAST A MOCK-UP OF A MONEY-MAKING FEATURE ON YOUR SITE - SOMETHING THAT WILL ACTUALLY ACCEPT REAL PAYMENTS WHEN ITS DONE!

* Many, if not basically all, start-ups these days rely on user-submitted content. Be prepared to answer how you will deal with the legalities of that and potentially compensate the users that do the submitting.

It was a tough sell with this potential investor. It didn't work out but I learned a lot. As I meet with other investors, I will share my experiences.
Best online resources on API design
More recently there has been a lot of talk on API design and I'd like to start thinking about the design of the API for the startup I am working on.

What are all the best online (i.e. free) resources on API design?

What are the best (i.e. most elegant) APIs to study?

P.S. my goal here is to have a thread that complements this previous thread asking about the best books on API design: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668561

Here are the recommendations from that previous thread:

Online Resources:

-- "The Little Manual of API Design" by Jasmin Blanchette
http://chaos.troll.no/~shausman/api-design/api-design.pdf

-- GoogleTechTalk "How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters" by Joshua Bloch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw (video)
http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf (slides)

-- "Designing Qt-Style C++ APIs" by Matthias Ettrich
http://doc.trolltech.com/qq/qq13-apis.html

-- "Practical API Design" site
http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/Main_Page

Books:

-- "Practical API Design" by Jaroslav Tulach
http://amzn.com/1430209739

-- "Interface-Oriented Design" by Ken Pugh - http://pragprog.com/titles/kpiod/interface-oriented-design

-- "Service-oriented design with Ruby on Rails" by Paul Dix
http://amzn.com/0321659368

-- "C Interfaces and Implementations"
http://sites.google.com/site/cinterfacesimplementations/
http://amzn.com/0201498413
AskHN: Why hasn't open education worked yet?
There's lots of neat stuff out there and we're all aware of effort's like the Khan Academy or MIT's OCW, and very few people at this point /haven't/ watched a lecture online -- so why hasn't open education taken disruptive hold yet?

I'm still in University. Kids are still planning to go to colleges next fall. Hell, I'm actually thinking of doing a second undergrad at the moment! There must be startups who are making open education platforms, there must even be people who are doing it for free, that have lots of resources.

Lots of us are regularly reading how ridiculously expensive school is; how low the benefits are. We all feel at one time or another how inefficient the existing system is. And it's obvious that online courses using existing technology /can/ be an effective teaching tool. So what's missing?
Ask HN: Review my board game recommendation app
I made a little board game recommendation site in app engine: http://www.findanewgame.com/ - think netflix meets shelfluv for board games.

I wrote a blog post about the making of the site a couple of weeks back, HN thread is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1811024

I'm using amazon affiliate links on the game urls; with 6000 hits, it's made $40 - current traffic is around 100 hits a day.

I'd love to hear suggestions for improving the site, measuring affiliate conversions for A/B testing, making it more social, sharable, or whether just to let it be.

What would you do with it?
Got Game Releases In-Game Browser 
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/20/gotgame-releases-integrated-web-browser-for-games-watch-hulu-as-you-get-1337/
Browse the internet utilizing a transparent overlay in virtually any PC game!
Ask YC: Anyone looking for a loft in SF? YC members encouraged.
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/roo/908600614.html
I have a loft in SF, but unfortunately my roommates left me high and dry. I need to find 2 roommates pronto. Any M/F YC members looking?
Show HN: Summarize IPs (bulk geo, asn, privacy report for IP addresses)
We recently launched a free tool that shows a summary of the top cities, countries, asns, routes and much of the other context that we (IPinfo) have for any IP addresses you paste into it.

Sample results: https://ipinfo.io/summarize-ips/result?id=239e90aa-88b8-4476-84c7-bfd10ed2de3f

You can paste any arbitrary text into the tool at https://ipinfo.io/summarize-ips and we'll extract the IPs.

It can be useful for getting a quick summary of a set of IPs (eg. click on first google result for "public proxies", copy and paste the results into the tool, and see where the proxies are located, and the networks they're on), for investigating issues (eg. your website gets a large spike of traffic, paste the recent IPs from your access log into the tool and see if there's a specific network that stands out), threat investigation, debugging and more.

We're planning to add more functionality and data points in the near future, and any feedback or suggestions are very welcome!
Ask HN: How can I be successful in job interviews?
Professionally I'm a freelance web developer, but on the side I create video games for myself, run a niche search engine and have a plethora of other projects that I work on which are all related to programming.

I have decided to attempt to get a full-time job for steady income... I'm sick of feast or famine.

I had several job interviews recently which have gone awry. Typically the process is as follows:

1. Intro emails
2. Phone interview with HR
3. Phone interview with some sort of department lead
4. Technical phone interview
5. Code challenge
6. In person interview + write code on a whiteboard.

I have failed interviews at every step listed above.
Mostly I'm failing miserably on 4 - 6.

I have over a decade of professional experience, but not a CS degree. I know multiple programming languages, but during most interviews I blank out on the questions asked. I panic and my brain refuses to work with.

The same thing happens when I'm asked to write code in front of the interviewer - I panic and lock up.

I've started to lose confidence in myself even though I know I'm good at what I do. Often times I feel that I'm being judged a bit harsher because I don't have a CS degree - though that could be me projecting my own insecurities.

What am I doing wrong? Am I in the wrong industry? Should I pursue a degree? Does anyone else blank out due to stress, and if so how do you overcome it? What can I do to improve myself and land a job?
Ask HN: Why are many Techcrunch and Mashable submissions from the same users?
There seems to be more and more techcrunch and mashable stories making it to the front page these days than ever before.

Sure, they're legitimate news sources but what happens is people vote up the a given submission because of the topic, not because TechCrunch or Mashable are the article of record. Conversation ends up clustering around them rather than perhaps a more in-depth blog post (perhaps the original source of a news story) which leaves the community less informed (I think anyway) and less distinct from other sites.

If I want TechCrunch and Mashable stories, I'll look at TechMeme. I always aspired that HN would be a place to discover blogs and more community-orientated links (individual's blog posts, startup's blog posts, etc).

I began to look at who was submitting TechCrunch and Mashable stories that made the front page, and it looks to me like quite often it is a collection of the same users.

To confirm I looked over:

http://searchyc.com/submissions/mashable?sort=by_date

http://searchyc.com/submissions/techcrunch?sort=by_date

(you need to page through the results set to get a clearer picture, obviously)

Particularly if you focus on submissions with >1 points, you can see the same names there. I'm not going to name them here, but you can see for yourself. In all the users I identified, all posted links from other sources too, but in a few cases they were mostly TechCrunch or Mashable.

I'm not sure if those accounts represent someone with an interest in the authors (many outlets make extra payments to authors for reaching traffic goals on a given story), users trying to be opportunistic with vote-bait stories to improve their karma or just users who only read mainstream blogs...

...but I wondered what the HN community thought.
Pocket porn: The 20 most popular "adult" sites for your phone
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/6/smartphone_mobile_porn_sites
Who visits porn sites on their iphone? A lot of you, apparently.
Re-invent crashes site and tells customer to f* himself
http://postimage.org/image/rjq0gis93/
Today I had bad standoff with Re-invent support. When got back from summer vacation found out that one of the websites is not working. Of course, they have been migrating stuff without notifying owners and left it crashed.

After verifying it works locally in Cassini and IIS 7.5, then on another shared hosting (Arvixe) in IIS 7.5 I asked them to set it up correctly. They blamed it on me and wanted me to "fix my code" beside facts it works on other locations. After couple ticket reopenings, this is what I get.

Moving from there ASAP. Never again...
Tell HN: Our Project, 365.io, is now $5 instead of $11
A week ago blehn and I launched 365.io, a website that allows you to undertake a Project 365 in a focused, organized, and elegant way.

Quite a few users signed up, but one piece of feedback we kept getting regardless was that people were hesitant to sign up because of the price, $11 yearly.

As a marketing move and experiment, we decided to lower the price to $5 (which is just slightly below cost per user) for the next few days, and increase the price by $1 for a week after January 1st.

Our reasoning is that feedback has been fantastic, but the app is not spreading well enough because of the price, so we're looking at this like a marketing move instead of a price cut. Our goal is to gather as many users as possible during this time of the year (whether we make a profit on them or not) so the app can spread more easily organically after this period is over.

Let us know what you think of our move!
India’s hottest start-ups
http://businesstoday.digitaltoday.in/india-s-hottest-start-ups-4.html
This is by no means an exhaustive list, there are tons of other startups in India which could have made this list.

fyi: 1 crore = 100 Lacs (Lakhs) = 10,000,000 = 10 million
Show HN
http://tonecheck.com/
Hi, i was wondering what the HN community thinks of this email tone check application? Do you think this can be done better with open-source?

Disclaimer: I am neither a founder or an employee at the company. Just someone who had a similar idea.
Is Xobni the next Google?
http://davidadewumi.com/2008/02/21/is-xobni-the-next-google/
Rebuttal?
Mark Zuckerberg's profile on Google+
https://plus.google.com/104560124403688998123/posts
At this point, who can blame him.
Wealth tax would force business liquidation to foreign money
If you tax a % of someone's worth: let's say they own 100% of a $1b company, and they pay themselves $1m/year, but the tax is 2% of their worth, then they must start paying themselves $3m/year. If the business cannot afford that, then they must sell a piece of their business each year to pay the tax.

Business valuations would plummet nationally because everyone would be trying to liquidate, because other owners must also liquidate to pay the tax, so no one would have cash left over to buy up these pieces, except foreign investors coming in to gobble them up.

So, Americans would lose interest in their own businesses (heaven forbid the government accepting payment of the wealth tax in shares, ie TAKING OVER their businesses). It wouldn't be a wealth tax as much as an economic crash, giveaway and takeover.

If someone cannot pay and cannot liquidate, then the government might seize their businesses(government controlled means of production has often lead to fascistic massacre in the past).

Also, how would you calculate how much a business is worth EVERY YEAR? It's worth what people are willing to pay for it. That would be wildly dynamic especially in the feedback loop of the mass liquidation.

It's such a terrible^squared idea that sounds so benevolent.
Show HN: Favicon alert bubbles
http://tommoor.github.com/tinycon/
A javascript library that allows easy manipulation of the favicon to include nice looking alert bubbles. This means that users can pin your site and still see when their attention is needed!

It's been done before, but in my opinion not in a way aesthetically pleasing enough for production use. This library also falls back to the standard number in page title approach for browsers that do no support canvas / dynamic favicons.

Thoughts welcome.
Ask HN: Please take part in experiment on HN's collective expertise.
There's a lot of really smart people from different backgrounds on HN. I thought I'd ask the HN community to post the one piece of advice that you could give a fellow HN'er from your own domain of expertise. Please upvote the ones you like the most, but only post one piece of advice.
'Super clone' sniffer dogs: Coming to an airport near you?
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/09/30/tech/innovation/sniffer-dog-clone-incheon/index.html
A small army of elite, highly trained clones are sent on a mission to root out drugs and ammunition from the city. Every few hours they report back to their masters, to whom they've been devoted since birth.
Compete in Startup March Madness 2011
http://seatgeek.com/blog/ncaa-basketball/startup-march-madness-2011
We're excited for March Madness here at SeatGeek and thought it would be fun to put together a huge bracket tournament where startups could compete against each other. Please, only one bracket per startup. Thanks!
Show HN: Fluent Feeds – A feed reader for Windows 11
https://hannesschulze.github.io/fluent-feeds/
I have recently started experimenting with WinUI 3 and decided to develop a simple feed reader with it. It currently has support for RSS/Atom feeds, as well as experimental support for a Hacker News feed provider.
Erlang: A New Way to Program That's 20 Years Old
http://gigaom.com/2007/12/19/erlang-a-new-way-to-program-thats-20-years-old/
Geeks everywhere got excited recently when they heard that SimpleDB might be based on Erlang. Why? Is Erlang the next big thing? Probably not -- it's a 20-year-old language that some programmers find weird.
Anyone Interested in Turning this Technology into a Web Application?
http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/scene-completion/
I think it would be a fun project / business but I'd like some help. Any takers?
Want more startup hubs? Show us your faces
http://startupsrule.com
If you want to make more startup hubs around the world, you need each city's local heros to show their faces to early-stage entrepreneurs.

http://startupsrule.com
Ask HN: Would You Ever Pay For Search?
My frustration recently has been the massive numbers of scraper sites polluting my SERPs. So, an idea I've had (that no doubt has been thought of before) is a search engine with editor curation & user voting and reviews to determine site rankings.

But in keeping with Jason Cohen's post, http://blog.asmartbear.com/customer-validation.html , "When ten people say they'll give you money if you build this thing, that's the only validation that counts."

So: would you ever pay $1-$2 a month for search, or is Google et al cutting it just fine for you?

(my first HN post, hoping I'm not breaking any rules I'm not aware of here)
Let's Hear It. The truth about how hard you've worked to get your startup going
http://buildingof.com
I want to hear your story on how you built your startup.

I'm working on a startup myself, and would like to learn & share lessons from various entrepreneurs on their venture experiences. I'm trying to get my startup off the ground, plus a full time job, so it's a difficult journey ahead.

I figured I'd take all the stories and put them up somewhere, so I created http://buildingof.com , which focuses on sharing an inside look at the toil and hard work that goes into creating a startup. At this point, I'm interested in talking with founders that have interesting stories to share and help everyone learn a thing or two along the way.
EBay Spinning Skype Out Public
http://www.siliconangle.com/ver2/?p=3996
eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY) today announced that it plans to separate Skype from the company, beginning with an initial public offering that is intended to be completed in the first half of 2010.
The Myth Of Our Free Market Past
http://www.theartofthepossible.net/2008/09/18/those-who-control-the-past-control-the-future/
Everyone is bitching and moaning, this week, that American free markets are being destroyed. This article points out just how far you have to go back to find a government who didn't have their fingers in the market.
Top 33 Coding Bootcamps In The World
https://www.switchup.org/research/best-coding-bootcamps
We've researched coding bootcamps around the world (taking into account reviews, price, location, course type, etc), and came up with the short-list of the top programs. Feedback welcome!
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev charged with using ‘weapon of mass destruction’
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/alleged-bombers-aunt-tamerlan-tsarnaev-was-religious-but-not-radical/2013/04/22/ca8f3214-ab5c-11e2-a198-99893f10d6dd_story.html
This is the most bizarre and dangerous definition of 'WMD' that I've ever seen.