skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If only two people from this site have read the story, then yes.
A freebie tip is, yes, definitely target the smaller and niche pubs; don't spam Wired. The more helpful you can be, the more influence you have, and honestly, you're just not that helpful for Kevin Poulsen or Chris Anderson.

A press hit anywhere conveys an irrational credibility; think about it, it's not most people's job to parse which pubs have a reputation for editorial integrity. That's why the "Top 10 Pick" awards from places like SC Magazine (in my field) work so well. So, if "bang for the buck" is the goal, you'll get 80% of the value of a press hit by sniping at the small fish.

The obvious point to make about "the long game" in PR is that reporters and editors have ambitions too, and some of the smartest people in the trade are writing for the small fish; they'll be editors at Computerworld tomorrow.
These dreams are about to make a hard landing.

Allow me to rephrase that - there is no chance that jetpacks will be a conceivable way of personal flight in the forseeable future. Imagine how inefficient space rockets are: gravity drag constantly works against you and at all times you have to create about 10N/kg of thrust just to keep from falling down. And this is thrust you have to provide by expelling mass from your engines. It will be a cold day in hell before it will be viable to use this technique to stay in the air for prolonged periods of time. The problems that make it difficult to climb into orbit are doubled for atmospheric flight through mass ejection. (This is also why purely chemical rockets will never turn into a cheap way of getting into orbit, another pet pieve of mine).

Until we should happen to master large-scale production and lightweight, mobile storage of anti-matter (right, that's only going to be in like 50 years or so anyway), wings and atmospheric displacement are the only viable ways to achieve atmospheric flight of any significant duration. And among those, only wings allow you to gain any significant speed. If anyone can point out a flaw in my physics I would be delighted, but as far as I can tell this is the reality we have to face. No amount of daydreaming is going to change Newton's laws.

On the other hand, strapping your body to a set of wings while wearing an aerodynamic suit and a lightweight chemical engine (like http://www.jet-man.com/prod/index.html) could probably be a viable and exciting way to get closer to the air. Unless my intuition is off you will not get very good fuel efficiency, but some people think that modern sailplanes or experimentals are not a sufficiently fun and cheap way to stay in the air and travel long distances fast.

And even that being said, politics is a much greater impediment to the development of aviation than physics has been for the last 100 years. Google "aviation lawsuit" for a small taste of what anyone not playing squarely by the book have in store for them.
>I, and a majority of my friends, are in favor of the war.

I'm not opposed to it either (1). I guess I'm assuming you live on the coast; if you do, it's very surprising if you know multiple people who favored the war.

Regardless, my point is that many women make an emotional decision to support Hillary. They then come up with rational sounding reasons after the fact.

In any case, the point is that we know for certain that chemicals in the brain influence emotion and decision making (e.g., Ritalin). And the silliness/irrationality described on overcoming bias is mostly emotion defeating reason.

Regarding aggression specifically, we know that males are more aggressive both in humans and other mammals. Why do you suspect a non-chemical cause in humans, and a chemical one in other mammals?

>To reasonably be so certain I haven't had a girlfriend, you must think I am quite young. What about my writing style makes you think I am young?

I have no idea what your age is. I've never met a person who has had a seriously relationship and also believes women don't make extremely emotional decisions.

(1) I think freeing Kurdistan was sufficient justification, just as freeing Kuwait was sufficient justification for Iraq 1. At this point, I favor either ending it immediately or doing it right (split the country into small pieces, let them merge together if they want).
Those scripts do exist and can easily be found on the web. You simply input your URL, and they tell you stuff.
That's not a troll, that's a challenge. One that someone should take up. Not me, though... I'm too busy :-(
A dollar spent on blogging is worth 10 dollars spent on SEO, if our Google stats are predictive. Got $1000 to burn? Hire an intern (BTW: interns --- a best-kept-secret) and have them write blog posts for you.
Wish it didn't force me to register/login.
eHarmony's ability to market itself/word-of-mouth is impressive. My relatives/parents are like broken record players 'You know, Roy met his wife through eHarmony...' My friend Mike met his wife through eH as well - I remember him complaining about how long it took to answer the questionnaire set.
Media's next target: ISPs
I agree that many (but not all) women (and men) make bad decisions, act emotionally, make up ad hoc reasons after the fact, etc

Regarding aggression, we know that ideas are capable of causing aggression. I don't think this is in dispute: it is a possible cause. But we don't know that chemicals can do it, in humans. No one has suggested a mechanism by which they could.

I also don't agree that emotions are a separate thing from intelligence, which sometimes bypasses or overcomes it. I think that emotions are labels for (not amazingly good) ways of thinking -- they, like personality generally, are a part of ones ideas. In this case too, I submit that there is no coherent explanation for how they could be anything else.
How many people will just go along with whatever adversity they encounter in the relationship because they've "found their soul mate". It has to be, the computer said so.

The matching algorithm: m=rand(w);
I work in a cube every day and strategize/dream of getting out of my cube, sometimes hourly
Damn I was talking with them about investing some of my meager savings. Guess I should have trusted my instincts :( Wonder what the ROI was for angels.

Well I was certainly impressed when I saw the application. Nice work!
The first thing you should do is write it down. Write all of them down, in a notebook dedicated to nothing but your Eureka moments. If you don't have the notebook handy, write it down on whatever is, and put it in the notebook later.

If anything else related to that idea comes to you immediately(connections to news items you've read, statistics you've seen, specific features or UI choices you'd want to implement), write those down too, until they stop coming.

Then, let it sit for about 3 days. Do your usual tech reading during that time.

Does the idea keep nagging at you? Have you been writing down more related ideas on scraps of paper? Are you seeing connections to it in what you read, what you hear, what you say? If yes, then you might be onto something. So...

1) Take it to your braintrust.

If you don't have a group of good, trustworthy friends who are also interested in various tech subjects, you should. Tell them that you've had this idea, and you're wondering what they think. Ask if they've heard of anything like it before. (A lot of times people will say they think X is like your idea. Don't be discouraged; it's human nature to take things we're unfamiliar with and look for something we can relate to. Whatever they mention might not be anything like your idea, but research it, and note the differences.)

2) Figure out what space your idea is in.

Online video? Peer-to-peer? Social networks? Figure out if your idea is an improvement on current offerings, or something with a unique life of its own. If it's just an improvement(and it's not patentable), it's probably not worth starting a company for just to get it copied by all of your entrenched competitors. Instead, this might be a good opportunity to make connections in that space by offering your idea to whichever existing service you like the most.

If it is unique, then move on to...

3) Evaluate your commitment.

It should be about 9 days after you had your idea by now, or at least a week. Does it still excite you? Really excite you? If there appears to be a market opportunity for it, how much effort will it take to enter that market? Are you willing to make that effort? What if it took twice as long as you think it will?

4) Start the startup process.

We have plenty of "A-ha!" moments. If you've made it through the first three steps with the right answers, you've sifted out a moment that has the potential to be more than just an incremental improvement on something that already exists, and something that you yourself can commit to. You still need to do more research, such as "Why hasn't anyone else thought of this before?" and "Are other people going to want this improvement?". The good news is that if you can find a person who's as excited about it as you are, you may have found a good co-founder. And that's the best validation of your idea you can have at an early stage.
Yes; we should at least get some screenshots, or live demo.
My first formal programming class was a summer school (grade-school) experience using HyperCard so I have a sentimental spot for Hypercard Stacks. I remember being wow'd by the demos on the Mac SE.
I checked on the "obviously, I'm not as qualified as you in this sense" by looking at the user info, and I remembered that "Ideas to monetize new artifical intelligence" thread... so Marcus, sorry if it's offtopic, but how did you solve that problem? Are you doing captchas maybe? :)
The Census Bureau's data file
Aboriginal archive offers new DRM
Quarter of US iPhones 'unlocked'
ISPs new role in network control
EBay cutting listing fees, boosting commissions
So now I REALLY hope those SEO guys weren't doing this manually :) Sadly, I think they were.
news.ycombinator.com i think this firm can get the word out faster than you can imagine
Go build it.

Not a whole scaleable gigantic beast of code, but that minimal nugget that is its core.

This does several things:

1. Evaluates if you care enough to follow through.

2. Sees if it works the way that you hoped/wanted.

3. Identifies the hard bits.

Start building!
Ideas could cause aggression, certainly. Lots of things can.

However, we DO know chemicals can in humans. Pot and ecs reduce aggression, while meth increase it. I don't know if particular mechanisms are understood, I'm not a biochemist. But empirical observations do show that chemicals (in some way) affect aggression (and other emotions).

As for ideas, we don't know the mechanism there either. In fact, we understand the mechanisms of thought less than those of emotion. I can predictably make you and other humans I don't know happy or sad with chemicals; I can't do the same with ideas.
Which poker site?
nobody works at starbucks?
That's enough for me, I'm glad to hear things are going well. While it's hard to compete with Google's pocketbook funding the minutes, I think for a lot of Google services, they have a hard time competing with any competitor that has a human available in loop. People really, really value that and I'm sure you guys are reaping rewards from doing it.
Registering is surprisingly easy. "If you didn't set a password, you don't have one."
Disclaimer: it's been >10 years since I did any HyperCard/HyperTalk programming, so I will admit that I may mis-state some of the points below. That being said, HyperCard served as a major training ground for me when I was getting started programming, and I even went so far as to step through a fair bit of the obfuscated stack that made up Myst in order to understand how it had been implemented...

HyperCard suffered from a few obvious problems for larger-scale programming. First, it lacked any support for meaningful code structure and re-use. You didn't so much have functions or procedures so much as you had GOTO statements pointing between cards. For simple logic, that may be fine, but for more complicated workflow, the 1:1 mapping between cards and code blocks, and lack of shared state between them, means that non-trivial apps quickly became a mess of HyperTalk and hackish extensions written in C.

Also, it was tightly tied to a number of MacOS platform technologies; at a minimum, building a full clone of HyperCard would have required re-implementing some analogue to QuickDraw, including (IIRC) some undocumented hooks that the engineers at Apple used into the underlying system.

In the end, though, what probably killed HyperCard more than anything else was the rise of the web browser. Many of the basic operations of a HyperCard stack -- linking between discrete pages of data, providing simple interactive widgets and multimedia, and supporting complex layout of text and images -- are extremely well-supported by graphical web browsers, and the fact that resources are stored on the network mean that you don't have to pass around stacks on disk like you did in the HyperCard days.

That being said, there have been periodic efforts to fill the same niche, without continuing to enforce the more baroque limitations that HyperCard had. PythonCard was a very interesting project, but seems to be pretty much dead at this point.

The [Shoes](http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/shoes/) project seems to be a good bit more active at this point. It's still at a pretty early stage in terms of API stability, but _why is one of the more tenacious programmers out there, and the community that has already sprung up around it is impressive.
Empirical observations show that chemicals have some correlation with emotions, which does not imply that either causes the other.

Being able to make people happy with chemicals is consistent with emotions being purely ideas. It just takes a subconscious idea to interpret certain sensations, caused by the chemical, in a positive way. And for this idea to be shared by most people in our culture.
I currently work at 2K games! I'm a programmer there.

In march we are relocating to form a new studio with
the Bioshoch team... so I guess we would have worked
together.

Small world...
Epeus' epigone: URLs are people too
I think writing down is definitely the key. I then use a mindmap tool to kind of block out the logic and process to see if it makes sense(think like a user). Then I see what I can do to make it really unique. The classic key ingredient.
#lisp in ten easy pieces
Inform 7 programs read this way: http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Inform%207.html

This style makes it harder to write but easier for novices to read. It's not the tradeoff you would want for serious programming - the training wheels get old fast, but it makes sense if you need or expect lots of novices to read it.
Founder Burnout and How to Avoid It.
Charles Nutter of JRuby on the DLR
Jeez. Sometimes it feels like I'm a subletter. Every few months I "pack up" and move to a different service online. Wouldn't it make more sense to leverage delicious and use a common tag like "toread"? I've been doing that for a while and it works pretty well.
ok i do not see Thomas Edison on the first page. wtf is up with that.
I work at http://auctionpal.com - a startup in Waltham, MA.

(I'll admit, i only do it for the rails experience)
Was that supposed to be insightful? Do bitter and arrogant count as cylinders of the blog post genre?
"Before HyperCard, programming was more or less the exclusive domain of professional programmers."

I loved HyperCard (still have some of the reference books on my shelf in case it does come back) but a statement like this is way off base. Tens of thousands of non-professional students and enthusiasts were writing and sharing BASIC programs long before HyperCard and Turbo Pascal was a huge sensation at the time.
Doing CAD - Computer Assisted Diagnosis - working on improving early cancer detection in Mammography.
YouTube + Digg + Obama = YouBama
Reddit: "merely a collection of trivia, narrow, shallow, and sensational"
Zen and the whole "enlightenment" thing is a basically a sedative which some people mistake as some kind of puzzle or IQ test. The whole point is to help you achieve a kind of inner peace. Although it may be entertaining to some, that's not its purpose and it has little to offer anyone already living a healthy life.
Web Developer for CollegeHumor / BustedTees also run priceadvance.com on the side.
I didn't learn anything out of that one.
a visual display of all prior presidents, none of whom look the remotest bit like Obama

There's more to it than that. Obama looks, sounds, and acts presidential, and the disproof was in some way or another inadequate.

the party mouths decided that Obama was their future candidate

Hillary is winning the vast majority of super-delegates, so party leaders seem to be supporting her, not Obama.

Obama is the one chance for the Democrats to lose the white house yet again

Would you feel the same about an Obama/Edwards ticket?

McCain wins.

What reason do you have to think that Romney won't be winning the nomination?
This is probably a moot point for web startups but some PR people also help you get the right "message" across to analysts (e.g. Gartner) which may make sense if you're selling stuff to people who subscribe to them.
I agree. But I think Instapaper is interesting for its interface alone.

Ideally, cooler interfaces should be implemented over existing APIs. Stand on the shoulders of giants.
Indian Origin - VC
What can you do with mind mapping ?
Good idea....

But if it is that easy I suggest you move the register field to the front page. Just seeing a link that says register will lose you a lot of potential customers because a link that says "register" is normally associated with a form field that goes on for pages and people will not bother clicking. I know I didn't until I read you comment.

I think you will up your conversion ratio about 25% by doing this.
I'd strongly encourage you to rent some screens and a keyboard while you're abroad, buy them (used, if possible) and sell them used when you leave, buy them abroad and ship them home to yourself, ship them to your destination and then ship them back...

Whether or not you will be able to find any desk space abroad is, of course, a different problem.

Keyboards and monitors are now lightweight and cheap. I'm hoping to make this fact work for me when next I need to relocate temporarily...
Where's a story down vote when you need one?
>Empirical observations show that chemicals have some correlation with emotions, which does not imply that either causes the other.

Timing and randomization shows that chemicals are the cause. Double blind experiments must have been done at some point, which would show the effect is causative.

As for drug effects being cultural, I disagree. Amphetamines also cause aggression in rats, for instance:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/p2745782608v6558/
interesting point...
You're quite wrong. It's not really about achieving an inner peace, it's about being right here, right now. If you're angry, you're angry. If you're ecstatic, you're ecstatic. It's about learning to not waste the time we have by paying attention to what we do have.

It's not about being sedated at all, if anything, it's about waking up.
> Why Doesn't Anyone Give a Crap About Freedom Zero?

No no no, that's not how it works - Tell me, why should anyone give a crap about freedom zero?
'scp <user>@localhost:<src> <dst>' works reasonably well when I need it...
I've always thought that for blog comments, the captcha should actually take the form of a few short SAT-style questions which would test reading comprehension. E.g.

"Which one of the following is not one of the points the author is trying to make"

"Which of the following best describes the authors' opinion of Java?"

"What did the author cite as his source for his labor statistics?"
Well, I think Google is cool. So there's one customer.
There are a lot of startup founders here. Would you pay for this?
Well, I have no first hand experience of the phenomenon we're talking about ;) But the way I understood it, it's about no longer not seeing reality by being distracted by your own thoughts.
Bruce Schneier: Security and Privacy aren't opposites
You are all wrong and you are all right - that is Zen.
PS i wouldn't
Fair enough. It's often infuriating how stuff doesn't transfer in text; I probably would have thought the comment was harmless and funny had it been aloud and intoned correctly. Anyways, no harm, no foul.
I think their god-awful name had at least a little to do with it.
Try vipassana.
I can't repeat this quote enough:

"Marketing is a tax you pay for being unexceptional".

(holds for PR too).

I'm not saying you shouldn't do it when you have a great product... What I'm saying is that companies spend too much money/effort trying to get people to talk about them and not enough making their product worth talking about.

Why isn't your product worth talking about? Once you conquer that (much harder) problem, you'll have the budget for a great PR firm who can start pouring gasoline on your fire.
else:
pass

Why is that there (and a 5-space indent to boot)? Also, there were bugs in that you could go on a date if you had < 0 money, and even if you had money, you could spend more than you had. Finally, what's the point of setting all these variables?

Sure, I'm being cynical, but I just didn't find it that funny, and it's not because I don't know Python.
And here's a book (complete text online) about vipassana meditation that is very practical:

http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html
I thought I'd have a go at this. The "no tables" crowd always seems to sound morally superior so I recoded a site using these techniques.

It's a lie. 90% of the secret is that he makes a DIV to be a TABLE and one to be a TR and some to be TDs using the display:table, display:table-row, display:table-cell. If you want a tabular layout, use a TABLE.
The Final Prejudice (David Deutsch)
My reasoning for why chemicals do not cause high-level human personality traits depends on intelligence, so experiments on non-intelligent rats do not contradict my position.

---

Double blind experiments (with controls, randomization, etc) do not show causation, they show correlation. You need to have an explanation of what the cause is, or that kind of study doesn't get you anywhere. Because without an explanation, you don't even know what you should be looking for, or have any idea why that correlation exists.

BTW, if you know of a reputable, scientifically-oriented source which believes that double blind experiments demonstrate causation in the absence of an explanation, not just demonstrate correlation, I'd like to see it.
Sun Labs Lively Kernel | Javascript Web Programming Environment
Or just get image stabilizer!
I was lead programmer at PKR http://www.pkr.com
The site looks bad (remembers me the "rich dad" kind of thing), but the articles are actually very interesting and useful.
It looks like a descriptive language rather than a Turing-complete programming language. Or am I wrong?
RailsConf 2008 registration is now open
I wish more web developers took a moment to state what their site needs up front. I tried to log in a few times with no success, then decided to try different browser settings. Enabling cookies fixed things. The "login failed" page should clearly tell you to enable cookies.
So water is wet, eh? DDDownvote
Darn it. I thought this was going to be about kestrels and starlings.
16 Puzzles for International Puzzle Day
I recommend that book as well.