skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Long ago, manga aspired to be like Dragon Ball Z: graphically iconic, with a story more coherent than it probably needed to be. Now there's the ADHD-addled Dragon-Ball-Z-inspired One Piece, a manga for the Twitter age if there ever was one.

Pop culture was best when you, the reader of this sentence, were 12: http://i46.tinypic.com/1625ims.gif

I remember watching DBZ after school, and while it is certainly "graphically iconic", there is no legitimate way to claim it has a coherent plot. It seems like the author is remembering his Saturday morning cartoons through some rose-tinted cokebottles.

I won't even touch "Anime is terrible. It used to be okay."
starring emails is a critical part of (my) email work flow.

It's far too many clicks on the mail iphone app to "flag" an email, so I use the gmail web ui on my iPhone as my email client.

So then I want my starred emails to appear on my desktop too, right, so I use gmail in a web browser. But then when I quit my browser (or accidentally close the tab) I'm disconnected from email.

So I could wrap gmail in a fluid app. But then it's a very "dumb" mail client.

Mailplane adds a number of critical features to gmail on a desktop, specifically:
drag and drop of attachments.
copy and paste images into emails and they're attached.
growl notifications of new emails or google chats.
I believe I read sometime that all posts without a URL (i.e. "self" posts) get a discount of about 40%.
Yeah, that was 20,000 words of relentless positivity.
Exactly. The only individuals relevant to evolutionary processes are those that reach reproductive age.
I've been looking for an app like this for a long time. Do you have an email? Have lots of feedback.
Good article, but about 3 or 4 times longer than it should have been.
Did anyone actually read this novel?
a topologist would say they have different fundamental groups

In the affine real plane, yes. In the projective real plane, all (non-degenerate) conics have the same fundamental group.
here's some i initial feedback...

first launch open the "Add account" window instantly

username = email address?

one account = change view to the client inbox rather than the "accounts" view?

The "address book" button doesn't work: says I need to be composing an email in order to add a recipient - despite being on the compose screen

thought about offering push notification for $n/month? I'd pay $1/month for it.

you need a website to pitch mailroom to users :)
Littlest station gives us the 'sound' of Mars Express
advertising has value for us as a consumer

Advertising is an attempt to make us modify our behavior, regardless of whether it's in our best interests to do so. Marketing and truth are orthogonal.

How exactly would you find stuff otherwise :)

I'd look for professional and customer reviews which would likely convey more useful information than ads with bikini girls next to the product.
Alex, how does your search on Mailroom compare to Remail? I loved Remail's wicked fast search on my iphone.
I think you're right about micropayments. I think most everyone's thoughts are in hindsight, using existing reading patterns to determine value. However, as soon as you actually have to pay to read an article - reading habits change.

It's like free food. A lot of people will eat anything when it's free, but that doesn't mean they will actually buy it.
Started out reading, then scanning, finally skimming for section heads and interesting topics.

The problem is that the author didn't make a cogent point and back it up. Instead he started off with a lot of excuse-making, then went into a list, but kept deviating from the list to talk about video games (which, I guess, should have been the topic?)

It had the feeling of a long list of grievances strewn together, ranted about, and then tacked on to a couple of other conversations.

The strength of the article was in the negative first-person impressions of Japanese culture. He should have stuck with that, cut out the apologizing and made that just a sentence or two at the end. Then he should have tightened the hell out of the prose and tried to make some kind of thesis that his stories supported.

Other that that, the first-person stuff was good. But damn -- this guy is an editor? The structure is a mess.

At one point he even admits how bad it is -- and then continues on in the death march towards the end.
the gmail iphone web search is awesome, mailroom uses that.
"The issues that bother you at the beginning will be what kills you later."

This section describes a people problem, and I think the headline should be narrowed to that realm. Otherwise, a good, honest list that I believe will ring true to many HN readers.
> Advertising is an attempt to make us modify our behavior

Absolutely. That doesn't mean it is valueless.

> I'd look for professional and customer reviews which would likely convey more useful information than ads with bikini girls next to the product.

That works if your looking for something. How many useful products would you miss? Quite a lot I bet :)
UPDATE: Site should be working fine now -- fast, no problems with the order or the links.
Very good essay, not just on the specifics (many of which you'll be familiar with) and looking at the problem from both sides, but in this conclusion that getting it right is important now:

"[ Logic would dicate this would be an employer's market], [h]owever that doesn’t mean that employers don’t need to worry about making the advertisement attractive and descriptive. Actually, I’d say it’s the opposite – since I know that there will likely be hundreds of other applicants, I only send a resume in for jobs that I think I have a very good chance of getting. I’m sure I’ve skipped over good positions just because the description didn’t communicate that to me – and I’m sure I’m not alone.*"
If they won't give you this information, ask yourself if these are the type of founders you want to work with?
This is great stuff, kudos to Kevin.

The "looks like/is a goose" one reminds me of looking for a "market alternative" (from the book "Crossing the Chasm"). The market alternative is how potential customers presently deal with the problem the new product solves, and it has a name and an existing budget. This helps to communicate what the product is to the customer.

If it's hard to find such a market alternative, it's a sign that the product isn't ready to 'cross the chasm' into the mainstream - that is, it
won't be attractive to pragmatists (who just want a percentage improvement on existing methods, with minimal change). It's still in the non-mainstream pre-chasm realm populated by techies and visionaries (who think the tech is cool in itself, or who can see a new way to use it to make money, respectively).

It might also be that the target market selected isn't suitable, i.e. there might be another application of the technology and for another group of customers, for which there is an existing "market alternative".
Ah okay, so starring (which is not a part of my workflow) is the unique selling point. Thanks, got it!
Just Ask HN (or more precisely, url-less) posts
this guy is an editor? The structure is a mess.

Aha it makes a little more sense now. Editors are usually poor writers/reporters - their skill set is different (which doesn't excuse the fact he clearly never copy-edited what he wrote)
I've mixed feelings about this mistake.

Even if your error was not using consistent hashing, what's preventing you to modify the program in order to use two caching systems for a limited period (the time needed to rebuild the cache)?

So you can use a better distribution strategy, and finally shut down the old cache and use the new.
Tim Rogers is a nutjob. But he's got a few interesting points buried in there regarding language.
I only read about half that article before losing interest, but one argument jumped out at me: the mandatory office parties and drinking outings. This, IMO, is not a Japan-only phenomenon, although I'm sure the Japanese put their own cultural twists on this lovely concept.

After college, I went to work in a bank in New York. The in-crowd in my group went out for drinks, together, at least three times a week. I never saw any appeal in $10 martinis or $6 beers — especially with a bunch of people with whom I just spent 10 working hours. Needless to say, it did not take long before I was considered "not a team player." (My bosses liked me, so I did well enough before I realized I loathe corporate life and left, but my peers were not fans and caused considerable trouble.)
I founded my company together with my dad. He is almost 60, but he's having tons of fun working from home doing QA for the latest web technologies, as opposed to his last job, where he was QA'ing 30 year old COBOL bank applications.
Ask girls about their experiences in all girls schools and ask them if they'd like to experience that for the rest of their lives. It's unlikely that killing off all men and then cloning the remaining females is a viable solution to world peace.

In answer to your actual question, though, you proffer a world with no war in violence as an ideal. However, I challenge that idea that you would even enjoy living in such a world; or at least enjoy living in such a world that is necessitated by a total lack of violence.

In elementary school, we learned that the central element to every story is conflict. A story with no conflict is boring. The same is true of life.

And then add to that that it's impossible to have a world without conflict without giving everyone a lobotomy, which would then result in the sudden collapse of civilization and the extinction of the human race...

It's a very simplistic world view you have that all violence is wrong. Sometimes violence is necessary, and sometimes it's entertaining (sports or action movies, anyone? Or a good beheading in the old days?). But even if you disagree on those two points, conflict is inherent in any system where individuals of the same species compete for resources.

There are such things as dumb questions, especially if they're hypothetical.
Add nonsmoker to the list.
The plastic goes yellow but there is often a film of brown sludge that stinks of cigarettes... it's not pleasant.
I thought it would be interesting to see just these posts so I whipped up something to do it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/ask

Here's what it takes to define such an operator, in case anyone's curious:

(newsop ask ()
(listpage user
(msec)
(retrieve maxend*
[and (>= (realscore _) front-threshold*)
(cansee user _)
(blank _!url)]
ranked-stories*)
"ask"
"Post Without Urls"
"ask"))
What content is censored in USA and other "free" countries?

I mean, it's not that we just get the full firehose here, and other countries are variously prudish. In America we do filter things especially for child porn, and also for various other illegal topics (especially intellectual property).

Before you jump on me and say that we're just protecting children (or whoever the victims of other censored crimes are), please consider how well the actual legalities map to actual objective harms, or even to community-accepted morals.

I assert that we're still subject to a non-trivial degree of censorship in America, and the boundaries of that censorship map very poorly to an objective harms, and only approximately to any morality that's pervasive through our culture.

So any argument against filtering for the laws and culture in other parts of the world can't just be "censorship is wrong", because then you indict our own rules as well. It's a much more complex question.
yeah I was just going to say that. Why the F deal with the overhead of a relational database only to use it for key/value pairs? Is it just so mature that it's not worth it to trust anything else?
An interesting article, but the title left me with a question that the article completely failed to answer: what about the lesson "don't spend your family's life savings on your startup"?
Reading the article I felt that just like how he is comparing current Anime to DBZ (what he remembers) is the same way he is comparing his current feeling towards Japanese culture to what he thought it would be.

It feels like reality has settled in and his daily life has some deeper rooted problems than the stickers being placed on the barcode a certain a way.

Regardless he gives a view of the culture that you don't often hear about.
Is it possible to have it as a link at the top of the page too? Because people are sure to forget - or new users won't find out about it for ages :)
I suppose it's a matter of taste, and I just look at C-style macros as a means to an end.

I suppose I think the fact it's not more common has to do with this knee-jerk reaction to avoid macros like some kind of plague.

Regarding your other point, I agree: at a certain point hacking up the DSL in perl or lisp is going to give enough greater flexibility that it's going to be worth the additional complexity (to the build system, documentation, programmer-requirements, etc).
Great. Thank You.
They might be. You don't need a license in startupology to start a good company. Some people think (erroneously) that it's bad to have people talking about company numbers. Conversely, there are some m-teams that are extremely "open" about numbers and valuations that will, in the end, totally screw over everyone on the team. When it comes to startup equity, let me say it again: you have no rights. The exceptions to that bald assertion tend to prove the rule.

Are you doing what you love? Do you like the people you work for? Is the company thriving? Each of those questions is probably more important to your outcome than your "percentage".
I'm just testing this. (I literally just pasted it into the repl.) If it's super popular I'd consider adding it to the top bar. But it will be on http://news.ycombinator.com/lists at least.
Ask HN: Want to create $5 Excel add-in for charity, help with ideas
Hi,

I want to create a $5 Excel Add-In that will support an Australian charity that supports
people who care for disabled people.

It will be totally trustware, in that people can download it and if they want to continue using it they should
pay $5, which will be donated 100% to the charity (my business will cover all costs), but I wont have copy protection.

I'm looking for better ideas. Currently my best ideas are :

An Mp3 library.
- When the open the add in it can scan your hard disks, locate and list all audio files.
- You can save the file information to a worksheet
- Possibly load metadata on the files from a free web api (does a free music metadat api exist ?)

A DVD library.
- Manually enter DVD information and then record whether you've leant the DVD to someone.
- Would be cool to allow bar code images to be used but I doubt there are free lookup services
to get the DVD information from the barcode

There has to be better ideas than these :)

I think the idea should have relatively broad appeal, although I guess it's a big world and even a specialist
tool could do well.

I am going to stick to making it an Excel Add-In because I think that's a pretty big market and it's something I
have experience with.

Cheers
Sam
This is one survey I found, thoug I'd be very interested in seeing a more statisticall valid survey. http://nmc.itdevworks.com/index.php/2009/08/facebook-usage-h...
imho it's bit unfair to compare LaTeX to MS Word, as the other is typesetting system, and the other is word processor. How does LaTeX output compare to Adobe InDesigns or some other tool that actually cares about typograpy?

My main gripes about (La)TeX are that Unicode seems to be an afterthought, it has its own peculiar font system and creating custom layouts/styles with it seems to be harder than it should.
I like that GUI, but it is unclear what your username is for if the password is not given to you. I think you mean that the password is given by the login provider, but then does that mean the user has two loginid's with you? [One for you and one for the provider] I am not the user who thinks you should google for your facebook account, but unfortunately I guess I am a bit confused! I wish I weren't because I really like the OpenID idea and haven't had troubles with the GUI myself... except it does take more screens it seems.
The linked article (especially "the more I use any one service the more power it has over my digital life") provided me the motivation to crystallize some thoughts about Facebook Connect:

Premise 1: With Facebook Connect, a business--the primary interest of which is to keep making money--is in charge of your online identity.

Premise 2: In real life, you are (mostly[1]) in charge of what you look like, where you go, what information you reveal, etc.

Premise 3: Premise 2 is correct unless you're working for a business, in which you agree by contract to devote certain amounts of time to certain activities and agree to give up some privacy (e.g. email and phone use).

Claim: Facebook wants you to work for them. In fact, you are whenever you use their products and services. You are making them money in exchange for your time and effort. You also gain access to things that only Facebook provides.

I want an internet where each user controls all their appearance, connections, suggestions, etc... just like I do in the rest of life. OpenID seems to be a better solution, in my opinion, then letting Facebook be in charge. That said, I realize many online users nowadays don't even realize the value they willingly hand over to Facebook to manage, and many are happy to do so because it lets them be socially connected with minimal hassle. What we need is a revolt against FB connect and it's Google Buzz kin. A declaration of making a better internet, for the people, by the people, with personal identity controlled by each individual.

--

[1]assuming you're not famous and the media is following you, or living in an oppressive country that monitors your every move.
tl;dr

edit - that's not entirely true, I got about 1/10th of the way through and realised I could do more constructive things with my time.
Awesome feature. Just in checking it out, I found several excellent questions that it would never have occurred to me to ask.

Thanks for implementing this!
Didn't even know lists exist. That right there is killer (best comments, etc.) Most of the time I read HN for the comments.
Great feature, thanks.

A parallel feature for "rate my startup" posts would be useful; those self-posts also tend to get lost.
What do you think about the Twitter Sign-in API? I like that Twitter involves delimited, public information, so linking it to other accounts may be less problematic.
iPad might enable a paid content model that works. It has a frictionless payment system that handles small transactions. iPhone OS offers more robust interaction capabilities than web technology.

Most importantly, the public is accustomed to paying for apps. Paid content doesn't work on the web because people expect it to be free. Consumers view apps as objects, more like books or magazines, which they expect to pay for.
ala Matt & Trey's clipper chip...
To elaborate on cperciva's (correct) point:

On a projective plane a parabola contains a single point at infinity, connected (both figuratively and topologically) to the two open ends. A hyperbola contains two distinct points at infinity each connected to one end of each of the two usual components.
I think I was unclear WRT to your last point. I'm saying that "we", the STEM types, live in a popular and to a certain degree also a higher culture that is a superset of the culture that those in "the humanities" live in. It's a very broad generalization, perhaps colored by my being a part of a sub-group that would go to the ballet, Shakespeare productions, Ring Cycles (and each of us had at least one poet and painter we really liked, etc. etc.) ... but then again those who didn't like attending "operas [that] last three or four days" nonetheless had at least a minute appreciation, e.g. we weren't denigrated for our particular interests.

I was told an anecdote by someone in a course by Sherry Turkle: he said that one day there were many absences due to a Grateful Dead concert and that she couldn't comprehend this. Unfortunately I can't remember the details of her incomprehension, but at least as of the early 80s I didn't know anyone who knew her who thought she had a clue about what she was studying.

Perhaps I should say that there was nothing in the culture (as construed above) of those in "the humanities" that was out of bounds for us, whereas e.g. they'd never get jokes like the ones about an Abelian Grape, or better, a spherical cow ("Let us solve Schrodinger's equation for a cow. First assume...").
One difference with Livly is the type of research being done - harnessing the innate immune system to develop a true cure, as opposed to developing a vaccine or a way to marginally increase the lifespan of someone with cancer, for example.

A lot of money has been spent on cancer research... The NIH estimates over $157 billion, and that was in 2002. There has been little progress. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bookshelf/br.fcgi?book=cmed6&...

It's not simple enough to say that spending more on cancer will result in the same amount of progress. A little can go a long way in the right hands. That is the case with Livly. It's a self-funded startup focused on a cure, not on being published or getting publicity.
I would second this. My last post about Cadmus got buried almost instantly. Thanks.
The first time I read this comment the title had a typo ("Beautfy" instead of "Beauty") that has been corrected. By YC, I suppose.
Life would be an excruciating slog if I had enough time to write a fucking novel about the things I hate in a place I chose to live.
England trying to top DMCA, Big Content trumps Economics
3 What-Ifs to justify Apple's stock price
"In the long term, we are all dead." J. M. Keynes
Choosing a price for your webapp or startup using multivariate testing
I'd be interested to hear how this turns out.
Has anyone here used a free, open-source SO clone? Any thoughts on which are good or bad?
Warning: Your reality is out of date
In the US, if you are given shares of a company when you join, you must pay taxes on those shares.

Let's say the startup is currently valued at $5M, and you are given shares for 1%. You need to write a check to the IRS for your share of $50,000 in income.

Alternatively, if you are give the equivalent number of options, you do not have any tax liability until you exercise those options.

This is one reason (of many reasons) why it is almost unheard of for a startup to grant employees shares instead of options.
10-20% doesn't sound nearly as bad as single digits. partially psychological I suppose.
Why the double post? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1173761
I hadn't considered the meat part before, but he's right, nearly everything has meat in it. USA is getting pretty vegetarian-friendly, Japan not so much.

As to the other complaints: rose-tinted glasses looking back to "the good old days", plus a bit of culture shock. It's a frickin' different culture, of course you're not going to understand / go along with it perfectly.

I'll fully grant that some of the cultural habits are downright dangerous (not merely creepy), but every culture has that. Sounds like he's merely found out recently that Japan isn't some holy grail location like he seems to have thought it was, and is merely a location on Earth.
Easy payment is something we need to improve on. Online payment needs to become more accesible. We've got Google Checkout, PayPal, credit cards,... but they're all just proxies to where my money is (bank account). They all need to be set up and not every site accepts them, requiring you to join another system.
Plus on different parts of the world some of them might not even be available to you at all.
I wish banks worldwide would work together to create a fast and reliable online wire transfer protocol. (fast, solid API to verify payments,...)
Bugging bugs: Learning to speak microbe