skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hope it's not out of line to point out a competitor in a post like this, but a very good friend of mine has this service:

http://www.24hrassistant.com

She primarily sells to hair stylists and those people, but has lots of different customers that use it in pretty out-of-the-box ways...
On a side note, I wonder if a lot of the services listed here are really startups. Some of them have an amateur feel to them - there's nothing wrong with that - it's just that startup doesn't seem to be the best description for a lot of the services listed here (and not because they don't have any VC funding). If we take a polished piece of commercial software as an analogy for a startup, then some of these projects are more like shareware. ("shareware as a service")

just to be clear: I'm not criticizing the services here. Some look very useful and as the owners have said are already profitable. I'm just interested in how others define a startup and whether or not people think that term fits these ideas. How exactly do you define a startup?
Download Yahoo Messenger 10.0.0.1241 - FileHippo.com
I did an experiment and turned off javascript and redid the test... it still is unique enough to track a browsing session. Give it a try.

I would consider using Duck Duck Go if nothing was logged. Right now I use another service precisely because they don't log anything.
On the other end of the spectrum: there is a burger joint back home that will put a pickle on the sandwiches even if you ask them not to (and remind them and their manager and it ends up on the ticket in front of the cook/preparer). In this case (at least for me), free pickles equals worse customer service.
In chrome you just add an 's' in the URL in your default search engine settings.
Robot Exclusion Protocol
So did you ditch any sort of tracking? It doesn't look like you added cookies or anything. (very cool if so)
Seems to be a restaurant review site.
Yeah, I ditched it.
I just correct that thank you!
Interesting. That's close to what I had in mind, thanks.
I don't think so. I think my analogy was that given the data, if I can create a model that accurately predicts the data given, and is plausibly simple, i.e. for X=Y, Y=ordinal(X), then I can have some faith in the model.

To put it another way, if Gottman said:
Add up these 5000 variables multiplied by these factors to get the score
then I wouldn't believe it. But I think he said something much closer to (on p. 13 of the 98 paper):
We tried a couple of combinations of variables, that we had hypotheses for. One combination gives a very accurate predictor (Table 1, Husband high negativity). Two others are also accurate (Table 1, low negativity by husband or wife.)

I think where the paper went wrong, and what the Slate article is criticising is the claim made in the second column of p. 16, where they do seem to put all the variables into a model and pull the answer from nowhere. So, I'll give you that the 82% prediction is not justifiable. But negativity as a predictor for divorce seems well supported.

---

If I drop 30 monkeys out of different height trees and I measure 100 things about each monkey, each second, as it falls, and then I give you a model that purports to tell you a monkey's speed from those 100 measurements, then you won't be surprised to received an over-fitted piece of junk.

If instead I give you speed=constant * t^2, would I need to drop another 30 monkeys?
Certainly better for some uses. I think a key point is that there's no reason why Etherpad couldn't (or shouldn't) be built on top of Wave.
FUD; a wave-to-email gateway is solved by design.
Nobody except the contractors wants this to be simple. The contractors would love it though, there would be less income lost to "preferred vendors" who provide the contractors with a stiff take on the paychecks, and they'd get to negotiate their own rates.
You could put that together with this: http://3mindme.com/

Say: "I would like an email back about this email in 1 week."

Disadvantages to this:

* Your email goes out to them and gets stored for that long.

* You have to remember to include it as a bcc on every email you care about following up with.

* It doesn't automatically snooze if you get a followup.

* You have no way of tracking responses (in, say, a DB).

But it's a cheap solution that will do the job. Otherwise, there are special CRM packages for this. Unfortunately, I don't know much about them.
I was more referring to the climate in places such as here (HN) and so forth. We fall quite squarely into his target audience (based on previous postings anyway) and a good proportion of us are security conscious now :)
Possibly, but this is still my favourite:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+calories+are+i...
Jason, I think you are being too snarky.

Here's an example where Wolfram Alpha served me well:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+between+haifa+...

Nothing fancy, but it did the job and gave me a few bits of information I didn't ask for but were good to know.
Not convinced by the Linux comparison. The biggest thing about Linux (in comparison to the major competitors at least) is that I can dig into the guts and fix any bugs I find there. I can do this with Gecko and Webkit based browsers but this simply isn’t the case with Opera.
People wanting to hire contractors don't want this to be simple?
Because Python isn't Lisp.

I don't think python particularly handles image based programming very well (not that all Lisps do this exclusively, just that they support it well enough for SLIME to make sense). Right now I have a load of code in Python which I'm constantly changing and reloading into my iPython session and it can be a bit of a pain, my files are littered with "reload(x)" statements just so when I reload one the others also get reloaded. I've tried the deep-reload extension to iPython without much success but maybe this will help in the future.
I'm surprised no one has commented on this thread that The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (leaving her strong political leanings aside) provides an excellent overview of the shock therapy as it was applied to the USSR and other nations. It was by far the most disturbing book I've ever read.
I hope this history is not lost on my fellow Americans: "The Soviet system, created on the precepts of socialism amid great efforts and sacrifices, had made our country a major power with a strong industrial base. The Soviet Union was strong in emergencies, but in more normal circumstances, our system condemned us to inferiority."

We're at a similar brink, though via dissimilar circumstances. While we properly are looking for ways to repair and improve, I hope that there is a strong resurgence of both Democratic and Capitalist principles. The alternative, as some are leaning towards, has a well-documented trajectory. It would condemn us to inferiority.
A tip for anyone else with an upcoming wedding to avoid this situation: Keep track of all your RSVP's in a document (excel, google docs, etc), assign one "bully" on each side of the family (mothers, aunts, etc), when the "RSVP due by" date hits give the bullies the green light to get those answers.
Google Is Poised to Close China Site
Rope :)
I just turned user agents off.
Please critique my project. Is it a waste of the domain name?
Good idea. For the time being, I just turned user agents off. I have't really got much use out of knowing what browser's people are on anyway.
Do they have babies? Are any of them sick or old? Are there any low-skill Americans that don't have the tenacious work ethic of most immigrants?
Great to hear! I have been considering switching to DDG to give it a long-term try for a while now and this pushed me over the edge! DDG is now my default search site in FireFox!

Great work epi0Bauqu!
A brief history of pi
Apple COO Tim Cook awarded $22 million bonus
Cool. There was just a post the other day on that Polyglot Chrome extension with a similar goal. That one is at:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/plpjkjplknknmhfh...

The polyglot just auto-translates some of the words on the page. Might be a feature worth adding here too.
Seems to me that wave needs an overhaul at the product level. If I can't quickly discover compelling uses of the product then I think the product is flawed. It feels a lot like wave was developed in a vacuum compared to Google's other products. For instance, I don't think many people inside Google use wave, which is the complete opposite of gmail, gchat/gtalk, calendar and docs. That should be a significant signal right there.
Another reason I'm glad that my professional persona and my Internet persona are completely separate.
It is a bit disappointing. At my university, we were taught of this fallacy in the mandatory introduction to science course. I remember a beatiful analogy which went something like:

As long as both your sample data and your test data are collected between January and May, you can make a model that accurately predicts the time the sun sets based on the length of your hair.
Hmm..we do have a Firefox add-on and I am working on another one. I'm not sure why it doesn't show up there though. Thx.
JacksonPollock.org
Blogspam; article closer to the source: http://blogs.technet.com/privacyimperative/archive/2010/01/2...

Actual researchy stuff: http://www.microsoft.com/privacy/dpd/research.aspx (PDF and PPT)
Looks cool. However I don't see anything in any of the places (no pins and I'm not sure what it is suppose to do)?

So some more info would be appreciated
"It's easily mined from our rivers in winter," a party spokesperson said.

Bah-dum-chah!
If your business has 499 or fewer people, you are stuck with Android.

Incidentally, I know of at least one small business (4 people) which would like a mobile app for their employees. They are stuck with apple on the desktop, android on the phones.
Willow Garage Shares Specs for TeleRobot, Takes It To Show and Tell at School
Can anyone confirm that AppEngine does not work right now in mainland China? I've been thinking about moving to China for a while now and this would be yet another reason to stall on that decision. I know I can VPN out for Twitter / FB / Google, but that just seems such a hassle for an internet professional.
This is a very good point and is the fatal flaw of most metaprogramming. It does seem easy to generate quite confusing error messages by making minor typos. Clang does a much better job with macro expansion errors than gcc, but it's still not great. As for actually using debuggers, it looks like you're on your own to understand the implementation enough to be useful. I don't know if it would be feasible to write a gdb plugin to improve the experience.

OTOH, Cos offers more compile-time type safety than GLib, so you might hope that you'd need to spend less time in the debugger.
Seriously, this article ignores the important aspect of Wave, something that it doesn't ignore for something like Email. Email is useless without other people using Email. So is a chat program. Wave is useless without other people as well. This is why Wave isn't based around Google, but rather, a protocol that anyone can use.

Consider that email was first 'invented' in the early 70's, and SMTP in the early 80's, emails adoption speed was comparable to that of a glacier in terms of todays adoption speeds.

Wave is such a big undertaking that even Google will have to work hard to move it forward. But consider for a moment how much work is involved with email, and yet, today, how easy it is to integrate with your average website. Indeed, we don't think about how much is built on email. It's wide spread use lets us forget that it would be useless if no one else used it.

So yes, while the Google Wave client is still in its infancy, and Wave itself is still an early idea, the idea and what it represents is major. Email, IM, Social Networking, etc, won't be replaced by Wave, much like none of these replaced Email as a means to communicate. Rather, Wave will become apart of these means of communication. Wave is the protocol that allows for this communication.

Something as simple as Hacker News comments could easily be a wave, and it wouldn't require us, the users to do anything, yet we could benefit greatly from Wave being apart of the system.

So every time I see someone complain about Wave, I can't help but think that they would have said the same thing about email when it first appeared.
> Isn't that assumption always taken by default when considering nearly all market actions?

Yes, and bankers are generally motivated by self-interest when undertaking market actions. However, we are not talking about a market action. The question is what motivates Ben Bernanke's decisions as the head of the Fed?

Is he a selfish kleptocrat trying to enrich himself and his buddies, or is he providing prudent guidance to the country and economy as a whole? Personally, I disapprove of his role and distrust the Fed's entirely, so I cannot provide a reasonable answer here.
Ask HN: Nonstandard Masters Entry
A friend of mine wants to do Engineering/CS but can't really afford to do so. He has a Masters degree from a world class uni that's minimum top 3 in the field but has never done a university level Math course. How could he swing entry into a CS programme?

He hasn't done the GRE but at a lower bound I'd put him at 95th percentile Verbal, 85th percentile Math.

I'm guessing an Engineering course is impossible but a programming project portfolio would do it somewhere, but would he be able to get a full ride entry into a Ph.D. programme anywhere?

He has two years of a scholarship so he could get that much of an engineering degree. (a)Would that be sufficient in addition to get in somewhere (b)If there is no possibility of getting a loan is there any way he could get enough from summer work/internships/side projects to put himself through the last two years?

Thanks in advance.
Today is the Ides of March
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1191262

Report from a different source for comparison.
StartUp Innovation, a Systematic Approach for Success
And "my country" would be _______ ?
No, but there are rules if you do. (e.g., have to share with FBI when asked, have to delete after X months).

Most search companies want to identify you. The problem is keeping them from having too many records.
Virtual Offices
The real point was "if you're generous, you'll win loyal customers."
It seems like Buzz should have been based on Wave
All I do is maintain a general ledger. Everything else I need falls out of this data. I use gnucash.
I’d like to think that Hacker News is the kind of community that doesn’t need a tl;dr before they dive into the comments…
I'm surprised to that the discussion here is only about how Gottam came to his results, although that's fair game and I agree with you.

But there is learning here, too. My mother is a psychologist and she says that the most destructive thing she sees in marriages is the level of toxicity. Couples can have lots of fights, but if they never lose respect for each other, they're usually ok. It's when this respect devolves that trouble begins.
"It’s adding to my load what should be in yours."
What's utterly creepy about this is that employers aren't required to divulge that they made their decision based on unreliable online material. They should be. If a company wants to reject Jason M. Smith because someone posted on 4Chan that Jason W. Smith is an asshole, then fine, but they should be required to admit to their rationale with a straight face.
Wow, now that's what I call customer service :-) Thanks for listening... I'll give it a try.
> The central requirement is that the currency-makers be independent of just about everyone

Thus ignoring our entire system of checks and balances. Do you not see the danger, here?

> This angers everyone who thinks they know better than the central bank

AKA, every market participant.

> but rather that any currency should be kept far, far away from politicians.

In what sense are central bankers not politicians? They are not elected, that's for sure. However, they exercise a large amount of control over our economy and very much influence official political action. In a sense, they are very much a separate executive branch of our political system.
1. ~1 year

2. No, but an accelerator in Austin would certainly be nice

3. No

4. http://whyspam.me
Well the Etherpad guys are working at Google on the Wave team now so you never know
This may even be useful for Google Voice. After hanging up a call have an option to be notified after a period of time if you haven't received a call back from the phone number -- or email from that same contact.
Sounds like a pain point - better get to work on subversion for ms office ;)

EDIT: I just realized after I wrote this that Sharepoint has some of this functionality (versioning) but imo is a bear to use.
Basho's (Riak's Sponsor) Open Source Business Model
It probably has to do with the fact that HR decisions don't have much of an upside. If you make a good hire, it reflects well on him. If you make a bad hire, people question your judgment.

You have an upside in hiring if you'll directly work with the people you hire. If you're in an entirely different department, there's no real benefit. HR is just the gatekeeper.
There is no pre-existing "system of checks and balances" when it comes to banking. But let's pretend there is.

As an analogy, consider that we have managed to get on with a politically independent Supreme Court, with their least proud moment (Dred Scott) being when they decided to ignore their charter and bow to the will of the people.

I have no problem trusting independent bodies with things, so long as they are well-chosen and truly independent. History shows that this is a much better idea then trusting either the econo-politically elite or the demos.
true, true. Unfortunately we're also hard to monetize.
i don't really see how it's much different than just using twitter.com's search for "ruby" and seeing a bunch of results, aside from your affiliate links on the right.

perhaps add some kind of trending so one doesn't have to sift through pages and pages of results to see what's new/popular?

i think a more generic domain name would be better so that you could just use subdomains to affect the search. ruby.yourdomain, php.yourdomain, etc.
There is. If they notice they can email pg. If they don't notice they're not going to be contributing to the conversation anyway.
I have a weird tic where I double-click words on a page and select paragraphs at random. This page, though, takes a double-click to mean "take me to a new tab, and search for more stuff about this particular word".

It's something the NY Times does as well, and I don't like it very much. Does anybody else notice this?
Yes obviously spiraling military costs (aka security costs) had nothing to do with it. We should focus on stopping all infrastructure improvements, and all services and instead funnel that money to the Homeland Security and DoD. They only spend a few trillion a year.
He wrote about his site's architecture here: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-arc...

He also answered some questions on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=525048
http://www.tungle.me ties into Google Calendar & Google Apps as well.

I know a company that build billing for medical and they tried to build out a product like this but the people running it just hated it. They either get people all booked in horrible times or for a non-busy place people see that and associate it with being bad. One solution they never tried is trying to make it like the Apple store booking engine.
You probably have to use Ubuntu if this is the case, which will automatically shut out 99% of the world's users.

Secondly, the average user of Ubuntu probably doesn't pay for music anyway, so what is actually the target market?
Computer Games Are Chewy Fodder
You'd have be stupid to disagree with that. But there's a difference between "most efficient" and "efficient at all". I've seen Excel spreadsheets used to track orders, at a rate of 100 or so a day. Then it gets too big so new spreadsheet files are used and the filenames are dated (using inconsistent date formats, making it difficult to find a spreadsheet for a specific date range, and none of the regular users thought to rename the files). But finding historical orders is a nightmare because the order numbers are not based on dates. And two people need to edit the same spreadsheet at the same time, or someone gets the bright idea that they'll be more efficient if multiple people can enter the orders, so someone makes a copy of the current master, and the changes never get merged in. So there's duplicated data or data for overlapping date ranges in multiple files and no authority on which data is valid, it needs to be looked at every time to find out which one is the "real" version. But even that's hard because columns have been added and removed and reordered on all of them. And most of these issues are not even a matter of "using the right tool for the job", even though the root problem is just that; they are caused by not spending even a half-hour to think about things before doing them, and not having enough experience to say "boy, this is a real headache to deal with". So inefficiencies get piled on top of inefficiencies, all in the name of automation. And the few clueful people who are forced to use the system end up with a bad impression of computers.

If an ostensibly talented developer creates a system like that, they can remove "ostensibly talented" from their title.
Sneaking into Future: 25 Ultra Modern Websites Using HTML5
I agree with you. A start-up is probably something that in theory can take over the market it defines.
Wow - I was ready to rant about Xt Intrinsics or something then I had a look at the article and it actually looks pretty cool.

CLOS features in C - interesting!
You really don't need the apple store to distribute apps. with a small handful of people, it's easy to get their uids and build the app for them.
Ask HN: How would you invest $50,000?
I am in a financially secure position. I have no debt, I am single, no mortgage to pay, and no need to work (although I do it anyway because I enjoy it). I am not "super" wealthy either. Rather than having money sitting in the bank, I've decided to invest $250,000. $200,000 will go into vanilla/convserative investments. But with the remaining $50,000 I'd like to try something a bit more interesting. I have unlimited risk tolerance for the $50k, provided the investment has "home-run" type upside.

1. Excluding angel investing, what would you do?

2. Assume you have zero experience angel investing, but have a capable technical background. What do you do? How would you build an angel brand for yourself?
The Venture Fundraising Rejection Form Letter
I came across this form template, and thought they did ask very good questions regarding a startup. I have some startup ideas here, but I don't think any of them will reasonably survive this template.

What are your thoughts?