skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just finished frying my steak and now I need some ideas on how to build a restaurant around it.

I'm sorry but you are approaching this from the wrong end. A project like yours is 99% a business effort and 1% technical. I am not even sure the market for something like this exists. There are convenience issues, there are trust issues, there could be regulation issues (google for a recent car sharing project and how it got shut down because it went against taxi licensing bylaws). You are effectively asking for help building a business plan, while all you have is a very basic undeveloped idea.
> Can't the entrepreneur say, look that was for the angels because the round was so small and it doesn't make sense for us in a round this large?

You can say anything that you want.

However, remember that they don't care what other people get - they care what they get. FWIW, you should have the comparable position.
The "think 0-0" mentality is one of the oldest sports memes around :)
Ask HN: What do you think of the Give Me My Data application for Facebook?
Now that several HN participants are announcing that they are quitting Facebook, I wonder what each of you think about the Give Me My Data application of Facebook, which allows Facebook users to download their data from Facebook. I learned about the program in the New York Times yesterday, and have been using it to archive my list of 610 links submitted to Facebook.

Usually a lot of the links I submit to Facebook are the links I see here on HN or directly in the computer industry press about dodgy aspects of online security on Facebook. One old friend of mine teases me about worrying about Facebook, pointing out that ANYTHING I put online is subject to being searched up. Yesterday, when I linked to Give Me My Data, he replied, "Should be called "Give Him All Your Data," suggesting that he and I were going to have a role reversal about who was more worried about online privacy with regard to that application. What do you think?
Goldman received over $12 billion directly from the AIG bailout. Perhaps it could have survived without TARP, but almost certainly not without both TARP and the AIG bailout.

Would Goldman Sachs have crumbled if AIG were allowed to default? The company claims it was properly hedged, but it stretches credibility to believe this given (1) its massive exposure to AIG and (2) the state of the financial markets at the time.
I like charts that don't have any numerical basis.

You've just arbitrarily illustrated their trend towards fewer privacy restrictions in a way that will certainly sway people to your argument but only represents your sentiments and nothing concrete about the actual situation.

While I agree with your argument, this really bugs me, particularly in dealing with the audience you've chosen to address and the false authority it might lend you to those outside of it.
P.S. The thread on HN mentioning the New York Times article

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/facebook-app-...

was posted yesterday, to upvotes but no comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311387
24 Extra Hot Free Linux Games (Part 2 of 3)
Church Numerals Using C++0x Lambda Expressions
Samples of motivating Research Paper Ideas
When students are forced to embark upon research paper projects, the first thing that they need to do is to come up with attention-grabbing research paper ideas. However, there are countless research topics one can write about
You can often find great bargains on used exercise equipment, as it's often bought and then rarely used. Check craigslist.
Not to rain on your parade, but I'm having a hard to understanding how you'll undercut shipping companies. Their prices are so low because they rely on economies of scale (large trucks and a very sophisticated supply chain) and complex algorithms that determine the optimal route for delivery.

First, there's the problem of paying the couriers. I can't speak for others, but I would never carry a package in my car for $5 -- it's not worth the hassle. I might carry 10 at once for $50, but even that payout is very low for my time... not to mention that the likelihood that my route intersects with 10 different packages being shipped on the same day is extremely low. Drivers working for shipping companies make a relatively low wage, and they ship lots of packages. You'd have to pay couriers per-package, and at a much higher marginal rate than shipping companies pay. That means additional overhead, which means your prices will go up.

Then you'll have extremely high overhead with respect to fraud, insurance, etc. UPS/FedEx packages are handled by professional drivers, and I'm certain that their insurance costs are still astronomical. This means more overhead, which again means higher prices still. In fact, I'm willing to bet that even if you could find an insurance agency willing to underwrite your operation, the cost to insure each package would be higher than the overall cost UPS/FedEx charges their customers to ship.

Finally, you're going to have a hard time convincing customers that your service is reliable and safe. That means even for the customers you will get, your cost per acquisition will be much higher than UPS/FedEx. That won't hurt you too much right now, but it will be a major barrier to scaling -- and scaling is the only way you're going to compete with the shipping companies.

Maybe you can compete on some other way than price?
I've run into that very model before. There are courier services that effectively pay folks to carry things on to planes. They then drop it off on the other side at the courier desk and go on their merry way. I did that a bunch of years ago (mid 90's).
> The solution, as noted already in this thread, is for governments to ban fees on standards, just as they currently don't allowy non-RAND fees on standards.

Huh?

What law says that if a standards body choses a technology, the patent owner must RAND?

If that were actually the case, folks would set up standards bodies to force RAND.

Note that the same applies to fees, only moreso.
I just did a view source on one of the pages to see if I was missing something, and it was full of what looked like explanations: loads of text in HTML definition lists, which seemed a bit unusual, but I figured that was something to do with how the material was meant to be structured.
Similarly, in ancient Rome, when a triumphant general would parade through the city heralded as a god, right behind them on the float would be a slave whispering into their ear "Memento mori", "remember that you are mortal".
I just set up a standing workstation for drawing, electronics work, and (some) coding. I wrote an extensive post about it, including what equipment I used and why I made the choices I did here:
http://ivorjawa.livejournal.com/624808.html
Learning to say NO
The canonical way to do this (which I will call the "hitman protocol") is a percentage up front, and the remainder upon completion.

Given that the sums here are probably small, this probably doesn't fix the situation.
Scott Adams (Dilbert) wrote a blog post about how to match people who would like to travel together, instead of packages, a couple of years ago. But the problems, namely trust, are essentially the same.

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/06/how_...

His idea to connect people with GPS is something you could use. His screening idea's are something you could also incorporate.

To make this an succes I would create a social networking site so that everyone who wants to participate can be publicly hold accountable. If all my personal data is known to you I would think twice before I'd steal a package. A scoring system would bring up the most reliable people to do business with.
Actually they've got ~ 10% and other plastic cork producers have another ~9% between them.

Additionally screwcaps have another 11%.
I agree with what you're saying, but would argue that if you're opening a restaurant, the steak should come first. :) In this case though, you're absolutely right.
http://code.google.com/p/zen-coding/

Towards the bottom is a pretty long list of what it's available for.

There are several OS X apps it supports, but Aptana is the only free one I believe. It's quite good if you can deal with how big of a program it is - you should check it out if you haven't already.
see also: Mitch Hedberg
Got an update from the Broad and they feel confident now that there is no crosstalk between Cambridge and Boston water supplies. Sorry for the false alarm!
Do you understand why your competitors work? They've spent decades building up brands like "When you abso-fricking-lutely have to have it there by the day after tomorrow, or it's your job." There are movies about their core value proposition and brand messaging.

Now after you understand how they work, do you understand which of their customers don't need to pay for that? Can you identify a group of folks currently shipping through FedEx who can switch to "eventual, best effort, may not actually arrive" delivery? An addressable group? A big addressable group?

If not, scrap the idea and do something else.

P.S. I think you are missing the "last quarter mile" problem, too, although it won't be a quarter mile for your implementation. I assume that in any given day there are a lot of packages going from somewhere in LA to somewhere in New York, but not one single package going from "somewhere in LA" to "somewhere in New York". They all have to go to a specific address in New York -- which means you need to find someone going to that exact address.
Perfect? I wonder if the author tried installing it on a MacBook Pro.

WiFi won't work without the proprietary BroadComm drivers. But jockey (the program which detects which drivers you need and installs them for you) won't work without an internet connection. So if you don't have a usable ethernet connection handy, you're a bit stuck.

It's possible to install the drivers manually, but it's a pretty convoluted process (which still involves downloading things - go figure). I've not yet had any luck with it.

The irony is that it clearly has the drivers somewhere in the .iso, because when you run it in LiveCD mode it's able to install them, no internet connection required.

Overall it felt like a trip back to the bad old days of linux, where you had to spend a week editing config files before you got a usable system

Not what I'd call perfect.
I'm currently at The Berkshire Shareholders Meeting weekend. Warren led the meeting off with his long talk on Goldman. I think the main thing that he was trying to drive home that is not getting reported is that there is a difference between being "accused" of wrong doing and actually having done something wrong.

He did go to great lengths to explain how he interpreted the goings on at Goldman. He even compared it to a recent blind bond insurance deal that Berkshire had made. And in his opinion, according to the information he had available, it didn't seem like there was any wrong doing on the part of Goldman.

However, he was very clear that if the ACCUSATION of impropriety became proof of wrong doing that he would have a different stance on the matter.

I'm just reporting what I heard him say. Interpret as you wish. As for the side that says he has a conflict of interest in this matter, he also said his investment in Goldman is paying $15 a second. I know that would be a conflict of interest for me, but I am not Warren Buffett.
I stand unimpressed...
A little up front effort goes a long way [software design]
Rise in Tech Investment Could Signal Economic Recovery
Reminds me of a king's jester who would taunt the king and publicly and privately mock him.
Good for you. I deleted mine a little more than a year and a half ago, when rumors started appearing they would change their ToS and privacy policies in a way that would make me uncomfortable using the service.

I've tried to explain to friends why, but the only response I got from them was "I've got nothing to hide". In any case, with cheap/free hosting, I can host my profile page, with information I want to give away.

Some random quote from a comment (slashdot, perhaps?):

"People fail to realise that Google's and Facebook's customers are the advertisers, and the users are in fact the product they sell."
> I think judging him as a evil exploiter with weak ethics is a little harsh.

Why? Doing something bad doesn't become OK just because you got paid a lot of money to do it. Indeed, a reasonable definition of ethical behaviour would be doing the right thing even when faced with significant incentives not to.
If I had written this post, it would have been titled: Why I never created a facebook account. Anyone who is crying now, should have known better.
IANAL, but legally, any mark you make with the intent of signing is a signature. I guess you could claim after the fact that it wasn't you who signed the receipt, though...
Ask HN: Review my weekend project - TVmemes.com
Hi all! We cooked this project up on Thurs/Fri in time for ROFLcon. It was an experiment in Memetic Television.

TL/DR: It's like lolcats but for TV.

Looking for some usability feedback / general impressions / feature requests! Appreciate the HN crowd taking the time to check it out.
Clickable: http://tvmemes.com
Nothing, because I don't have a facebook id.
Inflammatory title, but interesting thoughts on changes in journalists' careers, whether they like it an are ready for it or not. Two sides to the tale.
What about one of these instead of a treadmill?

http://www.amazon.com/Stamina-40-0045C-InStride-Electronic-S...

The same company also makes a compact elliptical.
I also have a personal domain name, and have been rather disgusted with Facebook's changes over the last few years.

I've thought of maybe doing a small redirection, in the style of Class.cpp/ClassImpl.cpp, where my FB profile just says "see my 'real' profile at myname.com," from where I can serve a static page with any information I like.

This way I could still expose whatever data I like, on my terms, and keep all the friend requests I've made.
Aside from the concerns I share with others of your deliveries being safe, secure, and reliable, here's how I think you should focus your product. I see no possible way that your product could initially address the needs of someone needing to ship something outside of their local city/town. If I'm travelling San Francisco to Manhattan, and your site has matched me up with someone who needs a package shipped from San Fran to the Bronx/Queens/Brooklyn etc, you would have to offer me a pretty high price to deliver that package.

I have two suggestions: First, start with deliveries that need to be made within a certain territory. I could maybe see something like this working in a big city like NYC since there are millions of people moving around and your chances of finding fairly precise matches for delivery routes is much higher.

Second, I think you would need some sort of drop box system where shippers check in their packages and deliverers check-out the package, deliver the package to the closest drop-box to the destination, and the customers pick up the package from there. I know this second point adds a huge layer of start-up cost to something like this, but it's the only way I could see it working. When the delivery person checks out a package, their account would have to be liable for damage deposit, lost/stolen package/etc and when they deliver successfully, their account would be credited whatever fee you pay them. If you had a network of redbox-like machines in public places for drop-off and pick-up then maybe something like this works.

I know what I've just described is probably a completely different idea, but when people are in their cars going somewhere, they've budgeted almost an exact amount of time they need to get where they're going and delivering a package to an unknown destination that may only be a little bit out of the way could completely throw a wrench in that time budgeting.
Sit in any any regular chair, and don't lean back. Simple, similar to the "stool perch" recommendation, free and universally available.
Some random ideas to salvage your idea a tad (which seems to be very difficult to make work given it's difficulties):

* Start with a niche like used books and perhaps partner with a book swapping site (e.g. bookmooch or bookcrossing or something) to get the initial tests done on something people don't mind losing. Other second hand material would be good, too.

* I think you'd also do much better with such a service if you treat your site more like a craigslist for "package hitchhiking" and reverse the process.
I.e. travelers post where they're going on their next road trip and they say they're willing to take a few odd things. So you'd get a lot of random trip listings perhaps all on your front page until there's enough to break them down.
People browse the site when they have something to ship (especially second hand stuff, etc) and if they see someone going the way they need, they make a bid/offer to the person going that way.

* On the security angle you might look into the "friend of a friend" and "church group" organization like http://www.goloco.org does. Targeting widespread organizations or friend networks may make this more palatable to people worried about trust.

* Posting some examples of "what people shipped" on the page, with a constant stream would help people feel more comfortable.

* I assume there will be ebay like ratings and reviews, etc?

* Overall, I'm not sure this "disrupter" is going to work unless you can plug it into the thriving secondhand market as an extremely thrifty for low-value items. Positioning yourself initially would do you a lot of good.

* Finally and not most importantly, the website (unless owned by craigslist) will need a much more polished design to make people thing this is a "real deal" enough for them to try it out. I don't think that alone will help you, but your traction issue isn't going to be helped by your current design (usability and visually).

Best of luck-- regarding the other comments, sometimes the naysayers on Hacker News are wildly wrong and harsher than they used to be, but they often have very good points that will let you adapt your vision and save it. Take all the advice with a grain of salt. You're going to learn the best from your users once they start giving you feedback, so testing your idea and site is far more important than our responses.

Edit: To that end, give something like feedbackarmy.com a try a few times and see what random people think about the idea and see what percentage you could get to say they'd give it a shot.
Enough with the anti-fanboi fanboism.

Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer: "Regarding the App Store and iTunes stores, we are running those a bit over break even, and that hasn't changed."

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/26/app_store_wild...
Ask HN: Optimizing Site Load Times (Pingdom Help)
Hi,

What with all the recent hubbub about Google taking site load times into consideration and all, I've been using Pingdom to analyze my site and need some help understanding the results.

Example link: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/?url=http://neosmart.net/forums//&id=2230361

According to them, the portion of the bar that is yellow is the time between "start" and "connect" and the portion of the bar that is green is the time between "connect" and "first byte" with the blue section being the actual transfer time (time between "first byte" and "last byte").

Unfortunately, they don't seem to explain what actually happens in each stage, so I have no idea what I'm supposed to be trying to optimize. My working assumption is that the first section of the bar is "network-level" time (time for the packet to reach an open port??), the second section is the "software-layer" delay (for the request to be processed by the webserver), and the 3rd part is pure transfer time?

I need to know if changing anything software-side (w/ regards to the webserver stack itself) will improve the first section of the bar, or if that delay is purely due to the overhead of running the webserver in a virtual machine.
I've been sitting on a medicine ball for a while, and I agree that there's a big tendency to slouch into a C-shaped back. However, if you are conscious of your posture, it is possible to sit with an S-shaped back. At least, that's my subjective, anecdotal experience.

A side effect of sitting with good S-shaped posture on a medicine ball is that I don't really "sit" any more. Instead, I straddle the ball as if I were riding a horse.

However, for me the reason I switched to sitting on a medicine ball has nothing to do with back posture and everything to do with preventing a recurring pilonidal abscess.
This is a fantastic article on "big numbers" (and discusses tetration):

http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html

(I think someone has posted it to HN before, which is why I am leaving it as a comment)
The Floating-Point Guide
IIRC, Congress has the ability to void patents for the public good. Weren't such steps taken to standardize automobiles? And Hollywood wouldn't exist without piracy -- avoiding the patent royalties due to the Edison company was why they fled west to begin with.
Calling 10.04 perfect is a real, long stretch. Even the authors own description of 10.04 hardly amounts to "perfect."

Its cosmetic changes are, in my opinion, dubious at best. Window controls are on the left hand side of the Window for no good reason. The color scheme is way too dark, it made me long for the old human theme. UI elements are glitchy in places. The "Me Menu" is useless to me. And why the heck did they ever remove the startup/shutdown options from the system menu? Why are they off on their own?

I like the idea of the Ubuntu Software Center but its execution leaves a lot to be desired. Last time I checked it was just another front end to apt. Many of the packages available are totally useless to the vast majority of people.

Ubuntu One and the Ubuntu Music store, well, we'll see how those go. Personally, I've never, ever used them and I have to wonder if they're the type of things that will actually draw people to Ubuntu

And, well, I hate to come off as a curmudgeon because I really do like Ubuntu, but to say that 10.04 blows OSX and Windows 7 out of the water is just wrong. It doesn't. For instance, why does Ubuntu still have the same old application menu? Both OSX and Windows 7 (and even KDE4) have moved away from this model. The categorized, hierarchical menus that have been around forever are really unhelpful. Why can't I search this menu like in Windows 7 and KDE4? For that matter, why can't I easily search everything like I can in Windows 7 and OSX (spotlight). If they really want to compete with Windows or OSX they need to give me better ways to find, sort and organize everything on my computer.
I understood that it wasn't that lumbar support isn't good, it's that a normal chair with lumbar support is still just a normal chair, and thus too low; you're still sitting on your butt instead of letting your legs support you.
This is valid point, but its implications are limited: you're basically saying that if AIG collapsed, it would lead to further collapses (due to "the state of the financial markets at the time") and that could very well lead to GS suffering as well.

This is true, not just for GS, but for almost any other financial firm and bank in the United States. In that sense, we all, including end consumers, enjoyed the benefits of TARP bailouts - assuming that without them and policies related to them, the entire financial system would collapse and drop the US to something like the great depression or worse.
Great quote:

"Even though we're a pure cork company, my motto is you sell what your customer wants and not what you want to sell..."
Sorry, but you don't "code" HTML, you just write it.
It's perfect just like every Ubuntu release in the last 2 years has been.
its impossible to cheat while standing on a treadmill, but those things you can just stop.