skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reddit uses Pylons, not web.py (it was originally written in Lisp, then moved to web.py, then Pylons).
Why, so we can have more drama?
Not really. I was given a choice of offices during my interview process in 2008, when they had more employees then than they do now.
For your health, man--your health!
Concept is good and I think it is definitely useful.

1) The interface should guide you through the process of creating a search and adding item. Maybe do that if they don't have any saved searches.

2) You should be able to add comments for each item
Nice tip - but the @font-face generator on the linked site actually does font smoothing before generating the output.
I'm interested in "leverage" in the sense of powerful tools, methods, etc., e.g. look at http://www.vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm

If you can help to significantly improve the general purpose technologies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_technology) that are available (i.e. better than 10x, not little stuff) you'll potentially make a great impact.
Was this Kazaa-style sharing or Bittorrent sharing? The distinction is important when it comes to risk.
Are you being literal about the blackboard/chalkboard, or do you mean a dry erase board?
No, because if it is flags they might not flag it again. Deleting the story does more damage than a conversation.
Do you double your number of cars or romantic partners every year? Then the analogy might hold and the strategy might work.
Airbnb has 20 job openings
Isn't this desire for a response from Wakemate more emotional than reasonable? Look: they're either going to get their shit together or they aren't. In the meantime: they've 2x blown their credibility with message-board types like us. Calls for them to be accountable to Hacker News don't make any difference: nothing they say matters to reasonable-but-anal people anymore.

How about, we just assume it's not going to work out for them, and be pleasantly surprised if it does?
A Generation Gap Over Immigration
Well, if you don't punch out (pull the ejection handle), one piece of advice from the head of LMI was to focus on one thing and get it done. I.e. better to make some forward progress than let yourself get overwhelmed and paralyzed.

I would add: especially since some of the things going wrong will get resolved one way or another.
The right answer to a flagged story isn't to repost it as an appeal. While I flagrantly ignore Graham's request to "just flag stories and not comment on them" (because I think that's a silly policy), even I might think it crosses a line to repost a story to beg for someone to violate that guideline.

The discussion the original story hoped for is already happening here. Let it do what it's going to do and then go away.
The work done to build a robot is amortized over all the robots built. So I think it will be cheaper. Factory robots do replace workers because they are cheaper. Humans can do high quality paint jobs too. It just probably takes them longer, or maybe humans need multiple tries because they mess up more often. The point is, no factory owner will invest in new technology if it didn't make economic sense. Quality is not orthogonal to price.

A mower robot could also be safer. A person riding a mower is exposed to a lot of noise, sun, and shaking. If you are relatively disabled or have a bad back, you can't operate a mower. Just about anyone who can see, on the other hand, could operate a mower remotely. No exposure to noise, to dust, to sun, to bumps. Also, you would want to err on the side of safety, so if the robot is in any way unsure of itself (say because there are moving objects nearby) it should just shut off and wait for human guidance. Some jobs, like mowing, cleaning, planting, harvesting, etc, can easily be stopped with no problems. On the other hand, you wouldn't want to just shut down a car in traffic when something goes wrong.

If people can attend meetings in another country remotely, why couldn't they also push around a vacuum cleaner or pick strawberries remotely? This would avoid all the costs of travel and food and boarding in a foreign country. Rather than immigrants working illegally in the US, they could be operating machines in the US from their home countries.

Janitors already travel from building to building to clean the floors. If they could operate the cleaning equipment from home, why wouldn't they? Physically transporting a person is more expensive than transporting information, and the gap between the two will only widen.

It seems to me that the hard part is remote controlling the robot so that it can move around while not hurting itself and other people. The Anybot robot is already semi-autonomous in this sense. Once you have this basic feature in place, it's straightforward to add other capabilities.
Thanks! We're getting a bunch of signups right now.

If anyone has questions about Tender, feel free to comment here, tweet @tenderapp, or email support@tenderapp.com — Will's girlfriend is in town visiting, so let's keep him as busy as possible!
> I assure you that the significant part of humanity that is trying to track down enough food, clean water, or even a warm place to sleep each night - let alone adequate medical care or education, doesn't suffer from ennui. They, of course, suffer from hunger, thirst, and exposure - problems, yes, but they certainly have clear priorities.

Maybe they don't suffer from ennui, but why do you come to the conclusion that they do not get a mid-life crisis? Surely they notice the decline of physical strength too. I certainly think that also people not provided with anything necessary may ask themselves at some point "isn't there more?".
It's hardly a dog whistle reference. Everyone knows there are hardly any left-wing talk shows on the radio. It's too obvious to be a "dog-whistle reference".
Care to write a review of the Zeo? I'm thinking about getting one if I still don't have a WakeMate by my birthday (in June).
I suspect [hope?] the reason it was deleted was down to the fact it was directed at the founders (and was angling for a response).

A "what happened to wakemate then?" post may have survived.
> you got a chance to eat meat once a week

Really? Is that true? What groups are you talking about?

> It's only when the 20th century rolled around, and meat became cheap/available everywhere, that people started eating meat once a day, leading to a spread of all kinds of diseases, heart attacks, cholesterol, cancer, etc.

Ok, interesting hypothesis. So assuming this is true, people in 1830 ate less meat and had less heart disease than people in 1930, right?

What if I told you, in the US, the opposite is true? That, on average, people ate more meat in 1830 and had less heart disease than people in 1930?

If people aren't eating meat, what are they eating? grains? sugars? How would you create a study to test your hypothesis than meat consumption causes heart disease? Has this been studied? What were the results?
> I believe producers of content should be able to reap rewards for that production.

Never before in history has as much "content" been sold to as many people for as much money as today.

What exactly is the problem?
"Man Cave" is married-folk slang for "some personal space where I don't mess with your stuff."

Have a gaming rig on a table that your wife can't go near? That's a man cave. How about a car project in the garage? Fishing boat out back? Electronics bench full of parts and tools?
Angels focus on young start-ups
I don't think having a more engaged audience is necessarily that good of a metric to look at. The more popular a website is, the more casual viewers it will attract. The fact that justin.tv has such a high viewership time may have more to do with the fact that its audience is tiny, and that viewers kind of have to consciously seek it out. As opposed to youtube, which is one of those timewasters you go to without really thinking. If/when justin.tv grows, it may find its time per viewer ratio shrink proportionally.

Of course, there is absolutely nothing bad about having an engaged viewer base. Especially if that core groups' enthusiasm can be used to help recruit more eyeballs.
Didn't know about this flag - thanks for pointing it out. As for the post - doesn't seem offensive at all.

PG: Hacker News improvement suggestion: for any post that gets deleted - show the username of the one who deleted it so when "showdead" is set to "yes" it shows this. An explanation would also be a nice thing to have as part of this mechanism. I'm going on the assumption that you follow Guido's BDFL model.
Wakemate pretty much launched from HN, plenty of the first batch of pre-orders came from here.

If wakemate does not communicate openly, even if there is a big problem they may do a lot of damage to future YC start-ups that plan on HN as their first place to gain traction.
It seems plausible that it was done by hand and then sped up to match the speed of the talk.
The problem with flagging or deleting is that you risk giving it a lot more attention than it would have received in the first place :/
A good start.

I would also recommend going after a target market.

Apparently the current growth of Facebook is in the +35 demographic, so maybe targetting University students at the start of the term would help.

Being the unfacebook doesn't just mean 'another place to share', it needs to provide an alternative to just privacy.

Sewing the seeds of dissent by targetting University students who made facebook what it is, and possibly are those that facebook is ignoring as it goes forward.

This is one of the things I really like about diaspora. The four guys in the video are exactly where Zuck was not long ago, but they have a better target and purpose, though they still need help communicating what that vision is.
I had a moto droid and now have an htc incredible. The droid is a "google experience" phone and the incredible runs HTC's sense UI.

What exactly do you hate about the sense UI? Granted it's only my opinion, but I'm quite fond of the sense UI. On a phone as powerful as the incredible it runs smoothly and genuinely adds to the Droid's generic feel experience.
The post was well over 10 votes (which IIRC is the limit where flags don't take effect in killing it any more).

So it was a moderator kill. On that score I believe YC alumni are the mods :)
Unfortunately this kind of moves from different companies affect the entire SaaS space.

There has always been a degree of uncertainty when committing your business to one service like this... what if they increase the prices? what if they will close? what if they turn bad and close my data behind a payed wall? will they be able to keep the service up most of the time (just think of the time when Gmail went down..)? And so on...

This is only going to make this worries a bigger issue when choosing to commit to one of these services.
> The discussion the original story hoped for is already happening here.

Good point, I missed how fast this shot up.
I think you could aim this at non-native English speaking folks who write tech support emails in English.
I think that's already happened.

Way to go, moderator.
This is hardly a blunder. He decided to go with the less risky option of taking the smaller share of options instead of betting that Apple stock was going to skyrocket over the next 5 years which seems like a sane choice to me.
The Streisand Effect.
It anagrams to Haskell, so I assumed this was some DSL for writing Javascript in Haskell...
Ah ok. I missed that last part then.

But I'd still recommend web.py or something similar because it seems to me that he doesn't really need a framework, he wants to put one together from parts he prefers. Doing that with something like Django is a bit painful.
I'll admit that the exposure it would get on hacker news factored into deciding to write it here. They have a valid excuse to ignore my own blog, less so here (well, I thought that anyway).

Nevertheless, I see posts like these pop up on hacker news from time to time and thus considered it 'fair game' for wakemate too. Apparently not.

I respect you for dismissing Wakemate. You offer valid reasons elsewhere in this thread too. But it matters more to me. It's not about that lousy five bucks for me, of course it isn't. As I said in my original post. that 5 bucks represent trust (and, on their part, commitment.) Admittedly not much, and they do not have to give it, but hell, They'd be a much better company if they did try to keep that trust.
Good point -- it was on that i2hub program that used to be popular in college back in 2004-ish, so not torrents.
It is big, it covers alot of ground, therefore it has large software product illnesses - complicated to setup, hard to master, tricky to optimize to run fast. However, it is a nice product for some heavy-duty task managing once you have it set up and running, absolutely nothing is horrible.

For a smaller project, though, I would roll your own to specific requirements, or would use a smaller package or product - because JIRA does everything and that could be too much sometimes.
"Take three ounces every hour for stimulant until stimulated."

This is a great story.

Considering how everything you ingest is a drug (affects you both in mind and body) it's interesting how various substances become "dangerous" over time -- and how that can be reversed.
Inspirational video from a man with no arms and no legs (and no worries)
There's probably a lot of them on-line, but I can give you my experience with it. I'm in class right now but I'll edit this post later (30-60 mins) with a review.

Edit: I agree with everything jrockway said. I've seen improvements in my sleep, but it's not a miracle device: you get what you put into it. My problem was that I was sleeping a lot (10-11 hours wasn't unusual) and still felt tired in the morning and often went back to sleep. Since using the zeo, I've been able to reduce the amount of sleep I get to a more reasonable level (7-8 hours) and I feel pretty good in the morning. I've also been waking up earlier in the morning, giving me more time to do things I want to do before going to sleep. Sometimes I was too optimistic and set the alarm too early, though, and went back to sleep anyway. That rarely happens now, however. That said, I can't way whether my improvements in sleeping are due to the zeo or just a placebo effect.

Having hard quantitative data lets you analyze how your habits affect your sleep. For example, it's completely obvious to me now how drinking alcohol before sleeping negatively affects your sleep. The quality of my sleep went down and I'd wake up several times during the night. I'm hoping I can figure out more things like this like jrockway talked about (it's not perfect since you can't do something like a double-blind study, but you can try to emulate the scientific method).

The headband is fine. The alarm clock has a similar interface to any other alarm clock. The alarm sounds are really pleasant to wake up to (no beeping). I would recommend this to more people if it weren't $200, though to me it's a bargain for sleeping better.
Google To Launch Amazon S3 Competitor ‘Google Storage’ At I/O
"This assumes from the outset that you know the difference between a good future employee and a bad one." -- Not really; his simulation assumed the hiring process had error bars of 15%.
It's unfortunate to see the aftermath of Oracle SUN's purchase. I used to explore their website to see what products they have (OpenSSO, OpenDS, OpenPortal, OpenSolaris, OpenESB, MySQL, GlassFish and its supports). Most of them could compete with Microsoft and RedHat in the SMB and in the low to mid level Enterprise sectors.

I wish they would spun off the company into 2-3 sub-companies: Hardware, R&D and/or Service. Cause if one is deemed not making money, either they kill it or do something extreme to it, but at least it won't drag the other parts as well.
Full access to your own data: anything less is sharecropping
Any idea how much funding these guys got? They seem to be doing well.
This really underscores my wish for HN to be more transparent in how the decision is made to [dead] a submission or a comment. Right now it feels highly arbitrary; about half the time I can't easily determine why something is killed.
My HTC Incredible has a google logo on the back...
> show the username of the one who deleted

I have no evidence for this but I think there is a policy of the mods not discussing a) that they are mods and b) their reasoning etc.

I kinda agree; many forums end up degrading into arguments about which mod did what and for why.

EDIT: possible happy medium - a text field where a mod can jot down why it was killed...
Link is down. Here's another URL that works for me:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0516-ok...
It should probably be a lot higher than that.
I think that's a valid point. For long years mostly the live performance of media was paid for. Then with the manifestation of media as data, the guys who had the machines to record and create copies claimed the stakes and the exclusive rights as a form to create economic value. Time has passed and now we have found out that every data are equal and data can hardly be bounded and the exclusivity of copying has gone away. Perhaps it's time to rethink the claims.
Have you tried it on the incredible? Pinch-to-zoom works perfectly on my phone.
> I believe producers of content should be able to reap rewards for that production.

True, although the "elephant in the room" is that piracy actually drive sales (except in some markets, like computer games, which are thrown-away after you're getting tired, so there's no incentive to purchase it after you've finished it).

Movies are best watched in a cinema room, I pay lots of money for that privilege ... but I only go to those movies that deserve my attention, and the music labels should promote real talent instead of superficial trends (teens, boobs, bliz-bliz) that DO NOT attract a sustainable fanbase. I only buy albums and go to the concerts of my favorite bands. Other than that they should fight for my attention (and be grateful for piracy for that matter).

>> am also shocked that websites like this find so much support from this community

As much as I disprove of piracy, I care more about the rights Internet service providers should have. For me, IMHO, the PirateBay is on the same level as Wikipedia, i.e. a resource I can use to find stuff.

They shouldn't be guilty about what their users upload. You want to sue somebody, go after the ones who upload ... if that's not acceptable because those people don't know what copyright is and you'll end-up suing a grandma ... then there's something wrong with your business model.
I have a Zeo. The headband is comfortable to wear, and the data it collects is pretty interesting. (The question I wanted the Zeo to answer was, "is it useful to go back to bed for an hour after getting up to write an email and check on work". The answer is yes; I get right back into the REM sleep I was in when I got up. It's like I never woke up at all. I have also learned that I sleep better on my back than on my side. When I sleep on my side, I usually wake up after a few minutes of deep sleep. On my back, the deep sleep lasts for an hour a night or so.)

It's not all good, though. Their web interface is a PITA to use (the textfields are their custom javascript code instead of textfields, and this completely breaks conkeror), and the data the device collects is encrypted so that you can't access it without their website.

The Zeo is worth $200, but it's not a perfect product. I would have liked a VFD instead of a LCD for that kind of money, for example. And hiding my own data from me is pretty evil. If someone made a competing device, I would buy it instead of the Zeo. Probably.
Firefox 4: -moz-any() selector grouping
VDI or Cloudtop Computing?
It would be good to know how experienced he is with Python. I recommended Werkzeug elsewhere, which would fit that requirement quite well, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to someone quite new to Python.
Google Apps Marketplace Enables Contextual Gadgets, The Battle for Gmail Begins
Also I thought this post made it worthwhile:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358462

Could have been an interesting discussion.
I can't take seriously the assumption that skill level in this context is a scalar.
I agree. If they had trouble getting their product made then they should have blogged about their experience and been a lot more open about their troubles.

This would have won them a lot of sympathy and trust.
Interesting is an understatement. It looks like the holy grail of distributed storage - if it works as advertised.

Looking forward to see more of that. They say it's not yet ready for production, but the kernel inclusion seems to suggest they're at least reasonably sure that this will be made work in the foreseeable future.
Selfcontrol - Block servers for a specified period of time
I can only offer an anecdotal perspective, but would say 'not too much'. My experience in a few Euro countries with both hrdware and software startups (both as participant/employee, and as friend-of-founder) is that most startups follow one of 3 routes (or some combination thereof):

1. Friends & family capital, recycle revenue into firm
2. Affiliate with a university to pursue research grant
3. Industrial development grant from govt. agency

This is assuming something speculative that mightn't easily get normal bank funding, of course. And it's rather out of date.

I don't think this will have such a big effect on VCs. It's not so much anti-US (although protectionism is a worry) as the EU spanking the UK for the previous government's lack of financial oversight. Basically London is the European hub for finance partly thanks to history but also because the UK has access to all EU markets but the regulator (Financial Services Authority) famously employed a 'light touch' approach. Unlike the SEC, the FSA doesn't have a thick rulebook with strict compliance, but has generally operated on a case-by-case basis, leading to a perception that it is overly biddable.

So the EU's position is basically that they are no longer willing to trust this 'gentleman's agreement' approach to regulation as the sole compliance regime to get access to the whole EU. There's also a bit of a sideswipe at the UK's persistent habit of wanting all the market access benefits but wanting opt-outs of any EU regulations they dislike - having one's cake and eating it, so speak. The incoming Conservative government is historically anti-EU (they still feel the EU humiliated Thatcher by inducing her to sign a treaty she didn't read properly), so to some extent the other EU countries are making the point that they don't want 5 years of being scapegoated for the inevitable deep cuts to the UK budget, or having treaty negotiations put on ice because of the British aversion to holding referenda.

I can understand Geithner's worry about it being a form of regulatory protectionism^ but think to a certain extent he is also playing a diplomatic game. It would be a distinct feather in his cap if he could export something similar to the SEC ruleset to Europe, which would lower the compliance burden for US firms substantially, in kind of the same way that the Norwalk Agreement seeks to harmonize US and international accounting standards to bring about a consistent global compliance regime. While the SEC has had its ups and downs in terms of regulatory consistency and responsiveness, it's generally respected for the transparency of its compliance requirements.

See also: http://www.economist.com/business-finance/displaystory.cfm?s...

^ Of course, protectionism already happens to a large extent, and not just with regulation. For example, many non-EU firms are headquartered in the UK to be in the middle of London's giant financial market, but domiciled in Ireland to take advantage of ~10% corporate tax rate.
I think "properly processing" a 3 foot thick layer of sludge on the ocean floor might be a little more difficult than you're making it out to be. Or maybe it's easy. I don't know.

But as things stand right now, the process as implemented is completely unsustainable.