skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google I/O Tomorrow, Makers Faire on Saturday
I actually disabled ad-block out of curiosity.

I don't understand how people browse without it, now.
that's why you guys have 5Liter bottles of booze on walgreens and CVS then.
NewzBin goes down; apparently in debt to tune of £730k.
Definitely! In fact, why doesn't wakemate crowdsource their problems? The one place where people will fall over each other to help them out is here.
The ability to deliver technically is only part of the success of a business. The ability to communicate clearly, honestly and effectively is just as important.

It may be that the Wakemate devs have perfectly fair and reasonable grounds for not delivering yet; being open and honest with their customers about where they are and what they're dealing with could well win back some of their lost credibility.

It's not "emotional" for a customer to reach out to the company and ask for some straight dealing.
Maybe an irrelevant data point, but I am in the top 10 users karma-wise, and I have never heard anything about being a mod. So it must be the super-secret elite that get to be mods.
As we have said several times, we underestimated demand for our product. PG has always said to build something people want. We did that, albeit a tad too well. Rest assured, this is not a conspiracy organized by the caffeinated beverage industry to keep these units out of your hands!

Several units have already shipped and have received overwhelmingly positive responses. While the vast majority of backorder customers understand our difficulties, it's clear that a subset have grown increasingly frustrated, and understandably so. We think this reflects on the great enthusiasm for our product. However, these concerns must be addressed, and we intend to address them. To alleviate the frustrations of our most eager customers, we are offering to expedite orders for those who upgrade to our Pro Package offering. For a minor fee, you will be bumped to the front of the queue and enjoy also all the benefits provided for by the Pro Package. We feel this is the best solution for all. Details will be forthcoming on our website.
PTA directed to block Facebook’s caricatures link
That's unfair. I don't kill links to blog posts critical of YC funded companies. The reason I killed that post was that it was using an HN post to send a message to one.

It's explicitly against the site guidelines to use HN posts to send messages to YC, and has been many years. We ask anyone who has a message for us to send it by email. This is the first time anyone has used HN to try to send a message to one of the companies we've funded, but that seems close enough that it's reasonable to kill it. There was certainly nothing in the post to engage one's intellectual curiosity.
The pledgie tool is either v e r y slow or misbehaving; it shows 0 pledges even though there are believable comments that there are more than that. pledgie took my e-mail address, but I haven't gotten anything from them yet.
This article's analysis is dross. This is purely a selection bias issue. ANY significantly smaller video site with similarly-sized content will have a higher engagement metric.

This is no different than "deep" cable television channels, or really, ANY form of niche media down to individual book authors.

FWIW, A.C. Nielsen knows this all too well and says as much in their "cultural impact" reports (Full Disclosure: I once worked on A.C. Nielsen software). A fact which is conveniently missing from this article.
That doesn't mean it is better at creating food for us.

Sun -> algae -> small fish -> medium fish -> fish we eat.

Very doable, the problem comes in dealing with the waste.
Oh, yeah -- I grew up in Oregon, I'm familiar with that.
Would they hire the right candidate if he did not want to relocate to SF?
I just tried it. It's not the same, they're using Hinting to render better, but it's definitely not smooth.

my comparison
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/9537/textshadow.png

It's even worst at smaller font-size. My test font is relatively simple also, imagine the disaster the NYT font would be without a blank shadow.
reply due to not being able to edit: fixed!
Well - if we take a big leap here and assume that one of WakeMate's founders is a mod and this person deleted the post then the policy is not so good.

A possible approach is to allow the mods to have aliases to their usernames (and PG and company can be the only ones knowing the correspondence of alias to username). This way - HN users could see the history of deletions of a particular mod without knowing the actual user.

Granted, HN users are smart and someone could probably create a data mining app which would find the actual user by looking at pattern of deletions, topics of posts, etc... but that's life and that's what you get for having a lovely place such as HN.
1. Start a Startup - Everything I've read suggests that the founders (and first ~5 employees) of a startup will be spending a lot of their time on non-hacking stuff.

I would like a comment on this. Is hacking all and only about code? Isn't doing business another type of hacking? Hacking is all about doing something cool and different, right? Why can't a company hack business models? Like google for example.

I know after a certain size is attained by a company, business is just business. But why can't we have companies which hack business models in the time of there inception.
Ask HN: How to improve odds when applying as a single founder?
In the FAQ it says the odds of being accepted are much lower for a single person applying for funding. I know they have funded single person startups in the past, but is that still the case? If they do, I'm wondering what factors do they look for from a single founder and if there is anything you can do to improve the odds (like maybe have a working prototype)?
Yeah, I'd really like to know how they get the Y-axis. All of the google interview recaps I've ever read have made it seem as though candidates aren't likely to get the same interview.

That said, it could be that their interview questions are like the questions on the SAT, or GRE, with the difficulty being normalized in some way.
Not really an issue, the world is ending by 2012 anyway.
Hmm, when I looked up "The Lake Wobegon effect" on Wikipedia, it linked to "Illusory superiority." I'm guessing that's not quite what Google is going for here.
This is awesome cool! After seeing the website made to look like 3.1 on here a while ago, I have been looking for some old install media to give it a spin.
Mostly software engineers though - people notorious for not buying software. Pagerank is the only benefit you can get from it.
My submission about a submission about wakemate getting deleted got deleted....
This is getting ridiculous. The submission had > 100 points and a lively discussion was going on there. I don't see how it violated the guidelines apart from the comments being critical towards Wakemate.

Here's the link to the dead submission where you may read the comments and judge for yourself: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358446
What Captain Planet can teach us about entrepreneurship
In my haste to up vote this, I accidentally down voted.

We've handled a couple hundred thousand support tickets in RT, some of them hundreds of interactions long, and it's still scaling happily.

Using email for support is liberating and using the web interface is phenomenal too. Can't complain about the licensing, but you'll definitely want someone who knows Perl and or the O'Reilly book.
For me, the thing that makes most nervous about translations is that I can't read them. They're a black box. They could say almost anything... 'all your base are belong to us' springs to mind (and it can be much worse).

So when I see:

'First available freelancer works on your order'

I leave. Tell me it's quick. Tell me it's easy. For whatever reason, that phrase just makes me lose all confidence in your site.

On another note. Are these translations audited? For an additional fee can I have another translator (maybe a 'senior' or 'trusted' translator) proofread them?
Why would you assume that market saturation is the goal instead of the highest possible profit margin?

Not everyone thinks saturation is economically viable, or even desirable. And honestly, in a market like SaaS web apps, it would be very hard to achieve, even at rock bottom prices. A help desk tool, no matter how crappy, is not a true commodity. One will serve a given customer better than another.

Also: I wasn't asking about ZenDesk, I was asking for other examples.

In my consulting business, I raised my rates from $75 to $300 in a couple of years. I wasn't going for saturation, and I didn't grandfather at all. But that is a 1:1 relationship with clients, and I radically changed my business over that time. I also raised the price of my ebook package from $24 to $39 but that was not the same customers, being that it was a one-time sale.

I am a big believer in raising prices. I like more money from fewer customers, which means I can simultaneously work less, and have higher quality interactions with my customers. It's a win/win/win.

My SaaS is one of the most expensive in our category, and for good reason. We're growing at a nice pace, too. I want to think about how we might raise prices, if we decide to, and for future products that I am planning.

And that is why I wanted real examples. Which other people were able to provide me.

Thanks, other commentors.
N1 here. but you still get the +- buttons using screen. sucks.
Add a bug button on the prototype? Integrating the bug reporting means you can automatically supply a history of the last n things the user did, or whatever debugging state you think is helpful, and the user will fill in the rest. Similar to automatic crash reporting, except without requiring the crash.
Not at all. These robots, if they become popular, will be a fat fat target for all kind of hackers. All it takes is to add the web interface URL pattern to the popular key loggers. If there are many ppl who use the robots, some will have their PCs rooted already.
Better get ready to submit a story about your submission about your submission about your submission about wakemate being deleted...
As far as I can tell, they're only YC funded. They have steadily growing revenue (given the assumption that more people are booking lodging through their site)
So, do you have kids?

If not, it doesn't invalidate your observations, but it definitely puts you at a disadvantage. You just have no idea what you don't know until you spend 24/7 raising a child.

I have two kids. They both learn differently and at different rates. As a result, we teach them differently. However, we are still teaching them what is appropriate to their specific stage of development (I call that age appropriate, but you may not).

So, I totally agree that learning should be unique to the individual, but I also think there are very real and distinct stages of growth that each individual goes through and for learning to be most effective it needs to take that into account.
Review My App: Hacker / Entrepreneur Salon
Disclaimer: There's no app yet, because I don't want to start coding before I get a sense of what people want.

So I have been looking into a few social networks for entrepreneurs, and they all kinda suck. I think the key is to make it super niched, i.e. hackers / internet entrepreneurs.

What I really want is a place for internet entrepreneurs to brainstorm, get feedback from each other, survey, basically things that is already happening on HN that is not "news"

Yet, hacker news is build more as a news site so some of the other usage cases cannot be fully exploited. Non-news discussions tend to get drown out in the sea of regular news (though the addition of Ask HN section has made things better).

I want to do a survey to see what features will be good.
- Video chat brainstorming
- Site / App feedbacks
- Organizing local meetup
- Ardvark-like context matching of profiles to recommend relevant discussions
- Weekly group Q&A, Contest
- Plain old forum

And of course the site will following a set of rules of conduct such as constructive feedback, limited self-promotion, etc. It will probably have some sort of rating / karma system.

Any suggestions? Thanks.
agreed, and where does androlib get it's numbers?

I went to http://androlib.com, and their 'currently viewed' shows a much better group of apps (caller id, task manager, flight status, inclinometer, podcast).

If you're looking at non-official sources, it appears http://www.androidapps.com/?__utma=1.956696379.1274210202.12...

is a better result (top 10 on the right hand side)
I personally hope that someone (e.g. pg) steps in and clears that up.

I preordered a Wakemate and while I fully understand delays I don't understand not letting customers (who learned about Wakemate through YC) discuss their issues.
Imigran Lebanon Menjadi Pemenang Miss USA 2010
I wonder if smoking-cessation products like nicotine lozenges and so on might start to get off-label prescriptions as has happened with some other drugs. One issue they all have is their lack of a quick release, which is what most smokers are seeking (guilty :-/ ).
Scientists Find 'Baffling' Link between Autism and Vinyl Flooring
It was nonresponsive for me for a while yesterday (checking in response to the other post).
"There is a way, it's called the internet. They can put their music on their website and let paypal handle the transactions -- except people don't pay for it that way either and no one hears of the artist when they do..."

Artists can still have clips of their own music on their site to give people a taste. They could even give out some songs for free (not all). There are multiple ways to get yourself out there without a label. The difference is that it's the artists' choice.

Without a major label, the Artist not only needs to make the music, but manage everything (including marketing). This is not an easy task and takes time away from what they really do best. Most people don't have the ability to run a successful business (which is what it is). This is why labels will always be around in some form.
Study: ADHD linked to pesticide exposure
PG responded here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358627

That's unfair. I don't kill links to blog posts critical of YC funded companies. The reason I killed that post was that it was using an HN post to send a message to one.

It's explicitly against the site guidelines to use HN posts to send messages to YC, and has been many years. We ask anyone who has a message for us to send it by email. This is the first time anyone has used HN to try to send a message to one of the companies we've funded, but that seems close enough that it's reasonable to kill it. There was certainly nothing in the post to engage one's intellectual curiosity.

Funny, I recall posting a discussion that was basically a feature request to Posterous. It got upvoted, went to the top of HN, and I don't recall it being deleted on these grounds.
Not an announcement, a preamble.
I cleared it up here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358627

Would you please stop filling up the site with metaposts?
I hope the bit about easy migration from S3 means a compatible API, just change the base URL. Would that make the S3 API the de facto standard for cloud storage APIs?
So why wasn't she helping him to process this pain and mourn his losses rather than simply ignoring his pleas for help?

"Giving someone space" is not the same as just telling them you don't believe them and turning away from them.

I remain convinced that she's a narcissistic person who doesn't know what love is, and this story is heartbreaking for all the wrong reasons.
Or is "Of" pronounced "Ov"?
Geonames is great. It doesn't get any freer than this (in both senses of the word).
I would probably just have another from the same service translate it back to English. Paying double but it would help add some type of feedback for judging accuracy.

If it comes back good enough then I would accept it. If not I would ask for my money back. I wouldn't tolerate too many screw ups though before I went somewhere else.
Yeah that seemed unworthy of you, when I read it. If Max has a profitable business, he's already vanquished a key aspiration of HN's members, whatever the product. Only world-changers gain respect?
Sadly, while just selecting an id is faster than selecting the whole row, it's still a very slow operation overall. Here's the results on an 8-million-row production table:

mysql> select * from large_table order by rand() limit 1;
<...>
1 row in set (36.69 sec)

mysql> select primary_key_column from large_table order by rand() limit 1;
<...>
1 row in set (7.33 sec)

Basically, ORDER BY RAND() forces a temporary table / filesort no matter what; selecting fewer columns decreases the size of the temporary table, but doesn't actually eliminate the problem.

The best way to select a random row from a MySQL table is using a trick I got from Mediawiki: create an indexed float column, set it to RAND() for each row, and select random rows using:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE randnum > RAND() ORDER BY randnum LIMIT 1

This runs as an index range scan, making it basically instantaneous.
In other words: The third step is realizing that you have no idea how many steps there are.
0 to profitable in how many days. You decide.
This can only be good. More competition will probably mean better prices, more features, higher reliability and more innovation. And if someone can compete with Amazon on this, it's certainly Google.
Um, I HIGHLY recommend that you DO NOT do this.

Technically, you are mis-representing yourself as an "officer of the court" (e.g. a firm which employs people who have passed the Virginia bar). It's a crime similar to impersonating a law enforcement officer.

However, along these lines, it's perfectly reasonable to hire an attorney (some will do it gratis or for an extremely small fee) to draft a follow-up "letter of demand threatening suit" in their office's letterhead.

In practice, all this does is intimidate the legally ignorant (e.g. not normally any kind of corporation) since the attorney must go through the exact same legal hurdles as the debtor and the amounts involved in this case would never be worth engaging the firm's personnel.

Essentially, these levels of disputes are "write-offs" and "costs of doing business" to those who can afford to hire an attorney in the first place.

The only reason to engage an attorney here is if you wished to wage a profitless, but potentially damaging, negative PR campaign (think Gloria Allred) against this firm.
one more to the "what's bad"

multitasking is arcane and weird.

you never know when you app will be on the back, runing on it's own state. or when it will be killed for memory and the previous state restored. this is mainly a pain with the Aldiko ebook reader he mentions on the article and Opera.

put both of those applications on the background, and go do stuff.

if you didn't used much memory, you get the last book open on Aldiko and opera with the tabs.

if you did used more memory, the OS still show those apps as open (if you hold the home key) but changing to them will give you initial states. no more open tabs in opera. no more the current book open on aldiko. you even get the loading screen again of opera mini.

And since i installed a process killer, that shows what really is running --hint, it's not what the long-press-on-home-button tells you, i keep seeing (and killing) the mp3 store. I have NEVER clicked the mp3 store icon. it does not show up as a battery user on the battery use list. but it's always running... what gives?

but all and all, i like it. android is the PC revolution happening on the mobile market. Just like the mainframe lease is done today, the mobile abusive billing will be soon.
Lightspark, an innovative FLOSS Flash player, reaches Beta Status
"The scientists were surprised by their finding, calling it 'far from conclusive.' Because their research was not designed to focus on autism, they recommend further study of larger numbers of children to see whether the link can be confirmed."

That's the money quote in the interesting submitted article.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

The finding is quite intriguing, and I wonder how it will filter through the varied opinion-makers in the autism-issues blogosphere.

After edit: You're welcome for the link to Peter Norvig's article. As regular readers here know, it is one of my favorite links to post in comments here on HN. My further comment on the submitted article in this thread is that its second page refers to an increase in autism in California. Statements that autism has increased in recent decades are controversial,

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=4726

http://www.asatonline.org/about_autism/ontherise.htm

http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/features/counting-autism.html

because diagnostic criteria have changed over the same period, so how much real increase in the actual condition there has been may be much less than the increase in recorded diagnoses.
Using Starbucks Stores to Model Retail Gravitation
Ask HN: Best/worst stories re. startups communicating with users
Managing user expectations can be tricky as a startup grows from, say, 20 users to product-market fit. What startups (I'm most interested in web startups, but any will do) have done this well? Poorly? Why and how?
They also were funded by Sequoia Capital last year.

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2009/10/25/sequoia-capit...
How We Wrecked the Oceans
Sails, I hope. :P
Considering that YouTube now limits video uploads to 10 minutes in length, this is hardly surprising!

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en...
Why not do an MVP and then ask for input? That's the usual advice given here on HN.
LifeTrac II: open source tractor
That's a tempting definition of drug, but it's easy to dismiss because then the word would have no meaning. The accepted definition, from m-w.com: a substance other than food intended to affect the structure or function of the body.

Also, I'm not sure what your overall point is. Alcohol abuse still is considered dangerous now. (I say this as someone who drinks socially.) If you want to point out how cultural attitudes change how various substances are regulated, I don't think just "dangerous" expresses that.
Of course she has tried that and
of course he couldn't explain what was wrong.

Ah, the laziest excuse for bad behavior ever. "I tried that, and it didn't work!"

He couldn't explain what was wrong, but he was trying to explain how he felt. These things are complicated. And rather than try to help him explore this problem, she refused to listen, because his feelings didn't jive with her worldview.
Could Hackers Virtually Break Into Your Car?
Tender (http://tenderapp.com/ ) is pretty nice, and it looks like it's almost always cheaper than Zendesk. (I think the only time Zendesk would really be cheaper is if you're a 1- or 2-person team that can get by on the starter plan.)

As a support person, I don't find Tender especially amazing, but it gets the job done and never really gets in the way. But, more importantly, as an end user, I find Tender to be much easier and more pleasant to use than Zendesk. I cringe whenever I go to someone's support site and it's Zendesk.
We're hiring at Mendeley. We're based in White Bear Year, London. Check out our blog for job listings: http://www.mendeley.com/blog/jobs/
Most sites don't have ads placed and sized in this obnoxious a manner.
"What do you think is more likely, Microsoft intentionally breaking spec or the spec being poorly worded?"

Well, I'm waving my Bayesometer at both those propositions and both are coming up pretty close to 100%, within each other's needle wiggles. I don't think I can answer that.

(Oh, so close to a word coining: http://www.google.com/search?q=bayesometer )
Onstar and Google team up to make apps for the Chevy Volt
I would love to see either side of the debate pull this argument away from the hypothetical realm.

At least we know fairly objectively claims of economic harm caused by piracy are hyperbolic:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-governmen...
A Cooler Hotmail?