skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't seem to find any screenshots of how your app does what it promises to do. And the only way I know what it's supposed to do is because you told us in the HN submission, not on the site itself.

The first interaction is for me to type in some pretty sensitive information (email, phone number, etc.), which I am simply not going to do until I feel it's worth it.

Also: your site breaks in weird ways in Opera (10.60).
PSD to HTML Service Review
Web Designing & Development is a very demanding profession; you need to have complete dedication towards your work in order to be successful. There can be Ups and Downs in your career; still you need to move on. Sometimes you face so much pressure when you are flooded with orders and you struggle to meet the deadlines.
you could -EASILY- define a function of data/voice connectivity
as throughput to a percent scale.

"But data and voice have different quality of service criteria
and blah blah blah!" So make up a function that accounts for this.

Translation: insert magical code here?

You remind me of people who say "Your videogame is so slow, why don't you use multiple cores? Just use threads, you could easily do it."

Practical problems are rarely easily solved.
I want to look around more and learn about the features, see some screenshots, read about the pricing, et cetera, prior to "adding my first contact".
Just focusing on the design aspect, I'm split between thinking "I love the simple, clean, minimalistic look" and "It looks like it's half built, I'll come back when it's finished". Perhaps even just the inclusion of a small logo or a bit of colour anywhere, would give the added impression that at least "something" has gone into the design and that this isn't just the default look & feel of a CSS framework.
How to Watch Satellite TV Online Without Any Satellite Dish
Anyone can watch satellite TV online without any satellite dish system nowadays. In case you do not know, this article would show you one time-tested and another new revolutionary way to watch satellite TV on the internet without having to set up a satellite dish...and more in my site
Diet Hacks
5 ways iphone users get ripped off
I get a white page with a spinning icon top left, and this in my JS console:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Security error" code: "1000" nsresult: "0x805303e8 (NS_ERROR_DOM_SECURITY_ERR)" location: "https://szpil.com/javascripts/application.js Line: 7562"]

Firefox 3.6.6, OSX 10.6.4
No, the lesson is to not add one-liners that don't add anything to the conversation.

Even after posting the original message, I really don't get your comment on it.
Might I suggest a fade in with a graphic of some type?

$10/month for contact synchronization is too high. Dropbox's 50gbytes is at that level and I think that's over priced.
Also, TCP/IP stack hardening http://www.cromwell-intl.com/security/security-stack-hardeni...
I like the speed and simplicity, but without the ability to import contacts, I'm going to treat it more like a toy than a tool.
Ok, I really like your app. It's very javascript based so I'll be viewing your source heavily, because I'm also creating similar javascript based applications and I get into a big problem with code growth/complexity, so I'm hoping to learn something from you.

Here's some helpful criticism. I hope I don't come off too harsh, since I really actually like this app.

Some questions:

- What are your unique features? It seems to be very javascript centric and it feels fast, I guess that's a good feature.

- What is "an account" in szpil?

- Is there some list of all contacts? I just found "Today" - but that feels like everything I've done today, not everything ever

What I like:

- It's fast to use.

- It's simple

What I don't like:

- The single-colored interface - some icons might help

- The full width layout (uncomfortable on a widescreen display) - you should at least use max-width

- It was confusing that I didn't have to sign up and I didn't realize I had started.

- I didn't realize that my name when I signed up was my username, so I put my long name with all the icelandic chars...

- You could do better with the feedback button. Some simple feedback form or something like that.

Bugs:

- My name got formatted in a weird way: "ArnóR HeiðAr SigurðSson" (Should be Arnór Heiðar Sigurðsson) - that also had complications when I logged in/out again

- My stored password seems to not be bound to username, it's just always filled in - probably because you're not using a regular login form, but a javascript method that takes the variables and submits... too bad :/

- When I logged in again, everything I did "today" was gone. So now I can't find the contact I created.. :P

Good luck and keep up the good work.
Alan Kay's talks aren't only about Smalltalk ... they are often about education, and the part computers might play in children's lives. The man is a genius.

> This is a thread, not a bibliography.

What is that supposed to mean?
In a lot of banking and finance, they use "M" to abbreviate thousands and "MM" to abbreviate millions. It's based on the roman numeral "M", so "MM" is meant to represent "a thousand thousands". Of course if you know anything about Roman numerals, "MM" is in fact = 2,000.

I believe the appropriate abbreviation is "$425M", not "$425m". The AP Stylebook avoids the issue altogether and dictates that million, billion, etc. should all be spelled out and in all lowercase.
Experience is nothing but trial and error. Once you've been programming for a while, you'll get much better intuition about what works and what doesn't.
The player is fantastic – excellent job there. I think there's still some issues with the colours/contrast though; the white on very light blue is a bit distracting. I would probably also try some different fonts, but that's just me.

Apart from that, I really like it. I love the minimalism, and again, seriously impressed with the player.
I often get sidetracked by looking up something on wikipedia. Or Hacker News, BTW.

Now, back to my book.
I believe that's the relevance of the sweep account issue. If you're using the "deposits" into a sweep account as the basis for measuring the supposed & claimed "fraud", its an incredibly overinflated figure.
It happened to me as well (in Chrome), but only on the first mouseover. After that it worked fine.
Create funny stories with random strangers
The homepage has very little salesmanship going on, making the whole thing rather cryptic (On the other hand, the minimalism is very refreshing so there is a balance to be struck).

You should go read "Sign up and ramp up design patterns" by Adaptive Path:

http://j.mp/dynuJs

I think you'll find it really helpful. Good luck.
Make should you have a notebook (Notepad will do) ready before you login the first time. Record down every single step as you setup your box.

Review back the steps, optimized them if necessary. You will find them extremely handy the next time you setup a new box.
Do I want to know what a "mayonnaise sandwich" is?
I think that it would be wise of you to stay publicly silent and to only state your position after the legal system has done its job and to take action then if necessary. I am a neutral third party, I think that you would be wise to heed my advice.
Your areas of interest overlap with my own (machine intelligence/interfaces) but I'm tied up on other projects in the near term.
Good hunting Justin
I don't even see the Flashblock.
When I was employed as a developer, I was quite obsessive about refactoring my code to the point where I considered it elegant.

Now I run my own company and am the sole developer. So these days I tend to think if my code is well factored, I'm doing it wrong.

It's not quite that simple of course. The lower down the stack a chunk of code lies - the more things that depend it - the more I want it well factored and well tested. But I'm quite comfortable with code high up the stack being scrappy, hacky and untested.
Still far away from what I want to see.

I want to know which is the easiest and cheapest way to get from point X to point Y (with a few options/alternatives I can choose from) at a rough time range. And that is any possible combination of train, car or airplane or whatever.

The nearby-feature is already nice (and I haven't even really seen that elsewhere) but I still found myself too limited. For example I don't care if I have to travel maybe 500km or even 1000km by train to another airport if that can save me 500€ or so.
Am I going to have to manually enter each call myself? If so, then no.
I like the condition system. I knew it from Lisp, but I never thought about it consciously. For interactive systems, it seems superior to stopping execution due to an unhandled exception.

It's similar to the SmallTalk debugger asking you when it encounters an unknown symbol, allowing you to for instance correct a misspelling.

These ideas are so logical and long known, I wonder why they aren't used more. (Are they used somewhere outside the respective languages at all?)
What to do If (your shoemoney) & someone stalks you online
I am not sure if i would have gave out his information on youtube but I for sure would have called his house or better yet went to maryland and stalked him.
How Do You Identify New Startup Opportunity
Wedding favour bags
Organza bags and other favour bags come in a wide variety of styles,sizes and shapes,making the perfect thing to use as wedding favours,or even just as a gift bag for smaller items.
And why aren't they here defending the CS degree side of this argument?
Riding a Mega-Trend Isn’t the Same as Solving a Real Problem
You compared him to Paris Hilton ... in my world that's a pretty big f u regardless of her perceived skill level at 'being famous'.
Since all HN'ers claim they chose right sided faces, I'll be the one to admit I chose all lefts (easy). But I didn't choose a woman (or man :D) to marry, I just chose whichever I considered to be more attractive generally speaking.
Here in Europe there's a company that sends out something similar. For example in Italy it's called "Registro italiano delle imprese in internet". I mistakenly registered with them and they started sending me invoices of more than $1000 dollars each (which I never paid).

I did some research and they have been declared illegal in many countries but somehow never got charged. If these guys are doing the same thing, then I don't know if it's illegal or not in the USA but it surely is something unethical with the only goal of spilling money from people.
Who is this app aimed at? If it's aimed at people who would pay to manage their contacts, then it must be able to import from any reasonable email system. That includes outlook, Notes, Eudora, Thunderbird, Mail etc.

Importing means basically scraping most of the context and content of email, contacts, notes and appointments.

To me this sounds like a CRM system, and if someone came to me and said, I want to build a CRM system, I'd ask what they could bring that would persuade me to use their system instead of something established.

Typing my details manually into a web form would not make it past that bar.

I may be missing something here, and I don't want to be gratuitously harsh, but it doesn't really seem like the basis of a viable startup.
One thing, of all the dynamic languages the default Ruby implementation is by far the slowest. For anything that is slighty computational expensive, the default Ruby implementation is poor. Also think green, if you have lots of computation in a slow language, that easily adds up in a large data center in form of wasted electricity, which adds to cooling and is generally expensive. Some Ruby implementations try to get in the direction of, say, a Lisp implementation like SBCL - which is used by ITA. SBCL provides since quite some time a compiler that can generate reasonably fast code.
Full url: http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2008/06/16/sign-up-ramp...
Yeah the idea of releasing the site but "not launching it" (thinking of marketing launch here) sounds like a good idea. Perhaps doing an invite only on Hacker News could get me the feedback needed to tune things up for the marketing launch thereafter.

I like the idea of "things I love" - see? That's why I need to get our site out there and get some feedback! Cheers!
How? Does Google have your Facebook login cookie?
Thanks for the feedback. One of the things that has been keeping me back from launching is this idea that I've got "only one shot at making the first impression".

I'm coming to realize that while the above statement is true, there are other things at play too. Cheers!
You're right. This is not a one shot game. It is something that I will keep working on. Somehow after all this time has passed, it's embarrassing to launch a minimum viable product because people will say "Oh, that's it?". But that's just in my head and need to get over my fears. Cheers!
Almost all GSM phones sold in the past 4-5 years are quad-band phones-- 850 MHz/1900 MHz (US, Canada, a few other places), and 900 MHz/1800 MHz (Europe, Asia, Africa).

An iPhone in the US, for instance, connects to AT&T for voice calls on the 850 or 1900 MHz bands, depending on what chunk of spectrum the carrier owns in the caller's particular location. If Joe Caller got on a plane to Europe, the phone might roam onto a GSM900 network. But in the US, part of the 900 MHz European GSM band happens to be allocated to ISM.

What people experimenting with OpenBTS in the US tend to do is test with old 900/1800 MHz-only phones that can be procured for a pittance on eBay. That way, they're guaranteed not to connect to AT&T or T-Mobile.

As a sidenote, before the GSM carriers started upgrading to 3G networks, most GSM phones didn't actually have GPS chips. Sprint & Verizon (CDMA) phones did, because GPS timing information is a crucial part of the standard (see
http://alumni.cs.ucr.edu/~saha/stuff/cdma_gps.htm for gory details).
I hear you, I'm at that point now where I'm embarrassed by all the time I've wasted. Thanks for the feedback, cheers!
I think it's pretty foolish of Obie to defend his friends here so publicly. Even if this is all legal and they are eventually vindicated, most folks know of these sorts of "businesses" and very few people find them upstanding ventures. It makes me question what completely legal, but of questionable value, business practices Hashrocket themselves conducts?
Damn! b3c.org is taken...
BBB:=Big Biology Boom
Motivation sure is tougher to come by when my co-founder and I have been on this for 13 months full-time pulling 12+ hours a day on this. Even if I had only 5 users I think it would motivate me like nothing else. Thanks for the feedback, cheers!
I do know that ...
Ask HN: do you use a SERP ranking service ? Which one ?
I'm currently trialing http://www.seorankmonitor.com/ and it works quite well to see how a given website ranks for specific keywords.

Would you have other similar tools to suggest?
Thanks for sharing this with me, it's very helpful. We have a lot of guessing going on, and you're right; we should wait to see how users will want to use the site and get feedback before building stuff people might not care about. Cheers!
I would like to try this but I'm not prepared to pay $100 a month in addition to the $30 a month I'm paying for quickbooks online unlimited transactions. Switching will be a huge pain in the ass, but PayPal integration will be worth it, if everything else is the same.
No, someone actually offered him a sysadmin job. He wasn't very impressed.
Designers, please don't make this UI mistake
I came across this idea of if you have to fail, fail fast and early. If our thing doesn't fly I will have learned this the hard way for sure. Thanks for the feedback, cheers!
The Guardian invites/welcomes former readers of The Times (now under a paywall)
When I'm having a discussion with someone who isn't clear on the Scientific method, or whether science can find the truth, as the people in the article, I'm on pretty safe ground. Although, yes, in theory, they could convince me of their views that homosexuality is a mental illness, etc. I think the odds are poor.
Ask HN: Is .NET knowledge useless?
Hi,

I am a new graduate. I will be continuing my education with a masters in CS in University of Cincinnati.

My question is; is .NET knowledge useless?

Everywhere I look, everyone is using * nix + php + nosql/mysql/postgre. By everywhere I mean giants like Facebook, or any startup job post I look at.

I admit I am no expert but I like .NET, particularly C# and MSSQL. I enjoy using Visual Studio, mostly because it lets me create very fast. I love it's support tools like IntelliSense.

Should I switch to php+*nix+nosql, and start learning those?
Your examples of stories they derived movies from were in the public domain specifically because their creators were dead and no corporation owned the rights to them. So what if they are still making money off of something they are actively using? You actually believe our culutre is negatively affected by this? I bet you would't feel the same way if you were forced to relinquish your own wildly successful IP due to some span of time elapsing. That whole bit about a future where all parts of our culture are "locked down" by corporations is utter nonsense.
You Can't Smell Apple's Bullshit?
Facebook did it, and now Apple with the iPhone 4 antenna issue. Can't believe people are buying this.
Before I commit any code, I spend a surprisingly long time making sure the diff looks neat and it does things the right way.

I wouldn't revisit old code until I needed to change it for another reason, since all changes should be thought out properly.
That demo was shot like 12 months ago. I think we've changed the design/UI 3 times since then. It's silly, I know. I'm coming to realize that I'm sabotaging my own startup with my fears of launching.

The gallery implementation we built ourselves... That's something we sure spent a lot of time on. In hindsight, it could have been built after seeing how many people use that feature and if it is needed or not. Thanks for the feedback, cheers!
Well, have you debugged? I've done so thousands of times, and invariably the cause was that the computer was doing exactly what I told it to do, but not what I thought I was telling it to do.
No anonymous search: Scroogle.org is down again
This would have a huge impact on overall security: How many spammers and other vermin rely on the fact IE6's vulnerabilities are still so common? Forcing browsers off the web before they get to be that much of a problem would force them to work harder and might even make it unprofitable for some of them to continue.
I think you're right about selling something you don't believe in and/or want to use. In retrospect, I don't think that's the case with our product - but rather me not being able to build it to my expectations. What I realize now is that it's something I can iterate on to get to market fit (and my expectations fit). Thanks for the feedback, cheers!
Garden Hose Reel Cart -
Why not contribute to an existing application ?
It is! Is that good or bad? I don't know. I guess I need to launch it to find out. Thanks for the feedback, cheers!
What's the advantage of this over a site like Pandora or Last.fm where I can easily program music I prefer?

I read some more
The algorithm is social crowd filtered as opposed to individually tuned. That's pretty interesting.

I can enjoy the simplicity of the design and interface, but at this level why not go all app since there's no network effects to leverage with a web interface?
Hey thanks! I think we will have something up for the Hacker News peeps to play around with and get that important feedback we crave. Thanks for the feedback, cheers!
Definitely submitting tunes to lastfm would make this for me.
I got as far as adding my first contact, and couldn't really find then where it was added. No contact list given, no real info given about the product. Not going to sign up, sorry, not even for free ... no clarity to this product, $10 per month for this is a little crazy. I don't think that this solves any real world PROBLEMS since I'm quite happy with my contact management already. Looks more like a college project than a real world product... Apologies if that seems harsh, but it's an honest opinion.
refactoring is a natural part of coding process. in an ideal world, it only has to happen only when you need a particular chunk of code in more than two places. otherwise, time spent without adding value is just wasted.

but this is not an ideal world and from a recent thread about a similar subject, i got the impression that most of us don't like the code we wrote the second time we look at it.

i guess it's okay to spend time on code that's already perfectly working as long as you don't miss your deadlines (or arrive late to a date, or something).
Are you looking to run the Google Android OS on your Windows Mobile device?
To do so, you need to download the Nexus One build and dual boot your Windows pda. Dual boot allows Windows Mobile users to run the Google Android mobile operating system on their mobile phone.
I have the same issues with the wrong videos starting to play in Firefox 3.6.whatever on Mac OS X. Great idea, but the playing bit really didn't work right for me.
Disney isn't the only producer of "cows." If Disney wants to use it forever, let them. It would not stop anyone else from coming up with something original. Owning the rights to Mickey Mouse for so long hasn't even stopped them from producing new works all this time.
And that's the problem with Rockstar Programmers. They know they are rockstars, they know that they can get funding for their own product at a moments notice, they know that they can always go on a speaking tour.

You need them, but they don't need you, and they know it. So they walk in and want to do what they want to do, they have no intention of doing the shitty stuff. But work in a company has a lot of shitty stuff to be done.

The problem with Zed is that though he is a good developer, he's also a good writer and probably a good talker. Those last two are important to him, and when people work at companies, they should not be having two big side projects (writing and talking). It distracts from the work.

All the rockstar programmers of the last few years all seemed to have entered CTO roles, have started their own companies, or are important people in very big companies. Very few are still just slugging away at code at small startups.

This story is basically why you should not hire rockstar programmers. Hire normal people who depend on you for their income.
Not sure where you're looking:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=C%23,php&l=

There's quite a lot of C# jobs out there, but I doubt there's many in the 'dude we're a startup' scene. Perhaps there's where you're looking? The C# jobs are going to tend to be in larger corporate America (in the US, obviously.

Personally I think MS has been painting themselves in to the corner of only being a viable toolset for larger corporate America due to their pricing. They acknowledge this themselves with programs like BizSpark and WebsiteSpark.

It's a good language, and .NET is a powerful framework, just very tied to the Windows platform (mono notwithstanding). And the Windows platform is pretty expensive compared to other platforms. Although the tools are very nice, if it comes down to spending thousands on premium tools vs saving thousands and learning to do stuff 'by hand', most startups choose the 'by hand' route. BizSpark and/or WebsiteSpark can help reduce that upfront cost for a few years, but at some point you'll need to pay the piper.

If you want to work in a startup working in the web space, PHP/Ruby/Python will be the way to go. Those are even runnable on Windows - MS has made a lot of commitment to getting PHP running well on Windows. If you're looking for a high-paying corporate job, C# may be the better route, depending on where you're located. Oh, you're on Cinci - there should be a lot of options between Cinci, KY, IN, and perhaps TN or PA. You're a few hours from a lot of places.

Good luck!