skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who creates apps that are somewhat experimental, I have to point out how irritating your comment is. He wasn't asking you to become a customer, he was asking for some feedback about his app, one HNer to another. Sometimes, that involves signing up for the service (gasp!). Perhaps this is a barrier to entry for the OP's potential users, but you could just express that in your comment in a less - to use your terminology - douchey way.

And the offhand dismissal of Facebook integration? Are you kidding? You bitch about having to sign up to use site while in the same breath complain that the OP is providing too many (convenient) ways for users to sign up for the service I'm sad this comment has so many up votes.
Four years of sustained imaginative effort isn't.
I really hate to resort to name calling, as I realize it reduces the name caller's credibility... fuck it. Am I the only one that thinks this guy reads like a douche bag? "Mr. Fried", "The Pernicious Lack of Perspective (PLP) is metastasized through the entire corpus of their “business advice” work.".... or maybe it's this guy's writing style? Maybe, I'm use to reading so many informal blogs that have a conversational tone? I don't know.

Help me out.
Light typeface, low contrast colors and non-perfect text rendering. Welcome to the custom font age.
Jay Rosen has a great article on the beat reporter/freelancer aspect of this episode: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2010/06...
Qt should help there. Symbian^3 (meaning N8 atm) runs Qt apps, and everybody loves Qt, right?
This is a new one - guilt as the ultimate professional motivator? :)
Do they? I've seen more people saying they expect it's just a software/presentation problem. Not that I think there's any particular reason to expect either group to know what they're talking about.
This article could easy be titled:

No-name Blowhard Slams Accomplished Internet Entrepreneur in Half-Assed Effort to Validate Gigantic Ego

I've known Jason Fried since 1998 or so and he's a stand-up guy. Over the years he has built his own successful empire by carefully hiring the right people and nurturing them in the proper ways. While his advice is unconventional, it is by no means bad advice. What works for him and 37 Signals will likely work for others.
Absolutely true. At Mash, we monitor HN every day and night.
Start Up: A Comedy Sitcom Pilot About One Unfortunate Entrepreneur
They'd need to have people opt-in, otherwise privacy nuts would be complaining that "MW is holding on to my personal clothing sizes for years without my consent!".

Opt-in would be fine, but I have to say as someone who is in the process of aging, I'm not the same shape I was 5 years ago. 6 months probably, but I doubt for many people the data is actually usable without a refit after, say, 3-4 years.
I've been following the ideas of this guy also:
http://stealchoofsideas.blogspot.com/

Would be worth a post of its own, some are really technical.
Holy crap, that is nausea-inducing.

If you didn't want to do it in real-time you could do this with ffmpeg and some perl (or whatever).

ffmpeg can turn a movie clip into a series of sequentially-numbered jpgs (or GIFs or PNGs). Take both the movies, convert them to a shit-ton of images, and then feed a series of images back into ffmpeg to make a movie. Basically take all the Even-numbered image files from the left camera, and the odd's from the right camera and squirt them back through a script and ffmpeg and out to a movie.
The HN Guidelines explicitly frown upon "X reasons..." titles because they're almost always linkbait.

If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Regardless, there is no reason we shouldn't continue to help them succeed (by being rational and decent).
About time. N900 was released last year, and just recently got it's second major update. It still feels very much like beta software. It just feels like a small sideproject for Nokia, which is very disappointing. N900 had such potential, but lack of focus and US markets ruined it.
Cell Transplants for Macular Degeneration
> Similar to etherpad links, the shortened db.tt links are public but unfeasible to guess

I imagine people will be searching Google for them, and later creating programs that just go through all the possibilities (if the hash isn't long enough), download whatever they can find, and then later go through whatever they got to see if there's anything of value.
I'm a big fan of doing this with Gearman (http://gearman.org/). Super simple interface, very easy to shove stuff into the background.
I wonder if it would be possible to have page templates delivered separately from their dynamic content? The templating of the dynamic data would happen on the browser-side machine. This way, we could use really expensive compression algorithms with high CPU cost for compression, but then cache the compression result.

This could be achieved by using Javascript and fetching data as JSON, but it seems to be something that would be very useful and beneficial if it were standardized.
> Somehow, she understands CUT and paste, but can't make the mental leap to COPY. She typically cuts, pastes it right back to where she came from, and then goes to paste it again elsewhere.

That's a pro trick, I think. I consider myself a power user and I switched from copy+paste to cut+paste+paste a while ago. It gives me an extra kick of making sure the copy worked as intended.
Given Enough Standards, Define Anarchy
I'd prefer it to a two paragraph Wikipedia article.
It's very annoying to wait minutes to decompress big files. In particular installation times.
I had the N900 for a while - it is dire.

That's the best I can say about it :)

So hopefully this will be a more concerted effort.
I'm getting a kick out of the Schaumburg comments.

I lived there in the mid 90s, working in the next suburb north of there, Rolling Meadows. At least then it was a pretty soulless place and better known as Scumburg and Rolling Ghettos.

I live in a tiny village in the foothills of the Berkshires now. Last night was spent listing to the 150 year old town military band perform on the grounds of the historical society in perfect weather. My small kids ran around and played off by themselves and as I walked around I said hi to 10-20 people I know and who know me. Maybe I'm just getting old but that one simple night was worth more than anything living in SF could give me.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/06/new-iphone-4-anten...

Ars Technica usually know what they're talking about. I tend to trust them
I tried this, and I could only make it work when the phone was without a case. When I touched the metal directly I could make the signal go from 5 bars to 2 bars. With the case on I could not make it change at all.

EDIT: this was holding it with my left hand, I did not try it right handed.
Some larger funds become a broker/dealer, so they can cut their brokers out of the loop. I really doubt that anyone big enough to do that would be willing to risk their business on a DOS attack, however.

I fully agree that it's possible to do. I just find other explanations, like badly written algorithms, much more plausible.
So, why does my Mom actually suck at computers? Is it because computer interface designers suck at design?
Quite related, I think, is preterition: the act of mentioning something by saying you won't mention it. I seem to encounter it from computer/math people a lot, it's nice to have a name for the action.
Personally speaking, the login requirement was a non-starter. Unless you can work out a deal with content providers to supply at least a sampling of the experience without an account, I'd say you're going to have a tough time attracting users.
This reminds me of an interview with a former car thief about securing your car. His point was that home-made antitheft measures are better than the popular commercial ones.

The reasoning is similar to the one presented in the article: car thieves come prepared for the commercial ones and don't have time to figure out where you put the breaker in the electric circuit or how to remove your homemade padlock from the pedals.
That is unrelated IMO. People have to choose what to spend their money on; marketing (and perhaps social) pressure tends to incite people to see films that are much too often not worth their price; ergo they prefer to pirate them and spend their good money on more useful stuff.
The question in my mind is if 7-zip has a good multicore implementation for compression/decompression. I recall that the multicore implementation by the original gzip author increased the speed on a 4-core machine by something like a x3.75 boost.
>> Finally, if you are working under weak consistency, it is also worth noting that it is not a matter of picking just a single strategy. Depending on the context, the application layer can choose a different set of requirements for each data object!

This is the part that is the most important. You don't have to try to pigeonhole your application to fit into CA, CP or AP. You can say things like "writes to the user's profile must propagate everywhere instantly" or "status updates can appear a little late, no biggie.". You have significant flexibility in the amount of consistency you impose on a per query basis.
That much is clear. It's also why actual scams are set up the way they are. Saying it's effective in no way means it's not sketchy.

E.g. the famous art gallery scam is what sells art near tourist attractions, to judge by how often it pops up.
> a software/presentation problem

As in

int fix_antenna_problem(int bars) { return bars < 5 ? bars + 1 : 5; }

? :)
Fault? No-button disconnect is totally a feature.
I would call that natural selection. The actual selection is not done by humans (hence not artificial), they only set up the environment.

Well, you might say it’s a bit of both. Or you might completely do away with the concept of artificial selection. Humans are part of nature just as much as gazelles. The first select tastier cows, the second faster gepards. Artificial selection is, seen from that angle, not much more than a special case of natural selection.
What a lot of 37Signals-fanatical-defence and unnecessary MBA bashing.

I'm a huge fan of the business 37Signals has built however Scott Olsen hit it on the head with his critique of their advice.

37Signals do indeed suffer from a "Pernicious Lack of Perspective" and from "Strident Insistence". If you read Rework (which frankly will only take you an hour), it is a series of chapters that could each be retitled "And another thing I really like about what we do at 37Signals".

Their advice doesn't work in all cases and they seldom if ever draw examples of other companies where it does. This doesn't take from what they have achieved but it does mean they're often far too far out of their boat when shouting advice at others.

Kudos to Scott for not only making this point but also being a very good writer.
Mr. Olsen's essay is what we commonly call a rant. Though he doesn't fully reveal in his tirade why he perceives Jason Fried as a dangerous enemy who must be defeated, we can deduce the real reason for his seemingly bottomless anger: oxytocine poisoning.

Oxytocine is the love/hate hormone; it binds a cohort together and simultaneously creates aggression towards outsiders. Oxytocine is responsible for the condition known as The Fanboy Syndrome. Whether by design, or by instinct, each utterance from the lips of Jason Fried and Davie Heinemeier Hansson carries a payload of powerful semiotic messages that alter the target's brain chemistry. Sometimes the target will become a Fanboy, and sometimes the target will feel a threat to a pre-existing Fanboy alliance---then comes the rage.

As members of the tech community, we endure constant oxytocine bombardment by masters of manipulation. With each new version of Android, with every semi-annual dose Steve Jobs charisma, with every shift in the Facebook security policy, in the Ruby vs Python vs Java flame wars, we are exposed to massive, and sometimes fatal, doses of harmful hormones. It's important to remember that we are not animals; we can take defensive measures. When next you feel your Fanboy or your Hateboy urge rising from the depths, do not resist it. Resistance is futile. The path to freedom from oxytocine slavery is to acknowledge it, to embrace, and then, to let it go.
If anyone found this interesting, you should check out "In the Pipeline", a nice insider blog in the pharma industry: http://pipeline.corante.com/index.xml

As a free bonus, his "Things I won't work with" sub-series is a great humor read about dangerous chemicals.
It does. How dangerous they actually are? If it was that common for them to cause serious disruptions in the operations of our desktops and laptops, where are these faults? I mean, in the last 10 years, I simply can't remember any experience of a sudden and irreproducible computer failure that couldn't be quite convincingly attributed to something else.

I'm sure that this can happen to me, that in any particular moment, my memory can get corrupted by these rays, or something else, and then, the computer can misbehave or crash. And if I really wanted to be sure that it will not, I'd need to have some kind of protection against it. But compared to many other possible faults, is it really anything more than a very very rare and minor reason of a computer failure that I simply can just discard on my laptop, which is nowhere near a "critical and vital" system?
What will the pricing be after the beta ends?
Advertisers pay the corporate government of Facebookistan handsomely for privileged access to its willingly captive (the most lucrative kind of captive) population of consumers.
Finding your team is a lot easier in the valley than anywhere else in the world.

I live in Europe and I've never met anyone who I think would make a half-decent co-founder.
I have been expecting death of Symbian for a while. It existed for when all phone software sucked big time. Not anymore. There is android + iphone and symbian has no chance there.

The problem is symbian is clunky. The UI looks old and boring. It is slow, it is written in C++ with complicated interfaces. Not great software for a limited device like a phone.

Its also worth noting that it is not only Symbian, but Nokia's conservative and limited vision on innovation.
Ask HN: I've users + growing who want more. I need capitol, what do I do?
I am running a free site, that could do ads at some point. But my users are asking for an iOS app. They say they would pay for it as well. The problem is the website is easy, well I mean all it took was sweat capitol.

The iOS app would require investment in some more serious hardware. I don't need alot, I just need cover server cost.

I haven't ever worked on something that needed capitol investment, and I don't know where the best place is to ask, or even start looking.
By that logic, we're all pirates for reading his blog without paying.
I'm typing this on an N900 and I love it. What didn't you like about it? I don't have any gripes at all.
Yeah, I am currently streaming Pandora, holding the phone with my left hand cradling the bottom, while replying to this post, all on 3G. I haven't been able to get the bars to drop either...
NYT: Women Out of the Loop in Silicon Valley
It scares me to think (parts of) how many will probably be patented even though this guy thought of them by himself.
Mathematica Finds Positive Results on National Study of KIPP Schools
Hm. Its an accomplishment I guess. Like a huge ball of string.
To both of you: I’m far from a statistician, so YMMV, but after trying to work with multivariate data in both R and MATLAB, I really found using numpy/scipy to be substantially nicer. And even better, if you ever decide to do anything else in a program, like munge text or interact with internet services, a general-purpose language like Python is a big advantage.
Statistical Analysis and Visualization of the Drug War in Mexico
Hmmm. I grew up in SF. Parents didn't have money, went through the public school system. Public schools here aren't that bad, as long as you apply yourself and get into the magnet schools.

(Still live here too. The dilemma I have now is that I hate the commute to my south bay job, but I don't want to live the city. I still think most of the peninsula is pretty damn boring.)

I turned out fine. (I think...)
Aren't you conflating ethics with politics? It seems having a personal notion of social responsibility is quite distinct from wanting that notion imposed on all people by the state.
If not in at your Apple store, maybe a local issue, as they're in stock by the truckload at Apple stores nearby (NYC area).

With it on, the glass is separated from flat surfaces you set the phone on, and the phone looks less distinctive too (which can be a good thing).
He gives all these ideas away for free, seems to have fun writing them, while making a point about IP in general ( http://iotd.patrickandrews.com/about/ ).

Why belittle the effort?
Twitter Settles F.T.C. Charges Over Privacy
Cradling from the bottom isn't the problem. Holding it from the sides without touching the bottom, and without a case, is the problem. Remember that the antenna is the metal on the sides.
thanks. makes it an easy decision. definitely worth trying though.
He was going to put it across 11 comments, but as the Wikipedia article clearly points out, xz compression conventionally bundles a single file.
A/B Testing Calculator
Past a certain comfortable dollar amount, who's to say that greater fame and social standing are necessarily sillier than more money?

It wasn't even clear that's what he was after from the article. He came across as a bona fide entrepreneur who was executing successfully and wanted to take it to the next level. SF looked to him like the best place to do it.

I'm not sure whether you're arguing that he's always been a pseudo-entrepreneur, or that he remains the real deal but miscalculated in moving to an area rife with fakers, or that he became a faker by looking for a deal or acquisition offer when he should have kept doing his own thing, or whether you're trying to point out the uselessness of a certain personality type, of which he happens to be a poor example.
Yeah you can get a lot done but it's a transient state, you're leaving on a date and can't come back for months. It's really not a good way to relocate a startup, not to mention the visa violations.
These kinds of writings are why I read HN. The article is pretty technical, well written, and removes any political BS that you would most definitely hear on TV.

Notice that "circuit breakers" wasn't offered up as a solution to the problem.
> So, what have we learned about the woman programmer’s dress code? Unlike the men’s dress code, beards are not in fashion

Thank goodness!
Depends on what work takes place. It's a great opportunity to network, and write your own code.

Seems to be just fine for YCombinator too.

By the way, why is the knee-jerk reaction always to talk to a "competent attorney" for stuff like visas? I'd like to think the HN community is a pretty capable group of folks. The US government provides more than enough information online to figure out what will work best for you depending on your activities and to do it on your own. I was able to get my wife a green card completely on my own without having to consult a "competent attorney". If you are sufficiently competent, hiring a professional will save you research time but not much else.
Me too a few times.
The drag and drop feature in the setup window is a bit slow.
Ask HN: I am a startup CTO, do I need Internet at home? 
I am a startup CTO. I feel I get enough internet at work, and appreciate the lack of internet at home for the decompression time it gives me.

Recently, my CEO has been pressuring me to get (and pay for) internet at home so I can support our fledgling site during all hours of the day (and night).

Some background:

* We have 500K users. Consumer-Focused.

* We raised a $1MM A round 1.5 years ago. The money is almost gone. We are trying to hit profitability in the next few months.

* The site has some uptime problems. (think 97% - 98% uptime). I am working dilligently to fix them during work hours.

* We are a small team. 5 members. 3 F/T, 2 P/T.

* I am a minor co-founder at this company. I have 5% equity. The other two co-founders are non-technical.

* I am the only team member with any expertise in scaling or systems.

* I am stretching to make ends meet financially (we're aiming for ramen-profitability), and another $50-60 / mo is not a desired expense.

* I live in NYC and move around a lot, so a 1-yr contract with Time Warner is undesired.

Should I get internet at home? Should I be expected to pay for it?
The author obviously missed the ENTIRE POINT OF OSS! The idea is you don't charge people for the CODE, or the compiled code, etc. You charge people consulting. And it works. My co workers found good OSS, and guess what? They hired the people who wrote it for a project, and those people delivered as expected.

How did emacs oss shit start? The guy made an OSS editor, and said I will customize it to your company's needs for my fees, and you just have to accept that my changes will all be oss. And if I do something cool for someone else you get those changes too.

Thats the point. You think Linus is having trouble finding a high-enough paying job? HA!

The only thing this DOES mean though, is that those who "don't do" can't really make the money on software. Unless they bring value to developers by helping the devs get work, work together, etc. If all you have is 10 lines of golden code and that is something someone else wrote and u can't do shit with it, then you have nothing because everyone has those 10 golden lines. Yet if you have the person who wrote them you have a competitive advantage.
We are giving out water
That is amazing. Do you have any links that show that the factors causing it are likely to continue; and/or if there is a bottom-out/saturation point? I tend to think Moore's Law is the exception, not the rule, and it's only technologies based on silicon that have a similar trajectory over the long-term. Many technologies may have a short-term performance spurt.
Raising Money: Use VentureHacks
Ask HN: Are there any competitors to KissInsights?
Couldn't find any competitors, but a few must exist?
Poorer Countries Taking Over Global Economy
I still see Bing regularly come up with lousy search results. The other day I did a Bing search for "FM100-6", and none of the top 10 hits were relevant: http://www.bing.com/search?q=FM100-6&go=&form=QBLH&#.... Google, on the other hand, had exactly what I was looking for in the all of the top 5: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=FM10...

This happened frequently when I tried using Bing exclusively.
1) With the integration of R and PostgreSQL (PL/R), this might change. For example, calculate the area of a spherical complex polygon on Earth using PL/R:

CREATE FUNCTION plr_polygon_area(
latitude double precision[],
longitude double precision[])
$BODY$
areaPolygon( cbind( longitude, latitude ) )
$BODY$
LANGUAGE 'plr' VOLATILE STRICT
COST 1
ROWS 1;

Pretty powerful.

2) The learning curve for R was 30 days for me. (Still learning, but everything is now no longer alien.) I submitted a bug to a Professor. Not only did he fix the bug within a few hours, but he offered to personally send a new build for my platform. He also suggested a performance improvement for my code (by practically rewriting it) that resulted in code 43 times faster.

The PL/R mailing list has been nothing but helpful and expedient.

3) Scalability of R functions is not too difficult to test.