skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> perfect example of the male body

Ha! I must spend too much time around weightlifters/powerlifters. He looked a little scrawny to me.

Another interesting case of internet popularity not translating into sales was "Snakes on a Plane". From wikipedia:

"""
Due to the Internet hype surrounding the film, industry analysts estimated the film's opening box office to be between US$20 million and US$30 million.[4] While Snakes on a Plane did narrowly beat Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby for the number one position during its opening weekend, it did not meet these estimates and grossed only $US15.25 million in its opening days, a disappointment for New Line Cinema. ""
Is it possible to download this somewhere as PDF? I prefer my PDF reader over a web interface.
Ask HN: Would you play a distributed, programmable MMO?
In college I enjoyed participating in a few AI competitions. Students would develop some basic AI for a robot who could move and shoot, submit the code and then watch everyone's robots battle on a large projector in a digital arena. Very educational and fun.

I know there are many open source projects that let you build and compete in these sort of things, but they always seem to be language specific. You can't battle your Java AI against your C# or Python AI. So, what if we all settled on a common language such as JSON & REST? And what if we made the game persistent?

The idea is this. A cloud hosted game which is persistent but allows new players to join or leave at any time. To participate you only need to register an account and give it a base URL of where you are hosting your player's AI logic. There would be some documentation on the expected REST URLs that need to be available. This lets you use any language you want to participate. It also allows players to have a database to store past moves or data about the environment. The game server could manage invoking the player's AI based on a turn system or in real-time when needed. A player's AI while waiting for a 'turn' could invoke service calls on the game server to 'look around' and learn about the environment.

The visuals would obviously be basic at first and should be displayable on a webpage.

The game itself could be as simple as a 'player' moving and shooting when it detects another player. You could introduce items, weapons, etc.

Or it could be more complex and similar to this (posted on HN not too long ago):
http://phonons.wordpress.com/2010/06/01/cells-a-massively-multi-agent-python-programming-game/

Does something like this exist?
Things You Should Be Doing With Your Server, But Probably Aren't
I find that when ever I am working on something new or difficult, I feel stupid. The act of working on it reveals my ignorance and makes me confront the fact that I am not as smart as I think I am.
Last time I "tried" Old Spice I got a rash. They make crappy deodorant. It's okay if you're used to it but if you switch prepare for the worst. For some reason I've found this to be more common with Old Spice rather than any other deodorant brand.
> and after few days I already wrote a lengthy essay about Haskell

Can we stop doing this, please? This is just a really cheap way of driving traffic to a blog. All you have to do is tinker with something for a few days and write an inflammatory post. I'd rather read the analysis of someone who's written a decent-sized program in it.
> Usually when writing a program in F# I usually write out the types of the functions I need first, before worrying about how the functions work.

And that kind of things can give rise to such wonderful tools as hoogle (a type-based Haskell search engine, specify the type you need and it'll find the matching functions, whose types are often quite good insight as to their purpose)
I hate people that agree to one thing and then do another if it isn't what they want later on. "Yeah, I hired him to shovel my driveway. He said he invented a new shovel called "The Shovel" and needed money to sell it. I invested with him and now he says his new shovel, called "Shovel", is unrelated."
Fall 2010 Eres Lingerie Ad Campaign
php|architect's recently released book entirely on this topic:
http://www.phparch.com/books/phparchitects-guide-to-web-scra...
Nine deficit myths we can't afford
FYI, if you're looking for a very, very well-written and well-tested C codebase to read, give SQLite a look.
Looking quickly at your product - here is my advice.

Raising funding will be hard for this type of product. MS Access for the web is an extremely hard business model to raise any funding for. You have a platform you can build stuff in - what is your market for sales?

So they may be worried for good reason. Your product has a lot of uses, but no clearly defined market.

What I would do is take your product and figure out what the top 10 tiny niches are for it and do some testing/analysis. A good example here is the guys who do the restaurant ipad/mobile sites. Why are they just attacking the restaurant space and not any website? Surely the technology is the same. The reason is they chose the best battle they could. Consider doing the same approach - you have a general platform that could be very useful for many individual uses.

Then when you have a very clear concise business, market, customer growth strategy, basically a good story in one little niche - you could have more success with funding.
That's more current styles though, I like it.
FaceBook Ads Crush Google AdWords for the Founder Conference
In all fairness to the team behind this, they're obviously trying to cross the product over into a new demographic. If Old Spice's existing demographic is dying off, there can be a huge payoff if they succeed in making it hip and ironic. Remember the Black Label campaigns in the 90s? That succeeded in turning a moribund beer brand into a hip brand. It's worth swinging the bat a few times over the next five years to see if they can do something with Old Spice.
"If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Newton
It's not clear to me what point you're trying to make, but the second one gives an error: "-e expression #1, char 2: unknown command: `''", because it's getting a single argument containing a quote.

Removing the quotes gives "-e expression #1, char 10: unknown option to `s'", because "s/a/b/g -f" is not a valid sed command.

And to illustrate my point about env, sed for me is in /bin. But "#!/usr/bin/env sed -f" doesn't work, because it looks for a program named "sed -f".
To use a regular phone you would have to reverse-engineer a significant part of the (low-level) software, est. cost > $1m

Even then you would have to get lucky with the hardware, as it is not designed to sniff all the meta data and pass it up for capture. It might do some of the stuff in hardware that you want done in software.
Also http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/07/deficits-do-matter-bu...
Droid X has been Rooted
My type system experience mostly comes from OCaml, not Haskell, and I haven't done much with existential types.

While I feel vaguely anti-intellectual saying this: I grok the H-M type inference used by ML* , and the simplest mechanical application of it probably covers 95% of the things I'd use it for. It simplifies things immensely, yet it's easy to reason about. I'm not sure that more advanced types are useful enough to justify the added complexity, personally. (Though if I added one thing to ML, it would be typeclasses.)

However, I'm sure that, with sufficient experience, they probably also become second nature. I just prefer languages with relatively small semantics.

* If I had understood unification when I was learning OCaml (I learned Prolog/unification later), though, it would have seemed practically obvious. "It's trying to unify the types, based on actual usage...oh! And it infers when they're parametric!" (with a few special cases so that e.g. functions keep their more specific types in recursive calls.)
With a family, freelancing and consulting is your friend. It allows you the flexibility in schedule to pursue ideas and to work with other individuals that are in the start-up arena. You meet a lot of young companies in that line of work and you see a variety of problems. If you find a group who has an idea that you like but they cant provide a paying gig yet, you can scale your freelancing to provide the necessities while allowing you the free time to commit to a project. I freelance and consult for 3-4 days of my week, take weeks off at a time and still do well over 150k a year this gives me time to peruse the back log of ideas that me and two of my close friends have. I have 4 kids, a wife and grandparents that I take care of and I can say without a doubt that I have never felt more secure in my life than when I started freelancing. Well technically that is not true, I had a moderately sizable exit from the sale of a travel company that it gave me a nest egg, but even if that was not there, I would feel more secure than someone else making decisions about my future.

Point being, get out of your day job and into freelancing first. Get to where you are working your 40hr week and another 40hr steady freelancing, this will allow you to build a nest egg while you are making the transition, then when you are getting 40hr a week freelancing and it is steady dump the day job, then start scaling your hours back freelancing until you meet an equilibrium of money to free-time to pursue projects.
I used Survey Monkey and some one on one session with people in store like Borders.

What I found is - people who are really running with tight budget are seeing that as useful service but same time they don't want to spend time everyday to enter the data. Easiest is to allow them to just send receipt pictures but technically it is not feasible to parse image with bend paper ( people will keep receipt in pocket so it won't be straight when they take picture ).

Whats your thought?
One, ahem, way to conquer your Gmail addiction
Follow Along with my Rails3 University Class (Week 1)
I see two problems:

1) The refill station has a lifetime of only 1000 hours of operation (1000 refills) and costs $500! C'mon, the best li-poly batteries has lifetime of 1000 cycles!

2) With 12 Wh per 83 g, the stick has roughly same energy density than the best lithium-polymer batteries, and battery chargers don't die after 1000 hours of operation.
That a claim to privacy is a technique to hide amoral/unethical/criminal behavior.
To me, this behavior solidifies further Google's transition into the Microsoft of the 90's role. I guess that puts them at 2020 for being virtually completely removed from innovation and fully in the role of a differentiation defeater.

Microsoft could turn around and so could Google, but it's very hard when they're so established that short-term risk to profits becomes a major concern.
I don't think it's a big deal but I guess the author wanted to point out an easy way to crawl this public info. There are similar ways to crawl public Facebook profiles too, so it's really not a big deal.
Agreed. When real business is starting, or a contractor/employee is being hired, some form of confidentiality should be in place.
Ask HN: Useful tools for picking SEO friendly URL's, and Google discrepancies
I've been doing some research to find some URL's that would be SEO friendly for Google... I figured that I would look for some information on the popularity of search terms and have come across 2 different tools provided by Google:

Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends)
Google Insights for Search (http://www.google.com/insights/search)
Adwords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)
Search-based keyword tool (http://www.google.com/sktool/)

For the keywords: forex, forex trading, forex market

I obtained the following results (first two are relative, second two are absolute values)

Term forex forex trading forex market
Trends 1.00 0.10 0.02
Insights 83 8 2
Adwords 11,100,000 3,350,000 135,000
SKTool n/a 66,000 10,000

Normalizing the data with the lowest result set at 1:

Term forex forex trading forex market
Trends 50 5 1
Insights 42 4 1
Adwords 82 25 1
SKTool n/a 7 1

Trends and Insights have decent agreement, but Adwords and SKtool have a large variance, especially in the absolute values (3.3M searches is a lot different than 66k!) but also in the relative sizes. I'm not sure why SKTool wouldn't generate a result for "forex" and all of the configurations were set to "all countries, all languages" for the past 12 months.

This link (http://www.google.com/support/sktool/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=114875) explains the difference between Adwords and SKTool: "You may also notice that some of the data (like such as the monthly search volume) may vary slightly between the two tools, which is due to different methods of calculation at this time."
Perhaps Google's definition of "slight" is different than mine.

What are everyone's thoughts/insights on this data, and more generally, how to best go about choosing a URL and building a business around popular terms?

Cheers,
Matt
Hey Michael, I've actually not heard of McClure's AARRR model, I'll check that out. I've read read some of McClure's other articles, but not that one!

Your first comment about the referral only working in the sweet spot probably did kill it for us. We still aren't at the sweet spot, and the process of engaging with the product definitely isn't frictionless like it is for dropbox.
Trademark dilution - using famous marks can lead to trouble
Cheapest laptop backpack,8 U$D each.
Why I'm Reinventing Disqus
Hmmm, that's no good. I'll have to check that. Thanks for the tip.
It is almost as bad to have your passphrase-protected key permanently stored in ssh-agent, because anyone with access to your machine can use the key without the passphrase. A better solution is to use ssh-agent with the -t option to establish a lifetime (after which you will need to re-enter the passphrase).

My setup is to keep ssh-agent running with a 2-hour lifespan, and connect to that automatically when I log in. Basically this:

$ ssh-agent -t 7200 > ~/.ssh-agent
$ echo "source ~/.ssh-agent" >> ~/.bash_profile
$ [... log in ...]
$ ssh-add

I am not annoyed by re-entering my passphrase every two hours.
Flagged for blatantly lying:

'''And the quote by Eric Schmidt: "Internet users shouldn't worry about privacy unless they have something to hide." Ouch. That doesn't sound very straightforward OR user-friendly. Almost sounds intimidating...or maybe...evil?'''

Eric Schmidt never said that. What he said was:

'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we're all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.'

Which has a very different meaning. You should be ashamed, Louis Savalli.
Simple Random Number Generation
Untangling skill and luck - How to think about outcomes [scribd]
Writing an Impressive Application Essay to reach the goals
An application essay is common to anyone who is expecting to admit him or herself to a college, university or an organization. Therefore one has to take this seriously to achieve a better admission to persuade in a career of your dreams.
I agree. The post has nothing new to say... what is it doing up on the top of the first page?
Facebook's "Consumer Satisfaction Problem" Is A Crock
Great questions. Customers are individuals and small businesses who want a web application or to web enable their business. Most of the revenue is from building custom apps on top of it, then charging a monthly rate for hosting, essentially. I don't want to get too specific about the details. I feel uncomfortable enough as it is just talking about it publicly. That's part of the problem I suppose.

The pricing/business model very well could be flawed. I'm constantly refining pricing. Some customers think $8/mo is too expensive, others tell me I'm not charging enough, so I experiment with pricing. I'm not really sure what the best price is. If I lower the price, I do get more signups, but I read all the time about charge more and people will think it is worth more, so you'll get more customers, so I wonder if I should just make it $5/mo and get lots of customers, or $5,000 and sell harder. The issue at that price point is that customers want to be sure the platform will never die and the bus factor is low. The largest sale was to a Fortune 1000 for an enterprise license.

I have got plans asking for as much as $2M.

But you're right. It's not clear what it does. My family does understand it, to some extent. I do need a lot of help on the marketing side. Explaining it. Helping customers understand how to use it. That's what I mean when I say customers who can understand it. The market is split between developers and business users. I'm a developer and have tended to focus on that route, but developers want 100% control like they get with PHP or RoR. Business users need more assistance and quite frankly, building information systems is hard, so it takes a lot of time to help them figure out how to create a system -- with any tool. I spend a lot of time helping customers define a model for their systems. There is a large learning curve and I continue to shrink it. That's what I spend a lot of time on.
Open Core Model Vulnerability Exposed?
Forbes contradicts this (http://tinyurl.com/2exqhg7). Here's the quote...

And, perhaps, persuasive. Total sales for Old Spice body wash at supermarkets, drugstores and mass market retailers excluding Wal-Mart were up 16.7% in the 52-week period ending June 13, according to SymphonyIRI Group, a Chicago-based market research firm.

So the yahoo article is singling out the one sub-brand of body wash in the Old Spice Man's hand (which is down) but the brand itself seems to be up. Now I don't know about the rest of you but I didn't even notice what specific type of Old Spice Body Wash he was holding and I don't think others had either. So I don't think that specific sub-brand's falling sales reflect on the ads at all.

(To give the appropriate plug I actually found the forbes link via this site: http://tinyurl.com/27d9aer)
Yeah, Dropbox has a wicked simple homepage, I love it. I'm actually multivariate testing almost everything on that homepage, so it's possible you got the variant with the animation (would make it a lot more busy).

Substituting out the founders bit is something we've played with, but the previous test didn't get conclusive results one way or the other, so I need to keep trying different things with that space.
That's not fair; hundreds of people report vulnerabilities to Apple every year. We've done it, many times. They're not lightning fast, but they aren't blowing people off either.
While I admire powerlifters, I wouldn't consider an extremely muscular body aesthetically perfect. My man crush is on athletes who are muscular but not extremely so, like Greg Louganis, Rafer Johnson, or Roger Federer.

Federer can carry my bags any day ;-)
how about hacker news gold, with a special restricted-access area only? ;)

a bit more seriously, are there any plans to increase the number of karma-locked features? if people knew that there were more benefits to contributing high quality content/submissions/comments, they might put a bit more time and effort into contributing them.
Found it on sale here: http://www.ultimatesniper.com/catalog_page_detail.cfm?record...

I have no commercial interest in this book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping
Ubuntu needs to work on user experience
That's very common where I work as well (Denver, Co,USA). Many of my co-workers (I work in IT), carry a work Blackberry and some kind of personal phone.
Computer geeks learn to flirt
I'm teaching a rails 3 class, every week we go over a few chapters in the Agile Web Development with rails book and then i present on introduction to rails 3 material to the students
let me know what you think!
What do you mean with "tried"? What did you actually do with it?
A google search caps out at 2,000 results.
Is this another case of scribd being used to pirate books? The last copyright on the book is 2006 and Paladin Press is still selling the book for $60.00 here http://www.paladin-press.com/product/The_Ultimate_Sniper/Sni...
Motivation is Tricky Business
Time-Lapse Twitter Visualization Shows America’s Moods
Open Web Payments - PayPal's answer to OpenTransact
How to explain Singapore’s growth despite lack of stimulus?
My first instincts are to assume this is a "post hoc ergo propter hoc" statement. Just because sales are falling doesn't mean the commercial is ineffective. After all, how do you know that sales wouldn't be down 14% without the ads?
It seems like constant population size is one of the most important assumptions here, but it's not really discussed. It's obvious from the code given that the author is fully aware of the importance of this assumption, but it is such a blatant separation from the real world that I would think it deserves some discussion - e.g. although we know human population has grown exponentially, how do we approximate the error between what the function gives us and what actually happened genetically?
Either way, when your ad campaign is the most remarkable thing about your product you still have a problem.
No standard alternate style sheets. Again.
I've gotten a rash from just about every deodorant on the market after half a container or so. The only ones I trust are the simple white cake ones. And they usually say 'dermatologist tested' since they require a gimmick to be sold.

I wish we could go back to when nobody wore the stuff.
That's pretty much what I'm doing now. Building apps on top of it and selling those as customizable CRM's, intranets, etc. I have lots of ideas: catering businesses who want to put menus online, online stores, warehouses with lots of inventory, things like that.

I think at this point, it may be easier to sell a product for a specific niche than to sell the platform itself, which is why I wonder about funding at all.

People don't want to build a custom system. They either want a system that is up and running or to pay someone to build a system for them.

And then there is the market who has very specific needs for which there are no niche apps for them. They are left stranded, because the cost to build from scratch is too high. The goal of the platform is to reduce development costs and help more people who need information management systems get them.
This makes more sense to me. It would be very surprising if what I think one of the most engaging ad campaigns in recent memory had a NEGATIVE impact on sales.
curl -O http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/sitemap-[000-3278].txt
Their problem, as I see it, was mainly that they were using Solr, which requires an inordinate amount of time to configure and maintain (time they didn't have), and also isn't good at handling frequent updates, like the up and down votes.
Classic stories: The Story of Mel.
Ask HN: How can I recognize when I don't know what I'm talking about?
Like most people on HN, I'm a pretty smart guy. Like most geeks and nerds, I have know a little bit about a lot of things, and a lot about a few things. There are plenty of topics I have minimal experience with, but have read enough about that I feel qualified to discuss, at least in a "contribute to the conversation" or "Basic Intro to Topic $FOO" kind of way.

The problem is I wind up in conversations where I think I know enough about a topic to talk about it, only to get called out by someone who knows I'm very wrong and can prove it. It's a normal part of life for this to happen sometimes, but I notice it happening too often as of late.

How can I recognize when I don't know what I'm talking about, before getting called out on it?

Edit: I'm humble enough to admit when I'm wrong, I just want to be wrong less often. Part of my problem is getting called out too often, but the other part is knowing when to keep quiet when I'm not around people who could correct me. I don't want to misinform my friends.