skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just to complicate things a little bit more for you: even if your SO says she supports you she may not always do and vice versa. My wife is supportive but, as the female prerogative goes, if she is in a bad mood I will still get the "why did you quit your well-paying job, now there is pressure on me to keep working" spiel. Even though my startup is doing great. And she may be totally different the next day. It's not a binary yes/no as we hackers would like.

Ah women. I think the species it too complex to come up with generally applicable advice. You should still aim to get support though. Years ago, my entrepreneurship professor wrote on the blackboard the very first day "EENASWSI" - "Every Entrepreneur Needs A Spouse With Second Income". It's hard enough to do a startup without having to fight a battle on two fronts.
Could you list off those sites? Besides Topcoder.
I don't care about the morality either. I'm telling you that things that involve national defense trump everything else in the budget. Everything. You picked an awful example. All it does is lead to an argument about the use of force, which has nothing to do with NASA.

Pick subsidizing fruit growers, or the rural electrification commission, or studies of prostitutes in Hong Kong -- there are a zillion projects that you can pick which will provide that same WTF moment you want. Hell, just point out the freaking size of the federal budget in general and how it compares with NASA's budget. But the project you picked leads us off into another direction entirely.

Another commenter made a great point -- the closer NASA was to being another arm of DoD, the more funding and budget goodies it got. Perhaps if we could find some reason to fear an attack from outer space, NASA would kick into high gear again (and I'm only being slightly facetious)

With all the downvoting I'm getting, perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps most folks feel like the use of deadly force is more or less the same as any other expenditure: bomb an insurgent, watch some young kid die in an IED detonation, build a bridge, fund some research, build a space station, buy buses for a school system.

I am not one of those people.

And while I have strong moral feelings about this, it's not a question of morality. As a practical matter, the use of deadly force by the state should only be done in times of emergency, and in those cases funding for that use of force trumps everything else. Now we can argue whether or not Afghanistan holds up to that criteria, but that's a war discussion. You're dragging in another topic when there are plenty of examples of other funding that don't have the unique qualities of Afghanistan. Hell, entitlement spending alone counts for about 60% of current federal spending. http://reason.com/blog/2010/01/25/news-flash-entitlement-spe...
This is where MS can get the upper hand.

Yes and no. I have to admit I hoped for the ability to install any app you like (like in former versions of WinMo). Sadly that is no longer the case.

Silverlight/XNA development is fully OK for me, but it seems a tad restricted. Especially without the ability to run Silverlight in the browser, something which really, really surprised me when I heard it (at least that's what I got told on the Windows Phone 7 developer session).
I've had positive results with the pcengines alix boards for routers: http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm . I suspect they'd work well for other server use.
I wonder is some kind of reverse flattr would cut out the trolling: as a commenter I have the option of paying a little money to comment, with a nice filtering option for non-paying commenters, maybe the default?
What do you mean by "commoditise the software"? If it's open source, how much of a commodity can it be?

Also, and again I apologize for not understanding your language here, but what do you mean by a "vertically integrated solution"? Could you give an example to illustrate what it would mean for a competitor to do this?

It would be interesting if there is a competing solution on the horizon, the success of which Rackspace is trying to preempt with this offering. I guess time will tell.
Are you referring to Champagne that can only be called from Champagne if it's from that area? Because it's different from the florist issue. The EU Protected Designation of Origin system was meant mostly to let local producers protect the local and artisan character of traditional products.

Florists probably argued the same thing that most professions that try to round the circle of the guild argue: the profession required special knowledge and for the sake of consumer protection we need to let only vetted people into the group. It's the same argument doctors use - yet I hardly ever meet anyone who questions the need for certification by a professional group or government of the medical profession (for the record I oppose such barriers to entry and advocate putting more responsibility with the consumer).
The Velluvial Matrix: Commencement speech at Stanford by Atul Gawande
Congratulations!

It looks like you have a nice MVP there. Good work.

I found the "Pricing" page to be needlessly confusing. There's a lot of room for optimization there.
Nope :).

I signed up because I like the writing, and columnists and I'm willing to pay for good content. Comments are just something that I noticed was an emergent property.
So you're saying that they are maybe deliberately understating the pain of migrating platforms with this solution simply to achieve recognition as being in a leadership position.

If you are correct, this sounds like quite a cynical move to try to hoodwink potential customers into a false sense of security with an apparent promise of platform independence.
Ask HN: Review my status board startup
Geckoboard launched into private beta last week. It's very much a minimum viable product in that it's a functioning product but there's still lots to do. It's bootstrapped by me with the design and development outsourced to companies in the UK and Belarus respectively.

Geckoboard is SaaS status board that uses other services' APIs to collect and summarise key business information and display it in a way that's easy to understand and interpret.

Data from web analytics, server monitoring, project management, email marketing, CRM/helpdesk etc shown together on one dashboard to give a near real-time status on the health of all aspects of your business.

At the moment we integrate with about a dozen different API but more are being worked on right now and even more on the backlog. I'd love to hear your thoughts and/or suggestions.

EDIT. Signup instructions:
We're in private beta but you can bypass the private bit by using the invite code "HN" on the signup page (don't include quotes).
Link: http://geckoboard.com
HN Feature Request: Submit anonymously
Anonymity is (sometimes) a need. This feature would at least reduce the number of temporary accounts created just to preserve privacy or anonymity. Maybe only add this feature to users with karma > x ?
We're in private beta but you can bypass the private bit by using the invite code "HN" on the signup page (don't include quotes).

Link: http://geckoboard.com
Thanks!

I completely agree with Pricing page being confusing... It felt fine when I initially created it, but hours after launching I want to remake it completely. There are only two main options to tell people about, and two different prices - seems like all that text isn't really required.

Also, pardon my ignorance, but what do you mean by MVP in this context?
Welcome, & glad you're enjoying Europe. People should travel more, then at least they'd see different (if not better) ways of doing things.
"We asked some of our users who've been coming here for a while. @wondroushippo summarized it well - 'A site tracking what you, your friends, and everyone else is favoriting on Twitter.'" @ http://favstar.fm/faq

According to this, they have to ask their users what they do. I find it hilarious.
Damaging Effects of Tinnitus
Oh Hi. It's funny who you run into here. :-)

I'm a developer at 99designs and we've been using Visual Website Optimizer to do A/B testing. Our marketing guys love it.
Innovative and cheap method of delivering vaccines
Of course, this will cause every civilized government to fail, because governments depend on tax dollars.

If governments find it impossible to tax income as they lose their monopoly on cash, they will still be able to tax tangible property: land, buildings, cars, airplanes, etc.
What NASA (and society as a whole) needs is less focus on safety. Go do some wild things & if volunteers die in the process, accept that risk.
Ask HN: Which Laptop?
Hi All,

I'm updating my laptop at the end of the month (payday!) and was wondering which to choose. I've been browsing around the internet for the past week but there are so many to choose from its hard to know which is best.

Currently I have a HP tx2000 with dual boot Windows 7 Professional & Ubuntu. It has served me well over the last couple of years but its starting to fade now. Plus its not the lightest laptop around, even without the battery and CD drive, and since I do a lot of travelling I need something lighter.

The main use for the laptop will be programming/movies/internet and my budget is about $1000/€700.

I'm open to any suggestions?

Thanks,
T
This is ugly, but it should do the job:

"#000000" if sum([int(i,16) for i in re.findall("..",myColour)]) > 382.5 else "#ffffff"
I was more specifically thinking of the requirements (depending on the country) for certain types of whiskey, beer, and IIRC some grain alcohols. I know the French do the same thing, but never delved into it because wines and cognac and brandy seem to be worlds more complicated.
tl;dr

GPU dies because connectors between chip and the board fracture because of thermal stress due to some poor engineering choices on NVIDIA side.

Owners of mis-designed chips (used in many dell, hp, apple) laptops can somewhat alleviate the damage by resoldering connectors by reheating the board in the baking oven (sic!) or using blow-dryer or heat-gun.
Why? Because there seems to be a short attention span downvoting cabal on HN. Any post that is mildly controversial and requires people to think has a moderate to high chance of going to -2 within the first 45 minutes, only to bounce back to more than 10 after a few hours. Don't worry about early votes.
Concern for Those Who Screen the Web
I think that video games or movies are so moving, that everything else
in life seems fade.

That's why they're so addictive, because they're so much "more" than reality.

The only solution is to reduce the consumption of them. Than reality
will "bloom" again. I have been there before.

Unfortunately I'm currently again on the other side, and I know hard
it's to reduce it.

Edit:
The funny thing is, that reducing them makes them again more enjoyable.
Find your invisible friends on Gmail, programmatically
A simple code to get a list of email id's of those who are in the invisible mode, from your contact list.
That would make everyone poorer in the long term.
http://dell.com/ubuntu occasionally has something ok. I've got a Dell Latitude e6500, which I got with no OS, and it runs Ubuntu fine.
What did you make the UI in? looks really nice.

I find the text really hard to read when configuring a widget.

Also, uservoice support :)
This looks fantastic, congratulations!

You might want to remove this weirdness at the bottom of the front page:
"Start GOOGLE ANALYTICS<--> End GOOGLE ANALYTICS<--> Start CHARTBEAT<--> End CHARTBEAT<--> Start ZENDESK<--> SupportEnd ZENDESK<-->"
Friends of a friend started http://www.chictopia.com

It's fashion oriented, but I don't know much else about it other than that they appear to be successful.
Minimum Viable Product.

In terms of the Pricing page, there are two possible ways to deal with the problem. One, of course, is to fix the page. The other is to fix the pricing model.

I assume you've already given your pricing a good deal of thought, and have some reasons for having priced things the way you did, but off the top of my head, if it were me, I'd be offering pre-pay options, with steeper discounts for larger purchases.

In other words: something like 20 messages for $5, 50 for $10, 150 for $20-- and forget about the "monthly" plan altogether.

But, as I said-- that's just a gut feeling, without any real analysis. I imagine you know what you're doing.
Put JavaScript in your Lisp and Emacs in your JavaScript
It's amazing to read how the iPhone4 is so great and how people can't live without it.

I have a 3GS, an Ipad, an XPS gaming laptop, and tons of others tech stuff and if they all went away one day, my life would still be a rich one.
It's beautiful. Great job!

It definitely needs those additional API's. And could you offer a simple full list of all the widgets upon signup, where you could checkbox the ones you want, instead of hunting one-by-one in a dialog? It would make it easier to get started.

But I would definitely use such a service. That'll do pig!
Mozilla Security Bug Bounty Program
I've read a lot of interesting comments on here, but what is everyone's stand point on support. Do you offer free support? Do you charge? Do your clients ask for it? Obviously a change request is chargeable, but what about a bug?

I used to do freelance work face to face, I made a nice chunk of money from it - but in the end the support I had to give was exhausting. Most of it was neither a bug to be fixed or a request requiring a change, often in fact the support query was completely unrelated to my freelance work.

This is one problem with freelancing in general. At the start it is easy, fun, creative and you are printing money. However, the more clients you have, the more work you do and the more money you make, is counter balanced by the increase in support duties.

I decided to join a software consultancy instead, doing roughly the same role as when I was freelancing. The only difference is, now I get paid a salary (which is a lot less) and our support team handle the support of clients. (Something which many clients actually are happy to pay a premium / service fee for).

This said, I see how much money things cost clients compared to my salary (for my work) and get the temptation to just go freelance again.

So HN freelancers, what is your standpoint on ongoing support?
George Lucas wants to talk to NMANews, how dare they infringing on his idea.

NMA News and HTC are both Taiwan-based.
It was emotional, and it was hostile. But, you know, emotion and hostility are sometimes the right reaction to someone else's behaviour. Microsoft has threatened open source in the past with lawsuits, and leaked Microsoft memos (the Halloween Documents) have talked about using that as a strategy.

Given all that background, it makes sense for people to be cautious -- though not unremittingly and unthinkingly hostile -- regarding Microsoft.

Now, for me, if I was developing on the CLR, I would very much consider using IronPython. Though having said that, I wouldn't consider developing for the CLR, because it isn't open source and doesn't run on Linux. Instead I might use the JVM, which seems to be acquiring a good ecosystem of languages (Groovy, Clojure) and tools (ANTLR, various IDEs) that run on it.
I really don't want to get into a back-and-forth here, because clearly we both consider each other idiots, but your belief that national defense trumps everything (and the fact that it's shared by all too many people) is why we're in this situation in the first place.

Does national defense trump food? Does national defense trump disaster preparedness or emergency response? Does it trump basic research? (Consider that last answer carefully.)

Cost-benefit ratios apply to everything, even including national defense. And it all has to be managed together. The idea that we have to put it all on the line every time some guy in a cave sneezes is the panic mode that let us spend off-budget for years on national defense, and it's the reason why entitlement spending doesn't actually account for 60% of federal dollars.

So this is the crux. National defense spending is considered holy, and yet it's an immense drain on our national resources that, if it were examined in any honest way, would be cut so fast your scissor fingers would be blistered. I could say the same for lots of things, but national defense is such a sacred cow you just can't say any other program comes even close in terms of the way it short-circuits discussion at every juncture.

You're 100% right in your plan to refund NASA, though. If we could just get Fox News to believe in alien terrorists, we'd be on Mars next week.
The 2D UI is a big risk considering the competition. iPhone 1.0 had a nice 3D feel to it. The WP7 OS seems very responsive and snappy. But the lack of wow factor might be because of the 2D UI and monochrome color scheme. It lacks depth and looks plain.
Yeah probably the same mechanism, it works and is administered on the EU level. It's used for many spirits, wines and agricultural products in the EU. An area close to where I'm from in Belgium even has a type of pie protected that way.
I Live in the UK, but I get some Timmies imported. I dont even drink coffee, but try The French Vanila Coffee, Abso. Awesome!

And Don't forget the Garlic Cream Cheese Beagle,Apple Fritter, Boston Cream, Blueberry Fritter.....

Why have you done this to me!!!!
What Could Google Do With the Data It's Collected?
How safe are we, really, from terrorists?
Can dial up be as good as broadband?
Well, where i come from internet is very expensive and very few people can actually afford it. Dial up is affordable. By means of implementing a proxy, which compresses all the data and have a app on a computer that decompresses that data and feed that into the browser, can the dial up connection be as good as low speed broadband ?
Picture below for clarity
web<-fast connection->| proxy server |<--compressed data(dial up)-->app
Hi Dennis, glad to find a customer here on HN!
Bangalore's online gift portal for sending Gifts & Flowers
Your los angeles time conversion in your clock widget is incorrect, it is one hour behind.

Fantastic idea and UI
I guess this is one of the best descriptions of my own "hunting" habits. It is amazing to me how hacking/making seems so similar to the kind of persistence hunting that our ancestors used to depend upon (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o). As I meditate more about these traits and my own struggles with ADD/bipolar tendencies, it is becoming clearer that most hackers are indeed "hunters in a farmers' world".
http://www.spoj.pl/ is a good multi-language site.
Fantastic app! UI is particularly well done, great job.

Small number of currently present APIs definitely is a let down, but I suppose that will change soon?

I would love to have ability to create multiple "pages", for monitoring different projects - so that their widgets don't overlap.
Thank you. I figured if it was something that you were going to look at throughout the day or even put it on a large screen in the office (as one of out testers is doing) then it has to look decent.

It was actually designed by Jason Reynolds at a company called Buffalo based in Brighton, UK (http://builtbybuffalo.com/). I've used them before and was really happy with the result.

Thanks for spotting the "Start End" weirdness, will fix it.
We actually went part down the road of Uservoice integration and it was going to make the first cut but due to a few issue we had it's been put on hold. We'll get it in soon though, I promise.
and hey cool you went or are going to my Alma Matter. MTSU - though Baltimore is hometown and where I reside now.

Recording Industry major. Fun times!
Very good advice for such a young person. Your post makes clear that age != experience.

To the OP, I think it depends strongly on your client whether you have to have a big portfolio with big names in it or don't have to have a portfolio at all. My advice: Charge a little less (ahlatimer does this, too), but deliver quality and learn on the go as much as you can. I think every customer is looking for quality & honesty, so when you deliver, you will be able to charge a little more the next time. Good luck!
any porno backing will work

.. plaaaayaaaaa
For those who like programming challenges, there is a interesting Project Euler problem about Palindromes (Lychrel Number).

http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=55
We're working on daylight savings support right now, should be there soon.

Thanks!
Opportunity Costs
I can't agree more; that's why I married a European.
Wanted to complement you on the design as well, looks really nice! Just one issue, the background is flickering on my Laptop's screen (Lenovo T510i). No of to explore your solution some more.
Rakudo (Perl6) now supports feed operators
Yes - we're ramping up the number of APIs, this was just the bare minimum required to get it out there and hear what people needed.

And thanks for the multiple pages suggestion. Certainly something we'll look into!
I'll go with the simple video version, because anything else just seems to fancy for me.

It depends on your customer: If you have customers who are not that tech-savvy you might consider touration.com, otherwise stick with the basic video and you'll be fine.
On a wider note, I do think the Halloween Documents heralded Microsoft's current weakness. In them, they said that they were going to compete with Linux and open source by using legal shenanigans. Nowhere did they say they are going to compete by writing better software and producing better devices than the competition so people would prefer using their products.

Instead MS though their dominance of the PC space meant they could relax and didn't need to develop good products. And now Apple is eating their lunch.
my nephew got recruited by a similar wind startup.

http://www.jobyenergy.com/tech
Thanks, although full credit for the design has to go to the designer Jason from http://builtbybuffalo.com/

We'll look into the flickering, could be to do with the repeating background image.
Oh, this is fantastic. I can definitely see myself using this, thanks!

One quick note: On the Beta sign up form there's a misspelling: "Acount" instead of "Account."
No problem was just trying to help. I really like it and I hope you add on more key google analytics indicators like conversion rate, number of sales, etc.
The Social Network (facebook film) script leaked
What's wrong with temporary accounts?
i may be misinterpreting the article, so correct me if i'm wrong.

is the author suggesting that there is nothing to fear from the possibility of a "pain gun" being used against civilians because sooner or later the steady march of technology will ensure that we all have pain guns to use on eachother?

that doesn't sound too comforting to me.
relevant: http://face.com/
Do you check to see if electrical appliances are UL listed?

UL is private company that sets safety standards and tests products that manufacturers voluntarily submit for (and pay for) testing.

Does a small mid-west town have the resources and and expertise to inspect the traveling carnival rides to insure they are set-up properly? Or does the carnival's insurance carrier handle that responsibility?

There are private replacements for coercive regulation that are not theoretical but are actually working.
http://www.flockengine.com - Android Multiplayer Framework & Hosted Infrastructure
What happened to Quicken Online, post-acquisition of Mint
Yeah, I've given it some thought. I'm still trying to decide which way to go (keep current model, or go in a direction that you suggested).

However, your suggestion about dropping monthly plan is interesting. I thought it would be a matter of convenience for people? Given that they'll be using the service monthly, of course.
Steep discounts does sound like a step in the right direction.

Thanks a lot for your comments!
or they could approach a reddit-like approach.
I would absolutely love to have such a feature on my online newspaper.