skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please rate my idea; a thesis idea but can be a startup
I am building a web based system that indexes operations research topics both algorithms and problems. It also indexes short info about topics, articles and books on the topics, real world practices, software packages and tutorials around the web. Do you think can I transform this thesis idea in to a startup? Can you give me some advices to improve this system?

There is no live system yet because i am still developing it with magnificent Play Framework...
To be fair, we want the same thing in return, while trying to get by with the minimum effort exerted by the other husbands.
Why North America? For the most part North America has mature deployment of Internet services. What is really driving IP address exhaustion right now is Asia where millions are coming online for the first time. They are the ones that will have a hard time when unused IPv4 addresses become scarce.
Ask HN: HN job board needs moar luv
no one's hiring?
Advice for first time entrepreneurs raising funding
He could have easily compared the US to Canada, which has also seen faster growth than the US, and is __much__ more comparable, but it doesn't fit with the particular ax he is trying to grind.
Deploy it on the web and let it decide
Who is doing PR/Marketing for Flipboard... They're everywhere I look in the last few days!
iPhone 3G w/iOS4 - slow & very buggy
Do we even need to hypothesize this as a specialized evolutionary response?

“My life sucks; studying hard and looking for a job will not make it suck less, because even if I get good grades, nobody will hire me; however, if I have a baby, then there will at least be something cute in my immediate environment that loves me” looks like a straightforward chain of logical reasoning to me.
Very well put! I shall be snagging that line for future use, if you don't mind.
what a horrible barrier to entry: You cannot collabrr at this time because you are not logged in, or you have been muted. Either log in or find another topic to collabrr in until hosts change.
Why would anyone bother signing in? Open posts to read only (at least) until there is some content worth protecting with a sign in page- you'll just annoy visitors otherwise.
Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure: Bringing Balance to the Force
If you are great at javascript and php and want to get in on the ground-level of http://infusedindustries.com, then send me an email. Email me brian (at) infusedindustries (dot) com. We're currently looking for someone like you (or who you say you are!)
The streaming part is neat, providing access to data well beyond the storage capacity of your current machine. ZumoDrive (former YC company) also focuses on the streaming aspect.
I agree with you. "Don't tell me what I can't do" is a philosophy that Microsoft's biggest customers pay for.

Raymond replied down in the thread: "In this case, it was not for a specialized scenario but a program for a general audience."

OK, in that case, we can taunt that developer, but it wasn't clear from the post itself which seems to ignore valid use cases. Think about a billing widget at Kinkos or vital metrics on a shared terminal in a factory.

In my opinion, the correct response would have been "Sorry, we don't support that feature because it damages the user experience for home users. Also, we didn't think we could engineer a fully extensible sidebar in a meaningful way given our schedule. If you have an enterprise need, you can provide your own widget host and override the entire sidebar via group policy."
"... autocompletes just about everything ..."

The problem is it cannot autocomplete this:

def example(a,b):

a.
Don't get me wrong. I think Gruber would pummel either of these two hacks in an argument, and I enjoy his writing while Mary Jo makes me want to gouge my eyes out, but you have to admit that sometimes, no matter how well formed his argument, John really works his ass off to find a defensible position for Apple.
Wow your third reply to me ever is an ad hominem? Classic.

And you should probably be more careful in what you wish for because I actually have reported security vulnerabilities to Apple before. And in one case, I waited even longer than a month for a reply (rdar://3775607).

Did you still have a point to make?
Researchers discover more moon water: This time, inside the Moon.
1 point: For every 5 years after the age of 20 - Jason Friedman

The mortgage, loans, and kids I agree with. But there are many wives who not only support their husbands ambition but actively encourage it. If a wife is willing to endure the Ramen years then it is of no concern.

As for the quote that I referenced from Jason Friedman above, well he just entered ass clown status in my book.

Not only is that blatant age discrimination, but there are a lot of 30 somethings and 40 somethings that have a wealth of experience that a younger person has not experienced. I have had three successful exits through my 20's now 30's and I would say without a doubt my current me is 10:1 a better individual to have on a start-up team over the 23yr old me that had his first exit (that guy was scared shitless the whole time) or the 28hr old who had his second (that guy was too cocky). The 32yr old me played it just right and the X yr old me assumes he will have it down to a blueprint after the next one.
Not necessarily anything in particular. Just a big picture overview of how the technology works.
"Lack of experience" isn't the reason most businesses fail
I was surprised to see you say "The government owns much of 'private' enterprise".

Singapore is known as one of the most economically free countries in the world, consistently outranking the U.S.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom_histo...

One measure of the percent of private industry the government owns is the tax rate (just as an investor would earn a percent of profits based on his ownership, so does the government). As the article points out, Singapore's tax rate is 12% while the U.S. is 44%.

You mention some specific companies which I'm not familiar with, but overall, wouldn't it be more accurate to say "the government owns the least amount of private enterprise compared to almost any country in the world?"
Smurf account so I can write freely without risk of lawsuit. HN regular-ish (karma > 1k) and Singaporean.

newy is very right with the summary above.

Some points to add:

"The government also hands out "scholarships" for US college education, but really these are loans that require one to return and work for the government for X years"

The bond period is 4 years for local scholarships, 6 for overseas.

"Males are required to complete military service"

The conscription period is 2-2.5 years. Until you're age 40/50 (latter for officers), you are eligible to be recalled arbitrarily. This is typically 2-3 weeks a year.

The company analogy is apt. It is most certainly not a democracy. There is no freedom of speech, no freedom of press, no rule of law. Some highlights:

- NYTimes pays $114k damages and makes apology to Singapore's ruling family: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62N26D20100324

- International Bar Association's report on how rule of law does not exist: http://www.ibanet.org/Article/Detail.aspx?ArticleUid=0081C46...

- very recent (July 2010): UK author of book on death penalty in singapore arrested for defamation: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/18/singapore-britis...

- citing anti-corruption, the government pays itself very, very well. "In 2008, the annual salary for entry-level ministers was $1,924,300." http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_Singapore .
Fully open source? Interesting.

Considering their bread and butter last I knew was source control, wonder if they plan to make money off support contracts, tools on top of it, or something else.
I'm curious if there are any plans for a "VeracityHub" or something similar.
Yup, that's a good idea, looking forward to seeing the link. Operations has always interested me, lots of practical business applications for developers and designers. A lot of this common sense science has been lost on us youngsters since the 70s when it was a big field
The article is seriously flawed, because it completely discounts the possibility that the fast lifestyle is the cause of the pathologies of the poor.

It mentions the oft-cited statistic that 2000 calories of junk food is cheaper than 2000 calories of vegetables. The fact is true, but irrelevant; if you are overweight or obese (as most of the poor are), you can reduce your caloric intake and increase food quality for the same cost. A few of the poor may be working dangerous jobs, but the vast majority of the poor are simply not working.

When you subject individuals from affluent (or poor, but foreign) backgrounds to US poverty-like conditions, they rarely exhibit the same pathologies. Graduate students earn very little money, but don't become obese. Indian immigrants in Jersey City, which includes guys working at fast food places, don't turn to crime, teen pregnancy [1] or exhibit the poor health that Americans do. That isn't what you'd expect if environment, rather than personal choices, were the driving factor.

[1] They do reproduce fairly early, but this is caused by different pathologies (forcing girls into arranged marriages at an early age) and it occurs even among affluent Indians.
I imagine a journalist or blogger writing about "los angeles web designers" probably would use those terms. They would at least use terms like "web design" which the advertiser can target and then geo-target the campaign to only show ads to users in the LA area. It actually works pretty well. If you spent more time learning how to use it or work with someone who does then it then you might find success.
The part about sources and especially linking to them is something I wish bloggers would take to heart. I'm so tired of shitty blogs that go out of their way to link to more of their own garbage or search engine spam "tag pages" instead of companies, products, wikipedia, news sites etc to provide context.
What about waf? http://code.google.com/p/waf/
LifeHack: Getting More At Starbucks
Pipelines and continuations
This is not that big of a problem and I think to varying degrees, everyone does it. Learn to spot when you do it more frequently. And for practice, make a note when others do it as well. You'll learn to distinguish air-tight arguments from sloppy ones. It also helps to use a mental filter to call yourself out before anyone else can. Here are things that help me:

1/. State an argument. Then, take the opposite side - ask yourself, what are the arguments people might have against my argument? What assumptions am I making? Is what I am saying true in all cases or only under specific circumstances?

2/. Reading Richard Feynman's Cargo Cult Science speech at Caltech helped: http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

3/. Two quotes from Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett's partner), that also act like a filter:

"You are not entitled to an opinion unless you can state the arguments against your opinion better than your opponents can."

and from an interview:

Q: You've often said that one of the keys to your success has simply been to avoid making the garden-variety mistakes that you see other people make.

Munger: Warren and I have skills that could easily be taught to other people. One skill is knowing the edge of your own competency. It's not a competency if you don't know the edge of it. And Warren and I are better at tuning out the standard stupidities. We've left a lot of more talented and diligent people in the dust, just by working hard at eliminating standard error.
This, no offense, seems like the worst idea ever*. Who needs to innovate when you can just c/p a design pattern? (Yes I realize you can already do that, but making it easier seems like the opposite of progress.)
Package managers aside, you can run:

sudo easy_install bpython
I feel the exact same way. Somehow I've been able to get over it and it makes what I'm doing much more fun. One thing that I've done that's really helped is creating something that many people find value in and enjoy using. I know what I've created could have been done much more elegantly by most of the people here but I just keep building on what I've done fueled by the growing user base and positive feedback. Awesome learning experience and confidence booster.
That's pretty much Yuri's modus operandi.
The Web’s Five Most Endangered Words
How can we get research out of the Ivory Tower and into production?
"In 2008, The Economist reported that Morgan Stanley had estimated the fund's assets at US$330 billion, making it the world's third largest sovereign wealth fund."

That's in addition to Temasek Holding's ~US$100 billion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_Singapore_Investm...
Timing is Everything
Snarky response is that we don't need hypothesises at all anymore, we understand enough of the universe to be rather ok.

But there is value in accepting this theory, which I might add is reasonably well accepted as far as most other mammals. The value is that your chain of logic blames first the people themselves, and feeds back into the aticle's final justification, that is, while such things as increasing education are politically expedient, they don't actually change conditions. Getting this theory widely accepted can do a great deal for changing how governments fight the problems of poverty.
As far as "point 1" is concerned, in our industry it really does seem "outrageous and unconscionable", but as far as case law is concerned I wonder if in the grand scope of new businesses in general it would be viewed as such. The court may be predisposed to believe that people and businesses have freedom to contract, and it seems reasonable to believe that the argument could be made that this clause should be left to stand as written.

New York may have been chosen as venue in order to "fit" with known case law on this and other points. Such as the allegation in paragraph 3 that Facebook is a "domestic corporation" in New York (a very basic detail to get wrong about this) seems like it might be an "error-on-purpose" to lay the foundation for using a particular case, either now or later. Sloppy errors do happen, so does venue shopping, and with a case that has this big of a potential payoff, feigned errors on the part of counsel might allow introduction of some "hoped for" piece of a supporting case. It is New York after all.
Details About the Firefox Button (in FF 4 Beta 1)
Two questions

1) How does this system handle two devices behind separate NATs? (aka a work device and a home device.)

2) What is the conflict resolution protocol if a file is modified in two or more locations? (Newest wins, automatic duplication for manual resolution, etc.)
That's was a good UI decision. However, a bad decision was when they copied the iPhone UI for a Visual Studio add-on.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/07/19/vs-2010-pr...

via @rsynnott
It's one factor - there are going to be a whole host of influences.

But remember even cuteness is an evolutionary response. Nature selects for mothers who care for little things with wide eyes and big heads.

If you're interested in evolutionary psychology and the nature-nurture debate I highly recommend The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker.
My teammate once had an idea about creating an app about releasing an iPhone App. Basically you would copy a popular idea, then purchase developers and a marketing team. The greatest challenge was to see if Apple would approve the app.

We were thinking a simple 50/50 chance to reasonably model the Apple approval process.
CHILDHOOD TILL SHE TOUCHED 43 – HALLE BERRY REVEALED
It's an exaggeration. I seriously doubt Microsoft would fire their employees for not using Microsoft technology, but I would also see the phones as serious dog-fooding. Microsoft needs to know what's wrong with windows mobile that makes nobody want it and it's obvious whatever they had been doing prior to w7p wasn't working at all. What w7p will become is unknown and its success is far from sure. It's more likely market share will keep eroding, undermining their desktop market share even further.
You're right. This is a very humbling place, but also inspiring.

Never judge your insides based on anyone else's outsides.
I'm pretty sure Newy mean 'owns' in a pretty literal sense http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temasek_Holdings
On the other hand, I do. You don't have to be as big to be the biggest fish in a smaller pond. (Or as 'The Dip' puts it, to be the best in the world start by shrinking the world)
Exceptions aren't the only solution though. Conditions/restarts in common lisp seem to be a more powerful but similar alternative.

One problem with exceptions is that they can only be one deep. Ie. if you are executing the code invoked by handling an exception, what should happen if another exception gets thrown. Java says forget about the old exception (ie. lose information), C++ says crash. Maybe there is something in between?

With or without exceptions, being error-safe is still really hard. I find you have to think "transactionally". For every operation you perform you have to think about what you need to clean up if it fails, so you focus on specifying what you want to do, not how you want to do it.
Detailed guide to mechanical keyboards (switch types, hysteresis graphs, etc)
I recently started using IPython, also with a comparable feature list: http://ipython.scipy.org/moin/

Does anyone know off the top of their head which of these is the most active?
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/collab13/public_html/statistics.php:17) in /home/collab13/public_html/statistics.php on line 301

Sanatize/Check that input better.

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/collab13/public_html/statistics.php:17) in /home/collab13/public_html/statistics.php on line 524

Warning: Division by zero in /home/collab13/public_html/statistics.php on line 1588

statistics.php needs to be relooked at.
Yes, you can say you're an expert in DHTML - no, wait Ajax - Oh, I mean Web 2.0, sorry. Oops! HTML 5, of course.
You're discounting the argument that the fast lifestyle isn't a response to poverty, but a response to expectations of poverty.

Environment as it affects someone born into poverty without examples of persons who grow out of it, rather than a grad student(really a laughable argument that a grad student is 'poor' considering the value of their education.) or an immigrant to the nation, come to find opportunity...
From the FAQ:

"Open Source? How are you guys gonna make money?

Geez, do we really have to explain that HERE? At the O’Reilly OPEN SOURCE Convention?
The core of Veracity will be open source, but we plan to sell other products and
services on top of that core."

http://sourcegear.com/veracity/literature/Veracity_FAQ.pdf
Those smart people can also give you more ideas for things to ship.
One thing to note is that that's only a deodorant, not an antiperspirant. It certainly helps prevent smells with no lingering perfume, but that's it.

I tried the Crystal deodorant and was happy with it, but I had to switch back to my regular antiperspirant because sweating led to chafing, not body odor (I shower 1-2x a day). If I wasn't concerned about sweating (cold day at home, no workout), I'd probably use the Crystal stuff again.
Edo, you have provided really great feedback for me and I appreciate it more than you know. I am going to work hard to get this going and build on all these suggestions. Will you be checking this post in the future, (tommorow or the day after for example) so I can check back in with you when I have made the changes? Your feedback is highly useful for me, since this is the first site I have ever made.
This is just me throwing out a toy idea here, but.. Consider that most computers have large chunks of unused space. Now draw a parallel to projects like Folding@Home which make use of unused CPU cycles for computation. Wouldn't it be nice to make use of the world's unused storage in exchange for providing your unused storage? This made me think of that as it sounds like this 'p2p supercloud' could be just another peer type. You opt in to share 100GB == you get 80GB of redundant off-site backup for free type system.

Now, I am not asking you to implement this peer type (although that would rock my world if you did), but would it be possible for someone to implement it themselves? In other words will you be providing a 'peer API'?
Yes: that I don't believe Apple is actually sitting on security bugs and not telling researchers they've received them, based on our own experience reporting bugs to them.

I don't know how or what you reported or what channel you used to report it. It's possible that Apple makes this reporting process overly confusing. But I simply don't buy that other large vendors are significantly better at reporting progress than Apple. The MSRC takes flak all the time for how they handle reports, Adobe gets more flak than even Apple does, and I think your expectations are unrealistic.

In all cases, the process is, report bug, get pro-forma response, wait forever. Hence NMFB, hence "rebooting responsible disclosure".

If you reported a obviously bad flaw to Apple using product-security@, and they never fixed it or fixed it without crediting you on the credits page they've maintained for something like 5 years now, I apologize for making the assumption that someone saying the things you're saying has never reported a security vulnerability to Apple.
Should I try to convince my client to fire his current developers?
His code base is atrocious. I just got this contract and I'm trying to be as professional as possible by giving my client examples of why he needs to change the way he is doing things on the technology side to avoid certain disaster.

The code clearly exhibits that the developers do not understand programming in several instances. There are is-a relationships used where has-a would be appropriate as well as code that is just completely in the wrong freaking place, to put it bluntly. Misspellings are abundant and there is no documentation. All the code is formatted like trash and I seriously doubt that even the original developers (an outsourcing company who are obviously specializing in making shitty websites as fast as they possibly can and didn't even bother to open up a programming book before trying) would be able to read the code.

Any advice on explaining this to him? None of the code is in version control, documented, or has any heirarchical structure. Tons of code is repeated, there is voodoo code, yoyo code, bulldozer code, and several examples of developers copy pasting and obviously not reading docs at all.

Here is one of the cutest things I found:

function formatAvgRating($average_rating){
124 if($average_rating <= "0.25" ){
125 $average_rating = "0";
126 }else if( $average_rating > "0.25" && $average_rating <= "0.75" ){
127 $average_rating = ".5";
128 }else if( $average_rating > "0.75" && $average_rating <= "1.25" ){
129 $average_rating = "1";
130 }else if($average_rating > "1.25" && $average_rating <= "1.75" ){
131 $average_rating = "1.5";
132 }else if($average_rating > "1.75" && $average_rating <= "2.25" ){
133 $average_rating = "2";
134 }else if($average_rating > "2.25" && $average_rating <= "2.75" ){
135 $average_rating = "2.5";
136 }else if($average_rating > "2.75" && $average_rating <= "3.25" ){
137 $average_rating = "3";
138 }else if($average_rating > "3.25" && $average_rating <= "3.75" ){
139 $average_rating = "3.5";
140 }else if($average_rating > "3.75" && $average_rating <= "4.25" ){
141 $average_rating = "4";
142 }else if($average_rating > "4.25" && $average_rating <= "4.75" ){
143 $average_rating = "4.5";
144 }else if($average_rating > "4.75" ){
145 $average_rating = "5";
146 }

Should I tell him this is how a competent individual would write it?

function formatAvgRating($rating) {
$rating_floor = floor($rating);
$part = $rating - $rating_floor;
if ($part < .25)
return $rating_floor;
else if ($part > .75)
return $rating_floor + 1;
else
return $rating_floor + .5;
}

???

So many decisions..