skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think one of the best things you can do if you're committing to major SEM is put out an RFP. The responses can not only save you money but give you some valuable insight into the company's workings and strategy which can be just as valuable as any cost savings.
Ask HN: How to choose a name for a web app?
I'm nearing completion of a web application planned to launch near the end of May. The only problem, well one of the problems, is that I'm completely lacking any ideas for a name. I don't think I'm alone, but I find this to be one of the hardest parts of developing. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas, methods, thoughts, or anything at all worth discussing on this topic.

Thanks..!
EBay sues Craigslist over ownership stake
You can also give paying members something besides additional functionality. Game sites with even minor social functions naturally bring out the competitive sides of players. A "supporting" player could have their username in bold or with a star beside it making them stand out more in "Now Playing" or "Top Rated" lists.
Wow. For that argument to make sense, all you have to do is get bought by Google.
First, some meta-advice: start the process early and let it go for a long time. Keep thinking about it and talking to people about it. I find that good name ideas come over time and come in spurts.

There have been some good name posts on news.yc, so search for those. What I strive for:

--As short as possible.
--Memorable (often through rhyming, alliteration, repetition, etc.)
--Something people can spell.
--Something related in some way to the app (this is just my preference).
--Easy to pronounce (e.g. people know where the accent goes).
--Good connotations (or at least not bad).

There is also some psychology involved in certain sounds, but I forget the specifics of at the moment--search for it.

Finally, I find instantdomainsearch.com, a rhyming dictionary, webster, and a thesaurus useful tools in the process.
Introduction to typography
Yes, that is the work of crawling and parsing. On some sites, they are human edited as well.
there is no "social contract". i didn't sign anything. they use force. end of story. you don't pay, people with guns do come. there is no denying it.

but they aren't a tyranny, that's very different.
I just got a sweet idea.
Indeed! And there are other dark alleys I could have walked down -- shame on me for complaining, just because someone is threatening me with punishment in order to take away property I've earned.

In addition, the government under which I live is kind of nasty about engaging in anticompetitive behavior. Apparently they don't allow other people to operate anywhere they do business. And sometimes they set up shop in overseas countries, and engage in the same monopolistic tactics! Frankly, they are being run very poorly, and it is terribly inconvenient that they use such tactics to maintain their market share despite more efficient competitors.
there are always secrets nobody will share
Conjugal Harmony
I just starting using Anki ( http://ichi2.net/anki/ ) which runs on OS X, Windows, Linux, and is open-source.

Accepts Mnemosyne decks, too.
Any resources on how to do this?
Perhaps they were reading my mind when I was thirteen, too.

And then they planted it in Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, which somehow has a copyright date from several decades ago.
What I do is create a list of words that you can use to describe what your site is, does, promotes, enhances, etc. Start combining some of the words together, keeping it as simple as possible. Alter some words, like changing f to ph, and play on their meaning. Use a thesaurus and a dictionary.

Don't get too stressed over it. Often, the name will jump off the page at the most random of times.
Thanks for the feedback everyone - some nice leads.
See what Scala people think of the Web 2.0 crowd
I'd sell it if I had an option to buy it back.

All of the unresolved questions you have also apply to equity in corporations. Except that corporations live forever, rather than for seventy years, so the uncertainty is compounded.

I don't understand the 'corrupt' argument. Do you worry about this with regard to stocks, too? Does owning AMZN make you 'corrupt' when you ignore Barnes & Noble?
Thanks for the tip. That is a good idea. Never knew registrars offered returns on domain names before. I usually use namecheap to register because the name transferring is so easy, which is really helpful when it comes time to sell. I think dynadot offers that too.
Thanks. I'm a bit surprised. That number is still lower than I thought.
Maybe this technique could apply to other kinds of memories when combined with lifelogging. I could video tape all the time and then choose certain portions of video to retain in memory by review.
http://ichi2.net/anki/
Ask HN: One page site/app + advertising revenue?
I've got an idea for a quick app/site (that could get bigger in the future based on some other ideas) that I'll probably crank out over the next couple days.

One thing that I'm wondering is how do I get more impressions/clicks on a page/app that is just one page?

I can make the page all ajaxy/flashy and have ads on it, but a user can then be there for hours and never refresh the page/ads, so my potential clicks (assuming the person would have clicked in the first place) will be lower than they could be.

Do I force refreshes every x minutes? Just sell ads at a higher cost?

I'm new to the ad funded model, so I'm missing step 2 of
1. Built it with ads 2. ??? 3. Profit

My goal is to just get enough traffic to pay the hosting bill and maybe a beer every couple months...
I'm glad you enjoy paying $2000 a month for a 600sqft San Francisco studio, sutro.
Well, I am doing this myself at the moment. I use LWP in Perl to crawl. As for generating the description, it depends on what you want to do. You can use combinations of the title and meta tags, or if it is just major sites you want, try to grab a (at least partially) human edited form like from Alexa.

What is the application?
I wonder if DHH means SF proper, or if he's actually talking about the entire Bay Area.

The Peninsula (Palo Alto, San Mateo) and the South Bay (Mountain View, San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale) are home to the popular web sites used around the world.

The issues you would deal with living in SF differ pretty dramatically from the ones you'd deal with living anywhere else in the Bay Area. (Except the expense, which is bad everywhere.)
No one's mentioned competition?

Along the lines of start small, regional and expand. It's easy to differentiate yourself as a regional online application. Anywhere else.
Can you tell me how these objections do not apply to buying shares of IBM? Clearly, the people who work for IBM would work a lot harder if they owned the company -- and yet billions of dollars ride on the assumption that they will work hard anyway!

You can probably decide on which information to disclose in advance. This is how it works with OTC securities -- some companies don't give any information in their annual report, and others will tell you down to the last dollar how much they spent on their secretary last year.

Unfortunately, if the government somehow allowed this, it would almost certainly mandate consistent disclosure, making this a market for people who have whatever cookie-cutter preferences the first bureaucrat thought up. Oh well. Maybe if you list people in Dubai you'll have better luck. They seem friendlier to new financial products.
This isn't really news without any details.
I started that a few weeks back. Still haven't put anything together yet. Thats exactly how I ended up naming my last site and I was pretty happy with how it worked out. Guess I need some patience.

Makewords.com is a pretty useful tool as well.
I think it would be amusing to many of us to see you defend the argument about San Francisco's diverse political persuasions. I suppose there probably is a distinction to be drawn between crony machine liberalism and impotent outrage liberalism.
* Public transportation in the Bay Area is a shambles, and, in particular, getting between any two points in the (tiny) city of San Francisco involves interaction with the worst bus system in the country.

- Public transportation is bad, unless you've ever been to houston, phoenix, dallas, detroit, los angeles, or anywhere else in the US outside of NYC, Boston, Portland, Chicago, or D.C. As bad as it is, SF's public transport is probably the 5th BEST in the country.

* Housing is spectacularly expensive, which, in hacker teams, simply means you're going to be living in half the space you have now, with no amenities.

- Yes.

* Office space in San Franscisco? I already spent the modifier "spectacular", so let's go with "catastrophically" expensive, meaning: your office won't be in the city, it will be in San Mateo, which despite its relative proximity to the city, will still be an hour and a half commute. Unlucky enough to wind up in Santa Clara? I was. My commute from SOMA often exceeded two hours each way.

- My office space on Howard street is cheaper than what I would pay on the peninsula or in Chicago. I think I lucked out, though.

* Half to 3/4s of your friends are going to live in the South Bay. No matter where you choose to live --- San Francisco or the suburban Mallhalla of the South Bay --- you are going to be 45 minutes to an hour away from anyone you want to visit.

- uhh... i guess if your friends all work at Yahoo!? I don't really see this unless your friends are all married or dorks.

* An ongoing dispute between the dispatchers, the city, and medallion owners keeps taxicabs artificially scarce, so that you are going to wait 20 minutes to catch one on Folsom or downtown.

- this is pretty much true.

* There isn't one good place in the city to see a show, but that doesn't matter, because your favorite band skips San Francisco.

- this is true if your favorite musicians are Jack Johnson or Britney Spears. If you are cool and listen to interesting music there are at least 6 decent mid to large clubs and dozens of smaller spaces. The music scene is better in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Chicago but SF is on par with everywhere else.

* Last call in San Francisco? Earlier than other cities.

- except it is the same as Los Angeles, Portland and Minneapolis, an hour later than Seattle and Boston, and about the same time as when most bars in Chicago now close. If you want to stay out really late your only choice in the US is Manhattan.

* Weather? Choose between "brown" or "wet".

- more like "cold and windy" or "not quite as cold and windy"

* Streets? Laden with human feces and garbage. Am I being hyperbolic? No.

- it sounds like someone's office was close to 6th and Market. SOMA is slimy in parts but gentrification happens and the poo is mostly confined to a few select corridors these days.

Poopy streets to avoid: 6th between Market and Folsom and associated side alleys. Capp between 15th and 17th. The tenderloin bounded by turk, mason, leavenworth and o'farrell.
When I'm writing a block of code, I tend to do something like this. I pseudo code the algorythm and then write the code.

I tend to remove my comments though and they normally aren't 100% correct by the time I'm done and have refactored (heck, a lot of times the comments become the code/called method names).

And then you assume that the comments are kept around/up to date when a bug is fixed or an enhancement is added.
And of course we shouldn't forget governments: By providing free primary and secondary education, and (in most developed countries) free health care, governments provide per-capita funding on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars -- and then call their annual dividends on equity "taxes".

This is one of my favorite objections to socialized medicine: do you really want your lifestyle to be a liability on the government's balance sheet?
Please check your gender bias at the login page.
Much of the "go big with other people's money" culture is by design.

People are naturally risk-averse -- moreso than pools of capital would prefer. Capital wants to maximize expected return, and will smooth out the variance by diversification, rather than trading away raw expected return for stability.
Live blogging and analysis of Yahoo's Q1 earnings call
I believe what you're talking about is the title of the website.

From www.cnn.com

<html lang="en"><head><title>CNN.com - Breaking News, U.S., World, Weather, Entertainment & Video News</title>

So you could just parse our the title of each site and display that.
Not at all true! The difference between the Chicago hacker scene and the San Francisco hacker scene is, you have to go out of your way to find the Chicago hacker scene, and you can't avoid the San Francisco hacker scene.

I've worked for two startups here, both successful, and know of plenty more. And of course, "Feedburner Feedburner Feedburner 37Signals".

Should there be a monthly meetup for people like us in Chicago? Absolutely. I set one up for security people (http://www.sockpuppet.org/chisec) and it's been pretty successful --- at least, if its spinoff (http://www.citysec.org) is to be believed. If 40 people will show up each month to swap drinks for infosec stories, surely more would show up to talk about Social Networking for Pets.
In my experience you should handle SEO yourself. Most of these guys are a joke (but not all). There are a couple of alternative strategies SEO's use like hot beds, link farms and other white-hat / black-hat techniques... however, most of this stuff is on Google's checklist to weed out over time as there jeopardize the integrity of AdSense too. And quite frankly, if you have to stoop this low you shouldn't be in business.

One of the most important things is getting linked-to by respected sites (ie: TechCrunch) and amongst the web (PR releases but do these sparingly). It's in this dimension that page rank within search results are determined these days, a natural filter to all the crap! This is key reason why spam bots dump responses filled with links on blogs and popular sites like Digg/etc... Bastards!!

However, it's still in good form and highly recommended to continue using UNIQUE meta tags, page titles, alt descriptors, etc...

And, there are valid white-hat techniques to consider, especially if your site is entirely flash/flex or graphic-heavy in nature. An example of this is delivering GoogleBot an alternative page that your visitors do not see which describes the site's content by way of traditional markup. Mismanaging this can quickly put you in the blackhat bucket.

Sitemaps are also important and I don't see enough sites trending to spider's preferred structure: sitemap.xml. Drupal users are in luck as there is a plugin to handle dynamic generation of the sitemap to spec, and submits it to Yahoo/Google/Live spiders each time your content changes. But if you don't use Drupal, just google "sitemap.xml" and you'll find out all you need to know.

Speaking of Drupal, search engines absorb it like a sponge; it's soo well built for SEO. <3 :P
If you'd like Lisp without parens, how about Logo?

Logo seems like Forth backwards: prefix instead of postfix; neither language needs parens for function calls because they both know how many arguments each function call uses.
And there should be a sub-bullet for "HARD TO COME BY IN THE BAY AREA". Yes, there's clearly more of it in the Bay in gross terms. That doesn't mean you're getting access to any of it: new startups in San Francisco are totally, completely outgunned.
How can I access this title automatically in the first place? Are you familiar with any PHP solutions in particular?

Thanks again
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=91005

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=114920

http://searchyc.com/
You know none of this really matters. Be a rebel. Live everywhere as often as you can.

I've lived in Taipei, Los Angeles, LA suburb, east San Jose, Cupertino, San Diego, Pendleton, Lejeune, and now back in Cupertino with constant visits to San Francisco and I can honestly say... it doesn't really matter where you live.

Learn as much as you can. Make as many friends as you can. And make sure you always have a WiFi connection.
Anki looks great, thanks for the link.

I was just thinking today how it's time to start studying Japanese again. I studied there for a year when I was in high school, but have forgotten a lot since then. Time to relearn :)
Why Johnny can't program
To be fair, the new Prius is really hard to figure out how to turn off.

- Taking the key out of the car doesn't turn the engine off. You have to press a button.

- A lot of times when you press the button the car doesn't turn off.

- It's really hard to figure out if the car is on or off because the engine turns off as soon as the car is stopped, so the car is completely silent.

Most people I know with the new Prius have accidently left it on at least a few times. Since the engine is turned off the energy penalty for doing that is minimal, the biggest concern is that the car is probably stick unlocked.
There's some info here - http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/craigslist_investor_ebay_... - if you don't feel like logging into NYTimes.
True. For me the temperature isn't a problem. I dislike the long bouts of sunless days during our winters, particularly in February and March. I just ensure to throw myself into social activities then. Otherwise it's easy to feel down in the dumps around that time.
I will definitely miss Seattle's easy access to nature (along with the views and climate, which are amazing) ... but that's also part of the reason NYC isn't a permanent move :)
I've been to San Francisco several times, and enjoyed it (I was deciding between SF and NYC for my move). I don't disagree that there's a fair amount of diversity -- however, it just doesn't compare to NYC, totally different ball game (just like SF's tech community is in a different league than Seattle's).
I'd sell Brandfame for less than $50k ... anyone interested? lol
Thanks, that's a lot of very good advice!

About ads... large game sites (competitors) tend to have lots and lots of very, very annoying ads. But, they're free. I'd rather be a smaller, membership site without all the annoying ads. So, I'm reluctant to even use ads on free accounts because I think it sends the wrong message about what I want my site to be.
Two sites that have been posted here before that might be useful:

http://www.nameboy.com/

http://www.makewords.com/
Work Visas: Lose the Lottery
> I think the key is to get the hell out of the suburban hell holes that riddle North America like cancerous spots on an otherwise healthy lung, and find cities in which you can live

I don't think suburbs are the end of the world, especially for people with kids.

You also left out college towns, which can be very nice. While the college town I'm living in now (Laramie, WY) doesn't have the sheer diversity of a major cosmopolitan city, it attracts a healthy selection of smart, interesting people. I can also walk to work in 10 minutes, housing is way cheaper than places like Seattle and SF, and there are mountains less than half an hour away. If you don't need the networking resources of a major city, a college town can be a sweet deal.
I second the "do it yourself" process. You'll learn a lot from it and nobody but you truly understands your business like you do. It's not rocket science, but it can be hard work getting the inbound links. The first priority is definitely to work on making sure that your pages are friendly, that your title tag, alt tags and text in the pages is relevant. Good content, put together well always helps
You'd get better and more straight forward answers if you gave a little info about your site. I think it'd vary on the type of page you were running.
Well its a finance / wall street focused site so if anyone wants to lend a creative hand, I'm more than open to suggestions. Thanks..
I plan to visit BA coming northern winter. I couldn't find your email. My email is (gmail kirubakaran)
I modded you up, but:

* Compared to Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, or Boston, San Francisco is filthy, both in a "civic pride and basic hygiene" sense, and in a "methadone clinics spewing out mentally ill homeless people contributing to a desperate humanitarian crisis" sense.

* What areas are walkably friendly got that way by gentrifying and bleaching out the culture and neighborhoods from the city. Live in San Francisco? When was your last block party? Can you name your neighbors?

* Strong indie music scene? I guess it depends on what you like --- you could caricature me as a Pitchfork fan. Admittedly, comparing to Chicago, most other cities save New York and Seattle are going to suffer. But go read JWZ's blog about the DNA Lounge and form your own conclusions about how vital and diverse San Francisco's indie venues are.

* If your friends all work at startups, a big chunk of them live in the South Bay, which means you will rarely see them, because facing a 45 minute commute (that's without 101 traffic) at 12:30AM is a strong deterrant to an impromptu night at a bar.

* Your office on Howard Street --- presuming it's a real office --- is not cheaper than what you'd pay in Chicago. Let's compare notes. You first.

I'm skipping the good stuff about San Francisco. Leaving aside the benefits of being surrounded by product managers and QA team leaders, which is a dubious benefit, let me get in:

* You have 7-day-a-week access to solid Dim Sum.

* You live in the US capital of fresh water aquarium suppliers.

* On any Friday or Saturday you are 30 minutes, a cooler, and a couple of logs away from a bonfire on the beaches south of San Francisco.

* If your car can handle, the drive to Half Moon Bay is pretty awesome.

I'm assuming most of the readers here don't have kids. I have two. We won't get in to how much worse the city is going to be for you if you're trying to raise a family.
That's a very good point. I've had a player ask for a "feature" where he could have his username appear in red instead of the normal color. I think people like to be able to customize their internet personas and those kind of features would make nice carrots.
While a representative democracy cannot be considered a tyranny in the sense of being run by a single ruler with absolute power, a common, looser definition is that a tyranny is simply an oppressive and unjust government.

If you believe that the government is making you do things over which you have no control and which you have not consented to do through the use of force, how would you consider a tyranny different?
Dollr.
Searchme Visual Search - Beta - rev. 1.3
Someone offered to do this for me a couple years ago. There was an ethical conflict of interest though so I never actually considered it seriously. I don't remember what the actual proposal was, but I think it involved an apartment in Boston with a running tab for a couple years in exchange for some percentage of whatever I made for the next five or so years.
Fairly simple/straightforward calculator/trend viewer.

Really one page unless I forced the user to jump through post back hoops (blah).
need a bit more info than that. is there any particular interesting hook to it? crowdsourced stock picking? stock market watch?

maybe name it williamst.com or southst.com or pearlst.com or investirati.com
(I don't honestly think it's a good name, but it fits with the pattern at least. Most of the names I see I find kind of tasteless. I much prefer names not based on misspellings.)
Philip Greenspun: It's not just programmers who can inflate their LOC counts
You can have users refresh the page when they want to see the results of a calculation. I'm not sure how often that's done, though.
Hi Ardit33, our longer term outlook isn't build around serving startups - thats a very cyclical market. Instead we believe that a better online approach will win customers as they cut costs in their recruiting budgets.

My point is centered around not getting distracted by the media frenzy around this problem. If it affects your startup adjust - its doesn't mean ignore it completely. Crazed optimism and a desire to do whatever it takes is what startup founders should be focusing on. At least we are at Snaptalent.
what pattern?