skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reviews for startups have always been extremely artificial. In an ideal world, users would be very vocal about what they like and don't like. Surprise, they're usually NOT!

Techcrunch in particular is a traditional publicity channel that gets most of its information through heavily biased sources such as press releases, friends, etc. instead of directly from the users. This is why I find it hilarious that techcrunch should be the ones to call them out on producing biased information.

Then again, Arrington has been working to discover sites as a user through hn for example, so he may be doing a small part to correct this wrong.
Ask YC: Who wants one month of free advertising space on Simplebucket.com
The YC community has helped me in many ways getting things done with excellent advice and suggestions. So I thought what better way to give back to the community other than offering one month's of free ad space.

You can see the ad space at http://www.simplebucket.com/explore

Add a comment here with your startup url and a brief description of what your startup do and the comment with the most points get the spot. How this?

*oh, I forget to add, I will reserve the right to select the next highest comment if the winner is a competing startup (ie. photo hosting ), I hope you understand.
What kind of software is used to do this?
Really good point. More to it than that, but thanks.
Blackberry's business: Sustainable Innovation
Strictly speaking in terms of effectiveness, your #2 point is most often very wrong. You could be giving out free bars of gold and not have one customer speak positively of your service unless you really prod them.

People are EXTREMELY resistant to becoming advertising tools for corporations.
Hmmmm, I guess I wasn't posting to news.yc standards. My apologies.

My point was that I didn't see it destroying cisco/avaya any time soon, due to the nature of enterprise software and the sales distribution channel.

Linux is still not the ideal desktop replacement, even today. It has its place on the server rack, thats for sure, but I don't see it replacing windows any time soon for all uses. Something else might.
Sed quare? Latina autem lengua tenet haec difficultates.
What about "creates $7b of wealth, then gives it away for free"?
Stop Dreaming.  Start Building.
Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop
The problem with this proposal is that it ignores the fundamental problem behind any flamebait: that flamebait qua flamebait is not _intended_ as serious discussion, nor as a prelude to serious discussion.

The proven technique for dealing with flamebait is to tag it immediately for what it is, and not waste any reader's time with a detailed discussion of an idea that is not even worthy of refutation.

And yes, even Aristotle in the Topics agreed that there are propositions/arguments that are so silly or vain, they are not worthy of a serious refutation. Flamebait certainly counts as one of these. (BTW: I see there are Aquinas fans here, so I will point out that Aquinas expressed his agreement with this in, of all places, his commentary on the Ethics: I think it was Lecture I).

The only problem is that there really are people who are too quick to tag someone else's post as 'flamebait', even when it is not. This happens on those very topics that most need to be seriously discussed, simply because they are so important, yet so many people hold strong opinions on them, opinions that are not founded on sound logic, but on passionate attachment of one kind or another. So they are strong opinions, but they are wrong opinions. These are the
discussions that are the most difficult. They should not be attempted by amateurs. But there is no enforcing of _this_ principle on the Internet;)
I see nothing wrong with this. You'd be surprised at some of the stuff startups have to do to get out there and get initial traction, not limited to spam and "faking it till you make it".

The only thing that surprises me is that they were putting up fake reviews so late into the game. The benefits weren't that great at that point, and the risks at least mediocre. It just looks like laziness, if anything. Maybe they wanted to artificially stimulate some growth prior to that new funding round and possibly trying to get acquired, and fake reviews are just one of many methods used at once.
What point am I missing? That we should ignore reality to avoid hurting people?

I object to the article's claim that

> the roots of many handicaps actually lie in the stereotypes.... women’s performance on spatial and mathematical tasks is created by ... the stereotype of their spatial and mathematical inferiority

Stereotypes may contribute slightly to group differences, but they are not the primary cause of them.
Notepad.

Nah, just kidding; gvim
very straight to the point blog post, but i do like the quote:

"I promise not to keep ideas in my head, unfulfilled and full of promise - not to let these vague outlines of future actions give me false confidence and security in the abstract. Instead I will execute them quickly and faithfully so that I am again on the brink of the unknown, hoping that these ideas were not the last that would ever come to me from God knows where."
Winston Churchill would top my list. Definitely passes the PG criteria.

Post WWII:
Churchill's Grandson (after running into his office without knocking): "Grand papa, is it true that you're the greatest man in the world?"

Churchill: "Yes, now bugger off."
How Google Trends And Blogger Are Used To Spread Virus And Porn
Notepad++ is good for Windows; alternatively, there's a good Eclipse Javascript plug-in.
AP Language, Computer Courses Cut
Also worth noting that a Calder sculpture is on the cover of a common Algorithms book:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41WDWECWVCL._SS500_.jp...
"1. Plain Text"

I'm confused, is there another option?
So when could I see something like this in my home?
Spoken like someone who's never tried to port GCC to a new CPU. It's seriously unfun.
From the Asterisk website found a link to the oreilly book, "Asterisk - The Future of Telephony" in pdf format [14Mb] ~ http://downloads.oreilly.com/books/9780596510480.pdf
Let's say that someone else had a startup and they needed your talent under those conditions. What would it take to convince you to join them? If you're not willing to offer that, why should someone else accept it?

BTW - Part-time isn't necessarily attractive. It only works for folks who have a hole in their schedule. You might get more takers for temp than part-time.
When did doubling the size of my roof become cheaper than a solar system?

Silicon isn't the only cost. As I wrote, inefficient technology makes small systems uneconomic.

FWIW, the systems with the highest efficiency right now actually have less silicon than typical rooftop systems.

Note also that there is no one "cost of silicon" - silicon prices vary widely. Many of the low-silicon cost/efficiency systems actually use more silicon than some of the high-cost/high-efficiency systems.
Is it just me, or does this feel like linkbait? The facts seem to be accurate, but the style and the title make feels like a cheap shot to get attention to the article.
I have to give a shoutout as this is based out of my home city: Huntsville, Al. Certainly no big deal for all of the valley startups, but it's not too often we get a Forbes-worthy startup here.
Richard Feynman, physicist

Sam Harris, articulate atheist

Wendell Berry, articulate farmer
Heh, it amuses me how they group "computer science" with "language". Interesting.

And they should cut the CS A exam, not the CS AB exam. Maybe that way people will be forced to learn a bit more, and that's never harmful. (As a side note, I was recently looking at the contents of the AP exam on Comp Sci because I wanted to skip said course in my school, and the differences really aren't that big, just a few algorithms and data structures, so it wouldn't be a big stretch to teach those additionally.)
JRuby 1.1 Released
1. IMO yes. My first action--after carefully sketching and editing a two page business plan--was to seek a team of advisers to provide feedback and advice.

2. No. All I had was an idea, a 2 page document with bullet points outlining the idea and key issues (and seven months experience at an Internet startup following graduation).

3. Right away. I reached out to a co-founder of Google and a partner from Sequoia, both of whom I hadn't met, and they both have been kind enough each week to give me 45 minutes or so over coffee or the phone. Along with two friends I've known for the past two years this advice has been instrumental in helping me get the demo going.

CAVEAT: Don't confuse advisers for team members. Although they are great and essential to have, my team is definitely more key to me.
I use Safari to develop, to browse for fun, for everything. I use Firefox/Firebug only when its necessary, which turns out to be not very often.
What are these people commenting on? I always feel like there's not much going on on the Internet.

That story probably should have mentioned that Om Malik was kind of overweight and smoked.
This headline bears no relation to reality: we're not using all the fiber we've laid, and this isn't a last-mile solution or an ansible. The project page itself (http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/overview.html) makes it sound like they've built some new computing centers and connected them to terminals at universities: am I missing something?

The most interesting bit here was that CERN will produce 15 petabytes per year, which by my rough calculations is within an order of magnitude of the rest of the internet combined. The last time I thought about petabytes was when I interviewed at Chevron's geological data analysis department.
“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,”

Oh jees not this again. Doesn't this 'grand idea' come up every 5 years or so and just die when people realize they don't want their photos, personal documents and media stored on some corporate servers (where it can be analyzed, and sold to the highest bidder)

Oh and with 50% of Americans still on dial up, I don't see this super fast kick ass Internet taking over anytime soon (not when there's money to be made selling small incremental speed bumps over many years similar to how cell service has evolved here)
I can be used for good. Netflix comes to mind.

They say there are only 800 people in the world, the rest are androids.
The evidence that Nanosolar is really shipping panels at $0.99/W is pretty weak. They made that announcement in December; I've seen no corroboration.

They've also claimed that they were going to build a factory capable of producing 430 MW of panels annually by the end of 2007, which hasn't happened.

I'll be their biggest fan if they succeed, but so far, they're making big claims, soaking up VC funds, and shipping little product.
I was way off about the scale of the internet: the US alone currently sends 5 exabytes of traffic per month over IP, or 60000 petabytes per year. Edit: or ~12000, depending on the study.

http://www.discovery.org/a/4428, http://www.dtc.umn.edu/mints/home.html
Latent Semantic Analysis in Python
Even more strange, he says plain text then says he uses markup languages in them...
Think And Grow Rich
"people.. don't want their photos, personal documents and media stored on some corporate servers "

Email? Credit cards? If it's easy, people will do it.
I disagree with "isn't all that special".

I've worked with it too. It's a PBX/ACD/IVR all in one. That's huge. Get these bundled together from a commercial vendor and you are paying through the nose on a per seat basis. Yeah, it's about as user friendly as Linux in the early days. So if that's not going to work for you, just call Avaya and get out the check book.

From what I've seen the problem is that enterprise managers don't to absorb the risk of using an open source phone system (a highly visible piece of infrastructure).
Top-Down approach to simplify your CSS code
Bad things done well: accepting dangerous input with Rails
"Stop talking, start building" is also true. I can't believe how many times I've gone out in the bay area and all people talk about is servers, scalability and monetization.

Nobody cares! Build it and prove it, to yourself and others.

Good article
We've had "brand name" advisors before. I suppose you think of them like decals on NASCAR cars. The question ought to be, "did anyone on Hacker News ever get any benefit out of having advisors?"
One idea that I've heard mentioned a few times is to use a percentage of the stored energy in electric cars to help power the grid overnight. The car owners would have to be compensated, but as battery technology improves (it has its own Moore's Law equivilant but the period of doubling is much longer), say, 20% of the energy stored in cars would end up being a very significant amount.

There is a problem with the idea though. Part of the reason why electric cars are attractive is that you can charge them overnight in such a way that it levels out the power demand, which makes power generation cost less. Not to mention many commute patterns mean that cars are not at home during the peak hours of electricity generation.
No question that PGW was the greatest prose stylist of the 20th century.

Makes sense, from his biography: every morning, 6 days a week, year after year for decades, he would sit down and churn out some 10-20-30 pages of new or edited prose, without fail. Much of it ineffable lightness, some of it a bit clunky, but on the whole an incredible body of work.

Here, in a somewhat explaining-the-joke kind of criticism, is still some pretty rummy stuff about Plum:

http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/uni/nec/leimberg1312.htm

He had a rather sad life, but he was a great artist.
Unobtrusive Javascript based login window
The point is that stereotypes are almost always spurious on account of being greatly oversimplified. There's a big difference between applying proper statistics to a situation and applying a stereotype.
From this perspective, there's no way to decide whether it's a bluff or not. Microsoft is no stranger to hardball tactics, but I seriously doubt that it would turn down a good deal 4 weeks from now just because it sent this letter.

Corporate mergers -- especially when the sides aren't best friends -- are never pretty. My only question is why does Yahoo!'s board think that a giant premium is bad for stockholders? The board's only concern should be getting the best deal possible for the owners (i.e., stockholders).
Most of the mobiles are literally recursive. I spent a couple days trying to reproduce them once, and one thing you learn when you do that is that each subelement is a complete mobile in itself. In fact I suspect he must often have incorporated "finished" mobiles into larger ones later.
I'm perfectly happy having 99% of my photos and media stored offsite. There are a few things I'd want to keep local, but I couldn't care less if Smugmug keeps the originals of my vacation photos. In fact, I'd much prefer that because I can access it from any computer (work desktop, personal desktop, iPhone), I don't need to worry about synchronization, and when done properly they take care of backup far better than I ever could.

If I have the only digital copy of my photos then I need to worry about a hard drive failure, fire, flood, power surge, theft, etc. I can certainly take care of some of that by buying an off-site backup service, but then we're back to square one (I will have sent all of my media to a corporate server, but without any of the functionality). Or I can mail DVDs of my data to my trusted friends, but that's also a giant pain.

If done properly, with the right privacy controls, there's no reason why all data shouldn't live in the cloud, with a local backup copy only.
Extensions are useful to me personally, but they also speed the rate of browser evolution, which is why I hope Firefox stays on top.
Can someone post a clip with Omnisio so we can see it without that obnoxious preroll?
I think about it, and I realize that Cisco et al. were essentially making money without producing corresponding wealth - a sort of bubble waiting for someone to come along and pop it.
the quality of the writing is poor, too. didn't expect that in a british times publication
Better to take multiple five minute breaks reading something worthwhile than to spend five minutes reading something useless.
I think this concept was best present here: http://xkcd.com/406/
The exciting thing about Asterisk to me is not how well it can replicate traditional PBXs, but that it allows you to deal with voice communications programmatically, with a very low barrier to entry. This allows all kinds of experimentation with voice and touch tone, which was previously inaccessible to hackers in an accessible way. Having a UI option for input/output that works with any touch tone phone is starting to produce interesting projects. I've used Asterisk for a real-world game and an automated booty call system (ahem). And friends of mine are using it as an interface for games on large screens (playmegaphone.com) and an interface for networked objects (botanicalls.com). These are things it was never intended to do, but because it's turned the phone system into software, you can hack it and repurpose it. And that's why it's interesting, not the fact that it may-or-may-not replace corporate PBXs.
You can have informal advisors who aren't investors. But it's usually a bad idea to have a board of advisors, for example, or to give stock to people who want it in return for being an advisor, yet for some reason don't want to actually invest in you.

The one exception is when you're a grad student and start a startup based on your research. Then it's common to give your (faculty) advisor some stock.
Hey! That's me &co., yay. Our goal is to build the best free repository of data on the web, like a 'flickr for datasets' or the almanac to wikipedia's encyclopedia. There's some similar, excellent work being done by numbrary.com, swivel.com and Freebase, and we intend to complement those projects (as well as to fuel and inspire the projects you all are building). The difference between infochimps and those sites is we're 'messy' -- we'll take the data as it stands, and we'll give it to you with no restrictions and no sandbox, to play with on your machine with your tools. As people find various datasets interesting or useful and thus choose to enhance them (better formats, more metadata), we'll make it easy to share those contributions back.

If you're excited about this project and want to help it grow, please (http://help.infochimps.org/help/show/Contact) contact us. The site's still in rough shape, but there's a lot there to love. You can also follow along with the development at our blog -- http://blog.infochimps.org/
The first thing the author's name makes me think of:

"A sonnet by Byron might score high on the vertical but only average on the horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, would score high both horizontally and vertically, yielding a massive total area, thereby revealing the poem to be truly great. As you proceed through the poetry in this book, practice this rating method. As your ability to evaluate poems in this matter grows, so will, so will your enjoyment and understanding of poetry."

I don't hear enough rip!
Wow, that's nice coverage. Though I do loath the way all new tech is portrayed in the most ominous fashion. Then when a real but mundane threat like overuse of antibiotics comes up, it gets very little play. I suppose TV News is just bad at getting the real story because they need to captivate the audience in 3 seconds.
"In one experiment, Eagle looked at how well he could predict an individual’s activities over a 12-hour period, based on their data from the previous 12-hours."

First 12 hours: sleep.

"After training a simple Hidden Markov Model, he could predict people’s behaviors with 79% accuracy"

Monday: Class.
Tuesday: Class.
Wednesday: Class.

Thursday -- you'll never guess!
It's not quite as bad as it looks for CS: there are two AP Computer Science tests, A and AB. College Board cut the latter, which covers more material. It would like eliminating Calculus BC but keeping AB---bad, but not catastrophic.

As a former taker of the CS AB exam (back in the Pascal (!) days), it does make me sad, though.
Blackberry's business: about to be crushed by mobile Internet devices.
i wonder if a city could attract nerds by laying out this infrastructure
Pretty awesome how tons of really smart people just won't get over their fear of parentheses even when they know the power that's behind them.

As peculiar and different as lisp is, the difficulty of learning it is highly overrated.
What a wonderful hit piece. Mainstream media can't compete with blogs, therefore writes about how bloggers are dropping dead competing with each other.
no need to watch, pg. more doomsday talk about the end of privacy as we know it :)
"great programmers can write better programmers than they can hire"

good talk.
Life with the MacBook Air
Perhaps it's due to the somewhat limited graphics capabilities of the MBA -- mostly due to its lack of a dedicated graphics card -- but it does, on occasion, have a bit of trouble with quick screen refresh and occasionally just gets bogged down completely. And yes, when it does this, you are treated to the spinning beachball show for several seconds until things get going again.

I'm looking forward to the 2nd or 3rd revision when the performance issues are resolved.
They might as well have gone for broke with "superfast internet that has sex with you".
This doesn't seem right. I'd venture to guess that there are many people that would make great advisors for a startup, but are not in a position to be investors.

Of course, it's better for advisors to have skin in the game and be investors too, but just the fact that a competent, experienced and passionate person is not investing does not necessarilyy make them bad advisors.

On a related note, not all startups need (or should have) investors. Trying to get investors just to get good advisors seem arbitrarily limiting.
Perhaps true - my problem with UMPCs right now is that wifi isn't very widely available yet, and although they can attach to cellular networks I believe the data rates are very high for tethering. I think WIMAX is being deployed soon in a few states though.
try the answers.com firefox addon. it's my unlivewithoutable addon. alt-clicking on a word will show the results in a small window within the page. because it's answers.com, it has access to wikipedia, a dictionary, and whatever else answers.com has

one nice thing about it is that the text matching is greedy. so when you alt click on a name ("bill gates"), idiom/saying ("jumping the shark"), etc, you get the results you expect

http://i277.photobucket.com/albums/kk63/temporaryupload/answ...

http://i277.photobucket.com/albums/kk63/temporaryupload/answ...
Perhaps it's due to the somewhat limited graphics capabilities of the MBA -- mostly due to its lack of a dedicated graphics card -- but it does, on occasion, have a bit of trouble with quick screen refresh and occasionally just gets bogged down completely. And yes, when it does this, you are treated to the spinning beachball show for several seconds until things get going again.

I'm looking forward to the 2nd or 3rd revision when the performance issues are resolved.
New law targets corporate killing
Affinity and Herding Determine the Effectiveness of Social Media Advertising