skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dating sites get over the hump of "oh my god this is creepy" because their users are desperate.

I think to imply that the general users of dating sites are "desperate" is not only judgmental, but completely inaccurate. Of couse there are SOME desperate users, but they are far from the majority.

I tried out Match 4 years ago because I was out of college and just moved to a new city, both factors which make it much harder to meet men I'm compatible with. I thought that by looking at profiles online, I could efficiently choose people to date who had the exact qualities I was looking for. My boyfriend (who I met on Match) used the site for the exact same reasons. I know at least a dozen other couples who are also normal, social people who met the same way. They certainly weren't desperate, nor were most of the people they went on dates with. Because so many non-desperate couples have met through online dating sites, the number of non-desperate users must be a pretty large pool.
I love the dashboard screenshot. More of these Patrick! How about a tour of BCC someday?
People use okc to make friends all the time. This problem is pretty much solved for the 18-30 set. Now, how do you make friends in your 40's 50's or 60's is another problem.
eharmony sucks. If there were a site to make friends that uses an algorithm similar to eharmony's, it would be a complete failure.
Personally I think the whole eHarmony model is dead (or dying).

I'm interested in people's social interactions and how that is changing with new people growing up with no digital prejudices against technology.

I believe social networking replaces traditional online dating. Especially the younger you get the more true this is. The eHarmony model tends to prosper over inflation of the details you put down.

Okay so the trend that I see happening in younger people is that traditionally Myspace actually took this space for finding new friends online with people under 18 (non-tech). Facebook has a social contract that you typically have to meet the person or heavily been in a person's social circle before becoming friends on facebook.

The site currently ruling making new friends online is Dailybooth and YouTube which is immerensly popular with under 21s. Not only do participants make "online friends" they usually translate into offline friends. I have personally observed a high percentage rate of meetups and "gatherings" with both these communities.

So what makes Dailybooth popular with making new friends.
1) Use of actual photos of the person on a dailyish basis: This allows for people to follow people that they would be generally interested in hanging out with. The use of images from a webcam also means that you can verify the person, that they are real, and again images are a very powerful tool in considering if you'll like the person or not.

2) The details on dailybooth has the standard social networking info and also the location. Dailybooth users when they gather or meet up with one another they tend to take a booth/photo of the meetup each tagging the other people. This drives other people to meetup in groups.

------------

In consideration of an algorithm I've been meaning to pitch Dailybooth on an idea to populate a user's photo stream with people that you can calculate based on the network graph of who the user has followed/followed back. And based on location, to try and increase the percentage of people making offline friends using the service. Which decreases churn rate and brand value.

So yeah, I'm heavily researching this area right now so if you interested in discussing it further my details are on http://benreyes.com

I could talk about this topic for days.
Upvoted for the "800#" notation. I love it.

(Well, that and being generally insightful and expressing a valid, important opinion.)
Please tag this as a pdf.
They often are. In many large companies shareholders elect board members, and delegate their voting power to them. They effectively run the company democratically. Even though they don't actually manage the day to day affairs of the company, the C-level officials who do can be fired by the board so it's not totally unlike a parliamentary system.
Mongrel2 got mirrored on github.
Thanks fragmede!

Specific responses:

* Man, it never occurred to me that the straw poll looks like an ad but you're totally right. Not sure how to fix that.

* I agree about Delete vs Archive but that's not actually my list.

* Good point about the split Inbox Zero link, though it's really just a compromise: I think Jeremy Zawodny's succinct post is better but Merlin Mann's site is more official (and Inbox Zero is Merlin Mann's idea so I can't not link to him).

* Point taken about the weird mix of generality and specifics. I did want to give a full spec for the UI and tried to isolate that in the Nitty Gritty section (and the appendix).

* I guess the "auto-expire 999" thing was like if you wanted to get yourself in the habit of picking an auto-expiration window for every single email. You're right though. I'll either make that point better or drop it. [done; better?]
You are very correct and most people feel the way you do even if they wont admit it. I have worked at sever large hookup and dating sites and all the problems are the same. The main one called the 90/10 rule is the root of all their problems.

I am building a dating site right now that eliminates this issue and introduces a totally different model.
Microsoft recently did release a OneNote Web App: http://office.live.com (full disclosure: I work on some of this.)
Redfin: it's still expensive to build a great product (McClure rebuttal)
Now, I don't want to sound like a hopeless groupie or somesuch, but I don't know how else to say this... I love this guy!

Too often my hope of ever launching my own startup one day falters after attending yet another pointless big company Dilbertian meeting or when I give in and watch a stupid action movie from Netflix that I had watched at least twice before, rather than learning Rails. After those moments, I read one of PG's essays and I feel it is possible, I can do it.

Maybe I'll never launch, but just for giving me that hope for a short while, I love him.
Does anyone know better ways to evaluate and execute Clojure expressions in Emacs?

I find key combinations like these clunky:

C-x C-e

C-M-x
USV and Dave are both invested in Twilio, anyone know which other companies they share?
Yes, there may be some common attributes and I don't think it is biochemical when it comes to male friends.

I feel that someone can look at the problem differently. To make a site based on a common interest and get people to pay for it. The users of the site will find a way to make friends.
I was thinking about building something like Instapaper, only you would be able to add notes about pages you read and share with people...
Your argument hinges on the fact that we currently live in a Democracy/Republic, which is highly debatable.
I see your point, but subscription-based music services had been around for five+ years before the Zune came out - and even so, all iTunes evidence pointed to a trend that users wanted to own their music.

And the beaming feature may have been nice in theory, it was widely considered to be hobbled with DRM.

Lastly, let's not forget the seemingly inane decision to bypass what little music people had from PlaysForSure campaign and re-implement a completely incompatible new format.

Marketing? Maybe, maybe not. To me it sounds like a severe lack of execution. They made consumers re-purchase music, didn't offer much differentiation from their competitors, and were five years late to the party.

In comparison, it's reported that the entire iPod development process, from the form factor, to the scrollwheel, FireWire, OS, and iTunes integration only took 18 months.
Make money online: 200+ Best Path to Make Definite Income Plan
The question should be rephrased to "would you invest in facebook? how much? and why?" This would take the question of stock price out of the question.

I think bringing price into the equation is arguing details unrelated to the point of the question. I would assume most of us here at HN are familiar with the matter and have an approximation of how much FB is worth.

I personally have low expectations for the future of Facebook. As a graduating senior in college right now, I joined Facebook near it's inception during my senior year of high school when my peers first got .edu accounts and it was still private. Almost everyone I knew made the switch over from MySpace over a year or so.

If you can recall what Facebook was like back in the day: it was an exclusive club for college students. No high schoolers and no "adults." I really think this targeted niche was really one of the most appealing factors when I joined. I also really enjoyed the static structure and cleanliness of each page. It was nothing like the myspace mess of fugly personalized layouts everywhere. It was just a nice clean, niche, social environment.

But they've changed a lot since then, and only gotten more unappealing. I remember the days my friends and I dreaded the "public opening" of facebook, when your little brother in middle school and your parents and grandparents started joining facebook. Among all the other features they've now added to their bloat, facebook is just becoming the social Microsoft. All the old fogies are trying to jump on the bandwagon and market their facebook sites, while all the original members like me are leaving.

My facebook page as of the moment just shows my twitter stream and I check it once or twice a month to see what new comments and event invites I've gotten. That's it. I honestly don't really care what the majority of my 600 "friends" are doing; I got code to write.
This CNN article is much better account:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/07/27/sasselov.earth.planets...

The important graph is around 8:00.
Ask HN: Is there any non-web-development jobs out there?
After I saw three "Who's hiring" threads, I recognize that startup companies are mostly looking for web developer that relates on back-end front-end development, RoR, Scala, Hadoop, Javascript, CSS, LAMP stack.

It totally makes sense since most of the startup companies are building their websites now.

I was just wondering if there is anyone hiring for a non web developer position which only requires knowledges in basic CS (algorithm, memory, etc) and basic programming in C, Python, Java, C++, etc.
Even on my crappy OSS projects, I've been able to pay for a few sweet sushi dinners. WORTH IT.
Same feeling here. Not sure if Allard has any credits for the Kinect, but it's pretty much the only thing that wowed me from MS since win95. Seems like they really thought outside the box even though the aim was to copy the wii. Makes me want to get the xbox just for it.
Is there an excellent bookmark manager?
I regularly use 7 different browsing platforms. Chrome, IE, and FF on both my work and home PCs and Safari on iPad. I want to keep my bookmarks organized in one reliable place accessible from anywhere. Ideally it would be easy to export from one of my browsers to this solution to get started. Reliability is important. Backup would be a nice feature. Ease of use is important. It should seamlessly work with all 4 browsers.
"entrepreneur" seems to be on the rise

http://www.google.com/trends?q=entrepreneur

(although "entrepreneurship" is declining...)
70 pixels? that ought to be good enough to implement an optical alt-tab.

i would agree to arbitrarily invasive monitoring of my web activity in exchange for that.

details: special behavior for, say, the vestigial enter key to the right of the space bar on my old MBP. When it's depressed, trigger exposé and start tracking my point of fixation. As it's released, return from exposé with focus on the window i was looking at.

or maybe aapl would pay? it's got more wow factor than spotlight or time machine.
Is America the next Lithium powerhouse?
The re-ping feature you mention is one of the "extras I mention - I've implemented it in a separate script. Dropping an email into an appropriate folder means it's watched by a script, and if a reply to it comes in, it gets deleted. If it's not deleted after 7 days it re-appears in my inbox.

Your other feature is "archive after X days." I'm trying to work out if I'd want it, but I don't think I do. But the fact that I've hacked the other two features into my existing workflow certainly shows that they are potentially interesting/useful. Hope that's interesting.
I think this just reflects how few people are part of the Valley culture. Outside of the Valley and people strongly affected by its culture, they're not called "startups" — they're called "businesses." The phrase I would guess most people would use to search for information on the topic is "start my own business." I don't think anyone I know would say "start a startup."
Facebook won't allow this link to be posted in the feed. Its considered abusive.
Release of Toyota Documents Blocked
I'm sure that's true so some extent, but I'd bet the vast majority of 'home business' searches are people doing lead gen, e.g. 'home business' + 'palo alto'.
Is the region based data on that page normalized ? Otherwise its funky that more people in Sweden and Finland are searching for Clojure than the USA.
What is even more interesting is the countries and cities the searches are coming from. A lot of Asia as far as countries go but the top cities are in the US
I don't think the comments themselves reflect poorly on him. Late 90's would have been significantly influenced by the bubble and who wasn't thinking how much the sequenced genome would be worth. Twelve years is a long time to reverse-map current feelings and knowledge onto previous memories.

The part that reflects poorly, IMO, is how he tries to pin it on Collins when faced with the quotes. I can understand why the interviewers didn't press the issue, but I would have liked to see them press it.
The loss in accuracy between us and a custom hardware setup for eye-tracking is primarily due to the fact that we're using a very different eye-tracking method. The "gold standard" for eye-tracking involves shining an infrared LED at the user's eye and measuring the reflection.

Since we're trying to use no custom hardware at all, we have to use machine learning techniques to extract features from the visible-light image of the user's eye. This is a lot more difficult than locating the bright spot in a reflection, so there's a lot more that can go wrong.
Well, at least it's an elephant we're all talking about a lot. It's not as if anyone's ignoring that.

If your DB is dog slow, you can still handle wildly high concurrency with node. It's just that the user will feel the slowness, and your DB will struggle. But at least your server won't be unable to serve requests while it's waiting for IO.

Of course it's still on the developer to architect their system for success. Node just takes one unnecessary bottleneck out of the equation.
The Capital Tsunami
Still means there'll be more "data entry" job request in outsourcing forums requiring indians to enter friend requesting captchas all day. Oh and more friend requests from people that will send you spam every week.
In the Future, We'll All Wear Clothes Made by 3D Printers
The Canadian who holds the key to the Internet
Hey Adrian:
I started and run Founderdating.com - a little bit of a different model but we've been very effective. Email me and let's chat jessica@founderdating.com
This is basically the business model of RapLeaf.
Dude, give me a break. If you're a white American male, and you're gonna whine about the discrimination you face in life, you need to wake the fuck up. Literally everybody else on earth has it worse than you. Grow up and take responsibility for your own situation.
Ask HN: Are tenacious salespeople/marketers here?
I think a team which includes a great hacker, web designer, and marketer is a killer combo. A reason power is shifting from investors to founders is because such a team can go far enough to gain traction and profitability without requiring a cent of investment, especially if they refuse to quit and keep iterating on ideas. It seems pretty easy to connect with great hackers and designers, probably looking no further than right here at HN. However, I wonder if finding great marketers is as easy. I don't mean marketers that focus on online tactics like SEO, SEM, social media etc. Anyone involved with Internet startups will likely be okay with picking up slack in those areas. I'm talking about a different personality type. I'm talking about traditional sales -- picking up the phone and cold-calling, or pounding the pavement, just doing whatever it takes to get the sale. There is a whole world that still doesn't know any more than what they need to know, or may have heard casually, about what's happening on the Internet. To reach these people ideally you will have a tenacious marketer. Paul Graham says his company Viaweb had such a person, someone they could call "an animal". My question is where do you find such people?
A friendship may still be valuable even if it isn't fit for a startup.
search engines provide some of the answer, but search engines have an upper bound to their effectiveness. If a search engine were more effective than an ad, people won't click on search engine ads, and the search engine wouldn't make any money.

I think what we really need is another business model for search engines.
But if you went and got it from Facebook, I could alter my settings and make it go away. The torrent is forever.

However, to believe what I just said is completely naive. If you screw up and make something public, the likelihood that it is already forever somewhere is close enough to 100% that you should just expect it.
The second was a case where guards had already seen the incriminating content. Maybe defendants can still plead the 5th when the contents are unknown.

In any case, if you can show that you weren't the one who encrypted the document, I don't see how you could be prosecuted for not doing the impossible.
I disagree. There's a big difference between finding a date and finding a friend (in the sense that the OP uses, i.e. not in the friend with benefit sense). As you point out (unfortunately, but it's a fact of life) objectively beautiful/attractive people are rare in the population and they are even more rare on dating sites. However, social interests, may be rare locally but on a national scale can be quite easy to match up. For example I like to play Go but it's rather hard to find players in my immediate friend circle and I cannot go around asking people.

Book clubs, chess clubs, etc. have operated in this manner for a long time, the only difference is that they substitute a physical space for a web site.

The real problem here is that it would be hard to create a comprehensive questionnaire that covers, say, 90% of interests and it would be even harder to find users patient enough to fill such a monstrosity. The only way to go is for them to fill out a small questionnaire and try to rapidly learn their preferences by asking them questions, 20 questions style, I think.
well, if you have no lead, you certainly can't turn it into gold, so that option's right out.
One Random Book
Why not something like this?

function routine () {
doIOForMe(function (resp) {
doMoreIO(resp, function (nextResp) {
transform(nextResp)
})
})
}

// or with a little helper function:

function routine () {
chainTogether
( doIOForMe
, doMoreIO
, transform
)
}

The "Step" library from Tim Caswell (creationix) lets you do a LOT of very interesting parallel/serial stuff. In npm, I have a few helper functions that make it easy to do serial "this then that" stuff.

It would be nice to have something in the language that does this. Maybe something for the Coffeescript guys to check out. For me, plain old JavaScript is enough, I guess.
You can also get Google profile URLs for 16,256,271 users from the top post in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1537968
That's super cool that you've hacked up two of these features already. Want to share the scripts? For re-ping though I think I'd rather it to be one of the compose headers so it would be part of composing the mail rather than having to take another action, after sending, to schedule the re-ping.
Have you seen Diigo [http://www.diigo.com/]? Does more or less what you described.
Very interesting post! I've found that my priorities when it comes to spending and saving have changed drastically in the last 10 years. I still enjoy shopping for clothes, but I do it far less often these days and spend a fraction of what I used to because I'm saving for a down payment. Having a house is far more important to me, for emotional and practical reasons, than having an updated wardrobe, eating at nicer restaurants, or traveling.
Great salespeople never lack for a job, so you'll find them already employed, making good money. As for where online you'd find them, I'm not sure. I'm not a great salesperson, but my wife is, and she frankly doesn't spend a lot of time in online communities. I'm sure there are some who do, but that's my data point.
I suspect delicious will be your best bet. See http://delicious.com/help/tools and http://delicious.com/help/thirdpartytools
Damn, I missed this article while it was higher up on the page. Not sure if there are enough people around but I'll ask my question nonetheless.

"""Venter: Well, the goal is multifold. We have to start by creating minimal cells. A human cell is too complex -- we have no idea how any human cell works. We don't even know how the simplest bacterial cell works."""

Do we have no idea how a cell works? I know we understand the anatomy but I had no idea we hadn't moved beyond that? Is this some kind of satire/joke or is this where the state of the science is at?
Googles public data explorer
I would like to see an updated version of this essay. I am sure many things do not apply or are out of date by now.
There's no mention of this on the Apple homepage. I find that rather interesting.
How not to sign NDAs
Socially Connected People Live Longer
Android 2.2 on the Evo 4G
I just joined after meaning to for a while, and it seems awesome. There's a hash run in Hong Kong tomorrow I'm thinking of going to and an entrepreneurs group I made a post to asking who wants to have a coffee in Central/Sheung Wan. I do a lot of my work from a cafe in Central/Sheung Wan anyways, so having someone stop by for an hour to chat would be a cool way to break up the day. Looks like a promising for a way to meet people into cool things, athletics, adventuring, business, etc.
They are full up with shipping products and the iPhone cases. Direct link is http://www.apple.com/macpro/
Unexpected viral 'fossils' found in vertebrate genomes
Al Marwa Rayhaan Hotel, Makkah
This is probably because it's not shipping yet. They are still selling the older model in the store. It'll probably get a "Now Shipping" front page spot when the time comes.
picking up the phone and cold-calling, or pounding the pavement, just doing whatever it takes to get the sale

People who are good at this are the same people who are good at landing great jobs and constantly getting promoted. In the rare event that they are without a job, they are likely on the phone nonstop or pounding the pavement to find one. Probably the best way to find a great marketer is to steal one from another company. You'll have to offer something attractive enough to warrant leaving a good job to come work for your startup, though.
We haven't reached the point of dramatic optimizations yet. We're making some architectural changes in Parrot (the Lorito project) to allow for tracing JIT, bytecode optimizations, and slimmer deployment of dependency-traced applications.
The internet at this point is just noise and I don't see how encouraging people to contribute to that noise is going to make things better.
It would be more than surprising, then, if the human genetic data so far did back up the association between vitamin-D-deficiency genes and T1D.