skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went through the same thing with Infoseek. They used to be a fantastic search engine, with a full suite of boolean operators and everything. Then they become the Go Network, and their simple homepage was turned into crowded portal.

Half the reason I eventually switched to Google was because of their anti-portal philosophy.
I'm definitely much more direct and polite in French. I'd prefer to calculate what I'm about to say a little longer than misspeak the local tongue, so I end up appearing much more tight-lipped as a result.

My wife, on the other hand, has spent a lot more time in France than I have, and apparently learned from the school across the tracks--she's much more apt to stutter and fumble with vocabulary (she's got an anecdote about learning the difference between cravat and crevette), but she's much more talkative and seems to get more done with her style.
I don't know the specifics of the Bush II era plan. However, the operational idea of moving the government pension plan from a defined benefit model to a defined contribution model makes sense to me. Where to stash the contributions will always be a problem. The current imaginary Social Security lock-box seems to me as dishonest as the Bernard Madoff fund management approach.

I acknowledge that there are some other concepts involved. For example, Social Security has limited transferability--one's spouse and children may see some benefit but they can't inherit the face value of your contributions from you. This is a bug and a feature. If enough people die early enough, the unused and un-transferred amount can be used to pay for people who live longer and so withdraw more than their contributions. Without means-testing, there seems to be little social-justice in that.
PayPal once made me refund every customer in the last 6 months. They said it was the only way to unfreeze my account. I gave them the thumbs up because I had no other options at the time, and they said, "you have to manually refund them one-by-one yourself and then call us when it is done". It was really strange.

They permanently froze my account after I refunded everyone and refused to talk to me when I called. I wasn't able to get a merchant account and I lost thousands of PayPal recurring subscriptions. This was the death of my first start-up.

PayPal is a scam and it's not as uncommon as you think. If you're using PayPal, your time will come. I didn't think they would do it to me either, they never bothered me once until all of this went down.
> This is a GNOME bug tracking system, not any family consultancy.

This person may be taking things all a bit too serious.
I used to think that Red Bull just put their logo on cool stunts, but it turns out that they have a really competent team of engineers and fabricators to pull this off. In fact, Joeseph Kittinger, who holds the record currently, said they were the first crew to approach him that sounded like they could do this without killing someone (since 1960!), so he's actually working with them on this.
Assuming by Lisp we mean either "Common Lisp" or "what somebody would have called Lisp in 2006", there is now an exception to "All roads lead to Lisp" that has moved from total obscurity to all-language-geeks-should-know-about-this: Haskell. You can not take a 2006 Lisp and macro your way to purity. You could build a pure subset, but that would be a new language in every way that matters because you couldn't use non-pure libraries without a lot of wrapping.

You can of course also start a new Lisp-like language with new primitives that do include immutability, but I would suggest that that shows Lisp moving forward by taking a feature from another heritage, which means you've no longer got all roads leading to Lisp/2006, you've got at least one leading away.

If there's anything strange about Lisp, it is that it really was a local optimum posing as the global optimum for so long. We should end up with a few more local optima before all is said and done; there aren't enough yet.
I tried to build this website in the form of a minimum viable product the same as I would try to help others implement their idea. Found a free online template, built a web 2.0 button, tweaked the hell out of the template, and added a link to a Google Form. This is a true "minimum viable product" that I would like to create for others.
Are you sure?

500 messages a day costs < $0.07 total. It's cheaper than that in Europe?
It doesn't matter if it's something you enable explicitly, you're thinking about this the wrong way. Even if you enable it explicitly you have now compromised the uniformity of the utility of those buttons. There is now a cognitive cost of working out what that button is going to do every time you press it that didn't exist before, your quality of experience suffers. It's saving you from yourself.

Now you probably think that sounds anal retentive and patronising in equal measure but that's how you make good UX across a platform - by understanding the power of consistency to reduce the cognitive load of an interface.

Don't like it? You're welcome to go buy some random Android device with a random amount of buttons and widgets and d-pads and track balls that take a photos in this app and ring your grandmother when shaken to the left in the other app.

Personally however I'm glad this stuff is enforced. Sure, if it wasn't I could avoid apps that broke HIG, market forces and all that crap but that gets hard. I then have to try and find alternatives or put up with not having access to some functionality.
There's a bright side in this: seriously.

If we don't live our lives with the expectation that we will finally begin enjoying them when we retire, we might begin living our lives to our more short-term satisfaction.

Not that saving for retirement is stupid - it isn't - but working at a job you hate because it will provide retirement benefits is.

Take vacations now, go skiing now, spend time with your kids now...those are the takeaways. I hope the "countdown to retirement" mentality ends as a casualty of future uncertainty.
The removal of the ability to quickly select unread messages is proving to be an annoyance. I know I can select it from the checkbox dropdown, but I used that link constantly in my multi-inboxes set-up. Now having to do it in two clicks is less convenient.
You have kids, 'jacquesm?
Is this it?
http://dionidium.com/projects/greasemonkey/hnsort.user.js

Edit: Looks like it is.
Actually it was Clinton's idea to have the government invest SS funds in the stock market directly: http://people-press.org/report/70/support-for-clinton-but-no... . That would have been a terrible idea for many reasons. Bush's plan to allow younger workers the option to invest a small portion of their SS taxes would would not have been significantly affected by a fall in the market over the course of a few years.
Well, that certainly sounds like half of a good story.
You have the (rare) experience of a pilot. Therefore I would suggest you think about making iPhone, iPad and Android apps for pilots (i guess most of them use iOS). Start with really small ideas (virtual horizon, display pitch, etc.) and grow to more sophisticated projects (eg. flight planning and so on).

There is a lot of money to be made on those platforms; pilots are willing to pay for tools that help them, and non-pilots don't know what they need and can't easily produce such apps out of the blue. I bet you would also easily find a co-founder once you have concrete ideas / concepts.
I think the "Symptom: you're about to give up too quickly." should also be followed up with "Symptom: you're sticking with an idea that is dead"

if you had 3,000 people come through your site, without a single sale, it's probably a good idea to try something else.

it's very easy to delude yourself into thinking that you are a hockey stick case. "oh yeah, we've had 2 sales @9.99 this month...but remember the hockey stick...a year later, we'll have 5,000 sales a day!"

if you are going to stick with an idea, you need to have consistent sales that are actually increasing. So that there is an indication that someone actually wants the product you have to offer.

personally I take a 3 step approach to this. 1) get actual people to the site and see if it actually converts(2-3000 people is plenty). Once you find out your starting conversion rate(even if it's 1:2000) 2) then your goal is to scale up so you get decent traffic to the site...100-200 people a day at least. 3) then you start optimizing...run a multivariate a/b test every week with 3-4 variations. Discard the crap and keep the better converting ones. Keep doing this every week, and by the end of the year, you'll go through 100+ different variations, and your 1:2000 conversion rate, will most likely be down to 1:50-1:100.

and with a/b tests you have to test EVERYTHING...don't leave anything to chance. You don't know your audience, until you actually test. You have no idea if you'll get more conversions with "buy" "buy now" "get it" "download it" "order" "order today" "give us your money" "stop being an idiot" or "insert coin"...not until you actually test it. For all you know that "stop being an idiot" order button will increase your sales 10 fold.
The thing that those 3 have something in common with their search engine and Adwords; they all inspired the same initial reaction: "Someone's finally fixed what's wrong with incumbant market players - this is a game changer". Do you remember what it was like in the days when spammed to death AltaVista, "2MB inbox" Hotmail, static image Multimap, clunky WinMobile and popups/animated gif banners were the kings? (Android is not quite the same, since the iPhone had pointed the way).

I've not seen that many software products which were so obviously disruptive; it's no wonder they became giant-killers. Facebook is the only other one I can think of.

On the other hand, some of their other big products have not be a huge success precisely they haven't been game-changers. Google Docs, for example, might be a good example of a web office suite; but it's hardly a game changer as far as office suites go, because it doesn't do some of the core things that people do daily with office suites. It was clear from the beginning that it would be a slow starter. Whereas Maps for example, you knew at the beiginning that nothing else could touch it
Info Design: A Recap by SEO.COM
Wolfram's a volatile topic not because his ideas are considered intrinsically wrong, but for some combination of the following: 1. He rather insultingly takes about an order of magnitude more credit than he should; his share is not zero, but it is not commensurate with the amount he took and 2. For all the wonderful ideas in "A New Kind of Science", it's pretty darned short on testable predictions or useful explanations, where by useful I literally mean "suitable for some use". And I mean any use, including scientific or even just as a framework for thinking about things.

The link between fractals and superconductivity is interesting and tantalizing, but the credit should mostly go to the people working on fractal theory and the people working on superconductivity; a lot of us perceive a mention of Wolfram as wedging a name into the discussion that really shouldn't be there.
That's Ruby community love, folks.
No, rather the opposite.
Kayak co-founder Paul English on "hiring religion" (2002)
Where you should keep your checked-out source code
It's obviously not illegal to hire contractors to work on a specific projects.

The scheme you're suggesting where an employer hires people and calls them "independent contractors" to dodge taxes is not at all what's being discussed in the article.
I like it. I'm guessing you're going to crank out quick Rails skeleton sites to Heroku? This is a good service and i see nothing wrong with people using your sketched out web apps to begin the customer validation process.

If Tim Ferriss can test an idea with a non-functional landing page and a few hundred dollars in adwords, surely your service is at least as viable.
Good points for anyone if they're weighing the fulltime gig vs. contracting vs. consulting. However

1. The "Self Employment Tax" (in other words, FICA and Medicare) is closer to 7.5% extra for the self-employed. When you're an employee you pay 7.5% of this, and your employer matches that. When you're self employed you pay the entire thing.

2. The FICA and medicare tax can be avoided if you're contracting through a third party agency (and being paid W2 via that agency). This has its own set of tradeoffs and rewards, but is another option worth considering.

3. Remember that the 401k match has to vest, meaning that 4% match is closer to 1.6% if you hold the job for only two years. (on the flip side, that 1.6% is pre-tax)

The matching can also be a temporary benefit if your smaller company gets bought out by a larger one.

4. Paying your own health insurance is a burden, but it's a burden with a fixed monthly cost. It's worth investigating self-insurance options and doing a straight up dollars to dollars comparison.

Consulting and contracting aren't for everyone, but if there's parts of full-time employment that frustrate you it's definitely a route worth considering.
Apparently the author isn't happy with the messiness of his current build process, but plans to release the source eventually:

https://code.google.com/p/android-apktool/issues/detail?id=7...
Apple outs anti-jailbreak update
> But regulation hasn’t stopped the [pension] plans from being underfunded, in part because the regulators, who worried that companies would use pensions as a slush fund to smooth their earnings, kept them from overcontributing in flusher times.

Why would this sort of smoothing need to be regulated away?
When we first became parents I put my son at the top spot and thus my wife and I have talked about this a good bit. We found that if we focus on each other it makes it overall better for everyone, including the kids. I guess how we look at it is family is #1 instead of breaking it down.
To every story there is also the other side of the story. They obviously don't freeze accounts account just like that for fun, so they certainly had some reasons to do so.
A New Look at Friends
When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
The specific savings mechanism isn't the problem - stocks, bonds, govt pyramid schemes, whatever. All this article says is that stocks aren't a magic solution like some people thought they were - the premium they had over bonds has decreased (though they are still better than SS [1]).

The fundamental problem is that any mechanism of retirement savings is a claim on the productive output of workers. When the retiree/worker ratio gets too high (which will happen), pain ensues.

[1] If SS were eliminated, stock/bond performance would become worse as SS money chases returns on stocks/bonds. It would still be better than SS today, but would be worse than stock/bond performance today.
I don't see how your link is not relevant, first of all.

(edit: eg, you could post links to lots of Flash, Java, whatever that run on OSX but aren't allowed in the App Store)

Also, I don't see how "developers and end users wanting it" changes anything, Apple is clearly not interested in letting developers and end users dictate how they operate, otherwise they would have been doing things differently from day one, and most obviously there would be Flash on the iPhone.
Except that they were still buying from China then. Even some of their "made in America" products were mostly made in China. They got busted for this and that's why they stopped, not because people didn't like the idea [1].

[1] Though to be fair, people not only wouldn't like but wouldn't accept paying what it would cost to make the goods in america.
It is! Thank you.
The policy outlined in the submission tip image seem pretty reasonable to me. With so many people building apps for iOS, one has to assume that some of them are malicious assholes.
Even if they don't use it from their side to maximize the efficiency of displaying ads, they want you to use it to maximize your AdWords performance and/or AdSense revenue. They make it easy to link your account to your AdWords/AdSense account so that you can run tests and reports.
I left Melbourne in 2002, and finally visited again in 2009. The effect of seven years of sustained prosperity was palpable in many ways, but none more so than the number of new cafés. I guess it's the sort of change you don't notice so much when you see something every day.

(I'm subscribed to a Melbourne photo blog, and it nearly brings a tear to the eye at least once a week. Melbourne's easily my favorite city in the world.)
Scout this Accessible Eboy Out
You are right I'm a techy, I talk to people who run online businesses, they use PayPal and other methods. PayPal is by far the biggest problem when it comes to payment solutions. Also I'm from Europe, which means I talk to people who use the common solutions in Europe to deal with payments, which is direct bank transfers or an online alternative provided by banks (such as iDeal in Holland). While our banks don't require as much documentation as PayPal sometimes requires, you also don't have to threaten them with lawsuits to get your money (I've seen that happen). They even have an chief escalation officer who jumps in in case clients threaten them with lawsuits.

PayPal doesn't have the right to just freeze money for periods of 180 days without providing sufficient methods for their customers to quickly resolve the issues. 180 days for freezing all money for one suspicious transaction is absolutely ridiculous. I don't claim PayPal achieves profitability by freezing accounts, I do claim they regularly screw their own customers with questionable account balance freezes.
Forgot the /s tag...
Do not agree at all with this, while I do think that nothing majorly wrong is going to come with is and I don't think we are going to be oppressed by our ISPs I do not think that trusting large companies to self-regulate when they have no real competition is a good idea. Verizon, AT&T (and Sprint) don't have any competition, and I can see that AT&T is also happy with this deal.
And Spanish, "Tu" vs "Usted" vs "Vos"
I recommend you focus your copy on the type of people you'd expect to buy your service and not the programmers here at HN that are offended by the boldness of your claims.

You're contracting a high hourly rate to non-technical would-be founders on the understanding that they can get to the validation stage after a few hours of your time without having to line up a co-founder/CTO. This is gold!

Hopefully patio11 will review you - I think this sort of marketing is his specialty.

I'd also recommend you downplay your fresh-out-of-college status to avoid scaring off potential customers. Being a bright young 20-something is fine, but the "MY COLLEGE CAREER" link has a "just fell off the turnip truck" feel to it.
Hadn't read Paul's essay on pooled risk company management (sales to public companies) before. Thanks a bootload!

I highly suggest any other HN'ers that haven't done so check out the post.
Visiting Fallingwater, America's most beautiful house
Thanks for the comments everyone:

Here are some replies...

1.) This website took 90 minutes to create from idea to publishing.

2.) Eric, Steve, Brant, and Peter are in no way affiliated with this except they are awesome and helped inspire it.

3.) An MVP can mean many things to many people. I think you should do the least amount of work in order to validate/invalidate the most assumptions. "Get out of the building", show people sketches, create site mockups with buttons that don't work and calculate the number of people who pressed them,etc. Here's an article from Venture Hacks.

http://venturehacks.com/articles/minimum-viable-product-exam...

4.) Interesting thought about NDAs. I think I would take the same route as VCs. Don't sign them because they may inadvertently affect other projects you're working on. I probably won't be able to offer assurance except not doing it - also like VCs.

5.) What do I provide. Depends on the project, I think smaller is better to validate assumptions with the least effort. This way, you don't waste time building something people don't want.
Which is why I didn't say the claim was false. I just have doubts that it's true.

Googling "apple hiring process" turns up this:

http://www.ifoapplestore.com/stores/hiring.html

"And lastly, the competition for jobs is intense! Sr. v-p Retail Ron Johnson has said it's tougher to be hired than being accepted by Stanford University--literally. During one talk he said Apple hired 978 store employees during 2002 from an applicant pool of 16,438, or less than a 6% chance of being hired (Stanford accepted 12.6 % for 2005). Put another way, only 1 in 17 applicants is hired."

Sure that's just retail, but it seems reasonable to guess that a similar hiring process exists for other fields.
Mac Pro - Now up to 12 cores of processing power.
If you exceed 5 million pageviews, they don't cut you off, they just compile your statistics once per day instead of multiple times throughout the day.
This is the second or third time I've something like that. First time was from Mark Suster who said the best way to raise an angel round is to get a few key angels on board with a great deal 2% for 10k, then have a larger angel round afterwards using social proof to get introductions to more potential investors.
Ask HN:  What are some good color blind palettes to use?
How many color blind palettes does one need to handle the most common forms of color blindness?

And what are some good color blind palettes to use?

What would you suggest as a color blind alternative for this color sequence: blue, cyan, green, yellow, orange, red?
Tell HN: Annual Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight at 80 meteors/hr
For those interested in this kind of thing: Peak is tonight, forecasted at 80 meteors an hour.

Some refernces:
http://www.nasa.gov/connect/chat/perseids_2010.html

http://www.ukspaceagency.bis.gov.uk/News%20and%20Events/News/19445.aspx

The forecast here in the UK is depressingly cloudy but might clear up, so hopefully this helps others enjoy it.
Hi Andrew, we are not actively calling or contacting organizations at this moment. We are just collecting feedback right now. But its an interesting tool.

I think eventually we will get some accurate data based on third party IP info and I also saw corporate info in those packs.

Its an interesting idea. But how does you tool work in the real world? I get someone from Adobe in San Jose on my site this morning and then what? I have to coldcall and hope I get the right person in that corp. office that actually visited my site?
I was hinting at the opposite experience - people who know only java and think that javascript is just java lite (so obviously if you know java, you know javascript).
Visiting Lego Fallingwater
POP3 still seems to be free though :-)
Cyber Defense Weekly: Israel Pursues E-Warfare
A lot of parents believe in the "white noise" and it does seem to work for a lot of babies, but (this is not scientific by any means) what I have noticed with other kids we know closely is that if you start them with white noise they will continue to need it as they grow older and without it they are not as good of sleepers. So it seems to create a dependency. I know opinions like this could be argued with a lot of baby topics (food, play, milk, etc.), but the white noise is the only one that I have seen repeatedly hold up.
This sounds exactly like the Facebook origin stories, both the ConnectU one and the "Paul Ceglia owns 84%" one.