skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's right - though you enter your own URL. Extra idea: it might also show you complements (products/services that fit in nicely with yours; these are usually pretty obvious in established industries - razors+shaving cream; milk+eggs; tyres +brakepads - but not so obvious in emerging industries. You might not have even thought of the category of a certain complement, let alone the name of it, nor specific brands that do it. It's valuable, because you might consider targeting people who buy the complements. It's a kind of market-research.

(Unhelpfully) I think every website could benefit from it. Probably emergent and fast-moving markets would benefit most (because they don't yet know their competitors/complements + it's all changing very fast anyway). A very specific start would be... y-combinator offerings (that have just launched - not the established onces); for fun, you could also do it for emerging languages (like Mirah). These aren't ideal biz markets, but they would gain attention here on HN, and might validate the basic idea (to see if it's possible.) For example, if you were able to find a competitor to a YC company that they didn't know about, it would be pretty compelling evidence (and will surely happen, since startups rarely look very closely for competitors; they are too busy doing. Which is a good thing. Knowing about competitors too early can be artificially discouraging. So this is probably most helpful for companies that already have enough traction that they wouldn't be discouraged. Competitors are good for giving you ideas; for demonstrating market existence (good for raising funds...); for suggesting markets you hadn't thought of. Complements are always good.

Perhaps also, companies that are always launching new products might appreciate it: eg Proctor and Gamble (though in their market, there are only a few competitors and they are well-known...). It might help in industries that are often disrupted - ie high-tech industries. Examples might be the established competitors of YC companies. If you could demonstrate legitimacy, big enterprise might pay a lot (perhaps equivalent to how much it would cost to hire someone to do the same work manually). You can be an arms dealer, and sell to both sides. :-) That's the nature of competition.

EDIT http://www.mirah.org hasn't got results yet. JRuby's competitors are:
Groovy and http://rjb.rubyforge.org... There's a japanese (I think) news site. That might be helpful, if you can detect similarities across languages...
I have a friend who makes a lot of money (way more than me) doing affiliate marketing for adult sites. He's a really cool guy and I respect him a lot. Every time I'm around him, I ponder the things I could have done to make more money. I always come to the same conclusion: that I have no desire to make any amount of money doing anything I'm not passionate about. I think that money is a great incentive, but a horrible motivation.
I thought this one was genuinely funny and well executed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FC_eMDnCRg

Thumbtack; saw this because they just got funded through Venture hack's Angel list.
Immigration and Customs officials don't need a warrant to detain you (temporarily), search you, ask your questions or seize some or all of your luggage. This has always been the established norm as it is on the (controlled) borders of just about any country.
It's a good rudimentary read, but there's a lot more compelling stuff coming from the visionaries in the sector out there.
They only thoroughly checked about ~2000 of the documents according to a speech Julian gave on Lateline (Australian TV Show), They [wikileaks] did offer the US government a chance to check though and blank any names they found but they did not accept the offer.
I never thought about why road signs are like that, but you are right. Interesting. Unlike my observation about the website, which somebody finds offensive or wrong, it seems :-D
His story will resonate with anyone who's written software for business.

At my very first "real" programming job, my boss thought that this was how you motivate programmers - take whatever the real deadline is and cut the time in half, on the theory that the programmers will take twice as long as you give them anyway. I was pretty upset by this, because by being lied to about what the real timeframe was, we made a number of unsound technical decisions thinking we didn't have time to do things right. I don't think being lied to caused us to magically be able to get an app out the door faster - what being lied to about the schedule actually caused was for us to produce code that wasn't a good foundation for future changes.
Cookie Madness: on the recent WSJ scare story.
You will be billed $90,000 for this phone call
Actually I just checked HM #3 on PDF and looks too small on the kindle, barely enough to be read.

Possibly because he adjusted the font size by a point. For 8.5x11 PDFs you really need a Kindle DX or iPad.
Patents are an incentive given to inventors to reveal their inventions and not keep them as trade secrets ( reason for patents from the perspective of the state).

Using this as a guiding principle, a patent should be granted only to those products that use an idea which has not been successfully replicated after some period of time.

Say if a product/service uses an idea and has been in the market for 2-3 years. If the idea adds to the greater good of the society and has not been replicated by anyone else yet; such ideas should qualify for the incentive of patents.
A river, Heraclitus and the meaning of life (video)
I think a more apt example would be if you knew of the address of a meth lab. Meth labs are often heavily defended. You give the address of the meth lab to the police, knowing that when busting it some police officers may lose their lives.

Would you be accountable for the deaths of the officers?
Interviewing Bill Gates, by Email and In Person (1994)
When the Americans kill civilians ("Collateral Murder"), Wikileaks gets blamed for being biased. When the Taliban kill civilians, Wikileaks gets blamed, even when they tried to contact the White House so they could remove information about informants.

Perhaps I'm just out of touch, but I normally would put most of the responsibility for these things on the warring parties. Blaming a third party that doesn't have an army, a militia, or guns seems self-serving or disingenuous, depending on who's doing it.
Beautiful Code, Compelling Evidence [pdf]
I discovered tree-style tabs a few months ago and love them. However, I find myself running Chrome for its superior performance on my Mac. Is there a grouping tab manager anyone can recommend for Chrome?
See Andy Grove's article, from which the insightful content here was plagiarized (e.g. the 10-to-1 China:US ratio, the stat about computer manufacturing employment, etc.)

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_28/b41860483...
How to Pirate A Vinyl Record
1. Why are these mutually exclusive? I think it's possible to believe that both Iraq/Afghanistan and Wikileaks' release of these documents without checking to see if they put people's lives at risk are irresponsible.

2. If exposing the truth is always the best alternative, one wonders why Assange & co are so secretive about their own operations & movement. Clearly they have good reasons, for example Wikileaks tries to maintain the secrecy of their sources so they don't end up on jail. If they really exposed Afghan sources in these documents, the outcome for them will most likely be far worse than jail.

Personally I think WL is important and has great potential, but I wouldn't automatically consider them the good guys in every situation. It's more complicated than that.
Hopefully you can find the time to do this soon, it will be very helpful for all of us trying to become successful and change the world (or a piece of it) with our startups.
I collected some startup pitches/demo and did a blog post a while back. There are some good ones here including Loopt, AdMob, Dropbox, etc.

http://jonbischke.com/2009/11/13/a-dozen-of-the-best-start-u...
This is a particularly good counterpoint to some of the ideas in the article:

http://www.economist.com/node/16479024?story_id=16479024

* Even though stocks have fallen in the last decade, they are still historically expensive. Because the fell from such a high peak in 2000.

* The more people that follow the author's advice of investing in shares (the cult of equity), the worse their
collective return will be.

* Unrelated but interesting is that high-yield bonds have outperformed stocks since 1995.

If you'd invested $1,000 a month since 1970 you'd be rich. Yes, but $1,000 a month in 1970 was a lot of money. In 1970 the median household income was around $800 a month (in 1970 dollars).

It'd be more informative to know how rich you'd now be if you'd invested in stocks something like 20% of the median household income for the past 40 years.
Money is virtualized power. If you haven't used it all by the end then you've left things undone. An unused tool is a worthless tool.
Related: http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-examples-of-startup-...
I couldn't find the link to the actual comic on the article: http://www.lefthandedtoons.com/77/
Your argument is absolutely ridiculous. This has nothing to do with republicans vs democrats. As far as I know, LBJ and McNamara were democrats. And so are Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, who voted for the war in order to avoid jeopardizing their chances of getting to the oval office. What exact part of "meretricious congressmen" didn't you understand?

Assange has never claimed that there are no legitimate secrets. He's not exposing cyphers nor nuclear secrets. The truth that he's exposing is one that the Afghans know well, but that the American public does not know. The purpose of WikiLeaks is to promote transparency and accountability by exposing truths that catalyze reform. This means, essentially, to close the feedback loop so that the electorate can make wise decisions every four years. If the electorate has no clue what is going on, you have no republic, you have a farce.

What reform is attained by exposing someone's phone or address? That's right. None. If you can't understand that privacy and transparency aren't incompatible, then you must be seriously intellectually challenged. In other words, you have no point, and you have no argument.
Basically... you have to decide what you can live with. Everyone has a different view/perspective but you're the only one who has to live with your decisions (well and anyone you affect, but im putting them on your shoulders). So, their own fault or your evil genius?
Glowing is an interesting idea, but I think just placing the search button beneath would be helpful enough - then it's obvious to the user that they need to hit that, and it's easy to find. That would solve both of the problems that I had, anyway.
No, that'll tell you the value of the Last-Modified header (or equivalent). If you open your history, and filter based on the page title, you can see the visit date.
I've seen some really bad code... it didn't even work properly! I think that should be the benchmark for sucking. Once it does work, I don't think it can 'suck.' It can be inefficient, it can be slow, it can be improved, but let's reserve suck for real bad code.
I'm crazy about the idea of wikileaks but the Journal's article brings up good points. These documents are unlikely to fundamentally change peoples' opinion on the war(s), yet the documents have already been found to name afghan informants by full name, village and father's name.
An offtopic question if you dont mind.When should we think of switching from a VPS to a fully dedicated server?I have a forum with around 3k members and vBullentin and the forum will grow further rather fast in next two months.
Can any individual government agent in such a capacity ever really be "just like me"? I don't take orders from anyone. They do. In that respect, they are nothing like me at all.

A large part of what makes tales of government harassment like this one so troubling is how similar, reasonable, and even pleasant the agents are. If they are just like us, then why is there so much injustice?
Even to the extent that this is currently the norm, why is it OK?

Why should state officials ever be allowed to interrogate U.S. citizens' political opinions, regardless of whether those citizens happen to be standing in an airport?

It makes perfect sense that Customs be allowed to inspect physical items passengers bring through the airport, but what rationale says they should look through your computer files, especially in a post-Internet world? (I.e., there's no sense in claiming that you'll stop child pornography or other hot-topic illegal data entering the U.S. in an age where the Internet exists.)
I never claimed that they are incompatible. I merely claimed that those who invade a sovereign country that posed no threat, leading to 100,000s of deaths (5,000 of which U.S. soldiers) have no moral authority and cannot claim that their irresponsibility is even remotely comparable to the irresponsibility of revealing possible informants' names.
Quora is nice and I hope they do quite well, but I don't understand how it's revolutionary.

It's been done before. They're free to do it better. Personally, I think SO came up with some really great ways to do this sort of thing. Yahoo and Google both had properties that did questions and answers along with countless smaller ones.
I get the premise of the article, but I think that you can quickly look at some code and determine if it passes the sniff test. I've been guilty of rewriting sections of code just b/c I didn't like the formatting and other minor annoyances, but then again, there is just general newbie or outsourced lazy, sloppy, spaghetti code. You can spot that in less than ten seconds and it truly does suck. Engineering is about integrating prior solutions to solve a problem. Many times that means the experience to know I can pull in a library and write 10 lines of code to solve a problem instead of hundreds....of bad lines.
What I'd really like is to have a second, isolated firefox process that I can run alongside my main one with as much functional independence as possible.

What's stopping you from running a separate process?
There are no good guys. Is there such a thing?

From what I understand WL offered the US government the chance to clear names of informants. They refused. They obviously wanted to pressure wikileaks not to release the information.
Invite-only has been pretty successful at Quora (now public) and Forrst so far. A lot of designers also want in on Dribbble because of the scarcity of invites they've created.
How was Jake associated with noisebridge? I was just there a few days ago...
That one is boring, left me with no idea what rule.fm is/does (I stopped watching after about 45 seconds), and looked lovely doing it. F+ (a + for looking good while being completely and utterly pointless).
"Perhaps I'm just out of touch, but I normally would put most of the responsibility for these things on the warring parties. Blaming a third party that doesn't have an army, a militia, or guns seems self-serving or disingenuous, depending on who's doing it."

I'm not blaming Wikileaks for those things. As you say, they don't have an army. What they do have is a very large audience. Just like with a militia (or owning a gun), you need to be responsible. Giving out the names of potential informants and spies is not being responsible.

If there was even a chance that people could die as a result of this information, they shouldn't have gone public. Because they did, it leads me to believe that they are being driven by an anti-war political agenda.

To me, the information given is not worth the number of lives that will be lost as a result.
Paul Vixie: Taking Back the DNS
So I was out to dinner tonight and got an email from my VPS saying my disk IO was high. At first I thought someone might have hacked my server, but it turns out that someone posted the link to my site on HN!

I've been working on this website for the past couple of weeks. Please email me at andrew [AT] naturalparsing [DOT] com if you have any questions or suggestions, or want to use the API.

FYI, right now the API is not using all the capabilities of the Stanford Parser, just the word tagging part. More features will be implemented soon. Let me know if you have any specific requests.

Andrew
"They only thoroughly checked about ~2000 of the documents according to a speech Julian gave on Lateline (Australian TV Show), They [wikileaks] did offer the US government a chance to check though and blank any names they found but they did not accept the offer."

Why take the chance? Why not blank out all the names?

They don't seem to care about the potential loss of human life.
"What reform is attained by exposing someone's phone or address? That's right. None. If you can't understand that privacy and transparency aren't incompatible, then you must be seriously intellectually challenged. In other words, you have no point, and you have no argument."

When you are exposing potential informants and spies to known murderers, lots.
Do they not teach Defense against the Dark Arts at university these days? "We can incorporate that new feature, boss. What feature do you want me to cut? I can get you expiring coupons but the store locator will have to go. Your call, you get paid the big money to make the important decisions."
Uh no. What you quoted was the reply. This is the original discussion.

Sexual love is a human need as fundamental as food and shelter.
I say "this code sucks" pretty often. Occasionally, I'm wrong in ways similar to those described in this article. Often, it's crappy outsourced code built by intern developers with no sense of right and wrong.
This is destined to be a classic. Well written and so true. It's a better version of the tale I tell my friends about my line of work.

I wonder if forwarding it to my non-coding partner will make any difference?
My lifetime might not be long enough for "the long run." Any longer than that and your 200 years means very little.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Plame

Seriously? You're complaining about Wikileaks doing it (debatable) when Bush & Co make this seem like so 2006.
Just built it on Snow Leopard (it's not on MacPorts yet). Sadly, there are a couple of independent documentation projects underway but no "official" docs. Since I have a day or two to spare, can anyone point me to a learning resource (Python/ObjC guy here)?
This was a pretty funny story. I was kind of disappointed that it never got into the area that I was really interested, though: that of writing clean, maintainable, "good" code.
Here's a fourth : Blimps.
Yes--sex is less fundamental a need than food and shelter. You can go without sex for years at a time, but it's hard to go more than a couple weeks without food or shelter.
Video that explains putpat, a german music video service:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EAkuKwS1JM
Assange gave the Guardian, that paper's main competition, advance access to the docs.

Bitter much?

To date, there is absolutely no evidence of these sort of reprisals actually taking place, other than a vaguely worded threat from some token Taliban mouthpiece. And you know how uncommon that is...
For more Adam Lisagor, try the video for the Birdhouse iPhone app, which is even more charming than the Square video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8yRaWY1xV8
The Netscape example is an extreme case since it was an entire system rewrite (still a valuable example).

The other extreme of leaving the code to rot is just as bad. "It works... for now."

There are too many little changes that occur in either the larger system itself, the platform, or even the OS (and of course the customer) to just say "it works." This then leads to, "Well it should still work" as time goes on.
Jean Meslier
Ask HN: What is this 'hacker' trying to do?
I've recently being getting strange requests in my error logs. For example:

'/Scripts/)j.html(e'

'/Scripts/);c(this.node).html(f.preloadText);c(this.node).appendTo('

'/Scripts/).html(parseInt('

'/Scripts/).html(g);$('

'/Scripts/).html(f);$('

I get probably about 20 of these requests in a minute and I can't think of what the person is trying to accomplish.

It's probably assuming that I'm parsing whatever string that comes after /Scripts/ directly and then hoping to ... ???

It's great when you pick these up in your logs but a little worrying when it stops. Just wondering if anyone recognise the 'test' suite that's generating these requests.
Except that in Communist Russia he would have probably "disappeared" into some labor camp in Siberia. We are still far from that.

However, at the same time, in Communist Russia nobody had the illusion that it was a free, open, morally superior country. All that propaganda bullshit was recognized as bullshit. Except for some old WWII veterans who believed in the "system", everyone in private knew it was all a spectacle.

In case of the American society, the majority still think they live in a democracy, where they can do whatever they like, say whatever they like, that the government doesn't spy on them, doesn't put people on black lists, that searches are really "random" and so on.

And I like how the FBI agents want to talk about "human rights". Wow! Such a cheap shot at creating rapport. They couldn't really come up with anything better !?
Either you're too naive or not cynical enough. Assange is on a power trip, but WL is necessary and has been useful so far, so I forgive him. He has a large ego and wants to deliver impact. Exposing informants is peanuts. Why would he do it intentionally? He has already caused one government to collapse (in Kenya). If you had such power, would you use it for the little things, or for the big things? Too bad for the informants, it would have been better if no names had ever been exposed.
Sounds like a case of "collateral damage." Our military's stance is that such damage is completely ok no matter what proportionalities are involved.
"Seriously. You're complaining about Wikileaks doing it (debatable) when Cheney makes this seem like so 2006"

Seriously. When has two wrongs ever made a right? Also, the topic isn't Cheney, it's Wikileaks.

Do republicans that don't run the country anymore always have to be brought up when left leaning organizations or politicians are criticized for their actions?
Google does not do this as a technique of attracting interest, they do it so they can scale more predictably. If it increases interest, it is only because people already wanted it.
Seriously. You follow up "white people don't have it so bad" with "I'm a white south african and I've had it so bad"? Is irony dead?
Blimps are slow. Also blimps are not planes.
That's the value of a balanced budget. The value of saving is compound interest, whether in money market or stock dividends, or a brilliant startup (what if the startup you pounce on fails or only breaks even?). Saving early means you start in on the compound interest sooner, which means you get a longer timeframe on your exponential growth.
Ciara Pushes the Envelope on 'Basic Instincts'
I'm a big fan of the SoundCloud demo: http://vimeo.com/1857085 just feels slick & tells you exactly what the service does.
No, call it Collateral Murder
The argument is that stocks have been the best asset class investment in each decade for the last two hundred years, not that it takes two hundred years.

I'm going to guess that you'll live for at least another decade, and tell you to go right ahead and consider that the long run. If you've any multiples of decades, you're even more set.
X10: a new object-oriented, type-safe programming language