skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm looking at RobotVision to see whether it's something I could use or adapt. http://openslam.org/robotvision.html
The problem with this approach is that it is more of a one-on-one feedback system, which to me is the opposite of what you find here on HN. I love the "Show HN" posts b/c I learn something from them even if it isn't my app. If I put the effort into giving feedback I would hate to know that there is a good chance it won't be seen b/c the poster doesn't have enough "credit".

Also, I think most of the quality "Show HN" posts don't go unnoticed and the incentive to comment on them is the same as any other post on HN.
iPhone 4 Carrier Unlock Now Available
The limit is probably the amount of "fund-worthy" founders that exist (and apply) at any given time. If it's not that, then YCombinator batches are kept intentionally small. I would imagine so that there's a higher mentor:founder ratio, and so that all the founders form a tighter-knit group. If the groups are small enough so that everybody knows everybody, there's the "esprit de corps" that binds all together in the common goal of success. You don't want to show up to the Tuesday dinner and report no progress.
When I feel like lightening up, I go to that red-place. When I'm serious, I come back here. It's nice to have the separation; if we weren't all so serious all the time on HN—if it was just another Reddit, in other words—would there really be a point to coming here? :)
Bash Reference
Nice find! I admire that girl's courage.
Amazon tells companies to lower expectations for cloud
LinkedIn Acquires mSpoke For Its Recommendation Technology, Team
The easiest way to win The Game is to cheat.
One of the things taught to undergrads in the humanities—specifically, in communications design—is that you should make the metadata of something interesting-seeming to a wider audience than the data it represents, so that it spreads further—that way, more of the people interested in the data will see it.

As an example, one of my friends told me about a very interesting paper called, and I quote, "Three Monkeys something something." He didn't know what it was about, but he said it "sounded like something I'd be interested in." He was quite right—but if it hadn't been for the monkeys, he wouldn't had anything vivid about the paper to recall at all.
"Some of the stuff in this sounds nice but I feel it lacks some honesty. "What is the thing you have been the most wrong about?" And you say that the worst error in judgment you've made is an off-hand remark in a meeting?"

Huh? That isn't how I read it at all.
From the article:

"Question: What about you yourself—what have you personally been most wrong about?

Answer: One thing is how fast things change.[Stuff about meeting here]You think you have this experience—and we talked about how important experience is for having intuitions—but experience can go out of date very quickly."

To me he seems to be saying that one of his major mistakes is underestimating how fast things change, and underestimating the erosion of the value of his experience in guiding his intuition (He just finished talking about the importance of intuition for situations where statistics and data can't help/don't exist.)

Given that he was speaking about a professional context [1] and the position he occupies at Google (Director of Research), where anticipating change would be presumably part of his job description, that sounded to me like admission of a major lapse, somewhat different from "My biggest mistake was an off hand remark I made at a meeting", as you seemed to imply.

He was using the meeting incident as a concrete example of a rather large failing. How is it "dishonest"?

[1] The whole interview is about errors in a professional context , about Google and his work there, so I wouldn't expect to hear about whether he got stoned as a teenager and got thrown in jail! ;-)
There was a company (BSO) that did just that, they split every time they got to a certain number of employees (I believe the magic number was 50). They were hugely successful.

You can read all about it here: http://www.extent.nl/articles/entry/the-evolution-of-bso-and...
And how do you measure IQ? With a test?
Parts of this speech imply the valedictorian was somehow misled into working hard and graduating at the top.

Well, I don't like speeches about the evils of money given by rich people, nor do I like speeches about the broken education system given by valedictorians.
Eckart Wintzen, The Evolution of BSO and its Offspring
Had to look it up. Really quite creepy and annoying.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhBnEV3ElvY
hey, you back from vacation?! My answer: to f*ing much
Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai
Quantum cryptography breakthrough could lead to more secure communication
Funny that someone would stress the importance of understanding "business needs" and in the same breath consider "We should write this piece in Java. I know Java pretty well." to be absolutely absurd.
Any, when author knows basic principles of secure (safe) usage of C programming language and UNIX API.
"is best at making products that minimize the time you have to spend using them"

An excellent observation - I use Google a lot the total amount of time I spend on their sites really is pretty small and the "brand loyalty" for me is almost non existent.
I love the Show HN posts too. I recently had a rather successful one here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1564183 A lot of very, very interesting discussions arise from them, and there's a lot to be learned from them.

But for the purpose of receiving simple feedback like: "Was it clear what this site does?", "Which feature was most useful?", "Your thoughts on the usability of the site?" Show HN will often fall short. While often times there is incentive to add feedback on HN, there is often times not incentive to just ramble on about your user experience -- though this might be very helpful to the op.

Finally, I'm pretty confident that people will want to view the feedback they've gotten, and will happily give feedback to other people in order to view it. I don't think there's a "good chance" that the user won't give someone else feedback to get credit to view yours. I think there's an exceptionally high chance all feedbacks will be viewed within a very short amount of time. Only the very latest feedbacks would not be viewable, and with a high enough churn, they wouldn't be unviewable for long.
Ask HN: Zvon announcements - netiquette question
Hello,
I have just announced Bash reference at Zvon.org (my site).
Is it fine to announce new relevant (at least in my eyes) Zvon.org materials here or is it against this list netiquette?

Hacker News were just recommended to me by a friend and so I am a total newbie to its rules.

Mila
I propose to call that "Investment Fallacy".
Brand Name Loyalty or Mental Trap?
Will DevOps Fork?
Four biggest sales challenges Internet startups and entrepreneurs face
The Web’s New Gold Mine: Personalizing Your Online Experience
you make me wonder what kind of security research and corporate apologism genius am I dealing with here?

because the thing was defined as rootkit by original security researcher, EFF, court AND even Sony itself.

May as well end here I think.
In this case, the и intensely reminds me of a swastika so the effect is doubled!
Train your customers
Infosec Island Security News Digest for 8-04-2010
There are also many ideas that are flights of fancy or long shots that a single person can be "dead set" on but unable to seriously convince anyone else about until it's, well, working. Dyson and his cyclone vacuum cleaner comes to mind.
Telcos Close To 'Deal' On Net Neutrality That Gives Them Everything They Want
And here I though they meant some kind of external micro-plated armor. I've never witnessed it, but babies with armor? It's cool enough I'd buy it.
Agreed. Hard to argue that price inflation in education hasn't reduced its value.

Not its worth -- that's remained or even increased. But its value.
Down as in, a healthier population will require less healthcare. They never foresaw the NHS paying for hymenoplasty...
Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
If I was head of the Coxsackie-Athens High School, I'd be damn proud. You've taught your students well if they end up concluding you've been doing it wrong all the time.
I wonder why he missed out those that haven't purchased but still see the value of a product irrespective of a brand label?

Aside: I'm assuming this piece is by DougP, I found it annoying that the author wasn't mentioned. Must remember to add author info to my blog!
I'm pretty sure there must be video analysis software out there that's capable of figuring out whether people look angry.
He's got a lust for life (insurance)...
10 Utile Resources of Aug 2010 for Web Design and Development
In this post I am sharing some really useful and fresh resources to help web designers and developers for day-to-day projects needs.
Yeah military is definitely an option as well. Easily the most motivated and focused person I met in college was a Navy veteran who had recently gotten back from Iraq.
I've always wondered this too. Most mammals seem to figure it out effortlessly.

Most mammals have mammaries that are purely functional and only round out due to filling with milk. Human female breasts are full for other reasons, too full in fact to be baby-friendly. Most other mammals also feed their offspring in plain view of others of their species, which means there is plenty of opportunity to observe how it is done. In human cultures, we debate the morality of -- gasp! -- breastfeeding in public. When it is done in public at all, it is handled very discretely so no one gets a glimpse of someone's breast or, god forbid, nipple. Not exactly a learning opportunity for any other women who happen to be around who might someday have a baby themselves and might want to breastfeed.

Part of my experience with this subject: I breastfed my oldest until he was nearly 2 and my youngest rejected the breast very early (due to lactose intolerance), breastfeeding full-time for only 10 days and part-time until he was 6 weeks old. And I helped my sister address some issues she had with her baby so she could successfully breastfeed.
That is a circular argument :]
Fraternity Websites - Sorority Websites
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Sounds like someone stoned and rambling. Get off my lawn.
You'll find yourself in some place beautiful.
I looked at the fee structure, right now it looks like getting the merchant account is the first step.

Although I already have a business bank account I have not heard/come across "merchant account"term in any of my contracts.

It looks like this process would add another $100/month cost to my operating expenses. I guess just to avoid that I'd rather go with Amazon or PayPal.

In terms of switching from PayPal to Recurly, would one lose all the subscription information? It's one thing to want to save money but losing subscriber information is a no no. Can anyone comment?

rmoriz and atldev, thanks a lot for your input so far!
"software that knew how to apply a selection of mathematical functions to my data, and then breed the results like a GA"

yeah, I'd envisaged using the accuracy of the neural net as the fitness function for a GA that mutates input parameters. It's another layer of complexity, and I've no clue how you'd start, but it seems like it would work.

In other words - use a GA to select features, using how well the NN trained on that set of features performs as the fitness function.
GIGABYTE announces Mini-ITX contest without prizes?
From what perspective?

From 99% of users' perspective: blocking rackspace has no effect on them unless they try to switch to posterous.

You are one of a handful of users running something else on rackspace for personal use. Sure for 5 users this was a bad approach.

From twitpic's persepective: it stopped them from losing users to posterous. Win.
seems to be something like twitter for projects, but it's giving me errors for a lot of things.
For the RSS, yes, but I don't think JS can download and then upload an image.
Here's how I would make it. No guarantee that I know what I'm doing...

When you arrive there is a very brief 1 or 2 line summary of your service. "A place to buy and sell used university textbooks". Below there are two options (perhaps use an accordion type thing to expand the option when clicked)

Sell your books: When clicked, show a friendly looking form: text book title, description, book ID (ISBN or whatever it's called), asking price, etc. Let them fill it in right then, and when they submit, then ask them to login (make it very painless).

Buy cheap books: When clicked show the following options: search by name, ISBN, whatever. Or, browse. (Though I doubt browsing would ever be effective for this type of thing, but whatever)

Now, words on how the site currently is:

What am I looking for drop down... what is this? Am I looking for university textbooks? Duh, of course I am... What is this option even for? There are two things I'm looking to do: buy books, or sell books. No need for a dropdown here.

I couldn't for the life of me figure out what I would do if I wanted to post my book for sale. I clicked "show all" and then saw a button to "add a new listing" which should really read "sell your book". Back at the frontpage, I realized that the top area is actually a link. This is not at all obvious because it just looks like header text and not a call to action. Add a button that says "sell your books" or something like that.

And, final words that are probably the most important:

Your sites needs user to be useful, and nobody will join if it's not useful. It's a chicken and egg problem, so you're going to be facing a very steep uphill battle to get enough people using the site in order for it to be useful... and frankly it's not that original of an idea so it's likely somebody is doing it better than you are already. Perhaps this place exists in real life, such as the university bookstore?

Ideas to boost chances of success: Target your specific university ON the website.

That's all I've got for now.

Check out my idea here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1574127
Google AdWords Folklore: The Second Coming
Pssh – HTTP-tunneled SSH sever implemented in PHP
An entire article (both this one and the linked WSJ article) on language influencing thought and vice versa, and not a single mention of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that's sad.
"We run every single e-mail we get through Flowtown so we know a bit about who’s coming in through the open door."

So... as a financial site, the very first thing you do with your user's info is hand it over to another company you have no control over? Awesome!
‮ ‮It's pretty damn cool!
Tell HN: Github has dozens of public s3 passwords
I almost pushed my s3 credentials to a public github repo for the third time in one day.

So, I got curious. Are there people out there who forget cover their tracks?

A quick search shows quite a few 'open' buckets out there. What's the best way to warn these folks? What other credentials are lurking out there?

Here's the search:
http://github.com/search?langOverride=&language=&q=S3+Base.establish_connection&repo=&start_value=1&type=Code&x=0&y=0

And the first open bucket I found:
http://github.com/prakashraman/jammmin/blob/a668672c69fafdb8317fec4fb19b7abb0b318e1a/app/scripts/s3_connect.rb
Ask HN: Should I stand tall in the face of negative feedback?
I recently got some seed money for an idea I've been sitting on for a while, have formed the company and done all the necessary legal stuff. The seed money is now in my account and I'm ready to get this thing going. Up until today, I was excited and positive that I was finally taking one of my ideas to market.

I recently emailed a well known blogger in the industry to discuss the possibility of using his blog to leverage some initial traffic to the site at launch and his reply was... well, it was depressing.

He basically shit all over my idea, and explained in a long and detailed email why I would fail. He has a lot more experience and insider knowledge than me, and backed it up his points with facts and figures.

This has really knocked my confidence and I'm racking my brains trying to decide what to do next. The choices are either to ignore him and continue irrespective of his feedback or modify my business plan and try something different (possibly in a totally different sector).

Luckily, the person funding me is very understanding and I think he would be fine with me taking a different route, so I'm not too worried about that.

What do you guys think?
My bad. This is a follow-up article.

Apologies.
Ask HN: Problems for my web solution?
cQuery.com is an application I built that extracts content from live web pages using CSS selectors:

http://cquery.com/

I was wondering if the good people of HN could think of any interesting uses for a web service like this...

If anybody is interested in the technology or how it could be integrated into other products and services, please do get in touch!

I believe this service is pretty much unique and there are loads more features I want to add - let alone doing a bit of publicity, but I am reluctant to invest time without having a clear objective.

Thanks!!!
Can't you do that for much less money in the military?
A more precise search
http://github.com/search?langOverride=&language=yaml&...
Ask HN: Audio software idea for extreme geeks
Hi,I had an idea I felt like posting.

There is a software program called Melodyne that has developed technology that can take polyphonic audio recordings of instruments (such as a recording of a piano chord) and literally split it into its component notes.

I was thinking it would be really cool if somebody developed a synth/audio editor that would do the same but would split the file in a manner based on user definable parameters. The split derivative files could then be put into lanes for individual processing.Then the file could be re-collapsed into a single file.

Even though it's a derivative idea, it seems like it would make a great sound sculpting tool. If anyone reading this knows anything that exist like this on the market please post it :)
Had some server issues, should be fixed now.
PS direct link: http://blog.shore.be/europython2010/presentation.html
ONLINE DOCTOR
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First interactive Kindle content available
A Useful Selection of Android Developer Tools and Resources
Experiment: Can You Mine Gold From Old Motherboards?
(oh, the name cQuery is inspired by 'jQuery' because cQuery uses some jQuery selector syntax expressions - and the 'c' stands for 'content' - thus: "content query")
Another game here:

http://www.amazon.com/everyword
If school taught me anything is that unless im working for myself on what i want, its better to just half ass everything, and not do your best, because all it takes is to not be your worst

This is so true. I realized this very thing myself in the second year in high school. I thought: what the hell am I doing trying to get good grades—from every subject?

I had been doing precisely that just because I could and with the eerie awareness of the fact that I would forget 95% of anything deemed uninteresting right after the course. When it came to subjects tangential to my interests, I realized that I was certainly not going to learn something in school that I couldn't learn by myself.

If I ever needed to cross check which European country invaded which other European country in the 1600's, how to translate "dear girl, I want to marry you for the rest of my life" to German should the opportunity arrive, or desperately need to exercise in some molecular calculations, then I was convinced that I would still have the chance to learn that stuff.

Except for the subjects of my interest, I then dropped all my effort to the very, very minimal level and as a result my grades dropped slightly. It was probably the 20% of effort, 80% of results scheme in action. In some subjects that I had decided to completely ignore, like religion courses (yes, we had those in Finland...), I let my grades drop to the minimum that was required to avoid flunking and was actually pretty proud of that result.

I graduated with good grades in everything I cared about. My high school diploma then exhibited real value for the period of a mere month until it claimed its purpose and I got accepted to the university. I've never needed it after that.

And, by the way, except for mathematics, 99% of what I learned in high school I have never ever needed since. I'm 32 now and I'm glad my teenage realization turned out to be correct.
Proving It: Wind-Powered Cart Goes Faster Than the Wind
I don't know about this particular case but MySQL generally performs poorly on complex queries. That includes anything involving subqueries and all but the simplest joins.
Ask HN: Please review my pet project - Ping Brigade
Ping Brigade (http://www.pingbrigade.com/) is a webapp that lets you measure how fast your web server (and/or your network connection) is from several locations in the world at once. It started out as a side project but after spending several months working on it, it is now live. For the future, I plan on adding more locations around the world, a mobile version and a blog (to talk about various optimization techniques, review hosting providers, etc.)

Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.
I notice no one is attacking what he said, just the man.
It's hard to say without knowing your idea and the criticism, but you shouldn't take one person disagreeing with you as a reason to give up. There's always someone who'll disagree that your idea is good / workable.

Do you agree with his comments? Are they convincing, or just dispiriting?

You'll hear the word 'pivot' around here quite a lot... very rarely does an idea become a business without being altered by feedback.
Firefox 4beta IndexeDB API playground
Observation Will lend a hand You To Find Fresh Research Ideas
When required to write an essay students will have to select a research idea. Research is the search for knowledge, information and facts. Research idea guides the student showing, where and how, the subject area and methodology for this search.
Can you explain to me why this is an important issue? The jobs TLD in general is considered to be a bust. Only 15K registrations so far, and most corporates don't even seem bothered to register their own .jobs domain.

Edit: The pdf you linked to doesn't exist.
As a curious european, I always wondered: who decided female nipples are shocking, but male nipples are acceptable? It's rather like saying, "you can show milk bottles, but only if they're empty".
Saudi Arabia announces it will block BlackBerry service Friday
Schneier on UAE to Ban BlackBerrys
Zed tends to do the ad-hominem part very well without any need for external help. And you are using a straw-man. I never came even close to advocate for banning all software innovation.

What I said, and repeat, is that if you want to introduce an expensive to maintain piece of code, you have to weight the added cost against the performance gain. In this case, the performance gain seems marginal, the assumption of usage envisioned seems wrong and the added complexity seems just pointless.

It's his project, his code and I am not even a Mongrel user. I offer this as a friendly piece of advice, from old programmer to young programmer.

You know: it doesn't matter if you are beam-racing a 6502 or writing networking code to run on 64-bit deeply pipelined processors, there are things that remain true. This is one of them.