skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds interesting. Can you answer the following for me? With mobileply I can now do X which previously replaces Y and is so much better because???
Yes, the cost is nonlinear with height, but my point is that the benefit to density can also be very high.

(I can believe that in the specific case of the Burj the cost outweighs the benefit, given that the skyscraper was built primarily to give Dubai bragging rights. But even if the infrastructure of a 124-story skyscraper is too expensive, that doesn’t refute the value of 60-to-80-story buildings.)
At this point, the service would connect the photo sharing of different services to the user based on their choice (I use Flickr, so I share Flickr, or I use Facebook so I'll share that with everyone). There is more functionality than in a standard Facebook App, but Facebook apps (and open social apps, and iPhone apps, etc) would be part of the solution. The service is based on sharing from the services a user already uses, but there's nothing stopping the service from helping users discover new services that are perfect for what they want to do.
OK, you take out contrib.auth (and other contrib.* packages, including the admin).

What's left that's actually compelling about Django vs other frameworks ?
Also, I rarely see listed Devel::REPL. Excellent, excellent tool. Run re.pl with perl -d, and you have half the useful REPLness of CL.
> The middle-east seem to be a very good emerging new market.

Not bloody likely. In which way, exactly, is the Middle East a "good emerging new market"? Beyond their natural resources and strategic positioning there is nothing at all to speak of in any industry.
The Lounge (.NET developers) - http://theloungenet.com

Ruby Row (Ruby developers) - http://rubyrow.net
God I hope not. I really don't want webpages serving up multithreaded JavaScript on anything with fewer than two cores.

Say what you like about Flash, it always confines its evil to a single core.
Windows Mobile Loses Ground in Smartphone Market
You know, this internets thing is disrupting more than just old-school businesses. It looks as if it's also disrupting tech-based VC businesses too. And the world marches on...
HN: Help me pick a logo for jMockups
It's possible to invalidate only certain claims of a patent with prior art. In theory you would think that if there's lots of prior art of people doing XYZ, then someone doing XYZ in Java because their project uses Java would be obvious and therefore not patentable. In practice the Federal Circuit has taken an absurdly narrow view of "obvious".
In the past I've lived sort of like this and found it quite lonely and alienating. What the article doesn't mention is that nobody really wants to hang out with the weird guy with no stuff and no apartment. If you're single, only really strange and desperate people want to date you. I also found that the act of finding another place to stay quickly became tedious. In the past, nomads were out being nomadic with the rest of their huge nomadic tribe. They weren't just bouncing around settled society with a laptop by themselves.
That's just not true. You can read about it here: http://www.stoke.gov.uk/ccm/museums/museum/2006/gladstone-po...

The innovation was not about something other than clay fired in a kiln; it was making the process scale from "a potter" to a factory.
Supporting the Rural American Mobile Workforce. The Rural biz model.
"The quality of content and tools offered by Lycos has always attracted the best of the consumers across the world."

Seriously? Like what?
Turn Wordpress into an Image-Slinging Warhorse in Three Steps
If you take D3 supplements, make sure they are in gelcap format and not dry tablets. Vitamin D is fat-soluble and much better absorbed that way.

Personally, I take 4000 UI/day (living in Canada).
I think (as a technical guy now in the biz founder role) that this depends a lot on the context of the startup. Since we tend to focus on software startups here, and that is more what I know anyway, I'll talk to it. I think the concept apply to other fields, but the exact nature of the technologies would be different.

The biz cofounder needs to understand the technology as it applies to their business. Simple example: my startup relates to email. I have to understand SMTP, IMAP, and POP pretty well. I don't have to know how to build a mail agent.

You need to understand your particular technology backwards and forwards. When you are out talking to people, you are going to get asked technical questions. You need to understand all the pieces of the system and how they work together.

In a big company, marketing, product management, and even sales engineering may get away with just using marketecture documents. You can't do that. You need to understand the full architecture.

A biz cofounder don't necessarily need to know how to code. Picking up a book and learning how to code won't help significantly. The value of a coding background for a biz person is understanding the development process, which kinds of things are easy to change (and which aren't), and (perhaps) acting as a sounding-board for the tech founder.

Since you aren't going to pick those up without a few years experience, just learning to code gives less value. Learning the meta information about coding (project management, agile development (and what that means to both developers and product owners)), mythical man-months, etc, are more valuable.

(All of this is, of course, my own opinion and worth every cent you paid for it, though I'm not sure it's worth every cent pg paid to host it...)
There's a bit of difference: there's an open-source version of Chrome which presumably has a fully-commented source code implementation of this feature, together with a public bug tracker, etc.
instead of telling me what to do, i'd much rather google helped me make informed choices about what to do.
I think read part of that as well, I just don't do Java dev day in, day out is all :-)

But this got me thinking about compiler tricks in general, and how they can be a good thing.

For instance in C# the keywords foreach, and using are just compiler tricks, as well as the notion of closures.
i will adopt this strategy ;)
Actually, I've read some very moving accounts by people who are nomadic with kids.
Bootstrapping to the end, I didn't start trying to break out to make my own success to have to take crap from anyone but myself and my customers.

To hear a VC talking about $25 million as a small time exit is disgusting.
Indeed, there is, but at least one of the people profiled in the article doesn't even have a space for himself.
Ask HN: Solo Entrepreneur, what are my chances and have you done it?
I decided to apply for the YCombinator program this fall. I am a solo entrepreneur/startup and one of the reasons for doing this by myself is because I see it as a way of bootstrapping my way to success. I am sure I can get another person to be my co-founder, however by doing that I'll be adding more expenses that I cannot afford right now. That does not mean I cannot get people to help me, but they will be helping by me offering sweat equity.
What do you think? am I nuts? do you someone who has succeeded applying to YCombinator's program by themselves, without co-founders?
I think this is SO much more valuable for a biz founder than learning to code. Understanding the development process and developers is critical. On the other hand, knowing how to code is merely useful.

(Note: I differentiate "knowing how to code" from being a coder. One means I made it through Python for Dummies; the other means I have a history of making software and understand the issues around it. That is far more than useful.)
Here's one "dark pattern": Writing about a site and hiding the clickable link deep within the text of the post, in a way that the text of the link doesn't indicate that it actually takes you to the site, in the middle of a jungle of other links that take you to various other articles on the same blog.
For those of us who are Vim users, could you explain the Emacs system?

EDIT: It seems that undo-tree.el file has a good explaination in the comments: http://www.dr-qubit.org/undo-tree/undo-tree.el
As a long-time vim users and short-time Visual Studio user, I've found viemu to be a nice addition but frustrating to use. It conflicts with VS2010's keyboard shortcuts, and I've found myself doing the "random typing OMG what did I just do" thing fairly often. I hadn't done that in vim for over a decade.

Maybe it's just that viemu for VS2010 has only just come out recently, and may still need some tweaking. Long term, it's probably a great tool.
I'm no programmer, barely a web developer, and have no idea what he's talking about half the time. But jeeze this man can write.

I should go learn about compilers. Or improve my typing.
Thanks, looks like text ads are also available: http://www.advertising.com/publisher/ad-formats
Heard of the Dead Man Test?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_behavior_analysis#Behav...
"If a dead man can do it, it ain't behavior, and if a dead man can't do it, then it is behavior."
What's stopping you from promoting an iPhone or Android app like any other software?
It's possible, but you'd need to measure it somehow. If your hunch is correct, then the effect should not show up on weekends and holidays. One low-impact way to measure it might be to write a little script that pings a few specific hosts every minute or 5 minutes and tracks the reply time. Run it for a few weeks and graph the results.

I remember years back working for an electricity generator and wondering why we had a spike every evening between 5 and 6 - sure, I thought, with people leaving work consumption should be down? turns out that electric kettles and domestic televisions draw more current in the aggregate than office equipment.
Because you couldn't use them due to Microsoft distending the language. You weren't guaranteed what you build using VisualJ++ would actually working on another VM. When using anything that did code generation (which a lot of AWT tools did), you ran into this possibility.
Many retired people get rid of all their stuff and do the RV nomad thing.

In the future when nobody has enough money to buy a house or a bunch of stuff in the first place we'll probably be seeing more nomadic seniors.
[From my limited knowledge] Wouldn't DNSSEC bring more uncompetitive centralization around the usual suspects?
you won't know if you don't try. (you'll be fine, if the mint guy can do it, so can you - surround yourself in great mentors/employees/investors/friends)
The problem with that approach is that once someone figures out 1 of your passwords "PclarkUnsecureWebsite123$%^", it becomes easy for them to guess "PclarkGmail123$%^".
Open Data: Messy and Great
If you are a company that makes apps, you should trademark those apps under your company's name. That's the most obvious and elegant way to do things.

If you're looking to separate a specific app from your company, whether to branch it out as a second company, to separate assets or to sell it off entirely, I would incorporate the app and trademark under that entity.

The advantage of the first is its simplicity. A disadvantage would be, like chc said, if you're sued, all of your eggs are in one basket of liability.

The advantage of the second would be legally separated liability. The disadvantage is paperwork and fees.
For anyone looking for a Haskell job, this was recently submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608147
I'm also under the impression that functional languages are just generally used more extensively in the financial(high frequency trading for example) sector than in other areas.
Working during college is not as daunting as it sounds.

I worked the entire time I was in school, the first year part time, the last 3 years were full time (40+ hours per week).

I graduated on time with a degree in Economics with as much of a focus I could put on Game Theory and Statistics.
Prior art is not as easy to use as a defense as people usually think. On that topic, I found the talk by Andew Tridgell quite interesting:

"
You need to learn to read patents. And that doesn’t mean just the abstract. In fact, many people in the free software community, a lot of discussions on sites like Slashdot, people stop at the title. And they think that based on the title they can say "Ah, that was done by the FooHits Corporation in 1925, therefore it’s not a problem". Right? And it doesn’t work like that. You can’t stop at the title, you can’t just stop at the abstract.
"

http://news.swpat.org/2010/03/transcript-tridgell-patents/
The reason the results were lousy was due to the sales culture. Sales people needed more pages to put banner ads on, so all our efforts went to building a "portal" -- not to improving search. The last thing Lycos wanted was for people to find something somewhere else on the internet.
Do you feel like you have less to worry about though? One of the advantages of this minimalism seems to be being able to walk into your room and not being overwhelmed with everything you own. So, even if you own as much music, books, etc.. out of sight, out of mind?
For somebody who is so super-excited, those are some really dismal numbers to be excited about. Frankly it looks like a sucker's game. You might be better off playing the lottery. Trying to be a rock star.
That's true; the vast legions of workers brought into the US under false pretenses, who then have their passports confiscated and are forced to work for several years in excruciating conditions just to "earn" their freedom, are there for other reasons entirely. I recommend reading this article series, "Diary of a Sex Slave":

http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-10-10/news/17314668_1_massag...

Also, slavery is an economic institution, and so the benefits flow not only to the slaveholder but also his customers, and they can be exported internationally to customers like you; the costs are borne by the slaves.
Considerations For FLOSS Hackers About Oracle vs. Google
This is where the test of true value comes into play, for both your app and the person promoting your app (who could easily be the person who created it).

Here's some starters. Note that none of these cost anything really, unless you outsource any part of this:

0) One little way I've seen some devs do it, and this isn't really true of everyone, is they have a developer blog or diary with little snippets of code or screenshots or balsamiq mockups or character sketches for games, to build hype. I see streetwear clothing brands do this all the time, and it captures the energy of the product before you even see the finished product.

1) Get active on boards and social groups that have alot of members that would take their interests to their phone. If you're an automobile mile-per-gallon (MPG) calculating app, frequent some hypermiling or green-car (or even general automotive) blogs and forums, get active, and then tell the site admin that you've got an app for that and that you'll promise them a promo code if they can review it. Be prepared for all kinds of tricks back from them (especially if the site is popular). If you want to make a deal (payola review, promotion, etc.), go ahead and make it. You don't generally have to do much with the smaller niche sites, though. A promo code will probably do it. You can also PM one of the board moderators or senior members if they want to take a look at the app as well. Could be worth it.

2) This doesn't really work with games (though it could, I guess), but if it's not a game app, SEO your product website, per instructions on patio11's blog:
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/07/17/seo-for-software-compani...

3) When it comes out, Facebook wall, tweet, prweb announce, etc the launch. The usual stuff that $19.99 "e-marketing" ebooks tell you to do but you should know from reading HN every day anyway :) That stuff's easy.
So, who profited in 1999 when Lycos was sold for $5+B? Some quick Googling didn't result in any answers.
I agree that app store marketing is very tough, and even with a great marketing strategy it can fall flat on its face.

Generally the strategy is send out promo codes to blogs which can provide an uptick for a few days.

Besides that you should probably try and introduce social features to the app such as facebook/twitter.

Another option is the rising number of pay per install services. My own startup adsreloaded.com (/end shameless plug) is involved in this area, as well as other companies such as apperang, or Flurry's appCircle.
Can a Banker’s Algorithm Help Catch Would-Be Terrorists?
What do you wish someone would start a startup to build for you?
An RV is a mobile home, it has all the trappings of a home except for size, and for some of those RVs the size was bigger than my smallest apartment. It's just exchanging one set of stuff for a more mobile set of stuff, but not exactly minimalist.

Those couples that I've met that did the 'RV thing' after their pension typically saw it as a way to do all the traveling that they had missed out on while in their working years, a way to reward a lifetime of hard work.
Best Diet Plan To Keep Weight Off
"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

When I do a search, I really, really want Google to find me a page that answers the question I am searching for. I think they really need to get back to improving their search.
I heart this site - Badabingle (bing + google)
badabingle.com
Whoa, meta.

We should do a patent like this every day.
Happy 17th Birthday Debian (And some interesting history)
God 1, Best Buy Geeks 0
I gave an average over a much larger number of sites though, some do better, some do worse, it seems to average out to about $0.16 ECPM.
I expect to be downvoted as the signal that I would indicate is not exactly on the same wavelength as most -- and so you'll probably interpret it as noise.

However, I think Nicholas Carr's points are not completely without value. The problem is if you attach qualitative judgment to it (the changing mind is good / bad, etc.) -- because it's very difficult to judge those things without knowing the future. For instance, take this note from the post:

UPDATE. A reader reminded me that Socrates was worried about the impact of written arguments many centuries ago. People have been wailing about technology spoiling everything for a long time.

Arguably, this 'linear' way of thinking that he argues pre-Internet writing cultivated -- arguably, that has real limitations. If you've ever studied ancient Greek, you might've noticed how anti-linear the language is (because of variable word order, cases, tenses, particles, etc.). In many ways Greek was a much more powerful way of thinking. And in many ways it works better in an oral environment. There is perhaps a reason that the Iliad and the Odyssey were created as oral poetry. As with a lot of archaic lyric and choral poetry that later formed the basis for Greek drama. And similarly, Socratic argument is something like the antithesis of a 'linear' mind (or certainly it complicates it).

So one might argue that linearity was a major problem that prevented, in certain areas, more dynamic, Renaissance-like thought until other languages developed a sufficiently rich and malleable base. Elizabethan English is anything but linear. Shakespeare, the spark and/or a central figure of that, was not linear in the written sense. 'Would that he had blotted a thousand lines...' was the general consensus until people paid better attention to his antilinearity, arguably.

But I mention all of this because it's important to study how different languages and mediums affect how we think. It's unlikely that anyone will figure out the present way of thinking, definitively, during the present. But I admire Nicholas Carr for trying (if I don't admire his judgments).

Perhaps he gets it completely wrong. Perhaps the internet allows us to have a non-linear renaissance of discourse, etc. But being precisely wrong is often half the battle, at least among analytical understandings of how mediums work, etc.

Or take Hacker News. The fact that you can't edit something that you post after a certain amount of time in conjunction with comments being attached a numerical 'value' from up/downmodding -- could dramatically affect what types of things are discussed here. I can understand the rationale (what's said is said -- editing after the fact is potentially disingenuous). However, people in turn may be less willing to take argumentative risks because they fear being locked into a 'trial' of an idea. Maybe this is good (for signal/noise). Maybe this is bad (low discursive risks, low discursive rewards). And I'm sure there are many other factors. But arguably it's worth thinking about all the effects of any type of medium.
Being free in the copyright sense does not affect your patent status as far I understand (unless there is a specific patent grant in the license)
Ask HN: For-profit, non-profit, or some kinda hybrid?
Important Media (.org) is another entry in the "innovative models for breakeven+ creation of good online content" spaghetti-against-the-wall contest.

Currently, it's organized as an L3C -- the "low-profit limited liability company" is on the books in ~10 states, and is defined by putting 501c3-like social mission into an LLC charter ahead of profit. What this means is that it's basically organized as close as our legal system allows to a hybrid right now, and retains the optionality to take either path for as long as it's kept this way.

Background: A long time ago in a part of the bay area far far away, I started a niche blog network about environmental issues called Green Options Media. After a while, it was acquired by a social entrepreneurship incubator called Virgance, and then mostly spun back out to me earlier this year. I've nursed its 11 sites mostly back to health from disrepair, while implementing what I believe to be sustainable, scalable structures for organic growth.

Over the last few months of re-bootstrapping, I've confirmed my most important hypotheses, hit breakeven, and am ready to look at raising money to scale more quickly.

The million dollar question: is an altruistic content play (i.e. the bastard child of ProPublica and teh Cheezburger network) better served, both for short-term purposes of fundraising and for the long-term, by the for-profit or non-profit world?

I wouldn't ask here if I thought there was one clear right answer, but I've always been rabidly pro-entrepreneurship since I saw firsthand the ineffectiveness and utter lack of financial independence of environmental nonprofits in DC.

There are many, many angles to consider and I would love to take the conversation offsite to any other venue if it's more useful, but I couldn't think of a better place to get the conversation started than HN. I'm not much of a hacker myself, but I'm a firm believer in the wisdom of hacker culture. So, discuss?
There is also free Android and Iphone versions available in the market/App store.
Can you even patent the process of fighting someone for patent infringement?
This exact same thing happened to me while subscribing with www.1and1.fr for a 1 year free domain name + 100mb disk space.
At the end of the year, they started charging me, but I never noticed because the credit card I used when I subscribed was expired.

A few months later I got a letter from a bailiff (not sure of the translation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huissier_de_justice) saying that I owed like 100$ to 1and1, then I got another letter, and another, I never replied and the story stopped here.