skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I resent that remark, because I own a Mac and drive an SUV, and the SUV is exactly the kind of cheap-falling-apart-crap that the Mac is the total antithesis of. Maybe it's possible to make a well-designed SUV, but mine is just awful. Latest example: the gas cap doesn't screw on and off like an ordinary fucking gas cap, it's a turn-1/8-of-a-turn-and-pull-out gas cap, with a lock. So, with all those moving parts, it broke and I had to spend like $80 getting a shop to forcibly remove the thing and replace it with another gas cap (non-locking, so it's more reliable). This is when it got permanently jammed--when it was only temporarily jammed, the only way to put gas in the damned tank was to rear back and kick it in the gas cap, which allows you to unlock and remove the gas cap in the usual fashion. This little fix permanently bent my fuel door out of position.

And newer SUV's are even worse. You can't even see out of the back of a fucking 08 Explorer.
If I remember correctly, they've been serving ads occasionally since close to the beginning of the site. It was just a reasonably infrequent occurrence.
Good luck! :)

Unless you're taking a blood sample from every user, you are going to have spam that you can't catch.
Sure would be cool if you had c based tools (c, c++, objective-c etc) and a user interface toolkit to go with it for Android development.
This is a motivational article. And a good one with great specific tips on how to optimize your workload. But obviously wrong in that natural talent has little to no effect on skill. But of course you have to say that in a motivational "working hard gets results" gist type article.
Quantum Algorithms A Different View—Again
One letter on a plane ticket says a lot about you
IBM is the line. Their participation in the OSS community is very active and positive. See IBM's developerworks as examples as to how the largest organizations can participate in the open source community and not try to take direct control.

Now, IBM's motive is to most likely bundle services around those OSS implementations, so they profit from that.

On the other hand, we have Oracle who outright acquires OSS organizations just to wrap sales and maintenance around the products. They'll trickle in funding to barely nurture the products along, only to have the founders/leaders of those projects bail when they realize what is really happening.

That results in the mass resignations that we see with MySQL and countless other Sun OSS acquisitions.

And don't get me started on Java. :(
(ok with the pre-amble that I am VERY pro-OSS, and generally very bullish on the value for companies of every size to embrace an OSS strategy...)

I think a resource-constrained startup (pre-funded thru to series A) needs to be careful that every dollar spent is building direct value to the company that investors will want to invest in.

Creating good OSS does have an over-head (documentation, support, community collaboration, etc). Sure that can help you attract good developers to come work for you - but if you launch too many OSS project the overhead costs can become disproportionate to the funding of the company.

You also need to be careful that while you are building value early-on that you are not exposing yourself for your competitors (or your own employees) to fork what you are doing and build their own competitive service (it does happen but again, some of this comes down to license used).

I would not want to publish 'secret sauce' of a company (algorithms, development strategies, etc) before I got to a point where I could defend the business with network effect, traction, funding, etc.

There is no point of over-committing or over-exposing and then not having the resources to be around in 18 months time to keep the OSS project going.
There is certainly an argument to be made that "feminism" is not the best name for itself, but regardless, that is its name and it certainly is true that that is what feminism is. It is not about trying to get more rights for womyn while ignoring the areas of society where men are oppressed. That's total nonsense and completely ignoring the real problem. But that's not what feminism is. Feminism exists to challenge and ultimately destroy the mental programming we've been subjected to that causes us to assign specific roles and rights to people based on what we perceive their gender to be in the first place. This idea of gender is something that oppresses all of us, male, female or whatever, and feminism is a movement to destroy it. Seriously, that really is what it's about, regardless of the impressions you might get from the name.
How would blood samples even help? We're talking about excluding content, not people.

It's a certainty that the spam you can't define is the spam you can't catch. The "I know it when I see it" test doesn't scale.
It depends - are you sure this isn't a winner-take-all market and do you have something that gives you some unique advantage over them?

Perhaps you have unique insights into the market which they don't understand? (Eg, Foursquare vs Google Latitude)

Perhaps you have a launch strategy that gives you something better users (Eg, Facebook vs MySpace)

Perhaps you can do a better job (eg, Dropbox vs every other previous backup service, Google vs every previous search engine)

They have money, first mover advantage and the advantage of YC contacts. Are you advantages enough to win?
Five Technological Advancements to Boost Your Mental Health
why isn't this feature in google voice instead?
Apple can't do well for that segment of the market until those people start to take Apple seriously. Right now, the prevailing opinion among Apple detractors seems to be that all the little touches are "fluff" and polish that don't add up to any monetary value at all.

Evidence of this abounds: my favorite example is the multitouch touchpad that Apple uses. If somebody is saying something good about a pointing device on a non-Apple laptop, odds are good that they've never spent time with Apple's touchpad. It's that much better, but if you haven't used it and you don't trust Apple or anybody who uses Apple products, you'll probably never assign it more than about $5 of value, when experienced users would easily value it at ten times that. (That's why it isn't insane for apple to release a standalone touchpad for $70).

Fortunately for Apple, far more people have been willing to try the iPhone than have been willing to try their computers, and many of them have discovered that "not sucking" is worth more than a few hundred megahertz. The "halo effect" is real, and is not due entirely to people "buying in" to an Apple lifestyle.

The people who have strong technical or financial barriers to using Apple computers are far outnumbered by the proud Apple haters who haven't actually used a Mac long enough to appreciate the little things. However, unless somebody else starts releasing well designed computer hardware and software, Apple will eventually win over most of the haters through sheer ubiquity. (I expect that at some point, there will be a tipping point where hating Apple becomes uncool. If we pass that tipping point before Apple has serious competition, Apple will probably achieve a near-monopoly.)
Directory Catalogue - Premium Web Directory of Directories | Directory Daily
That's the only way you're going to be able to ensure that everyone interacting with your site is a human. (It's preferable if you take a blood sample on every interaction, just in case.)
Civil rights is not "black rights", you're right, and feminism is a questionable name for itself.

But that generalisation about -isms is intellectually vacuous nonsense.
How To Know Which Websites You Can Trust?
I've always been curious: does anyone else dart their eyes back and forth to determine if a light is blinking or not?I feel like it might be my superpower. I can spot 60hz no problem.

When I first saw the MacBook indicator, it was a lot of fun to finally see my talent put to use in an additional dimension. I remember seeing the modulation and thinking: oh cool, the entire duty cycle remains constant as they increase the on while decreasing the off.
I'm not going to name the company, but another extreme example comes to mind was of an early stage company in a specific vertical who completely funded a relatively high-profile (read: well hyped) open source project that was orthogonal but not completely related to the core competencies and interests of the parent company.

I would have been strongly against this if I was an advisor or investor in the company.

Suffice to say, things ended badly when the company ran out of money and now both their project and the open source project are dead in the water, + lots of hurt feelings all around.
It's common knowledge that the founders of the United States favored the separation of church and state because they didn't want government interfering with freedom of religion by telling people what to think.

At that time, there were no government-run schools in America. If someone had suggested that government should be involved in running schools, maintain massive "Education Departments", etc., I'm sure Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest would have had the same reaction that they had to the idea of government-run churches.

If it is dangerous to a free society for government to be involved in telling people what to think via religion (and it is), how much more dangerous is it for government to be involved in telling many of the youngest and most impressionable members of society what to think?

We should demand the separation of school and state and end government control over education in the United States. Schooling is not the only means to getting an education (Mark Twain famously said "Never let your schooling interfere with your education"), but if universal schooling is deemed desirable, you could simply take the amount of money spent by government to run schools and maintain bureaucracies, divide it by the number of students, and issue each student a voucher to spend at the non-government, voluntarily funded community school of their choice.

To support freeing children from the dangers of government indoctrination and control, visit and join the Alliance for the Separation of School and State -- http://www.schoolandstate.org/home.htm. As authoritarians are so fond of saying, "Do it for the children!"

-Starchild, candidate for School Board, San Francisco
Working from home is both awesome and horrible
After submitsting this to reddit, I thought, you guys might use a laugh :)
iTunes needs some of this attention
Thanks, I guess I should say the same to you! :)
Ask HN: Review a startup - Grafighters
Hey guys we are looking for a helping hand from the HN community.

We are building a game that aims to bring your drawings to life exactly the way you envisioned them. graFighters is an online fighting game for your hand drawn characters. By taking a picture of your drawing with you phone and going through a quick process we can bring your character to life to battle other drawings on the site. The interesting part is that you don't control the character, they take on a life/attitude/stats/abilities all on their own based on our systems analysis of how it was drawn. We are calling this algorithm "Cornelius".

I'm reaching out to you guys for feedback on the concept and the potential to spread the Kickstarter link to people who might be interested. This algorithm has been underway for a year and it is not cheap, so we are looking to raise 20,000. Thanks!

graFighters on Kickstarter - http://kck.st/cnTzcP

Main Site- http://www.graFighters.com

Footage from the Demo - http://bit.ly/9J1wdc

More videos - http://vimeo.com/user1881676/videos

Feedback, criticism, verbal abuse, and donations will all be highly valued.
If that's how you see it, then yes, I guess I do. (obvious troll is obvious?)

The thing I've learned is that people often value things differently to how I do, and for reasons I don't often understand.

Personally, I find Windows to be a hugely annoying OS to use, and very limiting, but I understand that for almost everybody else it suits their needs fine and they like it. I'm a big fan of Linux, but I realise that may not suit everyone.

Same with music; you wouldn't believe what I listen to, and I don't imagine for a second you'd like it (hint: if an album doesn't have at least a few tracks that go for over 10 minutes, I'm not interested), and the reverse is possibly true as well.

What am I getting at here? Thankfully, we're not all clones of each other, and often personal tastes are very different. Expecting some stranger to justify their choices to you kind of indicates you haven't figured this yet.
Tim Tebow, All American Super Hero?
Competition is indeed overrated. Everyone wants to be first/fastest/biggest, but quicker/cheaper/smarter competitors always pop up regardless of the industry you're in.
Ask HN: Is the current duplicate story handling hindering discussion? 
I sometimes find blog posts, stories etc that I find interesting and go to submit them only to see they were submitted earlier and never got any traction. And sometimes, those earlier submissions were done at times when most of the HN audience wasn't around. Basically, a potentially interesting topic that could have generated interesting comments and discussion is forever buried because it was submitted at a low activity time and never got any traction.

My thought, would it not make sense when someone submits a duplicate that is far enough away from the original, but still within a reasonable time frame like more than 8 hours since the previous but less than 2 days since the original, to just put it back in the new list and see if it picks up traction at this different time of day, day of week etc. Then good stories originally submitted on weekends, middle of the night where most HN readers are, etc aren't buried just based on the happenstance of when they are submitted.

Just a thought. Would love to hear your ideas.
Interesting points, and some food for thought. Thanks for that.

I'm not sure it's a "winner take all" market - there's no real "social"/"viral" aspect, just the usual "word-of-mouth" that people aim for.

We have no money (don't need it), no YC contacts and it seems we'll be entering later - so we better have some other (big!) advantages ready.
Steal This Product - Highr.ly
Why working from home is awesome and horrible (comic)
Genetic Future: How much data is a human genome? It depends how you store it.
One word: mogoDB, rethinkDB

(Yeah, that's two words. Off by one errors suck)
Wow. Really incredible work. Mind posting a packer-free version so we can look at the source?
If a robot makes a meaningful contribution to your website / service, do you really care if they are a robot?

If you could tell which comments are insightful / relevant / interesting / unique it wouldn't matter which ones were produced by humans and which ones by algorithms.

Likewise humans can often create spam by hand - daft comments / contributions that hurt your site but come from legitimate humans.
There are two kinds of companies for whom OSS makes sense. The first category of OSS company is the data driven companies. Twitter, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook all fall into this category. Data driven companies derive their primary business value from the quality and quantity of their underlying data. They give away their software because it is free PR, endears developers to their platforms and it is a big morale booster for their engineers. Google will never give away its search index. Facebook and Twitter will never give away dumps of their graphs. Those things are the crown jewels, not the software that supports them.

The other kind of company that benefits from open source is companies like Red Hat, Basho and Opscode. Their open source offerings are loss leaders intended to stimulate enterprise sales. Mission critical systems get built on the open source software, and then managers can elect to buy enterprise features and support from the vendors.
i know simplenote a recent graduate spoke how they used it to scale.
It's not pie-in-the-sky.

Anyone should be able to make between $4 & $5 per 1000 visitors from just running AdSense.

Use that as a baseline and do the math from there. If you can add-on non-advertising forms of revenue then that is a bonus.
Testing the concept: how we decide on the next killer app
"Particularly Ruby programmers."

Ruby programmers talk good game. But actual production Ruby code can be pretty messy.
I believe the author is confused about what a "sunk cost" means.
Not exactly anything new, but submitting because I'd never heard of Unbounce before and it looks awesome for doing idea testing and lead generation.

Edit: Ouch. Just saw their prices. Steep.
One paragraph per page combined with ads?
Ask HN: How clean is your startup code?
So we all know it's important to go public as fast as possible. I was wondering.. how clean is your code?

Do you have 10 php files with 5000 lines each? Or some ruby codes with lots of tests? Do you comments a lot? How is your inter documentation? What if someone joins your startup.. how easy will it be for him/her to catch up and understand the code?
How can you work if you're drunk?
Why are the zoom/minimize/close-or-sometimes-quit button so small and difficult-to-acquire targets? I'm not complaining, mind you, I'm just wondering what the rational is for that.

Also, why does the dock not stretch across the bottom? Apple certainly knows about Fitt's law - what's the reason for ignoring it?
Ze Frank's listings got a lot of traction on HN a few weeks ago: http://www.zefrank.com/jobz/
Thanks for the pointer to Zim, it looks quite interesting. Could actually make for a pretty good journal tool. Very clean data format.

Now if I could only use Vim bindings in there :)

Emacs gets support via GTK ... sigh, I guess I'll have to learn emacs after all.
Ask HN: anyone doing an interesting fantasy football startup?
I'd be willing to pay for a fantasy football service with an emphasis on analytics, especially if it has an API. I know about myfantasyleague.com and their API, and it's a start, but it appears to be focused mainly on managing leagues hosted on their service (drops, adds, standings, etc.). I don't need real-time feeds; I'm mainly interested in using historical player data to create a draft strategy, and to make my own weekly player projections.

Basically, what I'd like is a service that gives me an API to access the player data that ESPN, Yahoo, CBS, etc. use to make their predictions, so that I can make my own.

Is STATS the only source for this kind of information?
Very impressive story. Would love to hear others' stories on why / how they became entrepreneurs.
My guess is it doesn't really matter either way. Software projects are so complex that just understanding them is a full time job. The code will be an incomprehensible blob to anyone who hasn't put many hours into understanding it. People may be enthusiastic at first and screw around with your project for a couple of weeks, but eventually they will stop caring. So the maintainer ends up doing the vast majority of the work, regardless of whether a project is open or not.

I have no data to back up that claim, it's just my gut feeling.
Has Reddit gotten substantial code contributions as a result of open-sourcing its stuff?
The delay is called "hysteresis". Gtk implements this through "gtk-menu-popdown-delay", and seems to be making sure the mouse is moving in a triangle region towards the submenu. (See gtk/gtkmenu.c, esp gtk_menu_set_submenu_navigation_region.)
This is not a new trend. The Times even offers a set of APIs:

http://developer.nytimes.com/docs
The assumption with any kind of collaborative filtering is that the opinions of many people produce a better result when combined than the opinions of one person. If you are allowing machines to vote then you're letting one person have an arbitrary number of votes, which totally breaks the model.
The thing is: the sleep indicator doesn't go all the way off when pulsing. It goes to very low, and back up, but never off until you wake the machine.
Why Working at Home is Awesome and Horrible
I think the more important issue Judge Kozinski brings up in his dissent is the increasing approval of the use of super-human observational powers by the police. The rule used to be that what the police can readily see--literally, see, with their eyes--had no expectation of privacy. Now it's whatever information the police can gather using increasingly unlimited technological means, like GPS trackers, only vaguely related to that standard.

Actual dissent: http://www.leagle.com/unsecure/page.htm?shortname=infco20100...
Hi Ryan, I think that the rule of thumb used in the spreadsheet overstates the average customer tenure (as calculated by the alternate formula I outlined in another comment): https://docs.google.com/drawings/edit?id=1-9z5wczSfbM3KLZavF...

In case you find this worthwhile, I uploaded a spreadsheet showing my calculations which you can see here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ag-jmDLo09WNdHBNY1d...
The problem is there's no better alternative.
Ask HN: Anyone want a free copy of a $25 marine boating iPhone/iPad app?
We launched a new app, and I'd like to distribute a few codes to get the hacker perspective - hopefully people who know boats and know software development, or even iPhone or Android development specifically.

We have a lot of feedback from straight-up boaters, but I like to get some hacker feedback, since it tends to be grounded in "what's possible."

If you want a promo code to download the app, email me at andrew@gaiagps.com. FYI, the launch has already been very successful, and we don't have many codes left... so while supplies last.
The document does in fact talk about rendition policies.

For some reason you appear to have not seen the document that you claim doesn't say what it does say.
I agree with your ideas and observations in your second paragraph. Indeed, there seems to be a block of time each day when links are more likely to go big on HN - these then ride out the small hours while otherwise good content floats on by in /new.
Normally I would agree with you, but having owned both I disagree. I think the latest generation of Macbook Pro's are just heads and tails above the older generations.
How to Boost Your Willpower[2007]
I quoted directly from the document. You should go ahead and read it.
Seems perfect for a web app. Your viewing a page about frued, google/amazon puts some links up for psychology books. Heck you modify the wiki article such that if the person has books written or authored about them or the subject you could Amazon link it easy. Seems more profitable..
For a second I got them confused with TwentyThreeSix and was momentarily excited.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Z-Jqe5yG4
Your last sentence is very loaded.

1. This case wasn't a ruling, nor is it a lack of ruling. It was an instance of a court refusing to re-litigate existing law. That means that it already ruled and does not feel that the law should be changed. Nothing happened here. No new powers can be created by not ruling. By definition nothing happens when refusing to hear a case.

2. Second reason no new powers were created: The 4th Amendment to the US Constitution protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. The 9th Circuit has interpreted GPS to not be an unreasonable search and seizure. Therefore the restriction on government never existed because the Constitution does not protect people against reasonable searches. The police power to install GPS devices on cars was not abolished when the 4th Amendment went into effect 220 years ago. No new powers because the power existed 220 years ago.
Thanks for pointing out the comments. I was about to dismiss the article as well but there are some great contrarian comments as you pointed out. My favorites:

-Innate talent > Practice. Painful to admit, but better if you can own up to your weaknesses early on and focus things you are better at.

-Extensive practice only applies to single tasks, not complex activities such as business which requires being good at multiple disciplines plus coordinating and understanding the interaction between those disciplines