skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Try selling your product at a fair price when you have 4 competitors who’ve each raised $10 million in VC and who expect it will be easy to raise the next $10 million. Over funding drives poor market behavior and makes it difficult for strong players to earn proper returns."

Every entrepreneur that bootstraps their company has to deal with this. Sure it would be 'fair' if everyone had to make their own way but then it wouldn't feel like success to beat the competitors that did get funding when you decided to take none. Just because you're competition chooses to get VC funding doesn't mean they know what to do with it. I'd love to see a reduction in the attitude from a previous HN post where a VC was quote about "dipshit" exits at $25 million.
Which LOLCODE interpreter to use? - Stack Overflow
A Comprehensive, Intro to SEO Powerpoint Slide Deck
Consumers will spend $6.2 billion this year on mobile apps
link to techcrunch article [http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/06/skype-recruits-yahoo-engine...] techcrunch
forgot to mention that I work an 8-5 job so it may take me a day or two to write up a post...but i'll do my best

-Dave
You can't just go to a bar or pub or club on your own and talk to a stranger. Well you can, but thats the exception not the norm.
Cold water sometimes cleans effectively enough.

Certainly for any given water temperature you can line-dry to save even more energy. However, it's important to know that lowering the water temperature by a few degrees does more to reduce your energy usage than line-drying.
What you say is true, but over the same period the distribution of wealth within the USA has shifted dramatically. Therefore the median family income has not kept up with per capita GDP.

The figures I have from http://www.davemanuel.com/median-household-income.php go from 1975 to the present. $3000 in 1975 was 25.4% of a year's income for the median family. $4000 in 2009 was 82.5% of a year's income for the median family. My understanding is that tax rates on the median family have increased, making that picture even worse.

Therefore education is much less affordable than it used to be for the median family.
if you don't have a free plan, you will never get my business.

That made me chuckle. Unless you pay for a product, you are _not_ giving him any business.

Don't get me wrong; I can totally see where you are coming from. I'm pretty much in the same situation. However, you and I are clearly not Mark's target customers, so it's a bit unhelpful to ask him for a freebie. How does it help him?

To make money, one needs to sell to people who can pay. There are plenty of businesses out there, who will pay money to solve their problems. Broke startups selling free apps to other broke startups is not a business model.
Would be nice to see a list of sources. When I first tuned in, I didn't recognize any of them, then the MSM started to come in.
So what does this mean? How does this change the motivation for working (for food etc). Can it be reversed? How does it interact with other dopamine processing and dopamine producing actvities (e.g. drugs, sex etc)?
If I recall correctly this was one of the goals of Guile, which is essentially Scheme, arguably cleaner than common lisp.
It's too hard to see what this means from the information in the article. What was the protein and carb content? Was it a low-protein diet or low-carb (I'm guessing low-protein given other study results)? How many rats? Were they obese to begin with? etc. etc.
Yeah, I understand. I think at this point we're considering the list (~10k sources) a business asset.
There is a BIG problem with Twifficiency
Their country's TLD?

I assume you are American, but when did exactly .com became the USA's TLD?
.us is your country's TLD
Did you read the article? He makes a good argument why CSS icons are a Bad Idea. In short, paraphrased:

CSS is about facilitating graphical display, it's not about creating the graphics themselves.

I think that's a good point. I'm quite shocked to see someone's pushing CSS Icons as an actual solution to a problem - what next, CSS video? It's possible (an absolutely positioned div for each frame, and then just cycle the z indices to animate (perhaps even sans-js using :hover!)), and would be a lovely thing to hack around with, but as a serious "let's deploy this"? Whoa there.

That's taking CSS too far.
Most people don't, but try it anyways. You'll probably be pleasantly surprised.

Most people don't go to chat rooms online either. You shouldn't judge what is possible by paying attention to what most people do.
Maybe Asus does have something in the pipe, but you don't know about it because they actually keep their secrets and not leak them on purpose.
Perhaps telling that his bio is almost as long as all the content he ever posted to his blog:

http://madhuyarlagadda.blogspot.com/
My margins are always really tight. I rarely part with money willingly.

When crossbrowsertesting.com announced their launch a while back, I used their free service just enough to become convinced that supporting them was worth the monthly charge; I've been a paid user ever since, even though I only use it occasionally.

So, I think that if you offer a compelling service, something that provides more value to your customers than it costs them, then a free plan should pretty much only be considered a "demo" of your service. If you've got a good product, then even misers like me will pay for it.

edit: Oh, and also: for a service I'm working on right now, I've decided to use "early adopter" pricing. It works like this: pricing starts at $X / month; for every new subscriber, all previous subscribers receive a $.01/month discount. If or when the monthly prices ever drop, it will drop by the same amount for all subscribers. So, the sooner someone signs up, the sooner they'll get the service for $5/month -- or even free. I don't know if it'll work, but there it is.
I'm a woman and I'm pretty sure I was like this when I was in kindergarten, as were most of my friends. I would be kind of concerned to meet a 6 year old girl who never acted this way.
The entire book is available on their website: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

Wanted a deadtree version to read at my leisure, but at $70 I think I'll read the HTML version.

EDIT: found a PDF version: http://www.scribd.com/doc/15556326/Structure-and-Interpretat...
Ask HN: Utilities for creating custom web buttons?
I'm looking for a utility to create some web UI buttons, similar to DaButtonFactory.com -- but with the ability to incorporate multi-line text.

Can anyone recommend a worthwhile button generator? Or, alternatively, a Gimp-compatible template?

Thanks in advance!
You're right about the lack of name checking.

I think it's due to people being unable to accurately spell foreign names when taking orders over the phone.

Tricky problem. In fact if you solve it nicely, there's probably a good argument to shift your startup's focus to doing that.
I think it depends on what monitor you're looking at it on :) I think it should probably go too.
Unfortunately, the same mentality applies to universities, too. They love to build new buildings instead of hiring the best faculty.
Great guide! Indeed very comprehensive.

However I don't think it's for beginners and people just starting with SEO. Too much information is sometimes overwhelming :)
I've never squatted on a domain.

Is the idea here that each year every domain would be subject to auction to the highest bidder? If so, that hardly seems fair that after having spent thousands of hours promoting a domain and invested in it that a spammer can come along and outbid me for my own domain.

If the idea is that this should only happen when you first buy, it's similarly absurd. When you buy a domain there is only one person that wants it - you. Otherwise the domain is "not available".

Also, no one made the domain. Why am I paying some third party for a domain anyway? It's not like their labor manufactured the domain.
Interesting, but fairly useless article. I have no idea what this means. Maybe this is a good thing? Fat is satiating and helps you feel full.

Also, a high-fat diet by implication means you've removed either protein or carbohydrate, if you're holding calories constant. A low carb diet, if low enough, puts your body in ketosis, and your brain switches from using glycogen for energy to ketones. For all we know the title could have been "A Low-Carb Diet Alters Crucial Aspects of Brain Dopamine Signaling."
Here's a nice presentation from him that has diagrams of how the basic logic circuits are built up using this approach:

http://cba.mit.edu/presentations/03.09.Vigoda.ppt
Anecdote time. For two summers while in high school, I joined the Youth Conservation Corps, basically living away from home the whole time working in the fields and national parks. I was like 14 and 15. Great times. Got paid working while in camp for two summers. Yeah my parents worried but they let me go anyway.

Young people can do a lot of things if you let them.
Super angel Keith Rabois explains his startup portfolio
1985...when it was administered by U.S. DoD
> I think he's suggesting that social norms generally permit neighbors access to each other's lawns, and that violating these norms is associated with cranky old men.

Actually, they don't. The social norms allow access when you're interacting with the relevant residents.

It's like toys - you get to play with Pat's toys while playing with Pat. Otherwise you ask, and even that can be creepy.
Ugh, this is exactly why Google is and will continue to fail at social. Our social groupings are intrinsically not algorithmically based. They contain a much richer depth of nuance and ambiguity.

It reminds me of when Facebook released the "people you should friend feature". Roughly 80% of that list were people I was carefully avoiding friending. Sure enough, a few weeks after the feature had launched, I started receiving a ton of unwanted friend requests since I had started to pop up in their "people you should friend" box.
I think that people who play with unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and image analysis just found themselves a business model.
wouldn't starting just 6 months ago be a bit late in any case?
Just Curious - Why Are Only Some Stories Nofollowed?
I love reading hackernews, but just noticed a Curious quirk. The story links appear to have random nofollow tags assigned to them. In this screenshot, 4 out of 30 homepage links are nofollowed. http://www.img7.com/images/hakckernew.jpg

I'm just wondering if this random or editorially controlled.
It's in the works :) no strict date yet, but suffice it to say that it is our top priority after our upcoming goodies on Friday.
7 Lies That Will Keep You From Starting Your Own Business
If Oracle is seriously planning to "spend more on Solaris than Sun did", they have a lot of hiring to do... just to get back up to parity.

At least in Austin it's rumored that Oracle has a net influx of chip designers.
Couldn't agree more. I'm 23. When my father entered the workforce there was a clear expectation of lifetime employment and a very nice set of increasingly better benefits and career opportunities with time. I worked in the same company a few years ago and the outlook is completely different.

Because of this outlook I decided that I'd be better off working as a consultant and travelling. Really, I see little benefit to working in a corporation when we have today's lack of job security.

And with the exorbitant cost of real estate, which is several times what my parents had to deal with during their time, I see no reason to stay in one place when it'd be actually easier to move around.

The cost-benefit relation to having a commitment to a company and place is not the same as it was before. At least that's the way I see it.
Unless this prairie happens to be on the set of a Jackie Chan movie, the gangsters already have guns. They don't need to rob your house to get them.

Following your analogy, your employer will certainly have other patents and other ways of getting them than through you. It's a systemic problem that has to be treated at a higher level.
This has been said before but it's worth repeating, Oracle is not an engineering company. They are giant sales organization with an engineering department tacked on.

They probably considered Sun's workforce before the acquisition as a liability instead of as an asset. The assets were in Sun's products, patents and customers. In that calculus, the people who quit willingly just represent severance checks Oracle doesn't have to write.
Yeh but you would feel weird. Why not just have a place where it is conventionally acceptable to talk to other strangers.

Anyway, what has everyone else always wondered?
The biggest thing reading 'Good Calories, Bad Calories' did for me, was make me question every single scientific study in much greater detail. It's shocking how much niche* scientific research makes it's way into the 'news', 'common knowledge' or even public policy.

I don't mean this as a knock against this specific study -- however, we don't have enough information to conclude anything about it.

* = where 'niche' implies a strict and specific set of conditions or even assumptions, reducing 'general applicability'
There's even a Y Combinator RFS for it: http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html
GM files for IPO
That was very funny. I am scared to try and find out what a blue waffle is :P
NJ

as far as food: 4 supreme beef chalupas, 2 chicken quesadillas, 2 drinks = ~20
I'm curious if other shops are deploying Membase, as it being the backend behind Farmville attaches more negative connotation than positive for me.

My girlfriend has a ludicrous Farmville addiction, and I don't think she's gone more than a few hours at a time without it messing up and loosing whatever she'd just spent the past twenty minutes doing. If that happened to me more than once, I'm pretty sure I'd stop playing that game.
Something more substantial than simply displaying automatically-generated sponsored links.
The curious part of me was hoping for a reason.
If you want to minimize HTTP requests, or store everything in one document, couldn't you embed a GIF or PNG in the HTML using MIME? I just checked, and a PNG of the "profile" icon is about half the size of the CSS. (261 bytes vs. 560).
I'm no lawyer, so I'll take your word on the legal aspects. But from an ethical perspective, I think the temperature of the coffee is important. They intentionally sold a dangerous product. The woman's only faults were being kind of clumsy and assuming that the "hot" coffee was ouch-hot, not ER-hot. 140 degree coffee is ouch-hot, and serving coffee so hot it would injure you if you tried to drink it right away is absurd.

Juries are just people, and people blame victims of things all the time.
Spook Developer Speaks An interview with Matthew Burton.
Sun had a ton of chip designers, I'm skeptical quantity was the problem with respect to their SPARC development.
we seem intent on removing opportunities for personal virtue

Really? I do not see any evidence for this intent anywhere. Certainly, the point of SSDI is not exclusively the removal of an opportunity for personal virtue. There is also the fact that everyone here is one car accident and brain injury away from being incapable of working or caring for themselves. And while some people will purchase disability insurance, some will not and those people will become a drain on the public purse. Better, both in moral terms and in economic efficiency to make everyone pay for a baseline insurance package.

More to the point, there is nothing stopping you from volunteering to help the disabled or anyone else. SSDI provides a minimal standard of living, but we all prefer to live on more than the absolute minimum. There is more to life than a small monthly check can possibly provide, so there is ample opportunity for you to express your virtue by helping disabled people.

This applies in the negative sense as well. Because the law compels me to morality (e.g., in the kinds of things I say in public, refraining from hate speech), I don't have the opportunity to be virtuous of my own free will.

I think you're conflating morality and law. The law compels your behavior. It cannot make you moral. There is no law against being a bigot or even saying bigoted things per se.

Since I must behave this way due to the law, rather than my innate goodness, can I still consider myself virtuous?

As I understand it, hate speech is only a crime in the US when it occurs in conjunction with a systemic campaign of discrimination or a violent crime. I'd say that if the only thing keeping you from launching into long diatribes about how various racial groups are genetically inferior (while either discriminating against them or assaulting/murdering one of their members) is the possibility of legal sanction, then you are not actually a virtuous person. And this lack of virtue really cannot be blamed on society. Or the law.
Free plans work if they are inadequate for customers who can afford to pay, but adequate for a taste. Less Accounting does a great job of this. The only reason not to offer such a plan would be the resources it requires to support free customers, and perhaps that it has a negative price anchoring effect.
Do rats eat fat in nature? I don't know anything about animal nutrition, but is this like feeding protein to say, rabbits, which are herbivores?
The article makes excellent points all around. The #1 goal of any business is to gain positive cash flow (revenues greater than expenses). Anything else sinks your business. It's high time start-ups learned that lesson.

Sure, starting out you need to gain traction. You do that by:
1) having a superior product
2) gaining a superior rep

The only way to have a superior product is to identify your target market. Nothing in life is "free". If you want to offer a service to your clients that cost them nothing out of pocket you better be pulling in revenue in other ways (advertising or info selling). Since many are averse (privacy issues and ad-block) to those other options you must charge your user base.

Your product doesn't have to be the one with the most features, just the one whose features are the best executed.

Your product has to meet the client's needs. If you don't know who your target client is (Everybody is not an appropriate answer) then you need to refine your pitch. Part of client needs eventually comes down to support and interaction. If you spend all your resources (time, server, bandwidth, development opportunities) supporting a vast number of free clients at the expense of revenue generating clients you will quickly gain no to poor reputation.

Note: I tried to figure out what Evernote is doing. Their free service does meet the vast majority of user's needs (including mine). The amazing thing is that their service is so simple and straight forward that perhaps they don't need to spend so many resources on support and with the API (Trunk) and partnerships their development/expansion costs are now being taken on by so many other parties. I'm sure they bled cash brutally at the beginning but their product was so novel and amazing that VC money came to the rescue. Fact is that there are few start-ups in such a position. There are also few products out there so novel that users talk about not "needing to" but "wanting to" contribute to their success. Twitter? Ha! But Evernote is different. People want to pay them for their service even if they don't need to upgrade. They just love it so much. That is a truly rare and beautiful thing.
Well, the sooner you have your solution ready, the sooner you will understand that you were solving the wrong problem.

By the way some of the new elements in HTML5 (and there are not three but almost thirty new elements) are in fact supposed to save web developers from the need to invent theri own way to express some common semantics in HTML, e.g. section, artcile, nav, header, footer.
There are alos a buch on new API, much richer inputs collection for forms, etc.
That's stupid simply because the Internet removes barriers and many companies operate on a global scale.
They're all links that have collected fewer than 10 votes. (I don't know what the exact threshold is.)
I'd go even further and say that a 'crash' in the higher education market would actually be good for the economy. Unlike lower home prices, lower tuition rates would have no significant direct impact on existing college graduates, and would permit more people to seek admission, increasing competition and therefore increasing the caliber of students enrolling. Bright people whose talents would be otherwise wasted working at Walmart will instead be able to contribute at a higher level to the economy.
It bothers the hell out of me that many web devs have decides that all HTML and CSS should be hand-editable and comprehensible at a glance.

Obviously, it's vital that both those features be possible.

But it's not obvious to me that those features be required in all markup; on the contrary, it seems far more useful for there to be a standard, predictable strata of functionality that developers can target with compilers.

From that perspective, the ability to do pure-CSS buttons and icons is a win. It's hard for a web developer hand crafting markup to apply CSS buttons, but it's trivial for a developer using something like Sass to get a button as a oneliner.

I'd sacrifice 10,000 extra lines of line noise markup in every design if it meant I never had to open Photoshop.
cool I'll give it a try.
CSS buttons mean that web apps can create UI elements without (a) relying on ugly, unreliable browser builtin sprites, and (b) having to handcraft graphics for every label the application needs. It's not a small win; it reduces many feature requests from 30 minutes down to 2.
Yeah, that's a big issue. You can actually specify a subfolder when you create the request. It's the last field on the page. We probably need to make that more obvious.

Thanks!
Open PDFs at specific entry points in the browser
BeautifulSoup vs. lxml benchmark
Reminds me of the Science News Cycle:
http://www.g2weather.com/.a/6a010535bea9f5970b0133f1e3258297... (image)
Per capita GDP is a transparently stupid way of evaluating median income. You should use something like... median income.
Dopamine systems are related to motivation, compulsions, and addictions.

It's unclear whether the changes detected by this study would be correlated with more or less addictive behavior, task-persistence, long-range goal-seeking, executive function, etc.

But, it suggests ideas for further research about diet and behavior.
So, how long till spammers remove the + and following characters or strip all the . out of a gmail address?
Useful.
The cloud has just gotten a tiny bit more convenient.
I was a skeptic. Now I use Google Docs almost daily. In my opinion there is no more doubt that Google is right and that in 10 years there will be no more applications that we install on our hard-drives or apps that we install on our phones. The OS will be a browser.
Predicting how nanoparticles will react in the human body
I love grooveshark, I am a VIP and spend clean over 60 hours listening to it every week. However its not good at finding new music.

Its awesome at having/playing/sharing but no good at recommending. Especially small "local" bands, and off genre artists.
Negative mood enhances creative problem-solving
Good point on 2) total market dominance !

I wonder if Twitter would have had a chance at all if they required payment for participating (even as little as $5 a year would probably be too much for it to take off) ?
Ask hN: Most difficult positions to fill?
Which is the most difficult positions for an IT company to fill?
I won't get into the CL vs. Scheme pissing contests, but if I remember correctly Guile was basically RMS' answer to Tcl, a language he didn't particularly like. And it was more intended to replace Emacs Lisp, while most of the infrastructure would still be written in C. Running on Hurd, of course.
Only the abstract is available for free, but the conclusion is interesting.

Two of the best hackers I've worked with were in a negative mood a lot of the time. Hmmm. Maybe I shouldn't be so cheerful.