skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My candidate for a valuable idea with no real need of exceptional execution:

The Million Dollar Homepage

"Many other sites sell advertising by pixels. Tew said of the sites, "[they] popped up almost immediately; now there are hundreds of Web sites selling pixels. The copycats are all competing with each other."
"They have very little ads, therefore I guess it’s not going too well for them. The idea only works once and relies on novelty. Any copy-cat sites will only have pure comedy value, whereas mine possibly has a bit of comedy plus. So I say good luck to the imitators.""

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
That was going to my answer, too, so I'll elaborate a bit.

It depends on the format of the database and the contents as well. If all you store is a single 4.9MB image, then there's not much overhead. If you store thousands of short text records, then each one can only have a little data, and will have a lot of overhead.
Props to her for being a female entrepreneur AND bootstrapping in SV.

However, one advantage she had over most people was she had already been a CEO of a VC backed company and learned a lot from that. I'm pretty sure what she learned in that experience proved invaluable in her second company.
If you search the page for "You mentioned you used Erlang in GitHub." and click the link, it'll fast-forward the video right to where they they talk about what's mentioned in the title.
Anyone who wants to read stuff more interesting than water permits being issued in Montana or business fluff like "Developing a Transparent Business Case that builds true Accountability" :-)
5mb compressed minus database overhead?
14 Years Old Kuwaiti Achieves 800,000 Downloads for His iPhone App
I've heard this from so many people and so many reputable sources that I feel as if I'm the only person that has never experienced this phenomenon. In fact, when I've been in an instance where I've feared for my life (and there have been several) it seems to me that time speeds up and things happen so quickly I only have time to react and not to think. I only seem to recognize something happened after the fact.
Looking at that I had horror-flashbacks to thinnet.

Shudders
Ah, but if pirated photoshop weren't an option, more people would be in the user pool, and thus more potential resources for people to get those last things they need.

(Well, ignoring exceptions like Pantone.)
You'd be rather disappointed, I think. I'm not secretly Michael Arrington. And any aspiring journalist should feel free to come question me - the details of how long it takes me to walk to work or how my back-ache is doing would make for an interesting story for me, but I'm not sure many will care otherwise.

It's all rather undramatic, I'm afraid.
If you use software to severely stretch a bubblegum pop sound from a teen heartthrob, you get atmospheric music which is by turns haunting and vaguely spiritual. Some of it puts me in the mood of Gregorian chants or my mental image of the music they describe in sci-fi books to demonstrate that the Buddhists-in-space aliens are better than humans.
This guy is a douche for doing this 7 years later, but at the same time I hope Zuckerberg gets what he deserves. Karma's a bitch!
Kuwait is on the richest countries in the world in terms of GDP, so not everyone is spoiled do not u think so?
The first few minutes sounds like a collaboration between Brian Eno and Deerhunter. Very ambient and atmospheric.
In the kitchen, I'd say it's medium-rare.
How is that possible? I'm reading the Bing terms of service (http://www.bing.com/developers/tou.aspx), and it seems pretty clear. From section 3c:

You will not, and will not permit your users or other third parties to:
...
(c) modify, filter, obscure, or replace the text, images, or other content of Bing results, including by changing the order in which Bing results appear (but this limitation will not apply to Bing results of type "Web"), intermixing Bing results with search results from other sources, or intermixing with Bing results any other content so that the other content appears to be part of Bing results

These terms seem to pretty much prohibit using Bing search results for something like DDG, because all they let you do is change ordering. Am I missing something?
The Court that gave us Wickard v. Filburn was also the court that provided a precedent for Guantanamo Bay (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_parte_Quirin). Stone (the Chief Justice for both cases) had the shortest run of any Chief Justice yet he managed to rack up quite a little record for himself.

(He was also the only Justice to drop dead in open court while reading a decision btw which is the reason I remember him)
I have no wish to do either ebooks, conferences or video interviews, all of which I have already been invited to, and have declined.

I'm writing because I've been writing on the internet since 1999, and on this website for more than 3 years.

I write, not because it's a big conspiracy or I'm trying to sell you vitamin pills that will allow you pleasure your woman all night, but because I enjoy writing. It's just a hobby - there is no commercial gain - no ads, no trying to sell you my products, no conferences, etc.

That's why 37signals and all those people write. They are selling you shit. I'm not - I'm just a normal hobbyist blogger.

There is really no conspiracy, and the details of my life are unfortunately quite boring - the interesting parts I've already written out as stories.
Having looked at the interface, it's basically taking orbitz results and slapping a slightly nicer GUI on it. If they were backended into ITA instead of hopping via Orbitz that would be better.

What I would like to see is something that ITA has already, which is see cheapest fares by month. I'd also love to see all the weird fares that FlyerTalk people have. Also, US Centric sites: the pricing information for inter europe or asia flights is dismal! Dismal!
Rumour: 7-inch iPad 2 launching soon
Wakemate Timing Update
This is what I got from it too. Ray is not an idiot.
I agree with you that the limited aspect of the monopoly has become watered down over the years, but I'm concerned that you appear to be suggesting that a corporation cannot have a limited monopoly (because that would require the transfer of the monopoly rights from a real entity to a legal entity).
FWIW, that's thick-wire with a vampire tap.

Not ThinWire.

The early DEC H4000 transceivers were rather larger than that transceiver, too.
Just try it out and you'll understand how polished it makes linux flash look. (It is provided by mono)
> If you can stop working tomorrow and maintain your present lifestyle - I consider that wealthy.

Even for most rich people, stopping work would require some adjustments. Tom Wolfe documented this pretty well in Bonfire of the Vanities. A bond trader loses his job and has to live on his savings. He acknowledges that he could still live like a king if he just moved out of his Park Avenue apartment, but "going backwards" is just socially inconceivable. He'd have to quit the club that all his wife's friends are members of, etc. etc.

However, I agree to some extent with your definition of rich. I just note that 'present lifestyle' is also a variable here. This is why adjusting your expectations provides, in a certain sense, the best ROI possible. It costs nothing and you can become fabulously wealthy as a result.
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=filetype%3Ar...

Nobody's perfect, I guess.
Not a bad little article, but "Get good t-shirts"? Methinks 15 tips sounded better than 14.
I've been doing just fine without any self-help books, why do I need to recommend an alternative?

Rich Dad, Poor Dad is particularly terrible by the way. A sampling of the criticism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_dad_poor_dad#Criticism
I think everyone agrees that coming up with ideas is pretty easy (not to mention fun). Personally though, as soon as I do a bit more thinking about any idea, I realize how much work it is to make the idea a reality.

Some of this work makes sense to me - the coding part. I have written code before. I can approximate the effort required (knowing my estimate is wrong, of course). The other part of the effort - marketing, getting users, convincing investors, other things I can't even think of - is an unknown to me. I have never done anything like it.

This is how you'd convince me to join your project: by convincing me you can take care of that other stuff I don't know much about. I think a team with complementary skills can work. But it has to be more or less an equal partnership. What will scare me off is the impression that I will be implementing someone's vague and constantly changing idea with no credit for my work.
Last Chance to Register Online for 2010 Workshop on Scheme and FP
Everyone is an expert on AI and the human brain today I see.
I've never understood this anyway. Just ask for the zip code, and figure out the rest from that. (Prepopulate, so people have a chance to fix it just in case your zip code db is wrong, and record the changes so that you can update your DB as needed.)
People are quoting "The Millionaire Next Door" on HN?

This community has gone to hell.
Don't be hasty to criticize people - it may feel good in the short term, but over the long term it always turns out bad. And upvotes and downvotes really don't matter, you know.
More evolved? Yes. Using a different monetization strategy? Yes.

But different? I don't think so. The technological foundation of Android (linux for the kernel, small C library and functionality-rich runtime for a custom VM supporting Java-ish programming language) is the same today as it was 5 years ago and is just an evolution of what Sidekick did in 2002. Sure, they made lots of technical progress, added bunch of APIs, polished the UI, changed the business model, but technology is the same, just improved (like you would expect after 5 years).
To be fair though, the patents were filed with the intention of corporate defense. That is, if a company like IBM sued them again, they could use the patents that they had to come to some sort of low-damage settlement. When Oracle bought Sun, this defense became an offensive weapon - something far different than the Viacom situation. Repurposing joke patents is far different from fabricating evidence.
> You can never know in advance what you will need, and chance favors the prepared mind.

I agree with you fully. It's surprising how useful things from unrelated fields can be. Just as an example, taking a course on economics taught me about utility functions, and decision theory. The decision theory stuff became really useful when I started learning Machine Learning; for example picking from a set of competing models using decision theory to think about the costs and benefits.
I've always viewed releases as two schedules of 12 months. i.e. one potentially not all that stable build (x.10) and one stable "safe" build (x.04).

I'd never really use a x.10 build in production myself.
I hesitate to say it after his recent "I will reveal my methods" fiasco but this reminded me of:

http://maxkle.in/programming-is-a-way-to-procrastinate/

"Max", if you're reading this, weren't you going to give away your methods in August or something?
This is awesome. I've always learned by doing as well. Thanks for sharing!
I read the title as "hyper-spatial" and was all excited, only to be disappointed. Apparently obsessively reading the Doc Smith Lensman series recently is taking a toll.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lensman_series
65+ resources for entrepreneurs and small business owners
Eclipsing The Competition (Interview on Entrepreneurship)
This is great. Congratulations!

FWIW I am a 35 year old New Yorker has 3,000,000 active users for his iPhone App (Darts). I am embarrassed by the advertisements but it pays the bills. sigh.
The essential point is that you can't model the behavior of a non-equilibrium system by modeling its constituent elements, which is what Kurzweil claims.

That no two non-equilibrium systems are exactly alike seems to me a different question.
I would say Pyra (Blogger), Picasa, Keyhole (Google Earth), Urchin / Measure Map (Google Analytics), YouTube, DoubleClick, FeedBurner and Grand Central / gizmo5 (Google Voice) have all worked out nicely in retrospect. Others in progress like ITA and AdMob should also be wins.

A lot of their smaller buys were for staff, so it's much harder to say if those panned out.
Java has pointers. What it doesn't have is pointers overloaded as arrays and iterators, pointers to stack objects, pointers to pointers, or pointers with undefined values.

Point being, there's nothing wrong with pointers but there may be something wrong with the way memory is used in C.
Even that is pretty thin stuff. How long does it take to survey people, or come up with a business model that will likely change a few times over? The cofounders should be honest and ask how they are going to help push this boulder over this hill. That means getting hands dirty and pushing, not dreaming up strategy, marketing ideas, and other things that can't help get a product out the door.
welcome, i got some people to help in some coding and then the rest by my self :)
it is ok, there was no iPhone 21 years ago :)
I think the correct analogy would be, a bunch of posts asking "How do I win Wimbledon?" And I think people respond negatively because the odds are laughably remote, the pursuit will turn you into a one-dimensional person, and at the end of the day, the payoff isn't that rewarding anyways.
> It seems a little quick to me. 9 months would be better (though irregular) in my opinion.

Doesn't OpenSUSE have a 9 month schedule?
Well, of course the NRA are GOP stooges. I don't take them seriously, I think they really want to preserve the status quo. Heck, they didn't want to pursue the Heller case. Gun Owners of America are much better defenders of shooting and self-defense rights.

Now, victim disarmament (aka "gun control") is most certainly a Democrat talking point. For example, they were the ones that got the ridiculous assault weapon ban passed, and thought that its repeal was the end of the world. I know that Liberal and Democrat are only slightly closer to synonyms than Conservative and Republican.

As far as NIMBY goes, well, Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein both carry concealed (see http://americandaily.com/article/9405 ), and they're very loud supporters of victim disarmament. Hypocrisy is par for the course in politics. Witness John Kerry's yacht.

Politics should not be confused with ideology. They dress it up and put ideological lipstick on it, but the vast majority of today's politicians are not fighting for any ideology, they're fighting to extend their careers and their power.

Of course the GOP is full of hypocrites as well. GWB talked about smaller government, but the government grew more under his watch than at any time in the history of the country.
True! I did play around on a Commodore 64 though!
I'm not sure anyone programming common lisp would agree with you. There's been no "splintering" of the language due to reader macro usage, and the reader macros that CL already provides are not exactly few. Here's a good post describing the what why and how of CL reader macros:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7sfro/response_...

I would also hesitate to name any particular language feature of Clojure as having an impact on its popularity. I think it's due more to the current zeitgeist of "Lisp is cool, but I program in something else" and "concurrency concurrency concurrency."
Is there any justification for that distinction? That is, does Canonical consider the x.10 builds experimental and the x.04 builds stable? I've never heard that.
I couldn't compile paulstretch under Linux but got it working via WINE and wrote up what I did - http://alicious.com/2010/paul-stretch-download/, also made a short sample of my own making available and linked to a CDN copy of the track in question.
No, just my personal experience. It's not entirely true for evey release but I find it a good rule if thumb.
Is that the one that said it was finally cash flow positive after half a decade? http://www.webtvwire.com/analysts-claim-youtube-on-course-fo...
Honestly LTS releases are only viable for 3 years if you're OK with 3 year out of date versions of software. They never import new major versions of anything, so you're stuck with whatever (eventually old and crufty) version you got. Hardy was stuck on an old and crashy version of Pidgin for a long time, whereas newer builds were actually much better.
Time really pass faster when you get older, subjectively speaking; When you are 2 years old, the last year amounted to 50% of your whole life. The year between 40 to 41 is 2% and from 80 to 81 only 1%.
Because ITA doesn't care, they power the back-end of a lot of big players (eg. Orbitz) and they use some serious tech (which is why GOOG bought them), they don't really care about the consumer market and don't really want to play there. Makes sense to me.
yep I did not have a PC but i sued to play with my mom's Mac, it used to speak as i remember :P
Takedown requests are for companies like YouTube where content is illegally uploaded by a user. In this instance, the site owners clearly stole the intellectual property themselves. This is plagiarism, plain and simple, and the DMCA does not (and should not) protect it.

I may be biased because I'm a published author, but if it takes a guy like this to hammer plagiarists I'm all for it.

If you want to use someone else's writing, ask them for their permission and get it in writing. That's been the law and custom since time immemorial.
I think I've done that already. My first program parsed a network protocol. http://botdom.com/wiki/Dante (The code is nasty but it works)
Appengine keeps getting better and better.
The burden is on you to convince a potential technical co-founder of value of your skills. Saying "I can do marketing, monetization and bizdev" is vague, therefore unconvincing. Anyone can say that, just like everyone can say that they're a great programmer. The trick is in convincing people you're good at it and that it brings value.

There are 2 ways to do it.

One, you can give examples from the past how your marketing, monetization and bizdev skills contributed to a success of a startup. And talk about specifics, not generalizations. "My bizdev skills increased revenues 2x" is unverifiable generalization. "In a startup offering on-line marketing to restaurant owners I contacted every restaurant in San Francisco and booked 100.000 revenues for our services" is an example of a specific thing that you did, that brought value to a startup and a many people (e.g. me) would not be comfortable doing.

Second is to offer your ideas tailored to a specific person. "So, you're working on startup doing ..., here's a few ideas of things that I could do to get more business for your services".
I've been using paulstretch for years, works a treat on spazzy jpop for pad samples :D

edit: though, I am tempted to downvote for bringing bieber to HN. :X
kjksf summed it up nicely. Google obviously provided a ton of capital but it was Rubin, using what he learned when building the hiptop, that gave the spark to the whole project.
How angel investors are destroying young gullible programming talent
This really isn't that big of a deal. If you look through some of the results, you see things like blank forms (where "Confidential" refers to the information filled in by the applicant), boilerplate, attachments as part of public filings (where the document may have been confidential but came out in a trial) etc.

In one case, the "this document is confidential" is a phrase taken from the sentence "nothing in this document is confidential." I'm working on a "confidential" document right now, but it's intended for litigation and will likely show up in a records search in a year or two.

There may be something juicy in here, but you're gonna have to go through a whole bunch of the mundane to find it.
The Automated Workplace: Robots On The Rise (Infographic)
Oh no, it was merely an example. I would rather prefer my code not to be in the FreeBSD source tree, I don't think it is good enough yet.
... the FBI will accidentally declassify military communique on the reproduction of Tesla's experiments: http://bit.ly/aT5AZ0
I heard this in the morning, and I'm glad it got on HN, because Radiolab is so great. If you liked this at all, you should really check out their long shows, they are almost all gold. Their style works a little better in a long form I think.
Thanks a lot for the advice. We got put in a local paper, but there wasn't much action from that. The hardest part of the whole site is that the marketing is literally to everyone and just not one area.

With that said, I really like the idea of using subdomains for each location to condense it down. That really helps with the marketing aspect.
I hope someday we as a society can shift from the idea of "ownership" and "creation" to one of "contribution" and "discovery". Is anything really "invented", or rather pulled from the set of "things that can be"?

I also believe part of the original intent of original US copyright law was to promote progress by rewarding discoverers' contributions. To be in a state that we are now, where we are actually stunting discovery with ridiculous IP laws, is quite sad.

[Edit: Not sure the reason of the downvotes?]
Exactly; people in power, especially in large organizations, are very nearly a self-selecting group. In the military, for example, to make it to the upper levels, you have to make a conscious choice not to retire after 20 years and instead continue to play the game. The type of person who continues to work in those circumstances are the ones who do it to gain power or prestige.

That's an obvious choice in the military, but it exists in large organizations everywhere; do I work longer hours and play the office politics so I can rise to the top, or do I go home at 5?
Why You Need Anecdotal Evidence
Ask HN: How do I find events to demo my product
I've finished developing a product I'm happy with. Now how do I find events/conferences to demo the product. Any additional ideas on how to get publicity are welcome.
Maturity Is The Ability To Do Something Even Though Your Parents Recommended It.
Inaugral Issue of International Journal of Software Architecture - out now
I think here you mean the per capita and not actually the global country GDP. However, there is no relation. Having a higher per capita or GDP doesn't relate to luxury. It's the amount of work a nation has made over a year.

For the game, I think it's more about the idea than the coding itself.
> Many targets of the Righthaven lawsuits are political blogs and discussion boards, both liberal and conservative, which have posted content—nearly always entire articles—written by Review-Journal reporters.

What's the problem there? If people are reproducing entire articles, they're clearly operating outside of fair use, and ought to be paying licensing fees.
The "Web of Intent" Vision
I don't see how this site is anything more than a feature for another site. Just keep it up for people and put ads on there. Host it off your home computer, can't imagine you're getting much traffic and should be free. Think of something creative to do around it.. I really don't have any ideas on how you can do anything more with it.
"Many targets of the Righthaven lawsuits are political blogs and discussion boards, both liberal and conservative, which have posted content—nearly always entire articles—written by Review-Journal reporters."

I'd be curious to see the percentage as well, but those cases clearly aren't fair use.
They have dumps available, but their application and server are proprietary. And now that Google controls them I want nothing to do with it (other than maybe using one of their dumps to start me off).
Nope. I think it was the one explaining that YouTube is the world's second largest search engine as well as first search choice for an entire generation or something along these lines. But I'm not sure cause I only read between the lines.