skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just issue query to Orbitz via the affiliate API and they'll pay you for every flight booked. The TOS have some limitation, but if you can work within them you can explore pretty easily.
v ery inspiring!
Seen it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1612361

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1610703 <- This has comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1610309 <- This links to a single page version.
There were webkit animations in the beginning though the framerate was too low.
>That's why birds are so much faster than planes.

wtf? As if the only goal for flying is to go as fast as possible. A bird can land on a branch that can hardly support its weight while the wind is blowing said branch.
Nokia X3 Touch and Type in India Soon
the author compares linux suspend/resume to a clingy pet.

at home, it works alright.

resuming at work, the volume keys don't work.

suspending on weekends will just not work, like it wants to stay in.

i'm not sure if the author validated their theory. wouldn't surprise me if, depending on nervous system of handler and location, some EM or electrostatic fields were slightly affecting the hardware...
How many lives do you think one drug dealer ruin before they are caught?
I still remember this about-face, makes me chuckle every time: "Now, don't get me wrong: there's nothing wrong with Java as an implementation language.

Wait a minute, I want to modify that statement. I'm not claiming, in this particular article, that there's anything wrong with Java as an implementation language. There are lots of things wrong with it but those will have to wait for a different article."
Thanks for your feedback! That's a bug - we should have a fix out tomorrow. The issue is with spaces in completion, so if you just type "san", you should see San Diego in the list.
Lawks, it must suck to work in a factory where scented water is puffed onto doilies by baby deer with adorable eyes (I am guessing). But seriously - "motherfuckinglasers.com" didn't alert you?
I'm as non-Apple-fan as they get, but this is honestly why I really, REALLY admire Apple - they only announce products that are ready to ship, and steer clear of "We're working on this, stay prepared for our awesomeness to blow you out of the water! Coming soon to cinemas near you!"
Quite insightful compared to your run-of-the-mill checklists. I guess it wouldn't have come up on hbr.org otherwise. Its nice it covers some really diverse aspects of a business.

I am glad I have followed some of them which I was already aware of and gotta agree, definitely got some new things to think about from this list.
Adding Role Based User Access Controls to your Wordpress Plugin
I just keep a personal Wordpress blog hosted on my computer, and keep a link to it in my home page HTML. I've found the scheme to work pretty well.
Pleco is an awesome piece of software, even on my old Tungsten. Having the SRS flashcards integrated with the Chinese dictionary and a text reader is just indispensable. I couldn't imagine learning Chinese without it.
I realize printing in small runs is more expensive so such a magazine might cost more than, say, Harper's or the Atlantic Monthly or maybe even the New Yorker. More than all three combined, though?
It does, big time for me. But then it would depend from person to person. I can be a restless person sometimes, to say it lightly. So I need to print out a long email to read it, and then I usually read it while walking and that works perfectly fine for me.
Does that challenge allow for landing the plane on ILS autopilot? Because I've done that multiple times in X-Plane using the highly complicated x737 addon package, and I would imagine that the ability to correctly operate the autopilot is far more important in that sort of situation.
Animated heatmap of WikiLeaks report intensity in Afghanistan
I don't understand the downvoting on this, but I'll elaborate.

Computer gaming was already a high-end, enthusiast market before the whole phone/tablet thing started. Going forward, it's only going to become more of a niche as the desktop computer becomes strictly a work machine.

Casual entertainment is now delivered through convenient gadgets that work where you are comfortable, instead of chaining you to a desk. Anybody who has some of these gadgets knows that this is the way it must be, and soon that will be everybody.

The technology stack Google is talking about here is nowhere close to being viable for games on gadgets. And the gadgets already have fully realized commercial gaming platforms anyway, that are always going to be way ahead of the web stack.

There is just no reason to make games for the Chrome App Store. Productivity apps are a whole other matter. But games, no.
> Ctrl-F "quaver"
not found

Meh.
My overly friendly dog will definitely improve your productivity if by 'productivity' you mean the number of times you are able to scratch a dog's belly over eight hours.
Why Free Plans Don’t Work
A/B Testing Frontpage Screenshots vs. Illustrations
My point is that you can't write a little equation for a neuron (which is an entire living cell!) and wave your hands and say "done!" Kurzweil is way way way too hand-wavey for me.

Yes, we're in full agreement on this, especially the part about Kurzweil - I don't think he advances the science of this at all, and his poppy PR approach rubs me the wrong way, for sure, as do many of his specific ideas.

In particular, I think it's a terrible idea to hinge our hopes for AI on the idea that we'll be able to carry out a perfect enough simulation of a full brain to call it "done". Not only does it seem to be a pipe dream at present, depending on a whole bunch of technological advances that may not come for a long time, it would be almost completely inextensible and teach us very little - once we had such a simulation running, it's unlikely that we'd understand enough about how to modify it to improve upon it.

I don't quarrel with the idea that DNA encodes the brain extremely indirectly at all, including a substantial development process that depends on a lot of things other than the pure genetic code, and I also agree that the dynamics of a brain are very dependent on the details of all sorts of cells, not just an oversimplified logical representation of them. Where I think we start to diverge is that I have issues with the idea that the particulars of any of those processes can somehow "piggy-back" any non-trivial amount of functionality into the system that's not coming from the genetic code.

Here's the clearest way, I think, to state my information-content claim: if we were to randomly change the details of the way neurons function in detail (still leaving them with the same highest-level capabilities), and randomly change the way brain development happens, and randomly change all steps of entire process that leads from DNA->brain (again, subject to the restriction that the whole thing still works), and even - I daresay - randomly change the laws of physics, then...

...if all of these changes still permitted us to write down any string of DNA (or whatever our new version of DNA was) that ultimately resulted in the growth of an intelligent human brain, the amount of DNA required would, on average, be pretty darn close to the amount that we see used today. And that has implications for other implementations of the same logic, namely that if we could find some way to optimize towards whatever solution evolution has found, we could probably end up with a shorter code for it than evolution has because we can allow all parts of the DNA->brain process to optimize for compression whereas the real physical process is largely frozen against change.

That's the sense in which I think Kurzweil has a reasonable estimate, nothing more, nothing less; where he takes it from there is another story altogether. :)
Very very interesting to see C++ being thrown in to the mix.
Black hole mystery solved by magnetic star discovery
Total Cost For France.fr: €4 Million
I'm seriously wondering what is up with the voting the last couple of weeks. This is a genuine question, asking for an explanation of a term that I don't know. Why would anyone vote this down? Is there a 'basic knowledge' rule I violated here?

(sorry about asking about downvotes for the second time in two days - I'm just wondering what changes I need to make to my posting to not annoy people so that they don't have to vote me down).
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Ask HN: Is there any hacker who is also movie/TV actor?
Is there any hacker who is also movie/TV actor?
Windows 7 Manager 1.2.8 (x86/x64) iNCL. Keygen
At last, a loyal minion who will fear and respect me!!!! Mwuhahaha!
Some businesses don't need "angel" money or don't need very much.

One of my tenants wanted to start a small brick-and-mortar store. He needed $30K to get inventory, and he could only get a bank loan for $15K. He was glum and depressed one day, and I suggested to him "have you considered equity financing?"

The next day he came around and asked me if I was serious -- I told him I'd chip something in if he got others to. I bought $2K worth of shares, and other people, like the leader of his coven, bought shares too.

Now, from my perspective, the $2K meant that he was going to keep paying the rent, and I could lose that much money if the apartment was vacant for a few months, so it's a pretty risk free proposition. If I cashed out now, I'd get at best a small capital gain, but I wouldn't have done any better in the stock market.

Of course, I'm not a "serious" investor and I wasn't systematically thinking about how to make money -- but this gives some idea of the scale of investment that's required to succeed at a "lifestyle" business and how it's just not worth it to somebody who's already rich...

------

For a current venture I'm thinking a lot about finding "investors" who are interested in payments in kind that can be delivered quickly (a year or so;) Roughly, I'm looking for a certain kind of "investor/customer" who can pay me $10k now, expect to get $20-40k worth of value over the next year, and leave me with an asset that generates $2-5k a year worth of cash flow. This "moving revenue backwards in time" makes a big chunk of my balance sheet weightless, could let me grow fast w/o sinking in a lot of my own capital... And rather than diluting my equity, it incorporates the "voice of the customer".
Debian celebrates its 17th birthday
Bangalore household runs on a robot of few hundred rupees
If I could do it all over again...
BBC Dimensions - Compare the actual sizes of things visually
Where is USD $112? I was seeing USD $88 on the site.

EDIT: Ah - $88 + shipping at $24 (US/UK) - = $112.

I tend to agree, however nice the layout, these are just reruns of stuff we've seen. The next step will likely be using the initial subscription money to start funding some new original columns.

It's tough work, no doubt. plug: http://jsmag.com and http://groovymag.com possibly don't look as nice, but we do get out around 30 pages (each) of original content each month.

I've looked in to shipping for groovymag and jsmag, and the costs would add around $4 per issue - $48/year, which almost doubles the current cost. Not easy doing print in small runs. I was looking at b/w - hackermonthly is color, IIRC, which is even more $. My bet is if magcloud offered b/w, they might get the price down a little bit, but not much.
I think he sees angels as more of a blogospheric enemy than a financial or business enemy.

For everybody who's seriously involved in business around Hacker News, there are quite a few dabblers and posers, and a lot of people who get their rocks off by writing about business rather than doing it. There's also a lot of people who are immature and naive, haven't seen much, and get a 1-dimensional view of things... who ought to have some different perspectives on business than you usually see around HN.

But then again, you could also be hanging around people like Eli Aliosi and Nicky Cakes...
More on Mark Hurd and HP Board skullduggery
Hi. Talking about this topic, there is SmartPeople (http://nasr.ath.cx) which lets you subscribe to HN users and threads. You'll then receive any new comment made by any user, by e-mail. The same for the new comments made on a particular thread.
OK, point taken. Thanks for the warning.
The Three Providers Who Decide Whether You Will Be Hacked
Data Center Comes to Life in an Old Model T Plant
Google Apps and Google Accounts merge
seems daft they'd overlook that... surely they could build it in as a way of upselling bus/train/taxi/car hire tickets if nothing else...
If you can't sit around at a computer and mess with random things, you are not going to be a good programmer. Sorry.
Assuming you've gmailed personal messages (and therefore trust google enough), you could set up google calendar to email you daily.

Of course without the random previous entry. Maybe with google documents there's a way to do that too.

EDIT google word doesn't have scripting, but their spreadsheet does. Their automated forms is a tiny bit like what's needed [you can enter info & it's stored], but it's not emailed, and can't be configured with a random entry. Now that I think about it, MS Word disabled automated emails (due to spammers using it), so maybe google has too. But there seems no harm in allowing it to only the one verified & linked gmail address for the account. (Otherwise there may be a niche here).

Checking google spreadsheets, and you can email from it. Just tested, it works. There's a time-based "trigger". You should be able to email a form, in a htmlBody, and store the results so you can include a previous entry.

The scripting tool and documentation are excellent.
Details about Nvidia's x86 CPU
>It also improved my writting.

Sadly not the spelling.
Perhaps the moral of that cartoon should be "why Entrepreneurs should reconsider having partners and children that can't tell the difference between play and work"

My 4 year old daughter woke me up the other day saying "Wake up you've got to work. That's what grown ups do".
I think it's a great idea, but before I would start using this, I'd like to at least try to understand your business model.

How is this supposed to make money?
Can hyperlinks be libellous, or are they just mere footnotes?
The most interesting bit of that show was how they beat that serious-looking fingerprint sensor with a licked piece of paper:

Photocopy a fingerprint, lick the copy, push it onto the reader.
Well I didn't find it annoying.

So basically the cap table is a spreadsheet of who has what percentages of equity (and numbers of shares) in the company and then for any given dilution event (typically investment) shows how your percentages will change - and being a spreadsheet obviously you can play with the values to understand how things change.

So it lets you model how investment alters your share holding. It lets incoming investors understand the share structure of the company (and who holds power etc) and ours has a couple of columns of what we might earn at given exit values - this is kind of incentivising but its also useful once you start talking about preference shares and multipliers. It is also a useful tool when negotiating on an investment because you can see what the implications are - for example say an investor was asking for 2% more - you might be able to see that it hardly makes any difference and isn't worth arguing about - or it might be absolutely critical.

Investors seem to want to see this as well.
As well as being Unix backwards, it's also a recursive acronym; Xinu is not Unix.
You need all of this information plus knowledge of the various interactions of the different environments to pursue Kurzweil's approach.

Absolutely, and this is one reason why I think Kurzweil's approach overall is pretty foolish.

But I do think that his information-content claim is within the bounds of reason (I've explained my stance on that many other places in this thread, the gist is that it's highly unlikely that the whole developmental process supplies a huge amount of information "for free", in the same sense that it's unlikely that you'll achieve a 10x compression in code size by using Python instead of Ruby to write a program) and it at least tells us that a solution to the problem of intelligence does exist that doesn't require (for instance) explicit hard-coding of every neural connection inside a brain. In fact, it requires massively less information to specify than that, so there's some hope that in the end we'll be able to come away with reasonable approximations to that algorithm since it must be "fairly simple" (meaning: more complicated than anything we've tackled before, but maybe still within the realm of possibility).

That hints at the fact that AI researchers (at least those that don't buy Kurzweil's ridiculous "simulate-the-whole-thing!" approach) should be looking more into building out small "genomes" into massive structures rather than focusing too much on individual explicitly specified processing networks, because nature is clearly doing something like that, and it seems to work pretty well, letting it achieve a remarkably compact solution, given that evolution tends to produce very bloated code as a rule. There has been tentative research along these lines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNEAT, for example), but there needs to be more, particularly to figure out what sorts of things we actually want these massive structures to do, what sorts of processes we should be focusing on to control that building process, what types of units we need in order to make the processing that we're doing feasible, etc.
Keep in mind that if you have 25% of the stock now, it's very unlikely you'll get 25% of any purchase, if there is one. The buyer will direct most of the deal toward earn-out for employees they want to retain, and try to minimize money that goes to shareholders. It's also easy to dilute minority shareholders over time, e.g., by giving currently employed founders big option packages. Generally speaking, common shares owned by a founder no longer active in the company are seldom worth anything, unless the company is a major success.

On the other hand, given that the company hasn't really succeeded so far, it's not clear that your efforts to date are worth all that much. If the company goes forward, the real value creation is still in its future. So you're not really being screwed over, you're getting fair value for what you've done. The tough part is recognizing that even though you've put in a lot of effort, and invested a lot of emotion, the results so far just aren't worth that much. You sort of recognize that by walking away. But now you want a share of what the other founders create in the future, which isn't fair. You only deserve a piece of what's been created so far, and by your own description, it doesn't sound like that is very much. You can't have it both ways.
Now let me see if I got this right:

Hacker News:

- interactive
- real time
- available 24/7
- the participants are the stars
- the beauty is in the substance
- an example of new technology we embrace
- free

Hacker News Monthly:

- read only
- time delayed
- available once/month
- the stars are chosen by editors
- the beauty is in the appearance
- an example of old technology we replace
- you pay for it
I know some guys who used to send 100 M emails every weekend with a qmail cluster. It was sorta opt-in, sorta. Lets just say that they're not doing it anymore.

I don't think there's a big technical issue in scaling SMTP sends; you can have N machines doing it in parallel and it will work (almost) N times faster than one machine. There IS the question of minimizing your cost per unit email, and the real spammers address that by building SMTP senders that don't comply with the standard.

What does bug me about email is deliverability. It's pretty much impossible to send e-mail to AOL members, for instance, if you (1) don't pay ice to AOL, or (2) are big enough that AOL is afraid you'll sue them. AOL has shrunk a lot lately, so this isn't as big a concern as it was years ago.

It's not hard to get burned by other organizations as well. For instance, I sent an email shot on the the behalf of a campus organization at a university from off campus... an opt-in list of 2500 subscribers, really just chicken feed, but only 1999 went through -- after 2000 connection attempts, they firewalled my IP address and for all I know that address is still firewalled today. I knew the guy who runs email for that school by name and refused to talk about the whole affair... That's what you're really up against.
I'm pretty sure the current AAA game industry isn't going to move into the browser. Not everything needs to happen inside the browser. If the browser really does take over the whole computer, like many are predicting, the game industry will probably abandon the general-purpose computer entirely and stick to the (more profitable) consoles.
Slick Specs
I currently work at a largish consulting firm and get all those things, plus I don't have to settle for "long hours and low pay". Perhaps "work at a company that lets you work on interesting problems and learn new skills" would be far better advice. There is no reason why that has to be a start-up, nor is there a guarantee that a start-up will give you those things.
Well yeah, the media does that for them for free.
I agree. He makes it sound like a Delaware C corp a no-brainer, but it's a lot more complex than that. Delaware is geared toward larger companies but and is great if you plan to get acquired. the legal system in Delaware is very favorable to corporations. I don't think it's right for every business, or every businessperson.
Yeah, I find it hard to help them understand what I'm trying to do.
I guess I have a few issues -

1. Immigration - I am an immigrant which makes launching your own company hard. I have a few years before my permanent residency comes through

2. Point #1 can be very demotivating. I have some ideas, and I keep playing with projects [Nothing worth releasing, or even having much potential, mind you] but not knowing if and when I can actually do something about it proves very unsettling, and ambiguous

3. My work permit requires a full-time job. This can be very consuming as many other HN'ers know. Does not help with the motivational aspect of it

Despite all this, I have hopes. HN provides valuable insights, and stories like yours provide encouragement. Perhaps it will remain a dream, for I am already 32 and I don't know where I will be a few years from now.

Here's to hope! :)

[Congrats on your 3rd launch]
I imagine this will be the official app store for chrome os when it launchs.
Why wouldn't NaCl work on phones and tablets? The NaCl people seem be developing an ARM version.
I think the lessons on money are especially good. Even with debt <= my income / 10, I can't wait for it to be paid off. Even with leisure travel spending >= my income / 10, I've never regretted a penny of it.
Dependants and student debt.
Is The Web Dead?
THis comes from practical and historical considerations. Mass is probably most commonly used quantity by non-technical people, so it is desirable to maintain continuity with previous systems which had gram as base unit. On the other hand kilogram as base unit makes many useful relations between various quantities simpler not to mention that it is significantly more practical to make and maintain prototype of kilogram, than prototype of gram.
Business Value – Current Thinking for IT Leaders
I don't get why people are upvoting this story so much. Yep, Wired's wrong, but it's really not very interesting.
hellacandela?
I think the web is far from dead, but designing for web browsers first is becoming a deadly strategy. Most interesting bit from the article: "In a board meeting yesterday, the founder said, 'everything we do is cloud-based, with an API, and mobile friendly'". That's very insightful: the time has come to design your apps for mobile devices first.