skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We accept regional differences between dialects as a natural phenomenon.

There are actually quite a lot of regional dialects within the US, not even getting into the differences with how Canadians, Brits and Australians speak. Some such differences have stalled political negotiations and such historically.

FWIW: I speak conversational German but can't really follow the News in German and can't really read or write it. I read and write French a little but never developed an ear for it so I have enormous difficulty following spoken French and struggle enormously to put together a spoken sentence. I think there are substantial differences between written and spoken, formal and informal for any language.
>Well, I think that the idea is the most important part of any project.

You haven't been here long, I take it.

Generally speaking, anyone with any measurable experience in startups and business will tell you that execution is what counts.

>If your ideas suck then your product will suck as well.

YC doesn't even care much about the idea when they're vetting startups, they care more about the individual character of the cofounders and the work ethic embodied in the state of the current project.

Team cohesion > idea. You can always pivot, which many YC startups have done.

>Any monkey can bang out code

That rather mistaken idea has earned me a great deal of money. I've taken quite the schadenfreude out of charging businesses money for cleaning up/redoing the utter horrors that the outsourced indian teams produce.

If you really believe this, put your money where your mouth is and hire a remote team from Mumbai. I'll be happy to throw you a rag for your tears of blood when you come back in here screaming for a real professional.

>I am not a programmer, It's not my trade

That was implicit in your insulting the entire field that most of the people on this site have dedicated their lives too. An excellent start towards finding someone willing to work on your ego^H^H^H idea.

>however, I don't think that you have to sleep with CSS3 book

The point is passion.

>I am not offering anyone anything

That became clear already.

>Outsourcing is cheap...a person to build...not a problem

Cf. bloody tears, schmucks like you making messes for me to charge top-dollar to clean up, etc.

>yet I don't completely trust my own judgement enough to sink my life savings into.

So you're faithless, talentless, lazy, unwilling to put your money down, but willing to waste someone else's time?

Charming.

>I am not looking to throw an idea at someone and say "Build it while I sit on the couch and throw out ideas like our friend above suggested."

That's exactly the meaning your every sentence and clause has built towards.

Good luck, I'll have a good chuckle when you make another account and try to slither past this critique instead of trying to grok or absorb it.
My iPhone 3G nowadays basically takes guesswork to function. "I pressed this link four times, is it frozen or did I touch the wrong place?"
Strange Advertisement for Milk
There is a recently open-sourced fork of CouchDB that does the sharding thing. With this addition to the capabilities, CouchDB really can scale up to hundred machine clusters.

http://blog.cloudant.com/cloudant-core-is-open-source
How to appraise a developer (part 1)
I use the European PayPal which I believe has different regulations (for the better) than the American one. I've never encountered a problem with getting funds in 3 years of heavy use.

We have had a few chargebacks which in some cases were decided in our favour. Afterwards I simply refunded the customer informing them they should have just asked for a refund :)

Any time I've had to contact their technical support via email, which is rare, it's been useless.

Their APIs are a mess. Documentation is all over the place and far too verbose. Many of the APIs overlap leading to further confusion. This isn't much of a problem if you use a cart or Rails Plugin but if you're coding your own stuff from scratch prepare to suffer. That said, once you understand it and get it working it's actually pretty good. You'll find there's little you can't do using PayPal.

The sandbox does a decent job of allowing you to run tests, but it does have some frustrations. You have to go through many steps to set things up. They have an IPN generator but it leaves out some important notification types for subscriptions. It's also totally separate from your real account, so even if things work in the sandbox, if a setting differs in your real account it will break in production (this has happened to me).

Their reports are okay but the website is pretty slow so getting at them is a pain. I hate going into the website because of the slow page loading.

If you do go ahead with PayPal I would recommend using it for a large volume of small one-off payments (means a lower risk from chargebacks). I use it for subscriptions but don't like the fact that if I have a problem with them I'll have to get those customers to sign up again. Always transfer money from it once it gets over $100 and create a separate bank account dedicated to PayPal. Regularly transfer the funds from it into your real account. Always have a backup payment source so you aren't losing sales if you encounter problems.
Over 9000. If both accounts are from Gmail its even cheaper...
So why don't they move to some part of the UK that has cheaper housing if they really want to own a house?

Place like Edinburgh, where I am, don't exactly seem to be suffering that badly in the economic downturn and there is affordable property here - might not be that fancy, or in a great neighborhood but you have to start somewhere.
So what you're saying is basically anyone who is not a programmer is a lazy idiot and has no place in this world

Wow, I understand now why you sleep with a book, because no human being in their right mind would ever do so without the use of force.
"We’re losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science," he says. "We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential."

This article speaks volumes about how many sheep there are in today's tech scene. We need more lions. They are the ones who challenge the leaders and actually move things forward.
My experience has been the same regarding chargebacks. High volume of transactions, very few chargebacks, all or most refunded (I can't remember for sure).
I've been bouncing an idea around in my head related to this for a little while now. While I don't think it's as specific as 'no engineers qualified to fill 50k/year job' I have a feeling that in general it is lack of computer skills that is keeping these people unemployed.

There is a huge amount of the population - in America at least - who cannot handle the most basic of tasks on their computers without assistance or a large waste of time. Not that I'm blaming them, as they got along just fine (though less efficiently than their more computer literate co-workers) before the downturn, but now that they have been laid off and are looking for new jobs, the employers willing to hire people who don't have the basics down are few and far between.
Reminds me of all those "Why Ping will fail" articles.
Check out Kojo (a tool that I have been developing and teaching with for the past few months):

http://www.kogics.net/sf:kojo

Kojo includes:

- Logo like stuff to begin with

- Processing like stuff for the next level

- A Virtual Math Lab
You are so far down the path of fruitlessness already and you do not even see it.

Any monkey can bang out code

You have already failed. True anyone can write some bug riddled piece of dog snot. But programming and development is a creative endeavor. AKA an art. Jut as my kid can knock out a stick figure in art class, it does not make his work a Rembrandt. Sure it's art and "anyone can bang out art" but when I go and try to sell my child's art as a masterpiece, well we both know what the revenues are going to look like.

You already have a respect for the profession that is going to put you at odds with the kind of people that you would need, to get you anywhere further than a failed project. These people don't need you or your idea. They are creative they have plenty of their own projects and they respect their craft and only work with others that respect their craft.

As for the idea thing, it is worthless absolutely worthless, you need to understand that first and foremost. Great ideas fail in the market place for all kinds of reasons, it does not guarantee success. So you have to ask yourself what I am going to contribute and you need to be able to communicate that to a perspective partner.

You need to be able to say, hey I have this great idea for a product. I can't write code, but I am great at sales and marketing or accounting or business development or X. Or you need to be able to say, actually I can't do anything but I am going to bankroll the whole thing. Those are valid but if all you have is an idea and you want someone else to put in the sweat to bring your idea to life while you sit back and come up with ideas, well then you are SOL.
Having not read Jaron's book, this article piqued my interest in doing so - along with the good Amazon reviews. http://amzn.to/bn1Xyj. Probably the best book to challenge my preconceived notions of tech.
How to overcome idea to idea syndrome
ZModem (Or; why I had resumable downloads on my dial up modem in the 80s)
>So what you're saying is basically anyone who is not a programmer is a lazy idiot and has no place in this world

False

>Wow, I understand now why you sleep with a book

I didn't say that I did. I'm going to assume from here that you're not a native English speaker

>because no human being in their right mind would ever do so without the use of force

Or a paranoid schizophrenic. Either way.

I actively seek out non-programmers to work with on side projects/startups, I just don't seek out lazy people who haven't read a single thing about startups, startup culture, or how to increase your odds of success, or how YC picks the 'winners'.
BTW, I know some very talented Indian programmers who could probably blow your socks off.

It must really be lonely being you.

Work at home in your little loft in NY, pay hookers to sleep with you because of your complete lack people skills.

I would not wipe my ass with anything your silly little hands had touched.

I would rather let my children eat garbage than feed them with money from something you had a part in.

And you're a raciest and an narcissist to boot! Good LUCK to you and your life.

Ps. The next time you are at home, alone and heating up your 14th package of Ramen noodles consider doing the
human race a favor and follow the instructions in this link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods
Take a look at mbed (http://mbed.org). It is designed for very rapid development (12/13 year olds were the test subjects, I think) and so abstracts a lot of the very hard stuff - but shows the basic concepts of microcontrollers. It has the benefit of allowing physical things to be controlled, like flashing lights.

Whatever happened to the expansion ports on home micros that provided full access to the microprocessor's bus? The BeBox's geek port was such a good idea...
Saw something similar at the store yesterday. Sony 3D TV showing football.

I wasn't impressed. And if you don't have glasses, the quality is piss-poor. This means buying a LOT of glasses. Unless you are a recluse, this really doesn't allow for easy expansion.
For what it's worth, I also could resume using some variant of x-modem that I don't recall in detail, but I always preferred running ZModem.

I don't get why I still have problems resuming downloads from websites.
Why the iPod will fail (2001)

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257
Try this one too:

"Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age"

http://amzn.com/0061687162
I just don't seek out lazy people who haven't read a single thing about
startups, startup culture, or how to increase your odds of success, or how
YC picks the 'winners'.

Oddly, he's (51) had an account here for almost 3 years.
I'd say you can do either, depending on your requirements. Some of the biggest CouchDB users use it as a scalable back-end. But some of the most exciting uses are deploying personal web-apps to the desktop.
The difference between radio to tv and tv to 3d tv is that with radio to tv, you upgrade a single element (radio to tv) to get the benefit. You also gain a substantial benefit: visual as well as audio.

With 3d tv, you can't just upgrade the TV. You also don't get any major upgrade like radio to tv. You get the simulation of depth, but that's it.

Finally, with radio, you could invite people over to listen, as well as with the TV. 3d tv prevents that.
I'm watching one of the 2 hours videos from the Stanford professor. He looks like a college freshman! No offense intended.

Do you have any resources on how to use these tools (especially the python library), and examples of implementation? I'm interested in learning more and using these tools on real data, but don't necessarily want to spend the time learning all of the theory behind it.
If the iPad had LOGO on it, that 10 week old baby could be learning how to program and understand the real power of computing devices.
That's brilliant! Another hack: vary your distance from the screen, moving really close up to the picture, and then back away, till you're leaning back in your chair.
I am going to consider from now on that you don't understand how to read.

I don't, nor did I ever say that I need YC funding you tool. I have money I don't want anything from anyone, I am not looking

for a handout, if you could read you would understand that from my first post.

I understand that sub-par programmers like you are a dime a dozen these days and that makes you pissed but you think twice

before you criticize someone for no reason it's impolite and makes you look like a real asshole.
Which apps/games helped her?
By all means, put something out that we can play with then. I can't come up with any reason why you'd lock this away behind a landing page if it's even at alpha quality.

Let it out to the world. People will use it. People will tell you what you need to do before you can release it as a product. It's amazing how much good feedback you can get just by letting people try your thing out.

You're doing yourself a disservice by disguising your thing as vaporware if it actually exists.
GCSE Student Launches New Appstore Hit with Help From ‘The Studio of Dreams’
For the past 3 weeks, our friends from ustwo™ have been working on a radical new iPhone app with the latest member of the team, Jack McLean – a 16-year old work experience student.
Sorry, but in the real world no one cares how beautiful your code is. Do you think any one of the 500,000,000 facebook users cares how beautiful the code is? I don't think so. So, coming back the the real world I have an idea for a BUSINESS, not a piece of art.
Good luck to you sir.
Hangman's hardest word
I thought it was low-level because I've read its frameworks tend to be faster (CodeIgniter comes to mind).
Fellow HN-ers. Please don't feed the troll. Just flag.
He did this

http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/09/500x_p...
Do you mean because normal Arabic lacks vowel markers? If so, I've got the same problem reading Urdu newspapers and fiction; one has to speak the word out loud and guess from the context what it 'completes' to.
For an introduction to programming and Ruby at the same time, Chris Pine's Learn to Program ( http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/ ) is excellent.
Many captcha bots support audio strings.
Previous submissions on the same subject:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1617924

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1617639

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614085

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1611663

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1610900
Are you in the US? I want one of these cards, but they seem to only be available for US accounts...
Have you tried App Inventor for Android? Really easy to get started with and you get an actual application that can be used on a phone. Very encouraging and inspirational.
I agree entirely with your last point, but if the unemployed/unemployable are not finding work in the private sector and are thus doing public works, displacing the current public employees into the private sector seems unlikely to result in them being fully employed/employable as well, right? It's not like the job-for-life public sector folk are the cream of the crop, in aggregate.
Not a bad idea, but some of the questions + pictures I've got have just been plain stupid. One was of a character which I had never seen, let alone know the name of.

"What are these beds called?"

There are about 4 separate names for bunk/cabin beds.

Typos are another issue. "Where do you where these things?" Also, how the hell can you expect people to answer such a vague question?

I have to say that I think this is both harder, and less accessible than a traditional CAPTCHA.
1. Write troll article, urging everyone to sell their stock.

2. Stock dips, buy as much as you can.

3. Wait 3 years.

4. Profit!
My fingertips are too big to type accurately. It's a pity because I really like my iPod touch.
>> A dean, who had been informed about the hack after the arrest, went down to bail the students out. He pointed out to the detective that the battery-lined coats were only circumstantial evidence. At this point the dean opened his own battery-lined coat and declared that “all Tech men carry batteries.”

Unfortunately, these times where MIT officials will protect students seem to be gone by now.
I've been listening to just this kind of glib, arrogant, self-satisfied rhetoric from Lisp zealots for over a decade now. Your tangential tirade about militants in the Congo is novel but the tenor is familiar. Are you a Naggumite?

The really smart Lispers like Peter Norvig recognized Lisp for the lost cause it is and moved on to build companies like Google. Maybe you've heard of it? People have been solving hard problems for decades without the "magic" of the Lisp primadonnas.
No one seem to mention one of the things that annoy me the most with 3D movies: the focus. If you are looking at something different than what the director wants or expects you to look at, it all blurry because its out of focus.
Yes, I got several which were impossible for me to answer.
Difference is, people die from bad science. No one does if a christmas tree is nomenclatured a holiday tree.
You should consider linking to an outline/synopsis with a link to the pdf. This would make it more accessible to those(we) of short attention spans as well as the very busy.
You've been irrational and angry the whole time (not that telling you will change anything)

I'll side with how the community is voting on this one.

Your behavior isn't appropriate, and it's obvious that you haven't spent any time learning the culture here.

It's not so much being able to repeat programmer shibboleths, you've just not used your time in this community wisely.

The point isn't to seek YC funding, I don't have any interest in that right now as I'm not aiming to do that kind of startup.

The point is that PG is a great deal more experienced, level-headed, and intelligent than any newbie founder would be. One should try to use his knowledge.

Don't make a mess in this typically polite community. Act out your tantrum with me privately.

Don't make ad hominems here, they don't fly well.

While you're reading some interviews of PG, check out:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Emphasis:

In Comments

Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
Sorry, attempt at pedagogy. I'll suppress it next time.
The real question for me is why so much 3D TV and more importantly, why now??

Are they only trying to make things more difficult to copy a movie? Or just another excuse to have people purchase new hardware as the cycle for HD is not even over? Or is it a reason to justify HD and put those extra pixels to use?
I didn't say I understood it. :)
I came in here to ask a simple question, was attacked and insulted and now I'm being called a troll. Amazing. You people really need to get out more.
Seeking to influence is not an excuse for peddling falsehoods.
It is a Worthy Struggle to Delve into History Research Paper Topics
History research papers require extensive research. Similarly when looking for history research paper topics, you have to explore deeply into the subject. There will be many topics which you will be able to write your paper on. However, if you select the most suitable topic, you will be able to write an A grade paper.
a 1 kB email is 9,000 times cheaper? Can you please point to any sort of evidence for this please? Thx.
N+1: Internet as Social Movement
That's true. Maybe you could do something with profiles from FB. Show a small collections of faces one of which is your friend on FB. Then you have to select your friend. For the visually impaired you could read peoples' names.

A real person would instantly recognize one of their friends and even the guy getting paid to solve captchas would have a hard time.

Of course, you then have the problem of getting someone to connect FB to the CAPTCHA service for the first time instead of abandoning the form.
Stephen Hawking takes on GOD
Please Review: Chittram Online Javascript Vector Editor Service
Hi,

(Wanted to ask in HN but ended up posting a link!, just read the FAQ)

Chittram is a 100% javascript vector editor service online. It was launched softly about a month back and I have not spread the word much. It works with latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari & IE.

It would be great to have your feedback on it.

Biz Model 1 liner - Browser based drawing/modeling tools targeting enterprises and designers. This is just the start.

1. What could be the ideal revenue model?

2. Site improvements

3. Any alternatives, other than aviary.com, google app drawing tool?

4. Are there any other websites that provide javascript based vector editors?

5. Does it work in iPad? (could not test yet :-()

6. Is the demo good enough?
thank you for your time...

cheers Shakthi
Still better than TV though, at least there's interaction.
Looks good, but what happened to a small reference that fits on a single fan-folded card? Many 'cheatsheets' as good as they are, were they to be printed would be longer than the classic K&R C Language Reference.
If you were not such an asshole to me in the first place there would be no problem. I came here to ask a simple question and you instantly assumed I am some stupid child coming here to beg for your 1337 skillz. yes, I am angry you insulted me and spoke to me like i'm an idiot because I'm not a programmer. You need to work on your people skills friend, seriously.
I think he was referring to you. I came in her and politely asked a question you called me a lazy good-for-nothing because my degree is different than yours.
interchange, say what again.
Ten of the Worst Reasons for Starting a Business
Well this assumes that life-satisfaction is the same thing as happiness, and I'm not sure it necessarily is:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100701072652.ht...

"A worldwide survey of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries included questions about happiness and income, and the results reveal that while life satisfaction usually rises with income, positive feelings don't necessarily follow, researchers report."

And some further recent research on the matter reviewed here:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-money-b...

Basically - increasing wealth makes you immune to the smaller/simpler joys in life.

From the paper you quoted, this was also in the abstract:

"HIV prevalence in Africa has little effect on Africans’ life or health satisfaction"

which actually supports my other assertion that those with disabling diseases or conditions are no less happy than those more fortunate (assuming you equate life-satisfaction with happiness).