skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a shame, I think it could have completely revitalized a struggling industry ("The only way to control your content is to be the best provider of it"). I would love to build something like it again, but unfortunately it would be pretty difficult without the resources or industry connections I had while working there.

Why would it be a "struggling" industry if in fact porn are getting more free and easier to access? It's a thriving industry even if players are hurting.
What's the next step for my web app?
I am a software developer, experienced primarily in database systems (some internals, some application development). I've made half-hearted attempts to stay current with UI technology but stopped pre-Ajax.

Years ago, my family joined a babysitting coop. Parents who know and trust each other join and babysit each others' kids. There is a ticket system used as currency, and there is a formula for tickets involving number of kids and length of sit. The coop aims to have 30 families. As families leave, new ones are recruited from acquaintances.

The coop had been running for years before I joined, doing everything with phone and email. In one of my efforts to learn UI technology, I built a website to run the coop, using Python, Django, Postgres, and Apache. Members request and volunteer for babysitting jobs, an administrator select volunteers, a president controls membership. It's plug-ugly but gets the job done. It's a very simple application. The real value in the work is that the features have been designed and fine-tuned by very involved members.

I have no talent or interest in the business side of things, but it occurs to me that this could be turned into a small business. A coop of this sort has a specific set of interests and is in a single zip code. Ads (which are not on the site currently) could be targeted extremely precisely. The coop collects some annual feeds, so its possible that a website like this could charge an annual fee per coop.

The service could easily be generalized in obvious ways, e.g. swapping other kinds of services and goods. There are other coop sites on the web, but they rely on random people signing up, and to my eye they appear to be pretty inactive. One insight from my coop is that you'd need a more active sales approach to find existing coops who could use the automation.

So what do I do with this and how? I know that I'm the wrong person to do sales and business development, so any expansion would involve bringing in people who have such interests.
No, it's like telling George Wallace to go to the back of the bus. If the MPAA wants to be the chief asshole of the internet then they don't get to play in it with the rest of us. It's not the downfall of society, it's just a little mischief to compensate for an obviously broken democracy. It has always happened and always should.
Dark Patterns: User Interfaces Designed to Trick People
Saving NYC One Hacker at a Time
What's with HN and completely inappropriate titles lately?
I must confess, this post makes me feel a bit like Edward Everett. In the future when I attempt this argument, I'll just quote you:

"A lot of us would prefer that every browser maker simply implements the standards, but a lot of innovation in web technologies (img tag, applets, xmlhttprequest) started life as browser-specific extensions. Frowning upon, or not allowing any differentiation would remove a lot of motivation for pouring resources into browser development."

Very well put.
McArdle is unreadable. In addition to the linked post, I'd recommend Mike Konczal's response to her post on Elizabeth Warren's scholarship:

http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/megan-mcardles-hac...

Isaac Chotiner's reporting on her blatant agitprop:

http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-plank/megan-mcardles-word-games

Ezra Klein on the same subject:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/08/in_defen... and http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/08/is_megan...
I just posted about Amazon Mechanical Turk in the story immediately before yours - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704704 - but in all honesty, I have heard of a few people getting good results, although I don't know if you can target specific demographics too easily.

I think a good bet would be to pay for Facebook ads as they have pretty awesome demographic filtering. Check it out here: http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/
the biggest ideas are the smallest stuffs like that. This is deadly useful!
Wish you good luck with this idea!
The scientist and I don't disagree; I think we just have a semantic difference. If the cancer is genetically different from the expectation, then it requires a different treatment. So if you have a disease that looks just like CML but doesn't have a Bcr/Abl fusion tyrosine kinase, imatinib is probably not what we'd want to use. I would call that molecule-centric, and s/he might call it patient-centric. Either way, the wording doesn't matter so long as you're treating the patient with the most appropriate therapy.
It's not only about the client side. With the rise of node.js, it will be more and more relevant for server-side, data-heavy processing.
is there any reason why non-US residents can't just put in a fake US address and proceed to get the results they need?

I believe you need a US billing address to pay for Mechanical Turk, so a fake address won't work. I'm not sure why this is the case, since you can pay for other Amazon products from outside the US.
Unfortunately not, since the Kernel is GPL2.0, not GPL3. GPL2.0 doesn't have anti-tivorization features.
The idea behind them was to remove the work involved in learning and the effort required to teach.

In exercise you cannot get strong without effort, and there is no way to learn without effort.

The most effective way to teach someone and to learn is with a teacher, blackboard, and chalk. Everything else is second best (including the wonderful Kahn Academy).
I was extrememly surprised at the number of people at Singapore's Changi airport who were using their (Apple) tablets in the departure lounges. Still a small percentage of total laptop users, but very noticeable.

And the number of kids showing their parents how easy it was to be online with iPads in the various shops that were selling them.

Step outside the bubble yourself - "most people" don't understand the complicated "Start" menu - they just want to get on with using the web so they can do their internet banking, buy cheap airfares or look at gossip sites. Preferably not at desk. Or with a keyboard.
They never said that they're perfectly secure, they said that they're as versatile as they are secure. As in "You're as smart as you are handsome".
My comment history serves as a counterexample to this claim.

I make plenty of comments on controversial topics, often in opposition to mainstream opinion. I get lots of critical responses, but I only rarely see downvotes, and have only one comment that I know of that's below 1 (deservedly so; it was snarky and non-contributory). I'm neither timid nor controversy-avoiding; I just present my controversial ideas in a way that's engaging and enlightening.
See the latest post on ucentric.org and you will see our reasoning for this opinion.
The issue I take with that comment is that its peppered with phrases that do nothing to add to the discussion, but rather to make the parent poster feel dumb. For example:

"From the article you seem to be replying to"

"Since you've simply flat-out contradicted a research paper with nothing more than assertion,"

The person he's attacking made a simple statement (perhaps factually incorrect), and the guy jumped all over him. Its not a particularly egregious case, and certainly not uncommon, but I surmise that it exemplifies the authors complaint.
I seem to remember reading that this is a myth.

Even if I hadn't read that, it wouldn't make sense. Ships of any era represent large capital expenditures. No navy would give up a ship unless it's unusable or can't be defended; worst case, they'd sail home empty with a skeleton crew.
How did Lake Nyos suddenly kill 1,700 people?
OK, I've read the manuscript now. Very interesting work. I didn't realize this initially, but they are also saying that the transient phosphorylation of PGAM1 is a mechanism by which PEP is converted to pyruvate at a meaningful rate!

Reason for the exclamation point: the conversion of PEP -> pyruvate is is considered the last of 3 rate-limiting steps in glycolysis. They propose an end-run around this rate-limiting step. In their model, PEP donates its phosphate to PGAM1. Thus, PEP becomes pyruvate. Normally I wouldn't expect this to be a meaningful way to produce pyruvate--but their data appear to support the notion that PGAM1 becomes dephosphorylated at a high enough rate that this process can repeat itself fast enough to sustain pyruvate production. Oh, and phosphorylated PGAM1 isn't just a temporary phosphate holder--they hypothesize (relying on other studies) that it helps shunt carbons into biosynthetic pathways (which you need if you are a proliferating cancer).

It's not every day that someone figures out how living cells bypass a canonical rate-limiting step in the fundamental metabolic process shared by all living things.
Yes, karma affects things. It's an instant feedback. So you can adjust to it. It's supposed to have a positive effect, and I believe it has, but the negative is:

I've already learned that going "with the crowd" can get you more than trying to argument against the popular belief. Going against guarantees to give you some minus values even if you follow all the rules and contribute to the discussion (that is you're not going off-topic). I guess we can generalize things and say that the life is the same, you just can't argue that the condoms are good among the Catholics. So I have personally already also learned that how I'd be able to get more karma: say positive things about Python in post about Python, about Erlang in post about Erlang, about Lisp in posts about Lisp, etc. As Scott Adams would say "we're just meat robots."

As long as people react so, the people are not only train not to troll, but also not to discuss against, just to "join our righteous crusades and fight the infidels."
First impressions count
The phone lets you do a lot of things paper (but mostly plastic) can't. Some we've released...

- Standardized electronic receipts with line item data available in real-time

- Instant and free peer-to-peer money transfers (you can use Bump)

- Set the tip on the phone when you're at a restaurant

- Storing multiple account numbers for frequent flier programs, insurance companies, school IDs, etc.

...and some we're still working on...

- Bill splitting

- Location based offers (coupons), automatically-applied when you pay

So there are a bunch of advantages to using the phone.
makes me want to buy one of these:

http://www.bomb-shelter.net/individual%20shelter%20systems.h...

I've also been watching Jericho and LOST lately, which is probably a factor too - lol.
Assuming for the moment that by some bizarre turn of events my system were implemented...

1. Why is this a problem? Obviously legacy systems will have to stay in place until smartphone adoption is as ubiquitous as credit cards are today, and the only person you're inconveniencing by using them instead is yourself.

2. My iPhone is smaller than my wallet, and is more indispensable for travel (and would be vastly moreso if I could use it for even a small portion of payments.) I guess this one is just a culture difference, but it looks like the world is moving my way.

3. In keeping with the above, you could still carry around your debit card if you want the backup. (Your phone could even act as a passive RFID backup, so you don't have to carry around the card.) But since it wouldn't be your primary method of payment, you would be able to up the security on it such that every payment must be signed for, and signatures actually validated. A bit kludgy, but that's how it is supporting legacy technologies.

4. What happens right now if your debit card is stolen? Except without the "Enter PIN" part.

But seriously, since this technology is customer-initiated, the security of it will continue to improve as security features on phones improve. Whatever my new phone supports — fingerprint, face recognition, geolocation — I can use to authorize payments, and the merchant never has to worry about it.

5. There's a tradeoff between security and speed, here as in all things. Maybe this system would wind up being a little slower than our current one, which provides almost no security... I guess that's a fair tradeoff for me. After spending 20 minutes finding my groceries, whether it takes me five seconds or 45 to authorize the payment isn't a big deal. And as smartphones improve, it will get faster and faster.

Anyway, if you think what I'm proposing is the heavier, bulkier, or less secure option, I'm not sure if you've thought about what a debit card transaction actually entails.
Do you know the etymology of the word "pornography?"
solar -> similar; so -> do; Also, it should be noted that my initial, personal reaction was one of frustration: "ugh, yet another thing I have to deal with today :(". However, that reaction doesn't make other people want to help you, so I repressed it. Also, I will admit I was slightly more flustered when they blocked my company account once and was requesting documentation that would be impossible to produce: in that case my personal reaction was anger. However, I again went through the same sequence of "that doesn't help", and then had multiple pleasant multiple-hour long conversations with some /epic/ support people who worked their asses off to help me. Being calm and rational, certainly being nice, is very important. I am going out of my way to say this because I do customer service myself, and when a customer ruins my day by yelling at me (or posting public vitriol over what was likely a misunderstanding) it becomes very difficult to be motivated to be helpful, and what you really want in those circumstances is more of an "above and beyond" response, which is unlikely to ever happen once you've sent the all-caps angry-mail. :(
Medical ghostwriters who build a brand
"This is the exact same kind of terrible, short-sighted, browser-specific garglemesh that plagued the web with favicon.ico a Microsoft only image format that forced a specific file name and location (and generates billions of 404s across the web every day)."

Hmm. With the iPod, there's the apple-touch-icon.png
If you are planning to release this as a product, i doubt that it could gain traction, although the whole node.js thing makes me wonder whether everything is moving to the client, even heavy computational tasks as ML or AI problems. If it is a project just for the sake of it or for fun, then it would be cool to see your implementation.
This is the chief argument against open plan offices - it can be difficult for people involved in intense mental work to concentrate.

Would headphones w/ noise cancellation help? Even if you didn't play music through them?
If you credit the merchant's account, then your account will be debited by someone, by definition, whether it's your own bank on behalf of the merchant or the merchant itself. Whether or not you authorize one side or the other first is pretty much irrelevant because the other will happen very soon (usually milliseconds) after. Either way, someone will need to keep track of the numbers. I think you're making a big deal out of what to me seems to be the least broken part of the payment system.
There are communities I have left for various reasons. I am not wrapped around the axle enough about it to write a blog post naming the forum in the title and bitch about everything that is wrong with the forum in question. I couldn't get through half this post. I just don't care that much. I stopped reading after he explained how central HN had been to him and how giving it up was like lopping off a limb (or some such) but he just had to do it (or some such). HN serves some of my needs, so I visit when time permits and the interest is there. No big.
hipmunk has a cool little chipmunk.
The thing about Karma is it's related to Zen.

Sometimes you just have to accept things for what they are and let them be. HN is the Parisian salon or bohemian coffee house of its age. And they also suffered from the pretentious, inane or despotic and inciteful, as well as the insightful and delightful.
Right. I attempted to argue that this was because the comment they disagreed with failed to make them stop and think about why disagreement exists, and re-evaluate their position. That is, downvotes are generally a sign of failure.

Certainly, some people stop, think, disagree, and downvote. I believe that this is the case when the original comment is sloppy, and generally warrants a reply. In some cases, especially various kinds of politics, the replies are omitted presumably because of fatigue. Such people have already replied to the argument enough times in their life to not want to do it again. That could be interpreted as a failure of domain research on the part of the original commenter, but I don't like to blame people for not being "well-read".
Mostly unknown little site: I kind of have a (stylized) gazelle for Health Gazelle, made from the letters h and g (you can probably readily see the h, maybe not so much the g).
Yes these would be useful to me. What would the performance be like compared to other options like Java? You'd have to use the new typed arrays to have any hope of comparable performance right?

This http://harthur.github.com/brain/ seems very slow to train.
Actually, it is the opposite.

Think of a Formula 1 car: it is strong because it is made of carbon fibre, not because it is made of glue. Carbon fibres have 5 times the tensile strength of steel. They are spun into yarn, which is woven into cloth, layered into a mould, and held rigid by plastic resin. All the strength comes from the carbon fibres.

In the case of this armour it is the linen which provides the strength, not the rabbit glue.

"Linen is among the strongest of the vegetable fibers, with 2 to 3 times the strength of cotton." Wikipedia.
I'd heard something about this a couple months back, but don't recall what it was all about. I think your latter guess is closer than the former.

Oh, here we go:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/191896/commodore_64_awakes_fr...
Yes, actually. From the article I linked to above:
"The computer will be an all-in-one keyboard, with Intel's 64-bit quad-core microprocessors and 3D graphics capabilities, according to the site."
I wonder if this is referring to the "unique" way the Kindle has of referring to locations in a text. You can't just tell it to "go to page 10" but instead have to give it some rather odd looking location such as 1768-79.
Wonder why this was downvoted..
Is it bad to hope that Cuil is open sourced??
Really? You can't see the practical difference between these two flows?

The Way It Obviously Should Work:

Me -> my bank: I want to pay this store $10. Here's my password.
My bank -> the store: Here's $10 from Cushman.
The store -> me: We've got the money. Here's your stuff.

The Way It Does Work:

Me -> the store: I want to pay you $10. Here's my password.
The store -> my bank: Cushman wants to pay me $10. Here's his password.
My bank -> the store: Sounds good to me, here's $10.
The store -> me: We've got the money. Here's your stuff. And I promise I didn't save your password or anything.

I'm obviously not an expert in this stuff at all, so I don't know how broken that is in economic terms, but it's obviously broken.
What? That totally sounds like the argument for a Quentin Tarantino movie.
I stopped reading HN too. Doh!
A Kindle (or other similar e-ink device) would be great for textbooks that you didn't jump around in, like literature or history. But even jumping between reading and exercises is a chore. Typing notes is horrible on the Kindle's keyboard.

But I could see a future where a student carried perhaps two 8"x10" e-ink displays in a package no bigger than a composition notebook. They could have two different page views of the same book (or multiple books), with wireless sync between them. Touch (at least resistive) could improve the interface for highlighting and some notes. It'd be easy to support slim wireless keyboards for longer notes. I don't know if they'll ever be able to improve the speed of the displays unless they change technologies.
I see, well I'll certainly take your word for it. I really need to read more of this literature as I've been working with these folks quite a bit, and hardly know the difference between a gene and a protein.
Most (if not all?) credit card companies will not hold you liable in the event your card is stolen. They also require you to get a new credit card number and report the old as stolen in order for this protection to exist.

Now the question is, are you going to trust that just because you have this security card you don't need to report the card as stolen / get a new card?
And who reads a textbook page at a time in a classroom discussion.

This is just an Apple ad-itorial, "with the iPad all the diagrams in your textbook can be interactive"
>But now we're moving on to personal computers, and for some reason if I want to pay someone I still need to give them my bank account details.

For what it's worth, paying bills in Europe works with the Giro system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giro) which is the opposite of the US system. When a company wants me to pay a bill, they give me their giro number and an invoice number, and I deposit money in their giro account. They never get to know my bank account number, and I never get to know theirs.

I just came home from eating out, and the restaurant had a portable chip&pin reader, which is increasingly common. The waiter enters the amount in the reader, gives it to me, I insert my card, enter additional tip, enter my pin code, press ok, take my card, and hand the thing back to the waiter. We both get a receipt, and the restaurant gets my money without ever knowing my card details. It sort of solves the underlying problem.
I will need you to cite your source on that claim. I have the original Blue, with the chip to which you refer, and can assure you that it is not the same chip as in "chip and pin".

It was marketed by Amex with a special RFID-esque reader that was designed to unlock your Amex "password vault" or some such silliness.

It was such a flop that the new Amex cards have switched to actual RFID (or similar technology) for use in "Speed Pay" or whatever, in that you need not take your card out of your wallet to buy things at CVS or Whole Foods (for example).
Yeah, if you live in the United States. If I wanted to see, say, the Lost finale before it was spoiled to oblivion I had two options:

a) BitTorrent it.
b) Scream in agony.
Haven't got anything off the ground yet, but I've thought about this a lot, since I've heard this story before from friends that tried going down the single founder route.

The conclusion that I've come to, is that this is a business model problem. If you are a single founder and want to stay that way, then starting a consumer business whose success depends on getting a lot of customers doesn't seem like the way to go. When I do take the plunge and start something of my own, it's going to be something that caters to very few customers, who in turn sell something to a lot of customers (e.g., a publishing platform for authors where you make a cut of every book sold) or who I can charge a lot. Even better if the billing is recurring.

P.S. The single founders I've spoken to consistently also mention that something that got to them more than any of this, was a feeling of loneliness. Guess HN sorta solves that problem for some.