skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In case you want to see comments from earlier submissions of this, here are a few links.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782171

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357390 <<<-- This one has the comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1360285

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370134

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1376655

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1383943

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385999

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1388904

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1389955

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390588

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1397443

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408731

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1410992

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439939

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1466084

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1640824
But I've seen articles with 0 comment and only 9 upvotes appear on the front page, while there are threads with more comments and upvotes not getting noticed.
You could install openX and sell your own ads

You can find a sponsor who wants the advertising to brand it theirs (some sort of school supply or test prep company maybe?)

You could add some advanced features only accessible after pay paling 5 dollars.
Delicious.com + tagging. Trying to figure out the One Right Folder for most sites is a doomed prospect.
Please use the syntax "Ask HN: [question]" in your title.
If you have been living with the name for three months then go ahead and buy it. I have missed a couple of really nice domain names in the past by reasoning that they were too obscure for someone else to register.

Namecheap.com currently has a deal for new .com registrations for $5.99 using the coupon code SAVEBIG - that should save you a few bucks if you do decide to register the name.
There is quite a bit of software in modern aircraft and I guarantee you that the guys that write it and review it are just as aware of the fact that their software could kill if done improperly.

It's very easy to think that your role (the designer) is the crucial one, but in the aircraft construction business there are very few jobs that require a less then 'mission critical' attitude.
The point I wanted to make - it's clear why you need a tech co-founder, but why would such a person need you in particular and not the other business guy?
Hi :)

I'm one of the co-founders. This is a Launch48 project, i.e. we started it yesterday morning, from scratch. (48 hours to launch a web startup). If someone has found a co-founder by now I would be over the moon.

The main idea is that search based just on skillset matching is not ideal for finding a co-founder you will truly be able to click with and work to build a successful startup. We bring in methods such as what is your desired exit strategy or how much time can you currently put in. These can be real issues.

Let's see where this goes..
At this point, I am simply baffled at how you are interpreting my remarks. Japan having a long view is just an example and was followed by this comment:

I've had foreign friends or American friends who lived for some years in an older country/culture. They think different than the typical American. (For clarity's sake, I don't think Japan plays a big role in such personal experiences. Europe and the Middle East play much bigger roles.)

Again, I was replying to a remark/question by another member. I think the fact that American culture is highly influential globally is relevant (for example: the city is compared in the article to Disney's Magic Kingdom). I don't see how that observation is "parochial" or "off-putting".

Peace.
Addendum: If you're just starting out learning to program, I would recommend Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML as a better place to start than the Java book.

Coding HTML is probably the fundamental skill. It teaches critical concepts such as syntax and debugging in an extremely lightweight environment.

HTML allows the most inexperienced programmer to start solving meaningful problems write away.

Most importantly, HTML is the best introduction to iterative development and progressive refinement.

And it is utterly painless to learn.
> We’ve already fallen behind in areas like alternative energy, better batteries, and nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology? You can't fall behind in vaporware.
What I find most interesting about this event is that there is really no consensus on what would have happened had he believed the alert to be genuine. When he received an award at the UN in 2006, Russia felt the need to declare that they would not have launched a counterattack without confirmation from other sources. I think it's a good example of how history is far more subjective that we like to think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
> should the start-ups - which rely heavily on user addiction - be treated as gambling outlets, and therefore be regulated and watched closely?

No, definitely not.

You might as well outlaw television for entertainment and the writing of fiction and poetry.

Everybody gets to decide how they spend their time, that's an individuals freedom, and every company gets to decide what product they want to make.

In the past companies have worked hard to give us more productivity and therefore more leisure time. New companies have stepped up that capitalize on that leisure time.

The times when people had to be productive (in the developed part of the world, that is) every waking hour is fortunately behind us, and bringing it back by force is not a solution.

For ever addict there are 100's or even 1000's of 'normal' users of those same services, you can't penalize everybody because of an inability for self-control in a minority of the population.

"Facebook" or "Wow" or any other so called addictive product is only as addictive as you let it be.
Great post.

To be blunt, I think there is a balance between helping/screwing the users of your free service and helping/screwing your bottom line.

While we like to think of Google and Facebook as altruistic companies, they have bills to pay. Sure I agree that it is critical for them to retain and even grow their userbase, and to try to keep them happy, but they (1) have to make money in order to survive and (2) have to work with various organizations that may access/use that data for purpose that customers are unaware of.

For #1, we have to admit as users that despite the "Do no evil" policy, there are some things that Google is doing against our best interests as users. Same with Facebook, except that they don't even have that policy. :)

For #2, I am by no means trying to fuel some conspiracy theory, but I often wonder if these companies aren't at least partially funded by organizations that would benefit from the information collected. Obviously on the books their stated customers are primarily advertisers, but why wouldn't the CIA, NSA, and every other government's intelligence agency want access to these data sources, and what wouldn't they do to get access to them? I'm not against our government doing what they need to in order to protect us, so it isn't a criticism, but I wonder why I don't see this brought up more often- again, not as a conspiracy theory, but as a legitimate concern/question. We already have to assume that at least some major institutions and companies have some sort of representation by or at least relationships with these agencies, even if few know about them.
Not sure I understand correctly "LUI" but if it means something near command line, I dare disagree. Two examples of "simple stuff" that are way easier in CLI than GUI: redo last action (up - enter), list actions done recently (history).
Are they still working on it? It's literally been in beta since 2006.
It's certainly not the getting on the front page that matters the most, it's staying there.
Yes, and hopefully it won't last too long. You just know the silly money is flowing again when you look at some of the stuff that gets funded and the amounts that are thrown at it.

It's sad, really that lessons from the past do not seem to stay learned, this cycle of extreme waste followed by extreme frugality isn't good for anybody.
I just contacted a business guy with a nice profile and an impressive resume.

If anything, this can serve as a medium for introduction, and not necessarily final match-making. Think bar, not a marriage agency for catalog Romeos.
Thx for the reference; that's a start!
Nope. HAM has its own spectrum that is unrelated to the station's primary communications radios, so keying your mic over and over or continuously transmitting just means you'd be disrupting HAM communication (not very nice).

As ugh pointed out, all the important communication uses satellite communication links that are likely digital. It is more difficult to disrupt digital communications than it is analog. You'd have to send out a signal that was specifically designed to disrupt their communications, which can be triangulated in a hurry. It wouldn't be log before a bunch of black Suburban were parked outside your transmitting location.
The cure is worse than the disease at this point, the situation is such that the patents to tend to go overwhelmingly to those that troll rather than to those that have ideas and actually implement them.

That's kind of logical too, after all having an idea and writing it up in a patentable form is much less work than following through so while the 'doers' are stuck on their first one the 'patenters' are on their 10th or more.
Thx for the ideas--some really good stuff in here. Some quick responses to your 1-4.

#1 always working on more speed--it's been a priority and will continue to be so.

#2 planning on ditching that sidebar. Check out http://duck.co/topic/new-ddg-header -- would love your thoughts.

#3 this is definitely needed and in process. It's half implemented now but is hit or miss for sure.

#4 many people have requested different variations of this, e.g. as far as iGoogle, but a few links would be cool.
Would the person that thought this fit for downmodding please explain why?
Is the big company going to require you to follow their existing procedures, or are you free to develop your own?
Ask HN: Joyent hosting for Rails
Hi,

I'm almost sold to Joyent SmartMachines. Even though is more expensive, it seems that the smaller machine can be faster than an EC2 instance.

What's your take on that? Are there any reasons why I should overpay for Joyent instead of an EC2 or any other host?

http://www.joyent.com/services/cloudhosting/
The site is still up, and the forums are active. Beats me.

I spent about 20 minutes researching them. Looks like they picked up funding in 2007. Lots of rave reviews, very slick demo video on the home page, lots of users on the forums begging for new invites.

The blog hasn't had any activity for a long time now.

Beats me.

I guess that's the big difference between a real store and an online store: in a real store you can always tell if it is out of business.

I'm looking at 30boxes now. You'd think this would be simple: all I want is calendars, tasks, recurrence and sorting, being able to print them both like a DayRunner, and links/subscriptions to other calendars. Google doesn't do the task/day printing, or I'd just stick with them.

Instead I've fallen into a world of social media, flash animation, AIR, AJAX, flickr -- everything in the world except for a simple calendar. It's like asking for a fork and getting a 423-piece kitchenware set that includes a blender and gas oven.
Also, if you have 1M viewers a month, that 1 GB is probably a drop in the bucket.
Love this. I have drafted a similar post directed not only to my parents but most of my friends, etc..

Unless they truly understand "startups and/or webapps" they have no clue what we do with our days (and nights, weekends..)
I agree that it is a mistake to view these companies as altruistic entities, after all, they're not charity organizations. They will use your data some way or another to increase their revenues and I think within reasonable limits this is acceptable.

As for government agencies, I'm more afraid of my data ending up in incompetent hands. Governmental organizations are not exactly known for their competency, neither here in England nor across the Atlantic. Someone incompetent with access to my data, even with the best intentions may cause serious trouble to me, not to mention someone without exactly the best intentions.
I agree with the author's critique of the trivial nature of most start-ups. Lots of guys are simply trying to make widgets more shiny, and that's a shame because they could do so much more.

I disagree that there is something we can do about it. It's the natural state of affairs.

(My rewrites always take 400-word explanations and turn them into 2 sentences. Writing is much like code golf. Sigh)
Practical Essay Tips to Solve Common Writing Problems
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See I can't drink much because I start feeling sick pretty fast. If I want I can drink a lot but it's fighting my stomach the whole time. Either I only have one or two beers or I drink till I can't feel it anymore lol. And the later will probably cause more problems.
I like to meditate a lot but I'm not very good at keeping it constant.
A similar game I like to play is with Foursquare; keep clicking through friends and locations to get from one location to another around the world.
See also:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/09/the-soviets-built-a-...

And the Hn discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=884554
>Out of curiosity, does it work the same way for you as a hacker hiring a biz type? For example, if you hire a sales and later fires him, there's the chance that he/she will take your clients away. Thoughts?

I wouldn't know. I'm in a business where face-to-face sales doesn't matter. the value is in the price and reliability. I mean, if someone else wants to build something better and cheaper, I might have a problem, but I don't think anyone would get very far just calling my customer list.

Also, when I do advertise, or "sell" I mostly focus on brand building rather than selling to individual customers, and I own the brand much more than I own the customer list.

If more of my perceived value was in individual customer sales, of course, this would be different.

You do bring up an interesting point, though. most of the people I do this with, I can train, to some extent. I mean, every now and again I'll find a webapp dev who is better than I am at that right off the bat, but most people I've hired required some training from me to get to that point, so it might be that you need to do this with people in your skill area? on the other hand it sounds like you've got some basic tech skills, so it's probably worth a shot.

The closest thing to biz types I've hired are accountants and bookkeepers. I've actually done okay, I think, hiring bookkeepers; as for my accountant, I pay full price just 'cause of the incredible badness of screwing up your taxes.
Well, I think Guidos point is just that the pep number should be changed - to follow procedure.
Your description of Minimum Viable Product appears to classify the MVP as the end-point of the process. My thinking is that the MVP is the starting point of an iterative development process. Its value is that it allows users to participate in the product design, and from this feedback you can modify and extend the initial product with the things they actually want rather than the things you imagine they want. The MVP is the first question you ask your users "Is this what you want?". Users find it very difficult to engage with design documents or specifications, but put a product in front of them and they will understand you and tell you what they want different.
Simple, don't think of it as a tech startup. Find a way to make money without writing code. I started off using Google Docs before paying to get a Rails app built. Once the money is coming in, even just a few bucks, you can work on attracting people with time and/or money to help you scale.
I tried it, but doing a GET to api.no.de/coupons returned an empty array ([]) and posting to ♥ got me {errors:"page not found"}

I wonder if they're out of coupons..?
> Yes I could spend the next 12-24 months to learn coding but we know in the start-up world it's all about speed to market.

The more coding you know the better your income prospects, the more valuable your skill set will be in a tech startup, and the more potential co-founders you will meet.

12-24 months is nothing in the development of a business.

And sufficiently developing relationships with good potential technical co-founders could easily take longer.
Node.js is the most promising new web application server. The key features are:

* It's designed around an event loop and non-blocking IO
* It executes server-side JavaScript on Google's V8 engine
* It's fast and high troughput
* Node.js is currently adopted by Joyent, Heroku, Yahoo and many others

Details about Node.js can be found here: http://nodejs.org/
Is anyone else having trouble viewing that haskell link (ie 8 & firefox 3.6.10 on Windows 7)? I'd really like to have a look at it but it keeps flickering and then going to a blank page. When I hit the back button I see it for a second but then it disappears.
I was one of those guys and if I hadn't given it a shot, I would have regretted it for the rest of my life. I learned some hard lessons and then went to college and got a bachelor's in engineering.

Okay, so I put off financial security for a few years, but I have a lot of great memories and the satisfaction of knowing I had the balls to try. No regrets.

From the condescending tone of your post, it seems you think you're better than all those guys who pursued their dream. You're wrong and I salute each and every one of them. What fun is life if you don't take chances?
1000x YES on the "aim high stuff is nonsense." It's cargo-culting, pure and simple. Copying the way an accidental empire was built is as silly as building a straw plane in the hopes that the real plane will come back. Or buying Aeron chairs and a foosball table.

As Basho once wrote, "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought."

That said, can't agree with you on the statement that a lifestyle business is a business where the ambition has waned. Lots of people with "lifestyle" businesses are getting exactly what they wanted. Getting what you want is getting what you want, regardless of whether somebody on the outside deems your ambitions "good enough."

HNers seem to treat "lifestyle business" like a slur, while lionizing people with unlikely lifestyle businesses (hi patio11). I'd like to see that cognitive dissonance resolved.
Try http://www.teknobites.com/2008/08/13/scrybe-invites/
Except the implicit intellectual theft. What you are describing is pretty close to the music industry's original purpose - bridging the gap between creators and buyers - and see how often that gets criticised (perhaps rightfully now) as vampiric.
Right, but that's what I'm talking about. Widgets should never be your language. If you think widgets are your language then you've fallen into the widget trap.
Murasaki: A Fast, Parallelizable Algorithm to Find Anchors from Multiple Genomes
For example, American companies tend to focus on the next quarter. In contrast, Japanese companies tend to have a 10 year plan.

This is a commonly repeated trope, but I don't think it's true. The time frame a company targets is primarily a function of it's business model, not it's country of origin.

Many US companies have a long term (30+ year) focus; Pharma (long drug development cycles), some Big Tech (Oracle, IBM focus on relationships with big business), many financial companies (Berkshire and Lehman Brothers make long term bets in securities markets) and all oil companies (finding oil takes time).

Most companies with a short term focus primarily focus on rapidly changing markets. Apple is is focused on building a shiny version of whatever is hot right now (or about to be hot) and Goldman is focused on short term speculation/services. It's not hard to think of foreign companies with a short term focus - L'Oreal (next big thing in cosmetics) and Bandai (next big thing in toys) are two such examples.
How does one begin freelance web development?
Hey guys. I'm a high school senior that wants to start web development for several reason: 1) I enjoy web development 2) I need a job 3) I'm probably shooting for a Computer Science degree. However, I'm at a loss as to begin this venture and how to procure my first several clients. I'm willing to do the first couple of clients pro bono, because at least that will give me some sample work that I can show off in the future to potential clients. I would be grateful for any advice.
Google at 12
> we're going to do user research methods I've never heard of

That's a good thing.
#2 I might be missing something, but is there a way to do a quick image or news or map search with that new format without the sidebar? If there is, I couldn't find it quickly.
The algorithm, crudely speaking, is based on upvotes and age. Nine upvotes in a short enough period of time will get a story to the #1 position; nine upvotes over many hours might not get a story on the front page at all (depending on the other stories.)

If you want to see the details, check out the Arc source code.
I've used all those methods, but of course, using those methods alone don't deliver good (or even mediocre) usability.

Honestly, I think those methods are only useful if you already pretty much know what you're doing in general, know all the key principles, and are trying to get a handle on the specific case you're designing for.

People who don't know what they're doing usually try to hide that behind process-wanker-hood.
Ain't it the fact that 90% of everything sucks?
Sal Khan's Academy
Choosing the Domain Name for Your Blog
99 pages of apps on the wall
Http://www.eymardeas.com/choosing-domain-blog/
I think that the title of this HN posting is misleading. The actual title of the article is Wildlife filmmaker Chris Palmer shows that animals are often set up to succeed
So if I understand this correctly, it all boils down to how far the aliens are? If they're too far, there is no way to discern that there are planets around here, but if they're close enough they can detect the presence of a large source of gravity that would potentially intrigue them enough to make a closer look?

Or more to the point, it means our chances of discovering inhabitable exoplanets are next to zero despite there being a near infinite number of such, simply because even when we do discover them, what we really discovered is a planet from thousands or even millions of years ago. Useful!
Please don't take offense, but that's a very programmer-like approach to usability.

Usability is so much more about mental models than it is about efficiency, about helping the user feel confident & safe, than about a lack of surprises. Sensible hierarchy and visual relationships are a big thing that most people seem to forget.

Workflow, too, is critical. I've used a lot of software where every screen is mathematically, scientifically "usable" but the software overall was crummy because it duplicated a workflow from another piece of software which had got it wrong initially.

For example: 100% of email clients. Feed readers. Project management tools. They're all the same.

Surprises are actually very good in many cases. Even "ease of use" is something you don't actually always want.

My interfaces break all sorts of rules like "use standard widgets" and "conform to expectations" and "no surprises" -- but that surprise then results in an "AHA!", great enjoyment and power, and that's why people write love letters to our customer support account.