skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you feel about Shelter Pets?
So how you people feel about shelter pets? Have you ever gotten one?

I'm actually volunteering my time on a team with the Shelter Pet Project (a $100MM+ media campaign to encourage pet adoption) and we have like a 10-question survey you can fill out.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/B7T6WL7

Most of the people I know with shelter dogs say they're the greatest thing to ever happen in their life but other people need to go to breeders due to specific needs.
However many management people believed that customers don't care design details and it can't sell
Today, I am coding for opportunity. A siren's call in my analytics report. Market Driven Development.
That makes Dropbox a lot harder to use because you now have to be able to decrypt your files on every device you want to use Dropbox on. I use Dropbox to have access to my files from anywhere with an internet connection if even I'm not on my computer and unless there's encryption built in that isn't going to work.
Ask HN: Any good places to find early adopters/testers in addition to HN?
I'm simply looking for that magical garden where there are slews of open-minded folk that are excited to play with your MVP and willing to offer helpful feedback.

No seriously, I know HN is probably the closest thing to this magic garden, but I was wondering if anyone else found any good resources for early exposure and feedback.
There's an interesting reversal in that statement. Historically, we host our letterbox or our phone terminal, and we buy equipment and such to do it with. (mailbox and phone).
The post and phone networks provided connectivity, but not the place. Here, facebook is providing the place, but not the connectivity (users do that, by buying their internet connection), and the difference doesn't help the comparison
From the article:

> my answers are my own, and they reflect my mood, and my typos. and if they want me ot fix them they should ask me.

'Mood' is useless to those reading your posts, regardless of whether you care. I like SO because the answers are for the community and not individual egos.
I think as Jacques suggests, the problem is sheer number of submissions, combined with the way the new page seems to work by showing everything: stuff thus scrolls off the bottom much faster than it used to.

It’s unclear what could be done to counteract this.
Why would it be more unlikely, than the religious women sleeping with an atheist?

(If I may add, both scenarios are fairly common even now, and we're not even facing extinction yet)
Two solutions:

1. Spring-loaded folders. Drag the item to the left-hand pane (e.g., Places > Home) and hover over your home folder. After a moment, the folder will pop open. Continue this until you find where you want the file to go.

2. Use Path Finder (http://www.cocoatech.com/) and drag the item to the Drop Stack. Navigate where you want the file to go, and then drag the item from the Drop Stack.
Did someone say MUD?
Funding and execution I guess.

WW.com was bootstrapped out of my previous company (consultancy / software licenses).

Justin.tv is a lot slicker and it seems they are doing way better than we are in terms of traffic and user satisfaction, but we're working quite hard at the moment to turn the tide on that. WW.com to me feels as though it has a stronger community element to it.

WW is actually quite a bit older than justin.tv (we started in 1998 as 'camarades', but because the name was pretty hard to spell it got changed), we missed a few chances, had some spectacular bad luck but on the whole I'm feeling better about it today than I have felt in the last 5 years.

I don't think the Justin.tv guys have too much to worry about for the time being, but we're definitely planning a very serious effort to make a go of it.
It isn't meant to be an improvement or a replacement.

It's just a tutorial on how such things are done. :)
- Popup/Popunder ad revenue

- Sell infected users software to remove it.

- Replace links with affiliate links.

- Redirect websites/searches to other sites.

- Steal your data and sell it.

- Turn your computer into a zombie (botnet), at which point you and thousands of other infected computers attack various business servers around the world.

That's the jist of it. It's all about money.
Umm...it's an article about getting boys to read and the long-term effects of meeting boys where they are. I'm guessing they didn't emphasize being good wives and mothers because boys rarely grow up to be wives and mothers.
The long term problem with such efficiencies is that there aren't enough jobs, and that causes a great monster of a social issue.
I'd suggest you educate yourself on the origins and goals of HN before you start complaining that it's not trying to compete with Digg.
Making Progressively Enhanced Pasta
anecdotal evidence is not very useful.

Which is probably why the article mentioned a study that examined the link between access to video games and academic performance?
Yeah, couldn't find the about page.

Is it just an AJAX-based Youtube search autocomplete that pulls up the results and then makes am autoplaying playlist?
Like old fashioned interactive fiction and point and click adventures?

More seriously, I fully intend, when I have kids, to filter the games they play and try to introduce them to games like Civilization, Secret of Monkey Island, The Longest Journey and so on... I'm not exactly convinced that letting young kids play GTA and Stalker 2 is that great an idea...
Weird Anatomical Sculpts
I would become religious strictly for the benefit of getting laid. Especially if there were a lot of women and no other guys to compete with. +1 if their religion has no problem with promiscuity and sex without marriage (or maybe I could just marry them all.)

Otherwise, I could care less about the survival of the human race. In the grand scheme of things, our survival is meaningless. There is likely intelligent life elsewhere anyways. Once I die, I won't be around care.
Nice post, but your forgot the most important option of all: my customer.

My customers do great things. They often need my software, built and functioning properly for years to do these things. I love building stuff, but they are the real heroes. Just some of the things that they do:

- get the right drugs get to the right people
- get the ambulance to the right address
- get the right materials purchased and delivered
- get the right product built, on time and budget
- get the right product shipped accurately and on time
- make sure the parts going into that airplane are certified
- make sure your insurance claim gets processed properly
- make sure they make enough $, so they can keep doing it

I can go on and on, but you kinda get the idea. I love to learn, to optimize and refactor, and to build beautiful things. But what I do pales in comparison to what they need to do. I never forget that.
It shows how much the feelings about guns have changed over the past few decades. My dad used to bring his .22 caliber rifle along with ammunition to school everyday so that he could go hunting afterwards. He'd just carry it into school and put it in his locker. Not too many years ago I always had a knife with me when I went to school and in the parking lot almost every pickup had at least one shotgun in the back window. Supposedly there were rules against that, but nobody cared. Now we have students getting in trouble with the police for bringing pellet guns and knives to school.
One trick that's worked for us:

If your kids want to take a toy with them to bed, instead let them pick out a few books. This way they think of books as toys and therefore a sort of privilege (i.e. fun!).
The intention of this post is to be polarizing and controversial in order garner traffic. It doesn't deliver on anything insightful or interesting.
Well, that's like suddenly enjoying being raped.
Consumers underpredict their ability to learn new products
Paul Graham on Wikiquote
ditto. If anybody is aware of any, please advise.
That is clearly not where I'm coming from. I'm just trying to point out how an analogous article today that would make such emphasis would probably strike most people as inappropriate or chauvinistic. Don't you agree?
There's actually a nice Crossfit article about this: www.crossfit.com/cf-journal/Virtuosity.pdf

Interesting point: apparently in gymnastics, "virtuosity" is defined as "performing the common uncommonly well." I really like that :)
Doesn't it look disturbing that premier financial data company, the source of business & financial news, needs to describe ARM Holdings Plc as "designer of chips that power Apple Inc.’s iPhone"?
Why You Should Cover The Keypad When Using an ATM
Starcraft AI Tournament 1 results (with videos)
Repost of a comment I made a few days ago:

Excuse my language, but give me a fucking break. I was a teenager not that long ago, my siblings are in their teens, and I know other teens who have zero interest in video games. Aside from the fact that I think the claim of impending ostracization for non-gamers is bullshit, if your friends shun you because you don't play 20 hours of video games a week, get some new friends. You could easily make the same arguments for drugs and promiscuous sex, which I understand are popular among some groups of teenagers. I'm sure there's a lot of people that would argue that it's a "huge social disadvantage" to not being into sports, but I've lived in many places were sports seemed to be all most people cared about and I managed to maintain plenty of rich friendships, despite not giving two shits about any professional sports.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1707083
I had the same reaction. It seemed adorably quaint, as if I was reading something from the 50s. In fact the whole article gave me that impression: "It's all them new fangled gadgets I tells ya"

I don't feel enlightened having read that. The "here is my anecdote and it proves everything that I am going to say" aspect struck me wrong.
I'm not sure what your keyboard looks like, but on my keyboard the Cmd-C and Cmd-V key combinations are far, far closer together (and thus more convenient) than the CapsLock-C and CapsLock-V combinations you suggest.
Then why not a facebook account, a twitter account, an sms account, a 24/7 too-free number, a ever other form of communication?

It is very not cut and dried. It very much depends on the habits and needs of companies customers. And it very much depends on the nature of the company. Steel mill, taco cart two companies I'm not gonna begrudge not having email.

Finally it is far worse to do something poorly rather than not at all. If I can't find an email or get a bounce back I'll be miffed. If my emails aren't handled timely and well I be upset and developed a much poorer view of the company.

If you take on replying to customers you had better be committed to doing it excellently and have a clear understanding of the Cluetrain Manifesto.
It's easier, and a pass-through model is not entirely new.

DEC's fx!32 emulator was running Windows x86 code on Windows Alpha way back in 1996. And yes, fx!32 passed calls through to native Windows code, too.
There have been some great posts/discussions at the blog The Online Photographer in the last week about this, proximately prompted by the new Fuji digital rangefinder just announced at Photokina:

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogra...

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogra...

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogra...

and then less directly:

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogra...
I actually like edits on my questions/answers because they are usually always an improvement to what I wrote.
When midnight strolls by and I'm in the zone hacking, then I'm programming for me. When I wake up early and tired mon-fri to go program all day, then I'm programming for my family. I love what I do so I'm not complaining and I'm very thankful I am able to use programming to provide for my family, I just wish I could figure out a way to do that without sucking up all my programming energy and leaving me useless for the late night hack sessions I love so much.
Will be more interesting with answers.
Yes, we pay by tolerating ads and nosy engagement ploys, but we receive in exchange, curation of the raw news. On places like HN, we can participate in that curation process, which, if the community is a good match for our interests, can do a far better job than the mass media. How is the Magic Brick going to replace that?
I liked this one as well:

http://www.slideshare.net/jrosoff/scalable-event-analytics-w...
I had a similar situation once where a character set encoding bug in a cron script I wrote and was told to put live late on a Friday caused one lucky customer to receive an SMS message every minute for over 60 hours.

I got away with that one.
You can try reddit -- not the main reddit, but a technical subreddit will usually get you some constructive feedback. For example, if I wrote an app in Python, I could post to the python subreddit to get some better feedback than any of the other ones. You'll have to weed out some of the trolls, but it's still worth the time.

I have also seen some good feedback come from posting a link on Twitter. Usually just the people I know will actually try it out, so the feedback is honest and straightforward.
Tell HN: My solution to the lack of new story reviews
Since JacquesM just told me I was a solution looking for a problem, I thought I'd share some of my "solution-ness" with the rest of the gang.

I propose a site called read-edit-write

To participate, you must write, edit, and read articles. It is not enough to simply consume. The ratio is probably something like for every
story you write(submit), you must edit 3 other stories, providing detailed feed back to the user so they can improve their work. And for every story you edit, you get to read, vote, and comment on a dozen or so stories without participating at all.

This means everybody is a player.

Of course, adoption is the problem here. But I bet there are thousands of folks who write that would like others to edit their work, and there are many more that would love reading certain authors except for the fact that their work is so poorly edited. I know I would be excited to see a site where participating meant more than just voting somebody down because I disagreed with them.

The beauty of this idea is that the original authors are free to take their edited work and rewrite for other markets. Readers get heavily edited unique work which has also passed the wisdom of crowds thing. And reviewers get the chance to read and meet new people as they provide their edits.

[Queue up the 17,321 reasons this would never work]
Seems like the Ruby equivalent of Python's Unladen Swallow, but with more momentum. Unladen Swallow seems pretty neglected at the moment.

The Ruby community is definitely not lacking in passion, something I'd like to see more of in the Python community.
I see Larry needs low-power navigation equipment for his new boat...
How I Spent My Summer in Startup Boot Camp
Patents are meant to spur innovation and thereby improve social welfare. Just because this may work in certain industries, doesn't mean that it automatically works in other industries. There's a lot of evidence that the costs of software patents to society are higher than their benefits.
It's a product for a niche B2B market, but if you're buying, email's in my profile ;)

The network is 10-Gigabit ethernet, from server to a switch, then switch to client, all via CX-4 or SFP+. The data is actually coming off disk at that rate (in ram would be cheating :p ). It's backed by a 16-drive hardware raid using 2TB spinning disks (SATA) in a raid5. The performance we sell is actually 2 streams of read while simultaneously writing a stream to disk, so 600 out, 300 in.

The files are actually the hard part. This supports the dpx 'video' format. The format originated from film scanners, and so each frame is (basically) a 12.5 MByte jpeg. Multiply that by 24-30 fps, add in overhead for reading that many files/sec, and you get 300+ MBytes/sec. (This is also why I'm so sure there's more performance to be had if you don't have the same overhead.)
The way i see it, is that this is just capitalism. If you sell a overpriced poor product, and someone comes in and sells a better product, your going to lose. Of course people don't like to lose, so they try to get government to prevent the new comers from getting a foothold on their market.
PPK had this to say about it:

"Just tested Windows Phone for the first time. Not bad, Microsoft, for all that you're using IE7."

http://twitter.com/ppk/status/25159727435
I'm pretty sure I would want things to happen more or less only when I take some action with my hands (gaze AND click/keypress). Things opening, closing, raising, lowering, or otherwise flying around purely on the basis of my gaze would probably be disorienting, or there would be a lot of false positives. ("I don't WANT that window to raise!")
I find it quite interesting. It overviews the history of the StackExchange program and expresses how the rules for the program are quite arbitrary and that Jeff and Joel are the ultimate gatekeepers.

It's posts like these that often allow those running the ship to get objective feedback on how their decisions are affecting the community.

It came across a little nasty, but informative nonetheless.
Work that matters: Sr. QA Automation Engineer to Serve Humanity
Come do work that matters. Benetech is a non-profit social enterprise building software to address global issues around literacy, human rights and environmental conservation. We are looking for talented QA engineers who want to serve humanity. Learn more about Benetech at http://benetech.org
Swear on my life, I love my parents for video-game deprivation.
Coding for the customer is fine, but they don't know the difference between crap and art; as long as it runs.

I code for me, later, when I'm trying to figure out what the heck I did.
For Facebook, Movie Damage Control
if u have a following on twitter...
Yes and no. It's very easy to end up with a tab bar jam-packed with pages on topics only peripherally related to what you're interested in... that's how people get lost on Wikipedia for hours. Or tvtropes or encyclopediadramatica, to take more frivolous examples!
HN does not need to be re-jiggered or re-invented or re..., just make an effort to check the new page and upvote the articles you like. I always do because I like to see quality, or my assessment of it, make it to the front page and have other users chime in. Let the experiments happen on the plethora of clone sites.
Yes. This is pretty much where I am at. :)
Watch and learn: How music videos are triggering a literacy boom in India
so how exactly will the schools be able to sell the stock? trough SecondMarket like FB employees?
Do us all a favor and just lie instead. Lie about being religious.
IBGStar iPhone Glucometer Could Provide Unprecedented Aid to Diabetics
Ask HN: My startup failed. $9k in debt and need to pay most of it in 12 days.
HN,

A startup that I am part of failed. Prereq: USA, C-Corp in Delaware. We have $6k in server fees to Rackspace and $3k in debt with our lawyer. We also have a huge amount of credit card fraud that went through our credit card processing account/merchant account (like $8k), which is going to be an ongoing issue for the next year+ and may end up in me and my SSN being blacklisted from Visa and Mastercard.

I used to be able to cover this kind of failure, but over the past few months, I've sunk tons of my money into this company and completely depleted my checking and savings accounts.

The account goes into collections in the first week of October (which means my credit will be destroyed). I will be leaving the startup after I sort everything out.

I need a way to make this $6k in about 12 days. My savings is shot. I have some consulting (WordPress, PHP, Rails) money coming in, but it's only $1k and might not even be on time. My co-founder owns a majority of the company but he's traveling so he's a bit unavailable.

This seems to be the "low" of that rollercoaster we call serial entrepreneurship. Thank you for your help, Hacker News.

EDIT: I'd just like to say that I'm using a throwaway because I'm pretty well known on HN, which makes this pretty interesting. I usually read these kinds of Ask HN posts and think "ouch"—funny to be on the other side.

EDIT: I'll respond soon, HN is giving me the "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." thing. I'm reading all your comments—they are not going unnoticed. And thank you.
> The USPTO can, and should, exclude software from patent eligibility on other legal grounds: because software consists only of mathematics, which is not patentable, and the combination of such software with a general-purpose computer is obvious.

Software does not consist of only mathematics. One might use mathematics as part of understanding how a particular piece of software works, but that is not really different than the way one might use mathematics to understand how an electronic circuit works.
for an mvp it may be tough... but i have beta tested for companies that i follow on twitter.
Microsoft reverses course: IE9 won't require Windows 7 SP1
I code for myself: the only customer and beta tester that will endure me.
HP Slate video shows all that's wrong with Windows 7 on tablets
Too bad it works neither on Linux nor OSX. Would be nice to see the info about unsupported browsers earlier.

I would love to try it!
Food trucks are one of the breaking trends in urban food scenes. Austin is apparently famous for them, but every major metro area has a bunch of them now. For the uninitiated, these are high-end restaurant operations, in "sandwich shop" configurations, hosted in trucks. They aren't hot dog carts; we're talking about foie gras and duck confit flatbreads here.

There's an obvious legitimate concern here, and it may help if you switch the role of the underdog and the establishment to understand it. If guerilla chefs can set up trucks, so can Starbucks[1]. How would we feel about Starbucks launching a fleet of cafe trucks and parking them right near independent coffee houses?

It's these kinds of tensions between the local optima that the market seeks and the long-term welfare of communities that makes me not a libertarian. The food trucks are awesome. I want more of them. But I don't want every neighborhood restaurant in the South Loop replaced by Potbelly's, Jimmy Johns, and Dunkin' Donuts, which is exactly what will happen if food trucks make the margins on brick-and-mortar restaurants untenable for independent operators.

Chicago apparently has a provision that allows food trucks only within a certain distance of a brick-and-mortar restaurant. It's a clumsy start. It looks like there's no black-and-white answer... which is why we have a city council, I guess; that, and to prevent us from eating foie gras.[2]

[1] When I left Ann Arbor, Zingermans[3] ran a cafe truck out of a strip mall parking lot, and it was spectacularly awesome; I can't wait for the dawn of the cafe trucks in Chicago.

[2] Our city council famously banned foie gras, because force-feeding ducks is an outrage, unlike battery farming Purdue chickens.

[3] Which is awesome[1], go there, worth a detour to A2.