skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that is just the start. Imagine an app that lets groups of office workers put together a large complex order that is already paid for when the trunk leaves the overnight lot. It could start to blur the distinction between food truck and the office catering outfits I have seen.

You could go so far as to allow the menu to be customized the night before. Maybe the truck operators could move on a great deal on beef because they have all the orders paid for in advance.

Another idea for an app would be a real time inventory that could run against a fleet of trucks so that new inventory could be dispatched to try and catch more of the unexpected lunch rushes.
I think everyone can agree (relentless optimism ensues) that we hope the licensing costs cover the externalites (parking, waste clean up), which mitigates that to some extent.

That still leaves property values as an issue.
Hey <US carrier> how about this idea. Charge me for (.5, 2, 5) GB of data and then let me use it. Let me turn my phone into a wireless hotspot so I can use my laptop/ipad/tablet/something on the Internet.

I wonder how long it will be before one of the carriers start offering this. Verizon and Sprint each offer a portable Wifi hotspot, but you can't share the data with your smartphone data plan (which is usually required). Just put the hotspot on my phone and don't make me pay twice.

Yes, I know this is wishful thinking. And yes, I know it's "unofficially available" via Froyo, but it's my impression that this functionality is not officially sanctioned by the cell providers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research
I removed my email and personal information for a while due to my actions on HN. I engaged in a strange exchange on HN which got me thinking that it was an odd conversation after some research on the person in question I found that they where a convicted pedophile and had been expelled from Egypt due to links to a terrorist organization. I believe that they are still being sought in the states. Anyway, I felt that it may be prudent to remove my info for some time least I get a bunch of harassing communications due to my finding out their dirty little secret, but I felt compelled to inform others who they where dealing with.
Programs are made of ideas
I think we are on a path to reach an asymptote, so changes won't be as drastic (though that may just be narrow-mindedness).
Living With the Revenge Effect - John Parkinson
I actually prefer source code revision system more than wiki. Wikis are chaos. People can still fork your code, and submit pull requests. Moderation is still required.
That's not the only way to transmit information with radio waves. What's wrong with this: To send binary data, you could either send the pure signal (1), or you could not send any signal at all (0). As long as the clock cycles of the sender and receiver are the same, it should work (eg: 100MHz).

Given that this isn't the way it works, there must be some major flaw with it.
The real issue with sites like 99designs isn't the quality (though it IS mostly terrible), it's the _consistency_. If you're getting a bunch of different designers to design you something over their lunch break with no interest in or knowledge of your company/goals, you're gonna get something different every time.

Seriously, skip the kids at 99designs and hire a local freelance designer. Maybe you can get lucky and guarantee them [X] number of hours a month in exchange for a lower rate.
I think the worst problem is breakdowns. Given a bunch of complicated mechanical devices zooming around the place all day long being pedaled by people with no incentive to be careful, how often is one going to get jammed? I'd say pretty often. And then your entire line is filled with angry commuters dangling in plastic tubes above the ground while you have to go get a crane to fix it.

Still, a small-scale deployment might work. I can imagine it on a university campus. I can't imagine any city installing it, simply because there are too many voters who would say "damned if I'm going to get into a little plastic tube and pedal while everybody looks at my legs".
fresh, eager, programmers should jump into any project that interests them, regardless if its personal or public.
I pasted in a Perl module and my Dvorak actually managed to narrowly edge out Colemak in most ways. But I would consider that a fluke.

The heatmap of the buttons was particularly impressive. It's great to see what I already felt.

Oh, and ignore the personalized layout, though props to the site for saying what things they did not consider when making the layout. But those things they ignore matter a lot.
Fallout 1+2 (and 3 when it gets old enough to be considered "classic")
How a Pricing Expert Negotiates Cheap Tickets
I still have a lot of fun with Thrust, Repton and Blockout, all of which have crappy graphics.
Making the first lesson available for free would answer a lot of questions and address a lot of anxieties as well as probably lure in more students.
For most of the people looking to program something in Haskell or Erlang, programming is their outside interest. Perhaps that's why we get so many compilers written in exotic languages...
I'm not opposed to regulating food trucks for crowd control reasons. Nor would I object to charging them license fees proportional to their impact (e.g., cost of additional litter cleanup) - in fact, I'd strongly support that.

But that's not tptacek's objection - his objection is that many people will prefer Starbucks Truck to Intelligentsia, which might cause Intelligentsia to go out of business. This would deprive him of the coffee he desires, and he is willing to deprive everyone else of the coffee they desire to protect his preferred coffee.
Beating the Impossible Slider Puzzle
Wish I had seen Flightcaster before her flight took off! Her route had over 80% chance of delay, which it was-- over an hour.
Do we now need a startup that is an Exchange for MSFT points?
This is completely rational if you consider that Larry Ellison's goal is to build TJ Watson's IBM. Oracle wants to be a systems company instead of a software license company.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/ellison-wants-to-model-new-ora...
100% Exclusion from Tax on QSB Stock Bought Before End of Year
What's the followup here? I'd like to give this a shot at some point, just for a few days to see how it goes. I have been typing long enough that I definitely don't need to look at a keyboard, so I'm guessing I'd need to pop off all the keys, reconfigure, then find some sort of software that remaps the keyboard? Or is something like this built into Windows and Mac?
You are basically saying that there is no reason to incorporate, and that simply isn't true.

Your name can be on the paperwork, your company can be in debt, it can even go bankrupt, as long as you did not do something called 'mismanagment' or 'fraud' you should be good. Being a minority shareholder implies that even if you had wanted you could not have stopped it from going the way it did, unless you happen to be a signing officer of the company able to act on his own, but that does not detract from the above.

Puncturing the corporate veil to go after the private assets or credit status of an officer of the company is a very high threshold to meet, in the case of 'peanuts' debts like the one we are talking about here nobody in their right mind is even going to try.

On top of that, he would have to be an officer of the company that has put up a personal guarantee for any of the debt to rub off, if you do that you're silly and I assume that since there is a corporate lawyer involved here and that the company is a Delaware corporation that he's well protected from that angle.
As a designer I would never hand over my designs to one of those chop shops. Any designer worth his salt can code his own designs. I don't trust the psd2html services to give me high-quality, semantic, robust markup and CSS.
If you're looking for a logo or page that will fit in with your existing look and feel, those sites are pretty good. But for me personally, I got a lot more traction by being able to sit with the designer and really give them a sense for what I'm trying to accomplish. So, it really depends on what you need.
Who says you need graphics?

o | o | o
----------
x | x | x
----------
o | o | o

That (if HN doesn't mangle it) should be a fully working Tic-Tac-Toe board. You can store it as a string, hashtable, whatever you want. You could label the squares 1-9 for the prompt asking the user where to move.

This is all doable with perl and a command line. Try it out, see what you learn.
From what I can tell, this is after the write-downs from sold assets: someone walks on their mortgage, the bank sells it in a foreclosure sale, some of the proceeds are distributed to the bond holders by tranches, and then that asset is removed from the bond. The way tranching works, lower tranches like this one lose assets that way disproportionately quickly. Their bond now has no remaining assets on which it has any claims left, so any cash they've already gotten is the full value of the security.
Great post!

And the other reason you were smart to quit that idea is: "Easy to use note-taking application with cloud syncing and simple organization." That sounds like overkill if I've ever heard it for a simple note-taking tool. If I'm taking notes I use a text editor or paper. For task and project tracking, I use Jira.
My friends on steam started to comment about how many times they see the popup that I'm playing X-COM: UFO defense, so I had to stop.
Part of me is left nagging me for not learning Haskell.
My favorite game of all time was made in 1998... 12 years later I still play it maybe once a year. Anyone else a big fan of Grim Fandango? I wish they would resurrect this game, or at least do an update to it like they did with Monkey Island.
I'm having trouble connecting your analogy to my analogy, which is the trouble with analogies.

In this case, we're not talking about "old" vs. "new"; we're talking about one group of merchants who rent retail space and pay taxes, and another group which does neither, offers a substitutable good, and uses public space to do it.

Like I said, I like the food trucks, but the city is already pricing out independent restaurant operators without effectively subsidizing another class of competitors.
HN mangled it, but I think you can see where the line breaks ought to go.
It depends.

Firstly, what stage of a startup are we talking about? Are we talking a guy building just a landing page? Are we talking a 20-person team with VC? The answer is different for each case, both because of the money available, but also because of how much that design will end up being used. A landing page that might never lead to a product shouldn't cost you $1,000.

I haven't had much experience on the later stages of a startup, but I have built a few products to the beginning stages. Early on, I made the mistake of building the product without a design first thing. I figured, if it gets good feedback, I can alway redesign it. Instead, what I would do today if I were building any product is go buy a template for $50, and work off that. Saves a lot of redesign time (which is harder to do, since you've already got legacy code). Also, gets you the "good design first impression" right off the bat, which will lead to more accurate results when you need them the most (since you really don't know if the product will be a success or not).

For a landing page, which you should do before building a product (unless the product is really simple), I've recently learned the best way. Go to WooThemes.com or ThemeForest.com, buy a WordPress template for $70, and it will make setting up your landing page a Wysiwyg experience, which is much better. Even if you're a programmer like me, trust me on this, using WordPress will make things smoother, and the design will be better for it.

As for an actual startup with an actual product (and money in the bank), I wouldn't even think twice: hire a designer.
Python is particularly cozy, I think. It picks up things from other languages, so I don't think there's much it can't do reasonably well.
Thanks for the reply. I'll follow-up later to see what Zed's plans are. I agree that getting instructor Q&A is valuable and that live video is tricky to schedule. I'd be happy with screencasts since there is an opportunity for Q&A later.

It might be a personal thing, but I learn much better when I can see the teacher and follow along with them. My best teachers have always been my most passionate teachers, and I think many of us either know of Zed's reputation or have had first-hand experience with it.

Zed giving readings, assignments, and feedback: worth the money.
Zed getting all up in your business, taking you down a notch or two, and building you back up again: priceless.
Zynga Buys German Game Engine Developer Dextrose AG
Poll: Would you be more likely to purchase from an honest advertiser?
If an advertiser either online or print could prove their claims and in general avoid "selling too hard". Would that make you more likely to buy their product? You can assume that the advertiser meets your own personal requirements for verification for the sake of the question.
Yes, I'd be more likely to purchase from them.
No, wouldn't make a difference.
I have to admit, I was actually a bit upset to hear this.

I remember finding these guys some time ago and loved what they were building. Now it seems like it will never be available to anyone.
Ask HN: Donations with ustream, please rate my new node.js app.
Hello, Here's my first mashup, you can collect donations with it, next to your live video.
It lives here: http://donat.io
It was made for the paypal developer challenge:
https://ppdevchallenge.ebayinc.spigit.com/Page/ViewIdea?ideaid=1708
Please tell your suggestions or even vote for it.
Thank you!
Btw, don't forget to check out the other entries also: https://www.x.com/community/ppx/devchallenge/peoples_choice
MeeGo Developers Get a Discount at Qt Developer Days
You're probably more talented than you realize, but I wouldn't expect all designers to know html. I know a few designers that are amazing, but clueless with html. I think the skills are quite often mutually exclusive -- which is a good thing for you as the exception.
I have no idea why they didn't go with the new Windows Phone OS as it seems more suited in so many ways. I can only speculate some vendors were already writing software to run over top the old OS.
I think a lot of the classic games are classics because they're universal and appeal to human natures desire to solve puzzles and best challenges. Games like Tetris will never get old because they're simple, easy to pick up, but you can always outdo yourself. Most games now cost $50-$60, last 5-10 hrs, and then you're done (generalizing here). I think that's way worse than classic games that I'm still playing 15 years later.
Think about movies. The earliest movies were terrible; just technology demonstrations, but they wowed audiences at the time. By the 1920s you were starting to get some films which are still worth watching today as films rather than as historical curiosities (Metropolis, The General). By the 1940s, truly great films were being produced (Citizen Kane, Casablanca) and many would argue it's been basically a plateau ever since then... a few truly great films and a large number of quite good ones produced every decade since.
You know what? Everyone is giving Kevin Rose shit for this redesign, but kudos to him for having the balls to take the risk to not rest on his laurels and try to improve. We'd all be lucky to be in his shoes to have that opportunity to take such a risk.

The reality is, some business decisions are bad. But you really don't know until you try them. i.e. you get nowhere without taking risk.
* System Shock 2
* Tie Fighter
Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets
I am a programmer starting my own business. I pretend to be a designer, but when it comes down to it, I'm really lost. I've tried the ThemeForest/WooThemes route for nice templates. While they have some beautiful templates, they'll still need customization that I can't do.

Suck it up, find a good designer and pay them well. I'm glad I did.
The abominable strtok()
Computer Controlled Bacteria Builds Tiny Pyramid
Yes, it's unfair to other coffee shops to have to compete with a truck that offers a similar product with an artificially (state-sponsored!) reduction in cost structure.

Cities are zoned for retail business. That zoning is part of what determines the cost of commercial real estate. Why is it fair for the city to "look the other way" when people set up transient businesses that cannibalize businesses that invest in their community? That's a de facto subsidy, not the free market.
The way that these deals are structured is that a bundle of loans are aggregated in a broad river of money over a period of time, and then the money is sliced by time into bonds. (Not entirely by time, it is usually structured so that later bonds get appropriate interest payments.) If you're in one of the later time slices and money doesn't come in, you don't get paid. If you're in one of the earlier time slices, you still get paid. This means that every deal generates bonds with a range of risk from extreme to AAA. (Unless the risk models are wrong, in which case the "AAA" can turn out to be risky. As happened.)

When you have a loan modification, the principal owed drops. That means that the total amount of money coming into the deal goes down. Those losses hit the bottom bonds first. As you reduce principal, you reduce interest. Once enough money has gone out of the deal, those bonds won't pay anything more, and the bond is dead.

(I haven't been in finance for several years, but I used to be in the CMBS world.)
Eagles on Pogo-sticks.
Thanks. I know it sounds like overkill - but it's exactly what SimpleNote dies :-) I would be very curious to know more about how successful they are.
Mine too: the original Deus Ex was one of, if not the, greatest games ever built and I still play it today.
I just sent you an email. I used to research the carding/malware scene I can probably answer all of your questions.

It's not that easy to drain a bank account- which is why malware authors will typically sell bank account info in bulk for about 1% of the balance. You can get a credit card number for as little as $2-$3 on the black market.
One more try:

1) Why not limit submissions on HN to one per day?

That way, people will only submit their most relevant links. If a story is important enough, then either 1) someone else can submit it and this will invite broader participation on the site, or 2) it won't be submitted today and can be added tomorrow (and it probably wasn't that important to begin with).

2) HN articles used to relate to either hacking or startups (stories about education, economics, etc. were typically found on Digg and Reddit). Why not return to this formula?
Thanks, for clearing that up but from the charts I saw on the site, there where still assets in bankruptcy which temporarily stays the asset sale, I could be totally misreading the info (it happens) but it did look to me that their where still unsold assets under the umbrella protection of bankruptcy proceedings. As well I still do not see how PMI plays into their return.
Avandia Goes Down: A Pharmaceutical Research Rant
Well you can't get divorced if you can't find a wife! I kid. I kid.

But engineers strike a good balance of time at home and financial compensation. If you're making much more than a decent engineer, you're probably a senior exec, lawyer, or business owner with not enough time for the wife. Don't have any data to back this up, but just my suspicion.

If you're making much less than an engineer, you may run into money problems which is a leading cause of divorce.
Google, Apple, Intel Said Poised for U.S. Agreement on Hiring
Dungeon Keeper 1 is still one of my favorites. I complete it a couple of times every year.
You're right, but it depends on the length of the conflict. Each Apache Helicopter is built by hand. They have individual names. We only produce 60 of them a year.

I don't know the loss rate we've encountered in Iraq and Afganistan (I know its much lower than the Blackhawks) but even if you're losing 61/year for a long enough timeline....
Donkey Kong (arcade version) is still the only game that, in my opinion serves as a true metric of core gaming skills (tenacity, patience, hand-eye, etc)

New games won't ever come close to that era in regards to sheer difficulty
> This paragraph from the paper is a false statement when applied to randomized quicksort.

Looks OK to me subject to the criteria McIlroy gives for the success of his method. (You did read the whole paper, not just that paragraph, right?) His adversary effectively incorporates a heuristic for telling when the pivot is being selected!

See http://pastebin.com/5B5qffJt for a simple demonstration of McIlroy's adversary in action against a randomized quicksort implementation. If you run the code there, you'll find that the "good" case (without the McIlroy adversary) typically takes about 1.5 n log n comparisons, and the "evil" case (with the McIlroy adversary) typically takes about 0.5 n^2 comparisons.
If you know her send her my thanks, her video was very inspiring to myself and a bunch of my friends.
Honestly, I don't care; I go to Starbucks 40% of the time and Intelligentsia 60% of the time (Intelligentsia is on the first floor of my business). The reason I brought up Starbucks was to take the "underdog vs. establishment" subtext out of the discussion, because it isn't relevant, but was essentially the theme of the article we're commenting on.
Why isn't the text on github yet, it just says "Nothing to see here yet. Move along."
Ask HN:  Contemplating Working for a Competitor
(This is not from my regular account.)

Here's where I am:

> Have worked in enterprise software for past 15 years

> Part of a still-startup semi-successful company for > 5 years now, increasing management responsibilities during that time, have written key parts of complex product's back-end

> Current company has several hundred customers, many well-known corporate names

> Company well-established in its area, is expanding into another area

> A viable new competitor in the other area is gaining some traction, might start addressing current company's expertise soon ...

> Current company will need to expand code base and dev team to address new area and new competitor, but: dev team has ossified and developed some bad habits (encouraged by former dev head), dev organization won't scale without hard-to-effect changes

> Current company is being granted patents for current tech but for an over-engineered solution -- patents probably circumventable and I'm sure prior art exists

> Mid-40's, been dealing with same tech for a while, but still nimble and read up on latest developments, don't have too much trouble venturing into new areas

> Increased family responsibilities of late

> In California (might apply for legal questions)

... and so:

> I believe I have expertise and management skills the new competitor would need to quickly develop a competing version of current company's product (you might ask "why don't you take that expertise and apply it to current company's culture?")

> I'm less and less enchanted with current company, I worry for their future

> I'd like to rebuild this product concept again the right way ... there's too much cruft

> My personal outcome might be much better, if not monetarily, at least from a personal satisfaction viewpoint (other than being marked a traitor that is)

> I'm sure the new venture would be demanding ... in my current position I can deal with family matters and explore new tech

> * in any case, I WANT TO TALK TO COMPETING COMPANY ABOUT A POSSIBLE ARRANGEMENT *

Not being given to underhanded tactics in the past, contemplating this step is new and somehow satisfying and freeing. How will a competitor feel about discussing the possibility of an arrangement? Should I feel dirty? What should I ask for in return?