skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 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

Speculate much? Food trucks and restaurants offer substantially different products (restaurant = food truck + service + cozy environment). Of course food trucks would put competitive pressure on restaurants (which would lower prices, to the benefit of consumers), but why would they totally wipe them out? Would consumers switch wholesale to food trucks? Of course not. More likely, a handful of weaker, low-end restaurants lose out and close, funneling their customer bases to the fewer remaining restaurants.

But if they did, why would be go about saving them? Where's your evidence that a few brick & mortar restaurants is better for society than multiple food trucks + a park?
This is actually a really good idea. Could be very useful to startups. I'd be in if we could get it done without too much of a time commitment.
That's pretty cool; and I didn't know about codelesson - if I ever had the time to put together a decent class, I'd try this out for sure.

Grats to Zed.
How I became a boy that reads:

My parents read to me alot. I would find a book, walk up to mom and say, "Book." I loved them. Then once I learned to read I read everything, you name it, I read it. Books, magazines, billboards, cereal boxes, coke cans, if it had letters, I read it. Simple as that. I have read nearly every book in the house, twice. I just ate up books.

Now I read HN articles, programming articles, free books on Kindle, iBooks, and real books. They are the single most influential part of my life.

Reading is a very fulfilling addiction. I caught the bug. I hope you did too.
For a while I thought Google would be sweeping this under the rug.

Great call on Khan Academy.

But the $1M spent on schweeb could have done more good elsewhere. Nobody wants to go pedaling upside down on a suspended monorail. The bicycle has solved this problem pretty elegantly.
It's an interesting idea... One thing though: People usually write articles on their own sites. How are others going to be able to edit them? Or will they write articles on the new site itself, and "editors" essentially send authors a diff, or a message with suggestions?
"The Pearl" was required reading in high school. If that had been anywhere near my first book, I would have stopped reading for recreation forever. Love of baseball doesn't begin with the workout, why should reading.

// my book report was the subject of a parent / teacher conference
Wow thanks everyone for the great feedback. It sounds like Wordpress is probably going to be the safer more well supported option. Really appreciate the thoughtful comments.
Apple clobbers the competition: The carnage of Apple’s spectacular success
Any recommendations for credit card processors for the rest of us out here?
A grab-bag of study links ending in "But the issue is convoluted enough that I'm unsure."
I was wondering where Zuckerberg got $100 million in cash. Now I find out it's "$100 million" in facebook stock? Based on a valuation of... what exactly? And sellable to whom?

edit: I think I've answered my own question and it's based on a valuation of $23 billion.

Really? Who here would be willing to buy facebook at a valuation of $23 billion? Even if you think it could be worth that much, I see a lot more scenarios where it's worth less than scenarios where it's worth more.
I think this is exactly what Lending Club is for. You'll pay 9-12% interest/year, but you'll get a loan based on credit score, personal reasons and your ability to tell a story on why/how you'll pay it back: http://bit.ly/lending-club
How about this one?

http://translationparty.com/#7967523
According to a thread less than 24 hours ago the problem is that your articles are falling off the new page too fast.

The problem is too many submissions, not less people reading the new page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1720742

It's an alternative explanation.
I find myself coding for deadlines or myself all too often, which is why I would like to start open sourcing some of my projects - even if no-one uses them, it will keep me honest.
Posture influences politics?
Here's a post from 2 months ago for an MVP that aims to do just that - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511591

I'm not sure what their plans are (right now its basically classifieds for testers), but I'd love to see something far more robust. I envision the tester selecting an app to test, and then being redirected to the side within a stumbleUpon style navigation bar. This bar would provide tools to mark up the app, leave notes, etc etc. Clixpy style tracking would be great as well.

I'd definitely be game for working on this--it has "something people want" written all over it.
Dropbox is one of my favourite and first-recommended products lately. I use it for lots of things.

I use it as a general dump-folder that I sync across my Macbook Pro, my work PC (Win XP), and my Android phone. This cross-platform ability so share files is priceless to me.

I also keep my KeePass file on it, then have copies of KeePass on my phone, work PC, and laptop all pointed to that devices Dropbox folder, giving me shared access to my encrypted passwords anywhere, anytime. Again, priceless.

I use a shared Dropbox folder with some friends, and we sync files to each other when we want to share them. No more email attachments, image uploaders, or IM file transfers.
Seems unlikely that this case is going to set a precedent that redefines fair use in a jurisdiction that will be useful to you. Best not to copy whole articles in that case.

(That said, it is idiotic that you can sue someone for a copy of an article that a/ they did not post and b/ you never notified them of before suing them. THAT is broken. It should be illegal in general to utilize the courts for remedy before an equitable agreement is attempted outside the courts.)
I don't see the problem here.
In testing a MVP I submitted to several of the startup websites (1). The quality of traffic was bad. Their audience were people who were interested in kicking the tires on startups and not people in the industry I was targeting who needed a solution.

Having people try the site and give feedback on Mechanical Turk also doesn't work.

I like the suggestion of others on this thread to post to a focused subreddit. Another good idea is to find a blog through AllTop for your industry. I've found most bloggers will accept a direct ad for less than $100 a week.

What worked the best for me was good old AdSense, monitoring, and a/b testing. It is pretty easy to get a $100 coupon for new AdSense accounts and you can find out much about your site for that amount. Good luck.

(1) Fyi traffic figures indexed to highest: KillerStartups 1. FeedMyApp 0.85. NetWebApp 0.10. Cloudomatic 0.04. GreatWebApps 0.01.
I don't get how shutting down the systems is better than having attackers do it. Also, the side effects of such a bill would be ridiculous. I know most arguments I could make would be slippery slopes but I think the concern for it to get out of hand is valid.
The Constitution and U.S. Code on GitHub
We now have the technology to participate directly (if unofficially) on optimizing the U.S. Constitution and Code. Instead of interacting with the legal system politically, by supporting/opposing archaic human "representatives", let's be hackers and fork the laws. We could first gain an understanding of the legal environment, then beat congress at their own game. The U.S. Code is published every six years; the last ratified amendment to the Constitution was in 1992 (and it was proposed 202 years earlier!). Can we do to Congress what email did to the USPS?

I don't have the time to get it started (plus I'm a total git n00b), but I wanted to throw the idea out there. Maybe others have done something similar, a cursory check on Google didn't return anything though. I registered this "laws" username on GitHub and created stub repos:

http://github.com/laws/United-States-Constitution

http://github.com/laws/United-States-Code

I'd be happy to hand over the account if somebody wants it. Anyone interested?
$6k in server fees?? Was it over a couple of months? I'm curious to know the space your startup is in for that kind of server fees.
Could you elaborate on point 1?
check out http://blog.fireeye.com/.
I'd love to take a Mongrel2 class from Zed. Codelesson is new to me - I must explore...
Talk to your parents, perhaps?

(downvoting, eh?) Talk to them about a loan.
The Top-10 is just a start. As a penetration tester and sometimes-trainer, I find it's when developers start to see practical demonstrations of what these vulnerabilities can actually allow a malicious party to achieve that the eyes really get opened. Particularly when those demonstrations are within their own applications.

Check out the rest of the OWASP site, and play with WebGoat (http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_WebGoat_Projec...).

Take a look at the 'Web Security' section here: http://code.google.com/edu/courses.html

Start following some of the many webappsec blogs floating around the interwebs, subscribe to mailing lists, read tweets:
http://www.gnucitizen.org/
http://ha.ckers.org/
http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/
http://www.webappsec.org/lists/websecurity/
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23WebAppSec

There is a huge amount of information out there.
Some people spend years figuring how to make money, others spend years figuring how to take it from you.
"I donated the entirety of my early sales to charity and chalked up the experience to the importance of rigorous QA, no matter how trivial a change seems."

WOW. Respect.
There is a surprising number of these. Although I would wager that the ones who hang around wanting to make it big and having lots of ideas as to how, just no useful ones are on the right track. They just have to improve their ideas so they can be useful.

The real problem are those who don't even have useless ideas.
Chrome should have a klingon translator.
How can someone rack up an $18,000 bill? Was that just over a single month? I'm not a client of Rackspace, but I thought they billed out monthly, so if you don't pay your bill I thought they would shutdown your service. What happens, do they leave your service running and just let your bill compound?
I've also heard this called a Cache Stampede, since it's commonly caused by the sudden invalidation of a cache, which was the case for this outage.
Hands down the best file syncing and backup experience. I use it on my Ubuntu netbook and laptop, iMac, Macbook Pro, a Windows 7 VM on occasion and my Android. Sometimes there are weird conflicts between all these different devices (maybe client software/OS bugs?) but I trust it with my life.

99% of all my files are in Dropbox (minus large archived projects and videos for space/bandwidths sake) and I do a monthly dump to an external.
I disagree about choosing a language. I've been bitten first-hand when choosing a language for something it isn't good at.

These situations are pretty few and far between, but they do exist. I once used VB for a very processor-intensive algorithm because it was the best tool I had at the time for GUIs. For easy problems, the tool worked fine. It was about a week until I hit a problem that took hours to run on it. A few days later, I hit a problem that took days to run.

Had I written it in a more suited language, I could have delayed that problem... Possibly forever.

I actually consider rewriting that code even to this day... But I don't really have a good use for it now, like I did then.

In short: For that problem, I followed the advice in this post, and I was burned.
My problem with looking at the new page and help in filtering is due to the amount of general and blog spam.

I think downvotes on new page can actually help so they can discourage users from spamming HN with articles in trying to build karma points

Alternately, make posting cost the user something, say 10 Karma points per submission, in that case users will only submit something they think will grab enough attention
If you think that Chrome OS is going to be a "hacker OS", you haven't been looking at the Chrome demos.

It's designed to be more idiot-friendly than Android.
It may work, but it doesn't mean it does work. You may remember James Watt's steam engine monopoly slowing down the industrial revolution in Britain.

Everybody believed that it does work without actually examining the evidence for the other industries.
See, this is the thing about Microsoft and the Web. You can't release software that's web-based in cycles measured in years! Microsoft is still completely stuck in the '90s. Google is releasing Chrome on something like a 6-week development cycle. That's how it should be done. The web changes all the time, and Microsoft's products don't. That's the problem.

Also, from other comments on this story, I've discovered that Windows Phone 7 won't be HTML5-capable. If IE Mobile isn't even near IE9's level of sophistication, it seems unlikely that they'll ever update it to be compatible. Otherwise, why not ship something at least as good as IE8?!

In two to three years, much of the web will be HTML5. And Windows Phone 7 devices will be left in the dust.
I also love the HN minimalism. I will never change that. My problems are: I go to google in order to search HN. I can't find my bookmarks on Delicios some valuable HN tips articles. I waned to build one HN api and I want some official HN API for that. I think that HN can work to improve the readability, it happens to me that I need to search sometimes more than 10 seconds to find some article that I now is there.

I'm not talking about changing everything I'm talking about changing the small things.
Agreed. I find that when you're actually building something, that's when the great ideas come. You start to think of improvements and new approaches that you just can't think of without first getting your hands dirty.
Ask HN: Anybody going to Maker Faire this weekend? (nyc)
Maker Faire will be taking place at the New York Hall of Science in Queens this weekend, was wondering if anyone else was planning on going? One of the center stage talks i'm looking forward to is Mitch Resnick from Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu)

http://makerfaire.com/newyork/2010/
Some of the "no design still sells" can be attributed to "corporate buyer doesn't care about people using what buyer is buying".

// I should say that Toshiba does have some good design in some of their products
Awesome, thanks, the play-through by david was very helpful for getting an idea of what the game is about.
Add SSL to the list, along with hidden form parameters and request headers. It's as if nobody's ever heard of using cURL or an HTTP proxy, even if for debugging purposes.
This pretty much says word-for-word what I wanted to post. I find the existing HN design to be one of the easiest-to-read news sites around. There's absolutely no clutter, no "design getting in the way of content", and the way the meta data (post author, date posted, etc) is small and grayed out, makes it a lot easier to just skim through the post titles. Same goes once you're in the comment section.

Rather than a new design, I think HN could more benefit from new (and optional) ways to order and present the posts and comments. I'd like to read comments in their chronological order, for example, to get a better feel of the progression of the conversation.
Thanks, that's great information. Do you mind if I add it to the (public) notes on my web-page? How should I cite you?
> anything that Fog Creek every sends out and anything that I ever send out to the 60,000 people on my mailing list... I get every single bounce and delete them all by hand.

Have you considered using a system that handles that for you, like Mailchimp does? Hard bounces never hit my inbox, because they are filtered out by Mailchimp.
As a tiny incremental change, it might help if the resubmission of a link by another user would bump the link back up to the top of the new page in addition to adding a vote. If multiple people find it worthy to submit, it's probably worth giving it more screentime.
Oh wow, those are real books? From the titles, they sound like they were written entirely via mad libs.

If I had children, I would absolutely forbid them from reading books like Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger and The Psycho Butts of Uranus. Then I would smile to myself, because I'd know they'd be reading them behind my back, and the effort they'd be going to in order to hide it from me would prevent them from getting into any worse trouble.
I certainly hope that it is just speculation. I've never seen a CPU that was as much a joy to code for. I've done some assembly for various architectures, and nothing at all compares to the elegant, powerful simplicity of the ARM.

Based on Oracle's treatment of Sun, it would be a crying shame for ARM's design team to share a similar fate. No one needs a world where "movsne r0, r1" is going to violate some Oracle license agreement.
Even shorter:

http://lendingclub.com
Go for it, no need to cite.
Seems like a good companion to the "how to raise boys who read" article.
Somebody here once suggested categories, and I think there might be some merit to that idea. It allows more new and more front page stories (if there are both new and front pages for each category) and allows people to skip categories that don't interest them. For instance, some people may prefer not to see metadiscussions like this one, and are only interested in what HN thinks are worthy industry news.
sucks for the store
Reflectors use mirrors; !lenses.

I've ground a few too; Polished fewer and never completed any :)
Any time a merchant account is closed for cause, such as having too high a chargeback rate, the underwriting bank has a contractual obligation to place the merchant in the TMF (Terminated Merchant File) and MATCH list. Both the company AND the names/SSNs of the principals of the company are listed. This is intended to protect other banks -- so that a company with a history of payment fraud or other problems can't simply go bank to bank as each account is closed.

This is what would be scaring me more than any of the debts. Almost no bank will open a new merchant account for him if he's on TMF/MATCH, and that includes if he's just one of several owners of a future company -- merchant account applications ask for a list of all principals for just this reason. He'll find his way out of the debt problem, whether it's through bankruptcy or repayment, but being listed on TMF/MATCH can prevent him from starting a new business that accepts credit cards for the rest of his life.
Also, by encouraging him to drop out of Stanford, they obtain an employee with a somewhat lower market value if he ever feels like leaving youtube.
And it's a testable alternative explanation.

PG, check the analytics. What's been the trend on hits to /new over time?
It's not about credit.

Any time a merchant account is closed for cause, such as having too high a chargeback rate, the underwriting bank has a contractual obligation to place the merchant in the TMF (Terminated Merchant File) and MATCH list. Both the company AND the names/SSNs of the principals of the company are listed. This is intended to protect other banks -- so that a company with a history of payment fraud or other problems can't simply go bank to bank as each account is closed.

Being on TMF/MATCH can prevent you from opening a merchant account for future business the rest of your life. Very few banks, almost none in the US, will open a merchant account if any of the owners of the company are listed.
For a long time, i've been wanting a news site that PURELY states facts about things that happened... with absolutely no author opinion or anything else cluttering it. Yes, a lot of people might find it boring, but I also think there's a large contingent of people out there who would appreciate the ability to just read through a list of hard facts about events happening around the world and being allowed to make their own opinions on it all. It also might be interesting to combine that with user comments, so that the story itself is pure fact, and the comment section lets people discuss/debate it independently of the article author's opinions skewing the base content.

Change of this happening though? Probably close to nil.
Ask HN: Is it worthwhile for a startup to use a professional designer?
A potential client recently asked me this question and I'm interested in the community's opinions on this.

Also, this is not really a yes/no question; it's a discussion prompt. :)
"All a computer can do is mathematics"

All an electrical circuit can do is physics. Therefore, electrical inventions should not be patentable as all they are is physics.
Bull. Those German ballots may come with names on them, but you can also strike out names and add other names by hand. There may be individual restrictions on whether you can only name people that registered as candidates, or anyone fulfilling the legal requirements for being a candidate, but writing a name on a ballot doesn't always make it invalid (of course, if you write something else than a name - say, a story or an insult, or of you draw faces or doodle on it, it does become invalid).
I'm a little late to this discussion, but I have one more suggestion for boys over the age of 13. Get them around girls who find boys who are artistic and literary attractive.

I know, anyone who watches glee thinks that jocks and cheerleaders run the high schools, and I know that my experience (a small private high school in san francisco) probably isn't representative... but still, if you can find an environment like this for your kid, go for it.

He'll look back with mild embarrassment at how oh-so-suave he felt hanging out in north beach cafes reading beat lit, but hey, at least he's reading, right?

(ok, fine, that was me).
Exactly the opposite of my sentiment. You're not fooling anyone by pretending that a message was written by the CEO (unless that CEO is Steve Jobs, but that's because Jobs acts as Apple's de facto PR department). You're also not fooling anyone by putting a "personal" greeting including the customer's name at the top of your mass mailing.

The only time I want a communication from a specific person is if that specific person both wrote it and will be answering replies. Unless I have a specific relationship with someone (insurance agent, account manager, something like that), these are unlikely to be the same person.
The other comments here will help you much more in the immediate timeframe, but here's my suggestion for after this is all over:

Write. Nothing will give you catharsis and perspective on this unpleasant experience like writing. Consider sharing your experience with the community; your lessons learned may end up saving someone else from a similar situation, and while learning from a failure is great, teaching from a failure is even better.
CNN: Linkbait attempt #x
Nissan has to stop taking LEAF reservations 3 months ahead of schedule
When all you have are nails, anything hard and flat will do as a hammer.
FYI, I'm getting a 404 for the link to the Part B follow-up lesson.
Point is, not all computer nerds are math geeks.

He didn't say they are, he merely said math geeks are nerds.
If HN starts to redesign for aesthetics, it will be a slippery slope before HN starts catering to a much larger populous than it should. HN is about hackers and entrepreneurs, and it delivers news clearly and cleanly.

As for the back end of the site, I'm sure the code that determines what makes it and stays on the front page could be revised though. As to how that should work- my guess may be as good as yours.
Tight budgets mean hard choices for science funding
http://www.prosper.com/ for those that dont know, it's basically peer to peer lending. investors decide how much risk they want to take on, and prosper auto allocates it among people requesting loans. you'll probably get better rate from prosper than a bank.
Vast Majority Of Software Patents In Lawsuits Lose