skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ironically, I send replies to a FogBugz mailbox. It works decently. Ever think about building a CRM for developers that connects to a bug database (FogBugz) and knowledge base (StackExchange)?

Most CRMs are aimed at sales professionals (Salesforce) or agencies (HighRise).
No.

...assuming the startup is bootstrapping. Why?

1) Ugly designs are often very effective.
2) You can polish it later when you're making money.

Your site might look amazing. Your site might look crappy. If no one knows about your site or no one cares, then it doesn't matter either way.

Focus on traction for the product or service you're providing, then worry about the design of your letterhead, business cards, shiny web 2.0 logo, etc.
Pocketknives are always good. But how old are you thinking?

Personally, I'd stick with a pocketknife regardless of age. Or a lighter.
Actually, it's "Mac OS X".
I would argue that if you're really worried about grandma or the stay-at-home mom in Kansas, then even a 0.1% false positive rate is unacceptable, since it'll send a real email into a black hole.
Because articles cannot be downvoted, I am very stingy with upvotes. I don't like most articles on the front page, let alone the new page. If your article is really great, it won't be on the new page but not the front page for long anyway.
My takeaway from this piece is that the Righthaven model of so-called "copyright trolling" depends on intimidation leading to pre-litigation settlements and will break down or stall if those who are targets of the intimidation just realize that they do have grounds to fight.

The problem remains, though, that for most people paying a few thousand as a nuisance payout is simpler and cheaper than going to the expense of a legal fight that will cost that much just for taking the first step or two.

The Righthaven model is disturbing to me not so much for its trolling aspects (and it does have those, since Righthaven will, in effect, scout out the terrain, find the offending pieces, and then approach the papers to get assignments on those items) as for its "collection agency" overtones: it is a business model built fundamentally on harassment of small players who more often than not have inadvertently stepped into it without even realizing what they were doing. This is not a defense legally (see this piece for a lawyer-type analysis of why those sued are indeed often in the wrong under current copyright law: http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/09/zelnick-copyright-tr...), but it raises public policy concerns about whether copyright law should be so structured as to allow this. The law may say it's right but, as with collection-agency forms of abuse, it feels fundamentally unfair.
Introduction to Prediction Markets
On the other hand, you can change your keyboard shortcuts. (Probably.)
I'll agree that there are plenty of companies to whom this does not apply. Facebook is a great example. But I have seen SO MANY small retail companies who send out email to engage customers, and the VERY FIRST thing they say to their customers is, "I don't care what you have to say." It's just nuts.

> I get every single bounce and delete them all by hand.

Don't do this! Maybe you already know about this, but for the benefit of everyone else following, Email Lesson:

1) Email bounces are not sent to the "From" address. It goes to the "Envelope From". You won't see Envelop From unless you dig through email headers. It's really just part of the SMTP conversation before your mail server starts sending the actual message (header and body). Your desktop email program probably makes these two addresses the same, but your mailing list software needn't.

2) When Joe User replies to an email on purpose, his email client WILL use the From address (or Reply-to, but never mind that).

3) There is a clever idea called VERP (Variable Envelope Return Path) that exploits this, where you make the Envelope From different for every email you send to a list. If you send me an email and your mailing list software made the Envelope From, "newsletter+haroldp=internal.org@joelonsoftware.com" and it bounced, your MTA could route that bounced message to the "newsletter@joelonsoftware.com" account, and use the encoded email address in there to figure out that it was my address that bounced. The To address on the message should point to a human's mailbox. Only real replies (ok, and the stupid out of office messages) will land there.

Poorly coded auto-responders are another rant, but I don't hold out any hope of getting everyone to read man vacation.

VERP: http://cr.yp.to/proto/verp.txt
Did joel ever post a response?
If you are getting the message: "You're submitting too fast",
and you need to reply soon, just access HN through web proxy,create an acc, and submit! :)
Do you not read Engadget or ZDNet ever? Both have been pretty complimentary about WP7. But everyone is also waiting until release. There's just too much we don't know... in particular the strength of their app ecosystem.

Why is having a plugin incompatible with the web? Sure it's not THE web, but getting the web doesn't mean that you ignore all other methods of delivering experiences. It's like saying that Apple doesn't get computers, because they also make phones.

And I'm sure MS does get that the OS is becoming less relevant. They've probably known this for longer than most people here have been devs.

That statement you made is one of the naive statements I often see from kids who just got out of college. The issue isn't if they know that the OS is becoming less relevant, but the real question (the one that is actually hard to answer) is what do you do about it when you generate $30B/year revenue from it? I'm sure from your perspective they should just drop Windows and move everything to Linux starting yesterday. They'll make that $30B back on ads, right?
"Vacuum Gang" Sucks Up $800,000 From Safeboxes
Microsoft Bribes You With Rewards To Use Bing
I'd like to know the answer to this also, but after reading the comments I'm still clueless.

Maybe this will help - Has anybody dared to do any A/B testing on professional vs "unprofessional" design?
To add to the great comment above, especially for the parents here considering instructing their children on the formalities of reading, make sure your children learn the sound-symbol correspondences of English (or whatever language's) writing system and skills for pronouncing unfamiliar words first seen in print. All four of my children, now avid readers, got a lot of help from the book Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach by Leonard Bloomfield and Clarence Barnhart.

http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Linguistic-Approach-Leonard-Bloom...

I like the stories in that book, too, especially the very last story.
I don't think I've ever gotten any spam from HN. Have gotten a few nice emails that started an interesting conversation, though.
try to press hard to get the consulting fees
Yeah, here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhxVtUFZVzk) they claim 2x the efficiency of bicycling, thanks to aerodynamics. There are some serious logistical challenges - e.g. to address the problem of slow people & free riders you might have to detect and incentivize/reward contributing (human) power to the system.

But the low-weight, self-powered approach means it's probably the lowest-cost system to mount above the current din of street life, which could end up being a big benefit.

I'd file it under strange/interesting, rather than crazy/ridiculous
Yes, definitely. A well-designed and aesthetically pleasing site adds instant credibility, especially for people who are non-technical (i.e., the people who often make the final buy/no-buy decision).

And it's rare for a strong systems or web back-end programmer to also have a good design sense and to be versed in the various rendering quirks and workarounds for the common browsers.

Note that it doesn't mean you have to hire a full-time designer. A lot of designers are freelancers, and like it that way.

37signals' Sortfolio (http://www.sortfolio.com/) lists a lot of independent designers for a range of budgets.
Ah, I should've been clearer: I meant putting your email in the "about" field for others to see.
Exactly. These claims fly in the face of overwhelming counter-evidence. I can believe that something in the quantity of quality or grains we consume now may have changed over time but the idea that grains are generally, inherently toxic requires some very, very strong proof.

I have a feeling all these diet hackers would get a lot more mileage out of regular exercise and smaller portions.
I'm afraid I won't be able to accurately formulate the difference between both. I'll refer you to the wikipedia entry of User Experience Design [1] which will do a much better job than I could.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience_design
I'm not sure who posted this this time, but when I first posted it, it never found much traction.

One of (IMHO) the problems with Hacker News is that there is no good way to store and locate meta information. So all the mashups, meetups, resources that have been inspired or built around and by the community live and die by being posted as stories. If someone isn't an obsessive reader of the site, it's pretty easy to miss these things. Resourcey is a good link, but you must also know it exists in order to find the other links.
Microsoft acquired Softricity a few years ago who had a product, SoftGrid, that did this. Kinda sad that it now only appears in a footnote on this page: http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/appv/default.mspx
Windows don't raise unless clicked. They only take keyboard focus when hovered. Of course, desktop environments like Gnome and KDE don't do this anymore by default, to accommodate the converts from Windows and MacOS.

Edit: the focus-stealing prevention already built into window managers could be combined with the gaze tracking to allow you to type into one window while reading from another.
The author would still publish on his/her site. The new site would simply provide an automated edit/review workflow for the author.
I learned at a young age to never ever tell my parents I was bored. My children have learned the same lesson.

We also limit our kids to one hour of video games a week, only to be used on Saturday or Sunday. After homework and chores are finished.

They all love to read and the local librarian knows them all by name.
Maybe you're right. This would be like trying to carve out an optimal Lisp with CL as one's starting point. A better approach might be to begin with the Constitution (as pg did with McCarthy's original paper) and "restart the kind of [legal] design" the founders were "doing at the point where [they] left off." (http://www.paulgraham.com/core.html)
You are protected under a C-Corp, unless they can pierce the corporate veil in court (unlikely if you didn't do anything you weren't supposed to do) you can walk away and the only assets any of the creditors can go after are those of the company. All of your personal assets are free and clear.
Someone knows about a similar site offering (or someone willing to offer through codelesson.com) a good software engineering course? I'll be up for that.
It probably shouldn't be referred to as Tim Ferris' "no grain" diet. The original post was Robb Wolf, author of The Paleo Solution. The goal isn't to eat no grain. The goal is to eat no gluten. Grain just happens to contain gluten.

It should probably be called No Gluten diet or refer to Robb Wolf instead since he wrote the book and did all of the research.
The Rise of Reddit: 4chan and Digg Get the Credit While Reddit Booms
Eggs seem conspicuously absent.
That's really risky. What happens when everyone realizes the valuation is sky high and the $100m in paper turns into $20m liquid?
To take advantage of caffeine, it must be used sparingly. If you drink 5 cups a day, that extra cup will do very little. OTOH, if you drink 1 a week, that single cup provides an amazing boost. Remember, a single cup of coffee a day is enough to addict most people. If you're addicted, that cup of joe you drink in the morning isn't "waking you up", it's eliminating your caffeine withdrawal symptoms.

The other benefit of caffeine is that it provides a significant effectiveness booster to many other drugs, like ASA, ibuprofen and acetaminophen.
My usage of Digg is actually up recently. The front page stories have rarely been interesting since Digg went mainstream a few years ago.

Digg 4 is actually useful because it's like twitter without the chatter. The only annoying thing now is that they keep logging me out every couple days.
I'm pretty skeptical, but the reason I'm willing to give the notion a little traction is because no other primate eats grains - and even humans didn't until the dawn of agriculture.

Of course a lot of things humans do are completely unnatural: alcohol, dairy, fish, tobacco, complete lack of physical activity, etc.

I'm far from convinced, but that's the point of the experiment. I'll see how this thing shakes out in 30 days...
Save-for-later is a statement that what I'm reading doesn't benefit me, but I predict it will benefit future-me more than a random article will benefit future-me.

If the magic brick works well and I can find articles which benefit me well, then I wont need save-for-later.

If I hit reply then suddenly I'll need a keyboard full of buttons which don't seem present.

And what goals does Magic Brick help the user achieve? I lament on HN and Reddit the lack of distinction between "i like/dislike it" and "it's a good/bad contribution". The reason I care is because I want to follow interesting debates and encourage a place where they happen instead of "you're wrong" rebuttals. Magic Brick means there is no place and I can't go somewhere good or avoid somewhere bad, whatever my definitions of good and bad are. If I can't choose where to go, I can't subscribe to sites that are good either, to give them deliberate revenue.

It's a lot like an iPad if it only had apps and no web browser.
My favorite book as a kid was Lord of the Rings, so I'll recommend that. Also H2G2.
Legalities of Adware?
So I'm intensely curious as to the legalties of adware. I understand that the proper source to talk to would be a lawyer, but maybe you all could help out a bit.

I've written a lot of adware in the past couple of months and the tracking software to go with it and have support for all the major browsers. I don't intend on distributing the software through botnets and it is relatively easy to un-install. I plan on including a TOS describing that the software is ad supported.

PPV networks are ENTIRELY adware based networks and make a ton of money so I can't see it being completely illegal considering a handful of these companies are based here in the US.

1) Is there a difference between inlining your ads on the page or popping a window or placing them in a toolbar section (legally speaking of course)?

2) Is it legal to replace existing ads on the page? (eg: exchanging google/facebook ads on the right sidebar for my own)

I understand Claria/Gator had some trouble a long time with this but settled out of court instead -- it seems to suggest there is little legal recourse against this.

Can anyone shed any light on this?
Interesting hack. I'll point out a couple things you may not have thought of though:

1. The U.S. legal system is designed to go slowly. That's what checks and balances are for. It takes a long time to see the full implications of each law (look what happened when Glass-Steagall was repealed), and if the laws change every day, you can end up whipsawing with no idea what really works or not.

2. How will the laws be evaluated? In the U.S, you have judicial review, where cases come before the courts, the facts come out into the open, a jury of your peers evaluates how the law applies to those facts, and then the appellate court system ensures the law was applied correctly. If the law is egregiously wrong, there's widespread publicity and then public pressure to amend the law. How does this same sort of fact-based discovery process factor into your system, and how do you avoid it devolving into a "he said she said" contest of differing opinions?

3. How will you get public buy-in? Democracy's based upon the consent of the governed; when everybody writes their own version of the laws, each person could make the argument that they didn't consent to the other person's version.

4. It seems like this would replace plutocracy (government by the rich and well-connected) with technocracy (government by the quick-thinking and technically savvy). As a technocrat, I'm all in favor of that. ;-) But it seems like you're just exchanging one set of masters for another, and in many ways, this new system is less fair than the old one. What happens to the 95% of Americans who are not accustomed to thinking at Internet speed? They're already being left out in the cold by many economic developments; will you exclude them from the political process too?
An issue with any reading-related arguments is that the definition of "reading" is so loose. Here are at least three different definitions commonly in use:

1. A person can look at a page full of sentences and translate them into appropriate sounds coming out of his mouth. An add-on to this definition is the ability to answer basic comprehension question questions about these sentences.

2. A person can reason upon, expand upon, interpret, or otherwise think about the words he has read.

3. A person can read fiction and appreciate it in some way.

#1 seems like an obvious necessity for life in a society where so much is communicated via written language. #2 seems like necessary skill for someone to be a high-functioning adult. But, why do we couple our discussion about why Johnny can't "read" with our concerns that Johnny can't think? Isn't written language simply an (important) input method for ideas upon which one may reason?

As a guy who hasn't read a work of fiction in a long time but still considers himself a regular "reader", I consider definition #3 to be ill-conceived. Why is it more important for a person to be proficient in the interpretation of "written word" art than visual art, performing arts, cinema, etc.? What's so darned special about literature? I spend a lot more time observing others' photography (in an attempt to improve my own) than I do with other art forms. Am I un-cultured? Un-intelligent? In college, when I had lots of time on my hands, I enjoyed sitting down in the afternoon with a Guiness and reading large swaths of the Wall Street Journal. Does this count as reading?

The lack of definition around the test "is a reader" results in many mushy arguments. Shouldn't those proficient in Definition #2 be able to detect this?
I would recommend reading The Vegetarian Myth as well, as it concerns eating meat, dairy, and avoiding grains. The author makes a pretty compelling argument about why monoculture, grained based agriculture is both damaging to the environment and to our health.

And as for perfectly natural, try eating wheat, rice, or any other grain directly from the field, versus an apple.
$18k for a dedicated server? Sheesh, I sell them for $1k/year.
2nd Sentence from the Article: "Aboukhadijeh will continue to attend Stanford while he works at the company."

He get's a job YouTube while finishing his education at Stanford. Sounds like a good deal. I don't see the downside.
Ubuntu Server tech lead: The real problem with Java in Linux distros
There's a huge interest in education material in the free software and creative commons movements. The idea of putting free education material on the web isn't new at all, and there's tons of material available out there (and has been for quite a while).

Khan Academy stands out because it's just really, really, really (really) good.
I read it on Business Week magazine 4 years ago. There was an article about Microsoft releasing their accounting software as part of Office.

I suspect that you and your group of business owners might be different than the average. When the magazine mentioned small business owners they probably included a lot of non-computer savvy people: hairdressers, small farmers, pipe-fitters, etc.
I would hope that anyone who wants to help in this way would contact the person behind the throwaway account. If your excuse was "they used a throwaway account and therefore I won't help", I'd imagine you weren't going to help regardless.
Good point. I'll be upping my consumption.
One other trick with this site that's not listed on the about page: click on the title to refresh.
You can (or could) also get focus follows mouse on Windows using one of the Power Toys applications.

OS X may be as hackable as Linux, but it doesn't seem as easy to find out how. It took me days to find the MacOS equivalent to xorg.conf mode lines, for example.
One example that I have seen of this was this submission of Grace Hopper on David Letterman's show from 1984 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719458).

Now I realize that many people don't vote up videos. However, this is Grace Hopper, who was one of the first programmers for the very first computer ever. She is credited with coming up with the term "debugging" after finding a moth in one of her computers, and she wrote the first compiler for a programming language.

If that's not Hacker News worthy then I don't know what is.

And yet amazingly, this submission only got two upvotes (one of which is mine). Now I realize that we've had a lot of scandalous and "Big Important News" but two upvotes seems abnormally low to me. In fact, if Google Students had not tweeted it (http://twitter.com/googlestudents/status/25361367579) I would have never even seen it.
I think you may be surprised at how fast MS revs the phone. They've already hinted that IE9 will be on the phone. One of the reasons why MS said no skins to the OEMs is that they want to be able to rapidly rev all phones.

I wouldn't be surprised if less than a year after launch they have IE9 on the phone.
I use FastSpring but it doesn't come cheap. I am on 6% :-(
Rice and oats are grains and they contain no gluten.

Edit: and corn.
You're missing the point. The full name of the operating system (Mac OS X) is often shortened to "OS X", whereas OSX is just plain wrong.
The Ugly Truth About Classic Games. They Are Terrible.
Slide 11 and 12 were interesting because they are close to the same solution, but 11 looks more complicated with Voldemort, et. al. in the mix. HBase with Hadoop seems like another good alternative not mentioned.
Visual mathematics and visual proofs
Politics and governance maybe, but not law. The text of law actually shows remarkable statistical resemblance to code, since fundamentally it does something similar and has to be just as explicit in its methods. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/code-looks-like.ht...
Sure:

https://epoch.com/

http://www.ccbill.com/

http://www.vxsbill.com/ (disclaimer, run by friends of mine)

Stay away as far as you can from IBill and e-passporte, jettis has also been going through a rough period.

I hear good things about 'chargify', but I have no idea how well their anti-fraud measures are.

My only problem with processing charges is consumer fraud, the people that actually bought the service that consume it for months and that then suddenly reverse 6 months worth of charges. This happens infrequently enough that it is not a problem. It is also impossible to protect against in an SAAS or subscription situation.

Actual fraud that makes it through is a fat '0'.