skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, no, it's like saying "I don't understand why anyone pays $12,000 for a Ke$ha album." If the price was broadly reasonable, there would be no argument. But if the price gets outlandish, then someone needs to call B.S.

And yes, this happens now and then for ordinary, exchange-traded companies. Usually, it results in the exchange suspending trading for the company for a bit. Sometimes, it requires someone to call B.S. In an ordinary, regulated market, one or the other of those actions restores sense, gets the price back somewhere within shouting distance of reasonable.
Would it be possible to discuss this without descending to even greater depths?
I don't think there are any airline points that work across _all_ airlines - if for no other reason than this removes the loyalty incentive that makes FF programs attractive to the host airlines. Generally, the programs that let you use your points anywhere will be run by a third-party, often your credit-card provider.

As the article says, get every account you might fly on, but keep your focus on one airline/alliance. If you need to move your points around between airlines, there are services like points.com that let you do that for a fee.
Judging by his profile (UK), Shift-3 for him is probably Pound. Unfortunately, that means something different in the UK than it does in the US, though for reasons not unrelated. UK keyboards have a separate key for #.
> So far as I know, nobody else has ever come close to that even with 10x faster CPUs.

With 10-gigabit becoming commonplace in high-end server rooms, dual 10-gigabit cards hitting the market, and 100-gigabit on its way, I've got to ask, what you mean by no one has come close?

(Certainly, 1 GByte/sec is achievable; splice is a large part of that.)
Many places allow a "write-in" option on the ballot, where you can vote for a candidate who isn't otherwise listed by writing in their name.
Excellent points, but please be sure to simply never split infinitives. ;)
But beyond the high default rates, consider what a student loan does. In the past, college degrees conferred higher incomes on those who earned them. But almost all of that surplus went to the student rather than the college, because aside from a small number of extremely affluent families, the students were young and did not have that much cash. If colleges wanted to expand their market, college tuition was constrained to what an average student, or their family, could pay.

How far back do we have to go to get to a time when the "average [university] student" was from not an "extremely affluent" family, but still well above average?
Here it comes: 'Super WiFi'
Mulve: a RIAA lobbyist's wet dream, and a Spotify killer. Wonderful. Was the current piracy regime so badly broken that this needed to happen? The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the Gallo report, the UK's Digital Economy Act, and in particular, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, will all
a) seem completely warranted, and yet
b) will make even moderates presently optimistic about Spotify making copyright enforcement hardening unncecessary, despair
c) finally, the awful copyright policy we've seen pushed in 2010 (see above) will seem inadequate to all, and even harsher measures will be necessary. Throw the safe harbour / intermediary immunity out the window, allow wanton monitoring, consider making wilful downloading of infringing content illegal, bring back DRM, etc...
Three strikes? Let's make it two.

And if mulve had never come along? people would just learn how to conduct their business online with greater discretion. Privacy, anonymity, encryption, closed communities, being selective about which computers you let your PC connect to - hardly a bad schooling?

If it ain't badly broke, don't fix it.
What's with the XKCD reference? SQL injection and XSS existed long before Munroe made a half-decent joke about it. I see no reason why we should assume the author reads XKCD.

Edit: Sorry, I meant author of the blog post. I know the HN title style guide.
This sounds great! I just formed a LLC today and will be launching my Twilio powered business in 2-3 weeks. It's web + iPhone app based app. Will be announcing soon here as well once my iPhone app gets approved.

$10K is not huge money for me, so that's not something which excites me, especially when I've revenue making plans from day 1. It's the network effect, PR effect, building relationships that one can achieve from these kinds of programs, excite me. I'm guessing this will be a great YC competitor, and in turn I hope it will return YC like after results.
Well... You simply linked to their front page.

This submission got more interest: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1717172

I think such an article generates more interest because it puts everything in context, and explains GOG's strategy / hoax.
Some of the discussion is reasonable, but I really dislike the reliance on "Figure 4: Expected Lifetime Earnings by Educational Attainment". Certainly there is a correlation here, but is there causation?

Not demonstrated, but certainly plausible, since the different education levels seem to point towards different career paths.
If you are right (about healthcare and oil), then I am on track to be a billionaire.

Not holding my breathe, mind you...
... which gcc is if you compile with -O2.
In 1998 they tried to charge me for a late fee which I thought was not correct. So, in a long line on Friday night at Blockbuster, I asked the employee for the scissors where I promptly cut the card up and left it for them on the counter. I never went back and was happier shopping elsewhere. Then Netflix came around and I've been loyal to them ever since.

Losing customers by overcharging doesn't make for a good long-term strategy.
How do you explain a similar increase in private tuition?
I agree with what you said everything except the banning.

"Let a thousand flowers bloom"- Chairman Mao

Remove the post not the user. Clearly, lionhearted is thinking different than most of us here and that should be encourage.

I find banning to be a knee jerk reaction and such rules are only to be made deliberately and without emotions; right now we are too close to the event to make a rational one.
I really hope he does!
Holy shit that's a good idea. The only reason I broke up with my ex is that whenever I went into my local bar (every day), the girl would ask me

"Did you do anything about it yet?"
"Did you do anything about it yet?"
"Did you do anything about it yet?"

I bet getting a call every day would work extremely well, bringing the same dread as a call from a bill collector with a far more straightforward path to mitigation.
Around here (NYC metro area) more of the construction is done at night than not at night

IME (having worked on several NYC-area construction noise assessments) that's not true, and when it is true, it's usually because the traffic disruption would be so severe, the project has no other choice. MTA/NYCT work also tends to occur at night because that's when train schedules are reduced and workers can have room/time to work.

And why do you have to pay so much?

Because working such a physically demanding job at night for extended-periods, especially in cold/wet weather sucks (again, speaking from experience).

Looking at the Big Dig night work, younger guys were likely to sign up for night work to make a quick buck while the older, more experienced guys (usually with families) would use their seniority to get on day shifts so they could lead normal lives. This causes problems because you want the more experienced guys working nights so they get things right the first and don't have to wake up project engineers when they encounter problems, so you wind up upping the hourly wages to try to attract those experienced workers.
Generally speaking, it's more agreeable to read about things the author has done than things they have no control over. It's a reason why I like patio11's writing style (and some others' as well).
Tips for Remembering and Organizing Ideas
Another approach is to prevent these - which is how pg seems to describe his role at HN these days, at least for (3) gaming the system - leaving the field clear for the good stories. The flag link often takes care of (2) link-bait (though most people complain rather than click it). Well-known (3) author/domain probably isn't too bad, if the brand is justified, and even seems to be countered at times, eg. Seth Godin doesn't come up much anymore.

The big problem I see is industry gossip, within which I include: the crunchpad drama; iPhone/iPad dramas; Zuckerman's integrity; Bill Gates' integrity; Steve Jobs' integrity; Larry Ellison's integrity; today's psychoanalysis of one of our own members; even the Ring of Dark Angels/AngelGate.
Now, industry gossip is relevant to people in the industry. But it's not Hacker News (at least, not according to the guidelines.)

If there is a clear perception of what HN is, and enough people resolve to flag stories that don't fit that perception, then this problem goes away. We deserve the HN we get.
Actually, it's two houses, one in Canada and one in NL.

The latter was a rebuild, an old farm house, the one in Canada was from 7' in the ground to two and a half storeys.

The one here in NL was a major project, mostly because I did it all by myself and it's a brick building. It's a beautiful little house in a very quiet spot of the country, with a fair bit of ground around it.

It took me two years to get it all done.
More like "hack stuff together because if we don't get more business quickly we won't be around in 2 years anyway"
And "500 Startups" is a nod to "500 Hats", Dave's personal angel investor brand. Which is a nod to a Dr Seuss book ("The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins")
It's because you didn't need a subsidized loan when you could afford to pay tuition yourself. Sure, they were available, but there were fewer people that would be unable to attend school without them. I have an old teacher who went to college in the seventies, and he says he didn't get a subsidized loan because he was too lazy to walk down the street and fill out an application.
I should have put "personal" in quotes. Yes, we have no evidence that they're sharing private data, but they certainly are using the information users willingly share to sell ads. There's nothing wrong with that at all, but I suspect most of their users don't realize that's the primary monetization method right now.
3 years ago
http://www.rbnz.govt.nz/keygraphs/fig1.html
Seeing as Facebook login lets you easily collect email addresses these days you could always have a page that says, facebook is down click here to get an email confirmation link to login or something similar.
"That's beautiful, man." - Snowball
DNS issues are the cause for so many outages by a myriad of prestigious web shops. It's incredible how often overlooked something so pivotal to your infrastructure goes without being properly monitored. I have seen entire businesses suffer hours of downtime because their monitoring systems would query an authoritative name server from RFC1918 IP space - but not the same from an externally visible address. An NS not responding to local queries can be just as detrimental internally as they are externally because of how web services are architected, obviously. In their defense, Facebook rarely incurs outages of this capacity, and I can bet it won't happen again and someone is getting seriously reamed. They can and will happen to the best of them, no matter how many MIT PhDs you have designing your systems.
Hitler Finds Out AngelGate at Bin 38
LOLing about the angelgate....
Five comments in, I was absolutely certain this was a joke thread. O_o
Isn't that kind of a circular argument? Loans are more common now because tuition is more expensive because loans are more common?
Tadam, you've just promoted it! I googled and took a quick look at it, but I'm curious how different is it from a bunch of other already entrenched bookmarking sites?
Facebook Desktop
The author of the blog post, or the person who attempted the injection?

Pretty sure the author's read it, since he's linked to the comic.

Anyway, I think at this point it's a common enough reference that when you tell someone "Little Bobby Tables", they immediately associate it with SQL injection.
From the article: "'I can target my exact audience, rather than trying to come up with a proxy for it,' like looking at search terms or which websites people visit, says Belden, who was spending about $4,000 a month on Facebook earlier in the year before he was forced to rein in his marketing expenses because of budget issues."

Maybe I am misreading this, but in context this seems to say that the guy thinks Facebook offers better value than any other advertising platform, but STILL doesn't make him enough money that he can afford to keep using it. Doesn't Facebook have to help people make money for it to continue to gain advertising revenue?
Seeing Life through Cat’s Eyes
Now we can see how life looks like through cat’s eyes.
I thought I explained that in my initial post. Many of the state schools (such as the UC system, but many others too) provide high quality education and take so many students that they influence the market. Thus private school tuitions depend on market forces created by public school tuitions.

Once the public schools raised their tuitions the private schools knew it would be safe to raise theirs as well.
Warren Buffet on Jay-Z: Learn from him
It might be a philosophical thing. One APIs became popular, scraping started to be viewed as breaking the rules. I think this has discouraged many from writing search engines. Crawlers are just scrapers on a big scale.

I know I'd like to see more serious attempts at vertical search engines. I wonder if getting backlash, in the form of people complaining to hosting companies, would be the hardest part of writing a search engine for ruby blog posts that understands regular expressions. I could certainly use such a tool.
Alright, I'm in. I started an Android game for last year's developer challenge but didn't finish by the deadline.
If you're moving to San Francisco or Silicon Valley for a tech job then this isn't even a question. There is so much talent out here that a company would be insane to pay the extra costs of looking outside the local talent pool.
> Let's keep HN sacred.

I had no clue this was a religious community.
Someone should make a wiki that explains all these references, because I'm completely lost.
You may be able to negotiate a better deal than that. As you grew you could almost certainly negotiate a better deal. You could also scrape the data yourself. Supporting the top 15 financial sites would probably cover 80%+ of your users fully.

If there are not any startup friendly alternatives to Yodlee, then maybe you just found what your startup should really be doing :-)
Don't understand this.

The guy's telling the Bingo Card Creator guy he should be making more money. Which is absolutely true because he has the skillset to make millions a year.

How is this bad in any way - it's not.

It's not psychoanalysis. It's just a guy saying - Dude, You should be making a lot more money with your skillset.

Option 1:Let your ego get in the way and stay at under $60K a year.

Option 2: Learn from the advice, even if it isn't sugarcoated, and get to $1 million+ a year.

Why do we have to sugar coat everything. Are we women now? Are our feelings getting hurt?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck is as exotic as it gets.
I've always asked myself how come big companies like Google, IBM,etc are on the east side and not in Vancouver. I mean this clearly illustrates that there might be more tech workforce in Ontario. So for a startup this could be an advantage. It's just a educated guess and I don't have any facts yet.
Doesn't it mean that your laptop bought in the States won't work with WiFi stations in Europe?
Let's not post this sort of thing here.
Could you clarify your question? Is it directed to my post? I am unaware of anything in my own post that could be considered offensive but if it seems otherwise I would appreciate knowing in what way it seems so.
There is a great quote that will serve you well when blogging: "Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people." (attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, but disputed).
State budgets are growing but university education is getting a smaller share. The lost dollars are going to Medicaid.
Structuring a "build this for us - for free" deal
Lemme start with I've tried googling for about 30 minutes, and searched this site for a bit, but just came up empty. If there are some links I'd be happy to read them.

Background:

I've recently launched my own startup, and a client of mine would like me to do some related work for them on the side, so they can resell it to their customers. It's all custom and it's nothing I could turn around and sell to anyone in the future.

They are offering a commission or percentage type of deal, with no money up front and are estimating it's gonna take about 3 months to develop. (I don't have all the reqs. yet but want to be prepared with some options)

They say they will resell this to all of their clients, although I don't know them well, and don't have many details.

I can't sustain myself on savings for 3 months, and just hoping that they might sell some in the future and give me some nice recurring income sounds like a really bad plan that's been tried a million times before.

Question:

Any ideas on how I could structure a deal with them? Say a $xx per hour (minimum tech wage???) with x% revenue share when the product is sold? Maybe a deadline saying "free if you sell xx units by 2/2/2011 or you owe me $20,000."

All thoughts and ideas are welcome. I'd like to go into the meeting sounding like I know what the hell I'm doing on the business side. The tech part is no issue.

Thanks!
I don't know that that's a circular argument so much as a vicious cycle. Perhaps I am reading too deep, but that's the exact point the article seems to be making.
Ask HN: Tell us about your experiences of pitching to people who "got it"
When pitching my ideas/apps/products to people (friends, relatives, people at tech meetups, etc) there are people who don't like the idea, people who are lukewarm about it, and then there's the third category.

These people "get it". They see the big picture you see. They go there with you. They see all the use cases you envision and add more, usually enthusiastically. It's just pure elation talking with one of these people, especially after some lukewarm responses from others.

Of course, these people may be as wrong about the potential of your product as you are, so finding such people is no guarantee of success by any stretch, but it truly replenishes your energy after you talk to one of them.

What have your experiences been pitching to such people, especially when you were just starting out? Did their thumbs-up and feedback help more or less than the feedback from people who were lukewarm or negative about your idea or product?
Stuxnet worm attacks industrial targets, could be aimed at Iran
Ah, the Chicago-New York feud, older than Hatfield–McCoy.
I know a lot of users use Google Reader and don't see the articles until they are a little stale. They still will up vote good articles. Perhaps the algorithm could be tweaked to make time less important then it is currently. I'm not sure how you could do that though..
Jay-Z's entrepreneurial skills and success seem to be pretty frequently mentioned, but when Warren Buffet says "For a young person growing up he’s the guy to learn from," it is definitely worth listening. Full interview at http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/1011/rich-list-10-omaha-wa...
Un-downvoted. The poster presented his case in detail, if you don't agree then respond with counterarguments instead of just downvoting.
In plenty of countries this is a reality already. Sensors are placed anywhere from a few meters to hundreds of meters ahead of the actual lights to determine the flow of traffic, there are 'green waves' which you can synchronize with to guarantee uninterrupted passage (both for congestion control and to save fuel) and there are adjustments made based on the expected flow from different routes depending on the time of day.

The future, in this sense at least, has already arrived.

Sure there are plenty of places where this is not common yet, but infrastructure upgrades are expensive.
Mobile Application Support API
Is it just me or is there a serious need for decent user support for mobile apps? Here's an idea that might scratch that itch.
Thanks for the link - it puzzled me because I didn't realise the story had already done the rounds, and search didn't turn anything up. Makes total sense now.

The front page at the time had a post discussing what had happened - now it just links to the main site.
But four-way stops give the Americans so many opportunities to demonstrate their well known diffidence and thinking of other drivers.
I don't think you need to pull Patricks religion in to this at all, that was just about the one thing missing in the original post.
Joel really shouldn't have started the Chicago hyperbole

He's a New Yorker, it's in his DNA.
I don't know anything whatever about the person behind patio11 but, from everything I know about patio11, I sure would want to know that person. Thanks for your always-perceptive and intelligent contributions to this site.
I wasn't aware the cupboards were big and sturdy enough for that sort of "experience".
Yes, this is a very good idea.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I won't do FB apps for clients anymore, despite the high demand and great pay. It's just way too stressful to have the clients always angry at me because of the platform's shortcomings.
If you think their idea is better than yours, then maybe you could scrap your original startup idea and instead build their product. You would own the company/product and they would be your first client. They could prepay for the product which would cover your initial expenses, or even invest money in your startup if your R&D costs exceed their initial license fee or if they want the chance of a payoff if the idea sells well.

If their idea isn't better than yours and they're not willing to pay you, then why are you spending time on it.
While I agree that the post was inappropriate, I don't agree that the post was inappropriate by HN's standards. (And I think flagging based on personal standards rather than HN's standards is not the way to go.)
Chrome Web Store: Google Checkout integration & previewing for your apps
Sell drugs until you make enough money to become a rap star to raise money for your business career? Seems both a bit morally suspect and unlikely.
I recommend writing a programming language.
thoughts on a similar existing service? http://likebutton.me/
No electronic voting in Sweden at all but the election workers had to type in the hand written votes, not only, to be able to publish them online.
...it was my honest and well-intentioned thought...

I know that. And I suspect that anyone who follows your writing here realizes that, too.

I'll lay low for a while...

Please don't.

One of the memes constantly reinforced here at hn is pushing the envelope. How many times have we heard, "If you don't ruffle a few feathers, you're not pushing hard enough."

You pushed. You ruffled. You learned. You stood up like a man. And we all survived.

"Laying low" contradicts the expected behavior of so many outliers and achievers here. Respect.
Absolutely no content here, maybe except the usual advice to write everything down because otherwise it's going to fade away.
Here's my issue after reading all of this. Who the hell cares? I love minutiae as much as anyone, but this is worse than arguing about text editors.

This sounds like a bunch of privileged people arguing about something that that doesn't make a damn bit of difference to what's really needed in this world.

I thought I was going to learn something. But now I just feel a little ashamed that I read any of it all.
Now QR Codes Can Generate Likes On Facebook