skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started Barhopolis (look at barsannapolis.com) as a hobby because we never knew what was going on until after it happened. We reach over 40,000 people a month now not including mobile, and we are growing fast. Last night we went around town with the Mast-Jägermeister executives filming, including the CEO of the company that imports Jägermeister into the US. In July we had a huge event (1700 people at it's peak), and the governor showed up and performed with the band, pretty cool. We aren't where we need to be yet, but we are profitable and growing.
Geez way to call someone a liar. Why would you believe a known shady government over anyone? I don't think Ben is trying to gain anything out of this besides warning people of .ly's governance. I for one am glad I know this now.
We would absolutely guarantee him complete anonymity. Our goal isn't to out him. It's just to give his fans an opportunity to hear him express his views.
Groupon's Andrew Mason On Yahoo Acquisition Rumor: "Urrgggghhhh"
Yep. Consider January's Wired magazine feature titled In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms are the new Bits."

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution
The Wow Signal
Pie + Design = Change
Yep, decided not to continue when I got to that point.

It looks like the number is a landline in the Bay Area. I wonder if some poor soul at Greplin will be taking calls all day.
How would you know it was really him?
Well this stinks both because I used it all the time, and it completely shuts out non-smartphone users from those services.
Hey man! Congrats!!! =)... Success stories are among the best type of stories :)
My life has change (and also my little mind) thanks to Hacker News. I should say "I read enough, yet a lot", may be more than 500 pages (I already printed 200 or so).

Not only my financial situation changed, but also the way I view the world. Just 400 days before now, $25 is my monthly money pocket that I get from my parents and it should cover all my expenses (except clothes, food and obviously housing).

Now I have my own Internet subscription ($30 a month) and also I just purchased a VPS and a couple of SaaS service. I did bought my Nokia feature phone ($150) also myself and this little netbook I'm typing from ($400). That in 300 days or so, and by the end of this year, I'm planning on buying a Sony Z series, 23'' monitor and a smartphone.

I have 3 years browsing and reading the Internet, but it's only in the last year that I started making money out of it (not browsing! the internet). This wouldn't be done without Hacker News. I should also mention that my English was revamped considerably and ... okay, lot of things actually.

Thanks HN! You didn't give me money but you did teach me how to make it and also LIVE happy.
Microsoft's tools may be more appealing than Cold Fusion or JRun, but they are still less appealing than pretty much everything else this side of Java.

At least with CF and (IIRC) JRun you are not locked into Windows...
Thanks to you and the parent commenter for a very insightful response.
Show HN: My HTML5 Sokoban game
Ship Mate for the iPhone (Android coming some time in the future) is a side project, hopefully transitioning into a full time thing. It is now making me a livable wage and I haven't even started the big ideas for it yet.
The donate button seems kinda alien to me, why would you be asking for money at the same time your are asking someone to signup to know more about what you are doing? I think people donate money when they see something and are impressed about it.
How Do You Reward Yourself After A Long Week's Slog?
http://scripting.com/stories/2010/10/08/4MoreFreeProjectIdea...
Changes Between the Multiple Editions of "On the Origin of Species"
Ask HN:interest in api where given a Twitter login, you get their interests?
I'm working on a service that crawls through all the data for a given twitter user and figures out what they are interested in. I have an early stage prototype that shows some of the information that can be returned.
I am planning to offer this as an api for other websites to use and integrate so they can better personalize their offering.
Would something like this be interesting to you guys? What other features and information would you like?
Currently I am working on getting more accurate results and then getting more in depth interests (X likes biking, swimming vs X likes sports)

Here is an example site I built using the api:

http://badgeu.com/t/davemcclure

http://badgeu.com/tags/show?name=vc

You can also see what interests your own twitter profile gets by putting in your twitter login at http://badgeu.com
If anyone is interested in using the api, please email me at jason@socmetrics.com
yea, he said apply to infosys or tata consultancy services.

all he does is wait for companies to come on college campus and then tries to get as many students in entry level jobs as possible.
Quite the contrary - upvoted. Thanks for the opinion.
Restaurant websites are abysmal, all of them. I've long wanted there to be a service that provides the following information in a non-flash, easy to consume format (in order of importance):

- Hours of Operation

- Menu with Prices and Pictures of the main dishes (if not every), in HTML, not a freaking PDF

- Phone number and address with easy way to find and print directions from my location

- Pictures of the restaurant in an easy to use, standardized slideshow (lightbox or other similar solution)

optional:

- Reviews from yelp and other services

- Ability to make a reservation online

- Backstory of the restaurant

I think there's huge startup potential in this space, but I imagine the difficult part is getting the restaurant owners on board. I'm surprised a CMS hasn't been popularized that allows restaurant owners to create sites that meet these specifications easily and uniformly. I suppose you wouldn't even need the restaurant's approval, though, because you could just set it up for them like Yelp and other services do and have users upload the pics, menu details, etc (like a wiki).

Anybody know if this has been attempted before?
I use DNSPark.net, my host doesn't include DNS (afaik) and while I could run the dns servers myself I don't want the extra load / responsibility keeping that part of a very high volume site running.... especially when it's so cheap to let someone else do it.
Used this a number of times in a pinch. It'll definitely be missed. Makes me want a smartphone a little more.
MS managed the fruits of the SoftImage acquisition pretty poorly. It had a lot of potential, particularly since MS could have parlayed it into a part of the premiere games development platform, but they bobbled it pretty badly and ended up with trueSpace instead, which has really never come even close to living up to its potential.

Autodesk and Adobe compete really only in digital audio & video editing, and compositing. The rest of Adobe doesn't really have much impact on any of Autodesk's businesses.

I suspect that Autodesk bought Alias for Alias:Studio rather than for Maya, because Alias:Studio is the Big Dog revenue stream there, and among Autocad's biggest competitors.
pretty much mirrors my outcome. some social anxiety, lone wolf tendencies, with situational/social awareness thrown in there. can't complain really, although makes me wonder how i would have turned out had it not been for the rough childhood
I love Instapaper and bought the Pro version for the iPhone the minute it came out as I wanted to give back. Just introduced my wife to it too (as I thought it might be too much hard work for her to learn yet another toy of mine), she loves it!
You should pretty it up and talk to SPIL Games - http://www.html5contest.com - they're paying $$$ for HTML5 games.

Also if you're interested I'm wrapping up a JavaScript version of my API from http://playtomic.com, in addition to the analytics it has stuff like a level sharing API that would let you have user-created levels, leaderboards etc. If you want you can test the JS version for me. Email's in my profile if you're interested.
do you hire a guy with no degree? since i am currently pursuing one. Else we both might have to wait 4 more years :)
Ship Mate for the iPhone is making me enough to pay all my bills and then some. I still have my full time job though, I don't know what I'm waiting for to just dive in and take it to the next level.
I've experienced my registrar's DNS servers going flaky or downright not working for a full working week. It's fine to rely on them for a project that hasn't gone big, but once you're making decent money, I'd really advise spending the $howmanydollars/year insurance on a proper DNS service.
Perhaps this is one of those "secret recruitment processes."
I'm not calling him a liar. I just pointed out that he can't prove his site of it and neither can they. It may even be that both parties are telling the truth (for instance because of some overactive spam filter). Personally I wished that if they did contact them and it did not work that they would now take the suspension under review (assuming contact has by now been solidly re-established). But I think that NIC.ly is not going to change their mind, they have their views on morals and standards and (as PG suggested) might have had ulterior motives (also impossible to prove or disprove) so it is simply not going to go anywhere from what I can see.

Lessons learned:

- don't rely on domains in regions where you have no representation

- have a plan B if you do

- if you can't read the text don't agree to it

- don't waste time trying to convince parties with
other views on morals that they're wrong (especially
if those morals have been dicated by some religious
views)
Interesting idea, still a bit "stiff" for my taste. I'd allow a few more "modern" tricks but still keep it mostly "C-like" (because it's obvious its main goal was to be immediately readable and editable without the surprises to the C programmers). For example,

n := 1;
s := "abc";

like in Go (and Limbo) as an allowed replacement for

int n = 1;
string s = "abc";

And then the same would function in the for loop:

for ( i := 0; i < 10; i++ ) {
}

(I'd also rather write:

struct dirstats {
int files, size, total_files, total_size;
}

than in four rows member by member.)
"Physical bumps and bruises heal, mental bruises not so quickly."

Unfortunately, I don't know about any study correlating bullying (or lack of it) with future success or failure in life. For example, do we know that being bullied in childhood encourage or discourage (or have no correlation with) development of one's psychological resilience?

While playing - growling, biting, jumping - wolf puppies prepare themselves to live as wolves. Humans are the most cruel animals on Earth, thus it seems natural that the play of human puppies is much more cruel than that of wolf puppies.
Don't spend all your money on toys... The few hundred dollars you've spent already, had you invested it in your business, or even put it into savings, could be worth tens of thousands or even millions a few decades from now.
TANSTAAFL

I try to keep this in mind with respect to all "free" products, including others from Google. E.g. Google Apps Standard: Nice while it lasts, but don't invest in its sticking around.
1. video - there is a video in the original post
2. job - i have to explore on the job all the time, i don't have the stuff at home
3. creating a vm for making dev environments, what i was thinking this part of the thread is about
4. abstracting away the entire os setup and seeing that combination of os+app as just an app, i would consider that an abstraction, and not just a pattern, but the pattern being trying to think along these things of what can be abstracted in this way. not trying to combine or confuse the terms.
Thanks for both tips. Making sokogame work for mobile shouldn't be that difficult. And I'll be in touch about the API.
@michael_dorfman

"...if _why wanted to tell people his reasons for disappearing the way he did, he would have done so."

Why so snarky?
Who cares what they say? This is an organization run in a nation state without the rule of law. There is no governing organization you can appeal to to ensure their decisionmaking is consistent. The rule that allocated them ".ly" is (essentially) ISO 3166-1, and ISO 3166-1 does not care about you, your business, or your rights. Neither, it should go without saying, does Libya.
One reason is performance. If you need your website to be fast, DNS lookup is yet another thing that can be optimized.
You should share everything but individual salaries.

If there's good or bad financial news, the best thing you can be doing is having public discussions about it.

If you're making decisions about the direction of the company, everyone should get to have their say (not that you have to be a democracy).
Do these companies hire people from tier 2 (!IIT or NIT) colleges? I cant do MS in USA (family reasons).
Same here. Though I much prefer the Star-Trek-like, simple voice interface to interacting with a smartphone.

There should be more voice apps like GOOG 411, not less.
I'm not sure you can call a text editor 'ultra minimalist' when it depends (on my system at least) on 353MB of other software.
Maybe those GE phones will go on closeout?

http://www.amazon.com/28213EE1-Advanced-Cordless-Directory-A...
I use Instapaper on the iPad every day.
Phone call no longer required.

For what it's worth - it's just a Twilio app - we thought it would add to the fun.
Take a look at Arduino (http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...) It's a good board to start on, especially for sensor-based projects.
Respectfully, I really don't think the Windows factor had much to do with it.

It came down to one thing: the perception that MySQL was fast and Postgres was slow.

Further, MySQL was easier to setup due to its simplistic security model, and thus there was less to learn.
Yes, just like the former East Germany was called 'the peoples democratic republic of Germany'.

North Korea, China and a bunch of others all have very flowery names hiding some pretty ugly stuff.
In my experience, people who ask "why aren't you working on a cure for cancer?" never had to build a HIPAA-compliant system, much less get something as harmless as a nutritional supplement approved by the FDA. You can't disrupt a "serious" field with two college buddies and a few AWS instances.

Anyway, this "bread and circus" discussion reminds me of all the authors -- Tolkien in particular -- who were accused of wasting their talent in escapist works.
The Design of Everyday Things is cool, indeed. Norman's a great author who keeps questioning what we take for granted.

However, if you are looking for something more pragmatic, Steve's Don't Make me Think and JJG's The Elements of User Experience should be the top of your reading list, especially on web design.
There's no contradiction. I recommend using more than one service, if practical.

I have found, however, that hosting companies tend to cater for the less technical user, whereas what I usually want is to run my own "stealth" master and have the public providers have a quick turnaround on NOTIFYs.

The ideal choice is a provider with both a good web interface, for when one is too small to run ones own master, as well as good no-frills slave service, for when one has grown to need it.
Um, no answer on the phone. I let it ring for over a minute.
Number 2 sounds good, but photographing food is insanely difficult. See:

http://photocritic.org/food-photo-tricks/

I think hiring an artist to make a drawing of the food may be cheaper :-)
I have a dedicated server I bought myself years ago and host it at a coloc in downtown Toronto.
You seem reluctant to share what country you are in. Can you share what region (E. Europe, S.E. Asia, etc)?
1-800-FREE411 is still going strong.
_why would have to prove his identity by doing something with one of his online accounts.
what about large scale sysadmin/isp or large scale networking jobs in India? are there any? if you say i dont need certifications in India , can you hook me up with an interview then? cause most companies prefer certifications, they dont mandate those, but they do desire.
It's funny but some of my friends and I have been looking at the second idea and have made some progress there. I'll takl to my friends and contact you if they seem interested.
The link you provided does not support what you are saying. The link you provided actually agrees with me saying that the theory about air being deflected down is correct. It merely says that while correct, this explanation is not rigorous enough to do engineering. Which is totally right. But I was not trying to do any engineering, I was trying to provide a simple explanation about how a wing works and how that relates to Newton's third law of motion.
Sifter (http://sifterapp.com) started out as a side project. It was literally just something fun for me to fill my time with until a handful of people encouraged me to actually try to build a business out of it. Within about 18 months of launching it was able to support me full-time.

During that 18 months, there were times where it was rather stressful to work full to part-time on another job and manage a web application that's supposed to be up 24x7.

However, I would definitely say that if anybody else is in that tough spot before your side project can support you full-time, it's definitely worth fighting through it.
Oh well, no more free phone calls that you sign up as businesses on goog411. It was fun while it lasted.
Sorry to rain on Kindle's parade... but iPhone/iPad has been able to do it since the beginning of time: http://code.google.com/p/iphonefrotz/
Better ask for your money back, then.

Okay, to be serious though: this service never made it to Canada so I only got to use it once while visiting the USA. It sounded pretty cool and I know you'll miss it.

Seeing as this is HN, though, this is an obvious opening for a startup right? I mean, Google clearly doesn't think the service was worthwhile but much of HN is lamenting its loss.
Anybody else browsing by mobile try to do Level 1 by inspection?
Daniel,

Thanks for the comment. I think the idea is to connect across a reasonable combination interests (i.e. 2 to 3) at a time versus ALL the interests one has - although the app does make it possible.

Lets say you have those 4 interests, you can 'follow' the the crowd combinations you're specificlly interested in and not need to constantly check them.

Great points though - thanks for the feedback!
The Rise of the Angels
Ask HN: Anyone in SF have a bedroom available to rent for 30 days?
Hey guys, I'm going to be moving to SF on or around the 22nd of October to work with WakeMate in their new office, and I'm looking for a bedroom to rent for the first 30 or so days that I'm there. I'm basically looking for something in the downtown area at a decent price if at all possible.

I'm clean, friendly and outgoing, I love hacking, StarCraft and beer. I'll be gone most weekdays until 6pm or 7pm most evenings, and then I'll probably either do one of my favorite things listed above.

If anyone has anything interesting to offer, or knows of someone who does, please send me an email -> jlgosse [at] gmail [dot] com

Hope to hear from some people soon! Thanks again.

Josh
Hi, great questions, I'll try to answer them:

1. Yes, it is critical that we minimize the amount of JavaScript necessary. Most of the libraries you observed are needed for the demo webpage: the horizontal scrollbar, the popup box, etc. The widget, if embedded on a webpage will need very little code, only the part that does autocomplete. We'll do our best to make that minimal.

2. Yes, we want to check for updates, and we will try to use all methods that are available. So far we use our own http crawler, and where they are available RSS/Atom feeds or sitemaps. It would be easiest if the sites would notify us automatically of changes, but otherwise we can recrawl at a given rate.

3. Yes, we are still tweaking the algorithms for ranking and building phrases. One of the reasons behind doing this demo is to get feedback on what could be improved there.

4. Good idea, we will try to do somthing like this. This is one of the reasons for going for blogs as the first target: they have well-defined format so we can do specific things for Blogger, Wordpress, etc.

5. Yes, we want to do this. This demo showed just the suggestions, but we will have traditional search as well.

6. Soon, hopefully... We are aiming for a few weeks from now. Thanks for your interest !
This is a topic dear to my heart, there's not much I love talking about more than side-projects.

http://mocksup.com is my current side-project, and while it's yet to "go big", it's profitable and growing.
This was great and so true. Information definitely worth sharing. Thanks!
Doesn't VS2010 have a new extension API?
I started TwitterCounter.com as a fun weekend coding project after my partner said he wouldn't have time to start on it until he had finished some other stuff. I couldn't let it go so started coding right away. We launched 6 days later. Not it is hugely profitable and has 2 full-time employees.

More importantly: I think almost every major internet success was started as a side-project. Yahoo, Google, Apple, the list goes on and on...
The Duct Tape Architect
Absolutely. Also seems a little strange to not give back to the community such basic information, after it's done so much for him.

Maybe there's a competitive reason he's not divulging, or he's just too darn busy? ;)

(I'd love to know, too)
Just a note- The company I used to work for, 1800 Free 411 is still around, and makes a pretty decent alternative. Free411 is ad supported, and doesn't have call completion, but otherwise its a pretty decent stand-in.
After doing the obvious brute force algorithm, the correct answer is not a real word. So you'll have a tough time getting it on your own
That's something I learnt while working and it really helped me a lot (and will in my professional life). However, I don't have my own computer (shared one, except this netbook); so I need a better setup for my development.

I try to prioritize the items I need. An external hard-drive comes first, because I should have a backup strategy. The monitor is more important, because I need better display...

Certainly, I'll offer myself an Android as a gift and that also should serve and help me in business (read emails in the go, check statics, HN on mobile instead of computer...)
You (as in you the law enforcement agency) might be in the right to attach stuff to my car, but I as the owner of the vehicle am not responsible if your stuff goes missing in action.

[you are both right, if only you listened to each other]

Version 1 (Jacques): if the GPS tracker disappears and no one can prove that I had anything to do with it, then I'm not liable. True.

Version 2 (Roel): if I destroy the GPS tracker and tell the court that yes, I found it, I knew it wasn't mine, and I destroyed it, then I am liable. True.
A game I wrote for iPhone (Spit a.k.a Speed) has been covering my living expenses for about eighteen months now but it looks like its coming to an end :(

It seems like its also mostly due to a bug I'm unable to fix (mainly since I can't reproduce it). If anyone wants to give it a shot maybe we can work out a deal?
> This is an organization run in a nation state without the rule of law.

Libya actually has a pretty modern legal system (other than being based on 'Sharia' law that is), with several levels of appeal possible including a supreme court.

> There is no governing organization you can appeal to to ensure their decisionmaking is consistent.

Actually, there is:

This Regulation shall be interpreted and construed under Libyan Law.

So you could appeal to the Libyan courts. As they say though, good luck with that, but that would be something to do before making the claim that this was unlawful.
Charming. Nice work.