skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe you could run in the background and just pay attention to what the users actually use? It seems like the pattern of use is going to be more indicative of what the rest of us should take a look at than the people-who-bother-to-rate-bias will allow. For example, a few basic things I'd like to know: if someone downloads it, tries it, and uninstalls or never touches it again after a couple days, if it force closes a lot [on a class of devices], and if people are using it consistently over time, like multiple times a week for months.

That said, I don't really need recommendations as to what to try, I just need something that doesn't present me with a zillion clearly crappy options (and this applies to Apple's too.. Stupid-compiled-pamphlet-of-information I'm looking at you). After eliminating those, there's not so much left in the Android Market that I can't go through it in a reasonable amount of time.
If an idea is obvious then it is not patentable (in theory). Additionally, if there is prior art that captures the claims then it should also not be patentable. I feel like patent law covers this pretty well.

The big problem to me are patents, common in software, that do the following:

1) They target a new problem that didn't exist before.

2) Have a trivial solution to this new problem.

3) Then one can claim that this patent is non-obvious since no one else has done this before.

The interesting thing is not the actual patent, but the problem it is solving. In SW this happens because the industry changes so quickly, but the patented ideas are obvious, its just that the problems are new.

I propose that we add a new test to patentability -- prior art that this problem has been attempted or struggled with. Thus if your solution is the first one to ever been attempted on a given problem its defacto non-patentable.

A quick example is in order:
SMS comes out with 148 character limits. Someone then instantly patents URL shorteners to fit in the 148 character limit. Patent denied as there is no prior attempted solutions or struggles fitting URLs in it. (Note, if the patenter can find articles written by practitioners about how SMS is not useful because of link lengths then that would be applicable as prior attempt).
A creative cover letter from a hacker to the Chicago Tribune
'They' are actually robots. In my experience they never stop communicating. Once you are in the database, they'll spam you forever.
I've noticed that a really bad idea on Craigslist, etc often sounds like, "It will be like Facebook, but for X" where X is some group.

With Diaspora I always felt like they were saying, "It will be like Facebook, but for those who don't use Facebook"
Yeah, auto-location was quickly identified as a potential future option. Though it's not quite foolproof because there are a lot of cases in which you don't actually want the nearest radar site, but rather the nearest one upwind of you.

Another feature I'm toying with is the ability to stitch together multiple images so you can pick any point in the country as the "center" of the image.

As for the radar range, there is all kinds of post processing that could be done to simulate shorter ranges, but the only images the NWS currently produces are either 124 or 248 nautical miles.
I would say the same for Prolog. Since doing general programming is so different in Prolog, it has been used mainly for the implementation of DSLs. It is really nice to read papers where a apparently complicated DSL is implemented in < 100 lines of code.
For that 90s retro vibe.
The reason why advice here is almost exclusively aimed at programmers is because HN is bias towards startups that make stuff that are byproducts of the software discipline.

Startups that focus on Web/saas/cloud are getting a lot of attention lately but by no means is this your only path. Maybe consider a career arch that will value what you would like to focus your energy (research, writing, & marketing)?

For example, I've notice a growing trend of upstart industry analysis boutique shops that are taking market share from the Gartner/forrester/Juniper research mafia. Some examples are redmonk (developers) and altimetergroup (social media). The high value workers of these companies are the analysts (that like tech) and not the hackers.

Bottom line is don't limit build/succeed of a startup to just being a hacker.
Shit, I'm sorry. I meant to vote Craigslist up but instead gave your comment the fat-fingered iPad treatment.
Getting stack trace from a running Python application
The main problem here is that Kelly should start using some other tools/source of information instead relying only on "grep" for her job.
Forgive me, I failed to make this clear, but I work on such systems and I don't think they are all that smart. The code for station keeping is less interesting than the code for directions on Google Maps. (Connecting GPS points in space is pretty damn easy). Landing a UAV is pretty sweet, but I still wouldn't call it AI. The complexity is on the control side, but if you call that AI then is your cruise control in your car AI?
I kno wpeople who have had success finding work on CraigsList. I have relied on a network of contacts I have delveoped over the last decade, but keep an ear open to recruiters who strike me as intelligent and on the ball.
Disclaimer: I work for Black Duck / Ohloh.

As far as I can tell, existing Ohloh features and community will stay as is and will remain free as we add more features and enhance the site. Feel free to email me <username> @ blackducksoftware.com if you'd like to ask any specific questions or have ideas/comments/suggestions.

FWIW - I think this FAQ covers a lot of questions - http://www.blackducksoftware.com/ohloh/faq.html
Using this service the user is effectively trading time of his followers for money. One of the worst kind of spam ever.
This is very similar to my own microstartup -> (shamless plug) JotOnce.com except we're for messages instead of links.
What is a systems analyst? I've never known what that title meant. What do you do all day? This is an honest question. Sometimes I wish I could move back to the Midwest, but there are few (no) job listings for "hackers" in my home city. There are many for "systems analyst."
I know this is nothing compared to what a lot of you guys are probably use to, but I released an app earlier this month called EasySal Calculator. I wouldn't say it is "cool", but I am new to programming so actually finishing and publishing an Android app is pretty damn cool to me.
There's an article on LWN from 2008 about distributed bug tracking: http://lwn.net/Articles/281849/

One advantage that it mentions is a more tight coupling with distributed source code management systems.
Oh, and P.S.
I love Rails, but I always try to use the right tool for the job. Sometimes that means good old PHP and MySQL. Don't just use cutting edge tools because they're 'cool' or 'developer friendly'. Developer friendly and consumer friendly are two very different things.
Yea, I thought your approach was interesting (as is typical in most code reviews) but I was also amazed at the non-straightforwardness of getting said version number.

EDIT: Also, a lot of commenters here are just making jokes (funny ones, sure) but not actually looking at or considering the code required to get the version number.
Would you enlighten me how it is supposed to call Truphone/Gizmo unless the owners of those services specifically want to connect them trough SIP gateway? Is Skype supposed to go out and find every standalone SIP setup in the world and connect to it?
I would guess you are overestimating the memory footprint of your applications (unless you are planning on running Eclipse/Firefox/etc.) on the box.

USB2.0 will push 480Mb/sec which is probably sufficient for streaming content.

My wireless router has 64MB of ram and is capable of running as a NAS device if you plug a USB enclosure into it.
i encountered this sort of "pay with a tweet" (pwat?) via a macheist promo you're mentioning and i had exactly the same reaction as actually paying cash, except that it was more difficult because it was a sort of half-hearted, monetarily encouraged plug for something i wasn't internally raving about. At the point i actually did it, i felt like i had sold out.

Which is to say that pwat could be totally effective in being a payment mechanism, but only if the stakes of the pwat's message are high enough to equate to a non-trivial reblogging of a url.
The biggest problem with IE6 that I see with my company, is that a lot of corporate clients still have IE6 on their machines because of their lazy IT departments. So they don't care if only 0.0000000000001% of the traffic is from IE6 because it happens to be them.
Panasonic's new camera is a phone
Bots that execute analytics javascript? Sure they're out there, but that's a very, very small percentage.
The idea of computer-as-integration-point is really a Western one. In Japan you have your smartphone, your console, your camera, etc, and they all overlap more than Western counterparts on what would otherwise be done by a PC.

That's why Sony make great hardware but lousy PC software. Their core market in Japan doesn't need to plug their phones into their PCs to manage their music, they do it all on the device...
Why are technical recruiters so clueless?

Because they are a little less clueless than most HR departments.

Are there any recruiters working in technology who get it?

Yes. The top 1 or 2%. The bell curve of competency for recruiters is a lot steeper at the high end, so finding one who "gets it" is difficult. So when you do, keep them. Whether you're hiring or looking, they can change your life.

The problem with this kind of hackery is that it has breed an outright animosity to recruiters in large parts of the tech world.

When you stop to think about it, this may not be such as bad thing for the top 1 or 2% of recruiters. Once the wheat is separated from the chaff, it becomes more straight forward for a competent recruiter to do their thing and gain your trust.

In this way, recruiters have a lot in common with real estate agents, car salesmen, lawyers, and even programmers. The masses of mediocre ones give the whole profession a bad name, but the best rise to the top and really do make a difference.
The email that DHH got is essentially spam since he is obviously not looking for a job.

I've gotten my previous two jobs via "technical recruiters". If you expect them to hack on operating systems in their spare time you'll probably be disappointed, but IMO they are useful as market makers and are highly motivated to match you up w/ an employer that will be happy w/ you (since there is typically a 3-month probation before they're paid, and it can lead to repeat business). I wouldn't bash them for being technically ignorant since it's not as if internal HR recruiters are known for their technical proficiency either.
I tend to agree here, although I don't think it is limited to the HN community. This article could have easily had the headline, "60% of Groupon merchants would do it again". I think that would have been the headline a few months ago.
I deleted my Facebook account over a year and a half ago, and honestly I miss it, not enough to want to trust them again, but enough to want SOMETHING to fill the gap. I'm excited that someone out there is building an alternative, is it Dispora? Probably not, just speaking from a statistical sense, I think they've made progress, but I'm still excited because even if they fail some other hacker group will make this happen.
We have real life contacts, don't forget that. That will help a lot.
What are the numbers, roughly?
"Technical" recruiters don't understand technology. The ones I've met are only capable of handling bingo sheets of buzzwords.

My take on the whole recruiter industry is that the parasitic field of recruiters exists because of 2 factors:

1. Mismanagers don't know how to hire people. Is someone skilled? They don't know. Will someone make a good fit? They don't know. It is like Supreme Court Justice Potter's remark "I'll know it when I see it."

2. Companies don't like how references have devolved to "X worked here from Y to Z and is/is not eligible for rehire." This makes paying the 20-40% of the first year's salary for a new hire a cheap way to evade lawyers, courts and previous employer's HR departments. In short, recruiters get hired by HR departments to get around other HR departments (perhaps one should consider getting rid of one's HR dept?).
Yeah, I'd buy you drinks and stuff. You'd be one of my 200 top people that I cultivate.

I'd be an awesome recruiter :-) But I'm too introverted I think.
I just checked Learnhub's numbers (http://learnhub.com) and IE is now at 40%, it was 54% a year ago. Most of the traffic comes from India.

Chrome went from 7.5% to 20% in the same time frame.
You're right, I didn't get a ton of responses. Still, the responses I did get were overwhelmingly pro-Groupon. As someone seeking an answer to an important question, my takeaway was "Hm, HN thinks it's a good idea."

Honestly, I'm still on the fence. I've said this elsewhere, but I'm in China and the Groupon clone market here is really saturated and interesting to watch. Basically, the Chinese clone market really resembled the American market for a while (w/ a winner, Meituan, pulling ahead), but then just about every site with a large email list or userbase joined the fray. Even my local expat magazine is running a Groupon clone. The original players are now getting clobbered by RenRen (a Chinese Facebook) and Dianping (the Chinese Yelp). I can tell because I know a Groupon clone owner who's basically dropped out of the contest and because the other clone salespeople (including Meituan's) have become increasingly desperate and have offered me increasingly better terms.

I'm currently leaning towards using some of them, because I believe I've gotten some of them to the point where I can have the Groupon require customers to buy from my website, which gives me customer information that I really want.

Customer data aside, I still think these sites are causing the equivalent of a price war in the industries they're targeting. During some periods when a competitor is being featured, it almost seems like it's directly hurting my volume. I guess it could be coincidence though.
I guess technical recruiters will never be any good until you find ex software developers to be technical recruiters - and I can't think you'd find many software developers willing to do that.

I am convinced there are still many ways for recruiting to be fixed by disruptive startups
The most important thing I've learned is that every (good) typeface is designed for a specific reason, otherwise they would have used an existing one. That reason may be overcoming a technical limitation of the time, or there is a quality in the content that needs additional emphasis.

All of the great typefaces have some kind of history. An original use case (the brief), influences, designer biography, etc. - which can be looked up on wikipedia or elsewhere. As a general rule, if your project meets the original requirements of the typeface, it should be appropriate. Sometimes a face will pick up additional cultural connotations along the way, depending where it's used. And great graphic designers know when they can mix-and-match history for style.
I would guess the 'systemic problems' are from companies not following the license rules of many OSS projects and treating it as FREE software rather than free but with license restrictions software. Specifically their experience with their Linksys issues (http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Cisco-settles-with-F...)
I'm confused by this title. Was being kicked out of France part of his punishment, but he's still a trader? Or is he a French ex-trader? This could be rephrased for clarity.
Fake Education Pundits are Dangerous
Creating a Simple, Reusable Cache Class in PHP
John, thank you for clarification!
I believe the purpose of dev kits is prototyping, where cost isn't that much of an issue.
Cutting Teeth, Software Projects, The First Two Weeks
A few questions came up recently that I wanted to answer, but before I answered I wanted to post them to see what others might think.

What are the most basic concepts of the application story needed to get started?
What should be assumed to be complete based on that after 1 week?
After 2 weeks are up, what could or should be delivered for a MVP (Minimally Viable Product)?
Ideally speaking development wouldn’t start until one has done a few paper prototyping sessions and written up a number of user stories. Often though just a minimal amount of things actually need to be known. My immediate answer to, “what is the most basic concepts of the application story needed to get started?” would be,

A simple story around the core prospective user of the application.

An example would be a story along these lines. Since I’m the user in this case, I’ll use “I” instead of “the user”.
It's interesting to think about ways in which using Groupon would be beneficial.

Maybe for a new entrant to a geographic market where they are willing to settle with much lower margins? So you would in that case use Groupon to get your initial customers at the expense of neighboring competitors. And by keeping prices permanently low you would potentially keep those customers.

Presumably, if you can keep that up and competitors cannot compete, you could drive them out of business and then raise prices. Sort of a Walmart 2.0 strategy.
What about Neuroscience or Materials Science?
New startup with @limedaring(same name on HN)
The notion of "another social network" doesn't really excite me at all. That being said, I do like the approach they're taking and if everyone just sat on their asses and didn't challenge the big guys, things would never change. The security flaws and the like from the alpha release (or was it beta?) disappoint me a bit too and I wonder how long it will take to have a viable product that can compete with Facebook and if they're capable. Overall, though, I think new social networks need to fill some sort of niche to be successful and I only see Diaspora as an easier to control general network. Not enough of a reason to switch from Fbook or get excited, at least not this early.
Real world contact helps the problem, but it doesn't solve the problem.
http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ#deletea...

I just did, thanks for the suggestion.
Guilty as charged.

However, the mainstream media seem to interpret Diaspora as being a Facebook competitor
Aakrosh Movie Wallpapers, Ajay Devgan & Bipasha Basu Aakrosh Movie Photos
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because achieving 100k units or 1M in revenue in short period of time is beyond their abilities, duh?
Just like we all have something like a fake/spam email address (that we give out to the sites we don't care about) -- we'll end up with fake twitter accounts.

Also - can't we just filter this out from a client?
The Great HackerNews Book-a-thon
tooling costs have ranged from 5,000 USD to 12,000 USD. i plan on visiting the factories, but the large range in prices has me unsure of how i should price my own product.

first run of production will be 5k units. we will ramp up production once we get more distribution and the product begins to sell well.
What about p2p encrypted backup? There was some attempts but none gained traction AFAIK.
> As an advocate for the DB2 team I often hear people ask, “Why would you use DB2 when MySQL is free and Open Source?”. The truth is that countless companies use DB2 because they know it ends up being cheaper in terms of both time and cost, when compared to Open Source database solutions.

It's as if PostgreSQL doesn't even exist. DB2 vs MySQL is comparing an aircraft carrier to a kayak. MySQL isn't the only open-source DB out there and it is nowhere close to the best option in most enterprise cases.
That footer navigation looks like an after-thought, or a joke. I like the top of the page though: clean and simple.
I look forward to it providing many opportunities for satirical comedy similar to cuil.
There are also apps that rely on IE6 and simply do not work properly in IE7 nor IE8. These apps would also have to be updated which, with tight purse strings in some companies, is not bound to happen soon.
Ask HN: How do you manage taxes for your startup/consultancy business?
Like many individuals that frequent HN, I work as a consultant full time and use the money I earn to support my family and work on an ambitious startup project on nights and weekends. After little consultation, I decided that a single member LLC is the way for me to go in as far as forming a corporate entity to protect my assets and maximize on my tax write offs.

Being someone who's worked as a W-2 employee his entire life - I am clueless with how to manage my taxes. I'm used to just getting a ton of money removed from each paycheck and paying someone $100 a year to just do my return for me.

Things I am doing to prepare myself as a 'business owner' is setting aside 35% of my gross into a savings account, assuming that's going to federal taxes. I opened a business checking and a business credit card that I use solely for organizing expenses that I think are businesses expenses. I also just started reading some highly recommended books (which I'll list upon request, but I don't want this thread to seem like a promotional one)

I plan to use my LLC not only as a consultancy but also to do business as my startup until/if the startup gains enough traction to open its own LLC, I can't justify the costs right now at this stage.

I do have a certified CPA that deals with corporate tax that is consulting me. I feel it's not enough. I wanted to reach out to the HN community to see how do you deal with your taxes? What tools/suggestions/tips and tricks can you suggest so I can maximize on my return? How do you track your expenses? How do you plan what you are doing for your startup/consulting shop in as far as spending goes?

The less time I have to spend thinking about and working on taxes, the more time I can spend on building great products.

I was naive in originally posting this - I should make note that this probably applies to those in the United States only as taxes are handled differently in other regions of the world.
Request HN : Help ne Name my Startup
Internet Explorer Drops Below 50% Market Share Worldwide
Play Framework 1.1 RC1 Released
Excited about poor code and implementation? Login details left in config files on a public check out?

4 Months or whatever for 4 (?) people to make that? And rip UI off Facebook?

Please, moving along. But I hope those who donated, will get their CD copy!

P.S the actual real time distribution, is borrowed from another author; they had to basically:

1. Take Facebook's UI
2. Plug in another dudes code for core functionality
3. Write simple controller and views
This company invented this model http://promojam.com and they are already working with all the big record labels and entertainment co's...
Washington DC online voting hack contest suspended early