skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I second this - make the todo interface the main focus with a giant text box for the email, and a button that says "Send me this list daily".
Is it fair to say that "sex positive" is equivalent to "sex friendly" ?
oh and as a side note: to sign up free, enter the a credit card # 4, followed by 15 1's. Thanks!
This is brilliant. So brilliant I'm submitting it to the main page.
Distellamap: Visualization of Atari 2600 Code and Data
Ask HN: How to select and build content for specific domain names?
I have read in many places about how having a domain name related to your product can give you additional SEO benefits. Related to that I had two queries:

1> I have purchased a domain name which is not directly related to my business, but is adjacent to it. It is something which my potential users do search for, but for a different purpose. My plan is to build content focused on the queries associated with these users and then to add messages about my service at the beginning/end of the content. Does this seem like something worthwhile to do?

2> This one is a bit trickier. There is a domain which is available at huge premium ($1000) which is directly related to my product. The one gotcha is that it is a combination of 2 words, which are in opposite order. For example "goodday.com" vs "daygood.com". Will this also have SEO benefits? The other concern I have is that, google already churns out many good quality links for the search term associated with the domain. Will the domain name matter in such a case?
The system may be unable to give you a consistent response, no matter who you ask. It really depends on how you build your protocol.

Let's imagine a system where you want to be 100% available for reads, for any number of failures less than N. Then you need to be able to submit every single write to every single node in the system, otherwise the failure of all but the up-to-date node will result in stale reads.

But then if a single node is partitioned from the network, we can't (correctly) be available for writes, because the system is incapable of sending updates to all reads as required. It doesn't matter which node you ask.

The point is that every system has a failure mode like this. I take your point that it's not always just a single node failure that precipitates the abandonment of C or A, but that was never the point of the CAP theorem.
I love love love this!
I'd love to hear more details too, especially the name of the country you live in.

One of the beautiful thing about the Internet is how it allows you to set up nice lifestyle businesses. If I have a successful application (I'm 20), I could easily travel around the world working wherever there is an Internet connection and just getting by nicely. At least for a few years!
Why are you considering buying in?

Are you familiar with their financial situation? Do you know how much money they make? I can't find any reliable numbers. This is the best I could find:

http://www.businessinsider.com/hulu-ceo-talks-ipo--here-are-...

So their net profits are estimated $70M this year (before tax, I assume).

Their growth rate is the only thing that justifies 2B valuation.

So my main point is - we don't know enough to decide whether they are worth that much.
I just got done watching the 2nd DVD from Get Lamp and I was throughly impressed. I'd watched it at PAX East prior, and then the 1st DVD a few weeks ago. The 2nd DVD goes into some excellent depth.

Plus he isn't just making movies, but like you say, preserving history with his massive archives.
Nope, I'm not sure.
Hat Tip: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772615
I think we agree in some regards, although I think we see differently the crux of the problem.

Someone (forget who) once made the comment about hating being a developer at MTV because MTV wasn't a software company, so devs were always second class citizens. I think this is the case in the enterprise often.

The job of the enterprise generally isn't to make software. Software is there to support the business. Unfortunately, many developers don't act as if this is the case, and often seem to act as if the businesses end goal is to get this particular application working.

I'd propose that the best thing enterprise developers can do to help their prospects of being a "second 90% dev" their whole career is to show they understand the business and how they can bring value to it.

I knew an architect at Walmart who talked about how their philosophy changed and really focused on showing how Walmart IT need not be a cost center, but rather can be an actual profit/loss. This apparently drove more innovation, more interesting work, but also brought a lot more accountability.

I think that's the right model. Not just "Devs, go pick your favorite toys and run amok", but to have the devs say, "we're a tangible part of the business and we can account for our spend in the bottom-line". With that, I think good things come with it.
Not sure if you're bring sarcastic, but I'll bite.

Yes, but you need to peel off a specific problem within a given vertical. I bootstrapped both of these ideas and, because of the limitations that come with bootstrapping, I targeted them specifically.

MailFinch is on demand direct mail for real estate agents. Over time, companies that send a lot of invoices started using it too.

NotaryCRM is for notaries - plain and simple. Over time, it became apparent that signing companies were also looking for a solution that solved their specific pains.
Yes. Cardpool started offering something similar, but their focus is completely different currently. Also, the thought of using foodspotting to kickstart things occurred to me as well :)
Your dad is awesome.
As an analytical thinker I know I need to stretch myself a little more often to use my "other brain". Good thoughts. I enjoyed it.
I miss NM every day.

Could you add an RSS feed to forlue?
I played it for 5 minutes and then seriously considered getting a pencil and paper to start drawing out a map like I used to do. I forgot how addictive these games were!
What Amazon Fears Most: Diapers
Number 2: I don't think high-end restaurants want to show images of their dishes. For some reason it does not seem classy. Perhaps that's not an issue for the low/medium range.
What happened to the goose that don't lay the golden eggs?
I just adblock that shit. I know I should just not visit their site or whatever, but if everything I wanted to read had to live up to my standards, there would be nothing to read.

(Incidentally, my own blog didn't live up to my own standards, and it's down pending me fixing that :)
Regardless of whether there are, it would be infinitely more beneficial to buy a few books and jump in on your own.

Theory and practice assignments can only teach you so much. You really need to be creating real applications to understand performance, reliability, and security.
I've got 11 out of 12 that are failures. If you want to see them ask. And a few that have been winners. I'd build products whether they made me money or not--we're at a lucky time in history when the thing I (we?) like to do as fun and as a hobby is sometimes also really commercially viable.
What you are looking for in India is product-focused company rather than a service focus company. A product focused company will try to turn your hacker skills into engineering skills. My company ReaMetrix is a biotech company but we make instruments as well. We do a lot of prototyping in python along with web, firmware and image analysis. You would be exactly the kind of candidate we would look for. Also knowing what Hacker News is a big plus.
Google Cuts The Cord On Its Free 411 Service
Do the ads load quickly? If the ads load quickly but the content loads slowly, people are more likely to click the ads.

Of course, they'll never visit your site again, but hey... that's what "social media" is for!
So I'm a bit hesitant on Hulu's long term viability. They are extremely beholden to the networks and they are in a very scary position. They don't really hold the reins to their own destiny.

That being said... I think if you can get in early enough you can see some decent returns over the short term. I'd plan on about a 12 month window of getting out. I definitely wouldn't consider Hulu a buy and hold stock. The key here would be to watch out for Hulu being able to get some long term content deals (3+ years) with major networks. If they can lock in some content deals for a longer window they become much more viable for a long term run.
How long did you work on it before making it a full time project? And how long until you got funding/hired your first employee?
1-2 hours! Great...now my productivity will be shot for the day.
Startup Recipe
The Nobel Peace Prize 2010 Get Critism
this is the the kind of stuff we need in schools... why are we still waiting for superman? i found him... KENT HEALY
Yes, this is something that I'll add soon.
How to Buy a Round-the-World Plane Ticket (That Kicks Ass)
woah, you made visor too? I love that thing. totalfinder looks awesome too, will be check it out later today.
How true this is. Great information!
thanks for all the valuable points you listed out. The one thing I didnt quite understand from your comment was the following:
'give restaurant a stack of cards to include in your diner's checks or charge $10-$15 to do a custom card' -- could you clarify if you get a chance. thanks.
Hi, I made this website, partially inspired by google instant. You can open the search results in iframes and drag/drop/resize the iframes. Thus, you can avoid shuffling between the tabs. I think people with relatively large screen space would fine it useful. Would love to have some feedback! Thanks!
I don't think you can create a side project for fun and have it turn into a profitable business. You can, however, create something on the side with a mind to sell it, and become successful.
I tried it out, and the bottom line is: this is really slick, and I want it on my blog immediately. How soon are you sending out those beta invites?

Now to make myself useful:

1. This pulls in about 50 kB of very useful JavaScript: jQuery, jQuery-ui, TopUp, jCarousel Lite. Your own JS code is very light in comparison. All this is minified and gzipped, which is good, but that's still a fair amount of stuff. Do you have any plans to lighten this a bit? Perhaps use something like Closure Compiler with advanced optimizations to get rid of functionality that you don't use, and package it all into a single file?

2. How are you going to check for updates to the blog's content, so you can re-index it? The traditional way would be polling the RSS/Atom feed; the shiny new way is to get realtime updates via PubSubHubbub where available, and fall back to polling when that's not available. This can be simplified by using a service like Superfeedr to handle the polling fallback for you and just provide everything as PubSubHubbub feeds.

3. It's probably too early to talk about tweaking your ranking algorithm before you've started getting actual user data (you are storing complete logs, right?), but I'm sure there's a lot of room for improving the results. Again, this can happen after you've started to get more blogs and more user data.

4. A lot of people have blogs on Blogger, and despite being run by Google, their search box is pathetic. However, terrible as it is, it occupies some prime screen real-estate. I would like to have some Blogger-specific JavaScript I can drop in to replace that search box with yours.

5. If I type in a search query and press Enter without selecting one of your drop-down menu suggestions, nothing happens. It would be nice if pressing Enter did something, even if it just sent the user to a Google search.

6. Seriously, when are you sending out beta invites? ;-)
Hi,

* blogs have a well-defined format, they are relatively easy to crawl and they are wide-spread. Certainly, we can add wiki formats as well.

* good idea... the modal window is only for the demo, when the widget will be embedded on a website, it will take you to the search result directly. But for the demo I agree that Esc would be natural to use.

* No, the back-end is built from scratch, we crawl the contents of blogs, and run our own scripts to filter out the content, gather statistical data about the words, build expressions and rank them. Most algorithms we use are standard in NLP, a few are more experimental. We do most of the processing in Python and Perl. While we know and love Lucene, we don't use it here. We will write in more detail on our blog about the implementation details.
Revenue doubles at LOTR Online (after dropping subscription fees)
I worked for a couple years in college to come up with way to intuitively encrypt application data without resorting to full-disk encryption, the result (http://www.espionageapp.com), has been keeping me alive and self-sufficient. My advice isn't anything remarkable: find something both you and other people really need that doesn't exist and focus on it.
This is very western way of seeing thing, which I happen to agree. The current Chinese education system has been trying very hard, and quite successfully, to mix these concepts together: country, geographic land, government, ethnic group in order to make the current political system legitimate by "natural".

I agree as far as the current situation, but I don't think it's anything inherent about western or non-western ways of thinking, just a result of where Europe and China happen to be currently in their politics. Mixing country/land/government/ethnic-group into a "natural" whole used to be a very European idea as well, and was probably the dominant view of nation-states throughout the period of European ethnic nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries.

I think that today it's unpopular in Europe partly because it's so associated with 20th-century fascism: no mainstream German today would want to promote the idea that the German people, the German land, the German state, and German culture are some sort of natural, unified whole, because that sort of rhetoric marks you out as a member of the far-right.
WeatherLoop° http://weatherloop.com is a side project of mine. Amazing how scratching your own itch can benefit someone else.
Uh ... call a phone number? No thanks.

Edit: Excellent! Back to hacking.
I do alot blog reading and i must say, I like this one the best today! speaking the truth! Keep up the good work and the excellent information. I look forward to the next posting!
I think Hulu is problematic because of how its ownership structure is set up, you have these studios/content providers that are going to want the majority of profits.

When we buy businesses, we are anticipating the future cash flows that are going to be generated by the business but here - it's very possible that content providers could strangle the cash flow that is available to shareholders in favor of their own pockets.

I've seen this happen a few times in the past where a company has a handful of very large customers/clients that also own equity in the business.

I looked a bit at this space and came out most positive about Liberty Starz (when it traded in the low $50s). They should benefit from a renegotiation with Netflix over streaming rates but they are also moving into original programming.
Thanks, misham. Just starting up, so no specific questions yet. Still need to get up to speed from not touching any hardware for 15 years.
A venture capitalist's confession: Why I blog
I made a WordPress plugin to add a feature to one of my own sites, and threw it up on my blog as a free download. After hundreds of downloads and comments asking for support, I rewrote it and packaged it up as a commercial product. In the next 1.5 years I made about $180,000 in profit selling that plugin, then sold the rights to the plugin on Flippa for another $90,000.
Does anyone else hate the following transpiration:

Afifi asked, “Are you the guys that put it there?” and the agent replied, “Yeah, I put it there.” He told Afifi, “We’re going to make this much more difficult for you if you don’t cooperate.”
I live in a developing country, share an apartment, and am relatively frugal. I do however spend money on things that save me significant amounts of time.
I’m very impressed by mailfinch, the idea that someone will upload a file and address let you print and mail it still blow my mind. Now you’re making money on it, Great job guys!
First, your eyes are much, much better than mine. All the text on the site is, to me, either unbelievably small or has unbelievably bad contrast with the background.

As for the site itself, I think it's hard to say what it could become until it gets bigger. I'm not really sure why I'd want to use it right now. Finding people with all similar interests would be cool, but what would we share? It's not like there's content out there that's simultaneously about guitars, programming, go, and cooking. So why would I include all those tags instead of posting guitar stuff with guitars, programming stuff with programming, etc.

It also seems like searching/browsing will be strange. If I'm interested in the 4 things I listed above, I need to check 15 combinations of tags to make sure I'm not missing anything.
The US offshore wind energy technology conundrum
Founder Institute looks to incubate 50 Seattle startups
You're right. And I've seen several public requests in #clojure for him to stop with the unproductive language wars, but he ignores them.
Guys don't downvote somebody on their FIRST POST on HN. This guy may legitimately want to know how to do this, that's one hell of a good reason to be on HN.

Jastis, to answer your question, you do it one step at a time, because if you try to do too many things (or too big of a thing) at once then nothing gets done. Bite off one small thing a day and you'll be amazed how much gets done in half a year.
This is a hard question to answer. I work on a lot of side projects in the form of open source libraries and whatnot. It's possible that any of those could blossom into a business, but I've never really pursued many of them.

As for other business projects:

* I tried to resell knives and other camping gear on eBay once. I called it Wolfcastle Munitions. That was a disaster. I'm not built to do retail.

* I had an idea called Project Mothership that was going to be Rails hosting (before anyone was doing dedicated Rails hosting and much like what Planet Argon became) but I abandoned it after I realized that I'd lose my mind if my job became network operations management.

* I wanted to do a climbing sight called Microbomber that would list and categorize climbing routes across the world with photos and reviews and whatnot.

* I also thought about making custom gloves and coats for hardcore outdoor activities (wilderness hiking and skiing, etc). I have a near impossible time finding gloves that fit me well and are legitimately waterproof, and I've still never owned a winter coat that I've loved. I was also going to use the name Microbomber for this effort.

There are plenty more that I've long forgotten.

But, all of these ideas (except the first) I only spent very small effort on. I like to put small efforts towards a lot of ideas and then see what catches. That way I don't spend a lot of time and effort that is later wasted. Knowing when to abandon something and when to dive in is the hardest part, but it's essential. Call it what you want: intuition, savvy, or instinct. I just call it seeing the world objectively and not overvaluing every little idea you happen to have.
Transparent JPEGs for the browser
Dang - I seriously loved this free service. Had it in on my favorite list and used it once a week at least. Hopefully someone else will make something similar.
the lift comes from pressure differential between "top" and "bottom" surface of the wing - that's the definition used by professionals in the field.

Here's why definition about deflection of the air is generally not accepted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(force)#Criticisms_of_defl...
I think Visor was created by Blacktree (the guy behind QuickSilver), but woid is the new maintainer (if I'm not mistaken).
Thanks man! It's great to hear that kind of stuff from other developers.
Meebo is very proud of this bar, for reasons I don't entirely understand. I can see a fair amount of use for it, on some websites, but I really wish they would optimize it so that those that opt to implement it on their pages don't get such a performance hit to pageload.
* We said we'll start out with blogs, because that's where we miss such a feature dearly. In the long run, anything which contains plenty of text could be "metahinted".

* Very useful suggestion, thank you. It is implemented now: ESC should close the popup window.

* Few commenters have suggested that. Would you prefer to see the entry occupy the entire screen or fit in a text-area of some sorts?. Anyways, reworking the preview functionality is on our TODO list.

* We'd respectfully defer answering this question in ample details to an upcoming blog post. We appreciate your understanding in this matter. To give you a short answer, however: no, it's not Lucene.

Thank you for your comment!
An Inevitable Slide for Americans’ Standard of Living
How about changing your recruiting strategy from 'top' to 'potential' since it's so hard to reach top ones?

Diff from big-fat-cat company, startup has a big advantage that it's going to grow and employees can really feel it.

This is a good chance to cultivate ownership, loyalty, sense of belonging, etc.

Good luck :)
Cut Cut Paste. Cut
I am not a student. I am young, not married, and do not have kids. I live in a developing country in Asia and am frugal: I could buy a dryer, but I hang my clothes to dry instead.
Apple's also not really a software company.

Still, even if you ONLY look at Apple's software revenues, I suspect that Apple would turn out to be more diversified than Google. :)
How can I turn my passion into business
Hello All,
There have been many stories about how people have converted their passion into business. I am one such passionate person who has not yet given his passion any business aspect to it, but would like to. I am the founder of Drawmics.com which is was born out of my passion for sketching without an aim to create something worthwhile. It is just like sketching one's mood. While I wanted to do this, I thought there must be similar people like me who would want to create such casual work of art. So I created a social media platform: Drawmics just like twitter where people would sketch, upload images, art works, comics, etc on Drawmics and share it with other people. I am seeing some traction on Drawmics and people registering into it, but until now there has not been significant increase in the traffic.
I would appreciate if you can provide your valuable
ideas about how to build a business out of it and monetize
my passion.

I have a few questions:
1. How to market it. I have used Stumbleupon, facebook, twitter and tumblr ads, but still don't see the traffic I would like to.

2. How should I target my website against people who are participants rather than just passive observers.

3. What improvements on the site that you would like to see?

4. I have contacted a few webcomic artists as well for uploading their works. Some have accepted and some have turned down the offer. Since I am just a guy with a regular job, I cannot pay them.

5. I have used GWT and Php for all the coding, GIMP for graphics and Flash for the sketchpad. Now I am thinking of using SVG and HTML5 canvas for the sketchpad. Would you advise me using any other tools for improving the visibility?

Thanks for your time.
Vikrant Ramteke
Hey, thanks for making viemu. I make games and I use viemu for visual studio about 6 hours a day. :)