skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is a video of Tennessee fire-fighters watching a house burn to the ground because the owner didn't pre-pay the annual fee.

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/10/04/county-firefighters-subs...
Making music suck --> alternative rock

I think this is related to the "ugly for authenticity" point in the article.
'A minimalist lifestyle does not make you a better person'

I'd like to understand why, but fixed-width, left-aligned layout at 1680x1050? Fluid width or at least centering the text would be helpful.
I like this formal press release:

"On behalf of all of us at Viaweb, I'd like to congratulate Dr. Blackwell on his new degree and matching ring," said Viaweb president Paul Graham. "Also, Trevor, if you get this, could you call Linda Wilk? A user wants to talk to you about Cybercash."
The bike snob anti-new-minimalism thread is highly entertaining and informative. The idea that those suffering from extreme poverty are the ultimate minimalists puts the recent "wearing minimalism on your sleeve" trend in perspective IMO.
All fairly regular tasks I'd say

The vast vast majority of people I know have never done any of those things, and probably never will. If their xbox is broken, they either send it off to get fixed or throw it out and get a new one. If they need drywall or heavy bookshelves put in, they call someone.

I would consider owning no tools and and getting other people to handle all your repair work to be a fine example of a certain type of minimalism.
I never imagined how easy it would be to get started. After pitching a failed startup in New York City, I received a random email asking if I knew any software developers. I mentioned I was looking for freelance work, and that was my first gig. I'm currently working four and the offers keep coming. All you really need to do is go to startup events and tell them you're a developer. 95% won't want to pay you, but there's always a few that will.

I keep track of hours using freshbooks, ask for 50% of estimated hourly fees up front, and use paypal for payments. It's pretty easy, and I never even built a website, lol.
Groupon: Goldmine, Tar pit, or Niche Solution
I agree with the majority of the article. I think that design is very important and is essential to user experience on your site, however, i dont think design is more important than engineering like the author states.

You can have a functional site with no design, but you cant have no function and just a design. I'm not saying you have to choose between the two here, just saying, engineering is the meat of all websites, without it, you have nothing.
In Zynga games, you’re just trying to get more stuff. You’re caught up in this junkie behavior, and you have to keep upping the dose. That has me terrified.

This exactly is what playing most MMO games is all about: the grind for stuff. I don't see a reason this should be considered that threatening to anything. The draw of MMO Games is the sense of accomplishment (next level, next piece of gear), and in any games now that've implemented achievements (Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead, Quake Live, Starcraft 2 the list goes on forever) it's the same feeling of accomplishment when you get your 500th midair knife kill.

That's just the direction games are going. Give the user a a feeling of accomplishment.

I don't see anything warranting a gloomy outlook on games because of farmville, especially, since I don't see a huge overlap in target markets.
I think there are more opportunities than ever before.
see Blackberry/UAE.
Cool, I'm very happy that you guys are making money!

(For what it's worth, my love is not abstract -- I actually learned something about my spending habits in the mere two weeks of using Xpenser that helped my peace of mind. It's something that makes my life demonstrably better!)
Why isn't Fabric doing this? This would be basic feature of deployment software I would think. I vaguely remember the old, old Fabric (before they rewrote everything) did this.
Trader losses $120,000 due to TD Ameritrade Tech Glitch
How to start your web design business
How India Will Outsmart China? | The World Reporter: News Opinion and Analysis
The money quote:

"Facebook didn't even exist when we started the company. The iPhone didn't exist. We've adapted and changed and rolled with everything that's come our way. We've constantly integrated our approach to games."

Evolution is one of the most important words in business.
Running out of money forced them to cut features and launch. On my first project running out of time before school started forced us to cut features and launch.

Since then my projects have been after work and I haven't had any force requiring me to do this... So they haven't been launched.

Seems like some sort of outside force requiring you to launch is a good thing to have.
"I can't stand clutter"

That pretty much sums up the article for me. I'd rather hear from someone who switched to a minimal lifestyle than from someone who apparently has always favored it.
However, self employed workers can write off work related expenses. This may help offset the higher taxes. On the other hand, as a freelance web developer, my overhead is so low I don't even bother with deductions (I'm living in the Philippines to take advantage of the freedom of self employment but costs are super low here.)
Ask PG: Necessary to be a technical founder to be accepted in YC?
I have some knowledge related to programming, although not enough to actually build an app. It is, however, sufficient for communicating what I need to developers. I am also familiar with various web technologies, workflows, and stacks.

If I got a developer (non-founder) to build an app based off of my idea would I still be considered for admission to YC? Assume the app is live (in beta) with some traction.
"We're afraid because we make big-budget games, and Zynga has made people pay for low-budget games."

Nobody gets annoyed at the success of Bejeweled or Sally's Spa or their many knockoffs. They're simple, but they're not "evil".

Good controls, decent visuals and audio, and great plot and/or mechanics. That's what makes the best games.

And Farmville has none of those. It's just a Skinner box. (So is WoW, but at least it has a skill component).
Awesome. Thank you. I will do that. I do suspect that there might be changes to my project structure that would make things easier under MonoDevelop.

I should have made clear that other than these little annoyances, we love MonoDevelop. I certainly prefer using it within my standard Linux and OS X environments over figuring out what I need to click on in Visual Studio to get anything done.
"But it had to be done. Because if people knew that the firemen would save them free of charge, then nobody would pay. And if people knew that you could avoid paying the firemen up until the moment that first spark hit your curtain, well, again, nobody would pay."

Exactly. Nobody wants someone stranger's house to burn down, but part of the rules of living there was that you'd pay your portion if you wanted protection.

On another site, I saw someone write a comment like "When my house was robbed, the insurance companies just stood there and did nothing! I offered to pay them afterwards, but they wouldn't agree!" (Obvious sarcasm.) Insurance doesn't work if you only pay it -after- you have a problem.
Show HN: Review my project: MarkUp, a tool to draw on any webpage.
Here's the website: http://markup.io/

We created MarkUp at Medium to help make the QA process better for
sites we're working on. Grab the MarkUp bookmarklet, go to some page
in your browser, then click it to draw on the page. Publish to make a
link you can share.

We've tried similar tools like BounceApp, Notable, and Skitch.
Everything else we found is screenshot-based or takes us out of the
browser. We wanted something that felt quicker than screenshots and
more integrated with the browsing experience.

Instead of taking a screenshot, MarkUp snapshots the DOM in the
current page, strips the javascript, and overlays a transparent DIV to
draw on. We used Raphael for the drawing tools. The server-side is
Node.js/Express.

What do you think? It's in beta and we'll be adding more features,
but we wanted to start getting feedback now.

Thanks
They weren't 'watching it burn'. They were protecting the neighboring houses. The ones that -had- paid to support the fire department.
Most blogs make this difficult by not having an easily-discoverable link back to the main site. They link back to the root of the blog and maybe have a link back to the main site hidden away somewhere, which takes more time to find than editing the URL by hand.

It's frustrating but could be solved regardless or sub-domain/sub-directory preference.
I think 'fun' can be a relative thing, which is why people play games like Farmville. When you are bored at work, then a game like Farmville would be a 'fun' diversion of your time. Or if you are bored at home and rather than worry about bills piling up, or that school paper due you play Farmville because it's more 'fun' than worrying about either of those things.

It's like Solitaire. I've played countless games over the years, but I don't recall every actually enjoying the time spent playing it. Normally I was just avoiding doing something else.
This is what it's like to live in a place where "taxation" is a dirty four letter word. Call me a commie, but I'm glad I live in a place where public safety, road maintenance and health care are a shared civic responsibility. Everyone who can afford to pays and everyone benefits.
The last paragraph is key, Zynga games, by and large, are social lubricants more than art. Compare Farmville, which seems to be the example of terrible game design. Is it better or worse than Monopoly or Uno? Both those games have highly deterministic styles of play and exist more as a framework for social interaction than as "Art". I don't think its a bad thing. Just look at them in context as substitutes for kitchen table games for widely distributed friends.
i think they've been planning to for a while: http://code.fabfile.org/issues/show/19

i haven't really followed their progress too closely, but they seem to be close to releasing something for 1.0.

I think they do client-side threading while i prefer to to do fork() on the server to avoid multiple ssh connections and retain maximum control.

i'll reevaluate when they ship. till then parex works for me.
The truth, though, is that sometimes you might have to lower your rate to take work if you're going through a particularly dry spell and have bills to pay.

Don't feel bad about it.

In that instance, try and get a retainer, so that you're getting paid every 2 or 4 weeks for a set number of hours no matter what.
StackExchange site for Freelance Developers - needs your votes
"He said it was refreshing that someone took the time to write a cover letter because 99% of developers don't bother."

I find this hard to believe. I might believe that 99% of applicants don't. But not 99% of developers.
Barbarians at the gates of complexity
HTML5 can't solve all the problems, e.g. support for full screen video. Browser vendors need to have their own workaround.
So when the HFTs got hold of the futures contracts that the Waddell & Reed algorithm was selling, they would've first looked for legit buyers to flip them too. And, not finding any legit buyers, they just started rapidly buying and selling amongst themselves to at least pick up some rebate money.

A couple of things:

1. E-mini futures don't give rebates

2. He seems to suggest that different algos from different companies were knowingly trying to collude with each other to get these nonexistent rebates. This seems pretty far-fetched.
Ask HN: Where to look to learn UX/Design
I understand that this wont make me a web Picasso or anything, but I would love to be 'not horrible' when it comes to sites design and UX. What are some good places to look at, get inspiration from, and especially, learn from?
Avoiding a simple question, not having an answer ready to questions easily forseen, speaking on the brink of uttering nonsense, making really bad jokes wrt a competitors product and its user.

I read a transcipt of Ballmers public speaking before and I was then also shocked by the poor quality of it.
The sad part about this one, is that it was for a huge tech firm, who hired this person based on reputation and the circle of friends that this person associates with, they paid top dollar for this person. The individuals pedigree looks outstanding and they are a great speaker and advocate for the industry. They just could not apply their trade to real world problems, and in turn blamed the client due to their inflated arrogance due to being so respected in the speaking and blogging industry, when in fact this client has their act together, it is one of the better development houses I have seen.
Please vote your preferred entry in the Redis Logo Contest page
I really liked it.

It's certainly not 100% accurate, and I don't think it's trying to be. It glosses over some major aspects of Facebook's history (like Zuckerberg's friendship with Graham, the heavy focus on Wirehog, the importance of Dustin Moskowitz, and so on), it compresses a lot of events into a shorter timespan than they occurred in real life (Facemash, renaming from Thefacebook to Facebook, the excising of Saverin from the company, the acquisition of VC, the move to real offices), and it fabricates a bit wholesale (it plays up one of Zuckerberg's ex-girlfriends, making it seem as if she was his only one; portrays Zuckerberg as having heavy asperger syndrome; implies that all of Facebook's funds came from Saverin; pretends Facebook was started because Zuckerberg wanted into Harvard's Final Clubs, etc.). That's true.

But it's not about vilifying Facebook; the dramatic license was taken to be dramatic, not to make some point about Zuckerberg or Facebook. Zuckerberg is portrayed as a total genius; his role as CEO is respected; he is not portrayed as having ripped off the idea for Facebook from the Winklevoss twins, and while he does ultimately screw over Saverin, the movie goes to pains to make it clear that it had to happen for the success of the company. At the risk of sounding a bit truthy, I think that the movie did a superb job capturing the feel of a startup in Facebook's situation, even if some of the facts are slightly off.

While I think this review is slightly hyperbolic, I don't think it's crazy, either. The movie was insanely well-done from start to finish, and I don't honestly think that the creative license is much worse than, say, Apollo 13. I think if you were expecting to see geeks get vilified, you'll be very pleasantly surprised.
You're right. I was particularly agressive in my wording to get my point across. I will say, however, that if you come up with a static prototype based on proper design thinking, you'll be in much better shape to go around and ask people "would this make sense to you?".

We both know that the key here is balancing these 2 things out, so we're in agreement ;-)
Personally I think YAGNI can apply to skill sets as well.
Prachi Desai, Hot Prachi Desai Wallpapers, Pics, Images
Television’s golden girl, Prachi Desai’s demure and pretty looks catch the eye at first sight. She showed that she was an actress to watch out for in Rock On.actress to watch out for in Rock On.
Didn't Calacanis leave Facebook?
Does HN transforming into a magazine for housewives? ^_^
this is how it works: the voting will remain open til the end of 15th October GMT time. I'll select the winner from the top-five most voted entries.

There are a few entries absolutely worth voting!

Thank you for your help
Pretty cool app, my only problem is that none of my friends use it yet.

Any chance I could log in to twitter/facebook and you could grab my friends locations that way?
No, but submitting it to HN does
> If you're employed, your employer pays a half share of that in payroll tax. If you're self-employed, you have to pay the whole thing

Thanks for explaining that! I've been self employed for 6-7 years and I never could figure out the reason why this was (never really took the time to)
From the comments: "He's just a guy who knows a bit of PHP and wanted to get rich, along with the creators of 1000 other social networking sites, and just got lucky that his went viral."

It's amazing how easy it is to dismiss other people's accomplishments. Notice how "Knew a little bit of PHP and got lucky" is used to represent years of hard work, business and development wise.

You must have never run a business if you think that Zuckerberg's success came easy and was due to sheer luck.
Unlike mailing lists, groups on Facebook have hitherto been used mainly to _signal_ agreement with a particular sentiment or membership of a particular organisation.

Mailing lists with outrageous titles won't become directly linked to a prominent profile theoretically controlled by you or part of an "open graph" of your interests should Facebook ever decide to make them publically viewable (which their track record strongly suggests they might)
Hi Aaron! We're indeed using your gem, I e-mailed you about some caching issues back in August, you fixed everything since.

Great gem, thanks for everything :-)
20 Amazing Android Apps for Android Lovers | Technorox
People might pay for this in SC2: a web interface to tournaments and replays.
I think those machines work by using a portion of the blood and combining it with known reagents. Obviously shortened for TV time.
Should we decide to bomb Ghadafi again, all of you would be sorry to pick such a retarded option for a domain.

Cyber war is just one flick of a switch.

Btw, weplaynicely.com is available.
Right, but it does mean that if any law was broken anywhere in the chain from procurement to you buying it, you're guilty of breaking US law. A truck driver was speeding on a road in Elbonia while delivering Elbonian packing rat pelts for the leather that eventually became the couch you purchased on Amazon and had delivered? You're guilty. With laws like these, there's just no way you can know how many times you've broken the law this week.
I know I'm probably the only one thinking like this, but I find this whole concept - starting from "voluntary" payment right through to "watching their houses burn so they can learn their lesson" - incredibly perverse and morally bankrupt to the extreme.

If your neighbor's house is on fire, you don't haggle over the price of the garden hose. If you're a firefighter equipped to deal with disaster, you do your damn best to do your fucking job whenever the opportunity presents itself.

It would actually be less cruel if there was no local fire brigade at all. What kind of asshole do you have to be if you can just sit there watching a family's home burn down while doing nothing but make pompous remarks?
Over $45,000 now, ftr.
*asperger
It's actually an analogy with great applicability. Quite a bit of work has been done on this topic - see the work of Pennock at Yahoo. One result: completely efficient prediction market is a general purpose computer. Such an object also requires a ridiculous number of market participants, since it can solve NP complete problems.

http://dpennock.com/publications.html

One very popular result (major media attention) along these lines is this paper, which proves that pricing a certain type of CDO is an NP-complete problem:

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rongge/derivative.pdf

(Side note: this paper really pisses me off because they did not cite ANY of the prediction market literature. It's hard to believe this was not on purpose.)
The solution of including the cost of fire fighting in the cost of owning the house itself helps fix what I see as the mistake in thinking that I don't benefit from having my neighbors house fire put out.

If volunteer fire fighters are told by the people who they protect that it is ok to watch a house burn (because necessary costs were not covered somehow) then philosophically what is to stop them from not helping when I don't slip them extra money because their labor is volunteer anyway? I think this eats at the soul of the community.
In the spirit of "Any time I have to touch the mouse, I feel inefficient" (http://michael.lopp.usesthis.com/ ): Once you are used to Firefox or Chrome keyboard shortcuts, it's easier to do Alt+D - right arrow - Backspace a few times, for URL hacking. Subdomains change this to Alt+D - right arrow - fiddle around a bit in the address bar. So directories save URL hackers time.

I do not believe this is a good argument for or against subdomains, though.
If you sit down at your desk every day at a certain time, what part of writing is "hard"?
Just for the sake of having some balance in the opinions here (I'm not really willing to go into any flame war) I'd like to state that in my opinion Paulo Coehlo is a bad writer, by which I mean that a) he has a poor style of writing, b) his books don't provide any serious value for the reader.

To end on a positive note I recommend anyone to read "Master & Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov, a masterpiece that for some reasons isn't as popular as it should be (in the western world at least).
The whole "Oh god, Zynga is morally and creatively bankrupt" line is at least 6 months old at this point (and for a company that's only 3 years old, that's a pretty long time).

So what is your point here... It doesn't matter how long ago something like that is said; does it have any merit? Also, I think the first time I heard that kind of observation was a lot earlier than 6 months ago, and I actually still hear it.
We'll definitely do that. It happens to me all the time.
Do you think it's a serious blow for a consumer facing site to be down a day? Enterprise, sure.
Customers from 32% of the businesses did not return. 32% of the businesses said customers did not return. Hmmm... seems like the same thing to me.
Yes, I'm going to make the controversial claim that donating blood and scavenging for cans in the dark are not real jobs.

It's more than a bit callous to suggest a senior citizen is not doing his part for society because he's decided to live off the benefits afforded to him by paying into taxes his whole life, instead of wallowing in the trash and selling his own bodily fluids.

If you're going to point out that these aren't "real" jobs, then neither is running a startup.

Previously, I thought the guy who suggested seeding the southern border of the US with landmines to keep the scourge of underpriced gardeners and line cooks out of the country had made the stupidest statement ever on Hacker News, but this is a close rival. Hopefully none of the more impressionable readers of this forum take this to heart and decide to apply for YC funding with their sperm donation startup idea. I'd hate to be the one screening the application videos.
Apple TV, Google TV? Why not. That's a cool idea. We hadn't thought of that. We'll see when they release their SDKs.
In this particular case, they have some decent mens rea protections. You're only criminally liable if you "know" that a law was broken, and only civilly liable if "in the exercise of due care [you] should know". Your broader point stands, of course.
Monty Python and Censorhip
personally, I find the last paragraph priceless.
> Seems like some sort of outside force requiring you to launch is a good thing to have.

Sounds like a good idea for a startup...Nag.ly?
Related http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1768209
Ah so you did Kevin!
Sorry, I didn't tweak to the connection immediately as the original poster had a different name...

I'm really glad to hear the Gem is working well for you! Please let me know if you guys have any further feedback now that you're using it in production!
Thanks man, awesome tool :)