skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a particular comment there I found interesting:

There is value in Hipmunk no doubt, but I still can't get over that they are just hooked into a single affiliate offer and were able to get $1 million in angel funding, two posts (and video!) from TechCrunch on what is really only a feature but is being pitched as a complete business.

Only a feature.

I just want to shake people sometimes.

It's not just a feature. It is the feature. Buying a plane ticket is the single biggest element of making travel decisions. The experience for discovering the optimal balance of carrier, connections and price is, let's be clear, one of the most important, expensive and stressful elements of planning a trip.

What Hipmunk has demonstrated here is that they are in the business of making an important, universal process much easier. They've demonstrated a very specific insight for solving the problem.

So if they can, from day one, make money doing this while hinting at their unique insight, that shit is magic for anyone looking to make an early bet on a consumer product. Imagine what they'll be able to do with the rest of the travel space.

Who wouldn't want in on that action?

There's a pretty clear pattern of success for businesses who turn up and remove the bullshit from useful but sloppy product categories: Google, Facebook and Mint, for example.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1765111 =)
Ender's Game comes to mind. Win. Period.
The primary function of the university is to enervate the optimism of youth. Education is a secondary goal. Learning to navigate an insufferably confusing bureaucracy with grace and determination is thus the whole point of college. How else would we train the bulk of our citizenry to quietly endure forty hours a week in front of a computer screen?
Eh. Also, "how to get made fun of at a bar". I think a better bet: get a half pour of a cheap/decent single malt (ask for a Macallan, everyone will have it), a half pour of a decent bourbon (Makers Mark is fine), and a half pour of rye. Compare. The distinctions are impossible to miss.

The water thing is important though. Even with single malt. If all you taste is fire, you're not really tasting the spirit.
psd conversion skills? doh!
bacon+toast hell?
Let me start by saying I love xpenser. But note the following:

"""

Why is Xpenser free? How do you plan to make money?

We'll be introducing premium accounts that'll carry a monthly fee in the near future. The goal is to keep the base product free and charge for longer data retention and other services.
"""

It's not yet making money, which would disqualify it from the criteria for this Ask HN
In the future where will be the expert in Mozambique when a crisis hits? Or Serbia?

He/she will be in Mozambique, or Serbia, and will be able and willing to tell us what's happening because he or she lives there. The value of dropping a satellite phone-wielding reporter from a helicopter and picking him up 24 hours later has always been questionable, IMO, and now it's completely pointless.

Information may or may not want to be free, but news definitely does.
Your scenario doesn't work for me since I think more people spend time using computers in the office, rather than while on vacation.

But if I am on vacation, I'm going to the lounge with neither my laptop nor my iPad. I'm taking the Kindle, because I'm going to deck of the lounge to enjoy some sun, while I catch up on some books I've neglected for real work over the past year. I am on vacation, right? :=)
I went to the University of Oklahoma.

It is very easy to find whatever you're looking for.

1) Explore campus a lot, even if you don't really have a purpose. There were things that I was finding my third and fourth years. You will eventually learn where all of the buildings are and the random class gifts and old meeting places and anything else cool your campus may have.

2) People will be helpful. "Hey, you do you know where the engineering building is?" You've found your answer.

3) My school had maps everywhere and online if all else failed.

My only complaint: Some of our buildings were too small for their original purpose or got re-purposed for other reasons. They became a mishmash of offices, class rooms, and every other function you can think of. If you were looking for a building by type (say, engineering), it could be difficult, because a few different buildings might all have overflow for that building.
Should you crowdsource your medical problems?
Yes, when Android first launched it was very interesting to see Apple users use phrases like 100,000 apps in the app store and dominant market share, and how these have changed as they were overtaken.

Mac users were always defending the boutique, specialist, quality over quantity arguments on the desktop and then suddenly it was all a numbers game for a while there.
This is an admirable idea, but I can't help but think of the number of CDs I've bought at used record stores with "Not For Resale" stickers still affixed. Label review samples that had gone into the second hand channel just fine.

Also I know from experience that used book sellers will often quite happily clip or black out portions of the frontispiece or half-title page if they need/want to.

Collectible book dealers are also quite happy selling galley proofs of classic books, in fact some people collect them. They're also usually marked "not for sale".
Ask HN: Best Business Credit Card
Hi there, I am looking for a business credit card to put thousands of dollars of expenses on. I was wondering what card you guys recommend and why?

Right now I am considering CapitalOne NoHassle, but I've seen a lot of companies using various AmEx cards.
Would love feedback from fellow HNers on what keeps you going on your bootstrapped startup!
I also don't understand why people are giving them a hard time for raising an angel round while having supposedly so little. They have one founder who's already proven himself and another that was writing books for O'Reilly at age 16. And it's not like angels are expecting that you have a finished product, let alone a finished company at that stage.

I think it must be some reaction to getting so much press so early (Pogue wrote a glowing review in the NYT).
I thought they figured that out at least a year ago. I guess it was just a hypothesis then.
Thanks to Oracle Java is a minefield that Google stepped on and a bomb went off.

.NET (potential of being sued) is better than the alternative (Java, where someone has actually been sued).
Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Viewers? Anticipating the Blog-To-TV Tsunami
Several of those lawsuits have to do with LCD price-fixing, if I recall correctly.
until someone invents something else worth inventing.
Ask HN: How to link QR on the backend?
Hey HN,

I'm working on a concept related to QR scanning apps like ShopSavvy. I'm completely lost on being able to integrate this technology into the mobile app.
Does anyone have suggestions on where to look?
I googled a bit but couldn't come up with anything.

Thanks in advance!
If you have a list, you can drive monster gains via basic A/B testing of components.

- Time of day sends make huge differences, early AMs test well for us despite article's counter point.

- Highest open rates are Sunday but Tuesday we see highest level of transactions.

- Including company name in your email can increase opens and clicks substantially.

etc etc - so much good data on this topic - particuarlly the first link:

http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/tactics/best-time-to-...

http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/personalizing-your-...

http://www.mailermailer.com/resources/metrics/index.rwp
Has anyone seen new API features for these new groups? I want to write a script to pull members from old groups (already possible), and then add them to one of these new groups. They seem more useful, but I don't want to deal with adding 100+ people to the new group.
Redmine does a great job for a web application in being easy to use out of the box, while handling loads of data as well. With the amount of stuff it does, it could very easily be convoluted and spiteful to its users. Instead it's quite easy to use and logical in it's layout. It's not pretty, mind you, but it's functional.
Used book dealers are a strange lot. I never heard or saw of scanners, but when I worked at one we'd certainly look online for any book that we thought might be valuable. I think, especially at that time (2001-2004), the internet was inflating rather than devaluing used book prices in Australia.

The strangest people are dealers/collectors who would spend hours of their saturday in the store, eventually buying a cheap book so they could smugly inform you, the seller, that it was a collectible edition, worth much more than they paid. Or that they would be swapping the dust jacket from this copy onto their copy, thereby improving its condition, even though this jacket was from the second printing not the first. Or dozens of other strange obscure tricks.

Those are the people who don't need scanners, and presumably would resent them as a poor substitute for their encyclopedic knowledge.
spam hack
World Wildlife Fund uses augmented reality to save tigers in Russia
actually, i just came across this article.
so i'm all set, but for anyone else who is interested in creating a QR scanning function into their app should check this out:
http://www.biggu.com/developers/
I like American Express especially for the customer services and some protection policies they have.

For example I remember when I bought the first iPhone for $600, after Apple reduced the price by $200 and refunded $100 with a gift card, Amex refunded (even if the iPhone wasn't covered by their policy) everyone by the $100 to make up for the difference.
I second American Express -- awesome customer support.
Well put. For reference, the transcript of the D8 interview with Steve Jobs:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/01/steve-jobs-live-from-d8/?...

Selected quotes:

[On competing with Google]
“We want to make better products then them. What I love about the marketplace is that we do our products, we tell people about them, and if they like them, we get to come to work tomorrow. It's not like that in enterprise... the people who make those decisions are sometimes confused.”

“We never saw ourselves in a platform war with MSFT, and maybe that's why we lost.”

[On tablets replacing laptops]
“I'm trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.”
'Speaking to the Financial Times on Oct. 5, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, chief of the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, said economies should not use exchange rates as a weapon.'

Is it a weapon, or are they preparing for something to happen to the U.S. economy?

The U.S. has just been "printing" money without it being backed by something tangible of worth, while spending like crazy without raising taxes.

The U.S.'s National Debt is somewhere around $13,554,861,000 USD and growing ( http://www.usdebtclock.org/ http://zfacts.com/p/gross-national-debt.html ), and the answer we come up with is "printing" more money, spending more than we'll ever have, and borrowing even more.

A major chunk of that debt is owed to China whose economy is primarily based on producing goods for purchase by U.S. consumers. China may at the moment be unable to afford to make the U.S. pay up, but all it takes is for something to happen to the U.S. economy such that the U.S. consumers slow purchasing even more, the Targets/Walmarts start closing, and China will drop us before we have a chance to ask for more money from them.

It doesn't matter how this happened right now (politicians afraid to tax and afraid to cut spending across the board) as much as what we are going to do about it.

Turkey's currency warfare is a small issue compared to this mess, but I think it could be a signal that they know something that we haven't yet.
Weebly has the best WYSIWYG website designer I've ever seen. The output it produces is beautiful as well.
I like how you parenthesized:

(and, to a lesser extent, slow resume from sleep)

That's no small thing. Not only does this change the usability of the machine tremendously, it has quite a big bearing on battery life. In fact, battery life is directly affected by how it is used.

The iPad can be used in a way which is fairly close to how one would use a notepad. You click the "sleep/standby" button and off you go. The netbook/laptop is a workstation and so wants to soak up all of your attention for some interval of time.

Also, I bet that that $200 advantage is going to disappear in short order.
"Reinvent the 737" is a horrible way of putting this. They used the 737 and 777 has baselines/references of their design goals. Perhaps they based some of the fuselage/wing work on the existing planes, but they are so different, you could say they reinvented any two engine passenger liner built since the 737.

These designs also rely on some very advance (for commercial jets) engines. PW was involved in the engine redesign of this project, so I imagine the numbers they pulled out for increases in efficiency, while optimistic, are not pulled out of their ass, and definitely achievable. One of the things they're trying to to shift towards lean burning (so more oxygen than required for "complete" combustion), to reduce pollutants. They also want to use thrust vectoring in their hybrid wing concept, which I guess would do wonders for runway length requirements.

Regardless of how feasible actually getting these into production (imagine Boeing actually redesigning one of their planes based on what some outside source came up with... at the very least, it would be completely reinvented in house at Boeing... well, that's my guess anyways), it's nice to see how much detail they put into this. They even went to try to reduce vortices at takeoff/landing so you could cycle planes faster through a runway.
I lost a lot of respect for Violet Blue in the dust up with Boing Boing.

http://boingboing.net/2008/07/01/that-violet-blue-thi.html

I don't see how Mitt's decision is evidence. It could just as easily mean that you've successfully created a scare story that was big enough to scare his tech team.

If there's a history here that doesn't involve you guys, I'd like to know it. But your involvement doesn't carry any credibility with me.
There is a legitimate "existing library of apps / network effects" argument here, as well as an illegitimate "appeal to popularity" one.
I actually suggested something similar on the mailing list[1] (static analysis & removal, similar to -ffunction-sections & -gc-sections in gcc.) That's when Dean pointed out his plans to not have the code objects resident in RAM, which he thinks should make that step redundant.

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/python-on-a-chip/browse_threa...?
Writing Tips for Expository Essay
Writing an expository essay requires the same considerations as when writing a standard academic essay. The only difference is in the manner in which it is written. By knowing how to write the essay, you will be able to submit a good essay paper.
I see that you specifically called out Belkin as undesirable, but I have a Belkin F4U017 on my desk plugged into my MacBook Pro charging my iPhone 4 and handling 3 other peripherals. It has been fantastic so far.
Oracle will earn something through winning the lawsuit, but their customers will not, which is what that line was referring to.
Uh who is windows losing ground to exactly? My understanding is that mac osx has been losing market share since Windows 7 came out.
Does it? Since when? Do you think 37Signals potential customers feel good about feel-scammy-website? Maybe casual average-joe might like it (Only God knows why) but I don't think their potential clients would
They didn't integrate into the Outlook though, they did integrate into Windows Desktop Search
it's happening ;)
Are you looking for a credit card or a charge card? There are important differences, and its not clear from your question which you really mean.

Amex has credit cards, but they are mostly (IME) associated with charge card accounts.
I recently went from a 2007 MacBook to a Lenovo X201 with 9-cell battery, and it's worth pointing out that the much-improved battery life (3-5 hours -> maybe 6-9), lower weight (5.5 pounds to 3.5) and heat (uncomfortably warm -> barely noticeable) have made a huge difference in how I use it. Even the size difference, though not quite as dramatic, is very noticeable.

I used to really debate whether or not I needed my computer when I left the house, but now I tend to not think about it (3.5 pounds is pretty negligible, where 5.5 was verging on uncomfortable to shoulder), and I need to worry a lot less about preserving battery power than I used to. In that respect, I definitely see the argument for the iPad in his situation (though it's still apples to oranges), but if what he really wants is a long battery life and portability, there are pretty viable options out there that are still full-fledged computers.
A couple of comments here have liquid card based layouts (http://spacecollective.org/projects/The-Total-Library, http://alpha.patterntap.com/collections/Tabs). To add to the list of this type of design check out http://pinterest.com/. That site does a great job in showing and discovering collections.
It's probably to do with how replaceable the company is. It takes an actual airline or travel company to realise "oh hey we should do this" to destroy this company, they offer nothing beyond a pretty interface unless they have some secret magic behind the scenes. Maybe that's how business works, you gamble on nobody ever challenging you, but I've seen a lot of the criticism towards HM come from how replaceable they are, because they don't even have a market share.
What debt default idea?
I think the problem is that there aren't any perfect solutions to bad human behavior. Sure, this kind of retaliation can happen but that doesn't mean it was wrong to fight back in the prior incident where one doesn't have this foreknowledge.
what are you guys up to? I am doing something in this space but I think there are still tons of ways to create value.
Is there any point in this post beside of the fact Steve Ballmer mentioned about this guy vaguely in his talk?
Erase bad credit
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_%28computing%29

I first learned the names for these familiar social app behaviors from Adam Rifkin's "Pandas and Lobsters" essay:

http://ifindkarma.posterous.com/pandas-and-lobsters-why-goog...
A Search Engine Funded by Google & the CIA
You probably would have said the same a few years ago, but Youtube emerged as a recent Google/Facebook sized opportunity.

Someone could displace Google/Facebook in their core competence. For example, DuckDuckGo and Diaspora. Apple is even getting into the ad game.

There is huge money to be made in developing web-based office and enterprise applications that Google and Microsoft are barely touching.

Casual gaming. I'm pretty sure Zynga et al are making more money off of Facebook than Facebook is.
But isn't that the norm for all companies that raise angel money?
Groupon has become a 1+ billion company in less than 17 months. See Forbes article: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0830/entrepreneurs-groupon...
To anyone sending emails (including posterous), I'd recommend going beyond A/B tests. You should know the optimal time to contact each user.

For new users you can intentionally send emails at various times (and days of the week). Then you can track a time-specific clickthru rate for each user. Eventually you'll converge on one or more optimal times/days. You can accomplish this with a machine learning algorithm or you can simply track the timestamp of each user's last N clicks and use that to decide when to email them. Precision isn't of the essence here, but I've found that clickthru rates can be dramatically affected by picking the right time of day and day of week.
Was it the same cause of a double-whammy virus teamed up with a fungus?
Given that the writer says he works up to 80 hours a week and "with diligence, someone working alone can make $1,000 per week" (i.e., ~$50k annually) I wouldn't call that a "quick buck".

I've also donated a lot of used technical books to thrift stores and library sales, and if they're picked up and re-sold by guys like this that's fine by me.
I respect this guy a lot. There's been enough times I wanted to get an obscure out of print book and I can only find copies that cost $60 or even $200+. Taking a book off the shelf, paying the used bookseller and freeing up their cash/space, and stocking the inventory in his home for the whole world to be able to buy the book online - man, the guy's almost a saint in my book.

Some people are upset he's making a profit. This is crazy to me - the guy's making by his own numbers $4000 per month for 80 hour workweeks and amazing customer service, and he's making 10,000+ titles available online that might otherwise not be. If I ever see someone with the book scanner thing, I'm going to thank them and tell them I think they're doing a great thing for the world.
Do you know Ruby’s ‘Chainsaw’ method?
How to work anywhere in the world
If you haven't learned yet not to read TechCrunch comments, I highly recommend it.
What's the key difference between a charge card and a credit card?
Not all bullying situations are necessarily toxic or dangerous. Consider hazing and boot camp, both of which are essentially sanctioned bullying. I suspect a good number of people actually enjoy hazing (joining a fraternity) and others believe military training builds character, etc.

Likewise, try entertaining the idea that childhood bullying (within reason) might serve a social purpose. I've heard multiple first hand accounts of former targets overcoming bullies to become protectors, for one. Perhaps bullying creates a social order, a sense of empathy for victims, etc? I'm not arguing that all bullying is constructive, but I'm not also willing to say it's all destructive either.
Good design is not a commodity. Surely Apple has taught us all that. Even if the average big company sees something good and thinks "we should do this," odds are they'll fuck up.
The Earth is not attracted to where the Sun is "now", it is attracted to where the Sun was approx. 8 minutes ago

That's not entirely true as there are higher order effects in GR canceling this lag "to second order".

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/grav_spe...
Get away with what?
I love the flip-around tablet. It's better than a touch screen for almost any creative application because of the great input resolution. The only real negative is that it's expensive.
I think the first-sale doctrine might make that sticker a mere suggestion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_card

"A charge card is a plastic card that provides an alternative payment to cash when making purchases in which the issuer and the cardholder enter into an agreement that the debt incurred on the charge account will be paid in full and by due date (usually every thirty days) or be subject to severe late fees and restrictions on card use"
Apple To Announce Verizon iPhone
What are the advantages / disadvantages of credit card verses charge card?
Without the government's liability coverage for nuclear plants, none would ever be built at all. A nuclear plant is simply un-insurable.

To all those people who insist nuclear power is very safe: no private insurance company has ever concluded the risks are sufficiently quantifiable to offer insurance.
I'm very intrigued. This is definitely one of the skills I'd like to improve upon. But I'd like to play with a demo episode first before forking over the preorder cash.