skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Android 2.1 is pretty damn close. 2.2 seemed to be a little worse.

Main example: it used to be if you had someone's address in your contacts, you could hold down the search button until the voice search prompt came up, then say "Navigate to <person's name> and it would pull up Google Navigation on that person's address.

Around 2.2 Google seems to have removed the ability to search your contacts from Google Maps. I'm not sure if this is a bug or a decision that searching your own contacts won't generate ad revenue. In any case, what happens now is it gives you a popup of search results for that name in your vicinity and asks you to choose, usually there are like 20.
I would, but lack an Android device. Thanks for pointing that out.
Really? Like where? Not being sarcastic but even in a cheap place like Bangladesh, you need atleast $700/month to have a decent hacker life (constant electricity, decent internet, own apt, a hacker-friendly environment - coffee, music, hobby, junk food, etc).
My results were interesting and relatively accurate.

I don't get what the second link does.

I could imagine somebody finding it useful, but I can't think of anything I'd do that would use it.
I'm curious: How much time per week does it take to maintain + edit the site?
Balancing Work / Startup / Life / Sleep
Decide whether your site is primarily about drawing or image sharing. I think working on the drawing will bring a smaller but more stable community over the long term; however you have more chance of making a buck with the sharing. I can't see what you offer for image sharing that Twitpic or something does not, however.

Then, start over with your user interface, maybe with help from another person. It loads quickly and smoothly, so I can see you have put in some work.

But visually...I'm sorry, it's ugly. The colors and fonts seem to have been selected at random and there are too many things competing for my attention. The first thing I notice is that few or none of the users are paying any attention to your 'theme of the day,' so maybe the theme is pointless; you can get rid of multiple UI elements immediately. The center window changes size depending on the task (browse/search/draw) - very disorienting. And adding your website to the corner of the picture you uploaded...well I see why you do it but it's just annoying, and it often covers part of a caption. Make a logo, make it small, put it in the top left corner.

There is potential, but please work on simplicity and consistency first. Right now, it's like a meal with 7 courses jammed onto one plate.
I didn't know basecamp and started looking at your site; I really love the presentation except for one thing: the bit about the basecamp competitor founder saying blabla basecamp is the best is the "who uses it" page. When I read the part between parenthesis the whole thing really sounded to me like a phony message, and made me have a more negative look on the page.

Just wanted to let you know.
Tone your Backside with These Daily Exercises
i haven't touched the site in at least a month. Sure, there are bugs, sometimes registration fails, but for the most part it's completely hands-off.
Looks pretty cool....did you write it in rails?
With the number of startup founder / employees on HN, I'm curious what things you guys do to keep everything in balance.
Avoiding the Red Queen's Race
I dunno what your comment has to do with anything other than getting upvotes, which I'm sure you'll get plenty of.

My comment was more geared towards pointing out the obvious incompatibility of US based porn capitalist and Libyan Arab Socialist government. And that's not even getting into history of these two countries' relations.

I'm amused how little educated some people here are about the Rest of the World.
You're very welcome! I'm an ex-games dev myself, so I know what you're talking about - and I can very barely believe that you only use it 6 hours a day in that industry :)
Drupal Theme Developers Wallpaper
better to make a comment like this after you've gained at least 100 karma in other topic parts of hacker news
thats what i assumed but I guess you'd be better off putting that up on the landing page .. a little howto .. i passed the link to a colleague or 2 (non technical) and that was the first question that came up ..
So, if a person has a great idea for a web app that might be useful to some niche group of businesses, they should throw it out and keep thinking about how to feed the hungry or cure diseases - problems they have no expertise in and that they are unlikely to ever solve?

Smart people should figure out what they're good at and what they're interested in, and do that. If you have a good idea that has worth to some group, you should try to implement it. A good idea is a good idea.

And while we're at it, things like Google and Facebook, in addition to facilitating wasting time for those with no motivation, can also be used by, oh I don't know, medical research companies or nonprofits trying to feed the hungry to get the word out.
Advice number 1: can you reformat your post so it's readable? Thanks.
It should be marked as the most "unpeaceful" night of Nobel Peace Prize. As to date, More than ten people in Beijing and Shanghai who voluntarily celebrated the event were taken into custody.
OSDI '10 (top-tier systems conference) has released their proceedings
Great to hear that! Just an extended question:

For both Gravatar and GitHub, did you put in any marketing efforts and money while they were still in the "side project" stage?
A Note on Risk
Thanks for the feedback. Will add a bit of context to the dots.
Microsoft Says Treat Botnets By Quarantining Effected Computers
RandInt:  For all your application random number needs...
Well, I was suggesting looking for symmetrical triads (or repeating characters) and then working outward. I'd say the eye is pretty good at picking out symmetries.
That doesn't mean anything. The "Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" outlawed political parties 40 years ago and has been ruled by Muammar Gaddafi ever since. The Iraqi Baath party could have made the same legal process claims, while leaving out the fact that you'd be slowly boiled in a vat of oil if you attempted to avail yourself of that process.

We need to stop kidding ourselves. Just because it's on the Internet doesn't make it not real: people buying .ly names are doing business with one of the world's great dictatorships. Whether or not that's bad ethically, it sure is a dubious business decision.
It really varies depending on your industry.

Generally, being a social person (which does not come easily to me at all) is very helpful. If you have a lot of friends, it's very likely one of them will be able to help you market or sell in some way or another. I relied heavily on friends and friends of friends. I still do.

More specifically, figuring out who are major journalists or trend-influencers (potential customers who can convince their friends to become customers) within your target market and then befriending them is very useful.
i think this is an interesting concept...to be honest a lot of people can't or choose not to use their "left brain" .... i agree with healy that creativity gives people the new edge over the eager left-brainers... however, i think that there is still a lot of opportunity for those of us less creative types who do the analytical work well... there are so many people who just don't care to put in time and effort at all and don't do what they say they are going to do... that this provides me an advantage... now if i want to take it to the next level... then yeah... harnessing my creative side is the next step...
I'm glad that you found yourself vindicated and will refrain from interfering with your righteousness.
Privacy, “The Creepy Line” And Beyond: It’s Not Just About Google
Ask HN: Side Projects Gone Deadpooled
As eps pointed out in the previous thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772224) about side projects gone big, there were also an enormous amount of side projects that just went dead. I am sure many of HNers are curious to hear and learn from them.

So feel free to list what the project is, how did you come up with the idea, and of course, when and how did it go deadpooled.
Don't do number 1 - instead build that content on your own site. In the long run you will be better off. Number 1 is more of a way to creatively build links, but domain number 1 won't have link popularity to pass. So unless it has high exact match value, you are better off not using that strategy.

Number 2 - There is value in that domain buy only acquire it if you want to chuck your existing domain and 301 everything to the new one.
The second link is just a convenience page showing what all the top VCs get for badges.
Done, as usual with these things using Python feels like cheating.
And when you "call them out on this" and they ignore you, because domain registration revenue is a pittance next to the revenues they get from petrochemicals, what's your next step?
Why is a blog-style rant a scribd document?

Nothing terribly interesting in it, either. Apparently Y-Combinator is "The Man" these days and must be railed against?

Times change so fast.
Sure - I'm suggesting that you get the restaurants to do your marketing for you.

For instance you could print ~5,000 GENERIC, but tastefully designed business cards for $50 - 100.

EG - "Thank you for dining with us - we'd like to thank you with 10% off a gift certificate for your next visit. Just visit RestaurantDeals.com and search for us right away."

Once you run out of the 5,000 cards, reprint with updated messaging based on what you learn.

Then that messaging works for ALL the clients you sign up, and you give restaurants a stack of 100 cards that they can include in the receipts or checks they hand out to patrons.

Direct respons rates on cards targeted properly can drive up to say 3 - 5% which more than covers the cost of you handing out the cards, and helps you go viral since customers will also realize they can get discounts on other restaurants :)

Make sense?

Then offer as a premium service to restaurants cards printed with their own specific URL / messaging if they don't like the generic model.

To sell this vision work closely with a half-dozen restaurants, get them extraordinary results, and use their testimonials as your sales pitch.
I built Upcoming.org on the side from my day job just for fun, and I didn't quit my day job until it was acquired by Yahoo two years later. It was never a big revenue generator before acquisition, but ads covered server expenses and then some.
That was a great topic to discuss. I've created an extra HN thread, Side Projects Gone Dealpooled, for those of you who are interested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772903
Google Apps Standard might be different. Google Apps Standard is offering you the same thing that Google already offers for free, just using your own domain. It still has ads and such. As such, as long as Gmail, Google Calendar, etc. remain profitable, then Gmail for your domain, Google Calendar for your domain, etc. should have the same level of profitability (and cost). The additional service that Google is offering via Google Apps Standard is the ability to use your own domain which really doesn't cost Google.

GOOG-411 wasn't ad supported so they didn't make any money off of it. It seemed like it was being run in order to collect voice data to create better speech recognition algorithms. Now that many have smartphones, they're getting that data in a cheaper way and, ultimately, in a way that they can monetize easier. Rather than paying 800-number charges for everyone to call into (and pay while the call was connected), people are using their iPhone and Android devices to give Google voice data.

I think Google Voice is the more likely service to get canned. Phone charges can become burdensome while bandwidth is essentially free when you're Google's size (since I'm guessing they're working off peering agreements more than buying bandwidth). Even if they were buying bandwidth, bandwidth is something with lots of competitors and very low regulatory charges. Phone connections are different.
Now I'm getting tired of those cliches e.g "X is the new Y" and the like. Where can I get some journalism that doesn't fall for this?
I've played stick golf it's great! Keep up the good work.
> It came down to one thing: the perception that MySQL was fast and Postgres was slow.

I've always said that Mysql (with MyISAM rather than InnoDB, to be fair) was like a bicycle without brakes. Yes, it's faster going down hills, however...
A link between low testosterone and onset of Alzheimer's
Goodbye to an old friend: 1-800-GOOG-411 [duplicate]
Just created a related discussion: Side Projects Gone Deadpooled http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772903
Money (n.) a claim on human labor

It's a tool, and like all tools, it's inherently neutral. If I use a hammer to kill a squirrel, is the hammer evil? No.
It's ironic this is hosted on Scribd, a YC company.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772609
Just bought totalfinder - great work, it solves a lot of issues I had with finder.
Ask HN: Best books on Politics
I am itching to read a few books on theory of political philosophies and how they fare in practice.

I was born in a small developing nation where the word 'Communism' still sells like hot cake. As I grew up, I got infatuated with with other extreme - 'Randism' and I still am. While I go back to my country and see the nation filled with poverty and a few filthy riches, I feel like non-violent communism is the way to go. When I come back to US and enjoy the freedom, I feel very differently. Basically, I am confused - food vs freedom!

I was wondering if anyone has any good suggestions on books on politics that everyone should read. My intention is to learn the strength and flaws of each and have a more realistic view of the world.
Generating Slides from a Spreadsheet [HTML5][AppEngine][Google Docs]
I don't think this piece was meant to denigrate YC, though a cursory reading of it certainly makes it seem that way - the author didn't do a very good job balancing the link-bait against his true point.

This is just another "get out there and do something" fluff piece, packaged in an angsty teen way.
30 minutes. Would have been less but the IVR response was a little confusing. Took about 40 lines Ruby code to solve.
This article is dangerous because it mixes truths with falsehoods.

Yes, if you're banking everything on YCombinator, you will fail. You're doing it wrong. Rethink your approach.

However, if you are doing everything right, and you get into YCombinator too, you will get a lot of value out of that, and you should squeeze the most out of it.

YCombinator is a multiplier. You need to have something worth multiplying first.
Yeah, that's what makes the internet a great place to start business. You don't have the risk to lose tons of money if your business falis.
> That doesn't mean anything. The "Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" outlawed political parties 40 years ago and has been ruled by Muammar Gaddafi ever since.

Agreed, but you'd have to give them the benefit of the doubt before pronouncing judgment, otherwise you can't make that statement. After their courts have let you down you could make the case that you've been duped but given the terms-of-service I would not find it totally incredible if the courts sided with the NIC for valid reasons.

> The Iraqi Baath party could have made the same legal process claims, while leaving out the fact that you'd be slowly boiled in a vat of oil if you attempted to avail yourself of that process.

Unlikely in this case, and we're discussing Libya, not Iraq before the removal of Saddam Hussain & his cronies.

> We need to stop kidding ourselves. Just because it's on the Internet doesn't make it not real: people buying .ly names are doing business with one of the world's great dictatorships.

As dictatorships come, Libya is fairly small fry. Just like in former Iraq - which we're still not discussing ;) - life for most Libyans is at a perfectly acceptable standard for the region, and they are not so upset about these things that they seem to be inclined to overthrow their government any time soon.

> Whether or not that's bad ethically, it sure is a dubious business decision.

Personally I would not do business with a .ly registrar exactly because I would not want to put my business at risk like that, but also because doing so effectively sustains a regime that I feel no sympathy for. I don't think that any money sent to the .ly registrars will end up to benefit the Libyan population in general, but most likely will end up in a few very select pockets or to do stuff that I do not want to be associated with.
The last problem was really simple in Python. I was all psyched up for a big bad end-level boss! Still, it was fun to play.
Why aren't you guys just searching for the palindromes?

There's more efficient ways than doing every character, or groups of them... What constitutes a palindrome? What does that mean to simplify what we're doing?

http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_obj_string.asp
Can we get some supporting evidence, please? This strikes me as a little unreasonable.
Fantastic post! Just read through it all...truly inspiring.
How long did it take for Basecamp to take off and become profitable?
Awesome. I've been a longtime random.org user but have always complained about the lack of a Comic Sans interface. It seems my prayers have finally been answered:

http://randint.com/labs/comicsans.php

(My first Comic Sans number was 17 - it even feels more random than the competition!)
i suppose it depends on the area. i'd say a far greater percentage of people around here (chicago) know of yelp than angieslist. businesses have yelp stickers on their front windows in these neighborhoods.
There are only 31 known Fibonacci primes (plus a handful probable primes)...
Thanks HN: Help Pay My Bills Wrapup
This is coming from maxklein, a "famous" person here (read this if you want to know who he really is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353307). So it's surely another social hack. Maybe testing the theory that if you complain about something, you create more pages views.
Here is Amnesty's most recent report on human rights in Libya:

http://www.amnestyusa.org/annualreport.php?id=ar&yr=2008...

Can you explain to me why anyone could be expected to mobilize over "censorship" of your URL shortener? The Libyan government kills journalists. All they did to you was shut off your Libyan vanity domain name.
Still, I wonder how much these limitations could be overcome by good management? Yes, I agree, most enterprises are sluggish and bureaucratic and, yes, there are too many meetings and everything gets decided in a committee and innovative ideas usually get killed by those who are protecting their territory - but isn't all that just a sign of bad management? Isn't it a sign of great management when large organizations mangage to operate as if they are smaller and more nimble than they really are?

When it comes to technology, for sure, innovation often gets killed by those whose job it is to support the infrastructure. But wouldn't good management find ways to lessen the stifling effects of legacy systems?
Interesting concept... How do you measure or assess creativity when hiring people?
This link actually crashed my MacBook. WTF, Scribd. Worst YC funded project ever.
i'm 100% sure that postgresql's goal was not to "make [their] technology attractive to a broad base". it was to create the best free rdbms they could.
Cool, I read your Google story, I also started 20 years ago on a ZX Spectrum and like to run. Are you my twin?
For MailFinch, does it take a lot of time to operate since you have to print the paper out and mail it?
That doesn't make sense. If they ignore you because the revenue is pittance, then they wouldn't bother with trying to resell the domains either.
Yes, you are right. I picked up that project because I needed to fix applescript bug in Visor. And the rest is the history.
I don't have to give them the benefit of the doubt. It would in fact be stupid to do so. The Libyan government does far, far worse things than capriciously turning off domains on a regular basis. That logic is repellent.

We need to stop kidding ourselves. .ly really is Libya. I don't support bombing them, or anything crazy like that, but doing business with them is lunacy.
I won't be buying their domains any more.

Just like I do now...

But I also won't be giving them the benefit of the doubt, which given the evidence is the only course of action in this case. They clearly spelled out what they were going to do, there are cases on record of the NIC.ly institution contacting other website owners regarding their content and if Ben & Co had simply decided to go for a .com instead of .ly for their 'sex positive' (whatever that means) URL shortener instead of trying to walk this very fine line then none of this would have happened.

It's just that they will not be able to hide behind that trick more than once, so they just cut off some of their own room to maneuver in a very public way.

If a .ly ever gets repossessed and re-sold within a timespan short enough that the press still remembers they'll be torn to shreds.

And anybody that continues to base their business on a .ly has been properly warned and should move away from there.
Ok, gotcha. I tried changing vc to some things that I knew were common hashtags and it didn't find any results. Maybe /lists/ would be a better url than /tags/
Reading this on Scribd, wrapped in 4 large adsense units is such a horrible user experience.
The site looks great! Just curious, how did you find your initial paid customers? Is it just through word-of-mouth or did you do anything more specific?
I just emailed you but I got a bounce, "address rejected".
If, like me, you'd never heard of this editor previously, here's a video demonstration of it in action:

http://scribes.sourceforge.net/demo.htm

Certainly looks interesting.
So why would you go through all this trouble?
Be careful with that html5contest.com... their FAQ says "Further, we ask for a non exclusive license on all games whether they win or not."
Clickable Links:

http://badgeu.com/t/davemcclure

http://badgeu.com/tags/show?name=vc
The hardest thing about a startup is marketing. YC basically guarantees that you will get the exposure you need. In addition, they have vast experience and will tell you what sucks about your business with no BS and then mentor you in the right direction. It's disingenuous to discount the worth of those two factors alone.
Didn't crash for me, but just as annoying: stupid Facebook tracking scripts everywhere. Seriously, it's becoming even more pervasive than Google :-(
The revenue from the largest domain registrars in the world won't move the dials on the Libyan GDP. And .LY isn't even close to one of the largest TLDs. The Libyan economy is dominated by an 11-figure petrochemical industry. I'm not seeing the "if" here.
Scribd is actually the most successful YCombinator startup by number of page views (the 233rd most popular site in the world according to Alexa, only just pipping Reddit though).

I imagine YC are very happy they funded Scribd.
I've been reverse engineering code for a living for 10 years or so, and writing assembly code for 20 or so.

I don't have the time to provide examples I'm afraid, so take it or leave it ;)
> I don't have to give them the benefit of the doubt. It would in fact be stupid to do so.

So in any altercation between a westerner and the Libyan government the Libyan government is automatically at fault?

> The Libyan government does far, far worse things than capriciously turning off domains on a regular basis.

Agreed.

> That logic is repellent.

No, that's just not descending to their level because I disagree with their politics.

> We need to stop kidding ourselves. .ly really is Libya. I don't support bombing them, or anything crazy like that, but doing business with them is lunacy.

That's up to every individual to make that choice, I would advise against it but those that do have made their bed and should lie in it rather than complain.