skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The data visualization realm might be something for you. Take a look at Stamen Design for inspiration (http://stamen.com).

There is so much more interesting data than maps and Flickr photos out there, from government data to the data that New York City makes available, to Twitter streams or Facebooks social graph, etc. Take a look at this list of popular APIs on programmable web for some inspiration - http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory/1?sort=mashups

If you make a cool visualization that makes an interesting topic easy to understand, you can be sure that it will get some nice coverage, too.

Hope that helps.
Manage Employee Training Online Using Mindflash
This is true, but I believe sex is still the #1 transmission vector. And if it's not, #1 is dirty needles. So by avoiding #1 and #2 (most people don't shoot heroin) you cut out the biggest risk factors.
QT has a style system that can closely match the target platform.
Exactly this. European governments have put various financial incentives in place for having kids, yet they're scratching their heads why they're not working.

At least in Austria, it pretty much doesn't matter how much your household earns, up to a certain level (it's somewhere around €2300/month net if I remember correctly), as long as you have at least 2 kids. The child benefits plus family tax breaks compensate for low income. The benefits are diminished (not just proportionally) at higher income levels, which basically means there's an incentive for poor people to have kids. Having a kid probably won't reduce your standard of living if it comes with a 50% raise or whatever. One parent dropping from full-time to part time will also have little to zero financial impact at that level.

At higher income levels, none of that is true. The jobs tend to be more demanding, working part time is hardly an option, and daytime childcare is expensive. The €100/month/child or so the government give you won't even get close to covering that.

I don't know if the incentives are working among those with lower income - they have more kids, but for all I know they would have more anyway, but the current setup is useless for encouraging reproduction across the board.
Ask HN: Experiences with retargeting?
I'm thinking of making the plunge into retargeting campaigns. It seems like AdRoll and Retargeter may be my best bets. It concerns me that Retargeter charges a flat fee and that their website doesn't give any details about estimated # of impressions or clicks. Anyway - you all have any experience with this?
"Fixed monthly price"

"75% off retail prices"

"may differ for more expensive items"

These things are all mutually exclusive. Whenever I see things on a site that don't match up, that's a huge warning sign that it's a scam.

I'm not saying you're scamming. I'm saying you look like you are.
Has no one here read Catch 22? One of the little commentaries in the book is one character who already figured this out- he insists on hating every second of life, because when you are miserable time goes by slowly.
People learn and analyze in different ways. Many sources cite three: auditorily (sp?), visually, and/or kinesthetically.

Could people who think better visually be underserved by text-only sources?

I think the fear you cite is too early to substantiate. I'd equate it to the fear of facebook/aim/texting destroying face to face (or voice to voice) communication.
Obviously, it's too soon to tell which direction WP7 is going to go. Microsoft certainly have form in totally screwing their partners and customers, so skepticism is warranted. And it's not like there aren't sufficient internal problems with the company to scuttle even an excellent product.

But more competitors focussed on the customer and not the carrier is a plus in my book. I'm an iOS fan, but I don't want to live in an Apple monoculture.
Some random thoughts:

1. Good ideas are cheap. You sound like you're after a killer idea. There are very few killer ideas. Amazon was originally just buying booms online. Google? A search engine. eBay? An auction site.

2. What matters is execution not the idea.

3. Just because someone else is doing it doesn't mean it's already done. You can have a different (better) take or simply do it better.

4. Pain points are a good starting point. Look at your life. What hires? What could be better?

5. Software is a great starting point because a decade an onternet startup took $5 million whereas now it is as little as $20k.

6. Don't get caught up in hype. For example social media is now (IMHO) hugely overhyped. You need to be somewhat contrarian.

7. Realize when a field is "done". For example, location. You would need a veru different take at this point to compete in this very crowded market.

8. Timing is everything. There was a video on demand startup or two every month before Youtube struck gold.

9. Success will take longer than you think it will.
Syphilis used to be a sentence of death preceded by insanity. People still had sex.
You know, I've heard that bike lanes are more dangerous for years, and many of the arguments are convincing. But the trouble is, 98% of drivers won't realize there's a method to your madness. Riding in the main lane when there's a perfectly good bike lane will just reinforce the preconceptions that bikers ride with lawless abandon, ignore common courtesy, etc...

If bike lanes really are that dangerous, we need to get rid of them.

[Of course I don't want to start a drivers vs. bikers thread. I'm sure the reality is that 95%+ of both drivers and bikers are just fine. It's just that other five percent that we actually remember.]
From friends on the inside, it sounds like a nightmarish political situation, with powerful, long-established, and hugely profitable nearly-autonomous fiefdoms at continual war with one another. There are excellent people there, and excellent technologies, and a cripplingly awful corporate culture.
Are you responding to the article above?
While I don't know much about retargeting, I've met Arjun, the founder of Retargeter, and he's one hard working dude. Really believes in what he offers so I'd be comfortable recommending doing business with him.
I have used Paypal with Payflow Pro since they bought the services from Verisign. I have had absolutely no issues, and we process several high-value transactions daily from international clients. However, we only do credit card transactions, not direct Paypal transactions. I think this keeps Paypal out of our transaction issues with clients, and if we get charge-backs (rare) we deal directly with our Merchant bank which is alway dealt with in a way we find reasonable.
Pretty much. Java + Eclipse + SWT. In our case it's swing because I don't wanna mess with 100% portability since we're doing webstart.

Eclipse makes Java feel "dynamic" since it auto-compiles with every keystroke. Brilliant stuff, really.

Having said that, our server side will remain in 100% Common Lisp on the JVM. Since it's the part that sees near daily updates, unlike the client GUI which is code and forget.
I am looking forward to the inevitable dome and the nearly as inevitable Logan's Run style dystopia taking hold in what's left of Vegas as the water runs out. Death rays from the sun just make my nightmarish fantasy ALL THE MORE REAL.
You are right to say that it is a big deal. Your point I think largely disproves the article referenced above. Clearly, government regulation can stop asset bubbles. It has before and I'm sure it will again. The government can stop anything by ending freedom.
The article is a little bit misleading. Serving a larger area and serving more people are actually conflicting goals. The latter is always more important in urban area.
I've also been an avid reader forever and I've started feeling like Gloria from White Men Can't Jump, " I'm filled with more useless goddamn information than any human being on this fucking planet!" so now I do what I (rather grandiosely) call Rapid Prototype Reading. I read until I hit an item that I can act on in some way and I stop and either use the info or practice "doing" the item. So even if I don't finish reading I still get memorable value from it.

I also use a digital tape recorder that i re-listen to at random times for general interesting info. And sometimes call my Google phone and let them transcribe to email.
Ask HN: The definitive guide to outsourcing a tech-startup.
I can do HTML/CSS and design, but I can't code. I bet a lot of people are in my situation, or even worse.

I don't have a technical founder, but I want to start a startup, via outsourcing. I spent all of last night searching for information, and there really isn't much other than "make sure you hire someone experienced."

So, please share any and all information or links or experience you have on doing so.

Commence.
I could imagine a "yes" answer that still restricts what a specific legal organization can do. For example, the collection of individuals behind "Google, Inc." could hire a professional political advocate... but perhaps they wouldn't be allowed to do so via the specific legal vehicle "Google Inc.", which is only chartered by the state to serve particular commercial purposes. The individuals would remain free to take up collections for their lobbying efforts outside the framework of that specific legal entity.
I've definitely seen part time developer jobs when I worked at a university, they just don't pay very much.
Keynesian economics won
Ask HN: Please review my startup - techofnow
Hey everyone -- I wanted to run a project I have been working on for the last few months by the folks at Hacker News:

LINK: http://www.techofnow.com/

techofnow is an aggregator for technology memes -- similar to techmeme, although there are a few key differences. In particular, the method by which articles are clustered into memes and ranked is completely automated. This means an article which is considered important and promoted by an editor at techmeme may not be promoted on techofnow since it is not a significant meme.

A little background.

I started techofnow as a weekend project a few months ago after completing undergraduate (CS + Math) about a year ago. I thought building a meme aggregator would be a good challenge outside of work and graduate school to learn and maybe gain a little bootstrapped entrepreneurship experience.

Any feedback, thoughts, guidance, or criticism would be appreciated.
China is like a sociopath in a room full of schizophrenics.
Here are an excerpt from Lecture 1 transcript http://dpaste.com/252190/plain/, and a version of it bastardized by MacOS X Summarize service set to up to produce a very short paragraph summary below.

> There is always going to be some point n_o where for everything larger the Theta(n^2) algorithm is going to be cheaper than the Theta(n^3) algorithm not matter how much advantage you give it at the beginning in terms of the speed of the computer you are running on.

Or maybe not so much bastardized. That is to say – it can probably be done.
Essentially, what the author described: someone involved in advanced math, sciences, or programming.
Physical vs. Social Proximity at a Cafe
He might need to take a year off to master Common Lisp though.

Dunno, a year off sounds nice, but you don't need to wait that long to be competitive. Better find a GUI and an obfuscation solution for a language you already know now, than to dick around with new languages when you have a product to finish and ship.

If I must. I would do the app in Python or whatever, then spend 2-3 weeks designing my own custom loader. Some C-based stub code packer that load a python interpreter as a shared library then my code. Wrap everything up with some compression and verify integrity with some crypto.

Nearly every embedded scripting language can be shoe-horned with custom packer like this that looks a lot like Java's ClassLoader. If you want to take this to its engineering extreme, you might even be able to get remote binary update functionality, by fetching packed tarballs of new code from your server, after the necessary key exchange.
Exactly. Wish that there is an option for users to keep EXIF including geotagging. And give us API to query metadata of pictures (with privacy control).
I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who commented. Really great advice. It is much appreciated.
Why Apple TV is a Ticking Time Bomb for Big Cable
PyQt is nice, but damn, the other two are ugly slow dogs.

I just removed Air yesterday, and Appcelerator needs a bit more work.
She's a social media person and a reporter, not a hacker. I think GP feels that this would have carried more weight if she was a kernel developer or open source guru, instead of someone who paid attention to the social aspects of computing more than anything else (she talks about BBSes, chat rooms, etc.)
I believe it is like color to like color.
I'll take a crack at it, whether you consider it satisfying is not something I can control.

I used every version of Visual Basic from 1 to 6 (and used 3 onwards for client work) alongside classic ASP 3 for web stuff. I did this well enough that I have a Microsoft MVP certificate hanging in the bathroom here at Unspace.

When they pushed .NET down our throats (I was one of the 200 MVPs that signed a petition demanding a COM-based VB7) I realized that culturally, MS tech was no longer a good fit for me and I looked for other options.

The thing I want to emphasize, though, is that during that 14 years I truly believed that VB, ASP, COM and Windows in general were great, powerful environments to build things in. I would argue that it was silly to suggest that PHP could do anything that ASP couldn't do. I believed this, and so did thousands of others on the forums I read at the time.

When I look back on MSFT dev communities today I see them 5-8 years behind on things like MVC frameworks, object mappers and new tech like MongoDB or OAuth or even REST in general.

The issues are not related to intelligence or integrity, but a generally conservative community that is told what to be excited about. I love the open source world because the pace of innovation is some exponential value faster than what I enjoyed for the first 2/3 of my career. It makes me feel passionately angry when I see people writing dozens of lines of code to do things that some frameworks make obvious and simple.

All generalizations, but still a very significant reality for me. Sometimes we're wrong about our tools, and there are simply better ways to do things.
There's a quote that goes "Your capacity to short a market is dwarfed by the market's ability to defy gravity".

The housing bubble began in 2002. If you had shorted it as soon as it was 10% "too high", you would have had to wait 6 years before cashing in. The yield/year is miserable, and meanwhile, your total net worth would have been negative around 2006. (More likely, the bank would have forced you to "cash out", at great loss)
Android reaches new high in purchase intentions
The valuation of Yahoo assets in Asia is about the same to the current market cap. The bold move is to focus on emerging markets and move headquarter there.
The Unseen Sea
I'm opting in by posting anything on Facebook, yes. I assume that using the service opts me in.
At an altitude of 100,000 ft (30.48 km), the balloon reached the stratosphere portion of our atmosphere. The space shuttle and other spaceships reach the thermosphere, which is the layer between 95km and 600km. The space station orbits at an altitude of 350km. The edge of space, called the Karman line, is 100km above the Earth, meaning that the ballon technically did not enter "space". Regardless, this experiment and it's footage are fantastic.

More info at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth
Does last.fm's desktop client stick out like a sore thumb everywhere?
Is this a problem? Overpopulation seems worse to me.
As in, it appears her job history doesn't involve technical roles. She self-describes it as "writing, old/new media, entertainment, social media strategy, ideation, online communications and community management". Source: http://www.wulfeck.com/
I was planning on coming, but it turns out I have a midterm that night. I'll try to make the next one though!
Pentagon out to 'destroy' Wikileaks, founder says
True that any program can be reverse engineered. But for example with Python, you're not just handing them the program, but also the bytecode, which can be turned into source without spending much time. This gives a lot more information much faster.

I would prefer something like C++ which is about as obfuscated as you're going to get, but I'm curious if there are any higher level options that would save programming time.
I'm taking Math and Physics at uni in a pre-engineer year. Khan Academy is making me learn a lot! My physics teacher is not that good, Sal however is an amazing communicator. If you only visit the site shortly you will only see the youtube videos but looking closer you will find the real gem: The application guiding you through math and physics. If you can answer all the questions correctly you know have learned everything you need to know to pass a exam! :-)
I'm trying to get off of still using pen and paper, and have been trying to get used to onenote. I'll agree with others that it's a bit bloated, but:

1) I like the possibility that I can freely draw and "whiteboard" in it. I like thinking spatially at times. I typically still do most spatial planning/whiteboarding in excel, but I'm trying to see if I can do the same in onenote

2) I plan to eventually retain scanned docs with it (it has ocr searching like evernote). This also means I could just pen and paper for notes, then take a picture with em and OCR em in.

3) the sidenote feature seems really cool, just hit Windows+N wherever you are to type down something. It's a small step towards pervasive note-taking.

I haven't tried mobilenoter/other syncing interfaces with it yet.
I'm also looking at org-mode as an alterative, not sure.

Things I hate about onenote: it doesn't have the freeform tagging infrastructure evernote has, and is too obsessed with trying to feel like a physical notebook. That said, evernote seems too oriented towards capturing outside information and less focused on one's own thoughts.

If onenote had a good delicious-like tagging experience for web bookmarks, I'd probably be sold on it.
Facebook updates photos; high resolution images, new viewer, easier uploads
Right. The opportunity cost of having kids is much higher today than in the past.

This is one reason why concerns of overpopulation if we develop life extension technologies are overstated.
The advances in the sport have been tremendous. But all of those advances were made for a reason, to package the sport better and reach a wider audience. Unfortunately, thats where cricket has not progressed. A handful of countries take the sport seriously and even from those, the sport is extremely popular (a religion in some) in the Indian sub-continent.
I'd like to see some real-world examples of a highly-functioning one in, say, another country.

So would the other countries. That's game theory for you.
Ask HN: How do you manage trigger-happy installing and file-bloat 
This is probably a newbie question. I'm using a mac, and getting into development, you tend to install a lot of stuff.

While there are some nice package managers out there, their scope is limited, and since when is hacking a =). Hence, I'm pretty sure my trigger-happy installing and trying to stay up to date with the latest versions of everything has left my root directory littered with now useless stuff.

From now on, I guess I'll be more selective with what I install, but the problem still needs to be fixed.

Because I'm not a UNIX-wiz, and the fact that so many shell scripts share the same name. eg: I've got a node script in /usr/local/bin corresponding to v0.2.0, and another corresponding to v0.2.3 in another dir, but I'm hesitant to move things around or delete things, in fear that something may break.

I probably need to get a much better familiarity with the file system. Basically, things like bash paths and all the stuff that goes on when you call "make install" . As such, what resources would be good?

Thanks.
Always get the AppleCare.
A user can replace the default MAC address which the platform read from the hardware. Is that true for an iPhone UDID?
Apple Approves a BitTorrent App for iPhone
You make a good point with regards to the native look. Is this really done in practice, creating different versions of the same app to target different platforms? Not only would that require duplicating the code, but in my case I'm familiar with .NET and C++ but have never touched Objective C. It seems like it would make the most sense then to only target Windows, which is something I'm reluctant to do (I'm a Linux guy at heart.)
The Ovi Store Is Growing Fast, but Nokia Still Faces an Uphill Battle
I think this is noble, achieving worthwhile pursuits. However, we cannot forget the value of play.

"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing." --George Bernard Shaw
Computing Profitability with GroupOn – Relevant Costs and Cognitive Bias
Thanks, you got me interested. There's a free PDF of "The Little Book of Semaphores" by Allen Downey (and a video) here:

http://greenteapress.com/semaphores/
What Steve Jobs really wants
... market share. Never mind what Daring Fireball says.
Sounds cool. Any examples of people who have done something similar?
Can't we hold them both at arm's length?
Welcome to HN, binomial. You can assume that we're not trolling (most of the time). Thank you for the clarification.
That's assuming time has constant value.

For example, I consider time I spend reading on the toilet basically worthless. So when the voter guide comes in the mail, with the candidates' statements, text of propositions and submitted arguments for or against, it is less than $0.25 to multitask there.

Expected gain, though, is higher than just the tax cuts and beer-having. It can be fun to study that stuff. And, looking at the big picture, the collapse of our democracy by having an uninformed electorate would mean everyone loses everything that is based on the USD.
There are 100 million votes, one of which decided the election (the N+1'th vote on the winning side, assuming N votes on the losing side).

If you prefer, you can play with binomial distributions to calculate P(side X wins with N votes && side X wins with N-1 votes) [1]. Using the normal approximation and ignoring the normalization prefactor (an overestimate) exp[(n(p-0.5)^2 / 1(np(1-p))] odds of having your vote matter. For p=0.501 (i.e., voters are split 50.1%, 49.9%), that works out to about 10^{-87}. For p=0.51, double floats are incapable of representing a number that small.

I stand by my statement. Your vote doesn't matter.

[1] Conceptually, this is slightly different from computing the odds that you cast the deciding vote, but I realize it is more useful from a decision theoretic perspective.
I'm a noob when it comes to web design, but I think you'd be much better if you converted "Discussion" links into expandable form. They take up too much space, if a visitor is really interested in the sources that mention the news, they can click on the discussions and see the results.

Other than that it's a good idea, why don't you add Monthly/Weekly The Most Popular memes?
Mark Twain, The Biggest Liar in America | Quazen
6 of the Best Free Linux Task Managers
How Does One Startup Defeat Another?