skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to turn that on its head. I'd like to see an end to the demagoguery of greed.

In my perfect world, people understand that when someone makes money, it's because he's providing something of value to society. And the more money he makes, the more value he's delivering. The way to encourage people to work hardest for society is through the incentive of potential riches.

The only sin begotten by greed is the use of force and its little brother, fraud. So long people openly enter into agreements that they both believe to be beneficial to themselves, it's no one else's business.
Yes, it's significant to note that Google (à la Street View scanning) is not the only party that's made a concerted effort to collect them. Whether Google's purchased (or absorbed) such data from others, I don't know.

I speculate that further routes for collection may be available. E.g. a user uses a wi-fi connection with a device that has geo-location turned on, and "Bob's your uncle".
First Potentially Habitable Exoplanet Discovered
92% of pronounceable 5-letter domains are taken
A nice summary, but I think a little too casual in recommending 'flags'. The official guidelines mention flags for "spam and offtopic"; this FAQ says to flag when you "think it's not HN material", a looser standard.

How about on-topic but trivial, repetitive, frivolous, flimsily-argued, outside-the-mainstream, etc.? Best to ignore, rather than flag these -- a flag is not a downvote saying 'less attention', it's a judgment 'no attention; against-the-rules'. (It stings far more when your earnestly-offered submission is killed than when it simply never musters many votes.)

I've noticed more people using flags as simple downvotes, and some good submissions have been killed as a result.
I quit google, got married, we got pregnant, bought a house in San Francisco, and started a business all in about a year (late '98-99).

My wife is on my board, technically she can be part of the set of people who can fire me.

I don't know if marriage is the right thing for everyone, it's worked well for me though. I think a huge part of it is who you marry, I got lucky with a very supportive and understanding wife. We took huge risks, didn't really have a business model (I was trying to help out Linus), she supported me throughout.

I think that support is key for any founder or early stage employee. I had a policy, still do though it is less important these days, of getting the blessing of the spouse before making an offer to any hire. Seems obvious to me but a lot of people skip that step.

On kids & startups:

When the first kid came along, my wife did 100% of the work, or very close to it. We worked out a warning system, our house was upside down, the living room (where I worked) was upstairs; if I was on a sales call and she came in, I'd stomp on the floor - for some reason a crying baby doesn't aid in sales :)

So for one kid, no real hit on productivity if you have a really cool wife.

When the second kid came along, I had to help, one person can't raise two young kids without some help (or if they can, wow, my hat is off.)

Kids do change the equation a bit, things get harder, they also get better. I personally like hiring people with kids because kids teach parents tolerance. Before I had kids if someone just hung up on me I'd think that was really rude. After kids, I shrug and assume that something more important (like a bloody nose or whatever) came up and I don't get mad.

That works both ways, if I have to deal with an urgent issue and I abruptly get off the phone with one of my people, they don't get mad either.

One other big kid related change, though age plays into it as well, is when I work. I do my best work these days early in the morning. I'm usually awake by 4am and give up on sleep by 5am. That gives me ~2 hours of quiet time before the kids get up. Lots of good stuff happens then.
I don't.

I might if I ever need any info on algorithms in the future, but I'd wager that there are quite a few professional programmers on here who, not being in college anymore, don't really need to read academic papers.
I'm assuming these are specialists rather than typical web developer positions, yes? Otherwise I might be underpaying.
> The sooner the world will have no borders the better.

I think you should really think that over. A world with no borders is a world with one government.

Currently, if your government becomes something you can't tolerate, you can usually move to another country, or at least dream of moving. With a single, world government, your only option is revolution, which I believe is rapidly becoming almost impossible and certainly would be against the might and resources of a world government.

Are you really willing to resign your children, grandchildren, and humanity in general to some unknown world government of the future? Are you really so trusting?

Even if you don't believe that under such a system, human rights would erode at an alarming rate, you should at least shun it for the very reason that there is no diversity that will save you in case of unforeseen events. You want the world to be a field of wheat, all of a single strain. You would never advocate such a plan with actual wheat, since you know that diversity is a form of insurance.
An Idea-Evaluation Framework
Love Made to Stick and Founders at Work. I haven't read 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, but I'll check it out, thanks.

One excellent marketing book I recently read is Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd by Youngme Moon (no ref link: http://www.amazon.com/Different-Escaping-Competitive-Youngme...). She believes that going tit-for-tat on adding features and augmentations is a losing game that results in every competitor looking like one another. Instead, you should find your strength, and focus on that while resisting to focus on where your product falls short. The book is also very... poetic. She's quite a quotable writer. Good stuff.
Speaking of fast followers, I've just started reading this book last week titled 'Copycats' by Oded Shenkar http://amzn.to/cG7vm3 - which basically talks about using imitation slash innovation as one of available tools in your repertoire. Read up to chapter 2 but so far I like it and recommend it, on the topic of fast followers.
Announcing the CrowdFlower Fund | 500 Startups
> Ask someone to give you their seat in some public area (e.g. bus, restaurant). (Note: what if they actually give it to you? o_o)

There was a famous sociology experiment by Milgram that had students doing this on the metro.

http://www.slate.com/id/2235474/

> People were surprisingly compliant—a total of 68 percent either got up or moved over in the "no justification" condition. The more justification that was offered, however, the less likely people were to stand up. Curiously, Blass notes, the most striking thing for many of the participants was just how difficult it was to ask for the seat ("I actually felt as if I were going to perish," recalled Milgram). It's not hard to imagine why; asking for help on a subway exposes one to both the risk of a certain stigma—and to the possibility of rejection.
I've done some work with environmental GIS and meteorological services, and the one thing that really caught us off guard in sales was the need for whitepapers for sales purposes. I blew a huge lead due to unpreparedness- never again. We had pdf pitches prepared with comparison charts and the like, but what really sells, and what matters most is a 3-5 page whitepaper outlining your technical competency in the utmost detail.

Also, factor in switching costs when getting out there. We hit a wall when we discovered that even though our services were 9x more detailed and 10% more accurate in our environmental assessment, the people we were selling to had a through infrastructure built around dealing with the existing crappy data and services. It was such a barrier that we had to reposition everything. It happened early though, so we were still in the "feel it out stage."
IPads for Middle Schoolers
Because if you're actually concerned about the privacy and security of your messages then webmail ain't ever gonna cut it.
B2B deals can be closed on the phone.
For B2C, you can always put on your contact form that all emails are read and that you will respond within 12 hours and usually within X hours. Every time we (PlantMyPhone.com) responds instantly, people are quite amazed and tend to blog about it. This has happened with other startups I have ran also. It helps to be a bit A.D.D. and feel the urge to instantly respond. When things start to get a bit hectic you should start using a CRM system so no customer gets dropped.
Agreed, but I personally prefer to know what a pdf file is about before downloading, so I chose to link to the summary on highscalability.com
Ask HN: Re-invent Music - Meet Co-founders?
Recently I discovered the http://freemusicarchive.org , which has an API an streams CC ( Creative Commons ) music. They have a number of genres, and the music is enjoyable even though none of it is what you would hear on the radio.

I would love to see if anyone would like to hack on a few music projects based on this site, for mobile or otherwise.

In general we would be relatively free to experiment with how music is consumed, and we might actually create something that is pretty interesting.

I would like to play with the notions of social media, and location, and yes tie that to a mobile device like a palm pre, or iphone.

Since this is not the basis for a good company, but it would be a fun weekend hack project.

Any interest, ideas?
Yes, I fully agree. I remarked as much to PG that this would be an unintended and negative side effect when he implemented this, but I don't care one bit about my 'average karma' so that's just too bad, and I'll keep on answering 1 upvote 'Ask HN' posts anyway.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence though, so to be perfectly honest, I'd like to see a good number of people wearing these new lenses before concluding that they are as amazing as they are being presented as being.
Ramifications of web traffic concentration for startups
For people with fairly good vision, the brain is already good at doing synthesis, so you have a whole scene effectively "available" to you, even if your eye can't simultaneously focus on all of it--- as you scan across a scene, your iris is constantly opening/closing, and the lens is changing focal depths, but you perceive it as effectively one scene. Sort of a fancy real-time version of HDR plus focus aggregation.

It's possible that being able to actually see it simultaneously will make a big difference, but it's possible that much of it won't be that noticeable, because it'll just be implementing in hardware what we can already composite in "software" fairly well. Although, I can imagine one difference might be at wildly different focus depths, e.g. when I'm sitting at my desk, I don't simultaneously perceive my monitor and the tree 100ft away out the window as being in focus. It's hard to say, because there's also a center-of-vision / peripheral-vision distinction involved there, which would still exist even if all distances were simultaneously in focus.
I find it funny and strangely coincidental that both linode and chunkhost seem to building their admin web interfaces on top of Drupal.
> punishing children at home

We shouldn't punish children? Even for things they clearly understand are wrong?
.... but you can' digest it. If gold eating was popular culturally, there would be people mining for gold in sewers.

Gold is also used in products .. and there salvage companies that specialize in processing this gold.

My point was that when the demand curve shifts , the supply curve can also shift as mining even "difficult to obtain" gold ( as in above case) becomes profitable and supply curve will also shift. And the price should stabilize -- but it hasn't yet .. because the demand keep growing .
Since no one mentioned it yet: The lack of right to die if you are incurably ill is shameful

A few countries and states already have euthanasia laws in place (Switzerland, the Netherlands) but in most other places you are still forced to die a painful and long drawn out death that is hard on the relatives too.
Now please apply this to speaker drivers so we can have huge rooms filled with flat 110dB sound, with consistent SPL across the spectrum no matter the listeners position relative to the speaker :)

Seriously, it does remind me a bit of Turbosound's polyhorn system, see page 8 here: http://bit.ly/dxEYrB
It may be. I can only speak for my experience. For me, being around people who don't share my values is utterly draining. Time you could be spending making magic happen gets spent on convincing other people that magic is worth something. It can be exhausting.

You absorb the energy of the people around you. And if the people around you fail to give a damn about the things you care about, you run the risk of losing own energy for it, too.

I don't, in the end, know the best solution for your case. But whatever you do, protect that spark that makes everyone look at you like an ear is growing out of your forehead.
I'm guessing you saw only the course listed on the left- not the curriculum search itself. If you use the search, and see lecture notes, assignments,ppts on various topics, you might come across things you didnt know before.
at the most basic: plenty of paper sheets and a pencil. I use this _a lot_.

for coding: any computer with vim is good enough, but my main machine is a MBP 15" w/ a 23" flat screen, wireless apple keyboard and mouse. I use the iphone a lot to snap pictures of said paper scribbles but I usually keep them in the iphoto library or upload to goplan. lots of people I know swear by evernote, but I don't get it and as such I don't use it. when in need to do HTML, I start up textmate (although I'm not very impressed with it, it does get the job done in a reasonable ammount of time). nor am I a huge github fan, although it's pretty easy to use.

for management: goplan (http://goplanapp.com) for basic project management, excel for cashflow management, keeping track of generic project stuff, metrics, short term projections, etc. I'm also back to using word a lot to write specs, although I prefered to use Google Wave for that until the specs were closed but as they're shutting it down I stopped using it.

for communications: calling people and email when calling isn't appropriate. call me old fashioned but actually talking to people sorts lots of issues very fast and time is the one thing you'll never get back so I see no point on wasting it.

If I had to elect one single thing as what makes me productive, I'd say it's other people who get their part of the job done, not any hw/sw tools.
In the digest question you might want to add the RSS feeds from "A cure for Hacker News overload":

http://jmillerinc.com/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-over...
I started writing this as an ask HN post, but it became so long that I decided to write a blog post instead. Still, what I am really after is feedback from you guys :-)
Scott Cook Bio - http://www.inc.com/magazine/20040401/25cook.html

Cook onstage at TC Disrupt http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/27/ge-intuit-tcdisrupt-sf/

Scott Cook working a trade show booth
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10133923-2.html
Curiously, company site [1] seems to be already pretty old (all info points to 2006, domain was registered in 2004) and it describes pretty much the same technology.

So New Scientist got it wrong when telling startup was founded just now to commercialize it.

I wonder why it didn't catch on (if this approach is really so good). It does sound a bit "too good to be true".

[1] http://www.xceedimaging.com/
Poll: Do you use Google CS Curriculum search?
Item http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755903 just begs for a poll:
Heard of it, never investigated
Looked at it, don't use it
Use it occasionally
Use it frequently and/or regularly
Being mostly from the US, lots of you guys are religious, right? Does contributing to open source projects boost your chances of going to heaven?
Keeping www allows hosting static content in cookieless subdomain (without getting new domains) which speeds up page loading.
Clickable: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755903
It all comes down to phrasing doesn't it? Maybe the future will phrase the problem differently than we do.

* Freedom from being beaten by one's husband vs the right to feel secure in one's own home.

* Freedom from slavery vs the right to live and work according to your own dictates.

* Freedom from censorship vs the right to say whatever you want.

* Freedom from bankruptcy or death when illness strikes vs the right to realistically affordable health care.

This will sound snarkier than I intend, but there was a time when some Southern farmers thought that freedom for black people was a problem "at the margins" as it required increased expenditure to maintain their farms. It caused a breakdown in the entire economic model of the South- how does that impact the moral calculus as we look back?
It's new to me but I'll definitely use it now
Why should I trust or distrust a world government more or less than the current ones?

What is the last time in living memory that people in a developed country revolted against their rulers?

Poland? That was more of a strike, and that weapon will always be available.
It's new to me, but I probably won't use it.
>Ethan and I came up with the “Zombie Team” test for figuring out whether or not someone is ready to work on an intense project, be it a start-up or otherwise. The test is this: If zombies suddenly sprung from the earth, could you trust the perspective team member to cover your back? Would they tell you if they got bit? Most importantly would you give them the team’s only gun if you knew they were the better shot? If the answer is no to any of those questions you need to let them get eaten by the cubicle wasteland of corporate culture, because they aren’t ready for this kind of work.

This is the best highlight for me. It really says a lot about the kind of work startups are. We may not realise it, but really we are macho warriors fighting zombies and getting The Chick in the end
This is shocking. I'd expect this from Michael Arrington, but not from you ;)
I don't want to tell Jason how to do his job, hell, he knows more about this stuff than I do but I'm really not liking it.

Too much scrolling (which I thought was established as bad in Web Design 101 though I'd love to hear otherwise as 37signals have ignored this for a while), and the lower sections manage to feel crowded despite having white space in abundance (possibly due to using fonts as large as 18.5 pts for paragraphs of text), the font sizes seem to be almost at random section by section.

It's nice that it doesn't look like every other website but beyond slight originality it doesn't do it for me.
If I were to recommend only one Java book, it would be this one. Definitely deserves to be on the list.
It sounds like he has legit reasons for leaving ChunkHost, but doesn't address how Linode will be better about these problems. (I'm assuming they have an SLA, but he doesn't even say that.)
Email vs. snail mail (infographic)
Cool. I've assumed touchscreen UIs used something like this, within certain tolerance limits, to make it easier to click small targets.
Coding Blind
The Lean Startup Bundle
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1736812

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1733883

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1725592 <- This one has lots of comments
Very interesting to see Microsoft holding 3 spots in the Top 10.
Open University courses. Whilst I can't speak for the rest of the syllabus, the postgrad maths is well-written and well-paced, with tutors available for help, a well-run discussion forum, optional extra residential weekends here and there, marked assignments at decent intervals, and the prospect of serious additional qualifications to show off in conversation.
If you want to see the old design, this site is still using it: http://startupschool.com.au/
Wow even the bots aren't pretending to be IE anymore!
I'm fairly sure we'll be judged to some extent that we allowed Bush to be president, twice no less, and also that we spent the first decade of the 21st century in war.
Do you have a phone with a Barcode Reader?
Scan a QR code with a barcode reader and get famous quotes directly on your phon
my response to Marc's post based on being an investor in Mint and a colleague of Marc's

http://blog.pasker.net/2010/10/02/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint-%e...
That's true, let me think about that, that's a thing that will impact quite a few entries actually.

If you want to re-word a specific entry in it's entirety I'd be grateful, this is a hard one to get right.
"On Stage" is too public - you can torpedo yourself with one careless remark. You can't put your flaws in context, and they are likely to be taken wrong. Private conversations are exactly the right place to learn the real nitty-gritty.
But if you don't, and register those 2 tax years as non-resident then it would be fine?
Wow. Dunno if it's awesome or embarrassing to see reference to a document I wrote over 4 years ago in this article. Oh shit... I'm 31 now!

For those curious (I never got around to part 2), boompa ended well. After turning down an early exit, we shifted focus to comicvine.com and ended up growing that site to its current position as the largest comic book site on the web. Ethan and I eventually partnered with some other old CNET veterans and formed Whiskey Media, which runs giantbomb.com and tested.com, among other sites.

If there's anything I've learned in this business since I wrote that article it's that you're lucky if you can maintain a 50% win/loss ratio with each product your launch (though I applaud you lucky bastards that got it right the first time). My advice continues to be to ditch and move on if your product doesn't catch on within the first six months. If for no other reason than it keeps you engaged and excited on what's coming up next. Sometimes what you think will work just doesn't catch on and that's totally OK. Maybe your next idea will.

Keep on keeping on.
Google Queue looks more interesting than it sounds.

Having had a first gen Apple TV, one of the things I found mildly frustrating was that I couldn't queue up a playlist of Youtube videos. With this, it looks like I can. If I can favourite my playlists or queues, this simple feature would open up for Youtube to become the MTV of the Internet.
What do you mean? Chrome is rapidly eating through Firefox's user base. Especially on more tech-savvy sites, it's not uncommon to see Chrome start overtaking every other browser (I think TechCrunch or a similar site released their August browser share stats, with Chrome just about to lap Firefox).
I'm not sure how big of a deal this is, but it might be worth mentioning that many HN users dislike short URLs and will often vote you down if you post one. Just a community norm that some folks are surprised by.
Huge improvement over the last iteration IMO, which felt packed with too much stuff. It was also hard to find the SvN blog link in the old version.
India Protests New iPhone4 Maps’ China Tilt
Hasn't picked up on any of the router MAC addresses I gave it. Guess it's not reached Ireland yet…
Complaints at the hosting low-end always amuse me.

You're paying <$20 a month for a slice of a server and
expect not just a tight SLA but ideally also a personal account manager who jumps when you whistle?

And would you like champagne with your Happy Meal, too?
Thanks for the interest! Just sent you an email.
Okay, so Sony signed some papers with them and will be offering it right on the TV.

Will Samsung? Because that's the TV I have. Hulu and Amazon both support the new Samsung TVs. (Or the TVs support those services, depending on how you look at it.)