skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think if you asked 1000 people on the street, by far a greater percentage of them have heard of Angie's List than Yelp.

I've been using the web since the days of ISPs providing a browser with their own brand (I'm looking at you, Netcom!) and email & Usenet before that. I still have never heard Yelp mentioned outside HN, but I hear "sponsored by Angieslist.com" on NPR all the time.

Don't underestimate the power of offline marketing.
Actually, in the UK, banks are pretty much the only way of getting a merchant account, see:

http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?type=RESO...

(sorry for shitty URL)

The only non-bank merchant accounts you can get are Amex & Diner's Card, both of which only work for their own cards.
That's the obvious plan isn't it? Sure iPhone won't be in the list but that's because of Apple not Adobe.
If this was in the EU it would be a case for Protected Geographical Status - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_Geographical_Status
When Portfolio Companies Work Together
Indeed. His Wikipedia page says that he is "married to Liu Xia."
I have problems with our adserver tags loading much slower than our pages. I often use a CSS hack to that the adserver code loads at the bottom of the page but is position in CSS at the top. However this can't be applied in 100% of situations......

Has anyone managed to load adserver code with this method successfully? I'll be trying myself this weekend and will report back....!
> Don’t mandate stacks, languages and frameworks.

I know someone who had to put his job on the line to get use of Spring vs heavyweight J2EE approved. Seriously. There are entrenched forces who will spread disinformation if it threatens their comfort zone. A corporate environment is one where J2EE is just another checkbox on the thousand-item RFP.
"Babbage's heart-warming message for the middle-aged"

and "A message from Babbage's life for the middle-aged"

to me both titles sound elegant but the former is misleading and the latter is correct.

The title is not trading ambiguity, it is just misleading.
> But in this case it's clearly wrong, because the two-syllable "Xiaobo" must be a given name because it's got two syllables.

And it's confirmed by the fact that his wife is Liu Xia.
Communication, communication, communication... Read your 'technical contact' email!
Facebook, I just can't quit you
Your Lawyer and 3 Other People You Should Not Give Equity To
Ask HN: Anyone making a living from just 1 app?
If you have a desktop/mobile/web application that is sustainable and you can be able to live on its profit, list them here. Thanks!
What I don't understand is how something as trivial as a URL shortener is in a position to:

- attract funding at this level

- ever monetize it (so you get some click stats on a subset of the web, so what?)

- is able to convince investors they're getting a 'good deal' at any valuation

URl shorteners are like a plague, I will never ever use them for anything voluntarily (some sites will do it automatically, not much point in fighting windmills there), they degrade the value of the web (indirections make the graph of the web harder to interpret and add another step to linking that could fail) and in general are a nuisance because they make a link unreadable, you never know what you're going to get from that particular box of chocolates.

They also make it much easier to spread 'bait and switch' links where the link title says one thing but the content is something entirely different.

Down with URL shorteners.
While I do agree with your points in general, it's important to keep in mind that everything is relative.

On the point about the cameras. If the photographer has a decent level of talent, then the gear definitely matters. Less so if they don't.

I know a lot of gadgety people who like to show off their expensive cameras. Their photos, however, aren't worth showing off at all - it wouldn't have mattered if they used a 5DMK2 or a lowly Rebel XSi. Boring is still boring no matter how sharp the picture is.
FeynTube - transform YouTube comments into reasonable and smart ones
Read the comment again. You've misread its Boolean logic (assuming it hasn't been edited).
In Defense of Lobbyists
Thank HN: 7 months ago, I asked for help. Now I've got 5 employees.
7 months ago, I posted asking the community how I could most efficiently make 300-400 US dollars a month, my cost of living, online (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1171520). You guys really poured out good ideas and several of you offered me work.

Patio11 was among those: he offered to pay me 400 USD a month, every month, to make a custom Wordpress theme for him. I took him up on it. His offer really helped. The ability to hammer out a Wordpress theme and cover my living costs in a short period of time meant that I could hire out someone else to do the tasks that were taking all of my time to pay for my food and rent. With the new-found free time, I was able to focus on marketing and sales and grow the service I had been doing myself into a larger business. By the time the 2nd Wordpress theme was due, I had run overdue on its deadline because my tiny business had been covered by some major media and I was swamped with just keeping it up and running. Thankfully Patrick was understanding when I turned in the late 2nd project and told him I simply had no more time to design for him due to my personal business's growth.

Fast-forward a few months. I now have 5 people working under me (3 full-time, 2 part-time) and my own office. Things are still hard, and I'm not rich, but I'm in a much better place than I was when I first posted. Thank you!
For the record we did NOT receive any communication from NIC.ly before they pulled the vb.ly domain.

We had received other emails from them previously including our domain renewal notice just a month and a half before so I know they had a working email address for us and that we were receiving their other correspondence.

They've made out in their statement that we ignored their email - given how upset myself and Violet Blue have been over this I would urge people to consider whether these are the actions of two people who would intentionally ignore such a significant warning. Why would we do that?

I do, however, feel relieved that they will not be letting anyone else register the domain - we were concerned from a security perspective of someone else registering the domain and re-routing existing vb.ly links out there to insecure or spoofed websites.

(we hadn't highlighted this concern previously because we didn't want to give anyone ideas but now they have said the domain is 'locked' I'm happy to talk about that concern)
This only works for the correct set of user expectations. If the user expects the whole suite to act like one big app, then this will not work. Also, there need to be standards so one can be sure of object identity. If the web piece announces that "John Smith" has changed his subscriber level, there better be a scheme to ensure everybody knows which Mr. Smith this applies to.
Public-access TV in YouTube era? City budget crunch forces debate
um no, spin spin spin...

see my thread above http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772206
A suggestion for Google App Engine - A State Service
How Much Do Markets Matter?
It implies that to you?

Is that due to your nature or your nurturing?
Ooh, I'll have to try that. I've been using different profiles, but didn't know about the last step.

Still; mindboggling. Different version = different binary launched, which accesses a different and non-locked profile. Why the hell does it instead open a new window of the currently-running version?

As a heads-up to anyone considering this: Sync doesn't (currently) like multiple versions. 3.6.10 won't sync now that I've hooked up some 4 betas.
UK Based HN'ers - We are running a Hack Day in Leeds... come and join us :)
American (Relative) Decline Would Be a Good Thing?
Have you considered using NoScript? It might be easier to whitelist the few widgets you care about, vs. tracking down miscreants.
I'm not big on the Nobel Peace Prize, though I guess they're improving their average over last year. But man, I love Norway:

China declared the decision would harm its relations with Norway - and the Nordic country responded that was a petty thing for a world power to do.
If you are a passionate programmer that wants to work with new tools, sexy frameworks, and other passionate developers...

...you should NOT be working in the Enterprise.

Unfortunately, the nature of the Enterprise will kill much of that because of the 4 reasons laid out above.
Bellamy salute
> They're, what, 30-40 years behind the cultural norms of the US, in this case?

And the us is another 10 to 20 years behind some other parts of the world in this respect.
Certainly makes the IPv4 to IPv6 transition look like a walk in the park . . .
This is huge. With API V3 and its accompanying "Wizard", Google has essentially democratized cartographic design. It's never been this easy.
Ask HN: Side Projects Gone Big
I've heard many of you love to create side projects for fun, but I also heard that few of them actually took off and grow into a profitable business. So feel free to list if you have any. Statistics will be welcomed as well!
Success in the Enterprise is dictated by throughput and repeatability, not in coolness of the solution. It's unfortunate, but the nature of the beast. They want their batch reports run on time, every night, and come out 100% accurate.

That's not sexy, but it helps them make $. The end.
The letter in the article reminds me of an engagement I had during the dot.com boom. Oracle told my client they had to buy their license right away before some imminent price hikes, so they did. The next week, Oracle dropped their price by 100K for my client's equivalent licensing level. Needless to say, I had one --pissed-- customer on my hands.
It's a bit argumentative to assume it's FUD and not an honest mistake or a change in the Adobe Reader 9 installation process.
Here's a reason I have trouble believing in the next Silicon Valley in Skolkovo: what about the previous one that was going to be in Dubna? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubna#Economy) News about it first appeared in 2002, but nothing has commenced since. That's why, unfortunately, I have to come to the conclusion that this new Silicon Valley project is nothing more than government propaganda aimed at fixing the country's self-image within Russia.
"Attempts to send mobile text messages with the Chinese characters for Liu Xiaobo failed."

Not only the internet, but also the text messaging channels are under censorship. China looks like a country that came out of a political horror movie.
Problem: born in hungary. Solution: during high school, I've complemented my english courses using the Internet (reading RFCs, and white papers). After university, I've literally hacked myself out of the country, by doing consulting on the side, and saving every penny I could.

Currently in London, and content, if not happy.
Can anyone make recommendations for merchant accounts in the US? Are there any that you would avoid? beanstream, authorize.net and Braintree all look pretty similiar, are there any real differences? Thank you!
Tell HN: Business/Finance Website (like HN)
Generate ItalianPost25, RM4SCC & IATA 2 of 5 Barcode Symbologies
Aspose.BarCode for JasperReports allows developers to display high quality barcode labels on JasperReports that can be rendered further in BMP, JPG, GIF and PNG formats. It supports more than 25 barcode symbologies including Linear or 2D barcodes and can also be integrated into existing and new JasperReport (jrxml) files. Aspose.BarCode for JasperReports is written purely in Java and a single provided JAR file can easily be deployed on the machines running JasperReports or JasperServer.
I know nothing about Chinese names but the original comment might have meant that it must be a given name because a family cannot have two syllables. No idea if that's true or not though!
Smart specs unite world and data
Boarding the Mothership: My Job Interview at Apple Computer
Gerald S. Lesser, Shaper of ‘Sesame Street,’ Dies at 84
NewMogul is gone, Markenomics is now defunct, Newsley isn't social anymore, so this is my attempt at resurrecting a social news website about business/finance.

Btw, it's setup right now so that you don't have to create an account. You can just go straight to "submit". (Though, I may require registration in the future.)

Thanks!

admin@forlue.com
Python script to notify on HN changes
hey Ben,

Not to add insult to injury, but it is very hard - next to impossible - to believe your version of this over the nic.ly version or vice-versa given the available evidence. All there is are stories.

You are the 'injured party' and it is to your advantage to present your case as strong as possible, and not being warned is of course going to make the other side look bad.

They in turn are going to make it seem as though they did everything they could and only used the disabling as a last resort.

From what I understand though, you were happy to operate this service under their terms and conditions, knowing full well that they could repossess the domain at a moments notice.

I would very much like to believe that they never sent you any email but it's going to be very hard for you to prove that conclusively, they are going to have an equally hard time showing that they warned you, but even if they didn't it will not change things much (as far as I can see they're not going to have a change of heart any time soon).

If I were you I'd pick a .com that has a good ring to it and relaunch, use the current media frenzy around the story to get your new name out there before you are 'old news'.

That way you get to rescue as much of the wreckage as possible.

Think about the future, not about the past. Good luck!
A C/C++ Programming riddle
OpenLayers also provides editing capabilities. This is used for example in the OpenStreetMap project.

Note that his requires writing support (WFS-T or similar) on server side. However, the typical map servers such as GeoServer and Deegree all do support WFS-T.
Ask HN: Your thoughts on my new project?
Hello HN. I really respect the HN community and would love to hear your feedback on this.

Last Wednesday we launched an invite-only IT community at Talentopoly.com. It's a place for programmers, designers, and IT professoinals to share what they're working on, get feedback, and learn from other talented professionals.

I think there is a serendipity that can happen when you get a few talented developers and designers in a room; conversation leads to hatching new ideas and new ways to approach the design. This can be hard to recreate in a company with only a handful of developers. I've faced this problem myself when I'm working solo on projects. So we created Talentopoly to be a virtual room full of talent to see if we can catch that lightning in a bottle. I think it will be especially useful for freelancers and people working in companies with one or two other developers/designers.

It's invite-only and will probably remain that way. Posts and questions are only visible to the community. Users have profiles and can post their resume. Each user has a certain number of invites they can send out.

Examples of posts would be an awesome pic of something a designer is working on and wants some feedback on, a link to a new jQuery plug-in, asking the community what they listen to while they work, and starting a discussion by posting about the best places to host your new web project. Even finding people to work with you on your next great pet project is a really great way to use the site.

I'm thinking (hoping) that this site might be a good fit for a lot of HN readers. To request an invite just head over to http://www.talentopoly.com and submit your info. We invite a few new users every day.

UPDATE: Talentopoly may look like just another HN, fair enough, but we don't allow the posting of news to the site for one. HN already does a great job of that. On Talentopoly you'd see a screenshot of an iPhone interface a designer is working on for instance. That is not really the sort of posts that appear on HN.
I've written my own custom data recovery tools to recover lost files. The first was a hack of ddrescue to only recover sectors containing a certain string (because the drive had so many bad sectors that a full ddrescue would have taken weeks to complete). Recently I wrote a tool to recover deleted directory contents from ext file systems that works even if all the inodes are gone. I didn't need the file data, only the names and folder structure, and I realized that if you don't need the data you never need to dereference the inodes. Instead you can treat the inode number like a database key to cross reference directory blocks.
I think we all have it in ourselves to be petty dictators, even to the point of convincing ourselves it's for the greater good.

When we have a teaspoon of power as parents, managers or customers, is it not tempting to hide the truth and impose our wills without concern for our subordinates?

I have to work on this constantly as a father. The greatest thing is when I loosen the reins and give my 3 year old son more freedom, and he comes around to do the "right thing" without being forced. I'm so much prouder of him than if he was just following me out of fear.
"Any use by you of any of the CloudMade Materials and CloudMade Site other than for your personal use is strictly prohibited."

Nice service, but given that HN is for startups (i.e. commercial entities) these terms make it kind of useless to most of us don't they?
I wonder what is the proportion? What are the probabilities that, as a reader of Hacker News, you are 1/ a software developer, 2/ been bullied

That might be enough data to qualify the correlation between having been bullied and being a software developer that reads Hacker News

BTW: is there some online tool that could help setup a poll like that (two binary questions, 4 cells distribution)?

I suspect there is a correlation, but I may be wrong, someone with facts on that?
Broadband penetration in the US was at 20% in 2007. 8Mbps is positively luxurious. (When I lived in Ohio I was at 3Mbps advertised, which of course translates to significantly less.)

Now I'm on a shared satellite link which is something like 8Mbps for 30 users.
The Kindle connection is really just setup for this (fantastic) closing paragraph:

> Of course, with the e-readers' lack of a backlight, you won't be able to play in the dark. But that's probably just as well. You might get eaten by a grue.
I'm uninterested in Hulu as a business, but if this means the IPO window is open (thus allowing people to exit financially while retaining founders in management roles and in control), I'm elated.
Yes, a story can have a message, but "Babbage" is a person, not a story. "This story's message" has a different agent from "Jim's message". Jim is always the _author_ in the second meaning.

"Babbage's message" made the title shorter, but also misleading. A complete title of "Babbage's heart-warming" would have made it even shorter, but I hope you're not advocating in favor of that!
Awesome. What is your business?
Wives don't take their husbands' family names in China. If she is named Liu, it's just a coincidence (Liu is one of the most common family names).
you missed the point completely.your focus is too narrow. there are vast quantities of people on this planet who are working to solve the "real" problems that you mention. your argument does not hold because you are only talking about the base of the maslow hierarchy of needs. OF COURSE there are people whose most basic needs are not solved yet on this planet. You are only argumenting for the lowest levels of the pyramid! Once someone has covered his basic needs and moves up the pyramid "other" types of problems emerge like "how do i watch my favorite tv show on my mobile phone" etc.
you have to segment your argument and make it very clear that you are addressing the lower levels of the pyramid.
Celebrating Nobel Peace Prize: $4.99 Tracku App for free today
A guided tour of the new 37Signals office
There's no doubt that a $50 charge is a significant hurdle to overcome for someone wanting to ballot box stuff using a bot on a review site, but for this to be a legit contrast to "free" or "anonymous" services, you have to assume that the free/anonymous sites are overrun with bots stuffing the ratings. Each review/vote counts for more if there are less of them. Look at any on-line review site: the wide majority of the entries have at most a handful of reviews/ratings. In order to attempt to influence that one way or another, you only need to have an extended family-size worth of accounts ("Hey cousin Bob, use angieslist to find your next plumber, then can you write a negative review of my landscaping competitor?"). The key is how the site mitigates that. angieslist charges $50 to discourage it -- angieslist also discourages it by having reviews of services you don't continuously need/use a lot of (how many painters can one person hire and review?). Yelp has automated review filtering technology. I assume Google has some algorithmic method. I don't know what citysearch does. I don't think which method you use to discourage/mitigate ballot box stuffing matters as much as that you do have something.

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, and nobody will even suspect you're a dog if you have $50. Exactly how much verification of the accounts occur? I guess for $50, angieslist can afford to follow up on every account. But in order for that to be effective, the people who pay $50 have to think they are getting $50 worth of service/benefit out of it. It seems to be effective in angieslist case. I, personally, don't use enough of the kinds of services that angieslist lists in order for $50 to be worth it (although, I guess getting screwed for $51 by some shady service provider just once might be enough to make it worth it).
Here’s what we’ve learned about doing UI for mobile web apps
It is a little sad to rewind the tape and go back to 1999, when both MySql and PostGres were talked about as being roughly equal. MySql had not yet taken over open source databases yet. MySql was greatly helped by the rise of PHP - I think those 2 technologies grew up together, and leaned on each other. But I also recall, when I was learning PHP in 1999, most PHP books devoted some time to Postgres. And PHP supported Postgres from the beginning. It wasn't till a few years later that I started to see book titles like "PHP/MySql development for beginners" as if those 2 technologies just naturally belonged together.

I recall when Tim Perdue published this article in 2000, and the strong impression it made on me that PostGres was the much better database:

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000705.php3

Tim found that PostGres could scale:

"The most interesting thing about my test results was to see how much of a load Postgres could withstand before giving any errors. In fact, Postgres seemed to scale 3 times higher than MySQL before giving any errors at all. MySQL begins collapsing at about 40-50 concurrent connections, whereas Postgres handily scaled to 120 before balking. My guess is, that Postgres could have gone far past 120 connections with enough memory and CPU."

At that time, circa 2000, developers often claimed that they could live without ACID reliability, in exchange for speed. Thus, there preference was for MySql. There is something to that argument of course. In recent years, the NoSql movement has gone much further, throwing out integrity as a concern, in exchange for massive scaling and fast speed.

Somehow, lost in the shuffle was the fact Postgres is, in most ways, technologically superior to MySql. It may not be as fast as MySql, in some situations, but for a wide range of purposes, it should be really be preferred to MySql. And I think, somehow, developers have often forgotten that, for a wide range of purposes, the best choice would be Postgres.
Follow-up: Gapgate
Nope, you should be able to begin using the API immediately upon signing up.