skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems to be more proof that the telephone is becoming legacy -- the least important part of a "smartphone" is the phone.
Just get a cheap VPS (Virtual Private Server) and install your choice of linux on it. A good VPS host is http://www.linode.com/.

I'm a college student, so I move every six months, so I'm in a similar position as you. A VPS allows me to have my own server without having to maintain the physical box.
I really like your product (being a customer). So, when are you going to host it in France :) ? Because the only problem with basecamp is the load time around here :) But congratulations for this product and wish you the best.
This doesn't fit in the tech startup realm at all, but I started doing martial arts for fun, got pretty good at it, got chosen to do the motion capture moves for the Mortal Kombat video games. Did that for 10 years. So I got paid to do that. I also did performances like shows, theater performances and corporate events etc. I would say it was nice money but definitely quit your job FU money. I also taught martial arts on top of my day job which means I got paid to exercise, a rarity in our tech geek community.
They are one with the Tao.

http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html
Bill Lear? Which company? You can't just throw out a name like that and not fill in some details.
Business number 2 for needmoney, building the Theme Factory.

I can't decide if I want to customize themes or hire a designer. I've tweaked my own theme a dozen times this year.
Time constraints: we weren't making significant process on the core idea, and we're both very busy students, so the side project fell by the wayside.
Second that. Being an extrovert is good for business.

I'd add to that:

Do what you love.
Be passionate about your work.
Share that passion freely with anyone who will listen.

If you're an engineer, consider buying "Get Clients Now". The cover looks awful. However, it's a great recipe book for learning to market yourself.
Hey be sure to put http:// in your url's so people can click them :) here it is : http://www.barsannapolis.com
Yes. It was a side project by members of the Odeo staff, correct?
How (if at all) did you handle marketing your app? I have a few small Android apps in the works and one on the market, but gaining visibility is my biggest issue.
I'm working on this right now. I'm starting with Orange County, CA at the moment and then I plan to roll it out to other places later. I am focusing on simple, informative restaurant pages with aggregated reviews and comments from other sites.

I plan to post the site on HN when it is ready. It is called Orange Dish.
Seems quiet in here...

The trouble is, side projects go unfinished and become dormant, but they never really die - they haven't been born yet.
Does that forgive the moral questionability of lying?
I love this:
1. Recognize “art.” We are surrounded by remnants of imagination and innovation. It may exist in the form of advertising, architecture, physical/material things, products, services, culture, etc. Noticing displays of creativity engages our mind and encourages the application of a new creative outlook. Remember, the world is no more interesting or dull than you are. View yourself as a consultant seeking ways to improve the image, style, brand, and function of what you see and use each day. What would you change? Why? How?

So many people ignore this aspect of life, and don't take the time to analyze and interpret the world around them. Awesome post.
This is a cool app. How much time have you put into it?
Only if you made it.
I tried once, but the whitelisting got too tedious; almost every website I interact with needs scripting. I've also never been hit with an XSS attack; similarly I haven't gotten a virus since a boot sector on a floppy 15 years ago. I haven't found the risks to be high.
> and that 95% of all computers are Windows boxes.

According to reddit statistics, this is no longer the case (68% only). And back in 2000, I knew almost nobody in the web dev business using windows, but Macs instead.
2010 Homeland security award for Border and Transportation Security program -
Can we rate limit Ask/Tell/Show HN posts? There are currently seven on the front page (and another nine on the second page). Three on the front page are from this new SomeoneAtHN anonymous account.

Maybe one Ask/Tell/Show allowed per user every week?
Steve Jobs's Strategy? "Get Rid of the Crappy Stuff"
I wonder if injuries and insults commute...
Now where did I put the key to that barn door?

It's in the saddlebags.
Andy Rubin and carriers meddling with Android
I uninstalled NoScript after it interfered with my e-commerce transactions one too many times. Lack of Javascript caused the transaction to halt abruptly, sometimes causing me to lose the ticket I was booking (some travel tickets are very time sensitive here). Even after I added my own bank to the whitelist, the middleman sites between the retailer and the bank were getting affected and blocked.

I just installed RequestPolicy addon after going through this thread, and am hoping it will be a good tradeoff (other reason for installing this instead of NoScript are those annoying ad-filled pages NoScript shows after its frequent updates, and its author's attempts to fiddle with ABP sometime back, making his integrity questionable).
Babbage's work was a bleeding edge of the science. As far as i know there is still no "cult of youth" in the areas what are bleeding edge of science today. Most people are getting to the bleeding egde and starting to produce their first significant science results only at 30+ . Dismissing 40-50+ year olds at the top of their scientific work would be just like throwing gold in thrash.

Programming isn't a science (it is barely an engineering) and thus comparison with Babbage just isn't valid.
I'm disappointed this wasn't some tongue-in-cheek zombie guide.
I don't buy the argument from authority, I really think you're trolling.

Apart from the bad FPU code in gcc 3 (or generally relatively poor code in gcc 3 compared to more recent or more expensive compilers) I really don't know examples of significant problems in the code generation of modern C compilers. Just don't give me examples that work only on the latest CPU's or that are fast only on one of CPU generations or on the CPU of only one manufacturer.
Stick Golf rocks. I love it and my 4 year old also likes to think he is playing it. How do you make money on it though? I don't think I have ever seen any ads. EDIT(I must have downloaded when it was free? It you ever do a version update I will be buying it for sure.)
The expense is a good thing. They need to be focusing rather than throwing dragnets. Expense forces prioritization.
It currently only evaluates recent tweets for resource reasons, but I do plan to evaluate all of a single users's tweets. We can see the peaks and dips of when someone is talking about something.
Dude, I'm Civ08 so I didn't get to use your app, but choosing courses was a nightmare. I'm sure my brother uses you guys. Congrats!
Have something that stands out about you ... better design/user experience, better community, better content. something. If you can't come up with something that will make you standout somewhat... pass up the opportunity.
Google Chrome 8 Build Started – Clouding Here
http://www.lowendbox.com has good deals on cheap VPS's.
Our avacados usually come from Isreal. Perhaps why there's so much tension in the region.
This was a side project to my main project for 2 months, but I'm planning to move to this full-time if I can find enough interest in this.
Everyone who sees me using TotalFinder asks me about it and I know at least a couple have bought it first thing when they got back to their computer. Great work.
Solid base for American political thought and law: Democracy's Discontent It will give you valuable insight into the current political process, how it was formed, why some laws are the way they are, and it has chapters discussing privacy law, free speech, religion, and a multitude of others. The chapter over the 14th Amendment offers such a great framework to view the Constitution that reading this book alone before college allowed me to ace any government type class I ever took.

More dense and more theory: Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. I have read it 3 or 4 times and I still haven't digested all of it. It starts with an excellent argument for the primacy of justice and then destroys it. My favorite section of his book was about morality/enforceability of contracts in a philosophical sense. Worth several reads.
I'm unsure about the 'ownership' of such a device.

If someone denies ownership of something, do they loose all rights to it? "Is that your $20? No? Ok, must be mine."

Furthermore, if you trespass upon someone's property and leave something that you feel is important ($20) while trespassing, can you demand it back?

Also proof of ownership is something I wonder about. Surely the FBI has serial numbers, but the person with the 'device' could deny them to enter their private property to inspect such. If i haven't done a crime, then you can't get a warrant to search my place for such a device.

Should i find such on my motorcycle, I'll simply attach it to the nearest 18-wheeler I find, or mail it around the country.
This is a classic effectiveness (as Larry the Cable guy says, Git-R-Done) vs efficiency (Git-R-Done faster/better!) discussion.

Ideally, you want effectiveness and efficiency. If you can't have both, you need to be effective before you are efficient, as both of the author's analogies make clear.
I think this is a legit concern, but there isn't enough evidence that this trend will continue.
I'll cap off my contribution with this guy who's eating nothing for the next two months but potatoes. Twenty every day. He's the Executive Director of the Washington State Potato Commission. http://20potatoesaday.com/

It's been fun!
Stick golf was free for about 5 days during a promotion I did with FAAD. (freeappaday.com). It's now $0.99, and been at that price for a while.
Meh, it'll fall off the page soon enough if it's not interesting.
I own an iPhone 3G and I really wish that my carrier (Rogers) would let me get rid of all phone-related services. I don't want or need them. Internet in my pocket is really the important part. And if I want to talk, send my voice through the data channels!

Same with TV; I don't own one, but I wish the cable companies would kill a few shitty cable TV channels and use that bandwidth for Internet data instead.
Adobe AIR runtime for Android lands
A user maximizing his browser on a screen 1680 pixels wide is not a user whose particular aesthetic preferences are worth accommodating.

If you choose to make your browser window wider than a line of text you'd comfortably read, you also can choose to apply any settings that will make sites look more to your liking.
As I read on the unofficial FAQ to HN by jacquesm, "self" posts have a quite heavy weight on them. It's harder for them to get to the front page and they fall out of it faster than normal ones.

I think that this is enough and we don't need any more limits. Moreover some of them are really good and insightful in my opinion, so I don't feel the need of a limit at all.
So I made something that's pretty stupid but had fun doing it
I really wanted a project that I could use map reduce on and this idea came up amongst a group of friends as a joke.

Unfortunately the link graph was really stale when I ran it so it is not always correct. Also dates make it boring sometimes.
> I think the concern is irrational; the alternative (having agents manually tail people) is error prone,
> subjective, incredibly expensive, and no less intrusive.

Don't underestimate the role of the "incredibly expensive" part. The physical and resource constraints for tailing people limit law enforcement's ability to do that. In this way GPS trackers are more intrusive than traditional surveillance methods, in the sense that they can be deployed indiscriminately at a much larger scale.

(For a related example, in "Code" Lessig argues that the US founders didn't need an explicit right to privacy since it was implied by the search-and-seizure and trespass constraints. Prior to electronic surveillance methods, it was difficult to invade one's privacy without already violating trespass or similar laws.)
side projects don't die, they just get put back on the shelf for another stab at it later on
Thanks for you comments anigbrowl,
My main aim was to have drawing/sketching capability at the website with sharing feature, but users have also used the site to upload images. It is different from twitpic in the sense that it allows one to draw/edit images at the website itself using the sketchpad.
And I think you are right, I need to work on the UI, and hence I have got a graphic designer friend who is working on redesigning it with uniform colors and fonts.
I am using GWT to code the UI and may be there are some settings that I have not used which control the changing window sizes. I will spend some time to fix it. Since I am not a javascript/html person, I found GWT very easy to use. Do you have any recommendations for any other tools instead of using GWT?

Putting a logo at the top left corner would be more
distracting, don't you think so? I would rather have it in
the bottom right corner. I was thinking of creating another
small strip of image containing the logo and attach it to
the bottom of the main image.

The new design that we are coming up is surely clean,
clutter free and more pleasant to look at. Earlier I was the
only person working on it so you can imagine how tunneled my
vision must have become, but now I am getting more people to
work on improving the website.

The new design should give you the feeling of one course at
a time of a great meal :).
Thanks again for your comments, I will keep you posted
here.
That's a brilliant and simple idea! Can I ask how you send out texts? Do you use a third party API like Mobile Messenger?
Workaround, if you just say their name, it will pull up their contact info and you can tap the address there.
> solving this problem is something I'm quite excited and passionate about

I'd say that's your answer.

If it's something that interests you, you're going to pushing that much harder towards the goal, which makes a crowded market less of an issue. Besides, isn't the point of all this entrepeneur stuff to do what you want to do?

If you're going to be financially dependent on this, then yeah, do the research and weigh the odds and all that. If not, do what you enjoy, and if it fails at least you've had fun and gained a bunch of experience for next time.
I'm looking forward to what Caleb comes up with here, his Toluu.com site is great, if you haven't tried it and are looking for some interesting blogs / podcasts be sure to check it out
My fiancee is a jewelry designer, making a living selling her work on the website I built for her (http://www.ghostlove.com). Not exactly an app as such, but what the heck :)
Reformatted. Thanks.
Is WP Review Site the plugin in question?

http://www.wpreviewsite.com/
http://absurdlycool.com and http://recreationparks.net pay rent - they are both side projects for me.
I think that's what it's supposed to do.
Also useful:

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-10-25/
I was a little bit of both. Thanks for the extra info!
The avocado farm needs people interested in giving away money to help other people.

The dongle people only need people interested in buying something that they benefit from.
Freelancing outside the US/EU
Dear HN, I'm a college student and also have a full time job during the day so I can pay my tuition, rent, et al. I've been wondering where should I put my efforts so I'd be able to live with more comfort.

For the past 3 years I've been working with application support, but my goal is to work full time with development, but I just can't afford taking a junior position somewhere else because I'd run out of money. So I ask: any suggestions on where specifically I should put my efforts to find my way on online freelancing? I've signed up for some of the sites suggested here, but I'm still looking for the area that demands the most. With USD1000 a month I already could pay the bills, anything else would be extra.

I've already invested some time on two certifications (SCJP and ITIL) but since I have no enterprise experience they would still take me as a Junior -- anyways, I passed both.

I'm willing to spend any free time studying something new, just wondering what would be it.

Thanks in advance.
PS: I'm in Brazil.
The biggest problem I have with OpenStreetMap is that it is ugly by default. I suppose you could make it perfect but you have to put a lot of work in. Google’s sensible defaults with sensible options get you up and running a lot quicker.
I recommend you read this post by Seth Godin if you haven't already: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/09/if-you-want-...

I think he nails it. Want to start doing something? Do it. It won't be pretty at first but you'll learn from your own experiences which is invaluable. And, by selling just $50 of services or products to your friends next month, you'll be $50 closer to your goals.
Humans don't judge probability and risk very well. It's hard to forsee the future and problems. Hindsight is 20/20. My bag of cliches is exhausted.

Maybe there were other things the engineers were working on that brought definite (as in 100%) benefit. Maybe there's a good product/consulting opportunity here. Everybody needs monitoring, but it takes time and resources.

I agree, that they are focusing on it now, because it happened.
>even a vague statement like "I wish someone would kill (x)" has been considered justification for some police departments to investigate the author

In limited circumstances I'd think that does call for investigation. Have you ever made a post like that, asking for someone to be killed? In what context?
Paul -- would love to hear a summary of what you did to market these sites. SEO? Direct marketing? Word of mouth? Online ads? What was your approach, and what did you learn?

Edit: I suppose one could read this post: http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/distribution-distribution...
Many online accounts are never truly deleted and can be reactivated at a later time.
Great story, but I hope people won't get inspired by this in the direction to start submitting their request for help for non-sense/non-relevant aspects to the HN Community.
So what languages did everyone use?

I decided to try a different one on each level, so I used Python, bash (letting GNU coreutils 'factor' do the hard work), and Haskell, respectively.
A project managment based upon Google Wave :)
Check out DDS (disclosure: my company sells an implementation). It's a pub-sub based middleware, slanted toward a data-centric approach, as contrasted with distributed objects or message-passing. As far as agree-upon messages... there are plenty of standards to choose from. :) The keys are to be internally consistent and to have an interoperability plan.
Hi there. Great story, I can get you some work too for themes and other stuff related to video games. jimmy@inodesoft.com

Keep having a very bright and sucessful day!

:-)
Don't I know it.

Last client, travel biz, had APIs to many holiday and travel co's APIs. Some of the big ones, no names, had no mock data. Being travel data, live data changed by the second. Had to employ someone specifically to fix test data, and the tests, simply to allow the devs to work. Insane.

Corollary: The reason the travel industry is such as mess is its complete lack of understanding of, and refusal to engage with, its customers. It's really, really easy to fix, but the suits refuse to acknowledge the problems.
Wow, someone noticed it :)

If you're in a mood to give feedback what we're looking for are suggestions that make it easier to review the code without making it really unpleasant to write the code.

Here's an example of where we're borderline too pedantic (the whole class_method(instance) instead of instance->method() )

class wtf
{
instance
{
public int x, y;
}

constructor wtf_new()
{
self->x = self->y = 0;
}

public void wtf_incboth(wtf self)
{
printf("%d,%d\n", ++self->x, ++self->y);
}

}

void
main(void)
{
wtf huh = wtf_new();

wtf_incboth(huh);
wtf_incboth(huh);
}
The last question isn't that difficult if you brute force it and have loads of memory. I tried to do it in python using itertools on my work thinclient and got a memoryerror. If you however break up your combinations.. you're good to go!

Fun, made my day.
Good idea greplin dudes!
Pointing out a real annoyance in the Android GUI. Checked boxes have a "√" checkmark in them, but is grayed out. This is bad UI design.
"Even if you're not looking for a job, we'd love to hear what you thought about the challenge."

I would be curious how many people did you lose because of phonecall requirement (before you changed it).

Also CSV for just a list of 22 numbers wasn't really necessary.

If you do web puzzle, the best is to keep everything self-contained, no downloads, no using external channels, just copy and paste.

FYI another Python cheater here (+Wolfram Alpha & Wikipedia, I'm lazy :).
It's good advice.

However, IMO, I still don't credit Jobs with the success of Apple.

Woz was the hero behind the technology of the original Apple, and Jonathan Ive was the hero behind the modern look and feel of Apple, which arguably was and still is the main success driver. Throw in some good marketing folks and the NeXT acquisition, and you have the modern Apple.
Of course that is unreasonable. I don't think it was meant to be taken literally, but as advice recommending that as a suspect or person of interest one generally shouldn't assume that law enforcement folks are on your side.

(I have a lot of respect for the police: they accept a lot of risk to try to ensure a civil society in exchange for not a lot of reward, but there's little doubt that if they see themselves in an adversarial relationship with someone they are willing and able to mislead or misdirect that person in order to accomplish their aims. There is a reason that the Miranda Warning became a legal requirement.)
Yahoo Search BOSS V2: A Paid Service with Web, Images, and News
the great thing about side projects is they cant "fail"

I have
http://erldocs.com - nice ui to the erlang documentation
http://arandomurl.com - blog / html5 games
http://pastebin.me - pastebin that executes js
http://erlangotp.com - information about erlang
http://talk.io - chat client

some are virtually silent, some are reasonably popular, I dont worry about promoting them or getting visitors etc, 2 of them are still yet to be done and I am under no pressure to finish, I can just do them in my own time.
I agree.

I wonder what the currently owners of art.ly think about the statement?

So basically the domain registry of their domain don't really want them to own it (having already sold it to them) and would rather they had it back and could sell it to a local company.

!