skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some people have said these are good: http://www.xpad4laptop.com/

Certainly cheap enough to try instead of a new computer.
I would love to see what crypto card offload cluster they built for this.
It said google made money from android. How do they make money from android?
I think I have mentioned this before, but an excellent guide to advertising copy can be found in: David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man (ISBN 1-904915-01-9).

It's considered a seminal text among copy writers. I found it very helpful, for exactly this purpose.
To be more direct, weather can affect crop production. Most of which is bought and sold in commodities markets.
So if the weather is cold FCOJ is going up.
I enjoyed how the caption photo changes between sites.
The loser-pays rule can often work hardship on average people caught up in the court system.

Fee awards can be devastating to a middle-class person. I once had a case come to me after some homeowners had lost at trial in a dispute with their mortgage lender over some technical provisions of their mortgage. The amount at stake was perhaps a couple of hundred thousand dollars. However, on losing, the court awarded the lender almost $400K in fees (it did so under a contract provision providing that the prevailing party in any dispute would receive an award of such fees). It seemed pretty clear that the court had rendered some doubtful rulings in the case and that the case would likely be reversed on appeal. However, in order to get to an appeal, the losing parties needed to get a stay on execution of the judgment. To get the stay, they had to post a bond in an amount equal to no less than one and one-half times the amount of the judgment. Since this was beyond the financial means of the losing plaintiffs, they found themselves being subjected to liens, attachments, garnishments, and the like in ways that basically ruined their day-to-day lives long before they could await the outcome of any appeal. As a result, though they were probably right on the merits, all it took was the harsh acts of one judge to render them helpless in asserting their rights by being able to pursue their case to its proper outcome. They had scraped to pay their own attorneys to prosecute the case but they were overwhelmed by the attorney-fee award that crippled their case midstream.

That example involved, not poor people, but those who had homes and jobs and who felt they needed to try to undo a wrong that had been inflicted on them by a lender. The result was that they folded their case, borrowed from wherever they could to pay the lender's fees, and dropped their appeal, walking away licking some pretty heavy wounds.

Based on many such situations, I would say that a loser-pays rule could easily work hardship on average people seeking access to the courts. I will grant that such a rule sounds attractive in principle and our courts are full of abusive litigation that needs to be curbed. But I'm just not sure that this is the right approach to reforming the problems.
Given the context of the discussion, it only seems fair to remove all the products they acquired from your list.
What a brilliant idea. What do people think of this UI switch-up (from an ameteur designer trying to get better)?

http://f.cl.ly/items/88b19cf0a0964af0e53d/Screen%20shot%2020...
This is by far one of the the coolest startups I've heard of in a while. Unlike many today, it solves a real problem for real people. I also love the fact that it bridges tech with reality (and by that, I mean physical interaction). While this seems like an obvious concept, it is completely overlooked by a surprising number of startups these days, I think it is a pretty essential component.
Nobody is stopping the Ruby devs from writing a Ruby interpreter for the browser. Here is the recipe:

1) invent a type that the browser current doesn't understand like: application/ruby-script

2) write a parser for it in JavaScript

3) Profit??

It would look like this:

<script type="application/ruby-script">

//your browser will ignore this but your parser won't

//sorry I don't do ruby to come up with an example

</script>

<script src="yourawsomerubyparser.js">
Is that hop private?
ugly?! the building is beautiful!
Interesting way of giving charity.

Instead of just giving money to 600 people, he gave them jobs. And don't forget his suppliers too who also have jobs.
Heres a couple from my ideas list:

WhatIsThisSiteAbout.com - Flashes an image of a website homepage for 5 seconds and the user has to guess what the site is about. Feedback can be used to hone the site so that it makes a better impact in the future. (Someone told me that a similar site might already exist?)

iPhone Training App - An app that uses GPS to figure out how quickly you are moving and the route. It could maintain a history of your previous walks/runs and then use sound clips to motivate you (i.e. saying whether you're going good, or if you're going too slow etc)

Friday Drinks - A variation on a little app I built (http://meatinapark.appspot.com/). Shows nearby bars on a map and then you can organize Friday drinks with (facebook) friends. I could probably modify my own app. One day....

Online Mirror - A webpage that can be used as a mirror. Handy if you have a webcam but no mirror!

Hotel style room service for your own home - A cleaning service more akin to a hotel, where they restock certain items in the fridge and bathroom etc...
Good stuff! I need to find time to make the switch to MixPanel.
Is there a reason why you cant have one of these forward to an HTTPS port that's using a long-lived self-signed certificate?

Much better: Forward via HTTPS to EC2 instances which are using short-lived certificates. When you boot a new instance to add to your load balancing cluster, have it generate an SSL key which ELB is told to trust. If a node is compromised, you just tell ELB to not trust that certificate any more.

But that doesn't seem to be possible, and it still doesn't make up for the fact that putting SSL stacks and $BIGNUM SSL keys together is practically begging to be attacked.
>>Absolutely nothing happens when you microwave a glass of water that wouldn't also happen if you heated it on the stove, or put it under a heat lamp.

I'd like to see someone superheat water on the stove or indeed boil water inside a block of ice under a heat lamp.
Or, better yet, don't put sensitive data in public web directories! Have your working copy somewhere else, and update your "svn update" script to also run an rsync with an --exclude=.svn to your web root.
No more or less private than connections between EC2 nodes.
I don't think I agree with kachingle's stance. Casting the situation into one I can more easily grasp:

What if I feel that movies should be free; that there be an "open-theatre"? I pay my $11.00, set up my camera and sound equipment, and press record. I then share this recording with a bunch of like-minded folks. ... Wait a second...
Anathematizing a person isn't the same thing as condemning a person to hell. Rather it is a form of excommunication (prohibition from receiving communion). The ultimate fate of the person in question is understood to be in God's hands.
FTP meet HTTPS: An easier way to talk to Github
"Dalai Lama Int'l Airport" on Nepal gave me a good laugh.
For them it doesn't pay to fact check. In the media business it is all about getting a breaking story out there quickly, and if they waste time fact-checking they are losing readers who are getting the story elsewhere. Clearly this isn't good, but it is the price that we pay for demanding fast, instant news.
> To receive EM energy you need a structure that's a substantial fraction of the wavelength.

Fractal antennae don't work then? Oh wait.

But at least self-similarity is rare in natural systems ... oh, fiddlesticks.

</sarcasm>
Thanks for the tip, amazon has my order. Does he delve much into online copy writing techniques? I'd imagine it's quite a different beast to traditional print/display advertising.
It's not a platitude, it's a metric for finding truth that successfully compensates for what appears to be an inborn weakness in the human brain for overvaluing words.
Private equity courts News Corp, AOL on Yahoo: source
That looks really cool. I'll definitely grab a copy when it comes out.
Nexiwave: add machine subtitle to your media collection
Hi,

I'm interested to get in touch about the biz dev position.

Is there an e-mail address I can reach you at?
Dell reaches $100 million settlement in SEC fraud case
Check out his book since it looks like it might be good, but if you really want to learn Python and need a good place to start, I've written one:

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

It's free, you can download a PDF, and you can hit:

http://learncodethehardway.org/

To ask questions if you get stuck.

If you already know how to code it might be too simple for you.
This is what was lost when blogs overwhelmed journalism. Fact-checking, accountability and misaligned curation but I am hopeful blogs will evolve over time to incorporate them back.
Copyblogger (http://www.copyblogger.com/) is a pretty good resource.
This is someone who went through the program, and is commenting on the value extracted from it. For the author, the value of going through the YC program and getting the 'SV insider' connections was worth more than the equity share given to YC. I don't see how this is fanboyism in the slightest.
I hate to see entrepreneurs acting like predators. I like to think we are in it for noble reasons - advancement of humanity, crucial innovation - you know, changing the world. But cold hard cash rules for many.

It makes a certain kind of sense that a guy who left Google for BMG would be capable of such a scummy company.
Google blows away Street estimates
I wondered if they were showing a building still under construction.
1 out of every 3000 Ideas Succeed
Removing objects from video in real time
Even VentureBeat did a positive "review":

http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/12/douglas-merrill-zestcash/
Those situations depend highly upon context, at least they feel like it, so...

I would rather have a chat service where it connected you to girls to answer questions, kind of like KGB but for dating.

Interesting features would be:
taking/sending video of the environment, so you can be walked-through how to make small talk.
* an emergency call me back service, so you can pretend to have an important call, and either ignore it, or get feedback on what's happening in real-time
They would be welcomed at any point to increase the share of revenue given to the publishers.
There I was, tripping balls with Phish blaring "Bouncin' 'Round the Room" and my start-up idea came to me!
My pleasure, I'm shocked at how the HN community responds to that article.
Well, he did say IMO YMMV. I happen to agree that it looks pretty nice, at least on its own (although it might be trying a bit too hard to look modern), but it's definitely pretty polarizing architecture, so opinions going either way are not surprising.
I think we're fine with organizations... IEEE, LOPSA, SAGE, USENIX, etc... I bet the average sysadmin is a member of more professional organizations than the average public school teacher.

The difference is that we use these organizations to make contacts, learn things, etc... basically to become better programmers or sysadmins, to find new mentors, co-workers, employees or employers. Teachers use their union to set wages.

I don't think you will find technical people using a union to set wages any time soon just 'cause we have little tolerance for incompetence (and because our market is efficient enough that good people, to some extent, get rewarded. maybe not as well as they should, but there is some correlation between skill and pay.)

Most of us are perfectly okay with seeing our less-competent peers getting left in the dust. Really, most of us prefer it that way. This is what the organizers will have to overcome if we are to unionise.
Startup coverage has always been done without the slightest of fact checking. Read your local bigtown paper sometime, and see how bubbly they are about startups, specially local ones.
I find it amusing and disturbing that you have a great many upvotes for this comment, but that it is ambiguous whether this support is in favor of reforming the law or killing the trolls.

Or possibly both.
He doesn't per se discuss online copy writing... it was written in the 60s :-)

But he talks about direct response ads, which can be seen in light of A/B testing, on web pages. For example, by changing one word, the response rate was increased 20-30%.

I earnestly don't think it's that different a beast. The techniques always remain the same, so why not learn from the master?

For more recently written stuff, I think groupon do a really good job, and you can find their stuff online: https://docs.google.com/View?id=dmv9rbh_11gtqx983t
Every time a user types a web search on an Android phone, they see Google ads and may click on them. I would guess that's the only way they make money from Android, but they probably make a ton that way.
Are you sure? I don't see anything on their site about circumventing a paywall. Also, I don't even think NYTimes re-launched their paywall yet.
Melbourne’s new road network : 2040
I think there are plenty of them. IRC would barely qualify as "popular" among CS/SE students graduating in the past 5 years.

/jarek, developer, IRC user, not a bot programmer
Sadly I haven't got the time to give as detailed an answer as this deserves but.. even if you do the lion's share of the writing yourself, at least hire a professional writer to give it the once over once you're done in order to catch any particularly bad syntax or constructions (and to get another set of eyes over it, too). This should only take a couple hours of their time if it's a typical SaaS site and would be worth the $50-$200 peace of mind. I give this advice as someone who's written for a living for > 10 years and who still benefits significantly from third parties looking over his work.
Americans have some strange ideas about what causes global warming
...and not just from U of Rush Limbaugh either
I'm coming as well. Glad to see some DC love.
Anton Supercomputer Proves its Mettle
There's one big problem with this app. The advice that girls give guys about how guys should behave/act with girls have about the same chance of being useful/correct as flipping a coin.

Don't get me wrong, that means that 50% of the advice is useful, specifically advice like "pickup lines don't work". But other advice such as "be a nice guy," typically is downright wrong.

I am aware that both of the above examples for and against the advice of girls could be picked apart as "straw man" arguments. I won't even say for sure if it's 50/50 chances or 60/40 chances of good advice to bad advice. I do know that the advice is bad advice often enough that guys should instead seek the advice of alpha males than girls themselves.

It's like product management. Yes, of course you ask the user what they want, but you take whatever they say with a grain of salt, because rarely does a user know what they really want. Instead you should seek the advice of those product managers that are best at creating a product (i.e. men that are successful with the ladies) that the customers (i.e. women) love and can't get enough of.

Girls often say they want one thing when they really want something entirely different. Their advice should always be treated as suspect, if only for the very truth that there are no universal likes and dislikes when it comes to women. As far as I can tell, it's the most fragmented market of buyers in the world.
Schmidt On Social: “We Want People To Be More Logged Into Google.”
I'm not sure I've ever been at a Music Festival and thought "hey, wish I could interact more with my phone". Maybe that's just me though...

Of course there's also the battery and signal issues that would make it useless at any festival I've ever been to.

Maybe there are other situations in which it would be useful though...
Yeah, if Libya went down the "nefarious purposes" path, we should probably filter at the browser level.

But think down the path you'd need to go if you chose to block bit.ly at the DNS level... Right now, IANA's root name servers delegate all .ly requests to name servers under Libya's control. I'm pretty sure there's no mechanism in place for the root servers to change that to "send all .ly requests to Libya _except for_ bit.ly requests, and serve them ourselves or send them elsewhere", and in my opinion there _shouldn't_ be any such mechanism because of the potential for abuse at government levels - would you want the Chinese government to know IANA has the ability to redirect traffic from domains they don't like?

So the _other_ alternative seems to be to have IANA refer all .ly requests to a new tld authority. Same problem - if you do that once, especially if you do it just to protect a company's profits/business model, how do you refuse a request from China to assume control of all of Tibet's tld?

Suggesting DNS level changes for bit.ly seems to me to open a whole can of very ugly worms...
All the good programming ideas I have ever had have occured away from a computer. And I don't mean most, I mean all. I still remember my first Eureka moment while waiting for a train to go home. I was so excited about it I almost turned around and went back to the office. Instead I excitedly jotted it down over about three pages of notebook and went in the next day and implemented it.

You have to figure in some time each day away from the screen but still thinking about work in a kind-of background task. And carry a notepad or make voice memos when the light bulb moment strikes.
At the same time it seems like those who would actually fact check would have a story that no one else has.
True. When the prices are substantially raised you are forced to 1) pay the price or 2) re-integrate. So the cost in the my first point is actually doubled.
QED is commonly understood to mean "the theorem is proved," and it is used in rigorous mathematical proofs that leave no doubt of their meaning.

From wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q.E.D.): The phrase is traditionally placed in its abbreviated form at the end of a mathematical proof or philosophical argument when that which was specified in the enunciation, and in the setting-out, has been exactly restated as the conclusion of the demonstration.

I agree with the parent comment that this rhetorical flourish is misleading, and I agree it gives the non-scientific set a hook to riff on.
Github account or fake.
Easy to say it's predatory but I'm not convinced. These are high risk loans so who's to say that the interest rates and fees charged aren't reflective of that risk? On the other hand I am willing to entertain the idea that if the people who most often used these places don't have access to these loans at all maybe they would be better off.
If you add your ssh key to an ssh-agent you won't have to type the password for it each time and the password won't be stored anywhere.

You do still have to trust the root user, but this is still way better than putting your password on disk.
Google’s Big Quarter So Far Worth Over $15 Billion To Wall St.
They already have. You're reading the fact checking right now.

News corporations may be more consistent, but do you really think they're more trustworthy?
I would think that now that they are starting to invest in long term clean energy, that now is when they will start to make real money - in 20 years or whenever these fuel-less investments start to pay off
Strong Codes For Weak Channels
I gather that the default rate for payday loans is several percent per month, so you'd lose money charging 30% APR (2.2% / month).

Can anyone point to a good article on how the industry works and who their customers are?
Read Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins, the granddaddy of all copywriting books.
Do it now.
It's very short, it's available online for free, and it has no fluff and all useful information.

It was written a few years ago, so it doesn't have the latest techniques for maximizing conversions for SaaS products.

However, it's written for direct response advertisers and not brand advertisers, so it covers the basics of getting
sales, tracking, split testing, etc very well.

You can take the techniques Hopkins presents for writing short, effective classified ads and apply them very effectively, with minimal modification, to your AdWords ads and landing pages.

These techniques have been tested by dozens of advertisers since, and they work VERY well.

A good copywriter will usually charge $10-$15K plus a percentage of sales. I would strongly recommend bringing your copy skills to "Good enough" and doing it yourself.
Probably a good point, but my sense is that HTTP is the future (and faster) for git{hub}. I may be wrong about that.

Based on the quick downvote, I am wrong. Fair enough, but I'm curious to know, is HTTP not more efficient/quick than ssh now for git? I thought it was.
My sole experience with jury duty -- during voir dire:

Prosecutor: Juror number six, slightly abstract analytical question.

Me: Intelligent answer.

Prosecutor: The prosecution thanks and excuses juror number six.

Uh huh. I'm gonna remember that if I see you do it to someone else next time.
This might turn out to be fairly straightforward if the 'discovery' of the flaw took place through industrial espionage or breach of contract.
I don't have a link, but Planet Money did a great podcast on payday loans.
thanks Kent!
I'm really sorry that Prosper didn't prosper, because I thought that P2P lending would be an excellent alternative to payday loans. It made huge sense to me that if one person in a community has money and one person in a community needs money, then if they trust each other, one guy pays a modest APR and everyone walks away happy.

As it turns out, Prosper couldn't beat the payday loan companies because the people who need payday loans are atrocious credit risks and they collectively relieved us lenders of hundreds of millions (cough, not a typo) before we wised up about this.
Emacs will be even better when you can use Scheme instead of Elisp.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1663627/guile-and-emacs
I've ordered the book, even if it's not current it might help put me in the frame of mind I need to approach this. Thanks for the Groupon link.
OK, but has anyone managed to construct the real numbers with intuitionist logic? Maybe different logics are like different building materials, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.
Beyond de-politicization, which can cut a lot of different ways, the other factor in acrimony-reduction is the European social safety net. The EU legal system doesn't have to be the tool of last resort to the same extent as in the American style.

See also Matt Yglesias: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2008/12/loser_pays/
Who's to say crack isn't fun for some people? You're still a criminal and a drag on society if you sell it.

It's not that I don't think the rates reflect the risk... it's that I think these rich bastards are saddling poor people with loans, and they expect a good portion of them to drown in the loans.

They charge these rates so they can recover vast losses... in the end, the honest people get screwed and even the dishonest borrowers get buried in a tar pit of debt.
Haters gonna hate, bro! I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation as to why TechCrunch and other industry insiders are swooning over their newest darling startup. I'm sure it has nothing to do with who's in the in crowd and who's not. After all, silicon valley, and the tech industry as a whole, is a pure meritocracy!
Evil exists in the world.

QED.
Poll: What phone OS do you have?
Hackers are often good indicators of where mainstream is going in a few years. I'm interested in the break down of phone OS choice among this group. So which do you have?
Windows Mobile
Palm/WebOS
Other (web enabled)
Other (no web access)
In a world where IRC networks are frequently DDoS attacked by scriptkiddies (and others), a single point of failure is not worth the simplification.