skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anmol - you're building an information business. And at scale, IMHO, they're fabulous. Health information seems like a massive market, and this seems like unique data. (Think about financial consumers who care about health data in addition to the pharmas.) I'll assume your app scales so that you get critical mass of input, but once you have that in your sights, here's how we constructed our information business.

In my experience, the best information businesses are founded on a core of primary research - data that you find/generate that no one else has. Once you build that database, you build the products. You might be surprised, but here's what many information products look like - I'm a fan of doing it in this order:

1. A big honking CSV file of the primary data. For customers that have their own models, which your early adopters will likely have. Ours did.

2. A CSV file of derivative analytics (the output of your prediction tools perhaps?). For customers who want your algorithmic take on the underlying data.

3. Reports (manually written). People buy your analysis of the data. We found a majority of the potential market doesn't want Tools or data files (even if they're Wall Street "quants"). They just want answers - and by virtue of having the data, you're an instant expert. Reports have the nice benefit of being A) tangible B) easy to consume and C) subscribe-able (repeat revenue!) They have a bonus of being delicious chum for the media sharks.

4. Reports (automated, for scale). Subscribers get the latest insights each week, month, etc. Best not to automate until you see which of #3 are most popular.

5. Now come the technology Tools. #3 and #4 above will be excellent test beds for your prediction tools. Doing it in this order, you won't have to build any front end applications until you understand what predictions people pay for. One way to build a tools-based product line is to give the tech away for free and have the customer subscribe to the latest data.

You might also find that a great consumer-facing website is powerful for the information business. We don't have those skills in our company, but have found that when we pull it off even a little, institutional buyers begin as personal, individual consumers. A great consumer facing site/app is a perfect way to reach them.

rock on.
I'd love to see someone win this auction and donate it to the Computer History Museum, does anyone know if they have one already? http://www.computerhistory.org/
Seems like you have something that public health officials would want, and maybe mobile carriers, if the privacy issues can be solved and having it installed wins them some points with their regulators.

If you want to make something businesses want to pay for, see if the same predictive models work for forecasting product demand and other economic activity. What is the effect of a movie release on patterns of communication and movement? Can profiles be (semi-anonymously) correlated with other tweets/purchases, so you know that learning about a certain product, or buying it, changes behavior in some way?
PRS-505 here. You don't find the 5" screen too small? For books with proper zoom text re-formatting, not an issue at all. But otherwise, I find myself complaining even with the larger screen.
Well Iran is signatory to these principals in the form of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Int'l Covenant on Civil Rights.
Father and Son Launch iPhone Into Space [video]
Your post did not contain any of the following technologically relevant keywords:

{Google, Gmail, Apple, Github, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, Android, iPhone, Techcrunch, awesome, innovative, AB-test,
execute, idea, stuck in the past, iterate}

Your post did not contain any of the following historically/politically relevant keywords:

{Marx, Ayn Rand, taxes, welfare, government, constitution}

Seriously, I think the people who flagged this thought anime is irrelevant to "business^H^H^H^H hacker culture". Which leaves the question why all of the above is apparently relevant to "hackers".
Why We Need TechCrunch in the Classroom
41 Hacks in 24 Hours, Results from Music Hack Day Boston
Unfortunately, they aren't allowing him access to independent legal representation. What Saeed needs right now, big time, is access to the technology that will allow him to prove his case and disprove the IRI's baseless charges.
It would help to know what was the poll about.
There's no reason it shouldn't work in excanvas.

However if you add animation to it you'll have the usual excanvas problems (slower framerate over time)
Connecting to mongrel2.org:80
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "client.py", line 36, in <module>
post_msg("connect")
File "client.py", line 28, in post_msg
msg = '@bbs %s\x00' % (json.dumps({'type': 'msg',
'msg': data}))
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'dumps'

I think it's to do with my python 2.5.
Yes - we in fact work with Amnesty to do most of this. They don't do as much online advocacy as much as encouraging people to write actual letters -- bc of the short amount of time left before Saeed's trial, we decided to go the route of e-letters. Amnesty has an AMAZING track record though, recently spoke with one of their Iran team and she noted that since AI's advent, using these types of campaigns have seen 44,000 prisoners released.
Nuff said about what? Yes, this has a dependency on Flash (soon to be on Java instead optionally) but so does EVERYTHING that interacts with video or audio devices on the host operating system. This is why Google Talk, Voice in Gmail, etc require the google a/v plugin to be installed, and it's the same reason that this requires Flash.

If you don't like it, go lobby the <device> in HTML5 committee.
This sounds like Maimonides Eight Levels of Giving: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides#Charity_.28Tzedakah.....
> This is not efficient. Under this system, giving a homeless person $1 is good, but giving him $1 and setting another dollar on fire (maybe in a way that hurts me!) is even better.

I would say that these are two distinct acts. You do not help someone by setting another dollar on fire. Rather, the comparison would be giving someone your last 10$ vs. giving 10$ when you are a billionaire. I think in some ways, perhaps unquantifiable, that it is more 'noble' about acts that are not in self interest. Businesses are not the same as non-profits, even if they functionally provide the same service.

> Helping someone in a way that produces extra wealth--perhaps enough for you to profit from it--is best of all.

I don't know if this was intentional, but this implies a higher order magnitude of help. I would personally balk if I hear of a charity that donates only 50% of what they receive to the intended audience.
I believe it was the "do you watch anime" pool.
I've obviously missed the deadline, but I'm frankly amazed that searching this page for "rubba" doesn't come back with anything!

No one thought of Rub-a-dub-dub?
Hmm, you can try this submission if you haven't seen it - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1041820. Check out the comments for it, too, since there are a lot of suggestions to use it to get started in the morning.
I try to minimize the number of things I'm working on at a time. If I start something new, I try (and fail frequently) to complete what I was working on previously.
Missing important information: how did she get to the US? If legally, how did she manage to get a visa? If illegally, is INS enforcement really so lax nowadays that she's happy to give her real name and place of employment to the LA Times?

Otherwise, fairly dull and lacking in surprises.
Also, from a couple weeks ago, a similar telling from another Airbnb founder:

http://www.beyondthepedway.com/why-airbnb-failed-to-gain-tra...
Total Lookalikes
Ha, ha, ha really funny. Don't you think so?
I moved from Slicehost to Linode, mainly for performance reasons. The pricing difference encouraged me to wait no longer.

One of my sites was having serious performance issues on Slicehost, which seemed to be due to low disk i/o. I was cleaning the database, optimizing, etc. and stressing out about it, wondering what to change. After moving to Linode I haven't had the slightest hint of a performance issue.
The reports are that the company that makes the cards is going out of business; perhaps it's Cubic's card supplier?
I started a poll about this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1801073

It got killed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1801504

So did the question asking for insight as to why it got killed.

<shrug>

I really don't understand HackerNews at times. I watch with decreasing interest to see the fate of this comment.

FWIW - I've never watched Anime. I'd be interested to know how it correlates with people here, but I guess I now won't get any more information about it.
Olin College is one pioneering example. However, the main problem with the startup education + credential approach is that the barriers to such a school offering an accredited credential are overwhelming.

However, imo traditional universities also support founders and grant them a credential. Students typically have a lot more free time than if they were employed (depending on their major). It's just that the student would also have to be incredibly resistant to peer pressure.
"Linode offers some kind of customization so you can make machines with more RAM, or more bandwidth if you need to."
Any details on how this works?
Ask HN: What's the Story of iMeem
I was at Startup School, and enjoyed Dalton Caldwell's talk. However, he didn't really tell the story of his company - it was more of "here is why you don't want to start a company that deals with the music industry."

Does anyone know of a blog post or website that gives a detailed story of what happened to iMeem?
I understand it's annoying that Lua doesn't have a a single, officially recommended Unicode library* (in the core distribution or otherwise), but as problems go, it's easily solved by loading an existing, freely available library and getting on with life. It's much less trouble than (say) removing the GIL from Python or retroactively fixing weird operator precendence in C.

* Though there are recommendations at http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaUnicode .

In practice, it could look like this:

U = require "unicode"
s = U"some unicode" -- using a library sure is hard
length = s:len()
replaced = s:gsub("thing1", "thing2") -- global substitute
etc.

You can add regular expressions and bignums to Lua pretty painlessly, too.
I thought he meant it in the sense of the circulatory motion that occurs in a fluid at a nonuniform temperature owing to the variation of its density and the action of gravity. People that aren't following their dreams are stuck in "convection", cooking themselves and others.
I was rocking with some dedicated servers from SoftLayer (who are awesome) but "downsized" to Linode about 18 months ago. I discovered VPSes weren't as slow or crippled as I imagined and I now serve much the same stuff for a fraction of the cost. Win win.
Minecraft Map Viewer in JavaScript/WebGL
College and youth time is a good place to use your seemly unlimited energy to start building a business that allow you some leeways and free times later in your career.

24 thousand dollars a year with very little work each week is pure gold.

You'll never have your back strapped to the wall and you can do whatever you want.
Why would that make it Clojure rather than Erlang or Scala?
So detectability, probably, was not that big of an issue itself.

Unless, of course, he got it into his head that Inuit didn't have cancers, and then started making false diagnoses based on that.

Look, I don't know how much of this story is true and how much of it is made up. Certainly the part where he's a trained physician seems to have been made up. The part where he examined fifty thousand Inuit plus a significant of westerners per year in between his actual duties as a ship's captain appears to be completely implausible. If this random anecdote is the best evidence we have that living with a traditional Eskimo diet will signficantly lower your chance of cancer, I think it's safe to say that the evidence for the hypothesis is pretty darn pissweak.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1801418

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1800367

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1750517
I believe the Coro module for Perl satisfies all of those.

http://search.cpan.org/~mlehmann/Coro-5.23/Coro.pm
"Web Development Framework" is not very accurate IMO. I would change that to "WYSIWYG HTML editor".
Once you have a node you can upgrade the specs a little. Short of transferring to an entirely new node, you can boost your bandwidth, get some extra RAM, and add some disk space, within limits without changing what host machine you're on due to the slack they have.

Separate to that, Linode also appear to support significantly larger packages than their pricing table indicates. Once you're in the system, there are references to things like "Linode 16384" accounts, etc.
I noted this below as a comment, but really wanted all to see it in case it gets skipped o'er. Do letters work? Yes.

U4I has, in the last few months, received emails from foreign ministers and their representatives promising that they will address it with Iran's officials as they visit the countries, that they will continue to pass on the information, and even releasing statements of condemnation.

With Iran, it will ALWAYS remain a PR game, and the end goal is to 1) highlight the cases and 2) get the world community to decry them. Name and shame, assign blame, embarrass Iran. That is their biggest fear, truly.

An example is below of how effective letter writing CAN be.

--

"The Dutch minister of Foreign Affairs Verhagen has received a number of emails highlighting the case of the 7 Baha'i Leaders, generated through your website. I would like to inform you minister Verhagen has publicly expressed his concern about their fate:
http://www.minbuza.nl/en/News/Newsflashes/2010/08/Netherland...
_about_fate_of_Iranian_Baha%E2%80%99i_leaders

Best regards,
Bart Rijs
Spokersperson minister of Foreign Affairs
The Hague
The Netherlands

---

So does it work? Yes. Slowly sometimes, but yes. Knowing you're being watched DOES indeed change your behavior. Just ask Roxana Saberi :) Thanks to all, this is quite the community!
Thanks for the screen shot and the feedback.

I use http://halftoneny.com/ for all my design work. They're insanely talented and really down to earth.
I've found that there usually is a moment in a programmers technical career where it just clicks. I find that what seems like productivity is almost always a direct result of a higher order of understanding.

An analogous situation is your average first year PhD candidate. Initially making some sort of contribution to the field feels overwhelming and almost impossible. But once you've spend a year or two reading papers and having coffee with the leaders in the field, everything comes together. That same PhD student starts to churn out quality papers every 6 months or so.

I think back to what it was like watching my dad program in Scheme when I was in high school. I got the same curious and overwhelming feeling then as I do now when working on certain areas of distributed systems. There's no reason to believe that the barriers that grownups face are any less insurmountable than the ones children do. :)
The link didn't paste correctly, here it is: http://bit.ly/cxv7Gl
I can't actually work out how to use it. The toolbox makes it look like it's drag and drop but it isn't. I click a widget, and I just get some text that says "add here"....but I don't know what to do with that.

Also, I added a page called "test" accidentally clicked home, and now the page is gone, but I can't create a new page called "test" and I can't close the dialog to just edit the page I had.

Oh...I just worked out how to add an element. Why do I need to click "add here"? Now I'm clicking it and nothing happens....

Oh...You have to open the properties from the tool menu? Weird.

I like what you're trying to do, but I feel like I'm using Photoshop (You even mention photoshop in your intro), but it doesn't work like Photoshop. If you're going to use controls analogous to other applications, then it really needs to work like those other applications. You have a fairly low tech interface that LOOKS like a high tech application GUI.

In general, considering you're presumably targeting non-coders, it's VERY complicated. In reality, what is the likelihood that someone who doesn't know CSS know's the difference between padding and margin? Or that someone who doesn't know databases is going to be able to link up pagination to a database? You have a "power" application aimed at non techies...but you still need to be a techie to use it.

Who is your target? What problem is it solving them?
10 Good advice when you call tech support
"Ladies night" is also illegal in California (among other states) though the practice is still relatively common.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies_night#California
MVC, PVC and (¬M)VC
Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Moe24BzPdU
The boy's story is pretty awesome
Try this (with a transcript) http://mixergy.com/airbnb-chesky-gebbia/
Well one advantage the print view has is that it's at least centered, whereas the normal view is off to the left. Though this only makes a difference on higher resolution screens and it isn't enough of an issue to outweigh everyone having to dismiss a print dialog / deny ad impressions, in my opinion.
For me it's not just quiet that helps. It's that doing things on my own time makes me much more relaxed about how I do it - want refactor that bit of code that works ok but you know it's ugly as hell? Want to try YUI3 when your whole site is written with YUI2 and you've got no great reason to upgrade? Want to redo that button with a background image that isn't quite antialiased properly? There are a whole slew of things that I just can't justify from a business point of view, but that have huge potential in terms of personal payoff. But once I'm on my own time I can sit down and try them out. Those that work out I take with confidence into businesss hours, those that don't are just a little self-development time.

Before anyone mentions it, I am somewhat internally conflicted in the sense that this kind of stuff should be built into the "on the clock" time. But it is how it is.

NB: the sad thing is - what he says about kids is absolutely true. With 2 kids now, even when I do get a little time to myself it is still laced with some guilt that I could be spending that with my family. And if I do put extra hours into to work it affects the whole family. So work stress translates directly to family stress.
I was surprised it got killed too... Oh well sometimes it's just a question of bad luck I guess... (and after that I find that HN has a very low tolerance on meta submissions asking why a submission got killed)

I used to watch a lot of anime while in university because I I wanted to learn japanese and I found the scenarios interesting. Part of what made animes interesting was the novelty and part of it was the fact that a animes tend to have complex stories that are not overly simplified black and white conflicts.

After a couple years of watching around 10 hours a week I got a bit tired of most stories though and once I came to Japan I stopped watching altogether. It was mostly a question of time, I started working full time, didn't have the motivation of watching it to immerse myself in Japanese (since I could hear the language all around me) and I didn't have the time to search for the diamond in the rough among new animes....

EDIT: I said that a lot of animes had complex stories but looking back, I think it's selection bias on my part I only really remember fondly the best series and forgot the other ones...
Dude Marijuana as an Alternative Fuel?
Ask HN: Necessary piracy?
This is quite a hard topic for me. As a programmer I feel bad about piracy. I wouldn't like to steal somebody's work. I know how hard it is to make smth nice and that cost of software/music/book/whatever is not just it's physical format.

I heard about Tony Hsieh's "Delivering happiness" quite a few times. Today I decided that I want to read it. I live in Lithuania (aKa ex-ussr), so naturally book shop next door doesn't have english books in stock. But I've got Kindle! Let's try amazon... Whoops, "books is not available in your region". F*ck! Next stop - book's website.. They don't sell directly at all. BN sells to US-adresses only as well. I checked amazon.co.uk as well - no digital version available, paperback can't be shipped to my address.

What shall eastern-european-to-the-bone do? Let's google "delivering happiness download". Long story short: I got it on my kindle in 15 minutes. For free.

For Americans and most of westerners piracy may be about morale and choice. But for many piracy is not a choice. And not because of price. That's the only way to access information.

What's your take? Is it OK to "steal" stuff that is very hard to obtain in legal ways?
Two actors play Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, but with only one head
Non-Facebook URL:
http://www.ted.com/talks/benoit_mandelbrot_fractals_the_art_...
A reply from Alex Hudson http://www.alexhudson.com/2010/10/17/bkuhn-on-canonical/
I'm in the middle of making the same move. My motivations were price (a 512 slice costs half as much on Linode) and locality (Linode have a London data centre; Slicehost don't). So far I've been very impressed.
I just want to add one alternative voice; I've been a slicehost user for about 2 years and I've couldn't be a happier customer. It's the first time I've used a VPS like this so I can't comment on how their service compares price/speed/functionality-wise with Linode et al., but I can say that:

- My sites haven't once gone down.

- I have found the whole interface and management backend very intuitive.

- Their articles are fantastic. I went from pretty much knowing nothing about servers or linux to running 6 sites on my slice, with email server, FTP, securing it with iptables, django installed, installing postgres with remote access, etc etc, all through their articles.

- The support is exemplary. Last week I accidently made a double payment (my stupid fault). I emailed them, a human responded within 40 seconds saying it had been forwarded to the billing department; 90 seconds later the billing department emailed me saying they had reversed the transaction.

(edit: formatting)
Clearly neither the Mashable author nor the NYMag author actually watched the video or they would have noticed they did NOT send an iPhone into space.

The iPhone was used for GPS tracking on the ground. The camera in the balloon is a Go Hero Pro HD.
That is missing the point of the story. All of the students see the cleaning staff around, but no one takes interest in them. Seeing someone regularly, just walking by, and not even knowing their name is a bit of a disappointment, and an opportunity missed.
In case people don't actually realise how historically significant these computers were, Xerox PARC invented most of the common UI abstractions that we take for granted today:
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/software/alto/index.html

(Although it looks like the common "desktop layout" screenshots that I'd always associated with the Alto are actually the SmallTalk environment running on the Alto.)
user=> (= (first [nil]) (first []))
true
The zoom on the 300's really good for epub, not so hot for PDF. I tend to find with PDFs that it's hit and miss as to the formatting, but PDFs that are effectively scanned images are pretty much off because of the size.

I find the screen size (roughly the size of a paperback) is fine for Epubs though, which is what I mainly use for tech books. I also like the fact that it fits in the pockets for my shorts. This summer I went to an Island in the mediterranean and went through about 10 books in 4 days on the thing. Carrying the 10 books would've meant less room for luggage. Being able to take 200-odd books to the beach is pretty awesome.