skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here in Australia employers have to offer several choices of investment plans for superannuation, and ethical mutual funds have sprung up as a result. You can pretty much invest ethically if you want. You're still stuck with the problem that you don't get to define what "ethical" means though, you usually have to accept the mutual fund manager's definition.

The other problem with ethical investing in a constrained universe of stocks is whether you are inadvertently increasing risk (i.e. price variance to benchmark) by the selection constraint. I'm not up with the latest research, but by the early 2000s there were sufficient ethical funds in the U.S. to pretty much ameliorate that risk and I'd be surprised if it was a real factor today for the U.S. (I don't have the latest data for Australia.)
I was going to suggest long polling as well. Seems to make way more sense than normal polling for this application.
good implementation, but why 3 websites for the pro with 1000 keywords?

Don't even limit to websites at all, just use keywords. It's regex parsing anyways, it's not hard to check any number of domains.

The failing point of almost all rank tracking systems is limiting keywords and domains the way they do
http://pocketodds.com/

Poker odds calculator (texas holdem), the plan is for the website version to get linked around and soon release a phone version for a couple of bucks (starting with iphone, not finished yet).
http://offbudget.heroku.com

Simple and no-nonsense budgeting app using mostly inline editing. Theres only like 4 main pages planned namely 'Dashboard', 'Budgets', 'Daily Expenditure' and 'Reports'.

I have only coded 'Budgets' at this point. Signing up doesn't require email confirmation at this point.

Screenshot: http://offbudget.heroku.com/images/screenshot.png
Need to bring someone on board with native English speaking skills and business/marketing background. Need a better more professional web designer to help with main page.

e.g. "Convince more visitors into becoming customers" on main page should be "Convert visitors into customers".

Some fonts on main page look amateurish, including the logo.

Your customer review looks fake.

Waived off => Waived.

Spell out the copyright and center it.

etc.
Here are two pieces of evidence that this boy was fortunate in his choice of parents:

Miller is quick to point out that he's not just playing games; what Alex is doing is learning. "Clearly it's his passion," she says.

"But you still have to do chores," Miller reminds him when he talks of his next debugging mission.

What a delightful story, and so free of the "genius whiz kid" trope that has infected this genre since long before I was that age.
http://www.mickjoffe.com/

Got lots of original content (interviews, 1500 of them); not sure the best way to make money out of this, in fact if you have some good ideas to monetize this stuff please let me know. Do you think ads would be best or some arrangement like 10% of the content free and pay to access the rest?
Why oh why couldn't I have been brought up in a white, suburban, upper-middle class family with my own computer and a highspeed internet connection.

Stories like this always make me bitter, but good on the kid for making the most of his upbringing.
I'm neither an accountant nor an American, but I thought that e-commerce was a grey area with respect to sales taxes in the US. Most e-commerce companies didn't charge sales tax outside of the state they operated in.

During the dotcom days I was assigned to research the implications of interstate transactions, and honestly, all that nexus stuff was dizzying.

I only recall hearing periodically (every couple of years) that the ecommerce sales tax moratorium (if you can call it that) had been extended yet again. Is that still the case?
We just got bit on the ass by this one yesterday. (still deployed on 5.2)
Appleseed - An open source, distributed social networking framework.

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org

My Appleseed profile:

http://developer.appleseedproject.org/michael.chisari/

Most recent code:

http://gotham.appleseedproject.org/bruce/

(Yes, I use comic book characters for testing... Don't judge)
No, that was my exact point. In general, economics treats money and utility as distinct. I should've been clearer: money only proxies for utility in behavioral experiments.

Labor supply theory, for example, assumes people maximize utility by choosing a combination of work and leisure. It doesn't assume people work as much as possible (or, maximize their money).
Then why don't you buy a Unicomp Space Saver or Customizer? Those are modern Model Ms, made on the same equipment with the same feel: http://jseliger.com/2008/05/07/product-review-unicomp-custom...
These complaints are valid, it is annoying but fortunately the docs are extremely easy to use.
I think the best way for you to answer that is to try them all :)
I'm a fan of the Kinesis too: http://jseliger.com/2009/07/20/kinesis-advantage , but I'm not a huge fan of its price. But considering how much time I spend at the keyboard, I can deal.
I've done this for the wheel of time.. Satisfying but a lot of work. (Hoping to put it properly online in the next week or so -- having some hardware issues on my development system)
Yes, even though I've failed to catch on each time I've tried, I keep picking up more and more of the concepts/lingo.

I do all the mockups and am orchestrating the product development, but the more I learn about programming the more I learn that a single extra box on my "mockup" can mean hours and hours on the backend.

It's so easy to do a mockup and say, "this is how it will work"...turning that into an actual application is where the magic is.
Not quite half-baked:

http://benatkin.github.com/outliner.js

Anywhere from just a name to README Driven Development[1] to the aforementioned:

http://github.com/benatkin

[1]: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/08/23/readme-driven-devel...
http://vol.ly - Volly ~ Plans made easy

An app to help friends get together quickly for casual events. iPhone app just released.
We were thinking about omitting the actual percentages and just telling them that any four of those possibilities will happen. So far we haven't gotten any traction, but we haven't spent much time marketing it because we have been working on another more exciting project that will probably be ready for launch by next week.
http://darcsden.com/

I fell in love with darcs (switched from git) and wanted a place to put my stuff, since github would no longer be of much use to me. So I made it. Right now I just add things as I need them, or think they'd be a good idea (like "ssh username@darcsden.com init reponame"). Been meaning to get around to built-in issue tracking, but I'm busy working on other projects.

Source here: http://darcsden.com/alex/darcsden
Can you clarify what you mean? I'm not sure I follow. Thanks a lot for the feedback!
I’m not sure whether the architecture prevents it or not, but certainly the App Store rules prevent you from dicking around with other apps or their data on the iPhone. I would also guess automated tests look for violations of this rule.
http://frutell.com - Daily Deal Aggregator
I'm looking forward to the current crop of ongoing errors being resolved. I strongly prefer App Engine for a variety of reasons (built in versioning, pay only for what you use, easy deployment).

Right now I'm just happy that some of the features that would have caused me to put all my eggs in the app engine basket weren't available, because if they had been I'd have felt a lot more pain from the outages.
Hey Kartik, I remember when I first got to know you before you took that job. Your story reminds me of when Evan Williams (Blogger) was the only person left, and he was just stitching it all by himself, no money, etc. But he had users.

I sense your frustration, that you feel like you're spinning your tires - and I've been there.

(1) do you have a non-negligible number of users? (have you done qualitative + quantitative research, customer development, etc)

(2) do you have a business model hypothesis, that you've sought to validate/invalidate?

(3) does getting into YC have to be a pre-requisite for your startup to succeed? (Can you try to succeed without it?)

Another quote came to mind as I read your comment; as they say in startup world, there's fine line between a visionary and a lunatic. I genuinely want to believe that you are a visionary. All startup founders want to be visionaries. But we know the dismal rate of startups.

We're techies, and we naturally like data. We know that while we founders are emotionally swayed, data is not. What does the data say? Is it looking good?

I feel you when you talk about finding your blind spot. Blind spots are by definition, well .. hard to find, which is why it's so frustrating (been there). There's a quote that I can't seem to recall now, but it's something to do with trying too hard. Counterintuitive, I know. But if you've been staring at something for too long, you might be too close to the problem to objectively assess it.

I don't have answers to your questions. The way I sometimes deal with ambiguity is to define processes, fail-safe checks, high/low-level watermarks, etc. More structure. If I were you, I would come up with a sign post. How do I know I've gone off the deep end? E.g. wait for someone to tell me, or specify mile-markers, or ..
good point. those numbers keep changing and the pro seems too low; we're probably going to make it higher.
Because the government and consumer are just as culpable. Fannie and Freddie bought any loan a bank generated. They didn't care about the borrowers ability to pay back the loan! It's inexcusable that a Nobel laureate ignores this fact. It's like blaming the drug dealer for the existence of the drug. No, there are two other parties involved. It's no coincidence that there are huge price distortions in that market either. People who think they know what's best for us telling us it's the "American dream" to own a house and drugs are bad (mmm kay?) are screwing up the market, and freedom.

Artificially low interest rates attracted people that otherwise wouldn't be able to afford a house. Laxed lending standards turned a blind eye to the credit worthiness of borrowers. Land use restrictions limited supply and tax credits drove up demand.

Big banking and big government created the big bubble and big recession. And they're still rolling in the dough: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/10/17/how-wall-stree... (devaluing our money in the process)

Vote out people like Dodd and Frank (and any republican who supports fiddling with the market - subsidies). Have the wealthy bankers who made their fortunes off of this bubble help those responsible people who are in danger of losing their homes.
http://www.goblabble.com

Instant voice recording over the phone. Listen by phone or web.
I've heard non-programming web designers say, "I've designed this app. Now all I need is to have it coded up" (as though the back-end is merely icing on cake and that the heavy lifting is already done).

disclaimer: I'm mostly a back-end person, and I appreciate how difficult it is to not have sense of design, and I don't take good design work for granted.
Where did you read that, rushlimbaugh.com?

Straight outta the Karl Rove playbook. Don't play defense, attack attack attack.
"Even the canonical example of an isolated transaction—a transfer of funds between bank accounts—happens with a 24-hour window of indeterminacy. In fact, one of the few financial transactions which actually resembles a database transaction is the physical exchange of cash for goods—a totally analog experience."

With all due respect, that's a bunch of bullshit, and is a great example of passing off how you think something works as how it does work.

My bank transfers between accounts happen instantly. Buying stuff online isn't an analog experience, and happens instantly.

Let's not put banking into the same category as a Twitter-like app, because they're nothing alike.

It's perfectly okay that two different solutions exist for two different sets of problems, and there's no real need to argue that your world view applies to all problems.
Quiet depressing(but not surprising) to see that China, the country that I'm doing a start-up in, is ranked 89th. Thanks for the link though ^^
Sage oil
Sage is a drying herb that has been shown to reduce night sweats and hot flashes when it is consumed in tea form. Although sage essential oil can be placed on pressure points such as the inner wrist, the most beneficial ways to use it is as sage tea.
I think the Japanese disagree on how well that nuking worked.
Easy way around it - all deliveries to Texas are shipped from an Amazon warehouse in New mexico and, deliveries in NM are shipped from Arizona etc.

All the orders are taken by Amazon Bermuda.
http://www.distobs.org/

Using the CCDs on Androids or iPhones to detect cosmic rays, and in the process making the world's largest cosmic ray telescope (see http://www.auger.org for the most similar big physics project). Unfortunately, this project has been dead for awhile now.
I wonder how much of this is still true. Python was a very compact language a decade ago (when I started using it), but gradually acquired bloat (perhaps because people switching from Java demanded it - decorators* ? tuples AND dicts AND lists?). I later switched to Lua, which on the whole is very similar, but has constraints that have made it stay compact.

* Seriously - downvoters, explain. What do decorators actually add that wouldn't come free with non-broken lambdas? I've tried to make sure I'm not missing something, but they seem like a gratuitous workaround.

@dec
def somefunc(x, y):
blabla

vs.

somefunc = dec(fun (x, y)
blabla)
A designer who works for me part time here in Buenos Aires...email me if you want me to introduce you (scared to introduce you as she's busy for me right now :)
Hacker News Safari Extension: http://github.com/braintapper/Hacker-News-Safari-Extension

My attempt at a prettified Safari Extension for reading HN - for fun, not money. Lets you star items, follow sources and or user submissions etc. Uses Safari's SQLite db to store stuff.

Some explanation of how/why: http://blog.braintapper.com/update_hacker_news_safari_extens...

Only about halfway there, got busy with contract work. The source is all there if you want to build it though. Still buggy. Some edge cases are breaking my page scraping code (i.e. HN Poll items, etc.).
The truest measure of wealth is the degree to which working becomes a choice. It's a continuum - a little wealth gives you short-term freedom like choosing to start a business, whereas $10m+ gives you the option of doing whatever you like for the rest of your life without worrying about an income.

I suspect most people have things they like to do if they suddenly came into a large fortune, but continuing at their day job is rarely one of them. Actually, with people who win the lottery you often see the opposite - they don't need to work, but they feel pressured to do something and often end up losing spectacular amounts of money in foolish business ventures.
All the keyboards he pictures are ergonomic nightmares.

+1 to jfb's recommendation for Kinesis Advantage. Their ergonomic designs are well-made and durable. (My first lasted seven years; still on my second.)

Doesn't hurt that it gets a lot of attention. Sort of like a sports car for your fingers. :)
Oh, and it's written entirely in Erlang (runs on the Nitrogen Web Framework), except for a bit of javascript.
Yes. Tons of evidence there were no bio weapons in Iraq. The UN weapons inspectors had inspected every square inch of Iraq over and over again. They said there was nothing to be found.
Cool effect, but I don't think it's live. I find it hard to believe that every single office has someone walking around in it 24x7 (which always seems to be the case).
Nice, I was just telling some college students about Appleseed yesterday when I gave a presentation about securing your online profile. I expressed that Appleseed, along with other competitors, would be a viable contender to Facebook (a couple years down the road). Prove me right =)
Image-focused chat: http://popchat.org
Granary (granary.heroku.com)

Very much half-baked. Granary is sort of an online Access/Bento webapp. It started off with an emphasis on making data publicly available and editable (Wikipedia for data?), but that's faded into the background somewhat with private databases available.

Probably ideal for small websites/non-technical people who want to make their data available via web interface and API (like a hosted database?). Feel free to signup with a fake email to mess around with it, this is the dev site (and also, the only site).

Some simple examples of what it can do:

* http://granary.heroku.com/public/pj8lF5uM - pictures (of fruit)

* http://granary.heroku.com/public/GKhdmAFt - links (bookmarking)

* http://granary.heroku.com/public/8aHsg1cZ - information (the planets)

* http://granary.heroku.com/public/iiIPmf2H - maps (quasi restaurant reviews)

* http://granary.heroku.com/public/07meNTGa - information (caltrain schedule, partial)
The moral question of Iraq is further complicated by the progression of the war from an US invasion to an Iraqi civil war. In retrospect someone who was advocating a quick withdrawal from Iraq, myself included, in 2004 would have been more or less advocating the same policies these documents outline about the US condoning Iraqi-on-Iraqi torture. We just wouldn't have been around to look the other way but the outcome would have been just as bad if not worse. If you want to apply some of the same moral lessons to Afghanistan it really shows how incredibly complex war is.
This is more like unbaked: http://wallstdollar.com
Gary Vaynerchuk's new book - The Thank You Economy
Innocent lives get taken in car wrecks every day. We don't abandon automobiles because there's a risk of innocent lives being lost in car wrecks.

Life has risk.
Yeah but we got the Sony walkmen, Manga, Honda Fireblade, Nintendo WII and some nice cameras. As well as a staunch ally that's been no trouble to anyone (except whales)

Just saying it's worth trying - just a couple of cities.
Only if they're greenfield projects. But if you're a job hunter, and there's a really interesting project using legacy code in a language you don't like, are you going to turn down a job offer because of that?
Poppy Seeds for Sale
For sale, we offer hard to find high quality seeds of Papaver Orientle, California Poppies, Papaver Somniferum, Feathery Poppies, Papaver Paeoniflorum, Papaver Rhoeas, and Meconopsis Betonicifolia.
http://www.fridgetofood.com

StackExchange meets TasteSpotting and hopefully, eventually LocalHarvest
Be sure to check out Jordan Sissel's Grok as well: http://code.google.com/p/semicomplete/wiki/Grok. It's a field extractor.
An ancient kernel hole is closed
I must be a lunatic because despite all its warts, I love PHP. There are a fair number of gotchas with PHP, but I think the docs are generally great, mostly thorough and usually easy to find what you are looking for, everything is in one central place and user comments/examples can be incredibly helpful. I'm able to write fast, efficient code in PHP quickly. It's not going to win a race against C any time soon, but for what it is it's pretty quick, and of course there are a large number of extensions available for it that are written in C. I'm sure it's not the same for everyone, but the amount of time it takes me to write code in PHP is significantly less than any other language I've messed with.

Note: While the vast majority of my work these days is done in PHP, previously I worked almost entirely in C++. I've also used/dabbled in Perl, COBOL, BASIC, VBA, Java, Javascript, Python, AS3, Lisp. I've also looked at some Ruby code, maybe changed 3 lines of it in my entire life. ;)
You cannot answer that question with "I don't" or even "I don't know" because existence is axiomatic. Any answer you give to this question (or any other) subsumes existence, consciousness and identity. So the only answer is "I exist, I know that I do, and all things are what they are, so I am what I am."
Innocent people die every day. Should we all stop driving cars because if the risk of car wrecks.

Should we all stay indoors when there are clouds overhead because there is a risk of innocent lives being lost when there are clouds overhead to lightning strikes?
As I struggle to figure out which language to use for my Facebook game... this is not helping. :)
I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your service. Thank you.
Junk Mail Keeps the Post Office Alive
Again, 62 miles is a made-up POLITICAL standard.

"Space" has been measured to start at 73 or 76 miles depending on which science experiment you want to accept.

So are people taking this flight because it's the wonder of science or for bragging rights? Because if it's for the wonder of science, well science says you aren't in space.

(and really, if there is even doubt that the height you are going to is actually "space" then what the hell is this nonsense about? Let me know when you can do at least one orbit of the planet and then I'll say you did something extra special for spending all that money)
What is this wonderful bank you use where transfers between accounts at a different bank happen instantaneously? Every time I've tried it the process takes 1-2 days and most likely has to go through an ACH.

As for credit and debit charges, my bank always has two transaction histories. Cleared transactions and pending transactions. Pending transactions are merely funds that have been reserved against your account and they may or may not clear after a period of time. Sounds like that fits pretty well with eventual consistency.
Yeah, including a bugfix for it to work on Chrome in Linux. I choose a game, submit, then get a blank page with just the header.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

The concerns of people designing programming languages are different from people who want to write stuff today. Python is a reasonable choice.
Whale bacon creepy commercial
Yes, however to get these, you are now in C99 land, which excludes you from some compilers (the obvious one is the MS compiler). What we do is define our own compiler abstraction which can use stdint.h on C99 compilers, and typedef standard types into C99 versions for other compilers.

So, once you have a working stdint-like thing you then usually want the "least" (or maybe "fast") variants of them instead:

uint_least8_t, int_least16_t etc.

These have the advantage of being actually guaranteed to exist (the exact size variants are only required to exist if the compiler exposes those types, and they are 8, 16, 32 or 64-bits (from memory)). This means that if you are running on a 24-bit chip (e.g. char==short==int==24-bit, long==48-bit) your code will still work good (where not working good could mean that it doesn't compile because it is missing types, or it could mean that it compiles, but is really slow as it is emulating un-naturally sized types)

On the other hand, the type int_least8_t must exist. (as must 16, 32 and 64). However, to do the 64-bit type, you have to be careful, as C90 doesn't require a 64-bit type, so a fallback abstraction usually needs compiler specific tricks ("long long" is a safe bet).

Of course, if you actually wanted a type that is exactly 16-bits wide, then use these types, as that is what they are for... but usually you don't care if it is bigger.

And this is why the normal char/short/int/long types are good: They don't over-specify.
holy mouse-clicks batman! that's an awesome site/project.. sending to the wife now
That's quite a broad statement.

Is Instapaper merely adequate, or is it better? Would it have been that much better if it was constructed in Rails?

IIRC, Instapaper's a PHP application. I could have mentioned a larger site, but Instapaper was probably a better example, since it's quite popular with HNers.
It does not matter where you ship from, if you have a "presence" in the state you get dinged for sales tax on sales to residents in the state (or at least that is what TX and a lot of other states are claiming...)