skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Idea: great, execution: no idea?

I'm just directed to a Google Docs form asking why you must host me? It kind of implies that you'd rather not host me, but if I have to strong arm you then it might happen..

What is the pricing? The details of the hosting? What's going on here?

Fair enough you're in beta, but at least give me an idea about why I should invest time in the beta i.e. how is this easier than standard hosting, and what kind of hardware will my app have access to etc.
8 Hours Of The Top JavaScript Talks From 2010
Legal, piracy is a beneficial public policy. 19th century and 18th America benefit enormously from the piracy of British literature at the expensive of native American writers, who does have copyright. Of course, some British authors actually made money from the exchange too. Some authors like Charles Dicken are deeply upset by the fact. Nonetheless, cheaper books help Americans afford more books and learn to read.

As for me, I don't feel bad about piracy. I am an anarcho-capitalist, so I don't have much respect for any law that transcend my property right. However, I also noted how piracy hurt my interests tremendously in the long run, no matter how attractive and unrisky it is to pirate.

Piracy support monopolists, not entrepreneurs who respect my property rights. As a result, I am gald when people target pirates instead of my business.
Peter, you beat me to it! Thanks so much for the recommendation. ;)
That's the standard anti-piracy strawman - you don't know that the people who borrow the book from the library would necessarily have bought it.
It's fine to play devil's advocate, but I would advise against making that depend on a secondary argument that society disagrees with, that being libraries as a negative thing.
For what it's worth...

I was at the Tokyo hackernews shindig. Everyone was quite supportive of each other and everyone was willing to offer constructive criticism.

Your princess is in the castle but you do have to squash some gombas to get there. It's just an unfortunate reality.
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You know, those terms that most people usually don't read and just click "I accept".

I don't remember if Amazon have those before registering/buying though.
Oh, I've had to deal with all of these at one time or another. I said that was contrived because of this audience... I seriously hope no one is creating a web service that is reading /etc/passwd.
i understand the basic concepts

i've read them hundreds of times

this is about discrimination
I assume you've checked out Linode's Library? It's pretty comprehensive, with new articles being added almost daily (they have several full-time staff members who spend a great deal of time writing/testing library articles).
Can the iPhone Thrive in Apple’s Closed Ecosystem?
Facebook Apps transmit Personal IDs and Friends' Names to Advertisers
It depends. If you read the book on the kindle once and then the library has the hard copy forever, then it's equivalent to a full donation on top of reading the book. If you use it as a reference and come back to it often, then you're double dipping.
no i am not

if i subscribe/pay for content, i don't want some ISP blocking it because they are in a spat with the content owner
The Lifestyle Business Podcast is an absolutely awesome podcast about modern business. They have decided to take payments for the first 30 episodes, but it's so damn worth it!

http://www.lifestylebusinesspodcast.com/
I am not a developer, but from what I've seen, many successful projects start with a developer scratching a personal itch. So maybe your first app should be something that would be useful to you personally.
wow

great conversation

i am just seeing this now

i wish disqus could pick up this entire discussion and post it into the comments on my blog

it would greatly enrich the conversation there and i would be able to engage in real time, not a day later
Have you tried duckduckgo?
I really don't think that applies, but I'm upvoting your comment because it's interesting and links to a concept that I haven't heard named before.
Several months back I noticed that I was reading a "Argh, I hate Verified by Visa!" tweet at least once a week so I rigged up a silly Twitter page at the time to show all the Verified by Visa hate in one place ;-) http://horrifiedbyvisa.no.gd/
The goal is to make the mobile space more accessible, thanks for the comment!
They aren't listed on the home page, but as soon as you click through to "sign up," you can select plans up to 20GB.
Terms of Service, probably.
That's why the statement was doubly odd, because todos are pretty transient.

I like Things for Mac myself because it automates repeating and scheduled todo items, and has a distinction between completable projects and areas of upkeep. A programmer can leave any time they want by processing its XML file.
This is interesting. I wonder if this is an effect of HN elitism. As in "I read HN which makes me cooler than sliced bread." Disturbing nonetheless.
Google Struggles to Build Social Features
How are we supposed to enjoy Chinese language video? The firewall of china is just one barrier. The more significant barrier is how to translate it.

The language barrier is preventing synergy between Chinese and Western cultures.
Kindness of jack namer
One missing item is instrumentation and metrics. Understanding and debugging a complex application is made much easier by having an abundance of easily collectable metrics that describe the running or cumulative state of the system.
I do work as an analyst with a value approach.

Besides what you have listed above, I like to do a lot of comparisons to peers in the rest of their industry. So when I see an insurance company trading at 1/2 their shareholders' equity and the industry average is 1x, that is interesting.

I also like to see figures such as returns on invested capital (EBIT/NWC+PP&E), ROE, ROA, and things such as gross margins vs operating margins.

I like when I can get both EBIT and EBITDA relatively quickly as well.

I really really like to see how the numbers have developed and changed over time. If you go onto Morningstar you can get data on key figures over a 10 year period. You can find some really useful trends by looking at that data.

I do a lot of quick math when looking at a stock too. Such as calculating FCF and seeing what it versus the stock price (so P/FCF or FCF/P for yield).
Traffic Bait Doesn’t Bring Ad Clicks
First and foremost, I love the idea and the reader seems really nice done. That being said, the controls on the reader are a pain to use at first. Bookmarks are extremely confusing until you've made two or three of those to see how they work. I think the buttons on the menu should have some hover text or there should be a tutorial available to understand how the controls work on the reader. I really like the idea and think you have a great product. Good luck!
I thought that as well and then I remembered, they don't fund companies or ideas, they fund teams. These teams, may or may not change the idea the had when they applied.
If we're being honest.. what percentage of people with accounts on HN are actually bashing together applications, pushing them live, and posting for feedback? A mammoth minority, I'm sure. For me this community is about putting in hustle, and having the guts to take ideas public. The submitter's post deserves encouragement.
I think it's not, but having a working specimen would certainly help making it available.
HN your feedback would be very supportive if you get the chance, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1801861
I don't know about Europe, but in the US you just have to re-enter your credit card information if you have it shipped to another address. Obviously, so someone can't just login to your Amazon account and order stuff on your card.
I think record companies would be making a lot more money right now if they'd embraced Napster and started to compete with their own websites. But that's hindsight.
Colored boxes for the easily amused.
I made this to help me pick random colors (highlight each box for the hex rgb color code) and found out I was addicted to reloading the page over and over again...
If you think this is bad, go visit proggit (programming.reddit.com) sometime. It's a cesspit. Not only do I not post/comment there anymore, I don't even read it.

Submissions can't really expect more than a 4:1 ratio of upvotes to downvotes. Say anything negative about Python (even things that are demonstrably true like the performance degradation of CPU bound tasks on multi-core machines because of the GIL on CPython) or positive about Apple (even something demonstrably true like "the iPad is a successful new product launch") and get downvoted into oblivion (sadly, HN is starting to get a few knee-jerk Apple haters /sigh).

Someone posted a "Physics of Angry Birds" post here in the last week and someone took the time to post a snide, self-righteous "this doesn't belong here" comment, which is similar to what you're talking about. Frankly I don't understand this attitude at all: if the post doesn't interest you, move on. 3/4 of the HN posts are of no personal interest to me. That doesn't make them objectively bad.
I'm not sure I agree with the objection to passwordless ssh keys. A system that uses passwordless ssh keys may be more secure than one using an unauthenticated protocol.
Automate your way to productivity
If there really is 'vendetta downvoting' going on, perhaps it could be negated by limiting the number of times a user can downvote another specific user's comments/submissions within a certain time frame. Eg. you can't downvote the same person more than twice a day, and if it's a submission you can't downvote two in a row
Text became what it is to me today after my first revelatory experiences with Linux/bash--something like being six years old and realizing the alphabet is all I ever need to describe anything and everything.

Indescribable feeling.
If the system guys you have worked with have lots of downtime you have only worked with crap sysadmins.
I've been lightly active for two months and am approaching 200. Maybe your writing style doesn't quite click with HN's readership.

People are weird.
I might be a bit slow between the ears, so I don't really understand what it is. What is it exactly? Is it a webservice, is it a piece of technology? Is it a javascript library?

The site looks very nice and you absolutely have my attention.
Specifically:

"The apps, ranked by research company Inside Network Inc. (based on monthly users), include Zynga Game Network Inc.'s FarmVille, with 59 million users, and Texas HoldEm Poker and FrontierVille. Three of the top 10 apps, including FarmVille, also have been transmitting personal information about a user's friends to outside companies...

The information being transmitted is one of Facebook's basic building blocks: the unique "Facebook ID" number assigned to every user on the site. Since a Facebook user ID is a public part of any Facebook profile, anyone can use an ID number to look up a person's name, using a standard Web browser, even if that person has set all of his or her Facebook information to be private. For other users, the Facebook ID reveals information they have set to share with "everyone," including age, residence, occupation and photos.

The apps reviewed by the Journal were sending Facebook ID numbers to at least 25 advertising and data firms, several of which build profiles of Internet users by tracking their online activities."
The Startup Success podcast - http://startuppodcast.wordpress.com/

37signals podcast - http://37signals.com/podcast

Startups for the Rest of Us - http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/

Traction by Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo) - http://traction.blip.tv/
Same thing in Europe.

But they may just ask you re-enter CC info OR validate it against your address as well.

Fun story: been living in the UK for a while, but using Lithuanian credit card to shop online. Most websites required UK billing address. And allowed to use my cc with billing address in different country...
"sadly, HN is starting to get a few knee-jerk Apple haters /sigh"

I'll have you know I've always been a knee-jerk Apple hater, and I've been here for years.
Imagine if the the golden Age of holywood had been shot on proprietry digital formats.

We would know there was a film citizen kane, and would have the memories of people who had seen it but couldn't unlock the encryption.
Showing off the benefits of HTML5 while requiring Silverlight to watch the videos? That was a bit odd.
So I ran into the same problem on Chrome as everyone else, but I fired up Firefox (something I'm increasingly trying to avoid) to give this a try. I'm not completely non-technical, but my coding ability is quite limited. I've tried just about every visual programming platform out there and have yet to find something truly intuitive. AppCanvas is no exception (sorry for the bluntness) but I see a lot of potential in it.

Non-coders want to put as little effort into development as possible. Otherwise they'd be, well--developers. Starting with a blank canvas and the ability to add little widgets seems like a rather common sense approach to this kind of thing right? It confuses the hell out of us. How do you turn this blank screen into an actual application.

Of course education and intuitive UI will help with all of this, but I think you could also benefit by having a better understanding of how non-coders think about software design. I believe it was patio11 who made the comment that visual programming's greatest downfall is that it simply addresses the syntax. The designer still needs to understand the logic and data structures driving the whole thing. For example, I wouldn't just intuitively know that when I sign into a service, I become an object of the 'User' class based on a series of logical tests. This stuff matters.

As I said before though, I actually am excited about the potential of this project. I think you're aware of the issues I raised, you just need to iterate(again, and again, and again!). My email is in my profile, please drop me a line whenever you need feedback from a potential user.
"Sales from online advertising reached 20.7 billion yuan ($3.1 billion) last year, according to data from Beijing-based iResearch Inc. By comparison, ZenithOptimedia estimates U.S. Internet advertisements in 2009 were valued at $54.2 billion."

Seems like burying the lead to me. I don't think you can say Chinese web sites are surpassing U.S. ones as a business until the revenues are comparable. Otherwise, it's more like bit torrent or the Pirate Bay. They may be surpassing YouTube and Hulu in downloads, but that doesn't mean there is a superior business model behind it.
SEO Companies get Joint Venture Capital
>> I suspect that some of them are people that took rejection by YC a bit harder than they should have

I suspect anyone with enough drive to get a funding decision from YC (even a negative one) will be moving on to new opportunities, not defacing websites.
In the article, Rapleaf says de-anonymized linking of ID's to real names "wasn't intentional." That's a little hard to believe -- isn't the point of the company to have a massive person database of information like this?
Beta sounds like you have something going, the form looks like something to gauge interest though, what stage is this at? I would love to have Heroku for .Net and have prototyped bits of automation myself.

I don't believe pushing source code up for .Net is going to work as well though as there are too many quirks in the compilation process. An example would be a site I run which uses PostSharp to post process the .dlls.

Keen to hear more details about what you're doing.
I consider how predictable the dividend is.
They got some things right, as I recall:

"Shine proposed that Marlo would kill Prop Joe; the youngest attendee, the 29-year-old Flavor, placed $2,500 on Clay Davis escaping indictment"
I have no idea what business problem this solves. That's sad, because you used the word "powerhouse" to describe it, and that got my attention; that was good writing!

Learn the difference between a "feature" and a "benefit". A benefit is a pain I know I have even I don't know what any of your features are or mean. LEAD WITH BENEFITS.
I don't know if this fits with your startup, but something I'd really like to see is: given this set of transactions (basically, stock, date & time, buy/sell, price), here is a graph of the value of the portfolio over time. Ideally, you'd even include things like dividend pay outs, margin fees, etc.

This would make trying out different investment strategies and portfolio allocations much easier.
I hope I didn't come off as making sweeping generalizations. I think 99.9% of the folks on here are awesome. If anything, I think this is just a problem of growth, as I said on another thread today:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1800252
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Well, you're not bringing up a valid point. You see, HN is not turning into Reddit. The guideline is not creating a truth, it's stating a fact that has been true and remains true.
Perhaps. My views, interests, and experiences invariably differ from the status quo around here. I'd like to think that has little effect though--my karma per post is within range of the top contributors'(http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders)*

*To be fair, the list is quite sporadic. Min = 1.2, Max = 19.61, Avg = 4.909.
French hackers here? I'm working on a french "reddit"
Hey guys, I've been slacking on reddit a lot this last year and I was really wondering why we don't have that kind of community and website in France. I know there used to be scoopeo (now dead). And they are great communities like clubic, canardpc etc...

I just don't see anything where you can really upvote and follow discussions like reddit.

So yeah, I've been working on this thing, hopping it would bring something new in France but I have no idea how I could promote this... I know I'm not the only french here. Could use some help !

The url : http://www.100hp.fr
The bury brigades had to go somewhere when digg own-goaled.
True. I guess it really depends on the data being transfered. I have not seen a case where remotely invoked rsync over ssh was necessary given the type of data it was. It's mostly a security thing. With passwordless ssh keys scattered around the network in use by cronjobs, the machines those keys can access are at somewhat more risk. If you run an rsync server to transfer the files, you know exactly how that can be accessed. With ssh keys, you have to ensure that, say, certain keys can only do certain things (which is more complex to setup and get right in the authorized keys file).
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Penalizing drivers for the smog they create in the San Joaquin Valley
Astronomy Overload: Scientists Shifting From Stargazing to Data Mining
I disagree, music isn't going anywhere, but the music industry is fundamentally a publishing industry, and they face the same problems that all publishers do, in that the internet makes the problems of distribution and marketing that they solve much less difficult.

I don't really know what that will mean in terms of startups, but it seems like there would be money to be made exploiting these changing in circumstances while the bigger companies are fumbling about wondering what is happening.
Look, even if you're joking, is that the sort of attitude you want represented here?

Knee-jerk hate might be a beneficial strategy if you're trying to survive in Darfur, but we safe people should try to minimize it for the benefit of our own minds. We learn and grow by studying things, especially the things that rub us the wrong way. The other benefits of arbitrary hate like feeling you belong to an in-group seem out of place on HN, a site mostly devoted to curiosity (from what I've seen).

I'm not saying you should or shouldn't feel or act a certain way, but for all of our sakes lets keep it mental and not bring that sort of thing into the public light here where it might be perceived as community endorsement of that point of view.
Why we were wrong about why we were wrong.
Agreed on Dalton's speech. It was also really good to hear from someone whose company had failed, and to see how he dealt with it afterwards. I'm glad to see that he's so upbeat about it now, and that he still seems to think it was worth it. As a serial entrepreneur, I know that I will eventually be in his position, and I hope I will handle it so gracefully.

I also caught a great one-liner from Reid (something to the effect of): "The big danger is not Google or Microsoft building your exact product -- they probably won't. The big danger is 1000 other startups building slightly similar, and you getting lost in the noise." (Except he said it better than I am restating it.) For me, that took a lot of things that I had understood but never really examined and crystallized them into an 'aha!' moment.

I liked Paul's entire talk quite a lot -- his thoughts on funding were typically well-stated and articulate, and it didn't hurt that they painted a hopeful picture for us as entrepreneurs. Hopefully the ripples of the changing investment structures in the Valley will spread to affect the general economy in a few years.
Recent talk of results from Folding@home (audio + slides)
So this is a wild guess since I'm unable to look at the source but having the images loaded prior to rendering on canvas might provide a speed boost so less chance ofnwaiting for images to load, and maybe there is a caching advantage you get by also having images in DOM?

I'll dig into it tomorrow when I have a laptop to use.
Sounds like http://www.modestneeds.org/ and kiva are the highest form of charity.
On first impressions I like this much more than ppss. The distributed setup is much easier and the documentation is more thorough.
Full disclosure: I was on the team who built this.

I really love how this turned out.
Just a suggestion -- use DisplayRecorder (from Cydia) on a device ( http://rpetrich.com/cydia/displayrecorder/ ) or SimFinger (on GitHub) with the simulator ( http://blog.atebits.com/2009/03/not-your-average-iphone-scre... ) when taking your videos -- it makes it a lot more pleasant and less confusing than seeing a mouse cursor over the iPhone's screen.
I didn't see it before-hand, but I suspect that it was inspired by a recent episode of "How I Met Your Mother", in which they were debating the qualifications necessary for being a New Yorker.

Because of that episode, I immediately recognized the purpose and intent of the website, though I'm certain it was far less obvious to those who didn't see it.

Of interest, the criteria they came up with were:

You're not a New Yorker until:
- You've stolen a cab from someone who needed it more than you,
- You've killed a cockroach with your bare hands
- Seen Woody Allen and,
- Cried on the subway, oblivious to what anyone else thinks
It was a dupe.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1801814
Thanks for your interest, Skanr is the iPhone client that allows your service to leverage this new functionality. The interface used to capture data is represented by a simple JSON string, hope that helps!
Share your gem list. Now.
You're right of course -- I didn't mean to imply that you should use cost-plus pricing as a baseline, rather, that you should definitely not do anything BELOW cost+, regardless of how much (or little) value you might be delivering to your customers.

That said, there are numerous examples in which even this rule can be thrown away (Facebook, Twitter, et al.)
I also am ill-informed on this topic, but i have heard that the Afghanistan leaks included the names of Taliban informers, which would put them in danger, and make it harder to recruit informers in the future. That would seemingly jeopardize Australian soldiers, and could be characterized as collaboration with the enemy.