skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, yes, I had to remove ThinkPoint from my wife's computer a few weeks ago. It's not that hard, it's just a bunch of work, and requires more knowledge than can be expected from the average computer user. Unfortunately, since I "know about computers", this job is always for me (which doesn't really improve my mood, or my opinion of Windows, to say the least).

I do wonder how this malware got on the PC, since she is usually careful, doesn't use IE, doesn't download any weird stuff, runs Windows Update regularly, etc.
When I saw "the Deaths of Four People Cost the U.S. Government $6.5 Billion" I imagined the government taking 6.5 billion from taxpayers and spending it extremely inefficiently. But I am not a journalist living in New York City (if the blogger wrote the headline or an editor for the New York Times if an editor wrote the headline of the blog post)! What the headline is really talking about is the government's failing to collect death taxes that it could have collected if Congress had voted differently.

So apparently according to this journalist every time the government fails to collect X dollars that it could have collected through the legitimate operation of elections, Congressional votes, etc, that failure "costs" the government X dollars. I am having trouble escaping the implication that the headline writer believes that any money that Congress could have voted to collect rightfully belongs to the government, and if the money remains in private hands, maybe that is worth a blog post in the New York Times!
It’s most likely not a guess, they link this source: http://nos.nl/artikel/202302-nieuw-soort-leven-ontdekt.html (Dutch)

That’s an article on the website of a dutch public broadcaster. The way it’s written, it looks rather like they didn’t respect the embargo, not like speculation. The Guardian [0] also seems to know something: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/02/nasa-life-form...

[0] Others also picked up the story: http://news.google.com/news/story?client=safari&rls=en&#...
Sure. Anything you want me to cover in particular?

I'm also in talks with Twilio about producing something with them about it. Preview of coming attractions: everybody should use Twilio. Oh goodness. It is freaking amazing. It is like email: add it to an application, just about any application, and it gets suddenly, radically better. (And the existence of it makes possible applications that wouldn't be possible otherwise, like AR.)
Really poor title for the NY Times.

I'm pretty sure Dubner posts these without review, so it's really his wording, not anything attributable to the NYT.

It's not the government's money to begin with, it's the property of the people who died.

This is one (perfectly valid) model of property. Another would include the fact that the institutions that make the ownership of a baseball team or oil corporation feasible (stock markets, banking, legal courts, law enforcement) exist because of the social contract the person entered by deciding to live in the US. Estate taxes (or death taxes, if you wish) are the other side of that social contract: when you die wealthy, you have to pay your dues to the society which made accumulation (or maintenance) of wealth possible.
I always pictured my solution to this problem like this:

* Everything that is not allowed to get wet or is loose, is stored in a safe place.

* Some 'high-pressure cleaner things' at strategic locations.

* A big fan and a hole in the ground.
The cleanest way to achieve 'dream like' attentive state of the mind is by deep meditation.
There is no ego involved, you again miss the point. What I'm saying is that you are looking a gift horse in the mouth, you don't have read / use any of those, that's how all ideas start out, imperfect, no business model, just as a glimpse of what could be. You would never find a worked out business plan at this level because it literally is an idea dump, the short notes I make when I have an idea, just enough to catch the gist of it so I don't forget what it was and then I go back to whatever it was that I was supposed to be doing in the first place. It's the byproduct of an over-active imagination.

From the steam engine to the lightbulb to google it starts off with just a half-formed malleable idea.

Adsense is what makes google profitable (context sensitive ads), not search.
Heh, whoever put this together didn't remove the user account stuff. I just created an account there and was able to comment & submit stories.

Although, I guess that might have been intended functionality.
The Something Store
It would only be a "counterexample" if it was a valid example. This only keeps the "counter" part, but as an example it is flawed.
Whoah - a user. I've heard about you, but didn't know you existed.
Thanks for trying it out!
(and tell your friends).
Dead again.

Edit: Up again.
Let's say you are running a business which sells FooWidgets and you charge $100 for them.

Then for the holidays, you decide to only sell them for $50 each.

Doesn't the $50 in savings which you are passing on to your customers also represent $50 in potential revenue that you are not collecting, since you decided to be generous?
Increasing Series A financing risk for software/Web startups
Interesting article.

I wish he hadn't dropped "Why the $f not?" line. I'm not offended, but it comes off as unprofessional in otherwise well written content.
The tax code is what it is. The deaths of the four people did not cause the government to lose the money. The structure of the tax code did.
Totally broken for me. Says I didn't watch pr0n. oops!
Chromatic intervals between guys and girls
You have a good point, but still, the difference between learning to "program" and making a working product can be decades.

This hits home for me, struggling to self-learn desktop programming, pushing back expected prototype dates further and further.
Only if they knew design from decoration.
Same here.when I started 2 years I did want to do lifestyle business, but 6 months later realised that phrase
Has different meaning for different folks.
anybody can create something better than craigslist. It's actually a very simple design.

Not everybody can get the traffic. Everyone already knows and uses craigslist. Unless you have lots of money for a marketing campaign (and even this isn't a given), it's going to be very difficult to get anywhere near CL. It's the same with facebook killers and dating sites.
Google owns user generated video on the internets via the youtube acquisition. I think they paid a very, very small price for this.
When I kicked off my startup in Jan 2010 I thought in 6 months the bootstrap period will come to an end. Now 12 months into it and still some more time needed. My advice check on the six month bootstrap timing you plan, might be a little short.
when you die wealthy, you have to pay your dues to the society which made accumulation (or maintenance) of wealth possible.

They did pay their dues as defined by the tax code in place at the time of their deaths.
I was thinking about something like:

meta=document.querySelector('meta[name=viewport]')
meta.parentNode.removeChild(meta)

Thanks anyway for your quick response!
That has to be the only hammock on Amazon with "lisp" and "call-with-current-continuation" as suggested tags: http://www.amazon.com/Original-Pawleys-Island-Hammock-Presid...
Uses a version of news.arc vulnerable to the identity stealing problem described in http://xach.livejournal.com/228481.html

That's still the latest version of news.arc publicly available, though.
Utterly outlandish? Please.

The only proof we have of something being easier to learn, beside anecdotal evidence ("oh, I tried it and it was easy") is statistical empirical evidence, i.e people actually learning it. Well, people are not actually learning those languages. They are learning the "other ones".

(Where by people, I mean: a significant percentage of people, > 1%. I'm sure me, you and that "professional programmer who gives a shit about Haskell" do not a significant percentage make).

Even in universities, students find functional languages difficult, and opt-out of those classes.
To me, ability to comment makes sense, ability to submit stories does not (as per the about page)
That is a wonderful application technically. Chat me up sometime when I'm more coherent and I'll give you some marketing/conversion pointers. The only one I trust myself to be accurate on at 2:30 AM is that you need to charge radically more.
Making your web presence go dark
> You only really need in excess of that for rooms full of batteries.

Behold, racks of crossbar switches (from one such AT&T facility). I'm glad these things are pretty much a relic of the past. I suspect the weight of those racks was one reason for the floor load ratings.
http://long-lines.net/places-routes/MoundsOK/DSC00536A.html
Android and iOS fragmentation
Definitely, the PIC paper.

Somehow I missed Urs Hoelzle's thesis. Nice! It has some papers on dynamically compiling APL in the biblio I haven't seen, too. :)
The manipulation is going to be near impossible at your price point. Remember for each articulation you'll need a motor unless you build a flywheel assembly. That adds to the price really quick.

The programming, if you're just doing it for a single defined bathroom isn't that hard. It's when you get into 'all' bathrooms that the complexity increases exponentially.
Apollo 13 transcripts "Houston, we've had a problem"
Dubner's point here is that the timing of the deaths did in fact cause the government to miss out on some tax revenue. I agree he's being a bit cute about the wording, but it is just a blog post - not a NYTimes cover news story. He's trying to make a point about the quirks and odd facets (some might call them ridiculous) of our tax code.
The purpose of the analysis is less to create incredibly specific revenue plans and more to, as you suggested, get an estimate of the size of the market we're dealing with.

I will definitely use your method for estimating the size. I just feel, however, that there's a tool out there that lets me analyze unique traffic to a range of sites instead of only a single one.
The principle of symmetric change
That's it. I'm patenting patent-related recursive jokes. If I see one more of these on HN, I'm taking the poster to the Supreme Court.
Ask HN: What's appropriate equity for part time PR person
We're a small bootstrapped startup with no revenue currently flowing, we expect this in the coming months but want to keep burn rate down currently. We have someone where there's mutual interest in helping with PR on a part time basis. What's an appropriate equity stake for helping with mostly PR but potentially some marketing part time?
I'm a bit unclear what "link bait" would be but I do think that the title is a tad misleading and sensationalistic but in a good way. It's like pitching a VC your problem statement. You'd be a fool to be pedantic about it. You want to catch their interest so that they'll listen to the rest of your pitch. The title does the same thing. No one would read the blog post if it was titled "How 4 Deaths Delayed an Indeterminant Amount of Government Revenue for an Indeterminant Amount of Time."
I expect that programming for the desktop is more difficult than web stuff. I do web stuff only, but still have the perspective to kind of realize the spectrum of difficulty generally inherent to different types of programming.

That said, there is also a spectrum of business difficulty. Running a laundromat is easier than running a startup, but I don't know enough about the business side to quantify that difference.

I view it as a sister to the Dunning Kroger effect. I don't know enough about business to grasp the difficulties in each problem, simply because I don't know what types of difficulties exist in business (at least, not as well as in programming).
I honestly have no experience with warehousing and fulfillment, but the inner hacker in me loves to think of cool applications for barcode scanners, sensors, some nifty Arduino/RFID projects, reporting and even "Smart Promo Distribution" where you could warned that the ZIP code you're about to send that Red Lobster gift card doesn't have a Red Lobster location within 50 miles

You're right through...cool hacks aside, the physical act of retrieving an item from inventory, packaging, labeling and shipping has its own drawbacks.

Storage fees are fair, I think. Think of the value: before even paying the cost to the carrier (USPS/UPS/FedEx) you've invested time and money in to that label printer that never works right, consumables such as ink/paper/packaging, your time packing these promotional items and God forbid you run out to get coffee when the UPS guy swings around to pick up!

On a small, manageable scale, it sounds like an awesome operation for a programmer/tinkerer.
The styling of a:visited elements seems to have been removed in Chromium, there's some discussion of this here:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=56802

So I don't think history sniffing using this method is possible anymore in Chromium. I disappointingly found this out when playing around with facebook history sniffing, so if anyone thinks I'm wrong please let me know!
Considering all the effects are done via CSS, there's no reason the images couldn't have been made in MS Paint.
I've been using Aviary as a last-ditch backup for a few years now. It's never been my go-to tool on a machine that I control, but at work, it will often be just enough. I would like to see better wacom compatability with their tools (eg: pressure sensitivity), and more accessible Bezier control points for their SVG tool.
Sorry for being off topic, but where can you get the news.arc code?
Does Julian Assange have no limits?

[I'm saving my insightful commentary on extraterrestrial life for the Hacker News post after the press conference...]
i googled and found this cool robot that cleans your bathroom... sorta like a pool cleaner robot.

http://www.inewidea.com/2009/08/12/8900.html
1 Top Three Questions about CouchDB on Android
For everyone who has launched, have a look at this site:

http://www.44tips.com/b/Eric/Where_to_submit_your_Startup/

Spend a few hours submitting your site to whatever review sites from that list are appropriate for your app.
This thing has real potential. Props to whoever put it together.
Obviously that's fine for your use-case where the querySelector function is available, but it wouldn't work e.g. on Internet Explorer. My version is also more robust when dealing with markup errors, i.e. when there's more than one viewport meta element.
Semantically, if they paid nothing because they were not required to pay anything, then I don't think you can say they "paid their dues".
Erlang has heart (http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/heart.html) for similar reasons. Of course, it also has distribution, for when the whole computer it's running on dies.

I use runit (http://smarden.org/runit/) instead of daemontools (same sort of thing, but a bit less opinionated about e.g. where it gets installed). Rather than expecting every daemon to implement its own supervisor, logging system, etc. correctly, just use one of those.
Could you make it more obvious where to click and hold to drag?

I think you want to allow the user to select the text with the mouse without moving the note, but maybe some kind of styling at the bottom and top of the note to designate a "drag" zone.
I prefer pithy comments, but I can give you a verbose one too. I've used Lisp professionally for 20 years and I'm a huge fan of the language. But if there are lots of brilliant programmers who use other languages to build brilliant systems, how can I claim my favorite language is superior? The language is less important than the programmer. In this case, the winner has proven he's a very good programmer by winning other contests. The fact that he used Lisp merely shows that it is capable of doing the job.

Programming languages are like basketball shoes. You need a minimum feature set to play safely (ankle support, good traction, comfortable arches, etc). But buying a Nike Zoom Kobe will not make you the next Kobe Bryant. So what's the minimum feature set for a good programming language? I don't know. C appears to be good enough, while assembly is not.
I've come around to accepting that anything conforming to the relevant standards can (and should) properly be called HTML5, even if it doesn't actually take advantage of anything that wasn't available in HTML4.
I put together Markup Converter http://markupconverter.com/

It's a simple web service for converting markup from one format to another. Most of the conversions in the app are done using the Haskell library Pandoc, but I'm also using Discount, Python's Docutils and Ruby's RedCloth. It was also an opportunity to use MongoDB a little more. Right now it just converts snippets to snippets, but I'm in the process of adding additional options, like autolinking URLs when outputting HTML and adding headers and footers for formats like RTF that require them for complete documents.

I really liked the November sprint idea and am going to try to launch at least one thing a month this winter, even if only a simple microapp.
Yeah, sites like http://www.didyouwatchporn.com/ and http://ha.ckers.org/weird/CSS-history-hack.html fail to work in Firefox 4. The followup bugs are more to do with tuning what is allowed and what isn't, e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=559722.
Microbes use arsenic in their DNA:  Proves phosphorus is not required for life
This should send you on your way - http://arclanguage.org/
I rolled out a series of huge updates for my site:

- released a JavaScript version of the API

- released an ActionScript 2 version of the API (AS2 is an antique I wasn't going to bother with but one of my users back-ported my API for me so I took it from there)

- added custom data for leaderboard scores, can't wait to see what my users do with that

- added some awesome new reports to help developers make their games more engaging and generally ease them into data-driven development, a lot of casual game developers "launch and forget" which is something I'd like to see phased out

- launched the level sharing API for user-created levels

- announced pricing, still haven't implemented it yet but that's coming ASAP

And I made the whole thing real time ... 8 billion events a month and growing!
It looks like users can make money by having their affiliate codes embedded in (qualified) links they submit. But, how are you making money?
IPad withdrawal
I won't claim to have answers but I can share some impressions.

The number of clicks you mentioned isn't a lot to judge a PPC campaign on. In such a small sample you never know where the clicks may fall--sometimes you'll get a bunch later and be surprised. I don't mean to suggest you should continue your campaign (especially if you're paying a lot for clicks while lowering your price), just that I wouldn't measure its success based on such a small sample size.

Price drops like that just seem like a race to the bottom, and it doesn't appear you've generated enough traffic to know for sure whether it's necessary. If/when you do find someone who'll pay $9, maybe they would have been just as happy paying $29, or more.

If it does turn out you're "competing with free," there are articles out there discussing tactics you can use to compete. Can you white-label it and sell to businesses, such as temp firms (I assume they still do typing tests)? Or professional training programs?

If that doesn't work, can you give away the tests and sell something else? Use it to generate traffic and promote a broader/different product, etc.?
It's down for me. Here's the link to Google cache:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:grokco...
Thanks for showing interest in this. I'll definitely post my launch here.
Also notify you if you have signed up at my landing page
It's useless being the market leader if you can't make it profitable.
very nice. i will use this as it is.
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That's cool. Still, it's better form to at least try to not to use language that smacks of category-based discrimination. Just stating your age, for example, will instantly repel anyone in the pushing-30-or-over set.
> every major shift ends up breaking way to many tests that you either don’t do it, or you just wasted all that time writing tests.

This is why I'm a BDD guy, not a TDD guy. Seems like you're writing a lot of the wrong kind of tests...
Agreed that titles are meant to attract but this specific case I believe goes beyond that. It left me with a negative impression of the NYT. A feeling that I had been misled.
Thanks! I'll be in touch.
You work on versions, do you? After using it at my last job, I've found that my work flow completely depends on it. You can tell it was an application designed for the mac, not just by the way it looks, but by the way it works ('Reveal in Finder'? Thank you!). I love how easy it is to see view my changes. I love how easy it is to see that there are changes in the repository, and view what those changes are. I love that you can view the full history of a file, along with who committed each change, the commit note for it, and the diff.

I have to say, though, that if the app was only $10 I probably would have bought it for personal use 9 months ago. As it stands, I'm still struggling with the price, even though I'll probably cave in and buy it after the trial ends on my new computer.
What if it's not mounted in the ceiling? What about legs/tracks that move the arm to where it needs to go. I was thinking a subsystem that identifies object, e.g. "there's the toilet" or "there's the bathtub", then moves the cleaning system closer to the object to be cleaned.

I have a feeling this puts me closer to a 9 on my scale, but then again I feel like there are robots that do this subtask already? Identify target -> move to target. Plus I could cheat and put some sort of clue (RFID/infrared/big shiny sticker), on each object. Then it's just a matter of moving to the right spot.
I can see some sort of coordinate system being useful if I wanted to send someone a link to a particular item / patch of cork.
If this is true, life evolving twice right here would have implications for what we would plug into the Drake equation, and make the deafening silence so far even a bit more eerie.

edit: It sounded like a separate evolutionary path initially before the actual announcement--that is what I was saying "if this is true" about.
I like the password handler. Simple and useful idea!
Thanks for the feedback. We'll add the google type confirmation in the future.
I'am implementing such kind of thing atm.

Some few things are missing, but overall its ready to use (e.g. test). Feel free to try around. This is not livedata atm, everything can be resetted.

Written in Ruby/Ramaze btw.

http://palavr.kommunism.us/
Those designs are absolutely awesome.
You think that it's better for Lieberman to have tried to legislate away hosting of Wikileaks --- legislation that very well might have passed in this climate --- than for him to have used his "influence" as one of America's least-beloved Senators to shame a multi-billion dollar company that probably planned to jettison Wikileaks anyways?
Simple, non-intrusive social network. Click complete for information page