skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cool, didn't know about directedge. Any idea how profitable are they?

[edit] Crunchbase says they only received YC's $15k in seed funding. That's weird for a B2B company.
Video Walkthrough Of Virgin’s New Project iPad Magazine
Web Developer Info Graphic - Mozilla Research
May I recommend http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.html for heatmapping.
So what happened to preezo? I noticed you weren't linking to the homepage preezo.net but to http://www.techmixer.com/online-powerpoint-presentation-crea... and that links to preezo.com.
This is awesome... time to dive into hpricot!
I'm working to become one such person at the moment. It would be awesome to be able to do so while working somewhere like AirBnB or CarWoo.

By the time I'm an expert at this, I might be making enough money that working for others isn't really what I want to do.

Anyway, I wish them success finding the right person.
Hi!

Hosted on the cheapest prgmr server available, so sorry if it doesn't last.

My tribune to _why's hoodwink'd project, Goggles is a bookmarklet that lets you scribble on any webpage you like. Drag bookmarklet to bookmarklet bar, click, enjoy.

Left mouse = draw. Right mouse held down = erase (really stupid logic but it works well enough).

Hosted on nodeJS hiding behind nginx. We use long JSONP polling but I want to switch to something more dignified like socket.io for that.

Please don't draw rude pictures -- this is my final for art class. I'll restore it to yesterday's backup when I present.

Source: http://github.com/gcr/goggles. BSD licensed; feel free to fork away!

It's a really stupid bandwidth hog right now; all points are sent to the server when you draw a shape and all points are sent when you delete. This is more of a proof-of-concept than anything. Let me know what you think!

Tested in firefox 3.6 and Chrome. I've been told it doesn't work in Fx 4.

Who knows how long this will last before the vandals arrive...

For future work: bandwidth savings, vandalism mitigation, different pen sizes (it's there but no UI for it).
Making DIY ipad stylus
So this sounds like one of those newer types of positions that will start becoming more common. However I doubt that a tone of people have actual experience at this.

However I bet there are a ton of brilliant young hackers who could learn to do this and would see it as a sharp career move. Perhaps going after someone like this would make more sense?
So, this has happened before, with not much success: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlterNIC - of course the guy that started that also cache poisoned InterNIC so that might've had something to do with it...

I'd assume that anything of this nature needs critical mass more than anything else. Like Google Public DNS/OpenDNS supporting it on day one, or the next version of BIND (whenever /that/ happens!) having it built in.
I think it's a serious stretch to say that, coming from someone who sees the "war on terrorism" as completely silly. Those "fighting terrorism" aren't the same people doing, say, banking oversight. While these things are both handled by the government, the government is not all one big team, it's a bunch of individual components working on totally different things with small amounts of overlap.
This just got me thinking that dating sites definitely fall into this category. Perhaps the answer is not a dating site but a dating tool, much like Facebook does not try to make you social connections, but facilitates the social connections you already have. You could write down the dates you have already been on, what you did/talked about, and compare notes with other people. Anyways, just a thought.
Quite pleased to see none of these are on the list of ten startup ideas I released a few weeks ago: http://www.puremango.co.uk/2010/10/ten-ideas/
I feel ashamed that I didn't realize Guy Steel did Scheme nor that he is the current Chairman of Common Lisp. Go figure.

Anything Lisp related just immediately makes me think of McCarthy.
It was an interesting read until the heading "So, here we go." Then, it turned into a creepy infomercial about professional blogging.
Great post, and so true.

Unfortunately, "user acquisition hackers" are basically priceless. A hacker that builds great product is hard enough to find, a hacker that BUILDS TRACTION?! Holy God would that be amazing.
I can't wait to make one of these. This can be a great method(resource)for hacker/artists to show money the depth in workflow which goes into a project. Thanks, and great work with this and your deliverable.
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
output = Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse("http://www.google.com"))
Nobody uses DNSSEC, so it's still easy to poison DNS caches

I'm not sure if that's accurate - I believe source port randomization has made it extremely difficult to poison recursive DNS servers. I think a recent "successful" attack on source port randomizing showed it took them 7 hours on a 10Gb/s link to poison one A entry.
The full story is told in my next post, which should be done tomorrow and will be entitled "How I Screwed Up My Google Acquisition".
Cloud Monitoring Using Zenoss – Interview with Josh Duncan
If you're lifting weights with your arms, you're probably doing it wrong.

Try the olympics lifts: power cleans and snatches and squat cleans and snatches. Or their components: deadlifts, front squats, presses. Or back squats and thrusters. Do a bunch of those in rapid succession and your whole body will be much more tired than doing a 5k run, guaranteed.
Amen. Definitely been sucked into and subsequently failed at Social Travel big time. I think that's a sexy one, there is an unsaid allure in it of being able to mix travel with running a startup. Such a crowded space, and most fail out the gate. Once you do the math you realize there is far more travel media out there than travelers, especially in a down economy.

Anyone who loves to travel and wants to get out more, but is stuck inside writing friggin code all day gets this idea at least once. "Wait! How would I combine writing code with travel? I know, I'll make my own travel recommendation site." The irony is in reality I traveled wayyy less as a result of committing to this idea. Bummer
If it's like other trackers, every time you click/select, it loads a resource, causing the status bar to flicker.

Many people read while clicking and selecting text. This means sites that do stupid things when the user selects text (popup definitions, ads, change the status bar, etc.) become very annoying.
I've spent time in Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. I never claimed Latin Americans blame the US for all the things that the juntas did, merely that there's a fairly strong undercurrent of resentment towards the US there.
This is definitely an idea lots of nerds have, which is exactly why it shouldn't be shrugged off. There's a desire for nerds to socially interact with similar nerds, and by and large this has been accomplished by adding social features to the internet.

Well, why not add social features to a game stop? Why not add nerdy features to a bar? A barcade doesn't need to be the last stop. Why not take what we learned about online dating, and use it to improve offline dating?

Maybe people don't want 'a bar revolving around gaming', but it's a thought in the right direction. Barcades and shared hacker work spaces are an actual step in the right direction.
I thought I saw him lift a picture of a MBP off Apple.com into his document for a bit. I got a bit worried there too. I know lots of web apps end up with one of those generic MacBook pictures showing their site on the screen -- Apple won't sue you for using their picture?
Why is it that corporations, specifically Yahoo!, have a tendency to lay folks off right in the middle of the holidays?

If I recall they had huge layoffs in '07 right before their infamous Xmas party.

All this does is destroy morale, produce more rumors, and takes a big hit on the company's overall image.
How can I use Python for large scale development?
The idea seems nice, I'd have to test it out to actually see if it really delivers. One thing that bugs me tho is the tone of the text. It's all "this is the best thing since sliced bread" and "authors surly must be at least demi-gods". This comment in the page's source says it all really:

"headjs :: possibly the most important script after jQuery"

I'm all for cocky and confident attitude, I just think it has no place in a presentational web page/docs
Granite Countertop Craze Has Cost U.S. More Than First Gulf War
Like http://www.appignite.com/ ?
Please tell me that the headline is not accurate -- I hope that they gain access to the APIs/tech, and not to any actual personal financial data.

I highly doubt mint.com's userbase really wants their banking data shared with new startups.
Another N810 user here. Love it!

I have N900, but it SUCKS - the screen and keyboard are too small for doing anything serious. My girlfriend uses it now, mostly as a phone :)
Ah wheels, I saw #2 and I thought of you. ;)
I love it, its so simplistic :D
This reads like a list of the Montreal startup scene. So far I've met people working on dating sites, purposeless recommendation engines (to be fair, in one of those startups two of the guys were part of the team that won the Netflix prize, the other one is headed by someone who placed second in the GitHub contest, so they're not dilettantes at least), social travel ("we'll get film students to make videos about restaurants... for free!"), I'm pretty sure there was a Craigslist killer there somewhere.

Other hard things of dubious utility people work on:

1. Local events

2. Local business directories (I was once removed from this space by working at a company that provided an integrated directory/SEM buying product to various Yellow Page companies around the world; the cynic in me thinks this is a great way to fleece small businesses, although if you try it really can drive a lot of business)

3. Microsoft Access for the web. Dabble DB tried (acquired by Twitter), I tried, http://formlis.com/ (HN user warrenwilkinson) is trying. There's probably a bunch more. Google Forms and Wufoo seem to be the most successful with the least functionality. The hard part here seems to be getting people to know about the service. Companies typically contract these apps out, and the contractor companies are more interested in $30k contracts to build custom form apps and making busywork for PHP drones than reselling a solution where the customers or other contractors can cut them out as middlemen. Actually the more I think about it, the more I want to try this again.
hey... where's eduardo...
So, Clinton did not say in a press meeting that Wikileaks should be labeled a terrorist organization?
I have a theory that most people that fit the requirements of a “Customer Acquisition Hacker” are likely trying to use this skill to their own advantage and not selling it to a company as an employee.

I totally agree. The talents mentioned in the article are right down my alley, but I've been busy using those skills to get more subscribers and traffic to my own gigs. This is true for others I know who have similar skillsets (Amy Hoy stands out as a prolific example here, to me).

Doing these things full-time for other people would negate most of the reasons I do them already - like extremely flexible hours, the ability to work on exactly what I want, etc. Not only that, but it's taken >10 years of hard slog to feel confident about my abilities. It would take a significant increase in other forms of compensation (money, prestige, etc.) for me to do this full-time for someone else. (All that said, if a reputable company has $150k base plus options to invest, I'm listening ;-))
Norman Walsh and Manu Sporny on XML vs JSON.
"Social e-commerce". I get a lot of project bid requests for variations on this theme. Especially when the economy really tanked every panicking startup tried to pivot their business plan to be shopping related for a while. Very difficult to implement, people are much less amped about sharing purchases than nerds would expect
You eliminated step one, which clearly states:

[X] Put services online using backup, except for password-based ones (e.g. the web interface)

The other step you omitted is the one where they allow people to log in after fixing the vulnerability.

As for the audit, there's no such thing as a complete security audit, and there's no reason to keep the site down in fear of hypothetical holes.
This is what I use, though not as fancy.

mac$ ssh user@remote "some command" | pbcopy
You make great points for the engineering minded, and the original article was about nerds, so that's all grand.

However; when I inwardly cringe at these ideas being rehashed (possibly not the machine learning one), it's when someone non-technical is eagerly pitching me their Facebook for Dogs idea and trying to get me to code it up for free, it'll be the Next Big Thing, just you wait and see...
The Best Entrepreneurs Are Closet Pessimists
Then why have their attacks so far had the primary effect of creating panic when a couple dozen random bombs would both be easier to execute and cause more destruction? Why continue to attack planes — the area in which our paranoia is most concentrated — when legions of American-born madmen have proven that just pulling out a gun in a public place and shooting people is plenty effective?

It seems to me that they don't necessarily want us to die, at least not on any particular schedule — just to be so afraid that we won't be able to oppose them with any strength.
Thanks for the feedback from everyone on this thread. I massaged that part a bit.

I happen to think infomercials are pretty brilliant with marketing, but of course, they can be heavy handed. Thanks for caring enough to say something.
I sorted the comments by oldest first and skimmed them looking for people dumping on facebook with things like "flash in the pan" or "i could build this in a weekend".

Surprisingly few. In fact most people loved it. So if you're looking for indicators of startup success they'd go something like:
1) 85% of target demographic has signed up.
2) 3.5 millions users.
3) TechCrunch commenters love you.
Work/Life Balance
https://github.com/headjs/headjs/blob/master/src/head.loader...

Head Loader: The ultimate JavaScript loader. Can be used as a standalone tool.
You mean like the whole pick-up artist community? Most girls aren't that interested in recording details of their dates, and definitely don't want other people knowing about their dating life (unless they're really young and want to brag that they're dating a football player, or in one recent case, have had the discriminating taste to sleep with half of the Duke lacrosse team).
Absolutely. The javascript loader sounds interesting, but I don't need any of the CSS, HTML5 or screen size detection.
Maybe Google wants to buy a highly salesforce, capable of luring small business owners in very risky deals. They definitely could increase the amount of adwords customers as well.
Headline missed a word : "again"

Original issue date: August 13, 2003

http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2003-21.html

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/MISSING-FILES.README

Moving Forward

All releases after the 2003-08-01 date will have checksums GPG-signed by
the GNU maintainer who prepared the release. This assures automatic
certification of the integrity of all GNU source from that date onward.
This is an excellent point. The free market has done nothing to build a powerful, universal foundation for telecommunications in Australia. We've seen nothing but stalling and roadblocks from Telstra in recent years.

A major part of the problem is that rural/country Australia is so vast that it is not economically viable for profit driven companies to support.

Telecommunications in Australia a disgrace. Frankly I think that massive government expenditure in this area is well overdue.
I'll do that

Now we have you on record. Please deliver :)
I believe you mean "Maemo 6", i.e. what Harmattan would have been if there was no MeeGo.

Latest MeeGo release is 1.1 for handsets, netbooks and in-vehicle infotainment systems, each with their own "user experience" layer on top. The handset UX in 1.1 is for developers to have a peek on the new direction. 1.2 is coming up in a couple of months.

MeeGo distribution will be RPM based; that is inherited from Moblin. That shouldn't change anything substantial. The kernel and other guts are still all true Linux goodness.
This reads odd for a TechCrunch article.

Its written more like a personal blog/analysis of the startup rather than reprinting of a press release or some drama angle.
عطر هاير انرجي - Higher energy
I only got three, coicidently all "C". C, C++ and C#. Dont ask me why I know those three right away but struggle with the rest.
I think by "silent larger community" with "dozens" of people, who he's really talking about is people pay Oracle a LOT of money. Oracle wants these assets to stay under as much Oracle influence as possible so customers don't go getting any bright ideas about taking their money or attention elsewhere.
The ideas are obvious because people want them.

Lots of people want a Craigslist alternative that doesn't have the shittiest search interface this side of 2004. Lots of people want a dating site with a 'market' that doesn't heavily heavily favor women. Lots of people want to exercise/lose weight in a fun game-like way. Lots of people want the concept of TripAdvisor but don't feel like they identify at all with the typical TripAdvisor reviewer.

It's hard to learn about why these things are difficult without actually trying to do them.
Rate My Startup: Outsourced user mgmnt -- Thanks
> In my mind, there is nothing wrong with creating alternate systems that work beyond the view of government agencies and the public in general. However, every time we do this, we create yet another fracture in the Internet that we know and love.

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -John Gilmore
I think in this context 'framework' means "a way is provided to" not in it's technical sense.

The developer was complaining that there was no system in place to sell apps to users - not that there was no gui toolkit to write them.
Actually the author of the original article is not that negative about the ideas he mentions: "This suggests that either all nerds think alike, or alternatively, that they are unsolved problems that someone, someday, somewhere, may actually come up with a variant that hits big."
hi, nice app ;)
i found little bug - if u draw and u drag mouse out of window and return to window app will draw without need to have left mouse button pressed:)
tested it on chrome
Best comment on the site (by RFarahmand):
All of these ideas seem perfect, and yes, we know them all... its all about execution. The fact is most of the nerds like myself ( 99.99%) don't get operational and don't execute. The 0.01% who aren't afraid of failure go to silicon valley and fail - maybe many times, among them lucky ones with better execution are the ones who make billions! with a bit of luck
The harder you work, the luckier you get!
there's already an app for that
Thanks.

That happens because the canvas' onmouseup event never fires (it landed on another window). Does anyone know how to fix?
That depends on what you think the product is. Tidypub is pastebin+readability.
i am! i was pleasantly unsurprised to see dating as number one! (read as "i thought it would be, and laughed when i saw it was"). the reason most dating sites fail is that people keep building the same site again and again but with different branding. i think the problem can be solved by completely changing the experience. that's what i'm staking my savings on anyway.
I think that all of these (or at least most of them) are reasonable ideas that could work. I think the biggest problem is that a lot of them are either technically difficult or involve entering crowded markets.

For example, the Craigslist killer can and has worked. The guys at RentHop and AirBnB are both attacking pieces of Craigslist's functionality.

The problem is that most nerds don't have the ability to pull these ideas off. Heck, most people in general don't have what it takes to build a successful company. There's a big difference between hacking on something for a weekend and building a company out of it (although you can't build a company without starting somewhere).

Overall, a lot of people (including many successful YC Founders) start out with stupid, unfocused ideas, and morph into something that's focused and solves a problem that people need solved. It's all just part of the process - if you wait for the perfect idea to hit you, you might never get started.
I thought James Strachan was the creator of Groovy.
Slightly different, as that compromise was of the FTP servers, which store packaged releases. Savannah is the development system.
I just got off a gig working for someone who is like the king of customer acquisition. Very successful at it. Very difficult to work with. And this guy is only in his job because he was acquired in a buyout of his startup.

From what I've gathered, if you want someone in this role they need to get paid a LOT of money. If they are good they could end up making more in commission than all your engineers' salaries combined so you need to be prepared for that...
Sounds pretty good, I look forward to reading it.

If anyone clicked on the link looking for information, I posted an 'Ask HN:' a while back on the same topic. Loads of people responded, with some great advice. It's here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839022
Just in time for the holidays (in my world, Christmas). Epic. Fail.
It's called affiliate marketing, and thousands of people do exactly this for a living full time. All of the affiliate marketers who are any good work for themselves driving traffic to others for commission on every lead or sale, or creating their own products.

The people who are good at driving traffic are driven, entrepreneurial, and have the hacker mindset. Of course they would prefer working for themselves without an upper bound on their earning potential.

The fact is that, if you're good at driving traffic, there are still tremendous opportunities for you out there, and you can earn much, much more than any salary could pay.

I actually emailed you with some advice about hiring someone like this based on my experience in the industry, I'll repost it here:

Ranking experience by preference, I would most prefer a candidate with affiliate marketing experience, next someone who managed SEM/media buys for a large performance advertiser, and finally someone with agency experience. Stay away from people who have only done branding, they will eat your money.
Also, I know you're looking for a hacker, but I think the most important factor in running internet marketing campaigns is knowing how to sell. Identifying your target market and what their pain points, wants, and desires are is paramount. Optimizing, split testing, etc is important but secondary compared to marketing fundamentals.
Finally, watch out for "social media experts". Value applicants based on how many conversions they can bring, and how much they can spend effectively, not on how much they can engage in conversations. Until you can pay your vendors in Twitter followers, all that matters is getting quality traffic and sales.

I think the fundamental issue is that you're framing this as a job for hackers. For whatever reason, most hackers have a distaste for marketing, and would probably be loath to apply for a marketing-type job. They would rather be building things and not worrying about things like positioning or segmentation.
Missed groovy, scala and basic. Actually surprised I missed the latter, but then again I never sat down and thought, "who invented basic?"
You know it's something with math, when almost everyone in the picture is Asian.
I don't understand the whole dynamic class selectors for "Screen size detection". If it's trying to add support for standards, it should support media queries instead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
using firefox4 i cannot navigate thru the site...