skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(67) ClickApp

I built something similar at a previous job. I never really thought that anyone outside the domain it was built for would use it.

Now this has got me thinking about it again...

I wonder if it could be marketed to the same sorts of folks who use SurveyMonkey and whatever that contact form builder company is called (it pisses me off that I can't remember the name of it at the moment).
First Look At TweetMag – The Flipboard Killer
by charging for the service.

Xmarks is great but I don't think it's a service I would pay for.
I think it's fair to draw a distinction between being excellent at something and being the best in the world at something. Any number of people who possess an adequate combination of innate ability and proficiency can qualify as excellent - and beyond a certain threshold, slightly greater proficiency can make up for slightly inferior innate ability.

There are some winner-take-all contests in life in which a tiny advantage in innate ability translates into total victory over everyone else, but in most cases, good enough is just that. Those tiny advantages in innate ability are less significant than the general benefits of training-based proficiency for most activities where excellence is required.

For example, my doctor doesn't have to be the best in the world to diagnose an illness accurately and prescribe an effective treatment. She merely has to be competent enough to accomplish that task.
In response to your imCaptcha idea, have you ever seen http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/ ?
The core service remains free. Like Lastpass, you will have to pay if you want advanced features like Android and iPhone apps.
Top 6 Transportation Apps of 2010
I don't remember when I first heard this story, but it was back in the early 90s, at least. I've been trying to trace it (in a desultory fashion), and the closest I've come with a very quick search is a reference from this page:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Did_the_monkey_banana_and_water_sp...

... to the following articles:

Stephenson, G. R. (1967).
Cultural acquisition of a specific learned response among rhesus monkeys.
In: Starek, D., Schneider, R., and Kuhn, H. J. (eds.),
Progress in Primatology, Stuttgart: Fischer, pp. 279-288.

mentioned in:
Galef, B. G., Jr. (1976).
Social Transmission of Acquired Behavior: A Discussion of Tradition and Social Learning in Vertebrates.
In: Rosenblatt, J.S., Hinde, R.A., Shaw, E. and Beer, C. (eds.),
Advances in the study of behavior, Vol. 6, New York: Academic Press, pp. 87-88

This search:

http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&q=Five+monkeys+cage+water

... gives over a million results. I haven't checked them all. Does anyone have any better references?
What if people could continue the story tree horizontally, and continue on the part they found most interesting? Then the parts with the most "continuations" could get a higher ranking and therefore shape the best story at the (never)end.
Thank you! I haven't seen a better explanation of what music labels' do and how they add value... it's not all about just counting the money and stroking the cat. :)
Yes, the author of the article must not have watched the video he linked to. The CEO of Bahnhof himself jocularly admits it wouldn't survive a direct hit.
How to Detect Mentors Who are Critics in Disguise
Interacting with the command line with MAIN subs (Perl 6)
Save As .WWF - The PDF you can't print out
If it is your startup, and if you're in the bay area, and even moderately social, I don't understand why for your first ~50 employees you'd be posting jobs to the general public at all (or at least, treating it as a very low priority thing, like how VCs react to random bplans mailed to them without an introduction).

If you as a founder don't actively go out and meet and recruit your core team (maybe the first 20 people?), or meet them through referrals from other team members, trusted friends, etc., you are doing it seriously wrong.

The only way I'd hire a random person is if it was for a specific role where I didn't know anyone (say, CFO for a complex ad network, although I know plenty of non-CFO accounting and finance people). Even then, I'd want references from people I already trusted. Mining piles of resumes is not the efficient way to find good people, and really, for a lot of roles, I want to know someone is at least a B player, and would love an A; I'd rather a B than someone who may be an A or may be a C. This is especially true for support, operations, etc., and anything where I don't have domain expertise to evaluate competence directly.

If it's a specific domain, and you've exhausted all your 1-2 degree connections, maybe find the internet nexus of discussion for that topic and participate for a while until you can see who is great, then try to figure out who is available. Pull, vs. push.

Maybe this is joshu's new secret startup :) (as speculated on Quora)
I think the point is that normally you hear "Company X was hacked via vulnerability in Y". Here Company X actually makes Y.
GPU accelerated lattice Boltzmann model for shallow water flow
Google Buying Groupon is not a Flawed Strategy
The script on YouPorn’s site that checks a user’s history (which you can see for yourself by going to the site and checking out its html with 'View Source')

Did Forbes just tell me to go to YouPorn.com? :)
New Kind of Life Discovered
Having seen these in action at MacTech Conference last month, I was seriously impressed.

At most conferences I've been at, the wifi tends to die or have performance problems.

In this case, it was actually usable with effectively no performance/signal issues even with 200+ people (probably 300+ devices between laptops/iPads/iPhones) in a large hotel conference room.
I read the title, watched the first couple minutes, skimmed a few more minutes, and I -still- have no idea where he was going.

What exactly was supposed to entice me into watching 40 minutes of that?
Here's a list of what's already been done by others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 10.10
I can think of some approaches:

- Gattaca-style DNA checks for the "coding passion" gene

- The fMRI scans that the Daemon uses to evaluate candidates for faction membership

:-)
Yes, the programmer was the important piece of the solution. Note the careful wording the winner used in his advocacy: "Lisp doesn’t get in my way as much as other languages."

From the article's description of how far ahead Melis was (2nd paragraph), you could say Java was king of "a race for second place".
Wow, thanks for very helpful and useful reply. I wasn't aware we were having a philosophical discussion on what's irrelevant or not in life.
Actually, there was an article in the NYTimes four years ago about lactic acid, and it turns out that "lactic acid is actually a fuel, not a caustic waste product. Muscles make it deliberately, producing it from glucose, and they burn it to obtain energy. The reason trained athletes can perform so hard and so long is because their intense training causes their muscles to adapt so they more readily and efficiently absorb lactic acid." (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/health/nutrition/16run.htm...)

So maybe that explains why Phelps can train as he does: if he's producing fuel faster than anyone else, presumably his body is also better adapted to absorbing and using it.
What you need is a half-hidden line of text or graphic near the bottom screen-edge. only way to hint at scrolling.
The History of CSS Resets
I never really liked ProFTPd, it always seemed too huge and bloated.

My favorite has always been Pure-FTPd - it really has some neat features and is very easy to setup and so far very reliable for me.
I know BuySellAds.com allows you to sell web, OS X and iOS ads. It does not appear that they have support for Windows apps. http://developer.buysellads.com
Aside: A long while back I wrote a tiny greasemonkey script to remove those annoying feedback tabs. (Here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/76116 )

I forgot that they even existed until you just mentioned it. Maybe other people would want to use it?
Ask HN: How can banks improve their branches? 
Hi,

My colleague recently posted this article on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1906251 regarding how banks could better use the internet to better serve their customers.

We were both really pleased with the level of response and Steve was well armed when going to his meeting. They agreed that almost everything that was said would be hugely beneficial to customers and our bank. Excitingly they are now looking into seeing what could be rolled out and are putting a plan together. Thanks for all your feedback - it was massively appreciated.

Steve and I have now been tasked to try and improve the customers experience when they actually go the branch (the physical bank). So I am hoping we may get the same level of response from the HN community again. Is there anything you would like to see in a branch that is currently not there, or does your branch do something particularly useful that others could copy?

An example would be rather than give a customer a printed receipt of the transaction that they did in the branch they could instead get an email or a text message.
May be, we don't know; if you have data or (somewhat) robust theories on why and how, please tell. My point was that your 'proof' wasn't proof at all for your stated premise. I suspect this will be hard for you, because I don't have rational reasons to believe that such a sudden drop-off is happening. I don't really know though, I'm just trusting on an abstract 'common sense' approach; the best I have in situation like this where objective measure are not available (to me).

Anyway please feel free to share your theories and data on why you think that over such a very short amount of time the level of education will take a sharp drop-off.
I like the idea of this... it would be great if you were checking out a new job and you could get a "feel" of how the workspaces are setup before you even went to an interview.
Google Chrome (No)Privacy
How To Make Your Own Ethernet Cables
>>America’s politicians are mostly lawyers; not engineers or scientists like ours

Is that so? /* Am really asking an honest question! */

A google_search("chinese politicians scientists"); seems to be a story by it's own, BTW.
Wait, so they're surprised that they can't find students willing to work hard in return for some vague hope of money in the future?

Wow. Color me shocked. /sarcasm

And the advice that they could just learn programming themselves? I don't think anyone ever says 'I need X, but don't know anything about it myself. I'll just learn it.' (At least, nobody that thinks logically.) It doesn't work that way. (Okay, granted, some small number of people might think that and actually succeed at it. But at the cost of things they could have been doing efficiently, instead.)
Nothing new here, this is an old technique that already exploded a while back. The Mozilla team said they would be removing this "security hole", I don't know if they have yet.

What most reporting on it fails to cover is the nature of the "history sniffing". They cannot view your browser history. What they can do is query specific URLs against a black box that either says "yes" or "no" to the question "has this user been to this exact URL at some point in the past?"
Apple wouldn't be in existence without the billions it made volume selling to schools. From grammar school to graduate school I was forced to use an Apple/Mac.

Your comment, while mostly fiction IMO, does have a nice storyline.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange faces new warrant
RIM acquires Swedish design outfit The Astonishing Tribe
"Using the accel, a possibility is to see how close a person can swing the iPad towards his body."

http://library.thinkquest.org/C003763/index.php?page=planet0...

So it would be possible to give an estimate of upper body weight if a person would swing the iPhone with hand straight. It could give the body mass as a multiple of the hands mass. It would be easy to cheat though.
1.) People (who use them) will happily tell you that each of those are the 'best' choices in their respective fields. People say 'C is best for systems programming', that I worded it more weakly is irrelevant.

2.) Lisp has been in use in AI, since before the birth of AI. It is still used in AI, and there has been plenty of success with it. There is plenty of 'constant conjunction' (to borrow the causative definition from Hume), associated with Lisp and AI.

Acting as if his use of Lisp couldn't have given him an advantage in an AI contest is pretty much the ultimate lisp denial-ism.
I agree - I've been in a similar situation where I inherited a huge chunk of Python code that worked great and played a very significant role in our product's core, but was horrific to understand or maintain (in Python, of all things!).

I stuck with it for the past 1.5 years and finally got the green light to rewrite it from scratch. Because I worked so hard to figure out what the hell was going on for so long, the actual coding from scratch took less than a month. Bottom line - if you're being paid well, like the environment and think the company has potential and that you have room to grow there, give it some time before you decide to quit.
Clearly Rich failed at fitting the whole of his talk into discrete Tweet-sized portions. For a talk about thinking through problems you would think he would have thought about that angle. Sheesh.
Best Buy's CEO on Learning to Love Social Media
Some more semi-thought through business ideas
Gorgeous?
Enable me to do everything online. My bank is scared of letting me do things online like changing my address. Everything I can do in a branch I should be able to do in person-including talking to people (this can be achieved via webchat),
I hope XMarks doesn't end up dragging LastPass down with it. Don't get me wrong, they're both good services, but I don't think it's possible to make money with what XMarks offers.
Html5 Adventure Calendar
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلي وسموحة
So the idea is to get people to install extra software on their computer which restricts their ability to do their jobs? Sure, that's going to become a big hit.

The file they have for download is close enough to a standard PDF that the standard Ubuntu PDF document viewer will happily open it and allow you to print. So nothing to worry about here in terms of accessibility in Linux, though I'm guessing it'll annoy Windows users who'll have to rename file extensions.
I honestly doubt you can do that in an automated way

I have no idea whether they'll do it, but I am confident we can use software to improve the process by an order of magnitude,and given the amount of money sloshing around the process, I have great confidence someone is going to get rich working on this problem.
NKinect
Favorite tube aggregators?
Good luck and do let us know how it goes!!
I'm not too curious about the tools, whatever was used is beyond my ability, but the art kept me on the page - beautiful.
You know, people storing their passwords on a /free/ service always seemed a wee bit icky to me. What happens when the service goes bust? Will all their passwords be lost, like tears in the rain?
Selling Apples to Japan
Maybe you could alleviate the problem by introducing a distinction between 'writers' & 'editors'? Or maybe have people collaboratively write an outline then let a good writer write the whole story?
Delivering Wow Customer Service: An Interview with Valerie Liberty from Balsamiq
Nice site! I have been using Dojo, but I read Mark Pilgrim's HTML5 book. My hope is that Dojo will eventually wrap HTML5, providing a smooth migration for me since I am not a Javascript/UI expert.
Yep.. it's all about being filial in Asia.
Region locks - My 2¢
Not particularly relevant, since that's not the justification they are using for the TSA.
Yeah, I don't see how 66 is ever gonna work as long as it's done by humans.
"I don't think anyone ever says 'I need X, but don't know anything about it myself. I'll just learn it.'"

Yes, people do that. Like me, when I was interested in having a strawbale house I read a book and built a strawbale house (took 6 months). Learned a lot about construction in the process. When I wanted a website, I read a book and built my first website. Like the house, it was not the ultimate expression in its field but it was a website. So now I am not an expert at construction nor website building but I do know a whole lot more than the average person and I do know what parts are hard and what parts are easy. Makes the conversations with the real professionals much easier.
Well, yes, of course. Competently done. Competently done crypotgraphy is rare, and most common cryptography is not competently done. Which is exactly the point of my post.
Recruiters and HR departments value tech certifications because it means they don't have to test the technical knowledge of the candidate themselves. This saves time and acts as a 'useful' filter when they are processing resumes en masse.

To clarify, you wouldn't expect to see this followed at a company where its programmers are first class citizens; these guys tend to be real thorough.
I really hope all of this dns dustup is really about showing ICANN and the powers that be that they shouldn't risk fracturing the Internet by hijacking domains the way they did.

The alternative - actually wanting to split a bunch of users onto a new set of root servers and inventing a brand new method of peer to peer zone transfers seems overly complex and filled with potential pitfalls.

While this may be a bit overstated, when arguing against COICA the IEEE had this to say about fragmentation:

These problems will be enough to ensure that alternative name-lookup infrastructures will come into widespread use, outside the control of US service providers but easily used by American citizens. Errors and divergences will appear between these new services and the current global DNS, and contradictory addresses will confuse browsers and frustrate the people using them. These problems will be widespread and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.

Is there a need for all new roots? One option might be just to have various recursive resolvers available for people to switch to aka opendns or google, but these could be delegated as secondaries by worried domain holders and thus return authoritative without consulting root servers. Signed zones could prevent tampering. If they really want to run software on the client it could be stuff that's already built - a small validating resolver that could send most lookups to the user's isp but query the alternate provider for a specific tld or when validation using DLV fails.

The spit-balling about the design of this thing has given me flashbacks to 25 years ago when manually replicated host files ruled the day (and it sucked). I totally agree that not being able to trust the roots is a big problem, but there must be a better way to go about this than having me run some custom software on every one of my clients (and hope it's not a new attack vector) just in case a site that I use might get hijacked by the feds in the future.
I know many will disagree with me, but I've always had the feeling that advertising on mobile apps is there to exploit user distraction. I haven't got any source to back my theory, nor any conversion rate stats, but I would say that a big chunk of clicks come from user mistakes, rather than genuine interest in the ads, and the same would apply to desktop applications imo.

This might happen on the web too, but with a lower order of magnitude, since the average internet surfer is more likely ready to evaluate an offer/purchase.
"But if that were true, it would be between you and the airline, not the government."

Apparently the airports can choose to opt out of the TSA and provide their own non-governmental security, like before 9/11.
http://www.examiner.com/libertarian-in-national/florida-airp...
Tech Startups and Human Development: Different Worlds?
The interesting part of this is that it claims to encrypt the drive, but really just overwrites the MBR. Much easier, and probably gets them money from at least half of the victims that they would have done anyway.
Racism! Just fix it!
Obligatory "Life Of Brian": We are all individuals!

You're correct. Whether this ends up being more distinctive or demarcative depends on how widely deployed it is. A few hundred and it's not very helpful, but if you have tens of millions of browsers reporting only "LOLCAT BROWSER" (or for old sk00l credit, "AOL") it may give data miners some headaches.

It's kind of like Tor (or if I remember right, anonymizer.com) in those respects - until you have scale, it probably gets associated with shenanigans; once you hit the tipping point, it operates as desired/intended.

But hell, I don't mind marking myself as a type of person who doesn't want intrusive ads. (Why yes, I do run adblock!)
I wonder if they're going to apply this filtering technology to their sponsored links. There are paying scammers, too.
From HN Guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."
The idea that this will be limited to the US is rather charmingly naive too.
Mac Must Have: Hazel
When I see a blog post like this, it serves more to raise doubts about Node.js than anything else.

Before today, I had been considering Node for an upcoming product. Now I read that people are actually building and releasing software to work around the fact that Node.js servers regularly incapacitate themselves. Really? Like it just goes down and doesn't know how to cycle itself? Ouch. That translates to me as "Don't go anywhere near Node.js until they get it stable."

So yeah, I'm sure this is a great way to shore up your system. Buy I'm going to think twice before investing time in a system that needs shoring up.
Just for you: https://gist.github.com/725354
"If we control the bug rate, is TDD faster?" is the central question. I assert that TDD is the Cause of the bugs, so the question is nonsense.

Code should be developed with as large a view of the design as possible. TDD restricts development (by definition) to satisfying the tests. The effect is of 'moving the bugs around' since the existing tests rarely completely describe the whole design. You get into a loop of "oh, yeah, well we Really meant to write a test to cover that case too", repeated ad-nausuem.
It seems funny to me that so many people want to be software entrepreneurs, but refuse to learn about software.

Six months ago I quit my banking job of five years to learn how to program. I am taking discrete math, data structures & algorithms, and computer organization courses as a non-degree student. I am also up to speed with python/django/HTML/CSS/JS, or at least I know them well enough to hack a prototype together.

Programming is overwhelming at first, but seriously, it's not that hard to learn enough to test out your ideas.
There are things that are far more valuable than money that a person can gain from an experience.
I had answer your email.
Relax, this ain't your grandpa's BASIC.
An Interpol red notice isn't a warrant: http://www.interpol.int/public/wanted/default.asp
The original poster is from India, not America.
Books for Tech Entrepreneurs & Startups
Most people are good at what they're good at, so it makes no sense for them to learn something they have little interest or skill in. The typical request from a non-tech guy is not in implementing a hard engineering problem like database management or search query structure, but in putting together what is typically a glorified e-commerce site or social site (digg etc).