skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did something similar for the "open" command, "ropen": https://github.com/tlrobinson/ropen You can open both files and directories. It uses sshfs with simple PHP script to coordinate. I used it for a couple weeks then forgot about it.

Then I did this one using Dropbox, but it only works if you have Dropbox installed on both machines:

alias dbcopy="cat > ~/Dropbox/.dbpasteboard"
alias dbpaste="cat ~/Dropbox/.dbpasteboard"

I think there's probably a better solution than all of these.
Yeah that's what I thought by reading the headline. "I'm really going to see the financial's of a startup in my industry?"....not
Most every option is documented here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2861/options-for-html-scr...

You'll likely find this tool handy once you choose your framework:
http://www.selectorgadget.com/

Another quick and dirty way:
http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2008/10/data-scaping-wik...
wow. that's really insightful. thanks for the post. I guess you're right, there is room for improvement, but . . .

I wonder if the failure rate is higher, because those ideas are common, and everyone tries it. Yeah maybe the same number will succeed, but since everyone and their mom is doing it, it probably won't be you . . . dunno.

Btw, a news site should be on the list too. Even I have one of those: http://tech.rawsignal.com.
Canon Original Data Security System Vulnerable to Forgery
Unexpectedly (I've used them before), I found the file links returning 403.

There are copies in the Wayback Machine, and the original site's front page has a link to MD5 hash values in case you want to (more or less) verify the files acquired from Wayback.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://unxutils.sourceforge.net...

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://unxutils.sourceforge.net...

http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/md5sum
To use a baseball analogy, you're looking for a catcher that hits .300 and 30 HR. Catcher is one of the most defensively demanding positions in baseball. Finding a player with all those defensive tools AND that can hit at an All-Star level is incredibly rare, which is why players like Joe Mauer easily get $100MM contracts.

But as other people indicated, you don't need Joe Mauer on your team. You really just need to him to show up for a few weeks, teach you some basics and give you some tips, and you can do the actual heavy lifting yourself. 20% of this stuff is figuring out concepts like how you would build an effective SEM bidding system and determine whether it's working, the 80% is actually executing (ie. figuring out the bidding algorithm).

TLDR; Find a contractor, pay him enough per hour to make it worth his while, profit.
So desperate to get this to work...but no avail!

I made the bookmarklet in my firefox toolbar with the javascript code.

I open google translate, click the bookmarklet...nothing happens.

My roomate thinks it's an error with the bit.ly redirect

Any suggestions? I want it SO BAD
my bad. Nope, I went to reading the abstract and skipped the author's name. Stupid.
Software Carpentry v4: free, brief screencasts on basic python, shell, regex...
How Apple Can Fix the iPad in 2011
Unfortunately, "user acquisition hackers" are basically priceless.

That's good to know, and the hundreds of startup people emailing me asking for advice on getting traffic seem to confirm the incredible demand.

I'm still wondering why more hackers don't go into the traffic generation space. There are tremendous opportunities
for someone who knows how to code to use automation to scale campaigns and completely dominate a niche.

I can barely throw together a few lines of PHP, and I'm still leaps and bounds ahead of most of the marketers I'm competing against.
I've been reading up alot on javascript loaders lately to see which one I should use in the webapp I'm currently building.

So far I'm checking out LABjs, RequireJS and now apparently headjs. Unfortunately I am not so sure which will suit me best. Has anybody had any luck with any of the aforementioned three?
Playing Minecraft with Kinect
Starting 3 Companies W/ A Long Time Friend, Russell D’Souza of SeatGeek.com
Mocking Pad for iPad – Week 1 Sales Stats and Other Things of Interest
"Inevitably, I would get burnt out and be wildly unproductive for weeks at a time."

I can attest to this and I think it is something that a lot of management types may not understand about the engineering work culture (at least in my experience). When we're in full steam our job's don't naturally lend themselves to down time like a game of golf with Gary from Sales might.

It's definitely a problem that I am still learning to deal with effectively and am always looking for tips/experiences from others.
Directed Edge has some really insightful technical articles on their site. I did not know they were a YC company -- awesome.
Why Gawker is moving beyond the blog
Long time lurker first time contributor. I recently released an iOS app and thought sales stats etc. might be of interest to other iOS developers.

Any questions feel free to ask.
I'd say just the opposite. Life is very short so don't attempt to compete with Craigslist unless your site is based on A) different assumptions about what creates value for your users and B) a different worldview concerning human values, the economy, the future, etc.

The problem with most Craigslist competitors is that they are designed for mainstream Craigslist users. This indicates that the people doing them usually don't have the level of thoughtfulness that's needed to succeed. And while it's certainly possible to listen to your fans and make changes as you go, it's too hard to succeed this way against an already entrenched competitor unless you have at least a little bit of an ideological advantage compared to the existing platform. For example, if you want to start yet another fitness company based on game mechanics but you haven't read Punished By Rewards then you are probably pretty screwed.
I do like the idea of making it into some sort of game in order to provide motivation for completing items. Sharing of a list could be a little more obvious as well. Ill have to think on it a bit. Thanks for the ideas!
It's only one walk to the voting booth if there's an alternative available to vote for. Significant changes in US politics have cost lives, blood, and suffering.
Thanks, definitely would be a good way for me to continue developing the app and learn more rails.
There is something common with some of these ideas worth noting:

Dating sites, social travel (social anything), and Craigslist killer all depend on network effects.

A common argument for starting a new business is that "hey, someone else already has this idea, they've mapped out the market and proved it can make money." This works really well for things like restaurants where there is no network effect, no incentives for new users to go with well-established providers or disincentives for existing users to switch providers.

In the social/dating/craigslist space, you don't just need to build a better X, you need to convince people to leave the old X (or pray that they've never heard of the old X before and won't consider it) and sign up for your new X.

In terms of dating, social and craigslist at least you're only dealing with one type of customer. As soon as you turn to local events/businesses you needs to do this for two (the people looking for events and businesses, and the promoters and business owners).

Cable networks are similar businesses, but I think the key distinction is that they charged money for their services. Somewhat paradoxically, I think this makes it much easier for people to switch than if all the services are free - there is the immediate incentive of "save $10 a month!"

I think this is why AOL and Prodigy managed to make so much money. Then all the free (ad-supported) online services came along and basically wiped out the paid services, and intensified the network effect and its disincentive for switching to better services.
YC provides a lot more than "advice and a little bit of seed capital". There's certainly network effects going on when you have over 200 start-ups, each with a specific niche.
I do believe it has to do with the Tax code in the US, but I can't remember exactly why. The other thing is that it probably makes the quarterly numbers look better.
The biggest downside of experiment based engineering is that if you aren't careful you can easily slip into programming by coincidence rather than intentional engineering. This can lead to unstable systems that nobody understands.

The key question: when new requirements (an inevitability) force you to re-engineer a key element of your system (an inevitability) will you have to perform more "experiments" to figure out which random mutations of your previous design yield the desired results or will you be able to mostly plan ahead of time how to change your design to have the desired characteristics?

If it's the former then you may be faced with the prospect of a change of requirements that you are incapable of coping with, causing your business plan to die. Many software companies have met that fate.
Collected papers of Paul Erdos from the Renyi Institute
Yes, only the admin link is currently active. Thanks!
I found Halting State to be fairly good. It's more "thriller" than sci-fi, but there's a number of good ideas in there.

Also, check out Stross's blog posts on the viability of space travel; I found them rather interesting.
Most Human Viruses are obvious.
The question of programming languages used is one of the least interesting things in that article.
I'm working through Walling's "Start Small, Stay Small" and I found a couple of niches that seem ripe for the picking. The problem I'm having is how to get a foothold (information products, apps, starting an SEM vendor, etc.). I haven't found much on evaluating how to make this sort of decision.

I lean towards building apps, but that's mostly my developer bias showing.

Do you have any advice (off channel, even)? Are there any resources you can recommend?
For your example you pick a comment about lisp datastructures?
Many reasons you got only luke warm response:

(1) Comments were disabled in the original post (for reference, see original post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945582.) Disabling comments for job posts is not ideal in an open community. My hypothesis is that it hurts more than benefits YC companies. Pile on the fact that you're trying to hire for a non-traditional role.

(2) You're trying to hire for your core value-add. This is what founders should be owning. If your founding team can't do this, look to add a co-founder, not an employee. If your founder's aren't looking to get your customer base to a critical mass, and thus make the marketplace more favorable to both customers and dealers, what are they doing?

(3) A dangerous attitude. Your voice in both these posts lacks empathy. Your original post is highly presumptuous. Your follow-on blog post doesn't clarify things much further, and fails to provide concrete motivation/reasonings to apply.

I hope these criticisms help.
JavaScript Goes First Class With Tropo
your problem was picking the wrong title for the position...noone knows what you mean by a user acquisition hacker. Should have called it VP of Business Development or VP of Marketing.

It really sounds like a position for a business guy, not a hacker guy. The fact that you require hacking skills probably turned away anyone who could do what you actually needed.
What makes you think there's only one Internet now?
The Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers
A few years ago I was surprised to hear there were radiation concerns about granite countertops. According to the EPA it's not a serious threat.

Any naturally formed rock material has the potential of containing varying amounts of naturally occurring radiation. Natural radioactive elements like uranium, radium, and thorium can be present in a wide number of minerals that appear as crystals in granite from around the world. So, it is not unusual for materials such as granite to have some amount of radioactivity (emissions of alpha or beta particles or gamma rays). Depending on the composition of the molten rock from which they formed, some pieces of granite can exhibit more radioactivity than others.

http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/tenorm/granite-countertops.html
yeah why would a good affiliate marketer get a job for $30K, if he can make that in a day slinging Acai
The article used the word "sell," not develop.
Most peering agreements don't work like ISP customer agreements. Peering agreements are usually entirely agreements NOT to charge for traffic which terminates directly on your network. Transit agreements are more like typical ISP customer relationships, where I pay you to transit traffic that has an endpoint on some other network.

Ignoring the fact that the entire DOCSIS standard was designed around downstream distribution of content, and simply would not function well if you try to reverse the flow, how do you determine who pays who in your world? If I'm Comcast, do I have to pay L3 because they have content my customers want? Or should L3 pay me because I have customers they want to deliver content to?

You see, it is not so cut and dried as "everybody pays for bandwidth." ISP customers pay for bandwidth because they are asking the ISP to transit traffic through their network. Peers typically don't pay because they are both endpoints.
If all you need is an easy way to asynchronous / lazy load JavaScript, you can just include something like this: http://friendlybit.com/js/lazy-loading-asyncronous-javascrip...

Or a nice function, with "Ready" support:

In <head>:

<script type='text/javascript'>
function ljs(s){
var a=document.createElement('script'),
b=document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
a.type='text/javascript';
a.async=true;
a.src=s;
b.parentNode.insertBefore(a,b)
}
var Ready=[];
</script>

Then anywhere in the <body> or in any included scripts you can do:

Ready.push(function() {
//this will get executed after all the ljs files
});

Then in a script that contains your JS library, append:

$.ready(function() { // or some other ondomready fn
// execute all the Ready functions
for (var i = 0, m = Ready.length; i < m; i++) {
Ready[i]();
}
delete Ready;
});
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1954391
Sorry, my mistake. I got the website<->other services restoration time backwards. Thanks for correcting :)

Re. audit - of course you cannot be sure, but once you get taken over and your system is offline anyways, it might be a good idea to at least grep the sources for queries and quickly check for obvious stuff. Which is what I assume they're doing.
And another: Algorithm to predict football scores.
Interesting piece outlining their strategy going forward. Worth a read!
Ouch. This is bad.

It illustrates how much of a pain SQL injections are, if they can affect the GNU project which has some of the most incredibly talented hackers worlwide...

Props to them for having a working backup strategy though.
Missed Groovy...

I would like to see other very important people on this list, e.g., where is Niklaus Wirth? or Alain Colmeraurer? or Chuck Moore?
I thought more eyes on the source means that OSS is impenetrable. Guess not.
This is one of the things I dislike most about this forum: people want to attract attention to their articles by changing titles.

The original title "Teen Mathletes Do Battle at Algorithm Olympics" is not much better, but at least describes correctly the subject.
What an idiotic article. Granite countertops are discretionary consumer spending. People buy them with their own money. They are not purchased by the government with taxpayer money. Individuals chose to buy them on their own free will. Unless the writer shows that people are somehow forced or tricked into buying them (and he does not), this is not in any way wasted money, because individuals that buy them presumably get enjoyment out of them that is proportional to their cost.

Also his financial analysis is so dumb it is amazing. He bases his estimates on out of thin air numbers thought up by industry insiders, and then compares that to the gulf war which happened 18 years ago without taking account of inflation.

So Forbes actually pays someone to write this tripe. This is why magazines are dying.
TechCrunch Classics
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1955250
You could not have said it any better. I've spent the last year learning this skill and it is a lot harder than one would generally think. It isn't something that you can just do as an afterthought after you are done hacking for the day. There is no reason why someone who is really good at it would work for anyone else.

There are plenty of so called "internet marketing gurus" (the Frank Kern's and Mike Filsaime's) who teach it but most of them are no good. They have only ever sold internet marketing informational products to other aspiring internet marketers. If a potential hire has only sold internet marketing products this is an immediate 'no hire'.

Good luck finding this person!
Customer #1 without Launch
What a moran whoever did this.
Maybe someone had an idea for putting a vulnerability into a GNU utility.

Personally, I expected that a project such as Savannah wouldn't be vulnerable to an attack as simple as SQL injection.

Seconded. But then again, the GNU source code is mostly C, isn't it? They're used to doing things that most developers would consider intractable and therefore impossible to do safely: such as comprehensively sanitizing inputs so you can safely construct a query string out of them.

"Hey, those web guys say sanitizing inputs is effectively impossible. Should we really be doing this?"

"Snort. That's what they say about manually deallocating memory, too."

"Oh yeah! What a bunch of wimps! I'll get right to work on the query builder."
It's not telling you to take all sorts of weird drugs in order to sleep, it's basically outlining things we already know.

Go to sleep early, eat right, don't eat weird shit at night, and you'll feel better. Witchcraft, I say.
How is that not fair to Comcast? Comcast is getting a great deal. They get content for their customers free of charge and don't have to pay an upstream transit provider for the bandwidth. Comcast is not a tier 1 backbone, which means they have to pay MCI/UUnet or AT&T just like any other ISP. By peering they save a significant amount of money in bandwidth costs.

I'm actually surprised how many people here have no knowledge of how peering really works, and are buying the propaganda that Comcast puts out.
Look up "positional externality". There is a cost beyond manufacturing costs.
Offer HN: Data extraction
I'm testing a business model, and I'm offering up my service and my data extraction tool-chain.

For more details: http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2010/11/customer-1-without-launch.html
curb is a lot faster than net/http

require 'curb'
c = Curl::Easy.perform("http://www.google.com)
puts c.body_str
Geeks are so incredibly negative it's why I end up trying to convince friends to find a better career filled with happier people whenever they ask how to get into the tech field.

There's nothing more pathetic then that guy who is the born skeptic and can't see beyond his own inability to find success, constantly putting down every idea his friends give him. I'm told that's what it's like trying to do a start-up in England.
Generic Programming Barriers to Entry
MailChimp seems to be pretty involved locally. So you just might see them there... Not that I'm confirming or denying anything. :-)
Proves the point that thanks to the internet you can literally think of the title first, then write the article.

So here's the fuzzy-math behind his argument:

"The granite-countertop craze got rolling in the late 1990s, so even using Reis’ much lower figures, we’ve spent $12 billion. There’s a pretty good argument to be made we spent $15 billion. And it might be we spent $60 billion."

So he guestimates based on loosely researched studies with a range of $12b to $60b in TOTAL spend on countertops accross 20 years.

Then compares that figure to the $6b the USA spent on the gulf war, tossing out the other $54b we spent, but other nations remunerated.

Let me try one:

"Drinking Coffee Craze: US Spends More on Coffee than on Education!"

So we spend roughly $18b a year on coffee, so let's go look back from the "late 90s".

With that logic we've spent over $100b dollars on Coffee alone, and we only have $63b in FY 2010 discretionary appropriations earmarked for education so . . .

Reminds me of that old "73% of statistics are made up" line.

grumble.

http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/index.html
However - Radon does kill 20,000 americans every year and is the biggest source of lung cancer in non-smokers.
http://www.epa.gov/radon/healthrisks.html
What's the alternative? Being completely in the dark about everything? I admit that it's far from perfect, but the government is not transparent enough given their size and strength nor are main stream media outlets doing their job well enough.

Maybe if the government was less pervasive and more hands off (i.e. taxes and so on) I would be less interested in their day to day affairs.
The actual classics link: http://techcrunch.com/classics/
But isnt it just for the processing language and the processing tools?

My intention was on ordinary dtp programs like CS suite. (so propably jscript?)
Congratulations to the book deal! I'm happy for you! Don't burn out that flame of yours too soon, it's a long way from here to the finished book. I'm looking forward to reading it!

My suggestion is that as soon as you've written one chapter you're sort of happy with, put it on HN for for feedback.
I recently did something similar using anemone to crawl the website, and Hpricot to scrape each individual web page and add to the database.

Anemone is great because it can focus your crawl to only url's that match a certain pattern, which really helps you traverse a small portion of a larger website (like a University site). You can also do specific actions on pages that match a certain pattern.

For scraping, anemone natively supports nokogiri, so since you're coming from a blank slate, it might be easiest to learn nokogiri. Before discovering anemone, I had already written what needed to be done on each page in hpricot, so my code is a bit messy, but it's not that difficult to get anemone and hpricot to work together.
The only thing that spoiled this for me was every single reference to Star Trek.

Star Trek captains never give instructions to or ask questions of the computer in battle. The captain is always talking to another crew member who's at a control station.

Outside of battle, it's clear that a ship's or station's verbal computer interface is just a spoken command line, complete with scripting capability, and about as dangerous if you don't rattle off a reasonably precise command.
I think the point this author is making is not, "These ideas won't work, so don't do it." but rather, "You might think these ideas are unique, but they're not."
So he's not shooting down the ideas per say, but warning people that if they undertake such a project they need to be honest to the fact that your "variant" needs to be something special and/or you have to execute seamlessly to get ahead of the crowd.
MySpace Is for Sale; Could Google Buy?
Actually, a tool bringing pick up artist techniques to the masses might be useful.

I know a guy who does record assorted details of approaches (various sketches/openers) and outcomes (dissed, phone number, base #, etc). He records them on paper, puts it into excel the next day and A/B tests. He is very successful.

A tool that automates all this could be very useful for those of us less willing to devote large amounts of time to picking up women.
Revolt of the Geeks
Our definitions of "significant" differ so much that I wrote Modern Perl to demonstrate precisely how to write great Perl with 5.10 and 5.12 instead of 5.8 and earlier. See http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/