skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fitness Equipment
Whether you are involved with running a commercial health club, are an entrepreneurial fitness coach looking to start your own personal training studio, or are a home owner looking to build your home gym with quality equipment.
We can train technical skills, but we can't train honesty and candor.

I read something from someone sometime that said something like, "I like to ask questions about the obscure items on their resume and ask them to explain the concepts." The purpose was to see if the person will try to bullshit their way through it or will they throw up their hands and say, "I don't know."

The article's main point was, "If they bullshit you during the interview, they'll bullshit that much more if you hire them."
At some point there was a database of user info. Search for it and maybe you'll find it?
Zero if you use one of the many Greasemonkey scripts available: http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=ycombinator
Sorry for the rant but Fonts are the most overpriced thing on the web. $775 for a collection 15 fonts is what one of those fonts costs. Give me a break.
Yahoo spurns Microsoft again as blood boils
Manhattan Solstice.

There are three from yesterday's event but this photo from earlier in the year is visually stunning. I can't imagine the traffic slowdown driving sunwards.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kliman/2539479392/

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=manhattan+solstice&s=rec
What I meant is that one can't deny others those same 4 freedoms, which include modifying and distributing the changes.

I like to think that what folks refer to as its' "viral" nature is really the preservation of freedom. It strikes me that this license more than any other protects the rights of programmers and enables them to earn a living. This might seem counterintuitive, and it certainly is counter to the propaganda that often spread about communism and programmers earning a living, but much of that stems from the way corporations are structured as legal entities.
Mesh Network
Wireless Mesh Networks from MeshDynamics consistently outperform the competition.
Monkeypatching For Humans
Nice idea! Workable, cool [and all other words of praise :) ]

why didn't guys at Facebook think abou this?

IMHO, the clicks-to-gifts won't be 5%. That maybe true for USA, UK, Canada and countries like that. Maybe 1-2% (or even lesser) for other countries in Asia-Pacific region. And maybe the same for european countries like France, Germany, etc.

Basically, I just mean that it all depends on the mindset of the people of those countries about ecommerce in general. So people in regions like Asia-Pacific will get only "Happy Birthday" wall post. :)
Richard Stallman says Orphan Works Bill actually a Good Thing
What a bird-brain comment. Sadly, that bird may be the canary in the coal mine ;-)

This post is old. So what? Well, old posts that have merit ought to be reposted. But old posts of little value? Why are we upmodding this? So that we can all agree that Eric is wrong about hackers in a self-congratulatory fit of back slapping and strutting?

Either way, I agree that this is another sign that HN is changing character. I am not prepared to say it is changing in a bad way, or that the site has no value, or that there is going to be an exodus.

But I agree that there is a change going on.
Reasons to write bad code
IT department people and job interviews
Does anybody have any experiece with people at IT departments of non-IT firms? Do everywhere people suck so much? I started working for a summer job at a pretty big corporation (at least by our standards -- they are a high-tech manfacturer of some electronic parts, by the way) my father is a CEO of and a major shareholder and was shocked by sheer incompetency of the people there (of the IT team). One even didn't know what FTP was. They were programming some classic ASP code, but didn't really know what they were doing -- they didn't even master the concept of a loop!

Is it everywhere this wild? Is it normal for companies to have no job interviews and test the knowledge of candidates? Is this situation normal?
Keyword Research Video
How Our Bodies Age (And What You Can Do About It)
Is free news killing newspapers?
union -> intersection
+1, Gratuitous, yet hilarious, musical interlude ;-)

It cracked me up, LOL
On a Small Screen, Just the Salient Stuff
In House, Tweets Fly Over Web Plan
Sometimes sites get onto themes. Lately one theme has been to post all the best-known essays disagreeing with things I wrote. Don't worry, though. There aren't that many left. And you liked the recent one about New York, even though that seemed to me roughly equivalent.
Why Musicians Make Us Weep And Computers Don't
You can download the database of user info here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173045

And the database of posts here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=172701

YC/PG: Any chance of updated versions of these?
This is spot on, I've wondered about the economics of scarcity for a while. How does it apply to selling accounts for a hot web service? Maybe give them away for free while you're obscure, grant invitation privileges to the early adopters and start charging when the mass of users rolls in. Bonus points for raising the price, the more well-known you become. Can you share your success with the early adopters? Maybe allow them to sell their contingent of free accounts somehow?
Regardless of whether ISV = small, surely small ISV = small.
Equity Investment Simulation
Chat With Indeed CEO Paul Forster
Porn industry takes a steamy first shot at the iPhone
Gmail to No Longer Auto Add Contacts
A New Fashion Catches On in Paris - Cheap Bicycle Rentals
I was there last fall and these bicycles were massively popular. I think they made quite a lot of people ride who wouldn't have otherwise.
As China embraces the car, Paris embraces the bicycle.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-11/11/content_...
that's just noise for me. This is a better example:

http://tn3-1.deviantart.com/fs25/300W/f/2008/043/7/9/perfekt...

its made by Nastera(aka Nasimo), one of Bulgaria's best graffiti artists and a Balkan champion. What you show doesn't look like it was designed at all. It was paint pored on the floor!?!? But still you point is correct, just not your example.

ps I did choose my example very fast, but im a long time graffiti art fan, so i knew what to look for. I didn't look specifically for this work, but i knew what artist i wanted to show.
Rename your Ubuntu computer
Why Disqus will be huge
There is a program in Barcelona, too (http://www.bicing.com/).
I am sure that the mistakes that clearly caused the failure of the company in "Startup.com" (recklessness, poor planing, wishful thinking) will be show to be genius business aptitudes in this stupid movie.
Graham and Feynman Meet in the Middle
250 (or perhaps it's > 250) : I've just got there.
In Copenhagen we have free city cycles in the entire central city area. Just slip in a coin and you can take the cycle out for as long as you want. When done park it at any of the stations and take your coin back.

Also, pretty much every street here has a dedicated cycle lane on each side of the road.

http://www.bycyklen.dk/english/thecitybikeandcopenhagen.aspx
Um. I wish I had an excuse. For some reason it just clicked and I never thought about it, although it is clearly and irrefutably wrong. Thanks for pointing that out, its been fixed (although the cached copy may take a bit to update).
What's that you say? You want to buy the crown jewel of our business? But not for cash? And the rest of our company gets turned over to a man with no experience running Internet businesses?

We'll get right on that.
How many people have you teased for being technologically inferior, such as writing "u" instead of you or accidentally installing Gator? When you rip into other people for doing this, even if not directly towards your girlfriend, she sees that and probably starts feeling self-conscious if she is a technological dunce too.
Anybody have any idea when HTML5 is going to be released?
At my college we had "Faces and Places" a.k.a the "Meet Book" otherwise known as the "Meat Book." I don't remember it specifically called the "Face Book" but I don't think it's a stretch to think that kids at many other schools would have called it that.
Lotta good topics in this one: role of government in controlling speech, rumors versus reality, use of web sites as proof of tech-savvy ("I use Digg...").

Pelosi and several other house leaders have said that they want to look into re-instating the fairness doctrine -- which basically puts a government official in charge of determining whether users of the public airwaves are acting fair or not. It was a doctrine from the 1950s when you only got 3 channels of TV at your house.

This relationship of government to technology is so critical, yet it seems like all we nerds get is sloganeering and pandering. It'd be great to see some proposed constitutional amendments extending our rights in this new era.
how come there is no user profile?
no user profile?
Detroit (IIRC) made me do that. I was fine with it.
If you REALLY believe in the value of this algorithm, I would think the best way to monetize it would be to put it to commercial use. The usual reason to license is because implementation requires too much capital. Algorithm commercialization is cheap.
It's really not that great of a movie.

It was hard to watch all the way through. Mainly because the biggest conflicts were usually trivial things. Also how they ran their business was exactly why most start-ups died that year.
My analyst warned me, but metaprogramming was so beautiful I got another analyst
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/07/my-analyst-warned-me-but...
Hi there!

I looked over your site briefly, and have a few comments -

1. Overall, the site a slight cluttered feel to it. I am not sure I can put my finger on it, but you need to reconsider your fonts and white spacing

2. You have the "Contact Realtor - Realtor - Listings" next to a property, but I am not sure where you were going with the styling. It looks like an incomplete box, and the text does not flow well around it. Consider some margins

3. Your search seems to have an issue. There is a listed house in Pune, but when I search in all Maharashtra, I get no listings. Shouldn't the Pune listing show up?

4. At the top of each tab, it always says, "You are here
Home" no matter what tab you are on.

5. Your theme is very confusing. You seem to have nice shiny reflective Web2.0 divs on the left hand side, while your right side are flat grey sections. Whats with that?

6. Most importantly, what differentiates your site from other housing sites out there? Maybe I missed it, but its not very apparent to me, and I am not sure it will be apparent to others...

Hope this helps.

Good luck.
At this point, the only choice Yahoo's board has is "merger" or hostile takeover. They might as well flip a coin. 'Cos none of them are walking away from this unscathed either way.
Does Hacker News have to re-post everything Jeff Atwood writes? Sorry for my ranting.
10 Web 2.0 Ideas That Failed
"If Intuit sells 10mm copies of QuickBooks a year, why don't they just have 5 or 6 employees instead of the hundreds that they have"

Why do Google and Yahoo have 5000+ employees, when Craigslist gets by with about 20?

Many companies hire people because they can, and because cash in the bank gets a miserably low return. The extra employees aren't strictly necessary, though they do help (presumably over the marginal return of cash, which is about 0 when you figure in inflation).

BTW, Intuit's sales took off when they did only have 5 or 6 people. They probably wouldn't have been able to release anything else if they hadn't hired more people - the engineers (all 2 of them ;-)) were answering phone calls all day instead of coding. But they could've grown quite large just on Quicken.

There're a bunch of other ISVs that grew very large on very small teams, eg. Aladdin (StuffIt) and NullSoft (Winamp). Weren't many of Borland's early products (Quattro Pro, Turbo Pascal) also done by teams of about 4?
I hope drawing out a 1 page article over eventually 4 fails.
What if the Candidates Pandered to Economists?
Make Firefox to increase / decrease font size
This is my tips for today. Increase or decrease the text size to our need. Don't worry, this is very simple. Even my 3 year-old child could do it! If you are using Firefox right now, then you can try this pronto :
It is telling that none of you showed THIS graph:

http://tinyurl.com/5mv8hv

ie, the competing Microsoft service.
How Your Brain Can Control Time
I apologize for the pejorative tone. I overreacted to the word "most."

It's entirely possible, of course, that all the cities we're talking about are too large to be the best city, that in fact smaller cities (I'm in one right now - Ottawa, Canada) actually function better overall.
Do a literature search (I'll try to find mine), whether you have a effective /original named entity recognition algo, how scalable and domain-specific it is. This is also referred to, or covered in related research, as anaphora or antecedent resolution and co-reference / record linkage / deduplication. sounds kinda like a gazzetteer (sp?)

To quote one paper (ginormous project, 4 PI's at UIUC):

http://serrano.ai.uiuc.edu/doi/

==============

research on methods for Named Entity Recognition (NER) is voluminous but has tended to focus on the problem in widely used languages such as English, otherWestern European languages, Arabic, and Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
PHP uses files for storing sessions; you do want to restrict where on your site you are using sessions as they do have side-effects. Most notably any page served in a path configured for sessions will have an expiry time in the past and a bunch of no-cache headers; for a dynamic page that is the behaviour you want, make sure it's not being applied where it should not be.
try nosquint.
It's coming in Montreal too in Fall 2008:
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=654...

From the Gazette's article: Montreal plans to be the first city in North America to set up a large-scale "self-serve" public bicycle rental service.
I'm guessing that youre doing some kinda work in NLP, so you know where the literature is, but for folks who aren't, the first stop is

http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/

i have in my notes that NER was a conference task for 2003

http://www.cnts.ua.ac.be/conll2003/ner/
I want to be in complete control in my production machines (aka servers) not in my development machines. When I want to code I want to get it with the minimum hassle.
Since the last round, Microsoft has acquired Powerset, whilst Yahoo has lost top execs and done an ad deal with Google. Microsoft looks in a stronger position this time around.
Live expo was a total failure. Good riddance.
Phrasing stuff as a tautology sort of kills any discussion. History is full of examples of technology advances killing business models. The problem isn't the "free" part because the alternatives will end up costing money in some way (ad-supported at the very least), but the giant cost drivers that the now-dead model is stuck with. Buildings, machinery and people - too many of them.
This kind of projects brings fun traffic management challenges.

On late Friday/Saturday nights, it was impossible (experienced it myself) to find a bike for the taking in central Paris, since the flow of bikes was from the inner towards the outer Paris at that time.

Similarly, trying to find a bike after 9am on weekdays if you do not live in the center of Paris was impossible (experienced it myself): the flow of bikes was from the outer towards the inner Paris at that time.

That was Fall 2007.
> "You will have to appreciate the time and effort it took to run a search engine optimization campaign on the website he made you for your birthday, and how important that is to him. He shows his affection differently than other guys do sometimes."

That's funny.
Didn't Reddit go through a similar phase?
Especially since last Fall saw the serious public-transportation strikes in Paris. This for sure is a good incentive to force people to use those bikes :) People were getting up extra early to maximize their chances of putting their hands on a bike to go to work, as they couldn't use the subway!

But don't get me wrong, this project is an unequivocal success (as well as a political investment for Paris mayor Delanoë, preparing for the presidential elections in 2012).
Warning: Habits May Be Good for You
this isn't digg or reddit or techcrunch, so there is no need to submit stuff for the sake of submitting. Gotta keep the quality up or the essence of HH will be lost.
While I am bearish on SUN oops, JAVA, try to imagine what would have happened if Sun hadn't realeased Java for free. I suggest that the Internet boom would have created three families of tools fo rbuilding web applications:

Scripting (Perl, PHP, &c.), C++, and Microsoft.

Which one do you think most corporations would be using?

I agree that giving shit away isn't a source of revenue, but it can be a good way to play defense. In Sun's case, Java seriously hampered Microsoft's vision of the Internet future. If there was no Java, I believe Sun wouldn't exist today, because Microsoft would have taken 100% of the market for corporations creating public-facing web applications.

Sure, Sun's in rough shape. But at least they have a chance.
Worldwide Vacation Day -- Courtesy of Google
as long as its relevant, yes.
30 Abstract Satellite Images of Earth
Disqus is great. I switched blogging software so that I could have out of the box Disqus integration.

I hope they take their competitive advantage (they're just a little bit better than the alternatives) and sustain it.

FriendFeed and others are catching up, but I suspect with their heavy hitting VCs guiding them, they'll stay ahead of the pack.

I particularly like their open attitude about downtime and service quality. When they screw up, they post about it on their blog, apologize, and explain how they're getting better. This appears to be one item in the recipe for success.
We already know that free news is killing newspapers.

The headline of the article is "The Nightly News, Not-For-Profit" and the point is this: Since companies that produce reporting can no longer sell it, wealthy donors are stepping in to fund its production in order to disperse it for free. Herb Sandler (of moveon.org) is the example given and a frightening one at that. He's a hard leftist, and is using his personal fortune to fund propaganda operations.

I always wondered what would happen to the dead trade of journalism once newspapers were gone. I guess I know now. The mild constraints that the marketplace put on pinko media owners is finished, replaced with direct orders from the Sandlers.
Nerve-tapping neckband used in 'telepathic' chat
Lower power microcontroller runs on fruit
Ask YC: Agile Project Management with Scrum - Software?
I've been getting into Agile Project Management using Scrum for a while now. Currently, I've been using XPlanner (http://xplanner.org/), however, it is a pain and has plenty of bugs.

I was wondering if anyone out there knew of a better software, preferably free, for scrum management?
The "white bicycle" concept dates from 1965 and was proposed by Provo, a Dutch counter-culture movement. In a manifest (see http://www.gramschap.nl/provo/chrono/prpk5.jpg) they announced that they would place a white painted bike in the city center of Amsterdam which would become public property. The goal was to counter pollution of the city but it was also a statement against the increase of consumerism. After they placed the bike it was immediately confiscated by the police because it didn't have a lock.
The same can be said as a CEO, CTO, CIO, Managers, Accountant, Athletes or basically, anybody who works hard and always try to improve their skills to be successful.
yeah offering 1b when they can make 800mm with goog and not lose ownership is stupid. i think if msft offered the whole deal again at 32 it would have to be accepted though
Anybody here participating in this or contributing to Django in general?
I have had some success with:

ScrumWorks (there is a free and pro version)
VersionOne (paid only)
Jira (paid only, needs plugins)

Banana Scrum is free and looks good. It was talked about on HackerNews awhile back.

After experimenting with lots of this software, my team has reverted to the whiteboard for Iteration Goals, and sticky notes for the iteration's tasks. We've found that you can't beat the tactile qualities of post-it notes.

Items in a software package can be easy to ignore if you don't manage it closely. But if you look at the whiteboard and see more sticky notes in the "pending" column than there should be, you instantly know something is wrong and can dive in.
For some reason, this is becoming an increasingly common pattern amongst the websites of "mainstream media".

It's like they all got the same memo one Monday morning: Hey, if we break up our articles into 5 pages, we get 5X as many page views!
There is a moral statement to be made about sexual equality, but it is not the same statement that is made about income or intelligence. Various political groups find it useful to conflate the following types of equality:

1. Equality under the law/Equal rights as humans -- the law should treat men and women equally. "It is wrong to punish men more severely for crimes than women."

2. "Societal" equality -- the attitudes and viewpoints of mainstream society should consider men and women to be equal. "It is wrong to believe that women should have children."

3. Statistical equality -- men and women must be statistically identical for a politically useful class of statistics (e.g., intelligence). "Anyone who speculates that women are not as smart as/have different variance/etc is a sexist."

4. Equality of outcome -- men and women should achieve the same outcomes, for a politically useful class of endeavors. "Professors in every field should be 50% male, 50% female."

#1 and #2 are moral questions, #3 is a scientific one. #4 is a consequence of #1,#2 and #3. The moral statements are hardly rubbish, they are perfectly legitimate moral claims (I even agree with #1). The bullshit is trying to claim that 1 == 2 == 3 == 4.
Would you pay to access Youtube? Facebook? or even Twitter?
Most hot web services work only because they are 'free' for most users, scarcity doesn't help Youtube, Facebook,or Twitter. Think about all the pain caused with every Twitter outage. The early adopters simply get the 'I've been here longer than you' status when you display publicly how long they've been involved with your service.
Drum beats with Skittles [video]
What's really neat is that the "div selection" you can do on the iPhone to zoom in on a portion of a page lets you strip out ads on the left/right of the screen, making the experience even better.
a classic supply demand market for early adopters would work.

Give invitations for free while you are obscure

Grant 50 invitations to the early adopters

Start a bidding process for new adopters that closes every hour.

Thus allowing the early adopters to cash in on their invitations or give them away for free.

You control demand by selling your own unlimited supply of invitations (to cap the price or cap your expansion).
What I had in mind is more the classic pay services, a là 37 signals and the pro flickr accounts. Currently they work by having a free trial or functionality-limited version. I read somewhere to charge the producers, not consumers of content.
I'd still use OSX then virtualization to get to whatever OS I need. It does depend what sort of programming you need to do though.

Do many people still do systems programming? :/
As it turns out, I'm writing a free web Scrum PM tool.

Email me at my profile if you'd like to be in the closed beta. I had been planning on using it with just my large clients but if it is something you need I'm willing to help you out. (I'm also an Agile Coach and help teams adapt to agile and perform faster, in case I can be of any help there)