skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dating sites are a stupid idea in the first place. Your system or algorithm cannot ever hope to compete with 30 seconds of face to face interaction, ideally with that first meeting occurring by way of mutual friends.

Sorry, but building a better dating web site is trying to drive a nail with a screw driver. People who need help dating need a larger and more active social circle. They don't need a dating website. Anyone trying to sell a dating site will inevitably discover they're hawking snake oil and surrender to that reality.
I wonder if the server runs Debian.
A Deep Dive Into The Paris Startup Scene
Here's the podcast of a talk I (and many others) gave on APIs at South by Southwest. I think it provides some great guidelines.

http://blog.carlmercier.com/2008/06/17/podcast-building-deve...
You forgot handbags and gossip.
The one thing that stands out for me is that TripLog has inadvertently generated a ton of publicity (and maybe a bunch of people willing to offer free help). The next version will have a professional UI and sell a gazillion copies.
Where is this unreadable perl? I can't find it. I have no problem reading perl by all kinds of people.

C, on the other hand, is frequently indecipherable because so many lines are spent doing something trivial that it's easy to lose the forest for the trees.
3 Resources for Web Designers
YC: Is anybody working on visual search problems?
I've been working on some novel technology (so far as a hobby) that would be useful for a visual web search service.

I have a few fun ideas of my own that I'll be applying it to, but I'd be interested in hearing from anybody that may be working on similar projects in a more serious manner than me - perhaps we could collaborate in some way..

- Andy.
Cool!

Its a very detailed analysis of analytical sites. Examples shown serve different fields - travel and web traffic. And even usability of analytical sites is broken down by time!

That was a great read for. I am developing a set of news analysis tools and this post helps.

But I am still wondering what could be done in my case?

I have a totally varied set of tools. Some of them show graphs, some maps and some text data. I have separated the mashup into sub-tools. But now after reading this post, it makes me think about presenting the overview of all the types of results on the overview page like the Google Analytics dashboard. Then, I still have to think about users with slow internet connections, since the page load time might increase (and there might be time out errors from my servers resulting in half-loaded pages).
I saw an interesting solution to this by the brits a couple years ago.. I think the site was "datemymate" or something to that effect.

Essentially the idea was that the friends of someone would sign up, and then start writing their friends profile - the idea I think was to mimic how women find their friends dates in the real world.

From what I understand, their female/male ratio was very good to the point where at times the females outnumbered the men - whereas on other dating sites this is just not the case.
Yes. Futures speculation is a zero sum game. There's a loser for every winner, so blaming speculators for price movements in the spot market is absurd. What about the speculators who have lost? Spot prices are well above the delivery price of most maturing futures contracts.

If politicians want to pillory traders and suppliers the charge should be keeping prices too low in prior years and being foolishly shortsighted. The price should have risen much higher much sooner to encourage conservation and inventory. Current market conditions should have been more broadly foreseen and the increase should have been more gradual and sooner. Current prices are clearly justified by supply and demand, future expectations thereof, monetary policy, and geopolitical concerns.
The Bill of Rights does not secure the right to earn a profit. Every one of these corporations had a choice between doing the right thing and doing the easy thing.

A true patriot would fold the business before allowing it to be used to infringe upon the rights of citizens.

We can blame Bush and we can blame Congress, but first we should blame ourselves for letting it go this far.
Seth's Blog: The limits of meta
Just imagine this with 80 columns, 24 rows, a black background, a lime green foreground, and no mouse:

|==========================================================|
| 21:33 CALL CENTER SYSTEM 07/09/08 |
| |
| ENTRY TYPE: __ OPERATOR ID: 127 |
| CALL CODE: __ SHIFT NBR: 2 |
| CUST NBR: ______ ____________________ AGENT MODE: 3 |
| ____________________ |
| ____________________ |
| __________, __ _____ |
| |
| CHANGE CODE: __ |
| CALLER ID: ___/___-____ |
| REQUEST TYPE: __ ______________ |
| MONITOR: ___ |
| |
| COMMAND: _____________________ |
| |
|==========================================================|
So, you could say that a dating site needs a different focus that can complement the real-world somehow?
New to CSS? New to CSSnewbie? Start Here
Google Lively FAQ
Testing the Long Tail's First Test
Comparing travelocity and kayak is interesting, but the best flight scheduling interface is ITA's demo app (seems to be down right now):

http://matrix.itasoftware.com/

It gives a color coded matrix of flights, and all the info is captured in one screen. I think orbitz and others use their optimizer as a backend.
Mark Cuban to Show New Movies on TV Before Theatrical Release
How Youtube Can Fix Their Revenue Problem
I bought one because the other notepads and notebooks I've used before did kind of suck. The binding especially was awful on those previous notebooks. But I'm no elitist, I just use a cheap blue pen :D
Channeling PG for a moment: Make something people want.

I think that on the whole, most dating sites are more concerned with figuring out how to make a buck off someone than what their users want.

If you use Wordtrackers keyword tool which people normally use for SEO purposes and type in "dating"... 4 out of the top 10 keyword are related to free dating sites, but how many dating sites can you name that are free?

I can only think of one off the top of my head (penty of fish) - and Markus is making a killing with his site. [edit: if you take the social networks like facebook and myspace into account, you have a couple more - but the traffic to those sites is less qualified, IE not people specifically looking for dates]

I think that if you can build a decent site (it really doesn't have to be that fancy) that you can run free - I think you would have a better chance at success than simply trying to build more complex functionality and charge people for it.

Make the site simple, make it user friendly.
Tapulous Wants To Be The RockYou Of Apple’s App Store
Gangplank: Making Phoenix Awesome
Honestly I don't why someone would downmod your comment. I think it plays well with the "Trust" points idea I've pitched a few comments up.
What a bunch of crap.

Climate change is a fact. But unlike the hole in the ozone layer (which is being fixed), when there are HUGE economic interests involved, a change in enviromental politics is really hard to make.
Domaintools shows they have 'private registration' and a established SSL cert even though they're not using one and on the site claim they're 'getting one soon'

http://whois.domaintools.com/sshkeygen.com

Pretty fishy.. or should I say.. phishy?
Most people here need to look into what OPTIMAL in a gametheoretic sense means.

It doesn't mean optimal in the way people normally use it.

A player playing gametheoretically optimal will beat ALL other players.
That is however not the same thing as playing the most exploitative poker against every single player.

So the perfect bot would beat all the other players in the world, including the best human but if the bot plays the worst pokerplayer in the world and so does the best human player then the best human player might beat the worst human player for more money than the bot would beat the worst human player.
30 things every entrepreneur should know how to do
Mounting a legal defense wouldn't cost the business owner any money; in fact, they wouldn't even need a lawyer. If anyone sued them they could go to court and lose instantly and be in the clear legally. But instead they acted without being compelled to by a court. That's what makes their actions illegal and that's why they deserve to be in jail.
I wonder if there's a market for an OCR web service?
The Pirate Bay Wants to Encrypt the Entire Internet
Whenever I find an open source project thats written in a language I understand, I usually take awhile to explore the web code repository and see what kind of structure they have setup and how their code is interacting.

I don't know of any qualifiers that separate good from bad, but if you follow basic coding conventions and the thing works (and is secure) you are probably good enough. Either way, its a good way to learn.
I am working on image and videosearch, just getting started though.

Are you talking about that or more like robotics systems?
I think the target user for sites like travelocity is probably fairly inflexible in their preferences. They want higher income, price insensitive business people who specifically want from point A to point B at time X. The sites and airlines don't really want to cater to College Kid Joe who's carefully weighing his options and playing around with them to save $150. Those people just don't drive revenue.
But the agent-principal conflict shows up in every kind of business. You hire a plumber, and you have to accept that he can a) just do the job right, b) waste a lot of time, and still get it done, and charge you extra (how are you supposed to know?), or c) experiment with some awesome wrenching and piping methodology he picked up in the latest issue of Plumber Weekly.

The difference between the plumber and Amaranth is that it's much easier to quantify when Amaranth is screwing around. Even before a blowup, some strategies have a 'signature' -- high leverage + low volatility + long illiquidity + short liquidity, for example -- that can tell you ahead of time when you're dealing with a crafty gambler.
How did you find this site?
I wonder if he's a bigger threat than Gruber making fun of the WWDC two-polo episode.
I felt the same way about 'Thinkpad + Ubuntu' vs MBP.
First artificial DNA a step towards biological computers
For logos, you can try running a contest on a site like worth1000.com (there are other similar sites, but that's the one we used). You get a lot of choices for only a couple hundred bucks, and you can always work with the artist to refine your top choice.

edit: didn't see the comment above before I posted.
There is another problem with this argument: on one hand you have bankruptcy of a business, on the other hand you have collusion of state and corporations to crush individual rights.

It's about priorities.
Playboy Asks Which Female Blogger You’d Like To See Sans Clothing
Mind games: computer headset lets brain control action
Hmm... Maybe poker AI is about more than number crunching. Anyway... Interesting tidbit: craps is structured so that the pass line bettor will lose 50.7% of the time. That 0.7% provides casinos with billions in profits every year. I would think that any decent poker player would have to be able to calculate odds with better than a 2% error rate.
I was especially amazed by the syntax for quoting and forced evaluation. Very nice and seems better for some cases than the lisp backquote.
Frameworks are great, but they're not a substitute for knowing the actual language well.
Check out NanoSolar. They have built solar cell printing technology that prints much faster and much cheaper than anything else on the market. The material installs somewhat like wallpaper.

http://www.nanosolar.com/
How the 7 Deadly Sins Could Lead the United States into a Depression, not Recession.
This is funny. Reminds me of the chap who wondered on an online forum about how to hack his school's server, and forthwith acted upon the advice from the forum to send a "ping of death" to the i.p. address "127.0.0.1"! :-) Could just be an urban legend, but still amusing!
It could be your Flash player. Make sure you have the latest update.
It's not collusion. The telecoms didn't call up Bush and say "hey, anybody want any phone records? We can work together and really screw Americans."

It's directors of large corporations trying to do their job of representing the shareholders, and their job as citizens complying with the government.
Chip makes broadband 60 times faster
That makes so little sense that I hope you mis-worded it. You're not thinking from the perspective of a business owner. I've been taken to court before, and when facing that situation you don't think "well, I'll go represent myself and lose, and then I'll be in the clear legally." That makes no sense.

Your thought process is more like "fuck, I better find a good lawyer." Being taken to court is serious stuff. And I've never been taken to court by the government. That's really serious stuff.
That doesn't matter. There's no corporate size limit at which you no longer have to comply with government orders. In fact, the fact that they're publicly traded means they're exposed to shareholder lawsuits if the shareholders decide that the people in charge aren't doing their duty to represent them. Especially by, say, wasting a bunch of money on legal bills to fight the government.

I just can't envision running a corporation in a world in which you could be penalized for complying with the government. What Sarb-Ox has done to publicly traded companies, this would do 10x to all of them.
HTML or XHTML: Does It Really Matter?
Fruit Loopt
No. A dating site needs a big FDA warning label that says "This is a load of snake oil and can never work. Go get a life."

Maybe a site can help people get a life, but it wouldn't be a dating site. And I think the best site for that is a glorified local bulletin board, which is pretty well saturated by craigslist and the local alt papers/sites.
It really depends on the niche that you're targeting.

For example, I know of an online store that sells wine but they sold wines that came from a fairly specific region - when they started marketing their site, they sent free bottles of wine to various wine blogs and reviewers, with a very simple "With Compliments" card.

They didn't ask to be reviewed, but ended up being reviewed favourably anyway, and garnered a decent amount of traffic.

Anyway, the point of the story is that if you are targeting people who are passionate about a specific area of interest, you can often get away with giving something that has more than a monetary value as long as you are being creative.

At least thats my opinion.
This has been referenced before on News.YC; this is an interesting paper about the design and implementation of ITA's optimizer.

"Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning" by Carl de Marcken (2003)
http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...
These websites exist to solve people's problems in dating, and dating problems are like depression in that there are so many causes that it's impossible to find a single cure.

The bureaucratic categories that people have to box themselves into for many of these websites are not very useful. For example, "Christian/Protestant" and "Atheist/Agnostic/Other" are enormous categories. Instead of equality-matching over these bureaucratic buckets, a better matching question might be something like "Do you meditate?".

Dating ultimately comes down to interpersonal chemistry, which is very subjective. By contrast, online dating often comes down to objective criteria like race, age, and religious affiliation, which simply aren't usually relevant in predicting whether a match is possible.

If I were to build a dating site, I would:

1. Unapologetically make it a niche site for intellectuals, targeting people from solid schools and graduate programs. This is a group of people who (1) tend to prefer each other, and would pay a premium for an elite dating site, and (2) tend to have difficulty in dating that is not due to personality problems.

2. Use Amazon book-recommendations style comparisons to define a metric for "similar tastes" in books, movies, and hobbies, then match people based on that. My site would be AI-driven, because while interpersonal chemistry is really difficult to nail down, one can probably get closer by using similar artistic inclinations than by assessing people according to bureaucratic categories.

3. Concentrate on building a real off-line community, with meetups and speed-date events, which the dating site would supplement. This would implicitly imply that the site would be focused on a few major cities, at least when it started.
Very nice, although they could have reversed the roles of square and ordinary brackets. Especially since square brackets mean "list of stuff" in most scripting languages.
Yeah, thanks, I agree with what you mentioned as well. From my experience, people tend to date within their social circles because of those very reasons.
I am thinking from the perspective of the business owner. Let's say the government asks me to wiretap for them. I say no because it would be illegal, but if it weren't illegal then I would gladly do it (as an evil telecom). So the government then goes to court to compel me to do it. I go to court and put up no defense and I lose. Now because the government has a court order mandating that I allow them to wiretap, if I do allow them to wiretap then I cannot be held accountable. I don't see what is so misguided about this.
Does the code do what it's suppose to?
Is it maintainable?
Is it scalable?

If you answered Yes to all the above...then you are doing fine.
re part 3 - thats not necessarily the case.

Often some good looking women are single for lengths of time as a result of their looks. Its a weird paradox, but its true

Case in point: Halle Berry - she is one of the hottest women on the planet, but is often single.

There are two possible reasons for this, firstly men just assume that she is not single, as a result of her looks and status. Secondly, perhaps some men are intimidated by her looks and status and simply dont approach her as a result. In regards to celebrities, it seems that this can happen often.

Either way, Being good looking != being instantly attached or approachable.
Shared Hosting is Doomed (and I have the graphs to prove it)
I've been thinking about the economics of hosting for a little while. Here are my reckonings.
Savings Bonds
Commentary about Savings Bonds.
Dell coupons
Commentary on how to find the best Dell coupons.
I wear a blazer when I leave the home/office for this reason - I always have a Mead (or whatever Walgreen's has on sale) top-flip spiral notebook in the inside right breast pocket.

Good for notes, thoughts, and writing down phone numbers. Much better than napkins or business cards after a certain hour of the night.
An older movie by the same authors--"Fargo"--was based on facts and was even better than "No Country for Old Men."
To my understanding, the only thing that can safely protect you is to wear a Pirate hat and Eye patch at all times.

Consuming copious amounts of Rum may or may not work, as the only people that recommend this strategy are generally drunk - so this information is unreliable at best.

Hopefully on September 19th* we can co-ordinate a proper defense to take out this imminent threat

*September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day
How to botch a demo
And in any case, this is highly applicable:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dju9y5BdVQ
No, let's blame our parents for raising us to be this way!

No, let's blame THEIR parents.

I blame you.
To Steve and Apple, it's not about bad press and good press.

It's about CONTROL. And an anonymous writer posting to a blog pretending to be the man himself... well, that's the opposite of control.
you sir, win the Internets.
How a Classic Man-in-the-Middle Attack Saved Colombian Hostages
Some people don't care in where they write; $1 notepad is just fine for them. But sometimes, this same person is very particular in what they wear; hence, for example, they buy a very expensive jeans at $100. So let's ask them, "What the hell is wrong with a $30 jeans?"

In a nutshell, different people have different ways in manifesting their sense of egoism.

P.S. I am not a moleskine user.
Man. Where's the credit card field? I want to pay for such a sweet service.
Proprietary software is never better.
No. No no no no no no. Please no Onion on the Hacker News front page.
John Gilmore (employee number 5 at Sun, and co-founder of the EFF and cypherpunks) tried something similar in the late 1990s: http://www.toad.com/swan.html
kool, Im a SGSN/GGSN engineer by trade, but I don't do the programming aspect.
Eee Video test after 1g ram upgrade | My Philly Network
May be we should do something about it!?
"... so I appreciate the benefits of free software as much as anyone.

But at home I use some proprietary technologies too. Windows and OSX can be found on the computers there, because they’re still both much more user-friendly than the free alternatives for everyday use, and they have a far more vibrant ecosystem of developers and applications."

Obviously you don't appreciate the benefits as much as anyone.
Girls Dressup Games Online
girl dressup games is games for girls who love to dressup. here you'll find alot of dressup games and much more.
Huge need for a simple web application for doctors
Same. I tend to erase and retype, or ctrl-left back a few words, select, very quickly overwrite.
Memory upgrade for the Eee | My Philly Network
Why isn't this being covered widely?
As the guy in the family who gets the call when computers don't work, I wasn't surprised when I got the call today that mom & dad's computer lost connection to the Internet. After all the troubleshooting was complete, the DSL modem was on and connected, the computer was talking to the DSL modem just fine, etc., I said he needed to call his ISP. AT&T (rebranded from SBC/Yahoo!) in the Texas town where they live had an automated recording giving them a Microsoft phone number to call.

After being on hold for nearly an hour at that Microsoft number, the operator gave him a case # and said told him he could either call back in a day or two with that case #, or wait on hold for up to 4 hours - as the Microsoft techs dealing with this issue are swamped. It is apparently a VERY big issue. I can't find ANYTHING in the news about it.

What I did find was this: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4304820.ece. I found that highly curious, and probably related, but dad hasn't had ZoneAlarm on his machine for over 2 years, and I removed it myself.

I can't believe that either or both of these issues aren't getting more coverage? What's the matter...is twitter down again?
From the article, it seems his goal was not met yet. However he is very proactive in fighting the illegal net spying. Maybe the Pirate Bay guys should consult him too.
My observation is that online dating not only works but has by now become totally mainstream. I keep hearing about couples which met on the Internet, in fact I would say that this is true about 100% of the weddings I'm attending this year. It's no longer something that warrants even a lifted brow. My perception may be biased by living in the Bay Area, but even if so, then it's just a matter of time.

This does not mean that the dating sites are particularly good right now, just that the demand is so great that people are willing to suffer the poorest UIs to get to the good stuff.
There is proven benefit to dressing reasonably well. You look better and people treat you better. Cheap clothing is also generally a false economy: the more expensive stuff lasts longer, at least for men's clothing.

None of these clear-cut advantages apply to silly fashion accessories like pens or notepads.
a better title would be: "Techcrunch once again reports non-tech news in order to get more page views"
MS Windows update causes web blackout