skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The articles get a decent response. Activity usually lasts 2-3 days but the users only click on other articles from there and then bounce.

There isn't a lot of promotion as most people view this as something they might use while traveling as opposed to adding content in the city they already reside in. And, thus, there is very little word of mouth.

I have seen some people join from marketing efforts, especially people who are leaving for a trip, but end up not using the site. I have a rough idea as to why (usability) but it is not concrete enough for a radical change
Six Greatest Science controversies of 2010
Bad News for Aspiring Gurus?
This rings true with me. I started my own startup in 2009 in what could be considered a relatively boring but proven industry. I focused on price and SEO and it is currently making decent money and growing 30% month on month.

I am still very excited and motivated by it all, but I can't help feeling just a little jealous when I see some of the 'cool' webapps that spring up on here.
Joe Wilcox: ’Why Verizon Won't Let Apple Announce iPhone'
Is there any way to find out the specific reason the book was not allowed to be published?
That's really very impressive, I can imagine coming back to this as a rapid-sketch tool in a way that I never could with SketchUp.

One suggestion: To aid camera/scene navigation, you might want to consider hotkey + drag to temporarily flip into camera move modes, even when in draw mode; many desktop 3D/CAD tools offer this. I'd opt for ctrl/⌘+drag for rotate, and allow your existing shift+drag for panning to work in draw mode.
Ask HN: Virtual or part-time CFO leads in Austin
I need a CFO for my new Austin based materials development start-up and am looking for leads, a virtual or part time CFO seems to be what we are looking for at this point. If anyone has any connections that they can pass along if would be helpful.
The big CES news Engadget missed
> What I add to the conversation is the observation that groupthinkers enforce conformity with downvotes.

No, you didn't add that. What you added was "only meanies will disagree with me".

And, even if you had added that, it's not all that interesting without specific support.

After all, they didn't actually laugh at Einstein but they did laugh at Bozo the Clown.
"If you can’t hit the T-ball why are you trying out for the majors?"

...this one struck a chord with me. I've released several iPhone applications over the last couple years, "scratching a personal itch" for the most part so I haven't given much though to who the "specialist" users might be for any of these apps and instead simply tried to design something that meets my personal needs and does so in a reasonably well-designed way.

Of course if one of my apps turned out to be a "hit" and was able to underwrite my attempts at the Google Lunar X-Prize, great!

That hasn't happened yet, but having read this and giving some thought to who could be a specialized audience for one or more of my apps has turned my mind on to marketing opportunities that don't have the "bland or sour taste" of most of the recommended ways of reaching a general audience.

Excellent work putting this into words that are graspable and actionable.
IBM Is (Still) The Patent King in the U.S.
Temporary Root HTC EVO Shift 4G With One Click VISIONary App [Guide]
Ask HN: How fast is too fast?
You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.

How fast is too fast? I made a post on thread, then read another and three minutes later attempted to post on that thread and got this message.

I want to read HN in ten minutes and be done. Do I now have to read one post every hour, just so I can reply?

Needless to say, in posting this, I got the error message. I'm posting this, the next day.
> "Getting to the moon was a complex problem, and I'm sure it took lot more than 2000 pages to explain the process of getting there."

Yes, but how many of those pages were written by congressional staffers?

> "Complex problems have complex solutions."

Not necessarily. Besides, the question is not whether the solution is complex, it's whether the proposal is a solution. The fact that a proposal is complex doesn't tell us whether it is a solution.
New Year, New Marketing Goals for Businesses
> Throw a dart at western Europe. Any of those places will provide a better quality of living for most people.

Which direction is the immigration pressure?
I doubt it had anything to do with format control, seeing as CineXPlayer was on the App Store well before VLC was and is still available: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id384098375?mt=8
Klout Snags $8.5 Million in New Funding
> Actually currency is more a debt than an agreement.
When you have a 20 € bill, the European Central bank "owns you 20 €".

What does it mean for the central bank to owe me 20 euros? Specifically, what do I get when they pay me what I'm owed?

If the answer is 20 euros....
For some, building software is the answer to the question: 'How can I make money?'

For others, building software is the answer to the question: 'What would I do all day if I didn't have to worry about making money?'
Thanks so much. I'm really happy with the team too.
To Groupon or Not to Groupon: The Profitability of  Deep Discounts
Do we need another web analaytics program
I was thinking about the future of my latest project this morning, and I realized that logically it should become a web analytics program. Now, this is something Google (and others) already do pretty well, so I'm trying to decide if it's worth the trouble.

Do we need another web analytics program, or is what we have 'good enough'? If not, what features would you love to see in an analytics site that you don't have right now?
First of all, it works perfectly in Firefox 4, since FF4 has the new Mozilla audio API. Anyways, the "save states" is really freeze states, since it saves the entire emulation into the offline storage, so you'll need to bump up the usual 5 MB limit for offline storage to something like 30 MB or so.
Hey, I totally agree with you. Dowvoting below 0 should only be for spammers/trolls. Profanity? Fuck no! I'd hate it if profanity got downvoted on here. See my comment from almost a year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161148

But the reality is, downvoting goes wrong sometimes. That shouldn't be such a big deal, though. It works most of the time. Just stick around and you'll see.
Couldn't you just post the link without tacking on a passive aggressive comment? Do you actually think Zimbabwe's actions are even in the same realm as the Fed's quantitative easing?
Show me a web framework written in Perl that I can dig into and understand with zero Perl experience

I think delving into any web framework with zero language experience isn't going to be easy :)

However here are two Perl web frameworks which (IMHO) are easy to follow:

* Mojolicious - https://github.com/kraih/mojo

* Tatsumaki - https://github.com/miyagawa/Tatsumaki
Cute, but I'm not so sure that using the same ID for all people you want to talk with is all that clever.

It's also vulnerable to traffic analysis, but then so all are all real-time mix networks like Tor.
> You end up focusing on the parts themselves, instead of their interactions, which is actually the important part.

Aren't interactions on what CRC cards put emphasis?
Not surprising, considering Justin Bieber uses up 3% of Twitter's infrastructure.[1]

[1] http://mashable.com/2010/09/07/justin-bieber-twitter/
1986 Privacy Law Is Outrun by the Web
This is a great example of "Don't stop doing what made you successful"

While I am sure this activity can be delegated, it warms my heart to see Craig still taking care of business.
Strange that it was banned. Maybe it had to do with the vignettes---some of the examples are from political science (e.g., election results, polling) and another deals with arsenic in drinking water...or maybe Hu Jintao feels the way to deal with hierarchal data is to cluster standard errors.
Perhaps those who downvoted you disapprove of your writing style and not your (allegedly good) intentions.

The downvoted comment has an unrehearsed, rambling air to it. Frequent comma splices and mis- and overuse of ellipsis (…) don’t help.

The writer is responsible for presenting their ideas effectively. It’s a common courtesy to spare the reader from deciphering a first draft of your ideas.
Global drop in spam e-mail is 'short lived'
It's a business failure. That's all he's saying. He's not calling himself a failure. When we say things like, "oh, that's not really a failure", when we highlight these moral victories, we delude people who are considering starting companies.
> We can only exist as human beings with rights if we respect our fellows' human rights.

What are said rights?

For example, do I have a right to food? If so, who is obligated to provide it? ("govt" isn't an answer.)

How about a right to live in the southwest US? (I may require a dry climate for health reasons.) How about with an ocean view for my piece of mind? How about a right to live near people who I like or away from folks whom I don't like?
Where are the Asian CEOs?
Gigapixel Computational Imaging
I believe the point was more that Google profits both from spammy search results AND from quality search results.

That's a conflict of interest, one well spelled-out in the original post: When removing all spam (let's pretend it's possible) will negatively impact revenue, even short-term, there's less motivation to do it.
Business failure = chapter 11, not selling it for a less than spectacular price.
For those seeing an Error 503, the post can be seen at the top of their blog: http://blog.flightcaster.com/
I think you're missing the same thing the author missed in the Jim Gettys' article. You cannot fix the situation easily in every situation if the ISP is not behaving correctly, contrary to what the post says. He was able to fix this specific scenario, because he was the bottleneck (he was generating more traffic / accepting promise of delivery) in this case. The original series of articles (I really recommend reading them - they've got a great deal of tech details) dealt with a bit different situation - the person was not even saturating the link. Problems started appearing because of the shaping on a link which actually should support the traffic - he could introduce fake bottleneck, which was not the point really, because he would be wasting some possible bandwidth. The problem there was mostly out of his control, although could be mitigated to some extent by local tuning (http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/mitigations-and-solut...).

I didn't want to say your solution won't work. But it's not going to solve all problems - it will work if you / your direct link is the bottleneck.
There are also decent SDL bindings for Perl. http://sdl.perl.org/
A bit off topic: what is your interactive JS sandbox? (Firebug, Chrome console, Rhino... ?)
Situation may be different. Co-founder may sell fast by promising more features. If it's done without consultations with tech co-founder it may break the architecture and development cycle completely. And in case feature was promised and never delivered customers will be disillusioned.
This is absolutely true. But two things: (1) Dan was already passionate about VisiCalc. It's not like he and Rich Franklin weren't particularly interested in numbers but thought they could save accountants a few bucks a day. And (2) You are describing something that might transform someone's job or disrupt an industry. That's very motivational. But this is not the same thing as "Hey, someone might pay a few bucks for these crud operations."

The ideal business is one where (a) you are already motivated by the subject matter, 2) you will transform somebody else's life or business, and III. they are willing to pay for it.
>I maintain: down-voting, should only be used for spammers, or for clearly defined things (like profanity being used etc.)

If you’re going for the sympathy vote you should go easy on the entitlement.
I confirm this. Opera 11 on Linux (11.01 - 1160).
I was aware of that, I was hoping for some "word on the street" type of information.
A gentler and more logical economics
Is there any GUI layout builder tools? Like qtbuilder?
I actually made pretty good money in the early 80's from programming games and later selling licensed software on the net.

Yes, large numbers of BBS's were dedicated to piracy but large numbers of meters of shelf space in retail stores were dedicated to 'boxed' software too.
No, Jacques. Re-read his comment. If I buy CSCO at 20 and sell it at 15, it isn't a decent investment just because I was able to offload it.
SageMath: Python-based Mathematics. Rock it.
I didn't realize that things in China are that crazy...
The author doesn't know, but he hypothesizes that it's because "the idea of prior distribution [is] contrary to Communism".
Rethinking Advanced Placement
Author warns of Russia's and China's 'Spinternet'
The adage "cock-up over consipiracy" comes to mind when reading this. What the author implies is that Google is knowingly keeping spam sites in their results so as to profit from them. Google is still the largest player in search by a good margin, so I suspect it is more the case that spammers are targeting their SEO spammy skills to Google's algorithm, and google just fails to withstand the onslaught.
The 41 Places to Go in 2011
Summary: You can get a better iPhone if you wait longer. If you buy a subsidized phone now, you can't get another subsidized one for a while.
They are the ones who spend the money,...

Consumption isn't useful to society. Society is useful in that it makes consumption possible, but that's not the same thing.

How do you define "work"? Obviously not manual labor.

I imagine he meant production, rather than work. A developer (potentially earning $200k/year) who builds an application can be hundreds or thousands of times more productive than a secretary (potentially earning $20k/year). The same applies to a manager who streamlines a production process, a consultant who outsources labor to where it is cheaper, or any number of other similar jobs.
Selling Quality
Interesting. I quite like that.

To me the most useful feature is the in site toolbar with the buttons expanded that just allows you to quickly switch between different sites results sets.

I suspect though that for 99% of users Google is all they ever touch, and the other 1% use a browser toolbar of some kind to redirect their searches. After all, in FF it's only 1 click and an enter keypress to switch to a different engine (assuming you've got the ones you want setup).

Have you thought about displaying multiple results side by side (or even interleaved)?
Mug: A New JavaScript compiler for the JVM
> If making money is the objective, I suggest going with the market-first approach

That's one way to do it, but not the only one. For example, it's not how Apple designs products -- their design criterion is whatever Jobs likes.
Probably because they're using Bayesian filters on various security fronts: internal threat analysis, the great firewall, whatever side projects some bureaucrat is using to pad his income.

This is a problem with classification/censorship schemes: the censors/classifiers are all stove-piped, so their decisions come with a high degree of variability. The censor may well have been unaware that this is a whole field of work, or, is aware, but isn't responsible for the censoring decisions about all other related titles.
Hiring talented hackers with deadly, insatiable thirst for knowledge (YC W10)
Instead of Stochastic Fairness Queuing, a better approach the bufferbloat problem from the end host is to enable RED/ECN on all client hosts. However, as the author mentions, this is going to massively hurt the non-ECN capable hosts in the network.

This approach is "better" because it is analytically proven that for a number of fair TCP stacks competing on an ECN enabled link, the average buffer occupancy can be controlled "around" a certain operating value, which puts a bound on the latency contributed by a particular link.

Also, I wonder if the bufferbloat problem becomes significant only in really small RTT networks. i.e., where the RTT is at least the same order of magnitude compared to queuing delays. On long distance links, my guess is that the propagation delays might dominate latencies.

I disagree with the point that a solution to bufferbloat is purely end-to-end, if that's what the author implied (Apologies if the author didn't mean this). Even if you have perfectly shaped end hosts, if they share a bottleneck link that's deep buffered, they both will suffer the latency problems.

Queuing/buffering in networks is a very nice research area. "How much buffering do we need in a network?" "What if I run a network with as small a buffer as possible?" There are some people who believe that there should just be O(1) buffering in the network. It has been theoretically and experimentally shown that TCP loses only 30% of the throughput if the bottleneck link in the network has a buffer size of just ONE PACKET! So the question here is: is 30% thput loss acceptable? If latency matters, then perhaps yes.
No. The world doesn't end when overvalued companies go through corrections or failures. It may seem that way for some people and for some time, but whole economies do not just stop working. And really, we're talking about Twitter and Facebook here, not Enron and Bear Sterns.
The problem with this approach is the domain is specialized enough that a 'throwaway' team may not be able to make contributions to begin with. I plan to grow this company into something longer term so the quicker I can recruit good people the better.
New Year's Resolutions I Wish Your Company Would Make
twitter-text-rb - Twitter's text processing library for tweets (Ruby)
Notes on implementing MongoDB driver
I believe he says that SQF+TBF is bad because SQF will first sort the packets before being sent to the TBF. This causes your high bandwidth applications to be less likely to drop packets because of the sorting and therefore cause your low bandwidth applications to drop more packets than you want. Without the sorting, you would have been more likely to drop the high bandwidth application packets because they come up more often. Again, they're not coming up "more often" anymore because they are sorted and sent in a round-robin fashion.

I'm not sure why you couldn't just buffer them first and then sort them to solve this problem but I'm not a clever network engineer so I am certain I am missing a lot of knowledge here.
How would you label cuil?
Which seems more than a little ridiculous to me, but ... it is China.
This was my gut feeling: not only is building a product first the easier thing to do (in my case), it helps me in the secondary step. I guess the true skill is ascertaining once you have a 'minimum viable prototype' to show to prospective coworkers.
This uses Tor's hidden services. The project page says each client makes 3 "random hops" and meet in the middle to create a secure tunnel. The communications never leave the Tor network so, I could be wrong, but I don't think traffic analysis applies here.
Thanks so much. Any insight from your startup we could benefit from?
"I think that the next printing of our book should have "Banned in China" slapped on the cover. That should be good for sales, right?"

I would buy that in a heartbeat
"Hacker News Classic, and other stuff you probably didn't know about HN"
Paraschopra has written one the secrets to building a low risk/high returns web app which re-echoed here using founding
http://www.sharefile.com/blog/seeking-startup-advice-look-no...

In my opinion, those of us who want to build business shouldn't focus a high risk / high return approach of building b2c apps dependent on advertising and large user base. We can easily swing for the fences in our second satrt-up. Two examples of people that took this aaproach are Djarmesh shah of hubspot and Joel spolsky with stackexchange. These were there second start-ups after selling the 1st in the case of Dharmesh and making mony from fogcreek in the case of Joel.
I would seriously doubt this is the reason. If you want to learn applied Bayesian stats, you go to a machine learning or game theory conference or read research papers. There are plenty of Chinese citizens doing both, including low-level university students, so this really can't be the reason.

I would think that the reason has something to do with objectionable content inside this specific book, perhaps in an example problem as another commenter noted.

Bayesian stats have been around for a very long time, and it's senseless to try to block textbook-level access to it, unless you're really trying to block just the textbook itself.
I like it, but you need to do this in a way that you append a known/deterministic string so you can monitor THAT one in Google Alerts.

I don't care whether the unique strings collide (although I love the idea of being able to tie the IP address of the crawler to the page on which the content was published for maximum evidence collection), I just want Google Alerts to find them reliably AND I don't want the spammer to catch on and be able to easily remove the unique strings before I catch him.

The only way for him to find my little landmines (to strip them) would be to read through every piece of content he scraped from me.
I don't get it, the MVP of this site is a landing page? I have clicked "Like", but was not presented with any beta access. Is this just a thought at this point? I like the idea, I want to see some 'beef'.
A global trouble-ticketing system. Fixing things.
I'll combine the first two and say that I estimate I can complete a prototype in about 2/3 of my runway. I do not have anyone specific in mind for partners (which is why part of me wants to get working on that early).
اهداف مباراة البحرين وكوريا الجنوبية
Paraschopra has written one of the secrets to building a low risk/high returns web app which is re-echoed here by the founder of sharefile.com.
http://www.sharefile.com/blog/seeking-startup-advice-look-no...

In my opinion, those of us who want to build a business from our startup, shouldn't focus on the high risk / high return approach of building b2c apps dependent on advertising and large user base. According to Amy Hoy, we can all easily build a 30 x 500 wep app (http://unicornfree.com/30x500/). That is 500 customers paying $30 per month which gives us $15k monthly and $180,000 annually. With just 500 users and this finances in place, we can then swing for the fences in our second start-up, knowing that we don't have to eat ramen or beg anyone for funding in the beginning. This also ensures we have the power to take investments only from the right kind of investors and more importantly, it put us in a position to retain controlling shares in the new start-up. Two examples of people that took this approach are Dharmesh shah of hubspot and Joel spolsky with stackexchange. These were there second start-ups after selling the 1st in the case of Dharmesh and still making money from fogcreek in the case of Joel.
I don't know, I didn't follow cuil that closely. My understanding is they took significant VC. So their team probably got paid close to market salary. So, if they returned all the capital to investors, they "didn't fail", and if they didn't return capital, they did.
Not on HN
I think they mean $20 worth of value be it gold or some other bankable theoretical material. Originally us dollars were tied to physical gold assets
Old-style Mac OS X Leopard Exposé in Snow Leopard