skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why don't you let the market decide? Let users decide.

1. Build a prototype

2. Launch it

3. Get feedback from users

4. Make changes*

*which may mean you need to move onto another idea and build a new prototype

Embrace "failure".
Could be interesting with a flattr-like system where people pay a lump sum every week, and the people whom you thank/upvote the most gets a proportionately big amount of your monthly fee (aside from the share Quora takes).

Keeps away the tossers and rewards the people who take the time to help. Of course, there's the chance that people start gaming the system in order to earn all the money, somewhat similar to a content farm.
this is also my strategy. If you are willing to do a bit of hardware work, you can make them last forever; parts for used thinkpads are easier to come by than just about any other model of laptop I know of.
Manufactured rivalry: Brady and Manning
I've discovered that most of my ideas are usually missing one thing. I have a group of friends that also have a ton of ideas, and I bounce all of my ideas off of them. Most of the time we agree that something is simply missing, and we can't figure it out. Sometimes though, someone will say something that makes the project an obvious green light, and that's when I go for it.

For me, this final idea is usually the difference between "this project is going to be awesome" and "this project is going to be awesome and I know exactly how I'm going to get people to use it."
CloudMade buys vector-mapping firm
Xkcd: Good Code
Right-click, Inspect Element `white-space: normal`

No more scrolling.
I still remember my days on the decwroter\r\e\t\oiter
Please, tell me more about poverty, as I have never lived it and cannot possibly understand. Then I will tell you more about life before electricity, which I understand completely.

The second clause of each of those sentences has the same truth value as the other.
It will show any purchases or rentals made in iTunes (including the App Store) on any platform. Apple will also email you a receipt after a purchase (including free "purchases").
how's that Google Chrome Web App store doing?
I don't know it seems so weird to see it like that, fix login bug seems more like a todo than an action.

I could understand if it were in this format: Fixes login bug. Updates copyright year. Ignores log directory. Those seem so much more like actions than the other.
I had a window manager on an old Linux box (I forget which one) that would replace the "OK" text on dialog boxes with random interjections: "Oh, well" or "Damn!" or "Huh..." :-)
Yes, it's definitely different in the mobile world. Mobile is still a very small portion of overall web use though. It's difficult to tell if StatCounter includes all mobile browsers in their overall stats, but they do at least include the iPad. Either way it would barely make a dent in overall numbers. http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-2009...

You can see a comparison of mobile OSs here: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-200912-20101...
Global warming does not really matter (and we can't do anything about it).

Oil production of almost all countries has already peaked (this is undisputed). The only nations where production hasn't peaked yet (Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia) are expected to peak in this century.

What will happen when we have a global peak? Just look at the state of the current economy and imagine energy costs exponentially rising. There are also economic scenarios that do not predict a huge rise in energy costs, but most (all?) of them predict a shrinking economy.

"Green energy" is not the solution to this problem. Yes, it's a replacement for oil (at a much smaller scale), but it does not prevent rising energy costs. In the short-term things like coal will be a replacement for oil and will dramatically increase CO2 emissions. And it's rather unlikely that any country will abide to CO2 emission agreements, when its own energy supply is at stake.

I think that we'll see some rather large changes during the next decades. And global warming is only one among many other larger problems.
Your logic is flawed here. You're basically saying the author's statement that the "poor are blessed in industrialized nations" is incorrect because of people who are not blessed for reasons other than simply being poor.

By that same logic we could say the poor are overwhelmingly blessed because some people who are technically poor live in mansions with their wealthy parents.

That's why we use generalizations in theoretical discussions. The author uses the generalization of "the poor" as people who are poor but have no other serious problems or benefits. In that context he's right.

And my experience confirms that because the aide was there and available to anyone who wanted it. I wasn't special. As I said just the opposite was true. My Mom squandered much of the Aide given to us and we STILL got by. So in a general sense others should be able to as well.

Finally as others have pointed out here the author's point is wealth is relative. Even those living on the street of the United States are tons better than many of the people living in third world countries.
Releasing an iPhone game: Whack-a-Kitty three weeks later
They'll sell millions the first weekend. There will be lines stretching around blocks. People have been waiting for the iPhone to come to Verizon for years. Don't think this won't be a huge event.

Now, when a Verizon customer needs a new phone, they'll have a choice between Android devices and the iPhone. The iPhone, with all its allure and emotional value attached to it, against a dozen Android devices all running different versions of the OS, all with different capabilities and different advertising campaigns. Everyone knows what an iPhone is. Few people can name more than 1 or 2 Android devices unless they're a geek.
If the government could change the way they pave roads to save money while still having the same quality of road, it would be good for them to do so.

If they could make pennies for cheaper, it would be good to do so.
You make a series of egregious assumptions in your analysis of poverty. First, is that "productivity" is fixed in any way. New skills can be learned, attitudes can change, etc. I would especially argue against the idea that leisure is a virtue amongst the poor, instead arguing that depression and social alienation are greater issues than a culture of leisure.

Second, you ignore the point that welfare, in the U.S., is not perpetual. TANF expires after 60 months. Unemployment runs out. Disability requires a disability, etc.

In fact, there's a strong case against what you're arguing, because countries such as Norway, Sweden, Germany, which have extensive welfare systems, do not follow the trajectory of encouraging low productivity as you would suggest they do.
The NFL is at least mostly on OTA broadcasts that can be picked up well with a cheap antenna. There are only a few OTA broadcast baseball games with my team per season (when it's the Fox Saturday Baseball game). All the others are on a regional sports network, Sun Sports. They're in HD and look great, but cable/satellite is the only way to get them.
There's possible value is calling out the genericness of getting to the empty form vs the specificness of the submitting the data on a single instance of the form. "Create user" takes you to a form that has potential to be any user (because it's empty), "Create this user" finalizes the action based on the filled-in data on the form.
Don't you mean:

> Exactly. That's why you write it to the lowest common denominator, so
> that everyone can use it well.

Reads great!
I've been following the thread and I commented on Michael's site, but thought it would be worth sharing on here as well: http://hoisie.com/post/a_warning_to_hackers_be_careful_build...

Since most of you probably don't know me, I'm director of the platform at Twitter.

Let me know any questions/comments you might have. I'm interested in an open discussion about it.

Ryan / @rsarver
I wasn't listing out ways to resolve the hypotheses, just a method for using hypotheses to drive the startup. Talking to potential customers is obviously an essential step in resolving questions like "what features are people willing to pay for?" or "will people be willing to pay anything for this?"
Perhaps, but it couldn't have been too bad - she's the one who became a physicist.
Don't worry about it. I've been through this countless times as I'm sure all creative people have. It's depressing, but the other side of the coin is that this is the thing that gives you confidence in the right ideas. The trick is to keep doing what you're doing and wait for the time when an idea comes along in which you can't identify any fatal flaws and that you don't seem to be able to stop thinking about. Don't bank on having a perfect idea, all will require adjusting and lots of persistence to implement. Just like natural selection the good ones will hang around. Have patience, wait for these ones. If they have been destroyed by weeks, months or even years of critical thinking then they're the ones to lean towards.
Instead of letting you talk yourself out of ideas, let others talk you out of the ideas. Thrash anything you come up with. Ask other potential users if they would use it. Ask if they would pay for it. I think you're probably wasting a lot of time jumping into the code without talking to others. Before you know it, you'll hear "You know, that's a really good idea..." You'd actually be surprised how honest friends can be; or maybe my ideas are just that bad...
Pixelmator goes exclusive to Mac App Store
Pro-tip I learned from Peter Thiel's 20 under 20 application:

To avoid the wait, try and answer the question "How are you going to change the world" on paper. Try and make it at least a page. If everything you come up with sounds like a sham, it's probably not that good of an idea.
Sorry, accidental downvote, meant to upvote!
Anything like this in Boston that people know about?
Ask HN: Do you use SEO software?
More specifically, tools that give the PageRank, inbound links, keyword analysis, etc. for a domain.
I take cold showers immediately before going to bed. Hasn't failed me yet! Now if only I could get my neighbors to be quiet so I could stay asleep...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2031470
Californians braces for 59% health premium hike
I do something even worse: I often take my ideas all the way to a finished implementation, and then fail to launch them. My only advice, to both of us, is "stop doing that" ;)
How To Promote Your Blog And Get More Traffic -The Copy Paste Blog
I don't think it is vague at all. For one reason.

Hitting the "Submit" button happens within a context.

The person just filled out a form. That form showed up in their web browser because they navigated to the page the form was on. Much of the time that navigation was the result of clicking on a descriptive link, like "Create an Account". The person filling out the form knows that they are completing a task that they started by filling out the form. Submit, as others have said here, is a perfectly logical name for the button (just like submitting a paper form to a real person).

You could try to make it more descriptive, but you run the risk of confusing the user with things like "Create Account". I agree with others here, that in some contexts, and for some users, rather than clarifying what is happening, you will confuse them into thinking the "Create Account" button starts the process over again at a blank form (rather than submitting the form they just filled out).

Also, it isn't like this is new technology. Anyone who has any significant amount of experience using the web in the last ten years (or more even) has filled out an HTML form, and a high percentage of those forms have submission buttons that read "Submit". Even non-technical users understand it. I can't think of a single case where a person has talked to me because they have been confused by a "Submit" button. And of the few people I can think of that might have trouble with an HTML form, renaming the submit button would do absolutely no good (because they are the type of people who are so afraid that they'll do something wrong on the computer and delete all the information in the known universe :-D )

(laughing to myself as I click the "reply" button -- I missed that part of your comment until after I noticed the button)
Is that a lot? Any numbers how how much software is acquired by any other means on any given day?
Sublime is great, but closed-source and is going to charge for use. Many of the open source players beyond just VideoJS are just as good, IMO. Also depends on what you need.
The new house is in Midtown, the Facebook house is not.
I'd have to say the benefit of html5 video is greater on mobile devices and Macs, domains where Flash performance has traditionally been terrible, and where a content provider will most likely spend effort in patching UX.

It'll be a bit until WebM chipsets come out for the incoming flood of Android tablets, and since h.264 is the easiest target, I can't see the current statistics really influencing the encoding of video until Android can make a dent. Flash video works great for the 90% of computers running Windows and the plugin, so why fix something that works?
Despite the unfortunate reference to the iPad, the poster has a point. We are better off than the 'kings of yore'. We have access to better housing, heat and air conditioning, abundant and varied food, easy and affordable access to education and medical care and medicine, electric light, personal transportation, personal security and the list goes on. It's not just consumer goods -- we have more of everything including health and well-being, and most likely happiness. How many people back then (other than a king) could hope to be anything but a serf and tenant farmer in their lives. I think personal fulfilment would have been in short supply.
Microsoft was behind SOAP and quickly added it to Visual Studio.
Is "Fix bug" actually in the present tense? I would have thought present tense would be "Fixing bug", and that Fix bug is imperative.

That makes more sense (to me) for the example of rebasing - the applied diffs become a list of commands of what to do: Do this! Do that!
I think the drama of a million "WTF?"'s are just people of the internet being, well, people of the internet.

The TechCrunch post, discussions here, etc more accurately portray people being annoyed that this critical bug is getting ignored.
Fwiw, Nexus One and Nexus S do the same for Android.
> And if you really don't want the job: "Take a call during the interview from a girl you just started dating and sweet-talk her."

Priorities, priorities... :)
One could possibly provide the hardware on a capital lease agreement and then use their retained ownership to obtain warranty service on behalf of the customer from the hardware vendor...though IANAL.

The other option would simply to be a reseller.
http://www.techdata.com/
Law of diminishing returns - the associated overhead with additional parallelization starts creeping up on the benefits of said parallelization.The problem is parallelizable, but it might not be a big enough problem to need access to every core in order to achieve maximum performance.
Chart of YC companies' hosting decisions, 2010 edition
I agree with all of these, but I'm glad you brought up points 7 and 9.

As a job applicant, you don't always know how bad things are or will be until after you start working there. Sometimes, the job starts out OK, but things get progressively worse over time. Am I supposed to voluntarily endure a crappy situation that has no end in sight, so that my next employer doesn't think I'll leave too fast? You should be able to explain that kind of thing in an interview without it being considered a mark against you.

As for #9, too many places ask these types of questions when the job you're applying for amounts to cranking out CRUD web apps. I think it's just cargo-cult behavior from old Microsoft interview techniques. If the job will require the unorthodox, creative thinking the employer is trying to test for by that question, a better way to do that would be to see if I have any actual projects, apps, open-source code that I actually wrote that demonstrates this ability.
A TV is a completely braindead computer. If people could get the exact same content for the same price online TVs would die very quick.
It is good to fail fast, but you need to prototype or start implementation before you do. There will always be a side that doubts but the entrepreneur in you needs to believe, but also be realistic.

I am always surprised what sells, so you don't really know if an idea is good until you get it out in the market. Your intuition is good to go by but your intuition may also be completely wrong about what might work as well as what might not. Only the customer/market gives you the real answer.

Also don't just do an idea because you think it will work, do one that solves a problem that you are interested in. This will retain your interest and fuel some belief.

It looks like you are bailing at the 'crisis of meaning' http://i.imgur.com/DEOmi.jpg . Sometimes this is correct, other times a friend or community can help you through it. The quicker you can get to market to test the better, all other input is just opinion.
Facebook's Microsoft Parallels
I used to find it unnatural too. Recently, I changed my working habits so that I keep a running todo list of things I'm working on. When I complete a task, the todo becomes the commit message, and I leave it in present tense.

Other reasons to prefer it:

* It's generally shorter than the alternatives: "Implement" versus "Will implement", "implements", or "implemented".

* I think it's actually more accurate to say that commit messages should be in the imperative mood, not the present tense. The message is basically telling some unspecified agent to do something "Fix this bug." That lines up with the imperative form we use to write a lot of code.
How Pixelmator is moving to the Mac Apps store
Another reason for being exclusive in the Mac App Store: Getting to the top of the Top Paid/Top Grossing lists which help more customers discover them and provide social proof the app is worth buying. By not having other ways of buying this app, it concentrates the buyers through the Mac App Store which helps their ranking.
They'll sell millions the first weekend.

If AT&T were some regional wireless company serving just the South East or something, I could see this. If the iPhone were 12 months into its life and subscribers were rolling out of plans and looking to upgrade, then sure.

Instead AT&T is a nationwide mega-carrier, and the iPhone has been out for years. Outside of the customers already with them, they had a massive influx of customers who went to AT&T simply for the iPhone (hence why AT&T paid big dollars to be exclusive).

Millions on its first weekend? Even the most optimistic analyst has lowered their forecast for the iPhone post adding Verizon to be "marginally more than if its AT&T exclusive". The only significant change that will bring is that AT&T will lose customers, but the net will level out.

The need is already serviced. The customer base is set. Most people who want an iPhone long ago moved to AT&T.

The iPhone, with all its allure and emotional value attached to it, against a dozen Android devices all running different versions of the OS, all with different capabilities and different advertising campaigns. Everyone knows what an iPhone is. Few people can name more than 1 or 2 Android devices unless they're a geek

You're resorting to some tired early 2010 material here. You need to move onto the "Of course Android is winning because there are dozens of devices" approach that is the current propaganda.

The only way the iPhone is going to significantly rebound is an accelerated iPhone 5 that really blows the world away (though damn, they have their work cut out for them if you've watched CES news), or if they use their position to get carriers to stop the subsidization game (as Google attempted) and introduced a very low end model like a iPod Touch+ or something.

Verizon getting the phone, however...who cares.
Here you go: http://hnweekly.chibidesign.com/

Googling brings it up too (turns out Google isn't all that bad).
Really? They wiped out poverty?

http://www.redbarnet.dk/Default.aspx?ID=2208
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Canada
http://www.economist.com/node/17581844

Poverty exists in every nation in the world.

There are a small percentage of people that have mental or physical issues, and they should be helped by the government. The rest need to get jobs.

If you are stuck in a dead-end job, I don't feel sorry for you. I was stuck in one. It takes hard work, dedication, and sacrifice to get out. I've know a ton of people stuck in those types of jobs and most of them weren't willing to sacrifice their free time for their career. Instead of sitting at home and watching TV, playing video games, or hanging out with your friends when you get home from work, educate yourself. We are in an age where you can get tons of free information online. MIT even has free courses. Hell, if you want to go the less legal route, you can find almost any college textbook in pdf format, for free.

I'm tired of people making excuses for lazy people. It reminds me of when I was in school: we would have group projects where one or two people would do all of the work and the rest (usually 4-5 people) would sit and earn the same amount of credit. I suppose this was a model for real life.

"Meritocracy is a complete myth. The poor work the hardest and most dangerous jobs and the most hours."

If you have a job that anybody can do, you aren't going to get paid very much..because its value is low. Making money has never been just about working hard. It also takes intelligence, skill, and there needs to be value in it.
Separating Terror from Terrorism
bd had to make his own, i.e. teach.
PostgreSQL performance considerations
>P.S. Even if you decide not to move to the Mac App Store we will continue to provide free Pixelmator 1.X updates til version 2.0.

A little less sensationalization next time
The other issue, which has gotten more and deserved press lately, is that of zero marginal product workers: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/01... . Some people do not appear to offer any margin on their labor, which is a big structural problem that I don't think anyone knows how to solve. If you're interested in the subject, see the link.
Pretty much need testing and data. I've heard arguments both ways.
Show HN: Online Exquisite Corpse Storytelling Game
This is widely believed, but only due to a deeply flawed study which got a lot of press.

New statistics following the publication of that article have shown this pretty conclusively.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/12/will-hea...
I actually think having ideas and talking yourself out of them, as you describe, is completely healthy.

The ideas that keep coming back to you and have to be repeatedly beaten away are the ones that might be worth taking a chance on. Pay closer to attention to the ones that keep coming back.
Indeed. I have done some research on flywheels and I believe that they can be much more efficient than batteries. Another huge benefit to flywheels is that they are consistent and do not suffer loss of capacity over their extremely long lifespan.

Flywheels really should be used for this type of thing, not batteries.

Regarding efficiency, the following is from a 2003 report:

"Various losses in the system, including bearing losses, and electrical losses (stator losses, power converter losses), contribute to the overall conversion efficiency. The power electronics switching losses usually dominate the total losses, and the overall efficiency is a function of power, usually > 80% for power in the range 10% to 100% rated. The maximum efficiency quoted by some manufacturers is 96%. This gives rise to a typical maximum in-out efficiency of 92%."

- http://www.itpower.co.uk/investire/pdfs/flywheelrep.pdf