skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We'll all be there at some point.

Yes.

> the fact is old people have more experience, more knowledge, and are just far more sensible.

No.

A randomly chosen old person has more experience than a randomly chosen young person, by definition. Due to neural plasticity, a young person has more knowledge in every field that changes significantly over the course of a generation. I cannot discern a meaningful definition of "sensible" in this context.
Finally, a service for bombing mobile phones with hundreds of text messages.
The article's market-first approach:

* Find an industry (ideally, an old fashioned one) where people are making money
* Find the single differentiator which will put your app apart in the already established industry (read or research what pain points are still not addressed by top 3 solutions)
* Make a web app, market it, refine it based on feedback, monetize the app
* Slowly incorporate all standard features expected out of a solution in that industry so you can shoot to be a market leader

I think this sounds great, but the key point is "read or research what pain points are still not addressed by top 3 solutions" which I think is very hard from outside the given industry.
WSJ: Verizon iPhone Will Come With Unlimited Data
I think you miss the point entirely and quoting Paul Graham without understanding what he writes is not going to help either.

What Paras is getting at here is that if your goal is to make money then you are probably better off building something that has that premise baked in to it from the first moment rather than to just go and make some consumer app that might get traction but that will be hard to monetise.

The 'people' from Pauls piece can be interpreted as both consumers and businesses, and if you aim for 'people' that are willing and used to spending money for the kind of service that you provide then you stand a much better chance of making money than if you just 'build anything people love and use'.

Sure, youtube is a great counterargument, but barring being bought out by some big company such a success could easily be lethal. See 'imeem' and lots of other highly popular but ultimately losing propositions.

Making money should not be an afterthought, it should be a focal point if that is your motivation to do this sort of thing. If you do it for fun or because of a drive to change the world for the better, if you're already rich from past ventures and any one of a hundred other reasons why you are not currently in it for the money then sure, go ahead and do that thing that scratches your itch.

But if you plan on paying the bills focus on where the money is made first.
Pay Attention, Please
It doesn't analyse the content, so it doesn't know about that. I do plan to have the ability to train it, though, so that would quickly improve it by quite a bit...
Griffin’s Crayola iPad
But I would rather avoid a discussion on IQ (I don't think it is very relevant to the discussion, as its correlation with success in modern societies is pretty weak, once above a minimal threshold).

No, it's predictive value for individual success is pretty weak. That's not the same thing. Here is a rather famous graph:

http://www.impactlab.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/occupati...

If 50% of current variation in IQ us caused by genetics, this does not conflict with the Flynn effect.
will do. We originally had a flash banner and crap like that ... that was opted against for various reasons
Could Europe build a Y Combinator?
Sales Taxes May Make Some Mac App Store Deals Not So Great
Why Some Free Shows On The Web Are So Heavily Pirated
I have, but, I would then have to make one completely no-follow to not get dilution from double content, right?

I can see how I can focus on that one niche and become profitable, but wouldn't that be spreading myself thin over two projects instead of one big one?
Ask HN: sensors that export data?
I'm trying to manage the humidity in my new house, and have a humidity meter. But it doesn't export data over time. I'd like it to have a usb port so that I can get data over time and put it on my computer. I can also imagine wanting to do this with other data (temperature, walking data, sleeping data, ...) that various sensors gather.

Are there any tools like this out there? Open source hardware projects that I can hack? Commercial tools?
Interesting observatiom.

It's not clear to me though, why the author is attributing this behavior to a generation, rather than simply to the group of people who use tools and forums that multiply the number of weak ties they have.
She could even interview the same people as in the original, because almost none succeeded with their initial venture.
Nah. pg's post fits perfectly here. Specifically the part "Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy."

This is exactly what paras is doing. Dismissing apps he doesn't think can make money as toys. Why should the focus just be on making money?

Saying "if your goal is to make money" is sort of strange to me anyways. Probably because my goal is not to make money, but to build new and interesting things that have an impact. Focusing just on money to start seems like the path to building yet another 37signals basecamp knockoff.
This is not necessary in the US or most other industrialized nations - our bottom x% tends to eat too much, not to little.
How to use sessions on Google App Engine with Python and gae-sessions?
That is awesome use of canvas. What is it for?
Hi Vog, sorry to hear that. Maybe the title was a bit unclear. Hope you liked to content anyhow.
Maybe I will take up your subject (white space) in another article.

- Christian Holst, Baymard Institute
Well there has got to be at least one "hard" part in making money, otherwise wouldn't everyone be doing the same? There is no easy way to make money or successful but it isn't impossible either.

I will give you my example. When I was starting out with Wingify (Visual Website Optimizer), I had absolutely no idea or industry connections in online marketing industry. But I started reading blogs, used existing solutions, talked to people and then eventually figured out that sufficiently large number of people do A/B testing, pay for it and right now it is hard enough to justify a new solution that simplifies it. The idea of "Visual A/B testing" wasn't something I realized overnight. It was a result of more than a year of trying to understand pain points of a "large enough" industry.

If you spend enough time researching an industry, you will eventually find some great opportunities.
Going completely prototypal in JavaScript
Here are some links:

http://swombat.com/2010/12/27/startup-mistakes-selling

http://swombat.com/2010/12/27/dont-dwell-startup-mistakes

http://swombat.com/2010/12/3/startups-post-mortems
Is this what you are looking for:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596807740

Building Wireless Sensor Networks with ZigBee, XBee, Arduino, and Processing
People determine their own level of satisfaction based on comparisons to other people.

Asian Americans may feel more depressed because they see themselves missing out on socialization and general "fun" that their western counterparts experience.

However, Asians in their home countries (or in ethnically homogeneous American communities) may not feel more depressed because they only have each other as comparison.

If no one is going out to parties on Friday night, then it is a lot harder to say "my parents are being unfair to me", or even feel it without expression.

Now addressing your charge that this culture is "unnecessarily" cruel... if we find that giving people the opportunity to have fun over work leads to higher satisfaction and consequently lower suicide rates, we still can't call any specific balance of work vs. fun "unnecessarily cruel" without justification.

It's a judgement call as to what level of 'fun' is a good thing for children to pursue at the expense of their intellectual, athletic, or social development. Is the level of depression, and suicide found in western cultures acceptable or unacceptable? Should we stop foisting 'work' and competitive rating (in the form of school in particular) on children who don't want it, in order to have a lower suicide rate?

I'm not pointing at statistics here on purpose because this is a philosophical question rather than a quantifiable scientific one.
To be honest I'm astounded that they still had that many to lay off.
Lithuania (http://lists.openid.net/pipermail/openid-eu/2009-February/00...) allegedly has an OpenID-based national digital identity system, but Google Chrome does not trust the SSL certificate on Lithuania’s provider (https://openid.vrm.lt/), so perhaps there are a few kinks to work out.
I had to reread both of these comments a couple of times, before it dawned on me why you disagreed - correctly.

Since I am from the UK public school reads 'posh elite school', not 'state school' so it had an opposite sense to my thinking.

As to the alleged assumption, I'm not entirely sure to what degree I am making it. I am assuming of course the same conditions as the experiments I mentioned - which were, I am fairly sure, western society in general in the last few decades. I won't pass judgement as to whether this meets the condition of decent state schools for all.

In all not too sure what the point of the original observation was, it could go in both directions. The figure of 50% only makes sense given some context.
What part of 'if there are no consequences to it' did you glance over?
Previous discussion for reference:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=823347
We have just used something like that in our lab. You can check

http://www.itwatchdogs.com/product-detail-minigoose_ii-8.htm...

it is a device connected with air flow/humidity/ Dew point/ temperature sensors
and connected to the internet. The basic models starts from 200 dollars I think.
If you want to contact me at my username at g mail I can link you to our lab's website to check the interface
I think this is probably a re-post, but worth repeating for those who may have missed it.

Complete this, read JavaScript The Good Parts and JS becomes more pleasurable. If you're interested in improving, I highly recommend taking an hour to work through this tutorial in the console.
I don't know how resource hungry ZFS is, but the problem would be with the iOS devices, not MacBook Air.
> Dismissing apps he doesn't think can make money as toys.

No, it's just that bills want to be paid and if you plan on paying the bills from your venture then you should plan on doing something where making money is not a question but (assuming proper execution) as good as guaranteed. Typically in the business world that means you start signing up your (potential, pilot) customers before you have a product.

Dismissing apps that can't make money as toys is not the same as saying that 'what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy'. Really, they're not even close to being the same thing.

> Maybe thats just because my goal is not to make money. It's to build interesting things and have an impact.

Yes, that probably has something to do with it. If making money is a secondary goal to you for whatever reason then you are in a luxury situation, one that likely the vast majority of the people out there envy you very much for.

The interesting part for me is that typically developing without a monetary incentive to do so leads to lots of wasted time and effort, having a simple and concrete number to measure the success of your application by (turnover vs 'eyeballs') works wonders to stay focused.

"Make something people want" is not a religious item, it's common sense if you want to make money you had better make sure that there is a market for your product. That's the 'want' bit.

Developing 'just for eyeballs' or 'impact' or 'personal interest', 'technical fascination' and so on is great but without a monetization strategy you might as well be living in 1999.

You keep taking PGs words out of context and applying them to the writing of Paras because in your mind there is a seeming contradiction but I think the similarities are far larger than the differences.

YC typically does not invest in companies that have no clear idea of how they plan to make money, even when they're focused on the consumers.
I started Mefeedia.com in 2004, it was a videoblogging aggregator. I sold it 3 years later for a small amount, it was in other words a failure.

- Timing was awesome, I was riding the same wave that Youtube rode (Youtube started a few months later I believe).

- I got lots of high profile press from riding this wave (New York Times, Wall Street Journal etc etc). Press is mostly about riding a wave they want to write about, and being available on the phone.

- I failed mostly because a) I couldn't execute well enough, and b) it was too early for the actual idea. (The idea was that you could easily gather video from all over the web into your own stream and then watch that on your computer or tv). The idea may also have been simply wrong. But mainly I couldn't execute well enough. Not enough coding power.

- I did great with community engagement: the videobloggers were all behind me, even though the product was fairly useless. The site was explained in various books. I had a steady trickle of about 100 new signups a day.

- Selling it was the right decision. It took my mind off it and on to new projects.

- The first working version was a real weekend project (took about 3 days to write the video aggregator). But then it took up much more time than I ever thought.

The 2 greatest lessons where:
1. It's a marathon, not a sprint.
2. Execution is everything.

See also:
http://www.slideshare.net/petervandijck/2-lessons-from-my-fi...
Lightweight and Minimal CSS Frameworks
You can buy sensors for things like that, but they'll tend to be expensive for what you get, eg:

http://www.tequipment.net/AmprobeTR300.html

If you like to hack around with micro-controllers then you can build something that does all that more for about the same price, but have a lot more flexibility.

Google for things like "1-wire humidity sensor". The Dallas Semi 1-wire bus is widely supported with most micro controllers, and fairly easy to implement.
If you get a lot of visits to that section, then you could A/B test to choose which is the better way.

A simple alternative I could think of is to get rid of the list of countries and make the search form on the right the main interface. You only need to ask "where are you going?", "where from?" and "your nationality". Simple search boxes or dropdown menus with flags would be great.
Epic Data Center Campus Planned for Las Vegas
I'm going to guess that there are a lot of people that would use a holodeck if they had one, why bother if you can live real life?

If you've got a 4D immersive environment on hand then why bother buying a real flute? If you can't tell the difference I mean. In the case of the flute you could have the best flute in the world [for you], break it and it doesn't need fixing just re-rendering, the pads wouldn't wear out, you could alter the weight/tone/colour/taste at will, you could play along with an orchestra without the trouble of hiring one etc.. VR theoretically will give as far more nuance than real life.

Of course it won't be real ... but who will know.
Amazing how Myspace has about fallen off the face of the earth. I remember 5 or 6 years ago at the height of Myspace, it was getting harder for me to stay on top of the local music scene, because bands began to give up on posting flyers in bars. Posting flyers took time and money, while Myspace was free and 99% of their fans were on it anyway.
In Sweden they also have a Personal Identity Number (Swedish: personnummer). You need a personnummer in order to do just about anything of significance (healthcare, education, accommodation, bank account, insurance, etc).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identification_number#...

I've got to say, having a personnummer makes dealing with the Government and businesses a bit smoother and more efficient.
Pretty Perl
Really smart tutoring tool. I've seen other tutorials with editable javascript examples, but I think the combination of well chosen examples, use of asserts, and nice design brings it to a whole new level.
I'm not sure about the no-follow thing, but you are probably right. A simpler alternative to a new domain might be a more key-word rich url or sub-domain.

I can understand you don't want to spend too much time over this. Can't you automatically generate static pages listing the key information given the user's destination, origin and nationality? I'm guessing the embassy information doesn't change too often, so having static content will help with SEO and caching.
Why I don’t write in Pascal
If you’re a successful bootstrapper, don’t get stuck managing your server
The key word here is _probably_.

There is room enough for both blue-sky idealists and pragmatic business grinders. We need both and both are likely to fail more often than they succeed.

It might be easy to criticize somebody who follows their passion and then fails on business issues but there are many ways to measure "success" and not all of them line up with a VC's definition of "success".
I get that. What I don't understand is why. Does he think the ID system will be required to connect to the Internet? I'm pretty sure that's incorrect.
The ultimate nerd badge
That's a good way of saying it :) I'm pretty sure it is linked to how much water is in the ground. Actually, it could be quite interesting to overlay a graph of precipitation during that year.
As opposed to all that open source stuff for free in the repositories, yes. But paying for software is something that has meanwhile been superseded by people paying for services, and that's where the real money is in the long run.

Someone paying $10 for your software is great but not as great as someone paying $4.95 monthly for the use of a service.

The difference is that if you intend to hold on to your userbase on a subscription basis that fart apps are not going to cut it (pun intended), you will have to deliver value for the money your subscribers pay you.

Apple has not conditioned people to pay for software any more than google has conditioned people to click on ads, both companies simply used their economies of scale to make it worthwhile to market to their particular audience, google through their adwords (not adsense!) program and apple through their app store.

Just wait for the 'facebook phone' and it's associated app store, it's only a matter of time.

It's not as though Steve Jobs invented 'software for sale' with the app store, software has been sold to individuals and businesses alike for decades now, the things that have changed the equation here are:

- download sites for PC software

- open source

- massive piracy
More ways to do Web TV than giant, full keyboard remotes
I suppose the counter point is that teachers are 'underpaid' for their intelligence, when compared to workers. There is probably an element of that since teaching is vocational and most people entering the profession do so in the knowledge that they will not earn as much. Hence we should not be surprised that their children do better - for both cultural and genetic reasons (50-50?).

The original point was about academic success, which is surely more corelated with IQ than economic success.
I don't know. You had 100 new signups a day and you sold for a positive value. I would describe that as success. Only a small success perhaps, and perhaps it didn't meet your goals, but a business success none the less.
Check out Bug Labs: http://www.buglabs.net/
This is a long article that can be completely summed up by the headline (it's a rant about people who criticize Lisp's syntax).
Hugh Hefner Takes Playboy Enterprises Private (At $6.15 Per Share)
Why not become that travel agent yourself? This might be a longer-term goal.
Really? Lets think about it.

* First up we gotta biometrically scan every citizen of the United Kingdom for starters. That's 64 million people.

- Scanners

- Appointment Management

- Advertising Campaigns (to remind people to register/go)

- Chasing people who aren't registered

* Then for that to make sense you need to be able to validate people in places.

- Invest in technology to biometrically match people (readers etc)

- Train users/operators

- Handle the kinks in that tech (complaints, false positives).

- Handle any legal issues.

- Create the back end system to auth (somewhat non trivial)

- Load balance

- Security Checks, Penetration testing, etc, etc. No point in the whole system if its easily spoofed, right?

Then of course we need to produce the cards and send all the cards to those 64 million people. Also this system is supposed to integrate with existing government systems. You can imagine what I nightmare that probably was going to be.

My point being that its only a database and some photocards in the sense that I can write Stackoverflow in a weekend ;).

Tbh your belief that it was only photocards means that you probably didn't appreciate the full scope of the legislation. It actually sickened me how the entire focus of the debate on the ID system was on the cards when they were the least important aspect of it.

If I wore a tin-foil hat i'd even go so far as to suggest that politicians intentionally focused on the card part of it to divert our attention from the rest of it.
Can someone explain to me how this post is still getting so many upvotes? Unless I'm badly mistaken the ID system will not be in any way mandatory to connect to the Internet. Even if it becomes de facto mandatory (e.g. e-commerce sites deciding to require it) making a second internet wouldn't change anything...
Looks really cool, but not much hands-on examples and documentation.
Public transit is a product of the government, no?

If it were a private system and the company who owns it required you identify yourself so they can track your movement, would you also be upset?
The gulf stream makes the weather in Norway a lot warmer than it should have been, so it might well be that the weather is similar even though latitude is so different:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream

You can see that the sun is quite low on the horizon during the winter, though, which is probably quite different from Indianapolis.

And yes, Oslo is quite magnificent for a couple of weeks in th fall.
I've been calling them that for years now, and I suspect others have too, so the term is hardly novel, but that's exactly what they are.

Throw enough things at the wall, a few will stick.
This is brilliant, thanks for the link. Busy wrapping my brain around R and knowing that you can export R graphics into interactive charts makes for interesting learning.
Direct links:

http://codemonkeyism.com/6-reasons-why-my-vc-funded-startup-...

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/12/i-dont-dwell-on-...

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2682-the-creators-of-no-longe...
I know this is probably said pretty often, but there's nothing stopping you from creating a new syntax for Lisp so long as it can easily be translated into the abstract form of S-Expression. That's what M-Expressions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression) tried to do.
I remember people marveling at Digg's 60 employees when they started to lay some off. Oy.
This discussion seems to focus on the plain spartan Scheme standard, when -- comparing to CL -- it should focus on an implementation that contains standard-ish libraries as well.

Although CL might be the whole well-stocked golf bag (1-wood, 2-wood, irons, wedges, putters, ball-cleaner, radio...), wouldn't, say, Chicken be a smaller but still fairly well-rounded set?
Fix Social Networks' Fantasy Valuation Bullshit.