skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Amazon UK iPhone app does this. Or there's RedLaser, which gives you Google Shopping results + local libraries and bookshops.

It's brilliant. Though I usually try to buy some things in the shop too, if it's a place I want to survive.
I may be mistaken, but I've found reCAPTCHA to be often forgiving, sometimes the words are just not clear, and I just type what I think it is. I don't remember ever being incorrect on the reCAPTCHA.
The Most Amazing Press Release Ever Written (clever marketing)
Ask HN: Review my social network web app startup - Refynr.com
Refynr.com - Connect to Twitter & Facebook. You make Keyword Lists. Refynr finds all the matching tweets & FB posts, and puts them in one simple Stream. Refynr saves everything permanently, so you can review your Refynr Stream any time. If you want, Refynr can even send you a Daily email with the latest, so you can "catch up" with what you missed any time.

First, I know the home page still kinda sucks: http://solowebstartup.com/why-does-my-startups-home-page-suck-be-honest

Second, the design of http://Refynr.com is _mobile first_, so it looks/works well on iPad/iPhone (landscape), Android devices, and then on Mac & Win FF, Chrome, and Safari. Yep, it looks like hell on IE for now, cuz I used jQuery Mobile Alpha for the UI.

Third, I'm mostly looking for feedback on what Refynr does and if it could be useful for you. And how can I make it _more_ useful?

TIA,
Aaron Longnion
- Solo Founder & CNO (Chief Nerd Officer)
I agree, but it depends on how much removing native support for h264 this soon advances the state of html5. We are still convincing content-publishers to adopt html5. Dropping support right now and forcing people who want to support html5 video to dual encode and wrap content in flash for the sake of compatibility might slow adoption more than waiting for more people to get on first, then pulling the plug.
Are you using Adwords and is it working for you?
"But six months later, the fickle followers of Web fads have collectively hit the "next" button.
Since peaking in usership in the spring and early summer, Chatroulette has been hemorrhaging traffic, with visits plummeting close to 60% in the US, according to Quantcast."

I knew this would happen, it seems everyone but he did. Is this a case of wishful thinking, or being blinded by how great he thinks his own product is? Also, the idea that they're making so much money off redirecting the people showing their genitals sounds very... unlikely. Surely these people aren't the sort who would, after being kicked from chat-roulette, go on to sign up for a dating site?
The last coupon I got by e-mail was around the end of December. Ordinarily they came out once or even twice a week, so it feels as if they've finished doing this.

However, this site lists some current coupons:
http://www.dealigg.com/story-Borders-Coupon-Code-Discount
I have a lot of family in Europe. It wasn't the social programs that led to their current problem. They were vacationing and dining out on credit cards, accumulating lots of revolving debt, and acquiring rental properties that were supposed to pay for all of this. Of course, since everybody else in the middle class was attempting the same strategy, it became a bubble. Essentially, Europe is in much the same mess as the U.S. is for a lot of the same reasons. However, because the U.S. is a single country and Europe isn't, getting out of the mess is a very different problem.
Writing c++ is painful without IDE as well.

Come to think about it, the same can be said about Objective-C
By dropping H.264, is Google avoiding a trap or walking into one?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1447428

http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/how-to-become-a-millionai...
Scopeleaks.js: detect variables leaking into the global scope
When I read a critique of an article that starts with a personal attack on the writer, I take the critique much less seriously.
Unless their margins on coffee are high enough to subsidize a book inventory. At which point, they could basically be a library without the lending.
Couldn't agree with you more. I've never been a big fan of the "good programmers are rarer than unicorn's teeth" school of thought, since both developers and business folks have their own self serving reasons for believing it, and because it's just not true in my experience. More likely is that there may not be any good programmers available that fit the exact slot they're looking for. If they'd just give a programmer who's 85% of the way there a little time to come up to speed, they'd fill their chairs with competent programmers in a fraction of the time. But instead, they'd rather hold out for a genius with years of experience in their exact little universe - and in so doing, screw themselves out of the much-larger-than-they-think universe of good developers out there.
A fine example of parochial thinking. Point is NY tech funding surpassed New England's, so, naturally, New England sucks. Of course, by this logic, Silicon Valley tech funding surpassed New York's, so, naturally, New York sucks.

Can't we all get along?
Bene-what now?

Maybe I'm just a terrible screwup, but in 2004 I qualified for EIC and left programming entirely because the bottom had fallen out of the Perl market. And I've never gotten benefits.

And no, $60K is pretty tight for a family of four anywhere in the US.
Having spent the last week struggling with getting a hand-rolled source control monitoring system working, and finally ditching it and using CruiseControl (and getting 95% of what I needed out of the box), I empathize with you.
If we're sharing awesome designs, I own all of you ;-)

http://oi55.tinypic.com/r8yys7.jpg
> But the secret to Google’s success was actually not PageRank, although it makes for a good foundation myth.

I do love the story of algorithm wins, but is there any evidence at all showing how important PageRank was/is, either way? I think it is hard to be sure exactly why something is popular, even when it's happening, so I suspect there isn't much evidence either way. There's two parts to the issue:

(1) did PageRank give "better" results, for what users wanted?
(2) was this an active factor in their preference for google?

I've heard the argument that the speed of results is a very significant factor (as the article claims), and that was definitely a factor for me. Also, I recall research from google showing the dramatic effect on user satisfaction from even slight differences in latency (above a perceived-as-instantaneous threshold).

Another factor at the time was that google didn't have paid ranking, so search results were better in this sense - related to this is a psychological trust issue, which would make people feel more comfortable with google, even if the improvement in search results was insignificant. You didn't have suspect the results.

Possibly the crucial factor (at that time) was that everyone else had crowded homepages; whereas google was simple and sparse and just did search.

Both the last two have been eroded, as the competition copied google. One would think they could also catch up on latency - it's certainly easier for any search engine that processes fewer queries. Google retains the advantage of familiarity, which surprisingly is one of the strongest competitive advantages for consumer goods, where the technology doesn't change much (eg. gum and cola).

So... provided google keeps up with the competition technically, it will trounce them commercially.
The website is down because it is handling too many requests :(
Nice. What's the Minus Delta forum for? Trolls trolling trolls?
Localizing games is even more complicated. User applications typically "talk" to the user, but games also have a variety characters speaking to each other. And in MMO/sandbox games, you may not be able to anticipate which characters will be conversing. Localizing inter-character conversations also introduces pronouns, which are not often used for user applications.

Game translators need to know all sorts of metadata about the speaker and listener characters' "social context", such as gender, age, and "honor". Is the old king speaking to a young peasant girl or an entire village? Is the young prince speaking to an old peasant woman or to his old grandmother? Is the grandmother speaking to her son, who happens to be the king?
Robert Fulghum, "All I Really Need to Know I Learned at 37signals"

HAHA I wonder, due to age, if the average HNer might not get that reference. Regardless, I can't help but feel that would be a hilarious book.

A few possibilities:

Warm cookies and great design are good for you

Wash your hands before you code

Say you're sorry when you have downtime
Dear swombat, nice of you to post this now rather than three months earlier and letting me learn it on my own. :P
i thought one of the best startups i came across last year was Solve Media. that's an enormous problem you're referencing, and not only did their startup solve the problem, but they also created value for brands by advertising within the password boxes

check out the venturebeat writeup from last year:
http://venturebeat.com/2010/09/20/the-latest-ad-frontier-sol...

they also put together a great youtube overview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-dZvZasg0o

it's one of those ideas you come across every so often that just makes too much sense. i'd bet they'll have their fair share of competitors soon enough.
And possessing great and detailed knowledge of the side effects and both the known and potential dangers.

How, precisely, would you propose that the participants in the first ever test of a drug obtain such knowledge?
A similar system was put in place by a pharmacy system to detect employee narcotics abuse. They'd throw an alarm when a pharmacist started dispensing pills at a rate outside their SD.

The system worked great except in the case where a pharmacist slowly ramped up usage as his addiction worsened. Seems like that's a feature that works well in your case. As a business sells more stuff, their transactions will ramp up and your model will still hold.

nice.
The Barnes and Noble in Clear Lake, TX (near NASA) had a 30'x8' wall of programming and sysadmin books, and 3x that when you take in general computing, math, and science. I loved it. "Corporate" had them rearrange the store a bit, and the selection is (or looks) a bit smaller now.

Borders in San Antonio has a large selection of said topics, and I'm impressed. The only thing about Borders that bugs me is the lack of sitting areas.

I wonder if their demise would actually be good for a lot of independent booksellers whose customers would avoid B&N.
OO in perl is a little bit weird if you aren't used to it.
>Yet, your return will be better if you were to do the same in most other countries so why bother?

Well, with something like YC sure, but anything else you might bother because it's the country you grow up and you know it well. Also because any of those countries that are easier to do will also have more, tougher competition.
The only benefit Borders offers is immediate gratification for those who can't wait a few days

Or for those who want a meaningful preview of a book before buying.

Over the years, I've saved much more money by avoiding purchases of books I imagined I would like, than I've saved by buying from discount warehouses.

Libraries are one way of doing this, but for new technical books, my local Borders was a go-to place.
He may be selling snake oil, but that doesn't mean we have nothing to gain by learning how he sells.
Kinect Hacking Tutorial
First thing that jumps out:

Why try it? It refines & backs up your Social Networks based on your keywords

I have no idea what that means, and I know those terms. If I don't know what it means, then Joe Average won't even know what it doesn't mean... if you get what I mean...

Anyway, you need to make the purpose of it clear and obvious. What does it actually do? Explain it below and I'm sure me and others will try and help you come up with a better way to express it.
Arguably Ruby and Python rank just as high, if not higher, on all of the first line, and do so without Perl's cruft and bloat. There's more to a language than just it's syntax, and even if Perl can have some pretty compact syntax - and it certainly can - that doesn't make up for it's weaknesses in other areas.

Namely, it's Object Oriented programming that is a bad joke, it's weak-ass multithreading, the fact it's a walking memory leak, it's attempt to shoehorn two completely different variable scoping paradigms into one language, it's vast and bewildering array of special cases and exceptions to it's own rules....I could go on and on.

Disclaimer: I have used a great deal of both Perl and Ruby.
you probably won't retire in five years if you have that mentality.

the ones that succeed the post have a passion about what they are building. that passion doesn't go away.

they may have a lot more freedom, but many jump right back into the game.
Bold move: BlackBerry Dakota photo, specs leaked
one of my favorite blogs that is littered with satire and tech-related gadgets and stories is http://www.geekologie.com/
The statement that stands out most to me:

"the group of people with a little bit of knowledge (likely due to ad hoc experimentation and intuition based on previous familiarity with another programming language or Unix culture or just copy and paste osmosis from a barely-working heap of sticks left by the previous maintainer) dwarfs that smaller group of experienced programmers."

I think one of the reasons there are a bunch of people with
just a "little bit of knowledge" is that there are a bunch of gigs where that's enough. I also think that its a tremendous mistake for people to take these types of jobs if they have any personal ambitions to reach that "experienced programmer" level. Unless your personal situation dictates that you have to.

But, the trick is that the ad-hoc experimentation and intuition is a necessary first step to moving to the next level. I'm personally interested in figuring out what you need to really grok in a particular programming paradigm/language to be a really great hacker using that paradigm/language.
Scared of the dark: a look at the audio game Papa Sangre
If one has multiple copies of a book, say 5 or more, they can take up less shelf space cover-out than side by side, depending on thickness... which allows you stock a larger, diverse inventory while still having copies in stock for the popular titles. Also, if a book is a very popular book, it's worthwhile to have it cover-out so that folks can quickly locate it. That doesn't mean the store focuses only on mass market, but instead focuses on customers: some want the popular item, so make it easy for them and not be out of stock on these, and some want more depth, so try to stock as deep as you can on the shelves.

For many stores across many industries, having enough stock of popular items subsidizes the ability of the store to stock rarer and less-often selling stock.
thank you.

I just realized I did it wrong earlier this morning with this post. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2099538

Do you think it would be ok to resubmit in a proper way next week ?
Years ago, I worked at a Borders competitor for a little while: Joseph-Beth in Cincinnati, Ohio. Things might be different now, but back then, that store kicked ass! Somehow, the store managed to have a bunch of passionate people working there, and it showed.

One of the things that we did was "don't give up" customer service. We absolutely did not give up on finding something until the customer did. Google was new in those days, and I also remember multiple "oh my gosh, that's freaky" moments from customers coming in with the vaguest, weirdest clues and still somehow finding the book for them.

I remember going into a Borders around that time and noting that the help wasn't nearly as persistent, but I went into a Borders about a year later and thought: "Hey, they must be copying Joseph-Beth now!"
European Sudoku.

...And where did this 98% figure come from?

Additionally, 98% of people in 1940? What % might it be today?
not only that, its multi-user - you walk around with a lot of other Larrys, all completing the same quests, drinking the same beers, etc. - World of Larrycraft?
As opposed to the US where everybody over the age of 30 is afraid to quit their jobs to start their own company because they'll lose their health insurance? And I see lots more Americans staying at home getting fat in front of the TV than I do Europeans.

- 5 extra hours a week and 4 extra weeks of vacation a year just give you more time to work on your side projects to get out of that corporate job quicker.

- in some countries, unemployment insurance provide resources to help you start your own company

- "overseas vacations" are a lot cheaper cause you can buy a plane or train ticket for 50 euros to get to the Mediterranean

- Nobody wants two cars because they provide more hassle than benefit in an area where everything is close by and available via public transit that's clean, convenient and used by everybody, not just the poor.

- but most importantly, if you fail, you know that your kids won't starve and that your own retirement will be comfortable. As everybody knows, fear of failure is the biggest impediment to starting your own company.

- in return, you pay 10% higher taxes, which you don't miss one bit once you make that first million.

The biggest reason the US is more entrepreneurial is purely cultural. In France, one of the biggest aspirations is to go to Polytechique and become a bureaucrat. In the US, that's for lazy people who want a secure job. So France has a much better bureaucracy and a much worse entrepreneurial scene.
"Understanding the Ruby way of doing things is different from understanding Ruby. Understanding when to use meta-templates in C++ is something you only learn by reading a lot of templated code."

Very true - and that's why truly good programmers will promptly take it on themselves to read as much code in a given language as they can get their mits on after having learned it's basic concepts, syntax, and so on. Precisely because every language comes with a sizeable corpus of lore, best practice, idioms, and other such things that are the closest things programming has to an oral tradition.
extreme claims have low probability of being correct. For example, I am not sure that it is impossible due to laws of physics for 5-6 men to pull all the strings, but common sense would tell you it is extremely unlikely. If your friends don't see that, nothing you can say will convince them otherwise, so just don't engage in pointless debates :)
YouTube: Finally Ready To Make Some Money?
Thanks (both you and InclinedPlane), I guess that makes sense.

I thought there were some theories that early-universe physics were very different from what they are now, though I'm not sure how that would help.
I worked at Borders after the dot-bomb, since my car was broken down and it was the only job I could find that I could ride my bike to. I bought a bunch of programming books with my employee discount and then realized what a complete chump I was - the exact same books, online at Amazon, were cheaper including (free!) shipping than in the store with my employee discount. I quit soon after and got a job writing code.
Linux Mint Debian Edition 10: Rolling Release Nirvana
Scrapped doesn't count, if so I have some 1960s gear. I also have a bit of nostalgic fondness for VAX & VMS as I spent my early computing career working on it (along with the full range of DEC gear). I'd never want to go back, though.
Black Fancy Sarees Design
The 1000 Core Processor
"... wide selection of technical books" - my experience is opposite, sorry. I've seen the number of technical books dwindle in the years I've patronized my local Borders store. Lots more emphasis these days on M'soft applications and Xyzzy for Dummies. Where there was once an entire corner of the store dedicated to computing titles, there is barely 15' of wall space now.

Over time the store has ditched its foreign newspapers. Used to be able to buy Russian language titles in there, but not anymore. Few tech books on music/theater. Biographies heavily loaded toward current celebs.

But they've got holiday calendars by the gobs.

I liked doing business there 'cause I got instant gratification and it was a comfortable place to browse. But they've gotten rid of the chairs and tables too, and now the only place to sit is in the cafe. Many's the time I'd read a chapter in an easy chair, get up and purchase the book so I could take it home with me. But now all your browsing has to be on your feet - I get the feeling that management thinks bookstore shelves are like supermarket shelves. "Hello Dear? Would you stop by on the way home and pick up something from the Ender series?"
Newest (US) Amazon app has bar code scanning for a product... Then add to cart.
Good post, but this "not allergic to commercial offerings like many other popular forums on the web" is changing rapidly. I'm seeing a large influx of people who don't seem to realize that profit is not a bad word.
That's one of the cases we don't alert ourselves too: getting a lot of transactions is a good thing. =)

In the reverse, however, is another issue entirely. A site that is slowly getting less traffic won't be alerted. However, this is where we have to draw the line. We aren't looking for long term trends. Rather, immediate issues. Basically, if a site that normally has 20 attempted transactions during the last hour suddenly has 0, is this a problem?

There is still a lot of tweaking that needs to go into the system. We're also exploring how to use this in other areas as well. Since all these accounts are internal, it's easy for me to get feedback.

The end goal, however, is to be notified as soon as possible when something occurs that will negatively affect our bottom line.
In the article: "Include the link in the body of your post. It won't be hotlinked, but don't worry about that. Do not include it as the "URL" part of your post, some people consider that bad form."

Is that true? It seems that there are as many posts utilizing the URL field as without and I've never seen any chastising about the practice. Posts w/o a URL move off the site faster (right?) so there would be a definitely advantage to linking to the new site in question.
"So - go for it - tell me, right now, which of his many predictions are "obviously going to happen." and which are "Totally foolish". "

I'm not claiming to be able to make long term predictions.
I'm also not egomaniacal enough to think that anyone will care enough to come back and check my post in 5/10 years :)
I'm just saying to accurately evaluate how good his correct predictions were, we would need a benchmark of predictions of other people.

I think there's a lot of value to reading Kurzweils writing, and its entertaining. I just object to people who pick out the things he generously got right, and massively overestimate his success rate, including him. He recently announced an 86% success rate.
1) He shouldnt put sharp numbers quantifying things that have been loosely defined, and sloppily evaluated.
2) He has no-where near that, in my opinion.

I dont want to go through 2 in detail, but I think its fairly clear from reading his prediction summary, or http://us.penguingroup.com/static/packages/us/kurzweil/excer... that while he got a good few things right, he got a lot wrong too.
Site isn't responding. Does anyone have a mirror?
That's what I'm talking about, too. Design patterns aren't that hard. Maintainability and readability are obvious, if you've got good examples to follow.

Sure, it may take a couple years for a developer who's absolutely stuck in the mud. But a good developer already knows multiple languages, already is familiar with multiple paradigms, and is capable of meta-cognition to recognize what the new patterns are, how they are useful, and apply them.