skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or... It's about making the right product at the right time and reaching the right market. The problem (even if we consider the social one) that solved facebook wasn't that hard to solve. The timing and bootstrap / first users (universities) was the key. For Youtube the key timing was about bandwidth and for Google about technology/research (as well as a new search vs organize vision of the web).
San Francisco bus stops get multiplayer touch screen games
Transit riders who wait for a Muni bus in a transit stop can now pass the time by playing video games at some bus shelters in downtown San Francisco. A promotional campaign headed up by Yahoo involves digital video touchscreens that are tied together, letting commuters play head to head. The games are part of a contest and include visual puzzles and sports trivia competitions.
Its name associates it with Wikipedia because that its data source. Qwiki recites Wikipedia article summaries.

Doesn't seem quite as magical anymore, eh?
Exactly my current path. Find a problem, solve, then get people to pay for it. Do that enough times and you're bound to eventually create something very valuable.
How To Write a (Good) Sentence
Ask HN: Legal implications with torrent scraping site?
I recently had an idea for a weekend project to build a simple web app that scrapes popular torrent sites (like thepiratebay.org) and displays the newest movies, albums, etc in a clean user interface with thumbnails and torrent 'health'.

Obviously torrenting music and movies is illegal, but what legal implications would be involved with this if the thumbnails are merely links to the original source?
How Money Shapes the future of the Web
The same thing could of been said about twitter when it first came out. Recreating the feature set would of been very easy, but ultimately the feature set was not what made them successful.
Massive lawsuits and jailtime not enough as legal implications to scare you off?
123reg.co.uk was inaccessible from both Morocco and Egypt when I travelled there last year. I had to use a UK-based VPN to modify DNS records.
In retrospect do you think you could have innovated better with a team? Or would it have just distracted you?
Let's not kid ourselves. Any morning we will wake up to the headline "Quora acquired by Facebook."
The WordPress team has thought a lot about this issue, and the most effective solution so far has been to have robust official sources of themes and plugins and educating people to get everything from WordPress.org. (It's the only source built-in to WP software.) It's our equivalent of airplane security's "tougher cabin doors and passenger's willingness to fight back."

An automated scanner in core might temporarily relieve some of the current techniques of spammers but it would be trivial to vary obfuscation to evade any automated check, and I worry more about the false sense of security they would provide. A built-in automated checker would not make it safe for you to Google around random sites and install their software to execute on your server.

On the plus side, we now have over 1,300 themes in our official repository and every single one of them has been verified by hand.
I find quora to be useless. I finally signed up the other day to ask a question that I was having a hard time getting answered elsewhere. After 2 days, it had exactly 1 view, mine.

I consider the StackOverflow model to be much more useful.
As it says, the 'use Switch;' version is a source filter as opposed to a feature built directly into the interpreter. For those unfamiliar, a source filter is something that modifies the source code before it actually is interpreted, and you have to be very careful with source filters. If your source filter injects code that blows up, or just isn't careful to preserve things like line numbers, then it can be a mess trying to track down problems because the source that you're looking at isn't exactly the once that's being run.
you'll probably get a lot more value if you post the link to your question on your own social networks (Twitter/FB) to start
Right. But Firefox 4 is still in beta, making it a bit misleading to say "Gecko is just fine".
http://pharo-project.org/

Download Pharo Smalltalk and fire it up. Download "Pharo by Example" ebook, from the same site, and open it up.

I guarantee you this: with every page you read, you will grow to resent the cruft-peddling "mainstream" computing.
That is definitely one of our options.

We're looking into jumping ship to Rackspace once they complete their move to Akamai for Cloud Files (anticipated to be finished by the end of Q1 this year). It seems like they will support the Accept-Encoding header: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097491
The same way you demonstrate knowledge gleaned from an institution, or anywhere, really.
Well, apple ends up paying about 24% in corporate taxes, even though the corp tax rate is 35.
I hope I don't get slammed for this, but the tax code is a large pile of stinking dung, and good luck trying to do the right thing.

S-Corps work under the general premise that it's just like you, if you were a corporation. So if you don't spend all the income in your business in the year, you owe income tax on what remains. If you have plenty of profits, you write yourself a regular W-2 paycheck. At the end of the year, whatever you don't spend as a legitimate business expense -- even if it's exclusively for business purposes -- is taxed at the same rate as if you had spent the money on whiskey and hookers.

Case in point: there is a huge difference between a high-income wage earner who uses S-Corp status for maximum flexibility and the local beautician or mechanic who does the same thing. Lots of independents who are S-Corps have highly volatile income: if you get a client that writes you a check for 50K in January that might be the last income those guys see for that year. So those guys have to make a difficult business decision as to what to do with the money, and the most logical thing to do is to pay business expenses as needed and withdraw the rest as cash disbursements only as a last result. Writing yourself a W-2 paycheck when you're not sure of future income is basically taking away spending money from the business for no logical reason. As I understand it, the system is designed this way on purpose: tough times allow S-Corps to ride on profits and re-tool for the good times. Good times S-Corps work just like "regular" businesses.

So for small folks with highly-volatile income, being able to move funds around is the only thing sometimes that keeps them afloat. Unfortunately, there are a lot of guys making 400K a year or more who pay themselves a salary of $20K and take the rest as cash disbursements (thereby avoiding paying themselves as W-2 employees mostly altogether)

The reason the tax code is such a mess is that folks get mad at one bunch or another that they think are not acting fairly, so they punish them -- usually punishing many more than the original target. Or politicians want extra votes, so they make an exception for certain people -- usually providing exceptions to hidden interests and creating perverse incentives. 60 years of this and you have a complete disaster.

So yes, by all means make folks pay their share, just be aware that the guy you read about in the paper isn't necessarily the average guy. It's not an "income trick" if it helps the economy grow.
I never got the point behind wanting to have a code editor for phones...
Rails split tester (A/B testing plugin)
Just because you use technology doesn't mean you're inventing it.

Very few startups would qualify as truly innovative, and disruptive:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology
You sound like an awesome guy to work for! I love your hiring philosophy. No, I'm not joking ;)
The problem with fighting crime is escalation. In the real world, the mafias have to face logistical problems to create a response, but on the internet escalation is just a hack away. That's what I was trying to say. The solution, then, is not to "fight" crime, but to weed it out and choke it to death.

If you make just the right investments in nigeria then over time this will change. Everything else is temporarily. You might even figure out a way to use machine learning to statistically weed out the spammers visits by looking at how and where they click (bots and humans), but that peace will last for only so long.

The lasting solution would be to address the root cause of this, which is something I just don't know and understand. (I might not know what the solutions are, but I can see what isn't a solution)
As a corollary, can anyone list people have been successful without going through the normal establishment method of formal schooling and certification? It seems most of these people saying that education is in a state of revolution and how you can learn from OCW and other online resources instead of from Podunk U or Podunk HS haven't actually taken this path themselves...
I keep it fullscreen in a separate space via OS X Spaces. Works well too.
And so is crazyfuckingawesome.com
http://nametoolkit.com/suggest?q=fucking+awesome&hide_ta...
Is the license mentioned in this blog post http://www.touchqode.com/blog/009_analytics_and_licence_expl... available on the website anywhere?

If there are any onerous terms, I'd like to know what they are prior to installation.
Thanks for the response! For the trolls, oh well, what can ya do. For the people who are downvoting because they agree with him ... does a downvote meant "doesn't add value" or "I disagree"?
Wow! This just rocked my world. Being an iOS developer for a few years now, this will definitely come in handy. Thanks!
Yelp is using your Facebook info without permission?
I don't know how I fee about it. I've been a long time user of yelp, but using my Facebook information without prior permission seems off base to me. Thoughts?
Sure, using the OS settings would be the most sane way, but I still see it working well 9 out of 10 times. Could be a lot better, but I don't think it deserves "taking the cake" of the localization-challenged software.

And ok, it was my fault for not testing the language option before mentioning it.
Great advise. And I too recommend The E-Myth Revisted by Michael Gerber; it's definitely a great book and can really help to establish in one's mind the right way to go about working on your business and not in it, a key distinction.
The switch statement isn't being replaced. Perl5 never had a switch statement. Perl6 implemented on as given/when instead of switch/case. The Perl6 switch statement was back-ported to Perl 5.10. The 'use Switch' example in the post was a 3rd party work-around to the lack of a switch statement in the language.

Beyond that, might as well make fun of any differences between languages or just devolve into bickering over indentation/coding style/which line the opening brace should go on/etc.
International Symposium on Freedom of Expression
Eric Schmidt, in Control
Also in that sample of 1000 people the people who chose Wikipedia will have better understanding on their subject rather than the disjoint pieces spitted out by Qwiki.
eBooks compiled from top StackOverflow topics/answers
The problem is that subscribers can sign up and increase data consumption at a faster rate than carriers can build out infrastructure. The fact that subscribers are under contract to pay whether or not the service sucks is a disincentive to spend money scaling the network.
Forgive me for a slight offtopic, but I'd ask... While virtualenv is a must-use tool, is there anything like Ruby's rvm in Python's world?
It's relatively common for tech companies to try to encourage employees to recommend people, with a ~$500-$2k bonus if you refer a friend who ends up getting hired. Not sure if it's actively taken into account on the hiring-decision side, though, or if it's just seen as a way of getting in more applicants.
Also, C-A, C-E, C-K, C-F, C-B, C-P, C-N, C-Y and a few other readline keybindings work in all standard Cocoa text controls.
Haters Gonna HATEOAS
Quora's gotten recent press in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, NBC, etc. etc. ... just try Googling them. So the hype's gone beyond the echo chamber.
فساتين قصيره شتويه
Due to being in a similar business space (they have a google maps based bike route planner), I signed up for an account to check it out. They send out a spam newsletter once a day filled with fad dieting aimed towards fitness minded people. It's a pretty shady endeavor.
My two greatest passions are also math and art. That's what I started Art.sy.

One of our greatest challenges has been finding people whose abilities span the gap between these two, traditionally disparate, fields.

If you are interested in working with us, please reach out!
"There is nothing wrong with referring at this point to the ineffable. The mistake is to describe it."

I don't see why it's a mistake to try to describe the ineffable, nor do I see any reason why describing something makes it no longer ineffable.

I hear people saying the latter a lot, but I've never heard any justification for it.
I sometimes had the need to fix some small bugs, or just trow down a few ideas I had while in a meeting or while skiing. Not that you're supposed to write a full app there.
Can you share the numbers please?
So Lance is not only scheming the sport of cycling but the search industry as well?

(sorry, someone had to say it)
There's some parts of this that I'd like to elaborate on in the future, but I think this is a good starting place. Any REST masters want to share some thoughts? I'm still learning all of this stuff, too.
Very good point.

I think the point on corruption and the rule of law is really significant. It goes beyond just e-commerce and into a whole economy. A government of men and not of law does not make for a thriving economy. If found these two maps on corruption and governance really interesting. They really speak to they trouble with doing e-commerce in Africa:

Transparency International: http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/...

Governance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_Governance_Indicators

I wonder how ratings for China / India / Brazil will change in the next few decades as their per-capita GDP increases.
Walter Pitts was a renowned self-educated logician and helped create the foundations for Artificial Intelligence. Read his story (he's relatively recent).
16 Shocking Facts About Student Debt And The Great College Education Scam
Be nice to your customers
If the company is based in the UK you could have had a local representative to file a claim.

It may be of course that you have no legal recompense; however I'd exhaust all possibilities in that direction before sabotaging a site.

Perhaps what's needed is a "name and shame" list of deadbeat clients somewhere that developers can check before accepting work.
Wikipedia doesn't verb-ize well either
__CALLER__
Right, just like when they announced videobay and all the rest of the stuff that never happened or turned out to just be a turnkey script they uploaded.
In theory, it's a great idea, but watching that video made me cringe. With current input technology (tiny keyboards, either virtual or physical), it's too frustrating to type anything, let alone navigate around code.

For small fixes or notes, an ordinary text editor on your phone works as well as anything. For anything larger, just bring a small laptop.
Linj: Compile to Java Source code
TL;DR summary: "Silicon Valley is again drinking its own Kool-Aid; it is looking at the world through its own prism."

Well worth reading. There's an interesting comment from Fred Wilson too.
"Become so good they can't ignore you."

etc. etc.
Why aren't most developers paid in proportion to their productivity? Simple - there are very few people who employ programmers who are capable of identifying productive developers.

If someone is more skilled than you in a difficult-to-quantify discipline, you have no idea whether they are 1% better than you or 100% better. We have absolutely no useful metrics of developer productivity, so unless you're a skilled developer yourself, you can only guess whether someone really is supremely productive. Most managers and recruiters in tech firms can't code at all. A lot of developers can't either, but I don't find that surprising.
Well in this case it really is an income trick. I have friends who do S-corps for this reason and the main thing they stress over is paying themselves a fair market salary. The guy in the article was paying himself barely 1/2 what a new grad would make so it's clear that he was well below fair market.

If he had just paid himself fair market he would still have come out ahead and not had to deal with the IRS.
I don't know.. the article basically comes down to "i use perl because someone helped me at some point, when using it"... I don't think i would base such a decision on that..
Most recent license is of course visible at first start of application. Current license can be found here: http://www.touchqode.com/licences/touchqode_licence_1_0.htm

The blog post was related to some early user comments that were not specific. If you see anything you could find questionable write us an email and we will gladly explain.
Neat, but .pdf's would have been nice...
Perhaps this is a better example of why it is better than the switch/case? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1735590
Next time I'll have this problem I'll probably start using something like http://www.mindquilt.com/
I see so many questions getting asked each day and so much knowledge getting dispersed, tools like this could really make a company go faster imho.
The most inspiring sentence that a human has ever said. - Mashape's Voice
In many areas, there are exams you can take without needing to do an entire course.

I'd recommend this with a foreign language, or with something else that's easily testable. With an MBA? I second wybo's suggestion of blogging about it, or writing some related articles elsewhere.
This is the same reasoning used 10 years ago to write off South America as a rounding error. It was frustrating and wrongheaded then, too.
This is one of those few instances where I actually support the IRS and also support the law that's being contemplated.

S corps (and AFAIK LLCs) are supposed to have "pass through" taxation. I think it's fair that all income (whether salary or profit distributions) from S Corp is treated as regular W-2 income.

If you don't care about the simplicity that "pass through" offers, register a C-corp.
Something no one else has mentioned yet (perhaps for fear of plunging down the meta discussion rabbit hole) is the degree to which HN competes with Quora.

As a small experiment, I'd previously posed roughly the same question to both HN and Quora.

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-optimum-pricing-strategy-fo...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097527

The response from HN absolutely destroyed the response from Quora. Those links don't even tell the whole story as I had multiple people email me directly from the HN community to offer advice and in one case give me access to a private iPhone application price research tool that he'd built for his own use.
I use Quora daily, and I find the info valuable - but the UI and the clunky-ness of the interface are debilitating.

I think that in the longer term, if they dont make topics easier to navigate and sort info from - they will lose the value they provide. For example - you cant easily browse the topics, top answers top questions etc.

The search box tries to be too cool and provide a list of what you may be searching for - but at the expense of letting you type fluidly.

The choice of fonts, sizes, colors in the UI is counter-intuitive and suggestions made to the quora team fall on arrogant ears "We designed it to be like that" rather than, you know what - you may be right - useability is affected by the slowness of the site"

Any thread with a substantial number of comments regularly crashes my browser (the thread about which startups are hiring in SF Bay will crash FF on linux) - and viewing the site on a phone is clunky, jerky and slow.

All of that aside - if they can allow people to post as quickly and efficiently as Reddit - and allow for topics to be better navigated, I think they will survive.
I have been using touchqode for few months already (since I am developing it) and I have found it really useful - often just to get reminded some old code, browse project source from the couch on the galaxy tab, or start implementing some simple functionality.

Maybe what the video does not show is that most of the time you are viewing the code - and when it comes to writing you are done in few keystrokes. Plus autocomplete really helps.

Anyway thank you for feedback - the video presentation certainly needs improvement.
I've always seen the job of "startup founder" sold as: get investment, get big, get bought, then retire in luxury.

This idea that startup founders want to work very hard for a short period of time then retire (or do something else) is an alternate explanation of why startups tend to die after they get bought. The people who made the companies worth buying moved on.

(of course, this doesn't explain why some companies that get bought and do poorly end up doing better after they are spun off again.)
Qwiki won Runner up for "Best Technical Achievement" at the Crunchies the other night. Fqwiki is a statement meant to illustrate how ridiculously naive we have become with respect to "innovative technology". Neither Fqwiki nor Qwiki belong even remotely in the same league as Google's Self Driving Cars (which won for Best Technical Achievement).

Building a great company is about more than a hacked-up prototype built in six hours and, with luck, Qwiki might achieve this status. At the same time, however, Qwiki is being disingenuous in promoting a nonexistent technological breakthrough that falsely sets expectations for what "technical innovation" actually means.

Misinformed investors and entrepreneurs will only bring us closer to a bubble that may some day pop. Don't let the hype fool you.

Yours,

Banksy The Lucky Stiff
I think this misses some of the point of the exercise, which isn't necessarily to impress an employer with your excellent resume. There is nothing wrong with building a resume and working a job, but being autodidactic can open doors beyond the typical work-a-job strategy.
Hm, I wouldn't expect lack of hinting to be a problem on iOS, given its aggressive anti-aliasing.

Wouldn't lack of kerning tables be a bigger problem?
To be fair; the audience for your particular question is better on HN than Quora. If you had asked "what is the optimal pricing strategy for funding an iphone startup" quora may have been a better bet.
Not to sound snarky, but I liked this sentence:

> I'd wager good money that if you gave a random sample of 1000 people the option of either reading a wikipedia page or watching a qwiki, a majority would choose qwiki. If that's not proof that they are solving a problem differently, than we'll just have agree to disagree.

It basically says, "I think Qwiki is solving a problem, and if you don't find my opinion proof enough, then we just can't agree on it."
Tracking Down My Online Haters
"There isn't much of a financial incentive to expend the resources for that small of a market."

While probably justified, it also leaves most of the country out of the growing trend towards global ecommerce, possibly encouraging more people to take up fraud as one of the few ways to make any money at all.
Note that the Engadget author that paralegal PJ is lecturing on copyright law is an actual copyright lawyer.
It really seems to me that Qwiki is a solution I'n search of a problem.

What problem is it really solving? Could you ever imagine yourself paying for Qwiki?
Wouldn't it be funny if this was just a large bag of nothing? I mean, there will be all the fearing in record executives and all the press and all that and they just upload one lousy image or better yet a propaganda?