skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sadly Majestic just wasn't run well and in the end was a complete failure. If you want to see tons of Alternate Reality Games currently in action or just starting check out http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/

The big problem with ARGs are that most of them die out, sometimes without a good resolution - you always hope the next one will be better than the last.
There are several whole industries revolving around paying people for help with trading strategies. Most have very specialized economics.

A hedge fund requires capital to operate, and the owners can't necessarily cover fixed costs (salaries, etc) with their own personal capital. I'd be surprised if many of the strategies on collective2 fit this model

Investment advisers often fine tune a strategy to match your personal risks - i.e., help Southwest Airlines hedge their exposure to gas prices, or Apple to hedge their exposure to the RMB. Since Southwest is already short oil due to being an airline, the trading strategy of going long evens them out. It wouldn't make sense for me to trade this strategy, since I don't have an intrinsic short position in oil (plus the alpha in Southwest's strategy comes from selling flights, not oil).

If you let a dozen people use your strategy, does acting on that information give you much of an advantage?

Buy $10k of some low volume stock. Have a few other people pile on and buy the same stock (after you). The price will go up a few cents. Then you sell, probably to the same people buying from you. This is called frontrunning. If you didn't frontrun, you bear the risk that one of your renters would buy the shares before you do, thereby driving up the price before you purchase it. Less of an issue with GOOG, admittedly.
Are Law Schools Lying To Their Applicants?
Sorry but I'm posting it this way, but The Last Psychiatrist blog is autokilled by the HN submission form..

I don't think this is right, as it's pretty good writing and "gratifies my intellectual curiosity", so to speak.

Link here: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/01/are_law_schools_lying_to_their.html
Clickable: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/01/are_law_schools_lying...
But that's my point. It wasn't that his advice wasn't wrongheaded or flat ignorant, it was your reaction.

"Oh, No! You have no _right_ to change your mind!" It's a blog post. It has as much legitimacy and authority over marketplaces as the entire CNBC network, i.e. none at all. Time and again, we see people on these so-called business networks doling out terribly wrong advice that, if followed, would cost you dearly, even in the short term (e.g., Jim Cramer's infamous "long on Bear Stearns" rant only a week before it went out of business). Cramer is a guy that's been a hedge fund manager and stock prognosticator for as long as some of us on HN (not me, mind you) have been alive and for some reason is just as stunningly ignorant of future events in the market as a market newbie.

This is the world that we live in now. We'll all just have to accept the fact that there are people who document everything that is going on in their minds, whether it's what they ate for lunch to their forex trading strategy to their insistence on voting for only old white Protestant men. Nothing OP did was immoral or illegal. It was content. Information, no matter how right or wrong, wants to be free. And, you're free to opine on it, and I on yours.
I believe that part of that design is what's so confusing to non-technical users. If somebody were to tell them that 'the box in your basement' could be used to verify access to their banking website, you'd completely lose them. Granted, its an implementation they'd likely never encounter, but the fact that its possible just contributes to the noise around OpenID.
This could actually be useful to a UI designer in a non-evil way. Normally we have a list of services that you could authenticate with. If we knew that someone was logged into a less-common social network we could show that button instead of a more-common one they weren't logged into.
Can wordlens grab a patent for device based visual translation in real-time?
No is a powerful tool use it often.
yes they are!
I'll lend my anecdotal experience here as well.

I was the fourth employee at a startup (that is still going strong nearly 10 years later). Pretty early on we were forced into a major pivot which saw us make the transition from Palm OS to Symbian. At that point we were left with a bunch of really difficult questions.

The code-base, as it was, was not in very good shape. It was full of bugs, suffered from some ahem questionable design decisions, and ran rather poorly. On the other hand, it was the basis for a product already doing millions in sales.

At that point I had grown into a technical lead role (we were probably more in the 25 employee range at that point). I looked over everything and championed a strategy in which we would simultaneously port the "bad" code over while splitting off a much smaller team (that I ended up leading directly) to rewrite everything from scratch.

That rewrite literally saved our business. Our 'old' code base had suffered through that year as we struggled to patch it up enough to meet acceptance requirements from a device OEM we were working with. It was a terrible project, and no one was particularly happy. Meanwhile our direct competitor had brought out a new product that raised the bar in terms of quality by about 1000%.

As we transitioned to the new, much saner, codebase we were able to very quickly respond. We built better features that worked more reliably. Our next experience with that same OEM went incredibly smoothly. They went from nearly dropping us to being among our biggest champions going forward.

So in that case, rewriting the thing probably saved the business. In the ensuing years, as more and more platforms have come about, that same code has continued to evolve nicely to meet the demands of those platforms as well.

So I'll agree with jacquesm: except when it isn't indeed:)
I think the team deserves it. It's a solid alternative to Photoshop for those who want to fiddle with image editing but don't want to pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege.
New Giant "Bearded" Crayfish Species Discovered
Agreed, in manufacturing there are engineers that design the product (currently called developers) and there engineers that design the assembly line (currently called sysadmins).

When Toyota retools a factory, they don't have robots build/deploy the robots, there are engineers that "re-tool". This is exactly what is happening at Google/Facebook/Twitter, etc. There are maintenance guys, aka NOC monkeys, and there are engineers.

Eventually, everyone will need to be an engineer and that is where systems administration is going with the devops movement.

Here is a presentation I gave on it and you tell me if sysadmins are going away.
http://crunchtools.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/DevOps.pdf
China erects 15 story hotel in less than 6 days (video)
Ask HN: Please Review my MVP - figure which entrepreneurial idea to pursue next 
I wanted to get some feedback for my new web app Shapea (as in Shape Idea).

You can check it out at http://shapea.com first if you like. It would help me understand if message is clear on the webpage.

The main goal here is to help entrepreneurs validate their ideas. Shapea tries to achieve this in following ways:

- Manage your ideas (all ideas are private by default and you can track your ideas, add researched information and so on)

- Receive Feedback : the goal is to build a community where people can share ideas and have a healthy conversation around an idea. I have tried to mimic HN by using voting on ideas, voting on comments, threaded comments

- Landing/Coming Son Page : You can automatically create a landing page for each of your idea. You get a Shapea sub-domain and there is no hosting to worry about.

Plans:

- Inline Tool to edit landing page with ease(right now you can only add css to override, which sucks!)

- better analytics data (What information would you like beside page views?)

- Help promote your landing pages

TLDR: Check out http://shapea.com and let me know what do you think about it.

Thanks in advance!
"By the way, I'm always thinking about beautiful the font on your site is, and then I realize it's Georgia. Ahhh, Georgia."

Thinking about that old sweet font the whole day through?
Clickables:
http://shapea.com

http://shapea.com/sharedideas/1/shapea-figure-which-entrepre...

http://shapea.shapea.com/
This is a crucial step for safeguarding privacy/security if OAuth is to become more prevalent.

Any app may request any number of permissions from me; but I as a user should be able to choose what permissions it gets. I would take this one step further and allow the user to retroactively withdraw permissions (OAuth already allows for asking the user for additional permissions).
Show me an example of a startup that scaled up massively and didn't rewrite their code. I'd suggest here that we have a case of correlation without causation. Startups tend to need a big rewrite early in their history, which is also coincidentally when they are likely to fail. People looking for a reason (or an excuse) for failure will blame the rewrite. Not unlike the 'vaccines cause autism' meme.
Except that the role of piracy is anything but clearcut. As Tim O'Reilly famously said in 2002 [1]: "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy."
False dichotomy much? I'm now an avowed ebook pirate, and my ebook library has ballooned seriously over the past 3 years. But I'm reading less than I did 5 years ago, when I used to frequent bookstores.
Actually, I have a HP LP2475w. I bought it because it has an IPS panel just like Dell U2410 which has a DisplayPort, too.
Sigh, I can't read OSNews anymore. It's got ugly ads plastered all over it.
A standard household ammeter watches the electrons sashay back and forth in the wires and totals that up. e.g. you get billed for both current you use and current you produce (since they never imagined that when they built the meter).

A "net-metering" ammeter determines if the electrons are cycling back and forth because you pushed them, or because the power company compelled them and tallies them appropriately.

Does anyone know how they determine "why" the current moved? At a first crack, I'd check the voltages very carefully on either side of the ammeter and decide which was bigger, but this is going to be complicated since there will likely be different answers across the complete cycle.
Do Your Users Have Shopping Cart Abandonment Issues?
It's meant to "bake your own" like so:

* expose your data via REST

* configure your models tot the urls where to sync data /users , /posts/1 etc.
Yes, visitors get a cookie that has the value of the page they should see on return visits. For instance, if a visitor ends up on variation page #2, they will see variation page #2 from now on. Or at least until they reach the conversion page or the cookie expires in 30 days.
Did you notice that the skills/experience bullet list said "some". We are interested in abilities, insight, and basic knowledge. As part of the candidate evaluation process we test candidates on their performance with a substantial design and implementation project, one that we believe should be fairly simple for someone with good programming skills and a good knowledge of algorithms and design. Most fail, and most of the rest perform badly. Even at the coder level, we see people who are unable to translate written descriptions into code. It is really depressing.

Maxeler is an interesting and challenging gig. Maxeler takes clients "known to work" code running on a cluster of machines (typically several thousand) and accelerates it by as much as a factor of 250X using a combination of hardware and software. Salaries depend upon skills and performance and are competitive with those elsewhere.
That's correct... I'm using the ihackernews.com API at the moment, so your votes aren't reflected in the data I get from there if you reload the app/page. If/when I use an html parser to fetch all the data directly from new.ycombinator this bug will be fixed. For now, if the number of points changes after you vote, it means the vote went through successfully.
The problem with twitter in particular is that it lets you do two things: read and post messages. What granular options do you see?
A patent for something that shouldn't be patentable? Bah. It's nothing against Google (who I'm a fan of), but a patent for "displaying original text in a user interface with translated text" just seems farcical.

What's next, a patent for "displaying relevant search results in a user interface with a given search query"?!?
Android needs this too, perhaps even more than OAuth does.
The post and FAQ only mentions mobile numbers. Any idea if this is available for land lines as well?
How To Build A Profitable Lifestyle Business In Web Apps, Info Products And More
In fairness, sending them has always been easy. The DMCA just means that people have to listen to them.
Perhaps you could suggest a payment method, and we could implement it. We've had a good amount of people sign-up from SA today.
The download on Android devices is 404ing for me.
Location Enhancement - The Power of the Present
Why would HMAC be inappropriate in this case (of storing user credentials)? Is there a vulnerability?

HMAC(key, password) instead of hash(password) or hash(salt+password)
Yes ... we persist to PostgreSQL/Solr, but others using Backbone sync their models to MySQL, CouchDB, MongoDB, and Redis (that I've heard of).
Not only that, but those who didn't spend their money on {software|music|movies} very likely managed to spend it on something else.

There is no giant pirate treasure hoard, where "pirates" cache these "billions of dollars every year", and we would not all be billions of dollars richer if only these pirates would give their money to the software / entertainment industries instead.
This makes me very happy. I am in the overwhelming minority of professional photographers who don't use Photoshop, but I have happily been using Pixelmator since it launched.
I just skimmed the comments thread and have a vague idea of what OpenID is but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Sounds great, Yahoo/Google/Facebook take your pick with a button or if you're hacker/paranoid enough to have your own infrastructure the slightly complexity of using a URL?

Main complaint seems to be it's URL and not user@host? Couldn't one just add support for user@host into the next
iteration of the standard? Maybe using something like DNS SRV records that seem to work well enough for XMPP?

Decentralisation is important and more cultural than technical. We need to keep working for it and it's not a short term goal--if it happens over decades so be it, but we shouldn't give up ground where we don't have to, especially with things trending against at the moment.
He left out the part where if you misuse the DMCA takedown notices, it's a crime.
I build applist. A way to share App Store downloads. (Web, mac & win) Opinions?
Their 990, a form nonprofits have to file with the IRS. You can find them at guidestar.org. You can also walk into any nonprofit and request a copy of their most recent 990 no questions asked (well, no questions answered anyway).
An inspirational collection of UI details/hacks
Yes, and he would succeed in style. I'm reminded of Sipser's intro to theory of computation: lots of images paint a very clear picture. Much clearer than when you would find yourself forced to draw all those images yourself (which you simply wouldn't do and you would instead settle for thinking you understood it). This is much simpler, but there are enough folks for which it is equally hard as intro to ToC was the first time for CS geeks.
His post wasn't Twitter specific; he just used Twitter as an example.

But since you asked, here's a couple I can think of:
* A rate limit on the number of Tweets per hour/day/week
* Ability to follow or unfollow
* Ability to index my tweets if they're private
You have no choice. Give in to Startup: a roller coaster of external self validation through articles (young! college drop out! attractive! pointless mission!), funding (let's raise $30M!), and high power friends also stuck in external self validation cycles (omg, another hit on my google alerts search for my name!).

When you find out you aren't the person reflected back at you externally, you do what you did the first time to get back into the spotlight. So what if you burn through $30M and still can't make money? Just raise more money. Remember: shoot for the moon. Start an inferno with a match. Worst case, you get a free pity acquisition from one of your slightly older, slightly uglier, but much smarter friends.

(I must have woken up on the wrong side of my VC this morning.)
I agree, and good for them. It's a great little program. I use it in place of Photoshop oh my relatively low-end Macbook for light image editing, just because it performs so much faster.
The dollar sign goes before the number.
Couldn't that be obviated by wrapping it much as jQuery makes browser support less painful?
yes - for good suspend/resume (in laptops), multiple monitor (hot plugging and unplugging doesnt work as well as Win 7) and.... Steam.
Tell HN: Enterprise Grade Social Media Management, Now Free
This is really some core "who am I" type issues. I had a similiar situation 15 years ago where I fell into a depression. I was talked into doing a weekend seminar by Landmark Education. It might sound hokey but I found it to be so powerfull that after the weekend I shut down my business, sold my house and ended up starting a new business 6 months later that ended up making me quite wealthy. Obviously not everyone will have the same results but if you want something to shake you out of complacency I can't think of a quicker, better way to do it.
This ia a great way to meter energy usage. Definitely need to get my hands one of their products.
A Sneak Peak At Google Offers (Courtesy Of Google Search)
I had no idea HP did that.
Diaspora will not kick start innovation in Ghana
This stickers are another instance demonstrating that Google has some people who are EXCELLENT at "teh social", in given -- if quite limited -- opportunities.

I don't know whether the perspective doesn't scale, or if other things are going on that affect the broader Google image. One thought: This kind of brilliance is coincident with, rather than orthogonal to, other kinds of brilliance, and the people who exhibit it are also very busy doing other things.
Oh great, so the future of authors and their revenue lies now in the jobs that haven't been automated yet?

There used to be a time when taking an ID photo would require you to go to a specialized photo studio, you know.

Waiting tables might still have a future though, since those robots from Japan are kind of creepy (for now at least).
I take the "libre" as (sort of) a Spanish "lee-bray", so it's no more difficult to pronounce than "payoff" or "layover".
Couldn't log in under two browsers. Was able to register but no luck after that.
Show HN: AisleFinder.com (Google maps for Supermarkets)
I'm guessing most people do it either because of security or for deployment into non-wordpress situations (e.g., you can basically host your small blog/site for free in App Engine).

For infrequently updated sites where there aren't multiple authors, wordpress is overkill and not worth the security concerns, IMO.
That's the free part too, so anyone can use it.

Although I suppose it won't be long until a cracked version of CrackTracker appears on those file hosting websites.

Another interesting concept would be to package this in a DLL and include it in the software you want it to protect. When someone runs a cracked copy, it will go see if it can find any relevant links in the browser's history and then auto-report them.
The Evolution of Knowledge Management
The article does not sound like that at all. There is not even a hint of the assertion that the browsers that do implement part of the SVG spec only did so in order to game the acid test.

It may remind you of such affairs, but people are likely to come away from your comment with a wrong impression of the article.
Help wanted: Google hiring in 2011
Who had the happiest customers in 2010? (Infographic)
Using location based applications to save real lives
The San Francisco suburb of San Ramon, California, is holding a press conference right now to launch a new version of the somewhat generic sounding iPhone application 'Fire Department'. The twist; This app will use geo-location to potentially save heart attack victim's lives. Read more...
yes - please. I wrote about it previously : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2129846

Not sure where you are from, but this definitely doesnt work in Asian countries.
You're overlooking the disincentive that there is to defend yourself even when you're innocent. The costs of defending yourself in court (and possibly needing to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court) well exceed the $4k settlement offer. This is why it's a 'shake-down'.

"We think that you have wronged us, so pay us $4k or else be forced to defend yourself in court where if you win, you have thousands of dollars in lawyer/court fees, and if you lose you have thousands of dollars in lawyer/court fees in addition to whatever the damages awarded are."

That you're completely ignoring this possibility says to me that you feel everyone accused by the RIAA is guilty until proven innocent (in your eyes at least).
I've also been part of a successful rewrite for an enterprise software project. Keys to success:

1. Cut features. Aggressively scoped the project to only core functionality and cut down a bloated feature set by about 50%. This allowed us to complete the rewrite much faster. Existing customers weren't forced to migrate, but often wanted to because we'd...

2. Deliver new features that weren't possible on the legacy code base. This included:
- 100x Performance improvements (hours to seconds)
- Versioning and audit tracking
- Better, faster, sexier user interface

3. Leverage new technologies and frameworks. This is an obvious part of any re-write because it enables a team to move faster. Technology changes so quickly. Think of how a small team today can accomplish so much more than a large team stuck on a platform from 5+ years ago.

I'm not saying that a rewrite is always right, but I believe you can make a good case for it. In this case, I guess you could consider it a part of a business pivot.

Sometimes you just burn the boats...
Pixelmator is perfectly positioned, which wont be very common. A good solid application, easier to incrementally learn and much cheaper than the primary competitor.
Economics of Cloud Computing - A Different Angle
Does this organization serve the interests of mankind, art, science and enlightenment generally? Does it serve the interests of some elite power group? Does it directly or indirectly serve the interests of death and war? I won't work for anybody; I have to sleep at night. I wouldn't serve communist China, a known entity, for a million dollars a day. And for damn sure I won't serve an unknown entity for free.
Even better: Let the application also say why it needs the permission:

* Read access
We want to analyse your tweets
* Read/write
Because we want to spam your friends
Earlier discussion about the hotel construction at

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1901274
If you can decode a way to 'beat the market' that means once you start beating the market someone else is loosing. They will adjust their trading techniques and your "algorithms" are now wrong