skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Myspace could have been Facebook

I disagree, and I spent a year working with MySpace in the relative hay-days of 2007-2008.

You could write a book on why Facebook has succeeded and MySpace hasn't... but the two headline thoughts for me are that:

1) MySpace was generational, Facebook is pan-generational. MySpace took everything that was current and popular in the early to mid 2000's and fashioned it into a web-based product that became part of pop culture of that era - thus the massive connection with the bands, the celebrities, etc. That was clever, but it was a time-limited play. Facebook appeals to multiple generations because it doesn't have that pop-culture appeal. Facebook is a utility, MySpace is/was a product.

2) Facebook was built as a data-play from the ground up. All of its value leverages its data and power of the network. MySpace's data model is/was atrocious and was never built with that in mind. Instead it was built as an ever-changing digital based bilboard ad.
Verizon users flock to forums to address iPhone pre-ordering glitches
These kinds of polls seem to come up every few months/years here at HN[1].

It'd be nice if someone made a little page that kept track of these various polls (age, gender, etc) like Gabriel does with the StartupWiki[2].

[1]: http://searchyc.com/submissions/How+old+are+you

[2]: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive
Ask HN: Does anyone know of a medical-niche startup blog?
I am looking for a startup blog that covers startups in the medical field (web startups and biotech). Does anyone know of any?
If copyright only protects content that is stored permanently, doesn't that mean I can stream whatever I want without paying for it?
ACCESS DENIED. Lol.

I guess I don't have a problem with that triangle. I do find it funny that out of so many blocked sites at my workplace, Reddit is not... must be Redditors in ITD.
Computer programmers are used to exact rules, but copyright law has a large subjective component, and it depends on what you do with it.

So the exact same technical action can have varied legality depending on what the end user does with it and the intent of the person doing it.

So striping ads in order to save bandwidth may be legal while stripping ads because you protest the concept of ads may not be.

Or stripping ads (in order to save bandwidth) may be legal for your ISP but illegal for a 3rd party.
It's simply so glaringly extraneous. And don't discount the author's point about how ugly it is.
Those are 3 of the most important :). Don't have to have all 8 or even a majority of them. Sometimes 1 can be enough.
NAT?
I am 22 and still absorbing lisp, currently running through "ANSI Common Lisp" and learning how I can apply this language to potentially my own startup. Only been visiting ycombinator for a week now and I already love it! So much information that is useful. Finally registered today.
Mubarak: 'If I Resign Today There Will Be Chaos'
For me, it's HN, Metafilter, and HN again just in case.
It's Windows Vista, Stupid
But if it's in Detroit what are your chances of getting out of the city with the money?
Couldn't agree more. I work at Thomvest Ventures and almost every portfolio company we have is hiring (a few additional aren't listed because they are in stealth but are about to go into ramp mode). Have quite a few friends working on funded startups who are looking to hire as well.

If you know the type of work you want to do, have a list of some of the stuff you have coded/what languages you know, and/or are interested in a specific company we have feel free to shoot me an email and I will try to help out (info is on Nathan's blog).
And doesn't work right. Hitting "page down" doesn't work unless you first click on the page with your mouse.
Also ironic that if you hover over it in Firefox, it says "This web site does not supply identity information." :-)

(The ICO is the UK government body responsible for, among other things, regulating the processing and disclosure of personal data.)
hey.. jonathon from Ludlow Ventures here. no local bias in the event. we're certainly excited to have the event in detroit, but the best company will win regardless of where they are from/located.
Mobile browsers don't support it. I've never been clear on the reasons, except maybe that there's a tension with the carriers over airwave bandwidth. Honestly: there's a Javascript interface in mobile Safari to access the location sensors and, IIRC the accelerometer, but the camera is offlimits.

On the other hand, the HTML interface is a mime-multipart form and a file upload - it's only convention that says "upload images only" - and the mobile platforms are very particular about access to files on the device. iOS for sure won't allow one app to touch the files of another.
Thanks very much - those are really good suggestions, I really appreciate it - I'll work on them both for v2.
I use Password Safe and Dropbox. I got the idea a few years ago from a blog post Joel Spolsky wrote:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/09/11b.html
In the UK British Telecom set up an ad service called Phorn that monitored your browsing and replaced ads with targeted ones from it's own suppliers.

A huge public backlash when it replaced charity "save the children" ads with ones inviting you to buy interesting videos of schoolgirls, caused it reconsider what had only been 'a trial concept'

The courts decided it had broken just about all the privacy/wiretapping laws but nothing to do with copyright.
Naturally it got off with a warning under the 'laws don't really apply to big telecoms companies" amendment.
Interesting idea. Also like the natural virality of the service.

If the system does not support it already, something worth considering is a function allowing the person making the list to upload a photo of themselves to be displayed on their wish list page.

This will re-assure the "buyers" they are on the correct page, not just some random list of products on the internet :)
Agreed. I wonder what percentage of us have promptly thought about the startup costs and practicalities for doing that sort of business ourselves ;-)
Totally agree. My sister emails around lists of things to buy for my twin two-year-old nieces. Then she has to check with everyone to make sure there's no dup's, etc.

I'd love to see the ability to organize by child, so my sister, for example, could put items into either child's registry.

Simple, awesome, easy to use, and real-life purpose.
Cogent gave us /22 (1024 IPs) free of charge in December.
Considering the 15 people who are going to be sending condolances letters once it hits the rumor mill? yep.
What does this say? I mean, it's nice that he made a popular app and a ton of money, but there is nothing to learn here. It was either raw luck or a stupid populace or both that made this happen. There's no insight in to the design of a well made and genuinely entertaining or interesting application here, just a gimmick app that somehow made it big.

It's discouraging to read things like this, because the implied moral is "any stupid idea you come up with has a chance of making it big". But if that's true, then why bother taking your time to design good applications? Why strive for excellence when some random gimmick app is just as likely to make money?
I've heard it stated (and I can't remember where) that the major difference between the social behavior of women and men online is that women tend to use social networks to extend existing real world relationships, and men tend to use social networks to replace or substitute for real world relationships.

Like any generalization, I can think of plenty of counterexamples and exceptions, but as a general statement it kind of rings true for me.
What is a "dye pack"?
Thanks, but dropping out of school and going into poverty in extremis before getting my career together wasn't my first plan.

Many many months of ramen and green tea.

Many...many months.
The Tiger Mom's Endgame
I'm not having a dig at the site. And I didn't know that about the product token.

Could you not do something with the user agent or do you get that already?
I suspect this is a case of £5 for the final icon, £580 for the other 10 comps and three rounds of meetings you had to go through to decide on the inverted version in the first place.

It's trivial to recreate the end result, but you can't ignore that the end result wasn't a foregone conclusion; ideas had to be floated and presented and agreed upon, etc. Especially with high-politic clients, getting consensus on even a small thing can take a lot of time.
I'm pretty sure T-mobile does something like this. I believe you can get a non-NAT'd address if you specifically ask for it.
Yeah, I think UX is the starting point, I'd love to hear what they think the ending point is.
In undergrad after your first year my college had an open book policy for all engineering courses. Tests were usually 2-3 questions (~2hrs long) and you could use any resource you wanted just like you would at a job. There was no memorization, they only tested your ability to solve a problem.

Feel the same way that's why I really didn't care about 'grades' or 'majors'. Sadly most people need the physiological motivation of the grading system. If I wanted to learn something I took the class: engineering, comp sci, bio, whatever I felt like. In grad school I never even opened a report card, they just went right in the trash. You're there to learn, not to get grades. But again most people cant work like that.
Share them, it might make someone feel smart today. ;)
This is all public but I don't really have any close personal connections that lead to her.

http://twitter.com/#!/lgrenawalt
http://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsaygrenawalt
Content Distribution and Sharing Sites That Matter
> Zuck started FB at one college with one photo, but I bet you he knew exactly what it could become one day.

I'd take that bet.
PyBrain: The Python Machine Learning Library
I think this is definitely readable for someone who has stepped away from probability for maybe a year or two after having taken a couple courses on the subject at the undergrad level. And that seems like the target audience as well--undergrad students who need a refresher at the start of a new course.
Hehe, I'm only reading the article now. My comment was based on the other comments here.
Best calculator ever - HP 32Sii: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-32S
Open Source Developers Love It
Assuming you are employing hyperbole I'll skip over the idea of it costing more than £585 in their time to find out.

As to the MPs' expenses stuff, I don't know the figures of how much the inquiry cost, but assuming you're right that it cost more, it doesn't mean they shouldn't have done it.

For one reason, ethics - should police ignore crimes when it appears that the damage caused by the criminal is less than it would cost the police force to pursue it?

For another, the future - If you cut off the problem then it doesn't keep costing money year after year, which would add up to costing more than the inquiry did.
Nice, but it's no http://dygraphs.com/
Too bad profits don't have that failsafe.
Verizon's "Explanation of Optimization Deployment"
Is this the one time we old fogeys are allowed to complain that HN is getting more like Reddit every day? ;-)
Tycho from Penny Arcade writes an excellent post on communication and offense
Some backstory: They put out a comic in which they made a secondary joke that involved rape (you should probably read the comic, it's not necessarily ABOUT rape). Readers thought the concept was funny enough and a "Dickwolves" t-shirt was sold. Eventually, the shirt was pulled but that didn't stop criticism.

A few months of anti-rape blog members and Penny Arcade members "interacting" eventually resulted in death threats.

Original Comic: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/11/
This is from Andrew Ng's machine learning course, CS229. These notes are probably from a TA and handed out during a recitation.

You can see the rest of the notes, lectures and other course materials at http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=348ca38a-3a... .
Quick and dirty solution, for each favicon you'll have a different virtual host inside Apache.

And I fail to grasp the situation where you've got multiple subdomains setup inside the same virtual host config (through ServerAlias), but still having different favicons. But even for this case you can probably come up with something based on mod_rewrite.
Picky monkeys PIC ARM
I'd like to say that Scott Gonzalez and I have been working to unify the API and make it more consistent.

When the 1.9 release is out, we're hoping to have less bugs and more consistent code. I believe the effects plugins are also going to be rewritten (draggable, droppable, etc) which should improve consistency and behavior of all the plugins.
I guess I could recommend to you 'Introduction to Machine Learning' by Ethem Alpaydin : http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=10341&#...

I find it is less brutal than Bishop's book, providing insightful analogies. It won't make you an expert, but it will give you a solid starting point.
Thanks. There are honestly some much more important things going on in the world right now, so that doesn't bother me too much.

It did bother me a lot that people were happy to "put the boot" in on Microsoft based on pretty slim evidence, and without much level of criticial thinking. I'm not really a Microsoft fan, but the whole thing felt a lot like confirmation bias to me.

To answer your questions:

1) I'm guessing so. I'd wager that you might even be able to run a similar experiment to Google's Bing experiment (on a different host), and see the result turn up in Google's search index after a while.

2) I was wondering that, too. I might check it out tonight.
It reminds you that when your small ideas require proportionately small efforts, you might as well do them and see what happens.

Too many people inappropriately shrug off their smaller thoughts as not worth doing, because they're not going to 'change the world' or some other low-probability outcome.
You forgot the risk premium, among other things. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_premium
I think the fundamental issue is that no one asks the simple question, "What is the goal of testing/grading?"

I think is in order for the _student_ to evaluate their mastery of the given discipline.

Everything else, I feel, stems from a distortion of this process for other purposes.

As for grading in schools, I cannot say anything reasonable because I got good grades, although I hated school. However, I recall my art teacher in middle school who would sit you down and ask you about your aim with your work and what you thought you deserved, and then she'd settle on a grade. I found it really strange, because I was too young to understand. I would often overestimate my grade, but what she wanted of me was to figure out what I expected of myself and to develop the ability to evaluate that.

It's profound that someone would want that of you at 12 years of age.

I'll never forget it, though I only understood it many, many years later.
Auto-register people. Circle back with people after 6 months and find out how they would have registered differently. Develop some profiles, identify the popular products, and you can allow expecting mothers to auto-register with the recommended items.

And buy yourself some kid-o-potamus swaddles. We never would have picked that out but someone gave us one and that was a life saver the first 6 weeks or so. Never would have though being all straight jacketed was the preferred way for babies to sleep...
Here's my number one feature request that wishlists never seem to support: partial contributions. This is even more the case with baby registries, where families might want help with high-cost items (carseats, cribs etc) but where well-wishers are generally going to contribute something in the $20 range.

Ideally, I want to be able to contribute $20 towards that $80 carseat. If A, B & C also contribute, the item should be sent as coming from me, A, B & C. If only myself and A contribute, you should be given the opportunity to put in your $40 to complete the purchase.

Just my 2 cents.

[Edit: Basically I would like the lovechild of a wishlist with something like http://www.chipin.com/ - do that and you can really differentiate yourself]
Possibly. If they are someone you have worked for in the past, then it can be a great thing.
Dragon Age 2 demo will appear on 22 February
Some backstory: They put out a comic in which they made a secondary joke that involved rape (you should probably read the comic, it's not necessarily ABOUT rape). There was some backlash, and some readers thought the concept was funny enough and a "Dickwolves" t-shirt was sold. Eventually, the shirt was pulled but that didn't stop criticism.

Penny Arcade never issued an apology as they felt they weren't obligated to, but at the same time acknowledged that there were people who were offended.

A few months of anti-rape blog members and Penny Arcade members "interacting" eventually resulted in death threats.

Original Comic: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/11/
Interesting pricing concept: If InDinero helps its customers succeed, so do its revenues! Great idea!
UI thought: list of items in the showcase section has a lot of white space. While this is a good practice, you may want to allow more than 4 items per screen by reducing top & bottom white space for each item.
I'm not in the least... It probably took them an hour to find out, reply to the emails etc. They probably had to ask others etc. Their salary, electricity, office overhead etc. I'd expect it came to a fair bit more than £585 to deal with the request for information.

The MP expenses thing was always ridiculous. So an MPs husband mistakenly put in an expense claim for £10 adult movie. Sure it sells papers, but £10 is nothing. We spend more on paper cups in a single room of the NHS.

The rules were ridiculously open to interpretation - second homes etc. Couple that with the fact that MPs get paid next to nothing, and it's no wonder they try to claim expenses for everything.

The answer is to pay MPs more - the going rate for if they're in the business world. If you don't want corruption or taking liberties, you must start by paying a fair wage.
Your Wikipedia-based contention does not appear to be relevant. Paul Baran's original research does not match what the Internet actually became. On that point, we agree. I based my contention strictly on the primary source-- Paul Baran's RAND research note. The DARPA research and the RAND note were an investigation into the idea of having a network which would meet military objectives, possibly including communications after a nuclear strike. Much of the note focused on that. Example after example exists of commissioned military research which gets applied to a purpose other than the original subject of the research-- that's exactly the point I was intending to get across with my example. The structure of the Internet was designed to be decentralized in part because Baran envisioned this military need. Whether the RAND team and the DARPA team agreed on the direction of the research seems besides the point.
I'm a Java person, but I forced myself to implement it in C.

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
int integer = -1231232342;
int negative = integer < 0 ? -1 : 1;
integer = integer * negative;
char c[11];
int index = 0;
while(integer != 0) {
int position = integer % 10;
c[index++] = 48 + position;
integer = integer / 10;
}
if(negative == -1)
c[index++] = '-';
int swap = 0;
while(swap < index / 2) {
char t = c[swap];
c[swap] = c[index - swap - 1];
c[index - swap++ - 1] = t;
}
printf("%s\n", c);
return 10;
}
I've charegd a client over $1000 for a one-line script that used SCP to copy a file from one place to another. I even told them upfront it would be a trivial one-line script, and made no pretense it was not a really simple thing to do.

But by the time you cover quoting, invoicing, documentation for the change control process and arranging the required access there is a whole days effort spent on the task.

Just because something is easy to do in an environment where you have complete control and no need to justify and document changes doesn't mean it's easy to do in a production environment, and that's assuming the icon itself wasn't properly hand-crafted pixel by pixel to get the best result.
First words of the piece: "No he didn’t."

Surprise! Another attention-grabbing headline used as link bait. These are designed to steal your time and attention, and _that's_ the idea.
Well, you attitude is both better and smarter than mine. :-(

I have a couple of large 80% done libraries I wrote to publish as open source -- which I am going to rewrite heavily before I'm letting anyone see.

(Answer to next question: Yes, a couple -- instead of finishing one and starting a second. There are reasons in addition to me being stupid. :-) )

At least I learned a lot.

Edit: About the article -- it is hard to create a good API, I've designed lots of APIs in my days -- and I don't think I've done a single good one. :-(
Wallpapers Shop: Shilpa Shetty And Chitrangada Singh Walk The Ramp
Usually companies looking to hire people.
It might be cool for InDinero to support data imports from our FaceCash POS system. As mobile payments take off more businesses will be using it, and though we have our own accounting features they might want to build it into InDinero too if they're using it already.
Out of curiosity, how'd you get the coverage from CNN? Was it their interest, or via a marketing outreach?

Congrats on the coverage!
Much love to JSPerf.

OT, but, is there any way to embed the results dynamically?
Google Gets 75,000 Job Applications in 1 Week, Setting Record
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

-from Gödel, Escher, Bach
Google, Bing, and web browsing data
Wow. Today must be a day for great photography links.
That's a separate issue - discounting the value of the service based on uncertainty over its continuance. But even within the limits of the unstated limit ("excessive use"), the heavier users are still subsidized by the light users.

You can still freeload up and until you hit the limit.
What does the startup do?
I feel a bubble coming on.
IRS Launches iPhone App That Does Almost Nothing
>News Corp's acquisition for $500m will probably be remembered as a collossal blunder

Didn't they have a $900 million search deal from Google, though? (Granted, my understanding is they didn't hit their numbers so they made slightly less than that, but still I think this makes it likely that News Corp's acquisition of MySpace was profitable and not a collossal blunder.)

Here's an older TechCrunch article talking about how buying MySpace was one of Murdoch's best decisions ever. (I agree that it looks less good now, but overall I don't think it was horribly bad from a financial perspective): http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/15/three-years-later-buying-my...
Great looking site and definitely fills a void for new or expecting parents. My wife definitely would have used this when she was pregnant last year.

Congrats on your forthcoming arrival!
It looks alright, but I'm not sure how it's better than Google's Annotated Timeline Component? http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gall...
Most US states are at-will employment, allowing anyone to be fired at any time, for no reason at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

Fun fact, many anti-discrimination laws in the US don't apply to companies with less than 15 employees.
1997: Steve Jobs joins Apple's board after the NeXT acquisition.
I'm willing to bet it would ;)