skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Re-evaluate the business relationship - she's not really a 'co-founder' any more, or perhaps never was. Revisit the relationship and make her employee #1 with a moderate equity stake, or just an 'advisor' who's given some equity stake in the project. I'm assuming you're 50/50 on this (which I'm not sure I could ever bring myself to do personally) but she's certainly not contributing anywhere near 50% of the initial work, and apparently she realizes it.

Keep the friendship, rework the business relationship to something fairer to all involved.
Good eye... I'll change the age poll's title as well. ;)
Solving the 'chicken and egg' problem has lead to a catastrophe in large dating markets:

Abandoned accounts and men->women spam.

I think a smaller dating site would prosper quite well if it could eliminate wasting people's time. eHarmony has a good practice in this regard, but eHarmony is also marriage, christian, straight focused - and excluded all others.

A dating site that disabled user accounts that hadn't logged in or responded, initiated conversation eHarmony style, and somehow limited the spam that men send, well... that'd be worth checking out. It would drastically raise the signal to noise ratio.

For spam: perhaps you can only send one message per day to new people, and one message per person per reply. Choose wisely.

Also, for every uploaded picture, grab the date it was taken and put that on the page. Might not stop hackers, but that's a small minority.

Other effects to combat: the ego inflation effect, where having many virtual 'options' makes you more selective.

Maybe even a 'ask a friend' feature, where you email a reply history to a friend and ask their advice (helps with network effects).

There's LOTS of room for innovation here, essentially.
> 1) They said that the favicon was not quoted from the contractor separately. Clearly the listed price is from some weird government formula. (Although, the original document DOES list it separately)

Exactly. The government paid for a website maintenance contract. This was some of the maintenance done. They probably divided the maintenance done by the fee paid to arrive at the figure quoted. This doesn't account for the actual bulk of the maintenance expense, which is "being on call for maintenance requests".

I paid for a snow-plowing contract this year. There has not been much snow. Accordingly, I've paid hundreds of dollars per snow-plowing actually performed. This doesn't make it a bad deal, because the service I paid for is actually not "come and plow x times", it's "come and plow as many times as required for the year".

TL;DR: There's no story here, at all. Zero. At no point in time did anyone write a cheque for 585 pounds for a favicon. It's conceivable that the government overpaid for the whole website maintenance contract but there's zero evidence of that being true. Everyone commenting should be embarrassed.
This post is a prime example of the slippery slope fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
Giant Virus, Tiny Protein Crystals Show X-ray Laser’s Power and Potential
Seriously, the icon design wasn't a foregone conclusion. It could have NOT had the inverted colors. Or just had the I. Or something completely different.

Plus, it wasn't an internal project. It was outsourced. That can cut productivity quite a bit.
At a current 98:6:2 ratio, I'm thinking "everyone" here has a pretty clear gender.
I made an HN extension for Chrome a while back called Hacker News OnePage. I also have a version of it that runs on Greasemonkey for Firefox. https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/plldnnbdlbgbiknj...
Study finds girls benefit from playing video games with their family
Try deep focus and commitment on a new goal. Set milestones, even several a day. Put the horse blinders on.

Also, this article comes to mind and may help: http://rejectiontherapy.com/how-inadequacy-and-betrayal-can-...
I'm not sure where I'd put this on your scale, but I'm an evolutionary thinker instead of a revolutionary one. I don't look at the world and ask "what could be?" - I look at something already existing and ask "why aren't they doing $insert_obvious_feature ?".

This means I'll probably never be the "idea guy" in any venture I undergo, but that doesn't really bug me - startups aren't my thing.
I did a bunch of work for a porn site back in the 90's who somehow managed to not pay me. Something like $6000 down the drain. (So my wife was mad at me twice over that one. Sigh.)
Was probably easier than:

"On a scale of 1 to 10, please describe your sexual identity as it relates to the presence of traits and characteristics formerly associated with the expression of the human Y chromosome."
13-16-95, 64-67-64.

You need to make unique codes for same locations.
About 2000 people have used it. Like I said, can't really call them a user since this tool is useful maybe 4 times a year. We built it for ourselves because we just moved to Pittsburgh, PA and couldn't find our way around this city.

We haven't tried any marketing, we're not even sure what niche we're serving still.

It's built using Django, although I'm probably going to rewrite it to use either node or Tornado + web sockets. It's kind of a hodgepodge implementation right now that was built just as a proof of concept to start.
I don’t think you can look at the average hourly revenue of the online store, look at how long it was down and calculate Apple’s revenue loss from that.

Of course not. But neither can you say that 100% of people will come back after the store turns them away. There is undoubtedly a cost to store downtime; the only question is how much. On a high traffic store like Apple's, even a small percentage of lost customers is a large amount of money lost.
Am I the only one wondering why you'd use jQuery to begin with if you actually needed these sort of micro-optimizations?

Regardless, there's an edit with a correction now.
Am I the only one impressed with the speed and (relatively) decent and detailed response by the government in this case?
How Kraft’s Face-Scanning Tech Will Tell You What You Like to Eat
that's not an argument about twitter, that's more about the internet and global communication. it would be different without the internet. it would not be different without twitter. even so, the internet only played one piece -- communicating what happened in Tunisia. there were so many other factors in place in Egypt that has brought it to where it is now that have nothing to do with technology, despite how much you seem to fetishize it.
Many technical interviews are very theory-heavy, muddling the divide between Computer Science and Software Engineering.

I've been faulted for this in my interviewing, but I think that you have to pose at least one problem that can be explained precisely in less than a minute and solved completely in less than an hour. Such a problem will inevitably have an abstract, theoretical feel.

It's also good to ask more realistic questions to test domain knowledge, but there are candidates who can string the right words together in the right order all day long but fall apart when faced with a real problem. It's very frustrating to try to identify such people using a loosely-defined, open-ended problem, because they can speak competently and professionally while avoiding the aspects they don't understand, and many experienced candidates will exhibit the same blathering behavior even if they are technically strong, because it's a standard mode of speaking that everyone in the industry has to learn.

I.e., if I faulted people for spouting BS in response to realistic, open-ended questions, I'd rule out strong candidates as well as posers. Asking candidates to completely and precisely solve a simple problem separates abstract thinkers from people whose skills are purely verbal.
I'm a pregnant hacker. Please review my side project.
At the rate at which technology is advancing, I think that learning how to educate oneself is almost as important as what you learn from actually being in school. Yes you need to learn the basics, but in general I think it would be much better to teach someone how to think and learn than it would be to spoon feed knowledge. The "teach a man to fish.." line is very much applicable here.
I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks'

Yeah, me, too. Some kind of similarity metric would be nice, wouldn't it? "More like this"? Email me if you want to get serious any time.
I wonder if they were the ones who set the favicon up so it worked on their server.

If that's the case, diving around someone else's code for £585 is pretty cheap.
The fact that they were ready to supply an honest answer to the inquiry is pretty cool. Regardless of how steep the cost of that favicon was, I'm impressed by how they can be held accountable for it
When I got my job in the porn industry they didn't advertise that was what it was for. Instead it was brought up during the interview process.

They asked me a series of questions related to it as well. Like "For your day job you may have to visit bigblackcocks.com to make sure their website is functioning again, how do you feel about that?" and "We host a lot of content that might be offensive, if given root access would feel the urge to delete everything because it didn't fit in with your world view?"

I'm not offended at anything, so it really didn't bother me. I worked on many different aspects of the business. Massively scaling MySQL, handling DDoS attacks, setting up load balancers on the fly, helping figure out how certain websites were attacked and or compromised. It was a fun job, and one of the sites I worked on currently has 600+ live models streaming to over 1 million unique IP addresses.

I don't know how you'd go about finding such a job, I stumbled upon it. No, it is not on my resume since I am a software engineer at heart and not a sys admin, but the knowledge I have gained has allowed me to engineer various different systems in the mean time.

CCBill and Cave Creek located in Phoenix are two of the places where I interviewed before landing the other job, later I found out through a friend who did get the job at Cave Creek that he was doing the same stuff I was doing.
>The only investments we need the "gift" of government to pursue are those that we get less value out of than we put into.

Or those that need more than one person to implement.
An entrepreneur can decide to buy a cab and offer rides to the airport - but there isn't much point unless a million tax payers have already got together and built the freeway.
Another advantage of having accounts: users can "link" stories together to make a book. So if I post story1, story2, story3, I can log in to my account and order them as story1 -> "Chapter 1", "Chapter 2", etc. You can have other cool features too: table of contents, "Save a PDF of your book"
It stems from what you mean by "infinity". Most people use the term as if infinity is a number, and that gets you into trouble. You need to say what you mean.

He talked about \infty - 1, and really that means - "take an infinite-sized set and remove an element from it." Now you have the question: Which infinite-sized set?

In particular, there are different sizes of infinite sized sets. The set of positive whole numbers, the set of primes, and the set of rationals are all "the same size" (under a reasonable definition of the term). However, the set of real numbers, or the set of subsets of primes, are both "bigger" (in some very real sense).

So I was responding to the comment about "\infty - 1 being \infty" causing trouble. When you treat these things properly (whatever that means) then it doesn't cause trouble. At least, not any more, and not for people who understand the care required.

tl;dr : If you mention "infinity" you are probably talking about the size of a set.
Nobody is claiming anything about the internal combustion engine. Uvdiv is claiming that oil is not an example of path dependence because it is actually optimal. That there exists a path to get to the ICE does not refute the argument.
similar list: http://hnresources.com/apps/
I spent a long time trying to get mine right, and it's still looks a bit shabby in my mind - http://www.codegrunt.co.uk/ - I'm not actually that surprised by the cost.

This seems to me to be classic non-tech manager thinking - 'how on earth can a 16x16 icon cost that much?!' - but once you factor in all the various factors it's not so obvious. Just because the instinctive reaction is 'that's ridiculous!' it doesn't mean that should override an actual analysis of what might actually be involved.
DICE Cancelled Battlefield 1943
Developer DICE has just announced that the long awaited title Battlefield Onslaught 1943 will no longer be. With the development of Battlefield 3 it will be a challenge to support the games while building a new one. DICE has made a tough choice, and will focus on their next hit Battlefield 3.
Axiomatic reasoning about music theory(prolog, haskell)
You know, when you split it like that, it almost sounds plausible.

So, I looked closely at the PDF:-
-"Web development work (Logo and fonts £2,317.50, Favicon £585, E-newsletter £1,080)"

Creating a favicon costs a quarter of logo and fonts? That is literally unbelievable.

Your reasoning has merits but I think they (the web design company + those who commissioned them) do not merit it.
6 months ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1571216

2 years ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309

and leaving this here if helpful to anyone doing other surveys

http://google.com/search?q=site:ycombinator.com+poll
http://cltblog.com/files/2010/08/03-980x661.jpg
Chrome adds experimental text-to-speech extension API
Let's do it this way - if I'll make you 50 pixel perfect fav icons in a day you pay me £100 for each one. OK? (It's a huge discount...)
I'm 8-months pregnant. When I went to create a baby registry I was pretty disappointed with what was out there (I ended up using Amazon Universal Wishlist). I found myself with some time on my hands waiting for baby, and decided that I'd build a better baby registry. I partnered with a great designer I met on forrst.com, and this is the result.

I'd love any feedback, suggestions etc.
Top Eco Friendly Concept Music Players
Agreed, its not like the designer was doing some sort of high-detail pixel art or anything. Favicons can take a really long time. They are an art.

However, this one is not even that good of a job. Its a little off center, the font isn't very clear, hard to read. Clearly just a photoshop resize job. I would expect much cleaner work for that price
I always got the impression most tech conferences were too thin-skinned about the subject, which is sad considering the porn industry works on a lot of interesting tech problems.
Given HN polls allow users to pick more than one option, you could have had a "What is your age/gender?" With both Gender and Age options, letting people vote on the two relevant answers.
Oh Canada!
77 Business Apps with Open API for developers
Message to the future: there were ~30 people who had voted 11-20 by the time the switch was made to break it up into two sections.

To figure out the actual distribution of people, you'll have to subtract 30 from the 16-20 range and then compare that with the 11-15 range, and then add back in the 30 votes distributed correctly.
Real quote: "A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship."

src: http://www.woopidoo.com/business_quotes/authors/john-rockefe...
Twelve Simple Steps to Planning a Killer Blog
37, here.
Interesting to see the progression of these numbers over time.

male:female (other)

@30 minutes it is 200:10 (7)
@15 minutes it was 42:2 (0)

http://hackeress.com/hackeress/etc/genders.png
The cofounder and I came together because of the startup. And we have the good ol' reverse vesting thing, neither of us is over the 0% boundary yet.

As for the startup itself, it's almost certain to get a follow-on of a certain government grant, so it wouldn't be the wisest decision to just dissolve it completely.
This is absurd. I am working on my internet startup as we speak and reading news like this really disappoints me. Why is our country all about a quick buck or fast cash rather. We move from Internet bubble in late 90s to Housing bubble in the '00s back to the Internet bubble... is housing bubble next?
Oh I did not know that. Thanks! That's good to know in the future. I assumed HN automatically removed your previous vote similar to radio buttons.
Nielsen: Apple iAds More Effective Than TV Ads
Good for business?

<Sarcasm>Yeah, and when those 5% of users quit the service, you can get rid of the next 5%. Keep repeating until you have no customers.</Sarcasm>
Hey Timothy, Emrah here.
How did you set up this poll?
I'd like to do one.
(I answered both and found useful)
Thank you:)
I was thinking the exact same thing. It's a little too late now though to get worthwhile results, I think. Perhaps a year from now I'll ask again with a script ready. :)
Oh good, Verizon Wireless. I have other reasonable choices than Verizon Wireless.
> Yes, obviously "hiybbprqag" came from Google.

That's all Google is saying.

> They never tested the fact that it could have come from any other website as well.

It doesn't matter, Google is only complaining about what Bing has copied from Google. What Bing copies from other sites is between them and the other site.
£1 for the new favicon, £1 for knowing how to do it, £583 for knowing my client will actually pay that much.
Great idea. Great looking site.
I've often wondered if the tech industry has a statistically higher other ratio than others, or if people are just more open or honest.
Design is awesome. First impressions last.
Exclusive Interview on Starting PoundWire
20 years later and it is still a/s/l? sigh
http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

Don't abuse it!
1977!!
The site design alone really is a superb lesson in simple effective good-looking usability. As someone else pointed out: one click ordering, brilliantly-worded concise text, good design, immediately understandable purpose and call to action. These things all instill confidence, and are no accident. Anyone who's ever tried should know how difficult it is to make something "simple"... so yes I'd say your years of hard work have paid off.
Wow, I really expected the demographics to tilt towards my age group (early 30's). Looks like I was wrong.
I want the writer to be in full control. They should be the originator of the tweet. What do you think of only being able to re-tweet a story, IE) if the writer wants to tweet it originally they can but if they don't, others cannot tweet on their behalf.
This is good on my work connection but doesn't quite work on my third-rate rural DSL connection from Frontier.

ivi.tv will give you a stream with bandwidth requirements that works on any connection, degrading all the way to a slide show if it has to.
Open source urban planning
I'm shocked that this hasn't happened yet. Good job, looks great.
Maybe you should have asked who the other guy was and interviewed him.
People have been beating the same "gas is running out" drum since we left Tulsa apparently, and that was three hours ago.

Hey... why aren't we moving anymore?
30, nearly starting to come down the other side of this curve
This is good advice!

A domain name needs to fit the web site, and your approach to attracting visitors and maintaining relationships with them. But the original post never described these aspects of the business/service being considered.

I wrote an article about this yesterday: http://domainjig.com/ideas/great-domain-names.html in preparation for the public launch of a new ... domain name suggestion tool! I'm not quite ready to post it to the main HN page (still working out a few to-do's), but for those of you wanting a sneak peek, here it is: http://domainjig.com
I have a 48SX on my desk that I use almost every day. It's not just the notation and interaction that is nice as there are plenty of calculator apps that support RPN. The tactile feel of the keys gives good positive feedback that you haven't missed a digit when calculating in a hurry.
One infinity is not necessarily equal to another. You are correct. Equality is not a very useful concept for infinities, really, you need other concepts like one-to-one mappings. Take one away from your infinity and you haven't done anything to its cardinality. A one-to-one mapping between the old infinity and the new one is still trivially available.

Words are useless. English is absolutely incapable of dealing with infinities in math, full stop. If you are arguing with English words, you're already wrong. That is why I said that I am presenting one useful way to think of them, and it is absolutely not the best or only way. What I showed was just a somewhat intuitive way to think of the infinity most commonly encountered in otherwise-conventional math and isn't totally correct there, either, it's just intuitively closer. Arguing about my intuitive shortcut misses the point entirely. You must go learn the math. I can't use the math terms to explain it to you here, either, because the correct understanding of the terminology would be tautological to understanding my point.

Also, I am not trying to be mean here. It took mathematicians decades to work out consistent definitions of infinity, and if you are going to insist on banging on the definitions and exposing the inconsistencies, an admirable enterprise, the only definitions that will stand up to that scrutiny are the ones that have been honed over the decades, and they do not fit well into HN posts. (Even if they are posted, they are thoroughly based on other mathematics that they would be meaningless until you understand those other things.) There's no Royal Road to infinity.
Working for the government, I've seen some fleecing in my day. If contractors bid on a job, they have no problem charging 5X, 10X, or more than what they would in the private sector. Sometimes, it's the government agency that is to blame. Some decision makers will not bid out the contract, but will only give it to a select contractor (no-bid contract). I always assume that these decisions were influenced by bribes or money under the table...something!

Case in point. Accenture bid on a fairly complex web application for tracking "containers" that get transferred to private companies, but ofen the "containers" aren't returned back to the agency. Knowing they were the only contractor bidding on this project, Accenture's bid for this web app was over $5 or $6 million! Last I heard the project was still going through. It's sickening to think about it. That's a lot of money for a small, somewhat complex solution. Any advanced enterprise Java developer could do this project by themself within a year's time for 3%. It's a shame, I say!
22 and 4-5 years into my career.

I can only hazard a guess at what I'll be doing in 20 years.
We recently experienced similar frustration with the lack of a good universal registry mechanism for babies. While this makes sense, in the same way that most stores try to keep all registries internal, from a consumer standpoint it remains quite lacking.

I think it's great. Color scheme and style are very appealing and appropriate. The one awkward point for me is the "plus any other online store" tag after the noteworthy logos. It seems a little too much like an add-on. Maybe something a little bigger (to draw attention to the fact that your service is universal), with text suggesting, "BabyList registry works with any online retailer!" and then have an "including:" or "featured" listing over your images?

Just my two cents.
I'm going to guess that come twenty years time the curve will just have shifted with you.

So, really, you're just at the cutting edge :)
I'm just glad to see I'm not the only one who's been led to think: if Google can demonstrate that Microsoft is picking up search correlations from the Google site, and Microsoft just explained that, no, it's just that we pull in clickstream data, then couldn't one feed synthetic clickstream data to Bing as a blackhat SEO technique? That seems like much less work that setting up content farms or botnet clickfraud.