skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Softwares for creating animated product video?
So my startup needs to create intro video that explains what our service do.

I have already wrote the scripts (I used to write screenplays). I try to simplify each scene so that they can be accomplished by just using moving images (similar to dropbox's video). I know they used stop-motion to accomplish that, but I imagine there must be an even easier way to do it all on the computer.

What software would be good for that task? Flash?

Also, voice over syncronization is a different matter, but if you know a good tool for that, that will be helpful too.
Just signed up.
Siegler's argument is that a long history supports Apple's revenue dropping less than Microsoft's in the fourth quarter. It's a new argument. The recent pace revenue growth was Siegler's reason that Apple would beat Microsoft in Q1. Rapid growth in no way implies slow decline.
Gallup Poll: Precursor To Elections In Egypt?
I'm not cynical at all about HN in its context, namely as a site for sharing news about startups and hacking. It does a very good job of those things, and the mechanisms on place like moderating posts and karma all work towards that.

With respect to people going off together and starting companies based on "meeting" each other on HN, I'm not cynical about that either, I just have no opinion of it one way or another. It's as if you told me that two people met at a bus stop, fell in love, got married, but one had an affair and now they are in a bitter custody dispute. I feel very sorry things didn't work out for them, but as far as the bus stop is concerned, my interest is in when the next bus arrives, and I think the interior of the shelter should be devoted to the schedule, not to their story.

All I am saying is that there are established places for entrepreneurs to meet each other for the purpose of doing business, and such places have mechanisms for resolving and/or publicizing such disputes.

p.s. That being said... Perhaps this is a one-time thing and will blow over. Unless the front page starts picking up a few stories like this a day, HN is not in any danger of losing its focus, so I don't have anything really to worry about. Carry on!
Hit me up, noah at appsumo. Maybe we can help get you going.
Spread sheets with units would help "can't compare ampere to 1/ampere". As would ditching "the world is one giant grid" in favor of multiple tables as in a relational DB on the screen. For example if you applied a formula to a table, you get a new table instead of some region of cells that happens to be the formula applied to another region of cells. This also solves the problem of having to enlarge the region where a formula is applied when more data comes in.
I think the important point is that there are no engineers among the top political ranks in the United States. I feel the US govt would benefit from an influx of good engineering minds.
Ah, thankyou, so finally we have an answer to the question "Is it true that hardly any current Apple executives have MBAs?" and the answer is "No". Four out of eleven is a minority, but doesn't count as "hardly any".
Smarkets in London: http://smarkets.com

Real-time trading platform. Python frontend, Erlang backend.

Smarkets is one of the Wall Street Journal’s Top 10 Tech Startups to watch in Europe and was shortlisted for the Startups Awards.
This is what you get when you spend millions of dollars on an enterprise CMS + integration once every 8 years or so.
Also see: http://www.gallup.com/poll/108724/Iranians-Egyptians-Turks-C...
IPv6 is here
Should You Really be a Startup Entrepreneur?
I don’t understand the point you are making. Revenue will drop (quarter-to-quarter, not year-over-year) because the next quarter is not the holiday quarter. Simple as that.
how do you make sure it doesn't drift away?

unless you combine the plane and the balloon into the zeppelin...
The other key aspects are:

1. Bob Smith can legally point a gun at another VC to take large quantities of their money.

2. The process of getting an investment from Bob Smith puts the relative trivialities of "office politics" or "networking" in perspective. The US Government is to Office Space as Office Space is to a startup.
no attack, just a giant wordpress fail earlier
"I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too."

It's because speech recognition does not exist for Egyptian Arabic.

There are some research programs, but no actual completed products.

This may be surprising to some, but speech recognition is only available in a small number of languages. Mainly European languages plus Chinese.

There is nothing preventing speech recognition in other languages, it's just no one has done it.
I'm disappointed that this summary doesn't touch on the actual results; the system recognizes 19/20 characters in the best of cases, and 9/10 is an optimistic number otherwise (so many different trials make naming one number impossible). I am glad to discover this awesome, extremely impressive work; but including numeric results would have ensured that I saw this as a information security problem. Instead, I imagined that I could unplug my keyboard forevermore :)
Because saying that Apple’s Q1 results were “insane” is not actually insane. I won’t defend every single piece but I will defend that particular headline and the linked article. I won’t go hunting for pieces I disagree with because I usually don’t read anything by Siegler. He often is a biased hack, you know. But not in this particular piece and not as far as the headline of Siegler’s article on Apple’s Q1 results is concerned.

How could saying that Apple’s Q1 results were “insane” ever be considered biased? Just look at those results! They were insane in every way!
True - but then the developers have to deal with higher taxes as a result of free health care.

I also think the effective corporate tax rate is higher too so that can causes issues.
Redesigning OSX Spaces: 45˚ Is All It Takes
How high is high enough? :)

Very cool by the way, great idea!
I don't see how anyone could regard those technologies as huge successes. All three would be in my list of technologies which were overhyped and hugely underdelivered.

XHTML was a failure. Everyone stuck with HTML4 and advantages of XHTML haven't materialised. I question the whole reasoning behind trying to retrofit HTML into XML.

The "semantic web" has never delivered on its promises, despite hanging around like a bad smell. Very few sites use RDF (or FOAF). The real-world problems that RDF was supposed to solve are, in practice, solved by simple JSON-based Web APIs.

The only XML-based web technology to become a success is RSS.
IPv6 is not here; that's the problem. This is a momentous announcement, though.
I used to work for a company that made custom web applications, occasionally for the government (though more often, not.) This problem is actually a pretty tough one.

The way it usually works is the government agency drafts a request for proposal which has a list of features and other miscellaneous, sometimes random requirements. The thing is, who at the government would think to request friendly or short URLs? They are not web developers. They are probably older than 40, and not really up on all this social media stuff.

Now, some firms that submit proposals are of a high-enough quality that they would know that friendly and/or short urls are a part of modern web best practices. But again, how does the government agency know that seeing that is a good sign?

So sometimes, the agency realizes it doesn't know anything about technology and hires a company who does to develop the RFP. Except, then you're back at the same problem: how does the government agency know how to choose a company that will write a good spec?
thanks! i recommend putting something like what you said on the project's home page, or, just a link off of it.
so how about data as a public utility? there's no competition up there anyway. why not let the cartel we ostensibly empower handle it instead?
It's a high-order function that computes the fixed point of Yahoo!
The Worst Interview Question (and How to Answer It)
> A convertible note, however favorable its terms, is
> still fundamentally a loan.

Ya, but it's a loan to the company. If the company goes bust the owners of the company aren't liable.
It looks like you can add venaltech.com to the list of domains the guy is listed as the admin contact for. It doesn't look like that has been mentioned yet in any of the threads. Google that domain and you find a crap load of "reviews" on sites of questionable origin. A few of the domains of the sites that talk about it follow the pattern of *reviews.com so it looks like he probably paid some service to write them. You might be able to follow that trail.
To be fair to NYC, they were enlightened enough to let developers compete to build apps on city databases.

http://www.nycbigapps.com/
Ahh, I see. That's more-or-less the same situation we have here, except that I like talking to the cute girl behind the counter at the coffee shop :).
The Administration Starts Its Startup Policy
Because all of those companies are already paying their ISPs as well (or are big enough to be their own ISP, ala Google).
Bandwidth is already paid for in both directions - nobody gets a 'free' pipe as it is today. This is letting one side charge double for no good reason.
A stable system must have high diversity and high connectivity. If you do not have a network with strong connections to many people of many backgrounds, you will have trouble surviving/understanding changes in the world around you and you will eventually become irrelevant. The startup environment is incredibly taxing on a person and the group. If the people in a startup are not well connected and diverse in knowledge, they will not be resilient enough to survive internal or external conflict. In small groups, it only takes one person with a small network or a limited scope to make it all crumble when the pressure is on.
So no more egyptian stock market?
Sometimes the benefits are only apparent later one.

What is failed about it?

It's different yes. But what is failed about it?
Another aspect of that is that taking that money (which comes from taxes as you mentioned or from inflation) reduces the bottom line of businesses across the USA. The taxes directly hit the bottom line, but the taxes and the inflation boost the cost of goods, making consumers buy less, and production more expensive.

The thing is, job creation comes from business expansion. So, taking the money in the first place hurts the economy.

This sort of investment scheme is not the worst use of $2B from the US government, I'm sure they spend that much on wasted paperclips each year. But even with this relatively wise investment, it will never return to the economy enough growth to replace the damage that taking it out did in the first place.

I think this is an important economic point that people miss because they don't really think about where government money comes from, and the impact it has.

Further, they are investing this money in "disadvantaged areas" and "areas like clean energy", which is to say politically connected or politically influential areas. Political correctness is not a good investment strategy and will produce lower returns.

Anyway, a company looking at expansion will look at the capital and resource requirements for that expansion. If the marginal cost of a new employee is around $10,000 (a rough estimate on my part) then that $2B will directly prevent the creation (and in the case of marginal businesses that are forced to lay people off, cause the destruction of...) around 200,000 jobs.

200,000 jobs may not sound like that much, but the next year the economy will miss out on the economic effects of having 200,000 more people employed for a year, producing more goods and profit for their employers and buying more goods themselves. That activity creates jobs which are also lost.

It is a compounding effect, and that is just assuming the program only lasts one year and costs only $2B. (I think for the federal government to distribute $2B in investment money, the programs will cost $4B or $6B when all is said and done.)
Founders Visa is missing. It was the perfect moment to introduce it. http://www.paulgraham.com/foundervisa.html
Is there some kind of circle of trust established-- you know, good old fashioned key-signing plus vouching for people? 10 years ago I would have bet big money that by now people would have well-established cryptographic identities online, verified by a larger circle of trust. Does this exist, or is that a dated idea without a whole lot of merit?

Or maybe that's what LinkedIn was supposed to be before it turned into something that to me feels much more impersonal and spammy.
'Not taking sides in foreign politics' also brings us things like US networking supplies companies selling dictatorships that means to suppress free speech on their countries' internet access.

The real questions is: how does one 'take no sides' when dealing with international commerce? Is selling weapons to both sides, 'taking no sides?' Or is the only true way to 'take no sides' just to refuse to do international business at all?
When you have 20 clients (or 20,000), firing one or two has much smaller consequences than quitting a job.
If you apply for an invite and focus on the HN field you can see the limit, currently at 2500 karma.
A warning to not send money to people you met on an open internet forum? Really?

If someone can help lrm242 great, but I don't think anyone else has delusions that HN is anything but an open forum on the web and therefore entails the most basic precautions.

There are thousands of other bad-actors waiting even if you manage to round up a posse to track this guy down.

So lrm242 has my sympathies but this is definitely a personal problem because making any assumptions based on the fact that someone entered news.ycombinator.com into their address bar (which is the only barrier to membership) is frankly, stupid.
Startup Funding: A Bubble, Or A Correction?
One tip- move across the bridge to Midtown or South Side Park. I'd consider moving back to Sacramento from SV to work for a startup, but not West Sac. Forget it.
most of us only have one choice... decided to cut off cox communications as well as qwest

I count two choices here?
those are parent references, ex: 'foo:hover' vs 'foo :hover', you can simply nest them for descendants
The White House Launches “Startup America”
That's really cool. Someone should make a game to compete with your neighbors for lowest power/gas/water usage... Maybe have a Friends Leaderboard on fbook.
New features and a new design come to Digg. No, for real this time.
I doubt money was their only concern, but I'd be amazed if they found others bidding over $200M
So what is this really? Starting to move things that were once handled by bloated databases into the application layer?

I've heard Redis is pretty far from a full featured database, but I don't see why you couldn't build most features on top of it. Like CouchDB style auto updating views, which let you do more advanced queries etc..

Is that where they're going?
I believe we do sponsor visas, but I'm checking to be sure...

In any case, we have offices around the world. So even if this specific position can't work, feel free to have them email me about other opportunities.
My Interview With John Glazer, Director, TechGROWTH Ohio (Part 1)
I live in one of the most densely populated parts of a major city (Phoenix).

In all honesty, cox was the only choice for me for a long time. I think qwest only started offering DSL in my area very very recently.
It's primarily a human rights issue. If they have the resources they should do something so kudos to everyone involved.
You mean a summary?
I agree in principle, but in this case there's one side attempting to cut off all uncontrolled communication in and out of the country. It seems like an easy choice to side against their position on communication.
Gosu 0.8.5 Released (WSDL, XSD, Properties Support)
Ask HN: Have high traffic med site, what to do?
For over a year and a half, I have been blogging on medical topics at healthlifeandstuff.com. The articles, which are written to be friendly and accesible, with the help of SEO, now reach 60-70,000 visitors a month.

I was running Adsense on it, and making up to $1,000 a month, but was removed from the program with no explanation. I was in full compliance, of course.

Now I have the site but don't know what to do with it. I tried other ad programs, but they were either poor quality or had ads for online drugstores which I could not remove and was not comfortable with.

What should I do with the site? I'd love to sell it or something but don't know how/what is normal in these situations.
Are they? From http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/about/commissioners.htm, the backgrounds of the Commissioners:

von Finckelstein (Chairman) was the head of the Competition bureau and implemented NAFTA.

Katz (Vice-Chair, Telecommunications) was at Bell and Rogers until 2001.

Morin (Secretary-General) was a career bureaucrat.

Cugini (Ontario) was with Alliance Atlantis, a film and TV
company.

Lamarre (Quebec) was with the CBC.

Duncan (Atlantic) comes from various small players in the Cable TV industry.

Molnar (MB and SK) comes from Customer Service and Regulatory Affairs at SaskTel.

Menzies (Alberta) ran the Calgary Herald, a large newspaper.

Denton was on the board of CIRA and was the solicitor of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers (the industry group of independent ISPs).

Patrone, Morin, and Poirier were journalists.

Simpson was an ad exec.

If you're counting obvious (perceived) biases there, you'd say Katz is representing Big Telco and Denton is representing independent ISPs. Molnar would count as a half-vote for Big Telco (as SaskTel is an ILEC), but it's a minor one. The rest, as I see it, have no obvious perceived biases in this case.

As for the high-ranking staff, that's a lot harder to figure our their backgrounds - although most of them should be civil service positions, which means they're relatively impartial.

If we check out our lobbying disclosures (always interesting when it comes to this), we see that in the past year there have been 18 registered conversations between lobbyists and the CRTC on the issue of Telecommunications - and of those, I'd guess that the two from Bell and one from SaskTel were probably focused on Internet-related issues, whereas the Quebecor/Globalive/Shaw/CMPA ones weren't.
Blackberry doesn't have some magical powers to connect to the internet. It's just an average GSM/3G device. Do you have evidence to suggest authorities were filtering out non-Blackberry 3G traffic?
1M/1M: A Policy Suggestion To President Obama | Sramana Mitra
Google Works to Further Divide Android and Chrome OS by Apps
Bandzoogle is looking for a remote Ruby on Rails developer.

We build tools that help musicians succeed. Bandzoogle launched in 2003 with the idea that if we can help bands make money, they would sign up. It worked, and we've been profitable and growing every month since.

We just re-wrote our app in Ruby (from terrible, terrible Coldfusion) using today's best practices, and have some big plans for new features.

Aside from working on fun projects for musicians, we offer great pay + profit sharing bonuses, reimbursement of home office expenses and education materials (including conferences), and fun yearly meetups. Next one is in Montreal for the Jazz festival.

Interested? Full job post is here: http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/8006
agreed. whenever I see that, I always sort of mentally pipe it to /dev/nul. it's become like boilerplate. it's unfortunate people can't say what they really think. reminds me of the whole "press release" paradigm, where, no matter what has happened, it's always spun as a Good Thing, regardless of whether it actually is or will be, or not.
WordPress check it post has the_excerpt
Interesting feedback and we have spoken to readers who do this. I will say that it is a minority of people who read like that and for those readers we've made it easy to disable the Highlighter functionality. We obviously want to do nothing to take away from the reading experience only add to it, making it easier to share and comment.
I'd be interested to know which firm, and to see the post mortem about why they went out of business first.
فساتين للمراهقات
The fact that you recognize it as unworkable “for us 10%” indicates a failure.
i'm sure the audience of this site is technically savvy enough to all be running modern browsers that recognize startcom as a valid CA (if not, consider it a valid barrier to entry), so it would be free and take just a few hours to receive an SSL certificate for this site.

http://www.startssl.com/?app=1
In Canada, Debit has always been swipe and PIN, but Credit is only recently becoming chip and PIN.
>They are probably older than 40

Yep it's tough being over 40 - we don't really understand this web stuff. I mean we invented it all 20years ago, we wrote the first browsers and the first servers, we wrote the first pages - but since we don't spend all our time following #britney or end every sentence with LOL we obviously can't understand it.

Now you kids get off my (virtual) lawn
Exactly. I really don't know what the news is... Also, having Disqus is better since users can still do anonymous commenting
Gotcha, thanks for the input. As far as the female thing, I'll admit it was partly to get noticed. Sorry if that was a HN faux pas.. though, people do ask where the female founders are, so here I am! (:
Everyone has a different level of risk aversion. Some people want to play it very safe, and others are willing to take large risks if the possible rewards appear worth it.
Just off the 80 and the I-5, West Sacramento is the best California location for inexpensive commercial and industrial property. Cross the bridge and the rents doubles. Besides, the commute from Midtown to West Sac is 5 minutes. Live the cool hot rod, swing time, rockabilly, hipster culture in Midtown http://www.shadyladybar.com/, while working on an amazing product with great neighborhood eats and the lowest overhead in West Sac.
Now I feel pretty bad for being wrong about TekSavvy et al being DSLAM terminators. Please accept my apologies.

If I may be so bold, I'd still like to say I wish you had made this correction directly to my post above. I think people would not have wrongly upvoted it so much in that case. Either way, thanks for the correction. Your point is well taken.
Me too. Engineers have all the system-building instinct of lawyers, but more experience in fixing unintended consequences.

I've sometimes toyed with the idea of setting up a non-profit, non-partisan organisation to encourage STEM professionals to run for public office, along the lines of Emily's List.
IPv6 IS here, I believe you meant to say it's just not evenly distributed yet!
What about satellite internet?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#Mecha...

Relatively expensive but nearly impossible to stop.

We have it out here in the more rural parts of the USA.

They used to use dial-up for the return feed, but now it can do 2-way via the sat. A bit laggy though.
This raises a thought for me with regards to my own Twitter usage. I find this a great idea and would like to follow it, but the high level of tweets this produces will saturate my stream and block out the other people I'm also interested in (I follow ~30 people and keep the people I follow limited to those I am truly interested in) so I wonder, could Twitter eventually have some sort of "Watch" feature?

Display would be the same style as trending (maybe next to it and re-position the suggested users) where each "watched" user is displayed with a running tally of total tweets and next to that the # of new tweets since I last visited their page? I guess lists would be a temporary solution, but even they get saturated easily.

completely off topic, but maybe some others share the same desire, I figure this is a good topic to use as an example :-)