skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How's this for a launch page/viral loop?
Background info: I'm launching an image sharing site (http://lolstack.com) this coming Tuesday and I'd like to get some momentum coming out of the gate. In a nutshell, lolstack is cool because it encourages quality content through duplicate detection, community voting, and virtual currency (lolbucks).

I'd like some feedback on the launch page before I go on an all out media blitz submitting to TechCrunch et al.

I've heeded the advice of several articles on launch pages and implemented the following:

- Custom welcome messages depending on the traffic source. ex: http://lolstack.com/?ad=r1

- Incentive for referrals. If you sign up, you'll see a screen offering you 50 lolbucks for referring two friends. It looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/DA0Wl.jpg
There's also a "tweet this" button encouraging users to mention lolstack.

My latest development snapshot of the actual site is available on the subdomain "dev" of lolstack.com. Feel free to poke around in there. I would love some actionable criticism.
While an interesting article which does a good job of breaking down the technical details AND citing industry, it doesn't seem to me the FCC is "Planning to destroy GPS".

This sounds a lot more like the FCC not entirely understanding the ramifications of what they approved and/or a company trying to take advantage of licensing loopholes which have unforeseen consequences.

Yes, the FCC fucked up here but it isn't time to bring out the tin foil hats yet.
I see we agree on large parts of this.

Concerning cost/benefit ratio, Oracle wouldn't have to sue them all. It could contact many of them and some would pay. Some would refuse to pay, and then Oracle would single out one or two or more of them and sue. Just the fact that they make good on their threat to sue would get some others to pay. And if they prevail over only one, they will get everyone to pay.
But isn't a usable screen size a big factor when selecting a smartphone? I dread browsing on the credit-card screen or playing games or writing email or doing anything else that I do on my phone
I also use AndChat from my phone to hit the ZNC and carry conversations as I move between locations if needed. Good tips, thanks.
So... how do I actually BUY these cards? I WANT TO GIVE YOU MONEY.
With your definition, anarchy is mainly a function of where you draw your borders.

If you draw your border around North America you find anarchy (the law varies as you move from Mexico to the US). Even within the US, laws vary widely. But if you draw the border around Somaliland, you don't get anarchy (Somaliland has more or less consistent laws).

I'm also not sure why you don't consider a warlord to be the government. In what way does a warlord differ from a government?
Something about Sparrow just doesn't feel right. I can't quite put my finger on it but...well I think that's just it. Last I tried Sparrow it felt like I was using an iOS app within the iOS Simulator.

I did like the simple feel of it though and would be willing to buy it for anything less than $14 NZD.
Quick SEC disclaimer... I'm not an investment professional; I'm just sharing my personal experience.

"Default" doesn't always mean that the principal won't get paid back. In almost all cases, it means that timely interest payments won't be made. Even in the most recent bond crisis in Puerto Rico, the "risk of default" was somewhat mitigated by the threat of shutting down the government offices (i.e. put the employees on unpaid furlough) just so the Puerto Rico could make their bond payments.

IMHO, it would be political suicide for a municipality or state to let bonds default. Here's an interesting article on this subject:

http://www.publicbonds.org/public_fin/default.htm

The default in the 1975 New York case was for revenue bonds. I don't know the exact details, but they sounded like LTX bonds.
Was absolutely intended to be tongue in cheek
I don't think there is anything he can do to prevent what some users consider the decline of HN. He's just not that heavy-handed. He could easily go in a kill every shit article day in and day out, but it's not in his interest to do so. As HN is a vehicle for exposure of YC startups the continued increase of users on HN is only to his benefit. That isn't to say that this is why he started the site, but it's certainly a huge benefit to him. You simply don't #1 every piece of YC startup news on Reddit. :)

I agree with you that eventually something else will come out and we will flock there to get away from HN once it gets to the point where it's mostly fluff articles about Apple and politics.
If marketed correctly, especially towards females, this phone could be a decent success. None of the girls I know have ever complained about a phone being too small, only about phones being too big. For my friends at least, text messaging and size seems to be the first priority, with the other features coming second to those.

There's still a slight functional balance that needs to be met when making a phone small, however. But if you can make it small and keep it functional, kudos.
I knew they wouldn't have mentioned my two favourite Amiga OS features: Pre-emptive multitasking and the Workbench screen model. At a time when PC users were still struggling with blocky DOS screens, the Amiga offered a virtual desktop type environment through workbench screens (which could be dragged up and down over each other or flipped backwards and forwards) and proper multitasking meaning that things in the background screens would carry on running.

The other OS feature is one that I only started playing with a couple of years ago on the ZX Spectrum. The ZX Spectrum has a fairly unique way of drawing the screen in monochrome 256x192 pixels and a 32x24 8x8 pixel colour attribute cell system. Ignoring the monochrome (which was what I used to use in the 80s) and manipulating 8x8 cells directly means that the entire screen is represented by 768 bytes of memory. This lets me play around with colourful 3d in ways I could only imagine as a kid. Sad, I know, but I'm just a big kid in the end.
HTML5 includes support for localstorage, which removes the need to signup to save state.
all these human progress discussions imply, or bounded by, one hypothesis - there will exist only one species of humans. Is divergence of the species into 2 or more is such an unprobable event?
I can't believe I'm seeing Florian Muller glibly being called a liar and troll and getting upvoted on HackerNews.

Disagree with him on particular points all you want (and back it up), but he's done more for FOSS than 99.999% of the posters here. Anyone remember the NoSoftwarePatents campaign in Europe several years ago? Guess who led it.

Calling him a liar and troll should be way below HN standards.
I would say the problem with your company wiki is a problem of technology. A wiki requires that people become curators That takes a lot of energy, thought, and intention.

I think there is huge room for technology to solve these kinds of problems, and we've only scratched the surface.
The readability of the page is supposed to be the responsibility of the browser, not the page.
> They charge 100 yen for doing a book conversion. That's only about $1.25 US. I would kill for a service like this.

Are they physically scanning every book presented, or is each scanning service building a library (by scanning each title only once) ? If they are doing the latter, I can see how they can pull it off at that price.
The cards go on sale after the first contest is over, at the beginning of March. :)
There's this user, patio11, I think he's in the top 5 karma here, and his schtick might be summed up as:

1) A/B Test
2) Middle aged women are tremendously underserved in the software market, and not because they don't buy software.
This is really cool, but I'm having some issues here, when I open up a directory more than once the directory's that are in that folder duplicate, like say a folder called css, I have a folder named img in it, if I re-open it then it displays to img folders
He's not fighting software patents any more though is he? He's decided that fight can't be won and now he inserts himself into every other press article involving patents and open source and says that whoever holds the patents will win and those opposing stand no chance. Often this campaign of patent FUD (yes, I know it's a cliche) involves linkbaity headlines and articles like this one.

Whether it's just out of control self-promotion or something even better paid, I'd quite like it if he stopped getting himself quoted as if he's speaking for the wider open source community. They have a variety of opinions on patents and how to work with, work around or work against them but even within that broad spectrum Florian's more recent opinions seem to be somewhat extreme and idiosyncratic, not to mention overly dramatic.
Amiga is one of the big OSes I never got a chance to play with, though I know it had some innovative features and very loyal users.

Other than finding an old Amiga, is there a practical way to give it a try today?
who'd have thought that by now, email clients are not a done-deal. It's awesome to see people still bringing out thick mail clients and people liking them. A few years back everyone rushed to move apps to the web for no-install and no-version problems, now we seem to be swinging back to thick-clients, until people once again realize the challenges of such. As the landscape changes and software distribution improves (for example the app store) it once again opens up the door to new clients.
This is fantastic. This is exactly how I foresee the future documents and editing. Dropbox, or something like that, provides the service of saving the files. Then web apps are granted access to them and can edit them. Local storage becomes a cache, and Dropbox is where the files are "really" stored.

The advantage of this, of course, is that all your stuff becomes device-independent. Log in from any device that has web access, and you'll have access to all your apps and all your files.

This is much better than having each web app manage files on their own. For instance, you might have documents saved in Google Docs, notes saved in Evernote and Catch.com, and emails saved somewhere else, etc. It sure would be nice to have a single service provide the file storage so that you always have all your stuff and don't have to worry about some web app going obsolete and losing your data along with it.

Now what I would really like for backwards-compatibility is a web-based Linux environment to access my files. Someone recently created a web app using the HTML 5 canvas element (I think) to run an X GUI. (Anyone remember what this was called and where it is located?) Attach a Linux system and that GUI technology to your Dropbox, and then you have an entire computer that can be accessed from any device. Either the browser itself would load all the files and run them by emulation, or a server could run them natively and just print the results to your browser. Either way, once that becomes possible, I would be able to convert to an all-web environment.
Whoops, since I've last checked they dropped the rate to 3%.

It does come with minor strings attached. You only get the high interest up to 15k, you have to use the debit card attached to the checking account 10 times per month (which is simple for me) and you have to get your statement electronically, not by mail.

http://www.communitywestbank.com/personal/checking/GreatRate...
"god... waves back hair"

Epic.
The teachers at my kids schools don't all use their school email accounts. None of the students I know of do. No, not super interested in waiting for the schools to figure this out, or helping to push them there. I don't know why this should have anything to do with schools; in fact, getting outside the little social circles inside a school is one of the major wins to this.
"hybrid search engine" is just worthless words, what does it even mean? If you want people to stop saying you're just syndicating others data publish the amount of others data you do use, but when I've compared bing.com searches with yours they're very similar whereas google is different, which would imply you're heavily taking from bing, whether or not you crawl yourself...
Even then he did seem to have a kingly quality.
I saw someone post on a show your web app type thread the other day telling the developer to make his website an iphone app and sell it for 99cents. At first I was going to comment that it really didn't need to be an iphone app, and that it was fine as a website but then I thought about it and really thats the only way you'd get people to pay for the service.

Apple have trained people to pay 1 or 2 dollars for mobile applications, and thats great - but if you said to someone you need to pay a dollar to use this website they'd leave straight away.

So now you have the situation where it's in both the developer AND Apple's best financial interests to make native applications - how is the web on mobile going to come forward? What incentive does Apple have to make HTML5 run great on their devices when they earn a chunk of native app sales? Additionally, if they threw resources at it, they'd probably end up contributing a bunch of code back to Webkit which would immediately be used by their biggest competitor.
I meant that one can only cook as well as they can clean.
Our home has no broadcast TV. We do Netflix and Hulu for some (mostly advert-free) entertainment. My 12-year-old son can only go online via the living room PC (mostly because he doesn't have a PC in his room) and my 15-year-old daughter has mostly free-reign to do what she wants online via her netbook. I'd much rather have my kids reading and writing stuff online (even if some of the correspondence was questionable), as opposed to drooling in a trance while watching the boob-tube.

Call me a parent with weird priorities, but I'd rather my kids hold their own on places like Reddit and (yes, even) 4chan over watching much of the crap on TV (extreme left/right hate politics on CNN/FOX/CNBC, Hanna Montanna, reality TV, etc.). Not that either of them know of Reddit or 4chan yet (that I'm aware of), but I assume you catch my meaning.

Of course, the 'net does have a lot of TV-like mindless crap that can be just as (in my opinion) soul-killing as TV; things like Farmville and other pointless drivel. However, the kids don't seem to get hung up on stuff like that. Yet. We'll see, I guess.

This brave new world of parenting is always a mixed bag, isn't it?
That was my initial reaction to this too. But without a compiler/interpreter on hand, this app won't be too useful for any serious coding. You just can't test what you're writing.

On the other hand, this is fantastic for non-code text files.
Community West "Great Rates" checking.

http://www.communitywestbank.com/personal/checking/GreatRate...

Since I last checked they have dropped the rates to 3%.
This reminds me of a discussion on a mailing list where someone pointed out the most amazing scam.

You find 256 people and email them the details of a 50/50 prediction. 128 people should get the right prediction. You then email them another 50/50 prediction. Of course, 64 of them receive the right prediction twice in a row. You then make a third 50/50 prediction to the 64, another to the 32 positive responses and so on until you find a manageable number of people who now believe you have some amazing insight into the future.

As much as we may want to think things are not random, sometimes they really are, sometimes they're just probabilities.
One year, I accidentally let a domains expire and fall out of the grace period to renew. Thought I was screwed, but decided to contact their support anyway. After explaining my dumb mistake, they got back to me and said the domain was back in my account. I know it probably wasn't a big deal, as it was only a few days out of the grace period, but I felt they did more than was to be expected.

The UI for their control panel is just awesome. Much less clutter than the other registrars.
Their home page is the equivalent of going to mcdonalds.com and seeing a help wanted ad instead of a juicy Chipotle BBQ Bacon Angus Burger.
How QR Codes Can Grow Your Business.
This phone has a pull out keyboard, that means you still get have a similar area to write emails that an iPhone would with a virtual keyboard.

So, for communication and entering text, I don't see how this would be inferior to an iPhone unless you are only using a virtual keyboard. For browsing, you're correct.
Scrolling up on a text message in landscape mode is nearly impossible on my iPhone. The vertical screen real estate is smaller than the width of my thumb.
Your best option is satellite.

If the base station is in another country, and the satellite covers your geography, it's just a case of smuggling in the hardware, or if it's legal hardware, setting up the account and getting the card thingy.

Then share that as you wish. Probably best shared as open wireless, but blocked from the internet, with a VPN server running inside. To the outside it just looks like someone's unsecured WiFi, unless they start packet sniffing, and start seeing VPN tunnels. Then you might be in trouble.

A closed WiFi may attract attention, who knows, if not, then that's even better.
Thanks, Derek, hadn't heard about these guys.
This is awesome -- but badly needs some interface work. We've built a similar tool for our CMS also on Bespin/Skywriter/Ace. Here is a screenshot:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gethifi/4952045778/

Little things like icons on the left are really helpful when trying to browse a file structure. In any case, I'll likely be using this once and a while in a pinch since I keep all of my client files in Dropbox.

I'm also excited for the Ace update. This appears to be using a pretty old version. Rendering text in the DOM is much faster.
Twitter user tricks Sony into posting "secret" PS3 code
Ok, I would pay for this app.
Or gzip for that matter. :)

gzipping this thread page results in a 5x size decrease.

Can't blame pg though. He's just a product of his computational adolescence. In another 15 years, we'll still be using CSS and divs while the kids move on to 3D direct brain interface temporal markup languages.
The keyboard may be weird-looking, but more importantly it's pretty easy to use and way more efficient than on-screen keyboards.
Would this affect the upcoming Galileo platform too? Does it use similar frequencies?
Strategies for Honeycomb and backwards [Android]
I think Caius is overreacting. Just tell them politely that you are not interested and that you don't want to be contacted in the future.

I have friends that have worked in the recruiting industry for a long time and one has to realize that though there are some bad recruiters out there, a lot of recruiters are subject to their companies internal performance metrics, incentives, policy and company culture. So some recruiters behave a certain way because they have to.

My friend has worked in recruiting agencies that have call and email quotas. If you did not meet them you were let go. The company was strucutred and functioned as a dialing for dollars call center. So this creates a condidtion for the recruiters to spam peple like you or suffer the consequences. The companies philosophy was quantity over quality relationship building. This created the overall way the recruiter behaved.

Also, some mismanaged recruiting firms put undue pressure on the recruiter to come up with a candidate for an opportunity that is very hard to fill or can't be filled. So they are forced to make calls to people who are not a fit or have a certain key word on the resume which doesn't fit the overall context of the resume. Remember, people are just trying to make a living.

I see threads like this all the time. Someone here needs to see that this is an opportunity for entrepreneurs.The overall recruting market will exist because technical folks are getting scarce and there is more demand for them. This coupled with the majority of people having bad experience with recruiters tells me that there is an opportunity to create a better way.

Companies like LinkedIn, jobvite is providing their solution what is yours?
I switched to mutt after finding myself in the same boat with most GUI clients. After writing a few save-hooks and macros (the hard part), I can check and process all of my accounts in a minute or two, even on a slow connection (great for vacations). Since I version control my ~/.mutt directory, it's easy to deploy on multiple machines. If I don't have access to mutt, my phone or webmail serves as an adequate backup.
I take a more differentiated look at those patent disputes than what you claim. I encourage you to take a look at the documents contained in this folder:
http://www.scribd.com/my_document_collections/2770688

What you call a "linkbaity headline" was just a quote from Oracle's filing.

I never claimed nor implied to speak for the wider open source community. In this blog post (published in December) I even made it absolutely clear that I don't:
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/12/foss-focus-philosoph...
The headline made me envision a device the size (and shape) of a credit card, in which the entire front face was screen and nothing but screen. No bezel, no top and bottom non-screen black areas for buttons and mic, just 100% screen.

I instinctively figured that's what you'd have to do shrink a smart phone down to the size of a credit card, and I was kind of excited to click the link and see some real design innovation from HP of all places.

But alas, it wasn't to be. I should have known better. Same layout and form as every other smart phone, just smaller. Oh well, maybe Apple will make an iPhone mini one day.
The guy's a perfect salesman. He knows how to sell.
No NFC chip in these new devices. That could be a deal breaker, if iPad ships before HP..
This is the game developer's version of "Okay, I wrote a contact form in PHP, time to write the next Facebook".

Sadly, this is far more prevalent than it should be.
Plastic Strainers for your Kitchen
You'll need an emulator called UAE (http://www.amigaemulator.org/) or a port like WinUAE (which comes with a frontend and is much easier), a Kickstart file for the right system (Kickstart is the name for the Rom and varied from Amiga to Amiga) and some floppy disk images for the games themselves. There's a WinUAE guide here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Amiga_1.html and a more general beginner's guide here: http://cpc464.back2roots.org/menu.htm

It's very different to modern OSes if you don't tweak around but as a modern alternative the Icarus AROS distribution (http://www.icarosdesktop.org/) provides a modern continuation of the Workbench experience.
Makes me wonder: would mag-lev make this situation any better? I've never been near a mag-lev train or heard it pass in real life. Anyone with any experience with them care to comment on how loud they are?
Free preview: $500. And $100 increments for more storage.

Apple history suggests they don't change price, they let Moore's law and software updates sweeten the deal.

They're absolutely killing it at their current prices and would-be competitors are apparently unable to build a comparable device for less. Why would they go off-script?

The charge for cellular capability is the only real question mark, but I'm guessing it remains a ~$100 premium.
HP Announces The TouchPad
It's all dependent on your definition of meaningful. If you want to be an activist, writing a letter is an excellent way to go about it. If you want a passport to travel sometime during your lifetime but would prefer to not have to worry too much about privacy concerns, writing a letter isn't going to help you much.

I hardly think it's tin-foil hat territory to look at the state of most Western governments and deduce that they are becoming more fascist and less democratic all the time, completely in the name of preventing terrorism. Sanding your fingertips off and writing a letter to your MP serve two distinctly different prongs of a fight against that fascism.