skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Headline is misleading - the real complaint isn't that participating is impossible, it's that reputation is hard to earn. In SO's nascent days, you could earn rep simply by showing up and answering questions. Now that it's popular, if you want to gain rep, you have to muscle your way in using methods like the author describes.

I find it amusing that SO's creators chose the term "reputation" for their participation points, as opposed to "karma" or something else, because in this aspect it's pretty similar to real-life reputation. When supply is high, it's hard to gain reputation without gaming the system. That's not SO, that's life.
Right -- when I said "any service that accepts JSON input", I meant "any JVM-based service that accepts JSON input". I thought the JVM qualification would be clear from the context of this thread, apologies if it wasn't.
That's because it's Ancient Greek for "to make name for": http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/onomatopoeia
It always amazes me that people don't see we're repeating desktop history.

Look back to when desktop apps were the norm. People eventually realized it was counter intuitive to write the same program 5 times for 5 different platforms so they started moving to frameworks (Java/.Net). Then as the web gained the power to host comparable apps people started moving to the web.

It was a natural progression of societal knowledge based on trial and error.

So why are we now making the same mistakes on mobile platforms? Especially since web apps can already match the functionality needed by 99% of the applications out there? Seems a little silly
Hi GanjaHacker. I'm a developer and currently run a cannabis related website. What's your email? Let's talk.
Exactly the kind of thing users not familiar with the way Linux handles memory DON'T consider when they check how much free memory they have. If you're the sort of person concerned with the overhead of zeroing pages then you can look at more detailed memory-usage info to find the details you're looking for.
Does anyone think that the Google toolbar doesn't do the exact same thing? Just sayin
Look behind you, we're already building them. Not everything needs to work in every old browser.
Could someone help me run the numbers? What will $150,000 be used for on an average YC startup?

$150,000 will allow the startup to hire 1 or 2 engineers in the short-term. Is that the real use of the $150,000?

What other expenses do they spend good money on?

Another way to look at this question: If you were a new startup in YC, what would you spend the 150,000 on?
That's true, its not exactly the same as your example. But the method I have developed does work.
The FTC shouldn't meddle in Apple's business? Apple's management should have the right to set any policy it considers relevant?

What do you see the role of the FTC as being, and why should Apple be able to set any policy, even if it may violate the law?
Without putting too fine a point on it -- if you don't have the drive to start it, why should someone else have more drive than you?

Here's some things you can do since it sounds like you've got more time than money (like most entrepreneurs): break your idea down into a few simple components and see if you can build any aspect of them. I know people who have started companies with sketches on napkins -- you can too.

Go find 10 people who would be ideal customers. Talk to them about what your idea is going to do for them. Do they really have a need? How much is it worth to them? Would they actually pay for it?
Those new Mozy prices seem pretty close (if not cheaper) to what S3 will charge you, even for reduced redundancy storage.

Only if you completely fill your quota at Mozy. Most people don't have data neatly quantized into units of 50 GB ($6/month) and 125 GB ($10/month), so they'll end up paying the full price for less storage. In contrast, Amazon only charges for actual usage.
I really need something like this!
It would even better to never get any mail that wasn't specifically authorized.
In many cases, that's how the state justifies the lottery.
getattr(scipy, x)(2)
I can give you at least one reason:

Paragraph four, in bold: "In order to stay competitive, web companies now must provide for all devices."

An expanded quote from that paragraph: "If I’m walking down a hallway, I’ll be swyping on my Nexus S. When I get to my desk, I’ll switch to my MacBook Pro, and when I jump on a long flight, I’ll be typing on my iPad. I expect demand the absolute best user experience on each of these devices, and vote with my wallet for the company that will provide this."

The goal of OrangeSlyce appears to be connecting designers and customers. It's inherently social. Why wouldn't I want to have ready access to browse projects (as a student) or monitor my listing (as a project stakeholder)? I'm not trying to be a prick here, I'm just encouraging everyone to step outside this situation and get objective for a moment. We didn't go with Basecamp for our project management needs, so I'm not in this to stick up for 37 Signals or even my own opinions on their product.

I'm prepared to cede the fact that the author's intention was to address 37 Signals and similar companies, but I really don't understand why I'm being drilled for taking away what I thought was a pretty clear point.
I've heard of this technique used for games of chance in vegas where they need to tightly control the outcomes both so they don't lose money but also to satisfy the reporting requirements for the regulatory commissions.
'"Google complains about competitor Bing"'

"Bing is too weak to stand on its own and it knows it, so it cheats."

I do not think the court of public opinion is going to let go of the word "cheating" so rapidly. It's a toxic word, and whether or not you think it's true it's supported well enough that it won't matter.
Making the Yellow Pages opt-in makes it easier to gather that data!
How is opening an externally bought MP3 in-app, different from opening an externally bought e-book in-app?

I think Apple is opening a can of worms.
It's not really relying on Google's search solutions at all. It's relying on users' search behavior. It's coincidental that they (users) use Google and that they happen to always click on the bogus result --when no other data are available.

Their method, when no data is available for a search term, is to sometimes (7 out of 100?) rely on human ranked results (in this case gamed by Google) via user behavior gathered with their toolbar.

It'd be interesting to find out if Bing was only using behavioral results of Google users or they recorded behavior by users of all search engines. Unfortunately, Google don't seem to have conducted an A/B test to find out, so it ended up with confirmation bias.
Slide rules are still made (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...)
>onomatopoeia is not itself onomatopoeic.

It would be very difficult to do that since onomatopoeia is a concept and concepts don't make sounds.
>And magenta? It comes from full R and B with no G, activating Filter #1 full-positive, Filter #2 at zero.

This doesn't seem right to me. If the second filter were at zero, you should have a pure red and not something with blue content in it like magenta clearly has.

I think he may be representing the second filter as R+G-B, when R+G-2B would make more sense. The latter system shows FFFFFF as being neutral on the yellow-blue axis, while the former erroneously puts it in the yellow region.
I did not mean to suggest that one cannot, or should not, use the same code on client and server. It's a good idea. What I suggest is that -- in your words -- it requires "discipline". Such discipline is a conscious process, one which requires the programmer to be fully aware of where the client/server dividing line is. When you abstract away that dividing line you make the discipline harder.
That doesn't seem a terribly good reason to turn it down. A valid reason might be that the company is already profitable or has "enough" runway from a friends & family or non-YC seed round. In this case the convertible note's due date (or interest, if there is none?) might somehow be a problem, as it forces the company to sell more equity to get a conversion valuation. It goes beyond my knowledge of these things, however.
Perhaps you need to define slow or run the benchmark(s) yourself. Sorry to be pedantic. I don't really understand what you mean by "templates that make your template engine go slow," as business requirements are going to trump anyones' skewed, dogmatic reality on the [controlled] use of eval, exec, etc.

Where my data is coming from local cache, the template does stick out in the request/response chain.
I Worked on the AOL Content Farm & It Changed My Life
In other news, Google has finally figured out why their search result quality has been steadily declining but won't comment on the specifics.
In this article you say that you are <strike>a pretty and smart</strike> "a pretty smart guy". Then you are definitely welcome at SO.

NOT participating in SO is neither a solution to your problem nor a decision that a pretty smart guy would take.

Give it a shot buddy! and I am sure you will NOT write an article about how awesome SO is because you won't find the words to describe SO awesomeness.
This pastry shop is located in Jamaica, so keep that in mind when responding.
I have never been to Jamaica, so I am not sure what to keep in mind.

Sell shirts with the name of the shop on them. Give free samples near the competition. Maybe instead of a trade up campaign a get a free one of theirs when you buy ours.
It would be preferable to use getattr(scipy, x) rather than reaching inside the internals of the object (module).
A New Cheap Alternative to the Internet in Canada
It just takes time and dedication, the motto of any true software developer.

Using the CPU power of a device that is capable of playing video games to calculate your social graph (that is stored on that same device) is extremely powerful and well worth the time and dedication.
One I remember being fascinated about from Latin class: the Antikythera Mechanism[1].

EDIT: Others include Roman cement, which was masterfully produced by them. It's the reason so many of their structures and amazingly engineered roads are still around today, millenia later.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
New 2011 No Deposit Bingo Sites
I much prefer ramen profitable, I think it will be a shame if Pizza profitable becomes wide spread. I'd never heard it before the article, and I stopped reading to come and comment. It's obviously something we all relate to considering it's already the top comment.
Damascus and bulat steel too. Lots of weapons mentioned here...
FYI, Teksavvy's cable plans still offer 200GB and unlimited options, since they're running on Rogers' lines (I'm a cable customer and have confirmed this with them). This may change, but in the meantime it's the best thing going if you can get it!
> I think that "arbitrarily small" is not enough, especially
> if you are running a business for decades.

Sure it is. How do you think casinos work?
They could eliminate uncertainty by choosing a fixed number of winners from a given block of tickets, using true random numbers.
Danish / Swedish IT Mecca
Craigslist, as the answer to both questions.

You can tell the safe/desirable neighborhoods by getting a good neighborhood map (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Manhattan_neighborhoods) and paying attention to which neighborhoods CL ads lie about being in (for instance, in Brooklyn, it's common to see ads for apartments that are physically in Gowanus saying they're in Park Slope or Carroll Gardens instead).
"I tried ... Paleolithic hammers (still being made) ...". OK this is too good to be true. I googled and it IS available, for $230: http://www.stoneageartifacts.com/html/Artifact-Hand%20Axes.h.... It is mind boggling who buys these things.
Outside of the lisp machine, it was pretty trivial to find examples of those technologies that are still being made and sold.

I'm sure some nerd out there is making a lisp machine in his garage this very moment. :)
I think the more interesting discussion (and where I hopped this was going) was that tools never die, they just evolve.

For all of his examples he was able to come up with some trivial example of some near-extinct culture in some very small part of the world using them. But for instance the chariot wheel EVOLVED into the automobile wheel, hammers evolved into jackhammers and hammerdrills (and just plain hammers), brass helmets into motorcycle helmets.

I think finding a tool that is no longer used and has no "children" would be the truly interesting find. If a tool is used to serve a purpose and solve a problem, are there any categories of problems that we simply don't run into anymore?

And for the people talking about parts for '87 chevy's and IDEs or dead software projects, I think you're taking his point far too literally.
Google's Mid-East Marketing Head Snatched Off Cairo Street
I've gotten my last couple places on craigslist and been happy. Look for apts that are truly 'by-owner.' Plenty of them do exist.

Astoria is relatively cheap (as noted above) and safe; other nearby neighborhoods in Queens can be even cheaper, if not quite as safe (Sunnyside, Long Island City), and if you are commuting to midtown (or in my case, not commuting at all) you're looking at <30m.

IMO, Brooklyn apts tend not to have the same value, taking safety and commute time into consideration, but plenty of people would argue with me on that point.
Good ramen is more expensive than good pizza.
I'm not sure what the connection is between white-labeling a product and rebranding oneself, if white-labeling is essentially stripping the product of the brand to be replaced by the brand of the customer.

Unless it's simply to appeal more to a new set of customers, particularly ad or PR agencies, which is a totally legitimate reason for this rebrand. But even in that light, I prefer the previous site, which instills a no-nonsense level of trust.

But this is just my opinion on the brand aspect of the redesign. I think everything else they've changed and added with the site are excellent, particularly the resource section which feels like a library of manuals. The customer stories in video format is a great idea too, though I was confused by the actual videos, which simply did not get to the point of how they related to Mailchimp, at least not as long as I watched before getting bored and stopping the video.
Maybe I'm the only one, but I always thought pizza-profitable (or ramen- or sushi- or whatever) referred to the fact that a company was pulling in enough revenue such that the founders could cover the cost of pizza (or sushi, or ramen). When used that way it's also more informative; sushi means more revenue than pizza, which means more than ramen.
It could have just been the case that more experts for the particular area you're interested in were on SO at the time you asked that question. Had you asked a different question on a different topic, perhaps there would have been more experts ready to answer it on IRC than on SO.

Having spent a long time on IRC, I can attest to seeing many people's questions getting answered there constantly, and usually (on the active channels, at least) very quickly (ie. often within seconds or a minute or two). Fifteen minutes is usually considered a long time to wait in an active channel for an answer to a question that isn't really obscure.

Of course the likelihood of an answer decreases with the obscurity of the question, the lack of popularity/appropriateness of whatever it is you're asking about, and depends on when and how you ask the question. The same goes for any other medium of communication.

I'm happy that you've had a positive experience on SO, and sorry that you haven't had much luck with IRC. But that doesn't mean that your experience is a typical one.
> I've got a designer, a fellow stoner, who wants to help me build a better weedmaps.

Which is...you know...a clone of weedmaps.

> I'm looking for a coder who is a better coder than I am who also is more functional when there's a vaporizer next to her/his keyboard.

So you want a person to code up the website while you smoke some pot and the split the profits?
Thanks - I wasn't clear on that.
You mean like english? And all languages?
This is a sloppy article. If you are going to quote a Microsoft blog post in part, do link to it. Does anyone have a link to the blog post in question from Harry Shum, Bing Corporate Vice President. The quote sounds pretty evasive but I would like to see the whole thing before I judge.

EDIT: I found the post:

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20...

Reading the whole thing it seems like he pretty much admitted copying Google's search results through users of the Google toolbar. He calls it "collective intelligence."
You didn't address my point about initial discovery being maintained by Skype.

Also, could you please point out to me the method you have developed for initial discovery? I've yet to see it in your source code. This is a very tough nut to crack and if you've got it done already then I'm impressed.
Interesting angle to go through the tied market and competition policy: that's a type of authority that is far more intelligent, and precisely just prosecuted IE in Windows. However, you'd have to either have a US court acknowledge that a European was right to disagree with them in the first place, or have a European court admit that their previous decision wasn’t enough. It’s feasible, but hard.

Where you’ll be more limited with it, is that it’s apparently not IE, but the Bing Bar that is at stake—the connection is getting thinner.
Which means that onomatopoeic is a heterological adjective - an adjective which does not describe itself.

Is "heterological" a heterological adjective?

- Grelling and Nelson, 1908.
Social TV - Blue Ocean Strategy?
Thanks to all those who replied. I think I may need to draw up something more relevant so that I would be able to convey more clearly what I am trying to get across.
One thing it can buy is time, and consequently leverage.

At Demo Day, the investors will know that all the startups have some cash to last after YC, so that they don't have to rush on the first investor that comes along which should translate to better terms for the founders. Or it could just allow them to look for investors a bit later on, hopefully providing them with a better negotiating position by having a product further along or gain some traction before needing the money.
Organized Crime: The World's Largest Social Network
I wouldn't have been surprised if they had known about the 'flaw', but didn't mind it, because, as Srivastava said "it wasn't worth the time to abuse the flaw". In similar vein, I once randomly generated 2 million out of 40 million possible codes. Consumers would buy products, obtain a code and it would allow them to 'buy one, get one free' for some other product. The code being short and without the usual mixup candidates (I, 1, O, 0, etc.) was much more important than people 'cracking' the system. Even at half the price, the other product still sold at a profit and nobody saw room for mass purchase/reselling.

Of course, later in the article it appeared that people were abusing cracks in the system and reaping the benefits, so it doesn't apply to this case. I just wanted to note that sometimes business concerns trump all actually interesting parts of a problem :/
Your code should be as boring as possible
I vote to run with this idea and see how its received. I think enough people would appreciate the value there.
StackOverflow versus Quora
Great article, though, I take issue with this tangent:

"James “Whitey” Bulger, a notorious South Boston mob boss currently on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list—he’s thought to be the inspiration for the Frank Costello character in The Departed"

The inspiration for that character is the original movie, Infernal Affairs, which The Departed is a remake of. They may have bleneded some features of Bulger into that character, but that doesn't make him the inspiration.
I think you overstate it. Ask your dentist about the MS antitrust case and if MS cheated in it. I bring up dentists, because way back when it happened mine gave me a monologue about how MS was being raked over the coals because of how good they were.

He didn't know anything about, in this case, actual fraudalant and illegal practices. And this was a much bigger story at the time than this is likely to be, by orders of magnitude.

Most people, to this day, think that MS was sued because they were a monopoly. Not because of illegal practices while a monopoly.

Given that its Google bringing the charges, and not the DOJ, I think also weakens it.

And lastly, the fact that it's not illegal, also makes it look like whining. Steroids are illegal and generally considered really bad, and the American public hardly cares about that. If Barry Bonds was a nicer guy the public may well have demanded they make steroids legal! :-)

My point, since I rambled, this will be more he said/she said. And less one sided than I think you believe.
Ask HN - Review my startup: Localmind
The Pitch: Localmind helps you quickly get information about what's happening right now at places you're interested in. Leveraging check-in services like Foursquare, Facebook, Gowalla, etc. you can ask people at those locations questions about what's happening there in real-time. Those questions are sent via SMS, and an iPhone app is in development.

We believe that the untapped power of location-based services lies not in what's happening with your friends right now, but instead lies in what's happening at the places you care about in right now. More insight into our vision here: http://bit.ly/gv5vpN

http://www.localmind.com (use invite code: HACKERNEWS - gets you in immediately for next 24 hours)

We're interested in people's feedback on the overall concept, but especially on the UI and experience.
Manymoon Acquired by Salesforce.com today
How to Transfer Files Between Your PC and Android Phone Wirelessly
In Calgary here; I don't experience any "caps" on my usage.

I don't count how much I download but I'm pretty sure I average over 100GB/mo easily.
This...doesn't seem massive. From the article:

>I don’t have access to DNS settings to point MX records to Google Apps or set up CNAME forwarding for things like calendaring. But my claim means that when SeattleTimes.com decides to switch to Google Apps in the future, it will have to jump through extra hoops to get there.

So...no harm done, just a bit more annoying if and when SeattleTimes.com decides to set up Google Apps? If you can't actually do anything, or prevent SeattleTimes.com from doing something, this isn't a massive loophole. Should it be changed? Sure, why not. Is it a giant problem? No.
Bald-faced pimping of a resource the company I work for, EdgeCase, put together as well: http://gitimmersion.com/
For all Google’s sins, there is a Dashboard that let you erase all you care them not to know: Google could promote that heavily in case of stone, glass house. I always assumed this would be a great way to learn more about queries: spotting what words people are ashamed to have searched for.

It could be something a registered user could set from a browser toggle, and DuckDuckGo is a very good project, or course. My point was: data portability and user control are within Google's long term interest, not being evasive about their data cache.
* So you want a person to code up the website while you smoke some pot and the split the profits?

Yeah skippy, that's exactly why I want to work with people who are better at something than I am, so I can slack off. How did you guess?
The lottery system can now confidently continue to extracting money out of idiots who don't know better. Somehow this whole story leaves me feeling that nothing good has happened.

The whole story just feels like a good Samaritan helping a schoolyard bully steal change out of the back pockets of unwitting classmates.

A happy ending would be the lottery system managers getting thrown out after suffering unexpected sustained losses.