skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Print magazines are always from the future. They think no one will buy one from the past.
Demos? Screenshots?
I dont know, a set of anonymous reviews of somebody does not sound like a measure of anything related to that person.

What will these reviews really tell me?

None of the reviews in the profiles that were linked here seemed to provide an quantifiable metric of any sort unlike say a set of LinkedIn recommendations or StackOverflow reputaton points.
Perhaps the lawyers have a bigger lobbying group to counter that?
36/sec but then they're doing 800 http requests per second, not sure what could cause such a big difference (lots of ajax stuff?) but I think 800/sec is an interesting thing to see them deal with, that's something in the region of 1bn a month, which fits your requirement for interesting-ness :p
God forbid you ever find out about Metasploit, your poor little head might explode!
the url path is humen, because that's how rails pluralizes human. the class name is "human". this is my first rails app. i didn't bother to change it out of laziness.

yeah see above. chattel has a neutral definition and it's just that chattel is personal property that's movable. throughout us history, people have been thought of as chattel, namely slaves and women. i suppose the site calls all people chattel, and in that way it's somewhat contentless and i don't think it takes a stand on the normative value of slavery and say, women's sufferage. (although i think it's fair to say, boo, slavery, yay, women.)

i'm actually a lawyer, and i'm sure that if anyone uses this site to say horrible things about some litigious person (or just really bad things about a normal person), and people actually use this site, then i will have to deal with civil litigation. i suppose there's a moral question as to creating a site in which libel is more freely available, but i'll leave that to the moralists to duke out.
This is a whole load of conjecture, but the product announcements coming out of Apple for the last few years seem to be converging on a pattern.

1) Update on success / market share / etc.

2) Possible update on retail.

3) Compare product that is about to be obsoleted with its competition while putting said competition in an unfavorable light.

4) Make the magic happen and take the press to their happy place.

#3 intrigues me. I can't help but wonder if casting the competition in a negative light is just an excuse for being able to talk about the competition at all. Given the possibility of government interference in any industry it is in the best interest of most businesses to maintain the perception of healthy competition. What has struck me about Apple's portrail of their competitors is that they preset what appears to be a finely tuned mix of recognition, disdain, and paranoia. It's almost as if they want you to remember that there are others out there. Any company that mops the floor with their competition is going to have to deal with the losers running off to the FTC, Congress, etc and whining about anti-competitive practices. At times Apple's presentations seem to be attempting to preempt that sort of thing.

Let me preempt any emotional responses by pointing out that I'm not saying Apple/iOS is better than Google/Andriod, etc, etc. I'm saying that in terms of financial success and overall market/mind share they're doing some serious winning (and not in the Charlie Sheen sense of the word).
I'm currently reading it - a friend lent it to me :)
I make a rule to only visit when I'm doing what I call "brain dead" tasks. Waiting on hold, the time before meetings where I show up on time and everyone else is fashionably late, and so on.

It doesn't work when I get in a really intense debate but 95% of the time it's effective.
This is amazing, thanks so much for this - will definitely follow up on all of this.
Allowing Human Nature To Work Successfully
They use their paid VIP service, which is pretty solid (and pricy).
Honest question - why is this article #3 on Hacker News? It isn't interesting to me at all; in fact, it seems like nothing more than a press release. Is there something I'm missing?
I pointed out that his facts was wrong. I don't care about his point.
Of course, that is clear. However, declaring a Charter City won't magically erase corruption and other structural causes of poverty, and bringing in a foreign party to impose governance brings its own set of issues / has historically not worked out well.

Something closer to the lines of SEZs seems to capture the best of both worlds and makes more sense to me. It's a way to encourage liberalization (which we'll accept as a purely good thing for now, though obviously there is debate on that), bring in improved regulation, and provide some foreign expertise which could be helpful. It also aligns incentives a bit better, since it specifically focuses on business, rather than all aspects of governance (it's easier for us all to get along when we're in a mutually profitable relationship).
Okay thanks. It seems like an interesting concept, something that should be native to Email perhaps. However, outside of this thread, if I visit your site (as an average user), the concept of how it works doesn't seem easy right away. I'll have to play/test to figure it out.
I've read such a story about somebody else before (I think it was somebody else - younger, and colored). So it seems the same trick has been invented several times by blind people.

Still very cool.
I think you've sold me. I can't wait to really sit down and dig into the demo tonight.

I had way more than $90 worth of headaches on my last iOS project keeping UI assets straight. I had no automated workflow; it was "do this in Photoshop then change the color manually for each one and then probably forget once or twice to export the correct resolution and tear my hair out wondering why it looks like crap."

I absolutely hated making minor iterations to the design, because I'd have to waste half an hour changing everything for a few pixels difference.

Thanks for the recommendation on this!
Only vaguely related, but I've heard it explained that the term "reservation" derives from the idea that it's land that the Indians "reserved" for themselves, rather than ceding in treaties.

Now, that's of course a distortion of the forces at work that caused the so-called reservation of lands to be necessary, but there's also some contemporary value to Indian leaders in restoring that sense of meaning to the word today.
Steve actually wrote a pomodoro gem that aliases sites like that for 25 minutes at a time: https://github.com/steveklabnik/pomodoro
I do believe they fixed the issue with regards to minecraft.
Currency, politics, local mobile networks, vital function (e.g. Netflix), local requirements (app store servers, or individual app info) and stupidity.
Video games all seem to tell the same story: 8 or 9 pirates to 1 legitimate user (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350 http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/04/stardock-88-per/)

Pirates converted to legitimate customers (in the face of DRM or other obstruction of the pirated form) at a rough rate of 1 customer per 1000 defrayed pirates. This seems to indicate a rough ratio of 1000 As to 1 B. Are a thousand sales worth a million users?
Not surprised to see Lord of the Rings references, but it's odd to see a service level named for Barad-dur --- the Dark Lord's HQ. (Why not Minas Tirith?)
I don't agree that it would be better served, and I don't like the poster's equivocation of "I don't think these are equivalent to this issue at hand." His examples are perfectly analogous to the issue at hand, which are instances of an outdated and poorly-considered law allowing people to do clearly unethical things while remaining within the bounds of the law.
I disagree. I think that the average person looks almost exclusively at price, and not much else.
However, in my experience the few people that pay much attention to the specific type of laptop they are buying pay at least as much attention to quality as they do to aesthetics. (Note that I don't have any numbers to back this up, this is just my experience from the people who I help buy computers)
Google passively makes money proportional to the number of people browsing the web. It is in Google's greatest interest for everybody to be online at all possible times and in all places. It doesn't matter where you are, what you are viewing. Your presence (in large numbers) converts to earnings for google, due to their large spread of Adsense ads.

Gmail, for example, has been a highly profitable endeavor. Not because they can serve ads, but it raised the bar for browser based email. More people are doing email in their browser because Gmail came out, whether it's on yahoo, hotmail, etc. Not leaving the browser increases the time spent browsing the web, which increases pageviews on google ads.

Android is just another free product Google uses to keep you browsing the web as much as possible.
Don't remind me - I once wrote server side code to translate HTML between the forms that different browsers are happy editing using contenteditable.

I'm a markdown man these days!
Honduras recently amended its constitution to permit the creation of Regiones Especiales de Desarrollo, following Romer's ideas: http://www.congreso.gob.hn/contenido/1640-cronologia-del-nac...
Allow me to appropriate a quotation from a person who's legacy Apple has had no shame appropriating for marketing: "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

This was plainly an exercise in ridicule by Jobs.
Other than the millions/billions of ad impressions every month they show along the way? No.
I try hard not to assume "top 1%" == "smartest 1%". I tried being very smart for awhile, and I'm really pretty good at it.

Turns out that "dedicated" and "hardworking" trump "smart" nine times out of ten. So now I'm trying for that. It's taking longer.
Here's a bookmarklet to try it out on any site (paste into the URL bar, hit enter):

javascript:(function(d,l){l=d.createElement("link");l.rel="stylesheet";l.href="https://github.com/tlrobinson/evil.css/raw/master/evil.css";d.body.appendChild(l)})(document);
I might try and build this into my upcoming hosted CMS, CMSey (http://cmsey.com). I was planning on using TinyMCE but we'll see..
Yeah - if BBM is so great, and it's now available on any device, why wouldn't a user have the best of both worlds by using RIM or Android devices?
I think the closure of Djangy has actually aroused interest in dedicated Django hosting - a market with much apparent potential in which there isn't any clear leader. With everyone trying to make 'the Heroku of platform_x' in the wake of Heroku's success it must be a good time to announce anything related to this.
I suppose a lot of people really want there to be a good "Heroku for Django". I follow the companies in this space with interest, and jumped on the link. Especially with Djangy giving up last week, it is good to see some forward progress.
"Don't answer these questions"

Don't worry, I wasn't going to.
It sounds like we're down to services and live performances. I think you just eliminated most of the classes of content that you likely consume in a recorded form. And in the software world, some would say hosted services should be freely available as well (viz. AGPL), thereby driving absolutely everyone to commodity pricing.

> Allowing copies only when somebody "agrees" (usually for money) is protectionism and for-profit censorship, pure and simple, and I am against it.

Crazy town. I only now noticed your "*-gnu" handle, but things make more sense now.

Just out of curiosity, what do you have in mind for a suitable business model?
This does seem very much like just a press release, but the first thing that came to my mind -- how come the Tolkien estate hasn't sent them a cease and desist yet?
Parents rationalize economic cost of kids by exaggerating parental joy
Because "Heroku for Django" is on a lot of peoples' wish lists, and this looks like a serious attempt to provide something like that.
Yep. suss.me is available -- I bought it when the .me domains first came out, thinking of something like this, but never did anything with it.
String Searches in Redis using Sorted Sets
Real Story Behind Charlie Sheen Joining Twitter
College Entrepreneurship 
this site helped me when it came to discovering trends and ideas for college students and <a href="http://www.creatingyourselfatthetop.com/blog/bid/41774/College-Income-The-Best-Time-to-Start-a-Home-Business">college income</a>
How To Generate Revenue From Freemium Customers
Thanks I'm glad you liked the app and definitely glad we can continue in the tradition of good Facebook apps from HN regulars
We'll definitely look into that it's a cool idea. We are looking around for some way to pivot WhereMyFriends so that could be a interesting direction
>If I were blind, I would surely pay thousands of dollars for the K-Sonar device if it could enhance my sensory input beyond "what I feel with my cane within 2 feet" to "everything around me within 15 feet".

There is an easy(cheap, i'd say tens of dollars, see prices for ultrasound parking sensors) implementable "virtual cane" :
the pair of laser (like in laser pointer) + receiver + small chip which would re-scale the sensor output to the hand from light speed scale (10m / 300000 m/s = 0.00003s ) to the tactile feedback scale - tenths of a second.
The same can be done with ultrasound. The both can be even paired, for precision and cases of say low light (or sound) reflecting surfaces.

The main problem i think is that blind people have their hands full just trying to live the life, while non-blind don't care and or passionate enough to cross the threshold into doing something. The guy in the article is just a miraculous exception.
Absolutely agree. Finding the right fit for a company, somebody who is dedicated and works well with a team, is probably more important than that top 1%.
I think it's bad to intentionally select hugely emotionally charged examples (e.g., Godwin's Law) in order to emphasize a point.

It's just trying to prime the emotional state of the reader to sway them to your point.

Very effective technique. But it means that someone is intentionally and strongly pushing an agenda, using subconscious techniques that subvert our rational mind.
> I have a confession: At first, I didn’t get Hipmunk. I mean, I understood the merits of the interface, I respected the user focus of the site, all of that was awesome and drew me to the iPhone project.

Danilo: How did you pitch them? Or did they pitch you?

You have mad design skills (Opacity does rock) for a coder. Dangerous!
Quitting to spend more time doing constructive things is good.

Quitting, but spending the whole day on #startups IRC channel wasting time, is just, well, a waste of time (like others who "quit" just to hang on IRC).
The truth is calling someone a "fanboy" is childish and virtually guaranteed to send the discussion in a bad direction.
They're on VIP hosting -- http://vip.wordpress.com/hosting/

If you're a publisher it's a great deal, we can absorb huge spikes in traffic because the scale of what we do. But you have the risk of being collateral damage in something that affects all of WP.com, like a DDoS or bad code deploy.

On the bright side, anything that impacts all of WP.com is an all-hands-on-deck matter for us since it's the vast majority of our business, so we're as aligned as could be.
You are confusing explanation with justification.

I think steve jobs was dishonest in presenting that uncorrected quote from the Samsung executive. It lessens him in my eyes and it has been called out already.

Does that mean we can't attempt to understand his motivation without being called names? Must every statement about the subject begin with 'Steve Jobs is a liar'?

It's worth pointing out that nothing else he said even comes close to being a lie.
Isn't the motivation "they lie to sell more devices" - which is what your post seems to dance around, without outright saying it? Or am I oversimplifying?
How one startup successfully sold physical products – The Sticker Mule story.
Welcome to Selican Technologies' Blog
Some version of that is occasionally proposed for forest fires in California, but it's never managed to get enacted. Even if we accept that putting out the fire overall is the state's responsibility, a significant portion of the cost of fighting a forest fire is in saving clusters of houses (or occasionally individual houses) that are pretty close to the fire, but seem saveable. In terms of just containing the fire, it's much more efficient to put up a fairly wide perimeter and let everything within it burn, rather than sending in units to spray foam on individual houses.

So it's occasionally proposed that that gets reformed somehow: either be less aggressive in trying to save houses overall; or do so but bill the owners; or stop doing it unless owners buy some sort of supplemental insurance in advance; etc. Not a very popular proposal, though. An alternate one is to assess some kind of "you live in a high-risk area" supplemental property tax, which would be more or less like a mandatory version of the insurance option.
"direction:rtl;" could be a nice addition if you pick the right location for it.
Easy.

1) Do they perform original research themselves, or do they purchase patent rights? If they're not actually generating knowledge, then they're rent-seeking.

2) Do they generate income from licenses, or from lawsuits? Licensing IP is a voluntary transaction for both parties, so the people using the IP believe they're paying a fair cost for it. Lawsuits seek to extract maximum payoff through coercive means, usually because the free-market value of their IP would be vanishingly small.
Is Collaboration Software Useful?
It actually also works because a sound registers differently based on the direction it travels through your own head (i.e. your skull itself is an occlusion source) - your brain recognizes front vs. back based on how your own head dulls the sound
One of my friends just buys lots and lots of gold. I think it depends on your goals and what you want to achieve. In your prior post about selling, you said you wanted to pursue something bigger. Taking that into consideration, you would want to keep away from real estate in today's market where it is flooded and then you have to remember that owning real estate also requires management of the assets/upkeep etc.

Since Africa is having a meltdown and the Iran just took some war ships through the Suez, I would say military companies would be a good investment right now. Also, I would look to companies that help Americans forget their troubles such as entertainment, food etc.

There is a really cool Vodka company in Alaska, Alaska Distillery, that might interest you. They have a cool product and want to expand internationally. They make Salmon Vodka which is a niche product. There are three partners and maybe you can buy one out.. (I don't have any ownership in this company) They have amazing sales that are strong and steady and they have a great leader running the company.

You don't have to buy stocks on the stock market, you can find a stable smaller company with good growth and invest money in it without too much risk and get a nice income in return.
"I suspect this is more of a branding issue."

It's a choice issue, too. If my next laptop is a MacBook, I know that I have basically one choice to make: how big I want the screen. If I'm a penny-pincher, I can check out the refurb section of the Apple Store, but in general, I really only have one choice.

If I want to get an Asus, where do I even start? Screen size, resolution, weight, price, processor, presence or not of optical drive? How do today's models stack up against yesterday's? How much would I gain in price and trade off in performance by seeking out a store model or overstock one from six months ago?
Depends on which group you look into. The social level who can afford to buy apple? Most likely not that many.

Those who can't afford to change the laptop if it breaks (or who would find this to be a major expense)? Yeah, I can believe that.
I didn't see, in the release notes (http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.2/html/users_guide/relea...), any mentions of improved inlining or thread scheduling. Do you have a link to that?
The game mechanic of social sites like HN is not helping general productivity. The usage of HN should be an award of real work being done.

Here's an idea. (someone implements it quick :)

- Block all distracting sites. Can be done as simply as remapping the hostnames to localhost.

- Monitor user activities. Hook into the OS to monitor keystrokes and mouse movement (I know how to do it on Windows, not sure about other OS).

- Accumulate reward points for work activities. Factor both intensity of typing and duration into the reward. Display reward points to visually encourage work.

- Once reward points reach a certain level, a half-hour or hourly pass is granted to access the blocked sites.

- Once the time on the pass is used up, the sites are blocked again.

Bonus: block all games or other distracting programs.
Lots of people think it's a Jeopardy reference, but actually I was thinking of that time Watson and I were cellmates in prison, and it kept raping me.

After I read that response I scrolled right back up and checked his proof that it's him. I knew Ken Jennings has a sense of humor, but I clearly underestimated him.
About this attack, I am curious if that was targeting a specific web site or just the whole inf? Can you share the details? How many different IPs?
Charlie Sheen to Start Tweeting Endorsements
He stands to make $1 million a year as he officially signs with Ad.ly, which specializes in celeb endorsements on the microblogging site.
Show HN: "Never wait on hold again" service built with Rails and Twilio 
My buddy paulsingh and I have been working on this for a few weeks, got something up and running and wanted to show you.

The problem we're solving: When you need customer service (your flight got canceled, strange fees on your bill, etc) you just want to talk to a real person. Waiting on hold wastes your time AND your concentration; you can't be coding in the zone when part of your brain is waiting for an operator.

Our solution: We wanted to make it "one click" to reach a real person.

How it works: You click on who you want to talk to (even a specific department, like the billing dept at AT&T) and we take it from there. Our system dials in, presses whatever buttons need pressing and waits on hold for as long as it takes. Only when we have an actual operator on the line do we call you.

Website version: http://www.fastcustomer.com (free)
iPhone: http://itunes.com/app/FastCustomer (99 cents)
Android: Know any great Android developers? ;)

Technical: Rails + Twilio, hosted on Rackspace Cloud.

We'd LOVE your feedback, and if any HNers want to review it let me know and I'll send you a promo code. If there are any companies you call regularly that we don't have (we're closing in on 1000 of the most-called companies) just say the word and we'll add 'em. Also, if you can think of things to do with our API we'd love to talk to you.

Thanks for checking it out!
The Twitter Story Fail
Here's an independant 3rd party that saw 0.9 million Galaxy tabs activated in December alone.

http://blog.flurry.com/bid/54035/Android-Special-Report-Is-S...

It seems that despite the correction, we apparently still believe that the sell-through was "small" rather than "smooth". Even though Samsung themselves raised their estimated sales in November, suggesting it was doing better than they expected.
How Volusion Rips off Business Owners
Our obsession with the word "random"
Thanks for kind words. I actually started with Photoshop around age 13, and didn't learn to program until I was 20, so that helped round me out a little bit.

Short version: I wrote a post about Hipmunk that got Adam's attention, then didn't leave him alone until he gave me the gig. Here's the longer story, if you're curious:

http://blog.hipmunk.com/hipmunk-for-iphoneipod-touch