skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Keep in mind that the number of "weekend" startups compared to the number of people hacking on the weekend is very small. The quantity of successful weekend projects is even smaller.

Every now and then someone gets a good idea that is quick to implement and they are prepared/experienced enough to execute it well, but it doesn't happen as often as your post implies.

Stop beating yourself up! Get back to making something you think is cool!

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. -- Thomas Edison.
Sudoer :)
the 'flag' link up there
Creator Of Angry Birds’ Physics Engine Calls Out Rovio For Not Giving Him Credit
Looks facebookish (not necessarily a bad thing).
I would improve the general tagline (there seems to be a few and you cannot decide which one to promote and end up promoting all) and the pictures (current ones are too details, I lost interest in investigating what they show after taking a glance).
Feedback welcome:  Current project - Salesforce.com Cloud Backup
Yikes, sorry to hear this. In retrospect probably your best play was to work with the acquirer to negotiate a low figure 100% cash deal with good going forward comp and equity options for you and your operating team. With that in hand you then lay out a scenario to the VC where your team is exhausted and it is either this deal of the company falls apart. The hope is he grumbles all the way to his low cash takeout and you get another chance to prove your company out in a different equity structure. Good luck going forward!
Stieg Larsson's new book would be, The Boy Who Stuck His Penis in a Hornet's Nest.
I generally agree but both VCs and entrepreneur's rely on reputation. I'm not sure a public airing of grievances will do the OP much good.

The threat of doing so is really the only thing that would have any benefit, perhaps encouraging the VC to move faster with future deals, actually posting may damage the OP's standing with potential VCs in the future. There is likely another side to this story and I lean towards keeping dirty laundry private.
6 Terrifying Ways Crows Are Way Smarter Than You Think | Cracked.com
How far back does your data go? Twitter's API doesn't really allow for historical searching so there may be value to someone who wants to, for example, compare trends over time.
One of the draws of arduino for me is that it by its very nature invites frankenstein type arrangements of hardware.

Just because this thing is old school tech, doesn't mean the peripherals people connect to it will be. Accelerometers are very popular in the arduino world. It wont be long before somebody manages to get their pets to interact with it somehow as well, that seems a strong meme in arduinoland.

Yes you can interface all these things to a PC as well, but there are many layers of abstraction imposed on you. And you don't get to fashion your own casing out of things you find lying around.

The entertainment value possible in consumer hardware that is produced with no profit motive whatsoever is pretty epic.
Is there some reason the author should be able to explain the motivation of all female coders? She saw that people were wondering why females weren't showing up, and she gave her personal reasons. She's giving a single data point, not trying to draw a conclusion.
Smart Interactive Displays [YouTube]
The No A$$hole Rule : Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't; Robert I. Sutton; Sep 1, 2010; ISBN 978-0446698207.
"Snow Crash" by Neil Stephenson is also an amazing read that has a better technical grasp on the growing technology. "Neuromancer" is amazing and all, with some really brilliant passages, but it was composed on a typewriter and Gibson had relatively little experience with programming or computers. Stephenson's work is like a mix between a coherent William S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon - strangely prophetic ideas shown in complete detail with such conviction as to make it almost ironic.
Wow, Linus sleeps 9 hours a night -- maybe the health gurus are right when they say more sleep makes you more productive.
I will send it all. You do not have to tell me about your project. Just be sure to post it here when you are ready.
The Start-up Paradox
Facebook taking control of the world is not really that bad. It's only uncomfortable.

It's similar to the Microsoft empire from a few years back. Windows knew everything about you and you were completely locked-in not being able to stop using it because you had all your apps there.

Now you have all your friends there.

From application developer point of view this is actually a good thing - you have a common platform to code for. And it triggers innovation as we don't have to reinvent the wheel - there is the default social network already, so let's build on top of it!

Of course it would be great to have a free, distributed, open source social network anyone would join and leave at any time (think: Diaspora). Just as it would have been so much better if it was Linux or BSD who gained the monopoly on desktops, not Windows.

But we survived then and we'll survive now.

And if Facebook starts being RELALY nasty, people will finally leave it for something more friendly, cooler or maybe just new.
If the programmer still has to perform manual copies, what's the advantage?
so, when i mention categories of female sex and coding/programming in one sentence - it is male-pig-chauvinism. When it is done by a lady - it is what?
so you read it... on reddit?
Thanks, but I have a flag link. Maybe I don't have enough Karma. And I cant see the logic behind not letting low karma users flag spam.
The real problem here is that she puts two spaces after a period.
They did it before 2000:
http://www.vincelewis.net/ekranoplan.html
How American Airlines is utterly terrible at customer service.
ummm I'd just prefer neither. I cringe to think of net neutrality in place next time there is a Republican majority.

The energy being applied advocating net neutrality could be a lot better spent lobbying for real freedom in the telecom space and undo'ing the legally enforced monopolies there.
One thing that completely puzzles me: How does dynamic memory allocation/deallocation in GPU kernels work? Also, will the programmer be able to use virtual functions in CUDA kernels? If so, does the usual thinking about warp divergence apply? That is--- should all threads in a warp ideally be calling the same function address?
Still Committing Like Crazy
"...coding isn't something I do on the side/in my free time/in a vacuum" - not a hacker, shouldn't go to hackathons. Nothing to do with male vs female.
The reasons she listed for not attending point more to her not being a hacker than to her being a woman.

> She doesn't code or build things for fun

> She sees hackathons as a waste of time because she doesn't 'get anything' out of it

> They take too much time

> Sees it as a competitive environment and akin to hazing

I don't identify with much in the article. Personally, the joy of making something quickly is reward enough. Making something quickly with smart people who can immediately refine what you made and producing a more polished product is just an added benefit.
You failed to negotiate effectively with your VC.

At this point, you should explain to your VC (hopefully he is your only one) that you intend to: (1) wind down the business, layoff all staff, pay off all debtors and cease all company operations. And (2), without soliciting any employees or infringing on any IP, you intend to reconstitute a new company in the X space where X is your current business.

Explain how it was a pleasure to work with him, and you're sorry you were unable to return his equity in this endeavor. You can ask if he is interested in finding a buyer for his remaining equity, despite it's precipitous loss in value pending the imminent loss of all employees, and if so, you may be able to arrange a buyer.

You are on the east coast so be sure you do not have any sort of non-compete agreement with your company that is enforceable. You most certainly have a non-solicit agreement in place, so be cautious, and email none of these communications or plans around. This is a decent time to be paranoid.
There is a lot more leverage here than that.
Strong disagree. Outing the VC won't help and the OP has much more leverage than that as I commented elsewhere in the thread.
I built something that would appeal to certain college professors (as well as others), then emailed probably a 100 of them to see if they would find it useful for their students. Remarkably, probably 25% not only responded positively, but posted it on their class websites.

Great way to kick off an SEO campaign :)
the code to do it starts with (
TellFi (YC W11) Is Google Voice For Companies
Is there an API for this?
That's not quite true--there is this bit:

> I'm actually pretty flattered that you'd like me to come to these events. There's just little in it for me, while you guys get some good publicity with me and my fine lady coder friends in attendance while you take the obligatory geek girls are cute picture.

I can understand not wanting to feel like she's on display (since regardless of how true it is that she would be--which I personally don't doubt--it sounds like she would feel that way).
Had a similar thing happen to a company I was involved with a long while ago. (The VC involved was far from the valley.)

In fact, the partner even resigned from our board during acquisition negotiations, because the squeeze he was attempting, enriching his firm at the expense of other shareholders, wouldn't mesh well with the fiduciary responsibilities of a board member.

Some people think using every lever at their disposal to eke out a few extra percent at the last minute proves their business mettle. I suppose they expect – or prefer to guarantee – that this be their last transaction with the others affected.

We wound up acquiescing to his demands to avoid ruining the acquisition. And most of us resolved to never do business with him or his firm again.

If another acquisition materializes, you may just have to acquiesce and/or play chicken/hardball with this VC – all the while hiding any internal dissent from the acquirer, so that ultimately it's up to you and your investors whether you walk away from a deal.

If he's a bit player at a larger VC firm, you might privately share your concerns with other more senior partners there – which almost always would be a relationship-destroying maneuver, but if the relationship is already kaput, why not?

Hardball might involve having your own lawyer find the maximum you can do under the investment agreement without the VC's agreement – asset sales, de facto liquidation, etc. – or find grounds to (credibly threaten to) sue the VC for breaches of various duties.
Thank you for the analysis, I appreciate the clarity with which you describe his confusing behavior. It might be that he has such plans.

As for taking the conflict public, I don't have it in me. It is not something that aligns with my world view because I know that I too can be wrong sometimes and not see the whole story. I prefer that people know they can trust me rather than applying that kind of leverage.
The Ekranoplan
Will Apple kill its third-party store network?
India expected to scrap source code regulation
There is no "why" in this article; it is merely about the how.
Good point; updated.
If you don't know the language to begin with, how could you possibly know what code to write? How do you know what's important? How do you know that what you're doing is correct? How do you know when you're done?
Thank you for great advice. The takeaway for me is that I should get a more thourough feel for what the rest of the team thinks. There is a lot of leverage to be applied this way.
>Nothing to do with male vs female

actually there is. Hackathons for computer geeks is like deer hunting for Pennsylvania gun-clingers ...
I would be in the same boat. I actually like a lot of movies but I am so disinterested in the kind of celebrity idol worship that most are that I don't remember the names of a lot of actors/actresses.

I reserve all my idol worshipping for linus
Internet upstart: Entry 1 – Dear diary
I am sure you're right... I don't have a good enough perspective to give much more of an opinion than I did though :)
Sorry if my comment above was unclear -- there is no plan for a highspeed rail across the US, I was mentioning specific plans in FL and CA. Both of which do no make sense when you run the numbers, and are the ones that are the furthest along in planning.
Quite honestly I couldn't figure out what workola _does_ after about a minute of scanning over the landing page. I see here that it's in the flavor of netvibes. On your site, however, you simply make mention of a "remote desktop" and have a picture of an iPhone. These two things (desktop and iPhone) paired together confuses me even further.

It all looks very nice, and I'm sure there's value to the concept, but your site simply doesn't convey what that value is. That being said, shoot me an email and I'd love to have a more in depth conversation!
Make it a game:

* 1 point for each number

* 2 point for each letter

* 3 points for each symbol

* first of each class counts for five (caps count as a separate class)

"your password score is 32 points, which places you in the top 10 percent. User bschnier is ahead of you by 10 points."
As I recall, you need 50 karma to flag items. The logic behind this is preventing bunches of new users from flooding the site and knocking off all of the new articles - as with 10 flags, an article under 10 points is auto-killed, or something like that. Giving trolls the ability to easily do that could be pretty bad.
Idea: put some kind of link to American Airlines website/customer service in your website, so they can see your post as source of web traffic?
They are probably "monitoring their brand," but still...
email id? Don't see anything in your profile.
Most semi-competent developers can build SOMEthing in a weekend, but the trick is making something that actually works at scale, or works for more than a single user, or providing any kind of audit trail. In short, almost all weekend projects are a hack.

The big features that people like, the UI/UX polish that makes it easy to use, the scalable backend that lets it work under load -- those things aren't generally even considered for a weekend project.

That's not to say that there aren't some people who don't produce brilliance over a weekend, but it really is the exception, not the rule.
If you like Snow Crash, I definitely recommend checking out Daemon (and its sequel FreedomTM) by Daniel Suarez. Just found them recently, and they're fantastic.
It was very valuable to hear of a similar situation. I'm happy to hear that you were able to rescue the deal, albeit paying a heavy price.
That's kind of steep pricing IMO as far as the minutes are concerned. I can get an OOMA for $200 + $100 / year with 2 lines, 5000 minutes and lots of other features.
I don't think this question is as profound as it seems. Basically, it is asking: If a civilization had access to the resources to create a technology, why didn't they?

But it is a profound question. The turnaround version of it is: what do we have the resources to create, but aren't doing? What aren't we looking for? What aren't we seeing?
Creative Ways to Fund Your Dreams | Lifetime Moms
Google restores Gmail access to one-third of affected users
How does this improve, or differ from, Toktumi (http://toktumi.com/Whytoktumi.aspx)? At first glance, they appear quite similar, with perhaps Toktumi edging ahead on features.
Egyptian names his daughter "Facebook"
I'm not sure what crazy world you live in, but if I asked a random person "Have you heard of Linux?" odds are it's "no".

The "regular world" is a really long way from the tech industry.
This is neither true (I've personally known plenty of computer geeks of both sexes who aren't interested in hackathons), nor evidence of some sort of gender difference, since if the statement in the first place were true, you would have exactly one data point with which to correlate gender with being a genuine computer geek.
Oodle commissions study that accuses CraigsList of being a cesspool of crime
What you are 'missing' and the folks who watched minority report or Avatar are lusting after, is a transparent piece of material that they can display stuff on.

True, LCDs are, by their nature, transparent. However their contents are only 'visible' when there is light going through them, and they work by adjusting how much light passes through them using polarization. If you have a full spectrum light behind them, and you have red green and blue dots which you use for color selection, you get a color LCD.

However, these don't generate light. And no, nobody has built one of those yet. To build such a display would no doubt require that you build a pixel out of three (or four) LEDs that are nominally transparent, such that turning them on would cause the pixel to appear.

That would then make for a display which was clear, except for where it had data showing. So far, this technology (outside of using a projector to project the display on to a window where the user sees the reflection as the display) does not exist.
Yes, I believe it will be very hard for us to raise another round. The VC's story is that they changed their strategy since investing in us. True or not, it is a high liability since it is easy for prospective financers to read something else into the fact.
Kairosoft Launches ’Hot Springs Story', Follow-Up to 'Game Dev Story'
1. Agreed on their likely being another side of the story; that seems to be the case more often than not.

2. Outing the VC could provoke him to retaliate by filing a lawsuit for defamation, and/or for tortious interference with prospective economic advantage. The OP doesn't need that kind of grief right now.

3. It might be worth spending a few bucks to talk to a savvy business litigator -- this sort of thing comes up fairly often in closely-held corporations. Maybe Grellas will put in an appearance on this thread?
GoDaddy just always makes me think porn before DNS. I can't imagine what thoughts were going through their heads when they thought "GoDaddy. Yeah. That makes me think 'major DNS server'. Lets go with that."

To make matters worse, they've got women wearing shirts that say "GoDaddy" on their front page. Gotta wonder what their target audience is, with that featuring so prominently.
Gameloft to Use Unreal Engine 3 in Future Games
Not sure someone will click the link while reading the story
Wow. I missed a Delta flight in SF (that while I'll blame the PA system for anyone who listens, was entirely my own fault), and I ended up first on the standby list. I always got the impression agents put people who miss their flights pretty high on the priority list, as opposed to people who just feel like going standby.

Weird that treatment would be so different across airlines.
Saudi king to buy Facebook to end the revolt.
I believe the net price wasn't that heavy, but it stung, because it broke the all-in-it-together logic that otherwise had ruled.

It was already a good result for the investor – the last-minute extras demanded weren't a part of any prior negotiated preference, they were just new things extracted in return for not vetoing a deal everyone else wanted.
If anyone is put off by a snake-oil, slimy, manipulative impression from that title... Don't be. Give it a try anyway, it's not what you think.

I always found the title offputting but I'm glad i looked past it; it contains lots of great social advice and anecdotes, not a recipe for becoming an unctuous car salesman type.
Yes they do, but how much depends on your rating and amount of competition. A few months ago I killed a $1.99 app that hadn't been updated in over a year, yet 3-4 people were still buying it a day. I just felt bad charging for something I had no plans to go back to, and that had become a lot less useful after changes Apple made in iOS4.

Clearly you're not going to live on $5 a day, but I think a good strategy is to build a decent number of smaller "library" apps while working to fry bigger fish.
"... Does archived social media data have any value in itself, or is it the application which determines the value of the data? ..."

No, yes.

"... What are some possible uses for archived social media information? ..."

What problem does this solve for you?

ps: I like being able to get "Top 1000100 Tweeters based on Followers" by selecting ~ http://www.tweetheap.com/followers/10000
Ask HN: Any Experience buying / selling a domain at live auction.
I was wondering if anyone on HN has had any experience buying or selling domains at a live auction.

What can / should be expected? (both in terms of activity and price)

Is it a good idea / bad idea?

Is it better to just acquire or sell an unused domain at a resale site like sedo?
Thank you for very valuable advice all over. It aligns very much with my thoughts but lays it out with perfect clarity. Your advice also focuses on process rather than ends, which I appreciate as a complement to all the (also very valuable) alternatives proposed by other commenters.
You can take an arbitrary pointer value in a function, look up its location, and do the copy if necessary, instead of requiring multiple entry points for CPU and GPU pointers. This also simplifies multi-GPU programming a lot--copy from one arbitrary pointer to another and it just works, instead of having to specify which device the copies are going to or anything like that.
Hmm..when I read the article the first time I didn't get the impression that he was saying business people should stay away from politics. But I was closely following the 2008 election in CA and assumed that's what he was referring to.

I think business people should definitely be involved in politics. I think everyone should be involved in politics, as a matter of fact. Democracy is a wonderful thing.

But I don't think being successful at business automatically means you're going to be successful in politics as well.
Apple’s precedents vs. Apple’s guidelines
We (Convore Inc) were an early beta user of TellFi. In about 5 minutes we were able to get a phone number and have that phone number go straight to voicemail and email us the voicemail. Perfect!
These are the top books chosen by the whole community. The all-time most influential book is _Code Complete_? What's with all the Agile? Multiple books on design patterns? More books about the profession of being a developer --- and, in particular, a BigCo developer --- than about the most interesting aspects of designing programs.
This is not a true story according to this:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/saudi-king-did-not-offer-...
Privacy and liberty are closely related in many situations, but aren't prerequisites for each other (e.g. I'd argue that something like David Brin's Transparent Society provides plenty of liberty with 0 privacy).

I suspect Thiel subscribes to a similar approach (e.g. from his Wikipedia page, a quote: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.").
In what way is this better than any of the other hosted PBX solutions out there? I don't see the novelty here. Even the "advanced" stuff, like voice mail transcription, have been standard features at virtual PBXs for years now.
I think there's some preallocated memory for dynamic allocations from the device. As far as I know virtual functions work as well, and the usual thinking about warp divergence does apply.