skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do we need an app to make it easier for people to advise us?
Contemplating creating an app that would make it easier to make use of advice from trusted advisors. We all have goals that need to be turned into tasks. Advisors can help us determine how. But do we always maximize the value they provide?

And we need to decide how to accomplish each task. Do we know how to do it or do we need to learn? Or can we delegate it or use a tool to accomplish it? Or does the task need to be broken down further before we can decide?

And once we've made these decisions, many of us benefit when our progress is visible and encouragement from real people is possible. We can and do easily ignore reminders from computers. Questions from people whose opinions we care about get a lot more attention.

Do you think there's a need for a tool that can help with this?

Is this something you would pay for?

How much would you pay if it helped you reach your goals?

Is there already a tool that does this? Does it have shortcomings?

Any other thoughts?

Thanks for your time

Al
"If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them."
Link to the actual image: http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/pics/EW020...
A theory of academic justice (2004)
Well, i note that we joined hacker news within 40 days of each other. Given that, i'd hazard to say we at least have some similar sense of what the community is (although obviously there's an element of self selection in terms of what we read and contribute to).

At the same time, if you don't find the generalist argument persuasive, i'd fall back on the point i skipped previously, which is that this is of direct interest to data geeks. One of the major information brokers, which is interesting both as an individual instance, and as a representative of all large information brokers is fundamentally broken internally.

This is a data processing and scaling issue laid out in a way that should make us ask what's wrong, and what it is that can be done to fix these sorts of problems.

Put more succinctly, this is a problem in our domain.
Erik,

credit where credit's due, i didn't author the original piece, and there are several things i would change about it if i had.

But yeah. i should blog more too :P But self promotion is frowned upon at HN.
One request: Make a version for those of us that like hot coffee (160F).
If you found this pictures to be interesting, you might also like some of photo sets of other abandoned facilities:

Vandenberg Missile Sites: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tunnelbug/sets/7215762296233064...

A Missile Silo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tunnelbug/sets/7215760341039595...

USA Refinery: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tunnelbug/sets/7215759418921441...

(See also: http://uer.ca)
Mine too, but the current VZW iPhone doesn't support 4g/LTE, so my bet would be for that.
Paul Allen Describes an Uneven Partnership With Gates
Nice to see this executed in a publicly-accessible way. I built a similar thing a little while ago, but never got around to polishing it up and packaging for consumption.

http://vimeo.com/18833937

https://github.com/burke/jsgithistory
This assumes that all programming in analogous to 'graphic design'. This analogy breaks the moment you consider that perhaps at least some programming is more analogous to, say, civil engineering or in-house material science research or in-house statistics... none of these other professionals are going to be able to disclose their 'portfolio' in any meaningful way.

Yet, mysteriously, civil engineers, material scientists and statisticians somehow keep being hired and the work keeps getting done. Baffling, I know.
Ask HN: Why can I not post on my regular account?
Im new to HN, but for some reason I can't post with my regular account. The posts just sit in a queue. I can post comments but not submissions. Did I do something to get banned? My account has around 20 karma. Ive searched, sent email to info, but can't find the answer
I know a few people who have the money to buy an iPhone 4 that will not simply because of the "consumer reports" iPhone antenna review. It's nonsensical for sure but I wouldn't be surprised if it would help apple to put the issue to bed for good.
IANAL, but I think one could at least make a case that scraping content off another site, removing the ads, storing it on your own server, and then retransmitting to your users could be copyright infringement.

Put another way, what's stopping me from putting out my own Washington Post app that scrapes content off their site and uses my ads instead of theirs?
Yea, some colleagues of mine thought that installing a fresh OS on their laptop would "break" it. The software engineering workforce has its range of very good and very bad employees.
Jive Preps For IPO; Facebook, Google, McAfee Execs On Board
I had the opportunity to meet the two founders the day they got accepted to YC and when they were telling me what working on, I was already canceling my efax account in my mind. Yesterday when I had to fax documents to a bank and Scottrade, it was actually a pleasant experience. The only thing I wish I could have done was prepare a fax and have a link to send to my wife so she could sign the documents as well.
Both require spatial thinking. To imagine how notes come together to form music isn't really that different from how lines of code create a program. Although music gets you laid more, which is why it's more popular IMHO.
Tell HN: It's time, 2 Twitter apps up for sale on Flippa
I've been going back and forth for a while about whether or not to do this, but it's time. Selling UseQwitter.com and TweetSaver.com on Flippa... no reserve, you bid you buy.. 2x1!

http://bit.ly/apps4sale
Super-sucks to exist in a world without a vaccine.
I've heard this for years, but have never been able to find out what references someone gave for me in an employment situation. Is it common?
How about a display on the back? That way there would be (nearly) no wrong way to hold your phone.
Seriously, I want this so bad. I LOVED Buzz when I worked at Google, and I desperately want this for my new company's GAFYD.
FWIW, here is HN sorted by votes/comments, with a minimum threshold like RoG suggests:

http://www.upthread.com/

I made it for myself. I'm sure it misses some good stuff, but what does make it is almost always top-notch.

Note: there's a hidden span after the links with the score if you're curious. I have it hidden because it can be distracting.
Tasty Labs is hiring frontend and backend engineers in Sillicon Valley. We use Python and Java. We are building a way to help people use their social networks to get things done.

http://tastylabs.com/
I'm reminded of this story I heard not too long ago: http://lesswrong.com/lw/37k/rationality_quotes_december_2010...

Note that in this case of circumcision the possible negative effects are well known, but a vaccine might have complications in X years that would not be worth the decreased contraction of AIDS. In hypothetical example, perhaps it increases the chances and severity of heart attacks by some ridiculous percentage.

In general, with medicine, it sucks to be on the wrong side of an experiment, but it can be difficult to know which side that is.
TN also has no state income tax, and has the FedEx global hub in Memphis, and is a fairly short flight to Washington, DC. I could easily see it being the Seattle, WA of the Mid-Atlantic.
Before You Know It Lite – powerful software for office use
Before You Know It Lite is the powerful software for office use. Office is nothing but MS office. With the help of this software you can learn easily new materials.
It is bad form to post these before the 1st of the month.
How Snooki can Stop Violent and Sex-Crazed Children
Noone cares :/ but i've updated my blog on building a better Ticket Master.
From what I can tell these people as selling a huge lump of metal. It's a F*CKING thermal mass. This isn't an invention of any kind. They simply took thermodynamics. It's kills me they made 22grand.
Actually, it is not time for another Hiring thread until the 1st of April.
According to the rumours, there will be a 7" WebOS tablet in September.

http://www.precentral.net/hp-touchpad-targeting-june-release...
Ask HN: Monetizing game websites?
So I just took over hosting a family member's website -- a wiki for a smallish online game. After migration, I am able to access the logs and I discover they are getting 50-100k hits/day.

Is this sort of traffic worth monetizing? If so, how?
There is something very Google about the branding. It's a little bit nerdy, very simple, and cool. I like it a lot more than "Like".
doesn't matter. The Tetris company can also sue you for the gameplay.
You know, this reminds me that a good portion of the general populace has 1-2 inches of their screen taken up by browser toolbars with lots of icons and bookmarks. I have 8 buttons in chrome (min,max,close,back,fwd,refresh/abort,wrench and star), but they might have 80. What's another shiny +1 button?
FBI asks for help cracking cipher in murder case
Hiding the Real Africa : Why NGOs prefer bad news
I think the point was more of a focus on software. Where we are today I think the iPhone 4 stands up in hardware, but is lagging in software (notification UI, reliance on iTunes, etc). An extra four months for some more RAM and maybe faster data access isn't going to bother most people.
I really like it, I wonder if there's any point in funding them more now? I can't find anything about what they are planning with all the extra money.
They don't have any TOS on their website.
I don't personally downvote things I disagree with (If it's presented well I sometimes upvote) but I think it's acceptable. If it wasn't supposed to be that way, it would be "flag" with no downvote option. I also personally think downvote should be removed from the UI completely but...
Kamme,

For now, we're restricting sign-up to Facebook because it 1) allows for really easy signup, 2) reduces password friction to simplify purchases, and 3) helps us reduce fraudulent signups. As the business grows, we will certainly open it to alternative signup options, but for now, Facebook is the only option.

During our beta period, we're offering completely free transactions to all of our partners. This means that if a user pays $0.25 for your digital good/service, you will receive $0.25 :)

If you have any other questions, feel free to email me directly at calvin@minno.co--I'd be glad to help!

Calvin
That seems to be the black and white one released yesterday and not the colorized version released today.
#yourkerneljokes
You can only see one side at a time.
The parent claimed "least loyal and trustworthy friend".

Where have you supported that claim? If you've "met" BG, I invite you to post some already-known anecdotes etc about his conduct as a friend, which is exactly what I asked about.
Color: http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/pics/first...
But there's also the issue of how the public would see it. Everyone can understand "we are making a base in space" and why it's awesome.

If the public didn't approve the collider, be it because of ignorance or not, it might have been canceled anyway and further science budgets would be hurt.
do you really find "have you plus-oned it?" catchy? or are you just being sarcastic? (I'd go the sarcastic route, imho it sounds terrible)
That was South Africa (I'm here). That wasn't a study on circumcision, that was nothing more than a statistical correlation, and one without any established causal relationship to support the 'prevents HIV' claim. There are many other factors to explain the correlation - cultural, economic and demographic.

Circumcision is still practiced as a coming-of-age rite here by many.
I was hoping for dual cores and iOS5 (notification feature mainly).

My brother is saying they will be integrating a credit card system. That could be possible.
Ask HN: PHP to RoR, dreamhost to what?
I've been writing PHP and hosting everything on dreamhost for about a year. I just started learning Ruby/Rails today. I'd like to change my host to something that will (1) support both Rails and PHP and (2) scale easily if any of my future projects happen to gain traction.

Which do you recommend? (I've heard both AWS and Heroku mentioned, but have no clue otherwise.)
I never have a problem with my antenna. If it does drop... it is unnoticeable.
Building a better CA infrastructure
Big corporations change things. They don't want to, but they just can't help themselves. The Engadget guys are probably being asked to fill out quarterly training goals in Excel worksheets and enter their sick days in an IE6-only web app that goes down every day at 6pm for maintenance. Or maybe the editors were "invited" to attend leadership training. There are many kinds of torture that wouldn't encroach on editorial freedom.
"At the end of the day, it's really what the developer is most comfortable with."

Totally agree. I would maybe extend to say its what the team of developers is most comfortable collaborating around (assuming you are more than 1 person).

Basically, it should be about building a good product. The end user generally couldn't care less what programming language your project was built in. If you can deliver the best experience in the fastest amount of time with programming language X, then that's the one you should use.
How Bill Gates tried to cheat me: Paul Allen
Not quite. They are taking advantage of the fact that matter takes (or releases) a lot more energy when it is changing state(eg. solid to liquid), then when it is simply changing temperature in the same state.

for example, water takes about 75J to heat one mol by 1K. but it takes
about 285000J to change one mol of ice to one mol of water

So, they have this lump of metal, that has a core of some other material that presumably changes state at the preferred temperature of coffee. What this means is that when the coffee is hotter than the joulies, the core melts absorbing a lot of energy. Then when the coffee is cooler than the preferred temperature, the core of the joulies re-solidifies, releasing a lot of energy, keeping the coffee warm.
Heartless as it sounds, it is absolutely fair to think about how to protect the business and yourself in the event that a fully vested founder were to be unable to do the duties one has reasonably assumed they would do.

Ownership shares are not like salary (imho): they're not just for past work, but also for future contributions.

Without specifics on to what extent exactly they were planning to dilute him, I am not prepared to condemn BillG. YMMV.

Jobs' actual cheating through a straightforward lie to Woz wrt how much they got paid for Atari's contract job they did is FAR worse than a planning conversation BillG had. IMHO. http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/hackers/steve-wozniak/
What kind of game changing things are you thinking of? Colliders help us learn what model is correct (or rather let us eliminate incorrect models) of very low level physics. We don't remotely have any technology to do anything with physics at that low a level, so isn't knowing which model may be correct pretty much going to remain of theoretical and philosophical interest only?

It's good to figure that out, but it isn't going to change anything about our higher level understanding of physics is it? By higher level I mean the physics that affects chemistry and biology and material properties of interest to engineers, and things like that.

A good strong space program, on the other hand, can give us over the next 100-200 years clean energy (solar collected from space stations, beamed to Earth), resources (asteroid and lunar mining), better instruments for astronomy (useful for answering philosophical questions about the origin and ultimate fate of the universe that are arguably as interesting as the questions colliders can help answer), better materials through zero G manufacturing, and perhaps a defense against the next big meteor or comet based mass extinction.
I don't think that is all there is to it. The page says they are filled with "Phase Change Material" (which I would guess is some sort of wax) that melts at !40F. I don't know why that would be better or worse than a lump of metal though.
You should check with a lawyer, but when you say 'national railroad company' I think of Amtrak, which is a corporation that is 100% owned by the US government. According to their ToS they would be within their rights to cut off your access, but actually launching an infringement suit against you would probably be an expensive waste of their time. I think you would be OK as long as you complied with a cease-and-desist notice if they saw fit to issue one - but I'd say a bigger worry would be making sure you're covered against suits arising out of errors in the schedule you present to users. Again, I'm not a lawyer!

http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?c=AM_Content_C&#...

PS have you considered asking the people at Data.gov to help you out; They've got a reputation for being approachable and the executive mandate to back it up when talking to agencies and quasi-agencies.
According to small print, you'd also need to move to Canada.
Ok, that that is not what I understood to be happening. That is definitely more serious, especially if they are re-hosting the information and placing their own ads.
Does anyone else associate profanity with a sense of honesty and realism? I loved it to be honest.
Slicehost and Linode are both pretty good for scalable VPS hosting.
Very cool! Now I just need a bigger screen to be able to see everything :)
> I feel they have a real-estate bubble of incredible proportions.

It's bad, but I think it seems worse than it is. Reason is that in East Asia buildings that have been lived in are considered "used" and therefore less valuable than a new one. So whereas in the West an investor would get himself a little pocket money by renting his building out, in the East they keep it empty to keep its value up.
Seriously. This assured topic every month is turning a lot of people into karma-whores.

This doesn't benefit those who are looking for jobs, as these pre-mature threads disappear fast without too many people noticing them and then sometime in the middle of the month a few more of these threads pop up.

IMO, we should let some mod or a bot post these hiring threads every month.

P.S: I'm flagging this thread
Underbelly: Private Equity Unveiled
Kid/Teen Programmers on the rise?
AngelPad Blasts Off 13 New Companies
Ask HN: Leaving college to work on a startup?
I am a college student, and recently I've been rather disenchanted by academia. For years I have collected and combined various ideas, and I am to the point with one where I feel confident that I could start a successful startup around the idea. The problem is that I do not yet have a college degree. What benefits would I have with staying behind and putting the idea on the backburner until I get my degree? While it might be more difficult to do so without a degree, should I attempt to find venture capital and see where that takes me if it becomes available? I really have no other reason to finish the degree, and I feel like my time in college has, for the most part, been a waste of time. However, if in the long term I end up needing the degree, I can always come back and finish. Thus, I see no reason to wait to work on my idea---can anyone else?
Dell Latitude E6500 battery
Ask HN: How can I get more clients?
(This is a throwaway account.)

I run a small, niche, software company. We do mostly contract work. We have some of our own products, but nothing that will pay the bills just yet.

We're not going to starve or anything, but it would be nice to get some new clients. Until now we've gotten by with AdWords as a sales lead strategy, but competition is heating up, and I predict that may no longer work for us in the near future.

I really need to be doing more in-person networking, but in typical programmer fashion I have no idea how to actually go about this. Most of my contacts are other developers or current clients. Networking events here are mostly cleaning companies or computer repair services, which don't make good clients for custom software in general.

I guess what I'm looking for is a book or guide to b2b sales from a hacker point of view. Most of the resources out there are targeted at selling mass-market products and are mostly obvious platitudes ("Set Yourself Apart From Your Competition"). What I'm looking for is more of a set of actionable steps: 1) Find networking events by doing X Y and Z, 2) Attend said networking events in business casual attire, 3) Listen to customers and focus on them and their problems, 4) Follow up after X time by tailoring one of these e-mail templates, etc. If Amazon carries this book, I cannot find it.

What can I do today (or this week) to get better at selling and get more clients?
J, which is close enough, was always free-to-use and recently open sourced https://github.com/openj/core

K4/Q 32-bit is free for noncommercial use http://kx.com/trialsoftware.php and has been from the day it became generally available. (And before that, k2/k3/ksql were similarly available)

A free / open source K3 interpreter is being developed in https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona , and while incomplete it is already quite capable.

Oh, and Kx are (or at least were) quite reasonable with commercial use licenses for businesses that can't yet afford them.

> Arthur's languages are awesome, no doubt about it.

That is the only true thing you wrote.
That there's a market for products like this is a very bad sign. How many parasites can the market handle before it becomes completely ineffective?
A Guide To iOS Twin Stick Shooter Usability
Please wait until the first of the month to make this thread, otherwise there ends up being half a dozen different versions and no single focal point.

It's only two days away....
Didn't know it existed :D
We're just a random B2B company you've never heard of (Sydney)
Ask HN: Got celebrity to tweet about my project...
she's going to tweet to her many thousands of followers sometime next week.

It's a PHP/MySQL website hosted on Dreamhost. I've never had to scale, and don't know anything about handling traffic larger than a few people an hour.

How should I prepare for this?
Didn't know there was a sequel, will definitely give it a shot!
Best part about the signup form was a comfortable option for the security question "What is your favourite programming language?", although a lot of my friends can guess it if I used the right answer, it's still a good try to give options related to the user.
WePay is hiring for a number of positions including front-end and back-end engineers. WePay has an awesome team and is solving a real problem (and is thus growing like crazy).

https://www.wepay.com/about/jobs
Integrated CC system sounds much too niche, especially with Square and similar solutions.
That comment was based on Allen's account of Ballmer and Gates plotting to dilute him – a dick move by any measure, esp. after Allen showed his good faith on a number of occasions.

Gates and Allen were friends at when they went to school together. I went to the same school some years after them, and drew my own opinions based on first and second hand experiences with both of them.

No matter what you believe about the quality of their friendship, there's a teaching lesson for co-founders in their story.
They "simply took thermodynamics" and created a useful, beautiful product that solves a common problem and doesn't (as far as I know) exist yet. I don't understand what your issue is.
Is it just me, or is the computer incredibly bad? I played the AI and I'm really bad at chess. I beat it easily.
I'd be interested to see a graph of the temperature over time of a cup of coffee with Joulies vs. without.