skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[W]e don't get the most interesting stuff on the front page

If someone ever comes up with an algorithm that guarantees that all front page stories will be "interesting" to all HN users, a story about it will certainly make the front page.
Ask HN: Does anyone else here accept Bitcoin?
I was inspired by a Reddit post to look into Bitcoin, and I really like the idea of a decentralized currency to counter this inflationary USD nonsense. So I just went ahead and slapped one of the Bitcoin icons onto my company website's footer.

So I'm wondering if anyone else here accepts Bitcoin. If so, have you received any payments in it? What has the experience been like? I would really love to see who is adopting this technology.
I'm the author of Exodus (no affiliation with the recent itunes app gay-cure scandal), and I wanted to put a plea out there that if any of you do try this out and encounter any issues with it, please feel free to post issues on github. It is a simple app, and I don't really intend to do significantly more work on it, but I would like to fix any bugs that arise.

Rendering of exceptions is enabled by default in development, but if you're running the app in "production" (which is the default environment), just enable the debug > renderExceptions flag inside config/settings/production.php.

Thanks!
I wonder if there's a selection effect at work here, in that the majority of people who end up being very rich are those whose lives are defined by money. After all, why would you work your ass off to make more money than possibly can have a meaningful influence on your life unless you were driven by the idea of money alone?
It seems ridiculous that it's taken several years to get this info released.
There's a name for "good reasons" that don't result in proven product. They're called "bad reasons".
They all use the same protocol: ostatus
Bertrand Serlet Leaves Apple
If you're on the Mac:

“ = Alt-[
” = Alt-Shift-[
« = Alt-\
» = Alt-Shift-\
‘ = Alt-]
’ = Alt-Shift-]
— = Alt--

For other operating systems there are typographic layouts, such as http://ilyabirman.ru/english/typography-layout/

There are libraries that can do the conversion, such as SmartyPants: http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/

In HTML, it's pretty easy to remember a few typographic characters that you'll need, see http://www.degraeve.com/reference/specialcharacters.php
Originally, as proposed by Turing, the test involved a computer, a man and a woman and the computer is trying to identify who was the man and who the woman, while the humans could try to deceive the machine.
Dark Forces strikes me as an odd choice, since at that time period, LucasArts had in-house Mac porting developers. Dark Forces, Loom, and even Sam & Mac got classic Mac OS ports that supported better graphics resolutions than the DOS games of that time period. Pity it was mostly based on the work of one key developer who moved on after a couple of years…

EDIT: Citation Needed… http://www.aarongiles.com/history/index.html
Ask HN: Check out this interesting poll
I ran this poll yesterday : which pointing device do you prefer? Mouse / Trackball / Touchpad / Others.

It generated a significant amount of interest (almost 150 votes and 35 comments) before it got 'buried'.

Most of the comments are particularly interesting/insightful so I thought I'd post the link again for those who missed it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358462
The question is poorly formed. What other kind of matter is there than "physical matter"?
Thexder still hates me.
As someone with a company that has purchased 6 and 7 figure domain names, I wonder why you make this assumption. All our deals were for cash, and I have no reason to believe these listed deals were otherwise.

Do you have any citations?
Why is this on Hacker News!?
Clickable:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358462
do you know how many web/ISP hosting providers are out there that give out non-root SSH access to their customers? or how many do shared PHP hosting that make it easy to run local commands on the server? do you really think all of those servers have been rooted? here are two free shell providers:

http://www.devio.us/
http://sdf.lonestar.org/

if your operating system has no local user security, you should really upgrade it or switch to a different operating system.
Exploiting variable-bitrate codecs to recover phrases from encrypted VoIP
ISP's like Comcast are well on their way already.

I think really it's a case of hunting for an IPv6 capable ISP/webhost and home router.
How do you track the results of the meetings?
Increase revenue by offering more options
The perfect job ad
Polymer-dipped carbon nanotube catalysts better than platinum and 650x cheaper
Wouldn't that be fair use? Do you have issue with the content being posted, or the fact that it's scanned?
I feel like if this is at all successful, it's just going to get shut down by Facebook for creating fake users.
I linked to Schneier's summary because I can't find a non-paywalled version of the new paper, but here's a paper by some of the same authors on the same topic, from an earlier phase of their research: http://www.krypt.cs.uni-sb.de/teaching/WS08/Seminar/reports/...
It remains to be seen, however, whether we'll actually get A Dance with Dragons.
Just think about the availability constraints such service needs to comply with. I can't remember a bit.ly outage, and an outage would make half the Internet unhappy.

Same for spam filtering, automatic reporting using the "+" links etc. At some scale level keeping up any service becomes a nontrivial task.
Also consider watching "The One Percent". It's about wealth and the expanding class differences. It's available to watch instantly on Netflix.
This is a common story, engineer on project X does his best to convince management of X that they are making a mistake, they don't make the change, engineer leaves.

The variables in this particular tale are

* Engineer's ability to influence varies by factors {in|out} of their control.

* Management {listens | doesn't listen} and {ignores | decides} not to act on the suggestions.

* Engineer { leaves | is fired | stays and whines } about the whole affair.

Its one of the rhythms of work. Everyone gets to keep a score in their head of when they were right and when they were wrong. Its been said that if you're right 51% of the time you're ahead of the game. Personally I prefer to be right at least 61% of the time in ensure that being right isn't just a statistical fluke :-).

But listening to people's concerns, asking for them to explain their reasoning, and then acting based on reasoned debate rather than reputation, personality, or prejudice is key to getting to the best answer at a given time.
Ask HN: Where did the color.xxx link go?
I saw a link to a parody pitch deck for color.xxx this morning. It had 200+ points. Where did the link go? How did it disappear that quickly?
A long list of things learned from founding companies
If anything, an investment firm named after Marx's magnum opus is more ironic than a communist murderer's face on a t-shirt. At least Marx never directly killed anybody so it is in somewhat better taste than the infamous t-shirt (though his ideology led to the murder of nearly a hundred million).
Am I the only one who is annoyed at apps that require GPS to be enabled? I can deal with it for things like Navigation where I can plug my phone into my car to keep the battery up. But for general use, it just sucks up way too much battery and is easy to forget to turn off.

The result is that I just avoid apps that require it.
A quote attributed to Rudyard Kipling that's been floating around the internet:

"Some day you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are."
I think perhaps you are looking at basic college data structures courses through rose-tinted glasses.

A typical first course in data structures is where novice students learn about everyday tools like hash tables and balanced binary trees. It probably mentions a few slightly more amibitous things, but not many.

I would hope a second course at least introduced topics like purely functional and lock-free data structures and their applications, but obviously you're not going to get Okasaki and everything that's developed since at that level.

Most people doing a straightforward CS/SE degree aren't going to do a lot more than two general data structures courses, and maybe encounter a few of the more specialist tools in applied courses on topics like 3D graphics or databases/information storage.
I think some HNers aren't bothering to distinguish between satire/parody and silly memes. So they kill great posts like that one off just to be sure, and then we're left with a bunch of posts where people make the exact same points using more serious-sounding language.
banks does have the hability to scrutinize all your financial life before lending you money. but all you have when giving them YOUR money is a little pamphlet.

Also, i'm pretty sure i can pay some few bucks and also have most of that information about you if so i desire.
Nobody needs a tablet? Sure... let me just pack my desktop computer up and put it in my carry-on bag the next time I travel.

"As you might expect, the top three things consumers have been doing with iPads are surfing the web, writing and checking e-mail and playing games"

That sounds like the same thing people are doing with desktop computers and laptops.
No Media Spend
This is awesome, back when the Tell-Me API and Voice XML was going (over a decade ago?) I had my cheapo pager pushing me scraped news alerts and all kinds of things. I think the one big hurdle would be for large organizations that worry that sensitive data would have to flow, or worse, that they'd come to rely upon the thing too much and uptime and reliability would only be as good as the weakest link, which may well be the telco's anyway.
WordPress track post views without a plugin using post meta
Exactly! If the G.I. Joes taught me one thing when I was younger, it was "knowing is half the battle." Now that I know, just have to execute, and like you said, stick with it!
Users are not snowflakes
Is it a Bubble or Startup Fatigue?
What could you sell/exchange/provide for 1.5 cents per subscriber?
Interview with Amarinder & Vaibhav of Open Coffee Club Bangalore
Almost certainly. It'll be hilarious while it lasts though. The name alone cracks me up. Unfortunately they've dropped the ball by not having a painfully trendy logo with a cartoon girlfriend sitting on a cloud or something.

They should open source it when it gets banned so the fun can continue.

EDIT: just realised - this is basically a more benign version of that "sockpuppet management" stuff we've been seeing recently. Is this the start of the rise of the bots within human society?
Did you even read the article? He explains really clearly that he understands the advantage Tablets represent. He even makes a nice little Microwave-to-Oven analogy.
Who did they buy this from and what was up on color.com prior?
Canaan Partners strings together good news, just as pressure mounts on VC model
Yo mommaboard's so slow, she exhibits 63.7% packet loss on her on-board Kilobit Ethernet NIC.
Excellent read and insight to what you guys must have gone through. Congrats!
Are there any remnant advertising networks like AdSense that serve opt-in mailing lists? If not why not?
There seems to be a self-similarity at play where society looks roughly the same from a very wide range of vantage points. The elite see the elite within the elite and feel like outsiders in comparison. An important Buddhist meditation is a prayer of gratitude for being born human; how often do people remember how lucky they were to have human births, on a planet where we are 7 billion out of ~10^30 living beings (counting bacteria and plants, which Buddhists generally don't consider sentient but which are living).

Anyway, at the three-digit millionaire and billionaire level, it's all about score-keeping and social status for those who care at all. Most billionaires are not quite at the pinnacle of the social elite, and no one stays at the tip-top of that for very long. Wealth is more stable, at the upper tiers, than social status, which is lost to age if nothing else takes it away.
I'm pretty sure this takes outsourcing a step or two too far.

Personally, I'm hoping it's some kind of social experiment, and they're going to come out with some OKCupid-style expository blog posts in a few months.

(If anyone's seriously considering this, do ask yourself if it's really going to make you happy ...)
Jokes aside, I bounced the concept for colors.com off of some people and they didn't like the idea of automatically sharing pictures they take with people who are nearby. While there is something interesting to this concept, I think it could go either way. It could be a lot like Google Wave. It is certainly innovative, but I'm not convinced it will catch on. Maybe it will...

Thoughts anyone?
Hard drive search warrants: should there be any limits?
Hmm, they print an aerial view that looks like Google maps and "For personal reasons we aren’t going to print the address."

Sounds like hacker baiting to me.

On a more serious note I would expect any VC to have a place to entertain clients and potential investments near where they are, its so much easier than trying to arrange schedules so they can fly to you. I suspect he's got a nice NYC place too for the same reason.
But here's the thing about 'next Googles': you can try (and tout) 500 of them. You only need to get one right.
IRobot debuts 'throwable' 110 FirstLook robot
Boy, there are a million reasons to hate on Color, but the fact that their 1.0 app crashes is the least convincing and the most mean-spirited. Everybody's 1.0 app crashes.
All of the top things you can vote on that you use your tablet for are things that my girlfriend uses my Cr-48 (Chrome OS laptop) for.

I don't think that tablets are special, per se, they're just one of a number of ultra-portables (with Cr-48, netbooks, and smartphones being the other ones) that are gaining in use because of how quick/easy they are to pick up and put down.

Not on the uses list, but ultra-portables are also far more comfortable/easier to take into environments like the bathtub. The bubble bath + kindle + zip-loc bag wins the day in this use case, as there's the same functionality as on 'dry land' and no worry involved.
Good question. All of the meetings I've had so far have been "sorta customer development, but not exactly" meetings... That is, I've been meeting with people who I think are smart, or insightful or connected, or all of the above, and getting some very preliminary feedback. But they - so far - haven't been what I would consider "real customer discovery" meetings, with a specific list of questions to hit on, and a formal mechanism for recording the output.

That said, I'm just now in the process of writing down all of the briefs that @sgblank talks about, and expect to be getting into the "formal" customer discovery stuff in the next few weeks. Once that happens, I do have to do a pretty good job of tracking results, so I've been trying to figure out what a good way would be. I don't have an intern / secretary / assistant / etc. to take notes, and I can't write/type fast enough to take a whole lot of notes during a meeting, without interrupting the flow of the meeting. So far, the best ideas I've had seem to be

A. tape record the meeting, then transcribe the important stuff later. There are some downsides to this: some people might not allow you to record them, the recorder batteries might die, etc. All told though, I do expect I'll try to do this as much as possible.

B. print paper forms (or make a quick Grails app) to record the answers to the pre-known important questions, that I go into the meeting knowing I need to ask. Immediately after the meeting, enter the data for that meeting, before it fades from memory.

Combined with taking brief notes (on paper, or on my phone, or a laptop, whatever) during the meeting, I think some combination of this will work.
Upvoted because your social engineering worked. :-)
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what exactly this app does, but I think identi.ca already has this functionality:

1) Settings
2) Twitter
3) Check: Subscribe to my Twitter friends here.
Thanks for those suggestions. So, then, do you (or others) actually use those key combinations instead of ' and " while writing/typing? That seems like a fairly heavy re-working of a very low level muscle-memory process that would take me a long time to habit-change.

I don't use any of the software that Smartypants supports, but I just started playing with Pandoc http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ yesterday, and it has a --smart flag, so that's probably what I'll go with.

As I also recently started trying to learn vim (it's hard), I might try this: http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2005/10/smart_quotes_and_... too.

In case anyone else is in a similar position.
Houdini, A Trickster for the Industrial Age
"He even makes a nice little Microwave-to-Oven analogy." (TomOfTTB)

The microwave-to-oven analogy doesn't make much sense. Do you think most people are sitting beside their desktop/laptop while they use their iPad/tablet? I love my iPad, but I will surely use my desktop when I can choose between the two.
I wonder if it isn't something much more subtle, like the fear of success... such that a truly great idea that really helps people would ultimately be seen for its capital value only in the startup world. I would propose a solution being a non-profit that actually does the thing, but then a for-profit entity that capitalizes on the efforts of the non-profit. The idea could theoretically still have all the goodness, and any possible downsides or fears about being wildly successful would be absorbed by the for-profit entity. If the thing isn't successful, then also, the idea theoretically wouldn't go down with the ship, either.
Camtasia hits Mac App Store; TechSmith sees sales jump
> The fact that most people imagine it would be paradise to never have to work does not make the experience any more pleasant in practice.

The financially independent often choose to work anyway - so why not just choose work you enjoy (or rather, find worthwhile/meaningful) in the first place?
One Woman Tries to Create Google Earth Murals
Part of me thinks this is a genius marketing ploy. Seriously, outside of the few remaining die-hard fans, who even knew that Duke Nukem forever was still being developed? I certainly didn't before this piece of news, and I'll now be watching when they release the thing to see how it goes.
The critical distinction of redis-objects is that it does not abstract away the atomic redis commands, which are the source of redis' power. It contrasts with ORMs where the goal is primarily convenience; with redis-objects the goal is power.
s/money/power

Power attracts the corrupt, and it does corrupt. This is why handguns are (for a certain type of person, i.e. those who are explosively impulsive) so dangerous. Holding one gives the power of life and death.

Being in power tends to make people arrogant, short-sighted, and less creative than they'd otherwise be. Power relationships are generally negative on both sides, thus worse than zero-sum.
>My guess is a lot of angry geeks, since they're all who know about it so far.

Actually I think it's the fact that the app seems to be a buggy POS according to a large number if people. I think there are a lot of people in the startup/geek world who aren't happy with the extremely high valuation and the all the hoopla around them, but I doubt they would sabotage their app rating intentionally.
Charging batteries in two minutes
Sell t-shirts and mugs with some of the more popular facts. Github was able to sell out of tees and mugs with just their logo on it, so I imagine people would want them with interesting content rather than just a logo.

Additionally (or alternatively) you could create a fmylife.com equivalent for your facts. Even if you don't let users submit content, it's a place where the community can vote on their favorite bits of info. Doesn't even need tons of ads, and you can take private advertising and make sure they are all in good taste for your audience.
Richard Stallman weighs into Google GPL violation debate
This was one of the more intriguing and thought-provoking articles I've read in a while. As someone who always had enough to get by, but never enough to spend without consequence, the goal of "being successful and having money" was always one I sought to obtain. While younger I always assumed all my problems would be solved by such a venture. I've learned that will never be the case on my own, but the concerns the wealthy state are interestingly complex - much more so than the standard concerns of a middle-income family/person. I can imagine the shock of a life of toil to get rich, only to find that your life and problems are exactly the same or even more complex.

The sole reason why being happy with the present will do more for you than anything else.
Simple. Build a $70MM startup incubator in a mansion and fill it with the best and brightest. Like the Playboy mansion only for startup founders. Could call it Startup Centerfold. Could even have it's own Grotto for super secret deal discussions. And, yes, they can have their own calendar too!
it seems there is really dry season in your geography to trigger you to make your first comment on HN :).
Overthinking the Meaning of Drop-Down Menus
Reminds me of the pre-IPO dog and pony shows I experienced in 1999 when series 1 and 2 investors would tell mezzanine investors that "This is bigger than electricity, bigger than the railroads" with a straight face.

Sequoia is just talking their book to the greater fool. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
Reminds me of the evergreen Joseph Heller anecdote:

"At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history. Heller responds, 'Yes, but I have something he will never have . . . Enough.'"
Sorry for noise - but the phrase 'laser focus' always bugs me. AIUI, lasers aren't focussed (which I would define as: having non-parallel rays converging on a point), they are collimated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collimated_light (i.e. parallel).

Of course I understand the sentiment, and I similarly understand that when people say "exponential" they commonly mean "big" rather then "has rate of growth proportional to current value".

To try and rescue some signal from my noise - sometimes it's possible to "turn off" people with choices of phrase. Particularly technical people of a certain bent. That can be a useful observation for a technical startup founder.
The takeaway I have from this is that people are people, no matter their status: not sure if what they're doing is what they should be, insecure about other's love for them, never satisfied.

It reminds me that we're all people, all human.

Also reminds me of a bible verse (Ecclesiastes 9:10): "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom."

Whether rich or poor, happy or not, we all die.
i'll wait until the adults start using it (or something like it). I consider bitcoin an expensive proof of concept not something worth using as is.
Virtual social proof. An ePivot. Pre-selection DHV as a service. I love it.
Second that. Graphics were passable but it was damn fun.
I'm willing to bet that a lot of you are only upset because you didn't have the idea first ;<)
Startup Death Clock
$350,000 is a lot for a 5 letter domain name (says owner of fab.com) ;-)
P.S. Little easter egg - Watch the clock as you plug in your numbers.
Quoting parts of the book to support some points made in the article would fall under fair use, but linking to a scan of the entire book would not.