skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I'm allergic to those too, so it isn't much help ;)
Clear Desk, Clear Mind
Is There a New Technology Bubble? Ben Horowitz Doesn't Think So.
I seem to get FRESH COFFEE (NOT STARBUCK) an awful lot. None of mine seem to be making it in either, yet I don't think it's moderated as there are plenty of "offensive" messages in there.
"Houses in Detroit are already selling for $1"

Where can I find these one buck houses? Hell, I'd pay at least twice that.

Seriously, though, the lowest prices I see on craigslist right now, in the city, for an actual house, actually for sale, is $9900. Now, I'm not one to complain about a $9900 house on a reasonable chunk of land, but this one happened to have a gang tag on the garage door when I looked it up on google maps.

Sure, a can of paint is only ten bucks, but I can imagine a $9910 house going down in value. And, I don't want to park my motorhome in a place where it'll get vandalized...it costs a hell of a lot more than ten bucks to repaint a motorhome.

But, let's assume I come to Detroit this summer (I've been considering it) to look at houses. Where should I be shopping? What neighborhoods are centrally located, and coming up rather than going down? I kinda imagine the ideal neighborhood would be one filled with old folks. Old folks usually take pretty good care of their houses, they don't spray paint gang signs on garage doors, and they're mostly likeable mind-their-own-business sorts of people. A lot of the best neighborhoods in cities I've lived in have been older neighborhoods with older residents, that became hipster neighborhoods as the old folks passed on. That may just be selection bias...just the neighborhoods I liked and have seen grow (like East Austin, or the Montrose in Houston).
I always found modal editing most valuable when editing and navigating through large bodies of text. I'm not quite sure that it makes sense on the command line, where you're rarely dealing with more than a few lines of text, and seldom need to rearrange those particular lines.

Nevertheless, I switched to zsh on Sunday, and with it, vi keybindings. It's getting better, but it still doesn't feel quite right.
I don't have a platitude for why we need to defend speech. My only argument has ever been that my icky speech today is your essential speech tomorrow. By the time you think something needs to be censored is beyond the line of where you could still rationally discuss the idea.

If you think the government should suppress an idea the only reason must be that you personally cannot reasonably consider the concept. Banning a subject because you cannot fathom talking about it means you must be willing to impose your internal and personal morals on others, by force if necessary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ISil7IHzxc
Fuck. That made me want to change careers and move to Florida. I have no journalism background and I hate Florida. Respect.
I'm not sure how relevant Gary Taubes is to the subject of carrots. In his latest book, "Why We Get Fat", carrots aren't mentioned in the text at all, only in an appendix which spells out a Duke University Medical Center diet.

For those who don't read all the way to the end of the sixth page at _Reason_, Taubes has a response[1] to his critic, Fumento.

Contrary to your assertion about Taubes "first making a name for himself" back in 2003, he's been a science writer for something like 30 years. He won an MIT journalism fellowship back in 1996 and he's won three awards from the National Association of Science Writers.[2]

I also don't know about the "religious fervor" of Taubes' anti-carbohydrate stance. He's made it clear, for example, that not all carbohydrates are the same, just as not all fats are bad for you. I think his main point is that the post WW2 infatuation with low-fat diets has been a disaster.

Both Taubes and Fumento are bright fellows who write about controversial areas of science, so it's not a big surprise that they might disagree on a topic. But it's pretty easy to tell the difference between them: Taubes is the one with masters degrees in engineering and journalism and writes articles for _Science_, while Fumento is the one whose degree is in law and writes articles for _Reason_.

[1] http://reason.com/archives/2003/03/01/an-exercise-in-vitriol...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Taubes
Do you know anyone who actually does this? Even die-hard vi folks I know can't get used to modes on the command line.
What in the world does a picture app need to use my mic for?
One of the main realities of our current world that I strongly disagree with is the existence of the NDA. I don't believe that individual human beings should ever be required to waive their right to say whatever they want to about anything. Of course, the entire corporate universe is based on NDAs and secrecy and competition - I wonder what an alternate universe based on free sharing of information and cooperation would be like. I'm pretty sure its a universe that I would prefer to live in.
When to Use Try Catch
Being fault tolerant and catching errors is often an after thought when it comes to coding standards in businesses simply because we tend to think about how our software works, not how it breaks. We’ve all come across the “What were they thinking” code now and then, and I’ve started to notice a trend regarding unnecessary or improper Try Catching, and that is they show up most often from newer programmers or those experienced but unfamiliar or uncomfortable to a particular part of the codebase. While these are clearly not the right reasons to use Try Catch, I can’t recall ever seeing an official “When/Why to” article.
Clear desk, clear mind but also fresh layout, fresh mind...

I find that after changing an office layout (moving desks and changing things around) it results in a nice benefit of a slightly altered perspective that can be a good healthy boost of added productivity.
I find it sooooooo ironic that I'm stumbling upon this post now. I just published my last YC submission and then posted it here on HN. You might want to read it, opaas :)

(if you think it's spam, just don't click the link, okay? :))

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2361753
The likelihood of someone going to great lengths to break through Google's security is rather higher than someone going to great lengths to break into your personal computer (assuming you are at least capable of securing that against generic threats, which really isn't that hard for technical folks).

It's the agglomeration of lots of people's data that gets dangerous/interesting. And seemingly boring data like your browsing history can actually be pretty revealing -- ah, hey, I notice you regularly sign into the Bank of America site, plus you have an account on the forums at (easily hackable site)... might your username and/or password be the same? Ah, you sign in as the admin on an "anonymous" blog... and you mention your first pet (common security question) and link to your favorite uncle's blog, but he has a different last name from you... so is that your mother's maiden name? You see how this works.

If some clever had access to this level of data on lots and lots of people, they wouldn't strike gold for everyone, but there would be quite a few casualties.

All this to say that there are some very good reasons to avoid letting corporations gather lots of wide-ranging data about you in one place. The intentions of the corporation don't actually matter as much (though obviously if they're selling your data, the risks are higher); it's how valuable that data stockpile is, and to whom.

If you just have your own data, and you manage it yourself, it's not worth it for someone to put much effort into hacking you personally, so you're in a much safer position.
Remember Twitter lists?
For those who'd prefer a primary source, here's Comodo's actual report: http://www.comodo.com/Comodo-Fraud-Incident-2011-03-23.html
What has YC (and every other prominent investor) been emphasizing lately? That the team is the most important part of the deal. And that team looks rock solid, arguably more so (on paper) than google did in 1999.
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/12-item%20Grit%20S...
Turns out that Opera does css colors it's very own special way. Fixed.
It's also important to understand the recipient's business. I made sure to do some research, if I wasn't already familiar, of all the YC alumni companies that I contacted for assistance with the application. If you don't spend time learning about their company, why should they do you any favors?
Windows Media Center and "to the cloud"
No. Its not 2% of our budget. NYT (to the best of my knowledge) has the largest newsroom in the world (even after recent layoffs and hiring freeze). As such thats a very very large expense.

While this same newsroom covers nice and safe things like Travel, Arts, Books, Crosswords and such it also covers things that entail 4 journalists getting detained and abused in Libya, a photographer losing limbs in Afganistan, reporters abducted by the Taliban, and all the other war, economic, analytical, and political reporting that is done.

The NYT is far from perfect but its not Burger King.

I should clearly state that I work there - this opinion is my own and very very personal
While he could have stated his point more succinctly, what made the article notable was how he used his personal experiences to make the point. You can google and pull up dozens of takes on the first amendment that come to a similar conclusion, but this article was interesting for providing an account nuanced by Neil Gaiman's first-hand experience.
I feel the same. Unfortunately, after spending a few minutes with such an app and not having a positive impression, it's pretty rare that I would revisit the app again later in the future. Most of the people I know behave the same way: if it catches their attention, it stays on the phone or else the app's gone.

The best launch scenario for them would have been SXSW .. instead, all the group messaging apps got the limelight and these guys seem to have missed that boat ..

Also, what's the privacy aspect of this app?! I could think of a few concerns.. e.g. someone's photos popping up when the user doesn't intend to be seen at a particular place ..
http://www.ideaswatch.com is a website where people share and discuss startup ideas.
Or use mg, which is a very fast and light Emacs workalike

There's also zile, another mini-emacs (great if you run Linux on small embedded computers.) I haven't used mg yet, so I don't know how they stack up against each other.

I do have a creeping feeling I should some day bite the bullet and learn more than 4 vi commands, though.
Irony at its greatest
Yes Quicken Loans, is known as Quicken around here. I am sorry if that was not obvious.
I had the same two reactions to the ad: (1) no way that's going to work (i.e., not look like crap) on airport wifi; and (2) what in the world does watching streaming TV on your laptop in an airport have to do with cloud computing?
I'm from one of those countries where 'color' is spelt 'colour' and I'm glad to see www.colour.com is owned by them also. I doubt it cost as much though.

It would also be interesting to see if searching for 'colour' in the respective app stores also brings you to 'color' so that they are truly interchangeable
I agree. Just because I advocate direct response instead of firing employees whatever possible doesn't mean I am in favor of imposing it by law.
Although the nuances of the debate are interesting, I'm always a little disappointed when hackers and scientists lean towards physicalism. If you are of an analytical mindset, it's tempting to be drawn to explainable phenomena and to reject pie-in-the-sky and intractable philosophical questions.

I think that just displays a disappointing lack of imagination, a fear of the unknowable, or both. That's why I had to opt for the neglected third-option.

I just don't feel like we have sufficiently solid axioms to even approach such a question with any reasonable degree of certainty. Physicalism vs Dualism, for instance, hinges on the definition of physical, which might be conveniently defined as phenomena within the current physical subsystems we are aware of. In that case, what is defined as Dualism today could become Physicalism tomorrow as physics evolves. Or indeed, there may be dimensions of reality that are incomprehensible by us consciously due to the very nature of our meat brains, but which nevertheless we have some connection and effect on our brains but which will never be comprehensible due to limitations of our reasoning which has evolved under the constraints of meatspace. The idea that predictable behavior implies determinism will never be credible in my mind because we will never be able to observe anywhere near enough of the universe and crunch all the numbers to be sure that there aren't unobservable inputs that we've missed. There is no microscope or telescope powerful enough.

edit: I don't normally complain about downvotes, but a driveby downvote on something this carefully written is a truly cowardly act. Why not step up and actually justify your kneejerk reaction?
I agree with you, and about Waterloo specifically.

I'm probably going to be banned from HN for saying this, but the giant Google talent vacuum cleaner is one potential reason that starting a startup right now is especially difficult and maybe not the right choice.

When I've started startups before, it's been in economic down times (eg. right after the .com boom). I actually preferred it that way.
NPR member stations get some money from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, which is funded by the federal gov't. NPR itself gets less than they do. According to Wikipedia, 1.5% of its funding is from CPB.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding
The domains aren't 'great' domain names in my opinion. However, if you are looking to sell them then you should either sell them at Flippa, Sedo, Cax, MissDomain, Afternic etc. Additionally, you could also find a broker to sell the domain names for you (the usually charge a transaction fee), offer them to BuyDomains or place a "For Sale" sign on the domains and ask people to contact you offering you a price for them.
We made a decision early on not to censor, though the hacker news crowd has upped the frat-house humor. Funny that people still try to inject javascript...
"It also covers things like involve 4 journalists getting detained in Libya, photographers losing limbs in Afganistan, reporters abducted by the Taliban, and all the other war, economic, analytical, and political reporting that is done."

But how much of that is actually investigative journalism versus reporting, opinion, or shallow analysis?
> What do you look for?
Determination. When we started, we thought we were looking for smart people, but it turned out that intelligence was not as important as we expected. If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.

This is awesome.
Looking forward to it. The last two meetups were great.
Have you considered adding a way for content makers to require a small payment (via a Facebook Connect-esque popup)? It seems like you're halfway to micropayments.
Hah! I didn't notice.
Could you tell use what exactly you hate about CA and where you are?

I have made a couple of big moves, including to another country and each time there were "I'm so homesick, maybe I should just pack up and go home." times, just like yours. And reality often panned out very differently to the dreams but for the better in the long run.
I think you have a great point here. Other than documenting an event I cannot see any utility in sharing photographs with people in my immediate vicinity.
You need to deduct employment expenses from that, which is why the article uses the $400k number.
I use vim almost pathologically, but I gave up on set -o vi. Since there's no visual indicator of which mode you're in, it's easy to make confusing mistakes and not the right feedback. It just wasn't worth it.
So true. A clear mind is a creative mind.
Disclaimer: Three of us are building a pet project that has some similarities with Color. One big difference - all user generated content is private by default.

That out of the way, we are certainly envious about the 100-200 million dollar evaluation they got on day one. With about 4k spent so far, in our case and with three of us chipping in any extra time we have (me - any extra time I have outside of lurking here), we are still a couple of months away from a MVP that will make us cringe ever so slightly when we see how far we will have to go. Till then, no real sleep, and a lot of heartburn. Still, its good to see Color validating some of what we do, but in the end, we both will have to prove there is a market. We however can afford to fail early and not give any VC's any heartburn, just our own families.

One thing is for sure, we do not plan to build sonar capabilities. We dont have the knowhow and I am not sure that will be the make or break for us anyway.

We also dont have the same pedigree, and therefore its clear that VC's will not be snapping at our heels (But we go back six years, all three of us). We are ok with that, but heck..41 million is a lot of money.

As the weeks peel away, I hope to share here on HN where we stand with the product and hopefully even line up some kind souls here who will be willing to beta test for us in return for some good karma. We cant afford to pay (please refer back to the 4k burn total).

We however have some ideas on how we plan on monetizing. We plan on finding out as early as we can, whether our ideas coincide with real needs from local businesses.

Right now, I am shamelessly stopping people on the street, as they veer away, ignore, stare, and sometimes stop and tell me what they need and what they want. I do this as behind the scenes we toil away on building something that in the end we can be proud of.

In all fairness, right now, they have a far more capable app, employing 9 times our current strength and vastly more capital and brain power. In the end, may the best viable product and company win.
If you're going down the hosted route then you should use either Wordpress.com or Posterous. The reason I didn't include Tumblr in this is because, its more of a 'reblogging' type service and is different to what Wordpress/Posterous offer.

However, if you are going down the self hosted route so you can host it at blog.yourdomain.com then I'd again recommend Wordpress since its a great service, and its really easy to work with.
The Smart Guide to Beating Procrastination
This was the first idea that popped into my head, but I have not been using it yet. My only worry is that it is still not proven reliable or stood the test of time. Its seems nice and pretty, which is great, but I wouldn't want its growing pains interfering.

A more proven alternative may be simply to use google talk (with history tracking if you want that), google groups, and (gasp) email.
Anyone try this? It is basically bump for photos.
Well that really depends on how cute the people around you are and how much you'd like to contact them without you know, actually getting up and talking to them.
I'm sure it's well-known acronym in marketing circles, but I appreciated being introduced for the first time to the pejorative acronym HIPPO: Highest Paid People's Opinion.
Don't start from scratch! That lesson is reiterated over and over.

Start as soon as possible with a minimum viable solution, get community growing, and the software solution will create itself based on real needs.
Having just launched Momentomail and watching our userbase slowly grow despite quite a bit of effort to get coverage, it's been a struggle to keep positive.

This is a great story that put a bunch of hot air in our balloon tonight as we realized we're actually not too far off this track.

We have no expectation of being another Twitter by any possible stretch of the imagination, but finding out that at this early stage we're tracking with a reasonable expectation is a great point of validation.
If it's clear and yella', you've got juice there, fella! If it's tangy and brown, you're in cider town.
HBGary CEO Speaks Out On Anonymous Hack. Blames Google's customer service
Well pen.io already offers no logos (branding), pagination, anonymity and HTML support.

A professional version of the product will be released later on this year which covers pretty much the rest of the features
Great until: Stay minimal, my people! It's good that it works for him but it's different strokes for different folks. I'd previously assumed the sterile environments you often see in "my desk" photos were staged for the photo but clearly not.

I know more creative and productive people with a little clutter than none at all. That said, Al Gore's desk sets my teeth on edge ;-) http://www.dailygalaxy.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/11/25/a... .. I find having my computer organized cleanly to be far more beneficial because that's where I spend more of my productive time.
Can anyone explain the concluding slide's assertion that "A/B testing is useless when evaluating dramatic changes"?
You should probably at least make sure that each post is unique though, looking at the source that's why I kept getting the NOT STARBUCK one, it's been submitted multiple times
CSans - Light, Flexible & Expandable CSS Framework
Ah the "big favor". In a business context, I always say "No. Apologies but I have to take care of X, maybe Y can help you instead?".

Of course if you had just come out and asked me from the start, I'd be more likely to help you especially if its something that interests me.
This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes (which I suppose was made in the context of the "devil's music" scare of the 1970s/1980s):

"There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another."

--Frank Zappa
PeteSearch: Launching the Data Science Toolkit
Am I the only one who sees the irony in HBGary's CEO complaining that "Google’s call center set up elaborate hoops through which they expected [him] to jump in order to validate his identity"?
Congrats Jason and Andres!
i don't really know anything about domain value but i'd honestly have guessed higher.
The case for associative main memory and storage
Best practices for building Internet capacity in Liberia
You're right, but that's not all the funding they get. The member stations also get tax deductions, grants from federal/state/local government as well as grants from government funded universities.

This is from a (clearly) slanted source, but their numbers seem above-board: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/10/how_public_is_nprs_fu...
There are a number of "beta" agreements available on the web that you might consider as starting points (or templates to give to an attorney to craft into your own).

Additionally, consider what you want to get out of the Beta: If you simply want a name to use for marketing, then ensure that's in the agreement (obligation to support your marketing efforts). If you really want to get end-user feedback, either ask the company to put some skin in the game (money, committed to levels of use, etc...), and consider rewarding them in some capacity if they achieve your goals (x number of transactions, x number of users, y number of bugs, etc...). Rewards could be discounts on purchase when it exits Beta, participation on customer advisory boards, etc...
Glad you got it sorted out. I just get a blank white screen for my site, but it sounds like it's working fine for others. I reckon I'll try it out again in a bit once some kinks are worked out.

Any reason why visiting a site from a normal browser would still necessitate loading something from plug.onswipe.com? Can't that be excluded, and only loaded when visiting on an iPad?