skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Help me with ideas YC
So, I'm currently in school and I procrastinate a lot. Being the nerd that I am, I like seeing progress bars. I decided to combine the two and make a website/webapp that basically creates progress bars and lets you track them.

I made a rest api that would enable other applications to use it and I use it along with Git to track my progress of a goal of 500 commits to my favorite projects.

I have most of the website work done, I just need to make it look better (css noob here), and iron out the bugs.

Should I turn this idea into a public website?
I was also looking for a way to pay for college and making an add/donation supported website would be a great idea.

Would you use it?
Any ideas?

(If it helps, it runs off node.js and redis)
Congrats guys! Now that the hump is over, what are the traffic levels like?

In 'What went wrong' you imply that you didn't do enough to capture user info but in 'What went right' you say you kept the barriers low by not requiring registration. In hindsight, which of those was the bigger deal?
Second installment of in:focus with Vitaly Friedman
Really? Just now?
Does disabling GPS actually save power if no app is trying to use GPS? I thought the GPS receiver only draws power if an app is actually using it.
It's art.
and they will immediately surrender and hand me over their corporate secrets. rrright!
The only argument I don't buy was #3. The whole write shitty code so that you can get paid for support. If your code is really that bad then who would want it in the first place? The ideal get paid for support scenario is where you write good easy to use code, large corps pay for huge support contracts then never or rarely needs to use them. It scales much better than the working your butt off to fix everyone in the worlds problems but only for them so the next guy will pay for support too plan. That also misses the get paid for custom development on top of a foss base system.

As far as #4 goes you waffle quite badly on that one.
seeded with corporate or taxpayer's money. and relies on corporate and taxpayer money to sustain itself. Are two different things entirely. Yes many successful projects got started as government and corporate projects, and the largest most successful do survive on corporate benevolence, but there are plenty of good projects that did start but don't sustain themselves on those sources.
Or it is a completely natural gesture when rolling up the cover in a certain position to help create the stand ...
Just pushed a new build that removes the quotes - that was one of those things that looks better on a mockup than it does in production.

As for the scrolling issue, it could either be the Twitter @Anywhere hovercards or the background (used some CSS hacks to make it scale with the window when you resize) - could you let me know what browser you are using?
Slight nitpick. The article is clear that the real "win" for Color is as a new type of social platform
(likely with a multitude of different "apps" leveraging it). I'm as skeptical as anyone on this, but I can at least buy that point. There may be a really compelling platform... if enough people use it.
iTunes crash reports aren't reliable. We launched our iPad app two weeks ago and have already fixed a couple crash bugs that were reported by users and didn't show up in the iTunes logs.

There should have been quite a few, too, since we were the #1 iPad app for a while so I expect every crash report to mean 10x that many users actually experienced the crash.
This strikes me as an article written for people who don't have money as a means to explain why they don't have money (pretending money would just make them miserable). I'm reminded of the Norman Maclean passage about fishermen (and their wives) who pretend to prefer small fish because it's easier than admitting they can't catch big fish.

No, I'm not rich. But I'm not one to pretend I prefer being poor because it's easier than admitting I can't make money. Come hell or high water, I'll one day catch big fish.
Drop MailChimp and save the $50. Get a server running Linux. Use Mailman to manage your mailing list or do something custom. Write a custom maier program in Python to distribute the emails. Write the list content in HTML If you don't have a spare server, you should be able to find one suitable for this task for $20 or less per month. Use other suggestions here to generate additional income.
Really? A wooden cover for the iPad 2... with magnets. That's what makes the top of HN?

I can see this belonging on Engadget but what's the value here?

Don't get me wrong: I have an iPad 2. I love my iPad (1 & 2). I just don't see how a wooden cover for it is HN-worthy.
When you can do whatever you want, you get a variant of the terror induced by the proverbial blank page. There are a lot of people who think the thing stopping them from writing that great novel they plan to write is the fact that their job takes up all their time. In fact what's stopping 99% of them is that writing novels is hard. When the job goes away, they see how hard.

That seems to be what college (esp. summers and spring break) is for, at least at a good school: giving you a sense of what life would be like if free from economic bullshit (as it is for the rich, the only people attending college 150 years ago). It's better in most ways, as only the most successful or wealthiest adults actually enjoy adulthood more than college, but college is not perfect. I had fun, but I wouldn't want to go back. And how many college students are writing novels, or even engaging in the amount of reading and writing that an aspiring novelist needs to be doing? A few, but not as many as who "want to write someday".
The value of a stock is the total future profit of a company priced in today's dollars.
Let me know (via the Send Feedback link in Boxer's app menu) where you got your copy of Stunts from - I'll check it out and see if the import process needs tweaking there.
Apple's iOS is open when they decide you can see it, too.
In other words you're saying that a bubble might only affect new companies spawned by that bubble. That wasn't true in the late 90's though -- just look at the telecoms. Many of them had substantial trading histories, but they also saw big runups in their valuations followed by big drops in the early 2000s.

Also, the author talks about this in the first paragraph of his post:

Similarly, in recent high profile private financing rounds for private technology companies with valuations over $1B, the valuation multiples were at or below corresponding multiples for publicly traded companies such as Google.
good point, but comments that hi-jack a thread should be down voted :)
They mean whatever the upvoter wants them to mean: agreement, approval, or a meant-to-click-downvote instead. In practical use, people often do upvote because they agree.
RIM Expands Application Ecosystem for BlackBerry PlayBook
Thanks so much. It seems like forever ago that those went up. I'm really proud of the progress we've made in the last year.
Dieta de los Abdominales | Engrandece tus Conocimientos
Google chrome, version 10.0.648.151 which chrome tells me is up to date. My operating system is Windows 7 and I have about 2.1GB RAM free out of 6GB total and CPU usage is at ~1%. I don't get the same lag in Firefox 4.
I've answered this a couple of other times publicly, but feel free to send an email to admin [at] thankuz [dot] com
Please don't superscript the "1/2".
This entire blog seems like it's platitudes for motivational speakers to memorize, or perhaps for television anchors to make sure you stay tuned in.

TO BREAK BAD HABITS, BE THE LION

THE STALLING TACTIC THAT COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE

Just be a zebra[1].

[1] http://dresdencodak.com/2006/03/23/be-a-zebra/
Facebook Revealed the New Featured Question/ Answer Tool [Get it now]
>Top programmers in Portland or Raleigh-Durham (where Shoeboxed.com is located) don’t have as many lucrative opportunities to choose from

As a result, they may move to Silicon Valley.
Thanks. I appreciate where you're coming from. It was a bit short-sighted of me to add that field. FWIW We're working on an overhaul of the invite system and model.
Yes, that was my motivation.
That's odd - I tested it in Chrome on Windows 7 on a machine with similar specs and I don't have that issue. I'll do some digging around and see if there's something funky with that block of CSS or my JS
Haha, indeed.

But thank you, I really appreciate it!
I'm not sure how you can characterize reducing costs and making short term profits a "risk-taking". If anything, it's the safest thing Hurt could do. Research is risky. Big, ambitious projects are risky. Selling toner isn't.

Also, most CEO's incentives are medium to long term, anyway. Compensation is usually a mix of cash and restricted stock, all of which goes down the drain if the company tanks. Take Ed Whitacre as an example - his pay is $1.7M in cash + $7.3M in restricted stock. His fortune is strongly tied to the medium-term (several years) value of GM.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/GM-CEO-Whitacre-receives-9M-ap...
huh? So they have the lighting profiles of every public and private space indexed?
We got about 1K uniques today before this post. So far we've seen 800 uniques on top of that, with 80+ users concurrently online. This is likely to drop off, as we are no longer on the home page, so the lesson here is that accidental launches are better than planned relaunches.

To answer your other question: ideally I think we should have gone for a user experience whereby we let users try the service out without registration, but prompt them to save their work by registering when they try to leave.
It may not be illegal, but it's incredibly poor form.
My reaction to this story about a painting of Navy torpedo boat influencing someone to join the Navy?

That very old Saturday Night Live skit:

[opening scene of Navy ships in port]

Announcer: Port of call, Bayonne, New Jersey.

[Navy men are seen doing laundry]

The Navy Adventure.

[as background music plays, scenes show Navy workers performing various activities: mopping a floor, peeling potatoes, cooking and serving cafeteria food, scrubbing toilets, chipping paint off of an old ship wall, fastening chains on a ship, mopping the ship, tarring a ship floor, and sitting in a room watching TV ]

The Navy. See your local recruiter or call toll free.

[final image shows phone number 311-555-5000 against a man with a mop and bucket - the motto is also shown:]

It's not just a job, it's $96.78 a week.
For more in-depth explanations:

http://www.wylfing.net/essays/matrix_reloaded.html

http://www.wylfing.net/essays/matrix_revolutions.html
I built reddit + 4chan + yelp. Thoughts?
We're requiring invites always, in order to keep out recruiters, "idea" people, and other non-dev/designers, as that would likely detract from the community in a grave way.

We are, however, in the middle of a huge overhaul to the invite system to ensure that developers/designers can and will get access, while still ensuring only they do so.

The new system will be much, much less of a black box, and hopefully alleviate the frustration too many folks have had to experience.
Moreover you can generate a realistic wealth distribution via random auctions.

(Hopefully you are becoming inspired to do some agent-based computational economic modelling! It's fun.)
iTunes Connect is the last thing you should be using to know if your app actually crashes or not. I'd consider app reviews in the App Store to be more useful than iTunes Connect is to know if my app is crashing or not.

iTunes Connect relies on people syncing their phone. Which doesn't happen nearly as often as you think. You should use something like PLCrashReporter[1] if you want accurate crash reports.

1. http://code.google.com/p/plcrashreporter/
Main Street And High-Growth Startups: Legislators Must Make A Distinction
So if I'm understanding correctly, if they only make $1 per user per year, and do that for the next 166 years (not adjusting for inflation,) then they're just as well off?
I have my Facebook profile completely locked down from the outside world, and I make sure that what does get out there under my name is stuff I want out there. I am already wary of Facebook to the point that every-time they change something privacy related I feel like I may as well just delete my profile.

While I am intrigued as to how Greplin works I don't think I would ever want to use it because of the concerns you've stated and I myself agree with.
Super Size Mii
I don't see how this could be very useful. If I'm looking for something within my personal data, I'm probably going to know whether it's on Facebook, in my GChat logs, or on my filesystem and use the domain-specific search feature for that.
Thanks, Jim!
Sounds a bit like the Osmosis Advertising Technique, where you pay for your products to show up as pervasive background elements in movies and TV and wherever else you can so people start to associate them with whatever's going on.
Location-based apps requiring GPS to work is a surprise to you?
The era of Cheap China Goods may be over but the era of Cheap Goods is not over.

Industries requiring lowest wages will migrate to other countries as the article states: Viet Nam, Indonesia, Bangladesh.

Eventually Africa will be the manufacturing powerhouse for lowest-wages goods.
Ah, thanks for that key detail about Firefox - that tells me that the scrolling background might be the issue since it does some browser-specific stuff in order to resize with the window.
I am sure it would be faster to take on a technical founder -- but it seems as though there is a shortage of them available these days.

I am trying to find a workable solution to a lot of peoples problems - that they don't have full-time/interest to be a technical founder and others don't/cant contribute enough hustle to make technical founders take the jump.

Mentor someone for a few hours though, for an advisory % (between .5 and 2%) and it might work out.

If you meet with someone who you feel merits more time/interest/stake -- then go for it.

This might be a way for hackers and hustlers to meet up and speed-date.

The hacker gets to see the idea's vision and can determine if its something he wants to be a part of.
That's precisely why I moved from Seattle. I don't know why I waited so long to literally double my salary (compared to five years ago).
I don't believe Apple will allow you to release a beta product on the app store.
>What does his average have to do with it?....neither does his karma, comment average, ...

in his post spoiledtechie clearly connected upvotes/points and informativeness. If we accept that connection, having 1.57 average, he can't credibly make statements about informativeness.
The Locker project has a similar goal but is completely open-source. You can run it on your own server if you don't want to put all your eggs in someone else's basket.

https://github.com/quartzjer/Locker
Even on iOS, it is surprisingly easy to kill the springboard from an app.
Best Practices for User Authentication
in sophisticated, autocratic regimes, you need a fake anarchist mastermind.

in non-autocratic regimes, all you need is People magazine and TMZ.
Help > Submit Feedback... > Report Site Issue.
Redis' usual mode of operation is to keep the dataset in memory, making the FusionIO SSD hardware kind of redundant. With the new diskstore back-end, though, and really fast solid state drives, I bet that Redis could be really fast with a data set much bigger than memory.
Should tablets be multi user (and other thoughts on Android)?
A coworker of mine was just bit badly by Java's insistence that unsigned types are so evil that the language shouldn't have them. He calculated a 32-bit hash, but since the ints are all signed, he took the absolute value before the modulo with the hash table size. That's all well and good, but abs(-2147483648) is still -2147483648 in 32-bit two's complement arithmetic.

I'm sure I don't need to point out that this particular problem had nothing to do with unsigned types (they were signed!). A better rule of thumb is: never use "long" in C/C++ unless you really don't care whether it's 32 or 64 bits.
what do you think of the new UI?
Especially the hand-painted ones.
well, nobody said only you will be able to search in your personal data...
Last of the Women Computers
The Navy Wants a Swarm of Semi-Autonomous Breeding Robots
I love this idea. Good implementation too, the only thing i'd change is:

1) Add an overview page with a much bigger list of ideas.

2) Decrease the font size a bit. I could only see two or so ideas at once on the home page.

3) Perhaps add a voting system of some type?

You also might want to seed it with a bit more content, otherwise you'll have a hard time breaking out of the chicken and egg problem (that's what ended up killing me).

EDIT: I'd also add some indication that you aren't going to tweet as me.
Kyle, since you're here I figured I'd give you my #1 bug I'd love to see fixed: The login wall loses what you were trying to access after a successful login. It's a stab to the heart. Stabby stab stab.

EDIT: That and the login cookie seems to be one of the shortest lived of any site I use. :(
The really reliable stuff is called enterprise-class or carrier-class.
I installed it. Couldn't understand the point. Uninstalled.
Ask HN: Review ting and win $25 Amazon Gift Certificate
The other day I submitted the link to my new Google App Engine project ting http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359979 for your review but it was quickly buried under new submissions and received no comments.

I really would like to have your comments so I thought about offering $25 Amazon Gift Certificate.

So if you could log in with your Google account, submit at least 1 link and add value of at least $1 to a tag (to test Google Checkout which was difficult for me to integrate and tested only in the sandbox environment) and write about your experience as a comment here and your comment collects 25 upvotes first, then I will send you $25 Amazon Gift Certificate by email. There is more explanation about Gift Certificate here https://www.amazon.com/gp/gc/order-email?ie=UTF8&ref_=gc_lp_ln1 (which may not be redeemable in some countries)

The inspiration for the site came from reading here about spam in Google search results. So ting which stands obviously for “this is not google” sorts results by dollar value. Online businesses submit links and associate tags with their site. ting displays only 7 highest paid sites and at the bottom lists related links for more specific results.

I’ve been using ting to organize my favorite links and it seems to work well. Since ting is still very new and the database is empty except my own links I prepared these few sample searches for your review: “new york hotels”, “startup”, “google app engine” and “python.”

I look forward to your comments.

http://ting-1.appspot.com/
Likewise. I was fortunate to live and travel through South America and Southeast Asia through my teenage years since my father took overseas engineering jobs. I cannot begin to express what traveling, and more importantly, immersion, will do to your vision and your priorities. It's a wonderful world out there.
Color didn't find the right balance of "when to launch". They should be congratulated on not spending 3 years building their launch product, but criticised for releasing what can only be described as shoddy software.

The chicken or egg problem could have been partially solved by gathering thousands of Android testers and quietly building up their photo collections.

In conclusion, they screwed up their big launch, regardless of $41 million in funding.
As the great philosopher Inigo Montoya once said: "You keep using that word..."

Let's talk about this chart for a second:

http://www.google.com//finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...

Ok, see that 4000% increase in 18 months? That's what a bubble looks like.

Now, please point out to me where on the graph it made more sense to invest your retirement money in the S&P 500 rather than Amazon.

Wait, you mean pets.com, not amazon.com? Fair enough. But now I'm not sure what your argument is. That color.com is going to fail and the investor are going to lose all their money?

That is what you're saying right? Because if you're saying they're taking a large risk that has a very small chance of paying off then you're saying nothing. That's what investors do. That's what makes us (as a society) all rich.

If your argument is that capital is being misallocated then you have to say why and where the capital should be allocated.

Which brings us to what is actually a bubble and not just people with lots of money taking big risks that may not pay off:

1. capital being invested by (otherwise) non-investors

2. who can't afford to lose

3. who have come to believe, with certainty, that they can't lose

That was the case in both the stock bubble and real estate bubble. It's not the case now. I guess the headline "valuations are unrealistically high" wouldn't generate as much heat and would require a coherent defense.
httrack
But... what if facebook just buys one of the inevitable competitors for a fraction of the price? Or builds the feature on their own?

So far I'm missing the special sauce that makes them a must-buy-can't-clone.
Chef Cookbooks for Erlang Deployments
this is a great idea about... ideas
no mention about performance.
The question is, do you trust all your Facebook friends' tastes?

Perhaps I just want to ask a few people that I trust in <food/fashion/movies>.

Of course, the questions will be a great way for companies to get information about you.
"He also reports that he wouldn’t feel financially secure until he had $1 billion in the bank." ... "Such complaints sound, on their face, preposterous."

It may be preposterous for most anyone to feel financially insecure, given that it's possible to survive through couchsurfing and dumpster diving and what a high historical standard of living this would provide.

The super-rich aren't the only ones who keep seeing their standards go up.
Greplin is not really like googling yourself. That analogy threw me off. It's a search engine for personal data.
Inside a Verizon Wireless Superswitch
Can you elaborate? Do you think they fear competition from non-OHA members?
I will confirm you are being overly stupid here.

Your readers are of a certain type. The probably have projects and businesses that align with that type. They want their projects and businesses to have more attention from people like them.

You could even not allow ads that don't represent high quality awesomeness if you're so inclined. Make it an exclusive type of advertising and say, "$5 to offer my readers something awesome" so then you're aligning your readers wishes of finding out about cool stuff and getting a discount on cool stuff with your own financial interests.
But they don't claim that it is "open", unlike Google.
For me, this question is mainly practical. If indie developers could put out GPL software and make good money from it without requiring the support infrastructure of a megacorp, I would think that was the bee's knees and I would promote that business model like crazy. I just don't think it's generally possible. I'm not familiar with SourceFire's story, but a look at their site seems to suggest the "Enterprise tech support company" model. I'll have to look closer.
Really? A wooden cover for the iPad 2..

yes. it's much more ingenious than iPad 2 if you think about it.

In fact this thing made me consider for a second that maybe I should get an iPad.
It's funny you say it's obvious. The whole elastic network concept wasn't obvious to me at all until they explained it. It's somewhat engenius in my opinion, but maybe I'm slow and this idea is obvious. Like I said though, I think the concept has some mainstream acceptance problems and I'm not sure it will work.
Our session lib is my arch nemesis these days. They should be good for a year, but for whatever reason, it's hosing them. I'll see what I can do...
Seeing in Color
Sure, but if you absolutely need to take a salary, why not just include that in the expenses?