skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
seems like in this case coming up with the idea is easy, building a prototype is easy, and building a solid, profitable company with stable management and growth prospects is hard and time consuming. So it's the same as every other business scenario ever.
Oh yeah, it does get used in court in the US. I paid attention to a murder trial of a neighbor that happened nearly a decade ago, and they presented evidence of his cell tower connections contradicting his story of whether he was in a certain state at the time. It was by no means a substantial part of their case though, they were just piling things on. But yes, it's definitely admissible, I assume it happens all the time.
I've stumbled across reports of "unnatural dragonfly-like" drones above crowds/protests but it's often hard to tell if those are legit sightings or imaginative conspiracists.
Yes it's a card game.unfortunately ,they don't allow yet to gamble online in our country.But i will build it for free and see if i can have partners elsewhere
+1 recommended reading for "In Defense of Food". It's way outside my regular reading tastes (pop-ish science + nutrition related), but I enjoyed every moment of it, and it's definitely changed the way I think about eating.
Thanks for the clarification on your post. I agree with the whole statistics being thrown around being a bit ridiculous.
Would a rewrite necessarily benefit the business? Can you make a strong case for that?

If not, start writing tests, try small incremental refactorings, ask your manager to hire more people, maybe someone not as qualified as you but that can take on some more of the unpleasant activities. Maybe you can negotiate some 20% time? Use that time to build tooling to help you do your job better. Share it with the world. Management won't give you these liberties? Find another job. And ask the next company to show you their code metrics before you seal the deal.
I would rather them show downloading at capacity of the benchmark (520Mb/8 = 65MBs) than 32MB/s.

Still impressive numbers (although not surprising) but still... "This car can drive 300MPH. Here's a picture of it driving 150MPH".
Sometimes it does take a rocket scientist to take on Hollywood
3 Actions to Reverse Declining Trends
The hypertext project Xanadu, founded in 1960.
Well, as far as I can tell, he has no idea if coming up with the idea was easy. And anyway, I'm not sure ideas are valued based on how hard they are to come up with. Work can be based on replacement value, but I don't think you can do that with ideas.
The first thing to do, in my opinion, is to maintain an active Github account and contribute to the open source community.
We experimented with a multi-step sign up process where we first prompted for a zipcode, then prompted for an email address (letting you know at that step whether we had data for your zipcode), but a multi-step sign up process felt too heavyweight given that we really only need two pieces of information to create an account.

If we don't have data for your zipcode, then we don't send you email. We just keep your address on file so we can notify you when we launch in your area.

Suggesting recipes that use deeply discounted items is a good idea.
What is today's American Dream?
his language colorful and opinions are abrupt.
It would be great if I could import addresses from gmail (or other services) instead of typing emails one by one...
How the Internet of Things is Changing the Way We Work
I have a ton of ideas. What I do is send them to a group of friends that serve as an echochamber and ask them to poke as many holes as they can. They ask questions or point hings out, ask how i monitize etc.
That's assuming that a copy of the legible characters wouldn't lose any of the original information -- the way words are written could matter.
The TL:DR is: Rich people (what he calls Westerners) are fat. Poor people (like afghanis) aren't. Rich people get more diabetes which costs them money. Poor people don't. He's cut both types of people open and looked at their fat.
Thanks for all the input.

1. Yes, there is a ton of room for the company to grow (market is young and expanding rapidly).

2. I definitely can see the logic in making sales a priority. I have absolutely no experience selling to businesses, and would be happy to jump in the deep end. However, I don't know how you actually sell to large corporations. In the past we have just waited for RFPs to come to us. Any suggestions on how to actually pound the concrete looking for clients?

3. Good suggestion. Unfortunately not applicable in this situation.
If you look at the page for an individual item on our website then we show you some historical pricing information. For example, if you visit:

http://www.anyleaf.com/product/navel-oranges

Then you'll see that 25 cents / lb is the low price we've seen, 97 cents / lb is the most common sale price, and so on.

This data is only available on our website and isn't in the iPhone app yet, but we'll be adding it to the app in an update.
Pandora is not really a subtitute or rival for the existing business models - more like a competitor for radio stations. Grooveshark from what I can tell relies on breaking copyright. Meanwhile iTunes is successful but a) not much cheaper than CDs and b) only a small portion (combined with the other MP3 stores) of the overall music retail market. So it would appear to me that music is sold by 'the industry' at a price people do find acceptable, round about the same price they'd been selling at during their most successful days, which ended with the popularization of illegal filesharing.

Basically out of all the people who love music, a large subset of them will pirate it without qualms, and that's all that's really going on here. The changes brought about by the internet have just shrunk the overall industry, rather than allow it to be reshaped by visionary businesspeople or artists. 99 Designs works because due to copyright protection designers feel confident about showing work before receiving payment, meanwhile the music industry is failing because people feel confident about avoiding the legal sanctions of downloading copyrighted material. That it should be like that is just an accident of law enforcement practices and tracibility.
Sorry, I meant morbidity, but I should have been more clear. Childhood disease(morbidity) leads to a high infant/child mortality rate in poor countries due to poor nutrition, sanitation, and heath care. IMO, it's better to think of these deaths as a symptom than a cause.

For comparison US death rate in the 0 - 5 range is really low. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Causes_of_death_by_age_gro...

PS: Nutrition is huge: According to Jean Ziegler (the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food for 2000 to March 2008), mortality due to malnutrition accounted for 58% of the total mortality in 2006: "In the world, approximately 62 millions people, all causes of death combined, die each year. In 2006, more than 36 millions died of hunger or diseases due to deficiencies in micronutrients"[4].
As an O'Reilly member I seem to have a standing 2-for-1 book deal, so I just batch up my orders. I really like their ongoing updates and early releases and the DRM-free formats are a big plus.
Google Goes ChatBot: Google Talk Guru
It's a tough question and I think there is a drought of answers, even from those who think about the subject quite a bit. I'm not sure it's the best idea to go all in, but that's certainly an approach. I suspect one of the mid term answers (in general) may involve creating a ton of contradictory noise on your behalf, but I'm not even sure if that could be applied to mobile location. Privacy is clearly not winning the match so far.

While it's not quite on topic, this presentation by moxie marlinspike last year at defcon europe has some interesting thoughts on how we voluntarily surrender our privacy. It's definitely worth a watch if you're thinking about the subject.

http://vimeo.com/11303353
Web-based chat, by its nature, is also very distracting. One click and you are reading HN instead of your internal chat room :)

Anyway, when I worked at an all-remote company, we just ran our own IRC server. Then all the channels were work-related. Of course, it was pretty easy to also join other networks, which we did (but would do anyway).
oh, nm, it is under "more invite options" ;)
Which feature would Paul Graham most like to change on Hacker News?
Hooray! I hope I can make it this year! I really enjoyed participating last year.
Actually, that's turned out to be little help. Less than 4k of our new subs are former members so far.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2370022 (CEO Friday: Why we don’t hire .NET programmers)

Would an open source programmer do something like this?
Ah, ok, interesting. Ruby for the backend, Javascript + HTML + CSS for the frontend should be doable without too much hassle. You could use canvas if you want animated cards and such.
For those interested, peta will give you a free starter kit to help you eat more vegs (http://bit.ly/hpGK0b).

(Although of course they approach it from an ethical perspective. But it makes you just as healthy.)
Glad you like it!

Figuring out where to stock up on soda is one of our most popular use cases. Diapers too.
Interesting.

I'm pretty sure I heard that in a talk on AWS given by an Amazon product manager, but I could be wrong (or he could be wrong).
It's hard - I try my best to answer every one of the 50 or so messages a day I receive while operating my startup. Every once in a while one drops through the cracks, or a few if I don't re-check my inbox, and I feel like a real ass.
Yes, I just looked at the form again (the link still works) and it asks:
University, Major, GPA, strongest programming language, second programming language, and preferences for location, and then a five-option part where you rate yourself out of:
Not my thing (none)
Can make do (fair)
Comfortable (good)
Comes easily (better)
World Class (best)

On the following:
1) Applications and Services: this is Google's term for the software that is directly visible to end users. People who focus on applications and services typically work on improving our capabilities in a variety of areas that span the range from new features to increasing performance and efficiency at Google scale. They will be tasked with devising and building new approaches to Google's problems, and exploring their effectiveness.

2) Systems: People who have a systems focus are oriented towards behind-the-scenes software and systems, often building them from underlying components and services. Systems work spans from platforms (hardware, OS, networking) to infrastructure (shared services such as storage, cluster management) and everything in between.

3) Sys-admin: Our system administrators keep all of Google's systems running, and help deploy new ones. They deal with issues involving single machines to those involving huge numbers. They work with native Linux environments, and Google extensions and services.

4) Verification and Test: Our test teams helps make our systems resilient and reliable - we put a lot of effort into this. Building world class applications at world class scales doesn’t happen by accident. It takes insight, innovation, and precision to verify our systems perform as expected.
There was a site called Jedi Britain earlier....or maybe it was called JFDI Britain. Liked that more.

I think the hard part is finding collaborators. I'd lilke to see more side-project startups, with multiple collaborators.

Yes, you can do it on your own. But maybe it's viable as a sideproject until it takes off if there's a few of you?
You may have it backwards: Chuck Moore doesn't compute. He tells electrons where to go, and they take orders. Inside every computer built by Chuck Moore, there is only another computer built by Chuck Moore. Chuck Moore once built a zero-instruction chip that always produced the correct answer. According to a doctor that wished to remain anonymous, Chuck Moore has only two internal organs: a whiskey processing unit, and a NAND gate. Chuck Moore once traveled back in time just to convince Alan Turing that his computer didn't need any I/O devices besides a tape reader.

SCNR
Google To Let AdWords Advertisers Target Contextually By Category
You jest but many Europeans have already evolved greater capacity to digest milk and alcohol than other races with less exposure.
I would love to know what he thought about racing the 12 hours of Sebring.
Bacon already tastes as good as it's going to get! (No, this is not sarcasm.)
See the list at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android#System_Req...
It's actually not that hard to get good clients on Guru and the sites you mention. You just need to differentiate from that Russian kid on something other than price.

Back in my eLance days, I charged $75/hour for my time and wrote good thoughtful proposals for jobs that sounded interesting. Those two things set me so far apart from the rest of the field that potential clients would essentially have two piles of proposals on their desk:

- Pile A: 100 broken english canned proposals quoting $14/hr and dripping with flakiness

- Pile B: 1 proposal from the expensive guy who sounds like he knows what he's doing

So the thought process then changes to "do I take a risk, or do I spend the money to do the job right". I'd only hear back from 1 in 10 proposals, but the conversation was always the same from there:

"Wow, you really nailed what we're looking for, but, well, you're a bit expensive. Any chance you can give us a break on price?"

"No."

"OK, well we've talked it over and we think we'd like to give it a shot."
> The number of people that can start with a blank file and start writing a computer program is probably somewhere around 5% of programmers.

What?! There's no way this is true... is there?
Quotevadis: Inspiring and Interesting Quotes
This excerpt is fantastic -- refusing to let Nixon's impeachment derail his path toward writing a novel.

When I find myself about to lose focus, I ask myself, "Ten years from now, are you going to remember that crappy TV show you watched for one hour on a Tuesday, or are you going to remember the moment your advisor kicked you out of his group?"
Evan Williams on leaving Twitter
De la difficulté de trouver des fonds pour se faire financer, chapitre Americain
I really doubt almost everything you said. RE: Exercise being far more important, things like jogging, aerobics, etc. are a relatively new phenomenon, but the obesity problem has become much, much worse since their advent.

Also, the idea of calories vs. exercise being a simple balancing act is almost certainly wrong. The measure of calories is based on the amount of energy that can be gotten out of something by burning it, with fire. Your body is definitely not as even handed as fire when it comes to releasing energy from food.

For a simple example, look at the atkins diet.
Show HN: Ranking content by social engagement
Discovering content that others have found to be engaging (real-time) is difficult. I typically bounce from site to site browsing the "front page" hoping to see the most recent, top stories. I recently set out to create a single destination that sources content from websites, social networks, etc. and ranks it based on social engagement data. If you connect via Facebook, you can see what links your friends shared. If you choose your city (limited to 11 as of right now), you can see your local news. New content and engagement sources are constantly being added.

URL: http://www.trendn.com

What do you think? Thanks HN!
Here is a link to comments about this story when it was carried in the NYT:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2371548

The discussion included that they use it for modeling traffic patterns and areas to help them plan capacity and new towers. I'm sure they use it for other things as well.
What the hell, never knew about this:

Consent to Access Your Files
BY UTILIZING THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES AND/OR SERVICES,
YOU CONSENT TO ALLOW DROPBOX TO ACCESS YOUR COMPUTER
TO ACCESS ANY FILES THAT ARE PLACED IN THE 'MY DROPBOX',
'DROPBOX' FOLDERS, AND/OR ANY OTHER FOLDER WHICH YOU
CHOOSE TO LINK TO DROPBOX.

Is this intended for the program to access the files and send them to the server? Or does this mean the bad thing, that nothing is really private?
the one thing about hard science - it's a specialty that can distinguish you from general programming, which may increase the rate. however, you don't want to get in the business of competing with graduate students, who are accustomed to doing very difficult work for very little money.

I did a lot of operations-research type programming in grad school, and I thought it would set me apart, but I've found that the jobs that want programming and OR skills don't seem to pay any better than other types of programming. This is jobs, not consulting gigs, though, and I'm only basing this on a few data points.
Yes it can, and so can recordings from remote activation of the mobile phone mic:
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029_3-6140191.html
Just Keep Going, You Got Nothing To Lose
Disclaimer: Not my project; found it via Smashing Magazine.

Cool to see a Paul Graham quote here (http://quotevadis.com/post/3539428188/you-are-forced-to-face...)
And some others regarding a lot of topics from various sources (people, movies, poems, etc).

Bonus: It just never ends.
is there a webserver for Ruby like IIS for asp.net.is there a good framework for it?what are canvas?
It is poor form to ask for advice then rip someone for giving it to you...
The Real Science Gap
They can import your iTunes library, via an uploading tool (written with Adobe AIR).
Jack Dorsey & Biz Stone (Twitter) Interview on Piers Morgan Tonight 9PM EST
Any word on when it will be available outside the US, particularly in the UK?
Heh. One of the best protections against SQL injection is not to grant those privileges to the db account from the webserver. So many sites could protect themselves at the least from data loss by using the built in tools. Also, I've worked on projects where the only way to change a table is via a stored proc, no select access on the tables, no SQL injection. Or at least you'll have to figure out a way to to the injection into the stored proc which is nigh impossible unless they are using exec_sql in the store proc.
How I Learned to Speed-Read Faster than the Speed of Light
Zapd: ‘We built it, they came, but Facebook pulled up the drawbridge’
> Moreover, the type of food you're eating has at least as
> much effect as its theoretical caloric content. 300
> calories of raw carrots is not equal to 300 calories
> of potato chips, as far as your body is concerned.
> We're not calorimeters.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...
Creepy, but I'd pay for this as a service! Would be a nice travel memento, for example.
NoSQL  Netflix (Part 1) Video
This talk was given a few weeks ago at Facebook to an audience of 600.
The fact that they're "granting you permission" to post your own paper, which you wrote at your own expense (or that of supporters you secured independently from the IEEE), and in which they have no legitimate copyright claim on your own website just underscores how dangerously close to the wind these guys are really sailing.

Unless they're actually bribing tenure committees to maintain their exclusive (and totally unearned) hold on people's professional futures, it seems like they're one coordinated action away from a richly-deserved implosion.
Depends on your definition of 'work' doesn't it?
Did you experiment with different ad copy/targetting ? - it can make a huge difference.

I'll see if I can get the OK from Facebook to publish the CPM/CTR rates from one of my ad campaigns so I can show exactly how important tuning is.
Was the real estate itself part of the bubble? I thought there was lots of trading of mortgage-backed assets that went on the ridiculous assumption that house prices would continue to rise indefinitely, then when they stopped rising the derived (high-volume) trading was exposed as irresponsible. So the bubble would be in credit-default-swaps or whatever you call them, not in actual property.

Someone who knows what they're talking about explain please!
How The Economist uses relative pricing to push it's most expensive plan
I believe that the #1 job as a CEO is to own the goals (the reasons for existence) of the company, doing whatever it takes to achieve the goals.

If that requires raising money or hiring/firing, those get prioritized high. Some startups don't require funding (just read a great post about GitHub), and others can be better staffed by a team of experienced mercenaries than a bunch of novice citizens.

And sometimes, the CEO has to be the cheerleader that prevents the founders from giving up...
Excellent. I personally love this sort of thing, though I'm rarely successful.

I was typing out the letters as I saw them, and I noticed that I interpreted many of your "S" as the number 5, but after looking at the way he wrote "S", it appears relatively consistent throughout the text.

So letter groupings became interesting:
SE - 66 matches
RSE - 18 matches

In the first document TFNRE appears twice.

Here's my interpretation from looking at the two documents (I really wish there were seriously high resolution scans of these docs, it'd help to sort out the asterisks which I used to represent characters I couldn't reasonably identify)

(M*ADMKNE#R-N-STA-KNARE) (ACSM)
*TFRNENP*NSEWPBSERCBBNSENPRSEINC
PRSENMRSEOPREHLDWLDNCSE(TXFLFTCXLNC*E)
AL-*RPPITXLYPPIYNCBEMEKSE*C*SEPRSE
WLDRCBRNSE*T*SNE*TXSE-C*SLE-CITRSEWLDNCBE
ALW*PNCBETSMEL*SERLSEVRGLSNEASNWLDNCBE
(NOPFSENLRENCBE)NTEGDDMNSENCURER*BR**
(TEWETFRNENC**TSENCBEI*G)
(FIRSEPRSEONDE71NCBE)
(CDWSEPRSEONSE74NCBE)
(PRTSEPRSEONERDE76NCBE)
(TFNGCMSOLEMRDELUSETOTEWLD*WLD*CBE)
(194WLD'SNCBE)(TRFXC)

Page 2

ALPNTEGLSE-SE ERTE
YLSE MTSE-CTSE-WSE-FRTSE
PNRTRSEONDRSEWLDNCBE
*WLDXLRCMSPNEDVLDSTSMEXL
DULMT6TUNSENCBEXC

(*UNSARSTENMUNARSE)
KLSE-LRSTE-TRSE-MKSEN-MRSE
(SAE6NSESEMRCE)

NMRCBRSNEPTE2*TEWSRCBKN*E
**MLSE74SPRKSE29KENO*OLE17SRTRSE
8S*LECLG*E**NUTRE*KRSEPSESHLE
6SIMTCSEHTLSENCUTCTRSNMRE
99.84S2UNEP2SENCRSEAOKTSENSKSEN*SE
NSREONSEPVTSEWLDNCBE(JXORL)
*NMSENRSEINRNTRNTRLERCBRNSENTSRCR*NE
LSPNSENGSPSEMKSERBSENCEAVXLR
HMCRENMRENCBE 1/2MUNDDLSE
D-W-MIYMPL XDRX

This is the sort of problem I'd like to give to my child (as Douglass Adams states throughout his books) ... no bias or formula to work with. The "Street Smart" comment struck me a bit. When I was a kid, being "Street Smart" was a compliment used in contrast to someone who is "Book Smart". Being "Book Smart" was bad. Street Smart == Application of knowledge, Book Smart == would beat you at trivial pursuit/Jeopardy, but wouldn't know what to do with that knowledge.

EDIT: Ahh, half my comment was missing!
Thanks for the clarification. I missed the Target inclusion on the basic things I was looking for because it's based on the circular, which has fairly little in the way of food items.

With Whole Foods, the best (and most pragmatic) deals they offer aren't at all on their website and must be tracked in store. I think that there is a market for including Whole Foods, not in the novelty items, but in comparing natural/organic commodities that are popular enough to be carried by Target, Safeway and even Costco. On those fronts, WF is frequently the cheapest.

Do you have plans to, perhaps, crowdsource some of the price reporting similar to how gas price comparison sites are done?
A better image of the text can be found on the FBI's site:
http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/march/cryptanalysis_032...
I never thought of this. It's good
I'm not pg but I would love to have more _regular_ (but not artificially supported) posts by the YC class. Perfect place for insights and just general things about their first hand account of the YC process.
I know what problem I'd most like to solve: the gradual degradation of comments. But I doubt the answer could be expressed as changing a feature.
What he gave me isn't advice, that's called an "insult"
What is a good Iphone app development company?
I have a few apps that need to be developed. I need designers and coders. What is the best company to use?