skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really like the strategy layed out in MJ Demarco's Millionaire Fastlane. A lucrative startup idea should have five things:

Need - There has to be a need for what you're delivering. Don't blindly do what you love or are passionate about, do what the market requests. The market doesn't care at all about what you love, they care how you can solve their needs.

Entry - It shouldn't be easy to start the business/to step in the market. If it's to easy to get into the market, it's probably way harder to succeed in that market. There's a reason why it's almost impossible for blogs to earn serious money, it's simply too easy to start one. Everyone can start one. If everyone can start up a clone of your business, it's not likely to succeed. However, if it takes some real work/investment to startup your business, it's probably a better business.

Control - You must be in control over your own business success. If somebody else can shut down your business, you're not in control. If your business is relying on API access or affiliate income from somebody else, it's not a very substainable business.

Scale - The business must be able to scale to the masses. If you're running a sandwitch cart, it doesn't matter how good your sandwitches are. You can't suddently sell 100 000 sandwitches in a day in your neighboorhood. However, if you're selling access to something online the whole world is your market and it doesn't cost you much more to sell 10000 subscriptions than it does to sell 10.

Time - The business success needs to be seperated from your time. If the business can't grow seperated from your time , it's not really a business. It's just a job you have created yourself. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't spend a lot of your time on your business, it just means that what your business earn shouldn't be connected to how much time you spend running it.

Read the book, it's really good (71 five stars/1 four stars/0 three-two-one stars).
http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Fastlane-Crack-Wealth-Life...
After reading this, I've spent the past 2 hours perusing the Inc. 5000 list that he links to. http://www.inc.com/inc5000/list/

There are some mind-blowing/boggling entries there, like: http://www.inc.com/inc5000/profile/chasing-fireflies

Take some time browsing through, you're sure to find something you'll be scratching your noggin over.
On Tesla's induction motor
learn to leverage layer styles
Compare: http://www.turningart.com
would displaying them just like the links on the front page not work? are they not currently working like that anyway?
Some of the comments at the article site seem to be from the author. One of them says they selected 400 articles from the featured articles and at the time that was 0.013% of all the articles.
I'd want the reset button to be hit every 100 years.
Ask HN: Hacker book suggestions similar to founders at work
Im going on vacation for a month and am looking for about 20 books to read (ideally with kindle versions)

So maybe Ive been living under a rock (doing enterprise software) but I only learned of ycombinator about a week ago. In doing research about ycombinator I read about founders at work which turned out to be entertaining and inspiring.

This community is great and so Im looking for hacker book recommendations about startups, or hacking. fiction or nonfiction would be ok

Id like to travel light so the recommendations should have kindle versions.
he has done something to sabotage the font resizing buttons so when I try to make the text less gargantuan, it retains the text size but inexplicably shrinks the column size.

The width of the column is set in "ems" rather than pixels. This has the advantage of ensuring that the measure (column-width) remains the same number of characters wide. 66 characters is often regarded as the ideal measure.

http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Horizontal_Mo...
Thanks for the really insightful comments. UI-wise, I can probably fix most of these (e.g. dates).

As you say, the real challenge is getting the traffic. Stumbleupon users are far from my target, but at least a cheap way to see how people interact with the site. Google Adwords is most likely best for targeting ready buyers, but without an idea of the expected value of each customer, may be too expensive at this point.

Thanks again for taking the time to comment in such depth, appreciated.
Thanks for your thoughts. The site is still very new and in many ways we are still uncovering who our exact target customer will be, as the current customers vary quite a bit in demographic and use cases.

To clarify a bit, the target customer we are currently targeting is a first time (or very new) art buyer who is unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the traditional gallery sales system. The pain points include generally very high priced work, cold salespeople, and a general fear of commitment that we see in purchasing today (ie. the rise of free returns.)

We think of our site as providing the option to "try before you buy". Essentially, lower the risk to seeing how the work will look in your space for $50/month, knowing you can return it if it is not right for you. We do not expect many customers would continue to rent if they love the work they choose, instead potentially choosing to purchase at that point. Because our work is by young emerging artists it is generally more affordable for the new collector as well.

Thanks for your thoughts!
Indeed, there is no meat here. Upvoted you, and flagged the submission to save other people from wasting their time.
Or you could redesign Skype and probably get a job out of it or at least an amazing project to put in your portfolio. This is a huge opportunity for anyone trying to break into the business - college kids, amateur designers, the unestablished.
The main difference is that with Artsicle you get the original, one of a kind piece where as with TurningArt you get a reproduction of a work. It's just a different approach. On TurningArt you may find some more familiar names where as with Artsicle we're focused on emerging artists before they get their break.
Thanks for the advice, will look at options for being more specific on dates - although I suppose what I am really trying to offer here is an opportunity to see the absolute best prices on packages for those who have flexibility around their travel dates.

Thanks again!
Welcome to Hacker News! :-) FYI, comments like that tend to get downvoted swiftly on Hacker News. You may want to read the guidelines if you haven't already.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Watch the new video about Asus EEEPad tablet on YOUTUBE"
10 seconds later "buy an ipad today" ad appears at the bottom.

Who would like to see ads about their competitors in their own videos, which WILL happen on Youtube.

Stuff like that and complete control over their own content.
> Americans are taught that "all men are created equal." While they continually violate that idea in some aspects of life, in others they adhere to it.

Boy, I wish more Americans understood that.
People still use audio CDs?
"US Americans" ?!
Maybe a corollary for businesses whose product is based on lock-in. Poor software design is sort of the point as long as you keep getting your hooks into people.
"...after all, licenses shouldn’t be necessary for users to play their own music, right? The labels seem to disagree they expressed shock following Amazon’s announcement, with a Sony Music representative implying that the company was looking into legal options."

Record companies have lost control over the production as well as the distribution of music. Instead of innovating, they rely on lawyers and lobbyists, shady backroom dealings and secret handshakes, and what amounts to a policy of systemic political and legal bullying to protect their gatekeeper role in producing a product they're no longer needed to produce. Yet they have the nerve to act (or pretend to act) shocked when the world notices that the record company of yore is obsolete; a dinosaur; a wooly mammoth whose time on the evolutionary tree is now happily finished.

There are 2 choices here: a) sell people music in a permanent format that doesn't offend them with half-baked notions of quasi-ownership (not being able to play the song on the device of choice, not being able to lend the song to a friend like you would a CD, etc.) and simply deal with whatever profit loss results or b) people will pirate your shit en masse. This is science, and not all the lawyers and lobbyists in the world can change it.
This experiment is pretty arbitrary -- I guess they would only register good domain names if they pop up, not just random ones.
US sends robots to Japan's rescue
Check out lynda.com. They have some good lectures for free, and a huge library for 25/mo.
This is standard from what I understand. As it has been explained to me in the past, what happens is once the domain has passed expiration it is actually renewed automatically at the registry level,until or unless the registrar issues a command to delete it. Within 30 - 45 days from the expiry date the registrar will keep the domain in a 'grace period' where you can still renew it with them. If you do not renew during the registrar's specified grace period they will then issue a command to delete it from the registry and it will go into the next phase of the drop cycle, I myself have only ever noticed this happen on .org and .mobi domains, but I've been told it can also happen with .com and .net
Video: Google Python Class Day 1
As it's a guide for international students at NYU, I think that's implied.
Sure, as opposed to Central Americans, South Americans, Mexicans, or Canadians.

There is no estadounidenses in English but "Americans" logically includes Alaskans through Argentinians.
One simple idea to improve HN story quality
Get more eyes and therefore more quality votes on new submissions. How often do you look at the new page? I don't. It's too hard.

This idea is stupidly simple. Just make a two column layout. Might work, might not. Try it for a couple days and see what happens!

mockup: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/150723/test.html
clickable: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/150723/test.html
Hi Imran,

I think you're right that the value prop isn't made explicit enough at the moment - I could use adding some kind of introductory text to make it clear what the site is about, question is where to put it.

To me, the value proposition is that 1. it shows you the absolute cheapest dates to go somewhere if you have the flexibility and 2. that it shows great deals to places you might never have thought of otherwise - all much easier to spot because the results are mapped.

Good suggestion re. target audience. Assuming you're talking about changes to the site itself (rather than its advertising) I'd be interested to hear what changes or additions you would make to go about that, i.e. to specifically target the 20-30 singles demographic.
Solr + Hadoop = Big Data Love
Bixo Labs shows how it's using Solr as a NoSQL solution for big data.
In terms of actual real-world tangible importance, I consider Alan Turing more important than Einstein. He and von Neumann are possibly the greatest scientists of the 20th century.

BTW, another thing people often don't know about Turing and von Neumann was that their interests went beyond computers and mathematics. Both were very interested in biology and physics as well, and did important work on those fields. von Neumann in particular did important work in regard to the theory of self-replication, early proto-evolutionary-information-theory, etc.
So you're proposing that for those students who have not yet been motivated to work hard as a result of a broken system, we should just keep trying to force them through that system with no change? There are many, many reasons why the education system is not working, and there are many proposed solutions. No one solution is going to fix things, but they can contribute steps towards the overall solution. By dismissing all technology as nifty gadgets and refusing to even consider changing a broken system for a new generation, you're giving up before even trying.

One reason the educational system isn't working anymore is the behavioral changes in children that have been encouraged through cell phone and social networking usage. It's been shown that face-to-face discussion is intimidating and harmful to brainstorming or learning effectiveness [1]. This is why children and young adults prefer texting and communicating through Facebook over face-to-face socializing or even phone calls. Despite this fact, the size of classrooms continue to grow as we cram more and more students together to fight for the instructor's attention and to discuss topics in front of each other. Then we sit back and wonder, why students are intimidated and are unable to learn.

We have a classroom full of unengaged students staring blankly at an instructor, we know that they're intimidated to engage and ask questions in front of such a large group, and we know that they already have mobile devices on them that they are comfortable communicating and engaging with in large groups. But instead of taking advantage of those devices, you (and everybody else) seem to want to ignore everything and just keep trying to force students through a system that's not working for them anymore.

[1]: http://books.google.com/books?id=RNiFM9br5PwC&lpg=PP1...
Richard B Johnson rants and makes some poor points. I am more interested in the cultural issues typified by his aggressive behaviour than the technical questions being debated.
It's hard to tell what perspective this article is written from. There are many subjective qualifiers. For example:

> Americans place considerable value on punctuality.

From a German perspective, this is wildly untrue.
Profiling a PHP Application
Yes, US Americans, as opposed to US Mexicans, or Canada Americans, Brasil Americans, or Columbia Americans.

See what I did there.
Give high-karma users more power to downvote: if you downvote a comment, click the now-red downvote button again to add e.g. <your karma>/500 extra_downvotes. At any time, a comment with extra_downvotes has min(#extra_downvotes, max(0, #points) / 2) fewer points than it would otherwise have.

Some examples:

- "good": tptacek likes something and gives +1 point - he has no more power than anyone else to upvote

- "bad": RiderofGiraffes downvotes for -1 point

- "crap": RiderofGiraffes thinks a comment at -2 is mean, and downvotes twice. The comment is now at -3, since extra_downvotes do nothing on comments with zero or fewer points.

- "popular crap": tptacek double-downvotes a 17-point comment to 8 points. Two 2000-point (top-1000?) double-downvoters could also get it to 8.

- "ridiculously popular crap": tptacek and RiderofGiraffes hate a 302-point comment. tptacek double-downvotes it to 176; RiderofGiraffes double-downvotes to 150 (half of #upvotes - #downvotes = 300); lots of others also lend their extra_downvotes. The comment stands at 150 and upvotes have half effect.

I think this proposal strikes a nice balance: users with high (500+) karma can better help keep the crap out; extremely-high-karma users get a bit more power (only a bit - realistically, tptacek will typically remove something like five points from a popular-but-crap comment since others also have extra_downvotes).

More importantly, "normal" users still run the site (that 150-point comment is still at the top of the page, and no amount of extra_downvotes is going to dislodge it). If you're going to cry "democracy", remember that the only current way of dealing with popular crap is [dead] - losing half your comment karma is not that harsh. And, again, people with lots of karma are apparently interesting.

Note that points and extra_downvotes must be tracked separately; otherwise, people would want to wait until a crap comment has gained some points to make their extra_downvotes more effective.

Finally, two tweaks: it may be a good idea to let only comment karma count for extra_downvotes purposes, and it may be a good idea to allow extra_downvotes on submissions.

It's a pity that no-one is going to see this comment...

[Note: HN handles used for illustration only, I'll happily remove them if you'd like.]
http://jtnimoy.net/178/TRON_GFX_BR_07.JPG seems to indicate plain old grep, not futuristic intelligent grep.
Why yes there is. The OpenCV book, from Oreilly. It's excellent for getting to know the library more deeply.
www.triviatise.com

Like scvngr without having to go anywhere.

Triviatise increases retention of an advertiser's message by encouraging consumers to take quizzes about products in return for a chance to win prizes.

The triviatisement can be embedded in the advertisers website.
SQL Server - automatically create all Store Procedures
A shorter version would be: Americans are generally individualist Protestant technologist capitalists. Like any other culture these defining traits bring inherent strengths, and unavoidable weaknesses.

On a different note, Does anyone know the author of this essay? I've seen it around at least as far back as the early 1990's, and it's good to see it still in use.
Perlmonks certainly works. However I don't think that the level system is the reason. My opinion is that the real reason is that a good community was established early, and then a focused remit maintained it.

Ironically that is one of the reasons why I lost interest. My interests moved on. A small fraction of the conversations taught me anything interesting. And so I drifted away. However the focused remit is essential for maintaining that community as it is, even if I am no longer that big a part of it.

Incidentally I am http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=tilly there, and http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=754085 describes some of the early history of how it came to be as it is.
More accurately, Americans mostly adhere to the notion that "all men are equal" when it serves the interests of the top 1%. Voting, the military, taxes, college admissions, etc.
Guardian.co.uk Switching from Java to Scala
Everyone Communicates, Few Connect
Why not just do something like the below when you need to do that?

var img = new Image();
img.onload = function(){
//draw to canvas
};
img.src = "image.png";

Could be a stupid answer, or possibly it'd be better to do it your way?( Maybe I can learn something :) )
This makes me think of this research [0] where students on a photography course had to choose one photo they took to take home. One half was allowed to swap after a few days, the others weren't:

"Compared with experiencers whose decisions were escapable, those who were not allowed to change their minds showed a greater preference for their chosen photo two and nine days after they had made their decision."

So being able to swap your art may actually make you unhappier in the end! But it also mentions that people think they'll be happier given the choice, and will pay good money for it.

[0] http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct01/strength.aspx , under the "The price of freedom" heading
Ask HN:Review My Updated Side Project - ShelfLuv.com (250 invite codes)
http://www.shelfluv.com (250 invite codes) use: HN

I initially submitted this project to HN back in September/October last year. At the time, it was a hackathon project that just did instant search on Amazon. It received great feedback so I decided to build on it.

Although it took a really long time since the hackathon, the new ShelfLuv is finally here and I would love some feedback. It is far from done, but as they say, if you are not embarrassed by your first version, then you've released too late. There are still many glaring holes in the functionality but those are coming.

I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. What do you love about it? What confuses you? What would bring you back to the site. If you want to contact me personally it's pek at shelfluv dot com

Thank you
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that there's noone on earth who grew up in one country, moved to another one, and managed to completely forget about salient facts like the poverty level in their original country.
I think your site is neat. StumbleUpon users, in my experience, tend to show a high bounce rate (often not waiting long enough for a site to load), so they are not a good test case.

If you're still looking to advertise, Adwords might be a better bet, though your niche, as you know, is extremely competitive.

Aside from that, I have a couple of comments on the UI:

1. After clicking a price tag, you get an overlay which looks to be draggable (hand icon) but is not. It also exhibits a disconcerting zoom in/out effect when you zoom the map with the overlay visible.

2. Personally I think the logo wouldn't be totally out of place on a tub of margarine. No offense intended. Objectively, it doesn't match the colour scheme of the site.
I've been poached rather differently - I formed a limited liability company, and found that as soon as my formation was made official, someone had registered "$mycompanyname.com". Foolish on my part I suppose.

I do find it rather odd that the owner isn't responding to contact via the whois record - seems an odd sort of extortion where they don't want to take your money.
Place value != arrive on time

I know I'm doing something wrong when I'm late. Yet I'm sometimes late anyway.
I have a suggestion. mcrider, why don't you allow interested Canadian users to "vote" for support of these services. It would become an activism platform of sorts that way. If Zappos for example sees that 2 million canadians want to buy their shoes, they have an incentive to add support!
Why straight-A's may not get you into UW this year
Probably a bug, since I am still getting hit byt SQL slammer on our IDS.

*edit, maybe an April fools joke? Article is from april 1st.
I have been in the US about ten times and I think one of the initial barriers is our that our perception of the US is formed through Hollywood.

Some things that did not match my expectations/assumptions:

- The average American is much poorer than I expected. Wealth is less evenly divided, than say West-Europe.

- Americans are extremely nice and warm. Some Europeans say it is superficial, but I really liked when eating at some place that a stranger would pass by and have a chat.

- Apart from the West coast and North-East, Americans are pretty conservative.

- Americans have a positive attitude towards life.

- Americans are prepared to take risks, where Europeans are for more risk-averse. This (IMO) has a bad effect on the social system, but a positive effect on entrepreneurism.
Shampoo Bingo Review - FREE Prizes | ShampooBingo.com
http://www.shelfluv.com
Completely agree, this author apparently, potentially, lives in a sort of cloud society where every designer is paid handsomely for his work and you don't have to scrape and beg and plead and bleed and tactically position yourself in order to make it. A winning Skype redesign would be life-changing for anybody with the time to submit to such a contest, by definition.
You are trapped in the same Hell as other creative types, such as musicians: there are countless young aspirants who are willing to do this work for free just for a shot at "making it", but precious few people who sign checks who are able to discriminate the quality of the work.

Engineering and accounting, your two comparison fields, don't suffer this problem.
Am I the only one who thinks there's way too much similarity between the the RIAA's "Save the artists" screeching, and the "design industry's" "Save the artists" screeching?

Your existing business model is disappearing, and your cartel isn't going to stop it. Sucks for you.

(BTW, my wife is a graphic designer, so make of that what you will)
It took centuries to come to the point of introspection - anthropologists apparently label the normal American kinship system as Inuit or some such, because it wasn't until studying another culture that we recognized our own.
Unrelated: If anyone wants to purchase Bitcoins, feel free to contact me. (sneak@datavibe.net - PGP 5539 AD00 DE4C 42F3 AFE1 1575 0524 43F4 DF2A 55C2)
Was thinking two iframes when I read the ask. Always helpful to see it live and consider it's utility in practice.
Relative traffic of popular web framework lists