skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the best way is to find an industry where people are already making a ton of money, and carving a piece of that.

Inventing the wheel is a recipe for disaster...because not only do you have to convince them to buy from you...but you also need to convince them to buy the thing in the first place.
A famous recipe for rabbit stew starts off, "First catch a rabbit ...."

A recipe for applied research starts off, "First get an application ...."

The article has,

"These companies can afford to set up big labs with lots of PhDs and pay them to do whatever the hell they want with little accountability, but maybe this model is no longer sustainable."

Thanks a lot former Harvard prof: That's an insult to Ph.D. holders, cuts them off at the knees, and is a great recipe for Ph.D. unemployment: Or, just why will the lowest non-Ph.D. manager in a management chain want to bet their budget and part of their career on "PhDs and pay them to do whatever the hell they want with little accountability"?

Just what is it about wasting time you find so attractive?

If you want to sit in a small, closed, dark room and engage in intellectual self-abuse, first make, marry, and/or inherit some money and then go for it. For the rest of us who sacrificed a LOT and got a Ph.D., JUST to be, and ONLY to be, better qualified to contribute to both top and bottom lines of accounting income statements, please cut the insults.
Why is an audio CD 74 minutes long?
Also it doesn't render right in IE 8? Font progressively larger for each entry until its a huge blur
Diametrically opposed to demolition derbies, Hash Functions
Ready to move your business to the Cloud? 20 user's favorite to choose from
That's really cool. The branding made me say at first "So what? Browsers natively play gifs..." If you retitled it some how to indicate you can step through it, that would be a better step for promoting this, which is something that is really cool. I'm going to have to check your source out later if you're on github.
Basics of a Model Term Paper
Model term papers are plagiarized copies of written documents prepared for similar topics. If students are using model term paper examples they should only do so to check the tone of the term paper. With model term papers students will be able to judge the manner of plagiarism.
There are a TON of ideas being thrown around in PG's thread, but something in your comment sparked with me... I don't know that anybody's talked about putting a karma requirement on UPvotes.

Everybody's talking about modifying the downvote behavior (among other things), but if we required a breaking in period for new users before they could even be allowed to upvote, then that could give them a better idea of what the community's about before they could start upvoting the trivial nonsense that everybody wants to upvote when they're new.
Seriously? Fortune 500 companies hosting their own videos?
Correct me if I'm missing something here...

But WHY!?

YouTube:
- individual control over an account
- its what they do
- the embed codes are even there for you!
- organic SEO ( duh )
- this issue has been solved

Why are we still waiting for video feeds on commercial websites... as stated earlier, from fortune 500 companies!?
You're comparing two completely different technologies though, that'd be like me complaining about how we're "so not-winning" with the size and price of SSDs.

Side Note: A 23" monitor purchase is not necessarily a "careless" one, for example the NEC model I use has one of the nicest feature sets for the price (fully adjustable base, IPS panel) but is only available in a 23.1" 1920x1080 version.
Introducing the iPad killer - the DumbPad
One of the problems with new stories (for me at least) is when they are submitted. I often see something interesting in the rss feed that was submitted several hours before I got to it. Upvoting on a story that old is useless, if it hasn't reached critical mass by some time threshold, no one will see it.

It is a good filter for low quality content, but it also filters out things I find interesting.
Is mobility better better for productivity? Pretty much all hackers I know now work on laptops, sometimes really small ones. Are they throwing their productivity out the window, or are we simply not measuring the right things?
Have a gear cube as a consolation prize: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfspDCpVDTw
If you don't have a terminal to hand, you can go through nametoolkit, i.e., www.nametoolkit.com/whois/nametoolkit.com.

We are just using a linux terminal on the back end and this data goes nowhere.
Ask HN: What podcasts do you watch regularly?
I'm a big fan of podcasts and I'm always looking to discover new shows. I'm curious what shows do you watch / listen to on a regular basis? I'm a big fan of:

Mixergy,
TWiT,
This Week in Venture Capital,
This Week in Startups,
Sitepoint,
Standford Entrepreneurship Videos (not sure if that is considered a podcast),
Reporters' Roundtable

You?
Just to be sure, what exactly is a management risk?

Risk due to founders being naive about business strategies and its complexities?
How HN Got us Into Google
Can You Run a Sustainable Company with Unpaid Interns?
I had ten originally, but then I was reminded that 1 sheet equals two pages (recto and verso). So, 5000 pages = 2500 sheets = 5 reams.

Even ten reams is significantly smaller than the tower pictured, though.
How To Outsource?
Lush, an object-oriented lisp for large-scale numerical and graphic applications
Hey Wriggler,

I wouldn't base too much on that poor bounce rate. What you need is to target UK folks who are actively looking for holidays, I'm not sure Stumbleupon is a great way to do this.

Here's my thoughts UI wise

1. You need to learn more about your market, or maybe you already know this but have yet to put it into practice.

Start with one particular user, let's say John. John is an Adwords guy in Google. He is 28 and wants to go on a summer trip with his girlfriend. By an exercise left to the reader John has found your site. John needs to go away in August as that's when downtime is for his team, and he's hoping spend about £400 or thereabouts, though he will pay more for a better place.

Based on John alone, here are a few random thoughts.

1. It's a bit funky to drag end of the slider on top of another just to say "August". Also I think you should consider handling custom date ranges.

2. Sliders aren't a great mechanism in my opinion, as they don't tell you what you're missing out on. Possibly a histogram behind them would help. (See Year or Price on this page http://www.carzone.ie/ to see what I mean)

3. People don't book package holidays in isolation. John should be able to input "10th of August for 7 nights, less than £600" and then send this to his girlfriend, or post it to Facebook, or do whatever so that John and his group can make a decision. (This is especially true for package holidays)

4. Ditch the sliders (hey I said these thoughts were random). You must realise your slider for selecting stars was a bad idea when you were coding it.

5. Spent more time on designing your search results page. Basically when someone clicks the little bubble and gets a list of 5 packages, they inevitably have to bounce into and out of each of them to assess them. This isn't a great experience. The more info you can offer up front the better.

Overall great job, I think you've done some good work, and the stuff I've wrote about is relatively minor in comparison to the significant challenge of getting the traffic you need.

Best of luck,
Des
Not to take away from your comment, but my use case is quite the opposite.

I have a few weeks vacation a year, and I don't particularly care WHEN I take them. What matters most is getting the best experience without getting raped on fees.

I was just posting about it elsewhere, but we did a private island campsite in Lower Saranac Lake for a week. It was cheap, and during the cooler start of the season (my kind of weather) and cost almost nothing to be up there for a week. That is the sort of vacation for me.
A Call to All UI Designers: Do Not Play Skype’s Game
Windows 8 to feature a Dropbox-like sync in Windows Explorer
> He also reads Paul Graham’s Hacker News, and admires the Y Combinator founder for being able to “spot talent and nurture it. He’s so committed to young entrepreneurs,” Milner said, adding how in the start-up funder’s early years Graham had a whole wall of food devoted to feeding the start-up founders himself.
Good asks experts: is the paleolithic diet really better?
Hacktivist group Anonymous launches “payback” cyber attack on Sony
Music Industry Will Force Licenses on Amazon Cloud Player or Else
http://www.amazon.com/Merck-Manual-Diagnosis-Therapy-18th/dp...

3000 pages, 2 inches thick.
Why renewables are 'safer and cheaper' than nuclear power
i tried a modified zenburn for a bit (i modify all my colour schemes so that the background is pure black), but went back to desert256 in the end. i just find it more pleasant to look at for hours at a time.
Apple's not so secret weapon in the tablet market
What are the applications of this? Or is that a blasphemous question to ask?
Today we "treat" children with drugs to 'correct' their depression, their ADD, and so on. How can we be sure that a generation from now, we won't look back and realize that we were damaging their brains during a crucial learning window? How can we be sure that a generation from now, we won't look back and realize that we were playing God with people's personalities?

I'm not against pharmapsychiatry, but at the same time I would stop well short of saying that everything we do with it is unassailably beneficial for the patients. Perhaps in a generation we will realize that trying to 'cure' ADD isn't very different from trying to 'cure' homosexuality.
There is a lot of talk about spaces. Does anyone else find they find the transition a bit much at times?

Do people have certain configurations that work well for them?
I'm interested in a bit more about your choices with respect to the implementation of project. Is it a CMS? Wordpress? Did you code it yourself? Flat HTML? Is there anything dynamic about it or did you just put a bunch of stuff up on a page and a domain?

Incidentally, "suggest a link" is broken unless you submit a fully qualified domain name. (I just sent http://example.com to you)
Larry Page Officially Starts as Google CEO
Wow, how short is that guy standing next to it, if the book is only 19 inches high? It comes up to his knees!
You should avoid misleading your company, that's just asking for trouble. If you don't want to agree to a particular part of a contract you should be open and discuss it with the company rather than trying to slip changes in under the rader (which depending on your jurisdiction may be illegal).

Imagine what happens if your company gets acquired, and during the due diligence the acquirer discovers that a critical employee contract is missing vital IP clauses because that employee "lost" that page. You could end up destroying your company.
Why hasn't another product disrupted and replaced Craigslist?
The source code is a bit of a mess, but if anyone is
interested in the non-bookmarkletized code, I can upload it
somewhere.

How about hosting the source code on GitHub? I'd love to see how this works!
Even as an American, I still love to read about others' views of America. A little narcissistic, maybe, but I think it's more like getting another pair of eyes on something you look at everyday.
Good article, but Rolling Stone has the most annoying 'print friendly' layouts I have ever seen. Peppering the article with links to other (mostly unrelated) pages really takes you out of the story.
Get more sales - Facebook strategy
Start-up Idea: 3DS photography takes off, but you're on your own to share images
I know that Möbius strips have applications in real engines. Fanbelts for example are möbius strips because they get worn equally over the whole surface that way.

Perhaps there could be a similar use case for a gear like this,but I have never heard of any.
Two small ideas for improving HN
I made a mockup of two possible methods for dealing with multiple, often over-the-top, submissions on popular topics (Color funding, Apple TOS changes, etc). These tweaks don't address quality of comments or submissions directly, but would leave room for different submissions and mitigate the need for critical comments about poor titles and duplicate submissions.

Alternative titles:
Users can submit an alternative title for a submission. If the alternative title gets more than X percent of submission's overall score it becomes the new title.

Merge requests:
Users can submit a merge request by providing another submission ID or URL to merge with. Merge requests show on both posts. If the merge request's score becomes more than X percent of the lower-scoring submission's score, then the lower submission is merged into the higher-scoring one, maybe with small markers on merged-in comments to show that they were merged in, just in case the two submissions had a slightly different focus.

Mockup: http://min.us/lmLZve
Not every contract is set in stone
Ask HN: Recommendations on Learning Photoshop?
Hi, over the years I've worked to round out my design skills by reading books like Don't Make Me Think, the Non-Designers Design Book, Bulletproof CSS, and Handcrafted CSS.

One area where I feel like I'm sorely lacking is Photoshop. Right now I cobble some basic stuff together using Acorn. I'm looking for a good way of learning PS from the perspective of modern web/app design. I don't care about photo editing, etc. which many books focus on. I want to be able to rely on myself for cranking out your standard web/app elements. The more of this I can do on my own, the better since it means I can iterate faster without waiting for a designer to send stuff my way.

By no means do I think designers are irrelevant. I just need "good enough" to let me iterate faster. Any recommendations?
So Louis L'Amour is the greatest American novelist of the last century. Well, at least one U.S. president thought highly of his novels.
RIM has two CEOs and three COOs
5by5's shows: The Talk Show, Hypocritical, Build and Analyze.

http://5by5.tv/
That's a misleading headline; there's no indication that the "sync" feature will be any more Dropbox-like than any of Microsoft's previous attempts at sync (like Groove, or Windows Live Sync, etc.)

Sync is so-well-known a problem at Microsoft that Joel devoted an article to the "architecture astronauts" wrapped up in it back in 2001. In fact, we're two weeks from the 10th anniversary of that retrospective. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html

EDIT: Actually, this 2008 article by Joel adds more to the story: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html
I read that book when I was studying design. It is definitely a worth read. It reads very quickly, and truly "shows" key prinicples instead of just "telling" them.
He looks exactly the way I'd pictured him from reading previous articles about him.
It's an interesting approach, and I'm not unconvinced that the premise has some legs. At the same time, your target customer -- and your articulation of the value proposition for that customer -- seems a little unclear.

Who is your target customer, and what are their pain points re: art buying? And how does renting-before-buying solve for those pain points?

Let's assume casual or beginning collectors. You're asking them to pay up to $600 a year to rent a piece, so presumably, you're targetting people who are in the market for pieces at least in excess of that price tag. In which case, you're not yet in the super-serious collector segment -- but you're operating in what must still be the 90th percentile of all art buyers in the country.

On the higher end of the market, let's look at serious but not uber-rich collectors. What would they get out of this service? Potentially the following:

1) Provenance? Possibly, but only if you document every person who's rented, and probably only if those renters are respected collectors or institutions. Possibly a cool idea to be worked out on this dimension, but also a pitfall if you don't address it properly. I could see the rental concept's having a negative effect on provenance if not handled well.

2) Sampling / try-before-you-buy? Maybe. If a piece isn't selling for well north of $600 to begin with, the economics don't add up. You need customers who will be looking at the pieces as investments, and not necessarily as decorations. (In which case, I would suggest choosing different images and copy on your site to reflect such a mindset. The pics and copy on the site right now give off an art-as-decor kind of vibe).

My biggest critique is that you seem to be straddling a few lines between customer segments and use cases. I'm sure you have carefully considered exactly whom you're targeting and exactly what problem you're solving for that target. But it's not clear in the layout/UX of the site.
Ask HN: Astrophysics for a guy who can't remember highschool math?
Hi HN!

I've had this unfaltering fascination with astrophysics for years now. I studied CompSci in university and always kind of wished I'd taken more math courses.

I'm at the point now where its not financially responsible of me to go back to school to pursue my passion. So my question is; what online resources would you recommend for a techie who can barely remember his university math, let alone highschool?

More specifically, where can I start(from the beginning) to work towards learning more about astrophysics?

Thanks!
Hacker News March 2nd Edition
How to bring work to a standstill. Minority Report style
Yes, that is damned annoying. They need to stop doing that immediately.
Living abroad, I can definitely see myself in a lot of this.
Blog Post - Why I like Twitter’s Site Streams
https://live.gnome.org/TheBoardProject says:

The Board is a space for quickly placing daily records: photos, video, audio, text, and more. Think of it as a combination of a note-taking app, a photo and video booth, a photo album, a sketching board, and a digital scrapbook.

It would probably be helpful for people new to the concept if that page contained the use cases from the "Adding to the Board" blog post. I know what Cheese is because it is installed on my computer, but if I did not, the link you gave to the project's home page explains that it is a webcam application. I am not sure that the live.gnome.org page is as clear.
The Pipeline is another good 5by5.tv show. It's just interviews made by Dan Benjamin, different people each episode, but it's usually great!
Follow up: Entrepreneur featured on front page of #StartUpBritain speaks out
Simple upvoting/downvoting can't handle the herd voice. Too much text. No time to read it all. Make something actionable to better filter and engage us. Please!

Personally, I want information to inform my actions. I want to make better predictions. Please give me info I can use. Help me sort it. Make me act on it.

I want statements I can agree with, or not. If I'm not sure which, please provide me access to distillable arguments for and against any such statement.

First, I want to very clearly understand what any statement intends to say. Please provide ample means for clarification of such a statement. What is said? What does it mean?

Next, I want to sort and compare reasons to agree or disagree with any such statement. I want to see who agrees or disagrees with such a statement. This is much more valuable to me than the herd voice.

Make it systemic: let broad statements rest on supporting statements, where each statement provides for debate to define whether it is True or Not, Unlikely or Likely.

Something like this might suck less than the bloviating blog/comment/infoglut of yesteryear, especially as the next billion users go mobile.
I'll mark your newsletter as spam in gmail if you don't provide an easy way for me to unsubscribe - preferably without having to remember my account info.
I'd be curious to know how the pieces are secured against damage. Does one need to put down a security deposit while they are in possession of a piece? If so, is it the full cost of the work or some %? If not, how else are the pieces secured against damage?
"Be patient if Americans are ignorant of some aspect about your home country. Use the opportunity to educate and share, just do so in a polite and brief manner."

Citizens of other countries always like to point out how Americans are ignorant of other nations and their cultures, oftentimes failing to realize that within their own nation poverty is rampant and the majority of the population remains illiterate (yes, although I was born American my ethnic background comes from one of these such nations). Yet because of our standing in the world as a superpower, and because so many people from so many countries end up moving here - we are expected to be experts on the cultural sensitivities of all these countries.
Americans are more open and willing to learn, I find, than pretty much any people anywhere in the world.
I run OpenVPN via Linode for $20/month. I've got about 5 friends on it so we just split the costs.

http://library.linode.com/networking/openvpn/
I'm sure this is great for immigrants , but it's just as useful for Americans, like myself living abroad. Before living overseas, I only understood a few vague general distinctions. Knowing your own peculiarities is a good starting point for adaptation.

There's also a link from the page on 'Cultural Adaptation' with great content for anyone interfacing with a second culture.
“Sheep Breeding!” And other fascinating features as Zynga expands Farmville
Well done! Im looking for a png parser in javascript. I would like to load pngs with xmlhttprequest and them draw them on a canvas. Ever heard of one?
Challenge HN: feedback on elevator pitches
Use comment threads to help edit and refine elevator pitches.

Post a your link to your project/start up and your pitch and then give others feedback. Is the pitch clear and easy to understand? Accurate based on looking at the site? Can you suggest better wording? Is it written with the correct audience in mind (e.g. general public vs. hackers)?

Please avoid unconstructive criticism and any feedback relating to the actual project or start up. This is specific to communicating pitches effectively.
I started out using OpenVPN as well. However, the speed and latency was always very bad even though my VPS connection is fast.

After spending too much time trying to figure it out, I decided to just spend just $55/year and use StrongVPN. Added bonus, I can use StrongVPN on my iPad/iPhone!
I like the idea, but going to your site I can't see your value proposition.

Your key differentiator is that you combine hotel+flight prices and you should make that more clear. Also it's not clear if your hotel prices are per person (with the assumption that there's two of you sharing) or per room.

I also agree with several of the other comments that you need to focus on your target audience much more. I'd recommend targeting 20-30 year olds without kids with disposal income who are looking for somewhere to go for the weekend.
Hackers Turn a Gmail Motion April Fool’s Joke Into a Reality with Kinect