skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the non-programmer this is something of a catch 22. Unfortunately ideas guy's are a dime a dozen. And it really just isn't hard to have new ideas. The hard part is separating the good ideas from the bad ones.

For a programmer you can usually mock up something in a weekend - or maybe a month - enough to either validate or kill the idea. Unfortunately the non-programmer typically has to;
a) find a programmer
b) explain the idea
c) hang around while it gets implemented
then
d) when it doesn't work, throw some new parameter into the mix and repeat from step (b).

All to often the ideas guy just keeps having ideas on how to turn things around. So a bad idea can have a life all of its own. Meanwhile the programmer of course isn't getting paid, and there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel.

So catch 22 - ideas are nothing without the programmer - the programmer would rather work on his own ideas.

If I had a nickle for each person who comes to me with an idea for fixing credit-card fraud, or for eradicating spam, or for some other boil-the-ocean scheme, well, I'd have $1.75...

Basically a founder needs to have either cash, or a skill that an early startup needs. And unfortunately no, it doesn't need a lawyer, or a salesman, or a marketing bloke, or, dare I say it, an "ideas guy".

I'm not sure what the OP was - but it's hard to convince a programmer when all you bring to the table is an idea.
I wouldn't put "economists" on the same intelligence level with "hackers".

Most economists -- I wouldn't trust. In a similar way that I wouldn't trust most politicians.
Public Internet Inhibiting Exploration
People cry not because Love ends but because…
Free software isn't at odds with capitalism. In fact, right of property is what makes free software possible (otherwise you couldn't enforce any free software license).
Run Node.js as a Service on Ubuntu
I don't think the guy who ranted about bitcoin using the gold standard is an economist because from reading what he writes it's clear he had no clue of what he was talking about.
Your viewpoint is only sensible if one is neutral or negative toward capitalism and assumes everyone else must be as well. If you think capitalism is a good thing, then of course something being at odds with it is problematic.
Free software isn't at odds with capitalism (you don't have to extract monetary profit from everything you do in capitalism). Neither is bitcoin. Government-controlled paper money, on the other hand, definitely is at odds with free market.
All economies are built on some combination of trust, fakery, coercion and hard work. The underlying rationale of a currency backed by "real material" is that it can be trusted to last. It can be trusted more than any government. Governments can fall quickly.

Bitcoin hasn't proven itself to the degree of gold. It doesn't necessarily have to, though. It just has to look _better_ than alternatives, within some useful timeframe of economic activity(i.e. more than a year or two, but probably less than a century). And, as the original author wrote, it might fall apart suddenly, but then it is basically the same risk as a government-backed currency.
What's wrong with Indian startup scene?
Empirical study of HN: Best time to post, and other time-effects
GPL is a hack; its existence is not an approval of the system in any way, shape or form.

That's not the point though.

Whether Free Software is at odds (or not) with capitalism shouldn't matter at all in any intelligent discussion.
You're lucky it's not in the Microsoft PDF killer format: XPS!

Still, I always wondered why they keep publishing stuff like this in a "working" format (doc, odt...) instead of a "distribution" format (ps, pdf...) .
African Food Store
I'm oversimplifying here, but it all boils down to Keynesian economics[1] (steaming rant) vs Austrian economics[2] (this submission) if anyone wants to dig deeper in the subject.

tl;dr: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school
"If you think capitalism is a good thing, then of course something being at odds with it is problematic."

Something can be problematic but that still doesn't make it a bad idea. It might be a brilliant idea which challenges you to modify your viewpoint - perhaps you end up questioning the particular form of capitalism which you think is good. Perhaps you end up endorsing your former viewpoint and discarding the new idea. hasenj's point is perfectly valid: "If an idea is at odds with capitalism, that doesn't necessarily make it a bad idea" (even if it might be problematic).
Poll: Which is your 'test connection page'?
Whenever you're done with fixing up with new hardware or tinkering around some network settings, which is the first page you open when you launch your browser to test if you're internet connection is working fine?
Search engine (google.com)
Search engine (yahoo.com)
Search engine (duckduckgo.com)
Search engine (bing.com)
Some random query in your browser to trigger redirection to your default search engine (Select this even if your default search engine is one of the first four options)
Some network speed testing
I generally have to check for LAN connectivity only
Even if you think it's a great idea; it's still possible to be ok with new good ideas even if they happen to be at odds with capitalism.

For instance, I think Open Source is a great idea, but this alone is not good enough reason to think that selling iPhone apps is evil.

Acting very cautious and defensive around capitalism makes it look like a holy untouchable ideology; this is what annoys me.
>Have a look a Baidu, Maxthon and the warehouses full of copycat iPads.

Innovation is insanely hard. It rarely happened at all for thousands of years. It seems to me that the Chinese are being efficient here. Rather than waste time trying to out-Apple Apple they copy known-good solutions. What do we lose by them doing this? Are we upset that China has a bunch of money and we think it should belong to us?

>When a US company wants to do business in China, they are forced to take Chinese "partners."

Lots of places have similar protectionism [1].

[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ncn-acW...

Search for: "The reason why I asked this, is because foreigners are not allowed to legally own businesses here in Japan. More often than not, they will have a Japanese national listed as the owner or President of their company."
>I don't because I am not chinese and will not share in the wealth of such enterprising behaviour.

So you want them to remain poor and primitive just because you can't cash in on their success? That's... not very nice.
This is not RMS's point of view.

RMS doesn't care if you give him back your changes; he cares that you have the freedom to make any changes you wish. He wants you to be free from artificial restrictions imposed by copyright laws. He doesn't care if you share your changes with him.
From each of these different things like this I have seen, even people that get unbanned (rare) don't seem to know why. Although FWIW I have never used Facebook for anything.
I think that the web has made the "dark side" of H1B more widely known. H1B holders often feel like indentured servants. There are many stories of people who slaved away for years while trying to get a Green Card but didn't get one in the end. Also , post 9-11, with the associated paranoia and security hassles, living a plane flight away from your extended family, especially in the US, would seem far less attractive. Its a pity because there are some great tech opportunities in the US right now. My solution would be , the US needs a better tech visa program where people have a chance to stay in the US on a more equal footing with Americans (and thereby become employers themselves, which helps Americans too). Also the US needs to stop treating every normal innocent visitor like they're a potential threat of some kind.
> 10 years ago ... websites were of laughable quality

Did anyone have a reasonable-looking website in 2001? How is that an American phenomenon?

> Now, I can only dream of Europe having things like America's NetFlix, Internet industry, smart phone usage, creative restaurants, hotels, and much more.

The service industry is the only thing left throughout America, so it's no wonder it's the only one where innovation is taking place.
Micromax 2 Bling - a Android smartphone for the fairer sex
Micromax 2 Bling - an entry-level terminal with Swarovski crystals accompanied by an elegant clutch bag with integrated mirror.
"Old" in China is several hundred years different than "old" in San Francisco, unless you're in Muir Woods.
If Security in the Cloud were Handled Like Car Accidents
Just on a brief look at BitCoin the question I have is generating blocks of bitcoins which requires computational power earns 50 bitcoins. Firstly that seems fairly arbitrary but secondly, what would happen if the currency became commonly used and a large company with a lot of computational power decided to get involved i.e google / facebook / microsoft. Wouldn't they end up monopolising a large portion of the bitcoins?
Car Rental Agra India
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The Idea of a Private Law Society (2006)
Interesting page, but this part is a bit hard to believe:

There is no tech labor shortage. No study, other than those sponsored by the industry, has
ever shown a shortage. Wages, both for new graduates and established professionals, have
been flat or falling in the engineering and programming fields (adjusted for inflation).
Employers hire only a tiny fraction of those who apply. HR departments routinely exclude CVs
of applicants they deem "too expensive"--those that are over age 35. (So managers never see
these CVs, and mistakenly believe there are no applicants.)

The argument about ageism might well be true. However, I don't think it's going to be easy to find high quality software engineers, especially if you exclude the all the foreign students graduating from the top-25 or so CS programs in the country
You're right in the sense that the free software movement as advocated by Richard Stallman is at odds with capitalism. I really meant "Open source software isn't at odds with capitalism".

But I don't think we should exclude the capitalism debate from an intelligent discussion since it has pretty huge implications. If you're advocating a system that is incompatible with capitalism, you have to first make the case for an alternative to capitalism.
Technically, BitCoin is hardly scalable.
As every participant needs to be aware of every transaction, that gives O(N^2) computational/storage cost, assuming N is participants and transactions~participants.
May be cured by a dedicated central server storing all the transactions, but then it is not P2P anymore.
Interesting that you didn't mention something that overlaps with this substantially:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2022547
How OpenID works | Clickpass Documentation
Revenue is going to have a long tail for MS because it takes so long to migrate from one system to another. I think looking at revenue and saying "see, they're still growing! Everything's fine" is a mistake. The important questions are; how much of that revenue is from threatened markets (not just from competitors but from obsolescence as well)? How fast are their new markets growing (they are having success here with at least XBox)?
Perhaps, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try. I'm also unsure how much of an interest the government has in killing it.

Bitcoins are not inherently anonymous, and in some ways it makes things easier for law enforcement, because all transactions are public and accessible without the need for a warrant. The hard part would be matching a Bitcoin address to an individual or organization, but maintaining anonymity against a determined investigator is hard, and requires a high degree of technical expertise to pull off. I don't think Bitcoins actually make things any harder to find criminals.
I think they count on Moore's law.
Samoa to jump forward in time by one day
Incidentally, Bitcoin will be discussed on Tuesday's This Week in Startups @TWiStartups

http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/

"Oh yes, we'll talk about poker and #bitcoin on Tuesday's #TWIST. Guest Amir Taaki has experience w/this business model."
http://twitter.com/#!/TWistartups/status/66565296550457344

I'm assuming the host will be @Jason Calicanis.
I received spam from you on my email, scraped from HN. Please don't do that.
Beautiful set of Google Doodles today, remembering cartoonist Roger Hargreaves
Again, Open Source is not at odds with capitalism. Capitalism doesn't mean making money or selling stuff. In fact, charities aren't at odds with capitalism. Did you know that Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Whales, is a libertarian?
The Rise of the Front-End Developer
A good description of why that won't happen comes from a comment made on HN a week ago by Construct.

"Meanwhile, hardware enthusiasts all over the internet are rushing to buy GPUs to dedicate to mining. They don't seem to realize that the bitcoin system automatically adjusts to keep the bitcoin generation rate constant at 50 BTC per 10 minutes. As the mining market becomes flooded with new 'miners' the difficulty will climb rapidly, until it becomes unprofitable to run a GPU if you have to pay for electricity."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2501154
I generally head here, to HN - the dynamic content means I know it's a new page not a cache on my machine, which concerns me with other pages. It also loads reasonably fast, so I have an answer either way without too much hassle.
Keep in mind the coverage a few weeks ago that indicated there are some automated/judgement-less processes at Facebook, based on number of complaints/flags, that can take Pages down. See for example:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2494231

So don't assume Facebook has already judged you; as soon as someone there looks at it, it may get fixed. (Sucks in the meantime, but like Google and Craigslist, outsourcing lots of the moderation to the semi-anonymous masses can generate collateral damage even if it usually is a win.)
Advantages of Custom Software Development Services
Now-a-days, custom software development services are increasing. One of the main reasons that this kind of flexibility offered to every single company is required to update and change their functions with the modern era.
Are you a Northampton Townie who got the irresistible urge to migrate to to Portland, Oregon?
Since I work for a producer of STPP (the phosphate ingredient in detergents, usually not TSP) I can agree on the whole with this article. Governments around the world are banning phosphates from domestic detergents to prevent water eutrophication (algal blooms etc.). However, domestic applications account for no more than 2% of the problem, the remaining 98% come from human waste (crap) and agriculture (both phosphate fertilizer and animal waste).

It is therefore rather "symbolic politics" with politicians trying to get a "greener image" on this issue, rather than actually fixing the environment.

What's more, sewage treatment plants could also reclaim phosphate from wastewater and collect it to be recycled, this would close the cycle.

But this probably won't happen, right now governments are looking at banning STPP from automatic dishwasher detergents as well, and industrial and institutional cleaners are next. So you can expect a lot dirtier dishes soon as well.

For more information you can check out http://www.ceep-phosphates.org/ which is the European lobby for phosphate producers. They have some good background information on this.
Thanks for noting this. I added a link to it from the post.
Picasa Web Albums: free photo sharing from Google
I agree with Stuk, data visualisation is all about capturing the users attention and interest besides giving out information . Maybe its not apt for a police station soft board but a junior school teacher on the other hand might find it useful
When you add the tablespoon of TSP be sure to handle it carefully:

http://www.inchem.org/documents/icsc/icsc/eics1178.htm
Bitcoins are only generated every 10 minutes (on average), so it would probably not be worth it for a company to dedicate a huge cluster of computers to it. At most they could earn 50 BTC/10 minutes, no matter how much computing power they'd throw at it.

It get's more interesting if a company could calculate blocks faster than all the other nodes combined. Then that company could forge the complete chain of transactions.

I think there are even numbers floating around in the BitCoin forums as to how much it would cost to build such a server farm atm. So yeah - with enough money you could ruin BitCoin, but why would you be motivated to do so? Also, it gets harder every day, as the network of nodes grows.
Life is cruel. You have one piece of toilet paper. Will you use it for yourself or give to a stranger?
Try asking on Quora. It's a longshot, but there are a couple of people on Facebook who check it regularly.
Do you have any guesses why you were banned?

Maybe Facebook has the impression that all the Pokemon videos available on your site are copyright violations or something? I'm not sure whether that kind of stuff is illegal to host where you are but it's the kind of thing that companies seem to care about these days.
Laundry detergent used to contain "STPP" TSP is not common https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sodium_tripol...
Nope they don't know your password, they just have the salted hash.
> He doesn't care if you share your changes with him.

Well, he does care if you make your changes available to the users of your software so that they too can make the changes they need. That's the whole point of the license, or you should just use MIT/BSD.
You need to get in touch with an account manager. They're actually really easy to deal with if you know the right combination of words, as with most things.

We managed to get a clients FB page vanity URL switched from an old page to a new page within about half an hour of sending an email - something we thought was a long shot.

Hit me up if you need a hand, my email is in my profile.
How to manage your programmers 
Just a short guide how to improve morale and results in your team. Because the fact that we use Agile processes doesn't mean we are no longer a human beings.
As an appreciator of vintage BSTJ issues (in particular the 1948 C.E.Shannon vehicles ;-), I liked this bit:

[...] it was widely argued that a single page and a single table from the November 1960 edition of The Bell System Technical Journal -- in fact, this page and this table [1], triggered the rise of telephone network hopping “phone phreaks” [...]

[1] http://lauren.vortex.com/bstj-bluebox.jpg
well spoken!

But most importantly, always remember that the three most important components of your computer really are:

* your chair

* your input devices (mouse/keyboard/…)

* your monitor

Also, if you feel that your computer is getting a bit slow, consider updating your hard drive (possibly to an SSD) before shelling out a far greater amount of money for a new computer.
Might be worth a (2008) flag, especially if any of Alex's opinions have changed inbetween.
If someone still didn't get it - the whole original post was a hilariously executed troll. The author very clearly states this:

"See, a bitcoin rant is almost too over-the-top for me. Asking why I think bitcoin won't work is like asking why the sky isn't red. I mean, wait, you think it is red? You actually took that seriously? Oh boy. Where do I even start?"

"For the record, I'm stupid and trolling. That's why it was hard to tell."
An anoying article. The author rants at length about how evul the gubmint is for banning clean shirts, calls "trisodium phosphate" "a natural element" which cannot be correct chemically correct, and falls for the "natural must be safe" falacy. He totally fails to even mention the reasoning that led, rightly or not, to this chemical compound being no longer used, never mind adding up pros and cons of it.

The first para at wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trisodium_phosphate ) is more informative, which is a damning lack of reasearch.
To me, it's interesting that almost no discussion of the H-1B touches on another topic that is widely discussed, too, but in it's own mindspace : the U.S. is now a scary place. The eager use of tasers by the police and the presence of the TSA goons on trains and buses in addition to airports add unpleasant possibilities to the anti-immigrant sentiment (not to mention the moral questions about the whole War on Terror, Guantanamo, etc;). I have never heard of instances of immigrants getting tased just for looking different, for example, but these are things to consider when immigrating to a new country : are they friendly, are they peaceful? Do I want to be associated with them? Am I that unhappy in my own situation that I really need to go to such a place?
sigh couldn't come at a more appropriate time for me. Alas, isn't these three contradictory:

* Use as little software as possible.

* Use software that does one thing well.

* Do not use software that does many things poorly.

I have a "good enough" workstation with 4GB of memory. No matter how much tweaking I do to eclipse.ini, Eclipse still crawls to an halt when I work on our large Java project... Alas, I can't just change it to VIM + command line svn. It would be a mess.
Programmable OLED watch by Texas Instruments and Fossil
If I had to guess I would wager that this is a result of someone sharing a video that had some naked ladies in it, and some other users then flagged that as spam/abuse. So it was completely automated probably.
Just a clarification for those (like me) who didn't get it:

A logistic curve is basically an S-shaped curve, also known as a sigmoid.
Do you expect a response at 3AM on Monday morning in Facebook's main time zone?
I think free software is at odds with certain capitalistic ideas:

As a private owner of a "production" factory, you have control over your products, and through this control you gain profit.

Contrast this with communism, which views private control over things which are needed by the public (like food) as a bad idea because the person in charge gets to limit the freedom of others (or some idea similar to that).

Free Software is similar in this regard: software is ubiquitous, and so it's unethical (according to the philosophy of the FSF) to let it be under the control of corporations. Apple has complete control over iPhones, and they decide what you can and cannot do with it: this is "evil", according to FSF's philosophy.

From a purely capitalistic point of view: a software developer gets an incentive to create and evolve software if it was closed source and hard to crack so that he could sell it and get profit. From a market perspective, this is more efficient.

But, from RMS's perspective, market efficiency shouldn't matter here because the act of putting artificial restriction on software usage is unethical.

While I don't agree with RMS about this thing being necessarily unethical in and of itself; I do find his arguments very compelling, and I'm inclined to say that it's best if one was able to make money doing open source. However, I think one has to be realistic, and in reality developers need money, and so it's ok to sell closed apps (as in iPhone apps, or SaaS webapps like 37signals).

As you can see, my position doesn't have anything to do with capitalism as an ideology.
Mobile Photo Apps Will Kill The Desktop App
FB's practices are well known and should've served as a warning. You shouldn't rely on this being resolved now. I ain't saying it won't be resolved in a good way, but just don't rely on it.

Even if your page is restored, think about alternative marketing channels. Don't make yourself depend on the services of one attractive but unereckonable company.