skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Design needs work on 2 levels:

User-friendliness

* when using the categories on the left to narrow a search, clicking a category always adds it to the end of the search, even when it's already included, even when it doesn't have any effect.

* likewise, while you can "drill down" by selecting additional narrower categories, you can't back out by selecting a parent category or de-selecting a category.

* the numbers here are off a bit. "Floor Care" gives 97 results, but the category on the left claims 71

These little details can lead to frustration for the user.

Visual Design / Branding

* Particularly considering your target market here, you guys desperately need a visual designer to create an attractive look for your site, and to give your site a feeling. Look for example at http://www.projectwedding.com/. They do a great job of design, where every element of the page is intended to evoke an emotion or association in the mind of the viewer, from their logo to the color scheme, to the (I assume) hand-picked lead imagery for the front page. Of course yours will be different, because your target market is different, but you can get a general idea from them.

* For example, you should not just have text examples, but show the thing that your buyer wants, so they can more easily make the association, and even make the leap to thinking what their home would look like if only they had those drapes &c.

* You also need a name and logo which can mean something to the user. Even non-sense brand names are chosen specifically to evoke an idea or emotion, to make some association. You should pick a name which really communicates what your site is, though not necessarily in direct terms.

I agree with others though, that the site looks promising. Good luck!
Regarding 2 - ever tried Skat? A ridiculously complicated trick taking card game that goes well with moderate amounts of 7 in pubs (at least in Germany).
> If there is no exit planned, then it's not something an investor wants to be involved in.

Buy and hold anyone?
Someone wrote an interesting article once about hiring strategy (Joel?). Basically he didn't want to know anything about the interviewee except what job he was considered for, to the extent that if anyone told him any details (like "Harvard graduate") he'd refuse to interview him, as his perspective would already be tainted.
Looking for work in Web2.0 ?
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing...
Sure it can. both trade deficit and expectations of inflation play very important roles.
Competitions.

Prize can often be trivial/small, but competitions that are fun and involve the userbase often get great response in my experience.
The founder of 4Chan said:

"My personal private life is very separate from my Internet life ... There's a firewall in between." http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/20/internet.go...

and here in this article Jason Fortuny calls himself "a normal person who does insane things on the Internet."

In both cases, they separate their screen lives with their non-screen lives. But, the mind is the same that moves between the two, except that there are two separate levels of morality that habituate according to the mind's sensory context.

So what lies in the mind at the border between the two moralities: shame, fear, hate and intolerance.
Working Long Hours, and Paying a Price
actually, when a circle's diameter is 1, its circumference is π
Firefly: Chat about nothing everywhere...
Another website annotation service. Looks VERY cool but doesn't seem to lead to any useful conversation. Why is that???
Oh I'm sorry, it would seem you got confused on your way to YouTube and ended up here. For the record, the solution to every problem or disagreement isn't "shoot the offender."

It is a quality YouTube-style comment, however; you've even gotten specific as to the type of rifle, suggesting you've given more than a moment's thought to this punishment.

Needs more capital letters and cussing, though.
They did not. "And I try to get better at it everyday," is not a parenthetical phrase. It is a parenthetical phrase and the conjunction "and."

His writing is both stylistically weak and grammatically incorrect. There is no good excuse for overreaching.
I met my boyfriend at a barcamp :)

One thing that helps is a group/mailing list to keep in touch between barcamps. Twitter can be useful too. You don't have to be restricted to one-on-one emails.
Joel went to Penn, didn't he?
i am not sure who is the "idiot" here.

"I called the competitor to ask about him. They verified that yes, he was a former VP there. Awesome, this guy was for real."

even if the guy who responded the call is real, you just never trust a phone call.

if the guy worked on commission why not hire others too on the same manner?

also we don't have any info about the product and why they should prefer it.
It makes for good TV and sells. That's why the press.
I actually found moot's new robot9000 banning algorithm to be interesting. I'd like to hear more about it. Banning people for progressively larger periods of time seems to be a decent idea.
Why You Should Fire Your Clients And Launch A Product
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arrows can be made much more easily than bullets. and yes, broadheads would work against zombies.
Federation.

I read a bit over ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, and the recent and lovely ZeroMQ. As far as I could find, none of them provide federation on a Internet scale. Specially Open Federation using TLS.

I'm a XMPP developer for 6 or 7 years now, and if someone thinks that XMPP is going to replace MQ systems, they are delusional. But for Web integration, XMPP beats the crap out of current MQ systems because of Federation.

Sure, you can get 2.5M messages/sec on ZeroMQ. So what? I've seen personally a XCP XMPP server doing 1M messages per second also. But for internet scale stuff, even slower servers like OpenFire would work just fine for the current loads they are seeing.

It also helps that for scripting languages commonly used (like Perl, Ruby, Python), XMPP bindings are commonly available, while AMQP are still rare. Please please prove me wrong :).

My recommendation for startups? Use a MQ system internally from day one to develop your solution, but use XMPP to talk to the outside world.

RabbitMQ (and I'm suggesting it based only on what I read, I don't use it myself, I use another one) is the best placed MQ system right now, because it offers the bridge between local MQ system and XMPP world.

Best regards,
Give away the idea to several people in the hopes that they hear the idea and want to work on it.
No problem with AMD here. (But that does not mean it's save.)
I'm not in the S.V. area, but I've gradually built a small network of contacts over the last couple of years, doing work for people who refer other people to me.

I recently decided to turn that into a club, and the Nevada County "Solopreneurs" was born. It's pretty new, so not that big yet, but so far everybody likes it. We meet socially once a week for lunch, with plans for an evening potluck with 10-to-15-minute presentations.

Also, you mentioned having unique business cards; I got semitransparent plastic ones. They're tastefully done and they've been worth every penny.
Because it's crass.
"Is there any existing MQ system that is decentralized?"

Yes. http://softwarelivre.sapo.pt/broker/ for example.

But "decentralized" does not mean "federated" which is I think your point.

Best regards,
> said one ex-troll

Once a troll, always a troll.
Another unwelcome change is that the XML you get from, e.g. http://del.icio.us/api/tags/get now comes with a trailing comment containing the date and time. This means periodically downloading your data to store off-del.icio.us results in a growing set of diffs even when none of the real data's changed. E.g.

-<!-- fe02.api.del.ac4.yahoo.net uncompressed Thu Jul 31 02:23:30 PDT 2008 -->
+<!-- fe02.api.del.ac4.yahoo.net uncompressed Fri Aug 1 01:28:35 PDT 2008 -->

Now, I can change my scripts to easily work around this, but should I really have too? Didn't compiler writers learn a long time ago that embedding a timestamp into a object file is a bad idea; far better for it to be determinate for comparison and testing.

P.S. +1 for wanting the old UI back. Sorry, joshu.
Read it again for the first time.

Still, gave me a chance to read through it again. Really well done piece.
Wow, those -x comments get pretty unreadable.
Google Search API
watch an example opensearch.tk
Would like to read that article, but its probably a few bits of anecdotal evidence spun into a trend and story. Also I am lazy and forgot my NYT password.
>>At least when Microsoft came out with Vista I could choose not to upgrade and keep XP. This really sucks!

I think you make a very interesting point. This could be a major problem for online applications, where users are forced to use newer versions even if they prefer not to. Perhaps, as web applications mature, they will start giving users the option of using older versions, although I'm not sure how practical it would be for the developers.
Summertime and the searching ain't easy
New Softphone - Beta release
I don't think there's perfect symmetry. A bad programmer can get stuff done but leave a time bomb of bad code which would be hard for a non-programmer to detect. Sales results are easier to measure than programming.

That said I'd have very little confidence in my ability to measure a salesperson at interview-time.
From wikipedia:

[after the company shut down], CEO Julie Wainwright received $235,000 in severance on top of a $225,000 "retention payment" while overseeing the closure.

At least she felt bad about what happened.
The leading photo is hilarious.
Actually, for me the comment is so sarcastic to the point of being funny (hunter: do you really think that that vigilante act would bring justice or would it be disproportionate?). But, these trollers are lying when they say "look, because we did this, it shows that you should be more alert to people who can also do it but actually intend harm." Or, "we've hurt your feelings, maybe you need to toughen up cupcakes, next time it could concern something that actually mattered." To me, the serious trollers do intend harm for the most part and they say it in this interview. Their excuses are a lie. They are the practical jokers that go overboard, placing white hats over their black hats when things go bad.

I saw a documentary once of a team of people boarding a plane during its refueling and restocking at an airport. They ran down the aisles jumping around. Their message of "look what we can do and no one can stop us" should be taken seriously, and they had then intent to help.

If someone wants to do some white-hat cracking for real benefit, why not announce it before the act has taken place and do it in a way where the recipient can at least first respond and say, "no, we'll do it ourselves" or thanks go ahead. If they ignore such a warning, the cracker can go ahead and at least have some form of recourse. I can't see many crackers doing that anyway, and the whole area's shady. White-hat crackers are usually treated like criminals.
C4[2] Conference speakers announced
That was my question too. I had always thought electrolysis was a non starter for large scale production because of the inefficiencies involved.

Even th article seems to focus on how they invented non-toxic catalysts. It mentions nothing about improving the efficiency of the reaction.
Learn How To Find People
Was looking for a site to do people searches. Found this site. It's a great reference for finding people.
Hu? electolysis makes O2 just fine.
What? You can't make oxygen gas and hydrogen ions at the same time. If you make oxygen gas you also make hydrogen gas. Which is not a big deal, electrolysis is not new.

Not sure what the platinum has to do with it though.
Is the movie industry growing that much over time - or is it just inflation?
Networking is about more than distributing a business card and shaking hands. Don't schmooze. Reframe as "Make new friends" and you'll do well.

When meeting someone new:
- Give yourselves an "official" reason to talk again, e.g. something to follow up on. It can be small like a exchanging a link or two.
- Give them an "unofficial" reason to talk again, e.g. they should want to talk to you again. Be funny/interesting/poised for success.
The obvious question would have been "why is he no longer working for you?".
OK, I tried. I really tried to give them the benefit of the doubt - I mean it's mit.edu, but seriously what they wrote there and what I know of physics have little to do with one another.

I fell like I'm missing a joke somewhere.

First off: what does electrolysis have to do with photosynthesis? If you want to store energy it's just as important with wind, or any other.

Second: photosynthesis and photovoltaics are not the same thing. They seem to confuse them quite a bit. And on top of that, this seems to have nothing to do with either of them - it's all about electrolysis.

Third: "Currently available electrolyzers, which split water with electricity and are often used industrially, are not suited for artificial photosynthesis because they are very expensive and require a highly basic (non-benign) environment that has little to do with the conditions under which photosynthesis operates."

Has so many errors I don't even know where to start.

a: electrolysis does not require a basic environment, it requires a salty one.

b: again mixing up photosynthesis and photovoltaics

c: there is no such a thing as artificial photosynthesis. Only plants know how to make hydrocarbons from water CO2 and light.

If someone actually did manage to create artificial photosynthesis that would be massive. Which is what I hoped to read about here, and then I didn't.

Fourth: they start off saying something about advances in solar power, and well? Where was the advance? All I see is something about electrolysis.

Fifth: "[plants] storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine." Most plants don't actually do that. They don't store energy, they make hydrocarbons, which are not an energy source for them, they are the final product. (For us the hydrocarbon is energy storage.) There is the CAM photosynthesis cycle used by pineapples, which does actually store energy for later. But the only reason the pineapple does that is so that it doesn't dry out during the hot day, so rather it collects it's CO2 at night. This does not seem to apply here.

Someone: please tell me if I missed something massive, but this really looks like the kind of nonsense energy inventions you read about all the time. But, but, but it's on mit.edu!
Mac Cloner Psystar Hires Apple-Busting Law Firm
Web Design Pattern
New Linux file system in development: Tux3
8 things you can do with an ADC to make your apps secure, fast, and available
You wouldn't have the hydrostatic shock that a bullet provides, but if the grey matter disruption of a small-calibre round to the head is sufficient to drop a zombie, a heavy draw bow and a broadhead oughta work, too--and the arrow might be more re-usable than a bullet.
Replacing the WebSphere Apache Plugin with iRules
Disagree with it being modded up? Yes, this is more the type of comment I would expect to be modded up ono Reddit.

Disagree with calling "them" "douche bags"? I don't think I've ever called any one a "douche bag". A regional dialect thing, perhaps.
PowerReviews aims to become the AdSense of product reviews
Commercializing the Cloud
Breaking Free of Outlook
The forgotten Americans who ended in the gulag
Are prospective investors killing your vision or fueling your fire?
Actually, it's Randall Munroe's: http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-at...
I hope you appreciate the difference between the abrasive, obsessive perfectionist with a drive to create something great and the competent employee who gets along well with everyone and always put the needs of the many above the desires of the one.

Both are needed for great companies. Only one is needed for great software. See also: Linus Torvalds' emails ;-)

p.s. As I read the OP, this was about a situation where editing the original actually changed the desired behaviour. So the example I would have chosen would be that a code reviewer, instead of firing back a question about the one-liner, changes it without any discussion. And breaks the application. Whereas you seem to be discussing a hypothetical case where changing something from one to six lines has no effect on the resulting functionality.
Toyota's Winglet aims to usurp Segway
Well, the article says that there may be underlying neurological causes. Of course, an archer would probably lose their confidence and focus once they know their arm muscles might lock up at any time and make them fire before they can aim properly.
10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List
Now everyone wants to cloud compute
How To Recover From Windows Vista Crashes
Combinator Birds
No time to think?
I think they mean Bill Gosper [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gosper]...
Man, I remember when that guy first came up. He was a monster. Should have seens his Triple A stats that year. It was to the tune of 40 walks and 200+ strikeouts. The guy had velocity and control...but went out like smoke afterwards. Tsk tsk
So you think she wasn't really depressed? Lot's of people are depressed, even though their living circumstances don't seem to warrant it. Boo fucking hoo?

Maybe it is just a variant of what is described in "Fooled By Randomness" about this guy who was being on of the top earners of the country, but because he lived in a neighborhood of even richer people, he still felt like a loser. All relative?
I was prepared! I read a lot of books!

lol

Books, articles, conferences, websites, etc. can all be excellent sources of good data to run your business (especially for us techies).

Just don't make the mistake of substituting them for experience in the trenches. That would be like taking a pill for exercise. (Now if someone could just invent an exercise pill or a book as good as actually doing it...)
Standalone RPMs available for Eucalyptus (V1.2)
My guess is that as the web matures, there will be some places populated mainly by trolls, like /b/, and that everywhere else will evolve protections against them.

I haven't been to Burning Man, but it doesn't sound like it's a complete free for all. Doesn't it have customs banning certain types of asshole behavior?
Hopefully they fix the usability issues they introduced quickly. I'm a long time user and I might bail. More feedback here:

"Suggestions and ideas: What do you dislike about the new design?"
http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID...

Maybe contact Bernard as well:

Bernard Kerr, lead designer user experience designer @ delicious
http://infosthetics.com/archives/2008/04/bernard_kerr_yahoo_...
If you're interested in Forth, check out the online Thinking Forth book project: http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/ With the author's permission, several people collectively scanned and re-typeset the book because they didn't want it to stay out of print. (Quite a complement, for any author!)

TF is a really eloquent distillation of what Forth has taught the author about keeping programs maintainable, well-organized, and concise. Most of its techniques (often called "factoring") are applicable in almost any language, and it often reads like a predecessor to Martin Fowler's _Refactoring_. (The ideas spread from the Forth community to Smalltalkers over the fifteen years between the two.)
Cuil Needs To Fix Its Technology Before It Can Get Hot
Chosr: Quicksilver interface in the Web
Speaking of which, what are you guys using for shared calendaring? Google Apps? I'm still a little leery of tying business data / processes like that to a we-own-the-internet company. I've thought about Bongo, perhaps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bongo_%28software%29).
Well, Connecticut does have a significant number of investors for pharmaceutical products and other life sciences startups - but not much for the web.

See https://www.pwcmoneytree.com/MTPublic/ns/nav.jsp?page=region...
You can't reuse bullets.
8 tips on how to survive a prison stay...
People don't get hired just because they know people

wanna bet ;)
I didn't know Olin Shivers was on Hacker News. Welcome, Olin!

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/autoweapons.html
Apple iPods and Supplies - iPod, iPod Mini, iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle
Wow, are there more of these?
Bijan Sabet: Techmeme vs Hacker News
From what I have seen...

Client business:

* Often end up with 100 projects doing 1 unit of work.

* Often repetitive (new client, but same old ecommerce/CMS site).

* Often low progression in adopting new tech as most clients usually go for safe bets and don't like risk (even today, many still do not understand incorporating social networks and user generated content into their site models).

Product business:

* Often focus on 1 product with 100 units of work. Hence better quality result, more crafted and focused.

* Often of greater value to the market (when it is something people want).

* Each iteration actively builds upon past learning more so than in most client models.
Open source text readability code (PHP)
Unless someone is listed as a reference, you're not allowed to ask about job performance, reasons for leaving, etc. You can only contact to verify that the person did actually work there and when.
Sad stories. It's interesting, that similarly how Western media painted a distorted picture of Soviet communist regime, they now paint a distorted picture of China communist regime. The same deception tactics still works, the existence of forced labors camps (gulags) is very rarely mentioned, horrible human rights abuses go unreported in mainstream media, etc.

When will mankind learn their lessons?
Right. Too bad the author took every piece of advice from the Guerilla Guide except that one.
I think "unit circle" means a circle with a radius of 1, not a diameter of 1: http://everobotics.org/projects/roboMagellan/img/UnitCircle....
Ecrio's Revolutionary Cell Phone Applications Could Change How America Shops
Same here. I guess it's because their preferred URL uses a hyphen between the words.

I wonder how long it took them to realize that their website had an unfortunate name? It had to be after the name was in use, because "Expert Exchange" doesn't have the same problem.
I think that is true, but I think that it's only later versions of Python (2.5+, maybe?) that allow you to omit the parenthesis. I've had earlier versions (2.3?) complain of a syntax error when I leave them out.
Funny that with all that (decades of success and one public fiasco), she still wasn't happy. That's a great lesson that all the success in the world made her overweight and with a crumbling marriage, but a humiliating public crash caused her to find herself and joy in life. I wish her the best, and it sounds like she's going to get it.
Even with a reference, employers will often be reluctant to dish actual dirt, for a variety of reasons, from pity to legal liability. You have to read between the lines and be up on your euphemisms.
Childrens magic key
Do you have any idea how many people are "wallowing in self-pity" and do need to "get over it"?

Why should she write about the Pets business failure? It's on her site SmartNow, which in the bio says: "She founded SmartNow.com last year to help women help themselves." I don't think people coming to the site care about sustainable revenues, cost structures, brand management, etc. But seeing a successful woman take a hard knock and pull herself together better than ever might be interesting.
Okay, so half a million dollars above and beyond her no doubt titanic salary and she's still depressed. I can believe that easily. Our happiness doesn't have much relationship to our financial status.

So perhaps it would have cheered her up to donate half of it to a charity operating in the third world. $500,000 will buy a whole lot of anti-malarial medication, mosquito netting, goats, and microloans.