skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some of my favorite quotes from the great man:

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.”

“Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.”

“When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.”

“The one and only substitute for experience which we have not ourselves had is art, literature”

“I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances -- from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.”

And finally, an excerpt from "The Gulag Archipelago"... on how to resist fascism & tyranny. The lesson that's just as important today as it was half a century ago.

"During an arrest, you think since you aren’t guilty, how can they arrest you? Why should you run away? And how can you resist right then? After all, you’ll only make your situation worse; you’ll make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake. And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! We didn’t love freedom enough. Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself."
If you do announce something, don't call it a 'launch' call it an 'alpha.' When you do a beta, call it a beta. Don't use the word launch until you're ready, b/c any news is going to say "But you launched in August! What's new?" and all you can say is "We're out of beta" or something like that.
that is fantastic feedback bootload, thanks a lot mate!
I've upgraded you (login:bootload) to premium as a gesture of the thanks.

jase
The Austin Wiltshire quote was interesting - I don't imagine YC is doing much better than break even at this point.
Field Guide to Genetic Programming (Free Book)
Supporting a free language study application?
Wow, all it seems that I do is ask Hacker News for advice. And this is long, so I apologize in advance.

Anyhow, I've written a web-based language study application that will be in beta for the next month or so. The application is a vocabulary-list manager that uses adaptive psychological modeling (similar to SuperMemo) to provide for rapid assimilation of new vocabulary, as well as a bunch of built-in dictionary data and NLP magic to manage individual user’s study lists, all with a dead-simple workflow.

I use it to retain vocabulary from books that I read in Japanese, as I just need to throw the words I’ve had to look up, as well as the occasional example sentence, into a big text box, hit ‘submit’, and the system handles everything for me. I don’t need to look up words in a dictionary, or manage a big pile of flashcards. I don’t even need to add examples if I don’t want to, because there’s a quarter-million of them pre-loaded into the database.

My application also automatically adds new words that appear on language proficiency exams, based on vocabulary that I’ve already added, and the system is smart enough to provide alternate drill methods for things like kanji, grammar, and so on. The system is modular, so it can be used for languages other than Japanese; a friend of mine is writing a Chinese language module, and I’m going to write an English module after I finish with the Japanese-specific bits.

I've been studying with this application for just a few weeks now, after taking nearly a year off from studying Japanese, and the results have been fantastic. A handful of other people have also started using it with similarly positive results, and I can honestly say this is the best study tool I’ve ever used.

So, here's the problem: I don't want to monetize this application and turn this into a 'product'. Most of the magic, including all the NLP tools and language data, have been produced by other researchers, and I think it would be a bit hypocritical to make use of their freely-available work, and not be willing to give back to the community.

Having just graduated from school, however, I am far from wealthy, and so it would be nice if the application paid for its own hosting costs. A lot of data-munching happens on the back-end, so the system will require a dedicated EC2 instance.

I don’t want to use ads, because they would just distract people when they’re trying to study, and relying on donations from college students doesn’t seem like a solid game-plan, either.

So, I was thinking of offering the application on a low-cost subscription basis. People can try the system out for free for a month or so, and if they feel that it is a useful study aid, pay a small fee (around $20) for a yearly subscription.

Does this sound like a sensible plan, or can anybody offer some other good ideas for covering the hosting costs for an otherwise free application?
An inspirational man. Another quote:

"If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?"
"Why would any company rely on a yet to be successful rocket to launch them into space?"

2 of the 3 payloads, PreSat and NanoSail-D, were paid for by NASA.

With NASA retiring the shuttle in a 2010, the Falcon rockets are looked upon as the next generation of rockets before NASA's Constellation program begins in 2014.

Bottom line: NASA is re-positioning itself to help private industry succeed even if the risks are high.
Really? That's one of the last things I think about when using new services or products.
Powernapping achieves much of the same (atleast for me). So if for some reason you are unable to take sleep, at least be sure to try and fit in a ~20min powernap. The benefits can be surprising.
Any idea how the attacker is getting the browser to run an image, presumably in an <img> tag, as a java applet? Or maybe it only works if you view the image directly and the browser decides it's an applet by sniffing the contents?
Anousheh Ansari, first female private space participant, founded and sold Telecom Technologies, inc.
I know folks who work on neural imaging. Let me assure you that to call sleep "an observable process" is a big exaggeration. Stars are much easier to observe than the details of your brain at work. Indeed, the reactions which drive stars are easier to see, understand, and simulate than a single neuron is.

It's not the size or the distance -- it's the complexity. I'm not saying that astrophysics is easy, but it's a lot less complex than the brain. Your brain is the most complicated thing in the universe... as far as we know.
My tae kwon do master states the same:

"Slow, well done, steady."

[as opposed to aerobics shake-it-all with music "gymnastics"]
Don't agree with the generalisation. Probably more to do with fact Mixi is a better cultural fit and captures more of the essence and behavioural traits of the people.
Wikipedia (updated moments after the news broke):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn
good suggestion :)
we have import from csv, but you're right - import from supermemo and eqiv would be a useful feature.

thanks
PreSat - http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/smallsats/PRESat.html

NanoSail-D - http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/smallsats/nanosaild.html
It's always sad when a post like this happens.
This is an interesting but fairly esoteric point. It requires the following to be true

1. The bluffer knows some secret information that is not known by other participants.

2. All other market participants must believe the the bluffer is acting on secret information by their bet.

In a market with many users and anonymous trading I can't see it being worth the risk to bluff. There are bound to be traders out there who will simply accept your money when you bet for the 'impossible' result and any money you make by betting the other way is not likely to compensate.

With non-anonymous trading it is possible that a trader with a high reputation could pull this off but they would damage their reputation in the process.
Great feedback, even if it isn't my application! I'll try and keep these in mind before I launch things...
While I am all in to prevent further damage to Earth ecosystems and to fix whatever has been broken, and to switch to renewable energy, lets not forget the Russian scientist predicting an imminent new small ice age akin to that of the middle ages, related to the Sun's emission cycles. We may end up needing to pump CO2 to the atmosphere in purpose.
I've written a similar system specifically tailored to learning foreign languages, so I'm definitely interested in taking a closer look at what you've produced.
Twitter will kick themselves for missing this
some good points.
I really like your comment about knowing the schedule for a deck. We do have an overview in the train page, and some more information in the stats page, but a clear visualization of a decks complete schedule would be a great addition.

thanks.
yeah, the video of DHH's talk at startup school influenced the team a lot!
sorry about that, out email broke. should be working fine now.
"... thanks a lot mate! I've upgraded you (login:bootload) to premium as a gesture of the thanks ..."

Aw gee you didn't have to. But I'll see how I can make use of it. One idea I've had is could you use the flash cards as a sort of measurable help system? Anyway thanks. Keep up the features.
All I can say is, thanks for all the feedback! This is really useful stuff...
However, your How can anything manage to be this incoherent, ignorant, dysfunctional did not sound right to me

You forgot "personally ugly" :)

Actually that phrase doesn't sound right to me now, either. I was focusing on whether the words were individually accurate, and I still think they are. But put together, they come across as heavy-handed. I see why you got the impression you did.

Usually I edit to the point where you might call it pathological, but not enough that time!
The definition I like is that you must fix at least 3k bugs before a public Alpha. Looks like you're 1k short, buddy.
There's no such thing as rocket science. Rocket science is a dozen or more sciences all jumbled up together, each of which has to be executed perfectly just to get into orbit. Then the hard part begins.

Much respect to NASA and the mars lander programs.
Startonomics Conference - Dave McClure
"Sometimes quality.."
I guess you mean quantity
I don't think I can edit it now. I'd guess it's because it's not a direct link, so it bypassed the pdf logic. Apologies.
Very good advice. You are absolutely right. I did not think of that.

Thank you very much.
I plan to tell my children, once they are old enough, not to get tattoos. The reason being is that you will force your 35 year old self to live branded with what your 16 year old self thought was cool.

On second thought, tattoos can be erased by laser, Myspace might be much more permanent...
> And finally, an excerpt from "The Gulag Archipelago"... on how to resist fascism & tyranny. The lesson that's just as important today as it was half a century ago.

Although fascism and Communism are pretty darn close (both seek total control of the economy and the culture), let's not forget that he was specifically writing against a Communist system, not a fascist system.

It's shocking that the BBC link doesn't even use the word "Communism" in it once. Can you imagine an article on someone who stood up to Hitler without using the word Nazi once?

Perhaps Solzhenitsyn can shed some light on that?:

"For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Solzhenitsyn

"Instead of blaming Russian conditions, he blamed the teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, arguing Marxism itself is violent. His conclusion is Communism will always be totalitarian and violent, wherever it is practiced. There was nothing special in the Russian conditions which affected the outcome."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn

I suggest we honour Solzhenitsyn's life by actually not avoiding focusing his criticism directly at Communism and more generally at Totalitarianism.
Sure,

To find those more 1k bugs to fix I would need to open it to some users. We are testing it almost everyday and now are unable to uncover more bugs.
I mean bugs will always be there. Windows XP has lot of bugs.
As I am advised by others, at one point if you feel codes is stable enough, you need to open it to get more feedback.
I've actually read the entire "Gulag". Anyone else here...?
He's referring to government rationing and fold-up houses while being bombed by the Axis forces? Yea, people were just loving life back then. I wonder what England's energy expenditures were to drive the military.
Clearly his post was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. But then again it's hard to read someone's intentions without the <tongue-cheek></tongue-cheek> tag. Maybe it will be released once Arc has smiley support.

Edit:
Japanese don't love Perl they love RUBY!
Yes, we did http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=259524
I think your suggestion is good. But knowing people they're going to be pretty diplomatic about their answer as well. Spitting out generic schlips that you already know. I guess the best advice is Iron_ball's. Just try to read between the lines, but thinking about it, even that method is a stretch :-(
Perhaps the submission page could have a PDF checkbox with the default state taken from the PDF autodetection function? This way we could correct the autodetection when it fails. Also it would ensure a uniform title "tagging" style.

Now that I think about it we could have radio buttons: Regular, PDF, Movie, Picture.
Holy layout tables batman! The UI looks like Craig's list with a little Web 2.0 gloss... not very modern to me.
fixed close to 2k bugs

* blink *

How much code do you have? I've been writing code for my own startup for about 20 months, and after 25k lines of code I'd say I've fixed maybe 50 bugs in total.
This is why I love my freedom to bear arms.

That amendment isn't for hunting--it's for homicide. It is for invaders and secret policemen.
As far as I can see, there is nothing wrong with your plan. So, in the absence of anything to say but "go for it!", let me work on your philosophy a little.

When you say:

I don't want to monetize this application and turn this into a 'product'.

You're wrong. That's exactly what you want to do. That's exactly what you're planning to do.

There's nothing wrong with that. There's certainly nothing hypocritical about that. Yes, "most of the magic" was built by other people, but that's true of everything we do in life. Most of my professional tools were built by other people. A lot of them are products, but some are open-source projects. Linus Torvalds is a much smarter programmer than I, and he works a lot harder, and (thank god) I get to use his freely-available work without paying him, and then I get to charge money for doing so. Because Linus gave it to me for that very purpose! (And I'm very grateful.)

I'm saying this because you sound like someone who is used to thinking of his time as cheap -- and like you can't quite believe that this thing you've built is a "real" product. (Which it is; it sounds more real than 50% of the products on the web.) And I wouldn't want to see you do something silly, like price your product without considering the cost of (e.g.) your time. [1] You need to be paid for the development time you've put in, and for the maintenance time you're going to put in, and for the opportunity cost of keeping this thing alive instead of devoting all of your time to some other project. Otherwise, you will ultimately abandon this project and go do something else -- something that will make a profit for you, and pay you a living wage, and let you go to conferences and take people out on dates.

What I'm trying to say is: Embrace the fact that you're going into business, and take it seriously. [2] Don't undersell yourself or your product, and for god's sake don't price it at cost without paying the system administrator and the management team (i.e. yourself). Remember that it's really easy to lower an asking price and really hard to raise it afterwards. Test the market a little, see what competing products are charging, and go for it!

[1] For all I know $20 a year is overpriced for an app like yours. I don't know what your market is like, or your competition. But consider charging by the month instead and asking $9.99. -- or, at the very least, sell 6 month subscriptions at $29 per. (Think: semesters.) Don't make the free trial more than 30 days. Remember the possibility that many of your customers won't be repeat customers: Only a certain number of language students remain language students for years at a time, so it's not as if the cost of acquiring a customer can be amortized over ten years. Speaking of the cost of acquiring customers, don't forget to budget for the Google ads!

[2] If all this going-into-business stuff just sounds like too much trouble for you... don't go into business. Upload the code to Sourceforge or github and get on with your life. There's no shame in that, either. It happens all the time.
How does he get his del.icio.us feed into Facebook?
Hey guys! I finally got my site out the door tonight and thought I'd see what the HN early-adopter crowd thought of it.

The idea with SocialPredictor.com is that it's meant to be fun. There were two angles I knew I could take with a prediction site - fun or statistically valid predictions. I chose the former. Was I at least marginally successful?
It looks like a domain squatter page. I was surprised there was no "This domain may be for sale!" link.
How to Start an Online Business: 11,520 Free Resources for the Internet Entrepreneur
People, please let me know how did you find the ebook. This is my first ever ebook. :)
Found an error:

>Push, store, and jump bytecodes require only small changes to the state of the interpreter. Objects may be moved to or from the stack, and the instruction pointer is always changed;

How about if you jump to the current location of the instruction pointer? =P
I think the dog hair is its undoing.
It looks interesting, but it might be better to do a little more handholding on getting users started, instead of just having the list of directions. Maybe handpick a market and put it up top and ask people to predict on it, before even registering. When they want to register an opinion, let them, and then show them what they can do beyond that.
That actually happened to use with PriceAdvance. We "launched" our beta and then officially launched a few months later and a number of write ups mentioned we had already previously launched.

Also if your going to submit to techcrunch, make sure they are the first. They like to break news. You have a better chance of being covered if they get dibs.
Here's the results of my two-minute test: I tried to make a prediction and was greeted by a login screen. Fun over.

I completely understand why you'd want to limit your voting to actual registered users. Nevertheless, I'd try to find a way to let visitors pretend to participate. How about tracking votes by non-registered users in a separate tally? When I click to vote, I get a screen that says "Thanks for voting!" and has two sets of results: A "low-quality" set that includes all the non-registered user votes for the last 2 hours (or 12 hours, or 24 hours, or -- if there haven't been too many -- the last week) and a "high-quality" set that only includes registered users. Next to the registered user data is an explanation ("these are the results that really count") and a link ("join our site if YOU want to cast votes that really count!").
In defense of Perl.
A Post-Mortem for Faneuil Media
First impressions:

A: SocialPredictor is similar to SocialPredator which is what I thought when I first read it.

B: "You must be logged in to use this feature!" = Fail.

I won't touch on the name so much, but there is a much better way to approach the login issue. I assume that logging in is only to keep the votes uncontaminated, but you said that you wanted to make this site more fun than statistically valid, and seeing the login requirement was not fun for me.

Later impressions:

This site has the potential to be an interesting/fun way to spend some time, and if I could A: see the predictions before voting (ie. just being able to browse and see what most people think about a specific subject), and B: not have to log in except maybe to participate in a discussion afterwards, then I would be very likely to use this site as a way to pass some time.

Also, a thumbs up for having a "correct users" section. I think the possibility of getting the predictions "right" and being able to be respected everywhere (on the site) as an accurate predictor is another fun angle that will attract and keep users.

Final impressions:

This is a startup, and by definition is designed to earn you money. Is there a plan for this in the future? Do you think ads are the way to go, or maybe sell the results to marketing agencies (for targeted subjects and users)?
And here's one of the hideous things.

Maybe I don't understand how to do this, but there seems to be no way to search for something in all of, for example, Massachusetts instead of its separate geographic regions.

If that's the way it is, it's ridiculous and if it's not obvious how to do a broader search, that's also ridiculous.
I didn't think I'd ever say this, but this would be a good candidate to have a Facebook app. The logic being that I can go on the website to make predictions, and then show them off to my friends on Facebook.
Ok, it sounds like I need to rethink the login issue.

I was thinking of adding the current results via graphs and it sounds like you think I need to communicate results in a better way as well - I'll get on that, thanks for pointing it out.

As for the money, that can come later. I'm more interested in seeing if it's a viably high-traffic site idea before I slap on the ads.
It's funny that you mention the part where you'd like to start using the site anonymously, because that was the way I had originally planned to differentiate myself in this space.

What you're describing is what I was thinking to almost a 'T'. Have two voting ranges, one for registered users and one for anonymous users. Sounds like I need to jump back into that and start building that out as a feature.

Thanks for the comments guys, these really make a difference.
You can do it in any of these four ways (and likely many more).

1. There is a Delicious FB application. That's how I have done it historically.

2. Facebook added FriendFeed like features into its core functionality. I now have a direct Delicious feed into FB.

3. You can feed Delicious into FriendFeed and then install the FriendFeed application into FB.

4. You can get an RSS feed for your Delicious bookmarks and use that to directly feed into FB, FriendFeed, etc...
You're right, I'll get on that. Thanks.
I should mention this, I haven't registered yet so if there is a 'results' area that only shows to registered users I haven't had the chance to see it. I assumed that I would only see the results after I voted.
That is just TOO freaking cool. Love the visualization of loads of data.
I never considered that - good idea :)