skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Has anybody tried entering the details for a 1990s dot.com to see what kind of valuation you get?
It's not random. It's funded by Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, and Max Levchin.
You can always sell the laptops back on eBay, right?
I read once on 37 Signals that they have a twitter like "what are you doing?" status page so that the team lead doesn't have to ask this all the time.

I really expceted this to be a "what are you doing" kinda app rather than a "what have you done" one. To me (I'm sure people will disagree, np) it's easier to write down a task when you start it, or when you are in the middle of it, than when you end it. And that way it's easier to track interruptions, etc.
does that lend weight to, or subtract from, his warning?
Added Benefits of Botox
I am 48 years old and I have been a regular user of Botox for more than two years. I have always appreciated its ability to iron all my wrinkles off making me look young. I have become a great fan of Botox these days after I came to know about its ability to treat migraines
"Give us your sensitive data, we'll make you feel good and optimistic"

Preying on the vulnerability/need for validation of most startup founders?
If they want to pay you, payment is within 30 days after the invoice is sent, not "when we have cash". That's a joke, not a contract.

This is more true than I can tell you. Even when it comes from "friends". Once you agree to these 'terms', you will go right to the very bottom of the list. There will always be something more pressing to spend money on than to pay you for something that is already done. They'll also find a way to make you feel bad for asking even if you do it while they're unpacking their new Aeron chairs and 24" monitors.

I have traveled this road, friend. Here be sorrows.
fwiw here in India the Macs have a 33% surcharge for some reason ( The dealers say "customs duty", though PC prices track international prices pretty well - something strange is going on). This makes the macs way more expensive than an equivalent PC.
I can't figure out what's wrong with the flash not loading - several people have reported this now. Can one of you guys hack it and reply with the answer? I'll buy you a pizza (no seriously, I will)
Live Traffic Reports
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Does Anyone Use Trackbacks Anymore?
I would disagree. This sounds like a red herring -- I'm trying to point out that the current campaign finance laws are a bad way to combat corruption, not arguing that corruption is okay.
Sirius (SIRI) Q2 Conference Call: LIVE ANALYSIS
Can Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin provide a lift to the sagging stock?
These tools are really only as good as the information they are provided or access, and without looking at failure rates/reasons in the model do seem fundamentally flawed to me.

As mentioned by others, the results provided do look very optimistic (at least from what I can tell based on the values it provides for things I am involved with) and with refinement once they get the datasets will probably go down significantly in most cases.

Time will be the real judge. It will be interesting is to see what they predict and what actually happens in the next years. Hopefully they will provide this information (semi-)publically, but it seems unlikely.
Reliable Ruby timeouts
On a side note, and without wanting to be negative, at times I am not really sure they care about many things apart from growing really fast and getting momentum/exposure/traction (which is understandable).

You can gauge how much they (or anyone for that matter) care by the response you get when you try and engage with them. In this respect, my past experience has not been good (no response to emails/queries/etc), but maybe that is because I am not significant to them as an individual.

When I compare this to the engaging experiences I find with many YC start-ups (http://www.socialbrowse.com springs to mind) and others (e.g. http://www.huddle.net and http://www.freshbooks.com), the difference is night and day.

Maybe this is just my experience. Still, I’d be more likely to provide sensitive information to sites I trust and that seem to ‘care’.
This is one of those rags to riches stories that inspire us all.

Not exactly. Peldi seems to be doing well so far, but I'd characterize his story to date as riches to rags (and hopefully to riches again). It's only been 7 weeks or so since he launched, so it might be a bit early to anoint balsamiq as a huge success.

I sure hope it is though. Very inspiring.
"YouNoodle's model is based on rigorous quantitative analysis of historical data and the application of the latest relevant theory"

Brilliant generic tag line.
Pygments — Python syntax highlighter
Pitching VCs? Better know about IBM's latest OS/2
LOL. Thanks. It's just a job and it's paid the bills while I've chased my dreams. I must say, though that there are a lot of tough men and women working as nurses in Chicago. I learned a lot from them.

Buy me a beer some day, and I'll tell you about the time my friend Sue was an hour late for work because she and her paramedic husband were trying to revive her next door neighbor who had just been shot 3 times in the chest.

I'm 6'6" and 300 pounds, and I'm a complete wuss compared to Sue.
Belgian hosting company starts preregistration for new domain extensions
Trying my start-up now. Does take a lot of time to fill out everything...
YC just funded a startup that's posting startup jobs: http://startuply.com/

It might be worth a lookee.
Redefining SOA
‘Fakeproof’ e-passport is cloned in minutes
Microsoft's $20 bn plan for investors
UPS Shipping still SUCKS - A Horror Story
Private works too, as long as I get a key. :P
11 Foolproof Ways to Make Your Mac Secure
'Google gadgets spread malware'
Babul - we aim to respond to every email and query, sorry to hear your experience. Feel free to email me: kirill@younoodle.com with more details and if you think we didn't cover any particular issue properly. Thanks.
`iPhone security not foolproof’
"But, in a server, you need to know where you stand--and being able to experiment has far less value."

That's an amazing sweeping generalization. I'd say if you're trying for some highly optimized custom setup, gentoo is precisely the right distro to choose on a server.

I do agree though with some of your points. Ubuntu is certainly a lot less hassle than gentoo to maintain/setup, and deploying things on Ubuntu is easier since it's a pretty much known state...
Can imageine a few (NSFW) 4 character words that would do well... ;-)
Y Combinator Challenge #13 - Online Learning
I like Balsamiq, although I prefer Axure (wish they made a mac version) simply because I can create a functional prototype and auto-generate functional specs.
Net shoppers bullied into being Verified by Visa
"I thought HN was above this crap"

Who reads TFA? ;-)

I'm here for the comments.
It's 100% true. If you're just "experimenting" use some back alley place like Microsoft Adcenter. You can find coupon codes for $75 in free ad words with them. Until you know what you're doing, don't use Google Adwords.
Ask HN: Which are the well written open source programs?
We learn a lot from other hackers code.
What are the open source programs/code you liked?
please also share the quality/thing you liked.
Thanks.
The stock market wouldn't work either if users of the products companies make would act like investors. Just imagine what they would buy :-)
If it helps, Microsoft provide free Virtual PC images of IE6, IE7 and IE8 for compatibility testing. Only downside is they time expire after a few months when they provide a new version and you'll need to convert the virtual machine to another format to run it on Mac or Linux.

Download from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21E... and info on converting them can be found at http://blog.mozmonkey.com/2008/vpc-ie6-ie7-ie8-on-mac-os-x/ (it suggests you can use Zipeg to decompress the files meaning a Windows PC isn't required at all).
Only in the tech business are companies born with neither a clear reason for being nor a clue as to how they'll produce profits.

Only in tech media are articles written that tease with a question and provide no answer whatsoever nor a clue as to how they'll produce anything resembling journalism.

(After reading this article, is anyone any closer to knowing "the true meaning of Twitter"?)
Microsoft Misses Windows Mobile Sales Target
Ronco Spray-On Usability (2004)
True, but what makes a creature like the gordian worm more interesting is that there's a reproductive benefit, for the parasite, inherent to the behavioral changes induced. Do the pork tapeworms benefit by causing this problem in humans, or is it just an incidental side effect? It seems to me to be the latter.
Actually that looks really useful. Thanks!
Security flaw allows hackers to reroute computers users to fake Web sites
Carolina to Canada to California by car: days 1-5
A few months ago I wrote a post asking for advice regarding a long road trip over the west coast, and got a great response from this community. Several people asked me if I would write about it. I started driving last Saturday. This is my story.
Menpants.de - ShoppingPortal für getragene Unterwäsche von Männern.
There are some who believe that fungi and plants like marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms actually co-evolved with mammalian nervous systems, as opposed to the more common theory that their psychoactive chemicals evolved as pesticides (like caffeine, which is deadly to insects). For example, one theory is that psilocybin developed to inspire herbivorous animals to break out of their routines and seek new ranges, defecating over a wider area and creating a larger habitat for the mushrooms. Terrence McKenna, though it should be said that he was far from a skeptical researcher, believed that psilocybin actually drove human evolution; for example, drug-induced synesthesia, mapping concepts to symbols, is his explanation for the emergence of language. (However, language has been shown to emerge naturally in the absence of psychedelic chemicals, so I find this to be particularly far-fetched.)
FYI, with Twitter you can direct message ("dm idw completed rought draft") so your tweet won't appear on the public timeline.
Just curious, does this delete the person's comments too and leave gaps in conversations? Or are those here to stay?
And we recognize each other, how?
it seems too focus too heavily on keyword density. also a internal link, can only pass your own rank (competing with yourself)
The best ones I have used are LucidSpec (http://elegancetech.com) and AxureRP-Pro (http://www.axure.com), but Balsamiq wins for basic conceptions simply because it is web-based and it is easy to collaborate with others across the globe hassle-free.
Stupid PHP tricks: (true == false)
This Week in HTML 5 - Episode 1
6 Lessons I Wish I Knew When I Started Online Freelancing
Hours and wages are negotiated between the employee and the employer.

Everybody should know how many hours a week they are expected to work and/or be on call before they start. And, you can ask for that in writing. If you ask them "how many hours a week am I expected to work" and they say "40", but they fire you for working less than 60, then the company defrauded you. But, if they say "60" and they fire you for working less than 60 then you only have yourself to blame.

If you have a written statement about the hours you are required to work or be on call, you can pretty much never be fired for failure to work more without compensation. Get it in writing.
Schneier: Hacking Mifare Transport Cards
The Mifare chip is used in transport cards (i.e. subway passes) around the world. It had poor security. Researchers hacked it. They published. The company, NXP, sued.

A Dutch court wisely ruled: "Damage to NXP is not the result of the publication of the article but of the production and sale of a chip that appears to have shortcomings."
First: Congratulations on reaching this milestone!

Second:

No intro page.

Keep the front page as functional as possible, so people can immediately see what the site is about it, what it does and why it is useful.

You should already have a "Join" or "Sign up" link on the front page. Keep it. If necessary, make it more prominent.

Don't overemphasize that you're in Beta. While this is doubtless a milestone for you, new users could care less. They want software that works well. Use the front page to show them what your software does, why it works well and why they should want to sign up. You can do this by highlighting what the software does for existing users, perhaps providing live examples. Show, don't tell.

If you can, give people a way to play with your software without signing up. Perhaps a sandbox, perhaps by not asking for login until they want to save what they've made. You want people to start using your tool as quickly as possible, with as few barriers between them and the tool as possible. Signing up is a huge barrier. People won't sign up unless they want to use a service, and if they can't use a service until after they sign up, how will they know that they want to use the service? Again: Show, don't tell.

Best of luck :)
It's an interesting idea and probably useful in some situations. It would be much more useful, though, if the parser kept structural information about where in the html tree a particular text fragment was found. Lines could still serve as the unit to which statistical analysis is applied (although that seems error prone), but knowing more about the structure would enable further processing down the line.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=265550
Absolutely, and corporations will never in a million years understand that, and they're willing to pay ten to twenty times as much for a "secure" internally-installed app (when you include the price of hardware, consultants, etc.)
If you're really interested in it, there is a psychology book out there that's actually a great basis for getting started:

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini:

http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Busine...

It's marketed as a business / marketing book, but it is probably on the book shelf of every one of the magicians / mentalists that this article refers to.
i can certainly understand your frustration, but two wrongs don't make a right. if you use inflammatory language, you are only going to harden the position of the people on the other side.

a better tactic is to try to get employers to empathize with their employees. if they fully understood the anguish they are causing, they would be less likely to continue such policies. if that doesn't work, vote with your feet: work somewhere else.

it's a sad thing about getting angry: you yourself are negatively affected by it far more than those you are angry with. it's better to remove yourself from a negative situation than it is to flail around in it, making yourself feel worse.
Just give me Illustrator. Way more flexible.
I prefer Illustrator for sketching because it is easier to drag certain elements straight to Photoshop once you are done. But I will give this a try anyway...
This is an awesome example, as the article says, of the extended phenotype of Prof. Richard Dawkins. The genes of the worm parasite for example, produce proteins which manipulate the central nervous system of the grasshopper, ergo, one has the genes of one organism affecting the behavior of another organism. I'm a big Dawkins fan, ever since I got 'The Selfish Gene'. I am particularly intrigued by the ability of the parasite to escape once its host has been preyed upon, so if a frog eats a grasshopper that has a worm in it, the worm can escape both the carcass of the grasshopper and the frog. In the end, the grasshopper becomes nothing more or less than the worm's mechanism of replication. One could view this as a restricted class of cases, however, I think one can generalize this by saying as some do, that in fact all life from parasites to ourselves is simply a form of intermediaries to preserve a relatively restricted set of phenotypes, i.e., we are indeed, like the grasshopper, "gene carrying robots". Of course I think I take a certain geeky pleasure from this knowledge, to be able to disabuse people of their quaint, deluded notions of life having mystical attributes, when in fact it is finally speaking a fancy chemical process brought about to preserve genomes, this, and nothing more! :-)
It has long been known that cats carry a sort of mind-altering parasite (toxoplasmosis).

The parasite has been shown to affect behavioral changes in rats, causing them to recklessly seek out areas marked with cat urine (which causes panic in normal rats). So the parasite seems to help its original host organism in their common interest of staying alive.

There's more on that here: http://www.livescience.com/technology/060210_technovelgy.htm...
That would be a Geo Metro. I love Wranglers, but for entirely different reasons than I love Porsches.
Speed vs MPG 0-60 Times, MPG Ratings, Gas Saving Tips, and more...
IPhone can phone home and kill apps?
Introducing Snowl: An Experiment with Messaging in the Browser
I once added some custom functionality to MediaWiki, and was very pleasantly surprised by the codebase's organization and the readability of the code.
Black-hat SEO: Google's Insights for Search "very valuable"
How copyright got to its current state
Hackers Take Aim at Google Gadgets | TechJaws
Robert Sapolsky has a fascinating article on this topic called "Bugs in the Brain." I couldn't remember the article title, but I just had to google for the terms:

sapolsky french kiss polar bear

and that did it. Read the article and find out why. It's classic Sapolsky.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=bugs-in-the-brain
Kind of makes me wish we had a list of companies he'd tried this at; it makes me nervous to think I might be invested in some of them.
Er, yeah, I don't know how I managed to type 300 million without realizing that was rather high. I think I was too focused on my twitter hate
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You're using the RIAA as a mode of how to be successful and happy?

It's not stealing since you're still getting paid. It's just that the more hours over 40 (or whatever you expected), the lower your hourly pay goes. If you feel like you're working more hours than you agreed to, bring it up with HR or your boss or whatever. They should either lower your hours or increase your pay. If they won't do either, you should find a better job. Life is too short to feel cheated every day at work.
Well, an attorney's opinion on the law is certainly not infallible, but it should be considered a lot less critically than a hacker's.

The danger is that misinformation is often worse than no information at all, and asking a bunch of non-attorneys for legal advice is sure to net you a ton of it.
I'm not saying we should destroy Twitter or something, just that I don't understand why people use it. I understand why people listen to other kinds of music, that doesn't confuse me at all, but I don't understand what Twitter offers that draws people to it when it's essentially a blog with a character limit. greyman had a couple good points above your post
I thought that, and that Balsamiq Mockups looked way too simple to be useful - but it isn't! I rebuilt the basic look of google maps in less than 5 mins...

The beauty of it IMO is it makes you think about the layout of the app/site, not the look of it.

But, saying that...I will be sticking with photoshop for my mockups, just because I DO use my mockups for the design too, but thats just a personal preference, I know a lot of people want to build the layout then find a nice design, thats where this tool is cool!
But do you doubt for a moment that Longhorn will provide more improvements from Windows XP than desktop Linux will gain during the same period?

Wouldn't have been an unreasonable doubt, in retrospect.
Seriously, pizza? Please!

Cash!
It's been a while since I've been as proud of any legal system as that quote made me about Holland's.
ScURLr - the screenshot generator/visualization tool for web URLs
I agree, I love that quote.
Questionable Dell and IBM filings highlight flawed USPTO processes
The whole key to this idea will end up being the music, and not the 'getting paid for downloading the music.' If the site does a good job of promoting quality artists who you may have never discovered otherwise, then that's reason alone to buy Popcuts. When a band gets big, people will buy the music off of ITunes anyway, but if Popcuts identifies a quality band early, then it saves hours of internet search and digging to find good new stuff. And that's something worth paying .99 for.
Yes, yes, you've stated many, many times that you think you're a genius.

Hooray for you!

Now try to stick to the topic in future comments.
This phenomenon is by no means unique to entrepreneurial pitches. I see this all the time in big business: managers BSing customers about stuff they don't know, managers BSing higher managers about stuff they don't know, engineers BSing managers ... you get the idea.

Is it just fear of seeming weak or ignorant? What is it about our culture that makes us so resistant to admitting that we don't know something?

I'm reminded of the "Have you tried Javascript?" story: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Straight_Shooter_for_Upper_M...
Markov Chains using CouchDB's Group Reduce
Its not so much the not understanding the OS/2 part, but moreso the fact that Arthur Anderson is about as disgraced as any auditing/accounting firm can be while still having profitable divisions, which should sound off the alarm bells.

Is it really reasonable to expect a business person to be familiar with the history of countless major software artifacts that are essentially defunct, and/or similarly many contemporary research projects that also produce possibly usable software artifacts?
Good article with a lot of good points, but I was put off by this quote:

"[UI Design] is not something every programmer can learn. Most programmers don’t have any aptitude for UI design whatsoever. It’s an art, and like any art, it requires innate ability. You can learn to be a better writer. You can learn to be a better illustrator. But most people can’t write and can’t draw, and no amount of practice or education is going to make them good at it. Improved, yes; good, no."

I get his point, but saying that everyone who isn't a natural {writer, illustrator, programmer, UI designer} will never be good is a slap in the face to everyone who's ever worked hard enough to get good at something (including the naturals). I think the "naturals" are the people who care enough to work, practice, think, and generally dedicate themself to becoming great.
Regator, The Social Blog Aggregator, Launches To The Public
See What Facebook Connect Looks Like
Most iPhone Apps Are Failing To Leverage The Network Effect
That sucks. Here, they're essentially disposable. Compared to salary and overhead, you can probably buy 2 MacBooks per team member and not even notice it.

If a MacBook cost 3x as much, I would definitely have issues over the build quality. My MacBook is currently duct taped together.
The law is the law
If they really want to test this ability, just set up a DNS proxy to your own server... it looks trivial to spoof.
When are they going to be "poison neutral" ?

I couldn't care less whether my vendor is carbon neutral. I sure would care if they opened recycling centers in the U.S., rather than shipping waste overseas to poison the poor.
Take a hand-held power tool. Rebuild it into a racing machine.
That was one of the most disgusting versions of that trick I've ever seen. Also, given how small the boxes are, one of the more nimble assistants.