skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok so it won't win any awards but not many startups can have a prototype done in 5 minutes!

What you're suggesting at the core is basically what mobile transcoders already try to do, and any document classification system which needs to work out the most important content. It's a hard problem but there is plenty of thoughts out there to build on.

What you could do, even, is build a "meta-service" on top of something like Google's transcoder, where you pass the site into Google, then transcode /it's/ results to add a nicer style and the usability stuff like the feedback link. That would be a way to get something started pretty quickly, and you could use the feedback to see where Google isn't good enough, and therefore how to improve the service.

How would you make money though?
1) What are the weaknesses of your startup?

2) How do you manage between letting people have a say in product versus micro-management?
Aggregators are the new portals.
On the subject of toolable languages, the Microsoft Languages teams do a faaaantastic job of making languages that are designed to be used with a proper IDE.

For example...

Generator expression in Python:

(p.Name for p in people)

And in C#:

from p in people select p.Name

Or:

people.Select(p => p.Name)

Notice how in the C# version, the source comes before the projection. This enables code completion when you type "p."

The VB, C#, and F# teams work their asses off to make all those little things work so nice. These are things that even the most experienced developers might not notice, but they attribute to that confusing "this sucks" shock when VS users need to use VIM or Emacs.
New magazine-sharing site escapes copyright laws abroad
Article was unmitigated crap. (FYI, I don't suffer from a "God Complex", I relish every second of it.)

The author brings up these eleven points and then rebuts each one with a paragraph of contradicting platitudes. Example from number 4:

"Sometimes, ignorance is bliss." ...OK so far, though I don't agree...

"There’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to constantly learn." ...Still OK so far...

"However, becoming obsessed with knowledge can be damaging." ...Wait. Wouldn't wanting to constantly learn sort of be pretty close to the same thing as being obsessed with knowledge? So, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it, except when there is?

If you think you need to step away from what you're doing and get some wider perspective on things, or rejoin the real world, or whatever, then go for a walk or do a little traveling or something. Don't bother reading articles like this one.
For the specific example given, yes, that is true. But I think the general principle still holds.
Part of the problem with these REST discussions is that the definition of what is being discussed keeps shifting. The reasonable bits of REST are, well, reasonable, and generally non-controversial.

Most of what he describes in this post is fairly reasonable, but his previous REST post (that I mentioned as silly) focused on the less reasonable (and more dogmatic) parts. He criticized APIs for such things as, "REST API Sin #1: URIs Identify Methods Instead of Resources (The Original Sin)". Referring to design decisions as "sins" may be cute, but it's also a clue that you may be drifting away from pragmatism and towards religion.
"Welcome to Redux, our humble endeavor to change the world. Admittedly that does sound a bit cliché, and truth be told, we don't actually think that the world is such a bad place as it is, yet there are a few areas that we have chosen to improve. Namely, allowing you to discover entertainment, people, and products that actually mean something to you."

OW MY BRAIN.
A WMG-owned production of Mylie Cyrus singing "7 Things" is not simply an "idea". That's a straw-man argument.
This seems to me like a far better solution than attempting to legislate that businesses ignore the market. Of course, it implies that we should blame the artists, not the labels; I'm already on that page, but many aren't.

Musicians go to the major labels because the major labels own the distribution channel and the prestige that goes with it. But ten years from now, that channel is going to be meaningless. What's the business that fixes the RIAA problem?
Y Combinator: Innovation Economy video 
The other videos are also good (if old), be sure to take a look e.g.

Paul Graham on Rails:
Part 1: http://www.brightcove.tv/title.jsp?title=372299254&channel=29794487
Part 2: http://www.brightcove.tv/title.jsp?title=372311271&channel=29794487
Part 3: http://www.brightcove.tv/title.jsp?title=372183596&channel=29794487
Part 4: http://www.brightcove.tv/title.jsp?title=372183598&channel=29794487
(YC August 2008) Demo Day: Innovation Economy video
Which is why I frown when I see somebody who wants to "dabble" in crypto by making their own cipher that probably "wouldn't stand up to serious analysis" (is there any other kind?).

But the protocol has already been engineered. Its a matter of handling certain a use case sanely rather than flipping out. An https connection with an untrusted CA has exactly the same absolute security as a plain http connection. Why doesn't Firefox throw up big warnings for every http page I visit?

Having said that, Mozilla could alleviate the situation by including CAcert in their trusted certs. Domain ownership assurance is really the only thing common SSL certs get you anyway. (And I've got no problem with "high assurance" CAs getting special indications).
I was having so much trouble finding entertaining things on the internet; Thank god these guys have come along to solve that problem.

/sarcasm
I'm not sure what "the titlebar of a site to drop all the images" means.

I remember the early browsers (we're talking Mosaic and Netscape .9 here) having support for "navigational links" (although Wikipedia only talks about the link element, and doesn't have much information on this) rendered as a list of buttons across the top of the rendering frame. The only place I remember seeing this heavily used was on some site that Eolas (http://eolas.com/, yes, the plug-in patent Eolas, who I was tangentially involved with back in the mid-90s). I don't think it caught on because, really, internal, embedded links are more a more valuable, user-friendly, and web-page UI component. Additionally, I don't think many designers (or whatever you called people who built web pages back then) used them because it was kind of an obscure feature and it didn't get you as much control over the display as even a simple list of links did back then. It's really something that should be brought back, but it would most likely get abused anyway. The limited space used in the original rendering would make navigation more difficult, as the site author would consider different things to be important to navigate to than actual users would (for example, how often do you actually need instant access to the "about us" page?).

I find it tremendously useful to have a site's shitty design, layout and navigation help indicate early on, before I get frustrated with it, if the site is even worth visiting or coming back to. "Well, the person behind this site obviously doesn't want me to find anything on it, time to head somewhere else".
Does this mean you're reconsidering your opinion that the idea of "free will" is meaningless in an atheistic context? ;-)

Link to a PDF outlining the study, with graphs and methodology: [http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n5/suppinfo/nn.2112_...]

Regardless, I don't see how this particular experiment threatens the idea of free will. It found that there was a disconnect between the moment that a person made a decision -- subconsciously -- and the moment in which they became aware of their decision, or "decided to make a decision".

Also, the decisions being made required no consideration on the part of the subjects, which I think is an important factor when talking about free will. The test subjects didn't have to consider the consequences of their decisions before making them; they simply pushed a button with either their left or right hand.
Oh yeah, that's right, since jdk1.5. It used to be StringBuffer.
Windows programming needs an IDE because Windows is not a programmer's OS. Unix was designed by programmers for programmers. Windows was designed for end-users.

The author got close to this distinction with the "Unix is my IDE" point, but didn't quite make the connection.
Now we know why Seth Godin is bald.
Create playlists. Buh. Just use an activity aggregator like friendfeed. I guess something like this would be useful if the actual content is kind of vacuous and you want to wrap it in something more interesting. I try to only show my friends interesting content though.
This might be a very difficult question to get answered, but I think it could be very interesting: In retrospect, how closely (or not) did the allocation of ownership (between founders, and also founders vs. employees) match the contributions people ended up making to the company?

Bonus points if you can ask several people at a company and get different opinions about the relative values of each other's contributions. :-)
1. Why did you start your company(ie. what problem are you trying to solve)?

2. Has your original idea/product changed over time?

3. Have you started a company before?

4. What are your funding goals (if any)?

5. Where do you see your startup in 1 year?

6. What is your best advice to other entrepreneurs?
i'd wager at least $2 mil went to fully developing that feature
Hundreds of people prosecuted for practicing "interior design" without a license.
I think it's kind of cute. Not enough sites do whimsical easter eggs anymore. It's one of those goofy things people do on a saturday afternoon that improve team morale.

Seriously, I bet "seizure" goes into their nickname for it too. :)
I'd argue we're not in a bubble, because this company would have been able to raise 80 million in '99.
That's very typical of early startups who are still ramping up. I wouldn't read too much into it.
I used to work at a company where the programmers got basically whatever scrap monitors could be found - usually a single 15" or 17" CRT - while some of the secretaries had dual 19" LCDs. That was as recently as a year and a half ago. (I think things got better since then, but I didn't stick around).

So, yes. Excellent question.
Yes, "free will" question as in "conscious choice" is the only formulation I found that doesn't involve supernatural. The answer still seems to be "no".
I am almost certain that this site is merely a demo for their backend. Look at their board... a former managing partner at In-Q-Tel is on it. My guess is the US government is a serious potential buyer based on that. But who knows, they have well connected investors who could also help them land deals with bigger content creators.
I think we're all a little tired of the off-topic police. +1 for giving it a rest.

I am tired as well, with all these off-topic articles. Giving it is a rest is a bad idea, since that will only accelerate HN going the reddit way. For all practical purposes it is going that way, just that you are helping accelerate it.
wow, so many comments to a simple problem.

File->Print preview
Andrew Reynolds : Sk8prK - The Best Skateboarding Community
UPS has far more cost data.

For example, UPS knows that turning left from Main to Elm takes 45 seconds while left from Main to 2nd takes 15 seconds. UPS knows how fast you can actually go on different streets. And, it knows how these things vary with time of day and day of week.

Hmm. UPS could probably make money selling traffic and planning information.
Strange, was able to submit the same item twice...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278560
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278541
Which advice have you ignored at the outset, only to regret it later?
There is unpredictability, but there are also things that are unpredictable that don't have free will. Consider three armed pendulum.
Man, these are awesome questions.

Talk about success story in crowd-sourcing.
Except that they're a year and a half old. Quite the ramp-up. I think most of the people on this site would agree that a year and a half-old startup with traffic approaching zero and $8 million raised is looking like a failure.

Just for reference, Youtube went from founding to acquisition in the exact same amount of time.
Visual Studio 6 is a full three versions behind the current version ( VS 2008). I use Visual Studio 8 and have none of these problems. Complaining about a version of VS that came out 10 years ago is ridiculous.
The Real Reason You Aren’t Losing Weight at Fresh Start After Divorce Blog
Or at least turn public errors off!
Try ZODB/ZEO, you will be able to access native python data structures (possibly cached in memory) from multiple python processes.

http://www.zope.org/Products/ZEO/ZEOFactSheet
Great Content – the Key to Social Bookmarking Success - Video
I initially agreed with you, but in a world where anybody can generate as many accounts as they want, allowing users with zero karma to submit doesn't change anything.

If we want to restrict posting access, the community has to have some pre-approval process. Whether it's by comment karma, friend graph, required posting approval by someone else with karma > N, etc.
Going Organic
Zimbabwe is War 2.0. You know how things moved online? Well, Zimbabwe is what happens when a media and economic war is waged against a country. The war is between Britain and Zimbabwe, and the REALLY sad part is that all of you have been convinced by the one-sided propaganda you read. How many of you who think you know the entire story have actually ever read the Zimbabwean side of things?

It's war 2.0 folks, and you don't even realise it. Africa has a completely different perspective on the Zimbabwe conflict, but in your freedom to read whatever they provide for you to read, you have no other sources of information.
But they are, by definition, not off-topic. Given PG's guidelines, for something to be off-topic it has to not gratify anyone's intellectual curiosity and not be of interest to any hackers.

So to say that something is off-topic here, you have to be willing to assert that it is not of interest to any hackers, which means that whoever posted it and whoever voted it up are not hackers. Are you willing to assert that for something that now has 22 points? I wouldn't be willing to assert that for anything that was submitted at all unless it were blatant spam.

It seems that everything posted here is, by definition, either spam or on-topic. Perhaps you are looking for a social news site that defines on-topic as being CS-related, but at least according to the current guidelines, that is not this site.

That's why I'm constantly annoyed at the off-topic police. They're trying to make this site into what they wish it were, rather than what it is. Please reread the stated purpose of this site and explain to me how it is possible that that article does not fall within the guidelines.

Edit: I would appreciate that anyone who downmodded this explain my logical error. Not because I care about the karma, but because I'd like to see at least a reasonable explanation as to how I'm incorrect.
Firstly, learning more than one programming language will make you a better programmer.

Secondly, you are at liberty to write code in your free time, where you can experiment with whatever language/IDE/OS combinations you deem fit. I'd argue this will also make you a better programmer.
I've only dabbled in Prolog so far, but enough to be able to thoroughly recommend the book Clause and Effect by Clocksin. As one of the amazon reviewers says 'It serves roughly the same purpose for the Prolog language that "The Little Schemer" serves for Scheme.'

http://www.amazon.com/Clause-Effect-Programming-Working-Prog...

For a preliminary taste, this online tutorial seems quite good:

http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~kris/learn-prolog-now/lpnpa...

You might also like to look at this free book:

http://www.ida.liu.se/%7Eulfni/lpp/
I think I just died a little bit inside by reading that.
Agreed. I think there's a couple issues that cause confusion.

Yes, REST advocates say your URLs should be for "resources" not "methods", but sometimes the distinction is blurry. For example, a Google search: http://www.google.com/search?q=restful

Is www.google.com/search a "resource" or a "method"? I would call it a method, but it's also sort of a resource. I can't think of any way to make it more "resource oriented".
> I think we're all a little tired of the off-topic police.

Do you think I should submit this link?

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

(I read it today to satisfy my intellectual curiosity.)
HTML _is_ more semantic. It's perfect for marking up text.
Well yes, that is sort of true. But, if it were most other subjects people wouldn't give a crap. It's hard to say what it is about pure REST that works people up so much.

I think, perhaps, it's hard for people to be told they don't get REST when they thought they did but were actually doing a REST-RPC hybrid.
"The "limit" on copyright is duration. The market owns price. You haven't answered my question."

Yes, I did. See the other comments on compulsory licensing as being state-sanctioned price limit, if my own answer was not clear enough.

Also, a reasonable counter-question is, what gives someone the right to prevent me from making a copy of a digital entity?

Intellectual "property" is quite different from physical goods, and the fact that the Constitution has a special clause for copyright suggests that IP was not meant to be equated with, say, land or other material things.

Perhaps copying is the real right, with government offering to restrict that right for a period of time so as to offer incentives to people to make their creations public.
A Robot Learns to Use Tools
"It's hard to say what it is about pure REST that works people up so much."

I think a comment on Damien's blog summed it up nicely:

"I love living in the modern age.

It's so refreshing to have moved from religious fights based on the Bible to religious fights based on RFCs."
I interviewed with Redux in July and from what I gathered, they had a pretty good team together.

It's a python shop running either on a custom DB or on Berkeley DB. Their core business asset is the collaborative filtering mechanism that drives the Redux.com site.

I got the impression that the site itself is very much a proof-of-concept application of the underlying technology. They have a BHAG to become the default collaborative filtering mechanism for the internet. If they are successful, I consider it very likely that they will do so by licensing this technology to other companies.

It should also be noted that, as a company, they did not start out in the direction that they're going now. They've gone through several products and switched directions multiple times, eventually settling upon what they're developing now as a result of that process.

If I remember correctly, they are 11 employees, 8 of which are engineers and the CEO is a definite techy.

Smells like win to me.
The fun part is that if you are possessed by feature creep you don't know about it. I have had many a conversation where someone would say "we must ship absolute minimum of features in v1" and then turn around and argue for some favorite toy feature in the same breath. Looking back I see myself doing the same. This is one thing I wish i could undo, it would have saved us months off development time.

Makes me wonder if I am still possessed, and oblivious.
On dependencies in the API
Didn't you read the warning labels that came with your internets?

WARNING: Exposure to large numbers of other people may cause cynicism.
Alan Greenspan: Triple Skilled Immigrant Quota
False premise. Google chose Python as the first language for GAE because it would be the most appealing language among the programming languages already used at Google. It has nothing to do with "being a language widely used and understood by the masses".

Javascript/Rhino would be also a cool choice, but I think that is what Steve Yegge is working on.
The thing is, there's nothing wrong with doing REST-RPC hybrid. The reasonable parts of REST (like making things stateless, using http error codes, etc) are just as reasonable with RPC, and often RPC is the right way to approach an API (better than pure REST).
Ask HN: Need Mobile Beta App Testers
Hey,

I'm the owner of Streetread.com - you may remember reviewing the site on here about a month ago. If you don't, Streetread is an innovative, ajax-driven, news aggregator for Wall Street - collecting news from over 20 of the leading financial sites as well as all of the stocks you choose to follow. The interface and data available are very complex (jQuery - Drupal).

In lieu of user-demand and general sense I've decided to roll out a mobilized version of the site - with surprisingly no loss in features or convenience. Even more surprisingly was that I was able to complete the mobile development and design in two days. Like the rest of the site, it's built completely on Drupal (first complex mobile drupal app?).

I'm coming here for the great help and intelligence that defines this community. If anyone is interested in helping to test out this service - I would greatly appreciate it. It seems all of the coding is completely functional; my main concern is device compatibility.

To participate simply visit streetread.com via a computer and register a free account (takes 15 seconds). Add a comment to this thread saying "username: <insert user name here>". I'll enable mobile access to the account and reply to the comment once completed. You can then visit streetread.com/m/login via a mobile phone to login and begin testing. Please provide as much feedback and information as possible.

Thank you very much to anyone willing to help.

Mike
Wait, what? When I heard about Redux way back when (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/28/redux-discovers-friends...), it was for discovering new friends, which seemed like a good idea. But now it's this? Why the change [in the wrong direction]?
You're probably right. But at the same time, we don't want to create 'artificial' events... Let's see how things go with the official launch. Fingers crossed. Either way, its been a great ride so far!
Thanks this is exactly what we are doing... (the first option).
How Much Money Should I Raise?
Oh no, the [programming language I favour | band I like] is now mainstream. Well, I [use the more obscure features | prefer their older albums].

I [am a much better coder | have way better taste] than those other people anyways.
could lisp be blub for something else? if yes, what is that something. if you think not, why not?
I didn't really want to respond to this off topic post. I didn't read the article, so I'm not exactly sure what you mean by it been war 2.0 or Africa having a different perspective of Zimbabwe than the rest of the World.

I live in South Africa. I've spoken to many Africans who seem to agree with the rest of the world, as do I. This war between Britain and Zimbabwe? That's the sad delusions of Robert Mugabe and his friends... Used to fuel hatred.

I'm utterly confused and actually disgusted that you're comparing the situation in Zimbabwe to the movement of the Internet?
As little as you need, but not less.
A tip I remember from somewhere goes something like "if a feature provides more value than the effort required to learn how to use it (for the average user) then its a good addition." Admittedly there's some unknowns in there.
Sure. Though I generally dislike Wikipedia entries, this is meant to be a marketplace of ideas, rather than a site that appeals to my tastes above all.
I liked [band I like | programming language I favor | dinosaurs] when they were still underground.

http://xkcd.com/460/
It's more like a collection or list of resources, and the search term is a filter on that collection.
Have you ever been to Zimbabwe?
I bet someone could through together a formula for the best ratio of article types to keep the site both growing and hacker focussed.
Exponential Growth (video). So the doubling time = 70 divided by the growth rate.