skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couldn't agree more with the sentiments above. The name needs to be changed as does the home page copy and the tag line. the addition of a tour and screenshots would be very helpful as well.

Beyond that, I was surprised at how different my impressions of the site were between reading your copy there and reading your description here. It is as if you're describing two entirely different services.
This guy is making a generic conclusion (open source does not need money) because of a bad project admin/lead.

I'm not sure I follow this assertion. Jeff is asking a generic question, yes, and he does make some generic suppositions, but he does not really declare any conclusions.

If anything Jeff was surprised by the exchange and is asking the question as he is because he believes (or used to believe) that money could help OSS projects and is curious how, since it is not something that he has experience in himself.

As a side note, do you really think $5K will buy you a quality full-time developer for 3-6 months? I would be very surprised, though I admit I have little knowledge of programming labor markets outside of Boston or SV.
"Because it's cool" implies its own form of necessity.
Relive the "series of tubes" before Ted Stevens goes to court
I don't understand what you mean. Why would we introduce noise into the results?

Given a face to replace and a database to find candidates from, the process is fully deterministic. The database itself can of course grow, or be switched out. This allows one to create different databases for different applications (e.g., one with synthetically rendered faces, one with stock photos, one with personal photos, etc.).
No, that's not the same game. "Similar" I will grant you, but if you are a Scrabble player than this substitute would never suffice.
You are correct, but in precicely the wrong direction: private transportation is subsidised much, much more than rail transport as a function of GDP, passenger miles, or population. It isn't even close.

And your "gas tax should fund highways" idea is laughable. Look at the numbers (there were some posted at matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com in the past few weeks). The gas tax doesn't even cover maintenance of existing road systems, much less all the new construction that we are constantly doing. And remember that it's not just the roads themselves, but all the extra costs involved in forcing society to do all that driving. Cost of delivery of goods to residential areas, for example, is much higher in the US than western europe because of all the trucks needed.
The Future of Web Fonts Looking Brighter
I don’t think we’ll get anywhere with this discussion—you have an existing prejudice about those involved which causes you to toss around trivializing sarcastic insults of Professor West (have you read any of his “actual” work?) and Harvard professors in general (“huffy”, “egotistical”, “cozy”? “behave differently?”).

And no, it’s not “factually incorrect”: it’s an opinion piece. It is, however, garbage.
I've considered it, and in fact you can see what you're describing at:

http://news.ycombinator.com/active

The problem is, number of comments doesn't seem to be highly correlated with how interesting a story is. Sometimes a story has a lot of comments because it raises a lot of interesting issues, but sometimes it happens because people get onto an interesting topic only tangentially related to the story. Without AI it's hard to distinguish between the two cases.
I'm all for personal privacy and a healthy cash economy, but this won't expand the powers of law enforcement (who can already subpoena your credit card records more or less at will) or change the tax code. All it will do is give the IRS some chance at tracking down the most flagrant violators amongst online businesses.

If you are running a small business, fail to keep accurate track of your income and expenses, and are under-taxed because of it, you are committing tax fraud.
You know, if there's one thing I'm not a fan of, it's taxes.
There's a fallacy more.. The business never, ever, ever puts forward so simple requirements, and if they did, the only right way to respond would be to just f*ing do it.
The business has a problems that's more like, "all of these CSV files clutter my desktop, I need them cleaned up". The hacker that then goes home and makes a Perl script that parses and archives all the files in a relational database need not apply, while the guy who ventures out to figure out how these files got there in the first place and how to fix the broken process should get the job.
If you've read http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/0... you wouldn't be surprised at that.
Sometimes, by email, but more often you talk to them on the phone.
"I Miss Bill." Do You?
Bizplanner might be a better name. That's what I said in my head once I figured out what he was trying for.
A Personal Roadmap
This is a follow up to a question I asked several weeks ago on HN about how I should prepare for entrepreneurship. As always, I appreciate any feedback.
We're talking about the IRS here. They already have records (including SSN/Tax ID, name, address, etc.) for every person and business in the country, so I don't see how this could possibly be some major new security risk.

The argument about gross revenues is vacuous, too, since the entire point is to compare the reported gross and deductions against the known online revenues. You're expected to include all your income in a tax return, deduct where appropriate, and pay your fair share of tax. This new reporting scheme really just reduces the odds that someone could dramatically under-report their revenue without the IRS noticing.

It may also be worth remembering that the IRS already has the right to ask for bank records during an audit, so this won't give them access to any information they couldn't get their hands on already.
It wasn't quite that close. I think we may have had a line of credit we could draw on.
This is a follow up to a question I ask HN a few weeks ago regarding the road to entrepreneurship. As always, I appreciate any feedback.
http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/2008-07-29
What we need are software engineers who understand how to build complex systems. By the way Java has almost no presence in such systems. At least as of a few months ago, there was not a single line of safety-critical Java flying in commercial or military aircraft.

Such a breadth of options! Surely if we teach students how to create avionics systems for commercial aircraft or military aircraft, they will never want for jobs!

If he were to point out that using any single language as a vehicle for computer science is bad because it ties the knowledge to APIs rather than underlying concepts, that would be one thing. If he were to further point out that a lot of complex systems nowadays aren't written in a single language, and that being able to quickly acquire competence in new technologies is possibly the most valuable skill a university can give to its students, that would lend even more weight to his argument.

But no, he's just whining that no one thinks Ada is relevant anymore. I'm sure he's having trouble finding fresh college grads who share his passion for safety-critical avionics systems, but I really can't muster up that much sympathy.
That comparison does not work. Microsoft pre-installing their applications, or tweaking their OS such that their applications provide a better experience is anti-competitive because it lets Microsoft utilize their monopoly to prevent competition.

Google is not preventing any other search engines from gaining popularity. People go to google to find the most relevant answer to a particular thing, when the top result is consistently a spam knol, people won't go there to search anymore.
Mobile web gets some standards
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=260737
What can you do on a Windows PC that you cannot if you have access to a browser on a Linux based computer?
Being a hacker and asking simple requirements questions aren't mutually exclusive.
Every time someone clears their cookies they have to log back in. If someone is such an apathetic user of the site that they can't even log in, they'll stop using the site the next time they clear their cookies anyhow. All Delicious is doing, in effect, is clearing everyone's cookies at once. I'm sure there will be a slight dropoff, but this article exaggerates.
Congratulations on selling projectwedding
As of today, play high performance games.
Did Viaweb have employees by the end?
Sounds like a bunch of hokey-pokey hand waving to me.
It's more of a post-judice. I notice that in disputes with Larry Summers, Summers offers lots of data and the other side offers lots of emotion. I mean, the Big Stink over Summers was when he mentioned a fact about the standard deviations of test scores, and a professor in the audience swooned ("I would've either blacked out or thrown up.")

So yes, I think referring to the emotional aspect is important, here. People nail Summers for mentioning data they don't like -- which is probably why he gave up on academia and government and moved closer to finance.

I would like to know what about the article is garbage. My request for ways in which the legitimate field of Afro-American studies has improved my life still stands. If you can't discern a single logical or factual error in the entire National Review article, but you persist in, er, trashing it, shouldn't I just accept that you're reenacting the typical disagree-with-Larry pattern?
Part of writing great code that, as a hacker, one can be proud of, is to understand the purpose of the code. Otherwise, there's no way to tell whether the code is great.

To a large extent, yes. At the same time, a piece of code can be elegant and beautiful in the same way that many mathematical proofs are elegant and beautiful, even though they don't do anything immediately useful.
FFmpeg on Mac OS X How-to
Agreed. A focus on application development to solve _real_ business problems as opposed to _fabricated_ hardware problems is key.
I was in the middle of a game!

Seriously, though, silly move on Hasbro's part. Of course, if it's true that the brothers rejected $10 mil, then I don't really see what they're aiming for... maybe assurances that it wouldn't be shut down?

As a consumer, I just want Scrabulous back, and the sooner Hasbro engineers that, the better for them. Maybe if they take it over all those ad can leave
Microsoft Research Lab Opens Near  MIT, Director Says Intellectual Climate Ready to Ignite
Using Carrot and Stick, IBM Buys LISP Pioneer Ilog
I think providing an active page helps. It seems like a good compromise. Thanks for the link.
Can you comment more on how the monthly coaching helps you focus? Accountability?
this is brilliant, I just tried using macports, which didn't work, after a quick break I found this link, now hopefully this works.
Well, of course we'll have to establish military bases on Mars, Jupiter's moons, and Pluto first...
With over 22000 karma points, (~5000 more than nickb) you could construe that Paul Graham is the cult leader of this board, whereby his words are not just approved, they are also a guide.

If you start disagreeing with PG in a large way, those that like him will scrutinize you and take aim as they may feel they are also being questioned. So there is a slight cultish behaviour going on with this board and maybe with its larger YCombinator fund context, but not intently by PG, he's an investor for the most part.

YCombinator as a 'startup scene' is not a cult because no harm is being done, and the absorption of minds is for the most part very beneficial. Cult leaders, I think take advantage of their own charisma to defray free choice in their environment for their own benefit. All in all, Ycombinator has a culture but is not a cult.

The notion "build something people want" I think is an ideology and ideologies are at the foundations of many cults, but cults generally have spiritual or religious overtones.
The ability to link to other notes may indeed be useless for your particular needs. But it's hugely useful for a large class of notebooks. For instance, if you're writing a novel and you need to keep track of your characters and their relationships, being able to link from one note to another is incredibly handy.

So I see that as where Luminotes fits in. It's really a notebook of interlinked notes, which you can't really do with Google Docs or Tadalist. You can do it with a full-fledged wiki like Mediawiki, but for many people that's overkill, and besides doesn't come with the nice UI.

As for bullet point check-off capability, you can quite easily use the strikethrough for that purpose. I know several people who use that for crossing things off lists as they're completed. It's perhaps not as convenient as a single checkbox, but it does work.

"Personal wiki" isn't marketing speak, as I'm going for the "interlinked collection of notes/pages" aspect of the word "wiki" rather than the collaboration sense of the word. But I think it's becoming increasingly clear that regardless of all that, "personal wiki" isn't a great way to describe the product.

Thanks for the UI bug report. I think I should be able to make the scroll and flash work serially rather than in parallel.
Why British Telecom Bought Ribbit Web Telephony Platform
Rate/Review: Feedback on my start-up?
Though it doesn't launch till mid-august, the landing page is there with the concept and screens.

Looking for some comments, its still not too late for me to incorporate them before launch.
I think the main source of this confusion is the lack of understanding of the difference between computer science and software engineering:

"A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build."

http://www.stevemcconnell.com/psd/04-senotcs.htm

It seems to me that this professor is teaching CS to students who actually should be enrolled in a SE program.
Justin.tv uses a custom twisted-based server for all of their media serving. They consider it part of their proprietary advantage.
And how many humans hand-cranking windmills for how many fortnights would that be?
Quick note: It doesn't launch till August, I know, but any feedback would be much appreciated, as its not too late for me to incorporate changes, etc. Thanks!
I agree.

Why should electronic transactions be taxed any differently than traditional transactions? "Because the internet is special?" Give me a break.
My solution is "modes", I have a goof mode where I try to soak up as many ideas as possible, and surf around, then I have a crunch mode where I do nothing but work. I need both modes to stay sane.
Why do hackers build applications without having a distribution strategy? You can build the best application ever, but if no one finds it you are going to have the issue you have now.

Before even starting a project like this you need to be asking 2 questions.

1. Is this an application that is going to really solve a problem people have?
2. After building the application is there a viable distribution strategy for it?

I know that doesn't directly answer your question on how to grow your audience, but I think the question you are asking is something most hackers overlook and maybe this will help others still deciding on what they want to do.

To directly address your question, I would seek out and open conversations up with sites like Gusto and other social travel sites. You might be able to piggy back off of their audience or become a potential partner or acquisition option for someone a bit more established.
SoCal earthquake a powerful reminder of Twitter’s potential
... or you could write the plan out as plain text (i.e. the hard part of coming up with the plan is coming up with the plan, not formatting it):

http://www.paulgraham.com/vwplan.html
Cooler than Cuil, True Knowledge takes a sniper’s approach to search
Only serially: the concurrent case has still not been handeled satisfactorily.
Why choose the second over the first?

To give Blub programmers the warm-and-fuzzies, one assumes...
As am I, since I use Rails every day. However the number of DHHs and Ezras in the world vs. the number of us regular ol' web developers is quite small. There's a reason the rest of us should take advantage of the labours of the few rather than attempting to duplicate them.
Do Higher Gas Prices Mean More Mobile Productivity?
Even with the edits, your estimates are off. Historical prices in a chart are always split-adjusted. (Otherwise you would see big discontinuous jumps at each of the split-indicator dates.)

So the reported 108 YHOO high in December 1999 is equivalent to a price of 108 for a current 2008-share.

Thus the peak value of the (393,591 * 2^4) 6,297,456 2008-shares was about $680 million in December 1999. The other (61,126 * 2^4) 978,016 options probably added around another $100 million, assuming their strike price was very low.

Of course, timing is everything, and when the holdings were either hedged or sold determines how much ViaWeb shareholders actually came away with. A couple days after the exchange, June 12, 1998, the 6,297,456 2008-shares were worth about $45 million (at $7.11/share). One year later, when registration lockups may have expired, they were worth about $212 million ($33.8/share).
This is something that every website should have installed, the problem, is that the sites that'll actually have this installed are the same sites visited by people who have already upgraded to the latest version of firefox.
Make sure to include Neal Stephenson's disclaimer from Cryptonomicon

"EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING
Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went belly-up and only returned her ninety-nine dollars. Ever since then the government has been on our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril — you are dead certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony.
Still reading? Great. Now that we've scared off the lightweights, let's get down to business. "
...macadamia nut coffee... yes. A thousand times, yes. But I do remember reading an essay a while back about what makes SV so popular and a major point was the fact that it was beautiful, but not too beautiful. He contends that the landscape of Hawai'i is beautiful to the point of being a distraction.

Though, I don't think I could turn down an offer to spend some time working on any of the larger islands.
I think you're missing the point. He's not looking for hardware hackers. He's looking for people who know how a computer works. God job candidates should have no trouble answering that question regardless of whether they've actually ever seen a CPU bug.
DHH, JKM, and AH were a "regular ol' developers" until after they built rails and django.

They're smart cookies, and but so are many web devs. While I agree that we should benefit from their labours, if there are times when we are confronted with the problems they had, we should be as bold as they were.
Why am I being down-voted for my comment? People generally under estimate the rate of technological progress. When researchers in the 30s thought about utilizing fission for energy, much less weapons, they broadly thought it would take hundreds of years to become practical. Come 1944, Hiroshima and Nagasaki went up in smoke and radiation.

Once we develop a mathematical understanding of how we can manipulate various forces of nature, practical applications tend to evolve very, very quickly. This has been done over and over throughout history.

Simply because we don't have a complete understanding of how to build a device described in the story NOW has no impact on what we discover and are able to build in the next few decades.
With much more justification.
Or... we could use reiser4. The design of reiser4 was inherently geared towards making DBs obsolete. Hans may have failed as a person but he was still a great programmer.
wait till ----- Inc. finds out. =D Then you can feel terrible full time!
More generally, there are basically two kinds of apps that connect to a database: "application databases" that are the primary or sole user of a database and use it for all their persistence needs, and "integration databases" that are one of many interacting with the database. Web apps usually work with application databases. AFAIK Martin Fowler coined this terminology/distinction, see http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ApplicationDatabase.html .

For application databases, usually having any kind of view/stored procs/triggers/prepared statements is a smell that you're conflating business logic with persistence.
To be fair, there was a brief bit along the lines of "because the easy, low-hanging fruit, web apps in Java jobs are the first ones to get outsourced". Whether that's really true or not is another matter.
much, much more than rail transport as a function of GDP

Uh, you have to compare it with the amount of people it moves. Not the absolute amount. If taxes pay for trains, upkeep, insurance, salaries for drivers, as well as the infrastructure, then that is a greater tax burden than just the highways, PER USAGE. I considered explaining that in my post, but I figured that math savvy hackers wouldn't need it. I figured wrong.

And your "gas tax should fund highways" idea is laughable.

Oh? Please...explain why.

The gas tax doesn't even cover maintenance of existing road systems,

Oh, I see. Well, if you re-read my sentence I said "SHOULD" fund highways. "Should"

SHOULD: A word meaning, "ought", as in, you "should" parse and process each sentence properly before commenting on it. You "should" look up any words you don't fully understand. That sort of thing.

See, I figured that a bunch of well-educated hackers could understand basic language concepts. I figured wrong.
Scrabulous: Triple Points, Less 92
IMO the most pragmatic way to deal with the question as posed requires no knowledge of computer hardware.

If you want hardware knowledge, ask about pointer arithmetic and memory hierarchies, which is still mostly irrelevant to what most developers spend most of their time doing.

Before someone launches into a jihad about memcached and load balancing and super high-scale stuff, most people never have to do that.
Ask YC: What financially successful companies have been born out of YC?
I have been following HackerNews and PG for about a year. I like the general ideas, but am curious because I simply do not know the answer:

What YC funded businesses turn a profit while sustaining paid employees?
Cuil, Please Stop
There's a good argument for buying a games console.
Here's my feedback, and please take it with a grain of salt and a good deal of humility.

You're 23. Holy shit you're young. What the hell are you going to wait 4 years for? Do it now.

Quit your job and join a startup. There are probably a few in your area, and I'm sure a couple are using ASP or .Net, which is right up your alley. Working there will sort out a few of your learning finance & business issues.

Learn more skills on the side, and when you are ready (not 4 years dude), jump. In fact, jump with your own stuff as a means of learning. Learn while building.

You've got years before succeeding will really matter, to be honest. You've got a wife that can help with income in a crunch. Do it now. In four years, it will be harder.

As a 33 year old with a wife and child, trust me on this one.