skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As if parents weren't chastised enough by how they bring up children, now there is more reason to blame: 'your ancestors’ diet, smoking habits, exposure to pollutants and levels of obesity could be affecting you today'

Its tough to be a parent
Can Social Networks Hurt You? | My Philly Network
Microsoft Office will eventually lose its throne, but I'm not sure I agree when you say that a startup can do better at making an online version of Office than Microsoft can. Microsoft has built-in advantages: they have an existing codebase for Office, they've been moving towards putting Office online with products like Sharepoint and Groove, and they have a lot of experience and knowledge in selling to enterprise clients. Maybe a well-executed startup can win in the consumer market, but it will take something special to beat Office in the enterprise. For all their convenience, Google Docs and Zoho are nowhere close to Office-killers for enterprise customers.
Are mathematical proofs worthy ideas?

Are you saying that all the proofs to be discovered have been?
>With a bit of thought it may be possible to make a framework into which volunteers add a lot of the content, though editors/quality control would likely be necessary.

I like the idea of students up or downvoting stuff based on how clear it is. Even a diagram or a one-sentence description could have up and down votes associated with it.
She says:

"when I make predictions, instead of casting them abstractly into the air, I’ll post them here: einfall.slinkset.com. And I won’t delete my predictions — if they turn out wrong, I’ll keep them there, as permanent reminders to learn from."

Here is the strategy that I recommend: predict less often and predict things that are easy to predict. Unfortunately, "big" predictions get you web traffic and short-term attention. When the outcome reveals itself, the vast majority of people forget that you made a prediction. So I don't think this is that big of a move. Now, if you put money behind it...
Sure, but if you have a computer with internet you have access to Wikipedia and the like. Access to information is what allows people to bring themselves up in the world. In so far as the OLPC will bring these kids more and higher quality information it will help them of course they need to learn to read before they can realize those benefits.
if you don't intend on selling your company, selling any part of your company, or getting funding from VCs, you sould form an LLC. its the easiest to deal with and its just a liability shield that will help protect personal assets form lawsuits, basically. it can be more if you treat it as more, but if all you want is protection from lawsuits, LLC is it.

delaware is the ideal place, but if you don't live there, it'll cost you a little extra. it doesn't matter that much, it'll just be better for you if you do get sued, as delaware has the most established body of legislation on LLCs. consider a vermont LLC, also, because iirc, they are allowing purely virtual companies.
Because it uses a smaller sequence of characters for new lines
Facebook is killing itself right now? Are you sure?
Student researching ethanol producing bacteria stabbed
Most of these predictions are those I've made long before, I just hadn't nailed down the specifics. So my rate of prediction hasn't quite settled yet. And the predictions are likely to arise from things that I think about, which, more often than not, are fairly 'big' in nature. But I agree that smaller, more specific, short term predictions are valid and helpful too.
"But moving just the forefinger — not the whole hand, or bunching all the fingers, but just the forefinger — actually makes the mouse rotate, particularly for left- and rightward movements. If the sensor is up the front of the mouse, that rotation of the mouse will give the user the desired outcome: the cursor will accurately move to the left or right, or back and forth. But if the sensor is in the middle of the mouse, then all of that fine control is lost: no or little movement will be registered."

Paraphrased: With the ball/sensor at the top of the mouse, you can have more horizontal control by rotating the mouse left or right.

My response: With the way that the hand rotates (the base of the hand as a fixed point), the speed of the cursor slows down the farther back the sensor is placed. So in essence, you can get more precise horizontal control with our current sensor placement standard than with a index-thumb sensor.

This is good because it's easier for the human arm to move the mouse quickly horizontally by rotating at the elbow than it is to move vertically (by rotating the shoulder, or in my case, moving my wrist/fingers).

Then again, I have my mouse set pretty sensitively, so I can traverse the entire screen within the range motion my wrist allows (no need to lift my hand at all). Also, I'm pretty sure that the difference is negligible compared to sensitivity settings and advances in technology (such as slowing the cursor when the mouse is moved slower... that sounds obvious, how about decreasing the absolute speed of the cursor when the mouse is moved slower).
MacOS X is cited as an example of minimalist software design? It may be many things, but I'm not buying minimalist.
"Wrong" does not apply to extra-scientific statements.

"Ice Cream is nice" is extra-scientific. It is, strictly speaking, nonsense. "There might be a methodology for association various ice creams with personal tastes, and this methodology might hold up to the scientific method" is the beginning of an area of study for science. Philosophy generates science -- it moves from quasi-true and tenuous connective statements into fields of further study that can be joined with better-defined and more rigorous logic.

Hegel made some great observations. Some of which are provable and might involve some creation of a scientific discipline at some time, and some not. Some were along the lines of "ice cream is nice". Since nonsensical statements have no logical evaluation, any formation of predicate logic is non-applicable.

Or maybe I missed something. Seemed like you were being flip.
Parasitic computing -- what can you get other machines to compute for you unknowingly?
What's New in Edge Rails: Nested Model Mass Assignment
Roovno has a new kind of a web apps development team that specializes in incubating web application prototypes for very early stage startup founders.

Think of us as a Venture Capital firm developing software, web applications and prototypes, instead of funding. We make your idea come alive - without paying anything until your prototype is LIVE in the market.

www.roovno.com
Does genuine tech innovation happen better in a recession?
For $100 you can get a halfway decent dedicated server, or, a high-end VPS (virtual private server, essentially a Xen or VMware instance on top of a big machine). And then you can put whatever you want on there.
Gdata store is good, but they will surely release new features. Fulltext search isn't available. But some guy who calls himself 'appengineguy' found code in the .py files of the dev server that actually supports fulltext.

Here's the link which shows how to do it:
http://appengineguy.com/2008/06/how-to-full-text-search-in-g...

There's are other places like appenginefan.com and appengineguy.com which provide tips and tricks for appengine developers.

I am waiting for the pay-as-you-go model, because until that, the app isn't 'really' scalable.

I just posted a thread in the Google AppEngine groups asking about the launch of the pay-as-you-go model.

Here's the link to the thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_threa...
the relentless decline in the number of Pirates has led to global warming

Damn ninjas! The way to stop global warming is to eradicate all of those pesky ninjas so the indigenous pirate populations can recover. I knew it all along.
See How Much Time You Are Wasting With RescueTime
Is it? Apple went ahead and implemented exchange for the iPhone, not because they have a gun to their head, but because businesses can't live without it.

It's easy to point at all of the new Office competitors and say MS is doomed, but none of them have any significant market share yet. OOO has been around forever, and even Google Docs and Zoho are past the stage where we'd call them new.
The only thing that's going to beat Google is a superfast, high-res, 3-D virtual world (kinda like Asimov's imperial planet Trantor) where people can browse by using approved and licensed vehicles to cruise the virtual streets, alleys and hidden corners of their favorite neighborhoods. The system makes money by convincing advertisers and vendors to compete for virtual property and goods. Private and/or secret enclaves can be set up so as to require an entrance fee or a subscription from prospective customers and interested parties. As the system gets larger, new businesses can start selling maps, transportation and information on how to get around and find what you're looking for. Above all, it should be fun and there should always be something new to discover and explore. It's should be much more intense and interactive than what's already out there (e.g., Linden Lab's Second Life) and give the user powerful tools with which to create their own enclaves, avatars and anonymous corporations.

But then again, Google is already moving into the virtual world business and, besides, the kind of immersive virtual 3-D world I envision will require a much faster and distributed internet, at least 2 orders of magnitude faster. Oh well, it's nice to dream.
A Handbook for Consensus Decision Making
Surely the real reason that being a parent is tough is that you want to do your very best to help your kids, and has absolutely nothing to do with what other people think. You don't care about them, you have kids to think about instead.
BlogHer, Like Flies To Honey | My Philly Network
I'm flagging all of the stories that turn out to be locked behind a paid subscription wall. Is this an appropriate use of flagging?
I got hit with this very same attack over July 4th weekend. I inherited an abortion of a site written in "classic" ASP. The attacker inserted javascript links into every VARCHAR database table it could. Took me hours to clean out everything. Taking me even longer to go through and validate all the form posts.

People complain you ought to need a license to have a kid. This kind of crap makes me think you need a license to write a web app.
great comment, mlinsey. i've been thinking about this problem a bit too and your points essentially sum up what needs to be built - a HN for academia. citeseerx, though more of a search engine, kind of does this on an annual basis by tabulating citations; ditto for ssrn.com in the social sciences world. but i think one of the problems is that the conversations and feedback around these papers doesn't yet happen in a more public forum, and that alone would be a pretty useful feature.

btw, i don't think your email address is public, but my contact info should be listed; feel free to shoot me a message.
Use a JavaScript mashup to do a Google site search by emulating a Google search of the form

findthis site:mysite.com

So the user enters "findthis" in a form field. On submit your JavaScript performs an XmlHttpRequest for URL:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=findthis+site%3Amys...

and returns the result to the user.

Downside: User's browser must have JavaScript enabled.
Chasing originality is a self-defeating thing to do, but not because all worthy ideas are unoriginal. It's because it points in the wrong direction, away from the wellsprings of creativity. It's like trying to be funny. The most striking thing about all those "persistent quest[s] for originality in literature" is how utterly samey they are. Ditto for music. But then someone like Bob Dylan or Kurt Cobain does do something original, and people wake up.

The way I hear what you're saying, you found a way out of a trap for yourself (the trap of trying to be original, which just leads round in circles) by deciding that nothing's really original. That sounds like a valuable insight under the circumstances. It doesn't mean that the generalization holds universally, though (which is why you're getting objections to it here). In fact the opposite generalization might be equally true: every great idea has never exactly occurred before.
The Internet's Typographical and Grammatical Morass
sophomoric, I'm not sure why this appeared on reddit.
I wasn't referring to what other people think. I was referring to kids when they grow up ;)
If by "proper database layer" you mean a relational DBMS then:

First go read the responses to the article "Maybe Normalizing Isn't Normal" at http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001152.html which should convince you to normalize your database.

Secondly peruse the Google App Engine newsgroup at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine
wherein much ado is made about how normalization is a _bad_ thing for Google App Engine databases.

Finally choose: do you want a consistent database or a very, very fast database that may be inconsistent?

I chose consistency and consequently abandoned the idea of using Google App Engine. I gain further peace of mind by _not_ abandoning decades of relational database wisdom.

Google isn't infallible.
actually, i have a few ideas i can't take action on. i'd be willing to spread the love if someone has the time and drive and wants an idea that might fly for a YC app.
The food is actually really good too (at least, assuming you like sauerkraut, venison, sausage, and/or quail)
Well then I guess I'm at a good age to think about a proper startup. I just finished sophomore year :P
The Googling
Does that mean you are actually going to test on history? I was pretty mad when the physics professor actually put in a question about history on the exam. Its fine if they want to put sidebars in the textbook, but really if it is not tested it is going to have to be up to the student to take on an interest in the history and learn it.
Daigle's edge rails reviews are probably my favorite content of all the rails blogs I subscribe to.
These retrospectives are always hard for me: so much lost because of systems that works so poorly. Such needless waste...
etag header for rss?

currently working on my own reader and it looks like this is not implemented: so i need to parse the feed every time, instead of fetch from the db when etag is unchanged.
The 20-year-old at heart of web's most anarchic and influential site
Hm, seems like pg & co. want to have all the big problems of business and the economy solved for $15,000. I guess if you're only funding kiddies with amounts equivalent to the allowance they get from their parents, all you get is kiddie solutions. As soon as $15m are on the table, call me.
Instead of hundreds per second I see you've switched to billions with a "B" per month? No shit, Sherlock. How about Trillions with a "T" per year? You should also try measuring shit in football fields just to make your arguments more impressive.
Great comment. One consideration is that the credibility isn't global or transferable across fields. It's constrained to each niche. So you really want a slinkset for academia more than an HN.
Dollar for dollar, such donations do more good for more people than a donation to help save the one life. However, it's easier for people to relate to individual tragedies than it is to the faceless masses who collectively are in greater need.
A large and frequently overlooked part of what good teachers do: motivating. In my opinion, it's the true hard problem in online learning.
(Catfish Jerry?) You know they get you started then put you in front of the right people to get the 15m. But there are too many people beating down the door to get in, but email me I have several things going on that can provide you with more income then you can spend.
Simple DB commits: zodb + cherrypy python
#3 New News: There has been a tendency to focus on mass audience news. This inevitably leads to incremental improvements on news delivery. Think about the news that matters most to someone running a household--it's inherently local. But newspapers can't scale to deliver this kind of news and aggregators can only aggregate what others can deliver. The real source of local news comes from the people who live there discussing what is happening around them. We're working on a neighborhood network that allows neighbors to share and discuss what is most important to them, whether it's a shop where they had great customer service, or the little league championship game, or traffic calming issues at a particular intersection, or an event going on at the local park this weekend. By putting neighbors in touch with neighbors to discuss key issues, we think that there is an opportunity to redefine what "news" means.
Or: the "weak spot" might simply be that people inherently differ in their display preferences. _I_ happen to like Google's clean design, but if even 5% of the population actively dislikes it, someone could make some money. Google's "weakness" then becomes the fact that they can only present one face to the world. The beauty of this approach is that it will be tricky for Google to counterattack since they won't want to confuse their brand.

In short, Google may not have weaknesses, but their market does.
Regarding "23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia" - I investigated this myself a while back. A viable BUSINESS is much, much harder than it looks. To begin with, note Jimmy Wales's separate commercial company "Wikia" is already in that field, and both Wikia and Wikipedia people assist in moving some content from the noncommercial Wikipedia to the commercial Wikia. Let me be clear, I don't say what they do is illegal (even if does raise eyebrows sometimes). But it's a fact that there's already a very strong established competitor, one with a huge amount of insider access that another start-up would not have. Moreover, while it's obvious Wikipedia has a huge amount of Google-juice, few people realize how difficult that is, and how many other sites have floundered in the bottom of the search results. So what's likely to happen is the start-up ends up with a website full of junk, or even worse, gets penalized by Google for having content that's too similar to Wikipedia and/or Wikia sites.
The health care market is a hard one to sell to, and while it is probably the most deserving area for research and development, there are many many many legal and organizational hurdles to overcome to get to a 'sell' or 'win'.

If you have a zillion ideas, that's real good, since there are a zillion different systems/formats/workflows/protocols in place in all the hospitals/laboratories/clinics in the USA alone. Unfortunately, you can only realistically work on one idea at a time...
While we're at it:

i know nobody uses wired mice anymore, BUT: why does the wire come out the top. Don't they realize if the wire came out the bottom (towards the user), you could position the mouse much closer to the home keys?
I suspect the Auctomatics (and their millions) would disagree with you here.
Creative at what cost? The racism, sexism, and willful callousness of 4chan doesn't seem to be getting a lot of discussion in the latest round of media coverage (outside of FOX News "HACKER-PEDOPHILES ON THE INTERNETS" hysteria).

"TITS OR GTFO" (said to anyone presenting themselves as female), "be an hero" (encouragement to commit suicide)... maybe these could be considered jokes in bad taste. But the racist pics and rants about "niggers"? The griefing in Habbo? The spamming webcammers with insults until they cry? The mass harrassment of people by phone, e-mail, and IM? Encouraging people to abuse their girlfriends / sisters / women in general?

Is any of that anything but feeding hate? Are communities that allow that (and make no mistake, 4chan allows anything that won't get it shut down) really ones we want to glorify? There's a price to pay with anarchy + anonymity. Yes, 4chan has produced, or popularized, things that are hilarious. But it's a bit like panning for gold in a river of shit.
This is a great illustration for folks that don't understand why the iPhone works so well. When you can compare it to a phone that has similar functionality, but fails miserable to measure up, you start to sense how important the small decisions are.

It isn't good enough to have a list that scroll up-and-down when you drag your finger, but it has to do it at the right speed. It isn't good enough to toss up a keyboard when it is too small and the delete key is impossible to touch.

I'm sure the OpenMoko team didn't have the resources of Apple, but to make great things you don't need to. You simply need someone obsessed with doing average things amazing.
I'm pretty new to rails (well, 3 months?), but when I saw this post last night, it was the first time I had said "Wow, that makes sense!" to a new feature.

The old way was horrible, it felt like a hack!
There is no "OpenMoko team". If something doesn't work right in OpenMoko, it's your fault for not fixing it.
If you don't plan to seek funding it doesn't matter what you do. If you do plan to seek funding, figure out a way to make it a 50/50 split if you are going to have a cofounder, any other arrangement will raise eyebrows and cost you time and legal fees when you try to get funding.
Not as much. A company can figure out its logistics in a way a consumer can't. Overnight shipping is going to become a lot more expensive, but one-week shipping probably isn't. And if people start buying everything from home, there are economies of scale there.
I like the comments on the article. "haha, let's laugh at those crazy 'open source' developers; Apple is cool because the ads convinced me so!!11!!". I will be laughing at them when they are forced to pay $500 for every piece of software because there is no Free software anymore.

Instead of posting an "lol" comment, it would be more helpful to patch the problematic areas of the Openmoko codebase. That way every person in the world would theoretically benefit from the 10 minutes of their time. Sitting and watching the video is worthless, and I wish I could post a sarcastic video about that.

Basically, as I mentioned above... if open source doesn't work for you, it's your fault for not fixing it. The developers will love you forever if you help them fix it. So will everyone else. So get off your ass and start helping, or at least stop criticizing the people that are donating their time to help keep software Free.
Personally I don't mind the inappropriate jokes/posts, sure some are racist, some are sexist, some are just plain disgusting, but that's the whole point, in the age of political correctness its actually refreshing. Step outside your comfort bubble.

And hey...if you don't like it, nobody is forcing you to go there. Everyone likes to talk about freedoms we get in this country, yet these same people who wave the flag, have no problem with taking away other people's freedoms by forcing other people to behave in only the ways they approve of.

And yes you should glorify sites like that, they let us keep the whole idea that you can have complete freedom on the net.
There's a new startup, BarterQuest (http://www.barterquest.com/), that aims to do the same sort of math trades, craigslist-style.

Sounds like a really neat idea if you could get enough people involved...
Welcome, Redditors, to news.yc!

Let the flame war about Rails begin!
well, I think that nowadays the optical sensors are quite sensitive, and it's not that hard to achieve any apparent placement of the sensor through some software modification of the output. So even if you place your mouse at the far back, you can make it behave as though it's in front. Or at least I think so...
personally, I believe it is my right to call you a Nigger cock loving cum receptacle

ah liberation
DICKS EVERYWHERE