skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: VC backed startup founder needs part-time work
(long time user posting from a throw-away)

I'm a college student living at home for the summer. I recently received angel funding from a top VC in SV, but won't have access to the capital for a while (i'm willing to discuss details privately).

These last couple months have been beyond incredible, but I'm flat out broke. I find myself wanting to turn down meetings with people I've only dreamed of talking with because I can't afford gas.

I have no problem getting a minimum wage job if that's what it comes to, but I'm trying everything to avoid it. I've contacted old clients and local companies to no avail. So I ask, is anyone in need of work? You guys are my last resort, aside from my top secret Obama-O's competitor.

I can do basic website design (html/css/jQuery), basic development (php/mysql), write blog posts, manage social media, research your market and competitors, collect user feedback on your product, work on marketing strategies, etc. I'm willing to do any and all grunt work.

I would deeply appreciate your help. konathn@gmail.com
Twitter Just Botched Direct Messages for 3rd Party Mobile Apps
My Japanese mom and her thoughts on my entrepreneurship
If tablets really are the future of computing, then developing countries can bridge the digital gap quickly with inexpensive tablets.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/35-tablet-from-india-look...

Imagine 500 millions like these in every Indian's pocket.
As a white, thirty-something, short-haired, middle-class, Prius-driving, native-born American citizen, I would feel okay answering questions. However, I would still be on a hair trigger to lawyer up, no matter what was at stake for the greater good.
Droid X2 Out Officially, Available From 26th May
"He's on Linkedin, Lemon. He might as well be dead." -- Jack on 30 Rock.

I think that the utility it serves is perhaps not how they present it. I see it as a Facebook of your work history perhaps. These are people you've met along the way, may be able to help you in the future, but generally it doesn't provide the sort of advantageous network effects you may get from, say, a key conference or social event, or just simply doing great work. This is just my experience, but I'd love hear the experiences of others.
Ask HN: Flaregun - Manage domains and SSL certificates - Would you pay for this?
Hey everyone,

I am really keen to build a for sale web app, having developed a couple of successful free products. Instead of going for the build it and they will come approach, I have decided to get some early validation of my idea. Yesterday I asked HN about Silo (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2556658) a SSL certificate management web app. A HN user pointed out that there may be major trust hurdles to overcome with this product, but he expressed interest in the expiry notification concept. This got me thinking.

A little while ago two major, yet easily avoidable problems occurred, resulting in downtime, lost revenue, stress, and unhappy clients:

1. I get a phone call from a client who tells me their websites and email is down. I run some checks and find out that the domain name had expired. My client registered and manages the domain name so this downtime is his fault. However my client is not particularly happy when I tell him this. He was of the opinion that I looked after his domain and hosting so should of spotted and warned him about this. Clearly doing this manually for all my clients is impractical. The domain went into 'holding' and an extortionate release fee had to be paid, which I bore the cost of as a gesture of good will. With lots of clients and domains registered by myself and clients this is likely to happen again.

2. I get a phone call from a client who tells me that some of his visitors have reported that their e-commerce website is coming up as insecure in their browsers. I check the website and see that the SSL certificate has expired. I spend the next few hours getting a new certificate re-issued using my clients Enom account. My client is annoyed as his customers have complained and he suspects he has lost revenue as a result.

Step in Flaregun. Flaregun (http://getflaregun.com) is targeted at people who look after domains on behalf of their clients. You enter all your domains and it looks up the whois information. A notification email is sent out a week before the domain expires to ensure you have time to warn your client and renew the domain. Similarly SSL certificates are added and expiry notifications are sent out a week before to ensure you have enough time to renew your certificate.

I have put up a holding page (http://getflaregun.com) with price plans. I am reaching out to the HN community to see how the idea is received and whether you would be willing to pay for this product. Thanks for your time.
News is 5 times more engaging on a tablet than a website
Is data-driven decision making the nail in Google's coffin?
Win 10 copies of Threads’ Not Dead eBook
Go Media's Jeff Finley put together a great ebook containing all the info he gathered through the years for designers to dominate the apparel industry.The eBook is called Thread's Not Dead and features contributions from the people behind Go Media, Emptees, Threadless, Design by Humans, Big Cartel, I Am the Trend, Jakprints, Glamour Kills among others.
I'd like to see it be able to run a program in the background with the -h flag or --help flag to find at run-time what the available options are to help auto-completion. This way it would be able to support even programs that it doesn't know a priori.

This looks like a fantastic direction to experiment in. Kudos to the author.
Which is more than fourSquare needed? Why?
Meh, on the final question I would have added a single button - "OK" :)
While I would agree that Chrome, in some flavor, should be a part of Android, I wouldn't assume that Chrome is destine to be a part of Android. The Chrome and Android projects seem to be dueling strategies at Google.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/google-chrome-android/
Satellite IR data may have predicted Japan earthquake
Hear, hear. REST APIs are particularly difficult to implement when you have multiple optional value to query/describe a particular set of resources. The RESTful way encourages an explosion of URLs to try and support the different combinations. Adding new ways to list resources at a later date is also next to impossible. Query parameters simplify the process and the API significantly and still make it easy to describe and use. For me the best approach is to mix the two: make often used, pre-defined queries RESTful then support all the specialised combinations through query parameters.
The solution to Sony's issue here seems like a no-brainer to me.

The answer is to rebuild/rebrand the networking for the playstation with a strong partner like Amazon, Google, or Valve/Steam.

A partner like Amazon for example could bring good e-commerce stability to lend confidence to platform.

Google is also an excellent candidate -- they have the experience with scale and could use a strong partner like Sony to help push their home media platforms (GoogleTV, etc.)
Men-sized Robot Library
Yes. On months you go over the old free limit by $0.05, you will be charged $9.00 instead of their proposed $9.05.

On months you go over the old free limit by $12.34 you will be charged $12.34 instead of $21.34.

It is a good change (minimum spend v. privilege to pay) but still quite a big change from the old pricing structure.
Sorry, this is my normal username I sign up with and I didn't create a throwaway account. I just rarely comment.

My username on reddit is the same also. 2+ Years or so and no comments.
Hi, I'm the founder of LifeEnsured. We're that app. We let you do define what you would like to have happen to your on-line accounts after you pass. http://www.lifeensured.com.
Tablets can't do serious gaming.
mvkel, what would you say are the best 'cool plan-making utilities'?
This might get me voted down, but honestly, people who obsess over game console TOS really need to get a life and find something worth worrying about.
I'm glad they listen to us GAE users. I've been advocating the platform to friends since it was first introduced. Any other fellow GAE users here? I remember in the GAE mailing list somebody said that VCs generally don't like GAE. Is the sentiment still like that?
I actually grew up there, and I remember that my teacher's would take points off for anything less than awesome handwriting. During math exams we'd basically do all the work on a separate sheet/scratch sheet and then copy it over to the final notebook we'd submit for grading. Great handwriting and neat notes were considered a sign of an educated person... (With the exception of doctors, they were required to have crazy handwriting, at least for prescriptions)
Unfortunately, calls to boycott are rarely successful. The defect rate is too high because of the huge incentive to defect. Also, in this specific case, the collateral damage will be the buying public. If there's one thing that consumers have proven time and time again is that ultimately, all they want is the product; they don't care about your cause. Secondly, but possibly more importantly, customers respond negatively to being used as a means to someone else's end. Developers denying customers features and updates because of a patent lawsuit boondoggle is about as far from consumers' needs & wants as it gets. This reinforces the natural incentive to defect in a boycott scenario. Not only are you emptying the market of competition, but you are endangering the customer relationship. I'll be amazed if this garners any level of participation from the iOS development community.
Someone on the bitcoin forums[1] has a killawatt meter and measured the difference between idle and 100% CPU. We did the math and for his computer, if the cost of electricity is under 14.1 cents per kWh (and you have your computer on anyway), it's profitable to use my CPU miner.

[1] http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=8780.msg127782#msg1...
From the article:

"Content Farms like Demand Media are worth more than the New York Times, producing over a million low-quality articles for popular searches. Other sites quickly copy published content, flooding search results with just a few extremely similar pages. When I Google: “How much is spent on SEO every year?”, 8 of the top 10 results are a conversation with someone named Jack – and no answers. As Paul Kedrosky puts it, “Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. …Content creators are simply using Google against itself, feeding its hungry crawlers the sort of thing that Google loves to consume, to the detriment of search results and utility.”

Most of what we do online to make decisions – searching for data, seeking to understand what it means, and then understanding what’s important to us – has already been done by someone else who’d like to share their research. And, if it was available to you, you wouldn’t mind making that research a bit better. We just need the tools."
I think a lot of people read its title and dismissed the article out-right because they didn't want to be called a loser because they considered themselves "frugal." The author of the article actually describes real frugalness, by getting what you pay for instead of just buying the cheapest thing possible.
I certainly hope they can continue to collect the data. This article doesn't seem to mention it, but I wonder what kinds of false-positives come out of this method, or if otherwise the noise can be factored out, and if the whole thing can be measured. Pretty compelling that in my lifetime I've seen both better tsunami and tornado warnings... maybe not the best, but way better than being in the complete dark even just 20 years ago.
> especially now that Apple et. al. have essentially validated this patent by licensing it themselves. Very disappointing across the board.

I thought that Apple picked up this licenses as part of a bulk deal with the previous holder where they bought hundreds/thousands/millions of licenses all in one place as blanket cover. It's impractical to believe that they hand-vetted each one, so it hardly sounds like validation, even in court.
At the risk of sounding like a tin-foil-hat-conspiracy-theorist: I told you so.

Just be careful to use only government-sanctioned language online and you should be okay. Dissenters, satirists, and malcontents (or the plain silly, dumb, or careless) beware! They probably have a keyword alert backend on facebook, twitter, etc that pops this stuff up as soon as you post it.

Poor kid man. This stuff is getting out of control.
No, and I think it can be useful for a lot of professions.
Unfortunately the law doesn't always make logical sense. The real question is, do you think the government will accept the full use of an untraceable, uncontrollable, hard-to-audit, hard-to-tax alternative currency without any kind of opposition?
Schools which force you to have perfect handwriting are crushing creativity and entrenching bureaucracy.The implied message is that the expression of ideas is more important than the ideas themselves.As long as your handwriting should be legible and that's it. Do not put the medium before the message.
Don't want to be spammy here but we recently asked quite a few folks "what do you want to have happen to your on-line accounts when you pass away" and there was a split for many of them. Some people want their accounts suspended/deleted when they pass, some want them left alone, some want them passed on to their families.

http://www.blog.lifeensured.com/account-handling-after-death...
Can you share your portfolio or link to design/dev stuff you've done?
Nice video. Would you also like to know more about secret Masonic control codes embedded in to episodes of The Simpsons?
99% of people don't give a toss about serious gaming.

The iPad has become the primary gaming device for me - I rarely ever play video games elsewhere.
I've had this idea for a few months and really wanted to build it. Imagine being able to record every user interaction, seeing their mouse move and following them through pages.

The difficulty lies in replaying activity for web apps with logins, sessions etc.

Anyway, great job implementing this, I think it's a great idea and you should carry it forward!
AntLR can do this, although it does not work that well. I used the C backend, which is pretty directly ported from the Java backend. C-in-Java-style is pretty awkward.
Cloud Business Survey: Businesses are Struggling in Cloud ROI Calculation
You could try using Google Health or Microsoft HealthVault in order to collect patient data.
http://www.google.com/intl/en-US/health/about/index.html
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/healthvault
I think what you're doing is super cool and as long as you do indeed provide an easy route to getting the data off the servers then I don't see a problem at all. Is this meant to be a freemium model? Or is it going to be a paid service?

How do you go and use this in a website though? That's another facet of the semantic web that I think needs to be addressed too - content is great but if I have to export it from your servers then stick it into my website, that could get to be a pain.

Is Silk maybe going after a Semantic Cloud sort of model? I think that would not only be tenable but a really smart move. I would use a Semantic Cloud service.
If the UN Guidelines for Consumer Protection haven't brought down capitalism, why do you think having pre-written T&C that a company can opt to use would?

If anything, having easily understandable pre-written T&C in the style of similar license could only support capitalism: companies would opt to use them if they deemed it profitable, and consumers would be more able to make the informed decisions on which capitalism should thrive.
In his play, Fischer was amazingly objective, long before computers stripped away so many of the dogmas and assumptions humans have used to navigate the game for centuries. Positions that had been long considered inferior were revitalized by Fischer’s ability to look at everything afresh...

...Fischer’s modern interpretation of “victory through clarity” was a revelation. His fresh dynamism started a revolution; the period from 1972 to 1975, when Fischer was already in self-exile as a player, was more fruitful in chess evolution than the entire preceding decade.

We need some more of this objectivity in programming. The programming domain is so complex, it's easy for people to create dogmas and defend them with verbal salad. Some more "victory through clarity" would be beneficial.
Here's a funny story. DotCloud's early prototypes were in fact very similar to Cloud Foundry's "paas-in-a-box" project. We even open-sourced large chunks of it.

We eventually had to drop that design because, beyond a certain scale, it gets in the way of the user experience - in a major way. I think all major PaaS providers will agree with me.

You have to chose your priorities. Ours is to make developer's lives easier. We axe everything else.
tcgyJc «- Just used this one. Didn't expect the first on the list to be free.

imogNG «- Someone else used this one.

And Thanks! Looks like an awesome service - taking it for a spin…
Big – A Quick Shell/AppleScript/LaunchBar Script to Shout Results
Anecdotally, I know several people who have replaced their computers completely with iPads. They won't be buying new laptops any time soon (and yes, they use their iPads for work).
This will replace the terminal as much as the microwave replaced metal over fire for cooking or as much as synthesizers replaced real instruments in music.
Debt Consolidation Options Simplified by ConsolidateMyDebtToday.com
A debt consolidation loan is the most common option. Though it is possible to get an unsecured loan, it is more often necessary to have property to borrow against such as a car or real estate.
Don't forget to recharge your jacket
You seem pretty determined to give the police the benefit of the doubt; why? It's a lot easier to believe that someone at Facebook called them up and made a lot of scary noises about "information about the commission of a crime" and "threat to the personal safety of our customers" and "possible dissemination of proprietary data and trade secrets in the form of illegal hacking techniques." (Maybe that's not impressive, but I'm just an amateur; a lawyer could sound much more scary while being a lot less specific.) Maybe whoever was in charge of the investigation was too easily cowed, too scared of bad PR, too easily panicked by vague specters of anarchy, or simply too trusting of a successful and established business. That seems pretty believable to me, and I haven't heard an equally plausible explanation.

(I agree its a little silly that "don't talk to the police" dominates this page so much it's a pain to find the posts about the actual article.)
It's still the market that decides the interest rate. The Fed simply adjusts the money supply by buying or selling short term securities (historically) in order to create or soak up liquidity. The interest rate that results from these "Open Market transactions" are what you hear. The focus on short term securities means that in the long run the supply of money is still private-market driven.

There's an increased focus on affecting the medium-term or longer-term interest rates through the purchase of toxic assets like mortgage backed securities.

Not sure if that answers or clarifies anything though. I can say more if you're interested.
Wow this is awesome. This project basically just showed me everything I never knew I wanted.
Comparing the FB/4sq/SimpleGeo/CityGrid POI APIs: And the winner is...
We built a tool to query the various POI APIs.

Striking how different the results are... We have an analysis write-up coming out shortly.

Currently, the default location is set on SOMA in San Francisco.
To have both generalized parsing and context dependent parsing you need to somehow revert changes to the global state when you backtrack. You can do this by restoring it to old versions, which requires copying the state and keeping the history. The Colm approach is to keep only one global state, but store instructions for programmatically reverting the state while you backtrack.
The big virtual currencies - Facebook credits, cash and coins in Zynga games - don't work like regular currencies. You can't exchange them for cash, you can't send them to other people, and at any time the entity that controls the currency can change the amount you have.

So a third-party bank doesn't make much sense. The companies that created the currencies want to retain control over them.
The price point is similar. Both browse the internet just fine. But one has Angry Birds and FaceTime. One is new and cool. One is dusty, has viruses and keeps reminding you that your software license may be non-genuine.
Maybe the rest is a donation.
"if I did, I'd probably use Finder instead."

The thing that strikes me as very, very cool about this project is that you might not need the Finder at all any more.
Interesting points. (I'm the original author, btw). Some thoughts:

The "loser" word choice, as someone pointed out below, was a double entendre, meant to mean, first, that you're losing in the long run when you make bad/cheap purchases, and second, that I think there is a psychological effect of surrounding yourself with low quality stuff.

Second, I'm really not talking about expensive v. cheap. Most of the stuff I'm talking about, like nail clippers, might be 2-3 times the price of the cheapest you could find, but still well under $10. And, the quality is so much better it makes life easier/more enjoyable.

And, of course there's a way to get beyond "piece of shit" when there's better or more expensive available. There are nail clippers on amazon right now for like $80. That's absurd. And, you can get fantastic meals for $15, or terrible meals for $80. I think that's kind of missing the point. We're talking about quality here, which isn't always synonymous with price.

As to the psychological effect: I don't think anyone literally thinks "damn, I'm worth this" (maybe occasionally as a rationalization?) or "damn, I'm not worth it". But, I really do think that there is some psychological effect of surrounding yourself with cheap, shitty quality stuff that never quite works right. Whether that's morally wrong or not, I think people do this to themselves (I've got no studies to back this one up, btw, just what I've observed). I also think there's a psychological upside to surrounding yourself with well-made and well-designed stuff. If nothing more, it frees up some neurons from getting angry at shit that doesn't work well, but even more so, for me at least, it helps creativity.
You're not sure about the need for a sterile structure that can be erected in 24 hours, almost anywhere in the world?
Cool. I guess I should sign up before suggesting stuff :o)
Definitely. I'd be happy to email you some past work.
ANTLR is not the same as what I am describing. ANTLR generates code in each target language: I am talking about a common runtime that all languages call into. Think of it as a "parsing VM." Using this scheme, there would be no need to have separate backends for C and Java, the only thing you'd need to port is the bindings.
Ozma a mozart oz backend to scala [chpt 4 pdf]
This is really awesome. I just hacked together something similar for my website yesterday to show me guests / users activity on the site. Can't wait till you guys open it up, especially if there's an API to stream it on our own dashboards.

One note: after I filled out my info and clicked submit it kept the "what are you looking for" field on the page.

Another note: I included the referrer which I think is going to be pretty useful to know.
I have no home computer...I have my Laptop for work, and everyone else uses an iPad or phone.
Flickr power users flock to 500px
We Are Crossing the Boundary Between Knowledge and Belief
Also, gaming consoles exist. A PC was never necessary for serious gaming.