skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part of the point of the review model of Yelp (and Amazon, for that matter) is that you don't have to trust a review. You only have to trust the consensus of all of the reviewers - which, at best, is very, very hard to spoof. When I see a place on yelp with a 4-star average on 1000 reviews, I feel very confident about going there. It's hard to get to that critical mass, but far from impossible - and you don't need someone's "real name." This is actually somewhere where Yelp is doing well, too - they give people a _persistent_ identity. You should trust reviews from someone who's written 100 reviews more than a review from someone who signed up just to review a single place - and Yelp makes that judgment easy by putting the information right in front of you. Blizzard and other strategies have demonstrated that real names aren't necessary for a good community - just persistent names.

Also, I have to laugh that the UrbanTag folks approvingly cite the complaint that existing reviews sites are "giving customers “the upper hand” in determining an establishment’s reputation." Well, yes, they are. That's the point. That power has always rested in customers' hands, because that's what reputation is: what other people think of you. You can work on your reputation and "manage" it and "optimize" it, but if it's not what other people think, it's not reputation. Business owners neither need nor deserve control over other people's opinions - look at those asshole doctors that were linked here a while back, forcing customers to sign agreements that amounted to "we can sue you for posting a negative review of us on Yelp."

As for unreasonable customers: that's nearly as overblown as the threat of piracy, and if your business can't deal with unreasonable customers gracefully (not the same as caving and giving them what they ask for), you deserve to go out of business.
My Doodle Songs
I'm ashamed to admit that I actually have a qualification in COBOL, obtained many many years ago. Even at the time it was a dead/obsolete language.

Some COBOL programmers were employed in the last few years of the 20th century in order to combat the largely fictitious Y2K menace. There was a point at which I could have joined that particular bandwagon, and I probably would have had considerable earnings for a couple of years. But I knew enough about COBOL that I didn't want to be anywhere within a barge pole prodding distance of it.

COBOL is a language which was probably incredibly appropriate and highly useful within the culture and technological infrastructure of the 1960s/70s. If a company advertises that it's still using COBOL or Visual Basic 6 then this says to me that they're not interested in innovation, and that for someone like me working there would be like doing the coding equivalent of a jail sentence.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a DHS sub-agency. Organized copyright infringement like DVD and fake-product piracy, as well as contraband IP like child porn, has usually been their responsibility because a lot of it was done overseas and imported. Patrolling the internet sort of fell to them by default, and not that far away from stuff like cybersecurity. They're not the only government agency interested in such things, of course, but DHS has one of the largest budget allocations in the federal government.
ARM Holdings was the first company that popped into my head when I read the headline. Without ARM there would be no Facebook/Twitter because inexpensive mobile computing probably wouldn't have been invented yet.
Ask HN: Anyone want a Canv.as invite?
I have 6 invites. If you'd like an invite, please leave your email address.
Leave it up as a reminder about the danger of jumping to conclusions.
I really wish there was a professional review company that charged restaurants for the reviews and then made the information public. Zagat's model of charging for the ratings isn't helpful because the reviews are limited to their ecosystem and don't show up in the places I read reviews (seamlessweb, google, etc)

Yelp reviews are so astroturfed the ratings are useless.
Is there any way to postpone the 30 day countdown? It's going to be a terribly busy month for me as the finals are coming up.
A critique of the Startup Genome report
I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek with the "1950" comment, is all -- making fun of one camp's deep backlash against post-modernism (among many other things).
Humble suggestion: replace "b/w" with "between".
Interesting point - what if your reviews are shared between your friends? Our findings are that people can be honest in a community where they know their recommendations will mostly help their friends find great places.
That was one where I thought it made a lot of sense.
The post linked to in this thread has been literally the most interesting thing I've read, in quite a while. Thanks for linking me to more :D
Symbian powers both "smartphones" and "dumbphones".
I agree about the importance of, e.g., TCP/IP. But we're headed for James Burke territory now. It's ultimately kind of pointless to argue which inventions in a chain were more important than others: What are the criteria? Who is more important, Einstein or Einstein's mother? Where would Einstein have been without his mother?

And inventions tend to come along when their time is right. Lots of important things are invented simultaneously. That makes it hard to argue that, say, the inventors of Gopher were significantly less brilliant than Tim Berners-Lee, or that OS/2 was less significant than Windows 3.1 from any perspective other than hindsight.

All of which ties into what I think is my greater point: Don't be too hard on yourself about the apparent pointlessness of your work. A lot of pointless things turn out to be worthwhile, and a lot of apparently important things turn out to be pointless.
This is right up there with most brilliant explorations I have seen in Scala. I am very pleased indeed that the language and its tools are strong enough to support that kind of experiment. It's a different question entirely whether you want to put that into production code. My answer would be almost certainly no, but that's not the point of this blog, as I understood it.
I thought the title meant that an executive from (the now nonexistent) Sun Microsystems lost his cool.
Apple created the market for touch-friendly pocket computers. There were no established products in that market.
The signal-to-noise has worsened appreciably on Yelp to the point where I rarely look beyond the star rating and the number of reviews, and even then I take the star rating with a grain of salt. The folksy, storytelling style they seem to have championed makes reading through even a sampling of the top reviews unbearable. It's too bad - I think they could successfully "pivot" (sorry) into everything from location to coupons relatively easily if their community didn't suck.

That said, Yelp is already fairly well integrated with the social graph (via Connect) and one of the best use-cases for Yelp is for finding destinations away from your main locale and, presumably, your social graph. I don't think this approach will add value.
Facebook Used by Courts to Find Those Who Are ‘Only Online’
Aside from the the hardware and the OS, the most exciting part of the announcement is how HP is using their sizable scale and distribution channels to get the touchpad into the 4 of the top brick and mortar retailers. It will make it far more accessible to the average consumer than the iPad. I wish the price was lower, but sadly if they didn't match the pricing of the iPad then too many people (or worse media outlets) would automatically assume that it was priced cheaper because it's an inferior product (which it isn't).
The title of the article is misleading. Yearly revenues do not necessarily mean technological innovation. There is plenty of innovation in Europe (and a lot of it gets sold to US companies who get to increase their annual revenues with it).
The font type is horrible to read.
I just got my 32GB Transformer from Newegg on Monday.
The winning HTML5 app, Music Can Be Fun -- http://musiccanbefun.edankwan.com/
This requires setting up syncing, which seems complicated when I just want to copy some files.
Technical Co-founders Are Overrated
Which is exactly why if you're in favor of software patents you should at least be in favor of a shortening of the duration. 20 years is an eternity for software.
Might be able to connect you with Sense-of-Fashion, find me @liorsion
[I'm one of the co-founders of Optimizely] Hi Eliezer, thanks very much for your thoughts--these are great. You're absolutely right that classical p-values are not without their shortcomings, which can be significant when misused! A Bayesian approach would address some of these shortcomings, but would also introduce other hurdles, like generalizing the selection of a prior distribution and, more importantly, (IMHO,) distilling likelihood ratios in a way that can be quickly grasped by someone with no formal stats/math background. In simpler terms, classical statistics is not perfect, but in most cases it provides a lot of useful information in an easy-to-grasp way.

That said, we've started looking more seriously at incorporating Bayesian techniques into our interface and would love to get your thoughts on great ways to communicate these concepts to our customers. I've reached out to you directly off-thread and would love chat further!
This is true for every piece of software ever written (with respect to the hardware providers).
Xmarks and Last Pass Server Breach=Is It Really Safe to Use Last Pass
Great Computer Programming Quotes
Ahh, yes, those...
Except that the big idea -- transform the XML and present it in Word -- is obvious.
Ask HN: What should I bring to Startup Weekeend?
The Startup Weekend site recommends "laptop, power cord, business cards, camera, a second monitor, keyboard, and lots of creative energy!"

What else?
Over the long term, lots of assets are better investments than cash. That's not what I'm getting at. If I go to the store and prices are in dollars and not Bitcoins, or if loan payments can't reasonably be priced in Bitcoins, they aren't performing one of the primary functions of money.

Put it this way: people are excited because the price of Bitcoins in dollars is going up. If things were priced in Bitcoins then it wouldn't make any difference - the prices would still be the same (in Bitcoins).
Tourism business database
caffeine + pencil and paper to do quick sketches, model the db, architecture, etc.
agree, the rest, really silly.
Thanks for all the input, it is GREATLY appreciated! I plan on getting this printed at kinkos on good paper (no margins) and dropping them off in person at places so I wasn't too worried about having a digital format, but I think I will create one and put a link to it on this copy and in my emails. As far as specific examples, I was hoping that this would help drive people to my online portfolio which contains all that. Good call w/ switching the experience/education, that makes sense.

Spelling mistakes were to be expected, I need more revision - just testing the waters w/ the design and format first.
Automated Chopsticks:
http://pastebin.com/tCpg7jjw
Looks very similar to http://www.sinuousgame.com/
Selling US products in Germany – which was basically colonized by the US after 1945 – is bound to be easier than selling those same products in Russia or China.
Why is Europe so bad at technology development? Heterogeneity, among other things.

Hang on a second... so Europe's technical founders are disadvantaged by being able to serve particular niches?

I get that being able to sell to hundreds of millions of people gives you a great market by numbers. What I don't understand is why targeting by culture, language etc., is viewed disfavourably.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon
As a "European" from The Netherlands, I feel I need to say something about the inflammatory title of this article. Europe does not "suck" at technological innovation, there is simply no such thing as "Europe" at this scale. Like the article says: Europe is still 27 very different markets.

As a US consumer, you are used to a being part of a massive and hugely uniform market that also happens to speak the language of international business. As such, nearly every successful innovation company will try to enter that market.

Don't be fooled, however, into thinking that everything you use is American, simply because it is in English. I am sure most would not think of Distimo, eBuddy, MobyPicture and Skylines as European, yet they are all from the tiny country of The Netherlands.
And Europe does not just sprout small tech startups either. TomTom (NL), Siemens (DE) and Philips (NL) are all huge players in their fields.

Yes, making a lot of money with innovation is easier in the American market and the conditions for founding a startup are still best in The Valley, but saying that innovation in Europe sucks really makes no sense. Perhaps most the innovation is of a different nature and scale, but it is certainly there. It is a shame that this article does not attempt to uncover these things, but instead tries to score some cheap points with one liners.

P.S. Did you know Python and Vim are both Dutch as well?

P.P.S. Did you know that most European countries hardly produce any wine? Europe is more than France, Spain and Italy.
But they are awesome! They want to give me a coffee maker for praising Cobol!

http://www.cobol.com/competition
While I don't condone drunk driving at all and personally don't have a use for this app as I don't drink and drive this is just one more example of why I'm an android user. I don't need papa jobs looking out for me.
Things you need to test in your iOS app
What the frack are you counting as tech industry that you managed to Russia have more than Germany?

I'm wondering this as well. Surely the computing power behind Frankfurt must be quite substantial...
Lead without Follow? Oh yeah
http://www.playdiplomacy.com/ :)
You don't have to choose between an iPad or Chromebook just as people didn't have to choose between an iPad or a laptop (although some did, and some will).

As for your point about the iPad having a browser too, Chrome is among the elite (if not THE elite) browsers on the market; comparing it to a mobile OS browser and saying they are equivalent is not fair. Forget about Flash, the iPad cannot render javascript at near the speed that a desktop browser can, nor does it support as many of the cutting edge HTML5 features.

Additionally, Chrome is updated at a much more rapid pace. The CR48 doesn't even have the same UI that it had 6 months ago, not to mention additional HTML5 support (such as Speech input, which iPad doesn't have).

Lastly, Chrome syncs extremely fast. In fact, they specifically omitted a sync button in the settings page because it is designed to sync faster than you could get to the button. If a change isn't synced instantly it's considered a bug in Chrome.
I can tell you with some certainty more co-working/collaborative space for tech startups and tweeners is coming to downtown Durham :)
As sick of paying a premium for antiquated goods as businesses may be, they aren't going to make a decision that has costs far in excess of it's benefits.

The benefit of abandoning COBOL is greatly increased programmer productivity. The cost of abandoning COBOL is completely rebuilding your system from scratch.

I could go on for days about why it's dumb for an organization to undertake a massive project for which it is horribly ill-equipped in order to replace something that works. Instead I'll just note that I used to work (not as a programmer) at an organization that tried this. They ended up spending 8 figures for nothing more than the realization that they should hire more COBOL programmers.

I agree that the percentage has dropped (due to organizations that use COBOL dying and new ones avoiding it for obvious reasons), but I doubt it has dropped that much.
I think it's a cultural thing. Americans (and American immigrants) are risk takers. So even if you are Danish, French or Egyptian by virtue of immigrating to a new home, you have exhibited a high level of risk taking behavior. It is only natural that this behavior turns into more entrepreneurial and innovative ideas.

But I have to agree with other commenters that regulations and laws play a huge part. Americans are definitely better at that. So, you might have all sort of labor protection, multi-week vacations, free healthcare and benefits in Europe, these laws are usually a burden on small businesses (where most innovation takes place).
Yes the Newton was a great product.
Yeah, Viewpoints Network tried the approach of "reviewers similar to me" and nobody really cared. Now they're just another opinion engine.
Not entirely sure how you can look at the economic history of the past 3 years or so and think Europe doesn't have any bubbles or financial crises.

But more to the point, I don't think technical innovation has much to do with bubbles, any more than building technology caused the real estate bubble.
Good call on the university thing, it was a student position however that was the actual title they used. I'll change it to 'Senior Student Technician' instead. I obviously wasn't a senior engineer the day I started at my current job however I did rise fast and that has been my title for a long time. Is there a better way to illustrate a change of position at the same employer, AKA should I have multiple listings in that section for the same employer but with a different title? I should add months to the dates as well. I started my current job in Jan 08 so it's been almost 3.5 yrs. Better change that, thanks for the heads up!
Yahoo's hadoop-based Latent Dirichlet Allocation On Github
The time stamp from the webpage is "May 17, 2011 20:07"!

But if it is outdated a PIC-AVR-ARM update would be interesting. Personally I used all three, but prefer nowadays PIC because of the wide-ranging PIC24&dsPIC and Microchips great stacks offering.
Oh well. The developer will just move it to a web app. If he was smart, he was just using the embedded app version of Safari anyway to access a web site.
I also find Yelp pretty useless at this point, so I've been hoping to find a site that allows me to easily see the places that my friends (or friends of friends) have been and to see their reviews of those places. Are all reviews on your site going to be public, or is there going to be an option to only show them to your friends and their friends? I'm hoping it's the latter.
I'm only speculating, but these are my thoughts:

1. Harder to expand quickly because of legal barriers.

2. Network effect/expansion is harder. Say you start hitting a network effect in Germany with some new social app... You can't necessarily leverage that in Portugal where the same simply isn't true in the US market.

3. When you serve a niche market you can't necessarily apply the economies of scale.
i sometimes don't trust my friends' recommendations. what if my friends and I don't share the same tastes? or, maybe my friend recommended a sushi place, but it was the first time she tried sushi...
Yeah, I work at Bronto, next to Tyler's. Underground is pretty awesome, plus the free arcades are solid.
Wait, you mean Europe is not a country? That's funny... I always hear that complain from my "African" friends... Now you know how it feels to lump people into one group "African", "Middle Eastern", "Asians", etc... :)
gamesbyemail.com also has a nice diplomacy interface.
Or maybe Amazon/Netflix/et al acted like mature, responsible companies and worked out a compromise with Apple?
...and what happens to any private repos when it's over?
Because we invented the web and since then ... Farmville.
Maybe I misunderstood you, but it seemed to me that you were circumscribing creativity to 'traditionally' creative activities, like music, painting, programming, and so on. My point is that you can be creative in any field of human activity, even fields we don't normally associate with creativity.
Good post, but I would change the title. It's not about technical co-founders being overrated. It's about how it's a good idea to make yourself technical enough if you are a business person who wants to start a company based on a web application.
I think that movement is well underway with the iphone, ipad, unity (ubuntu) and gnome3.
No, it is underground. You have to take an elevator and go one floor down from the ground floor. There are no windows in any of the offices.
Tell HN: My experience with a "Resume 2.0" site.
http://ilovecolourlovers.com

There's seems to be some interest around here in these “resume 2.0” sites lately, so I thought I'd throw my experience out there for the benefit of my fellow HN'ers (also some critique will be coming my way, I'm sure.).

I was contacted by their CEO who said he was impressed with the site and my passion. After some back and forth questions he said they'd already filled the two positions for which I may be a good fit. He wished me the best of luck and said he'd pass on my info to any interested parties he came across. (This was last week.) It was a positive experience overall, but no offer.

Since I didn't get the job, I re-purposed it for 37signals and sent it to them as an application piece for their current UI opening. (http://ilove37signals.com) I haven't heard from them either. (Probably some really stiff competition there, considering their level of pop-dev media exposure.) I'd like to get some feedback on this. It's my code and the enthusiasm is sincere, but I felt weird re-purposing it after building it for a specific company...

Maybe my interface design/dev and copy writing chops aren't what I thought they were, or maybe I just had bad timing. I’m also aiming high, because I actually like my current job, but it looks like pay has leveled out and I basically have no benefits (I pay almost $1,000/month for health coverage for myself and my family.)

As for the code, it was meant to be a resume/portfolio in and of itself as evidenced by the content, but also the back end of it utilizes everything I currently know about CSS3 and responsive web design with lots of nice (IMHO) touches like embedded web fonts, shadows, text shadows gradients, media queries, transforms etc... I think it's a pretty slick piece.

I'm probably going to re-skin my personal site at http://wademeredith.com with some iteration of this design and keep looking for a telecommuting/Kansas City job as a UI designer/developer that actually has benefits.

FWIW, As long as it's an employer's market, I think this "resume 2.0" trend will grow. A competent design/dev can knock out a completely custom one of these out in a weekend. (I did this over the course of about 7 days in my spare time. I work 60 hours a week and have an 11-month old daughter.) When the cost of really standing out from the stack of resumes is a weekend project's worth of work, why wouldn't you do it? Especially if it can land you a job you'll have for years.

TL;DR Didn't get the job, got a nice note from the CEO, will be re-purposing the code for something else since a lot went into it.
The problem with that is I don't need a digital way to manage word-of-mouth from my friends; I can handle that mentally. I need a way to find out about places my friends haven't been to.
Will Microsoft Learn DEC’s Lesson?
LinkedIn Hits New Low as Fusion-io IPO Opens Big.
I tried to find information about this on their site for half an hour the other day, couldn't find a thing.

I would hope that they would stay private, and that you simply wouldn't be able to push any new commits to them.
Ugh.

Yet another site/app that depends on Facebook. I'm not even going to try it.