skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: GiftBait - a refreshingly unique take on gift wish lists and registries
I created GiftBait.com that provides a refreshing new way to gift and get gifted. Instead of the party host specifying what gifts they want, it lets the guests submit gift ideas and allows the host to choose the gifts they like.

WIN-WIN: Hosts get engaged guests and a buffet of gifts to choose from, guests are not limited to only expensive gift registry items.

BONUS: Some cultures frown upon hosts specifying what gifts they want and GiftBait allows the guests to make the suggestions instead!

As part of the "Early Access" public beta, all new users get to use the unlimited plan until the site goes live. Feel free to create an account and try it out casually with friends for your next party (birthday, house warming, wedding, bridal shower, etc.)

I would love to get the HN crowd provide their thoughts on idea, execution and the overall look & feel (incl. the pricing strategy @ http://www.giftbait.com/pricing). Many thanks!
Very helpful stuff in there for entrepreneurs. What I love about James' writing is that it's all from hard-earned wisdom over a period of years.

I've personally printed out a few of his posts and keep them on my desk at home to review occasionally.
This sucks! I was using it just a few minutes ago. I am so sick of the music industry and their retarded licensing system.
I almost didn't look.

Password Gorilla is a Tcl/Tk application

I can't speak to the efficacy, security of the program, but I found that bit interesting.

I'm about ready to pick up Tk, again, because it looks good enough (for me) and I'm tired of dicking around with UI crap.
I thought about doing that, but the "discounts" are usually things like 0% financing for X amount of time or "we'll waive the financing charge", which means that if you take them, you are in exactly the same place as if you'd bought for cash in the first place, you just have to remember to pay off the loan early.
The article did say (rather deeply in) that the CO2 produced was pure enough to be directly sequestered without additional post processing effort. So while not the best, that saves on the energy consumption to post process normal plant output into pure enough CO2 for sequestering. That energy also has to come from somewhere.

Also, if a 50% conversion efficiency is realistic, that is a benefit, because the same energy output could be produced with a reduction in waste byproducts, or more energy output could be achieved with the current levels of waste byproducts.

Both are advantages. Not huge like a breakthrough in solar energy harvesting, but still advantages.
Short Hairstyle for Women
Benefits Of Short Hairstyle For Women and Advantages of Short Hair Cuts For Women Short hair cuts are growing to be stylish of late.
MySQL at Facebook, Current and Future (video)
Obama: "We Need More Robots"
Why is your portfolio offering the same service for $575?
Electrical impedance made easy - Part 1
Here's an IRC log that will give you some insight into how Anonymous thinks:

http://th3j35t3r.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/time-to-speak-up-p...

These people are certainly not the Thomas Jeffersons of our time.
Password Gorilla : https://github.com/zdia/gorilla/wiki

Store much longer, more complicated, passwords, without having to remember them.
Agreed, this stuff is lame.

Most CS students worth a dime could write programs to do these things.
Interest on car loan is still higher than any investment I can think of with equivalent risk characteristics. 3-year treasuries are currently yielding about 0.75%, 3-year car loans are about 3-4% on a quick Google search. I don't see how you could arbitrage that into a profit.

Also, paying off (non-tax-deductible) loans essentially buys you after tax dollars, while investments must be bought with pre tax dollars (though some are capital gains taxes if you hold them long enough). That's an additional 15-40% you have to chop off the return rates of investments when comparing them to paying off debt.
irssi. It's awesome. On another note, is the main HN channel #startups?
Clickable: http://www.giftbait.com
For Facebook "active" has always meant "signed on within the last 30 days."
presumably this feature will be useful when ios5 ships and the majority of iphone/ipad/ipod touch users install it.
Well, I think the number of users on 5.0 will go up a lot when 5.0 is actually released...

But really, 5.0 has a huge upgrade-incentive, and I think it will be pretty safe to assume people who know how to save a webapp to their homescreen will update.
Just tried to sign up and apparently they very much want me to sign up via facebook. Invites to people who want to login with their email are apparently only given out "sometimes". Great! Thanks for that! So I have to give my data to Mark Zuckerberg who tries his best to make it as public as possible, in order to use your service?
But it get's better: If you sign up via email, you have to answer "Who'd win in a wrestling match, lemmy or god?" To answer this they expect you to watch some silly Youtube video. No thanks! What ever happened to making sign up as easy as possible? With that attitude turntable can keep its service for itself!
I actually think one Interaction decision they made (intentionally or unintentionally) that helped with engagement a lot is the lack of a queue system for becoming DJ. Forcing people to be first to click to become a DJ when one leaves means that anyone who wants to be DJ means that everyone who wants to DJ has to be paying close attention/very engaged in the room, which probably leads to more chats, more thought put into what they will spin, etc.

This taps into people's natural desire to be seen and heard and impact the world around them, and also makes them more invested the longer they wait -- if you've been waiting for a DJ spot to open up for 30 minutes, or haven't been able to click in fast enough, you feel almost obligated to stay until you get one. And then once you get one, you feel like the cost of getting there was such that you don't want to give the seat up.
Absolutely. People like to help people a lot more than they like to be asked for help. Think of how many people asked you to write stories about them when you were at the Times, and that little part of you that died inside every time and made you actively NOT want to cover them simply because they asked. Meanwhile, if you heard about someone doing something awesome cough Reddit cough you'd want to go write about what they're up to and spread the word.

It's the same for these kids. Waiting around for someone to make their dreams happen for them won't work. They need to go try to be awesome and then people will help them get better.
The AT&T building where the company allowed the NSA to wiretap the country without a warrant is the windowless bronze cube at 2nd & Folsom.
Yes, this is very sad. I was really enjoying this.
Wait, are you saying I can't get jobs? I wonder whos been paying my bills all this time!
You got it exactly backwards, I meant they were better. That you assumed otherwise tells us more about the relative esteem in which you hold the two than it does about anything I could say.
DOMO-KUN Window 7 Start Orb
Thinking about it more, its probably just a breadth-first search. Duh.
The landing page [...] plays some audio instructions [...]
There is a five minute pause as AT&T’s website “checks my system.” [...] my browser is not supported — well, I use chrome on ubuntu [...] Firefox. Wrong. It requires an ActiveX control [...] Windows XP [...] IE [...] ActiveX control. I’m getting frustrated by this point.

Wow, this is one patient guy. I would have gotten frustrated by the second point already and would have thrown something against the wall by then!
A New Billionaire’s 10 Rules for Success
For the time being, it seems like that would open up an opportunity to launch a similar product in the UK with local licensing. Get to work!
I disagree that the key asset of brand is not being affected. Skype's name is definitely being dragged through the mud. It's pretty much a certainty that Microsoft would not want to buy a company that people would feel embarrassed to say they worked for. Microsoft's senior management is already under the cloud of being perceived as screw-ups. This must be really pissing them off.
Well as much as it sucks, I am sure they would have gotten into legal hell otherwise. Thanks very much to the current copyright system.
We are talking about offshore datahavens.
Should be 'Goldbergian'. There is a 'd' in there.
The Verbalizer – An open source board to use with Google's Voice Search
<IANAL>I don't see any meaningful legal liability for Microsoft there. </IANAL>

Microsoft might have some financial exposure which presumably they have covered - and of course it is not in Silverlake's interest to create poison pills because the relatively small profits are unlikely to balance the financial exposure from a potential Microsoft lawsuit. Not to mention that it is almost certainly in Silverlake's interest to get the deal closed, deliver profits to the LP's, and move on to look for new investments.
If you were a smart and talented computer programmer and you saw a headline on HN, "Disqus doubles salaries, and still looking to hire", you might be more inclined to check them out than if they were just offering market rates.

A weird thing about programmers is that they aren't used up when they are bought. They aren't consumed. There is just a minimum benefit that needs to be perceived before it becomes worthwhile to switch from that well-paying and comfortable job.

If you're having a shortage, double your salary/benefits. It should get you a lot more interest from talented people who might otherwise be off the market to you.
Incase Audio
Fundamentally, the clinical definition of "hallucination" does not apply to 90% of the effects of psychedelic drugs. "Perceptual disturbances" would be the correct term.

A hallucination is the perception of something that is not there at all, and it generally means that the thing is sincerely perceived as real.

Psychedelic experiences typically fulfil neither of these criteria.
I imagine that in these specific case is because longer URLs represent deeper pages on the site that are less "important" (in terms of internal incoming links and pagerank) than the shorter ones. It doesn't seem logical that google order the URLs by length and then crawl them in that order; probably the URL length can be a factor that the bot takes into account, but not the only one in the manner this article suggest :)

Anyway, good point, that deserves more testing to extract some conclussions
What are the most fascinating known unknowns?
Actually Cornell is ~4 hours away and is making a push to open a 'tech campus' in NYC proper:

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March11/NYCTechCampus.ht...
MAPS (maps.org, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) is one of the best run nonprofits out there (I have donated for years). They have very low overhead, and in addition to directly funding key research (which is expensive) have gotten funding from other sources to cover important research into the use of MDMA and hallucinogens to treat diseases and disorders such as PTSD.
It would be really hard for me, in the current stage of my career, to justify working for a startup unless I knew the expectation value of the returns aren't at least comparable to traditional jobs. The investment money wouldn't be there either.

I wouldn't really be a smart rational economic actor if I hadn't judged it to be profitable over my other options, though I admit there is more to it than just money.
What if the language has very few speakers left in the world, including you? If only you speak the language, could they compel you to translate it? Or if only you and one other person in the world spoke the language, and neither of you wanted to translate it?
Science very much needs to embrace the wonder and majesty of its discoveries. It sometimes comes off as too dry, which is very offputting for many people. However, it's important not to tread into the realm of superstition or teleology.
Going by what CCP said, their internal newsletter really is a collection of position papers not necessarily reflecting the true views of the authors. This is much like internal position papers to a political campaign (argue the other guy's side so we can hone our argument). That is truly something I would not want leaked and could cause some serious damage.
True. I keep forgetting Cornell exists.

The lack of good public schools is still an issue I think. The major tech corridors (bay area, research triangle, seattle/portland, northern VA) are all close to top-notch state engineering schools. I worked at a startup in northern Virginia and definitely noticed that having Virginia Tech right there was a great benefit as we grew. I think that's a huge weak-spot for NYC.
I must admit that I lost the thread of the argument towards the end :(
We watch Ponyo at least twice a week in my house (4 year old loves it) and I have always wondered about the boat. The first thing I wondered if a.) it was real and worked - based on jgc's post seems that it does and might be more common than I thought and b.) if the heat would allow Ponyo to actually sit on the top of the boat as she does while it is moving.
>"So if you get a warrant to search your hard drive for something, you are compelled to give them the password just like you are compelled to let them into your house if they have a warrant to search for something like drugs or guns or counterfeit plush toys."

You might also be missing something about TrueCrypt: plausible deniability. You can have different passphrases that unlock different things. You could provide them with a passphrase the only unlocks innocent documents when really you have CP stored using a DIFFERENT pass phrase -- any this would stand up to any cryptographical analysis -- they simply cannot PROVE that the CP exists or even that more encrypted data exists.

The analogy to a key isn't quite valid here; it's more like the doors in that hallway in the matrix. If you use key A in the door, you will get content A. However, you can use a different key, open the door, and it'll go somewhere else entirely. Also, if you rip the door off the wall, there is just the wall behind it. Crazy stuff, that.
> What sorts of recreational drugs are not addictive?

> And what sorts of drugs will not mess you up when taken in "recreational" dosages?

Alcohol is one, if we change "not addictive" to "not always addictive".

Alcohol certainly can be powerfully addictive, but you can also use it periodically in small doses throughout your adult life without becoming dependent.

Alcohol certainly can be massively destructive, but, depending on your definition of a recreational dose, it not. It can actually have health benefits, and is associated with longevity.
Indeed! That line also struck me as nothing but feel good platitude! Most nerds in high school lack self awareness, perhaps the reason they are social awkward. Integrity and passion are unrelated to being socially well adjusted and I'm not sure about courage and resilience!
Instant pages with HTML5 Visibility API & Page Pre-Rendering
Part of what I see is that Google does not have a good model for making Google Voice profitable given their revenue model because it doesn't drive eyeballs to Google search and the advertising customer base, and because datamining the communications of Google Voice's users for the sort of keywords and profiles useful for search has a huge potential for social blowback - imagine how some people would react to web page ad placement based on last night's booty call - not to mention the possible legal problems given the diversity of wiretap laws, e.g. state by state in the U.S. never mind world wide variations.

[Edit] Given changes in Google's leadership and the apparent emphasis on core function which seems to be underway along with the limited rollout which Google has done for Voice, I would not be surprised if it is destined for the same fate as Google Health over the next few years.
Wait, did you just say that seriously?

Plaintiff: "There was a dead-body in the toilet, but the defendant has been regularly flushing, thereby destroying the evidence and proving his guilt."

Judge: "Well, if you say it, it must be true!"
On OSX I love LimeChat.
That's not what I was suggesting. Send them to public school, or private, or home school them. The socialization argument is a bunch of horse shit though. There are plenty of ways to meet people.

What I'm saying is that if the four years of high school is pain, get the GED and go to college, or if you're a geek join the work force as a consultant, or both. High school is only useful for people who really want to be there. College (community or state) will accept a GED, has plenty of social opportunities, and you can control your education more granularly.

No one in the real world cares about your high school grades or what letter was on your jacket.
You also are missing the point of TrueCrypt: Plausible Dependability and multiple passwords for different content. It'd be like "Give us the key to this safe that unlocks the incriminating evidence, even though we have absolutely no way of knowing if you're hiding more or giving us the full truth".

You could have cat pictures encrypted with passphrase A and incriminating evidence (that stands up to the best forensic analysis currently available) encrypted with passphrase B and they wouldn't know which is which, if they unlocked ALL the data, or what.

Truecrypt is AMAZING and anyone holding onto stuff that might get them into trouble (esp. w/ foreign gov'ts) should use it.
Change is hard especially if you are the one supposed to change | Mini Saga
You bring it to the job, not the other way around.
I would honestly have a lot of difficulty naming a Yahoo! product that launched in the last 10 years, period.

I understand that Apple had more than enough failures in the 80s and 90s, but honestly they are basically a different company since 1998 when Steve Jobs came back and completely changed the trajectory of the company.

They have managed to have basically no significant failed products at all in the entire term that Google has existed at all as a company. Google and Microsoft have had several extremely high profile failures, and dozens of failures as minor as the most significant failed product that Apple had.

The stock price of the company went from 3.5 in 1997 to 350 in 2011. I just don't think that the Newton is at all relevant when talking about how careful the respective major companies are to avoid large public failures.
How many people give up before reaching the form, and end up calling someone at AT&T for help? The costs must be enourmous.
http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/
I've activated without installing anything with every broadband provider I have had as well and most of the time it is quite easy.

Cable seems to be activated just by using their modem the last few times and qwest dsl can be activated by a simple login on a browser and waiting for them to verify.
This has a much bigger impact than canceling your own subscription. It raises the danger that you might impact other players to quit. If I were a new player and I found that the servers were too clogged over protests, I might be inclined not to continue. If I were a more casual player, I might go outside, go play another game, or do something else and find I have better things to do than play Eve every night.

This is actually how I quit MMOs in college. When it started to feel like a job when I logged in every evening due to the commitments the game placed on a guild for "serious progression" I stopped logging into avoid it. Then I realized fairly quickly that were many other things I'd rather be doing and I cancelled.

Get someone to stop logging in for a week and you could very well lose them.
That's really cool. I've published some of my own theories on basically the same thing:

http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2010/06/how-writing...

http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2010/03/how-to-blog...

Have you checked out the book Why Don't Students Like School? I've heard it also explores this, but I haven't had time to read it yet. The book Made To Stick actually has a chapter on this as well. This is a problem that I've been somewhat obsessed with for several years now.
You hit the nail on the head, bellaire. The best thing you can do is support competent people and call out people who bring others down. It doesn't matter if someone is a woman, African American, or has a crazy lisp or something. If someone brings value into the workplace, which according to research, women do, we should protect them for the sake of us all. I don't want apologies. I want you to have my back, because I'll always have yours if you are good people.
http://bettermagician.com/papers/

The masters thesis is the first one, but the intercultural study was in my undergraduate thesis which is only available in person. Let me know if you would like to see it, and we can meet up in the real world.
Two recommendations - first, manufacturers of bill acceptance devices need to optimize their Firmware Upgrade process, while I realize not everything can be OTA (Over the air), no bill acceptance device manufacturer, can, with a straight face, make the claim that they didn't know that there would be new currency formats coming out.

Second, they should separate the core functionality of their devices (Scanning, pulling in the bills) from the identification process (Which Bill is this?) - LUA is a pretty traditional implementation language to do this.
Those web startups I keep hearing about that somehow manage to target a large swath of browsers/versions must have tons of people working on the problem!

Snark aside, I think the problem is most large corporations view internal development and network/systems administration as cost centers, and treat it accordingly. Then grouse and complain when things dont work, are fragile, or require additional expenditures to keep apace with more current technologies. Go figure.
I think you need to clarify your thinking which is why you got downvoted. You start out with 'it sucks' and finish with what's great about it. The product isn't what you're complaining about, it's the roll-out plan of the Canadian gov't.
I wonder when/if FaceTime will support video conference calling.
THE WORLD MAY NEVER KNOW
http://www.dedleg.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/m...
I also grew up in the third world and can attest to what you are saying. Kids who do well in school have status. They are generally not cool but they have status--no one persecutes them. It therefore surprises me to read an article like this one:

http://www.law.wisc.edu/blogs/wisblawg/2009/10/judge_olly_ne...

Thank god I didn't go to high school in the states! If I had gone to high school in the states and grown up 'african american' (I'm african) then I'd probably have had to diminish myself to fit in and not truly pursue the things I was interested in.

Now the kids who are good at sports, outgoing and confident (the cool kids) and who get the girls also have status, but if they are poor academically they also tend to have a chip on their shoulder. Here is one such kid blogging about it years later...

http://ngethustar.blogspot.com/2006/06/mangu-high-school.htm...
DNA In Spit Used to Test Age
Frustrating CSS Animations » ac
50s aren't particularly common, but ATMs in Nevada and Reno disburse all large amounts using Benjamins. They are a pretty common bill. I'm guessing 99% of those clerks in a store would have no trouble recognizing one.
For all you Lawers and Biz-Dev people who keep crying for a developer to help them do their next 'web hit'.

How about taking your skills and trying to find a way to bring media (music/video) to the 6 billion people who do live outside of the US ?

Now that would be a real startup !
Now: Would DropBox do something this silly?

Yeah. DropBox installs Growl without the user's permission. http://growl.info/thirdpartyinstallations.php