skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, validate your idea. Do you think it's good, or do you have people outside your circle of friends and family saying it's good (and ideally, telling you they'd use/pay for it)?

If not, that's your first step: http://swombat.com/2010/12/20/how-to-validate-a-startup-idea

If you're beyond this, hire someone to make a minimum viable product (MVP). You can either pay somene's market price (odesk, elance, forrst and similar are okay places to find'em, although be careful in selecting/vetting the people), or offer them some partnership. In the latter case, keep in mind you're asking them to invest in your idea - you have to convince them (why) your idea is good and that you can execute on the business side (or whichever angle you'd be covering).

And whatever you do, please don't try the "do it for free, there will be more work coming" or "it's going to look good in your portfolio" route.
Our libel laws are currently being rewritten, basically, due to huge demand for change. Yes, as they stand they are a bit unreasonable, you have to be able to prove you're correct rather than the other person prove that you're incorrect, which makes it dangerous to call out people like chiropractors.
Here's the money quote:

I'm officially quitting that job on national TV

The use of the word 'job' there implies The Job, not 'the job on the project', hence the overall confusion - people taking the words as said, not as meant

Note: Did HN just screw up this same posting?
I think that's fair, though I think it's fair for these things to be labeled "weekend project" which carries the implication that it is being worked on during non-work hours or for a short period of time as a one-off or throw away.
Wasn't there a story less than a month ago lamenting the lack of available tech talent in LA? One with actual developers talking about this, instead of some "technophile" who was an executive at MySpace of all places?

This reads like one of those "Come visit scenic Ratsnest, Pennsylvania!" billboards you see in subways and airports.
The part in here about the FAQ really burns, now more than ever. Language used regarding renter protection should be as forthright and above-board as that used in payment checkout. Just the facts.
OK Go's latest video "All Is Not Lost" premieres in interactive HTML5
However, what kind of case could MBTA possibly have against some kids who found problems with their infrastructure?

The flaws they found allowed them to obtain, according to their talk's description, "free subway rides for life", which would deprive MBTA of an unknown amount of revenue which was rightfully theirs. They wouldn't disclose the vulnerability when MBTA approached them, although they changed the description of the talk to no longer imply they would explain how to get free rides.

You can read the MBTA complaint yourself:
http://www.universalhub.com/images/2008/mbtamit.pdf
I wonder if this is a part of the Google+ push. Once Google opens G+ to the general public, my assumption is that if you have a GMail account, you'll essentially automatically have a G+ account. If you're logged in, then you've become a G+ user just by using GMail or even Google Search.
It's been worked on. Next version will have those features included.
It's horrible but inevitable that something like this would happen.

I can imagine it'd be useful for a third party service that provides identity checks and insurance or escrow for AirBnb customers. Why play with fire (without hazard insurance)?
It still sounds like the mental bias of post-hoc justification.

The malnourished value food more and those who have an imminent terminal condition feel every moment more intensely, but that doesn't mean it is better to be so. None of sound mind should be forced to take life-saving treatment, but in my view it is a good to have the option.
That may be the very reason why they made this - to make "Invite to Gmail" more fun, humorous, etc.?

Interesting nonetheless, not something I'd care to use. Any of my friends / family not on GMail probably wouldn't understand the email anyway, and would probably assume it was spam.
Could have sworn I saw this at no.1 with 44points in 12 minutes with about 7 comments. And there was a guy requesting a feature saying he hates to be that guy.

Edit: Oh it died: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813976
"radical transparency" is a powerful concept. Weird and uncomfortable at first - but I generally like it. In case anyone want's to see their 100+ page internal company manifesto, it's right here:

http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...
Well, as long as we're considering all sorts of hypothetical scenarios, consider this one:

1. You die in a year or two from terminal illness or an accident.

2. You purchased a life insurance policy when you were healthy, so cryonics is very cheap.

3. Unforeseen advances in AI/nanotech/medicine allow you to be revived in just 15-20 years.

4. You are back from the dead and find subsistence (let alone wealth) in the near future superior to your old life.
There's a difference between:

-- the police came and charged my tenant with selling drugs, so I kicked him out.

and

-- every day I obsessively searched through my tenant's belongings when he was at work to make sure he wasn't violating any laws, in my sole opinion, and then when I thought I found something illegal, I kicked him out.

Google can't judge what is or isn't child pornography. Lawyers and judges can't even do it. Nothing is child pornography, no matter how explicit, unless it appeals to the "prurient interest".

And in fact I'm not even located in the United States. The child pornography laws in my jurisdiction are less vague and more narrow than those of the United States. Is Google's crawler programmed with laws of every jurisdiction worldwide? I rather doubt it.

It would be perfectly legal for Walmart to take a non-proactive approach to photo developing. Machines do it all anyway - the only human step is picking up the stack of photos and putting them in an envelope. But Walmart has directed its employees to search through all photos, searching for kiddie porn, and to call the cops. That's a personal stance of Walmart's CEO.

Google is similarly protected - it has no legal liability in the United States for serving as a passive conduit for anything its users care to distribute. It's unfortunate that Google's CEO is adopting a similar stance.
My iPhone to Mac Writing Workflow
Oh, then its easier to understand that in this query: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=leveldb&...
It's amazing to see that guy still going. I remember seeing a PDF of his first book which was, if I remember correctly, largely a bunch of pasted unix man pages for various security tools and bits and pieces of guidebooks from the linux documentation project.

This was probably 10+ years ago so I don't want to make any judgements about his work now. If he has carried on as he started it's hard to believe he has managed to make a following for himself.

I guess if you publish enough stuff over a long enough time people come to see that as evidence of credibility.
Hmm, interesting. That level of detail is fairly uncommon for academic publishing from what I know, though I am not too experienced myself. When someone like MIT Press publishes a book, the way I've heard the process described is that three external academic reviewers will give high-level feedback and make publish/don't-publish recommendations, and then one MIT Press editor not necessarily expert in the area will do layout/stylistic/copy/flow editing. But partly that's because they have a line to walk between providing real editing and quality control, but also providing a not-too-filtered platform for authors to put out their own views.

I would hope that extensive plagiarism would be caught by one of the academic reviewers, though.

Though with Course PTR it's probably more just lack of per-book resources. When you're rushing to get out a book that amounts to a manual for XNA 3.1, and you put out dozens of those books a year, there's only so much detailed editing you can give it.
And all created 955 days ago.
I thought the point of open standards was that you didn't develop for just one browser. Google loves to trumpet its openness a lot, so forgive me for being confused by their motives.
You're inferring something that wasn't intended. Your peace-treaty example was exactly the type of situation my analogy was referring to.

Patents are being used aggressively because that's the nature of competition—if anyone is going to use them that way, everyone has to. But it could be in everyone's interest if that option were removed from the table, regardless how much each had previously spent amassing an arsenal simply to remain competitive.
"First, mention the name of the company."

No agency will give me this, I assume because they're worried I'll apply directly and skip their fees? Please chip in if you know why!

It's super-annoying, because there is a lot of cross-over with local agencies and they know it, so they want to know a list of all the agencies I'm currently engaged with to avoid this (ostensibly), which is completely backwards.

I agree with all your points. It's amazing how many businesses that contact people by phone get the very basics wrong, so many companies I deal with always have terrible line quality for example.

My pet peeve is how pushy they are. If I say no, I don't want to work for that company, then why push it? I often have good personal or technical reasons for turning it down, and it's a complete waste of both our time to spend 30 minutes pushing it on me - and it looks really, really desperate.
Upcoming versions of the Chrome browser include an implementation of the IndexedDB HTML5 API that is built on top of LevelDB

Really excited about seeing IndexedDB run atop of this
Nebula - scale-out cloud deployments (by ex NASA CTO)
Here's the documentation for Safari's 'webkitEnterFullscreen': http://tiny.cc/uw00x
China’s Plan to Beat U.S.: Missiles, Missiles and More Missiles
Ha, I was just thinking the same thing. Also, if we're talking pure logistics, don't jump off the BIKE either.

Perhaps we should consider the fact that the secret service was involved.. I bet that guy is pretty fast. I don't know why I think that though, just seems more "tough".

Another thing: Aaron is a really important person to have writing/researching/hacking outside of prison. Surely it's a net win to just pay a faster/sneakier kid to do this for him? Do you think he thought for one second he might get caught?

35 YEARS IN PRISON? Avon Barksdale is only serving seven! :)
We've seen people who post a link to HN, then have a dozen or so of their fake user accounts up vote that link. Given the economic incentive of being/lingering on the front page there will be folks who try to game it.
I like having my privately hosted email services so Google can not start reading my mail and 'adjust my search accordingly' or anything like that!
I think that at least a few other people have access to the account. To bad there isn't an api to see when the tweets were deleted.
TPB most certainly does "get some money" from ads. The website is plastered with them.

It may not inject ads into the content like an online service like Hulu, but they're certainly making money from advertisers.
They want to make sure you haven't already applied to them, which rather than just telling you the name up front, they do by asking for a list of every company you've talked to. Logical, I know.
Will someone steal my grand piano?

Highly unlikely. Grand pianos weigh thousands of pounds and do not fit through doors.

That's just unacceptable. Regardless of whether this ever happened to EJ or not.
No, it's bullshit. YC shouldn't censor the articles, especially one as potentially dangerous as this. AirBnB has everything to do with the title and blog and they deserve any bad PR they receive. Very disappointing.
I hope that you are right. Where I work our IT department has banned the use of Dropbox because in theory it would allow sensitive data outside of the organisation. However, they've not been able to provide any kind of alternative. My team could in theory do this but the politics we'd need to wade through would be horrendous. If Dropbox were to offer a way to run their service entirely inside your own firewall (with support) then I am sure that my company (and many others) would happily pay huge amounts of money for it.
There's a photo credit at the bottom that links to the picture on flickr, where it has a ton of annotations, by Doctorow and others.
> i was trying to use the hash directly, and kept being constrained by the amount of available data.

Too much data from the hash? It seems like a 256-bit SHA-2 hash could map 1:1 onto a 16x16 pixel icon, giving you 24-bits of color depth per pixel to encode each hash bit in a non-ugly way.
"Exaggerated article about a browser-sniffing art project"? It's bizarre how Google defenders justify things that Apple was bashed for when it put Safari-exclusive HTML5 demos up on its website. I guess Google's ploy works on you--if they talk about "openness" a lot, they get a free pass.
Frankly, until google gets some kind of end-user support going, i would be hard-pressed to recommend any google service.
"For its part, JSTOR says it worked with Swartz’s lawyers to get the data back[...]"

Interesting way of putting it. I would have said "removing the data from his possession"
>I imagine people will wait until they've reached 30 or 50% of their life span simply because there is just no rush.

The biggest problem here is that we would need a change in human sex characteristics.
We would have to change the way a female matures so that she would be able to (healthfully) breed at that age, otherwise should she desire children, she would have to have them at a (relative to long lifespan) very young age.

One other proposition would be the secure storage of her eggs.
Guess it got flagged quite fast because of the title. Maybe I should change it to give more the spirit of the post.

Edit: hope it is better now.
StackOverflow careers isn't massively popular in the UK, although there are some damn cool jobs on it.

The impression I've gotten so far (and please correct me if I am wrong - I am not long out of university) is that development just isn't treated the same way in the UK as in the US. When I talk with my similarly-aged peers across the pond, the situation is very different for them. (But perhaps they're just a lot better than me!)
Bad hive-mind; Hacker News fires Steve Yegge: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2011/07/hacker-news-fires-st...
This gives me a warning telling me to switch to Chrome, but when I open it in Chrome it runs slower than in Firefox. That's obnoxious.
Thanks for stating your contested opinion/conclusion as categorically fact that we all know as true, period.

Your argument basically amounts to "well the dog pooped on the carpet, that's what dogs do, what can we do it about it except get rid of the dog?"

Real world: people respond to incentives.

(1) Currently the patent troll model is heavily incentivized.

(2) Currently, there's a huge incentive to file obvious and frivolous patent applications.

(3) Currently the USPTO is underfunded.

Obvious solutions...

(1) Disincentivize the patent troll model. You can do this by limiting the amount they can recoup from litigation or by increasing their costs. I'm suggesting both.

(2) Disincentivize obvious and frivolous patent applications. Obvious solutions are to stop approving these and to have some additional penalties for failed applications (esp. repeat offenders). I'd suggest both.

(3) Increase funding to the USPTO. You could do this with money from income taxes and the general budget (laff) but I'm suggesting using the highly lucrative patents themselves to finance the office.
"Pwnies" are the Grammies of the Hacker World
i think i'll catch one of those early birds. unfortunately my latest project is rather an idea than a startup...next year!
How big block trades affect stock market prices?
So anything remotely related to YC companies that shed good light are immediately frontpaged but something potentially dangerous that is bad PR gets title changed?
Reminds me of The Suit Is Back // http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
...you have the world as it is. You can already move to change governments, only now you have to move farther than you used to. Notice how most of the oppression in the US is from the federal government, not state or municipal ones. We are predisposed to support government as a holdover from our instincts about tribal politics, but tribes never got anywhere near as big as 1/4 billion people. That immense power abuses result should surprise no one.
Haha, I keep forgetting that because of AdBlock. Sometimes I visit on a friend's computer and I'm like "whoops, forgot about the nude girls on that page, sorry!"
'No one needs a million dollars. No one.'

Yeah, but it helps.

I think it should be noted that Steve is probably fairly wealthy by most any standard from GOOG & AMZN stock.

And with that wealth comes more freedom...to work on 'big' projects.

I think it's a bit disingenuous to ask people to work on non-lolcat projects when you are wealthy and set for the rest of your life. It's admirable to devote your life to working on big ideas, but I would argue most people who are doing so (even those mentioned in his talk - Gates, O'Reilly, etc) aren't really worried about money.

Most people are simply worrying about how to pay next month's rent or handle their family expenses. Sorry, but these people are not 'in' when it comes to working on big ideas.

In my case, if it came down to working for Facebook and making $10+ Million on the IPO or working to cure cancer - Facebook wins. Maybe after that I'll work to cure cancer.
> They're criminals.

So was Martin Luther King.

The civil rights movement has been historically full of criminals. Lets question the legitimacy of all their claims!
No. As the article states, he has a particular form of Parkinsons unique to his ethnic group that is extremely heritable.
Plasticity and neuron interconnects seem to be keys here. Regions like the corpus callosum are immensely interesting. I am curious if we could some how manipulate animal cells to generate more of these fibers, with a better distribution and observe the level of intelligence animals exhibit.
Don't be silly. No one can own an idea. The very concept of "intellectual property" is false to facts.
Ironic title, considering that Google actually could have saved the Usenet when they took the DejaNews archives and spun them into Google Groups. All they needed to do was invest in some basic spam filtering and they could have gotten on top of it.

But they didn't. And the Usenet died in a sea of uncontested spam.

The amazing thing is that nothing rose up to replace it. Everybody pretty much just gave up. Maybe a few communities limped on in the form of phpbb boards, but not in the same sense. Rec.climbing, alt.surfing, sci.space.tech, and all the comp.sci.programming groups pretty much just evaporated into nothingness.

If somebody had come along and simply tried to keep it all going, I can't imagine it not working. But nobody did.
here is his talk, very inspiring

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8
Are there some mechanisms to prevent advertisers from annoying behavior?
"My point is that even though you think you can't compete with these guys who read, study and do 'real' science they could use a lot of help from the likes of you. Sure learning some linear algebra and bayesian statistics can help in directly implementing the algorithm, but usually the biggest problem I've seen is a complete lack of software engineering and hard coding specific to certain data sets."

Yup you said it exactly right. More programmers to assist the scientist. The scientist know the science part but they need help with the informatics part (lots of it). If not they do it themselves and you end up with some software that becomes critical but with no one being able to maintain it.

Plus working with the scientist means you have access to expert in their field and usually they like to talk about it so you'll learn overtime the science and whys behind the stuff you work on.

Good luck with the startup.
Newly Public HomeAway Reports Q2 Revenue
I think that it would certainly be the right thing to do to bring back anyone, like Ben Franklin, who wanted to be preserved to see what the future would bring. I'd say that we should work to bring back anyone who want to be be brought back, but also not force various sort of life extension on people.
Heartbreaking to read this.

Hang in there.

It may help to think that
a) these people are broken in some profound way, possibly from some early abuse
b) this may not be directed at you personally, you did not deserve this, and this was not your fault

I do think the AirBnB business model needs to take into account some kind of insurance cover, or set aside some percentage of funds to apply to help in the edge cases like this - so that some of the practicalities are taken care of [ such as cleaning the apartment, temporary accommodation ] giving the victim some breathing space to heal from this.
"slowly and inexorably moves from ignorance to truth."

I don't think that's what science is. It moves in fits and starts, has fads that come and go. Sure, if you average over long enough time it looks like smooth progress, but it's really not.
Is Quantum Theory a System of Epicycles? [pdf]
1. Not enough information.

2. Yes, depending on what you guys discussed beforehand.

3. Yes, pretty much.
How about the most basic IDS on the laptop? He really should have know it was taken from the closet (and its network connection) and then replaced. Personally, I'd have been more patient and used wifi. Or one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug
Lets see if YC changes this title too...
Top reasons why IT projects fail
I'm all about startups having a sense of humor and personality. I think that their mistake is not following their answer up with something like this:

"But seriously, you rent at your own risk. Make sure to lockup or move all valuables to a friends place. If there are any problems, contact us 24 hours a day at XXX-XXX-XXXX"
You only think it's "useless" because it bashes Google, obviously a company you like. You ask what Google's incentive is to build the site if they can't make people download Chrome to use it, which is a bizarre question that seems to admit that Google is not about open standards at all. If Google was all about open standards, it wouldn't matter which browser you used.

The reality is that Google is not some benevolent open source company as they're often portrayed but are a gigantic advertising company with a financial incentive in getting you onto their products, which gives them data to index for advertisers. Chrome, for example, automatically interfaces with the Google search engine by default. They don't care about openness--that's a feel-good buzzword they use to make techies like them.

Google defenders have gotten worse than Apple defenders when it comes to justifying absolutely every shitty move Google makes.
www.2checkout.com
I don't get it. Why would I care what e-mail people are using? I'll tell them about it if I think it will solve some problem they're having, but otherwise it doesn't matter to me.
I don't understand your point. Whether aliens built the pyramids is not a matter of opinion, it's a question that has a factual answer. Nevertheless it's arguably not science.
The New Yorker article was really interesting. This other article's title is pretty annoying. The title is way too exaggerated. I'm tired of these "click-bait" calculations on the part of media outlets.
Why aren't they just trying to void the damn patent in question?
We can already freeze human eggs just fine. Heck, if you count zygotes you could say we've already brought people back from cryogenic storage.
The questionnaire is pretty good. Good job.
How long before AirBnB offers some form of insurance, much as ebay started offering buyer protection.

Related: how long before your home owner / rental insurance specifically excludes AirBnb type activities?