skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Customer reviews and ratings can be one hell of a mess, not just for businesses but also for customers.

As a customer, they are often useful in narrowing down one's choices, even with a margin of error from cheating or lack of enough data. But, they are still a heck of a lot of work! Ever tried choosing a wardrobe, washing machine or laptop based on reviews? You can spend hours reading wildly different accounts, which leave you more confused than when you started.

I generally read reviews to answer simple questions which the product listing does not answer. I try to find out if there are any common problems with a product.

A good FAQ and a list of the most common problems may be a better solution than pages of reviews.
I'll pass on reading paper news and wasting time flipping through things that don't interest me just to get a good story every once in a while.

Id rather consume news via sites like HN where I get interesting stories all the time and get to chat about it with the community.
Wrong. The note goes right in the same box as the review.
How would you build this twentywords retweeter?
I feel like I get all the theory. I can't sit down in Illustrator and make it happen. I'd really like to get a good book or course that can help me actually use the tools to design great sites.
Since individual words may yield too many matches, I would try phrases. Not 20 phrases either, of course. Perhaps 3, to pick an arbitrary number. That might be easier to solve though. But so would 20 obscure words. Hmm...
Warsow Needs You
Question for you, if you don't mind. How did you get to this point, where you have a job offer? I am also self-taught with 0 professional experience in NYC and would like to be in your shoes.
I'm viewing your site with Chrome on Ubuntu and your linked text is overlapping onto your other text. Sounds like a fun idea, though. I hope that you'll keep records for us to see.
EDIT: So is your bolded text.
Zagats is primarily crowdsourced.
Wow, great way to take criticism! Thank you.
Well, Assange did try to drive home the importance of protecting the password. He wrote down most of it and made Leigh memorize the rest, creating a "something you have" factor and a separate "something you know" factor.

Assange didn't want to give them access to the cables at all, but relented when they demanded it in negotiations with him. He then made them sign a contract to protect the information [1]. Clearly this wasn't enough though.

[1] http://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/Guardian_Letter_for_Package_3.p...
Thanks, You mention these three "categories" that I could possibly grade companies on. That sounds rather interesting. How would you suggest I get data or a system to grade these?

Also, do you really think that Dropbox and Airbnb are the only A+ companies? dont you think that companies not worth a billion dolars can still have been successfull in all categories and maybe just didnt have as large of a market to tap into?
Ironically, mild extortion is the point of the Tribune's "What's Your Problem?" column.

People who can't get results from local businesses write the column, where they're publicly shamed into doing something to help the consumer.
Pardon my naivety, but you mention here that you cashed out only 1/3rd because cashing out 100% had "tax ramifications", even though 6 years later the shares you kept were worthless. Could you elaborate on the tax ramifications that made cashing out 100% a net loss compared to keeping shares that would only depreciate over time? If you cashed out for $50k with a third of your options, why wouldn't cashing out all of them be in the $150k range?
Because Yelp is a scam business which extorts. I'm more surprised to see people defending Yelp on this site.
This also goes to show that a business owner can not afford to be Internet-illiterate.
What Yelp does is a racket, similar to what BBB does. In Yelp's case they are being helped by Google and other search engines. The problem is that when people link to them that's an upvote in Google's eyes. After enough upvotes are gained, provided they don't spam, there's little anybody can do to downvote them. It's not like you can negatively link to them. This, I feel, is one of the main problems with the like and +1 buttons. There's isn't a -1 or notlike option.
แทงบอลออนไลน์ แทงบอลผ่านเว็บ แทงฟุตบอลออนไลน์ ดูข้อมูลที่นี่
Are you referring to this line?

"Check for SSH keys. Have an existing key pair? You can skip to Step 4"

I think many people might not know what that means. Also, why does the next step tell you to move any key pairs you already have, if you are only supposed to do this step if you don't have a key pair?

There is a possibility I'm confused, but I think this guide assumes too much, and makes users undertake possibly dangerous changes, when the easier option (login with username/password) is much less risky.
The current model of RSS consumption is still broken. For the vast majority of news sources, you really care about headlines and recency rather than read/unread counts. I had a rambling blog post about it a few years ago: http://bit.ly/rklROK

My first startup was trying to address some of these issues but we never quite got there. Unfortunately, innovation in the RSS space pretty much stopped (partially because of the adequate, and free, google reader). I keep waiting for someone to pick up the news source / skimming / river of news / feed magazine torch but I haven't seen it yet.
The article recommends a sales book based on research rather than war stories. It sounds interesting, but isn't available on Kindle. I really thought Amazon would have enough sway to get the Long tail of books onto their format. Does anyone know the major impediments to this? Is it publisher reluctance? Is it merely an issue with priority and effort doing the work to get older items into Kindle format?
aren't there any username? So that i can go to my blug by http://duuble.com/username
Pretend you have a magic clone wand. Wave your wand at any target. What do you have?

1). No customers, visitors, or social proof.

2). No marketing strategy.

Sure, you can announce to an uncaring world that your clone is cheaper. So what? People don't buy Github because it is the cheapest option. They buy it because it is Github.

To the limited extent that cheap is itself compelling, cheap compels terrible customers to use you... Until someone undercuts you, at any rate. Pray that that day is soon, because the pathological customers attracted by Lowest Price Here are like dementors with keyboards. One glance at a support mail and your soul will get sucked out of your very eyes.

There are gigantic swathes of the human experience where startups are not as thick on the ground as "Ooh I should solve the problems of git using programmers." Go over to the BLS. Look at occupational listing. Sort by gender. If you see Engineer at top, invert sort. Pick anything now visible on your screen. Solve their problems. You'll have people laughing for years that there is any money in what you are doing.

P.S. Github's weakness on pricing, to the extent it exists, is that there exist customers for whom it is too cheap to take seriously.

P.P.S. Feature parity is unnecessary to sell many types of software and is sometimes actively harmful.
The whole site feels really cheap. I closed it at first because I thought I typed the URL in incorrectly and had landed on a parked domain.

The best thing about Khan Academy is its personality, which makes the learning very accessible. It's a no bullshit content delivery system, but this feels like it's straight out of Generic Corporate Designer™.

Also, if you want a clickable url: http://alison.com
Wrong, but with the right attitude. A while ago, SEOMoz reported a similar problem with ripoff report:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-ripoff-report-la...

Apparently, suing them for libel laws is impossible because of CDA, but suing them under RICO might work. CDA says that you can't sue someone for content posted by their users. RICO is an anti-mafia law that says if you are part of an organization that causes illegal things to happen, you could also be liable.

(IANAL)
Given Yelp's size, why doesn't it employ some collaborative filtering options? In general I don't care about everyone's reviews (especially of restaurants). But it would be interesting to know -- for people who like White Castle, McDonald's, and Denny's, but not Applebees -- what would they recommend. This is not the type of thing you could typically get by reading reviews by themselves (and maybe those people wouldn't do Yelp reviews in any case). But standalone reviews of things where taste is such a large component I find almost worthless. With that said dog training is probably something where taste plays a much smaller role.
I like lots.
That's what I've thought at times, but then I've come to the conclusion that:

Think about the population of big internet sites (google, fb, etc) there will ever be. There are countless of these sites that have yet to be created as of today. Therefore, there's plenty of opportunity.
This is a great idea and I hope it brings you a month of interesting adventures.

That said, hope you'll be cleaning my home some time soon. :p
No. Price is a signal of value-- you'll basically get all of the cheap-bastard customers for whom a $5/month savings is worthwhile.

Additionally, you'll be hamstrung from a budget point of view in terms of marketing and product dev budgets.

That said, there are magical price points and economies that technology can get you. For example, Encarta (the CD-ROM encyclopedia) gutted the door-to-door encyclopedia business because they could be cheap with a high profit margin.

So instead of trying to undercut an efficient technology startup, try to undercut someone (or a whole industry) who isn't using technology effectively.
I kinda missed the part where he talked about his latest novel… Zero History was originally published about a year ago (September of 2010) and it is now in mass market paperback. But, when you say "latest" novel it sort of means you're talking about the new novel that hasn't been released yet. Not the old novel that is being released again.

Although, now it appears the title has been altered?
RSS says "William Gibson talks to BoingBoing about his latest novel"

Meanwhile, HN has "William Gibson talks briefly to BoingBoing about his novel, design & the web"

Color me confused..
Jacob Appelbaum: attackers got certs for *.*.com and *.*.org
QB64: A QBASIC compiler that runs on modern machines
Whether yelp's business model meets the definition of extortion is debatable ( either way, i find it distasteful ). However, there is nothing extortionist about this.
Facebook vs. Privacy: The Motivations of Both Sides
I think they do things like filter out reviews from a user that has only posted one review, or if your name appears to be fake, etc. But who knows how exactly their algorithm works.

They're afraid of competitors leaving negative reviews for a business and there's probably something to that, but there's no transparency about it. And they've been doing the extortion thing for a while now: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/yelp-under-fire-from-...

I always thought it would be great if there was a Yelp for landlords - because landlords are rarely held accountable and it's not like you ask for references before you sign a lease - but there would probably be too many false reviews posted to make it work or tenants wouldn't feel comfortable speaking freely (because unfortunately tenants still need references). There's actually a website trying it, but doesn't seem like it's going anywhere right now: http://www.donotrent.com

Hopefully people will see Yelp for what it is: a small sample of the population that may be dissimilar to you writing probably biased reviews.
Since this came up, my take on deploying from Github looks like this: https://github.com/samsonjs/ThePusher ... deploy by pushing.
环氧树脂地坪
Remember Adobe Flash?
Ask HN: How to get into a job at a bank?
I've been doing this project at university, it was written in a functional programming language.

25% into the project I had a meeting with my supervisor, he said he was very impressed with my work. He went on about when I'm going to work in a bank, programming functionally. That day he praised/flattered me so much I'd wager my face was red.

I didn't believe him, though. I'd just failed a Google intern phone interview.

That was 4 months ago. I've had friends graduating since then, getting into 40k programming jobs working 8.30 to 5, 5 days a week, some of them moving into the capital city to work for the government^.

That's not the lifestyle I want. I'm starting to want to work in a bank. At least it pays well enough after a few years I can quit and just... not have to work. I'd still program, but I wouldn't have to program. Do you know what I mean?

How do you know if you're a good programmer or not? How to be one?

^The capital is 10% the size of the city I live in; not an exciting place to live in. I'm studying a double degree in commerce as well, so still got one more year to go.
I agree wholeheartedly with your last sentence.

After stoping to care for downvotes and upvotes, I started to see my karma as a _wallet_, with it I could _spend_ points in irrelevant comments, bad jokes, etc., but not carelessly, just enough to have a good laugh without compromise or worry. Positive points in my _wallet_ means I'm still contributing positively to this community, just that.
Even if the recruiter never plans to do business with the employer again, his interest aren't fully aligned with the job seeker. The recruiter has a strong incentive to the the seeker hired -- regardless of salary -- because if he gets ends up taking a different position, the recruiter may get nothing.
I worked at a semiconductor startup that was acquired in the recession of 08. Got 2 years of a 12.5k annual retention bonus, and well, my job (engineers stayed on, sales/upper management were out)

Was it worth staying there for 2 more years? Dear god No. My opinion these days is that "most post-m&a situations suck", especially those where you're not immediately integrated into the acquiring's company culture, or promoted to lead them to better things. The problem is that it's deceiving at first. When you get acquired, you're like, "hey, my fellow engineering team stays the same, and all the crappy management from startup is out!". They built a new satellite office for us to move into with their other recent acquisitions. While it sounds nice, it's miserable if you don't see a growth path for yourself, and don't understand how the rest of the acquiring company functions. Why should I work for some options of a company I don't understand?

In the 2+ years, I've dealt with lack of funding for projects I want to do (project customers want and competitors already have), watched several very smart engineers (the ones you look up to) leave the company, as well as my own manager recently leave. Simultaneously, I feel like my work-life is more stressful as I have to work with "company-wide" field engineers that don't necessarily care about our product line, we've been losing customers since they notice us not shipping new parts and integrating our support across the company.

To help clarify, I'm an apps engineer - i.e. a mix of trying to do software development, customer support, working/managing a contractor, setting up our issue tracker, and dropping everything to hack something up for a tier-1 customer.

My advice to other non-founders getting acquired: If you're not in debt, don't worry about the money from your acquisition. Worry about whether you'll be gaining any new experiences post-acquisition. If the acquiring company is just dangling you along, leave. Be very weary of "retention bonuses" - they can alter the way you perceive your work for the worse.

Disclaimer: I need to start following the above advice.
Javascript and jQuery free course
Content thinks about this a little bit differently.

Here are a few factors that may make the proposed offering less favorable than the status quo, even if you factor in piracy:

(1) Windowing. First-run content is way more valuable than longer tail content. So sure, Simpsons episodes can go for $2 on Amazon and eventually come bundled on Netflix, but only after a wait. This is a more favorable situation for content. Different media and different windows command different fees, and this allows content producers to sell to different people at different times. In the case of Scrubs, for instance, Buena Vista/ABC produced the content, sold the first run rights to NBC (who paid ~20% of cost for first-run rights) and then later syndicates it to Comedy Central and others. They ultimately become available on DVD, iTunes, etc.

(2) Advertising revenue isn't enough. That's right, in many cases, only around half of value comes from advertisers. "But TV is free on my bunny-ears!" Sure...but not if you pay for cable. If you do, the cable guys have to pay retransmission consent to content guys, and those costs can be considerable. On cable, most if not all of the content revenues are from subscription fees.

(3) Bundling. Taking in subscription revenue allows content to take bigger risks on (potentially) great content, and to invest more in it upfront. Think about HBO. They cost a fortune, but I think that many would argue that they are worth it.

On a related note... I part of a new TV startup that addresses many of these issues. We're serious, we're venture-backed and we're disruptive. PM me if you're interested.
I agree with you on the site's looks, very uninviting... And that damn animated button in the right corner drives me crazy.
One of the things that is slightly disappointing here is that Starz is the one carrying Torchwood for season 4 here in the US.

That said however, I have completely given up on Netflix. I got sick of them years ago when they throttled my dvd subscription. An example; I used to get a movie on Monday, watch it, send it back Tuesday and I'd get another DVD on Thursday at the latest. By the end of it, I'd get a movie on Monday, send it on Tuesday and not get another DVD until Saturday or the following Monday.

Just got annoying. My brother has the streaming plan hooked up to my AppleTV and while Netflix streams fine on a computer it occassionally skips about 5-10 seconds of audio/video on the AppleTV. I'm not sure if that's an issue with the AppleTV or something to do with their streaming service. Regardless, it's annoying.

I've just gone back to DVRing the crap I want to watch and torrenting the stuff that isn't available in the US on normal tv.
Wrong too. The note goes on guy's website, not on Yelp's. "We noticed you came here from Yelp. Yadda-yadda..."
Nearly read "My dream is to watch Jobs die". I am far too tired to read HN right now.
Maybe that's why it's not exposed in the first place. :P
It looks corporate and soulless - not fun at all.
There's a lot of good Photoshop walk through tutorials out there, I find they're a good place to get started, after you do a few you start to internalize the various techniques that are popular.
I like the idea, a pretty radical one too! :) All the best!! Do share the results with the community
"Agriculture isn’t that old"

Agriculture is way older than any surviving building, back to about 9000BC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture
In case you want to dig in deeper, Frank Brader's dog business on Yelp now has 4 stars from 5 reviews:

http://www.yelp.com/biz/haus-von-brader-dog-obedience-traini...

Justin G, the negative reviewer, was a Yelp Elite member from 2006-2008:

http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=z25c9TyWY1TdVEGxkj34...
This is going to sound like grumpy old guy, but I really don't mean it that way.

One of the mistakes I made early on when participating on HN was giving a shit about what folks here thought about my startup ideas. Funny thing -- I didn't even realize it. I would just suggest something, somebody would trash it, and I would move on without working on the idea some more. Unknown to me, I was letting popular hacker opinion be some kind of gatekeeper to what I wanted to spend my time on.

To your point, don't do this. If other engineers like the idea -- building some new toolset or creating the 4000th version of an online scrum tool -- run away from it. Run far, far away.

I had a cousin who was always trying get-rich-quick ideas. One year it was zero-down real-estate. Then it was investing. Then it was MLM. Then it was something else. He read some books, get jazzed up, and work as hard as he could. But, of course, none of it ever worked out.

One day I was speaking to him on the phone and he was very excited. Yet again. I kind of sighed inwardly, but then he described to me how he was going to make a renewable power product -- how the cost per material had a significant differential, how he had contacts in the import business, how the fabrication could be done at a small improvement -- all nickel and dime, small percentage, boring stuff. You know, distribution channels, marketing, production models, etc.

It was then I knew my cousin was finally going to make it. He graduated from dealing with all the emotions around startups to actually working the mundane, small, detailed problems that really make a business hum. There won't be any books or seminars on how to create a renewable energy manufacturing business -- he's making up the book as he goes along. That's what real business building is about. Not about creating some cool new thing or solving world hunger. Of course, nothing wrong with chasing a dream -- as long as you don't delude yourself and know what the numbers say. The trick is graduating from "feel good" startups to actual, real, down-and-dirty, numbers-driven, boring startups.
A friend of mine found once such book from 1932. It's pretty amazing and she has fittingly been posting some of it on Tumblr: http://someoldbooks.tumblr.com/tagged/diary

A lot of walking down the street!
Reading this was fascinating and considering the number of unhappy reviewers over happy, their own 3-star rating seems far-fetched.
"It makes local hard to scale because your audience size is that much smaller that reviews are far less reliable both in frequency and volume"

I've been a member of Angie's List for over 2 years now. It's not only saved me countless amounts of money over choosing nationally-advertised service companies for stuff like plumbing and HVAC work, but it's saved me tons of aggravation filtering out the honest, hard-working businesses from the fly-by-night charlatans who pile on services and "annual maintenance contracts" that are just code for finding yet another problem next year.

How do they get "local" reviews? Simple. If you pay for it, you'll review to keep the cycle of reviews going. If you're invested $30-60/yr. to subscribe, you feel like you have a vested interest in keeping both the review site and the service provider alive. I liken it to the SomethingAwful forums: the ones who subscribe are also the most frequent posters.

But, Angie's List also uses their own tactics to keep reviews flowing and fresh. They will email reminders to review service providers you've recently browsed if you decided to use them. They'll even call you to record a review over the phone and then they'll transcribe it.

It's why they've been blowing everyone else out of the water in "local" search since the 90s.
Sure, but considering the scales involved the need for buildings is relatively recent.
You might also enjoy my own account of ArsDigita University:

http://aduni.org/~tomh/rants/aduni_five_years_later.html

Nice to hear the ToC lectures are still being used 10 years later.
This is a great idea. But I find that the churn rate for HN is quite high in comparison to reddit, and I need to check HN quite a few times a day to not miss interesting stuff. Also, though this case is probably rare given the shared interests of HN and subreddits, it's still possible that you could miss out on something that you would have potentially found interesting, but the majority did not.