skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Review my startup (tool for social network power users)
Hi,

A couple of months ago I launched a "field trial" of my startup (http://welshare.com). It's a project I'm doing on the side (I'm working as a full-time Java developer) and it's a tool for social network power users (like me).

Since then I've been using it extensively, fixing some issues and adding some features. But that's about it - I don't have more than 10 users using the service. So I might say I've just launched it.

I've shared the technical details in my blog: http://techblog.bozho.net/?p=346

I created it because I was trying to find a tool that does all I want, and couldn't find any. There are many tools out there - tweetdeck, hootsuite, seesmic, etc., but they either have a different focus (business users) or they lack features other than the basic ones.

What I need to do now is obtain validation. Whether the thing would really be useful to more people than just me, and whether it is a good product in its current form.

I would also like to get your feedback on how to improve it. Thanks in advance.
Interest shouldn't accumulate as long as payments are being made.

If people are leaving school and jobless, then any debt is going to be rough on them.
That was fun. The challenge is not very hard.
Part of me agrees with what you're saying, and in some cases, I do acknowledge this and try to give business to those that truly provide a valuable service to me.

However, in the case of BB, I'm less inclined to reward them, as I feel they -- in a lot of cases -- take advantage of uneducated customers, and gouge them with certain lines of products. Cables (Monster cables are the worst) being a prime example of this, where they sell cables at a cost sometimes 25-50 times that you can get almost anywhere online (selling a $3 cable for $100).

I don't want this to turn into a discussion about specific stores or products, just using that as an example of why some retailers have lost the respect of some of the more educated consumers. Business is one thing, but taking advantage of the uneducated is another.

But again, I do agree with you about the general notion of giving business to those that provide a valuable service to you.
Depends on the type of loan.
I have friends with non-government loans, and for them, interest starts accumulating the instant they take the loan.
`ansi-term` is probably is for me. Integrating your terminal closer with your editor is really amazing. Using `multi-term` to make it easier to handle multiple terminals, and you've got a really nice integrated environment.

That's probably the killer feature for me.
I'm saying that fraud was systemic during the prelude to the crash as the banks scrambled to unload as many of these CDOs as possible, however possible. It'd be near impossible to add up every single case of fraud and bicker over which is really fraud and which is only sort of dishonest, but they definitely unloaded a lot more CDOs than 570 million on their unsuspecting clients.
No, the major issue was not customer service, but the way they locked them out of the funds.
Handling delivery of packages is sill a major annoyance of online shopping. I love Amazon but consumer-side logistics could use some serious improvement. The drive to reduce shipping prices as much as possible has definite downsides.

- Items consistently damaged/stolen during shipment.
- Delivery of incorrect items/wrong address.
- No place to leave packages during the day if you live in an apartment with no doorman.
- Impossible to schedule delivery, especially before the first delivery attempt. It is unwise to order things while
traveling.
- Carriers lie about delivery attempts and times.
- Distribution center for package pick up is 10 miles away and only open M-F 9-5.
Under current tax laws they would most likely only do this in states where they already have shipping centers (Nevada and ...?) because opening such a store would create a nexus, requiring them to collect use taxes on all of their online sales to the state where the store is located.
Sound effect attenuation in video games?
Dear HN,

Can anyone please give me pointers or references
on the following question?

In video games today, if a player is distant
from a noise source, how is the noise reduced?
At what point is the source not played?

I am trying to understand how distance based
priotization and culling of game objects
should work.

The motivation for my question is far away
game objects (such as big explosions) that
should still not be culled because they are
so loud as to be heard even at great distance.

Many Thanks
> Do you know if anybody has tried a showroom/ship model for those sorts of purchases at any scale?

Britain's Argos comes to mind.
The translation you're probably looking for is "millet". :)
The counter examples are legion, but Apple's future growth is dominated by Asia (esp. China).

Western companies selling (likely chinese-made) goods to China without investing in serious design, development and marketing (not to mention ecosystem and support) are not going to have much of a future, I agree.
SAP and Salesforce of Small Businesses

We did something like that in mid-2000s as an Open Source project (http://openpsa2.org/). Never really caught fire with us, though. Business apps are a difficult area.
if they want to make real impact, they should be changing their policies...not just releasing the funds in this one single case.

if the only way to get good customer service is to get millions of people to support you, then you aren't doing it right
Why is it that every time I see a .io domain, I'm not surprised there using the cliche twitter bootstrap. Other than the lack of originality in design, I think it's pretty useful. Although I would like to see some decent HTML5 documentation. It's not unusual for me to search several websites for HTML5 docs. Would be nice to have a 1 stop place for HTML5 and the related languages. Keep up the good work, great project!
Whim Launches Real-Time Spontaneous Meetup Platform
Introducing ECMAScript 5.1
"First of all, I think it's very likely that one of your own (ex-)employees will either go public with the information or blackmail you in order to buy your silence."

Why would they go public? They're presumably making (what they consider to be) good money writing fake reviews. By going public they'd be 1 - losing their revenue from you, 2 - undermining the public's confidence in reviews, which would translate in to a less lucrative business for the provider of fake reviews.

As for blackmail, I'm sure it happens from time to time. But I don't know how to estimate the frequency with which fake reviewers blackmail their clients. What is your basis for estimating the probability of such blackmail as "very likely"?

Furthermore, blackmail is an obvious risk for any secret/illegal undertaking, and yet people attempt try to do things in secret and break the law all the time. Clearly, for them the risk seems worth it (at the time).

"Secondly, a sudden increase in the number of positive reviews should be fairly easy to spot by a competitor who has already hired a developer to watch for such things and do automated sentiment analysis on the reviews of competitors."

So, the fake positive reviews might be staggered over a reasonable period of time. But even the business receives many positive reviews in a short period of time, that's not proof the reviews were fake.

"Thirdly, it's entirely possible that a broader-spectrum monitoring of reviews (perhaps provided by a third-party service) could identify common authors and/or text that is likely to be fake by analyzing the content of the reviews themselves. This would help pick up paid reviews that were placed over a long period of time."

Are there any such services which claim to be able to detect fake reviews? Or is this mere speculation on your part? Regardless, just because some service or algorithm claims a review is fake doesn't mean it is. Once again, their guess/estimate is not proof.
Red Cross Would Like Rules of War Applied to Video Games - Forbes
What you are saying is completely valid if you are comparing the prices between two physical stores in the same general area. The problem (which may or may not be an actual problem) is that the overhead of operating a store that allows browsing demands the price to not be competitive against amazon (if you are defining not competitive as 10% more expensive).

This will only become an increasing problem as more people do what is discussed in the article. Best Buy will have to handle all of the foot traffic for both their own sales and for Amazon sales, that will lower their conversion rates which means they have to have an even higher markup which will drive more people to buy online and so on. At some point the store will go out of business and you won't even be able to pay the $10 extra to be able to physically compare products even if you wanted to.
Understandable. I'll check again, a bit later.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply.
on a side note, whenever i asked such open ended question on stackoverflow, it would quickly get closed by some other user claiming that "there is no right answer" and the question must be closed. But there are so many great open ended questions on there that score so high among users. i guess it's a matter of luck that some anal retentive person doesn't get to it first?
Russian Girls And Dating Today
The article mentions PLV8 which transparently converts everything to JSON internally and can be used to output json directly. And there are various other extensions to Postgres that will allow you move JSON into and out of the database.

If you want to talk to an arbitrary webservice as though it were a local table you can use www_fdw (Foreign Data Wrapper) https://github.com/cyga/www_fdw/wiki/Examples

And if you're doing geo stufff PostGIS speaks GeoJSON.
Hey Google | Socyberty
Nice.

Having the canvas consume the full client area in the browser would be helpful; there's a lot of wasted space in the margins. The title/input area could be top center and z-ordered above the canvas.
Whoaa...I am not very technical, but the first question that comes to mind is, what would be a difference between this and what Tor attempts to accomplish?
Very cool. I figured they didn't use Flash since it works on my iPad.

Have you used the Echonest stuff at all? Its pretty slick too.
Clickable link: http://theopenphotoproject.org
Sebastian thrun nytimes essay on robocars
Rebuttal: http://i.imgur.com/pRUqr.png
Final should be Default for Classes in Java
Why would I want to pay 20 bucks to an artist I don't know and haven't heard before? Pretty sure that is not how new bands are able to get off the ground and make it. You need to put out a CD and tour (and make revenue off both) to keep doing the same.
Personally, I think the 10-cent sale is brilliant. 10 cents motivates you to put in your credit card number if you haven't - and then the difference between 10 cents and 99 cents for other apps later is pretty trivial psychologically.

I wonder if they are compensating these partners beyond the 10 cent price?
Also, the fact that BaseCamp has quite decent APIs has enabled a "cottage industry" of third-party clients and add-ons to evolve. This has probably made the product a lot more durable:

http://basecamphq.com/extras?cohort=Landing%20Headlines%20/%...
So, then, that's more of a showroom than a "store".
Autodiely
I'll believe it when I hear it from Regretsy...according to their blog (http://www.regretsy.com/2011/12/06/breaking-news/), they know as much about the resolution as we do...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3318903
I've been trying to figure out a good way to do this for a while in vim, and can't say I've found much. The best i can figure is something to this effect:

highlight LowVis ctermbg=233 guibg=233 ctermfg=240
syn region LowVis start="\s*log_" end=";" contains=LowVis oneline
C-x C-t

Transpose the current line with the previous line.
This is an excellent start for a long discussion on economics, ethics, psychology, etc. that probably would be done better in a cafe, slowly sipping Earl Grey tea rather than on HN, but still..

One of the main points of the argument is that

i) It is feared that the rich will take advantage if this is legalized
ii) But the rich already have many ways of access to organs anyway
iii) It is predominately the poor who die waiting for a kidney.

This argument is strong, e.g. if Amit Gupta was a poor nobody, would his case get the exposure it did? On the other hand, isn't this argument similar to the one advocating free sale for guns, because criminals have access to these anyway and it's only the person on the street who gets hurt?

I think the main argument against explicit sale of kidneys is on moral grounds, nor operational, i.e. how to best implement this system. You are selling part of your body, which no sane person in a normal situation would do, so there must be something wrong with this. This argument runs foul of the fact that other such activity, that is on similar gray (or really dark gray) area, is legal, e.g. prostitution, getting compensated for being a surrogate mother.

Let's zoom on prostitution. You think it may be irrelevant to selling kidneys, but think about it: you are selling something to a stranger, kidney in one, dignity in the other, that normally you would not do. Many countries have legalized prostitution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution#Legality) because of the realization that it is not the actual act that should be banned but all the bad secondary factors it brings, i.e. sexual slavery, veneral disease. If these can be controlled, why not make it legal between consensual parties. Still, this doesn't leave me feeling good, I feel an unease that I cannot put a finger as a human being.

I feel similarly for selling organs.
The Future of CSS (Slides)
I like the choice of colors.. And the code is well done imo.
Eshop
Eshop, spare parts, auto
TopForty.it is the Twitter Music Top 40
Redefining the Epoch: The Internet Calendar
Library of Congress to receive entire Twitter archive
Once they start messing with that, legal or not, I feel there will be a huge political backlash. While the confrontation will be fascinating to watch, I believe the "stop messing with the cell phone" party will win.
Congratulations! Looks interesting; what are some use cases?
I like idomenu, which lists variable/function definitions in your file. When you combine it with ido-menu, it's magic. Bind it to C-c s, and you get a list of symbols you can navigate extremely fast.

The downside is that if the symbol locations change in a file, you'd have to refresh it. :(
Founder Dialogues - Niraj Shah & Steven Conine of Wayfair [video]
More and more desktop apps are interfacing the users with the Internet though, especially when you extrapolate Apple's model with their app store.

It is just as dangerous "in here" too...
I'm doing a project looking at startup hubs, and some of the related factors. Here's a map of LA startups with some neighborhood outlines: http://imgur.com/hiG3Y .

The data is a crawl from crunchbase, so it's not perfect, but it provides a rough indicator or where startups have popped up over the last 5 years.

The raster underlay is a function of point density within a set radius.
This is not true. Interest does not start accruing on subsidized loans until repayment begins. Interest accrues WHILE you are still in school for unsubsidized loans. In both cases, interest is accruing as you are making regular payments.
Yes, I saw this. I was looking for a way to add new music, without clearing what was already there. Oh well, no matter.
I feel no remorse doing this at Fry's. But at a place such as Books Inc. (your basic friendly neighborhood book store), well, I'd rather just buy it from the store.

Borders is gone. If Books Inc goes too, downtown will be a much less interesting place.
Submitted this yesterday but no one cared. http://badassjs.com/post/13788484076/csg-js-constructive-sol...
Nonsense. Saying that kidneys should be "commoditized" to avoid the black market it's like saying that slaves should be legal to avoid people travelling in a container.

In particular, kidneys can be transplanted from "dead" to living, and donning between living - even inside your family - is very restricted (at least in Uruguay). Although one case may be very altruistic and reasonable, there are thousands of subtle situations which are horrendous, and all the donning process will be heavily affected.

It's a moral statement: you can't put price on life or your body.

Improving the donors rate with policies is a better way to go and it hasn't reached its limits so far.
2011 Tech Holiday Gift Guide
URDU SEX STORIES: Fauj May Mauj
Occasionally it will disengage, leaving the pilot in full control. IIRC, when in full-auto it will automatically wave off (add power and climb out to go around and try again) when it disengages unless the pilot actively takes over; so it wouldn't create an immediately unsafe situation, but it could result in an unneccessary missed opportunity to land.
Ars Technica’s 2011 holiday gift guide extravaganza
449,543 like this
16,516 talking about this

That's a popular dog.
Read the guidelines:
"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."
For Vim users like myself, there's a related Stack Overflow Discussion: What is your most productive shortcut with Vim?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most...
I really like this from PayPal. They have nipped the issue in the bud. They are making a donation to boot.

It seems to me that both Regretsy and PayPal are at fault. Regretsy for using a button with implications they didn't realise. Paypal for not making these issues clear and what looks like some shocking customer support. I hope PayPal look into the customer support issue but that aside the issue is resolved. PayPal have publically admitted fault and are taking steps to correct it. Good on them.

PayPal gets a lot of bad press. I do feel though if you look at the quantity of transactions they deal with and the amount of rules and regulations they have to work with they are doing an alright job. The could improve in areas but lets face it.. what big company couldn't.
Breaking News (Regretsy & PayPal)
The single most useful Emacs feature is the design of Emacs as a platform for hosting ELisp. Without ELisp, and the OS and text editing services provided by the Emacs run-time, none of these extensions would be possible.

Trite but true!
even so, you're adding risk on top of the risk of running a business.
By that measure, you pay for shipping at Walmart, too. The goods don't magically arrive at the store.
Video Advertising and Your Website
I found this part a little weird:

>In the meantime, Paypal has issued a statement saying
they have made a donation and they are working with me,
but I have not spoken to anyone yet. I will let you know
when I do.
Ok I am not expecting miracles here. How usable is it? Will it play angry birds (smoke test). Bascially, is this a repeat of the previous $100 android tablet fiasco?
Unfortunately I've had the opposite experience: trying to use request then finding that I have to build my own. Mainly because it has no good pattern for both streaming and catching errors in a predictable fashion, the streaming isn't true streaming in most cases (try a 5GB file), and with binary files, it's tricky to nail the right encoding.
Get the same error, guess it is already fixed.
Clickable: http://welshare.com
Apple still get the money if you buy their products elsewhere.
Idea: a site designed to build and maintain a trusted local network of people who are at home or work all day, and who will receive packages for you, for a small commission.
It really depends on if you can prove malicious intent. I know in the back of Wal Mart, for example, my cell reception is terrible. There are metal walls everywhere, thick metal shelves, and the back of the store is made of concrete and rebar. When I go into a store, I really expect my cell service to drop out. I expect a lot of people have the same expectation.
I have instacss.com in my bookmarks bar. Is dochub.io a "better" site to use, or does it not matter which one I use?

Incidentally, I find it very strange that when the site first loads, it's a completely blank page with a Feedback tab on the right. It can sometimes take quite a while for the actual contents to load.
Why should I use this anyway? (btw - useless invite codes)
On the other hand, protein and fat increase satiety better than carbohydrates, so if you want to feel fuller on fewer calories, protein is a good bet.
> Why would I want to pay 20 bucks to an artist I don't know and haven't heard before?

You wouldn't. Release some samples first. Play at venues. Make a name for yourself. Make people want more.

Why would you want to hire a hacker you don't know and haven't seen work from? Either you take a chance on someone who looks good on paper without seeing any of their work, or you look for someone who has already demonstrated their ability. The same thing applies to artists.
I'm always concerned when a company says "We're popular and well liked, so we're going to change everything!"
Business apps are a difficult area

Open Source and Free do not work for serious businesses.

For open source, you want someone responsible. Except you have a strong re-seller and support program, I doubt it will work.

Free is an entirely different issue. A business will not want to be 'Gowallad'. i.e, Sell suddenly and say have your data and thanks for your time. We are shutting down next month. See thread discussing this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3318458

When you create a company i.e charge money, businesses know you are serious and have someone to complain to. Then you have a higher chance of gaining traction.
Intel, Micron offer 128-Gbit NAND flash memory
Intel and Micron have announced the development of a 128-Gbit NAND flash memory made using a 20-nm manufacturing process technology for flash that includes high-K metal gate (HKMG) transistors.
This was indeed a bug, and shouldn't work any more. We turned off the system that lets you report content through this flow (and thus made this bug's code inaccessible) as soon as we became aware of the issue.

In the future, if you find a security / privacy bug on Facebook, feel free to report it via our whitehat program, which will get things looked at more quickly than random blog posts. You can get credit for the find and even make money with bug-bounty payouts: http://www.facebook.com/whitehat/.

For what it's worth, a few people were alluding to this meaning that we don't check privacy by default. In fact we do have a pretty robust default-deny system for running privacy checks. This was an edge case where it was forced to work in a way that was incorrect.

(I work at Facebook, but not on this system.)
> there isn't as far as I know much in the way of social video sharing

SocialCam has been nailing this pretty good, IMHO.

http://socialcam.com
Thanks!

That's one of the hardest parts is to narrow use cases down.

What we're focusing on at the moment is for consumers. It provides a way to synchronize/aggregate your photos from across multiple photo services into one location (that you have the option to own/control). We haven't built all of the connectors but that's in the pipeline.

From a technical perspective, decoupling the service from the database and filesystem (basically allowing users to provide their own) opens up a lot of opportunities. We're paying a lot of attention to which opportunities look the most interesting.

There's an entirely separate use case for businesses which we haven't even touched. Any business that was weary of putting their photos on Flickr now has a compelling alternative that will satisfy any of their paranoia.