skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Best launch strategies for a weekend project? And what I did till now.
Hello fellow hackers,

I'm getting close to finishing the development phase of my weekend project (v0.1 of course), so I started wondering what would be the best launching strategy.

I've already read numerous articles on that topic which all mention: spreading it in your networks (FB, Twitter, G+), emailing the press, writing a blog, ads, etc. However, I want to hear your success stories. What did you do when you launched your weekend project? Did it work? Is your weekend project a success? Links to the projects itself, blogs, etc. are more than welcome.

Let's make like a small weekend-project-how-to-launch together. :)

P.S. Little details on my weekend project: It's a time-optimizing advisor. It will help the user do his/her activities and cure his/hers procrastination. I believe it has something valuable to offer its users, since time is our most valuable resource. Till now I just started a personal blog (http://1p1e1.tumblr.com/) where I plan to eventually announce it. However, I definitely need more angles of attack over the problem defined above. :)
Can you explain what STEM background means? Most politicians in India are uneducated. Of course the ones at the national level are educated but by and large they are think only save their seats and get reelected, nothing beyond that.
http://fitbolt.com/ is down.
I think that schools are not so much about learning stuff as about training and testing ability to learn dull things that you don't like and/or care about. That's invaluable skill in life.

Most people forget 90% of things they've learnt in school after 5-10 years after finishing.

If you take a look at the things you were learning in college, you'd be amazed how much of even interesting and seemingly useful things somewhat associated with what you currently do, you can't even remember learning.
Would a guy like that even know how many zeros come after the 3 in $3 billion?
Nodeflakes - real time tweet powered snowflakes
Is this a mozilla.org build? If so, what does about:crashes say? Can you paste some of the links here?

If this is a distribution-provided build, it might still have a working crash reporter or not, depending on the distribution. Check about:crashes, and if the links there don't do anything useful try reproducing the crashes in a mozilla.org build?
But it wouldn't even be calculus in 10th grade.

In 10th grade most kids have done a year of algebra and are doing plane geometry along with simple proofs.

That must be it: the scientific sample of people he described the test contents too did not use proofs in their work. Therefore, introducing mathematical logic in 10th grade is not going to prepare students for the high-tech jobs of the future.

Brilliant!
yes—i'd probably buy it if only for the insurance, though I doubt if i'd use it without a really good reason.
The Internet: Triumph of human evolution
Where did you get this glorious idea from, about Indian politicians? Half of the parliament probably never finished high school.
Show HN - platform helping employers screen candidates effectively
Refactoring My Basement
I use the PwdHash extension. It works great. You type the same password into every box; it in encrypts it using the domain name of the current web page as the key.

Also I'm using SSL client certs for a recent project, and I LOOOVE them. I wonder what sorts of problems render them "unusable" for him.
ReadWriteWeb's Most Promising Company For 2012 (Hint: Think HTML5)
Of course you're right. I'm an idiot. Thanks for setting me straight.
At best, I'd say that there must be some context missing.
Interesting article, terrible title - add something significant, like "the effects of frictionless sharing"...
Second that.. If anybody has links to the test, post them.
Indian Pharmaceuticals Industry Acclaimed Globally
CAFE is particularly interesting because the government recognizes that the standard results in lighter, deadlier cars, killing thousands of additional people on American roads.
You're talking about a related but distinct legal issue. CAFE is an exercise of Congress's commerce clause power, and as part of that power, they have allowed states to set stricter standards. Had they not specifically done so, states would not have that authority, as federal law would preempt them in that area.

The issue here is that there are, in fact, certain federal laws regarding toxins in general, and batteries in particular, that might lead a court to conclude that federal law has preempted state law in this area. Congress's choice not to require battery manufacturers to take certain steps is not the same as Congress abdicating that authority to the states.

I'm not saying this is cut and dried, or that they'd likely win, I'm just saying it's sufficiently fuzzy that I'd expect the lawsuit to be filed.
Make topics appropriate to real life situations, don't just provide definitions (A VC's MBA Mondays blog does this already).
exactly, bingo! It's like saying u'll stay married forever when your hormones are raging.
I did make a claim about how it makes sense even if the skills aren't directly applicable to any profession.

I understood the claim to be "the skills being measure are not necessary" to mean "you don't need the skills to be successful" which I do agree with. That is a completely different claim than the idea that that the skills are useless, the skills are only useful to some (significant) subset of the population, and I argue that we should teach them even to people that they will be useless for to force feed them an opportunity that they might otherwise have ignored as a possibility.
Have you looked at grubwithus.com? Not many "famous" people yet, but definitely a start in the right direction.
Case studies are lousy because they are not rigorous, and often have not had any meaningful result.

See also knee arthroscopy for patients with osteo arthritis - many of these surgeries were performed before a trial with a control group was possible. That trial found that people who got the sham surgery did as well as the people who got the real surgery. Case studies are lousy, often harmful, medicine.
Along those lines, how many times were you given a paper to write that 'must be at least 10,000 words' or 'presentation must have a minimum of 8 slides'? Discard the fact that you can communicate and support your idea(s) in 5000 words or 3 slides.

Modern education systems in North America focus on the wrong things.
Android 4.0 Compatibility Definition
Now the bad guy has to crack two sites which you register on. (Or just make you register on two of his sites). Bam, all your passwords are effectively 3-letters long.
This scheme is pretty common, so yes they would think of that. They might not try and figure out the alphabet position thing, since the password is laughably easy by now.

Or, they have you register on just one site they control, and figure out the substitution trick. They now have all your passwords.

Now that you made the post it's even worse: we all know your password here is 8 lowercase characters + 813. If that's really true, I recommend changing all your passwords everywhere, NOW.

It's an extremely, extremely tiny step up from having the same password everywhere.
Spot Pornography on Facebook for a Quarter-Cent an Image
Do iPad sales signal the laptop’s decline?
Facebook worm spreads via chat
Love.

This isn't a piece about china, or developing countries, or even internet businesses. This is "rich vs king". (1)

There are tons of opportunities out there, but a lot of the good ones are decidedly unsexy. Getting the most press != Making the most money.

(1) http://blog.asmartbear.com/rich-vs-king-sold-company.html
I think it is pretty cool!
The resulting story is (as expected) not good. As for the cost, assuming 10 words per sentence on the average, he pays $0.01 per word. Compare with what some magazines pay: http://johnaugust.com/2009/how-much-does-a-short-story-earn-..., since most sentences will be crap, it's not that much cheaper.

However, I still think this is fantastic! Obviously it can be of use of seeding thoughts to get out of a writer's block, someone can offer this as a service. However, the cooler application would be to couple this with an AI trained on contemporary literature to select more promising sentences automatically. This may also be applicable to other fields, i.e. painting, where you can ask people to come up with local abstract designs and put them together to get the final picture.
Also hard to believe that he had to guess the answer for every single math question.
Thanks ive been hacking about with node and hadn't come across this module yet. Looks super useful.
The problem is the author went to school too many years ago and missed the ubiquitous "how to take standardized tests" curriculum.

These days kids are taught from kindergarten on how to take standardized tests. My sixth grader can look at a test question and narrow it down to two answers before even reading the question. And for math, he doesn't solve the problem, he plugs the two answers in to see which is right.

I teach math at a community college and it is common to have students test into math classes that they don't have the basic prerequisites for - just because they test well.
This is what you get when you seriously consider making SOPA into law: "If you can get companies to strangle funds and kidnap domains of people saying that, can't you not also make this disappear?"
I could not agree less with the conclusion the board member came to. In my experience, the general education is dual purpose. There is surely a foundation-building aspect to it, where the student's body of general knowledge is expanded. But more importantly, the process of learning builds discipline and habits for success. A successful educator and educational system balances these two purposes.
It would have to be an open-source, client-side only application. That's the only way I could consider trusting it.
Back in September I went through a similar exercise and wrote down some details about it here:

http://johndbritton.com/2011/09/30/consciously-deciding-to-l...
I've just glanced over it, but so far it seems to fill an identifiable niche: non-programmers who realize the importance of programming.

It's really the right time for a book like this (for all the reasons the author enumerates).

Everyday I see how bad decisions are made because the people in charge haven't touched a line of code in over a decade (if they ever programmed at all, which is the more common case). This is a big driver of missed deadlines, cost overruns and generally craptacular products. Learning just a bit of programming can really shed some light on what coding is all about and what one needs to consider. It also highlights the potential for making your business decisions a lot more data driven instead of relying on people's personalities and internal politics.

I was thinking of ways to get more non-programmers in my company to understand the importance of coding and also something to get them started off on the right track. This book might be just what I was looking for.

Thanks for the efforts and thanks for making the draft available online, otherwise I would never have bothered reading it.
Wonder what's more absurd teleacquisition of EEG signal or ability to actually read any concrete information about thoughts from them.

Nonetheless, it's rather sad, because the issue is rather serious and that's a rather serious newspaper, isn't it?
For entrepreneurs building a patent portfolio
The easiest (and, considering the context, best I think) way is to post a "Show HN", together with some installation codes so that people can try and give feedback. If the thing is good, you'll get great buzz. If it's not ready, you'll get great feedback.
This would be awesome but I don't think the usual Lego blocks would work in this case.

In minecraft you can "snap" blocks sideways, something that is impossible with these blocks.

I was thinking, why not use small internal magnets? It would increase the price of the pieces but it would pretty awesome. (Cheaper version would be to add those snap-in thingies to every side.)

Why stop there and not support redwire by using small electrical circuits inside the blocks?
The Data Viz Challenge
Google's all time biggest failures
i would be too worried that it would get triggered by accident or that someone would pretend to be me and hit the "panic button". i could imagine being on vacation and suddenly being locked out from all my stuff. it's bad enough when my bank card gets flagged.
Your link has no open positions, did they all get filled in the last three days?
Well, he doesn't always look like that. Sometimes he's sleeping. :-)
How to Spot Technology Trends I: Mother Knows Best
> and I don't understand why it's not widely used.

RSA, one provider of such tokens, was hacked making many of those devices worthless.

RSA was hacked because someone in Personnel opened an attachment supposedly from a recruitment agency.

(http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2391951,00.asp)

Very frustrating that the expert people supplying the extra security for the people wanting extra security are the people falling for stupid stunts like "include an infected Excel file, and hope someone opens it".
QRADIO - QR code street art that would make Banksy jealous
His intention was to get people to be a little more considerate when asking for people's time, not turning relationships into dollar-per-hour transactions. We in the nerd community often have problems empathizing with others, and thinking more about turning a request (check out my new startup) into a nice experience for the other guy (how about free lunch?) would go a long way toward getting people to hear us out.
Cool way to display data! And it's festive too!
Congress abdicating that authority to the states

That's an odd phrase, in the presence of the 10th Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Congress doesn't get to decide what power it will exercise, and leave the crumbs for the States (at least not in theory). The States and the People have decided what powers to grant to the Federal Gov't, and so Congress is limited to that scope.

(Yes, I'm aware of preemption in various matters, I'm objecting to the implication in your statement that Congress gets to decide what the States' rights are.)
Science, Technology, Engineering, Math.

Having a STEM background doesn't mean they aren't pig ignorant, it just means ...

Well, to be honest, it probably doesn't mean anything other than they were capable of passing a test.
Apple pushing iPads for use in hospitals
Cars are successful because they work in all climes, are enclosed, and don't make people sweaty. Bikes will not work in a lot of places with snow because plowing doesn't really remove ice patches and winds can be brutal (40 - 60 mph gusts). The future replacement for cars will probably use the same infrastructure and be powered and enclosed.

As to the no need for showers, it seems a lot more people who think they don't need to shower actually do. I had a cube two rows down from a biker that believed that, but it wasn't so.
Although I agree with you I do find it fishy to say this man holds multiple degrees, with one (at least) being in the sciences.

If he's capable of defending that degree then he theoretically should have a grasp on the kind of mathematics are being thrown in Grade 10. If the grade 10 mathematics are some odd-ball thing that has no real relevance (and thus the last time he saw it was grade 10) it points at a bigger issue.

If my memory serves me, grade 10 was algebra almost exclusively. It wasn't until my grade 11/12 courses that other topics like limits and matrices came into play (and those are still simple by my terms).

What I'm trying to say is, although intelligence and success are separate entities the test should be somewhat correlated with his university education. If what high schools are doing is NOT preparing students for real world or post secondary life then what are they doing?
I have lived in one of the other countries, know hundreds upon hundreds of people from several of the other countries, and own and have read textbooks from several of the top TIMSS countries, including textbooks written in languages other than English. (I speak, understand, read, and write Chinese to the level of a professional translator and interpreter.) I reject the facile analysis you picked up from a blog post--so far not published in a peer-reviewed journal--by a graduate student who has yet to complete his degree because I have read better research on the subject by authors who have completed their Ph.D. degrees at better academic institutions, and who have published in peer-reviewed journals of high quality. I'm sorry for you if you are stuck on one lame explanation for the phenomenon of underperforming United States schools, but especially if you would take the time and effort to read good-quality dead-tree literature on the subject,

http://www.amazon.com/Vision-Elementary-Mathematics-W-Sawyer...

http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Gap-Schools-Japanese-Educatio...

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

you could learn something new that could help you better understand the other countries in the world and what the United States might learn from them.
Well, you can still retrieve passwords from iPhone/Android apps, or in worse case, 1Password Web UI right from Dropbox web interface.
DARPA challenge to read shredded documents solved
I would add that it is possible to make standardized tests that teach more than memorization, but those tests will cost more to construct, norm, and grade. Schools are caught between the imperatives of testing and budget-cutting.
Explanation of how Jboss created scalable business model by David Skok
US Drone Probably Experienced Mechanical Failure
I would prefer we avoid shooting the messengers. Even if there's an argument that EMTs should honor indelible express wishes, we can't have this debate with all of them simultaneously. We are being informed that many of the ones out there today will not, which never would have occurred to me, and knowing that has some value.
Wow. I consider myself to be pretty well-informed both in privacy and general stuff happening in my country, but it's the first time I'm ever hearing about this.
Is it possible that "get medical treatment" or "go in peace" is a false dichotomy?
Ask HN: Who still uses voicemail on a website?
11 Groundbreaking Inventions Of 2011
Holy cow!!
The problem is that it's much easier to quantify a developer's output. Does that dropdown include all 50 states? Great, here you get paid. Do people using the dropdown know that its to enter a state? Well one guy says, "ya duh" and the other says "hmm not really".
Http://www.reverbnation.com/play_now/song_11108139
3D printer used to make bone-like material
Is this significantly different than, say, flavors.me or about.me?
The road to launching Dingadeal - the Irish start-up scene
It's the equivalent of restricting programmers "lines of code typed per hour" in the misguided belief that will reduce bugs.
If you hate passwords, check out http://dswi.net/
This is pretty awesome so far. Many introductory programming texts do not show the user practical things they can do with programming, or if they do make an attempt, they tend to gloss over the details involved.
Frictionless: read Facebook social news stories without installing apps
On an aside, relating to the performance of these two Firefox technologies, it is interesting that in the battle of the JavaScript engines it is artificial metrics that are driving the game: No one is measuring the number of clocks taken to run the JavaScript on typical pages like Twitter or gmail, or whether the variance is enough to even noticeably matter, but instead we run looping benchmark code entirely unlike anything actually used in practice (SunSpider being the most egregiously invalid test).

I would posit, based upon nothing, that in practice JIT systems can be a net negative to the overwhelming majority of run-once JavaScript encountered across the tubes.
In Germany this is actually law for car batteries. You pay a 7,50 € fee when buying a new battery and get a refund once you return a used battery.

And just for the record: Throwing away batteries has been illegal in Germany since 1991. Since that law was necessitated by a EU directive, I assume that is also true for all other EU member states.

Source: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterieverordnung
Most of the Chinese and Indian politicians have STEM backgrounds.

To the contrary. Most Indian politicians are battle-tested veterans of university student unions (the "youth" wings of major political parties). They spent their university years running political campaigns, fighting the other unions, general thuggery, etc. In other words, they are the muscle of the political parties. After graduation (a term used lightly), they move on to the parent parties and rise up through the ranks. The rise is mostly determined by 2 major factors: your pedigree (as in who's kid & grandkid are you), as well as sycophancy (the more outlandish your slavish behavior, the faster your rise).

The fraction of politicians with a STEM background would be about 0.001%, if not less.
Financial Times tech talk on aspects of HTML5 development
thank you dude... i went through all those learn.appendto.com JS tuts you reccomended and will now proceed to explore a bit of php as well as brush JS skills. thank you for everything man :)
TraceMonkey, JaegerMonkey, and IonMonkey. Well, the names are nothing if not consistent, but impossible to keep straight. I think IonMonkey is the new one?
The article says the tracing JIT can be faster for tight, non-branchy code. I imagine that Lua programs would be tighter and less branchy than JavaScript, which has many small callback functions invoked by native code.
Before I went to high school (maybe 8th grade?) I took some kind of test to determine what kind of career I was best suited for. It said the least likely position was computer programming because my math skills were so poor. I was already programming in C and Perl at this time. (I'm still not a "real" programmer; I learned early on that sysadmin was easier and pays more on average. I now regret going the easy route)
haha.. ok, that's awesome!

(The SaveIE6 campaign was launched on April 1, 2009 and will last until April 1, 2010.)
Great book idea! We salute you here at Code Academy.
As far as getting a 62% on the reading portion, well that's just pathetic.

For all we know, the reading test was either testing for a different kind of plug-and-play (“the author of the above paragraph is using (a) apostrophe; (b) synechdoche; (c) both; (d) neither”) or is testing mastery of a certain kind of teaching-to-the-test in the guise of “reading comprehension”.
A Clean Computer For Better Performance
They can also message your friends as if they were you. Scams and social engineering attacks do and have operated this way. If you or your friends are high-value targets, they or their interests can be seriously hurt by this sort of thing.
The Metacircular Evaluator
It sounds good...but is an iceberg type of problem.

How do you activate the deadbolt without giving the ability to someone with my phone to do so?

How do you store all of my most important passwords? I don't care if someone compromises my facebook account nearly as much as bank account. Is it a bigger risk giving this single point access to all of my most important accounts?